Contractor builds his own border fences
He hopes the federal government will use his wall and contract for more. But he’s run into opposition.
MISSION, Texas — President Trump took office vowing to build “a big, beautiful wall” along the 1,954mile U.S.-Mexico border, but so far the federal government has managed to build only about one mile of new border wall.
Texas may be the biggest obstacle. Unlike in other states, most of the borderland here is privately owned, which has delayed construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Federal lawyers have had to comb property records, track down landowners, make offers to buy the land and — if owners refuse to sell — file lawsuits to seize the land.
Contractor Tommy Fisher says he can do much better. His company has built about 1,500 feet of what it says will be a 3-mile fence. The cost, he estimates, will be $42 million, making it faster and cheaper than the work of government contractors who have spent months surveying and building more expensive fences nearby. His estimated time of completion: two weeks.
Fisher, 50, said he hopes to sell or lease his section of the fence to the government, and to persuade it to contract with him to build more. He has bought 100 miles of land elsewhere along the river in Texas from about two dozen private owners.
He has also attracted fierce criticism — and a federal audit.
“We’ll protect southern
Texas faster than they ever dreamed,” he said Tuesday as he helped workers pour concrete and place 18-foot steel bollards along the banks of the Rio Grande, a few miles west of the border city of McAllen.
Fisher — who took over the family company from his father at 25 after graduating from Arizona State University with an agribusiness degree — has moved swiftly to acquire land, overcoming local opposition.
Last year, federal prosecutors and the nonprofit National Butterfly Center sued to stop his fence. They said the wall was too close to the Rio Grande and risked changing its flow, altering the border and forcing floodwaters into Mexico in violation of international treaties — all of which Fisher disputed. Last week, a federal judge ruled in Fisher’s favor, lifting a temporary restraining order and allowing construction to resume.
Fisher’s neighbors are incensed. Rey Anzaldua’s family has owned land next to where Fisher is building for generations. Now he fears they could lose it to erosion.
“By them clearing the brush from the riverbank, they have speeded up the erosion process, and the next flood, we’re going to lose some land,” said Anzaldua, 75, a retired customs agent. “What damage will it do to our property and properties downriver — or properties on the Mexican side?”
Scott Nicol, co-chairman of the Sierra Club Borderlands Campaign, also said Fisher’s fence could worsen erosion and flooding.
“He shouldn’t be able to do it,” Nicol said. “One big concern is that the land the wall sits on is going to erode and get swept away. You can have terrible destruction just from their construction materials hitting things.”
Another detractor is Terence Garrett, who teaches political science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville.
“It’s more symbolic than effective,” Garrett said. “It may be cheaper, but I’m not sure he’s using the quality of materials you would normally see. It’s not going to be as strong and it certainly isn’t well thought out in terms of placement.”
The idea of a private contractor building a wall, Garrett said, has shocked many neighbors.
“Normally, you have some kind of process to evaluate what actually might be commendable to the area, what might be reasonable. There is surveying by the government ... and in the process some kind of condemnation. You might be against the idea of the government taking your land and using eminent domain, but at least there’s some kind of process. Here there’s no process. There’s no sort of realistic assessment as to how it might impact the area. That’s the issue that the landowners and neighbors have.”
Fisher began preparing to build border fencing as soon as Trump got elected. He visited the Arizona border and talked to Border Patrol
agents and ranchers.
“I wanted to build the biggest infrastructure known to man, and I said I think we can make it better than what agents have,” Fisher said.
The Washington Post reported this week that Trump is preparing to divert an additional $7.2 billion in Pentagon funding for border wall construction this year, enough to complete about 885 miles by spring 2022. That would bring the federal funds allocated to border fencing to $18.4 billion.
An 8-mile section of fence being built by a federal contractor near Mission cost $167 million — about $21 million per mile, $7 million more per mile than Fisher’s fence, which also includes a concrete access road. Fisher said that if the government contracted with him to build on the 100 acres of private land he owns along the river in Texas, he could fence it all within a year for about $1.4 billion, and would maintain it for a decade for an additional $400 million.
In an interview, Carmen Qualia, an assistant chief patrol agent at U.S. Customs and Border Protection who is overseeing border wall construction in the area, said the other fence might have been more expensive than Fisher’s because it includes a concrete levee.
She said a 5-mile stretch of border fence being built by federal contractors to the west in Starr County cost $14 million per mile.
Both fences are due to be completed within a year, Qualia said, among nine border wall building projects underway in the Rio Grande Valley. The pace of construction “is picking up,” she said.
She said the agency was not consulted about Fisher’s wall but was not concerned.
When Trump was elected, Fisher had hoped to offer a bid to construct the entire border wall. He went on a blitz of right-wing media, making his case to Trump via television and Twitter.
With 1,600 employees, Fisher Sand & Gravel had handled large highway projects but nothing for Homeland Security. The first time it bid on the border wall last year, Fisher won a $400-million contract to build 31 miles in Yuma, Ariz. Surveying is underway, he said, but the company faces a federal audit after complaints from members of Congress that Trump steered the work their way. Fisher insists he did nothing wrong and that the audit will show “how much we saved taxpayers.”
Last year, Fisher was hired by conservative Florida-based nonprofit We Build the Wall, whose board includes former Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon, to build half a mile of fence for about $23 million in 10 days in Sunland Park, N.M.
The group claimed to have raised $25 million to hire Fisher for the walls in New Mexico and Texas. Fisher said the nonprofit contributed only $1.5 million of the $42 million for the Texas fence and isn’t involved in his other ventures.
He erected one of the wall prototypes in California and lobbied lawmakers and Homeland Security. Fisher attended Trump’s State of the Union address as his guest.
After his crews cleared brush to build his fence, Fisher had them plant palm trees and Bermuda grass. He says he wanted the area to look like a golf course to please Border Patrol agents and, of course, Trump.
“I’ve done everything that I can as a citizen,” he said. “The government can see it can be done.”