After President Donald Trump declared a national emergency Friday to access billions of dollars in funding to build a border wall, some landowners along the U. S.-Mexico line say they see a government land grab in their future.
Gary Jacobs looks out over the Rio Grande from the deck of the clubhouse at a public golf course in Webb County, Texas. It’s a sunny morning, quiet except for the chirping birds and the thwack of clubs hitting balls.
“Where are you going to put the 30 feet?” he asked.
On this side of the river is a 270-acre plot of land Jacobs and his wife donated to boost the profile of Laredo, a border town about 160 miles south of San Antonio. On the other side is Mexico.
Jacobs, like most of Laredo’s 260,000 residents, is talking about President Donald Trump’s border wall, a project that’s engulfing not just the border, but also Washington and almost 1 million federal workers who went unpaid during the U. S. government’s partial shutdown.
Texas, a state where Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 9 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election, illustrates the political complexity of his push. After Trump declared a national emergency Friday to access billions of dollars in funding, some landowners along the U. S.-Mexico line say they see a government land grab in their future.
The logistics of building a barrier are challenging enough. Thousands of creeks called “arroyos” carry rainwater from South Texas thunderstorms to the expansive river, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. A wall could act as a dam, trapping water on the U. S. side and potentially complicating how Mexicans and Americans share the river for their water supply, said Jacobs.
But his bigger problem with the wall is constitutional.
