Associated Press / Mercury News
January 7, 2008
SAN DIEGO—The Border Patrol will close a popular park on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean to make way for a triple fence along the Mexican border, a legislative aide and activists said Wednesday.
The Border Patrol had been mum on whether Friendship Park would be affected by plans to erect more than 670 miles of barriers along the southern U.S. border. The park draws big crowds from both sides, where people chat through a chain-link fence separating Imperial Beach, Calif., and Tijuana, Mexico. They exchange kisses, tamales, even communion wafers.
By May, the half-acre plaza inside Border Field State Park is expected to be gone, replaced by three fences separated by about 125 feet, according to Jonathan Hardy, an aide to state Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego.
Hardy said he attended a meeting on Tuesday in which Border Patrol agents, led by the San Diego sector chief Mike Fisher, told legislative aides and community activists that the agency will build the fence at the plaza, which was dedicated in 1971 by then-first lady Patricia Nixon.
He said officials showed them backhoes that had already begun breaking up the cement plaza to make way for a dirt patrol road that will be sandwiched between the fences.
A Border Patrol spokesman, Mark Endicott, said he was unaware of any decision on the park's fate. He said Fisher was unavailable to comment.
The fence will extend to the beach, where the border is now marked by tall poles with spaces big enough for adults to slip their arms through, said the Rev. John Fanestil, a United Methodist pastor who was also at the meeting.
"There will be no public access, it could not have been more absolute," said Fanestil, who has offered weekly communion through the chain-link fence. "Their language was that they were demolishing the plaza and then they'll reconstruct it with a road."
In November, U.S. Reps. Susan Davis and Bob Filner, both San Diego Democrats, and seven state and local elected officials wrote President-elect Barack Obama's transition team to urge that the park be kept open, calling it a powerful symbol of goodwill between the U.S. and Mexico. They are awaiting a response.
A spokesman for Davis, Aaron Hunter, said the Border Patrol's decision to close the park was disappointing.
"We have a new administration. This decision was made by an administration that's on its way out," he said.
On the park's Mexican side, there is also a cement plaza, which sits next to a bullring. One group holds cross-border yoga classes.
Parts of the 800-acre Border Field State Park will remain open, including equestrian trails, according to those who attended the meeting.
The park is next to "Smuggler's Gulch," a gorge that is being filled with nearly 1.9 million tons of dirt to make way for fencing. The area was overrun by illegal immigrants until U.S. authorities launched a crackdown in the 1990s that pushed people to remote mountains and deserts.
Border Patrol officials told the group Tuesday that drugs have been passed through the fence at Friendship Park and that the agency lacked resources to patrol the crowds, said Hardy, the legislative aide.
"In their mind, it's supposed to be a controlled, secure area," Hardy said. "They feel they don't have the manpower to allow large groups."
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_11401124
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Community celebrates Chertoff’s departure
Brownsville Herald
January 5, 2008
Border communities from Tucson, Ariz. to Brownsville on Saturday will celebrate the end of Michael Chertoff's term as Homeland Security Secretary with piñatas, music and a retirement cake.
There's only one catch: Chertoff isn't invited.
Some of the secretary's most vocal critics will gather at Brownsville's Galeria 409, just a few yards from where the fence will be constructed, to commemorate what they consider Chertoff's disastrous tenure.
"This is not a protest disguised as a party - this is a party," said Scott Nicol, of the No Border Wall Coalition. "Chertoff has only been secretary for three years but he has managed to do a tremendous amount of damage. Texas will be glad to see him gone, and it can't come soon enough."
A group in El Paso will also host a Chertoff sendoff party on Jan. 10, which will include a border fence limbo.
But before groups celebrate Chertoff's departure, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will begin preparing for the fence's construction in Brownsville.
In a letter to Mayor Pat M. Ahumada Jr. last week, DHS officials wrote that clearing and grubbing will begin in two city locations where the barrier will be erected - in the La Muralla area and on a stretch near River Bend Resort. The two segments total 5.2 miles.
Though the government's deadline to complete the project passed on Dec. 31, plans to build 17 miles of fencing in Brownsville remain unchanged.
"We're still headed toward our goal," said U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling. "The contracts that were awarded (in Cameron County) still stand."
Ahumada hopes to add the City of Brownsville to an amicus brief filed by the Texas Border Coalition expressing opposition to the fence. He'll broach the issue at the Jan. 6 City Commission meeting.
The border fence has made Chertoff a household name in South Texas, as DHS's influence has grown. Created in 2002, the department has become the third largest cabinet in the federal government, overseeing U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/chertoff_93327___article.html/tucson_michael.html
(For more information on the Chertoff Retirement Parties in Brownsville and El Paso, go to:
http://noborderwall-take-action.blogspot.com/2009/01/chertoff-retirement-parties-in.html )
January 5, 2008
Border communities from Tucson, Ariz. to Brownsville on Saturday will celebrate the end of Michael Chertoff's term as Homeland Security Secretary with piñatas, music and a retirement cake.
There's only one catch: Chertoff isn't invited.
Some of the secretary's most vocal critics will gather at Brownsville's Galeria 409, just a few yards from where the fence will be constructed, to commemorate what they consider Chertoff's disastrous tenure.
"This is not a protest disguised as a party - this is a party," said Scott Nicol, of the No Border Wall Coalition. "Chertoff has only been secretary for three years but he has managed to do a tremendous amount of damage. Texas will be glad to see him gone, and it can't come soon enough."
A group in El Paso will also host a Chertoff sendoff party on Jan. 10, which will include a border fence limbo.
But before groups celebrate Chertoff's departure, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will begin preparing for the fence's construction in Brownsville.
In a letter to Mayor Pat M. Ahumada Jr. last week, DHS officials wrote that clearing and grubbing will begin in two city locations where the barrier will be erected - in the La Muralla area and on a stretch near River Bend Resort. The two segments total 5.2 miles.
Though the government's deadline to complete the project passed on Dec. 31, plans to build 17 miles of fencing in Brownsville remain unchanged.
"We're still headed toward our goal," said U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling. "The contracts that were awarded (in Cameron County) still stand."
Ahumada hopes to add the City of Brownsville to an amicus brief filed by the Texas Border Coalition expressing opposition to the fence. He'll broach the issue at the Jan. 6 City Commission meeting.
The border fence has made Chertoff a household name in South Texas, as DHS's influence has grown. Created in 2002, the department has become the third largest cabinet in the federal government, overseeing U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/chertoff_93327___article.html/tucson_michael.html
(For more information on the Chertoff Retirement Parties in Brownsville and El Paso, go to:
http://noborderwall-take-action.blogspot.com/2009/01/chertoff-retirement-parties-in.html )
Monday, January 5, 2009
Friendship Park's intended purpose is lost in fog of border war
Los Angeles Times
January 5, 2008
There are just two weeks left in his presidency, but down in San Diego County the heavy machinery is grinding away at one last grand project from the administration of George W. Bush.
As The Times reported Sunday, your tax dollars are paying for contractors to move mountains of earth and make canyons disappear at the U.S.-Mexico border. New fences are rising and a no-man's land is being carved into the Earth.
By government decree, state and federal laws that might have slowed down the project -- including the Clean Water and Endangered Species acts -- have been suspended in the name of national security.
This hurried display of Pharaonic excess from the people who brought us the Iraq war won't make us much safer. It's another bit of overkill that's blind to the causes of illegal immigration. And it also happens to be killing a place called Friendship.
Friendship Park sits on a spot of California territory overlooking the beach where the border reaches the Pacific Ocean. In the early 1970s, President Nixon and then-Gov. Ronald Reagan established it as a symbol of international goodwill.
These days, contractors hired by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have sealed off its picnic benches with hurricane fencing.
For three decades, the park has been property of the state of California and a cross-border meeting place. Fernando Orozco, a legal U.S. resident, biked there Sunday. He recently had his wallet and ID stolen, and the park is the only place where he can see his wife, Marta Ramos, a Mexican national. They embraced and kissed through the fence.
John Fanestil, a Methodist minister, is one of several activists who say they are determined to "use the park for its intended purpose." Even as the construction project marches toward the sea, Fanestil holds Communion at the fence every week, passing a chalice of wine over or through the barriers.
"There is no accountability and no check on the power of Homeland Security," he told me as we hiked to the fence. "What they're doing here is almost punitive."
Illegal border crossings at the park stopped being a major problem more than a decade ago -- that traffic moved inland, to the Sonoran Desert, after the Clinton administration's Operation Gatekeeper brought fences, cameras, floodlights and motion detectors to the area. But the current administration's determination to build ever-higher barriers has not flagged.
In November, two members of Congress, half a dozen state legislators and Lt. Gov. John Garamendi wrote to President-elect Obama's transition team asking that he "intervene to save Friendship Park."
But construction has continued. And on Sunday, Fanestil, 47, passed tortillas that doubled as Communion wafers through the border. Border Patrol agents had prevented him from climbing up to the bluff and his usual spot near the picnic benches, so he held the ceremony at the beach. "Just another day at Friendship Park," he said afterward.
A lot of history has unfolded on that spot of earth and sand, much of it reflecting the tortured and ambivalent relationship we have with our Spanish-speaking neighbor to the south.
On Oct. 10, 1849, in the wake of the Mexican War, a group of U.S. and Mexican surveyors met there and began mapping the frontier. First Lady Pat Nixon dedicated Friendship Park in 1971, and even reached across the border to shake a hand or two. Until recently, you could picnic in its half-acre plaza, or walk up to the obelisk that marks the first point in the 1849 survey. You could even put your fingers through the fence and talk to someone on the other side.
That was the era of "friendship." John Carlos Frey, a San Diego native and filmmaker who joined me on my hike with Fanestil, remembers celebrating his ninth birthday at Friendship Park in 1972.
"My Mexican relatives passed their presents over the fence," he said. "And we could walk over to the Mexican side and buy some tacos if we liked. It wasn't a big deal."
Then came the era of The Wall, which was spurred by the anarchy of the 1980s and '90s. Large crowds of illegal crossers gathered at the bluff and nearby canyons at night to rush past the overmatched Border Patrol.
The fences the Clinton administration built in response shifted illegal immigration but didn't stop it. In the first years of this century, migrants have paid increasingly higher fees to smugglers who ferry them through the distant desert.
Last year, when I lived in Mexico City, I knew one woman whose husband paid $3,000 to a "coyote" to get across the border. He later called from Phoenix to say the smuggler was holding him hostage and demanding $500 more. It seems crazy that anyone would try to cross that desert by dealing with such criminals -- but many take the risk and make it across.
Even if the U.S. government managed to hermetically seal the land and river border, experts predict the smugglers would simply move out to the Gulf of Mexico, much like the Africans who cross the Mediterranean Sea to enter Europe.
What will stop illegal immigration is a mega-construction project of justice on the Latin American side of the border, the sudden leveling of mountains of inequality.
That won't happen soon. But in the meantime, the crackdown on employers and the slowdown in the U.S. economy are succeeding in keeping more people on the other side.
"They don't want us over there any more," a Salvadoran man named Walter told me through the fence when I visited Friendship Park last spring.
He had been deported from the U.S. a year earlier, after 15 years in Los Angeles. His wife, U.S. citizen Alicia Sandoval, had moved to Tijuana to live with him and their two children. On the weekends, they come to the park to peer into the country where they used to live.
"Tijuana is not a good place to be," Alicia told me through the fence. "There's too much violence."
A few minutes later, I met another woman, Angelica, who stood on the other side of the fence with her son, 9-year-old Eduardo. She wept when I told her that a Border Patrol agent had chased everyone else away, saying the park was closed.She had come to the fence to meet her husband, a Cuban musician who had obtained asylum in the U.S.
The boy peered through the steel mesh into the United States, as if his father might appear suddenly on the empty trails and wetlands on the other side.
http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-me-tobar6-2009jan06,0,2887120.column
January 5, 2008
There are just two weeks left in his presidency, but down in San Diego County the heavy machinery is grinding away at one last grand project from the administration of George W. Bush.
As The Times reported Sunday, your tax dollars are paying for contractors to move mountains of earth and make canyons disappear at the U.S.-Mexico border. New fences are rising and a no-man's land is being carved into the Earth.
By government decree, state and federal laws that might have slowed down the project -- including the Clean Water and Endangered Species acts -- have been suspended in the name of national security.
This hurried display of Pharaonic excess from the people who brought us the Iraq war won't make us much safer. It's another bit of overkill that's blind to the causes of illegal immigration. And it also happens to be killing a place called Friendship.
