objections

PHOENIX — The Trump administration has begun work on a project to build a stretch of border wall in southern Arizona along part of a Native American tribe’s reservation, pushing ahead with one of its signature projects despite protests from the tribe.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the area is a dangerous smuggling route and that building the wall will close a longstanding security gap. But members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose membership spans both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, have accused the administration of trespassing and say the construction will damage land sacred to the tribe.

The wall segment is part of a $46 billion effort by the Trump administration to fill the border with 30-foot steel bollard walls, vehicle barriers, and technology designed to stop undocumented immigration and smuggling.

But as building efforts have ramped up, the administration has run into opposition from landowners, environmental groups, and Native American tribes who say construction is violating property rights and desecrating sacred Indigenous sites.

The Tohono O’odham Nation said in a statement Tuesday that about 20 Customs and Border Protection officers, working with contractors, went onto the tribe’s land early that morning to begin construction.

Drone videos published by nation officials show roughly 14 vehicles and an industrial drill at one of the sites.

A federal judge permitted the government to move forward with construction earlier this month, but the tribe says the contractors are violating tribal codes and trespassing to access the border wall site.

The Tohono O’odham Nation, which has 37,000 members including thousands who live in Mexico, sued the federal government in June in an attempt to block construction of the border wall. The tribe argued that the wall would cause “significant devastation” on the reservation, including the destruction of mountain peaks sacred to the tribe, and would alter boundaries of their nation.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, ruled in favor of the government, noting that the border wall would be built on a 60-foot wide buffer zone of federally owned land called the Roosevelt Reservation.

“Defendants have not yet articulated plans to construct outside the Roosevelt Reservation,” the judge wrote in his opinion.

The Tohono O’odham Nation said that even if construction were contained to the Roosevelt Reservation, driving onto tribal land to access the area still constitutes trespassing.

“The contractors, who are on the Nation illegally, were accompanied by agents as they worked on three separate locations near the border with drill trucks to conduct soil sampling and other activities,” tribal officials said in a statement.

The CBP agents were masked, armed, and set up a vehicle blockade to stop tribal police from removing the contractors, according to Tohono O’odham officials. The nation had set up “No Trespassing” signs before Tuesday.

So far, no physical confrontations between police or members of the Tohono O’odham Nation have been reported.

CBP defended the need for the wall in a statement Tuesday, saying the desert spanning the Tohono O’odham Nation is a corridor for drug smuggling.

“The project will close one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border: remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity,” said CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott.

Tribal officials said they’re exploring further legal actions in an effort to remove contractors.

SLSCO Ltd., the Texas-based construction company building the section in Arizona, has secured over $390 million in funding from the Department of Homeland Security to build the border wall since 2023.

Schuettler writes for the Associated Press.

The United States has sent about 2,300 Mexican nationals to Guatemala, despite objections from the Mexican government, as President Donald Trump steps up deportations.

Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo confirmed on Wednesday that his country has received about 2,284 Mexican nationals deported from the US this year.

“They are arriving on planes carrying Guatemalan returnees,” Arevalo said in a news conference.

“In coordination with the Mexican government, what we have done is bring them through in transit so that we can return them to Mexican territory within 24 hours of their arrival in the country.”

The removals are part of a growing trend of third-country deportations under Trump, who has sent migrants and asylum seekers from the US to countries they may have no connection to.

Largely, the Trump administration has justified such deportations by saying that the immigrants in question are unable to return to their home countries.

But that is not the case with Mexico, which has consistently accepted deportations from the US.

Critics have blasted the third-country removals as a form of punishment, effectively stranding migrants and asylum seekers far from home.

Speaking about the Mexican nationals sent to Guatemala, Arevalo has said that the deportees are quickly repatriated to their country, with the costs covered by either the Mexican or US government.

But Mexican officials voiced concern about the US sending its citizens to third-party countries.

“The Mexican government has expressed its opposition to this practice to US authorities and has reiterated that every Mexican citizen has the right to enter the country,” Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Thursday.

Following a meeting with Guatemalan officials on Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry also said that the two countries are united by shared values including shared security and “human mobility with dignity”.

Guatemala is not the only country to receive Mexican nationals from the US in recent months. Reports have also emerged that some Mexicans have been transported to Honduras as well.

“They didn’t tell us anything, just to get on the flight,” Arturo Trejo, a Mexican man who was deported to Honduras, told the TV channel Telemundo.

Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM) told The Associated Press news agency that the US had justified the practice as a form of deterrence.

“The reason is that the United States wants to prevent them from crossing back into its territory,” the INM said.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), meanwhile, responded to inquiries about the practice by saying that it was “utilising all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised”.

But many human rights experts view the third-country deportations of Mexicans as an intimidation tactic.

“What we are seeing seems part of [a] broader trend towards a very severe US migration policy where they seek to instill terror and fear in migrants at all costs,” Ana Maria Mendez, the Central America director at migrants rights group WOLA, told the news service Reuters.

As neighbours, the US and Mexico have long had a close relationship. The two countries remain top trading partners for one another, with a cross-border exchange of roughly $964.1bn in 2025 alone.

But since Trump returned to the presidency last year, the Mexican government has had to strike a delicate balance.

It has sought to cooperate with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement, while defending the rights of its citizens against alleged abuse.

Critics have accused immigration agents of using excessive violence during raids, and experts have noted a rising number of deaths while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Since Trump returned to office, at least 15 Mexican nationals have died in ICE custody, and another three died during enforcement operations.

In response, the Mexican government has filed complaints with state prosecutors in the US. It has also denounced conditions in ICE detention centres as “incompatible with human rights standards” and urged regular visits from Mexican consular officials.