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2026-04-06 04:39:01

Thousands of striking workers at a beef plant in Colorado agreed on Saturday to return to work as JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, agreed to resume contract negotiations. 

The workers, who are part of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, went on strike on March 16, 2026, focused on disputes over wages, safety equipment, and working conditions at the plant, which packs about seven percent of beef in the entire country. The strike took place as the price of beef has spiked over the past year. According to the personal finance website Money, a pound of ground beef is now more expensive than the federal minimum wage. 

UFCW Local 7 President Kim Cordova said that JBS would meet on April 9 and 10 to resume negotiations, and workers would return to work on Tuesday, April 7. “Workers remain united and will continue to fight until JBS fully ends its unfair labor practices and gives workers a contract offer that protects them,” Cordova said in the Saturday press release. 

In a March story for Mother Jones, just days into the strike, Ted Genoways summarized the stakes:

“If the strike lasts more than a few days, then what has been a local battle over workplace conditions, healthcare, and wages could turn into a proxy for bigger picture conflicts—inflation and affordability, the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, and corrupt corporate influence.”

Genoways explained that most of the workers at the Greeley, Colorado, plant are foreign-born laborers from Haiti, Somalia, Burma, and Mexico. The last major meatpacking worker strike, which took place 40 years ago at a Minnesota pork facility, largely failed as the plant brought in over 500 “permanent replacements,” leading to hundreds of union members ultimately crossing the picket line and returning to work. This paved the way for meatpacking companies to consolidate the market, replacing a majority-white, US-born workforce with immigrant workers. A lawsuit filed last December by Haitian workers in the Colorado plant alleges the plant segregated them to a night shift and forced them to work at “dangerously fast speeds.” 

In explaining the rationale for this strike, the UFCW press release notes, “Instead of shifting toward fair treatment, the Company has recently doubled down on its illegal tactics by threatening to discontinue their healthcare benefits, and by threatening workers with termination if they did not resign from the Union and refuse to strike.”

“This decision by the union comes without any new agreement or change to [the] company’s original offer,” JBS said in a Saturday news release about the return to work, maintaining that the company’s “Last, Best and Final offer” is still on the table. 

The union said the company had offered less than two percent more a year in wages, which does not reflect the rate of inflation in Colorado. JBS has denied any labor law violations and said its contract offer was fair.

2026-04-06 00:11:22

President Donald Trump gave Americans a bizarre, expletive-filled Easter Sunday message, celebrating US plans for war crimes against Iran following what appears to be the rescue of two airmen shot down in southern Iran. 

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

As a text launched on the morning of one of the most significant religious holidays on the Christian calendar, the post is disturbing enough, but it becomes even more so when read aloud, as Jake Tapper did on CNN’s Sunday show, State of the Union:

Aside from the president’s uninhibited vocabulary, attacking civilian infrastructure such as power plants is generally considered a war crime by international law experts. 

“Given that such power plants are essential for meeting the basic needs and livelihoods of tens of millions of civilians, attacking them would be disproportionate and thus unlawful under international humanitarian law,” Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, said when such threats initially surfaced, “even in the limited cases that they qualify as military targets.” 

Trump’s repeated belligerence and the continued and escalating military aggression in Iran, which has reportedly killed at least 2,000 people since the US and Israel launched the war on February 28, framed the sermon of Pope Leo XIV, who proclaimed in his Easter message on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica that the world was becoming “accustomed to violence.” 

“Let those who have weapons lay them down,” he said. “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace. Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue.” 

Pope Leo has long criticized the war and, for the first time, explicitly mentioned Trump last Tuesday, saying he hoped the president would find an “off-ramp” to end the fighting.

But perhaps the president was just overtaken with joy on Sunday with the news that the US military had rescued the second American pilot who was shot down while flying over southern Iran on Friday. The two-member fighter jet was the first US aircraft to crash in Iranian territory since the beginning of the war. The first pilot was rescued just hours after the crash. 

“At my direction, the U.S. Military sent dozens of aircraft, armed with the most lethal weapons in the World, to retrieve him,” Trump posted in celebration on Truth Social just after midnight on Sunday. “The fact that we were able to pull off both of these operations, without a SINGLE American killed, or even wounded, just proves once again, that we have achieved overwhelming Air Dominance and Superiority over the Iranian skies.”

