Frontera Federation condemns multi-billion dollar scheme that contaminates drinking water, destroys the ecosystem, and funnels taxpayer dollars to private companies with government ties
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 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.
"What arrived in Eagle Pass yesterday is not a border security measure — it is a killing infrastructure," said Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of Frontera Federation. "These buoys are engineered to roll and spin so that anyone who touches them is vulnerable to being drowned."
The Trump administration is spending billions of taxpayer dollars to drown people in a river that two nations share, millions of people depend on for drinking water, and entire ecosystems rely on for survival, Frontera Federation said.
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. The U.S. taxpayer-funded contracts were made possible in part by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated $46.5 billion for border fortification despite CBP having recorded 73 percent fewer Rio Grande Valley sector apprehensions in fiscal year 2025 compared to 2024.
As is the case with border wall contracts now facing backlash over contracts awarded to Trump donors, 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. To fast-track the project, the Department of Homeland Security waived more than 30 federal laws, and performed 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.
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. River scientists have warned that the buoys pose catastrophic risks to the Rio Grande's ecosystem.
More than 1,100 people died attempting to cross the river between 2017 and 2023. The new federal buoys, which are engineered to ensure no handhold, represent an exponential escalation of lethal deterrence.
"Deterrence through drowning is not a border policy — it is state-sanctioned killing," said Ari Sawyer, co-director at Frontera Federation. "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."