Border wall issue divides Starr County leaders

Rio Grande Guardian
May 10, 2013
by Steve Taylor

RIO GRANDE CITY, May 10 - Opinion is divided among elected officials and business leaders in Starr County over plans to build border walls in Roma and Rio Grande City.
Starr County Judge Eloy Vera says his opinion on border walls has changed. He used to be strongly opposed to them.

“As you know, I was very negative about the border wall at one time but I have seen how the walls have worked. Even though people find it hard to admit, I will admit I was wrong. I think walls are effective in certain areas,” Vera told the Guardian.

Asked if a border wall in Roma and Rio Grande City would give the wrong impression to potential Mexican tourists, Vera said he did not think so. “Those that are coming here legally are coming over our bridge. At one time I thought it would be a negative thing, that we were telling our neighbors that we were building a fence to keep them out. However, I think a lot of that has smoothed out and they realize we welcome them with open arms,” Vera said.

Vera said Border Patrol makes a good point when it says it is difficult to apprehend someone in a city because it is easy to hide. “I think they have a legitimate argument,” he said. For that reason, he said, border walls may make sense in Roma and Rio Grande City.

Vera made his comments after participating in a stakeholder meeting with U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and other local leaders at the Starr-Camargo International Bridge last Monday. In all, Texas’ senior senator spent four hours in Rio Grande City, accompanied by his wife Sandy. He became the first sitting senator to visit the Starr-Camargo International Bridge.

Vera said Cornyn was asked what he thought about border walls for Roma and Rio Grande City and his answer was that he would leave that decision to the experts. “The Senator’s view was, if CBP feels it is good idea he will back it,” Vera said.

Rio Grande City Mayor Ruben Villarreal said his view is that a border wall is a “stigma” that reduces the attractiveness of a community to potential tourists. However, he said he is resigned to Customs and Border Protection building them, no matter what local opinion says.

“I would say opinion varies (about what to do to stop a border wall being built). Nobody wants to see it happen. Do I think it will happen? Probably, yes. I wish I could stop it. A fence is not going to fix anything,” Villarreal told the Guardian and Action 4 News. “Without a doubt if you have a border fence all of a sudden you have to deal with an added stigma.”

Villarreal said what he wants most of all is good communication with the federal government over the construction of a border wall. “Whatever the government is planning to do… do not catch us off guard. We want to prepare our people. We want to prepare our communities to be able to deal with a border fence. Let us know, keep us in the loop,” Villarreal said.

South Texas leaders can be partners with the federal government, if they are given a chance, Villarreal said. “We understand that perhaps their (CBP) solutions will not be the ones we are happy with but if we inform our people at least you will have the benefit of saying we can work with you towards a solution and not leave us out of the mix,” Villarreal said.

Villarreal said an example of bad communication from a federal agency came last September when the U.S. Section of the International Boundary and Water Commission called a public meeting on the border wall issue in Rio Grande City. “It was poorly organized. Information was scant, and the people making the presentation were ill-prepared. That is no way to do a meeting for the people. That was our first introduction to the border wall. It was a disappointment,” Villarreal said.

Like Judge Vera, Villarreal participated in the stakeholder meeting with Cornyn. “I was impressed with Senator Cornyn’s willingness to engage on the issues. He said no subject was off bounds. We have 26 million people in Texas. Senator Cornyn came to a region that is a little bit off the map for some but to us it is the entire world,” Villarreal said.

The mayor said that on the subject of immigration reform, Cornyn said nothing has been decided in Washington yet. “Senator Cornyn promised us he would pretty much let us know everything he could to make us as educated as he can. He said it is not about sealing the border it is about finding a solution that is multi-faceted. He is on the right track. It is not just one thing,” Villarreal said.

Villarreal added that Cornyn explained that he sometimes has a hard time conveying to other senators what a dynamic border is all about. “It is hard for one person. He is just one out of 100,” Villarreal said.

The owner of Starr-Camargo International Bridge is businessman Sam Vale, a former chairman of the Border Trade Alliance. The Guardian and Action 4 News asked Vale what he thought about border walls coming to Starr County.

“My view of the border wall is that it is a nice wrought iron fence. It is not as horrible as people said it was. I would not mind having it around my back yard,” Vale said. However, he questioned if it was the most cost effective way of securing the border. He speculated that it could be cheaper to have more Border Patrol agents.

“I do not think it is the horrible thing they say it is. On the other hand I think it is very inconvenient to get to property that is left on the south side of the wall. For those people who are left with significant property on the south side of the wall it is a big economic inconvenience,” Vale said.

Like Vera and Villarreal, Vale was at the stakeholder meeting with Cornyn. He said the point he wanted to get across to the Senator is that if more security personnel are to be deployed at border ports of entry they should be specialists that meet the demand. For example, Vale said, there is a need for more food inspectors because certain Asian vegetables are now being grown in Mexico and exported to the United States. “You have to have different types of inspection protocols. The imports must not be a threat to the U.S. food supply. We need more people trained in the agriculture identification process, more supervisors for cargo facilities, and more inspectors at the primary booths,” Vale said.

 http://www.riograndeguardian.com/bordernews_story.asp?story_no=20

Border fence gap to close

El Paso Inc.
October 21, 2012
by David Crowder

The 18-foot-high border fence intended to seal the U.S.-Mexican border from San Diego to Brownsville will soon close a half-mile gap just west of Downtown El Paso.

The new section will run right through the spot where many historians believe Spanish explorer Don Juan de Oñate crossed the Rio Grande in 1598.
 Rancher Chip Johns, who owns the property, recognizes the inevitability of the fence. But he doesn't like much about it - not the damage that will be done, not the presence of the heavy-gauge steel barrier and not the price the government is offering.

"They're trying to put that ugly fence right through the property," said Johns. The land on West Paisano Drive near the Yandell Drive overpass includes historic monuments, the former La Hacienda Restaurant and several buildings from the 1890s that were the first Fort Bliss. The fence picks up again near the site of the former Asarco smelter.

Just when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will start construction to fill the gap is uncertain, said Ramiro Cordero, a Border Patrol special operations supervisor.

"There's still a lot of things that need to happen with the property owners and right of entry before they give us the green light to do it," Cordero said.

Documents Johns provided El Paso Inc. indicate he is being offered $22,300 for 19,608 square feet, or about half an acre, along the southern property line parallel to the American Canal.

"I understand that we need a fence and all that, but I'm not going to accept the high-handedness of what they're trying to do to us," he said. "We need something that is more esthetically pleasing than that damn ugly fence, otherwise I'm going to have to get kinda Western with them."

Johns, who runs the 250,000-acre JCJ Ranch along the border in New Mexico, thinks having the fence across the back of the Hacienda property will diminish its possibilities for redevelopment.

The property should be a tourist attraction, he said, given the history of the old Hacienda Restaurant building. Built in the 1850s by pioneer El Pasoan Simeon Hart, it was described by a traveler of the time as a large and luxurious residence built in the Mexican style.

But the restaurant has been closed for years, the Fort Bliss buildings are now low-income apartments and the historical monuments have been vandalized.

"I still feel that between Old Fort Bliss and the Hacienda and the Oñate crossing site, there's a viable attraction that needs to be developed by the city, the city or somebody," he said. "But I'm 68, and I'm tired of it."
Johns said he is haggling with the government over the price of the land it intends to buy with his agreement, or condemn without it.

"I have been told if I do not acquiesce to their demands, they will put a condemnation suit on me," he said. "So that is a done deal."

Changing attitudes

The border fence was greeted with opposition and protests when work began in El Paso County in 2007. The county challenged the fence all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost in 2009.
The controversy has died down since, and some attitudes about the fence have changed.

In El Paso County, the biggest disputes with Homeland Security involved area farmers and the El Paso County Water Improvement District No. 1, better known as the irrigation district.

Jesus "Chuy" Reyes, general manager of the district headquartered in Clint, said one battle focused on Johns' property and plans to leave an important irrigation head gate on the south side of the barrier.

"That head gate is very important to the irrigation district's movement of water," Reyes said. "Any failure of those gates could potentially flood downtown El Paso in a crisis like the one we had in 2006."

That was the year a major storm flooded many areas of the city.

Another problem, Reyes said, would have been the theft of vital irrigation works.

"We're always battling thievery by people coming across the river and stealing parts," Reyes said. "There are some scary aspects about leaving the American Canal on the south side of that fence."

But Reyes' brother, U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, was able to procure $16 million that will be spent to put the American Canal works and part of the canal itself underground.

"That would let Homeland Security route their fence so they could leave those structures on the north side," Chuy Reyes said. "We're happy now."

Some area farmers have also changed their opinions about the fence.

"Our farmers down here on the river are happy because they no longer have that illegal traffic coming through their fields," Reyes said. "They no longer have the danger of the drug smugglers because it's really curtailed now.

"It is working. We hear of drug smugglers coming over the fence, and Border Patrol is always dealing with cuts in the fence, but the community that lives along the border is very happy that the fence is there now. I get those comments all the time."

Huge disparities

There's a new controversy over the border fence in the Brownsville area. Recent reports show huge disparities in the prices property owners have been getting from Homeland Security.

"Since 2008, hundreds of land owners on the border have sought fair prices for property that was condemned to make way for the fence," the Associated Press reported last week after conducting an investigation. "But many of them received initial offers that were far below market value.

"And dozens accepted those amounts without seeking any legal help, only to discover neighbors had won far larger settlements after hiring attorneys."

