Bulldozer Plows Across Thousand-Year-Old Indigenous Land Art During Border Wall Construction
9May 7, 2026
Construction workers racing to build the Trump administration’s border wall between the US and Mexico accidentally damaged a two-hundred-foot-long work of Indigenous Land art thought to be over a thousand years old, according to theWashington Post.Satellite imagery near Ajo, Arizona, showed what appeared to be bulldozer tracks cutting a path approximately sixty to seventy feet wide across a colossal fish etched into the earth. The work is an example of intaglio rarely seen in the southwestern Arizona desert.
A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson confirmed to thePostthat a “border wall contractor inadvertently disturbed a cultural site known as Las Playas Intaglio.” He said that the remaining portion of the work had been “secured” and would be “protected in place.”
The harm comes as crews are under pressure to quickly construct hundreds of miles of barriers, working at a rate of three miles a day to complete a $46.5 billion expansion of the wall. Texas is receiving its first barriers, while second walls are being built in large swaths of California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The project is funded through Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and is enabled by a 2005 law waiving numerous environmental rules for border security projects.
The border-wall expansion has raised concerns among local Native communities. Among the culturally significant sites projected to be affected by it are Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument’s Quitobaquito Springs, where endangered turtle and fish species live. A Native American gravesite also lies in the project’s path.
Lorraine Marquez Eiler, an elder of the Hia-ced O’odham Indigenous people, told the Post that the damaged site was particularly meaningful to Native Americans.
“If someone came to Washington and started destroying all the different sites that people in the United States revere,” said Marquez Eiler, “it’s the same thing for us.”