Border fence divides U.S. government and landowners

By Ed Stoddard and Randall Mikkelsen

EL CALABOZ, Texas/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Standing on a grassy levee, Eloisa Tamez stares at the modest dwellings on her property near the U.S. border with Mexico and cannot imagine a wall running through it.

Tamez filed a class-action suit in February to keep the U.S. government from surveying her land for a border-security barrier. That puts her on the front-lines of a presidential election-year battle over an impatient Bush administration's efforts to get tough on illegal immigration.

"They are using very, very strong-arm tactics. They just want me to roll over and say yes," Tamez said as she looked over her 3-acre plot with two small houses, the remnants of a ranch that has been in her family since the 1700s.

Washington plans to build 670 miles of fencing along stretches of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border from California to Texas to help stem the tide of illegal immigration. More than 300 miles are already built, and the U.S. government is pushing hard to finish this year as mandated by Congress.

But opposition by landowners could slow the project, about 54 percent of which is to be built on private property, a government watchdog agency said in a report in February.

"Until the land issues are resolved, this factor will continue to pose a risk to meeting the deployments," the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said.

Tamez is one of many opponents along the border who are fighting the fence. Ranchers fear they will lose access to irrigation pumps; ecologists worry it will block the migration of endangered species such as the jaguar and ocelot; anglers and boaters do not want to be cut off from the river.

And in western states like Texas and Arizona, the government's concerns over illegal immigration clash with cherished values of landowner rights, which have helped sustain U.S. President George W. Bush's Republican Party in the region.