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Plan for border barrier gains momentum

By DAVE MONTGOMERY

Star-Telegram Washington Bureau


As mayor of Eagle Pass, Chad Foster presides over a thriving Texas border town that takes pride in a robust economy, a spectacular view of the Rio Grande and a warm relationship with Piedras Negras, its municipal neighbor and trading partner across the river in Mexico.

Now talk out of Washington has Foster worried.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, a powerful California Republican, wants to build a security wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, an old idea with new momentum in the security-minded post-9-11 era.

Hunter envisions a barrier stretching across four states, from the Pacific Coast in California to the Gulf Coast in Texas, following a 1,951-mile route that presumably would edge along Foster's riverside town of 25,000.

"It's going to be a waste of time and money in this citizen's opinion," said Foster, a 56-year-old real estate developer who has lived in Eagle Pass most of his life. "It's going to antagonize my relationship with my friends and neighbors in Mexico."

Foster is hardly alone in his dissent. Hunter's proposal and similar plans have also stirred an outcry from an array of other critics, including the Mexican government and environmentalists. The Bush administration, while supporting limited fencing along troublesome segments of the border, has signaled an aversion to a border-length barrier.

"The president is aware of the concerns of critics who would like to build a wall around the United States," Tony Garza, President Bush's ambassador to Mexico, told reporters in Mexico City on Thursday. "As a former governor of Texas, he knows that such proposals are both unrealistic and undesirable."

Security concerns

Despite the high-level opposition, polls suggest that the idea of a border barrier is gaining currency among a rapidly growing segment of Americans who worry that potential terrorists could be among the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants entering the United States.

"This is no longer an immigration issue," said Hunter, who represents a border area district in Southern California that includes parts of San Diego County. "This is a national security issue."

A poll of 1,500 adults conducted Nov. 4-6 by Rasmussen Reports, a New Jersey-based company, found 60 percent in favor of building the barrier and 26 percent opposed.

An informal survey of Texas lawmakers showed mixed opinions. The state's two senators and a number of Republican House members, including several in North Texas, say they might support fencing along portions of the border but not its entire length. Some Democrats vehemently oppose the idea, although the government-sanctioned fencing programs were created by Democratic President Bill Clinton's administration.

For years, the border has had long stretches of flimsy barbed-wire fences, but the structures being debated now are 10- to 12-foot-high solid-steel and galvanized-steel-mesh fences designed to stop even the most determined illegal immigrants.

Critics counter that criminals wanting to cross the border will find ways to get under, over or around barriers.

More than 80 miles of federally enforced barriers and fencing have been erected at strategic points on the border - including Hunter's district, as well as segments near El Paso and Laredo - but proposals for a full-length fence have historically gone nowhere. The political dynamics, however, appear to be shifting in the post-9-11 era.

As chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Hunter is positioned to throw a hefty dose of power behind his border security project. Moreover, he has the backing of a newly formed citizens lobby - WeNeedAFence.com - and a budding grassroots movement.

"Our message is getting out there on a national basis," said Colin Hanna, a former county commissioner in West Chester, Pa., who heads WeNeedAFence.com. "Support for it is building extremely fast."

Hanna, who is also president of Let Freedom Ring, which advances conservative social issues, formed the pro-fence lobby in October. Since then, he has visited the offices of 38 House members and three senators, commissioned a public relations firm and promoted his cause through TV ads and interviews.

As of late last week, more than 10,470 people had signed an Internet petition on the group's Web site endorsing a border barrier, Hanna said.

Hunter proposed the fence as part of a comprehensive border enforcement package that would also create 25 additional ports of entry, add thousands of Border Patrol agents and increase fines against employers who hire illegal immigrants. It would extend the double fence now in his district across the remainder of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Cost projections for the barrier range from $2 billion to $8 billion.

The barrier would stretch through population centers as well as treacherous desert and mountain terrain, presenting its planners with an immense set of obstacles, including right-of-way issues, inevitable environmental challenges and potential eminent domain proceedings to allow the government to seize land.

An estimated 11.8 million people live along the border - 6.3 million in the United States and 5.5 million in Mexico. More than 90 percent of the border population is clustered in 14 sister cities.

A sizable share of the land is government-owned, including Big Bend National Park, which sprawls across 801,000 acres in Southwest Texas. But Jeff Holgren, an official in the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, says as much as 50 percent may be privately owned, including vast ranchlands along the border.

Cost issues

Hunter, in a telephone interview last week, said he believes that the fence can be erected "very quickly" through simultaneous construction projects all along the border. He estimates the cost at $1 million per mile but concedes that the project would go through some "tough geographical areas," forcing the price to go up.

But Hunter said the construction costs represent only a fraction of the billions of dollars that taxpayers spend on services for the estimated 11 million immigrants now in the country illegally. The California lawmaker also points to the success of the border fence in his home district.

