Thread: Texas Rancher's Bridge to the Past Runs Afoul of the Border

OCTOBER 6, 2008
Texas Rancher's Bridge to the Past Runs Afoul of the Border Patrol
Span to Mexico Reminds Him of His Youth; Bilingual Poker, Whiskey, Calf-Brain Stew
By STEPHANIE SIMONArticle
SIERRA BLANCA, Texas -- In a swampy corner of his desolate ranch, Bill Addington proudly flouts the law.
The Department of Homeland Security has demanded that he tear down a rickety footbridge from his land across the Rio Grande into Mexico. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, authorities have shut down nearly a dozen of these informal river crossings along the Texas border. This is the last they know to be operating. They want it gone. Mr. Addington refuses.

Stephanie Simon
The Department of Homeland Security demanded that Bill Addington tear down this rickety footbridge, which links his farm to a Mexican village.
He crossed that bridge countless times as a boy, darting into Mexico to buy candy or watermelon juice or to flirt with the girls at church-hall dances. Mexicans crossed over, too, every day, to work the cotton fields for Mr. Addington's father -- a U.S. Border Patrol agent. After a hard season's labor, they would all celebrate together with a night of bilingual poker, fueled by whiskey and calf-brain stew.
Mr. Addington, who is 52, clings to those memories. So when the Department of Homeland Security sent his family a letter this past summer warning that his bridge could allow "the illegal entry of terrorists, aliens, and/or drug traffickers," he scoffed.
That's not his border. Not the bridge he knows. And he will not accept that it could be.
"They say it's a new era, but their vision of the border is a place of fear and trouble," he says. "We just don't see it that way. This is our home."
Mud slurped at his boots the other day as Mr. Addington trudged out to check on the bridge. It's a rustic affair, made up of old boards anchored to wires that stretch 30 feet across the river. The water beneath is about 10 feet deep, murky and swarming with mosquitoes.
Bill Addington
Mr. Addington grabbed hold of the hand rail -- a wire strung across the river at shoulder height -- and stepped onto the first board with a splash. Thirty teetering seconds later, he was in Mexico.
"I'm in forbidden territory!" he called, grinning mischievously.
Mr. Addington says he doesn't use the bridge much these days, except to round up cattle that have strayed into Mexico over a shallow passage downriver. Foot traffic from the Mexican side has slowed, too, because the region bristles with motion detectors, security cameras and federal agents.
Still, "people do cross and drugs are smuggled" over the bridge, says Bill Brooks, a regional spokesman for the Border Patrol. Mr. Brooks would not provide numbers. But fresh footprints were visible on a recent afternoon in the dirt path leading from the bridge, and a Mexican soda bottle lay in the weeds.
For years, authorities did not make a concerted effort to cut off the unmonitored crossings, like this bridge, that had linked Mexican and Texas border towns for generations. That changed after Sept. 11. Federal agents took out the rowboat ferry in the village of Lajitas; piled boulders to block a river-bottom road through a shallow stretch of the Rio Grande near Redford; began prosecuting anyone caught scrambling across a narrow dam that runs from bank to bank near Del Rio.
The crackdown did not reach this stretch of the river until a few months ago, when the Border Patrol, a division of Homeland Security, decided to move against six illegal footbridges. None posed a major threat to national security, Mr. Brooks says. But each made illegal entry easier. "We're making every attempt we possibly can to gain control of our borders, and it just got to be time for these bridges," he says.
Landowners responsible for five of the crossings agreed to demolish them or asked the government to do so.
Mr. Addington vowed to fight.
A tall and rangy man with scraggly gray hair, Mr. Addington has thrown himself into campaign after quixotic campaign to preserve the borderland he loves. He helped fight off a nuclear-waste dump slated to be built in this poor-but-striking region of ragged mountains and rough scrubland. He spent years protesting a business venture that, until 2001, imported New York City's sewage by the trainload and spread the sludge across a ranch just outside the small town of Sierra Blanca.
Lately, he has been up in arms about the 670-mile fence that Homeland Security is building on the southern border. The fence will not cross his property -- there's a big gap along this stretch of the Rio Grande -- but Mr. Addington is distressed all the same.
He grew up on the river, soaring out over the international border on a tire swing, splashing in the lazy current, frying fresh-caught catfish with his Mexican buddies on one shore or the other. Border life has a unique culture and rhythm, he says, and he can't stand to see it locked down behind steel fencing. Or cut off by destroying a footbridge.
The local sheriff, Arvin West, backs him up. Sheriff West believes that security imperatives will one day require the bridge to close. He acknowledges that it can enable illegal immigration -- in fact, his own grandfather used it to sneak into this country. But Mr. West says the bridge is hardly a threat and calls it ridiculous for the government to target a flimsy string of two-by-fours when miles of border remain unsecured. So for now, he vows to stand "toe to toe and nose to nose" against any federal official who tries to shut down the crossing.
Such a confrontation is unlikely. The letter from Homeland Security did contain a vague threat of unilateral action: "Our goal is to work...in a peaceful and cooperative manner," it read, "...however, we cannot allow your bridge" to remain open.
But Mr. Brooks of the Border Patrol says authorities don't intend to forcibly remove the bridge. Instead, they have warned Mr. Addington that he faces a $3,000 fine every time his bridge is used for an illegal crossing.
The Border Patrol doesn't have a permanent lookout at the bridge, but the local field office has authorization to add more than 300 new agents over the next 15 months and plans to step up patrols in the area. Agents already monitor motion sensors on roads around the ranch.
Mr. Addington shrugs off the warning. He'll take that risk, he says, for his friends across the border, for his fellow ranchers who rely on day laborers from Mexico, for the memory of those dances and the long evenings after the cotton harvest, when people from two nations bonded over barbecue.
"We should be building bridges, not walls," Mr. Addington says. "I'm not taking it down."

