The Bipartisan Border Wall

We can talk about the great evil that Donald Trump did on the border and the horrible ways he treated immigrants and how he wants to deport them all now. We should. But it’s worth noting that the border wall is completely bipartisan, the result of multiple presidents making white people in Nebraska feel safe in their whiteness.

Contemplating Trump’s rhetoric decrying U.S. “open borders” while in the shadow of the wall is absurd. Up the hill from where I stood with the teachers, a tall post holding several cameras—a remote video surveillance system, in official parlance—stares along the international boundary and into Mexico. I’ve been coming to this border—an hour away from my home in Tucson, Arizona—for 30 years, and these cameras have been here the entire time. Underneath them, Border Patrol agents watch the boundary line, unmoving during eight-hour shifts. This three-pronged logic of border enforcement dates back to the 1990s Clinton administration: barrier, armed agents, and technology.

While Trump campaigned in 2016 as if there were no wall, its construction here began in 1995, when I arrived at the Nogales border for the first time. That year the government replaced chain-link fences with a 15-foot wall of rusty-looking metal once used as makeshift landing strips during the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars. They were the blueprints for a new strategy, still in place today: prevention through deterrence. Block off the traditional crossing routes in the border cities, and the surrounding deserts would be potentially “mortal,” a 1994 Border Patrol memorandum explained. It was a prophecy: At least 10,000 people have died crossing the border since then.

During the Clinton era, border and immigration enforcement budgets nearly tripled—from roughly $1.5 billion to over $4.2 billion in 2000. Then came 9/11. In its aftermath, the George W. Bush administration brought enforcement to unseen levels, converting the border into another flank in the War on Terror.

At the time, I crossed the border several times a week for work, and I watched it transform and deform before my very eyes. The days when Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence Day parades crisscrossed the boundary line were long over. By the end of the Bush administration in 2008, the annual combined U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget ascended to $14.4 billion, the most money put into the border under a single president. This investment spurred the largest hiring surge in Border Patrol history—8,000 new agents in three years. Meanwhile, the government awarded a nearly $2 billion contract to the Boeing Corporation to use technology to construct a virtual wall, and Congress funded the construction of more physical barriers through the 2006 Secure Fence Act (passed with yes votes by future Democratic presidents and presidential candidates Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton).

In 2011, during the Obama administration, I watched the machinery from the Secure Fence Act arrive in Nogales—easily removing the original landing-mat wall as if it were plucking out a set of bad teeth.  Thick steel bars resembling that of a prison cell replaced the rusty metal sheets. Shortly after, in 2012, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed an unarmed 16-year-old-boy through those bars. As the teachers and I walk up the hill—past the agent, past the surveillance tower—we find artificial flowers on the border wall honoring José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, and when we looked down into Nogales, Sonora, a small cross and altar. Ten bullets hit José Antonio in the back and head as he walked on the Mexican side of the wall; Border Patrol claimed he was throwing rocks.

While the Biden administration ignored Nogales’ mayor’s request to take down the coiling razor wire in 2021, earlier this year—for a moment—it seemed something had changed. CBP removed the razor wire from a large swath of wall. Observers speculated that the wire might finally come down. But when I called CBP to figure out what was going on, an information officer told me that wasn’t the case. They were only taking it down to put up what he called a new “capability.”

Our hatred of immigrants is absolutely a bipartisan shame.

Ms. Harris, Tear Down That Wall!