NOT IN OUR BACK YARDS! – Border Residents Pledge To Fight Inch By Inch To Keep Trump From Grabbing Their Land For Wall!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/texas-landowners-dig-in-to-fight-trumps-border-wall/2019/01/09/89bb3b4e-145a-11e9-ab79-30cd4f7926f2_story.html

Nomaan Merchant of AP reports in WashPost:

HIDALGO, Texas — As President Donald Trump travels to the border in Texas to make the case for his $5.7 billion wall, landowner Eloisa Cavazos says she knows firsthand how the project will play out if the White House gets its way.

The federal government has started surveying land along the border in Texas and announced plans to start construction next month. Rather than surrender their land, some property owners are digging in, vowing to reject buyout offers and preparing to fight the administration in court.

“You could give me a trillion dollars and I wouldn’t take it,” said Cavazos, whose land sits along the Rio Grande, the river separating the U.S. and Mexico in Texas. “It’s not about money.”

. . . .

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Read the complete story at the above link.

I remember a “time long ago and far away” when the GOP was the staunch champion of private property rights against the incursions of Government (having had some contact with eminent domain, vehicle and vessel seizure, and entry onto “open lands” for law enforcement purposes during my past life at the “Legacy INS”). That was then; this is now! Does the GOP really believe in anything these days? Not apparent to me.

PWS

01-13-19

THE ATLANTIC: Priscilla Alvarez Gives The Real Scoop On Trump’s Failed Border Wall & Other Plans For Border Enforcement!

https://apple.news/ANv1VbtW7RSeRiPNUodE0rA

 

“Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director, said on Tuesday that the administration will replace segments of chain-link fencing with a 20-foot-tall steel fence along the southern border, despite Congress refusal to fund the president’s border wall in its spending bill.
Trump, for his part, has claimed that the administration is “beginning to build the wall,” which was a central plank of his presidential campaign, saying that “we’re putting up a lot of new wall in certain areas.” Mulvaney elaborated Tuesday that there is funding to “replace cyclone fencing with 20-foot high steel wall.” He declined repeated questions from White House reporters about where along the border the fencing would go, or how many miles it would cover.
He was apparently referring to a provision in the spending bill unveiled by Congress earlier this week, which falls well short of the president’s repeated pledges. The bill allocates a little more than $341 million “to replace approximately 40 miles of existing primary pedestrian and vehicle border fencing along the southwest border using previously deployed and operationally effective designs, such as currently deployed steel bollard designs, that prioritize agent safety; and to add gates to existing barriers.” According to a 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office, existing vehicle and pedestrian fencing along the border averaged somewhere between $1 and $3.9 million to erect. The budget allocation implies that replacing that fencing with a steel-bollard design would cost $8.5 million per mile.
In 2006, President George W. Bush authorized the construction of a 700-mile wall of double layer fencing under the Secure Fence Act. Still, to seal off the border entirely, the wall would have to extend roughly 2,000 miles. And that’s a costly endeavor. According to estimates by the Department of Homeland Security, the wall’s price tag could be as much as $21.6 billion.

So far, the administration has only secured funds to improve existing fencing. When pressed on whether that was the most effective way to spend funds, Mulvaney said, “There are certain places where technology will also help.” He also noted that constructing a wall along the entire southern border “is a several year process.”
Building a wall along the southern border is a difficult task, and that may be especially true for the administration as it tries to close off the border in new areas. Mulvaney suggested that the administration will also prepare  for land acquisition. During the Bush years, the administration focused on areas where most of the land belonged to the federal government, but along the Texas-Mexico border, much of  the land is private property, raising the issue of eminent domain. Republicans have expressed concerns over the use of eminent domain, which some argue is an example of big government overreach, setting up a whole separate challenge for the White House.”

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Read Priscilla’s complete article at the link!  Trump just can’t admit that his really bad idea is — a really bad idea! And it’s not just Dems and advocates who think so!!

PWS

05-02-17

Land Grab — DOJ “Lawyers Up” To Seize Private Property From Trump Supporters Along S. Border — Wall Trumps Property Rights!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/21/trumps-big-beautiful-wall-will-require-him-to-take-big-swaths-of-other-peoples-land/

Tracy Jan reports in the Washington Post:

“It’s going to be time consuming and costly,” said Tony Martinez, an attorney who is mayor of the border town of Brownsville, Tex. “From a political perspective, you have a lot of rich landowners who were his supporters.”

Trump, in his recent budget proposal, is calling for the addition of 20 Justice Department attorneys to “pursue federal efforts to obtain the land and holdings necessary to secure the southwest border.” The Justice Department would not expand upon the details. Of the department’s 11,000 attorneys, fewer than 20 currently work in land acquisition. Trump’s budget would double that.

The battle has been fought before. The last wave of eminent domain cases over southern border properties dates back to the 2006 Secure Fence Act authorizing President George W. Bush to erect 700 miles of fencing.

Of the roughly 400 condemnation cases stemming from that era, about 90 remain open a decade later, according to the Justice Department. Nearly all are in the Rio Grande Valley in southwest Texas.

The U.S. government has already spent $78 million compensating private landowners for 600 tracts of property for the construction of the existing pedestrian and vehicle fence, according to Customs and Border Protection. The agency estimates that it will spend another $21 million in real estate expenses associated with the remaining condemnation cases — not including approximately $4 million in Justice Department litigation costs.

. . . .

“It’s not like if you build a wall your problem is gone,” Barnard said. “We need more boots on the ground. More boats, more sensors, more drones that would be more efficient and more productive.”

It remains an open question how much sympathy Trump would have for Barnard’s situation — or that of any other private landowner standing in the way of Trump’s wall.

As a developer, Trump has wielded the power of eminent domain to make way for his properties. In Scotland, he pursued compulsory purchase to force neighbors out of their homes for the Trump International Golf Links near Aberdeen. When that didn’t work, he built a five-foot-tall wooden fence — then tried to make his neighbors pay for it.

Trump also famously tried seizing the property of an elderly Atlantic City widow to make way for a limousine parking lot for his hotel and casino. He has a consistent history supporting the use of eminent domain and praised the 2005 Supreme Court decision — denounced widely by conservatives — that said the government could force property owners to sell their land to make way for private economic developments that benefit the public.

“I happen to agree with it 100 percent,” Trump said during a 2005 Fox News interview. “If you have a person living in an area that’s not even necessarily a good area, and … government wants to build a tremendous economic development, where a lot of people are going to be put to work and … create thousands upon thousands of jobs and beautification and lots of other things, I think it happens to be good.”

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Duh, I thought conservatives had this “thing” about private property and government intrusions.

My prediction:  Trump will long be gone, and they will still be litigating, negotiating, and wrangling  over the right of way. And, as with many such “eminent domain” projects, by the time the government actually spends the time, money, and loss of good will to obtain the property, the original project will have long become obsolete (as this one in fact already is) and will be consigned to the dustbin, thus making the entire exercise a costly “wild goose chase.” Talk about waste, fraud, and abuse!

PWS

03/22/17