The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency intends to seize seven acres of state trust land along the New Mexico-Mexico border, according to the State Land Office.
The federal government first awarded the parcel near Santa Teresa to the State Land Office in 1898 to generate money for local schools. But over the last several years, according to correspondence the Land Office provided along with a news release Friday, the federal government has sought to purchase a strip of it along the border to beef up border infrastructure.
According to a March letter the Land Office provided, CBP officials in March determined acquiring the parcel was needed “to construct new border infrastructure along the United States/Mexico border, namely, steel bollard border barrier, the installation of detection technology, and roads.”
The CBP in March offered the state roughly $800,000 for the parcel, which a U.S. Department of Justice attorney wrote is the fair market value for the property. After the Land Office did not respond to an April 1 deadline to respond to that offer, CBP officials alerted the state that it intended to seize the property and would file necessary paperwork to do so Friday, according to Land Office spokesperson Joey Keefe.
Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, in a statement Friday, described the federal government’s effort as “historic overreach” by President Donald Trump’s administration and said her office is reviewing any recourse it may have to prevent the acquisition.
“Doing business with these thugs was simply not an option,” she said, referring to the federal effort to purchase the property. “Unsurprisingly, the President threw a temper tantrum when he couldn’t automatically get his way and is now going to forcibly take our state land and deny our school kids the revenue that comes from it.”
Keefe told Source NM on Friday morning that the federal government is expected to file the necessary paperwork to “condemn” the property for acquisition Friday afternoon. CBP officials did not provide a response to Source NM about its effort to acquire the land as of publication time Friday.
Garcia Richard said the seizure of the property is the latest escalation in years of conflict between the State Land Office and federal border authorities seeking to build a border wall on state trust land.
Her predecessor, Aubrey Dunn, a Republican who later changed his party registration to Libertarian, tried to prohibit the federal government’s trespasses onto state trust land to build a border wall in 2018 during Trump’s first term.