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06-16-2006, 01:39 PM #1
If you can't beat 'em ... help them over?
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... DEL03.html
Texas ranchers hope ladders will save fences
06/16/2006
By LYNN BREZOSKY / Associated Press
If you can't beat 'em ... help them over?
Some South Texas ranchers, sick of having their pricey fences slashed by illegal immigrants trying to avoid Border Patrol checkpoints, have installed rudimentary ladders along the fences, hoping the migrants will take the easy route and save their fence line.
"It's an attempt to get them to use the ladders instead of tearing the fences," said Scott Pattinson, who owns one of a group of ranches known as La Copa.
La Copa is just south of a U.S. Border Patrol highway checkpoint that went up several years ago, sending immigrants through the brambled scrub of nearby ranches instead.
The checkpoint is about 75 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, one of a line of checkpoints on highway routes leading out of South Texas. It is the end of the Border Patrol's saturation zone, and beyond it illegal immigrants and smugglers consider themselves home free.
Some immigrants walk for hours or days to skirt the checkpoints in temperatures hovering around 100 degrees.
Their feet have worn visible paths through a forest of cactus and mesquite otherwise thick enough to conceal them from Border Patrol helicopters overhead and agents only a few hundred yards away.
The paths lead from one ripped-down section of fencing to another.
"Just the wire is probably a dollar a foot," rancher Michael Vickers said. "You figure building it and everything could be $10 a foot. The wood (for the fences) is probably $100."
Texas ranches can be so large it could be days before owners notice the hole in the fence, long after the livestock possibly escapes.
Paul Johnson protects his exotic game ranch of zebras, scimitor-horned oryx and wildebeests on his 2,700 acre ranch with about 10 miles of high wire fence, and joined his neighbors in placing ladders along the way.
But apparently some immigrants think the ladders are too good to be true.
"They ignore it a lot," Johnson said. "They're afraid that they're monitored by the Border Patrol."
Johnson plans to take the ladders down, worried about the message he's sending.
"I think what it does is give a signal that we are wanting them to cross there, don't mind the crossing, and that kind of magnifies the problem," he said.
"I've had a dose of it myself, it's not fun," he said. "That's just my attitude, why make it easier for them to trespass?" he said.Support our FIGHT AGAINST illegal immigration & Amnesty by joining our E-mail Alerts at http://eepurl.com/cktGTn
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06-16-2006, 02:19 PM #2
What a total disgrace that this government is not stopping this. Those ranchers shouldn't have to spend on dime.
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06-16-2006, 03:55 PM #3
- Join Date
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Originally Posted by BobC
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06-17-2006, 08:55 PM #4
The government is probably sending the illegals the wire cutters to cut through the fence.
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