Birds chirped as the 76-year-old traced the 75,000 acres of mining claims on the edge of her community with her finger. She wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a fearsome wolf hovering above a rugged mountain range. The wolf is the calling card of the Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, or PARA. The local group monitors industrialized mining in the Patagonia Mountains, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Schafer is president of the board.

“This is our new logo,” she said, picking up a pamphlet with the wolf on the front. The old mascot — a cute cartoon dog — no longer matched the moment. A vigilant pack animal sent a more appropriate message.

“We think of ourselves as local watchdogs,” Schafer told me. “We pay attention to what’s going on with the companies and the agencies, and then we bark really loudly to the big dogs, who have the staff, the knowledge, and the experience to do what is necessary.”

The big dogs, Shafer and her allies believe, are needed now more than ever. Last month, the Biden administration announced the “first-ever” inclusion of a mine in a federal program that expedites permitting for high-priority projects. In this case, it was the extraction of minerals from the Patagonia Mountains to support the president’s green energy agenda — manganese and zinc, specifically, for producing electric vehicle batteries and fortifying renewable energy installations, among other purposes. In the weeks since the announcement, the Forest Service has issued permits advancing large-scale drilling in the area.

The operation is the Hermosa project, which encroaches on the Coronado National Forest, an hour southeast of Tucson. The company is South32, an Australian spin-off from global mining giant, BHP Billiton. The program, FAST-41, was created in 2015 to streamline the federal permitting process. The Permitting Council, an agency with a nearly $100 billion portfolio in government infrastructure projects, oversees the program.

The administration’s support for the mine follows President Joe Biden’s 2022 determination invoking the Defense Production Act, which ordered an increase in domestic mining of “critical” materials sufficient to create a large-scale battery supply chain and move the nation away from fossil fuels and foreign production lines. Manganese was singled out as critical. Congressional passage of the Inflation Reduction Act also called for increased domestic mining in the name of green energy.

With an initial estimated outlay of $1.7 billion, South32 anticipates a lifespan of 22 years for Hermosa’s zinc deposit and 60 years for its manganese deposit. Full production is slated to begin in 2026 or 2027. Company executives celebrated their FAST-41 inclusion with the Permitting Council’s director in a press call last month. Hermosa project President Pat Risner drew a direct line between Washington’s goals and his company’s aims.

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“These policies pave the way for a vast domestic expansion in electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable power production,” he said. “South 32’s Hermosa project is the only advanced mine development project in the U.S. currently that could produce two federally designated critical minerals as its primary products, those being manganese and zinc.”

Shafer was blindsided by the news. “That really wasn’t on our radar screen at all,” she said the first time we spoke. In the month that followed, PARA cranked up its advocacy like never before, organizing with larger NGOs and telling any reporter who would listen about the project’s extraordinary ecological stakes.

Carolyn Shafer, board president of Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, points out locations on maps outside her home in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

PARA’s Lawsuit

Last Tuesday, the calls for help became a call for action. PARA, with support from the nonprofit advocates of Earthjustice and the Western Mining Action Project, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Forest Service and the supervisor of the Coronado National Forest, where the mining activity is concentrated. Several of the region’s environmental organizations — and its most experienced litigators — joined as co-plaintiffs, including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Tucson Audubon Society, and Earthworks.

The groups alleged a series of Forest Service violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, resulting in the rushed release of two permits for exploratory drilling projects in the Patagonias last month. One of the projects is overseen by South32 in conjunction with the high-priority Hermosa project. According to the lawsuit, the permits impede recovery of the threatened Mexican spotted owl and the yellow-billed cuckoo, as well as disrupt federally protected migration corridors for endangered jaguars and ocelots. (The Forest Service declined to comment on the pending litigation.)

“Drilling could begin at any time.”

Hermosa project at South32 is not named in the lawsuit. In an email, Risner suggested PARA’s ecological concerns were overstated.

“With a surface footprint of just 600 acres, the Hermosa project is a fraction of the size of most mining projects and keeps sustainability at the core of our approach,” he said before the lawsuit was filed. “Hermosa has also had in place for more than a decade a robust biological monitoring program.”

PARA and its supporters called on the court to declare that the Forest Service broke the law and quash the agency’s authorizations. The moment demands urgency, they argued: “Drilling could begin at any time.”

View of the Patagonia Mountains from the Borderlands Wildlife Preserve in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 20, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

A Sky Island

The weekend before PARA and its allies filed their lawsuit, Shafer and her partner, Robert Gay, an architect and journalist, invited me on a bumpy drive deep into the mountains to survey the Patagonias’ rivers and canyons and offered their take on current fight and its wider implications.

The Patagonias are an iconic member of the “sky islands,” a network of mountain ranges that rise up out of the desert of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Home to an estimated 100 endangered or threatened species, the mountains contain the largest cluster of mammal species anywhere north of Mexico, more than 500 species of birds, the highest density of breeding raptors on the planet, the most reptile and ant species in North America, and the most bee species on Earth.

The virtually unmatched biodiversity has made the town of Patagonia — with a population of around 900 residents — a world-class birding and wildlife research destination for generations. The town is also a launching point for the famed Arizona Trail, an 800-mile hike that traverses the state from north to south. More recently, it’s become home to a growing gravel bike scene, with riders pedaling through the mountains to reach the stunning San Rafael Valley, one of the last unbroken stretches of grassland ecosystems in the American Southwest.

Together with the unique abundance of flora and fauna, outdoor recreation has made Patagonia a hub in the “nature-based restorative economy” of Santa Cruz County. According to a 2021 University of Arizona study that PARA and other conservation groups in the area helped produce, the attractions generate tens of millions of dollars for local businesses and residents.

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Though the battle over mining in the Patagonias goes back generations, this latest iteration is frustrating activists on the ground for reasons particular to the present moment.

Shafer and Gay are both diehard environmentalists. An “Earth Day is every day” flag hangs outside their home. They are deeply concerned about the climate crisis and would never say otherwise, but they are just as concerned about biodiversity loss and the planet’s unfolding sixth extinction. For them, a mine that would accelerate one cataclysm in the name of combatting another is unacceptable.

The minerals needed for a green energy revolution can be found elsewhere in the world, Shafer argued: “There’s no other place to go for Mexican spotted owl. Yellow-billed cuckoo. Jaguar. Ocelot.” The frustration in her voice rose as she ticked off the names.

Harshaw Creek runs through Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

Wild West

In the U.S., mining is governed by a law President Ulysses Grant signed in 1872. With scant regulations, the Wild West-era statute has undergone little substantive change in the century and a half since. Technology, however, has changed. The lone Civil War veteran busting his back hoping to strike it rich in a national forest has been replaced by multibillion-dollar corporations with the most advanced extraction tools money can buy.

In the Patagonias, the main hub of activity centers around an old mine water treatment site run by the American Smelting and Refining Company, or ASARCO. In the 1960s, the endeavor collapsed in a storm of bankruptcy and environmental damages, including pollution of Patagonia’s water.

Decades later, Arizona Mining Inc., owned by billionaire mining tycoon Richard Warke, purchased the land. South32 bought out Arizona Mining in 2018, in a $2 billion sale that marked one of the biggest mining deals of the year.

The area surrounding the old ASARCO site is largely national forest land, which South32 is actively exploring, as well as ranches and other parcels of private property. The privately held land is shrinking though, with South32 buying up properties one by one in recent years.

“It’s very, very active out here right now,” Shafer said. “These mountains, unfortunately, are chalked full of valuable minerals.”

For Shafer, the heart of the matter is water. Patagonia relies on the mountains entirely for its water, but the range’s hydrological significance doesn’t stop there. The mountains are the headwater of Sonoita Creek, which flows into the Santa Cruz River that provides water for more than a million people.

“The community’s concern is: What is this going to do to that ecosystem?”

When ASARCO was running its mine in the 1960s, the company’s chief problem was water; it would fill the mine’s shaft and the company lacked the technology to keep it out. Facing the same challenge today, South32 has received permission from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to run up to 4,500 gallons of water per minute through one of its two water treatment plants, then dump that water into Harshaw Creek, a tributary to Sonoita Creek. At max capacity, Shafer noted, that would mean more than 6.4 million gallons of water flowing into the Harshaw on a potentially daily basis.

“We don’t know how much water they’re taking out and using on site, but that’s how much they are permitted to discharge into the Harshaw Creek,” Shafer said. “The community’s concern is: What is this going to do to that ecosystem?”

“This is my version of tree-hugging,” Carolyn Shafer, board president of Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, said in Humboldt Canyon in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023. “My favorite canyon is whichever one I’m in,” but Humboldt Canyon holds a special place in her heart.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

“Desiccate and Saturate”

A small stretch of the Harshaw has perennial water. Monsoon season aside, the water tends to lap around a person’s ankles. The rest of the creek is typically dry. What 6.6 million gallons of water a day would do — and more when the heavy rains of late summer hit — is difficult to fathom.

To put the town at ease, South32 released a video last year. The minerals the U.S. government seeks lie below the water table under the Patagonia Mountains, the company explained. South32 would drop the table by pumping water out. The water would then pass through a treatment plant before being dumped into the Harshaw. This would create “a cone of depression” around the well site, allowing safe underground work.

“Most of the discharged water will soak back into the ground. Some will evaporate or be used by vegetation, but most will recharge the aquifer without ever reaching the town of Patagonia,” the company said. Even in the event of a 100-year, 24-hour flood, the increase would not have an “adverse effect” on the hamlet, South 32 said, nor did the company “expect that wildlife would be negatively affected.”

PARA consulted with hydrological experts and responded with a video of its own. Noting that South32 planned to pump “the equivalent of 10 Olympic-size swimming pools per day” into the Harshaw every day for up five years, the experts predicted the creek would quickly go from almost entirely dry to constantly flowing, carrying any undetected contaminants from the mine wherever it ran and heightening flood risks during monsoon season.

As we prepared to head out for our drive into the mountains, Gay pulled out a poster he made, detailing the expanse of water South32 expects the town of Patagonia to receive in the event of the 100-year flood — and how it would cover the town’s properties. “When you look at that closely,” he said, “it’s 70 percent of the lots now.”

In Patagonia, the problem would be too much water. In the mountains, it would be the opposite. “My fear is it’s going to dewater the mountain,” Shafer said. “If it dewaters the mountain, it kills the plant life. If it kills the plant life, there’s no place for this incredible biological diversity to survive. That’s my bottom line, but that’s not speaking as the organization. That’s speaking as Grandmother Carolyn.”

“It’s feast or famine,” Gay added. “I call it desiccate and saturate.”

A dewatering and water treatment facility at the South32 Hermosa mining project along Harshaw Creek in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

Hoping for a Miracle

Patagonia’s paved roads disappeared in the rear-view mirror. Gay’s beat-up 4Runner crept slowly over the rough terrain. Approaching the old ASARCO site from the north, we passed abandoned mining tunnels from decades before, ranches that had been sold to the mining company, and others that soon might be.

“It is a patchwork of extreme complexity,” Gay said, leaning forward on the wheel. “Just a snarl, between the bumpiness of the land and the irregularity of the property lines.”

At a town council meeting last month, South32 presented its plan for managing the convoys of trucks that would run these roads, hauling minerals for green energy out of the mountains. In the early stages, it would be 62 heavy trucks, 26 buses, and 139 passenger vehicles daily. The flow would increase as the project became fully operational, at which point more than 200 heavy-duty trucks — in addition to the buses and passenger vehicles — would come through.

Given the landscape, traffic at that scale would require significant road work and with it, the obliteration of the mountains’ otherwise serene quiet. Like the water in Harshaw Creek, the change was difficult to imagine.

“Patagonia in 10 or 15 years won’t be recognizable anymore,” Patagonia Vice Mayor Michael Stabile said in an interview in the Patagonia Regional Times. Stabile was a founding member of PARA, though he no longer works with the organization. “They’re going to flood us with water,” he said. “And they’re going to flood us with trucks.”

“Patagonia in 10 or 15 years won’t be recognizable anymore.”

Days before we met up, Shafer had a similar moment of unsettling clarity. “I just realized I have shifted into grief about what is happening here,” she said. “Because of the realization of how special this is to me and that I will not be able to come out here for at least seven years, and when I do get to return, what will it be like?”

South32’s assurances about safeguarding the ecological systems were cold comfort for Shafer. “There’s nothing legally we can do to stop it. What we can legally do is mitigate the potential damage. That’s what we’re working very hard to do,” she said. “But unless something under the definition of miracle happens, there will be destruction by industrialized mining in these mountains.”

“The disaster of that,” Shafer said, “is that this is one of the regions of the world most in need of protection for species survival.”

A flag outside Carolyn Shafer’s home declares “Earth Day is every day.”

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

The Cathedral

There was little to see at the old ASARCO site. A locked gate. A handful of “no trespassing” signs. We turned around and headed west into Humboldt Canyon, where work is currently overseen by Barksdale Capital Corp., a Canadian company specializing in mineral exploration — the kind that precedes a company like South32.

“I am in a stronger relationship with the natural world in this canyon than I am in any other canyon,” Shafer said, as we passed under a majestic spire of twisted rock. “This is a spiritual experience for me — full of experiences of dear friends of mine.”

Years back, Shafer officiated her friends’ wedding in the canyon. The couple was among PARA’s original founders. The groom was Glen Goodwin, an old-school Arizona cowboy who, in 2014, detected extensive water contamination stemming from the Patagonias’ old mine sites — including sites that are revving back up again today. Goodwin died last year. His ashes were spread in Humboldt Canyon.

The road twisted deeper into the mountains until coming to a stop in a clearing. Shafer got out and leaned against a tall pine tree, listening to the birds. “For me,” she said, “this meets the classic definition of a cathedral.”

On our way off the mountain, we stopped to watch mule deer grazing in a field. We dropped Gay off in town before leaving for the tour’s final destination: the perennially flowing stretch of Harshaw Creek.

Willow trees lined the way, along with massive Arizona sycamores. We walked down to a particularly beautiful bend in the creek. Shafer mentioned a paper she recently heard about discussing the mental health benefits of birdsongs.

“When you live with something all the time, you don’t think much about it,” she said. “But I have birdsong all day long, and it is something I do appreciate.”

Shafer is the last of PARA’s original core still living and working in Patagonia. “Two are now dead, two have moved out of country,” she said. She knows that stopping the mine is next to impossible, but then, the same could be said of her.

Shafer’s mission now is making the cost of doing business in the Patagonias match the value of the place. “I’m sorry if you’re not going to get a 25 percent profit margin,” she said. “If you have to live with 5 percent to honor what is here and you don’t like that, then go away.”

She leaned forward, smiling, and added in a whisper, “It wouldn’t hurt me if you left.”

The post Biden Fast-Tracked a Green Energy Mine in One of Earth’s Rarest Ecosystems. Arizona Locals Took It to Court. appeared first on The Intercept.

The 58-year-old was killed in a hail of gunfire last month, after stepping outside to find nearly a dozen Border Patrol agents and at least one tribal police officer advancing on his property in the dark. Late last week, a tensely awaited medical examiner’s report ruled the case a homicide, finding that Mattia was shot nine times. Border Patrol body camera footage released at the same time confirmed that what the authorities thought was a gun was in fact Mattia’s cellphone.

For Mattia’s family, more questions arose from the videos than answers, hardening their resolve to find accountability for the loss of a beloved father, brother, and uncle.

“If they’re allowed to get away with this now, it’s not going to stop.”

“We feel after watching the video that he was trying to comply the best he could,” Mattia’s niece, Yvonne Nevarez, told The Intercept. “If they’re allowed to get away with this now, it’s not going to stop.”

On Friday, Tohono O’odham Chair Ned Norris Jr. and Vice Chair Wavalene Saunders issued a statement on the body camera video and autopsy. “The information contained in the report and the body camera footage is graphic and concerning,” it said. “But we must not prejudge the situation and continue to allow investigating agencies to do their fact-finding work.”

The case is still under investigation, with the participation of the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, as well as the FBI and the Tohono O’odham Nation. Of the 10 Border Patrol agents involved in the incident, three opened fire, CBP has said. Those agents are currently on administrative leave. Whether Tohono O’odham police also opened fire is unclear.

The family hoped that the body camera videos would provide answers to their questions. When they arrived at a Tohono O’odham police substation last week to view the footage, however, they found that was not the case. Though CBP had confirmed that all 10 agents involved in the incident were wearing body cameras, the family was shown the same 28-minute edited video the agency released to the public last week, which only included video from the three agents who opened fire.

“We were under the impression that we were going to watch raw footage,” Nevarez said. “The way they put it together feels like a cheap attempt to justify what they did, and it feels like none of them are on our side. It feels like they’re just trying to defend themselves, instead of defending my uncle Ray.”

At around 9 p.m. on May 18, according to CBP, a Border Patrol station in Arizona’s remote west desert received a call for assistance from the Tohono O’odham authorities. The tribal police had received a report of shots fired in Menagers Dam, a Tohono O’odham village on the U.S.-Mexico border, 140 miles southwest of Tucson.

In a recording of the call, a Tohono O’odham police dispatcher reported that two tribal officers were headed to the village. A convoluted story then followed, involving multiple unidentified people and a restraining order, and mentioned a report of a shooting the previous day and a dangerous man in the area with a rifle. No names or addresses were relayed by Tohono O’odham authorities, and the origin of the purported shots was unclear.

“Everybody is saying they heard two,” the dispatcher said. “Nobody can pinpoint where it came from.”

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Border Patrol agents mobilized within minutes. At 9:27 p.m., the agents met with an officer from the tribal police department at the Menagers Dam recreation center. The officer gave the agents the name of a man — redacted in the videos released last week — and said shots were fired in the vicinity of his property.

“It’s going to be a little bit of a guessing game trying to find it,” the officer said. “I don’t know exactly where that motherfucker’s at.” They would be approaching two homes with two brothers living in the buildings, he explained; one had a rifle.

“It’s dark as fuck,” he said, as the combined unit headed out, carrying rifles of their own.

At approximately 9:35 p.m., a convoy of seven law enforcement vehicles descended on Mattia’s property. Four minutes after arriving, the officers and agents approached his front door.

Standing outside his home, Mattia was ordered to approach with his hands up. “I am,” he said. Mattia was then ordered to “put it down.” In the body camera footage, an object can be seen tossed away by Mattia after he received the command; it was his sheathed hunting knife. The officers and agents then began shouting at Mattia with escalating intensity. 

“Get on your fucking face,” one of the men yelled.

“Put your hands out of your fucking pocket,” ordered another, his gun pointed at Mattia.

Mattia pulled his hand out of his pocket. One second later, the officers and agents let loose of volley of shots — initial reports indicated as many as 38 rounds were fired.

Mattia wheeled around then crumpled to the ground. The officers and agents began screaming at him. “Put your hands up so we can help you,” shouted one. “He’s still got a gun,” yelled another. “Put your hands out, bro,” said a third. “You’re gonna get shot again.”

Face down in the dirt, moaning and bleeding heavily, Mattia did not move. His hands were cuffed behind his back. The authorities, intent on finding a weapon, did not. Instead, they found Mattia’s cellphone.

“They asked him to take his hands out of his pockets. And that’s what he did. And then they shot him.”

“They asked him to drop his weapon,” Nevarez, Mattia’s niece, said. “That’s why he threw his knife toward them, and it was still in its sheath. They asked him to take his hands out of his pockets. And that’s what he did. And then they shot him.”

At 9:46 p.m., the authorities called for an air evacuation but were advised that one could not be provided due to inclement weather. A doctor declared Mattia dead at 10:06 p.m.

Roughly 31 seconds passed from the moment Mattia received his first command to the moment the first shot was fired. His body would remain where he had fallen for nearly seven hours. 

In the moments before he was killed, Mattia was on the phone with his older sister, who lives nearby in the village. Requesting that her name be withheld out of fear of retaliation, she described what she saw and heard that night — and what her family has experienced in the weeks since.

Mattia’s sister had been working outside all day. After sundown, she had turned on the TV and begun cooking dinner when her dog barked in the direction of her brother’s home. She texted him to see if everything was OK. Mattia replied that a man was just in his house, demanding to use the phone, presumably after crossing the border.

“He said he argued with him. And then another male walked into his home, and then another,” Mattia’s sister told The Intercept. “There were three of them all together. And he said that he just grabbed his hunting knife and scared them off. And he said they ran.”

The experience was not uncommon in Menagers Dam, but, depending on the situation, it could be unsettling. “Peaceful migrants who are trying to come through for a better life have never been a problem,” Nevarez said. “But there is a lot of illegal activity that happens here with drug smuggling and human traffickers.”

Help was never guaranteed. “It takes hours for anyone to come out here,” Mattia’s sister said. “If they’re not in the area, they don’t make their way over here.” One person she could count on was her brother. “Ray has always been here to protect me in the yard,” she said. “We hear something, our dogs start barking, and he’ll walk around with a flashlight to see what’s going on.”

Mattia told his sister he called authorities to report the men in his home, though which authorities he may have called is unclear. Around the time of the siblings’ text exchange, a convoy of law enforcement vehicles began filing into their village, and armed men began jumping out. Mattia’s sister was alarmed. This time, she called her brother.

“I said, ‘They’re running all crazy,’” she recalled. “I told him, ‘They’re in the wash running toward your house.’”

“I was in shock, just hearing all those gunshots, knowing they were shooting at my brother.”

Mattia’s sister remembered Raymond responding calmly, telling her that he would go outside and talk to the agents. Seconds later, she heard a sound she will never forget: a cacophony of gunfire so heavy that she thought a cross-border shootout was underway. She could see lights flashing around her brother’s property and heard a man’s voice shouting for someone to grab his bag. She immediately knew he was seeking his first-aid kit.

“I was in shock, just hearing all those gunshots, knowing they were shooting at my brother,” she said. “I saw Border Patrol running from vehicle to vehicle, and I shouted to them: ‘What are you guys shooting at? Did you just shoot my brother Raymond?’ And they said, ‘We possibly did.’ And they kept running.”

At a loss for what to do, Mattia’s sister called her children but was so distraught, they could barely understand what she was saying. She decided to drive to the home of her adult niece and nephew — Raymond’s children — and go from there.

Raymond Mattia, who was killed in a Border Patrol raid in May, as seen in a recent family photograph.

Photo: Courtesy of Yvonne Nevarez

Together, the family approached the scene of the shooting. Mattia’s sister was met by the Tohono O’odham police officer who led the operation. “I said, ‘I want to know what happened to Ray — why were they shooting Ray so many times? Why are they all here?’” she recalled asking. “All he told me was, ‘You can’t go over there. It’s a crime scene now.’”

The family stood and watched as Border Patrol agents picked up the bullet casings that littered the ground. An overnight storm rolled in. It began to rain. The family continued to wait. “They were there for a while, and we were just watching them,” Mattia’s sister said. “As I saw them walking by with their guns, it just felt like they were walking in slow motion.”

The hours ticked away. The family was unsure if Mattia was alive or dead. “Nobody’s talking to us. Nobody’s telling us anything,” Mattia’s sister said. Eventually, the worst was confirmed: Mattia was gone. His sister told an investigator that they needed to perform a blessing on the body. “It’s traditional,” she said. The family was denied, though the man did offer to set a candle by Mattia’s corpse.

In the early morning hours, Mattia’s remains were finally loaded into a vehicle. The family said their goodbyes to an unopened body bag.

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“We did a blessing for him while he was in the vehicle in a body bag, and we had one of our traditional singers sing a song for him, a traditional song,” Mattia’s sister said. “We all took it very hard.”

Mattia’s body was taken to Tucson.

“I asked the coroner, ‘When we have Ray’s funeral, will we be able to have an open casket?’” his sister said. “She said, ‘His face is OK, but from the neck down — it’s not very good.’”

In the weeks since, Mattia’s sister had a single meeting with a Tohono O’odham investigator. Other than that, the family has not been interviewed by the authorities, including the federal authorities at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security involved in the investigation.

Mattia was a member of the community council in Menagers Dam, where he had been outspoken against the corruption he saw on the border, including corruption involving border law enforcement. He was a traditional singer, an avid hunter, and an artist, making jewelry, pottery, and paintings that honored the borderlands that the Tohono O’odham call home.

For Mattia’s family, none of the information that’s emerged so far has been able to explain why the authorities ended up at his home in the first place. The references to a restraining order and a double shooting in the community the previous day don’t make sense.

“My uncle Ray was out of town celebrating his birthday the night before,” Nevarez said. “The dispatcher states that they couldn’t pinpoint where the shooting was coming from, but yet, when they are there at the rec center, they’re coming straight to my uncle Ray’s house, with their guns drawn.”

“They’re walking around like it’s the war zone,” she said. “This is a village. People live here. Our houses are in close proximity to each other, and there’s people with families and children that live around here.”

