2026-03-26 23:09:25
Democrats on Wednesday denounced a massive contract that the Homeland Security Department handed to a company owned by a financial supporter of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as an example of what they called rampant corruption under President Donald Trump.
DHS last May awarded Salus Worldwide Solutions a contract worth up $915 million to provide flights out of the country for undocumented immigrants under a self-deportation program set up by the Trump administration. As Mother Jones has reported, Salus had limited prior federal contracting experience but won the business following extensive contacts with top department officials. A DHS contracting officer acknowledged the situation created “an appearance of favoritism,” according to a court document. Salus is owned by a former State Department official who in October 2024 gave $10,000 to a political action committee that supports Noem.
“The web of corruption here will take us some time to fully unpack,” Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) said Wednesday at an unofficial hearing held by House Homeland Security Committee Democrats.
Magaziner and other Democrats also pointed to a $220 million ad campaign Noem launched last year. The ads, crafted in part by firms with close ties to the former secretary and to her adviser Corey Lewandowski, were nominally aimed at urging immigrants to self-deport. But they also appeared intended to promote Noem herself, complete with a now infamous spot featuring the former secretary on horse. CNN recently reported that the department paid $20,000 to rent the horse for Noem. The DHS inspector general has reportedly launched an investigation into that ad campaign.
Additionally, lawmakers cited an NBC News report alleging that Lewandowksi requested that companies seeking DHS contracts pay him, or hire people associated with him. A Lewandowski representative has called those accusations “absolutely false.”
The so-called shadow hearing Wednesday was part of a broad effort by congressional Democrats to trumpet plans to commence aggressive oversight of DHS and federal contractors should they take control of one or both congressional chambers next year—and regain the subpoena power that Republicans are largely unwilling to use to scrutinize the Trump administration.
“We want to assure the public that at some point there will have to be a reckoning for a lot of the contracts and other things that we question,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee’s ranking member, said Wednesday. “We plan to put as many people on notice as possible that the committee in due time will look at it.”
Noem’s rocky tenure at DHS is ending this week with the confirmation of former Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to lead the department. But Democratic lawmakers have said they still plan to scrutinize Noem’s role in federal contracts as well as that of Lewandowski, who is expected to give up his role as special government employee.
One Wednesday, Sens. Adam Schiff (Calif.), Peter Welch (Vt.), and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), the top Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, asked federal contractors including Salus to preserve communications with Lewandowski and with people and firms working with him.
Elsewhere in Congress, House Judiciary Committee Democrats unsuccessfully urged that panel’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), to subpoena Lewandowski over this role in DHS contracting. House Oversight Committee Democrats have launched their own investigation into the former Trump campaign aide.
Democrats have denounced what they call the unprecedented corruption unleashed by the president and his family, whose personal wealth has skyrocketed since Trump retook office. In previously unimaginable ways, the Trumps have accepted money from people hoping to influence federal policy, including secretive investments by foreign interests in Trump family companies.
The contracting scandals involving DHS, by contrast, involve allegations of fairly traditional graft that would have been understandable to “boss” William Tweed of Tammany Hall. NBC News’ report last week included an allegation that an official at a firm seeking a subcontract under Salus Worldwide was pressured by someone at that company to hire “one of several consulting firms tied to Lewandowski.”
Lewandowski denied this claim, and an attorney for Salus told NBC that the account was “entirely false” and that the company “would never entertain this type of arrangement.” Mother Jones has not independently confirmed these allegations.
“I’m not a lawyer, but this sounds illegal to me,” Jon Golinger, a democracy advocate at Public Citizen, said at Wednesday’s hearing, after the caveat that he did not personally know if the allegations are true.
Mother Jones and the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, have reported that Salus Worldwide won its $915 million contract with DHS after extensive contacts between the company and DHS officials. A contracting officer at DHS, according to a court document, found that Salus “appeared” to shape the government’s requirements for the contract that the firm was trying to win. The court filing by DHS disclosed that the same officer found that DHS officials had “shared high-level budget and task information with Salus that was not available to the public,” contributing to “an appearance of favoritism toward Salus.”
But the agency waived restrictions meant to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety, citing factors including the contract’s supposed urgency and “national security considerations.” And after a limited two-day competition, Salus received the massive contract.
Mother Jones and POGO have also reported that Salus’ owner, William Walters— who donated $10,000 to a political action committee backing Noem in 2024—is closely linked to other firms that are selling airplanes to DHS, including a luxury 737 with private bedrooms that was reputedly used by Lewandowski and Noem.
At Wednesday’s shadow hearing, Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the director of government affairs at POGO, argued that problems with large contracts on the scale or the one held by Salus can occur via subcontracts that firms give to other companies. Those subcontracts are subject to laxer regulation and fewer disclosure requirements than the primary contractors, he said.
Hedtler-Gaudette said there are indications Salus is awarding subcontract work to firms connected to Salus itself. “We are seeing potentially what looks like a shell game of a company and then a number of smaller companies that are linked to that company in some way,” he said.
Committee members said they would come back to the issue. “We’ll go forward in due time holding this administration accountable for this egregious waste of taxpayers’ money,” Thompson said.
2026-03-26 19:30:00
In 1981, Congress amended the Social Security Act to help millions of disabled people and older adults move out of institutions. Through home and community-based services waivers (HCBS), some 7 million Medicaid recipients now receive support that lets them stay in their communities. But after years of neglect under both parties, experts fear that sweeping cuts to both Medicaid and FEMA—especially under the GOP’s most recent budget bill—may be the final straw for the often small, privatized, and often budget-strapped providers behind that care.
That’s especially true as heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires and other climate events ramp up globally: almost a tenth of Medicaid recipients rely on HCBS, many in climate disaster–prone areas that have been targeted by the Trump administration for cuts. The administration’s attacks on Medicaid-based home care have focused on states like with Democratic governors like New York, California, Minnesota and Maine, all of which face risks from extreme weather—but almost all states are expected to cut home care funding as a result of federal Medicaid cuts.
HCBS providers, which range from smaller nonprofits to large, private equity–backed organizations, are essentially the coordinators of many Medicaid recipients’ independent living. Few have the flexibility to pour more funds into advance planning for growing risks like fires, floods, and hurricanes—a role that FEMA would once have done more to shoulder.
But the Trump administration has moved to, in effect, dismantle the agency, rolling back key services like FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program and moving to lay off thousands of workers (a plan that was put on hold), including those who could coordinate with home care providers for contingency planning.
That’s made clear to health care providers that their patients will shoulder even more of the risk in climate emergencies—as in Oregon, where FEMA sought to roll back a $14 million grant to a hospital for a tsunami shelter, KFF Health News reported.
