BORDER
April 2025
Divided Sacred Lands:
The Tohono O'odham And The Border Patrol
San Miguel Gate, Between Arizona & Sonora​
Mike Wilson, Tohono O'odham activist, writer and documentary producer who's long fought for migrant rights by maintaining several water stations in the arid basins of Baboquivari Valley pets one of his doggos, while Natasha observes his picture in Platon's The Defenders book.
One day under the scorching sun of Southern Arizona’s desert, a man with a gray ponytail was observing the four 50-gallon water tanks - christened after the four apostles - that he had placed out in the Baboquivari Peak Wilderness a few days earlier. As he expected, they were empty.
But they had not been drunk. Nearby, there was a sign that said “Tribal member, you cannot trespass!.” The tanks had been dumped out on purpose.
In a withered environment where temperatures constantly reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, water’s presence can prolong life, but water’s absence can bring it to death. Dehydration, heat strokes, and hypothermia have, in fact, already killed thousands in the U.S.-Mexico desert-borderlands.
According to the Humane Borders’ Death Map, created in partnership with the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office, 4,329 are the migrants who have died in the Sonoran Desert alone between 2000 and 2025.
More than 10,000 those who died between 1998 and 2025 along the 1,300-mile stretch of wall-less wilderness that separates the United States and Mexico.
An average of one dead human per day.
These numbers do not count those who went missing, but were never found.
“The red dots on the Humane Borders’ Death Map represent a location where human remains were found, migrants, coming from South, crossing into the United States, attempting to reach Phoenix, and scatter throughout the country,” says Tohono O’odham human rights’ activist Michael Stevens Wilson, author of the book What Side Are You On? A Tohono O’odham Life Across Borders and main lead in several award-winning documentaries.
Looking closely at the Death Map, there are blue flags that represent water stations east and west of the Tohono O’odham Nation. But no blue flags within its boundaries. And most of the certified migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert are concentrated within those 2.9 million acres of the Tohono O’odham Nation, where water stations are completely missing.
Twenty-four years ago now, Wilson realized that the absence of water stations in the wildest stretches of his reservation had turned the Baboquivari Valley - a land corridor of dry wilderness on the west side of the Baboquivari mountain range - into a graveyard under the open sky.
“At that time, the national press was already calling it the deadliest migrant trail in the United States,” Wilson says.
It hasn't changed much since then.
Two years ago, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) declared the U.S-Mexico border “the world's deadliest migration land route.”
And the 18-mile-wide strip of succulents’ kingdom stretching from Sonora, Mexico, north towards Sells, Arizona, bound to the east by the rugged Baboquivari peaks and to the west by vast desert, is among the hottest, driest, spiniest, and craggiest strips on the entire border.
It's known among agents as “the Little Tucson corridor,” perpendicular to the approximately 75 miles of relatively undomesticated border between the Tohono O'odham Nation and Mexico.
For its wild characteristics, it attracts irregular border-crossers who can't fit the requirements for legal entry into the United States.
But there's no water anywhere, unless intentionally placed.
And that's exactly what Michael Wilson did for the twelve years following 2002. He would sustain, almost alone, the four water stations that he had named Saint Matthew, Saint Mark, Saint Luke and Saint John, after the Gospels, and regularly refill at least 60 5-gallon water jugs in the thorniest areas of the Baboquivari Valley with the intention to save migrant lives.
“Already twenty-five years ago, I had estimated that at least fifty percent of all the migrant deaths in the Tucson sector of the Border Patrol were on the Tohono O’odham Nation,” he says. “Then why isn’t the Nation putting out water? And why isn’t the Nation allowing humanitarian aid?,” were his questions, burning for answers.
He knew that the Tohono O'odham Nation was periodically refilling 2000-gallon water tankers for animal agriculture. And yet, not a drop of that water has ever been provided in locations where migrants were known to be marching through.
“What’s wrong with this picture?,” Wilson says. “Mike Wilson is putting out water for humans who are dying, the Tohono O'odham Nation is putting out water for horses and cows.”
In Wilson's idea, the Nation could allow volunteers to maintain small water stations right next to the ranchers’ water basins filled up for their cattle.
But that's what it remained: an illusionary idea of justice.
For the past 25 years, the Tohono O'odham Nation has never allowed human rights activists and volunteers to maintain water supplies that could relieve migrants’ thirst, and thereby save them from dehydration, on its vast stretches of desert.
It even tried to prohibit its own tribal members from providing this life-sustaining substance out onto the wilderness of their own lands.
Signs that said, “Tribal member, you can't trespass!,” in Wilson's own district, and his four water stations often slashed or dumped were proof that the Nation was determined to punish human rights’ volunteers.
But despite the fierce resistance that he was met with from his own district’s leadership - the Baboquivari District Council - Wilson still continued to nurture his water stations and jugs for many years. Until he couldn't anymore.
