On April 23, 2026, a bulldozer scraped a fifty-foot-wide path through a 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph etched into the floor of the Sonoran Desert. The Las Playas Intaglio — 200 feet long, carved into the hardpan of what is now the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge — had survived a millennium of sun, wind, and monsoon. It did not survive a government contractor with a grading blade.

The Tohono O’odham Nation had warned them. Pointed out the site. Asked contractors to avoid it. The geoglyph was a spiritual compass, according to David Martinez, professor of American Indian studies at Arizona State University — it pointed toward the ocean, tied to the salt-gathering ceremonies that call the summer monsoon rains. The contractor drove through it anyway. Five days later, on April 28, the Nation was notified of the damage. U.S. Customs and Border Protection called it “inadvertently disturbed.”

“This was a devastating and entirely avoidable loss,” said Tohono O’odham Chairman Verlon Jose.

Archaeologist Rick Martynec was more specific: “I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines.”

The Tohono O’odham Nation’s statement called it “an irreplaceable piece of O’odham heritage” that “leaves a scar on the hearts” of its members. Irreplaceable is the correct word. You cannot rebuild a geoglyph. A geoglyph is the ground. The ground was the art. The art is now a construction road.

Three hundred miles west, on the California-Mexico border, federal contractors are blasting Kuuchamaa Mountain with dynamite.

Kuuchamaa — also called Tecate Peak — rises 3,885 feet where the Kumeyaay Nation has lived since before any border existed. In the Kumeyaay creation story, a shaman transformed into the mountain. For generations, young men spent 40 days at its base in a coming-of-age ceremony. The National Park Service listed Kuuchamaa in the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, noting that “discarding or disturbing the mountain’s natural state would be sacrilegious.”

The explosions send rocks hurtling down Kuuchamaa’s Mexico side. “No one ever consented or supported the use of dynamite on the mountain,” said Emily Burgueno, a Kumeyaay Nation member and chair of the Kumeyaay Diegueño Land Conservancy.

In Kumeyaay, the word for “body” and the word for “land” are the same.

“This is sacred to us like a church for you all,” said Kumeyaay tribal leader Norma Meza Calles. “The mountain is our healer, our psychologist.”

Meanwhile, in Sunland Park, New Mexico, the federal government has sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces to seize 14 acres at the base of Mount Cristo Rey — a pilgrimage site topped with a 29-foot limestone statue of Christ, erected in 1940. Every fall, up to 40,000 people walk to its summit. The government’s assessed value of the land it wants to take: $183,071. The diocese said the wall “could irreparably damage its religious and cultural sanctity, obstruct pilgrimage routes, and transfer sacred space into a symbol of division.”

In western Texas, east of Big Bend National Park, the federal government has notified ranchers it wants their land too. The Rio Grande canyonlands there hold pictographs, petroglyphs, and paintings of shaman figures that predate every government involved in this story. Retired Big Bend National Park ranger Raymond Skiles described “paintings of shaman figures and various things that we don’t know how to interpret.” We don’t know what they mean, but we know where the road is going.

Four states. Four sacred sites. Two Indigenous nations, one Catholic diocese, and rock art no living person fully understands. All in the path of the same machine.

The machine has a name. It’s Section 102 of the REAL ID Act of 2005.

Section 102 gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to waive — in their entirety — any federal, state, or local law that impedes the construction of barriers and roads along the border. Not suspend. Not seek exemption from. Waive. One unelected appointee, one signature, and the law ceases to apply.

The laws waived for border wall construction include the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act — and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Twenty-nine laws and counting. The two written specifically to protect what is being destroyed are waived alongside twenty-seven others, buried in a list so long the reader goes numb before reaching them.

Desecrating a sacred Native American site on federal or tribal land is a felony. Unless the felony has been waived.

The current Secretary of Homeland Security is Markwayne Mullin. He was confirmed by the Senate 54-45 in March 2026. He is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation — the second Cherokee citizen to serve in the U.S. Senate before his appointment. He has pledged to complete the border wall from the Pacific to the Gulf by mid-2027. He met with the Inter-Tribal Association of Arizona — which represents 21 tribes — and reiterated his intent to build walls rapidly.

The Cherokee Nation’s own history includes the Trail of Tears: forced removal from ancestral land, sacred sites left behind, a government that valued infrastructure over Indigenous presence. Mullin knows this history. He carries it. He is now the person signing the waivers that allow bulldozers to drive through a 1,000-year-old geoglyph and dynamite to crack a mountain that a shaman became.

This is not an accusation of hypocrisy. The system does not care who sits in the chair. The system built the chair specifically so that whoever sits in it can waive any law with one signature. Mullin’s Cherokee citizenship does not make the waivers worse. It makes the chair more visible.

Now consider the numbers.

Border crossings are at their lowest point in more than fifty years. The U.S. Border Patrol recorded twelve consecutive months of zero releases at the border as of May 2026. Southwest border apprehensions in February 2026 were 92% lower than the monthly average over the last 33 years, and 97% below the peak of December 2023. Pew Research called it “the lowest level in more than 50 years.” DHS itself called it “the most secure border in history.”

The administration devoted $46 billion to the wall. Over 600 miles of new barrier with surveillance technology are under contract. Another 370 miles of double wall are planned or under construction. The urgency used to justify waiving 29 federal laws coincides with the lowest illegal border crossings since the Johnson administration.

The wall is not being built because the border is insecure. The border is, by the government’s own published data, the most secure it has ever been. The wall is being built because the money has been appropriated, the contracts have been awarded, and the waivers have been signed. The machine is running. The question of whether it needs to run was answered with a signature, not with evidence.

Emily Burgueno said it plainly: “This is a great example of the federal government not following federal laws.”

She’s almost right. The federal government is following one federal law — Section 102 — which exists for the sole purpose of not following all the others.

A geoglyph that pointed toward the ocean for a thousand years now points at a construction road. A mountain where shamans were made is being blasted apart. A church where 40,000 people walk every fall is being appraised at $183,071. And the law that protects Indigenous graves has been waived by a member of the nation that walked the Trail of Tears.

The word “waiver” means to give something up. The government waived the protections. The verb is also the confession.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: Associated Press via PBS NewsHour (May 17, 2026). Archaeology Southwest (May 7, 2026). Center for Biological Diversity (May 5, 2026). Texas Tribune (May 15, 2026). NPR (May 21, 2026). Pew Research Center (Feb 2, 2026). DHS (May 15, 2026). Sierra Club (Section 102 analysis). ICT News (May 29, 2026).