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Peter Frick-Wright: The National Butterfly Center, near the US-Mexico border in Texas, is usually a peaceful place. Sitting on the banks of the Rio Grande, it has acres of flowering native plants, and it’s surrounded by sprawling onion, cabbage, and grapefruit farms.

The center is a crucial stop for migrating butterflies who need to rest on their journey north. But, in January 2022, someone else showed up.

Marianna: Please put your mask back on.

Kimberly: Sorry, I have asthma . . .

Kimberly Lowe was a congressional candidate from Virginia, here for a photo-op.

And greeting her at the entrance was Marianna Treviño Wright, the head of the Butterfly Center.

Usually, her job was stuff like maintaining the gardens, managing staff, and increasing membership.

When she took the position, she didn’t realize how many political figures would be stopping by for pictures.

Marianna: I saw that y'all tried to drive back there on your own. That is private property. It is posted by. No, that road is not this road where the pavement ends. And that's where there's, well, there's a big sign at the gate that says no trespassing.

Kimberly: I'm sorry.

Marianna: No, you are here to promote your agenda, and your agenda is not welcome here.

Kimberly: So you're not for keeping the illegals out?

Marianna: That has –

Kimberly: So you're not for that, has all these poor people in the humanitarian crisis. That's what we're here for. So you're okay with children being sex trafficked and raped?

Marianna: That is not at all what this is about. We have Girl Scouts spend the night here. That's how safe it is.

Kimberly: I’m sorry, you’re ok with children being raped.

Marianna: No, I’m not ok with that. And your bullshit is a big problem.

It sounds like things are going off the rails, but actually, Kimberly Lowe was getting exactly what she came for. At this point, she took out her phone and started narrating for her online audience. At which point, Marianna swats the phone out of her hand.

Kimberly Lowe: So we're here with a woman who's not a very nice person, who's okay with children— you do not take my phone. Get the fuck down, bitch.

But then Kimberly Lowe’s friend grabs Marianna’s phone and pushes her to the ground.

Kimberly: She has her phone. You give me my phone. You have my phone!

So, how does a congressional candidate from Virginia end up on the southern border in an all-out brawl with a butterfly conservationist?

Kimberly Lowe: Okay, it's okay. Give me my phone. Give me my phone. It's okay.

Today, we’re continuing our series on monarch butterflies, and the surprising ways that this tiny, dainty insect intersects with the structures of power and people in North America.

Over the last two weeks, we told a story about how, in a small town in Mexico, a butterfly conservationist lost his life to build a sanctuary for the monarchs, but he saved his hometown in the process. In Mexico, the monarchs brought people together.

This week, it’s the first of two episodes looking at another fight over habitat, this time on the southern border with Mexico, in Texas. But, in Texas, the butterflies don’t bring people together. Instead, everything gets torn apart.

This week: Butterflies on the Wall.

It comes to us from reporters Michael May and Zach Goldbaum.

Marianna: The border was never really a border for us growing up here. We were two communities, not two countries.

Michael: Marianna Treviño Wright has lived almost her entire life on the border. She grew up on a horse and cattle ranch nearby, in McAllen, Texas. Back then, it was simple enough to cross the border that they’d go to Mexico to fill up on cheap gas.

Marianna: It was quick and easy to get back and forth across the bridge.

We knew lots of the border agents, the CBP agents and others, whether it was on the Mexico side or here. So you're, you're driving up to pay your 75 cents or whatever the toll fee was coming across. And you knew the agents. You could be like, “Hi Brad, good to see you. How are the kids?” It's not like that anymore.

The county is now home to almost a million people. Marianna’s home is gone. So are the farms and empty land that once surrounded it. Instead, there’s a Gold’s Gym. A Sam’s Club. Long stretches of strip malls.

And over that same time, the border became militarized. Border Patrol went from apprehending tens of thousands of illegal migrants a year – to two million in 2023.

Zach: Despite running a butterfly center, Marianna is not an ecologist. She’s an expert in business development. And when a friend told her that the center was looking for an executive director, she was like, what butterfly center?

Marianna: That tells you they had zero community outreach or marketing. I knew that this was going to require leadership in the form of entrepreneurial ownership.

I knew I would never be bored and that two days at work would never be the same. I also love South Texas. I love the landscape. I love our Tamaulipan thorn scrub. I love the river. I wanted to preserve that. And this was going to afford me the opportunity to do that.

