Dear Agent Montoya,

I am writing in response to your letter of May 22, 2002, a response to my letter of April 29, 2002.
I take no issue with the United States Border Patrol's performance of its statutory immigration duties on my property or anywhere else along the border. I do, however, have a problem with the interruption of my ranching enterprise and the destruction of my private property. I now have a problem with you disputing my word and calling to question my honesty and integrity as a citizen who has every right to ask for a review of the practices of your agency that impinge on my rights.
It may be your belief that your agents do not enter my property south and east of Laredo and that your agents "only patrol those areas of property that lie within 25 miles of the international border." Those are flawed assumptions on your part. I with my own eyes regularly see your agents on our Aguilares-Mirando City property which is more than 25 miles from the border. I spoke to seven or eight of them just a few weeks ago in the month of May, one of whom I had seen just the day before. The name of one agent comes to mind as Agent James. When I complained to one agent in particular about traffic, he gathered up by radio six other agents on the property so that I could speak to all of them. This was in front of my home before which they had passed as my ranch hand and myself stood there. They did not have the courtesy to stop and identify themselves.
You state in your letter that the lack of information I have provided you as to time and dates "makes it very difficult" to address my concerns and you therefore summarily dismiss my contention that Border Patrol agents hunt for arrowheads on private property. Check their pockets. Do you not keep records or call logs of any of the numerous calls I have made to your office over the years? If you kept adequate records that reflect that you act on the concerns of those of us who live here, you will find that I called when my son and I, flying in a small aircraft over our ranch, spotted a USBP helicopter on the ground inside our ranch 50 miles from the river. Two uniformed agents were hunting arrowheads. I called the Laredo office about the incident, gave them my name and the time and location of the sighting, everything but the agent's names.
You state that the Laredo sector has conducted very few helicopter operations over my property in the past few years and that most of the flights are "over highways and the areas adjacent to them." My ranching operations are in those areas adjacent to highways, and I see your aircraft frequently. They even go so far as to hover over my daughter's house north of Laredo. While most of us ranchers agree that your helicopter pilots are safe and competent in the air, we also agree that they are not cowmen and that they have run herds of cattle through fences by flying too low and scaring them.
In your point-on-point refutation of the veracity of my concerns, you have said, "The Laredo sector does not operate unmarked vehicles on your property." Two of your agents in an unmarked vehicle identified themselves as Border Patrol agents, once to my ranch hands and on another occasion to one of my children and went about tending to the sensors you have on our property north of Laredo. We called in a complaint about this. My neighbor on the adjacent ranch found one of your unmarked vehicles on his property and removed all four wheels until your agents walked up to the ranch house to ask for the wheels so they could get off his property.
You concede that while USBP vehicles may travel on my ranch during wet conditions, it is a rare occurrence. You also state that the rutting of my roads could be from vehicle traffic from oil field workers, ranch hands, hunters, my family or friends. I find this galling, because the vehicles that cut donuts and rutted my roads on my property just north of Camino Colombia were marked USBP vehicles, and this was attested to by my ranch hands and my children. Furthermore, that ranch is not leased for minerals and there is no oil field traffic. If an oil field company had reason to be on that property, it would be required to put down caliche to traverse our land and it would be required to stay on the caliche. I do not have family members or employees who do not know better than to rut roads in wet weather.
You do not believe that your "agents have seriously disturbed hunters" on my property. If you disturbed them at all, that's serious. What is the interest of your agents in our hunting operation? Illegal activity drops in those colder months, yet your agents are increasingly vigilant during hunting season. This was very evident last hunting season to the extent that your agents chased down my son-in-law at dusk at high speeds with lights flashing. Your agents have come before daylight and approached a blind with a hunter in it. What do you think that does to the hunter and to his idea of whether or not he's getting what he paid for in a lease? I got calls and taped messages almost every day from hunters last season about problems with your uniformed agents. I played the most disturbing of those messages for Agent Vidal who said he "didn't know where" his men were. If I were a federal bureaucrat who didn't know where my men were, I'd be looking for another job.
Mr. Montoya, please don't issue such patent and unbelievable disclaimers for how hard your agency tries to keep a low profile during hunting season. You may believe this because it is recorded somewhere in the reams of written policy that give your agency directive, but out here on the ranches the acts of individual agents do not reflect your rhetoric.
I am particularly galled by your lack of "knowledge of any other fences or gates being cut or removed by Agents." You make reference to one recent incident in which your agents cut all five strands of a reasonably new barbed wire fence on my property that is more than 25 miles from the Río Grande. Like any prudent rancher would have, I repaired it immediately. What you fail to reference is the incident two years ago involving two agents who showed up from within our ranch to exit at the gate guard's trailer. The gate guard keeps a log and she knew they hadn't entered the property earlier. The agents had no explanation. They were lost. It turns out they cut boundary fences between the Barrosito Ranch and our property. The gate guard got their names and their vehicle number and this information was forwarded to your office. Could your agents be issued a compass and then taught how to use it?
In another incident two years ago, again more than 25 miles from the border, U.S. Border Patrol agents came into our property, but never came out. They had cut the boundary fences between us and my neighbor Bobby Fulbright and then cut a fence again between Mr. Fulbright and the Uribe Ranch so they could find their way to a road that would get them home. My son Primo found the cuts. In that case, our cattle mingled with the neighbor's herd. The incident, which merited a visit from a special federal investigator, is well documented. Agents pieced the fence together in a very poor way, in a way that told us how unimportant they thought fences or fence cutting was.
Shame on you, Mr. Montoya, for answering me as though my concerns were of an insignificant and unfounded nature.
Your wholesale dismissal of my concerns as lacking in information reflects precisely what is wrong with your agency. Somewhere along the long and expensive corridors of your bureaucracy, which we taxpayers fund, has come an edict for your agency to act with impunity and with disregard for the rights of others. Your refusal to take my concerns seriously, which reflect Agent Lauro Vidal's cavalier responses to me in the past, and the actions of all your superiors from Laredo to Washington, are indicative of this widespread attitude that the U.S. Border Patrol has the authority to move through this part of the country with complete disregard for the property rights of those who live here on the border. Your refusal to believe that there is anything wrong and that there might exist something to holler about, sets the stage for further animosities and engenders discordant and unproductive relationships between agents and landowners.
If the USBP had a way to look at this in a detached and rational problem-solving way, the way a business would look at how best to work alongside the landowners of this region -- a way in which you would first have to admit a problem exists -- it might become clear to all of you that to many of us ranchers on whose land you traverse, we no longer believe you act in our best interest. This is a trend I began to notice about three years ago due not only to increased damages on my property but also due to your general lack of regard and response to my concerns.
You may have statutory authority to enter private property to perform your mission, but you do not have authority to destroy my property, disrupt my business, or infringe on the quietude and the way of life I have enjoyed here with my father and brothers and our families and now with my grandchildren. Every time your agents tear across my property like they own it, I reaffirm to myself that this should not be the case.

Sincerely,
Gene Walker