By admin 
LOCHIEL, AZ (AZFamily) — For more than two months, protesters occupied a stand of cottonwood trees in the San Rafael Valley to block construction of a second border wall in southern Arizona.
Read more Review ordered after 3,000+ Maricopa County mail-in ballots mailed early
On Monday, federal agents raided the encampment and felled one of the largest trees they had been protecting — estimated to be about 200 years old — in a matter of minutes, activists said.
Video shows federal agents surrounding the tree as crews used a cherry picker to remove a protester before cutting it down.
“50 federal agents … masked federal agents raided the camp on private property and then surrounded the tree and they set up a cherry picker machine to pull the protester out and then immediately,” one protester said, “cut the tree.”
The confrontation near Lochiel, a small town in the San Rafael Valley of southern Arizona, is the latest in the fight over the Trump administration’s plans to build a second border wall.
Arizona’s Family has previously reported on opposition to the second wall on the Tohono O’odham Nation, where construction crews damaged a sacred archaeological site.
Russ McSpadden, a conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, said activists camped at the Lochiel site for more than two months.
“Folks locally were very upset about these trees being cut and so they jumped up on one of those trees sitting out there, you know right on the line where the border wall construction would come through and ended up staying up there for 71 days,” McSpadden said.
Read more Controversial televangelist Jim Bakker dies at 86
Border Patrol agents broke up the encampment Monday, arresting 10 protesters, according to activists.
The four cottonwood trees stand in the middle of what would become the second wall.
Activists criticized the tactics used during the raid.
“It (was) very alarming and we started to see federal agents in masks … you know armed with masks … they had tape over their badges on their shirts so they couldn’t be identified,” one protester said.
Some of the protesters have been released from jail, while others remain in custody as of Tuesday.
Activists say protests are expected to continue. One protester was in a cottonwood tree on the Mexico side of the border Tuesday as demonstrations continued.
See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.
Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.
Read more Woman on mobility scooter fighting for life after being hit by car in Phoenix