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The Trump administration has started construction of a section of a border wall in Arizona despite objections from a Native American tribe.
The wall is part of a $46 billion effort to shore up the southern border with 30-foot steel bollard walls, vehicle barriers, and technology designed to stop illegal immigration and smuggling.
However, the Tohono O’odham Nation has said the construction will damage land sacred to the tribe, The Associated Press reported.
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U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said the desert spanning the Tohono O’odham Nation, which sits on both sides of the border, is a major corridor for drug smuggling.
“The project will close one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border: remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity,” said CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott.
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The tribe, which has 37,000 members, including many who live in Mexico, sued the federal government in June in an attempt to halt the project.
The lawsuit argued the construction would cause “significant devastation” on the reservation, including the destruction of mountain peaks sacred to the tribe.
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A federal judge rejected the argument, siding with the government and noting that the border wall would be built on a 60-foot-wide buffer zone of federally owned land called the Roosevelt Reservation.
“Defendants have not yet articulated plans to construct outside the Roosevelt Reservation,” U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C., wrote in his opinion.
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The tribe said the construction still constitutes trespassing, even if the project is contained to the Roosevelt Reservation. The tribe set up “No Trespassing” signs this week and said masked CBP agents set up a vehicle blockade to stop tribal police from removing the contractors.
“The contractors, who are on the Nation illegally, were accompanied by agents as they worked on three separate locations near the border with drill trucks to conduct soil sampling and other activities,” tribal officials said in a statement.
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The tribe said it was exploring other legal means to remove the contractors.
Fox News Digital has reached out to CBP and the Tohono O’odham Nation for comment.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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