Trump has waived environmental laws along border. Planned river buoys could have consequences

The Trump administration is waiving environmental laws and spending billions on building a wall on the Southern border along our Southern border.

But in Texas, much of the border is marked by the Rio Grande River and there, they are putting in buoys. Big, orange, tube-like buoys designed to stop people from crossing the river.

But, this climate reporter reports the planned hundreds of miles of buoys could have major consequences. Martha Pskowski is a climate reporter based in El Paso, Texas, for Inside Climate News. The Show spoke with her more about it.

Jorge Salgado

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Full conversation

MARTHA PSKOWSKI: The buoys that are being placed in the Rio Grande are these massive orange cylinders. They're about 12 feet long and they're connected one to another, so there's no gap between them, so it's supposed to create a continuous barrier across the river that would stop anyone from getting over it.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so that's kind of how they would stop migrants from crossing the river, which has been something that's happened on the Rio Grande for a long time, right?

MARTHA PSKOWSKI: Right, the idea behind the buoys is that if you have a barrier in the river itself, people don't even have the opportunity to get over to the other side and get on land.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it sounds like the Department of Homeland Security went around environmental laws, waived contracting laws, expedited this process in lots of ways that we've kind of seen happen in various parts of the border, especially, you know, as we're seeing wall construction happen here in Arizona as well. What did DHS do here to get this buoy project underway?

MARTHA PSKOWSKI: This project really picked up momentum last year once there was funding for these contracts, and the first section is going in in the river near Brownsville, Texas, so there was a series of waivers last year that kind of cleared the way and then these contracts started going out for hundreds of millions of dollars, some of them over a billion dollars. I added up around $2 billion in contracts that reference the buoys. So, this first section in Brownsville, but then also contracts that have been issued for other parts of the river where they'll presumably go next.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so your reporting here, Martha, on the possible environmental impacts of these buoys, if they end up being as extensive as the plan is, which is very extensive, what could those environmental impacts look like?

MARTHA PSKOWSKI: Right, the Rio Grande through South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley, you know, it's a dynamic river. So, over the last few years, it's been quite low because of the drought, but there are floods on the river, there have been hurricanes that have come up from the Gulf. So, one of the big concerns is just in a storm how are these buoys going to perform.

Customs and Border Protection says they're designed for a 100-year flood, but we haven't been able to see any specific technical information. And then just having these buoys in the river could really change the flow of the river. It could push the water in different directions, cause sediment to build up in new areas. So, something like this has really never been done on this scale, and there's a lot of questions about what impacts it'll have on the river.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, you talk to this geomorphologist, which is a great title to begin with, who was kind of studying the existing spherical buoys that are already on the river. What did she have to say? This was about flooding in particular.

MARTHA PSKOWSKI: Right, so this is Adriana Martinez, she studied these buoys that are in Eagle Pass, Texas, which the Texas government installed a couple years back. And this is a very small section of buoys compared to what the federal government is doing, but she did observe that, you know, when the water was low, the buoys would actually be sitting on the riverbed and then, you know, sand and sediment would build up around them, and the water was being pushed in different directions. She had concerns that it could change the Mexican side of the river. So, this was only a 2,000-foot section of buoys that she observed these changes on while the federal government is now planning to install hundreds of miles of buoys.

LAUREN GILGER: What would the full scale of this look like? How many hundreds of miles are we talking about here?

MARTHA PSKOWSKI: What the Customs and Border Protection has proposed so far is 536 miles of buoys. The first section they're doing is 17 miles in the Brownsville area. So, you know, if they build this whole chain of buoys, it would go all the way up towards the Amistad Reservoir in South Texas, you know, a significant chunk of the border between Texas and Mexico.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, yeah. And, Martha, this is all happening as we're watching the border really change, like unauthorized border crossings have dropped dramatically in recent years. How does that kind of context play into the, I guess, the necessity for a project like this?

MARTHA PSKOWSKI: Right, you know, at the moment, we're just seeing really low numbers of people attempting to cross the border. I live in El Paso, you know, anyone who lives on the border sees these ebbs and flows both in the number of people arriving and then the media attention that follows, but right now, you know, month to month there's very few people attempting to cross the border, being apprehended.

But that hasn't slowed down the Trump administration's border wall or border buoy plans. To the contrary, they're really moving quite quickly and implementing these projects, you know, in Texas, Arizona, a lot of different parts of the border. And, you know, the waivers specifically for Homeland Security to issue those waivers, you know, there is meant to be a homeland security justification for, you know, waiving all of these federal laws. So a lot of people are asking, you know, what's the urgency to do this when we're seeing such low numbers of people trying to cross the border.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And you report that this project has really been going under the radar in a lot of ways. What's the reaction been like there in southern Texas, though?

MARTHA PSKOWSKI: I was reporting in Brownsville earlier this year and, you know, that's where the first buoys are going in and some local activists had a rally and have been going to county commissioner's court is what it's called in Texas, and a few counties have passed resolutions in opposition to the buoys and trying to raise this issue, you know, with their congresspeople or, you know, just get some more information from the federal government.

You know, a lot of people just don't know that this is happening. So, you know, in the Rio Grande Valley, in South Texas, people are trying to spread the word before the buoys extend to more areas of the river.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. Martha Pskowski, a climate reporter based in El Paso, Texas, for Inside Climate News. Martha, thanks so much for your reporting here. Thanks for coming on.

MARTHA PSKOWSKI: Thank you for having me.