After months of talk about “smart” border barriers along the Rio Grande, traditional steel walls are nearing construction in the Big Bend.
Recent reports from landowners, park staff, and Border Patrol agents confirm the federal government is actively seeking leases for construction staging areas, radically changing the way Big Bend residents experience the rugged landscape that drew many to call it home.
“Is it worth billions of dollars and destroying the environment and our access to the river?” asked Charlie Angell, who runs a river guide and expeditions business out of Polvo, a historic community on the river outside of Redford, Texas. “And our president is supposed to be this hot, top-notch real estate guy. How wise is it to ruin all this riverfront property with a damn wall?”
The border in the Big Bend could soon be abuzz with activity. Not with migrants, of course—the Trump administration’s aggressive approach has led to record-low apprehensions—but with construction crews, kicked-up dust and the ceaseless beeping of heavy equipment bringing the president’s dream of a coast-to-coast wall along the Mexican border to fruition.
In October, the Big Bend Sentinel reported on a 20-plus mile concertina wire fence under construction near the Presidio International Bridge downstream to Alamito Creek. The project was the first border barrier of any kind erected by DHS in the region, whose notoriously rugged terrain has shielded the region from serious attempts to build a wall since the first bollards were erected over a century ago in Arizona. “For us, we’re not pressing the actual brick-and-mortar-style wall here. That’s not our objective,” Lee Smith, a former Border Patrol union president, told NPR in 2017. “We’ve told everyone from the [Trump] transition team to the current administration, for us here locally in Big Bend, what we need is [more] manpower.”
Between October and November of last year, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem published a series of rapid-fire postings in the Federal Register authorizing the construction of “border barriers” across the state of Texas. In December, more detailed notices were published authorizing the construction of border walls in the Del Rio and Laredo sector with corresponding buoy barriers in the channel of the river itself. (Contracts to build 63 miles of wall cost the government a cool $3.3 billion.)
These postings corresponded with a DHS media blitz touting the agency’s Smart Wall program. “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,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Big Bend Sentinel.
Those “natural barriers” may no longer be enough to satisfy the Trump administration’s appetite for a wall. An updated map on the agency’s website describes three contiguous wall projects in the Big Bend Sector, stretching from Fort Quitman outside of Sierra Blanca and ending at the Colorado Canyon River Put-In in Big Bend Ranch State Park, with a total mileage of around 175 miles of wall.
The wall comes for us all
Several sources with knowledge of the project verified that federal officials approached landowners—one near Redford, the other southeast of Ruidosa—to initiate discussions on leasing their land for staging areas. According to the source, one told the officials to “go to hell” while the other told them to talk to their attorney. (These sources did not want to be named, because they feared that if roads, walls, and other infrastructure impacted their property, they wanted a good relationship with government workers.)
One of the sources talked with officials along the river who believe that a steel wall definitely will be in the mix in the populated areas around Presidio and Redford.
Angell’s Polvo riverside home and business is within 100 feet of the river and could be lost if an actual wall is built. Angell said he would not sell or lease to the federal government—but that may not mean much if the feds use the power of eminent domain to seize it. “I moved here planning to spend the rest of my life here,” Angell said. “So, yes, I’m terrified.”
He faces a tricky situation relatively unique among the Southwest borderlands, thanks to the way that Texas was annexed by the Union. The vast majority of land along the border in California, New Mexico and Arizona is owned by the federal government, protected in many places by something called the “Roosevelt Reservation,” granting federal law enforcement powers over a skinny strip of land that spans multiple states.
The border in Texas, on the other hand, is mostly privately owned, and any entity hoping to build a cohesive border wall has to petition each landowner individually. Trump’s push to build a wall during his first term mostly fizzled out in the courts, but the first major attempt to erect a wall in Texas under George W. Bush resulted in hundreds of individual lawsuits characterized by the Texas Tribune as “the most aggressive seizure of private land by the federal government in decades.”
Further reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune found that government agencies tasked with sealing land deals severely lowballed property owners and kept sloppy records, meaning that these cases clogged up the federal courts for decades. Landowners without legal savvy or the means to pay for aggressive representation often found themselves on the wrong end of a raw deal.
While the Big Bend isn’t a physically practical place to build a wall, it does represent an unusually large concentration of public land in Texas—and by extension, a potential cheat code for negotiators hoping to iron out agreements quickly. A Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) source, not wanting to use their name because they don’t have permission from superiors to speak, confirmed that government officials also had talked about staging areas in Big Bend Ranch State Park, which encompasses virtually all of the land along the Rio Grande from Tapado Canyon to Lajitas. The views from the twisting, mountainous Highway 170 (River Road) are stunning, and it serves as entry ways to many of the park campgrounds and trails—including the popular Hoodoos Trail and corresponding whitewater run, which would be cut off from public access by a wall if plans are executed as written.
Any kind of visible infrastructure could be devastating for park visitors who come from around the world to experience that stretch of the river. (While many sources had also heard of possible infrastructure in Big Bend National Park, such a project has not been confirmed by Big Bend Sentinel beyond preliminary discussions of river barriers presented by the U.S. Army in February of last year.)
