Mexico Trucker Online

Congress approved a shift of $400 million from technology accounts to construction of the U.S. border fence despite a Customs and Border Protection admission that it cannot be completed by year’s end, officials said Monday.

The House Appropriations Subcommittee for Homeland Security agreed to a CBP proposal to transfer funds from other accounts to build the remainder of the 670 miles of border fence.

Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, voiced disappointment over Congress’ decision to continue to fund “the border wall.”

“It won’t work. It is lethal to people and wildlife and eventually will be torn down,” Foster said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Or perhaps that is too strong of a statement because it disrespects a horse’s hind end.

Tom Tancredo, Colorado representative who tried to run a Presidential campaign on one issue, ridding the US of all Hispanics, while in the past he hired illegals to remodel his Boulder mansion amongst other things. This man is a hypocrite and a fraud.

Border mayors, Colorado lawmaker fight over ‘no border’ comments

Members of the Texas Border Coalition are sparring with Colorado Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo over his muttered suggestion that if politicians think a border fence will disrupt the region’s multiculturalism, the best place for it might be north of Brownsville.

Tancredo sent a letter to Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada and Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster on Thursday “clarifying” the comment, which came during a congressional field hearing Monday at the University of Texas-Brownsville, which could lose land to the fence.

Tancredo and U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., strong proponents of the fence, were at odds with Democrats on the panel who said the fence will be an ineffective blight for a region that thrives on social and economic ties with Mexico.

“Securing the border is not a local issue,” Tancredo wrote to Ahumada. “Local communities have expressed multiculturalist sentiment by suggesting that ‘there is no border’ between the U.S. and Mexico, and refusing to cooperate with federal authorities over the congressionally approved border fence.

“This is a matter of national importance, and the American public should not be asked to sit back and allow a handful of local governments and their friends in the ‘open borders’ lobby to exercise veto power over something that impacts not only our national security, but our national sovereignty.”

Ahumada and Foster responded Friday by accusing Tancredo of misquoting them and suggested Tancredo take Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s advice to “grow up.”

Chertoff made the comment during a January interview with the Associated Press. He was referring to critics of new documentation rules at border crossings.

“We have never said, ‘there is no border,’” the mayors wrote. “The Rio Grande … has been our border since the agreement to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. To ascribe that quote to us, even by inference, in your tirade is ridiculously juvenile.”

Their letter ends, “Best wishes in your post-congressional career.”

“Best wishes in your post-congressional career.”
That probably went over some of your heads. What they are referring to, and I am still laughing my ass off over this is that Tancredo, during his first campaign, he promised to only be a two-term Congressman. But, he lied! What new with that.

Confronted with environmental concerns about proposed border fencing, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff used his power Tuesday to waive dozens of federal laws to clear the way for building it.

Chertoff’s announcement followed a March 3 letter from a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official pointing out that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials had abruptly spiked a compromise the agencies were working on to protect an extensive riverfront wildlife refuge affected by a Hidalgo County fence-levee project.

He signed two waivers Tuesday, one of them negating 37 environmental, historic preservation and land management laws to speed 470 miles of fence projects in Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico.

The other, which waived 27 laws, was specific to the 22-mile project in Hidalgo County that Chertoff, on a visit there on Feb. 8, had touted as a win-win plan to shore up worn Rio Grande flood control levees while creating a barrier to unauthorized entry.

Under the 2005 Real ID Act, Congress granted homeland security the authority to waive legal restrictions that could impede efforts to secure the border.

Chertoff that year used waivers for 14 miles of fencing near San Diego, Calif. Last year, he waived regulations for two stretches of fencing in Arizona. But this is the first time he has used a waiver in Texas.

“Criminal activity at the border does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation,” Chertoff said in a news release Tuesday. “Congress and the American public have been adamant that they want and expect border security. We’re serious about delivering it, and these waivers will enable important security projects to keep moving forward.”

Combining the fence with repairs to the levees had been suggested by local leaders fearful of potentially devastating flood damage, and the idea was quickly backed by U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Hutchison on Tuesday praised Chertoff’s action, calling it a “responsible approach to exercise his legal authority to keep the agreement with Hidalgo County that serves the dual purposes of flood protection and border security.”

Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas said the waiver was “responsive to the needs of our diverse border community.”

But the fence-levee plan is unpopular among environmentalists, who say it will cut off endangered cats and other wildlife from their sole water source in parts of the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge. The patchwork of preserves stretches about 275 river miles and is considered one of the most biologically diverse havens in the United States.

“We need for the administration and Congress to hit the pause button here and stop this outrageous, accelerated quest to finish a wall that most people realize not only will not work but will do more damage than good,” anti-fence activist Jay J. Johnson-Castro said.

Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, issued a statement railing against what he said was “the largest waiver of U.S. environmental laws since the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and we all know how well that worked out. Just ask the people of Valdez, Alaska.”

Cornyn was reserving comment until he could be fully briefed, said his spokesman, Brian Walsh.

U.S. Reps. Solomon Ortiz and Ciro Rodriguez, both Democrats, expressed outrage. Ortiz called the waivers draconian, and Rodriguez said Chertoff was “selectively ignoring laws and the will of Congress.”

