By Algernon D’Ammassa | Albuquerque Journal
April 16, 2026
Federal authorities are eyeing a 7-acre parcel of New Mexico trust land near the Santa Teresa Port of Entry for border wall construction.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection offered in March to purchase the land for nearly $798,500 in a letter that threatened to use eminent domain to obtain the land. After the State Land Office declined to agree by an April 1 deadline, CBP informed Public Lands Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard it would proceed with a court filing Friday to condemn the land.
“We intend to reject CBP’s offer because we do not agree that this would be a good use of state trust land,” Joey Keefe, the State Land Office spokesperson, said.
Garcia Richard, a Democrat nearing the end of her second and final term as commissioner, called the move a land grab that followed years of trespassing and apparent confusion over where the federal government has access.
“This land was granted to us by the federal government, so we have very little recourse in this situation,” Garcia Richard told the Journal in an interview. “It is a condemnation for a public use — that’s the necessary criteria — and that should be terrifying to every single New Mexican.”
The office said it would review legal options in the matter. Garcia Richard’s successor will be elected in November and take office at the start of 2027.
Garcia Richard is not the first commissioner to push back against federal encroachments on state land near the border. Her predecessor, Commissioner Aubrey Dunn, famously put up a “no trespassing” sign in 2018 after border authorities built a road and installed fencing without acquiring a right-of-way. The dispute occurred during President Donald Trump’s first term.
At the time, Dunn said, “Border security is important, but so are our kids; and they have a right to collect the money earned from the lands they own.”
Dunn and Garcia Richard both repeatedly complained to the Department of Homeland Security about encroachments on trust land in Luna and Doña Ana counties by steel bollard wall, fencing, roads and staging areas for equipment and supplies.
Both commissioners also called the federal government out for placing lighting and staging areas on a narrow strip of land near the border known as the Roosevelt Reservation, established as a buffer against international smuggling by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. Last year, Trump issued an order commandeering that land for use by the Army and federal agents after declaring a national emergency at the border.
Dunn, a Republican who switched his affiliation to Libertarian while in office, focused on earning compensation for the land use, negotiating rights-of-way and even discussing a sale of the parcel now at issue, which sits near the cattle crossing.
Garcia Richard additionally has been opposed to the wall and other aspects of the administration’s border policies under the Trump administration.
In a 2021 letter to DHS and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she wrote: “The harms that the federal government has inflicted through its dangerous wall-building program are extensive and well-documented. Federal agencies’ ongoing violations continue to damage the United States’ integrity in the eyes of our own people and abroad; hurt untold numbers of families coming to this country to escape persecution and violence; and have desecrated wild lands along the border, including lands recognized as sacred by tribal nations.”
The State Land Office manages over 13 million acres of state land, earning revenue through land leases to benefit New Mexico schools, higher education institutions, hospitals and other public institutions. The land was granted to the New Mexico territory in 1898 and held as a land trust. Since Garcia Richard took office in 2019, the office has drawn in about $14 billion, negotiated ancestral land exchanges and enacted conservation measures.
CBP told the State Land Office that $798,500 was the assessed fair market value, as reported by an independent appraiser from California.
“CBP has determined it is necessary to acquire 7.259 acres of this property … to construct new border infrastructure along the United States/Mexico border, namely, steel bollard border barrier, the installation of detection technology, and roads,” CBP stated in a March 17 letter to Garcia Richard penned by an attorney from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The letter and appraisal indicated that required surveys of the land were complete. The formal offer was the next step in the eminent domain process, which allows the property owner — in this case, the State Land Office — to negotiate, although the government is not required to bargain. If there is no agreement, the government may then file a “declaration of taking” in federal court to condemn the land. It would still be required to present the owner with compensation at the fair market value.
CBP did not immediately comment on the transaction when reached by the Journal Thursday.
“They can buy or seize it. It’s the same either way,” Garcia Richard said, “but I don’t want to entertain anything from this administration.” She added that once the government purchases the land, state trust beneficiaries will be deprived of potential revenue from the land.
“This trespass goes back before me,” she said. “We’ve been trying to require compliance, bring people to the table, ask people to acknowledge they have been trespassing on state land.”
This article originally appeared in the Albuquerque Journal.