Enviros move to protect cottonwoods threatened by Az border wall

At the center of the hamlet of Lochiel, Ariz., a cluster of ancient cottonwoods has stretched across the U.S.-Mexico border, forming a canopy of shade that has stood for decades. But in the next few days or weeks, those tall trees will be cut and uprooted by contractors building a 27-mile stretch of border wall in a remote area of Southern Arizona.

DHS officials told Erick Meza, borderlands coordinator with the Sierra Club, they will build a new double wall through Lochiel, expanding at least three feet beyond the 60-foot easement known as the Roosevelt Reservation. The work will include cutting down the trees and expanding the road, while threatening access to the town cemetery and the historic customs house that once served the unofficial port for decades.

Lochiel sits in the San Rafael Valley, about 25 miles east of Nogales and not far from where the headwaters of the Santa Cruz River flow south to Mexico, where the channel loops and heads north at the twin border cities of Nogales.

On Tuesday, contractors for U.S. Customs and Border Protection tore into the fence line, ripping out the old port gate and hurling it to the side in a tangle pile of metal. They also flattened a few luckless mesquite trees, leaving the limbs in a pile. They also began removing concertina wire, installed last year and left lengths of the razor-tipped wire in the desert.

Last April, the Sentinel broke the news the CBP
officials were seeking to build a new barrier near the Border Patrol’s
Sonoita station, closing a gap that starts near Border Monument 102 and
extends west for nearly 25 miles. The wall will begin east of Nogales in
the Patagonia Mountains and run straight across the valley to the
Coronado National Monument, about 15 miles south of Sierra Vista, Ariz.

In the following weeks, Homeland Security officials laid out the
legal groundwork to build the wall, waiving dozens of environmental laws
for the new barrier, which will include 30-foot high steel bollards,
each one six inches square and spaced just four inches apart.

A
few weeks later Fisher Sand & Gravel was awarded a $334 million
contract to build the wall, funded by a 2021 congressional
appropriation. More funding is coming after Congress passed last year’s
so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, along with additional bills a few
weeks ago.

In September, contractors for the agency installed the first sections cleaving through a valley long considered a “biological hotspot” and a migration corridor for dozens of species and contains the headwaters of the Santa Cruz River.

The new construction will create the “longest unbroken stretch of border wall” in Arizona, spanning 100 miles and effectively closing the ability of the northern jaguar, along with ocelots and dozens of other species, to move through the state’s Sky Islands—a region known for its immense and unique biodiversity.

As if to highlight the issue, remote cameras have continue to spot “Cinco” a male northern jaguar, who has spent months haunting the mountains.

Meanwhile, DHS officials have effectively doubled-down,
planning a larger project to install 222 miles of “barrier system,”
including both primary and secondary walls where “operationally
appropriate” in Pima, Yuma, Santa Cruz, and Cochise counties.

The
plan includes 19 miles of primary wall—a 30 foot high barrier, with
six-inch thick “bollards” separated by four-inch gaps. The bollards are
sunk into concrete footers and topped “anti-climb” steel panels. And,
CBP will also build 42 miles of “secondary barrier.” In some cases, this
barrier is smaller and less robust than the main barrier, but in
Arizona, the secondary wall is just as large.

The agency also will
install fiber-optic cables, lighting poles with stadium-style lights,
surveillance cameras, and access and patrol roads throughout.The
new plan has already drawn criticism from the Tohono O’odham Nation, who
filed a lawsuit last week to block construction along their stretch of
the U.S.-Mexico border.

Cutting trees, filling riverbed

For months, contractors have shown their intentions for Lochiel’s trees — smashing down old oaks and scraping the grasslands clean as they continued an inexorable march from a work camp. As they worked eastward, they began pulling water from the aquifer and used explosives to shatter rock at the foot of the Coronado National Memorial, and used the rubble to make concrete for the wall’s footers.

In some places, contractors remade the landscape, carving into the rolling hills to make a wide road, and soon trucks thundered along, carrying the metal panels for the 30-foot high wall. They also created a roadway over the Santa Cruz River, filling the riverbed with dirt and a few plastic culverts to carry the water through what would otherwise be a dam.

As it became clear the contractors were heading for Lochiel’s trees, a small group of activists begin asking for people to stay in the town, renting the old customs house to create a “long-term presence” in the tiny town to “keep contractors accountable” and make sure they didn’t destroy the trees, or the historic buildings.

On Wednesday afternoon, Kate Scott, one of the co-founders of the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center, said beneath the eastern-most cottonwood, a large tree she called a “grandmother.”

“These trees, they embody an entire universe,” Scott said. “I am sitting under the one that I’m kind of attached to the most,”

“This tree speaks to me, telling me it’s a living being, its branches are a home, the root systems are a home for insects and fungus. These trees are older than the houses and the town,’ she said.

She also nodded to the other trees, including mesquites and honey locusts loved by butterflies. “These will go down too.” She described how contractors would attack the trees—not with surgical saw, but rather with a “ball and chain” swung hard at the trees’ branches.

“They’ll crush it,” she said. Scott said a biologist conducting a survey as part of the construction described how the contractors would approach their work. “‘I’ve never seen such a level of destruction,’ he told her.”

In recent weeks, contractors with Fisher Sand & Gravel — a Trump-connected company that has made its titular family billionaires from border wall construction — also began carving their way into the desert to build the new secondary barrier.

While previous border wall construction has been contained inside the Roosevelt Reservation — the easement created in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt — this project has exploded beyond that boundary as contractors cleared a 150-foot wide swath of land, reaching into the Coronado National Forest.

‘A sacrifice zone’

“Special places require special protections,” Meza told the Tucson Sentinel.”That is what we are fighting for, it goes beyond the ancient cottonwood trees of Lochiel that create habitat for many species, it is also the history of the town that goes back to time immemorial,” Meza said.

