A group of private landowners in western and southwestern Texas filed a federal lawsuit Monday to stop the Trump administration from building border walls, barriers and roads through their properties.
The group includes some property owners and local residents who were up in arms a couple of years ago demanding better enforcement along the border and criticizing the Biden administration for spikes in immigrant border crossings.
The lawsuit was filed by Conserve Big Bend, an umbrella group that includes a coalition of about 230 landowners, and six plaintiffs. It was filed in Washington, D.C.
The plaintiffs allege the administration has wrongly designated the area along the Texas border as one of “high illegal entry.”
The Trump administration did so, the lawsuit states, to invoke “extraordinary power” to build a border wall on their property in “one of the most remote, rugged and ecologically significant stretches of the United States.”
But in 2025 the Customs and Border Protection’s Big Bend sector, which stretches over 77 counties and the state of Oklahoma, tallied the fewest number of apprehensions — just 1.3% — among the total of nine southwest border sectors, according to the lawsuit.
The same has been true in the last five years, when the Big Bend sector accounted for 1.16% of apprehensions and had the lowest number each year, according to the lawsuit.
Holding signs that read “Landowners against Border Wall,” landowners and their supporters stood Monday at the Presidio County Courthouse in Marfa, where the filing of the lawsuit was announced at a news conference. Some wore their summer cowboy hats and large silver belt buckles, while others held aloft flags of Texas and the U.S. One flag flown said, “Don’t Mess with Big Bend.”
“We spoke real loud when our border was being invaded. And as a two-time Trump voter, you know the border’s secure. Thank you, thank you, President Trump. You’ve secured the border, but now let it go,” Laura Allen, a Val Verde County rancher and a former Val Verde County judge, said at the news conference.
Allen, who’s not named in the lawsuit but is part of Conserve Big Bend, told those gathered of how she was repeatedly on Fox News and other media outlets when “we had the Haitian crisis in Del Rio.”
In 2021, more than 10,000 immigrants, mostly from Haiti, were packed by Customs and Border Protection under an overpass bridge in Del Rio, a city in Val Verde County, as border officers scrambled to keep up with a surge in crossings.
But now immigration enforcement-related construction threatens land that has been in Allen’s husband’s family since 1920, she said.
The project will go through the middle of their property, Allen said, which lies close to Lake Amistad and the Rio Grande boundaries. According to her, the construction plans would put “working facilities” behind “walls,” which would cut off a subdivision of about 100 retirement homes and weekend getaways built on their property.
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