First, in Texas we have border communities that are tied and interconnected. Culture, economics, family, history, agriculture… It is basically one community on either side of the river, not two. This article, and others that focus on our border communities unique ties, help dispel the notion that the border is one continuous vast stretch of barren desertscape.

Second, this article calls to our attention the unconstitutional way in which land is being seized by the Department of Homeland Security. Private property is being seized from local residents through so called “eminent domain”,  but as the article says, it not only turns out landowners are not being fairly compensated for their land, but also are not even being contacted for negotiation. In addition, South Texas, which is known for its world class birding sanctuaries and eco tourism, is being mocked by its government. The REAL ID act gives one man, Michael Chertoff, the power to override decades of hard fought legislation. In this case, dozens of important environmental laws are being ignored to expedite the construction of the border wall.

Is it no wonder why South Texas, the poorest region in the country, is absolutely livid about the idea of a wall that steals land, destroys the major economic industries, cuts off family and friends, ignores their culture and history, ignores other major MAJOR needs for its people.

It is no wonder why South Texas and other border communities, the only people that will feel the negative impacts of the wall, are trying to break through to the rest of the country to say, “This is not a pragmatic solution. It will not stop people from crossing, but only make it more dangerous. It is purely a hateful symbol, nothing more”.

Here is the article:

Perhaps no one told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, even though he works in the Bush White House, that you don’t mess with Texas. Why else would he be pushing so hard to build a border fence that folks in the Lone Star State don’t want, so much so that a group of South Texas leaders have now hauled him into court?

The Texas Border Coalition, which includes just about every mayor and local Chamber of Commerce in the 1,200-mile Rio Grande Valley, accuses Chertoff of seizing land to build the fence without first negotiating a fair price. TBC’s complaint, filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C., also alleges that the Department of Homeland Security may be favoring wealthy landowners by routing the fence away from their property. “I puzzled a while over why the fence would bypass the industrial park and go through the city park,” Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, the coalition chairman, says in the suit.

Elsewhere along the border between the U.S. and Mexico, National Guard teams and private contractors have built more than 300 miles of new fencing in the past year with little official complaint from local citizens. Along big stretches of the Arizona border, for example, the fence crosses uninhabited desert lands already owned by the federal government.

But plans to fence 70 miles of the Texas border — mainly the populated stretches, where immigrants and smugglers can reach safe-houses or catch a ride north within minutes of crossing — have stirred up serious opposition. South Texans are happy with the soft barrier provided by nature — the Rio Grande — and enjoy a long history of easy commerce from one side of the border to the other and back again. In other words, Tex-Mex is more than a style of cooking down there — it’s an entire culture, and what looks like a bright line on the map is actually an indefinite blend of one nation into another.

Compounding the problem is that there is no simple way to run a fence through these towns. In some places, families own property that actually straddles the line, a legacy of Spanish land grants older than Texas statehood. A new barrier might cut these spreads in two. Other properties run right up to the line. The University of Texas at Brownsville, for example, could find its campus golf course and part of the outfield of its baseball park amputated.

But Chertoff has been ordered by Congress to put up fences, and the the goal is nearly 700 miles by the end of the year. After scheduling 18 town hall meetings to explain the fence-building plan — and making scant headway in changing public opinion — the Homeland Security boss last month exercised a special authority to override local objections and federal environmental regulations. Some 600 landowners in the fence zone were ordered to make their property available for survey teams and construction crews.
Perhaps no one told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, even though he works in the Bush White House, that you don’t mess with Texas. Why else would he be pushing so hard to build a border fence that folks in the Lone Star State don’t want, so much so that a group of South Texas leaders have now hauled him into court?

That’s what prompted the coalition’s class-action lawsuit, which follows other suits filed by individual parties. The TBC seeks an immediate injunction to halt the Texas fence project, and asks the court to force Homeland Security, which claims it has gone above and beyond to negotiate in good faith with the landowners, into new negotiations for the right-of-way. But the 19-page filing is not entirely focused on individual property rights and the Ps and Qs of bureaucratic procedure. The coalition’s lead attorneys are not real estate lawyers — they are associated with the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, a California-based group that opposes the federal crackdown on illegal immigration.

As the battle of the Texas fence moves from the newspapers and meeting halls into the courts, the point is clearly to slow things waaaaaay down, perhaps in hopes that fence fever will eventually subside.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1808405,00.html

Securing the nation’s borders is so important, Congress says, that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, must have the power to ignore any laws that stand in the way of building a border fence. Any laws at all.