Friendship Park sits on a spot of California territory overlooking the beach where the border reaches the Pacific Ocean. In the early 1970s, President Nixon and then-Gov. Ronald Reagan established it as a symbol of international goodwill.
These days, contractors hired by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have sealed off its picnic benches with hurricane fencing.
For three decades, the park has been property of the state of California and a cross-border meeting place. Fernando Orozco, a legal U.S. resident, biked there Sunday. He recently had his wallet and ID stolen, and the park is the only place where he can see his wife, Marta Ramos, a Mexican national. They embraced and kissed through the fence.
John Fanestil, a Methodist minister, is one of several activists who say they are determined to "use the park for its intended purpose." Even as the construction project marches toward the sea, Fanestil holds Communion at the fence every week, passing a chalice of wine over or through the barriers.
"There is no accountability and no check on the power of Homeland Security," he told me as we hiked to the fence. "What they're doing here is almost punitive."
Illegal border crossings at the park stopped being a major problem more than a decade ago -- that traffic moved inland, to the Sonoran Desert, after the Clinton administration's Operation Gatekeeper brought fences, cameras, floodlights and motion detectors to the area. But the current administration's determination to build ever-higher barriers has not flagged.
In November, two members of Congress, half a dozen state legislators and Lt. Gov. John Garamendi wrote to President-elect Obama's transition team asking that he "intervene to save Friendship Park."
But construction has continued. And on Sunday, Fanestil, 47, passed tortillas that doubled as Communion wafers through the border. Border Patrol agents had prevented him from climbing up to the bluff and his usual spot near the picnic benches, so he held the ceremony at the beach. "Just another day at Friendship Park," he said afterward.
A lot of history has unfolded on that spot of earth and sand, much of it reflecting the tortured and ambivalent relationship we have with our Spanish-speaking neighbor to the south.
On Oct. 10, 1849, in the wake of the Mexican War, a group of U.S. and Mexican surveyors met there and began mapping the frontier. First Lady Pat Nixon dedicated Friendship Park in 1971, and even reached across the border to shake a hand or two. Until recently, you could picnic in its half-acre plaza, or walk up to the obelisk that marks the first point in the 1849 survey. You could even put your fingers through the fence and talk to someone on the other side.
That was the era of "friendship." John Carlos Frey, a San Diego native and filmmaker who joined me on my hike with Fanestil, remembers celebrating his ninth birthday at Friendship Park in 1972.
"My Mexican relatives passed their presents over the fence," he said. "And we could walk over to the Mexican side and buy some tacos if we liked. It wasn't a big deal."
Then came the era of The Wall, which was spurred by the anarchy of the 1980s and '90s. Large crowds of illegal crossers gathered at the bluff and nearby canyons at night to rush past the overmatched Border Patrol.
The fences the Clinton administration built in response shifted illegal immigration but didn't stop it. In the first years of this century, migrants have paid increasingly higher fees to smugglers who ferry them through the distant desert.
Last year, when I lived in Mexico City, I knew one woman whose husband paid $3,000 to a "coyote" to get across the border. He later called from Phoenix to say the smuggler was holding him hostage and demanding $500 more. It seems crazy that anyone would try to cross that desert by dealing with such criminals -- but many take the risk and make it across.
Even if the U.S. government managed to hermetically seal the land and river border, experts predict the smugglers would simply move out to the Gulf of Mexico, much like the Africans who cross the Mediterranean Sea to enter Europe.
What will stop illegal immigration is a mega-construction project of justice on the Latin American side of the border, the sudden leveling of mountains of inequality.
That won't happen soon. But in the meantime, the crackdown on employers and the slowdown in the U.S. economy are succeeding in keeping more people on the other side.
"They don't want us over there any more," a Salvadoran man named Walter told me through the fence when I visited Friendship Park last spring.
He had been deported from the U.S. a year earlier, after 15 years in Los Angeles. His wife, U.S. citizen Alicia Sandoval, had moved to Tijuana to live with him and their two children. On the weekends, they come to the park to peer into the country where they used to live.
"Tijuana is not a good place to be," Alicia told me through the fence. "There's too much violence."
A few minutes later, I met another woman, Angelica, who stood on the other side of the fence with her son, 9-year-old Eduardo. She wept when I told her that a Border Patrol agent had chased everyone else away, saying the park was closed.She had come to the fence to meet her husband, a Cuban musician who had obtained asylum in the U.S.
The boy peered through the steel mesh into the United States, as if his father might appear suddenly on the empty trails and wetlands on the other side.
http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-me-tobar6-2009jan06,0,2887120.column
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Keep Out!
Could it be that the biggest problem along the U.S.-Mexico border isn’t undocumented immigrants but Washington politicians who want to build a fence?
Texas Monthly
November 2007
I’ll confess that I tossed the plan almost immediately. I’d intended simply to drive from Laredo to Brownsville, the stretch of border where most of Texas’ share of the proposed security fence is supposed to be built. A day here, a day there; I hadn’t meant to linger in any one place, but after three days I found myself still in Laredo, darting on and off the tail end of Interstate 35. Hot, overcast, and clogged with cargo-laden rigs, the city had little to lure the casual traveler, but if you were interested in the matter of the fence, there was always another person to see. There was Joseph Hein, who took me to his family ranch on the Rio Grande, where he raises Appaloosas; he told me he’d have to get out of the business if the water were fenced off. There was Dennis Nixon, the chairman of IBC Bank, who met me in his expansive office, outlined a broad economic case against the fence, and sent me off with a white paper on immigration policy he’d distributed to every member of Congress. There was a young woman from Mexico, undocumented, living and working in Laredo, who told me that her estranged husband had reported her to the Border Patrol so that he could kidnap their children. If a fence were built, she speculated, a lot of people wouldn’t be able to see their families as much.
Last summer, in Laredo and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, what had once been presumed a political phantasm now loomed as a real possibility: that the Secure Fence Act, passed by Congress to prevent “terrorists [and] other unlawful aliens” from entering the country, might result in an actual fence being built along sizable stretches of the Rio Grande. When President Bush signed the bill in October 2006, it was perceived as a feint meant to appeal to voters on the eve of the election. (Because their immigration bill had failed, the thinking goes, Republicans had to do something to show that they’d confronted the issue.) Yet $1.2 billion was quickly appropriated for border security projects, and this year the Border Patrol, in a clumsy, quasi-clandestine fashion, began to circulate maps indicating where the fence might go. From afar it was difficult to imagine: Hundreds of miles of fence between two countries? The state of Texas partially walled off? What would such a thing look like? Where would it go? What effects would it have? The best way to begin to answer those questions, it seemed to me, was to drive to the border and ask them.
This was not an original notion. I arrived in Laredo to discover the city full of reporters—from newspapers, magazines, CNN—booked at the posh pseudo-colonial La Posada Hotel, drinking at a new bar off Del Mar Boulevard, comparing notes and names. It wasn’t just the fence. Some had come to report on the case of three National Guardsmen who’d recently been caught smuggling Mexicans into the country, but there were also the Nuevo Laredo violence stories, the drug stories, the immigration stories, all of them tangled together. A town whose name had once been synonymous with “dusty backwater” had lately become a fishbowl for certain national woes.
The stated aim of the Secure Fence Act is “operational control,” defined as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States” (both unwanted people and contraband may qualify as “entries”)—in essence, the fantasy of a perfectly sealed border. Like the aim of eradicating all terrorists from the globe, operational control serves to justify considerable expenditures and the overriding of other laws. The two missions blur together at times, and the militarized view of border control has become standard. The phrase I kept encountering as I spent time on the border was “more boots on the ground.” Whether or not they were in favor of the fence, people spoke of the need for more boots on the ground in order to secure the border. And this from environmentalists, mayors, schoolteachers.
There is in fact a portion of existing border fence right in the city of Laredo. Several years ago the Border Patrol approached Laredo Community College, which is situated on the river, with a proposal to build a length of fence along the edge of the campus. Though the immigrants who regularly crossed the grounds had not, as a rule, created much of a disturbance, drug smugglers had been a greater concern; bales of marijuana had been found hidden near the tennis courts, for instance. (I was unable to learn whether news of this discovery had caused a surge in applications to Laredo Community College.) As it turned out, the fence, made of eight-foot-high wrought-iron bars that narrow to spikes curving outward toward Mexico, had not rid the campus of smugglers, though the number of immigrant crossings had dropped.
One afternoon I drove over to the campus to see it for myself. With its spearlike protrusions and tall black bars, the fence was unsettling. And depressing: I was surprised by how immediate and visceral my distaste was. I walked beside it, past athletic fields and a swimming pool and barracks-style housing on the campus side; across the divide were thorny brush and a gravel road suitable for a Border Patrol four-by-four. The fence wound past an elementary school and stopped at a brick wall about five feet high. I looked over it. On the other side was a dead-end street, where two small boys were lobbing a basketball at a six-foot-high basket. Black-haired, brown-skinned: Who knows where they might have come from?
My second day in Laredo, I stood on a bluff a short distance from the World Trade Bridge, north of town, which had been dedicated in April 2000 in a ceremony attended by presidential candidate George W. Bush. Bush had been tarred during the campaign as a foreign policy greenhorn, and his trip was widely viewed as an attempt to muster up a little cosmopolitan flair. Sharing a stage with Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo on the Mexican side of the bridge, Bush declared to the assembled crowd of mostly Mexicans that in the past there had been “walls of divide between Mexico and the United States. We must, we must be committed to raise the bridges of trade and friendship and freedom.”
Looking down at the bridge, I could tell by the line of idling rigs waiting to enter the U.S. that trade, at least, was in full swing. (Friendship and freedom, however, were in doubt. After Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, Mexican president-elect Felipe Calderón called the fence “a grave mistake.”) I was there with Tom Vaughan, a biologist who leads groups of students on a tour of Laredo as part of a four-week environmental health program for aspiring medical workers; they make stops along the river and also wade into its midst to sample for toxins and coliform. By visiting the border, I hoped, if nothing else, to be able to picture what a fence would look like, in the literal sense: how it would fit into the landscape. And so I spent half a day with Vaughan’s group, squinting at different spots along the Rio Grande, trying to make out a fence that didn’t yet exist.
A co-founder of the Rio Grande International Study Center, an environmental education nonprofit, Vaughan could have passed for a water sprite: a lean man with wisps of white hair winging out from beneath a red nylon cap. He wore a waterproof camera around his neck and elfin river shoes that resembled rubber socks. Though his research specialty is benthic macroinvertebrates (think shrimp, snails, aquatic worms), his impromptu lecturing to the students ranged over coal and trade and long-haul versus short-haul trucking and salt cedar trees and the Mexican petroleum industry—as if he were trying to spool out as much of his local expertise as he could in the time he had. The air was thick and warm, full of the trucks’ rumbling. After a while he came around to the subject of the fence.
“Where are we going to build it?” Vaughan asked. “It’ll move the border from the middle of the river to where the fence is. For example, here’s some high ground where we could build a fence.” He pointed directly in front of us, to the top of a steep bank. “Now we get over on that side,” he said, pointing across the road that led to the bridge. There, the high ground receded farther away from the river, and the low riverbank widened. “Is it going to follow the high ridges or is it going to go straight down? I will tell you, it’s not uncommon for that area there to be underwater. No fence can hold up underwater. Any fence anywhere in the floodplain is going to get washed away, and the floodplain’s pretty wide. So we’re talking about moving the border two hundred, three hundred, four hundred feet away from the river.”
He took a couple of steps in the direction of our parked cars, then paused and flung his arm back toward the bridge. “Anyway, this is international commerce in action!”
We drove to a private ranch, where Vaughan had been given permission to take water samples.
Some of the students began to pull on waders. We all filed down a narrow path through the mesquite to the river, and those of us who were not venturing in for samples sat around a small clearing at the water’s edge. It had been hard enough to visualize a fence near the World Trade Bridge; it was all the harder to imagine this quiet terrain of grass and foliage riven by “at least two layers of reinforced fencing,” which is what the Secure Fence Act proposes, as well as “additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors.”
On the ground were signs of people who’d passed by: a blue pair of men’s underwear, two warped and rusted cans of black beans, a dusty shirt. Traces of the international labor pool in action.
The Border Patrol made its first foray into fence building in its San Diego sector, in 1990. The “primary fence,” as it became known, was constructed from surplus corrugated steel panels, of a kind that had been used to build portable landing strips in Vietnam, and originally extended from the Pacific Ocean fourteen miles inland. (Today it covers more than fifty miles.) Only ten feet high and easy to climb or to dig under, it might as well have been a privacy hedge. Work on a secondary fence—higher, less easy to climb, and floodlit—began in 1996. Yet immigrants are still able to scale both fences in a few minutes; even the Border Patrol has labeled the fences a “filter,” slowing people down rather than stopping them.
