Valley braces for new sections of border wall
Portions will be built on levees, leaving thousands of acres of land — and U.S. citizens’ homes — on the ‘Mexican’ side
MCALLEN — With a fresh flurry of tweets and comments, President Donald Trump has thrown his long-sought border wall back on the national agenda, with vows to shut down the U.S. government if he can’t get it built soon.
“It’s time we had proper border security,” the president said last week. “We’re the laughingstock of the world.”
Those words already may have faded for many Americans amid the drumbeat of crises and controversy that punctuate public life these days. But here on the lower reaches of the Rio Grande, Trump’s demands have served up a new thump of worry about a long-looming threat.
Now, landowners and anti-wall advocates are suiting up for another round, bolstering their argument with liberals
conservatives alike with calls for both protecting the environment and respecting property rights.
“We’re ground zero. Ground zero-zero,” says Becky Schuster Jones, who has been told by federal officials that any new fencing will first go up through the border-front farmland her family owns downriver from McAllen.
“It’s like a lava flow,” she said. “You know it’s coming. Now what do you do to stop it?”
National debate about Trump’s wall has dwindled since Congress reached a funding compromise in March to allocate $1.6 billion for new wall construction, far short of the president’s demand for up to $25 billion.
Public concern faded even further amid this summer’s crisis involving the plight of Central American migrant families separated at the border.
A congressional watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office, said Monday that the Trump administration’s plan fails to adequately consider costs, which could increase the price and lead to delays.
While prohibiting a wall through a 3-mile stretch of the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, which had been slated for the first new section of it, the March agreement provided enough money for building it most everywhere else on this stretch of border.
Because of the river’s snaking path as it nears its mouth, 25 miles of new wall in Hidalgo County will be built on flood control levees, often a mile or more from the border itself. That will leave thousands of acres of land, and the homes of U.S. citizens, on the “Mexican” side of the wall.
The Rio Grande here wriggles past cities that are some of the most violent in Mexico. A multisided war between criminal gangs and security forces is blamed for killing more than 29,000 people across Mexico last year — higher than the homicide rate at the peak of the country’s drug war in 2011 — and officials say this year will be worse. The Lower Rio Grande Valley serves as the primary destination for migrants crossing illegally into the U.S.
‘Our actual border’
Few here question the need for security. But many simply don’t believe a wall is the way to guarantee it.
“This idea that if you’re against the border wall you’re for open borders is a fallacy,” says Marianna Trevino-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center, a 100-acre river front reserve outside the city of Mission through which new fencing is planned. “If anyone thought that the wall was a solution, you wouldn’t have the vigorous opposition you have had.”
The levee fence as currently designed will leave as much as 70 percent of the butterfly preserve — the most important in North America— on the Mexican side of the wall. The same will happen to a neighboring federal wildlife refuge and the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park, just upriver.
The three refuges, which total more than 3 square miles of border-front habitat, are part of a wildlife corridor that stretches along the Rio Grande. Wright and other advocates say only 5 percent of the region’s natural habitat remains intact. Once completed, a border wall will maroon 95 percent of it on the Mexican side.
Still, scuttling plans for more wall “is not about the butterflies and birds,” Wright argues. “It’s about protecting property rights, defending our actual border.”
Scores of lawsuits
Carter Smith, executive director of Texas Parks and Wildlife, sent a letter last week to Border Patrol officials advising that putting a wall through the Bentsen-Rio Grande State Park would “substantially disrupt” operations there.
Arguing that it is a “biologically rich and exceedingly unique” area hosting species found nowhere outside the region, Smith said that “ensuring the continued future viability of the state park is of paramount importance.”
Border Patrol officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Despite the heavy traffic of illicit drugs and unauthorized migrants passing through them, McAllen and other Texas border cities rank among the safest in the U.S. Many residents argue that security has been more effectively won with boots on the ground and electronic surveillance.
“It would be better if they just brought in more agents,” says Yolanda Hernandez, 66, a retired school secretary who has lived her entire life in a tiny cluster of houses called Rancho Vieand jo, staked to the cotton and sugar cane fields 2 miles downriver from the Santa Ana refuge. “They are doing a good job.”
As plans stand now, Hernandez’s house, those of her neighbors and the 85-year-old Pentecostal church where many of them worship will be on the far side of the new fencing. Residents have heard that their area will be among the first for new levee wall construction.
Yet, no one from the government has come to explain when the fence will be built here or exactly where, Hernandez and others said. Surveyors have recently been spotted working on the levees nearby.
“They said they were going to start, that they were just waiting for the green light,” said Angel Anguiano, 56, the pastor of the church, called La Hermosa. “It’s really going to interfere with what we do here. It’s just very inconvenient.”
Landowners along the river began receiving requests to survey their property this past summer, with some agreeing and others refusing to cooperate. Anti-wall advocates point out that scores of lawsuits are still being litigated by landowners whose property was taken for portions of the wall built a decade ago. They promise fresh court fights over the latest wall building.
“Right now they have the money to build all the levee walls in Hidalgo County,” said Scott Nicol, the McAllen-based co-chair of the Sierra Club’s borderlands campaign. “But it’s going to take them a while because they are going to have to sue everybody. They can’t start building until they take that property from landowners.”