Reporting on Buoys and Boondoggles; Plus Big News from The Border Chronicle

A project to place more than 500 miles of chained together five-foot tall buoys, each buoy weighing a ton, on the Rio Grande, the sole source of drinking water for millions, and prone to flooding, would be a scandal of massive proportions under any other presidential administration.

But under this polycrisis presidency, it’s just a mere blip of a story in the national headlines.

On Thursday evening as the Rio Grande began to reach flood stages in Eagle Pass, Texas, hundreds of these buoys, which were stacked too close to the river, were swept into the Rio Grande causing chaos downstream as international bridges were closed, including the World Trade Bridge in Laredo — the country’s largest commercial land port — which will most likely result in losses of hundreds of millions in commercial trade.

We spent the weekend speaking with local officials, residents, river experts and scientists, — many of whom predicted that something like this would happen. Nevertheless, the administration is spending $3 billion in taxpayer money — much of it taken from healthcare, and other social safety net programs — to execute this plan and has waived more than 30 federal laws that would require oversight, impact studies and community input.

I encourage you to read our coverage of last weekend’s buoy debacle (see below). There will be more coverage coming soon. We also have some exciting news planned for August, a new project called Wall Watch, that will help border communities track border wall and buoy construction in real time on an interactive map, since as this weekend showed us in Texas, the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection which are doling out these barrier and wall contracts — with more than $46 billion to spend—do not see themselves as accountable to American taxpayers and border communities.

And now some Border Chronicle HR news from headquarters in Tucson: We’re going to take a brief summer break and will be back to our regular publishing schedule on August 4. We also want to welcome Erin O’Connor as our new video podcast editor. And we want to give a big abrazo to José Olivares for his podcast editing prowess over the last year for The Border Chronicle. José was just hired as a full-time immigration reporter for The Guardian, and they couldn’t have made a better hire. Felicidades, José!

Erin will start with us in August. We are incredibly lucky to have him join our team as video podcast editor. Erin is the former senior video reporter on climate and immigration enforcement in the Southwest for The Washington Post. He’s also a two-time Pulitzer finalist. So yeah, he’s kinda a big deal. With all of Erin’s talents, we hope that in addition to editing our podcasts, he can also do video reporting for The Border Chronicle to document the grift and environmental and other damages from buoy barrier and border wall construction, among other things. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

This is my cue to remind you that we are a very small shop—just three reporters covering a nearly 2,000-mile international border—and we need your support. We rely on grants, and our readers, to fund our investigative and accountability reporting. We’re the only independent publication providing region-wide coverage of the U.S.-Mexico border, which is why the buoy barrier debacle of last weekend wasn’t just a news blip for us, but a major breaking story that we will continue to follow.

So stay tuned for more. And please support our work with a donation or paid subscription. It’s just $6 a month, or $59 a year. We can’t do this without you!

 

And before you go, Brenda Machado, our social media maven, created this reel for our buoy barrier reporting. Check it out!