Landowner resistance forces Texas to build wall in remote areas

In December 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott traveled to South Texas to inaugurate the first 880-foot stretch of the state’s newly constructed wall on its border with Mexico.

At the press conference, with cameras zoomed tightly on him against a backdrop of the three-story high, slatted wall in Starr County, the Republican governor declared the barrier to be impenetrable. He banged a mallet on a metal beam to drive home his point.

“It’s heavy and it’s wide,” he said assuredly. “People aren’t making it through those steel bars.”

Three years and $3.1 billion later, Abbott may be right. Migrants and smugglers aren’t breaching the bars. They don’t have to, because they can walk around them.

Today, that completed segment, now 2 miles wide, is an island of metal and concrete surrounded by farmland — hardly an obstacle for migrants who have traveled sometimes thousands of miles to reach the United States.

An investigation by The Texas Tribune has identified for the first time where Texas has built its border wall, information the state keeps secret as it pours billions into the highly touted infrastructure project. It has revealed that the unprecedented foray into what has historically been a federal responsibility — Texas is the first state to build its own border wall — has so far yielded little return on billions of dollars invested.

The 50 miles constructed through November, totaling 6% of the 805 miles the state has designated for building, are far from the endless barrier Abbott often presents the wall to be in video clips he shares on social media. The wall is not a singular structure, but dozens of fragmented sections scattered across six counties, some no wider than a city block and others more than 70 miles apart. Each mile of construction costs between $17 million and $41 million per mile, depending on terrain, according to state engineers.

The Tribune also found the wall building program has been hampered by landowners on the border, who are resistant to letting the state build on their property. Since 2021, the state has asked hundreds of property owners to sign easement contracts, under which the state pays a one-time fee for the permanent rights to a strip of land to host the wall. Officials cannot seize private land for the wall like they can for other public infrastructure projects because the Legislature prohibited the use of eminent domain for the wall program.

Landowners in a third of the 165 miles the state is currently trying to secure said they were not interested in participating, the firm overseeing land acquisition wrote in a wall progress report last month. This has resulted in gaps limiting the barrier’s effectiveness in the few areas the state has built. Mike Novak, executive director of the Texas Facilities Commission, the agency in charge of the project, has said in public meetings that land acquisition is the most daunting hurdle in completing the program.

As a result, construction appears to be driven by where the state can most easily acquire land, instead of where wall would be most effective at deterring illegal crossings, said several border security experts who reviewed the Tribune’s findings. Texas has mostly built on sprawling ranches in rural areas, the Tribune found, while the experts said the priority should be urban centers where people sneaking across can easily disappear into safe houses or waiting vehicles.

“You wonder what the tactical purpose of this is,” said Adam Isacson, a regional security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy organization. “This seems to be dictated more by just who has been able to grant [Abbott] permission than anything particularly strategic because a lot of these places are very sparsely populated.”

Mike Banks, the state’s border czar, said the wall sites were chosen because the Department of Public Safety designated them as high priority. He said the rural focus is intended to help police intercept migrants who intend to sneak across the border rather than request asylum.

“Your biggest threat are those that are trying to avoid detection, and that’s happening away from the larger cities in those ranchlands where we’re building,” Banks said. “That’s the state wall.”

Of the 94 land agreements the state has secured so far, less than one-third are in the 20 most populous border cities. Some, like El Paso, already have sections of the 140 miles of wall the federal government has built in Texas over decades — most of which predate the Trump administration. But others, like Laredo — historically a hotbed of activism against border barriers — have none.

Raul L. Ortiz, retired chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, said the rural wall construction appeared to be more about sending a strong message than deterring border crossings.

“Part of the building of that infrastructure, even in the rural areas, was as much a political statement as it was a means to have an effective wall,” Ortiz said. “You’re making a statement that, hey, we’re going to do everything we can to deter and impede folks from crossing, to include building wall in areas where it may not be the most effective tool.”

Texas officials do not reveal the location of wall sections, even after they are complete, citing concerns about terrorism and related criminal activity. And they refuse to disclose the data that planners use to justify where the wall is built.

The Tribune identified current wall sections and land planned for future construction by reviewing more than 3,000 pages of state contracts and then cross-referencing that data with county appraisal district records and mapping software. Reporters confirmed these findings by inspecting almost every mile of the wall identified from those records in Val Verde, Maverick, Webb, Zapata, Starr and Cameron counties. They shared the findings with seven border security experts to review.

