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How a Native American reservation became entangled in the border crisis
When President Trump proposed a barrier along the southern border with Mexico, a Tohono O’odham elder famously declared that the tribe did not understand the concept, having no word for “wall” in their native language.
Vice chairman Verlon Jose seemed to echo the sentiments of most of the 34,000 members of his tribe, half of whom still live on the sun-baked reservation in the desert straddling Arizona and Mexico.
But the tribe recently gave the go-ahead to US Customs and Border Protection to ink a $26 million contract with an Israeli defense company to build a “virtual wall” — a deal finalized last week.
The barrier, which will be constructed by the same firm that provides surveillance systems for Israel’s wall on the West Bank, is designed to track drug traffickers and illegal migrants without disturbing sacred land.
Elbit Systems will build 10 mobile towers, mounted with cameras, motion detectors and radar systems. The images gathered from the towers can be immediately transmitted to the three nearby CBP command and control centers that could dispatch agents within seconds.
The Tohono O’odham reservation stretches more than 2.7 million acres in the Sonoran Desert and is roughly the size of Connecticut. More than 62 miles of the sovereign land lies on the border with Mexico — a frontier currently protected by little more than a short wooden fence.
In some places, there is no barrier.
“Nobody has ever wanted a wall,” said Thomasa Rivas, 60, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation who grew up on the reservation. “It would kill our way of life.”
Rivas said members of the tribe travel back and forth to sacred ground in Mexico, where nearly 2,000 tribal brethren still live. “My father is buried in Mexico,” she said.
US members of the tribe participate in annual July pilgrimages for special ceremonies in which they make offerings to their creator I’toi near the Mexican side of the border. For years residents have argued that a towering wall would also hurt the environment, preventing the migration of jaguar, coyote and small wild boar known as javelina pigs.
Rivas and her family also regularly cross into Mexico during the May-July harvest of the red fruit that grows on top of the saguaro cactus, a sacred plant for the Tohono O’odham. The fruit is used to make jam, syrup and ceremonial wine, she said.
“There has never been a real border for us,” said Rivas, whose long black hair is streaked with gray and who has several tribal tattoos on her face and around her wrists. “Ever since I was a little girl, I saw migrants who were looking for work traveling back and forth. My mother would make them food.”
But after 9/11 it became harder to cross into Mexico, she said, and CBP required residents to show a passport as well as a special native identity card in order to travel between countries. But even then there was still no real barrier.
Now with a recent influx of Central American migrants pouring across the southern frontier, hundreds of Border Patrol agents in white and green pick-ups have been deployed to patrol the sprawling reservation outside Sells, a sun-blistered desert town which is the capital of the reservation and the seat of the Tohono O’odham government.
The agents, who have three stations adjacent to tribal land, are on the lookout for both migrants and drug traffickers who take advantage of the rugged frontier to cross into the US. They work alongside federally funded tribal police known as Shadow Wolves.
Many on the reservation resent the CBP presence, likening them to the Gestapo.
“They pull guns on people all the time,” Rivas told The Post, adding that a friend was recently stopped at a checkpoint and harassed because she would only answer questions in the Tohono O’odham language.
“Our government is afraid to stand up to Border Patrol,” she said. “They are afraid to step on federal toes. We can yell about the wall and everything else, but let’s not do it too loud because something bad can happen.”
Like other native groups, the nation receives millions in federal grants every year to finance everything from small business initiatives to policing on the reservation, where more than 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. The median household income is just over $24,000, according to the most recent US Census Bureau statistics. By comparison, median American household income is more than $63,000.
‘Nobody has ever wanted a wall…it would kill our way of life.’
It’s not clear exactly what the reservation received from the feds for agreeing to the project known as Integrated Fixed Towers. One source told The Post that CBP agreed to build a network of roads on the reservation, which still relies on dirt tracks.
A March 22 tribal resolution also refers to the approval of unspecified “compensation for related rights of way for the IFT project.”
A spokesman for the Tohono O’odham Nation told The Post that the talks between CBP and the group have been going on since 2015, and that representatives from the reservation’s 11 districts unanimously passed the resolution to allow the towers.
A spokesman for Elbit said that the discussions with the tribe were “protracted,” and leaders only agreed to install the observation towers, which will range between 80 and 140 feet high, if they could easily remove them if residents found the system too invasive.
“They are a sovereign nation and they wanted the flexibility to take the whole system out,” said Gordon Kesting, an executive with the Israeli firm’s local subsidiary in Texas. “We had to be very sensitive to the ground that is sacred to them.”
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