Aggressive policies impact border
Two events from the past provide some peace
The effects of Trump’s aggressive border policy were felt in communities across the United States in 2025, even in cities like Chicago, Illinois, and Charlotte, North Carolina, hundreds of miles away from the Rio Grande. Communities banded together to protect their neighbors from being taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at schools, churches, and routine immigration hearings, and videos circulated on social media of confrontations between law enforcement and suspected undocumented people that advocates say violate civil rights. The Trump administration, meanwhile, doubled down, saying that these tactics were necessary to stem the tide of violence and narcotics flooding the border at the hands of transnational cartels.
The Big Bend Sector—which the Department of Homeland Security defines as just over 500 miles of border between Sierra Blanca and Sanderson—is historically the quietest stretch under Customs and Border Protection’s purview, typically seeing the fewest criminal apprehensions, both in terms of routine immigration infractions and in smuggling activity. Last Friday, the agency released its year-end data for Fiscal Year 2025, which recorded just over 3,000 apprehensions between the last sixth months of Biden’s presidency and the first six months of Trump’s second term—a 74% drop in total traffic.
But while border activity is unusually quiet in an area already known for bucking national trends, Big Bend residents have seen a number of policy directives play out in their neighborhoods and backyards.
Military deployed to the region for the first time in 30 years
Rumblings that the military would be deployed to the Big Bend began almost as soon as President Trump took office at the end of January after leadership at Big Bend National Park began meeting with officials with the United States Northern Command, tapped to coordinate the military’s implementation of executive orders filed by the president that addressed the southern border.
In March, officers from the Stryker Battalion met with officials in Brewster County as plans for a deployment to the Big Bend region rapidly took shape. Presidio County leadership was mostly left out of the loop, leading to widespread speculation about what the deployment would look like as word got out that the military was considering building a barracks out of the Marfa airport, which maintains a lease with Customs and Border Protection that includes a firing range used by agents for training.
Deploying the military to police domestic matters is controversial and typically seen as a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th century law that made it onto the books during the Reconstruction period after the president used the military to break up a railroad strike. Questions about the legality of domestic military deployment are currently playing out in courtrooms across the country as the leadership of Democratic-led states and cities are challenging the Trump administration’s ability to send military forces into communities that don’t want them there.
The announcement that troops would be deployed to the Big Bend cast a special pall over the region that suffered a tragedy the last time the military was active in patrolling the region, during the mid 1990s. In May 1997, Esequiel Hernandez Jr., a sophomore at Presidio High School, was shot and killed by a Marine in his hometown of Redford. Charges were eventually dropped against the shooter, Corporal Clemente Bañuelos, but the loss left a psychic scar for a generation of Presidio County residents caught in the literal crosshairs of the federal government’s increasingly militarized border policy.Â
The Hernandez family eventually sued the federal government for wrongful death and won a $2 million settlement, and for decades, Esequiel’s death was used as a case study to explain the tragic consequences of using the United States military as civilian police.
Big Bend residents expressed many of the same concerns in letters to the Sentinel. In March, Sabrina Maloney of Alpine wrote about how many of the destabilizing events in recent Latin American history that sent waves of migrants to the U.S. were the direct result of American interventionism abroad, and she questioned why the government was using expensive, punitive means of addressing problems that it played a hand in causing. “The U.S. is not in a defensive position on the border but must be understood as an aggressor,” Maloney opined. “Reacting to the humanitarian crisis posed by migration with surveillance, detention and deportation is just so completely the wrong response that it pains me to see it intensifying in this area.”
While some residents were privately uncomfortable with the spectacle of armored vehicles rumbling up and down the River Road, most reported neutral or positive interactions with stationed personnel, who offered their support in initiatives like litter pickup for the Make Presidio Beautiful campaign. Military leadership explained that troops would be used in support roles and would not take the place of Border Patrol agents deputized to make arrests.
The deployment has been a financial boon to local businesses like the Hotel Parker in Alpine and the Three Palms in Presidio, who have enjoyed guaranteed long-term bookings. For local groups that depend on taxes generated by hotel stays, the outlook was less rosy. Federal employees—including Department of Defense personnel—are tax-exempt. Over the summer, officials in Presidio projected a loss of $56,000 to the Convention and Visitors Bureau, which funds events like the Bluebonnet Music Series designed to bring tourists to town. In Alpine, event organizers reported that out-of-town guests were having trouble booking local rooms during busy weekends.
