They delivered blunt news to ranchers and farmers, sheet metal workers and university professors, auto mechanics and wealthy developers: The federal government was going to build a fence to keep out drug smugglers and immigrants crossing into the United States illegally, they told property owners. The structure was going to cut across their land.

The government would make a fair offer to buy property, the agents explained. That was the law. But if the owners didn’t want to sell, U.S. attorneys would file a lawsuit to seize it. One way or the other, the government would get the land. That, too, was the law.

    The visits launched the most aggressive seizure of private land by the federal government in decades. In less than a year, the Department of Homeland Security filed more than 360 eminent domain lawsuits against property owners, involving thousands of acres of land in the border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

  Years before President Donald Trump promised to build his wall, Homeland Security erected an 18-foot-high fence here — at a cost of $18.2 million, to cover almost half of the Valley’s 120 miles — in a botched land grab that serves as a warning for the future.

An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune shows that Homeland Security cut unfair real estate deals, secretly waived legal safeguards for property owners, and ultimately abused the government’s extraordinary power to take land from private citizens. 

The major findings:

 ● Homeland Security circumvented laws designed to help land owners receive fair compensation. The agency did not conduct formal appraisals of targeted parcels. Instead, it issued low-ball offers based on substandard estimates of property values.● Larger, wealthier property owners who could afford lawyers negotiated deals that, on average, tripled the opening bids from Homeland Security. Smaller and poorer landholders took whatever the government offered — or wrung out small increases in settlements. The government conceded publicly that landowners without lawyers might wind up shortchanged, but did little to protect their interests.

● The Justice Department bungled hundreds of condemnation cases. The agency took property without knowing the identity of the actual owners. It condemned land without researching facts as basic as property lines. Landholders spent tens of thousands of dollars to defend themselves from the government’s mistakes.

● On occasion, Homeland Security paid people for property they did not actually own. The agency did not attempt to recover the misdirected taxpayer funds, instead paying for land a second time once it determined the correct owners.

● Nearly a decade later, scores of landowners remain tangled in lawsuits. The government has already taken their land and built the border fence. But it has not resolved claims for its value.

Determining who owned certain property also slowed the process. Records were missing, or families had multiple members claiming ownership. In one case, Homeland Security offered to pay the city of Brownsville $123,100 for nearly 16 acres abutting the Rio Grande. It turned out the land was owned by the city — but 257 other people also had claim to the property.

The errors and disparities played out up and down the length of the border fence.

The Loop family spent more than $100,000 to defend their farmland from repeated government mistakes about the size, shape and value of their property. The government built a fence across Robert De Los Santos’ family land, but almost a decade later has yet to reach a settlement for it. Ranch hand Roberto Pedraza was accidentally paid $20,500 for land he did not even own.

Homeland Security and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers referred questions to the Justice Department.

A Justice Department official, who insisted on anonymity, said all agencies involved in the land seizures followed proper procedures. The agency did not respond to specific written questions sent by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

“[F]or any large public works project impacting hundreds of properties, the values are likely to cover a large range because so many different kinds of property are being acquired,” the official said. “It is these very differences in uses that cannot be captured in a cursory statistical analysis of the properties acquired and the prices paid for these lands.”

Michael Chertoff, the former secretary for Homeland Security under President George W. Bush who personally approved the condemnations in Texas, declined to comment.

Greg Giddens led the fence building project at Homeland Security. Now retired, Giddens said his team faced pressure from both U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which wanted the fence built quickly to benefit law enforcement, and from Congress, which set a deadline to complete the structure.

“Everybody wanted to do this right. But it was clear that the mission was to get this done,” Giddens said.

Hyla Head, the former Army Corps official who oversaw the condemnation process for the agency, said the government did everything according to regulation.

“There is a process that we have to follow and we followed that,” said Head, now retired. “I think we did a damn good job with the constraints that we were under.”

On Oct. 26, 2006, President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act. President Obama oversaw the fence’s construction. All told, Homeland Security built 654 miles of fence — just short of the 700 mile goal set by Congress — at a cost of $2.4 billion.

Now Trump has promised to finish the job with a much larger wall — nearly twice the height of the current fence, made of concrete, and occupying much of the remaining 1,300 miles of southern border unguarded by a physical barrier. His administration has declared its intent to take more land to build the wall in the central Rio Grande Valley, where much of the property remains in private hands.

For Trump to succeed, the federal government will have to file more eminent domain lawsuits using the same law that resulted in uneven payments the last time. Many of the players who oversaw construction of the fence are now working on making Trump’s wall a reality.

Grab the land now, discuss price later.

The Homeland Security officials in charge of building the border fence were getting nervous.

Congress had set a deadline to complete the project: Dec. 31, 2008. But people in the Rio Grande Valley were refusing to sell; the land agents had closed only 22 deals. On Dec. 7, 2007, Chertoff announced his decision: If landowners wouldn’t cooperate, the government was going to take the land. They had 30 days to decide.

