Native activist goes to court to protest Trump’s wall
Fourteen months have passed since Amber Ortega, a 35-year-old member of the Hia Ced O’odham tribe, was arrested for blocking the construction of boundary walls that threatened a sacred desert oasis in southern Arizona. Ortega was remanded in custody along with Nellie Jo David, another Hia Ced O’odham woman, at Quitobaquito Springs, a world-famous ecosystem on the southern edge of the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument that has been a center of cultural and spiritual tradition for O ‘ odham for thousands of years.
Under President Donald Trump, government contractors rumbled across Organ Pipe’s pristine desert habit in tons of vehicles, pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water from the groundwater reservoir that sustains the springs, and blasting parts of a nearby burial ground apart with powerful explosives to make way for the wall. In September 2020, Ortega and David prayed at the springs when they encountered one of the construction crews. The couple sat on the crew’s vehicles and told them they were not welcome. Tactical teams of border patrol agents and park police were called, and Ortega and David were arrested.
For a low-level offense usually handled with an admission ticket, the two women were strip-searched, chained and driven to a for-profit prison 130 miles away, where they were kept incommunicado without access to a lawyer for nearly 24 hours. Early in her case, a court-appointed lawyer told Ortega that efforts to combat her charges, which have a maximum sentence of six months, were likely to fail. Ortega no longer cooperates with the lawyer. Although she could understand where the lawyer was coming from, it was not an option for her not to fight.
“We have had our rights and access to land, to holy places, taken by the US government, and this has happened since colonization.”
“I wanted to get on with it to create awareness of the oppression that we as natives, like O’odham, have endured. We have been denied our vote,” Ortega told The Intercept. “We have had our rights and access. to lands, to holy places, taken by the American government, and this has happened since colonization. “
On Thursday, Ortega will make a statement of no guilt in her case and present an argument to a Tucson jury that the acts for which she was arrested were rooted in deep-seated spiritual beliefs. Ortega’s new lawyer, Tucson-based civil rights lawyer Paul Gattone, believes they have strong cases. “She’s a young Native American woman who has strong faith, religious and cultural beliefs – that’s why she was out there,” Gattone told The Intercept. “Because of these cultural and religious beliefs, she felt compelled to act, and that was what she did.”
The trial marks the first case in which the Biden administration continues a Trump-era prosecution of a Arizona border attorney, and the second time in recent years that a state activist has launched a religious freedom defense in response to high-profile allegations. linked to the government’s border security apparatus. Humanitarian worker Scott Warren, who the Trump administration accused of human trafficking to provide aid to migrants in the desert, successfully defended religious freedom against two attempts at federal prosecution in 2019. Ortega’s case is filed by the National Park Service and has the Department of the Interior. prosecute Ortega for trying to stop the same construction as the agency’s own top official and first Native American secretary, Deb Haaland, spoke out about as a member of Congress.
Although President Joe Biden swore that “not be another foot of wall” would be built under his administration, his record of Trump’s signature ambition has been mixed. In South Texas, new wall sections being built; in Arizona, the Department of Justice is locked in a legal battle with the Attorney General, who claims that by stopping the brick-building in the state, the president is pursuing a project with “population growthAimed at flooding the country with foreigners. In a recent Senate confirmation hearing, Biden’s election to Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus said he would support expanded wall construction along some areas of the border. Senate Finance Committee will vote on Magnus’ nomination today.
At the heart of Ortega’s decision to fight the case is what she describes as a “frightening spiritual battle” against cultural deletion. With the Gadsden purchase in 1854 and the drawing of the modern American-Mexico divide, O’odham, which means “people” and includes several tribes, saw their physical world split in two. In recent years, O’odham’s rural areas in southern Arizona have been made the site of an unprecedented explosion in border militarization. While struggling with increased surveillance and law enforcement, Hia Ced O’odham, the youngest of the O’odham tribes, waged a three-decade struggle to gain formal recognition of their existence from the broader tribal system. These efforts paid off in 2013 with Hia Ced O’odham officially with Tohono O’odham Nation, though Ortega claims that the federal government’s continued treatment of O’odham lands as a war zone in need of fortification represents yet another failure to see Hia Ced as a people.
For thousands of years, the rare Sonoran Desert aquifer that feeds Quitobaquito Springs has provided the only source of fresh water for hundreds of miles around, making it a vital source of life and refuge for plants, animals and humans in the region. To mix concrete to the wall and spray down the dirt roads used by Trump’s construction crew, public contractors tapped into the groundwater reservoir and withdrew hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. In July 2020, just two months before the arrest of Ortega and David, National Geographic reported that the flow of water to the springs in a few months had dropped by 30 per cent, leading to the lowest water level in more than a decade. It is doubtful whether the oasis will ever fully recover.
