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Border Security and Indigenous Heritage: What Is at Risk?

  • Writer: MIP Author
    MIP Author
  • 2 days ago
  • 7 min read
Border Fence Line slices across public lands in Arizona and Sonora. Photo by Donna Burton. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Border Fence Line slices across public lands in Arizona and Sonora. Photo by Donna Burton. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Across the United States and Mexico border, two public responsibilities are colliding. The federal government is expanding barriers, patrol roads, cameras, sensors, and other infrastructure intended to deter unauthorized crossings, interrupt smuggling, and help Border Patrol agents respond in remote terrain. At the same time, construction is crossing Indigenous homelands containing sacred mountains, ancient geoglyphs, ceremonial places, and some of the oldest surviving rock art in North America.


The issue is not whether border security matters. The Tohono O’odham Nation, for example, has worked with federal agencies on law enforcement and public safety along the border. The harder question is whether the United States can secure that border without permanently damaging the Indigenous history and sacred landscapes it is also responsible for protecting.


As the United States expands border infrastructure, Indigenous Nations and preservation advocates are asking whether security can be achieved without destroying sacred places and some of North America’s oldest cultural sites


Las Playas Intaglio and the O’odham landscape


On April 23, 2026, construction equipment cut through part of the Las Playas Intaglio in Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The approximately 1,000 year old figure was created by ancestral O’odham people and stretches about 270 feet across the desert floor in the form of a fish.


The damage was especially troubling because the site was already known. The Tohono O’odham Nation said it had identified the intaglio as a cultural place that contractors should avoid. Customs and Border Protection described the damage as inadvertent and said it would protect the surviving portion, but no stabilization plan can replace what heavy equipment removed.


The intaglio is part of a much larger O’odham cultural landscape extending across Arizona and Sonora. The present international boundary divided communities, ceremonial routes, gathering places, and family relationships that existed long before the United States and Mexico established the border.


The Tohono O’odham Nation is not arguing for an unsecured border. Its position challenges the assumption that every security problem requires a permanent physical wall. The Nation has supported cooperation with federal law enforcement while opposing construction that divides its lands and threatens archaeological, environmental, and religious places.


Las Playas demonstrates the difference between documenting a cultural place and actually protecting it. A site can be surveyed, mapped, and designated for avoidance, yet still be destroyed within hours when communication, oversight, and contractor accountability fail.




Kuuchamaa and the Kumeyaay and Kumiai peoples


Farther west, Kuuchamaa rises near Tecate along the California and Baja California border. Also called Kuchamaa, Tecate Peak, or Cerro Cuchumá, the mountain is sacred to Kumeyaay communities in the United States and Kumiai communities in Mexico.


Kuuchamaa is associated with prayer, spiritual instruction, ceremonial knowledge, healing, and the preparation of medicine people. It was entered in the National Register of Historic Places in 1992 because of its continuing importance to Kumeyaay religion and culture. The mountain does not merely contain a sacred site. The mountain itself is sacred.


In spring 2026, federal contractors used explosives and heavy equipment on portions of Kuuchamaa during border construction. Indigenous leaders reported that blasting damaged culturally significant formations and altered a ceremonial landscape extending across the international boundary.


This case exposes a major difference between conventional historic preservation and Indigenous understandings of place. A federal survey may search for individual artifacts, buildings, burials, or archaeological deposits. Kumeyaay and Kumiai relationships with Kuuchamaa also encompass the mountain’s form, views, access routes, natural features, and connection to surrounding lands.


Protecting one identified object does not necessarily protect the sacred landscape as a whole.




The Lower Pecos Canyonlands


In southwest Texas, border infrastructure plans have raised concerns about the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, one of North America’s most important concentrations of ancient Indigenous rock art.


More than 2,000 archaeological sites have been recorded across the Lower Pecos region, spanning a period from recent history to more than 10,000 years ago. Hundreds of rock shelters contain pictographs, including monumental paintings of humanlike figures, animals, plants, and symbolic forms.


