[News] Climate Change, Migration, and Militarization in Arizona’s Borderlands

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/03/climate-change-migration-militarization-arizona/ 



  Climate Change, Migration, and Militarization in Arizona’s Borderlands

Ryan Devereaux - October 3, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I_magine a sensation_ akin to sticking your face in a furnace, except 
the furnace is everywhere and you are walking through it. The air is not 
just hot. It actually burns against your eyeballs. Every step you take 
is met with a hidden conspiracy of loose rocks, barbed plants, and 
poisonous animals. You can’t touch anything. Your body’s internal alarm 
system blinks red. If you stop moving for any significant amount of 
time, you die. Even if you keep moving, you might also die. In fact, the 
heat is already killing you.

This is not some future hellscape. It was the Organ Pipe Cactus National 
Monument, along the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona, on a typical 
morning in August 2018. A team of humanitarian aid volunteers were 
searching for a young man who had gone missing while crossing the 
border. I was along to report. The search was ultimately unsuccessful, 
though we did find two sets of suspected human remains. The man would 
join the thousands of migrants who have died or disappeared in the 
Sonoran Desert since the U.S. government began funneling them there a 
quarter century ago.

By the time we got back to our vehicle, the dashboard thermostat read 
123 degrees Fahrenheit.

To stand in the summer sun on Organ Pipe and contemplate the long walk 
north invites some startling realizations. One: Despite the heat and the 
militarization, generations of people have somehow survived this 
seemingly impossible journey. Two: No one is going to undertake such a 
journey without a deep motivating desire to move. And three: All of 
these factors — human migration, the desert’s capacity to kill, and the 
hardening of the American border security apparatus — are on a path to 
historic intensification in the coming years.

Right now there are construction crews at work on Organ Pipe, pumping 
water from a rare desert aquifer to mix concrete for Donald Trump’s 
long-promised border wall. The survival of a fragile and unique desert 
ecosystem hangs in the balance. Laiken Jordahl, a former employee of the 
U.S. National Park Service at Organ Pipe and now the borderlands 
campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, monitored the 
situation throughout the summer. Making the two-hour drive from Tucson 
to Organ Pipe, Jordahl would shoot video dispatches from the monument, 
detailing what was happening on the ground, cataloging the progress of 
the project and describing for viewers what was at stake.

“It’s basically just an all-out attack,” Jordahl told me. “It’s 
unbelievable. This would never be conceivable if normal environmental 
laws were in place.”

Organ Pipe sits directly south of Ajo, an unincorporated community 
surrounded by a vast expanse of federally administered borderlands 
sometimes referred to as Arizona’s west desert. To the west of the 
monument is the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. To the east is 
the Tohono O’odham Nation, one of the country’s largest Native American 
reservations. The tribe’s ancestral homelands were split in two in 1853 
with the Gadsden Purchase, which established the current U.S.-Mexico 
dividing line. Descended from the first people of the Sonoran Desert, 
the O’odham have been living with, and in many cases resisting, U.S. 
government notions of border enforcement ever since. In 2016, Verlon 
Jose, the former vice chairman of the nation, responded 
<https://www.abc15.com/news/region-central-southern-az/other/tohono-oodham-national-tribal-chairman-says-nation-wont-allow-border-wall-to-be-built> 
to the suggestion that Trump would build a wall on the reservation with 
the words “Over my dead body.”

For Jordahl, Organ Pipe was the place where he first fell in love with 
the Sonoran Desert. It’s easy to see why. With its rolling hills, 
wide-open vistas, and still, soul-settling silence, the monument is as 
breathtaking as it is deadly. Jordahl bristles at the media’s habit of 
saying that much of Trump’s wall-building in places like Organ Pipe is 
merely the replacement of existing barriers, and thus not a win for the 
president.

“That grossly misconstrues this issue,” he said.

There’s a difference between a Normandy barrier 
<https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6028/us-southern-border-fence-tech-map/>, 
Jordahl noted, which people and animals can pass over and under and 
exists in many parts of Arizona, and the 30-foot steel bollard walls, 
topped with floodlights, that Trump administration contractors are 
planting deep into the ground. It’s all the more serious in the case of 
Organ Pipe, where the water used to mix the concrete to support those 
walls is sucked out of a rare aquifer. According to the Arizona 
Republic, U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates that it will need 
84,000 gallons of water each day to complete the Organ Pipe project, 
which was awarded to Southwest Valley Constructors, a New Mexico-based 
firm. At a rate of roughly 1.85 million gallons per mile, 43 miles of 
bollard fencing “could require a total of 79.56 million gallons of 
groundwater,” the paper reported 
<https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/2019/09/05/where-water-arizona-border-wall-coming-from/2157543001/>.

