Border wall contractors unearth Native American remains in Organ Pipe

Trump administration builds second wall in Organ Pipe

ProPublica confirmed that Native American remains were unearthed in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on Sept. 8 amid soil overturned by border wall contractors, according to the National Park Service. The discovery went unreported until ProPublica’s account and came 15 days after Lorraine Eiler, 89, warned at an August news conference that the Trump administration was racing to erect a second border wall across the monument, southwest of Tucson. If the bulldozers came, Eiler said they were bound to disturb the final resting places of her family and Hia-Ced O’odham ancestors. Eiler said, “People used to live here.”

Discovery and consultation rules

The National Park Service said in a statement that the discovery was made on Sept. 8. “Following established protocols, the University of Arizona conducted an assessment and confirmed that the remains are human and align with tribal cremation practices,” the agency said. James T. Watson, curator of bioarcheology in the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona, analyzed the remains in the field. Although he was not authorized to discuss the details of his findings without park service approval, Watson said in an email that he confirmed the remains were human. He wrote that the evidence suggested they were cremated in a manner consistent with precolonial practices in the region dating back 1,500 years.

For an inadvertent discovery of Native American remains on federal land, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act governs the steps agencies must take, including halting any activity that contributed to the discovery until tribal communities are consulted. For remains inadvertently uncovered on park service lands, Watson said NAGPRA requires the remains to be immediately secured and the superintendent of the jurisdiction to notify “all relevant lineal descendants” with “potential cultural affiliation or ancestral ties to the land.” He wrote that “Work in the immediate discovery area must remain suspended for at least 30 calendar days,” while the park service consults with tribal representatives “to determine the disposition and physical treatment of the remains.”

The National Park Service said it was “committed to respecting tribal rights and traditions” and was “working diligently to identify the culturally affiliated tribe and ensure the respectful return of the remains, so the tribe may observe their religious and cultural practices.” Eiler was alerted to the discovery by a cultural affairs specialist with the Tohono O’odham Nation, a larger tribe whose reservation is east of Organ Pipe, and later by the Organ Pipe superintendent’s office. Her family discussed what to do and decided to hold off on reburying the newly unearthed remains until construction in the area stops, fearing the work will disturb more sites. Eiler said, “Who knows what more will come up,” adding, “They’re going to find remains wherever they dig.”

Customs and Border Protection contractors have bulldozed a wide swath of vegetation parallel to the international divide. The agency has fashioned staging areas for heavy equipment by knocking down, uprooting and attempting to transplant select specimens of the monument’s native plants. Eiler was told the remains were found by a park service archaeologist near the base of a saguaro cactus that was still standing. In a statement, CBP said it was advised of the discovery six days after it was made, that its cultural resource specialists examined the area and found no other remains, and that “no additional construction has occurred at this location to date.”

Tribal reactions

Verlon M. Jose, the Tohono O’odham Nation’s chairman, expressed gratitude that the park service had notified his office of the discovery but mourned the fact that it was necessary. “When you have mass destruction and disturbance of land taking place where there are clearly sacred sites, cemeteries and other areas of cultural importance, these types of discoveries are bound to happen,” Jose said in a statement. “Every time this happens it is a wound to the heart of all members of the Tohono O’odham Nation — these are our ancestors, our family members — whose remains are being desecrated.”

U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva, who appeared with Eiler and Jose at the August news conference, said the government had failed to heed their warnings. “Tribal leaders and elders have warned DHS about the devastating consequences of bulldozing through their ancestral lands, beginning with the destruction of the Las Playas Intaglio,” she said in a statement. “For months, those warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Now, we are seeing exactly what they feared: sacred sites destroyed and ancestral burial grounds desecrated.”

David Martínez, a University of Arizona professor of American Indian and transborder studies who is a member of the Hia-Ced O’odham and Akimel O’odham tribes and the Gila River Indian Community, said such incidents have happened repeatedly across the O’odham homeland. “This sort of incident has happened numerous times across our homeland, and it’s always alarming to hear about a case from an O’odham point of view,” he said. “Those remains shouldn’t have been disturbed in the first place,” he said. “While there are protocols existing today to properly care for these remains, ultimately, whatever either the government or the corporate world is pursuing to build, we know that at some juncture that construction will continue, and it always leaves us feeling, I think, a little hollow.”

