MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
OK, to southwest Texas, where the Trump administration's plans for border barriers are moving forward. Since announced, the federal government has waived more than two dozen federal laws to fast-track construction across nearly 175 miles of rural West Texas. And as Carlos Morales reports, the plans have brought together an unusual bipartisan front.
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CARLOS MORALES, BYLINE: On a quiet spring morning, Joe Pineda is driving across his family land near Redford, Texas.
JOE PINEDA: Let me see. It's probably easier to go back this way.
MORALES: He points to where he's grown alfalfa, pecan trees, then to the family cemetery that dates back to the late 1800s.
PINEDA: And here's the river.
MORALES: Yeah. Can we go...
PINEDA: Yeah, let's get down and - let's go look.
MORALES: ...Take a look?
As Pineda looks over the Rio Grande, a gentle wind runs through overgrown reeds and mesquite trees. He thinks about the days he spent here as a child and the times he brought his own children here.
PINEDA: It's things like that that I'm going to miss. It's the time that you can enjoy with your kids and enjoy heritage of your land where your great-grandparents and everybody else before you lived. And it's going to be taken.
MORALES: Pineda and his family have received a letter from the government warning of eminent domain proceedings if they don't sell the land or voluntarily give access for border wall construction. It's a scene playing out across the Big Bend as the government looks to build roughly 175 miles of border barrier. This area, one of the last pockets of untouched frontier country, is now set for 30-foot-tall steel fences, patrol roads, floodlighting and surveillance systems.
The plans have united Democrats and Republicans who say a wall's not needed here. They worry about the blow it would deal to the region, from threats to the environment and Indigenous sites to impacts on the area's famously dark skies and on wild animals like black bears, which have made a recent return. It's all part of a $56 million tourism industry that Pineda says is now in jeopardy.
PINEDA: They're killing our economy with this wall because this area gets a lot of money from tourism. It's going to make everything change. It's going to be sad.
MORALES: U.S. Customs and Border Protection tells NPR the agency will try to avoid or minimize impacts to the environment to the greatest extent possible in the areas where they plan to build walls. Historically, the area's rugged terrain has meant few people attempt to cross through the Big Bend. And since President Trump's second term, that number has fallen even further. In the first three months of the year, CBP's Big Bend sector saw a tenth of the nearly 4,500 apprehensions made in Texas' busiest sector.
RONNIE DODSON: We're not the No. 1 crossing spot.
MORALES: Ronnie Dodson is the sheriff for Brewster County, home to Big Bend National Park, where CBP says it's no longer planning to construct 30-foot-tall steel fencing. Instead, the agency will now build vehicle barriers and patrol roads along the border.
DODSON: We agree with border security. We agree there needs to be walls places. There's no if and ands or buts (ph) about that. But not here.
MORALES: Dodson says the money being poured into border walls could be better spent. The price tag for just a single mile of border barrier in the Big Bend - over $17 million.
JOANNA MACKENZIE: These numbers are mind-boggling. That type of money is generational changing.
MORALES: Joanna MacKenzie is the top elected official in Hudspeth County. In a joint letter, MacKenzie and all of the county judges on the Texas-Mexico border wrote the government asking for a say in how border security takes shape in the places they know best.
MACKENZIE: Tell us, is this going to happen and we don't have a say in it? OK, what can we do? What can we do? That's it. What can we do?
MORALES: For some private landowners here, the answer's clear. They're willing to do whatever it takes, including filing their own lawsuits against the government. Raymond Skiles is a longtime wildlife biologist in the region and a land owner himself.
RAYMOND SKILES: If this were to come to pass, it would be a rip through, you know, the treasured landscape of the Big Bend.
MORALES: Sitting in his home in Alpine, Texas, Skiles looks at a map Customs and Border Protection sent him.
SKILES: It'd be like taking a knife to the Mona Lisa and just cutting it in two and leaving that rent scar across it.
MORALES: For Skiles, an imposing barrier through the Big Bend would be a painful reminder of what once was - an unwanted memorial to the place he calls home. For NPR News, I'm Carlos Morales in the Big Bend area of West Texas.
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