In Texas, Juneteenth is often described as the day that Union Major General Gordon Granger marched upon the shores of Galveston to announce the Emancipation Proclamation—on June 19th, 1865. 

But freedom in Texas was achieved both after and before formal emancipation. 

Following June 1865, those newly freed Afro-Texans who’d heard the news still had to battle the psychological toll of slavery, briefly remaining bound to the familiarity of plantations for fear of white violence, racist policies, and uncertainty. Eventually, Freedmen established more than 500 Freedom Colonies and even migrated to urban centers like Houston for better employment opportunities as well as, they hoped, safety. According to the National Park Service, “Emancipated people settled in the Big Thicket [a forested region in Deep East Texas known as the ‘biological crossroads of North America’] and survived off the land, using the woods of southeast Texas for homesteading, hunting, and foraging.” 

And, prior to 1865, many Afro-Texans reclaimed their sovereignty and autonomy well before the federal government acknowledged their basic humanity, though there’s a dearth of centralized information about Black placemaking in Texas from this time. This reclamation was called “marronage”—a term borrowed from French for this act of antebellum self-emancipation. The word most often refers specifically to runaway slaves, or “maroons,” who broke free to set up isolated communities in places like East Texas, Louisiana, and throughout the Global South. 

Ferns in a bog along the Kirby Nature Trail in the Big Thicket National Preserve in Kountze in October 2005 (Randy Mallory/UNT)

There are only piecemeal accounts of how Black maroons actually created their own communities in the dense, jungle-like swamps and forests of Deep East Texas. Newspaper clippings and oral histories leave just crumbs of stories related to these outlaws who sought refuge in the Thicket. 

Regardless, marronage showcases that some Black Texans had already gained sovereignty long before it was granted to them. Maroon communities in the woods embodied the intricate connection between the natural world and Black people. Ecospirituality, reciprocity, and Indigenous technologies from Africa and America have always been the drumbeat of Black survival in this state. 

Diana Jones Allen, director of landscape architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, has dedicated much of her research to the history of maroons in Coastal Louisiana and the connection between environmental justice, identity, and cultural landscapes. 

From the Carolinas to Haiti, Brazil, Jamaica, and even Florida, Allen has described how Black maroons operated as landscape architects who had the forethought and technical skills to work with the natural world. Allen’s work points to why studying Black marronage is essential to both ecological preservation and understanding the true meaning of freedom in Texas, on Juneteenth 161 years later. 

The Texas Observer spoke with Allen in early June. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

TO: What is a maroon community, and why are they important? 


Maroons were self-liberated enslaved people.
I call them self-liberated because they were not freed. They chose to liberate themselves. 

In the U.S., escaped enslaved people [in general] were trying to go and be free in the North. Marronage was different because not only did they not want to be enslaved, but they didn’t want to be a part of the system at all, right?
They saw the flaws. … It’s not just that [maroons] were people that were trying to escape enslavement. Maroons were different. They wanted to make their own communities, their own way of living, and their own values. And so they had to be isolated to do that. 

Oftentimes, we talk about slavery, as if there was slavery and then there was 1863 or 1865 and then everybody was free. But there’s so much messiness in between that. Can you expand on that?

Enslavement in the Americas … was really based on capitalism. It was based on production. And this production, of course, took labor. But it also took knowledge, right?


So in Louisiana, the French needed to clear and drain the swamps. The landscape was quite different from the Europeans’. They discovered that in Africa there were certain landscapes, for example Senegambia, where it was a lot like Louisiana. And so people in Africa knew how to build levees and how to do drainage and they also knew how to grow rice. The French were almost about to die, but then they started particularly bringing in slaves that had this knowledge and brought them into Louisiana, which had a similar landscape.

Even if you look at the East Coast, like the Gullah people—they didn’t maroon themselves, they were kind of left there—but they were able to survive. They developed the whole culture because they had this knowledge.
Maroon communities throughout Texas, Louisiana, and other places were brought here for this knowledge; they were able to take it into these landscapes and continue to figure it out. And they also exchanged knowledge with Indigenous people.

