State buys South Texas ranch to build its own border wall

STARR COUNTY, Texas (Border Report) -- A Texas agency has bought a ranch on the border in rural Starr County where the state plans to build more border wall.

The Texas General Land Office on Tuesday announced it purchased a 1,400-acre ranch where corn and other crops were being grown and the state will build a 1.5-mile new segment of border wall on the property.

The land is near where Texas built its first, 1.7-mile segment of state-funded border wall in 2022 as part of the state's Operation Lone Star border security initiative.

Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham told Border Report on Tuesday that the agency had been trying to acquire the land for a while because of reports that the area is notorious for sexual assaults of migrant women and children by Mexican drug cartel and human trafficking organizations.

"This is a high traffic area at the border. A lot of terrible things happening there," Buckingham said via a Zoom interview from Austin. "Because the landowner was not allowing law enforcement nor the border wall to be built on her property, once the bad guys know this is a free pass zone, then they just start running through. And the stories that I was hearing as we were getting closer and closer to acquiring this property were just heartbreaking. It was story after story of abused women and children.”

The agency bought the land on Oct. 23 with mineral revenue and Buckingham said the purchase was approved by two independent boards.

The agency plans to give an easement of the borderland to the Texas Facilities Commission to start border wall construction in December.

"It's been a long fight to get here, to be able to acquire this piece of property to get this wall built," she said.

As of the summer, Texas has built about 34 miles of state-funded border wall at a cost of about $25 million per mile, according to an investigation by the Texas Tribune.

Border Report asked the Texas Facilities Commission, which oversees state border wall projects, how much this new section will cost, but the agency declined to comment.

The newly purchased parcel of land and ranch are just west of the small town of La Grulla and the current section of Texas-funded border wall, which was the first to be built in the state and the first state to build border wall in the nation.

Grass and weeds already are growing at the base of the 1.7-mile segment, which will not abut the new section but will be within a couple of miles, agency officials tell Border Report.

Drone footage of the GLO land show fields of corn and sorghum, cotton and onion crops, which Buckingham says the agency plans to continue farming and should not be affected by the border wall construction.

She said the General Land Office last week also acquired land in West Texas, in Brewster County, near the city of Marathon "with a small segment on the river" where the agency also plans to give the easement to the state to build border wall.

Buckingham says the state is building the wall because the Biden administration isn't defending the Texas border.

"Texas and this entire administration has been standing in the gap left by the federal government," she said.

Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.