Plans have now been announced to build just under 25 miles of new border wall that will slice through a portion of desert in Arizona.
The structure will go up in an area bookended by Nogales Border Patrol Station in Santa Cruz County and the small town of Naco in Cochise County.
Naco is located directly across the U.S./Mexican border from its sister city Naco in Sonora, Mexico.
In a statement published in the Arizona Daily Star, John Mennell, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, referenced a Trump executive order declaring a “national emergency” on the southwestern border.
The president has thus ordered the Department of Homeland Security to “take all appropriate actions to deploy and construct temporary and permanent physical barriers, to insure complete and operational control of the southern border of the United States.”
The project will most likely be funded through appropriations approved by Congress during Trump’s first term in office.
Going up in a part of the San Rafael Valley known for its biodiversity, the wall project has sparked the attention of the Sierra Club, among other environmental groups.
In a statement, Erick Meza, a coordinator with the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, said the existence of a new wall will “sever connectivity for countless animals, pushing already vulnerable species closer to extinction.”
An exact construction schedule for the project has not yet been announced, but various sources have estimated that due to the high priority the Trump administration is placing on it, work will likely launch sometime this fall.
May 1, 2025
By Garry Boulard
Photo courtesy of General Accounting Office
