We covered the Big Bend wall contracts on their own terms — an unnecessary barrier through terrain that doesn’t need one, built with almost no public accountability. What we didn’t get into is who’s actually cashing the checks, and it turns out the answer runs directly through one of Trump’s own circle’s earlier fraud scandals.
THE CONNECTION
Fisher Sand & Gravel — the North Dakota company run by Tommy Fisher — was the literal contractor for “We Build the Wall,” the privately funded border wall project founded by Brian Kolfage in 2018, with Trump’s own former chief strategist Steve Bannon serving on its advisory board. In 2020, federal prosecutors indicted Bannon, Kolfage, and two other WBTW leaders on fraud charges, accusing them of defrauding hundreds of thousands of small donors — U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss’s own press release said they “capitalized on donors’ 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,” while secretly funneling money to Kolfage’s “lavish lifestyle” after publicly promising he’d be paid nothing. All four men were convicted. Trump pardoned Bannon at the very end of his first term.
Fisher Sand & Gravel itself wasn’t criminally charged in that specific fraud case — but it was in its own separate legal trouble the same year: the International Boundary and Water Commission sued the company for violating a binational U.S.-Mexico water treaty after it built fencing in South Texas without authorization, and a ProPublica/Texas Tribune investigation found a 3-mile stretch of Fisher-built wall along the Rio Grande was at risk of collapsing shortly after construction.
NOW THEY’RE GETTING BILLIONS AGAIN
This isn’t ancient history colliding with the present by coincidence. Federal spending records show Fisher Sand & Gravel has received nearly $15 billion in border construction contracts over the years — more than $13 billion of that under this current administration alone, including the massive Big Bend-area contracts we’ve already covered. During Trump’s first term, he personally and repeatedly pushed officials to award contracts specifically to Fisher, according to reporting at the time — and, sure enough, the company landed roughly $2 billion in work, mostly in southern Arizona.
THE COMPETITION PROBLEM ISN’T JUST FISHER
A different contractor, New York-based Posillico Civil, sued the administration in May, alleging CBP had effectively pre-committed roughly 73% of new Texas wall contract value to just two firms — Fisher and Barnard Construction — arguing the process lacked “genuine competitive opportunities” and that CBP kept no documented price-comparison analysis to justify the awards. Barnard, for its part, has its own direct financial ties to this administration: FEC records show Barnard’s leadership donated over $1 million to Trump’s campaign, plus additional donations to cabinet members including JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Ryan Zinke.
WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND ONE COMPANY’S HISTORY
Put the pieces next to each other: a wall project through terrain that doesn’t need a wall, built by a company with a documented record of shoddy, treaty-violating construction and a direct institutional link to a fraud scheme run by the president’s own former chief strategist, awarded through a contracting process a rival company is suing over specifically for lacking real competition — while the company’s leadership and its closest competitor’s leadership both show up as major donors to the president and his cabinet in federal campaign finance records. This isn’t a story about border security policy anymore. It’s a story about which specific people get paid billions of taxpayer dollars, and how closely those names overlap with the people who’ve spent years helping build Trump’s political career.