Good news for Roma, Texas landowners - the Bush administration is going to build a wall to protect your property.
Bad news for Roma, Texas landowners - the Bush administration may take your property (via eminent domain) to build the wall.
Officials say two words are striking fear in the hearts of Texas landowners who have been contacted in recent days about handing over their riverfront property for a massive border wall: eminent domain.
That's the term for the government's power to condemn private land for public use, and some say it's being thrown around in South Texas, where federal authorities are actively planning to build more than 125 miles of fencing, officials say.
"Right now, landowners are very, very reluctant to have this happen," said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo. Cuellar met with landowners last week in tiny Roma, in the Rio Grande Valley, where officials are eyeing numerous private tracts for the wall. He said officials with the Department of Homeland Security mentioned its condemnation authority "within the first 15 words" spoken to landowners in recent meetings in the district he represents.
"Keep in mind we can take away your property through eminent domain," the officials said, according to Cuellar....
The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a private border watch group, has sent volunteers to build fences for willing ranchers, promoting a design modeled after Israeli walls designed to keep militants out of the West Bank and Gaza.
But in Texas, a top Minuteman acknowledged that landowners are concerned about losing their land or river access, even though they want more protection from human trafficking and drug violence.
"There's some concern about water rights and eminent domain," said Pat Byrne, deputy director of the state Minuteman chapter. "I think what they would like to see is good, solid, firm protection on their property without the financial obstruction that would result from the fence."
In Texas ("we used to be an independent nation, and don't you forget it"), there's no difference between ceding your land to the illegals and ceding your land to Uncle Sam. Either way, you lose it.
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2 comments:
I think this and the NAFTA SPP highway were part of the "background" thinking that resulted in the Supreme Court's recent eminent domain case in Kelo v New London, Connecticut. That paved the way for the 4 football field's wide of the super highway to gobble up farms, ranches, cut through small towns.
Sort of made me think of the Douglas Adams trilogy - Life at the end of the universe.
Good to find you.
Although in Texas, the confiscated lands were for government use. Was it in Connecticut that the confiscated lands were going to go to private business? (Or was that New Hampshire?)
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