So why not build a fence that can’t be so easily surmounted? Why not, say, put razor wire on top? Or at least make it higher? According to an article that appeared in Foreign Policy, the ease of climbing the primary fence in San Diego was intentional: The Border Patrol didn’t want to see its agents sidetracked by injured climbers. And even a low fence could bar (or at least reroute) the vehicles that transport drugs into the country. Though the proposed border fence has been touted as a kind of all-purpose barrier, deterring immigrants, drugs, and terrorism at the same time, this rhetorical fusion breaks down, apparently, at the level of design.
It was perhaps for this reason that before the passage of the Secure Fence Act, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had been a proponent of what he called a twenty-first-century virtual fence. While acknowledging that actual physical fencing might be built in some areas, he also said, “We don’t want to lock ourselves into something that’s a one-size-fits-all solution for the entire six thousand miles of border.”
This past February, during a visit to Laredo, Chertoff was still reassuring border officials, visiting one of the city’s bridges and declaring, “I do agree that where you have a significant river as a natural obstruction, fencing is not necessarily the right solution.” Soon after, however, a Border Patrol map of planned fencing was leaked, and the DHS sent out a request for proposals from contractors to build fence in and around Laredo. Chertoff announced that fence construction in Texas would commence this year, only to retract that statement two days later.
Then, in September, the Border Patrol and the Army Corps of Engineers at last released a more detailed map of the planned fencing in the Rio Grande Valley, with short sections of fence denoted by red squiggles, like fallen bits of yarn. Brownsville contemplated a lawsuit to block construction. Texas senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, both of whom had voted for the Secure Fence Act, had called for local consultation before any fencing was built. Yet after spending time on the border, it was hard for me to see what that would accomplish. Everyone local seemed to be against building a fence altogether.
“Uno nunca sabe cruzando”—“You never know when you cross.” I was talking to a young man from Nuevo Laredo who had crossed the river, by his estimate, hundreds of times. “I came here to work, to do something more,” he said. “In this way a person can realize his dream.”
Jose Manuel (as he asked me to call him in this article) works in Laredo at a fast-food restaurant, using an invented Social Security number, and though he doesn’t cross so much anymore, he used to go back and forth thirty to forty times a year. “Back and forth, back and forth—a game of roulette,” he said. We spoke outside a business where he sometimes does odd jobs, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash. He smiled often as he told his story. He first came across when he was fifteen, with a friend, just to see what there was to see. They crossed the Rio Grande about ten miles upriver of Laredo, waited in the brush for the Border Patrol to leave the area, and then climbed out, warily, having been warned about “las abuelitas”—older women who would call the authorities if they saw people emerging from the river. Upon reaching the street, evidently clear of vigilant grandmothers, they were greeted by a man washing his car. They rode a bus into town, had a look, and then went home.
Not long thereafter, Jose Manuel started coming regularly for work, first unloading rolls of fabric off trucks, later doing odd jobs. His preferred crossing point was one that landed him in the northern part of the city, at a spot where the river was low and where he could easily disappear into the neighborhood once he’d crossed. Typically the process would take about an hour. He would descend to the river on the Mexican side, take off his clothes, and ask for God’s blessing, having also received his mother’s. (“And that’s worth a lot, a mother’s blessing,” he said.) He usually went with a friend, because it was dangerous and you could lose your footing. “The river will betray you. Many people have died trying to cross.”
Once he’d made it to the American side, he had to elude the Border Patrol, which was easy enough when the agents were sitting in their SUVs. (Jose Manuel is of the opinion that many Border Patrol agents prefer sitting in their vehicles and reading the newspaper to slogging through the thick carrizo cane that infests the riverbank.) But there were times when he was chased and had to jump through the cane, bounding like a deer. Four times he was caught and sent back. It’s become harder to do: There is more vigilancia now, he told me, more helicopters, more agents in four-by-fours.
Now that he has the job at the restaurant, he rarely crosses. He rents a house in Laredo. He talks to his mother by phone. He believes he will always live in the United States. “There is a great future that will never be over there,” he explained. “You have all the advantages to move ahead. A lot of people here don’t take advantage of them. If in Mexico they had these advantages—imagine it—everyone would be millionaires!”
Before I left town, I decided to visit the Casa del Migrante, a church-run shelter in Nuevo Laredo that offers up to fifteen nights of food and lodging to migrants on their way north. I walked over the bridge to the Mexican city, where the decline in the tourist business was evident: Signs for salty dogs and tequila sunrises fronted bars whose few patrons, all single men, looked sordidly bored; liquor salespeople glanced up at me indifferently, the shelves half-empty behind them; no one tried to sell me a hammock or pottery or chewing gum. A little spooked by the city’s reputation for violence, I’d arranged for someone to pick me up. It had begun to pour by the time we reached the long, plain, gray building, where a line of mostly men waited in the rain for the shelter to open for the evening.
They were let in shortly after I arrived. The interior was immaculate and barren. A handful of men sat around a television in one unlit room; others stared with tired red eyes into the middle distance. I talked to a few of them, from El Salvador and Honduras. It was the same old story: no jobs at home, no way to support their families, and so they’d ridden up by train, bound for Houston or New York or Los Angeles, not knowing (or at least not saying) how they planned to cross the river. They were nineteen, twenty, seventeen. They had brought next to nothing with them.
On my way out I stopped by a bulletin board near the door to read the missing-persons notices posted by friends and relatives: Height: 1.65 meters, Color of Skin: Light brown, Hair: Brown . . . To please call his mother . . . Wearing a red T-shirt with a Nike logo, blue pants, black and white sneakers . . . If you see him give him this phone number. . . Mentally disabled . . . Disappeared the 5th of April in Nuevo Laredo after having been deported . . . Se Busca . . . Se Busca . . . .
To get back to the U.S., I did not have to look for a low spot in the river or wait for the coast to clear or strip off my clothes and carry them over my head; with 30 cents and a driver’s license I was able to walk across a bridge, and from there it was just a few blocks to my hotel, with its embarrassment of pillows and televisions (there were two), its bath products in miniature bottles, its comfortable furniture, and its view of the river from above. I ate a shrimp cocktail at the adjoining restaurant and returned to my room to watch Entourage.
It’s not as if the divide between poverty and privilege is imperceptible at home, but to literally walk from one to the other, over a bridge off-limits to the men I’d just talked to, and then loll on a sofa sipping wine is to be reminded of the wall already in place.
From Laredo I had planned to go south to the Valley, but first I drove north to Eagle Pass, to meet with Chad Foster, that town’s mayor and the current head of the Texas Border Coalition. Foster told me that the way to reduce illegal activity is by improving visibility—rooting out the carrizo cane and salt cedar on the banks, installing more lights and surveillance cameras, and adding more agents. “We’ve learned to live with cameras. Why do we need physical barriers?”
Erecting a fence along the border would essentially split a community in half, he said, in reference to Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, the town across the river. The DHS has maintained that a physical fence is most needed in urban areas, to slow an immigrant’s progress into a neighborhood or to a bus station, yet in urban areas the fence is especially despised, because of the ties between communities on either side of the border. (“Where Yee Haw Meets Olé” read a pamphlet Foster gave me touting the joint advantages of the two towns.)
Foster, who speaks Spanish, frequently attends events both informal and formal in Mexico, and he offered to take me over to Piedras Negras to show me the city. After driving for a while, we came to the Plaza de las Culturas, a swath of concrete where three small pyramids, along with a scattering of statues, commemorate the Mayan, Olmec, and Aztec civilizations. We walked inside one of the pyramids, where we encountered Fernando Purón Johnston, the director of the plaza. He offered to give us a sneak preview of an exhibit on prehistoric life in the region. Following him down a wide corridor, we viewed a human jaw, then a femur. Before long, discussion turned to the fence.
“People are very angry and very politicized here,” Johnston said. “Where’s it going to go? We have problems here, as at all borders, but a wall won’t contribute anything to get rid of these problems. The river doesn’t divide us, it unites us.” Foster nodded in emphasis. As we continued through the exhibit, the two kept speaking—each trading off languages—so that I learned little about prehistoric populations but plenty about the alliance between the two cities.
Outside we ran into a salty-looking man in boots and jeans and an old T-shirt. Apparently he had been a waiter at an event Foster had attended. “Chad Foster is more Mexican than the Mexicans!” he proclaimed. “Piedras Negras is very fortunate to have two great mayors.”
As we headed back to Eagle Pass, I asked Foster what he thought of the notion that he was in some sense Mexican. He replied without skipping a beat. “I’m a product of my environment,” he said, “and I love my environment.”
Back on the road, I was bound for the Valley at last. South of Laredo, the strip malls receded; the four-lane Zapata Highway rolled along through brush, past ranches and the turnoff for the tiny old town of San Ygnacio. A string of restaurants and gas stations marked the county seat, Zapata, where posters advertised an upcoming fishing tournament and where I had arranged to meet with the sheriff, Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr.
Over the past couple of years Gonzalez has appeared repeatedly before legislators in Austin and Washington, calling upon the state and federal governments to open their coffers to law enforcement agencies along the border, so that local officers may better patrol the region and assist in catching any drug smugglers, gang members, and terrorists who make it across. Maybe it was because of the name he’d made for himself that I’d pictured him as a large, stern, gunslinging type, but that was not the man who bid me to take a seat in his windowless office, carefully groomed and deliberate and tapping his Marlboro Lights over a green ashtray.
No sooner had I said the words “border fence” than he dismissed the idea. “If a fence were to be built, the cartels would come and cut through it. A fence is not going to stop them,” he said. “We have received information that they would bring portable torches and a small generator and saws that cut through steel.”
Information from whom? I asked.
“Informants in Mexico,” he said.
I waited in vain for him to elaborate. Instead, he told me about the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition, which he helped establish in 2005 and which has lobbied for a piece of the homeland security pie. “Our border was completely vulnerable and unprotected, extremely porous,” he said. “We’ve been accused by some elected officials of exaggerating the threats in order to get funding, but regarding the violence along the border, it’s happening.”
He reeled off past incidents: snipers in Mexico shooting at officers across the river, encounters with groups of immigrants carrying automatic weapons, high-ranking members of Mexican gangs discovered on this side of the river, threats made to law enforcement personnel, hundreds of aliens from “special interest countries” apprehended in Texas. And, he added, “How many child sex abusers, rapists, robbers, murderers, and thieves are coming into this country?” (In addition to other perils, law enforcement officers on the border face the risk of monetary temptation; a week before I spoke with Gonzalez, a former deputy of his and two other men had been indicted, accused of extorting money from drug traffickers in return for help with shipments.)
Gonzalez had enumerated these dangers to state and federal lawmakers, and evidence of his persuasive powers was parked outside; on my way in I’d passed six brand-new pickups, purchased with money from the governor’s homeland security office, with “Operation Linebacker,” the name of Gonzalez’s border security initiative, printed on the rear gates. (“We wanted Border Patrol to be the first line,” he explained, “and then we would be the linebackers.”)
The low-ceilinged room felt a little bunkerlike, notwithstanding the miniature knickknacks on the shelves behind the sheriff—Washington monuments, Jesus, an eagle, and a white-bearded cowboy that looked like Santa Claus—and notwithstanding the fact that I have never been in a bunker. Maybe it was that Gonzalez’s allusions to encroaching enemies had put me in a certain mood. He went on to describe a pair of suspicious-looking patches with Arabic writing on them that had been discovered in Jim Hogg County, and he raised the possibility that Hamas had established a training camp somewhere in Central America, all the while repeatedly referring me to several unfamiliar Web sites. It is difficult to draw a clear line between prudence and paranoia in matters of national security (see: liquids and gels), and I didn’t quite know how to receive Gonzalez’s dark assessments. Yet it did strike me that here were the sort of dangers that another person might cite in arguing for a fence to be built, and here was a man who saw no value in building one.
Farther south, the tenor of the opposition to the fence shifted. While frustration was apparent all along the border, in and around Laredo anxieties stemming from the drug trade and its violent symptoms ran closer to the surface, and as a result, there was a plaintive quality to the criticisms of the fence: What about the area’s real problems, which a fence would do nothing to solve? In the Valley, where farming and eco-tourism are significant industries and shoppers from Mexico a pillar of the retail trade, I was more often informed of the damage to the environment and the economy a fence might cause: The protests seemed almost boosterish. The opposition in the Valley was also more organized and activist; here there were bumper stickers, meetings, events. “I’ve never seen this area get so spun up about anything,” I was told by John McClung, the president of the Texas Produce Association, whom I met at the association’s headquarters.
