It was hunting season in Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, and the Marine sniper was alone on a backcountry trail more than an hour’s hike from his vehicle. He carried a camouflage Remington rifle and was in sight of an elk herd when a grizzly bear emerged from the brush. In a series of audio and video recordings from that autumn day in 2015, he narrated what happened next:

“I just got attacked by a grizzly.”

“I fucking laid into him.”

“I don’t want a big bear like that where I hunt.”

“I’m smoking him.”

“This is destiny. That bear attacked the wrong man.”

Finally, after tracking down the federally protected grizzly he had shot, seeing blood along the way, he said, “Looks like I found a dead bear.”

Kneeling over the dead grizzly with his rifle in hand, the man took selfies and recorded a narration of his wilderness adventure. The bear’s coat was splattered in blood. The Marine cut off one of its claws then continued his hunt, spending two more nights in the woods.

It wasn’t until he completed his hunt several days later that he reported the bear’s death, as required by federal law. By then, investigators were already on the case, alerted to the grizzly’s killing by an anonymous tipster who had encountered the Marine during his trip. The Marine kept the bear claw as a souvenir, the tipster told investigators, according to their report.

The Marine, on reserve duty at the time, told U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents that the bear charged him. The killing was in self-defense, he said. He was “happy for the experience and thought it was pretty cool.” After killing the bear, the Marine admitted, he went on to kill an elk that he did not tag, ignoring his legal obligation to register the kill with state officials who issue a set number of hunting licenses each year. His plan, he told investigators, was to illegally use his tag for a future hunt.

The Marine, whose name is redacted in the report, had a history of legal infractions, the agents soon discovered, including a warning from a Wyoming wildlife law enforcement officer for harming or killing a kit fox. They seized his recording devices. Besides photos of the dead bear and elk, they found pictures of a bald eagle carcass. The Marine claimed he had nothing to do with the bird’s death.

Killing an endangered or threatened species in self-defense is not a crime. Cutting off a grizzly’s claw for a souvenir, however, is a clear violation of the Endangered Species Act and associated regulations. In their incident report, the feds determined that the Marine had likely violated a slew of federal and state laws.

The hunter was found guilty of wasting an elk under a Wyoming state law and ordered to pay a $640 fine. A federal prosecutor, however, declined to bring charges under the ESA. The Marine faced no consequences for desecrating a protected grizzly bear.

A Failure to Protect

Steve Stoinski was one of two Fish and Wildlife Service agents who interviewed the Marine. Based out of Lander, Wyoming, Stoinski had spent much of his adult life investigating wildlife crimes in the American West before retiring in 2020. He remembers the case well — especially the Marine’s shifting version of events.

“Parts of his story were just too hard to believe,” Stoinski recalled in an interview with The Intercept. “One minute he’s underneath it, shooting it. The other minute, he’s not being touched by it and firing a shot two feet away but couldn’t hit it.” Still, the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute was no surprise. Stoinski knew he and his partner were facing an uphill battle. The dismemberment of the bear was apparently not compelling enough for the U.S. attorney’s office to take the case. And with no direct witnesses and a victim that couldn’t speak even if it were alive, it would be next to impossible to disprove the claims of self-defense.

“You can’t charge people what you think they should be charged with,” Stoinski said. “You can only charge them with what you can really prove beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The Marine’s case is hardly an anomaly. Despite the Endangered Species Act’s fearsome reputation as a powerful tool for securing environmental protection, an Intercept investigation drawn from nearly 4,000 pages of Fish and Wildlife Service case files reveals that when it comes to grizzly bears, federal prosecutors rarely bring criminal charges under the landmark law. (The accounts of grizzly bear killings in this article are drawn from those case files, which The Intercept obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.)

The Endangered Species Act turns 50 years old this year amid a growing global crisis of biodiversity loss and increasing attacks by right-wing lawmakers who see predator control as a front in the battle over states’ rights. In theory, a law that the Supreme Court has called “the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species enacted by any nation” would serve as a critical bulwark against further ecological damage. Under Section 9 of the statute, Congress declared it illegal to kill, harm, harass, or otherwise “take” protected species; prohibited the transport or possession of such animals or their body parts; and established civil and criminal penalties for violators, including imprisonment of up to a year. Investigations into suspected ESA crimes fall to special agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which sits within the Department of the Interior. The investigators hand their files off to Justice Department prosecutors, who make the final call on whether to bring a case.

The factors that shape those decisions, however, reveal the limits of the country’s most famous conservation law. From 2015 through 2022, according to the records reviewed by The Intercept, the Fish and Wildlife Service completed 118 investigations for violations of the ESA stemming from the killing or harming of grizzly bears in their primary range in the Lower 48: Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Fourteen involved bears preying on livestock, while 74 others involved claims of self-defense, most stemming from hunters encountering bears in their habitats. Many of the cases contain evidence to support such claims. At least a dozen, however, show clear and, in some cases, flagrant ESA violations — from hunters admitting to stalking grizzlies before killing them, to dismembering animals for trophies, to describing efforts to cover up their kills. And yet only five of the cases led to criminal penalties under the ESA, and only two led to a prison sentence, one of which was overturned on appeal.

Grizzly bears were added to the endangered species list in 1975 and are currently considered a threatened species. An iconic symbol of American wilderness and a conservation success story, the bears are beloved by millions of people around the world. That adoration makes grizzlies a revealing barometer: If the ESA is failing to protect even them, what hope is there for the many imperiled species that don’t have a well-funded army of human defenders?

A Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson, in response to a series of questions from The Intercept, said the agency “prioritizes the investigation of take of ESA-protected species domestically and abroad,” including grizzly bears, and “works effectively and efficiently with state partners across the country.” (The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.)

In his corner of Wyoming, Stoinski said, the story of the grizzly bear over the half-century since the ESA’s passage shows how the law’s lofty goals continue to clash with ingrained cultural beliefs. “It’s a rural area — lots of ranching influence, that Western cowboy mentality, if it isn’t in the greatest interest of cattle, then it needs to be removed from the landscape,” he said. “That generally seems to be the way some people operate — shoot these bears, shovel, and shut up about it.”

The experiences of seasoned federal agents like Stoinski raise serious questions about the nation’s commitment and ability to uphold the ESA. In the case of the grizzly bear, the data and associated case reports obtained by The Intercept show a federal government that has failed to robustly enforce the historic statute despite evidence that it is being flouted on the ground. The upshot is diminished security for grizzly bears, current and former federal officials say, a downstream consequence of the Fish and Wildlife Service losing its way — chasing headline-making cases that span the globe while letting its domestic operations wither.

“They’re stuck spinning their wheels, trying to spend most of their time on these international smuggling cases, when they have so many incredible cases in their backyard that are just considered ‘game warden’ cases,” said one Interior Department official. The official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said that this dynamic has huge implications for the grizzly bear: “They might as well be delisted right now with how we’re acting.”

No Deterrence

Over the course of more than three years, starting in 2015, Stoinski led a probe into another grizzly killing in the Shoshone National Forest. His investigation of the so-called Barbers Point grizzly (a reference to the 4-year-old sow’s kill site) culminated in a nearly 300-page case file — and one of the only ESA convictions in the records reviewed by The Intercept.

At points, Stoinski’s report reads like a dark episode of the popular “Yellowstone” TV show, with confidential informants passing on word of incriminating barroom boasts and a pair of offenders making every attempt to bury evidence of their crimes — sometimes literally.

A week after a pair of motorists discovered the dead bear on the side of the road, Stoinski made a critical break in the investigation: A source turned in an audio recording surreptitiously obtained at a bar 30 miles south of the kill site.

In the recording, a man boasted of killing the bear, which was well known to locals and not considered a problem animal. He described how he and a friend encountered the bear twice — harassing and throwing rocks at her on the first occasion, then killing her on the second. “I don’t give a fuck. I would have been in jail by now if they would have found out about it,” the man said as he pulled up photos and videos to show other bar patrons. “There are so many of those cock suckers around here, I don’t give a fuck anymore. Fuck them!”

The recording led Stoinski to two residents of Dubois, Wyoming: 27-year-old Kelly J. Grove, the man on the tape, and 25-year-old Matthew John Brooks.

When Stoinski first interviewed Grove, he denied having anything to do with the grizzly’s killing. “As much as I would have fucking loved to, I didn’t shoot that fucking bear,” Grove said — though he applauded whoever did: “They should be given a gold medal.”

Stoinski continued to pursue the case, interviewing witnesses and collecting evidence. In the summer of 2018, Grove and Brooks pleaded guilty to violating the ESA. In their plea agreement interviews, the duo said they decided to kill the bear to improve the poor hunting season they’d been having. Late one night, they staked out the site where they had seen the bear guarding an elk carcass. To prevent GPS tracking, the men turned off their cellphones and stuffed them in the console of the vehicle. When the bear emerged, they stepped out in the dark, each armed with a rifle. Brooks fired. The bear wheeled and headed back for the trees, where it let out a dying moan. The two men left the scene, but not before dusting the tracks left by their vehicle. Weeks later, they made a midnight journey to a remote creek where they buried Brooks’s rifle and the paperwork associated with the weapon.

Brooks admitted to prosecutors that he pulled the trigger and said it was the most irresponsible period of his life. Grove was less contrite. When asked why they killed the grizzly, he responded, “Because we hate bears up there.” He added, “I thought it was great! Another dead bear!”

A federal judge ordered them to pay thousands of dollars in restitution, temporarily revoked their hunting privileges, and placed them on unsupervised probation for five years. 

If the intent of ESA prosecutions is to deter future violations of wildlife laws, it didn’t work on Grove. Just a few months after his sentencing, he was convicted on charges related to deer and elk poaching under Wyoming state law. The federal judge in the Barbers Point case then revoked his probation and sentenced him to six months in prison — half the maximum sentence allowable under the ESA. (Grove declined to comment for this story. Brooks did not respond to a request for comment.)

Like the handful of other convictions, the Barbers Point case broke from the typical trajectory of grizzly investigations in the West. As the Fish and Wildlife records reveal, most cases die the moment that a human — typically a hunter creeping around bear habitat at dawn or dusk — describes their fear during a bear encounter.

Making ESA cases more difficult still is a long-standing Justice Department policy requiring the government to prove that a suspect knew they were killing an endangered or threatened species when they did the deed. Known as the McKittrick policy — named after a Montana poacher who was convicted under the ESA for killing a Yellowstone wolf — the rule was established in 1999 as the result of a winding legal fight that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Among conservationists and wildlife investigators, it is derisively known as the “I thought it was a coyote” rule. When it comes to bears, if a hunter kills a grizzly but claims they thought it was a black bear, for example, the case is often dead on arrival.

