Trump’s Order for a ‘Big, Beautiful’ Wall Renews Fears at a Border Campus

When President Trump ordered that construction begin immediately on the “big, beautiful, powerful wall” he had promised his supporters, he probably wasn’t imagining the green, 10-foot-high fence that runs along the southern perimeter of the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.

Jasmine swirls through the links of the fence that winds past a campus baseball field and running trails just north of the banks of the Rio Grande.

It’s the closest thing the university has to a wall separating the United States from Mexico. And it’s only there because the federal government ordered it built a decade ago.

The fence, which is interspersed with concrete columns that blend with the university’s architecture, was a hard-fought compromise between the university and the Department of Homeland Security, which had demanded more of the 18-foot, heavily-fortified structure that picks up where the university’s fence leaves off.

No one here knows for sure what the president’s executive order, signed last month, will mean for the university and whether its current fence will pass muster. The president’s latest pronouncements have, however, sparked acute worries about how the university’s reputation as a welcoming, multicultural place might be harmed if it is perceived as being walled off from its longtime neighbors.

And it’s not just the wall; the president has also called for much more aggressive immigration sweeps in a region where students already complain they’re unfairly targeted as criminals.

The order calls for the “immediate construction of a physical wall” along the roughly 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico. The structure must be a “contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier.”

The debate over a border wall has been raging since 2007, when Congress passed legislation that led to the construction of nearly 700 miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. It began when the campus was known as the University of Texas at Brownsville — an upper-division institution linked with the two-year Texas Southmost College. It has since merged with the University of Texas-Pan American to form the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. The university enrolls just over 26,000 students, many of whom commute daily from Matamoros and other northern Mexican cities.

A decade ago, Juliet V. García, then president of the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, refused to allow the Department of Homeland Security to survey the university land, saying an 18-foot steel barrier between the two countries “would directly contravene our mission and destroy the campus climate that has been so painstakingly and carefully created.”

The U.S. government sued the university, but the two sides reached a settlement that allowed the colleges to simply beef up existing fences.

The resulting border fence has a 24-hour opening at the entrance to what used to be a golf course, which is now a field overgrown with weeds wedged in a no-man’s land south of the fence but north of the river. It’s one of many gaps that anyone can easily walk or drive through along hundreds of miles of existing fencing.

Impassioned Discussion

Plugging those gaps and fortifying the wall makes sense to Sergio Luna, 33, an ex-Marine and father of four who spent seven years working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement before enrolling at the university.

Mr. Luna, whose work involved intercepting people trying to enter the United States illegally and settling unaccompanied children in family shelters, hopes to become an immigration lawyer. He is more sympathetic than most students to the idea of an expanded wall, which he said would funnel more immigrants to areas where beefed-up patrols could intercept them.

What he and his relatives in Mexico object to are the disparaging remarks the president made about Mexican immigrants in presenting the plan, branding some as rapists and killers.

His perspective was part of an impassioned discussion that took place on Tuesday during an advanced seminar on immigration, race, and citizenship taught by Sylvia Gonzalez-Gorman, an assistant professor of political science on the Brownsville campus.

“My students are very concerned about the wall — not necessarily the wall itself, but the rhetoric that comes with it,” she told a reporter before the class.

When Mr. Trump insists the Mexican government will pay for the structure, some worry that this might result in higher fees to go back and forth across the Rio Grande.

“Instead of paying 50 cents to cross the border, will they have to pay $5?” Ms. Gonzalez-Gorman asked. “That’s a lot of money in Mexico, and I have students who are saying they wouldn’t do it.”

The wall, and the increased militarization of the border the executive order calls for, raises other objections here.

Kelly Saenz, a junior enrolled in Ms. Gonzalez-Gorman’s class, attended an early-college high school on the edge of the campus just blocks from the border fence. She said that two girls from her school were jogging along the fence to earn a physical-education credit and were questioned by Border Patrol agents. They asked to look at the soles of the girls’ running shoes to see if they were muddy, which would be a telltale sign that they had crossed the Rio Grande and then scaled the fence.

When the girls said they were jogging from the nearby school, the agents wanted to drive them there “just to be sure they were really students,” Ms. Saenz said. “It was ridiculous.”

“If we look at the data, illegal immigration has gone down, so why are we talking about even more enforcement?” she added.

