“Oh, but the ranchers on the river! Whatever will the ranchers on the river do without being able to water their cattle in the deep, clean waters (okay, not so deep, not so clean) of the Rio Grande?”
well if the rio grande could function as a moat then that would be a decent deterrent but it’s not an excuse to use to be against fencing all the other areas.
The idea that one can’t build a patrol road and a fence near a river is absurd.
There are hundreds of counties in the United States with difficult hilly and riverine terrain that have managed to build a road near a riverbank (and if you can build a road, you can build a fence next to the road).
Obviously, there could be breaks periodically for access to the river, which would at least serve as choke points to monitor what was going on at the border.
It’s one excuse after the other, because the businesses that use cheap Mexican labor to compete unfairly and shift their full costs onto others (not to mention the $15 billion drug cartels) have lots of $$$ to fill the coffers of anyone willing to mouth these excuses.