The post Border Patrol Video of Killing Shows Native Man Had No Gun, Complied With Orders appeared first on The Intercept.

When the sun goes down, the wall’s ecological footprint expands up and out, with lights reaching into the sky and illuminating cross-border habitats. Most of that illumination is concentrated near population centers and ports of entry, but with the flip of a switch, that could easily change.

According to a new survey, federal contractors have placed nearly 2,000 stadium-style lights in southern Arizona alone in recent years, imperiling some of the most ecologically complex and celebrated public lands in the United States.

In a report published Tuesday, the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based environmental organization, revealed the placement of more than 1,800 lights on federal land in the Sonoran Desert between 2019 and 2021, including wildlife preserves that are home to at least 16 threatened or endangered species. The new lights are not yet in use, and according to the report’s authors, they never should be.

“The scientific record clearly shows that artificial light at night can have costly, even deadly effects on a wide variety of species including amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, insects and plants,” the group said. “High-intensity lighting in these priority conservation areas would be devastating to the rich biodiversity of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico.”

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The Center for Biological Diversity documented the placement of lighting in several of the most famed ecosystems of the American Southwest, including the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, and the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.

Together, the four parcels provide a habitat for hundreds of species of birds and an astonishing number of ecosystem-sustaining insects, while also featuring some of the only U.S.-Mexico jaguar migration corridors on the planet, all of which depend on dark skies to survive and thrive.

“The entire purpose of the wildlife refuges where these lights are is contradicted by the actions of CBP.”

The Center for Biological Diversity’s findings mark the latest example of the mission of the Department of Homeland Security — especially Customs and Border Protection — colliding with that of federal agencies mandated to protect public lands and wildlife. Those collisions have been particularly acute in Arizona, where CBP has blown apart national monuments and wildlife refuges and desecrated sacred Native American heritage sites to make way for wall construction.

“The entire purpose of the wildlife refuges where these lights are is contradicted by the actions of CBP,” Russ McSpadden, the Center for Biological Diversity’s borderlands advocate and lead author of the report, told The Intercept. “It’s outrageous that they built these. These are some of the most important conservation lands in North America.”

A map of the border wall lighting infrastructure at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, San Pedro River National Conservation Area, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, San Bernardino Valley, and San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.

Image: Curt Bradley/Center for Biological Diversity

The expansion of Arizona’s border wall lighting began in 2019 under former President Donald Trump. The additions created a major hurdle for officials at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, who were in the middle of applying for certification with the International Dark-Sky Association for recognition of the monument’s unique lack of light of pollution.

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Monument Superintendent Scott Stonum, in a statement to Arizona Luminaria, a Tucson-based news outlet, said the National Park Service “provided comments at the request of CBP concerning potential impacts and suggested mitigations” at the time of the expansion. The service’s “concerns included potential impacts to natural and cultural resources: disturbance of archeological sites, disruption of wildlife corridors, wilderness values, scenic vistas, night-sky, and others.”

In a call with reporters last year, CBP officials outlined a series of construction projects related to the border wall, from repairing gates and roads to filling gaps. New lighting was not included in the contracts for the “remediation” work, officials said in September, adding that the agency was “currently evaluating the operational requirements for lighting across the southwest border” and “looking at the technology available that may help reduce the need for light.”

Whether CBP’s position holds 10 months later is unclear; the agency did not respond to a request for comment by publication. The Center for Biological Diversity’s report, however, shows that whether new lighting goes up or not, the infrastructure is already in place in southern Arizona to do significant environmental harm.

“If they ever switch the lights on, you’d be able to see this huge linear line of lights from space.”

The group’s investigation began after McSpadden called several of Arizona’s federal land management offices and learned that they had no idea how many lights CBP had placed in their jurisdictions. He began making trips to the border and counting lights on the wall, then cross-checked those counts with public records requests and follow-up calls with federal officials.

“The biodiversity in these regions is off the hook and they built it right across federally designated critical habitat, habitat for at least 16 endangered species,” McSpadden said. “If they ever switch the lights on, you’d be able to see this huge linear line of lights from space.”

Flood lights illuminate the U.S. border fence with Mexico at dusk near Nogales, Ariz., on June 22, 2011.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Contrary to the desolate desert images of the popular imagination, the ecosystems of southern Arizona are among the most vibrant on the planet.

“Half of all breeding bird species in North America are known to use the San Pedro River corridor,” the Center for Biological Diversity noted, “along with 82 species of mammals and 43 species of reptiles and amphibians.”

A single game camera along the river documented more than 1,100 instances of wildlife crossing through the borderlands in a three-year period. The travelers included badgers, bobcats, javelina, mountain lions, raccoons, and multiple species of skunk and deer.

Additionally, the report added, “the borderlands between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, contain some of the highest diversity of insects in the world.” According to one study cited by the group, “the highest diversity of bee species anywhere on Earth exists within just six square miles of San Bernardino Valley, including the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.”

“Turning on the existing border lighting infrastructure at Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta would be devastating for lesser long-nosed bats.”

The insects provide food for the area’s world-famous bird and bat populations. Lesser long-nosed bats in particular, which migrate by the thousands over the border wall each summer, are key pollinators for Arizona’s iconic saguaro cacti. They are also prone to significant behavioral disruptions when confronted with giant beams of light.

“Turning on the existing border lighting infrastructure at Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta would be devastating for lesser long-nosed bats, shooting a massive wall of light into the sky stretching dozens of miles,” the Center for Biological Diversity reported.

The danger was one of many cited in the report. Others manifested in aquatic habitats, such as the famed Quitobaquito Springs on Organ Pipe, where threatened and endangered species like the Sonoyta turtle and the Quitobaquito pupfish are barely clinging to existence.

The impacts on the desert’s smallest creatures would have cascading effects on the ecosystem’s largest and most iconic animals, the report added, including endangered populations of jaguar and ocelot that still roam the borderlands: “Exposure to artificial lighting has been demonstrated to substantially change behavior patterns of rodents and prey species, thereby altering predator-prey relationships and diminishing hunting opportunities for carnivores.”

Lighting up the borderlands “would worsen the already devastating harm caused by border walls,” the report argued, “further altering behavior patterns and degrading habitat.”

The post The Feds Have Thousands of Stadium Lights on the Border. Switching Them On Would Devastate Desert Ecosystems. appeared first on The Intercept.

The group was small. A man, two women, and two children, a boy and a girl. Their bright shirts made them easy to spot against the green and gold of the desert. The boy waved his arms above his head as I drove nearer, like a shipwreck survivor on a deserted island. I rolled down my window. He looked to be about 8 years old, maybe 9. Just tall enough to peek over my door, he said hello in English. The man beside him looked exhausted and desperate. I asked if they needed help. They did.

It was the morning of Friday, May 12. Roughly 12 hours had passed since President Joe Biden lifted a public health order known as Title 42, which had strangled asylum access at the border for more than three years. He replaced the measure with a new suite of border enforcement policies that would have much the same effect.

Across the country, the headline was chaos. The details didn’t matter as much as the perception. Title 42 created a massive backlog of asylum-seekers south of the border, and now it was going away. The president’s critics did the smugglers’ advertising for them, repeating ad nauseam the lie that the border was now open and Biden wanted the migrants to become Americans.

In a press conference earlier in the week, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, outlined the new enforcement framework. “Our overall approach is to build lawful pathways for people to come to the United States and to impose tougher consequences,” he said. Simply showing up at the nation’s doorstep was no longer enough. Asylum-seekers could download an app and to join an electronic line now. Those who failed to seek asylum in another country first would not get in. Deportations would be fast-tracked, and new tweaks to the asylum interviews were aimed at making them harder to pass.

How it would all play out remained to be seen. “I think DHS is just absolutely terrified and clueless,” a senior asylum officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, told me while Mayorkas spoke on Thursday. The administration had reason to be concerned: The estimated arrival numbers were historic, and Republicans clearly smelled blood.

By the time the first day was through, the headlines imagining chaos were replaced by reports of calm across the border. While that may have been true in some parts, on a far-flung strip of border road east of the tiny community of Sasabe, Arizona, the first 24 hours in post-Title 42 America offered a grim suggestion of the days to come. Heeding the call of the state’s right-wing political leaders, armed vigilantes stalked and harassed humanitarian aid providers during the day and by nightfall rounded up migrant children in the dark. The events followed weeks of rising tensions that included the arrest of a longtime aid volunteer by federal authorities. Caught in the middle, as ever, were desperate families facing a deadly desert.

Crosses left by border activists memorialize migrants who died trying to cross into the United States through the harsh conditions of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, on January 28, 2021.

Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

An hour and a half southwest of Tucson, the beauty of the Buenos Aires refuge belies its capacity for lethality, and yet, people from around the world, kids included, cross the landscape in sneakers, without sufficient water or any real sense of where they are, all the time.

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Over the past two-and-a-half decades, ever since the government began enlisting the Sonoran Desert in its war on unauthorized migration, the office of the Pima County examiner in Tucson has recorded more than 4,000 migrant deaths along the state’s southern border. Nationwide, experts put the minimum death toll at around 10,000, though all agree the true count is undoubtedly higher. Last year was the deadliest on record.

The refuge has seen its share of migrant deaths, the most recent known case an unidentified man whose skeletal remains were recovered on the road running parallel to the border wall, just west of Coches Ridge, last October. The medical examiner estimated he had been dead for at least six months, maybe longer. The cause was unknown.

The man’s bones were found not far from the spot where the boy stood outside my truck on Friday morning. As usual, I had come to report but knew, as anyone who ventures into the Sonoran Desert’s backcountry should, that such an encounter was possible. The man in the group told me they had no water, no phone, and they had been walking through the wilderness for three days. They were from Ecuador. I asked if they wanted me to call the Border Patrol. The man said yes. I gave him the jug of water I had brought just in case and drove off to find cellphone service and call 911.

The Border Patrol agent who came rumbling down the road was gruff. I told him the situation. He asked if I knew that I was trespassing. While I was on a public road on public land, I knew the Border Patrol had recently adopted some novel interpretations of the law when it came to U.S. citizens passing through the area. I guided the conversation elsewhere. The Ecuadorians reported being in the elements for three days, I explained. They all say that, the agent replied, before driving off to collect the migrants waiting down the road.

They all say that because it’s almost always true. A day earlier, I had spoken to Dora Rodriguez, a Tucson-based borderlands activist. In the summer of 1980, Rodriguez was among a group of 26 Salvadoran refugees who were abandoned by their guide in the unforgiving expanse of the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, 150 miles west of Buenos Aires. Thirteen of Rodriguez’s companions lost their lives that day. She was 19 years old. It was the deadliest event of its kind at the time.

Today, Rodriguez is the director of Salvavision, an organization devoted to Salvadoran migrants and deportees. She also volunteers with Humane Borders, an aid group that maintains large water tanks in areas where migrants are known to die, and she’s a co-founder of Casa de la Esperanza, a migrant shelter in Mexico southwest of Buenos Aires. She knows what migrants passing through the Sonoran Desert face as well as anyone.

“On the Mexico side, there is still two hours from the road to get to the border wall,” Rodriguez told me the day before Title 42 ended.

The more difficult the U.S. makes it to cross the border, the more demand there is among people who want or need to cross it, fueling an ever-expanding market of illicit service providers. The customers don’t choose where they’re crossed. The smugglers do, and in the region of northern Sonora that abuts the Buenos Aires refuge, that means a long walk through the wilderness before you even make it to the border.

In addition to powering a vicious cycle that puts vulnerable people in dangerous situations, the smuggling market is in constant dialogue with shifting policies and narratives in the U.S. In the small town in northern Mexico where she works, everybody knows the border is now open, Rodriguez explained. She hears it from the women who staff her shelter.

“It just boggles my mind how they say, ‘Oh, Dorita, the border is going to be open, so people are going to come.’ And I say, ‘Where have you heard that?’” she said. “If that’s their mentality, if that’s what they hear, I am sure that’s what the smugglers are telling our people.”

As Title 42 ends, immigrants wait to be transported and processed by U.S. Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border on May 12, 2023 in El Paso, Tex.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Of course, detachments from reality know no border. Last spring’s arrival of a group of QAnon adherents who set up camp along the Buenos Aires border road proved it.

With Bibles in hand, the vigilantes intercepted groups of migrant children, who they claimed were being sex trafficked. They targeted local humanitarian volunteers as the perpetrators, posting their targets’ names, photos, and home addresses online. Eventually, after they ran out of money and a New York Times story exposed their harassment, they left.

Soon after, humanitarian aid volunteers in the area began noticing unusual “no trespassing” signs along the border wall. Though attached to federal property on federal land, the signs cited a state trespassing statute. Nevertheless, it was Border Patrol agents who began warning the volunteers that they could no longer stop on the road to provide aid.

In the wake of the QAnon affair, the Border Patrol resolved to never again allow camping near the border road, John Mennell, a Customs and Border Protection supervisory public affairs specialist in Tucson, told me.

There is no federal law that directly authorizes Border Patrol agents — employees of an immigration enforcement agency with some drug interdiction authorities — to arrest U.S. citizens for trespassing on federal public lands. In Arizona, however, there is a state trespassing law that allows for the arrest of U.S. citizens who disobey law enforcement officers under certain conditions. There’s also a federal statute, the Assimilative Crimes Act, that allows federal authorities to enforce state laws on federal land when no federal version of that law exists; the resulting charge, though drawn from a state statute, is filed at the federal level.

Putting two and two together, the Border Patrol took the position that U.S. citizens could drive along the border wall, but if they stopped, they would be violating the state’s trespassing laws and subject to federal prosecution. “The farmers and ranchers can use the border road to get up and around on their property or things like that,” Mennell said. Beyond that, the road would be considered off-limits. “What they don’t want is what we had earlier,” Mennell said, “where we had people camping on the road.”

“When you’re 75, eh — it’s just like, don’t mess with an old woman. I’m not afraid.”

Jane Storey, a 75-year-old retired schoolteacher, is among the Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans’ most active members. She is also one of two Samaritans whose personal information the vigilantes posted online. “They used to harass me all the time,” Storey told me last week. She didn’t let it get it to her. “I don’t know,” she said, “when you’re 75, eh — it’s just like, don’t mess with an old woman. I’m not afraid.”

After moving to the border in 2018, Storey found a calling in aid work. She ditched her Prius for a used Subaru that could better handle the rough terrain of the region. She went to the wall as often as she could. “I started keeping track because I was finding people all the time,” Storey said. She tallied 193 people, mostly children, who she provided aid to up until March 17, the day the Border Patrol finally placed her under arrest.

According to her account, Storey had pulled over for a group of children who were approaching a gap in the wall, one of whom was holding a baby. A Border Patrol agent had been trailing her and got out when she did. She asked the agent if she could give the children water. No, he told her, she had been repeatedly warned not to stop by the wall. Storey asked if she was going to be arrested. The agent said yes. The volunteer handed her car keys and phone to two of her companions.

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With flex-cuffs fastened tight around her wrists, the retired teacher was driven to Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson and placed in a cold, concrete cell. Having written her attorney’s phone number inside her shoe, she was able to place a call for help.

In a statement, Diana L. Varela, executive assistant to U.S. Attorney Gary M. Restaino, acknowledged Storey’s arrest and explained her office’s decision not to prosecute the case. “Charging the subject in those circumstances would have been a hasty solution,” she wrote. That did not, however, mean that federal prosecutors would never bring such a case. “The United States has clear jurisdiction to prosecute crimes, including state law trespass crimes, on the Roosevelt Reservation near the border,” Varela said, referring to the strip of land that runs parallel to the border wall. “Whether or not prosecution is justified depends on the nature of the intrusion into Border Patrol activities and the nature of the trespass activity.

“We will continue to evaluate potential charges for trespass on a case-by-case basis,” Varela added. “Because we cannot resolve border issues through prosecution alone, we are also looking for an opportunity to engage in a dialogue about Samaritan activities — and the adverse impact some of those activities can have on Border Patrol’s efforts to safely secure the border — with the leadership of the organization.”

Storey was released from her cell. A forest service officer drove her to a gas station on the southeast edge of Tucson. The officer parked behind the building and told her to get out. Storey had been unable to reach her family while she was locked up. She had no phone, the sun was going down, and she was more than 30 miles from home.

If Storey’s arrest hadn’t rattled humanitarian providers enough, the return of the vigilantes did. In the weeks leading to the lifting of Title 42, the volunteers repeatedly found their water tanks shot through with holes or drained at the spigot. “Almost every week, we have a tank that’s been shot,” Rodriguez said.

One of the prime culprits in the destruction is a man named Paul Flores, who made local news after verbally berating a group of birders as pedophiles. He has posted videos online claiming that the humanitarian aid groups were in cahoots with the Biden administration and “the cartel” in a plot to destroy the country.

Ahead of and after the end of Title 42 in Arizona, claims that the state is under invasion have only intensified. Pinal County Sheriff and Senate hopeful Mark Lamb has made the claim repeatedly in videos to his supporters. Rep. Paul Gosar, the ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorist representing Arizona’s 9th congressional district, has taken it a step further, telling his constituents that “America is under a planned and sustained invasion — we must act accordingly.” On the other side of the state, the Cochise County Republican Committee has taken it further still, with chair Brandon Martin calling on residents to “build an army” and “repel the invasion.”

On Thursday night, with plans to visit the wall the next day, Rodriguez found herself worrying. Her concerns were not misplaced. The following day, Flores was back in the desert posting videos of himself emptying a Humane Borders water tank. Rodriguez and her fellow volunteers, meanwhile, were followed by truckload of well-known armed right-wing extremists, including a member of an Arizona Proud Boys chapter.

At one point in the day, the men pulled over to film a video of themselves harassing the humanitarian aid providers. Among the most talkative of the crew was Ethan Schmidt-Crockett, a bigot provocateur who was recently convicted of harassment-related charges. In multiple photos and videos shared throughout the day, Schmidt-Crockett appeared with a rifle over his shoulder.

By evening, the men were documenting themselves corralling a group of migrant children on the border road, purportedly an attempt to gather their biographic information. Despite complaining of Border Patrol “harassment” earlier in the day, the vigilantes managed to avoid arrest.

That the people who need refuge most are often the ones least likely to find it is an age-old border problem. That dynamic has now worsened, Randy Mayer, the pastor of the Good Shepherd church in Green Valley, told me the morning before Title 42 was lifted.

Mayer has spent more than two decades providing humanitarian aid on both sides of the border. He sees the administration’s CBP One app as a failing attempt to implement technocratic solutions for flesh-and-blood problems. The app is meant to allow migrants to schedule an appointment at a port of entry, now a prerequisite to requesting asylum.

“A family might get two people registered and then it’s shut down because all the appointments have been taken. So it’s separating families.”

“It’s just a crapshoot if you’re going to be able to get an appointment, and it’s really hard to get your whole family in,” Mayer said. Entering information for each person takes about an hour, he explained. “A family might get two people registered and then it’s shut down because all the appointments have been taken,” Mayer said. “So it’s separating families.”

It’s also creating a two-tiered system for refuge. A family with a laptop in Mexico City stands a far better chance of securing a place in line than does one relying on a beat-up phone that’s crossed three countries connected to dodgy Wi-Fi at an internet café near a border shelter, Mayer said. Most importantly, the app does not undo the conditions that cause people to flee their homes in the first place.

“I’ve talked to Guatemalan Uber drivers who’ve been robbed, their vehicles stolen by the gangs, they literally are fleeing intense danger. The gangs are after them. They’ve killed family members,” Mayer said. “They’re running for their life.”

The pastor, drawing from decades of personal experience, believes the present moment has a clear and predictable end state — one with dire consequences for potentially millions of people down the line. “They’re gonna end up coming to the desert,” he said. “You may not see that right away, but that’s where this is headed.”

The post Desperate Families and Gun-Toting Vigilantes Converge in Arizona After Title 42 Ends appeared first on The Intercept.

Peppered with racist stereotypes, the proposal ultimately crumbled in the face of local and national backlash, but the tone was set.

In the months since, the Montana GOP’s willingness to push the envelope against perceived cultural enemies has only intensified, culminating this week in the exile of Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr, the first transgender lawmaker in the state’s history, from the House chamber.

“They have such anger and disdain and disgust that they can’t control it.”

As policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Montana office, Keegan Medrano has been in the Capitol in Helena day after day for the past four months, meeting with lawmakers and advocate on bills impacting Native American and LGBTQ+ communities. For Medrano, a queer descendant of the Muscogee Creek nation, the work is both professional and personal.

“What we’ve been seeing over this session is that there is such disdain, such animus, such disgust with queer people, Indigenous people, people that don’t fit in within their vision of what Montana is,” Medrano told The Intercept. “They have such anger and disdain and disgust that they can’t control it,” he said. “And they’re now weaponizing the institutions to exclude us and police us.”

In a vote that broke along party lines Wednesday, Montana Republicans banned Zephyr from speaking or voting from the floor or the gallery of the Capitol for the remainder of this year’s session, which ends next week.

The move against Zephyr followed a pitched battle in recent weeks over a bill that would bar gender-affirming medical care for Montana youth; similar proposals have been introduced and passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country. On April 17, Montana’s Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte indicated he would sign the bill, despite the pleas of his own son.

“He talks about compassion toward children, the youth of Montana, while simultaneously taking away health care from the youth in Montana,” David Gianforte, a 32-year-old member of Montana’s LGBTQ+ community said of his father’s support for the legislation in an interview with the Montana Free Press.

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Powered by an influx of ultra-wealthy conservatives and the ever-expanding regional influence of Christian nationalism, Montana’s reputation as a live-and-let-live state has increasingly given way to the hard-right politics of its Republican Freedom Caucus in recent years.

Greg Gianforte, the governor presiding over the shift, rose to national prominence in 2017, when he choke-slammed a journalist on the eve of his election to Congress. Drawing on millions of dollars in donations to himself — Gianforte was then the richest man in Congress — the evangelical tech entrepreneur was elected governor in 2020, breaking the hold Democrats had on the office for a decade and a half.

The GOP’s grip on the levers of state power further tightened with a series of wins in last year’s midterm elections, giving the party a supermajority heading into this year’s legislative session.

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Zephyr, a 34-year-old representing the liberal college town of Missoula, found herself in the crosshairs of Montana’s Republican hard-liners after speaking out against the bill to ban medical care for transgender youth.

“If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” Zephyr told her colleagues earlier this month.

That night, in a letter and tweet that deliberately misgendered the Democratic lawmaker, all 21 Montana Freedom Caucus members demanded Zephyr’s censure for “using inappropriate and uncalled-for language during a floor debate.”

Zephyr’s efforts to speak from the gallery in the state capital were repeatedly rebuffed in the days that followed. On Monday, hundreds of protesters converged on Helena. “Let her speak,” they chanted. Capitol police in riot gear were deployed. Seven people were arrested on trespassing charges, including two of Medrano’s staffers.

Among Zephyr’s constituents, a combination of frustration, fear, and outrage had been building from the moment the legislative session began, Medrano said; the protest was a form of release.

“I think that all sort of came out,” he said. “After over 80 days of not only the jokes, not only the questions, but also the policy, and then now, where we’re actually targeting, harassing, being retaliatory toward individuals from those communities.”

For Medrano, there is a throughline that binds Indigenous rights, trans rights, and reproductive rights: three areas where the Republican Party has directed much of its attention this session.

“Every single one of those individuals practices their own sort of body sovereignty and autonomy,” he said. “The Montana Republicans, the Freedom Caucus, they’re all afraid of these people, and so they legislate to extinguish their existence and/or to make their existences not palatable and not a part of what Montana is.”

“We’re seeing — across age, across race, and even really, across political belief — a real movement being started here to push back and to respond.”

Silenced by her Republican colleagues, Zephyr now sits on a bench outside the Capitol gallery, voting on bills and staying connected with her constituents on her laptop.

“It casts a pall over that building,” Medrano said. “There are lots of awful things that happened there, but there are truly new lows being explored by the supermajority.” At the same time, he added, “I think it speaks to her perseverance, her courage, and bravery.”

Medrano believes the Republican Party’s actions in Montana may, in the end, expand the movement it has sought to control.

“I think this is the moment. I’ve never seen such a groundswell and such camaraderie amongst people,” he said. “We’re seeing — across age, across race, and even really, across political belief — a real movement being started here to push back and to respond.”

The post An Insider’s View of the Montana Legislature’s Attacks on Trans Rep. Zooey Zephyr appeared first on The Intercept.

In a hearing that stretched into the wee hours of the morning Wednesday, the Texas House of Representatives heard testimony from first-generation college students, undocumented activists, parents, and children about the inherent dangers of House Bill 20. The author of the controversial proposal, Republican Rep. Matt Schaefer, meanwhile, was grilled by his Democratic counterparts over his bill’s logical and constitutional implications.

