Construction workers building the Trump administration's border wall between the US and Mexico accidentally damaged a two-hundred-foot-long Indigenous land art figure known as the Las Playas Intaglio, a colossal fish etched into the earth near Ajo, Arizona, that is thought to be over a thousand years old. Satellite imagery showed bulldozer tracks cutting a sixty-to-seventy-foot-wide path across the intaglio, and a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson confirmed the disturbance, stating the remaining portion had been secured and would be protected in place.
The incident highlights the tension between rapid border-wall construction—pushed at a rate of three miles a day under a $46.5 billion expansion funded by Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill and enabled by a 2005 law waiving environmental rules—and the protection of culturally significant Indigenous sites. Local Native communities, including the Hia-ced O'odham people, have raised concerns about the destruction of ancestral landmarks, with elder Lorraine Marquez Eiler emphasizing the profound cultural loss, comparing it to the destruction of revered sites in Washington, D.C.