The Lower Pecos Canyonlands Archaeological District became a National Historic Landmark in January 2021. Its 35 contributing sites preserve what the National Park Service describes as an exceptionally continuous record of human occupation extending across at least 11,000 years.


The earliest paintings cannot responsibly be assigned to one contemporary federally recognized Tribe. They were created by Indigenous communities across thousands of years, while colonization, displacement, disease, and forced migration disrupted many of the historical connections that might otherwise identify their descendants today.

That uncertainty does not make the paintings culturally anonymous or less Indigenous.


Construction near the canyonlands could include vehicle barriers, patrol roads, surveillance systems, clearing, excavation, and work through limestone terrain. Even where a tall steel wall is not planned, vibration, dust, altered drainage, road building, and heavy equipment can threaten fragile rock paintings and buried archaeological deposits. Recent federal planning has shifted some parts of West Texas toward surveillance technology rather than continuous pedestrian walls, but other cultural locations remain close to proposed infrastructure.


The danger does not require a barrier to pass directly through a painted panel. Construction nearby can still produce irreversible damage.




Why the federal government says construction is necessary


The Department of Homeland Security argues that barriers, roads, surveillance technology, and personnel work together as an integrated border security system. Physical barriers are intended to delay or redirect crossings. Cameras and sensors allow agents to detect activity, while patrol roads can shorten response times in remote terrain.


From the government’s perspective, isolated deserts, mountains, and canyons create serious enforcement challenges. Agents may face poor visibility, few access routes, difficult terrain, and long distances between detecting activity and reaching the location. Federal officials argue that additional infrastructure is necessary to reduce unlawful entry, disrupt smuggling, and establish greater operational control of the border.


Those concerns should be represented accurately. Border security is a legitimate federal responsibility, and unauthorized crossings can affect Tribal communities, private landowners, public lands, law enforcement agencies, and humanitarian services.

But acknowledging the security argument does not establish that every proposed wall, road, or route is necessary. The more precise question is whether construction at a particular cultural place represents the least destructive way to achieve the stated security objective.



When federal protections are waived


Section 102 of federal immigration law gives the Secretary of Homeland Security broad authority to waive legal requirements that could delay border barrier construction. Federal notices have used that authority to accelerate the construction of barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors.


These waivers can remove requirements normally imposed through historic preservation, environmental, archaeological, and Tribal consultation laws. A waiver does not prevent the government from studying cultural resources or consulting Tribal Nations, but it can make those protections discretionary rather than legally enforceable.

The Government Accountability Office found that previous border construction damaged cultural and natural resources, including a Tribal burial place. Federal, Tribal, and other officials also reported that they sometimes received insufficient information from Homeland Security to provide meaningful input before construction.


That distinction matters. Consultation after a sacred or archaeological place has been damaged is no longer preventive consultation. It becomes a discussion about managing a loss that should not have occurred.



Border security and preservation are not mutually exclusive


Border security does not have to require the destruction of Indigenous heritage.

In culturally sensitive areas, federal agencies can consider rerouting construction, using vehicle barriers rather than continuous walls, increasing cameras and sensors, expanding mobile enforcement, and establishing protected avoidance areas. Tribal cultural monitors should also have the authority to stop work when contractors enter a protected area or discover an unexpected cultural resource.


The government should be able to explain why a particular location and construction method were selected, what alternatives were examined, and why a less destructive approach could not meet the same security need.


Las Playas, Kuuchamaa, and the Lower Pecos are very different places. One is an O’odham geoglyph formed in the desert. One is a living sacred mountain connected to Kumeyaay and Kumiai communities. One is an ancient archive of Indigenous art and knowledge created across thousands of years.


Together, they reveal the same problem: a cultural place can be documented, recognized, and declared historically significant while remaining vulnerable to destruction.


The United States has a responsibility to manage its international border. It also has responsibilities toward Tribal Nations, sacred places, and the shared historical record.

The measure of a secure nation is not only whether it controls its boundary. It is whether it can do so without erasing the peoples and histories that existed long before that boundary was drawn.



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