The outgoing Republican Governor of Arizona is spending nearly $100 million in his final weeks in office to erect a makeshift border wall out of shipping containers and barbed wire that are being placed on federal and tribal lands.
For more, we go to Arizona to speak with two guests. In Tucson, Myles Traphagen is with us. He is the borderlands program coordinator for Wildlands Network, has worked in the deserts, mountains and grasslands of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for over 20 years. He’s a tribal member of the Chickasaw Nation. With us in Phoenix, Arizona, is Alejandra Gomez, executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA Arizona.Myles, let’s begin with you in Tucson.
The Coronado National Forest was established in 1902. Five years later, the Roosevelt Reservation was established by President Theodore Roosevelt. This is a 60-foot-wide strip that begins just west of El Paso on the Rio Grande and goes all the way to the Pacific Ocean. This allows the federal government to have control over this area for border security and commerce purposes.
This is what we are all wondering. It’s quite amazing that there’s simply been no law enforcement response. You know, where are the U.S. marshals? Where is Secretary of Interior Thomas Vilsack on this? Where is secretary — or, excuse me, agriculture secretary? Same goes for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
And so, we have been vigilant, you know, in this past election cycle. We knocked on over 450,000 doors, and a good portion of them were along the Yuma and the Cochise border. And what we’re seeing is that right now our communities are responding with aid — we have been seeing that for the past year — and that our communities are also — you know, the border has always been painted as — from the past governor, Jan Brewer, and now Ducey also — as a place where terror is happening.
So, everything that Alejandra was saying runs very deep here in Arizona as far as a long history of militias, and dating back to also union busting in 1918 in Bisbee. There’s a lot of, I guess I would call it, you know, just inherent racism and authoritarianism built into a lot of the actions that have occurred in the state for a long time now. So this is of grave concern to me.
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