LOCHIEL, Ariz. — For more than two months, activists sat high up in the branches of a giant cottonwood tree here on the border with Mexico in an effort to block federal contractors from knocking it down to make way for President Donald Trump’s $46.5 billion border wall expansion.
But that standoff came to an end Monday when demonstrators say more than 50 Customs and Border Protection agents raided the activist camp and an excavator knocked down what they called a “grandmother” tree, estimated to be 150 to 250 years old.
Footage taken by protesters shows the massive tree crashing down as border agents look on, and the activists who worked to protect it wail.
“We have been raided, assaulted, battered, bruised, bleeding by the Border Patrol agents,” said Kate Scott, an activist who kicked off the group’s tree sit, in a call following Monday’s raid. As CBP cleared the area, about 10 people were arrested, the group of activists estimates, and another 10 received citations, including for “violation of a closure order” for being in the border-wall zone.
At least one activist showed images of scrapes and bandages on a Monday video call.
Customs and Border Protection previously identified cottonwood trees on federal land in Lochiel “that needed removal for planned border wall construction” and finished removing them as of Monday, the agency’s assistant commissioner Hilton Beckham said in a statement.
“CBP recognizes the importance of protecting the environment, wildlife, and cultural resources during border wall construction,” Beckham said, adding that preconstruction surveys found no active migratory bird nests. The Department of Homeland Security has waived dozens of laws requiring rigorous review of environmental impacts, although Hilton said the agency was still conducting environmental and cultural reviews and seeking public input.
CBP did not respond to questions about the descriptions of the confrontation with activists.
The cottonwood tree had become a rallying point for anti-border wall activists, who opposed the destruction of a native habitat and major wildlife corridor, as well as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The scene Monday brought to a close a confrontation that began on July 27.
Scott, who had been in Lochiel on and off for weeks to keep an eye on advancing border construction, had sped back to the tiny former border crossing town that day after hearing fellow activists were in trouble. Arriving just in time, she ran across a field and dove under a fence, popping up on the other side to block an excavator that had already knocked down three other “grandmother” cottonwood trees.
The operator banged the excavator’s bucket around the tree threateningly and came within six feet of Scott. But he could not knock down the tree without hurting her, she said. He backed off, churning up the dirt nearby before leaving the area, damaging some tree roots but leaving it otherwise intact.
The moment was the start of what became a 70-day standoff on the Arizona border, amid efforts to massively expand the border wall during Trump’s second term.
Wanting to stop contractors from moving forward, Scott and a small but rapidly growing group of activists saw only one option to protect the cottonwood that clearly was in the border wall’s path.
“We looked at each other and said ‘Who is going to go up in the tree?’” Scott said.
At first, a tree-sitter just sat on a high branch with a yoga mat. But by night, a plywood platform — big enough for just one person at a time — had been rigged up to the tree, offering a bit more stability.
The group’s tree sit drew on a decades-old tradition that became most famous in California and the Pacific Northwest as a way to block loggers from cutting down old-growth forests. In the late 1990s, Julia Butterfly Hill occupied a redwood tree in Northern California for more than two years to prevent loggers from cutting it down.
“i have been supporting from a distance, the efforts against the border wall construction,” Hill said on social media, resharing posts from the Arizona tree sit to her account and alerting her followers to the clash with border agents on Monday.
As of late September, the wall construction stopped short about 300 feet from the tree. The contractors rarely passed, choosing alternate routes.
Speaking to the Washington Post in Lochiel last month, Scott called the effort a success thus far.
“Any group of people that can prevent border wall ecocide for close to three months is a milestone achievement,” she said then.
Federal contractors have been building the wall at a furious pace at the other end of the San Rafael Valley, a rolling grassland where the 1955 musical Oklahoma! was filmed. About 10 miles east of the tree-sit, a newly built concrete plant continuously loads trucks pouring the footers of the wall, while dozens of trailers sit nearby to house contractors working in the otherwise remote area.
On Monday, the camp that held frenetic construction at bay for weeks descended into chaos. As the group held a “sunrise ceremony,” a regular camp ritual not long after daybreak, dozens of CBP officers stormed the area.
“We were holding prayer. We were all silent and in meditation when they originally started to come,” said one activist on a Monday video call, identifying herself as “Hoops,” showing a scraped and bandaged arm.
