US-Mexico border wall construction is desecrating sacred sites, Indigenous leaders say

TECATE, Mexico (AP) — White sage burning, Norma Meza Calles gathers guests at a Mexican wellness resort into a semicircle facing Kuuchamaa Mountain and asks everyone to close their eyes and feel its presence.

“This is sacred to us like a church for you all. The mountain is our healer, our psychologist,” said Meza Calles, a Kumeyaay Nation tribal leader who explains that in its creation story a shaman transformed into the mountain. "Here is where we gather strength to live in this difficult world.”

Then she calls for a moment of reflection. But the silence is pierced by the crushing of rock. U.S. federal contractors have been blasting and bulldozing Kuuchamaa, which straddles both countries, to make way for new sections of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Indigenous leaders say that in the Trump administration's rush to build border walls, contractors are desecrating Native American sacred places and cultural sites at an unprecedented pace, more than 170 years after the international boundary split the territories of dozens of tribes.

Barrier construction has ramped up along the 1,954-mile (3,145-kilometer) border even as illegal crossings have plummeted to historic lows. Much of it began this year after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security waived cultural and environmental laws.

In California, explosions on Kuuchamaa send rocks hurtling down its Mexico side.

“We feel that in our DNA,” said Emily Burgueno, a California member of the Kumeyaay Nation, adding that “body” and “land” are the same word in the Kumeyaay language. Some tribal leaders met with DHS officials to urge them to protect Kuuchamaa and are looking into legal action.

“No one ever consented or supported the use of dynamite on the mountain,” Burgueno said.

The nation consists of more than a dozen tribes in California and Mexico’s Baja California.

In Arizona, DHS contractors last month carved through a massive 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph called “Las Playas Intaglio." The rare drawing, etched into the desert floor much like Peru’s Nazca Lines, was created on a lava field in what is now the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

The Tohono O’odham Nation said it had pointed out the site on its ancestral land for contractors to avoid.

“This was a devastating and entirely avoidable loss,” Tohono O'odham Chairman Verlon Jose said in an April 30 statement. “There is nothing more important than our history, which is what makes us who we are as O’odham. The site was also an irreplaceable piece of the United States’ history, one none of us can ever get back.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that a contractor “inadvertently disturbed” the site west of Ajo, Arizona, on April 23, but it vowed to protect the remaining portion. CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott is talking to tribal leaders to determine next steps.

Members of the Inter-Tribal Association of Arizona, which represents 21 tribes, traveled to Washington last month to lobby against a 20-foot (6-meter) secondary wall being built along that section of the border, as well as a primary 30-foot (9-meter) bollard wall planned on Tohono O’odham tribal lands. They met with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, a Cherokee Nation member, who listened but made clear his intent is to build more border walls as fast as possible, the Tohono O’odham Nation said in a statement.

The Trump administration says the barriers are necessary to keep people and drugs from entering the U.S. illegally. It wants walls to cover at least 1,400 miles (2,250 kilometers) of the border.

Trump’s “ big, beautiful bill ” devoted over $46 billion to the effort.

CBP has awarded contracts or begun construction on over 600 miles (966 kilometers) of new border wall, with companion surveillance technology. A double wall is planned or under construction along another 370 miles (596 kilometers).

In Arizona, where the Patagonia Mountains descend to the border, heavy machinery crawls along freshly graded roads to extend a double wall that could block a wildlife corridor for endangered ocelots and jaguars. Jaguars have long coexisted with the Tohono O'odham, who consider the species “spiritual guardians," Austin Nunez, a tribal leader, said in a 2025 lawsuit that unsuccessfully challenged the DHS waivers.

In Sunland Park, on New Mexico's border with Mexico, crews this year set off blasts on Mount Cristo Rey, a pilgrimage site topped with a limestone crucifix.

CBP is seeking to seize a strip of the mountain owned by the Roman Catholic Church for wall construction. The Diocese of Las Cruces asked a judge this month to deny the land transfer as an affront to religious liberties and the “faithful who seek to commune with God on Mount Cristo Rey."

In western Texas, the federal government in February notified ranchers on the Rio Grande east of Big Bend National Park of its interest in their land that contains canyonland pictographs and petroglyphs, said Raymond Skiles, a retired Big Bend National Park ranger.