Efforts by the DHS to communicate the status of its fence plans to border residents could hardly have been more inept. Maps were leaked, officials contradicted themselves, and gestures of appeasement went decidedly awry: On June 1, Border Patrol chief David Aguilar attended a public meeting in McAllen, where he declared that the only fence map had been drawn on the back of a napkin; on the same day local Border Patrol agents met with landowners and unrolled property maps on which potential fence locations had been designated.
“They came down here with a map, the Border Patrol wish list leaked, and that’s what drove everyone down here nuts,” McClung said. “So word went up to D.C.: You’ve ticked off the locals. Go out and consult with them. So what does the Border Patrol do? They call in landowners and give no indication they’re interested in reconsidering. Consultation à la Border Patrol becomes a matter of ‘bend over and prepare yourself.’ That’s obviously not well received. Then Chertoff supposedly gets word that the natives in the Valley are having a fit and throws his hands in the air.
“I actually feel a little sorry for the Border Patrol. They’re stuck between the reality in D.C. and the outrage down here, and their efforts to clean up their public relations have been disastrous.”
Although McClung told me that the Valley farmers he represents object to a fence on the grounds that it will disrupt their access to water, I did meet some who support the plan. On a warm afternoon I stopped in Mission to see Joe Metz and Sharon Waite, who raise sugarcane, grapefruit, oranges, grain sorghum, and cattle on their 1,400-acre farm. The couple live in a modern ranch house with large picture windows that look out onto a back patio and a small reservoir. The reservoir and surrounding foliage and dangling feeders attract all varieties of bird to the property, while the proximity to the river draws other visitors. “We’ve met people from all over the world,” Waite told me. “Brazilians, Chinese, Hondurans, Salvadorans.”
One day about a month before we spoke, Waite had glanced out the window and noticed a young girl seated on a patio chair. “She was a pretty little thing,” wearing a little bit of makeup and tight jeans and a tight T-shirt, “but she looked so young despite all that.” Around fifteen, Waite guessed. She offered the girl food (declined) and water (accepted), then let her use the phone to call a number in San Antonio. The girl walked to a nearby store, and in no time men arrived to pick her up. “I was scared,” Waite said. “I don’t want to turn somebody over to the Border Patrol, but then again, what am I sending her to? Am I sending her to something more horrible than I can even imagine?”
Metz had his own story of a recent encounter; while on his usual walk at daybreak, he’d come across three young men and a woman from China. “They knew three words in En-glish—‘America,’ ‘USA,’ and ‘thank you.’ We used sign language. First, they wanted a telephone, and I said no, and then they wanted me to drive somewhere, and I said no. I sent them to a store where there’s a telephone.”
When the fence controversy began, Waite and Metz had been reluctant to give interviews. “We are for the fence, but we don’t want to be painted as racist,” Waite said. It was just that things had changed. They used to see “little stragglers” crossing, but now “it’s not uncommon to see forty people come in,” Metz explained. “They cut our fences. We have to lock all our interior gates; otherwise they leave them open and there are cattle everywhere. We are getting to feel violated. The other part is the drug dealing. We see it weekly, people bringing drugs across. They’ll do it right in front of you”—floating over in rubber boats and handing off packages to people in cars who’d driven right onto the property.
“We understand that a fence isn’t going to stop determined people,” Waite said. “But it will slow down the drug flow and the illegal flow and push them into an area where they’ll be picked up more easily.
“Growing up, people went to the river for picnics and fishing; we used to wander around. Now you are very circumscribed by what’s happening. A lot of our friends who live along the river are very hesitant to say anything, but I’d say seventy-five percent are all for the fence.”
In the Lower Rio Grande Valley, U.S. 83 begins to resemble one very long strip mall, yet a few miles south, wildlife refuges line the river. The contrast is startling. Over the past thirty years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has spent $70 million to acquire land for the refuge system, which is one of the most biodiverse areas in the country, and millions more to restore and maintain that land. Yet even with the restoration, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the refuges represent less than 5 percent of the original wilderness.
Today the refuges support a sliver of riparian (riverside) habitat, which is surrounded by Tamaulipan thorn forest (and North American agribusiness). That habitat supports endangered and threatened species—many kinds of birds, as well as ocelot and jaguarundi—and it is narrow enough to be threatened itself. Clearing sufficient land to build one or two fences and a road would evacuate (or eliminate) animal populations, environmental advocates fear, yet because the refuges are owned by the federal government, at least one of them is seen as a likely fence location.
One day at lunchtime I pulled up to a bright-yellow house in McAllen, where a meeting of No Border Wall, a border fence opposition group, was under way. Ten or so people sat around a dining table and on a nearby couch, eating sandwiches and chips, as a rancher named Betty Pérez moderated the discussion. In attendance was a guest from Del Rio, a muscular, salt-and-pepper-haired man in a black T-shirt who’d handed me a card proclaiming himself “The Border Ambassador.” This was Jay J. Johnson-Castro Sr., who earlier in the year had walked from Del Rio to Brownsville in protest of the fence and was now urging on the group: “Let’s show the world in an upbeat, positive way that we are an international community!” The question was how best to publicize the cause; the gradual conclusion was that they would send a group of canoes down the river and hold press conferences in towns along the way. “If we the people say we will not allow a wall, with no compromise, they will not build; they cannot build!” Johnson-Castro exhorted.
Practical concerns were raised: There had to be time to prepare. Four kayaks and a canoe weren’t an impressive flotilla. Which stretch of the river? Was there any money? Should there be a Web site?
Eric Ellman, the owner of the house, was eager to take me to a section of refuge land within the McAllen city limits that he hoped—provided that the Fish and Wildlife Service approved and a fence was not built—to see designated a city park, where people could bike and camp and canoe. So I met him again that evening. We drove to a street of large warehouses on the south side of the city, then over a levee. He’d brought two bicycles; we hopped on and started along one of the Border Patrol access roads, where he regularly goes to ride.
“So this is it!” he called back to me. “This is the three percent that’s left! I mean, look at this. How many cities have places like this?” Not as adept a biker as Ellman, my gaze was frequently on the rutted dirt road below, but even so the greenery and quiet came as a relief after a day hauling back and forth on 83. We paused at a spot on the riverbank. “This river is invisible,” Ellman said. “We’ve been scared off. People could be camping here. Rio Grande City and Roma should have a booming float-trip industry.”
He was not the only person who raised the possibility: Instead of fencing off the river, what if it were instead made more accessible, more appealing to the general population and thus less attractive to surreptitious crossers? Or as another person said to me, “What better security could you have than thousands of birders with binoculars?”
Drug smugglers, meet the Birder Patrol.
I’d come across a number of maps of South Texas as I made my way down the border: maps showing wildlife refuges or citrus farms or factory locations or prehistoric remains or bird flight patterns, each one another reminder of how many different ways you could demarcate the same territory. The political boundary between the United States and Mexico was a feature of just one map, and to build a fence along it would require ignoring all the others.
“It’s emotional for me to think what a fence would look like. I understand that the law should be upheld, but everybody here knows somebody who has crossed.” I was talking with Rachel Benavidez, the 31-year-old editor of the Brownsville Herald, at her office. “When I was younger, I asked my grandpa, ‘Do you know how to swim?’ He said, ‘M’ija, if I didn’t know how to swim, you wouldn’t be here.’”
Benavidez, attired in black and white and a string of pearls, spoke with a thoughtful confidence: She seemed like a shoe-in for class president. The question of the fence, she said, was one she’d had to confront both professionally—a matter of covering the story fairly, in the point-counterpoint way of newspapers—and personally. To her the fence seemed “like this,” she said, holding her palm up like a traffic cop.
The fence, as she construed it, had as much to do with questions of identity—the border’s and her own—as with national security. Benavidez presides over both an English and a Spanish-language edition; the latter is largely staffed by people from Mexico, and so the newsroom culture replicates a divide that exists more generally along the border. “The culture is so different between this side and that side. I had to learn, for example, that I couldn’t communicate [with Mexican staffers] by e-mail, which they find impersonal; I had to tell them things in person or they would get offended. It took someone to tell me.” Outside the newspaper, the differences extend to male-female relationships, to attitudes toward food, to the character of social events. “With every year comes more separation instead of melding, because you have people who are assimilating and those who are holding on to Mexico.” And the current politics of immigration widen that divide. “When I was growing up, this separation of us and them didn’t exist,” she said. “The idea of putting up a fence, of people coming over who are undocumented posing a threat to national security, that was never an issue.”
When we speak of “the border,” we mean different things: There is the abstract concept of the border as a clear line on a map, and then there’s the notion of the border as a place and a population and a culture. The politicians and media personalities who have foisted the fence upon us clearly have the former in mind. But in South Texas there can be no question that the latter predominates, complicating any attempt to draw exact, clear boundaries.
“They’re us, we’re them,” Benavidez said to me. “What is the line?”
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2007-11-01/feature2.php
Texas Monthly
November 2007
I’ll confess that I tossed the plan almost immediately. I’d intended simply to drive from Laredo to Brownsville, the stretch of border where most of Texas’ share of the proposed security fence is supposed to be built. A day here, a day there; I hadn’t meant to linger in any one place, but after three days I found myself still in Laredo, darting on and off the tail end of Interstate 35. Hot, overcast, and clogged with cargo-laden rigs, the city had little to lure the casual traveler, but if you were interested in the matter of the fence, there was always another person to see. There was Joseph Hein, who took me to his family ranch on the Rio Grande, where he raises Appaloosas; he told me he’d have to get out of the business if the water were fenced off. There was Dennis Nixon, the chairman of IBC Bank, who met me in his expansive office, outlined a broad economic case against the fence, and sent me off with a white paper on immigration policy he’d distributed to every member of Congress. There was a young woman from Mexico, undocumented, living and working in Laredo, who told me that her estranged husband had reported her to the Border Patrol so that he could kidnap their children. If a fence were built, she speculated, a lot of people wouldn’t be able to see their families as much.
Last summer, in Laredo and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, what had once been presumed a political phantasm now loomed as a real possibility: that the Secure Fence Act, passed by Congress to prevent “terrorists [and] other unlawful aliens” from entering the country, might result in an actual fence being built along sizable stretches of the Rio Grande. When President Bush signed the bill in October 2006, it was perceived as a feint meant to appeal to voters on the eve of the election. (Because their immigration bill had failed, the thinking goes, Republicans had to do something to show that they’d confronted the issue.) Yet $1.2 billion was quickly appropriated for border security projects, and this year the Border Patrol, in a clumsy, quasi-clandestine fashion, began to circulate maps indicating where the fence might go. From afar it was difficult to imagine: Hundreds of miles of fence between two countries? The state of Texas partially walled off? What would such a thing look like? Where would it go? What effects would it have? The best way to begin to answer those questions, it seemed to me, was to drive to the border and ask them.
This was not an original notion. I arrived in Laredo to discover the city full of reporters—from newspapers, magazines, CNN—booked at the posh pseudo-colonial La Posada Hotel, drinking at a new bar off Del Mar Boulevard, comparing notes and names. It wasn’t just the fence. Some had come to report on the case of three National Guardsmen who’d recently been caught smuggling Mexicans into the country, but there were also the Nuevo Laredo violence stories, the drug stories, the immigration stories, all of them tangled together. A town whose name had once been synonymous with “dusty backwater” had lately become a fishbowl for certain national woes.
The stated aim of the Secure Fence Act is “operational control,” defined as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States” (both unwanted people and contraband may qualify as “entries”)—in essence, the fantasy of a perfectly sealed border. Like the aim of eradicating all terrorists from the globe, operational control serves to justify considerable expenditures and the overriding of other laws. The two missions blur together at times, and the militarized view of border control has become standard. The phrase I kept encountering as I spent time on the border was “more boots on the ground.” Whether or not they were in favor of the fence, people spoke of the need for more boots on the ground in order to secure the border. And this from environmentalists, mayors, schoolteachers.
There is in fact a portion of existing border fence right in the city of Laredo. Several years ago the Border Patrol approached Laredo Community College, which is situated on the river, with a proposal to build a length of fence along the edge of the campus. Though the immigrants who regularly crossed the grounds had not, as a rule, created much of a disturbance, drug smugglers had been a greater concern; bales of marijuana had been found hidden near the tennis courts, for instance. (I was unable to learn whether news of this discovery had caused a surge in applications to Laredo Community College.) As it turned out, the fence, made of eight-foot-high wrought-iron bars that narrow to spikes curving outward toward Mexico, had not rid the campus of smugglers, though the number of immigrant crossings had dropped.
