LA Times By Molly Hennessy-Fiske Apr 18, 2018
A decade ago, Juan Cavazos watched as government authorities built a border wall on two acres of his land in the Rio Grande Valley. To smugglers, they created a barrier. To Cavazos, they created a problem.
The Rio Grande winds here, and with it, the border. Because the river sometimes changes course, walls have to be built some distance away from its banks. Cavazos, like many property owners in the valley, has land in Brownsville, south of the wall that is still part of the United States, so the Border Patrol installed an electronic gate and showed Cavazos, 75, a retired teacher, how to operate the keypad.
Cavazos said the gate works, but has not stopped smugglers.
"There's another gap a block away," he said. "Trump wants to build the wall, but they need to close the gaps first."
And there are lots of gaps. On the 1,954-mile southern border, 654 miles are blocked by a fence or wall. That's particularly troubling in the Rio Grande Valley, the epicenter for drug and migrant smuggling. This region in southern Texas has 316 miles of border and only 55 miles of barriers, with 35 gaps that were left without gates for lack of funding.
More:
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-border-wall-gates-20180418-story.html