In the March 3 letter to Greg Giddens, executive director of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Secure Border Initiative, the wildlife service’s Kenneth Stansell wrote: “We were very concerned that after months of consultations on a proposed project design and reaching consensus on a way forward that satisfies the needs of both wildlife and a secure border, CBP would unilaterally propose a completely new design and request an immediate response from the service.”

He added, “We will continue to work with CBP to develop mitigation alternatives. … We would like to document, however, that any proposed fence and/or levee segment that bisects lands within the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge cannot be found compatible with the purposes for which the refuge was established. Therefore, we see the need for (homeland security) to utilize its authority … to waive the National Wildlife Refuge Administration Act of 1966.”

Interior Department spokeswoman Tina Kreisher said that the waiver didn’t mean an end to environmental considerations for the project and said homeland security was prepared to dedicate up to $50 million for mitigation projects.

“As they continue to work on this they’re continuing to do some of things like the environmental assessments that we normally do. It won’t come to a conclusion because they will be exempt from it,” she said

Luis Alberto Urrea
The Border Patrol agent was a 30-year veteran. He walked me across a patch of desolation to the Mexican border. There was no border fence there yet. Just Arizona desert, a dusty dry creekbed, and Mexican desert beyond, indistinguishable from the United States.

If you want to hear philosophical reflections from an agent, you have to talk to old-timers. The hundreds of new Homeland Security-era officers who have flooded the border are extremely well trained - the Border Patrol academy is a monster among law enforcement training programs - and they are certainly gung-ho. But the old guys will tell you the new ones don’t know the territory very well. There are fine points it might take 30 years to learn.

“My dad was a rancher,” the veteran agent said. “I’m a rancher. I come out here and you know who I chase? Ranch hands and farmers.” He wiped his brow, toed some possibly Mexican dirt. “Buddy, I am chasing my own people.”

This hotly contested stretch of sand and cinders stands to become a beneficiary of the $1.2 billion border fence that will seal off the southern American border. Well, it will seal off part of it. OK - it will seal off small areas of the border. Just east of where we stood, for example, the fence will stop. There are big scary mountains in place that will be included in the plan as natural immigration barriers. These are the same mountains over which many of the undocumented are already walking to avoid the good men and women of the U.S. Border Patrol.

But, the thinking goes, we have to start somewhere. On the Mexican side, among much gnashing of teeth, there is a joke that has been circulating the whole time. The gist of it is: Let them put up a fence! They’ll hire us to build it! Then, when it’s done, we’ll run the tourist concessions and the taco stands. Then, when they get tired of it, they’ll hire us to tear it down!

What are you getting for your 1 billion tax dollars? Well, you’re getting a little less than 700 miles of fence. Much of it double-fencing, but substantial segments to be single-fence. That’s the kind of security that has so successfully kept kids out of closed softball fields and skinny-dippers from midnight visits to neighborhood swimming pools.

Al Qaeda will weep with frustration when they encounter it and just go home.

Critics like to point out that the plan had originally called for triple-fencing, but somehow the folks who brought us Katrina relief can’t manage that on a budget. Critics also seem to enjoy reminding us that the border is 2,000 miles long. Of course, that would be as the crow flies. If you ironed out the Southwest, spread its many mountains (Homeland Security Immigration Barriers) flat, then pulled the squiggles and turns of the Rio Grande straight, how long would it really be? Buddy, that’s a lot of fence for them ranchers to ride.

What is a border? According to Webster’s, it is a margin. If one were to look at the margins of the United States, 700 miles of rockin’ chain-link might not seem like enough. Although it’s macho - it lends the desert a sense of WWF Steel Cage Death Match - a glance at the Canadian border suggests that it’s even less secure than we hope. That same Border Patrol veteran pointed out to me that the one real terrorist they caught was coming out of Canada with his trunk full of bombs. And, of course, those 9/11 bastards were “legal aliens.”

However, if we keep staring at the map with Zen clarity, a new revelation offers itself. I’ll warn you, it takes work. But we suddenly see there is another border of the United States. It’s called a coastline. Talk about unprotected. Why isn’t somebody fencing in Miami? They hate us for our thongs, people. Where is the fence at Malibu?

Of course, terrorism is only part of the paradigm - it’s illegal immigration, stupid. California has long struggled with remaining a good neighbor while bringing the hammer down. It might have rankled to read the insensitive Mexican jokes about the border fence, but the Golden State Fence Company actually did hire “illegals” to build border fences in San Diego. Not only that, of course, but they seem to have used the undocumented to build fences at military bases, immigration jails and Border Patrol stations. They were fined $5 million in 2006; if you think about it, when you combine the cost-cutting involved in the illegal workforce and the hefty fine, the actual cost of the border fence might have shrunk by several percentage points. Voters and columnists might express outrage, but federal border agents are realists and ironists - they shake their heads and laugh. They know a snafu when they see it.

