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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/10/03/climate-change-migration-militarization-arizona/">https://theintercept.com/2019/10/03/climate-change-migration-militarization-arizona/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Climate Change, Migration, and
Militarization in Arizona’s Borderlands</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Ryan Devereaux - October 3,
2019</div>
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<p><span data-shortcode-type="dropcap">I</span><u>magine
a sensation</u> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>By the time we got back to our vehicle, the dashboard
thermostat read 123 degrees Fahrenheit.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
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<p>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, <a
href="https://www.abc15.com/news/region-central-southern-az/other/tohono-oodham-national-tribal-chairman-says-nation-wont-allow-border-wall-to-be-built">responded</a>
to the suggestion that Trump would build a wall on the
reservation with the words “Over my dead body.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“That grossly misconstrues this issue,” he said.</p>
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<p>There’s a difference between a <a
href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6028/us-southern-border-fence-tech-map/">Normandy
barrier</a>, 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 <a
href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/2019/09/05/where-water-arizona-border-wall-coming-from/2157543001/">reported</a>.</p>
<p>“We’re literally mining it out of the earth here,”
Jordahl said. “It will take generations to regenerate,
if it does at all.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/25/">on
track</a> 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.</p>
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<p>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 people<a
href="http://www.fao.org/emergencies/crisis/dry-corridor/en/">
in need of humanitarian assistance</a>. USAID called
it “one of the worst droughts in 35 years in Central
America.” The agency’s grim climate forecasts for the
countries of <a
href="https://www.climatelinks.org/sites/default/files/asset/document/2017_USAID%20ATLAS_Climate%20Change%20Risk%20Profile_Honduras.pdf">Honduras</a>,
<a
href="https://www.climatelinks.org/sites/default/files/asset/document/2017_USAID%20ATLAS_Climate%20Change%20Risk%20Profile_Guatemala.pdf">Guatemala</a>,
and <a
href="https://www.climatelinks.org/sites/default/files/asset/document/2017_USAID%20ATLAS_Climate%20Change%20Risk%20Profile_El%20Salvador.pdf">El
Salvador</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://tucson.com/news/local/tim-steller-s-opinion-climate-change-a-facile-explanation-for/article_cfa4c2b8-fb09-5a17-8daf-01881dd06dc7.html">raised
concerns</a> 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 <a
href="http://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/mecc_outlook.pdf">25
million to 1 billion climate refugees</a> in the
world by 2050. The World Bank, meanwhile, has
estimated that there could be more than <a
href="http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/983921522304806221/pdf/124724-BRI-PUBLIC-NEWSERIES-Groundswell-note-PN3.pdf">17
million people internally displaced</a> in Latin
America alone by that time. Just last month, a <a
href="http://www.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/2019-mid-year-figures_for%20website%20upload.pdf">report</a>
from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
found that climate disasters forced a <a
href="http://www.internal-displacement.org/mid-year-figures">record-setting
seven million people</a> from their homes in the
first six months of 2019. That was before Hurricane
Dorian hit the Bahamas in what’s been <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/09/03/dorians-horrific-eyewall-slammed-grand-bahama-island-hours-straight/">described</a>
as potentially “the longest siege of violent,
destructive weather ever observed.”</p>
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<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<h3>Draining Life From the Desert</h3>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The following summer, the Border Patrol and the
Pentagon developed “<a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5987025-Border-Patrol-Strategic-Plan-1994-and-Beyond.html">Prevention
Through Deterrence</a>,” 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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/04/us/texas-border-migrants-dead-bodies.html">Hurricane
Katrina and the September 11 attacks</a> combined,
as desperate people tried their luck in one of the
planet’s most unforgiving ecosystems. In Pima County
alone, the remains of roughly <a
href="http://www.humaneborders.info/">3,000</a>
people have been recovered in the desert since 2001.
