U.S. border with Mexico in El Paso, Texas.
While the U.S. Border Patrol has constructed fences along the Rio Grande within the City of El Paso, many rural property owners along border are resisting the building of fences on their land. Dozens of landowners in south Texas are fighting plans by the federal government to build a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. The property owners in the Rio Grande Valley have refused to let U.S. surveyors onto their land. The government is suing about 50 land owners to gain access, which it says it needs to complete nearly 370 miles of border fencing by the end of the year. Constitutionally, the U.S. government can use eminent domain to expropriate land to build border fences. Read about this dispute.
Los Ebanos, in South Texas, is the last hand-pulled ferry to cross the Rio Grande River.


Where the Rio Grande River makes a bend in El Paso, the international border fences are clearly visible. The bed of the Rio Grande has been cemented to control the water flow and to fix the location of the river as part of the solution to the international border dispute. On the United States side, a over-hanging curbed wire-fence runs next to the river, then a dirt surveillance road, then an outward-facing (towards Mexico) angled-wire fence, another dirt road, and another outward-facing (towards the USA) angled-wire fence. Some of the wire fences are electrified with warning signs. Electric lights and electronic surveillance (cameras) towers periodically run parallel to the fence. Check out the border in San Diego, CA.
Margaret Dorsey, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania who studies Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley, says many local families can trace their roots to the mid-18th-century Spanish land-grant program. Border Texans often speak fluent Spanish and have family and friends on the other side of the river. Students commute from Mexico to the university in El Paso, crossing in a special line that allows them to make it to class on time. They even pay instate tuition rates. That would be unthinkable in Arizona, where the fence is broadly popular.