A city divided by DHS

Garza and his father have been cut off from their cattle. Ninfa Young, 56, said she cannot stroll over to her neighbor’s farm to pick watermelons. Nature Conservancy manager Maxwell B. Pons said the 6,000 feet of fencing on the Southmost Preserve severs an important corridor for coyotes and Texas tortoises.

At the Loop farm on the outskirts of Brownsville, dozens of citrus trees were bulldozed to make way for the fence, which splits the family’s 900 acres. On the Brownsville side, Debbie and Leonard Loop tend groves of oranges and grapefruit; on the “Mexican” side, their son, Ray Loop, cultivates soybeans, sunflowers and watermelons.

Things could get more complicated. With the government planning this year to install gates at 40 of the gaps, the family wonders about access. Residents will be provided with access codes, according to border authorities. But they have also heard that the gates would be locked during a high national security alert. Debbie Loop, 69, wonders how her young granddaughters would get through to the Brownsville side of the fence under that scenario.

“It’s an eerie feeling crossing that,” Loop said, as she drove with her husband through the fence line onto her son’s farmland. “In the past, if you needed to get out in a hurry, you could. Now you have to find a gap.”

Duncan L. Hunter, the former congressman from San Diego County who co-wrote the fencing legislation before leaving office in 2009, visited Brownsville in 2008 to explain how barriers helped reduce the numbers of undocumented immigrants flooding into California border cities.

Though the Brownsville fence placement sounds “illogical,” it is probably necessary if it means cutting off illegal crossings, said Hunter, who expressed surprise that the barrier here was placed so far from the river. Asked about the location, border officials said in a statement that a number of factors were considered, including the flood plain and “historic illegal crossing patterns.”

“From time immemorial, the way that you keep people from going into a restricted area is a fence,” Hunter said, citing a significant drop in crime in San Diego after the fence there was built in the 1990s. “It brought calm to both sides of the border.”

Longtime resident Taylor, however, said the no man’s land where her property ended up hardly qualifies as tranquil.

The fence funnels more illegal immigrants than ever through her property, she said, because it is close to an easily breached gap. Taylor is all for bolstering national security, but adding agents, cameras and lighting would have been more effective, she said.

She still opens her house to patrol agents on Thanksgiving and Christmas for turkey dinner. It is the politicians and senior officials who earn her wrath. She attended hearings and sent letters and emails to numerous officials, and got few responses.

“It was like talking to a brick wall,” she said.

These days, immigrants walk across a small dam that serves as a footbridge, traversing the Rio Grande in minutes. Crossings trigger the immediate appearance of Border Patrol agents on the river side of the fence, but Taylor fears that CBP could someday reposition its agents behind the barrier, leaving her family more vulnerable.

Heightened U.S. enforcement efforts, Taylor said, have bred a meaner, more desperate class of illegal immigrants. Some banged on her doors and windows last week, possibly seeking help. She can hear the “booms and bangs” from the drug wars in Matamoros, and Mexican military helicopters have strayed over her house, she said.

“We’re not afraid, but we do realize that Matamoros could spill over here,” said Taylor, who keeps three assault rifles loaded. The guns give her a sense of safety, she said, unlike the fence: “It’s not providing security for us, and it’s actually shutting us out of America.”