As Trump’s wall closes in, DHS intimidates a border tribe with surveillance, masked agents and drones
At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona, received an email from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. Government contractors were en route to conduct soil tests for construction of a 62-mile wall along the Nation’s southern boundary, wrote acting chief patrol agent Henry N. Laxdal.
If the tribe wished to have cultural monitors observe the work, they were welcome to, but they could not interfere with the government’s operations.
The work would begin in exactly one minute.
Jose, 59, was already aware of the contractors’ arrival. An hour earlier, a tribal member had called to report a caravan heading south through the reservation, and Facebook was lighting up with similar accounts. The convoy included not only work trucks and drilling rigs, but Border Patrol vehicles as well.
For months, the O’odham had maneuvered to avoid such a scene, taking their case to federal court. Their homeland straddles the border, and thousands of tribal members live in Mexico. A wall would disrupt routine border crossings for ceremonies and family visits and destroy landscapes they consider their duty to protect, members and leaders say. Their lawsuit argued that the Trump administration’s efforts to build it despite their opposition constituted an historic attack on tribal sovereignty.
But administration attorneys gave assurances that the government was engaging with the O’odham in good faith, and a judge in Washington, D.C., denied the tribe’s request for a preliminary injunction. In his Aug. 25 email providing Jose a 60-second heads up, the Border Patrol chief said his agency’s willingness to accommodate cultural monitors underscored its “commitment to ongoing coordination” with the Nation.
As daylight broke, Jose learned the contractors were guarded by federal agents in masks and tactical gear, drawn from a special operations cadre that participated in citywide sweeps in Minneapolis and Chicago the previous year, which left three people dead, including two U.S. citizens. When the tribe’s chief of police tried to reach the worksite, he was stopped at a roadblock set up by the agents. [Continue reading…]