Fence Pits Security Concerns Against Wildlife Protection

By Jay Root, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas

Jul. 8–ALAMO — For the past 27 years, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has been buying land in South Texas, planting native brush and slowly but surely restoring crucial habitat for endangered species and rare birds.

Now, in a twist of fate befitting of the dysfunctional U.S.-Mexico border, the painstaking effort to acquire connecting riverfront properties has made the land, or at least a large portion of it, a prime takeover target. It’s not a group of private investors eyeing the tracts. It’s the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Under the Secure Fence Act, enacted by Congress late last year, the federal government is supposed to build hundreds of miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. Private landowners are fighting back hard, but the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge already belongs to Uncle Sam, and that’s where the first stretch of fencing is expected to go.

It’s a heartbreaking scenario for former Rep. Kika de la Garza, the Hidalgo County Democrat who in 1979 authored the law that created the land acquisition and habitat restoration program.

“It would undo everything that has been done for conservation and for wildlife,” de la Garza said. “I may have unwittingly played a part in it. Who would have known then that someone would come up with the idea of a fence?”

Four climate zones

De la Garza said he was inspired to act after watching brush disappear at an alarming rate on the Mexican side of the border. On the U.S. side, only about 5 percent of the native forestland remains, government estimates show, even with the restoration efforts. Known as Tamaulipan brush land, the natural terrain of the Rio Grande Valley sits at the junction of four distinct climate zones — coastal, tropical, temperate and desert — and supports some of the most diverse wildlife in the country.

That includes 20 federally endangered species, such as the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle and the elusive painted leopard, known as the ocelot. The last 80 or so of the graceful felines, which once roamed from West Texas to Arkansas and Louisiana, are trying to hang on in the region, officials say. It’s also the northernmost reach of many rare tropical birds, making the Rio Grande Valley one of the most popular destinations for bird watchers, who pump an estimated $150 million into the area’s economy annually.

Since 1980, the federal government has spent more than $100 million to create and manage a long narrow patchwork of land that comprises the federal wildlife refuge. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has acquired more than 90,000 acres of habitat, spending at least $70 million on land purchases and more than $15 million on brush restoration, officials said.

Eventually, the refuge is expected to grow to 132,500 acres and stretch across 275 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande at Boca Chica Beach to the dam at Falcon Lake. That would give the region a woven patch of habitat that connects to existing refuges.

A new mission

That was the plan anyway.

Now the wildlife sanctuary has become the bottom line in the border wall debate. Of the 153 miles of fencing planned for the Texas-Mexico border before the end of 2008, more than half — or 86 miles — are slated for the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector. And on the protected wildlife tracts, there’s no need for messy real estate negotiations, court battles over private land seizures, or the bad publicity that could go with it.

“It’s a lot easier if the U.S. government already owns the land,” said Ken Merritt, project leader for the South Texas wildlife refuge complex. “The refuge will receive the fences first in my estimation … whether there is a [wildlife] corridor left is anybody’s guess.”

Merritt says he got tentative maps from the Border Patrol on June 20, but he wasn’t given permission to release them. Neither will the Border Patrol or its parent, the Homeland Security Department, which says no maps or designs have been finalized.

In initial meetings with the Border Patrol and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, authorities indicated that a 150-foot-wide area along the fence’s path would have to be cleared for the barrier and patrol roads, said Ernesto Reyes, a federal wildlife biologist at the South Texas refuge. But he said plans remain tentative.

“Any kind of brush removal in the Valley is a major impact,” Reyes said. “You’d be cutting off animals getting to the river and … concentrating these animals in certain areas. And then predators will concentrate in those areas, too.”

Wildlife versus security

Law enforcement and environmental activists have clashed for years over how to balance border security with wildlife protection. Now more than ever the fence project has put two federal priorities on a collision course. Border Patrol officials in Washington have said they will take ecological issues into account, but the government has the power to waive environmental requirements in the name of homeland security.

Like the Texas spiny lizard and the chattering chachalaca, dope smugglers and immigrants tend to hide in the thorny, subtropical brush, making the refuge a staging ground for illicit activities.

More than 100,000 illegal immigrants are caught trying to cross the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector every year, figures show. Merritt agrees there are “a lot of people crossing and a lot of drug trafficking” going down on the refuge. But he cannot shake his hope that the federal government will opt for what some call a “virtual” fence — cameras, surveillance, electronic sensors, overhead drones and the like — which will minimize the effect on Mother Nature.

“If Homeland Security signs off, that technology can be the barrier they need to keep terrorists out, and then that’s what we need from a wildlife perspective,” Merritt said. Last year, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff praised the concept, calling virtual fencing “the most cost-effective and quickest and best way to get control of the border.”

‘A higher need’

But fence supporters harshly criticized the idea, and the department has since moved forward with plans to build 370 miles of barriers along the border before the end of 2008, a little less than half of it in Texas.

Colin Hanna, a former Chester County, Pa., commissioner and head of the activist group WeNeedAFence, contends that the only way to protect the American way of life and thwart terrorism is by building a fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. A few simple design adaptations and placement outside the flood plain would mitigate most of the problems in Texas, he said, adding that environmentalists have exaggerated the effect on wildlife.

“National security is a higher need than the environmental need,” Hanna said.

Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, www.fws.gov/southwest/refuges/texas/lrgv.html

——

jroot@star-telegram.com

—–

To see more of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.dfw.com.

Copyright (c) 2007, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.