Centuries later, Traphagen’s own expedition watched as a line of armored trucks wended its way along a dirt road far below. At 3 o’clock that afternoon, the dynamite those trucks had delivered detonated, blasting a trench deep into the mountain’s foothills — the beginnings of a new stretch of double border wall that, under the current administration, may one day expand to cover all 2,000 miles of border running from California to Texas.
Trump admin dynamites national park site as part of immigration crackdown
SFGATE (FEb 18, 2026) by Amanda Heidt
It was a cool, breezy morning in early December when Myles Traphagen, the borderlands program coordinator for the conservation nonprofit Wildlands Network, joined a handful of people atop Coronado Peak in Arizona. Less than a mile from the U.S.-Mexico border, the mountain lies within Coronado National Memorial, a 5,000-acre stub of public land marking the valley where Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado first entered what is today the United States in 1540 seeking the mythical Seven Cities of Cíbola.
Traphagen and his companions were there to bear witness to what they say is an increasingly common, and extremely troubling, phenomenon: the co-opting and destruction of public lands along the southern border with little oversight. SFGATE could find no evidence of environmental impact reports, cultural or historical assessments or public comments prior to the blast. Instead, evidence shows that the Trump administration awarded lucrative contracts to individuals and businesses that donated heavily to the president’s reelection campaign.
To the east and west, more public lands are facing similar upheavals. Shortly after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum pulling tracts of land out of public hands to give to the Defense Department, which he has attempted to rename the Department of War. As a result, more than one-third of the southern border — including the southern termini of the world-famous Continental Divide and Pacific Crest trails and other areas once open to recreators — is now closed to members of the public, who can find themselves facing federal charges should they unwittingly trespass.
All of this, and more, has occurred with little pushback, Traphagen said, largely because of how few people live along our country’s southern border, and because the region has been demonized as an area “overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers,” and “other criminal entities.”
“The borderlands are a testing ground for a lot of things because there’s just not a lot of people to advocate for these spaces,” Traphagen told SFGATE. “We wanted to be present, even if it was just four of us watching while a national park site was being blown up.”
Death by 1,000 legal cuts
The construction at Coronado National Memorial and other sites spanning states along the country’s northern and southern borders is legal based on a single section of the Real ID Act of 2005. Section 102 grants the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to waive nearly 50 laws — including the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water and Air acts and the Antiquities Act, among others — for activities “necessary for improvement of barriers at borders.” This provision gives the Department of Homeland Security secretary, a political appointee, unprecedented power to bypass foundational conservation laws in the name of border security.
Trump has continually referred to the situation at the southern border as an “invasion,” in which “potential terrorists, foreign spies, members of cartels, gangs,” and other violent individuals are attempting to perpetrate harm against the United States. In legislation, lawmakers have also pointed to the potential for migrants to damage pristine landscapes along the border by leaving trash, starting fires or cutting new paths into wilderness areas. Research has found that these concerns are valid; still, migrants as a group are reportedly more law-abiding than citizens, and sources tell SFGATE that visitors to public lands cause far more damage than migrants ever have.
This depiction of borderlands is worth noting, because it’s being used to strip land managers of their ability to make sound decisions regarding the lands under their purview. Indeed, the Real ID Act is just one of several pieces of existing or proposed legislation that continue to pose “a concerning shift in the way that our federal land agencies are able to exercise their management authority,” according to Kelly Cox, a senior policy and planning specialist with the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife. Today, within 100 miles of both the northern and southern U.S. borders, “land managers are increasingly being placed in a subordinate role to DHS,” Cox said.
Traditionally, relationships between U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and park officials are governed through “memorandums of understanding” charging the two entities to work together in support of each agency’s stated mission. This might mean deploying less-disruptive surveillance towers instead of barriers in sensitive landscapes, while in other instances, Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service officials have helped carry out border security sweeps on public lands.
Bob Krumenaker, a former superintendent of Big Bend National Park and Rio Grande Wild & Scenic River in Texas, told SFGATE that during his tenure between 2018 and 2023, he often worked with CBP officers stationed in Big Bend to keep the park’s 118-mile stretch of border secure. The two groups may not have had equal powers, he said, but they were cordial and collaborative with one another.
One of the special attractions at Big Bend, for example, is an off-the-beaten-path border crossing, where visitors can cross the Rio Grande to wander the small settlement of Boquillas, Mexico. DHS and the Park Service built and maintain that crossing together, and Krumenaker said border agents sometimes supplement park staff, helping to maintain roads, build employee housing, and support search and rescue operations in the park.
