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“We Will Not Let This Destroy Our Sacred Sites”: Indigenous Leaders Fight Trump Administration’s Border Wall
“All of my lifetime of work has been for the memories of my ancestors, of what they went through. With the incoming wall, should it be disrupted?” Marquez Eiler said in a determined voice, speaking of her ancestral lands. “That’s just another slap in the face, as far as I’m concerned, to my ancestors. And so I ask: Why?”
Lorraine Marquez Eiler’s photo of her great-great grandparents and her great-grandparents, who would walk about 50 miles through the Sonoran Desert to the springs.Surrounded by more than 100 community members at a town hall that followed the visit to Quitobaquito, Marquez Eiler hoped the federal government would pause border construction, as it did earlier this month in Texas after public backlash.
Quitobaquito is sacred to the Hia-Ced O’odham, the Tohono O’odham and other Indigenous people in Southern Arizona and México, who have traveled to the site for generations to join religious pilgrimages and ceremonies. They fear the spring is at risk of drying up if another border wall is built on the protected lands about 30 miles west of Tohono O’odham Nation.
The Nation is now fighting to halt border construction on two fronts: On O’odham land, where the federal government plans to build a new 30-foot border wall; and on adjacent federal land where another new border fence threatens Quitobaquito.
The projects are part of the Trump administration’s push to spend nearly $50 billion in taxpayer funds on border wall construction.
This is far from tribal citizens’ first fight with the U.S. government over destruction and division of their sovereign tribal lands. From the beginning, people of Tohono O’odham Nation have lived on lands that had no borders.
The Quitobaquito pond sits near the U.S.-Mexico border just west of the Lukeville port of entry on Monday, Aug. 24, 2026. The Trump administration is attempting to build a second border fence 150-feet from the existing border, which O’odham tribal members and environmentalists say would damage Quitobaquito, a sacred site to the O’odham and other indigenous people. Credit: Stephanie Casanova
When the U.S. and México governments agreed to separate territories, the Tribal Nation wasn’t informed.
For years and until today, O’odham citizens — on both sides of a border they never agreed to — travel freely across their nation. While they have tried to work with border officials to quell crime, they have fought border walls that separate their people and harm their ancestral lands.
The recent fights under the Trump administration have spurred a legal battle and a high-profile standoff between federal agents and law enforcement from the Tohono O’odham Nation. O’odham people are now fighting for Tribal sovereignty in the face of a Republican-led federal government arguing for U.S. sovereignty.
Feds already razing the land
In the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where Quitobaquito Springs sits about 13 miles west of the Lukeville port of entry, the Trump administration has proposed a 30-foot tall border fence 150 feet from the existing one. Marquez Eiler is worried she will no longer be able to access land that for generations has been part of her Tribal Nation’s religious traditions, if that wall is built.
Parts of Quitobaquito lands originally belonged to a family of Hia-Ced O’odham descent. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt signed a proclamation establishing the Organ Pipe National Monument as a way to preserve a vast swath of the Sonoran Desert. The new monument was part of a U.S. National Park Service effort to preserve “ecological wonders of the country,” the agency’s website states.
Now, a few miles east of the pond, construction equipment from federal government contractors sits next to the border, the land around it already cleared. Cactuses along the border are marked with a colored string, and a rope lines the proposed area where a second border wall may be built.
Construction equipment is seen near the U.S.-Mexico border just west of the Lukeville port of entry on Monday, Aug. 24, 2026. Credit: Stephanie Casanova
If that line continues west, the Quitobaquito pond is right in its path. If contractors bulldoze the cacti, they will destroy legally protected desert plants. They will destroy flora that is sacred to the O’ohdam people, who traditionally believe that plants and the earth are their ancestors.
When the U.S.-México boundary was created through the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, it divided the Tohono O’odham Nation’s ancestral lands. Today, there are about 3,000 enrolled O’odham citizens living in Sonora, México, and families often cross the border to visit family, visit cultural sites, and for religious ceremonies.
Tohono O’odham Nation sues federal government
About 30 miles east of Quitobaquito — on O’odham land — the administration has also proposed building a 30-foot fence in three areas where the border is currently marked by heavy steel fencing a few feet tall.
In June, the Tohono O’odham Nation filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to block border wall construction on their land.
“While the Nation values its close relationship with the Department, it has long opposed construction of a border wall on the Reservation,” the lawsuit states.
“The Nation understands that construction of the wall would entail significant devastation on the Reservation, including the destruction of mountain peaks sacred to the O’odham,” the suit argues. “It would fray the ties between O’odham communities and families on opposite sides of the border, interfere significantly with O’odham religious rituals and practices, and destroy plant and animal resources sacred to the O’odham.”
The Nation’s lawsuit cited instances earlier in the year when federal contractors “destroyed ancestral sites of great importance while constructing the wall” adjacent to O’odham land.
In April, a Department of Homeland Security contractor damaged the Las Playas Intaglio, a 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph in Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge that pointed toward the Gulf of California.
