EAGLE PASS, TX — On June 10, 2026, flatbed trucks began delivering hundreds of enormous orange cylindrical buoys to a staging area at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, just steps from the Rio Grande. Frontera Federation, a binational border-rights organization, was on the scene and is sounding the alarm: these are not ordinary river barriers. They are industrial-grade drowning devices, each one 14 feet long and nearly five feet tall and built to ensure that no human being can climb or cling to them.
The 300 new buoys are implicitly designed to endanger the lives of irregular border crossers, who are often refugees, children, and families who arrive exhausted and are likely to be pulled and held repeatedly under the water. The buoys are specifically engineered to roll and spin so that anyone who touches them is vulnerable to being drowned.
What arrived in Eagle Pass yesterday is not a border security measure — it is a killing infrastructure.
There were additional buoys staged on private land south of Eagle Pass, and buoys have already been deployed in Brownsville, TX. The Department of Homeland Security also plans to implement the new buoy model in the Rio Grande near Laredo, TX, in the near future.
A $3 Billion ‘Floating Border Wall’ With No Environmental Review
The buoys arriving in Eagle Pass are part of the Trump administration’s “Operation River Wall,” a plan to deploy more than 536 miles of continuous buoy barriers along the Texas-Mexico border — a project with no precedent anywhere in the world. The first 17-mile installation, near Brownsville, has a price tag of $96 million, and at $5.6 million per mile, the full project is projected to cost over $3 billion. The Del Rio 1 Project consists of 40 miles of buoys in a contract awarded to BCCG A Joint Venture at $565 million.
To fast-track the project, the Department of Homeland Security waived more than 30 federal laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and critically, the Safe Drinking Water Act. No environmental assessment, no flood modeling, and no independent engineering review has been made available to the public or to the communities who live alongside the river.
A Threat to Drinking Water on Both Sides of the Border
The Rio Grande is the primary source of drinking water for millions of residents on the U.S. and Mexican sides of the border. By waiving the Safe Drinking Water Act, the federal government has stripped communities of protections designed to prevent industrial contamination of this shared resource.
The buoys, massive steel-and-polymer structures, introduce new contaminants, including microplastics, disrupt natural water filtration processes, and, when they break free in flooding events, will likely damage water intake infrastructure downstream.
Additional buoys could also lead to drinking water shortages in Mexico, with whom the U.S. must share the fresh water resource.
River Ecosystem Destruction: An Ecological Disaster
River scientists have warned that the buoys pose catastrophic risks to the Rio Grande’s ecosystem.
Mark Tompkins, a fluvial geomorphologist who reviewed the project for an environmental coalition, warned that the buoys will inevitably alter flood dynamics, accumulate sediment and debris into dangerous “rafts,” and shift the river channel in ways that could trigger a diplomatic crisis under the 1970 U.S.-Mexico Boundary Treaty. In a region already battered by a history of major flooding, including the 2010 Hurricane Alex event, when the Rio Grande crested more than seven feet above flood stage for 33 days, he called the buoys “a time bomb.”
Adriana Martinez, a Southern Illinois University geomorphologist who has studied the impact of the state buoys already in the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass, documented how the structures cause sediment buildup, redirect water flow, and create conditions for new sandbars and islands, fundamentally and permanently reshaping the river. She has described the federal government’s much larger cylindrical buoys as an even greater impediment to natural water flow.
Migratory wildlife, such as black bears recolonizing Texas from Mexico, endangered birds in the Rio Grande Valley’s internationally recognized wildlife refuges, and species regulated under the Endangered Species Act face disruption of movement corridors that the federal waivers have placed beyond legal protection.
Drowning by Design: The Human Toll
Border Patrol has openly described these buoys as rolling devices intended to prevent any person from climbing out of the water. When Texas installed a far smaller, 1,000-foot stretch of earlier-generation buoys at Eagle Pass in 2023, at least two people have died as the result of the buoys, with one person’s body found caught in the buoys and the nets that flow beneath them to prevent people from swimming underneath.
More than 1,100 people died attempting to cross the Rio Grande between 2017 and 2023. The new federal buoys, which are engineered to ensure no handhold, represent an exponential escalation of lethal deterrence. More people, including women and children, have drowned crossing the Rio Grande in recent years than ever before.
Eagle Pass is the deadliest stretch of river.
Deterrence through drowning is not a border policy — it is state-sanctioned killing. And it is happening in a river whose flows have dropped to historic lows, meaning people are being killed in a body of water that the government is simultaneously destroying.
Taxpayer Billions Flowing to Politically Connected Contractors
Federal contracting records reviewed by Inside Climate News reveal that more than $2.5 billion in contracts tied to the buoy project have already been awarded to a small set of private companies.
Cochrane USA, a Virginia-based firm that demonstrated early buoy prototypes to Border Patrol during the first Trump administration, received $641 million. Spencer Construction LLC (Tucson) was awarded four contracts totaling $1.21 billion. Fisher Sand and Gravel (a company whose previous border wall contracts became embroiled in legal and financial controversy) received $316.7 million. SLS Federal Services LLC received $382.3 million.
The Trump administration has often awarded these and other border wall contracts to companies with ties to the GOP or after having received campaign donations from company leaders. The Frontera Federation found campaign finance data indicating many of the private individuals overseeing the Rio Grande buoy construction also donated to the Trump campaign, or Political Action Committees (PACs) supporting Trump’s election.
These awards were made possible in part by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated $46.5 billion for border fortification. That funding vastly exceeds any demonstrated need, given that CBP recorded 73 percent fewer Rio Grande Valley apprehensions in fiscal year 2025 compared to 2024.
Frontera Federation Demands Immediate Action
Frontera Federation calls on:
• Congress to investigate the no-bid and expedited contracts awarded under Operation River Wall and their connections to political donors;
• The U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission to fulfill its treaty obligations and conduct an independent assessment of buoy impacts on binational water resources;
• Federal courts to reinstate environmental review requirements waived by the Department of Homeland Security, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act;
• Media organizations to cover the arrival of the Eagle Pass buoys as the public health, environmental, and human rights emergency it is.
FF Co-Director Amerika Garcia Grewal Visits the Buoy Staging Area
About Frontera Federation
Frontera Federation is a binational organization working to defend the human rights of border communities and migrants on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. We organize alongside residents of Eagle Pass, Piedras Negras, and communities throughout the Rio Grande corridor. Learn more at fronterafederation.org.
Ari Sawyer is co-founder and co-director of Frontera Federation. They are an expert in deadly border deterrence, kidnapping and disappearance of people migrating, and U.S.-Mexico immigration policy.
