In March, the Tohono O’odham nation’s legislative council unanimously approved the creation of 10 integrated fixed towers (or IFTs), up to 140 feet tall, with radar and night vision cameras capable of streaming footage to Border Patrol.
Verlon Jose, vice chairman of the Tohono O'odham Nation, stands near a vehicle barrier along the reservation's border with Mexico. would build a wall along his tribe’s 75-mile border with Mexico only “over my dead body.”
But some younger members oppose the towers, fearing that their elders had sacrificed hard-won sovereignty. “We’re going to inherit this problem,” said Amy Juan, 33.which has grown in their lifetimesThe agency has said as much. A spokesman said the Border Patrol has no plans to decrease the number of agents patrolling the reservation after the towers are built.
An ocotillo plant flowers on the desert floor beneath the craggy, 8,000-foot granite Baboquivari peak,"neck between two heads," in the Tohono O’odham Nation. It can take the nation’s 87 tribal police several hours to respond to 911 calls — often related to drug and human smuggling — in remote border villages.
Hundreds of Border Patrol agents and a federally funded team of more than a dozen Native American smuggling trackers called Shadow Wolves patrol the border and reservation. A vehicle barrier cuts across a dry wash along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Tohono O'odham Nation in Arizona. water jugs, the color intended to camouflage them in the brush. Later the same day, agents used a helicopter to track 16 migrants who had fanned out across a steep mountainside.
The land at the border is part of a 60-foot-wide federal easement from the Pacific Ocean to the Rio Grande. Though the easement ensures access, the Border Patrol has negotiated with the Tohono O’odham Nation over road use and fencing. Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Rafael Castillo, a former Tohono O’odham police officer who now serves as a tribal liaison, said the towers will allow the agency to “see what we’ve never seen before” and compared it to “turning on a light in a dark room.”The day the tribe’s leaders voted to approve the towers, many Tohono O’odham were attending an annual tribal run across the border.
Left, a surveyor's marker shows the future location of a Border Patrol surveillance tower in the Tohono O'odham Nation along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona. Right, a Border Patrol helicopter flies over the reservation.
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