‘Tree sit’ protects remaining ancient cottonwood as border wall approaches Southern Az hamlet

Over the last two weeks, a group of protesters has guarded a solitary cottonwood near Lochiel, Ariz., with their “tree sit” keeping at bay border wall contractors who’ve already removed others in a venerable grove towering along the border line.

While the group has successfully kept workers from cutting down the ancient cottonwood — estimated to be at least two centuries old — there are signs officials may eventually use force to remove the tree and continue building a double-layer wall through the entire San Rafael Valley. The work is part of a $334 million contract under U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

On Saturday, one person—identified only as “Angus”— sat on a plywood platform, dozens of feet in the air , watching as construction vehicles passed along the roadway below, billowing up clouds of dust as he read.

For more than a year, environmental groups feared for the cluster of ancient Frémont cottonwoods, which once stretched across the U.S.-Mexico border forming a canopy of shade that stood for decades near the Southern Arizona hamlet.

Earlier this summer, DHS officials told Erick Meza, borderlands coordinator
with the Sierra Club, they were moving to build a new double wall through Lochiel,
expanding at least three feet beyond the 60-foot easement known as the
Roosevelt Reservation.

As part of this work, the contractors said they would remove four of the cottonwood trees to build the 27-mile stretch of border wall. The work includes cutting down the trees and expanding the road, and threatening access to the town cemetery and the historic customs
house that once served the unofficial port for decades.

A
month later, excavators arrived in the morning, uprooting and
splintering three of the four large cottonwood trees—a move that likely
violated a federal promise to delay the trees’ destruction to protect
migrating birds. Video shot from a nearby private stretch of land, shared with the Tucson
Sentinel, shows the excavators pulling at the trees, the limbs straining
before snapping and tumbling to the ground.

That morning, Kate Scott raced to the scene from her home about two hours away in her aging SUV. Scott arrived around 11 a.m., to find three trees down, and she ran to the last “grandmother” tree and stayed in the shade, she told the Tucson Sentinel during an interview last month.

With Scott nearby, a contractor halted tearing the tree down, and instead worked at the roots, tearing into them and then burying the splintered wood.

Since that moment, activists have stayed with the tree, and within days began the “tree sit” by lofting a plywood platform about 50 feet into the canopy. A few volunteers have spent days in the tree, though one activist spent a dozen nights among the tree’s expansive branches.

In the intervening days, monsoons storms and hail have lashed at the group, while during the days, they have been visited by U.S. soldiers and security guards, including one guard with Vision Quest who said contractors were going to go around the tree — a claim largely treated with skepticism by most of those involved.

“Every day that passes from this tree sit is a testament to the
endurance, resilience, and determination of the borderlands and its
people,” Meza told the Tucson Sentinel. “Every day, we witness all laws
being ignored for more walls, the environment and sacred sites
destroyed, people kidnapped by ICE. And so much more.”

“Direct action
is never the first choice, but government officials continue to ignore
their constituents, leaving people with no choice but to go out and put
their bodies on the line, ” Meza said. “This might be one tree. But it is also a vision and a symbol of a better future for the Borderlands.”

Across the entire Arizona-Mexico border, CBP has launched—or has
planned— more than a half-dozen border wall projects, slicing through
public lands and some of the state’s most treasured sites. This includes
a plan to install a secondary barrier along the Organ Pipe Cactus
National Monument, passing and potentially threatening Quitobaquito
Springs—a water-hole sacred to Hia-Ced O’odham— as well as efforts to
wall-off public lands in the Patagonia Mountains east of Nogales, Ariz.

The
Tohono O’odham Nation filed suit in June, and last week, tribal
officials closed access to tribal lands to border wall contractors to
stymie the beginning stages of Tucson 5 Project, a $47 million project
awarded to SLSCO LTD, a Texas-based construction company.

In a
letter to contractors, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham
Nation, warned that contractors and subcontractors would violate federal
law if they crossed into tribal territory.

“We are writing
now to bring these issues to your attention so that you may fully
account for them — we trust and hope that you do not wish to undertake
work in furtherance of the contract that will expose you to court orders
and penalties for violations of the Nation’s laws,” Jose wrote in a
letter published in court records on Wednesday.

Contractors also began bulldozing roads in Big Bend National Park in Texas, despite a widespread outcry.

Even as the group assembled to defend the Arizona tree, there are
worrying signs an earlier attempt to remove the cottonwood seriously
damaged its roots. After the contractors cleared the first three trees,
they tore into the roots of the fourth, but stopped because Scott was
nearby. Later that day, the contractors replaced much of the earth.

While the group has camped near the tree, they’ve been visited by soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division. Stationed out of Ft. Huachuca, the unit has been assigned to the Joint Task Force Southern Border, replacing the 1st Armored Division in May.

