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Now in his final days, the controversial Republican Arizona Governor once again puts an international spotlight on his one-man solution to immigration.
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However, as reported by both The Intercept and the Washington Post (and local reporter Angela Gervais writing for Nogales International), one law-and-order man stands in Ducey's way -- Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway.
Arizona Gov. Ducey pushes on with shipping container border wall as term ends
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Jennifer Hassan
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"Doug Ducey, Arizona’s outgoing Republican governor, has been overseeing an operation to stack thousands of shipping containers across valued conservation land along the state’s southern border, creating a makeshift wall to keep migrants out.
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Ducey, who is set to leave office in early January due to term limits, says the barrier — which runs through the Coronado National Forest, which is protected federal land, and the Huachuca Mountains and San Rafael Valley — is necessary. He has accused the Biden administration of failing to tackle an “imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises” at the U.S.-Mexico border, echoing language that former president Donald Trump often used.
The wall, estimated to be 3,000 containers long, is expected to eventually span 10 miles and cost some $95 million, the Associated Press reported. The federal government has said the construction is unlawful and ordered state officials to halt it, and activists have warned of humanitarian and environmental concerns.
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The latest criticism came from Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, who warned over the weekend that anyone found to be helping to build the wall in his county will be arrested.
“The area where they’re placing the containers is entirely on federal land, on national forest land,” Hathaway told Fox 10 Phoenix on Saturday. “It’s not state land, it’s not private land, and the federal government has said this [is] illegal activity.
“So
just the way if I saw somebody doing an assault or a homicide or a
vehicle theft on public land within my county, I would charge that
person with a crime,” Hathaway said. . ." READ MORE
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Arizona GOP governor builds border wall with shipping containers in final days of office as Democrat replacement calls installation - meant to plug up holes in Trump's 450-mile barrier - a 'poor use of resources'
- Work crews have erected hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped by razor wire along Arizona´s remote eastern boundary with Mexico
- The move serves as a bold show of border enforcement force by outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who is being replaced by Democrat Katie Hobbs
- Hobbs said last week she was 'looking at all the options' and hasn't decided what to do about the containers after her January 5 inauguration
- She previously suggested the containers be repurposed as affordable housing, an increasingly popular option for homeless and low-income people
Work crews have steadily erected hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped by razor wire to form a de facto wall along Arizona's remote eastern border with Mexico - in a bold show of border force from the state's outgoing governor, Doug Ducey.
The container wall effort began in late summer in Yuma in western Arizona, a popular border crossing point, where scores of asylum-seekers arriving daily have found methods to circumvent new barriers.
The containers - erected in protest of progressive policies making light of America's migrant crisis - had filled areas left open when Donald Trump's 450-mile border wall was built, and have been branded as illegal by the federal government.
Incoming Democrat Katie Hobbs, set to take office early next month, has also spoke out against the makeshift wall, calling the massive installation a 'poor use of resources.'
Federal agencies have told Ducey the construction on U.S. land is unlawful and ordered it to halt. The Republican responded October 21 by sing federal officials over their objections, sending the dispute to court. . ." READ MORE
Sheriff warns of arrests if shipping containers installed on border in Santa Cruz County
Crews sent by Gov. Doug Ducey are currently installing shipping containers along the U.S.-Mexico border in Cochise, a few miles from the Santa Cruz County line.
Photo by Melissa del Bosque'As a contractor hired by Gov. Doug Ducey continues to stack shipping containers along the U.S.-Mexico border in Cochise County, moving westward into the San Rafael Valley, Sheriff David Hathaway said he’s ready to make a stand at the Santa Cruz County line.
If anyone tries to put the containers in his jurisdiction, Hathaway told the NI on Thursday, they’ll be arrested for illegal dumping.
“I’m just going to make sure they don’t enter our county,” he said.
The sheriff’s warning comes as contractors build a 10-mile border barrier in a southwestern region of Cochise County – within a few miles of the Santa Cruz County line.
That work has prompted protests from environmental activists and a warning from National Forest officials. And while no barrier construction has begun in Santa Cruz County, fast-moving trucks are already traveling through an eastern swath of the county with the shipping containers, creating safety concerns among residents, according to one Elgin woman.
Reached Thursday, Ducey spokesperson CJ Karamargin said the current stretch of border barrier is meant for Cochise County, though he would not confirm whether any further construction would take place in Santa Cruz County.
Still, he said the outgoing governor was determined to continue the effort in Arizona.
“Gov. Ducey has no intention of slowing or stopping the effort to fill gaps in the border barrier,” Karamargin said. . ." READ MORE
Sheriff Calls on Feds to Seize Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey’s Illegal Border Wall Equipment
David Hathaway, the sheriff in southern Arizona’s Santa Cruz County, is offering a simple solution to stop Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s illegal wall of shipping containers along the border: Federal agents should begin seizing vehicles associated with the project.
Hathaway’s county sits directly west of Cochise County, where Ducey has been dropping containers for the past month and a half despite federal officials repeatedly telling him that his actions are unauthorized and unlawful. With federal authorities doing nothing to act on those warnings, Hathaway has vowed to arrest the governor’s contractors if they cross the county line into his turf.
That scenario would be unlikely, as the contract for the project has the governor’s wall stopping just shy of Hathaway’s jurisdiction. Convoys of Ducey’s contractors have, however, been racing through communities in Santa Cruz County for weeks now, hauling 40-foot shipping containers behind multi-ton pickup trucks at dangerous speeds. Hathaway said his department has received complaints from residents in the town of Elgin of Ducey’s drivers “barreling through town,” ignoring stop signs, and “flying past children.”
“The way you would end this right away is you go get a seizure sticker, and you slap it on the side of one of those $200,000 trackhoes.”