As Amin Saikal, a professor of Middle East and Central Asian studies at the Australian National University, told Al Jazeera on Sunday, rescuing the two pilots allows Trump to more freely pursue his military strategy, namely, the 48-hour deadline he imposed on Iran’s leadership Saturday morning to open the Strait of Hormuz before “all Hell will reign down on them.”

Later on Sunday, Trump told ABC News‘ Rachel Scott that if Iran does not agree to a deal, “we’re blowing up the whole country.”

2026-04-05 19:30:00

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In 2021, China’s leader Xi Jinping made two important promises intended to signal China‘s commitment to fighting climate change. At the Leaders Climate Summit in that April, he announced that China would “strictly control” coal generation until 2025 when it would start to gradually phase it out. He also pledged that year that China would reduce the energy intensity of its economy—the amount of CO2 used to produce a unit of GDP—to 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. 

This month, as China unveiled its plans for the next five years, both promises appeared to be in trouble.   

The annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and attended by some 3,000 delegates, is the occasion for China’s Communist Party leaders to make important policy announcements to China and the world. This year’s meeting was keenly watched: Running from March 5 to March 12, it marked the launch of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, a set of national policies and targets that will determine the shape and ambitions of China’s economy up to 2030. 

2030 is also the date by which China promised, in 2015, that the country will have peaked its greenhouse gas emissions, a milestone on the way to becoming carbon neutral by 2060. Since first making that commitment a decade ago, China’s leadership has further promised to bring the peaking date forward. What happens in the next five years will determine if those promises can be kept. But analysts fear that the continuing growth in the numbers of China’s coal-fired power stations and the lack of any clear commitment in the new five-year plan to call a halt to coal expansion, may make both promises impossible to reach.

China’s government can point to some progress in the long battle against coal: In 2015 coal generated 69 percent of China’s primary energy, and by 2024 it was down to 56 percent (still much higher than the United States at 8 percent). But the actual volume of coal consumed was greater than ever, simply because China’s electricity demand continues to grow. Despite its efforts to reduce coal use, four years after Xi Jinping’s pledges, China was consuming 40 percent more coal than the rest of the world combined. 

That total might have been greater still if not for China’s impressive growth in renewable energy. China installed a record 300 gigawatts of solar power and 100 gigawatts of wind power last year, which meant that the continuing increase in China’s electricity demand was largely met by clean energy. But although China’s decades-long investment in the manufacture of renewable technologies has been a hugely successful industrial policy, its attachment to coal means that this success has not translated into a correspondingly large reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. 

Paradoxically, China is at the same time the biggest installer of renewable energy, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the biggest user of coal. One explanation for this conundrum is a national concern over energy security: Coal is the only fossil fuel that China is not obliged to import, either through vulnerable pipelines or along sea routes that pass through precarious choke points like the Straits of Hormuz.

China has an abundant supply of coal, boasting about 13 percent of the world’s recoverable coal reserves, and, importantly, it is the one fossil fuel that Chinese planners know will remain abundantly available, regardless of any tensions in China’s East Asia region or military action in the Middle East, the region that supplies China with nearly half its oil. This means that despite China’s role as a renewable energy superpower, coal has continued to play a leading role in its energy system. 

The importance to China of a steady coal market was reinforced in 2021, the same year that Xi Jinping made his coal pledge, when China suffered power shortages that affected 20 provinces and impacted both industry and consumers. The problem arose as China emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic: Industrial production recovered, electricity demand soared, and that in turn sent coal prices spiralling upward. Coal-fired power stations were locked into regulated prices for the sale of their electricity, but the price of coal was not controlled. When the coal price became too high, the generators began to cut output to limit their losses, pleading supply shortages or technical problems. 

In October that year, the then Premier Li Keqiang reacted to the crisis, signaling an adjustment to China’s approach to climate policy. Economic growth, he said, was the key to lowering emissions in the long term and “energy security should be the premise on which a modern energy system is built.” China soon announced a new lending facility to support the “clean and efficient use of coal.”  

The following year there was a new energy crisis: A severe drought in Sichuan caused output to drop from the province’s hydroelectric plants, normally the source of 80 percent of its electricity. Factories were ordered to close or reduce their output to save households from power cuts, and applications for permission to build new coal-fired power plants reached record levels as provincial authorities worried about having the energy to meet their economic growth targets. The equivalent of two new coal plants per week were approved in 2022, and by 2023, permitting reached a 10-year high of almost 113 gigawatts.  The pace of construction continued in 2024, when China started building  94.5 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity—roughly 93 percent of all new global coal construction that year.