“Oregon needs more shelters like the one that Columbia Memorial is building, emergency managers say,” reporters Hannah Norman and Daniel Chang wrote. “Hospitals in the region are likely to incur serious damage, if not ruin, and could take more than three years to fully recover in the event of a major earthquake and tsunami.”
Almost 200 hospitals across the country face similar risks, according to another KFF Health News report. But HCBS providers are generally smaller, less resourced, and even more widely geographically dispersed than hospitals, compounding both the risks and the resources needed to address them. They face emergency situations more frequently than in previous decades, depending on their locations, and more than other providers, HCBS providers face special challenges in getting reimbursed for the additional work and expenses that they contend with after emergencies, including those caused by climate change.
“Most states have some sort of individualized service plan, or a person-centered plan, which is approved in advance, and then the reimbursement is tied to the services that are outlined in the plan,” said Kim Musheno, The Arc’s senior director of Medicaid policy. “The payment model is just not designed for a sudden demand or to pay for services that are outside of that approved plan.”
“Until we get serious about ending the bias in institutionalization, hoping that home and community-based services are going to adequately meet the potential safety issues that come with increases in extreme weather….we’re doing the absolute opposite of what’s needed,” said Marcie Roth, the chair of the National Advisory Committee on Individuals with Disabilities and Disasters and a senior advisor to FEMA under the Obama administration.
Some states are more prepared than others: In California, for instance, regional centers under the state’s Department of Developmental Services coordinate with HCBS providers in their area during wildfires. Several have made permanent modifications to their HCBS waiver program to acknowledge the devastating risk of increasing extreme heat events: seven states, including California and Texas, cover air conditioning costs. And states can apply for broad federal waivers for more budgetary flexibility around climate disasters, which they could in theory pass on to providers—but with states also facing a major public health budget crunch driven by federal cuts, those concessions may not be much comfort.
Federal infrastructure around in-home care, especially in disasters, was already lacking, Roth said—and under the Trump administration, she added, it’s heading backwards. Roth, who is also executive director and CEO of the World Institute on Disability, told me that HCBS workers generally do not have the federal-to-local support that they need when climate disasters do happen.
“I don’t see any efforts in which people who are paid to support people with disabilities have the support that they need so that they can come to work,” Roth said. Home care workers face the brunt of the impact of cuts, which leave them struggling to secure livable wages or support for expenses like transportation in hazardous weather. According to KFF, more than half of employees providing direct home care for those on HCBS waivers across 34 states make less than $20 an hour, rendering many home care jobs unappealing and understaffed.
Brian Ketay runs ICL Texas, a network of smaller homes for disabled people in South Texas, where the cost of a climate event that involves evacuations—generally to hotels—could run into the tens of thousands of dollars, he told me. Medicaid recipients “have increased staffing needs” in disasters, Ketay said, which cuts into funds that could otherwise go to wages and benefits.
In Louisiana, which is grappling with even more frequent and severe hurricanes, HCBS providers can face 16-hour work days on phone calls, ensuring Medicaid recipients’ safety and trying to coordinate evacuations. Erica Smith Buchanan, the executive director at a large HCBS provider in the state, says some staff have quit due to the intensity during hurricane season.
“We are not very good at the state emergency planning level, including around climate and thinking about planning for disabled people of all ages,” said Alison Barkoff, the director of George Washington University’s Hirsh Health Law & Policy Program and a former senior official in the federal Administration for Community Living during the Biden administration.
In some cases, as during the height of the Covid pandemic, those failures have pushed people back into better-staffed—but more restrictive—institutions. Roth said she advised the Department of Health and Human Services to close these gaps under the Biden administration. It didn’t happen.
“We are certainly no better off, and probably a whole lot worse off…because of our failure to ensure that federal funds are being spent in ways that actually do support communities, to support the people,” Roth said.
2026-03-26 19:30:00
President Donald Trump already has signed more executive orders since January 2025 than during his entire first term—and more than many presidents signed during their tenures in office. But one order has gone far beyond the others in reshaping the ecosystem of information the government and so many others, rely on.
“EO14168 has been overwhelmingly responsible for driving changes to federal forms and survey data,” says Melanie Klein, an analyst with the federal monitoring organization DataIndex who has been tracking these alterations. Although Trump signed EO14168—better known by its title “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—on his first day in office, data experts are still getting a sense of its far-reaching scope.
Of more than 500 federal databases affected by Trump’s myriad executive orders, nearly three quarters were revised because of the Defending Women order alone. Most of the cases involved removing trans-inclusive gender identity options from survey forms, leaving people to choose between male or female.
These change have affected “really critical programs like the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline or data collections about runaway and homeless youth,” Klein says. These have been among the removals that, over the past year, have garnered widespread concern because trans people are known to experience higher rates of suicide and homelessness than others—crises that have grown worse as a result of the administration’s anti-trans policies and rhetoric. “Without the data, disparities don’t just magically disappear, but they do become more difficult to document and address,” says Caroline Medina, a senior advisor for data policy at the Movement Advancement Project (MAP).
But the erasures are far more sweeping than that. “The breadth and diversity of the removals is really quite astounding,” Medina told me. According to a recent report from the Williams Institute, Trump’s order has affected some of the government’s most frequently used forms, including citizenship and passport applications and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Compared to the erratic erasures of webpages during the first few weeks of the administration, which left more visible digital scars, most of the datasets in question were amended quietly. When agencies modify a survey or database, they have a few options for how to record the revision, and “a lot of the changes that we’ve seen fall into two buckets,” Medina says.
A handful were revised under a lengthy protocol that invites public oversight. But another recent MAP report found that 83 percent went through a so-called non-substantiative review process. “This allows agencies to really quickly and swiftly remove questions with limited public visibility,” says Klein, who spent the last year tracking alterations to federal data collections.
This more obscured pipeline is usually reserved for “technical tweaks,” Medina adds, but “I would argue that these are meaningful changes.” If the modifications are classified as “substantiative” revisions, they would have been posted for public comment, something Trump has spent the last year skirting. Whatever value the administration places—or doesn’t—in public feedback, collecting that input remains valuable for things like future litigation, Medina says: “It’s a really important accountability tool—still.” (Trump’s order has spawned dozens of lawsuits already.)
But more surprising than the secrecy around the changes is the sheer number of them, given how little data on gender the government collects to begin with. A few national surveys—mainly focused on gender-based discrimination, health disparities, and violence—had asked about gender identity for a decade or so, but the majority of resources scrubbed were part of a far more recent push to improve federal data on gender.
