Wall map adds park barriers then disappears
Border wall opponents were dismayed to see a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “smart wall map” appear online on April 21 that showed new physical infrastructure for the national and state parks, then they were completely befuddled when the map disappeared from the agency’s website a couple of days later. The map—which intends to show where detection-technology-only additions will be made or where physical infrastructure like steel bollard walls will be used along the border—still hasn’t been reposted to the site.
“I mean, how about putting up a thing that says, ‘Hey, we took it down for a day or two, we’re revising it. We’ll put it back up on [whatever day],’ asked Brewster County Judge Greg Henington. “But, just to take it down just creates more havoc for everybody.”
Henington said he was making a call this week to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials to try and find out what’s going on.
On March 5 the “primary wall” designation (meaning possible walls) was pulled from the map for the national park. Then on March 22, a local CBP official assured there would be no steel walls in the state park, something that had been specifically planned for parts of the park. The last posting had shown a change in nomenclature to “technology & patrol roads” and the addition of “vehicle barrier systems,” which are wall-like metal structures to impede vehicular traffic, in Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park. As in the past, there has been no clarification from DHS as to what exactly these barriers will be and how the patrol roads will be built or managed.
The addition of physical infrastructure in the parks and the map disappearing act has reinforced the distrust anti-wall activists have in DHS. “When you just take it down based on everything else they’ve done, it just leads all of us to believe that you’re hiding something again,” Henington said.
“The map was never official or binding,” said Laiken Jordahl with the Center for Biological Diversity, a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against the wall project. “It helped cue us into what CBP was trying to share with the public, but we never trusted that map to start with, and from the very beginning we had urged people to not take whatever they had on that map as fact.”
Presidio County Judge Joe Portillo agreed that the map changes were an example of a key problem—a lack of communication from federal officials to local officials. “It’s an example of exactly why we’re frustrated because nobody knows anything,” he said.
Portillo was one of 14 county judges representing all counties on the border that wrote to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on April 21 asking the department to provide more information on wall projects. “As County Judges, we sit at the intersection of federal policy and the communities it affects,” the letter stated. “We know our terrain, our landowners, and the long-standing practices that sustain life and livelihood in this region. We offer that knowledge as a resource.” It’s uncertain whether the letter impacted the disappearance of the smart wall map two days later.
Portillo added that he recently met with state Rep. Eddie Morales and other border-county judges, and Morales agreed to try and set up a meeting with Mullin.
Tensions with contractors rise
While the map changes have elevated the distrust with federal officials near the parks, the map line never changed for upriver, where officials have directly indicated steel walls would be used—roughly from Redford west to Ft. Quitman. That reality has created more than distrust, creating more and more conflicts with contractors surveying the land along the proposed wall route.
Whoever crashed into a remote ranch gate in Hudspeth County, leaving it in shambles in the dirt, left behind an identifier—a license plate lying in the road that flew off the vehicle as it smashed into the side of a swinging gate arm that was open.
“I filed a report with the sheriff, Arvin West,” said Yolanda Alvarado, the owner of the gate, who has taken a role as an outspoken opponent of a border wall and whose family has owned a ranch on the Rio Grande for more than 100 years. “He ran the plate. It belonged to a rental company out of Oklahoma, which is like all those guys that are driving rental trucks.” For Alvarado, the implication was simple: this was a contractor out in the remote region there to build a border wall.
Since the driver of the truck is still unidentified and the destruction is under investigation by West’s office, it’s uncertain whether the act was intentional or just an errant driving error on a rough road. Hudspeth County Constable Abel Ramirez said Tuesday he has contacted the rental company, but has not yet heard back with any information on the identity of the driver.
Ramirez said that in another recent incident, men providing security services for contractors called the sheriff’s office to report that an unidentified landowner had confronted them. “They talked some smack toward them, made a threat towards them,” he said.
Redford resident and anti-wall activist Charlie Angell has continued to confront wall contractors, including a video showing him questioning a contractor on River Road in the state park. “What are you doing?” Angell asks the man, who stopped in the road. “Just doing a survey,” the man responds. “In a state park where there’s not supposed to be a wall?” Angell asks.
The man notes that it is not the state park, to which Angell replies, “This is the state park!” Angell adds, “Just doing your job, right?” to which the man says, “Yes sir.”
At an April 21 meeting on Angell’s property with two Army Corps of Engineers representatives, the scene was more subdued. About a dozen area landowners attended the meeting although uninvited because the corps representatives wanted to meet individually with landowners to talk through possible access agreements or leases and purchase of their land—introduced in letters to most landowners with a threat of taking property using eminent domain if no agreements were met.
However, corps representative Marvin Makarwich was diplomatic in his comments to landowners. “We want to try to get an understanding if there are other options, if there’s things we didn’t know that we don’t see,” he said in a recording of the conversation sent to the Sentinel, while still stressing the need to access land to do surveys. “I think that they would have to come and do the survey to come up with the option that suits both the needs of the landowner as well as needs of the administration.”
Angell said he appreciated finally getting a face-to-face meeting with federal officials, but he still gave an impassioned argument for why a wall doesn’t make sense and the damage it would do blocking him from the river, and he gave the representatives a tour of his property and a significant archaeological site located there.
Angell also repeated a request for a public meeting with DHS/CBP officials and landowners. “And if they can’t sit us down and give us a meeting and say, let’s talk about how we can compromise or do this a better way because I want border security,” he said. “Although it’s very secure here. I’ve never had a single crime yet here in 11 years.”
Makarwich made a comment, reported by an Axios reporter present at the meeting, for landowners who do not respond to CBP or the corps. “If the administration has a plan, and we try to coordinate with a landowner and the landowner doesn’t respond to us, that’s a … a message [that] you don’t agree” with a plan for access, he said.
Disclaimer: Rob D’Amico formerly was a board member of the nonprofit Friends of the Ruidosa Church, another plaintiff in the lawsuit against the wall project. He did not vote on participating in the lawsuit and has since resigned from the board to avoid any conflict of interest.