A Fence at all Costs

A Fence at All Costs

Now that Homeland Security's plan to build a 470-mile fence has run into many obstacles during the past few months including: angry property-holders who don't want a fence running through their homes or land without reasonable compensation; angry environmentalists who want to know why the fence cannot be built without protecting fragile habitats, and for those following the story, angry voters, who wonder why well-connected individuals and business are having their properties exempted from the fence-building while small property owners, some of whom have held the same land in their families since before the existence of the U.S. are now being told to give it up.

On Tuesday, April 1^st, Michael Chertoff declared that he would use his authority to bypass many laws in order to get the fence built by the end of 2008. While Mr. Chertoff argues that the fence is necessary to prevent illegal activity and drug violence from spilling over the Mexican border into the U.S., one can only question the willingness of a public official to run roughshod over so many basic American rights, including: the right not to be deprived of one's property without adequate compensation and due process and the right to allow challenges to laws to proceed through the court system to determine whether or not they are constitutional. Mr. Chertoff's actions would short-circuit these legal protections and due process all in the name of building a fence that is not even a contiguous barrier against entry.

The deprivation of individual property rights is particularly galling because it is being selectively applied, mostly to small property owners, while resort owners and those who are closely connected to the Bush administration are not having to fence their properties. One of the most egregious examples, is the exemption of 6,000 acres of property owned by Dallas billionaire, Ray L. Hunt and his relatives, one of the wealthiest oil and gas dynasties in the world. Hunt, a close friend of President George W. Bush, recently donated $35 million to Southern Methodist University to help build Bush’s presidential library.

In keeping with the general secrecy that pervades the Bush administration, the Department of Homeland Security has refused to release information on its selection process, its environmental investigations, or any part of the process by which some property owners lose their land rights and others remain exempt.

Once again, the Bush administration is taking a “father knows best” approach to the security of our nation's borders and tell those citizens who actually live on the border and face the daily burden of illegal crossing to put up and shut up when it comes to sacrificing their land rights for a fence whose utility and whose costs, both economic and environmental, are still a subject of debate.

Before Americans let this happen, it is time to call for Congressional hearings into the ways Homeland Security is implementing the legislation to build a fence on the U.S-Mexican border and to open up to public scrutiny their rationale for their efforts to compel property owners to allow the construction of a fence on their land without due process.