Marianna took the job in 2012. She begins every morning getting the property ready for visitors.

And sometimes in the fall, the visitors are spectacular.

Marianna: When we opened at 8 a.m. and went out to, you know, open the property and feed the birds and put out the butterfly brew and all of that, we, you know, were treated to just bows, covered, draped in monarch butterflies, and to sit there and watch them as they warmed in the sun, drop, and take flight, fluttering around as if waiting for their fellow travelers to join them.

And I, I know I have the goofiest grin on my face right now because it's just amazing.

Michael: The monarchs arrive like an orange river in the sky. Often they spend the night.

The center attracts many species of butterfly. But nothing is quite like the annual monarch butterfly migration.

The monarchs are the queen of backyard insects. The most beloved and recognizable butterfly.

For an insect that migrates thousands of miles, they’re not particularly efficient fliers. They burn up energy flapping their wings, more like a helicopter than an airplane. So they soar high above the clouds on thermal currents.

They are searching for somewhere to eat and somewhere to breed, and only one thing will work: milkweed. A lanky plant with broad leaves and clusters of flowers.

Zach: Why milkweed? Because it’s poisonous to most insects. So that means monarchs can feed on it without competition. And some of that poison stays in the monarch’s larva, making them unattractive to predators.

But Marianna has her own theory about why the monarch’s diet is so limited.

Marianna: Otherwise, butterfly larvae would be like locusts, like a plague. They would devour every green thing on the planet if their diet wasn't that restricted.

The Rio Grande Valley, where the Butterfly Center is located, is home to several species of native milkweed.

Marianna: Of course, because it is a weed—read native plants—that support butterflies, it is eliminated with glyphosate, with Roundup, which people are using in their yards, which farmers are using on their crops. Less than 5 percent of native habitat remains in South Texas. So they need everything they can find at the National Butterfly Center.

The Butterfly Center was once an onion farm. It’s now a 100-acre botanical garden with 300 species of native plants.

Marianna calls it a Waffle House for butterflies, like a place to stop on a road trip.

Marianna: You look for a Waffle House. The National Butterfly Center is that for a species like monarchs that are making this long journey and can no longer find milkweed and nectar sources along the way because now there are miles and miles and miles of pasture land for cattle grazing, of residential subdivisions, of industrial plants and commercial farms.

By 2017—five years into the job at the Butterfly Center—Marianna had increased the membership from virtually nothing to around 30,000 people.

She had turned a botanical garden in rural Texas into a real attraction. And she felt her work at the center was done.

Marianna: So I thought, wow, you know, yeah, I'm ready to move on. Sounds like this would be a good time to do it. I just didn't get out fast enough.

Michael: July 20, 2017, was another hot and dry day at the center. Marianna walked past fluttering butterflies and beds of flowering purple Texas lantana and pink Mexican nickerbean.

She headed to check on a pump house along one of the canals that brings water up from the Rio Grande.

It was a peaceful moment. The last one for a very long time.

As she crossed the canal, she was shocked. A construction crew was on her property. Three workers had chainsaws, and another was driving a huge mower known as a ‘brush hog.’

Marianna: And they were cutting down our trees and mowing down all of the brush on our property. And I confronted them, and I, I, I stopped them. I said, who are you and what are you doing here? And this young man in all of his PPE, his personal protection equipment, you know, he lifts up his mask,and he's got his hard hat on and his chainsaw pants and his fluorescent vest.

He's like,  what do you mean, ma'am?  And I said, what are you doing here? And he goes like, duh, we're, uh, cutting down trees.

I'm like, yeah, but why are you here cutting down my trees? And, and he said, well, the government sent us to, to clear this land for border wall construction. And I'm like, my land?

The crew’s supervisor was shouting into a phone and waving papers around. Marianna caught a glimpse of one page. It had photos of the Butterfly Center’s front gate.

So, very clearly, he was sent to our place. He was at the right place. Um. Although it was all wrong.

Zach: When Donald Trump took office, he set out trying to deliver on one of his most ambitious campaign promises: a big, beautiful wall on the US border with Mexico:

Trump inauguration: “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries—”

Trump: “We are going to build a wall. It’s going to be built”

Trump: “A big, beautiful wall”

Trump wanted a border wall to stop the flow of illegal activity from Mexico. He focused on drug smugglers, human trafficking, and the idea that immigrants are taking American jobs. The wall was a campaign promise that played on the fears of voters and helped get him elected.

