Border wall contractors are planning to bulldoze thousands of saguaro cactuses along the southern end of the sovereign Tohono O'odham Nation, starting immediately. Cutting down a saguaro would land you or me in jail with a felony — but armed with sweeping legal waivers, DHS plans to obliterate thousands of them with impunity. “Trespassing on our land to remove the sacred saguaros is like having masked men break into your house and take away your children,” Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Verlon Jose said in a statement. “The ha:sañ [saguaro] are our family, as much a part of us as any blood relative. To destroy them by the thousands carves a wound in our hearts that will not heal.” I took this video at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in 2020, where I used to work for the National Park Service before returning to document wall construction tearing through the Sonoran Desert. I filmed hundreds of these ancient desert sentinels plowed over without a thought. The Tohono O'odham Nation is now bracing for a far worse version of what we saw at Organ Pipe, where they were only building one wall. On O'odham land, they're fighting to build two.

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