“We’re literally mining it out of the earth here,” Jordahl said. “It 
will take generations to regenerate, if it does at all.”

The drain on the groundwater could have disastrous consequences for 
Quitobaquito Springs, an oasis that provides the only source of natural, 
permanent fresh water for hundreds of species of animals. Some of those 
species are endangered. Others, like the Quitobaquito pupfish, exist 
nowhere else in the world. But the implications of the construction run 
even deeper. In Arizona, the federal government has long weaponized the 
desert as a tool to stop migration, one used in concert with an army of 
federal agents, the best technology money can buy, and network of 
immigrant detention centers. While these get-tough deterrence strategies 
rarely achieve their stated goals, they do provide powerful political 
fodder and line the pockets of those with a stake in the game, from 
government contractors to organized crime.

Conditions that made the Sonoran Desert a deadlier and more politically 
fraught space over the last two and half decades will soon go into 
overdrive. According to the latest National Climate Assessment, 
delivered to Congress and the president in November 2018, the southwest 
United States is on track <https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/25/> 
for severe water shortages, multidecade droughts, and increased 
wildfires. Already home to the hottest temperatures ever recorded, the 
region is expected to see an increase in public health problems stemming 
from extreme heat, with children, the elderly, and Native Americans at 
particularly high risk.

South of the border, regional vulnerability to the climate crisis is 
already an issue. In the summer of 2016, as Trump was campaigning on his 
promise to build a wall to keep migrants out, the Food and Agriculture 
Organization of the United Nations reported that drought in Central 
America’s dry corridor had left 3.5 million peoplein need of 
humanitarian assistance 
<http://www.fao.org/emergencies/crisis/dry-corridor/en/>. USAID called 
it “one of the worst droughts in 35 years in Central America.” The 
agency’s grim climate forecasts for the countries of Honduras 
<https://www.climatelinks.org/sites/default/files/asset/document/2017_USAID%20ATLAS_Climate%20Change%20Risk%20Profile_Honduras.pdf>, 
Guatemala 
<https://www.climatelinks.org/sites/default/files/asset/document/2017_USAID%20ATLAS_Climate%20Change%20Risk%20Profile_Guatemala.pdf>, 
and El Salvador 
<https://www.climatelinks.org/sites/default/files/asset/document/2017_USAID%20ATLAS_Climate%20Change%20Risk%20Profile_El%20Salvador.pdf> 
suggest more hardship to come, with rising temperatures, food scarcity, 
and extreme weather threatening rural populations in a region still 
struggling to overcome legacies of Cold War interventionism, corporate 
exploitation, and war-zone levels of violence and insecurity.

Stories linking migration and climate change have proliferated during 
the Trump era, so much so that researchers at a recent conference at the 
University of Arizona raised concerns 
<https://tucson.com/news/local/tim-steller-s-opinion-climate-change-a-facile-explanation-for/article_cfa4c2b8-fb09-5a17-8daf-01881dd06dc7.html> 
that other factors driving people to move — poverty, violence, 
institutional failures — risk being overshadowed. The concerns are not 
without merit. Migration is not monolithic, and the reasons people 
choose to move are as varied as people themselves. At the same time, 
projections about the role climate could play in shaping the calculus of 
individual people are quite dire, and traditional factors that have 
driven migration are increasingly bound up in the environmental crisis. 
The International Organization for Migration, for example, has 
forecasted that there could be anywhere from 25 million to 1 billion 
climate refugees 
<http://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/mecc_outlook.pdf> in the 
world by 2050. The World Bank, meanwhile, has estimated that there could 
be more than 17 million people internally displaced 
<http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/983921522304806221/pdf/124724-BRI-PUBLIC-NEWSERIES-Groundswell-note-PN3.pdf> 
in Latin America alone by that time. Just last month, a report 
<http://www.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/2019-mid-year-figures_for%20website%20upload.pdf> 
from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre found that climate 
disasters forced a record-setting seven million people 
<http://www.internal-displacement.org/mid-year-figures> from their homes 
in the first six months of 2019. That was before Hurricane Dorian hit 
the Bahamas in what’s been described 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/09/03/dorians-horrific-eyewall-slammed-grand-bahama-island-hours-straight/> 
as potentially “the longest siege of violent, destructive weather ever 
observed.”

As life becomes increasingly untenable for people across the world, 
authoritarian, anti-migrant politics continue to demonstrate their 
potency as a track to American political power. Whether migrants are 
appearing at the border or not, these forces point to the threat of 
their arrival to impose lockdown conditions on border communities. The 
swirling mix of far-right politics and the actual threats posed by the 
climate crisis raise profound questions about what’s happening in the 
Arizona desert right now: Will the coming decades see a border more 
militarized than the last? What happens if people start showing up in 
truly unprecedented numbers with no livable homeland to return to? What 
moral obligations does that reality pose? What does the border become in 
that world?

