About 30 people protested outside the Bureau of Land Management offices on Tucson’s south side Thursday afternoon demanding that public lands along the border be reopened. At a news conference, community activists said the land closure is one of several ways the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service are pushing the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies.
On Sept. 28, the Department of Agriculture announced a two-year closure for border barrier construction. The closure encompasses parts of Coronado National Forest along the U.S.-México border near rural Lochiel, about 25 miles east of the Nogales port of entry.
A week later, armed border patrol agents raided a protest camp in Lochiel, arresting 10 protesters and making way for Department of Homeland Security contractors to cut down the last standing cottonwood tree in a row of cottonwoods along the path of a double border wall. Protesters had protected the tree for more than 70 days, taking turns sleeping and staying in it to keep it from being torn down.
Logan Miller, an activist who was arrested in Lochiel in August after trying to stop border construction, said the land closures provided the “sham justification for this illegal operation and the outrageous, flagrant violations of human rights.”
During the raid at Lochiel, videos show border patrol agents pushing protesters into barbed wire fencing, and people are heard screaming, “You’re stepping on them!”
“The border divides families, it divides communities, it divides mating pairs of jaguars, it keeps mothers from their children, both human and animal,” Miller said at the news conference. “The border kills ancient cottonwoods that have flourished for 200 years in a verdant valley, stretching in one unbroken grove from north to south, until this monstrous metal scar tears through them.”
Just days after the closure, on Oct. 1, the Bureau of Land Management denied permits for 12 water stations on public lands run by local migrant aid group Humane Borders, removing 30% of the group’s water stations.
Octavio Fuentes, executive director of Humane Borders, said 30% of the at least 4,500 migrants that have died in the Arizona desert since 2000 have died on federal public lands.
“Water is precious,” Fuentes said at the news conference. “Whether it’s for our plants, the animalitos, the little critters out there, and for human beings, regardless of status, that water is precious. It is life.”
As Rep. Adelita Grijalva stood in the crowd, holding a banner that read “Tierra Libre,” Fuentes addressed a comment she had made earlier, where she asked those present to partner with or elect Democrats. Fuentes said both the Republican and Democratic parties have continued to militarize the border, pushing migrants to cross in more remote desert land. Grijalva nodded as she listened to Fuentes.
“The federal government has to end its prevention through deterrence policy,” Fuentes said. “Funneling people into our desserts and causing the death that it’s created.”
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