The Feminist Texican

via Texas Observer

Melissa del Bosque has a terrific article up at Texas Observer about how the government is taking away land and property from homeowners and the University of Texas at Brownsville (who depends on federal funding) to build the border fence in the Rio Grande Valley.  Meanwhile the wealthy surrounding areas go untouched:

[Eloisa] Tamez, a nursing director at the University of Texas at Brownsville, is one of the last of the Spanish land grant heirs in Cameron County. Her ancestors once owned 12,000 acres. In the 1930s, the federal government took more than half of her inherited land, without paying a cent, to build flood levees.

Now Homeland Security wants to put an 18-foot steel and concrete wall through what remains [a whole three acres].

While the border wall will go through her backyard and effectively destroy her home, it will stop at the edge of the River Bend Resort and golf course, a popular Winter Texan retreat two miles down the road. The wall starts up again on the other side of the resort.

The government is also trying to run through Daniel Garza’s property–a whole mile north of the river–and is leaving the land owned by Texas billionaire (and $35 million contributor to Dubya’s presidential library) Ray L. Hunt untouched.

Garza stands in front of his modest brick home, which he built for his retirement after 50 years as a migrant farmworker. For the past five months, he has stayed awake nights trying to find a way to stop the gears of bureaucracy from grinding over his home.

[...]“I don’t see why they have to destroy my home, my land, and let the wall end there.” He points across the street to Hunt’s land. “How will that stop illegal immigration?”

Most border residents couldn’t believe the fence would ever be built through their homes and communities. They expected it to run along the banks of the Rio Grande, not north of the flood levees—in some cases like Tamez’s, as far as a mile north of the river.

Just another reason why the border wall isn’t intended to stop undocumented immigration.  All the government wants to do is take more land away from lower class people through Eminent Domain, and line the pockets of private corporations profitting from the building of the fence (such as Boeing).  If they actually gave a shit about stopping undocumented immigration, they’d reform their bullshit foreign policies such as NAFTA and CAFTA.

Tamez on Lou Dobbs: