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Peter Frick-Wright: This week, we are wrapping up our series about butterflies and the surprising ways that one of the most delicate, dainty insects in America has caused headaches for people in power. This is the second part of a two-part story, so if all this doesn’t sound familiar, go back and listen to last week’s episode.

When we left off, the National Butterfly Center’s executive director, Marianna Trevino Wright, had successfully stalled the construction of Trump’s border wall on the sanctuary’s property. But while the anti-Trump movement saw her as a hero, she had also riled up Trump’s base of support.

Reporters Michael May and Zach Goldbaum take it from here.

Zach: On September 11th, 2004, Brian Kolfage was an airman serving near Baghdad when a rocket landed three feet from him. Kolfage lost both of his legs and his right hand in the blast.

When he returned home and recovered from his wounds, his fortunes began to turn. He gave motivational speeches. He married a bikini model. And he started a series of political websites, where he posted clickbait with headlines like this one: “Trump just released embarrassing vids of Obama’s Muslim friends that he never wanted seen.” It made him an influencer in the burgeoning MAGA movement.

Interview:  Joining me now from Sunland, New Mexico, triple amputee Air Force veteran and president of We Build the Wall, Brian Kolfage. Brian, this is your dream. It looks like I can see over your right shoulder that it is effectively coming true. You have a sense of satisfaction right about now? Oh yeah, you know, it's just not my dream.

Michael: In December of 2018, Kolfage started a GoFundMe campaign, writing, “If you are sick and tired of watching politicians in both parties obstructing President Trump’s plan to build a wall on the southern border, then you’ve come to the right place.”

He promised to use the GoFundMe donations to build the sections of the wall that the government couldn’t or wouldn’t.

By June 2019, when One America News reported on his progress, he had raised millions of dollars and started to build a three-quarters-of-a-mile section of the wall in Sunland Park, New Mexico.

Kolfage: And we've got the job done. We built the wall with the people's money.

Host: It's an amazing thing because, you know, here you started with, uh, you know, the crowdsourcing and I want to get to that in a minute. Uh, but first tell me, this is built with private funding. Yes, but also it's built on private property. How did you finagle that? What patriot volunteered their property?

Zach: The project attracted a who’s who of the anti-immigrant movement. Politicians who had built their careers on opposing illegal immigration and saw an opportunity to harness grassroots momentum.

On the board: former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo.

And former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who helped set up the umbrella nonprofit that millions of dollars flowed through.

This is the group that approached Fisher Sand and Gravel to build the border wall in New Mexico. The owner, Tommy Fisher, was one of eight contractors selected by the feds to build a prototype.

A private company reached out to us, said that they've raised, you know, 25 million, 30 million on a GoFundMe account.

Michael: It was an all-star cast. Tommy Fisher. Steve Bannon. Tom Tancredo. And a guy just called Foreman Mike, who posted regular updates about the construction in New Mexico.

Foreman Mike with We Build the Wall, off in the distance, the most violent city in the country of Mexico, Juarez. 1,280 murders last year.

Foreman Mike was a gruff construction worker. He wore a hard hat covered in duct tape.

In the foreground, We Build the Wall's first half mile completed from the Rio Grande due west, up a 31 percent grade. The wall is up. We want to thank everybody for the donations.

Zach: The New Mexico wall was complete. It stretched over two steep hills . . . and then just ended, in the middle of the desert. We Build the Wall claimed it closed off a dozen trafficking routes.

Local officials complained it just diverted migrants elsewhere.

Whatever the reality, We Build the Wall was on to the next thing.

They had found a location for a new stretch of wall. Next to the Butterfly Center, in Mission, Texas.

Michael: The monarch butterfly is facing many threats.

There’s rampant pesticide use that kills the butterflies.

There’s climate change, which disrupts their life cycle. The monarchs rely on temperature changes to know when to migrate.

There’s habitat loss. Disease. Predators.

But now there was a new threat: American political dysfunction.

Marianna: The first sign we had that, you know, Steve Bannon's circus had come to town was a day in November 2019.

This is Marianna Trevino Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center. The center had become a symbol on both the right and the left for its opposition to the border wall.

I was driving to work, and on the way to the Butterfly Center, and the road is actually built on the levee.

I was driving there and I saw three or four men on the levee with cameras and gaffs. And, um, they were wearing these navy blue windbreakers like the FBI wears with yellow, big letter, yellow lettering on the back. Only instead of FBI, it said media.