By 2023, analysts were warning that, in addition to putting its climate goals out of reach,  the surge in new coal meant that China risked building coal-fired power stations that would never recover their investment and were likely to become stranded assets. Most of the new projects, according to a report from the energy think tank CREA, did not meet the central government’s criteria for new plants since they were located in provinces that had sufficient generating capacity to meet their needs.   

With a further 243 gigawatts of new coal power permitted or under construction and 149 gigawatts more announced, CREA’s analysts predicted that there were two possible results, both negative: a massive increase in coal power generation and emissions, or the coal plants would have to run well below their capacity. There would be no reduction in coal use, the report concluded, unless new projects were canceled or existing plants retired early. 

Not only have none been canceled, but the rush to build new plants has continued, and as predicted, the utilization rate of the new plants has dropped. 

The 15th Five-Year Plan offered a chance to correct these negative trends and get China’s climate ambitions back on track, but it is an opportunity the government appears to have missed. The plan does promise a continuing effort to produce and install renewable energy, and China did install more renewable solar and wind power last year than the whole of the rest of the world, but other signals were less encouraging.

Until recently, China argued that its continuing claim to be a developing country meant it did not need to set emissions limits, focusing instead on the energy density (also known as energy intensity) targets highlighted by Xi Jinping. In measuring the energy required to produce a unit of GDP, they are essentially measures of efficiency: As long as energy consumption grows more slowly than GDP, energy intensity is reduced. 

China set its first energy density target in the 11th Five-Year Plan in 2006, and it has been an important target in every subsequent plan, steadily improving the efficiency of China’s energy use. But greater efficiency does not necessarily mean that emissions fall. China’s energy demand has continued to rise, and so despite its greater efficiency, its emissions have increased. In the last 18 months, emissions have been down slightly, but if energy density improvements slacken off, that trend is expected to reverse.

Over the last five years, China’s continuing dramatic growth in demand seemed largely to have been met by the equally rapidly expanding supply of renewable energy. But on the negative side, China has missed its energy density target, for the first time. Aiming at a 17 percent improvement over those five years, it achieved only 12.4 percent. Given its GDP growth, that would imply that its emissions increased by 13 percent over the same period. 

That would put the country’s hopes of meeting its Paris commitments and Xi Jinping’s promise to reduce China’s carbon intensity by 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 severely off track. Planners could have compensated with renewed ambition in the 15th Five-Year Plan. Instead, they changed the way they calculate energy intensity, perhaps to disguise the failure to meet Xi’s target, and set a looser ambition for the next five years.   

If one aspect of China’s reluctance to abandon coal is related to energy security, another major obstacle is the vested interests within the system: Coal-producing provinces want to preserve jobs and local economies, and for provincial governments, a steady supply of electricity is more important than controlling emissions. These concerns can be in competition with national climate goals. 

In China, which has the largest electricity system in the world, power generation is under the control of provincial governments, while the generating companies and the grid operators who distribute the energy are dominated by state-owned companies. When China started to build large-scale wind and solar projects more than 10 years ago, the energy system was dominated by coal-fired power stations with annual contracts to supply the grid with electricity. Because the grid operator paid for that output regardless of how much it used, the operator ensured that coal output had preferential access. That meant that when wind farms were producing high levels of electricity, they frequently found that they were unable to sell onto the grid, and it was wasted.

There have been successive attempts to reform the system to favor renewable energy, and in the 15th Five-Year Plan, the government points to its continuing commitment to expanding the renewables sector as the key to its climate policy. But this industrial policy, however successful, will not in itself reduce emissions if coal continues to play a substantial role in the power sector. 

The government continues to claim that coal is necessary to balance the grid, filling the gaps in supply when demand is at its peak or when renewable output falls. But as the analysts at CREA point out, that is not the best or most efficient use of a coal-fired power station that has been designed for steady rather than sporadic operation. It can take several hours to get a coal-fired station into operation and, once operating at its maximum, it cannot easily be turned down when demand drops. To get around this problem, it appears that many operators are keeping plants in a state known as “spinning reserve,” running in the background and ready to dispatch energy at short notice. But this is inefficient both in energy use and in carbon emissions since the plant just keeps ticking, using fuel and emitting CO2.    