For Jordahl, and for many others in the borderlands, these are the 
questions ringing out from the desert right now. In a sense, Jordahl 
explained, it’s as though the Trump administration is providing a dark 
model of what’s to come: using the impacts of the climate crisis that it 
is exacerbating as an asset to support its anti-migrant ends. “It’s a 
story that really hasn’t been told yet,” he said.


      Draining Life From the Desert

Amy Juan grew up on the Tohono O’odham Nation. She graduated college 
there, and she’s 33 now, working as office manager of the International 
Indian Treaty Council in Tucson. Her dad’s side of the family comes from 
Newfield, a tiny O’odham community right on the border. She remembers 
days spent riding in the back of her grandpa’s pickup truck, rumbling 
over the steel cattle guard at the San Miguel gate. Sometimes they would 
be heading to a funeral, and sometimes they would be visiting family. 
Often, the trips were a treat: a chance to buy a soda or 
a quesadilla from the vendors on the other side of the crossing. For a 
kid growing up on the nation, “It was a cool place to go,” Juan told me. 
“I never knew it was a border.”

Juan was about 8 years old when she started noticing the changes. Though 
she didn’t know it at the time, the Clinton administration had passed a 
trade deal that would have devastating consequences for working 
Mexicans. Around the same time, in 1993, the U.S. Border Patrol 
apprehended more than 1.2 million people attempting to enter the United 
States without papers. Democrats and Republicans agreed: This was a crisis.

The following summer, the Border Patrol and the Pentagon developed 
“Prevention Through Deterrence 
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5987025-Border-Patrol-Strategic-Plan-1994-and-Beyond.html>,” 
a strategy for stemming illegal immigration by locking down border 
cities, thus driving migration flows into the border’s deadliest places, 
such as the Sonoran Desert. Virtually overnight the number of dead 
bodies found along the border began to explode, eventually surpassing 
the death tolls of Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attacks 
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/04/us/texas-border-migrants-dead-bodies.html> 
combined, as desperate people tried their luck in one of the planet’s 
most unforgiving ecosystems. In Pima County alone, the remains of 
roughly 3,000 <http://www.humaneborders.info/> people have been 
recovered in the desert since 2001. Border-wide, the government has 
tallied more than 7,500 
<https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2019-Mar/bp-southwest-border-sector-deaths-fy1998-fy2018.pdf> 
migrant deaths over the last two decades, though experts agree the true 
toll is certainly higher. U.S. lawmakers have largely treated these 
deaths as the cost of doing business, agreeing year after year to pour 
an ever-increasing stream of money, manpower, and technology into the 
most elaborate border and immigration enforcement system the world has 
ever known.

At its core, Prevention Through Deterrence was a massive redirection of 
traffic. The Tohono O’odham went from seeing 200 or so migrants crossing 
the reservation every month to 1,500 people 
<https://tucson.com/news/local/border/tribes-seek-to-join-immigration-reform-debate/article_d4fe1980-46d4-5e90-b690-ce78c5453bf1.html> 
a day. There was litter and there was theft but that was just the 
beginning of it.

As Juan went from elementary to high school, the Border Patrol moved in. 
It began with the agency setting up a “forward operating base” near her 
grandparents’ house. At first, it was little more than a spare modular 
building in the desert. Today, Juan said, it’s a self-sufficient 
facility with a helicopter pad and detention pens indoors and out. As 
the years went by, the skies over the reservation became dotted with 
choppers, and later drones. The old adobe Border Patrol station outside 
Ajo was replaced with a state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar facility. 
Its agent capacity went from 25 to 500. And then there were the 
checkpoints. “I think once the checkpoints were established that really, 
/really/ was a big transition to understanding, like, yeah, we are 
militarized,” Juan said. “That’s what this means, having to check in and 
check out of our own lands, our own community.”

To get anywhere north of the reservation requires submitting to 
inspection by armed federal agents. This means a kid on the nation today 
might be less likely to grow up remembering happy trips over the border 
in the back of a relative’s truck, and more likely to grow up 
remembering agents flashing lights into their car and questioning their 
parents. “It has psychological effects,” Juan said. “Especially for a 
young kid.”

Juan became politically conscious in her early 20s, as she began to 
realize that what her community was experiencing was both exceptional 
and unacceptable. “We started to see a lot of Border Patrol abuse and 
assault, especially on elders and children,” she explained. She’s spent 
the last decade speaking out, challenging the imposition of constant 
surveillance on the O’odham people, such as the recent fight to block 
the installation of a powerful Israeli spy company’s surveillance towers 
on the reservation 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/>. 
She recently traveled to the Arctic Circle and Palestine, and she sees 
clearly that militarized borders and the climate crisis are interwoven.