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He was to be put on the FBI list on charges of terrorism that would have damaged his life, he says.
Humane Borders' Death Map shows a very large concentration of migrant deaths on the Tohono O'odham Nation, yet no water stations within its boundaries.
When asked about the reason behind his tribe's bitter opposition towards the placement of water provisions on their wildlands, Wilson verbalized some painful words.
“Because the Border Patrol doesn't want any kind of humanitarian assistance on the reservation,” he utters.
“The Government thinks that providing water to thirsty migrants encourages them to keep coming,” Tohono O'odham marine veteran, activist, runner, teacher, safety trainer and entrepreneur Wynona P. Larson Yazzie says, while driving back to her village [Choulic]. “Although we know that water is not what motivates them to come.”
For instance, a 2018 Washington Post article reported that U.S. Border Patrol agents had been frequently filmed dumping water jugs left in aid for migrants by non profit humanitarian groups. In the same article, there was a reference to the arrest of the nonprofit No Más Muertes’ leader on charges of “alien smuggling,” after providing water, food, beds and clean clothes to two undocumented migrants in the surroundings of Ajo, AZ.
But these acts of selflessness have also always been an expression of the O’odham people's cultural upbringing.
“What we were always told and taught growing up is that when people come, you help them with water and food and you wish them well,” Larson Yazzie says.
“When I was a kid on the rez., sometimes migrants would knock on our door, for water, food, and my mother would help them because they were poor,” Tohono O'odham basket-weaver and potter, Reuben Naranjo, says. “They were just looking for a better life, no different than the first immigrants who came to the United States.”
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And when O'odham children lived across the fence in Mexico, they used to jump it to take the bus that would carry them to school, Yazzie says. “It was very normal back then, but not anymore.”
But things changed drastically over the years.
“These laws here don't really allow us to do good for migrants anymore,” Naranjo says. “There was a gentleman who was putting water out on the reservation for migrants, and they almost banned him from the tribe.” He was referring to Mike Wilson.
Tightly trapped in the net of foreigners’ politics, criminalizing even the most basic of first-aid actions [water and food] to undocumented migrants, the Tohono O'odham people's kindness towards passers by progressively died down.
Like a virus, indifference took over the landscape, transforming long-enduring hospitality into fear and suspicion.
Water stations weren't replenished, all humanitarian groups, including Humane Borders, gave up on the Tohono O'odham Nation [as they still do] and very few tribal members continued to care about the treatment of the travelers coming from the South, including the O’odham from Sonora.
“When the treaty of Guadalupe was signed, we as indigenous people were completely overlooked,” Tohono O'odham former tribal council member and activist for his peoples' rights, David García says. “Our O'odham community, divided forever” he says. “We became citizens of two different countries, each with their own laws, unable to operate under the same rights, on our traditional lands.”
García highlights the treaty as the first substantial division that changed for eternity the dynamics of their community.
And their traditional lands in Mexico, which were at least half of the O'odham lands when Europeans arrived in the area, were also lost forever.
The present Chairman of the Tohono O'odham Nation, Verlon José, like many others, also seems to resent the Treaty. “We didn't cross the border,” he says. “The border crossed us.”
But it wasn't really until the recent thirty years that the already established separation between the United States and Mexico became even more deep, more pronounced, and also more felt.
In 1994, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) began sharpening its control along the entirety of the country’s Southern Border with a strategy called “Prevention through Deterrence,” aimed at stopping unauthorized border crossings. The strategy not only concentrates more BP agents along the 1,300 mile-long U.S.-Mexico border than any other border, coastline or airport in the country, but it also included the installation of walls, barriers, barbed wires, and highly-advanced surveillance technology.
What the strategy also did was push migrants who can't produce the required documentation to enter the United States legally away from ports of entry and into the backcountry.
The Tohono O'odham Nation, with 2.9 million acres of desert, and only approximately 10,000 residents, became at some point a preferred transit route for irregular border crossers. Many made it through, but many disappeared in the thorny underbrush of the reservation instead.
Border Patrol’s PTD strategy, still in action all along the Southwest Border today, couldn't ignore the 76 miles of artificially conceived frontier that the Tohono O'odham Nation shares with its neighbor.
Eventually, BP worked in full its permission into the traditional homelands of one of the most ancient civilizations in North America.
This mural, painted on a wall in Ajo, Arizona, gives voice to the deep division that the international boundary between the United States and Mexico brought to the Tohono O'odham Nation. Before foreign empires split their lands, the Tohono O'odham moved freely across their traditional homelands, and knew nothing of private property ownership. Photo by Natasha Cortinovis
A 2007 “innocent” agreement between the United States’ border enforcement agency and the Tohono O'odham Nation paved the way for a future of further and long-lasting native lands’ military occupation.
