Russ McSpadden peered through the window of a Cessna plane last week and gestured toward a thin black line in the distance.
That line — a stretch of border fence — crept through the San Rafael Valley in southeastern Santa Cruz County.
“If they complete this stretch … it would connect to a wall to the next valley over and run all the way, basically, to New Mexico,” he said. “That’d be the longest continuous (border) wall in the United States right now.”
McSpadden addressed reporters during a flyover with EcoFlight, a nonprofit that coordinates free flights to educate passengers about conservation issues. The flyover offered glimpses of the Trump administration’s continuing border wall construction.
Last summer, the Department of Homeland Security awarded nearly $310 million to Fisher Sand & Gravel Company, a private contractor, to build about 27 miles of new border wall in Santa Cruz County. The construction, DHS said in a news release at the time, would “close critical openings in the border wall that were left incomplete due to canceled contracts during the Biden Administration.”
Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary at the time, waived environmental protections for the construction — a move that allows federal officials to circumvent the National Environmental Policy Act. The waived protections, DHS said, would ensure expedited border wall construction “by minimizing the risk of administrative delays.”
Border wall construction kicked off in the valley last September. Since then, contractors have built about five miles of the 27-mile goal, the Center for Biological Diversity estimates.
The construction continues as unauthorized crossings remain historically low along the border.
In January of 2026, DHS recorded 1,015 border encounters in the Tucson Sector, an area that stretches from the New Mexico state line to the Yuma County line. That figure represents a 78.5% decline from January of 2025, when DHS recorded 4,723 unauthorized crossings in the same sector.
Mullin, prospective DHS secretary, touts border wall funding##
Conservation advocates argue that waiving protections and constructing more border fence would harm a critical wildlife corridor for species that range from jaguars to pronghorn deer.
“It's possible that in the future we might see a wall that goes from east to west across all of Arizona,” McSpadden said. “And that would be incredibly detrimental to wildlife. Incredibly wasteful.”
Last year, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging that DHS violated the U.S. Constitution when it waived environmental protections across the San Rafael Valley. The suit remains active in federal court.
Noem — who headed the department that greenlit new border construction under Trump — was fired last Thursday. Trump’s pick for Noem’s successor, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, has also supported border wall construction.
Last summer, Mullin voted in favor of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, publicly touting the bill’s border wall funding in particular.
“We're finishing the border wall, hiring more ICE agents, and boosting detention capacity for mass deportations,” he wrote on X several weeks after the vote.
