US President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” has become the trademark of his presidency. It is the promise that more than any other has energized his base and riled his opponents, and his dogged attachment to it has now brought a large part of the US government to a historic 25 days of partial shutdown.
The potency of Trump’s wall — for his supporters and his detractors — stems from its simplicity. Build it tall, build it wide — he has pledged 1,600km of it — and the US will be safe again.
Yet how does that uncomplicated notion compare to the complexity of the border itself? Taken as a whole, the 3,145km of US-Mexican border is a place of astounding diversity — of terrain, land use, city and countryside, and ethnicity. It traverses desert, river, mountain and sea.
Illustration: Constance Chou
There is also diversity of political views among the 7.5 million people who live in US border counties. Some are ardent backers of Trump’s wall. Others see their future, and the future of the US, as being inextricably linked to that of their neighbor to the south.
FRIENDS
Hike 45 minutes past salt marshes and sand dunes, down a lonely beach empty but for occasional tourists on horseback, and you arrive at a steel fence that juts out into the Pacific Ocean.
This is where Trump would like to start building his wall should he find the billions of US dollars necessary. With the impasse over funding, which prompted the shutdown, administration officials have started to describe what is already here, as well as repairs to a 3km stretch of fence in Calexico, 160km to the east, as Trump’s wall. They are not.
The length of wall that has been built by Trump since he entered the White House in January 2017 is zero.
This is the westernmost point of the US-Mexico border, on the outskirts of San Ysidro, California, a suburb of San Diego that is home to one of the busiest border crossings in the world. Here, the hopes of thousands of migrants who try to make it to the US every year are often dashed.
The fence stretches out just to where the waves break and reaches 4.6m to 6m, not the looming 30 feet (9.1m) that the president has demanded.
Adjacent to this stretch of fence is Friendship Park, a patch of binational ground where loved ones from both sides of the border are allowed to meet. The name is paradoxical given the hostility that Trump has engendered since he began his wall obsession.
Outside Friendship Park — which only takes 10 visitors at a time — separated families and friends must make do with waving at each other from a distance. Today the US side is unpopulated save for a lone American, and on the Mexican side a father and young boy are looking northward.
“USA,” the man said, pointing through a slot for his son’s benefit.
From San Ysidro, the fence extends for 74km of the next 97km of border before finally giving way to the unforgiving desert. That is 74km out of a total of 1,053km of fencing that already exists, much of it in various stages of disrepair.
Those hundreds of kilometers of double reinforced fencing and wire meshing were the product of a different era in politics, when some degree of bipartisan consensus was possible. They were largely funded by the Secure Fence Act, an immigration compromise reached in 2006 under then-US president George W. Bush.
Compromise appears unthinkable these days. Trump has laid out a vision of the border that is harshly binary: On his side of the territorial line there is the rule of law, hard work and freedom; on the other side there is criminality, gangs and drug smuggling.
The purpose of the wall, in Trump’s dystopia, is to prevent the US from being overrun by the dark forces billowing out of its neighbor.
In his Oval Office address to the nation last week, Trump said: “Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now.”
However, talk to people in San Ysidro on the US side of the border and they will tell you about fear and intimidation inflicted on them by the US government.
In this town, where 90 percent of residents speak Spanish at home, the land south of the border is not equated with lawlessness and evil, but with family, friends and affordable healthcare. If there is a dystopia, it is not the Mexican one of Trump’s imagining, but the hardened militarism that is fast emerging on the US side, replete with helicopters, barricades and armed border patrol.
“The feeling like you’re in a war zone is so dramatic the last couple months,” said Lisa Cuestas, head of Casa Familiar, a non-profit organization that provides social services to San Ysidro.
Militarization sped up after the arrival in Tijuana, on the Mexican side, of the caravan of Central American migrants that Trump made so much of during the US midterm elections in November last year, calling it an “immigration invasion.” Now members of the caravan are stuck in Mexico and barbed wire has proliferated everywhere, like a mutant weed.
Estrella Flores has family and a job in San Ysidro, working with youth at Casa Familiar, but she lives in Tijuana with her husband and 18-month-old child. Her commute has become hellish since Trump’s border crackdown.
“The first time I went across the border where they had the barricades, and the barbed wire and the helicopters I was like: ‘Am I in a war zone? What’s going on here? I’m just trying to get to work,’” Flores said. “This isn’t just a friendly crossing, it could turn very bad, very quickly.”
Such views are commonplace across California.
A poll conducted by the San Diego Union-Tribune after Trump’s Oval Office speech found that 56 percent of Californians opposed the idea of the wall, compared with 34 percent in favor.
That is not surprising for a state that is a leading force of progressive politics in the US. However, California is also significant for having more undocumented migrants than any other state — 2.4 million to Texas’ 1.7 million.