In one case, a south Texas farmer accepted the government's offer of $1,650 for a slice of his back yard and then learned that one neighbor was paid more than $65,000 for a similar lot while another got $1 million, according to the AP.

http://www.elpasoinc.com/news/local_news/article_eab8ab70-1b7d-11e2-87ab-0019bb30f31a.html

Landowners say they were shortchanged in deals to make way for US-Mexico border fence

Associated Press / Washington Post
October 15, 2012
by Ramit Plushnick-Masti and Christopher Sherman

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — When the federal government began seizing private land along the U.S.-Mexico border to build a towering fence, Teofilo Flores was offered $1,650 for a slice of his backyard.

At first, it seemed like a square deal. But then the cotton grower learned that his neighbor had received 40 times more for a similar piece of land. And another nearby farmer pocketed $1 million in exchange for his cooperation.

Since 2008, hundreds of landowners on the border have sought fair prices for property that was condemned to make way for the fence. But many of them received initial offers that were far below market value. And dozens accepted those amounts without seeking any legal help, only to discover neighbors had won far larger settlements after hiring attorneys.

“You get angry. But that’s the way of life, I guess,” Flores said of the bigger payouts won by other landowners. “You know, people that got more money can afford to do more things.”

The disparities raise questions about the Justice Department’s treatment of hundreds of landowners from Texas to California who couldn’t afford lawyers and must now live with a massive steel barrier running through their farms, ranches and yards.

The wide variation in price “underscores how unfair these original offers were,” said attorney Corinna Spencer-Scheurich, who represented poor and middle-class landowners when the seizures began.

The federal government “is using its power, its clout, to try to take land from people at a price that is unfair. I think that is clear based on the settlements,” she said.

Federal attorneys say the initial offers represented only a starting amount that would permit the seizures to begin and could be adjusted later.

In 2006, Congress ordered construction of 670 miles of heavy metal fence to help curb illegal immigration. The project required landowners on the border to give up property that ranged from the size of a driveway to much larger farms and commercial lots.

The Constitution requires the government to provide compensation whenever it takes property for a public project using a process known as eminent domain.

About 400 landowners have been affected. Most are in Texas, because that state has more private property along the border than do New Mexico, Arizona or California, where much of the border land is already in federal hands.

An Associated Press analysis of nearly 300 Texas land cases found that most of the settlement money went to a small group of owners, all of whom had attorneys. The legal help appeared to pay off: Of nearly $15 million that has been paid out, 85 percent has been awarded to just a third of the property holders.

There are other reasons for the larger settlements beyond the advantage of legal representation. Many of the best-compensated landowners oversee large citrus groves or other commercial operations on land that is inherently more valuable.

They also stand to lose more from the rows of 18-foot rust-colored steel posts that now divide their land. Farmers, for instance, have complained that the fence slows down their work because large agricultural machines now have to drive around the bulky barriers.

Most of the fence construction was completed two years ago, but the government is still negotiating for land surrounding the project.

One recent case involved 8 acres at the entrance to a sable palm grove managed by The Nature Conservancy. The government initially offered $114,000, but in August the matter was settled for nearly $1 million.

Most of the fence construction was completed two years ago, but the government is still negotiating for land surrounding the project.

One recent case involved 8 acres at the entrance to a sable palm grove managed by The Nature Conservancy. The government initially offered $114,000, but in August the matter was settled for nearly $1 million.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/landowners-say-they-were-shortchanged-in-deals-to-make-way-for-us-mexico-border-fence/2012/10/15/84de16fe-16a1-11e2-a346-f24efc680b8d_story.html

The Texans who live on the ‘Mexican side’ of the border fence: ‘Technically, we’re in the United States’

Yahoo News
December 21, 2011
by Liz Goodwin

BROWNSVILLE, Texas—Pamela Taylor's living room has a Santa-hat-wearing stuffed dog atop a red doily on her coffee table, poinsettias near the couch, and, in the center of the room, an angel-topped Christmas tree with a few wrapped presents underneath.

Outside, the Christmas spirit is less visible, amid repeated warnings to KEEP OUT—though a "Merry Christmas!" sign hangs next to a warning to would-be trespassers that they're being filmed by a surveillance system. Written outside the front gate is the message: "Don't even think about parking here."

This will be Taylor's fourth Christmas living on what some Texans call the "Mexican side" of the U.S. border fence. Although she lives in Texas, her home is south of the 18-feet steel-and-concrete border wall erected by the American government. Taylor, who is 84, can see it from her front porch.

The wall was built to satisfy a law, passed in 2006 and 2008, that authorized 700 miles of fence on the southern border, 315 miles of it in Texas. President Bush said the fence would make the border safer and was "an important step toward immigration reform." Many of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, with the exception of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, say they want to build a fence that spans the entire U.S. border. The Brownsville area shows just how complicated that project would be.

Because of a decades-old treaty with Mexico prohibiting building in the Rio Grande floodplain, the government built its border fence more than a mile north of the snaky river, trapping tens of thousands of acres of Texas--land in Cameron and Hidalgo counties--on the wrong side of the fence. The border wall is also riddled with miles-long gaps, seemingly placed at random. The U.S. Border Patrol says that illegal crossers are pushed to these gaps, where they are more easily apprehended.

Some Texans, like Taylor, live completely on the other side of the $6.2 million-a-mile wall. Others had their property split in half by the fence, after the government seized portions of their land. At least 200 people in Cameron County had some of their land seized for the fence.

'It's really done nothing for us'

Ten years ago, Taylor found a stranger sitting in her living room. "He had used my bathroom, he had shaved and cleaned himself off and he was watching the border patrol go by, sitting in that rocking chair," she said in an interview with Yahoo News. A few years later, she found 40 kilos of marijuana hidden in her bougainvilleas.

Taylor says she had to work hard to get her citizenship when she married an American soldier and moved to Texas from England after World War II. She doesn't think illegal immigrants should get a chance to become citizens. "If anything comes really easy, it's not appreciated," she said.

But the government's solution to the problem strikes her as ridiculous. "It's really done nothing for us because they're still coming across," Taylor says. Earlier this year, teenage illegal immigrants pounded on her front door in the middle of the night. She called the Border Patrol, which arrested them and a group of Hondurans they were trafficking, according to Taylor. She keeps a gun and a taser in her house, just in case.

'This is our property'

A few miles east of Taylor's house, Tim Loop's green two-story home, where he lives with his wife and two daughters, is also stuck behind the border wall. He agrees that the fence is not solving anything. Driving in his truck along the fence this week, he pointed out several places where scuffmarks suggested that people had recently climbed over. On one part of the fence not too far from his house, a torn shirt hung from the top of a pole.

Loop worries that the government will close the gaps in the fence. A complete wall wouldn't let him get to his house from the road, which is on the "American" side. The road also provides access to his farm, which grows sugar cane, grapefruit, corn, and other crops, for his eight employees.

Earlier this year, Homeland Security told landowners that it planned to close the gaps with 15-feet-wide gates that would have keypads on them. Each landowner would get a personal code to open the gate, and the government would be in charge of who else might be allowed to use each code.

"This is our property behind here," Loop said in an interview with Yahoo News. "We don't want somebody else to be the boss of our gate."

Taylor worries about a proposed highway whose path would require the government to move the fence closer to her house. "We will be more shut in than ever before," she said.

'We're in the United States'

Bob Lucio, the owner of a 165-acre golf course that lies entirely on the "Mexican" side of the fence, says the thought of Homeland Security using a secured gate to close the one entrance to the course keeps him up at night.

"If that happens, I don't think we can survive," he told Yahoo News during an interview in his office.

Lucio worked with Homeland Security to beautify the fence. Near the course, the wall is several feet shorter than elsewhere and is painted green. The wall is so subtle that some putters, many of them "winter Texans" from Canada and the Midwest, don't realize they're on the south side of the border wall, he says. A gate would change that.

"Technically, we're in the United States," Lucio said. But during a drug-cartel gun battle in June just across the Mexican border from his property, several Border Patrol agents lined up on the north side of the fence and didn't venture beyond it, he said. It gave him the impression that the Border Patrol was securing the fence line in times of trouble, instead of the actual border.

"The whole situation left me kind of numb," he said. "It's kind of like, 'You're on your own, buddy.'"

Rosalinda Huey, a spokeswoman for the Customs and Border Patrol, declined to comment on that episode but said agents patrol both sides of the fence.

'I couldn't sell my house now'

The landowners on the other side of the fence in Brownsville know their property isn't as valuable as it once was. "Would you want to buy a house behind the border wall?" Loop asked dryly.

The government didn't offer to buy the land it walled off from the rest of Texas, or to compensate people for the subsequent devaluation. It offered only to pay for the strips of land that were seized for the fence's path.

Eloisa Tamez, a nursing professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville and an outspoken opponent of the fence, refused to sell the government a quarter of an acre of her three-acre plot. She was initially offered $100 for the patch of land, which was used for the fence that now bisects her property.

Tamez's family has lived on her land since the 1700s. The family traditionally held an Easter party near the river, which is now on the other side of the wall. The only way Tamez can access the other part of her land is through a gap 1,200 feet away, which she can reach only by trespassing on her neighbors' land.

The government's offer eventually went up to $13,000, but she still didn't accept. She refused to sign the papers and is locked in a court battle with the government over the quarter acre it took from her.

"I couldn't sell my house now," she says.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/texas-americans-live-wrong-side-border-fence-christmas-183312787.html

Lucio: I Plan to See Border Wall Torn Down in My Lifetime

Rio Grande Guardian
September 17, 2011
by Steve Taylor


BROWNSVILLE, Sept. 17 - State Sen. Eddie Lucio says if Rio Grande Valley residents keep up the pressure, they will succeed in tearing down the border wall.


“I was born and reared here and I have never seen anything like this monstrosity,” Lucio said, referring to the border wall. “In my lifetime I want to see the border wall come down, just like I saw the Berlin Wall come down. Even if I am 85 or 90 years old, I want to be there when the wall comes down.”


Lucio said he also wants to see, in his lifetime, the appropriate level of compensation paid to those whose homes and land have been disfigured by the border wall. “We give big corporations on Wall Street billions of dollars of tax relief. Why can’t we give the little people, people I consider great Americans and great Texans, some relief? We should not turn our backs on those in need,” he said.


Lucio, D-Brownsville, made his comments in an exclusive interview with the Guardian immediately following a town hall meeting he held to discuss to the impact the border wall has had on landowners who live between the wall and the Rio Grande.


Lucio said all the evidence suggests the border wall has not been an effective method in deterring undocumented immigration. He said it was only erected “to satisfy the appetite of immigrant-bashing politicians in other parts of America.”


A much better method of deterring undocumented immigration, Lucio said, would be to set up a four-state immigrant employment zone where Mexican residents could come in and work under a guest worker program. He said he is confident that if such a program were in operation, Mexican nationals would return to their homeland once their work is done.


“If we want to do something about illegal immigration we should create an immigrant employment zone and have guest workers come in. We would know who they are and where they live. At the moment people get in illegally and they spread out. They are in hiding,” Lucio said.


“I want to see the federal government pass legislation to allow the four Border States – Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California - to address this issue at the state level. We know better than the federal government how to set up this program. We need bricklayers, we need roofers; we need dishwashers, we need agricultural workers. Let us as Border States hire workers from Mexico to do the jobs our people are unwilling to do.”


Lucio said if the federal government allowed the Border States to create an immigrant employment zone for Mexican workers, the four states would be a lot cleaner. “These people are workers. They have an incredible work ethic. They would keep our state clean. All they want to do is make a little bit of money to maintain their families. They want to eat. They want to live. Who can blame them? It is all about if we are going to be humanitarians or not,” he said.

Lucio said the U.S. should also be doing more to help Mexico.


“The way you curb illegal immigration from Mexico is to create an economy there that is robust. The Mexican government needs to establish a national minimum wage. You get a $5 dollar minimum wage and these workers will not be coming here. They will stay in Mexico. Lift their economy and you keep these people in their homeland,” he said.


Lucio concluded his interview with the Guardian by casting doubt on the usefulness of a congressional hearing being staged at the University of Texas at Brownsville on Monday by U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble. The hearing is slated to focus on border violence.


“My staff has been told only invited guests will be allowed to speak at this hearing and that the people of my community, the people who attended this town hall meeting, will not be allowed to testify. That is un-American,” Lucio said.


“Why bother to hold a hearing if you are not going to hear from the public? Why waste taxpayers’ money? Send us the money for public education or healthcare. Don’t spend all this money on a joyride. As far as I am concerned these members of Congress could have stayed back home and done a teleconference. I am extremely disappointed our residents will not get to speak.”


Poe is a big backer of the border wall. Last March he co-authored the Unlawful Border Entry Prevention Act, which would require construction of an additional 350 miles of border wall.


Despite not being allowed to testify at Poe’s hearing, Lucio said he will try to get all the comments made by those at his town hall meeting entered into the congressional record. “I am going to see if they make these comments part of the record or chuck them away,” Lucio said. He said he would also be sending the comments of those who attended the town hall meeting to President Obama.


Lucio’s town hall meeting was held at the Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course, adjacent to the Rio Grande.


Among those who spoke at the event were state Rep. René Oliveira, D-Brownsville, landowner Michelle Taylor Moncivaiz, whose home lies between the border wall and the Rio Grande, Equal Voice for America’s Families leader Mike Seifert, La Unión del Pueblo Entero Director Juanita Valdez Cox, Sierra Club Borderlands Team Co-Chair and No Border Wall Coalition Co-Founder Scott Nicol, UT-Brownsville professors Jeff Wilson and Jude Benavides, Hidalgo County Democratic Party activist Aaron Peña III, Texas Rangers Liaison Art Barrera, and Rick Perez, a member of the special investigations unit set up by Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio. The only person at the hearing to speak in favor of the border wall was Brownsville resident Dagberto Barrera.

http://www.riograndeguardian.com/rggnews_story.asp?story_no=26

Impact of border wall discussed at meeting

Brownsville Herald / The Monitor
September 17, 2011
by Jacqueline Armendariz

BROWNSVILLE -- Drug trafficking from Mexico into Cameron County has increased, not decreased, since the border fence was built, a sheriff’s lieutenant said Saturday at a public meeting.

It was one of many points discussed at the “Border Wall Impact” meeting hosted by State Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. at the Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course. The event brought together legislators, city representatives, state and county law enforcement and private citizens to air concerns about the fence.

“Is the fence keeping drugs from coming in? No,” Lieutenant Rick Perez said responding to a question. “We have more drugs now than before.”

Perez is part of the special investigations unit of the Cameron County Sheriff’s Department.

A disconnect between U.S. border communities and the federal government, and the perceived ineffectiveness of the border fence, emerged as the major themes at Saturday’s gathering.

One property owner shared stories about finding drugs near her home and also being the victim of a home burglary.

Among people who spoke, some supported the fence while most did not.

“This is terrorism from the United States to other countries,” Yolanda Garza Birdwell said of the fence and its environmental impact. She described herself as a dual citizen of the U.S. and Mexico and a Laguna Vista resident for a year.

Dagoberto Berrera was at the opposite end of the spectrum. He said he supported the fence, and he spoke disparagingly of undocumented immigrants.

‘Better than nothing’

“The wall is better than nothing,” he said. “Sure, it costs a lot of money, but it also costs us by just letting everybody in here. We are a land of law and order. You’ve got to obey the laws.”

The audience, which included District 4 City Commissioner John Villarreal, numbered a little more than 20 people.

Lucio said he has been disappointed by the lack of information about the impact of the border fence, and said he hoped to use what he learned Saturday to be an advocate for the region in Austin.

“I truly hope that today’s meeting will be the first true step in understanding the real impacts of the border wall on our region with the information that you share, being armed with facts, figures and knowledge,” Lucio told those in attendance.

Lobbying for property owners

Lucio’s brother, Bob Lucio, is the manager of the border golf course that hosted the meeting and said his hope is to get more support for his group called the No Man’s Land Association.

With power in numbers, he said he wants to lobby to help for property owners or businesses like himself whose land has ended up between the Rio Grande River and the border fence.

At the meeting, several audience members brought up concerns about being able to communicate with law enforcement and the environmental impact of the fence, while others spoke to decreased property values and alleged that the federal government has abused its power of eminent domain.

Still others spoke to serious safety concerns, while another audience member raised concerns about the potential psychological effects the border wall has created for communities on both sides. There was also discussion of a University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College study that found the fence effects minorities disproportionately.

Fears for safety

Michelle Moncivaiz identified herself as a property owner living just a short distance from the border fence, but she said she feared for the safety of her family. She pleaded to the law enforcement representatives and legislators present for “more boots on the ground” to help.

“Washington doesn’t understand what this fence has created,” she said. “Where is our Homeland Security? ... Where is America helping us on the border?”

No one at the meeting disputed the assertion that more law enforcement officers are needed along the border. Perez said at the end of this year the Sheriff’s Department will lose 12 deputies who were temporarily staffed through a $2.2 million grant from the Department of Justice.

He read a statement on behalf of Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio saying that he never supported the fence. The sheriff was not present at the meeting.

“The sheriff suggests that instead of building the fence, take into consideration giving him the $10 million and you can hire 12 deputies for several years and they would do a better job than the fence,” Perez said. Still, the statement discussed a high-traffic drug smuggling area along Highway 4, where there is no fence.

Sharing information

Texas Ranger Staff Lieutenant Art Barrera said he is the liaison between local, state and federal law enforcement in Operation Border Star, and he reports information to Austin. He and Perez said the entities they work for have not conducted studies on the impact of the fence.

“It’s getting better,” Barrera said of sharing knowledge. “I’m not saying we’re there yet, but information sharing between federal, state and local is on the right track.”

Hearing Monday

A federal hearing on border security is scheduled for Monday. Lucio said state legislators were not invited and that testimony would not be taken from the public. He invited people to attend and submit written testimony with him.

“Only those that have been invited will be able to testify,” he said. “That’s not the practice we’re used to in Austin, and it bothers me.”

On Saturday, Lucio said he had just found out about the federal forum that day, but earlier in the week his spokesman told The Herald that the timing of Saturday’s meeting and Monday’s hearing was coincidental.

The “Secure our Texas Border Forum,” headed by House Representative Ted Poe, R-Humble, and other members of the House Committee on the Judiciary, was rescheduled at least once already this summer. The forum will be at the UTB-TSC Arts Center at 10 a.m. Prominent figures related to border security are scheduled to testify as witnesses.

Too expensive

Lucio said he introduced Senate Bill 1809 this past legislative session in an effort to secure an economic impact study of the border fence in this area. It failed in the House, he said.

He said the state comptroller told him such a study would likely be too expensive to undertake, but he hoped legislation for it could be pushed for in the future.

State Representative Rene Oliveira said the issue of security and immigration were two different things, though they are often connected when discussing the desirability of the border fence.

