How the US-Mexico border brought trouble to the Tohono O’odham Nation

The border has become impossible to ignore amid record numbers of migrants crossing into the US from Mexico and a bitter political storm over what to do with them.

The thermometer hit 111 Fahrenheit as we rolled up to a battered tent deep in the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation in Arizona. Under its shade lay around a dozen dazed looking families, many with small children. A stressed-looking mother of two paced back and forth. They had walked for five hours to get here, and had been waiting all day. But they looked at us – and the tribal dignitaries on whose land they were trespassing – with only mild curiosity. They were asylum seekers, looking for the green uniforms of US Border Patrol so that they could turn themselves in. Chairman Verlon Jose, leader of the Tohono O’odham Nation, considered addressing them, and then turned away. “This is nothing that the nation can solve,” he said. “Whatever I say to them is not even going to be relevant, other than our prayers for their journey.” The Tohono O’odham, or “people of the desert,” have lived in the Sonoran desert for thousands of years, their ancestral homelands stretching from what is now Pima County, Arizona, all the way to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. The US-Mexico border now slices across those lands, a 62-mile line of low metal fencing weaves between ancient saguaro cacti and that marks the southern limit of the Nation’s federal Indian reservation – and the edge of the United States. The Tohono O’odham do not recognize this border; enrolled members speak their own language, live on both sides and travel back and forth. But it has become impossible to ignore amid record numbers of migrants crossing into the US from Mexico and a bitter political storm over what to do with them.