More than anything else, more than like revolt or escaping, marronage was to the enslaver one of the greatest threats. Because marronage proved that the key to slavery was making other human beings believe that they couldn’t live without you or without this system, but maroons in a landscape somewhere prove to other enslaved people that it is possible that, actually, we don’t really need them and we could live on their own. It was a substantial threat to the slavocracy.

Is marronage actually freedom? If you are forced to go to a place to isolate yourself in order to be free, is that really freedom? 

I think the practice of marronage is freedom. I’m finishing up my book, and I’m about to send it off to the press, and one thing I do ask is, ‘What is freedom?’ 

Freedom is being able to decide for yourself what am I going to do in place of slavery? What am I going to do today? What am I gonna eat? How am I going to dress? And so on the plantation, almost all of those decisions were made by someone else. 


Can you tell me more about why maroons had the upper hand in the wetlands, swamps, and forests? 

We have this attitude towards nature that anything that can’t be built upon is worthless. So you have to drain it, fill it, clear it. … That land in its “naturalness” has no value, which is totally untrue.

So marronage can then happen in these places that other societies felt were forsaken. … That was one of the positive things for maroon communities; there were places for a time that were felt to have no monetary value. 

The other thing is the fauna. Alligators, bobcats, coyotes, all these natural animals that were there that were very threatening, but Indigenous and African communities had a different relationship. A spiritual connection with the plants and animals. Maroons figured out a symbiotic relationship with the alligators and water moccasins and all, wherever they were, be they in the the wetlands of Louisiana or Texas or the hills in Jamaica and Haiti. Which Indigenous people had figured out before Europeans came in. 

Why is it that we do hear about maroon communities in places like Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but we don’t hear a lot about Black marronage and sovereignty here in Texas? 

If you’re just looking at maroons in the U.S., you’re right; Florida comes up and Louisiana, and there’s a lot of stuff on the Great Dismal Swamp, the sea islands, but you can’t find Texas. 

So complicated, right? Because Texas was really Mexico. And then there was this war in 1836 where a group said we’re not going to have slavery anymore, and then some other people said we want to have slavery, and they had a war and they created Texas. And then, you know, Texas tried to be its own state … then Texas became part of the United States. So I think the true history of Texas, especially in terms of Black people, is very complicated and has been submerged. I mean, that’s why I think [Director of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project] Andrea Roberts is so great… finding all those Freedom Colonies and enlightening people.

The “absolute equality” mural in Galveston in 2024 (Josephine Lee)

As Juneteenth approaches, what does the history of marronage tell us about the meaning of freedom? 

It tells us that it’s possible, and it’s something that takes action. You can’t really have marronage without slavery, right? That freedom is possible, but you gotta go from the plantation to the thicket. 

So I think that’s the message for us, especially today: that we got to go from the plantation to the thicket. It’s gonna be tough, but we gotta take action. 

What is lost when we separate environmental history from Black history?

Oh my goodness, you really can’t. There’s this great book. It’s called African American Environmental Thought, and I’ve read that book and I’ve used it so many times.

It’s complicated because on one hand, you know, Black people have a love-hate relationship with certain landscapes because they were landscapes of slavery, right? That’s why a lot of people don’t want to be near a plantation. 

And also there’s this misconception too that Black people aren’t environmentalists, but actually we’re some of the first environmentalists. Like you go back to the maroons … that’s one reason, like I said, they brought us here—because we were environmentalists.

And also it’s just symbolic: Like, if the land dies, we die. Not just because it feeds us and gives us air to breathe and water to drink, but spiritually. We’re so connected. 

It’s part of our freedom.

The post From the Plantation to the Thicket: Juneteenth, Black Freedom, and ‘Marronage’ in Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In 1863, Betty Simmons was about 20 years old, and her 3-year-old son, Charlie, would soon be made to work in the field. 

In her 1938 interview with the Federal Writers’ Project, Simmons said: “[They take them young].” (These interviews were rendered by government workers in an excessively heavy dialect—in this case, for example, “Dey tek dem young”—which is converted here into standard English.) The prospect made her incredibly uneasy, but Simmons; her partner, George; and their children had few options. They were among the 182,566 people—30 percent of the Texas population—then reduced to property and held as slaves. 

