Three border wall protesters were arrested Monday afternoon along a remote stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border, where the Trump administration is building a double steel wall.
The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office says protesters were arrested on disorderly conduct charges just east of the Santa Cruz County line, where a group had gathered inside a wall construction zone.
In a statement about the arrests on Facebook, the Sheriff’s Office said deputies responded to a reported trespassing incident after protesters refused to leave the construction site.
“Several individuals subsequently moved farther into the restricted area and accessed construction materials intended for use in the border wall project,” read a statement. “Their actions created a safety and security concern for the protesters, construction personnel, private security personnel, and responding law enforcement officers.”
Video shared by protesters show a person dressed in a jaguar costume and another dressed as a local migratory bird called a Yellow-billed cuckoo. Both are cross-border, endangered species that environmentalists say would be cut off from water and mates in Mexico if the walls are built.
Protesters have been sitting in an old growth cottonwood tree several miles west of where this week’s arrests took place for nearly two months to prevent its demolition.
That protest began after three other trees, each estimated to be as much as 250 years old, were torn down by wall contractors. More wall construction is moving forward farther west inside Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and along the 62 miles of border inside the Tohono O’odham Nation.
Billions in funding is earmarked for the border wall and other Department Homeland Security projects under a massive GOP spending bill passed last year.
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The Forest Service is closing off a long stretch of the border to protesters and the public alike, raising issues of transparency as they claim its unrelated to confrontations. -
On Monday, dozens of agents swarmed a stretch of private land where the activists had been camped in and around a centuries-old cottonwood tree. Contractors tore down the tree and agents made multiple arrests. -
Protesters have been camped out in a plot of private ranch land in Lochiel for over two months now, trying to block wall construction as it neared a towering cottonwood tree that was the last of a grove slated for destruction to make way for two, parallel steel bollard walls. -
Activists have spent the last 70 days camped around and inside a cottonwood tree right along the border in the tiny town of Lochiel. The tree was the last of an old grove estimated to be up to 250 years old.
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The National Park Service has denied an activist group’s request to place water stations along the Arizona-Mexico border — marking the first time their permit has been denied in more than two decades.
