Far from DC, an iconic trail is militarized for Trump’s border wall

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Video courtesy of the CDT Coalition.

Before the Trump administration decided the country urgently needed to erect a hulking steel wall in southern New Mexico’s bootheel, only a three-strand barbed wire fence separated the United States from Mexico in this arid stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert.

“Maybe I’d see a Border Patrol truck, a rancher and a couple of cows,” said Teresa Martinez, co-founder and executive director of the Continental Divide Trail Coalition, a national nonprofit that helps steward the trail. Now, she said, it’s a “construction zone.”

Almost exactly a year ago, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum transferred 110,000 acres of federal land from the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico into the jurisdiction of the US Army. The emergency measure, he said, was spurred by a need “to secure the border and protect the nation’s resources.”

Part of the transfer, which included land in three counties, involved the famed southern terminus of the Continental Divide Trail, a 3,100-mile long-distance trail that stretches from Canada to Mexico and snakes along mountains that create a natural boundary between river systems.

The land transfer helps fulfill the signature promise of Donald Trump’s first and second terms—constructing a border wall between the US and Mexico to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants. Praised by supporters and fiercely condemned by critics, this latest iteration of the project—which will add hundreds of new miles of fencing and surveillance—is being funded by the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, a medley of tax cuts, revocations of green energy subsidies and infusions of funding for border enforcement.

Building a wall here, though, would completely transform the region, including the southernmost edge of the Continental Divide Trail, whose rugged solitude and quiet beauty have long drawn hikers to the area. That transformation began earlier this year when the remote and rocky road leading to the trailhead, historically navigable only by four-wheel drive, was smoothed out and widened to accommodate two semi-trucks hauling sections of the wall.

Stacks of that impermeable bollard fencing—the diamond-shaped stainless-steel slats that have become emblematic of the border in the last decade—recently greeted hikers near a famed obelisk called the “Crazy Cook” monument, where the trail either begins or ends, depending on which direction you’re headed. Within days, roaring equipment heaved them vertically into place.

Martinez has seen the changes to the landscape firsthand. A nearby hill that provided dirt for concrete to be mixed onsite is now completely eroded, she said. Dust from the constant traffic has created massive swirling clouds, and jackhammers now rumble through the once-silent landscape.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security and US Customs and Border Protection awarded almost $4.5 billion to wall-building efforts, including $1.6 billion to construct 49 miles of it in New Mexico’s remote Bootheel region, where the trail is located. Burgum’s transfer also designated the land as a National Defense Area (NDA), a temporary zone under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense—which the Trump administration wants to rename the Department of War—and managed locally by Fort Huachuca, a US Army base that’s 150 miles west of New Mexico in Arizona.

More than a mile of the trail is within the bounds of this controlled perimeter.

In the months after the creation of the NDA, all international hikers were prohibited from entering it. Then, the rules eased, allowing hikers to apply for authorization from Fort Huachuca and be escorted by qualified government personnel. American citizens also had to apply for authorization from the fort and undergo a background check. Without this permission, hikers could face federal trespassing charges.

Thru-hiking for all hikers was down by as much as 20 percent last year, Martinez said. 

Last June, thru-hiker Leslie Boyd set out southbound on the Continental Divide Trail at a time when confusion about the new NDA was at its peak. It wasn’t until September—more than halfway into a 144-day trip—that the application process and what it entailed became clear.

“In my mind, to apply for the permit would be to condone the creation of the NDA, and I do not condone the establishment of the NDA,” Boyd said. Ultimately, Boyd and a small group of other hikers decided against applying and instead reached the border by way of a small sliver of New Mexico’s state trust land where the federal trespassing laws did not apply.

“The repercussions of this?” they wrote in an Instagram post days after the hike ended. “Simply that I would not touch the terminus monument at Crazy Cook and take the iconic ‘monument photo.’” Instead, the group ended their expedition in a less traditional way, simply standing together next to a barbed wire fence.

Today, uncertainty remains high as two parallel barriers are slated for construction at the trailhead and monument, both of which will have to move some 200 feet to accommodate them. And Customs and Border Protection could temporarily limit all access to the trail for “safety reasons,” an agency spokesperson wrote by email, though he did not specify what those reasons might be.

Meanwhile, hundreds of construction workers have arrived in the region, transforming small towns like Hachita—a sleepy community of fewer than 20 residents with a church, a post office and a single gas station—into rapidly growing man camps.

Borderlands are inherently political zones that come with life-threatening perils. In 2022, the United Nations estimated that nearly half of all deaths on the US-Mexico border were of immigrants attempting to enter the country through the Chihuahuan or nearby Sonoran deserts, dry, forbidding regions where temperatures frequently exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer months.

From 2025 to 2026, the number of undocumented immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol was nonetheless down by 80 percent for all of New Mexico and two counties in Texas, though Customs and Border Protection declined to provide exact statistics for detentions in the Bootheel region. During almost the same period, the US Army made 24 temporary detentions in New Mexico, according to an agency spokesperson.

But when Burgum announced the land transfer last year, he invoked an emergency withdrawal, defined in the Federal Register as “extraordinary measures” undertaken to “preserve values that would otherwise be lost.” The Trump administration invoked the same provision—one move typically reserved by the Interior Department to preserve valuable lands from settlement, sale or extraction—in 2019 to withdraw much smaller chunks of land and transfer them to the Army for the same purpose.

According to Burgum’s order, the Army would “prevent unauthorized human activity in ecologically sensitive areas along the southern border, which can be harmed by repeated foot traffic, unregulated vehicle use, and the creation of informal trails or camps.”  

Constructing a border wall like this is arguably more destructive and critics say the cost of building it is far too expensive. “This Bootheel border wall project is the absolute definition of waste and will do nothing to make our country safer,” said Congressman Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) in January.

Indeed, the sense of wildness and wonder that land withdrawals have historically sought to protect is all but gone amid the current noise, dust, and pending steel wall. “What has been lost, we’ll never get back,” Martinez said. “In all the ways, physical, metaphysical, emotional, spiritual, cultural. We will never get it back. That is what I mourn.”