“I won’t say we never had tension, but my experience is that border security and public lands conservation are not incompatible,” Krumenaker said. “And at least in Big Bend, our existing agreements really worked. And I think they probably work in many places when both parties are acting in good faith.”
But more recently, that collaborative atmosphere has soured, sources say. While Krumenaker has since left the Park Service, he told SFGATE that he feels confident that “communications between DHS and the Park Service are not what they once were,” and that the current administration has taken “a very heavy-handed approach that’s totally unnecessary to achieve its goals.” In March 2025, for example, at least 200 Army personnel arrived in Big Bend as part of a state of emergency declared at the border, despite the park being one of the quietest areas within the quietest border sector in terms of migrant apprehensions.
Tom Workman, a retired superintendent of Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego, summarizes the situation more pointedly, calling the border enforcement agencies of today “a police state” made up of “poorly trained policing goons” who are hired with very little vetting. (Parts of this hold up, as freelance journalist Laura Jedeed was hired as an ICE deportation officer in 2025 after only a six-minute interview and despite a failed drug test.)
A DHS spokesperson disagreed with these characterizations, telling SFGATE that during the president’s first year back in office, his “leadership and bold action have given this country a secure border that keeps breaking historic records,” including record-low apprehensions along the border. Border Patrol agents, the spokesperson continued, “are highly trained and required to meet the highest standards of professionalism and law enforcement capability.”
This tug-of-war is being exacerbated by a pair of newly proposed laws that would largely overwrite existing memorandums of understanding and give border control unilateral priority. Upon leaving the Park Service, Krumenaker became a public lands policy consultant, and last year, he testified before Congress on behalf of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks and the Association of National Park Rangers against the Federal Lands Amplified Security for the Homeland (FLASH) Act. This law, introduced by Republican Arizona Rep. Juan Ciscomani, would allow DHS to construct hundreds of miles of roads, barriers or other infrastructure necessary for border security along any federal land unit in contact with Mexico, which amounts to roughly 35% of all land along the border.
A similar law in the Senate, the Borderlands Conservation Act, would also require an inventorying of all roads created through unauthorized immigration that have left a notable, if ill-defined, impact on the land. This in itself isn’t a bad thing, Krumenaker said, but the law, proposed by Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, goes on to state that such roads will then need to be improved and maintained for border security purposes.
Both pieces of legislation would disregard one of the county’s most foundational conservation laws: the Wilderness Act of 1964. This law prohibits permanent roads, motor vehicles, motorized equipment, or other permanent structures in designated wilderness areas, yet the new acts specify that patrols could be carried out by vehicles, planes or boats, and that infrastructure could include “observation points, remote video surveillance systems, motion sensors, vehicle barriers, fences, roads, bridges, drainage and detection devices.”
Cox told SFGATE that Defenders of Wildlife is carefully tracking both laws, and that the group stands ready to intervene if needed. At present, the FLASH Act has been presented to several committees, while the Borderlands Conservation Act has been sent back to Lee for corrections. In the past, similar laws have failed to gain enough support, even among Republicans, but today’s political climate makes anything feel possible, Cox said.
“I don’t know if they’ll pass, but with everything going on in the country right now, I don’t think it’s wise for anyone who cares about public lands to take anything for granted,” she said. “We need to be watching this carefully, and we need to be making the case that there’s a better way forward.”
One-third of the border is now officially ‘militarized’
Disruptions to longstanding public land policy aren’t limited to legal hypotheticals. As the Trump administration has ramped up its border presence to unprecedented levels, its actions are playing out on the land today. With billions of dollars allotted to immigration enforcement and border security, including $46.5 billion for border wall construction, contracts have already been awarded for hundreds of miles of new barriers, while DHS has received an unprecedented number of job applications amid a hiring drive. All this is taking place as migrant encounters have fallen to their lowest level in more than 50 years, and as ICE extends its influence far beyond the borders and into major cities across the country.
Today’s border is a patchwork of about 650 miles of primary wall, with another 535 miles slated to be covered by remote sensing technology. In recent months, contractors have started building new barriers and seeking leases for construction staging areas not just at Coronado National Memorial, but along the outskirts of Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley and Big Bend Ranch state parks in Texas, the Otay Mountain Wilderness in California, and within Arizona’s San Rafael Valley. The latter sits just 60 miles from the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose vice chairman previously declared that a wall would be built there “over my dead body.” (The Tohono O’odham Nation did not respond to questions in time for this story’s publication.)