Last week, Mr. Chertoff issued waivers suspending more than 30 laws he said could interfere with “the expeditious construction of barriers” in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The list included laws protecting the environment, endangered species, migratory birds, the bald eagle, antiquities, farms, deserts, forests, Native American graves and religious freedom.

The secretary of homeland security was granted the power in 2005 to void any federal law that might interfere with fence building on the border. For good measure, Congress forbade the courts to second-guess the secretary’s determinations. So long as Mr. Chertoff is willing to say it is necessary to void a given law, his word is final.

The delegation of power to Mr. Chertoff is unprecedented, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service. It is also, if papers filed in the Supreme Court last month are correct, unconstitutional.

People can disagree about the urgency of border security and about whether it is more or less important than, say, the environment. Congress is entrusted with making those judgments, and here it has spoken clearly. In the process, it has also granted the executive branch more of the sort of unilateral power the Bush administration has so often claimed for itself.

No one doubts that Congress may repeal old laws through new legislation. But there is a difference between passing a law that overrides a previous one and tinkering with the structure of the Constitution itself. The extraordinary powers granted to Mr. Chertoff may test the limits of how much of its own authority Congress can cede to another branch of the government.

Mr. Chertoff explained the reasoning behind the law in a news release last week. “Criminal activity at the border,” he said, “does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation.”

Mr. Chertoff has issued three similar waivers, and a challenge to the constitutionality of one of them has just reached the United States Supreme Court. If the court decides to hear the case, its decision will almost certainly apply to last week’s waivers as well.

The case was brought by two environmental groups, Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club. They sued Mr. Chertoff last year over his decision to suspend 19 laws that might have interfered with the construction of a border fence in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area in Arizona.

Congress, the groups said, had given Mr. Chertoff too much power.

“It is only happenchance that the secretary’s waiver in this case involved laws protecting the environment and historic resources,” the groups told Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of Federal District Court in Washington. “He could equally have waived the requirements of the Fair Labor Relations Act to halt a strike, or the provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in order to force workers to endure unsafe working conditions.”

(Happenchance? You don’t see that word every day, and certainly not in a court filing.)

The groups said Congress cannot hand over unbridled power to the executive branch even as it cuts the courts out of the picture. They relied mostly on a 1998 Supreme Court decision striking down the Line Item Veto Act, which had allowed the president to cancel parts of laws.

In December, Judge Huvelle rejected the challenge and allowed construction to proceed. She said she had no jurisdiction to decide whether Mr. Chertoff was correct in saying the waivers were necessary, and she ruled that the delegation of power to him was constitutional.

“The court concludes that it lacks the power to invalidate the waiver provision merely because of the unlimited number of statutes that could potentially be encompassed,” Judge Huvelle wrote.

A petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case was filed three months later.

Did you notice the missing step? In addition to forbidding judges from second-guessing Mr. Chertoff’s decisions, Congress forbade federal appeals courts from becoming involved at all. After losing before Judge Huvelle, the groups’ only recourse is to hope the Supreme Court decides to hear their appeal.

In their petition, the environmental groups said the Supreme Court had never upheld a broad delegation of power like that given to Mr. Chertoff without the possibility of judicial review of executive branch determinations. Nor, they said, has any appeals court.

It is the combination of those two factors — the broad granting of power to the executive branch and cutting the judicial branch out of the process — that makes the 2005 law so pernicious, the groups say.

The government’s response is due next week. In a brief filed in the district court last year, Justice Department lawyers told Judge Huvelle that the urgency of border security must trump other interests. They added that Congress may delegate particularly broad powers in the areas of national security, foreign affairs and immigration because the Constitution gives the executive branch great authority in those areas.

The line-item veto decision does not apply, the government lawyers said, because Mr. Chertoff is not repealing laws for all purposes, just suspending them for his fences.

It is true, of course, that Congress gave up its powers here voluntarily. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had a response to that point in his concurrence in the line-item-veto case.

“It is no answer, of course, to say that Congress surrendered its authority by its own hand,” he wrote. “Abdication of responsibility is not part of the constitutional design.”

Justice Kennedy made a broader point, too, one perhaps more apt today than it was 10 years ago.

“Separation of powers was designed to implement a fundamental insight,” he wrote. “Concentration of power in the hands of a single branch is a threat to liberty.”

Have you considered doing a piece/film on how our trade policy dictates the immigration “crisis”?

The people of South Texas are being forced to cope with the idea of a border wall, and to me that is absolutely ludicrous. I came down to Brownsville as a volunteer. I wanted to work in the environmental justice movement. I had briefly volunteered with life-long activist, Domingo Gonzalez, in the summer of 2006. Last summer Domingo told me I should become a full-time volunteer and work with him, so I did.

All along the Mexican border are US owned plants (80% of the plants are US owned according to Twin Plant, industry magazine) that pay low wages, have dangerous health risks, do irreparable environmental damage, mistreatment of female employees, don’t allow unions to organize…the list goes on. NAFTA helped boost the number of plants and goods being sent to the US, while ignoring the human rights and environmental protection of the border. Following NAFTA we had all this industry popping up just south of our southern border.

When these US companies discovered even cheaper labor in Asia, many of the plants disappeared, sometimes in the middle of the night. So, now we have unemployed masses with few options in terms of work, sitting on our doorstep. How can we have an immigration debate without talking about how trade affects the push and pull factors? The maquiladora plants are just one example of trade’s effects on immigration.

So, to stop the migration of these economic refugees the Department of Homeland Security’s, Michael Chertoff, is bypassing 36 laws to speed up the construction of the wall. DHS is expediting the building process of possibly the largest public works project in our country’s history to have the proposed wall completed by the end of Bush’s term. With the stroke of a pen one unelected official is waiving 36 laws include Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Native American Graves Protection Act, the National Parks Service Organic Act, the Antiquities Act, and 31 other laws in order to gain access to privately owned land. He is doing this without consulting local officials and local residents.

From my experience volunteering and registering voters on the weekend, I have yet to meet a single person who thought the wall was a good idea, or that it would even work, and that is because people here are smart. The wall is a reality to border residents and so we think more rationally about it. To the rest of the country it seems the wall is symbolic, our trustworthy government is proving they know there’s a problem out there. Comprehensive immigration reform was stalled in 2006, the wall does not address the fact that people migrate to survive and provide. It also fails to acknowledge the loss of life taking place in our deserts and rivers due to an enforcement policy that pushes migrants to dangerous crossing points.

The no border wall movement needs a national voice. Brownsville is the poorest city of its size and is predominately Latino. Comments like the insensitive remarks made by Congressman Tom Tancredo in a congressional field hearing held here in Brownsville–he recommended that they build the wall north of Brownsville, a fairly racist thing to say–need attention nationally. The wall is a form of environmental injustice, especially when you consider property rights to be a fairly conservative ideology. I guess property rights for white people are different from property rights for brown people.

We feel we are the only one’s shouting “a wall won’t work!”. Not only do we think it won’t work, but the building of it is insult to people everywhere, especially towards the culture that exists here at the border. This is a giant expenditure in a time where we should be using our tax money more productively. I hope our message reaches you, and I will be happy to provide you with any information you feel relevant. You have friends in Brownsville.

Best,

Matt Smith

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Brownsville Service-Learning Coordinator

ADELAS/The Border Campaign
thebordercampaign.wordpress.com
Brownsville, TX

The Cameron County Commissioners failed to carry forward the message of county landowners in a hearing that took place yesterday. A vote to join the lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Michael Chertoff failed to garner the support of four of the five commissioners (including Judge Cascos), and therefore the motion died and was not discussed. The only commissioner to voice their support for the law suit was Commissioner John Wood of the second precinct.

This appears to be a step in the same direction as Hildalgo County, whose officials agreed to constructing a combined levee/wall, or a wall with a mound of dirt behind it. It would appear as though these commissioners had something of conflicting interest preventing them from voting the way their constituents wish. Most Brownsville residents are openly opposed to the wall. Most Rio Grande Valley residents are opposed to the wall. Most of the border city mayors are opposed to the wall. Most of the businesses in the cities are opposed to the wall. In fact, after almost six weekends of handing out legal aide information to residents who live in areas that will be directly adjacent or south of the wall, I have yet to meet a single person who has said, “build the wall”.

So why is it then that these representatives are not representing the outspoken residents? Is it out of fear? What can the DHS really do to Brownsville? We are already the poorest city of its size in America, which is not talked about nearly enough when talking about why we are receiving the wall (environmental injustice). Could it have something to do with money? What are the commissioners getting out of this? I want to know.

The local media should be hounding the commissioners today. I haven’t seen a single statement from the commissioners explaining their inaction. They owe us an explanation for their lack of representation. We will continue to fight the wall as a city, so they might as well lead, follow, or get out of the way.

