Some of the 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, according to the Eagle Pass News Leader.
As shown in video obtained by the publication, a Mexican national is seen standing next to one of the huge buoys that washed ashore. When asked why he was burning the buoy, the man responded in Spanish: “Because it has aluminum.”
Sources told the daily that the aluminum can fetch around $2,300 once extracted from the buoys.
According to the Texas Tribune, two bridges connecting Eagle Pass to Mexico were closed on Thursday after the buoys came loose from their anchors, disrupting international trade. On Sunday, federal workers were called to the World Trade Bridge in Laredo to help extract dislodged buoys from the overpass’s pillars, the publication reports.
“Buoys with sharp razors are now causing damage to neighborhoods and have shut down a bridge that transports thousands of vehicles a day,” U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, said in a statement. “Abbott’s ‘buoy border’ was a reckless idea from the very start and border communities remain collateral damage.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott deployed his floating marine buoy barrier into portions of the Rio Grande in 2023 as part of his multibillion-dollar border crackdown, Operation Lone Star. The buoys themselves cost Texas taxpayers about $1 million to produce and install.
However, in a statement to the Current, Abbott’s team maintained that the buoys causing trade issues and being sold for scrap were not installed by Texas. Instead, the federal government planned to use them as an immigration deterrent before they were washed away by heavy rains.
“Texas’ buoys did not leave the location they were installed three years ago,” the governor’s office said.
Regardless, the dislodged buoys are now being burned to recover aluminum that’s then sold as scrap in Mexico, according to the Eagle Pass News Leader.
However, more buoys could be swept away in the coming days with Texas poised to get another round of heavy rain due to a tropical depression brewing in the Gulf of Mexico.
That disturbance could strengthen into a Category 1 hurricane and make landfall somewhere along the Texas coast as soon as late Friday or early Saturday, per forecasts from the National Weather Service.
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