I was delighted to pick up my Washington Post this morning and see, for the first time, a piece that homes in on the elephant in the room, re: the border wall. Who owns the land and how does the federal government get control of it?
I encourage everyone to read the piece:
www.washingtonpost.com/…
Here’s the money quote:
What is the result of all of this? Years and years of litigation before the “immediate construction” of the wall. Any federal eminent domain action on such a large scale against even a few landowners could trigger decades of court disputes before anything is built.
As it happens, I have some professional experience in this area, having been involved in the inter-government process on border crossings and related issues for some years. As a result, when this border wall concept became a thing in the campaign, my first reaction was “What about the land?” In my experience, anytime there was even a modest plan to expand existing border crossing facilities, they would quickly get bogged down in questions of land rights, rights of way, water rights, and the cost of purchasing or leasing the needed lands. If tribal lands were involved, the resulting legal questions became more Byzantine by an order of magnitude.
Veterans of border affairs would tell me that much of the border land had previously been federal land, but had been privatized and sold off during the Reagan administration. Now, it would have to be repurchased or leased at premium prices. I haven’t verified this point, but it sounds plausible if you remember the big Reagan sell-off of federal assets (that sure solved our fiscal problems once-and-for-all, didn’t it?).
Of course, the Donald Trump method of acquiring lands is to use bullying and intimidation until the owners give in and sell cheap. That’s how he acquired both Mar-a-Lago and his Virginia winery:
www.washingtonian.com/…
We’ll see how that plays when it’s the Executive Branch of the government doing the bullying, and not some blowhard from Queens. Anyone want to take any bets on whether we’ll see a border wall constructed during our lifetimes?