During the first Trump presidency, Tommy Fisher set out to construct a part of a frontier walls in South Texas, which immediately sparked controversy. Concerns were raised by shoddy construction and erosion-related problems.
Beyond that, Fisher’s business had received money from a group called We Build the Wall, an influential conservative nonprofit that included President Donald Trump’s then-political planner Steve Bannon as a board member. Some of its officials gradually lost their jobs as a result of their involvement with the project.
Yet the president criticized the task.
” I disagreed with doing this very small (tiny ) section of wall, in a tricky area, by a private group which raised money by ads”, Trump wrote on X in response to reporting by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune in 2020 detailing problems with the wall project.
The article continued,” It was only done to make me look poor.”
None of this prevented Fisher’s business from receiving contract work on the Texas border roof in the future. And now the federal government has awarded his company over$ 9 billion to build even more border wall — including a$ 1.2 billion contract in the Big Bend region of Texas, where residents have continued to press for answers about the government’s plans in and around one of the country’s largest national parks.
And Fisher’s function is once again causing controversy in Trump’s first word. A design firm based in New York has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration after it awarded the majority of new arrangements for the Texas border wall to Fisher Sand & Gravel and another firm based in North Dakota.
Posillico Civil Inc.’s lawsuit, filed in the Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D. C., on May 13, offers one of the first people glimpses into the purchasing process along the border in Texas. The lawsuit claims that just two of the 11 prequalified vendors for the wall projects, Fisher’s firm and Barnard Construction, based in Montana, were awarded nearly$ 14 billion — roughly 73 % of the contracts ‘ value. Additionally, El Paso, Laredo, Del Rio, and the Rio Grande Valley are the subjects of the work’s walls installations.
The Trump administration has come under scrutiny for awarding no-bid contracts and for the lack of transparency around its increased border wall construction plans, moves designed to help the leader reach his major campaign promises of securing the border.
Trump’s actions even faced criticism during his first word. ProPublica and the Tribune’s research for 2020 found that the state was granting land titles before settling them, resulting in millions of dollars in difficulties. A review of federal spending data by the news agencies also revealed how the first Trump administration had made plenty of lease changes, increasing the cost of the border wall job by billion.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which authorized the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to spend$ 46 billion on the construction of the boundary roof in 2025, demonstrates no sign of slowing down.
Prequalified companies are not surprising because the system is designed to speed up the government’s progress with projects, but competition is not a goal, according to Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on national contract rules and former participant of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
DHS “is picking contractors for loyalty and from confidence that they will do its bidding, rather than, as every other administration has done, picking contractors for best value”, Tiefer said, referring to reports that then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem awarded a$ 220 million ad campaign contract to a firm she had connections to. DHS responded to ProPublica’s report by saying the organization “has no control over the selection of subcontractors” and that it doesn’t have any say in who contractors hire.
They have a lot of blank checks, and they want to write them as quickly as possible, according to Tiefer.
The White House declined to comment for this story. A CBP spokesman stated in a written statement that the bidding process was fair. According to the spokesperson,” Contracts awarded are based on the contractor’s qualifications to perform the work in a timely manner and at prices deemed fair and reasonable,” adding that neither CBP nor DHS have any affiliation with We Build the Wall.
An attorney for Posillico declined to comment. The business has previously constructed 43 miles of South Texas’s federal wall and won a contract to construct portions of the governor’s senate. The state border project led by Greg Abbott. The state project experienced many of the same construction delays and cost overruns as Trump’s border wall.
Posillico asserts in the lawsuit that it spent” substantial bid preparation and proposal costs” creating plans for “untrue competitive opportunities” when creating plans for federal solicitations.
Although these are just allegations, Project on Government Oversight’s Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel, said border wall contracts have long been contentious and have raised questions about the cost as well as the contractor’s political connections. Amey closely followed border wall procurement during the first Trump administration.
Every time you mention anything about the border wall, there are a cost, ethics, and contracting issues that come up, Amey said.
Fisher Sand & Gravel and Barnard’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment. Barnard has filed as an intervenor in the case, meaning it isn’t a party in the suit but wants to participate.
Fisher and Barnard receives the majority of the new funding, but several other businesses, including Southwest Valley Constructors, Granite Construction Co., and Spencer Construction LLC, all received smaller shares of the contracts. Southwest Valley Constructors recently won another$ 1.7 billion contract for barrier construction in and around Big Bend National Park. The other companies ‘ representatives did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Posillico’s lawsuit claims that the contracts issued to the other companies went beyond the original scope of wall construction work the federal government told bidders it was seeking.