In 2013, two environmental groups sued the Justice Department over the policy, arguing that it was fueling the unlawful killing of Mexican wolves. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately dismissed the claim because the plaintiffs were not able to cite “any specific instance where the DOJ has declined to prosecute a wolf killing because of the McKittrick policy.”

When it comes to grizzlies, however, federal prosecutors declined to take on at least 18 cases under the ESA from 2015 to 2022 based on such claims of mistaken identity, according to the documents obtained by The Intercept.

In one of the most explicit examples, a rancher living near Big Timber, Montana, buried three bullets in a grizzly bear that had wandered onto his property in 2016. He told law enforcement officials that he went out to investigate a disruption in a cattle enclosure on his property in the early morning and encountered a bear. It was dark out, and he said he didn’t know what kind of bear it was, but he shot at it first when it started moving toward him and again when it began approaching his girlfriend. He only realized it was a grizzly, he said, after the bear bled out on the property.

Fish and Wildlife Service investigators later discovered several discrepancies in the rancher’s story and concluded that he “shot the grizzly bear in defense of his cattle and not necessarily in defense of his life.” The prosecutor who reviewed the case agreed that the rancher’s account was “implausible,” “inconsistent,” and “suspect in numerous respects.” Nevertheless, the Justice Department declined to bring charges. The reason was clear. “The primary difficulty we would encounter,” the prosecutor explained in an email, “is proving that [the rancher] knew he was shooting a grizzly bear.”

The difficulty of ESA enforcement also stems in part from the nature of the law itself. Despite its hefty maximum fine of $100,000 and potential year in prison, conviction under the ESA is a federal misdemeanor. The same Justice Department attorneys tasked with bringing such cases are responsible for enforcing every other federal crime. While a Fish and Wildlife agent’s most important investigations might fall under the ESA, a prosecutor’s priorities are different. Given their finite resources, public demand, and the potential for career advancement, government attorneys are structurally incentivized to chase felonies involving human victims over misdemeanors involving animals.

“Their priorities are felony prosecutions,” Stoinski said. “So when we show up and we say, ‘Yeah, we’ve got this misdemeanor whooping crane case,’ they hear misdemeanor; it’s almost like a switch, because they don’t have the time or resources.”

Alternative Methods

Given the hurdles federal agents must overcome to bring an ESA case, they’ve found other means to seek justice for poached grizzlies. Sometimes, that means assisting in cases that will be taken up by state, rather than federal, prosecutors.

In 2021, for instance, Fish and Wildlife investigators teamed up with Idaho game wardens after a bullet-riddled mother grizzly was found in a river on the western edge of Yellowstone National Park. It was the third such killing in just seven months. The public demanded answers. While regional nonprofits pulled together a $40,000 reward for information leading to the killer — or killers — local and federal officials went to work. They collected nearly 50 bullet casings from the scene and obtained a warrant allowing them to zero in on phone activity in the area. The warrant paid off. Phone data led investigators to a man who had traveled to and from the scene, repeatedly visited the Idaho Fish and Game department’s online ad seeking information on the bear’s killer, and attempted to sell 1,000 rounds of ammunition — the same kind found at the scene of the crime — weeks after the shooting. The man told state police that his father had joined him in killing the bear; they were arrested and pleaded guilty to state charges. 

Whether such state-federal collaboration will continue across the West is an open question. In 2021, the Fish and Wildlife Service circulated an internal briefing saying that its state counterpart in Montana would no longer investigate grizzly kills without a federal agent present.

Federal agents facing challenging ESA cases often turn to the Lacey Act, a law passed in 1900 prohibiting the transportation of illegally killed wildlife that includes felony penalties. The files reviewed by The Intercept describe one such case in Montana, in 2017, in which a man turned up at a hunting camp bragging of shooting a grizzly and rolling it off a cliff. He was said to be “smiling” and “looked proud” as he showed off photos and video of the bear, investigators wrote. “In one video the bear was still breathing,” agents noted, adding that the man “did not mention anything about self-defense while he was showing everyone pictures and video.”

Investigators ultimately discovered that the bear’s front claws had been removed with a knife. An autopsy revealed that a bullet had obliterated the bear’s spine, paralyzing it — likely explaining why the shooter could take smiling selfies while the animal was still alive. Investigators soon identified the killer as a 35-year-old man from Marion, Montana. In an interview with the feds, the man claimed the bear charged him. He acknowledged ignoring his legal obligation to report the incident and admitted his attempted cover-up. “I rolled the dice on whether I’d ever see you guys or not, and obviously it didn’t pay off,” he said. When asked why he dismembered the bear, the man cited his “straight up hatred for these things.”

“I basically said, ‘Hey, fuck you.’ And I cut his claws off,” he said. “I wanted to keep them as a memento.”

Facing a challenging self-defense claim under the ESA, federal agents instead pursued a Lacey Act charge for stealing the bear’s claws. The man was convicted, placed on probation for three years, and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.

The case files reviewed by The Intercept account for only a portion of the total grizzly killings in the Northern Rockies between 2015 and 2022 — they are the ones the authorities know about. Chris Servheen, the president and board chair of the Montana Wildlife Federation, said that while the Fish and Wildlife Service’s case count of 118 is “a big number,” the death toll is undoubtedly higher.

“Illegal kills are certainly happening out there across the landscape,” Servheen told The Intercept. “The implications are serious because they’re ongoing.”

For nearly three decades, Servheen was the top Fish and Wildlife Service biologist responsible for grizzly recovery in the Lower 48. Having seen the application of the ESA in grizzly cases up close, he believes federal agents do their best with what are often difficult crimes to solve — taking place in remote locations, among distrustful communities, with victims that cannot speak — but in the vast reaches of the West, there’s only so much they can do.

At the time of his 2016 retirement, Servheen was a prominent supporter of turning grizzly bear management over to the states. In 2021, a wave of Republican-sponsored, anti-predator legislation — rooted, as he sees it, not in science but in politics — changed his mind. He’s been fighting for the grizzly’s continued federal protection ever since.

“If the grizzly was ever delisted, I worry that the illegal kills would increase,” he said. The state’s posture would send a message. “There’s going to be a certain category of the public that would feel that it’s easier now, it’s more relaxed now, I can just kill ‘em,” Servheen said. “The feds aren’t involved.”

“Animal Prejudice”

In some pockets of the West, biologists and wildlife officials say, an old anti-predator adage still reigns: shoot, shovel, and shut up.

Anti-predator hate is bound up in a long, complicated relationship going back to the beginning of westward expansion. In the early days of the nation’s founding, predators were a problem to be eradicated, mostly with guns and poison. As cultural attitudes toward ecology, wildlife, and conservation shifted over the course of a century, predators’ standing in the eyes of millions of Americans did too. Those shifts in thinking were foundational to the passage of the ESA, while also becoming a central conservative talking point in the West — symbolic of a country disowning its heritage and traditions to serve the interests of a coastal liberal elite, and of the federal government’s tyrannical disregard for states’ rights. The animals that most symbolized that shift — wolves, grizzlies, and the like — thus became avatars for a particular political class. Stoinski calls it “animal prejudice”: when frustrations over human politics are grafted onto animals. It came with the territory. Sometimes, he even heard it from his colleagues working in state agencies.

“Those animals die without a sound and the only voice they had was ours,” Stoinski said. “I was happy to champion grizzlies, even against the opposition of some of my state counterparts who are not fans of protecting them anymore.”

“Those animals die without a sound and the only voice they had was ours.”

Stoinski, articulating a complaint echoed by every current and former federal wildlife official that spoke to The Intercept, argued that the near-total absence of grizzly killing prosecutions speaks to a larger, more fundamental problem for the future of conservation: a multidecade failure on the part of Fish and Wildlife Service leaders in Washington to grow and adapt their agency in the face of difficult political, cultural, and environmental circumstances.

While major conservation initiatives have rescued grizzlies from extinction, their continued recovery hinges on human tolerance. In the nearly five decades since the bears became a protected species, human presence in grizzly habitat, clamoring by conservative lawmakers for the feds to relinquish management to the states, and the number of unsolved grizzly killing cases have all grown. At the same time, the number of federal agents conducting investigations on the ground — never more than 250 — has stayed the same.

“The only day I knew that we were close to 250 was the day I graduated the academy” in 1998, Stoinski said. “We had 248.”

“We never got that close in the next 25 years of my career,” he continued. “We were losing people as fast as we could hire them. On a good day, we probably had 200, and I did the math — 49 of those people were supervisors or managers of some sort, not even carrying a caseload anymore.”

When Stoinski arrived in Lander — having cut his teeth in Colorado, Alaska, and Wisconsin — he was one of two agents responsible for running down every grizzly poaching case in Wyoming, he said. The Justice Department had four assistant U.S. attorneys in the local office, focused mostly on the nearby Wind River Indian Reservation, and one prosecutor handling the wildlife docket for the entire state.

At first, Stoinski said, things were manageable. The prosecutor was motivated, and they got along well, but then a job opened up at a judge’s office and he left. A second prosecutor soon followed. Neither post was refilled. In Stoinski’s final years on the job, there were just two prosecutors in Lander responsible for everything the feds brought in: Homeland Security human trafficking cases, FBI agents investigating missing and murdered Indigenous women, Drug Enforcement Administration drug war operations, and finally, the Fish and Wildlife cop looking into dead bears.

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency has two special agents in Idaho, two in Wyoming, and three in Montana — a total of seven agents covering more than 328,000 square miles, much of it rugged backcountry wilderness.

“I was one agent doing 18 different cases at one time,” Stoinski recalled. “I don’t know how detectives do it in cities — if you got like 10 homicides, does one guy do all the homicides himself, or do they got a team of people? Usually, I’m just an army of one, coordinating with state people to help.”

As the Justice Department presence contracted, Stoinski’s responsibilities expanded. “The last two years of my career, we were so shorthanded, I was covering southern Wyoming, western Colorado, and all of Utah,” he said. “By myself for two years.” Stoinski had wanted to be a game warden as far back as he could remember. While he still believed in his mission, making a meaningful impact felt impossible. “I was just fried,” he said. “I couldn’t get big picture things done. I was just fighting brush fires.”

