Feds: “Resistance is futile”

I guess the Constitution ends somewhere north of the actual border:

McALLEN, Texas (AP)_ The chief of the U.S. Border Patrol told angry mayors, businessmen and environmentalists Friday the federal government would have the final say on the exact location of a 700-mile (1,126-kilometer) fence along the Mexico border.

Local officials say the proposed fence will cut farmers off from water, harm wildlife, ruin recreational areas and send a hostile message to Mexico, Texas’ biggest trading partner.

Chief David Aguilar said he wanted to work with members of the Texas Border Coalition, but if they came to an impasse, the federal government would have the final say.

This is hardly just a theoretical problem down along the Rio Grande:

“CouldBeTrue” writes on the latest border fence stupidity at South Texas Chisme:

The more you get into it, the dicier this fence business gets. Please remember that crony Republicans do not care about solving real problems and crony Republicans don’t care what effect their actions have. Mess is inevitable.

Like some farmers along the Rio Grande, Edward Mathers is counting on a series of gates to open the fence that will cut across his land.
But others warn that the federal government is likely to restrict access to keys or remote control devices that would open such gates.

“I’m not happy, but I can live with the inconvenience,” said Mathers, who farms about 1,000 acres along the river.

U.S. Border Patrol agents told him that 50-foot-long gates would open along a 10-foot-high fence to let him tend to land on each side of the fence, Mathers said.

But in San Pedro, farmer Fermin Leal said he was told farmers will have to contact Border Patrol agents to open the fence’s remote-controlled gates.

Logistics is not a Republican forte.

Presently, there is no legal crossing point between Del Rio and Presidio, six hours apart by road. We’re contrarians down here in the Big Bend, maybe, but as Meghan Wilde writes in Marfa’s Big Bend Sentinel we’re looking to OPEN the border a little bit:

…a local group is working to reopen La Linda international bridge east of Big Bend National Park. For more than six years, a coalition of Brewster County and Coahuila residents and non-profits has been trying to restore the single-lane La Linda bridge, which was barricaded in 1997. The coalition sees the crossing as the lynchpin for a cross-border tourism economy between Big Bend National Park and adjacent protected natural areas in Mexico’s Sierra del Carmen.

I still say it has to do with us along the border being mostly “Ds” and the feds answering to the “R’s”… and playing to folks who assume they’re not gonna be inconvenienced when the local Homeland Security guy starts demanding THEIR papers…