“Back in time, many O'odham people were like my father, who could barely read,” Mike Wilson says. “And the Border Patrol army occupied us.”
“Border Patrol is an occupying army,” he says vehemently, while preparing to press onto the brakes of his vehicle to cross the Eastern gate to his reservation: Three Points Border Patrol checkpoint.
“And the present leadership of the Tohono O'odham Nation allowed all this that you see to happen,” he says with indignation, pointing at the imposing arc-shaped structure of the checkpoint. He repeats similar words while rushing past BP’s infrastructure stationed along the road that from Topawa leads to the San Miguel Gate, the Nation’s “port of entry” to Sonora.
Wilson deems his tribal Nation guilty of never trying to deny a BP’s request throughout the years. And for never challenging it to address migrant deaths on their reservation, preventable by placing some water stations along the most trafficked migratory routes.
“At the time when I sat on the tribal council, the Nation never really understood the kind of impact that signing an agreement with federal law enforcement would have on the Nation as a whole… the control,” García says. “I saw how it would change the whole area, in terms of the land, and both sides of the border.”
“And also how the Nation would hardly longer have a seat at the table in the discussions at the federal level, if it ever had one,” he also says, looking concerned, as if he had suddenly reawakened the ancient troubling ghosts of his mind.
His words mean that granting permission to a foreign power to enforce their laws on their lands’ border would erase the way back forever.
Over time, BP’s day and night shifts on what's left of the traditional homelands of the Tohono O'odham in the United States altered not only their welcoming spirit towards newcomers, but also their secular kinship with the Sonoran O'odham.
Suddenly, those who arrived at the international barrier from the south became targets of perquisition by men in green uniforms and Glock 47, Glock 19 and Colt M4A1 firearms.
“I think that the border between the United States and Mexico represents the shittiest possible border,” Pascua Yaqui Humane Borders’ volunteer Guillermo Jones says. “It's like the border with Gaza or North Korea, a border that says, ‘we’re good and you're evil’.”
The sentiment described by Jones did nothing but worsen with time, crossing the threshold of some people's hearts.
“Many O'odham here don't care at all for those in Sonora,” Mike Wilson says.
“We have become just as racist and prejudiced now, for the way we talk even about our own O’odham people that live in Mexico,” David García says. “Some of us say that they're not O'odham because they speak Spanish and not O’odham and they don't belong to a district, as we do here, but that's because in Mexico there's no such thing as a district,” he continues. “Yet, we are related, and so many of us here also don't speak O’odham, but English.”
Mike Wilson and David García, along with others like José García Lewis and his wife, María Angelita, owners of Tucson's La Indita, fought for the equal treatment of the Sonoran O'odham.
Many Sonoran O'odham obtained a Tribal ID; some, with a ‘no district’ designation, others, mostly from Sonoyta [Sonora], enrolled in the San Lucy district, Reuben Naranjo explains.
However, since 1924’s Labor Appropriation Act, the Border Patrol has been fully authorized to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border in the so-called ‘border zone’; an authorization to take travelers’ immigration decisions that has thoroughly extended to the O'odham borderlands since BP’s ‘watch’ on their territories began.
“Border Patrol decides on everything here,” Wilson's wife, Susan Ruff, says. “They have the power.”
It's the federal agency, in fact, that decides whether to grant or deny entry into the Tohono O'odham Nation of Arizona to the Sonoran O'odham, even to those with ID.
“Border Patrol has the authority to deny entry to a Sonoran tribal member,” Wilson says. “It happens often.”
He explains that the hospital in the Tohono O'odham Nation's main town, Sells, doesn't provide advanced medical care, and therefore when tribal members need higher level medical assistance, such as a surgery, they go to Tucson's Banner Hospital, which lies beyond the Reservation's boundary -but still on traditional lands.
“In the worst case scenario, the agent at the Gate will deny them entry; or, he'll say, ‘I let you cross, but you can't leave the Reservation,” explains Wilson, troubled.
He explains that some Sonoran O'odham have been denied access to healthcare they needed because of this agency’s full decision-making power.
“They don't have the same rights, nor services, unfortunately,” says García.
“But this is O'odham land, not Border Patrol's land,” Wilson continued, still troubled. In order to denounce the injustices that he feels the ‘Desert People’ experience, Wilson is now co-producing a documentary called ‘Whose Lands? O'odham Lands.’
'Revitalize O'odham Jewed [O'odham lands], Not Militarize!' mural, also in Ajo, Arizona, gives voice to the current informal militarization of Tohono O'odham lands, occupied by federal agency the Border Patrol. Photo by Natasha Cortinovis
Naranjo explains that some Sonoran tribal members were coming across and ‘disappearing,’ and that's why now the BP doesn't even accept a Tribal ID anymore to let them in, but wants a letter or a statement that they have an ‘official’ reason to come onto the Reservation.
