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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the book. I'm Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back founder of Tangle, an independent nonpartisan politics newsletter. You can find it@readtangle.com it's Isaac Saul. What's up, man?
- [00:12]
B
How you doing, Tim?
- [00:13]
A
I wanted to grab you because you sent a pretty powerful tweet earlier this week about what's happening in Big Bend. Started with bulldozers and heavy equipment arrived in Big Bend national park today. Trump's border wall is coming, as you always do. Had a lot of facts in it, a lot of support, reporting data, and it was a bunch of stuff that I just realized I didn't know or had forgotten or was not fully read in on. And so I was like, man, I think it's really important that we talk about this, but I just want to start here. Like I, I said I thought you were from the Northeast, but the tweet made it seem like you're living in Big Bend. So I just heard a square one. Like, where, where, which part of Texas is Big Ben? Where are you? Where do you live?
- [00:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, so I am, I'm full time in, in, in New Jersey. I've been living in Pennsylvania for a while, but I have a property and Bend that I, I'm seasonal in, in the winter time, and my family is all from there actually in West Texas. So my cousins, aunts, uncles, I, I, I grew up going there and living there in the summer, working for them. Starting at the age of 13, when I was about 23, 24 years old, I bought this cheap piece of property, 10 acres right outside the national park. And for the last 10 or 15 years, I've been building, saving money, building on it, built an adobe house on it and go down there with my family and spend time there. So, yeah, I'm not there full time, but a lot of roots there and spend a lot of time there in the, in the winter season.
- [01:39]
A
For people who aren't, you know, deep in the geography of West Texas, like, paint this picture of, like, this, of like, what is Big Bend National Park? Like, is this, you know, where exactly in Texas is this? Between, you know, what, what cities kind of like, kind of describe the land that they're building the wall on.
- [01:56]
B
Yeah. So the, the closest big city to Big Bend is El Paso, which is about four and a half, five hour drive if you're moving pretty well northwest of where Big Bend national park is. So this is southwest Texas. I mean, people call it West Texas, but it's sort of on the southern side of West Texas, and it is the most remote, most pristine land in the lower 48. I mean, that is frequently how it is described. It runs along the Rio Grande river, which is the water barri separates the United States and Mexico. And the national park down there is incredible. I mean, it's a, it's a hotbed for hiking. It is a place with some of the best river rafting in the country. People go there to camp and stargaze. The dark skies in West Texas are literally world renowned. If you want to look into the galaxies, there are so few lights and light pollution in the surrounding area that West Texas and Big Ben in particular, is one of the best places to do it in the entire world, right here in the United States. So in Texas, it's considered a gem. I mean, among environmentalists, campers, hunters, outdoorsmen, outfitters, it is one of the most treasured parts of the state. And it's because it is really, truly, genuinely unique. I mean, it's, it's possible to find this kind of remoteness and untouched kind of land in places like Alaska and Montana, but it is incredibly rare in the United States and very, very rare in Texas.
- [03:29]
A
The prompting of this, though, is the, is the wall, is the building of a wall through the national park. Talk about, like, why they're doing that, why you're objecting to it. I mean, you're usually playing it down the middle. Like what, like what, like what are the arguments at play here?
- [03:45]
B
Well, the, the reason why they're doing it is because President Trump ran in 2016 on building a 2,000 mile contiguous wall along the southwestern border of the United States. And he's trying to fulfill that promise, whether it makes sense or not. And I think that is the fundamental story here, is that there isn't really rationale for this, aside from the fact that Trump said he was going to do it and he's trying to follow through on that promise to do it. Which for the people who want a border wall, or maybe don't understand why a border wall is quite silly here. That might sound pretty good, but I think for most people who care about rational, smart, intelligent public policy, it's a really bad reason to do something like this. So there are a few things here to note. One is that the border wall is incredibly, incredibly disliked in this part of the country. And this is an area with a lot of Trump voters. The border down in West Texas is actually quite mixed politically. So we've had Republican county judges, Republican sheriffs, Republican border patrol agents coming out saying this is a bad idea. We don't need this. What we actually need in this area is technology. Because the big issue in most border places where there's a lot of crossing is that there's a city on the US Side and there's a city on the Mexico side. People come to the city on the Mexico side, they cross over, and then they disappear into the city on the US Side. In Big Ben, you don't have that. This is, as I described earlier, one of the most rural places in the lower 48. It is incredibly hard to traverse. People don't.
- [05:18]
A
You're nine hours from McAllen. I was thinking, I was like, near McAllen, it's like, no, you're, you're five
- [05:24]
B
hours from the closest airport. People cross this area. If they get to the US Side, they are, I mean, literally collapsing on the border and asking for help. These aren't people who are running away and disappearing into Los Angeles. There is nowhere to go. There is nowhere to hide. So what border patrol agents want and what they have in this area is, is technology. They want motion sensors, they want cameras that alert them when somebody crosses the border. And then they have a long, long time to go find the people who set off those alerts because there's nowhere to go, there's nowhere to run, there's nowhere to hide. Most of these Border patrol stations are an hour, two hours, three hours away from some of the places in Big Bend that even experience any crossings. And when they get a little tech alert, they can get in their cars, drive down to where they got the alert, and then they go find the people who again, by then typically just there to turn themselves in. They either get deported or, you know, they apply for asylum and go into the system. But one of the big things about Big Bend is that it is an incredibly, incredibly unusual place for people to cross because it is so, so desolate. It's so hard to survive the journey. And because, you know, Trump wants to put in a 30 foot border wall here, there are thousand foot sheer cliffs in basically every direction. I mean, the Santa Elena Canyon that runs through Big Ben literally has cliffs that are 500, 7501200ft tall. So a 30 foot border wall is not going to make it any harder for somebody to cross the river here. It's already basically impassable. And the data bears this out. The Big Bend region of the CBP sector is 25% of the US Mexico border. And in the last fiscal year, it accounted for 0.045% of border crossings. Okay, so it is practically nothing in the grand scheme of the sorts of things that the Trump administration says that they're worried about. And instead of solving this problem with the things that border patrol agents and local sheriffs are asking for, many of whom support strong borders, they want border security, they want to catch illegal immigrants. Instead of giving them the technology that they want or putting a little money into adding some agents in the area, they're building this massive wall. And a wall requires roads, and roads require water, and water requires drilling wells in the desert. And then you're going to put up lights that are going to disrupt the dark skies that attract tourists. And then you're going to need fences for the walls that block off people from the river, which is the only water source in the area, also happens to be a place where outfitters are running river trips. So now you're impacting the 100 million DOL worst business that exists in Big Ben. And so you have business owners who hate the wall, you have sheriffs who hate the wall, you have border patrol agents who hate the wall, you have local residents who hate the wall, and yet the administration is basically ignoring all of them. And this week, bulldozers arrived in Big Bend National Park. And as if it couldn't get any crazier, right now, currently they are clearing the way for roads in Big Bend national park that literally run parallel to already existing roads in the quote, unquote patrol roads that they're destroying hundred year old cactus plants and you know, disrupting all this wildlife and basically desecrating this pristine American treasure. They're doing it for pretty much no reason, because there's a road right next to where they could be driving that is so big in this vast, huge national park that the border patrol agents could just drive up and down on that road as they do now. But Instead they've given $1 billion to contractors who are coming in and building these quote, unquote potential patrol roads, which then will require vehicle barriers, which will mean walls along the roads to protect the roads. To protect. To protect the CBP agents.
- [09:26]
A
Is there any reason for that besides not construct some corruption gambit? They want to give the contract to somebody. Like what would be the reason?
- [09:34]
B
Yeah, and we'll get to the contracts in a minute because that is really the cherry on top. But no, the reason is that there are tourists who drive on the roads that run through the park, the paved roads that run through the park. And CBP saying that they want their own roads for bor patrol vehicles, which again, the roads are accessing all the Same lands that many of the existing roads already do. They're right. You can look at a map of where CBP is running these roads, and right next to them are existing roads in the park that I've driven on a million times that Border Patrol agents already use. I mean, it is totally nonsensical.
- [10:09]
A
What about the construction of the wall itself? And you said they're having bulldozers. Like what are they bulldozing down there? Like, what is the wall going to go through? You know, as far as what the train is now?
- [10:22]
B
Well, this is one of the really interesting things about what's happening down there is that, you know, DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen has said in interviews with News Nation and Fox News that the administration is trying to be quieter about the things that they're doing because they've been drawing a lot of attention like they were with the raids in Minnesota or some of the border wall building that they did in Arizona. So this time they're basically taking on a new strategy where they're not answering any questions. So the superintendents of the national park don't know exactly what kind of barriers are going up in the park. The DHS has published stuff on their website, but it changes basically every week. The local sheriffs have no idea what's coming up in the park. The Border Patrol agents aren't talking to anybody. DHS representatives aren't showing up for community meetings where business owners and outfitters and local residents who live next to where the map says a wall is going to go or vehicle barriers are going to go. Want to know what's actually happening? They're just literally not answering any of the questions. So we've heard. And what the DHS website says is that there's going to be 17 miles of some kind of vehicle barrier. They are claiming it's not going to be 30 foot steel bollard walls, but the vehicle barriers are 6 foot tall walls that are, you know, effectively going to require the same kind of construction and maintenance, which then means, you know, little houses that are 20 by 20 foot that have running into them, that require water, that are going to house the Border Patrol agents to sit there. All these things that they could just accomplish by putting up a pole with a flock camera on it. They're going to build walls.
- [11:59]
A
We don't like flat cameras in most places, but maybe, maybe one here.
- [12:03]
B
Trust me, a lot of people on the border would prefer that right now. And, and outside the park, running into Big Bend national park where a lot of the land is just as pristine as it is in the park. There are plans for those 30 foot steel bollard walls that are six inches apart. And the cost for those walls right now is running about 17 to 20 million dollars a mile, which, for what it's worth 20 million dollars, and this is not a joke, is literally more money.