By Angelo
The following essay is the first installment in a series of short reflections seeking to crystallize strategic and theoretical lessons from the ongoing anti-border struggle in Lochiel, Arizona. This essay considers the demobilization of police, the strategy of secession, and law’s dissolution by considering aspects of the struggle in Lochiel and extrapolating from them contributions toward a theory of revolutionary transformation in the 21st century. It offers an example of real-time partisan theoretical analysis tethered to place and to struggle, and we’re excited to publish it in the midst of the ongoing social movement in Southern Arizona that it analyzes. To learn more about the struggle to protect the Grandmother trees and halt border wall construction in the San Rafael Valley, check out our previous coverage, or a recent overview by Unicorn Riot.
“One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it.”
-Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception [1].
On a sunny, quiet day in the San Rafael Valley, the sound of dirt bikes and the roar of SUV engines suddenly pierce through the quotidian din of cicada vibrations from high in the nearby trees. A Border Patrol SUV speeds down the hill and into the valley where land defenders have established an autonomous commune and anti-border camp amidst the cottonwoods and tall prairie grasses, holding it for over six weeks. More follow behind him until 25 SUVs, some unmarked, some white and emblazoned with the signature green stripe, are dispersed along the easement road that runs along the US/Mexico border [2].
The officer grinds his truck to a halt and hurries out amidst plumes of dust, declaring to the awaiting crowd that anyone on the border easement from today on be charged with “criminal trespassing.”
“18...U-S-C...13,” he pronounces slowly, recalling the numbers and letters from memory, in a halting, practiced voice. “Anyone on the easement will be given a citation. Eighteen-U-S-C-thirteen” he says again. Like a mantra, or a spell, the words ring out like a sacred invocation of law, as though the words themselves were charged with the power to end the camp or to reassert the right of the United States to govern this valley.
The federal law the officer invokes allegedly allows federal officers to enforce state laws within federal jurisdictions if no federal law exists to address the criminal conduct in question. For the past month, Border Patrol has been confounded by the situation near Lochiel, Arizona, where land defenders continually commit brave acts outlawed by the misdemeanor statutes of the State of Arizona. The Santa Cruz County Sheriff, however, the primary law enforcement entity with jurisdiction to enforce those laws, is refusing to do so. Through some combination of professed opposition to border wall construction and lack of resources, the sheriff’s office has repeatedly, for over a month, refused to respond to calls reporting land defenders for occupying the federal easement and disrupting border wall construction. In this vast spatial aporia of law that has emerged beneath the towering cottonwoods on what has, for only the past 178 years, been considered the US/Mexico border, the Border Patrol agent has been forced to improvise.
“You have to provide people with an official trespass order,” a protester responds. “Because how do we know you’re telling the truth?” Here, at least in this moment, a federal law enforcement officer must prove, in writing, the truth of his legal pronouncements. The protester’s words, his legal play that lacks all reference to a juridical order, becomes a certain kind of law. Whether there is an official statute that his words reference has become irrelevant.
The Border Patrol officer tells the protester to Google it. Does his authority rest in the cloud? Sometimes he says people will be cited, other times he says they will be arrested.
“You are legally required to provide official documentation,” the land defenders insist.
Later the same day, under a Grandmother tree that hosts the treesit in its ancient, outstretched branches, a Border Patrol officer again threatens those gathered under the tree that he’ll cite them for trespassing if they’re on the border easement[3].
“I’d better not see you…” he says.
“I’d better not see you!” shouts a protester.
“If I see you on the easement again…” he tries again.
“If I see you again!” she shouts over him again, her threats mixing with his. Drained of authority, impotent, unable to cite, or arrest, the officer becomes just a man making half-hearted threats, threats the land defenders gleefully return in kind. These equals before the law in this territory where law has broken down take turns invoking absent gods, threatening unspecified consequences, or, when all else fails, resorting to intimidation.
“Take the cover off your name badge,” another protester says to the masked officers. “What’s your name.”
“Zero-two-five,” the officer responds, reduced to a numerical identifier.
“What’s your name,” someone else shouts.