Simmons was not born in Texas; an owner’s financial collapse had set her on a long journey through slavery’s widespread and deep-rooted network. 

Simmons initially lived among family in Henry County, Tennessee. Long before she was born, her father was given his freedom for saving his owner’s life, and he lived nearby in a cabin. She remembered how her Aunt Adeline helped her out of a bit of trouble, and she mentioned a sister in her interview narrative. In 1850, their apparent owner, William Leftwich Carter, counted 18 people among his property, ranging in age from 6 months to 70 years, half of them children. Though the county was known for its tobacco, Carter reported large yields of butter and fruit, plus smaller quantities of potatoes, corn, and other crops. Simmons does not mention participating in their production; she may have been too young. This first chapter of her life ended abruptly when her 82-year-old father fell while picking plums from a tree for the children. Not long after, Carter sent Simmons and her sister 40 miles away to be with his newlywed daughter.

Simmons might have been less than 10 years old at the time of the move. Mary Clementine Carter and Henry Washington Lankford married in 1854 and lived in Carroll County, Tennessee. The Carters made their practice of slavery generational; children owned the children of their parents’ slaves. Simmons said her primary task was to care for, or “nurse,” the young, a role often assigned to older children. A 20-year-old woman, a 1-year-old baby, and two girls, ages 14 and 11, possibly Simmons and her sister, were recorded as Lankford’s property. 

The practice of slavery provided owners with transferable wealth, as with other forms of property. Slaves could be rented or sold for cash, traded for land, insured, mortgaged, and seized to satisfy debts. “Wash” Lankford operated a store, but his alliance with dodgy business partners left him with large debts that precipitated his financial ruin. Lankford scrambled to hide his enslaved people while putting his plans for Simmons in motion. 

He told his wife, “[I think I better send Betty down to help brother Newt with the corn].” Simmons spent two days working on the brother’s farm, and on the third day, Newt brought her to two men who stood at his gate in a buggy. One man asked, “That the gal?” Newt answered, “Yes,” and the man responded, “That’s a small gal.” 

They told Simmons to gather her things and encouraged her to ride with them to a boardinghouse some 26 miles away, supposedly for two to three weeks of work. Once secured in the buggy, the two men revealed themselves as slave traders. Simmons began to understand the full extent of the ordeal, learned of Lankford’s ruin, and realized she had already been sold. At this moment, Simmons also heard of the “break,” or the crisis building between the North and the South. Simmons spent her first night on the road at a home owned by the father of one of the slave traders. By the mid-1850s, a well-developed network of holding yards, informal waypoints, ships, trains, roads, and trails supported the forced migration of enslaved African Americans from the Upper to the Lower South. Simmons woke up “in a stir.” The traders hurried the women to gather their bundles so they could meet the train headed to Memphis. The women took turns walking and riding in the buggy. 

Simmons noted that the men arrived separately, but she did not know how. Advertisements in newspapers like the Memphis Daily Appeal published routes, schedules, and modes, allowing slave traders to choose how to transport their human goods. In Memphis, they waited at a trading yard, also called a slave pen, for the ship called the Ohio. Records from the SlaveVoyages database show a steamship named the Ohio carried enslaved people from New Orleans to Galveston. The records do not currently confirm details of Simmons’ specific journey. 

Upon arrival in New Orleans, Simmons said, “[I was satisfied then I lost my people and ain’t never going to see them no more in this world].” She entered the trading yard. Simmons overheard the traders say that there were three such places inside the small river city. Its walls were built of planks, “fixed up” around the yard. Sandbars served as additional barriers, and the watchman acted as a final reminder of their imprisonment. At this moment of the account, Simmons told the interviewer that guards and traders whipped people on the train and in the yards. 