Rivers of Resentment

David J. Mattson and his wife Louisa Willcox live in southwest Montana, where bears venturing out from the protected confines of Yellowstone National Park run into an increasingly human-inhabited patchwork of public and private lands. The couple has made grizzly recovery their life’s work, with Willcox a full-time conservation advocate and Mattson one of the country’s leading scientific experts on grizzly habitat use.

The pair sees the “dead bear problem” — their term for the absence of accountability in grizzly killings — as a product of factors in both the ecosystem and the institutions of wildlife management, which are exacerbated by culture war politics.

In recent years, grizzlies have experienced reduced access to key food sources, Mattson explained. With declining populations of cutthroat trout, for example, the bears have increased their predation on ungulates, like elk, which they find by zeroing in on the areas where humans hunt and seeking out the animals they kill. Grizzlies have also descended from the remote high elevations where critical white bark pine populations have dwindled into areas where they can prey on livestock instead. In both cases, Mattson argues, bears are pursuing “anthropogenic meat” — that is, meat with a connection to humans — which can have deadly consequences.

“There are now two causes that account for probably 30-plus percent of the known and probable mortalities, and that’s conflicts over livestock — depredation — and encounters with big-game hunters,” Mattson told The Intercept. “It’s all plausibly linked to the demise of foods that kept bears out of harm’s way.”

As the bears’ diets have shifted, legal battles over their protected status have led many in the West — especially conservative lawmakers — to argue that grizzlies as a population are recovered and that the only thing keeping them under federal management are out-of-state environmentalists and well-funded nongovernmental organizations.

Whether grizzlies are truly recovered is a complicated question. The top scientific body tracking grizzly populations in the U.S., the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, where Mattson served as lead investigator from 1983 to 1993, tracks four fragmented populations of grizzlies in the Lower 48. Altogether, the four populations contain about 2,000 individual bears — up from the brink of extinction 50 years ago, but down from the estimated 50,000 bears that roamed the continent when settlers first marched West two centuries ago. Mortality records compiled by the team, meanwhile, show 456 known and probable grizzly bear deaths between 2015 and 2022 in the Greater Yellowstone region alone, with causes ranging from illegal killings, self-defense killings, and vehicle strikes to natural deaths and the killing of problem bears by government officials.

Numbers like that make fulfillment of the ESA’s ultimate aim — full recovery of imperiled species to their historic home range — difficult to imagine. “In terms of just looking at the science, to ensure long-term population viability in meaningful terms, you’re talking about ensuring that bears are going to be around almost certainly for 400 years,” Mattson said. That would require breeding between contiguous grizzly populations of as many as 2,500 to 9,000 bears. “We’re not even close to that in any of the populations we have,” Mattson argued. “Not even close.”

Population numbers are just one variable that goes into the federal government’s decision to keep an animal listed. States seeking to manage an animal population on their own must also show that they have a responsible regulatory structure in place to ensure continued recovery. It is on that point that Mattson and Willcox are most concerned.

In February, the Fish and Wildlife Service said that it would spend 12 months reviewing petitions from Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho calling for the delisting of grizzlies under the ESA. Should the states prevail, it would open the door to legalized hunting seasons across the Northern Rockies.

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The petitions are part of a wave of ESA-related, predator-centered GOP action in the West. Republicans are not only demanding that the Fish and Wildlife Service delist grizzlies through the ESA administrative process, but also backing federal legislation that would circumvent the scientific deliberation required under the ESA altogether and delist gray wolves nationwide — Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert’s “Trust the Science Act.” 

While state and federal authority has long been contested, the balance of power has recently shifted. All three Northern Rockies states are now led by Republican governors backed by Republican legislatures who argue that the ESA has for too long served as a Trojan horse for paternalistic liberal intervention in the West. Now in the political driver’s seat, they are passing measures to slash the populations of large predators throughout the region, from wolves to mountain lions. Should grizzlies lose federal protection, conservationists fear the bear would be next. “Management of grizzly bears under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act has become so symbolically identified and tangled with the culture wars,” Mattson said, “that there’s just this manifest displacement of resentments onto bears.”

In the 1980s, Willcox recalled, the federal government understood that grizzly bear extinction was a real possibility. Given the stakes, federal authorities were willing to confront illegal grizzly killing, despite the social and cultural costs involved.

“That kind of stuff doesn’t happen now,” Willcox said. “And that’s because the fear, the concern, about potential extinction is gone.” In its place, she argued, is an anger that’s been bubbling for years: “Now you’ve got that river of resentment flowing into the river of resentment that’s the ultra-right crowd, increasing the decibel level of the anti-bear movement.”

Ambitions Abroad, Neglect at Home

It’s true, says Doug McKenna, a retired Fish and Wildlife investigator: Agents working grizzly killing cases face serious challenges — but they aren’t insurmountable. An experienced investigator can navigate the hurdles, provided they have two things: local connections and support at headquarters. And there was a time, he said, when agents on the ground had both.

McKenna grew up in Montana, went to college there, and became a state game warden in the 1980s, shortly after grizzly bears were added to the endangered species list. He was then recruited to join the feds and spent the next two-and-a-half decades working Fish and Wildlife cases from the Northern Rockies to the desert southwest before retiring in 2012.

In his more than 30 years of wildlife law enforcement, McKenna observed a steady, disturbing turn by Fish and Wildlife Service leadership away from domestic wildlife enforcement and toward flashy cases with international ties.

When McKenna became a federal agent in the late 1980s, the Fish and Wildlife Service was placing agents in remote, one-person stations across the region. McKenna spent a decade working out of one such outpost in New Mexico. He would ride deep into the Gila Wilderness on horseback, searching for poachers along the New Mexico–Arizona borderline. “I knew all the locals,” he said. Those bonds were critical. “You have to have the locals and the state game wardens on your side,” he said. “They’re generally in the know about the different suspects and places people frequent.”

“The powers that be, they came in and they wanted to centralize everything. That’s kind of an FBI concept, and it doesn’t work in wildlife enforcement.”

The method worked well, but around 2010, McKenna noticed a change. Agents were being called back from their posts — in Victorville, Flagstaff, Yuma, and elsewhere — and told to report to cities across the West.

“The powers that be, they came in and they wanted to centralize everything,” he said. “That’s kind of an FBI concept, and it doesn’t work in wildlife enforcement.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service defended the evolution of enforcement and investigative strategies in recent years. “The methods used by state and federal enforcement to obtain and investigate allegations of illegal take have changed and developed over time but are generally considered to be an improvement over strictly employing backcountry patrols,” a spokesperson for the agency said in an email. “The advent of cell phone, GPS, and satellite technology — as well as the availability of aircraft to reach remote areas — has increased the speed with which reports of take are received and can be acted upon.”

The desire McKenna sensed among leadership — to reshape the agency in the image of its more high-profile counterparts, projecting a modernized institution with a global reach — was real. And it wasn’t going away.

In 2013, during a visit to Tanzania, President Barack Obama announced an executive order establishing a new task force of 17 federal departments and agencies to train law enforcement personnel and park rangers across Africa. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s law enforcement agents would play a key role in the $10 million global initiative. The agency’s attaché program, a first-of-its-kind State Department-backed initiative unveiled in 2014, further propelled the international shift.

Washington’s new embrace of international wildlife enforcement claimed its first high-profile win in Operation Crash, a sprawling effort that bundled multiple investigations targeting the illicit trafficking of rhino horns under the same umbrella. The first arrests came in 2012 and snowballed from there. The operation soon became the largest Fish and Wildlife Service investigation in history, pulling in more than half of the agency’s special agents and involving its every office in the country.

By 2017, the Justice Department claimed Operation Crash had led to nearly 50 convictions and the recovery of roughly $7.8 million. That same year, Edward Grace, who designed and headed the investigation, was appointed assistant director of the Office of Law Enforcement at Fish and Wildlife Service, where he remains today.

It was a career-making case for Grace and an era-defining moment for the agency. In a 2018 interview, Grace likened his agents’ casework to that of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations wing. “We use informants, we use undercover operatives, we use the same investigative techniques you’ll see in the investigation of another commodity,” he said. “Instead of having cocaine as a commodity, you have rhino horns.”

None of the current or former officials who spoke to The Intercept questioned the importance of targeting the illicit, international wildlife trade. What they did take issue with was seeing their agency pluck personnel from a small pool of stateside investigators and then leave those positions unfilled — as though the United States, having somehow transcended its struggles with poaching and wildlife conflict management, now had agents to spare.

“I trained game rangers, and I did investigations,” McKenna said of the attaché program. The work was “fine and dandy,” he said. “But I think the priority needs to be the domestic wildlife, especially the threatened or endangered species, because that’s ours.”

The Interior Department official who spoke to The Intercept said the same. “They’re pushing so hard for agents to work these cases with criminal networks and international smuggling rings, which are great, but the agency doesn’t have the capability to do it like [Homeland Security Investigations] does,” said the official. For animals like grizzly bears, the official argued, there’s now an absence of proactive deterrence in the field: “People go out and they know there’s no one out there looking.”

Another former Fish and Wildlife Service official, Ed Newcomer, served 20 years with the agency before retiring in 2022. Rising through the ranks in Southern California, he became an expert in international wildlife trafficking and was appointed the agency’s attaché for southern Africa in 2015.

The problem went deeper than his former employer simply deprioritizing its domestic mandate in favor of a foreign one, Newcomer argued. It was a failure on the part of the service’s leadership to keep up with times and, specifically, to push Congress for the resources the agency needs to address domestic wildlife crimes with the same urgency that it now does abroad.

“Nobody is doing any long-term strategic thinking in the leadership at the Office of Law Enforcement,” Newcomer said. “We have not expanded our agent force, at all, since 1983. Forty years. We have not asked Congress to expand our agent force, despite the fact that we have taken on a hugely new and much different mission.” While the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Drug Enforcement Administration have national programs to draw new recruits to their mission, he added, “we have a very half-assed one. It’s in name only.”

A Fading Flame

Despite progress in recent decades, the grizzly bear still walks a delicate line in the West. While the crush of human development shrinks its habitat, the animals are continually run down on highways and gunned down in fields and forests. Meanwhile, frustrations in local communities — the kind that can lead to bears being poached — continue to fester.

“I am concerned that the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to work itself into irrelevancy because they’re not getting enough done.”

