BORTAC special operations unit guarded soil-testing contractors on reservation
At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Verlon Jose, 59, opened an email from Henry N. Laxdal, the acting chief patrol agent of the 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, Laxdal wrote. 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. Laxdal said his agency’s willingness to accommodate cultural monitors underscored its “commitment to ongoing coordination” with the Nation.
Jose had already learned of the contractors’ arrival an hour earlier, ProPublica found, when a tribal member called to report a caravan heading south through the reservation. Facebook was lighting up with similar accounts, and the convoy included not only work trucks and drilling rigs but Border Patrol vehicles.
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 said. Their lawsuit argued that the Trump administration’s efforts to build the wall despite their opposition constituted an “historic attack on tribal sovereignty.”
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.
By sunrise on Aug. 25, Jose learned the contractors were guarded by federal agents in masks and tactical gear, drawn from a special operations cadre that had participated in citywide sweeps in Minneapolis and Chicago the previous year that 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 Border Patrol roadblock. A trio of Border Patrol supervisors approached, including two from a nearby station and a third representing BORTAC, the agency’s special operations wing. The SWAT-style agents wore desert camo, masks, and patterned scarves favored by U.S. military units in Iraq and Afghanistan. The chief was permitted to record only after promising not to interfere. He observed three drilling rigs manned by a handful of operators and an equal number of agents standing guard. The contractors’ heavy vehicles were all beyond the 60-foot zone that government attorneys had assured the judge they would not leave, ProPublica reported. The chief also encountered a trio of Bureau of Indian Affairs agents who said they had been sent from Washington, D.C., to “preserve the peace and monitor activities.” Jose issued a statement on the nation’s website declaring the incursion illegal and disclosing that DHS had deployed a surveillance blimp and enlisted Mexican security forces to help protect the work crews.
The ProPublica investigation, based on photos, videos, court filings, interviews with tribal leadership, firsthand observations, and more than 1,000 contemporaneously written observations compiled by tribal members, found that what followed was an extensive federal deployment against a sovereign nation that for a quarter-century had staved off a border wall by allowing the Department of Homeland Security to use the reservation as a testing ground for some of the government’s most aggressive security measures. The reservation, the largest on the southern border at 2.8 million acres, is home to roughly 14,000 of the tribe’s 37,000 enrolled members, with approximately 3,000 more living in Mexico.
The battle over a border wall on the nation has broken along familiar partisan lines in Arizona: GOP legislative leaders have filed briefs in support of the project, while Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has filed in support of the tribe, according to ProPublica. Progressive U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva, whose district includes the reservation, has said she is crafting legislation to rein in DHS’s sweeping powers to waive federal laws to expedite wall construction. ProPublica reported that the Trump administration has used those waiver authorities to circumvent environmental and cultural preservation statutes on 60 occasions across its two terms.
Two days after DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation and the first Native American to head the department, met with tribal leaders on April 21, a border wall contractor “inadvertently disturbed a cultural site” west of the reservation, bulldozing a 70-foot swath through the Las Playas Intaglio, a 200-foot-long earthen etching in the shape of a fish that was at least 6,500 years old. The site was well marked and well known to area archaeologists. Wynona P. Larson Yazzie, an O’odham tribal elder, Marine Corps veteran and former tribal police officer, had organized prayer runs that included stops at the intaglio, and she had visited the site the day before its destruction.
On Aug. 6, Larson Yazzie saw a disturbing filing from the tribe’s attorneys. They had received word that in four days government contractors would enter the reservation to conduct tests. DHS, the tribe argued, was “exploiting” the judge’s reflection period to “move forward with highly disputed actions.” Tribal leaders erected dozens of 8-foot-wide “no trespassing” signs along the three main access roads leading through the reservation to the border.
Larson Yazzie began making plans of her own. She was joined by Amy Juan, 40, a longtime O’odham activist. Juan had grown up riding in her grandfather’s truck over the clanking cattle guard at Ko:li Ki:jig, a traditional crossing on the U.S.-Mexico line. After 9/11, a locking gate was placed over the cattle guard. The Border Patrol built a “forward operating base” near her grandparents’ home that would eventually feature a helipad, a detention space and an endless cycle of agents. Around the reservation’s perimeter, CBP established some of the largest Border Patrol stations in the country. Checkpoints went up on roads leading north.
Human rights groups documented U.S.-born tribal members being arrested and deported, and verbal and physical abuse by Border Patrol agents. CBP did not respond when asked about the report’s allegations.
