Remember Donald Trump’s wall? The edifice along the southern border that was supposed to be about yea high, paid for by Mexico, and answers to the name “Big Beautiful”? One of Trump’s signature campaign pledges, a monument to both himself and racism, the wall sadly has run into some issues vis-à-vis actually ever being built, and not just because neither Mexico, nor Democrats, nor a majority of Americans want to pay for it. There’s also the minor matter of the Trump administration having only secured a small fraction of the private land where the thing is supposed to actually go.

According to the Washington Post, the fate of the wall is even more questionable than previously reported, given that just 16% of the Texas land where it needs to be built has been acquired. (Only four miles of the planned structure in the state is on federal land.) Setting aside the fact that security experts say a wall will be completely ineffectual and pointless, not to mention offensive, in the actual area where the highest number of illegal crossings occur, the government has barely scratched the surface. Per the Post, dozens of landowners have only just been contacted and asked for permission to visit their farms and ranches, and, thus far, they don’t sound too keen on the idea of the fence!

David Acevedo, a rancher and businessman with a 180-acre property south of Laredo, said he does not want to lose land his grandfather purchased more than a century ago. He has granted Border Patrol agents access to his property, but he does not want a giant steel structure on it. “I want border security. Put up more cameras, sensors, send more agents and give them drones,” he said. “But we don’t need a wall.”

According to a senior U.S. official, there are at least 100 landowners who would need to give up property for the project, and while the president has reportedly told staff to just “take the land”—it actually isn’t so easy to just seize whatever private land one wants for their snake and alligator-filled fantasy. The government could use eminent domain, but there are still these things called the courts to contend with, which haven’t been so hot on Trump’s legal theories of late.