A Visit to The Wall.

(December, 2019.)

I ended this year standing at Trump’s border wall, looking up. 

My partner Kristina is Latina - more specifically, she’s half Mexican, half European descent. She spent the first 18 years of her life on the border of El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico. Her first long-term relationship in school was split across the two cities. Her father Luis, who is of Mexican descent, is a criminal defense attorney whose cases frequently overlap into immigration law. He has stories about the immigration system and the plight of Mexican immigrants that would make your hair stand on end, even if you’ve seen the raw-yet-made-light reports from liberal political comedians like Johns Oliver and Stewart, or if you read CNN every morning in bed and get vaguely depressed by the kids-in-cages reports before getting up and trying to make sense of the world again. 

When we went to visit her father these past few days for the holiday season, we told him we were going to drive to the border to look at the Trump Wall and take photos in morbid curiosity. His eyes lit up. He began to list off all the many reasons why the wall does nothing to keep people out. He went into the many methods for illegal entry into the US, happy to lend us books from a large library of legal practice tomes and narratives about the border, all on a sagging overweighted shelf in his law office. He even had books about his own family’s border experiences. 

There are many ways to cross the border without a US passport. The most common is to hire expert people-smugglers, known as coyotes. Despite the best efforts of less corrupt agents at the gates and bridges that separate the two countries, these smugglers are all-too-good at packing desperate families into car trunks in exchange for every single penny these families have.

Another method for getting in to the country is to obtain a legal Visa, and then simply bury yourself into hiding - a “Visa overstay,” so the US government calls it. And method #3? Get lucky and encounter border agents who are looking the other way, or pay them off. The statistics say nothing in even the top 5 methods about crawling on foot over mountain ridges, across dry deserts, through thick woods or under tall bridges that separate the two countries. There has not been any easy way to do that for decades, long before Trump was a household name. Besides the fact that the border is crawling with agents that have no other job but to find you, the rugged terrain and desert landscape make chances of survival low.

We told Luis that part of why we were going to the wall was to try to mount some sort of evidence for its ridiculousness. We wanted to take something back to the pro-Trump people in our lives, to engage in a healthy debate. “We’re looking for something concrete - statistics, pictures. Things that can maybe help convince them what a waste of time this whole thing is.” His eyes got a bit dimmer and he shook his head, his voice speaking with the inevitable wisdom and bitterness of time and experience. “You’ll never convince any of them,” he said. But, we went anyways.

The divide between El Paso and Juarez is not like most other stretches of the southern border. Here, the two cities are smashed together. From most vistas high and low, on either side, they look like one big town. The various mountain ridges, and the long stretch of mostly-dry river, look more like a border than anything man-made. In some places, even those natural formations don’t clearly illuminate the difference between Mexican land and US land.

When you drive the highways of El Paso, you get no sense of where Mexico starts. You know what side of the road it’s on, because on the other side are the Franklin Mountains, the highest ridge in this part of the Texas / New Mexico / Mexico triangle. But it’s very difficult to tell the difference between countries from most vantage points. There are two popular slogans in both El Paso and Juarez, frequently seen on t-shirts and coffee mugs and hanging as signs and banners in and over restaurants. The first is “dos naciones, un corazon.” Or in English: “Two nations, one heartbeat,” often accompanied by the letters “JRZ” for Juarez and “EPTX” for El Paso. (The second slogan is “El Paso Strong,” which was created to honor the victims of the anti-Hispanic white terrorist who shot up the local Walmart earlier in the year.)

If you go to El Paso and can’t immediately see which houses are in one country and which are in the other, there are two key ways to tell the difference. One way is to drive all the way to the border fence, which has loomed tall over Paisano Drive for years. “Fence” isn’t really an effective word for the immense, tightly-gridded iron lattice that runs across the town like a prison. 

The second way is to squint more into the distance, especially where the border land goes up into the various dry ridges that separate large portions of the two cities, and look for that surreal brown-grey monolith that has sprung up only in the last few months about a mile or two south of the iron fence. Look long enough, and you’ll see it: that’s the Trump Wall. 

At night, the wall is easier to see, because there are blinding white lights that shine atop it, shooting illumination through the windows of the people that live in the houses below. But during the day, it almost looks like one of the natural formations of the mountain ridge, thoroughly featureless and bland, except it’s squarer and blockier than everything around it. When you ride in a car with El Pasoans and get a tour of the town, even as they proudly point out all the beautiful town squares, natural lookouts, and delicious restaurants, they’ll always seem a little sad when their eyes look up and South and catch a glimpse of this surreal, supplementary structure standing between neighbors. My partner Kristina, who grew up here, recognizes everything about her hometown, except for this. “Oh God,” she said the first time she caught sight of it. “Wow, that’s it isn’t it? Ugh.” That pretty much summarizes everyone’s view of it here. 

This stretch of the wall was actually built by private enterprise, via the deeply conservative organization that literally call themselves We Build The Wall, Incorporated. They have zealously volunteered to take over the land on behalf of the Federal government and start the building of Trump’s grand vision. The clear majority of people in the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez disagree with We Build The Wall. But where there’s money, there’s a way. I heard one El Pasoan sum it up nicely in a bar: “It’s a little like if someone you’ve never met came to your house, where you live behind your favorite neighbor, and said, ‘I’m rich, and I’m going to use my wealth to build a wall between you and your friend. I don’t really care if either of you want one.’” In this case, that “someone you’ve never met” also happens to be from nowhere near El Paso. We Build The Wall is actually based, of all places, out of Florida, my own home state, where my family and most of my high school friends voted for Donald Trump, and will vote for him again.