“One of our comrades was literally handcuffed and they were kicking him as he was on the ground,” the activist said. “They were dragging our comrades on the ground. They were pushing us into barbed wire fences. They had knees on people’s necks. They shoved me — I’m a very small person — and multiple men shoved me to the ground and got on top of me.”
All except for Scott declined to give their names or have their faces photographed, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy and for fear of retaliation. Many of the activists adopted nature-related noms de guerre like “Tidepool.”
The border wall construction has already changed the landscape in an area where no wall was built in Trump’s first term. One completed section with two 30-foot-high parallel walls — and 150 feet of no man’s land between them — bisects a landscape that until recently would have offered visitors a panorama view of near-pristine nature for miles on either side of the border.
In Lochiel specifically, the tree-sitters are defending one of Arizona’s last riparian ecosystems, or those that grow along waterways or water just below the surface, said Russ McSpadden, Southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group. He estimates those ecosystems, which allow for larger plants like cottonwoods to grow, have been more than 90% wiped out in the state.
The camp often mounts colorful, artistic protests that involve music, dance, or dressing up. Last month, three activists were arrested after confronting contractors while dressed as animals — including a jaguar and yellow-billed cuckoo — they say will have their migration corridors cut off by the wall.
Scott, who wore a monochrome jaguar shirt and a shawl, is a “great hippy matriarch of the valley,” McSpadden said, contrasting with the mostly much younger activists in the camp. Others protesters wore bandannas or even T-shirts tied across their faces, some expressing distrust of mainstream media.
Some wore dusters and broad brimmed hats — evoking the look of 19th century desperados of the Wild West — seemingly enough to spook at least one contractor who turned the truck around.
What unites the group is a feeling that someone needs to stand up for the nature that is being destroyed for the border wall, several said.
“The border wall is not yet a scar. It’s an open wound on our mother, mother earth’s skin, mother mom’s family, and in the heart of the mother in all of us,” wrote one activist who went by “Buglove,” when asked how they felt about the border well. They wrote responses with pen and paper on the tree platform, sending them back and forth 50 feet via bucket and pulley.
“It is a monument to fascism and tool of fear. It is not built for any ‘real’ purpose, even the evil purpose the state claims,” they wrote.
During the tree sit, activists took turns ascending to the platform, where there was just enough room for one person to live for days at a time. One activist, a Tucson-based arborist who only identified herself as “Magnolia,” said that when sitting in the tree, she could feel the roots shift whenever heavy equipment drives past. Living in the tree was “uncomfortable but really special.”
There was some “surf” on the platform, she said. It shifted with the person’s movement and the wind.
“It’s a mixture of terrifying, boring, magical, and peaceful,” the activist said.
A bucket, raised by rope, helped deliver meals to the sitters, and helped with bathroom and waste needs. The group kept secret how tree sitters would get into the tree and how often they would switch places.
By September, the camp could fluctuate between as few as half a dozen protesters and swell to more than 100 on days when special events were planned. When the Washington Post visited the site on Sept. 24, about 20 tents were set up on a private property just behind the cottonwood tree, whose owner allowed them passage to the 60-foot border zone controlled by the federal government.
But most of the group did not know each other before they organically arrived at the tree, Scott said.
“It’s magic. People just show up and they know how to do things for exactly what you need,” she added.
She said pockets of resistance against the wall have risen up in other areas along the border — in the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona out to Big Bend in Texas, where people say they are fed up with the government.
Some Tohono O’odham members have taken up watch on their segment of the border, where they have maintained a camp and prayer fire for weeks, observing masked CBP agents escorting contractors to drill soil samples in August.
In Big Bend, a judge granted a temporary injunction last week blocking construction of border infrastructure, in response to a lawsuit brought by environmental advocates and locals.
“We’re all aligned, and we all feel this is the moment in time and this is a time we have to take these direct actions because nothing else has mattered,” Scott said. “We know they don’t listen to us. They file our requests and our pleas and our petitions in boxes.”
In late September, Scott had vowed: “We will be here as long as it takes.”
Following Monday’s raid, Scott said they would continue carrying out other unspecified “direct action” that could take imaginative or creative forms.
“They have just cut down our grandmother but her roots are within all of us. I want to tell the country they will have a firestorm of energy, of prayer and song and activism and direct action like they have never seen,” Scott said.