One afternoon I drove over to the campus to see it for myself. With its spearlike protrusions and tall black bars, the fence was unsettling. And depressing: I was surprised by how immediate and visceral my distaste was. I walked beside it, past athletic fields and a swimming pool and barracks-style housing on the campus side; across the divide were thorny brush and a gravel road suitable for a Border Patrol four-by-four. The fence wound past an elementary school and stopped at a brick wall about five feet high. I looked over it. On the other side was a dead-end street, where two small boys were lobbing a basketball at a six-foot-high basket. Black-haired, brown-skinned: Who knows where they might have come from?
My second day in Laredo, I stood on a bluff a short distance from the World Trade Bridge, north of town, which had been dedicated in April 2000 in a ceremony attended by presidential candidate George W. Bush. Bush had been tarred during the campaign as a foreign policy greenhorn, and his trip was widely viewed as an attempt to muster up a little cosmopolitan flair. Sharing a stage with Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo on the Mexican side of the bridge, Bush declared to the assembled crowd of mostly Mexicans that in the past there had been “walls of divide between Mexico and the United States. We must, we must be committed to raise the bridges of trade and friendship and freedom.”
Looking down at the bridge, I could tell by the line of idling rigs waiting to enter the U.S. that trade, at least, was in full swing. (Friendship and freedom, however, were in doubt. After Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, Mexican president-elect Felipe Calderón called the fence “a grave mistake.”) I was there with Tom Vaughan, a biologist who leads groups of students on a tour of Laredo as part of a four-week environmental health program for aspiring medical workers; they make stops along the river and also wade into its midst to sample for toxins and coliform. By visiting the border, I hoped, if nothing else, to be able to picture what a fence would look like, in the literal sense: how it would fit into the landscape. And so I spent half a day with Vaughan’s group, squinting at different spots along the Rio Grande, trying to make out a fence that didn’t yet exist.
A co-founder of the Rio Grande International Study Center, an environmental education nonprofit, Vaughan could have passed for a water sprite: a lean man with wisps of white hair winging out from beneath a red nylon cap. He wore a waterproof camera around his neck and elfin river shoes that resembled rubber socks. Though his research specialty is benthic macroinvertebrates (think shrimp, snails, aquatic worms), his impromptu lecturing to the students ranged over coal and trade and long-haul versus short-haul trucking and salt cedar trees and the Mexican petroleum industry—as if he were trying to spool out as much of his local expertise as he could in the time he had. The air was thick and warm, full of the trucks’ rumbling. After a while he came around to the subject of the fence.
“Where are we going to build it?” Vaughan asked. “It’ll move the border from the middle of the river to where the fence is. For example, here’s some high ground where we could build a fence.” He pointed directly in front of us, to the top of a steep bank. “Now we get over on that side,” he said, pointing across the road that led to the bridge. There, the high ground receded farther away from the river, and the low riverbank widened. “Is it going to follow the high ridges or is it going to go straight down? I will tell you, it’s not uncommon for that area there to be underwater. No fence can hold up underwater. Any fence anywhere in the floodplain is going to get washed away, and the floodplain’s pretty wide. So we’re talking about moving the border two hundred, three hundred, four hundred feet away from the river.”
He took a couple of steps in the direction of our parked cars, then paused and flung his arm back toward the bridge. “Anyway, this is international commerce in action!”
We drove to a private ranch, where Vaughan had been given permission to take water samples.
Some of the students began to pull on waders. We all filed down a narrow path through the mesquite to the river, and those of us who were not venturing in for samples sat around a small clearing at the water’s edge. It had been hard enough to visualize a fence near the World Trade Bridge; it was all the harder to imagine this quiet terrain of grass and foliage riven by “at least two layers of reinforced fencing,” which is what the Secure Fence Act proposes, as well as “additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors.”
On the ground were signs of people who’d passed by: a blue pair of men’s underwear, two warped and rusted cans of black beans, a dusty shirt. Traces of the international labor pool in action.
The Border Patrol made its first foray into fence building in its San Diego sector, in 1990. The “primary fence,” as it became known, was constructed from surplus corrugated steel panels, of a kind that had been used to build portable landing strips in Vietnam, and originally extended from the Pacific Ocean fourteen miles inland. (Today it covers more than fifty miles.) Only ten feet high and easy to climb or to dig under, it might as well have been a privacy hedge. Work on a secondary fence—higher, less easy to climb, and floodlit—began in 1996. Yet immigrants are still able to scale both fences in a few minutes; even the Border Patrol has labeled the fences a “filter,” slowing people down rather than stopping them.
So why not build a fence that can’t be so easily surmounted? Why not, say, put razor wire on top? Or at least make it higher? According to an article that appeared in Foreign Policy, the ease of climbing the primary fence in San Diego was intentional: The Border Patrol didn’t want to see its agents sidetracked by injured climbers. And even a low fence could bar (or at least reroute) the vehicles that transport drugs into the country. Though the proposed border fence has been touted as a kind of all-purpose barrier, deterring immigrants, drugs, and terrorism at the same time, this rhetorical fusion breaks down, apparently, at the level of design.
It was perhaps for this reason that before the passage of the Secure Fence Act, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had been a proponent of what he called a twenty-first-century virtual fence. While acknowledging that actual physical fencing might be built in some areas, he also said, “We don’t want to lock ourselves into something that’s a one-size-fits-all solution for the entire six thousand miles of border.”
This past February, during a visit to Laredo, Chertoff was still reassuring border officials, visiting one of the city’s bridges and declaring, “I do agree that where you have a significant river as a natural obstruction, fencing is not necessarily the right solution.” Soon after, however, a Border Patrol map of planned fencing was leaked, and the DHS sent out a request for proposals from contractors to build fence in and around Laredo. Chertoff announced that fence construction in Texas would commence this year, only to retract that statement two days later.
Then, in September, the Border Patrol and the Army Corps of Engineers at last released a more detailed map of the planned fencing in the Rio Grande Valley, with short sections of fence denoted by red squiggles, like fallen bits of yarn. Brownsville contemplated a lawsuit to block construction. Texas senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, both of whom had voted for the Secure Fence Act, had called for local consultation before any fencing was built. Yet after spending time on the border, it was hard for me to see what that would accomplish. Everyone local seemed to be against building a fence altogether.
“Uno nunca sabe cruzando”—“You never know when you cross.” I was talking to a young man from Nuevo Laredo who had crossed the river, by his estimate, hundreds of times. “I came here to work, to do something more,” he said. “In this way a person can realize his dream.”
Jose Manuel (as he asked me to call him in this article) works in Laredo at a fast-food restaurant, using an invented Social Security number, and though he doesn’t cross so much anymore, he used to go back and forth thirty to forty times a year. “Back and forth, back and forth—a game of roulette,” he said. We spoke outside a business where he sometimes does odd jobs, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash. He smiled often as he told his story. He first came across when he was fifteen, with a friend, just to see what there was to see. They crossed the Rio Grande about ten miles upriver of Laredo, waited in the brush for the Border Patrol to leave the area, and then climbed out, warily, having been warned about “las abuelitas”—older women who would call the authorities if they saw people emerging from the river. Upon reaching the street, evidently clear of vigilant grandmothers, they were greeted by a man washing his car. They rode a bus into town, had a look, and then went home.
Not long thereafter, Jose Manuel started coming regularly for work, first unloading rolls of fabric off trucks, later doing odd jobs. His preferred crossing point was one that landed him in the northern part of the city, at a spot where the river was low and where he could easily disappear into the neighborhood once he’d crossed. Typically the process would take about an hour. He would descend to the river on the Mexican side, take off his clothes, and ask for God’s blessing, having also received his mother’s. (“And that’s worth a lot, a mother’s blessing,” he said.) He usually went with a friend, because it was dangerous and you could lose your footing. “The river will betray you. Many people have died trying to cross.”
Once he’d made it to the American side, he had to elude the Border Patrol, which was easy enough when the agents were sitting in their SUVs. (Jose Manuel is of the opinion that many Border Patrol agents prefer sitting in their vehicles and reading the newspaper to slogging through the thick carrizo cane that infests the riverbank.) But there were times when he was chased and had to jump through the cane, bounding like a deer. Four times he was caught and sent back. It’s become harder to do: There is more vigilancia now, he told me, more helicopters, more agents in four-by-fours.
Now that he has the job at the restaurant, he rarely crosses. He rents a house in Laredo. He talks to his mother by phone. He believes he will always live in the United States. “There is a great future that will never be over there,” he explained. “You have all the advantages to move ahead. A lot of people here don’t take advantage of them. If in Mexico they had these advantages—imagine it—everyone would be millionaires!”
Before I left town, I decided to visit the Casa del Migrante, a church-run shelter in Nuevo Laredo that offers up to fifteen nights of food and lodging to migrants on their way north. I walked over the bridge to the Mexican city, where the decline in the tourist business was evident: Signs for salty dogs and tequila sunrises fronted bars whose few patrons, all single men, looked sordidly bored; liquor salespeople glanced up at me indifferently, the shelves half-empty behind them; no one tried to sell me a hammock or pottery or chewing gum. A little spooked by the city’s reputation for violence, I’d arranged for someone to pick me up. It had begun to pour by the time we reached the long, plain, gray building, where a line of mostly men waited in the rain for the shelter to open for the evening.
They were let in shortly after I arrived. The interior was immaculate and barren. A handful of men sat around a television in one unlit room; others stared with tired red eyes into the middle distance. I talked to a few of them, from El Salvador and Honduras. It was the same old story: no jobs at home, no way to support their families, and so they’d ridden up by train, bound for Houston or New York or Los Angeles, not knowing (or at least not saying) how they planned to cross the river. They were nineteen, twenty, seventeen. They had brought next to nothing with them.
On my way out I stopped by a bulletin board near the door to read the missing-persons notices posted by friends and relatives: Height: 1.65 meters, Color of Skin: Light brown, Hair: Brown . . . To please call his mother . . . Wearing a red T-shirt with a Nike logo, blue pants, black and white sneakers . . . If you see him give him this phone number. . . Mentally disabled . . . Disappeared the 5th of April in Nuevo Laredo after having been deported . . . Se Busca . . . Se Busca . . . .
To get back to the U.S., I did not have to look for a low spot in the river or wait for the coast to clear or strip off my clothes and carry them over my head; with 30 cents and a driver’s license I was able to walk across a bridge, and from there it was just a few blocks to my hotel, with its embarrassment of pillows and televisions (there were two), its bath products in miniature bottles, its comfortable furniture, and its view of the river from above. I ate a shrimp cocktail at the adjoining restaurant and returned to my room to watch Entourage.
It’s not as if the divide between poverty and privilege is imperceptible at home, but to literally walk from one to the other, over a bridge off-limits to the men I’d just talked to, and then loll on a sofa sipping wine is to be reminded of the wall already in place.
From Laredo I had planned to go south to the Valley, but first I drove north to Eagle Pass, to meet with Chad Foster, that town’s mayor and the current head of the Texas Border Coalition. Foster told me that the way to reduce illegal activity is by improving visibility—rooting out the carrizo cane and salt cedar on the banks, installing more lights and surveillance cameras, and adding more agents. “We’ve learned to live with cameras. Why do we need physical barriers?”
Erecting a fence along the border would essentially split a community in half, he said, in reference to Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, the town across the river. The DHS has maintained that a physical fence is most needed in urban areas, to slow an immigrant’s progress into a neighborhood or to a bus station, yet in urban areas the fence is especially despised, because of the ties between communities on either side of the border. (“Where Yee Haw Meets Olé” read a pamphlet Foster gave me touting the joint advantages of the two towns.)
Foster, who speaks Spanish, frequently attends events both informal and formal in Mexico, and he offered to take me over to Piedras Negras to show me the city. After driving for a while, we came to the Plaza de las Culturas, a swath of concrete where three small pyramids, along with a scattering of statues, commemorate the Mayan, Olmec, and Aztec civilizations. We walked inside one of the pyramids, where we encountered Fernando Purón Johnston, the director of the plaza. He offered to give us a sneak preview of an exhibit on prehistoric life in the region. Following him down a wide corridor, we viewed a human jaw, then a femur. Before long, discussion turned to the fence.
“People are very angry and very politicized here,” Johnston said. “Where’s it going to go? We have problems here, as at all borders, but a wall won’t contribute anything to get rid of these problems. The river doesn’t divide us, it unites us.” Foster nodded in emphasis. As we continued through the exhibit, the two kept speaking—each trading off languages—so that I learned little about prehistoric populations but plenty about the alliance between the two cities.
