This is funny … almost.
I’m not laughing. However, the irony is too rich to ignore. As the New York Times is reporting, those closest to the nation’s southern border seem to be mounting the sternest challenge to efforts to build that big ol’ wall between the United States and Mexico.
They’re supposed to be terrified of the “flood of illegal immigrants,” right? Not exactly.
Texas appears to be at ground zero of the battle between private landowners and the federal government that seeks to build that wall.
Texas’s vast expanse of real estate is almost exclusively in private hands. Citizens own the land and they are none too willing to surrender it, no matter what the Department of Homeland Security might have to say.
According to the Times, landowners have filed dozens of lawsuits against the government that wants to condemn their land to make way for the wall. Some property owners are hoping to tie this matter up so tightly that they’ll outlast the Donald J. Trump administration.
Texans have proven over many years to be not bashful at all about fighting tooth and nail to protect their land from government seizure. That well could be the fight that the president faces as he maneuvers efforts to construct the wall that he and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly say can be finished in 24 months.
Texas and Mexico share 1,254 miles of border. Most of the land on the Texas side of the Rio Grande River is privately held. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires the government to pay “just compensation” for property it takes from citizens.
And, yes, there happens to be a lot of land west of El Paso — through New Mexico, Arizona and California — that the feds will have to take from private ownership. It won’t come cheaply.
I understand completely that the Rio Grande Valley region needs careful attention from border security officials. According to the Times: “The Rio Grande Valley is among the busiest smuggling routes on the Mexican border. Last year, Border Patrol agents seized 326,393 pounds of marijuana, second only to the agency’s Tucson sector. It also seized about 1,460 pounds of cocaine, the most of any sector. Nearly 187,000 illegal border crossers were apprehended here in 2016, the most of any Border Patrol sector.”
I see the need for greater security.
But seizing the land and building a wall? This fight is just beginning.
Oh, we can forget about Mexico paying for the wall — if it ever gets built!
I wondered when the outcry would come. Eminent Domain being what it is i doubted the land owners would cotton to it. The “being good stewards of the land” should come into play along with “it’s an expensive, stupid idea. I like the latter thought.
Since well before Pres. Nixon popularized (if not coined) the term “war on drugs”, the Fed (and their state and city counterparts) have violated the (fundamental, moral) non-aggression principle with their disastrous prohibition of pleasure drugs.
Now we have a war on immigration – soon to be (already) compounded by a war on property rights.
So much for my “comment”. I have some questions:
What is the status of property ownership on the Mexico side of the border – the adjacent part? How much of the property that straddles the border is held by the same private party?
Beats the dickens out of me?