“Now they also do background checks all the time,” Larson Yazzie says.
The federal government has recently allowed people to drive through the San Miguel Gate [the Nation's port-of-entry] again, she explains, but the crossing is only for recognized tribal members.
“My husband who's Navajo doesn't have our tribal ID, so I can't drive with him through this Gate, which is so close to our house in Choulik, although he's with me” she says. “So what should I do, sneak him through? It's crazy. Do you see what trouble we go through?”
For the O'odham who live on the Reservation, the San Miguel Gate is the fastest way to Mexico. But for years, it was a walking-only port of entry. An iron gate embedded into a never-ending, rigid vehicle barrier.
The reason why it was a walking-only port of entry is the fear of drug and human smuggling, Yazzie also explains.
“So they put cement and blocked it off, and by doing so, they blocked the area for us too,” she says. “That was our only way of going back and forth between where we live and Sonora.”
The O’odham who live on the Nation are forced to drive a long way around the eastern and western edges of their Rez. to go to Sonora when they can't drive through the San Miguel Gate.
“These BP decisions affect us a lot,” Yazzie says.
But that's true with pretty much everything, she says.
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The Tohono O'odham, like other tribes, have a very long history of making pots that served them to cook beans and other plants gathered or harvested. Their pots were made with clay, sand and horse manure.
But now that cookware is readily available in modern stores, many O'odham abandoned the craft of giving life to their own pieces.
For this reason, there's very few potters who still can make utilitarian pots in the traditional way, maybe not more than 25 among all the Tohono O'odham people today.
Sonoran clay, found in the desert hills of Magdalena de Kino -a place the O'odham call Mali:na- is highly valued among their community.
“In the area of Mali:na there's this beautiful red clay,” says Harrison Preston, one of the last few Tohono O'odham utilitarian potters. “But we have to process it over there, in Mexico, before we bring it across the border, so it's hard to go get it.”
“It depends on Border Patrol if they'll let the clay in, because there's a lot of laws on bringing earth or dirt on this side of the border,” Preston says.
Just like that, inexorably, ancient traditions are vanishing, caught between artificial borders and the indifference of progress.
“The red clay is so precious, but I’m terrified that the BP will confiscate it,” Tohono O'odham potter Kathy Vance says. “I go look for clay in other places, like the washes here, but it's not that beautiful red clay.”
And then there's the fear and discomfort of engaging in negative encounters and interactions with the U.S. border’s law enforcement, the O’odham explain.
“All our lives, literally all our lives,” Yazzie says, “it’s how long we’ve dealt with Border Patrol.”
“And never, never, never, never, had any incidences of positive interaction. Never. It was always, always, always bad. And not just us, other people too, a lot of the elders, a lot of the children.”
Yazzie shares her first bad experience with Border Patrol as a seven year old kid, sitting with her sister in the back of their mother's truck, leaving their home on the Reservation.
“I guess Border Patrol thought we were immigrants, and stopped us, with their weapons drawn,” she recalls. “What I remember is my mom upset, yelling, ‘what are you doing?! These are my kids! Get away, leave us alone!’.”
While she talks, she drives her truck on the road that leads to the international vehicle barrier, almost at it, ten minutes from her home.
“if they don't recognize this truck, then they'll start following, bothering, and harassing,” she says. Her words work like magic.
One, two, three, four BP vehicles approach.
“This is what I'm saying, we have to go through this all the time here,” Yazzie says, upset. “They act like the police, but they're not.”
The agent who stops her says, “I had reasonable suspicion to stop you, I'm doing an immigration inspection.”
“But I'm not an immigrant, sir, I live here,” Yazzie answers. She refused to show her ID.
The agent didn't know she had renewed her vehicle registration a day earlier, which suggests that BP is aware of all the vehicles that circulate in the area, without any exceptions.
“Many of these agents abuse their power,” she says. “We call them the VP -the village patrol,” laughing sarcastically.
The “VP” is a nickname given to this body of agents who, aside from patrolling the international divide, are also overly involved in the patrol of the O’odham villages.
In 2021, the blasting for the U.S.-Mexico border wall construction stopped. Since then, Yazzie has been running every spring with other 7-9 O’odham along the Nation’s 70-mile boundary with Mexico in honor of the burial sites that were destroyed in the blasting.
They run for prayer, to forgive, purify, unify and cure.
But as this group of O’odham runs to pray in what's now BP’s kingdom -but were their traditional lands- they can hardly find peace.
“We told them that we would be out there running and praying,” Yazzie says. “But it still doesn't stop them from sending helicopters, agents to come and look at us, to disturb our prayers, to disturb our view, to disturb our sleep.”
