 "Photo: Andrew Rogers, Daily Texan Staff")
BROWNSVILLE — The old, disused fencing has been removed from the south end of the UT-Brownsville campus, just north of the Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course. In its place, crews from Construction Rent-a-Fence have laid the foundation over the last two weeks for a 10-foot fence that will stretch 1,100 feet across the campus.
UT-Brownsville golf coach Bobby Lucio, who also owns the golf course, said there have been no surprises about the location of new fencing but said he will have to wait and see over the next six months how the fence affects his business.
“It has slowed down to less than a trickle, a droplet,” Lucio said of illegal border crossings on his course. “You just don’t see it. You don’t see it anymore.”
Lucio attributed the lower number of observable crossings to the steadily increasing number of border patrol agents stationed in the area for the past eight to 10 years. He said the fencing on the university campus may be the only area finished by the Dec. 31 deadline, as Customs and Border Protection spokesman Daniel Doty acknowledged may be the case.
UT-Brownsville professor Jeff Wilson became involved with a working group that submitted testimony to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Wilson first became involved in the project by trying to map out exactly where the wall would be built through Brownsville.
“They’re placing the wall in poorer areas, higher-percentage Hispanic areas, Spanish-speaking, lower-educated areas,” Wilson said. “This is all based on U.S. Census data.”
Wilson said the next step in his studies would be an analysis of the environmental impact of the fence, which he admits will be difficult until the fence is actually constructed.
“They want to have gaps and herd people into gaps where they’re more identifiable,” Wilson said. “They’re not going to admit to racial profiling.”
At around 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, more than 10 border patrol vehicles were parked outside the front office of River Bend Country Club. A man, who border patrol agents guessed was a drug smuggler, had driven a black suburban into the Rio Grande River after being chased by agents.
A group of nearly 30 residents gathered in River Bend’s main lodge for breakfast after Border Patrol told them to restrict themselves to the area.
“Over the years, there’s been a lot of activity,” said guest Dave Odle.
Odle, a resident of Pines City, Minn., and a yearly guest of River Bend since 1995, said people crossing the border would often shower and change in the bathhouse below the lodge.
“They’re pretty easy to pick out of a crowd,” he said.
Odle said he has the number for local Border Patrol agents plugged into his cell phone in case he ever sees anyone crossing illegally. He relayed several anecdotes of friends finding bundles of marijuana on the course.
An informal poll of the River Bend residents gathered for breakfast revealed that not one supported the construction of a border fence along the border with Mexico.
“Nobody wants this fence because it takes away from our view,” said Marilynne Short, a Brownsville resident since 1950. “We might find something stolen out of our shed — so what?”
Homeland Security has a congressional mandate from the 2006 Secure Fence Act to construct 670 miles of fencing along the Mexican border by the end of this year. Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol agents identified Brownsville as a high-priority area for fence construction.
In August, the university and the Department of Homeland Security resolved a yearlong legal battle over the construction of a border fence on the campus. Homeland Security brought a lawsuit against the university in January after President Juliet Garcia denied surveyors access to the campus to plan a border fence.
A settlement reached in March ordered the two sides to cooperate in finding alternatives to physical barriers to prevent border crossings on the campus. The university took the federal government to court once more before the current settlement was reached in August.
Under the August settlement, the university agreed to construct the fence itself with money provided by the UT System.
Doty said each place where fencing was planned was deemed a high-priority area.
That priority, he explained, was to keep narcotics out of urban areas. Doty said River Bend Golf Resort and the areas immediately to the west were hardly urban. By contrast, he said the Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course is right next to the city and just south of the UT-Brownsville campus.
“The goal is to stop the narcotics and the smuggling from getting into urban areas,” he said.
Doty said the vehicle involved in Saturday morning’s incident contained a drug shipment. By Saturday afternoon, Customs and Border Protection had lost the vehicle’s location due to the high water line and planned to pick it up downstream.
UT-Brownsville psychology senior Tonantzin Juarez said she commutes from home in Matamoros, Mexico each class day.
Juarez said she, like most Brownsville students, was opposed to the wall but was glad that at least the university would retain control of the fence by paying for the construction. She said students generally felt powerless to do anything about the fence.
“We don’t have the motivation to actually do something about it,” she said. “People just say what’s the whole point, they’re going to build it anyway.”
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