Texas Rancher Sues Feds, State After Finding Surveillance Camera on His Property

By Jason Buch and Joana SantillanaFebruary 12, 2018 Updated: February 12, 2018 7:57pm

A long-running feud between a South Texas rancher and the Border Patrol has escalated into a civil lawsuit after the rancher confiscated a surveillance camera he found on his property.

The suit filed by Ricardo D. Palacios, a lawyer who lives on a ranch near Encinal, north of Laredo, against federal agents and a Texas Ranger raises questions about how much leeway law enforcement officials have to enter private property near the border.

Congress has given the Homeland Security Department permission to patrol private property within 25 miles of the border without a warrant, but experts say the courts have never defined how much authority agents have on private land. Federal agents cannot enter “dwellings” without a court order.

If a judge finds that his property is outside the 25-mile zone, as Palacios has asked, the lawsuit might not resolve those questions.

Palacios’ dispute with the Border Patrol dates to at least 2010, when, the suit filed in November alleges, one of his sons was “body-slammed” by agents at an immigration checkpoint several miles south of Encinal. The son was detained for about 90 minutes, then released, according to the suit.

Several hours later, about 3 a.m., a standoff developed between Palacios and his sons, who also live on the property, and a group of agents gathered at the ranch gates. A Border Patrol supervisor eventually defused the situation, but Palacios alleges that he frequently finds agents on his property.

After one such incident, Palacios confiscated “a 1/2-inch diameter, white fiberglass spike about 2½ feet long with a round, 3-inch red reflector affixed at the top” that he found embedded in the ground, according to the suit.

Border Patrol agents apparently didn’t protest when Palacios took the spike — the suit says he still has it — but when he found a surveillance camera attached to a mesquite tree near his house and took it down, agents with Customs and Border Protection and the Texas Rangers started calling him. The suit says a Ranger eventually threatened to arrest Palacios if he didn’t return the camera.

The suit says Palacios believes that CBP agents and Rangers cooperated to place the camera on his property, “in violation of (his) property and constitutional rights.”

Palacios has asked a federal judge in Laredo to declare his property outside the 25-mile zone in which the Border Patrol can go on his land. He’s also asking for $500,000 in damages for mental and emotional distress and for unspecified punitive damages.

Officials with the Border Patrol and the Texas Department of Public Safety said they couldn’t comment on the pending litigation. The Texas attorney general’s office, which is representing Texas Ranger Mario Martinez, filed a motion to dismiss the suit, saying Martinez was acting in his capacity as a law enforcement officer and has qualified immunity.

Palacios referred questions to his attorney, Raul Casso, who said neither the state nor the federal government had authority to be on Palacios’ property and shouldn’t have been installing surveillance devices without a judge’s order.

“The government is peeking around where it’s not supposed to without any judicial oversight,” he said.

Casso rejected the state’s position that Martinez was acting within his rights as a law enforcement officer.

“It’s not us against the good guys,” Casso said. “We’re on the side of the law. We’re enforcing the Constitution and the laws that emanate from it. The government and its agencies need to respect private property and the individuals whose property it is.”

The Border Patrol has interpreted the law as giving it latitude to operate on private property, said Efrén Olivares, the racial and economic justice director at the Texas Civil Rights Project. However, the courts haven’t defined “patrolling,” and it’s not clear if the law allows Border Patrol agents to place sensors or cameras on private land, Olivares said. Last year, the organization operating the National Butterfly Center in Hidalgo County after the center’s executive director found CBP contractors clearing brush on private property.

The camera Palacios found on his property appears to be part of Operation Drawbridge, a multimillion-dollar effort by DPS that began in 2012 to build a “virtual wall” along the border. The agency has purchased 4,359 cameras, similar to wildlife cameras popular with ranchers but capable of connecting to cellphone towers, for about $300 a piece and has installed them across South Texas, according to DPS.

The cameras can be monitored by the state’s Border Security Operations Center in Austin, the six Joint Operations Intelligence Centers DPS has along the border and CBP officials. According to a DPS presentation to Congress last year, the images captured by the cameras can also be viewed by local law enforcement officers and by ranchers who have access through a password-protected webpage.

State troopers might be able to enter private property within the 25 miles and install a Border Patrol camera if they’re working with Homeland Security, Olivares said. But the law doesn’t allow state or local law enforcement to go on private property without a warrant, even within the 25-mile zone granted to the Homeland Security Department, nor does it allow state or local law enforcement agencies to place cameras on private property.

“The statute grants that authority to DHS agents or employees, not any other state agency or county agency or city police department,” Olivares said. “It doesn’t mean that within 25 miles, any agency, state, local, can enter private land.”

The state may have found a way around that. Testifying before Congress last year, DPS Director Steve McCraw told lawmakers: “The state of Texas has provided Border Patrol agents more than 4,000 low-cost, high-capability cameras to detect smuggling activity along the border.”

“If they are giving it to the Border Patrol, they’re free to do it, and now it’s no longer the property of DPS,” Olivares said, meaning the Border Patrol could then put the cameras on private property within the 25-mile zone.

However, it would be difficult for the state to bring criminal charges against Palacios, as Martinez, the Ranger, allegedly threatened.

“If that’s what they are doing, it is then Border Patrol’s property,” Olivares said of the camera.

If a judge finds that Palacios’ property isn’t within 25 miles of the Rio Grande, the issue of whether the Border Patrol has access to his property is likely rendered moot. The zone tracks the loops and bends of the river, but Palacios’ lawyers say the closest the border comes to his ranch is more than 27 miles from his property line.

