As landowners resist, Texas’ border wall is fragmented and built in remote areas

SOUTH TEXAS – The Texas Tribune says 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.