The Census Bureau, the government’s statistical powerhouse, only started testing questions on gender identity in its American Community Survey in late 2024. Had that barely launched trial not folded under the second Trump administration, it might have been a stepping stone to including gender questions on the census itself, which has only ever asked whether respondents are male or female.
Such efforts were spurred by a few executive orders under the Biden administration that Trump rescinded on his first day in office. “Those were big milestones, that are now unfortunately being dismantled,” Medina says.
Nowhere is that more true than in Health and Human Services, which accounted for nearly half of all data deletions from the Defending Women order. A thorough scrubbing of HHS datasets is not surprising given how, under RFK Jr.’s leadership, the department has taken aim at trans people time and time again.
However, previously, “HHS was a real hub for data and research on LGBTQ people,” Meghan Maury-Fox, a senior advisor for data policy in the Biden White House, wrote in an email. The department was among the first to collect any data on gender and sexuality, initially in assessments of HIV risk, homelessness, and other health concerns known to disproportionately affect queer and trans communities.
These health disparity measures were among the data collections altered or discontinued, alongside others pertaining to a wide range of health issues, from reports on food-borne illness to forms used to record the deaths of patients with end-stage kidney disease.
According to Maury-Fox, the breadth of the HHS revisions stems from past efforts to ensure that federal health programs didn’t neglect the unique needs of queer and trans populations. Under the Obama administration, HHS hired one of the first federal staff members to focus on gender and sexuality. (They only recently left.) The department also housed one of the few government offices dedicated to incorporating those populations into research—which the National Institutes of Health began dismantling in December 2024, well before Inauguration Day, figuring the new Trump administration would finish it off.
Now HHS, along with several other federal agencies, has even exceeded what the Defending Women executive order asked for. In at least 60 instances, the government removed data on people’s sexual orientation, which the order did not cover. “There is a sense of over-complying,” Klein says. And though the rate of removals has slowed as agencies run out of gender-related data to target, “there are still requests coming in to carry out the implementation of that executive order.”
Trump’s minions, that is, have kept up the search, sometimes circling back to further scrub massive datasets involving civil rights complaints and clinical trials. At this point, though, even the experts are not entirely sure how much gender data remains for the administration to sniff out. We may not know until it’s gone.
2026-03-26 19:30:00
This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service, and The Border Chronicle, which produces independent, investigative journalism on the US-Mexico border.
On a warm, winter Sunday, the Playas de Tijuana in Mexico is filled with families picnicking.
The beach here presses right up against the border wall with the United States. Music blares, teenagers film TikTok videos next to the 30-foot high fence, which is covered in painted murals on the Mexican side—butterflies, faces, human hands reaching out.
Looking through the slotted wall to the American side, the beach is barren. On the other side of the wall is barbed concertina wire, and then another tall fence, also ringed with wire.
It’s a scene from a war zone, minus the war.
In between the two walls, white Jeep pickup trucks with US Marines in full camouflage and battle helmets circle occasionally, watching the beachgoers; as the sun sets, a single Marine slowly walks toward the ocean and back, holding an M-38. But for the most part, the no-man’s-land between the walls is empty.
Days earlier, armed Border Patrol agents in military fatigues unleashed tear gas canisters on protesters in Minneapolis, 2,000 miles northeast from here. Both the Minnesota National Guard and active duty troops were ordered to prepare to deploy to the city in America’s heartland.
“We all have been expecting this to happen,” said Jacqueline Cordero, who helps organize humanitarian supply drops in the mountains and desert east of San Diego. “Basically, the border is spreading to the rest of the country.”
It’s been a year since President Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border, but amid far-flung domestic deployments, dozens of deadly Caribbean boat strikes, and now a war in Iran, the US-Mexico border has in many ways become a forgotten emergency—a military buildup that persists, as others have before it, long after public attention has turned elsewhere.
Trump campaigned on the southern border, painting a picture of a region overrun with violent criminals. On Inauguration Day in January 2025, he declared the magnitude of the crisis required a military response. The resulting deployment—more than 20,000 troops in the past year from the most expensive fighting machine on the planet—has no end in sight.
“Our job, our role here on the border, is to gain full operational control. Detect, respond, interdict, and ensure that nobody is doing illegal crossings from south to north into the United States.”
“Our job, our role here on the border, is to gain full operational control,” said Lt. Col. Max Ferguson, who directed Joint Task Force Southern Border’s operations through September of last year. “Detect, respond, interdict, and ensure that nobody is doing illegal crossings from south to north into the United States.”
So have they?
“Today, the number of illegals crossing into our country is zero,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in December, holding up his hand to make a “0” during a speech laying out the national defense strategy.
His math was off by thousands.
This February, the government recorded 9,621 encounters with people illegally crossing the southern border—an average of more than 300 a day. That’s still a 90 percent decline since President Biden’s last full month in office. But it’s about the same as it was in February 2025, the first full month after Trump’s inauguration—and has not changed dramatically in the months before or after the military deployment reached full capacity over the summer.
While most of the country has moved on, the unprecedented military response to Trump’s “national emergency at the southern border” has quietly continued in tandem with the Department of Homeland Security. The War Horse and The Border Chronicle teamed up to examine how President Trump’s pledge to secure the border has turbocharged the militarization of the 1,954-mile frontier. In the last 14 months, the administration has:
Trump sent the military to the border to seal it, promising a show of force. But as deadly encounters over immigration enforcement ramped up in US cities, many residents along the border said the military’s presence has been more “show” than “force.”
The Rollout: “What is this, the Middle East?“
Jerry Pacheco remembers a year ago when the military first stood up Joint Task Force Southern Border to oversee President Trump’s military border buildup.
“I recruit companies from all over the world,” said Pacheco, who heads the Border Industrial Association, an advocate for manufacturers on the New Mexico-Mexico border. “I had a Polish EV battery company come down, and they’re looking at setting up over here. And they saw the Strykers, two military personnel attached to the Stryker, and they said, ‘Man, look at that. What is this, the Middle East?’”
Actually, it was just outside neighboring El Paso, Texas. The 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, had arrived from Fort Carson, Colorado, to help patrol the Border Patrol’s central sectors along the southern border, from Big Bend, Texas, to Tucson, Arizona.
The backbone of a Stryker Brigade Combat Team is the Stryker itself, an eight-wheeled armored vehicle, built to withstand mines and IED attacks as it carries infantry squads in combat at speeds up to 60 miles per hour. Now there was a Stryker parked on a landfill overlooking the Sunland Park Elementary School.
The military buildup at the border was swift. Two days after Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, the Pentagon ordered 1,500 troops to deploy. That same day, it announced it would use military planes for deportation flights and quickly began ramping up airborne intelligence-gathering along the border.
