[News] Trump Is Blowing Up a National Monument in Arizona to Make Way for the Border Wall

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/06/border-wall-construction-organ-pipe/


  Trump Is Blowing Up a National Monument in Arizona to Make Way for the
  Border Wall

Ryan Devereaux - February 6, 2020
------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Contractors working for_ the Trump administration are blowing apart a 
mountain on protected lands in southern Arizona to make way for the 
president’s border wall. The blasting is happening on the Organ Pipe 
Cactus National Monument, a tract of Sonoran Desert wilderness long 
celebrated as one of the nation’s great ecological treasures, that holds 
profound spiritual significance to multiple Native American groups.

In a statement to The Intercept, U.S. Customs and Border Protection 
confirmed that the blasting began this week and will continue through 
the end of the month. “The construction contractor has begun controlled 
blasting, in preparation for new border wall system construction, within 
the Roosevelt Reservation at Monument Mountain in the U.S. Border 
Patrol’s Tucson Sector,” the statement said, referring to an area also 
known as Monument Hill. “The controlled blasting is targeted and will 
continue intermittently for the rest of the month.”

The agency added that it “will continue to have an environmental monitor 
present during these activities as well as on-going clearing activities.”

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat and chair of the House Committee 
on Natural Resources, told The Intercept that he has zero faith that the 
Department of Homeland Security’s “environmental monitor will do 
anything to avoid, mitigate, or even point out some of the sacrilegious 
things that are occurring and will continue to occur, given the way 
they’re proceeding.”

Grijalva’s blunt assessment is based on a visit he made to Organ Pipe 
last month, alongside archaeologists and leaders of the Tohono O’odham 
Nation, whose ancestral homelands and sacred burial sites are in the 
crosshairs of President Donald Trump’s border wall expansion. One of 
those burial sites lies just beyond the westward advance of the border 
wall, Grijalva explained. “It’s right in the path,” he said, meaning 
that “the one indignation of the blasting on the hill is shortly to 
follow with other indignations and disrespect.” According to Grijalava, 
“DHS had mentioned to the tribes that they would back off on developing 
the hill, but the work is still being done.”

The agency has consistently failed in its legal obligation to 
meaningfully consult with tribal stakeholders in southern Arizona, 
Grijalva said. The blasting that’s happening now, he added, “is just the 
crudest indication of what’s going on.”

Celebrated as “a pristine example of an intact Sonoran Desertecosystem 
<https://www.nps.gov/orpi/learn/nature/biosphere.htm>,” Organ Pipe was 
designated as a UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve in 1976. Even 
before the explosions began, the construction there was already one of 
Trump’s most controversial border wall projects, unfolding on the 
homelands of the Tohono O’odham 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/arizona-border-wall-native-activists/> 
and in areas that are ostensibly safeguarded by the strictest 
public-land designations on the books.

Neither factor has stopped contractors from drilling into the ground and 
draining water from a rare desert aquifer 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/10/03/climate-change-migration-militarization-arizona/> 
in order to mix concrete to support a towering, 30-foot barrier along 
the U.S.-Mexico divide. In working to fulfill the president’s chief 
campaign promise, construction crews on Organ Pipe have uprooted saguaro 
cacti, slicing the iconic plants into chunks and bulldozed a wide 
roadway to make room for trucks, cranes, and other construction vehicles.

    “A historically significant area is going to be changed irreparably.
    You’re never going to be able to put it back together.”

With the wall in place, and its floodlights illuminating the area 
through the night, the migration of several rare desert animal species 
is expected to come to an end. The construction is particularly 
threatening to Quitobaquito Springs, the only naturally occurring source 
of fresh water for miles around. The desert oasis was once inhabited by 
the Hia Ced O’odham — a smaller band of the larger O’odham community — 
and remains a monumentally important spiritual site for the O’odham 
people to this day.

“A historically significant area is going to be changed irreparably,” 
Grijalva said. “You’re never going to be able to put it back together.”

construction-1581004371

Magnified view of Monument Hill, in Organ Pipe National Monument, where 
border wall construction crews began using explosives this week.