The town contained dozens of hotels, markets, streets, and homes where others profited from the trade in enslaved people. Those trapped in the camp understood how their ages and abilities translated into the price required to remove them from the place. They assessed one another, sharing details of their histories and the unfortunate circumstances that led them there. By this time, the Civil War, no longer a break, was well underway. Simmons said they laughed and wondered why “[they kept on filling up when they were going to be emptying out soon].” 

Colonel Frederick Forney Foscue bought Simmons at an auction and set her on her journey to Texas. They traveled the Red River to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Foscue retrieved his buggy, then headed to Grand Cane in Cherokee County, Texas. The colonel had bought more people than could ride, so, again, Simmons took turns walking and riding to the new site of her enslavement. Simmons’ narrative accurately recalled the places where they settled, moving from Cherokee County to two sites in Liberty County. Foscue had moved from Alabama to Texas in 1854 and was recorded in Cherokee by 1860. 

Foscue was a large planter and slaveholder who dedicated his time to agriculture. The conditions of slavery could be made as unbearable as desired by a master. For the 32 people he enslaved, this translated to laboring for all but two hours on Saturdays and on Sundays. They worked at night. They lived across six cabins and kept small subsistence plots, and some raised small animals. The plantation utilized overseers, who, Simmons said, were “mean” and “rough.” They returned mothers to the fields, away from their newborns, after just one month. They did not shy away from meting out punishments with whips and, in at least one instance, dogs. 

The war continued, drawing in the younger men and leaving the older men to run the plantation. Simmons valued the change in conditions. Foscue also left to serve as a recruiting officer for the Confederate Army. Though not shared in Simmons’ narrative, records reveal that the colonel was a lawyer and a member of the Texas House of Representatives during the 8th and 10th sessions and a senator in the 11th. 

When the war ended and freedom came late to the people in Texas, Simmons, George, Charlie, and their baby Mittie, though born in slavery, no longer had to live under its systemic, oppressive, and dehumanizing rule. The family remained in Liberty County for almost 40 years until George’s death prompted them to move to Beaumont. 

In the 1930s, government workers interviewed Simmons and other formerly enslaved Americans as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project. These workers recorded the personal histories of more than 600 Texans. Researchers ignored the value of these interviews for decades. Their increasing integration into state and local histories enriches the historical record and provides us with memorable and authentic reflections of Texas life.

The post Betty Simmons, a Texan in Slavery’s Last Years appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Early this year, a delegation of officials from the City of Laredo traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with federal representatives about the Trump administration’s plans to completely wall off the Texans’ border community from the Rio Grande. The Laredoans returned using language that dismayed opponents of the president’s beloved border barrier. When City Manager Joseph Neeb briefed local elected officials after the Washington meetings, he cautioned them that opposing the wall altogether was “not the argument that we’re going to actually win with this administration.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says it plans to build “panels,” a term that could mean the 30-foot-tall steel fencing seen elsewhere on the U.S.-Mexico border, along all of the 40-mile stretch of the Rio Grande that passes through Laredo, one of the state’s major border cities and often the busiest commercial port in the country. This is a fate that Laredo has faced—and escaped—before.

In total, the federal government has built about 140 miles of border wall in Texas over the past two decades, most of it in the Rio Grande Valley or out near El Paso. During the Biden administration, the State of Texas tried its hand at wall-building and added around 80 more miles, some of this being in rural Webb County around Laredo. But in Laredo itself, local officials and activists have fended off essentially all border barrier, save for a stretch of less-obtrusive wrought-iron fencing around a Laredo College campus. 

Now, the border town of 250,000 has its back against the wall like never before, and some think it’s already too late.

A view of the Rio Grande from Laredo in 2019 (Gus Bova)

Last year, the Trump administration got $46.5 billion from Congress to build hundreds of miles of “smart wall” along the state’s 1,200-mile border, including 100 miles through CBP’s Laredo Sector, which includes Webb and Zapata counties. Smart wall is a vague term that means some combination of physical barriers, surveillance equipment, lighting, and roadways. In much of the Laredo Sector, the barrier’s full footprint will be 250 feet wide, including maintenance and access roads on both sides of the bollard panels. According to an online map published by CBP, only a short stretch of this sector, along Falcon Lake, will be spared the steel wall.