Military police battalions from New York, Kentucky, and Washington, and engineering units from Georgia and Kansas boarded cargo planes to fly to the border. By the end of the week, Marines—some of whom had been helping to fight wildfires in California—were installing the concertina wire along the double fence between Tijuana and San Diego. About a month later, another 3,500 troops were activated.
Military planners scrambled for places to house the incoming soldiers. Troops have stayed at hotels in small towns and crammed into run-down barracks at military outposts, like the Doña Ana Range Complex, where an Inspector General report detailed raw sewage leaking from the plumbing, and Fort Bliss, where inspectors found as little as 45 square feet of living space per soldier.
To officially stand up Joint Task Force Southern Border, the Defense Department called on soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division—a rapidly deployable infantry unit from Fort Drum, New York, trained in mountain and cold-weather warfare. By the summer, more than 10,000 troops were deployed to the border. About 9,000 remain there today, according to Joint Task Force Southern Border, despite the escalating number of conflicts and operations in the Middle East, South America, and Africa.
Many Trump supporters point to the dwindling number of illegal border crossings as a sign of the mission’s success.
“If you got a cop sitting on the corner in a police car, nobody’s going to rob the bank,” says Frank Antenori, a county supervisor in Cochise County, Arizona, and former Army Green Beret.
“If you got a cop sitting on the corner in a police car, nobody’s going to rob the bank.”
But others like Pacheco worry the growing military presence sends a signal to investors that the area isn’t safe—even though migrant crossings have plummeted to near all-time lows.
“It’s pure political show for people that are not from the border,” said Pacheco, who failed to land the Polish EV battery company, though, because of tariffs, not the military.
The Stryker near the elementary school outside El Paso remained parked there for months. Ferguson said that visible troop presence has been an important deterrent to migrant crossings, and that someone seeing a military vehicle and choosing not to cross is a victory.
Between October 2024 and September 2025, immigration officials recorded about 92,000 turnbacks—instances in which someone enters the US but then immediately turns around—at the southern border. That’s around 9,000 fewer than the previous year.
People in communities along the border say they are seeing far fewer migrants than they did before Trump took office. But they also say they’re not seeing many soldiers. The border is nearly 2,000 miles long.
“There might be people in fatigues eating at Burgers and Beer in El Centro,” California, said Kelly Overton, who runs Border Kindness, a humanitarian aid organization. “But does it feel like, ‘Hey, the military has come here and taken over’? No.”
The military has emphasized that its southern border mission is in support of Customs and Border Protection and says troops conducted nearly 3,000 joint patrols with CBP over the past year.
But as the military sent reinforcement troops south to the border, Border Patrol agents—led by Greg Bovino, the hard-line chief at the time of CBP’s El Centro sector, east of San Diego—headed north, away from the border.
“We’re taking this show on the road,” Bovino said in September, “to a city near you.”
National Defense Areas: ‘Declared a Restricted Area’
Of all the places one might expect to see the military, it’s in the town of Columbus, New Mexico, just north of the border.
Last April, the US Department of the Interior announced it was turning over more than 100,000 acres of land in New Mexico along the Mexican border to the Department of Defense to create a “National Defense Area”—essentially an annex of a military base.
There, troops would be authorized to arrest migrants or anybody else who happened to stumble into the area, bypassing the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from directly participating in civilian law enforcement.
Now, Columbus is abutted by a confusing patchwork of new military-controlled land. But town leaders say they never heard from the Defense Department about what the nearby National Defense Area meant.
“Nobody’s really said anything,” says Norma Gomez, a co-chair of the chamber of commerce in Columbus.
Residents haven’t seen many troops. The only tank in town is a replica from the Mexican Revolution at Pancho Villa State Park.
“We’ve not really seen any evidence of anything out here,” says Phillip Skinner, the town’s mayor.
Occasional red-and-white signs near town are the only indication of a military takeover.
“WARNING,” they say in English and Spanish. “This Department of Defense property has been declared a restricted area…Photographing or making notes, drawings, maps, or making graphic representations of the area or its activities are prohibited.”
The New Mexico National Defense Area was just the beginning.
Over the last year, the Pentagon has established six separate National Defense Areas in all four border states, turning more than 800 miles of previously public land—about 42 percent of the US-Mexico border—into military zones. Some are controlled by bases hundreds of miles away.
While the New Mexico National Defense Area stretches inland more than 3 miles in places, most of the other zones are just 60 feet wide, enough to ensure a migrant crosses directly onto military land, which carries additional criminal charges and permits soldiers to make those arrests.
But the US government can already file misdemeanor charges for illegally crossing the border, says David Lindenmuth, a former federal prosecutor in South Texas, and it becomes a felony after multiple crossings.
“So why in the world are you going to do all this other mess just to get two other ways to prosecute the same person for misdemeanors?” The tactic, he says, is like “using a cannon to shoot at a mosquito.”
“So why in the world are you going to do all this other mess just to get two other ways to prosecute the same person for misdemeanors?” The tactic, he says, is like “using a cannon to shoot at a mosquito.”
By the end of February, the Justice Department had lodged charges related to trespassing on military property in close to 5,000 cases. But as of mid-March, the Defense Department said that military troops have arrested only 68 people in National Defense Areas, meaning the vast majority of migrant arrests in the militarized zones have been by Border Patrol agents. Customs and Border Protection said it did not track arrests in National Defense Areas and could not comment on what happened on military property.
Attempts to prosecute people on the additional charges around trespassing on military land have struggled in courts, with judges in New Mexico and Texas throwing the charges out.
“The people being prosecuted there have no idea in most cases that this is going to be essentially a military installation,” says César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State.
The red-and-white signs that troops and military contractors have been installing near the defense areas are small, spaced far apart, and sometimes only face Mexico. Otherwise, there’s little to stop someone from accidentally wandering onto a military base. And their locations haven’t always been exact: In November, the Mexican government announced it had removed six signs from a Mexican beach near the mouth of the Rio Grande that declared the land restricted US military property.
While the boundaries of most military installations on US soil are available on government maps, that’s not the case with National Defense Areas.
Reporters at The War Horse and The Border Chronicle spent weeks being shuffled from agency to agency and from the military’s Joint Task Force Southern Border to individual branches in search of maps that no one supplied. To create maps of the National Defense Areas, we pieced together bureaucratic land-survey transfer notices in the Federal Register and information from the International Boundary and Water Commission.
James Holeman and Abbey Carpenter, who run Battalion Search and Rescue, a group that searches for lost migrants in the desert, say they’ve seen the signs as they work in New Mexico. They don’t always match the boundaries they’ve mapped out for themselves.
