Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmont, left, addresses some of the county’s concerns with Gov. Doug Ducey in a news conference near the border fence in Yuma on Sept. 8. Photo by Alexia Faith || Cronkite News
By Howard Fischer || Capitol Media Services
A national environmental group wants to join the legal battle to force Gov. Doug Ducey to take his shipping containers off the international border.
But the governor’s lawyer wants the Center for Biological Diversity kept out of the case playing out in federal court. Brett Johnson said the issue is not about whether Ducey is violating federal environmental laws in erecting the makeshift wall along wildlife migration corridors but whether the federal government even controls the land.
In fact, Johnson told U.S. District Court Judge David Campbell that if Ducey wins his argument, then the property where the containers are going up was never federal land in the first place. And if that’s the case, he said, there is no federal jurisdiction — and no federal environmental laws have been violated.
All allowing the environmental organization to intervene would do, Johnson said, is gum up the case over unrelated issues.
But attorneys for the federal agencies who the governor is suing apparently have no such concern. They told Campbell they are not taking a position on the bid by the Center for Biological Diversity to become part of the case.
The fight is over who controls a 60-foot-wide strip along the Arizona-Mexico border.
Federal officials have long operated under the premise it belongs to the federal government. That’s based on a 1907 declaration by President Theodore Roosevelt reserving those lands to keep them “free from obstruction as a protection against the smuggling of goods between the United States and Mexico.”
It has come to be known as the Roosevelt Reservation.
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Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmont, left, addresses some of the county’s concerns with Gov. Doug Ducey in a news conference near the border fence in Yuma on Sept. 8. (Photo by Alexia Faith/Cronkite News)
What changed is Ducey ordering the placement of shipping containers to fill gaps in the federally constructed border wall in the Yuma area. That drew a nasty response from the Bureau of Reclamation, which accused the governor of trespassing on federal land and told him to remove them.
The governor responded by filing suit insisting that it’s not federal land or, that if it is, the state exercises joint jurisdiction. And then he ordered a second line of double-high containers erected in Cochise County.
Attorney Marc Fink of the Center for Biological Diversity said this is more than a turf fight between the state and the feds.
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