Border-wide, the government has tallied more than <a
href="https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2019-Mar/bp-southwest-border-sector-deaths-fy1998-fy2018.pdf">7,500</a>
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.</p>
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<p>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 <a
href="https://tucson.com/news/local/border/tribes-seek-to-join-immigration-reform-debate/article_d4fe1980-46d4-5e90-b690-ce78c5453bf1.html">1,500
people</a> a day. There was litter and there was
theft but that was just the beginning of it.</p>
<p>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, <em>really</em> 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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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<p>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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/">surveillance
towers on the reservation</a>. She recently traveled
to the Arctic Circle and Palestine, and she sees
clearly that militarized borders and the climate
crisis are interwoven.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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<h3>Our Destruction Story</h3>
<p>As Juan watched the border transform over the last
three decades, the desert itself was changing.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>“That sort of risk is important in the future,”
Garfin said — it could mean the difference between
life or death.</p>
<p>Last year, Sonorensis, a publication of the
Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum, devoted a <a
href="https://www.desertmuseum.org/members/sonorensis/sonorensis2018.pdf">full
issue</a> to the climate crisis. Garfin wrote the
lead article, arguing that communities in southern
Arizona are already beginning to adapt.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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<h3>Migration and Militarization</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<blockquote data-reactid="255">
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>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 <a
href="https://rewilding.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Cabeza-Prieta-Vehicle-Trails_2011July.pdf">noted</a>
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>During his time at the Park Service, Jordahl became
obsessed with figuring out exactly how many “<a
href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.10/border-out-of-control">renegade
roads</a>” 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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="260">
<h3>State of Exception</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Folded into the newly established Department of
Homeland Security, the Border Patrol exploded in size
after 9/11 and its agents were <a
href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/15/border-patrol-trump-administration-227357">conditioned</a>
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 <a
href="https://www.dhs.gov/real-id">REAL ID Act</a>,
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 — <a
href="https://psmag.com/environment/the-little-known-law-that-the-trump-administration-is-using-to-build-a-border-wall">including</a>
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.</p>
<p>For years, REAL ID waivers were rarely used. Then
came Trump and his plans for a wall. A sampling of the
<a
href="https://www.sierraclub.org/borderlands/real-id-waiver-authority-compromises-our-borderlands">dozens
of laws DHS has waived</a> 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.</p>
<p>“Take the land,” the president has <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/us/politics/trump-border-wall.html">told</a>
advisers. “Get it done.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/us/politics/supreme-court-border-wall-trump.html">$2.5
billion</a> 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 <a
href="https://beta.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/06/pentagon-is-moving-money-pay-trumps-border-wall-here-are-consequences/">$6.1
billion</a>.</p>
<p>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
<a
href="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">painted
black, topped with spikes</a>, and guarded by a<a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html">
moat filled with alligators or snakes</a> — has gone
so far as to <a
href="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">offer
pardons</a> to officials who are charged with crimes
while attempting to complete the construction.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6419897-Organ-Pipe-NPS-Report.html">123-page
report</a>, first <a
href="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">obtained</a>
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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="263">
<h3>Rising Fascism</h3>
<p>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 “<a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/08/05/el-paso-shooting-eco-fascism-migration/">eco-fascist</a>,”
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.</p>
<p>None of these ideas were particularly new. There is a
<a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/15/anti">long,
dark history</a> 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. <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html">Bankrolled
by an heiress</a> obsessed with overpopulation and
the environment, he went on to create the three most
influential <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/09/12/anti-immigrant-groups-mainstream-media/">anti-immigrant
groups</a> in modern American history, while also
running a publishing house popular with
pseudo-intellectual <a
href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/social-contract-press">white
nationalists</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2017/02/09/trump-administration-prepares-to-execute-vicious-executive-order-on-deportations/">had
signed</a> executive orders <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2017/01/29/trumps-muslim-ban-triggers-chaos-heartbreak-and-resistance/">banning
travelers</a> 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 <a
href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/413079-trump-i-am-bringing-out-the-military-to-stop-border-crossings">national
emergency</a>, the <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/10/11/trump-family-separation-immigration/">separation
of thousands of children from their parents</a>, and
the dumping of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers in
<a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/07/14/trump-remain-in-mexico-policy/">the
border’s most dangerous cities</a>.</p>
<p>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,” <a
href="https://archive.defense.gov/qdr/QDR%20as%20of%2029JAN10%201600.pdf">read</a>
the Pentagon’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Report.
Reports published by DHS in <a
href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Appendix%20A%20DHS%20FY2012%20Climate%20Change%20Adaptation%20Plan_0.pdf">2012</a>
and <a
href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Climate%20Action%20Plan%20Addendum%20June%202014%20(508%20Compliant).pdf">2014</a>
echoed that language, referring repeatedly to the
possibility of “mass migration” events.</p>
<p>These are the kinds of signals that Todd Miller, a
Tucson-based journalist and <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/08/03/migration-empire-borders-book/">author
of the new book</a>,“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 <a
href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-T-GGD-99-148/pdf/GAOREPORTS-T-GGD-99-148.pdf">$1.5
billion</a>. 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 <a
href="https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/the-cost-of-immigration-enforcement-and-border-security">$324
billion</a> doled out since 2003 and <a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6443062-ImmigrationIssues2019-Final-WEB.html">$24
billion</a> 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.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="266">
<p>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.”</p>
<p>There are no asylum protections for climate refugees,
certainly not in the United States, where a cabal of
anti-immigrant hard-liners are <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/09/13/asylum-interview-immigration-trump/">working
day and night to dismantle</a>, 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.”</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="276">
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/01/17/no-more-deaths-border-documents-trial/">blacklists
of aid volunteers</a>, arguing that the provision of
water in the desert degrades protected wilderness
areas. In the most serious case to result from the
crackdown, <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/05/04/no-more-deaths-scott-warren-migrants-border-arizona/">Scott
Warren</a>, 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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/08/10/scott-warren-trial/">hung
jury</a> over the summer. His retrial is scheduled
for November.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2019/06/memo-what-s-next-ngos-lawsuit-against-trump-s-national-emergency-and-border">also
challenging</a> the Trump’s border wall, as is
the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern
Border Communities Coalition.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="289">
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
</div>
</div>
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</div>
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