Thread: This Is What the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall Actually Looks Like

Our photographer visits the most talked-about stretch of land in U.S. politics.



Story and Photographs by James Whitlow Delano
PUBLISHED MARCH 4, 2016

The candidates for president of the United States, particularly on the Republican side, have hotly debated how to handle the roughly 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) border between the United States and Mexico.

Donald Trump has famously and repeatedly promised to seal the border with a wall if he's elected. He and others have promised to send people who illegally crossed the border—a number that appears to have leveled off—back to Mexico. For these people, the border wall isn't an abstraction. Many parts of the border are already covered in fences. In other spots, the wall is not made of bricks, but out of scanners, drones, and guards.

Photographer James Whitlow Delano has visited the border several times in the past decades as these walls have gone up. These are his photos and stories:

In the photo above, the border wall separates Jacumba, California, from Jacume, Mexico, in the high desert. Even after the first border barricade was built here in the mid-1990s to disrupt human and drug traffickers, residents of Jacume could cross freely into Jacumba to buy groceries or to work, and children would be brought across to go to school or to the health clinic. Since September 11, 2001, security has turned a ten-minute walk into a two-hour drive through the official border crossing in Tecate, segregating these communities from each other. After ten years, Jacume, a village of 600, was called "a black hole," where even Mexican federal agents had been held hostage for attempting to extort money from smugglers.



A double border wall near San Diego blocks undocumented migrants from using the Tijuana River—located on the other side of the second fence—as a corridor into the U.S. In the 1980s, entire families would rush across the border, believing more of them would get through the gantlet if the U.S. Border Patrol was overwhelmed. Here, in the 1980s, I watched waves of frightened Mexican families, young and old, run through, trying to evade Border Patrol agents and, at times, risking life and limb by crossing a busy freeway nearby. This wall put an end to the runs.



When I first visited this spot in San Diego, where the border meets the Pacific Ocean, in 1982, there was a single corrugated steel wall that ended at the top of the beach. Helicopters circled above, but it was still physically possible to walk straight into Mexico or vice-versa. At the very end of the wall, on the Tijuana side, someone had spray painted "sin fronteras" ("without borders"). Now the wall extends into the breaking waves.



This lonely stretch of border is known for banditry.

For all the talk of sealing the border, this valley about 19 miles (30 kilometers) from the Pacific Ocean has no wall at all. From the U.S. side, it's forbidden to go any farther than the gate seen in the lower right, but the gate is the only physical barrier.



A parked U.S. Border Patrol vehicle looks out across the border wall at Tecate, Mexico, a city famous for Tecate and Carta Blanca beers. As is typical along the border, the city on the Mexico side pushes all the way to the wall, while the U.S. side is largely open country.



Yellow smoke rises from a brush fire south of the border wall in the Sonoran Desert, where California, Arizona, and Mexico meet. The increased surveillance near Tijuana and the coast pushed migrants eastward, where there were fewer U.S. Border Patrol agents.



The U.S. government filled in Smuggler's Gulch with a structure resembling an earthen dam and built a triple-thickness border fence topped with razor wire, flood lights, remote sensors, and cameras to deter nighttime crossings.

For decades, traffickers would smuggle everything—cattle, people, moonshine, cocaine—through this canyon, making it one of the most treacherous places along the border. In the 1990s, Smuggler's Gulch was a prime route for undocumented migrants attempting to enter the United States.

The Smuggler's Gulch fence is part of a 60-million-dollar project to install triple fencing over the final 3.5 mile (5.6 kilometers) of fence between San Diego and Tijuana.



The border fence ends and is replaced by a barrier on a desert plain in the Imperial Valley, at the edge of the irrigated oasis farmland west of Calexico. Border patrols were completely absent here, as opposed to all other places I visited along the border. Elsewhere, Border Patrol agents regularly approached to determine my nationality and to ask why I was so close to the line. Here, there was nothing but solitude.



This wall separates Calexico, California from Mexicali, Mexico. As their names imply, the two are sister cities, and the wall was not always this big. In the 1980s, there was a rickety corrugated steel wall that didn't even extend to the edge of the cities. But in 2008, when I visited again, U.S. crews were extending and reinforcing the barrier. Mexicali has a notorious reputation, but there were prosperous suburbs south of the city, complete with shopping malls and Starbucks.

That said, Mexican cartel violence has been known to spill over the border because of the lucrative smuggling business. In April 2015, U.S. Border Patrol agents seized more than 69 pounds of methamphetamine coming over the border. In the process, they found how smugglers were getting around the wall between Calexico and Mexicali—they had built a tunnel.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2...s-immigration/

In this photo provided by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a silver Jeep Cherokee that suspected smugglers were attempting to drive over the U.S.-Mexico border fence is stuck at the top of a makeshift ramp, on October 31, 2012 near Yuma, Arizona. U.S. Border Patrol agents from the Yuma Station seized both the ramps and the vehicle, which stalled at the top of the ramp after it became high centered. The fence is approximately 14 feet high where the would-be smugglers attempted to drive across the border. The two suspects fled into Mexico when the agents arrived at the scene. #
AP Photo/U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Google Street View of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona, seen from just over the border, in the northern Mexican state of Sonora.