“I’m telling you what the law is,” he responds, trying to redirect the conversation.
“The law is you have to tell us your name as well,” she tells him, despite the fact that (as any pious defense attorney wouldn’t hesitate to inform her) no such law exists. Here, laws seek no justification in the dusty books on the shelves of judges and defense attorneys alike. Here, law can be played with, a disused object that will never be restored to its original use, but that nonetheless remains.
The officer holds a triplicate citation pad, the likes of which haven’t been used by cops in decades. “I will write you a citation for criminal trespassing,” he repeats. He waves around the pad like a ritual object, or a fetish. No longer simply a tool for documenting a citation, but an object that stands in for the law itself, that invokes the specter of law, in the absence of the monopoly on violence that usually gives it meaning.
So far, after an initial arrest on the first day that resulted in no charges filed, more than six weeks have passed. Each day, dozens of protesters have occupied federal land and frequently disrupted construction in obvious violation of state and federal law. No further arrests have been made, no citations have been written. To be clear, this situation will not last forever. The federal government of the United States remains strong, and it is only a matter of time before it reconstitutes its capacity to assert its violence here. Still, the situation at Lochiel offers a unique vision of a world to come, one in which a weakened, or disorganized, state is able to confront challenges to its authority only in fits and starts. It is this vision that we must study.
The lesson from Lochiel is that however beaten back it is in this time and place, law has not disappeared from this valley. It continues to haunt the minds of protesters and cops alike—a ritual code, a sacred language, invoked, like Foucault’s famous lettres de cachet, by everyday people to infuse their words with sovereign force. Here land defenders, Border Patrol, and police practice a form of legal improvisation, in which the tether between what is declared to be law and what the state and federal legislature has officially decreed grows more and more unstable. Only the attorneys, those oracles who continue to claim the power to interpret the state’s esoteric codes, remain attached to a law increasingly incapable of correcting itself against any original, unadulterated, source. In their well-meaning advice, they speak the increasingly inapplicable language of state power.
Those who seek a “life without law” frequently struggle to name the form such a life would take. Without law, would there be norms? Customs? Accountability? Can we earthlings, temporarily liberated from the crush of thousands of years of western juridico-political tradition, suddenly inhabit a lawless world?
As always, the answers to our questions are generated through struggle, through the empirical process of direct and embodied collective confrontation with what exists. Learning is a collective, somatic process. Life in Lochiel offers a vision of a life, not beyond law, but beyond the concentrations of power and the capacity for violence that infuse law with its unique force. Law here has not ceased to exist, it has been, as Agamben put it, discarded, but still played with. Given new uses that were unthinkable before this very moment. It is weaponized, improvised, thrust back at the very agents who once saw themselves as law’s sacred messenger. Maybe, in these gestures land defenders are improvising in real time—this action as study, this studious play—we can see a clearer vision of a just world. As Agamben puts it, “What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity [inoperosità]—that is, another use of the law”[4].
As Trump’s fascist regime continues to generate defectors from within power’s own ranks, spaces in which law has faltered will become more and more frequent. In many cases, those spaces will be filled by violence untethered to law. We should, then, ask ourselves, why has violence, beyond all juridical justification, not emerged from law enforcement in Lochiel? In other words, why don’t the Border Patrol officers just beat the protesters over the head? Or even shoot them? Why, when confronted by law’s limits, don’t they “take matters into their own hands” as so many other agents of state violence have in other moments in history?
Maybe the answer to the riddle of Border Patrol behavior in the San Rafael valley lies in the question of means and ends. Land defenders approach their partisan tasks quite simply—as means—animated by their passion for the Grandmother trees, the free movement of life, or the joy of being together. Theirs is a project freely chosen, one they identify with and have, in many cases, sacrificed much to take on. The Border Patrol officers, on the other hand, do not approach their task of policing the protest with the same sense of identification.
