Trump's border wall expansion just bulldozed an ancient tribal site

Source: Washington Post

April 30, 2026 at 5:04 p.m. EDT




President Donald Trump’s expansion of the wall along the southern border with Mexico has damaged a rare Native American archaeological site in the Arizona desert, area residents said Thursday, as the administration moves to rapidly build hundreds of miles of additional barriers in a $46.5 billion project.

The aggressive expansion project — funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill — is erecting three miles of wall a week, introducing barriers in parts of Texas that did not previously have them, as well as a second wall in much of California, Arizona and New Mexico. The construction is not abiding by environmental laws and other protections, alarming advocates, national park staff and Native Americans.

In Arizona, construction crews ran heavy machinery through and destroyed a roughly 60-to-70-foot swath of an intaglio, a more than 200-foot-long ground etching that looks like a fish and is thought to be at least 1,000 years old, said Richard Martynec, a retired archaeologist who now volunteers his time surveying the area. Satellite imagery from Friday shows a disturbance crossing the intaglio area. Lorraine Marquez Eiler, an elder of the Hia-ced O’odham Indigenous people, said the damage happened last week.

“If someone came to Washington and started destroying all the different sites that people in the United States revere, it’s the same thing for us,” Marquez Eiler said. “Those things were made by our ancestors, and it’s hitting home. … For me, it’s an emotional subject,” she added. The intaglio is inside Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, where a government contractor overseen by Customs and Border Protection has been working on the barrier project for weeks. The Interior Department administers the refuge. An Interior Department staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, confirmed the intaglio had been damaged last week. CBP did not immediately respond to questions about the damage.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/04/30/border-wall-damage-indigenous-arizona/