The Trump administration’s expansion of border-policing infrastructure in West Texas is moving forward. That includes a 30-foot-high border wall, stretching more than 160 miles from Hudspeth County to the western boundary of Big Bend Ranch State Park.
It will impact historic sites and Indigenous religious practices. It may increase the risk of catastrophic flooding in Presidio. And, in remote Presidio and Hudspeth counties, the wall will cut through a landscape as wild as any in Texas, with profound impacts for both desert wildlife and desert science.
Dr. Vicente Mata-Silva is a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.
“Considering the current environmental threats that are intensifying both at the local and at the global scales,” Mata-Silva said, “and then you add this fragmentation or elimination of habitat, you’re adding physical barriers – it doesn't look good for these species that are already in a very extreme environment.”
Mata-Silva studies our region’s “herpetofauna,” its reptiles and amphibians. And he’s the director of UTEP’s Indio Mountains Research Station. South of Van Horn, the station includes riverfront property and lies in the border wall’s path.
As Mata-Silva notes, the Chihuahuan Desert is an extreme environment, and a warming and drying climate is making the margin for survival even thinner. A border wall along the Rio Grande will destroy habitat. It will cut wild creatures off from a life-giving source of nutrients. And by isolating populations, it will make those creatures less genetically diverse and therefore less resilient.
Scientists had documented border-wall impacts on charismatic mammals – bears, mountain lions and jaguars. But in December, Mata-Silva and a binational group of colleagues published a paper on border-wall impacts to the creatures they study. They found that the harms are “severe.”
The U.S. and Mexico share 231 reptile and amphibian species, and more than 40 percent are found in the Chihuahuan Desert. More than a quarter are highly vulnerable, the scientists found, and border barriers could drive them over the brink.
But Mata-Silva co-authored the paper before border-wall plans were announced in his own backyard.
This stretch of the Rio Grande is often called the “Forgotten River.” Every drop of water upstream is allocated for cities and farms, and the river is often but a trickle here. But life still thrives, as Mata-Silva has witnessed in two decades of research at the Indio facility.
“It's a very interesting, exciting and beautiful research field station,” he said. “And what I like about this station is that it’s in a remote location, and the consequences are that it has a mostly pristine landscape, a pristine Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem.”
Mata-Silva has recorded beaver here, and the river sustains distinctive aquatic creatures – the Rio Grande leopard frog, the Big Bend slider, the Texas spiny softshell turtle.
The turtles move between the river and its banks, laying their eggs on land, and a border wall will likely disrupt this part of their life cycle. Then, of course, there are the coyotes, badgers and other mammals that prey on fish and turtles. They will lose access to a critical food source.
The Indio station spans 40,000 acres, and it’s a hub for graduate research and undergraduate field schools. Its pristine isolation is its calling card. A border wall will fundamentally alter that, Mata-Silva said.
“That definitely will have an impact on all the activities,” he said, “both the research and educational activities that take place there. And if that happens, it won't be the same, in my personal opinion.”
Few Texans will ever see the Rio Grande’s “Forgotten Reach.” But that doesn’t mean its transformation via a border wall will have no effect.
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