Building the wall: the ulterior motives

Always, make the rich richer.

Let’s talk about The Wall—the big, beautiful Wall with the big, beautiful Door. It turns out that, starting in 2007, the federal government long has been stealing people’s land in order to fence up our southern border. The folks at The Texas Tribune partnered up with the ProPublica posse and went out riding the range, seeing what those varmints were up to.

Homeland Security circumvented laws designed to help landowners receive fair compensation. The agency did not conduct formal appraisals of targeted parcels. Instead, it issued low-ball offers based on substandard estimates of property values.

Larger, wealthier property owners who could afford lawyers negotiated deals that, on average, tripled the opening bids from Homeland Security. Smaller and poorer landholders took whatever the government offered — or wrung out small increases in settlements. The government conceded publicly that landowners without lawyers might wind up shortchanged, but did little to protect their interests.

The Justice Department bungled hundreds of condemnation cases. The agency took property without knowing the identity of the actual owners. It condemned land without researching facts as basic as property lines. Landholders spent tens of thousands of dollars to defend themselves from the government’s mistakes.

The government had to redo settlements with landowners after it realized it had failed to account for the valuable water rights associated with the properties, an oversight that added months to the compensation process. On occasion, Homeland Security paid people for property they did not actually own. The agency did not attempt to recover the misdirected taxpayer funds, instead paying for land a second time once it determined the correct owners. Nearly a decade later, scores of landowners remain tangled in lawsuits. The government has already taken their land and built the border fence. But it has not resolved claims for its value.

And, as always, the kind of justice you got here depended solely on the kind of legal help you could afford.

Retired teacher Juan Cavazos was offered $21,500 for a two-acre slice of his land. He settled for that, figuring he couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer. Rollins M. Koppel, a local attorney and banker, did not make the same mistake. A high-priced Texas law firm negotiated his offer from $233,000 to almost $5 million — the highest settlement in the Rio Grande Valley. “We got screwed,” said Cavazos, 74.

  Charles P Pierce

And there's not a damned thing they can do about it. This is our country. The best in the world. If you're rich.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.