BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) - On the dusty road into Sabal Palms Sanctuary, near the banks of the Rio Grande, a sign a mile from the entrance reassures visitors that despite the forbidding steel barricade ahead, no passport is required to enter the gates.
Confusion is understandable here. This once-thriving tourist destination was forced to close in 2009 amid uncertainty over the future of the 527-acre palm forest after the Department of Homeland Security raised a section of border fence north of the sanctuary.
Since the sanctuary reopened in 2011, the towering rust-colored bars intended to slow the stream of illegal traffic from Mexico has done as much to ward off visitors, fearful of what is lurking on the other side, the San Antonio Express-News (https://bit.ly/1frZKOD) reported.
“You hear lots of rumors,” Jeanne Bork, an 80-year-old Midwesterner who spends her winters in South Texas and recently visited the sanctuary. “I heard somebody was murdered back here.”
Due to the snaking course of the Rio Grande, which marks the international boundary with Mexico, the border fence was built on top of the levee, in some places a mile or more from the river, marooning thousands of acres of bucolic farmland, native habitat sanctuaries and private landowners on its southern flank.
Today, there are roughly 56 miles of border fence and wall in the Rio Grande Valley alone, none of which changed the underlying character of the land - what was farmland before remains farmland.
Yet, critics argue the fence not only disrupts communities and impedes residents’ ability to move freely the nearer they are to the fence, it has also created a “Constitution-free” region where Border Patrol enforcement faces less oversight.
“What they’ve essentially created is a no-go zone,” said Joseph Nevins, associate professor of geography and chairman of earth science and geography at Vassar College, who studies the U.S.-Mexico border region. “The very act of being in a particular place invites suspicion.”
At least three times in recent years, agents are believed to have killed people along the Texas-Mexico line - shootings that witnesses said were unwarranted. One man in Matamoros was fatally shot by an agent firing across the Rio Grande from Brownsville in July 2012.
On Friday, the Border Patrol directed agents to limit their use of force in certain situations after a recent report by independent law enforcement experts criticized a Border Patrol policy that led to the deaths of at least 19 people.
For its part, the agency says agents are authorized to search any vehicle between the fence and the river if the agents have “reasonable suspicion” that unauthorized immigrants are aboard.
According to Mitra Ebadolahi, border litigation attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, there is no legal principle that would suggest diminished constitutional protection when people are behind the fence.
“This idea that people are uniformly treated with suspicion just for being in a place that is technically U.S. soil is problematic from our point of view,” Ebadolahi said.
Before the fence went in the ground around the city of Hidalgo, the high school cross-country team used to train on the levee that borders the town of nearly 12,000. Bird-watching in the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge on the south side of the fence was also popular during winter months.
To be near the fence now, much less pass through one of its gates, begs attention from Border Patrol, which invariably has a sentinel stationed near gaps in the fence. Familiar faces barely warrant a second glance, others are subject to identification checks and vehicle searches. Just outside the refuge entrance, there is a stack of makeshift ladders used to illegally scale the 18-foot-high steel barrier.
“If you’re on the other side of the fence you’re either bird-watching or up to no good,” said Martin Cepeda, Hidalgo’s mayor. “But mostly people don’t go out there. If you do, Border Patrol is going to ask you your business.”
Over the past decade, Border Patrol more than doubled its staff in Texas to roughly 9,700 agents, who employ high-tech gadgetry and tried-and-true techniques to counter human and drug trafficking. As a permanent structure, the fence serves to funnel traffic into gaps where Border Patrol has the upper hand.
On a frigid January morning, infrared scanners detected movement nearby, and suddenly a voice crackled over the radio announcing that agents were in pursuit of three warm bodies, uncertain if they were foraging animals or stragglers from a group of 14 immigrants arrested an hour earlier.
The agents dashed through a tangle of thorny brush, looking for signs of bent or broken tree limbs, discarded clothing and shoe prints. These fevered cat-and-mouse games south of the fence net thousands of arrests every month.
“I can tell you it’s not a no-man’s land,” said Daniel Tirado, a Border Patrol spokesman in the Rio Grande Valley. “We are out there . so are aliens and smugglers.”
For those whose livelihood is by the river, there is a heightened sense of being exposed to danger that few are willing to discuss openly out of fear of retaliation from smugglers.
A couple of years ago, not long after the fence was built on the north side of Hidalgo County Water Improvement District No. 3, which pumps water directly from the Rio Grande to farmers and McAllen’s public utility, employees working by the river were shot at from Mexico.
Othal E. Brand Jr., who chairs the water district, told his employees they had his blessing to carry concealed weapons to protect themselves. Brand even considered hiring security guards but struck a deal for increased Border Patrol presence instead.
“I do not like the turn-your-head attitude,” Brand said. “But that is exactly what you have to do if you are going to continue to work or live below the wall.”
As one of the few citizens whose homes are south of the fence, Pamela Taylor has become dependent on Border Patrol for her safety. Unlike some whose ancestors were awarded land grants by the Spanish king, precisely to encourage immigration, Taylor, 86, married into her two-acre plot in Brownsville. She met her husband during World War II and immigrated to South Texas in the late 1940s.
But the days of languid summer afternoons cooling off in the Rio Grande’s twisting green waters, and migrant workers camped out in the front yard, bringing her fresh tortillas in the morning, are long gone. Her modest four-bedroom house still appears as an island surrounded by fields of cabbage in the winter and golden brown sorghum in the summer, but this pastoral vision belies the corridor for illegal traffic that unfolds nightly on her property.
These days, she is more likely to find a load of marijuana stashed in her front yard, or Border Patrol agents sipping on bottles of water from one of the coolers she keeps stocked on the dirt road in front of her house for thirsty passers-by. Strangers are warned the area is no longer safe.
“We’re isolated . stuck on the Mexican side,” she said. Far from providing security, Taylor said the fence has exposed her vulnerability. “The last thing I need is for people to know that I’m here alone.”
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Information from: San Antonio Express-News, https://www.mysanantonio.com
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