The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wall takes back seat to Harvey rebuilding
Funds for border construction drop in spending priority.
HOUSTON — The U.S. government carefully designed a path of least resistance to building a border wall in Texas, picking a wildlife refuge and other places it already owns or controls to quickly begin construction. All it needed was Congress to approve the money. Then came Harvey. President Donald Trump’s administration must now grapple with a storm that devastated the Texas Gulf Coast, with some areas still underwater and tens of thousands of people forced from their homes. Rebuilding will require billions of dollars to start — and may come at the expense of what is perhaps Trump’s best-known policy priority.
The White House wanted $1.6 billion for 74 miles of initial wall, including 60 miles in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
While a fraction of what the overall Harvey recovery effort will cost, funding for the wall already faced strong opposition from Senate Democrats. Three days before the storm made landfall, Trump threatened a government shutdown unless Congress provides funding. That threat now appears to be off the table, as is any potential maneuver to tie the wall to providing disaster relief.
“If Trump is saying, ‘Listen, you’re only going to get your disaster funding if I get my wall,’ that is a total political loser,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican consultant. “That’s just not tenable.”
Another potential way to get the wall started would be tying initial funding to the program shielding young immigrants from deportation, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which the Trump administration announced Tuesday it would seek to phase out.
The White House and Republican congressional leadership are discussing a larger package of legislation to address DACA, money for the border wall and other elements. Democrats have ruled out any trade off of DACA legislation with the border wall, though, casting doubt on such an approach.
Before the storm hit, the U.S. government had spent months quietly preparing to begin new construction in Texas. The first construction site would be the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, a verdant forest with butterflies and rare bird species next to the Rio Grande — that wasn’t affected by Harvey.
Those preparations are still underway. At Santa Ana, crews were seen as recently as Friday drilling holes for testing the soil on the river levee built to withhold high waters from the Rio Grande. The head of the National Butterfly Center, also next to the border, recently caught workers chopping trees and mowing vegetation on her property without her permission. And contractors have been spotted at a courthouse in a neighboring county examining land ownership records.
The government wants to build on the 3 miles of river levee cutting through the northern edge of the refuge, separating the visitor center from the rest of the park. A gate in the wall would open and close for visitors. Vegetation in front of the wall would be cleared for an access road and open land to give agents better visibility.
Under current plans, another 25 miles would go on other parts of the levee, where government agencies are believed to control land rights and have previously built sections of fencing. The remaining construction would go through river towns further west, taking a route the government examined the last time it built a border barrier, under the 2006 Secure Fence Act.