Hundreds protest border wall

Hundreds of people gathered in Brownsville Saturday — from students to elected officials — to protest the planned border wall that will be built sometime in 2008.

Mario A. Garza was one of the many protesters that met at Alice Hope Park Saturday afternoon for the event. The sophomore sociology major at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College said he decided to call in sick to work to protest the wall.

“I’m against the border wall, because plain and simple it’s a waste of taxpayer money,” he said.

The protest was called “Hands Across el Rio,” an event that has united hundreds of people along the U.S-Mexico border since it first kicked off two weeks ago in El Paso with similar demonstrations.

Hundreds locked hands and spread wide along a chain-link fence at the Gateway International Bridge shortly after 1 p.m. Saturday. The human chain reached from one end of the bridge, which was on the U.S. side, to the other, which was on the Mexican side.

Lois Huff, an adjunct professor at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, made the long drive to Brownsville for “Hands Across el Rio,” she said, while standing on the Gateway International Bridge.

“I’m happy this has been organized,” she said. “Historically, I think it’s a bad idea. Walls don’t work,” she said, referring to the Berlin Wall that was dismantled in 1989.

State Rep. Juan Manuel Escobar, D-Kingsville, was also there to protest the construction of a border fence.

“The problem is society,” he said as he too stood on the Gateway International Bridge sporting a T-shirt that read, “No Border Wall.” “The U.S. is not doing what it needs (to do). This is the wrong approach.”

Escobar remarked that the U.S. was very involved in the tearing down the Berlin Wall. “They fought communism to take down the wall in (Germany. Now) we are building a wall in a country that is democratic.”

In the meantime, Garza and others there are sure that when the government builds the wall, undocumented immigrants wishing to live the “American Dream” will find a way to make it across it, regardless of it’s size, shape, length, or height.