Dems aim to prevent wall land seizures

Two Democratic congressmen have drafted legislation they say would prevent Texans from surrendering their land for President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego and Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who drafted the Protecting the Property Rights of Border Landowners Act, said they plan to introduce it next week, hopefully with some Republican support.

The legislation would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to pro-

hibit the U.S. attorney general and the Department of Homeland Security “from using eminent domain to acquire land for the purpose of constructing a wall, or other physical barrier, along the international border between the United States and Mexico.”

“We do not need a border wall that raids the land of private citizens, ransacks the businesses and ranches of hardworking Texans and strips property rights away from Americans,” said O’Rourke, who represents El Paso and its surrounding borderlands.

Although the bill would apply to all private landowners along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, in practice it’s almost exclusively an issue for the Lone Star State, where nearly all land along the border is privately owned. Land bordering Mexico in the other three Southwestern states is mostly federalor state-administered.

In Texas, a majority of the state’s 1,255-mile-long border with Mexico is without fences or other physical barriers, other than the Rio Grande.

Gallego admitted that for the bill to have any chance, it must have support from Republicans. He said he thinks it could appeal to members of both parties who support private property rights.

“Where it goes, it’s hard to tell. When you introduce a bill, you have to get the momentum behind it. This is why we’re doing the initial push,” the Arizona congressman said. “If there’s movement on the Trump border wall, that’s going to expedite the process. We may find a way to actually attach this.”

The two committees that would likely take up the bill, Judicial or Homeland Security, are both led by immigration hard-liners who supported building border fences in 2006, the last time Congress funded additional border barriers.

Under that law, the Secure Fence Act, the Department of Homeland Security built 535 miles of new fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The federal government filed nearly 330 eminent-domain cases, mostly in South Texas. A decade later, more than 80 of them are unresolved.

A USA TODAY NETWORK analysis of property records shows almost 5,000 parcels of land sit within 500 feet of the Texas border.

Gallego said the bill would apply only to new eminent-domain cases.

But Matthew Festa, a property-law professor at Houston’s South Texas College of Law, said it could apply to any ongoing proceedings.

“In my opinion, from the research I’ve done, eminent domain is difficult to reform, and when it’s targeted like this, often there are ways around,” Festa said. “But that said, if this bill passes, it is a valid restriction by Congress of a federal agency’s powers to use eminent domain, so it could be somewhat effective.”

On Wednesday, the House Committee on Homeland Security marked up a separate bill that expands DHS’ authorization to “construct, install, deploy, operate, and maintain tactical infrastructure,” including barriers at the border. Several committee members expressed concern that this would lead to increased use of eminent domain.

Trump’s 2018 budget request for the Department of Justice seeks money to hire 20 attorneys “to pursue Federal efforts to obtain the land and holdings necessary to secure the Southwest border.”

House Republicans have passed a “minibus” spending bill that included $1.6 billion for construction of new barriers at the border. Gallego and O’Rourke voted against the measure, which is awaiting a vote in the Senate.

If approved, Homeland Security said, the money would be funneled to priority areas along the Southwestern border. Those include 14 miles of secondary fencing in San Diego. But the bulk of the construction would be in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley — the busiest transit corridor along the U.S.-Mexico border, and the focal point of costly legal battles in the past decade over eminent domain. The spending bill would fund 32 miles of new bollard-style fencing and 28 miles of bollard levee walls along the South Texas border.