“We’ve had these arguments with Border Patrol where they are like, ‘This is the NDA [National Defense Area],’” Carpenter says. “And we’re like, ‘No, it’s not the NDA.’”
Other groups, like hunters and hikers, have also raised concerns. The starting point of the 2,600-mile-long Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches from the Mexican border to the Canadian border, now falls within a National Defense Area. For decades, hikers began the trek north by touching the border wall. The Pacific Crest Trail Association recently informed hikers that they could access the official southern starting point, a small gray stone monument. But under no circumstances could they touch the wall, just feet away and now ringed with concertina wire.
“If I’m choosing to go recreate somewhere, you know what, I probably don’t need to be in the vicinity of CBP, the Army, DHS.”
The military bases administering the defense areas say that hunters and campers can apply for permits to access the land. But Sherman Neal II, who helps run the Sierra Club’s military outdoors program, which works to bring veterans into the wilderness, says that’s not the point. The point of the great outdoors, he says, is to get away from it all.
“If I’m choosing to go recreate somewhere,” he says, “you know what, I probably don’t need to be in the vicinity of CBP, the Army, DHS.”
Blurring Missions: From G-BOSS to Drones
During the first Trump administration, the Defense Department funded most of the 458 miles of new wall and barriers that sprang up along the southern border. This time things are different.
Who needs the military when federal law enforcement agencies have military-grade equipment, military-style weapons, military-assisted surveillance capabilities, billions of dollars of funding, and none of the prohibitions on policing civilians?
Despite the fanfare about the troops at the border, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill allotted the military a measly $1 billion for immigration, border operations, and counternarcotics—less than 1 percent of the Pentagon’s budget.
Compare that with $46.5 billion that the Big Beautiful Bill gave Customs and Border Protection to build up to 700 miles of wall, 900 miles of river barriers, and 600-plus miles of secondary barriers.
Still, troops deployed to the border have brought with them expertise in surveillance and unmanned aircraft systems hard-won on battlefields, supercharging a growing surveillance network that has long worried civil liberties experts.
On a recent January weekend outside of San Diego, past where the suburbs become empty hills, a pair of young Marines sat inside a white pickup truck.
Next to the truck was a high-tech camera system, equipped with infrared and radar, called a G-BOSS—short for ground-based operational surveillance system. It was originally designed to detect IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now it watches the desert for migrants.
One of the Marines said it was his fifth straight day of eight-hour shifts monitoring a screen in the pickup truck in the blazing desert sun. “It gets pretty boring sometimes,” he said.
This is the reality of much of the military’s mission here: keeping an eye on systems that keep an eye on the border.
For years, Customs and Border Protection has been developing a vast network of cameras and sensors throughout the borderlands that alert agents to potential migrant movement. Fiber optic cables attuned to the softest footfall snake through the desert in regions where migrants are known to cross. Cameras are hidden in construction cones and abandoned tires. Automatic surveillance towers use AI to detect human forms.
Some of this technology has ended up in interior cities this year, like the mobile facial recognition apps that immigration agents have used on protesters in Minneapolis. But in towns closer to the southern border, this sort of surveillance has long been common.
In Columbus, New Mexico, where no military presence marks the new military zone, surveillance towers ring the town of barely 1,500 residents. At the town’s entrance, there’s a small white trailer that contains a license plate reader tracking anyone who enters.
“When we think of the border, we tend to think of it as a line or a very thin stretch of land, and it’s not,” says Marianna Poyares, a researcher at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. “One element that folks don’t consider is that a lot of this apparatus is actually installed in neighborhoods, in actual American cities near the border.”
The Defense Department is increasingly working with DHS to integrate intelligence from this growing network of sensor and surveillance systems, adding its own assets that troops have brought to the border, like the G-BOSS and other high-tech imaging and radar systems. Military pilots are also now flying reconnaissance missions along the border.
US Northern Command, which oversees Joint Task Force Southern Border, has capabilities and authorities as a combatant command that allow it to fuse military intelligence with law enforcement data, beyond what Border Patrol or the military branches alone could do, through its use of Palantir’s Maven system, the same AI-fueled intelligence platform reportedly used in military operations in Iran and Venezuela.
The military and border patrol are also collaborating on drone surveillance and countering drones.
Lt. Col. Ferguson says that cartels have increasingly been using drones to smuggle drugs and scout out law enforcement—though there is a debate among experts over how frequently.
An Army aviation officer, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said that he has seen small drones operating on the Mexican side of the border.
“Probably the majority of it we see are cartel scouts,” he said. “They’re using a lot of small UAS [unmanned aerial systems] to kind of probe areas and see where it’s clear.”
The military is authorized to intercept or shoot down drones over certain military facilities—but whether that includes smaller, temporary structures, like ones troops have constructed along the border this year as they patrol, is unclear. This year’s defense authorization bill ordered a review of how military departments are interpreting the law.
The need is clear. In just over a two-week span in February, the military used a laser to shoot down what turned out to be a Border Patrol drone, and the FAA shut down the airspace around El Paso with no notice after the government reported Customs and Border Protection officers operating an Army laser counterdrone system had taken out a cartel drone.
“The threat has been neutralized,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X.
But another explanation quickly emerged from multiple news reports: The incursion was a party balloon.
Buoys: A Giant Divider Down the Rio Grande
Since October, small Coast Guard boats have been patrolling for migrants along 260 miles of the Rio Grande in Texas, from Brownsville to Mission: a stretch of river that has already been declared part of a National Defense Area.
They call it Operation River Wall—and it’s only part of the US border’s growing floating blockade.
This January, DHS began installing 17 miles of enormous buoys in the Rio Grande, 15-foot-long orange cylinders, designed to spin backward if anyone tries to climb on them, at a cost of more than $5 million per mile. While they look like a massive swim-lane divider slung down the middle of the river, the buoys hide acoustic and vibration sensors to alert nearby Border Patrol to unusual movements. The agency has contracts for 130 miles of buoys, with plans to eventually extend the barrier to more than 500 miles.
In recent weeks, it’s been dividing folks in South Texas.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott pointed to the border to whip up a gathering at the Smoke BBQ in Harlingen during a get-out-the-vote rally a day before the Texas primary this month.
“There are Democrats who support open border policies, and they must not be allowed to hold office in Texas,” said Abbott, who paved the way for the federal military buildup by launching Operation Lone Star in 2021, spending billions in state money to deploy the National Guard, state police, and build border walls.
“Whether you agree or not with open border policy, whether you think that there should be a reinforcement of the border, the way that this is being done has been a tremendous waste of time and money.”
But protesters just a week earlier rallied against the buoys in Brownsville at a park next to the Rio Grande. A century ago, a ferry here would make trips across the river to Mexico. But today, the gathered crowd can’t even access the water because of an 18-foot-tall black fence, erected more than 15 years ago.
