Protesters take to streets against border wall

Sean Gaffney
July 12, 2008 - 9:20PM

EDINBURG -- Hundreds of people chanting "No border wall" marched to the Hidalgo County Courthouse on Saturday evening seeking to persuade local politicians to abandon their support for the planned barrier.

Protesters specifically targeted Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas and other county officials for linking the building of the wall to the repair of the county's deteriorating levee system.

Salinas has consistently said he opposes the border wall. But when it began to seem the barrier's construction was inevitable, he and other officials started lobbying the federal government to combine the project with levee repairs to better leverage federal money for the latter project.

Current plans call for construction of two segments of the county's 22-mile stretch of the wall to begin as early as Monday.

In anticipation of that happening, a long procession of protesters marched down University Drive from the campus of the University of Texas-Pan American to the courthouse just before 7 p.m. Saturday, pushing strollers, waving flags and signs and chanting in an almost perfect, military-like cadence.

Four-year-old Jacob Becho helped his father, Arnoldo Becho scribble, "There are no illegal people," on a makeshift cardboard wall at the Student Union Ballroom on the UTPA campus before the march.

"I oppose the wall for environmental reasons, but also because it's a terrible symbol," the older Becho said. "Migration is a human right."

Locally, construction of the cement border wall atop the county's levee system will begin with a 1.76-mile segment in Anzalduas County Park in Mission and a 0.9-mile segment along the Lower Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Refuge between Valley View Road and Farm-to-Market Road 493 in Donna.

As Eric Lawn mounted his bicycle to ride alongside the protesters, the 41-year-old said immigrants should be welcomed into the country.

"These are the kind of people you want here," he said. "They come here and they work their butts off to educate their children and send them to college."

Ann Williams Cass, a representative of the No Border Wall Coalition, a grassroots opposition group, said County Judge Salinas should never have supported the wall or the levee proposal because it's the federal government's responsibility to fix the levees. Furthermore, she added, the barrier simply won't work.

"The majority of undocumented people come to this country legally (and overstay visas,)" Cass said. "This is the perfect example of institutional racism."