by Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, and Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and photography by Cengiz Yar, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Within hours of taking office, President Donald Trump declared an emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him authority to unilaterally spend billions on immigration enforcement and wall construction. He has since reportedly urged Congress to authorize an additional $175 billion for border security, far exceeding what was spent during his first term.

In the coming months, border towns in Texas and Arizona will receive more grants to fund and equip police patrols. New wall construction projects will fill border communities with workers who eat at restaurants, shop in stores and rent space in RV parks. And National Guard deployments will add to local economies.

But if the president asked Sandra Fuentes what the biggest need in her community on the Texas-Mexico border is, the answer would be safe drinking water, not more border security. And if Trump put the same question to Jose Grijalva, the Arizona mayor would say a hospital for his border city, which has struggled without one for a decade.

Although billions of state and federal dollars flow into the majority-Latino communities along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, many remain among the poorest places in the nation. In many towns, unemployment is significantly higher and income much lower than their interior counterparts, with limited access to health care, underfunded infrastructure and lagging educational attainment. Security walls are erected next to neighborhoods without running water, and National Guard units deploy to towns without paved roads and hospitals.

By some estimates, about 30,000 border residents in Texas lack access to reliable drinking water, among more than a million statewide. For 205,000 people living along Arizona’s border with Mexico, the nearest full-service hospital is hours away.

Such struggles aren’t confined to the border. But the region offers perhaps the most striking disparity between the size of federal and state governments’ investment there and how little it’s reflected in the quality of life of residents.

“The border security issue takes up all the oxygen and a lot of the resources in the room,” said state Rep. Mary González, a Democrat from El Paso County who has sponsored bills to address water needs. “It leaves very little space for all the other priorities, specifically water and wastewater infrastructure, because most people don’t understand what it’s like turning your faucet and there’ll be no water.”

Here’s how residents in two border towns, Del Rio, Texas, and Douglas, Arizona, experience living in places where the government always seems ready to spend on border security while stubborn obstacles to their communities’ well-being remain.

When Cierra Flores gives her daughter a bath at their home in Del Rio, she has to keep a close eye on the water level of the outdoor tank that supplies her house. Like any 6-year-old, her daughter likes to play in the running water. But Flores doesn’t have the luxury of leaving the tap open. When the tank runs dry, the household is out of water. That means not washing dishes, doing laundry or flushing the toilet until the trip can be made to get more water.

Flores lives on a ranch in Escondido Estates, a neighborhood where many residents have gone decades without running water. Flores’ family has a well on their property. But during the summer and prolonged droughts, as the region is now experiencing, their well runs dry.

At those times, the family relies on a neighbor who has a more dependable well and is willing to sell water. Flores’ husband makes hourlong trips twice on weekends to fill the family’s water tank. Their situation has felt even more tenuous lately, as her neighbor’s property was listed for sale, prompting worries about whether they’ll continue to have access to his well.

“I have no idea where we would go here if that........

© ProPublica