Reprint from the Progress Times - October 19, 2007
©Progress Times 2007 - All Rights Reserved

Texas Border Coalition urges feds to scrap Border Wall

 

A coalition of Texas border mayors, county judges and business leaders is calling on the Bush Administration to scrap its planned border wall in the Lone Star State in favor of more effective "smart" technology.
"The U.S. government is proposing to spend billions of dollars on a wasteful series of projects that will not deliver the security America and Texas need," Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition (TBC), said today in response to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ request for public comment on the proposed border wall in the Rio Grande Valley.
"The fence installed in San Diego didn’t stop illegal immigration; it was intended to re-route immigrant traffic into the Arizona desert where many are dying in their attempts to cross the border," Foster said. "A fence along the Rio Grande will achieve the same results, while providing Americans with a false sense of security."
Under the Bush Administration proposal, the Corps of Engineers plans to construct 21 segments of the wall along the Texas-Mexico border between Rio Grande City and Brownsville. Individual segments range in length from one mile to more than 13 miles, creating more gaps than barriers.
"By their own admission, the Department of Homeland Security has said that a border fence will not stop illegal immigration, but will give authorities only three to four additional minutes to apprehend anyone who attempts to enter the country illegally," Foster said. "We don’t believe DHS is using the Rio Grande to its advantage and it contradicts Secretary Chertoff’s statement that the river is a natural obstruction and that a one-size fits all policy will not work."
The wall not only would encroach on privately-owned, agricultural, suburban, and urban land, it would likely consume portions of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge and Texas state parks that host hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.
"Building a one-, three- or 10-mile segment of fencing that is bordered by scores of miles of territory with no barriers whatsoever is obviously a hopeless effort to stem any kind of pedestrian traffic," Foster said.
Ground sensors, radar, observation from the air, and remote video surveillance are "more effective, smarter, less environmentally damaging and ultimately less costly alternatives," he added.
To guarantee success, TBC believes that high-tech alternatives must also be paired with more Border Patrol agents on the ground and low-tech resources such as visual observations of illegal entry, physical signs of illegal entry (vehicle tracks and footprints, clothes, etc.), information provided by private landowners or the general public, and clearing the Rio Grande of vegetation, such as Carrizo Cane, that provides hiding places for illegal border-crossers.
"For those of us that live, work and raise our families along the Texas-Mexico border, we demand and deserve better security proposals than a fence," he said.