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The Trump administration is moving ahead with a new border security project in the Rio Grande — not a wall of steel or concrete, but a floating barrier of linked buoys.
The effort known as Operation River Wall, calls for more than 500 miles of buoy barriers in the river along the Texas-Mexico border. The first segment, now being installed near Brownsville, stretches about 17 miles.
Federal officials announced the project in January, and public reporting has said the broader plan could total roughly 536 miles. The first section carries a price tag of about $96 million.
The initial construction of the buoy barrier is in a remote part of the Rio Grande near Brownsville that is on the other side of the border wall and in an area that local residents call “No Man’s Land.”
Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, stood on the riverbank looking out at the buoys.
“This is a gorgeous riverbank,” she said. “And in the middle of our river I see these orange cylinder barrier buoys just floating in the center.”
Nearby, more than 100 buoys sat at a staging area. Workers on a raft were linking them together and anchoring them to the riverbed. Each buoy appeared to be about 15 feet long and four to five feet high.
Homeland Security has framed the project as a way to deter illegal crossings. But critics say the barriers could create a new problem when the Rio Grande rises.
In January then Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was in Brownsville to announce the buoy project.
“The Department of Homeland Security and US Customs and Border Protection are deploying over 500 miles of border barrier and that is long enough to stretch all the way from Washington DC to Nashville, Tennessee,” Noem said.
The Trump administration has used its waiver authority to speed construction, setting aside a long list of environmental laws and regulations for the project area. At the same time, outside experts say detailed flood modeling and engineering information have not been publicly available in full, complicating efforts to independently assess the risks.
Mark Tompkins, a fluvial geomorphologist who studies river systems, reviewed plans for buoy deployments in the Laredo area for an environmental group. He called the buoys “a time bomb.”
He said if sections of these buoy chains break free, “and then if they get caught on a bridge or on a section of wall, then you've got real problems.”
If detached sections were swept downstream and caught on bridges or other structures, he said, the consequences could be serious — especially in a region where international commerce depends on river crossings and port-of-entry bridges. More than half of U.S.-Mexico border crossings are in Texas, making any prolonged bridge disruption economically significant.
Adriana Martinez, a Southern Illinois University researcher who studied river flow after Texas installed state buoys in 2023, also questioned whether the new, larger system can be secured against the force of the Rio Grande in flood.
“They don't seem very stable,” Martinez said. “The amount of force that would be required to hold them in place is just not something that's physically feasible by the concrete blocks that I've seen.”
Customs and Border Protection has defended the design, saying in a statement that the waterborne barrier is built to withstand a 100-year flood event and to endure higher currents and rising water levels.
That assurance faces a difficult test in a river with a history of extreme flooding.
The National Weather Service says the lower Rio Grande experienced major flooding in 2010 after Hurricane Alex and its remnants dumped enormous rainfall in northern Mexico. At Rio Grande City, the river crested at 57.63 feet — 7.6 feet above flood stage — and remained in flood for 33 days.
