ONCE YOU GIVE SOMETHING UP, YOU CAN NEVER GET IT BACK

By Juan Montoya
Recently I had the occasion to drive along the river levee past Southmost Road where it turns into Oklahoma and continues toward Highway 4 (Boca Chica).
Despite all the talk downtown about the divisiveness, the hideousness that the Border Wall has generated, it is difficult to describe the true ugliness of this structure as you go for mile after mile of this structure. It continues in sight of the motorist it seems forever behind orchards, nature reserves, farms, and through backyards of rural homes.
It is ubiquitous. Just when you think the end is near, it peers behind citrus orchards, clotheslines, and native trees. Sometimes it's near the roadway. Other times it is a distant tan line snaking its way through the distant countryside.
In downtown Brownsville, it stares at you at the end of the north-south numbered streets in the city leading toward and away from the river.
Like any metal structure in South Texas, in places it has begun to sport a reddish patina of rust. At places, where there are huge gates to allow farmer and their tractors to pass, it remind one of the gates to a castle, complete with a berm and moat. Through the slats one can sometimes see the trucks of the manor guards – the Border Patrol – driving on top of the levee, themselves as much prisoners as those on either side.
On Oklahoma Road, the residents have been quoted in the local newspaper in the past speaking against it saying that it did not really prevent those who really wanted to cross the river and enter the United States. Statistics seem to bear that out because during recent congressional hearings secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano testified that of all the sectors along the U.S. border, the McAllen sector which included Brownsville all the way to the mouth of the river, is the only one where the number of illegal crossings still remain constant.

Numerous pundits have stated that after Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush instructed the Department of Homeland Security to prioritize the construction of fortifications along the Mexican border. The result has been thi astonishing array of barriers across America’s southern frontier. The number of Border Patrol agents doubled in seven years to more than 21,000 coupled with an interior enforcement expanded to identify, detain, prosecute and deport undocumented migrants. The latest budget – bowing to Tea Party and Republican demands – includes huge outlays for even more boots on the border ground and additional fortifications. In return, the Barack Obama administration is hoping that its immigration bill with a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people living here without documents will pass the U.S. Congress. We'll see.
President Obama has continued most of Bush’s programs — and, in fact, increased deportations to nearly 410,000 in 2012, the highest number ever. During President Obama's first term, his administration deported 1.5 million immigrants from various countries, according to US government figures. In 2011, close to 300,000 deportees were Mexican nationals, and nearly all of them ended up in Mexican border towns, like Brownsville.
Recently, the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) released a report confirming that 13,454 unaccompanied Mexican minors under the age of 18 were deported from the U.S. in 2012.
The vast majority of these deportations were to Mexico. Two principal agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, spent nearly $18 billion in 2012 — enforcing what Napolitano calls a no-nonsense approach to immigration.
Such an effort is necessary, she said, in order for voters to support comprehensive immigration reform, including the aforementioned pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants. Along the river boundary, the wide meanders of the Rio Grande made it impossible to build a continuous, straight-line fence. So the barriers were constructed north of the river — slicing off part of a nature reserve here, a few holes of a golf course there and cutting a university campus in two. United States citizens stranded on the “Mexican side” of the interior divide wonder if they now live in Mexico.
Observers like  New York Times columnists have written that "barriers in Texas, moreover, are disproportionately located in poor and minority communities — a pattern that is so clear that it sometimes becomes farcical: plans for one fence, for instance, show it ending abruptly at the edge of a billionaire’s property.
Borderlanders have done their best to adjust to this increasingly bizarre world. Crossing times at the border first doubled, then tripled, from what they had been before the fences, but people learned to factor the holdups into their commute times. Television news programs even began reporting crossing delays along with the weather report."
Indeed,we have.
Such adjustments, though, barely mitigate the outrage that many Americans feel toward the encroachment of hideous barriers into their once open land.
Just ask June Taylor, at the juncture of Esperanza and Monsees roads in extreme southeast Brownsville. Taylor, a naturalized English woman, often the ony native English speaker in this neighborhood, suddenly found herself on the foreigner side of the fence. Nothing, not even her signs declaring that "We're part of America," stopped the eventual construction of the wall that separated her farm from the rest of us and which one can see from the road nestled in a spot heading toward the Rio Grande. In fact, she's got a wall down the street, on her east side, and along the river levee that runs north and south at the end of the field in front of her ranch home.
These daily adjustments by border residents don't change the fact that the border fence is harming an ancient human ecosystem. Try telling the right-wingers in Congress that mutual interdependence has always been a hallmark of cross-border lives. Residents on both sides of the line have always regarded parts of Mexico and the United States as their home. For them, the border is a connective membrane, not a line of demarcation. Often they have more in common with one another than with their host nations.
We along the border have learned to live with many things. Whether it's Snowbirds from up north snarling our roads, the peso devaluation in the south impacting our economy, the cartel-fueled violence in northern Tamaulipas, etc. We've learned to live through it all. In the end the wall will become just another fixture of our landscape to be seen as a reminder of what we have given up for the "greater good." Take a trip to Boca Chica past the Border Patrol checkpoint while you're at it.  It might also be put out of reach in the near future. Once you give up something, you can never get it back. Get used to it.