Donald Trump must have forgotten you can’t build new structure on private property.
Number 45 is adamant about moving forward with his plan to build a wall along the Mexican-American border. His motivation: to keep Mexican immigrants out of the United States. Unfortunately for The Donald, many Americans don’t agree with his decision to move forward with the (unnecessary) construction of a wall. As a result, people recently began throwing their bodies in front of the construction sites in protest. In the group of protesters is a native tribe of people known as the Tohono O’odham Nation who own part of the land that Trump wishes build on. Last Thursday (Feb. 16), the tribe announced that they are 100-percent against Trump’s construction plan and were never consulted about the construction of the wall. When asked about the wall being built, the vice chairman of the tribe stated, “Over my dead body.”
Based in Arizona, the tribe’s reservation spans 75 miles across the U.S.-Mexican border and is home to 28,000 people. According to The Guardian, a member of the tribe named Bradley Moreno says the wall will cut through ancestral land and separate families within the tribe that have been able to travel back and forth along the border freely for years.
Moreno also stated that he and other members of the tribe have been subject to police brutality since the construction of the wall began. Many O’odham people have been detained by law enforcement while migrating through their land, practicing religious and cultural traditions.
“The O’odham people historically inhabited lands that stretched south to Sonora, Mexico, and just north of Phoenix, Arizona, and there are tribe members who still live in Mexico,” reports The Guardian. “The tribe today has the second largest Native American land base in the country, and indigenous people say the US Border Patrol has for decades significantly disrupted tribal communities and their day-to-day life.”
If Trump chooses to proceed with construction, the Tohono O’odham Nation has made it very clear that they will make the process very difficult, vowing to aggressively fight until the construction of the wall ceases.
