As Miller relayed this story, the sound of a vehicle coming down the dirt road interrupted him. “Here we go,” he said, rolling his eyes. A green-striped Border Patrol vehicle pulled up, and two agents got out, both wearing sunglasses and black tactical vests. “Just seeing if you guys are O.K.,” one said. (The agents declined to give their names.)
“We’re just talking about how they’re trying to build the border wall . . . and it’s supposed to basically steal all our property,” Miller said brightly, a glimmer of anger in his voice.
“Yeah, unfortunately, it’s gonna happen—” the agent started to say.
“It’s not going to happen,” Miller said. “Not if we can do anything about it.”
Building the wall in the area was “unfortunate,” the agent conceded, but it would help stop child sex trafficking. “Nobody wants that, right?” he said.
“Is it worth billions of dollars to stop a handful of people?” Miller asked.
“If it stops one child from getting sex trafficked, yeah, for me, it is,” the agent said stiffly. “We’re trying to make a difference.”
“It’s going to make a difference,” Miller said bitterly. “Like, the most horrible difference you can imagine.”
After the agents drove off, Miller walked down to the riverbank and stood looking out at the Rio Grande. It was a muddy green and moving quickly after some recent rain. Miller’s dog, Koozie, waded in the water up to her belly. Lately, the wall had been appearing in his dreams, Miller said. Sometimes he was on the river and the wall blocked him from reaching the shore, and sometimes he was on land and couldn’t find his way to the water. I asked him what he thought was going to happen. “I think they’re going to build the wall,” he said.
That afternoon, I drove upriver, past anti-wall signs that repurposed older political slogans: “Come and Take It”; “Don’t Tread on Me.” By the side of the road, I spotted checkerboard squares—survey points used by drones when conducting aerial mapping. In Ruidosa, a tiny farming community about fifty miles from Redford, I pulled over near a pen of small, frisky goats. The property owner, Jorge González, came out to say hello; he had a gray-flecked mustache and an easy manner. González told me that he had spent the past decade working on several hundred acres of arid land and turning it into this improbable desert farm. He gave me a quick tour of his collection of cows, chickens, mules, goats, and sheep. Some shaggy buffalo drowsed in a patch of shade, and a hose fed water into a large puddle where a white goose paddled in tight circles.
González had been informed that the wall would pass directly behind his house, effectively cutting his land in two. He picked up a stick and drew lines in the dirt to show me how it had been explained to him: a thirty-foot-tall steel barrier, with a road on either side. Patrol vehicles, bright lights. The initial compensation offered was five thousand dollars. González didn’t accept, but he worried that the wall might be built across his land, anyway. When he’d told an Army Corps official over the phone that a bisected farm would no longer be able to support his animals, he was told he should pen his cattle instead of letting them roam free. He laughed softly at the idea, which struck him as entirely impractical: in arid West Texas, a single cow typically needs at least twenty acres of rangeland to graze. “It’s easy for those guys behind those computers to say, but it’s not that easy over here. This is real life,” he said.
