ALAMO — Becky Schuster Jones drove to the land she grew up on, ripe with childhood memories, on this striking South Texas border. She stared at the looming wall stretching across the family farm.
Their land is sliced in two by the border wall — an 18- to 30-foot-tall barrier that casts a shadow on the estimated 700 acres that her father, Frank Schuster Sr., passed on to her and brother Frank John. Hundreds of acres are on the southern side.
“Trump rearranged the borderline and that’s the most un-American thing, because we’re essentially ceding hundreds of acres of land,” said Becky. “Trump did something Gen. Santa Anna was unable to do — establish the borderline north of the Rio Grande.”
The Schusters are among the families and communities who must live in the shadow of former President Donald Trump’s border wall even though President Joe Biden has stopped construction. Like many others who use historical cemeteries and nature reserves, or who live in small communities along the border, they’re divided by the wall. Now they must find a way forward.
Both siblings lean conservative, though Becky has been more outspoken, walking the halls of the Capitol in Washington, “astonished” that Republicans who talk a good game about protecting private property never stood up to Trump, or for border landowners.
“My greatest disappointment was held for several legislators who represented Texas,” she said. “Did they not learn in seventh-grade Texas history class that the Rio Grande marked the boundary between Texas and Mexico?”
There are the politicians who she says speak from both sides of their mouths on the controversial issue of eminent domain — the confiscation of land by the federal government for national security.
Her brother walks a fine line. He doesn’t like the walls that now shadow his property and home. Now with Biden in office, he said, “The change of administration just makes life complicated for everybody, especially us on the border. What’s there to be torn about anymore? The wall is up.”
Frank John would have preferred a technology-based fence with boots on the ground that keeps the border at the river and area residents safe from drug cartels that roam the area. But any thought of razing the wall today, he said, “would be spiteful.”
Becky says tearing it down would be “wasteful taxpayer money,” though keeping it also would cost so much in maintenance. “Nothing really makes sense anymore,” she said.
“The irony is that the placement of the wall actually prevents no one and nothing from entering the United States. It’s no-man’s land,” she said. “If you’re living in Cleveland, or Dallas, would you build a fence on your property or your homestead that gives your neighbor 10 feet of your own property that you’re paying taxes on?”
She paused and added, “We’ve been caught in a political theater, a photo op.”
Trump’s wall redraws the borderline that runs along the serpentine Rio Grande for 1,254 miles from El Paso to Brownsville. Any new barriers must be built on the U.S. side as much as a mile north of the river that marks the Texas-Mexico border.
Mexican General and President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna lost half of Mexico’s territory beginning with the Texas Revolution of 1836 and culminating with the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.
“If Santa Anna were alive, he’d give Trump a big abrazo [hug]” for seemingly abandoning the new strip along the river, Becky said. “And Texas, not Mexico, paid for it.”
Tiny communities, historical cemeteries, nature reserves, churches and some of the most pristine land for agriculture now find themselves in no-man’s land right up on a levee. Some residents and farmers must enter an access code to get through gates in the wall. “We will need to unlock the gate to get back into the United States,” Becky said.
This is all the result of Trump’s signature infrastructure project, his wall, an intense obsession that generated thundering applause lines in MAGA rallies — “Build the Wall, Build the Wall” — and led to a cultural movement of us vs. them, border experts say.
“Trump was able to draw that line, that is, to build his wall even inside the United States of America,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a border resident and professor of government at George Mason University. “With his rhetoric, he put one part of the U.S. population against citizens of Mexico and other parts of Latin America, against immigrants and other segments of U.S. society. He divided and conquered.”
On Inauguration Day, Biden’s executive order rescinded the national emergency declaration used by Trump to divert about $10 billion from Defense Department accounts for one of the costliest federal infrastructure projects in U.S. history. It remains unclear whether Biden has the authority to cancel completion of the wall.
The move is part of an overall pledge not just to stop wall construction, but to change the nation’s approach to immigration enforcement and to return to a more welcoming nation for immigrants seeking protection from oppression. The changes are fraught with deep challenges as Biden navigates the demands of supporters who seek a total repudiation of Trump’s nativist policies, to the reality of partisan politics in Washington and the complex nuances on the ground-in border communities.
Many locals, from political, business leaders, environmentalists, farmers to church leaders along the Rio Grande say the wall is menacing, expensive, destructive and ineffective.
The shadow of the wall falls on a historical cemetery with the remains of Native Americans, war veterans, freed slaves and Christian abolitionists who influenced the cultural racial history of the Rio Grande Valley. The wall aims to “erase the history of our ancestors,” said Paul Pablo Villarreal Jr., the Hidalgo County tax assessor-collector and a descendant of Nathaniel Jackson whose remains are buried at the Eli Jackson cemetery, next to the Jackson Ranch Chapel.
It’s a symbol of “our inhumanity, a sorrow on our borderlands,” added Father Roy Snipes, known as the Cowboy priest, who in the past has offered sanctuary to immigrants who come to his tiny chapel at La Lomita seeking help.
Snipes quickly added, “But opposing the wall doesn’t mean we want to have an open border. We’re the first ones to say we need security on the border, just not a wall. It means we want to treat people the way we would like to be treated, with humility and respect.”
But for the Schusters, who support border security but dislike the awkward, rambling structure splitting their land (and the continent) in two, finding a way to put the divisiveness of the wall behind them in the post-Trump era will be anything but easy.
The wall divides. It is meant to keep out immigrants and smugglers. The river — with its magnificent, grand and wide waters, a place for jumping fish, swimming and swooping birds with colorful foliage that knows no border — is key to verdant alluvial soil that yielded sugar cane, cotton and a variety of vegetables for consumers nationwide.
Becky remembers growing up with Mexican workers all around and listening to her father’s conversations in a mixture of German and Spanish. She remembers playing with sand by the river on Sundays and long drives, marveling at birds — the family farm sits next to the 2,088-acre Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge.
Like Trump, the Schusters are the descendants of immigrants.
Their father came to America as a 14-year-old from Austria to work for his uncles here in Alamo. After serving in World War II, he used his military savings to purchase the original parcel of land in 1948 with his military savings. Over time, he pieced together other small parcels near the Rio Grande.
Becky says he’d be sad about the scarring of the land and worried that the government wall will worsen periodic flooding when the Rio Grande jumps its banks. In 1967 during Hurricane Beulah, the storm caused catastrophic flooding and killed multiple people. Their father had to wade in the water to rescue his bulls, but returned to safety after realizing how dangerous the storms were.
“Nature has a way of dictating life along the river,” she said.
On her walk through her land, as Biden was being inaugurated, Becky said she thought of her father, as she often does, describing him as a “deeply patriotic man, who loved his country and would do anything to secure it. But, he’d say, ‘There must be a better way to do this.’”