“Part of my work now is really having conversations within the community 
about how we’re going to survive,” she told me. “Talking about water.”

Draining groundwater at a place like Quitobaquito Springs might seem 
like a small thing, Juan explained, but it’s not. “It’s so 
representative of the danger that we’re in. This spring has been able to 
survive for thousands of years, and it’s still here,” she said. “It’s a 
watering hole for all life, anybody that’s out there in the desert.”

If the springs are sucked dry, the desert becomes even more deadly. It 
feels almost intentional, Juan said, like someone “thinking that this 
watering hole is important for migrants — and it is — and wanting to 
make sure that it’s not there.”


      Our Destruction Story

As Juan watched the border transform over the last three decades, the 
desert itself was changing.

Dr. Gregg Garfin, a University of Arizona climatologist and an author of 
the southwest region chapter of the 2014 and 2018 National Climate 
Assessments, has closely tracked those changes. During the same period 
in which the government began pushing migrants away from border cities, 
Garfin’s research shows that annual average temperatures in the Sonoran 
Desert increased by more than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit when compared 
against the first half of the 20th century. By mid-century, what Garfin 
describes as “cautious projections” have annual average temperatures in 
the desert increasing 2-4 degrees, and by the end of the century 6-10 
degrees.

To understand what places like the O’odham Nation and Organ Pipe are now 
facing, Garfin explained, you must first understand that these areas 
were already “some of the most extreme and variable or erratic places in 
terms of their climate and weather in the United States.” Increasing 
temperatures and diminishing winter precipitation have contributed to 
two decades of drought in the Sonoran Desert. The early 2000s, some of 
the deadliest years for migrants crossing the desert, were particularly 
bad. By 2050, when the IOM says there will be anywhere from 25 million 
to 1 billion climate refugees roaming the planet, the hottest day of the 
year in the already scorching Arizona desert could be up to 7 degrees 
hotter than it currently is, meaning that a migrant attempting to 
cross a place like Organ Pipe could go from facing 123 degrees 
Fahrenheit to something more like 130 (the hottest temperature ever 
recorded, in Death Valley, was 134 degrees). Meanwhile, Garfin said, 
multiday heat wave temperatures are also predicted to increase by more 
than 10 degrees. “We’re going from very hot to damn hot.”

With the heat, the amount of moisture held in the soil will decrease. 
Precipitation will also decline, particularly in the winter and the 
spring, which is already the driest time of year. The ironic 
thing, Garfin said, is that warmer atmospheres hold more moisture. What 
that means is that while the Sonoran Desert will see less water held in 
the ground, the region’s already extreme bouts of precipitation will 
become all the more extreme. The frequency of one-in-20-year storms is 
expected to increase by 10 to 20 percent. In other words, when rain does 
fall, it will likely appear in the form of epic downpours. In a region 
with the kind of soil you find in the Sonoran Desert, where the 
topography is steep and rocky, a short but intense one-hour rainfall can 
easily cause a flash flood. It happened just last year on the Tohono 
O’odham reservation, Garfin noted, when a series of tropical storms 
moving through the area nearly overwhelmed the tribe’s earthen dams.

“That sort of risk is important in the future,” Garfin said — it could 
mean the difference between life or death.

Last year, Sonorensis, a publication of the Arizona-Sonoran Desert 
Museum, devoted a full issue 
<https://www.desertmuseum.org/members/sonorensis/sonorensis2018.pdf> to 
the climate crisis. Garfin wrote the lead article, arguing that 
communities in southern Arizona are already beginning to adapt.

Later on in the issue, Dr. Selso Villegas, executive director of the 
water resources department on the Tohono O’odham Nation, detailed what 
adaptation has looked like in his corner of the desert. The 
tribe’s legislative council requested that Villegas’s department 
investigate the nation’s vulnerability to the climate crisis and explore 
possible solutions in 2014. Working with University of 
Arizona researchers, Villegas eventually came up with a plan, which the 
council later approved, that included a return to the use of traditional 
home-building materials, such as adobe; the opening of local buildings 
as communal cool-off shelters for heat emergencies; the adaptation of a 
flood mitigation strategy; the hiring of more wildfire fighters; an 
effort to make sure groundwater for homes was treated; and education for 
community members about what was happening.

 From the O’odham perspective, Villegas wrote, Mother Earth had been 
poisoned. “Many indigenous people around the world have creation and 
destruction stories,” he wrote. “Sadly, we are at the beginning of our 
destruction story.”


