The borderlands are not empty. They have never been empty.

Before there was a Texas, before there was a United States or a Mexico or a New Spain, before governments drew a line through the Río Grande and declared that the people on one bank belonged to a different world than the people on the other, humans lived here. They traveled these mountains and deserts. They hunted, planted, prayed, traded, married, raised children and buried their dead here.

Rather than a wall between communities, the river was the living heart connecting them.

But this knowledge was obscured. Our eyes were clouded. The far-reaching vision of our ancestors was truncated. Understand: colonialism begins by teaching us to look at a living place and see only dead, raw materials

A mountain becomes minerals.

A forest becomes timber.

A river becomes water rights.

Animals become inventory in need of removal.

Humans become either labor or obstacles.

For once a society has learned to call the taking of land and water “development,” it is not difficult to teach it to extract from living bodies as well.

That history is not behind us. It did not stop when settlers became “citizens,” when colonial powers became “capitalist republics.” It is happening again in the Big Bend borderlands.

Federal contractors are preparing to transform one of the most extraordinary landscapes on this continent with barriers, roads, excavation, surveillance equipment, artificial lighting and construction infrastructure. Near Lobo, south of Van Horn, plans have been developed for a temporary worker camp capable of housing hundreds of people, a so-called “man camp,” in a desert community where water is already precious and local infrastructure was never designed to absorb an industrial workforce of that size.

We oppose that camp. That does not mean we believe that every construction worker is dangerous. We oppose the camp because communities should not be forced to gamble with their safety so that corporations can complete government contracts, enriching shareholders and officials while devastating the lives of those anchored to the land.

Across North America, Indigenous communities have already experienced what happens when extraction industries descend on rural places with large, temporary, predominantly male workforces. Studies of the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota have documented rising violent victimization and increased demand on domestic-violence and sexual-assault services. Canada's National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls found substantial evidence connecting resource-extraction work camps with increased violence against Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people and with greater pressure on policing, health and social services.

Rather than accusations against individuals, these data are warnings about systems.

A corporation brings in the workers. The government waives the protections. The money passes through. The project gets built. And the people who actually live on the land are left to deal with what remains: depleted water, damaged roads, disturbed earth, noise, light, violence, ecological fragmentation, overwhelmed services and scars that can outlive the contracts that created them.

We have already seen that pattern along this southern border. The federal government's own accountability office found that the last major wave of border-wall construction damaged water sources, endangered species and cultural sites, including blasting at a tribal burial site. Yet in 2026, the federal government has again waived environmental and historic-preservation protections in the Big Bend region in order to accelerate construction.

Who bears the cost, financial and otherwise?

The land pays.

Wildlife pays.

Indigenous people pay.

Border communities and migrants pay … with their bodies.

When thirty-foot walls were installed in the San Diego region, researchers recorded a greater than fivefold increase in trauma-center admissions from wall falls, alongside new deaths and more severe injuries. A taller wall did not make desperate human beings disappear. It made falling more dangerous.

And the violence does not stop at the imaginary line running through the river.

People displaced through Mexico already travel through landscapes shaped by poverty, organized crime, extraction and militarized borders. Indigenous migrants can face the added vulnerability of racism and language isolation. Migrants and asylum seekers stranded in Mexican border cities have faced kidnapping, sexual violence, extortion, forced labor and trafficking. Policies that close safe routes do not erase those people. They can leave them trapped longer in places where predators already know how to find them.

This is why the wall and the man camp cannot be understood as two unrelated projects.

They are parts of the same machinery of extraction: one converts a living borderland into a construction zone, the other imports the temporary labor necessary to do it.

Both demand that we who belong to this place surrender something so that distant institutions can achieve their objectives: our water, our quiet, our dark skies, our sacred places, our safety, our freedom of movement, our relationships across the river.

We reject the idea that this is inevitable. We reject the idea that protecting a border requires sacrificing the people who live along it. We reject the idea that Indigenous sacred places are expendable, that desert water belongs to whoever possesses the largest contract, that wildlife migration ends where governments draw lines, or that Mexican lives become less valuable on the southern bank of the Río Grande.

And we reject the old colonial lie that this land is empty.

We are here. Indigenous people are here. Chicane people are here. Mexican communities are here. Ranching families are here. Wildlife is here. Ancestors are here. Children who deserve to inherit this place are here.

The Big Bend borderlands are not a corridor to be conquered. They are a homeland. And a homeland is not something you extract from.

It is something you defend.