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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2020/02/06/border-wall-construction-organ-pipe/">https://theintercept.com/2020/02/06/border-wall-construction-organ-pipe/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Trump Is Blowing Up a National Monument
in Arizona to Make Way for the Border Wall</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Ryan Devereaux - February 6,
2020<br>
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<p><u>Contractors working for</u> 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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>The agency added that it “will continue to have an
environmental monitor present during these activities
as well as on-going clearing activities.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>Celebrated as “a pristine example of an intact
Sonoran Desert<a
href="https://www.nps.gov/orpi/learn/nature/biosphere.htm">
ecosystem</a>,” 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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/arizona-border-wall-native-activists/">homelands
of the Tohono O’odham</a> and in areas that are
ostensibly safeguarded by the strictest public-land
designations on the books.</p>
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<p>Neither factor has stopped contractors from drilling
into the ground and <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/10/03/climate-change-migration-militarization-arizona/">draining
water from a rare desert aquifer</a> 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.</p>
<blockquote data-reactid="233"><span data-reactid="234"></span>
<p>“A historically significant area is going to be
changed irreparably. You’re never going to be able to
put it back together.”</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>“A historically significant area is going to be
changed irreparably,” Grijalva said. “You’re never
going to be able to put it back together.”</p>
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<p><img
src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/02/construction-1581004371.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90"
alt="construction-1581004371"
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<p class="caption">Magnified view of Monument Hill, in
Organ Pipe National Monument, where border wall
construction crews began using explosives this week.</p>
<p class="caption">
Photo: Courtesy of Laiken Jordahl</p>
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<p><u>The expansion of</u> 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.</p>
<p>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
href="https://naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Grijalva%20DHS%20Border%20Wall%20Construction%20Letter.pdf">a
letter</a> 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.”</p>
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<blockquote data-reactid="240"><span data-reactid="241"></span>
<p>“What’s particularly frightening right now is that
Trump has weaponized DHS, politically weaponized
them.”</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
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<p><u>With the realities</u> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://medium.com/onspec/trumps-wall-is-destroying-everything-we-worked-to-protect-65bc687518d1">consistently
documented</a> 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.”</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>“They’ve completely decimated Monument Hill,” he
said.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
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