The Wall the Tohono O’odham Don’t Want

Before Trump won his first election, in 2016, with promises to “build the wall,” Arizona’s border with Mexico already had the most barriers of any U.S. state. But an unfinished stretch lay along the southern boundary of the Tohono O’odham Nation, a reservation the size of Connecticut. Now Trump is trying to fill that line in, by ordering a wall built across a 62-mile-long stretch of reservation land. This would constitute what the chairman of the nation, Verlon Jose, called “the biggest land grab of the modern era.” The federal government, he told me, “hasn’t unilaterally tried to take Indian lands like this in a very long time.”