Terry Bishop, a West Texas native with a monogrammed belt buckle and a leather holster for his flip phone, looks out over the 2,000 acres of farmland he owns near the small town of Presidio. His property is a five-minute walk from the Mexican border, and Bishop knows what’s coming. “I’ve got no doubt he’s going to build it,” he says. “He promised he would.”

By “he,” Bishop means Trump. And by “it,” he means the wall. If it gets built, it will almost certainly pass through Bishop’s land—as well as property owned by thousands of other Texans. But as with the previous attempt to build a border wall, during the presidency of George W. Bush, those most intimately impacted by the plan are among its sharpest critics.

There’s a lot to criticize about Trump’s plan for a border wall. It will be enormously expensive, bitterly divisive, and most likely ineffective; it will also slice through Big Bend National Park and other wildlife sanctuaries, disrupting the migration of more than 100 threatened and endangered species. But the reason why many Texans oppose the wall boils down to one simple fact: It will require them to give up their land.

Private property is central to Texas mythology, and there’s a lot of it: Some 95 percent of the land in the Lone Star State is privately owned, far more than in any other state along the border. (In Arizona and California, the federal and state governments own more land than private citizens do.) Land ownership often stands in for other things that Texans feel proprietary about: independence, self-sufficiency, not being told what to do. Texas is the only state in the nation with a Landowner’s Bill of Rights, which makes seizing property via eminent domain a costly and time-consuming prospect. “As a state, we probably lead the nation when it comes to private property,” says Richard Thorpe, president of the Texas Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.

Those rights may not mean that landowners can stop a wall being built. But they can definitely slow down the process, jack up the cost, and force the Republican Party to take Texas ranchers and farmers to court to seize their land by eminent domain.