The environmentalists should have tried to work with the feds. The illegal border-crossers did equivalent or greater damage. Who knows? If Congress had cooperated they might have been able to put in animal crossing points with remotely operated closure gates to stop illegal crossings. Maybe next year...for now they gets what they gets...
The gates are opened before the monsoons start in AZ and are left open for several months. We just closed our gates a couple of weeks ago even though we had very little rain in AZ this year. No reason to worry that these gates will block the flow of water we have them all over the place in my AOR and they work fine.