Thread: Texas Residents Brace For Border Wall Eminent Domain Battles

Texas Residents Brace For Border Wall Eminent Domain Battles

As the Trump administration sets its sights on building a barrier on the country's southern border, a group of Texas attorneys aims to help border residents ensure they are properly compensated for whatever land the government seizes.

By Julián Aguilar | April 20, 2017

The U.S.-Mexico border fence stretches between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, in this March 27, 2006, file photo. (AP/Lenny Ignelzi)

A group of Texas attorneys launched a campaign Wednesday to help ensure that property owners on the state’s southern border are properly compensated should the Trump administration seize their lands for a border wall.

The Texas Civil Rights Project says it will focus its efforts on lower-income residents who don’t have the skills or knowledge needed to fight through the complicated eminent domain process that’s looming as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security moves ahead with plans for the wall’s construction.

“Under the rules governing federal condemnation actions, a landowner who disagrees with the amount offered by the government has the right to request a jury trial,” Efrén Olivares, the Civil Rights Project’s racial and economic justice director, said in a prepared statement. “Our team at the Texas Civil Rights Project is ready to represent landowners, as well as train and deploy legal volunteers to ensure that all landowners have the representation and respect they deserve.”

In his Jan. 25 executive order on border security and immigration, President Donald Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security to begin planning a physical barrier on the country’s border with Mexico.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has since conceded that a coast-to-coast barrier isn’t likely to happen and that efforts would instead focus on a combination of technology and a physical wall. But a draft Homeland Security Department memo leaked last week stated that the Texas’ Rio Grande Valley area would probably be home to nearly three dozen miles of new construction once the building phase begins.

Facing off with the federal government won’t be a new challenge for the area. In 2006, the federal Secure Fence Act mandated that the government build about 700 miles of a steel barrier on the border. In response, hundreds of lawsuits were filed as Rio Grande Valley property owners sought proper compensation for pieces of land that varied in size from less than once acre to several hundred, according to documents provided by the Texas Civil Rights Project. Several dozen of those suits remain pending. The plaintiffs include private landowners, estate managers and local irrigation districts.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/texas-...attles/227036/

I think they should provide their client list. This is from 1996, things can't have changed that much.
Mexican drug cartels said to be buying U.S. border land

by The Associated Press on Aug 01, 1996, under News

WASHINGTON – Ranchers along the Southwest border with Mexico are being forced to sell their property to Mexican drug cartels seeking new routes into the United States, witnesses at a Senate hearing said.


A Texas rancher, hooded to hide his identity, and border-state senators told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that ranchers intimidated by rising violence and crime were selling land to the American fronts of Mexican drug traffickers.


Ranchers “have begun selling their ranches to the highest bidders, who happen to be fronting for the very Mexican drug traffickers who intimidated the ranchers into abandoning their livelihoods and way of life,’ said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.


The key witness was a Texas rancher who appeared wearing a black hood and raincoat and spoke behind a curtain into a microphone that altered his voice.


The rancher said that he has decided to sell the land his family has lived on for two generations even though he knows the only potential buyers would be drug-connected.


The border along the Rio Grande River “has become a Golan Heights, a no-man’s land at night’ with smugglers slashing fences, knocking down gates and firing rifle shots at his home. “Some days it looks like an army has crossed’ the land.


The rancher alleged that drug money had “gradually destroyed the community’ by tainting local politicians and law enforcement officers.


The president’s chief drug law enforcement officer, Barry McCaffrey of the National Drug Control Policy Office, testified that successes in intercepting drugs at border cities such as San Diego and El Paso have forced traffickers to look for weaknesses elsewhere. “The level of rural violence on the border is consequently increasing.’


In one New Mexico county, said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., “drug smugglers armed with automatic weapons threaten state police flying helicopters along the border at night.’
http://tucsoncitizen.com/morgue2/199...s-border-land/

The Texas Civil Rights Project sounds very much like the Texas version of he ACLU, and gets it's funding in many of the same ways.

History

James C. Harrington was a young man living in Michigan when he first learned of César Chávez’s grape boycott for the United Farm Workers. Moved by the dismal conditions under which migrant farmworkers in the United States lived and worked, Jim packed up his car and moved to South Texas. The year was 1973.

Jim fought tirelessly to improve the lives of farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley, first as a community organizer and then as an attorney. Jim’s advocacy created lasting policy changes for the workers, including workers’ compensation coverage, the availability of unemployment benefits, toilets and handwashing facilities in the field and a prohibition on the back-breaking short-handled hoe.

In 1983, Jim headed to Austin to expand the scope of his civil rights practice. After working for several years as the Legal Director for the Texas Civil Liberties Union, Jim founded the Texas Civil Rights Project on September 23, 1990.

Jim directed TCRP for twenty-five years, growing the organization into the sophisticated legal advocacy organization it is today.

“I didn’t know how it was going to play out,” Jim Harrington said. “We just responded to things that happened, and a lot of stuff happened in Texas. When I look at that 25-year anniversary, it’s astonishing the amount of things that have happened.”

In February 2016, Mimi Marziani, a nationally recognized expert in voting rights and democracy reform, was announced as the group’s second Executive Director.

• Read more about Jim’s inspiring career here.
• Read more about TCRP’s recent leadership transition here, here and here.
• https://www.texascivilrightsproject....e/our-history/

We need troops or national guard on the border in those areas. The drug cartels need to be straightened out once and for all. And have the AG send reps to investigate/oversee these bidders. In the last 16yrs they have been able to expand into every city & town across America and every illegal here is helping them in some way & the cartels arranged for every single one of the intruders to enter USA. That is why all illegals have to go otherwise the USA is theirs and they are almost there.