On a cool September morning, Pamela Rivas picks me up in a light beige F-150 driven by her 24-year-old son, Ivan. Country music plays softly on the stereo. We’re in Edinburg, the Texas border city where they now live, but we’re headed west. A 60-year-old nurse, Rivas is taking me to the land where she’s from—a property she’s spent nearly 15 years fighting to save from border wall construction.
As we drive Highway 83, the land shifts: Elevation rises; riverbanks steepen; the brush country starts to roll. After nearly an hour, we turn south toward Los Ebanos, the tiny town where Rivas lived until the second grade. We’re flanked by fallow fields when we see our first Border Patrol SUV parked
