Early this year, a delegation of officials from the City of Laredo traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with federal representatives about the Trump administration’s plans to completely wall off the Texans’ border community from the Rio Grande. The Laredoans returned using language that dismayed opponents of the president’s beloved border barrier. When City Manager Joseph Neeb briefed local elected officials after the Washington meetings, he cautioned them that opposing the wall altogether was “not the argument that we’re going to actually win with this administration.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says it plans to build “panels,” a term that could mean the 30-foot-tall steel fencing seen elsewhere on the U.S.-Mexico border, along all of the 40-mile stretch of the Rio Grande that passes through Laredo, one of the state’s major border cities and often the busiest commercial port in the country. This is a fate that Laredo has faced—and escaped—before.
