Protesters Stage Tree Sit in Arizona to Save Ancient Cottonwoods from Border Wall

Protesters are staging a “tree sit” in a tiny Arizona town to prevent the destruction of a grove of ancient cottonwood trees as federal contractors race to build a row of two 30ft walls along the border with Sonora, Mexico.

The gathering ramped up last week in the town of Lochiel, in the remote San Rafael valley of south-east Arizona. On 27 July, contractors working for Fisher Sand and Gravel crushed three of the largest cottonwoods with excavators.

Now the group is defending a towering cottonwood. Estimated to be more than 200 years old, it is the last of the huge old trees right on the border that some locals call the “grandmothers”.

The group has now grown to include several dozen people, with many camping on private land with permission of the owner. The protesters help to support and feed a single rotating person who stays in a platform high in the tree at all times.

The demonstration has been peaceful. One person was arrested by the local sheriff’s department on the day the trees were taken down but was released the same day without being charged.

The protest includes environmental activists who are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency spare the cottonwoods. Kate Scott, one of the leaders of the tree-sit and founder of the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center, and Erick Meza, with the Sierra Club, have been spending many days in the area in recent months.

“The tree itself has become a symbol,” Meza said, both of the ecological importance of the area and the beauty that remains, but also “how much violence and destruction has happened on the border”.

“She’s our Statue of Liberty,” Scott said of the last remaining tree.

The once idyllic valley, where the movie Oklahoma was filmed, is a high-elevation prairie home to bears and porcupines, and the mountains on either side represent two of the most important binational wildlife corridors in the borderlands. At the beginning of the second Trump administration, the border here was demarcated by hip-high vehicle barriers and barbed wire which animals could easily pass.

Now a double layer of wall is planned for all of it and construction began last year. Already, several miles of wall have gone up in the valley and contractors are blasting in the mountains and drilling wells to make cement for the barrier’s base.

The demonstration is already drawing national attention, including from Julia Butterfly Hill, who famously spent two years living in a redwood in California’s Humboldt county in the late 1990s, which led to it and other trees being saved, has reached out to the organizers of this gathering and hopes to visit to lend support.

“I always remind folks that when we see people doing direct action like this, it’s only because every other system has failed,” Butterfly Hill said. These people are “shining a light” on the devastation and destruction caused by border wall construction, she added.

The tree is in the path of a planned secondary wall being built about 60ft north of the border, along which another wall is also under construction nearby. A total of 384 miles of these secondary barriers are in development, according to CBP. Neither the DHS, CBP or Fisher replied to a request for comment.

Meza emphasized that while one border wall is destructive enough, a second one is even more so, besides being unnecessary due to negligible levels of border crossings in the area, and it threatens many other natural areas, including a desert oasis in south-west Arizona called Quitobaquito Springs. Part of the harm is severing wildlife corridors in one of the most biodiverse parts of the country, he said.

David Hathaway, sheriff of Santa Cruz County, which encompasses the western part of the valley, has publicly opposed border wall construction in this area, and has said that illegal immigration is practically nonexistent in the valley. Hathaway did not respond to a request for comment.

Cottonwoods are a vital tree species in arid regions because they can only grow in areas with underground water, such as river corridors, said Russ McSpadden, a conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. About 90% of riparian forests in the state have disappeared due to groundwater extraction or diversion, development and mining.

This area is the headwaters of the Santa Cruz River, which begins in this valley, before flowing into Mexico, taking a turn, and heading west and north back into Arizona.

“Places like Lochiel with this cottonwood forest, where this ribbon of green runs dozens of miles from Mexico to the US, these are the last threads of an ecosystem that has declined so much already,” McSpadden said.

Meza sent several letters to the CBP asking if the agency and their contractors could avoid felling the trees, rather than destroying them. The agency promised in a letter dated 18 June to not cut down the cottonwoods if any birds were nesting in them. Meza filmed a bird still nesting shortly before they were taken down.

On 4 August, McSpadden said he saw a western yellow-billed cuckoo, a threatened species, in the cottonwood they’re trying to save.

Federal contractors are exempt from complying with dozens of federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, due to the Real ID Act, which gives the Department of Homeland Security broad latitude to waive laws when building border infrastructure.

Part of the grove sits on private property near the edge of the 60ft-wide Roosevelt Reservation, a federally owned strip of land abutting the border with Mexico. The last remaining ancient tree towers over and shades the protesters, some of whom are camped beneath it, but its trunk is on federal land.

It’s unclear what a standoff would look like as the protesters have a legal right to remain on private property, and CBP is not understood to have legal authority to detain citizens on US soil.

Meanwhile, members of the group say they plan to stay with the tree for as long as it takes to save it.

“We want to shout from the treetops, literally, ‘We’re not going to take this any more,’” said Scott.