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ALAMO, Texas — An environmental advocate says the border wall panels installed this year at Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge were made in 2020, and that money from that year cannot legally be spent for construction at the refuge.
Work on the border wall at Santa Ana has been stopped since late July while litigation continues between Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2 and Tucson-based Spencer Construction LLC, the company hired for the federal contract.
Scott Nicol, a long-time anti-border wall activist and a former co-chair of the Sierra Club's Borderlands campaign, visited the refuge in mid-August after a court order paused construction and found an open trench at the work site.
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Nicol said he could see the fabrication dates that contractors write on the butt of each panel, normally underground once a panel is installed. He said the panels looked old and corroded, “like they were sitting in outdoor storage for years.”
“I saw that Spencer is using bollard panels fabricated in 2020. That’s illegal. Fiscal Year 2019 to 2021 wall appropriations cannot be used on walls through Santa Ana,” said Nicol. “They can use One Big Beautiful Bill money, which has no restriction, but those old panels cannot be used.”
During the first Trump administration, Congress barred the money it approved for border wall construction from being used at Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge and other protected sites in the Rio Grande Valley.
On a July tour with environmental groups, Nicol asked U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar directly about the use of those funds at Santa Ana. According to Border Report, Cuellar responded that they could not be used at the refuge.
Cuellar is ranking member of Homeland Security Appropriations, the subcommittee that writes the department's spending bill and sets conditions on how that money can be used.
“It is my understanding that earlier this year CBP made a bulk steel purchase through reconciliation dollars,” said Cuellar in a statement to Across The Americas. “Reports that prior year appropriated funds are being used to purchase border wall materials for projects in areas under protection like Santa Ana, is very concerning.”
Cuellar said he is working to find answers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to our request for comment on this story.
The steel's history is complicated by a long pause in construction during the Biden administration and by later surplus sales that moved panels out of federal hands and back.
The protections Nicol and Cuellar refer to go back to 2017, when local residents protested new border wall plans during Trump’s first administration. Hundreds of people in the Rio Grande Valley marched against the wall, in what CBS News called a “fierce movement.”
A 2018 spending bill signed by Trump funded about 33 miles of new border wall in the region, but left out a three-mile gap at Santa Ana, after more than a year of local pushback.
"Putting a wall through Santa Ana was made politically toxic to the point that they made an explicit carve-out for it," Nicol, then co-chair of the Sierra Club's Borderlands Team, told the Sierra Club’s magazine at the time but warned that it would not be a lasting victory.
South Texas lawmakers secured protections in later appropriations bills, covering the National Butterfly Center, Bentsen State Park, La Lomita Chapel, and the Vista del Mar Ranch tract, along with historic cemeteries.
But the One Big Beautiful Bill, which Congress passed last year, has changed all that. Border wall construction funds now go through a different budget process called reconciliation, which the Trump administration says is not bound by the exemptions.
La Lomita is the only site where plans may change. Cuellar said in July that DHS now intends to build the wall behind the chapel and closer to the Rio Grande, and a CBP spokesperson told the Texas Tribune the agency was working to find a route south of the church.
The spokesperson said the exact alignment had not been determined, and the Tribune noted that CBP's own map still showed the wall in front of the chapel, though the map does not update in real time.
In any case, CBP said funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill has no prohibited or excluded areas for construction.
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Henry CuellarThe steel Nicol says he found at Santa Ana was made years before these latest funding disputes, and sat in storage through a period when wall construction was halted.
Then-President Joe Biden stopped border wall construction by executive order in January 2021, leaving unused panels and bollards in storage across the Southwest. A 2024 defense bill required the Pentagon to plan for selling or transferring the material.
Last year, the surplus auction house GovPlanet told Fox News that it had reached a deal with the Trump administration's border czar office to return the materials to the government at cost, and that a contractor building the border wall would receive them within 90 days.
Fox News reported last year that several outlets had found the federal government no longer owned the stored components and that GovPlanet legally possessed them. That would mean some panels could have been repurchased with unrestricted funds regardless of the date stamped on them.
Federal procurement and contracting laws have been waived for the current border wall construction, allowing contracts to be issued without public scrutiny.
On June 21, Nicol photographed a storage lot on the west side of Rio Grande City where one bollard bore a March 2020 date. He believes that old bollards in storage as a result of Biden’s construction stop are “being given away to all of the Rio Grande Valley contractors.”
The Santa Ana case is one of several fights over wall construction in Texas. In Zapata County, landowners Frank Briscoe and Joel Ruiz sued the federal government, saying crews bulldozed their private land in San Ygnacio without permission.
In West Texas, the Presidio Municipal Development District sued in June over the Big Bend region project, arguing it violated federal law and could worsen flooding.
Construction is also happening in Starr County, where Nicol said materials that look like those at Santa Ana are being used. "They are also using old panels, but that is outside of the carve out locations so it is legal," he said.
At Santa Ana, Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2 sued Spencer Construction and Royal Concrete Products in July for trespassing on land it owns along an irrigation canal serving about 8,000 acres of farmland. A federal magistrate judge recommended that work stay paused until those claims are resolved.
The pause leaves the panels where they are, with their dates presumably still exposed in an open trench. Whether the steel was bought with money barred from the refuge cannot be answered by the date stamps alone. Nicol said the records would settle it.
"Really, CBP should be transparent with the contracts," said Nicol. "If they were transparent with how our taxpayer dollars are being spent there would be no question as to whether the contractor is fabricating new bollard panels or breaking the law."