And now that it was moving forward, there was a feeding frenzy. Contractors claimed their prototypes would turn America into an impenetrable fortress. One of them, Tommy Fisher, embarked on a media blitz.

Tommy Fisher: If the president – if he allows us to play, and our team of Fisher Industries to play, I guarantee like Tom Brady, once we get in we never come out and if we don’t perform, the president can fire us and that’s how comfortable and confident I am.

Laura Ingraham: I love it!! I’m not taking sides on which border wall is best, but this is why you’re a good businessman.

Fisher – a businessman from North Dakota – spent $100,000 lobbying for the border wall contract.

He was moving quickly and aggressively. He had to. In July of 2017 – even though Congress had yet to appropriate any money for the wall – the Trump administration was starting to break ground in Mission Texas… on the property of the National Butterfly Center.

Michael: No one had told Marianna or the Butterfly Center that the border wall would be built on their property. So when she stumbled on the team of construction workers, Marianna started making phone calls.

First, she alerted the media. Then, her Border Patrol contact. The next day, five Border Patrol agents came to her house.

Marianna: And they said, well, we came to tell you that what you are reporting through the media is happening here is not happening.

I said, “What do you mean?”

They said, there’s no border wall construction or anything underway.

I said, really? Why don't you boys get in your trucks and follow me? So they did. And I drove them down the road. And of course, the Border Patrol agents were able to see all of the fallen trees, the eliminated brush, the heavy equipment still there.

And they're walking around, talking to each other, very low voices. And, you know, I can see a couple of them on the phone. Clearly, all of this was above their pay grade. None of them knew what was going on.

But Marianna knew what was going on. And instead of leaving her job, like she had been planning, very quickly her job became all-consuming.

She had found herself in the crosshairs of a long-running debate – do border walls work? Do they stop illegal immigration? It’s become such a toxic political issue that it’s hard to judge a border wall on its merits.

But here’s the upshot: when it comes to securing the border, walls are useful. In populated areas. Before Trump took office, there was already over 600 miles of border wall.

It’s hard to say what effect building more walls through the desert would have. Most illegal immigration is due to people overstaying visas. And most drugs and human trafficking come through ports of entry.

But we know that border walls are very bad for wildlife. The US-Mexico border happens to be right on the edge of two climatic zones that animals move between. So a wall would alter migration patterns and put endangered species at risk of extinction.

And in more remote areas along the Rio Grande, walls just aren’t the best solution. Give people enough time with no one around, and they’ll climb over, go under, or cut a hole through the wall. So Border Patrol uses drones, ground sensors, surveillance towers, cameras, and patrol boats to track and apprehend people crossing illegally.

And all of those are less harmful to wildlife. As Marianna saw it, the border wall was an existential threat to the Butterfly Center.

Of course, monarchs can soar over the wall. But it’s not just a wall.

It’s a 150-foot-wide enforcement area, cleared of all vegetation by herbicide that would kill native plants throughout the center.

And the wall is topped with stadium lighting, bright enough to turn night into day, disrupting the circadian rhythms that butterflies use to navigate and feed.

Marianna: So you have this enforcement zone. Dead zone. They eliminate all vegetation. Every new mile of border wall construction eliminates 20 acres of native habitat. Every new mile, 20 acres.

For two weeks, no one told her what was going on. Then the chief of Border Patrol for the Rio Grande, Manuel Padilla, arrived at the center to talk.

He confirmed the news. There had been no mistake. The wall would cross through the center and quote “additional large areas of the Butterfly Center would be cleared for secondary roads and government operations.” In total, the center would lose control of over two-thirds of its property.

Padilla told her that the construction crew would return shortly.

Marianna: And when they returned, it would be with green uniform presence. I said, you mean armed federal agents on private property to protect private for-profit contractors.

And he said, yes, because people tend to get pretty upset when we take their land.

After the break, Marianna gets pretty upset.

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Zach: Marianna and the North American Butterfly Association, which owns the center, were left with no choice but to take on the Trump administration. The association filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.

The suit argued that the federal government had unlawfully entered the center and violated its constitutional right of due process.

