In November and December 2025, the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection awarded SLSCO Ltd., a Galveston, Texas construction firm, two border wall contracts worth just over $1 billion combined: $372.8 million for about 22 miles of wall in the Del Rio Sector and $664.8 million for about 41 miles in the Laredo Sector, paid for with funds from Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act. CBP announced the awards on December 18, 2025. The Daily Beast reported in March 2026 that Secretary Kristi Noem signed off on the contracts personally, as she did with all DHS contracts over $100,000.
According to the Daily Beast, SLSCO had been accused in a federal lawsuit of “human and weapons smuggling” across the southern border. Two security contractors, unnamed in the court papers and described as a former FBI special agent and a former San Diego sheriff's deputy, alleged that after starting work for SLSCO in 2019 they found migrants working illegally at Trump border wall sites in Southern California and armed Mexican nationals working as security guards, and that those guards exchanged fire in July 2019 with another group of migrants who had come to steal from the sites. They said management did nothing, and that the company fired them after the former FBI agent told the bureau, which they called retaliation. The Texas Observer separately reported in 2023 that SLSCO was involved in a 2020 federal lawsuit, ultimately dismissed, over the illegal use of Mexican security guards in California.
The plaintiffs dismissed the case voluntarily, so the allegations were never tested at trial, and SLSCO does not appear to have ever publicly addressed them, the Daily Beast reported. SLSCO won close to $2 billion in border wall bids during Trump's first term, according to the Daily Beast, and its founders, the Sullivan brothers, have donated to Republicans including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Florida also awarded SLSCO a contract of about $19.7 million to build out and maintain its “Alligator Alcatraz” detention site, AP reported. The company is not only a Republican vendor: Biden's DHS awarded it a $229 million border wall contract in Starr County in 2023.
An administration that justifies its immigration crackdown as a fight against border crime handed one of its largest wall contracts to a company that had been accused, though never found liable, of the smuggling it says it is fighting.
Correction (October 2, 2026): An earlier version dated this entry to March 13, 2026, the day the Daily Beast published its story; CBP's own release shows the contracts were awarded in November and December 2025 and announced December 18, 2025, and the date has been changed. The earlier version also stated as fact that the lawsuit's guards participated in a shootout and that the Sullivan brothers donated “hundreds of thousands” to Abbott and DeSantis; those are allegations or Daily Beast reporting and are now attributed, and the DeSantis donation claim, which no other source we checked supports, has been removed. The “no-bid contract” tag was dropped because no source describes the awards as no-bid.