“It’s been disturbing, but we have to talk about these things because it’s our voices and our people. It’s our unity that we fight for,” Ortega said. “It’s not just me. I’m not going through this alone. I’m reviewing this with my people. This is generational. This is the memory of our ancestors. That’s our story. It’s our way of life. ”
Photo: Kitra Cahana / MAPS for The Intercept
The way to this week’s trial has been extremely difficult for both Ortega and David. In interviews with The Intercept, the two women described how the traumatic events that accompanied their arrests lasted for several months. The arrest itself had already “felt like an extremely insecure situation,” Ortega said. With armed men from the U.S. government asserting their authority over the country and the Native American women standing in front of them, the moment was filled with dark historical overtones. In a video from the site, one could hear Ortega asking the agents to take their weapons away.
“This is something we as O’odham are familiar with. They do these things,” Ortega said. “The bigger story is that we are a traumatized generation and have lived with these traumas.”
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During their detention at the Florence Correctional Center, a medium-sized federal facility owned and operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, Ortega and David, 38, was originally placed in an area reserved for men without being told what charges they faced or for how long. be locked inside. “It was as if they wanted to make a show of us. They knew we were women,” Ortega said. asked to use the toilet, he said, ‘Oh, you are women.’ And then he let us out. “CoreCivic denied the claim.
When the couple was released, they were placed under strict supervision by the Office of Pre-Trial Services of the District Court of Arizona. Due to their refusal to leave the country that O’odham has trampled on since before the United States existed, the government ordered the women to submit at their own request home inspections, repeated urine tests and strict travel bans. If they failed to give consent, the government could issue arrest warrants for their arrest.
David said early on that she asked to visit Puerto Peñasco, a Mexican city on the Cortez Sea where her family members come from, to pray and gather her thoughts. “I really wanted to go to the ocean, near Pinacates, and just pray there,” she said. “I felt like it would just do so much because so much had been desecrated.” The government rejected the request. According to David, the situation got worse from there. “All this year, they have been treating my body as if it were their property,” she said. “Like what we did, made my body available to them 24/7, and I have not been okay with that.”
“All this year they have been treating my body as if it were their property.”
The restrictions on movement, the constant check-in, the repeated demands for her urine and the threat that any non-compliance would result in the total negation of her freedom, have for David felt like a new and intensified extension of border surveillance. has shaped so much of the modern O’odham experience. “We have lived our whole lives under this harsh surveillance,” she said. “They used our trauma against us.” David left law school to meet the ongoing demands of the court, but it was not enough. The pressure from the case began to take a serious toll on her mental health, and it triggered painful memories and disturbing reflections on the historical relationship between Native American women and the U.S. government. “I definitely needed mental help,” David said. “I talked to everyone I know about it.”
Early on, Ortega and David were told they should expect to appear in court in a few months. It did not happen. “That’s how they eventually carried me down,” David said. In June, she pleaded guilty to her charges of arrest in 2020. She was fined $ 200.
Photo: Kitra Cahana / MAPS for The Intercept
Ortega, who decided to continue, similarly described being scarred by his experience with the government’s surveillance apparatus before the trial. “I shudder when I call them,” she said. “I know I’m not doing anything wrong, but I’m literally shaking.
In the past year, Ortega has been pulled over several times by various government agencies while running errands and visiting family on the O’odham reservation. She has no doubt that the meetings are related to her activism. The stops in her hometown are particularly disturbing. “I grew up in the village,” Ortega said. “They know who I am.”
The pressure following her case became so intense that Ortega also took a semester off from school to cope. “There was a time when it felt like every single movement, every single week, was there somehow: on the phone, asking for a home visit, a UA test, a visit to the office,” she said. . “There was one thing after another.”
Often, in video calls with her official before the trial, Ortega was ordered to give a guided tour of her residential area. She saw her ability to attend tribal ceremonies suffocated by government intrusion into her daily life. “It was like I was going to go to a job and prove it and sign up,” she said. As her trial approaches, memories of her arrest and what the moment meant have hung in Ortega’s mind. “The day I was arrested, it was a reminder of what has already been done,” she said. “The shift. The moves. It was hurtful to go through it, to understand the story and then go through it.”
“Generational trauma exists and it’s not okay,” Ortega said. “We are good people. We are humble people. However, we also get angry. And we get hurt.”
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