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Voices: On the border, hostility to Trump's wall

Rick Jervis
USA TODAY

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — The three acres of shady land just off of Highway 281 have been in Eloisa Tamez’s family’s possession for more than two centuries.

A section of the 18-foot-high border fence that cuts through Eloisa Tamez's Brownsville neighborhood. Tamez and other border residents vow to fight a new border wall proposed by Donald Trump.

Tamez traces her roots on that small patch of land to 1767, when an ancestor won a grant from the Spanish crown for a stretch of land along the Rio Grande. The land has since been parceled, farmed on and sold off, with Tamez’s three acres one of the last remnants of that family heritage.

Today, an 18-foot-tall metal fence runs through the middle of the property, pinching her off from half of her land and providing a daily, rusty reminder of the federal government’s willingness to impose its will on the Rio Grande Valley.

“It’s very depressing,” Tamez told me recently. “We’re law-abiding American citizens, and we’re not free to move around in our own land.”

I visited this stretch of the border recently to see what border residents and leaders thought about Donald Trump's proposed border wall. They have experience: They've lived with an 18-foot-fence and other barriers for nearly a decade.

Take a drive south along Highway 281 between McAllen and Brownsville, and you’ll see the fence winding along the banks of the Rio Grande, butting up against fenced yards and, at times, slicing straight through them. The fence is the product of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which created a series of fences and barriers that stretch from this border city to the California coast and is widely criticized as a $3 billion boondoggle.

If Trump were to ever embark on building his proposed border wall, the stiffest opposition he’d face won’t be from immigration advocates or environmentalists. It’d be from property owners like Tamez, whose ranches and homes line most of Texas’ 1,254-mile border with Mexico.

Building the fence was easier in Arizona, New Mexico and California, where long stretches of federal land straddle the border. But in Texas, the project ran into a buzzsaw of lawsuits from landowners who refused to have the fence dissect their properties.

So many property owners fought the fence that the initiative wound up with just 110 miles of fence and barriers in Texas, even though its border with Mexico is 12 times that size, Scott Nicol, of the Borderlands Sierra Club, told me as we toured a chunk of border fence in Hidalgo, outside of McAllen.

If Trump wants his wall, he’ll face the same legal maelstrom, he says.

“You’re talking hundreds of land-acquisition lawsuits,” Nichol says. “There’s not enough lawyers or courts out there to handle them all.”

He’ll have to face people like Tamez, 81, a nursing professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville. Her father and grandfather farmed tomatoes, corn and green beans on the land. Today, she needs a code to open a mammoth gate to drive through her property.

When she first heard in 2006 that the federal government planned to erect a fence through her neighborhood, whether the neighbors liked it or not, she couldn’t believe it. The government had grabbed land around here before, first from the Comanche and Lipan Apache tribes, then the Mexicans. The area has had at least six flags fly over it, as it was traded from country to country: First Spain, then France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States of America and the United States. (Which is where, incidentally, the Six Flags amusement park company gets its name.)

But Tamez, who is of Lipan Apache and Hispanic descent, thought it couldn’t happen again. Not in the 21st century. Not to U.S. citizens. As the plans progressed, she sued the Department of Homeland Security to keep the feds off her land. The government ultimately won and built the fence on her property, but paid her a $56,000 settlement. She donated most of the money for scholarships at the nursing school where she works and used part of the payout to refurbish a home on her property, where visiting professors and researchers can stay for free while studying the border.

Tamez wants people to know that it’s not just immigrants who are punished by the wall; it’s also U.S. citizens with roots in the region that stretch back centuries. She doesn’t have the money for lengthy legal battles. But if Trump tries to build another wall in her area, she’ll be right back in court, she says.

“We’re not going to stand by and be deposed from our land,” Tamez says. “We won’t stand for it.”

Something in her voice tells me she means it.

Jervis is USA TODAY's Austin-based correspondent.

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