The Wall the Tohono O’odham Don’t Want

Before Trump won his first election, in 2016, with promises to “build the wall,” Arizona’s border with Mexico already had the most barriers of any U.S. state. But an unfinished stretch lay along the southern boundary of the Tohono O’odham Nation, a reservation the size of Connecticut. Now Trump is trying to fill that line in, by ordering a wall built across a 62-mile-long stretch of reservation land. This would constitute what the chairman of the nation, Verlon Jose, called “the biggest land grab of the modern era.” The federal government, he told me, “hasn’t unilaterally tried to take Indian lands like this in a very long time.”Cranes began putting massive steel panels in place in the San Rafael Valley last fall. From there, construction headed west toward the Tohono O’odham Nation. Jose had several meetings with local and federal officials, but the tribe’s objections to the wall were ignored. The Department of Homeland Security informed Jose that it planned to award contracts for construction by the end of this month, and contractors began touring the reservation. Concluding that legal action was its only option, the Tohono O’odham filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, and U.S. Border Patrol Chief Rosario Vasquez.[Read: The ‘big black scar’]The tribe is asking for an injunction that would stop construction of the border wall on their land. Losing, Jose said, would be a devastating blow, not only to the Tohono O’odham, but to all future claims of Indian sovereignty.The Tohono O’odham’s legal case argues that the reservation is private rather than public land, so the federal government is overstepping its authority by disregarding opposition from the Tohono O’odham, and trespassing on sovereign land; and the proposed border wall would destroy the traditional spiritual, kinship, and economic practices of the Tohono O’odham.In 1907, T