The state police declined to share any data that informs how they recommend construction locations. DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said in an email that the agency uses statistics on illegal crossings and smuggling operations, along with information shared by the Texas Military Department and landowners that “helps the department identify border hotspots and high-traffic areas where a border wall would have significant impact.” She did not answer seven follow-up inquiries between August and November.

Notably, the state’s ranches strategy is at odds with past efforts of wall construction by the federal government — which focused on more populous areas along the Texas border.

Novak, the facilities commission director, declined to be interviewed, citing “security restrictions.” His staff declined to answer a list of 65 written questions.

Abbott declined an interview request. His staff made Banks, the border czar, available for a 10-minute phone call. Banks praised the wall as effective, pointing to significant declines in two metrics: migrant encounters by Border Patrol and “gotaways,” a tally of border crossers who officers detected but couldn’t apprehend.

The drop in encounters began in January and has continued throughout the year — after the Mexican government increased its efforts to prevent migrants from reaching the U.S. border and the Biden administration in June barred migrants from seeking asylum if they crossed the border illegally. But encounters have decreased across all nine Border Patrol sectors on the U.S.-Mexico border, not just the three in Texas with the new state wall, U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows.

“There hasn’t been any demonstrable effect of the new border wall in terms of decreasing overall migration,” said Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University whose research focuses on immigration enforcement. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there are officials who support construction who say there’s some sort of causal relationship. But I just haven’t seen that.”

Banks said the state keeps its own migrant “gotaways” records but did not respond to four follow-up emails asking for more information. DPS said it does not track that metric. Kocher said that data is far less precise than encounters because it relies on chance observations captured via footprints, ground sensors, surveillance cameras and binoculars.

Security experts say the wall does not have to be complete to be an effective tool in policing the border. Substantial segments could funnel border crossers to gaps where police can more easily arrest them. Banks echoed this, stating that wall sections allow the state to “control much larger areas with a much smaller workforce.” But this strategy is predicated on the gaps being much smaller than the wall.

If fully completed, Texas’s border wall would exceed the distance from New York to Chicago. At the current pace, construction would take more than 30 years and cost up to $24 billion.

Only the next 40 miles of wall are funded based on the current rate of spending — though more money is expected to be allocated in the legislative session that starts in January. This leaves lawmakers in a precarious position. To stop now could mean squandering the billions of dollars already spent on a wall that today is the equivalent of a few slats in a backyard fence intended to keep out intruders. To continue would throw more money at a project that may never be completed because of landowner opposition, that relies on the political will of future governors and legislators and may not be a significant deterrent until the state has spent billions more.

The state wall begins from the west in Val Verde County, running from the Amistad Dam less than a mile along a bluff above the Rio Grande and the waving carrizo cane, until it abruptly stops.

Here, a seven-mile route identified for wall construction is made up of 76 parcels that belong to private property owners, according to a contract document published by the state. The state so far has secured land agreements for a little more than half of those parcels, from 12 individual landowners.

Of those who haven’t struck deals, five landowners interviewed by the Tribune gave various reasons for their resistance. They worry the wall would devalue their land or limit their river access for livestock. Some are simply holding out for more money.

Raul and Maria Gaona own 7 acres on Vega Verde Road that slope gently toward the Rio Grande. In 1977, Raul’s grandfather bought a large parcel along the riverbank northwest of Del Rio and divided it among five daughters. Raul, 44, recalls a childhood spent outdoors playing with cousins among grazing livestock and fruit trees. He and Maria, 42, want to leave their property to their four children, now adults.

The state wants to build the wall less than 90 yards from the Gaonas’ back door. An access road, which police could use at any time, would close that distance further. Flood lights would illuminate the wall each night. To use a 350-foot strip of the couple’s land, the state has offered the Gaonas $9,000. They said no.

For Raul and Maria, the wall would shatter the tranquility they cherish in this place. Raul likes to sip whiskey in the porch hammock and listen to music drift over from parties on the Mexican bank. He can still watch the sun set over the ridge, behind the maquiladoras in Coahuila, but in the foreground, unavoidable, is the glint of the razor wire the state strung along the road. Maria treasures coming home to her rabbits and chickens after a long day at working as a payment clerk. She dreams of raising honeybees and miniature cows, eventually a menagerie large enough to open a petting zoo.

