An Arizona sheriff has threatened criminal charges against any construction worker caught building a wall along Santa Cruz County’s boundary with Mexico — unaware that Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s office never planned to build there.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway warned late last week that he planned to arrest Ducey’s workers for illegal dumping if they continued to stack shipping containers past neighboring Cochise County into his county.
“There’s no permit been issued for these people to do this on public land,” Hathaway told local news outlet KGUN-9 Monday.
However, Ducey’s spokesman said on Tuesday that the state does not currently have nor has it ever had plans to build in Hathaway’s county and that Hathaway’s office at no time reached out to the governor to clarify where construction would take place or speak privately before going public with the claim.
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“No construction of border barrier is planned for Santa Cruz County, [It was] never planned. Only Cochise [County],” Ducey’s spokesman wrote in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
Hathaway claimed in a KGUN-9 interview that he had attempted to contact the state but was unsuccessful.
“Unless contact was made with someone I’m not aware of, we don’t believe an inquiry was every made by Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Office about our construction plans,” said C.J. Karamargin, communications director for Ducey, who added that that included the governor’s office and the state’s Division of Emergency Management. “Had there been in inquiry we would have told him what we told you — that there’s no plans to construct border barrier in Santa Cruz County.”
Commander Gerardo “Jerry” Castillo of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department defended Hathaway in a phone call Tuesday morning and said that the sheriff “did not know either way” if Ducey was going to build in his region.
“We saw the containers being moved from our adjacent county into the Santa Cruz County and the sheriff was proactive in saying the containers are not going to be allowed to be installed or laid down,” Castillo said. “It was more of a message before it’s happening. We realized it was about a couple of miles away.”
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In August, Ducey announced that crews would fill in areas of the border in western Arizona where projects funded during the Trump administration had come to a halt at President Joe Biden’s instruction.