For Juan, the Nation’s collaboration with DHS had sacrificed safety and civil liberties for elusive gains. Virtually everyone on the reservation had been touched by the dark side of border smuggling. During the mid-2000s, some tribal members, enticed by a chance at life-changing money, got involved in moving people and drugs, fueling cycles of arrest and incarceration that exacerbated challenges the community was already facing. At the same time, virtually everyone also had a story about negative interactions with the Border Patrol — a child traumatized at a checkpoint, an unlawful traffic stop or a loved one assaulted by an agent.
“We want safety and the same respect as the next person,” Juan said. “We’ve never been against keeping people safe, but at what cost?”
Larson Yazzie was similarly concerned. She worried that in the face of DHS pressure the Nation would fold and, like the intaglio, the borderlands would be lost. Prayer fires are an important O’odham tradition, often convened in moments of communal struggle. To Larson Yazzie, the coming of a wall was such a time.
The chosen site was symbolic: the border gate at Ko:li Ki:jig. The camp had limited amenities — cots and chairs that encircled the fire, a cooler for ice, a weathered canopy for relief from the sun. They called it Tadai Me:i — roadrunner on fire. Someone was always awake to watch the flame, which was lit on Aug. 9 as the Trump administration’s contractors prepared to enter the reservation. The first drone sighting in the area was recorded the following night, at 11:43 p.m., documented in the first of two activity logs. Kept in spiral notebooks, the logs offered a minute-by-minute account of what participants in the ceremony saw and heard. The handwritten observations, shared with ProPublica, span 13 days and chart a steady escalation by DHS, culminating in an elite tactical team that blocked tribal authorities from issuing trespassing citations to contractors or removing them.
Larson Yazzie knew at least one legislative council member who opposed the gathering. They feared it could lead to large groups converging on the reservation to physically block the border wall, in an occupation similar to the 10-month protest on Standing Rock Sioux land that halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. The idea terrified tribal leaders. With its lethal heat and unforgiving terrain, the desert was dangerous enough without outsiders squaring off against Border Patrol.
Supporters of the ceremonial fire were themselves uneasy. They knew the story of Ray Mattia, the 58-year-old who was shot and killed by the Border Patrol in 2023 while unarmed on the doorstep of his home on the reservation. Agents, who were backing tribal police on the call, claimed to have mistaken a cellphone he was holding for a gun. “My fear is that they gonna start shooting us,” said 24-year-old camp visitor Collin Quasule. Quasule had videos on his phone of recent interactions he had had with federal agents — agents trailing him as he drove around the reservation, following him to his home, pulling him over without explaining why, refusing to accept his legal name and birthdate, and winking at him when he protested his detention.
On Aug. 12, Juan received a call about a caravan: six trucks with Texas plates following an unmarked SUV with government plates through the reservation. She called the tribe’s police department, which intercepted the caravan and escorted it off the land. The driver of the unmarked vehicle was confirmed to be a Border Patrol agent. The interception was one of nearly a dozen tribal police recorded over a three-day period, ProPublica reported.
During the camp’s first seven days, the activity log filled with nearly 665 observations, mostly federal agents circling their location. While many would drive by without stopping, other agents would park and watch. At least one was reported snapping photos of the campers; ProPublica later obtained video of an agent doing exactly that. Mexican security forces, both military and police, were also observed conversing with Border Patrol agents over the international boundary. “It appeared that the 2 BPs were showing the Mexicans pictures on their phones,” read an Aug. 11 entry.
“Drones, helicopters, a lot of air activity,” Juan said, days after the prayer fire was lit. The helicopters included both marked CBP aircraft and what appeared to be military Black Hawks. The drones were handheld quadcopters, let loose directly over the camp, at times during prayer song ceremonies.
On the fourth night, a gathering was held. Upwards of 100 people turned up, including members of distant sister tribes. The evening was peaceful until Juan received a text from an elder couple who had left early to return to their home near Tucson. The Border Patrol had stopped them at a checkpoint a half-mile outside the reservation, they reported. The officers said they were conducting an “immigration check” and asked to see tribal ID.
“Where you guys coming from?” the agent asked. “Ceremony,” the couple replied. “Oh,” the agent said, “is that the one going on down south?”
The encounter was unusual, said Juan. The checkpoint is rarely staffed. When agents are on hand, she said, “they never ask us for a tribal ID.” When Juan shared the information with the gathering, people immediately began packing up, afraid, she surmised, of a late-night encounter with Border Patrol.
