(CN) — Marianna Trevino Wright thought she had found her dream job, directing a nature refuge on the Rio Grande where she would chase butterflies and toads and educate schoolchildren visiting on field trips.
But in July 2017 she found five men on the property razing trees and brush with chainsaws and heavy equipment.
“Who are you? And what are you doing?” she asked. They said, “The government sent us and we’re here to clear this land for border wall.”
Wright is the director of the National Butterfly Center, a private 100-acre preserve near Mission, Texas, home to 100 different butterfly species.
“The land used to be a commercial onion field and for the last 18 years we have been revegetating it with native plants,” Wright said Wednesday night in an online presentation she gave for a Houston-area chapter of the Sierra Club.
The refuge has almost 300 species of native plants, many planted to attract specific kinds of butterflies.
“Just like monarchs have to have milkweed, each butterfly species has to have just one or two plants its caterpillars eat to complete their life cycle…So the diversity of native plants, the presence of those plants is critically important to the survival of butterfly species,” Wright said.
Donald Trump’s presidency and his promise of a “big, beautiful wall” cast a cloud over the refuge and led its owner, the nonprofit North American Butterfly Association, to file suit in the District of Columbia against Department of Homeland Security officials in December 2017.
According to the association, the government violated its property rights and environmental-protection statutes by sending contractors in without permission to clear the land in preparation for building a wall atop a levee that transects the refuge.
Installed by the government, parallel to and about a mile inland from the Rio Grande to control flooding in the hurricane-prone Lower Rio Grande Valley, the levees also are the base on which the government installs 16-foot bollard fences.
Seventy percent of the refuge’s property is south of the levee, Wright said, so if a wall goes up there it will lose all that land.
And border wall construction entails more than just walls. Next to them the government builds “enforcement zones,” wide roads and tall poles topped with surveillance cameras and bright stadium lights that stay on all night.
To keep them clear of vegetation the government sprays herbicide that runs off into the Rio Grande, which is the U.S. border between Mexico and Texas, Wright said.
These enforcement zones have grown since President George W. Bush’s administration erected 610 miles of barriers along the border in the 2000s, following his creation of the Department of Homeland Security in response to the 9/11 attacks.
“Under President Bush this enforcement zone or dead zone averaged 40-feet wide. Under Trump it has nearly quadrupled. It is now a minimum 150 feet wide,” Wright told the Sierra Club.
A federal judge dismissed the butterfly association’s lawsuit in February 2019. But the D.C. Circuit this month revived and remanded it for hearings on the association’s due process claims the feds had illegally occupied and damaged its land.
The rancor in the government litigation pales in comparison to another legal dispute the butterfly association and Wright are having with We Build the Wall, a nonprofit led by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon that raised more than $25 million with online fundraisers backing Trump’s border-wall construction efforts.
We Build the Wall donated $1.5 million to Fisher Industries for its construction of a 3-mile stretch of wall on the banks of the Rio Grande near the National Butterfly Center’s refuge, a project it finished this spring after the butterfly association and Wright, plus the International Boundary and Water Commission, unsuccessfully tried to shut down construction in separate lawsuits.
Wright and the butterfly association claim in their lawsuit the wall will redirect the river and wash debris onto its property. And hydrology experts retained for the case say that due to erosion it is not a matter of if but when the wall will fall over.
CBS’s “60 Minutes” recently interviewed Wright for a story about Fisher’s wall. The company built it with a 2-foot foundation on a sandbar, Wright told the Sierra Club.
“The problem with it falling over is it’s going to float downstream and if it should breach the Anzalduas Dam downstream, we are looking at a catastrophic loss of life and property from that kind of flooding,” Wright said.
Besides Fisher Industries and We Build the Wall, Wright’s lawsuit names We Build the Wall Brian Kolfage as a defendant.
She claims Kolfage, an Air Force veteran who lost three limbs to a bomb explosion in Iraq, defamed her and the National Butterfly Center in social media posts in late 2019, claiming they were trafficking women and children across the border for sex work.
Her tiff with Kolfage brought some visitors to the National Butterfly Center, Wright said Thursday as rapt Sierra Club members listened in on Zoom.
She said men belonging to the Three Percenters, a far-right militia group, showed up wearing its patches and after that scare the center hired a security company, who trained the staff to recognize militia group emblems.
Should they find a stray backpack or water bottle on the refuge, Wright said, they have been trained to never pick it up because these people “could leave a bomb or other substance on the property.”
In August, a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted Kolfage, Bannon and two other men, accusing them of defrauding donors of We Build the Wall. All four pleaded not guilty.
Wright calls Trump’s border wall project the “largest private property grab in modern history” and believes it’s being done to benefit the private prison industry, namely the GEO Group and CoreCivic, who run several immigrant prisons in South Texas, and to make it easier for the oil and gas industry to build pipelines.
Building the wall won’t stop cartels from smuggling people across the border, Wright said.
There are residential neighborhoods, churches, cemeteries, country clubs, golf courses and state parks south of the wall and for people to access the properties, the government builds giant electronic gates every 1 or 2 miles within the wall. They are opened with a code on a keypad like a garage.
Wright said the Department of Homeland Security does not keep the codes secret.
“So if you think cartel members are not going to have the gate codes you are delusional,” she said. “All they have to do is join the National Butterfly Center, or join the country club, or be a practicing or nonpracticing Catholic, or have a sister who works for the cable company or something. It’s that insane.”
A married mother of six, Wright said she and her family are not happy about the death threats she has received for her opposition to the wall, and she never imagined the butterfly center would become a lightning rod in the dispute.
“But at the same time, I feel like I was put at this place for this purpose. And if not me, who?” she said.
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