The U.S.-Mexico border, the wall and the thousands of acres between them
In the fields south of this farm town, unfinished segments of the U.S. border wall jut from the ground with gaps between them as wide as a house.
The steel structures, painted jet black at the order of Donald Trump when he was president, are the largest objects for miles around, looking more like an abstract art project than instruments of U.S. national security.
Scrawled on one of the panels is the date they were installed: 1-13-21. One week before President Joe Biden took office and brought construction to a halt.
Trump is campaigning as the Republican nominee for president on a vow to finish the project that fueled his first White House run in 2016 and has animated his rallies ever since. Polls show there is more public support for the border wall than ever. But a resumption of major construction would contribute to a peculiar issue with the barrier in South Texas.
The U.S.-Mexico border is defined in Texas by the Rio Grande, but the government does not install 30-foot-tall steel barriers in the middle of a river, let alone on its looping, unstable banks. So the border wall in South Texas isn’t built on the border.
At some locations, the wall has been placed as far as two miles away from the Rio Grande, leaving thousands of acres in the liminal space between the border and the barrier.
The land is mostly farms and fields, but there are homes, historic churches and entire neighborhoods essentially cut off from the rest of the United States. A Washington Post analysis of U.S. Customs and Border Protection planning documents shows that the completion of the wall in the lower Rio Grande Valley would leave more than 100 square miles of U.S. territory — an area five times the size of Manhattan — on the wrong side of the divide.
The other side of the wall can be a lonely place. “We’re kind of abandoned here,” said Cesar Ortiz, 75, whose backyard edges up against the barrier near the historic Jackson ranch and cemetery, settled by a Union loyalist and his African American wife who helped enslaved people escape to Mexico.
Here as elsewhere in Texas, the Border Patrol has installed gates allowing agents and landowners to pass through the wall. But Ortiz says he still feels as if he’s living in a place that isn’t quite part of the United States, left on the same side of the barrier as the traffickers who sometimes cross the river after dark.
“I would feel safer if the wall were closer to the border,” Ortiz said.
The Rio Grande Valley has been the busiest corridor for illegal crossings for much of the past decade. Securing the border with a wall is a challenge when the border is a meandering waterway.
Border Patrol officials say the steel barrier is a valuable tool even though it’s not at the physical boundary: It may not stop smugglers and migrants, but it slows them down and gives U.S. agents more time to respond. And it allows the Border Patrol to introduce roads, sensors and surveillance cameras into areas that have long been inaccessible.
“The border wall is not intended to be 100 percent foolproof,” said Alberto Olivares, a 26-year Border Patrol veteran now running as a Republican candidate for sheriff of Starr County, whose communities are among the most isolated of the Rio Grande Valley. “But we should build it where it makes sense to build it,” he said supporting CBP plans. “And we should have done it years ago.”
Biden pledged during his 2020 campaign for president that he would not build “another foot” of border wall and froze construction on his first day in office. Since then, his administration has added some barriers in South Texas as part of levee repair work.
In March, a federal court in Texas sided with the state’s Republican leaders and ordered the administration to resume border wall construction using funds that were specifically allocated for that purpose before Biden became president. CBP officials have outlined plans for about 19 miles of new border wall in the lower Rio Grande Valley, but construction has yet to resume.
The amount is significantly less than the 86 miles that Trump would build to completely wall off the lower Rio Grande Valley. Vice President Kamala Harris, who became the Democratic presidential nominee after Biden ended his reelection campaign July 21, has not specifically addressed the barrier plans, but her campaign has endorsed a border funding bill that would facilitate some new construction.
CBP ranks several areas in the lower Rio Grande Valley as top priorities for more wall construction, including parts of Starr County, the last section in the region with relatively few barriers. The county has long had a reputation for drug smuggling and illegal crossings.
Starr lacks the federally built river levees that gave construction crews an obvious path for the wall in the counties farther downriver. To build in Starr, the government will have to purchase or seize land from hundreds if not thousands of property owners. Many property claims, some dating to 18th-century Spanish land grants, have never been formalized.
As Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) began building limited segments of border barrier in Starr, state officials were also slowed by tangled or missing land records.
Trump faced such a headache during his presidency that he ordered aides to “take the land” and told them he would pardon anyone who broke the law. He placed his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of wall construction and directed the Army Corps of Engineers to paint the wall black.
