Border Lights Illuminate Two Faces of Rio Grande

The Rio Grande is many things to many people: a divider of nations, a binder of cultures, a line of defense, an illusory line.

Here where it snakes through the lush tropics of Texas’ southern tip, the Rio Grande is also the one obvious and inescapable thing that it always has been--a river, flanked by some of the most vibrant and ecologically significant riparian lands left in the United States.

Making their home along its banks, amid majestic sabal palms and dense thickets of carrizo cane, are 19 federally protected species of flora and fauna--and 35 more that are at risk. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service owns more than 64,000 acres of that terrain, an unparalleled riverfront refuge. It is one of America’s top bird-watching destinations and the only place in the country inhabited by two endangered cats, the ocelot and the jaguarundi.

Yet even in such a natural wonderland, the border’s many identities still overlap. One man’s ecosystem, after all, can be another’s smuggling route. Where conservationists see nesting ground, law enforcers see secluded hideaways.

“I’d like to see as much brush as possible preserved for wildlife, and I’d like to see illegal immigration controlled,” said Steve Walker, a renowned outdoorsman who conducts ecotours for the University of Texas at Brownsville. “What’s the answer? There is none. This is the border. You live with the contradiction.”

Those ambiguities were illuminated last month shortly after the U.S. Border Patrol launched Operation Rio Grande, the latest in a series of high-profile crackdowns modeled after San Diego’s Operation Gatekeeper and El Paso’s Operation Hold-the-Line. A key feature of the Brownsville maneuver was to haul dozens of portable floodlights to the river’s edge, bathing a portion of the Rio Grande every night in a 1,000-watt halogen glow.

From the Border Patrol’s perspective, the tactic has been a spectacular success, grinding illegal crossings in the area almost to a halt. Agents who once groped in the inky gloom can finally see what they’re up against. Many wonder why this wasn’t done sooner, given the difficulty of tracking bandits and traffickers and undocumented migrants through the wild, chest-high scrub.

“Our agents would go down there into the elements, into the total darkness, where you wouldn’t know who’s out there or what’s coming . . . and it could be quite humbling, quite scary, really,” said Reynaldo Garza, assistant chief of the Border Patrol’s McAllen sector, which covers the Lower Rio Grande Valley. “There’s just so much vegetation. If you can’t eliminate it, at least you can illuminate it.”

Solving One Problem May Create Another

In solving one problem, however, the lamps may have created another. Shortly after the operation began, biologists at the Fish and Wildlife Service began voicing concern that the glare could disrupt the nocturnal activities of the region’s rare and cherished wild cats. They requested that the Border Patrol consider other alternatives, including adjustments to the height, angle and color of the 30-foot-tall, diesel-generated fixtures.

“We would like them to direct the lights in a way that won’t impact the tremendous amount of work that has gone into protecting the ocelot and the jaguarundi,” said William Seawell, a field supervisor in Fish and Wildlife’s ecological services division. Experts estimate that the ocelot population is less than 100; the jaguarundi is considered even more scarce. Both are small, bobcat-like creatures that hunt rodents in the dark brambles of the riverbanks.

“This corridor is critical to the survival and recovery of the species,” said Seawell, who also has asked the Border Patrol to consult with a recognized feline expert before it installs any more lights.

The prospect of a cat fight between two federal bureaucracies instantly captured the imagination of local reporters. “Operation Rio Grande Dividing U.S. Agencies,” declared a mid-September headline in the Monitor, a McAllen-based newspaper. Politicians rushed to take sides, leaving no doubt as to which agency would ultimately prevail.

“The federal government has all but lost control of the 1,200-mile border between Texas and Mexico,” the state’s two Republican senators, Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison, wrote in a letter to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. “We will fiercely oppose any efforts to diminish the impact or effectiveness of Operation Rio Grande.”

As it turned out, the Border Patrol and the Fish and Wildlife Service were far from feuding. Officials from both agencies had continued to meet, discussing their concerns rather amicably. By the end of September, they had settled on a tentative compromise--raising the lights 15 feet higher and aiming them more sharply at the ground--that allowed for most of the flood plain to remain illuminated while a thin strip of waterfront habitat escaped the beams.

What the episode did expose, however, was the inherent paradox of a river that is both an ecological marvel and a politically charged international boundary. No matter how much the Border Patrol and the Fish and Wildlife Service vow to cooperate, they still look at the same slice of real estate and see two fundamentally different worlds.

“Fish and Wildlife wants to buy everything up and reforest it,” said Walker, an avid hunter and fisherman who could be described as sort of a right-wing environmentalist. “If the Border Patrol had its way, this place would look like the moon.”

Agencies See River in Different Ways

There’s probably some hyperbole in that assessment, but not much. Since the 1980s, the Fish and Wildlife Service has been working to assemble the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, which it considers “the gem” of the national refuge system. Because of the region’s unique geography--a convergence of forest, desert, river delta and tidal flats--it’s able to sustain 11 distinct biotic communities, one of the most diverse natural settings anywhere in America.

To protect those habitats from encroaching development, the Fish and Wildlife Service has been purchasing an average of 4,000 acres a year, often abandoned farmland, then replanting it and coaxing it back to an overgrown state. The agency’s dream is to eventually piece together enough parcels to create a 132,000-acre wildlife corridor along the Rio Grande’s final 275-mile run, a ribbon of native brush from Falcon Dam to the Gulf of Mexico.

“The concept is to create a ‘string of pearls,’ so that these critters can move freely up and down the river,” said Larry Ditto, leader of the refuge project. “That’s where your greatest biodiversity is, where there’s water.”

The water, in this case, also happens to be the only barrier separating the United States from Mexico--and a notoriously porous one at that.

For years, the Border Patrol has fought a losing and sometimes lonely battle here, outnumbered by illegal crossers and outmatched by the jungle of vegetation. The turf is so rugged that agents sometimes have had to assign names to their official sentry posts based solely on the physical landscape: The Hackberry Tree, The Los Tomates Sand Pit, The Mesquite Wooded Area.

As anti-immigrant sentiment has grown, however, so has the political pressure to seal off that frontier. Before implementing Operation Rio Grande, the local Border Patrol sector received 70 new agents and dozens of new vehicles, not to mention the high-intensity lamps that now blaze over the hackberries and sand pits and mesquite like stadium lights over a football field.

“Before, you could be driving in the darkness and there could be 50 aliens hiding in the brush, and you could pass right by them and not even know it,” said Charles Dill, a 19-year Border Patrol veteran. “Now we can see.”

Land Holds Hidden Treasures, Hiding Men

If his vision for this terrain isn’t exactly lunar, it’s no secret that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s interests make his job a good bit tougher. Asked what these borderlands would look like in an ideal world, Dill didn’t hesitate. “Flat,” he answered.

For Walker, who once hosted his own TV show celebrating the Rio Grande’s splendor, the odd dynamic of the river couldn’t be more natural. As he guided a visitor down the levee roads that zig and zag with the water’s flow, he spotted quails and doves and mice and rabbits, pointing out pristine habitat and waxing on about the bloom of life.

In the middle of it all, a bare-chested man popped out of the brush.

“That’s a pretty good hiding spot,” Walker laughed. The man, taking no chances, dived back for cover.