Those protesting the border wall in Lochiel, at Quitobaquito Springs, and elsewhere, have repeatedly reflected that low-ranking Border Patrol officers, when forced to act as foot soldiers doing the work of enabling border wall construction, appear apathetic. In other words, they seem alienated from their work—they appear to not really care, or even, in some situations, to understand themselves to be enacting a meaningless project. Alienated from the project of repressing the camp, they approach the task instrumentally, as a pure end, with all the rigidity that accompanies this condition. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that this same affect of indifference also applies to their treatment of our migrating neighbors. Nonetheless, exploiting a condition of low morale on the part of an enemy force wherever we find it is an ancient strategy of martial engagement and one we should consider seriously [5].
It is here that we can begin to see that the slogan “all cops are bastards,” while just, and certainly emotionally satisfying, is inadequate in itself as a revolutionary theory of the police and their overcoming. Revolutionary movements that emerge from their confines within the imaginations of revolutionaries and test themselves against the real conditions of life find that one of their most important questions, a question that contemporary American revolutionary movements have as yet ceased even to broach, is the question of the demobilization of the police and the military. In the context of a revolutionary movement seeking the overthrow of the most powerful global hegemon in history, this is a question of the utmost importance. It requires careful study of the situation at hand to begin to formulate even a preliminary answer. One thing we can say for sure is that it will not be possible for us to approach this question while engaging all police and all enlisted military with uniform hostility. And especially not with dogmatic attachment to simplistic slogans. Some enemy forces must be fought, but successful revolutionary movements frequently owe their victories to the moments in which the enemy’s soldiers refuse orders, desert, pack up and head home, or even frag their superior officers. Our tactical repertoire must carefully differentiate between hostile forces of differing characters.
In order to deactivate law in this valley, it was not necessary for partisans to overthrow law once and for all, to establish the perfect order of things, or even to know what such an order would look like. They did not need the perfect analysis, pure intentions, or the appropriate demographics. They needed, simply, to begin to think territorially, and to set about concentrating a force capable of asserting itself in a coordinated and strategic way over time.
They also needed quite a bit of luck, which is another element that must not be overlooked. Not all strategies that fail do so because of mistakes on the part of participants. This is why ceremony, ritual, and the careful generation of spiritual forces is essential to the success of any revolutionary movement. We will not get through moments of failure and repression with purely strategic analysis of force relations. We must rely on faith.
A revolutionary unfolding will not entail a single, cataclysmic upheaval that ends state terror and sets us all free from the demand that we generate exchange value in a single moment. Revolutionary transformation is a process that involves, among other things, the accumulation of zones of decreased oversight and intervention by state forces. Within these zones—or territories, or communes, or free states or what have you—other modes of organization begin to take root, oftentimes in competition with dominant modes of organization that also continue to exist to some degree within the same territory. As methods of keeping state forces at bay are experimented with and new, more holistic and relational organizational structures are innovated, these technologies will spread and so, too, will secessionist experiments. As the state becomes increasingly unable to govern particular territories, it also becomes incapable of extracting the wealth and resources (including human resources in the form of recruits into its police and military, as well as those with essential technological, medical, and other skills) from those regions, which thereby weakens its overall capacity to exert itself outwardly (including, of course, internationally), strengthening experiments in autonomy elsewhere.
Those who seek to disrupt this country’s ability to continue to terrorize the planet and all its inhabitants would do well to take note of what’s happening in Lochiel, the Tierra Libre Free State, a vision of a secessionist strategy. Where citizenship means everything and nothing because it is offered to all, where a state lacks the capacity to enforce its rule, where law is something we play with, that we debate around the campfire and enact together with all the sincerity of god’s children, tasked with the responsibility of seeking a form of life worthy of our time.
Endnotes:
1. Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception. (Trans. Kevin Attell). University of Chicago Press. p. 64.
2. Watch the video of this interaction here: Instagram, @tierralibre_noborders, August 28, 2026.
3. Watch the video of this interaction here: Instagram, @tierralibre_noborders, August 28, 2026.
4. Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception. (Trans. Kevin Attell). University of Chicago Press. p. 64.
5. For a careful study of the concept of alienation, see: Jaeggi, R. Alienation. (2014). (Trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith). Columbia University Press.