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THIS WEEK: In mid-December, eight Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials met with the leaders of the National Butterfly Center, a private 100-acre nature and wildlife sanctuary set to be bisected by Trump’s border wall as soon as February. In a 2-hour conversation, officials revealed alarming new details about the wall’s environmental footprint and likely impact on tourism — though many questions were left unanswered. “They have been completely uncommunicative, and generally they have obfuscated or straight-up lied,” Marianna Treviño-Wright, the director of the National Butterfly Center, told the Observer. “So I’m glad we at least had this opportunity to put them on the spot for answers — or non-answers, as they often gave.”
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The Lede
Trump’s Wall Is Coming to Texas. Meet Its First Victims.
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- Fred Cavazos has lived his entire life along a bend of the Rio Grande. In his late 40s, Cavazos began losing the strength in his legs — the result of a polio-like virus — and he uses a wheelchair now.
- With help from a sister, who lives next door, and a cousin, he stays busy enough: He tends a handful of cattle and goats and helps with landlord duties for about 30 riverside lots that the family rents out. The rentals bring in about $30,000 a year, which supplements Cavazos’ Social Security and his sister’s pension.
- But the Trump administration has other plans for Cavazos’ land: He aims to put it — along with a butterfly refuge and a state park — on the wrong side of a 30-foot border wall.
- “We hate to lose this place,” said Rey Anzaldúa, Cavazos’ cousin. “We’ve lost land, and lost land, and lost land, and here they come again.”
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Sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin's Briscoe Center
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An officer with the Austin Police Department tries to redirect UT students marching south on Guadalupe St during an anti-Vietnam War protest on campus, circa 1968-1972. University Archives, UT Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History.
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UT Austin’s Briscoe Center was founded in 1991. One of the nation’s largest archives for Texas and Southern history, the center’s collection strengths have evolved to include American news media history and photojournalism, congressional and political history, and the history of public commemoration. These collections are open to the public for research in the center’s recently renovated reading room on the UT Austin campus. The foundation of countless academic pursuits, these collections also provide inspiration for the center’s own books, documentaries, exhibits, programs, and digital projects.
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From the archives
The Night Martin Luther King Jr. Came to Dallas
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What’s Happening at the Observer
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