The Tohono O’odham Nation Indian reservation, located along one of the most heavily-used invasion routes into America from Mexico, has banned US National Guard troops from entering the region, telling officers that they “don’t want white men on their land”—blatantly abusing their fake “First Nation” rights to protect their lucrative drug-running operations.

“They told us they don’t want white man on their land,” said a high-level federal official working in the region. “The agency, of course, is going to cater to that,” a report on the Judicial Watch website, a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation that “promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law.”

According to the report, this is not the first time that the Tohono O’odham reservation, which is in the south-central Arizona Sonoran Desert, has banned law enforcement personnel from its land which shares about 75 miles of border with Mexico.

The reservation is about 2.8 million acres or roughly the size of Connecticut and has about 30,000 members. For years it has appeared on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) list because it’s a significant center of illegal drug production, manufacturing, importation and distribution.

The reservation is a primary transshipment zone for methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and marijuana destined for the United States, a DEA official revealed in congressional testimony a few years ago. In 2015 Arizona led all four Border Patrol sectors in drug seizures with 928,858 pounds of drugs confiscated, according to agency figures.

A few years ago, the tribe prohibited the Border Patrol from entering its land by cordoning off a road in the southeast corner of the reservation with a barbed wired gate. A hand-written cardboard sign reading “Closed, Do Not Open” was posted on the fence to keep federal agents out.

“This is the location used most for trafficking drugs into the country,” a frustrated longtime Border Patrol source told Judicial Watch at the time, adding that agents assigned to the area were “livid.”

Federal agents on the ground say the reality is that the area is a hotbed of drug smuggling that desperately needs the extra manpower offered by the National Guard. “It’s the most notorious area for drugs entering the country and we will not have National Guard assisting us,” a veteran agent said this week.

A New York Times article published years ago revealed that tribe members are complicit in the trafficking business. “Hundreds of tribal members have been prosecuted in federal, state or tribal courts for smuggling drugs or humans, taking offers that reach $5,000 for storing marijuana or transporting it across the reservation,” the article states.

“In a few families, both parents have been sent to prison, leaving grandparents to raise the children.” The drug smugglers work mainly for the notorious Sinaloa Cartel, the piece revealed.

Nevertheless, the government has long caved into the tribe’s preposterous restrictions without even threatening to withhold federal funds. Back in 2006, the Tohono O’odham council passed a resolution forbidding National Guard troops from assisting Border Patrol by using mountains as observation posts.

A local newspaper report said the ban would apply to “an area known for drug trafficking and people smuggling.” The tribe has also refused to allow a fence to be erected along the most vulnerable and crime-infested portion of the border.

A recent report by News4 Tucson KVOA quoted Art Del Cueto, president of the Border Patrol Local 2544 Union and vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, as saying that the reservation is responsible for close to 50 percent of all the drug seizures in the entire country.