New Mexico’s state engineer is threatening to cancel the licenses of two drilling companies that have been working on construction of a new border wall.
The engineer’s office says contractors have drilled at least eight new wells to pump groundwater along the U.S.-Mexico border without state permits.
“Our permitting process exists to protect the groundwater New Mexico families and farmers depend on, and we enforce it rigorously,” said state engineer Elizabeth Anderson.
This issue has been boiling over in Southern New Mexico since early last month. Rancher Russell Johnson noticed a new well drilled on his ranch, which shares an eight-mile border with Mexico. Another one appeared on his neighbor’s property.
“These wells that they’re drilling for border wall construction, they’re talking about trying to attain 300-plus gallons a minute, and it’s going to pump us dry,” Johnson told Here & Now in July. “When you have livestock you’ve got to water, they can’t wait. You can’t haul enough water to keep them in good supply, so it becomes an immediate disaster.”
After the initial outcry, Rep. Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat from Southern New Mexico, gave a speech on the House floor accusing the federal government of stealing the state’s water.
New Mexico gets more than half of its water from underground aquifers, and an ongoing drought has put tremendous pressure on water supplies across the Western United States.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has responded by putting new restrictions on drilling. A CBP spokesman said it instructed the contractor working on the border wall to pause the installation of any new groundwater wells.
“CBP is committed to working collaboratively with local landowners to ensure that construction activities do not adversely impact their water needs,” the agency said.
Construction crews need water to build new roads, mix cement and keep dust at bay, CBP said.
Johnson, who is also a former Border Patrol agent, said the pause on new drilling doesn’t satisfy him because it does not address the state of existing wells.
“It’s like you caught your kid with their hand in the cookie jar, but they’re still eating the cookie,” said Johnson. “Those wells are still on the table if they decided they wanted to use them.”
During the first Trump administration, ponds at the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona dried up after crews pumped millions of gallons of water to mix cement.
Now, construction across the region has started again. The 30-foot wall is going up in places workers didn’t get to the first time around, and a second barrier is going up where a wall already exists.
CBP calls it a “smart wall,” which includes new technology like sensors, lighting and cameras. Congress gave the administration nearly $47 billion to finish the project.
The wells are on federal property, within a 60-foot strip of land that runs along the international boundary known as the Roosevelt Reservation. In April, Customs and Border Protection sent a letter to the state engineer’s office that said the federal government is “immune” from state law that requires a permit to pump groundwater.
Meanwhile, New Mexico officials said on Tuesday that companies drilling the unpermitted wells “failed to adhere to proper well construction and plugging requirements” and will have their licenses revoked if they don’t correct the violations within 30 days.
The owner of one of the drilling companies cited by the state engineer told Here & Now that he was told the federal government could drill on the easement without state permission.
“I was just a subcontractor on the job doing what the contractor told me to do. Now the state wants to take my driller’s license away because of it,” said Vinnie Wyatt, of Wyatt Drilling Arizona. “I am just a little guy in the middle of all this. They assured me I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
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Kalyani Saxena contributed reporting for this story.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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