The Trump administration has started work on a stretch of border wall along part of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation in southern Arizona, the Associated Press reported Thursday from Phoenix, pushing ahead with a signature project the tribe has already sued to stop. Customs and Border Protection says the desert is a smuggling route and that a wall will close a gap. The nation, about 37,000 members, including thousands who live in Mexico, says contractors are trespassing and that the barrier would wreck sacred peaks and rewrite the reservation’s edge.
Tribal officials said about 20 CBP officers went onto the land early Tuesday with contractors and drill trucks to take soil samples. Drone video they released showed roughly 14 vehicles and an industrial drill. They said the agents were masked and armed and blocked tribal police from removing the crews. The nation had put up “No Trespassing” signs. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, in Washington, had already let the government proceed, writing that the wall would sit on a 60-foot federally owned strip called the Roosevelt Reservation. The tribe’s answer is that driving across its land to get there is still trespass. So far there have been no reported physical clashes.
CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott said the job “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.” The Arizona segment is part of a $46 billion push of 30-foot steel bollards, vehicle barriers and surveillance. SLSCO Ltd., a Texas contractor, has more than $390 million in Homeland Security wall money since 2023. The tribe says it is looking at further legal steps. The drills are already on the ground.
Sources: Associated Press via ABC News; KJZZ.
