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(CNN) - Three years after the chants of "building that wall" became a war cry of Donald Trump's candidacy, his administration is involved in an increasingly aggressive land appropriation along the border Southwest to make a new wall a reality, as CNN's review of federal court submissions shows.
As of November 15, the Trump administration had filed 29 eminent domain lawsuits linked to the construction of the border wall this year, compared to 11 in each of the last two years, according to federal court records. All but four of this year's lawsuits were filed in Texas. Eminent domain is the right of a government to confiscate private land for public use, while providing compensation.
Last month, in the Rio Grande Valley, construction began on the first new barriers along the border since Trump took office. The US Customs and Border Protection Office (CBP) expects to build about 4.8 kilometers of new wall in the coming months, an office official recently told CNN. Mark Morgan, interim commissioner of CBP, has said the agency wants to build 724 kilometers of new wall by the end of 2020.
Approximately 2,092 kilometers of the 3,130 kilometers border between the United States and Mexico do not have fences; These areas are often treacherous or privately owned land.
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A conservation group, Friends of the Wildlife Corridor, is among the landowners who are now in court. The United States government filed an eminent domain claim in July on a 29.1-hectare package that the group owns in the banks of the Rio Grande. For more than two decades, the group has worked to create a wildlife corridor along the winding river, and its members had planned to sell the 29.1 hectares to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, to connect two existing wildlife refuges, said board member and lawyer Paul Gaytan. But the new border wall has devastated that effort.
"Unfortunately, the end result of this litigation is that the government has the right to take the land," Gaytan said. “The only question is: what is fair compensation? What is the value of that land? … How do you put a price on this native habitat and the purpose for which it would be used? ”
Federal law requires the government to offer "fair compensation" based on fair market value, generally established through assessments. In some lawsuits, disputes are based on competitive assessments and disagreements about market value or the likely impact of the wall on the value of the land, lawyers said. In Cameron County, for example, the government has offered homeowners from $ 14,775 per acre to $ 67,405 per acre, according to the documents presented by the federal court in the current cases.
Eminent domain trials are the tip of a much broader effort to take private land, say lawyers representing landowners.
"The lawsuits are only a fraction of the sentences that have been resolved outside the litigation," said Ricky Garza, a lawyer for the Texas Civil Rights Project staff, who represents some owners.
Since 2017, the U.S. government UU. He has also submitted at least 35 notices, called “seizure statements,” in Starr and Cameron counties, confirming that federal authorities have acquired land or property easements through the eminent domain process.
While CBP leaders described the acquisition of land as “a challenge,” neither CBP nor the Department of Justice responded to CNN's repeated requests for comments on the demands or convictions resolved outside the courts.
CBP's internal emails, obtained by the Sierra Club through a request for the Freedom of Information Act and shared with CNN, show that in February 2018 the agency identified more than 1,100 parcels of interest along the path of the proposed border wall in southern Texas.
The process generally begins with the CBP by sending the so-called “right of entry” letters asking the owners to voluntarily grant the government the right to access their land to conduct soil studies and tests, as a prerequisite to possibly take the earth, said Garza.
The Trump administration has sent letters to dozens of private land owners in Texas and other border states to examine their lands for future border barriers, according to two US defense officials.
“The Letter of Right of entry grants the government permission to enter specific private lands to conduct environmental assessments, property studies, appraisals, geotechnical works and other exploratory work to facilitate the acquisition of land in the future and the construction of a border barrier in those lands, ”spokesman Cheryle Rivas told CNN in an email.
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The Texas Civil Rights Project has published radio and newspaper advertisements and has sent mass emails at various locations along the border to try to reach landlords who may be receiving the letters, Garza said.
“If you do not answer the letter, you receive a visit to your home from a Border Patrol vehicle, arriving at the house with an officer of the Army Corps of Engineers, an armed Border Patrol agent and, often, someone from the Department of Justice too, ”he said. Several owners described similar visits to CNN.
Karla Vargas, lead attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project, said many homeowners don't understand that they have the right not to sign the application for admission.