When announcing its construction, DHS officials said the San Rafael barrier was needed to combat “high illegal entry attempts.” But representatives from the conservation nonprofit Sky Island Alliance say their network of 75 cameras across the valley captures around five people each month, mostly recreators and Border Patrol agents, and many hundreds of deer.
Furthermore, in early February, DHS installed the first stretch of what will eventually be 500 miles of floating barriers along the surface of the Rio Grande, an effort dubbed “Operation River Wall.” This first, 17-mile section spans a stretch of river between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, and was built at a cost of $96.2 million, with another 130 miles under contract.
Perhaps the most alarming change, however, has been the quiet seizure and transfer of public lands to the Defense Department. On the first day of his second term, Trump declared a state of emergency along the southern border, and began placing nearby military installations in charge of large swathes of public land redesignated as national defense areas. Today, five of these exist — including sections in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas — and on Feb. 6, the Air Force announced the creation of a sixth.
Collectively, national defense areas now account for more than one-third of the southern border, and the land they cover is no longer accessible to the public, although many areas have long been popular destinations for hikers, birders, hunters and ranchers.
Today, anyone caught on these lands risks federal trespassing charges, despite a law that typically prevents military troops from detaining citizens. And while judges initially dismissed many of the cases brought before them, or acquitted the defendants, hundreds of migrants have now been charged with trespassing on military territory and face possible 18-month prison sentences for first offenses on top of illegal entry charges and fees of up to $100,000. There have been no arrests of U.S. citizens, although the rules do not make exceptions for them.
This prompted Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, to send a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last May, in which he expressed his “deep concerns that the Trump Administration is bypassing due process for individuals who either intentionally or unintentionally enter this newly restricted area, including United States citizens who may be stopped and detained by US Army soldiers for trespassing on an unmarked military base.”
In a statement to SFGATE, Heinrich, who is the ranking member of the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said that threatening to arrest citizens for recreating on previously public land is “deeply insulting and un-American,” adding that “these are places where families have returned year after year to hunt quail, teach their kids how to track Coues deer, and find peace and perspective in the stillness of the desert. These landscapes hold our stories, our traditions, and our sense of belonging. We cannot and will not let this stand.”
Heinrich and other advocates have pointed to a sloppy rollout of the national defense areas in public statements and court filings. For example, the areas have been flagged with hundreds of signs in English and Spanish, but they’re often placed within the areas, which means that people entering from Mexico have already crossed into a restricted area before seeing any signs. The signs also reportedly face south, and so people entering from the north are unlikely to see them before crossing beyond the boundary. The DOD has not, to date, released detailed maps of the national defense areas, nor have popular navigation apps been updated to reflect the closures.
All told, the situation is so unclear that the American Civil Liberties Union recently released a guide on what to do if you find yourself detained by agents, and a federal public defender’s office in New Mexico called the designation of a militarized zone in the state without congressional authorization “a matter of staggering and unprecedented political significance.”
While some of the national defense areas are meant to be temporary, others have been established without a stated end date, leaving it unclear when these lands might be returned to public hands. (The Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about whether some national defense areas will be permanent.) Traphagen, of the Wildlands Network, said that while the phrase “militarization” is often thrown about casually when describing federal actions at the southern border, national defense areas reflect a true meaning of the word: “I don’t think it has taken hold yet that yes, we actually are officially militarized now.”
A landscape changed
These shifts in how public lands are managed along the border have far-reaching implications beyond just border security. A single piece of border barrier has the potential to significantly impact the land, wildlife and people around it.
The number of migrants attempting to cross the border may be steeply declining, but for those who do attempt the trip, it’s now a far deadlier one. As patrol agents and barriers flood the borderlands, it appears more people are taking their chances in remote and rugged corners — or being abandoned there by smugglers.
The nonprofit Border Kindness has reported a shift in where it receives most of its missing persons reports, from California to Arizona, such that it has had to remake its maps of where to drop life-saving supplies. And in recent years, border officials similarly noted a tenfold increase in the number of migrant deaths in New Mexico, largely due to dehydration and exhaustion, as well as an uptick in the number of apprehensions in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a park with a large chunk of designated wilderness that lies near a major highway in southern Arizona.
Mark Whelan, then a spokesperson for Border Patrol, told Border Report in 2023 that the Tucson sector, where the park is located, has seen “a steady increase in traffic,” adding that drug cartels are also to blame for placing people in danger. “They are being abandoned in the Organ Pipe National Monument and the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, criminal organizations abandon them out there, they’re often deceived by the smugglers of how they’ll make their journey into the United States.”