“I don’t want cartels in the Valley or Texas,” he said. “I don’t want those people to flourish in our country.”

But, he said, learning the impact of the border fence, and how to mitigate any negative effects, is now the necessary focus.

“The wall is here whether we like it or not,” he said. “I don’t think anybody is going to tear it down. The political will is clearly nonexistent for that.”

http://www.themonitor.com/news/border-54855-fence-cameron.html

Public meeting will address border fence

Brownsville Herald
September 15, 2011
by Jacqueline Armandariz

State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. is hosting a “Border Wall Impact” public meeting on Saturday, just two days before a federal committee hearing in Brownsville is set to address border security.

Saturday’s meeting will be at the Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course Clubhouse, 300 River Levee Road, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

“In order for Texans to respond to federal policy, we need to have facts, figures and analysis,” Lucio said in a press release. “However, when it comes to the federal border wall, there exists very little centralized information. This public meeting represents an opportunity for Valley residents to unite and study the impact that the border wall is having on us.”

Immediately before that gathering, a group calling itself the No Man’s Land Association will hold its first meeting at the same place.

The local start-up group aims to discuss the effects of the border wall on property owners whose land is fenced off from other U.S. lands, and to lobby for a tax-free zone or enterprise zone to help them, according to organizer Bob Lucio. He is the state senator’s brother and runs the Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course Clubhouse.

Worry of spillover violence and the death of some Americans in circumstances related to the Mexican drug war have attracted attention to the U.S.-Mexico border. A national debate that connects border security and immigration policy has continuously brewed, while the miles of border wall for residents along the banks of the Rio Grande is a fact of life.

Through a spokesman, Lucio said the timing with the federal event on Monday is coincidental.

That hearing, the “Secure our Texas Border” forum, will be hosted by U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, and other members of the House Committee on the Judiciary. It begins at 10 a.m. at the UTB-TSC Arts Center. Prominent figures related to border security are scheduled to testify as witnesses.

At the Saturday event, there will be presentations from various law enforcement agencies, and the public is asked to provide input and discuss the impact of the fence on businesses, the environment, property values and border security.

While Sen. Lucio said there is little data on the effects of the border fence, in March two faculty members from the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College discussed their study that found the fence negatively affects minorities disproportionately.

Jude Benavides and Jeff Wilson conducted the study that found Cameron County had one-third of the proposed fence gaps, more than any other Texas county.

With the combination of the Secure Border Fence Act of 2006 and another 2008 appropriations bill, the federal government was set to construct about 700 miles of barrier, about 315 miles of which is in Texas. Much of it is on private land, the study said.

Wilson, an environmental science professor, said: “We do not want to speculate as to the intent of the government on where it was placed but the results are clear: The wall is in the backyard of those who would be least equipped to negotiate.”

The findings were published in the 2010 edition of the annual journal “The Southwestern Geographer.”

UTB-TSC itself filed a civil lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security when it was proposed that the fence run through university property. The two entities reached a compromise in August 2008.

Today, No Man’s Land Association organizer Bob Lucio said it’s no longer an issue of debating the construction of the fence. It’s here, and now it’s time to deal with the effects, he said.

“What I’m trying to do is create an association that will give us numbers,” he said. “I do not want to fight battles that we fought five years ago when they were putting up the fence. ... We’ve got to go forward. ... We need to start asking questions.”

He said the several years he’s been a business owner dealing with the border fence have been “horrendous” and he believes property values are affected by it. The perception of danger the border fence conveys has also cut the number of memberships bought at his golf course, he said.

He calls the U.S. land between the river and the border fence a “no-man’s land.”

He said he worked with his brother to schedule the Saturday meetings together and brought his concerns as a business owner to the state senator.

“We’re on the border by the sea. That’s our city’s slogan, right?” he said. “Well, I say we’re on the border fence by the sea.”

Lucio said being on the banks of the river could be an asset, but the fence has ended that.

“Our kids don’t even see the river anymore,” he said.

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/articles/hosting-131258-lucio-address.html

Ariz. seeks online donations to build border fence

Associated Press
May 8, 2011

PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona lawmakers want more fence along the border with Mexico — whether the federal government thinks it's necessary or not.

They've got a plan that could get a project started using online donations and prison labor. If they get enough money, all they would have to do is get cooperation from landowners and construction could begin as soon as this year.

Gov. Jan Brewer recently signed a bill that sets the state on a course that begins with launching a website to raise money for the work, said state Sen. Steve Smith, the bill's sponsor.

"We're going to build this site as fast as we can, and promote it, and market the heck out of it," said Smith, a first-term Republican senator from Maricopa.

Arizona — strapped for cash and mired in a budget crisis — is already using public donations to pay for its legal defense of the SB1070 illegal immigration law.

Part of the marketing pitch for donations could include providing certificates declaring that individual contributors "helped build the Arizona wall," Smith said. "I think it's going to be a really, really neat thing."

Construction would start "after we've raised a significant amount of money first" but possibly as soon as later this year, Smith said.

"If the website is up and there is an overwhelming response to what we've done and millions of dollars in this fund, I would see no reason why engineering or initial construction or finalized plans can't be accomplished," he said.

The nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border already has about 650 miles of fence of one type or another, nearly half of it in Arizona. The state's 376-mile border is the busiest gateway for both illegal immigrants and marijuana smuggling.

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matthew Chandler said federal officials declined to comment on the Arizona legislation.

State Corrections Director Charles Ryan said getting inmate labor to help construct border fencing wouldn't be a problem.

Minimum-security prisoners already have been used to clear brush in immigrants' hiding spots near the border and clean up trash and other material dumped by border-crossers, he said.

Work crews of Arizona inmates also have been used to refurbish public buildings, build sidewalks and construct park facilities.

At 50 cents an hour, "we are a relatively inexpensive labor force," Ryan said. "If we have the funding to do it, we're capable of doing it."

Arizona's existing border security fund is being used to pay for legal costs of defending SB1070 in court, though Brewer's 2010 executive order creating the fund allows its money to be used for any "border security purpose." A federal judge has blocked implementation of key parts of SB1070, but Brewer has said she'll take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

The fund through Wednesday has received nearly 44,000 donations totaling more than $3.7 million, collected online and through mailed donations since May 2010. Roughly half of the money has been spent, and Brewer spokesman Matthew Benson said the balance is also needed for SB1070-related legal expenses.

Smith and other supporters of the border-fence legislation haven't produced any cost estimates for the state project, saying only that the state should be able to do it far more inexpensively than the federal government.

That still could be put the state's costs in the tens of millions of dollars — or more.

A 2009 report by Congress' Government Accountability Office said costs of federal fencing work to keep out people on foot ranged from $400,000 to $15.1 million per mile, while costs for vehicle barriers ranged from $200,000 to $1.8 million. Costs varied by such things as types of fencing geography, land costs and labor expenses, the report said.

Brewer signed the Arizona fence bill on April 28, and it will take effect with most other new state laws on July 20.

It took the bill about 2½ months to land on her desk, easily winning approval on party-line votes during a legislative session dominated by budget-balancing work

During committee hearings and floor debates, Republicans said the state has a legal and moral obligation to take action because the federal government hasn't done enough to secure the border.

"My constituents want this thing fixed and fixed once and for all, and we're going to do it," Republican Sen. Al Melvin of Tucson said during a February committee hearing. "People should not be dying in the desert."

Democrats questioned the project's feasibility and called it a feel-good distraction from pressing for more comprehensive action on border and immigration issues.

"If we are here to pass symbolic legislation and not really address border security, SB1406 does the job. But people don't benefit from symbolic legislation," Democratic Rep. Catherine Miranda of Phoenix said April 18 House vote.

Under the bill, the border fencing work could be done either in conjunction with other border states or by Arizona alone.

Smith said the committee will consider where to build the fence and what kind of fence is needed.

But the eventual choice could be like double- and triple-fence barriers already installed along the border in Yuma County in southwestern Arizona because they appear to block crossings, he said.

Any type of fence would require approval of landowners, but Smith said he expects that to be forthcoming from the state and private land owners, including ranchers who have complained of break-ins and other trouble associated with smugglers and illegal crossings.

Individual ranchers likely will cooperate with the state fencing project, just as they have done with federal officials on placing helipads, watering stations and communications equipment to help officers patrolling the border, an Arizona Cattle Growers Association official said.

However, the 1,100-member association didn't take a position on the fence bill, said Executive Director Patrick Bray.

"We certainly appreciate the efforts put into this legislation, however the funding is a huge question. It's an empty solution because we don't know where the money is going to come from."

Bray added: "We want to stay focused on the overall border security issue. At this point we are looking for a more comprehensive security approach rather than this pieces that might come to fruition."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gAETb5TcPFGARqPEZjmQdOBUHkbA?docId=1d1d25a9338f416bb4b2aee94d0a35b5

Texas landowners stuck on wrong side of border fence

Los Angeles Times
February 28, 2011
by Richard Marosi

Reporting from Brownsville, Texas — The Rio Grande once ran wide and deep behind the four-room house that Pamela Taylor and her husband hammered together more than half a century ago. Migrant workers had to take a ferry upriver to get across from Mexico, and a flood once inundated the family's citrus groves.

Over time, the waters receded, the river narrowed and Mexico got closer. Thieves led by a one-legged man stole Taylor's horses from the barn and beans off the stove. Drug smugglers hid marijuana in her bushes. Migrant workers would camp in her front yard and bring her fresh tortillas in the morning.

