Trump’s administration is risking New Mexico ranchers’ water for a border wall.
Wisconsin has a name for the well that pulls its neighbors dry. It is called a high-capacity well, and the state’s Department of Natural Resources has required a permit before drilling one since the conservation movement learned that an aquifer does not stop at a fence line. A pump rated at three hundred gallons a minute pulls from the same water table that feeds a household well at seven. That is the geology of the Central Sands — the flat sandy country that includes Adams County — and it is what the UW-Stevens Point Water and Environmental Analysis Lab has spent two decades documenting across six counties with a hundred thousand well-water records on file. The state permitting authority exists because somebody, somewhere, learned what happens when the pumping goes unregulated and the neighbor’s tap goes dry.
The same physics is what Russell Johnson is staring at in Luna County, New Mexico. Johnson is a cattle rancher and a former Border Patrol agent who supports the border wall. His ranch runs on twelve wells, each putting out between three and seven gallons a minute. When contractors for the wall drilled an industrial well on land he leases for grazing, they told him it could pump three hundred gallons a minute. State workers later found two of the new wells pumping two hundred gallons a minute. The New Mexico Office of the State Engineer has now identified eight wells drilled on the same project without the permits state law requires. The wall project has received more than $46 billion in federal funding and is being pushed across four states. The contractors named — Caddell Construction, Fisher Industries, Barnard Construction, Spencer Construction — drilled past the New Mexico permit requirement without apparent consequence.
The state rule is plain. All non-tribal wells in New Mexico, whether on state land or federal, must have a permit from the state engineer before drilling or pumping. The eight wells were drilled first. The state agency learned of them later. Only then did Customs and Border Protection order contractors to stop drilling new ones. CBP says it will “collaborate” with New Mexico and the Agriculture Department on a groundwater strategy. Asked directly whether the wells already drilled will be allowed to pump, the agency did not answer.
That is not stewardship. It is damage control after the machinery has begun moving.
Johnson has already cut his herd to a third of its original size. Drought has left less grass for the cattle that remain. If the industrial wells go online and the water table drops, his pumps start sucking air. “It would put us in an immediate catastrophe,” he told a public meeting — a former Border Patrol agent who supports the wall but does not believe it should cost him his cattle.
CBP has not said whether the federal government believes it can pump groundwater on federal land without the state’s permission. Water does not stop at a jurisdictional line because a project has a federal name on it. The aquifer beneath Johnson’s range is the same aquifer the contractors drilled into, regardless of which agency wrote the check.
The political theater around the stop-work order is as thin as the grass on Johnson’s range. Greg Cunningham, the Republican congressional candidate, says he brought the ranchers’ concerns to the administration and that it “listened” and “acted fast.” Gabe Vasquez, the Democratic incumbent, says he “raised hell in Washington.” Both are scrambling to claim credit for an order that does not yet answer the only question that matters: will the wells drilled without state permits be allowed to pump? A moratorium on new drilling is a pause. A well already in the ground is a loaded gun on the table.
We have seen the same pattern in other places along the border. Researchers have warned that the wall threatens a rare desert oasis and the species that depend on it. In Presidio, Texas, residents are arguing in court that the wall could flood the town. Families face land seizures in other stretches. Each case has its own facts. The operating rule is the same: announce the national purpose, move the equipment, and ask the people who live there to absorb the local cost.
This is what Wendell Berry meant when he wrote that an economy which stops seeing a farm, a watershed, or a town as a membership starts seeing it as a set of inputs to be consumed. The Wisconsin DNR’s high-capacity well permitting authority exists because somebody wrote that principle into law. The New Mexico Office of the State Engineer’s authority exists for the same reason. Federal contractors drilled past both. The wall is being built with the extractive mind Berry named — the one that treats a rancher as an obstacle to schedule rather than a member of the place.
What needs to happen is not complicated. The eight wells already drilled must be independently inspected. Their permit applications and pumping plans must be filed with the state engineer and made public. None of them should pump a gallon until the state engineer has determined, on the record, that doing so will not damage the wells of the ranchers who share the basin. If the federal government believes it has the authority to bypass state permitting on federal land, it should make that case in court, not by drilling first and answering later.
A wall can be repaired. A well pumped past recovery reaches into the herd, the household, and the years ahead — to the place where no federal press release can put the water back. Security can be built around the limits of the land. It does not have to be built by pretending those limits are not there.