      Migration and Militarization

The sun had just begun to rise over the Tohono O’odham’s stretch of the 
Sonoran Desert when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. The 
years that followed brought changes to the way people related to the 
land, to the way they moved. There were deeper, psychic changes as well.

When it comes to the kind of migration and militarization that the 
government brought to O’odham lands, Juan told me, opinions tend to 
break down along generational lines. There are the elders, she said, who 
understand that “migration and the relationship between the people in 
the north and the south is nothing new,” and have tended to view 
migrants as travelers moving along their way. Next, she said, is the 
middle generation: O’odham who were sent to boarding schools as 
children, “Americanized,” and instilled with deep respect for the value 
of education and authority. Finally, there are the young people. They 
are more connected to the broader world than any generation before them, 
Juan said, and tend to “understand that in order for us to survive, we 
have to work together as a part of the bigger global community.”

Within that generation are young people who remember the days before 
militarization and young people who don’t. It’s that latter category 
Juan spends most of her time worrying about. “They grew up in it,” she said.

The border enforcement regime born in the mid-’90s hit the fragile 
ecosystems of the west desert particularly hard, as laws designed to 
protect the land took a back seat to security.

The strategy brought a tidal wave of traffic to places like Organ Pipe 
and nearby Cabeza Prieta. Virtually all of Organ Pipe — nearly 95 
percent of its 517 square miles — is federally designated wilderness. 
The same goes for the Cabeza Prieta. It’s the most restrictive land 
management designation there is, and it means that it is the land 
managers’ job to ensure the pristine wilderness remains “untrammeled by 
man.” The nature of border security made that mission impossible.

    The border enforcement regime born in the mid-’90s hit the fragile
    ecosystems of the west desert hard, as laws designed to protect the
    land took a back seat to security.

Migrants and smugglers did their share of damage. Take a walk through 
the Arizona desert, close to the border, and you are likely to find 
discarded water jugs, carpet booties, and maybe a lay-up spot for 
migrants moving north. But compare those impacts to the operations of 
the Border Patrol, and things get more complicated. On paper, the Border 
Patrol can only drive onto designated wilderness if exigent 
circumstances present themselves. In other words, in an emergency. As 
noted 
<https://rewilding.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Cabeza-Prieta-Vehicle-Trails_2011July.pdf> 
in a 2011 U.S. Fish and Wildlife report discussing environmental 
degradation on Cabeza Prieta, however, which detailed the discovery of 
nearly 8,000 miles of unauthorized roads running through designated 
wilderness, the Border Patrol interprets its exigency requirement “broadly.”

Until recently, most of Organ Pipe was closed to the public, a decision 
that was made after park ranger Kris Eggle was shot to death following a 
car chase with drug traffickers in August 2002. Following the killing, 
Organ Pipe became known as the country’s “most dangerous” national park. 
With nearly 70 percent of the monument off-limits to visitors until just 
five years ago, the wilderness was effectively transformed into a 
closed-off space where Border Patrol agents chased their targets with 
little notice from the world at large.

During his time at the Park Service, Jordahl became obsessed with 
figuring out exactly how many “renegade roads 
<https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.10/border-out-of-control>” Border Patrol 
agents were making on Organ Pipe. He eventually found the data he was 
looking for. “In one year, Border Patrol reported driving 17,000 miles, 
off road, in designated wilderness,” he told me. “And that’s just what 
they reported to NPS. Just in Organ Pipe, not even factoring in Cabeza 
Prieta.” Like the draining of water happening on the monument today, 
Jordahl said, the degradation only helped make Organ Pipe a more deadly 
place.

“When we’re talking about climate change, all of this off-road driving 
basically disturbs all of the biological soil crust there and that 
increases erosion, that decreases the soil’s ability to retain water,” 
he explained. “It dramatically increases the desertification of the region.”

Garfin, the climate scientist, said the same. Just above Organ Pipe is 
the Barry Goldwater bombing range, an active bombing range for the U.S. 
military. If you look at Barry Goldwater, Organ Pipe, and the other 
lands in the area, including the Tohono O’odham reservation, you see a 
region dramatically shaped by human activity over the last 30 years, 
Garfin explained. “Between the human migration and the Border Patrol 
efforts to police that area, there’s been a lot of environmental 
damage,” he said. “Going through this pristine desert in big vehicles 
increases the probability of erosion.” Add extreme storms to that 
picture and you begin to see “a real threat to infrastructure,” 
including roads and culverts. Not only does that pose a challenge to the 
military’s training mission, Garfin said, it also places migrants 
in increased danger. On top of all that, there are a number of 
threatened and endangered species in the area that require protecting. 
It is the climate crisis colliding with life in the borderlands and, in 
Garfin’s words, that “makes for a very, very challenging situation.”


