ADRIAN MA, HOST:
The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to build out what it's called a smart border wall. This new part of the wall wouldn't be steel or concrete, though. It would be a floating barrier over 500 miles of linked buoys in the Rio Grande. But as Texas Public Radio's David Martin Davies reports, there are questions about what could happen when the river floods.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLE DRIVING OVER BUMPS)
DAVID MARTIN DAVIES, BYLINE: It wasn't easy to find the buoys. To see them, I had to cross to the other side of the border wall, an area near Brownsville that folks call No Man's Land. I drove past a border wall gate and onto a bumpy dirt path, then kept going along the Rio Grande until I saw them.
BEKAH HINOJOSA: There they are.
DAVIES: We have found them.
With me is Bekah Hinojosa, cofounder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network. She is an activist opposed to the border buoys.
HINOJOSA: This is a gorgeous river bank, and in the middle of our river, I see these orange cylinder barrier buoys...
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
HINOJOSA: ...Just floating in the center.
DAVIES: Upriver at the buoy deployment staging area, there are over 100 buoys on the ground. Each one is about 15 feet long and 4 to 5 feet tall. A work crew on a raft is linking them together and anchoring them to the riverbed. Eventually, this one string of buoys to deter illegal immigration will grow to be about 17 miles long. But this is just the beginning. In January, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was in Brownsville to announce the buoy project.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KRISTI NOEM: The Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection are deploying over 500 miles of border barrier that is long enough to stretch all the way from Washington, D.C. to Nashville, Tennessee.
DAVIES: DHS has named the effort Operation River Wall and signed this year a $96 million contract for the first 17-mile section. That breaks down to about $5.6 million per mile, making the whole project cost just under $3 billion. The Department of Homeland Security signed a waiver to expedite the project, waiving environmental laws. And environmental assessments, including flood modeling, are not public, according to Mark Tompkins, a fluvial geomorphologist who studies how rivers flow. He said putting hundreds of miles of buoys in the Rio Grande is a bad idea.
MARK TOMPKINS: It's going to cause disasters.
DAVIES: Tompkins was contracted by a Laredo environmental group. He studied Homeland Security's plan to deploy buoys in the area and said buoys could become a ticking time bomb.
TOMPKINS: Sections of these buoy chains breaking free, and then if they get caught on a bridge or on a section of wall, then you've got real problems.
DAVIES: Tompkins said if a string of buoys gets caught on border bridges, that could cause structural damage. Because of the significant amount of trade that crosses the border, closing down bridges could send shockwaves through supply chains. More than half of border crossings between the U.S. and Mexico are in Texas.
ADRIANA MARTINEZ: They don't seem very stable.
DAVIES: Adriana Martinez from Southern Illinois University studied the river flow in the Rio Grande after the state of Texas installed buoys to deter illegal immigration in 2023. She said the new buoys are bigger and much longer.
MARTINEZ: The amount of force that would be required to hold them in place is just not something that's physically feasible by the concrete blocks that I've seen.
DAVIES: In a statement, Customs and Border Protection said the waterborne barrier is designed to withstand a 100-year flood event. Additionally, the waterborne barriers are designed to withstand increases in currents and water elevations. According to the National Weather Service, the lower Rio Grande reached a record flood level in 2010 due to remnants of Hurricane Alex. For NPR News, I'm David Martin Davies in Brownsville. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