‘Criminalizes Our Community’

The president’s executive orders also call for stepped-up enforcement efforts to speed the deportation of undocumented immigrants. Mr. Trump has called for adding 5,000 Border Patrol agents to an existing force of about 20,000, as well as 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

He also greatly increased the pool of undocumented immigrants who would be considered priorities for deportation to include anyone who had been charged with a crime — no matter how minor. That could include driving without a license or using a fake Social Security card — risks undocumented people often take in order to work and support their families.

That worries undocumented students like Abraham Diaz, a senior at the Edinburg campus.

“It criminalizes our community in different ways,” he said. “My father was stopped and given a ticket and he paid a fine. Now, under the Trump administration, he’s considered a criminal.”

Students in Ms. Gonzalez-Gorman’s seminar were divided on whether such increased enforcement was a good idea. Some thought it was overkill, especially since illegal crossings from Mexico have actually been declining in recent years.

Border Patrol agents are everywhere already, Ms. Saenz said. “I wonder how much more you can increase it,” she added. Instead of just focusing on keeping criminals out of the United States, she suggested, the federal government could do more to reduce the demand for drugs in the United States that fuels trafficking.

A few students shrugged off the idea of a wall, saying they had grown used to surveillance and walls and didn’t think it was a big deal.

“I’d rather look out at the river than a wall, but whatever,” one student told his classmates.

Hector Rangel, a senior, disagreed. He said a reinforced wall would hurt efforts to recruit more students from Mexico at a time when the university is trying to beef up those numbers. “Why would I want to go to a campus where I feel uninvited — where there’s a symbol that just reminds me every day that the president of the United States doesn’t like us?” he said, his voice tinged with anger.

If the wall seems unwelcoming to people crossing the border, that’s the idea, Mr. Luna chimed in. Just as his father, in Matamoros, built a wall around his house to keep criminals from stealing his stereo equipment, U.S. citizens have a right to treat their country as a house that needs protection, he said. “We welcome people when we open the door,” Mr. Luna said, “but we don’t want people jumping the fence to try to get in the back door.”

With his muscular frame, beard and aviator sunglasses, Mr. Luna looks like the ex-border agent that he is. He was thoughtful and unfailingly polite as he debated with classmates who are a decade younger.

‘We’re Closing Ourselves Off’

Some students interviewed this week said they would welcome the jobs that the stepped-up enforcement of the border will bring. Others, including some who enjoy temporary protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, want the university to ban such recruiting on campus.

“The border wall is not just the wall. It’s about the militarization of the region and the feeling that we’re in a state of being constantly surveilled,” said Miguel Díaz-Barriga, a professor of anthropology at the Edinburg campus who has written widely about the topic. “You drive anywhere and the amount of law enforcement is overwhelming.”

He was speaking as he walked along the border fence with a reporter, detailing its history.

Where the university fence ends, the 18-foot rust-colored steel structure begins. Further down, it changes again to a metal fence topped with swirls of barbed wire. Far above the structures, cameras that peer over the Rio Grande are perched on poles planted between leggy palm trees.

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, over 70 nations have built walls,” Mr. Díaz-Barriga said. “When the Berlin Wall fell, everyone cheered — now we’re going to have a world without walls.” Instead, he said, the United States has given up on being a beacon of hope and freedom for people from other countries. “We’re closing ourselves off.”

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor of public affairs and security studies at the Brownsville campus, knows better than most the dangers drug trafficking brings to the region.

Her research focuses on the role organized crime plays in the trafficking of migrants in parts of Mexico and Central America.

“Building a wall is a useless idea,” said Ms. Correa-Cabrera, who is spending the year as a residential fellow at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank.

Spending billions of dollars on a border wall when no one has studied whether existing border fences work, she said, “is a waste of money.”

Other critics said that in addition to slicing through private property and farmlands, the structures threaten fragile ecosystems and endanger wildlife. The meandering path of the Rio Grande requires that a wall be built significantly north of the river, creating large swaths of what constitutes a no man’s land.

The president, said Ms. Correa-Cabrera, has no idea how complex and expensive it would be to build a continuous wall that crosses private properties, birding sanctuaries, and desert canyons.

The sheer impossibility of it all gives opponents at the Rio Grande Valley campus hope that their modest green fence might not have to give way to a wall any time soon.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.