There has also been a remarkable expansion of various forms of energy storage in China, including battery and pumped hydro, precisely to address the challenge of intermittent renewable power. Battery storage alone has increased by a factor of 20 in just four years. These forms of storage are cheaper, more efficient, and more climate friendly than keeping a coal fleet on standby and, as they grow, the case for the continued use of coal, let alone its expansion, seems sure to grow even weaker. 

Of concern for investors, the cost of China’s recent coal build-out in long-term stranded assets could run into trillions. The cost to the climate is of concern to everybody.

2026-04-05 02:06:26

The US Department of Health and Human Services gave at least $34 million directly to 16 crisis pregnancy centers between 2018 and 2024, according to a US Government Accountability Office report publicly released on Wednesday.

Crisis pregnancy centers, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are “facilities that represent themselves as legitimate reproductive health care clinics providing care for pregnant people” but work to dissuade them from seeing abortions, even during life-threatening situations such as ectopic pregnancies. There are between 2,400 and 2,800 crisis pregnancy centers in the United States.

This report comes as the Trump administration doubles down on its “pro-life and pro-family agenda,” according to White House spokesperson Kush Desai. On Friday, the Trump administration, in its budget proposal, announced plans to overhaul its Title X family planning program, moving away from contraception and instead focusing on “optimal health (defined as physical, mental, and social wellbeing), not just medical intervention.” This also seems to dismiss that some people need medical interventions, like IVF, in order to have children.

The researchers at GAO noted that it was difficult to identify how much money was given to crisis pregnancy centers over the six-year period, which does not include Trump’s second term, as they “are not easy to identify in government spending data.” They were able to identify 16 crisis pregnancy centers that received federal funds from HHS because they received a large amount of funding through two HHS Sexual Risk Avoidance Education grants.

“HHS’s oversight of federal funding obligated to CPCs is specific to the
requirements of the grant awarded and varies depending on whether the CPC is
the direct or pass-through recipient of the grant, according to HHS officials,” the researchers wrote. “HHS neither targets nor excludes CPCs from any federal grant opportunities, according to agency officials.”

The amount of grant funding that GAO located given to crisis pregnancy centers was not exclusive to the years during the first Trump administration. 2021 to 2024, HHS gave an average of just under $4.8 million per year over a four-year period during the Biden administration, just under the average of $5 million per year under the first Trump administration.

The GAO report lines up with a 2024 Health Management Associates report, which found that 650 crisis pregnancy centers received close to $400 million from federal funding streams between 2017 and 2023.

2026-04-05 01:04:25

On Friday, President Donald Trump released his budget proposal for the fiscal year 2027. Surprisingly, given the cuts that would be necessary to fund the $1.5 trillion the Trump administration is asking for military spending, the budget also included over $500 million more funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, for a total of over $16 billion. But disability experts are wary of other aspects of what the Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought, Project 2025’s architect, put forward. Vought wrote in the proposal that the budget “continues the Department of Education’s path to elimination, returning control of education back to America’s families.”

Under the IDEA, qualifying students with disabilities are able to receive modifications to their education, making sure that they have equitable access to learning opportunities in the least restrictive environment for them. The administration’s proposal includes nearly $700 million that would go directly to states.

“We do need to provide more money to states to provide direct services for kids with disabilities,” said Rob Trombley, who was an account lead for the Department of Education’s IDEA team during the Obama administration.

The budget recommends removing funding specifically designated for parent information centers, which help equip parents with information and resources they need to advocate for their kids with disabilities, as well as technical assistance for schools. This funding would instead come out of each state’s IDEA budget. Multiple experts I spoke with expressed concerns that this will lead to these parent programs not getting the funding they need.

“These are programs that are really critical for ensuring the implementation of IDEA,” National Center for Learning Disabilities‘ associate director of policy and advocacy Nicole Fuller said. “IDEA really is a comprehensive program, and all of the parts of it kind of work in tandem and together to support the implementation.”

The Trump administration tried the same move last year, but Congress, in a bipartisan fashion, rejected this change to the budget for parent information centers. “Advocates for students and families will call on Congress to do so again,” said Stephanie Smith Lee, former director of the Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs during the George W. Bush administration.

Last year, there was also an attempt to put funding for preschool for kids with disabilities in the states through consolidated grants. Though that was similarly rejected, it is again in the budget bill for fiscal year 2027.

Early intervention during preschool years can help kids learn the skills that they need to thrive. “The sooner we can provide services for those who have developmental delays, the less likelihood that they may have a more severe disability,” Trombley told me.

