1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

I want to bring attention to something that happened last month that hasn’t gotten nearly enough coverage. On April 23, a DHS contractor building Trump’s border wall bulldozed 60 feet of the Las Playas Intaglio a 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph etched into the desert floor of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. It is sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation. The site had been flagged by a cultural protection monitor. Contractors were specifically told to avoid it. The tribe wasn’t notified until five days later. Destroying a Native American sacred site on federal land is a federal crime. It can carry fines and prison time. The Trump administration waived environmental and cultural protections to speed up wall construction, but those waivers don’t cover this. What happened on April 23 meets the legal threshold for criminal charges. None have been filed. The problem is that prosecution requires DOJ to act, and this DOJ isn’t going to. Use your oversight duties ( and encourage your colleagues to do the same) to pressure the DOJ to hold the contractor and government accountable and provide reparations to the tribe. Do your duty!