In his most extensive public defense of his bill to date, Schaefer, the founder and chair of the arch-conservative Texas Freedom Caucus, collapsed the issues of fentanyl overdoses and migration, ignoring facts and evidence to argue that migrants are responsible for a wave of death and suffering that exceeds the worst episodes of national trauma in modern American history. Pointing to national overdose statistics, he described “a scale of death far greater than Pearl Harbor, the attacks on 9/11, or the totality of the Vietnam War.”

“So much fentanyl is coming across the border, it’s unreal,” the Texas lawmaker said before proceeding to conflate and misrepresent several issues regarding migration and drugs.

As federal officials, border researchers, and journalists have documented ad nauseam, most fentanyl illegally trafficked into the United States comes through U.S. ports of entry, often in vehicles driven by U.S. citizens; according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data cited in Wednesday’s hearing, 86 percent of defendants convicted of smuggling fentanyl through ports of entry are U.S. citizens.

Migrants, on the other hand, overwhelmingly cross the border between ports of entry, thanks to successive bipartisan policies that have made admission at the ports — including pursuit of asylum claims — all but impossible. Customs officers who work the ports where most of the drugs are crossing are distinct from the Border Patrol agents who work between them, undermining a central argument Schaefer made that Mexican organized crime uses migrants to pull away U.S. officials who would otherwise be intercepting drug flows.

“Many of them are coming here just for a better life and make wonderful neighbors,” Schaefer said of the migrants themselves, but “some of them are criminals — rapists, gang members, MS-13.” To address the threat, Schaefer has proposed the “Border Protection Unit,” a new security force composed of law enforcement personnel and private individuals alike, answering directly to the governor in a mission to “arrest, detain, and deter individuals crossing the border.”

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Schaefer’s bill, which Texas Democrats have dubbed the “vigilante death squads policy,” was among a bundle of proposals lawmakers heard Wednesday that would create a parallel, state-led border and immigration enforcement apparatus in Texas.

The bills are part of an explicit GOP effort to provoke a legal fight that would ultimately overturn Arizona v. United States, a 2012 Supreme Court decision that struck down a similar set of policies in Arizona as unconstitutional. Republican thought leaders, both on the border and in Washington, believe that the current conservation composition of the court is inclined to reverse the decision.

Democratic Rep. Rafael Anchía drilled down on whether the intent of Schaefer’s bill was to undo the Supreme Court case.

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“The intent of the bill is to assert the authority of the state of Texas under the United States Constitution,” Schaefer told him.

“Is there a reason you’re being cagey and coy and not wanting to answer?” Anchía asked.

“I’ve answered your question,” Schaefer replied.

Rep. Chris Turner, also a Democrat, pressed Schaefer about the fundamentals of his proposal as it related to drug overdoses, asking where the majority of the fentanyl smuggled into the U.S. comes from.

“The southern border,” Schaefer said.

“Where specifically?” Turner asked.

“I think there’s some debate about that, Representative,” Schaefer replied. “I think you’re going to hear some say that most of it comes through the ports of entry.” Others, he added, without specifying who, will say “a lot of it comes through in between the ports of entry, but I think in a way it’s distinction without a difference.”

Turner noted that seizure data from Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency responsible for border security, shows that more than 90 percent of the fentanyl trafficked into the U.S. comes through the ports.

Though he used CBP’s figures concerning the apprehension of people at the border repeatedly throughout his testimony, Schaefer said he did not trust the data. At one point, the Republican lawmaker attempted to turn the tables, pressing Turner to tell him the last time he had visited the border.

“We’re gonna talk about your bill, and I’m gonna get to ask you the questions,” Turner said. “I don’t represent a border community, and last I checked, you don’t represent a border community, so we’re both talking about a region of the state that neither one of us represents, frankly.”

Schaefer’s hometown of Tyler, Texas, is more than 500 miles from the border, closer to Arkansas than Mexico.

“What I’m trying to get to is the data and the facts, and the facts indicate that we know fentanyl is a huge crisis in our country,” Turner said. “We have a lot of different strategies that we can use to deal with that. I don’t think your bill addresses fentanyl at all. That’s that’s my problem with your claims.”

Schaefer’s proposal came at the end of a grueling day of testimony involving multiple bills that would effectively institutionalize Operation Lone Star, a $4 billion program that Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott authorized in 2021. The program has been riddled with scandal — including the deaths of National Guard personnel and systemic civil rights violations that have led to a Justice Department investigation — while making no discernable impact on the illicit movement of drugs or people across the border.

By midday, more than 300 people were registered to testify on Schaefer’s bill, nearly all of them in opposition. Many drove across the state to make their voices heard and did so despite the fact that Schaefer didn’t rise to defend his bill until after 9 p.m.

Across four hours of testimony, one speaker after another blasted the proposal as racist, sloppy, dangerous, and unnecessary.

Undocumented activist María Treviño recalled the “dark history” of a state-backed vigilante groups targeting Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas.

“This bill doubles down on these racist and illegal activities by potentially training and employing anti-immigrant hate groups,” Treviño said. “I oppose this pricey, xenophobic, and unconstitutional legislation that undermines the separation of powers of our country and believe that Texas legislators should instead prioritize the health of our residents.”

The youngest of the speakers was 9-year-old Asher Vargas, the son of a firefighter, who took the microphone late in the evening.

With Schaefer sitting behind him in the front row of the hearing room, Vargas told the lawmakers about his shifts volunteering at the local migrant shelter, folding clothes, preparing meals, and, with his dad’s help, arranging travel plans for families new to the U.S.

“I find joy in helping the migrants,” Vargas said. His grandmother came to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1980s, he explained, making his family’s life possible. “Migrants come seeking peace and better lives, just like my abuelita did,” he said. “This bill will make it harder for them, which is not very kind.”

“Do you want to be known as a hateful, unwelcoming state?” Vargas asked. “I know I don’t.”

The post Hundreds Turn Out to Denounce Texas Republicans’ “Vigilante Death Squads Policy” appeared first on The Intercept.

In a 44-page decision last week, Judge Todd Robinson ruled that U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, officials violated New York City pastor Kaji Dousa’s constitutional rights by adding her to a blacklist of border activists and calling on Mexican authorities to apprehend her — all despite lacking any evidence that she was involved in illegal activity.

For Dousa, whose experience The Intercept chronicled in an investigation last year, the victory marked the end of an exhausting ordeal that’s spanned more than four years.

“I had two real reasons for going into this — one, of course, to make sure that I’m safe to travel, but the other is that I just wanted it to help people, and from the responses that I’ve been getting, it seems like it will,” Dousa told The Intercept. “I feel like it’s a win for the helpers.”

Dousa filed suit against CBP and other elements of the Department of Homeland Security in July 2019 after a government whistleblower leaked internal documents showing that the pastor was added to a secret blacklist of journalists, lawyers, and advocates associated with migrant caravans in the San Diego-Tijuana area. A Homeland Security inspector general’s report later confirmed that she was one of at least 51 U.S. citizens who were targeted and tracked by their own government for their proximity to asylum-seekers as part of CBP’s Operation Secure Line. Nearly half of the so-called lookouts CBP placed “were on people for whom there was no evidence of direct involvement in illegal activity,” the inspector general found.

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Through her litigation, Dousa’s lawyers discovered that she was also on a list that included 14 U.S. citizens whose personal information a CBP official shared with Mexican authorities, claiming that the pastor and the others were “caravan organizers/instigators” and requesting their apprehension. In his court testimony, the CBP official in question, Saro Oliveri, confirmed that he had no basis for making the highly unusual and potentially dangerous request for Dousa’s capture by foreign security forces.

“I think this has to be one of the most egregious rights violations in recent memory.”

“We view this as a really significant victory for religious liberty and for free speech generally, but I think this decision especially stands out,” Stanton Jones, Dousa’s lead attorney on the case, told The Intercept. Dousa’s experience may not have had the broad impact of other major cases on the border under Trump, such as family separation or the Muslim travel ban. “But on an individual basis,” he said, “I think this has to be one of the most egregious rights violations in recent memory.“

In a three-day bench trial in August, Robinson, a Trump-appointed federal judge who previously served as federal prosecutor working drug cases on the border and as a CIA operations officer, heard from Oliveri and several other San Diego-based officials responsible for Operation Secure Line. Oliveri told the judge that his request to Mexican authorities was “literally creative writing,” that he had never made such a request before, that he did so “without any basis” in fact or law, and that he could not recall who ordered him to send the message.

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The email featured prominently in Robinson’s ruling, with the judge finding that Oliveri and his colleagues retaliated against Dousa for her ministry to migrants at the border — activity that was clearly protected under the First Amendment — and that the “email to the Mexican government would chill a person of ordinary firmness from continuing to engage in Dousa’s protected activities.”

“Not only does it appear that the decision to send such an email was unprecedented, but even Oliveri acknowledged that the email was ‘[l]iterally, creative writing … [w]ithout any basis,” the judge wrote. Robinson added that while Oliveri testified that he never intended to retaliate against the pastor, “the absence of any proper basis for writing and sending the email is incontrovertible evidence of Oliveri’s retaliatory motive.”

“I think that what it illustrates is really a pervasive culture and sense of lawlessness and lack of accountability within CBP.”

The judge additionally ruled that the sending of the email amounted to a violation of Dousa’s rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and ordered the U.S. authorities to contact the Mexican government and formally withdraw the request.

“CBP falsely told a foreign government to detain an American citizen who is a Christian pastor because CBP didn’t like the Christian ministry that she was providing to migrants,” said Jones, Dousa’s attorney. “I think that what it illustrates is really a pervasive culture and sense of lawlessness and lack of accountability within CBP.”

The post Pastor Wins Civil Rights Suit Against Trump Administration Border Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept.

“Since we’re talking about the Endangered Species Act, I’m just wondering if my colleagues on the other side would put babies on the endangered species list,” Boebert said, as she flipped through a series of graphic images. “These babies were born in Washington, D.C., full-term. I don’t know, maybe that’s a way we can save some children here in the United States.”

Boebert did not elaborate on the connection she saw between a law passed to protect imperiled wildlife and the viability of the human species, the most widespread mammal on the planet. Nevertheless, the tone for the day was set.

Boebert was on hand Thursday to discuss her “Trust the Science Act,” a proposal for the nationwide removal of federal protections for wolves, before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries. The subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Cliff Bentz, R-Ore., also heard from fellow GOP Reps. Matt Rosendale of Montana, and Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, who have both introduced legislation to remove grizzly bears from the endangered species list in their states.

“This is the first hearing that we will hold on the ESA but certainly not the last,” Bentz said of the landmark environmental law.

The Republican bills would capitalize on a precedent their Democratic counterparts set more than a decade ago: legislatively removing animals from the endangered species list, then barring those removals from judicial review, rather than following the scientific process required by the Endangered Species Act. The proposals are part of wider movement of Republican lawmakers — backed by supporters in the firearms and trophy hunting industry — to liberalize hunting of the West’s most iconic predators.

“While each of these bills is unique, they share the common thread of circumventing the scientific processes currently underway.”

Steve Guertin, a deputy director at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act, testified that the proposals “would supersede ongoing scientific analysis being conducted by the service regarding the status of wolf and grizzly bear populations right now.” The agency opposed the measures, Guertin told the lawmakers. “While each of these bills is unique,” he said, “they share the common thread of circumventing the scientific processes currently underway.”

California Rep. Jared Huffman, one of the few Democrats who participated in the hearing, described the day’s agenda as “a hot mess of extreme anti-science, anti-tribe, anti-wildlife bills.”

“The sheer hubris of these bills is impressive,” Huffman said. “The idea that we as members of Congress sitting here in Washington are more qualified than scientists and experts at the top of their field to make delisting decisions for the Endangered Species Act, and then to lock those in by insulating them from judicial review — that is incredibly extreme.”

While many environmentalists would agree, the move was not without precedent. In 2011, Montana Sen. Jon Tester, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, attached a rider to a must-pass budget bill that reversed a federal judge’s decision returning wolves to the Endangered Species List and prohibited judicial review. The judge blasted the move as blatantly unconstitutional. Wolf hunting and trapping in the Northern Rockies has been legal ever since.

In the past two years, Republicans in Montana and Idaho passed a series of laws to slash their wolf populations — in Idaho by as much as 90 percent — through the use of bait and snares, aerial hunting, night hunting with thermal goggles, and more. In Montana, Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte abolished wolf hunting quotas altogether on Yellowstone National Park’s northern border in 2021, leading to the deadliest season the park has ever recorded, with nearly a fifth of its wolves eliminated. As Huffman noted, “Some of these states want to ‘manage’ wolves and grizzlies like Buffalo Bill managed bison.”

Boebert’s proposal would turn wolf management over to the states in the rest of the country, while Rosendale’s and Hageman’s bills would add grizzly bears to the mix as well.

A wolf in Yellowstone National Park follows a grizzly bear in early spring in 2005.

Doug Smith/National Park Service via AP

Despite the high popularity, anti-government Republicans have long cast the law as one of the worst things to ever happen to the West. “For far too long, the Endangered Species Act has been weaponized by extremists, extremist environmentalists, to restrict common sense multiple use activities that they disagree with,” Boebert testified.

In 2020, voters in Boebert’s home state passed a historic measure mandating the reintroduction of wolves, which had disappeared from Colorado thanks to a government eradication campaign in the 1940s. The vote was extraordinarily close, with 50.9 percent of voters supporting reintroduction and 49.1 voting against. Supporters were largely based in urban centers on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, while the opposition was concentrated where the wolf reintroduction will happen, in Boebert’s district on the western slope.

Despite its name, Boebert’s promotion of the “Trust the Science Act” puts the politics of predator management front and center. “Its [sic] far past time that we removed leftist politics from listing decisions,” she said in unveiling the proposal last year. The bill received enthusiastic support from Safari Club International, a lobbying giant of the trophy hunting community, and the National Rifle Association.

Hageman and Rosendale sounded a similar tone in calling for delisting grizzly bears. “There’s a small handful of members on this committee that actually have grizzly bears in their districts,” Rosendale told his colleagues. “Yet, these bureaucrats and some members of this committee insist on telling Montanans how they should go about their everyday lives by keeping the species listed without ever feeling the impact of this decision.”

In advancing their proposals, the authors of the anti-predator bills often misrepresented basic facts related to wildlife biology and management.

Boebert read a statistic that “from 2002 to present day, approximately 500 people have been attacked by wolves with nearly 30 of these attacks resulting in human deaths.” Though she did not cite a source, Boebert seemed to be drawing from a recent Norwegian Institute for Nature Research report. She neglected to mention that only two of the cases were reported in the U.S. and only one was fatal.

As the report itself noted: “Considering that there are close to 60,000 wolves in North America and 15,000 in Europe, all sharing space with hundreds of millions of people, it is apparent that the risks associated with a wolf attack are above zero, but far too low to calculate.”

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Hageman, for her part, repeatedly used the term “Canadian gray wolf” when discussing wolves residing in the Northern Rockies and described them as “non-native.”

The so-called non-native Canadian gray wolf is a feature of a conspiracy theory in which the wolves that were reintroduced to the U.S. in the 1990s were part of a super-large strain of extra ferocious predators deployed by the federal government to destroy the Western way of life. It is not true. The wolves that were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in 1995 were members of the same species — canis lupus — that the federal government exterminated over the preceding century.

Rosendale, meanwhile, focused on the “150 confirmed or probable” claims of grizzly bears eating livestock in Montana and the “hundreds of thousands of dollars lost.” Rosendale left out some key context. According to the Montana Department of Livestock, grizzly bears were responsible for killing 143 of Montana’s more than 2.7 million sheep and cattle in 2022, contributing to a loss of .0052 percent of the state’s livestock. The state paid ranchers $234,378.37 to compensate for those losses.

Rosendale also said Montana’s pivot to heavy-handed wolf hunting was “because the gray wolf population is about 10 times the target population” and “it continues to grow.” The “target population,” as Rosendale framed it, does not exist. In the early 2000s, Montana needed at least 150 wolves to obtain and retain state management authorities under the Endangered Species Act. The number was a minimum, not a target to maintain in perpetuity. As for the continued growth of Montana’s wolf population, biologists broadly agree that those numbers stabilized in recent years, and some of the region’s leading experts have raised concerns that the state may in fact be overestimating its totals.

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The Republicans’ most challenging witness was Chris Servheen. For 35 years, Servheen led the U.S. government’s effort recover grizzly bears before retiring in 2016. Until recently, he was the most visible proponent of removing grizzly bears from the endangered species list. As detailed in an Intercept profile in January, the veteran biologist’s views changed with the anti-predator political pivot in the Northern Rockies.

As Servheen reiterated throughout his testimony, the Endangered Species Act is about more than numbers. States must have regulations in place that will ensure continued recovery before assuming management authority over a listed species.

“The adequacy of regulatory mechanisms is just as important as the numbers of animals,” Servheen said, and in the Northern Rockies “the lack of adequate regulatory mechanisms is due to political interference.” He added: “It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that if grizzly bears were delisted by congressional action and turned over to state management, the legislatures and the governors would do the same thing to grizzly bears that they are currently doing to wolves.”

The post Lauren Boebert Waved Around Pictures of Dead Babies in Her Call to Gut the Endangered Species Act appeared first on The Intercept.

“They’re voting with their feet,” Phelan said of the newcomers. “They know we’re a conservative state. They know we value the Second Amendment. They know we value life, and they know we value religious liberty.” These people are “fleeing states like California, New Jersey, New York, and Illinois for a very good reason,” the speaker argued, because Texas is “the land of opportunity.”

The news wasn’t all good though. The promise of opportunity had consequences, which would require a stiff response from the state’s residents. “In southeast Texas we care about four things, which is God, the Second Amendment, babies, and the border,” Phelan said. While Texas was doing great in the first three categories, “we have a long way to go on the border.” Luckily, the party has a plan. “Sometime next week,” Phelan vowed, “we are going to file a bill that is, I hope, going to make national headlines and change the conversation on border security, and hopefully take the battle all the way to the Supreme Court and allow Texas to protect its own border.”

“This dangerous, radical, and unconstitutional proposal which empowers border vigilantes to hunt migrants and racially profile Latinos is going to result in the death of innocent people.”

By seeking to create a state security force that would include private citizens amassed to “repel” border crossers and do battle with “cartel operatives,” the proposal — House Bill 20 — did make news. If it passes, Texas will field a new unit under its Department of Public Safety to track down, arrest, and deport undocumented people.

Stationed at the border, the unit will be run by a chief serving at the pleasure of the governor, who will oversee a mix of locally recruited law enforcement and ordinary citizens “without a felony conviction.” Unit members will have immunity from criminal prosecution and lawsuits in pursuing their mission to “arrest, detain, and deter individuals crossing the border illegally including with the use of non-deadly force.” They will also “use force to repel, arrest, and detain known transnational cartel operatives in the border region.” Private citizens will be given arrest powers if they are “trained and specifically authorized by the governor.”

Companion legislation in the Texas Senate, if passed, will make undocumented entry into Texas a state crime — with first-time offenders facing a year in prison, second-time offenders facing two, and offenders with a prior felony conviction facing life behind bars. The new unit will exist until at least 2030, at which point Texas lawmakers will decide on its reauthorization. Republicans have called the bill the “Border Protection Unit Act.” Texas Democrats have gone a different direction, dubbing the proposal the “vigilante death squads policy.”

“This dangerous, radical, and unconstitutional proposal which empowers border vigilantes to hunt migrants and racially profile Latinos is going to result in the death of innocent people,” Victoria Neave Criado, the Democratic chair of Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said in a statement last week. “MALC is going to do everything in our power to kill this legislation just as Latino State Representatives for the past 5 decades have fought against Klan-like proposals.”

Aiming for the Supreme Court

By seeking to legalize state-run deportation squads, Texas Republicans have created a dilemma for their ideological foes: accept the existence of the new border unit until at least 2030 or challenge the law and roll the dice with a conservative Supreme Court. The lawmakers clearly like their odds with the high court justices, three of whom were appointed by former President Donald Trump, and have their sights set on undoing one of the most important bodies of borderland precedent in recent history.

Eric Gamino, an assistant professor of criminology and justice studies at California State University, Northridge, grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, the South Texas epicenter of national-level border discourse and ground-level border militarization. For eight years, he was a police officer there. He now researches the way the border policing intersects border life. Gamino sees two important components to the Border Protection Unit Act: the immediate changes that would come to Texas if the bill is passed, and the long game Republicans are playing in angling for a Supreme Court fight.

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On its surface, he said, the bill is an escape hatch from a costly and ineffective border blitz. In 2021, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott launched “Operation Lone Star,” a massive state-led effort that has surged thousands of National Guard troops and various law enforcement officials from across the state to the border. In the two years since, the more than $4 billion program has been riddled with scandal — including the deaths of National Guard personnel and allegations of systemic civil rights violations that have led to a Justice Department investigation — while making no discernable impact in slowing the illicit movement of drugs or people across the border.

“It’s a rebranding campaign,” Gamino told The Intercept. “The governor has recognized that Operation Lone Star is ineffective, that it’s a failed operation. They want to send these individuals back home, but they need to replace the bodies — meaning these individuals who are hyper-militarizing the borderlands — they need to replace them with people that have arrest authorities.”

Phelan, the Texas House speaker, made precisely that argument in Austin earlier this month, telling Texas Public Policy Foundation attendees: “We can bring our troopers home. We can bring home our game wardens. We can bring home our National Guard and take the fight to the border ourselves.”

“They know that it’s unconstitutional, that it’s bound to get challenged in the courts, and that is what they’re purposely doing.”

If the bill passes, Gamino expects that most of the Border Protection Unit’s arrest operations will be carried out by locally recruited law enforcement officials, with civilians aiding in surveillance and border wall construction. The inclusion of civilians, which has featured prominently in coverage of the bill, still concerns him. “They might vet these individuals by providing training through DPS,” Gamino said, referring to the state’s Department of Public Safety, “but they know the type of individual that they’re going to attract.” The likelihood for zealous, anti-immigrant recruits is high. Gamino’s deeper concern, however, is the shrewd, and potentially precedent-setting, power play Republicans are making in proposing the bill at all.

“They know that it’s unconstitutional, that it’s bound to get challenged in the courts, and that is what they’re purposely doing,” he said. If the gambit is successful, he said, “It will change the complexity of enforcement on the borderlands for the entire Southwest region.”

Speaker of the House Dade Phelan bangs a gavel in the House chamber at the State Capitol in Austin, Tex., on July 8, 2021.

Photo: Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images

Past and Precedent

In Texas, raising citizen armies against particular populations of people has a dark, not-too-distant history. In the early 20th century, the state was the site of widespread lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The work of Monica Muñoz Martinez, a historian at the University of Texas and author of “The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas,” examines a particularly bloody period from 1910 to 1920.

“That was a period where you saw the militarization of the border in response to calls to secure the border and to protect Anglo Americans from Mexicans that were profiled as criminals, as dangerous, as a threat to democracy, whether they were American citizens or Mexican nationals,” Muñoz told The Intercept. “It was this period of what you would call today racial profiling.”

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At the time, lawmakers were clamoring — as they are today — for military force against Mexico. The state activated posses that worked with local law enforcement to hunt down purported threats from the borderlands. Historians estimate that thousands of men, women, and children were killed. The specter of vigilante violence returned in the 1970s, when Louis Beam, an infamous white supremacist, built a paramilitary “Klan Border Watch” compound in Texas. Beam trained hundreds of border vigilantes over several years. “When our government officials refuse to enforce the laws of the country,” he said, “we will enforce them ourselves.”

While it was Phelan who teased the Border Protection Unit Act in Austin, the proposal was written by fellow Republican Rep. Matt Schaefer, the founder and chair of the arch-conservative Texas Freedom Caucus. The east Texas lawmaker, who did not respond to an interview request, has dismissed his bill’s alleged reflection of a dark history of racial terror and violence.

“The Texas Border Protection Unit will be an organization of professional men and women hired/trained under the authority of the Dept of Public Safety to protect Texans,” Schaefer tweeted last week. “Many will be licensed peace officers, others trained and specifically authorized by the Governor to make lawful arrests. Exactly as the Nat’l Guard & DPS operate now under Operation Lone Star.”

Schaefer’s bill is part of a wider movement within the GOP. Since losing the White House in 2020, Republicans have made one legal effort after another to wrest control of the border from the federal government by arguing that the Southwest is in the grips of an “invasion” aided and abetted by the president of the United States and his administration. Under these conditions, GOP lawmakers say they are duty-bound to assert unusual wartime powers.