It is also perhaps unsurprising that the budget refers to unborn disabled children, as anti-abortion activists tend to do, claiming that IDEA serves “eight million children with disabilities, including those unborn.” But there’s no tracking of the federal government by the Department of Education of fetuses with disabilities—that eight million number just refers to students with Individualized Education Plans, commonly known as IEPs.

There are also attacks on other aspects of education that will undoubtedly impact disabled students of color if the budget is approved by Congress, including an attempt to eliminate the English language acquisition program entirely and funding for minority-serving institutions programs. The 93-page Special Education appropriations report for the budget proposal also only mentions the term “race” once, acknowledging that schools can be held to account for disproportionately penalizing disabled students of one race over another.

Disability education is, of course, far from perfect. The federal government has already not followed through on a commitment to fund 40 percent of the cost of IEPs. The new budget proposal says that it will reduce “paperwork burdens on special educators so they can focus their time on serving students.” But, reducing paperwork for IEPs may not end up helping disabled students. Trombley told me that he does think a pilot program for finding ways to streamline IEPs could be useful if it is effective, but he does not have faith in the current administration to accomplish this. “We still need to make sure that kids are protected,” he added.

“For families, [an] IEP being comprehensive is really important, not only for their child’s services and supports,” Fuller noted, “but also should they need to use their due process rights.”

There very much remains a concern among disability education advocates that the Trump administration will soon try to move the disability education programs from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has suggested that autistic people have no value, would have a more profound influence on disability education policy.

“It is time to focus on how to improve educational opportunities for all students, including students with disabilities,” Smith Lee, now the co-director of policy and advocacy at the National Down Syndrome Congress, said, “and stop focusing on eliminating important programs, dismantling the US Department of Education, and cutting department staff.”

2026-04-04 19:30:00

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News in partnership with Puente News Collaborative and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a Saturday morning in March, high school students, mountain bikers and soldiers from a nearby Army base climbed the winding path up Mount Cristo Rey. From the summit, they could see most of El Paso, the sprawling city that dominates a stretch of desert where New Mexico, Texas and the Mexican state of Chihuahua meet. 

They paused to trace the line of the Rio Grande, where it divides Mexico and the United States, and then touched the smooth tiles lining the base of the Christ the King statue, a cherished monument that gives the mountain its name.

Two days later, on a Monday morning, explosions rattled the same site. Contractors were blasting the south side of Mount Cristo Rey to prepare the terrain for construction of the border wall President Donald Trump has long promised would run from San Diego in California to Brownsville in Texas.

After the explosions, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) uploaded a video of the blasts to social media. One earlier post boasted the mountain was getting a “face lift” to “secure a historically challenging terrain.”

The sarcasm didn’t sit well with thousands of residents from both sides of the border, who looked forward to the annual Good Friday pilgrimage to the mountain summit. This year, they would be walking above an active construction zone.

Walls have long separated El Paso and Sunland Park, New Mexico, from the Mexican metropolis of Ciudad Juárez. But building a wall on the rugged slopes of Mount Cristo Rey was long considered impractical. Eventually, the mountain’s slopes became the only significant gap without an imposing border fence in the binational metro area of more than 2.5 million people. 

In recent years, Sunland Park and the area around Mount Cristo Rey saw high numbers of unauthorized crossings. Migrant deaths in the nearby desert soared. In lieu of a wall, Border Patrol agents blanketed the mountain and stationed themselves, along with surveillance equipment, on nearby roads. 

Border crossings in the El Paso sector slowed during the final year of the Biden administration and have plummeted since Trump returned to office. The second Trump administration is intent on sealing every border gap. 

SLSCO, a Texas company based in Galveston, has a $95 million contract to build a 1.3-mile wall on Mount Cristo Rey and two other barriers near El Paso. CBP waived environmental and historical preservation laws in June 2025, clearing the way for a border wall on the mountain. Over the objections of the local Catholic diocese, which owns most of the mountain, work began at the site in January. 

Robert Ardovino, a business owner in Sunland Park, is no stranger to the traffic of Border Patrol vehicles and undocumented migrants crossing into New Mexico. But he was appalled to see the side of the mountain being shaved off. “Electronics would have made more sense than destroying a whole mountain,” Ardovino said on a recent afternoon. “But they’re doing what they’re doing.”

He predicted that when the Good Friday pilgrims ascended the mountain, many would be shaking their heads at the destruction. “There is no accountability,” he said. “And the damage will be irreparable.”