The tribe filed its lawsuit to stop the project on June 16 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, arguing that the wall would reduce the size of its reservation — which can only be done by Congress — and would constitute an enduring act of trespass on sovereign lands and the destruction of sacred cultural sites. On the eve of a July 22 hearing, DHS filed a notice affirming that, to accelerate the project, it was waiving, in whole or in part, more than 30 laws, including several that mandate tribal consultation. In court filings, the government acknowledged its long history of working “cooperatively” with the tribal government while also arguing that the nation “does not hold veto power over the United States’ sovereign duty to secure its borders.” Trump administration attorneys contended that an injunction was premature; planning was ongoing, ProPublica reported, and problems the nation envisioned could still be addressed.
The government insisted construction would be limited to the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide zone running along the U.S. side of the border, where CBP was authorized to build barriers as it saw fit. Riyaz Kanji, the tribe’s lead attorney, argued the Roosevelt Reservation doesn’t extend onto tribal land, and even if it did the rugged landscape would force construction to diverge far from the 60-foot boundary. Sweeping as its powers were, Kanji contended, DHS could not override a sovereign government. The administration’s plans, he argued, constituted a “blatant and unprecedented disregard for the tribe’s rights.”
Adam R.F. Gustafson, a Justice Department attorney, countered that the tribe had already approved a barrier on its land many years ago. The question now was what kind of barrier it should be. That was for DHS to decide, he argued. The department was “committed” to consultation, he continued. “We take very seriously the tribe’s views on this,” he told the court.
The judge appeared swayed by DHS’ assurances but needed time to consider. “I don’t think the government is trying to go outside of that 60-foot strip,” he said.
The O’odham suspected the government would not be as mindful as it claimed.
Judge Richard J. Leon declined the tribe’s injunction request on Aug. 14. “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!” he wrote.
Within hours of the denial, DHS general counsel James Percival posted a celebratory meme depicting one of the cybernetic Star Trek supervillains known as “the Borg.” “RESISTANCE IS FUTILE,” it read. “We respect tribal sovereignty but not to the detriment of border security,” he wrote. “This wall is getting built. Our authority is beyond dispute.”
At the April 21 meeting, council member Vivian Juan-Saunders recalled Mullin telling the delegation, “Don’t mess with me.” Mullin’s office did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the exchange. The message was more direct the following month, when tribal leaders met with Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott. According to Jose, Scott told the delegation that if they filed a lawsuit opposing the wall, the nation could lose access to three border gates members use to travel to and from Mexico. Juan-Saunders and council member Jesse Navarro confirmed the account. CBP declined to comment on the alleged threat.
In June, a $1.3 billion contract to build the wall, known as the “Tucson 5” project, was awarded to Sullivan Land Services Co., also known as SLS and SLSCO. The Texas firm has a long history of Republican political donations and was a major recipient of border wall contracts during Trump’s first term. Confirmation that things would be different this time had come in February, when CBP informed the tribe that it planned to seal off the reservation entirely, tapping nearly $52 billion from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. During that first term, Arizona saw 226 miles of border wall built, but the Tohono O’odham Nation maintained its status as the longest unwalled section in the state.
Customs and Border Protection has reported border apprehensions 94% lower than during the Biden presidency, with Border Patrol “encounters” hitting their lowest levels in more than 50 years. The nation’s interim chief of police, James Cook, claimed in a sworn declaration that there had been a 90% drop in reports of illegal entry on the reservation over the preceding year, and that smuggling and other border-related crimes had “almost disappeared.” Benjamin S. Hollinder, a senior Border Patrol official, argued in a sworn declaration opposing the tribe’s lawsuit that the absence of a wall on the nation has produced a funneling effect, channeling smugglers onto the reservation. “Not having a border barrier system in this particular area makes it a vulnerable and a desirable area for [transnational criminal organizations] to operate,” Hollinder wrote. “If encounters of aliens entering illegally between ports of entry increase, vulnerabilities in the area will become particularly problematic.”
ProPublica sent DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Border Patrol nearly 30 questions about the surveillance and interactions with tribal members and leaders. The agencies answered none. Instead, CBP pointed to a statement Commissioner Scott made in August describing the reservation’s southern boundary as “one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border” and “a remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity.” Regarding construction of a wall, Scott said, “Congress funded this work, a Federal court has affirmed it, and CBP is carrying it out under the legal authorities that apply. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are securing the border and giving our agents the tools and support they need to protect the American people.”
