Washington’s War on the Borderlands is an escalating struggle of attrition decades in the making. Scenes of brutality and inhumanity along this stretch of desert that marks the nation’s southern border- many hundreds of winding miles in length- have repeatedly gone viral, with a noted uptick in coverage over the last 20 years. In the final months of 2022, the internet became captivated by a sight it had not seen before: a conga line of double-stacked shipping containers cutting through the desert, reminiscent of a freight train with no tracks, no conductors, no engines, and no real purpose beyond offense to the senses.
The stated purpose of these containers, of course, was to buttress the besieged state of Arizona against a torrent of undocumented migration. It was to manifest outgoing Republican governor Doug Ducey’s mandate to stem the flow of asylum seekers by any means necessary, in defiance of an octogenarian autocrat in the White House who would otherwise have the streets overrun by latinoamericanos seeking their legal right to refuge. When Donald Trump lost his re-election bid for the presidency in November of 2020, construction on his border wall ground to a halt; Ducey issued an executive order on August 12th, 2022, authorizing the Arizona state government to carry on construction anyway1.
It is no small irony that the Biden Administration themselves authorized border wall construction in Yuma2 the month before Ducey’s shoddy shipping container plug was completed in that very area, done allegedly in defiance of said Administration’s policies3. It was not long before yet another wall of shipping containers appeared at the governor’s behest, this time in the San Rafael Valley, to the tune of over $80 million in taxpayer dollars.
Membership of the Tucson Democratic Socialists attended a community meeting at Blacklidge Community Collective on December 8th, 2022. In attendance were border resisters who had, up to that point, ground to a halt this attempt to plug gaps in the border wall with shipping containers, this time in Coronado National Memorial a couple hours’ drive to the southeast of Tucson. Many miles had already been laid down in November, but volunteers who put their bodies between the machines and their work had managed to stall progress almost entirely. The site of construction is on federal land, to which the permitless Doug Ducey and his contracted Florida-based construction firm AshBritt had no legal right to operate.
The placement of these out-of-commission, pesticide-sprayed, lead-shedding containers amounted to little more than an illegal dumping scheme. These circumstances provided a vanishingly rare opportunity for land defenders to not only disrupt border wall construction, but to do so with complete legal impunity.
This site had clearly been chosen in part due to the close ties between Doug Ducey and the far-right sheriff of Cochise County, Mark Dannels. As Ducey had hoped, Dannels did not enforce the Forest Service’s call to halt the illegal construction, but border defenders quickly learned that he would not intervene to evict the protestors, either. In the preceding weeks, all encounters with Sheriff Dannels at the border ended with law enforcement directing AshBritt employees to back down. Curiously, the border defenders’ encampment had also been visited by the sheriff of neighboring Santa Cruz County, who assured protestors that any attempted construction that ventured too far west across the county line would result in the contractors’ arrest.
Camp Ocelot, so-called in honor of an ocelot spotted on game trail cameras due north of the camp, was in need of support. As a spontaneous and decentralized protest, land defenders continually rotated in and out of the campsite which had sprung up directly in the path of construction. They were in need of bodies, yes, but also provisions and cold-weather supplies to keep watch in the dead of night in December. As DSA’ers joined the coordinating WhatsApp group, it became clear that community members from all over southern Arizona were gleefully stepping up to answer the call for help. We set to work disseminating their request for aid through our own community network.
Borderlands Ecosocialists, Tucson Democratic Socialists’ ecosocialist working group, collected donations in the week leading up to the planned December 13th supply run. This included flashlights, batteries, hand warming packs, a bucketful of dry kindling, frozen soup, and a medkit with essential first aid supplies. Looking ahead, it seemed likely that Camp Ocelot would have to stand until at least the first week of January, when incoming Democratic governor Katie Hobbs would likely call for a halt to construction. It was feared that Ducey, seeing the end in sight, could order an escalation of the situation at a moment’s notice, to be violently enforced by either the sheriff of Cochise County or by the private security firm hired by AshBritt.
On the morning of the 13th, a small crew of Borderlands Ecosocialists departed Tucson for the border, driving south through Whetstone and then Sierra Vista before turning due west to enter Coronado National Memorial. Paved roads turned to dirt and gravel and began to wind up higher and higher as we climbed toward Montezuma Pass, over 6,500 feet in elevation. We were at once struck by the beauty of this land, transformed by nighttime snowfall into a winter wonderland. We paused to watch small drifts of snow filter through juniper trees, remarking sadly on the circumstances that had brought us here.