Recently, Stoinski bumped into one of his old tribal counterparts at a local store in Lander. The game warden was frustrated. There were more and more grizzlies on the reservation and no support from the Fish and Wildlife Service to be found. For Stoinski, it was a testament to the regrettable reality of his final years as a federal agent. “We’re neglecting our state counterparts who need help. We’re neglecting our tribal counterparts,” he said. “They’re pulling people off to do these international things. Guys are sitting in their offices now looking on the internet for someone trafficking in some wildlife commodity, instead of being on the ground where the bears and the wolves and the eagles and all the other critters are living.”

“It’s just a huge disservice,” Stoinski said of the agency’s priorities. “I am concerned that the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to work itself into irrelevancy because they’re not getting enough done.”

Hanging up his badge didn’t come easy for Stoinski. The veteran investigator had hoped to leave the state of conservation better than he found it. “You want to pass that torch to somebody,” he said. “You want to see them carry it, and you hope you’re leaving it in good hands.” He isn’t sure he did. “I think that’s the biggest regret I have about retiring — am I leaving it in better hands than I got it in?” he said. “I feel like the answer has become no.”

This project was made possible in part by support from the Fund for Environmental Journalism.

The post Grizzly Bear Poachers Flout the Endangered Species Act — and Get Away With It appeared first on The Intercept.

Late last month, federal prosecutors in Arizona invited the family of 58-year-old Raymond Mattia to meet in Sells, Arizona, a main population center of the Tohono O’odham Nation, which spans large swaths of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mattia’s loved ones and legal team attended the September 19 meeting under the impression that lingering questions surrounding Mattia’s May 18 killing would finally be answered. Instead, the family says they were given general descriptions of the law alongside confirmation that the officers and agents involved in the shooting would not face charges. Federal prosecutors, joined by a tribal liaison and an FBI agent, refused to answer questions as to how, specifically, the government reached its conclusion.

“It felt like we lost him again.”

“It’s kind of still surreal,” Mattia’s niece, Yvonne Nevarez, who attended the meeting, told The Intercept. “It felt like we lost him again.”

Prosecutors gave the family the impression they would have their questions answered at the meeting, said Ryan Stitt, a California-based attorney for Mattia’s relatives. Stitt said the refusal to answer questions undercut new Justice Department guidelines on the rights of crime victims.

“We wanted to have a fact-driven discussion about what happened to better understand their decision not to prosecute,” Stitt told The Intercept. “I was very clear that I did not want to recommend to the family that they come to this meeting if it wasn’t going to be a fact-driven discussion.”

In the absence of answers, Mattia’s relatives plan to file a civil rights lawsuit against the federal government. “It was disappointing and upsetting for the family,” Stitt said. “It puts them in a position where they have to file a lawsuit to get basic questions answered, like who shot Ray and why.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona said, “Department of Justice employees, including supervisory and line Assistant U.S. Attorneys, a victim advocate and an FBI agent, met with Mr. Mattia’s family and the family’s lawyers in Sells on September 19 for more than an hour.”

“The employees explained our conclusion in the criminal investigation — that the agents’ use of force under the facts and circumstances presented in this case does not rise to the level of a federal criminal civil rights violation or a criminal violation assimilated under Arizona law — and addressed questions posed by the family and the lawyers,” spokesperson Zach Stoebe said. “We decline to comment more specifically on the meeting between the family and the Department employees: victims have an inherent right to speak with the press, and to criticize their government.”

Edited Body Camera Footage

Mattia spent the entirety of his life in Menagers Dam, a remote Tohono O’odham village situated directly on the border, where he was an active member of the community, artist, and avid hunter. In June, Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, released body camera footage of his final moments there, compiled in a 28-minute edited video.

Shortly before he was killed, Mattia had exchanged a series of text messages with his sister, reporting that three men — presumed border crossers — had been in his home demanding to use his phone. The confrontation was apparently tense, with Mattia grabbing his hunting knife to run the men off. Mattia told his sister he called authorities to report the incident.

Soon after the exchange, a convoy of law enforcement vehicles rolled into the village. According to CBP, Border Patrol agents were responding to a call for back-up from Tohono O’odham police, who had received a report of shots fired in the area. No names or addresses were given, and the origin of the purported shots was unclear.

The team met in the dark at a recreation center. The Border Patrol agents wore tactical gear and carried rifles. “It’s going to be a little bit of a guessing game trying to find it,” a Tohono O’odham police officer said of their target, according to the body camera footage. “I don’t know exactly where that motherfucker’s at.”

The tribal officer led the agents to Mattia’s home. Mattia stepped out in the dark to greet them. He was ordered to step forward and show his hands. As Mattia complied with the commands, law enforcement officials mistook a cellphone in his hand for a gun. Initial reports indicated as many as 38 rounds were fired. A medical examiner’s report, ruling the case a homicide, said Mattia was shot nine times. The body camera footage indicated that roughly 31 seconds passed from the moment Mattia received his first command to the moment the first shot was fired.

Though Mattia’s family went into last month’s meeting with notice that charges would not be filed, they still had questions. From the outset, the edited body camera footage had raised their concerns.

“We mostly wanted to know why we weren’t allowed to view the entire video,” Nevarez said. “We also wanted to ask if there was something that they saw that we didn’t.”

Additionally, the family sought clarity on the murky circumstances that brought the authorities to Mattia’s door in the first place. They wanted to know if investigators had considered the mindset of the agents who responded to the call. Having reviewed the body camera footage herself, Nevarez thought it looked like less like law enforcement and more like battlefield prep for a night raid on an enemy compound.

“They were all there, hyped up, walking in like a war zone,” she said. “He really didn’t have a chance. They were out to get somebody.”

Victims’ Rights

Ahead of the meeting, at the request of the assistant U.S. attorney leading the government’s case, Stitt shared a list of the family’s questions. The two sides had agreed that they qualified as victims under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. That meant the family was entitled to rights established in revised guidelines Attorney General Merrick Garland unveiled in 2022.

The new rules — which went into effect this year and which Garland described as “victim-centered and trauma-informed” — advise federal authorities that a “strong presumption exists in favor of providing, rather than withholding, assistance and services” to victims. In meetings, the guidelines say, prosecutors should strive to both obtain and share information.

“We were very clear we wanted to assert their rights under the rules as victims to the fullest extent possible,” Stitt said. The questions the family had were neither complicated nor sensitive, he argued. They wanted to know how many shots were fired and if the Tohono O’odham police officer on hand participated in the shooting.

“They would not answer that question,” Stitt said. “They would not answer the question about how many shots were fired or why. They said that all the Border Patrol officers made statements to the FBI but would not disclose any detail about those statements other than they exist.”

At one point, Stitt said, the family was told that the purpose of the meeting was not to gather ammunition for a civil lawsuit. The comment was surprising and unsettling, given that the same federal prosecutor responsible for overseeing the decision to not bring criminal charges in Mattia’s case would also defend the federal government if his family brought a civil suit.

“It seems like it was an inappropriate response to the family to treat the meeting as just a way to tell them that no charges will be filed.”

“No civil case has been filed, and the family is looking for honest questions about what happened,” Stitt said. “We certainly can’t say that they’ve acted unethically, but we obviously have a lot of questions, and we were hopeful to get answers during the meeting. It seems like it was an inappropriate response to the family to treat the meeting as just a way to tell them that no charges will be filed and to provide no further factual explanation why.”

Among the most pressing of the family’s concerns, Nevarez said, was the unanswered question of what — if anything — the federal government intends to do to disentangle the relationship between the Tohono O’odham Nation Police Department and the U.S. Border Patrol going forward.

“We feel like we don’t even want to call TOPD or trust TOPD anymore because they can call Border Patrol just like they did for my uncle Ray,” she said. “We’re afraid the same thing would happen to us.”

The post Justice Department Won’t Charge Border Patrol Agents Who Killed Native Man appeared first on The Intercept.

In July, amid a lethal and record-setting heatwave, The Intercept captured photos of roughly 50 migrants caged in an outdoor pen at the Border Patrol’s Ajo Station, deep in the Sonoran Desert two hours west of Tucson. The high temperature that day was 114 degrees. According to CBP officials who are based in the state and have direct knowledge of the situation, the caging was no isolated incident: Supervisors at the remote station have been using the pen, as well as other exposed areas, since at least last winter to detain large numbers of people in extreme cold as well as extreme heat.

“This has been going on for a long time,” one of the officials told The Intercept. “Management is forcing us to violate these things that they should have — basic human necessities.”

Since 2020, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector has been under a “permanent injunction” following a class-action lawsuit revealing that migrants, including women and children, in custody in Southern Arizona were systematically held in deplorable conditions. Under the injunction, the Border Patrol is legally obligated to provide anyone in custody for more than 48 hours with a bed and blanket, showers, adequate food, potable water, medical assessments, and more. Agents sign paperwork acknowledging that they have read and will abide by the order.

In a moment of dire humanitarian need, CBP’s use of the outdoor pen reflects deeper problems at the Border Patrol’s Ajo outpost, the officials said, one that’s rooted in a lack of foresight or acknowledgment of the life-or-death urgency inherent in the desert. In July alone, the Office of the Pima County Medical Examiner, whose remit is within the Tucson Sector’s jurisdiction, cataloged the recovery of 44 sets of migrant remains in Southern Arizona — the third highest monthly total in a decade and a half — including 22 people who died a day before being found.

The CBP officials interviewed by The Intercept recounted the same specifics and timing of the detention conditions at the Ajo Border Patrol station. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press. To corroborate their claims, the sources provided photos and video of conditions both from within the station and on the border itself. The Intercept is withholding publication of those images, which feature the faces of scores of people — including men, women, and children — to protect their privacy.

The CBP officials stressed that by failing to provide the humanitarian resources needed for an influx of asylum-seekers, the Border Patrol has made it impossible for agents in Arizona to abide by the federal injunction mandating the humane treatment of noncitizens in U.S. custody.

“What we’re doing now is a disgrace,” one official said. “We need full-blown infrastructure down here. We need mobile command centers and tents and air conditioning and caregivers and EMTs down on the border.” They added: “If we got an EMT on shift, we’re lucky. There’s just nothing being flooded in.”

In a statement, CBP spokesperson Justin Long said the agency was “prioritizing all available resources in response to human smugglers endangering large groups of people by sending them into remote desert areas during extreme summer heat.” That response includes increased deployment of medical personnel in the Tucson Sector and the construction and retrofitting of facilities in the area. “Despite the increase in encounters in this dangerous and remote area, the Ajo station has remained one of the Border Patrol stations with the lowest average Times in Custody as we rapidly move people on from this area,” he said.

