Local opinion: Border wall through San Rafael Valley threatens jaguars, ocelots, biodiversity

Over the years, while checking trail cameras in the San Rafael Valley wildlife corridor south of Tucson, I’ve seen images that still take my breath away.

There was El Jefe, the legendary jaguar of the Santa Rita Mountains, moving silently between alligator juniper and agave. And just last year an endangered ocelot appeared, leaping from an oak branch, pausing to drink from a mountain spring. Each glimpse is proof that this place and the surrounding Sky Islands remain a lifeline for some of the rarest and most extraordinary creatures on Earth.

The San Rafael Valley is one of the last unwalled corridors connecting the Sierra Madre to the south to ecosystems in the United States. Bears and jaguars tread on the same trails. Elegant trogons and American robins alight on the same trees. It’s a continental convergence of biological diversity.

But it’s also a region under siege. Fulfilling his fantasy of walling off the entire southern U.S., Trump has sent bulldozers into the San Rafael Valley to cleave a new border wall straight through the corridor.

I visited recently and found that construction crews are already on the ground. They’ve scraped away grasslands in the Coronado National Forest and are preparing a “man camp” to house as many as 150 workers for the 900-day push to seal this wild place behind 30-foot-high steel bollard walls. To accelerate construction, the Trump administration is ignoring dozens of bedrock environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act to the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. These are critical protections for people, Tribal cultural resources, wildlife and landscapes, all tossed aside like trash.

This wall would slice the heart out of Arizona’s Sky Islands, blocking jaguars and ocelots from reaching the resources and mates they need to survive. It would fragment habitats, choke off genetic exchange, and erase the fragile hope of natural recovery for jaguars in their critically important northern range.

But we’re fighting back. The Center for Biological Diversity, where I work, has sued the Trump administration to stop this reckless project and challenge the administration’s unconstitutional disregard of the law. Trump wants to ignore the law and silence the communities, Tribes, scientists and local voices who deserve a say in the future of this unparalleled gem of nature. His abuse of power cannot stand.

The San Rafael has stood for millennia as a place of wild freedom. There’s nowhere else like it.

That’s why we’ll continue fighting — for jaguars and ocelots, pronghorn, porcupines, and desert rivers and grasslands alive with birdsong. And for a future where walls fall instead of rise.