REDFORD — As a teenager, Joe Carrasco would help his father pick onions and cotton on the family’s 40-acre ranch on the banks of the Rio Grande. On the weekends, he would mount his horse and wade across the river into Mexico, where he would race his horse and drink beers.
Today, Carrasco is 71, retired after 26 years working in the oil fields, sitting under a carport with a Michelob Ultra beer and staring at the mountains while his cows graze on his alfalfa farm.
“I like what I see,” he said.
But he doesn’t like what he sees coming.
Carrasco is one of an estimated 400 landowners in the Big Bend region whose land has been targeted by the Trump administration. Like other property owners along the Rio Grande, Carrasco received a letter from U.S. Customs and Border Protection earlier this year asking him to let contractors on his land to survey it or risk losing it through eminent domain.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has sent mixed signals about its plans to erect border barriers in this rugged, mountainous region, saying that it prefers other infrastructure such as cameras, sensors, and vehicle barriers inside Big Bend National Park and the neighboring Big Bend Ranch State Park.
Even though immigration officials have claimed they’re not building a wall in the parks, the federal government has awarded billions of dollars worth of contracts to companies that have previously built border walls for work within the parks.
It has also waived environmental laws in the state and national parks to speed up the process. Contractors are seeking permits to access enough water to house hundreds of workers in the area who will be tasked with building some form of border security infrastructure.
But what is clear is that the federal government has threatened to seize land along broad swaths of the Rio Grande away from the parks. And that’s causing alarm up and down the river.
“I don’t want a wall, I want to see this view,” Carrasco said, pointing at the mountains on the Mexican side of the river.
One-quarter of the border, 1% of migrant traffic
Big Bend is the largest Border Patrol sector, covering 77 Texas counties and 517 miles of the 1,954-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border.
It is also the least busy.
