Prensa. voanews.com
When retired
Lieutenant Sean Murphy patrolled the dry brush California hills outside San
Ysidro, on the north side of the U.S.-Mexico border, there was no towering
wall. The “barrier” that existed barely cast a shadow. “It was a wooden post
here, and a wooden post there, and some barbed wire,” Murphy said.
That was the
1980s.
In a span of
three decades, as successive U.S. presidents presented their blueprints to
secure the border, the barrier expanded, sometimes parallel to previous fences
- two or three layers thick. Today, it stretches no more than 1,000 kilometers
in total, along 3,000 kilometers of border that is mostly desert.
Before he became
president, Donald Trump made no secret of his plans to build a wall - “the
greatest wall that you’ve ever seen” - made of concrete, steel and rebar. His
motive: to prevent crime and drugs from crossing north and migrants from taking
U.S. jobs, charges he made repeatedly in 2016. “Who’s going to pay for the
wall?” he would ask at his campaign rallies, ear flexed toward his supporters.
“Mexico!” they
yelled.
President Trump
vows to deliver on this promise, despite Mexico’s insistence that it will not
pay - an endeavor that could cost as much as $25 billion, according to research
compiled by the Washington Post, more than double Trump’s 2016 estimates for a
10-12-meter, 1,600-kilometer structure.
Eastward
migration
Murphy of the
San Diego Police Department says he has seen migrants change course as a result
of the barriers in place today, the first under the president Clinton-led
“Operation Gatekeeper” in 1994, and again under president George W. Bush’s
“Secure Fence Act” of 2006.
“Back in the day
… you would run into people with large duffel bags, and guess what’s in the
duffel bag?” Murphy asked, answering his own question - drugs.
But while
border-related crime is down in southern California, where large sections of
the Bush-era fence are in place, Murphy says migration has only moved eastward
into Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. And he doesn’t foresee any wall stopping
criminals from entering.
“They’re getting
a little bit more creative. Now they’re using boats to get up the coast. They
are trying to bring it in through 18-wheelers and tractor trailers,” Murphy
said. In the vast desert outside Jacumba, California, Enrique Morones - founder
and director of Border Angels - drops gallon jugs of water beside bushes for
migrants who might otherwise die from dehydration.
He calls the
barrier there “the wall of death and a wall of shame.”
“This wall of Operation Gatekeeper, from 1994,
has led to the death of more than 11,000 people,” Morones said, using a figure
that he says accounts for both sides of the border. Morones laments that many
of those who perished remain unidentified and unknown to the world.
“You’ll recognize the image of the little boy
with the red T-shirt on, face down in the Mediterranean Sea … but nobody has
ever seen the picture of Marco Antonio Villasenor, a boy almost the same age,”
he said. “He was five years old, and he died crossing the desert into Texas
with 18 men.”
Ev Meade,
director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego, says
many are under the false impression that the border is “open,” due to the lack
of a physical wall along 2,000 kilometers of land. In addition to aerial
technology, Meade says the treacherous mountain ranges along the Sonoran Desert
with Arizona already serve as deadly natural barriers. “It’s a searing desert
with mountain ranges that aren’t precisely parallel, meaning that it is very
difficult to know where you are.”
Seaborne crisis
Where the land
ends in southern California, the Pacific Ocean begins. While the majority of
migrant deaths in the United States are due to lack of water, officials are
increasingly concerned about those resulting from seaborne excursions. As
Morones notes, “coyotes” or smugglers who send migrants north provide no
necessary precautions before pushing them out to sea.
“They cross in
little fishing boats called ‘pangas,’ - they don’t cross [by the shore] and
just show up over here. They go a couple hundred miles north, and they show up
in San Clemente,” he said. “The smugglers don’t provide life vests, the boats
are made for two people and they put 15 people on them. They flip over and the
people die.”
A place to
reunite
As waves break
on the rusting border structure, there is one place on the far west coast where
immigrants can “see” their relatives. Friendship Park is run by the U.S. Border
Patrol on weekends.
Through holes
one centimeter in diameter, families separated for years attempt to touch by
the fingertips. One family, from Michoacan, Mexico, traveled four hours by
plane so that they could see their son, Alejandro Moreno, a resident of
California, who lacks the legal documents to travel home and return to his
studies. It was the second such reunion
for the family in 14 years. Moreno’s sister burst into tears.
Arturo Martinez
contributed to this report.
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