Arizona agrees to remove shipping container border wall

• Barriers were placed to stop illegal migrants from crossing said Doug Ducey.
• Ducey has doubled down on securing his state’s border with Mexico.
• Ducey agreed to get rid of the shipping containers because federal officials said it was safe to do so.

Doug Ducey, who is leaving office as governor of Arizona, has agreed to take down a makeshift border wall that the federal government sued him over and that upset environmentalists.

According to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, Ducey said Wednesday that he would stop putting shipping containers on federal land along the U.S.-Mexico border. This was part of a deal he made with the Biden administration.

The agreement comes a week after the federal government sued Ducey’s government, saying that the border project was built illegally on federal land.

It tells Arizona that by Jan. 4, they have to take down the containers they put in the Coronado National Forest. The U.S. Forest Service must be consulted by state agencies to make sure that materials are taken away safely and won’t hurt natural resources any more.

“We’re overjoyed,” said Robin Silver of the Center for Biological Diversity. Earlier this month, the group filed a notice of intent to sue Ducey’s office over the wall because it was bad for the environment.

Protesters camped for weeks along the border wall, where it was cold and they had vowed to stay until the containers were taken away.

Katie Hobbs, who will replace Ducey as governor, is a Democrat. She has said that she doesn’t like the container project, but she hasn’t said that she will tear it down when she takes office in January.

Ducey’s spokesman, C.J. Karamargin, said that the project was always meant to be a temporary fix until the Biden administration agreed to finish building a wall that President Donald Trump started.

With only a few weeks left in office, Ducey has doubled down on securing his state’s border with Mexico. This is because local officials say they are seeing more illegal crossings because of confusion over Title 42, which limits the number of asylum-seekers who can enter the U.S.
The policy put in place by Trump was supposed to end this week, but the U.S. Supreme Court put a temporary hold on that on Monday. It’s not clear when the court will decide what to do.

In the meantime, Ducey’s office said it is working with local and state officials to send more help to places like Yuma County, where an emergency declaration was extended Wednesday before Title 42 was lifted. Karamargin said that things are still being worked out.

This month, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas gave U.S. Customs and Border Protection permission to move ahead with border projects in Yuma County, Arizona, and other places.

Karamargin said that Ducey agreed to get rid of the shipping containers because federal officials said it was safe to do so.

“For more than a year, the government has been talking about how they want to start building a permanent border wall again,” he said. “After the situation on our border became a full-blown crisis, they’ve finally decided to do something. Better late than never.”

Karamargin said that Ducey’s office is working with the Biden administration to “make sure they can start building this [new] barrier as quickly as this problem calls for.”

The final details of how much a new project will cost and when work will start are still being worked out. Karamargin said that the shipping container project cost the state of Arizona at least $82 million.

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