In the early 1980s, Donald Trump was eager to gain a toehold in Atlantic City. He had acquired a prime piece of land for his first casino, but financing issues stalled construction soon after it began.
Holiday Inn expressed interest in investing. As Trump recalled in The Art of the Deal, “I did everything I could … to assure them that my casino was practically finished.” To his chagrin, company executives wanted to assess the progress firsthand.
Trump ordered his construction supervisor “to round up every bulldozer and dump truck … and put them to work on the site immediately. What the bulldozers and dump trucks did wasn’t important … so long as they did a lot of it.” If necessary, they should “dig up dirt from one side of the site and dump it on the other.”
The Holiday Inn executives were fooled, and Trump got his partnership deal. (Naturally, the relationship ended in a tangle of lawsuits and recriminations.)
Thirty-some years later, the Trump administration is orchestrating another bit of construction theater, this time far from the raucous Boardwalk. It involves the president’s “big, beautiful, powerful” border wall, and the stakes are far higher.
The Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, though relatively tiny, is often described as the “crown jewel” of the national refuge system. It is situated along the Rio Grande, about 15 miles southeast of McAllen, Texas. Its location makes it an “ecological crossroads,” hosting hundreds of species of migratory birds and other wildlife, some endangered. Its location also puts it smack in the proposed path of the wall.
As with the casino, Trump’s wall is facing financial challenges. The administration included wall funds in its 2018 budget proposal, but recent negotiations with Congress have put the appropriation in doubt, or at least on the back burner.
Adding to the difficulty, almost all of the land along the Rio Grande, which marks Texas’ border with Mexico, is privately owned. (Obstructions built pursuant to the Secure Fence Act of 2006, along with natural barriers, already cover most of the California, Arizona, and New Mexico borders.) The federal government can take land through its eminent domain powers, but that can be a protracted and politically precarious process.
And then there is the Rio Grande itself. It’s no coincidence that, among the border states, river-bound Texas remains the least walled-off. The U.S./Mexico Boundary Treaty of 1970 forbids either country from unilaterally impacting the course of the Rio Grande, since territorial rights depend on the precise location of the river. A close-in levee wall on one side might, in times of flooding, promote erosion of the opposite bank.
These general complications do not apply to Santa Ana. The federal government already owns the refuge. And its land extends far enough back from the river to accommodate inland wall placement, thereby precluding a boundary treaty challenge. The three-mile wide site is, as such, reportedly at the very top of the Trump administration’s priority list. Even if wall money is not forthcoming from Congress, the Department of Homeland Security has the means to internally budget the relatively small amount that the Santa Ana stretch will require. Construction engineers have already been spotted collecting soil samples from the premises.
A U.S. Fish & Wildlife official recently leaked the construction plans, which call for an 18-foot wall, lighted surveillance towers, and miles of new access roads. The wall will run through the northern quarter of the sanctuary, cutting most of it off from the visitor center and the rest of America. The official opined that the construction will “essentially destroy” the refuge.
A hurriedly-built three-mile wall will, no doubt, do a fine job of diverting any border crossers onto the privately owned land that straddles the refuge. It will also allow President Trump to crow, “Look, I’m building the wall!” His base of supporters, supplied with cinema of bulldozers, dump trucks, and a wee bit of actual construction, will hail their hero, blissfully unaware that years of political and legal wrangling lay between the Santa Ana section and a comprehensive Rio Grande Valley border barrier.
Meanwhile, a wildlife refuge will be irretrievably wrecked. In her 2015 book Border Sanctuary, Kansas State University professor M.J. Morgan details the decades-long effort, funded largely by American taxpayers, to develop Santa Ana. Morgan (who happens to be my mother-in-law) celebrates the rich ecological payoff. But the refuge is also key to providing one of Texas’ poorest regions with a yearly ecotourism boost of at least $340 million. Its 165,000 annual visitors help keep high regional unemployment from hitting crisis level.
Questions about how, exactly, the full Trump border wall will be funded continue to fascinate the national media. But barring a dramatic last-minute save, the environment — and economy — of far-southern Texas will be the first to bear its costs.