Congress is using $46.5 billion to wall off Big Bend ranchers from their own river.
That money is now concrete and steel. A Montana firm named Barnard received a $960 million contract to build through Presidio County. Illegal crossings in this stretch of the border are negligible — the desert stretches vast and silent between the Chisos Mountains and the river. There is no crisis here. There are homes.
Yolanda Alvarado’s family owns two ranches in the Big Bend. The wall would cut one of them in half. Their well and their ancestral cemetery would sit on the inaccessible side. She spends her days calling landowners, explaining their rights, presenting them with legal options — because without that work, the wall wins by attrition. One signature at a time. One payment at a time.
The payment comes. When a construction firm with nearly a billion dollars in federal backing arrives in a community of a few thousand and starts offering cash for access, for water, for space — saying no costs more than most families can afford to lose. The capitulation is not contemptible. It is what economic coercion looks like up close. But the result is the same: each cooperative landowner becomes a foothold, and each foothold makes the next family’s resistance harder to sustain. The federal government is buying its way through the land with the same neighbors’ signatures it cuts off from their own river. A local pecan farmer tried to sell well water to a 500-person man camp of construction workers. A landowner leased RV park space to wall contractors. The Moody Bennett Ranch, partly owned by a co-founder of Yeti — the company that puts Big Bend on its cups and coolers — has been selling building materials to Barnard and storing its equipment. The company that markets itself on the beauty of this wilderness is helping to build the wall through the land it promotes.
You who live in communities that have not yet faced this choice should be slow to judge those who take the deal. The commandment in Exodus is older than any nation: “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” The ger — the resident, the one who lives among you, who has no army and no lobby — appears more than thirty times in the Hebrew scriptures. The tradition will not let the powerful forget what it was to be powerless. We who live far from the Rio Grande, who eat the produce the border economy moves and praise the cheap goods the ports of entry deliver, who sit in our parishes on Sunday and hear the Gospel read without asking what our government is doing in its name — we are not outside this. The wall is being built with money taken from our taxes. The pastors of every Catholic parish between here and the river should have been at Ms. Alvarado’s side before the contracts were signed. The religious silence is ours. That absence is part of how the wall goes up.
One hundred and fifty thousand people signed a petition against this wall and delivered it to senators who have not answered. Border agents, sheriffs, conservatives, and progressive activists have formed a coalition against it — not because they agree on everything, but because they agree that cutting a community off from its river is wrong. The Big Bend region has no crisis to justify the wall. What the wall would do, conservation groups report, is cause irreparable damage to wildlife, sever paddlers and fishers from the Rio Grande, and strip the region of its international dark sky status — the tourism economy’s mainstay. Pope Francis named the structure at Lampedusa in 2013, when hundreds of migrants drowned in the Mediterranean and the world looked away: “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference.” The same indifference holds when the drowning is closer to home — when a government spends billions to wall off its own citizens from their own river and calls it security.
Ms. Alvarado is still on the phone, calling landowners. Her family’s ancestral cemetery and their well sit on the side of the surveyor’s line that, by next summer, may belong to the federal government, with thirty feet of wall between them and the Rio Grande. There is still time to call your senator. There is still time to refuse the cheap deal that buys your neighbor’s destruction. The door is open. But concrete cures faster than petitions move through Congress.