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Subject: Border Fence NewsClips

Date: Friday, February 01, 2008 8:18:29 AM

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Border fence lawsuits hit Hidalgo, Starr

counties
By JAMES OSBORNE and JEREMY ROEBUCK/The Monitor
January 31, 2008 - 11:45PM
ABRAM — The legal fight over the border fence has extended right into the Leonardo
Ramirez Sr.’s backyard.

For more than 50 years he and his wife Anita have lived on a roughly 40-acre tract of land
just north of the Rio Grande. They raised three children there, while making their living
raising and selling goats.

But now, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has filed a lawsuit to gain access to a 3 acre tract that
Ramirez says is essential to his business.

“Everyday I cross the goats over the levee to graze” the 80-year-old said.

“How am I going to cross them with a fence there? How?”

The suit - one of 14 filed against landowners in Hidalgo and Starr counties over the past two
days - join a long list of litigation that began in Eagle Pass earlier this month.

So far, 35 Texas property owners have been sued by the federal government to allow U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers surveyors temporary access to land under consideration for border
fencing.

The lawsuits filed Wednesday and Thursday seek access to 57 acres of land in Los Ebanos,
12 acres in Hidalgo, 71 acres in Roma, 135 acres in Rio Grande City and the Ramirez’s 3
acres in Abram.

LANDOWNERS RESIST
Representatives from the corps of engineers and U.S. Border Patrol began contacting
landowners last spring. While a preliminary map was leaked to the media in May, the
government has not made final the fence’s path.

“In some cases unfortunately we have not been granted access to the land,” said Mike Friel, a
Washington, D.C.-based spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “We’ve been
forced to petition the court for access.”

Federal courts have sided with the government in each of the Texas cases to appear before a
judge. In Eagle Pass, where the city was sued for access to a 233-acre stretch of land Jan. 14,
U.S. District Judge Alia Moses Ludlum ruled even before a hearing date was set.

But the Hidalgo and Starr county cases are more likely to play out like those filed in
Cameron County earlier this month, said Angela Dodge, a Houston-based spokeswoman for
the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In those cases, landowners were called to a court hearing where
they could present their arguments for resisting the government’s efforts.

“We expect it to be like the Brownsville cases,” she said. “But, really, it’s completely up to
the judge.”

Plans call for 370 miles of border fence and 300 miles of vehicle barriers to be built between
the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean by the end of this year.

DEFENDANTS
Amongst those named in the most recent suits were the city of Hidalgo and the Mennonite
Bretheren Church.

Steve Crane, the attorney representing Hidalgo, declined to comment on the litigation, which
sought to gain a 4-acre tract the city owns along the flood control levee.

“I haven’t even seen the suit. We haven’t been served yet,” Crane said.

In the case of the Mennonites, the church apparently didn’t realize the government was trying
to gain access to their land, a tract in Los Ebanos donated years ago, said Joe Johns, the
chairman of the Mennonite Bretheren Church.

“I don’t have complete information, but it seems like there was some failure to
communicate,” he said.

Ed Flores said he hasn’t heard a word from surveyors either. The San Antonio resident co-
owns a stretch of floodplain near Roma named in a Thursday suit with several family
members.

“As far as I’m concerned all we do is pay taxes on it,” he said. “If they want to buy it, we’d
be happy to sell.”

The border fence remains a hot issue in South Texas, where objection has been loud and
come from all directions. Businessmen bemoan that it will hurt relationships with their
counterparts in Mexico; environmentalists say it will curb the movements of local wildlife,
potentially causing irrevocable harm.

For many landowners, the idea of giving up what they consider rightfully theirs is
unspeakable.

“I moved out of there when I was six years old, but it’s been in the family forever,” said
Pamela Rivas, whose family was sued for 3 acres in Los Ebanos Wednesday.

“The border wall isn’t going to change anything; it’s just a money thing.”

Posted on Fri, Feb. 01, 2008

Perry says he now supports border

fences
By JAY ROOT
Star-Telegram staff writer

AUSTIN -- Gov. Rick Perry issued some of his toughest talk yet on immigration and
border security Thursday, saying he favors border fences in some areas while flatly
advising Mexican workers who want U.S. citizenship to get in line "just like everybody
else."

The remarks came during one of the longest and most wide-ranging news
conferences Perry has held in months. The governor displayed his trademark
swagger as he discussed his endorsement of Republican presidential hopeful Sen.
John McCain, the perils of a Hillary Clinton White House and his controversial order
to destroy office e-mail once a week despite criticism from open-government activists.

Hundreds of e-mails from Perry's office, some of them embarrassing, were saved by
a citizen activist and have spilled into the open. In them are internal policy
discussions about border security, Perry's focus on promoting Rudy Giuliani for
president and candid exchanges among top staff members.

But Perry dismissed the flap over his previously secret e-mail records as a game of
"gotcha" and defended his policy of deleting the messages once a week.

"If we're going to spend our time gleaning through those for hours instead of doing
the work of the people of the state of Texas, I think we're headed in the wrong
direction," Perry said.

Perry called reporters to his office in the Capitol one day after Giuliani, the former
New York mayor, dropped out of the presidential race. He said he is endorsing
McCain, just as Giuliani had, and hinted that the Arizona senator would soon visit
Texas to see the state's border security initiative in action.

Like McCain, Perry has increasingly toughened his stance on immigration and border
security.

A few months ago, Perry, ahead of a meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon
in Mexico City, railed against all the "mean rhetoric" sparked by the immigration
debate in Washington and declared that border fences "absolutely won't work,"
according to published reports.

"We know how to deal with border security, and you don't do it by building a fence,"
Perry said during the August trip. "You do it by putting boots on the ground."

But on Thursday, Perry embraced physical barriers, a red-hot and divisive topic along
the border, for some areas.

"There is some strategic fencing that we support. We have said all along that there
are areas, particularly in metropolitan areas, that you can use strategic fencing to
help control the flow of illegal activities," Perry said.

Perry has also expressed support in the past for the now-doomed plan that would
have given work permits to Mexican guest workers -- an idea conservative activists
called "amnesty." And in 2001, Perry was the first governor in the nation to sign into
law a bill that allows certain illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Texas colleges
and universities.

On Thursday, the governor stressed border security over immigration reform, and
said that if a comprehensive overhaul occurs he wants temporary workers who apply
for U.S. citizenship to wait their turn behind others who have already done so.

"There's a line. Get in just like everybody else," he said.