      State of Exception

The federal government’s tendency to treat the border as a place where 
the rules do not apply, where thousands of people can die without a 
major public outcry, and whole communities can be placed under constant 
surveillance, only increased after the September 11 attacks. This “state 
of exception,” as the anthropologist Jason De León has called it, helped 
pave the way for the anti-environmental efforts of the Trump administration.

Folded into the newly established Department of Homeland Security, the 
Border Patrol exploded in size after 9/11 and its agents were 
conditioned 
<https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/15/border-patrol-trump-administration-227357> 
to see themselves as front-line soldiers in the global war on terrorism. 
Along with the new mission came new powers. In 2005, Congress passed the 
REAL ID Act <https://www.dhs.gov/real-id>, which gave DHS sweeping 
powers to waive local, state, and federal laws in order to construct 
barriers along the border. The act was emblematic of other war-on-terror 
legislation of the time; though it was passed under the Bush 
administration, it had bipartisan support — including 
<https://psmag.com/environment/the-little-known-law-that-the-trump-administration-is-using-to-build-a-border-wall> 
the likes of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and 
current presidential front-runner Joe Biden — and its detrimental 
impacts continue to this day.

For years, REAL ID waivers were rarely used. Then came Trump and his 
plans for a wall. A sampling of the dozens of laws DHS has waived 
<https://www.sierraclub.org/borderlands/real-id-waiver-authority-compromises-our-borderlands> 
in service of realizing the president’s core campaign promise includes: 
the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the 
Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Historic Preservation 
Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the 
American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Farmland Protection 
Policy Act. The list goes on.

“Take the land,” the president has told 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/us/politics/trump-border-wall.html> 
advisers. “Get it done.”

In February, Trump declared a national emergency on the border, bringing 
an end to the longest government shutdown in American history, which he 
began after Democrats refused to provide full funding for the wall. 
Months later, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration could tap 
into $2.5 billion 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/us/politics/supreme-court-border-wall-trump.html> 
from the Pentagon for the project. That sum has since grown. Last month, 
the secretary of defense notified Congress that he would be moving an 
additional $3.6 billion in Pentagon funds to wall-building on the 
border, bringing the total amount the Defense Department has repurposed 
for Trump’s top reelection priority to $6.1 billion 
<https://beta.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/06/pentagon-is-moving-money-pay-trumps-border-wall-here-are-consequences/>.

The administration has used the REAL ID waivers to push hundreds of 
miles of border wall construction, rumbling through whatever patch of 
sacred Native American sites, private property, or federally protected 
land gets in its way. With 66 miles completed thus far, the president is 
nowhere near the 500 miles of border wall he promised for his first 
term, and there are signs his already limited patience is growing thin. 
According to multiple accounts, Trump — who has expressed a desire for 
the border wall to be painted black, topped with spikes 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trump-wants-his-border-barrier-to-be-painted-black-with-spikes-he-has-other-ideas-too/2019/05/16/b088c07e-7676-11e9-b3f5-5673edf2d127_story.html>, and guarded by 
amoat filled with alligators or snakes 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html> — has 
gone so far as to offer pardons 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democrats-alarmed-by-trumps-promise-of-pardons-to-build-border-wall/2019/08/28/8eebe408-c9a2-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html> 
to officials who are charged with crimes while attempting to complete 
the construction.

In June, a team of Park Service archeologists visited Organ Pipe to 
assess potential threats to the monument’s many historical sites, which 
help to tell the story of the desert peoples who have inhabited the 
region for more than 10,000 years. In a 123-page report 
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6419897-Organ-Pipe-NPS-Report.html>, 
first obtained 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/border-fence-construction-could-destroy-archaeological-sites-national-park-service-finds/2019/09/17/35338b18-d64b-11e9-9343-40db57cf6abd_story.html> 
by the Washington Post, the experts identified 22 sites that would be 
partially or wholly destroyed by border wall construction, which is 
slated for completion in January 2020.

“As soon as the Supreme Court green-lighted that military funding, I 
mean — it’s pretty much limitless,” Jordahl said. The Center for 
Biological Diversity was among the first organizations to sue over the 
border wall expansion, arguing that Congress never intended the waivers 
to exist in perpetuity; that they were designed for expeditious 
construction in 2005; and that construction projects beginning in 2019 
no longer qualify as expeditious. Jordahl described the entire ordeal as 
a bizarro world version of the way the law is supposed to work in cases 
involving construction on protected lands.

“There’s no check on where they can build and how much money they can 
use,” he explained. “With the REAL ID Act waivers in place, the courts 
can’t step in. It’s like the definition of single branch government. 
Congress plays no role. The courts play no role. It’s an autocracy.”