Marianna knew that they could only delay the project; the government could waive any laws it needed to in the name of national security in order to build along the border. But… they hadn’t waived any laws yet. They were doing things out of order.

This means they waive the National Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. I can go on and on. For Hidalgo County, it's 28 laws.

That brought an awful lot of attention to us.

And I mean, you know, we had the New York and the L.A. Times, we had, um, Le Monde, uh, Der Spiegel, Al Jazeera, in addition to, like, the Corpus Christi Caller Times, I mean, it was like everybody was calling, coming, emailing, but mostly they wanted conflict.

Michael: But, at least on her side of the conflict, people rallied around Marianna and the Butterfly Center.

The community, once they realized what was happening, that lots of private property was going to be seized, and round two of the federal government's border wall construction project began to mobilize in a grassroots movement to protest. Honestly, it was a, a really beautiful time.

Marianna helped organize a march, a way for the community to show strength.

And we walked four miles, a thousand people, chanting, singing, carrying banners. We marched all the way to La Lomita.

La Lomita was the Catholic mission nearby.

In a sense, Marianna had gotten exactly what she wanted. She raised the alarm, and now the world was focused on the plight of the Butterfly Center. But she had also unwittingly poked a hornet’s nest. And now the hornets were headed her way.

Zach: While the Butterfly Association prepared its lawsuit, a movement was forming to make sure the wall got built. It was led by Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon.

“We're a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a, a culture and a, uh, and a reason for being.”

Bannon had come to the White House from Breitbart Media, where he had stoked fears about immigrants and promoted an extreme nationalist vision—essentially reversing the last 20 years of American diplomacy promoting free trade with Mexico.

In August of 2017, Donald Trump dismissed Bannon after just eight months in the administration. But Bannon wasn’t going anywhere. He was determined to start a movement, one based on his work at Breitbart and for Donald Trump.

Bannon’s first move when he left government was to set up a non-profit called Citizens of the American Republic.

One of their main objectives? Shut down the southern border to immigrants. End the asylum system.

But movements only build in opposition to something. So Bannon would need a target. Someone on the border they could villainize.

Michael: For the next year, the Butterfly Association’s lawsuit against the Trump administration wound its way through the courts. It argued that the government had broken the law by starting construction before it had waived all the relevant regulations.

Then, in February 2019, in what Marianna refers to as the ‘Valentine’s Day Massacre,’ there were three consequential decisions.

Marianna: All three of these things happened almost all at once.

First, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit. The judge said that the federal government had since waived all the relevant laws. Basically, they did things out of order, but the order didn’t matter.

Then, Congress passed legislation authorizing 55 miles of border wall.

And finally, Trump signed an executive order appropriating even more funds for border wall construction.

But, as part of the appropriations that Congress passed, they carved out a few exemptions. The wall could not be built through Benson Rio Grande Valley State Park. It could not be built through La Lomita Catholic Mission. And they told the Trump administration, the wall cannot be built through the National Butterfly Center.

So while the media was reporting this victory for the National Butterfly Center, hooray! they're spared! uh, you know, the Butterfly Center has been saved. We knew it wasn’t that simple.

The wall wasn’t going away. Marianna’s neighbors weren't exempted. Miles of habitat and migration routes would still be destroyed. Pretty soon, they would all have border wall construction on their property.

But it accomplished the administration’s objectives. It muddied the waters, it led to confusion, and, um, created the illusion that, um, the places that people across the country had mobilized to save were now safe.

Zach: The following month, CNN reported on a meeting at the White House with representatives from various organizations to discuss the border wall. One of the representatives, speaking anonymously, quoted Trump’s senior advisor Jared Kushner as saying, quote, “We solved the butterfly thing.”

A group that included Steve Bannon and Trump’s favorite contractor Tommy Fisher had figured out how to build the wall in places the government couldn’t.

Some of the people who were in regular communication with me, reporters with the Associated Press, for example, they’re like, Hey, Marianna, did you see this? What does this mean? And I was like, I don’t know, but I’ve been telling you, we’re not out of the woods yet. The other shoe hasn’t dropped, and boy was I right.

That's next time…

PFW: Zach Goldbaum and Michael May.

This episode was written and reported by Zach and Michael, with editing by me, Peter Frick-Wright, and Robbie Carver. Music and sound design by Robbie as well.

The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast is made possible by our ���ϳԹ��� Plus members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at outsideonline.com/podplus.