Built at Hunter's insistence more than a decade ago, the barrier consists of a 10-foot-high primary wall composed of steel portable landing strips used by the military. A reinforced steel-mesh fence runs parallel to that barrier, with high-powered lighting and a road in between that enables Border Patrol agents to maintain constant surveillance for illegal crossers.

Under a border security measure passed this year, the government is moving to complete a final 3 61/27 -mile stretch in a canyon known as "Smugglers Gulch."

The REAL ID Act empowered the homeland security secretary to override environmental and legal challenges that had stalled completion of the segment.

Before the barrier was erected, the dusty stretch of border between San Ysidro, Calif., and Tijuana, Mexico, was a crime-infested wasteland where bandits preyed on illegal immigrants crossing into the United States and often hurled grapefruit-size rocks at Border Patrol agents.

"The border was out of control," recalled Mario Villarreal, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman who was assigned to the area as an agent in the 1980s. "It was very, very chaotic."

With the creation of the barrier and with beefed-up enforcement, federal officials have seen apprehensions decrease dramatically, enabling the San Diego sector to escape its dubious distinction as the leading sector for arrests. The number of arrests for fiscal 2005, which ended Sept. 30, totaled 126,910, compared with a peak of 629,650 in 1986.

Nevertheless, the more tenacious crossers, including smugglers and gang members, remain undaunted. Villarreal says they try every conceivable tactic, including ladders, human pyramids, grappling hooks and tunnels - sometimes successfully, but often not.

Silvestre Reyes, who is now a Democratic member of Congress, helped pioneer the Border Patrol's successful use of barriers when he was a Border Patrol chief in El Paso in 1993. In a crackdown known as Operation Blockade, Reyes diverted patrol officers to a show of force along the border and erected a fence that remains in place today.

Within six months, the number of illegal immigrants dropped from 10,000 to 100 per day, immigration authorities said.

Over the past decade, federal officials have erected additional fencing, mostly in heavily populated areas. The steel landing mats such as those used in Hunter's district are the most commonly used material.

Hunter would use the twin-fence concept as the blueprint for his national barrier, but Hanna, of WeNeedAFence.com, proposes a more elaborate combination.

Starting from the southern side, it would include a pyramid of barbed wire, a ditch and a 15-foot-high fence topped with cameras. The pattern would be repeated on the other side, with a patrol road in between.

Berlin Wall?

Opponents say adding the barrier would place the equivalent of the Berlin Wall in the lower part of the United States, darkening America's image as a welcoming nation. Others also fear that additional barriers in urban areas could force an increasing number of Mexicans to make perilous and potentially lethal journeys through the harsh desert.

"We're trying to export democracy to other countries, and here we are building a wall," said Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-Corpus Christi. "Is that democracy?"

Environmentalists say a border-length barrier would also shrink - if not destroy - the habitat of wildlife that roam freely back and forth across the border. Mary Kelly of Austin, a program director for Environmental Defense, a national conservation organization, called the proposal "insane."

The reaction from the other side of border was similarly unreceptive.

"Fences don't make good neighbors," Mexican President Vicente Fox has said repeatedly.

Despite mounting pressure on Capitol Hill to toughen border security, many lawmakers aren't ready to fully embrace a full-length border barrier.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who heads a subcommittee on immigration, calls a full-length fence a "19th-century answer to a 21st-century problem,'' though he said through a spokesman that he might embrace limited fencing.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has also endorsed the idea of fences in areas plagued by illegal immigration but expressed concern that a barrier along the entire border could infringe on property rights.

"There are areas I think that could really benefit from a fence," said Rep. Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, who made a border inspection near Laredo last weekend, along with North Texas colleague Rep. Kenny Marchant, R-Coppell.

Marchant, though a co-sponsor of the Hunter proposal, said he believes that a well-patrolled "good road" along the border would deter illegal immigrants.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis, said he would support limited fencing, but not all along the border. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Flower Mound, said he supports the concept of Hunter's proposal but wants to take a closer look at the bill.

Then there are relentless advocates like Hanna, who believes that a barrier stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf must be a vital element of any plan to shore up the southern border and build a wall against terrorism.

"If you don't include that as one of your components," he said, "then your plan - literally and figuratively - has a hole in it."

IN THE KNOW

Building a fence

Pros

Supporters believe that a fence is the only way to protect the border. CIA and FBI officials say terrorists and violent drug gangs may be entering the United States, along with undocumented workers.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R.-Calif., believes that the estimated cost of the fence - a minimum of about $1 million per mile, for a total of about $2 billion - is far less than the tens of billions of dollars a year he says the United States spends to fight the drug trade and illegal immigration along the border.

Cons

Opponents believe that anyone wanting to cross the border would find a way around, over or under the fence and that it sends a negative message to Mexico and the world that the United States wants to wall itself in.

Critics argue that the fence would have economic and environmental consequences and that more illegal immigrants are dying trying to enter through remote areas with extreme weather and violent drug gangs and smugglers.

Knight Ridder Mexico City correspondent Susana Hayward and Star-Telegram news researchers Marcia Melton and Adam Barth contributed to this report.