UTB-TSC students, faculty look back on the border fence's travails

After a yearlong legal struggle and a fair share of international attention, students and faculty members at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College are looking back on the short history of the border fence's travails. With litigation still pending and the fence still not built in Brownsville, such an analysis might seem premature.

But after receiving a Difficult Dialogues grant from the Ford Foundation, UTB-TSC Professor John Cook decided to focus attention on the ongoing controversy in the university's own backyard.

On Thursday afternoon, Cook put together a small panel - consisting of an attorney, a professor and an affected landowner - to discuss their roles in the ongoing fence saga.

For about 50 students, it was a glimpse at the inner workings of the federal government's most visible border security initiative and a lesson in the importance of dialogue.

"This is a fascinating story," said Daniel Renfro, an attorney who represented UTB-TSC in its case against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. "We don't think of our legal system as promoting dialogue; it's an adversarial system."

But dialogue, aided by a court order, kept an 18-foot steel fence off the university's campus. Renfro described the details of the case, including a string of meetings, between university officials and top Border Patrol officials, that were initially ineffective. "We were talking past each other," Renfro said.

"But we convinced them that they could trust us," he added. "You can have a dialogue with someone if you trust them, even if you don't agree with them."

Eloisa Tamez, a UTB-TSC professor who owns land on the Rio Grande in El Calaboz, told of her own experience with the federal government - a far cry from the university's case.

"I started out thinking about me, and why I didn't want the government to take my land," Tamez said. "But I realized that my responsibility extended outside of me. I needed to understand how I could help (my neighbors) take on the fight against the government."

Tamez is both a plaintiff and defendant in federal cases. As an individual property owner, she's still hoping to reach a compromise similar to UTB-TSC's. "But DHS has chosen to look the other way," she said.

Arturo Zarate-Ruiz, a professor at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Matamoros, spoke about the fence's symbolism south of the Rio Grande.

"New York has a border on the Atlantic Ocean," Zarate-Ruiz said. "Are we building a wall straight through New York City?"