“We hear about this happening to people, but it’s sort of isolated incidents. … And it doesn’t necessarily rise to a lawsuit,” added Olivares, who’s based in the Rio Grande Valley. “But it’s still abuse of authority by CBP agents, so I’m glad there’s a lawsuit taking this on, because there’s a problem of Border Patrol and CBP agents doing more than the law allows them to do, and they trespass on private property.”

But Palacios’ suit points to bigger problems with increased surveillance across the border, said Chris Rickerd, policy counsel for border and immigration issues at the American Civil Liberties Union. Drones, surveillance blimps, license plate scanners and facial recognition technology are all potential invasions of privacy, he said. As evidence, he pointed to the 2016 arrest by Border Patrol of a woman and her young son at a baseball game in La Joya after DPS cameras recorded them going into the bushes to relieve themselves.

“The question really becomes what sort of surveillance is really looming over every border resident in their daily lives?” he asked.

What follows is relevant here, but I keep a cope on my profile page.

Courtesy of Travis McGee:

“The True History of the Southwest, 101”

The amount of historical idiocy and fallacies surrounding the history of the Southwest is staggering, chief among them the “Aztlan” fairy tales. What’s the truth? How did the Spanish Europeans conquer the Southwest? The “conquistadores” (that means “conquerors”) did it with the lance, and the lash.

For example, in 1541 Coronado entered present-day New Mexico (which included present-day Arizona during the Spanish era) searching for the “lost cities of gold.” One of his first actions upon meeting the natives was to burn 100s of them alive in their dwellings, for not handing over suspected horse thieves. That is how Spain conquered the natives of the present US Southwest—not with hugs and kisses. It was certainly no love-fest between long-lost brown-skinned soul-mates, as it is often portrayed today by the delusional Aztlaners, who spin the “new bronze race of Mestizos” toro-mierda.

By 1821, Mexico City was strong enough to overthrow the even more decrepit and ineffectual Spanish rule. However, the distant provinces of the current U.S. Southwest were far beyond the reach of the authority of the independent but strife-torn government of Mexico City. These distant northern provinces received neither military protection nor needed levels of trade from the south. Under Spanish rule, trade with the USA was forbidden, but at least Spain provided trade and Army protection from hostile Indians. Under Mexican abandonment and neglect, the Southwest received neither trade nor protection from Mexico City.

For example, Comanches and Apaches ran rampant in the 1830s in this power vacuum created by Mexican neglect, burning scores of major ranches that had been active for hundreds of years and massacring their inhabitants. Mexico City could neither defend nor keep the allegiance of its nominal subjects in these regions. Nor did it provide needed levels of trade to sustain the prior Spanish-era standard of living. Mexican governmental influence atrophied, withered and died at the same time that American pathfinders were opening up new routes into the region.

Increasingly, a growing United States of America was making inroads into the Southwest, via ships into California, and via gigantic wagon trains of trade goods over the Santa Fe Trail from St. Louis. The standard of living of the SPANISH in these provinces subsequently increased enormously, which is why they did not support Mexico City in the 1846-48 war. In fact, the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the Southwest NEVER considered themselves “Mexicans” at all, ever. They went, in their own eyes, from SPANISH directly to AMERICAN. To this very day, if you want a punch in the nose, just call an Hispanic native of New Mexico a “Mexican!”

So how long did Mexico City have even nominal jurisdiction (in their eyes) over the American Southwest? For only 25 years, during which they had no effective control, and the area slipped backwards by every measure until the arrival of the Americans. The SPANISH inhabitants of the Southwest NEVER transferred their loyalty to Mexico City, because all they received from the chaotic Mexican government was misrule, neglect, and unchecked Indian raids.

Since then, how long has the area been under firm American control? For 150 continuous years, during which time the former Spanish inhabitants of the region, now American citizens, have prospered beyond the wildest dreams of the Mexicans still stuck in Mexico. To compare the infrastructure, roads, schools, hospitals etc of the two regions is to understand the truth. The Mexican government has been mired in graft, corruption, nepotism and chaos from the very start until today. The ordinary Mexican peons have been trampled and abused, while only the super-rich elites have thrived. This is why millions of Mexicans want to escape from Mexico today, to enjoy the benefits of living in America that they can never hope to obtain in Mexico.

And because today Mexico is a corrupt third-world pest-hole, (despite having more millionaires and billionaires than Great Britain), we are now supposed to let any Mexican from Chiapas, Michoacan or Yucatan march into the American Southwest, and make some “historical claim” of a right to live there?

From where does this absurd idea spring?

At what point in history did Indians and Mestizos from Zacatecas or Durango stake a claim on the American Southwest? Neither they nor their ancestors ever lived for one single day in the American Southwest. The Spanish living in the Southwest in 1846 stayed there, and became Americans by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. There were no Spanish inhabitants of the Southwest who were marched to the border and driven into Mexico. It didn’t happen. The SPANISH in the Southwest welcomed American citizenship, which brought stability, protection from Indian raids, and a vast increase in their standard of living with the increase in trade.

In summary, NO current inhabitants of Mexico have ANY claim on even one single inch of the Southwest!

NOT ONE citizen of Mexico is sneaking into the USA to reclaim property their ancestors were deprived of, NOT ONE.

They are criminal invaders and colonizers, pure and simple.

It’s time Americans learned the true history, as a counter to the prevalent Aztlaner fairy tales.

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