AROUND THE COUNTRYSOUTH TEXAS BORDERAt least a third of landowners approached by state officials have refused to letwall be built on their properties. That’s forced the state to largely build on ranchland in remote areas, or erect sections that are full of gaps.By Zach Despart,Texas TribuneSOUTH TEXAS – In December2021, Gov. Greg Abbott traveledto South Texas to inaugurate thefirst 880-foot stretch of the state’snewly constructed wall on itsborder with Mexico.At the press conference, withcameras zoomed tightly onhim against a backdrop of thethree-story high, slatted wall inStarr County, the Republican governordeclared the barrier to beimpenetrable. He banged a malleton a metal beam to drive homehis point.“It’s heavy and it’s wide,” he saidassuredly. “People aren’t making itthrough those steel bars.”Three years and .1 billion later,Abbott may be right. Migrantsand smugglers aren’t breachingthe bars. They don’t have to, becausethey can walk around them.Today, that completed segment,now 2 miles wide, is an island ofmetal and concrete surroundedby farmland — hardly an obstaclefor migrants who have traveledsometimes thousands of miles toreach the United States.An investigation by The TexasTribune has identified for the firsttime where Texas has built itsborder wall, information the statekeeps secret as it pours billionsinto the highly touted infrastructureproject. It has revealedthat the unprecedented forayinto what has historically beena federal responsibility — Texasis the first state to build its ownborder wall — has so far yieldedlittle return on billions of dollarsinvested.The 50 miles constructedthrough November, totaling 6%of the 805 miles the state hasdesignated for building, are farfrom the endless barrier Abbottoften presents the wall to be invideo clips he shares on socialmedia. The wall is not a singularstructure, but dozens of fragmentedsections scattered acrosssix counties, some no wider thana city block and others morethan 70 miles apart. Each mile ofconstruction costs between million and million per mile,depending on terrain, accordingto state engineers.TEXAS HAS BUILT 50 MILES OFFRAGMENTED WALLAlong the Texas-Mexico border,the state has built 50 miles ofwall and acquired land to build anadditional 15 miles. Some of theborder is naturally uncrossableor already covered with spans offederal wall.The Tribune also found the wallbuilding program has been hamperedby landowners on the border,who are resistant to lettingthe state build on their property.52 The BLUES - JANUARY ‘25
Since 2021, the state has askedhundreds of property owners tosign easement contracts, underwhich the state pays a one-timefee for the permanent rights toa strip of land to host the wall.Officials cannot seize private landfor the wall like they can for otherpublic infrastructure projectsbecause the Legislature prohibitedthe use of eminent domain for thewall program.Landowners in a third of the 165miles the state is currently tryingto secure said they were notinterested in participating, thefirm overseeing land acquisitionwrote in a wall progress reportlast month. This has resulted ingaps limiting the barrier’s effectivenessin the few areas the statehas built. Mike Novak, executivedirector of the Texas FacilitiesCommission, the agency in chargeof the project, has said in publicmeetings that land acquisition isthe most daunting hurdle in completingthe program.As a result, construction appearsto be driven by where the statecan most easily acquire land,instead of where wall would bemost effective at deterring illegalcrossings, said several bordersecurity experts who reviewedthe Tribune’s findings. Texas hasmostly built on sprawling ranchesin rural areas, the Tribune found,while the experts said the priorityshould be urban centers wherepeople sneaking across can easilydisappear into safe houses orwaiting vehicles.“You wonder what the tacticalpurpose of this is,” said AdamIsacson, a regional security expertat the Washington Office on LatinAmerica, a research and advocacyorganization. “This seems to bedictated more by just who hasbeen able to grant [Abbott] permissionthan anything particularlystrategic because a lot of theseplaces are very sparsely populated.”Mike Banks, the state’s borderczar, said the wall sites werechosen because the Departmentof Public Safety designated themas high priority. He said the ruralfocus is intended to help policeintercept migrants who intendto sneak across the border ratherthan request asylum.“Your biggest threat are thosethat are trying to avoid detection,and that’s happening away fromthe larger cities in those ranchlands where we’re building,”Banks said. “That’s the state wall.”Of the 94 land agreements thestate has secured so far, less thanone-third are in the 20 most populousborder cities. Some, like ElPaso, already have sections of the140 miles of wall the federal governmenthas built in Texas overdecades — most of which predatethe Trump administration. Butothers, like Laredo — historically ahotbed of activism against borderbarriers — have none.The BLUES - JANUARY ‘25 53
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