$7M set for border habitat work

Arizona Daily Star
October 31, 2010
by Tony Davis

Federal money for jaguars and bats - or people?

That's the question ranching advocates raised after the federal government announced details for spending nearly $7 million to restore borderlands damaged by construction of the border fence.

From environmentalists and a public preserve manager came this answer: The feds have spent billions on border fences real and virtual, and it's about time to spend tens of millions protecting animals and plants.

In the next few years, authorities will spend the money to develop jaguar management plans, scan remote camera photos for the cats, close dirt roads and restore wetlands along the border. They'll reseed worn soils, monitor fish populations, build a fish barrier, count bat roosts and study bat movements, and plant agaves.

These actions are in the first leg of a $52 million federal program designed to compensate for damage to endangered species habitat on public lands by the border fence and other security measures.

Land managers and environmentalists called the money a good start, but some borderlands ranchers and their spokesmen in the Arizona Cattlemen's Association were less receptive. The association issued a news release titled "Jaguar Receives Green Card," saying the money should protect people first.

Six months after the still-unsolved slaying of Cochise County rancher Robert Krentz, "ranchers and residents south of Interstates 10 and 8 continue to live in a lawless region controlled by drug cartels," the release said. "These drug cartels continue to disrupt everyday life for rural residents along Southern Arizona's border. Yet ranchers are not receiving funds to restore our habitat, nor is the Administration working to restore our border. . . . We have a serious situation on our southern border, and ranchers continue to see the degradation of their environment and traffic from drug cartels."

Federal money for the wildlands will address impacts of a border fence built with no environmental reviews, countered Organ Pipe National Monument Superintendent Lee Baiza. As for competition with border security, Baiza said the $50 million is a small amount compared to $600 million Congress agreed in August to spend on Border Patrol agents, customs inspectors and other law enforcement officials, as well as communications equipment and unmanned aerial "drones" to monitor border activities.

The $6.8 million will pay for eight Southwestern projects, six in Arizona. A list of 29 projects identified as feasible for the entire $52 million includes 17 Arizona projects estimated to cost $14.3 million.

The projects are "an absolute joke" because they don't address non-endangered species such as mountain lion, deer and javelina that live in his area but can't get over the border wall, complained rancher John Ladd, who lives near the border wall near the San Pedro River. There's no jaguar or ocelots in that area - but they do exist in areas east of Douglas and west of Sasabe where there is no wall, he said.

"My family has been here since 1896, but we were willing to accept the consequences of the wall if the government had stopped illegal immigration. They haven't done it," Ladd said. "They won't patrol the border, and they can't get Congress to reform the immigration law."

Ladd has a point in that these projects won't help mountain lions get across the wall, said Matt Clark of Defenders of Wildlife in Tucson. But much of the new money will be spent where the Fish and Wildlife Service thinks it can get the most endangered-species conservation for the money, he said.

"The service is not looking at where we can make the border wall better. They are looking at where we can make an investment that furthers the conservation of these species," Clark said. "If you were to calculate the acreages lost to the border wall and roads on private and public lands, then you would be looking at well over $50 million to mitigate it. This is a down payment."

Reese Woodling, a retired rancher near Douglas who still sits on the governing board of the Malpais Borderlands ranching group, said he sees the jaguar monitoring as pointless because with no female jaguars seen in Southern Arizona for decades, he doubts the animal can survive as a viable population here anymore.

"They are just throwing money at these programs," said Wendy Glenn, a rancher in the Malpais Borderlands area east of Douglas. "It's a tough call for me to criticize them, but I don't know how they can spend so much on this when so many other things are needed."

Interior Department Assistant Secretary Rhea Suh, however, called the programs a first step toward meeting the government's responsibility to compensate for the impact on wildlife from the continuing effort to secure the border.

This debate could continue if more types of restoration projects come on line, as is hinted at by the agreement between Interior and DHS. It lays out five other classes of natural resources that could get restoration work beyond the $52 million: for non-endangered wildlife, wetlands and riverfront area, soils and cultural resources, including Native American human remains.

But a cautionary note about the restoration plans also came from another federal document on the Organ Pipe project. It said that unsafe conditions on the borderlands may prevent people from working in the area where most of the restoration work is needed.

On StarNet: Find extensive coverage of immigration issues at azstarnet.com/border

Areas where the wildlands-Restoration funding will be spent

Six initial projects are in Arizona:

• $2.1 million to survey and monitor jaguars for four years, develop a jaguar management plan, fence and restore jaguar habitat and work with ranchers, government and local communities to develop a system to report on jaguars.

• $1.9 million to protect, inventory and monitor endangered lesser long-nosed bat and Mexican long-nosed bat roosts. This involves finding roosts along fence segments from the Patagonia to the Huachuca Mountains and from the Perilla to Peloncillo mountains. It also involves radio-tracking bats in these areas to help find the roosts and to determine how much roads, fences, lights and other facilities act as barriers for bats.

• $980,000 to restore 84 acres damaged by construction of 5.2 miles of fence near Lukeville. This involves closing roads and allowing vegetation to regrow, replanting 200 large transplanted saguaro and organ pipe cacti, seed collecting and propagation, road decompaction, erosion control, planting and invasive species control.

• $657,000 to restore 49.7 acres at the San Bernardino National Wildlife refuge, east of Douglas. It will compensate for the loss of 16 miles of habitat and about 116 acres of roadbed for border fencing and other security measures.

• $441,250 to study four federally protected Rio Yaqui fish species and four sensitive fish species living in that refuge. The work includes an inventory of the fish and an accounting of impacts from unpaved roads, disturbed soils and soil erosion. A shallow well will be drilled to ensure permanent water for a wetland for the fish and the imperiled San Bernardino Springsnail. A fish barrier will be installed to keep exotic fish out of the refuge.

• $274,873 to plant 6,344 agaves at Coronado National Memorial to compensate for removal of 3,172 agaves for fence construction.

http://azstarnet.com/news/local/article_e2f4eb0f-6ade-5974-9c94-b39f9954fd3a.html

Locked up: Sabal Palm Audubon Center remains closed

Brownsville Herald
May 1, 2010
by Laura Tillman

When you drive down the pot-hole flecked road leading to the Sabal Palm Audubon Center & Sanctuary, a field of silky green stalks of maturing corn sits to your left, the brown expanse of the U.S.-Mexico border fence stretches out in front.

At the end of the road there’s an opening in the rust-colored fence, which allows vehicles to motor over the levy to a vista of the lush wildlife sanctuary beyond. But when you arrive at the gate for the Sabal Palm Audubon Center itself, there is no moving ahead into the brush.

Instead a stop sign hangs here — and a lock.

Sabal Palm closed in May 2009 for the season with hopes of re-opening that October. But October came and went, and one year after the center initially closed it remains locked up. The center has been unable to secure the funding it needs to pay employees, thanks in part to a decline in donations after the recession began.

Owned by the Audubon Society, Sabal Palm is one of the last two remaining protected groves of sabal palm trees in the country. The other is next door at The Nature Conservancy, a private nature preserve generally closed to the public, which may also end its tenure in the Rio Grande Valley. In the case of The Nature Conservancy, the issue isn’t funding — its liability issues posed by the path of the U.S.-Mexico border fence, which places upwards of 90 percent of its property on the south side of the fence.

At the Sabal Palm Audubon Center, the fence has also raised concerns. Bob Bentson, the vice president of Audubon Texas, said that he didn’t know if the gap at the entrance of the preserve, for example, would be filled with a gate or just more fencing.

A spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers told The Brownsville Herald that a gate would fill the spot.

"New hours of operation," reads a sign on the closed gate of Sabal Palms, hopefully. But then the next line, "the Sanctuary is currently closed," destroys that hope.

Bentson says the Audubon Society is optimistic that it will soon be able to secure funding to re-open the center, though he declined to specify where such money might come from.

"Unfortunately the economy hit us hard," Bentson said.

You can still drive to the entrance of Sabal Palm and, gazing over at the sanctuary, see kiskadees, mockingbirds, lizards, and the famous sabal palms themselves. The shaggy trees have not lost their rough tropical luster. But Bentson says that if and when the center re-opens, it will need some sprucing up.

"She doesn’t have on her Sunday best right now," he said.

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/audubon-111662-center-sabal.html

Budget, border fence keep S. Texas preserve closed

Associated Press / Houston Chronicle
October 23, 2009

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — A south Texas nature preserve won't reopen as scheduled this fall after it was left in limbo for more than a year by plans to build a border fence.

The Sabal Palm Audubon Center has been a popular destination with bird watchers and home to a rare native stand of Sabal palms along the Rio Grande. The Brownsville Herald reports Friday that the center will remain closed at least through the end of the year.

The border fence, which isolates the preserve between the river and the fence, continues to create uncertainty. However, Audubon Texas Executive Director Bob Benson says the more immediate problem is a lack of funding.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6682764.html

BORDER FENCE: Environmental protections jeopardized by GOP amendments, critics say

Land Letter
October 1, 2009
by April Reese

New efforts by Republican lawmakers to bolster security along the U.S.-Mexico border could undermine the Department of Homeland Security's plans to mitigate environmental damage from the 700-mile fence authorized by Congress to stem the tide of illegal immigration and drugs from Mexico, critics of the fence project say.

One new provision, included in last week's Interior spending bill passed by the Senate, would prohibit federal funding for projects that "impede, prohibit or restrict" activities related to the operational control of the border.

Environmental groups see the language, attached as an amendment by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), as potentially detrimental to efforts by DHS to carry out projects that would reduce the border fence's environmental impacts.

"The amendment is very troubling, as its language could be read broadly enough to prevent [the Department of the Interior] from raising legitimate concerns about border walls and demanding mitigation measures," said Scott Nicol, a co-founder of the No Border Wall Coalition, based in Texas.

