Residents and property owners along the U.S.-Mexico border have complained about the construction of fencing. In South Texas, where opposition has been widespread, land owners refused to give the government access to property along the fence route. The government has since sued more than 50 property owners in South Texas to gain access to the land.

Environmentalists have also complained about the fence because they say it puts already endangered species such as two types of wild cats — the ocelot and the jaguarundi — in even more danger of extinction. They say the fence would prevent them from swimming across the Rio Grande to mate.

"Unwilling to consult with local communities or to follow long-standing laws, Secretary Chertoff chose to bypass stakeholders and push through this unpopular project on April Fool's Day," Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope said in a statement. "We don't think the destruction of the borderlands region is a laughing matter."

Chertoff has said the fence is good for the environment because immigrants degrade the land with trash and human waste when they sneak illegally into the country.

Using Chertoff's logic, you know what would be real good for todo el mundo? If we put a triple-layered, laser-mounted, cement-sunk fence around all the fatcats like Bush and Cheney and Chertoff who don't care about destroying the planet or starving out the poor or the well-being of anything aside from their own crony-peppered circles because it is they—the elite, gross, bloated, greed-weighted faction of humanity that is a waste and a cancer on the surface of this beautifully-peopled ecomarble.