Texas officials are wasting little time escalating calls for the Bureau of Land Management not to dispossess residents of land along their state’s border with Oklahoma.

The ramp-up in attention to a 90,000-acre swath of land along the Red River comes after Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy successfully pushed back BLM agents who were attempting to round up his cattle for nonpayment of contested grazing fees. Armed militiamen flocked to Bundy's side and forced the release of captured cattle.

The BLM says it has no plans to expand its claim to land in northern Texas, but Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, demanded more details Friday, expressing concern the bureau’s denial is “deceptive sophistry.”

The land management agency is reviewing the use of property it supervises in Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas. Of concern to Texans living near the river is whether land they’ve bought, sold, farmed and paid taxes on for years may be deemed federal property.

“The BLM, citing a 1924 U.S. Supreme Court opinion and court rulings on two landowner disputes during the 1980s, says the land in question belongs neither to Texas nor Oklahoma – even if locals have bought it from one another and continue to pay taxes on it,” The Texas Tribune reports.

The border between Oklahoma and Texas is the southern gradient (sloped bank) of the Red River. The river moved over time, RFD-TV reports, eroding the southern bank before receding toward the north.

“Originally, here the river was out there where it is now and it eroded and accreted up to here, and then it eroded and accreted back,” rancher Tommy Henderson, whose failed 1980s court challenge established precedent, told RFD-TV. “[T]heir interpretation is that it eroded up to here but avulsed back. So when you listen to them it is always erosion to the south because the property line follows it then, but it’s always avulsion when it goes north. So the boundary can move south but it can never move back north."

Henderson lost 140 acres of his property. Locals and state officials fear the BLM may now be eyeing 90,000 acres of similarly situated land.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican running for governor, expressed concern in a Tuesday letter to the BLM, writing, “Despite the long-settled expectations of these hard-working Texans along the Red River, the BLM appears to be threatening their private property rights by claiming ownership over this territory. Yet, the BLM has failed to disclose either its full intentions or the legal justification for its proposed actions. Decisions of this magnitude must not be made inside a bureaucratic black box.”

The BLM responded in a statement that it “is categorically not expanding Federal holdings along the Red River.”

But Cruz isn’t convinced. “BLM’s statement does not address whether the agency takes the position that the 90,000 acres of land in question along the Red River is already BLM land, which would make the agency’s ‘categorical denial’ an act of deceptive sophistry,” he said.