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Arizona Finds Coronavirus Among Border Wall Workers

Two workers on the border wall learned they have the virus, prompting fears of further spread. Some residents had urged a halt to construction during the pandemic.

The new border wall under construction at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument along the Arizona-Mexico border in February. Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Health officials in southern Arizona have detected at least two coronavirus cases among workers on the border wall, igniting fears that the influx of hundreds of construction workers could spread the virus in small border towns.

The two cases were confirmed this week at the Desert Senita health clinic in Ajo, a town near the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument where a portion of the wall is under construction, said Chuck Huckelberry, the administrator of Pima County, which also includes the city of Tucson.

Since the start of the year, hundreds of construction workers, engineers and truck drivers from all over the country have moved to Ajo, sharing housing in rented homes and trailer parks and mingling in restaurants, which have reopened in recent weeks. The town is a haven for older adults, including many artists, and has a population of about 3,000.

“A lot of them are retired and probably a lot of them are vulnerable,” Mr. Huckelberry said. He added that Pima County had begun a contact-tracing effort to determine how many people in the area could have been exposed to the virus from the infected workers.

About 400 workers have come into the area in recent months, he said.

Francisco García, director of the Pima County Health Department and its chief medical officer, said the two workers were the first cases of the coronavirus to be confirmed in Ajo, though it was not clear how the workers became ill. Officials were examining another potential case that appeared to involve someone passing through the town, Mr. García said.

Over all, Pima County had 3,628 confirmed cases of the virus as of Friday and 222 deaths.The confirmation of the virus among workers has confirmed fears that many Ajo residents had voiced in March, when some of them called on the Trump administration to halt border wall construction during the pandemic.

The federal government declined to suspend construction and even accelerated work along some stretches of the border. In March, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to build or replace more than 91 miles of barriers along the border between Arizona and Mexico and waived some federal laws to speed up construction of those portions of the wall.

“It infuriates me that our health is worth less to the federal government than Trump’s wall,” said Maria Singleton, 57, an Ajo resident who has documented on social media how work on the project has disrupted life in the town.

Ms. Singleton said she had grown especially concerned about border wall workers moving around Ajo without masks, including in the town’s only supermarket.

The detection of coronavirus among the workers on the border wall comes at a time when President Trump has attempted to cast blame on Mexico for the spread of the virus in the borderlands.

In a news conference this month in which he championed construction of a border wall, Mr. Trump claimed that Tijuana “is the most heavily infected place anywhere in the world,” an assertion unsupported by factual evidence — San Diego, a smaller city on the other side of the border, has many more confirmed cases.

Several residents of Ajo, including Ms. Singleton, said they had observed a sharp decline in truck traffic on Thursday and Friday, raising questions about whether work on the project had been scaled back.

Raini Brunson, a spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the border wall construction, said that “construction progress” had not been halted along the border as a result of any concerns over the coronavirus.

Ms. Brunson said she could not confirm or deny the Pima County report of coronavirus cases among workers, but she said plans on the border now include “quarantining employees who are sick or experience any symptoms related to Covid-19.”

Kiewit, the Nebraska construction giant that has the lucrative contract to build the wall near Ajo, did not respond to requests on Friday for comment.

Across Arizona, which has had more than 1,100 virus-related deaths, there is growing concern over a sharp increase in coronavirus cases in recent days. The state health department reported a record number of new cases on Friday, with 1,654 infections and 17 deaths.

Simon Romero is a national correspondent based in Albuquerque, covering immigration and other issues. He was previously the bureau chief in Brazil and in Caracas, Venezuela, and reported on the global energy industry from Houston. More about Simon Romero

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Arizona Finds Coronavirus Among Those Building Wall. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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