“Whether you agree or not with open border policy, whether you think that there should be a reinforcement of the border, the way that this is being done has been a tremendous waste of time and money,” says Aaron Millan, owner of Brownsville Kayaks, who called the buoys an “ecological disaster.”
The buoy project has a military precedent: In 2023, as part of Operation Lone Star, the Texas National Guard began installing buoys in a shallow section of the Rio Grande, near the small town of Eagle Pass.
Those were 4-foot-tall orange balls anchored to the riverbed with steel cables, connected by weighted mesh underwater, to prevent people from swimming beneath them. Serrated metal plates between the buoys deterred would-be crossers from climbing over.
“It looks like a medieval torture device, truthfully,” says Bekah Hinojosa, an artist and environmental activist in Brownsville. “We call them murder buoys.”
Not long after National Guard troops installed them, authorities found a body stuck to one of the buoys on the side facing Mexico.
After the November 2024 election, Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, visited Eagle Pass, where the original buoys were installed.
“This,” he said, “is a model we can take across the country.”
A Year Later: How “Sealed” is the Border?
Just inside the National Defense Area in California, across from where the bustle of Tijuana turns to dry mountains, the towering border wall gives way to a small barbed wire fence, the kind that sometimes keeps cattle fields separated. If you follow the fence into the mountains, you can see places where it’s been trampled down, with no troops or Border Patrol in sight.
It would be easy to step into the military zone and cross into Mexico. Or cross from Mexico into the United States.
Migrant crossings have plummeted since Trump declared the emergency at the border. Still, everyone here—from military commanders to human rights activists—knows the border is still not sealed.
Border officials have apprehended as many as 12,000 unauthorized crossers in a month since Trump returned to office. Most are quickly sent back. Another statistic is harder to interpret: Between October 2024 and October 2025, Customs and Border Protection reported more than 70,000 “gotaways,” or cases where they know people have successfully crossed the border without encountering Border Patrol or military troops.
While that’s a dramatic drop from previous years, CBP doesn’t publicize the number of “gotaways” by month, so it’s unclear how the military’s deployment has impacted the trend.
The rhetoric often doesn’t square with the reality either. In December, less than a week after Hegseth gave the keynote at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, declaring “zero” illegal crossings, the Department of the Interior transferred a 125-mile stretch of land along the California-Mexico border to the U.S. Navy. It was still at risk from the dangers of an open border, the department said.
“This corridor is one of the highest traffic regions for unlawful crossings along the southern border, creating significant national security challenges,” said the news release.
A week later, Trump awarded a group of soldiers and Marines visiting the White House the new Mexican Border Defense Medal, presented to troops who have supported CBP on the border for 30 days.
“They made me look really good,” Trump said from the Oval Office, flanked by military leaders. “We went from having millions of people pouring over our border to having none, in the last eight months. None.”
Thousands of miles away from the border, Bovino—whose former CBP sector lies in the new California defense area—and the Border Patrol were about to make headlines in Minneapolis. Federal agents’ killings of U.S. citizens Renee Goode and Alex Pretti would lead to a reckoning.
Back in Arizona, Frank Antenori, the Cochise County supervisor and former Green Beret, says there’s a price that’s worth paying for security. Like the Chinook helicopters that he hears flying troops back and forth to their outposts on the eastern side of the state.
“The border now is technically a military installation. You know, they can do whatever the hell they want basically.”
“I served 21 years in the Army, so I love helicopters,” he says. “It’s a little bit of noise, kind of noisy, and [people] are crying about them flying at like 11, 12 o’clock at night, or 2 in the morning. But, you know, that’s the military. That’s what they do. The border now is technically a military installation. You know, they can do whatever the hell they want basically.”
James Cordero isn’t buying it. He and his wife, Jacqueline, have been leading hikes for years to drop food, water, and supplies in the mountains east of San Diego. In mid-January, as the group hiked near the new National Defense Area, they saw a trampled cattle fence separating the U.S. and Mexico.
“They bring in the military. They say the border’s closed 100 percent,” Cordero said, “And that’s why Border Patrol can go into the interior.
“It’s the illusion of national security.”
About the Project
This project is a collaboration between The War Horse and The Border Chronicle to examine the impact one year into the U.S. military buildup along the southern border. It was reported by Sonner Kehrt, Melissa del Bosque, and David Roza; edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Graphics produced by Airwars and The War Horse’s Hrisanthi Pickett and Amy DiPierro. Dante Dallago provided research assistance.
The War Horse is a nonprofit, independent newsroom that focuses on the human impact of military service. Subscribe to our newsletter.
The Border Chronicle produces independent, investigative journalism on the US-Mexico border. Subscribe to their newsletter.
2026-03-26 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
An experiment unfolding at the southernmost tip of this state could irrevocably change the iconic Rio Grande and the communities it sustains.
Contractors are installing a 17-mile stretch of cylindrical buoys in the river to prevent illegal crossings from Mexico. These are the first of 536 miles of buoys that the federal government plans to stretch from the Gulf of Mexico deep into South Texas. The Department of Homeland Security has waived environmental laws and issued more than $1 billion in contracts to private companies to install them in continuous chains. Each industrial-style buoy is more than 12 feet long and four to five feet in diameter.
Federal agencies have not made any environmental assessment or flood modeling for the border buoys available to the public. Experts have criticized the secrecy surrounding the project and warn that the buoys could intensify flooding and change the river channel.
“This is an experiment on a continental scale…None of this is based on common sense or science.”
Mark Tompkins, a geomorphologist who studies the flow of rivers and conducted an analysis of the buoys for a group opposed to their use, said the lack of public documentation violates the “basic professional standard of care” for projects of this magnitude. The city manager in Laredo, one community where the buoys are planned, said the city is working to obtain engineering and design information from federal agencies.
Experts consulted by Inside Climate News said they knew of no comparable undertaking on a dynamic river anywhere in the world. They warned that the buoys could speed up flood water in a region that already struggles with flooding. The buoys could also accumulate sediment and create new landforms in the river, provoking treaty disputes with neighboring Mexico. The buoys are planned through Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, Zapata, Webb, Maverick, and Val Verde counties.
“The design requirements for these barriers, set by CBP and implemented by contractors, mandate that they withstand a 100-year flood event—consistent with CBP established design standards,” a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told Inside Climate News. “Additionally, the barriers are engineered to endure increased currents and elevated water levels, ensuring operational reliability during extreme weather conditions.”
The spokesperson declined to provide any technical information about the design standards.
