Physical barriers (including 30 foot high steel walls and floating buoy barriers in the Rio Grande) and the infrastructure for the so-called “smart wall” expands across the Mexico-U.S. border with enormous consequences for land, wildlife, water, and people.
During the years of 2018-2020 much of the California, Arizona, and New Mexico border with Mexico was blocked off by a 30 foot high border wall. Today, the remaining gaps in that wall are being filled in across critical wildlife corridors and on O’odham, Kumeyaay and other Indigenous lands. New walls are going up along the Texas-Mexico border. Adding insult to injury, a second border wall (set back 120 feet from the first) is under construction across federally protected wildlife refuges, national monuments, national forests, and wilderness areas. Sacred sites such as Quitobaquito Springs in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on Hia C-ed O’odham land are once again under threat.
Take action:
5calls.org/state/arizona/arizona-border-wall-public-lands/
Read more:
Adam Federman (2026), “Trump Bulldozed a 1,000 year old Archaeological Site to Make Room for a Second Border Wall,” in The Intercept, 30 April. Access theintercept.com/2026/04/30/arizona-archeological-site-bulldozed-border-wall.
William DeBuys (2026), “The Border Wall Thrives, The Borderlands Don’t,” in LA Progressive, 30 April. Access laprogressive.com/immigration-reform/border-wall-thrives.
To understand how O’odham land defenders successfully halted border wall construction at Quitobaquito in 2020, see Rudy (2022), “Indigenous Hia Ced O’odham and Tohono O’odham Sacred Land & Water Protector…” in Indigenous Action, 22 January. Access indigenousaction.org/indigenous-hia-ced-oodham-and-tohono-oodham-sacred-land-water-protector-amber-ortega-not-guilty-for-resistance-to-us-mexico-border-wall-construction-at-sacred-s/.
Scott Warren Geography 