Border Patrol continues construction
In a memorandum outlining opposition to the lawsuit, the federal government’s attorneys said the Tohono O’odham Nation failed to show that the border wall construction is being done in excess of the federal government’s legal authority. The document also emphasized the U.S. government’s “preexisting right to secure the border.”
“While the United States has worked — and will continue to work — cooperatively with Plaintiff to promote their shared interest in border security, Plaintiff does not hold veto power over the United States’ sovereign duty to secure its borders,” the memo said.
While waiting for a decision from the courts, tribal leaders put up “No Trespassing” signs on Aug. 7, saying in a news release that border wall contractors who attempted to enter the Tohono O’odham Nation would be “illegally trespassing.” Early Tuesday morning, contractors entered the Nation accompanied by about 20 “masked, armed” border patrol agents, according to a news release from the Tohono O’odham Nation.
In an emailed statement Thursday to Arizona Luminaria, Rodney Scott, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said CBP is moving forward with the federal government’s border wall construction project along the 62 miles that cut through the Tohono O’odham Nation.
“The project 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,” Scott wrote.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson in the same email said, “the worksites are inside the 60-foot Roosevelt Reservation,” referring to designated land north of the U.S.-México border that the federal government manages.
Rep. Adelita Grijalva, left, and Tohono O’odham Chairman Verlon Jose listen as Lorraine Marquez Eiler, a Hia-C’ed O’odham elder, shares how her ancestors would hold ceremonies at Quitobaquito Springs. Grijalva visited the springs with tribal leaders on Monday, Aug. 24, 2026. Credit: Stephanie Casanova“This is about tribal sovereignty”
At Quitobaquito Springs, Marquez Eiler, the tribal elder, led U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva toward the pond to share more with the congresswoman about the tribal communities’ fight.
“After standing here today, seeing this land, and directly hearing from the nation, I am more convinced than ever, this is not just a border construction project,” Grijalva said. “This is about tribal sovereignty, it’s about sacred land, it’s about history, culture and spiritual practices of the O’odham people and others.”
Tohono O’odham Chairman Verlon Jose and Vice Chairwoman Carla Johnson organized the trip to Quitobaquito to stand against the Trump administration’s insistence on building a new border wall.
For the Tohono O’odham and other Indigenous people, the land is their church, where they hold ceremony and prayer, Jose said. The federal government has a history of destroying the O’odham’s sacred land, he added.
When the first border fence went up between 2019 and 2020, contractors blasted through O’odham burial sites on Monument Hill.
“This is not ours to own. It is ours to protect, to protect for the people. To protect for you and I and everyone the creator has placed here on this earth,” Jose said.
Sara Mae Williams, Justice of the Peace in Ajo and a Tohono O’odham citizen, shares their concerns regarding border wall construction on Tohono O’odham land at a town hall at the Ajo Plaza Rec Hall on Monday, Aug. 24, 2026. Credit: Stephanie Casanova“Why do we not want a wall?”
A few hours after their visit to Quitobaquito on Monday, the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, which Marquez Eiler co-founded, hosted a town hall in Ajo, about 40 miles north of the springs. Grijalva, Jose and Johnson shared their efforts to stop the construction projects and listened to residents’ concerns.
More than 100 people filled the Ajo Plaza Rec Hall.
They shared worries over whether the wildlife would survive another construction project – the Quitobaquito pupfish, an endangered species, the Sonoyta mud turtle, the desert caper plant and the Quitobaquito tryonia, a tiny springsnail, call the springs their home.
They criticized the taxpayer cost for the border fence as too high – more than $46 billion in federal funding for projects from California to Texas. They urged Grijalva to push for comprehensive, humane immigration reform instead.
“Why do we not want a wall? Because we are not afraid of who is on the other side,” said Sara Mae Williams, Justice of the Peace in Ajo and a citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation. “It’s us. It’s our people. It pains me when they try to divide us.”
On Tuesday, Grijalva and other Democratic federal lawmakers who represent the borderlands – Reps. Veronica Escobar of Texas and Raul Ruiz and Juan Vargas of California – sent a letter opposing the wall to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of the Interior.
The lawmakers urged the Trump administration to stop further construction of the border wall “until meaningful government-to-government consultation has occurred with the Tohono O’odham Nation and Congress has received a full accounting of the project’s impacts on Tribal lands, cultural resources, and surrounding communities.”
The fight continues
U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon denied the Nation’s motion for a preliminary injunction on Aug. 14. In a written opinion explaining his decision, the judge said the Tohono O’odham Nation is “unlikely to succeed on the merits because the federal Roosevelt Reservation exists along the international border and, in any event, plaintiff has not established that construction of a border wall will indeed alter Reservation boundaries.”
“The international border is an area of great significance to both the United States and to the Nation,” Leon wrote. “While I have concluded that a preliminary injunction is unwarranted, I fully expect the Government in the months ahead to follow through on its guarantees of consultation and cooperation with the Nation to address the Nation’s concerns regarding border wall construction!”
The Tohono O’odham Nation appealed that decision on Wednesday, court records show.