Outside we ran into a salty-looking man in boots and jeans and an old T-shirt. Apparently he had been a waiter at an event Foster had attended. “Chad Foster is more Mexican than the Mexicans!” he proclaimed. “Piedras Negras is very fortunate to have two great mayors.”
As we headed back to Eagle Pass, I asked Foster what he thought of the notion that he was in some sense Mexican. He replied without skipping a beat. “I’m a product of my environment,” he said, “and I love my environment.”
Back on the road, I was bound for the Valley at last. South of Laredo, the strip malls receded; the four-lane Zapata Highway rolled along through brush, past ranches and the turnoff for the tiny old town of San Ygnacio. A string of restaurants and gas stations marked the county seat, Zapata, where posters advertised an upcoming fishing tournament and where I had arranged to meet with the sheriff, Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr.
Over the past couple of years Gonzalez has appeared repeatedly before legislators in Austin and Washington, calling upon the state and federal governments to open their coffers to law enforcement agencies along the border, so that local officers may better patrol the region and assist in catching any drug smugglers, gang members, and terrorists who make it across. Maybe it was because of the name he’d made for himself that I’d pictured him as a large, stern, gunslinging type, but that was not the man who bid me to take a seat in his windowless office, carefully groomed and deliberate and tapping his Marlboro Lights over a green ashtray.
No sooner had I said the words “border fence” than he dismissed the idea. “If a fence were to be built, the cartels would come and cut through it. A fence is not going to stop them,” he said. “We have received information that they would bring portable torches and a small generator and saws that cut through steel.”
Information from whom? I asked.
“Informants in Mexico,” he said.
I waited in vain for him to elaborate. Instead, he told me about the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition, which he helped establish in 2005 and which has lobbied for a piece of the homeland security pie. “Our border was completely vulnerable and unprotected, extremely porous,” he said. “We’ve been accused by some elected officials of exaggerating the threats in order to get funding, but regarding the violence along the border, it’s happening.”
He reeled off past incidents: snipers in Mexico shooting at officers across the river, encounters with groups of immigrants carrying automatic weapons, high-ranking members of Mexican gangs discovered on this side of the river, threats made to law enforcement personnel, hundreds of aliens from “special interest countries” apprehended in Texas. And, he added, “How many child sex abusers, rapists, robbers, murderers, and thieves are coming into this country?” (In addition to other perils, law enforcement officers on the border face the risk of monetary temptation; a week before I spoke with Gonzalez, a former deputy of his and two other men had been indicted, accused of extorting money from drug traffickers in return for help with shipments.)
Gonzalez had enumerated these dangers to state and federal lawmakers, and evidence of his persuasive powers was parked outside; on my way in I’d passed six brand-new pickups, purchased with money from the governor’s homeland security office, with “Operation Linebacker,” the name of Gonzalez’s border security initiative, printed on the rear gates. (“We wanted Border Patrol to be the first line,” he explained, “and then we would be the linebackers.”)
The low-ceilinged room felt a little bunkerlike, notwithstanding the miniature knickknacks on the shelves behind the sheriff—Washington monuments, Jesus, an eagle, and a white-bearded cowboy that looked like Santa Claus—and notwithstanding the fact that I have never been in a bunker. Maybe it was that Gonzalez’s allusions to encroaching enemies had put me in a certain mood. He went on to describe a pair of suspicious-looking patches with Arabic writing on them that had been discovered in Jim Hogg County, and he raised the possibility that Hamas had established a training camp somewhere in Central America, all the while repeatedly referring me to several unfamiliar Web sites. It is difficult to draw a clear line between prudence and paranoia in matters of national security (see: liquids and gels), and I didn’t quite know how to receive Gonzalez’s dark assessments. Yet it did strike me that here were the sort of dangers that another person might cite in arguing for a fence to be built, and here was a man who saw no value in building one.
Farther south, the tenor of the opposition to the fence shifted. While frustration was apparent all along the border, in and around Laredo anxieties stemming from the drug trade and its violent symptoms ran closer to the surface, and as a result, there was a plaintive quality to the criticisms of the fence: What about the area’s real problems, which a fence would do nothing to solve? In the Valley, where farming and eco-tourism are significant industries and shoppers from Mexico a pillar of the retail trade, I was more often informed of the damage to the environment and the economy a fence might cause: The protests seemed almost boosterish. The opposition in the Valley was also more organized and activist; here there were bumper stickers, meetings, events. “I’ve never seen this area get so spun up about anything,” I was told by John McClung, the president of the Texas Produce Association, whom I met at the association’s headquarters.
Efforts by the DHS to communicate the status of its fence plans to border residents could hardly have been more inept. Maps were leaked, officials contradicted themselves, and gestures of appeasement went decidedly awry: On June 1, Border Patrol chief David Aguilar attended a public meeting in McAllen, where he declared that the only fence map had been drawn on the back of a napkin; on the same day local Border Patrol agents met with landowners and unrolled property maps on which potential fence locations had been designated.
“They came down here with a map, the Border Patrol wish list leaked, and that’s what drove everyone down here nuts,” McClung said. “So word went up to D.C.: You’ve ticked off the locals. Go out and consult with them. So what does the Border Patrol do? They call in landowners and give no indication they’re interested in reconsidering. Consultation à la Border Patrol becomes a matter of ‘bend over and prepare yourself.’ That’s obviously not well received. Then Chertoff supposedly gets word that the natives in the Valley are having a fit and throws his hands in the air.
“I actually feel a little sorry for the Border Patrol. They’re stuck between the reality in D.C. and the outrage down here, and their efforts to clean up their public relations have been disastrous.”
Although McClung told me that the Valley farmers he represents object to a fence on the grounds that it will disrupt their access to water, I did meet some who support the plan. On a warm afternoon I stopped in Mission to see Joe Metz and Sharon Waite, who raise sugarcane, grapefruit, oranges, grain sorghum, and cattle on their 1,400-acre farm. The couple live in a modern ranch house with large picture windows that look out onto a back patio and a small reservoir. The reservoir and surrounding foliage and dangling feeders attract all varieties of bird to the property, while the proximity to the river draws other visitors. “We’ve met people from all over the world,” Waite told me. “Brazilians, Chinese, Hondurans, Salvadorans.”
One day about a month before we spoke, Waite had glanced out the window and noticed a young girl seated on a patio chair. “She was a pretty little thing,” wearing a little bit of makeup and tight jeans and a tight T-shirt, “but she looked so young despite all that.” Around fifteen, Waite guessed. She offered the girl food (declined) and water (accepted), then let her use the phone to call a number in San Antonio. The girl walked to a nearby store, and in no time men arrived to pick her up. “I was scared,” Waite said. “I don’t want to turn somebody over to the Border Patrol, but then again, what am I sending her to? Am I sending her to something more horrible than I can even imagine?”
Metz had his own story of a recent encounter; while on his usual walk at daybreak, he’d come across three young men and a woman from China. “They knew three words in En-glish—‘America,’ ‘USA,’ and ‘thank you.’ We used sign language. First, they wanted a telephone, and I said no, and then they wanted me to drive somewhere, and I said no. I sent them to a store where there’s a telephone.”
When the fence controversy began, Waite and Metz had been reluctant to give interviews. “We are for the fence, but we don’t want to be painted as racist,” Waite said. It was just that things had changed. They used to see “little stragglers” crossing, but now “it’s not uncommon to see forty people come in,” Metz explained. “They cut our fences. We have to lock all our interior gates; otherwise they leave them open and there are cattle everywhere. We are getting to feel violated. The other part is the drug dealing. We see it weekly, people bringing drugs across. They’ll do it right in front of you”—floating over in rubber boats and handing off packages to people in cars who’d driven right onto the property.
“We understand that a fence isn’t going to stop determined people,” Waite said. “But it will slow down the drug flow and the illegal flow and push them into an area where they’ll be picked up more easily.
“Growing up, people went to the river for picnics and fishing; we used to wander around. Now you are very circumscribed by what’s happening. A lot of our friends who live along the river are very hesitant to say anything, but I’d say seventy-five percent are all for the fence.”
In the Lower Rio Grande Valley, U.S. 83 begins to resemble one very long strip mall, yet a few miles south, wildlife refuges line the river. The contrast is startling. Over the past thirty years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has spent $70 million to acquire land for the refuge system, which is one of the most biodiverse areas in the country, and millions more to restore and maintain that land. Yet even with the restoration, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the refuges represent less than 5 percent of the original wilderness.
Today the refuges support a sliver of riparian (riverside) habitat, which is surrounded by Tamaulipan thorn forest (and North American agribusiness). That habitat supports endangered and threatened species—many kinds of birds, as well as ocelot and jaguarundi—and it is narrow enough to be threatened itself. Clearing sufficient land to build one or two fences and a road would evacuate (or eliminate) animal populations, environmental advocates fear, yet because the refuges are owned by the federal government, at least one of them is seen as a likely fence location.
One day at lunchtime I pulled up to a bright-yellow house in McAllen, where a meeting of No Border Wall, a border fence opposition group, was under way. Ten or so people sat around a dining table and on a nearby couch, eating sandwiches and chips, as a rancher named Betty Pérez moderated the discussion. In attendance was a guest from Del Rio, a muscular, salt-and-pepper-haired man in a black T-shirt who’d handed me a card proclaiming himself “The Border Ambassador.” This was Jay J. Johnson-Castro Sr., who earlier in the year had walked from Del Rio to Brownsville in protest of the fence and was now urging on the group: “Let’s show the world in an upbeat, positive way that we are an international community!” The question was how best to publicize the cause; the gradual conclusion was that they would send a group of canoes down the river and hold press conferences in towns along the way. “If we the people say we will not allow a wall, with no compromise, they will not build; they cannot build!” Johnson-Castro exhorted.
Practical concerns were raised: There had to be time to prepare. Four kayaks and a canoe weren’t an impressive flotilla. Which stretch of the river? Was there any money? Should there be a Web site?
Eric Ellman, the owner of the house, was eager to take me to a section of refuge land within the McAllen city limits that he hoped—provided that the Fish and Wildlife Service approved and a fence was not built—to see designated a city park, where people could bike and camp and canoe. So I met him again that evening. We drove to a street of large warehouses on the south side of the city, then over a levee. He’d brought two bicycles; we hopped on and started along one of the Border Patrol access roads, where he regularly goes to ride.
“So this is it!” he called back to me. “This is the three percent that’s left! I mean, look at this. How many cities have places like this?” Not as adept a biker as Ellman, my gaze was frequently on the rutted dirt road below, but even so the greenery and quiet came as a relief after a day hauling back and forth on 83. We paused at a spot on the riverbank. “This river is invisible,” Ellman said. “We’ve been scared off. People could be camping here. Rio Grande City and Roma should have a booming float-trip industry.”
He was not the only person who raised the possibility: Instead of fencing off the river, what if it were instead made more accessible, more appealing to the general population and thus less attractive to surreptitious crossers? Or as another person said to me, “What better security could you have than thousands of birders with binoculars?”
Drug smugglers, meet the Birder Patrol.
I’d come across a number of maps of South Texas as I made my way down the border: maps showing wildlife refuges or citrus farms or factory locations or prehistoric remains or bird flight patterns, each one another reminder of how many different ways you could demarcate the same territory. The political boundary between the United States and Mexico was a feature of just one map, and to build a fence along it would require ignoring all the others.
“It’s emotional for me to think what a fence would look like. I understand that the law should be upheld, but everybody here knows somebody who has crossed.” I was talking with Rachel Benavidez, the 31-year-old editor of the Brownsville Herald, at her office. “When I was younger, I asked my grandpa, ‘Do you know how to swim?’ He said, ‘M’ija, if I didn’t know how to swim, you wouldn’t be here.’”
Benavidez, attired in black and white and a string of pearls, spoke with a thoughtful confidence: She seemed like a shoe-in for class president. The question of the fence, she said, was one she’d had to confront both professionally—a matter of covering the story fairly, in the point-counterpoint way of newspapers—and personally. To her the fence seemed “like this,” she said, holding her palm up like a traffic cop.
