Tucson Sentinel (May 18, 2026) by Paul Ingram

Contractors carving a border wall through the Coronado National Memorial may have ignited a wildfire last week that consumed around 60 acres of the protected landscape.

Around 1:17 p.m. on Thursday, the Yaqui Fire was first reported near a wall construction area on the southern edge of the Huachuca Mountains, less than a mile from Montezuma Canyon Road inside the federal memorial. National Park Service officials closed the entire park on Thursday.

On Friday morning, staff with Coronado National Memorial said crews were actively working on the blaze, but opened Montezuma Pass Road and the visitors center. However, Joe’s Canyon and the Yaqui Ridge trails remained closed.

“If you plan to visit, please use caution—smoke and fire crews may still be in the area, and conditions can change quickly,” said park staff. “We extend our sincere thanks to the many brave firefighters, volunteers, and protection officers supporting this effort!”

A photo posted Friday showed an air tanker dropping pink fire retardant over the monument, about 75 miles southeast of Tucson.

Federal officials did not confirm the fire was ignited by contractors, however, Myles Traphagen, an environmental advocate and researcher, told the Tucson Sentinel he thought it was “high possibility.”

Traphagen said he was on a tour with the Arizona Wildfire Federation on Thursday morning and could see construction work in the monument, where contractors for Fisher Sand & Gravel are building a new section of border wall near the southern terminus of the Arizona Trail, which has been blocked from public access.

Around 10 a.m., the group stopped on Montezuma Pass and Traphagen said he could see heavy equipment inside the monument’s boundaries. In an image shared to the Tucson Sentinel, multiple excavators were working, carving a zig-zag road into the grasslands where contractors are forging ahead on the project. Traphagen said group decided to head into the San Rafael Valley to the west, and returned around 1:30 p.m. to find the fire had started.

Traphagen recorded video showing smoke billowing out from the ridge line. He added he didn’t see the fire start, but the wildfire began within a “pretty narrow window of time.”

“I can’t confirm beyond all reasonable doubt that Fisher started it. But it looks like that’s a very high possibility,” Traphagen said in an email. “Not only are they blasting our national parks, they are lighting them on fire,” Traphagen said in a Facebook video.

Katherine Hostetler, the acting chief of interpretation and visitor services, said Friday the cause of the Yaqui Fire “remains under investigation.”

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman told the Sentinel he was checking on the cause, while the company in charge of construction did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Last year, the Sentinel broke the news that CBP officials were preparing to build a new barrier near the Border Patrol’s Sonoita station, closing a gap that starts near Border Monument 102 and extends west for nearly 25 miles. The wall will begin east of Nogales in the Patagonia Mountains and run straight across the valley to the Coronado National Monument, about 15 miles south of Sierra Vista, Ariz.

Dubbed the Tucson Sonoita Project, Fisher Sand & Gravel received a $334 million contract to build the wall, funded by a 2021 congressional appropriation. Last September, contractors installed nearly 250 feet of the planned border wall, and that work continued through October, even through the federal shutdown. As part of the work, contractors used explosives to blast their way through the Monument, and used the broken rock to make concrete for the border wall’s base.

The new construction would create the “longest unbroken stretch of border wall” in Arizona, spanning 100 miles and effectively closing off the ability of the northern jaguar, along with ocelots and dozens of other species, to move through the state’s Sky Islands—a region known for its immense and unique biodiversity, environmental advocates said.

The work is part of the Trump administration’s headlong drive to built a new layer of border barriers across most of Arizona’s border with Mexico.

Despite dwindling numbers of people attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, the Trump administration has sought to spend $51.6 billion in border wall construction authorized by the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” including around $4.5 billion in Arizona. As part of this, the agency laid out plans to build 222 miles of “barrier system,” including both primary and secondary walls where “operationally appropriate” in Pima, Yuma, Santa Cruz, and Cochise counties.

This includes 19 miles of primary wall, as well as 42 miles of “secondary barrier.” The agency also wants install fiber-optic cables, lighting poles with stadium-style lights, surveillance cameras, and access and patrol roads throughout.

“If border wall contractors started the wildfire at Coronado National Memorial, it would not be an isolated accident,” said Russ McSpadden, a southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.

On April 23, CBP contractors working in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge—about 193 miles to the west of the Coronado National Monument—bulldozed the millennia-old Las Playas Intaglio, a well-documented cultural artifact that is within yards of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The 200-foot-long etching that resembles a giant fish was crafted on the desert floor about 1,000 years ago, and despite efforts by members of the Hia-Ced Hemajkam — a tribal branch of the O’odham—to ensure the Intaglio was protected, a bulldozer carved a road straight through the heart of the artifact. “It would be part of a long pattern of rushed, militarized construction placing irreplaceable landscapes, sacred sites, public lands, and border communities in harm’s way,” he said.

“After the destruction of the ancient Las Playas Intaglio at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge last month, the public can no longer dismiss these incidents as unforeseeable mistakes. They are predictable consequences of a system that treats the borderlands, and the people and cultures rooted here, as expendable.”

Border wall contractors have damaged areas considered sacred to the Kumeyaay Nation near San Diego, and set off explosives near Mount Cristo Rey, where pilgrims travel to the mountain topped with a limestone cross, and moved to seize nearly 14 acres of nearby land.

The agency has also moved to spend $1.7 billion to build border wall and roads in the Big Bend region, despite widespread opposition.