County Road 006, in the bootheel of New Mexico, feels like a wrong turn. It’s unpaved and nestled in desert shrub and veers south from a highway that otherwise keeps polite distance from the United States’ border with Mexico. County Road 006 ends at the seam of two fences: where 18-foot-tall orange metal — Trump-administration construction completed in January — joins waist-high vehicular barrier that has existed in this area for years. Other than the sudden interjection of fence, the vast expanse of desert belies little evidence of human efforts. Buzzing insects interrupt the expansive silence.
Kevin Bixby, 62, remembers driving his daughters and their friends through this desert when they were young. He wagered $5 to whoever first spotted an ibex, a horned antelope originally from the Middle East. He laughs at this memory, because it took a few false sightings for the girls to admit they didn’t know what they were looking for. Decades later, Bixby worries that many people who live in this high desert area of New Mexico don’t actually know much about the landscape he works to protect, or about how Trump-proposed construction is going up in their own backyard. The border wall is the same length as it was when President Trump took office. Some chunks of existing fence have been replaced with taller barriers — which is what happened in uninhabited desert south of Las Cruces, where Bixby lives. Expansions to the wall’s length have been stalled again and again, tangled in dizzying legal battles waged by environmental groups, coalitions of border towns and the ACLU. “A lot of people are remarkably uninformed that actually 20 new miles were built in our county last year,” Bixby says. “It’s right here in our county. It’s out in the desert. People don’t go down there, so they don’t see it very often.” Bixby is the founder and executive director of Southwest Environmental Center, a conservation and advocacy group based in Las Cruces, New Mexico, about 45 miles north of the border and Bixby’s home for the past 31 years. Bixby is also a board member of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, which together with the Sierra Club and representation by the ACLU recently brought a high-profile lawsuit against President Trump’s $2.5 billion re-appropriation of defense funding for border fence. Bixby was a standing declarant in the case — meaning he testified to how proposed fencing would harm both SWEC and himself, to give the organizations standing to sue.
“My non-profit resources are being redirected to deal with this border wall when I could be saving the world elsewhere,” Bixby says, in a half-joking summary of his presentation to the court. “It’s a pretty cool argument, and it’s absolutely true.” At the time of this interview, just after Memorial Day, U.S. Northern District Court in Oakland had just issued a preliminary injunction to block construction in Texas and Arizona, initially scheduled to break ground May 25. “I went outside and I screamed, I was so happy,” he says. “We’ve had so few victories on the border wall.” The victory lap didn’t last long. In a 5-4 decision on July 26, the Supreme Court gave the administration permission to begin construction while the ACLU continues further litigation in appellate court. The ACLU is also representing SWEC and Sierra Club in ongoing litigation to challenge Department of Homeland Security’s waiver authority — a power that allows the agency to ignore “a variety of environmental, natural resource, and land management laws” in border construction, and has claimed gives it “the authority to waive all legal requirements.” In practice, this means the government does not have to prepare or publish environmental impact assessments for proposed border fence like it would be required to for other federally-funded construction projects. “It’s like whack-a-mole with this administration,” Bixby says. “Every time he proposes more border wall, we have to deal with it.” |