The once-swift river now could be crossed with little more than a leaky inner tube. Still, there was some comfort in knowing that, on the map anyway, the Rio Grande marked the international boundary. Nowadays, Taylor isn't so sure.

The Homeland Security Department last year put up a tall steel barrier across the fields from Taylor's home. The government calls it the border fence, but it was erected about a quarter-mile north of the Rio Grande, leaving Taylor's home between the fence and the river. Her two acres now lie on a strip of land that isn't Mexico but doesn't really seem like the United States either.

The government doesn't keep count, but Taylor and other residents think there are about eight houses stranded on the other side of the fence.

"It's a no man's land," Taylor said. "They said they were going to build a fence to protect all the people. We were just lost in the draw."

When the Homeland Security Department began its Southwest border buildup four years ago, erecting barriers seemed a straightforward enough proposition. The international boundary is ruler-straight for hundreds of miles from California to New Mexico, and planners laid the fencing down right on the border, traversing deserts, mountains and valleys.

But here, where the border's eastern edge meets the Gulf of Mexico, the urgency of national security met headlong with geographical reality. The Rio Grande twists through Brownsville and surrounding areas, and planners had to avoid building on the flood plain. So the barriers in some places went up more than a mile from the river.

While the border fence almost everywhere else divides Mexico and the U.S., here it divides parts of the city.

Authorities defend the barrier, saying it helps control illegal immigration and drug trafficking. The fencing doesn't stop immigrants, but they say it slows people down and funnels them to areas where U.S. Border Patrol agents can respond quickly.

In and around Brownsville, the fence slices through two-lane roads, backyards, agricultural fields, citrus groves and pastures for more than 21 miles, trapping tens of thousands of acres, according to some property owners' estimates. (The Homeland Security Department did not keep track of the total.) Narrow gaps allow back-and-forth access for cars and tractors, pedestrians and Border Patrol agents, but they are spaced as much as a mile apart.

"My son-in-law tells people we live in a gated community," joked Taylor, 82, who shares her modest home with her daughter's family.

Originally from England, she married her Mexican American husband during World War II, and picked tomatoes and cotton to scrape enough money together in 1948 to build a modest home and raise four adopted children.

She never learned to speak much Spanish and struggled with Mexican food. "My father-in-law told me I was the only person he knew that made square tortillas," Taylor recalled. Hers has been a life defined by adapting, but she said nothing prepared her for America's new border barrier.

"We feel abandoned here," she said. "That's why we refer to it as the Mexican side of the fence."

Planning challenges and fierce opposition held off construction crews for several years, making Brownsville the last border city to get barriers under the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

Tensions escalated in this mostly Latino, working-class city of 172,000 when people realized that large segments of the fence would not sit anywhere near the international boundary.

Some residents got the word by studying maps of the project at public hearings. Others answered knocks on their front doors to find Border Patrol agents bearing clipboards: Would they sign a waiver allowing the government to begin surveying their land?

Landowners were offered compensation, but many were outraged. They protested at public hearings, lobbied politicians in Washington and fought court battles. The government had to start condemnation proceedings against more than 100 residents, some of them poor farmers or senior citizens with centuries-old ties to the community.

Construction crews bulldozed orchards, drained lakes and graded over driveways and roads. The fence towers 18 feet and its steel posts, a few inches apart, whistle like a freight train when northern winds blow.

Eloisa Tamez, 75, who lives on land granted to her ancestors by the king of Spain in 1767, rejected the government's offer of $13,500 for a 50-foot-wide strip across her three acres west of Brownsville. The government seized the land and built the fence anyway. Now, three-quarters of the fallow acreage where her family once grew tomatoes, squash and okra is south of the barrier.

"It represents my heritage. This land here is what gave me life. I didn't have riches or luxuries, but we had food that was good for us," said Tamez, who is in a legal battle with the federal government over the seizure of her land. "I didn't want to let the government have it to build this monstrosity."

Rancher Alberto "Beto" Garza and his father have been cut off from their cattle. Ninfa Young, 56, said she can't stroll over to her neighbor's farm to pick watermelons. Nature Conservancy manager Maxwell B. Pons said the 6,000 feet of fencing on the Southmost Preserve severs an important corridor for coyotes and Texas tortoises.

At the Loop farm on the outskirts of Brownsville, dozens of citrus trees were bulldozed to make way for the fence, which splits the family's 900 acres. On the Brownsville side, Debbie and Leonard Loop tend groves of oranges and grapefruit; on the "Mexican" side, their son, Ray Loop, cultivates soybeans, sunflowers and watermelons.

Things could get more complicated. With the government planning this year to install gates at 40 of the gaps, the family wonders about access. Residents will be provided with access codes, according to border authorities. But they've also heard that the gates would be locked during a high national security alert. Debbie Loop, 69, wonders how her young granddaughters would get through to the Brownsville side of the fence under that scenario.

"It's an eerie feeling crossing that," Loop said, as she drove with her husband through the fence line onto her son's farmland. "In the past, if you needed to get out in a hurry, you could. Now you have to find a gap."

Duncan L. Hunter, the former congressman from San Diego County who co-wrote the fencing legislation before leaving office in 2009, visited Brownsville in 2008 to explain how barriers helped reduce the numbers of undocumented immigrants flooding into California border cities.

Though the Brownsville fence placement sounds "illogical," it is probably necessary if it means cutting off illegal crossings, said Hunter, who expressed surprise that the barrier here was placed so far from the river. Asked about the location, border officials said in a statement that a number of factors were considered, including the flood plain and "historic illegal crossing patterns."

"From time immemorial, the way that you keep people from going into a restricted area is a fence," Hunter said, citing a significant drop in crime in San Diego after the fence there was built in the 1990s. "It brought calm to both sides of the border."

Longtime resident Taylor, however, said the no man's land where her property ended up hardly qualifies as tranquil.

The fence funnels more illegal immigrants than ever through her property, she said, because it is close to an easily breached gap. Taylor is all for bolstering national security, but adding agents, cameras and lighting would have been more effective, she said.

She still opens her house to patrol agents on Thanksgiving and Christmas for turkey dinner. It's the politicians and senior officials who earn her wrath. She attended hearings and sent letters and e-mails to numerous officials, and got few responses.

"It was like talking to a brick wall," she said.

These days, immigrants walk across a small dam that serves as a footbridge, traversing the Rio Grande in minutes. Crossings trigger the immediate appearance of Border Patrol agents on the river side of the fence, but Taylor fears that U.S. Customs and Border Protection could someday reposition its agents behind the barrier, leaving her family more vulnerable.

Heightened U.S. enforcement efforts, Taylor said, have bred a meaner, more desperate class of illegal immigrants. Some banged on her doors and windows last week, possibly seeking help. She can hear the "booms and bangs" from the drug wars in Matamoros, and Mexican military helicopters have strayed over her house, she said.

"We're not afraid, but we do realize that Matamoros could spill over here," said Taylor, who keeps three assault rifles loaded. The guns give her a sense of safety, she said, unlike the fence: "It's not providing security for us, and it's actually shutting us out of America."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-texas-fence-20110228,0,7333306,full.story

Bill opens sensitive lands to BP agents

Arizona Daily Star
April 15, 2010
by Brady McCombs

Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House want to give Border Patrol agents total access to public lands where they currently must adhere to some restrictions.

The move is the latest fallout from the March 27 killing of longtime rancher Robert Krentz on his land northeast of Douglas.

The legislation would prohibit the Department of Interior from restricting Border Patrol activities on public lands. Currently, land managers can create rules regarding access to certain areas to protect land, wildlife or historical sites.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, justified the legislation based on the fact that the person who killed Krentz likely fled into Mexico through the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.

The refuge is 17 miles east of Douglas on the Arizona-Mexico border.

At the 2,309-acre wildlife refuge, the Border Patrol is allowed to patrol on foot or on horseback, but its vehicle access is limited to emergencies and to administrative roads, according to a May 2009 letter from Benjamin Tuggle, U.S. Fish and Wildlife regional director, to Robert Gilbert, then the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector Chief.

San Bernardino refuge manager Bill Radke could not be reached for comment Wednesday. But rancher Wendy Glenn confirmed that those rules still exist. Her 15,000-acre ranch surrounds the refuge.

At a news conference in Washington, D.C., Bishop and other lawmakers accused federal land managers of “hiding behind the law” to place wilderness or endangered species ahead of border safety. “It’s unforgivable,” he said.

“The Border Patrol is not being allowed do their job,” Bishop said. “That has to change.”

But a spokesman for the Border Patrol agents union in Arizona said agents understand the reasons for the rules and work around them without a problem.

“I would definitely look and see if there are some restrictions that are too restrictive,” said Brandon Judd, vice president of Local 2544 of the National Border Patrol Council. “But to get rid of all restrictions, you would destroy the land.”

The Border Patrol used to have total access to the San Bernardino refuge but lost that privilege because agents were driving off-road and damaging the land, Glenn said.

The legislation would be “bad for the country,” and wouldn’t improve border security, Glenn said. San Bernardino refuge officials cooperate with the Border Patrol, she said.

“They aren’t impeding border security,” Glenn said. “They are working with them.”

The change in rules wouldn’t have made any difference the night Krentz was killed or during the search for his killer, Glenn said. The shooter was likely in Mexico by the time they found Krentz’s body.

“Having access to drive through the refuge wouldn’t have stopped it one way or another,” Glenn said.

The restrictions imposed on public lands are based on decades of bipartisan legislation and are crucial to protecting the land and wildlife, said Matt Clark, Southwest representative of Defenders of Wildlife.