Nicol said he is also worried about an amendment in the Department of Homeland Security spending bill added by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) that would require DHS to complete 700 miles of double-layered fencing along the border by Dec. 31, 2010. Construction so far has included a mix of vehicle barriers, virtual fencing and stretches of physical fence. But DeMint maintains that such barriers do not meet a 2008 congressional mandate calling for 700 miles of reinforced, double-layer fencing (Land Letter, July 23).

"The American people were promised a secure border fence three years ago and it's time to make it happen," DeMint said. "Unfortunately, our government has dragged its feet for years and tried to use untested and unsecure 'virtual' fencing instead of actual, physical fencing. Our first priority must be national security, and we can only achieve that goal with secure borders."

Concerns over costs, impacts

DHS officials and others have argued that 700 miles of double-layered fencing is unnecessary and cost prohibitive. A Government Accountability Office report issued this month found that such fencing costs on average $3.9 million a mile.

In a Sept. 8 letter to Rep. David Price (D-N.C.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D-Texas), whose district includes 785 miles of border, urged House leaders to purge the amendment from the final bill.

"Funding for additional border fencing is not our most urgent need on the border," Rodriguez wrote.

A spokesman for Price said Congress is working on a continuing resolution that would buy more time in settling differences between the two versions of the bill. The new fiscal year begins today.

In January, DHS received $50 million to offset the ecological harm done by the 700-mile fence, which was authorized by Congress under the 2005 Secure Fence Act (Land Letter, Jan. 22). Congress included another $40 million for mitigation in the Homeland Security appropriations bill.

But the department has yet to spend any of the money, despite a July 23 letter from 43 lawmakers urging Secretary Janet Napolitano to establish an environmental monitoring program along the border and move forward with mitigation efforts (Land Letter, July 30).
DHS's delay in implementing the mitigation measures has fueled criticism of the agency from environmental groups, land managers, private landowners and biologists who say the border fence could sever wildlife habitat and create a host of other environmental problems in the border regions of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

Matt Chandler, a spokesman for DHS, said the border fence mitigation fund "has not been used to date." The Interior Department is finalizing a list of projects that will be funded with the money. "Once projects have been identified, DHS will begin transferring funds as appropriate," he said. Until then, DHS will work with local, state and federal land managers to "minimize adverse impacts" from fence projects, he added.

Critics say using the mitigation fund to offset the damage from the fence is especially crucial given that some of the construction occurred without the protection of environmental laws, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. In 2008, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff asserted his authority under the REAL ID Act of 2005 to waive 37 federal laws and all state, local and tribal laws to expedite construction of the fence along 500 miles of border.

New legislation

Rodriguez introduced his own legislation early last week aimed at forcing DHS to address the ecological impacts of fencing along the border. The "Healthy Borderlands Act of 2009," introduced Sept. 22, requires the Homeland Security secretary to develop a mitigation plan to begin to address the ecological impacts of border fencing.

Rogriguez's 23rd District of Texas, which stretches from El Paso to Eagle Pass, covers more length of the border than any other congressional district. About 29 miles of new fencing is planned for his district.

"Our borderlands are rich in natural and cultural resources, but they also can be places for illegal activity," Rodriguez, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.

"This bill is the next logical step in protecting the ecological integrity of our borders while also pursuing the measures necessary to secure our borders and defend our communities."

Rodriguez spokeswoman Rebeca Chapa said the bill would ensure the mitigation funds "are spent properly" and that a plan is put in place to mitigate the ecological effects of the fence.
Nicol of the No Border Wall Coalition said Rodriguez's bill is needed to push the federal government toward offsetting some of the damage caused by the border fence.

"As a result of former DHS Secretary Chertoff's Real ID Act waiver, which brushed aside federal laws including the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and National Environmental Policy Act, tremendous environmental damage that would normally be illegal has been done to our borderlands," Nicol said in an e-mail. "Representative Rodriguez's bill, if passed, will mark a first step toward mitigating some small portion of that damage. "

But Nicol warned that some of the damage is irreversible.

"It is important to recognize the fact that the extinction of species is permanent -- it is impossible to mitigate the loss of the ocelot or Sonoran pronghorn," Nicol said, referring to species in Texas and Arizona that wildlife managers believe will be harmed by the fence. "We should do what we can to lessen the border wall's impacts, but we must be aware that no amount of money will restore the borderlands to their pre-wall state."

Walled Off

Rio Grande Guardian
August 15, 2009
by Char Miller

CLAREMONT, Aug. 15 - Pygmy owls and Bighorn sheep make an odd couple.

These keystone species along the U.S.-Mexico border have little in common--their size and weight (so perfectly captured in their names), like their mode of transportation and food sources, could not be more different. Yet they share a desert habitat, and there in lies their mutual problem.

It comes in the form of the impenetrable border wall the United States is building across the southwestern states, which will inhibit their ability to move, hunt, and reproduce. How ironic that this triple-thick bulwark, which has failed miserably to stem the flow of undocumented migrants into the United States, may have a fatal impact on animals so innocent of the human politics and policies that led to its erection.

This dire situation has been the focus of the research of two conservation biologists, Aaron Flesch at the University of Arizona and Clinton Epps of Oregon State. In an article to appear in Conservation Biology, the scientists have explored the troubling possibilities the wall may pose to these two species’ daily life and long-term survival.

Consider the Pygmy owl’s below-the-radar flight path: most of its sorties are conducted less than13 feet off the ground, as it swoops down on its prey from its preferred perch in a secluded thicket. A wall that stands upwards of 19 feet, and whose construction requires bulldozing a wide swath on either side, thus poses serious problems for individual owls to protect themselves from their predators and to sustain themselves over time.

More complicating still is that the newly leveled ground will have a multi-generational impact. Juvenile owls need undisturbed landscapes in which to colonize, a nesting behavior that the wall’s structure necessarily will frustrate. And the breeding colonies on the American side of the border apparently require contact with those on the other. As Professor Flesch has observed: “Movement of pygmy owls from Mexico to Arizona may be necessary for the persistence of the Arizona population.”

The need for cross-border fertilization may prove even more important for the Bighorn sheep’s survival, Flesch and Aaron argue; their research indicates that there is a strong genetic link between those sheep populations living in the Sonoran mountains in Mexico and those inhabiting the southern highlands of Arizona.

Unimpeded connectivity between the two is essential because without it the different herds will become cut off, degrading their genetic diversity. “Bighorns in places like the Sonoran desert will form small populations – sometimes with only 10, 15 or 20 animals,” Epps said in a press release. “Yet they will occasionally move back and forth and mix with other groups. That connectivity is critical to their survival. Without it, they can still sometimes re-colonize, but often that small group will go extinct.” Should that occur, these sheep, like the pygmy owl, will find that human agency has sabotaged their biological imperatives.

The political impulse that built the wall in defense of U.S. borders is itself a form of territorial marking, a behavior that all species manifest; of necessity all species try to manage their habitats. The purpose of such management is to enhance their chance of survival, a process, often enough, that depends on beneficial interactions with other creatures; this mutuality is critical to the creation of sustainable landscapes and the rich biodiversity that makes them so.

But Homo sapiens also love monocultures, as our suburban lawns, big-box malls, and agricultural practices testify. Through our tools and technology we have the power to clear away competitors or build environments that diminish their odds of survival. The border wall is a monument to human hegemony.

Yet the wall’s construction is only one expression of our dominance. As contractors flatten the land; dig fence posts and hang chain-link and concertina wire between them; set up guard towers, complete with searchlights and infrared cameras; and lay down hardened roadways for high-speed patrol vehicles, they are manufacturing a new landscape with a single purpose.

The goal of this high-tech infrastructure on the ground--when combined with aerial surveillance--is to halt illegal immigration into the United States. To accomplish this mission, the federal government has spent millions of dollars; hired and trained thousands of new border guards; and has flexed its muscles in ways fiscal and physical that is designed to display its authority.

One manifestation of this is captured in the commotion that Professor Eppes describes as integral to the new habitat that the U. S. has built along the border. “The sheer number of people moving across the landscape is stunning. The crackdown on urban crossings has forced people into wild areas,” intensifying “the amount of human activity--both people crossing and the border patrols seeking them” in an arid region that once was thinly settled and rarely visited.

Bearing the brunt of this escalating human presence is the very wildlife that Flesch and Epps have been tracking. As a result, they propose a number of well-intentioned changes to the border wall’s physical structure in hopes of increasing the chance that pygmy owls and bighorn sheep will be able to survive in this trampled terrain; for the owl, they suggest maintaining tree cover along the border; for the sheep, a more open wall that will allow these them to continue their cross-border migrations. Even so, they recognize that their proposals conflict with the governmental desire to maintain an impassable barrier, and are thus a non-starter.

Indisputable is their larger, if unstated argument: to worry about the survival of wildlife, regardless of size, is to be anxious about our own.

Char Miller is director of the environmental analysis program at Pomona College, Claremont, CA., and author of Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas.

http://www.riograndeguardian.com/columns3_story.asp?story_no=5

If a Tree Falls in the Valley: The Sabal Palm and the Border Fence

The Nature Conservancy
June 22, 2009
by Clay Carrington

If a rare tree is leveled to make room for the border fence, will anyone care?

The moment the Secure Fence Act (H.R. 6061) was approved in 2006, the most important question associated with the construction of the United States-Mexico border fence ceased to be “why?” and became “where?” The fence — actually a series of intermittent freestanding barriers — is nearly complete, with most of the California, Arizona and New Mexico stages finished.

In West Texas, construction is well underway from the state line east to Fort Hancock, while on the opposite end of the state, building has begun on sections in the Rio Grande Valley. There, amid the resacas and thornscrub of South Texas, the finished fence will eventually trace the slow curves of the Rio Grande River.