Much of the border wall controversy in the lower Rio Grande Valley died down after Trump lost the 2020 election. His possible return to the White House has some landowners back on edge.
Barbara Barnett, 84, said she would have to leave the home where she’s lived for 30 years if the wall was built through her property along the border. She runs a private wildlife refuge she calls El Rio Park, renting day-use sites to visitors who come to fish and barbecue along the riverbanks.
“I fell in love with the beauty of the river,” said Barnett. “Why would I want to live here if the wall is built?”
With temperatures topping 100 degrees on a recent afternoon, Barnett sat outdoors on a shaded patio with a Dean Koontz novel and a dog pack: Popo, Troubles, Chiquita and Killer, a Chihuahua. A pink inflatable pool helped her stay cool.
Barnett said her husband, Larry, passed away in 2023. He never finished building their resort. “He was a dreamer,” she said.
Over the years, Barnett said, she has seen drug traffickers passing through, migrants drowning in the river and once a black bear rumbling up the banks.
“When you live along the border, you see everything,” she said. “I don’t care how big a fence they build, or how many miles long it is — if people want to get across, they’ll get across.”
One project, two border walls
Trump added 458 miles of new barriers at a cost of more than $11 billion, but construction was so uneven that he ended up building two border walls, not one.
In New Mexico, Arizona and California, the government laid down hundreds of miles of new wall in neat straight lines through the desert, mostly on public land. A federal easement along the border dating to the Theodore Roosevelt administration facilitated the work.
That was the low-hanging fruit of border wall construction.
The project in Texas was different. The Rio Grande forms roughly two-thirds of the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border. The land along the river has long been valuable — unlike most of the borderland farther west — because it has water access. Many parcels in Texas consist of narrow slivers of land running perpendicular to the river, allowing owners to draw water for cattle or crops.
To create a wall along the border, the government has to chart a path across every strip of land.
“These walls would cut off almost the entire Rio Grande Valley from the Rio Grande,” said Scott Nicol, an art instructor in McAllen who has led opposition to the project for the Sierra Club and other organizations. “Landowners will see their property condemned, and residents will be cut off from the river that, in all cases, was the reason for the founding of their towns.”
The barriers inflict “tremendous damage upon communities, landowners and the environment,” Nicol said, urging the government to remove them.
Other critics note that the barriers in Texas have done little to deter illegal entries. Migrants who cross the river can easily reach U.S. soil, where they are eligible to request asylum under U.S. immigration law. Border Patrol agents take migrants into custody after they cross, then drive them through gates in the wall.
In recent months, the border has been quieter than at any point in years. Illegal crossings in the Rio Grande Valley have plunged more than 90 percent since reaching a peak of more than 81,000 per month in the summer of 2021, the latest CBP statistics show.
U.S. authorities attribute the change to new legal and bureaucratic barriers rather than physical ones. Mexico has carried out a crackdown on migrants transiting its territory, and Biden issued emergency measures this year that effectively deny those who cross illegally access to the U.S. asylum system.
Shifting politics
The Rio Grande Valley is not a valley per se, but a flat, wide delta leading to the Gulf of Mexico. Construction in its floodplain is regulated by decades of U.S.-Mexico treaties and water-sharing agreements. The area is vulnerable to hurricanes because it is so close to the gulf.
Engineers say the risk of building a wall closer to the Rio Grande — and therefore closer to the border — is that debris could pile up against the structure and obstruct the flow of water during a major flood. The accumulating force could cause the barrier to collapse and float away, sending tons of steel and concrete hurtling downriver.
Keen to avoid this and bound by international treaties, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers builds on higher ground, not at the water’s edge. The Rio Grande curves and doubles back on itself, and because the barrier requires a straighter path, it is built at a distance from the riverbanks.
Mark Barnard, owner of the River Bend Resort and Golf Club outside Brownsville, Tex., said his brother used to perform a trick: driving a ball from his green that would sail over Mexico and land back in the United States.
The levee running through Barnard’s property parallel to the river is one of the few places in the area that does not have a border wall. Closing the 1.5-mile gap would sever the resort, leaving dozens of homes on the other side of the barrier. Property values would crash.
But Barnard says he sees smugglers sometimes run drugs across the river through the golf course, dashing to a pickup spot along the highway nearby.