      Rising Fascism

In the last year, there have been at least three high-profile terror 
attacks involving white gunmen targeting immigrants or the people 
perceived to support them. Two were committed in the U.S., in El Paso, 
Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The third, carried out by a 
self-described “eco-fascist 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/08/05/el-paso-shooting-eco-fascism-migration/>,” 
targeted Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. In each case, the killers 
had previously shared posts online that cribbed the “invasion” language 
so commonly heard from Trump and other far-right leaders. The El Paso 
and Christchurch shooters in particular put forth warped views of 
environmentalism that required them to kill competing races.

None of these ideas were particularly new. There is a long, dark history 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/15/anti> linking 
elements of the environmental movement, nativists, and white 
nationalists. John Tanton, a recently deceased Michigan ophthalmologist 
and godfather of the modern American nativist movement, once held a 
senior position in the Sierra Club. Bankrolled by an heiress 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html> 
obsessed with overpopulation and the environment, he went on to create 
the three most influential anti-immigrant groups 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/09/12/anti-immigrant-groups-mainstream-media/> 
in modern American history, while also running a publishing house 
popular with pseudo-intellectual white nationalists 
<https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/social-contract-press>. 
Over the last decade, those groups cultivated a close-working 
relationship with former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and his young, 
ultra-hard-line underling, Stephen Miller. With Trump in office, 
staffers from the Tanton organizations took up policymaking positions 
across the government. Sessions, meanwhile, became Trump’s first 
attorney general, and Miller became one of the president’s most trusted 
and powerful advisers.

The precise number of people who will emigrate to the U.S. as a result 
of the climate crisis is difficult to predict, but it’s also somewhat 
irrelevant to the question how future far-right governments, like the 
one in Washington, D.C., will respond to increased flows of people.

Authoritarian governments don’t need actual crises to initiate 
authoritarian policies. When the Trump administration came to power, 
Border Patrol apprehensions were at a historic low, and yet by the end 
of his first week in office, the president had signed 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/02/09/trump-administration-prepares-to-execute-vicious-executive-order-on-deportations/> 
executive orders banning travelers 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/01/29/trumps-muslim-ban-triggers-chaos-heartbreak-and-resistance/> 
from seven Muslim-majority countries and laying the groundwork for an 
unprecedented attack on the legal systems designed to protect the 
world’s most vulnerable populations. Despite the fact that border 
apprehension levels still have not hit the highs of the early 2000s, the 
administration has nonetheless used current levels to justify 
declaration of a national emergency 
<https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/413079-trump-i-am-bringing-out-the-military-to-stop-border-crossings>, 
the separation of thousands of children from their parents 
<https://theintercept.com/2018/10/11/trump-family-separation-immigration/>, 
and the dumping of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers in the border’s 
most dangerous cities 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/07/14/trump-remain-in-mexico-policy/>.

While the president and his party may be unwilling to acknowledge the 
climate crisis, the institutions responsible for maintaining the border 
take a different view. “Climate change will contribute to food and water 
scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or 
exacerbate mass migration,” read 
<https://archive.defense.gov/qdr/QDR%20as%20of%2029JAN10%201600.pdf> the 
Pentagon’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Report. Reports published by 
DHS in 2012 
<https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Appendix%20A%20DHS%20FY2012%20Climate%20Change%20Adaptation%20Plan_0.pdf> 
and 2014 
<https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Climate%20Action%20Plan%20Addendum%20June%202014%20(508%20Compliant).pdf> 
echoed that language, referring repeatedly to the possibility of “mass 
migration” events.

These are the kinds of signals that Todd Miller, a Tucson-based 
journalist and author of the new book 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/08/03/migration-empire-borders-book/>,“Empire 
of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World,” 
encourages people to pay attention to. In 1993, the year before 
Prevention Through Deterrence got started, the budget for the 
Immigration and Naturalization Service was $1.5 billion 
<https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-T-GGD-99-148/pdf/GAOREPORTS-T-GGD-99-148.pdf>. 
Today, the amount of money spent on the nation’s border and immigration 
enforcement agencies exceeds all federal law enforcement agencies — 
including the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF — combined, with $324 billion 
<https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/the-cost-of-immigration-enforcement-and-border-security> 
doled out since 2003 and $24 billion 
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6443062-ImmigrationIssues2019-Final-WEB.html> 
appropriated in 2018 alone. According to Miller, there are now more than 
70 border walls around the world, compared to just 15 when the Berlin 
Wall came down in 1989. Some market forecasts in the border security 
world describe the current moment as an “unprecedented boom period,” he 
said.