More or less.

The border fence doesn’t strictly adhere to the national border — the Rio Grande. In reality, its path veers erratically inland — a straight line that disregards the natural curves and oxbows of an ageless river — creating huge swaths of the United States trapped in a “no man’s land” south of the fence and north of the border. The Nature Conservancy’s Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve stands to be bisected by the fence, leaving nearly three-quarters of the preserve in this no man’s land.

The merits of Southmost Preserve are innumerable:

• Spanning 1,034 acres at the very tip of Texas, the preserve is home to a wealth of threatened and endangered species, including rare birds, frogs and tortoises.
• The land lies under the Central Flyway, one of four principal migratory bird routes in North America, and the preserve’s thick Tamaulipan thornscrub represents a prime wildlife corridor for free-roaming ocelots and jaguarundi.

For years Southmost Preserve has been a haven for scientists and birders enticed by land where, in a single day, dozens of rare animal species can be spotted.

But the real prize at Southmost — the bedrock of its unique habitat and the species that helped earn the preserve the moniker “Jewel of the Rio Grande” — is the rare sabal palm. Once found across much of the lower Gulf Coast, sabal palm forests have all but vanished under the plow. While some scattered trees can be found on private lands in the region, the significant remaining stands of these towering trees are located at Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve, the Sabal Palm Audubon Center and the Lower Rio Grand Valley National Wildlife Refuge. All three of those conservation areas lie in the path of the border fence.

In order to save sabal palms that would otherwise be leveled by construction of the fence, the Conservancy is partnering with the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and Audubon Texas in coordination with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to transplant palms to safe ground, one tree at a time.

The trees, which grow as tall as 65 feet and are up to 100 years old, are being uprooted and hauled to a number of spots, most within a mile of their original location, where they are then carefully replanted.

It’s a massive undertaking and a race against the clock. Each of the approximately 300 trees must be thoroughly trimmed and the root balls need to be unearthed intact to ensure survival. The project, which is already underway, is expected to last through the summer.

The security of our borders is of paramount importance. Since the creation of Southmost Preserve, the Conservancy has worked closely with the U.S. Border Patrol to allow ample access to the property.

Unfortunately, in an attempt to seize the preserve — or at least the narrow strip of land on which the fence would sit — the Department of Homeland Security has opted for litigation over collaboration. Southmost Preserve is now the subject of a condemnation lawsuit that, if successful, would allow construction of the fence and would require the government to pay for only the land on which the barrier sits, regardless of how much property winds up inaccessible, uninhabitable and outside the reach of conservation management.

Despite this harsh reality, the Conservancy, Texas Audubon and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service remain resolute, working throughout the intense heat of the South Texas summer to give hundreds of iconic, historic trees the best chance to survive for future generations of Texans.

And hopefully, if the project is a success, this scramble to protect the last remnants of a once-majestic forests will someday be viewed as the best possible conservation outcome salvaged from a very bad idea.

http://blog.nature.org/2009/06/border-fence-southmost-preserve-sabal-palm-nature-conservancy/

Conservationists say, ‘We'll take the trees, but no thanks to the border fence.'

Brownsville Herald
June 11, 2009
by Laura Tillman

On the outskirts of Brownsville, where subdivisions and strip malls give way to rust-tinted fields of sorghum, two environmental conservation non-profit organizations are welcoming what they call a "small positive in a sea of negative."

About 300 native sabal palm trees are being scooped out of the path of the border fence and transferred to the Nature Conservancy and Sabal Palm Audubon Center in Brownsville. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is moving the trees, the only palm species native to South Texas, off of what is now government-owned property at no cost to the nature centers.

Bob Benson, executive director of Audubon Texas, says his organization is concerned about the environmental impact of the border fence, but that the preservation of these trees is a "bright spot."

"Obviously it's making good out of a bad situation," Benson said.

But while Benson is glad to add trees to the Audubon Center, he has bigger worries.

Recently, several ongoing lawsuits between landowners and the federal government raised the question of whether the government could close planned access gates along the fence in the future. If the answer is yes, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen has said that property owners could argue to a jury that the government would be taking not some but all of their property.

Since the Sabal Palm Audubon Center is slated to be entirely behind the border fence once it is built, the center must have a reliable access gate to remain open to the public.

"We've been acting on good faith that we would have these access gates," Benson said. "We're happy to get the trees, but our main concern is those gates. We have to have access to our property."

Because the sabal palm sanctuary is entirely behind the planned path of the border fence, the organization never had to sell land to the Department of Homeland Security to make way for the path of the border fence.

The ongoing border fence debate has depleted tourism to the sanctuary by about 25 percent, Benson said, and he's concerned once the structure goes up the public might not realize they can still visit. So far, the Sabal Palm Audubon Center has cut back its hours and has closed for the summer months.

The Nature Conservancy, which is close to the sabal palm sanctuary, is waiting for its day in court. State Director Laura Huffman says she is still hoping that the conservancy property could be used as testing ground for invisible fence technology.

"The good news is that these three organizations - the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nature Conservancy, and the Audubon - are working together to save these trees," Huffman said. "The bad news is that if our property is compromised by a fence, then all the good we've accomplished will be lost."

More than 90 percent of the conservancy's property would be behind the fence if it's built.

On Thursday, mechanized tree spades dug snug six-foot inverted pyramids around the base of sabal palm trees and then removed them.

Then the machine dug out matching holes for the trees and slid them into their new homes. Finally, the corresponding holes were filled with the earth extracted from their new locations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service completes about eight of these transfers daily.

Once the switch is made, the palms stand a high chance of survival, according to Maxwell Pons, the preserve manager at the Nature Conservancy.

Transplanting, he said, often doesn't work because there is too much wiggle room between the plant and surrounding soil. When the plant moves, fragile roots break, and the plant can't connect firmly to the soil. But with the accurate tree-spade method, the trees will integrate well into their new locations.

About 175 of the palms were destined for the 1,000-acre Nature Conservancy preserve. This preserve already has acres of shady sabal palm groves hugging the riverbank.

Pons, the steward of the refuge, has lived on the property for more than 20 years.

"I see more bobcats than immigrants," said Pons, who said he watched a bobcat run along the riverbank earlier that day.

Pons has seen jaguarundi, snakes, rare birds, and even the occasional ocelot on the rambling land that will soon be behind the border fence. The property is replete with history - both environmental and man made. The groves contain 45-foot sabal palms, some more than 100 years old. In one grove, a small shaded cemetery is home to graves more than 200 years old.

"You can't separate the natural history from the cultural history of the area," Huffman said. "When you stand at that cemetery you really get a historical sense of what that landscape really did look like. These ancient majestic trees are part of the beauty of South Texas."

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/trees-98955-border-conservationists.html

Habitat nixed

Laredo Morning Times
April 7, 2009
by Zach Lindsey

Laredo City Council closed the door Monday night to aerial spraying of carrizo with Habitat by U.S. Border Patrol, and went a step further, with a motion that forbids the herbicide's use all together in the 1.1-mile experimental area Border Patrol requested.

Regarding aerial spraying, the council approved an easement for Border Patrol to experiment with methods of carrizo eradication along the U.S. bank of the Rio Grande on March 16.

The motion sparked an outcry among a public that fears the herbicide Border Patrol intends to use, Habitat, could contaminate the river.One of the most vocal advocates against aerial spraying was the government of Nuevo Laredo.

"We're comfortable with (aerial spraying), but the Mexican government is not comfortable with it," said Councilman Hector "Tito" Garcia."I do not recommend that we go further with this until both governments come to an agreement with everything."

The key to the issue in the eyes of the council was the support of the Mexican side.Nuevo Laredo Mayor Ramon Garza-Barrios attended the meeting, speaking in favor of mechanically removing the cane but asking for denial of aerial spraying.

Garza-Barrios reminded the council of who owns the river.

"It's not the property of North Americans," Garza-Barrios said.

"It's not the property of Mexicans."

The Mexican government's opinion on the safety of imazapyr differs from the American government's.Because of the proximity to Nuevo Laredo's water treatment plant, Garza-Barrios asked for an alternative that has no chance of putting people's health in danger.

"It is safe if it is used 100 percent in accordance with the instructions on the label," Landeck said."If you do not use it the way the label prescribes, it becomes dangerous."

Eric Webb, a scientist working with Border Patrol, compared the herbicide to a hammer.

Any tool misused can become dangerous.But the people who would apply it would be required to have a license.

Landeck brought up health concerns."The risks you're listing have to do with the chemical in its full concentration, not in its applied concentration," Webb responded.

Although imazapyr itself can cause health consequences, Habitat, the chemical compound Border Patrol wants to use, is not significantly dangerous, according to Webb."You can be 100 percent sure that it doesn't prove any health or human safety risk," Webb said."You can purchase these products in your big box store.Citizens use them regularly, and the Border Patrol intends to use the same products."

However, Border Patrol had already taken aerial spraying off the table.

Valdez noted this change of position, and asked why."The aerial spraying was removed because it was a way to move forward that everyone supported," said Border Patrol agent Rosendo Hinojosa.It was not because of any health hazards from aerial spraying, according to Hinojosa.

City Council asked Hinojosa if the project could go on without the use of Habitat."There is no project without the application of a chemical," Hinojosa said."It wouldn't be effective.It would be a waste of our tax dollars, from a federal government perspective, without the application of some chemical.

"Most of the U.S. citizens and organizations that have opposed aerial spraying do not oppose some form of responsible use of herbicide."

The Rio Grande International Study Center (is) not opposed to the application of herbicide, specifically the paint method," said RGISC Executive Director Jay Johnson-Castro."The mechanical method would cause tremendous erosion and the carrizo would come back.

