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.
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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.
“At this time, interactions between [Tohono O’odham police] and federal law enforcement have been peaceful and professional,” the statement said. “We will continue to monitor the situation.”
The early-morning activity is the latest chapter in a years-long fight between the Tohono O’odham and the administration of US President Donald Trump, which has pushed to build a border wall through the tribal nation’s land.
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.
Attempting to trespass on tribal land to build a border wall would be a violation of Indigenous rights, the Tohono O’odham Nation has said. It maintained it had not been asked for consent prior to construction.
By pushing ahead, the Indigenous nation argued that the US Department of Homeland Security “has chosen to disregard our sovereignty, ignoring proven border security strategies and dismissing the irreversible environmental and cultural destruction that will follow”.
“We have been left with no other choice,” the tribal government added. “We would prefer to use the resources that the litigation will require for services directly to Nation members. But our priority MUST always be to protect our people, our culture, and to stand up for what is right.”
On August 14, however, US District Judge Richard Leon declined to issue a preliminary injunction to stop the border wall’s construction on Tohono O’odham land.
Tuesday morning’s construction activity appears to be a result of that decision.
The Trump administration has argued the land along the border does not belong to the tribe. Instead, it has pointed to a 1907 proclamation declaring the area roughly 18 metres (60 feet) around the border as federal land for security purposes.
In 2023, however, a report from the Government Accountability Office, a US federal watchdog agency, found that the border wall effort had caused harm to Indigenous land, including by “blasting at a tribal burial site and altering water flows”.
In recent months, the Tohono O’odham tribe has put up large signs warning against trespassing on its reservation.
