{"id":369453,"date":"2026-07-11T13:16:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T13:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/369453\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T13:16:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T13:16:22","slug":"how-to-waste-2-6-billion-on-border-security-in-the-big-bend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/369453\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Waste $2.6 Billion on Border Security in the Big Bend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps Raymond Skiles should be relieved. A few months ago, the Trump administration was laying the groundwork to take part of his 550-acre ranch near tiny Langtry to build a border wall\u2014part of a wildly unpopular plan to wall off much of West Texas, including Big Bend National Park. But then, in March, the government backed off the proposal without explanation. Skiles, a 71-year-old retired Big Bend National Park wildlife biologist, was pleased that a thirty-foot wall wouldn\u2019t split his place. But he didn\u2019t exactly rejoice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In June, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, awarded a staggering $2.6 billion contract\u2014the largest upfront award for physical border infrastructure\u00a0 ever\u2014to build a four- to six-foot-tall steel \u201cvehicle barrier\u201d and pave new patrol roads for a 156-mile stretch from Sanderson to Lake Amistad. Fisher Sand & Gravel Co., a North Dakota\u2013based contractor with ties to the Trump administration, won the bid.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The new proposal will still tear up Skiles\u2019s land, destroying important archaeological sites<\/a> and polluting what is one of the last wild places in Texas. And if anything, the latest plans may constitute an even more pointless waste of taxpayer money than a thirty-foot wall. Skiles Ranch, like almost the entirety of the Lower Canyons stretch of the Rio Grande below the national park, is characterized by a deep river gorge, with natural canyon walls typically soaring from one hundred to three hundred feet. It\u2019s remote, harsh, and seldom trafficked by migrants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A border wall might, in theory, keep some of the small number who do cross there from entering Texas. But a vehicle barrier makes no sense for the simple reason that vehicles do not and cannot cross an impassable river gorge. As of now, smugglers have not figured out how to drive cars or trucks down vertical cliffs, across a river (or giant Lake Amistad), up vertical cliffs, and subsequently onto private property that\u2019s surveilled and patrolled by Border Patrol, enclosed within fences, and watched over by heavily armed private landowners. Why would they? There are far easier and better places to traffic drugs and people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s impossible\u201d to get a vehicle across the Rio Grande in the Langtry area, said Skiles. \u201cThere hasn\u2019t been a vehicle, since the mule-and-wagon days, come down on the Mexican side.\u201d Even if a \u201ccoyote\u201d (a smuggler) could get a car down to the river, he would then encounter fifteen to fifty feet of mud in the Langtry area\u2014the result of the muddy Rio Grande hitting the still waters of Lake Amistad, which has since receded. \u201cSo the idea of even driving across the canyon, even if you could get to the bank, is ludicrous,\u201d Skiles said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To understand this, you have to know something\u2014really, anything\u2014about the region\u2019s topography. And clearly whoever drew up the maps in Washington, D.C., does not. \u201cI know damn well nobody\u2019s even been out there to look around,\u201d Skiles told me. The whole thing has become \u201cshockingly absurd.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Skiles Ranch, sixty miles west of Del Rio, is a piece of stunning, rugged desert perched over the Rio Grande\u2019s deep chasm. Skiles is the third generation of his family to own it, after his grandparents bought the land in the 1940s. A major side canyon of the Rio Grande called Eagle Nest Canyon splits the property. This limestone enclosure holds several significant Native American pictographs, some of which are thousands of years old, as well as Bonfire Shelter,<\/a> the most southerly \u201cbuffalo jump\u201d site in North America.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Few migrants cross into Texas on foot through the ranches in the \u201cwild and scenic\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 Lower Canyons because of the remote canyon lands\u2014and it\u2019s unlikely any wall would stop those who do. (Once, on a friend\u2019s ranch just east of Langtry, near Skiles\u2019s place, we found makeshift ladders used to scale the steep cliff: willow branches lashed together with plastic bags. The border jumpers evidently used these ladders to gain access to the first major ledge, about fifty feet high, then pulled themselves hand over hand on ratty ski rope they had somehow tied around protrusions in the rock.) A vehicle barrier is even harder to justify from a border-security perspective. Anyone on foot can hop right over it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And what\u2019s the rationale for the proposed new patrol roads? Border Patrol already uses a gravel road that parallels U.S. 90 as close as a quarter mile from the Rio Grande. The agency regularly smooths the road by dragging tires behind their trucks with a chain, making a soft powdery surface that\u2019s easier for trained agents to \u201ccut for sign,\u201d i.e. look for footprints and other marks left behind by undocumented immigrants. Anyone crossing the river has to cross this patrol road to get to the highway. Fisher, the contractor, has told landowners that it plans to build roads down into the river canyon. In other words, the federal government would pay to remove a natural wall\u2014a huge cliff\u2014and replace it with a paved path.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Asked this week by Cohl Brazil, a landowner near Langtry, whether that might create a convenient ramp for migrants out of the river, Felipe Tenorio, a landowner liaison who works for Fisher, seemed unsure. \u201cThat I don\u2019t know,\u201d Tenorio said, according to audio verified by Texas Monthly. \u201cBut by building this road and building the vehicle barrier, Border Patrol is going to be able to access that whole portion and monitor it better to avoid any of these people that walk through or do whatever happens down there.