The Border Fence, Brownsville 
Keep Out!
Could it be that the biggest problem along the U.S.-Mexico border isn’t undocumented immigrants but Washington politicians who want to build a fence?
Illustration by Eddie Guy
I’ll confess that I tossed the plan almost immediately. I’d intended simply to drive from Laredo to Brownsville, the stretch of border where most of Texas’ share of the proposed security fence is supposed to be built. A day here, a day there; I hadn’t meant to linger in any one place, but after three days I found myself still in Laredo, darting on and off the tail end of Interstate 35. Hot, overcast, and clogged with cargo-laden rigs, the city had little to lure the casual traveler, but if you were interested in the matter of the fence, there was always another person to see. There was Joseph Hein, who took me to his family ranch on the Rio Grande, where he raises Appaloosas; he told me he’d have to get out of the business if the water were fenced off. There was Dennis Nixon, the chairman of IBC Bank, who met me in his expansive office, outlined a broad economic case against the fence, and sent me off with a white paper on immigration policy he’d distributed to every member of Congress. There was a young woman from Mexico, undocumented, living and working in Laredo, who told me that her estranged husband had reported her to the Border Patrol so that he could kidnap their children. If a fence were built, she speculated, a lot of people wouldn’t be able to see their families as much.
Last summer, in Laredo and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, what had once been presumed a political phantasm now loomed as a real possibility: that the Secure Fence Act, passed by Congress to prevent “terrorists [and] other unlawful aliens” from entering the country, might result in an actual fence being built along sizable stretches of the Rio Grande. When President Bush signed the bill in October 2006, it was perceived as a feint meant to appeal to voters on the eve of the election. (Because their immigration bill had failed, the thinking goes, Republicans had to do something to show that they’d confronted the issue.) Yet $1.2 billion was quickly appropriated for border security projects, and this year the Border Patrol, in a clumsy, quasi-clandestine fashion, began to circulate maps indicating where the fence might go. From afar it was difficult to imagine: Hundreds of miles of fence between two countries? The state of Texas partially walled off? What would such a thing look like? Where would it go? What effects would it have? The best way to begin to answer those questions, it seemed to me, was to drive to the border and ask them.
This was not an original notion. I arrived in Laredo to discover the city full of reporters—from newspapers, magazines, CNN—booked at the posh pseudo-colonial La Posada Hotel, drinking at a new bar off Del Mar Boulevard, comparing notes and names. It wasn’t just the fence. Some had come to report on the case of three National Guardsmen who’d recently been caught smuggling Mexicans into the country, but there were also the Nuevo Laredo violence stories, the drug stories, the immigration stories, all of them tangled together. A town whose name had once been synonymous with “dusty backwater” had lately become a fishbowl for certain national woes.
The stated aim of the Secure Fence Act is “operational control,” defined as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States” (both unwanted people and contraband may qualify as “entries”)—in essence, the fantasy of a perfectly sealed border. Like the aim of eradicating all terrorists from the globe, operational control serves to justify considerable expenditures and the overriding of other laws. The two missions blur together at times, and the militarized view of border control has become standard. The phrase I kept encountering as I spent time on the border was “more boots on the ground.” Whether or not they were in favor of the fence, people spoke of the need for more boots on the ground in order to secure the border. And this from environmentalists, mayors, schoolteachers.
There is in fact a portion of existing border fence right in the city of Laredo. Several years ago the Border Patrol approached Laredo Community College, which is situated on the river, with a proposal to build a length of fence along the edge of the campus. Though the immigrants who regularly crossed the grounds had not, as a rule, created much of a disturbance, drug smugglers had been a greater concern; bales of marijuana had been found hidden near the tennis courts, for instance. (I was unable to learn whether news of this discovery had caused a surge in applications to Laredo Community College.) As it turned out, the fence, made of eight-foot-high wrought-iron bars that narrow to spikes curving outward toward Mexico, had not rid the campus of smugglers, though the number of immigrant crossings had dropped.
One afternoon I drove over to the campus to see it for myself. With its spearlike protrusions and tall black bars, the fence was unsettling. And depressing: I was surprised by how immediate and visceral my distaste was. I walked beside it, past athletic fields and a swimming pool and barracks-style housing on the campus side; across the divide were thorny brush and a gravel road suitable for a Border Patrol four-by-four. The fence wound past an elementary school and stopped at a brick wall about five feet high. I looked over it. On the other side was a dead-end street, where two small boys were lobbing a basketball at a six-foot-high basket. Black-haired, brown-skinned: Who knows where they might have come from?
My second day in Laredo, I stood on a bluff a short distance from the World Trade Bridge, north of town, which had been dedicated in April 2000 in a ceremony attended by presidential candidate George W. Bush. Bush had been tarred during the campaign as a foreign policy greenhorn, and his trip was widely viewed as an attempt to muster up a little cosmopolitan flair. Sharing a stage with Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo on the Mexican side of the bridge, Bush declared to the assembled crowd of mostly Mexicans that in the past there had been “walls of divide between Mexico and the United States. We must, we must be committed to raise the bridges of trade and friendship and freedom.”