Raising the stakes even higher is CBP’s plan to string dangerous river buoys the length of the Rio Grande. Laredo, a historic town founded in 1755 that boasts a picturesque central plaza, draws all its drinking water from the river, and officials are concerned the buoys could cause silt to build up in front of the city’s intakes.

But local officials, namely Neeb and Mayor Victor Treviño, who took office in 2022, have now taken the position that past opposition tactics won’t work again. “We understand that the presidential mandates have eminent domain,” Treviño told the Texas Observer in May. “So if you say ‘no,’ they’ll do condemnation. But what’s the other choice? We still have the choice of dialoguing, talking about what makes sense and what’s the reality, versus saying no and then we get condemnation.”

As of early June, the second Trump administration had only filed about 30 condemnation lawsuits for the border wall in the Southern District of Texas, with all of those being downriver of Laredo in Starr or Hidalgo counties.

Treviño and Neeb have said they’re negotiating with CBP—the city itself owns 14 riverfront miles—to protect five public parks, four international bridges, two water treatment plants, and one wastewater plant. It’s better to sit at the table with the Trump administration, they say, than risk the feds running roughshod over them. That hasn’t sat well with wall opponents. 

“The city government wanted to negotiate with [CBP],” said Ricardo De Anda, an attorney who owns riverfront property on Laredo’s outskirts. “Create a carveout here, a carveout here. ‘We won’t put a wall on this park. We’ll agree to put it here, but we won’t put it there.’ The feds are saying, ‘Hey, we’re not the ogres they’re putting us out to be. We let them have this park.’ … It’s important that we stop the city from entering into an agreement to let the feds build the wall.”

Neeb and Treviño’s critics note that, far upriver in West Texas, a coalition of conservative and liberal wall opponents, including local officials, has seen success by banding together to fight construction on ranchland and public recreation areas. The opponents say the city is caving to the Trump administration, and the consequences will be a needless eyesore that divides the town from its sister city of Nuevo Laredo, cuts residents off from their river, damages a unique border ecosystem, and despoils the city center. 

And a fluvial geomorphologist’s recent study, which determined that building a barrier along the Rio Grande would likely cause deadly flooding, has breathed new life into these critics’ efforts to protect Laredo.

But the wall opponents have a tough fight ahead of them. Along with the power of eminent domain and an unprecedented level of funding, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has waived nearly 30 environmental, procurement, and other laws that might have slowed construction, and the president still has two-and-a-half years left in his term. The city also has to contend with Governor Greg Abbott, who’s shown he’s willing to use government resources against local officials who don’t fall in line with his and Trump’s agenda. 

When news broke earlier this year that CBP planned to build Trump’s wall through the Big Bend region, including its iconic state and national parks, a bipartisan outcry arose over the risk it posed to the remote, ecologically diverse region.

The national park is one of the state’s greatest natural treasures, and the Chihuahua Desert, with its “sky island” mountain ranges creating unique pop-op ecosystems, has devoted admirers across the country. It’s also a location where a 30-foot fence would be particularly absurd: At places, the Rio Grande cuts through rugged canyons, while an even bigger deterrent is the Sierra Del Carmen, a mountain range in northern Mexico that cuts the border off from that country’s interior. The arid Chihuahua desert deters immigrants on the U.S. side.

Even elected Republicans in Texas, who usually fall over themselves to kneel before Trump, have pushed back. Among them are legislators and Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West, a conservative border security hawk who’s turned alarmist rhetoric about immigration into Fox News appearances and grant money but in March joined other West Texas officials in opposing the wall through their part of the state. 

“Border security is not a one-size-fits-all proposition,” a letter that West and four other sheriffs signed states. “Strategies that may be appropriate in high-traffic urban sectors are not necessarily appropriate in geographically remote regions such as ours. Sound policy must be informed by local terrain, operational realities and fiscal responsibility.” 

Following the outcry, CBP has said it’s reconsidering its construction plans in Big Bend National Park. As of early June, the CBP online map shows plans to deploy only technology, roads, or vehicle barriers through most of the park—though constantly shifting statements and contradictory contract language have left residents still scrambling to understand the agency’s plans for the area.

The Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park (Shutterstock)

Seeing the united front in West Texas has galled Laredo wall opponents, whose home faces a similarly existential economic and cultural threat, they believe. Their region, which can’t claim the same menacing topography as Big Bend but does host a deep river and some bluffs, also sees fewer illegal crossings than other parts of the border. Yet their city is willing to sit down at the table with CBP and trade horses (the municipal government has already agreed to surveying and soil samples on land it owns). 

CBP has said it will begin construction in September on a stretch of border that runs from downtown Laredo south into Zapata County. Construction activities have already begun in southern Zapata County, near the community of San Ygnacio—home to historic buildings from an early 19th-century settlement—where activists are embroiled in a dispute with CBP about whether bulldozers are on land belonging to the federal government or to the county and private owners. Laredo’s political clout and resources could help private landowners fight back, activists told the Observer.

During the first Trump administration, the city government officially sat out the legal fight against Trump’s wall. But, with a native son, Henry Cuellar, in the U.S. House on the powerful Appropriations Committee, Congress restricted border wall funding to other regions until fiscal year 2020. At that point, activists and landowners launched efforts to gum up the works.

In 2020, Zapata County and now-Laredo City Councilmember Melissa Cigarroa filed a lawsuit challenging the waiver of environmental and other laws by the first Trump administration. A Laredo judge signaled she agreed with courts that had ruled that Chad Wolf, the man Trump had named acting Homeland Security secretary, was improperly appointed. After taking office, President Joe Biden halted wall construction in the Laredo area and rescinded the waivers.

But while both Neeb and Treviño agree with their predecessors that they don’t want a wall cutting through their city, they also take the position that there’s no pathway to victory if they fight. The Trump administration has too many advantages this time.

“Fight on what reality?” Neeb asked in an interview. “If Laredo is going to fight this in court, we want a chance to win.” The city’s best option, Neeb and Treviño argue, is to try to satisfy CBP while protecting as much as possible.

They’re asking CBP to narrow the wall’s footprint in some places to avoid running over parkland and a municipal golf course and to ensure access to the water treatment and wastewater plants, which in some cases officials also want room to expand. “We have to find a way to not conflict with (their) mission,” Neeb said.

Laredo’s San Agustín Cathedral (Jason Buch)

Meanwhile, Cuellar may not be as effective of a champion in D.C. as he was. Trump pardoned Cuellar, who’d been indicted on corruption charges, last year, then criticized him for not switching parties; in January, the Justice Department charged the congressman’s brother, Sheriff Martin Cuellar, with misappropriating government funds. 

Cuellar didn’t answer questions for this story, but his office provided the Observer a written statement: “Border crossings have declined without a single mile of additional border wall construction. As Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, I have worked to protect the local community including wildlife refuges, historic cemeteries, and other important sites from border wall construction through the appropriations process, while pursuing additional protections for areas of local concern. I will continue working to protect South Texas, and I believe in strong, common-sense border security.” 

Protections for wildlife refuges and other sites were not included in last year’s wall funding bill, and CBP has awarded a contract to build through previously protected sites in the Valley. Earlier this month, Cuellar tried unsuccessfully to amend legislation to explicitly shield some places in Texas, including Laredo’s city parks and water facilities and Big Bend National Park.

Today’s border wall opponents also risk retaliation from a vindictive state government run by Trump allies; last year, Texas officials ordered Laredo to pave over an anti-wall message on a downtown street or lose transportation funds. (Mayor Treviño told the Observer: “We did that upon our choice. We decided that was something that was a voice of an activist group, but I guess the majority of the people here know that we need to have federal and state help.”)

At an April news conference, city officials announced what they consider fruits of their more realistic approach, saying that CBP had shared detailed wall plans, and those plans showed the barrier won’t run through the Max Mandel Golf Course or the city’s water treatment plants. 

At the news conference, Neeb and Treviño presented renderings of a less obtrusive wall CBP had proposed for Laredo’s downtown.

