The Government Accountability Office confirms building a border wall caused significant environmental damage, depleted water sources and devastated sacred tribal sites.
WASHINGTON — A new Government Accountability Office report confirms what critics have long said, that the Trump administration’s rush to build a border wall caused significant environmental damage, depleted water sources and devastated sacred tribal sites.
The 72-page report, released Thursday, was requested by Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Tucson, who said it shows that the wall “has been an ineffective waste of billions of American taxpayers’ dollars – and now we know it has caused immeasurable, irreparable harm to our environment and cultural heritage as well.”
That included killing plants like the iconic saguaro cactus that were in the path of the wall and dynamiting Monument Hill, disturbing burial sites of Apache and O’odham ancestors and destroying land that was used by the Tohono O’odham for religious ceremonies. Crews disrupted Quitobaquito Springs, a desert oasis in the Sonoran Desert, and depleted groundwater supplies near the San Pedro River by drilling wells for water for construction.
Workers also left behind roads and hillsides that were not protected from erosion. Silt from a construction staging area near the top of a mountain in the Pajarito Mountains is filling a pond in the Coronado National Forest, threatening a vital water source for cattle and wildlife. “These border walls haven’t done a thing to address immigration or smuggling, but they did drive endangered species closer to extinction, butcher thousands of iconic saguaro cacti and dynamite Indigenous sacred sites and burial grounds,” Jordahl said. “This is a clear warning that any attempt to build additional miles of border walls would be a horrifically destructive and useless folly.”