Why the Wall Will Never Rise
The brush country along the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border grows thick: a jagged, tangled landscape of thorny trees, prickly pear, and grass so tall, it can hide a horse. Eight-foot rattlesnakes blend into rocks. Feral hogs wallow beneath mesquite thickets.
If President Donald Trump ever gets the funding for his long-promised wall, he will have to plot a course through Texas. But he will never make it all the way through here, the 800-mile stretch from Laredo to nearly El Paso. There will be no “concrete structure from sea to sea,” as the president once pledged. Taking this land would constitute an assault on private property and require a veritable army of lawyers, who, I can assure you, are no match for the state’s powerful border barons.
More than 250 years ago, José de Escandón, a Spanish army officer, established the first colonial settlements along the Rio Grande in South Texas. Later on, the Spanish crown divided the land into , or “plots.” Down in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the plots were small, radiating from the river. These fertile slivers could sustain more livestock, crops, and people than the more arid land upriver, removed from the
