Standing near the pond at Quitobaquito Springs, Lorraine Marquez Eiler, a Hia-Ced O’odham elder, shared how her ancestors held ceremonies at the sacred site — a desert oasis in a national park that the federal government is set to bulldoze for a new border wall.
She pulled out a photo of her great-great grandparents and her great-grandparents, who would walk about 50 miles through the Sonoran Desert to the springs. The O’odham call the water flow A’al Vaipia. She showed the image of her ancestors to a group that included Indigenous leaders and a U.S. congressional representative — all there on Monday to condemn the border wall construction.
“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?”
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 east 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.
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 border 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.
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.
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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.
“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.
“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.”
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