It’s one thing to fence off a few miles of California or Arizona. It is quite another to try to fence off the meandering bed of the mighty Rio Grande in Texas. Somehow, much of the border has remained, for all its media and political notoriety, invisible. Nothing reveals this more than the Rio Grande. (Or, as those darned Mexicans call it, El Rio Bravo - the untamed or brave river.) One of the most interesting border books to appear in recent days is Keith Bowden’s “The Tecate Journals.” He somewhat maniacally canoes the entire length of the river. The book shows a major American riverine ecosystem that remains ignored and reviled - perhaps because it is also the border barrier of record. Beavers and deer - who knew?

Strangely, a coalition of Texas mayors came up with a proposal to strengthen the border while avoiding the fence. They suggested that the river itself be dredged and deepened and widened. The natural demarcation line between our nations, in other words, could be revived and cleaned up to do its ancient work. Fences? We don’t need no stinkin’ fences! A plan due to fail.

The problem in Texas is simple - 180 miles of proposed fence must follow the river, but not get too close to the river, because the river itself is the classic illegal alien and will change course, wiggle under fences, even erode banks and topple fences and open big gaps. Obviously, Mexico will stop at nothing - if an old truck won’t bust the fence, they’ll send a river. So the fence must, at certain points, be built up to a mile from the banks of the river.

Unfortunately, landowners (ranchers and farmers again) have lived on this land for hundreds of years. Some farm plots along the river have been in the same families since 1767. Mexicans were living there eating frijoles before American revolutionaries ate baked beans at the signing of the Constitution? That’s awkward.

Although it is true that everyone ought to be willing to suffer for the security of the nation, in Brownsville, the fence line has cut off a section of the college’s soccer field and given it back to Mexico. Gen. Santa Anna is rising from his grave, rubbing his hands in glee: He’s actually getting back some of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

The Chicago Tribune quoted the mayor of Brownsville on Jan. 16: “To appease people in middle America, they are going to kill our communities along the border. The rest of America has no idea how we live our lives here. We are linked by the Rio Grande, not divided by it.” Linked? By a border? Not divided? What a concept.

If Americans want security, then they should get real security. If you really want a border fence, build a real border fence. I have some nephews in Tijuana who need work. But please, Mr. Chertoff - fence off Cannery Row while you still can.

_{Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of “The Devil’s Highway” and “The Hummingbird’s Daughter.” He teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His blog is http://lavistaluisurrea.blogspot.com.}

The battle over the border fence continued Thursday with more landowners finding themselves sued by the government for access to their land, while two landowners fired back with their own countersuit. A lawsuit by University of Texas-Brownsville Professor Eloisa Tamez and San Benito resident Benito J. Garza claims the Homeland Security Department disregarded the law by filing “declarations of taking” before negotiating a price for their land.

The government sued both for six months of access to plot the fence.

During a two-hour hearing before U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen on the government’s lawsuit, attorney Peter Schey said two acts of Congress prohibited the declarations of taking, or expedited condemnation, for the fence.

“The judge was very patient, very receptive,” Schey said. “He made very clear that this was the first time anybody has brought this to his attention and he’s really going to have to step back and contemplate.”

After a previous hearing, Hanen granted government access the same day.

Tamez said she is a descendant of the Lipan Apache and Basque peoples and her acre of land has been in the family for 265 years.

According to the complaint against Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Robert F. Janson, acting executive director of asset management for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 precluded the government from using expedited condemnation for border fencing. It says expedited condemnation was again ruled out by an amendment to the federal budget bill requiring consultation with locals.

The government’s reply to the complaint, filed Wednesday, says government officials are seeking only “minimally intrusive, non-exclusive” temporary access to plan the fence.

“Whatever concerns might be applicable to the actual permanent taking of land in fee for fence construction are simply not relevant at this time,” it says.

The Department of Homeland Security said it expects about 100 lawsuits against landowners. Twelve more landowners were sued Tuesday, bringing the total to about 50.

The parcels targeted so far include 132 acres owned by the Rio Grande City Consolidated Independent School District and 166 acres of the University of Texas-Brownsville/Texas Southmost College.

UTB President Juliet Garcia has refused to sign a right of entry request but the school has not been sued. University of Texas regents meeting in the Rio Grande Valley on Wednesday adopted a resolution urging “all involved to continue the dialogue and work cooperatively.”

But Rio Grande City schools Superintendent Roel A. Gonzalez said much of the district was built around Fort Ringgold, a historic Mexican War fort, and he’s prepared to fight for the lands and the riverfront.

“It’s a beautiful fort, it really is. It has a lot of history,” he said.

The tunnel opening cut into the floor of a shipping container here drops three levels, each accessible by ladders, first a metal one and then two others fashioned from wood pallets. The tunnel stretches 1,300 feet to the south, crossing the Mexican border some 50 feet below ground and proceeding to a sky-blue office building in sight of the steel-plated border
fence.Three or four feet wide and six feet high, the passageway is illuminated by compact fluorescent bulbs (wired to the Mexican side), supported by carefully placed wooden beams and kept dry by two pumps. The neatly squared walls, carved through solid rock, bear the signs of engineering skill and professional drilling tools.

Read the rest of this entry »