Close by is the site of Trump’s eight wall prototypes. He came here in March last year to pose for photographs in front of the giant slabs of concrete and steel. Now they languish and rust.
According to a later report by the US Government Accountability Office, the eight model sections were riddled with design and construction flaws.
US Customs and Border Protection tested the slabs and found that they can be breached.
DEATH IN THE DESERT
The first light glistens off the frosted spines of the cholla cacti as 30 volunteers in neon-yellow shirts fan out to comb the desert under a pale pink sky. Ely Ortiz, the leader of the Aguilas del desierto (“Eagles of the desert”) rallies his team, who have driven through the night from San Diego to Ajo, Arizona.
He tells them that the last time they searched this area they found 11 sets of remains.
The volunteers are joined by a team of cadaver dogs to help in the grim search. A dog called Zabra, whose last job was looking for victims of the California wildfires, is unaccustomed to the desert terrain and has to stop every couple of hundred meters to have barbed spines yanked from her paws.
Unexploded ordnance dropped by the US military in training is one element of danger for migrants.
Trump can already count on a metaphorical wall here. This is the most frequently traveled, but also most deadly, migrant corridor across the Sonoran Desert.
Water is scarce and temperatures rise above 50°C in the summer months. The official border patrol count records 7,209 deaths along the southwestern border over the past 20 years, but that is almost certainly a gross underestimation.
Despite the human tragedy, US federal prosecutors have seen fit to prosecute nine volunteers with the humanitarian group No More Deaths. Their offense: “littering” and driving on restricted roads in the Cabeza Prieta reserve when responding to search and rescue calls.
The nine on Tuesday faced trial in a federal district court in Tucson. Four were on Friday convicted on some of the charges brought against them, and could face up to six months in prison and a US$500 fine each, the Arizona Republic reported.
“The irony is that they tell us we can’t drive here or leave water because it’s protected wilderness, but meanwhile border patrol drives their trucks and ATVs [all-terrain vehicles] off-road, and fly helicopters and drones wherever they want,” one of the nine, Parker Deighan, told reporters.
Trump’s policy of “prevention through deterrence” is forcing migrants to take greater risks. As legal admission to the US through official ports of entry becomes ever more restricted, migrants are being “funneled” away from fenced sections of the border toward the desert.
One of the only towns in the area is Ajo. Today it is a ghost town, as its copper mine closed in the 1980s. Since then, most residents have switched to the main local job provider: border security.
Ajo Samaritans recently gathered in the plaza for a vigil to honor the lives of the people who succumbed in the surrounding wilderness. They laid out 118 white crosses, one for each of those lost last year. Those whose bones had yet to be identified were called desconocido — unknown.
MARKING AN ENTRY
Before Trump decided to throw a bone to his voter base during last year’s election campaign by sending more than 5,000 active-duty troops to the border, the gate at the Lukeville port of entry in Arizona was almost always open. US tourists, seeking to flee the winter, would blithely pour through heading for the beach at Rocky Point, an hour’s drive south on the Mexican coast.
Trump’s border clampdown has not only cramped the style of beach lovers as they pass through the now half-closed gate. Over the past two months, the US military has brought with it concertina wire and a double stack of shipping containers, ready to be used to block the entry as an impenetrable barricade should another caravan — or “immigrant invasion” — arise.
Not that there is any sign of that. Most of the traffic through Lukeville is commercial and passenger, and the main concern of federal agents is not migrants, but drugs.
It is one of the myths propagated by the Trump administration that the US is awash with drugs that have flooded into the country because of the lack of a wall.
In his Oval Office address last week, Trump said that “the border wall would very quickly pay for itself” by halting the flow of illicit drugs — implying that narcotics came into the US through sections of open border.
That is not true. Most illegal drugs are hidden away in cars and tractor-trailers as they pass over international bridges, and through small ports of entry like Lukeville.
Last year’s annual drug threat assessment of the US Drug Enforcement Administration said that for drugs such as heroin, up to 90 percent enters the country through ports of entry.
Another contradiction is that Trump insists on immigrants showing up legally at border crossings, yet for those who do so he has made it increasingly difficult to claim asylum.
In November the Trump administration announced that it would deny asylum to anyone who tries to cross the border illegally, although a federal court has since temporarily blocked the new regulation.
Meanwhile, a new system of “metering” has been introduced that amounts to a federal slowdown at legal entry points. As a result, growing numbers of increasingly desperate families, most coming from the trio of violence-ridden Central American countries — Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — have been left stranded in Mexico.
At Lukeville, asylum seekers following Trump’s orders and showing up legally at the port of entry have simply been turned away.
