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Fights over President Donald Trump’s border wall are erupting once again across the Southwest. Protesters are launching tree-sits in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, and the Tohono O’odham Nation recently put up “no trespassing” signs to ward off the federal contractors bulldozing across the Sonoran Desert to build a secondary border wall on tribal territory and in the public parklands of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

Flush with more than $46 billion in funding from Trump’s unpopular budget bill passed by the GOP in 2025, the administration is building a complex “border barrier system” that includes a “primary and secondary wall” with a road between them, as well as “waterborne barriers, patrol roads, and the technology required to tie it all together, such as cameras, lights, and other detection technology,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Photos taken on August 16 and 17 and released by the Center for Biological Diversity this week show “significant clearing” of otherwise federally protected wild desert along the southern border just a few miles from Quitobaquito Springs, a rare desert oasis that is sacred for Indigenous people and home to endangered species. Protesters have erected a tree-sit near the spring in an ancient cottonwood known as the “grandmother tree” to block construction.

To build a secondary border wall parallel to the 30-foot-high wall already in place in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, contractors have leveled and cleared of wildlife two areas east of the spring. One area is a large staging yard for construction equipment, while the other area was cleared for the wall itself, which is slated to be built parallel to the existing border wall. There will be 100 feet in between the two walls for Border Patrol vehicles and surveillance technology.

Russ McSpadden, the southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, hiked beyond road closures to take the photos. He said construction is moving toward the Quitobaquito Springs and threatening endangered species found nowhere else in country. Conservationists are removing endangered mud turtles to other locations to prevent them from being lost forever.

Both Parties Have Turned the Border Wall Into a Death Trap

“The water runs just a couple dozen feet from the border; if they put a second wall there, they will destroy the hydrology,” McSpadden told Truthout.

While construction continues in Arizona, the........

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