“CBP has environmental monitors present during these activities to ensure construction best management practices are being followed and implemented by the construction contractor,” an agency spokesperson said.

An environmental summary report, completed in lieu of an environmental impact assessment, is not available to the public, the spokesperson said.

Mount Cristo Rey is where the land border between the US and Mexico ends and the Rio Grande becomes the dividing line. This point, for centuries called Paso del Norte—the northern pass—has been a crossroads for Indigenous peoples, Spanish colonizers and later settlers traveling west on the early transcontinental railroads. 

Once the railroad reached El Paso in 1881, the city grew quickly. A brick company opened on the flanks of Mount Cristo Rey, and a quarry was carved into the mountainside. Later, a copper smelter rose in its shadow. Mexican American workers lived nearby in a company town called Smeltertown.

A priest at Smeltertown’s Catholic church first proposed building a statue on the mountaintop. The 29-foot limestone statue of Christ was dedicated in 1939. The mountain, previously known as Cerro de los Muleros, or Mule Driver’s Mountain, was renamed Mount Cristo Rey. 

Smeltertown was demolished in the 1970s. But descendants of several families who lived there still volunteer with the Mount Cristo Rey Restoration Committee, which maintains the trail and monument. They keep a watchful eye on the thousands of people, the religious and the secular, who join the Good Friday walk.

During the first Trump administration, in 2019, a group called We Build the Wall, that included Steve Bannon, tapped private donations to build a half-mile wall on the eastern side of Mount Cristo Rey. Fisher Sand and Gravel, which has received billions of dollars in border wall construction contracts under the Trump administration, built this section of wall on private property. CBP cut a dirt road across the south side of the mountain.

Bannon later pleaded guilty to defrauding donors. Lights illuminating the wall, which separates Mexico from the United States and El Paso from New Mexico, were turned off when the builders’ bank accounts were frozen.

Border wall construction largely stopped during the Biden administration. But once Trump returned to office, Mount Cristo Rey became a priority. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem waived more than two dozen laws on June 3 to expedite construction of the wall across the mountain. The REAL ID Act of 2005 granted DHS the authority to “waive all legal requirements” necessary to expedite construction of border barriers. Among the laws waived were the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.

CBP announced plans for a 30-foot-high barrier that would run along the south side of the mountain and loom over the Anapra neighborhood in Ciudad Juárez. Agency plans state the wall will consist of steel bollards spaced four inches apart. It will require drainage gates and access roads.

Funding for CBP’s El Paso Anapra 16-4 Wall Project, which includes Mount Cristo Rey, dates back to DHS 2020 border wall appropriations. Since then, the agency has received 224 written statements about the proposal. According to the summary, 211 comments opposed the wall. 

Notably, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces urged the agency to exclude Mount Cristo Rey from its barrier plans. In its comments, the diocese referred to the mountain as a place “where faith transcends borders.”

“A grant of entry onto land [the diocese] owns for CBP purposes, whether temporary or permanent, would deter those pilgrims and migrants from exercising their religion as they have done for almost one hundred years,” wrote the Diocese’s general counsel, Kathryn Brack Morrow. “A place of hope, faith, and communion would become a place of fear, exclusion and division.”

Morrow wrote that the Diocese had received multiple requests for access to its property from the Department of Justice, which were denied.

The trail to the summit has not been disturbed by construction. But last year, the area along the border in Sunland Park and at Mount Cristo Rey was designated a National Defense Area, part of the US Army’s Fort Huachuca. People who enter a National Defense Area can be charged with trespassing.

Contractors are blasting the mountain along a 60-mile strip of federal property known as the Roosevelt Reservation. The City of Sunland Park also owns property on the mountain. A city spokesperson said Sunland Park has no jurisdiction over the area where construction is occurring. 

The construction company JOBE also owns property on the mountain and declined to comment.

To the untrained eye, Mount Cristo Rey, like many Chihuahuan Desert locales, can appear desolate. A local CBP spokesperson compared it to a “moonscape” in a local news interview. “It’s just rock and sand.”

But for geologists like Eric Kappus, Mount Cristo Rey is a “treasure.”

Kappus discovered a series of dinosaur footprints at Mount Cristo Rey in 2002 while he was a graduate student at the University of Texas at El Paso. The prints were formed between 80 and 100 million years ago when Iguanodons and theropods plodded through mud on the edge of what was then a vast sea.