CNN video on Brownsville’s fight against the wall

A number of national media outlets have labeled Brownsville as the focal point, or epicenter, of the anti-border wall movement. The community faces the potential loss of over 700 acres of land. This loss of land means people and businesses will end up on the wrong side (south) of the wall. This will have a highly negative impact on the economy of border cities on the Texas border as many people have crossed back and forth over the border for years to shop, visit family, or just to spend their free time. In Brownsville, the proposed lay of the fence cuts off access to two international bridges, and parts of the University of Texas-Brownsville campus including:

-International Technology, Education and Commerce Campus
-Education and Business Complex lot
-Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course
-Segments of the historic Fort Texas (used in both the US Mexico War, and Civil War)
-The university baseball field

In addition to the ridiculousness of the planned lay of the fence there is the ridiculousness of the bypassing of 36 federal laws to speed up construction (Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Native American Graves Protection Act, National Park Service Organic Act, the Antiquities Act … and 31 other laws), the opaque planning process of when and where the construction will begin, the unanswered questions for those who will be left south of the wall, and most importantly, the fact that a wall has nothing to do with the wage differential between the US and Mexico and nothing to do with the economic struggle that pushes people to migrate under any circumstance.

Please help us fight this horribly planned wall. We don’t want it. It will tear through our South Texas community, it will tear through our bi-national community, and it is an insult to border culture.

Spread the word. We need support from the north. Be creative and proactive. Call your congressperson, tell them to support the Grijalva Bill. Shout out the window. Hold a sign. Boycott. Protest!

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2008/05/05/lavandera.border.wall.outrage.cnn

A Country Whose Officials are Exempt from the Laws?

I believe it is highly irresponsible on the part of the federal government to not only bypass it’s own laws (36 laws are being waived) to speed up the construction of the wall, fence, barrier, whatever you choose to label it, but to do that without addressing NAFTA and other factors that bring immigration to our doorstep is idiotic and shows an utter lack of understanding of contemporary migration issues.

I also find it irresponsible and arrogant on the part of the Department of Homeland Security to ignore the request of a meeting with South Texas mayors. The mayors are our representatives and we elect them, unlike Michael Chertoff, an unelected official unfamiliar with our culture, way of life, and la frontera in general. The final word on the wall/fence/barrier resides with the people who live here, and we will not be silenced or bow down without a fight.

The wall/fence/barrier does not address why people migrate here, and it will not impede the human will to survive and provide for one’s family. It does however put grave risks on human life, as we have seen a dramatic rise in the number of migrant deaths. Until life south of our border improves, we will continue to take in economic refugees, regardless of walls, rivers, border patrol agents, or deserts, they will come.

This wall/fence/barrier is nothing more than a symbolic gesture to the rest of the country (away from the border) that they (the government) are addressing this pressing issue. Even if they are contending that the wall would be effective, then how can they explain the mad rush to build it? This is possibly the largest public works project in our history, why would we be so careless as to expedite the building process to finish just before Bush leaves office? The administration’s logic does not make any sense. If they were serious about this wall as an effective way of stopping terrorism and illegal migrants, then they would build it right, not over night. It has already been reported that sections of wall in New Mexico have started to crumble and split because the wall was built to tall (this was stated during a field congressional hearing held in Brownsville, TX).

It is time to address immigration from a realistic standpoint. Comprehensive immigration reform that acknowledges the millions of people that are now living here and contributing to society, along with pathways to citizenship and humane strategies for slowing the immigrant flow are needed.

Are we so med-evil that we have to build a wall? Do we really want to be a part of a country that builds walls to keep people out? Do we really want to be a part of a country that’s officials are exempt from the laws, and dissenters are silenced or ignored? The foundations of our country are built on the idea that we the people keep our government in check. I want every homeowner and citizen of the Rio Grande Valley to have their voices heard, because we are untied against the wall, and all three branches of government need to hear US.

NO BORDER WALL!

‘Each Nation’s Primary Assets will be its Citizens’

Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor, said that “each nation’s primary assets will be its citizens”. Without the ability to read or write in any language, especially in English here in the US, a person is confined to a very narrow field of options. Education is the true path to social/economic mobility.

To quote the Buena Vida report, “The status of the educational foundations of this region are horrific at worst and dismal at its best”…”this region showed that it is not collectively ready for the demands of a national and binational economy that demands a highly literate and technologically prepared workforce”

In Cameron County, 30% of the population has not completed 9th grade, which is four times the national average. On top of that, 45% of the population has not completed high school. When you then come to find that 84% of the student population is economically disadvantaged it starts to add up. We need to focus on education if we are to achieve economic growth in the Rio Grande Valley.

“…children in this community are not receiving social skill development, are not being made stakeholders of the community and are not receiving sufficient extra-curricular academic support to augment the daily work at their schools.”
-Buena Vida Report (2003 C-BIRD)