"The easement is for a 1.1-mile stretch of the coast of the river.Border Patrol intends to use this area as an experimental zone.Whichever method proved most effective for removal might then be applied to a 16-mile stretch.

"The decision was made because of concerns in the local community, whether correct or incorrect, that's not the issue here," Valdez said."There were concerns, and the decision was made to remove that (aerial spraying) because that was the most contentious issue.

http://www.lmtonline.com/articles/2009/04/07/news/doc49db4e30387ce965204315.txt

Wildlife versus the wall

Denver Post
March 26, 2009
by Claire Martin

There's just a set of raccoon tracks on the dusty road in one of Wendy Shattil's new wildlife photographs. You can't see the raccoon.

But you can understand its determination as the tracks travel steadily alongside one stretch of the giant, and controversial, border wall that is going up along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Shattil, a Denver photographer renowned for her wildlife images, followed the little footprints for more than half a mile as they doggedly followed the access road next to the wall in Hidalgo County, Texas. A river courses on the other side of the wall, sometimes close enough to hear.

"It's hard to tell what's in the mind of a raccoon, but it could have been looking for the end of the barrier because it wanted to (cross over)," Shattil said.

"That could explain why it walked so far next to the wall. The tracks didn't stray from the road the entire distance."

Shattil, a slim woman with a piercing gaze and a mane of dark hair, recently spent three weeks on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands along with 12 other International League of Conservation Photographers. Each photographer documented a section of the wall between San Diego, Calif., and Brownsville, Texas.

Her trip to the borderlands produced a portfolio that illustrates how the formidable wall, designed to deter illegal border crossings, is also blocking ancient wildlife migration paths and habitat on more than 100,000 acres of riverfront public land and wildlife reserves.

The public is divided on merits of the wall, to say the least. Proponents argue it is a necessary step toward stopping lawbreakers and preserving security. Others fear it will take a terrible toll on the natural environment.

To hasten the wall's construction, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff waived scores of federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

Borderland environmentalists joke, sort of, that once the wall is built, the only ocelot likely to thrive in Texas is the Ocelot Grove subdivision, a housing development. The wall will separate a Mexican ocelot population from a tiny and increasingly inbred Texas ocelot community that wildlife preservationists say desperately needs new blood to survive.

Bulldozed access roads flank both sides of the steadily growing 15-foot wall, ravaging U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuge tracts, a state park, several birding centers and a butterfly preserve. Both the Nature Conservancy's Southmost Preserve and the Sabal Palm Audubon sanctuary are in the wall's path.

"People outside the borderlands don't have a clue about what's up with the wall," Shattil said.

"A lot of animals will starve or dehydrate unless they can find alternatives to what they've historically used."

Though birds can fly over the wall, the construction is destroying habitat hard- won over the past two decades by Ducks Unlimited, state and federal wildlife officials, and other conservation groups.

The refuges lured birds, and then a growing number of bird-watching tourists, who flocked to the borderlands to add to their life lists. Texas is the only state with its own Peterson's Field Guide, the birders' handbook.

Green jays, kiskadees, pauraques, roseate spoonbills, kingfishers and other rare birds — the second sighting of the snail kite was on the no-man's land between the wall and the Rio Grande river — have drawn so many birders to this part of Texas

that birding has become a commercial business along the border.

In acknowledgment of the wall's potential impact on wildlife, construction crews drape potato sacks and other fabric bags on top of the hollow metal posts that spike into the air. The bags are meant to protect the birds in case they land on the posts, one worker explained to Shattil.

Her photographs and others from the project will be displayed on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., to draw attention to proposed legislation that would halt the wall's construction.

"When you look at the wall from the ground, it looks like an artistic statement that will be taken down in a few days," Shattil said.

"It's such an anomaly. It doesn't look like a wall that should exist in the U.S. Especially in Texas."

http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_11995806

Keep Out!

Could it be that the biggest problem along the U.S.-Mexico border isn’t undocumented immigrants but Washington politicians who want to build a fence?

Texas Monthly
November 2007

I’ll confess that I tossed the plan almost immediately. I’d intended simply to drive from Laredo to Brownsville, the stretch of border where most of Texas’ share of the proposed security fence is supposed to be built. A day here, a day there; I hadn’t meant to linger in any one place, but after three days I found myself still in Laredo, darting on and off the tail end of Interstate 35. Hot, overcast, and clogged with cargo-laden rigs, the city had little to lure the casual traveler, but if you were interested in the matter of the fence, there was always another person to see. There was Joseph Hein, who took me to his family ranch on the Rio Grande, where he raises Appaloosas; he told me he’d have to get out of the business if the water were fenced off. There was Dennis Nixon, the chairman of IBC Bank, who met me in his expansive office, outlined a broad economic case against the fence, and sent me off with a white paper on immigration policy he’d distributed to every member of Congress. There was a young woman from Mexico, undocumented, living and working in Laredo, who told me that her estranged husband had reported her to the Border Patrol so that he could kidnap their children. If a fence were built, she speculated, a lot of people wouldn’t be able to see their families as much.

Last summer, in Laredo and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, what had once been presumed a political phantasm now loomed as a real possibility: that the Secure Fence Act, passed by Congress to prevent “terrorists [and] other unlawful aliens” from entering the country, might result in an actual fence being built along sizable stretches of the Rio Grande. When President Bush signed the bill in October 2006, it was perceived as a feint meant to appeal to voters on the eve of the election. (Because their immigration bill had failed, the thinking goes, Republicans had to do something to show that they’d confronted the issue.) Yet $1.2 billion was quickly appropriated for border security projects, and this year the Border Patrol, in a clumsy, quasi-clandestine fashion, began to circulate maps indicating where the fence might go. From afar it was difficult to imagine: Hundreds of miles of fence between two countries? The state of Texas partially walled off? What would such a thing look like? Where would it go? What effects would it have? The best way to begin to answer those questions, it seemed to me, was to drive to the border and ask them.

This was not an original notion. I arrived in Laredo to discover the city full of reporters—from newspapers, magazines, CNN—booked at the posh pseudo-colonial La Posada Hotel, drinking at a new bar off Del Mar Boulevard, comparing notes and names. It wasn’t just the fence. Some had come to report on the case of three National Guardsmen who’d recently been caught smuggling Mexicans into the country, but there were also the Nuevo Laredo violence stories, the drug stories, the immigration stories, all of them tangled together. A town whose name had once been synonymous with “dusty backwater” had lately become a fishbowl for certain national woes.
The stated aim of the Secure Fence Act is “operational control,” defined as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States” (both unwanted people and contraband may qualify as “entries”)—in essence, the fantasy of a perfectly sealed border. Like the aim of eradicating all terrorists from the globe, operational control serves to justify considerable expenditures and the overriding of other laws. The two missions blur together at times, and the militarized view of border control has become standard. The phrase I kept encountering as I spent time on the border was “more boots on the ground.” Whether or not they were in favor of the fence, people spoke of the need for more boots on the ground in order to secure the border. And this from environmentalists, mayors, schoolteachers.

There is in fact a portion of existing border fence right in the city of Laredo. Several years ago the Border Patrol approached Laredo Community College, which is situated on the river, with a proposal to build a length of fence along the edge of the campus. Though the immigrants who regularly crossed the grounds had not, as a rule, created much of a disturbance, drug smugglers had been a greater concern; bales of marijuana had been found hidden near the tennis courts, for instance. (I was unable to learn whether news of this discovery had caused a surge in applications to Laredo Community College.) As it turned out, the fence, made of eight-foot-high wrought-iron bars that narrow to spikes curving outward toward Mexico, had not rid the campus of smugglers, though the number of immigrant crossings had dropped.

One afternoon I drove over to the campus to see it for myself. With its spearlike protrusions and tall black bars, the fence was unsettling. And depressing: I was surprised by how immediate and visceral my distaste was. I walked beside it, past athletic fields and a swimming pool and barracks-style housing on the campus side; across the divide were thorny brush and a gravel road suitable for a Border Patrol four-by-four. The fence wound past an elementary school and stopped at a brick wall about five feet high. I looked over it. On the other side was a dead-end street, where two small boys were lobbing a basketball at a six-foot-high basket. Black-haired, brown-skinned: Who knows where they might have come from?

My second day in Laredo, I stood on a bluff a short distance from the World Trade Bridge, north of town, which had been dedicated in April 2000 in a ceremony attended by presidential candidate George W. Bush. Bush had been tarred during the campaign as a foreign policy greenhorn, and his trip was widely viewed as an attempt to muster up a little cosmopolitan flair. Sharing a stage with Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo on the Mexican side of the bridge, Bush declared to the assembled crowd of mostly Mexicans that in the past there had been “walls of divide between Mexico and the United States. We must, we must be committed to raise the bridges of trade and friendship and freedom.”

Looking down at the bridge, I could tell by the line of idling rigs waiting to enter the U.S. that trade, at least, was in full swing. (Friendship and freedom, however, were in doubt. After Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, Mexican president-elect Felipe Calderón called the fence “a grave mistake.”) I was there with Tom Vaughan, a biologist who leads groups of students on a tour of Laredo as part of a four-week environmental health program for aspiring medical workers; they make stops along the river and also wade into its midst to sample for toxins and coliform. By visiting the border, I hoped, if nothing else, to be able to picture what a fence would look like, in the literal sense: how it would fit into the landscape. And so I spent half a day with Vaughan’s group, squinting at different spots along the Rio Grande, trying to make out a fence that didn’t yet exist.

