The brush country along the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border grows thick: a jagged, tangled landscape of thorny trees, prickly pear, and grass so tall, it can hide a horse. Eight-foot rattlesnakes blend into rocks. Feral hogs wallow beneath mesquite thickets.
If President Donald Trump ever gets the funding for his long-promised wall, he will have to plot a course through Texas. But he will never make it all the way through here, the 800-mile stretch from Laredo to nearly El Paso. There will be no “concrete structure from sea to sea,” as the president once pledged. Taking this land would constitute an assault on private property and require a veritable army of lawyers, who, I can assure you, are no match for the state’s powerful border barons. (...)
Starting in 2006, when Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, the federal government used eminent domain to seize these plots and put up barriers, as high as 18 feet. More than 345 condemnation suits by the federal government resulted in a strip of land 128 miles long, according to a 2017 investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Yet dozens of cases are still tied up in court, and settlements have been wildly unequal: A retired schoolteacher got $21,500 for two acres; a lawyer and banker who hired one of the state’s biggest law firms got nearly $5 million for just six acres.
The cost has been staggering. The most recent 33 miles in the valley have set back taxpayers $641 million, or $19.4 million a mile, for a hodgepodge of fences, vehicle barriers, and some bollard fencing—with lots of gaps. And no one can really say, definitively, whether this project is worthwhile. To date, no federal agency has systematically audited what all the barriers cost and what, if any, effect they’ve had.
“First, this suggests that this is all theater. There is no operational decision making about what will actually work, because there’s not really a security crisis,” says Denise Gilman, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Instead, these federal agencies rush, saying, ‘We’ve just got to get the wall up,’ when what we need is real, targeted law enforcement.”(...)
Here is the final, insurmountable barrier to Trump’s wall here: money. The government has already paid nearly $1 million an acre for that six-acre plot in the Rio Grande Valley, potentially setting a precedent. If the Trump administration seized 700 miles of private land along the border, one mile wide—640 acres per square mile—the tab could come to $448 billion. Nearly 20 times the wall itself.
by Richard Parker, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Adrees Latif/Reuters
[ed. Glad to see someone finally figured this out (acquisition and eminent domain issues). Also, wildlife impacts from loss of habitat.]
If President Donald Trump ever gets the funding for his long-promised wall, he will have to plot a course through Texas. But he will never make it all the way through here, the 800-mile stretch from Laredo to nearly El Paso. There will be no “concrete structure from sea to sea,” as the president once pledged. Taking this land would constitute an assault on private property and require a veritable army of lawyers, who, I can assure you, are no match for the state’s powerful border barons. (...)
Starting in 2006, when Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, the federal government used eminent domain to seize these plots and put up barriers, as high as 18 feet. More than 345 condemnation suits by the federal government resulted in a strip of land 128 miles long, according to a 2017 investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Yet dozens of cases are still tied up in court, and settlements have been wildly unequal: A retired schoolteacher got $21,500 for two acres; a lawyer and banker who hired one of the state’s biggest law firms got nearly $5 million for just six acres.The cost has been staggering. The most recent 33 miles in the valley have set back taxpayers $641 million, or $19.4 million a mile, for a hodgepodge of fences, vehicle barriers, and some bollard fencing—with lots of gaps. And no one can really say, definitively, whether this project is worthwhile. To date, no federal agency has systematically audited what all the barriers cost and what, if any, effect they’ve had.
“First, this suggests that this is all theater. There is no operational decision making about what will actually work, because there’s not really a security crisis,” says Denise Gilman, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Instead, these federal agencies rush, saying, ‘We’ve just got to get the wall up,’ when what we need is real, targeted law enforcement.”(...)
Here is the final, insurmountable barrier to Trump’s wall here: money. The government has already paid nearly $1 million an acre for that six-acre plot in the Rio Grande Valley, potentially setting a precedent. If the Trump administration seized 700 miles of private land along the border, one mile wide—640 acres per square mile—the tab could come to $448 billion. Nearly 20 times the wall itself.
by Richard Parker, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Adrees Latif/Reuters
[ed. Glad to see someone finally figured this out (acquisition and eminent domain issues). Also, wildlife impacts from loss of habitat.]
