Who Will Stand Up for the Rio Grande?
The river is drying up, while Texas's elected leaders ignore the real border crisis.
In August 2022, Democrats in Congress rallied around a vote for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), despite opposition from a hard line of Republican nays. The IRA aimed to fulfill the promise of the stalled “Build Back Better” legislation introduced in 2021 and championed by former president Biden as a cornerstone of his domestic legislative agenda.
The bill proposed historic investments in climate and clean energy. Every vote was critical, because the legislation relied on a razor-thin Democratic majority. But there was a last-minute holdout: Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. She requested a concession before she would support the bill—$5 billion to address the water crisis on the Colorado River.
Sinema won the standoff and was able to negotiate $4 billion to help build essential infrastructure that would conserve water and optimize supply amid “the worst megadrought in a millennium.”
According to water experts and advocates, there is an urgent need for similar funding in the lower Rio Grande basin, which stretches over 350 miles from Del Rio, Texas, to the Gulf of Mexico. The river’s levels are as alarmingly low as the Colorado’s.
“The Colorado got $4 billion in federal investment from the IRA, while the Rio Grande at the same time received no money whatsoever,” said Martin Castro, watershed science director at the Rio Grande International Study Center (RGISC), a Texas research and advocacy nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Rio Grande watershed.
“That was due to Senator Sinema from Arizona at the time,” Castro said, “who was a really loud, strong advocate, and the voice in the room to bring that investment down from DC to that river.”
In April, American Rivers, a Washington, DC–based national conservation organization, named the lower Rio Grande the fifth most endangered river in the country, highlighting it as “one of the least funded and most overlooked major river basins in the United States.”
The organization attributed the endangered designation to growing water scarcity, poor water management, outdated infrastructure, and a lack of federal investment.
Flows in the lower Rio Grande have decreased by 30 percent over the past few decades, and today, only one-fifth of the river’s water reaches the Gulf of Mexico.
According to Castro, political champions in Congress are needed to address the Rio Grande’s needs, including federal appropriations for critical repairs to the two major reservoirs—Amistad, near Del Rio, and Falcon in Zapata—that supply water to over 2 million people in the Rio Grande Valley and the state of Tamaulipas.
But elected officials with the power to advocate for the lower Rio Grande river basin—including Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn and Representative Monica De La Cruz—have spent years focusing on pressuring Mexico to release water owed to the U.S. under an international treaty. This has included requests to withhold congressional funds from Mexico, some of which were necessary for the very environmental and infrastructure initiatives desperately needed on the Rio Grande.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) are the state and federal agencies responsible for environmental regulation and binational water management, respectively. In a letter to the IBWC, Bobby Janecka, commissioner for the TCEQ, said that by last year it was “hydrologically impossible” for Mexico to deliver what it owes by the treaty deadline.
Despite this, lawmakers continue to insist that water scarcity in the basin can be addressed by Mexico, with Cruz affirming as recently as last week that “we’re going to keep pressing and keep pressing and keep pressing.”
Castro believes a more realistic solution for the Rio Grande lies in making significant investments in a diverse binational toolkit for water resilience.
“We can’t sanction our way out of a climate crisis,” said Castro. “Drought conditions and scarcity require investments in water infrastructure, in diversification of our supplies, and in sustained collaboration with our international partners. Resilience is the key term, not punitive measures that are going to ignore the root causes of the problem.”
In November, the Texas Governor’s Office and Secretary of State, along with the TCEQ and the IBWC, passed an amendment to the 1944 water treaty with Mexico. Known as “Minute 331,” the agreement allowed Mexico to repay some of the water it owes from sources not previously included in the treaty.
Minute 331 enabled a partial water delivery this year, which may have saved the citrus industry in the Rio Grande Valley from the same fate as the sugarcane industry, which shuttered last year because it lacked irrigation water.
As members of Congress, Cruz, Cornyn, and De La Cruz were not included in the formal negotiations between federal agencies, but they were briefed throughout the process.
“It’s fair to say that we have senators that have not been the strongest advocates for getting federal funding to make investments in the river itself,” said Castro. “If the Rio Grande could see that kind of investment, we could really work to preserve it and ultimately get it out of a listing where it’s no longer endangered.”
Minute 331 was signed by Maria-Elena Giner, the former head of the IBWC, who spent years collaborating with stakeholders on both sides of the border to plan, fund, and initiate critical infrastructure projects aimed at addressing water scarcity and pollution.
Giner, regarded by border stakeholders as a key leader in infrastructure projects, was ousted by the Trump administration three weeks ago after Cruz, Cornyn, and De La Cruz lobbied President Trump to increase political pressure on Mexico.
In Mexico, officials fear that if the country, facing similar drought conditions as the U.S., fails to release water to meet its treaty obligations, the Trump administration may threaten more tariffs or retaliate during upcoming trade negotiations.
In the long run, Giner believes, building trust is more effective than adopting an aggressive stance toward Mexico. “Change comes at the rate of trust,” she said, reflecting on her strategy of collaboration and relationship-building while leading the IBWC’s U.S. office.
“Building trust, with regards to data across the border, was probably one of the biggest achievements,” said Giner. “It was very easy for us to ask Mexico to deliver water, deliver water, deliver water. But my value added was going in and saying, ‘Why?’ There must be a reason why Mexico is not delivering water.”
Giner collaborated closely with Mexico to identify the underlying causes of missed water deliveries to the U.S. on the Rio Grande, highlighting a need for greater awareness in Mexico about water conservation and increased government investment in water-saving infrastructure.
“Geography cannot be changed,” said Giner. “Cooperation has to be a path forward.” Alongside a collaborative approach, she emphasized that federal funding is crucial for solving the water crisis on the Rio Grande. In her resignation letter, Giner pointed out that the IBWC’s construction budget, before she arrived, averaged just $32 million a year for the entire U.S.-Mexico border, with no long-term plan for maintaining existing infrastructure—only a list of what was broken.
The real border emergency is water scarcity. “Investment needs to be made in South Texas,” said Giner. “Investment and reduction in consumption patterns need to be done in Mexico, and so both sides need to work together on that.” To make that happen, she said, lawmakers need to urgently invest in the lower Rio Grande basin. “Hundreds of millions of dollars,” she said, “maybe even billions of dollars, need to go into South Texas.”
Yes, the water experts recognize that the drought does not magically end at the border, that Mexico has the same problems we do. Politicians ignore this and scapegoat Mexico for not delivering water that does not exist. Oh, and do NOT even think about NOT importing avocados and tomatoes from Mexico (over 80% of US consumption comes across the border), tariffs or not.
This is Texas, where oil slicks and cow manure rule. There is no mention of the over 100 BILLION gallons of water PER YEAR that is permanently polluted and pumped into the ground for fracking. We're not able to drink that oil and gas, so at some point we will start to die off to keep the oversized pickups gassed up and flying down the freeways. Priorities ....
There are some who still think water can be transported/piped from back east to the Colorado River thereby ignoring the obvious problem in the Rio Grande. People who subscribe to this fantasy still think the watercourses in the east are never-ending sources of H2O. They think it will be just like creating another Interstate Highway system. They are wrong.