The argument is in part the brainchild of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing Washington think tank. Populated by former Trump administration officials, including Ken Cuccinelli, Trump’s former acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the group has spent the past two years lobbying hard for a legal theory that challenges broadly accepted constitutional understandings of the separation of powers between the federal government and border states.

In Arizona last year, the Center for Renewing America’s work set in motion former state Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s filing of a legal opinion declaring that the state was being invaded. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who recently left office, used a similar line of reasoning in a lawsuit last fall, which argued that a strip of the border that has belonged to the federal government since before Arizona statehood in fact fell under state jurisdiction. Ducey said a state of emergency meant that he could ignore all federal laws concerning construction on those lands. He then attempted to build a 10-mile border wall of shipping containers in defiance of federal authorities. The project, which is estimated to have cost Arizona taxpayers more than $200 million, was blocked by local community resistance and Ducey agreed to remove the containers in December.

In Texas, Abbott has leaned on the states’ rights invasion argument to justify Operation Lone Star, though he has faced criticism from the Center for Renewing America for not going far enough. Up until now, Abbott has stopped short of authorizing his forces to boot undocumented people out of the country themselves, a critical component needed to trigger the kind of constitutional challenges the nativist Republicans would like to see before the nation’s highest court.

Whether the Center for Renewing America played a role in the creation of Border Protection Unit Act is unclear, and the think tank did not respond to a request for comment. It appears, however, that the most hard-line elements of the Republican Party have finally gotten at least part of what they want: a powerful border state moving forward with a plan to conduct its own immigration arrests and deportations.

They have, in other words, created a constitutional provocation that seemingly cannot be ignored.

The Arizona Case

Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, has been prodigious in his legal war against the Biden administration. With a string Trump-era appointments to the federal bench, his efforts have been effective, so much so, though, that some constitutional law experts have accused the attorney general of “judge shopping.” (Paxton has denied the allegation.) In a state Senate hearing last year, Paxton’s deputy, First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster, highlighted his office’s “wild success” in suing the White House.

“We have a 93 percent win rate right now against the federal government,” Webster testified. But there was a problem: “Our hands are somewhat tied in what we can legally do in Texas regarding immigration. And that is because of a case called Arizona v. U.S.”

The case is among the most important in the recent history of the border. It stems from a 2010 Arizona law, known as S.B. 1070, that — like the Border Protection Unit Act in Texas — expanded the state-level government’s authority over border and immigration enforcement. The law empowered local officials like former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who then created a now infamous regime of racial profiling. The backlash to S.B. 1070 fueled massive protests across the country. In 2012, the core components of the law were struck down in a 5-3 Supreme Court decision.

“Our office doesn’t agree with that ruling,” Webster testified to Texas lawmakers last year. “We welcome laws that might allow us to have a new case we could go up on to readdress this issue, because the makeup of the Supreme Court has changed and because the situation has changed.”

As if he weren’t clear enough, Webster spelled it out. “Look at the laws that we can pass to go up and, again, challenge the current precedent regarding Arizona v. U.S.,” he said. “We ask for you guys to consider laws that might enable us to go and challenge that ruling again.”

“You can’t play to their hand, because if the Supreme Court sides with the state of Texas, it’s not going to be pretty.”

A year later, nearly to the day, the Border Protection Unit Act was introduced. For Texas Democrats, the bill is a road map to a “show me your papers” police state and a sign of the Republican majority’s posture going into the final weeks of lawmaking. “HB 20 is a tinderbox waiting to explode that will leave this Session in flames,” Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, said last week. “House Republicans have been warned.”

Texas immigration advocates are now in a delicate place. “This bill is the most dangerous proposal we have ever seen on border issues,” Roberto Lopez, of the Texas Civil Rights Project, told Texas Public Radio. But he cautioned that if a legal challenge led to the Supreme Court overturning federal control of immigration policy, the state-led regime that would take its place could be more dangerous for immigrants. “We need to make that very challenging and difficult decision on whether or not we want to risk upsetting or removing prior precedent that was beneficial to our communities.”

It’s a no-win situation, said Gamino, the border cop-turned-researcher. The Border Protection Unit Act would be bad in practice, he argued, and it would be the law of the land for several years at least. A Supreme Court decision upholding its legality, paving the way for its replication across the border, would be even worse.

“When you look at Arizona and you look at the decision that was handed down, that was 5-3. And now you look at the makeup of the Supreme Court, where it’s a conservative majority, who’s not to say that they will side with the state of Texas?” Gamino asked. “I’m not trying to minimize the concerns of the greater public with regards to what’s going to happen with this Border Protection Unit, but I think what should raise concern is the ultimate goal of these politicians.”

“You can’t play to their hand,” he said, “because if the Supreme Court sides with the state of Texas, it’s not going to be pretty.”

The post Texas GOP Wants Citizens to Stop Migrants. Critics Say It’s a “Vigilante Death Squads Policy.” appeared first on The Intercept.

In oral arguments Tuesday, the U.S. Forest Service said it was nearing completion of an environmental impact study that will transfer land east of Phoenix to two of the world’s largest mining companies for the purpose of building one of the largest copper mines on the planet. The massive project will hinge on the destruction of Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, a plateau otherwise known as Oak Flat, that is sacred to many Native American tribes, particularly the San Carlos Apache, who consider the area among their most holy of sites.

In a nearly two-hour hearing, an 11-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California, peppered lawyers on both sides of the high-stakes legal fight with an array of complex case law questions raised by the project. Begun nearly two decades ago, the battle for Oak Flat sits at the intersection of Indigenous rights and dispossession, religious liberty, public lands and private sales, and a growing demand for so-called green energy solutions in an era of climate catastrophe.

“As the court is aware, this case is not about an agency action. It’s about an act of Congress, in which Congress considered demands on a piece of property, balanced those interests, and made a decision,” said Joan Pepin, an attorney for the Forest Service, the agency that exchanged the land in a controversial deal nearly a decade ago. “It decided that Oak Flat should be transferred to Resolution Copper so the third-largest copper ore deposit in the world can be mined.”

The legislation in question — the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act — was the product of a proposal then-Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake added to a must-pass defense authorization bill late one night in 2014. The addendum, known as a rider, incurred no congressional debate. Described by the San Carlos Apache as a “midnight backroom deal,” the law transferred Oak Flat to Resolution Copper, a British-Australian concern jointly owned by the extractive giants Rio Tinto and BHP, both of which had sought access to the wildly lucrative ore deposit for years.

The project centers on a 2,200-acre area known as Oak Flat Campground, part of the Tonto National Forest, that has served as a centerpiece of Apache religious ceremony and cosmology since before settler expansion into the West. To access the ore underneath, Resolution Copper will use a technique known as block cave mining, which over several years will turn the sacred mountain into a two-mile-wide crater deep enough to hide a skyscraper.

Initiation of construction hinges on the publication of an environmental impact study from the Forest Service, which, under the law passed in 2014, starts a 60-day countdown before the transfer of the land from the federal government to the mining company must happen.

“A fine is a substantial burden, but here the government is doing something far worse, not just threatening fines, but authorizing the complete physical destruction of Oak Flat.”

Luke Goodrich, the lead attorney for Apache Stronghold, an Arizona-based nonprofit that brought the lawsuit to stop the transfer, told the panel of judges that the destruction of Oak Flat was a direct and flagrant violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Violation of the statute requires the imposition of a “substantial burden” on a person or group’s ability to practice their faith.

“A fine is a substantial burden, but here the government is doing something far worse,” Goodrich said, “not just threatening fines, but authorizing the complete physical destruction of Oak Flat, barring the Apaches from ever accessing it again and ending their core religious exercises forever.”

In January 2021, five days before leaving office, the administration of President Donald Trump released a study supporting the creation of the Oak Flat mine. Apache Stronghold had filed a federal lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the project.

Unsuccessful in the attempt, the group filed an emergency appeal to the 9th Circuit the following month. Six hours before its deadline to respond passed, the Forest Service — by then, in March 2021, under the leadership of President Joe Biden — announced that it was withdrawing the environmental impact study and postponing the land transfer.

A three-judge panel of 9th Circuit dismissed Apache Stronghold’s case in October 2021 but agreed to hear the case again before a full panel last winter. The unusual decision set the stage for Tuesday’s hearing.

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While the postponement of the project had given opponents of the mine a moment of respite in the long-running battle, the government’s testimony this week confirmed that the Biden administration is moving forward with a new environmental impact study and stands behind the controversial land swap.

“We said spring,” Pepin told the panel of judges Tuesday. “It could be shading over into early summer by the time that 60-day notice is given, but it is coming out in the near future, so I do believe this case is justiciable.”

While Apache Stronghold’s religious freedom argument has drawn support from an array of faith-based organizations across the country, proponents of the mine argue that the project would bring in 3,700 jobs and add $1 billion each year to Arizona’s economy.

David Debold, an attorney representing extractive industry associations, told the court that a win for the plaintiffs in the case “would erect huge and insurmountable obstacles” to the sale of government land to private entities. “The damage to private enterprise would be profound if the purchaser of federal property could only use that property later as though it were the federal government,” Debold said. “That is the rule that is being argued for here, although not in so many words.”

The judges took the arguments into consideration. The panel has offered no indication when it will rule on the case. Should the judges again rule in favor of the mining companies and the federal government, the plaintiffs are likely to take the case to the Supreme Court.

Following the hearing, defenders of Oak Flat gathered in the rain to debrief and pray. Goodrich, the Apache Stronghold attorney, said there was no disputing the core facts of the case. “This is not a theoretical matter,” he said. “This is a people matter. This is about the people and their freedom: freedom to be Apache, to be Indigenous, to be Americans.”

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After the day’s testimony, there was no longer any question where the Biden administration stood. “The government didn’t hold back today,” Goodrich said. “It said it for everyone to hear — everyone in the courtroom to hear, everyone in Indian Country to hear, and everyone in the whole country to hear. The government thinks it has blanket authority to do whatever it wants with the land that it’s taken from Indigenous peoples, even destroying central sacred sites and ending religious exercises forever.”

Wendsler Nosie Sr., former chair and councilmember of the San Carlos Apache and a veteran activist who has spent much of his life fighting the Oak Flat mine, joined in addressing the tribe’s supporters. “This country is a corporate country. It’s not even thinking about our children, the Earth, the things that give us life,” Nosie said. “The corporate world is waiting for this case to finish because they are in line for their exemptions. And if this happens, how we gonna stop that?”

Nosie’s remarks were followed by comments from his granddaughter, Naelyn Pike. Like her grandfather, Pike has devoted her life to stopping the mine. Among its many sacred attributes, the mountain at Oak Flat is used for coming-of-age ceremonies for young Apache women. Having been one of those young women herself, Pike worried that the space would no longer exist for the generations that come after her.

“This land is sacred. This land is holy. It may not have four walls or a steeple. It may not be a mosque, but this is my religion and my spiritual belief from my ancestors and to the yet to be born,” she said. “We have to fight for those who are not here so that they can go to Oak Flat, and they can pray and be one — because the United States government assured us today that their land is their land and that they can take it away, that they can say what I believe in, and what you believe in, does not matter.”

The post Biden Moves Forward With Mining Project That Will Obliterate a Sacred Apache Religious Site appeared first on The Intercept.

While the Department of Homeland Security’s investment of more than a billion dollars into a so-called virtual wall between the U.S. and Mexico is a matter of public record, the government does not disclose where these towers are located, despite privacy concerns of residents of both countries — and the fact that individual towers are plainly visible to observers. The surveillance tower map is the result of a year’s work steered by EFF Director of Investigations Dave Maass, who pieced together the constellation of surveillance towers through a combination of public procurement documents, satellite photographs, in-person trips to the border, and even virtual reality-enabled wandering through Google Street View imagery. While Maass notes the map is incomplete and remains a work in progress, it already contains nearly 300 current tower locations and nearly 50 more planned for the near future.

As border surveillance towers have multiplied across the southern border, so too have they become increasingly sophisticated, packing a panoply of powerful cameras, microphones, lasers, radar antennae, and other sensors designed to zero in on humans. While early iterations of the virtual wall relied largely on human operators monitoring cameras, companies like Anduril and Google have reaped major government paydays by promising to automate the border-watching process with migrant-detecting artificial intelligence. Opponents of these modern towers, bristling with always-watching sensors, argue the increasing computerization of border security will lead inevitably to the dehumanization of an already thoroughly dehumanizing undertaking.

While American border authorities insist that the surveillance net is aimed only at those attempting to illegally enter the country, critics like Maass say they threaten the privacy of anyone in the vicinity. According to a 2022 estimate by the EFF, “about two out of three Americans live within 100 miles of a land or sea border, putting them within Customs and Border Protection’s special enforcement zone, so surveillance overreach must concern us all.” Taking the towers out of abstract funding and strategy documents and sticking them onto a map of the physical world also punctures CBP’s typical defense against privacy concerns, namely that the towers are erected in remote areas and therefore pose a threat to no one but those attempting to break the law. In fact, “the placement of the towers undermines the myth that border surveillance only affects unpopulated rural areas,” Maass wrote of the map. “A large number of the existing and planned targets are positioned within densely populated urban areas.”

The map itself serves as a striking document of the militarization of the U.S. border and domestic law enforcement, revealing a broad string of surveillance machines three decades in the making, stretching from the beaches of Tijuana to the southeastern extremity of Texas.

In 1993, federal officials launched Operation Blockade, a deployment of 400 Border Patrol agents to the northern banks of the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The aim of the “virtual wall,” as it was described at the time, was to push the ubiquitous unauthorized crossing of mostly Mexican laborers out of the city — where they disappeared into the general population and Border Patrol agents engaged in racial profiling to find them — and into remote areas where they would be easier to arrest. Similar initiatives, Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, Operation Safeguard in southern Arizona, Operation Rio Grande in South Texas, soon followed.

Though undocumented labor was essential to industries in the Southwest and had been for generations, an increasingly influential nativist wing of the Republican Party had found electoral success in attacking the Democrats and the Clinton administration for a purported disinterest in tackling lawbreaking in border cities. The White House responded by ordering the Pentagon’s Center for Low-Intensity Conflict, which had spent the previous decade running counterinsurgency campaigns around the world, as well as the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service, to devise a tactical response to the president’s political problem.

The answer was “prevention through deterrence,” a combination of militarization and surveillance strategy that remains the foundation for border security thinking in the U.S. to this day. Bill Clinton’s unusual team of immigration and counterinsurgency officials saw the inherent “mortal danger” of pushing migrants into remote, deadly terrain as a strategic advantage. “The prediction is that with traditional entry and smuggling routes disrupted, illegal traffic will be deterred or forced over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement,” the officials wrote in their 1994 national strategy plan. The architects of prevention through deterrence accepted that funneling migrants into the most remote landscapes in the country would have deadly consequences, noting, “Violence will increase as effects of the strategy are felt.”

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Violence did increase, albeit in the slow and agonizing form one finds in the desiccated washes of the Sonoran Desert and the endless chaparral fields of South Texas. Before prevention through deterrence, the medical examiner’s office in Tucson, Arizona, averaged roughly 12 migrant death cases a year. After the strategy went into effect, that number skyrocketed to 155.

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The September 11 attacks made the already deadly situation far worse. In Washington, the cliched quip that “border security is national security” led to the Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the CIA and the Defense Department. With the Department of Homeland Security up and running, U.S. taxpayers began funneling more money into the nation’s border and immigration agencies than the FBI; Drug Enforcement Administration; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives combined. Immigration offenses became the most common charge on the federal docket. An unprecedented network of for-profit immigration jails went up across the country.

On the border itself, a massive new industry of surveillance tech, much of it repurposed from the war on terror, was born. The more money the U.S. government poured into interdiction on the border, the more money there was to be made in evading the U.S. government. For migrants, hiring a smuggler became unavoidable. For smugglers, engaging with Mexican organized crime, many with links to Mexican government officials, became unavoidable. With organized crime involved, U.S. agencies called out for more resources. These dynamics have been extremely lucrative for an array of individuals and interests, while at the same time making human migration vastly more dangerous, radically altering life in border communities, and exacting a heavy toll on borderland ecosystems.

A close-up shot of a Federal Telecommunications Institute camera lens, reflecting the desert landscape that it looks over below Coronado Peak in Hereford, Ariz.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Surveillance towers have been significant part of that vicious cycle, even though, as Maass’s EFF report notes, their efficacy is far less certain than their considerable price tag.

Nobody can say for certain how many people have died attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the recent age of militarization and surveillance. Researchers estimate that the minimum is at least 10,000 dead in the past two and a half decades, and most agree that the true death toll is considerably higher.

Sam Chambers, a researcher at the University of Arizona, studies the relationship between surveillance infrastructure and migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert and has found the two inextricable from one another. While the purpose of surveillance towers in theory is to collect and relay data, Chambers argues that the actual function of towers in the borderlands is more basic than that. Like the agents deployed to the Rio Grande in Operation Blockade or a scarecrow in a field, the towers function as barriers pushing migrants into remote areas. “It’s made in a way to make certain places watched and others not watched,” Chambers told The Intercept. “It’s basically manipulating behavior.”

“People cross in more remote areas away from the surveillance to remain undetected,” he said. “What it ends up doing is making the journeys longer and more difficult. So instead of crossing near a community, somebody is going to go through a mountain range or remote area of desert, somewhere far from safety. And it’s going to take them more energy, more time, much more exposure in the elements, and higher likelihood of things like hyperthermia.”

“There’s nothing to suggest anybody’s trying to make this humane in any manner.”

Last year was the deadliest on record for migrants crossing the southern border. While the planet is already experiencing a level of human migration unlike anything in living memory, experts expect human movement across the globe to increase even further as the climate catastrophe intensifies. In the U.S., where the nation’s two leading political parties have offered no indication of a will to abandon their use of deadly landscapes as force multipliers on the border, the multidecade wave of dying shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

“They’ve been doing this, prevention through deterrence, since the ’90s,” Chambers said. “There’s nothing to suggest anybody’s trying to make this humane in any manner.”

The post Mapping Project Reveals Locations of U.S. Border Surveillance Towers appeared first on The Intercept.

These were the lessons Doug Smith took home after a trip to the Alaskan outback in 1999. Smith had recently become director of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, the research program that followed the reintroduction of wolves into the national park four years earlier. At the heart of the nascent program was the winter study, when Smith and his team would track packs deep into the park, collect predation data, and fix individual wolves with radio collars.

The study relied heavily on aerial darting. Smith grew up shooting guns but hitting a moving wolf from an aircraft was a different challenge. He phoned Layne Adams, a darting pro with the U.S. Biological Survey, who was doing work at Denali National Park, and asked if he could come to Alaska to study his craft. The pair spent a week in the air. Smith vividly remembers the first wolf he darted. It was an evasive alpha female. His first shot missed.

“Take those fucking gloves off!” the pilot shouted into his headset. Smith was wearing flying gloves. He ditched them. Below, the wolf stopped running, took shelter in a patch of brush, and faced the strange object hovering above her. The pilot was shouting at Smith to shoot. Smith was shouting at the pilot to reposition. The wolf took off. Smith can’t recall how many darts he fired, but he knows that the last one hit its mark.

Smith darted six more wolves in Denali that week. Back in Yellowstone, over the next two and half decades, he darted some 600 more. The captures became the backbone of the winter study — today a top contender for the world’s most respected predator research project. Smith spent all year waiting for the snow to come, thinking about what the last winter revealed, obsessing over how to improve. He took those lessons to heart. “I never computed my long-term average, but I was getting down to like 1.2, 1.3 darts per wolf,” he told me recently. “Two days in my career, I fired 10 darts and got 10 wolves.”

When future historians sit down to tell the story of how wolves regained a foothold in the United States after near total annihilation, they will find many names. Few, if any, are likely to surface as often as Doug Smith. For more than a quarter century, Smith was the face of one of the most historic and controversial government conservation initiatives of all time. In November, he retired.

When we met on an overcast morning in Bozeman, Montana, Smith was six weeks into his new post-Yellowstone life. His former colleagues were in the midst of their first winter without him. “It’s the first time since the beginning I wasn’t there to handle capture,” he said. Smith was not yet sure if stepping away was the right call. He wavered sometimes. “It was a very hard decision,” he said. “I’m still doubting it some days.”

Doug Smith shows his National Park Service credentials and poses for a portrait at his home in Bozeman, Mont., on Feb. 22, 2023. Photos: Max Lowe for The Intercept

Now free from the constraints of federal employment, the veteran biologist offered critical observations on the way wolves are seen, managed, and killed in the Northern Rockies, and the values that treatment reflects. Smith’s exit comes at a tumultuous time for wolves in the Northern Rockies and wildlife more broadly. Last winter, he and his colleagues recorded the deadliest season in Yellowstone history. With 25 wolves killed, more than double the previous record, roughly a fifth of the park’s entire wolf population was lost.

The killing was concentrated on Yellowstone’s northern border, which cuts into southwestern Montana. In the run up to the unprecedented season, a panel of wildlife commissioners appointed by Montana’s first Republican governor in a decade and a half, Greg Gianforte, abolished quotas that had limited the number of wolves that could be killed north of the park.

With its 2023 legislative session now underway, Montana’s new GOP supermajority remains intent on dramatically slashing the state’s wolf population with an array of highly controversial and recently legalized hunting and trapping methods. Many of the West’s most respected wildlife biologists have spoken out at what they see as a politicized wave of “anti-predator hysteria” sweeping the region. Meanwhile, mass habitat loss continues to fuel biodiversity loss at a staggering pace, leaving national parks like Yellowstone among the only places on Earth where large predators like wolves are both protected and studied in depth.

“Literally, if you get the wrong wolf at the wrong time, that pack can fall apart.”

In the weeks leading up to his retirement, Smith completed a major paper with more than a dozen biologists from national parks across North America. A decade in the making, the rare, interpark collaboration — titled “Human-caused mortality triggers pack instability in gray wolves” and published in “Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment” in January — tackled the question of how wolf hunting outside of national parks impacts the social stability of wolf packs living inside them. The research showed that while wolf populations are remarkably resilient, the loss of a single wolf can be devastating to an individual pack. This was especially true in the case of leaders. “Literally, if you get the wrong wolf at the wrong time, that pack can fall apart,” Smith said. The study also found that despite living in the most protected environs available, wolves in national parks experience “high levels” of human-caused mortality. Last winter, Smith and his colleagues witnessed those effects firsthand at an unprecedented scale.

The paper was a fitting exit for one the country’s most celebrated biologists. The entirety of Smith’s Yellowstone career was bound up in questions of how the outside world shaped the bubble of preservation he signed up to study and protect. Under his tenure, the park’s wolf program became an exemplar of predator preservation and research worldwide. Taking advantage of Yellowstone’s unmatched observational opportunities, Smith oversaw studies detailing how the return of apex predators — not just wolves, but grizzly bears and cougars as well — helped usher in an era of ecological recovery rarely witnessed in the modern world. At the same time, while always keeping an eye on the science and planning for the next winter study, Smith’s work required navigating a social and political minefield. “Cross-boundary management is a bugaboo in wildlife management,” he told me. “Most of the time, people go, ‘They’re not our jurisdiction anymore, so we’re not going to do anything’ — that doesn’t benefit the resource at all.”

The borders invite questions that policymakers generally try to avoid asking.

The boundaries that divide national parks and states are more than a delineation between jurisdictions. Those invisible lines represent different worlds, both for the animals that cross them and for the human institutions on either side. The borders invite questions that policymakers generally try to avoid asking. After two and a half decades on the front line, Smith firmly believes those discussions, uncomfortable though they might be, must happen for wildlife to have any chance of survival. The study, in addition to its scientific revelations, was an attempt to spur those conversations. “That was the other reason we did it,” Smith said. “It was like, ‘Let’s shine a light on this.’ You have to expose painful topics to solve them.”

Doug Smith arrives on horseback to recover a tracking collar off a dead wolf with his team in Yellowstone National Park on Sept. 2, 2015.

Photo: Ronan Donovan/National Geographic

People Riding Around With Guns

Early in Smith’s Yellowstone career, a legendary park ranger named Jerry Mernin offered him a piece of advice he would never forget. “You’re not doing your job. No one gives a shit about your science,” Mernin told him. “What you gotta do is you gotta go in the mountains, on horseback, and talk to the people riding around with guns. That’s conservation.”

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Mernin was referring to the outfitting camps that ring Yellowstone’s border, providing guided hunts for paying clients, particularly those in pursuit of elk. Along with livestock interests, the outfitters were among the most vocal opponents of the federal program to repopulate the West with wolves. They didn’t ask for it, they didn’t want it, and they saw the wolves as a threat to their bottom line. Smith could see that Mernin was right. He needed to talk to them. Together, they loaded up their horses and rode out.

