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Still from “Ay Mariposa,” a film about people and animals in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and the fight to defend justice, wild beauty, and the future of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
Earlier this month, I spent a day kayaking in the Rio Grande delta region with a group of about a dozen veterans from across the United States. The group included two activists of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona, which also straddles the U.S.-Mexico border. They camped for six days north of the levee that sits on a federal easement on the National Butterfly Center’s property.
The conversations around campfires at night, following day trips to different locations along the Rio Grande, reflected a general consensus that the delta was far from a war zone—only made so by President Donald Trump’s hysterics about a border crisis.
“They’ve been doing that the last couple of nights,” said one camper of the Customs and Border Protection helicopter repeatedly circling above the campsite.
During the expedition, the group visited Nayda Alvarez—a resident of Starr County and staunch advocate for border residents who stand to lose their property to eminent domain, which federal authorities are using to seize land for border wall construction.
The veterans also kayaked the Rio Grande in Mission, the same location where Trump and Senator Ted Cruz had a now-famous photo-op donning bullet-proof vests. This group chose life jackets.
“We want to be optimistic but our hearts break for all she and her family stand to lose - not only land and home, but generations of memories on this beautiful slice of riverbank,” wrote Iraq War veteran Emily Yates on her Facebook page on March 10. Starr County stands at heightened risk of flooding because planned border walls would be built in the Rio Grande floodplain, behind which debris build up during floods.
The veterans also kayaked the Rio Grande in Mission, docking off of Anzalduas Park—the same location where Trump and Senator Ted Cruz had a now-famous photo-op donning bullet-proof vests. This group chose life jackets.
A few days later, on March 14, the U.S. Senate voted down Trump’s national emergency declaration in a 59-41 vote, with twelve Republicans breaking ranks. Trump declared the emergency back in February as a way to secure funds for his controversial border wall on U.S.-Mexico border. Congress refused to allocate Trump’s desired amount of barrier funding, offering compromise in a February spending bill of $1.4 billion for fifty-five miles of barrier in the Rio Grande Valley, well short of the $5.7 billion he requested.
As expected, Trump promptly vetoed the resolution of disapproval, signaling his response in advance in a one-word tweet.
Opponents are unlikely to muster the two-thirds majority necessary to overturn it. But in the areas closest to the border, the verdict on the wall has already been rendered. It is not needed and not wanted.
In the days leading up to the Senate vote, residents along the border vented their frustrations and fears on social media. Hashtags included #fakestateofemergency, #ourhomeisnotawarzone, and #borderviews accompanied pictures and photos of what life is really like on the border.
John Fanestil, an ordained minister in La Mesa, California, wondered in a Facebook post if the real border crisis wasn’t a shortage of tacos.
“The young, Mexican-American guy ordering ahead of me seemed torn between a bottled Negra Modelo and a local IPA, and his Anglo girlfriend couldn’t pronounce ‘birrhia,’ but that was about as stressful as the evening got,” he wrote. “I like to think that if President Trump had ever eaten real tacos, he would have a harder time using words like ‘emergency’ and ‘crisis’ and ‘invasion’ to describe what is happening on the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Debbie Nathan, a journalist from Brownsville, Texas, shared a “national emergency” breakfast at Central Cafe in Juarez, El Paso’s sister-city.
Sierra Club member Emily Yates opted for a local IPA on her last night in Texas as part of a Military Veterans Outdoors group, that recently camped out at the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, in a demonstration of solidarity with borderland communities.
Even Spike, a rescued African Spurred Tortoise residing at the National Butterfly Center, opposes the border wall and national emergency.
The National Butterfly Center, a natural sanctuary straddling the border, is very much on the frontlines of opposition to the border wall. It is located in Texas’ Hidalgo County, which voted only 28 percent for Trump in the 2016 election, with 68 percent supporting Clinton.
The center provides protected habitat for several endangered and threatened species, including the ferruginous pygmy owl and the monarch butterfly. Hundreds of bird and butterfly species migrate through the center every year.
In July 2017, the center’s executive director, Marianna Treviño Wright, was shocked to discover government contractors chainsawing on part of the 100-acre property in July 2017 to make way for the construction of a wall.
Money was dedicated in a 2018 appropriations bill last March to erect a wall of fifteen-foot steel bollards separated four-to-six inches apart atop an earthen levee that crosses the center’s property. The fence would stand thirty feet tall above the surrounding terrain, and require clearing of all vegetation up to 150 feet north of the levee.
It would include an “enforcement zone,” with a paved a road for border agents on patrol. Access to the southern part of their own property, accessible only via a coded gate, the type of which has proved difficult to open in flood conditions with disastrous consequences.
According to Treviño Wright, a national emergency declaration would suspend protections for all these areas.
“Look! We've been invaded,” wrote the National Butterfly Center on its Facebook page just moments after the Senate vote. The invaders, it explained, were the bilingual students of Instituto Piaget in Tamaulipas, Mexico, who are among the more than 6,000 students who visit the butterfly center each year.
And so the ridicule continues. One local community organizer created #sarcasticborderviews, as others post media of themselves at swimming pools, parks, and restaurants, enjoying life on the border—which is nothing like Trump’s imaginings.