Along with “detection and monitoring missions” soldiers with the task force are conducting patrols with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and “mirror” patrols with Mexican officials, part of a larger Trump administration effort to use U.S. military units along the Southern border.

On Monday, the group was “dusted” by a CBP helicopter crew. One member of the group said the helicopter maneuvered directly over them, about 25-30 feet in the air, hitting them with the rotor wash.

Over the past decade, there have a number of complaints about CBP pilots intentionally dusting migrants in the desert. And, a CBP pilot used this tactic against a group of people protesting pipeline construction in Minnesota in 2021, the Intercept reported.

Scott said a single CBP helicopter has flown overhead twice since the tree sit began. And, officials also told the group they were going to fly a drone over the area—though it’s unclear why.

‘Childish stuff so far’

Scott and other volunteers have
been in Lochiel since late June, when Meza was first told about plans to
remove the trees. Stationed at either a tent, or the old port building,
Scott has gotten used to bright lights at night from trucks on the
roads. “It’s just childish stuff so far, but we’ll see,” she said.

Scott
said they will have someone in the tree as much as possible because of
the the “blood lust” contractors have shown for the Frémont cottonwood.
And, this effort will take money and logistics, though she said over the
last two weeks, they’ve received thousands of dollars in donations, and people are
bringing food and other supplies—including a camp kitchen and a
portable shower.

She said it feels possible to hold out until the November election—which is now just 83 days away.

Scott
said she and other activists worry about the future, but as the
excavator came for the last cottonwood she was “more mad than afraid.
I’m so mad at them for what they’re doing.”

Action, she said,
“helps people to dissipate” their anger, and change “their rage into
action,” Scott said. “It’s the only way I deal with it. I mean, I can’t
sit at home.”

‘The only place where trees touch both sides’

Last April, the Sentinel broke the news 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.

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.

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.

In recent weeks, contractors with Fisher Sand and Gravel — the 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 near Kino Springs, Ariz.

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.

Meza told the Tucson Sentinel last month Lochiel was “the only place where trees touch on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.”

“These trees had withstood the test of time and were a national treasure, but instead of being cherished they were destroyed,” he said.

‘We have to try anyway’

For Julia Butterfly Hill, the tree sit is both “beautiful and heartbreaking.”

In 1997, Hill spent two years and eight days in a 1,000-year-old California Redwood to protect the massive old growth tree—named Luna—from a logging company. For 738 days, Hill lived on a small platform until the Pacific Lumber Company signed a preservation agreement.

Since the tree sit began in Lochiel, Hill has watched and offered her own support.

“It’s beautiful because it shows people standing up what is real, and valuable,” Hill told the Tucson Sentinel by phone. “And, it’s heartbreaking because it’s an ecological and economic tragedy. The wall doesn’t make sense. It’s not needed and it’s not helpful, and it’s wasting taxpayers dollars when we have other things we should spend the money on.”

“When you see people doing something like a tree sit, that’s the last line of defense, and that means every other system has failed,” Hill said. “We don’t risk our freedom, or our actual lives for the fun of it. We do direct action because it’s the last line of defense, and it’s a sign of a place and a community that’s being destroyed.”

Hill added the border wall is a “smokescreen” to hide the Trump administration’s failures to make American safe. “They’re doing everything that’s the opposite.”

“Immigrants aren’t the problem,” she said.

Hill said she managed to spend so much time in Luna because while the mind “throws up obstacles, the heart will say, we have to try anyway.”

“I just want them to know, they’re not alone and they’re doing an amazing job. It’s catalyzed attention and awareness,” she said. “It’s hard in today’s world, there’s so much to grab people’s attention. A tree sit grabs people’s attention, and not only gets them to pay attention, but to be motivated and inspired.”

“I never imagined the ripples from what I did, I just knew that I had to do it,” Hill said.

As the sun began to set on Saturday, one person who said their “camp name” was “Trans Uncle,” played an original song on a jarana jarocha—a stringed instrument similar to a ukulele produced in Veracruz, Mexico.

The following morning, a group brought a Statue of Liberty puppet designed by a Tucson artist, and walked along the wall.

“There’s something almost impossibly magical about a tree sitter, protesting from the canopy of one grandmother cottonwood, halting construction in this section of the multi-billion dollar border wall project of the so-called most powerful man on Earth,” said Russ McSpadden, southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity.

“This community has really gotten behind this tree, which has become a literal line in the sand, and I hope we can save this riparian forest forever,” McSpadden said. “I also hope everyone can know, at least once or twice in their lifetime, the feeling of choosing a tree, or being chosen by one, to stand against injustice with.”