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BISBEE JUNCTION — When the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps approached Richard Hodges earlier this year and offered to construct a barrier along his 0.9-mile stretch of borderfront property, the proposal seemed almost too good to be true.
“I live in Podunk, Arizona, and a company comes along and says, ‘We’re going to spend $100,000 on your property with no strings attached,’ ” he said.
“Well, that’s quite an offer.”
 Ed Honda-Herald/Review Richard Hodges talks about the location and distance a fence, which will be constructed by the Minutemen, on his property along the U.S./Mexican border. The fence will be located 61 feet north of the border and will be 9/10ths of a mile in length. |
But then county officials called and suggested they might have veto power over the proposed structure — an Israeli-style barrier featuring two parallel 14-foot fences topped with razor wire. After some investigation, officials ruled that the fence was acceptable, but gave citizens 30 days to appeal the decision.
As those 30 days counted down, Hodges heard little from the Minutemen. When the appeal period finally elapsed on Aug. 17 without public objection, there was still no word of a groundbreaking date.
But then came an announcement last week that a Washington-based company had donated close to $7 million worth of fiber-optic fencing materials to the effort. And on Wednesday morning, in the first physical act of fence construction, a Minuteman-hired engineer arrived at Hodges’ ranch to take exploratory ground samples.
With a backhoe busily digging away behind him, the offer that at first seemed too good to be true was finally starting to look like a certainty to Hodges.
“From what (the Minutemen) have told me, it is going to happen,” he said. “And I do believe that something is going to be built here.”
The plan, Hodges said, now calls for the Israeli barrier to be constructed about 10 feet in from the outer edge of his land with the high-tech security fence fronting it on the border side.
Hodges has long maintained that his primary interests in having a fence built are to stop drug-smuggling vehicles from tearing across his property and to keep his cattle off the border road. In fact, he recently lost one cow when she wandered onto a cattle guard along the road and broke two legs.
And while the Israeli barrier alone could likely take care of the cattle and drive-through issues, Hodges does not object to the addition of the high-tech fencing.
“It won’t do anything for me per se,” he said. “But if it will help law enforcement in stopping the illegal activity around here, I’m all for it.”
The sensor fence will presumably be monitored at an offsite location with information relayed back to local law enforcement.
Hodges grew up in Bisbee, has routinely crossed over to Mexico and has worked alongside Mexicans whom he considers friends. He says he regrets that some people have misconstrued his desire for security as a form of prejudice.
In one interview with a TV reporter, Hodges said he was asked what he does when he sees illegal immigrants on his property. He replied that he calls the Border Patrol. “So you hate Mexicans,” the reporter responded.
Hodges expresses doubts about certain hard-line anti-illegal-immigration activists who he believes hide a “hidden agenda.” He talks of bringing migrants, especially those with children, into his home to warm up on cold days. And he feels pity for those who are preyed upon by the nefarious characters lurking in the deserts on the other side of the border.
Hodges remembers one man, an unemployed carpenter, who came to his door and told him that a mugger in the desert had robbed him of his wedding band.
The stolen ring had been a family heirloom.
“They stole his ring, and for what?” he asked. “So that somebody down there can have a new Tahoe?”
It is stories like those, he says, as well as the drug-trafficking vehicles racing across his ranch and the all-too-frequent cartel-law enforcement shootouts that make him a proponent of tighter security at his stretch of the border.
“We are not against immigration,” he said. “We are against illegal activity on the border.”
Hodges still does not know exactly when his border barrier will be fully in place — the technical complications of the fiber-optic fence make a construction timetable difficult to nail down, he says.
But in the meantime, the federal government seems to be wasting no time in trying to beat the Minutemen to the punch. Sixty feet away from the edge of Hodges’ ranch, across the dirt border road shared by local ranchers and the Border Patrol, National Guardsmen are busy with their own machinery, pulling out the five-strand range fence and primitive rail vehicle barriers that separate the United States from Mexico.
They plan to replace it with a combination of 12-foot sheet metal fencing and vertical pole barriers that will eventually form part of a 40-mile wall stretching from Douglas to the Huachuca Mountains.
Asked if he felt at all wistful that the landscape he had grown up with would soon be scarred with several tiers of border fencing, Hodges acknowledged some misgiving.
“I’ve sat up on top of that hill, and I’ve even slept up there,” he said, pointing to a rocky bluff at the southern end of his property. “It’s really pretty up there as you’re looking out over the land, and I’ve had a reaction myself as I’ve seen all these new houses moving in.
“But we are responding to a situation that is very, very real.”
herald/review reporter Jonathan Clark can be reached at 515-4693 or by e-mail at jonathan.clark@bisbeereview.net.
Ezai I. Martinez wrote on Jun 24, 2009 7:58 PM: