The Looming Disaster of the Border Wall in Big Bend, Texas
Last fall, loops of razor-wire fencing were strung along the Rio Grande in the Big Bend area, a remote region of far West Texas. Then, in January, residents heard rumors that a steel barrier was in the works. The wall along the southern border of the United States, whose construction began in the early nineties, under President George H. W. Bush, spans some seven hundred miles. The Big Bend region had previously been a low priority, owing to its rugged terrain and low number of illegal crossings. “There’s parts of our border [in] which it makes absolutely no sense,” the Texas senator John Cornyn said, when the idea of a Big Bend border wall was floated during the first Trump Administration. In February, a local newspaper, the Big Bend Sentinel, reported that construction was imminent. Property owners received letters warning that their land might be taken through eminent domain. Soon, survey crews showed up, bulldozers were spotted along dusty roads, and the Army Corps of Engineers arranged private meetings. The founder of a local R.V. park said that he was offered more than half a million dollars to host workers. He turned it down. “I just couldn’t do it,” he posted on social media.
The proposed wall in the Big Bend region would cost more than two billion dollars. It would intrude on the land of alfalfa farmers, cattle ranchers, river guides, and wealthy landowners. It would block the views along what National Geographic has called one of the most scenic drives in the country, and it would brighten some of the darkest night skies in the continental United States. It would impede the movement of wild animals and prevent livestock from accessing the Rio Grande, a crucial water source. It may disturb historic evidence of “the edge of the Puebloan world,” according to an archeologist who works in the region. It could disrupt tourism in a regional economy that is reliant on it. In places prone to flooding, a wall could make the problem worse. It would sever people from their neighbors in a region that’s long considered itself binational and interdependent.
It is unclear what problem a wall would solve. Big Bend is Border Patrol’s largest sector by area along the Southwest border, spanning more than five hundred miles of the Rio Grande, but it has typically had the lowest number of illegal crossings. Since 2023, apprehensions have dropped further, to fewer than two hundred per month this year. The wall is opposed by environmental groups, local sheriffs, and a far-right pro-gun YouTuber who is the region’s Republican nominee for Congress. And yet construction appears to be proceeding apace.
The construction strikes many locals as both unreasonable and unstoppable. “You’ve got desert and high mountains and rugged, rough country and no water and no roads,” Bill Ivey, the president of the Brewster County Tourism Council, told me. “The easiest part of getting to the United States would be scaling the wall. We just don’t see people cross the border out here.” Ivey, a Republican who voted for Donald Trump, has lived in the area for seventy years. A historic house built by his father is in the path of the wall. “It’s so absurd that I never really believed that it could happen, but it seems like they’re making moves to make it happen, and it just scares the hell out of me,” he said.
On a sunny day in mid-April, I drove to Terlingua to meet Billy Miller, who owns property nearby, along the potential path of the wall. Terlingua, a former mining town, sits at the edge of Big Bend National Park, and is a popular tourist destination. Vacation rentals dot the craggy hillsides like mushrooms.
Miller is a river guide whose air of competence is laced with a rebellious streak. He uses a flip phone and, in a land of pickup trucks, he drives an un-air-conditioned minivan with the radio tuned to a Mexican station broadcasting from the other side of the river. His lips were sunburned after spending three days leading a group down the Rio Grande. “The river is just hanging on by a thread, anyway—the dams, the unregulated overconsumption, the introduction of invasive species,” he told me. Water levels were low, and rafting companies had been going out of business. He worried that the razor wire would come loose and travel downstream, and that a steel wall would make the river more dangerous for boaters during periodic flash floods—not that there would be anyone left guiding tours, anyway. “We’re all going to leave,” he said. “We don’t want to do wall tours.”
I followed Miller’s van to his property in Redford, where a banner hanging on the gate read “Governor Abbott: PLEASE STOP THE BORDER WALL!! Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Miller lives in Terlingua and uses the Redford land as a place to camp, and as a put-in for river trips. He and his wife had been planning to build a cabin and retire on the property.
Like other landowners I spoke with, Miller said his understanding of where the wall would go largely came from a map on the Department of Homeland Security’s website. A dark green line marked where the government planned to build a “primary border wall system,” while an orange line indicated “detection technology” but no physical barrier. Earlier this year, the line was mostly green, meaning that a steel wall would traverse much of Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park. After sustained public outcry—“stop the steel” was one slogan—the colors on the map changed: the line crossing the national park and part of the state park was colored orange. Miller’s land, which abuts the state park, was still in the green zone. But there was pervasive uncertainty about whose land would be affected, and how. “The only way to get this information is by refreshing the website and seeing what color it is,” a frustrated landowner told me. The map has changed multiple times over the past month, and at one point was removed from the website entirely. In mid-May, the head of C.B.P. said that the administration no longer planned to build a wall within the national park. The current map indicates "technology & patrol roads" and “vehicle barrier systems” within the park’s boundaries, and a steel wall elsewhere in the region, including parts of the state park.
Miller drove past a thicket of mesquite and parked on a bluff with patchy, sun-bleached grass. The Rio Grande was twenty feet away, shining between stalks of river cane. Though many people come to far West Texas for its isolation—the Unabomber’s slightly less reclusive brother did a stint here in the eighties, living at first in a crude underground shelter—Miller said that immigration-enforcement agents have been an intrusive presence for many years. “In the Obama days, they deported a lot of our friends out here—people who were raised in Terlingua,” he said. During the second Trump Administration, the federal government sent the military to the area; for a little while, there was a Stryker tank parked across from his property. On multiple occasions, he said, he’d found game cameras that border patrol had hidden in trees, to keep an eye out for illegal activity. (A spokesperson for C.B.P. noted that the agency was entitled to patrol on private lands within twenty-five miles of the border, and said that “when installing technology such as cameras on private property, the Border Patrol coordinates directly with the landowner. That was done in this case.” Miller said the agents had not coördinated with him.)
As Miller relayed this story, the sound of a vehicle coming down the dirt road interrupted him. “Here we go,” he said, rolling his eyes. A green-striped Border Patrol vehicle pulled up, and two agents got out, both wearing sunglasses and black tactical vests. “Just seeing if you guys are O.K.,” one said. (The agents declined to give their names.)
“We’re just talking about how they’re trying to build the border wall . . . and it’s supposed to basically steal all our property,” Miller said brightly, a glimmer of anger in his voice.
“Yeah, unfortunately, it’s gonna happen—” the agent started to say.
“It’s not going to happen,” Miller said. “Not if we can do anything about it.”
Building the wall in the area was “unfortunate,” the agent conceded, but it would help stop child sex trafficking. “Nobody wants that, right?” he said.
“Is it worth billions of dollars to stop a handful of people?” Miller asked.
“If it stops one child from getting sex trafficked, yeah, for me, it is,” the agent said stiffly. “We’re trying to make a difference.”
“It’s going to make a difference,” Miller said bitterly. “Like, the most horrible difference you can imagine.”
After the agents drove off, Miller walked down to the riverbank and stood looking out at the Rio Grande. It was a muddy green and moving quickly after some recent rain. Miller’s dog, Koozie, waded in the water up to her belly. Lately, the wall had been appearing in his dreams, Miller said. Sometimes he was on the river and the wall blocked him from reaching the shore, and sometimes he was on land and couldn’t find his way to the water. I asked him what he thought was going to happen. “I think they’re going to build the wall,” he said.
That afternoon, I drove upriver, past anti-wall signs that repurposed older political slogans: “Come and Take It”; “Don’t Tread on Me.” By the side of the road, I spotted checkerboard squares—survey points used by drones when conducting aerial mapping. In Ruidosa, a tiny farming community about fifty miles from Redford, I pulled over near a pen of small, frisky goats. The property owner, Jorge González, came out to say hello; he had a gray-flecked mustache and an easy manner. González told me that he had spent the past decade working on several hundred acres of arid land and turning it into this improbable desert farm. He gave me a quick tour of his collection of cows, chickens, mules, goats, and sheep. Some shaggy buffalo drowsed in a patch of shade, and a hose fed water into a large puddle where a white goose paddled in tight circles.
González had been informed that the wall would pass directly behind his house, effectively cutting his land in two. He picked up a stick and drew lines in the dirt to show me how it had been explained to him: a thirty-foot-tall steel barrier, with a road on either side. Patrol vehicles, bright lights. The initial compensation offered was five thousand dollars. González didn’t accept, but he worried that the wall might be built across his land, anyway. When he’d told an Army Corps official over the phone that a bisected farm would no longer be able to support his animals, he was told he should pen his cattle instead of letting them roam free. He laughed softly at the idea, which struck him as entirely impractical: in arid West Texas, a single cow typically needs at least twenty acres of rangeland to graze. “It’s easy for those guys behind those computers to say, but it’s not that easy over here. This is real life,” he said.
While Senator Cornyn seemed unconvinced of the utility of a Big Bend wall during the first Trump Administration, he is in the midst of a tough primary battle with Texas’s hard-right attorney general, Ken Paxton, and has been silent on the matter this time around. The Center for Biological Diversity has sued the Department of Homeland Security, arguing that its efforts to bypass environmental regulations to speed up construction are unconstitutional. (Miller is a party in the lawsuit.) But some people were skeptical that litigation would halt construction. “The way this government handles things, they plow ahead anyway, even if there’s a lawsuit,” a landowner who stands to lose several hundred acres told me. “They’ll just worry about it after there’s a wall.” Hundreds of miles downriver from the Big Bend, in the Rio Grande Valley, wall construction has been proceeding at a rapid pace, threatening areas—a historic chapel, a wildlife refuge, a state park, the National Butterfly Center—that had previously been protected by Congress.
In West Texas, some locals were hopeful that the exigencies of life in a rural area, where recordkeeping can be rudimentary and property boundaries aren’t always clear, might stymie the project, at least for a little while. David Keller, a co-founder of No Big Bend Wall, a community coalition, said that he had recently received a phone call from a man with the Army Corps of Engineers requesting permission to survey his land in Redford. “I had to correct him: ‘No, sir, I don’t own all that land, there are these little tiny parcels that run all the way to the river, and you’ll have to get permission from everyone.’ People are getting letters with the wrong names, or with the wrong parcels, which is great, because that bodes well for delay.” Small-town social pressure could be a useful tool, too. Recently, a former local official faced swift backlash online after he seemingly entertained the idea of allowing construction crews to use land owned by his company, Keller told me. (The former official denied that planned work on the property was related to the border wall.) “There is no one here speaking for the wall. If they did, the community would come down and crush them. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. And even though I preach all this high-road stuff, this is too important—I’m telling everyone, do not let your neighbors turn on you. We cannot tolerate turncoats. Rat them out. Shame them,” he said, smiling grimly. “This is how community works.”
In April, the Jeff Davis County commissioners court, the local governing body, met to consider a wall-related proposal. The county is majority Republican, but the general sentiment was strongly opposed to a border barrier. Outside the courthouse, a pickup truck had a canoe lashed to its roof, “NO WALL” painted in red on one flank. Inside, the crowd was impassioned but courteous; even the river guides had tucked in their shirts.
On the agenda was a seemingly innocuous item: proposed repairs to Chispa Road, an unpaved road that, owing to its proximity to the Rio Grande, would likely be used for wall construction. But first, some improvements would be necessary. In a region of rough roads, Chispa is among the roughest. About fifteen years ago, a couple of truck-enthusiast friends of mine took it upon themselves to drive the length of it, some sixty miles. They set off near dawn, loaded up with snacks and tools, and didn’t finish until near sundown. On the drive home, they were stopped by a Border Patrol agent who “was kind of flummoxed by the whole operation,” one of them told me.
In late March, Yolanda Alvarado was driving her Ford F-350 near her family’s cattle ranch when she saw a road crew—an odd sight in such a remote spot. “I played dumb and asked them if they were from the county,” Alvarado told me. “I knew they weren’t from the county, because they had nice, shiny equipment.” The workers told her they were there to improve Chispa Road, to help make way for the wall. They were subcontractors for the Montana-based company Barnard Construction, which had recently been awarded border-barrier contracts totalling more than four billion dollars. “They said, by the time they were done, it was going to be a highway,” Alvarado said.
Alvarado’s video of the construction crew went viral. The county, it turned out, had not been consulted on, or approved of, the road work. The company temporarily halted the work and offered to repair the road at no cost to the county, characterizing the work as a gift. At the commissioner’s court meeting, area residents universally condemned the idea, variously calling it a Trojan horse, a foothold, a wasp’s nest, and a bribe. Some framed their opposition to the road improvements, and by extension the wall, in the language of cross-border unity. “It’s all connected. We are all woven into the same regional cloth,” a former state-park employee said. Others seemed more offended by the idea of the federal government encroaching on local control. “I also can’t help but wonder what Jefferson Davis might think of some of this stuff that’s happening now,” one man said. “As far as I’m concerned, if they’re going to build this thing against our will, they can do it commuting back and forth on our crappy dirt roads, like everybody else,” a woman said.
In the end, the commissioners voted to table the decision, citing liability concerns. The day before, neighboring Presidio County had postponed a discussion on whether to allow work on Chispa Road, having asked the company (or D.H.S.) to track down land titles to confirm ownership and property boundaries before proceeding. “ I’m not sure that y’all know what your county road actually consists of,” a Presidio County commissioner told the Jeff Davis County commissioners. “We sure as hell don’t.”
Afterward, Keller stopped to chat with Alvarado at a sandwich shop. “I really think we have a chance,” he said. Without Chispa, they can’t get it started.” The two had never met before the news about the wall, but they had recently discovered a connection: years ago, Keller, an archeologist, had scouted for artifacts and dinosaur bones on Alvarado’s family’s ranch. All morning, Keller had been swinging between optimism and despair. Chatting with Alvarado seemed to bolster his spirits. “People come here for a reason. They love it, and they make it work,” he said. “They may have all the money, they have all the attorneys, but we have a passion for this place.” ♦
