The full cost of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s floating buoy barrier in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass is greater than previously revealed.
Between February and August of last year, the state attorney general’s office doled out expert services contracts and related amendments worth almost $1 million total as part of its defense against a federal Department of Justice lawsuit over the buoys, records obtained by the Texas Observer show. The experts are being retained to provide declarations or testimony in the year-and-a-half-old suit. Pretrial discovery is currently scheduled to last through May, though it’s possible President-elect Donald Trump’s administration will drop the suit.
The expert contracts are worth more than the $850,000 that the state paid to install the first 1,000 feet of buoys in July 2023, as calculated from purchase order records. (The state added to the riverine barrier in November.) Abbott’s office has described the buoys as “low-cost.”
State comptroller records show that the AG’s office paid out about $530,000 in “Witness Fees” to experts contracted for the court case between March and December last year. The attorney general’s office did not answer emailed questions for this story.
Among the experts contracted by the attorney general is former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who pursued the idea of river buoys in the first Trump administration and is now Trump’s pick to lead Customs and Border Protection. Scott’s private professional services firm, Honor Consulting Plus, is tasked with providing up to $50,000 worth of “consulting and/or testifying expert services” at an hourly r ate of $600, according to a copy of the contract obtained by the Observer . Comptroller records do not show any payments yet to Scott or his company. As of December, Scott had not submitted any invoices for services, according to a response to an open records request, nor had the state submitted an expert report by Scott, as it had with other experts. In a late October filing, the state listed Scott as a witness to be called at trial.
State Representative Armando Walle, a Houston Democrat who has served on the appropriations committee since 2015, criticized Attorney General Ken Paxton’s spending on the litigation as part of out-of-control border security expenditures.
“You could provide teachers a pay raise. … You could prevent rural hospitals from being closed,” Walle told the Observer. “Because he has access to these dollars, [he] is throwing out these types of consulting contracts to his friends to the detriment of the taxpayer.”
Walle specifically said the contract with Scott, likely to be an influential federal official soon, “raises a lot of red flags.” Scott declined to comment on the contract and referred all questions to the attorney general’s office.
Back in summer 2023, Abbott placed the buoys in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass to deter migrants from crossing. The move was widely condemned by Mexican officials, liberal lawmakers, and immigrant advocates, who argued that the floating barriers would make traversing the river more dangerous and push people to cross in more remote areas.
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice swiftly sued the state, arguing that installing the buoys in the Rio Grande was an illegal and unauthorized obstruction of a navigable waterway. This legal argument has led to convoluted debate between the parties over the historic and present navigability of the river and whether buoys qualify as “a structure,” with experts weighing in on both sides. After some judicial back-and-forth, the buoys have been allowed to stay in the water as the case plays out.
Other experts contracted by the AG are: RSAH2O, LLC, a water policy consulting firm; ExpertConnect Litigation Support, LLC, a firm that connects legal counsel with screened subject matter experts; Eleftherios Iakovou, an engineering professor at Texas A&M University; Cassandra Hart of the firm Coastal Environments, Inc.; ecologist Cristine Magers of Balcones Field Services, LLC; and Historical Research Associates, Inc., a Montana-based research firm. Taken together, the contracts, including amendments, are worth $990,000.
These expert services expenditures are an example, critics say, of the hidden costs of Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s multi-billion-dollar border militarization project. So far, Operation Lone Star’s official tally is $11 billion and counting—part of a decade-long trend of ballooning state border security spending.
“The point of the border buoys was political show, and to try to get into a fight with the federal government,” said Bob Libal, a Texas-based consultant for Human Rights Watch. “Of course, they’re going to spend more money on the fight than they are on anything that is meaningful.”
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Abbott, whose office did not respond to a request for comment for this story, has indicated a willingness to decrease the state’s border spending under the incoming Trump administration, though some experts doubt this will happen.
Juanita Martinez, an Eagle Pass resident and the chair of the Maverick County Democrats, told the Observer the buoys don’t cover enough of the river to deter crossings. Border Patrol migrant apprehensions in the Del Rio Sector, which includes Eagle Pass, have dropped precipitously since last January, but that coincides with other interventions including a crackdown by Mexico at the Biden administration’s behest.
A few weeks ago, Martinez said, she saw a man in the city’s downtown who had just crossed the river and whose clothes were still soaked. Martinez asked him whether Abbott’s buoys had impeded his crossing, to which he replied in Spanish: “This idiot put some orange soccer balls in the river. Everyone crosses there.”
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