The Texas General Land Office has acquired a 1,400 acre ranch along the Rio Grande, which the state will use to build a wall along the Texas-Mexico border.
Earlier this week, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham revealed that the GLO has acquired the ranch in Starr County—a border county 105 miles away from Laredo. The area, located in the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Sector, has seen the highest levels of illegal alien crossings.
Buckingham said that the Texas Facilities Commission—which is tasked with building the border wall—requested the property. With the purchase of the ranch, the GLO now owns two pieces of land, totaling more than 4,000 acres, in Starr County along the border.
“For too long, the federal government has abdicated its job to secure our southern border – endangering Texans by allowing hundreds of thousands of unvetted illegal migrants to stream across our porous border. This mass negligence and refusal to enforce the law is downright sinister. As Land Commissioner, tasked with overseeing thirteen million acres of state land, I will not idly stand by and let this dereliction of duty affect the lives of hard-working Texans,” said Buckingham.
This is why I am stepping up and acquiring this 1,402-acre property in the heart of the border crisis. The General Land Office works for the people of Texas, and our agency will take matters into our own hands and partner with the State of Texas to secure this section of Starr County by building a fortified 1.5-mile wall.
Buckingham also revealed that state employees have already been out to the property with bulldozers and she believes construction of the wall will begin soon.
Additionally, Buckingham explained that there has been massive amounts of human trafficking on the property. She said that the acquisition included trees that served as “rape trees”—which are used by human traffickers to display women’s undergarments as trophies after an assault.
“It’s at an area of great impact, it’s in an area where we see lots of people coming across all of the time, not only seeing the people coming across, but seeing those women and children who are abused and victimized. We’re seeing drugs. We’re seeing weapons. We’re seeing all kinds of things coming across this particular part of the border,” explained Buckingham.
“So we think that this barrier, this wall that the Texas Facilities Commission will build, will help to control that traffic and hopefully shut it down.”
The move to acquire the ranch comes after the State of Texas has continued to build barriers, including the buoy border barrier in the Rio Grande, along the border. Texas has also declared Fronton Island—a 170-acre island on the Rio Grande in Starr County long known to be a hotspot for cartel trafficking—to be state property.
Known as the Brewster Ranch, the Land Report describes it as “an assemblage of 28 historic ranches in Texas’s largest county that was parceled together by [Brad Kelley] over a two-decade span. After bringing it to market in 2019, James and Harrison King wore out two trucks touring potential buyers on the 552-square-mile Brewster County landholding, which stands at the intersection of desert, river, and mountain where Northern Mexico ecosystems blend with the southern extension of the Rockies.”