The Tohono O’odham Nation says the Trump administration is sending Border Patrol agents to their tribal lands — where contractors are preparing to erect a border wall.
In a press release Tuesday, the tribe said around 20 masked, armed agents with Customs and Border Protection entered the Tohono O’odham Nation early that morning.
The release said the federal personnel, including a Border Patrol SWAT team and officers with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, were at three sites inside the tribe’s reservation guarding wall contractors as they drilled for soil samples and did other pre-construction work.
The news comes just one day after tribal leaders and Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva gathered in the border town of Ajo and Quitobaquito — an ancient spring inside Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument — to call for a stop to the wall project on tribal land.
The tribe put up "No Trespassing" signs earlier this month and said wall contractors who entered the nation could be cited and told to leave.
Tohono O’odham Chairman Verlon Jose told reporters Monday that the tribe allows construction work on other border projects — like a forward-operating base and surveillance towers. But wall contractors haven’t been approved.
“Our Tohono O’odham Police, our rangers, have been stopping contractors if they didn’t have the necessary permits, they were letting them know, you are trespassing, please leave the nation,” he said.
Jose said tribal police have escorted a handful of wall contractors off tribal land in accordance with the no trespassing law during the last weeks. The Tuesday press release said a vehicle blockade set up by Customs and Border Protection is now preventing tribal police from issuing citations and removing contractors.
The Trump administration announced plans earlier this year to erect a wall across the 62 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border inside the Tohono O’odham Nation — part of a mega-project that includes roads, lights, surveillance tools and, in some cases, two parallel steel walls.
The U.S. has already built roads and set up surveillance towers, vehicle barriers and other infrastructure along the Tohono O’odham Nation’s stretch, but never a wall.
Jose said much of the tribe’s ancestral land, like Quitobaquito, already has a wall. The site is one of several in Arizona slated to get two parallel walls.
“Obviously the first wall didn’t work,” Jose said Monday. “We have a lot of other tools out there we could be utilizing that would not destroy the land, that would not destroy the sacred sites, that would not destroy these holy places, these religious sites … places where we call home.”
In an email, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said the wall project inside the tribe’s reservation “will close one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border: remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity.”
“Congress funded this work, a Federal court has affirmed it, and CBP is carrying it out under the legal authorities that apply,” Scott said.
A federal judge denied the tribe’s request to stop wall construction on their land earlier this month. The tribe says it’s exploring its legal options to appeal the order.
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