River Trouble

BROWNSVILLE — More than one decade has passed since Rio Grande Valley community members and local environmental activists tried unsuccessfully to stop the federal government from building a border fence that cut through sensitive ecosystems and wildlife refuges.

Now, many of those same people are fighting that same battle after President Donald Trump signed a $1.3 billion spending bill that provides for 33 more miles of fencing in Hidalgo and Starr counties.

The development has spurred American Rivers, a national conservation group, to rate the Lower Rio Grande as the fourth-most endangered river in the United States.

“There is nothing American about building a border wall that threatens a great river and its wildlife and tears communities apart,” said Theodore Roosevelt IV, great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, in a press release.

“This wall is wholly contrary to our nation’s values. Echoing President Reagan in West Berlin in 1987: Mr. Trump, tear down this wall.”

According to American Rivers, the Trump administration’s plan to add more miles of levee-border walls and bollard border walls to a river already choked by border infrastructure built 10 years ago will only increase flooding and erosion, while disconnecting the river from the floodplain and blocking access to people and wildlife.

The immediate effects of this kind of infrastructure on the environment were evident after the first border fencing went up in 2008 in Brownsville.

Jim Chapman, an environmental advocate with the Sierra Club, Frontera Audubon and Friends of the Wildlife Corridor, said after a 2010 flood, the levee walls constructed on national wildlife refuge lands resulted in a lot of wildlife mortality.

“They found hundreds of dead Texas tortoises,” Chapman said. “In terms of wildlife mortality, that was just the tip of the iceberg.”

The tortoises couldn’t escape because of the fencing, Chapman explained.

The Rio Grande ecosystem supports a mosaic of wildlife here that includes 500 species of birds, 300 different types of butterflies, the critically endangered ocelot, jaguarondi, javelina, peregrine falcon and the Texas tortoise.

And it’s well-known that the Rio Grande Valley is a birder and butterfly-watcher’s paradise.

According to American Rivers, the Valley’s combined wildlife refuges attract 165,000 people each year who visit the last remaining five percent of intact habitat and bring in $463 million each year to local economies.

While any other entity wanting to build in these critical habitats would have to follow environmental laws, the federal government does not, said Scott Nicol, another member of the Sierra Club.

“They don’t have to worry about whether they put the last nail in the ocelot’s coffin,” Nicol said.

A peer-reviewed publication by a pair of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin confirms the fears of Nicol, Chapman and American Rivers about the threat to endangered Texas plants and the disruption of ecotourism in the Rio Grande Valley.

Norma Fowler and Tim Keitt, professors at UT’s Department of Integrative Biology, in a letter published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, examined what would happen if Texas’ 1,200-mile border with Mexico would be walled off, according to a news release.

“Up to now, the wall has either gone through cities or deserts. This is the Rio Grande we’re talking about here. It’s totally different,” Fowler said in a news release. “We have high biodiversity because of the river and because Texas extends so far south. I and other Texas biologists are very concerned about the impact this will have on our rich natural heritage.”

That study determined that more border fencing would result in habitat destruction, habitat fragmentation and ecosystem damage, and Fowler and Keitt expressed concern that much of the new fencing in the Rio Grande Valley will cut right through parts of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

Much of the publicity around the impact on the Lower Rio Grande Valley has centered on the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Alamo, but there’s much more refuge area than Santa Ana.

“Santa Ana got all the attention, but there’s over 50 wildlife refuges along the river and each one that you wall off, you are basically stopping wildlife from moving to and from the river, and preventing escape from the river when the river floods,” Chapman said. “And we’ve already seen that on some tracts, but these are tracts the public doesn’t go to and there’s much less known about them, and we’ll see more of that if the wall is constructed.”

In an op-ed published in The Monitor, Nicol and Sierra Club member Stefanie Herweck said the levee-border walls will cut right through the National Butterfly Center in Mission and tracts in the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in Santa Rosa will be walled off.

The levee-border wall also will cut off Bentsen Rio Grande State Park and the World Birding Center in Mission from all of its trails, according to Nicol and Herweck.

As early as last July, Marianna T. Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center, reported that crews hired by U.S. Customs and Border Protection entered the refuge, which is private property owned by the North American Butterfly Association, without permission and began to remove trees and brush.

“It will turn it into a barren field,” Wright said of efforts to clear brush south of the proposed border fencing in the National Butterfly Center. “But right now, the remnant of native habitat that remains in the Rio Grande Valley, these are the plants that provide the feeding and breeding and reproduction areas for our native wildlife. These are the things that sustain the insects, the base of the food chain that goes all the way up to the ocelots.”

Wright says she continues to observe federal agents planting sensors and monitoring video surveillance on the private property, as well as observing agents conducting a practice of dragging tires.

“Well, they take old tires off the vehicles that are done, that are no longer road safe, and they bolt them together like a necklace and drag them behind their SUVs down the road,” Wright said. “And then, supposedly, when they drive back at whatever time, they are able to see footprints in the dirt or sand.”

All these activities, in Wright’s perspective, show a disregard for private property and the environment.

Wright said the fact that the Rio Grande has been named the fourth-most endangered river in the country sends a message to which the rest of the country actually will listen, as opposed to heated rhetoric about Trump building a “big, beautiful” wall.

“They want to bring awareness to the importance of our rivers and the health of our rivers, and move people to act where those rivers are in danger,” Wright said of the ranking. “And certainly the Rio Grande … qualifies at this juncture in history, given the fact that Trump’s border wall will entirely wall off Hidalgo County.”

Nicol concurred.

“There’s really not enough understanding of the kind of damage building a border wall can do,” Nicol said.