That boom translates to more surveillance equipment and more boots on 
the ground in border communities. “Analysts are thinking that there’s 
only going to be more and more buying of these technologies,” Miller 
explained. “So when you think about the future, well, then it’s a future 
of more of all this.”

There are no asylum protections for climate refugees, certainly not in 
the United States, where a cabal of anti-immigrant hard-liners are 
working day and night to dismantle 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/09/13/asylum-interview-immigration-trump/>, 
rather than expand, existing asylum protections. With research pointing 
to mass migration in the years to come, particularly poor people coming 
from countries that were not responsible for the climate crisis, Miller 
believes countries like the U.S. are presented with an enormously 
important moral decision. It’s a question of human mobility and freedom 
of movement, he said, and recognizing when the border has gone from an 
“obstacle or an impediment” to an actual “human rights violation for 
even being there in the first place.”

In the west desert of Arizona, where groups of asylum-seekers numbering 
in the hundreds turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents over the 
summer, the intersection of climate, migration, and border enforcement 
is already providing a glimpse at possible futures.

In addition to the border wall construction, the Trump government has 
charged nine people over the last two years with federal crimes for 
providing humanitarian aid to migrants crossing the desert in areas near 
the Tohono O’odham Nation and Organ Pipe. Working closely with the 
Border Patrol, senior U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials have built 
blacklists of aid volunteers 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/01/17/no-more-deaths-border-documents-trial/>, 
arguing that the provision of water in the desert degrades protected 
wilderness areas. In the most serious case to result from the crackdown, 
Scott Warren 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/05/04/no-more-deaths-scott-warren-migrants-border-arizona/>, 
a 36-year-old geographer from Ajo, was charged with two counts of 
harboring and one count of conspiracy for providing food, water, and 
shelter to two young undocumented men over the course of three days in 
2018. Facing up to 20 years in prison, his trial ended in a hung jury 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/08/10/scott-warren-trial/> over the 
summer. His retrial is scheduled for November.

The Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the borderlands in the 
president’s nationalist image is facing real resistance on the ground. 
Since filing their first suit challenging the president’s border wall 
expansion, Jordahl and his colleagues at the Center for Biological 
Diversity have brought more than a half-dozen other environmental 
lawsuits against the administration’s border construction efforts. They 
are not alone. The Sierra Club, having distanced itself from the Tanton 
stance of nativist environmentalism years ago, is also challenging 
<https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2019/06/memo-what-s-next-ngos-lawsuit-against-trump-s-national-emergency-and-border> 
the Trump’s border wall, as is the American Civil Liberties Union and 
the Southern Border Communities Coalition.

In tiny Ajo, where providing water to migrants is a decades-old 
tradition, the prosecution of Warren and other aid volunteers has 
prompted a fierce and defiant response. In August, members of the 
humanitarian community there opened up a permanent aid building for 
migrants on the main road running through town. What the future will 
mean for a place like Ajo remains to be seen. The management of water 
will be key, Garfin told me.

If anyone is likely to endure the coming years, he continued, it’s the 
O’odham. “We’re talking about people who have lived in this super 
extreme environment for thousands of years,” he said. “The one thing 
that’s different is that they previously had the ability to migrate. 
Now, that’s very restricted. But they have traditional knowledge that I 
think will help them to adapt.”

Amy Juan is certainly confident in her people. “I think we already have 
what it takes,” she told me. “It’s just going to be a regeneration of 
who we already are.” Juan is well aware of the projections DHS and the 
Pentagon have made for the years to come. “They’re preparing for climate 
change,” she said. “They’re preparing for mass migration and the wall is 
a part of that. They don’t want people to migrate or move.” It’s a 
threat to the O’odham way of life, to the ability of the O’odham to 
connect with thousands of relatives living on the other side of the 
international divide. “This border, it is a moral issue,” Juan said, a 
question of “who’s human and who has the right to life.”

Juan knows that she’s in for a long haul, that border militarization 
isn’t going away tomorrow. “That’s where I’m at now — accepting that,” 
she said. “Accepting it and preparing myself to work within that, to 
find solutions and build towards our future, and hoping that this isn’t 
going to be the situation that we’re going to be in forever. Because 
it’s crazy. I have to remind myself that not everybody lives like this.” 
When we spoke last, one of Juan’s colleagues was on his way back from a 
two-week conference on desertification in India. “We’re really anxious 
for him to come back,” she said. Heat and militarization, these are 
things the O’odham know well, she explained. Sharing that knowledge with 
others, making that the O’odham contribution to this historic moment, 
fills her with excitement and a sense of purpose. “We are beginning to 
see our role in helping other people around the world understand what 
that looks like, what it means, and what it’s going to take to survive,” 
she said. “We know what that life is like.”

-- 
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