The Bokjas port crossing is a small miracle of diplomacy, unique on the U.S.-Mexico border. Big Bend National Park’s border wall project threatened to separate Big Bend National Park from the Rio Grande.
Bokjas Crossing the Port of Entry – At a bend in the Rio Grande, American tourists cross the river from Mexico, climb a sandy embankment in the United States, and fish out their passports.
Located in a small stucco custom house deep in Big Bend National Park, Bokjas Crossing Port of Entry is a unique little miracle of diplomacy along the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border. It has inspired country songs, broken down border walls, and survived despite increasingly aggressive U.S. border security.
Crossing the river on foot during low waters is not only allowed, but encouraged. On high water days, tourists board the rowboat ferry for the two-minute journey.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump’s plan to build a border wall through the Big Bend threatened to cut off the port from the river and the Mexican village of Bocillas del Carmen, whose roughly 200 residents depend on U.S. tourism. After fierce bipartisan opposition, the administration withdrew the plan.
Rare Rio Grande border crossing in Big Bend remains open
A rare Rio Grande border crossing in Big Bend will allow tourists to enter Mexico on foot or by boat as border wall plans retreat.
For now, the borders are rivers and there are no iron bonds.
On the U.S. side, a lone U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent checks passports in a customs building surrounded by cacti and weeping mesquite. In many cases, park rangers are instead stationed at ports and have customs officials based in El Paso, Texas, conduct virtual passport checks.
Approximately 24,337 pedestrians crossed here in 2025, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Tourists must stop drinking during the day in Mexico well before sunset, as the port is only open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday through Monday.
Once across a river in Mexico, the men climb into dusty pickup trucks and take tourists three-quarters of a mile along dirt roads on horses and donkeys. The village at the top consists of two restaurants (the more expensive one offers views of the rugged valley and the blue Rio Grande below) and several homes. Children flock to tourists with baskets in hand, selling bracelets and trinkets with the slogan “No Walls.”
The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo established the middle of the Rio Grande as the boundary between Texas and Mexico, meaning that it would be a floating border “thence by the deepest channel to the middle of the river” when the river flooded, narrowed, or changed course. In the 1890s, mining attracted settlers to the area. Mexican villages continue to survive today through tourism.
On a Monday in late March, the river was azure and crystal clear, the sometimes murky water being purified and cooled by the springs. A donkey kicks up dust on the Mexican coast.
Ventura Falcon, owner of Bokjas restaurant on the Mexican side, said American tourists can’t stop talking about the border wall and its apparent repeal.
“That’s all they talk about,” he said, tallying up the tab. He opposes building a crossing at this remote intersection, about 250 miles from Mexico’s nearest physical town.
“But what can we do? We are on the Mexican side,” he said. If the U.S. builds a wall, “the problems will be on the other side, but the consequences will be on us, too.”
Diplomacy restarts border crossings
Big Bend National Park covers more than 801,000 acres in Texas. In Mexico, more than 2 million acres of mountainous and high desert landscapes are protected under a separate plan involving the federal government and corporate backer Mexican cement company CEMEX.
Before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there were informal border crossings up and down the Rio Grande, where small twin border communities existed that supported each other through trade, tourism, and mutual aid. (In 2019 and 2021, Bocillas del Carmen firefighters helped extinguish wildfires in Big Bend National Park.)
The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of 9/11 ushered in a new era. U.S. Border Patrol has closed unofficial crossing points, including Bokjas and the upper reaches of Lajitas, Texas.
However, after extensive lobbying on both sides of the border, President Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon reached an agreement in principle to reopen the Bokjas border in 2010. Their joint statement envisioned vast bilateral protected areas that would extend across borders. This was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s idea and vision dating back to the 1930s, but it was never fully realized.
The crossing was finally reopened in 2013.
A plaque outside the port of entry says: “The big idea to connect visitors to the protected lands of both countries continues today, with the hope that the original dream of another frontier will become a reality.”
Country crooner and ode to Rio Grande
Outside Mexico’s Bokjas restaurant, the sun was shining brightly and the embroidered aprons hanging up were being fanned by the strong wind. Several tourists were drinking margaritas from blown glass cups.
Inside, Falcon delivered food on hot plates to Chester Barber and his daughter Alma. They drove from Alabama to Texas, where Barber checked out attractions he had seen in Big Bend, including Santa Elena Canyon and the Lost Mine Trail (now Boquillas). It was his daughter’s first time in Mexico. They floated away.
“We’re strongly against any wall, definitely around Big Bend,” said Barber, who first visited the park in 1982. “If I see a bumper sticker, I’m going to buy it.”
Texas country singer Robert Earl Keene wrote an ode to this little river crossing in the 1990s, describing the time he took his girlfriend across the Rio Grande in a rowboat. “Two dollars in a weathered hand,” he paid a captain named Pablo. The song tells the story of a “gringo honeymoon,” a long, hot afternoon spent singing and drinking cold beer on the Mexican side.
Presidents of the United States and Mexico have come and gone. Politics is violently swinging from side to side, and we are running through a canyon. The river will rise. The river dries up.
The rowboat captain is now called Adrian. He charges $5 per ride.
Lauren Villagran covers borders and immigration for USA TODAY. Contact him at lvillagran@usatoday.com and on Signal at laurenvillagran.57.
