Arizona Governor Continues Trump's Fence With Container Barrier

The wall on the Mexican border, which became a watchword of Trumpism, has evolved in its architectural style.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
14 December 2022 Wednesday 03:31
9 Reads
Arizona Governor Continues Trump's Fence With Container Barrier

The wall on the Mexican border, which became a watchword of Trumpism, has evolved in its architectural style.

The idea behind it is the same, a xenophobic manifesto with little practical use in the face of a real problem: the mass arrival of immigrants without documents.

But from that "pretty wall" promoted by then-President Donald Trump, it has gone on to the rust wall of Doug Doucey, the Republican governor of Arizona.

Doucey, who will relinquish office in January to Democrat Katie Hobbs, wants to make her mark with a new makeshift barrier illegally erected out of shipping containers. Her project consists of placing these receptacles, stacked in a double row along territories under national protection, for more than six kilometers. Her intention is to reach 16 kilometers, with an investment of 95 million dollars.

This is not the iron curtain. The purpose of this barrier of rusty containers, topped with barbed wire, seeks to fill in the holes left by Trump in his intermittent work in that southern strip.

The area, with mountain ranges rising steeply from the desert and an environment diverse in vegetation and fauna, is under federal ownership. At the governor's initiative, the Office of Reclamation and Recovery, along with the Cocopah Tribal Nation, charged that Doucey has violated both federal and Native law. The office demanded that he remove the containers. The governor, no case, has ordered the execution of a much more ambitious project hundreds of kilometers to the east.

Doucey began his experiment with a pilot test in the area that meets California and Mexico. He even filed a lawsuit asking for state ownership of the affected land. Hobbs said he still hasn't decided what he will do.

Mark Dannels, Cochise County Sheriff, came to the governor's defense. "Stop crime," he said.

The southern border of the United States, turned into a political weapon, is back on the front page. Record numbers are recorded. More than 2,400 people a day made the crossing during the past weekend (from Friday to Domino) in the Texan municipality of El Paso.

One of the largest groups was that of Nicaraguans who, as is the case with Venezuelans, are not easily expelled under the pandemic regulations of the so-called title 42 (sanitary prevention) that does apply to other citizens, such as Mexicans.

But now, by court order, that regulation will no longer be in force. So these massive entrances through El Paso are feared to be the new reality. Only in October, there were more than 50,000 immigrants.

The Biden Administration announced Tuesday that it will work to close the holes in the physical barriers and solve the environmental problems and others that it inherited from the Trump wall, amid concerns about the inability to process the high level of undocumented immigrants. Everything consists of recycling one of the works most despised by progressives.