Like his winter study, Smith’s visits to the camps became a tradition. As it was with darting, the learning curve was steep. Smith quickly discovered that riding in with a list of points to hammer home never worked. “Literally, you had to go in and just establish contact, a rapport, a relationship,” he said. “Listen more than you talk.” Smith did not expect to uproot deeply held convictions. The goal was subtler, more human. “If you let those guys go, they will go,” he said. “So most of the time, you’re just rapping, and you’re trying to establish that I’m not as bad as they think I am, and even though I’m a government employee, they shouldn’t hate me for that — because they hate the government.”

Nothing was ever perfect, tensions and resentments remained, but bit by bit relationships were built. “I continued that almost until the day I retired,” Smith said. “I would consider it to be one of the more effective conservation efforts that I did in my career.”

Raised in rural northeastern Ohio on a horse camp that his parents ran, Smith began working with wolves as a teenager. He earned his Ph.D. studying under the legends of the field, old-school biologists whose groundbreaking insights were the product of handwritten notes compiled while trudging through deep snow in remote places. Among his mentors was L. David Mech. In an email, Mech, who is considered by many to be the most authoritative wolf expert in the world, described Smith’s predation studies in Yellowstone as “the most intensive and extensive wolf-prey system ever scientifically investigated.”

Framed photographs show Doug Smith with wolves in Yellowstone that he helped protect during his long career.

Photo: Max Lowe for The Intercept

Smith lived for the science, but he also recognized that the most important decisions in wildlife management happen outside the realms of biology and ecology.

In 2011, facing a precarious vote in the upcoming midterm elections, Montana’s lone Democratic senator, Jon Tester, attached a rider to a must-pass budget bill reversing a federal judge’s order returning wolves in the Northern Rockies to the Endangered Species List. The move was unheard of — Congress had never intervened to remove an animal from the endangered species list before — and led to state authorization of wolf hunting and trapping seasons. The following year, Smith and his colleagues released a report unlike anything they had published before, documenting the then-unprecedented loss of 12 wolves to hunting and trapping, many just over the edge of the park’s boundary lines.

Smith understood well that the goal of the Endangered Species Act was delisting, and that delisting meant state management, and state management meant hunting. Still, there were elements to the way the states structured their approach that he found ethically unsettling. Smith was a lifelong hunter, using elk and deer to fill his fridge. The meat was the “resource value” of the animal he killed. A wolf’s resource value was ostensibly its pelt, and yet Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho — then and now — started their seasons during the transition from summer to fall, when wolves’ pelts were at their least valuable. “You’re killing for a full two months for what?” Smith asked, before answering his own question. “Hatred.”

Doug Smith and Kira Cassidy begin drawing blood on three captured wolves from the Junction Butte Pack in Yellowstone National Park on Dec. 15, 2014.

Photo: Ronan Donovan/National Geographic

Boundary Lines

Following the deadly 2012 season, wolf advocates lobbied for hunting quotas north of Yellowstone. While most of the park’s boundaries lie in remote areas, well-removed from human settlement, Yellowstone’s iconic northern entrance is in the unincorporated community of Gardiner, Montana, where open access to wildlife moving out of the park is readily available. The region is but a tiny sliver of Montana. Still, opponents of wolf hunting quotas on Yellowstone’s boundary line argued that the park was pushing out its border and asked, with great frustration, where do you draw the line?

For Smith, it was the wrong question. Hard boundary lines didn’t make sense for wildlife in general and for wolves in Yellowstone specifically. The wolves spent 96 percent of their time in the park, with much of that time in Wyoming — meaning that killing those wolves to reduce Montana’s wolf population made little sense. There was limited livestock ranching in the pocket of Montana that the park pushed up against, and the state routinely reported healthy elk populations in the area. That meant two of the most common arguments for heavy wolf killing — livestock and elk protection — were shaky at best. Finally, because the wolves were born and raised in a national park, they grew up with little reason to fear humans watching them from a distance. This habituation raised serious ethical questions about the shooting of a wolf that stood 100 feet north of a line that it didn’t know existed by humans who it didn’t see as a danger. As an alternative, hunters and trappers in Montana still had access to the rest of the fourth largest state in the country, where they could stalk wolves that actually knew they were being pursued.

“They’re tolerant of having people watching, and so you can’t have an arbitrary line on a landscape — go from that, complete protection, to no protection,” Smith said. It was matter of fair chase, an ethical principle undergirding the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, a set of pillars revered by many hunters around the world. In a fair chase hunt, “an animal knows you’re after it,” Smith said. “You’re not riding a four-wheeler chasing it down. You’re not using walkie talkies to trap it. Those are all fair chase measures. This is one of them.”

In place of a hard line, Smith and others advocated for a zone of protection that gradually faded into the broader state management regime. For many, it was the economics of Yellowstone’s wolf program that served as the strongest argument for such an approach: According to an economic study published in 2022, wolf watching alone in Yellowstone generates $82 million a year in local ecotourism dollars.

Though he wouldn’t disagree with the value of ecotourism, Smith’s arguments tended to reflect his dual identity as a scientist and public servant. With the wolf reintroduction, Yellowstone, and by extension the broader public, gained an incomparable asset, allowing for deeper insights into the innerworkings of one of the last great ecosystems of North America. If there were ever an example of a National Park Service initiative achieving its mission of preservation and public access, it was the Yellowstone Wolf Project. “I believe in the mission,” Smith said. “I would argue — and I know the world does not work this way — don’t do a job unless you believe it.”

In his day-to-day work over the years, Smith routinely met with people whose opinions on that mission ranged from unaccommodating to outright hostile. For Kira Cassidy, who began her Yellowstone wolf career in 2008, it was Smith’s earnest interest in seeking out those conversations that made him indispensable. “For being such a science-focused person, he also has a very beautiful, philosophical way of looking at the human condition and human relationships with wildlife,” she said. “He’s not argumentative, but he’s convincing in what he believes.”

Gradually, through years of negotiations among an array of stakeholders, the number of wolves that could be killed in the two districts north of Yellowstone was pared down to one each. At the same time, statewide in Montana, wolf regulations were kept permissive, and hundreds of individual animals were hunted or trapped every year. Smith wasn’t an enthusiastic fan of the state’s wolf hunt, but he understood it as part of the complex world of trade-offs in which the Yellowstone Wolf Project was situated.

“That’s the give and take we need in our society,” he said. “The whole point here is reasonability, compromise,” he added. “I don’t think we’re being unreasonable by saying, ‘Look, you can kill them, you just can’t kill them all.’”

Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks veterinarian Jennifer Ramsey weighs a dead wolf that was shot in the Tom Minor Basin by a ranch manager who felt the wolf was a threat to the horses on May 14, 2015.

Photo: Ronan Donovan/National Geographic

Mind Your Own Business

In 2016, the research into how human hunting affects wolves in national parks began to gather momentum. After a successful project with an Alaska-based biologist in Denali National Park, Smith and Cassidy began kicking around the idea of bringing in collaborators from around the continent. Eventually, they assembled a wide-ranging team of wolf researchers from Denali, Grand Teton, and Voyageurs national parks, as well as the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve in remote eastern Alaska.

In addition to hunting, the biologists included vehicle strikes, poaching, lethal control by government agencies, and rare incidents of death during research capture in their analysis. With data stretching back to the 1980s, they had an extraordinary wealth of information to pull from. While Cassidy delved into the nitty-gritty of the research, Smith navigated the complexities of wrangling multiple national parks in a study that was inherently controversial.

“It was tough,” he said. “A lot of people were like, ‘Leave it alone. When they leave the park, they’re none of your business.’” To Smith, that response was premature. The research had not been done to determine the extent of the issue, so who was to say whether it was the business of national parks or not? “I’m OK with not doing anything,” Smith said. “But don’t you want the information to know?”

No adjustment to the status quo after reviewing data was one thing. “I’m actually OK with that,” he said. “But that’s different than ‘We don’t know, and everything’s fine.’”

As it turned out, everything was not fine. In August 2021, Montana eliminated the hunting quotas north of Yellowstone entirely. In the months that followed, the wolf project recorded an unprecedented 480 percent increase in mortality compared to previous seasons. Smith and Cassidy watched in real time as patterns they had traced for years emerged again and again across the park’s Northern Range.

The hunters would arrive at dawn or dusk, often with assault rifles, at known lookout points on the park’s border. They used predator calls to draw wolves over the line and often left the carcasses where they fell. Just as data coming in from parks around the country indicated, larger packs fared better in the face of the heavy human killing. Smaller packs did not.

The Phantom Lake Pack was a stark example. The pack was relatively small and traditionally held its ground on the northernmost edge of the park. Seven of its members were killed in two months. “We think that one of the first wolves that they lost during the hunting season was probably their breeding female,” Cassidy said. “They seemed to crumble after that.” With the Phantom Lake wolves gone, Yellowstone’s largest pack moved in. Though the Junction Butte Pack lost eight wolves to the hunt after taking the newly available territory, most of were pups or yearlings, and the pack had gone into the season with nearly 30 members. The pack persisted.

Most illustrative of all was the Eight Mile Pack. Unlike other packs in the park, the wolves were elusive and seemed to consciously avoid humans. Cassidy attributed the evasiveness to the seasoned alpha female that had led the pack for five years: “It seemed like for years she knew exactly how to avoid human-caused mortalities.” The wolf did not, however, appear to understand traps and was caught and killed late in the season. “Within 48 hours after the alpha female was trapped, the pack got up and traveled all the way until Lamar Valley,” Cassidy said. The journey was nearly 40 miles. “We have never recorded them doing that,” she said. “It seemed to be in reaction to this pretty severe disruption.”

As the biologists suspected, numbers alone failed to tell the full story of what happened inside packs when humans killed wolves. The process of confirming their hypothesis, however, was painfully grim. “This is the kind of study you don’t want to see succeed,” Smith said. “It relies on dead wolves being killed by people.”

The hunt marked the worst year of Smith’s career. It wasn’t just the loss of the individual wolves or the scientific setbacks, though both were brutal; it was also the damage done to the project of compromise and moderation in which he had invested so much time and effort.

Smith spent last summer working to convince the governor’s wildlife commissioners of the unique value of the Yellowstone’s wolf program and the important role quotas played in helping the Park Service achieve its mission. In August, at a hearing to establish this year’s regulations, he thanked the commissioners for hearing him out. In the end, the commissioners — some of whom had been prepared to begin another season with no quotas in place — agreed to a park proposal of a six wolf limit. Smith was sent to deliver the proposal. Following his remarks, a woman whispered to him that he had let the wolf advocates down. “That caused me to flinch,” he said.

At that point, the subject of retirement was already on his mind. Smith would be 62 soon, the age at which he and his wife had agreed to discuss a potential change in direction. Following the hearing, the couple took a canoe trip around Yellowstone Lake. The quotas may have been reinstated, but laws aiming to slash wolf populations in Montana and Idaho were still on the books. Smith knew that his words carried weight in the Northern Rockies. He thought hard on whether he should stick it out a little longer.

Doug Smith at home near Bozeman, Mont., on Feb. 22, 2023.

Photo: Max Lowe for The Intercept

Though he managed to hold onto his flying and winter study captures until the very end, the fieldwork and research that gave him purpose had been subsumed in recent years. “I had become a supervisor and administrator and a bureaucrat,” Smith said. “More and more of my job became keeping the show on the road, and less and less biology, ecology.” As he and his wife took in Yellowstone’s late summer beauty, Smith decided the time had come. Three months later, he retired.

“This is really the first time in 44 years I haven’t had my finger on the button,” Smith told me. “And you know, that’s hard. I’m still thinking about what that looks like.”

Just as the loss of a longtime leader can disrupt the most experienced pack, the loss of Doug Smith rattled Yellowstone’s tight-knit core of wolf researchers. “It was hard for us to even bring up really,” Cassidy said. The park’s 55th winter study was just gearing up and the project had lost its most seasoned darter: counting Smith, there were only two.

Smith was uneasy when their paper finally published. The concluding paragraphs called for a “renewed interest in interagency collaboration … defined by compromise and based on science.” To the layperson, the language would appear inoffensive, but Smith knew it would ruffle feathers. He worried he’d be seen as coaching his former colleagues from the sidelines. That was not his intent. As usual, he was looking to start a conversation. “I think it’s critical,” he said. Smith is not done with wolves — far from it. He’s itching to get back in the field, somewhere new perhaps. “Credit is not what I’m after,” he said. After a lifetime of studying wolves — and people — he still has questions. He’d like to find some answers. “I’m interested,” he said. “That’s what I’m after.”

The post How to Save Yellowstone’s Wolves appeared first on The Intercept.

The Texas judge traveled to the Capitol to recount the daily challenges civil society groups face providing humanitarian aid to asylum seekers on the border. He was prepared to discuss the nitty-gritty of that work and relay what he sees as the “success story” of his binational, Mexican American community.

Instead, he found himself fielding shouted questions about whether he agreed that cartel wars would soon spill across the border and plunge the nation into chaos — because after all, wasn’t that the explicit aim of the president of the United States?

The House Judiciary Committee hearing, titled “Biden’s Border Crisis — Part One,” was the first to be held by the new Republican majority. To no one’s great surprise, the six hours of testimony and partisan monologues revealed a legislative body that’s as far from passing laws that would change U.S. border enforcement and immigration policy as it’s ever been. It also affirmed the GOP’s continued commitment to a depiction of border communities under invasion, inviting extremist violence in the region and against immigrant populations nationwide.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the committee chair, set the tone. Following an hourlong procedural fight over whether to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Jordan began the hearing by outlining a central pillar of his party’s 2023 political vision: that President Joe Biden is intentionally allowing widespread lawbreaking across the border through undocumented migration and drug trafficking.

“Month after month after month, we have set records for migrants coming into the country and frankly, I think it’s intentional,” Jordan said in his opening remarks. “Under President Biden, there is no border and Americans are paying the price.”

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Jordan’s Republican colleagues took the argument further as the day progressed. “Migrants are absolutely invading this country,” said Texas Rep. Lance Gooden. The new arrivals are “willing to kill,” added Rep. Troy Nehls, also from Texas. “The reality is Joe Biden has enabled the largest human and drug trafficking operation in U.S. history,” asserted Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming. “This tragedy is not only manmade, it is government mandated.”

Wednesday’s hearing came as new data obtained by CBS News showed that apprehensions at the border fell by roughly 40 percent in January, amounting to the lowest totals seen since Biden took office after reaching record highs late last year. In the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, an agency spokesperson told the Dallas Morning News that average daily encounters fell from a peak of 2,150 in December to 929 in January.

Though the decline followed the administration’s reorganization of several key border and immigration policies early last month, experts cautioned that it may be too early to link the two developments. Apprehension numbers on the border often fall in the winter months after the holiday season.

The Judge

Samaniego, the judge, was invited to the hearing by his fellow El Pasoan, Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar. The Republicans’ speakers included Brandon Dunn, co-founder of the “Forever 15 Project,” established in memory of his 15-year-old son, Noah, who died of a fentanyl overdose last year. While Dunn gave lawmakers a heart-wrenching account of his family’s tragedy, it was the Republicans’ second speaker, Arizona Sheriff Mark Dannels, of Cochise County, who commanded most of the party members’ attention.

Though both Samaniego and Dannels came to Washington as local elected officials offering firsthand accounts of conditions on the border, the pictures they painted were a study in contrasts.

Samaniego began with an attempt to dispel three myths: that the border is “open” in El Paso, that the city is experiencing an “invasion,” and that “humanitarianism and security” are a “binary choice.” The judge’s comments were not radical. They were hardly even political. Samaniego did not call for defunding the Department of Homeland Security — something Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, one of Wednesday’s most fiery and poorly informed speakers, had done. In fact, Samaniego repeatedly highlighted the close working relationship between the Border Patrol and nongovernmental aid organizations in El Paso.

The judge’s core focus was El Paso’s Migrant Support Services Center, which the city opened last year to relieve pressure on a nonprofit community that has weathered a succession of trying episodes in recent years: from the Trump administration’s family separation program, to the anti-immigrant terror attack at a local Walmart, to seeing the critical donations needed to support border-based humanitarian aid work dry up with Biden’s inauguration. Samaniego described how the center’s success in connecting nearly 27,000 asylum-seekers with family members across the country was “proof that an organized, well-funded system is manageable — even on a larger scale.”

“I’m here to dispel false narratives about our communities and ask that you reject partisan politics.”

“What your border communities need is understanding and the continued resources to handle these events,” he said. “I’m here to dispel false narratives about our communities and ask that you reject partisan politics, reform our outdated immigration laws, and find a way to support us in providing a humane, effective, and orderly response when surges occur.”

Samaniego had little opportunity to elaborate on the center’s work during questioning by Republican lawmakers. The judge was instead used as a sounding board for the swirl of incoherent talking points, half-truths, and lurid conspiracy theories that make up the GOP’s image of the Southwest. The border, they say, is both “open” and “run” by smugglers; the reason why smugglers would be needed if the border is open is never explained in these depictions and that remained the case throughout Wednesday’s proceedings.

Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., read a news article from his phone to the El Paso judge. The article described the violence that followed the recent arrest of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán’s son in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.

“Do you not see it as possible that in a future with an uncontrolled border we can’t control, that those same conditions could exist on the streets of American cities?” Bishop asked.

Visibly searching for the right words, Samaniego replied, “I believe that’s not the case because I think we’re mixing two things.”

On the border imagined by the Republicans, Mexico is both a nation that was utterly powerless to stop the most brutal criminal forces on the planet, and the correct place for the U.S. government to force asylum-seekers to wait out their case, as was the policy under former President Donald Trump.

The GOP lawmakers were adamant that rule of law needed to be enforced — except, evidently, in the case of asylum.

The Sheriff

While Samaniego is a largely local figure in El Paso, Dannels is not. As the most high-profile law enforcement official in the state’s largest county, the sheriff is a central character in Arizona’s right-wing political sphere and, by extension, the national MAGA universe as well.

With nearly 40 Fox News appearances since 2018, according to a recent Media Matters count, as well as multiple interviews with white nationalist fraudster Steve Bannon, the Cochise County sheriff was at home describing his area of operations in southern Arizona as a war zone.

“This is the largest crime scene in this country,” Dannels said.

Though he insisted that he did not travel 2,000 miles to promote a “political agenda,” Dannels repeatedly described the border today as the worst it’s been in decades and pinpointed the shift in conditions to the change in presidential administrations. “It was better under President Trump,” he said. “This is the worst I’ve seen.”

Dannels’s counterpart in neighboring Santa Cruz County, Sheriff David Hathaway, has publicly pushed back on such descriptions as wildly exaggerated, unhelpful, and self-interested.

Early in the hearing, in an attempt to overcome the fact that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl is seized at U.S. ports of entry, not between them, Roy argued that the Border Patrol is “now distracted processing human beings” and “can’t possibly catch all the fentanyl at the ports of entry.” Dannels agreed with the Texas Republican’s assessment.

The attempted justification revealed that Roy, the same advocate for defunding Homeland Security, shares with the sheriff of Cochise County a dim grasp of which parts of the department do what. Border Patrol agents do not work at ports of entry. That work is done by officers with the Office of Field Operations, a separate entity under U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency that Dannels misidentified as “Customs and Border Patrol.”

On the eve of the hearing, Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, convened a call with reporters predicting that Jordan and his colleagues would use their first judiciary hearing to cast the president as an international criminal mastermind orchestrating a border invasion. The first-term member of Congress took the Biden administration to task for failing to acknowledge the intent of House Republicans, and for extending the Trump administration’s central tool for stifling asylum access at the border — the Covid-era program known as Title 42 — out of a mistaken notion that it will garner respect, cooperation, or goodwill from GOP lawmakers.

“I think it’s a mistake to expand Title 42, one, because it will make the humanitarian crisis worse, and two, because the far-right extremists in the Republican Party are not engaging in a policy debate,” Casar told reporters. “They are not going to slow down their attacks on the administration just because the administration takes a harder line on immigration.”

Casar was on joined on the call by experts in armed right-wing extremist groups. The experts traced how the ideological currents that flow through the Republican Party on border and immigration issues — particularly the notion that the federal government is importing foreigners to destroy conservative America — routinely find their way into the manifestos and justifications of right-wing killers.

“When migrants are described as invaders, that leads to violence. Because how else does one stop an invasion?”

“These sorts of ideas, this dangerous anti-immigrant rhetoric, is causing a horrific distortion in the way that we deal with immigration and immigration policy, and it’s also leading to violence,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “That connection is brutally clear.”

Beirich pointed to recent mass killings in Pittsburgh, El Paso, and Buffalo, New York. “When migrants are described as invaders, that leads to violence,” she said. “Because how else does one stop an invasion?”

“I’m frankly just astounded that you could have so many political figures on the right parroting ideas that have led to mass murder,” she added. “I think this is just a shocking development that doesn’t get the attention that it deserves.”

The post House GOP Spends First Hearing on the Border Casting Joe Biden as an International Crime Boss appeared first on The Intercept.

“The decision is made when you’re looking through the scope and there’s a grizzly bear there,” he says. “Are you gonna shoot him or not? You think, ‘I can get away with it. I don’t like grizzly bears. I can do this.’ Or do you think, ‘It’s worthwhile to have these animals around — I shouldn’t do this’? That’s where the bears live or die.”

For now, the solitary hunter in the crosshairs of Servheen’s speeches is choosing between letting the grizzlies be or poaching them — but that could soon change. While grizzlies are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, Republican lawmakers across the Northern Rockies are pressing the Biden administration to turn management of the bears over to the states, thus allowing for the opening of legal hunting seasons.

Bear biologist Chris Servheen.

Photo: Courtesy of Chris Servheen

By the time he retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2016, Servheen had become a prominent advocate of the view that federal grizzly bear recovery efforts had worked and the time for delisting had come. Now the president and board chair of the Montana Wildlife Federation, the state’s oldest and largest conservation organization, Servheen’s position on the delisting question has turned 180 degrees. The reason is rooted in politics, and what he sees as a wave of fact-free “hysteria” sweeping the Rocky Mountain West.

In the past two years, Servheen watched with horror as a right-wing takeover in state politics — from Gov. Greg Gianforte’s 2020 election to the establishment of a Republican supermajority in 2022 — has radically reshaped Montana’s relationship to wildlife policy, particularly in the cases of protected predators that some Westerners see as living symbols of federal overreach.

“It’s a clown car of absurdities here. The people that are coming up with these ideas are totally misinformed about what really is going on.”

The first wave of the assault targeted wolves. During Montana’s last legislative session, in 2021, Gianforte — with the help of handpicked wildlife commissioners representing trophy hunting, outfitting, and livestock industries — signed bills to deregulate wolf-hunting techniques. The state also did away with hunting quotas on the northern border of Yellowstone National Park, leading to the deadliest winter the park’s biologists have ever recorded, with roughly a fifth of Yellowstone’s wolves killed in a matter of months.

With a new legislative session now underway, Servheen — who also serves as co-chair of the North American Bears Expert Team for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature — and other veteran wildlife biologists across Montana are profoundly concerned that Republican lawmakers are angling to apply the same regressive approach on grizzly bears.

“It’s a clown car of absurdities here,” he told me. “The people that are coming up with these ideas are totally misinformed about what really is going on, and it’s all based on their misconceptions and their crazy feelings about ‘I hate predators.’”

In Montana, the effort to delist grizzlies is led by Gianforte and his fellow Republican, U.S. Sen. Steve Daines. The pair bonded in the 1990s, working at RightNow Technologies, a tech company Gianforte co-founded with financial support from Daines’s father.

RightNow was purchased in 2012 for a reported $1.8 billion. The sale helped transform Gianforte and Daines from very wealthy to ultra-wealthy. A decade later, the two men are Montana’s most prominent Republican lawmakers, attending the same evangelical church in Bozeman, itself a node in the rapid rise of Christian nationalism fast transforming the state’s political landscape.

“As we await final delisting, we must do all that we can to ensure public safety, to stop the risks to human life, and to prevent further livestock depravation that is devastating Montana agriculture,” Daines said in a 2020 interview concerning the bears’ status in the state.

Though grizzlies do occasionally prey on livestock, the Republicans’ claims of widespread and devastating financial impacts overstate the scale of the problem. According to the Montana Department of Livestock, grizzly bears were responsible for killing 143 of Montana’s more than 2.7 million sheep and cattle in 2022, contributing to a loss of .0052 percent of the state’s livestock.” The state paid ranchers $234,378.37 to compensate for those losses.

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In his many years dealing with the conflicts that arise from expanding human and grizzly populations, Servheen has learned to separate positions from interests.

“I talk to many people about bears. Many times what they say is that: ‘I hate bears. We don’t want the federal government telling us what to do. We don’t like the Endangered Species Act. We don’t want grizzly bears to be in this area or around my property.’ Those are all positions,” he said. “The position discussions are worthless because you end up hitting a wall.”