“We would of course like to reach an agreement with the landowner,” he told reporters. “But if we are unsuccessful, we are prepared to use eminent domain.”

 Over the following seven months, Homeland Security filed 330 lawsuits against scores of landowners along the Rio Grande. Most of the targeted acreage was farmland. But homes, golf courses, businesses and even nature preserves were sliced into pieces.

All told, the agency built 50 miles of fence in disconnected strips 40 to 60 feet wide — and seized a total of 564 acres. A process that can take years for a single parcel had been compressed into months.

The seizures were made possible by a piece of paper called a Declaration of Taking — an alternative to traditional, slow-moving eminent domain lawsuits that allowed the federal government to quickly build public works projects.

By using a so-called quick-take, a federal agency gained title to a person’s property on the same day it filed a declaration of taking in court. The bulldozers could roll as soon as a judge approved an order to possess the land. The landowner was almost powerless to stop the process.

The law required the government to pay fair market value. The landowner could take the money, but also could try to convince the government to pay more — a process that could take years.

“They can just grab the property now and worry about the price later,” said Robert H. Thomas, past chair of the American Bar Association’s eminent domain committee. “It’s a pretty potent tool.”

Homeland Security deployed a second tool to make it easier and faster to seize land. It issued a waiver that eviscerated a federal law designed to protect property owners from unfair seizures.

The so-called Uniform Act required the government to formally appraise land worth more than $10,000 before taking an owner to court. The government’s initial offer to buy property was supposed to be as close as possible to the final, full value of the land, priced at its “highest and best” economic use.

But with virtually no public notice, Homeland Security took advantage of a legal loophole and increased the appraisal threshold to $50,000 for property seized along the border.

Of 197 tracts seized by Homeland Security in the Rio Grande Valley, 90 percent were valued at less than $50,000.

In place of formal appraisals, Homeland Security directed the Army Corps to assign values to targeted land. Army Corps evaluators did not have to be certified appraisers, they did not have to identify the owners, and they didn’t need precise legal descriptions, called metes and bounds, to spell out property lines.

Tudor Uhlhorn, 58, a local politician, farmer and business owner, was perplexed by the federal offer to buy land he owned along the Rio Grande. Homeland Security sent him a map that appeared to be taken from Google Earth, with a red rectangle drawn around the targeted tract.

When he asked for more information, the Army Corps sent a letter: “The accelerated schedule that is necessary to meet the Congressional mandate will not permit the completion of the ground survey before acquisition,” it read.

  “They were building the fence on me without a full set of plans. They had no plans they could show me,” Uhlhorn said. “They just said it starts sort of in this area here and it ends sort of over there.”

    For owners with lawyers, payments jumped 200 percent

   As the federal lawsuits started, the Justice Department, representing Homeland Security, urged the federal judge overseeing most of the cases in the Valley to appoint a land commission — composed of local real estate experts to determine property values — to let small landowners plead their cases without the expense or formal procedures involved in a judicial hearing commission.

    “In order to achieve fair, uniform compensation awards expeditiously for all affected owners (represented and unrepresented) in the Rio Grande Valley, appointment of a commission is required,” Virginia Butler, the chief of the Justice Department’s real estate acquisition section, warned in a motion to Brownsville-based U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen.

   Hanen rejected Butler’s request, saying a jury trial was the best forum for the cases. When it came to negotiations between the government and landowners, Hanen declared that he would be “hands off.”

    Hanen’s confidence was misplaced. As the lawsuits played out in court instead of before a commission, Butler’s dire predictions came true. Payments were unequal and lawsuits dragged on for years, according to a review by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune of 197 cases in the Rio Grande Valley where the government took possession of property from landowners. The review did not include cases which remain open, or temporary land seizures.

    The analysis showed that landowners fell into three groups.

    The biggest group was made up of landholders of modest means, many elderly, some Spanish-only speakers. They didn’t hire attorneys and took the government’s initial offer. Half the lawsuits had that result. The median settlement was $8,000. The median seizure was just over one-third of an acre.

    Under federal guidelines, Homeland Security was supposed to evaluate the worth of a piece of land before building the fence, and its worth afterwards to estimate the full damage to a property because of the fence.

    But many in the Valley weighed the offer on a price-per-acre basis at a time when the best irrigated cropland was selling for $10,000 an acre. To those who didn’t know about the formula, the government offers seemed generous — at first.

    The Army Corps offered the Cavazos family $21,500 for the loss of two acres of their 30-acre property wedged between the Rio Grande and Oklahoma Avenue on the eastern edge of Brownsville.

    Juan Cavazos, a teacher and his wife, a secretary for the school district, didn’t want the fence. But who were they to fight the government?

    Juan Cavazos learned later that nearby landowners got higher payments than he did for similar parcels of land. He also believes the barrier has permanently reduced the resale value of the land now caught between the river and the fence.

    “At the time, we thought it was a fair offer,” Cavazos said. “The people who didn’t hire the lawyers got screwed.”