“There are pictographs, paintings of shaman figures and various things that we don’t know how to interpret,” said Skiles, describing the drawings on his family's ranchlands.

After community backlash, CBP's online planning map showed the 30-foot-wall plans were scrapped for surveillance technology, patrols and some vehicle barriers. A segment in the national park and neighboring Big Bend Ranch State Park would rely on technology alone.

CBP says it recognizes the importance of natural and cultural resources and is working to minimize the construction’s impact, including leaving drainage gates open in wildlife corridors for animal passage. Illegal border crossings have littered, polluted and trampled sensitive habitat, the agency says.

CBP also says 535 miles (860 kilometers) of remote, rugged border terrain will solely rely on detection technology.

Many tribes would prefer that to walls.

Tribes along the border “are all experiencing the same tragic desecration of our cultural and sacred sites,” said Burgueno, chair of the Kumeyaay Diegueño Land Conservancy, a nonprofit organization in California that works to protect Kumeyaay lands. “This is a great example of the federal government not following federal laws.”

Desecrating a sacred Native American site on U.S. federal or tribal land is a felony, punishable by imprisonment and fines. In 1992, the National Park Service listed Kuuchamaa Mountain, also called Tecate Peak, in the National Register of Historic Places, giving it limited protection. It noted that “discarding or disturbing the mountain’s natural state would be sacrilegious.”

Rising 3,885 feet (1,184 meters) above sea level, Kuuchamaa has also captivated non-Native people.

Sarah Livia Brightwood Szekely said her father, Edmond Szekely, felt the mountain's healing energy when he arrived in Tecate, Mexico, as a Hungarian Jewish refugee during World War II, and started the renowned wellness resort, Rancho La Puerta, which she now runs.

“There are all of these people that have a deep relationship with the mountain,” she said.

Meza Calles leads walks at Rancho La Puerta to teach guests about Kuuchamaa.

Traditionally, young men would spend 40 days at its base in a coming-of-age ceremony before becoming warriors or shamans, she said. Today's rituals are shorter. People suffering from a death, debt, divorce or other difficulty seek Kuuchamaa's healing, she said.

“It's sad they are ruining the mountain," she said. “We'll see how far they go. Destiny is destiny. But the fight is not over.”

Lee reported from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Norma Meza Calles, a Kumeyaay Nation leader, lights a bundle of white sage as she talks of the sacred importance of nearby Kuuchamaa Mountain at a wellness center Friday, May 1, 2026, in Tecate, Mexico. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Construction crews work on a new border wall segment near the end of a previously built section on Kuuchamaa Mountain, Friday, April 24, 2026, seen from Tecate, Mexico. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Norma Meza Calles, a Kumeyaay Nation leader, touches a branch as she leads a guided tour of traditional Kumeyaay uses for local plants at a wellness center, Friday, May 1, 2026, in Tecate, Mexico. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Norma Meza Calles, a Kumeyaay Nation leader, gestures as she speaks of the sacred importance of Kuuchamaa Mountain, behind, at a wellness center, Friday, May 1, 2026, in Tecate, Mexico. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Construction crews work on a new border wall segment on Kuuchamaa Mountain, Friday, April 24, 2026, seen from Tecate, Mexico. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

ROME (AP) — The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem.

“We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin's school of English, told The Associated Press.

What's more, she said, the poem was within the main body of Latin text: "It was extraordinary.”

Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, "Caedmon’s Hymn" appears within some copies of the “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” written in Latin by a monk and saint known as the Venerable Bede. His history is one of the most widely reproduced texts from the Middle Ages, with almost 200 manuscripts, according to Magnanti's colleague Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity.

He considers Caedmon’s poem to be the start of English literature.

The manuscript he and Magnanti found is one of the oldest, dating from the 9th century. Two earlier copies contain the poem in Old English, but as afterthoughts — translated from Latin and scrawled into the margin by later scribes or appended but not within the text's main body, according to the researchers.

The discovery sheds light on the English language's wide diffusion, long before what was previously understood, Faulkner said in Rome, where the duo had traveled to view the text in person for the first time.

