Texas Gets Hoisted by Its Own Razor-Bladed Border Buoys

A few years ago the state government of Texas, seemingly in an effort to discover the most cruel and inhumane method it could legally employ to discourage border crossings on the Rio Grande River, tinkered with the installation of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded, razor-bladed buoys to physically block passage from Mexico across the river. They were a smashing success, if you’re measuring in body count: Two people attempting to cross died in the river soon after, and one body was literally discovered tangled up in the razor-bladed buoys near Eagle Pass, Texas. Not to worry, said Texas: They were pretty sure this human being merely drowned before his body became entangled in the border buoys, so it’s fine. But what happens when the river’s flood waters start to rise?

If this past weekend is any indication, what you end up with is rogue, unmoored one-ton buoys covered in razor blades, sailing down the Rio Grande, interfering with critical economic bridge crossings, endangering civilians, and in some cases ending up hundreds of miles away. Oh, and some of them have even been scooped up on the Mexican side of the border and are being burned and sold by profiteers for the scrap aluminum they contain. So yeah, huge success all around! Definitely something I’m glad that our federal government has also poured millions upon millions of dollars into installing in the Rio Grande.

Controversial buoys installed in the Rio Grande by the federal government have broken free and are floating downstream. The buoys could cause damage to international bridges and other infrastruture along the border river. Read More👉 ebx.sh/HfkaM8

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— Texas Public Radio (@texaspublicradio.bsky.social) 4:28 PM · Jul 19, 2026

Texas was quick to point out that the border buoys they’d spent more than $2 million installing at Eagle Pass were not the ones that had escaped, blaming the federal government’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And wouldn’t you know it, CBP says they’re also not to blame for the screw-up, but instead threw a contractor under the bus, saying that the buoys had been stored at the town’s riverfront facility at Shelby Park, after the local city council voted not to lease space to the contractor for storage. They were still sitting in that spot when this weekend’s storms caused the river’s flood waters to rise, sweeping the 600 or so buoys–each weighing a ton and covered in sharp razors–into the river, floating in potentially deadly chains.

“Buoys under the responsibility of control of the contractor that were staged at nearby Shelby Park, were swept into the river due to the fast-rising water,” said the CBP spokesperson washing the agency’s hands of the mess. “These were not buoys that were already deployed and anchored in the river. CBP is working with its contractor to retrieve these buoys.” Sounds like a simple enough task to us! Some of them have already been reported … 160 miles away in Zapata County, so that should be a cinch to track them all down. There is also no real proof that buoys already placed in the river by CBP didn’t also come unmoored, a possibility supported by reports that many of the buoys have already seemingly been tied together on strings.

Some of those razor-sharp buoys tied together into strands were ultimately to blame for the closure over the weekend of the World Trade Bridge, which is the nation’s single largest inland commercial port and economic crossing on the U.S. southern border. This is a massively important structure and economic pipeline, which reportedly carries up to 15,000-20,000 commercial only vehicles per day, generating nearly $1 billion in commercial activity daily. The fact that it was closed for literally any amount of time is an economic loss measured in millions of dollars–all because our misanthropic federal government has a fetish for whichever methods of border security can cause the most gruesome damage to the human body. Or put another way, even a temporary closure here absolutely caused more economic damage than any amount of border security-derived stimulus could achieve, and the total cost of temporarily closing this bridge was probably far more than the price of installing the buoys in the first place. Great work! Medals for everybody!

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Razor-laden border buoys swept away by heavy floods over the past few days are reportedly being broken down and sold for scrap in Mexico

As shown in video, a Mexican national, when asked why he was burning the buoy, the man responded in Spanish: “Because it has aluminum.”

~San Antonio Current

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— Demblu🩵🕊ThankYouJoe Biden (@phranklindb.bsky.social) 11:16 AM · Jul 21, 2026

“After several sections accumulated near the World Trade Bridge, traffic operations were temporarily suspended out of an abundance of caution, but the operations have since reopened,” said the unnamed CBP spokesperson. “There are no reported injuries or damage to the bridge. Contractors are working to recover remaining buoys.”

As is customary to say after a screw-up: If only someone had warned that this would happen! And as is also customary to note after a government screw-up: Somebody did give warnings, repeatedly. A report published in March by the Rio Grande International Study Center warned that exactly this would likely happen in extreme flood conditions–and the conditions experienced by the Rio Grande River during these particular floods were not even considered extreme. As the researchers who put the report together observed, much bigger floods are not just possibly but likely in the same location. As the RGISC director Martin Castro wrote: “It failed a minimum stress test, as these are not even close to the biggest floods we can expect. Even if we get lucky this time around and it doesn’t damage our bridges, it is now clear that the buoy design won’t withstand greater flooding. It needs to be halted—immediately—until full and complete studies are conducted. Anything less is irresponsible.”

Despite it all, CBP still plans to install 533 miles of waterborne, razor-bladed buoys up and down the Rio Grande in coming years, all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, which it refers to as part of its “smart wall” on the border. How many of them will eventually end up sighted by Gulf oil platforms, or embedded in the side of a whale, because even when it comes to anchoring a cruel deterrent to immigrant border crossings, the federal agencies involved can’t be bothered to acknowledge that climate change is real and that flash floods in Texas are becoming more and more apocalyptic as a result?

“The city was warned, loud and clear, by experts, but the mayor and city manager dismissed these concerns in order to please the federal government,” said Laredo resident Nadja Lopez in a statement issued by RGISC. “They are picking politics over public safety. It’s inexcusable.”