With just under nine months until the United States presidential election, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with last-ditch efforts to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and it seems not even a National Monument can stand in its way.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contractors have recently been instructed to blast through Monument Hill in the southernmost section of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a 500-square-mile park on the southern Arizona border that had been designated a United States National Monument and a UNESCO biosphere reserve, to erect another portion of the barrier. Indigenous and environmental activists have actively protested on the site since November of last year, informing the administration that the site is not only a valuable ecological site, but also one of spiritual and cultural importance to the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American people of the Sonoran Desert.

Despite the fact that large swaths of the park have yet to be documented for uncharted ancient archaeological sites and animal habitats, demolition across the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument will continue unabated throughout the next month. Raúl Grijalva, the U.S. Representative for Arizona’s 3rd congressional district, has stated that while the government has hired an environmental monitor, he believes little attention will be paid to preserving sites sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation. “How would we feel,” Grijalva argued in a video posted to Twitter, “if a foreign nation came into the United States and began to dig up Arlington National Cemetery? Or if they began to desecrate cemeteries across the country?” He then committed to visiting with members of the O’odham Nation and others invested in the site to assess the damage that has already taken place.

Trump is bulldozing through Native American sacred sites and burial grounds to build his disastrous border wall. This week, I’m visiting the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona to see it for myself, investigate, and work with tribal leaders to take action. #NoBorderWall pic.twitter.com/dwAdBfPp0s — Raul M. Grijalva (@RepRaulGrijalva) January 18, 2020

The DHS has already uprooted several saguaro cacti to make way for a makeshift roadway to be used for construction vehicles and drained water from a desert aquifer below the terrain to mix the concrete necessary for the 30-foot-tall barrier planned for the site. If the wall is completed, its floodlights and divisive siting will interrupt the migration of several native animal species.