“This is an experiment on a continental scale,” said Elsa Hull, an environmental advocate and resident of Zapata County, near the buoy’s proposed path. “None of this is based on common sense or science.”
The buoys will also reduce access for boating, fishing and other recreation.
While local opposition grows, day by day, more buoys line the river.
During the first Trump administration, in 2020, the US Army Corps of Engineers sought solicitations for a “buoy barrier system.” That year the Border Patrol Academy posted, and later deleted, photos of a “buoy barrier demonstration” by the Virginia-based company Cochrane USA. The Army Corps of Engineers referred questions for this story to CBP.
The idea wasn’t implemented before Trump left office. But it resurfaced in July 2023, when the state of Texas installed 1,000 feet of buoys in the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass. The buoys provoked a diplomatic dispute with Mexico and a lawsuit from the federal government.
Unlike the buoys the federal government is now installing, the ones in Eagle Pass were spherical and segmented with saw blades. At least one person was found dead, trapped in the buoys. Advocates warned that the buoys made the dangerous trip across the Rio Grande even more deadly for migrants. More than 1,100 people died attempting to cross the Rio Grande between 2017 and 2023, according to a Washington Post investigation.
“The fact that they have waived these laws means they are creating a law-free zone along the border,”
Despite the controversy in Eagle Pass, the Department of Homeland Security hatched a massive buoy project once Trump returned to office in 2025.
On July 3, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem waived more than 30 federal laws in a 20-mile area along the Rio Grande in Cameron County to expedite the Waterborne Barrier Project’s first federal border buoys. Among those laws: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act.
“A capability gap has been identified in waterways along the Southwest border where drug smuggling, human trafficking and other dangerous and illegal activity occurs,” Noem wrote.
In October, Homeland Security waived contracting and procurement laws along the entirety of the US-Mexico border to speed up construction. Since then, billions of dollars have been awarded to private contractors from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for border fortifications.
The unprecedented expenditure comes as the number of unauthorized border crossings has dropped precipitously. CBP apprehended 73 percent fewer people in the Rio Grande Valley sector between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, according to agency data.
Noem traveled to Brownsville on Jan. 7 to announce the first buoys. CBP granted access to the conservative news outlet Washington Examiner to see the buoys installed. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks explained to the reporter that the buoys are designed to roll when someone tries to climb on them. “It prevents them from ever being able to climb up on it,” he told the reporter. He added that the buoys have been tested in pools with dive teams.
President Donald Trump announced on March 5 that he was replacing Noem as homeland security secretary; she leaves the position on March 31.
Unlike the Eagle Pass buoys, the new buoys are much larger, cylindrical and form a continuous barrier across the river. BCCG Joint Venture was awarded a $96 million contract for the first 17-mile section of buoys in Brownsville. At this cost of $5.6 million per mile, the whole project would top $3 billion.
Inside Climate News reviewed federal contracts and identified seven along the Texas-Mexico border, totaling over $2.5 billion, that reference either “waterborne barriers” or “waterborne buoys.” Three contracts that referred exclusively to buoys and waterborne barriers totaled $1.22 billion. Another four contracts worth a total of $1.33 billion referenced both buoys and border wall construction.
Cochrane USA was awarded $641 million for “waterborne barrier construction.”
Tucson-based Spencer Construction LLC has obtained four contracts totaling $1.21 billion. Fisher Sand and Gravel, which built border walls later embroiled in legal challenges, was awarded a $316.7 million contract. SLS Federal Services LLC was awarded $382.3 million for waterborne and “vertical” barriers.
The federal waivers have allowed this unprecedented project to proceed with little scrutiny. “The laws that have been waived were put in place specifically to protect communities from improperly built structures like the wall,” said Ricardo de Anda, a lawyer in Laredo whose property abuts the river. “The Environmental Policy Act would not have allowed the construction of these structures because they would damage the environment.”
The buoys are planned through the Laredo area, which to date does not have a physical border wall. “The fact that they have waived these laws means they are creating a law-free zone along the border,” de Anda said. “The problem for the country is that if people become comfortable with that … then it’s coming your way.”
In Laredo, landowners and local advocates successfully opposed border wall construction during the first Trump administration. Now, old networks are re-connecting to oppose both renewed efforts to build the wall and the buoys.
“There has been no comprehensive information from the feds,” said Tricia Cortez, executive director of the Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo. “People need to be aware of this quiet, under the radar, but very aggressive move that the federal government is directing on us at the border.”
The organization decided to commission Tompkins, a geomorphologist with the consulting firm FlowWest, to conduct his own study on the potential impacts of the buoys.
Tompkins presented his findings to Laredo’s Rio Grande Riverfront Coordination Ad-hoc Advisory Committee on March 12. He warned that because of the federal waivers there is “a nearly complete lack” of technical information for the buoys.
“What would happen if we did experience some of those bigger floods?”
Tompkins’ report cautions that the buoys could change the Rio Grande in “unpredictable, damaging, and potentially catastrophic ways.”
He explained that the Rio Grande picks up trash, debris and uprooted trees during floods. This debris forms “rafts” in the river that could accumulate along the proposed border wall and the border buoys. He said because the Rio Grande has a soft bed, the force of high flows could cause the anchors holding the buoys to break. “It is inevitable that portions of the buoy system will break free and portions of the [border] wall will fail,” he wrote.
“Even very small changes can have very big consequences,” Tompkins told the Laredo committee.
Laredo city manager Joseph Neeb put out a statement following the presentation. He acknowledged the concerns that Tompkins and the Rio Grande International Study Center have raised but cautioned that, in the absence of technical data, the study relied on assumptions. Neeb said the city is working to obtain technical information from CBP, the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission and the Army Corps.
“Our responsibility is not only to act, but to act correctly,” Neeb wrote. “Any position taken by the City must be based on verifiable, project-specific information that can withstand technical and legal scrutiny.”
Adriana Martinez, a Southern Illinois University geomorphologist originally from Eagle Pass, has studied how the existing state buoys are changing water flows and sedimentation in the Rio Grande.
Drought has lowered the Rio Grande’s level in recent years. But Martinez referenced floods during Hurricane Alex in 2010, when several communities in the Rio Grande Valley were evacuated. She said she has “significant concerns” about how the buoys will act during flooding. “What would happen if we did experience some of those bigger floods?” she asked.
She said the chains connecting the buoys in Eagle Pass to the riverbed would be tested, likening the design to holding a “giant dense yoga ball” underwater.
Martinez said the federal government’s cylindrical buoys will create an even larger impediment for the flow of water than the spherical ones. The water that the buoys divert has to find a new path, which can change the course of the river.