For them, the reality of living on the border does not match the rhetoric of politicians like Abbott, who they say unfairly cast the whole border region as dangerous. Walls and razor wire add to that stagecraft, Raul said.

“You feel like you’re in some war zone,” he said. “If they start throwing up razor wire on your property and a thousand National Guard … you’re going to feel like ‘Hell, maybe I’m not safe here.’”

The Gaonas mostly support Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s multipronged border security mission which includes building the wall, busing migrants to other cities and deploying the National Guard, among other strategies. But Raul, who works in law enforcement, thinks the wall is an ineffective deterrence strategy. A more cost-effective investment, he said, would be for the state to hire more law enforcement from local communities who can be deployed to high-crossing areas as needed.

Gaona is unpersuaded by the incident in fall 2021 when about 20,000 mostly Haitian migrants crossed into Val Verde County nearly all at once, attracting national attention. He described the scene along Vega Verde Road as “organized chaos”: Hundreds of migrants who crossed there, intending to surrender and request asylum, were met at the riverbank by waiting police, processed and whisked away on buses. A wall built hundreds of feet from the river would not have changed that outcome, he said.

Some of the Gaonas’ neighbors who now live between the wall and the Rio Grande, but whose land is not on the route, are resentful of the barrier.

“What good does it do?” Dave Rosser, 84, said as he swam in the river behind his house with his yellow labrador, Tippy. The retired railroad engineer moved here in 1992, drawn like many others to a quiet life in the country. He is trying to square why the state continues to push forward with the project when he says he hasn’t seen a migrant on his land in several years.

East of the Gaonas’ property, the route laid out in contract documents shows the wall is supposed to continue 2 miles to Cienegas Creek, where it would connect with existing federal fencing that stretches to the international bridge between Del Rio and Ciudad Acuña. But the state has built nothing yet; land agreements show the state has yet to obtain a single parcel in this stretch.

The state’s project manager first warned of lagging landowner participation in February 2023 and suggested rerouting projects to get around holdouts.

“Initial concerns with landowner participation have been confirmed and the lead time needed to secure enough land access to start projects is significant,” the project manager wrote to the facilities commission. “Current projects are beginning with minimum landowner support.”

That October, Novak said in a facilities commission meeting that the issue was persisting.

“It was anticipated from the very beginning that the land agreements, the easements, would be the most significant challenge, the choke point,” he said. “And that certainly has proved to be the case.”

In its three most recent monthly reports, the project manager classified 30% of landowners the state has approached as not interested. These holdouts collectively owned 47 miles of property on the wall route. Forty-five percent of landowners were classified as certain while the remaining quarter were labeled as high or medium probability.

In Fronton, signing a land agreement for the wall was an easy decision for Eduardo Riojas’ family. Residents in the tiny Starr County community are used to the staccato sound of gunfire from across the Rio Grande in Tamaulipas, where cartels fight for control of valuable crossing routes.

Three years ago, a stray bullet struck Riojas, 83, in the hip while he slept. He nearly died; a piece of electrical tape still covers the bullet hole in the wall.

Riojas used to trudge down to the river as a boy to draw water for washing. But he has considered the bank too unsafe for years, recounting how a fisherman was shot dead near there in 2017 by bullets police believe came from Mexico.

Riojas said his family gives food and water to migrants who need it, especially women and children. But he supports the wall because while almost all are seeking a better life here, he said, a few are criminals who need to be kept out.

“It’s dangerous … because we don’t know what kind of people they are,” Riojas said.

The holdouts have not delayed construction, as the state hit its goal of 50 miles by the end of 2024. But the stubborn land acquisition issues have pushed the state to build where it can instead of where it would be most useful to law enforcement, the border security experts said.

Ranches and farms are by far the largest parcels the state has obtained agreements for, and they allow entire wall sections to be built without lining up dozens of willing landowners.

Many are also remote. The riverbank along the Le’ River Ranch, on the southern end of Maverick County, is 10 miles from the nearest settlement. The Rio Grande in Hughes Ranch, in the northern end, is three. The state spent $137 million to build 4 miles of wall there.