Interests, like not wanting to lose livestock to grizzlies, are a different story. In the half century since grizzlies were added to the endangered species list, Servheen and a wider community of researchers and conservationists have developed an array of conflict management practices to address the inherent challenges of living with grizzlies: from compensation for ranchers, to the installation of electrified fences and food storage containers, to the relocation — and in some cases, removal — of problem bears.

“Trying to key in on what those interests are to people, and listening to them as opposed to telling them — I found that to be the most productive approach,” Servheen said.

Once interests are addressed, the work of underlining the value that large predators bring to an ecosystem — the kind of conversations that may prevent a hunter from becoming a poacher in a moment of unsupervised opportunity — can begin.

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At the time of his retirement, Servheen believed the future of grizzly recovery was on solid ground. Conflict resolution efforts were catching on and succeeding; Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, or FWP, still hung on to its reputation for considered wildlife management; and the bear populations in northwest and southwest Montana were growing. Servheen felt that his life’s work was in good hands. That confidence has been shattered in the years since.

Servheen’s theory of recovery and change turns on a respect for science. It requires a willingness to moderate and move on from long held but out-of-date positions, and it demands that state wildlife professionals operate free from political pressure and influence. In Montana, Servheen argued, those prerequisites have been blown to bits.

“I couldn’t have seen this coming,” the veteran bear biologist said. “For years, I was leading the recovery program and advocating that we should recover grizzly bears and delist the bears and turn them over to state management because I had a lot of faith in the state, that the state was making management decisions based on science and facts.”

That’s no longer the case.

“I can’t support that given the politicians doing what they’re doing,” Servheen said. “And this has just happened in the past two years. It’s totally new.”

Then-Rep. Greg Gianforte, R-Mont., left, waves to constituents at the Crow Fair in Crow Agency, Mont., on Aug. 18, 2018.

Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Wildlife governance in Montana, like most states, is managed by a panel of commissioners. Appointed by the governor, the commission sets regulations for the fish and wildlife agency — in this case, FWP. Montana law requires that those appointees be selected “without regard to political affiliation” and “solely for the wise management of the fish and wildlife of the state.”

Despite the apolitical requirements, Gianforte, Montana’s first Republican governor in a decade a half, populated his commission with a former running mate and a collection of high-dollar campaign donors — none of whom possessed professional wildlife management experience. He also tapped Henry “Hank” Worsech, the former executive director of the Montana Board of Outfitters, the licensing authority for Montana’s powerful political constituency of outfitters and guides, as director of FWP.

In years past, Democratic governors would veto the more extreme bills introduced by Republican lawmakers eager to liberalize wolf killing in Montana. Gianforte, by contrast, signed those measures into law. Worsech directed FWP to come up with plans for implementing the measures, and the commission gave them the green light. International outrage followed, as well as an ongoing federal review to determine whether wolves should be returned to the endangered species list.

Along with the many anti-wolf bills passed last session, Republican lawmakers also zeroed in on bears. Part of the push came from Republican state Rep. Paul Fielder, who also serves as the Montana Trappers Association’s liaison to FWP. Fielder hails from Thompson Falls, a tiny community in northwest Montana, a remote region with a reputation for attracting anti-government types that’s recently become awash in MAGA-inspired politics.

With Gianforte’s support, Fielder secured the re-legalization of hound hunting for black bears, a practice that Montana outlawed a century ago.

“He wrote this bill for something that was not happening in Montana for generations, and the Legislature, because it was proposed by a Republican, they all voted for it, and the governor signed it,” Servheen said.

Like the legalization of snares to catch and kill wolves — which Fielder sponsored and Gianforte signed — the hunting of black bears with hounds can also impact grizzlies, leading to dangers for the hounds, hunters, and grizzlies alike. (Fielder did not respond to an interview request.)

“It’s a minuscule number of people that want to do this,” Servheen said. “They’re a super isolated special interest, and the Legislature is going in and granting these people privileges to do things which are harmful to grizzly bears.”

“They’re a super isolated special interest, and the Legislature is going in and granting these people privileges to do things which are harmful to grizzly bears.”

Another bill signed by Gianforte in 2021 prohibited FWP from relocating problem bears, raising the possibility that first-time-offender bears would be shot on site. A third authorized ranchers to kill bears that they deemed as a threat to their livestock and left it to ranchers to define what constitutes a threat.

The onslaught prompted Servheen to speak out. In the heat of the 2021 legislative session, he wrote an op-ed for the Mountain Journal, a Bozeman-based conservation news website, connecting the Manifest Destiny-inspired thinking that led to mass predator extermination in the 1800s to Montana’s present moment.

“If this is allowed to continue,” he warned, “we stand to lose all that we have gained to build and maintain healthy natural ecosystems and repair the historic wrongs done to wildlife and nature by past generations.”

With a new legislative session underway, Republican lawmakers are pushing for further deregulation of predator hunting. Building on his 2021 black bear hound-hunting legislation, Fielder is now pursuing a bill that would eliminate the FWP commission’s authority to designate where that hunting occurs, increasing the likelihood of hound hunting in grizzly bear recovery zones.

“This is crazy,” Servheen said. “The commission is supposed to be the managers of wildlife. They’re supposed to be making those decisions. The Legislature should not be getting into the weeds of making detailed decisions about where wildlife are taken and how they’re taken. That is really inappropriate. They’re not experts in this.”

A grizzly near Swan Lake in Yellowstone National Park on June 6, 2015.

Photo: Neal Herbert/NPS

The big question now is whether the Northern Rockies states will win the right to manage their grizzly populations themselves.

As wildlife species listed under the Endangered Species Act recover, states must submit plans showing that they can manage the animals in such a way to sustain viable populations. Last month, FWP released a draft grizzly management plan for public review that sketched out a new framework for managing the bears.

The final decision on the delisting will fall to Martha Williams, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A veteran of the Montana wildlife management scene, Williams was director of FWP before joining the federal government. A lawyer by training and an expert in the Endangered Species Act, Williams was central in Montana’s efforts to attain state management of wolves more than a decade ago. Her appointment to head U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received enthusiastic support from Daines and his Democratic counterpart, Jon Tester.

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Some wildlife advocates, though, have questioned the legality of Williams’s appointment. She lacks a scientific degree, which is required under federal law. Others worry that Daines’s support for her appointment could be a sign of her potential openness to delisting grizzlies.

Servheen pushed back on the notion that U.S. Fish and Wildlife is certain to give Montana Republicans their long-standing dream of legalized grizzly hunts.

“It’s not a foregone conclusion,” he said.

While it’s true that Montana has petitioned for delisting, Williams and her team have yet to determine whether that petition merits a review. The process for removing an animal from the endangered species list goes beyond raw numbers, Servheen pointed out. He argued the laws on the books and those being considered — the hound hunting and authorizing private citizens to kill grizzlies any time they feel their property is threatened — make it impossible for Montana to satisfy requirements to ensure continued grizzly recovery.

Grizzly bears have one of the slowest reproduction rates of any large mammal on the planet. They don’t bounce back from heavy human-caused mortality the way wolves do.

“You could have dead bears everywhere, and you would be way beyond the sustainable limit,” Servheen said. “Fish Wildlife and Parks has no ability to control it, therefore you don’t have an adequate regulatory mechanism.”

“They would treat the grizzly bear just like they’re now treating wolves. That’s what would happen.”

While the laws could be tweaked to please U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as the federal agency considers the delisting question, Republicans in Montana have already revealed their anti-predator intentions, Servheen argued.

“As soon as the bear was delisted, then what’s to stop the Legislature from putting those laws right back in place?” he asked. “There’s nothing to stop them from doing that and given where they are and where they’re coming from and what they’re doing — it’s a clear indication that’s probably what they would do.”

“They would treat the grizzly bear just like they’re now treating wolves,” he said. “That’s what would happen.”

The current moment is as decisive as any in the history of grizzly bear recovery in the United States. A half-century of hard work that for many symbolizes the best of what conservation can be hangs in the balance. Servheen and others are fighting to turn the tide, but he worries it won’t be enough.

“I don’t see things getting any better,” he said. “I just see them getting worse, unfortunately.”

The post A Biologist Fought to Remove Grizzlies From the Endangered Species List — Until Montana Republicans Changed His Mind appeared first on The Intercept.

The last time the younger Guzmán was arrested, in 2019, hundreds of gunmen laid siege to Culiacán, burning cars, setting roadblocks, and surrounding a housing complex belonging to the families of Mexican soldiers. Fourteen people were killed on “Jueves negro” — “Black Thursday” — and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ultimately ordered Guzmán released.

Though Mexican authorities held on to Guzmán this time around, the raid exacted a heavy cost on Sinaloans still recovering from the last wave of violence. While details continue to surface, the latest reporting indicates that at least 30 people were killed — including 11 soldiers and 19 alleged shooters loyal to Guzmán. At least three civilians, including a child, were reportedly wounded in gun battles that raged for up to 12 hours.

As gunmen were terrorizing Culiacán on Thursday, President Joe Biden announced major policy changes on the U.S.-Mexico border, including the expansion of a Trump administration policy authorizing the summary expulsion of asylum-seekers to Mexico without due process. Both the Guzmán operation and the White House announcement came just three days before a summit, beginning this week, that brings Biden and López Obrador — as well as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — together for a meeting to discuss the most pressing issues facing the continent.

Guzmán’s arrest follows a pattern of prior cases where high-level narcos suddenly found themselves under arrest at times of important international summits. Many journalists and analysts speculated that Mexican authorities intentionally timed their operation against Guzmán for this week’s high-profile meeting — showing that, contrary to complaints from U.S. security officials, Mexico was committed to providing justice and security to its citizens.

“Was it a gift to Biden? I don’t know,” Michael Lettieri, a senior human rights fellow at Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, told The Intercept. “I kind of go with Occam’s razor there — if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck.”

Though Mexican officials indicated that the operation benefited from U.S. support, López Obrador denied that Guzmán’s arrest was politically motivated. “We act with autonomy, with independence,” the president said last week. “Yes, there’s cooperation, that will continue, but we make our own decisions as a sovereign government.”

Guzmán, a flashy young narco, is now being held in the same maximum-security prison that his father tunneled out of in 2015. While the elder Guzmán is serving a life sentence in the U.S., his son’s fate remains unclear. Though he bears his father’s name, Guzmán is considered a less significant figure in the family business than his brothers, and, while he is wanted in the U.S., the López Obrador administration has indicated that he will not be extradited anytime soon.

“He’s a useful scapegoat for fentanyl if he ends up in the U.S. At the same time, how quickly is he going to end up in the U.S.? I’m not so sure,” Lettieri said. “I would suspect that if Biden thinks he’s getting the gift, he’s going to find that the gift takes a while to arrive.”

Gift or not, Lettieri pushed back on suggestions that Guzmán’s recapture reflected a moment of redemption for López Obrador following the events of 2019.

“I would suspect that if Biden thinks he’s getting the gift, he’s going to find that the gift takes a while to arrive.”

“The point of 2019 was not that he got away,” he said. “The point of 2019 was that organized crime shut down a major city, took over a major city, and the state was just sitting there helpless. And guess what? That happened again.”

Despite a deployment of 3,000 Mexican soldiers, hundreds of civilian vehicles were commandeered by Guzmán’s “pistoleros.” Many of the carjacked vehicles were torched as Guzmán’s forces descended on the airport, where they opened fire on aircraft with .50 caliber sniper rifles — all but certainly procured in the U.S. — in an attempt to prevent his removal from the city.

“Organized crime not only shut down an entire city, they shut down an entire state,” Lettieri said. Still, despite the extraordinary show of force and its implications for Mexico, Lettieri is doubtful that Guzmán’s arrest will have much impact on this week’s summit.

“There’s so much on the table in terms of bilateral issues,” he said. “Security is never the top one.”

President Joe Biden arrives at the Santa Lucia Airport in Mexico City on Jan. 8, 2023.

Photo: Carlos Tischler/Sipa USA via AP

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Biden’s visit to Mexico City, the first for a U.S. president in nearly a decade, finds the relationship between the countries dominated by Washington’s fixation on immigration. Driven in no small part by endless attacks from a Republican Party unlikely to ever to declare satisfaction with the Democrats’ response to the issue, the president’s approach has left many experts and advocates unimpressed, frustrated, and disappointed.

“When the Biden administration speaks to the Mexican government, the central priority is how to further reduce arrivals and accessibility at the U.S. border to migrants and asylum-seekers, unfortunately,” Stephanie Brewer, director of Mexico policy issues at WOLA, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization, told The Intercept.

That fixation is the extension of a view held among officials and policymakers in Washington over recent years that the U.S. should “externalize” its border security mission — meaning that the project of stopping unauthorized immigration into the U.S. should begin in Mexico or better yet, in Central and South America.

The project began in earnest the last time Biden was in the White House, serving as vice president in the Obama administration. The U.S. poured millions of dollars into Mexican security forces in an effort to clamp down on Central American migration across Mexico’s southern border.

The Trump administration took the effort even further, threatening to shut down border trade unless Mexico agreed to programs — illegal under U.S. domestic and international law — in which asylum-seekers were systematically dumped in under-resourced and dangerous communities in northern Mexico to wait out their cases.

In his announcement last week, Biden expanded one of those Trump-era programs — known as Title 42 — to allow the expulsion Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans, further cementing the border externalization project of his predecessors.

By investing so much in pushing the border out, the U.S. weakens its own negotiating positions on other critical issues with Mexico, Brewer argued, including creating a public security framework that goes beyond the militarized, whack-a-mole drug war operations that rocked Culiacán last week.

“It’s giving the Mexican government this strangely disproportionate role and power in terms of apparently controlling U.S. southern border arrivals or enforcement,” Brewer said.

The current arrangement simultaneously puts Mexico — a country where disruptions in the day-to-day operations of organized crime can lead to the shutdown of entire states — in a position to receive tens of thousands of vulnerable people. Many of those will arrive as part of families with small children fleeing the very same forces of organized crime, corruption, and state violence that dominate large swaths of Mexico.

Under those conditions, “the whole bilateral relationship becomes distorted in furtherance of inflicting suffering and violating the rights of asylum-seekers,” Brewer said. “And there’s no clear benefit for anyone in that scenario.”

“This is not going to convince people who are on the other side of the spectrum.”

Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the so-called drug war in Mexico — a misleadingly simplistic name that refers to an infinitely complex pattern of violence, conflict, and official impunity that implicates U.S. and Mexican policymakers and citizens alike. Brewer contended that the urgent need to address this insecurity is one of the many critical binational issues overshadowed by an attempt to satisfy critics who will never be satisfied, no matter how much Biden pares back longstanding U.S. commitments to upholding domestic and international asylum laws.

“This is not going to convince people who are on the other side of the spectrum,” she said. Caught in the middle are everyday people — from Mexicans attempting to live their lives in communities like Jesús María, to asylum-seekers turned back at the border. “They’re the principal ones who are losing in this equation,” Brewer said. “They have nowhere to go.”

In the days since Guzmán’s arrest, residents of Jesús María have described the violence they witnessed last week. While the government insisted that no civilians were harmed in the operation, witnesses told the local news outlet Ríodoce that two innocent bystanders were injured by bullets that punctured their roof and that a boy between the ages of 10 and 12 was shot in the head by a soldier after stepping outside his home. The paper reported that the boy was transferred to a hospital and, as of Thursday, is still alive.

If there’s one thing he’s learned in his many years tracking human rights abuses in Mexico, Lettieri said, “it’s that when those helicopters start shooting like that, the likelihood that it’s basically an extrajudicial execution is pretty high.” He’s awaiting further, independently confirmed information on the deaths of nongovernment personnel reported last week.

“The use of helicopter gunships, it’s war tactics,” Lettieri said. “And it’s not always clear that it’s particularly attuned to human rights.”

The post Mexico Arrested El Chapo’s Son Before International Summit: “Was It a Gift to Biden?” appeared first on The Intercept.

State and federal officials, in a joint filing this week, informed a judge in Arizona’s U.S. district court that a process to dismantle the governor’s unlawful barrier would soon begin. Following weeks of fierce local resistance on the ground, the agreement will ironically make Ducey — a Republican who declared his state under invasion — the first U.S. lawmaker to initiate a large-scale border wall removal in modern American history.

Andy Kayner and Jennifer Wrenn, who live just north of the container wall, tempered their reactions to the news. The couple has been at the center of the battle to halt the governor’s project, fueled by outrage over the harm that was done to a landscape they treasure and the endless convoys of trailer-pulling trucks rumbling past their home day and night.

“Obviously, we’d love to see the wall totally gone,” Kayner told The Intercept. “Open that space back up for a wildlife corridor.”

On the one hand, Wrenn said, the agreement was clearly a win for the local residents who protested, as well as their wider network of supporters. On the other, she worried that Ducey, who leaves office at the end of the year, will slow-roll his deinstallation effort, leaving his Democratic successor, Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs, to clean up the mess. “How much can he remove before January 5?” Wrenn asked, referring to Hobbs’s inauguration date.

“Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for putting it in, then taking it out, and then restoring the land and restoring all the roads.”

Precisely how much Ducey’s entire endeavor has — and will — cost Arizonans remains to be seen. In October, the governor’s office told The Intercept the installation of the wall in Coronado National Forest, south of Tucson, would cost $95 million. Combined with a separate, smaller, equally unlawful project in Yuma, total contracted costs for container wall installation in Arizona over the past year has been $123.6 million. Removal and remediation costs associated with taking the containers down could drive the overall total up even further.

Ducey should be the one footing the bill, Wrenn argued. “Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for putting it in, then taking it out,” she said, “and then restoring the land and restoring all the roads.”

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Ducey first began stacking multi-ton shipping containers along the border in Coronado National Forest, in Cochise County, in late October despite being informed multiple times by federal officials in the U.S. Forest Service that his project was unauthorized and thus illegal.

In a lawsuit targeting the Biden administration’s top land management agencies, Ducey argued that a century’s worth of legal agreement that the border in Southern Arizona is federal property was wrong. The state had jurisdiction over the land, he contended, and because he declared a state of emergency resulting from a purported “invasion,” he was within his rights to disregard federal laws and authorization requirements surrounding construction in the national forest. (The litigation is ongoing).

In a span of a month and a half, Ducey placed nearly 4 miles of shipping containers across federally protected jaguar habitat entirely unimpeded. By all indications, he was on track to complete a 10-mile wall through the stunning San Rafael Valley when his march was halted by a network of local residents frustrated with the absence of a federal response. Kayner and Wrenn were among them, parking their pop-up camper near the contractors’ vehicles and spending several nights at the site with other local activists and allies.

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Beginning on December 5, the demonstrators’ continued presence ended construction at the site. The week after the shutdown began, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Ducey and Arizona’s Department of Emergency and Military Affairs over the container wall. In order to avoid the injunction that the suit called for, Ducey and the state entered into the agreement that was laid out in federal court this week.

The brief, two-page stipulation says that by January 3, Arizona “to the extent feasible” will remove all containers and equipment related to the much smaller installation in Yuma. The agreement calls for the same removal process for the much larger Coronado National Forest installation, though it does not include a target end date for those efforts.

In comments to the New York Times on Wednesday, Ducey’s press secretary, C.J. Karamargin, implied that the governor’s project had achieved its objective in pressuring the Biden administration to fill gaps in the border wall more quickly. “We’ll happily remove them if the federal government gets serious and does what they’re supposed to do, which is secure the border,” Karamargin said of the governor’s containers. “We now have indications that they’re moving closer, that they’re more serious.”

In a briefing in late July, Customs and Border Protection officials said that the Biden administration was beginning a “remediation” process along the border that would include filling “small” gaps in the border wall in select areas, in addition to various road and environmental repair projects. Contrary to Karamargin’s suggestion this week, a Customs and Border Protection public affairs officer John Mennell told The Intercept that the agency has made no changes to its plans because of Ducey’s Coronado project. Those plans, available online, do not describe erecting a border wall where the governor placed the containers.

For Kayner and Wrenn, the story of Ducey’s containers — how they came to cross Coronado National Forest and what stopped them from going any further — are linked to issues that go beyond the border and immigration. It’s the way in which the governor’s illegal wall, cleaving a vital desert ecosystem in half as it did, created yet another threat to biodiversity in an era of mass extinction. “We’d love to see dialogue about what we’re going to do with that area long term,” Kayner said. “Let’s just talk about being a little kinder to the wildlife, who’ve got no seat at the table.”

“This was the politicians violating the rule of law, and ordinary citizens — being peaceful, lawful, and legal — taking it into their own hands.”

Wrenn, meanwhile, linked the container wall to events in Washington. “This was a perfect counterpoint to the insurrection and the January 6 Committee,” she said. “This was the politicians violating the rule of law, and ordinary citizens — being peaceful, lawful, and legal — taking it into their own hands and helping preserve democracy in our country.”

Ducey’s sudden reversal on the project raises a series of questions. What if the Department of Justice had sought an injunction sooner? How much money could have been saved? And how much damage to the environment — and the credibility of the U.S. Forest Service and the laws it’s meant to enforce — could have been prevented?

One thing that is clear, Wrenn said, is that Ducey’s wall became the catalyst for something unforgettable. “When we realized that this wasn’t just a protest, that we could actually sit down in the road and stop it, it was the biggest eureka moment,” she said. “After hundreds and hundreds of protests I’ve been to in my life, I’ve never felt that — that this was real, that this had direct positive impact.”

The post Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey Agrees to Remove Illegal Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

The Browns live 10 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, on the southeastern edge of Sierra Vista, in Cochise County, Arizona. Like many of their neighbors at the foot of the rugged Huachuca Mountains, the Browns’s worry was javelinas, tenacious borderland omnivores often mistaken for wild pigs. Their dogs had been attacked. Their garden was in peril. Javelina damage keeps the Browns up at night. A purported wave of migrants laying siege to their community does not.

In late October, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey began unloading thousands of shipping containers on the border in the Coronado National Forest to thwart a supposed “invasion” on the Browns’ doorstep. Topped with concertina wire and welded together, the nearly 9,000-pound boxes would be stacked two high on land where the retirees chop wood every winter, where they took their sons hiking and camping as kids, and where they still hike and camp to this day. In the early 2000s, they saw evidence of heavy migration through the area — discarded desert clothes, empty water jugs, trash — but it hadn’t been like that in more than a decade.

On October 26, two days after Ducey’s project began, the Browns got in their truck and set off to see the shipping containers for themselves. They descended a rocky road east of the picturesque San Rafael Valley, then turned south toward Mexico. As they neared the border, they were stopped at an ad hoc checkpoint. A bald man, dressed in black with body armor and reflective sunglasses, approached. He wore no insignia and refused to say who he worked for. Michael asked if he could drive up to the containers and take some photos. The guard said he could not. Michael asked him why.

“I’m not answering any more questions, sir,” the guard replied.

The scene was as horrifying as anything the Browns could have imagined. Heavy-duty pickups were ripping down the dirt road hauling in shipping containers on trailers. The containers were then transferred onto a large military truck that raced down the road running parallel to the border, blaring a loud horn as it passed. At the end of the line, the containers were wrapped in a thick chain and hoisted by backhoes. Swinging precariously through the air, they were plopped in the dirt, then shoved into place with a forklift. The clanking and screeching of metal on metal filled the otherwise quiet landscape. The grinding of the heavy vehicles on the desert soil enveloped the entire area in a thick cloud of fine dust.

Christie was incensed, telling the guard that she would walk to the containers. “This is a dangerous area, ma’am,” the man said.

“This is our national land,” Christie said.

The guard cocked his head to the side, like he was schooling a child. “This is also the state of Arizona,” he said. “Are you a federal employee?”

Michael interjected: “I was.”

Michael, now 67, had lived in the area for nearly half a century and knew as much about border walls as anyone. Serving in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for two decades, he oversaw the construction of Border Patrol stations in Naco and Douglas. In 2007, he oversaw installation of the first federally contracted “pedestrian fencing” in Arizona. He continued to oversee wall construction across the southwest into the Trump years, before retiring in the spring of 2021.

Looking out across the landscape, Michael Brown saw a reckless operation that he would have shut down in a heartbeat. He decided to take a walk through the brush, snapping photos of birds while taking in evidence of the environmental damage. Christie waited back in the truck with their dog, Izzy. A man parked nearby and trained a pair of binoculars on Christie. He watched her until Michael returned and continued watching as the couple drove away.

An hour later, the Browns were back home when the doorbell rang. Michael opened the door to find two armed men in body armor, a pair of unmarked vehicles behind them. Unlike the guard at Coronado, they wore identifiable insignia. This was Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels’s heavily subsidized and much-advertised border strike force.