“This environment and its history are about to be irresponsible bulldozed and erased forever,” he said.

“Contractors want to do the job and fulfill their schedule without complying with the laws that in any other place will protect a site like this,” Meza said. “The trees do not pose a threat to national security, and this can be avoided by going around them. We demand that they take their time to make sure that these cultural sites and environment are protected for generations to come.”

“We are tired that areas like this are just treated like a sacrifice zone as contractors and CBP keep getting bigger budgets while our shared heritage is erased,” Meza added.

On Thursday, Meza met with DHS officials and a foreman for Fisher Sand & Gravel, who said they are pushing to build a double-wall and expand 3-feet past the 60-foot easement. Meza said he alerted land owners, including those who own the old customs house.

And, questions remain about the future of Lochiel. The customs house is dangerously close to the Roosevelt Reservation, and access to the town’s cemetery is through a road that links to the dusty border road.

In a letter to Meza, Michelle Barnes with Border Patrol’s infrastructure portfolio program said officials “evaluated the impacts of construction on the grove and potential mitigations.

“Four cottonwood trees fall within the Roosevelt Reservation and will be removed in order to construct the border barrier. They cannot be relocated. Other trees will be trimmed in order to safely operate equipment in the area,” Barnes said. “The rest of the cottonwood grove will remain untouched.”

She added environmental monitors will perform a “preconstruction survey” to identify active nests for migratory bird species before the start of any construction or clearing activity.

“Environmental monitors will also be present to ensure that removal and trimming of trees is limited to the identified trees needed to construct the barrier,” Barnes wrote.

“Hearing that those trees will be completely cut down definitely will not make our constituents happy, as we understand the fact that some branches could be on the way, removing them completely feels unnecessary and avoidable,” Meza told Barnes in a letter. “Trimming some branches we could understand. These trees do not represent national security concerns in any way. This is a very special place and we believe it should be treated like that.”

He also shot down the idea that environmental monitors would help, because DHS has waived environmental rules and “even if an endangered species is there like yellow billed cuckoo are present, that is not enough to stop anything and we haven’t seen any real impactful results on environmental protection.”

He also told Barnes that property owners have not been informed about the construction, including how it could affect the three families that own houses, or land nearby. “The trees of Lochiel matter deeply to border communities, and we will not stop advocating for their protection,” Meza wrote.

‘Arizona is the only place where you can be a cowboy’

For nearly 140 years, members of the De La Ossa family have lived in the area, including Maureen De La Ossa, who grew up in Lochiel.

De La Ossa was born in Rochester, N.Y., in 1945, but her father Jack Sullivan decided to take the family out west because, as she said he believed “Arizona is the only place where you can be a cowboy.”

Sullivan and wife Frances packed Maureen and her their infant son John into a truck and headed here, and he spent years working cattle along the border. As De La Ossa told the Sentinel, her father became a liner rider for the U.S. government, working along the border to keep U.S. cattle from coming into contact with Mexican cattle. She remembers her father attempted to managing a outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease. Forced to shoot the infected cows, Sullivan piled them up and set the bodies aflame in a nearby field.

Sullivan later served as the Patagonia marshal and a deputy sheriff for Santa Cruz County, she said. Maureen, meanwhile, headed to school in nearby Patagonia and began dating Onofre De La Ossa, known as “Ono.” They married in 1964 and moved to Patagonia where they began imported Mexican corriente cattle, a breed good for team roping and bull-dogging — selling the specialized cattle to rodeos.

They later began raising their own corriente cattle on leased state land just south of Tucson. Maureen raised their five children in Patagonia, and also worked as the town’s post office, and later served as the postmaster from 2000 to 2007, the Patagonia Regional Times reported.

In 2012, a few weeks after heart surgery, Ono went back to the desert ranch to move a cow, and collapsed near a gate and died, De La Ossa said.

Above the town on a hill, the cemetery contains the remains of many of the De La Ossa family, including Ono’s. Most of the flowers and plants on the graves are plastic because no one comes up to water them, and one shade tree is buckled and dry.

De La Ossa spoke about her husband’s funeral, attended by more than 400 people who gathered under a giant cottonwood and celebrated him.

“This valley was beautiful that day. It was just green from head to toe, all over the valley,” she said.

She worries about the future of Lochiel’s cottonwoods—not just the one’s destined to fall for the wall, but also the future of the remaining trees. One collapsed from drought last year, and the county had to come out and clear it. “We’ve already lost the trees that were here when we were kids, we’re losing trees now. It’s a shame this is happening.”

“Why are they taking them down,” De La Ossa asked as she drove her ranch truck under the biggest trees.

At the top of the hill, marked by a tall white cross, a Border Patrol agent was tucked under an ad hoc shade structure made from plywood and a few pool noodles stretched over his truck’s open doors.

‘We have this solidarity’

For Scott, she knows they can’t save the trees in the long-term. Instead, a victory will be the creation and support of “binational friendship.” between activists in the U.S. and Mexico. “We have this solidarity, and that takes time to build.”

“So we have that, and then the victory for me would be the coming together of the two communities and saying, ‘now this is a real binational community,’ and we can come together to save an ecosystem. That would be huge.”

“We can start with the valley, get an opening here, and in the riparian areas in San Bernardino and Silver Creek,” she said. “And, then we can start taking the wall down and repurposing it,” she said. “That’s the victory, it’s a layered victory—it’s going to take time.”

In the distance, the sky turned a deep gray and thunder rolled through the hills. A few birds breezed across the border, before wheeling back. Streaks of rain painted the valley in the distance, and Scott stood at the cottonwood’s base with her face in the sun.

“For now, I’m standing here. Beneath this grandmother,” she said.