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Border fence will damage habitats, US study shows

The US-Mexico border fence will make life harder on some South Texas farmers, damage valuable wildlife habitat, impair views and generally become an obstacle to border life, the US Department of Homeland Security acknowledged in an environmental study of the fence’s impact.

For the people of the Rio Grande Valley, the federal government said in the recent study that there are serious trade-offs for 113km of fence segments that will help Border Patrol control illegal immigration and smuggling from Mexico. But it added that residents would benefit from increased security against “illegal cross-border activity.”

Construction could begin in the valley next week.

“If you live within a mile or so of the river, which is where the fence will be built, you are eternally sentenced to an unsafe existence,” Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, head of the anti-fence Texas Border Coalition, said in a statement.

However, some South Texas denizens will get a break — the fence will include hundreds of holes so the endangered ocelot and jaguarundi can get to the Rio Grande to drink.

The department’s Environmental Stewardship Plan for the Rio Grande Valley was controversial before it was ever released. The Department of Homeland Security drew up the plan after Secretary Michael Chertoff waived environmental studies required by federal law to speed construction of the fence.

As the federal governAment ramps up efforts to build fencing along the border, Chertoff has also waived environmental laws to build barriers in California and Arizona.

“The Secretary made it clear when he invoked the waiver authority that that by no means meant we would act without some responsible plan,” Customs and Border Protection spokesman Barry Morrissey said. “The environmental work is still being done.”

Environmental advocates said they had not fully reviewed the document on Tuesday afternoon but said it was a mistake for Chertoff to waive the normal process for vetting projects and minimizing their environmental impact.

“There was a formal process in place for how to go through the [environmental impact statement] process and it’s something we believe in firmly,” said Oliver Bernstein, spokesman for the Sierra Club environmental group in Texas. “Any attempt to come up with your own fixes we’re going to be very wary of that.”

New maps of the 21 fence segments running through the lower Rio Grande Valley showed very little variation from preliminary maps released last fall.

The new plan does not clarify the issue of access gates in the fence — one of the most frustrating for landowners along the border who wonder how the gates will be operated, if they will be manned and how access could be restricted. The question is critical for homeowners whose homes and businesses will be left in the no man’s land between the fence and the river.

Without offering details, the plan recognized that the fence will be an obstacle to farmers in terms of access to the land for themselves and their machinery and livestock, and will increase their costs and may decrease the land’s value.

Despite the access holes for the endangered cats, the plan acknowledges that the fence “will likely impact wildlife movement, access to traditional water sources, and potential for gene flow” because some of the species cross the border into Mexico to mate.

Seven segments in Hidalgo County where the Department of Homeland Security will build a 4.5m to 5.4m concrete wall into the river side of levees will not include the wildlife holes. The longest of those segments will be just over 6.4km, the plan said.

Seventeen of the 21 fence sections in the valley will affect wildlife management areas or national wildlife refuges, 14 of them directly.

Since fence construction will overlap with the migratory bird nesting season, wildlife experts will mark nests in construction’s path and attempt to move them. Still, the noise from construction could overwhelm birdsongs, making it difficult for some to find mates, the plan said.
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