Misplaced priorities at the DHS. Hopefully, we’ll soon turn our collective attention to more pressing matters.
Jim Hightower: Why ‘homeland security’ is so often despised – poconorecord.com – The Pocono Record
The Department’s charm was on glaring display just before Christmas, when it sued the Nature Conservancy to condemn land near Brownsville, Texas, for the project. The conservancy owns and runs a unique 1,000-acre preserve along the Rio Grande, and the federal wall builders wanted to take a 60-foot-wide strip from the preserve, amounting to about eight acres.
Why fuss over eight acres? Well, you’d assume that the wall would be going up on the actual border, but no. They want to build this section a mile and a half from the border, thus putting three-fourths of the preserve in a no-man’s land between the wall and Mexico. The most critical part of the wildlife habitat, and even the home of the preserve’s manager, would be cut off by the wall, effectively destroying the park, which is home to two kinds of endangered wildcats and a rare palm forest.