Landowners along the southern border are feeling the consequences of a Donald Trump campaign promise more than a decade in the making: the creation of a border wall.
Equipped with billions of dollars in taxpayer funds, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has begun surveying remote West Texas land for wall construction. For some in Texas’ Big Bend region, these surveys may mean forfeiting their property rights, some for land their families have held for generations.
Earlier this year, CBP sent Right of Entry for Construction (ROE-C) letters to Texas landowners along the border, offering a signing bonus of up to $5,000 in exchange for allowing government contractors to survey their property for border wall construction. Failing to comply with the request or refusing to quickly sell their property, the letters warned, would risk a government lawsuit condemning their property or an eminent domain seizure, which many private landowners lack the legal and financial resources to challenge.
“I don’t want a wall, but if they’re going to build it, how am I supposed to fight it?” Adan Madrid, a Redford, Texas, farmer, told The Texas Tribune earlier this week. Madrid recently received a ROE-C letter offering $2,500 for the right of passage or risk losing his property through eminent domain, reports the Tribune.
Some local leaders doubt the viability of the government’s plan to add a physical barrier across the area’s harsh mountainous and desert terrain. In a joint statement, five West Texan sheriff’s offices claimed modern surveillance techniques would be a feasible alternative to a physical wall.
“Border security is not a one-size-fits-all proposition,” the statement reads. “Strategies that may be appropriate in high-traffic urban sectors are not necessarily appropriate in geographically remote areas such as ours. Sound policy must be informed by local terrain, operational realities, and fiscal responsibility.”
Confusingly, the potential land seizures for a wall expansion come as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reports historic lows in illegal border crossings. Despite the government’s classification of the region as an area of “high illegal entry,” the sector was reporting some of the lowest instances of illegal migration along the southern border, even before the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, per the Tribune. CBP data recorded 3,096 apprehensions in FY 2025, a 74 percent decline from two years earlier.
But it’s not just private property that is at risk under the government’s expansion plan. Last week, the administration waived several environmental regulations to allow physical barriers to be erected within Big Bend National Park, even though the DHS website outlines plans for the region that only included utilizing vehicle barriers and “Technology & Patrol Roads” in specific sectors along parklands. A measure proposed by Rep. Henry Cuellar (D–Texas) that would have prevented the DHS’ budget from being used to construct fencing or waterborne barriers within the parks was shot down along GOP lines last week.
Large private owners also have faced the brunt of the government initiative. Last month, in neighboring New Mexico, the federal government filed a land condemnation lawsuit against the Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces in order to extend the border wall to the foot of Mount Cristo Rey, a well-traveled Catholic pilgrimage site sitting on diocesan-owned land adjacent to the border. In publicly available court documents, the government detailed that the public purpose for its eminent domain claim is to construct structures designed to help further secure the United States-Mexico border. The diocese instead claims that the federal government has used its eminent domain lawsuit to attack its religious freedom.
“This is an example of religious freedom—the ability to have this pilgrimage,” Las Cruces-based Franciscan Brother Joseph Bach said in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter. “And if (President Donald Trump is) taking that sacred site away, then he’s taking away the people’s freedom to exercise their faith.”
The message from these latest developments is clear: the Trump administration is increasingly willing to sacrifice basic foundational rights and countless acres of private property to prioritize a costly pet project. The remaining question, however, is how much farther is the administration willing to go?
