Border Fence Divides Brownsville
May 19th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada has been embroiled the past year in a very contentious disagreement with his city commissioners over the construction of the border fence. In October 2007, the commissioners overruled him and allowed Department of Homeland Security officials to begin surveying city owned land for a fence. Since then, the Mayor Pro-Tem Charlie Atkinson has had some choice words for the mayor. This was reported in a Rio Grande Guardian story in April:
“Basically, he (Ahumada) is using the media for his own propaganda, because the bottom line is he is a deadbeat mayor, (and) he’s not going to get anywhere locally or nationally,” Atkinson said. “The commissioners are doing their hardest to make sure that they are communicating with DHS, and DHS is communicating with Brownsville staff.”
Last week, the Texas Border Coalition, an alliance of border mayors up and down the Texas-Mexico border filed a class-action lawsuit in Washington D.C. against Secretary Michael Chertoff and DHS over the border fence. One issue brought up in the lawsuit is equal protection guaranteed in the Fifth Amendment. The mayors argue that some politically well connected individuals are not getting the border fence while others less fortunate are. For example, as first mentioned in Holes in the Wall in the Observer, Dallas billionaire Ray L. Hunt escaped the fence on his 6,000-acre property while on either side, the tiny town of Granjeno was slated for destruction by the fence.
Mayor Ahumada said joining the lawsuit was not brought before the city commissioners, but that the city was on board. “We hope that it will force DHS to have a dialogue with us and consider a virtual fence,” he says.
Atkinson said he read about the lawsuit in the local newspaper. “It never went before the city commissioners,” he confirms.
Atkinson, who works for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said he wasn’t supposed to get into discussions about the border fence. However, he said he imagined something like the lawsuit would be considered by the commissioners first. “The city commissioners would want to have that input,” he says.
Nevertheless, Atkinson took a much milder tone toward the Mayor than he did in the April Guardian story. He said he didn’t know how the commissioners felt about the filing of the lawsuit. “This is just something the Mayor is doing with the coalition,” Atkinson says.
