How A Butterfly Sanctuary Became The Center of a Border War, Part 1

Robert and James head down to the Texas border to meet with the director of a butterfly sanctuary in the crosshairs of a far right culture war.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Unfortunately, some of these recordings haven't got the best sound quality.
We were walking around the Butterfly Center. We tried the
best to block the wind, but some of it's pretty
blown out and we still wanted you to hear them,
so we've included them, but apologies that the sound quality
isn't what it could be. There was a time when

(00:23):
you could have been forgiven for believing that American fascism
had been thoroughly beaten back, marginalized, and damaged beyond the
capacity for reconstitution. Only the very foolish and dishonest believe
that today. Every time the far right has taken a
serious beating in this country, they've had a place to retreat,
to a sanctuary, to reorganize, recoup, and surge out again
towards the halls of power. That sanctuary is the US

(00:47):
Mexico border. There's a song I quite admire by the
drive by Truckers named after your young Mexican man, Ramon Casiano.
In nineteen thirty one, after the kind of stupid altercation
young men have been having since time in memory, Ramon
was murdered by another kid named Harlan Carter. Harlan was
convicted of murder and then led off by another judge

(01:07):
due to a procedural issue with his case. It hardly
needs to be said that Harlan was white. He went
on to join the Border Patrol during a period when
it was seen as a model of good racial policy
by the Nazi government in Germany. Carter rose to lead
the Border Patrol, helped to militarize it, and then went
on to run the n r A and turn it
from a simple gun advocacy organization to the far right

(01:29):
culture war institution. It became everything we're dealing with today
from the far right started at the border, and to
quote from that song, that's still where it is today.
But the border is more than just a battle ground
in America's endless culture war, and it is more than
just the system of violence menlike Carter helped make it
into the United States. Border with Mexico stretches from the

(01:52):
Atlantic to the Pacific, through the homelands of many indigenous peoples,
and across the migratory trails of numerous species and too
many many people a day. It's still just home. Marianna
Jones right, runs a butterfly sanctuary that has somewhat improbably
provoked the direct I are of a U S President
and become the center of a series of conspiracy theories.

(02:12):
She also grew up along the border in the Rio
Grande Valley. In high school, she'd take trips to discothecas
and bars in Rainosa, just across the border from McAllen, Texas. Today,
she runs the National Butterfly Sanctuary just outside of the
nondescript town which seems to have endless strip malls, big
box stores, and family run Mexican food joints. You can
go there and see wildflowers, walk in the woods, and

(02:34):
if you're lucky like we were, you might even find
a snake in some monarch butterflies making their way across
the continent without regard for borders or immigration checks. So
growing up here, we all let very fluid lines, and
I use that word in the venti. During we would

(03:01):
literally drive the Mexibotic gas upper cars and then come
back for lunch, come back for class, to see class,
and come back to football games. Points. We were all
in Mexico partying our hasts. They had the best discos

(03:25):
and clothes, and our parents were over there too having dinner.
And I know people citizens who live in Mexico because
it's more affordable, because they have reliable electricity. I mean,
y'all are laughing, but no, no, no. The border for

(03:45):
most people living there, sometimes called fronte ethos, is an inconvenience.
You have to drive to a certain crossing. Sometimes your
truck gets checked, sometimes the port of entry is closed
and you're late for work. But in the public eye
it's actually during and after the presidential campaign it looms
like a scene from Lord of the Rings, and since

(04:07):
then it's also started to look like one. So growing
up here, I knew there was illegal immigration. It's impossible
not to know. I mean nearly everyone knows someone who
came across because a family on a short term home,

(04:35):
or they crossed the river somewhere. But you'll see here,
our river is high and deep and dangerous. It's deadly. Um.
I mean when I was growing up here and I'm
fifty two, I had friends who weeks ago their parents

(04:58):
had homes and businesses here and there. Some of them
read road the bus across the bridge every day for
school in the morning. I mean, it was nothing. We
never thought of anyone's you know, in terms of citizenship
or else. And they also sort of liminals who where

(05:32):
two passports to navigate and both countries have sis, they
have nothing, and there seems to be hardly any in between.
In mainstream media, the boarder is presented as dangerous, as

(05:56):
were the people crossing it. But it's hard to feel
that you're in danger when you're watching the sunset over
the real grand and listening to the owls who begin
their work after dusk and they over diminishing wild places
along the river's north bank. Up until a couple of
months ago, we were coming out here four or five
times a week, sometimes twice a day on our boat
and bringing a lot of journalists out. It almost never

(06:19):
wound up in the bridge because you know, they were like, yes,
take us out on the river and we want to
see the illegals crossing, and we're like, we're like, dude,
the only way to do that is to hooked up
with campaign officials working with some of the most beautiful