County officials feel powerless
Big Bend Sentinel spoke to four county officials who all opposed anything akin to a wall or a massive increase in technology infrastructure or patrol roads, but they feel powerless to stop the plans.
Citing administration boilerplate about “terrorists” at the southern border, DHS Secretary Noem’s Federal Register postings claim dozens of exemptions to natural and cultural resource protection laws and waive typical procedures aimed at maximum transparency in bidding on government contracts. Noem’s posting for the Big Bend Sector specifically keeps many of these environmental protections in place, but it waives contract posting requirements, meaning that much of the discussion about the potential Big Bend wall is happening behind closed doors.
What makes things feel different this time, as opposed to Trump’s first term—or even 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott launched a project to build the country’s first state-funded border wall—is cash. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed over the summer, provided a record-smashing $165 billion for DHS. Noem’s invocation of emergency powers means that there’s little the court system or the public can do to slow the government down.
All of that money is likely to go out of state, offering little local economic benefit beyond sales tax from gas station breakfast burritos and energy drinks for hungry crews. The most recent border wall contract award posted online—for a project in the Rio Grande Valley—went for an eye-popping $369.5 million to a Montana firm with a history of making donations to the Republican National Committee and to Secretary Noem’s personal campaign for governor of South Dakota.
“I just honestly didn’t think they were gonna get to us, you know what I mean?” said David Beebe, former county commissioner and County Judge Joe Portillo’s challenger in the March Democratic primary. “We’re so far off the beaten path. And really, if you’re really trying to secure the border, this is the last place you need to cover.”
“It’s like you’re playing whack-a-mole and then you finally get to us last,” Beebe added. “And that’s why my suspicion is it might just be easier to fool with us because there’s less resistance. No one can provide actual resistance to this. We’re so backwater and we’re so weak because of our lack of population and our lack of industry that would be affected by it.”
County Judge Joe Portillo was also not optimistic. “This is a federal issue, a federal project,” he said. “Our span of control is the county. The uniqueness for us is that we are on the border with Mexico. So it’s right in our backyard. We would hope that every avenue would be investigated … radar, the newest tech available to us now, camera systems that would leave much less of a footprint.”
Portillo said that actual steel wall infrastructure could be located nearer the port of entry and the city of Presidio but that it would still be nonsensical and unwanted. “I don’t want it,” he said.
Presidio County Precinct 1 Commissioner Deirdre Hisler, whose precinct includes part of Presidio, said the project is not needed and opposes it, as did Susan Hays, running unopposed for the Precinct 4 spot in the Democratic primary.
Customs and Border Protection staff in the Big Bend Sector have long maintained that an “actual wall” would not be built in the region. But a source who recently spoke to two people with close connections to Border Patrol agents said that’s not the case—just the opposite, that actual walls are planned. One source knew of an airplane trip taken by a potential contractor to view the river from above, and that contractor said they could build walls and had similar projects in Arizona.
Still shrouded in secrecy is who actually will be building this infrastructure, since no request for proposals could be found in government documents. A source who did not want to be named said a contractor called their workplace by mistake, suggesting a hurry to get things moving.
Déjà vu
Locals who lived in the area during Trump’s first term might be suffering a bit of déjà vu. In February 2017, an internal DHS memo was leaked to Reuters with detailed plans for a coast-to-coast wall, projected to cost upwards of $21 billion. Phase two of that project would have torn through the Big Bend Sector by 2020, if legal challenges and ballooning costs didn’t derail the president’s plans.
In the national press, Big Bend residents were united across party lines in expressing their distaste for the idea. “It seems, frankly, ludicrous that anyone would even attempt it,” Betse Esparza, then a Brewster County commissioner and a Republican, told Buzzfeed in 2017. “I don’t see how it’s physically possible to build a wall. We have canyons. We have what people are referring to as a natural wall. I think we’re pretty good.”
Folks took to street corners and the Presidio International Bridge with picket signs in English and Spanish. A big banner screaming, “Resist! No Wall!” went up along a busy stretch of road near the Terlingua Ghost Town. (The sign originally endorsed Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat running for Senate that year, and Will Hurd, a Republican member of Congress.)
Local artists on both sides of the border offered their spin on protest art. Yellow bumper stickers pleading folks to say “No al Muro” (“No to the Wall”) started popping up on tailgates and in bar bathrooms. In Boquillas, tourists browsing for handcrafted souvenirs could choose friendship bracelets with intertwined American and Mexican flags or beer koozies inviting the president to chinga tu muro (“f––k your wall”).
All the controversy spurred filmmaker Ben Masters to make The River and the Wall, chronicling the journey of a group of friends from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico by bike, boat and horseback. Along the way, they explore the wall’s devastating potential impacts to local wildlife, landscapes and the folks who call the region home. (By the time the film was released, Trump was near the end of his presidency and had only walled off around 20% of the border—but it struck a chord with voters on a successful festival circuit just the same.)
Longtime lovers and defenders of the Big Bend parks didn’t need a feature-length film to convince them, however. “Many, many people have put their whole careers working out here, preserving and protecting this area,” Marcos Paredes, a retired river ranger, told USA Today in 2017. “In one fell swoop, we stand to undo all of that with a border wall.”