io Grande Valley State Park (797 acres)
- El Morillo Banco Refuge Tract (654 acres)
- National Butterfly Center (100 acres)
- Cottam Refuge Tract (1,037 acres)
- Pharr Settling Basin (720 acres)
- Milagro Refuge Tract (846 acres)
- Marinoff Refuge Tract (432 acres)
That means the total nature space affected by the proposed, funded walls would be more than 6,500 acres in Hidalgo County, according to Kersten’s calculations. (The location of the 8 miles of wall in Starr County is still undetermined.)
Among the most visited natural areas in Hidalgo County is the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas. It’s a 100-acre wildlife center and botanical garden run by the North American Butterfly Association.
Plans suggest the proposed wall would go right through it, though Jeffrey Glassberg, the president of the center, says he hasn’t heard a word from the government about its intention to build through the center.
“This is complicated — it is not clear to me what this legislation authorizes or requires,” he said. “But they would have to exercise eminent domain to build a wall through it.”
A wall would certainly destroy the little remaining butterfly habitat at the center, he said. And it would further erode the region’s ecotourism. Look no further than what happened at Audubon’s Sabal Palm Sanctuary once a border wall was built through it: Visits fell by half because the wall made it a much less pleasant place to be, according to Glassberg.
Border fences have been terrible for wildlife and plants in other areas of the border
The 654 miles of existing barriers and walls — built with materials ranging from barbed wire to steel, bollard to wire mesh, and chain link — have already been a disaster for the unique and sensitive ecosystems and wildlife on the border.
Not many scientists have measured the full impact of fences on biodiversity on the border. One of the few studies to tackle these questions was written by Jesse Lasky, a biologist at Penn State who has studied the impact of border fences on border species, with his co-authors in 2011. They estimated that 134 mammal, 178 reptile, and 57 amphibian species live within about 30 miles of the line. Of those, 50 species and three subspecies are globally or federally threatened in Mexico or the United States. And they survive only because people on both sides have worked hard to conserve them.
With Thursday’s announcement of the waivers in the Federal Register — a move environmental groups like Defenders of Wildlife and Sierra Club plan to challenge in court — DHS is signaling is plans to move quickly to begin construction on the first 17 miles of new wall in Texas.
For humans who enjoy the protected areas and the local plant and animal species dependent on this ecosystem, it’s bad news. “[They] would lose some of their last remaining US habitat,” as the Texas biologists wrote in Frontiers in Ecology and Environment.