“I don’t want the wall, but I can’t be selfish,” Barnard said. “I know about the drug-trafficking problems affecting the rest of the country.” He said he’d prefer for the wall to be built along the banks at the edge of his fairways.
Barnard’s evolving views mirror a broader shift in the Rio Grande Valley.
Its majority-Hispanic counties had long been a reliable stronghold for the Democratic Party, but support for Republican candidates surged as illegal border crossings soared. In 2016, Trump won 19 percent of the vote in Starr County, which is 96 percent Hispanic. In 2020, he received 47 percent.
Richard Sanchez, 69, a writer and retired nurse in McAllen who enjoys fishing along the river, said the wall remains “a conundrum” for border communities despite its environmental toll.
“At the beginning, everybody was against it, but as time has gone by, and more and more immigrants have been coming, there is more talk about how it can help,” Sanchez said. “People are saying we need it and we want it.”
From farms to buffer zone
Some of the Americans who have been left in the space between the border and the wall are poor or elderly residents. Economic marginalization has become physical, too.
Arturo Muñoz, a 77-year-old Vietnam veteran, lives alone with his dog Bear in a house south of the wall a half-mile from the Rio Grande. He has no neighbors.
Resting in the shade of his patio beside a whirring swamp cooler on a sweltering day, Muñoz said he has refused offers from the government to buy his land. The former refinery worker doesn’t want to leave the home he bought for retirement, and where he has lived for 20 years.
He comes and goes through a gate the government installed for him last year. The Border Patrol always leaves it open, he said, so it hasn’t caused him any problems.
“But if they decide to close it and don’t give me a code,” said Muñoz, “I’ll have to go raise hell.”
The push for barrier construction in South Texas has been part of a broader land-use change. Farms are disappearing or going fallow, transforming fertile land along the river into a depopulated buffer zone for federal law enforcement.
Decades of drought have battered towns that once thrived on cotton, citrus and sugarcane. The reservoir at Falcon Lake, at the west end of Starr County, was at a 20-year low this spring, at about 13 percent capacity.
The decline in agriculture has left more land preserved for wildlife conservation amid efforts to bring back the endangered ocelot and other species. Barrier construction threatens that habitat, and leaves larger animals unable to reach higher ground in the event of a flood.
Where crops are still planted, some farmers must bring their workers — including those who are undocumented — back through the wall to reach fields cut off by the barrier. With fewer farms and fewer people around, the land outside the wall feels more and more abandoned.
“So many people aren’t farming anymore,” said Lance Neuhaus, a third-generation grower.
In 2019, Neuhaus allowed a private contractor and a group called We Build the Wall to install a three-mile-long border barrier on riverfront land where his family used to grow sugarcane. The group, led by former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, raised more than $25 million to build border barriers with private funds.
We Build the Wall and North Dakota contractor Tommy Fisher promoted what they described as a design superior to the one used by CBP and the Army Corps of Engineers. They put it right along the banks of the Rio Grande.
The Trump administration completed its own barrier through the area not long after — on the river levee’s higher ground — making the private wall redundant. Traffickers no longer pass through the area, Neuhaus said. “The wall has worked well,” he said.
From the river, the privately built wall appears to have some sections that are out of alignment. Fisher, who now owns the barrier and paid about $1 million for the land, said unstable soil along the river has led to some “minor settlement” issues. The wall is “all good, still standing,” he said.
After the private barrier was completed, Bannon and three co-founders from We Build the Wall were charged with pocketing donations.
Two of the co-founders pleaded guilty and another was found guilty at trial. Those three received prison sentences in 2023.
Bannon was pardoned by Trump before he left office in 2021, but was indicted in New York state court for his alleged role in the scheme, a case that prosecutors could bring because presidential pardons apply only to federal allegations. Separately, he has been serving a four-month prison sentence for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued during the congressional probe into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Fisher went on to receive $2 billion in federal contracts from Trump to build the border wall in Arizona.
About this story
Writing by Nick Miroff. Photography and video by Kirsten Luce. Maps by Laris Karklis. Design and development by Frank Hulley-Jones.
Editing by Efraín Hernández Jr. Photo editing by Natalia Jiménez. Graphics editing by Tim Meko. Video editing by Erin O’Connor, Whitney Leaming and Jessica Koscielniak. Design editing by Madison Walls. Copy editing by Anne Kenderdine and Martha Murdock.