Stealing land to build a wall? No, thanks
President Trump has been promising his border wall for nearly two years now, but his discussion of the topic is usually high on vivid imagery and low on details: How much will it cost? Who will build it? When will it be done?
Trump has taken a step toward the specific, asking Congress for $18 billion to build 316 new miles of border wall while repairing or replacing another 407 miles of extant fencing. That would be spent through 2027. It would leave about half of the U.S.-Mexico border without any man-made barrier, and doesn’t include another $15 billion for extra personnel, technology, and other costs that bring the total to $33 billion for the first 10 years.
The fiscal conservative in me must note the dramatic difference between these numbers and the estimates Trump supplied on the campaign trail. In February of 2016, he suggested a mere $8 billion would wall off the entire southern border. He eventually conceded it might be around $12 billion — but either is a far cry from $33 billion to do less than half the work Trump promised.
But what will happen to the Americans who own land along the border? If Trump gets what he wants, they are in for a world of misery.
In a Washington Examiner report, one of four contractors tasked with building a Trump wall prototype indicated the White House has yet to provide any guidance on how it intends to handle eminent domain. But we can get a good idea of what will happen during the border wall land grab from a December report by the Texas Tribune and ProPublica.
The study focused on the use of eminent domain on borderlands a decade ago when George W. Bush was getting to work on a previous round of border wall construction. Even though Texas has strong legal protections of private property, the feds have rode roughshod over property rights in the name of national security and fighting the failed war on drugs.
The land seizure process back in 2007 was a monument to government incompetence and cruelty. The Department of Homeland Security “circumvented laws designed to help landowners receive fair compensation,” the investigators found, lowballing property owners and refusing to conduct a proper appraisal.
Wealthier landowners could fight DHS for a fairer price in court, but for those who couldn’t spare the legal fees — especially while losing their home and/or livelihood — there was nothing to be done.
And we haven’t even gotten to the incompetence. Many landowners had to go to court because the government didn’t bother with property lines, sometimes trying to pay people for land that was not theirs while neglecting to pay the real owners.
A decade later, litigation is ongoing as border residents struggle to exact a fair purchase price from Washington. “We actually built the fence on land that we haven’t finished taking yet,” admitted Daniel Hu, a Justice Department attorney.
Is this what we want to replicate? Trump himself has been enthusiastic about the government stealing people’s land to build something “tremendous,” so it’s not surprising he would be fine with it. But his team should know better. Nothing about a large-scale violation of Americans’ private property rights will make our country great.