This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Joel Ruiz pointed his cane toward a long piece of metal lying in the dirt. Unwanted construction crews had left it behind on his riverfront property where he has lived and run a small fishing business for decades in San Ygnacio, Texas.
At 90, Ruiz still tends the land. But in July, heavy machinery gouged the earth where mesquite and dense brush once grew. A steel barricade of 30ft-high bars was erected across the riverfront, including on his property just across the Rio Grande from Mexico.
For months, Ruiz and a handful of other San Ygnacio residents have been trying to halt the construction of a federal border wall in their Mexican American town of roughly 400 people. They’ve blocked bulldozers, been arrested, unearthed 75-year-old land records and filed lawsuits challenging the federal government’s authority to build here. Even though residents say nearly all the riverfront land in the county is privately owned, the government is building on it anyway, claiming a decades-old right.
While they have stopped construction on the disputed land for now – a verbal concession, not a court order – the reprieve is precarious: the lawsuits are unresolved, the federal money set aside for construction remains in place and residents know the crews could be back. But they are drawing on the memory of a town that rose up against the government once before.
“This little spot is all we have,” said Elsa Hull, who owns property downriver with her two daughters. “But [residents] fought the federal government before and won – and we can do it again.”
‘Life or death for us’
Founded along the Rio Grande in 1830, San Ygnacio grew from a cluster of ranches into a small border town. Today, its plaza is still lined with homes made of sandstone quarried from the riverbank. The town sits in Zapata county, where roughly 38% of residents live below the poverty line and the median household income is about $39,000. Many work in healthcare, schools, food service and ranching. The border patrol is a major regional employer: its sector in Laredo employs about 3,025 people.
The construction is part of the Trump administration’s renewed border-wall push – a roughly $46.5bn expansion funded by what is known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. San Ygnacio is located in one of the stretches where that money is now hitting the ground – and it’s going up as the number of border apprehensions is dropping drastically. Ruiz said he rarely sees anyone crossing this stretch of river any more.
The Rio Grande is also San Ygnacio’s sole source of drinking water, and the wall is being built in its floodplain. To expedite construction, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) waived 30 federal laws – among them the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, eliminating the environmental review that would normally accompany a project of this scale. (The DHS did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.)
To fill that gap, the Laredo-based Rio Grande International Study Center (RGISC) commissioned its own. The assessment warned that the wall and buoy system along and in the Rio Grande would worsen flooding – and, in places, fail outright.
“This is life or death for us,” said Tricia Cortez, the center’s executive director. A breach of the wall system, she warned, would be sudden and catastrophic – homes destroyed, lives endangered. “The wall will straitjacket the river, forcing flood waters to rise and move faster.”
Construction in San Ygnacio had begun without notice. Residents watched what they called a “man camp” rise at its edge and sensed something was coming. At a June community meeting to discuss other business, word began spreading through the back of the room: contractors were clearing land along the riverbank. Several residents hurried down and confronted the equipment operators, telling them they were on private property.
Hull spent 25 years as an environmental investigator for the Texas commission on environmental quality. She recalled how she would watch deer, bobcats, coyotes and sunsets over the river from a bench beneath a tree on the bluff. Border construction has since knocked the tree down and smashed the bench.
“Every part of my life is intertwined with the Rio Grande,” Hull said. “To me this river is sacred.”
When contractors arrived near Ruiz’s home and RV park in June, he invited Hull and her friend to see the damage done. Crews had razed trees and severed an irrigation line. Before leaving for an appointment, Ruiz signed a paper authorizing Hull and her friend to stay and watch the property.
Two contractor trucks slipped through the gate. Hull said one worker repeatedly flashed a card marked “CBP” – presumably Customs and Border Protection. Then she noticed Southwest Valley Constructors identification on his vest.
“You’re not CBP,” Hull recalled telling him. When another truck approached, Hull drove her car across the entrance. More trucks arrived, followed by sheriff’s deputies, state troopers and border patrol agents.
“We were just surrounded by all these men,” Hull said.
Hull pulled up the county appraisal map and argued the crews were on Ruiz’s property. A deputy insisted the land was federal. Finally, Hull put her water bottle on the hood of her car and sat down.
“Fuck it,” she said. “Arrest me.” They did.
On 14 August, Hull returned, carrying a flag that read “Keep Our River Free” on one side and “Walls and Buoys Kill” on the other. When a sheriff’s deputy called to her from across a fence, she thought he wanted to talk. Instead, she was handcuffed and arrested again.
A win from the past
San Ygnacio had fought the federal government for this land once before – and won. When government contractors insisted the land was federal, Frank “Chip” Briscoe, an architectural conservator, started digging through county records.
The trail led back to the early 1950s, when the government built the Falcon dam. Its reservoir submerged historic ranch communities and Indigenous sites along the river, and San Ygnacio was scheduled to be condemned and cleared for the reservoir, too. But residents refused to accept it. In 1951, more than 200 people signed a petition, organized by local veterans and civic leaders, opposing the measure. It worked: the government carved San Ygnacio out of the condemnation, the one stretch along the river bend spared from the reservoir. Seventy years later, the town is invoking that same exclusion again.
Briscoe and attorney Ricardo de Anda searched subsequent property records and still found no evidence that the federal government had later acquired the excluded land. The documents gave De Anda something concrete to act on. In mid-June, he met with the US army corps of engineers on Ruiz’s behalf, arguing the crews had no legal grounds to build on the disputed property.
When construction continued, De Anda sent a warning letter and filed two lawsuits against the federal government, alleging it took private property in violation of the fifth amendment. Two more landowners are preparing to sue, and De Anda plans to sue the contractor, Southwest Valley Constructors, in state court. Landowners filed criminal trespass complaints, while about a dozen residents pressed local officials to intervene.
About a month later, according to De Anda, the county attorney arranged a meeting with contractors and federal officials.
“They agreed to stop,” he said, and the crews pulled back – for now.
For De Anda, stopping construction is only part of the plan. “Our strategy is to affect the national consciousness,” he said. The rest is a matter of time. Every day they hold the line – with their bodies, their deeds, their lawsuits – buys more of it. They are looking toward the midterms, hoping a change in Congress could give them another opening. They are betting they can outlast it.
At San Ygnacio’s Grito de Septiembre festival, enlarged copies of the 1951 petition and its signature pages were displayed in the plaza. Residents gathered around them, searching for the names of their ancestors.
Back on Ruiz’s land, people have stopped coming to fish for white bass and alligator gar; when construction began, it blocked his boat ramp access. The small fishing business he ran here is now, in his words, “kaput”.
Still, Ruiz keeps coming to the river. In 1973, he helped establish a bird sanctuary beside his property. “My baby,” he called it. “I built it.”
When asked whether his daily walks down to the river had become a way of watching for the crews to return – their equipment still sitting idle on the land – he shook his head.
He was here “just to be here”, he said.