Kappus said he spent thousands of hours exploring Mount Cristo Rey, looking for fossils and prints. After working as an exploratory geologist and teaching across the country, he still considers it one of the premier sites anywhere for geology education. 

“I could teach 75 to 80 percent of an introductory geology class in the field at Mount Cristo Rey,” he said. “It’s like a giant chalkboard.”

The prints, preserved in sandstone, were exposed during excavation for the brick yard. The site was later donated to the non-profit INSIGHTS El Paso Science Center. The dinosaur tracks site is not threatened by border wall construction. 

William Lukefahr, an INSIGHTS tour guide, led a group down a rocky trail to the dinosaur tracks on a warm March morning. He slowed down to look for plants and animals. He pointed out a Black-spined prickly pear cactus and a Mormon Tea shrub. Then he spotted a spider web encasing a cocoon-like structure made of debris—the home of a desert shrub spider. “This mountain is very unique,” he said. “But there hasn’t been a lot of scientific research done here.”

Other creatures commonly seen on Mount Cristo Rey include coyotes, canyon wrens, and the greater earless lizard. Scruffy sotol and creosote shrubs dot the mountainside. Lukefahr explained that Mount Cristo Rey creates a corridor connecting the mountains in Juárez with those on the western and northern flanks of El Paso.

In their public comments to CBP, more than 80 people expressed concern for Mount Cristo Rey’s prized environment. The agency’s summary statement, in response, explained that a biological survey yielded no federally listed threatened or endangered species. The survey deemed that the habitat has a “low to moderate” suitability for wildlife.

“CBP has also determined there is minimal impact to vegetation and behavioral patterns of wildlife since the project area is flanked by existing barrier and an active patrol road,” the agency wrote.

Ardovino, the local business owner, said that wildlife activity in Sunland Park diminished after Border Patrol was “unleashed” to drive across the desert and carve new roads.

Years ago, he said, there were 18 pairs of burrowing owls, a diminutive variety, on his property. That was until Border Patrol vehicles repeatedly disrupted their habitat. “They’re gone now,” he said. “Concern for the environment is last on [the CBP] list.”

Myles Traphagen coordinates the borderlands project of the Wildlands Network, a nonprofit advocacy group. He said building the border wall will counteract federal efforts to foster endangered species, including the Mexican gray wolf. 

US and Mexican government biologists collaborate on wolf reintroduction, with pups from New Mexico transported to Northern Mexico to grow the population and increase genetic diversity. “The border wall is quite disrespectful to a lot of work that’s been undertaken by numerous government agencies,” he said.

In 2017, Traphagen tracked the movements of a Mexican gray wolf outfitted with a GPS collar. The wolf traveled north from Chihuahua into New Mexico, then followed the Rio Grande to Mount Cristo Rey, where it crossed back into Mexico. 

He said the border wall will close off this wildlife crossing point.

Ardovino owns property less than a half mile from the blast site. He said his interactions with local Border Patrol agents have always been respectful, although he was not notified before the blasting began. The boom of an unexpected explosion signaled that construction was underway.

The neighborhood of Anapra in Juárez is just feet away from the blast site. Warning signs were posted in the neighborhood in January.

Morrow, the attorney for the Diocese, said she has yet to receive notification from federal agencies of the blasting. Neither has Ruben Escandon Jr., spokesperson for the Mount Cristo Rey Restoration Committee. “Hopefully,” blasting would not occur during the Good Friday walk, he said.

The CBP spokesperson said landowners would be notified, but that there are no landowners in the blast zone.

The Wildlands Network’s Traphagen said that contractors at Mount Cristo Rey are defying common blasting protocols. Blast impact goes well beyond the thin strip of land where construction is underway, he said, and nearby residents and landowners should be notified for safety.

Construction activities are so far limited to the government’s Roosevelt Reservation. But it is unlikely the wall can be built without access to the diocese’s property on the mountain. The Diocese’s attorney was adamant the church will not sell. 

The CBP spokesperson said that if the agency is unable to purchase property for border wall construction through voluntary sales, the Department of Justice can use eminent domain.

In public comments, the diocese attorney said attempts to seize the land would violate religious freedom and the right to worship, protected by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

For now, the diocese is holding on to its sacred space. On Good Friday, thousands of people would climb Mount Cristo Rey, as they have every year going back almost a century. 

But blast by blast, border wall construction is coming for Mount Cristo Rey.