The deputies told Michael they’d received a complaint that a truck like his, carrying four suspicious men, was spotted outside a hotel where the governor’s contractors were staying. The contractors had told police that they were frightened. Michael explained that he and Christie had simply gone to see the container wall. He showed the deputies cellphone video of their interaction with the guard. A third unmarked vehicle pulled into his driveway. Before long, the deputies’ demeanor softened, they turned friendly and appeared satisfied. As they left, one of the men remarked to Michael that the governor’s wall was a “sensitive political situation.”

“I know the contractors at the border took down my license plate and called them,” Michael told me a month later, over coffee in his kitchen. “I don’t understand why.” While some would be unnerved, he was mostly perplexed. Anyway, he and Christie now had bigger things to worry about.

Since their visit, Ducey had cut across miles of pristine desert. Federal authorities had told the governor that his project was illegal, but were doing nothing to stop it. The Browns were shocked. “The Forest Service is mandated to preserve and to protect our national lands,” Michael said. In the face of inaction, the Browns were left with one choice: gather as many friends, neighbors, and allies as they could and stop the governor themselves.

President Joe Biden greets Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey after arriving on Air Force One, on Dec. 6, 2022, at Luke Air Force Base in Maricopa County, Ariz.

Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP

Ducey’s Democratic successor, Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs, has said she will stop adding containers to the wall. She has not, however, committed to taking the existing structures down. If Hobbs does take the containers down, it could cost as much or more than it did to put them in. If she doesn’t, it will mean the collapse of a remarkable binational ecosystem, one of the last places in the U.S. where jaguars still roam, and the death of a stunning Sonoran Desert landscape set aside for all to enjoy.

The story of Arizona’s wall of shipping containers is a story about immigration and conservation, of public lands and insurrection, but as the weeks went by, it turned into something more. In the shadow of the governor’s wall, a roughly four-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border became the setting for a remarkable and unlikely story of everyday people who, with no one to count on but each other, stood up against the most powerful lawmaker in their state and won.

Michael and Christie Brown near the shipping container wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Coronado National Forest in Arizona, on Nov. 29, 2022.

Photo: Kitra Cahana for The Intercept

McSpadden works for the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, where he documents threats to the unique ecosystems of the Sonoran Desert. On social media, he intersperses viral videos of destructive border wall construction with equally popular videos of borderland wildlife. His encyclopedic knowledge of Arizona’s backcountry is matched by his passion for the animals that live there. From iridescent bugs to lightning-fast pronghorn, McSpadden loves them all, but one borderland resident stands above the others: el tigre de la frontera, the jaguar.

McSpadden’s employer has been central in the fight to return the big cats to their historic range across the American Southwest. In 1994, the group filed a lawsuit that led to the inclusion of jaguars on the Endangered Species List. Today, McSpadden is part of a constellation of advocates and biologists who monitor the ultra-elusive predators as they pass back and forth across the border. He is one of the few people alive who has managed to capture a jaguar on a game camera in the Arizona borderlands — not once, but twice.

As part of the center’s legal efforts, the federal government was forced to designate 1,194 square miles in Arizona and New Mexico as critical jaguar habitat in 2014, limiting the kinds of activity permitted there. That habitat included land on the western slope of the Huachuca Mountains in the Coronado National Forest, where Ducey began dropping his containers on October 24.

When the container project began, McSpadden was in a single-engine airplane flying low over the border. His phone rang. Robin Silver, a co-founder of the center, was on the line. He told McSpadden to get to Coronado right away. Tell the pilot to land, he said, or better yet, fly to the installation site.

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It wasn’t possible. I happened to be in the air with McSpadden that day. For more than a month, we had both been trying to confirm rumors that Ducey was preparing a mass deployment of containers somewhere outside Nogales, Arizona, likely in Coronado National Forest. Hundreds of the metal boxes had been stored at an unused armory in the border city then quietly disappeared. The governor’s office was being cagey, confirming that Ducey was eyeing locations but refusing to confirm where. McSpadden and I took a tour with EcoFlight, a company that provides aerial tours to environmental advocates and journalists, to scout for signs of activity in the Pajarito Mountains. By the time we touched back down in Tucson, it was clear we should have been flying further east.

Russ McSpadden, Southwest Conservation Advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, scans the border for signs of new wall installation. October 24, 2022.

Photo: Michael McKisson

Two days after our flight, I climbed into McSpadden’s work truck. Setting off in the morning, we pulled into the Coronado National Memorial before noon, then hiked south along a ridge with a commanding view of the landscape below.

Though we were miles from the site, the noise of Ducey’s project echoed through the valley. One after another, pickups pulling containers came rumbling down the Forest Service road that leads to the border. Plumes of dust curled above them. McSpadden set his backpack in the grass and unloaded a drone. I leaned against a wire fence and squinted into the valley. In just two days, Ducey’s contractors had fashioned a shipping container fort to serve as their base of operations. Armed guards waited at the entrance. McSpadden nicknamed it the “OK Corral.”

The drone zipped into the air and was out of sight within seconds. We spent two hours on the ridge watching Ducey’s trucks transform wilderness into junkyard. Trump’s wall-building was jarring for anyone who saw it up close, but this ramshackle operation was something else entirely.

Protesters block construction of the shipping container wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Coronado National Forest in Arizona, on Nov. 29, 2022.

Photo: Kitra Cahana for The Intercept

On September 16, Coronado National Forest officials received a request from the Arizona Division of Emergency Management seeking “authorization to place barriers on National Forest land in all areas that currently have gaps in the federal wall.” The Department of Emergency and Military Affairs, or DEMA, manages a $335 million “Border Security Fund” that the Republican-controlled legislature approved in 2021. The disbursements have been controversial, with the governor’s emergency managers distributing more cash to Republican-led counties and sheriffs — including Cochise County and Dannels, its sheriff — than their Democratic counterparts.

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With DEMA showing no sign of plans to abide by the process for the authorization of a massive construction project on federal land, the Forest Service denied Ducey’s request. On October 6, Kerwin Dewberry, Coronado’s forest supervisor, sent a letter to Maj. Gen. Kerry L. Muehlenbeck, the director of DEMA, reporting the sighting of dozens of shipping containers, construction equipment, and private security personal on federal land. “The Forest Service did not authorize this occupancy and use,” he wrote. Muehlenbeck fired back, pointing to a state of emergency Ducey declared in August: “Due to the lack of response and pursuant to the directive by Governor Ducey, work will commence to close the referenced gap to ensure the safety of Arizona citizens.” The response prompted an escalation from the Forest Service, with the chief of the agency’s southwest region reiterating that the governor’s project was unlawful.

In his complaint two weeks later, Ducey focused on the so-called Roosevelt Reservation. In photographs, it’s that flattened land that runs parallel to the border wall. Former President Theodore Roosevelt set aside this 60-foot-wide roadway as federal land in 1907, five years before Arizona became a state, so that the U.S. government could forever have an unimpeded view into Mexico.

For 115 years, the agreement that the easement is federal property has been a staple of borderlands jurisprudence. Ducey, however, presented the novel argument that Roosevelt’s declaration lacked authority and the state had jurisdiction over the land, particularly in times of emergency and cases of invasion; Ducey declared that both were present in Arizona in August. Under President Joe Biden, the federal government abdicated its obligation to provide security by opening the border to a criminal invasion of drugs and foreigners, the governor alleged. Arizona had the right to defend itself by filling gaps in the border wall that Trump left behind. (The Biden administration was already in the process of filling those gaps.)

Ducey’s reading of the law would grant border governors unprecedented power to sidestep federal statutes that have governed public lands for generations. In his view, he was both empowered and obligated to disregard those time-consuming processes. His lawsuit called on the court to agree.

Until a judge rules otherwise, Ducey has demonstrated every intent to keep doing what he’s doing. The Department of Justice has filed a motion to dismiss his suit.

Ducey selected AshBritt, a Florida-based disaster response company with significant ties to the Republican Party, for the Coronado project. In 2018, the company made a half-million-dollar donation to a Trump Super PAC, in violation of prohibitions against federal contractor political contributions. The firm’s CEO paid a hefty Federal Election Commission fine. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald McGahn, negotiated the settlement.

The Center for Biological Diversity quickly filed suit against Ducey, citing the threat to jaguar habitat under the Endangered Species Act, but there was a catch. The landmark environmental law gives defendants nearly two months to change allegedly bad behavior before any enforcement activity can commence. That meant nothing was happening right away. So in addition to that suit, the organization also intervened in Ducey’s lawsuit as a defendant. If the feds wouldn’t defend the land, Robin Silver, the group’s co-founder, told me, the Center for Biological Diversity would.

“What I saw was shocking and heartbreaking.”

McSpadden submitted a declaration in the case. Though Ducey had asserted authority over the Roosevelt Reservation, McSpadden detailed how the governor was, in fact, widening the longstanding federal easement. Describing our visit to the site the previous month, he testified: “What I saw was shocking and heartbreaking.”

McSpadden’s declaration was filed November 1, seven days before the midterm elections. Silver was sending his images from the field directly to Biden’s top land managers, including the defendants in Ducey’s lawsuit and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. With four decades of experience suing the federal government, often successfully, Silver’s connections in Washington run deep. He demanded that the feds do their job and stop Ducey’s lawbreaking. The message he got back was clear: Wait until the elections are over.

Less than 24 hours after Arizona’s polls closed on November 8, McSpadden and I were on the ground in Coronado. This time, instead of watching from the ridge, we drove directly to the site.

After walking the length of the wall, we cut through the OK Corral on the way to our vehicles. A gaggle of contractors in the makeshift fort exploded, shouting that we couldn’t be there and that they would call the sheriff. One of the men yelled out that he had already sent two people to the hospital that day and would happily send two more. As we continued, a private security guard with a sidearm approached and told us that the area was “very dangerous.” McSpadden responded that we were on Forest Service land, and the governor’s contractors were free to leave.

Up close, the scene had a Mad Max feel. Swirling dust. A wall of containers crowned with razor wire. Trees snapped, trampled, and shoved into mangled heaps. The contractors had laid down more than a mile of boxes since our last visit. The desert washes that provide runoff for monsoon rains were now blocked. Most startling of all were the bus-sized military vehicles racing down the narrow Roosevelt Reservation road. It felt unsafe for all living things in the area, including the workers.

Andrew Kayner, 71, sits down and blocks construction of Gov. Doug Ducey’s shipping container wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Coronado National Forest in Arizona, on Nov. 29, 2022.

Photo: Kitra Cahana for The Intercept

Michael Brown was a young carpenter when he landed a job on the base in the early 1980s. He had fallen in love with the jagged mountains and golden grasslands of the San Rafael Valley after a Christmas visit in 1975. Brown’s work on the base led to a job with the Army Corps of Engineers, which turned into a 20-year career of inspecting and managing border job sites. He insists the structures he built for the Bush and Obama administrations were “fences,” not “walls.” There’s a meaningful distinction, Brown argues: Fences can be seen through, walls cannot. “Border Patrol agents do not like walls,” he said. “They want to be able to see into Mexico.”

“I can proudly say that I had no part of the Trump-era stuff. To me, that was not done for security. It was for racism.”

Brown has complicated feelings about his old line of work. “I do have a history that I’m not proud of,” he told me the first time we spoke. From the beginning, he said, he questioned the border wall projects — “It just didn’t feel right,” he said — but still he worked on them. Brown’s last wall was an Obama-era contract that carried over into 2017. “I can proudly say that I had no part of the Trump-era stuff,” he said. “To me, that was not done for security. It was for racism.”

The Trump years were a profoundly affecting period for the Browns. Christie participated in a border wall lawsuit. Michael joined her at protests, though he had to keep a low profile because he was still working for the government. With Trump’s defeat, the couple believed the worst was behind them. Then Ducey’s project came along. Still, bad as it was, they expected that the conclusion of the midterms — with a Democrat winning the governor’s mansion — would spell the end of Ducey’s destruction of public lands. But then that didn’t happen either.

Michael used his experience managing government projects to catalogue the myriad ways in which Ducey ran roughshod over critical laws and regulations. He wrote to Arizona Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema and Reps. Raul Grijalva and Ann Kirkpatrick, at the time all Democrats, to share his concerns. He did the same with the Arizona office of the International Boundary and Water Commission and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. He included photos. Nothing happened.

My efforts to obtain any sort of comment from the Forest Service on its lack of action were similarly fruitless. I called Silver to see if he was hearing any murmurs of activity from the feds. “It’s the same for us,” he told me. “It’s like, give me a fucking break. Your habitat is just getting trashed. If I did that, you’d have the cops arrest me, and yet you’re standing by.”

The veteran environmentalist continued to send Biden administration officials visual evidence from the field, including a post-midterms email with the subject line, “WHERE ARE YOU????????”

The impact of Ducey’s project was growing by the hour. By mid-November, all illusions that the feds would suddenly spring into action were gone. On the other side of the mountains, meanwhile, close encounters with the governor’s project were beginning to have a radicalizing effect.

Kate Scott near the shipping container wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Coronado National Forest in Arizona, on Nov. 29, 2022.

Photo: Kitra Cahana for The Intercept

Martin Brown — no relation to Michael and Christie — lives in the canyon and teaches high school art in Tucson. He treasures his scenic commute, but it requires taking off before dawn. The most dangerous portion of his drive is in the canyon. Last month, he nearly died there.

Brown had been passing the convoys of pickups that came racing down the canyon for weeks. “It’s like clockwork, every morning, around 6 a.m., I pass 10 to 12 of those monster trucks,” he told me. “These are not the shorties. These are the 40-footers,” Brown said. “When they come barreling around those sharp corners, they almost can’t avoid being in your lane.”

On November 15, Brown rounded a bend to find one of Ducey’s container-carting contractors fully in his lane and coming fast. The truck and trailer passed within inches. “I would say that was the closest I’ve come to death ever,” Brown said. “If I hadn’t been coffee’d up and alert that day, I wouldn’t have made it. It would have hit me head-on.”

Brown told his closest neighbor, Kate Scott, about his near-death experience. Scott, who had had her own close call with the governor’s contractors, was outraged. She’d had enough.

A veterinary technician by training, Scott runs the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center, where she rehabilitates injured raptors. She and her husband bought the secluded ranch where the center is located, 20 miles north of Mexico, in 1997. The couple has far more trouble with trespassing hunters than migrants. “I’m never scared,” Scott told me. “All that stuff that they’re always harping on on the news, it’s all baloney.”

Scott’s greatest worry is the environmental damage that the baloney is causing. In July 2020, she and a friend visited the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, a world-famous birding destination where Trump was deploying explosives to make way for a 30-foot-tall bollard wall.

“I’ll never forget it,” Scott said. “When I saw it — it was like I was stabbed in the chest. It was a very visceral, very emotional feeling that I don’t think I’ve ever felt in my adult life.”

“It’s a crime against nature. Everyone in America should be mad because it’s going through their national forest.”

Scott organized protests and got to know other Arizonans fighting to protect their public lands. When she returned from a recent trip to find that those lands were once again under attack, she was horrified. “I felt the same way when I saw the Trump’s wall — that this cannot stand,” Scott said. “It’s a crime against nature. Everyone in America should be mad because it’s going through their national forest.”

“It’s another form of insurrection,” she argued. “You’re saying, ‘I’m not going to follow the rule of law, President Biden, I’m going to do what I want. This is my state.’”

Scott wasn’t the only one feeling that way. Jennifer Wrenn and her husband Andy Kayner live farther south down Lyle Canyon. They are among Arizona’s closest residents to Ducey’s wall. For more than a month, their mornings have begun with the clamoring of convoys passing their front door. They continue nonstop until sundown.

“Every day of the week. Sundays included,” Wrenn told me. “They’re very fast, very careless, and I’ve known several people who have been run off the road.”

Wrenn and Kayner reflect the wide blast radius of Ducey’s project: At the center are the containers, at the edges are Arizonans like them. Torn up by the governor’s convoys, the roads near the couple’s home have been nearly destroyed for a project ostensibly meant to keep them safe. They aren’t the only ones affected, Wrenn stressed: Access for boaters and anglers at popular Parker Canyon Lake, hunters in the national forest, and hikers of the famed Arizona Trail were all being impacted by Ducey’s project.

“It’s so unnecessary and wasteful. I mean, what could we do with $97 million?” Wrenn asked. “It’s a travesty and you’re reminded of it every five minutes — how stupid it is and how helpless we feel.”

Last month, Wrenn sent an email to her neighbors to see what could be done. She and Scott started talking. The Browns in Sierra Vista were looped in. Together, they began brainstorming the possibility of a protest at the construction site. Nobody knew what it would look like. Would the contractors run them off? Would they call the sheriff?

The group decided they needed to do a test run. On the morning of Sunday, November 20, Scott, Wrenn, and Kayner, along with Michael and Christie Brown, McSpadden, and a handful of others, drove out to the container wall. As usual, they were met by one of the site’s private security contractors. This time, however, they had numbers.

“We talk to the Border Patrol, the sheriff, the Forest Service,” the guard said. “They all have our back.” The locals pressed for names. The guard didn’t have any. “I’m out here trying to support my family,” he said. “That’s it.” When asked who he worked for, the man replied, “a security company.” He added that he previously served in the U.S. Marine Corps.

The residents stuck around as one hour bled into the next. They noticed the construction had stopped. At 3 p.m., the contractors packed up and left. They hadn’t put down a single container since the locals arrived.

Jennifer Wrenn, 68, and Andrew Kayner, 71, outside their home near Elgin, Ariz., on Nov. 29, 2022.

Photo: Kitra Cahana for The Intercept

Scott circulated a call to action to trusted contacts. “The rule of law must be followed and We the People will not be intimidated or dissuaded from enjoying our beautiful borderlands within the Coronado National Forest,” she wrote. “Make your Voice heard. Participate in the dialogue. Join us in this peaceful protest. Bring your signs, banners, songs and statements.”

Scott and the Browns had already arrived when McSpadden and I pulled up to a dirt intersection a short drive from the container wall. Wrenn and Kayner showed up soon after. They were joined by a handful of others. Everybody had their signs.

The sound of approaching trucks came echoing down the canyon. The protesters scrambled to their vehicles. At 10:30 a.m., they reached the ad hoc checkpoint that led to the wall. They didn’t stop. A private security contractor with a pistol on his belt held a walkie talkie to his ear as they passed. A voice crackled through the receiver: “They got all their vehicles coming in.”

The protesters arrived just as one of the massive military vehicles that ran containers to the end of the wall was preparing a delivery. McSpadden was standing on the Roosevelt Reservation with his camera as the vehicle approached. Protesters hurried to join him as the contractors climbed down from the truck and walked away. With the gargantuan container-mover half-parked on the border road, its one working headlight still on, Scott delivered an impassioned speech while the private security guards wandered over to the protesters’ cars and eyed their license plates.

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Two hours after the protesters arrived, a black pickup with tinted windows pulled into the site. Two men stepped out. Badges swung from their necks as they approached. The larger of the pair was tall and burly, with khaki tactical pants, a fleece vest, and a flannel shirt. He introduced himself as Sgt. Tim Williams, head of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department’s Southeastern Arizona Border Regional Enforcement task force. Better known as SABRE, it was the same unit that visited the Browns’s home a month before.

The unit was created in 2014, when Dannels took over as sheriff. Over the past decade, the Cochise County sheriff has made a name for himself describing chaos in his jurisdiction for Fox News viewers and Republican lawmakers. That message pays. In February alone, Dannels’s department received a promise of $14.9 million from Ducey’s border security fund. The first $2.7 million went to SABRE. Last month, Ducey approved an additional $5 million for a new “Border Operations Center” that would place regional law enforcement operations under Dannels’s command.

Williams explained that his office got a call about the protesters. “We just request that you guys keep it kind of civil and try not to get hurt,” he said. “You guys got any questions for us?”

“Well, actually I do,” said Michael Brown. “Do you know how many people actually cross from that mountain west?”

It was a question Williams clearly answered often. “Right around 1,000 a month that we know of, probably,” he said. “Between 500 and 1,000.”

Over the next hour, Williams painted a portrait of Coronado as a war zone. “Most of them are what we call military-aged males,” he said, invoking the language justifying lethal force that I often encountered covering U.S. drone strikes. “They’re between the ages of like 15 and 25, and they’re all coming across in large groups.”

Michael told the sergeant that he had cut wood in the area for more than a decade. “I’ve only seen one,” he said.

Williams countered that he had an archive of game cam footage proving that Cochise County was suffering from a historic wave of unauthorized border crossers, many of whom were dangerous criminals. I asked what the sergeant attributed this explosion to.

“The illegals will tell you directly that it’s President Biden has changed policy,” Williams said.

“Which policy?” I asked.

“The immigration,” he replied. “President Biden has made it easier for them to be here.”

When the topic turned to the container wall rising up before us, Williams suddenly became guarded. “Opinions are something I don’t talk about,” he said. “I know when you do any project like this, environmental studies have to be done and all that stuff.” I asked if he was aware those studies hadn’t been done here and that the governor was told that the project was unlawful.

“That I have no idea,” the sergeant said. “I know this is the Roosevelt easement. This is the federal government easement.”

The next morning, Coronado National Forest issued its first public statement on the ongoing destruction. The message: Stay away. “Last month, the State of Arizona initiated an unauthorized project to install numerous shipping containers in the Coronado National Forest which may be creating safety hazards,” the service said, citing the “unauthorized armed security personnel on-site.”

That afternoon, I spoke to Starr Farrell, the public affairs officer who circulated the alert. “We really don’t want a conflict,” she told me. Farrell acknowledged the damage Ducey’s “heavy machinery” had done to Forest Service roads and sounded genuinely alarmed when I told her that the governor’s private security contractors said her agency had their backs. “Oh,” she said. “Oh my.”

“This was an unauthorized placement of these shipping containers,” Farrell said. “That isn’t something we would ever encourage.” When I asked why the Forest Service wasn’t taking active steps to stop it, Farrell said it was out of her agency’s hands. The Department of Justice was calling the shots. “It’s been escalated up,” she said. “It’s outside of a normal conversation we could have on the ground here.”

For the protesters on the ground, the conflict that the Forest Service hoped to avoid had already begun. That same day, they were back at the governor’s renegade construction site. Once again, their presence stopped construction. It had become an ongoing effort to do what the federal government would not: protect public lands from illegal destruction.

“I thought they were going to kill some of these people out there.”

Over the next seven days, resistance to Ducey’s wall took a series of dramatic turns. Early on the morning of December 2, McSpadden returned to Coronado to find a new, younger group of demonstrators at the site. This time, instead of halting of construction, the governor’s contractors attempted to push forward with their work. McSpadden called from the scene. The connection was bad, but the words “really dangerous” came through.

Later that afternoon, he described a contractor navigating the arm of an excavator within a foot of protesters’ heads. “I thought they were going to kill some of these people out there,” he said. Then, out of nowhere, the work stopped, and the contractors again left. A place that had been so loud and chaotic for weeks was dead silent. “It was so stark,” McSpadden later told me. “It was like peace.”

Heavy rains that weekend brought construction to a halt. Ducey’s contractors had put down just 40 stacks of containers in five days, compared to the 20 to 30 they were averaging per day before. On December 5, a group of early risers shut construction by parking a car on the border road. Another day of work was lost. Ducey clearly needed to adjust.

The next morning, at 6:45 a.m., Scott returned to find the governor’s work crews had 17 dropped stacks of containers in the night. She alerted the growing group of volunteers. If Ducey’s contractors were going to work at night, then people needed to be on the ground at night. Within hours, a plan took shape. A shift schedule was created. Food and overnight supplies were purchased. Up in Lyle Canyon, Andy Kayner loaded his pop-up camper.

By nightfall, there were six people at the site. At 11 p.m., a line of headlights snaking down the canyon appeared in the distance. Two more protesters arrived. Together, the eight public land defenders needed to secure two locations: the staging area where Ducey’s containers were kept, and the end of the wall where the heavy equipment was parked. There was no tapping out. If they moved, construction would commence.

The contractors turned on their vehicles. Some slept while the activists stood. Four long, cold hours passed. At 3 a.m., the governor’s contractors gave up and left.

Still: Russ McSpadden/Center for Biological Diversity Southwest Conservation Advocate

The sheriff hated everything about Ducey’s project. For one, it was plainly illegal, and the feds were doing nothing stop it. Hathaway, a Democrat, vowed to arrest Ducey’s contractors if their work crossed the county line — an unlikely scenario given that the governor’s project was slated to terminate just shy of his jurisdiction — and ordered his deputies to look out for contractors driving recklessly through Santa Cruz County communities. There was little more he could do. It was the feds’ responsibility to enforce federal laws, and despite the private messages Hathaway was receiving from Coronado law enforcement expressing their gratitude, they weren’t doing it.

