On the morning of July 27th, an excavator went to work on a stand of Fremont cottonwood trees rooted near the Arizona-Mexico line. The trees were somewhere between 200 and 250 years old, which means they were growing before there was a border here. It took less than four hours to destroy three of them. Their beautifully arced limbs and strong trunks ripped apart in a cloud of smoke and sawdust. People there watched as their remains were gathered up mechanically, put into a dump truck and hauled away.
There were four of these beautiful old cottonwood trees. The fourth is still standing. The reason for that isn’t a change of heart in this administration, it’s because someone climbed it.
A lone climber went up in the night and within two days there was a wooden platform more than fifty feet in the air, a sleeping bag, a tarp, and a bucket on a pulley line for water and food. Somebody has been up there every night since. A local family whose property comes within a few feet of the tree has allowed protestors to set up a base camp from there. Dozens of people have rotated through in shifts to ensure someone is always in the tree they call Grandmother.
Construction on that stretch of wall hasn’t moved since. Fisher Sand & Gravel, the comically corrupt contractor this administration keeps handing border wall contracts, hasn’t been able to solve the problem of one person sitting in the old tree. Neither have the private security outfit guarding the site, the U.S. Army, or the Santa Cruz County Sheriff. Probably because bringing down a large tree with a single American fifty feet up in the canopy could kill them.
Russ McSpadden of the Center for Biological Diversity called the whole thing “almost impossibly magical,” and he’s right. But it’s more than that. It’s highly informative.
The Wall and the Contractor
The border wall in question here is part of a twenty-seven mile segment of double wall across the San Rafael Valley southeast of Tucson. Two parallel steel barriers thirty feet high with a sixty foot dead zone running between them. The price tag for this section of wall, which was split into two contracts, comes to nearly half a billion dollars. Both contracts went to Fisher Sand & Gravel.
If the name Fisher Sand & Gravel sounds mildly familiar, you might be remembering that they built the privately funded stretch of wall for We Build the Wall, the crowdfunding outfit whose leadership, which included Steve Bannon, was charged with defrauding its own donors. Trump pardoned Bannon for his part in the swindle at the end of his first term. Engineers found that section eroding and at risk of collapse within months of it going up. The International Boundary and Water Comission sued them for violating a binational water treaty with Mexico. Fisher paid $1.16 million in restitution, penalties, and fines after a former co-owner was sentenced to federal prison for tax fraud. The Army Corps of Engineers passed over Fisher’s bid because of the company’s publicly awful track record, only to have President Trump intervene personally and award them the contracts anyway. Panels on the new Arizona wall arre already warping and leaning.
To build in the San Rafael Valley the Trump administration waived 66 federal laws along with every state and local law that might have applied. Dinah Bear, who served on the Council for Environmental Quality under four presidents, counted another 24 laws and ten sets of regulations that were tossed aside to get the permits and money moving. Protections for Native American gravesites, wildlife, historic and scientific resources, and basic administrative laws that allow Americans to see what agencies are doing were all set aside to plow forward.
If you’re wondering how they can just set aside all these laws, the answer is an obscure provision in the REAL ID Act congress passed in 2005. It allows the Homeland Security Secretary to bypass any law in the country to construct border walls and shields it from judicial review unless the Constitution was violated.
The interesting thing is it wasn’t supposed to go down this way. On June 18th, Customs and Border Protection committed in writing to the Sierra Club that if the work landed during Arizona’s active nesting season, environmental monitors would run a pre-construction survey for migratory birds and identify active nests before any clearing began. Crews would then “establish a buffer zone around active nests until nestlings have fledged.” Despite the clearing taking place during nesting season, observers at the site say no survey was ever done. A yellow-billed cuckoo, listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, was calling over the meadow while the three grandmothers came down, a kingbird was nesting in the grove.
Kristi Noem, the disgraced former DHS Secretary, waived the ESA for this project last June. CBP had no legal obligation to survey for a single nest. But they’d promised to do it anyway, in writing, six weeks before excavators pulled in at dawn and tore apart the trees and that promise.
Almost no one crosses the border in the San Rafael Valley. It’s rugged and remote. Field research has confirmed this for years. What does cross is wildlife. Like a male jaguar named Cinco, who’s been moving through the Sky Islands just north of the valley since at least 2025. Ocelots, bears, pronghorn, and hundreds of bird species use the corridor. But half a billion of your dollars are being spent on a contractor with a proven record of malfeasance and shoddy work to erect a wall to stop migrants that aren’t there.
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
I hear the same thing over and over again from people all over conservation community. What more can we do? How can we stop this insanity?
This is how.
In the tiny town of Lochiel there’s a person on a plywood platform fifty feet up every night, through monsoon storms and Arizona summer heat, with food and water coming up on a rope and a fresh sitter climbing in before the last one comes down.
For three weeks now, a few dozen people have held that ground against the weaponized power of a federal government this president has turned into a private army, pointed at anyone who stands between him and what he wants. And they’ve won every single day.
We’re going to need a lot more of this. Not in place of comments or lawsuits or phone calls or elections, but in addition to them.
We’re witnessing the most brazen and systematic assault on America’s conservation and environmental laws in our history. Like locusts on a field of ripe corn, this administration is dismantling the legal underpinnings of our public lands and our national heritage. The speed and scale of it is staggering.
They don’t believe we should have the land, let alone have a say in what happens on it. They believe resources exist to serve the corporations and billionaires they golf with, and every law that says otherwise is paperwork to be waived. Comments and lawsuits and phone calls and elections still matter deeply. But the only thing that has physically stopped these locusts is a person who climbed a tree and refused to come down.
The people holding the last cottonwood are running on volunteer labor and donations. The Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center is the most direct line to them. You can support them here.
Short Update on MTJP
We’re back from Alaska and are playing catch up. There’s a lot of headlines we want to get to and we have a plenty to share about what we learned about the Ambler Road. We look forward to doing all that in the coming days and weeks. We’ll be headed back to Alaska at the end of this month to explore the Tongass National Forest and shed light on the alarming situation unfolding there.
Thanks for reading as always and thanks for your support. A lot more to come!
Until next time,
Jim
There's a sickness in this world and the billionaires have it.
Some idiots won't accept how important things like these trees are. Bless the folks for defending this remaining cottonwood tree.