“CBP takes allegations of mistreatment very seriously and has policies and procedures in place for the care of individuals in our custody,” he added. While CBP does not comment on ongoing litigation, Long said, the agency understands the injunction in Arizona to cover both outdoor and open-air facilities. “Tucson Sector constantly reviews the practices and procedures of all the stations within sector to ensure compliance with the injunction,” the spokesperson said. “Tucson Sector continually monitors its detention situation, if Tucson Sector’s conditions are not consistent with its obligations, proper notifications are made.”

“These people should have warmth in the wintertime and shade, at the very least, in the summertime.”

While apprehensions have recently dipped elsewhere on the border, that has not been the case in Arizona, where the Tucson Sector has become the busiest in the nation — not to mention the most lethal. In July, agents in Southern Arizona recorded nearly 34,000 apprehensions: a 28 percent increase compared to last year. Tucson Sector Deputy Chief Justin DeLaTorre told local outlet AZPM News that while most 2022 apprehensions involved single adult men, this year, nearly half are families. DeLaTorre added that roughly 80 percent of the people taken into custody turn themselves in — typically to seek asylum, a right enshrined under domestic and international law, including for those who cross the border without authorization.

“If you’re taking people into custody, you’re the custodians. You’re taking away their ability to protect themselves, the ability to provide for themselves. You are accepting that you are going to do that, and they believe you’re going to do that,” one official who spoke to The Intercept said. “These people should have warmth in the wintertime and shade, at the very least, in the summertime.”

The denial of either was “reprehensible,” they said, and yet, that’s precisely what’s been happening.

“Deprived of Basic Human Necessities”

Border Patrol supervisors at the Ajo station began using an outdoor pen to cage asylum-seekers last winter, the officials said, when nighttime temperatures plummeted to near freezing. Initially, the pen included a tent. Men, women, and children would cram themselves on top of one another for warmth, while others huddled together and shivered outside. The tent was soon disassembled, however, because agents could not see inside. People were left to fend for themselves against the elements.

“A lot of these guys, they don’t have jackets. They don’t have cold-weather gear,” the first official said. On certain shifts, agents were directed to take the jackets people did have and replace them with Mylar emergency blankets.

“Can you imagine?” the official asked. “We’re stripping them of their jackets and their hoodies in December, January, February, and then we’re handing them a Mylar blanket and telling them, ‘There you go. Hang out outside.’ Because somebody believes that these families from India are going to stab us through their jacket or something insane.”

In time, some asylum-seekers developed a preference for heavy-duty garbage bags over the Mylar blankets and would wrap themselves in those instead. “That’s the kind of laughable thing about the brilliance of the Border Patrol, or the stupidity,” the official said, “is they actually created a situation where now you need an emergency blanket. You’re now in an emergency, and the only thing they’re going to give you is an emergency blanket. This just keeps going on and on with stuff like this.”

Throughout the winter, the number of people in the pen would swell into the hundreds, added the second CBP official. The station set up an outdoor heater, but it did little good. The pen is “totally exposed to the desert air,” the official said. “Unless you are sitting directly in front of the heater, you’re not going to get warm. So that’s when you start to see all these aliens sitting out there, huddled up and they’re shivering, which is a bunch of bullshit.”

Day and night, as winter turned to spring and spring turned to summer, asylum-seekers cycled through the pen. “The thing that drove me crazy was the fact that it’s a rock area,” said a CBP official. “It’s fucking gravel, and it’s fairly hefty gravel. It’s not even fine gravel. They just gotta lay in there. It’s insane.”

Given the rough ground and the scalding rocks, cushioning of any kind was in high demand among migrants. The scarps of cardboard that agents use to pass out food became a valued commodity. “I’ve literally seen guys get into these squabbling fights over the cardboard,” the official said. “It’s wild.”

An arch over the pen provided a strip of shade that moved with the sun, hardly enough to provide relief to the swelling crowds. “Most of the shade that it provides gets cast way outside that fenced-in area,” the official said. “So they just get hit with the sunlight.”

Following The Intercept’s publication of photos depicting the pen last month, the Border Patrol stretched a shade cloth over the enclosure and hung white sheeting around its perimeter.

“It just blows my mind that it took all winter and damn near half the summer just to go out there and just lay a tarp across that outdoor pen,” one CBP official said. The Ajo station has ample shaded area for Border Patrol vehicles, they noted. “How come all these vehicles are getting fucking shade, but these migrants don’t?” the official asked. “Who cares if the paint fades or if the car’s really hot to get into?” they said. The material damage to a truck, they argued, would pale in comparison to the loss of human life due to heat stroke.

“How come all these vehicles are getting fucking shade, but these migrants don’t?”

According to the officials who spoke to The Intercept, some agents were fine with the outdoor caging, making comments like, “That’s what they get for coming here illegally.” That indifference was not universal. “They have normal rights just like any other person,” said one official. “You can’t just take them and just have them out there shivering all fucking night in the dark.” A second official agreed. “I don’t like seeing people freeze,” they said. “I don’t care how they got here.”

“There’s a lot of people that are really pissed off about what’s going on,” they added. “We’re all actually in shock. It’s kind of like a bad relationship. You think you’re going to come to work the next day and things will be a little better, and they never are.”

The growing numbers of asylum-seekers turning themselves in, the clear commands of the federal injunction that agents vowed to uphold, and the plainly dangerous conditions at the station became a subject of concern at muster, the routine pre-shift meetings where the rank and file receive their marching orders from station supervisors.

Agents wanted to know who signed off on plans to detain people outside and how those plans were consistent with the injunction they swore to follow. “The personal liability risk is real,” one official said. “And there’s nobody answering these questions.”

The official noted that the court order pertains to indoor detention practices. “I don’t know if any of this stuff is OK for outside detention,” they said. The injunction specifically calls for CBP’s comportment with detention industry standards, they added, and prohibits the depravation of basic human necessities. “They’re kept outside in a cage with no shade. No walls. On a rock ground,” the official said. “I’m pretty sure they’re being deprived of basic human necessities.”

“A Disaster in There”

Despite the concerns raised by agents, supervisors at the Ajo station stayed the course amid deadly heat and, more recently, torrential monsoon rains.

While individual experiences may vary, it is not uncommon for asylum-seekers, particularly men, to spend hours exposed to the elements, the officials told The Intercept.

“They’d probably be there for anywhere from a few hours, up to a whole damn day,” said one. “They’d definitely be out there overnight. They’d get there at like noon to 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and they probably wouldn’t fuckin’ leave there until sunup the next day.”

The pen has a music festival-style outdoor sink and porta-potties, though the latter is far from sanitary. “Sometimes you can’t even get within like 15 feet, or you’ll fucking throw up — I mean not literally, but you’ll start gagging,” said one official. “And these people got to go take a dump in there.” Another official added: “I’ve never seen outhouses with water that close to spilling over with shit and piss. They can’t get the company to come and clean them daily.”

“I’ve never seen outhouses with water that close to spilling over with shit and piss.”

Conditions inside the station are similarly grim. “It’s a disaster in there,” one CBP official said. “They’re overcrowded to the point where they can’t give them all mats.”

The provision of mats is one of the requirements of the injunction against CBP. Prohibitions on overcrowding and sleeping on or near toilets are also listed.

“I’ve seen the cells so full that people are literally laying shoulder to shoulder, head to toe next to somebody else, and they’re all wrapped in Mylar blankets,” one CBP official said. “When you see so many people wrapped in Mylar blankets that the whole floor looks like a mirror, that’s an issue. And it goes all the way back into the toilets sometimes. They’re sleeping back in and around the toilet areas.”

Medical assessments are also required under the court order. There too, the officials said, CBP is failing to meet its obligations under the law.

The problem stems from a sea change in the demographics of asylum-seekers in recent years, from almost entirely Spanish speakers hailing from a predictable roster of Latin American nations, to people from all over the world arriving by the hundreds in large groups every day.

“Any day of the week you’re encountering at least five different languages, sometimes up to maybe 10,” one official said. “There’s no way to accurately do the medical questionnaires. You can’t possibly have 600 people at the station with another 300 waiting to come in and do medical questionnaires for people in seven different languages.”

The large numbers and the linguistic diversity create a processing bottleneck, they said, as does a lack of familiarity with the U.S. intake system among asylum-seekers themselves. While a Mexican or Honduran asylum-seeker — thanks to the experiences of loved ones or acquaintances in years past — may know that the Border Patrol will seize their personal items and pack accordingly, an asylum-seeker from India, China, or Cameroon, may not.

“These are groups that are coming with full suitcases,” the official said. “It’s like you’re going through their dresser drawer.”

Like the seasons of Southern Arizona, fluctuation in global migration trends can be planned for with a bit of effort, but in the case of the Ajo station, that clearly hasn’t happened.

“It’s foreseeable stuff,” the CBP official said. “They knew this was coming. They knew it was out there. They said, ‘There’s all these people waiting to get in.’ And it’s like, OK, where’s the tents? Where’s the plan? Where’s the cohesion?”

“Time in Detention Is Being Skewed”

Outside the walls of the Ajo station, on the border itself, conditions are even more dire.

Large numbers of asylum-seekers arrive at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, two large tracts of public land that run along the border. Guided by smugglers in Mexico, they appear at all hours of the day but especially at night. A photo shared by the chief of the Tucson Sector earlier this month purported to show the largest of several groups detained one weekend, compromised of more than 500 people from 17 different countries.

How such groups are received can vary widely, one CBP official explained. “From one shift to the next, nobody knows what the hell they’re doing,” they said. “There’s no coordinated effort most of the time.”

Some agents will order asylum-seekers to stay where they are until vehicles can pick them up, others will encourage them to turn back. “There’s a rift in the station,” the official said of the divided approach.

For large groups, the wait at the border often takes hours, and the time is spent in some of the most remote and deadliest terrain in North America. “There’s no tents. There’s no shelter. There’s nothing out there for them,” the official said. “You would think the Border Patrol would have a designated guy bringing water down there. That doesn’t always happen. One shift might, but the next shift might not, so they can be down there without water for a long time.”

Given the lethality of the landscape, some agents are inclined to implore asylum-seekers, particularly men, who are likely to wait the longest, to leave. “Get the heck out of here — don’t wait here in the desert to die,” the official said, describing the sentiment of what agents might tell the men. “But not everybody believes that.”

