Presidio
A roll of razor-sharp concertina wire now spirals through the green vegetation along the Rio Grande underneath the International Bridge in Presidio—the first physical barrier erected in the Big Bend Sector to deter illegal immigration under the Trump administration and one that has left locals with more questions than answers.
A reporter for a radio station in Ojinaga was the first to spot the change, which was not popular on Facebook. Presidio Mayor John Ferguson was among those vocally upset about the new barrier, which he dismissed as pure security theater. He worried that folks on the opposite side of the river—who gather under the bridge to fish, swim, or even enjoy municipally-sponsored concerts—would find it patronizing at best and threatening at worst. “It’s not the first time we’ve seen this kind of stuff, but for the sake of the relationship between our two cities, it’s like ‘Hey—we know how to cross the river the right way,’” he said.
On a practical level, he worried that the barrier would become a hazard during floods, which regularly rip through the Presidio Valley between May and October. “Watch all that razor wire get washed downstream,” he said. “Where’s it all going to end up?”
Officials in the Trump administration maintain that such measures are essential sacrifices to defend national security. On October 15, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem filed a notice in the Federal Register authorizing her to “take all appropriate action to deploy and construct physical barriers to ensure complete operational control of the southern border of the United States.” The notice authorizes the construction of “fencing, barriers, roads, lighting, cameras and sensors” in Custom and Border Protection’s (CBP) Big Bend Sector, and waives a number of federal laws regulating contracts with outside vendors to get the job done quickly.
Statistically speaking, the Big Bend is the largest and most remote sector along the southern border. It also tends to have the least traffic. For these reasons—and the region’s forbidding geography—the government has never bothered to invest in physical barriers along this stretch of the Rio Grande. “This is the first time they’ve signaled any intention or started taking actions that would allow them to build walls in Big Bend, which for the longest time has just been a ridiculous idea,” Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity told Marfa Public Radio last week.
Thanks in part to the government shutdown, Big Bend Sentinel has been unable to confirm the details of DHS’s plans for this chunk of the border, which runs from Sierra Blanca to Sanderson. Calls for clarification to local Customs and Border Patrol reps were forwarded to DHS offices in Washington D.C., which have not responded to multiple requests for comment.
A local spokesperson for CBP was able to share one additional piece of information that suggested that the agency would not attempt to build walls where Mother Nature had already provided them. “In areas in U.S. Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector where terrain acts as a natural barrier, CBP is planning to deploy alien detection technology,” they wrote.
Noem’s posting references Executive Order 14165, “Securing our Borders”, which was filed on Trump’s first day in office back in January. This order set the tone for the Trump administration’s aggressive border policy, which has resulted in a historic crash in unauthorized border crossings. “A nation without borders is not a nation, and the Federal Government must act with urgency and strength to end the threats posed by an unsecured border,” Trump’s order reads. “One of [our] most important obligations is to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement.”
CBP released its data for September last Friday, which suggests that the record-breaking streak is holding strong through the fall. The agency’s numbers show a 93% dip in traffic from the Biden administration’s all-time high numbers in Fiscal Year 2021.
These numbers appear to contradict some of the claims made in Noem’s Federal Register posting, which declares the Big Bend sector “an area of high illegal entry where illegal aliens regularly attempt to enter the United States or smuggle illicit drugs,” to a degree that requires “expeditious” intervention. Noem collates numbers from Fiscal Year 2021—an all-time high of unauthorized border crossing—through July 2025, an all-time low.
Strike both extremes from the record, and the numbers paint a much different picture. Between Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 and FY 2022, encounters in the Big Bend sector dropped 14.3%. That trend continued until FY 2024 to FY 2025—spanning the last few months of Biden’s presidency and the first few months of Trump’s second term—when those numbers plummeted over 37%.
Despite the drop in traffic and the Big Bend’s reputation as a historically slow sector, the idea of erecting barriers along the river has been on the table since at least February of this year, when representatives for the Joint Task Force Southern Border (JTF-SB) attended a staff meeting at Big Bend National Park. As part of the infamous “Valentine’s Day Massacre” meeting that resulted in at least five layoffs, JTF-SB personnel told staff that barriers along the river could be erected during the Army’s deployment to the region.
The Big Bend Sector isn’t the only Border Patrol sector in Texas to see this kind of initiative. El Paso Sector was the first to earn a Federal Register posting on October 7, and Del Rio Sector is the most recent, receiving notice on Monday.
While all of these authorizations waive federal laws regulating contracts, the El Paso and Del Rio postings go a step further, waiving a wide variety of environmental and cultural exemptions. Border barriers in the Del Rio Sector—which includes public land and waterways along the Pecos River, Devils River and Lake Amistad—will not be subject to the Endangered Species Act, Archaeological Resources Protection Act, Solid Waste Disposal Act, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and dozens of other environmental and cultural regulations.