Sitting on bluffs overlooking the river vega, or floodplain, Laredo’s city center hosts the historic 19th-century San Agustín Cathedral on the plaza of the same name, while below the bluffs two bridges handle personal vehicles and pedestrian traffic alongside a city park with a basketball court, picnic tables, and grills. A 30-foot wall here has always been a nightmare to locals.

The renderings Neeb and Treviño displayed at the news conference showed, instead, a berm several feet high with a variety of shorter, less brutalist fences on top of them. (In the past, CBP considered a “bulkhead” concrete wall on the river’s edge that would have doubled as a sort of promenade, but officials say they’ve now discarded that idea.) “These are results, and they represent a process grounded in facts, experience, and good faith,” Treviño said at the time. 

The plans are not yet set in stone, though. In a statement to the Observer, CBP said, “The design for the border wall in the downtown area of Laredo has not been finalized.”

According to Neeb, he’s been obligated to become something of a CBP whisperer. “I spend a lot of time trying to determine what is it that they truly need, as far as in their minds, what do they call mission critical?” Neeb said in an interview. “And if I can talk on their level, we can interject what we’re asking for as a community within that. And I’ve not had a ‘no’ out of them yet on any of these conversations.”

But wall opponents note the city is trying to negotiate with an administration notorious for bullying and bad faith.

Laredo isn’t as widely known as the Big Bend for its history and natural beauty, but it’s one of the oldest cities in Texas, and the Rio Grande as it winds through South Texas is unlike anywhere else in the state. 

The Tamaulipan thornscrub gently slopes down to impressive bluffs that overlook a slow-moving, tree-shaded river that could be in the tropics. After recent rains in May, the Las Palmas nature preserve, near where the Zacate Creek tumbles over a limestone shelf creating a small waterfall before trickling into the Rio Grande, was verdant. Towering Washingtonian palms created a tropical grove boasting pops of color. There were yellow sunflower blooms and retama blossoms. Pink coral vines. White petals were beginning to appear on a Texas olive.

This is an area that has, in the past, seen smuggling, but on a recent weekday Border Patrol vehicles with their thick green stripes and rented trucks containing uniformed National Guard troops were plenty visible. 

As recently as last year, the Rio Grande International Study Center, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting and studying the river, had a working relationship with local CBP officials, said Martin Castro, the organization’s watershed science director. The center was working with volunteer groups to remove invasive carrizo cane and a species of salt cedar native to Africa and the Middle East. As it turned out, this was good news for the Border Patrol agents surveilling that part of the river; removing the vegetation improved their line of sight and ability to move through the vega. National Guard soldiers deployed to the border by Trump began joining the volunteers in removing the invasive vegetation. Then, in the fall, the troops stopped working with the nonprofit, and CBP became less communicative. Around that time, Castro said, Laredoans learned the wall was slated to cut through the park.

“This is a beautiful habitat for native plants and for migratory corridors for birds from Central and South America,” he said. “We have the wall just kind of looming over all this though, like a dark cloud.”

Children from both sides of the Rio Grande come together during Laredo’s 2020 celebration of George Washington’s birthday. (Gus Bova)

Las Palmas sits below Laredo’s historic Azteca residential neighborhood and between its downtown and the wastewater plant, all in the path of the wall project that CBP says will break ground in September. Neeb says this is an area the city wants to protect, but Castro said any kind of barrier running through it is likely to disrupt the delicate riparian ecosystem. 

Between Las Palmas and the Rio Grande, the Border Patrol maintains a caliche road that runs the length of Laredo. Cyclists can use it to reach parks the city government owns on the river. This is also at risk.

“We don’t know where the wall would be,” said David Patricio, who regularly rides along the river with friends. “All of a sudden, maybe you just can’t ride your trail that we’ve been riding for years.”

