An Indigenous tribe located between the United States and Mexico has accused US federal agents and construction workers of illegally trespassing on its land to begin work on a controversial border wall in the state of Arizona. In a statement released on Tuesday, the Tohono O’odham Nation said “approximately 20 masked, armed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents” accompanied construction workers to three locations before dawn. The statement added that CBP prevented tribal police from issuing trespassing citations to the contractors.
CBP had cordoned off the area with a “vehicle blockade” and deployed a special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team to protect the contractors, according to Tohono O’odham authorities. Mexican police had also been deployed to keep watch, the statement said, also noting the presence of a “tethered balloon” for surveillance purposes. The conflict stretches back to Trump’s first term in office, from 2017 to 2021, when he proposed a border-spanning barrier to deter irregular migration into the US.
But many Indigenous groups, including the Tohono O’odham, opposed the construction, which threatened to bulldoze sensitive habitats, sacred sites and other parts of tribal land. A federally recognised tribe of around 37,000 members, the Tohono O’odham Nation sits along roughly 100km (62 miles) of the US-Mexico border. Its territory straddles the US state of Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora.
The tribe has members in both countries, who often cross without passports or other documentation beyond their tribal identification cards. Under US law, federally recognised tribes are considered “domestic dependent nations”. They exercise sovereignty over their own land and are not subject to state-level laws.
But their relationship to the US government is particularly fraught. The degree to which federal authorities can impose their will on tribal nations has long been the subject of heated legal battles. The border wall has been at the centre of some of those fights.
In June, the Tohono O’odham legislature voted unanimously to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration over efforts to appropriate tribal land for the barrier. The nation argued that it had cooperated closely with federal authorities to stop irregular border crossings and drug smuggling, spending millions of dollars on the effort. It claims that cross-border detentions have dropped by more than 95 percent as a result of that work.
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