The legislation perpetuates the myth that border security and natural resource protection are conflicting forces when the reality is that land managers are usually very helpful in border security efforts, he said.

This is not the first time legislators have attempted to give Border Patrol complete access to public lands, Clark said.

“It is a shame that they are using this unfortunate event as a springboard for introducing counterproductive legislation,” Clark said.

Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, said federal land managers are committed to controlling the border by working with the Border Patrol.

During a two-day visit to Texas and Arizona last month, Salazar toured the border by helicopter and foot and was briefed by Border Patrol agents and land managers.

“Secretary Salazar believes that we can meet the twin goals of protecting our national security and our natural resources,” Barkoff said in an e-mail.

While the San Bernardino refuge is small, there are several other large public lands on Arizona’s border that would be impacted by the legislation. They include the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge southwest of Tucson and the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Southwestern Arizona.

http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/article_fa5c1624-485e-11df-9d8e-001cc4c03286.html

In Eagle Pass, divided view of border fence: Many see 2-mile barrier as an eyesore and waste of money; some say it helps quality of life.

March 7, 2010
Austin-American Statesman
by Jeremy Schwartz

EAGLE PASS — As the sun dips toward the horizon, Shelby Park becomes an idyllic place, a rare patch of manicured green along the Texas-Mexico border. Kids practice soccer on the expansive sports fields, and joggers make their afternoon revolutions. A couple of Border Patrol trucks hover in the parking lot alongside the dense stands of cane that hide the Rio Grande from view. Above, two international bridges funnel traffic between Eagle Pass and its Mexican counterpart, Piedras Negras, Coahuila .

Jose Luis Zuniga, watching his two sons practice soccer kicks, takes in the park's newest addition: an $11 million, 14-foot-tall black metal fence.

This part of the fence, finished in October, has roiled emotions like little else in this fast-growing city of 50,000. Like many of his neighbors, Zuniga is bewildered and angered by the placement of the fence, which cuts through nearly two miles of downtown and leaves the city's golf course and premier parkland in what some see as a no man's land between the fence and the river. Illegal immigrants and drug traffickers will simply go around, reasons Zuniga, an engineer at a plant that builds Mossberg shotguns.

"I don't know why they did it," Zuniga says in Spanish as he watches his two sons practice under the lengthening shadows of the international bridge. "Imagine, all that money for nothing."

As construction of 670 miles of fencing along the Southwest border nears completion, at a cost of at least $2.4 billion, border communities like Eagle Pass are struggling to come to terms with their new reality. Is the barrier an effective way to stem the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs across what was an inadequately protected border? Or is it, as Zuniga contends, the physical symbol of a misguided — and expensive — policy that ignores the unique dynamics of the border?

Local Border Patrol agents say the fence plays a vital role in driving immigrant and drug smugglers to the city's edges, where agents have more time to catch them out in the brush — people crossing near downtown can quickly vanish into crowds.

Cesar Cantu, the patrol agent in charge of the Eagle Pass Border Patrol station, says they need one-third fewer agents in downtown now — allowing them to concentrate more on the drug traffickers who prefer to move their product on the outskirts of the city.

Border Patrol agents are quick to point out that the value of drug seizures has gone up — from $41.4 million in 2008 to $76.5 million last year — and apprehensions of illegal immigrants in the Eagle Pass area have steadily decreased over the past five years, as they have throughout the Texas-Mexico border area.

"This is what we need," Cantu says. "Now we have time to do our job and patrol instead of processing aliens."

City officials aren't so sure. Mayor Chad Foster says the border fence hasn't had any "significant impact" on border security since it was built and worries that it will become an eyesore in future years if the federal government later decides not to spend the billions of dollars that maintenance is estimated to cost.

And though many Eagle Pass residents say the fence doesn't interfere with daily life, they resent its presence in their city.

"We feel like we are living with this stigma," Foster said. "My opinion is, this gives a false sense of security. It gives Middle America, which has an embellished idea of the border, the sense that they can sleep at night."

Routed through towns

The erecting of new border barriers, which began in 2006, has been particularly divisive in Texas, which, unlike the rest of the border, already had a physical barrier — the Rio Grande. Because of that, the 110 planned miles of Texas border fence — covering about one-tenth of the state's 1,254-mile border with Mexico — don't straddle the border as the fence does in places like the Arizona desert. Instead, the Texas fence meanders through cities and towns, often sparking protests from residents.

The Eagle Pass portion of the fence begins under the city's second international bridge, where it envelops the municipal golf course, which now lies between the river and the fence. It then jogs across Shelby Park, along the northern edges of soccer and baseball fields, before heading out to the city's less accessible western edge, where high bluffs loom above the river.

In Shelby Park, which sits a few hundred feet from downtown, large gaps in the fencing remain to be filled in with a series of gates that Border Patrol officials say will stay open except during national emergencies. Border officials say the gates will ensure public access to the park; they say they doubt many illegal crossers will make a run for the openings.

The fencing in Eagle Pass is one of several varieties that have been built along the border. The so-called "picket fence" style, featuring tall, thin metal slats a few inches apart, stands in contrast to the more imposing wall-like structures found in parts of the California and Arizona desert and in the Rio Grande Valley. When fully completed, the Eagle Pass section will measure 1.8 miles — about half of the four miles originally planned, but ultimately reduced, by the federal government.

It's just a tiny part of the 110 miles of new fencing that's nearly complete along the Texas border — larger stretches of fencing, measuring more than 50 miles, have gone up in El Paso and in the Rio Grande Valley, and smaller pieces, just a few miles long, have been built in Del Rio and Laredo.

After the U.S. Congress passed the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which mandated the construction of 670 miles of fencing, Foster and other border mayors argued that the barrier was unnecessary, given that apprehensions along the border were already in decline, and could harm relations with Mexico. Foster was worried about the reaction by Eagle Pass' sister city of Piedras Negras. In many ways, Eagle Pass depends on Piedras Negras for survival, as Mexican shoppers have helped fuel the city's economic boom over the past decade. And many families are divided between the two cities, adding to the ties between them.

Foster and other city leaders, hoping to avoid alienating neighbors to the south, tried to deny federal officials access to city land where the fence would be built. After a heated dispute in which the U.S. government successfully sued Eagle Pass in federal court for possession of the land, construction began in 2008.

Eagle Pass was the target of the federal government's first lawsuit against recalcitrant landowners along the border; Foster said city and federal appraisers are negotiating compensation for the land.

The project is nearly finished in Texas, except for a half-mile stretch in Eagle Pass and several miles in the Rio Grande Valley, where city leaders, ranchers, the University of Texas-Brownsville and environmentalists have wrangled with federal officials over where the fence should go.

Miguel Diaz-Barriga, an anthropology professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania who is writing a book about the border wall in Texas, said most border residents oppose the wall but want more border security. A recent survey he conducted found that just 16 percent of respondents in Hidalgo County favored a border wall while 80 percent wanted the number of Border Patrol agents to stay the same or increase. "One should not interpret opposition to the border wall to mean (support for) open borders," he said. "In fact, the opposite is true."

Effectiveness disputed

It's unclear whether the fence is accomplishing what the U.S. Congress originally hoped for along the 2,000-mile Southwest border.

Illegal crossings in Eagle Pass reached their height in 2005, when Border Patrol agents in the sector containing Eagle Pass made 68,483 apprehensions, many of them at the golf course. That number has plummeted since then; last year agents made just 17,079 apprehensions — a statistic that is considered the best measure of illegal crossings.

Today, agents say illegal crossings downtown have slowed to a trickle.

Cantu said his agents — who patrol half of Eagle Pass and parts of surrounding Maverick County — process five or six illegal immigrants per day, compared with as many as 300 during the 2005 heyday. Borderwide, apprehensions have fallen dramatically over the past five years, from 1.2 million in 2005 to 556,000 last year.

Much of the immigrant traffic in Eagle Pass declined after local Border Patrol officials instituted a "zero tolerance" policy for immigrants from Central America. Before the 2006 change, "other than Mexican" detainees were simply released and ordered to appear before an immigration judge. Few appeared for their court date, and agents say Central American immigrants began seeking to be caught, viewing the policy as a free pass across the border. Under the new policy, each illegal immigrant was sent before a judge immediately, often doing jail time before being deported back to the immigrant's home country.

The new policy flooded local court dockets, spurred the creation of large detention facilities and deterred large numbers of immigrants from the Eagle Pass area, experts say. The year after the change, apprehensions fell to 23,000 in the Eagle Pass area.

More recently, the recession has helped tamp down the numbers of immigrants seeking work across the border, many experts agree. But Border Patrol officials say that without a fence, there is no guarantee that large flows of illegal immigrants would not have returned to Eagle Pass. "With the fence, it's less likely that (Eagle Pass) would return to the time of mass crossings," said Dennis Smith, Border Patrol spokesman for the area.

The Government Accountability Office, noting that apprehensions along the Southwest border were already declining by 2007, before most of the fencing was built, stated in a November report that the Border Patrol has yet to conduct a systematic evaluation of the fence's effectiveness borderwide.

The report also found that costs soared during the course of the project — the cost of fencing like what was built in Eagle Pass jumped from $3.9 million per mile to $6.5 million. Among the reasons cited in the report was a labor shortage in Texas, the result of a pre-recession construction boom.

GAO investigators said maintenance costs are estimated to reach $6.5 billion over the next 20 years.