The first deployment to the area was a Stryker battalion, and the large armored vehicles made appearances in Big Bend National Park and along the River Road. In October, the deployment changed hands from the 10th Mountain Division Headquarters to the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Headquarters out of Fort Huachuca in Arizona. The troops currently on the ground in the Big Bend come from a JLTV (joint light tactical vehicle) unit at Fort Bliss in El Paso.
The Brewster County Commissioners Court also renewed a lease for space at the Emergency Response Center in Alpine. “My understanding is that they’re here for the full four years [of Trump’s second term],” County Judge Greg Henington told the commissioner’s court.
Border barriers go up in the Big Bend
Conventional national security wisdom holds that immigration numbers through the Big Bend sector tend to be low because of the area’s forbidding geography. Few roads cut across the desert to connect the border with bigger cities, and in many places the river is ringed by steep canyons and miles of wilderness.
On October 15, Kristi Noem, head of the Department of Homeland Security, posted 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 authorized the construction of “fencing, barriers, roads, lighting, cameras and sensors” in Custom and Border Protection’s (CBP) Big Bend Sector, and waived a number of federal laws regulating contracts with outside vendors to get the job done quickly.
That week, a reporter for a radio station in Ojinaga was the first to notice a new line of razor wire underneath the Presidio International Bridge. The border fence—the first of its kind in the Big Bend—will eventually stretch all the way downstream to Alamito Creek. “These efforts enhance our ability to deter illegal crossings, protect our agents in the field, and strengthen overall border security in this area,” CBP Watch Commander Adam Hershberger explained last week in a post on Instagram.
Local residents expressed concern about the optics of the fence going up, worried about the message it might send to locals on the other side of the border. Presidio Mayor John Ferguson also worried about the practicality of building a concertina wire fence in the floodplain. “Watch all that razor wire get washed downstream,” he said. “Where’s it all going to end up?”
Around the same time, the Department of Homeland Security authorized $4.5 billion in federal funding for “Smart Wall” projects across the southwest border. “The Smart Wall is a border security system that combines steel barriers, waterborne barriers, patrol roads, lights, cameras, and advanced detection technology to give Border Patrol agents the best tools in the world to stop illegal traffic,” the agency explained in a press release. “In total, these projects will add 230 miles of Smart Wall and nearly 400 miles of new technology.”
A map of projects provided by the agency shows two “primary border wall” projects along the river between Sierra Blanca and the edge of Big Bend Ranch State Park. A project described as “technology-only” straddles the protected Wild and Scenic portion of the river from Big Bend National Park to just shy of Lake Amistad.
Whether the projects will be finished as described remains to be seen, but the new line of concertina wire marks a major shift in how the federal government approaches border security in the Big Bend. “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.
Trump policies hit the parks
It was a rough year for the National Park Service, which faced a number of abrupt changes under President Trump’s leadership. By some counts, the agency lost more than a quarter of its workforce since January 2025, thanks to cost-cutting efforts launched by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE—headed by unelected billionaire Elon Musk—slashed jobs across the federal workforce, but seemed to focus an early wave of layoffs on the National Park Service and the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service.
Big Bend National Park was not spared from a particularly brutal wave of layoffs in February that claimed five employees, or around 5% of the park’s total workforce. As people across the country swapped teddy bears and boxes of chocolate on February 14, nearly 1,000 National Park Service employees received an extremely unromantic valentine from Washington, D.C. “The Department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs,” the email read. “It is necessary and appropriate to terminate your appointment.”
Also impacted was the Fort Davis National Historic Site, which lacked a superintendent, and the brand-new Blackwell School National National Historic Site—a commemoration of Marfa’s last segregated school—which was just getting up to speed on planning for improvements at the site and hiring staff.
Communication between the parks, the media and guests were strained during the wave of massive changes, and individual parks were instructed to direct requests for information up the chain to the Department of the Interior. Reports from the inside were bleak, with park staff engaged nationwide in what one reporter for Outside called “facade management,” throwing limited resources at maintaining facilities like bathrooms and visitors centers to keep up the illusion that the parks were not being impacted by layoffs. (Big Bend National Park implements a system that shifts personnel with desk jobs to public-facing duties, like traffic control, during peak visitation times.)
DOGE also offered buyouts to senior employees to encourage them to retire early. In May, Superintendent Anjna O’Connor—who had only been in her post for the better part of a year —retired suddenly. Deputy Superintendent Rick Gupman took the helm, and the National Park Service quietly folded the Blackwell School and Fort Davis National Historic Sites under his administrative duties.
