AUSTIN, Texas — Gov. Greg Abbott announced that more buoys were placed along the Texas-Mexico border in an effort to deter illegal immigration.
“Despite the Biden-Harris Administration’s attempts to shut down our border security efforts, the buoys are here to stay. We won’t back down from our mission to deter & repel illegal immigration,” Abbott said in a post on X.
This summer, after a long legal back-and-forth, a federal court ruled that Texas could keep its floating buoys in the Rio Grande River to prevent people from crossing the border illegally.
Dozens of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys have been deployed to create a water barrier along a stretch of the river where migrants often tried crossing from Mexico. Texas also installed razor wire and steel fencing on the border, while also empowering armed officers to arrest migrants on trespassing charges.
The buoys, deployed in July 2023, brought a swift legal challenge from the U.S. Justice Department, which accused Texas of putting a barrier on the international boundary without permission. President Joe Biden’s administration also said the water barrier raised humanitarian and environmental concerns.
Texas initially installed the buoy barrier near the border town of Eagle Pass, with anchors in the riverbed.
Eagle Pass is part of a Border Patrol sector that, as of the end of July, had seen the second-highest number of migrant crossings in 2024 with about 270,000 encounters — though that is lower than it was at the same time last year.
Like other pieces of Abbott’s multibillion-dollar border mission known as Operation Lone Star, the buoys pick up where former President Donald Trump left off. Plans for the same water barrier were in the pipeline in 2020, according to Mark Morgan, who at the time was the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.