Beyond the risk to human life, barriers also cause access issues and economic hardship in the areas through which they pass. Residents in El Paso, Texas, told SFGATE that the defense area near town has turned outdoor spaces “people used and knew intimately into a militarized zone, where being present without permission is a felony,” adding that “longtime residents suddenly need Army permits to access land they’ve used their entire lives.”
National defense areas have likewise prevented thousands of hikers of the Continental Divide and the Pacific Crest trails — which follow different routes from Canada to Mexico spanning 3,000 and 2,650 miles, respectively — from finishing their journeys. The southern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail sits within the 760 acres of land along the California-Mexico border transferred to the Navy in 2025, while the last mile of the Continental Divide Trail traverses the national defense area in New Mexico overseen by Fort Huachuca.
On Feb. 11, the Pacific Crest Trail Association said that while a monument marking the southern terminus of the hike remains accessible to hikers, the land south of the monument and the stretch of border wall there were now off-limits to hikers. A barbed wire fence now prevents people from undertaking a longstanding tradition of touching the border wall as an official beginning or ending to their journey.
Audra Labert, a spokesperson for the Continental Divide Trail Coalition, told SFGATE that the group is communicating with military officials to ensure that hikers remain in compliance with the new regulations, but calls it “a continually evolving situation.” The fort now asks all hikers to apply for permission and pass a background check before stepping onto the national defense area to reach the southern terminus monument.
For many of these remote areas, tourism is a major lifeblood, and so anything that threatens to frighten away visitors can have outsized impacts.
In the Rio Grande Valley, for example, ecotourism is a major industry that brings in about $463 million annually. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, communities there chose to set aside habitat to draw in visitors, and locals say new barriers risk derailing that focus. The area is a global hotspot for birding, yet birds are among the species negatively impacted by border structures. The Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park and the National Butterfly Center are all slated for new wall construction, and a recent protest drew more than 100 locals.
Greg Henington, a Republican county judge in Brewster County, Texas, which includes Big Bend National Park, said that in his part of the state, tourism is similarly important, replacing oil and gas as a source of revenue. “I’m not interested in seeing people become worried when they come to visit our county,” he told SFGATE. “I’m for secure borders, there’s no doubt about that, but there’s got to be some common sense in this, and the practicality of building large barriers is out of line.”
Barriers are also highly disruptive to wildlife, which are a massive draw for many visitors to public lands. Aaron Flesch, a wildlife biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has spent decades studying how animals persist across desert landscapes. One thing many people don’t appreciate, he said, is just how biodiverse the borderlands are, and how much landscape connectivity matters.
“Even a small section of wall can have an overly large impact if it impedes species’ ability to move around,” he said.
Along the U.S.-Mexico divide, neotropical species butt up against those found in the Sierra Madres, which are the southern terminus of the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada. They create so-called sky islands — towering mountains that stretch high above the deserts below — dominated by vastly different habitats. As a result, the desert southwest is home to hundreds of species, many of which are found nowhere else. Because many of these species are living at their physiological limit, they need space to move around to find enough food and establish new territories so they’re not competing with their kin.
In a 2018 editorial by Flesch and collaborators that garnered more than 2,500 signatories, the group reported that the border bisects the geographic ranges of 1,506 plant and animal species, including 62 species listed as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More recently, in 2024, a group of researchers, including Traphagen, found that less than 10% of wildlife interactions with a border wall led to a successful crossing. For larger species like black bears, mountain lions, deer and jaguars, every single animal was turned back. “We’re not making allowances for animals, or really even thinking about them anymore, and we’re already seeing really significant effects,” Flesch said, adding that they’ve found evidence of reduced gene flow between animals, suggesting that already-isolated populations are being cut off from one another.
Beyond the barriers themselves, there are other complications. Construction creates noise, which can disrupt animals’ natural behaviors, and walls and roads are often associated with increased erosion, which has already begun at Coronado National Memorial, according to Traphagen. Roads themselves are also well-known barriers for animal movement, and also serve as conduits for trash and wildfire risk that can penetrate deep into the heart of remote territory.
For Flesch, it’s clear that border walls and roads imperil human safety and conservation efforts. And while he understands that many Americans like the idea of a secure border, he questions how many actually support the wholesale carving up of public lands for private or political interest.
“When you think about what public lands are set aside to do — to protect beautiful and unique places — I can’t see how any of the arguments for the way we’re doing things today bear up,” Flesch said. “We need people to understand what’s going on, and to show up for these places before any more damage is done.”
To read the article online, click here.