Diverting traffic

At the Eagle Pass Municipal Golf Course, retiree Bruce Thompson hits some practice putts as he gets ready to play a round with some friends. The course hugs the Rio Grande, and from the first tee, you can see the cars and trucks lined up on the overhead bridges waiting to cross into the United States. Thompson, a retired special agent with the Department of Justice who has lived in Eagle Pass for more than two decades, remembers the chaos that golfers used to endure: great bunches of immigrants making mad dashes across the expansive greens with Border Patrol agents in hot pursuit. Worse, he said, bandits used to hide in the tall cane along the river, only to jump out at unsuspecting golfers, mugging them for their clubs and cell phones.

"In my opinion, the fence is a good thing," he said. "We used to have them coming across here by the horde. Granted, they are (crossing) somewhere else, but at least not here. It will keep them out of the downtown area. It will make them go to the outskirts."

Thompson also believes the border wall in downtown will clean up the dangerous neighborhoods just across the river in Piedras Negras, which officials say house gangs and stash houses born out of the illicit border crossing business. "I think in the long run, it will be better for the city because it will be safer," he said.

At Eagle Pass's biweekly flea market, held on the edge of Shelby Park, anger toward the border wall is palpable. The fence stands just a few feet from vendors selling everything from old washing machines to used power tools.

"Before it was very beautiful, very nice around here," said Reyes Medina, who has been selling used baseball equipment at the flea market for 15 years. "Now we feel like a catastrophe has hit us. We feel like we are in prison; it's like they have us locked up here."

"This is a wall of shame," fumed vendor Jose de Jesus Hernandez. "I can't look at it any other way."

Reyes said that in the first weeks after the wall was built, business was decimated. Customers, about 90 percent of whom cross the bridge from Mexico, were spooked, he said. Since then, business has slowly improved as customers became more used to the fencing but still hasn't reached pre-fence levels.

In Piedras Negras, where resentment toward the wall runs high — and where Coahuila's governor is building a "green wall" of trees along the Rio Grande as a response — the indignation hasn't translated into boycotts of American stores.

Fernando Estrada, whose family owns a Piedras Negras jewelry store, said that despite his opposition he still crosses the bridge almost weekly to take advantage of sales and specials at American stores like H\u2011E\u2011B. "It feels weird to see the wall when you cross," he said. "You can see it as a symbol of division, and that's why a lot of people don't like it, because it separates communities even more."

After two years, the fence is becoming part of Eagle Pass' psyche. On a recent afternoon at the municipal golf course, students Kimberley Rodriguez and Jennifer Zavala, both members of the CC Winn High School golf club, played in the shadow of the fence.

"It's a little strange," said Rodriguez, 17. "It feels like they are trying to keep us from our families (on the Mexican side of the river) in a way. "

For Zavala, 15, the fence is simply a part of her world. "I can't even remember when the wall was not here," she said. "I never really noticed, because it's part of the landscape."

http://www.statesman.com/news/texas/in-eagle-pass-divided-view-of-border-fence-326471.html

Landowner Says The Border Wall Has Cut Off Access To Their Property

KRGV news
January 25, 2010
by Christina Rendon

BROWNSVILLE - Ernesto De Leon's family has owned land south of town for generations. They've allowed a Fermin Leal to use the land grow crops on it since the 1970's.

Leal says recent work on the border wall has cut off access to the land.

"We don't have access to our property without going through someone else's property," says Leal.

Leal tells CHANNEL 5 NEWS up until a few weeks ago, there was a gap they used to access the land, but the government has now closed that gap.

Ernesto De Leon says he didn't fight the government when they initially built the wall, giving it away on the condition crews built a 40 foot gate on his property.

"We had four or five different properties we had to sign up for that fence to go through," says De Leon.

De Leon says he plans to fight for the fence he was promised, even if he has to take it to court.

http://www.krgv.com/news/local/story/Landowner-Says-The-Border-Wall-Has-Cut-Off-Access/VNLpNmWYsE2n0K-3VayVZQ.cspx

All Walled Up

Texas Observer
January 22, 2010
by Melissa del Bosque

In the early spring of 2008, the uniformed Border Patrol officers delivering condemnation notices door-to-door seemed surprised by the defiance they met from Brownsville landowners. The first time the officers came, it was with clipboards and a few documents to sign—the feds like to call it a “friendly condemnation,” which means folks are expected to happily sign away portions of their land for meager compensation from the U.S. government.

Along the border, it’s not unusual for landowners to take a look at the legalese, stare at the olive drab uniforms and shiny gold badges, and sign on the spot. But in Brownsville and Cameron County, many glanced at the words “taking” and “U.S. government” and showed the agents the door.

The next time the Department of Homeland Security came calling, all pretense of “friendliness” was gone. With real estate specialists from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in tow, they now had pointed words. Congress had mandated the building of a 670-mile fence along the southern border in its 2006 Secure Border Fence Act. Sign the form or not, residents were told: The government will get its land.

The sterner message had little effect. Those who had the money, or the pro bono attorneys willing to help, filed lawsuits against DHS and dug in their heels. The battle of Brownsville—the most pitched and prolonged fight along the Texas border—was joined.

It wasn’t just landowning citizens who were up in arms. Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada, insisting the wall would split his already-troubled community and wreck its hopes for the future, became one of the nation’s most outspoken opponents of the “security fence.” Juliet Garcia, president of the University of Texas at Brownsville, declared that the government was not going to build its wall through the middle of her campus.

Garcia channeled popular sentiment in Brownsville with her statement on the federal agency’s move to seize property: “Of course, we believe in protecting our borders. Of course, we believe in strong immigration policy. But we also understand that a fence, no matter how high or how wide, is no substitute for either.”

Residents marched in protest. Ahumada joined other border mayors and lobbied Washington. University students picketed the federal courthouse. Brownsville caused such a commotion that Congressman Raul Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, scheduled a public hearing at the university that April. Dozens of students and residents gathered outside, holding signs reading “Build Bridges Not Walls” and “No Wall Between Amigos.”

Inside, border-fence champion Tom Tancredo, then a Republican congressman from Colorado, was flummoxed by the fierce opposition. As one resident after another stood up to protest the plan, Tancredo huffed: “Why don’t we just build the fence north of Brownsville then?” Responding to a letter from Ahumada after the hearing, Tancredo shot back: “This is a matter of national importance, and the American public should not be asked to sit back and allow a handful of local governments and their friends in the ‘open borders’ lobby to exercise veto power over something that impacts not only our security, but our national sovereignty.”

Brownsville staged a lively rebellion. For a while, an unlikely victory seemed possible, thanks in large part to Andrew Hanen, the only federal judge in the nation who forced Homeland Security to acknowledge landowners’ constitutional protections. In case after case, Hanen refused to rubber-stamp the condemnations and ruled that the government would have to provide “fair compensation” for the land it was taking.

Residents pinned their hopes on dragging out their lawsuits long enough for President Barack Obama to take office. They expected him to send his Homeland Security team to take stock of the environmental and economic damage being done by the steel-and-cement monstrosity, and halt construction on a project whose $2.4 billion cost continues to rise. Those hopes were dashed when Obama announced the “secure fence” would be finished. In a final plea last May, Brownsville residents (along with others along the border) wrote a letter to the new president. “Absent your intercession, a great, lasting and damaging injustice will be dealt to the people of the Texas-Mexico border,” it read in part.

Obama never answered. More than 27 miles of border wall now snake raggedly through Cameron County. Only seven more miles remain to be built.

The rust-colored, steel-and-cement wall has become a surreal fixture on Brownsville’s skyline. It cleaves downtown Hope Park, built as a symbol of unity between the United States and Mexico. It stops and starts, without rhyme or reason, along the Rio Grande River’s levees, leaving miles of gaps. It highlights the city’s economic divide: It’s the first thing folks in the poorer barrios see when they look out their windows, while richer folks enjoy unaltered views of palm trees and manicured fairways when they tee off on private golf courses. It zigs and zags through residents’ backyards, through citrus orchards—an ugly red scar on a green, subtropical landscape.

“We don’t call it a fence,” says Ahumada. “It’s a wall. A fence is something you’d want to put up in your backyard.”

On an unseasonably frigid Friday morning in early January, the mayor sits in his downtown office sipping coffee and recounting the arguments he tried to make to Washington. “This wall has killed Brownsville,” he says. “We have a per-capita income of $14,000 per household, high unemployment, a high dropout rate. We don’t need a wall to compound the problems we’re already having. What we need is an investment from the federal government to help us fulfill our future.”

As he speaks, Kiewit Corp., one of the nation’s largest construction companies, is busy draining resacas (lakes created by the shifting tides of the Rio Grande) and bulldozing citrus orchards to build those last seven miles of wall through Cameron County. To date, 199 county residents have had land seized, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures. Every day, the Brownsville Herald publishes government notices of the properties to be condemned by the Department of Homeland Security.

The agency is already one year late and several million dollars over budget in fulfilling Congress’ 2006 mandate—and counting. The Secure Fence Act was cobbled together so poorly that legislators failed to take several important factors into consideration. For one, thousands of private landowners would have to forfeit their land—and not all would go willingly. For another, a 1944 treaty forbade construction of anything in the Rio Grande floodplain that would push floodwaters into either Mexico or the United States.

Because of the treaty, DHS was forced to build its wall north of the river’s levee—sometimes as far as two miles upland. In Brownsville, the 8-foot-tall earthen levee follows the twists and turns of the Rio Grande for several miles. The mayor had seen the river shared with Mexico not as a security threat, but as a selling point for his city. Before the wall, Brownsville had plans to build a river walk like San Antonio’s—an anchor for downtown revitalization and a transit loop that would spur more commerce.

