Fences don’t make good neighbors
Some locals upset, fear private border wall may fall down
MISSION, Texas — Along a bend in the Rio Grande, shorn of all brush except for an occasional palm, looms an 18-foot fence of galvanized steel a few feet from the muddy water’s edge.
The fence, constructed three years ago with private funds, was once at the center of a bitter national debate over border security, its builder touted by President Donald Trump and promoted in a fraudulent scheme by Steve Bannon known as “We Build the Wall” that resulted in criminal indictments and convictions.
Now, the 3-mile-long barrier is essentially orphaned, functionally useless — because of a federally constructed border barrier a short distance behind it — and, according to an engineering report commissioned by the Justice Department, at risk of falling over in a major flood and floating away.
And because of its location and construction along the water’s edge, federal officials worry that the fence could end up redirecting the Rio Grande in such a way that the land it sits on would end up as part of Mexico.
The fence has been opposed in litigation brought by the nearby National Butterfly Center, which attracted threats of such vitriol last year that it briefly closed, and by the Justice Department, which accused the private builder of the fence, Fisher Sand & Gravel Co., of violating an international treaty.
The Justice Department reached a settlement with Fisher last year that allowed the fence to stay in place and required a subsidiary of the company to maintain it. The butterfly center, which sits
just upriver, is continuing its effort to force the demolition of the fence. A trial could take place this year.
“The whole thing was stupid,” Ryan Patrick, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said of the fence, whose construction on the edge of the river, he argued, was a violation of a treaty with Mexico. “The erosion began almost immediately,” Patrick said. “I would not be happy if I lived in the vicinity of this thing.”
Despite its size, the fence is mostly invisible to the residents of the border community in Mission, Texas, where it rises at the edge of a sugar cane farm on the outskirts of town. But it is impossible to miss when looking out from Jose Alfredo Cavazos’ property a short distance down the river.
The reedy riverbank land has been in the Cavazos family for generations, said Cavazos, 73, who recalled
working there for his grandmother on what was then a farm and described jumping into the river to cool off. Cavazos, who once ran a local grocery store, now gets around in a motorized wheelchair, and his family rent plots along the water to local residents, including four members of the Border Patrol, so that they can have access to the river for fishing and boating.
Cavazos was dismayed when the fence was built on his neighbor’s property upriver, concerned about the impact it would have on the river and the land.
“He never even bothered to come and talk to his neighbors,” Cavazos said, speaking of the owner of the sugar cane farm, Lance Neuhaus. “He probably knew it was going to damage his neighbors, because he’s not dumb.”
Neuhaus, reached by phone, did not express concern about the fence, which sits on land he sold
to Fisher. “The wall is still standing,” he said. “It’s a good project.”
Before the private fence was built, the Cavazos family spent years fighting against the existing federal barrier. Cavazos’ cousin, Reynaldo Anzaldua Cavazos, expressed dismay at having had to watch the private fence go in right along the riverbank, an area that they thought everyone knew was ill-advised to build.
“We’ve lived here all our lives, so we know what a flood does,” said Cavazos, 77, a retired U.S. customs agent. “You don’t build on the riverbank.”
Engineers who studied the fence’s construction on behalf of the Justice Department reached a similar conclusion. Among the issues outlined in the 400-page report from the engineering firm Arcadis were that, in the event of a major flood, the fence “would effectively slide, overturn and become buoyant.”
The firm concluded, “The fence is likely not fit for use under all reasonably anticipated service loads,” meaning environmental conditions such as snow, wind, rain and floods.
But the government did not take its case to trial, choosing instead to reach the settlement with Fisher. Among the stipulations agreed to by the Justice Department and Fisher were that copies of the engineering report be destroyed. Its conclusions were instead reported by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to respond to questions about the settlement.
“Ultimately, we think what would be the best for everyone involved is just to take it down, even for Fisher,” said Javier Pena, a lawyer for the National Butterfly Center, referring to Tommy Fisher, the owner of the company. “He did not intend for this fence to stay up forever, because if he did, he would have built it better.”
Mark Courtois, a lawyer for Fisher and its subsidiary in the project, said the company stands behind the design and construction of the fence, disagreed with the “assumptions and modeling” of the government’s report, and “agreed to perform routine maintenance for the project as is required for all structures.”
Almost from the moment it went up, Marianna Trevino Wright, the director of the butterfly center, has been watching for cracks in the wall and erosion along the waterfront.
“The river is going to continue to reclaim its bank,” she said while motoring along the fence in a boat and pointing out areas where she said new dirt and rock appeared to have been carted in to replace what had washed away.
After working on the fence, Fisher received large federal border barrier contracts from the Trump administration.
But by 2020, Trump had distanced himself from the project after ProPublica and the Texas Tribune raised questions about its construction. And the fence looks to be slowly shifting. Its base appears to be separating and cracking. From afar, its evenly spaced posts are visibly misaligned in places.
But not everyone is concerned about the fence. Jennifer Hart has owned the Riverside Club, a restaurant and event space, for four decades, and in that time, there have been floods, including a massive one in 2010 that saw several feet of water come into the dining room and sit there for a month.
Hart said she does not worry about the fence eventually collapsing.
“If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen,” she said.