 

So that, you know, that triggered all of my spidey senses. I'm like, people in blue.  Jackets made to look like FBI, but with big yellow lettering that says media, this is not kosher. This is, this is something other than legitimate media.

 

Um,  I called father Roy and I said, do you have, uh, any availability this week to  cruise the river with me to take me out to do a look see, because something is going on  and he said, you know, sure.

 

Father Roy was a close ally in fighting the wall. The next day, they went out on his boat.

And we see the most shocking, really, thing on the river, which is bulldozers pushing all of the native vegetation and the high river bank into the river. They're clearing the river bank, eliminating all of the native vegetation, eliminating the 10, 12-foot-tall cut river bank.

From video: So we are on the banks of the Rio Grande River, Mission, Texas. Here is some heavy equipment, CAT earth mover…

Marianna was incensed. The 3-and-a-half-mile-long stretch of wall was being built right on the banks of the Rio Grande, in the floodplain, one of the few places where Texas desert plants could actually get water.

And cruising along that area documenting this happening on two border patrol boats are the four or five guys that I had seen up on the levee in these fake media jackets.

I was dumbfounded. I was completely dumbfounded because it's really, really hard for local media or legitimate media to get a ride-along with Border Patrol.

I've yelled, "Hey, Breitbart," and flipped him off, gave him the bird.

It was not subtle. It did not help. And it was filmed by the We Build the Wall “media” crew.

Brian Kolfage posted things like, "Thanks for falling for the bait, National Butterfly Center, uh, we're coming to get you." And it just kind of escalated from there.

Zach: At its heart, the battle over the Butterfly Center and the border wall was about which is a bigger threat: allowing the movement of humans across the border, or ending the movement of butterflies. It was two different ways of looking at the world. The two sides were talking past each other, telling different stories because they were trying to solve different problems.

Now, is there illegal immigration in South Texas? I'm sure there is.

So, I know it happens. I have seen it happen. But Border Patrol itself has admitted that the Butterfly Center is not a hotspot for that.

Brian Kolfage disagreed and took his battle with the Butterfly Center to Twitter, claiming that this nature preserve was actually a hub of human trafficking.

He tweeted: “What’s not funny, [at] National Butterflies, is how you decline to comment on the rampant sex trade taking place on your property and the dead bodies.”

Marianna: It was this onslaught, he told all of his patriot followers, you know, people who love America, to show us how they feel on our Facebook page.

And they did. Kolfage’s followers called staffers "pigs," "pathetic filth," and "traitors."

I wasn't aware he had put out that call to action until I got a notice from Facebook that they had, uh, suspended the review function on the National Butterfly Center page because of suspicious activity. So we were bombarded with negative comments and one-star ratings and things like that so rapidly that it must have appeared like a brute force attack or, you know, a bot.

Foreman Mike: Foreman Mike, We Build the Wall construction. We're waiting on the fuelers for our afternoon fuel up. Uh, project's going very well. We've got about a mile and a half clear. Back 120 feet.

In addition to the online attacks, Foreman Mike showed up at the construction site in Mission, right next door to the Butterfly Center.

Foreman Mike: We've got a couple of problems. All over the internet, we've got the butterfly lady who's up the street.

Doesn't want the wall. Fuck the wall. What you people have to know is that you have dead bodies on her property, right near her property. Yesterday, they have what's called a splasher. That's where they steal vehicles, the cartel, and they get chased by the Border Patrol. They drive into the Rio Grande where we can't touch them.

You patriots are putting a stop to that.

There was no dead body, of course. But it was useful propaganda for We Build the Wall.

Foreman Mike: Don't listen to these freaks. There's something really wrong with them.

Their moral compass is broken. When they don't want safety. Both sides of the border.

The Butterfly Center was a favorite target for We Build the Wall, and they kept calling out Marianna in their videos. She was, in some ways, the perfect villain for them, choosing butterflies over the supposed trafficking of children. But it was all talk… until people who watched the videos started coming onto the Butterfly Center’s property.

Marianna: The first two militia people we became aware of came into the visitor's pavilion… One of them was wearing cargo shorts that pulled very heavily to one side, so I knew he was armed. I knew he had a handgun in that pocket.

