The Wall Ranch, in Eagle Pass, Texas, occupies a thousand acres scrubland along the Mexican border. Several times a day, freight trains coming from Mexico stop on the southern edge of the property, where a large X-ray machine scans the cars to check if people are hiding inside. One morning in early January, the ranch's owner, Martín Wall, a fortyfive-year-old cattleman and a seventh-generation Texan, showed me around. Between 2022 and 2023, he said, more than two hundred migrants crossed through his land each day to board the trains and travel farther north. Discarded clothes and trash piled up in the brush. A tractor was vandalized. Wire fences that Wall had erected to keep his cattle from wandering into the road were repeatedly cut. Once, Wall came inside for lunch and found two men in his kitchen.

"Hell, you can grab their phones and they have pins," he told me. "They have my house marked." We were sitting in Wall's pickup truck. The muzzle of a hunting rifle poked out from the back seat, and a water bottle on the front console was filled with the brown swill of chewing tobacco. Wall, who is tall and burly, with long hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, told me that he'd spent more than three hundred thousand dollars making repairs on the ranch. "I've been totally crippled by this," he said. The problem began "as soon as Biden went in. We got forgotten about down here." By the end of last year, the number of migrants arriving at the border was at its lowest ebb since 2020, owing in large part to a dramatic increase in apprehensions in Mexico, and a series of stricter policies adopted in the final months of the Biden Administration.