The encounters at the border create yet another concern when it comes to CBP’s injunction. While the order pertains to actions the agency is required to take after a person has been in custody for 48 hours, people are often being told to stay put by U.S. government officials for many hours — in some cases, up to a day or more — without any resources, but that time isn’t being counted as official “detention.”

“The time in detention is being skewed,” the official said. “They don’t start the clock the moment they’re encountered and detained.”

It is just one more example of the system breaking down, they argued, and failing vulnerable people caught in a dangerous situation. “I think a lot of these people probably have a legitimate claim to asylum,” the official said. “There’s a lot of reason to believe that.”

The dozens of human remains found in the Arizona desert last month were a fraction of the more than 4,000 the medical examiner in Tucson has logged in the past two-and-a-half decades, which are themselves a fraction of the unknowable total of lives lost across the border in recent years. In the face of that grim reality, people keep coming from more and more places around the world. The U.S. government, meanwhile, appears unwilling to adapt with the times.

“It’s just completely unmanageable,” said the CBP official. “I know that the border has been open, wide open, for a long time, but as far as the humanity of what we’re seeing with these people, I never seen anything like it.”

“We can bring eight buses down there, but the smugglers are just going to bring eight semi-trailers full of people,” they said. “At some point, there has to be acknowledgment that we do not have the resources to do this humanely.”

Update: September 8, 2023
This article was updated to include a statement that CBP provided after publication.

The post Border Patrol Violating Court Order Against Inhumane Treatment of Migrants, Officials Say appeared first on The Intercept.

With its sweeping mountain view, the hill was Canyon’s refuge. His 3-year-old yellow lab, Kasey, was his constant companion there.

The two set off as usual that afternoon. Kasey was thrashing one of his toys when Canyon spotted a sprinkler-like object protruding from the ground. He ran a finger along the device. Suddenly, he heard a pop, and an orange cloud burst forth. Canyon lunged back as the front of his body was doused in chemicals. The burning began immediately.

As Canyon grasped for snow to irrigate his eyes, he heard Kasey grunting near the device. He called to him, but he didn’t come. He stopped what he was doing and ran to him. Dropping to his knees, Canyon watched as Kasey writhed in spasms. Frothing at the mouth, the dog’s eyes turned glossy. The boy didn’t want to leave, but he knew he needed help. He sprinted down the hill for his mother.

Canyon’s father, Mark Mansfield, a family doctor, was at work when the boy called for help. He raced home as fast as he could. Pulling into the property, Mansfield rushed to Kasey and positioned himself above the dog, prepared to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Canyon stopped him. It’s poison, Canyon said.

Kasey was dead, and Canyon’s head was pounding like never before. Toggling between his training as a physician and his horror as a parent, Mansfield struggled to sort out his son’s symptoms from the trauma he’d just experienced. He told Canyon to get into the shower immediately.

While his son cleaned up, Mansfield called the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office. A bomb and hazmat team were dispatched. Longtime Sheriff Lorin Nielsen was at a loss, trying to answer what felt like an absurd question: Who would plant a bomb in Pocatello?

Cyanide Bombs

Across the American West lies an untold number of potent chemical weapons, tucked away and waiting to go off. There could be one on your favorite hiking trail, or on the loop where you walk your dog, or in the woods where your kids play. Packed with sodium cyanide, these spring-loaded devices blast clouds of poison gas five feet into the air. Once inhaled, the lethal toxins mount a multidirectional attack on your cardiovascular, pulmonary, and central nervous system. Death can come in a matter of minutes.

The weapons, known as M-44s, are placed by an under-the-radar federal agency called Wildlife Services. The agency was created to protect the livestock industry’s bottom line by killing off the competition: namely, wild predators. The so-called cyanide bombs do kill predators, but they can also kill anyone else unlucky enough to stumble upon them. And they have a hair trigger.

Wildlife Services, which falls under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is well known in conservationist circles. Most people, however, have never heard of it. For the uninitiated, a glimpse into the taxpayer-funded killing machine can be jarring.

In the past eight years, Wildlife Services killed nearly 21 million animals as part of its mission to oversee “the eradication and control” of species “injurious” to human endeavors, particularly ranching. While agents’ preferred means of killing is by air, with gunmen in helicopters and planes, M-44s were used to intentionally kill more than 88,000 animals from 2014 through 2022 — the period for which the agency has data available online. The total amounts to roughly 30 poisonings a day for much of the past decade.

M-44s are part of “a broad strategy that also uses non-lethal methods, and that is informed by ongoing wildlife biology research,” Wildlife Services spokesperson Ed Curlett said in an emailed statement to The Intercept. Curlett added that 98 percent of the agency’s poison devices are placed on private lands and “only when the private, municipal, state, or federal landowner or manager requests assistance and enters a written cooperative agreement.”

According to Wildlife Service’s data, an additional 2,200 animals were killed unintentionally over the 2014 through 2022 period, including endangered species, domestic livestock, and pets like the Mansfields’ dog.

After losing Kasey, the Mansfields went on the offensive, suing Wildlife Services and traveling to Washington to spearhead legislation banning the use of M-44s. The hill behind the family’s home is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, an agency of the Department of the Interior. Idaho, at the time of Canyon’s poisoning, had banned M-44s on public land, but they remained legal on private land and on public lands throughout much of the rest of the country.

Surely, thought Mark Mansfield, the near-death of his child would motivate lawmakers to stop government agents from planting poison bombs everywhere. He was wrong.

The 2019 introduction of “Canyon’s Law” — a bill prohibiting M-44s on public land nationwide — went nowhere. “I don’t care if you’re red, blue, purple. I don’t care if you’re rural or urban. It just seems like a no-brainer,” Mansfield told me. “But somehow this still goes on. I’m shocked. I thought it would be a done deal within months. Call me naïve.”

Four years after it was written, Canyon’s Law was reintroduced last month by Reps. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

“This is remarkable. They weren’t prompted. We didn’t have a clue that they even knew this hearing was going on.”

After years of setbacks, advocates in the Mansfields’ corner believe the tide may finally be turning against M-44s — thanks to the emergence of an unexpected but critical ally. During a congressional hearing on Canyon’s Law last summer, the Department of the Interior submitted a statement outlining its M-44s position. “The Department is concerned that these devices pose a risk of injury or death to unintended targets, including humans, pets, and threatened and endangered species,” the statement said. The Department had “no technical objections” with the proposed bill “and would work to implement the legislation, if enacted.”

Brooks Fahy, the executive director of Predator Defense, a national wildlife advocacy group, was shocked. While the Department of Agriculture manages 193 million acres of public land in the U.S., the Department of Interior manages 245 million. The scale alone made the statement highly significant. That the largest land management agency in the country would take a critical position on the issue was unprecedented. “This is remarkable,” Fahy told me. “They weren’t prompted. We didn’t have a clue that they even knew this hearing was going on.”

Sensing an opportunity, Predator Defense and the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity rallied organizations focused on wildlife preservation in the West. With more than 70 allied groups joining them, the groups filed a formal petition last month, on the heels of the reintroduction of Canyon’s Law, calling on the Department of Interior to ban the use of M-44s on its lands.

Success won’t come easy though. Behind the M-44 lies a well-connected industry that’s influenced the government’s predator killing program for generations, one that’s unlikely to relinquish its bombs without a fight.

The M-44 cyanide canister that killed the Mansfield’s dog, Kasey, in Pocatello, Idaho, in March 2017.

Years of Hell

Mark Mansfield had to figure out two things after his son was poisoned: What was the toxin, and who was responsible?

Luckily, one of the sheriff’s deputies had worked as a federal trapper. He suggested contacting Wildlife Services. Nielsen, the sheriff, had never heard of the agency and had no idea that it was mining his county with spring-loaded poison sprayers.

Mansfield, too, was puzzled. He was even more taken aback when Todd Sullivan, the Wildlife Services supervisor who planted the device, showed up at his house.

“He killed my dog and he had nearly killed my child,” Mansfield said. “At that point in time, there was a lot of stress. It was very difficult for me not to, you know — whatever.”

The family was kept inside while Sullivan escorted law enforcement up the hill. Unbeknownst to the sheriff’s department, Wildlife Services had planted 18 cyanide bombs throughout Bannock County. Sullivan had placed the M-44 that poisoned Canyon and killed Kasey in plain view of the Mansfields’ backyard, a second device 60 feet from the first, and two more elsewhere in the neighborhood.

The public land behind the Mansfields’ home abutted private property, where a local sheep producer had leased an allotment to raise his stock. In an interview with a Bannock County detective, Sullivan said he meant to plant his bombs on private land, in accordance with Idaho law, and while he had the means to differentiate between jurisdictions, he didn’t. The Wildlife Services supervisor also admitted that there had been no livestock predation cases in the area. He was simply trying to “get a jump on the season” by poisoning any coyotes that might pass through.

“It was three years of hell for his parents and more so for him.”

In his thousands of hours in the emergency room, Mark Mansfield had never dealt with a sodium cyanide poisoning. He called specialists around the country to gather as much information as he could. It did not look good. As one toxicologist explained in a 2019 interview, sodium cyanide’s effects on the human body are similar to those of sarin gas, an internationally banned chemical weapon used in war zones.

Canyon’s pounding headache worsened with admission to the ER. He experienced nausea and vomiting on a near-daily basis. His hands and feet went numb. The worst of it lasted more than a month, but the long-term effects, from migraines to mood changes, lingered for years.

“Finally, about 2020, he was back to his baseline,” Mansfield said. “It was three years of hell for his parents and more so for him.”

A Family Fights Back

In the days after Canyon was poisoned, his father received an unsolicited call from Fahy, the Predator Defense executive director. “A lot of people helped us,” Mansfield said. “But he was the one who explained it to us.”

Fahy’s first encounters with Wildlife Services began in the 1970s, when the agency was still known as Animal Damage Control. Working as an investigator for the Humane Society in Oregon, he encountered the mummified remains of snared coyotes and orphaned pups at dens in rural areas throughout the state. He started Predator Defense a decade later as an animal hospital before transitioning into advocacy.

Fahy had witnessed the physical damage Wildlife Services’ traps can do but found the agency’s arsenal of poisons more unsettling. “You can’t remove it,” he said. “That poison is in their system and watching an animal die slowly, whether it be from sodium cyanide or strychnine or compound 1080, is extraordinarily disturbing.”

Fahy can rattle off cases going back years. There was the Wildlife Services trapper who scattered M-44s around a Christmas tree farm. And the one who hanged coyote carcasses on a family’s fence after killing their dog. And then there was Dennis Slaugh.

