A city divided by DHS

home with her daughter’s family. The Taylor residence has encountered some interesting characters. Thieves led by a one-legged man once stole Taylor’s horses from the barn and beans off the stove. Drug smugglers hid marijuana in her bushes. Migrant workers would camp in her front yard and bring her fresh tortillas in the morning.

Originally from England, she married her Mexican American husband during the Second World War, and picked tomatoes and cotton to scrape enough money together in 1948 to build a modest home and raise four adopted children.

She never learned to speak much Spanish and struggled with Mexican food. “My father-in-law told me I was the only person he knew that made square tortillas,” Taylor recalled. Hers has been a life defined by adapting, but she said nothing prepared her for America’s new border barrier.

“We feel abandoned here,” she said. “That’s why we refer to it as the Mexican side of the fence.”

Some residents got the word by studying maps of the project at public hearings. Others answered knocks on their front doors to find Border Patrol agents asking if they would sign a waiver allowing the government to begin surveying their land.
Landowners were offered compensation, but many were outraged. They protested at public hearings, lobbied politicians in Washington and fought court battles. The government had to start condemnation proceedings against more than 100 residents, some of them poor farmers or senior citizens with centuries-old ties to the community.

Construction crews bulldozed orchards, drained lakes and graded over driveways and roads. The fence towers 18 feet and its steel posts, a few inches apart, whistle like a freight train when northern winds blow.

Eloisa Tamez, 75, who lives on land granted to her ancestors by the king of Spain in 1767, rejected the government’s offer of $13,500 for a 50-foot-wide strip across her three acres west of Brownsville. Despite her rejection, the government seized the land and built the fence anyway. Now, three-quarters of the fallow acreage where her family once grew tomatoes, squash and okra is south of the barrier.

“It represents my heritage. This land here is what gave me life. I didn’t have riches or luxuries, but we had food that was good for us,” said Tamez, who is in a legal battle with the federal government over the seizure of her land. “I didn’t want to let the government have it to build this monstrosity.”

Rancher Alberto “Beto”