(06:42):
and fragile landscapes in the country along the southern border.
Part of Marianna's work is introducing kids to them. I've
been lucky enough to spend time in many of them,
camping in East County, San Diego, where the pcut begins.
It is one of my favorite things to do. Riding
my bike in southern Arizona is an adventure. I take
it everyp comortunity, and I'm not the only one. From

(07:02):
jaguars to butterflies, many species of wildlife live along the
border and pass over it on a daily basis. The
border might look serious on a map, but for much
of the last century, you'd have struggled to point to
it on the ground unless you had a GPS device
and far too much free time on your hands. These
kids that will be here this week as part of
their academic study, they thought the Rio ran Vlly was

(07:24):
a desert. They didn't know that you know that we
had eleven biologically distinct ecosystems in a four county region
that would fit inside San Diego County, California. That you
know that we have the river that's not a trickle
when everybody flushes their toilets, you know, like it can

(07:46):
be an El Paso. I mean, they had no idea
that we are the edge of subtropical you know, America,
the neo tropics in America. Since the board has become
a physical thing, a landscape thriving with life that's somehow
found a way to exist in places that can kill

(08:07):
you with heat in the day and cold the night,
and sometimes both in twenty four hours. Has been torn
apart to provide people who have never been there with
a chance to grandstand about security, and various government contractors
a chance to line their pockets. Ted Cruz recently posed
in a boat wearing body armor and standing next to
a machine gun, just feet away from where we watched

(08:29):
recreational boaters sail lately along the river. As we walked
from the center down to the river, we spotted some
trash on the grill and went to pick it up.
Turned out to be a battery, the kind used in

(08:49):
a tactical flashlight or weapon light. Marianna doesn't use those,
and it wasn't there last time she walked down a trail.
It's not just the wall that's ruining this landscape, she says,
it's a constant presence of militarized border patrol. We see
the area as a conflict zone, not a conservation one.
As I was saying, they're the ones you leave the

(09:11):
stuff as well. They're very commonly used on the kind
of lights. Yeah, of the little they're so expensive question.
Marianna knows this only too well. Her butterfly center backs
up to the Rio Grand It's a beautiful, peaceful place,
but since two thousands seventeen it has been under threat

(09:33):
from the relentless militarization of the southern border. The butterflies,
she says, are important for a number of reasons. So
butterflies are critical pollinators to all of the green stuff,
most of which we don't eat. People know bees pollinate
about one third of our food, and so they care

(09:56):
about bees now because everyone would hate to lose one
third of our food. But butterflies pollinate all of the grasses,
wild flowers, shrubs, and trees on the planet. The ones
that reduce erosion by holding the ground in place against

(10:17):
wind and against rain and floods. The plants that reduce
the radiant heat that would come off of the earth
if we didn't have the green stuff. They filter the
water going into the water table, and they produce oxygen
for us. They filter our air. That's why butterflies matter,

(10:40):
and that's why everybody should care about them and do
what they can in their communities with their endemic native
plants to provide habitat for butterflies. It's not just the
butterflies who are in danger either. It's disgusting, um, but
it is I hate to say, entirely predictable, but it's

(11:07):
fairly predictable in an in stage capitalist society where we're
moving from military doesn't to a border security where border
walls and security are the United States and people don't

(11:28):
even know about word I have been shot at by
word Pack many times and people don't realize it was
the CBP drones that we're flying overhead in Minneapolis. To
understand exactly what is at stake, both for the border
and the butterflies, it's important to understand exactly what the

(11:51):
border wall looks like on the ground. The border wall
ecosystem is not just a wall. It's a towering thirty
foot steel structure topped with anti climb plates. Along the barrier,
which is often hundreds of yards from the actual border,
there's a road wide enough for two of the expensive
pickup trucks the CBP drives to pass each other in
remote areas. A road to allow construction vehicles to get

(12:12):
to the wall also had to be built for landscapes
that had been untouched for centuries, it's been catastrophic. That's
why the National Butterfly Sanctuary fought the border wall. In
the summer of two thousands seventeen, they found contractors on
their land using heavy equipment to destroy the plants they
had worked so hard to protect. After we found the
contractors here illegally clearing our land with no right of entry,

(12:37):
no eminent domain exercise, no waiver of NIPA, and other
laws we um, you know, we filed suit against the
federal government. That brought some publicity and with it a
lot of people who said, you know that we if
we opposed border wall, we must be for illegal immigration,

(13:02):
as though the issue is that simple. The wall, in
addition to being a colossal expense, much of which is
funneled to Zeckelmann Industries, a Canadian owned steel company, which
was fined dollars by the FBC for legal donations to
the Trump campaign, is pretty useless. That the border wall
is built miles inside the United States, that border patrol

(13:27):
picks up ladders every day um to share photos of
ramps built so vehicles could literally drive over border wall
like you know the old range rover commercials and and
and also other breaches UM. We also got a chance

