In early 2026, the Trump administration quietly advanced plans to build more than 100 miles of steel border wall through the remote Big Bend region, a rural area in Far West Texas stretching down to the Rio Grande River. The administration waived dozens of environmental protections to expedite construction through protected areas like Big Bend State Ranch Park. When Charlie Angell, owner of Angell Expeditions and a river guide in the Big Bend region, first heard of the border wall plans from a friend last winter, he called his local newspaper, The Big Bend Sentinel.
Charlie Angell looks out over the Rio Grande from his property in Redford, Texas. (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan/The Daily Yonder)
“I called the Sentinel and I said, ‘Hey, have you heard of this?’ I was just told for sure that there is going to be a physical 30-foot-tall wall, with a concrete pad into the ground,” Angell said. “[Reporter] Sam Karas was looking into it…and saw there was this huge contract awarded for a company that had built a lot of the wall.”
Ten days later, while Angell was on the banks of the Rio Grande scouting canoe routes near newly-installed razor wire, he received a call from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers notifying him that his property would be affected by the wall plans.
IMG_4023: A sign outside of Angell Expeditions in Redford, Texas. (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan/The Daily Yonder)
At the time, little confirmed information about the project was publicly available. Early details emerged in fragments through contract filings and informal conversations, leaving both residents and journalists to piece together the scope and location of the proposed construction.
“We put out the first story about [the wall], and that, just like, really accelerated everything, where then the whole community was more or less on the same page,” said Sam Karas, a Big Bend Sentinel reporter and fellow Rio Grande river guide.
Local outlets quickly became the primary source of verified information in a rapidly-changing situation where official details remained scarce and inaccessible.
Big Bend Sentinel reporter Sam Karas. (Photo by Alexander Neal, courtesy of Sam Karas)
The Big Bend Sentinel covers Presidio, Brewster, and Jeff Davis counties in far West Texas, a region spanning over 12,300 square miles, comparable to the size of Maryland. Despite operating with only a small staff of a few reporters, residents within the Sentinel’s coverage area remain better served than many Texans when it comes to local news access.
According to the University of North Carolina, 21 of Texas’ 254 counties have no local newspaper at all, all of them rural, while 134 counties are served by just one paper. Across the country, half of all counties, 1,528, only have a single newspaper and 225 don’t have any at all. Most of these gaps are found in rural areas.
For some Texas counties, daily newspapers have been converted to weeklies and rural Texas is facing the rise of “ghost newspapers,” publications that continue to exist in name but produce limited original reporting and rely heavily on wire services for content that may not be place-based.
In the Big Bend region, on-the-ground reporting presence made real-time coverage of the border wall plan possible.
The banks of the Rio Grande near Presidio, Texas. (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan/The Daily Yonder)
Early reporting by small newsrooms established a timeline of events, identified key contractors and federal agencies, and documented where proposed construction could occur, efforts that began to draw attention well beyond West Texas. As interest spread, these small rural newsrooms adapted in real time, experimenting with new formats and distribution to reach a growing, and increasingly national, audience.
During the first Trump administration, threats of a border wall loomed over the Big Bend region, but plans never materialized. As new efforts to build the wall gained traction during the second Trump administration, the tone and urgency of coverage shifted. With no formal announcements and limited transparency from federal agencies, local journalists moved from monitoring a distant policy debate to closely tracking an active and evolving project on the ground.
“The coverage started pretty quietly. I mean, even for us, it wasn’t necessarily that huge of a story right away, because the details of the border wall plans were not at all clear to start with,” said Travis Bubenik, news director at Marfa Public Radio.
At Marfa Public Radio, a two-person reporting team covers Far West Texas and the Permian Basin The station broadcasts from Midland to Presidio, covering what Bubenik describes as “fundamental civic information.”
In the absence of transparent plans, early reporting relied heavily on records searches and incremental disclosures. Journalists tracked maps, contracts, and land surveys to verify the existence and scope of the project.
The Marfa Public Radio station in Marfa, Texas. (Photo by Madeline de Figueiredo/The Daily Yonder)
As landowners continued receiving formal notices of plans to build the wall through their properties, they increasingly turned to local media. The Big Bend region, which includes Big Bend National Park and large expanses of state-managed land, had not previously seen this type or scale of border infrastructure, heightening uncertainty about its potential impact.
“As landowners and residents who would be impacted by this project started hearing whispers of it, we knew in the press almost right away,” Bubenik said. “They were sharing government documents, Customs and Border Patrol letters that they received with us pretty freely, in a way that doesn’t always happen in bigger places, urban places. We quickly learned a lot of details about this plan just from the people directly impacted by it. Because, again, we know these people. It’s a small town; they’re just local folks in the community.”
The investigation became a community effort.
“In a lot of ways, people who live here began sort of practicing journalism in the sense of just trying to get answers right. Just as we were reporting on this story, so were everyday people,” Bubenik said. “They were talking to their local elected officials in the same way that we do. They were showing up to meetings trying to learn more.”
But as the Big Bend border wall story gained national attention, and became a source of state-wide and national organizing, reporting from local newsrooms began attracting a much wider audience.
“It was really noticeable how our audience engagement shifted,” Karas said. “Our social media blew up. Our website stats blew up. And then individually, people from all different types of media, documentaries, books, podcasts, et cetera, all started calling all around the same time too.”
The widespread engagement raised questions on how to approach the reporting.
“Something we’ve had to kind of figure out on the fly, and had a lot of different editorial conversations about this, is: Who is the audience for every single individual little border wall update story that we do?” Karas said.
To reach these broad audiences, Karas said many of the Sentinel’s reporting tools and practices have had to evolve quickly.
“Success for me right now means reaching the greatest number of people within my community the fastest, and so that’s why we’ve been really experimenting in this moment with different social media engagement things,” Karas said. “It has really prompted us to join the twenty-first century in a way, because the newspaper comes out once a week, and things are happening so incredibly quickly that it has shifted the way that we think about news.”
Karas said that she now delivers many of the border wall updates through short videos on social media, which local residents said help keep them informed in an ever-changing landscape.
“I know about the border wall thanks to Sam Karas,” said Yosdy Valdivia, a Presidio County resident and gallery owner who has become active in the local movement against the wall. “It was thanks to her videos [on social media] with the Sentinel.”
Even as the story has drawn national attention, the difficulties of reporting in a remote region remained. With limited staff and resources, newsrooms faced difficult decisions about what they can, and cannot, cover, and how to incorporate external reporting.
“We’re one of the only media outlets in the region. We can’t cover it all,” Bubenik said. “Every week, there’s some little aspect to this story that we just have to say, we can’t cover it. We just don’t have enough time and resources for that. We have to stay focused on the bigger picture.”
For Karas, the moment highlights the importance and potential of local rural journalism.
“Local rural news is in a really difficult spot, politically, economically, all of those things,” Karas said. “But there are still people out here doing this work, and we’re doing it in really enthusiastic and creative ways that I hope that other people look from the outside and see it and think it’s exciting.”
The post Rural Newsrooms at the Frontlines of the Big Bend Wall appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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