My partner pulled over to the side of the road about a half mile from the actual documented border, so I could take photos of the wall. I got out and started to position my camera; it’s tricky because, this close, you’re actually looking up at the wall through the grid of the border fence - one wall through another wall. I had to position my camera just right and zoom through the spaces between the grid to get a clear enough picture. I got the lens focused on a particularly compelling piece of the wall, where it starts to rise up into the mountains. This part of it is interesting because it physically illuminates one of the more absurd aspects of the border wall: Besides the fact that crossing on foot is not one of the main ways anyone gets across the border, the wall actually goes up over dangerously steep ridges that have no paths and no practical ways to walk up. If you were going to try to walk from Mexico to the US, it wouldn’t be anywhere near here. In fact, the border fence is constructed below the mountain, at the foot of it. But this newer border wall defiantly rises right over it, in that part of the land where it makes absolutely no sense for anyone to cross, and where no one does. 

Seconds after I snapped my first photo - the only photo I had time to capture - Kristina rolled down the window and leaned out the passenger side. Her voice was urgent and worried. “Get in the car. We need to go,” she said. I looked back behind me and saw it: a large border patrol van, the kind that seats several rows of people in the back, rolling up behind us from out of nowhere. A moment ago it wasn’t there; it must have crawled up from a hidden ditch somewhere nearby. Naively, I wondered why it would matter if we got talked to by this man. We weren’t doing anything wrong - there wasn’t anything illegal about hanging out at the border and taking pictures. But my partner had been a bit nervous all along about coming down here, and her voice was scared of something I didn’t entirely understand yet. Later, she explained that these men were often on a power trip, and while they certainly wouldn’t arrest you, they could make your life very difficult. Think about any of the worst cops you know in your own hometown. These guys, are those guys. So I climbed in quickly, and we sped off. 

For about a mile, we were followed close behind. I thought the border agent would almost certainly start flashing lights and try to pull us over. But after a minute or two, he pulled up beside us, turned his head in our direction in an ineffective effort to look casual, gave us a brief visual inspection, and then made a left turn away. My partner looked visibly shook, and I understood that this was something that had been happening here at the fence long before the wall went up above it in the mountains. I got my first taste of the instinctive distrust that locals, even white locals, have of the border patrol. I felt a little over-privileged at having taken this too lightly in my head at first. She tried to pull over to a quiet place on the road to re-compose herself, but we ended up at a dead-end turnaround where an El Paso cop was waiting, also at the border fence. As we turned our car round, the cop turned his engine on, and started to follow us just like the agent had. “Of course,” my partner said in resignation. 

It was the same thing: he crawled behind us conspicuously for about a mile, pulled up beside us, took a brief look in, and turned off. My partner told me why, but it was already pretty obvious. I’m privileged, but I’m not stupid. We are white - I’m as white as morning snow, and my partner, though half Latina, looks white. And so, we were deemed not worth the time, by these agents who were paid taxpayer money to sit in ditches and watch the wall. It’s also worth noting that both agents appeared to us to be Latino themselves. “Most of them are,” her dad later told me, and I researched online later for confirmation. Lest the point is missed here: We pay the US government, to hire Latinos, often Mexican Americans, to patrol the border into their own country, to keep other Latinos out of the US.

If that makes you angry at the agents who are immigrants themselves, remember, they came to this country on a dream: The dream of having a job, any job, that would feed their family. Even if that means arresting their own people.

White Californians like me love to watch Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers and laugh at jokes about how the border wall is a representation of Trump’s penis, a sequel to all the enormous golden buildings he’s built with his name across them, a transparent attempt to stamp his name and style all over things that were better off without it. The penis jokes are our junk food, an easily digestible way to understand the world around us. We’re as guilty of casually under-analyzing what’s going on around us as the pro-Trumpers who exclusively watch Fox News and feel fully informed by it. 

But our little excursion to the border illuminated the sadder truths beneath the it’s-Trump’s-dick jokes. Every president since long before I was born has wanted to leave a legacy for themselves in the history books. Regardless of your opinions of any of their administrations, or your personal analyses of their effectiveness, each leader of the free world chose a key issue or a place in the world, and said, “this is where my name goes.” For Obama, it was health care. For George W, it was Iraq. Ironically, Reagan, the president many Trump conservatives idolize almost as much as Trump himself, was famous for his appeal to the Soviet Union. I hear his words in my head often when I watch Trump talk about his legacy: “if you seek prosperity for Eastern Europe, come here to this gate Mr. Gorbachev. Open this gate, Mr. Gorbachev. Tear down this wall.”

After our visit to the border, I talked to my partner’s father Luis again. I felt more passionate than ever about presenting my findings to my conservative family members and friends. I pushed him to help me craft a good argument to support the photo I had taken and the story around it. But as before, he shook his head. “It won’t help,” he said. “People believe what they want to believe.”

Eventually, I gave up. But later, on our way out of his law office that day, he seemed to still be reflecting on it. Finally, he acquiesced to a single argument. “You want to try to convince them, really convince them? Here’s the best argument you can give,” he said. I expected him to pull another set of statistics out about how people actually cross the border, or what it is they actually do when they get here. I thought he might point out any of the many studies and reports that line his bookshelves, all of which contradict the narrative that undocumented immigrants are, as Trump likes to say, the primary source of violence and crime in the US.

Instead, he just peered at me through his thick-rimmed glasses, his eyes tired from having delivered this argument more times than he could probably count. “You tell them this: People who come to this country, are just people. Like all people, they want to make their life better. That’s what everyone wants to do, all people, everywhere. And they’ll always find a way. They always will. Fences, walls; you can’t stop people. They will always find a way.” 

As we drove away from his office, I looked south to the lines of homes, and I didn’t see the wall, the more obvious border fence, or even the ridge line or the Rio Grande. Before all that, I saw what my girlfriend had always seen first, ever since she grew up here: just, one big city, with one heartbeat.