This enchantment was blunted somewhat upon rounding the top of the mountain pass to spot the parade of shipping containers on the desert valley below.
We descended the west slope and made it onto another unpaved dirt road, taking a sharp turn directly south to close the gap between us and the international line in the sand between the US and Mexico. AshBritt’s staging area was immediately visible, a fortress enclosed on all but one side by shipping containers that had not yet been laid down. All of their vehicles were powered down and still in the afternoon chill, though the sound of a generator coming from somewhere inside the stronghold proved that the contractors had not yet abandoned their directive to push forward with construction.
Wedged between the staging area and the imposing site of the shipping container wall was a scattering of cars, vans, tables, tents, and volunteers: the defiant Camp Ocelot. We parked and joined a circle of border defenders around their campfire. As a decentralized protest, there was no one in charge to direct us; when we offered our food and supplies, food and supplies were offered in return. We deposited our frozen soup in the kitchen while fresh, warm soup and tortillas were prepared for us.
Some had come in for the day from nearby cities like Sierra Vista. Others, intent on entrenching themselves for the long haul, had come from as far as Atlanta and San Antonio. We exchanged protest stories, some stretching back decades. Those that had already spent weeks at camp recounted scrambling in the early hours of the morning when they had come to realize AshBritt contractors were attempting to place shipping containers while the land defenders slept. We took time to walk the slippery and icy trail along the wall, inspecting muddy banks that seemed poised to pull the rug out from under the governor’s arrogant stunt and topple these mostly unsecured stacks to the ground.
Of course, we also took the time to throw rocks and snowballs at the wall. Each dull thud rang hollow, confirming that there was nothing inside these containers to weigh them down. We probed the gaps between containers, confirming that they could be bypassed with ease. On one end, we reached a steep slope that marked the edge of construction, where the containers (whose overhang here left two feet off the ground) came to an abrupt end and could be circumvented completely. Upon returning to camp, we emptied out the firepit and dug deeper into the clay, reinforcing the sides with rocks crushed up by construction, in order to create room for much larger bonfires that could burn warm and bright through the weeks to come.
For all of Doug Ducey’s talk about securing the border via executive order issued at a time of emergency, the sloppy handiwork on display here betrayed how deeply unserious this stunt really was. Ducey is one of three Republican governors in southern US states- alongside Abbot of Texas and DeSantis of Florida- that have made their ambitions for political power at the national level nakedly transparent in recent years. As former CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, Douglas A. Ducey lacks charisma on the level of the Floridian demon DeSantis, and for all of his efforts has been unable to enact brutality against migrants to the degree that the Texan Abbot has. His certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory in Arizona in 2020 earned him the ire of Trump Republicans. By escalating stunts at the border, perhaps he sees a path forward for a moderate MAGA model that eases up on election denial rhetoric while continuing to throw border communities under the bus for the sake of scoring points with xenophobic conservatives nationwide. While my gut tells me that a man as cold and limp as soft serve has no chance at presidential power, there is no telling what the coming years may bring. We can only hope that demonstrating successful resistance will inspire communities all along the borderlands to fight back.
Not many of these stories have happy endings, but the Borderlands Ecosocialists departed for Tucson that evening with a sense of optimism. Land defenders continued to hold the upper hand, and we felt our supplies would help bolster Camp Ocelot in its fight of endurance against the machines. To all of our surprise, it was announced by governor Ducey on December 21st that the shipping container wall would come down4. The legal challenges to Executive Order 2022-04 had succeeded in forcing the state government to back off. Katie Hobbs succeeded Doug Ducey as governor of Arizona on January 2nd, 2023, and soon ordered the deconstruction of the shipping container wall5, a cleanup effort that will cost taxpayers an additional $75 million.
Politicians who have sabotaged the livelihoods of all working people invariably direct the blame towards migrants, and work to systematically deny them their human right to seek asylum in the United States. Conservative pundits from all over the country claim to speak for border communities when they call for more law enforcement, more barriers, more detainment facilities, and more destruction. Rarely are the opinions of border communities themselves considered in these decisions; polling is rare, and consent ignored entirely. No matter how outnumbered border resisters appear, it has been proven once more- this time, by denizens of Camp Ocelot- that victory is possible when we stand in solidarity, no matter how many or how few we may be.