A heavy equipment operator from Vernal, Utah, Slaugh had little in the way of money but took great pride in the work he did for the county. That ended following his brush with an M-44 in 2003. Plagued with daily vomiting, diminished breathing, and soaring blood pressure, the 61-year-old was forced to quit his job. Wildlife Services denied any fault in the matter and claimed that Slaugh exceeded the statute of limitations to file a claim of wrongdoing. Unable to work, the medical bills piled up as Slaugh’s health deteriorated.

“They took my life away,” Slaugh said in a 2020 documentary. “And now I can’t hardly change a light bulb. It’s all from this cyanide. It just took everything away from me.”

As the years went by, Fahy collected case after case of M-44s killing pets and harming people across the West. Never once, he said, did he encounter an incident in which Wildlife Services, per the M-44 use restrictions required by the Environmental Protection Agency, contacted local medical providers to inform them of devices planted in their area. Signage was another problem. A trapper may place a single sign at one entrance on a large plot with several entry points, or they might not place one at all. Both were common in the investigations Fahy undertook.

Fahy had never seen a case quite like the Mansfields’ where a child came so close to death. He shared everything he knew with the family. In June 2018, the Mansfields filed suit against Wildlife Services, accusing Sullivan of failing to follow a slew of regulations meant to govern the placement of M-44s, including the placement of warning signs.

The Justice Department initially responded by blaming Canyon and his parents for what happened, before admitting Wildlife Services’ negligence and agreeing to pay the Mansfields $38,500 to settle the case in 2020.

Thick as Pudding

Despite the national coverage the Mansfield case received, Wildlife Services has clung to M-44s as “an effective and environmentally sound wildlife damage management tool.”

In the wake of Canyon’s poisoning, the agency published a brochure justifying the devices’ use. “Our use of M 44 devices strictly follows EPA label instructions, directions, and use-restrictions; applicable Federal, State, and local laws and regulations; and agency and program directives and policies,” it said. “Our personnel do not use M-44s on any property unless the land’s owner or manager requests and agrees to our assistance. We must have a valid written cooperative agreement, agreement for control, Memoranda of Agreement, or other applicable document signed by the landowner or authorized representative to place any M-44s.”

After years of bad press, Wildlife Services is acutely aware of its reputation as the “hired gun of the livestock industry.” The source of the oft-repeated description is Carter Niemeyer, formerly one of the agency’s most productive trappers and today one of its sharpest critics.

“Their lobbying power makes or breaks Wildlife Services.”

Niemeyer is the author of “Wolfer,” an account of his quarter century as a Wildlife Services supervisor in Montana from 1975 to 2000. The veteran trapper believes the agency has important elements to its portfolio, and that many of its East Coast operations are quite professional. But in the West, he argues, existential ties to the livestock industry still reign. Unwillingness to relinquish M-44, he says, is an artifact of that bond.

“The very existence of Wildlife Services is dependent upon the livestock industry and all of the cooperators,” Niemeyer told me. “Their lobbying power makes or breaks Wildlife Services. If the cattlemen and sheep men lost their faith in Wildlife Services and didn’t do this insistent, persistent, powerful lobbying that they do, Wildlife Services would be dead in the water and probably disappeared.”

One of the starkest examples of that power came in 1998, when then-Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., introduced a bill to cut Wildlife Services’ budget from $50 to $10 million by taking an axe to its predator killing program. DeFazio was a longtime critic of the program, often telling reporters that Wildlife Services was more secretive than the intelligence agencies he worked with on the House Homeland Security Committee. His bill passed, but in a highly unusual turn of events, it was subjected to revote less than 24 hours later. The American Farm Bureau was in a fury. Overnight, agriculture lobbyists convinced 38 members of Congress to change their minds. The proposal died the following day.

“They were against the ropes, and it was all over,” Niemeyer said. “And in the last minute of the last hour of the last second, the livestock industry lobbyists somehow got to enough congressmen to turn the whole thing around and get that budget back when we’d pretty much heard that it was a done deal.”

Niemeyer never used M-44s and didn’t like them. The trappers who worked for him mostly felt the same. They were dangerous, required lots of paperwork, and trappers had plenty of other tools to do their jobs. “I was not disappointed if a guy didn’t want to use him,” Niemeyer said. “I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have either if I was in their shoes.”

There was one problem.

“My walking orders as a supervisor was to make sure the men used them,” Niemeyer said. “There was a real push from higher levels of the livestock industry to push for their registration and push for their use. Some of the sheep men, some of the notorious ones I remember, they figured that if you got snares, put ’em out. You got traps. Put ’em out. And for God’s sake, if there’s M-44s and you got a bunch sitting there in your cabinet, put ’em out.”

In its 2019 brochure on M-44s, Wildlife Services pointed to tens of millions of dollars lost every year by ranchers due to livestock killed by predators. Those numbers, Niemeyer pointed out, reflect survey data, self-reported by ranchers. They are not independently verified.

Though Niemeyer’s Wildlife Services tenure ended more than 20 years ago, the livestock industry’s continued support for M-44s is evident today on the webpage of the American Sheep Industry Association, which represents more 100,000 sheep producers nationwide. The site features a dedicated “Fact versus Fiction” page on the issue of M-44s. Among the fictions listed is the notion that cyanide bombs present a risk to the public. 

At this point, Niemeyer argued, clinging to M-44s is as much about symbolism as anything else. “Kinda like the old give ’em an inch, they take a foot,” he said. “If they take our M-44s, next year they’ll take our snares, and then the year after they’ll take our traps.”

There’s a material angle as well. In addition to federal funding, Wildlife Services relies on the financial support of “cooperators” to keep the lights on. In the case of its predator program, the cooperators are often agricultural interests.

“They’re thick as pudding,” Niemeyer said. “That lobbying power of the ag industry is what keeps Wildlife Services afloat. I wouldn’t call it a criminal, but they’re buddies. They needed us and we needed them, and that’s how it keeps going on to this day.”

For Dennis

Six years on, it’s impossible to measure the full impact that the poisoning had on Canyon, said Mansfield. “You’re not really going to have a control group on kids nearly killed by cyanide,” he said. “So anything and everything that ever happens to him, mentally and or physically, you say, ‘Oh, I wonder if cyanide has anything to do with that?’ It’s a haunting thought that comes up every single time.”

The family’s goal remains the same: getting Canyon’s Law passed. They are hopeful that the latest round of efforts will be the final push they have been waiting for.

Following Canyon’s poisoning, Idaho issued a statewide prohibition on the use of M-44s pending an environmental assessment that remains in effect today. Fahy, the Predator Defense advocate, had little time to celebrate.

“It literally ripped my guts out, the whole thing, what they got away with.”

In February 2018, he picked up the phone to learn that Dennis Slaugh passed away. The official cause was an acute myocardial infarction. Listed among his “conditions contributing to death” was “Cyanide Poisoning/Exposure From M44 Device 2003.” The words on Slaugh’s death certificate contradicted a claim on Wildlife Services’ brochure the following year — repeated on American Sheep Industry Association’s fact versus fiction page — which read: “No human fatalities have been associated with Wildlife Services’ use of M-44s.” When asked about the death certificate, Wildlife Services pointed to a 2008 federal investigation that purportedly cleared the agency of any culpability in Slaugh’s death.

Fahy was devastated. He, Slaugh, and Slaugh’s wife Dorothy had traveled to Washington together a decade before, urging lawmakers to act on M-44s before somebody was killed. Slaugh had never visited a city like D.C. before. He didn’t know what to expect, and he didn’t know what was happening inside his body — why, for example, he needed to pause periodically to vomit as he passed through the halls of the Capitol.

Looking back at a photo from the visit, Fahy notes the way Slaugh held Dorothy’s hand, squeezing it tightly. “He was scared,” Fahy said. He watched Slaugh’s slow and agonizing deterioration in the years that followed. His death was the outcome Fahy had dedicated his life to preventing.

“It literally ripped my guts out, the whole thing, what they got away with,” Fahy said. Approaching 70, Fahy has had his own health scares — a consequence, he believes, of internalizing decades of secondhand trauma. With Slaugh’s death, however, he vowed to continue their fight. Unlike Canyon’s poisoning, where at least there was some measure of accountability at the local level, he said, “with Dennis, Wildlife Services got away with it.”

“I find it unbelievable that there are people that could have treated him like that,” Fahy said. “Nobody stood up for him. They just walked right over him.”

The post Secretive Federal Agency’s Days of Killing Pets With Poison Bombs May Finally Be Ending appeared first on The Intercept.

In 2021, Abbott proclaimed that the “surge of individuals unlawfully crossing the Texas-Mexico border posed an ongoing and imminent threat of disaster” to the state and its residents. Among other effects, the disaster declaration opened a spigot of government money to a variety of private firms ostensibly paid to help patrol and blockade the state’s border with Mexico.

One of the private companies that got in on the cash disbursements was Cobwebs Technologies, a little-known Israeli surveillance contractor. Cobwebs’s marquee product, the surveillance platform Tangles, offers its users a bounty of different tools for tracking people as they navigate both the internet and the real world, synthesizing social media posts, app activity, facial recognition, and phone tracking.

“As long as this broken consumer data industry exists as it exists today, shady actors will always exploit it.”

News of the purchase comes as Abbott’s border crackdown escalated to new heights, following a Department of Public Safety whistleblower’s report of severe mistreatment of migrants by state law enforcement and a Justice Department lawsuit over the governor’s deployment of razor wire on the Rio Grande. The Cobwebs documents show that Abbott’s efforts to usurp the federal government’s constitutional authority to conduct immigration enforcement have extended into the electronic realm as well. The implications could reach far beyond the geographic bounds of the border and into the private lives of citizens and noncitizens alike.

“Government agencies systematically buying data that has been originally collected to provide consumer services or digital advertising represents the worst possible kind of decontextualized misuse of personal information,” Wolfie Christl, a privacy researcher who tracks data brokerages, told The Intercept. “But as long as this broken consumer data industry exists as it exists today, shady actors will always exploit it.”

Like its competitors in the world of software tracking tools, Cobwebs — which sells its services to the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and a variety of undisclosed corporate customers — lets its clients track the movements of private individuals without a court order. Instead of needing a judge’s sign-off, these tracking services rely on bulk-purchasing location pings pulled from smartphones, often through unscrupulous mobile apps or in-app advertisers, an unregulated and increasingly pervasive form of location tracking.