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Neither Fisher nor CBP responded to requests for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Skiles is also concerned that roads down to the river would necessitate destroying the canyon itself, in an area that holds one of the greatest concentrations of ancient rock art in North America. Tenorio has conceded as much to landowners. \u201cThere will be areas that we will have to cut down . . . to be able to build the access road and the vehicle barrier,\u201d Tenorio told Brazil. He said they would work with the federal government to steer around sensitive areas. \u201cIf there\u2019s a historical marker or something out there, of course we\u2019re going to take that into consideration,\u201d Tenorio said. \u201cI mean, the intent is not to destroy anything at all like what you\u2019re talking about.\u201d (The Department of Homeland Security has waived dozens of laws protecting the environment, wildlife, and cultural resources in order to expedite border-wall construction.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Both CBP and Fischer have shared very little with the public about their plans. Landowners and local officials, including Trump-friendly Republicans, have had trouble getting information out of the Trump administration. CBP\u2019s Smart Wall map has been one of the few sources of concrete information about the Trump administration\u2019s plans for the border. Yet it has also been a catalyst for confusion and fury, due to frequent unannounced and unexplained changes. Early versions of the map indicated a physical barrier throughout much of West Texas, including in Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and along the \u201cwild and scenic\u201d stretch below the national park. In early March, amid widespread outrage across the political spectrum, including from MAGA-friendly border sheriffs, CBP changed the map without notice. In this iteration, the CBP would rely on \u201cdetection technology\u201d in place of a wall from Big Bend Ranch State Park down to Lake Amistad.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now the map shows a nearly contiguous border wall from south of El Paso down to Big Bend Ranch State Park, several sections of vehicle barrier in the national park as well as extensive new patrol roads. At Skiles\u2019s place, the map shows the barrier-and-road system cutting across the mouth of Eagle Nest Canyon in the river\u2019s floodplain before running up a one-hundred-foot cliff back toward U.S. 90.<\/p>\n

But few locals trust the information on the site. Skiles recently received a packet from CBP threatening eminent domain proceedings if he didn\u2019t agree to work with the agency. The packet included a proposed route that doesn\u2019t correspond with the Smart Wall map.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Trump administration, because it has waived dozens of federal laws, has tremendous latitude. \u201cThe plans they show on their Smart Wall map website are nonbinding,\u201d said Laiken Jordahl, the national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that has sued DHS over the border-wall waivers. \u201cThey could show up tomorrow and start building thirty-foot walls throughout the entirety of the Big Bend sector, and they don\u2019t have to notify the public. They don\u2019t have to update any of these maps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though it\u2019s uncertain when construction will start\u2014Tenorio told landowners it could begin in just sixty days\u2014in recent weeks, CBP and Fisher have been quietly trying to soothe landowners. Christian Soenen, whose family owns a 725-acre property in Comstock, near Langtry, said agency officials recently told him that they were open to putting the barrier and patrol road alongside U.S. 90 rather than closer to the river. That\u2019s good news for landowners like Soenen. Under that scenario, their property wouldn\u2019t be split in two and sensitive areas would be avoided. The family\u2019s ranch boasts a cave that has evidence of human habitation dating back six thousand to 12,000 years, as well as historically significant remnants of the transcontinental railroad that ran from New Orleans to San Francisco and was constructed in 1883. But moving the new patrol road next to the highway, with its existing adjacent patrol road, raises questions about why Border Patrol would need two patrol roads.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It also raises questions about spending. Are border-security imperatives driving the $2.6 billion Fisher contract\u2014that\u2019s about $16.7 million per mile\u2014or is the money dictating decisions about the project? Notably, the contract was awarded after CBP backed off its plans for an extensive border wall in Big Bend. In his conversations with landowners, Tenorio seems eager to talk about the company\u2019s ability to raze whole cliffs and build through flash flood\u2013prone drainages\u2014expensive engineering. But if the vehicle barrier and roads no longer cross the rugged riverside terrain and instead hug the relatively flat U.S. 90, construction costs would presumably be much less.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s just no conceivable world where $2.6 billion is going to be spent on actual construction,\u201d said Jordahl. \u201cThey scaled it back to not build wall, just vehicle barriers and roads. I feel like any competent construction firm could do that for a few hundred million dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Skiles said the opaque process, threatening legal letters from D.C., and constantly shifting plans has soured his opinion of Border Patrol. \u201cI\u2019ve long now abandoned seeking logic or just any intelligence that has to do with the local conditions,\u201d Skiles said. His family, which has lived in the Langtry area for four generations, has always had \u201ca cooperative and friendly relationship\u201d with the field agents. Illegal activity has never been a major problem at Skiles Ranch, but he appreciated having \u201cextra eyes\u201d on his property. Now he plans to tell the local Border Patrol office that they\u2019re no longer welcome to conduct routine patrols on his ranch. And he\u2019s already changed the locks on the gate.<\/p>\n

Read Next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Perhaps Raymond Skiles should be relieved. A few months ago, the Trump administration was laying the groundwork to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9720,1477,61695,1724,2116,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-369453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-big-bend","tag-border","tag-border-wall","tag-immigration","tag-politics-policy","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}