These border sheriffs felt abandoned by Biden. Now Trump wants to blast a wall through their backyard.
Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson moves through the world like he’s playing the sheriff in a movie. As the top cop in Texas’ largest county, he’s built a colorful local reputation for his flashy high-speed chases and Wild West-style shootouts. Even at age 64, he towers over six feet tall and has trunk-like arms that test the limits of the stitching on his uniform. His easy charm and borderlands drawl have made him something of a media darling, clipped by reporters from all over the world for controversial tough-on-crime antics like making inmates at the county jail wear hot pink jumpsuits.
Technically he’s a Democrat, though no kind of Democrat legible to anyone raised north of the Mason-Dixon line. He is the proprietor of his county’s singular gun shop and collects old-school single-action firearms—he is not a fan of the AR-15, virally popular with a younger set of Second Amendment enthusiasts. “If a 12- or 13-year old can build it, it’s not a quality weapon,” he reasons.
In today’s hyper-polarized political climate, one might be surprised to find out that a man like Dodson has been speaking out in the national press against Trump’s push to build a border wall from sea to shining sea. Ever since the Big Bend Sentinel broke the story last month that landowners in neighboring Presidio County had been contacted by federal contractors seeking leases for border wall construction, Dodson has been telling anyone who will listen that a wall through his county could destroy the local economy—and potentially make law enforcement on the border more difficult.
He’s not alone. On Tuesday, Big Bend Sentinel also received the draft of a statement signed by Dodson alongside Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland, Presidio County Sheriff Danny Dominguez and Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West—all native sons of the Trans-Pecos—urging federal authorities to consult with them before building physical border security infrastructure.
The Sentinel sat down with Dodson and Cleveland last week to talk about their long careers in law enforcement—and their fears for the future of the region.
“The only thing that will stop them is a dinosaur”
Dodson is just as much in the dark about the border wall project brewing in South Brewster County as anyone else, including Congressman Tony Gonzales, who had a direct role in carving out $46.5 billion for wall construction last summer as a member of the House Appropriations Committee. The two men texted back and forth last week about the meaning of the term “Smart Wall”—which has been thrown around in the press since Trump took office in January 2025.
Dodson told Gonzales that he’d made a traffic stop on some out-of-towners who turned out to be border wall engineers and decided to seize the opportunity to get more information. “Nobody’s been able to tell me what a ‘Smart Wall’ actually is,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) touts the “Smart Wall” as a holistic approach to border security that includes “a steel bollard wall or waterborne barrier, along with roads, detection technology, cameras and lighting and in some cases a secondary wall.” (No one in Washington has yet clarified when or where any of these projects will break ground in Texas.)
Back in October, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem filed the first of two waivers aimed at fast-tracking wall construction and border security upgrades in Customs and Border Protection’s Big Bend Sector, a giant area that includes the Permian Basin, Texas Panhandle and the entire state of Oklahoma. Noem’s posting in the Federal Register waived a laundry list of laws requiring the government go out for bids and negotiate with contractors with transparency.
By the time a second waiver was published on February 17—this time flouting more than two dozen environmental and cultural resource protection laws—many landowners along the river in Presidio County had been contacted by a swarm of engineers and contractors, but no requests for proposals or contracts were posted online through the typical public channels.
As a result, the only people who appear to have any information from top brass at DHS about the project are the contractors themselves. The engineers Dodson pulled over confirmed that they were working on a physical wall, backed up by a giant purchase order for steel to El Paso the day before a draft of Noem’s latest environmental waiver was publicly released. Dodson started to suspect that the “Smart Wall” was doublespeak for a good-old-fashioned steel-bollard wall—in other words, a “dumb wall.”
The contractor left him with a chilling message. “He said the only thing that will stop them is a dinosaur—if they find a dinosaur or gravesites, they can’t build there,” Dodson said.
Dodson was especially perplexed by the government’s insistence on building a physical wall in the Big Bend given the technology available to law enforcement. “I have 250 cameras out in the field, and I catch things you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “I wasn’t a fan of Big Brother until I became sheriff, but Big Brother is here.”
Big Brother is big money in Brewster County. The Brewster County Sheriff’s Office is a longtime participant in Operation Stonegarden, a federal border security grant program first launched by the Bush administration in 2005. The steady stream of cash has made even the poorest and most remote counties attractive markets for defense contractors offering a dizzying array of dystopian technology from robotic K-9 Border Patrol agents to unmanned surveillance aircraft that can track groups of migrants for hours.
Dodson has been sheriff for 25 years, so he’s had a front row seat to major migration waves over the past several presidential administrations, including a large influx in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. At the time, he felt frustrated by what felt like a lack of support from the federal government. “We were getting hammered,” he said. “I’m talking groups of a hundred or more at a time.”
During the peak of this migration event, the BCSO was apprehending upwards of 200 people a month for crossing the border illegally—or helping others do so. Now, that number is down to virtually zero. Dodson told NBC News last week that he’d only caught one smuggler in the past three months. Those record low numbers are thanks in part to deployment of over 500 active duty military personnel to the Big Bend, the region’s first since a Presidio High School student Esequiel Hernandez, Jr. was killed in Redford by a Marine patrolling the border in 1997.
Nearly 30 years later, the vast majority of military keeping watch over the border here in the Big Bend are not deputized as law enforcement and instead serve in “support and intelligence roles” alongside the Border Patrol. Folks in small-town Alpine tend to be a patriotic and friendly bunch, so Dodson hadn’t heard of any complaints from locals about their presence—only that the deployment is taking up so much space in area hotels it’s begun to squeeze out the tourists.
Dodson worried that the wall project was just another example of how local communities are being asked by the federal government to sacrifice tourism profits (a $56.8 billion dollar business, per Big Bend National Park) to security theater. The millions of dollars his department has raked in over the years for border security has done little to make Alpine an attractive place for people to live and work, and now there’s literally no room at the inn. “We’re not doing ourselves any favors,” he said. “In the 1980 phone book, we had 28 restaurants in Alpine. Now if you want a steak dinner, you have to go to the Reata because Spicewood is closed at night.”
In 2012 Dodson and Presidio County Sheriff Danny Dominguez were invited to tour the wall in Naco, Arizona, where the border cuts a straight line across open desert. The two were traveling in a caravan of other border sheriffs and got the chance to meet ranchers from Cochise County, one of the few places outside the state of Texas where land along the border is privately owned.
There, a rancher took them to see a curious sight: drag marks that seemed to come out from underneath the wall. “The cartel guys had made a cut and when they needed to get stuff through, they took a floor jack and pushed the wall up,” he explained. “The Border Patrol didn’t even know about it.”
As a lawman, that was all Dodson needed to see. Walls made sense to him in urban environments, but it was clear that out in the middle of nowhere they did virtually nothing to make the border a safer place to live and work.
Something else that radicalized him: he’d assumed the border wall would be built on the actual border. Because it is entirely maintained and paid for by the United States government, crews need legal access to service the south-facing side of the wall on American soil — effectively ceding a hundreds-of-miles-long skinny strip of land to the Republic of Mexico. If the wall came to Brewster County, which experiences flooding events almost every summer, they’d have to build it even farther away from the actual border, creating an even-larger exclusion zone of land technically on American soil that Americans can’t easily access.
Dodson has a unique perspective on the anger many folks in South Presidio County are feeling about the potential seizure of their property because of his family history. Last month, he spoke at the Big Bend Natural History Association’s annual Pioneer Days celebration, which celebrates the stories of the ranchers who were kicked out of what is now Big Bend National Park during World War II.
The Big Bend has changed so much since the park was established in 1944 that it’s easy to forget there was a time where local people resented the National Park Service and the term “federal government” was a slur. Dodson doesn’t have the luxury of forgetting that public access to one of Texas’ most cherished landscapes was the result of bitter pain and sacrifice on behalf of dozens of Brewster County families.
A bit of his rebelliousness, Dodson reckons, comes from his great-grandparents, Harve and Minnie, who raised 12 children in the shadow of the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains. Avid hikers may recognize his last name as the namesake of the Dodson Trail, which winds through the desert between the Chisos and the Sierra Quemadas. Every year, hundreds of people who brave the park’s premiere backpacking route stop and rest in the shade at the ruins of the old Dodson Ranch—likely unaware that the Dodsons are still very much a part of local life, despite being forced by the feds to abandon their homestead.
As opposition to the wall mounts, he worries about having to turn against his own people, whose anger he keenly understands. “We’re not trying to get our local people in trouble for anything,” he said. “But once [the wall] goes up, there’s not much they can do beyond taking a cutting torch to it.”
“We’re still using our God-given skills”
Dodson isn’t alone in his quest to get the Trump administration to reconsider their wall project. Next door in Terrell County, Air Force veteran, former Border Patrol agent-in-charge and current Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland has set up his office as an ad-hoc TV studio. He feels a little undignified being a 52-year-old man concerned with things like ring lights and camera angles—“I despise social media,” he professes, though he has 44,000 followers on Facebook—but he thinks it’s important to be a voice for a region and a line of work few people in the United States really understand. (His kids frequently call him and tell him it’s time to turn his comments off.)
Over the past three years, Cleveland has become a frequent guest on FOX News, offering his thoughts on everything from the killing of Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis to the ouster of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces. He’s spent much of his life in the tiny town of Sanderson—population 664—but a national audience seems to find his insight on global issues fascinating.
Now, he’s facing one of the trickiest communication challenges of his career: explaining to millions of staunch conservatives how a man whose political beliefs generally line up with President Trump’s could vehemently oppose his big beautiful wall. “This should not be a partisan issue,” Cleveland wrote in an online statement to his followers. “A wall accompanied by stadium lighting and an extensive road network would permanently alter one of the last truly unspoiled stretches of borderland in the country.”
Cleveland is something of a collector, and his office is decked out with piles of challenge coins and arrowheads. His walls display photos and memorabilia from his long career with the Mean Green, commemorating tough days on the job and fallen buddies. As a younger man he served out of the notorious Nogales Station in Arizona, which at that time was “Ground Zero” for the Border Patrol. “We were catching a thousand people a day and leading the nation in drug seizures,” he said. “But like every Texan I had to get back home.”
Cleveland joined the Border Patrol in 1996, on the cusp of an important generational shift. Operation Hold the Line had just kicked off a few years prior in El Paso, changing the institutional goal of the Border Patrol from law enforcement to “prevention through deterrence.” The first steel bollards went up in the border city around the same time—the first in Texas—pushing migrant traffic deeper into the desert, where many perished.
After 9/11, the Border Patrol was folded into the brand-new Department of Homeland Security and pumped with massive amounts of money, fundamentally changing the job. In the new DHS era of Predator drones and Flock cameras, the Big Bend Sector is one of the few places the majority of agents still do the kind of fieldwork they’ve done since they were chasing moonshiners through the desert during Prohibition. “We’re still using our God-given skills—that’s looking for signs, looking for tracks, looking for broken branches,” he explained. “When you’re out in the brush tracking people, there’s times you can’t find them because they’re hidden, but you’ll start smelling them.”
In the age of $60,000 signing bonuses, record-high DHS funding hasn’t had much of an impact on the day-to-day experiences of Border Patrol agents in Cleveland’s neck of the woods. Being stationed in a place like Sanderson has its drawbacks. “If you come here as a single man or woman, you’re probably not going to meet your future spouse here,” he explained. “We don’t even have a grocery store. You can get the bare essentials, but it’s a tough place to live.”
Despite the drawbacks of isolation, that kind of on-the-ground work provides a rush like no other for those who are inclined toward the outdoors. “I’ve been shot at, I’ve been in fights, I’ve been in pursuit. That’s the fun stuff,” he said. “The hard stuff is when you have to catch women or children or you go to recover somebody’s remains.”
Cleveland was born to teenage parents who struggled with addiction. Legally speaking, he was raised by his grandmother, but he considers the entire town of Sanderson responsible for raising him right. “Every family treated me as if I was one of their own,” he said.
So when he got the news that former Terrell County Sheriff and fellow ex-BPA Santiago Gonzalez had suddenly passed away from a heart attack, he knew he had to step up. “I like to say that I really should still be a Border Patrol agent, but God had different plans,” he said. “It was time for me to take care of my community in a different way.”
Shortly after, his photo went up in the Terrell County Courthouse, just a few rows down from David Lawrence Anderson, who rode with outlaw Billy the Kid during the Lincoln County War and was arrested at the Siege of Stinking Springs. Anderson cleaned up his act around the turn of the 20th century, eventually becoming a customs inspector and the sheriff of Terrell County, where he was shot and killed in 1918 after responding to a call at a local saloon.
Cleveland’s entrée into a line of sheriffs so wild Hollywood couldn’t write them didn’t sever his ties to the Border Patrol. His first day on the job in 2022, he was called to respond to a gut-wrenching scene with some of his old coworkers: a young man traveling with a group of migrants developed heat stroke, which can make sufferers irritable and combative. The coyotes, or guides, told his mother he’d have to calm down or they’d be forced to leave him behind so he wouldn’t betray everyone else’s location.
The boy’s mother couldn’t talk sense into her rapidly deteriorating son, so the entire group held him down while the coyotes forced her to strike him in the head with a rock in hopes of knocking him unconscious. (He died at the scene—not from the heat stroke or the blunt-force trauma, but from the weight of his traveling companions.)
Even after a long career of tracking down people in desperate situations, telling the story still makes Cleveland feel sick. “I don’t care if you’re a good guy, a bad guy, legal or illegal—you’re still somebody’s son, daughter, husband, brother,” he said.
Though President Trump has claimed that there have been zero illegal border crossings during his tenure, Cleveland is still catching folks—and posting their unblurred photos online, a controversial practice he says he partakes in to help families across Latin America find missing loved ones.
Few can make it through his county without a guide or a smuggler. Those still attempting to cash in on crossing the border during Trump’s second term might as well be characters in a millennial reimagining of Les Miserables—one of Cleveland’s few human smuggling arrests last year was of a 24-year-old father of three with no permanent address who reported to Operation Lone Star’s indigent defense program that he worked 72 hours a week for DoorDash in Dallas.
In a county as small as his, every agency has to pull their weight. There are only seven beds in the county jail, which is laid out in such a way that it can only house inmates of the same gender. (If a traffic stop yields both a male and female perp, usually Sheriff Dodson comes over from Alpine to take one of them off of Cleveland’s hands.)
Just a few weeks ago, Cleveland and his team assisted the Border Patrol’s tactical search and rescue unit (BORSTAR), Texas Parks and Wildlife game wardens and several small-town emergency departments in a daring cave rescue after a scientist studying an underground river was struck in the head by a falling rock, fracturing her skull.
Terrell County is remote and rugged in a way that few Americans elsewhere can conceptualize. Cleveland is concerned that the wall could slow glacial emergency response times down even further—if folks are somehow still able to access the river but have to contend with finding and unlocking gates to get out in an emergency, that could spell trouble.
The only reason anyone ever books a trip to Dryden, Texas—an unincorporated town of around a dozen people in Terrell County—is because it is the take-out point for the Lower Canyons, an 83-mile trip down the Rio Grande widely considered bucket-list boating and one of America’s premiere floats. These folks are willing to spend serious cash: the National Park Service estimates that each visitor who makes the odyssey from La Linda to Dryden generates eight times as much local economic benefit as the average car-bound Big Bend National Park guest.
In 2013, Cleveland spent five days in the Lower Canyons on a river trip that included former National Park Service River Ranger Michael Ryan and Liz Rogers, one of the Big Bend’s most beloved lawyers. “She was a public defender at the time, and I’d never met her before—I thought, ‘Man, I’m being set up,’” Cleveland quipped. (Ryan took Cleveland to task for consistently mixing up the verbs ‘paddling’ and ‘rowing.’)
The crew hit it off so well that Cleveland still raves about the trip to anyone who will listen. Seeing the canyon country in his own backyard for the first time from the river—in the company of interesting strangers and a cooler full of cold beer—changed his life. “We’re American citizens, you know—we have freedom to do what we want, and certainly one of those freedoms is to be able to put a canoe in the water and float down the river,” he said. “Every American should have that opportunity if they want to take it.”
He can’t imagine what it would feel like to look up at a giant steel wall next to the river on the Texas side. “When you take the trip now, you can admire both sides,” he said. “When the wall gets built, you’ll only be able to admire Mexico.”