A co-founder of the Rio Grande International Study Center, an environmental education nonprofit, Vaughan could have passed for a water sprite: a lean man with wisps of white hair winging out from beneath a red nylon cap. He wore a waterproof camera around his neck and elfin river shoes that resembled rubber socks. Though his research specialty is benthic macroinvertebrates (think shrimp, snails, aquatic worms), his impromptu lecturing to the students ranged over coal and trade and long-haul versus short-haul trucking and salt cedar trees and the Mexican petroleum industry—as if he were trying to spool out as much of his local expertise as he could in the time he had. The air was thick and warm, full of the trucks’ rumbling. After a while he came around to the subject of the fence.

“Where are we going to build it?” Vaughan asked. “It’ll move the border from the middle of the river to where the fence is. For example, here’s some high ground where we could build a fence.” He pointed directly in front of us, to the top of a steep bank. “Now we get over on that side,” he said, pointing across the road that led to the bridge. There, the high ground receded farther away from the river, and the low riverbank widened. “Is it going to follow the high ridges or is it going to go straight down? I will tell you, it’s not uncommon for that area there to be underwater. No fence can hold up underwater. Any fence anywhere in the floodplain is going to get washed away, and the floodplain’s pretty wide. So we’re talking about moving the border two hundred, three hundred, four hundred feet away from the river.”

He took a couple of steps in the direction of our parked cars, then paused and flung his arm back toward the bridge. “Anyway, this is international commerce in action!”

We drove to a private ranch, where Vaughan had been given permission to take water samples.
Some of the students began to pull on waders. We all filed down a narrow path through the mesquite to the river, and those of us who were not venturing in for samples sat around a small clearing at the water’s edge. It had been hard enough to visualize a fence near the World Trade Bridge; it was all the harder to imagine this quiet terrain of grass and foliage riven by “at least two layers of reinforced fencing,” which is what the Secure Fence Act proposes, as well as “additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors.”

On the ground were signs of people who’d passed by: a blue pair of men’s underwear, two warped and rusted cans of black beans, a dusty shirt. Traces of the international labor pool in action.

The Border Patrol made its first foray into fence building in its San Diego sector, in 1990. The “primary fence,” as it became known, was constructed from surplus corrugated steel panels, of a kind that had been used to build portable landing strips in Vietnam, and originally extended from the Pacific Ocean fourteen miles inland. (Today it covers more than fifty miles.) Only ten feet high and easy to climb or to dig under, it might as well have been a privacy hedge. Work on a secondary fence—higher, less easy to climb, and floodlit—began in 1996. Yet immigrants are still able to scale both fences in a few minutes; even the Border Patrol has labeled the fences a “filter,” slowing people down rather than stopping them.

So why not build a fence that can’t be so easily surmounted? Why not, say, put razor wire on top? Or at least make it higher? According to an article that appeared in Foreign Policy, the ease of climbing the primary fence in San Diego was intentional: The Border Patrol didn’t want to see its agents sidetracked by injured climbers. And even a low fence could bar (or at least reroute) the vehicles that transport drugs into the country. Though the proposed border fence has been touted as a kind of all-purpose barrier, deterring immigrants, drugs, and terrorism at the same time, this rhetorical fusion breaks down, apparently, at the level of design.

It was perhaps for this reason that before the passage of the Secure Fence Act, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had been a proponent of what he called a twenty-first-century virtual fence. While acknowledging that actual physical fencing might be built in some areas, he also said, “We don’t want to lock ourselves into something that’s a one-size-fits-all solution for the entire six thousand miles of border.”

This past February, during a visit to Laredo, Chertoff was still reassuring border officials, visiting one of the city’s bridges and declaring, “I do agree that where you have a significant river as a natural obstruction, fencing is not necessarily the right solution.” Soon after, however, a Border Patrol map of planned fencing was leaked, and the DHS sent out a request for proposals from contractors to build fence in and around Laredo. Chertoff announced that fence construction in Texas would commence this year, only to retract that statement two days later.

Then, in September, the Border Patrol and the Army Corps of Engineers at last released a more detailed map of the planned fencing in the Rio Grande Valley, with short sections of fence denoted by red squiggles, like fallen bits of yarn. Brownsville contemplated a lawsuit to block construction. Texas senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, both of whom had voted for the Secure Fence Act, had called for local consultation before any fencing was built. Yet after spending time on the border, it was hard for me to see what that would accomplish. Everyone local seemed to be against building a fence altogether.

“Uno nunca sabe cruzando”—“You never know when you cross.” I was talking to a young man from Nuevo Laredo who had crossed the river, by his estimate, hundreds of times. “I came here to work, to do something more,” he said. “In this way a person can realize his dream.”

Jose Manuel (as he asked me to call him in this article) works in Laredo at a fast-food restaurant, using an invented Social Security number, and though he doesn’t cross so much anymore, he used to go back and forth thirty to forty times a year. “Back and forth, back and forth—a game of roulette,” he said. We spoke outside a business where he sometimes does odd jobs, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash. He smiled often as he told his story. He first came across when he was fifteen, with a friend, just to see what there was to see. They crossed the Rio Grande about ten miles upriver of Laredo, waited in the brush for the Border Patrol to leave the area, and then climbed out, warily, having been warned about “las abuelitas”—older women who would call the authorities if they saw people emerging from the river. Upon reaching the street, evidently clear of vigilant grandmothers, they were greeted by a man washing his car. They rode a bus into town, had a look, and then went home.

Not long thereafter, Jose Manuel started coming regularly for work, first unloading rolls of fabric off trucks, later doing odd jobs. His preferred crossing point was one that landed him in the northern part of the city, at a spot where the river was low and where he could easily disappear into the neighborhood once he’d crossed. Typically the process would take about an hour. He would descend to the river on the Mexican side, take off his clothes, and ask for God’s blessing, having also received his mother’s. (“And that’s worth a lot, a mother’s blessing,” he said.) He usually went with a friend, because it was dangerous and you could lose your footing. “The river will betray you. Many people have died trying to cross.”

Once he’d made it to the American side, he had to elude the Border Patrol, which was easy enough when the agents were sitting in their SUVs. (Jose Manuel is of the opinion that many Border Patrol agents prefer sitting in their vehicles and reading the newspaper to slogging through the thick carrizo cane that infests the riverbank.) But there were times when he was chased and had to jump through the cane, bounding like a deer. Four times he was caught and sent back. It’s become harder to do: There is more vigilancia now, he told me, more helicopters, more agents in four-by-fours.

Now that he has the job at the restaurant, he rarely crosses. He rents a house in Laredo. He talks to his mother by phone. He believes he will always live in the United States. “There is a great future that will never be over there,” he explained. “You have all the advantages to move ahead. A lot of people here don’t take advantage of them. If in Mexico they had these advantages—imagine it—everyone would be millionaires!”

Before I left town, I decided to visit the Casa del Migrante, a church-run shelter in Nuevo Laredo that offers up to fifteen nights of food and lodging to migrants on their way north. I walked over the bridge to the Mexican city, where the decline in the tourist business was evident: Signs for salty dogs and tequila sunrises fronted bars whose few patrons, all single men, looked sordidly bored; liquor salespeople glanced up at me indifferently, the shelves half-empty behind them; no one tried to sell me a hammock or pottery or chewing gum. A little spooked by the city’s reputation for violence, I’d arranged for someone to pick me up. It had begun to pour by the time we reached the long, plain, gray building, where a line of mostly men waited in the rain for the shelter to open for the evening.

They were let in shortly after I arrived. The interior was immaculate and barren. A handful of men sat around a television in one unlit room; others stared with tired red eyes into the middle distance. I talked to a few of them, from El Salvador and Honduras. It was the same old story: no jobs at home, no way to support their families, and so they’d ridden up by train, bound for Houston or New York or Los Angeles, not knowing (or at least not saying) how they planned to cross the river. They were nineteen, twenty, seventeen. They had brought next to nothing with them.

On my way out I stopped by a bulletin board near the door to read the missing-persons notices posted by friends and relatives: Height: 1.65 meters, Color of Skin: Light brown, Hair: Brown . . . To please call his mother . . . Wearing a red T-shirt with a Nike logo, blue pants, black and white sneakers . . . If you see him give him this phone number. . . Mentally disabled . . . Disappeared the 5th of April in Nuevo Laredo after having been deported . . . Se Busca . . . Se Busca . . . .

To get back to the U.S., I did not have to look for a low spot in the river or wait for the coast to clear or strip off my clothes and carry them over my head; with 30 cents and a driver’s license I was able to walk across a bridge, and from there it was just a few blocks to my hotel, with its embarrassment of pillows and televisions (there were two), its bath products in miniature bottles, its comfortable furniture, and its view of the river from above. I ate a shrimp cocktail at the adjoining restaurant and returned to my room to watch Entourage.

It’s not as if the divide between poverty and privilege is imperceptible at home, but to literally walk from one to the other, over a bridge off-limits to the men I’d just talked to, and then loll on a sofa sipping wine is to be reminded of the wall already in place.

From Laredo I had planned to go south to the Valley, but first I drove north to Eagle Pass, to meet with Chad Foster, that town’s mayor and the current head of the Texas Border Coalition. Foster told me that the way to reduce illegal activity is by improving visibility—rooting out the carrizo cane and salt cedar on the banks, installing more lights and surveillance cameras, and adding more agents. “We’ve learned to live with cameras. Why do we need physical barriers?”

Erecting a fence along the border would essentially split a community in half, he said, in reference to Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, the town across the river. The DHS has maintained that a physical fence is most needed in urban areas, to slow an immigrant’s progress into a neighborhood or to a bus station, yet in urban areas the fence is especially despised, because of the ties between communities on either side of the border. (“Where Yee Haw Meets Olé” read a pamphlet Foster gave me touting the joint advantages of the two towns.)