After weeks of rising frustration, Hathaway wanted to thank the people who were finally doing what the feds would not. He climbed into his work truck and set off for Cochise County. Scott, Kayner, and Ethan Bonnin, a Center for Biological Diversity contractor, were at the site when the sheriff pulled in, alone and unannounced. Together, they told Hathaway about the standoff the night before. The sheriff was awestruck.

Public land defenders Andy Kayner, Kate Scott, and Ethan Bonnin visit with Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway at an encampment blocking Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey’s illegal wall of shipping containers on Dec. 7, 2022.

Photo: Courtesy Kate Scott

When I later asked about his visit, Hathaway described how the governor’s justifications for the wall were as wrong as they were predictable. Lawmakers like Ducey, who made his millions selling ice cream, are often taken by harrowing “Sicario”-style accounts of border mayhem that they hear from men in uniform and disinclined to tell them no when they ask for more money and resources, he argued.

“Of course, they’re going to say that. It would be like going to Raytheon and asking them, ‘Should we have another war in the Middle East?’”

“Of course, they’re going to say that,” Hathaway said. “It would be like going to Raytheon and asking them, ‘Should we have another war in the Middle East?’” Peddling border fear sells among some Arizona voters, the sheriff said, particularly retirees from out of state who rarely venture further south than Phoenix. It was no coincidence that the governor’s project began and ended in Cochise County, he argued. “Sheriff Dannels is in lockstep with Ducey. He’s not going to oppose anything that Ducey does,” Hathaway said. It had nothing to do with safety: “It’s just political rhetoric.” The two men were appealing to the same crowd.

“I’ve been going out there since I was a baby,” the sheriff said. “It’s very safe.”

Scott was still buzzing from Hathaway’s visit when I pulled into the new encampment at the foot of the container wall and unloaded my tent. “It was like he didn’t want to leave,” she told me. “He’s really, really appreciative.”

The sun was disappearing, and the temperature was dropping. Kayner’s camper was parked at the end of the wall with the contractors’ equipment. A security guard was posted nearby in a pickup. Sitting inside his vehicle, Kayner was steeling himself for whatever came next. “It’s going to be more painful now because we got to be here at night, but it’s certainly doable,” he told me. For the retired engineer, stopping Ducey’s project was about pulling Arizona back from a dangerous brink.

“This kind of thing happened with the Malheur Bird Refuge,” Kayner said. He wasn’t the first one to reference the 2016 anti-government takeover of public land in Oregon. “They just stayed there, and authorities didn’t go in and chase them out and put an end to it,” he said. That inaction, Kayner argued, “empowers this kind of thinking that we can overpower the federal government, the people of the United States, and do what we want to do.”

“That’s what this wall is out here,” he said. “It’s one man going against the law.”

No one knew if the contractors would try another night installation, but they were ready if they did. Instead, strangers and neighbors shared soup under the stars. At one point, Scott described how a wave of energy had rushed over her at dusk. Maybe it was just the hawk she had seen hovering over the now quiet work site, but it felt like it was something more. “I don’t know,” she said, “I just think that we won.” The next morning, we awoke to frost on our tents. The desert was still. The governor’s men did not return for work. They have not put down a container since.

The post How Neighbors in the Borderlands Fought Back Against Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey’s Illegal Wall — and Won appeared first on The Intercept.

Hathaway’s county sits directly west of Cochise County, where Ducey has been dropping containers for the past month and a half despite federal officials repeatedly telling him that his actions are unauthorized and unlawful. With federal authorities doing nothing to act on those warnings, Hathaway has vowed to arrest the governor’s contractors if they cross the county line into his turf.

That scenario would be unlikely, as the contract for the project has the governor’s wall stopping just shy of Hathaway’s jurisdiction. Convoys of Ducey’s contractors have, however, been racing through communities in Santa Cruz County for weeks now, hauling 40-foot shipping containers behind multi-ton pickup trucks at dangerous speeds. Hathaway said his department has received complaints from residents in the town of Elgin of Ducey’s drivers “barreling through town,” ignoring stop signs, and “flying past children.”

“The way you would end this right away is you go get a seizure sticker, and you slap it on the side of one of those $200,000 trackhoes.”

“I’ve advised my deputies to especially scrutinize that area looking for speed violations, reckless endangerment, reckless driving,” Hathaway told The Intercept in an interview Friday — though, the sheriff argued, the real solution lies with the federal authorities paid to protect the public lands where the governor’s lawbreaking is taking place. The process wouldn’t be complicated. As a former Drug Enforcement Administration investigator, Hathaway sketched out a response the feds often take when targeting ongoing organized criminal activity.

“The way you would end this right away is you go get a seizure sticker, and you slap it on the side of one of those $200,000 trackhoes and say, ‘I’m seizing this because it’s being used to facilitate illegal activity,’” he said. “Or seize one of those F350 pickup trucks that’s pulling the flatbed trailers and say, ‘This vehicle is being used for illegal dumping on federal lands.’” Hathaway predicted Ducey’s work crews would “scatter like flies”: “That’s the way to really hit ’em where it hurts.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they all just packed up and left right then,” Hathaway said. “That’s what the Forest Service should be doing. They have the ability to seize vehicles that are being involved in illegal activity, illegal hunting, illegal whatever, and yet, nobody’s doing that.”

Since declaring in an interview with the Nogales International that he would arrest Ducey’s contractors — becoming the first, and to date only, law enforcement official in the country to raise the specter of consequences for the governor’s actions — Hathaway, a Democrat elected in 2020, said he’s had Forest Service officials quietly sending him updates on the container wall and expressing their gratitude for taking a stand.

“Surprisingly, Coronado National Forest, their police are very excited about what I’m doing. They’re very much on my side, and they’re feeding me information,” he said. For the sheriff, it’s a bizarre situation. “I feel like being kind of sarcastic back to them and saying, ‘You know, this is really your job. I mean this is on federal land. Why are you just waiting for a county sheriff whose county starts six miles down the road?’”

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On October 21, three days before he began a $95 million, publicly funded project to drop 3,000 shipping containers across more than 10 miles of almost entirely federal land, Ducey filed a lawsuit against Biden administration land managers.

The governor dismissed 115 years of legal agreement that a 60-foot strip of border road known as the “Roosevelt Reservation” belongs to the federal government — and said the state actually had jurisdiction over the land. Ducey contended that this mistake, combined with a state of emergency he declared because Arizona is purportedly beset by a foreign invasion, meant that he could disregard all of the time-consuming processes involved with following federal law when initiating construction on public lands.

Since filing the suit, Ducey has laid nearly four miles of shipping containers through the Coronado National Forest in Cochise County. The work by the Florida-based contractor AshBritt, which has deep ties to the Republican Party, is causing extensive environmental damage, blocking a critical migration corridor for jaguars and ocelots — both protected under the Endangered Species Act — and marring a once-serene desert landscape with a wall of giant metal boxes topped with concertina wire.

The sheriff in Cochise County is Mark Dannels, a close ally of the governor who frequently appears on Fox News to describe his county as engulfed in chaos and disorder. In February, the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs, the state agency managing Ducey’s border wall, committed to providing Dannels’s department with $14.9 million to thwart the purported invasion. As a county sheriff, Dannels has no authority to enforce federal immigration law.

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Filing a lawsuit to preemptively declare an illegal activity is in fact legal does not make it so, Hathaway said. “What if they were out there without hunting licenses, just shooting a whole bunch of people, and then saying, ‘Well, we’re filing a lawsuit and so you can’t stop us from doing this, even though it’s clearly a violation of federal law?’” he asked. What’s more, the sheriff argued, such a lawsuit certainly shouldn’t handcuff an agency like the Forest Service from executing one of its core missions. “If they witness a clear crime,” he said, “that’s a clear crime.”

While the Department of Justice has filed a motion to dismiss Ducey’s lawsuit, the Biden administration has taken no steps on the ground to stop the governor’s project.

If a normal person ventured onto national forest land and dumped a bag of trash on the ground in front of a ranger, they would be issued a citation, Hathaway said. In the case of Coronado, the situation is much more severe, with no repercussions. “You’re talking about hundreds of tons of material being dumped out there and a lot of earth-moving — heavy-tracked vehicles moving large amounts of earth. And this is all on federal land,” Hathaway said. “This is not state land. This is not private land. It’s been declared illegal.”

Late Wednesday afternoon, Hathaway made an unannounced, solo visit to offer his support to a small group of local residents and protesters who are camped out at the site of Ducey’s container wall construction. So far, the citizen public land defenders have been the only force to impede the governor’s destructive march through the national forest — and they have been remarkably successful, bringing the project largely to a halt over the past week.

“This is disgusting and ugly.”

Hathaway was taken with their efforts and wanted to say so. During his visit, the sheriff heard about the handful of people who had stood in front of the governor’s vehicles for hours in the cold, stopping their advance the previous night. “Man, fantastic what the protesters are doing,” he said to himself. The sheriff described the protesters as “very valiant” and likened their willingness to block heavy equipment to “a Tiananmen Square-type situation.”

For Hathaway, the area surrounding the protesters’ camp is imbued with deep personal meaning. “I’ve been going out there since I was a baby,” Hathaway said. The sheriff and his family have ranchland in the area. He’s ridden horseback along the border road where Ducey’s trucks are running for as long as he can remember. “That’s been most of my life out there, right where the protesters are,” he said. “I know that whole area in and out like the back of my hand, and it’s always been peaceful and serene and quiet.”

While he had been to the site of Ducey’s container wall more times than he could count, Hathaway’s Wednesday visit was the first time he’d seen the landscape bisected with a jagged ribbon of metal boxes. His reaction was visceral: “This is disgusting and ugly.”

The post Sheriff Calls on Feds to Seize Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey’s Illegal Border Wall Equipment appeared first on The Intercept.

In a highly anticipated hearing Monday, Lewis and Clark County Judge Matthew Abbott considered a potential first-of-its kind closure of Montana’s wolf hunting and trapping season, following an October lawsuit filed by WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote against the state, its wildlife commissioners, and its Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.

The battle over wolves in the Northern Rockies has reignited a culture war going back generations in the West. Last year’s wolf hunt, the most aggressive in modern Montana history, culminated in the deaths of one-fifth of Yellowstone National Park’s entire wolf population, with some three-quarters of those killed in Montana.

“There’s a lot of frustration that Montanans are not being heard and their best interests are not at play here for a few vehement, vocal wolf haters.”

Conservationists argue that Montana’s most extreme anti-wolf lawmakers have hijacked and politicized a formerly revered system of wildlife governance. Despite tens of thousands of public comments demanding a more measured approach to wolf management, the state has continued to pursue a campaign of large-scale population reduction.

“There are important justified values and ideals at play here,” Michelle Lute, the carnivore conservation director at Project Coyote, told the court Monday. “There’s a lot of frustration that Montanans are not being heard and their best interests are not at play here for a few vehement, vocal wolf haters.”

In court, the environmental groups argued that a flawed population model led Montana to overestimate its wolf population by hundreds of animals. The inflated numbers, they alleged, became the basis for legislation signed by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte in 2021 calling for the killing of at least 450 wolves — approximately 40 percent of Montana’s estimated population of more than 1,100 animals.

According to a plan developed in the early 2000s during wrangling over removing wolves from the endangered species list, Montana is required to review its wolf management regime at least every five years. The conservation organizations alleged that the reviews never happened, and the state adopted a controversial population estimation model — the central focus of Monday’s hearing — without adequate public comment and set statewide quotas based on the “stale” management plan.

“The issue is that the data doesn’t match the predictions of the model,” Francisco Javier Santiago Ávila, a conservation manager with Project Coyote, testified Monday, adding that his review of state records indicated that Montana overestimated its wolf population by as many as 300 animals in recent years.

The groups requested the injunction on hunting and trapping to prevent irreparable harm to the state’s wolf population, Montana’s system for democratic wolf management decision-making, and the organizations and individuals committed to wolf recovery.

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Officials with Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks responded in court by defending the state’s Integrated Patch Occupancy Model, or iPOM, as a sound tool created in conjunction with experts as part of a decade-and-a-half process. The department said the model had been presented to the public.

In a 26-page opinion rejecting the injunction request, Abbott wrote that he was not convinced that Montana’s population estimation is “so unreliable or so substantially tending to overestimate wolf populations” that its continued use would cause the kind of damage that warranted the injunction.

“There is no evidence that this season is the pivotal season for Montana’s wolves,” he wrote. “Even if 450 wolves are killed, no witness presented evidence that this year will plunge Montana wolf populations below a sustainable level.”

The plaintiffs could have a winning argument on Montana’s failure to review the wolf plan, Abbott went on to say, however, the proposed remedy for that issue was to order the state to review the plan, not to end its hunting and trapping season.

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Abbott said his task was “not to decide what Montana’s policy should be or to predict the outcome of this case.”

“The attention this case has garnered so far might lead one to believe the Court is deciding the fate of the Gray Wolf in the Northern Rockies today. It is not,” Abbott wrote. “Gray wolf management is principally a matter for the political branches; at most, this Court’s role is simply to ensure those branches of government are coloring within the lines set by the Constitution and the statute. And even that is not truly before the Court today: here, the Court considers only a request for preliminary injunction.”

To achieve the wolf reduction mandated by the Republican-controlled state Legislature, a panel of Montana wildlife commissioners appointed by Gianforte approved an array of highly controversial hunting and trapping methods in 2021, including the use of bait to lure wolves off protected lands, night hunting with night vision goggles, the use of snares, and an increase on bag limits that allowed a single individual to kill 20 wolves.

Most controversially, Montana abolished hunting quotas that had limited the number of wolves that could be killed in two hunting districts north of Yellowstone to one per year. The result was the deadliest winter the national park has seen since the animals were reintroduced in 1995. (Montana reinstated wolf hunting quotas outside Yellowstone in August — albeit with a threshold five times higher than it was at the time of Gianforte’s 2020 election.)

With the 2021 legislation still in effect, WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote filed suit on October 27. Abbott then issued a temporary restraining order reinstating the 2020-era quotas outside Yellowstone and Glacier National Park, reducing the number of wolves an individual hunter could kill to five, and prohibiting the use of snares.

Gianforte, who unlawfully killed a collared Yellowstone wolf himself a month after taking office, responded by attacking the judge’s credibility.

“The legislature makes laws, the Fish and Wildlife Commission sets rules based on both those laws and science, and FWP implements those rules,” the governor tweeted. “Unfortunately, another activist judge overstepped his bounds today to align with extreme activists.”

With his decision Tuesday, Abbott’s restraining order was lifted, and the regulations that were in place before went back into effect.

The eight-hour hearing in Abbott’s courtroom followed more than a year of escalating conflict over Montana’s management of wolves. At the center of that story is the relationship between Gianforte and the state’s once-vaunted fish and wildlife department.

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By law, Montana’s governor is to make selections for the state’s “quasi-judicial citizen board” of wildlife commissioners, who set policy for FWP, “without regard to political affiliation” and “solely for the wise management of the fish and wildlife of the state.”

As The Intercept detailed in an investigation in July, all but one of Gianforte’s nominees, were high-dollar contributors to his political campaigns. One was his former running mate. The commissioners hailed from the trophy hunting, outfitting, oil and gas, and livestock industry. Gianforte did not select a single representative from Montana’s expansive community of conservationists for the critical panel.

Veteran Montana wildlife managers have accused the governor, through his commission, of tarnishing a respected and professional department and seeking to return the state to the 1880s, when wolves were systematically extirpated from the landscape.

In a statement Tuesday, Lizzy Pennock, a Montana-based carnivore coexistence advocate at WildEarth Guardians who testified at Monday’s hearing, said her organization would continue its challenge to Gianforte’s campaign to slash Montana’s wolf population.

“We are devastated that the court has allowed countless more wolves — including Yellowstone wolves — to be killed under the unscientific laws and regulations we are challenging,” Pennock said. “We will keep fighting for Montana’s wolves in the courtroom while our case carries on and outside the courtroom in every way possible.”

The post Montana Judge Won’t Halt Gov. Greg Gianforte’s Aggressive Wolf Hunt appeared first on The Intercept.

Though filed separately, the two claims share a common concern: that wolf and grizzly bear populations in the Northern Rocky Mountains will be decimated.

In the past year, leading wildlife biologists have spoken out with rising alarm about the fate of the predators in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, where Republican lawmakers have advanced some of the most aggressive laws and proposals targeting the two species in recent history.

“There’s urgency to this. You really can’t reverse the consequences of a dead animal.”

“I feel that our public officials at the federal and state levels do not care anywhere near enough about fish and wildlife,” Robert Aland, a retired attorney and longtime environmental activist who brought the federal case, told The Intercept. “There’s urgency to this,” he added. “You really can’t reverse the consequences of a dead animal.”

By law, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should protect against threats to endangered species at the federal level. State wildlife agencies, meanwhile, should promote science-driven, nonpartisan management of species that are not endangered. For wolves and grizzlies, environmental advocates say systems are failing at both levels.

In the first of the lawsuits, filed late last month in the federal court, Aland petitioned a judge to declare that the director of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Martha Williams, is illegally occupying her position and order her removed.

Under the law, the director of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is to have both scientific experience and education. As an attorney, Williams has an extensive history in the legal arenas of wildlife management but does not have a scientific degree. According to Aland, “This is in violation of the clear and unequivocal terms of the statute.”

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Anything less than Williams’s removal, he argued, would lead to the “legal contamination” of several Endangered Species Act petitions concerning grizzly bears and wolves in the Northern Rockies.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to comment on Aland’s lawsuit. On October 26, five days after the complaint was filed, an external affairs office at the Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife’s parent agency, sent Aland an unsigned email saying: “The Department is fully confident that Director Williams is well qualified and has all the necessary authority to lead FWS.”

In the past year, many top wildlife researchers in the Rocky Mountains have warned of a return to the bad old days of the 1880s following political changes in the region.

Westward expansion in the 19th century featured a devastating war on wildlife that led to the extirpation of wolves and the near-total extermination of grizzly bears. In the generations since, conservationists and wildlife biologists, including many working for state and federal agencies, have gone to great lengths in their attempts to help the two species recover.

Wolves were among the first animals listed under the Endangered Species Act and the first to be removed, following their reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in 1995. A similar effort has been made to restore grizzlies to the region, an arguably even more difficult task given the animals’ slow rates of reproduction and sensitivity to human-caused mortality.

Grizzlies are still protected under the Endangered Species Act, though the trophy hunting lobby is agitating to have them removed. Wolves in the Northern Rockies, meanwhile, are not protected under the law, and environmental groups are fighting to see them relisted.

While politics have always shaped carnivore conservation, recent events have left many scientists horrified and outraged that decades of work could soon be lost.

In January, 35 of the region’s most prominent wildlife biologists wrote an open letter objecting to petitions from Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho to delist grizzly bears. The signatories included the longtime head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grizzly bear recovery effort, who declared that he no longer supported delisting grizzly bears due to politically driven changes to carnivore management. If grizzlies were delisted, the biologists argued, they would likely face the same treatment that wolves across the Northern Rockies were already experiencing.

Outside the protected confines of Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming has long permitted a shoot-on-sight approach to wolves across much of the state. Last year, Republican lawmakers in Idaho and Montana took major steps in the same direction, passing laws to drastically slash wolf populations — in Idaho by as much as 90 percent — by granting individual hunters and trappers the authority to wipe out entire packs, and legalizing wolf bounty programs, aerial hunting, the use of snares, night hunting with night-vision goggles and other measures long seen as far outside the ethical bounds of “fair chase” hunting, which requires that hunters not take unfair advantage over the animals they seek.

In Montana specifically, the biologists wrote, science-based wildlife management “was replaced by anti-predator hysteria.”

“It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that if grizzly bears were delisted and turned over to state management,” the letter said, “that the Montana legislature and governor would do the same thing to grizzlies that they are currently doing to wolves.”

In addition to the states’ requests to delist the bears, Wyoming Republicans Rep. Liz Cheney and Sen. Cynthia Lummis have introduced bills to not only delist grizzlies, but also to bar public comment and prevent any judicial review of the decision.

“It tramples on our separation of powers,” Aland said. The 82-year-old is no newcomer to wildlife litigation. He has been a pro se plaintiff in several lawsuits against U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to keep grizzly bears listed as an endangered species. In his experience, citizen participation, particularly litigation, has proven “absolutely essential” in upholding the Endangered Species Act. His lawsuit seeking Williams is no different, he argued.

“There are three petitions to remove the grizzly bears ESA protection for a third time. That’s a scientific decision,” Aland said. Williams’s legal career wildlife management may help her navigate the cases, Aland argued, “but she’s not even close to qualified to make that biological, scientific decision.”

A wolf carcass, bottom right, decomposes near Deckard Flats in Jardine, Mont., on Feb. 7, 2022.

Photo: Louise Johns for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Aland’s litigation follows the traditional route of raising concerns about conservation through federal court, but the veteran environmental litigator noted that some of the most consequential decisions in wildlife management happen at the state level. “The state agencies have gotten a complete pass on everything,” he said. “They don’t get sued for anything, so they feel like they can operate with impunity.”

The second Rocky Mountain predator lawsuit filed last month aims to break that trend.

On October 27, the environmental groups WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote, filed suit in a county court against the state of Montana; its Fish, Wildlife and Parks department; and the panel of citizen commissioners who make policy for FWP.

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Calling for an injunction halting the state’s wolf hunt, which began last month, the groups argue that Montana violated its own constitution in proceeding with last winter’s wolf hunt and that Republicans’ goals for reducing the wolf population were based on unreliable population modeling.

“We’re advocating for federal action, of course, to get wolves back on the endangered species list, to get those protections there, but we just don’t know when that’s going to happen,” Lizzy Pennock, a carnivore coexistence advocate for WildEarth Guardians, told The Intercept.

Over the past year, Pennock and her colleagues have grown increasingly concerned watching FWP, once considered one of the most respected state wildlife agencies in the country, become a conduit for an unscientific, partisan approach to wolf management that undermined years of hard-won compromise in the state. “We have been really frustrated with FWP and what’s going on and we wanted to take action at a state level,” she said.

WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote worked with Jessica Blome, a California-based attorney with Greenfire Law. In 2021, Blome filed a similar state-level constitutional challenge in Wisconsin, after licensed hunters nearly doubled their 119-wolf quota, killing 218 wolves in less than 72 hours.

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Pennock is hopeful that Montana’s constitution, which is uniquely strong in protecting the state’s natural resources, including its wild animals, can serve as a means to protect against the kind of undemocratic and unscientific policymaking of the past two years. As The Intercept reported in an investigation in July, the 2020 election of Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte ushered in a radical reordering of the state’s wildlife governance, stacking the commission overseeing FWP with representatives from the trapping and trophy hunting industry, as well as campaign donors.

Among the core claims in the WildEarth Guardians-Project Coyote lawsuit is an argument is that the justification for Montana’s ultra-aggressive wolf hunt is based on unreliable data.

Montana’s state legislature meets every two years for 90 days. During the 2021 session, Republican state legislators Bob Brown and Paul Fielder advanced a series of anti-wolf bills — all signed into law by Gianforte, endorsed by his handpicked FWP commissioners, and enforced by the department — based on the argument that Montana had too many wolves and at least 450 of the animals needed to be killed. “We’re not talking about necessarily ethical management of them,” Fielder said in the run-up to the 2021 hunt. “We want to reduce wolf numbers.”

Fielder pointed to a “new and improved model,” known as the “integrated patch occupancy model,” or iPOM, that FWP was using to estimate wolf population numbers in the state.

The WildEarth Guardians-Project Coyote lawsuit noted that iPOM — used only in Montana and only for wolves — has come under heavy criticism from some of the region’s leading wildlife management experts. The wolf legislation Gianforte signed in 2021 called for the killing of at least 450 wolves; the season ended well short of that mark, with 273 wolves killed. While anti-wolf Republicans have pointed to the total as evidence that a more intensive hunt is needed, wildlife biologists have argued that it may suggest that iPOM’s estimate of how many wolves live in the state — roughly 1,164 — was inflated.

“It’s hard to say what we know about the population because I don’t know how much we know, and I think that’s the point,” Pennock said.

The Montana legislature reconvenes in January. In a public meeting in September, Fielder signaled that the state would ratchet up its war on wolves in 2023. “It was stated on the floor last session that this is not about ethical or fair chase, it was about reducing the number of wolves. Management starts with M-A-N, man. We’ve got to take control of things,” he said. “As we go into this next Legislative session, we’ve got to look at how we can meet the intent of the Legislation that was passed in 2021.”

Conservationists are bracing for the worst. According to Pennock, “It’s gonna be a field day.”

The post Lawsuits Target War on Wolves and Grizzlies in the Northern Rockies appeared first on The Intercept.