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 U.S.-Mexico border. Today, the Tohono O’odham lands encompass, among Native American tribes, the second-longest territory along a border. On May 27, 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation stating that space within 60 feet of the U.S.-Mexico border belonged to the federal government, to help monitor the border. When Wilson penned his February 1, 1917, executive order outlining the boundaries of the Tohono O’odham Reservation, there was no mention of the U.S.-Mexico border. It should be noted that, until the late twentieth century, the border was nothing more than a series of stone markers in the high desert. The first time a fence was erected, it was to keep encroaching ranchers from claiming Tohono O’odham land as their own. In 1918, Congress directed the building of a border fence for cattle.
This did not mean that the Tohono O’odham Nation neglected the border. Starting in the late 1970s, the Tohono O’odham began working with Border Patrol on monitoring traffic across the dividing line. In the decades since, the Tohono O’odham tribal council has hosted Customs and Border Protection officers and permitted the construction of CBP bases. During the late 1980s, instances of border crossings ranged from 50 to 60 per month.
Then came Operation Gatekeeper. Beginning under the Clinton administration in 1994, the Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service (the predecessor to ICE) implemented a strategy of “prevention through deterrence” to reduce the number of immigrants entering via the southern border. Border walls were constructed around metropolitan areas and ports of entry, checkpoints were militarized, and detention centers were expanded. Entry into the U.S. was also more restrictive. One key aspect of this policy was that it forced undocumented migrant movement to dangerous terrain, where migrants could be easily spotted or deterred by the forces of nature.
The result was a movement of migrants through the Sonoran Desert, where many perished. In increasing numbers, border crossers entered through Tohono O’odham land. In the decade that followed, thousands of immigrants ventured toward the Tohono O’odham lands to bypass more securitized border entries. On April 27, 2003, The Arizona Republic, in a multipart series on the border, reported that from 2001 to 2002, 85 of 145 immigrant deaths at the border occurred on Tohono O’odham land.
Tribal Chairman Edward Manuel approached Congress, requesting additional funding for border protection and social services to address the rise of migration through the reservation. Since 2003, 1,500 migrants have died on Tohono O’odham lands while attempting to cross the border, and the tribal government has spent $6 million of its own funds to process those deaths.
The nation also faced additional concerns over the border: the harassment of tribal members by Border Patrol agents. Already, in November 2001, members of the Tohono O’odham Nation raised complaints against Border Patrol agents who targeted nation members for undocumented crossing despite being U.S. citizens. In response, Tohono O’odham members pushed for the recognition of Tohono O’odham membership cards as valid proof of citizenship, which could serve as U.S. passports for crossing the border to visit ancestral lands in Mexico. Congress has not yet recognized Tohono O’odham IDs as such.
The federal government did, however, help bolster border security—with the consent of the Tohono O’odham. In 2007, tribal leadership agreed to work with CBP to erect large vehicle barriers along the border. During the first Trump administration, in 2019, tribal members approved of the construction of an Integrated Fixed Tower system, which installed sensors that alerted CBP agents about border activity.
Yet the Tohono O’odham protested the Trump administration for attempting to construct a new border wall that cut through Tohono O’odham land. In 2019, the Tohono O’odham Nation submitted an amicus brief in support of the Sierra Club in its lawsuit against the border wall, Trump v. Sierra Club.
In February 2020, CBP contractors destroyed a burial ground at Monument Hill and damaged Quitobaquito Springs during the construction of a border wall. Construction of the wall, however, stopped following the election of Joe Biden in November 2020.
During the Biden years—even during periods when thousands of asylum petitioners camped by the U.S.-Mexico border for entry—members of the Tohono O’odham lobbied against future border wall construction, arguing that the current tower system worked effectively and that wall construction would produce more harm than good.
In 2024, Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Verlon Jose testified before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on the status of the border. Jose implored the subcommittee that a wall would do nothing to help with border issues. “As the Nation and others have warned for years, the border wall is particularly ineffective in remote geographic areas like our homelands, where it can easily be circumvented by climbing over, tunneling under, or sawing through it.… CBP data shows that most illegal drugs are smuggled through ports of entry rather than through the borderlands. The data clearly shows that federal funds would be put to much better use supporting tribal and federal law enforcement and border security services and public health services.”
Since the return of Donald Trump to the White House, Native Americans have found themselves directly affected by new policies. During the first year of the Trump administration, Native Americans were severely affected by funding cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE terminated leases for at least 12 Indian Health Service facilities that provide medical care on Indian reservations. Among those impacted were the nearby Tucson IHS facility.
In the first year of Trump’s second term, the border remained in the background as the Trump administration centered its immigration policy on mass deportation. Many victims of immigration sweeps were Native Americans. In several ICE operations, as reported by El País, members of the Oglala Sioux and the Navajo Nations reported being detained by ICE agents. In April 2025, the Trump administration issued a memorandum excluding federal Indian reservations from any border construction plans. To expedite construction, former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem waived dozens of regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act.
That changed in February 2026, when the Trump administration announced new plans to construct a border wall through Tohono O’odham land, reversing its previous memorandum. On April 19, Jose announced that legal protection was needed to stop the construction of the two new border walls. In an interview with the Arizona Daily Star, Jose told reporters, “The wall does not work. There are so many other things we can work on together to address this issue. What happened to the government that’s supposed to be for the people, by the people, when the people have no voice?”
On June 16, legal representatives of the Tohono O’odham Nation filed an injunction through the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia to halt anticipated construction of a new border wall.