The fence, as she construed it, had as much to do with questions of identity—the border’s and her own—as with national security. Benavidez presides over both an English and a Spanish-language edition; the latter is largely staffed by people from Mexico, and so the newsroom culture replicates a divide that exists more generally along the border. “The culture is so different between this side and that side. I had to learn, for example, that I couldn’t communicate [with Mexican staffers] by e-mail, which they find impersonal; I had to tell them things in person or they would get offended. It took someone to tell me.” Outside the newspaper, the differences extend to male-female relationships, to attitudes toward food, to the character of social events. “With every year comes more separation instead of melding, because you have people who are assimilating and those who are holding on to Mexico.” And the current politics of immigration widen that divide. “When I was growing up, this separation of us and them didn’t exist,” she said. “The idea of putting up a fence, of people coming over who are undocumented posing a threat to national security, that was never an issue.”
When we speak of “the border,” we mean different things: There is the abstract concept of the border as a clear line on a map, and then there’s the notion of the border as a place and a population and a culture. The politicians and media personalities who have foisted the fence upon us clearly have the former in mind. But in South Texas there can be no question that the latter predominates, complicating any attempt to draw exact, clear boundaries.
“They’re us, we’re them,” Benavidez said to me. “What is the line?”
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2007-11-01/feature2.php
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Fence Fears
Tucson Weekly
January 1, 2008
Metal barriers are the San Pedro River's newest inhabitants
Say what you will about Michael Chertoff, but the outgoing Homeland Security secretary has never shied from flexing his institutional muscle.
That's particularly true after passage of the 2005 REAL ID Act, when Congress granted him extraordinary powers to ignore a slew of environmental laws--including the Endangered Species Act--when building roads and barriers along the Mexican border. According to biologists, damage to habitat and wildlife migration is impacting species ranging from tiny lizards to mule deer, bighorn sheep, coatis, bears and jaguars.
The act also prohibits any judicial review, making lawsuits against habitat-destructive projects apparently pointless. That provision was felt firsthand in 2007, when the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife sued Chertoff over his decision to waive environmental laws while building a barrier across Southern Arizona's embattled San Pedro River.
Their suit was ultimately dismissed in federal court. "The construction of the border fence pertains to both foreign affairs and immigration control--areas over which the executive branch traditionally exercises independent constitutional authority," wrote Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle.
The final blow occurred this June, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of Huvelle's decision.
As that disappointment sinks in, conservationists are partially pinning hopes on the incoming Barack Obama administration and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a critic of the fence, who is slated to replace Chertoff. But even those hopes were tempered somewhat in December, when Obama passed over Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva--an ardent border-fence opponent and sponsor of legislation to repeal REAL ID's waiver provisions--in favor of the more moderate Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado to head the U.S. Interior Department.
Meanwhile, with legal avenues largely exhausted, environmental groups have increasingly turned to public education as a means of gaining support. One recent example is Wild Versus Wall, a Sierra Club documentary peppered with activist interviews, stark imagery and contradictory remarks by officials such as Chertoff. The work by Tucson-based filmmaker Steev Hise paints a grim picture of the border situation.
Dan Millis coordinates the Arizona Sierra Club's Borderland Campaign. He calls REAL ID "a judicial trump card in the hands of the executive branch," and says the goal is now "to get the message out to people who care about the environment ... on a local and national level."
That crisis may have deepened recently, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a "temporary" vehicle barrier across the San Pedro River south of Tucson. This new placement follows roughly two miles of fence already existing within the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. Many, such as Millis, question just how temporary those barriers truly are.
"As of Dec. 14, we had received photos of the 'temporary' vehicle barriers which look like Normandy-type beach fence," he says. "They're right in the riparian area, in the watershed. They go all the way through the river bed. They're pretty daunting-looking things, and the road has been graded right down to the water."
He questions whether federal officials will be able to remove the barriers, as promised, during high-water periods such as the monsoon season. Already, says Millis, nearby trees are filling with debris. "The reason they call these things temporary is because when the floods come, they'll get ripped out and sent downstream into the riparian conservation area."
He calls the barriers "a last nail in the coffin for the San Pedro riparian area," and questions how they will actually be moved. "I don't think that (federal officials) really understand the hydrology of the area, how fast those floods come up, how unpredictable they are. I don't see how they're going to get a crane in there. Even if they do, there are going to be significant impacts just from the removal procedures."
Several attempts to obtain comment from DHS officials were unsuccessful as of press time. But we did reach Linda Hughes, a National Environmental Policy Act coordinator with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Her agency administers the San Pedro conservation area, and initially had conducted a rapid-fire environmental assessment of the barrier project--an effort soon rendered moot by Chertoff's waiver. Today, Hughes says the BLM is in steady dialogue with the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Border Patrol. She maintains that the barriers "won't impede animals or people, because they have enough distance from the ground up. They're really just to keep vehicles from driving through the riverbed."
Meanwhile, talks continue over how to mitigate impacts in the river--impacts that the BLM initially said would remain minimal. The agency now urges the Border Patrol and Army Corps to ensure that flows aren't impeded, says Susan Bernal, a BLM realty specialist. "We would hope that they would continue with those mitigation practices. It's my understanding that they're only supposed to have temporary barriers in the river and the floodplain. That's the guideline under their supplemental environmental assessment of 2003.
"They know they need to remove those as necessary," Bernal says. "We just hope they do."
But Hughes admits that the BLM has little power in the light of REAL ID Act waivers. "It's out of our hands as far as decision-making because of the waiver. The best we can do is mitigate their impacts by cooperating and working with them." At the moment, there are discussions about some mitigation of that fence line through the San Pedro River corridor, she says. "But it's a little up in the air right now, and I can't provide specifics."
However, conservationists such as Millis say the public has a right to know specifically how the San Pedro is being impacted by border security. They also know that public pressure is the only way to make that happen. Millis calls Wild Versus Wall one of the primarily tools for getting out the word. "We think the film helps make the case to repeal (the waiver section) of REAL ID," he says, "to put an end to new-wall construction, and to fund mitigation and restoration projects."
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=oid:120220
January 1, 2008
Metal barriers are the San Pedro River's newest inhabitants
Say what you will about Michael Chertoff, but the outgoing Homeland Security secretary has never shied from flexing his institutional muscle.
That's particularly true after passage of the 2005 REAL ID Act, when Congress granted him extraordinary powers to ignore a slew of environmental laws--including the Endangered Species Act--when building roads and barriers along the Mexican border. According to biologists, damage to habitat and wildlife migration is impacting species ranging from tiny lizards to mule deer, bighorn sheep, coatis, bears and jaguars.
The act also prohibits any judicial review, making lawsuits against habitat-destructive projects apparently pointless. That provision was felt firsthand in 2007, when the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife sued Chertoff over his decision to waive environmental laws while building a barrier across Southern Arizona's embattled San Pedro River.
Their suit was ultimately dismissed in federal court. "The construction of the border fence pertains to both foreign affairs and immigration control--areas over which the executive branch traditionally exercises independent constitutional authority," wrote Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle.
The final blow occurred this June, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of Huvelle's decision.
As that disappointment sinks in, conservationists are partially pinning hopes on the incoming Barack Obama administration and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a critic of the fence, who is slated to replace Chertoff. But even those hopes were tempered somewhat in December, when Obama passed over Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva--an ardent border-fence opponent and sponsor of legislation to repeal REAL ID's waiver provisions--in favor of the more moderate Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado to head the U.S. Interior Department.
Meanwhile, with legal avenues largely exhausted, environmental groups have increasingly turned to public education as a means of gaining support. One recent example is Wild Versus Wall, a Sierra Club documentary peppered with activist interviews, stark imagery and contradictory remarks by officials such as Chertoff. The work by Tucson-based filmmaker Steev Hise paints a grim picture of the border situation.
Dan Millis coordinates the Arizona Sierra Club's Borderland Campaign. He calls REAL ID "a judicial trump card in the hands of the executive branch," and says the goal is now "to get the message out to people who care about the environment ... on a local and national level."
That crisis may have deepened recently, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a "temporary" vehicle barrier across the San Pedro River south of Tucson. This new placement follows roughly two miles of fence already existing within the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. Many, such as Millis, question just how temporary those barriers truly are.
"As of Dec. 14, we had received photos of the 'temporary' vehicle barriers which look like Normandy-type beach fence," he says. "They're right in the riparian area, in the watershed. They go all the way through the river bed. They're pretty daunting-looking things, and the road has been graded right down to the water."
He questions whether federal officials will be able to remove the barriers, as promised, during high-water periods such as the monsoon season. Already, says Millis, nearby trees are filling with debris. "The reason they call these things temporary is because when the floods come, they'll get ripped out and sent downstream into the riparian conservation area."
He calls the barriers "a last nail in the coffin for the San Pedro riparian area," and questions how they will actually be moved. "I don't think that (federal officials) really understand the hydrology of the area, how fast those floods come up, how unpredictable they are. I don't see how they're going to get a crane in there. Even if they do, there are going to be significant impacts just from the removal procedures."
Several attempts to obtain comment from DHS officials were unsuccessful as of press time. But we did reach Linda Hughes, a National Environmental Policy Act coordinator with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Her agency administers the San Pedro conservation area, and initially had conducted a rapid-fire environmental assessment of the barrier project--an effort soon rendered moot by Chertoff's waiver. Today, Hughes says the BLM is in steady dialogue with the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Border Patrol. She maintains that the barriers "won't impede animals or people, because they have enough distance from the ground up. They're really just to keep vehicles from driving through the riverbed."
Meanwhile, talks continue over how to mitigate impacts in the river--impacts that the BLM initially said would remain minimal. The agency now urges the Border Patrol and Army Corps to ensure that flows aren't impeded, says Susan Bernal, a BLM realty specialist. "We would hope that they would continue with those mitigation practices. It's my understanding that they're only supposed to have temporary barriers in the river and the floodplain. That's the guideline under their supplemental environmental assessment of 2003.
"They know they need to remove those as necessary," Bernal says. "We just hope they do."
But Hughes admits that the BLM has little power in the light of REAL ID Act waivers. "It's out of our hands as far as decision-making because of the waiver. The best we can do is mitigate their impacts by cooperating and working with them." At the moment, there are discussions about some mitigation of that fence line through the San Pedro River corridor, she says. "But it's a little up in the air right now, and I can't provide specifics."
However, conservationists such as Millis say the public has a right to know specifically how the San Pedro is being impacted by border security. They also know that public pressure is the only way to make that happen. Millis calls Wild Versus Wall one of the primarily tools for getting out the word. "We think the film helps make the case to repeal (the waiver section) of REAL ID," he says, "to put an end to new-wall construction, and to fund mitigation and restoration projects."
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=oid:120220
Valley still barrier to border fence
San Antonio Express-News
December 29, 2008
BROWNSVILLE — U.S. Customs and Border Protection has a color map showing the progress on a border fence that isn't quite done — with the Rio Grande Valley the point of lasting stubbornness.
Agency officials are hailing the accomplishments on a barrier that looks vastly different from what many in middle America might envision, saying they will complete 90 percent of their 670-mile, end-of-year goal before President George W. Bush leaves office.
But what was to be one of Bush's bragging points met unforeseen opposition from landowners and city governments clinging to their traditional relationship with the Rio Grande and shared heritage with Mexico.
Many in the Valley sport “No Border Wall” bumper stickers on their cars, and hundreds have showed up to protest what's seen as an insult to Mexicans who fill their stores and restaurants. Environmentalists fear the yet-unknown impact on at least two nature preserves that will be cut off by the fence and say it will disrupt one of the nation's last habitats for rare wildcats.
In two cases, the government reached compromises — one to reinforce 22 miles of levee to double as a border wall, the other to repair and heighten an existing fence at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
Another 14.4 miles of fencing in sections in Rio Grande City, Roma and Los Ebanos has been delayed, with the government citing engineering difficulties due to Rio Grande flood plains.
As planned, the three segments would affect historic and picturesque areas, including Los Ebanos' famed hand-pulled ferry. But CBP spokeswoman Angela de Rocha said the areas had been identified as high-traffic smuggling zones and that fencing would still go up.
Of the 670-mile goal, CBP maps call for 300 miles of fencing to deter vehicles and 370 miles to discourage pedestrians.
As of Dec. 12, the agency had completed 278 miles of pedestrian fencing and 248 miles of vehicle fencing, leaving it 144 miles short. But all construction contracts have been let, and about 50 miles is going up per week, de Rocha said.
That rate could mean completion by the time Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff steps down.
Except maybe for the Valley.
Red patches on the map indicate construction that hasn't begun. Aside from two small dabs in New Mexico and south of El Paso, the red is in the Valley, interrupted by the compromise levee portion in Hidalgo County.
De Rocha said contracts had been let but that she didn't know when construction on the Valley's remaining miles would begin.