Like the Big Bend, Laredo has built a broad coalition of wall opponents. Among them is Dennis Nixon, the CEO of the International Bank of Commerce and one of Trump’s biggest fundraisers. Nixon regularly puts out a white paper titled Common Sense Border Management Solutions, outlining his proposals for securing the southern border. The latest update, from 2024, largely tracks what were once mainstream Republican positions, along with a few that align with the Rio Grande International Study Center: strong interior immigration enforcement, updating immigration laws to meet U.S. labor needs, removing invasive plants along the river, and creating a network of parks on both sides of the border. “Despite our vast investments in constructing the wall, we have seen few results,” Nixon wrote.

But Laredo has received sparse national attention compared to the Big Bend.

“A lot of the same arguments for why you wouldn’t build it in Big Bend are the exact same arguments for why you wouldn’t build it in Laredo,” said Carlos Flores, a local attorney who fought the wall during the first Trump administration. “Laredo is a historically relevant community, no question. … People from all over the world come to South Texas in deer hunting season, because they want to enjoy that experience of hunting in the brush country, cold mornings up in the deer blind, waiting for a 12-point buck to appear in the sendero. That is a magical South Texas experience.”

In a brief interview in May, Mayor Treviño, who’s helped lead the efforts to accommodate CBP, stood with the common local view that the city does not actually need a wall.

“We’re one of the lowest, if not the lowest, illegal crossing sites in the southern border,” he said. “We’re one of the safest cities in the whole country. So logically speaking, you don’t need the border wall.”

Treviño said he does support additional agents on the ground. Neeb noted that they’re good for the region’s economy. But in the city council meeting early this year after visiting Washington, Neeb also warned elected officials that CBP is arguing that building a wall is less costly than paying for personnel.

Now, Treviño is preparing for reelection at an odd time in Laredo politics. In 2024, Trump won Webb County, traditionally a Democratic stronghold. But Democrats handily won down-ballot races. More than six times as many Democrats as Republicans voted in the March primary election—while Dems here and elsewhere show signs of highly motivated opposition to Trump.

And a report this year by geomorphologist Richard Tompkins has created a new sense of urgency among wall opponents. Tompkins’ report warns that when the Rio Grande floods, debris will clog the space between the wall’s steel bollards and make the fence impermeable. That will “straight-jacket” the river, increasing depth and speed until eventually a portion of the wall gives way—allowing “concentrated flooding” into residential areas of Laredo, “posing a threat to human life” and to property. 

“This is a question of public safety,” said Councilwoman Cigarroa, who also owns land on the Rio Grande in Zapata County. “Our request to the federal government is to get the public data, and do the studies we need. If they won’t, we need to know what those risks are, so our city can plan to protect our neighborhoods and our people. Really, the biggest priority is the loss of human life.”

CBP didn’t respond to the Observer’s questions about Tompkins’ report, but a letter Cuellar wrote to city officials included a response from the agency: CBP “does not agree” with the report, the agency wrote. 

“When constructing a border wall in an area identified as a flood plain, CBP conducts a hydraulic and hydrologic (H&H) analysis of the planned barrier alignment and consults with the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission (USIBWC) to ensure construction does not alter the natural flow of the Rio Grande River or increase significantly flood waters into Mexico in accordance with treaties with Mexico,” CBP stated.

In May, border wall opponents convinced the city council to conduct its own study. Laredo’s municipal government is in the process of hiring a consultant. It won’t be finished before projected wall construction is underway, however. 

Mariana Salinas told the Observer she raised her children, now grown, in the Azteca neighborhood, where her husband’s family has lived for generations. The family once regularly fished in the river, and when the Rio Grande International Study Center began working with residents along Zacate Creek on beautification projects—part of a decades-long effort to de-pollute and improve this stretch of the river—Salinas joined in. She’s now a staunch border wall opponent. 

“The nature is very beautiful,” she said of the greenway in the floodplain below her neighborhood. “And that they’re going to destroy it, well, the river has existed for ages. It’s the source of water and everything else, and that it can end moment to moment is very sad.”

Spending so many years along the Rio Grande, Salinas has seen how dangerous it can be. In 2010, Azteca was evacuated when the river spilled over its banks. “The wall will be right there,” she said. “The water won’t flow the way it flows right now. It will rise and flood the homes above.”

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