The tree is the last of four cottonwoods that have stood along the border in Lochiel, Arizona, for more than 100 years. The Border Patrol says the trees need to be removed to make way for the wall.
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A cottonwood tree stands halfway along President Donald Trump’s border wall in Lokiel, Arizona, activists camping near the tree told USA TODAY on July 28.
The tree, estimated to be 100 to 200 years old, is the last remaining cottonwood grove that once stood along the route of a proposed border wall in a remote Arizona town. The remaining three were demolished by a Department of Homeland Security contractor on July 27.
Lochiel is a remote former border town two hours south of Tucson. The area had been a ghost town for decades after the border crossing closed in the 1980s. But for conservationists, cottonwoods and their surrounding areas are worth protecting for their many other inhabitants, including antelopes, bighorn sheep, and potentially jaguars.
“It’s this amazing habitat that sustains the ecosystem,” border conservationist Kate Scott told USA TODAY of the rows of cottonwoods that migrate upstream from Mexico across the Arizona border. “This tells us that there’s water here and everything that comes with it. It’s its own universe.”
Furthermore, she added: “It’s ecocide…I have to say that because they’re destroying the environment and they know what they’re doing and they don’t care.”
Scott, a longtime opponent of President Trump’s wall cutting through the American Southwest’s wilderness, has been camping out next to cottonwoods for the past six weeks in an effort to stop Homeland Security contractors from cutting down the trees she calls “grandma.”
The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that at least one person has been arrested in connection with protests against the bulldozing of trees for border wall construction.
Scott said the cottonwoods are symbolic of the kind of neglect of nature she sees happening up and down the border, from the Trump administration’s efforts to build a border wall through Big Bend, Texas, to the destruction of 1,000-year-old Native American ruins a few hours west of Lochiel.
The Border Patrol told USA TODAY in a July 28 statement that the cottonwood stands on federal land and “needs to be removed to make way for planned border wall construction.” A spokesperson for the agency said the removal of the cottonwoods was carried out in the presence of environmental monitors and was done to avoid disturbing legally protected bird species.
The Sierra Club disputes the Department of Homeland Security’s account of how the cottonwood removal is being carried out, claiming there are no environmental monitors and that legally protected golden butterflies were actively nesting in one of the cottonwoods.
Wall opponents say the structure will ultimately threaten some of the rare species that make the American Southwest such a special region, such as jaguars and wolves.
“Wildlife and ecosystems don’t recognize national borders, and they would normally travel back and forth, but now they’re cut off,” Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter, told USA TODAY.
He added that animals caught between alternating sections of the border wall would likely die, that the wall could block vital water flow, and that the bellows wire along the wall was “quite literally a death trap for wildlife.”
Local activists say they have witnessed animals bleeding to death after getting entangled in the razor-like bellows wire.
Scott said she and other activists in the area plan to continue camping as close to the remaining cottonwood trees as possible. At the very least, she hopes the Department of Homeland Security will choose to build the wall along a route that doesn’t destroy trees that are roughly the same age as the country.
At best, she hopes those in charge of border security will take a lesson from the ancient tree that stretched across the border until July 27, leaning against cottonwoods on the Mexican side for support.
“We humans can take a little chapter from their book about coexistence,” Scott said. “Why do we make it so hard for each other instead of saying, ‘Let’s work together?'”