Victor M. Manjarrez Jr., a former Border Patrol sector chief, said walls are not meant to completely stop illegal crossings, but rather to buy time for law enforcement to make arrests.

“Someone that doesn’t belong in a rural or remote area, they stick out like a sore thumb,” Manjarrez said. “They’re ranches and farms where everyone kind of knows who each other are.”

The 5-mile stretch through Faith Ranch, which straddles the border between Webb and Maverick counties, is one of the longest completed sections so far. No part of the ranch’s river frontage is within 33 miles of the closest town. Reaching it on foot requires a trek through arid scrubland past its private airstrip.

Houston lumber tycoon J.M. West bought the property in 1932 to expand his business empire into ranching. A century later, it remains in the family owned by his great-grandson, Stuart Stedman.

Migrants have sometimes crossed the 40,000-acre ranch, Stedman said, adding that Border Patrol has come onto the property for decades whenever they needed to intercept them.

But he did not ask for a border wall. Stedman figured, rather, that the federal government would build one eventually and wouldn’t hesitate to seize the land. So when the state pitched him on its own program, he viewed it as the better option.

“It’s not like ‘Oh my gosh, look at this influx and we need a wall.’ … That’s not what happened,” said Stedman, 67. “The reason we did the wall with the state is because, like, we can deal with the state and not the feds and you’re not going to take the land?”

Stedman, one of Abbott’s largest political donors, received $1.5 million for the agreement he signed last year, a sum first reported by the Texas Observer (state officials have since redacted the individual sums paid to landowners). The Houston businessman, whom Abbott also appointed as a regent in the University of Texas System, said he asked for no preferential treatment in his dealings over the wall.

Stedman said the wall doesn’t harm his ranching or hunting on the property but it does have an ancillary benefit: keeping the whitetail deer in and Mexican cattle, who can carry an infectious tick, out.

Seventy miles downriver, there is no wall in El Cenizo.

The city begins less than 200 feet from where the Rio Grande flows languidly by, a row of houses perched on a low ridge that give way to its densely packed street grid. This is precisely the type of environment where illegal crossers can easily escape detention, the border security experts warn.

A contract between the state and the wall project manager shows a planned 9-mile section south of Laredo through El Cenizo and another small city, Rio Bravo. Appraisal district records show about 54 parcels along the route. Through November, the state had secured agreements for only 13. The Tribune found no construction on any.

Julio Rodriguez, 38, is one of nine El Cenizo landowners who have signed agreements. He was ambivalent about a wall when a land agent knocked on the door of his brick house to make the pitch for his third of an acre. He said he’s never felt endangered by migrants who have occasionally crossed his property.

“They usually don’t bother us,” Rodriguez said. “Once they get past the river, I just see them run into a car and take off.”

He viewed the wall as a business investment. With the help of a lawyer, he negotiated a fee of $81,600 for the state to build on his land — seven times the sum he originally purchased the plots for. The state has yet to start construction.

El Cenizo, a city of 2,500, is almost entirely Hispanic and has been home to working-class families, many of whom are undocumented. City leaders have not shied away from protecting them; they passed an ordinance in 1999 prohibiting city employees from disclosing residents’ immigration status and in 2017 sued Abbott over the Legislature’s ban on sanctuary cities.

The current elected officials have refused to allow the state to build wall through the city park, which occupies about half the El Cenizo riverfront. City Commissioner Daisy Perez, 28, said residents enjoy fishing and swimming there.

Perez can’t stand the thought that the state would spend tens of millions of dollars erecting a wall through the city when that money could be better spent converting their volunteer police department to a paid one or buying an ambulance.

“I would love for them to fund law enforcement over here,” Perez said. “For the fire department, we need equipment and training.”

Announcing the first completed section three years ago, Abbott said the “single reason” for Operation Lone Star was the Biden administration’s failure to secure the border. But now Joe Biden is leaving office.

Abbott has said he believes when Donald Trump is back in the White House, the federal government can finally secure the border. While Trump in 2016 promised to build a federal wall on the entire southern border, he said little about wall plans during his 2024 campaign, instead shifting his immigration focus toward mass deportations.