Photo: Courtesy of Laiken Jordahl

_The expansion of_ the border wall under Trump has been made possible, 
in part, by a post-9/11 piece of legislation known as the Real ID Act, 
which grants DHS sweeping authority to waive existing laws in order to 
construct border barriers. The Trump administration has used the act to 
waive dozens of laws — from the Environmental Protection Act to the 
Endangered Species Act — in order to push through new border wall 
construction projects.

In Arizona, the administration’s efforts have been bolstered by the fact 
that federal lands, rather than private property, comprise much of the 
border. Following his visit to Organ Pipe last month, Grijalva, sent a 
letter 
<https://naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Grijalva%20DHS%20Border%20Wall%20Construction%20Letter.pdf> 
to Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, expressing “serious concerns” that 
the department was “not respecting tribal lands and sacred sites as they 
proceed with border wall plans and construction.”

    “What’s particularly frightening right now is that Trump has
    weaponized DHS, politically weaponized them.”

Accompanying Grijalva’s complaint was a letter from Ned Norris Jr., 
chair of the Tohono O’odham Nation, to the U.S. Border Patrol, in which 
Norris reported that border wall construction on Organ Pipe had already 
“resulted in the inadvertent discovery of human remains” near 
Quitobaquito Springs.

“It’s been really frustrating,” Grijalva said. “You would think that in 
a situation like this, that involves human remains, burial sites, bone 
fragments that are traced and dated a thousand years or more back, that 
there would be some sensitivity, for lack of a better word, on the part 
of DHS and the administration. There is none.”

The entire episode is deeply political, Grijalva said, with the Trump 
administration clearly bent on completing as many new miles of wall 
construction as possible ahead of the 2020 election. “What’s 
particularly frightening right now is that Trump has weaponized DHS, 
politically weaponized them,” Grijalva explained. “And so right now, 
it’s about satisfying that political agenda.”

“The consequence of that, the intended consequence of that, is 
situations like this,” Grijalva said. “Situations like South Texas. The 
flooding of public lands. The loss of habitat. The list goes on.”

_With the realities_ of border wall expansion in southern Arizona coming 
into grim focus over the past few months, advocates on the ground have 
worried that construction on Organ Pipe might involve explosives. Though 
the monument is a desert, it is hardly flat. Just west of Arizona’s 
Lukeville port of entry from Mexico is Monument Hill, a rolling mound of 
earth that is not conducive to the kind of border wall construction that 
has rapidly unfolded elsewhere in the area.

Laiken Jordahl, borderlands campaigner for the Center for Biological 
Diversity, first got word the blasting was happening on Tuesday. He 
drove down from Tucson the next morning to investigate. A former 
National Park Service employee at Organ Pipe, Jordahl has consistently 
documented 
<https://medium.com/onspec/trumps-wall-is-destroying-everything-we-worked-to-protect-65bc687518d1> 
the monument’s destruction. At a gas station on his way to Organ Pipe on 
Wednesday, Jordahl spotted a construction vehicle adorned in yellow 
cautionary signs that read: “Explosives.”

Speaking to The Intercept from down the road, with the border wall 
construction in sight at a distance, Jordahl said he could not hear 
active blasting, though it was evident that crews on the ground were 
clearing a significant patch of land.

“They’ve completely decimated Monument Hill,” he said.

Jordahl snapped several photos showing a broad swath of overturned earth 
on the hill’s face, which he said was not present just a couple weeks 
earlier. He crossed the border into Mexico and took more photos. With 
spotty cell service, he tapped out a statement on the latest phase of 
borderlands destruction in a text message. “The Department of Homeland 
security is exploding a mountain on O’odham land and UNESCO biosphere 
reserve to build Trump’s wall. Draining precious groundwater, bulldozing 
ancient saguaros and plowing over burial grounds isn’t enough,” he 
wrote. “Now they’re literally dynamiting a mountain in protected 
wilderness lands.”

“Nothing is sacred to them, no amount of destruction too grand,” he went 
on to say. “We’re living a nightmare down here in the borderlands.”

-- 
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