Bizarre Flights Above Tohono O'odham Nation: US Military Claims it is Eliminating Enemy Drones

The MQ-9 drone parked on a tarmac in Arizona. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

Bizarre Flights Above Tohono O'odham Nation: US Military Claims it is Eliminating Enemy Drones using Direct Energy Lasers.

The U.S. military now claims it took out three enemy drones overnight that were targeting the US Border Patrol.

By Brenda Norrell, Censored News, September 25, 2026 Updated

TUCSON -- Those Bizarre Border Flights. The unidentified flights above the Tohono O'odham Nation border have now been identified as military drones, the kind used in war zones. After being spotlighted for weeks in our news reports, the U.S. military now says it took out three enemy drones using direct energy lasers, saying that the drones posed a threat to the U.S. Border Patrol. 

Book Tour: Spy Towers Impact Revealed by Ophelia Rivas, Tohono O'odham

The Book Tour for 'Significant Impact' begins at the Ajo Library in Ajo, Arizona at 5 pm on Sept. 28, 2026. The Book Tour brings the authors to Tucson, Phoenix, Tohono O'odham Nation, Canada and Mexico. There's also pending dates in New York in January.

Significant Impact: Contesting Surveillance Infrastructure on Tohono O'odham Je'ved

By Ophelia Rivas, Caitlin Blanchfield and Valerie Kolowratnik 

Significant Impact: Contesting Surveillance Infrastructure on Tohono O’odham Je’ved brings together stories, essays, and narrative cartography in a counter environmental assessment to document and describe the effects of surveillance infrastructure on the Tohono O’odham Nation—a Native American reservation on the United States-Mexico border.

A collaboration between O’odham Human Rights advocate Ophelia Rivas, human rights scholar Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, and architectural historian Caitlin Blanchfield, the book advocates against militarized infrastructures on Indigenous lands and challenges common protocols of environmental review, along with the Western frameworks of scientific classification and property embedded in them. The project makes visible the impact of surveillance when considered through Indigenous sovereignty and an O’odham epistemology of land. It offers a visual language that is sensitive to secrecy protocols within Traditional Knowledge and that challenges the colonial biases of Western cartography.

The book situates current surveillance infrastructure projects on the Tohono O’odham Nation within a longer history of settler colonialism and border militarization, and reflects on the role of environmental review within the politics of protection in Indigenous lands.

Purchase 'Significant Impact' by scanning the RQ code above on the poster,

Censored News 2026

'Tohono O'odham Sacred Mountain Facing Demolishment' by Ophelia Rivas

O'odham Western Sacred Mountain

'Tohono O'odham Sacred Mountain Facing Demolishment' by Ophelia Rivas

By Ophelia Rivas, September 25, 2026

Our western sacred mountain is threatened by US-DHS border infrastructure development. Our long standing relative with its ceremonial footprints is facing desecration and demolishment for a backward deranged eurocentric ideology of security.

While destroying nature to build a foreign structure without regard to cultural and environmental consequences, this country builds their false sense of security.

This security from immigration is created by the same government to continue to rage authority and control beyond this southern border in their false sense of dominate economic wealth.

This mountain is less than a mile from our community Ali Jeg'k, (little clearing) of the
Gu Vo (big pond) district of the Tohono O'odham reservation.

Requesting your strong energy and morning offerings to protect ancient places.

Ophelia Rivas
from O'odham homeland

Copyright Ophelia Rivas, Censored News. Content may not be used without written permission, or in any way for revenues.