Foster, who speaks Spanish, frequently attends events both informal and formal in Mexico, and he offered to take me over to Piedras Negras to show me the city. After driving for a while, we came to the Plaza de las Culturas, a swath of concrete where three small pyramids, along with a scattering of statues, commemorate the Mayan, Olmec, and Aztec civilizations. We walked inside one of the pyramids, where we encountered Fernando Purón Johnston, the director of the plaza. He offered to give us a sneak preview of an exhibit on prehistoric life in the region. Following him down a wide corridor, we viewed a human jaw, then a femur. Before long, discussion turned to the fence.

“People are very angry and very politicized here,” Johnston said. “Where’s it going to go? We have problems here, as at all borders, but a wall won’t contribute anything to get rid of these problems. The river doesn’t divide us, it unites us.” Foster nodded in emphasis. As we continued through the exhibit, the two kept speaking—each trading off languages—so that I learned little about prehistoric populations but plenty about the alliance between the two cities.

Outside we ran into a salty-looking man in boots and jeans and an old T-shirt. Apparently he had been a waiter at an event Foster had attended. “Chad Foster is more Mexican than the Mexicans!” he proclaimed. “Piedras Negras is very fortunate to have two great mayors.”

As we headed back to Eagle Pass, I asked Foster what he thought of the notion that he was in some sense Mexican. He replied without skipping a beat. “I’m a product of my environment,” he said, “and I love my environment.”

Back on the road, I was bound for the Valley at last. South of Laredo, the strip malls receded; the four-lane Zapata Highway rolled along through brush, past ranches and the turnoff for the tiny old town of San Ygnacio. A string of restaurants and gas stations marked the county seat, Zapata, where posters advertised an upcoming fishing tournament and where I had arranged to meet with the sheriff, Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr.

Over the past couple of years Gonzalez has appeared repeatedly before legislators in Austin and Washington, calling upon the state and federal governments to open their coffers to law enforcement agencies along the border, so that local officers may better patrol the region and assist in catching any drug smugglers, gang members, and terrorists who make it across. Maybe it was because of the name he’d made for himself that I’d pictured him as a large, stern, gunslinging type, but that was not the man who bid me to take a seat in his windowless office, carefully groomed and deliberate and tapping his Marlboro Lights over a green ashtray.

No sooner had I said the words “border fence” than he dismissed the idea. “If a fence were to be built, the cartels would come and cut through it. A fence is not going to stop them,” he said. “We have received information that they would bring portable torches and a small generator and saws that cut through steel.”

Information from whom? I asked.

“Informants in Mexico,” he said.

I waited in vain for him to elaborate. Instead, he told me about the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition, which he helped establish in 2005 and which has lobbied for a piece of the homeland security pie. “Our border was completely vulnerable and unprotected, extremely porous,” he said. “We’ve been accused by some elected officials of exaggerating the threats in order to get funding, but regarding the violence along the border, it’s happening.”

He reeled off past incidents: snipers in Mexico shooting at officers across the river, encounters with groups of immigrants carrying automatic weapons, high-ranking members of Mexican gangs discovered on this side of the river, threats made to law enforcement personnel, hundreds of aliens from “special interest countries” apprehended in Texas. And, he added, “How many child sex abusers, rapists, robbers, murderers, and thieves are coming into this country?” (In addition to other perils, law enforcement officers on the border face the risk of monetary temptation; a week before I spoke with Gonzalez, a former deputy of his and two other men had been indicted, accused of extorting money from drug traffickers in return for help with shipments.)

Gonzalez had enumerated these dangers to state and federal lawmakers, and evidence of his persuasive powers was parked outside; on my way in I’d passed six brand-new pickups, purchased with money from the governor’s homeland security office, with “Operation Linebacker,” the name of Gonzalez’s border security initiative, printed on the rear gates. (“We wanted Border Patrol to be the first line,” he explained, “and then we would be the linebackers.”)

The low-ceilinged room felt a little bunkerlike, notwithstanding the miniature knickknacks on the shelves behind the sheriff—Washington monuments, Jesus, an eagle, and a white-bearded cowboy that looked like Santa Claus—and notwithstanding the fact that I have never been in a bunker. Maybe it was that Gonzalez’s allusions to encroaching enemies had put me in a certain mood. He went on to describe a pair of suspicious-looking patches with Arabic writing on them that had been discovered in Jim Hogg County, and he raised the possibility that Hamas had established a training camp somewhere in Central America, all the while repeatedly referring me to several unfamiliar Web sites. It is difficult to draw a clear line between prudence and paranoia in matters of national security (see: liquids and gels), and I didn’t quite know how to receive Gonzalez’s dark assessments. Yet it did strike me that here were the sort of dangers that another person might cite in arguing for a fence to be built, and here was a man who saw no value in building one.

Farther south, the tenor of the opposition to the fence shifted. While frustration was apparent all along the border, in and around Laredo anxieties stemming from the drug trade and its violent symptoms ran closer to the surface, and as a result, there was a plaintive quality to the criticisms of the fence: What about the area’s real problems, which a fence would do nothing to solve? In the Valley, where farming and eco-tourism are significant industries and shoppers from Mexico a pillar of the retail trade, I was more often informed of the damage to the environment and the economy a fence might cause: The protests seemed almost boosterish. The opposition in the Valley was also more organized and activist; here there were bumper stickers, meetings, events. “I’ve never seen this area get so spun up about anything,” I was told by John McClung, the president of the Texas Produce Association, whom I met at the association’s headquarters.

Efforts by the DHS to communicate the status of its fence plans to border residents could hardly have been more inept. Maps were leaked, officials contradicted themselves, and gestures of appeasement went decidedly awry: On June 1, Border Patrol chief David Aguilar attended a public meeting in McAllen, where he declared that the only fence map had been drawn on the back of a napkin; on the same day local Border Patrol agents met with landowners and unrolled property maps on which potential fence locations had been designated.

“They came down here with a map, the Border Patrol wish list leaked, and that’s what drove everyone down here nuts,” McClung said. “So word went up to D.C.: You’ve ticked off the locals. Go out and consult with them. So what does the Border Patrol do? They call in landowners and give no indication they’re interested in reconsidering. Consultation à la Border Patrol becomes a matter of ‘bend over and prepare yourself.’ That’s obviously not well received. Then Chertoff supposedly gets word that the natives in the Valley are having a fit and throws his hands in the air.

“I actually feel a little sorry for the Border Patrol. They’re stuck between the reality in D.C. and the outrage down here, and their efforts to clean up their public relations have been disastrous.”

Although McClung told me that the Valley farmers he represents object to a fence on the grounds that it will disrupt their access to water, I did meet some who support the plan. On a warm afternoon I stopped in Mission to see Joe Metz and Sharon Waite, who raise sugarcane, grapefruit, oranges, grain sorghum, and cattle on their 1,400-acre farm. The couple live in a modern ranch house with large picture windows that look out onto a back patio and a small reservoir. The reservoir and surrounding foliage and dangling feeders attract all varieties of bird to the property, while the proximity to the river draws other visitors. “We’ve met people from all over the world,” Waite told me. “Brazilians, Chinese, Hondurans, Salvadorans.”

One day about a month before we spoke, Waite had glanced out the window and noticed a young girl seated on a patio chair. “She was a pretty little thing,” wearing a little bit of makeup and tight jeans and a tight T-shirt, “but she looked so young despite all that.” Around fifteen, Waite guessed. She offered the girl food (declined) and water (accepted), then let her use the phone to call a number in San Antonio. The girl walked to a nearby store, and in no time men arrived to pick her up. “I was scared,” Waite said. “I don’t want to turn somebody over to the Border Patrol, but then again, what am I sending her to? Am I sending her to something more horrible than I can even imagine?”

Metz had his own story of a recent encounter; while on his usual walk at daybreak, he’d come across three young men and a woman from China. “They knew three words in En-glish—‘America,’ ‘USA,’ and ‘thank you.’ We used sign language. First, they wanted a telephone, and I said no, and then they wanted me to drive somewhere, and I said no. I sent them to a store where there’s a telephone.”

When the fence controversy began, Waite and Metz had been reluctant to give interviews. “We are for the fence, but we don’t want to be painted as racist,” Waite said. It was just that things had changed. They used to see “little stragglers” crossing, but now “it’s not uncommon to see forty people come in,” Metz explained. “They cut our fences. We have to lock all our interior gates; otherwise they leave them open and there are cattle everywhere. We are getting to feel violated. The other part is the drug dealing. We see it weekly, people bringing drugs across. They’ll do it right in front of you”—floating over in rubber boats and handing off packages to people in cars who’d driven right onto the property.

“We understand that a fence isn’t going to stop determined people,” Waite said. “But it will slow down the drug flow and the illegal flow and push them into an area where they’ll be picked up more easily.

“Growing up, people went to the river for picnics and fishing; we used to wander around. Now you are very circumscribed by what’s happening. A lot of our friends who live along the river are very hesitant to say anything, but I’d say seventy-five percent are all for the fence.”

In the Lower Rio Grande Valley, U.S. 83 begins to resemble one very long strip mall, yet a few miles south, wildlife refuges line the river. The contrast is startling. Over the past thirty years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has spent $70 million to acquire land for the refuge system, which is one of the most biodiverse areas in the country, and millions more to restore and maintain that land. Yet even with the restoration, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the refuges represent less than 5 percent of the original wilderness.

Today the refuges support a sliver of riparian (riverside) habitat, which is surrounded by Tamaulipan thorn forest (and North American agribusiness). That habitat supports endangered and threatened species—many kinds of birds, as well as ocelot and jaguarundi—and it is narrow enough to be threatened itself. Clearing sufficient land to build one or two fences and a road would evacuate (or eliminate) animal populations, environmental advocates fear, yet because the refuges are owned by the federal government, at least one of them is seen as a likely fence location.

