When I was 14 years old, I traveled to the Big Bend region of West Texas for the first time. My extended family had lived along the U.S.–Mexico border since the 1970s, but this was my first time visiting them. As a suburban kid from Philadelphia, I’d never seen anything quite like it. Counties more than twice the size of Delaware held no more than a couple thousand permanent residents. Mountains, rivers, desert arroyos, cattle ranches — miles and miles of wild, untouched land stretched out in every direction, mostly unobstructed. The land is populated by ocotillo and agave plants, pig-like mammals called javelinas, coyotes, mountain lions, bears, snakes, deer and (more recently) majestic mountain sheep called aoudads. It was and remains the Western Frontier — alive and well, still unmarred by oil fields or residential buildings or government overreach. After my first summer working for my cousin in Big Bend, I went back every summer until I was 18 years old. I learned to drive manual transmission cars, dirtbikes, forklifts, and backhoes; I learned to shoot guns, ride horses, hike, camp, make fires, run rivers, and tow a trailer. I learned to work — backbreaking, hard work in the 115-degree sun. I was surrounded by people who knew how to live off the land, fix their own cars, and make ends meet with the bare minimum in a place where jobs (along with water, food, and people) were sparse. After I went to college, I kept coming back — usually once or twice a year, often for weeks or months at a time, until a few years ago when I finally bought a 10-acre plot of dirt and started construction on an adobe home for my family, which was completed last year. It is, without exaggeration, my favorite place in the world. My happy place. My getaway spot. My hope, with any luck, is that in a few decades my son will be inheriting the home and the land, shepherding it, and passing it along to his own children. And now, once again, I’m facing the prospect of President Donald Trump building a border wall through our backyard. This is not a drill. DHS is notifying residents and property owners about 30-foot, steel barricades going up throughout this pristine land. 30x30 foot shelters for fiber optic cable, surveillance, and CBP agents all along the border. Miles of 12-24 foot wide roads in land that has never had anything but dirtbike and horseback trails. It's coming and it could be happening as soon as this summer. I want to be clear: Building a wall here will 1) Destroy jobs in the region, cutting off river guides and horseback outfitters from the water and trails they use now, and thus reducing tourism, thus crushing the hotel/Airbnb/food industry that feeds people throughout Big Bend. 2) It will hand control of the river over to Mexico, basically cutting Americans off from the most precious natural resource in all of West Texas. 3) It will irreversibly damage the wild West, the last remaining truly untouched land in the lower 48, and 4) It won't actually reduce border crossings. In Fiscal Year 2024, just 0.32% of all crossings happened in the 517 mile Big Bend sector. Just 3,000 encounters happened in all of 2025. That's less than the number of encounters in NORTH DAKOTA in 2024. And all of this would cost hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. This is what it looks like on the border in Big Bend. This region is one of the most remote, unnavigable terrains in all of the United States. Border crossers aren’t going to be more dissuaded by a 30-foot wall than the thousand-foot sheer cliffs that already litter the Mexican landscape south of the Rio Grande River. Supposing desperate border crossers also happened to be experienced rock climbers who trudged up from Central America with gear to navigate the mountains, cliffs and arroyos, they’re still likely to die of heat exhaustion or thirst in a place where the temperature routinely exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit from April to October. And if they come in the winter, well, they’re liable to get hypothermia in the desert night, when the temperatures routinely drop below 40 degrees. That’s to say nothing of finding water or food in an area where locals with wells, rain catchment systems, and city lines are frequently struggling to collect potable drinking water; and the arid desert provides no easily accessible sources of food on such a journey. And if they make it through all that, they're just turning themselves in or being found half-dead near the border. It's just totally unnecessary. Again: This is one of the last remaining truly untouched, open, wild, and free lands in the U.S. Much of it is public, and a lot of it is privately owned by environmentalist-minded people who are simply preserving it (and now may have their land stolen via eminent domain by the government).