Looking down at the bridge, I could tell by the line of idling rigs waiting to enter the U.S. that trade, at least, was in full swing. (Friendship and freedom, however, were in doubt. After Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, Mexican president-elect Felipe Calderón called the fence “a grave mistake.”) I was there with Tom Vaughan, a biologist who leads groups of students on a tour of Laredo as part of a four-week environmental health program for aspiring medical workers; they make stops along the river and also wade into its midst to sample for toxins and coliform. By visiting the border, I hoped, if nothing else, to be able to picture what a fence would look like, in the literal sense: how it would fit into the landscape. And so I spent half a day with Vaughan’s group, squinting at different spots along the Rio Grande, trying to make out a fence that didn’t yet exist.
A co-founder of the Rio Grande International Study Center, an environmental education nonprofit, Vaughan could have passed for a water sprite: a lean man with wisps of white hair winging out from beneath a red nylon cap. He wore a waterproof camera around his neck and elfin river shoes that resembled rubber socks. Though his research specialty is benthic macroinvertebrates (think shrimp, snails, aquatic worms), his impromptu lecturing to the students ranged over coal and trade and long-haul versus short-haul trucking and salt cedar trees and the Mexican petroleum industry—as if he were trying to spool out as much of his local expertise as he could in the time he had. The air was thick and warm, full of the trucks’ rumbling. After a while he came around to the subject of the fence.
“Where are we going to build it?” Vaughan asked. “It’ll move the border from the middle of the river to where the fence is. For example, here’s some high ground where we could build a fence.” He pointed directly in front of us, to the top of a steep bank. “Now we get over on that side,” he said, pointing across the road that led to the bridge. There, the high ground receded farther away from the river, and the low riverbank widened. “Is it going to follow the high ridges or is it going to go straight down? I will tell you, it’s not uncommon for that area there to be underwater. No fence can hold up underwater. Any fence anywhere in the floodplain is going to get washed away, and the floodplain’s pretty wide. So we’re talking about moving the border two hundred, three hundred, four hundred feet away from the river.”
He took a couple of steps in the direction of our parked cars, then paused and flung his arm back toward the bridge. “Anyway, this is international commerce in action!”
We drove to a private ranch, where Vaughan had been given permission to take water samples. Some of the students began to pull on waders. We all filed down a narrow path through the mesquite to the river, and those of us who were not venturing in for samples sat around a small clearing at the water’s edge. It had been hard enough to visualize a fence near the World Trade Bridge; it was all the harder to imagine this quiet terrain of grass and foliage riven by “at least two layers of reinforced fencing,” which is what the Secure Fence Act proposes, as well as “additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors.”
On the ground were signs of people who’d passed by: a blue pair of men’s underwear, two warped and rusted cans of black beans, a dusty shirt. Traces of the international labor pool in action.
The proposed fence would be built in high-traffic urban areas.
Illustration by Eddie Guy
The Border Patrol made its first foray into fence building in its San Diego sector, in 1990. The “primary fence,” as it became known, was constructed from surplus corrugated steel panels, of a kind that had been used to build portable landing strips in Vietnam, and originally extended from the Pacific Ocean fourteen miles inland. (Today it covers more than fifty miles.) Only ten feet high and easy to climb or to dig under, it might as well have been a privacy hedge. Work on a secondary fence—higher, less easy to climb, and floodlit—began in 1996. Yet immigrants are still able to scale both fences in a few minutes; even the Border Patrol has labeled the fences a “filter,” slowing people down rather than stopping them.
So why not build a fence that can’t be so easily surmounted? Why not, say, put razor wire on top? Or at least make it higher? According to an article that appeared in Foreign Policy, the ease of climbing the primary fence in San Diego was intentional: The Border Patrol didn’t want to see its agents sidetracked by injured climbers. And even a low fence could bar (or at least reroute) the vehicles that transport drugs into the country. Though the proposed border fence has been touted as a kind of all-purpose barrier, deterring immigrants, drugs, and terrorism at the same time, this rhetorical fusion breaks down, apparently, at the level of design.
It was perhaps for this reason that before the passage of the Secure Fence Act, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had been a proponent of what he called a twenty-first-century virtual fence. While acknowledging that actual physical fencing might be built in some areas, he also said, “We don’t want to lock ourselves into something that’s a one-size-fits-all solution for the entire six thousand miles of border.”
This past February, during a visit to Laredo, Chertoff was still reassuring border officials, visiting one of the city’s bridges and declaring, “I do agree that where you have a significant river as a natural obstruction, fencing is not necessarily the right solution.” Soon after, however, a Border Patrol map of planned fencing was leaked, and the DHS sent out a request for proposals from contractors to build fence in and around Laredo. Chertoff announced that fence construction in Texas would commence this year, only to retract that statement two days later.
Then, in September, the Border Patrol and the Army Corps of Engineers at last released a more detailed map of the planned fencing in the Rio Grande Valley, with short sections of fence denoted by red squiggles, like fallen bits of yarn. Brownsville contemplated a lawsuit to block construction. Texas senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, both of whom had voted for the Secure Fence Act, had called for local consultation before any fencing was built. Yet after spending time on the border, it was hard for me to see what that would accomplish. Everyone local seemed to be against building a fence altogether.
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