The Trump administration drilled border-wall wells without state permission.
Here in Adams County, I know what it means when somebody treats groundwater like an empty tank. Our county sits on the Central Sands, where farms, homes, lakes and streams share water that does not belong to the first operator with the biggest pump. New Mexico and Wisconsin have different legal systems for managing groundwater, but the hydrology is the same: the aquifer does not care who owns the pump. It draws down for all of them.
The Associated Press reported Aug. 3 that Customs and Border Protection ordered contractors to stop drilling wells in drought-stricken Luna County, New Mexico. The order came after ranchers said the water needed to mix concrete could threaten their livestock. The New Mexico Office of the State Engineer identified eight wells drilled without its permission. State staff visited two of them and reported that they were pumping 200 gallons per minute. One rancher said contractors told him another well could pump 300 gallons per minute.
That is not a small ranch well. Russell Johnson has roughly 12 wells on his ranch. They pump between three and seven gallons per minute. His operation has already been cut to one-third of its former herd capacity because drought has reduced the grass and water available to his cattle.
The difference between seven gallons a minute and 300 is the whole story. One system serves a working ranch. The other serves a wall that the federal government has decided must be built quickly, across four states, with federal funding behind it.
The wall is not simply a line of concrete and steel. It is roads, dust suppression, cement mixing, heavy equipment and wells. Every public project has a material footprint. The people who authorize it are responsible for that footprint, including the water it consumes and the state oversight it bypassed.
New Mexico law requires permits from the state engineer before non-tribal wells can be drilled or pumped, whether they sit on state or federal land. The wells in question were drilled on the federally owned Roosevelt Reservation, a strip of land about 60 miles north of the border. CBP did not answer whether the federal government believes it can pump groundwater there without state oversight. The supplied reporting therefore establishes the absence of state permission, but it does not settle the federal government’s legal position or the final legal status of each well.
That question should not be difficult. Federal ownership is not a license to ignore the water law of the place where the land sits. The government can own the ground and still owe something to the people, livestock and watersheds around it. Whether a court ultimately agrees that the wells violated state law is a separate question from whether the state engineer was denied the oversight New Mexico requires.
CBP says it is committed to working collaboratively with local landowners so construction does not harm their water needs. But the state engineer says eight wells were drilled without the state’s permission. That is the Community Collapse contradiction: public language about protecting a community paired with decisions that can make the community less able to remain in place. The rancher is not asking the wall to protect him from his own water. He is asking the government to stop drilling into the water his cattle require to survive.
Johnson supports the wall. He used to work for Border Patrol. He says illegal crossings on his ranch have nearly disappeared, and he does not believe the wall should cost him his livelihood. That matters because it removes the easiest escape hatch. This is not an argument between a border hawk and a border opponent. It is a man saying that a project he supports must not destroy the ranch it is supposed to protect.
The federal government has already been warned that the border wall carries consequences beyond immigration policy. Main Street Independent has documented how researchers warned that the wall could threaten a rare desert oasis and its species. Another report described Texas families facing land seizures. A wall that takes land, redirects water or damages habitat is not merely a security object. It is an economic decision imposed on people who cannot move the river, replace the aquifer or buy another ranch.
Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America gives this kind of decision its proper name: an extractive mind. It sees land as a supply of inputs and a community as an obstacle between the project and its deadline. The concrete matters. The road matters. The contract matters. The rancher becomes a delay.
The same thinking has appeared in Adams County before. The Leola Drainage District covered roughly 15,000 acres, and ditches were dug across the marsh in the early 1900s. The black peat looked like wealth. The drainage system failed, the district went broke and the land was eventually restored in part to wetlands and public habitat. The lesson was not that every ambitious project is foolish. The lesson was that a landscape is not a blank page, and water does not obey the promise made in a development plan.
Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac that land is a community to which we belong. That is not a decorative idea for a bookshelf. It is a working rule. If a project cannot account for the water, grass, wells, cattle and families already there, then the project is not responsible infrastructure. It is an extraction scheme with a government seal.
The administration’s order to stop drilling new wells is necessary. It is not enough. The wells already drilled need independent inspection. The state engineer needs access to the records and the pumps. The federal government needs to disclose how much water the construction contracts require, where it will come from and who pays when the wells go dry.
I also argue that contractors should buy construction water from existing permitted suppliers, as contractors did during the first border-wall construction, rather than create new industrial wells beside working ranches. That recommendation is not established by the supplied reporting. It is the practical alternative the documented facts support: use water sources already subject to permission and oversight instead of adding large pumps to a drought-stricken aquifer before the state has reviewed them.
That is what real border infrastructure would look like: lawful, water-accountable and designed around the people who already live there. It would protect the border without sacrificing the ground beneath the people it claims to serve.
A ranch is not an empty place waiting for a wall. A county is not an empty place waiting for a project. The water is already carrying the future of the next household, the next herd and the next child. A man who once worked for Border Patrol and still supports the wall has accepted the moratorium because he knows the difference between protection and extraction. If we pump the water out for a monument, the monument will stand where the community used to be.