ALAMO — The Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge is at an ecological crossroads, where the coast meets the desert and the endangered ocelot roams among Sabal palms and prickly pear cactus.

It’s also in the crosshairs of a political tug of war over President Donald Trump’s border wall.

Hundreds of wildlife enthusiasts and community organizers, indigenous groups and concerned citizens turned out Saturday for the 75th anniversary of the 2,088-acre refuge situated along the Rio Grande to oppose a towering barrier that would be built through it and their communities.

“A lot of people from the outside try to tell the story of what’s going on around the border,” said Edward Vidaurre, McAllen’s poet laureate and a member of #PoetsAgainstWalls. “We deal with the stash houses and ICE agent raids, we have the immigration detention centers, it’s all here.”

The Rio Grande Valley is at the confluence of many hot button issues of the day: illegal immigration, border security and the so-called Dreamers chief among them. Yet voices from deep South Texas often are drowned out by the shouting in Washington over policies that most affect border communities.

“We’re trying to change the perception of the Rio Grande Valley,” said Amanda Elise Salas, a community organizer in the Valley. “This is about Santa Ana, this is also about a monument of racism constructed right in the middle of a culturally different place.”

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Over Trump's first year in office, a hard-line approach to immigration has largely defined his presidency. He asked Congress for $1.6 billion to fund 60 miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley, and 14 miles of replacement wall in San Diego, Calif.

Amid heated negotiations, Democratic congressional leaders offered to support the $1.6 billion for a wall at the Mexican border, then came to an impasse earlier this month over the fate of Dreamers, sending the government into a three-day shutdown.

Building a “big, beautiful wall” from San Diego to Brownsville has been Trump’s signature campaign promise, yet White House chief of staff John Kelly recently suggested the president’s views on a wall had since “evolved.”

Trump now wants to open a path to citizenship for as many as 1.8 million young unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children in exchange for $25 billion in wall funding. But Trump’s latest plan, while praised by some, was blasted by Democrats and some Republicans. Even Breitbart News, a faithful media ally of the president, attacked him as “Amnesty Don.”

“It’s a really inhumane thing,” U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela Jr., D-Brownsville, said outside the refuge, “to trade off something that’s deeply personal to a lot of people for what at the end of the day is a campaign promise that by some accounts (Trump) didn’t really believe in.”

Vela’s district covers Santa Ana.

In September, Trump announced an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, created by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Congress was given until March to find a permanent solution for the Dreamers; however, a federal judge this month temporarily blocked the program from ending to allow lawsuits challenging the administration’s decision play out in court.

About 700,000 people are enrolled in DACA, which shields them from deportation and gives them the right to work legally.

For the nearly 30,000 DACA-eligible people in Cameron and Hidalgo counties, the program opened the possibility of a life beyond the border region. It allowed Dreamers such as Abraham Diaz, 24, to travel through one of the interior immigration checkpoints located along highways miles north of the border with Mexico.

Though DACA has afforded him the opportunities his parents hoped for when they brought him from Mexico as a child, Diaz said, the tradeoff of increased immigration enforcement of border communities isn’t worth making.

“Even with a pathway to citizenship, getting the border wall 10 miles south of my house and more agents puts more pressure on my family,” Diaz said. “I’m not willing to throw my parents under the bus.”

Visitors from across Texas and the country descended on Santa Ana for Saturday’s rally donning “No Border Wall” T-shirts and carrying signs calling for protection of the ecosystem.

On a swath of farmland gone fallow adjacent to the refuge, DACA recipients, activists and members of the Carrizo-Comecrudo Tribe of Texas spoke of the legacy of hardship that border communities have endured even as farmworkers harvested vegetables on neighboring farms under the watchful eye of Border Patrol.

Dozens of organizations sponsored Saturday’s rally, including ACLU Texas, Frontera Audubon, Sierra Club Borderlands and Humane Borders.

Kay Smith, 69, of Austin held a sign that read, “The Only Wall We Need Is Around Trump.” She was joined by her sister, Sharon Spencer, 71, of Marble Falls.

“I think a wall is a waste,” said Smith, a retired special education teacher. “I think we can use technology better.”

They are not alone with that line of reasoning. Before retiring earlier this month, Gil Kerlikowske, the Customs and Border Protection commissioner under Obama, said building a wall along the entire Southwest border would not prove effective.

Still, the agency maintains that threats at the border are substantial, and efforts to thwart illegal activity would be greatly aided by a physical barrier, in addition to beefed-up manpower and technology.

Just this month, border agents arrested a Mara Salvatrucha gang member wanted in El Salvador in the slayings of a Salvadoran police officer and the officer’s daughter. Agents also caught four sex offenders and one convicted killer, recovered $2.4 million worth of marijuana and 80 pounds of cocaine and apprehended dozens of immigrants crossing the border illegally

“Border walls create an enforcement zone, which includes patrol roads, lights and surveillance technology which allow agents the best possible conditions to secure the border,” the Rio Grande Valley sector of Border Patrol said in a statement. “Infrastructure, technology, and personnel coupled with strong law enforcement partnerships will make for safer communities.”

During a visit to the refuge in December, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said construction of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico would begin with 2.9 miles of levee wall and bollard fencing and clearing a 150-foot enforcement zone around the barrier in Santa Ana.

Despite considerable opposition to the wall, stopping it from being built through Santa Ana is an uphill struggle.

Last August, homeland security waived environmental and other laws to take land near San Diego for replacement wall and to test wall prototypes. Last week, the agency announced it will sidestep 30 laws on a 20-mile stretch in New Mexico. Many anticipate homeland security will exercise its waiver authority to build the wall through Santa Ana, too.

Passed by Congress in 2005, the Real ID Act provides sweeping authority to the homeland security secretary to waive laws as he or she deems necessary. The following year, the department used its newfound waiver authority to seize land to build 650 miles of barrier under the 2006 Secure Fence Act.

Of that, about 54 miles of border wall and fence cut through communities, farmland and parts of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge corridor.

“Congress said, ‘We want you to build this border wall very quick, and here’s how you can get rid of the lawsuits,’” said Brian, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based environmental group challenging the limits of homeland security waiver authority in federal court. “Congress didn’t say provide DHS with the authority to do away with all of these laws forever.”

For local businesses that depend on the money ecotourism provides, walling off Santa Ana in a no man’s land threatens to eat away at the more than $463 million visitors spend across the Valley.

The wall is an even greater threat to the fragile ecosystem it took years to cobble together, said Jim Chapman, the vice president of nonprofit Friends Wildlife Corridor.

Nearly all of the Valley’s native habitat had been cleared for farming until conservationists in 1979 started buying back land from willing landowners, stretching from Falcon Dam at Zapata to the Gulf of Mexico.

Today there are around 100 tracts of refuge land up and down the Rio Grande. With 400 bird species and 300 butterfly species found at Santa Ana, the refuge is the crown jewel of them all.

When the Rio Grande floods, refuge lands along the river become inundated. The last time the river surged beyond its banks, back in 2010, Santa Ana was submerged for six months. At the time, many animals escaped the rising water over the earthen levee. Next time, Chapman says, many terrestrial animals might be facing a different fate.

“The consequences are known, it’s more like acceptable collateral damage,” Chapman said of a wall through Santa Ana. “When the next flood comes, nothing will get out. It will be almost biblical.”

anelsen@express-news.net