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Of the more<\/span> than $170 billion that President Donald Trump secured for his border regime in the \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill,\u201d nearly $50 billion is allocated<\/a> to border wall construction. Even with these enormous resources, however, the administration continues to face challenges<\/a> constructing its monument to violent exclusion along the southern border through tribal<\/a>, private<\/a>, and state lands.<\/p>\n For nearly a month<\/a>, the key force standing in the way of Trump\u2019s border wall project in southeast Arizona has been a person sitting in a 200-year-old tree.<\/p>\n More precisely, at every moment since late July, one person \u2014 although not always the same person \u2014 has been on a platform in the branches of a giant cottonwood tree in Lochiel, Arizona, with an expanding encampment of primarily local activists 50 feet below.<\/p>\n The protesters\u2019 aim is to stop the ongoing construction of two parallel, 30-foot-high border walls ripping through the remote San Rafael Valley.<\/p>\n Miles of the double wall structure have already been built in the area. This part of the valley is sparsely populated and hardly ever used as a border-crossing site by humans, but is renowned as a unique wildlife migration corridor. According to the Sierra Club\u2019s borderlands coordinator, Erick Meza, the region is \u201ca biodiversity hotspot and the most important jaguar corridor that we have left in the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n Residents from Lochiel and the surrounding area, including from Sonora, Mexico, had been coming together regularly for over a year for binational gatherings to organize against wall construction. They shared music, art, food, and ceremonies across the border, which is demarcated there by only a rancher\u2019s wire fence.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople got together that night and decided to go down and set up a tree sit in that final tree on the U.S. side.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The planned double wall structure, with a 60-foot no man\u2019s land in between, would not only devastate the land and its ecosystems \u2014 it would also sever the binational life worlds of the area.<\/p>\n The \u201chappenings,\u201d as organizers called the gatherings, escalated into a continuous protest and tree sit when construction workers with government contractors Fisher Sand & Gravel<\/a> crushed three giant cottonwood trees, known locally as \u201cgrandmother\u201d trees, in one day on July 27.<\/p>\n Local activists moved in swiftly to save the last cottonwood standing on the U.S. side of the border, and the tree sit began.<\/p>\n \u201cMomentum had been growing locally in the region to try to make more of an intervention,\u201d said an Arizona-based participant in the tree sit, who asked for anonymity out of concern for government repression. \u201cPeople got together that night and decided to go down and set up a tree sit in that final tree on the U.S. side, which was planned to be cleared.\u201d<\/p>\n Ever since, a tree sitter has been in the cottonwood at all times, numerous participants told The Intercept.<\/p>\n \u201cU.S. Customs and Border Protection identified four cottonwood trees on federal land in Lochiel, Arizona, that needed removal for planned border wall construction,\u201d said a spokesperson from CBP. \u201cPreconstruction surveys found no active migratory bird nests, and environmental monitors were present at the start of clearing activities to ensure work was limited to the identified trees. Three trees have been removed, and the remaining tree is scheduled for removal.\u201d<\/p>\n Meza, of the Sierra Club, told The Intercept that the government\u2019s environmental survey was out of date and that the day before the cottonwoods were felled, he had taken video of an active nest in one of the trees.<\/p>\n \u201cThe next day, they had sent the contractors to take down the trees,\u201d he said. \u201cTheir environmental monitor was not present.\u201d Meza added that \u201cwhen people saw what happened, the community in general got outraged.\u201d<\/p>\n For participants in the Lochiel encampment, protecting the remaining \u201cgrandmother\u201d is an anchoring point for the protest, but stopping the border wall and all it represents is the organizing principle.<\/p>\n \u201cSome people are tree sitting and supporting the tree sit. Some people are more focused on getting into the roads, and intervening in construction work that\u2019s happening,\u201d the tree-sit participant said. \u201cNow there\u2019s a whole zone of a few miles where they\u2019re having trouble building. And as camp grows, the ability to affect construction also grows.