CBP border-wall contractor bulldozed the 1,000-year-old Las Playas Intaglio, a Tohono O'odham sacred site, in Arizona

On April 23, 2026, a contractor working for U.S. Customs and Border Protection bulldozed a roughly 50-to-60-foot swath across the Las Playas Intaglio, a 1,000-year-old geoglyph in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, cutting through the middle of the fish-shaped desert etching and causing what archaeologists called irreparable damage. The site sits about 10 to 15 feet from the existing border barrier and is considered sacred ancestral land by the Tohono O'odham Nation, whose reservation borders the refuge.

The destruction occurred without prior notice, even as the refuge, the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service, and the contractor had been in talks to route the new construction around the marked site — negotiations similar to those that spared the intaglio during Trump's first term. A CBP spokesperson confirmed that on April 23 a border-wall contractor "inadvertently disturbed" the site, which had been staked and identified in advance, and said the remaining portion would be secured and protected in place. The clearing is part of a second barrier the administration is fast-tracking under the 2005 REAL ID Act, which lets the Department of Homeland Security waive environmental, cultural, and historic-preservation protections to accelerate border-wall work outside the ordinary legal process.

Tohono O'odham runners had warned tribal and refuge officials the day before that bulldozers were clearing everything in their path and approaching the protected area; the site was destroyed the next morning. "The significance of this site was not unknown," said Verlon Jose, chair of the Tohono O'odham Nation. "It had already been identified. It had already been marked as a place to protect, and yet, it was still lost." The episode echoes first-term border-wall construction that blasted through a burial ground at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and bulldozed a road through a Hohokam burial site in Coronado National Forest.

Updates

2026-05-15 — Interior Secretary called the destruction "a series of mistakes" [4, 5]

At a May 15, 2026 House Natural Resources Committee hearing on the Interior Department's budget, Rep. Adelita Grijalva pressed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about the bulldozing. Burgum called it "a series of mistakes that happened along the way," said there had been "zero intention," and testified that DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott had personally apologized to Tohono O'odham leadership. Grijalva responded that the loss could not be undone once the site was destroyed.

2026-06-17 — Tohono O'odham Nation sued DHS over further border-wall construction [6, 7]

The Tohono O'odham Nation filed suit against DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, and Border Patrol Chief Rosario Vasquez in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking to halt planned construction of border wall across the Nation's reservation lands without its consent. The complaint cited the destruction of the Las Playas Intaglio as evidence of the harm already caused by the administration's border-barrier program.

2026-08-14 — Judge denied the Nation's bid to block border wall construction [8, 9]

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon denied the Tohono O'odham Nation's motion for a preliminary injunction in its suit against DHS, ruling the tribe had not shown the wall would alter its reservation boundaries without congressional authorization and rejecting its trespass claim; Leon found a 60-foot strip of land designated a "public reservation" by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 allows the government to build the wall without impacting the reservation boundary. Tribal Chairman Verlon M. Jose said the Nation "strongly disagree[d]" with the ruling and would "consider all possible options for moving forward."