Somewhere, across hundreds of miles of desert, there is a hole in the border wall. Every night, a welder comes, fires up his torch and pops out the rusty, orange-brown steel separating his world from mine. That is when the cartel crosses people who do not want to get caught. During the day, Border Patrol closes up the hole with whatever junk they have around. This seems to have gone on for decades.
Here, south of Arivaca, AZ, standing at the end of the border wall — where the terrain becomes too steep for construction — I thought the wall looked small. It was unimpressive, almost shockingly so. The sun trudged across the sky, and every hour I was there, I felt more and more disillusioned. I have come to find two reasons for this feeling.
First, I was convinced that this thing — this metal barrier stretching as far as the eye can see — was scary; that it would somehow have a character of fear. And I certainly understand the fear factor that it can instill. It is 30 feet tall and casts deep shadows, but it stands at the center of a complex political economy. The wall itself is not scary, but this system is, and we allow it to exist.
The fact that the wall is not even on the border captures how truly unimaginative it is.
The first border wall between the U.S. and Mexico was put up in 1909 to prevent cattle from crossing. By 2005, under George W. Bush’s administration, there were 75 miles of border wall. Then by 2015, over 600 miles had been built. President Donald Trump had another 451 miles built in his first term, mostly replacing the wall put up under Bush with a taller and more “secure” barrier. The wall now totals around 740 miles.
As migration to the United States increased — acute influxes of migrants from the 1980s and 90s due to the Salvadoran Civil War are a good example — the wall took on a certain grandiosity as a “solution” to the crisis. It does this with a simple formula: People are coming, so why not stop them in their tracks? Trump compared it to the Great Wall of China in his first term, drawing parallels to a cultural icon and formulating “defense” as a foundational precept of the nation. But when I stood near the wall, all those words rang hollow — while they sounded uninformed before, now they were clearly detached from reality. The contractors who work day and night to build and maintain the wall, paving new service roads and chipping away at falling rocks, remind me how mundane this project is.
The fact that the wall is not even on the border captures how truly unimaginative it is. It stands 20 feet back in most places, sometimes as close as five, but never on the line itself. In other words, the wall is merely a representation of the ideology of border security: Migrants have already crossed the border before crossing the wall.
What is really scary is who built the wall, and why it was built in the first place. What is scary is seeing the trucks driving alongside the wall, Border Patrol gunning down hills in low-suspension Chevys and cartel soldiers regularly dropping off migrants out of sprinter vans. The wall is small because it fails to do its job and only causes more suffering.
Second and more substantially, the end of the wall — where I spent much of my time — was ridiculous. It may be hard to describe why this is so, given the gravity of the migrant crisis in Arizona. This became clear on my second day at the wall. I was accompanying a group of Samaritans from Tucson and Green Valley, AZ. These two organizations were founded in the 1990s and early 2000s, respectively, to provide humanitarian aid to migrants in the Arizona corridor.
That day, we were providing food and care for a group of about 40 migrants. Most were either Bangladeshi, Indian or Mexican — from the states of Guerrero and Chiapas, although many migrants would claim to be from Mexico to avoid attention. A common response I heard to “¿de donde eres?” is “Hermosillo,” a relatively large metropolis 200 miles south and the capital of Sonora. Hermosillo is a major transit point for migrants in the Arizona corridor.
Even though our group of Samaritans set up camp on federal land to do this work, Border Patrol was “grateful” for us.
Our job as Samaritans was to ensure the migrants received food and water, that their children were in good health and that they did not opt to walk out into the desert on their own. This would put them at significant risk due to heat, dehydration and an unforgiving wilderness. We waited with and accompanied the migrants as Border Patrol made their way down to conduct their arrests. We never intervened or prevented the arrests, as we are only humanitarians — and we are technically trespassing on federal and state lands to render aid in the first place.
Despite this, it should be noted that the Samaritans strive for open relationships with Border Patrol; it and other border policing agencies are aware of and nominally support the humanitarian work that the Samaritans do.
Herein is the first piece of this tragic comedy: Even though our group of Samaritans set up camp on federal land to do this work, Border Patrol was “grateful” for us. Without a humanitarian camp right next to the crossing, many migrants would go into the hills searching for American cities — Tucson is the closest. Putting their lives at incredible risk, many die before reaching Green Valley, some 30 miles from Tucson. Border Patrol agents do not hide their disdain for conducting rescues, despite the fact that their enforcement of the border — namely, waiting hours to pick people up — encourages migrants to brave the desert.
A Samaritan, Nancy, told me about a time the Samaritans had to climb a summit to rescue a man dying of thirst because Border Patrol refused to dispatch a helicopter. So here we were, every day for a week — others continued after we left — doing Border Patrol’s job for them. We were “estadounidenses,” the first U.S. citizens these migrants encountered.
This beautiful land still fights back, even as Border Patrol leverages the deadly climate against migrants.
Border Patrol incessantly harassed the Samaritans despite the fact that they, in some twisted way, made sure Border Patrol’s reputation remained somewhat intact: More deaths hurt everyone in the dangerous and horrifying political economy of the border.
When Border Patrol finally arrived after four hours of waiting in the heat, one of their trucks made a terrible noise and came groaning to a halt in the middle of the camp. The driver stepped out and looked down, shouting obscenities as we realized what had happened: They had driven their low-riding trucks so aggressively that the entire tailpipe assembly had fallen off. The driver radioed in and requested another ride. They do not bother to take care of their trucks. The agents then chatted about their bosses, complaining about their workplace drama as they waited to load young men into tiny, barely ventilated cells on the back of the replacement truck.
This reality, no matter how ridiculous, is biting and depressing. The American immigration system is so deeply broken, so ideologically polluted and so fundamentally backward that the agents tasked with this “humanitarian” job — as Border Patrol self-describes its mission — are grateful for the Samaritans (mostly grandparents and retirees) who do that humanitarian work for them.
It is obscene that in Border Patrol’s endless quest to police a two-thousand-mile border with rotting metal and shitty trucks, they keep losing tailpipes to the dust. And that every single night, a welder poached from trade schools in Ciudad de México is punching man-sized holes in a billion-dollar taxpayer project that is not even on the border.
Twenty miles west of the end of the wall, a large mountain impedes its path and the service road turns north to avoid it. The wall promptly continues on the other side. This beautiful land still fights back, even as Border Patrol leverages the deadly climate against migrants. All this was built on my behalf?
Ultimately, the wall is sad. It withers away. Sunlight glints off it, producing a strange shimmer as scavenger birds roost on its pillars. The remains of the previous wall built during the Bush administration sit in pieces nearby slowly giving way to desert plants and noxious insects. Every few miles, the bruises of last night’s welding stand mockingly. The remains of clothes, water bottles and ripped-up passports litter the service road. Cows stuck on the other side (whichever side) bellow, and javelinas squeal in the hills. On our way back that second day, we saw scattered stone ruins in a small valley. More than a hundred years ago, this was a saloon where Mexican and American ranchers shared drinks and exchanged cattle. I thought about that saloon every night after, and every morning when the sun rolled over the hills I thought that this place could not possibly be real.
I wonder if we will share drinks again, I wonder when this wall will be replaced with the next one, and I wonder what will happen to the people and the trucks and all this ugly steel.