In August 2021, the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism division purchased a year of Tangles access for $198,000, according to contract documents, obtained through a public records request by Tech Inquiry, a watchdog and research organization, and shared with The Intercept. The state has renewed its Tangles subscription twice since then, though the discovery that Cobwebs failed to pay taxes owed in Texas briefly derailed the renewal last April, according to an email included in the records request. (Cobwebs declined to comment for this story.)

A second 2021 contract document shared with The Intercept shows DPS purchased “unlimited” access to Clearview AI, a controversial face recognition platform that matches individuals to tens of billions of photos scraped from the internet. The purchase, according to the document, was made “in accordance/governed by the Texas Governor’s Disaster Declaration for the Texas-Mexico border for ongoing and imminent threats.” (Clearview did not respond to a request for comment.)

Each of the three yearlong subscriptions notes Tangles was purchased “in accordance to the provisions outlined in the Texas Governor-Proclaimed Border Disaster Declaration signed May 22, 2022, per Section 418.011 of the Texas Government Code.”

The disaster declaration, which spans more than 50 counties, is part of an ongoing campaign by Abbott that has pushed the bounds of civil liberties in Texas, chiefly through the governor’s use of the Department of Public Safety.

Under Operation Lone Star, Abbott has spent $4.5 billion surging 10,000 Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard personnel to the border as part of a stated effort to beat back a migrant “invasion,” which he claims is aided and abetted by President Joe Biden. The resulting project has been riddled with scandal, including migrants languishing for months in state jails without charges and several suicides among personnel deployed on the mission. Just this week, the Houston Chronicle obtained an internal Department of Public Safety email revealing that troopers had been “ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande” and “told not to give water to asylum seekers even in extreme heat.”

On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department sued Texas over Abbott’s deployment of floating barricades on the Rio Grande. Abbott, having spent more than two years angling for a states’ rights border showdown with the Biden administration, responded last week to news of the impending lawsuit by tweeting: “I’ll see you in court, Mr. President.”

Despite Abbott’s repeated claims that Operation Lone Star is a targeted effort focused specifically on crimes at the border, a joint investigation by the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and the Marshall Project last year found that the state was counting arrests and drug charges far from the U.S-Mexico divide and unrelated to the Operation Lone Star mandate. Records obtained by the news organizations last summer showed that the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into Abbott’s operation. The status of the investigation has not been made public.

Where the Department of Public Safety’s access to Tangles’s powerful cellphone tracking software will fit into Abbott’s controversial border enforcement regime remains uncertain. (The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.)

Although Tangles provides an array of options for keeping tabs on a given target, the most powerful feature obtained by the Department of Public Safety is Tangles’s “WebLoc” feature: “a cutting-edge location solution which automatically monitors and analyzes location-based data in any specified geographic location,” according to company marketing materials. While Cobwebs claims it sources device location data from multiple sources, the Texas Department of Public Safety contract specifically mentions “ad ID,” a reference to the unique strings of text used to identify and track a mobile phone in the online advertising ecosystem.

“Every second, hundreds of consumer data brokers most people never heard of collect and sell huge amounts of personal information on everyone,” explained Christl, the privacy researcher. “Most of these shady and opaque data practices are systematically enabled by today’s digital marketing and advertising industry, which has gotten completely out of control.”

While advertisers defend this practice on the grounds that the device ID itself doesn’t contain a person’s name, Christl added that “several data companies sell information that helps to link mobile device identifiers to email addresses, phone numbers, names and postal addresses.” Even without extra context, tying a real name to an “anonymized” advertising identifier’s location ping is often trivial, as a person’s daily movement patterns typically quickly reveal both where they live and work.

Cobwebs advertises that WebLoc draws on “huge sums of location-based data,” and it means huge: According to a WebLoc promotional brochure, it affords customers “worldwide coverage” of smartphone pings based on “billions of data points to ensure maximum location based data coverage.” WebLoc not only provides the exact locations of smartphones, but also personal information associated with their owners, including age, gender, languages spoken, and interests — “e.g., music, luxury goods, basketball” — according to a contract document from the Office of Naval Intelligence, another Cobwebs customer.

The ability to track a person wherever they go based on an indispensable object they keep on or near them every hour of every day is of obvious appeal to law enforcement officials, particularly given that no judicial oversight is required to use a tool like Tangles. Critics of the technology have argued that a legislative vacuum allows phone-tracking tools, fed by the unregulated global data broker market, to give law enforcement agencies a way around Fourth Amendment protections.

The power to track people through Tangles, however, is valuable even in countries without an ostensible legal prohibition against unreasonable searches. In 2021, Facebook announced it had removed 200 accounts used by Cobwebs to track its users in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Poland, and several other countries.

“In addition to targeting related to law enforcement activities,” the company explained, “we also observed frequent targeting of activists, opposition politicians and government officials in Hong Kong and Mexico.”

Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept that bolstering surveillance powers under the aegis of an emergency declaration adds further risk to an already fraught technology. “We need to be very skeptical of any expansion of surveillance that occurs under disaster declarations, particularly open-ended claims of emergency,” Lipton said. “They can undermine legislative checks on the executive branch and obviate bounds on state behavior that exist for good reason.”

The post Texas State Police Purchased Israeli Phone-Tracking Software for “Border Emergency” appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday afternoon, The Intercept observed roughly 50 migrants confined in a chain-link pen at the Ajo Border Patrol station, a highly remote outpost two hours west of Tucson. From a ridge overlooking the Border Patrol’s facility, the migrants could be seen gathered under a carport-like structure, crowding themselves into a single, narrow strip of shade to escape the desert sun. The only furniture available was a short stack of metal bleachers baking in the extreme heat.

Just one day earlier, Tucson set a new record with 11 consecutive days of temperatures exceeding 111 degrees. The unincorporated community of Ajo and surrounding areas have been even hotter, with Thursday’s high hitting 114 degrees.

“The U.S. Border Patrol has surged personnel and transportation resources in recent weeks to respond to a significant increase in encounters near Ajo, AZ — some of the hottest, most isolated, and dangerous area of the southwest border — where individuals have been callously sent by smuggling organizations to walk for miles, often with little or no water,” a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, said in a statement to The Intercept Friday night.

The Border Patrol “is prioritizing expeditiously transporting noncitizens encountered in this desert environment, which is particularly dangerous during current weather conditions, to USBP facilities where individuals can receive medical care, food, water,” the statement continued.

CBP did not answer several specific questions from The Intercept, including how long people are being kept outside in the heat, whether children are among those who have been kept outside, and whether anyone held outside has required emergency medical care. The agency did, however, reiterate its standard practice to provide medical screening for migrants upon arrival to the Ajo station and said that migrants held outside are provided with a large canopy, large fans, hot meals, water, and bathrooms.

No such canopy was visible during The Intercept’s observation of the Ajo station on Thursday.

“We are absolutely horrified at learning about how people are being treated at the border wall and the Ajo border patrol station — it is inhumane. This is abject mismanagement of a situation that could have been predicted, and should have been planned for,” Morgan Riffle, a volunteer with the Phoenix branch of No More Deaths and the Ajo Samaritans, two groups that provide humanitarian aid in the Sonoran Desert, said in a statement to The Intercept. “The lack of resources equates to neglect and is at the point of extreme physical endangerment and abuse.”

“We hear from other involved humanitarian aid groups that many agents on the ground want the resources to adequately take care of folks,” Riffle added, “yet it seems that upper management is failing to address the situation to the point of indifference.”

The Border Patrol station in Ajo can process a few hundred people a day, and on Monday upward of 800 to 1,000 people turned themselves in at the border wall, said a second humanitarian volunteer, who asked not to be named and has spent weeks providing aid at the border wall south of Ajo. “If you have a better idea what they should do, bring it,” he said, referring to the Border Patrol. “They’re out of buses. They’re out of equipment. I can imagine they would put people out in the parking lot if they have to. I don’t know they had a choice.”

The southwest is currently experiencing what the National Weather Service has described as “a dangerous, long-lived, and record-breaking heat wave.” In recent days, much of Southern Arizona, including the Ajo area, has been under an “excessive heat warning,” putting everyone at significantly increased risk for heat-related illnesses. The NWS recommends that people in the area stay in air-conditioned rooms and take extra precautions when spending time outdoors.

On Wednesday, officials in Maricopa County, north of Ajo, reported that at least 18 people have died from heat in Phoenix this year, with 69 other cases under investigation.

In the desert to the south, the extreme heat makes an already deadly landscape all the more the lethal. On Friday, Humane Borders, a nonprofit group that provides water for migrants crossing the desert and works with the Office of the Pima County Medical Examiner to map migrant deaths, reported the recovery of 13 sets of human remains on the border in the past month, including four people who had died within a day of their discovery.

Over the past two and a half decades, the medical examiner’s office in Tucson has logged more than 4,000 migrant deaths in Southern Arizona — a figure that border researchers widely agree is an undercount. The rugged terrain surrounding the Ajo Border Patrol station, known as Arizona’s West Desert, is notorious for being the state’s most lethal region. In response to the recent arrivals and the surging heat, Humane Borders has set up aid stations near the border wall south of Ajo but the group — along with the Border Patrol — has been struggling to meet the demand, said the volunteer who has been providing aid there.

“They cross between 1 and 3 in the morning, a majority, and the Border Patrol is in a race to get them out of there before it gets hot,” the volunteer said. The optics of migrants being held in pens are terrible, but the alternative is “pulling dead bodies out of the desert,” he said. “That’s what I did last weekend.”

The Intercept observed conditions at the Ajo facility for more than an hour as the temperature hovered around 108 degrees. During that time, Border Patrol agents lined up approximately 30 men and marched them to another area of the facility, leaving roughly as many people behind. Those people were still standing in the heat when The Intercept left the scene. Large floodlights above the enclosure suggested it was also being used for overnight detention.

Though most of the detained migrants appeared to be men, the ages and genders of everyone inside the pen were impossible to determine at a distance. Few, if any, of the people had hats or other sun-protective clothing. Most wore T-shirts; some were shirtless. At least one large fan and misting machine were visible at the enclosure’s edge, but both were positioned in full sunlight and directed toward the metal bleachers. Scores of empty plastic water bottles littered the ground. At one point, a vulture circled overhead.

Update: July 22, 2023
This article was updated to include a statement from CBP that was provided after publication.

The post Border Patrol Is Caging Migrants Outdoors During Deadly Arizona Heatwave appeared first on The Intercept.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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?”

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.’”

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.

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 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.