Residents of Naco, Arizona join residents of Naco, Mexico for a volleyball match during the fourth "Fiesta Bi-Nacional" at the fence that separates the U.S. (left) and Mexico (right), on April 14, 2007.

Balloon vendor at the US/Mexico Border Fence. Credit: Romel Jacinto CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A gap in the fence near the U.S.-Mexico border overlooking Tijuana, Mexico, in 2014. (Photo by Charles Ommanney/Reportage by Getty Images)

• Laura Bliss@mslaurabliss Jun 11, 2015

. . . and this is what it needs to look like:

Love it!

In this Nov. 17, 2008 file photo, a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle stands guard along the border fence with its concertino wire topping it, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi, File) — AP

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...order-fencing/

Man Trapped In Razor Wire Border Fence Removed By San Diego Fire Department (VIDEO) @ LINK

05/01/2013 02:22 pm ET

The San Diego Fire Department retrieved a man Tuesday left trapped 20 feet in the air, when razor wire sliced through his flesh, trapping him on top of the border fence separating the Mexico from the United States, Fox 5 San Diego reports.

The would-be migrant approached the fence with a ladder and tried to jump over -- a tactic used by some people who normally lay hard mats over the fence, according to Fox 5. (If you’ve seen the movie “Fight Club,” you may be familiar with the technique.)

The man was taken to receive medical treatment and may face charges for illegal entry.

The episode was a tragic reminder of how desperate some people are to enter to the United States, but it wasn’t an isolated event. U.S. authorities helped rescue some 21 people caught on the border fence last year, the Border Patrol told Fox 5.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3194505.html

What are we waiting for?

Pro-Trump Lawmaker Says 'Build A Wall' Doesn't Exactly Mean A Wall

Updated March 2, 2016 1:20 PM ET
Published March 2, 2016 9:54 AM ET
STEVE INSKEEP

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Morning Edition
10:19

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U.S. Border Patrol officers keep watch at the fence separating U.S. and Mexico in the town of El Paso, Texas.

Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

How would Donald Trump's most attention-grabbing promises become reality?

One answer came from one of the members of Congress who would face the task of actually enacting the promises. He's Pennsylvania Rep. Tom Marino, who recently became one of the first prominent Republicans to endorse Trump for president. Marino's answer: On one key issue, Trump doesn't literally mean what he says.

"It doesn't have to be a brick-and-mortar wall here," Marino told NPR's Morning Edition.

"We're talking about technology that we have that can sense people's movements," as well as additional border guards.

It was a striking position for Marino to take. He appeared to be interpreting Trump's border policy as no radical departure. It sounded instead like an amplification of the policy the United States already pursues.

Recent administrations, including that of President Obama, have built fences or concrete walls along hundreds of miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. A casual drive along that border reveals radar-carrying blimps and other signs of sensor technology already deployed. Marino said it hasn't been enough.

The Obama administration, especially in its early years, reported that it substantially increased the number of deportations of people caught in the U.S. illegally — so much so that immigrants' rights groups fiercely complained.

Conservative critics nevertheless insisted that Obama was not serious, complaining that the wall must be higher, and cover the entire border.

Trump captured this sentiment from his campaign's first day, describing many Mexican migrants as "rapists" who were "bringing crime," and vowing to build "a great wall" to seal the border, which Mexico would pay for. Responding to claims that this was wildly impractical given the border landscape, he spoke of his skill as a builder. In a February debate, Trump responded to Mexican criticism by saying: "The wall just got 10 feet taller, believe me."

Yet while Trump's rhetoric remains fierce, Marino's description better captures Trump's position as the candidate has gradually refined it over time. He has limited the apparent scope of his original idea laid out in June.

In that February debate, for example, Trump did not speak of a wall along the entire 1,900-mile border. "We need 1,000 [miles]," he said, "because we have a lot of natural barriers."

He has also said he wants a much higher barrier than the walls and fencing that now exist. But in urging partial coverage of the border, his view is not radically different than that of recent U.S. officials, who have built roughly 700 miles of walls and fences, relying on natural barriers such as mountains to block the rest. It is their position, of course, that Trump has gained so much from excoriating.

Listen to some of the Morning Edition discussion with Rep. Marino and Republican strategist Mark McKinnon:

Listen To The 'Build A Wall' Exchange

2:26

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To hear the full conversation, including a report from NPR's Sarah McCammon in Palm Beach, Fla., click the audio at the top of the page.

http://www.npr.org/2016/03/02/468873...ch-wins-voters