San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A wall of confusion
‘Border barrier’ construction may continue with funding still intact
SALINEÑO — Debralee Rodriguez felt like she had traveled back in time when Customs and Border Protection notified her that it would conduct an environmental assessment for a “border barrier” through the Valley Land Fund’s property in Starr County.
The status of Salineño Bird Preserve, a 2.6-acre tract near the Rio Grande renowned among birders, has been uncertain for years. In 2019, CBP sought permission to survey the property for a wall. In 2020, the Valley Land Fund decided to sell the property, then canceled the offer after an outcry from the birding community. Later that year, CBP sued the fund to condemn the land. Then the Biden administration dropped the lawsuit.
In the letter to landowners, CBP said the
environmental assessment would last through mid-March. An attached map showed planned construction that would cut off Starr County from the Rio Grande. The agency also would fill in gaps in fencing in Hidalgo and Cameron counties downstream. “It definitely stirred up some uneasiness,” said Rodriguez, the Valley Land Fund’s executive director. “Like, oh gosh, we’re back here again.”
The map depicts 86 miles of new metal fencing that would cut off corridors used by wildlife and further limit access to the Rio Grande. In some parts of Starr County, which has largely avoided construction on its 68 miles of riverbank, people still fish and boat. Private parks where locals can pay a few dollars to barbecue and spend the day dot the riverbank. The Salineño refuge is host to bird species seen in few other places in the United States.
Unspent border wall funding is left over from appropriations by Congress in 2018, 2019 and 2020, and unless legislators rescind those funds, the Biden administration
will have to continue construction. Language that would have rescinded about $2 billion in border wall funding was stripped from the omnibus spending bill President Joe Biden signed this month.
In court filings, the Department of Homeland Security said it “will undertake a thorough review and replanning process” of the project. The leftover funds will be used to pay off canceled contracts, to “remediate or mitigate environmental damage caused by past border wall construction” and on public consultation. According to the filing, the department may find “that additional land acquisition is necessary to complete projects contemplated by this plan.”
Shortly after taking office last year, Biden signed an executive order halting wall construction and canceling contracts. He promised “not one more foot” would be built. The federal government dismissed pending condemnation lawsuits. Opponents of the wall, which under former President Donald Trump was planned to stretch across the Rio Grande Valley and Webb and Zapata Counties upstream, breathed a sigh of relief.
Meanwhile, Texas has sued the Biden administration, demanding it restart construction. Instead, CBP conducted the environmental assessment, which it could have waived under George W. Bush-era laws that expedite wall construction. The General Accountability Office, a nonpartisan government watchdog, has ruled that CBP can take time to conduct the assessment but cannot completely halt construction. If the Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress this year, there’s little chance the funding will be rescinded.
“If Congress doesn’t do something, all three counties will be completely walled off from the Rio Grande,” said Scott Nicol, a board member of Friends of the Wildlife Corridor, referring to Starr, Hidalgo and Cameron counties.
The notice of an environmental assessment sent to landowners, which Nicol and others see as a delaying tactic by the administration, has caused confusion across the Valley.
At the Trump administration cost of $46 million a mile, it’s unlikely the current funding would cover the entire 86 miles of new construction. And wall proponents say canceling contracts, returning land and doing an environmental study are just efforts by the Biden administration to waste the money so it can’t be spent on construction.
But from Salineño to the Gulf of Mexico, evidence abounds that celebration by wall opponents was premature. In the eastern Starr County town of La Grulla, the state is building 1.7 miles of 30foot-high fence with materials donated by the federal government. In Hidalgo County, the federal government is putting new concrete slabs on flood control levees and topping them with concrete bollards several feet high. And as recently as November, the federal government filed a lawsuit to condemn land for wall construction.
“I know they’re continuing the wall. I know Biden didn’t keep his promise of ‘not one more foot,’ ” said Nayda Alvarez, who lives about 200 feet from the river near Rio Grande City.
A high school teacher who’d never dabbled in politics and wasn’t active on social media when she first learned CBP wanted to build a wall through her property, Alvarez has become a face of the opposition.
She lives next to the land where her grandfather farmed and ran livestock. Her dad lives in a house behind hers. She fought efforts to survey her property, not wanting to lose access to the riverfront where her family hunts and where it gathers on Easter. Last year, the government’s lawsuit to gain access to her property was closed. Alvarez said she hasn’t received the environmental assessment letter, but her father and a neighbor did.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, what letter I’m going to get next,” she said.
A way of life
The Salineño Bird Preserve began as an RV park. In the 1980s, a couple from Michigan purchased it and turned it into a haven for birders. In the birding community, it’s still known as DeWind’s Yard after those owners. The DeWinds donated the park to the Valley Land Fund in 1998. The fund purchased adjacent land and eventually partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to have on-site caretakers during the fall and winter.
The volunteers, Lois Hughes and Merle Ihne, greet visitors from around the world — about 1,700 people between November and March — and point out species that can be seen nowhere else in the U.S. Striking green jays and bright orange Altamira orioles flit among the mesquite and huisache trees near their RV. Chachalacas, a Valley specialty that looks like a cross between a roadrunner and a large dove, strut through the underbrush.
Hughes and Ihne said surveyors told them the wall would cut right through the property. The planned 150-foot enforcement zone mentioned in the environmental study would require clearing the birds’ habitat.
“If you’re a birder that has an (American Birding Association) list, you’re trying to see as many species as you can in this country,” Hughes said. “This is where you have to go to find species that are on the northern edge of their range. That’s the importance for hard-core birders.
“Maintaining the riparian habitat all the way along the river corridor is important for everything, so these animals can move back and forth without having their habitats chopped up.”