“We had a private investor group from California looking to invest $150 million in the downtown revitalization with the river walk as the anchor,” Ahumada says, “but they backed out because of the wall.” Making matters worse, DHS ran the wall close to the planned transit loop. “To build the loop now, we would have to move the border wall and put it somewhere else to the DHS’s specifications,” he says. “We estimate it would cost the city $13 million a mile.”

In June 2009, Brownsville council members finally voted to surrender 15 acres of city land to the federal government despite many residents’ persistent opposition. Ahumada never resigned himself to it. The two-year-long debate over ceding land to the DHS bitterly divided the city government—especially after the council’s majority agreed to perhaps the worst deal struck by any border community. They forfeited the $123,100 DHS had offered to buy the land and allowed, without compensation, a “floating fence” with 15-foot steel posts stuck into a concrete base to be built downtown.

What does Brownsville get in return? According to its contract with DHS, the city agreed to eventually build a combination levee-border wall, a permanent structure to replace the floating fence. Brownsville taxpayers will foot the entire bill, last estimated at $12 million to $16 million per mile.

So the battle of Brownsville became a surrender. But a few folks still fight on.

Seventy-two-year-old Leonard Loop lives on the outskirts of Brownsville, where he flies the American flag outside his feedstore. He’s as patriotic as anybody: an Air Force veteran whose wife used to work for the State Department. Two years ago, when he got wind of the government’s plan to seize their land, he called a family meeting.

“We sat down and talked about it and decided we had to do what was right,” Loop says. “My sons own the 730 acres on the river side of the fence. It’s their livelihood, and they are in deep debt for it. I told my boys, ‘the federal government will ruin you if you don’t stick up for your rights.’”

The Loop family filed suit against DHS. Leonard Loop likes to call it his “disagreement.” It’s gone on for 18 months now.

Like most folks around Brownsville, Loop says he’s all for border security. But the wall hasn’t made anybody safer, he says. In fact, just the opposite, especially for those—like his sons—who will be locked out on the river side of the wall with access controlled by the Border Patrol. Besides, Loop says, a poorly constructed fence with miles of gaps doesn’t exactly spell security. “I heard they already figured out a way in Mexico to use old motorcycle tires to climb the fence. They jam them in the gaps and climb it like a ladder.”

Loop owns 160 acres dotted with citrus orchards. He and Debbie, his wife, sell sweet Rio Red grapefruits and oranges at their feedstore. Their sons, Frank and Ray, grow cabbage, corn, and other vegetables on their 730 fertile acres along the riverbank. The Loops have farmed here for almost four decades. Even now, their lives are mostly marked by tranquility and backbreaking work. Occasionally, their routines are punctuated by bizarre moments that remind them they live along an international border. “I once saw a truck being chased by the Border Patrol drive into a wheat field,” he recalls. “The driver fled on foot and left five women behind in their underwear who had just swum across the river.”

The Loops occupy a particularly breathtaking patch of the Rio Grande. There’s a horseshoe-shaped resaca full of bass and catfish, lined with palm trees. There’s a pavilion on the river’s edge they use for family reunions and church picnics. They don’t make a mint off this land by a long shot. But it’s easy to see why they won’t give it up without a struggle.

On a bitter-cold January afternoon, Loop tells me he’s been up since 2:30 a.m. trying to save his citrus orchards from Brownsville’s first hard freeze in 20 years. No matter how exhausted he is, the notion of what the government’s done still raises his blood pressure. “This has been a learning experience,” he says. “I never thought this country would treat you that way.”

Last November, DHS sent bulldozers to mow down Loop’s grapefruit orchard. Then they drained a resaca and condemned his nephew’s driveway to start building the wall through the family land.

When it’s finished, Loop’s nephew and his son Ray’s family will live on the Rio Grande side of the wall—part of more than 50,000 acres of U.S. land along the river that will be walled off by the fence from the start of the levee in Hidalgo County through Cameron County. Leonard, Debbie and their other son will live on the other side. Homeland Security is building a 50-foot gate. The agency, Loop says, refuses to tell him whether his family members and their employees will be able to use it without a Border Patrol escort.

Loop says a federal official told his son Ray that if there were an orange alert—meaning a high threat level—his family would have to evacuate their home and the gates would be locked behind them. That strikes Leonard as especially ludicrous, since the segment of wall that cuts through the land will end a half-mile away from his property—commencing a 14-mile stretch of levee, largely federal land, that won’t have any fence at all. “You can just walk around it and do anything,” he says.

Claude Knighten, a public information officer for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, tells the Observer he’s not aware of the orange-alert policy. His e-mailed response was that the agency “has no knowledge of this statement and therefore cannot respond.”

That’s the kind of thing that galls Loop the most. He can’t get reliable information from the government, he says, so his family can plan for the future. “Initially, when we got into this 18 months ago, I thought the government would work with us, and we would sit down and discuss things like access,” he says. “But they just do whatever they please whether it’s right or not.”

At first, the government seized a 60-foot-wide strip of Loop land starting at the base of the levee. Then they took a 120-foot-wide strip. “First they told us we could drive on the levee. Then they told us we couldn’t,” Loop says. “How can a landowner feel safe when the government keeps changing its mind all the time?”

Loop falls quiet for a moment as we roll up on the levee in his silver pickup truck to where the Kiewit Corp. workers are building the fence that cuts through his orchard. Majestic pink spoonbills and white egrets forage for food in a half-drained resaca. A worker on an earthmover is filling the lake with mud.

“They can do that,” Loop finally says. “Homeland Security waived all the environmental laws. It’s unbelievable the power they’ve got.”

Two Border Patrol SUVs are parked side-by-side, blocking the levee up ahead. As we’ve circled his land, we’ve been under constant observation by the Border Patrol. Recently, Loop was told he could no longer drive the levee, which he must cross to access his son’s property and reach a portion of his own. “They haven’t paid me yet for the second condemnation,” he says. “As far as I am concerned I can still drive the levee till they pay me.”

Loop contemplates the situation, then turns back onto the highway. “There are so many things that don’t make sense,” he says. “I’m no expert, but I was born and raised down here, and I know what things are like on the border. The guys who are calling the shots—they’ve never lived here, and they have no idea what it’s like.”

Loop is slated to receive $24,900 for the three acres the government has taken. His property valuation has plummeted. The only thing he can hope to achieve now with his lawsuit is better compensation for his land. Nobody would buy it now, he says, with an 18-foot wall running through the middle of it. “The only buyers I could see interested in riverfront property now are the drug cartels or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

I feel like we live in an occupied zone now,” says 74-year-old Eloisa Tamez. Early on the coldest Saturday morning in memory, Tamez, a nursing professor at UT-Brownsville who looks 20 years younger than her age, sits in her modest home on her family property. An heir to a 12,600-acre Spanish land grant deeded by the king of Spain to her family in the 18th century, Tamez is struggling to hold on to the last three acres. Like Leonard Loop, she feels like she’s going to be the last holdout in Brownsville—battling the government not only for her family, but for all the border landowners intimidated into signing away their rights or giving up because they couldn’t afford court battles.

“People stop me all the time in the store or recognize me at the bank, and they say, ‘Good for you. Keep on fighting the government,’” Tamez says.

She’s been able to carry on thanks to lawyer Peter Schey at the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law in Los Angeles. He has handled her two-year-old case against DHS pro bono. “I will not give up my land,” Tamez says. She intends to leave it to her grandchildren.

The government has other ideas. Last summer, it seized one of Tamez’s three acres. While she was at a conference in Colorado, contractors erected the 18-foot wall outside her house almost overnight. They didn’t give her a gate, and now they want to bar her access to the levee—as they are doing with the Loop Family. That would cut Tamez off from her riverfront property.

Tamez believes it is punishment for having been one of Brownsville’s most vocal critics of the wall. “Homeland Security has been very aggressive,” she says. “Border Patrol agents rush over to my car and start questioning me whenever I drive on the levee. I haven’t been to my property on the south side of the fence since July.”

In December, Tamez rented out her deceased aunt’s home, which sits right next door to her own. Her tenant, a security guard who works at night, complains that the Border Patrol had stopped him to check his citizenship status on his way to work. He reports that Border Patrol agents often park outside the house. His family feels like they are being watched.

“They are intimidating people and stopping cars all the time to check citizenship,” says Tamez. “Border Patrol agents should recognize our cars and know that we live here by now.”

Traffic stops by Border Patrol to check citizenship status are routine in Brownsville these days. The green-and-white SUVs constantly race up and down the levees, leaving plumes of white dust in their wake. Steel towers with video cameras dot the South Texas skyline, and, now, the 18-foot wall.

“Where are our rights?” asks Tamez. “We are U.S. citizens, too.”

Mayor Ahumada wonders the same thing. When will Washington start listening to the people who live along the border?

“In terms of providing the security we need against illegal drugs and deterring illegal immigration, this wall has not helped us. In fact, it’s hurt us,” he says. “The congressional leaders like Tancredo who wanted to build a wall here—they did it to get votes from the interior of America so they could appear to be doing something to protect our country. We’re just a pawn in the political chess game.”

Increasingly, racism is cloaked in border security, he says. “Interior America is clamoring for anti-Mexican rhetoric. They disguise it under border security, but it’s racism in my opinion. We have an immigration problem, but what are they so afraid of?”

Clearly, they were not afraid of the citizens of Brownsville.

http://www.texasobserver.org/features/all-walled-up