An announcement via Virginia Gause

SOUTH TEXAS PROTEST AGAINST THE BORDER WALL

What: A protest opposing the border wall at the University of Texas Pan American followed by a march on the Hidalgo County Commissioner’s Court

When: Saturday, July 12, 2008 at 5:00 pm

Where: Beginning at the University of Texas Pan American Student Union

Who: United Methodist Student Movement

Saturday July 12, 2008 has been designated a Day of Protest against the Border Wall.  Construction on the first south Texas sections is scheduled to begin on July 14.

Saturday’s activities will begin at 5pm for a rally at the University of Texas Pan American Student Union Theater in Edinburg.  Speakers will address the crowd from 5:15 until 6pm.  Protesters will then march to the Hidalgo County Commissioners Court (at the corner of Closer and Cano).  At the courthouse members of the community will have the opportunity to speak out against the wall.  Their comments will be videotaped, and DVDs of their comments will be given to the Hidalgo County Commissioners.  The County Commissioners, led by Hidalgo County Judge JD Salinas, have agreed to incorporate the border wall into the county’s flood control levees.

Initiated by the No Border Wall Coalition, the protest is meant to raise local and national awareness of the vast opposition to the wall because of its potential to divide border communities, destroy homes and farms, devastate unique ecosystems, damage border economies, and undermine our flood control levees.

In Hidalgo County, the border wall has been linked to levee repairs.  While no one in the Valley disputes the fact that our levees need repair, allowing the Department of Homeland Security to take them over and make them into a border wall is a terrible idea.  Sufficient studies on the safety, effectiveness, and environmental impacts of a combined levee/ border wall have not been carried out, and after issuing a waiver of laws under the Real ID Act Secretary Chertoff stated that there would be no further studies.

Initial estimates that levee-walls would cost $5 million per mile have ballooned to $12 million per mile, with Hidalgo County paying over $200 million in construction costs rather than $48 million.  Rather than flood control, repairing the levees has become a means for the Department of Homeland Security to build piecemeal walls that do not match up with the section of the levees that are in need of repair.

The costs go beyond the monetary for this region.  DHS has initiated condemnation proceedings against hundreds of private landowners along the border.  Many U.S. homes, farms, ranches, and businesses lie either directly in the path of the wall or on land that will be behind it, cut off from the rest of this country.  Along the Rio Grande farmers and ranchers could be prevented from accessing irrigation water.  The wall is also set to divide the campus of the University of Texas in Brownsville.  Firefighters and emergency crews will have difficulty reaching people, structures, and parks on the south side of the wall.

The levee-border wall will also do tremendous damage to the environment of the Rio Grande Valley.  They will destroy habitat that is critical to the endangered species and migratory birds that bring $125 million in ecotourism to the area each year. The first two sections of combined levee-border wall will bisect parts of the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge.  In a letter to DHS dated March 3 the US Fish and Wildlife Service stated, “any proposed fence and/or levee segment that bisects lands within the Lower Rio Grande Wildlife Refuge cannot be found compatible with the purposes for which the refuge was established.”

For more information contact Scott Nicol at (956) 532-5983 or noborderwall@yahoo.com

or visit www.notexasborderwall.com and www.notexasborderwall.blogspot.com.

No Border Wall is a grassroots coalition of groups and individuals with diverse views united in the belief that a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border will not stop illegal immigration or smuggling and will not make the United States safer.  A border wall does irreparable harm to the borderlands and to our nation as a whole.  The No Border Wall Coalition is opposed to the border wall because of the devastating consequences that border walls have on border communities, economies, human rights, and the environment, as well as the United States’ relationship with Mexico and the rest of the world.