The sweeping view of undefiled wilderness on the border with Mexico long rewarded hikers who completed the Arizona Trail, an 800-mile route winding through deserts, canyons and forests.
Then something else came into focus a few weeks ago at the forbidding site in the Huachuca Mountains: a lonely segment of border wall, connected to nothing at all, in an area where migrants rarely even try to cross into the United States.
“There it was, this unfinished piece of completely pointless wall, right in this magical place,” said Julia Sheehan, 31, a nurse and former Air Force mechanic who trekked to the site with three other military veterans who are hiking the Arizona Trail. “It’s one of the most senseless things I’ve ever seen.”
The quarter-mile fragment of wall is part of an array of new barrier segments along the border, some of them bizarre in appearance and of no apparent utility, that contractors rushed to build in the waning days of the Trump administration — well after President Joe Biden made it clear that he would halt border wall construction.
Now the incomplete border wall, already one of the costliest megaprojects in U.S. history, with an estimated eventual price tag of more than $15 billion, is igniting tensions again as critics urge Biden to tear down parts of the wall and Republican leaders call on him to finish it.
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Former President Donald Trump made the wall a symbol of his administration’s efforts to slash immigration. While many stretches of the 1,954-mile border already had some low-level barriers built by previous administrations, the project was mired in controversy from the start.
Only a few miles were built in South Texas, the area most prone to illegal crossings. Instead, much of the construction, especially in the Trump administration’s closing days, has taken place in remote parts of Arizona where crossings in recent years have been relatively uncommon.
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Some stretches of the border, especially on federal lands that are relatively flat, now have long, continuous segments of 30-foot high steel barriers that could endure in the desert for decades to come.
But in other areas, border-crossers can easily tiptoe around far-flung islands of wall, some of which look more like conceptual art pieces than imposing barriers to entry.
There are half-dynamited mountaintops where work crews put down their tools in January, leaving a heightened risk of rapid erosion and even dangerous landslides as the summer monsoon season approaches.
In some areas, colossal piles of unused steel bollards linger at deserted work sites, next to idled bulldozers and water-hauling trucks. In Arizona, ranchers are complaining that rough roads carved by work crews into hillsides near uncompleted segments of wall now serve as easy access points for smugglers and others seeking to enter the once-remote areas along the border.
“Now there are so many access roads that it’s possible for someone to walk right up to places where the wall ends, and have someone just pick them up,” said Valer Clark, a conservationist who has bought and sought to preserve about 150,000 acres of land along the border in both the United States and Mexico.
Clark said a ranch manager recently quit after a break-in at his family’s home, the kind of crime that was rare in the area before the new roads appeared.