Ten days later, the Trump administration awarded a contract to Sullivan Land Services, or SLSCO, a construction company based in Galveston, Texas, to build the segment of the wall on Tohono O’odham land. The project, which is estimated to cost north of $1 billion, is dubbed the Tucson 5 Project. The design includes two 30-foot, 62-mile walls that run directly through Tohono O’odham land. For the current border wall construction, SLSCO was also awarded contracts to work on the Del Rio 3 Project and the Laredo 2 Project; it previously built several segments for the border wall during the first Trump administration.
In 2021, the company was sued when a whistleblower alleged that it overcharged for construction costs and even illegally hired armed Mexican nationals to guard border wall construction sites. Most importantly, the Houston Chronicle’s report detailed how the Sullivan brothers have carved a monopoly out of federal construction projects ranging from disaster relief in Haiti to construction work on the Port of Galveston.
Weeks later, on July 7, representatives of the DOJ’s Environmental and Natural Resources division challenged the Tohono O’odham’s injunction in a brief, claiming that allowing the nation to block construction would be a threat to national security.
“According to Plaintiff Tohono O’odham Nation, however, Congress silently left a sixty-two mile stretch of the Arizona border unprotected,” wrote DOJ attorney Stacy Stoller. “That stretch, Plaintiff says, shares a border with its reservation (the Tribal Reservation). As Plaintiff tells it, the Secretary may secure that portion of the border only if it [the Nation] agrees. Under this theory Plaintiff wields veto power over any border-barrier project in this area. Plaintiff’s theory would, to say the least, break new legal ground.”
Except the challenge does not break new legal ground. If anything, it preserves a status quo between the nation and DHS that has existed for decades. What would be unprecedented, however, is DHS’s move to challenge tribal sovereignty and create the illusion that the nation dictates all border policy.
On July 22, attorneys representing the Tohono O’odham and the Department of Justice convened at the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia for a preliminary hearing. Presiding over the case was Judge Richard Leon, who had already made headlines when he blocked the Trump administration’s construction of the new White House ballroom after it demolished the historic East Wing.
In the courtroom, attorney Riyaz Kanji, on behalf of the nation, argued that the Trump administration engaged in ultra vires actions—that is, going beyond its legal power—to construct the wall on Tohono O’odham land. Kanji noted that on several occasions, the Tohono O’odham Nation had warned the federal government that building a border wall through the nation’s lands would do nothing to deter migration, that migration levels were at an all-time low, and that such a project would desecrate sacred sites and have environmental impacts. Rather, Kanji noted, the existing border system worked well and border crossings were down dramatically from past years.
Judge Leon questioned Kanji about the nation’s case, citing the government’s argument that President Theodore Roosevelt had initially designated the lands of the border as a public reservation, regardless of tribal jurisdiction. Noting that the 1907 Roosevelt executive order designated all land 60 feet within the border as government property, Leon asked Kanji to explain why the 1907 order did not grant the federal government the power to build the wall. Justice Department attorneys asserted that the border remains U.S. government property, that the project would pose no environmental threat, and that the national security threat of immigration was real. By the end of the hearing, Judge Leon asked both parties to bring in written statements, delaying a final judgment by a few weeks.
For now, the case remains in limbo. Following the hearing, Representative Adelita Grijalva of Arizona’s 7th district, which encompasses the Tohono O’odham lands, released a statement in response. Joining in support of the nation, Grijalva reminded the press that “it is against the law for DHS to unilaterally alter the boundaries of a sovereign Tribal Nation, yet that is exactly what they are trying to do—usurping authority that only Congress has.”
Chairman Verlon Jose told me, in response to the trial, “The Nation has worked closely with CBP and other agencies for decades to protect the U.S. homeland. A clear purpose for undertaking these extensive security efforts was to avoid an unnecessary wall that would separate our people, desecrate our sacred sites, and devastate our environment. History and experience with the terrain in this part of the country clearly show that an expensive wall won’t work. That is why we implemented multiple levels of technology and personnel, which has been effective. The administration has repeatedly stated for months that the current border is 100 percent secure. As a result, the only impact of building a wall is to curry political favor, all at great expense to the taxpayers.”
In the meantime, the Trump Administration has decided to take advantage of the delayed ruling to act. On Thursday, August 6, DHS stated it would send contractors to the Tohono O’odham Reservation to resume construction on the wall. The following day, the Tohono O’odham Nation announced that any contractor who enters the Nation’s lands to work on the wall without prior authorization would be found illegally trespassing.
Other judgments have been granted to the Trump administration to continue wall construction. On August 3, federal Judge Reggie B. Walton allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with the construction of the border wall through the levee system near the town of Presidio, Texas. Environmental groups argued doing so would ruin the structure of a nearby levee, which would lead to flooding. The ruling underscores the legal uncertainty facing border communities regarding their ability to have a voice in the border wall construction.
The current attempt to construct two border walls on Tohono O’odham land reeks of the political graft and backroom deals typical of the Trump administration. The outcome of the trial is about more than just another one of the president’s many vanity projects. It could have long-standing consequences for Native American sovereignty. By ignoring these precedents, as outlined by Congress, the current border wall project on Tohono O’odham land would mark an erasure of Native American rights in the U.S. Most of all, it represents another obliteration of checks and balances between the branches of government. By allowing Trump to sidestep its authority, Congress sets another precedent to allow an unchecked executive to dictate federal policy, to the detriment of those who must live in the aftermath.