“I’ve advised my deputies to especially scrutinize that area looking for speed violations, reckless endangerment, reckless driving,” Hathaway told The Intercept in an interview Friday — though, the sheriff argued, the real solution lies with the federal authorities paid to protect the public lands where the governor’s lawbreaking is taking place. The process wouldn’t be complicated. As a former Drug Enforcement Administration investigator, Hathaway sketched out a response the feds often take when targeting ongoing organized criminal activity.
“The way you would end this right away is you go get a seizure sticker, and you slap it on the side of one of those $200,000 trackhoes and say, ‘I’m seizing this because it’s being used to facilitate illegal activity,’” he said. “Or seize one of those F350 pickup trucks that’s pulling the flatbed trailers and say, ‘This vehicle is being used for illegal dumping on federal lands.’” Hathaway predicted Ducey’s work crews would “scatter like flies”: “That’s the way to really hit ’em where it hurts.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they all just packed up and left right then,” Hathaway said. “That’s what the Forest Service should be doing. They have the ability to seize vehicles that are being involved in illegal activity, illegal hunting, illegal whatever, and yet, nobody’s doing that.”
Since declaring in an interview with the Nogales International that he would arrest Ducey’s contractors — becoming the first, and to date only, law enforcement official in the country to raise the specter of consequences for the governor’s actions — Hathaway said he’s had Forest Service officials quietly sending him updates on the container wall and expressing their gratitude for taking a stand.
“Surprisingly, Coronado National Forest, their police are very excited about what I’m doing. They’re very much on my side, and they’re feeding me information,” he said. For the sheriff, it’s a bizarre situation. “I feel like being kind of sarcastic back to them and saying, ‘You know, this is really your job. I mean this is on federal land. Why are you just waiting for a county sheriff whose county starts six miles down the road?’”
On October 21, three days before he began a $95 million, publicly funded project to drop 3,000 shipping containers across more than 10 miles of almost entirely federal land, Ducey filed a lawsuit against Biden administration land managers.
The governor dismissed 115 years of legal agreement that a 60-foot strip of border road known as the “Roosevelt Reservation” belongs to the federal government — and said the state actually had jurisdiction over the land. Ducey contended that this mistake, combined with a state of emergency he declared because Arizona is purportedly beset by a foreign invasion, meant that he could disregard all of the time-consuming processes involved with following federal law when initiating construction on public lands.
Since filing the suit, Ducey has laid nearly four miles of shipping containers through the Coronado National Forest in Cochise County. The work by the Florida-based contractor AshBritt, which has deep ties to the Republican Party, is causing extensive environmental damage, blocking a critical migration corridor for jaguars and ocelots — both protected under the Endangered Species Act — and marring a once-serene desert landscape with a wall of giant metal boxes topped with concertina wire.
The sheriff in Cochise County is Mark Dannels, a close ally of the governor who frequently appears on Fox News to describe his county as engulfed in chaos and disorder. In February, the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs, the state agency managing Ducey’s border wall, committed to providing Dannels’s department with $14.9 million to thwart the purported invasion. As a county sheriff, Dannels has no authority to enforce federal immigration law.
Filing a lawsuit to preemptively declare an illegal activity is in fact legal does not make it so, Hathaway said. “What if they were out there without hunting licenses, just shooting a whole bunch of people, and then saying, ‘Well, we’re filing a lawsuit and so you can’t stop us from doing this, even though it’s clearly a violation of federal law?’” he asked. What’s more, the sheriff argued, such a lawsuit certainly shouldn’t handcuff an agency like the Forest Service from executing one of its core missions. “If they witness a clear crime,” he said, “that’s a clear crime.”
While the Department of Justice has filed a motion to dismiss Ducey’s lawsuit, the Biden administration has taken no steps on the ground to stop the governor’s project.
If a normal person ventured onto national forest land and dumped a bag of trash on the ground in front of a ranger, they would be issued a citation, Hathaway said. In the case of Coronado, the situation is much more severe, with no repercussions. “You’re talking about hundreds of tons of material being dumped out there and a lot of earth-moving — heavy-tracked vehicles moving large amounts of earth. And this is all on federal land,” Hathaway said. “This is not state land. This is not private land. It’s been declared illegal.”
Late Wednesday afternoon, Hathaway made an unannounced, solo visit to offer his support to a small group of local residents and protesters who are camped out at the site of Ducey’s container wall construction. So far, the citizen public land defenders have been the only force to impede the governor’s destructive march through the national forest — and they have been remarkably successful, bringing the project largely to a halt over the past week.
“This is disgusting and ugly.”
Hathaway was taken with their efforts and wanted to say so. During his visit, the sheriff heard about the handful of people who had stood in front of the governor’s vehicles for hours in the cold, stopping their advance the previous night. “Man, fantastic what the protesters are doing,” he said to himself. The sheriff described the protesters as “very valiant” and likened their willingness to block heavy equipment to “a Tiananmen Square-type situation.”
For Hathaway, the area surrounding the protesters’ camp is imbued with deep personal meaning. “I’ve been going out there since I was a baby,” Hathaway said. The sheriff and his family have ranchland in the area. He’s ridden horseback along the border road where Ducey’s trucks are running for as long as he can remember. “That’s been most of my life out there, right where the protesters are,” he said. “I know that whole area in and out like the back of my hand, and it’s always been peaceful and serene and quiet.”
While he had been to the site of Ducey’s container wall more times
than he could count, Hathaway’s Wednesday visit was the first time he’d
seen the landscape bisected with a jagged ribbon of metal boxes. His
reaction was visceral: “This is disgusting and ugly. READ MORE
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