http://online.wsj.com

Short sighted fool.

He's just as bad as the illegals, he crosses without his passport too. That's a form of illegal entry. What's the fine for that?

Dixie

He crossed that bridge countless times as a boy, darting into Mexico to buy candy or watermelon juice or to flirt with the girls at church-hall dances. Mexicans crossed over, too, every day, to work the cotton fields for Mr. Addington's father -- a U.S. Border Patrol agent. After a hard season's labor, they would all celebrate together with a night of bilingual poker, fueled by whiskey and calf-brain stew.

............sick!

10.07.08
Feds cracking down on illegal border bridges

Posted: Oct 7, 2008 07:42 PM PDT

By ABC-7 Reporter Martin Bartlett

HUDSPETH COUNTY -- Customs and Border Protection officials are cracking down on a handful of illegal foot bridges along the border but at least one rancher says the federal government is overreacting.

"We're neighbors -- we should be building bridges, not walls," said third-generation rancher Bill Addington.


An hour-and-a-half drive south of Sierra Blanca, 40 miles after the blacktop of Ranch Road 1111 ends, in a place where you're more likely to see a horse or a javelina than any human being, the Rio Grande snakes through a thicket of salt cedars and the Department of Homeland Security says this is where Addington is breaking the law.

By crossing what's left of a 50-year-old foot bridge, he crosses the border; the Department of Homeland Security says drug smugglers, human traffickers, and even terrorists could do the same.

"There are much easier places to get across our vast open border that this little foot bridge," he said. "We're not going to take it down."

Still, DHS sent Addington a letter giving him the following three options: tear down the bridge, block it off, or face a fine of $5,000 for every person that they can catch crossing the bridge.

Border Patrol Marfa Sector Spokesman Bill Brooks said his agency is cracking down on the illegal crossings.
He acknowledges that dozens of which have spanned the Rio Grande for decades.

Brooks said many of them popped up in the 1960's when channellization projects made the Rio Grande too deep in many places to walk across.


"Bosque Bonito, the little town over there, had about 200 people and we employed them," he said recounting the parties his grandfather would through. He said everyone from the El Paso elite to farm workers who crossed the border would attend, play poker, and celebrate the harvest.

But all of that is in the distant past now. Many of the farm's fields have gone fallow and over-grazed grasslands have turned to desert scrub.
Addington said he's been distracted from the farm and ranch business that brought his family to this remote corner of Far West Texas. He has been an outspoken opponent of border fencing which is already being installed upstream from his farm and ranch at Neely's Crossing and in El Paso.

He also spoke out against plans to build a nuclear waste dump in Sierra Blanca.

http://www.kvia.com/global/story.asp?s=9142595

Tear down the bridge... Addington.

Yeah, yeah,

I get it! Lords of the peons. Just want to keep that lofty position. Take the bridge down before the DHS takes it dorwn.

But Mr. Brooks of the Border Patrol says authorities don't intend to forcibly remove the bridge. Instead, they have warned Mr. Addington that he faces a $3,000 fine every time his bridge is used for an illegal crossing.

How is the Border Patrol going to enforce that fine? They cant keep watching this guys bridge all day.

This man is a lunatic who is aiding and abetting illegal aliens. That is a crime.