For instance, in CPB’s Big Bend Sector project, contractors were ultimately required to install cattle fencing and cattle guards, according to Posillico’s lawsuit, which the government had originally demanded of potential contractors. According to the lawsuit, the government might have had a better chance of winning a contract if the scope had been more clearly defined.
As part of the new scope of work, winning contractors, including Fisher Sand & Gravel, will also have to work with the International Boundary and Water Commission, the federal agency that administers treaties around the Rio Grande and the physical border with Mexico.
Fisher has previously fought with the commission. After the company built fencing in South Texas, the commission filed a lawsuit in 2019 alleging Fisher had violated a binational water treaty between the United States and Mexico. The investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune found that a 3-mile stretch of border wall Fisher built on the banks of the Rio Grande was at risk of collapsing if not fixed. Additionally, the business did not follow the proper procedures when it constructed a section of a border wall in Sunland Park, New Mexico. Both initiatives involved nonprofit We Build the Wall.
In the end, four of the nonprofit’s top leaders, including Bannon, were arrested on fraud and other charges connected to the fundraising scheme. An Air Force veteran among the men was found guilty and given a prison sentence. Trump pardoned Bannon, who was awaiting trial.
Fisher and the government reached a settlement in 2022 in which Fisher Sand & Gravel agreed to conduct quarterly inspections, maintain an existing gate and keep a$ 3 million bond for 15 years or until the property was transferred to the government to cover expenses in case the structure failed.
” The Rules Don’t Really Apply”
The Posillico lawsuit provides a unique glimpse into the lucrative world of border wall construction, an industry that has emerged over the past ten years as a result of Trump’s repeated campaign promise to build a wall.
Due to Noem waiving dozens of laws regulating financial transparency and competitiveness in government contracting for the entire southern border, the procurement process has been particularly obscure around border wall contracting. That act marked the first time in American history these waivers were applied to all 1, 954 miles of the U. S. Mexico border.
Posillico made it clear in its lawsuit that it did not object to the wall’s use of waivers to speed up the wall’s construction.
The waivers have resulted in very little information from DHS for residents of border communities regarding the massive infrastructure projects coming to their communities. This spring, the Center for Biological Diversity filed two lawsuits in federal court related to border wall construction in the Big Bend area, specifically over DHS ‘ failure to respond to a series of Freedom of Information Act requests for documents related to the project and challenging the agency’s authority to waive laws without Congress ‘ approval. The government has not yet responded to the complaints, with the deadline for the FOIA complaint and the congressional authority lawsuit set for early June.
Judge David A. Tapp approved the motion in the Posillico lawsuit by DHS to seal all of the relevant documents, including any depositions or affidavits.
In the absence of publicly posted requests for proposals and direct communication from Washington, residents in the Big Bend region have been relying on an online map posted by CBP that says it tracks contracts as they’re awarded. Over the past few months, the map’s lines have dramatically changed, which raises questions about the government’s actual construction plans. Around the same time that protests about the possibility of a physical wall in Big Bend National Park reached a fever pitch, the organization briefly removed the map altogether. When the map was restored to the website, it appeared to show a mix of “vehicle barriers” and “patrol roads” planned instead of steel walls within park boundaries.
Although it hasn’t publicly announced any plans for what alternative border barriers might look like, Fisher Sand & Gravel is currently slated to construct a wall-related project in Big Bend Ranch State Park, which borders the national park to the west. Landowners in the nearby parks are still working to overcome eminent domain challenges from the federal government.
Barnard is working on a project outside the parks. Documents in Posillico’s lawsuit revealed that CBP has flagged portions of wall for “fast-track” construction by the business in Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, and Presidio counties. A pecan farm close to the small ranching community of Lobo has started clearing a swath of land for a 500-person camp and petitioning the local water conservation district for permission to use agricultural well water for the project in order to support that work.
Amey, the contracting expert, said the Trump administration seems to want to make the exception the rule, considering controversial practices like Noem’s decision to award the huge border ad contract and the fact the government has waived so many contracting rules to accelerate the wall’s construction.
” It seems as though this administration, especially this time around, has decided that the rules don’t really apply,” he said.
The Trump Administration is facing scrutiny for its billion-dollar border wall contracts, according to the article’s introduction on ProPublica.