“Prior to the discovery of the Rome manuscript, the earliest one was from the early 12th century. So this is three centuries earlier than that. And so it attests to the importance that was already being attached to the English in the early 9th century,” Faulkner said.

And it's something of a miracle they uncovered it at all.

Caedmon is said to have composed the poem while working at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire, after guests at a feast began reciting poems, Faulkner said.

“Embarrassed that he didn’t know anything suitable, Caedmon left the feast and went to bed," he said. "A figure then appeared to him in his dreams telling him to sing about creation, which Caedmon miraculously did, producing the nine-line hymn."

Some 1,400 years later, this copy of his poem resurfaced in Rome’s main public library — but not before crossing the Atlantic Ocean at least twice and changing hands even more times.

Monks transcribed this copy of Bede's history in the scriptorium of the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola, one of the most important transcription centers during the Middle Ages, located near modern-day Modena in northern Italy, according to Valentina Longo, curator of medieval and modern manuscripts at Rome's National Central Library.

In the 17th century, as the abbey's importance declined, its vast collection of manuscripts was shifted to another abbey in Rome, then moved to the Vatican and finally on to a small church.

Along the way, some of the texts went missing, only to emerge in the early 19th century in the possession of famous international collectors, Longo said.

This copy of Bede's history went to renowned English antiquarian Thomas Phillipps. He fell on hard times, selling off bits and pieces of his collection, and Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer secured the book. From there, somehow, it arrived in New York City, in the trove of Austrian-born rare bookseller H.P. Kraus during the 20th century.

Italy's culture ministry was scouring the world for the Nonantola abbey's missing manuscripts, snapping them up in auctions and from collectors around the world. It bought the copy of Bede's history from Kraus in 1972, Longo said, and since then the illustrious text has remained in Rome's library — but received scant notice.

Enter Magnanti, who had spent over four years studying Bede’s history and was compiling a catalog of extant copies.

“I knew that the book was listed in the library’s catalog, so I was almost certain that the book was, in fact, still here," she said. “I realized that, because of the very complex history of this book, no Bede scholar had really looked at it. So it had been virtually unstudied."

She emailed the library, which confirmed the book was in its stacks. Three months later, she received digital images of the entire manuscript.

Nupue. sciulun. herga. hefunricaes. puard. metudaes. maechti. and his.

mod geðanc. puerc. puldur. fadur. suæhepundragiaes

ecidrichtin or astalde. he aeristscoop eor dubearnū hefento

hrofe halig. sceppend. ða. middū. geard. moncinnes peard eci

drichtin. aefter. tia de. firū. on foldu. frea. allmechtig.

Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom,

the might of the creator and his intention,

the work of the father of glory, in that he of each wonder,

eternal lord, established the beginning.

He first created the earth for men,

heaven as a roof, the holy creator,

then the middle earth, the guardian of mankind,

the eternal lord, afterwards created

for men on earth, the almighty lord.

The library has digitized the entire Nonantolan collection and it is freely accessible through the website, Longo said.

It's part of a massive project by the library to make thousands of rare books and manuscripts available to researchers around the world, according to Andrea Cappa, the library's head of manuscripts and the rare books reading room.

“The discovery made by the experts of Trinity College is just one starting point, a single manuscript that might pave the way for countless other discoveries, in countless other fields, through international cooperation like this,” Cappa said.

—

An earlier version of the story mistakenly quoted Elisabetta Magnanti as saying that “no big scholar had really looked” at the book before. She said “no Bede scholar had really looked at it”.

The 8th-century manuscript copy of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, containing a rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — is seen at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)

A rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — is visible in the five lines above the final line of a page from an 8th-century manuscript copy of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)

From left, Elisabetta Magnanti, Mark Faulkner of Dublin's Trinity College, Andrea Cappa and Valentina Longo of Rome's National Central Library examine a manuscript containing a rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)

From left, Elisabetta Magnanti and Mark Faulkner from Dublin's Trinity College and Valentina Longo of Rome's National Central Library look at a manuscript containing a rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn, the first poem ever to be written down in Old English, at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)

A rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn — the first poem ever written down in Old English — is visible in the five lines above the final line of the left page from an 8th-century manuscript copy of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, at Rome's National Library, Thursday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Rosa)null