An edge-colored graph $G$ is conflict-free connected if any two of its vertices are connected by a path, which contains a color used on exactly one of its edges. The conflict-free connection number of a connected graph $G$, denoted by $cfc(G)$, is defined as the minimum number of colors that are required in order to make $G$ conflict-free connected. In this paper, we investigate the relation between the conflict-free connection number and the independence number of a graph. We firstly show that $cfc(G)\le α(G)$ for any connected graph $G$, and an example is given showing that the bound is sharp. With this result, we prove that if $T$ is a tree with $Δ(T)\ge \frac{α(T)+2}{2}$, then $cfc(T)=Δ(T)$.