Legible natures and the (re)making of environmental impact assessments in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands

Abstract

In 2005, Congress passed the REAL ID Act allowing the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to waive all laws at the local, state, tribal, and federal levels to rapidly construct hundreds of miles of barriers between the U.S. and Mexico in response to heightened anxieties about the “war on terror.” Included in these waivers was the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the legal anchor of the environmental review process for development projects on federal lands created during the Nixon administration. By 2008, border barriers were no longer legally required to undergo the NEPA review process. In its place, DHS instituted a non-legally binding review process called Environmental Stewardship Plans (ESP) that environmental advocates and other anti-border wall activists argue has little value in comparison to NEPA. However, prior to the 2005 waivers, certain portions of the border wall were constructed having undergone the initial stages of the NEPA process. In this article I analyze the two different environmental review processes for border barriers using the Arizona borderlands as a case study. Through processes of fragmentation, abstraction, and equivalence, I argue that the science as done through NEPA produces an accounting of the borderlands environment that fails to acknowledge true socio-environmental harms. I further present an “excavation” of the ESPs to understand how this process is conducted in the absence of NEPA. I suggest ESPs may be one avenue in challenging the expanding imperialism of the U.S.-Mexico border, as these documents are no longer tethered to any legal anchors.