“They trusted the government.” Journalists recount their investigation of a government land grab along the U.S.-Mexico border

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Our investigative team’s latest series just hit. It’s a joint project with ProPublica that takes a deep, multifaceted look at the secretive history behind one of the largest land grabs in modern U.S. history, all for the purposes of building a border wall along the Texas-Mexico border.

It’s called “The Taking” and you can read the first installment here. Lead reporters Julián Aguilar and Kiah Collier are giving readers a behind-the-scenes look at their experiences in the Rio Grande Valley while reporting the series.

Thanks in part to reader support, The Texas Tribune was able to devote several months and more than $10,000 to reporting “The Taking,” covering everything from public records requests to research, travel, photography and more.

Here’s what our reporters had to share about reporting on border security and immigration in Texas.

Q: How were your interactions with Rio Grande Valley residents when reporting “The Taking?”

Julián: Our interactions were varied. We encountered people that were happy to talk about their experiences, who’d drive us around on their land and explain, in detail, what happened with their cases and how long it took, among other things. Most of them said they were doing what they felt was a patriotic duty to sell the government their land in order to help secure the country’s borders.

Others weren’t happy at all to see a group of reporters. Some of them thought they had been burned by other media outlets prior to our visit and had had enough by then. Others simply wouldn’t talk to us at all. You can’t blame them too much, however. They’ve been going through the process for almost 10 years and were exhausted by it by then. And still others seemed annoyed at having to revisit everything, but opened up a bit more once we started talking about the story and what we were trying to accomplish.

Kiah: A lot of people whose land was seized by the federal government had kind of forgotten about it because it was 10 years ago, but when reminded of it a lot of them were still really bitter — particularly people who later found out they didn’t receive as much money for their land as their neighbors did.

Q: What surprised you or jarred you most during your reporting?

Julián: What surprised me was how some people couldn’t — or said they couldn’t — remember the details of their cases. Some folks were even a little fuzzy on how much they were paid.

Kiah: One resident we were talking to pointed to me during the interview and asked what would happen if he raped me. And we were like, “Uh, you would go to jail?” He said, yeah, and compared that to how he felt when the government took his land, i.e. the government raped him but nothing would ever happen to them.

Q: What did you see in the Valley that you wish you could have included in a story but didn’t?

Julián: I would have preferred to include more voices. There are some people who were flat-out ripped off because they didn’t know any better. That is, they trusted the government to pay what was fair but got less (a lot less) than what some of their neighbors got. There was one family who got very, very little and if our address searches were correct, lived in a very run-down part of town. I wish we had been able to contact those people and add their voices in our copy.

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