Just compensation

David Wick and his real estate partner, Roque De La Fuente, own a thousand acres of vacant property at the eastern edge of the 14-mile border between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico.

There, in the foothills of Otay Mountain, Mr. Wick planned to build a racetrack.

Now he’s in court, arguing the U.S. Border Patrol has executed a purposeful policy of double-fencing most of the border in the area, purposely funneling illegal immigrants into one or two stretches of open land where they’re easiest to apprehend — one of those corridors being his property.

The parcel is a favored crossing point because immigrants can easily scale the single, 8-foot border fence which remains the only barrier there. They then easily make their way through the hills to roads where smugglers pick them up and quickly drive them to urban areas.

“The Border Patrol’s presence on the property is hard to miss,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “Agents zip by in SUVs and all-terrain vehicles. Numerous motion sensors have been planted in the dirt. Portable light towers dot the landscape.”

Mr. Wick long ago gave agents permission to use his property. But he says his feelings about their presence changed a few years back, when they increased their activities in the area. Agents built a holding facility on his land. Detention buses crisscross the property and agents speed all over the acreage, rushing from one incident to another. It got so bad, said Mr. Wick, that agents ordered him off his own property, saying the land was actually owned by the government.

In effect, he now says, “OK, pay up.”

“Nobody can develop a piece of property that is crawling with aliens at night and Border Patrol vehicles and personnel 24 hours a day,” Mr. Wick’s attorney, Roger J. Marzulla, told the Times. Because of the Border Patrol’s strategy, Mr. Wick has been unable to develop or lease the property, his lawyer argues.

Mr. Wick stands behind the Border Patrol’s mission to secure America’s border, he says, but if the government is using his land — and preventing him from developing it — he should be paid. “If they need to use our property to do their jobs, that’s fine. But compensate us for it,” he told the Times.

The federal government has essentially occupied the land, so the property owners should be compensated as required by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which bars the taking of private property for public use without just compensation, Mr. Marzulla explains.

The government denies it’s purposely funneling the invaders onto Mr. Wick’s property. It also argues that federal law permits Border Patrol agents to enter private property within 25 miles of the border in pursuance of their duty, and that immigrants have been crossing in the area since the agency’s creation in 1924 — long before the current owners purchased the land.

Does the government really want to make a claim of adverse possession — that illegals have a right to cross the property because they’ve been doing it for so long?

“Entering property” now and then to arrest a lawbreaker is one thing. Setting up permanent housekeeping is something else again — precisely the kind of situation the Fifth Amendment’s “takings clause” was designed to handle.

If Washington needs the Wick-De La Fuente land to do its legitimate job at the border, the owners should be compensated.