On April 23, a federal contractor building Trump’s border wall bulldozed the Las Playas Intaglio — a roughly 200-foot fish-shaped geoglyph etched into the floor of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. It’s approximately 1,000 years old. It’s sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation. And it had been flagged by a cultural protection monitor as a site contractors were supposed to avoid.
About 60 to 70 feet of it are just gone.
The tribe had already met with DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. He listened, then made clear he planned to build more wall as fast as possible. The tribe’s chairman called the destruction “devastating and entirely avoidable.” The Interior Secretary later told a House committee it was “a series of mistakes” — and confirmed that neither DHS nor Interior had consulted the tribe before construction began in that area. Both Mullin and CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott have since apologized.
An apology. For bulldozing something irreplaceable that they were explicitly told not to touch.
This isn’t an isolated incident. In California, federal contractors used dynamite to blast through Kuuchamaa Mountain — a Kumeyaay Nation sacred site listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1992. In New Mexico, CBP is trying to seize land from a Catholic diocese that draws 40,000 pilgrims a year. The government waived environmental and cultural protection laws to move fast. The same laws that, on the books, still make destroying a Native sacred site a federal crime.
The Tohono O’odham Nation sued DHS over those waivers in 2025. They lost.
As one tribal elder put it: “Somebody is responsible for this, and we all know who that is, and he should be held accountable for it. He’s getting away with whatever he wants to do. He’s doing it. No one is stopping him.”
That’s not a border policy. That’s erasure.
Source: Copper Courier