A Day on the Rio Grande Reveals the True Cost of Trump's Border Wall
A surprisingly fresh breeze blew off the river as I watched 6-year-old Enrique Vargas cast a fishing line. Within seconds, he pulled it from the cool water, declaring that he’d felt a tug. When the hook emerged sans bait, Enrique expressed frustration. “The fish keep eating my fish,” he told me. His mother, Jasmine Hernandez of the tiny town of La Joya in deep South Texas, stood a few feet away on a floating 10-by-10-foot dock. She knew that her son, despite the lost bait, was creating lifelong memories as he and his stepsister, Jaylynn, enjoyed nature along the Rio Grande.
Just a few miles away, in a well-fortified enclosure beside well-traveled Conway Road in Mission, are acres of stacked, rusty-looking steel bollards—the building material for President Trump’s border wall. The federal government marches forward in its efforts to fulfill his campaign promise and add nearly one hundred miles of a border barrier across three of Texas’ southernmost counties: Starr, Hidalgo, and Cameron. While local activists remain committed to preventing new wall construction, a fatalism is creeping into the spirit of the people of this region. Many reflect on what might soon be lost: access to the Rio Grande itself, a once mighty and still swift-flowing river that first attracted the area’s settlement centuries ago.
“The Rio Grande river is our lifeblood in every way,” said Marianna Treviño Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center, which occupies one of the most sensitive areas threatened by what many consider Trump’s scorched-earth border security policy. “It doesn’t so much divide two countries. For those of us who live here and grew up here, it simply separates two communities that have always been bound together.”
Two years ago, U.S. Customs and Border Protection appeared likely to destroy one of the region’s most beloved edifices: the 120-year-old La Lomita Mission, the namesake of the city of Mission. The adobe chapel sat in a 150-foot “enforcement zone” just beyond the proposed route of the border wall that was slated to be clear-cut. La Lomita’s pastor, Father Roy Snipes, known variously as Father Roy or the “cowboy priest,” led a march from Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church to La Lomita, a distance of just over four miles. More than 1,000 people joined the protest.
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