Somewhere in the rugged borderland sky islands of Arizona, a single jaguar — known to scientists and trackers as El Jefe's successor — navigates the rocky scrub of what remains of his ancestral range. He is, by every available estimate, among the last of his kind in the United States. The corridor he depends upon, threading through the Coronado National Memorial and the vast borderland wilderness between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, is now being severed — by steel, by concrete, and by a legal mechanism that explicitly removes the requirement to ask whether any of this matters for the wildlife it destroys.
The Trump administration's accelerated border wall expansion has reached inside national park and protected public land boundaries, according to reporting by SFGate, advancing construction through ecologically critical terrain without the environmental impact reviews mandated under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The mechanism enabling this is a sweeping waiver authority — originally embedded in border security legislation — that allows the Department of Homeland Security to set aside dozens of environmental and historic preservation laws in the name of expediting construction. It has been invoked before. It is being invoked again, at a scale and pace that conservation biologists describe as alarming.
The Jaguar Corridor: America's Last Lifeline
The jaguar — Panthera onca — once roamed from Patagonia to the Grand Canyon. Decades of hunting, habitat loss, and the fragmentation of the borderland wilderness reduced the US population to effectively zero for most of the twentieth century. Then, beginning in the 1990s, camera traps began capturing something extraordinary: individual male jaguars crossing north from Mexico, drawn by deer, javelinas, and the rugged mountain habitat of southern Arizona and .
