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Credit: Martin Do Nascimento

Inside the federal government’s haphazard, decade-long process of seizing private land for a border fence.More in this series

More than a decade ago, the federal government began taking private property to build a border fence in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed that landowners were paid unevenly – different amounts of money for similar plots of land. Nowhere was that disparity more evident than on Oklahoma Avenue, a two-lane farm road in Brownsville where the fence ends. 

This video is part of The Taking, a project looking at how the federal government abused its power to seize property for a border fence.

 Learn about The Texas Tribune’s policies, including our partnership with The Trust Project to increase transparency in news.

Todd Wiseman was the senior editor for video and multimedia at The Texas Tribune, where he worked from 2010 to 2023. Todd previously worked at the Austin School of Film and Synthetic Pictures and interned...