Reporters spoke to Alberto — not his real name — in a shelter on the Mexican side. In November, he presented himself at Lukeville and asked for asylum.
The supervising agent there told him to leave, claiming that it was out of hours. Alberto was left on the streets where, days before, mafia members had told him that they would kill him if they saw him again.
Volunteer groups working with immigrants protested, and the border patrol apologized.
Now when asked whether they accept claims, Lukeville agents repeat the official mantra: “Asylum seekers are being accepted at all ports of entry.”
That does not mean that claims will be successful. Alberto tried a second time to have his claim heard. He is testify before an immigration judge in one week.
THE TWIN CITY
There is no place along the border that more strongly rebuts Trump’s dystopian vision than El Paso, Texas. The city is so intertwined with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande to the south that they are virtually inseparable.
Between them they are home to almost 3 million people — about the size of Chicago.
About 20,000 pedestrians and more than 35,000 vehicles cross into El Paso from Mexico every day, many to work, others to go to school or shop.
It is two-way traffic: Americans in El Paso also regularly cross into Juarez to visit family or experience the nightlife.
Eighty percent of El Paso’s residents are of Hispanic origin and a quarter of the city’s population was born outside the US.
Mary Gonzalez, the Democratic State Representative for El Paso in the Texas House of Representatives, said: “It’s a very generous, diverse, multinational, welcoming and loving community. That human component is left out when the border is discussed.”
Retail sales on the US side of the twin cities are estimated to generate US$10 billion a year, with one-fifth attributed to Mexican shoppers.
Against that reality, Trump has painted a picture of rampant crime and the threat of violence being imported into the US. That is a particularly loaded argument for El Paso, given the historically high murder rate in neighboring Juarez.
Last year saw the homicide rate rise again to almost 200 people killed each month. Yet crime in El Paso, on the US side of the border, remains relatively low. Violent crimes have fallen sharply from about 6,500 in 1993 to about 3,000 today.
That is why Beto O’Rourke, the rising star of the Democratic Party and a former US representative for this strongly left-leaning city, lauded El Paso as the “safest city in America” as part of his US Senate election campaign in November last year. (His claim was not entirely accurate — fact-checkers found that it was only “half true.”)
O’Rourke failed in his bid to unseat US Senator Ted Cruz in the midterm elections, but him coming within three points of doing so suggests that Texans might be more open to his liberal stance on immigration and less in step with Trump than is often assumed.
Opinion polls show that while most Texans are concerned about immigrants entering the country illegally, most are also opposed to Trump’s wall.
Some people go as far as to suggest that El Paso could be a harbinger of things to come for the whole of the US.
“El Paso is a place where there is a vision of the future, where people, instead of being part of a closed defensive community, are able to find the joy of relating to others,” Center for Inter-American and Border Studies director Josiah Heyman said.
THE RIO GRANDE
Travel 64km east from El Paso along the Rio Grande to Tornillo, Texas, and it feels a world away from the big city. Vast open areas are filled with orchards, and pecan nut and dairy farms.
US border patrol vehicles keep a watchful eye.
Much of the 2,120km of border with no fence or human barrier lies along the 2008km of the Rio Grande. The river serves as the demarcation line between the two countries all the way from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico.
Powerful currents, towering canyons and cliffs, which in the Big Bend section rise to 15m, reduce the need for a solid barrier through much of the river’s trajectory.
Still, Trump has his eyes on the Rio Grande for his wall. Of the US$5.7 billion that he is demanding from the US Congress, a sizeable chunk would go toward building more than 160km of wall along the river.
Here, just outside Tornillo, the existing fence that runs west to Sunland Park in New Mexico has a 16km gap in it. Despite the lack of an artificial barrier, most local residents go about their daily routine without fuss.
Miguel Alvarez, who has lived close to the border for 25 years, said that the arrival of the fence has made precious little difference.
“You still see small groups of people passing through just like they did before any fencing,” he said.
A farmer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that he would feel more comfortable if the gap in the fencing were closed.
“I haven’t had any issues with people coming across, but you never know,” he said.
Tornillo itself fell under the national spotlight after the Trump administration chose the Marcelino Serna port of entry south of the town to house thousands of unaccompanied minors in a tent-like facility.
It was meant to be temporary, designed to help deal with hundreds of children who had been separated from their families as a result of Trump’s crackdown on border crossers.
However, the facility rapidly grew to up to 2,400 beds, becoming the face of the brutality of Trump’s policy of tearing families apart as a form of deterrent.
In November last year, a government watchdog warned that conditions in the tent city were putting children at risk and since then, the numbers have been reduced until the last teenager was transferred out of the facility last week.
As far as locals are concerned, its closure could not happen fast enough.
They are eager for things to get back to normal. Or at least as close to what passes as normal these days.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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