While border fencing was conceived with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and became a national goal with an address by Bush in 2006 on immigration, de Rocha said the groundwork was laid during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt set aside a federal easement along the border to be used for security, which has allowed fencing to go up in California, Arizona and New Mexico at a fast pace.
“Old Teddy was thinking ahead there,” she said.
From El Paso to the Valley, the government was able to build on levees it already owned via the U.S. arm of the International Boundary and Water Commission, which oversees the Rio Grande.
But in the Valley, levees can be a mile or more from the river, with private property in between. Planners have also been stumped by hydrology and engineering challenges with the flood plain, de Rocha said.
The government filed 293 condemnation actions to take land, of which about 180 were settled with landowners agreeing on a price. Another 113 have been “adversarial,” but some of them have also since been settled, Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames said.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, who has heard the cases, has ruled that the government has a right to the land in about 170 cases, but the possession has been piecemeal and has impeded access to build. He has agreed to allow some cases to go to trial so a jury can hear evidence on fair compensation, though in some cases the government already has possession.
There are hopes that Janet Napolitano, President-elect Barack Obama's pick for Homeland Security secretary, might back down on unconstructed segments or use a late provision allowing the department to change plans, but Napolitano has not indicated that.
Border Patrol Assistant Chief Lloyd Easterling said Congress mandated the 670 miles and that it was too soon to tell whether his agency would ask for more.
“We're funded for the 670 miles, and we're going to get that part completed and then from there we're going to try to assess what we've done and evaluate,” he said.
But Easterling said the fence was fulfilling the goal of slowing unauthorized border crossings, part of a three-pronged approach of fencing, technology and personnel.
“In some cases, even a few seconds (of slowing down border crossers) is what we're after, where we didn't have that long before,” he said. “They either have to burrow under it, which we've seen, or they have to go over it or cut through it, and those things are easily seen.”
Arrest numbers are down 17 percent since the fence was built, and while the economy may be deterring job seekers, the numbers don't correspondent with dips from previous economic slowdowns, Easterling said.
“I'm not going to tell you we've won any battles or any war, but we're definitely headed in the right direction,” he said.
Fighting for a higher price, meanwhile, was a battle considered worthwhile for Valley landowners, some of whose properties have been in their families since Spanish land grants in the 1700s.
UT-Brownsville Professor Eloisa Tamez, who has become the poster child for anti-fence landowners, said the glitch now was getting land appraisals with all area appraisers already contracted to work for the government. Her case is scheduled for trial in the spring.
Overall, she's lost faith in a government she said is violating the Constitution and trampling on mostly poor, mostly Hispanic landowners.
“One wonders, is there any justice at all in the implementation of this mandate?” she said.
“We're still in America, we're not an appendage of America.”
“It's been a tough year,” she said. “But for now, it ends on a good note. There's no wall in my backyard.”
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/36815049.html
December 29, 2008
BROWNSVILLE — U.S. Customs and Border Protection has a color map showing the progress on a border fence that isn't quite done — with the Rio Grande Valley the point of lasting stubbornness.
Agency officials are hailing the accomplishments on a barrier that looks vastly different from what many in middle America might envision, saying they will complete 90 percent of their 670-mile, end-of-year goal before President George W. Bush leaves office.
But what was to be one of Bush's bragging points met unforeseen opposition from landowners and city governments clinging to their traditional relationship with the Rio Grande and shared heritage with Mexico.
Many in the Valley sport “No Border Wall” bumper stickers on their cars, and hundreds have showed up to protest what's seen as an insult to Mexicans who fill their stores and restaurants. Environmentalists fear the yet-unknown impact on at least two nature preserves that will be cut off by the fence and say it will disrupt one of the nation's last habitats for rare wildcats.
In two cases, the government reached compromises — one to reinforce 22 miles of levee to double as a border wall, the other to repair and heighten an existing fence at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
Another 14.4 miles of fencing in sections in Rio Grande City, Roma and Los Ebanos has been delayed, with the government citing engineering difficulties due to Rio Grande flood plains.
As planned, the three segments would affect historic and picturesque areas, including Los Ebanos' famed hand-pulled ferry. But CBP spokeswoman Angela de Rocha said the areas had been identified as high-traffic smuggling zones and that fencing would still go up.
Of the 670-mile goal, CBP maps call for 300 miles of fencing to deter vehicles and 370 miles to discourage pedestrians.
As of Dec. 12, the agency had completed 278 miles of pedestrian fencing and 248 miles of vehicle fencing, leaving it 144 miles short. But all construction contracts have been let, and about 50 miles is going up per week, de Rocha said.
That rate could mean completion by the time Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff steps down.
Except maybe for the Valley.
Red patches on the map indicate construction that hasn't begun. Aside from two small dabs in New Mexico and south of El Paso, the red is in the Valley, interrupted by the compromise levee portion in Hidalgo County.
De Rocha said contracts had been let but that she didn't know when construction on the Valley's remaining miles would begin.
While border fencing was conceived with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and became a national goal with an address by Bush in 2006 on immigration, de Rocha said the groundwork was laid during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt set aside a federal easement along the border to be used for security, which has allowed fencing to go up in California, Arizona and New Mexico at a fast pace.
“Old Teddy was thinking ahead there,” she said.
From El Paso to the Valley, the government was able to build on levees it already owned via the U.S. arm of the International Boundary and Water Commission, which oversees the Rio Grande.
But in the Valley, levees can be a mile or more from the river, with private property in between. Planners have also been stumped by hydrology and engineering challenges with the flood plain, de Rocha said.
The government filed 293 condemnation actions to take land, of which about 180 were settled with landowners agreeing on a price. Another 113 have been “adversarial,” but some of them have also since been settled, Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames said.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, who has heard the cases, has ruled that the government has a right to the land in about 170 cases, but the possession has been piecemeal and has impeded access to build. He has agreed to allow some cases to go to trial so a jury can hear evidence on fair compensation, though in some cases the government already has possession.
There are hopes that Janet Napolitano, President-elect Barack Obama's pick for Homeland Security secretary, might back down on unconstructed segments or use a late provision allowing the department to change plans, but Napolitano has not indicated that.
Border Patrol Assistant Chief Lloyd Easterling said Congress mandated the 670 miles and that it was too soon to tell whether his agency would ask for more.
“We're funded for the 670 miles, and we're going to get that part completed and then from there we're going to try to assess what we've done and evaluate,” he said.
But Easterling said the fence was fulfilling the goal of slowing unauthorized border crossings, part of a three-pronged approach of fencing, technology and personnel.
“In some cases, even a few seconds (of slowing down border crossers) is what we're after, where we didn't have that long before,” he said. “They either have to burrow under it, which we've seen, or they have to go over it or cut through it, and those things are easily seen.”
Arrest numbers are down 17 percent since the fence was built, and while the economy may be deterring job seekers, the numbers don't correspondent with dips from previous economic slowdowns, Easterling said.
“I'm not going to tell you we've won any battles or any war, but we're definitely headed in the right direction,” he said.
Fighting for a higher price, meanwhile, was a battle considered worthwhile for Valley landowners, some of whose properties have been in their families since Spanish land grants in the 1700s.
UT-Brownsville Professor Eloisa Tamez, who has become the poster child for anti-fence landowners, said the glitch now was getting land appraisals with all area appraisers already contracted to work for the government. Her case is scheduled for trial in the spring.
Overall, she's lost faith in a government she said is violating the Constitution and trampling on mostly poor, mostly Hispanic landowners.
“One wonders, is there any justice at all in the implementation of this mandate?” she said.
“We're still in America, we're not an appendage of America.”
“It's been a tough year,” she said. “But for now, it ends on a good note. There's no wall in my backyard.”
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/36815049.html
DHS seeks to condemn nature preserve land
Associated Press / Austin American Statesman
December 29, 2008
McALLEN, Texas — The Department of Homeland Security has sued The Nature Conservancy to condemn land in a South Texas nature preserve for the border fence.
The conservancy's Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve, which includes more than 1,000 acres along the Rio Grande near Brownsville, is home to a rare grove of native sabal palms, a South Texas native plant nursery for reforestation projects and habitat for the endangered ocelot and jaguarundi.
The government offered the conservancy $114,000 for a strip of land that would leave three-quarters of the preserve, including the property manager's home, in the no-man's land between the fence and Mexico, according to court records filed earlier this month.
The Nature Conservancy's preference is no fence and no compensation, but the offer failed to take into account the impact to the rest of preserve, Laura Huffman, The Nature Conservancy's state director, said Monday.
The organization paid more than $2.5 million in 1999 for the preserve and has invested considerable money in it since, Huffman said.
It would be a safety concern to have a property manager living south of the fence, Huffman said, and "if we can't steward the land properly ... it raises the question of whether or not it is a viable preserve."
In total, the 60-foot wide strip of land running 6,000 feet across the preserve is about eight acres.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is trying to complete 670 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, does not comment on pending litigation.
Even if the fence were situated in such a way that the conservancy's warehouse for its equipment and property manager's home were on the north side, the logistics of constantly moving farm equipment through still unspecified access gates would be daunting, Huffman said.
The Nature Conservancy leases swaths of the land for agriculture including organically grown citrus.
By starting the condemnation process, it at least gives the conservancy an opportunity to get its own appraisal of the property and make an argument for fair compensation, Huffman said. The conservancy would welcome a visit from U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen who has made site visits in the area for other condemnation cases, she said.
After one of Hanen's visits, the preserve's neighbor to the west worked out a compromise with Customs and Border Protection to build a concrete wall into the river side of the levee rather than building a fence, which would have affected buildings on the Old Nye Plantation. Huffman said such a wall would likely still create problems for the preserve.
The nearby Sabal Palm Audubon Center, which would be completely on the south side of the border fence, is still waiting for word on the fence.
Since the fence does not cross Audubon's 557 acres, the government has not had to sue for condemnation and has not told Audubon anything in months, said Anne Brown, vice president of National Audubon Society and executive director of Audubon Texas.
"We haven't heard a word," Brown said.
The border fence has faced its stiffest opposition in the Rio Grande Valley where it would cut through properties along the river that have been in families for generations, are critical habitat preserves or are part of large farming operations.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/gen/ap/TX_Border_Fence.html
December 29, 2008
McALLEN, Texas — The Department of Homeland Security has sued The Nature Conservancy to condemn land in a South Texas nature preserve for the border fence.
The conservancy's Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve, which includes more than 1,000 acres along the Rio Grande near Brownsville, is home to a rare grove of native sabal palms, a South Texas native plant nursery for reforestation projects and habitat for the endangered ocelot and jaguarundi.
The government offered the conservancy $114,000 for a strip of land that would leave three-quarters of the preserve, including the property manager's home, in the no-man's land between the fence and Mexico, according to court records filed earlier this month.
The Nature Conservancy's preference is no fence and no compensation, but the offer failed to take into account the impact to the rest of preserve, Laura Huffman, The Nature Conservancy's state director, said Monday.
The organization paid more than $2.5 million in 1999 for the preserve and has invested considerable money in it since, Huffman said.
It would be a safety concern to have a property manager living south of the fence, Huffman said, and "if we can't steward the land properly ... it raises the question of whether or not it is a viable preserve."
In total, the 60-foot wide strip of land running 6,000 feet across the preserve is about eight acres.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is trying to complete 670 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, does not comment on pending litigation.
Even if the fence were situated in such a way that the conservancy's warehouse for its equipment and property manager's home were on the north side, the logistics of constantly moving farm equipment through still unspecified access gates would be daunting, Huffman said.
The Nature Conservancy leases swaths of the land for agriculture including organically grown citrus.
By starting the condemnation process, it at least gives the conservancy an opportunity to get its own appraisal of the property and make an argument for fair compensation, Huffman said. The conservancy would welcome a visit from U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen who has made site visits in the area for other condemnation cases, she said.
After one of Hanen's visits, the preserve's neighbor to the west worked out a compromise with Customs and Border Protection to build a concrete wall into the river side of the levee rather than building a fence, which would have affected buildings on the Old Nye Plantation. Huffman said such a wall would likely still create problems for the preserve.
The nearby Sabal Palm Audubon Center, which would be completely on the south side of the border fence, is still waiting for word on the fence.
Since the fence does not cross Audubon's 557 acres, the government has not had to sue for condemnation and has not told Audubon anything in months, said Anne Brown, vice president of National Audubon Society and executive director of Audubon Texas.
"We haven't heard a word," Brown said.
The border fence has faced its stiffest opposition in the Rio Grande Valley where it would cut through properties along the river that have been in families for generations, are critical habitat preserves or are part of large farming operations.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/gen/ap/TX_Border_Fence.html
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