A small newspaper based in South Texas has discovered that the Department of Homeland Security has been lying to area residents and government officials alike regarding the level to which they have involved and informed local communities in the land-taking / fence-building process:

Chad Foster, Texas Border Coalition chairman, reminded the agency that to reject his coalition’s proposal would be in direct violation of a provision written into the Omnibus Appropriations Bill authored by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-TX, and Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, D-San Antonio, which requires the DHS to consult with local governments and communities located near the sites where the border fence will be built.

If the DHS doesn’t do this then the law says that funds won’t be released for the fencing, infrastructure and technology, until DHS proves they’ve complied.

The DHS immediately went on the defensive and said they complied by holding 18 town hall meetings gathering community input.

However, when the online news site, the Rio Grande Guardian, pressed DHS to show proof of those town hall meetings, DHS officials were forced to confess that none of the town hall meetings took place in the Rio Grande Valley (site of the staunchest resistance to the fence) and that the majority of those so-called town hall meetings were actually “briefings” held at border patrol stations.

As Del Rio Mayor Efrain Valdez told the Rio Grande Guardian, “We have learned that we can’t trust Michael Chertoff. He will say one thing and do another. When he has met with the Texas Border Coalition, he has said one thing to our face and done something else behind our back. I don’t trust him anymore.”

This sounds an awful lot like the tactics we’d use whenever we neglected to do assigned readings in college. We’d insist we did and then start making shit up and blame it on the fact that we were reading a different edition. And then we’d build a fence along the middle of the classroom. And when people were like “Hey, stop building that fence?” And we’d look coyly over our shoulder and whisper, “We don’t see any fences…”

Small Border Newspaper Catches Department of Homeland Security in a Big Lie [Latina Lista]