Controversy growing over buoys in the Rio Grande : NPR
The Trump administration has begun deploying 500 miles of Big Buoys in the middle of the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico, funded by the 2025 spending bill. Residents are unhappy that illegal border crossings are at their lowest level in 50 years.
ADRIAN MA, HOST:
The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to build what’s called a smart border wall. This new part of the wall, however, would not be made of steel or concrete. It would be a floating barrier of 500 miles of connected buoys in the Rio Grande. But as Texas Public Radio’s David Martin Davies reports, questions are being raised about what might happen when the river floods.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLE DRIVING OVER BUMPS)
DAVID MARTIN DAVIES, BYLINE: It wasn’t easy finding the buoys. To see them, I had to cross the border wall, an area near Brownsville that people call No Man’s Land. I drove past a border wall gate and down a bumpy dirt road, then continued along the Rio Grande until I saw them.
BEKAH HINOJOSA: There they are.
DAVIES: We found them.
Beside me is Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network. She is an activist opposed to border buoys.
HINOJOSA: It’s a beautiful river bank, and in the middle of our river, I see these orange cylindrical barrier buoys…
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
HINOJOSA: …Floating right in the center.
DAVIES: Upstream, in the buoy deployment area, there are more than 100 buoys on the ground. Each is approximately 15 feet long and 4 to 5 feet tall. A work team on a raft connects them together and anchors them to the river bed. Ultimately, this series of buoys intended to deter illegal immigration will be approximately 17 miles long. But this is only the beginning. In January, Kristi Noem, then Secretary of Homeland Security, 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 more than 500 miles of border barrier long enough to stretch from Washington, D.C. to Nashville, Tennessee.
DAVIES: DHS called the effort Operation River Wall and this year signed a $96 million contract for the first 17-mile section. That works out to about $5.6 million per mile, making the entire 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 river geomorphologist who studies river flow. He said putting hundreds of miles of buoys in the Rio Grande was a bad idea.
MARK TOMPKINS: This will cause disasters.
DAVIES: Tompkins was hired by a Laredo environmental group. He studied Homeland Security’s plan to deploy buoys in the region and said the buoys could become a ticking time bomb.
TOMPKINS: Sections of these buoy chains come loose, and if they get stuck on a bridge or a section of wall, then you’ve got real problems.
DAVIES: Tompkins said if a string of buoys gets stuck on the border bridges, it could cause structural damage. Due to the high volume of trade crossing the border, closing bridges could send shockwaves through supply chains. More than half of the border crossings between the United States and Mexico are in Texas.
ADRIANA MARTINEZ: They don’t seem very stable.
DAVIES: Adriana Martinez of Southern Illinois University studied the flow of the Rio Grande River after the state of Texas installed buoys to deter illegal immigration in 2023. She said the new buoys are larger and much longer.
MARTINEZ: The amount of force that would be required to hold them in place is just not physically feasible with the concrete blocks that I’ve seen.
DAVIES: In a statement, Customs and Border Protection said the water barrier is designed to withstand a 100-year flood. Additionally, water barriers are designed to resist increasing currents and water levels. According to the National Weather Service, the Lower Rio Grande reached record flood levels in 2010 due to the remnants of Hurricane Alex. For NPR News, I’m David Martin Davies in Brownsville.
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