The Arizona Tribe That’s Been Dragged Back Into Trump’s Border Wars

For years the Tohono O’odham Nation worked collaboratively with the federal government on border security. Now they’re facing an administration that wants to rip through their ancestral home.

On April 28, Chairman Verlon Jose of the Tohono O’odham Nation received a message from a representative of the Department of Homeland Security. A contractor working on behalf of DHS to construct an additional border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border had destroyed part of a site sacred to the Tohono O’odham—Las Playas Intaglio, an archeological site featuring art engraved in the earth in the shape of a fish (comparable to the Nazca Lines in Peru).

Angered, Jose told media that day: “This was a devastating and entirely avoidable loss. There is nothing more important than our history, which is what makes us who we are as O’odham. This site was also an irreplaceable piece of the United States’ history, one none of us can ever get back.”

Now the Tohono O’odham Nation finds its lands at the center of a dispute with the Trump administration over the building of new segments of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

As part of the Trump administration’s attempt to enforce mass deportations, the Department of Homeland Security has hired contractors to construct new additions to the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Using funds earmarked by last summer’s spending bill, DHS has hired several construction companies to build new segments, adding on to the existing wall originally built during the first Trump administration. One of those segments would cut through the Tohono O’odham Reservation.

The Tohono O’odham are facing another battle, in addition. Since construction began in April, workers for Sullivan Land Services, a Texas-based construction firm, have desecrated several religious landmarks sacred to the Tohono O’odham—the aforementioned Las Playas Intaglio among them. Other sacred sites, such as Horse Peak, would be affected by the wall construction, as well. In response, the Tohono O’odham Nation is now suing the Trump administration to block future construction of the wall, arguing that it undermines both tribal sovereignty and a long-standing precedent of cooperation between the nation and the federal government.

The recent contract to expand the current wall project is another unconstitutional vanity project that comes at the expense of the American people. Like the first border wall, the project is mostly spectacle that won’t actually achieve its ostensible goal of reducing migration.

In this case, it is also representative of Trump’s and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s unprecedented challenge to tribal sovereignty, whether through this or the unlawful detention of Native Americans across the country in immigration raids. As Chairman Verlon Jose told The New Republic, “This attempt to unilaterally diminish the nation’s reservation is just the latest example of the federal government violating its own rules regarding sovereign tribes. It should be of grave concern to all 575 federally recognized tribes in the U.S., as the same thing can happen to them.”

It also underscores the kickbacks given to Trump donors who receive lucrative contracts for building the border wall. For an administration that has already declared having “the most secure border in American History,” it begs the question: Why build the border wall?

Following the contours of the high Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona are the lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation. For thousands of years, the Tohono O’odham have lived in a region that encompasses southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, occasionally moving during winter and summer seasons throughout the Colorado River region.

The Tohono O’odham first came to the attention of the U.S. government when, in 1854, Mexico sold the U.S. a strip of land in northern Sonora, in what became known as the Gadsen Purchase. Suddenly, the new border split the Tohono O’odham Nation into two. President Ulysses S. Grant identified the nation by the old Spanish term, the Papago, which would remain the tribe’s legal name until 1986, when Tohono O’odham members called for the tribe to be recognized by its traditional name.

In federal terms, the land of the Tohono O’odham was delineated during the early twentieth century, amid the restructuring of Native lands. On January 14, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson penned an executive order that set aside 2.8 million acres of land from the new state of Arizona for a reservation for the Tohono O’odham. A few years later, Congress enacted legislation affirming Wilson’s executive order.

By American legal standards, the Tohono O’odham Nation is transnational, with its lands straddling the........

© New Republic