For locals, a wall cutting off access to the Rio Grande would change their way of life. The road to reach the preserve from the nearby community of Salineño, population 176, ends at a concrete boat ramp on the river. It’s a popular fishing spot most evenings. Locals and visitors drop in lines angling for catfish, sunfish, bass and alligator gar.
Along with being the most unfenced stretch of river in the Valley, Starr County has a higher poverty rate than Hidalgo and Cameron counties and is more rural, with less presence by legal aid groups.
Informal inheritance of real estate makes it more difficult for landowners to prove they’re entitled to compensation when CBP takes their property. Landowners without the resources to fight the federal government are less likely to be fairly compensated for the land they’ve lost, said Efrén C. Olivares, interim director of litigation for the Southern Poverty Law
Center. He previously represented landowners fighting condemnations as a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project.
“Many of the landowners were elderly, maybe they did not readily have access to technology to complete documents or go online and find things,” Olivares said. “You had to get out there in person, have conversations with individuals.”
A short drive from the refuge, Cynthia Talamante and her family were having a spring break barbecue. Talamante said Salineño is largely spared the flow of drugs and people that have plagued nearby communities, but she’d heard stories about her neighbors being menaced while fishing, and she occasionally sees border crossers.
“I’m half and half,” she said of her support for the wall. “Sometimes there are a lot of people crossing over, and you don’t know who they are.”
But that rarely happens, Talamante said, and her family continues to use and enjoy the river.
While her teenage son grilled chicken and thin-sliced beef, his friends pulled over in a pickup to chat. A young man on horseback joined them. Jesus Ibañez said he rode his paint horse 45 minutes from New Falcon, a small community nearby, to visit Talamante’s son. Sitting in her yard, he talked about fishing with his friends in Salineño.
“We were born here,” Ibañez said. “We opened our eyes in Salineño and Falcon. We’ve been fishing since we were little.”
‘A symptom of the disease’
Not every stretch of the river in Starr County is as idyllic as Salineño.
Downstream in Roma and in nearby Fronton, migrants regularly cross the river to surrender to the Border Patrol and request asylum. Residents of Fronton, a hamlet of 172 people that was founded by Spanish settlers in the 18th century, said they’ve had desperate immigrants knocking on their doors and asking for help, along with drug smugglers careening through residential streets. In 2016, a Rio Grande City resident was shot and killed while fishing from a boat on the river near Fronton.
A wall here is unlikely to stop the asylum-seekers — for years people have crossed into walledoff sections of Hidalgo County and surrendered to the Border Patrol on the riverbanks — but some residents said it would stop vehicular pursuits of smugglers and keep foot traffic off their property.
Rene Barrera lives less than 300 yards from the Rio Grande and said he owns an additional 5acre riverfront plot that he no longer uses for fishing because of safety concerns. Barrera said CBP asked to buy land for wall construction during the Trump administration and that he agreed to sell. “If they weren’t going to build the wall, I was going to step back and say, ‘I’m not selling anything to you,’ ” he said.
That’s not because he thinks it’s a particularly good solution — the wall is “a symptom of the disease,” he said — it’s just the most feasible way to stop smuggling along the riverbanks. Drugs will still come in on semitrailers through ports of entry, but they won’t be coming through Fronton. The real solution, reducing U.S. demand for drugs and cheap labor, is less realistic, Barrera said.
“Unless you’re willing to take some really, really hard looks at the realities of American culture, (the wall) is a solution,” Barrera said. “No one wants to come out and say how materialistic and how (messed) up our culture is.”
Like many landowners in the region who agreed to sell their property to CBP, Barrera said he doesn’t know the status of his property.
Not everyone in Starr County who had their land taken has been given it back. Noel Benavides, a businessman in Roma, said he first received condemnation notices from CBP in 2008, part of wall construction funded during the Bush administration. Benavides said the government wanted to pay him for only the 1-mile strip on which the wall would run, about 6 acres. But he would lose access to 20 acres along the Rio Grande of his 150 acres of undeveloped land. Eventually, after more than a decade of negotiations, he reached an agreement to be compensated for the land that would have gone behind the wall.
Even as other landowners are having their property returned to them, Benavides said he hasn’t heard anything from CBP about the land he sold.
“They’re not using it,” he said. “It’s just a waste of money. Money that could be used for schools. Medical staff. Hiring more people for the Border Patrol. Cameras on the river. More security.”
That funds for the wall could be spent on other forms of border security is an oft-repeated talking point along the border. The environmental assessment notice said it’s considering alternatives to new fencing, including lights, cameras and a patrol road, which CBP refers to as parts of the border wall system.
“That is just as harmful,” said Norma Herrera, the policy and advocacy lead strategist for border and immigrants’ rights at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “You’re still condemning property, you’re still clearing out habitat.”
Mixed messages
The region’s members of Congress have only added to the confusion about the wall’s future.
In January, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, took credit for part of the DHS appropriations bill that would have rescinded wall funding. But that language was missing from the spending bill Biden signed this month. After the bill passed, a spokeswoman for Cuellar wrote in an email that the legislation “prevents any new border wall construction.” She didn’t respond to follow-up emails and phone calls.
A spokesman for Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, wrote in an email: “In the fiscal year 2022 omnibus that President Biden just signed, there was no significant border wall funding rescinded.”
Congress passed large appropriations bills that included wall funding for the 2018, 2019 and 2020 budget cycles; Democrats controlled the House in 2019 and 2020. Cuellar voted for the 2018 and 2019 funding but against the 2020 bill.
“Now we’re seeing how difficult it is to fight back against these policies,” said Jessica Cisneros, Cuellar’s opponent in the May Democratic primary runoff election. “And that’s not to say the Biden administration won’t eventually win to stop construction of the border wall. But it makes it a lot more difficult once all the funding has been appropriated and has been designated for that use. We shouldn’t have gotten to that point to begin with.”