The Trump administration is racing ahead with a $46 billion border buildout that combines 30-foot steel fencing with surveillance towers, cameras, sensors, fiberoptic cables, roads, lights, and artificial intelligence systems across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Customs and Border Protection says the project is designed to make Border Patrol agents more efficient and help detect unauthorized crossings. But along the border, residents, privacy advocates, watchdog groups, and local officials say the “smart wall” is turning communities into testing grounds for a costly surveillance network at a time when border crossings have fallen to historic lows.
The Associated Press reported July 2 that CBP is putting up about six miles of wall per week and had added 74 miles as of mid-June. The broader plan also relies on surveillance where physical barriers are not planned, including rugged sections where towers, ground sensors, and other detection systems will stand in for steel.
“It’s a smart wall. It’s not just a barrier,” CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott told AP.
That phrase is central to the administration’s sales pitch. It is also why civil liberties advocates are raising alarms. The new buildout does not stop at fencing. It includes autonomous surveillance towers, cameras capable of long-range monitoring, buried sensors that can detect movement, fiberoptic systems, drones, and artificial intelligence tools that help determine whether a person or object should be flagged for Border Patrol agents.
For people who live along the border, that means the wall is not only a structure. It is a surveillance system that can reach beyond the border line and into communities, roads, farms, ranches, and private land.
“We are seeing a massive expansion of surveillance and surveillance technology across the borderlands,” said Ricky Garza, border policy counsel at the Southern Border Communities Coalition.
Garza told AP that the wall in all its forms harms border communities. Privacy groups have warned that this type of infrastructure can gather information about residents who are not suspected of any crime, expand the government’s ability to monitor daily life, and create a permanent enforcement footprint in towns that already live with checkpoints, patrol roads, cameras, and federal agents.
The spending is also drawing scrutiny. Congress provided the Trump administration with $46 billion for immigration enforcement and wall construction, giving CBP the funding needed to sign tens of billions of dollars in contracts. Watchdog groups have questioned whether the scale of the spending matches the need, especially when unauthorized crossings have sharply declined.
The administration has defended the buildout as a long-delayed completion of Trump’s signature border project. Border officials say technology gives agents better awareness and can help them respond faster. But critics argue that a multibillion-dollar wall and surveillance project cannot be justified by slogans about security when the federal government has not fully answered questions about cost, oversight, privacy, or local risk.
Those risks are now at the center of a lawsuit in West Texas.
On June 17, the Presidio Municipal Development District sued the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and other federal agencies over planned border wall construction in the Big Bend region. The local government entity argues that federal officials failed to obtain legally required approval before moving forward with a project that could interfere with flood-control infrastructure protecting Presidio.
The lawsuit focuses on the Presidio Flood Control Project, a levee system near the Rio Grande. Local officials say construction of a wall, roads, gates, and related technology near the levee could compromise flood protections and increase danger to homes, farms, and public infrastructure.
The Texas Tribune reported that the lawsuit argues the federal government failed to obtain permission from the Secretary of the Army before planning construction along the levee. The case also claims the project could worsen flooding in a region where heavy rains and flash floods are known dangers.
Presidio is not a hypothetical flood-risk zone. The city has already faced serious floods. Local officials and advocates point to past Rio Grande flooding, including events in 1978 and 2008, as evidence that flood-control protections are essential to the community’s survival. A 30-foot wall near a levee can trap debris, redirect water, interfere with drainage, and make a flood worse if engineers do not account for the hydrology of the area.
The Big Bend Sentinel reported that the lawsuit followed months of local concern about possible flooding impacts. Earlier this year, the City of Presidio and the Presidio Municipal Development District commissioned an independent flood risk assessment after officials said they received no meaningful response from federal agencies about the safety of the plan.
The flood concerns come as federal officials are also pursuing border construction in one of the most remote and ecologically sensitive parts of the border. The Big Bend region includes national park land, state park land, river corridors, wildlife habitat, farms, ranches, and small communities that depend on the Rio Grande.
The case raises a question that goes beyond Presidio: What happens when the federal government treats local flood systems, public land, and private property as obstacles to an enforcement project?
The Texas Tribune reported that the Big Bend sector recorded 3,096 migrant encounters in fiscal year 2025, only 1.3 percent of apprehensions across the entire U.S.-Mexico border. During the first seven months of the current fiscal year, encounters in the sector were down 42.5 percent from the same period the year before.
That low activity has sharpened opposition. Residents and local officials have asked why a remote region with relatively few crossings should face walls, surveillance systems, roads, flood risks, and potential land seizures. For some landowners, the fear is not only construction. It is eminent domain, long-term access roads, and federal control over property that families have owned for generations.
Environmental groups have also challenged the administration’s use of waivers to speed border construction. Critics say those waivers allow DHS to bypass laws meant to protect wildlife, water, public lands, historic sites, and Native cultural resources. In Big Bend, where the Rio Grande cuts through desert, canyon, and riparian habitat, those protections carry special weight.
The administration argues that the wall and technology are needed for border security. Local opponents say security cannot mean ignoring flood law, property rights, privacy, environmental safeguards, and the lives of people who live along the border year-round.
For border residents, the “smart wall” is not an abstraction. It is a camera tower outside town, a sensor buried near a ranch, a road cut through fragile land, a survey crew near a levee, or a federal contractor preparing land for a structure that could change how water moves during a storm.
The fight now moves through federal court while construction planning continues. If Presidio succeeds, the ruling could slow or halt part of the Big Bend buildout and force federal agencies to answer local flood-safety concerns. If the administration prevails, border communities may have little power to stop a $46 billion wall and surveillance project moving forward in their name.
Presidio officials are not arguing against every form of border security. They are arguing that the federal government must follow the law before building near the infrastructure that protects their city. As Democracy Forward put it when announcing the lawsuit, the emergency motion seeks to block construction of a wall that “violates law and threatens humanitarian, environmental, and economic disaster.”
COMMENTS