Low water flows cause a separate set of problems, Martinez said. She observed in Eagle Pass how the buoys rested on a sand bar when the river was low. Vegetation started forming around the buoys. If this process continued, the sand bar could eventually form a new island.
The CBP spokesperson said the buoys will meet “CBP established design standards.”
The federal border wall has been damaged in floods on at least two occasions, both in Arizona. The US Government Accountability Office found in a 2023 report that the border wall has exacerbated flooding.
The CBP spokesperson said the river will remain publicly accessible except in cases when Border Patrol determines conditions are “operationally unsafe.” However, even in normal conditions, the buoys will limit how people can use the river.
While federal laws have been waived, the United States is still bound by its treaties with Mexico.
One federal agency that has been publicly silent on the buoys is the US International Boundary and Water Commission. The US and Mexico are signatories to several treaties dictating the sharing of binational waters and the international boundary. The USIBWC implements these treaties, along with its Mexican counterpart, the Comisión Internacional de Límites y Aguas.
In 2023, the USIBWC determined that most of the buoys installed by Texas were on the Mexican side of the river, in violation of treaty terms.
Upon taking office, Trump pushed out the commission’s popular leader, Maria-Elena Giner, who grew up in El Paso and worked for decades along the US-Mexico border. He replaced her with Chad McIntosh, who previously worked for the Ford Motor Co., Michigan’s environmental regulator, and at the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump.
In response to a detailed list of questions from Inside Climate News, a USIBWC spokesperson only replied, “The USIBWC is fully supporting the Trump Administration’s efforts to secure the border.”
Samuel Sandoval Solis, a water resources professor at the University of California, Davis, said the buoys are likely to violate the 1970 U.S.-Mexico treaty. The treaty sought to resolve outstanding boundary disputes and laid out each country’s responsibility to preserve the international boundary.
“Rivers are meant to bring people together…These buoys are going to be an ecological disaster.”
The 1970 treaty states that both nations will not allow construction in their territory that could cause “deflection or obstruction” of the normal flow or flood flows of the river. The treaty states that if construction by one country causes “adverse effects” on the other country, the offending country must either remove the structures, repair the damage or compensate the other country.
Under the 1970 treaty, the United States would be responsible to repair any damage or compensate Mexico, according to Sandoval Solis.
“We are paying with our federal taxpayer dollars for the border wall and the buoys,” Sandoval Solis said. “But if things move we will also be paying for the restoration.”
The CBP spokesperson said the agency is working with the USIBWC “to ensure that the waterborne barriers deployed by CBP are placed in the United States and do not encroach into Mexico.” He did not respond to other questions about treaty compliance.
Downstream in Brownsville, where buoys are beginning to line the river, environmentalists are raising the alarm.
On February 24, the Cameron County commissioners voted in favor of a resolution presented by local advocates that opposes the border buoys.
“Unfortunately, the federal government, especially the current administration, doesn’t really inquire as to our concerns,” said county Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., a Democrat, before voting in favor. He said there are “numerous questions” about the short- and long-term impacts of the buoys.
The vote came the week of Brownsville’s Charro Days, an annual celebration when colorful parades fill downtown streets and the city celebrates its close ties to Mexico. Residents of neighboring Matamoros, Tamaulipas, join in the festivities featuring mariachis and regional Mexican music.
This year, while charrería dancers paraded down Elizabeth Street, contractors were busy placing buoys in the Rio Grande. Bekah Hinojosa, a longtime local activist with the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, spent a morning driving backroads in Brownsville’s Southmost neighborhood searching for a place where she could see the border buoys.
Hinojosa lamented that even in her lifetime, border wall construction and industrial development have significantly restricted access to the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico. She said the new wall construction and border buoys are just the latest step in disconnecting Rio Grande Valley residents from the river and natural spaces.
“Rivers are meant to bring people together,” she said. “These buoys are going to be an ecological disaster.”
She rushed back to downtown Brownsville to prepare for an afternoon protest against the border buoys.
Dozens of people gathered at a postage stamp park in downtown Brownsville for the protest. On the other side of the steel border wall, the placid Rio Grande flowed toward its terminus at the Gulf of Mexico. Border Patrol vehicles circulated on a levee road in between the river and the wall, rolling slowly past the protest. Cars sat in traffic on the international bridge into Matamoros.
Elsa Hull arrived from Zapata County with a banner denouncing the border buoys. River guide Jessie Fuentes drove the five hours from Eagle Pass to share his experience after the first buoys went into the river. Juan Mancias, chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe, spoke to the long history of human settlement along the river delta. He reminded the crowd that rivers don’t respect international boundaries.
They spoke in defense of the Rio Grande, which distant federal officials call a dangerous frontier that must be barricaded. But the people assembled on its banks in Brownsville embrace it as a part of their home worth protecting.
This reporting was supported by the Water Desk at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
2026-03-26 19:30:00
Former Vice President Al Gore delivered a blistering rebuke of President Trump’s war on Iran this week in his first wide-ranging comments on the escalating crisis, calling Trump’s lack of planning “an astonishing mistake” born of arrogance and corruption. “I never would have believed that any president would do even one-tenth of the atrocious things Donald Trump has done,” he said.
In an exclusive sit-down with Reveal host Al Letson for an upcoming episode of More To The Story, a visibly angered Gore linked the war to Trump’s climate recalcitrance and a slew of broken promises.
As the Pentagon prepared to send about 2,000 paratroopers to Iran, Gore argued that the president had brushed aside decades of war planning for just such a scenario. The energy crisis unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz has “been the number one question for all the war games and plans for 50 years almost,” Gore told Letson. “President Trump said, ‘Don’t worry about it. They’ll surrender before that comes into play.’ Well, that was an astonishing mistake of the kind that you really do not want the president of your country to make because it has put us in a terrible situation.”
“Could he be just as wrong about that as he has been in attacking Iran without a plan for the Strait of Hormuz?” Gore added. “Could he be just as wrong about that as he was when he threatened to invade Greenland?”
Elsewhere in the interview, Gore launched another broadside against a series of back flips and failed promises from the president: “He told us prices were going to come down. He told us we would not get into any more foreign ‘forever wars.’ He told us inflation was going to subside. He told us the economy was going to really boom. None of those things have come true.”
“This is the most corrupt administration.”
“This is the most corrupt administration, not only in American history, but more corrupt than I could ever have imagined a president would be able to get away with to the extent that he has,” Gore said. “It’s shocking to me.”
This is one clip from a series we’ll be posting in the coming days, ahead of our longer interview with the former Vice President soon, in which he discusses climate action, religion, and what’s giving him hope. Stay tuned.
And in the meantime, subscribe to Reveal on Apple Podcasts so you don’t miss the latest.
