Like 'building a 30-foot wall through Arlington Cemetery': Tribal leaders in Arizona are worried Trump's border wall will decimate sacred sites and leave smugglers no choice but to cut through native land

Caitlin O'Hara for Business Insider

• While the coronavirus pandemic has shut down a lot of the world, construction on President Trump's long-touted US-Mexico border wall has continued.
• The US Customs and Border Protection is building 43 miles of 30-foot-high wall through the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, in Arizona, on sacred land for the Tohono O'odham people.
• J. Weston Phippen, a writer in New Mexico, visited the wall this spring with Ofelia Rivas, a tribal leader and activist.
• Opponents have long decried the environmental effects and ineffectiveness of a physical barrier, but at some point numbers fail to communicate what — as the O'odham know — always follows a wall.
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In her favorite memory of Quitobaquito Springs, Ofelia Rivas is a teenager. The elders had agreed to teach her the ceremony, passed through generations of Tohono O'odham warriors, even though she was so young, and a woman. Their car left the highway in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument just before the US-Mexico border, onto a dirt road that was once a wagon trail. Conquistadors and Jesuit priests exploring the new world had carved the path, though Rivas knew her own people's history here reached back thousands of years.

From the car's windows, Rivas looked up at saguaro and organ-pipe cactus that were the tallest she'd ever seen. The desert monsoons had washed boulders and sand across the two-track rut, and the overgrown mesquite branches clawed at the doors with a screech. When they reached Quitobaquito, the elders bent to drink from the water. Then they built a small fire to warm their coffee, because the old men loved coffee, and for the rest of the day Rivas wandered the rocky hills alone, stopping to pray over the graves of her ancestors. As the sun set, she returned to the elders by the still burning fire, where she first learned the blessing for this land.

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NOW WATCH: I spent a day with Border Patrol agents at the US-Mexico border

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• Secret Service agents are reportedly being ordered to wear face masks even though Trump doesn't

SEE ALSO: A journey along the entire 1,933-mile US-Mexico border shows the monumental task of securing it

DON'T MISS: THE OTHER BORDER 'CRISIS': While America was fixated on Mexico and the wall, thousands of migrants were fleeing for Canada in a dramatically different scene

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