One day at lunchtime I pulled up to a bright-yellow house in McAllen, where a meeting of No Border Wall, a border fence opposition group, was under way. Ten or so people sat around a dining table and on a nearby couch, eating sandwiches and chips, as a rancher named Betty Pérez moderated the discussion. In attendance was a guest from Del Rio, a muscular, salt-and-pepper-haired man in a black T-shirt who’d handed me a card proclaiming himself “The Border Ambassador.” This was Jay J. Johnson-Castro Sr., who earlier in the year had walked from Del Rio to Brownsville in protest of the fence and was now urging on the group: “Let’s show the world in an upbeat, positive way that we are an international community!” The question was how best to publicize the cause; the gradual conclusion was that they would send a group of canoes down the river and hold press conferences in towns along the way. “If we the people say we will not allow a wall, with no compromise, they will not build; they cannot build!” Johnson-Castro exhorted.

Practical concerns were raised: There had to be time to prepare. Four kayaks and a canoe weren’t an impressive flotilla. Which stretch of the river? Was there any money? Should there be a Web site?

Eric Ellman, the owner of the house, was eager to take me to a section of refuge land within the McAllen city limits that he hoped—provided that the Fish and Wildlife Service approved and a fence was not built—to see designated a city park, where people could bike and camp and canoe. So I met him again that evening. We drove to a street of large warehouses on the south side of the city, then over a levee. He’d brought two bicycles; we hopped on and started along one of the Border Patrol access roads, where he regularly goes to ride.

“So this is it!” he called back to me. “This is the three percent that’s left! I mean, look at this. How many cities have places like this?” Not as adept a biker as Ellman, my gaze was frequently on the rutted dirt road below, but even so the greenery and quiet came as a relief after a day hauling back and forth on 83. We paused at a spot on the riverbank. “This river is invisible,” Ellman said. “We’ve been scared off. People could be camping here. Rio Grande City and Roma should have a booming float-trip industry.”

He was not the only person who raised the possibility: Instead of fencing off the river, what if it were instead made more accessible, more appealing to the general population and thus less attractive to surreptitious crossers? Or as another person said to me, “What better security could you have than thousands of birders with binoculars?”

Drug smugglers, meet the Birder Patrol.

I’d come across a number of maps of South Texas as I made my way down the border: maps showing wildlife refuges or citrus farms or factory locations or prehistoric remains or bird flight patterns, each one another reminder of how many different ways you could demarcate the same territory. The political boundary between the United States and Mexico was a feature of just one map, and to build a fence along it would require ignoring all the others.

“It’s emotional for me to think what a fence would look like. I understand that the law should be upheld, but everybody here knows somebody who has crossed.” I was talking with Rachel Benavidez, the 31-year-old editor of the Brownsville Herald, at her office. “When I was younger, I asked my grandpa, ‘Do you know how to swim?’ He said, ‘M’ija, if I didn’t know how to swim, you wouldn’t be here.’”

Benavidez, attired in black and white and a string of pearls, spoke with a thoughtful confidence: She seemed like a shoe-in for class president. The question of the fence, she said, was one she’d had to confront both professionally—a matter of covering the story fairly, in the point-counterpoint way of newspapers—and personally. To her the fence seemed “like this,” she said, holding her palm up like a traffic cop.

The fence, as she construed it, had as much to do with questions of identity—the border’s and her own—as with national security. Benavidez presides over both an English and a Spanish-language edition; the latter is largely staffed by people from Mexico, and so the newsroom culture replicates a divide that exists more generally along the border. “The culture is so different between this side and that side. I had to learn, for example, that I couldn’t communicate [with Mexican staffers] by e-mail, which they find impersonal; I had to tell them things in person or they would get offended. It took someone to tell me.” Outside the newspaper, the differences extend to male-female relationships, to attitudes toward food, to the character of social events. “With every year comes more separation instead of melding, because you have people who are assimilating and those who are holding on to Mexico.” And the current politics of immigration widen that divide. “When I was growing up, this separation of us and them didn’t exist,” she said. “The idea of putting up a fence, of people coming over who are undocumented posing a threat to national security, that was never an issue.”

When we speak of “the border,” we mean different things: There is the abstract concept of the border as a clear line on a map, and then there’s the notion of the border as a place and a population and a culture. The politicians and media personalities who have foisted the fence upon us clearly have the former in mind. But in South Texas there can be no question that the latter predominates, complicating any attempt to draw exact, clear boundaries.

“They’re us, we’re them,” Benavidez said to me. “What is the line?”

http://www.texasmonthly.com/2007-11-01/feature2.php

DHS seeks to condemn nature preserve land

Associated Press / Austin American Statesman
December 29, 2008

McALLEN, Texas — The Department of Homeland Security has sued The Nature Conservancy to condemn land in a South Texas nature preserve for the border fence.

The conservancy's Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve, which includes more than 1,000 acres along the Rio Grande near Brownsville, is home to a rare grove of native sabal palms, a South Texas native plant nursery for reforestation projects and habitat for the endangered ocelot and jaguarundi.

The government offered the conservancy $114,000 for a strip of land that would leave three-quarters of the preserve, including the property manager's home, in the no-man's land between the fence and Mexico, according to court records filed earlier this month.

The Nature Conservancy's preference is no fence and no compensation, but the offer failed to take into account the impact to the rest of preserve, Laura Huffman, The Nature Conservancy's state director, said Monday.

The organization paid more than $2.5 million in 1999 for the preserve and has invested considerable money in it since, Huffman said.

It would be a safety concern to have a property manager living south of the fence, Huffman said, and "if we can't steward the land properly ... it raises the question of whether or not it is a viable preserve."

In total, the 60-foot wide strip of land running 6,000 feet across the preserve is about eight acres.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is trying to complete 670 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, does not comment on pending litigation.

Even if the fence were situated in such a way that the conservancy's warehouse for its equipment and property manager's home were on the north side, the logistics of constantly moving farm equipment through still unspecified access gates would be daunting, Huffman said.
The Nature Conservancy leases swaths of the land for agriculture including organically grown citrus.

By starting the condemnation process, it at least gives the conservancy an opportunity to get its own appraisal of the property and make an argument for fair compensation, Huffman said. The conservancy would welcome a visit from U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen who has made site visits in the area for other condemnation cases, she said.

After one of Hanen's visits, the preserve's neighbor to the west worked out a compromise with Customs and Border Protection to build a concrete wall into the river side of the levee rather than building a fence, which would have affected buildings on the Old Nye Plantation. Huffman said such a wall would likely still create problems for the preserve.

The nearby Sabal Palm Audubon Center, which would be completely on the south side of the border fence, is still waiting for word on the fence.

Since the fence does not cross Audubon's 557 acres, the government has not had to sue for condemnation and has not told Audubon anything in months, said Anne Brown, vice president of National Audubon Society and executive director of Audubon Texas.
"We haven't heard a word," Brown said.

The border fence has faced its stiffest opposition in the Rio Grande Valley where it would cut through properties along the river that have been in families for generations, are critical habitat preserves or are part of large farming operations.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/gen/ap/TX_Border_Fence.html

Border Wall opponent halts construction at Rio Bosque

Newspaper Tree
December 17, 2008

A border wall opponent has stopped construction of a portion of the structure that is to separate the Rio Bosque Park, a wetland in the Lower Valley that is the last remnant of the thick groves of trees and vegetation that once thrived along the banks of the river, from the Rio Grande.

Judy Ackerman stood in the way of construction crews this morning, denying them access to the construction site, which is on International Boundary and Water Commission property directly adjacent to the park. Ackerman is a Northeast El Paso resident active in environmental issues.

Bill Addington, another border wall opponent, said that city of El Paso police and Border Patrol were on the scene, but had not arrested Ackerman yet.

"I hope others will replicate this," said Addington, who made national news when the Wall Street Journal wrote the government's demand he take down a footbridge crossing the Rio Grande. [video] [article]

He said the action by Ackerman marks "the first time anyone has impeded the construction that I know of, and I've been paying attention to this very closely."

Doug Mosier, Border Patrol spokesman, said he didn't know of any other similar instances.
He said that officials still were gathering information.

"The protester at this moment has not been arrested, although that may be forthcoming," he said at about 11:15 a.m. "But we need to wait and see what happens here."

The 372-acre Rio Bosque Park is described on its Web site as a remnant of the wetlands and riverside forests that "once graced the banks of the Rio Grande in the Paso del Norte region. They were the most productive natural habitats in the region, but today they are virtually gone. At Rio Bosque, the environment is still changing, but in a new way. Here, a diverse partnership is working to bring back meaningful examples of the unique and valuable ecosystems once found in our river valley." [link]

A newsletter put out by the Center for Environmental Resource Management, which manages the park, stated the impact of the wall: "At the Park, the visual impact of the fence will be immediate and obvious. The ecological impact will be gradual and more subtle, but no less real. For many animals, the fence will be a barrier to movement between the Rio Grande and the Park and a barrier to genetic exchange. Over time, the fence will affect what species get established at Rio Bosque and, for some species, the long-term health and viability of the populations present."

http://www.newspapertree.com/news/3211-border-wall-opponent-halts-construction-at-rio-bosque

Mexico planting own 'green wall' along border

Austin-American Statesman
December 7, 2008

CIUDAD ACUA, Coahuila — Tractor-trailers rumble across the bridge above, but down on the Rio Grande, it's a peaceful autumn morning as ducks paddle the river and herons glide from bank to bank.

On the U.S. side of the river, in Del Rio , plans are moving ahead for a controversial security wall that will eventually stretch across 670 miles of the southwest border.