“We will not let this destroy our sacred sites, our burial sites, our holy places, the places of our ancestors,” Jose said at the town hall, pausing to stress his sentences. “We will not let it destroy our environment. We will not let it further divide our people. We will not let it divide our reservation.”
“We Will Not Let This Destroy Our Sacred Sites”: Indigenous Leaders Fight Trump Administration’s Border Wall was originally published by Arizona Luminaria and is republished with permission.
Recommended
Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: Bridging the Gap
The data, however, should make all of us reconsider some of our assumptions.
Look at the national data
The first graph tells a remarkable story. From 1990 through 2017, the number of abortions in the United States followed a generally downward trend, falling from more than 1.6 million in 1990 to a historic low around 2017. Guttmacher describes this as a nearly three-decade decline.
Then the direction changed.
Beginning around the start of the Trump administration, the long decline stopped, and abortions began increasing. By 2020, abortions had risen to 930,160, an 8% increase from 2017. Guttmacher reports that the increase continued after that, reaching more than 1 million abortions in 2023 and approximately 1.124 million in 2024. Its latest estimate is approximately 1.126 million in 2025—the highest number since 2009.
The graph also identifies two important changes in the policy environment: the Trump administration's changes to Title X beginning in 2019 and the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision in 2022.
I am not claiming that these policies caused the increase. The data cannot establish that. The increase had already begun before Dobbs, and many factors affect abortion rates.
But the pattern is unmistakable: the decades-long decline in abortions stopped, and the trend reversed.
That should cause us to ask whether the policies we have adopted are accomplishing what we intended.
Texas provides an even more striking example
The second graph tells a similar story, but with an even more dramatic policy change.
Texas abortions had been declining for years. The total fell from 56,620 in 2019 to 55,175 in 2020 and 52,495 in 2021.
Then Texas banned abortion.
The effect on abortions performed inside Texas was immediate and dramatic. The number fell from 50,783 in 2021 to 17,212 in 2022 and essentially zero thereafter.
But that is not the same thing as reducing abortions among Texas residents.
As the orange line in the graph shows, the estimated total number of abortions obtained by Texas residents went from 52,495 in 2021 to 56,350 in 2023 and 64,060 in 2024. In other words, despite the ban, the estimated number of abortions obtained by Texas residents increased by approximately 22% between 2021 and 2024.
The abortions did not simply disappear. They moved—to other states and increasingly to medication abortion and telehealth. Guttmacher has documented the enormous increase in interstate travel and telehealth provision following Dobbs.
Again, I am not claiming that the Texas ban caused the increase. There are undoubtedly multiple explanations, and the available data cannot establish a single cause.
But we should at least acknowledge the obvious: the Texas ban has not produced the result its supporters presumably wanted if that result was fewer abortions among Texas residents.
What might explain this?
Here I want to make a suggestion, and I want to be clear that it is my hypothesis, not a proven conclusion.
Before Texas eliminated abortion providers, Texas law required a woman seeking an abortion to receive information that included alternatives to abortion and to wait at least 24 hours before the procedure, subject to limited exceptions.
Whatever one's opinion of those requirements, they created an opportunity for a woman considering an abortion to have an in-person encounter with healthcare professionals, learn about her options, consider alternatives, and have additional time before making the final decision.
That entire environment disappeared when Texas eliminated legal abortion providers.
A woman seeking an abortion in Texas now has to find another pathway. She may travel to another state, or she may obtain medication through telehealth. Those pathways can be extraordinarily valuable for someone who has already made a firm decision. But they may provide fewer opportunities for the kind of personal interaction, counseling, and consideration of alternatives that existed when abortion providers were available locally.
Perhaps that is part of the explanation for the surprising Texas numbers.
I don't claim that it is the whole explanation. It almost certainly isn't. The reasons for the increase are likely much more complicated. But it is a hypothesis worth testing rather than dismissing.
Perhaps we should learn from the data
For almost 30 years, the United States experienced a substantial decline in abortions. Whatever the reasons for that decline, something was working.
Since approximately 2017, that progress has reversed.
Texas provides an even more striking example. A state that had been experiencing a long-term decline eliminated virtually all legal abortion providers, yet the estimated number of abortions obtained by Texas residents subsequently increased.
If our objective is to reduce abortions, we should judge our policies by whether they actually reduce abortions.
That means pro-life and pro-choice Americans have an opportunity to move beyond the argument over who is morally right and work together on the outcome we can share: fewer abortions.
That could mean better access to contraception, better sex education, greater economic support for pregnant women, stronger support for mothers and children, adoption services, healthcare, childcare—and, perhaps, giving women who are considering abortion the information, counseling and time they need to make a truly informed decision.
We don't have to agree on everything about abortion to agree that reducing the number of abortions is a worthwhile goal.
And perhaps the most important lesson of all is this:
If being "pro-life" means wanting fewer abortions, then perhaps being genuinely pro-life means being genuinely pro-choice—giving women the information, support, time, and real alternatives they need to choose life.
Pro-life means pro-choice.
Michael A. Soderstrand is a retired professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and currently lives in Columbus, Ohio.