By Nick Braune
Although Homeland Security’s border wall has been out of the news recently and off some activists’ radar, there is still strong opposition to it.
Besides its other problems, the wall is mean-spirited and ugly, and a group of Valley “Artists Against the Wall” pointed out that fact a month ago in Brownsville at an outdoor exhibit. (Although attending two rallies in Brownsville’s Hope Park a while back, I had not visited since the wall went up there. I first saw the monstrosity last week: a long metal serrated knife scarring Hope. I am very happy the artists decided to decorate it for a day.)
The Brownsville Herald reported the art show: “About a dozen artists…rested their work on the fence in Hope Park, overlooking the Rio Grande. A 30-foot ladder fashioned out of bamboo and twine, a wreath of ribbon and artificial flowers measuring 8 feet in diameter, and a deflated black inner tube that had been salvaged from along the riverbank were included in the exhibition.”
A six-foot painting by the art show’s organizer, Mark Clark, mocked the “gringo’s nightmare” of Mexican immigration. The “nightmare” canvas showed “a shaman dispensing peyote buttons, Americans covering their ears at the sound of a mariachi band, an unemployed McDonald’s worker selling Mexican ice cream, Mayan women washing their clothes in a blonde woman’s swimming pool, a Mayan soccer player and an American soccer player kicking around the decapitated head of a Dallas Cowboys football player…”
The event was energetic and the Border Patrol kept distant.
***
Gathering background data about the wall, I recently interviewed political activist (and artist) Scott Nicol, cofounder of the No Border Wall organization.
Braune: Scott, how pushy has the government been lately? I am particularly interested in Brownsville’s wall.
Nicol: Well, in Cameron County there have been a number of landowners who had their property condemned by DHS [Department of Homeland Security] in the past year and have watched border walls be constructed on their seized land. At the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010, some of these landowners were served with a second, or in a few cases a third, condemnation to take even more land in the vicinity of the border wall. It looks like DHS wants to establish a broader zone of control around the wall.
The City of Brownsville itself was one of the landowners receiving a second condemnation. In the summer of 2009, the City Commission signed a contract with the DHS in which they gave away $95,000 worth of city property for free, despite strong opposition from the community. In exchange, DHS agreed to build what they called a “floating fence” that would sit on top of the levee, and at some future date the city could pay to have a new border wall built somewhere else.
It was a really bad deal, and it was unlikely that Brownsville would ever raise the $12 million per mile necessary to build the replacement wall. DHS ignored the deal and built permanent border walls that cannot be removed from the levee and in January filed a condemnation notice that they intend to take another 20 acres of municipal land.
Braune: I understand that you also have been helping a Sierra Club project.
Nicol: Yes, besides working with No Border Wall, I have been working with the Sierra Club’s national Borderlands Team, which focuses largely on the environmental impacts of the border wall. In South Texas the wall slices through the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge, which was established to create a wildlife corridor along the river to help keep endangered ocelots and jaguarundi from going extinct in the United States. Because former DHS Secretary Chertoff used the Real ID Act to waive 36 federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, there has been little effort to ensure that the border wall does not fragment or destroy large swathes of ocelot habitat.
There is also a great deal of concern about the wall’s effect on flooding along the border. In South Texas no studies of the hydrological impacts of the border wall have been released, raising the specter of deflected water and increased flooding in Mexico. In Arizona this has already happened. The border wall that divides Nogales, Arizona from Nogales, Sonora backed up seasonal flood waters, causing two deaths in Mexico and inflicting millions of dollars in damage.
The same flood damaged Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The laws that DHS waived were there for a reason. They protect human communities and the natural environment, and ignoring them puts us all at risk. The Sierra Club recognizes this, and has been working to prevent Congress from calling for more border walls. The Sierra Club is also worried about the precedent that the Real ID Act represents, where all potentially opposing laws can be tossed out the window.
[This column also appears in the Mid-Valley Town Crier in Weslaco, Texas.]
MoPress 
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