But on the Mexican side, authorities have begun work on an entirely different kind of wall: a so-called green wall, made of 400,000 trees to be planted along 217 miles of the Rio Grande.
Eventually, Mexican leaders hope the green wall will stretch the entire length of Mexico's shared border with Texas.

Officials in the state of Coahuila, where the project is beginning, call the green wall a rejection of the U.S. border barrier. The local Mexican officials hope the clusters of cypress, mesquite and ash trees will stand in stark contrast to the concrete and steel fencing being erected by the U.S. Homeland Security Department.

"This is a signal of protest, but it's also an opportunity for dialogue to find shared solutions to the question of immigration," said Gabriela de Valle del Bosque , Coahuila's environmental policy coordinator .

De Valle said the green wall will be an opportunity to bring more environmental consciousness to Mexican border communities. Area residents also will participate in riverside cleanups and classes on ecology and recycling.

Local officials hope the green wall will bring more attention to environmental worries associated with the U.S. border wall, particularly the migration of species such as white-tailed deer.

"If they put in the wall, Mexicans will find another way to get across, but the deer and other animals are not going to find a solution like Mexicans will," said Carlos Lombardo Gomez, who is in charge of technical matters associated with the green wall.

Coahuila Gov. Humberto Moreira said the green wall will result in Mexico's longest parkland corridor.

Moreira is no stranger to grand gestures. His administration has garnered national headlines in Mexico by ushering in a gay marriage law and has promised a state death penalty for murderous kidnappers, even though Mexico now outlaws the death penalty.

At a ceremony marking the start of the green wall, Moreira blasted the U.S. border barrier as a "wall of hate."

U.S. officials say the border fence is needed to bolster security along the southwest border. And supporters of the U.S. border wall warn that Mexico's green version could potentially aid drug runners and human smugglers.

Jim Gilchrist, president of the Minuteman Project, a U.S. activist group that monitors the border flow of illegal immigrants, said the green wall will "provide effective camouflage for criminal drug and human cargo cartels as they mass their illicit products behind the tree lines, awaiting delivery into the U.S. under cover of darkness."

So far, the state of Coahuila, which extends opposite Big Bend National Park almost to the outskirts of Laredo, has planted 2,500 trees along 25 miles of border. The state has approved about $1 million for the tree-planting program. Plans would extend the green wall in other border states such as Tamaulipas and Chihuahua.

The U.S. border wall is unpopular along much of the Texas border and has been opposed by most border communities in the state.

Despite that opposition, federal officials say that 90 percent to 95 percent of the 670-mile barrier should be completed or under construction before President Bush's term ends in January.

The City of Eagle Pass recently lost a court battle against the U.S. government over the border fence, and construction has begun near the city's downtown. Mayor Chad Foster , one of the border wall's most outspoken critics, said he doubts the change of administrations will halt the wall.

"I don't think President-elect Obama will take office soon enough to impact (the) damage being done in our town," Foster said.

So far, 426 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fencing have been built, according to the Homeland Security Department, but that includes just 25 miles in Texas.

Federal officials plan to build 116 miles in the state.

In Mexico, few think the green wall will have any real impact on the U.S. border barrier, but local residents are happy that it will bring more green spaces and parks.

Arturo de la Cruz Talavera, who runs daily at a park beneath the international bridge in Ciudad Acuña, is looking forward to the day when the green wall saplings grow into mature trees.

"The green wall is in favor of life, it will create oxygen," he said. "It's not like the steel wall, which just rejects."

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/world/12/07/1207mexgreenwall.html

'Green' groups push for Coronado National Forest protections

Tucson Citizen
November 26, 2006

A partnership of environmental groups and other nonprofits is calling for a wider swath of wilderness and more emphasis on quiet recreation in the Coronado National Forest.
The Coronado Planning Partnership represents a combined membership of more than 300,000 people in 20 groups. The partnership issued a state-of-the-forest report Nov. 7 aimed at influencing the forest management plan, on which Coronado is taking public comment.

"We wanted to make sure we got a plan based in conservation," said David Hodges, policy director for the Sky Island Alliance, under whose name the partnership report was written.
The group was spurred to write the report by the planned revision of the Coronado management plan, which was last revised in 1986.

"There are a lot of new pressures on the forest that the agency has to take into account," Hodges said.

Population in Pima County has risen by 250,000, illegal immigration has become a destructive flood and global warming looms. None of those was a recognized threat two decades ago, he said.
To deal with the border, the partnership suggests strengthening interagency cooperation and preventing a border fence.

"A border wall would seriously disrupt the movement and availability of resources to a variety of species that are of conservation concern for the Coronado along with ecological systems that support those species," the report says.

The forest should prepare for global warming impacts, including changing habitat boundaries, invasive species and changes in species viability, the group said.

Hodges laments the shift toward using forests for recreation instead of conservation - a move he says leans away from the reason forests exist.

The groups' report calls for several new wilderness areas and "sound sheds" where only quiet activities are allowed. The group identified eight areas the forest should manage as more-restricted wilderness areas, Hodges said.

Despite receiving comments from more than 600 people, the partnership wants more. The group will take public comments on its draft report, with a final version out next spring, Hodges said.

No timeline has been announced for the Coronado management plan revision, though it is expected to take until next summer.

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/ss/border/103738.php

U.S.-MEXICO: Fence to Carve Up Fragile Border Preserve

Inter Press Service
November 19, 2008

SAN DIEGO, California, Nov 19 (IPS) - Another chapter in U.S.-Mexico border relations is about to close. In the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is completing construction of a 22-kilometre triple fence along the San Diego-Tijuana border.

It is being done over the objections of environmental activists living near the border, who are worried both about the toll on wildlife and those seeking entry into the United States.

A patch of green encircled by two cities, the Tijuana estuary lacks the grandeur of a mountain range but to biologists and conservationists it's an invaluable piece of real estate.

Created in 1981, the Tijuana River Research Reserve is an island of relative calm at the centre of a political maelstrom that pits conservations against advocates that promote tighter border controls. Nesting amid coastal sage and tall grass, 400 species of birds inhabit the wetlands. Thousands more birds return each year to one of the last vestiges of salt marsh existing in Southern California, where 90 percent have been lost to development.

"The estuary is one of the few remaining in Southern California without heavy human intrusion," said Mike McCoy, president of the South West Wetlands Interpretive Association.

However, the estuary has been part of contested territory for generations. The land was granted to the United States after the Treaty of Hidalgo in 1848, which ceded much of what is now southwest Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and California to the United States in the aftermath of the U.S-Mexican War.

The estuary has also been labeled a haven for drug-running and illegal border crossings, according to border officials, making it a flash point for U.S. immigration policy and government agencies entrusted with protecting rare and endangered species living in the estuary. The nearby Otay Mesa border crossing is the most active border crossing in the world.

On average, more than 31 billion dollars worth of products cross through the checkpoint each day, nearly all of it related to the regional maquiladora/manufacturing and agricultural industries. Others seek entry through different methods. "The immigration problem is overblown," remarked a docent on a recent trip to the Tijuana River Research Reserve.

The border, however, does have a dark side. According to U.S. border officials, the region is a magnet for illegal activity -- 162,000 arrests have been made, and 49,000 pounds of marijuana and 699 pounds of cocaine intercepted since November 2007. Drug cartels waging war on the streets of Tijuana also add an element of fear and apprehension. Here the border is tangible.

After 3,200 kilometres, the line tumbles into the Pacific Ocean, and a steel fence divides the United States from Mexico.

During the 1980s, the estuary was in danger of being overrun. Social trails scarred the land. Migrants seeking entry into the United States used the estuary as a crossing point, prompting local politicos to take action.

Also known as Operation Gatekeeper, the 60-million-dollar construction project comprises the western portion of the San Diego Border Infrastructure System. A federally funded programme put in place by Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, it dates back to 1996.

In the coming weeks, two fences will flank the existing one, leaving a gap wide enough to provide access to patrol vehicles, along the westernmost 5.6 kilometres of the U.S.-Mexico border. It will enable agents to monitor a border that marches across the edge of Tijuana's city limits, stretching into the arroyos and mesas beyond.

The plan calls for infilling Smugglers Gulch, a steep canyon through which contraband and people pass. It requires the movement of 2 million cubic yards of earth and calls for building a culvert to divert rainfall that flows down denuded hillsides during storms.

According to local legend, Smugglers Gulch earned its reputation during the Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s, when Tijuana became a destination for U.S. servicemen and thrill seekers. In Mexico, it is known as Canon de Matador, or Slaughter House Canyon, supposedly because goats were slaughtered in the area.

The tops of mesas will be graded down and sections of canyons filled to accommodate an extensive defensive infrastructure that in all likelihood will add to the menace that pervades the border.

According to environmentalists, 100 acres of existing habitat will be compromised within the estuary, placing additional stress on the remaining habitat. "The long-term consequences are unknown," said David Massey, director of education at the San Diego Natural History, when speaking of the triple border fence.

The initial plan met with fierce opposition from environmental groups, who cite concerns that fill from Smugglers Gulch would ultimately choke the wetlands with sedimentation. This would violate federal laws that set aside the estuary as a wildlife refuge and water quality standards. The coastal commission agreed that the project would cause environmental harm and blocked construction.

In September 2005, Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security, trumped all legal challengers by citing the National ID Act, giving him the authority to waive any regulation that impeded construction of the fence in the name of national security.

A local federal district court judge then dismissed all cases that impeded the construction of the fence on the grounds that the intent of Congress was clear in terms of completing its construction.

Construction will move along as the DHS attempts to meet its stated goal of building 225 miles of pedestrian fencing and 362 kilometres of vehicle barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border -- plans likely to meet with additional legal challenges in the months and years to come as advocates on both sides of the fence continue to debate border policy over a landscape where cowboys and coyotes fear to go.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44774