The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.–Mexico Border

Chapter 9. Juliet Garcia’s Fence and Michael Chertoff’s Wall

Chapter 9 Juliet Garcia’s Fence and Michael Chertoff’s Wall Y ou’ve noticed the unique campus we have here,” David Pearson tells me, “the palm forests, the Spanish tiles, the historical restorations, the conversation areas where learning and education are encouraged to take place in informal and formal surroundings. With President Garcia’s full backing , the University Planning Committee has their hand on every inch of space on this campus. We have provided the infrastructure for real education to take place here. As a result, our campus is unique. Students can see and feel the difference. So can the faculty. Our challenge is we have to get the students here first to see what we have to offer them. Once they see our campus, they know they want to be a part of what we have to offer.” Dr. David Pearson, vice president of partnership affairs, is in charge of marketing the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College to the community and the region. He is also in charge of all new construction on campus, Juliet Garcia’s Fence and Chertoff’s Wall 199 which means he is in charge of building the new border fence separating the campus from Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico. While her boss waits patiently for my full attention, the administrative assistant hands me a mug of hot coffee. Eyeing me from behind an impressively outsized desk in what was once the Fort Brown army infirmary that housed officers dying from malaria, Pearson resumes his well-rehearsed presentation as soon as I am ready. Never to be mistaken for a faculty member at UTB-TSC, at 8:30 in the morning Pearson, a tall, persuasive-looking individual , dresses in a dark suit, white shirt, and distinctive power tie. Outside the thick brick-and-mortar office walls, under a restored loggia of the old fort, college students drift by on their way to classes. Before this same building was restored to its present pristine condition, less than fifty feet from where we sit in Pearson’s generous surroundings Antonio Zavaleta, Olga Rivera Garcia, and I officed in cubicles paneled by Walmart. It is the second week of October 2008. The campus fuss started eighteen months earlier when a group of campus administrators Googled the DHS website to locate exactly where the new border fence would be sited in Brownsville. The administrators stared at the map in front of them in amazement , then stared some more, because they could not believe their eyes: the line representing Secretary Chertoff’s new border fence ran smack through the middle of their campus. Along with community residents all along the border, these university administrators realized something the functionaries in Washington did not seem to understand. All land and people who end up on the south side of the new border fence, between the proposed new border fence and the Rio Grande, will no longer be in Brownsville. For all practical purposes, those located between the new border fence and the river at best will be in a noman ’s land fully controlled by neither one country nor the other. Dividing the university with a new border fence automatically places the south side of the university in the existing transnational space between Mexico and the United States—a space most visible from the air as being marked by trash, river vegetation, and the absence of buildings.1 The last thing the administrators wanted was pieces of UTB-TSC in border limbo. For its part, DHS suggested that there was no reason to get excited about the impact of an eighteen-foot fence crossing the Brownsville university campus. They insisted that students, faculty, and anyone else who needs to get from point A to point B will still be able to do so with little difficulty. The DHS vaguely mentioned, for example, gates manned by Border Patrol agents. University students armed with special IDs issued by the Border Patrol would be granted passage from one side of the border fence to the other. No Crossing to Safety 200 other information was forthcoming. Secretary Chertoff’s posture, as filtered through the DHS staff and CBP officials in contact with the university, was bluntly dismissive of any concerns about the new border fence and its impact on campus life. The Department of Homeland Security treated all landowners along the Rio Grande in exactly...