Nayda Alvarez, a school teacher in the city of Rio Grande, is a landowner who refused to sign. She said she has just under a hectare of land, adjacent to a plot of more than two hectares still in her grandfather's name. She strongly opposes the new barriers.
“Once, maybe twice, they called saying they wanted to come in and do a survey. (The letter) also said that they could enter and leave any property they had, and I said: 'No, I am not signing; and I don't like copywriting, '”he said.
CNN spoke with several owners and lawyers who gave similar accounts of the right of entry letter, which requests temporary access to privately owned land but does not reveal the consequences of not doing so.
"People do not know the reality and the seriousness of what is happening," Alvarez said. “They renounced the environmental laws that will affect us; They even renounced the Clean Water Law. The river is there. Where are we going to get our clean water? ”
In October 2018, the then secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen resigned from more than two dozen laws to accelerate the construction of the border wall in Texas, including the Endangered Species Act, the Law on clean air, the Clean Water Law, the Safe Drinking Water Law and the Migratory Bird Conservation Law, among others.
Until Tuesday, the government had not filed a claim of eminent domain against Alvarez's property.
Members of the Cavazos family, who own 25.9 hectares near Mission, Texas, were sued by the government for their land on November 5, 2018. They are worried about losing a large portion of that land, approximately 10.9 hectares, for the construction of walls, said Baudilia Cavazos Rodríguez.
The land has been in his family since the 1950s, he said. His brother and sister have more than 30 tenants living in their part of the property.
“My grandmother bought the land; He made my father and uncle sign it. After World War II, we planted cotton and had cattle, all kinds of vegetables, we had a boat ramp, ”he said. "We are devastated because this is something that my grandmother worked throughout her life."
She said her brothers depend on rent and “earn only about $ 30,000 a year. My sister Eloisa is a retired teacher, my brother is disabled in a wheelchair. If they put up a wall, we think those tenants will want to leave, ”said Cavazos.
On October 10, after 11 months of legal disputes, the government agreed to pay the Cavazos family $ 350 for access to inspect their property, instead of the $ 100 originally offered. Until Tuesday, the case had not passed to the acquisition phase.
There is relatively little dispute over the government's right to use eminent domain to acquire private property, especially when citing national security as justification, said Texas Civil Rights Project staff attorney Emma Hilbert.
"Many times, the delay is the name of the game" for the owners, he said. With a presidential election next year, there is always the possibility that a change in administration may mean a change in border policy. In any case, Hilbert said, the delay "is good for them as landowners, regardless of how the administration is now or within a year."
Scott Nicol, a longtime Sierra Club volunteer in South Texas, said the first round of border wall construction, just over a decade ago, offers an important lesson for homeowners who now face seizure of land.
“When the walls were built under the administration (George W.) Bush, if you accepted the first offer, you went very badly. Landowners who fought invariably got more money, ”he said.
A CNN analysis of 442 lawsuits from that previous round of border wall construction found that the owners were often offered much less than their land was worth and that at least a quarter of those who questioned the initial offers of the Government received more money. That figure does not include extrajudicial agreements. CNN discovered that some of the lawsuits also stopped construction at times.
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"The acquisition of land will remain a challenge," said Morgan, the interim commissioner of the CBP, at a press conference on November 14. “You could have a mile of land, again, on the southwest border, where previously you could have multiple owners, from 10 to 100 owners, who have a piece of that land. Sometimes records recede; The records were not so good. And it is a challenge to go through that process ... but again, I still think we are on our way to get the land we need for 724 kilometers. ”
Jim Chapman, vice president of the Friends of Wildlife Corridor, said his group planned to fight from the moment they knew the government had their sights set on their property.
“While many people agree because they don't see any way to fight it, they can certainly delay the process; That is what we are doing, ”he said.
Chapman says that due to agricultural development, there is very little weed and natural habitat along the river. Those few areas become magnets for hundreds of species of migratory birds and butterflies and those that live in the Rio Grande Valley throughout the year, along with endangered animals such as ocelots and jaguarundi.
"What is left is extremely valuable," he said. "That is why saving these 29-hectare plots is important, because there is very little left."
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