Company with long rap sheet of fraud, environmental & safety violations to build in Big Bend Ranch State Park
Last Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded Fisher Sand & Gravel, a North Dakota firm with an Arizona-based subsidiary, a $1.2 billion contract to build a “vertical border barrier system” from Ruidosa in northwestern Presidio County to the top of Colorado Canyon in Big Bend Ranch State Park. The project will cost roughly $17 million a mile and represents one of the largest contracts for border wall construction in U.S. history.
Fisher Sand & Gravel falls under the Fisher Industries umbrella—a vertically-integrated firm taking on projects like bridges, levees and roads from the design phase to the ribbon-cutting. They’ve become an industry leader in border wall construction, known for taking on flashy projects commanding eye-popping amounts of money in terrain that others balk at as unbuildable. “Fisher Industries likes the tough jobs—we take the hardest first,” CEO Tommy Fisher said in a promotional video.
Fisher himself attracted a lot of media attention during Trump’s first term for being the boots on the ground for We Build the Wall, a nonprofit organization started by far-right activist Brian Kolfage in 2018. Motivated by the belief that the federal government wasn’t doing enough to secure the border, We Build the Wall privately crowd-funded sections of border wall in Sunland Park, New Mexico, and Mission, Texas, with a star-studded crew including Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist.
In 2020, Kolfage, Bannon and fellow We Build the Wall advisory board members Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea were indicted on charges of skimming off the top of their fundraising efforts for personal gain. “The defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction,” U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss wrote in a press release. “While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle.” (All four men were eventually found guilty; Bannon was pardoned by Trump at the tail end of his term.)
While Fisher was not explicitly implicated in these criminal charges, the firm was in legal hot water all their own. In December 2019, the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) filed suit against a number of plaintiffs including We Build the Wall and Fisher Sand & Gravel for what the agency alleged was shoddy wall design in Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley.
Even in an era of unprecedented drought, the Rio Grande is still wild and temperamental, living up to the various translations of its name as “Big River” or “Brave River.” Both the American and Mexican governments have spent the better part of the past two centuries litigating exactly where the line between the two countries stands and how much of its water each country is allowed to use, a hot-button issue that has erupted in violence in recent years.
The IBWC’s suit alleged that Fisher’s wall design violated a 1944 treaty between the United States and Mexico regulating the flow of the Rio Grande—and specifically a 1970 update to that agreement setting the international boundary as “the middle of the channel occupied during normal river flows” and “prohibit[ing] any works in the United States that will … cause deflection or obstruction of the normal flow of the Rio Grande.”
In plainer words, IBWC didn’t buy for a second that Fisher’s novel pitch—a border wall designed to let floodwater pass through—would actually work and alleged that plans submitted to the agency for review “contained very little substance.”
In their answer to the IBWC’s complaint, Fisher roundly denied that the company’s actions violated international treaties and explained that the federal government had waived environmental regulations to expedite the construction of border barriers in Hidalgo County.
Judge Randy Crane dismissed the case in 2022 and a settlement was reached behind the scenes requiring “quarterly inspections, maintain[ing] an existing gate that allows for the release of floodwaters and keep a $3 million bond … for 15 years, to cover any expenses in case the structure fails,” per the Texas Tribune.
The IBWC suit was not Fisher Industries’ first or last rodeo with the court system. Federal court records show the company’s involvement in over four dozen lawsuits. A search for the company’s name on Good Jobs First, a database tracking white collar crime, yielded 25 results, ranging from a $1.16 million fine levied by the Department of Justice in 2009 for tax fraud to a $5,700 fine for a workplace safety violation issued in 2024.
Back in 2020, the Associated Press reported on Fisher as a rising star within the border wall industry who had personally lobbied President Trump via a spot on Fox & Friends with a promise that his company utilized technology “so revolutionary, it’s like comparing the iPhone to a payphone.” The AP interviewed a number of other influential North Dakotans who admired the outspoken builder for his business acumen.
In a strange twist of fate, Fisher Sand & Gravel is currently suing DHS for breach of contract on a section of border wall the company erected in Custom and Border Protection’s El Paso sector, alleging that the federal government has not yet paid the company for more than $6.3 million of services already rendered. (At press time, DHS had not yet filed a response to Fisher’s complaint with the court, but Judge Philip S. Hadji had signed off on a motion to stay, freezing proceedings until May.)
Fisher’s brand-new contract to build in Presidio County and Big Bend Ranch State Park—issued the same day embattled former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was booted from office—has raised eyebrows among environmentalists.
Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity, who has extensively documented border wall construction since the first Trump administration, declined to comment on Fisher Sand & Gravel’s work specifically, but said that he worried about any kind of large-scale construction project in the Big Bend. “In Arizona, we’ve watched in horror as contractors dynamited cultural sites, carved through cliff faces and paved over wildlife habitat to build the border wall,” he told the Sentinel. “In Big Bend, now that every environmental protection has been waived, there’s no limit to the malicious destruction they will inflict. They’ll profit from destroying our natural heritage. And we’ll be left with a cold steel wall between us and the Rio Grande.”
Fisher Industries did not return multiple requests for comment on this story, nor did attorneys representing the firm in its current suit against DHS.