Eleven days after the judge’s denial, on Aug. 25, the Border Patrol sent the Nation its one-minute notice that the contractors were coming. Larson Yazzie jumped in her truck and raced for the border to document what was happening. An agent on foot stopped her. He’d laid a spike strip in the road ahead, he warned. Larson Yazzie filmed the contractors in the distance.
When the prayer fire was relit after a seven-day ceremony, Davy Cross, a stocky 57-year-old with an intricate tattoo running down the left side of his face, was tending it at 4:33 a.m. when he noticed buzzing above his head. At least five drones were visible at first, Cross told ProPublica, but as they got lower the drones went dark. “I seen all the red lights,” Cross recalled, but “then they disappeared.” The drones were soon replaced by an airplane and a helicopter. Shortly after 9 a.m., a caravan of Border Patrol and construction vehicles trundled into view, and much of the Border Patrol force remained, forming a semicircle around the camp with Mexican state police closing the loop on the other side of the line. “We got surround[ed] by over 30 vehicles,” Cross wrote in the activity log. A video of the moment spread across social media in the borderlands. The tribe’s attorneys filed an appeal of the judge’s order allowing construction to proceed and pleaded for a halt to the government’s activities, arguing that the Trump administration was making “a mockery” of the court’s expectation of “consultation and cooperation.”
That night at the camp, Larson Yazzie was singing prayer songs when Juan pulled in. It was near midnight. Border Patrol agents were coming and going constantly. Some passed without stopping. Others idled at the edge of the firelight while the red lights of a surveillance blimp blinked over the mountains to the east.
Tadai Me:i was not the only pocket of resistance on the border, ProPublica reported. In Texas, the Trump administration’s plans to run a wall through Big Bend National Park had brought together an unusual coalition that saw environmental nonprofits and river guides standing with hunters, ranchers and local sheriffs in opposition to the project. One week before the convoy rolled onto the Tohono O’odham reservation, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced that, after speaking with the secretary of DHS, he had secured a pause on the Big Bend project. “There are technology tools that don’t include barriers,” Abbott said at a press conference. “Think of drones, think of fiber optics.” A federal judge subsequently granted a preliminary injunction halting construction in the Big Bend area while a lawsuit proceeds. To Amy Juan, the comparison was darkly ironic: for two and a half decades, the Nation had been a laboratory for the technology Abbott described, yet when tribal leaders raised that case, they were told to stand down. “What makes Texas the exception to us is very clear,” Juan said. “It’s good old boy conversations that are happening between the politicians and the CBP commissioners and Markwayne Mullin.”
The early fire watch on the night the work began fell to a young Pascua Yaqui member named Nate Sosa. At 3:28 a.m., Sosa heard a noise — a round being chambered in a weapon. A Border Patrol agent had exited his vehicle. With a long gun slung low across his back, he shined a light into Mexico and then walked within feet of the campers asleep on their cots. A half-hour later, a drone flew in from the north, followed by a helicopter, then a convoy dozens of vehicles long. At 6:02 a.m., while Larson Yazzie was leading the camp in prayer, a helicopter passed overhead; an hour later, a drone ascended above the fire.
Tribal member Deshane Gregg, whose vehicle was forced off the road by a convoy of contractors and federal agents, told ProPublica that the recent show of force on the reservation has felt like a government siege, not cooperation. “You just feel helpless. You see these people, and they’re just so aggressive. They want you to react. They want you to show them that we could be ugly too,” she said. “We’re just here doing prayer. We’re just here, not trying to bother them, but it gets to you when it’s constantly being like that. The drones flying over us all day, it’s a lot.”
Liz Quiroga, a 28-year-old tribal member and regular at the prayer site, sat with the camp’s logbook open in her lap. Over the next five days, the book filled with 379 observations, ProPublica reported — nearly two-thirds of which involved Border Patrol units near the fire. The arrival of Mexican authorities was documented six times; an additional 39 entries referenced unmarked vehicles and suspected “undercovers.” The logbook cataloged a dozen instances of aircraft flying over the camp, including four helicopters, three planes and five drones. “Nobody has any idea what’s actually happening out here,” Quiroga said. “This is true dystopia.”
While its legal challenge continues, the nation has ceased attempting to remove border wall contractors from its lands. The camp and the surveillance that has come with it remain.