Two wall contracts and tribal opposition

The discovery comes amid tensions between the Department of Homeland Security and tribal communities in the Sonoran Desert. In April, border wall contractors bulldozed through the Las Playas Intaglio, a large, well-marked earthen etching believed to be at least 6,500 years old. CBP said the incident was accidental. Soon after, DHS awarded a $1.3 billion contract for a 62-mile border wall across the entirety of the Tohono O’odham Nation. The tribe is fighting that project in federal court and has erected “no trespassing” signs to keep contractors off its land.

ProPublica recently reported that DHS responded to tribal opposition by deploying masked federal agents as escorts for work crews and conducting aerial surveillance of tribal members. The head of CBP justified the need for a wall by describing the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation as “one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border.” Separately, DHS hired Arizona-based Sundt Construction this year to build the second wall in Organ Pipe under a $443 million contract finalized in May. Sundt directed questions concerning the discovery of human remains on its job site to CBP. The $443 million project is separate from the $1.3 billion wall across the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Waivers and archaeological risk

In a region as rich with archaeological sites as the American Southwest, the inadvertent disturbance of Native American remains occurs with some regularity, ProPublica reported. What sets the Organ Pipe discovery apart are DHS’s extraordinary powers to expedite wall construction in the borderlands through legal waivers. Following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Congress passed the Real ID Act, including a provision empowering the DHS secretary to waive any law that might slow border wall construction. In the two decades since, DHS invoked the power 66 times, with 60 instances under President Donald Trump’s two administrations. The department typically waives dozens of laws at once.

In 2019, when DHS set its sights on Organ Pipe, then-Acting Secretary Kevin K. McAleenan issued a waiver setting aside more than 40 of the nation’s most stringent environmental and cultural-resource protection laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and others. Also on that list was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. ProPublica described it as “the landmark 1990 law that acknowledged the nation’s long history of desecrating Native American burials and required that ancestral remains and cultural objects be returned to tribes.”

An internal 2019 National Park Service report obtained by The Washington Post identified nearly two dozen archaeological sites in Organ Pipe as at risk of damage or total destruction by government contractors. Of particular significance was Quitobaquito Springs, less than 200 feet from the international border. The springs provide one of the only reliable sources of groundwater and shade for miles around and were a longtime gathering place, grazing site and home for O’odham families. The survey found that archaeological evidence of human presence extends back thousands of years, at least to Archaic times, and described the springs as the “only known Hia C-ed O’odham village site in the United States.”

A 2024 National Park Service report said a cemetery at Quitobaquito holds the remains of at least two families, including Eiler’s, and 34 graves. ProPublica’s NAGPRA database said that throughout the region, remains of 5,500 ancestors that were displaced have been made available for return to the Tohono O’odham Nation. According to Eiler, the remains recovered in September were not found at the springs, though government work crews were working in close proximity to the site. Quitobaquito now lies in the shadow of the border wall erected during Trump’s first term. Its construction required detonating explosives in the national monument, blasting apart an area called Monument Hill and outraging tribal leaders.

DHS’s waiver powers have been central to a federal court dispute over the department’s efforts to build a border wall through Big Bend National Park in West Texas, with a federal judge overseeing the case recently ordering a temporary halt. Borderlands advocates in Arizona are hoping for similar interventions. In Congress, Grijalva is preparing legislation to void existing waivers that have allowed DHS to disregard laws designed to protect tribal sovereignty, sacred sites and environmentally sensitive lands.

According to CBP, the 2019 Organ Pipe waiver remains in effect, years after completion of the project that prompted it. A second waiver, exempting DHS from many of the same laws and applying to the national monument as well as a wildlife refuge to the west, was issued by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last year. Dinah Bear, a Tucson-based lawyer who served for 25 years as a senior attorney in the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality under Democratic and Republican administrations, said, “Unfortunately, there is no end date to the effectiveness of the waivers.” She also said, “there’s nothing in the statutory language that ties the waivers to a particular project.”

Construction on the border continues. For Eiler, the disturbance of tribal graves resulting from wall construction reflects a wider pattern of destruction across the border. “It’s sad because it’s not only happening down there,” she said. “It’s happening all over the United States, and nobody’s saying much about it.”