Texas has offered to assist, giving the incoming administration access to newly acquired land in Starr County to use as a staging ground for removals, though how much the new Republican-controlled federal government will help Texas with its wall is unclear. The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

For now, the state is proceeding as it has under Biden. Novak said the facilities commission’s next goal is to complete 100 total miles by the end of 2026.

The state has some tools to try and persuade holdouts. It can offer more money and may already be doing so: The sum the state has paid per mile of land access has quintupled, to $322,000, since the first fiscal year of the program.

Land agents can offer more flexibility on how the wall traverses a parcel or throw in perks like livestock gates and fences. Or the state can forsake the carrot for the stick and start seizing land.

The Legislature prohibited the use of eminent domain for the wall in 2021 through an amendment by two border Democrats. Co-author Eddie Morales, D-Eagle Pass, said the change was intended to respect the rights of landowners to make their own decisions about participating.

Philip Hundl, a Texas land rights attorney, said “very few” infrastructure projects where linear parcels are needed, like a highway or railroad, are built without eminent domain.

Banks, the Texas border czar, said he believes the state can complete the wall without seizing a foot of land. He said in many instances, skeptical landowners have changed their minds after seeing barriers be effective on a neighbor’s plot.

But some lawmakers aren’t willing to take that chance. Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, filed a bill for consideration in January that would allow the use of eminent domain for the border wall. He said it’s the only way to eliminate the possibility of holdouts.

“The Texas border wall will take years to complete, therefore we are rolling the dice in an extreme manner, potentially putting ourselves back where we are today if we do not take the necessary steps to protect our citizens, our sovereignty and our southern border,” Creighton said in a statement. “Texans should not wait on anyone to save us, including the federal government.”

Washington’s experience building border wall, however, shows how eminent domain is far from a panacea. The Department of Homeland Security has regularly filed condemnation cases to seize land, but the first Trump administration estimated it would need 21 to 30 months to secure parcels in South Texas, a 2020 Government Accountability Office report found.

In Trump’s first term, the federal government completed just 21 miles of new wall in Texas. Some wall building continued under the Biden administration, to finish out congressional appropriations made before he took office.

Already, Texas lawmakers and state officials are pushing the idea that Texas, under Trump, can start spending money that would otherwise pay for border security toward other priorities like transportation and health care.

Abbott has suggested he is open to scaling back Operation Lone Star once the Trump administration can ramp up and implement its immigration policies. But he has declined to share how that would affect the state’s wall construction plans.

In the meantime, the governor submitted his border security funding request to the Legislature for next session.

He wants $2.9 billion.

Disclosure: University of Texas System has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

To identify the route for the Texas border wall, which state officials keep confidential, The Texas Tribune over a six-month period reviewed more than 3,000 pages of vendor contracts, easement agreements and project manager correspondence. While many of these records are redacted, the Tribune cross-referenced parcel numbers listed in the easements with that same data in county appraisal districts, enabling reporters to map where the state had obtained land. Reporters repeated this method to link easements to construction contracts, enabling the Tribune to determine when a wall section was being built. In the few cases where parcel numbers were absent, the Tribune overlayed parcel maps in easement contracts on satellite imagery to identify their locations, or used grid coordinates listed in the easement.

The Tribune verified these findings by inspecting the wall in Val Verde, Maverick, Webb, Zapata, Starr and Cameron counties in six reporting trips between August and December. They also built a map of the wall by using all of these data sources and GIS software.

Reporters contacted 45 landowners along the wall route and interviewed nine, as well as 21 other residents and public officials in the border communities where the barrier is being built. The Tribune interviewed and shared its findings with seven experts, including two former Border Patrol leaders and five scholars.

The Tribune made extensive efforts to interview state officials. Reporters sent the investigation’s findings and maps to Texas Facilities Commission leaders. TFC Executive Director Mike Novak, citing “security concerns,” declined an interview. His staff did not answer a list of 65 questions. Then-Department of Safety Director Col. Steve McCraw did not respond to an interview request. DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen, after sending a statement that the agency uses certain statistics to identify where the wall “would have significant impact,” did not respond to seven follow-up inquiries requesting more information. Gov. Greg Abbott declined an interview, though his office made Border Czar Mike Banks available for a 10-minute phone interview. The governor’s spokesman declined the Tribune’s request for a longer interview. After the conversation, Banks did not respond to four emails with follow-up questions.