Trump Bulldozed a 1,000-Year-Old Archeological Site to Make Room for a Second Border Wall

A rare archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert was bulldozed by a Department of Homeland Security contractor involved in building the latest sections of Donald Trump’s border wall, according to multiple sources briefed on the incident. The area, in a remote corner of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, is a roughly 280-by-50-foot etching in the desert sand known as an intaglio. Last Thursday, without any notice, a contractor working for DHS cut a roughly 60-foot swath across the middle of the intaglio, doing irreparable damage to the 1,000-year-old artifact. “I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines — something that culturally we should have been relishing and promoting.” Cabeza Prieta, one of the largest wilderness areas outside of Alaska, also encompasses lands sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation, which borders the refuge to the east. The O’odham have fought to prevent border wall construction across their reservation and during Trump’s first term largely prevailed; they also managed to protect the intaglio and a nearby burial site that they consider to be part of their ancestral lands. “I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines — something that culturally we should have been relishing and promoting. Not destroying,” Rick Martynec,