500,000 people in Texas border colonias were promised running water decades ago and still don't have it, and a 2025 study found threefold higher rates of hypertension and diabetes in these communities

Along the Texas-Mexico border, approximately 500,000 people live in colonias — unincorporated communities that were developed between the 1950s and 1980s, often by predatory land developers who sold lots to low-income, predominantly Latino families with promises of future water and sewer connections that never materialized. Decades later, thousands of these communities still lack reliable running water, sewage systems, electricity, and trash pickup. Residents store water in tanks that are prone to bacterial contamination, rely on septic systems that leach into groundwater, and in some cases haul water from distant sources. A two-year study completed in 2025 by Texas A&M University School of Public Health found arsenic contamination in colonia drinking water in the Rio Grande Valley, along with a threefold increase in rates of hypertension and diabetes compared to the general population. The health consequences are direct and measurable. Without reliable clean water, residents are chronically exposed to waterborne pathogens and contaminants like arsenic, which causes skin lesions, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. The threefold increase in hypertension and diabetes documented by the Texas A&M study is not coincidental — it reflects decades of environmental stress, contaminated water, and the physiological toll of daily survival in conditions that the researchers themselves compared to developing-world infrastructure. Children in these communities grow up with higher baseline exposure to contaminants that cause developmental harm. The lack of sewage systems means human waste contaminates the same groundwater that families draw for drinking. Colonias persist in this condition because of a structural gap in American governance. As unincorporated communities, they fall outside city limits and therefore outside the service obligations of municipal water utilities. Counties in Texas generally lack the authority and funding to extend water infrastructure to dispersed, low-density settlements. The colonia residents themselves have a limited tax base, making them unattractive for annexation. State and federal funding programs exist — Texas's colonia water infrastructure program has spent hundreds of millions over decades — but the scale of need vastly exceeds available funding, and bureaucratic requirements for project applications exclude the smallest, most desperate communities. In 2025, Congressman Tony Gonzales introduced a bipartisan bill to expand eligibility for colonia infrastructure funding, but the fundamental problem remains: these communities were built on a lie (the promise of future utilities), and no level of government has accepted full responsibility for making that lie right.