    The second group of landowners included many who didn’t hire a lawyer but had some familiarity with the workings of government — they were local, state or federal employees. Or they had connections to power brokers like local attorneys or politicians. Or they were simply comfortable negotiating directly with the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Of the 131 lawsuits in which landowners had no attorney, 30 settled for an increase of 33 percent higher than the government’s median offer. The payment for a median one-third acre tract increased from a median of $6,000 to just under $8,000.

For most people who had the money, hiring a lawyer proved a smart investment. Not everyone with an attorney got more money — but those who did reaped significant returns.

For about 30 landowners represented by attorneys, the jump between the government’s median opening bid and its final offer was 207 percent — from an offer of $13,100 to a settlement of $40,305. (In another 20 cases, the final settlement included additional land, making direct before-and-after comparisons difficult.)

The reason for the huge jumps became apparent during the battles between landholders and government attorneys: The Army Corps’ evaluators had consistently undervalued the land.

   Take the case of Rollins Koppel. In 2002, Koppel and his investors bought 420 acres of vacant land wedged in a prime location between Brownsville and Matamoros, its sister city across the river in Mexico. They planned a neighborhood of affordable homes and parkland to be known as Amigoland.

   Homeland Security offered Koppel $233,000 for a little more than six acres of land that would cut through the planned development. Koppel hired one of Texas’ top law firms, Vinson & Elkins to fight back.

   After three years of litigation, Homeland Security paid Koppel $4.9 million. That was the highest payout for any property in the Rio Grande Valley, and it represented a 2,043 percent increase from the government’s initial estimate of fair market value.

    In the end, even that might not have been enough. Koppel was never able to get the subdivision built. He died earlier this year at 88. His attorney did not return phone calls seeking comment.

    In another part of Cameron County, Ray and Frank Loop and their cousins, Tim and Paul, were working more than 5,200 acres on contiguous properties. Though the barrier didn’t make much sense to them, they welcomed the idea of better border control.

    In Ray and Frank’s case, the government announced its intention to take 5.5 acres. The compensation would be $210,000.

   Ray Loop talked it over with his family. He decided to fight. He hired one of the best-known eminent domain law firms in Texas, a boutique outfit called Barron Adler. Steve Adler, the politically connected co-founder, would become Austin’s mayor. (Adler also provided initial funding for the launch of The Texas Tribune.)

    They settled with the government, receiving $1.4 million for the loss of 11 acres.

   Meanwhile, Tim and Paul Loop decided to accept the Army Corps’ initial offer — a payment of $160,000 for the damage to their farming operation caused by the fence. It would run across seven acres on scattered strips of land. The price seemed right.

    “It was our desire to not be an obstruction to our government’s getting a job done,” Tim Loop declared in a deposition. “We wanted to do our patriotic duty.” Nobody told the family that the money was supposed to represent all the losses to their farming operation.

    Only after Ray and Frank’s experience did they realize the government had shortchanged them. Tim and Paul tried to reopen negotiations. But by then, it was too late. The government already owned the land.

    In the end, the government took additional land to build the fence and paid Tim and Paul $400,000 for the loss of 20 acres.

    “We trusted our government to treat us fairly,” Tim Loop wrote. “We trusted the representatives of the government to be honest and forthright when dealing with us.”

    A $20,000 payment to the wrong owner

    Roberto Pedraza, meanwhile, hit the jackpot — just not the way he ever imagined.

Pedraza was one of several property owners who were paid by the government for land that they did not own.

Pedraza spent most of his life working as a farmer and foreman for rancher Rex McGarr, who willed 114 acres of Hidalgo County farmland to Pedraza and his wife, Olivia.

But McGarr’s death led to decades of legal wrangling between other beneficiaries and attorneys for the estate. In 2008, the year Pedraza was first approached by an Army Corps land agent, he still wasn’t clear on what was legally his. But the federal government seemed to have figured that out for him.

   “I told him, that person from the government, that [there] was a legal matter on this property,” Pedraza said. “And [the government official] said, ‘Well, according to the records… you own it.’”

    In September 2008, Pedraza was paid $20,500. He and his wife used the money to pay off longstanding bills.

    More than six years passed. Then, one day in 2014, a government representative contacted them. After completing title research, the Justice Department realized that the land had not belonged to him — it belonged to his neighbor, who the government had already paid $45,000 for 3.4 acres of his sugar cane farm.

    The government offered Pedraza a deal. He could keep the money, so long as he signed a document disclaiming ownership to the land.

    “The government came in and said, ‘Look if you give the right of way … then you don’t have to pay,’ ” he said. “I said, ‘Fine,’ because I knew this thing was a big mess.”

   The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, which produces investigative journalism in the public interest, partnered on this project to expose the federal government’s unsettling use of eminent domain to seize land for a fence along the U.S -Mexico border. Learn more at texastribune.org. 

  The Texas Tribune's reporting on this project was supported by the Pulitzer Center, which is also the lead partner in bringing discussions of this report to schools and universities in Texas and across the United States through its K-12 and Campus Consortium networks.