So we knew these were dangerous people. We knew we were at the center of the storm and that they intended to rally physical harm against us if possible.

Marianna also lost her trust in the Border Patrol, who she says was aligned with We Build the Wall and other right-wing agitators. She no longer spoke with some of her neighbors. And it was proving harder than she would have ever imagined to stick up for the butterflies.

Michael: As construction continued, the North American Butterfly Association, which owns the center, filed yet another suit, this time against We Build the Wall. And briefly prevailed, but a few months later, a judge declared that the environmental concerns were “speculative” and allowed the wall to proceed.

Tommy Fisher was again tapped to build the wall. Fisher seemed confident that once the Trump administration saw his wall, the federal government would pay for this section and hire his firm to build more.

Fisher: My hope is, is that the new administration would come down and talk to the boots on the ground that could see something that was built on the Rio Grande that could have so many multiple purposes. Not only could it be for border protection, but it could also be for a public-use bike path, different.

In July 2020, the three-mile section was complete.

But shortly after, the investigative journalism outlet ProPublica took a closer look at what he’d built. They concluded that the newly completed wall was already showing dangerous signs of erosion. Then a month later, Hurricane Hanna hit South Texas and deep gashes appeared in the sandy loam under the wall.

Marianna: And to us, it was all really, really ridiculous. There were these disconnected, freestanding monuments to waste and stupidity that we joked one day aliens would find and think, what are these, you know, post-industrial concrete and steel Stonehenge-type relics?

Zach: In 1945, at the end of World War II, there were only five border walls, anywhere in the world. But they would soon become more popular. By 1989, there were 15. In 2016, when Trump was first running for office, there were 70. And during this time, the effects of climate change became more apparent, the gap between poor countries and wealthy countries continued to expand, and the world’s population grew past 7 billion. As all this happened, people started to flow across borders in search of resources. And that became an increasing concern… at least for people in wealthy countries.

So it didn’t matter that the border wall was washing away just a few months after it was built. The point wasn’t to actually keep people out, but to make people feel safer. More secure. It wasn’t a monument to waste and stupidity. It was a monument to fear. And, Marianna would soon learn, it was a monument to greed.

That’s after the break.

 

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Michael: Until a few years ago, scientists had no idea how monarchs navigated thousands of miles every year, from their winter home in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Mexico through the United States and Canada.

It’s not even the same butterflies that make the trip. Monarchs' entire lifespan is typically only 2-6 weeks. It takes three or four generations to complete the migration.

It turns out monarchs migrate by watching the position of the sun. And they have an internal clock in their antennas that helps them adjust as the sun moves across the sky. Somehow they just instinctively know to fly south in the fall and north in the spring.

The migration has been going on since long before the United States declared itself a nation. The monarchs don’t care about borders. Only seasons and the position of the sun.

Marianna found herself caught between these two forces. One eternal and natural. The other distinctly human.

Marianna: My husband ran out to tell me Steve Bannon's been arrested on a yacht by the US Postal Service for the We Build the Wall thing.

News – Steve Bannon / Brian Kolfage

Zach: In August of 2020, the feds unsealed an indictment against Brian Kolfage, Steve Bannon, and others. And it outlined a brazen scheme.

When Kolfage started his GoFundMe campaign, he had promised to give all the money to the Trump administration to build the wall. Problem is, that’s not really possible—you can’t just send money to the White House—and GoFundMe threatened to take his page down and return all the money.

To keep the donations, they needed to transfer the money to a legitimate nonprofit.

That’s when Steve Bannon stepped in. He created a nonprofit – We Build the Wall Inc. – and asked people donating to the GoFundMe page if they would approve transferring their donation to the nonprofit. And to assure donors, they promised they would quote “not take a penny in salary or compensation.”

But in fact, Kolfage took hundreds of thousands, which he spent on boat payments, cosmetic surgery, and more. Bannon was indicted for laundering money.

Today, Brian Kolfage is in prison, serving a four-year sentence. Bannon was pardoned by Trump, but New York brought state charges, and he’s scheduled to face trial in December.

I went to our local grocery store. At this point, it's, I don't know, nine, ten in the morning, bought two bottles of champagne, and headed to work where I popped corks and shared champagne with everybody. The first phone call I answered was from Michael, somebody, and I can't remember which outlet.

But he said, Oh my God, Marianna, have you heard the news? And I said, Yes, I have. He said, What are you doing? I said, I'm drinking champagne. And he said, Uh, what message do you have for, uh, Steve Bannon, Brian Kolfage? And I said, I hope they enjoy their cavity searches as they're, you know, taken to jail. And that, um, was indeed a very happy day.

Michael: Marianna may have been vindicated, but conspiracies about the Butterfly Center continued to percolate online.

In January 2022, MAGA congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe tried to drive onto the property.

She refused to pay admission, and when she was stopped at the gate, she told Marianna’s son that she wanted to enter to “see illegals crossing on rafts.”

When Lowe started to film the interaction, Marianna knocked her phone out of her hand. Then they got into a scuffle and Marianna ended up on the ground.

Kimberly Lowe: She is insane. She has assaulted me. This is crazy.

Marianna: You come out here and you spread your lies. Oh my.

Kimberly Lowe: Get in the car. Oh, this woman is insane.

Lowe ended up getting back into her red Range Rover and sped off, almost hitting Marianna’s son with her car.

Kimberly Lowe: I'm gonna have to call the police. They are. Oh my gosh. Get in the car.

The next month, the Butterfly Center shut down indefinitely. Law enforcement had warned her of credible threats tied to a nearby anti-immigration rally called We Stand America.

Marianna: It feels like the Butterfly Center and, uh,

my staff, myself, my family,

you know, became the public's piñata.

Michael: So, Marianna, I wanted to jump in for a second. To your credit, I don't know if piñata is really the right metaphor. I mean, I think you became a hero to a lot of people who wanted somebody to stand up as well. That's the other side of this. And you certainly, uh, just didn’t let yourself, you know, get hit without striking back, right?

I mean, there's fuck you, Breitbart, there are plenty of, uh, things on Twitter where you taunted Kolfage. Um, so I’m just curious, you know, I feel the heaviness of, and the toll this has taken on you. And I’m just wondering, reflecting on, on, on your own, you know, uh, decision to stand up and such. And I’m just wondering how you reflect on that.

If you have regrets, if you wish you’d gone farther, what, how do you feel about the way you reacted to it?

Marianna: At this time right now, you know, in between the last Trump presidency and the prospect of another one in the near future,

I really wish that I had left the Butterfly Center in 2016.

I will not make the same choices again. I was naive going into it. And while I appreciate the support that I received personally and that the Butterfly Center received, there's a big difference between people saying, um, we admire you, you’re fearless, you’re our hero.

And, um, living in fear 24 hours a day.

I am not and have never been a trifling woman. And unfortunately, that has caused me a lot of pain.

It has, um, meant that I have made a lot of sacrifices.

None of us are functioning in a vacuum. Every one of us is part of an ecosystem. I took this job to protect and preserve an ecosystem, the deep South Texas that I love.

The Butterfly Center was closed for nearly three months. It was a period of hibernation, of restoration.

But then, in April, just as spring was hitting its stride, Marianna tweeted: “Everything is blooming, the mulberry tree is bustling with colorful birds, and we’re open again.”

And that began a period of relative calm. Marianna left the Butterfly Center this March and is now looking for her next job.

I did that for 12 years. If that's all, I’m okay with it. I've done my job.

Zach: Right now, what’s known as a super generation of monarchs are on their way back to Mexico. The super generation grows twice the size of other monarchs, in order to make the journey south all in one push.

This generation of super migrants follows the pattern they have since the beginning. Born in milkweed, they will sleep and feed in oyamel trees. Lose either one of those two species, and we lose the monarchs. They are that picky.

And yet, if they weren’t picky, if the monarch’s diet wasn’t restricted to milkweed, they would devour everything; it would be us who needed saving from them.

Michael: But instead, it’s humans who consume everything. Who cut down the oyamel to plant avocados. Who build walls along their migration route. So it’s up to other humans to step in.

And every so often, you need a super generation of conservationists—like Homero, or Marianna—people who step up and give their lives in one form or another to protect an insect that just wants to fly north and south with the sun.

In a few months, the monarchs will arrive in Mexico in flocks of tens of millions. They’ll find their way up into the mountains of El Rosario, where they’ll huddle together for warmth and hibernate for the winter. It’s a short rest. But it’s all they need.

Peter Frick-Wright: That’s Michael May and Zach Goldbaum.

This episode—and this whole series on Monarch butterflies—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.

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