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Americans who live near border say Trump's wall is unwelcome

Associated Press

LOS EBANOS, Texas (AP) — All along the winding Rio Grande, the people who live in this bustling, fertile region where the U.S. border meets the Gulf of Mexico never quite understood how Donald Trump's great wall could ever be much more than campaign rhetoric.

In this Monday, Nov. 14, 2016, photo, a carrier delivers mail along a section of border fence in Brownsville, Texas. The idea of a concrete wall spanning the entire 1,954-mile southwest frontier collides head-on with multiple realities, like a looping Rio Grande, fierce local resistance, and cost.


An electronically fortified "virtual wall" with surveillance technology that includes night-and-day video cameras, tethered observation balloons and high-flying drones makes a lot more sense to people here. It's already in wide use and expanding.


"The wall is not going to stop anyone," said Jorge Garcia, who expected to lose access to most of his 30-acre riverside ranch after the U.S. Border Fence Act was enacted a decade ago.

In this Saturday, Nov. 12, 2016, photo, Isac Ramos fishes at a ranch on the banks of the Rio Grande in Los Ebanos, Texas. The area would be cut of if a border wall is build in the area.


Eight years after government surveyors marked Garcia's land, he and his wife, Aleida, are still waiting to see if the Border Patrol will sever their property.

"This lets me know that whenever they want to build the wall, they can," said Aleida, holding up a tax bill that shows the nominally expropriated sliver of property.



The gaps in the border barrier include an entire flank of the River Bend golf club and resort in Brownsville. University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley political scientist Terence Garrett calls them "gaps of privilege" because many landowners were politically connected.

Other landowners fought the Border Patrol in court.

In this Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2016, photo, a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent searches for suspected illegal immigrants passing through the area in Hidalgo, Texas. The idea of a concrete wall spanning the entire 1,954-mile southwest frontier collides head-on with multiple realities, like a looping Rio Grande, fierce local resistance, and cost.



The wall is popular in distant cities "because you can see, feel and touch it. But politically it just doesn't make sense," said J.D. Salinas, the coalition's chairman.





"What a wall ultimately does is slow a border crosser for 10 to 15 minutes," Isacson said. "In an urban area, that 15 minutes is crucial." Border patrol agents can arrive quickly. In rural areas, they may be an hour or more away.

The U.S. side of the border is quite safe, said Weisberg-Stewart. "We are not in a war zone."



"There's no way in hell he's going to see his great wall," Vela said.


In this Sunday, Nov. 13, 2016, photo, a young migrants girl from Central American newly released after processing by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is fitted shoes at the Sacred Heart Community Center in the Rio Grande Valley border city of McAllen, Texas, Sunday, Nov. 13, 2016.


If lots of "bad hombres" are crossing the border, as Trump has claimed, they are mostly taking their lawbreaking elsewhere. Further, there's no record of anyone sneaking across the border to commit acts of terrorism.

The Border Patrol's buildup after 9/11 is one reason, argues David Aguilar, who was named to the agency's top job in 2004 by a fellow Texan, then-President George W. Bush, and is now a private consultant. Since then, the number of agents has climbed from 9,500 on the southwest border to 17,500 in 2015.



Since tower-mounted video surveillance cameras began going up in 1999 in the Brownsville area, illegal cross-border traffic in the area "dried up by 85 to 90 percent," said Johnny Meadors, the sector's assistant chief for technology. He said the traffic moved west, where there were no cameras.




"If you had a sensible immigration policy, there would be no need for all this," said Garrett, the political scientist.

What Trump's policy will be remains a mystery.


Whether fear of a Trump victory has anything to do with a recent spike in arrivals from violence-wracked Central America isn't clear. They account for more than half of Border Patrol apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley, where many migrants turn themselves in at frontier bridges.




Ingrid Guerra, 21, a Guatemalan who is eight months' pregnant and bound for Kansas, said she was fleeing an abusive relationship and didn't tell the father. The father of her other child, a 2-year-old who stayed behind with Guerra's mother, was killed in a drunken brawl, she said.


Machuca, also eight months' pregnant, is bound for Dallas, where her husband lives. She says two of her brothers and three uncles were killed in El Salvador in violence she did not understand.




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