(13:48):
to explain to them that up until President Trump, the
Border Patrol Union itself had opposed border wall. They had
called it a waste of money's, ineffective, um and really
irrelevant to their mission of preventing illegal entry to the

(14:10):
United States. Walking along the border, we found half a
dozen ladders constructed from old wooden pallets. Alongside them were
I D. S clothing and to try this that migrants
had either abandoned on their journey north or had thrown
out for them by Border Patrol agents who had apprehended them.
Either way, these discarded things told a sad story of
young people, sometimes parents and sometimes children with siblings, crossing

(14:33):
a river and then a wall to try to get
a chance at a better life. What the border wall
does do very effectively is funnel people through the giant
gaps in it, from Texas to California. The Trump administration
has rushed to build as much wall as it could
in order to live up to the wildly exaggerated claims
that Trump made in his election debates. We now have
as strong a border as we've ever had. Were over

(14:56):
four hundred miles of brand new wall. Of that over
four hundred miles. Three hundred and fifty odd were repairs
to existing barriers or secure fences as they are technically termed,
but the rest was built in places that were easiest
to access. In southern California, mountains and valleys are simply skipped.
The wall stretches across the flat lands in between. People
are forced to cross in these gaps and the hardest places,

(15:17):
and as a result, many more of them die. The
Butterfly Center isn't one of the hard places, but Marianna
has found dozens of identity documents, some of them in
evidence bags labeled Department of Homeland Security. She says that
people aren't dumping them, they are being stripped of their
documents when they are detained. I know that the other side,
as with medium at the end of January and the

(16:00):
keep family to say you have to sit mom. You
know operated score um, the phone is the bait life
fide not only uh you know needs for the immigrant
the cartel. That's the only way that you paid. And

(16:27):
the fact that Order Patrol is making people undocumented is
something facts in the United States don't understand. They don't
see that we find carbage bags full of medical records,
birth certificates, marriage licenses, ideas and other things from migrants

(16:52):
that they have brought your identities and their illness or
the violence that they've they've suffered, and every day to
make their asylum cases but trashes. Throughout the four years
of the Trump presidency, the Butterfly Center fought to protect
the ecosystem they had created and to keep the pristine

(17:14):
river bank for barn owls, not border patrol trucks. Marianna
isn't alone. The South Texas Birding Preserve was forced to
back out of a deal with the FEDS after a
Cohinity outcry at the thought of the loss of one
of the very few wild places in the area. While
they have so far been able to stop the construction
of portions of the border wall, they have not been
able to stop the multiple armed agencies that police the

(17:35):
border and often each other, from encroaching on the Center's
land county in Texas, there are several overlapping missions to
protect the border. Under Operation Leaned, Texas National Guard soldiers

(17:56):
are deployed to protect the border and prevent drugs smuggling
at your trafficking, At least according to the Office of
Governor Greg Abbott sadly they're not able to protect themselves
from each other. So far, four soldiers have died by
suicide too in accidental shootings. Texas law allows National Guard
soldiers to bring their own personal weapons, which were responsible

(18:19):
for both deaths and one drowned trying to save migrants
from the river. Because the troops are deployed under state orders,
not federal ones, they receive fewer benefits and their families
are not compensated as well in the event that they die.
In addition to the ten thousand Texas troops, there are
also four thousand National Guard soldiers on federal orders along
the Border. Task Force Phoenix, as it's called, is a

(18:42):
combination of thirty four different Guard units stiched together with
very little cohesion or prior experience working together, and has
been blighted by low morale. Troops in this deployment are
three times more likely to have a car accident that
sees illegal drugs, and a battalion deployed to McCallan had
three soldiers die, the same number as the rest of
the National Guard combined that year. D u I ues

(19:05):
are so common the breath alyzers are being issued to units,
the crisis isn't at the border. The crisis is the border.
It's not only United States soldiers dying along the southern border,
it's also migrants. According to the Missing Migrants Project, and
state is admittedly better viewed than it is heard, migrants

(19:25):
coming from Central or South America are far more likely
to die at the USA's southern border than they are
at any other point on the way there. One thousand,
two hundred and forty eight people died or went missing
last year and making the trek North, five hundred and
ninety five of them at the border. Given that the border,
both under Republicans and Democrats, is a weapon that's increasingly

(19:46):
effective at killing people, an increasingly present in political debate,
it's surprising how many people have never been there. The border,
at least a bits of it without the wall, doesn't
feel violent. One night, while we were in Texas, we
sat the bank of the Rio Grand looked across the
river as the sunset. Behind us was a wall funded
by private donations to a group called We Build the Wall.

