‘A Place Where Nobody Can Hear You Scream’: Witnesses Describe Border Patrol Crackdown At Lochiel

A person who locked themselves to a gravel haul truck to halt border wall construction in Lochiel, Arizona, says a Border Patrol agent threatened to take them to “a place where nobody can hear you scream,” according to multiple witnesses.

The person, who has not been publicly named, was locked to the truck for more than seven hours on the evening of Oct. 7. They used a “sleeping dragon,” a protest device in which a person’s wrists are locked together inside a metal or PVC tube, making it much harder to cut them free.

Alex Chabbott, who was previously arrested near Lochiel while protesting in a jaguar costume, recorded much of the standoff. Chabbott said agents used pain-compliance methods on the person. Chabbott and other activists said agents partly enclosed them with silver emergency blankets, subjecting them to exhaust and heat. Kate Scott, an organizer, said it looked like agents were “trying to suffocate them.”

At one point, a construction worker drove the truck a few hundred feet down the road with the activist still attached. At least two activists ran into the road and threw themselves in front of the truck. They were arrested.

Late that night, agents used what activists described as an angle grinder to cut the person free, then took them into custody. As they were pulled off, they shouted “Tierra Libre,” or Free Land, a rallying cry of the movement. They had not been released as of publication.

A Border Patrol spokesperson told LOOKOUT in an email: “The operation was conducted in coordination with partner agencies to maintain public safety, protect personnel, and ensure compliance with applicable federal laws and land-use restrictions. While most activity remained peaceful, agents took appropriate enforcement action in response to alleged violations and an alleged assault on a federal officer.”

The raid

The standoff on the evening of Oct. 7 came two days after Border Patrol agents raided the protest camp, which had been supporting a tree-sit for 71 days.

Scott, who has been on the ground defending the cottonwoods and pushing back against border wall construction since July, estimated there were more than 200 Border Patrol agents at the time of the raid.

“I still have my pepper spray cough, which I’m proud of,” Scott said. Along with dozens of others, Scott was pepper-sprayed by Border Patrol agents on Oct. 5 as the agents pushed onto private property, surrounded and “brutalized” them, according to Scott and others. Scott was given a citation and released. That day, there were at least 20 arrests.

Construction workers made cuts to the tree, referred to as “grandmother” by the land defenders, even as someone was still on a platform in the branches. After agents extracted the person with a cherry picker, an excavator pushed down the cottonwood.

From the canopy to a detention center

One person arrested the morning of Oct. 5 was Raquel, who wanted to share only her first name for fear of retaliation. Raquel described to LOOKOUT the moment Border Patrol agents interrupted the morning prayer ceremony she was participating in: She said after agents made threats to the people engaging in the ceremony, things quickly escalated.

“An agent pushed me really hard, right in the chest,” Raquel said.

After agents cut a wire fence and entered the private property where the grandmother tree was rooted, she said, they attacked the land defenders.

Raquel was separated from most of the other activists, put in handcuffs and, after some confusion — Raquel said the agents initially wanted to release them and scribbled their addresses on a loose sheet of paper — was put in the back of a paddy wagon. She and the others arrested were transferred first to the Sonoita Border Patrol station and then to the Tucson station, where they were initially put in a concrete cell by themselves.

She described the experience in the station as “deeply dehumanizing.”

She said the agents “treated us with a lot of disdain.”

The cells had no beds, just an emergency foil blanket and a thin pad, according to Raquel. She saw a mother and young child detained in another cell. She said she wasn’t given a phone call and was finally released around 11 a.m. the following day. She and the other people arrested were dropped off at a McDonald’s on Craycroft Road in Tucson.

“Never before have I felt how deeply connected, on a visceral level, are these abuses,” Raquel said. “The wall, the detention center, they are all intimately connected and deeply one thing.”

‘We’re not going anywhere’

After the Oct. 5 arrests, someone climbed a cottonwood on the Mexican side and began a new tree-sit, cut off from supplies. Their presence has held up the southernmost section of the double wall. 

With all four U.S.-side cottonwoods felled, crews have worked around the clock on the northern section. On the afternoon of Oct. 8, more than 100 agents were guarding them. Some activists prayed and chanted. Others taunted agents. More than one said an agent allegedly told them, “We know where you live.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Scott, the organizer, said. 

Standing where the tree once stood, Scott called up: “We love you tree. We are always with you.” Another activist shouted a similar message to the tree-sitter in Mexico, who answered by making a heart with their hands.

Overnight into Oct. 9, roughly 10 Mexican State Police vehicles gathered beneath that cottonwood, where the tree-sitter had been perched since early Oct. 6, according to activists. 

From the US-side, Border Patrol agents used a cherry picker to try to remove her, and activists said via a press release that they removed the platform she was using to stay in the tree. As of publication, the person remains roped into the tree, over 100 feet above the ground.

Activists gathered along a stretch of border wall that they said Fisher Sand and Gravel had built in the previous six hours, between the Tierra Libre camp and the tree. They banged pots, drummed and sang, chanting “Keep her safe!” and “We will never stop fighting!”