\u201d<\/p>\n The remaining cottonwood itself is on federal land, but the encampment, just feet away, is technically on private land. It\u2019s a unique setup, organizers told The Intercept, in which local ranchers and authorities oppose the border wall construction, and construction workers cannot risk forging forward in the path of the tree as a person remains perched in its branches. The small standoff is becoming a growing site of border resistance, and the construction of Trump\u2019s wall in the area has been disrupted for a month.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At a time when jack-booted agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are terrorizing<\/a> communities nationwide<\/a> and over 73,000 people are held in ICE detention<\/a>, the defense of a remote stretch of borderlands may seem a minor struggle.<\/p>\n The binational protest around the cottonwood, however, exemplifies what it looks like to take strategic action to disrupt the infrastructure of the border regime.<\/p>\n \u201cSomething happens along these borderlands,\u201d said another participant in the tree sit and encampment, Uni Yuchi Trejo, a first-generation Mexican American. \u201cYou still feel the way the land moves here, how the living things on the land migrate and move with it.\u201d<\/p>\n Trejo highlighted other sites of resistance along the Arizona border, like fights waged<\/a> by the Tohono O\u2019odham Nation<\/a> to block the wall on its sovereign<\/a> and sacred<\/a> lands \u2014 fights that are heating up<\/a> just this week.<\/p>\n Compared to other struggles against border enforcement, the Lochiel encampment has seen remarkably little law enforcement repression, despite creating disruptions to a major border infrastructure project.<\/p>\n One protester was arrested in late July by local sheriffs for blocking construction workers on a roadway but was released the same day without charge; the sheriff himself is on the record<\/a> as opposing the border wall construction. And with the encampment on private property, it remains relatively protected from federal law enforcement sweeps.<\/p>\n According to activists on the ground, a second tree sit on the Mexico side of the border was initiated last week but ended after a few days, following reported interventions from Mexican law enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.<\/p>\n The relative peace the Arizona-based activists have enjoyed stands in stark contrast to the brutal persecution<\/a> others opposing border regime enforcement have faced in places like Prairieland Detention Center<\/a> in Alvarado, Texas; Spokane<\/a>, Washington; and Minneapolis<\/a>. The Arizona demonstration also sits in the legacy of site-based struggles not tied directly to the border, like Stop Copy City<\/a> in Atlanta, or the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock<\/a> \u2014 movements that have also faced<\/a> ruthless repression<\/a>.<\/p>\n This might speak to the place of the border wall in the Trump administration\u2019s current priorities. Even for an anti-immigrant fascist like Stephen Miller, swift border wall construction in the San Rafael Valley is not an urgent matter, owing to the minuscule number of border-crossing attempts there. Those that do attempt to cross are already facing long odds<\/a> against a system designed to push them into death\u2019s grips<\/a>.<\/p>\n Though the environmental destruction<\/a> of border wall construction is well established<\/a>, a spokesperson from Customs and Border Protection absurdly pointed to people who might attempt to cross as the real environmental threat.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile concerns exist about impacts to sensitive areas, it is important to note that illegal immigration itself poses significant environmental challenges,\u201d the spokesperson said. \u201cHigh volumes of unauthorized crossings often result in substantial amounts of trash, pollution, and damage to natural resources, including sensitive habitats and agriculture.\u201d<\/p>\n Suffice it to say, the people crossing borders do not tear down ancient trees, plow over tribal burial grounds<\/a>, or cut off wildlife corridors. Not to mention that no \u201chigh volumes\u201d of crossings occur in the San Rafael Valley.<\/p>\n As Arizona-based reporter and author of \u201cHow to Close a Camp,\u201d John Washington, told<\/a> Democracy Now!, \u201cPeople, I think, are right to point out that this very much smells of a boondoggle \u2014 that no one is crossing here, and yet they are spending maybe a half a billion dollars on just this about 27-mile segment of wall to devastate the local ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
\u201cLiving Things on the Land\u201d<\/h2>\n
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