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The Trump administration has started construction of a section of a border wall in Arizona despite objections from a Native American tribe.
The wall is part of a $46 billion effort to shore up the southern border with 30-foot steel bollard walls, vehicle barriers, and technology designed to stop illegal immigration and smuggling.
However, the Tohono O’odham Nation has said the construction will damage land sacred to the tribe, The Associated Press reported.
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Contractors drill at a border wall pre-construction site in Arizona on Tuesday. The project is part of a Trump administration effort to shore up the southern border, which came amid opposition from the Tohono O’odham Nation, which said contractors are trespassing on tribal land. (Tohono O’odham Nation via AP)
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said the desert spanning the Tohono O’odham Nation, which sits on both sides of the border, is a major corridor for drug smuggling.
“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,” said CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott.
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The tribe, which has 37,000 members, including many who live in Mexico, sued the federal government in June in an attempt to halt the project.
The lawsuit argued the construction would cause “significant devastation” on the reservation, including the destruction of mountain peaks sacred to the tribe.
Contractors drill at a border wall pre-construction site in Arizona on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026. (Tohono O’odham Nation via AP)
A federal judge rejected the argument, siding with the government and noting that the border wall would be built on a 60-foot-wide buffer zone of federally owned land called the Roosevelt Reservation.
“Defendants have not yet articulated plans to construct outside the Roosevelt Reservation,” U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C., wrote in his opinion.
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FILE – Illegal Mexican immigrants walk through the Sonoran Desert after illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border border on January 19, 2011 into the Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona. The immigrants said they had wandered the desert lost for a week after crossing from Mexico into the vast Indian reservation at night. Exhausted, they requested the Border Patrol to pick them up and take them to the U.S.-Mexico border, from where they would return to their homes in the Mexican state of Sonora. They had come, they said, to reach Phoenix and find work in construction or landscaping. All said they had worked in Arizona before. (John Moore/Getty Images)
The tribe said the construction still constitutes trespassing, even if the project is contained to the Roosevelt Reservation. The tribe set up “No Trespassing” signs this week and said masked CBP agents set up a vehicle blockade to stop tribal police from removing the contractors.
“The contractors, who are on the Nation illegally, were accompanied by agents as they worked on three separate locations near the border with drill trucks to conduct soil sampling and other activities,” tribal officials said in a statement.
The U.S.-Mexico border fence ends at the eastern edge of the Tohono O’odham Reservation near Sasabe, Arizona, U.S., May 10, 2022. (Reuters/Rebecca Noble)
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The tribe said it was exploring other legal means to remove the contractors.
Fox News Digital has reached out to CBP and the Tohono O’odham Nation for comment.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.