Conservationists and migration experts are clearing up misconceptions in a recent New York Post story that claimed floodgates in the border wall south of Tucson are “inexplicably” open and are responsible for a surge in Tucson sector migrant encounters in July.
The Post story — with a print headline of “Floodgates are open (literally!)” — focused on a stretch of border wall near Lukeville, Arizona, where border agents must open stormwater gates during monsoon season to prevent water and debris from knocking down the wall entirely.
Floodgates in Arizona’s border wall sections were also opened during the wall’s construction in 2020, when President Donald Trump was still in office, said Laiken Jordahl, Southwest conservation advocate with the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity.
“It has to be done, from an engineering standpoint. If the gates don’t open, the wall will fall down,” said Jordahl, who previously worked with the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management before joining the Center for Biological Diversity in 2017.
Jordahl monitored border wall construction and regularly shares missives with his Twitter followers from the environmentally sensitive areas affected by the wall, including Organ Pipe National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.
The Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector is broad, and border agents routinely face drive times of more than two hours in their work. During monsoon season, gates are sometimes left open because agents couldn’t reach them quickly enough if a sudden storm occurred, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP.
“High-water flow combined with excessive sediment and debris build up can stress or compromise the design integrity of the barrier. Once the rain or flood event is over and the debris and sediment are removed, the gates can be closed and secured,” a CBP statement said.
When gates are damaged, they must be secured open to prevent additional damage that would prolong the gap in the infrastructure, according to CBP.
Floodgates can be “spot welded” open, but that does not mean they’re permanently open, as the Post story suggests, Jordahl said. The welds are simply cut when it’s time to close the gates, he said.
Some areas of the border will see gates open full-time under a July settlement resulting from a lawsuit over how the Trump administration paid for new border wall construction. Under the settlement, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security must allow gates in certain areas to remain open to allow larger wildlife, such as the Sonoran pronghorn, to migrate freely, the Star reported last month.
Real risk
The risk of flood damage to border infrastructure isn’t theoretical.
In 2021, sections of the wall were damaged, with floodgates ripped from their hinges, after historic rains cascaded across the border near the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Arizona.
“If those gates had not been open, the reality is it would have taken the wall down. There’s just so much energy and pressure, the wall would not be able to sustain holding that back,” said Jeremiah H. Leibowitz, executive director of environmental group Cuenca Los Ojos, based in the San Bernardino Valley, near Douglas. The binational nonprofit manages 121,000 acres in northern Mexico, which includes 33 miles of the international border, and works to preserve and restore biodiversity in the region.
In 2014, monsoon runoff knocked over 60 feet of the border wall in Nogales, clogged small stormwater drainage holes in the wall and flooded nearby yards and homes, the Nogales International reported. In 2011, rain and debris washed away about 40 feet of the wall at Lukeville, the Star reported at the time.
Border wall fencing in the Tucson Sector was built in various segments between 2009 and 2021, and stormwater drainage has always been a consideration.
“These gates prevent flooding and subsequent environmental, infrastructure and community damage in various areas during the monsoon season in Southern Arizona,” the CBP statement said.
Busy Tucson sector
In July, the Tucson border sector — which ranges from Pima County’s western border with Yuma County to the New Mexico border — became the busiest of the nine southern border sectors, according to federal data released last week.
Tucson Sector encounters with Border Patrol agents reached a 15-year high in July, with nearly 40,000 people encountering border agents between official ports of entry.
The open floodgates are unlikely to be a major factor in the July uptick in Tucson Sector encounters, Ariel Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, said in a Thursday email.
Smugglers have sophisticated technology to monitor gaps in border fencing and border-agent enforcement levels, allowing them to adapt their smuggling routes accordingly, he said. But CBP has counter intelligence to direct agents to vulnerabilities, or highly trafficked areas, along the border wall, as well, he said.
And CBP statistics from recent past monsoon seasons — when floodgates would have also been open — show a dip in migrant crossings in the Tucson Sector for June and July, he said.
“This last point indicates that, even if the floodgates were opened, there are likely many other factors — enforcement in (the neighboring) Yuma Sector, change in migrant composition, other border policies — that influenced and drove migrants to Tucson sector” last month, he said.
Border wall impact
Facing resistance from Congress, in 2019 Trump declared a national emergency at the border, which allowed his administration to use billions in Department of Defense funds to construct the wall, The Associated Press reported. The emergency declaration also exempted the construction from environmental regulations, such as the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, that would normally force the government to assess environmental impacts before approving projects.
The emergency declaration sparked opposition, and litigation, from environmental groups. The Center for Biological Diversity submitted comments on the proposal to build 63 miles of border wall in the Tucson Sector, but the government was under no obligation to consider or respond to those concerns, as it normally would be under NEPA, Jordahl said.
The environmental group’s comments said the Trump administration’s rushed timeline and lack of environmental analysis meant threatened species and fragile environments could be irreversibly damaged.
The border wall cuts through the 40 million-acre Sky Island ecosystem, which stretches from southeast Arizona to southern New Mexico and northern Mexico and is a “hotspot” of biodiversity, Leibowitz said.
“You have these seas of desert grassland, interspersed with islands of mountains,” Leibowitz said. “You find the flora and fauna that exist at these higher elevations is equivalent to what you might find up in the Rockies of Colorado and at the same time, the Sonoran grassland desert species coexist in the same environment. This juxtaposition makes this region unique.”
The routine floodgate openings in the wall demonstrate its fundamental ineffectiveness as a border enforcement strategy, Jordahl said. Migrants have scaled the wall and cut through the bollard fencing using equipment easily purchased at Home Depot, he said. On a recent visit to the border, Jordahl found a discarded $5 angle grinder next to a section of the wall that had been cut open.
“It’s a physical impossibility to build an impermeable wall through these rugged, remote locations,” he said. “The hysteria around these gates being open is so ungrounded from reality. These journalists, these politicians have not been out on the landscape. They don’t understand the power of the monsoon rains here and they also don’t realize people are cutting through and climbing over the wall every day. The gates are obviously a very easy thing to point to and scapegoat. But none of this is about reality. It’s all about drumming up rage and fear.”
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