(20:08):
It's built so close to the river that the weight
from the border patrol boats will see it undermined and
washed away. In less than five years across from US,
Little Cabanias and bars studied the shoreline. They looked at
dylick and were it not for the thousands of armed
people who make it their job to stop it would
have been quite nice to swim across for a drink.

(20:29):
Swimming over was out of the question. But the peaceful
border we encountered was not the one you'd recognize if
you've seen Fox News over the past four years. For
much of Middle America, the border is constructed as a
lawless land somehow also as a desert, despite the fact
that it and marked that river and a place where
cartel violence goes and checked. Human trafficking runs rampant. Young

(20:53):
children are snatched away from their families and sold into
sex slavery. Of course, young children are snatched away from
their family to the border, but that's your taxpayer money
at work, not the zetas or cartel. Sadly, the butterfly
centers opposition to the wall combined with this political theater
at the border to place a group of people who

(21:13):
just wanted to be left alone, to be nice to butterflies,
at the center of a culture ward that wanted nothing
to do with at some point the Trump White House
became aware that hundred acres of Texas grasslands were holding
out against all the legal and questionably legal efforts and
Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration to destroy
the little haven along the Rio ground. We know that

(21:35):
Jared Kushner said in May of twenty nineteen in the
Oval Office, we solved the butterfly thing. And and Steve
Bannon had been, uh, you know, the former former special
advisor to President Trump, and then he is the one
who started this sip. And they took aim at us,

(21:59):
and instead of us being against the wall and possibly
for um open borders, they declared that we were a
cartel front and actively engaged in trafficking humans and drugs,

(22:20):
that we were not about conservation at all, but we
were selling women and children into sex slavery. Marianna's Twitter
bio at a time of writing reads do no harm,
take no ship, and that's approach she took as a
margat community began to sling an increasing amount of ship

(22:43):
at The North American Butterfly Association filed suit against Brian Calepage,
slash We Build the Wall, Tommy Fitcher, slash Fishers, and
gravel slash, trg construction, a large new house slash new house,
and sons. On December, call Page, the US Air Force veteran,
attempted to crowd fund the war after Congress wouldn't fund

(23:04):
it to the ridiculous extent that Trump desired. He raised
over twenty five million. In August of twenty call Page
was indicted along with Steve Bannon and two other co
defendants on federal charges of defrauding hundreds of thousand that
we Build the War donors. Federal prosecutors said that despite
repeatedly assuring donors that call Page would not be paid,

(23:27):
the defendants engaged in a scheme to divert three hundred
and fifty thousand dollars to call Page, which he used
to fund his lavish lifestyle. Call for Age was separately
indicted May one on federal charges related to his falsification
of tax returns. In April of two, Carthage entered a
guilty plea, having accounted for about ten million in spending

(23:49):
a little under five miles of actual war. Call Page's
attempts to build the wall in Texas were hampered by
the National Butterfly Center lawyers, who argued that it was
a flood risk because it is and by various tax
issues at call Fedge's team seemed entirely unaware of well.
They hope to transfer the war they built, which they

(24:11):
called the Lamborghini of Walls, to federal ownership. CBP wanted
nothing to do with it, as they were building their
own wall outside of the floodplane. After ignoring ruling, call
Fege eventually built about three miles of wall in Texas
and then declared the project complete November. With litigation ongoing,

(24:32):
call Fadge took to Twitter to accuse the National Butterflies
Center of having a rampant sex trade taking place on
your property and the death sick bodies. When we first
saw Brian call fag Is tweets and the we build
the Wall videos using my image and talking about the

(24:56):
Butterfly Lady and everything and the Butterfly Center. Um, at first,
you know, we we kind of reacted with humor, like
this is too funny, Like who in their right mind
would believe any of this? And you know we even
tried addressing I mean, I didn't know who Brian cole

(25:17):
Fass was at the time, but you know we replied like, um,
you have a very very active imagination, or you're a
really you know, twisted person. And we used the hashtag
liar liar pants on fire because we really didn't think

(25:37):
it was ridiculous. But any notion that this was not
deadly serious was soon dismissed. And now I've become this
god extremism in politics. As I told others, I've had.

(26:02):
I've had a lot of the journalists asked me, what
does it feel like to be in the crossroads of
the culture wars in America? And I'm like, I'm not
at the crossroads of the culture war. I live in
the borderlands, which are the proving grounds for fascism in America.
That's where I live. And we're gonna see it more

(26:27):
and more. Everybody's going to see it more and more.
They test things like the aerostat balloons here, and the
fact that we didn't cut them loose and shoot them
down and set them on fire. The fact that we
were like, oh, that's kind of a pretty innocuous, you know,
white balloon in the sky, we can live with it

(26:50):
means that now it's gone out from under DHS to
d O D and it's being deployed across the United States,
coming soon to a community. It could Happen Here as
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,

(27:11):
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