In July, the Rio Grande reached major flood stage in parts of the park the same weekend that a massive flood in Central Texas claimed the lives of over a hundred people. A small group of hardy summer campers were evacuated from Rio Grande Village Campground, but otherwise folks in the Big Bend were physically unharmed by the floodwaters, which caused damage to Old Ore Road, the River Road, Black Gap Road and portions of the road to the Langford Hot Springs—all of which remained closed at press time, six months later.
Big Bend National Park continued to struggle later in the year as its workers were furloughed during a fall government shutdown, the longest in American history. While the park gates remained open and visiting was free, key staff still working struggled to maintain the park. In the last few days of the shutdown, Julie Childs of the Big Bend Natural History Association worked with park staff on a volunteer basis to open the Panther Junction Visitor Center to guests seeking guidance and souvenirs.
At a meeting of the Brewster County Tourism Council in November, Deputy Superintendent Gupman said that the park was “playing catch up” after the six-week shutdown. An 11-month hiring freeze and wave of layoffs meant that the park no longer had a road crew to fix the segments washed away in the flood. Equipment and a temporary crew were brought in right around the time the shutdown began, but with no paycheck in sight, they were unable to complete the projects.
The Chisos Basin Lodge and water system project—originally scheduled to begin this summer—was rescheduled for next year. Gupman said that the timeline for the Basin overhaul was unaffected by the shutdown. (For the latest information on the closures, visit the park’s website.)
The past made whole
While layoffs, shutdowns, and shows of federal force dominated headlines through much of 2025, the year was bookended in Presidio County by attempts to correct historical wrongs.
In January, Yolanda Mesa of Oakland, California, wrote a letter to the editor detailing her family’s struggle to gain official recognition from the county for a series of murders that happened near the border over a hundred years ago. Mesa is descended from Longino Flores, one of 15 men murdered by a mob of ranchers and Texas Rangers at Porvenir on January 28, 1918. “The story of Porvenir cannot be swept under the rug any longer,” she wrote.
The Porvenir Massacre is believed by historians to be retaliation among local Anglos against the Brite Ranch Raid on Christmas Day in 1917, part of a wave of border violence in the Big Bend during the waning days of the Mexican Revolution. During this period, Mexican Americans along the border in Texas were the victims of extrajudicial killings at the hands of their neighbors and law enforcement.
The descendants of the Porvenir Massacre have fought to preserve their history for generations, despite challenges from the state. The massacre itself sparked the Canales Investigation, a 1919 legislative hearing into alleged crimes conducted by the Texas Rangers. A hundred years later, they fought for an official state historical marker, a process that was thwarted at the time by the county and state historical commissions.
As a final gesture toward closure, Mesa and the other descendants wanted their ancestors to be issued official death certificates from Presidio County. Former County Judge Cinderela Guevara issued one of the 15 death certificates in 2019, but later claimed she had done so by mistake—form VS-128, or court-ordered delayed certificate of death, is rarely used and county leadership didn’t want to run afoul of a legal gray area.
In May of 2025, the county called in Judge Eduardo Gamboa of El Paso—known for his expertise in probate issues—to rule on the certificates. As he issued the certificates, Judge Gamboa said that the darkest parts of human nature were on display that cold winter night 107 years ago and that issuing the certificates was a small step toward healing past wounds. “Monsters walk among us,” he said.
The ancestors are home again
In November, Presidio County residents were once again called to consider their place in history when the People of La Junta for Preservation and the Big Bend Conservation Alliance hosted a public ceremony to return seven sets of Indigenous human remains to the earth. Five sets of those remains came from the Millington Site—an archaeological site just a stone’s throw from Presidio High School—and two came from private ranches.
The remains from the Millington Site had been in basement storage at Sul Ross State University in Alpine for two decades. The Native American Graves Repatriation and Preservation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in the 1990s with the goal of returning bodies and funerary objects in institutional storage to Indigenous groups.
As local advocates and staff members at Sul Ross quickly discovered, the legal process for returning remains and objects through NAGPRA is complicated—especially for Native groups in the borderlands, many of whom do not have federal recognition. After a lengthy review, the remains were approved for repatriation, and the ceremony was set for November.
“This reburial is a testament to what can be accomplished when the community leads with heart, humility, and respect for the sacred,” Christina Hernandez, executive director of the Big Bend Conservation Alliance, wrote. “The ancestors are home again—and through their return, our people are made whole.”