Trump touts border wall, but no guarantee it would work
SAN DIEGO: On his first visit to California after taking office, President Donald Trump stood a few yards from Mexican territory with a poster showing before- and- after photographs of the border fence.
The older image, from the early 1990s, showed a trampled, denuded hillside with throngs of people criss-crossing a flimsy barrier. In the second image, the same area appears today, green after the rains, where tall steel fencing has made a sharp delineation: crowded Tijuana on one side, and a verdant, orderly American landscape on the other.
Rodney Scott, the chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector, pointed to the first image and began telling Trump what it was like patrolling in those days, but the president interrupted.
“It was an open wound, frankly,” Trump said, turning to the television cameras. “It was really, really bad. People just pouring across, drugs, everything else pouring across,” he said. “They re- established law and order in San Diego when they put up a wall. And it’s not a superior wall; it’s an inferior wall. But it’s a wall.”
Once the symbol of America’s broken border, San Diego today is the place Trump and his top Homeland Security officials point to as proof that “walls work.”
The border fencing here, 15 feet tall and topped in some places by concertina wire, has made San Diego one of the most difficult places to cross for illegal migrants along the entire 2,000-mile boundary. Trump has promoted a border wall as a solution to the opioid crisis, which was responsible for 42,000 American deaths last year. But US seizure data indicates that San Diego, the place with America’s most formidable fencing, has become its principal gateway for hard drugs.
Critics say the money would be better spent hiring more US customs officers whose job it is to facilitate trade and travel while stopping narcotics and other threats.
Trump’s border enforcement proposals call for 5,000 more Border Patrol agents and 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE) officers, but his plan would do little to address the shortage of customs officers, which has grown so acute that staff are being reassigned from US airports to the Mexico border.
San Diego’s main crossing at San Ysidro, the southern terminus of US Interstate 5, is the busiest land border in the Western Hemisphere, where 70,000 vehicle passengers and 20,000 pedestrians enter the United States each day. In the late 1980s, there were so many people breezing back and forth across the US border that sociologist Jorge Bustamante hired a photographer to take daily pictures of the scene at Zapata Canyon, a popular informal crossing that US agents nicknamed “the soccer field.”
Bustamante’s photos show something akin to an illegal Ellis Island. Handmade signs at the top of the canyon point
The Border Patrol was under a lot of pressure from the farm industry to let the migrants through. So they would allow them to pass during the day but arrest anyone trying to cross at night.
Jorge Bustamante, sociologist
the way to Los Angeles. So many farmworkers would pass through in springtime and during holidays that vendors set up food stalls, selling sandwiches and beverages to men who would sometimes play soccer while waiting for rides.
US Border Patrol agents appear in many of Bustamante’s photographs, milling among the crowds and appearing more like friendly traffic cops than enforcement agents to be feared. “The photographs show the degree to which this kind of migration was accepted by US authorities,” he said.
“The Border Patrol was under a lot of pressure from the farm industry to let the migrants through. So they would allow them to pass during the day but arrest anyone trying to cross at night,” he said.
Scott, the Border Patrol chief, arrived in San Diego in 1992, and began working night shifts. He likened it to “a war zone.”
“We would watch 10 people go through for every one we caught,” he said. “It was a riot-type situation every night.”
A shopping mall adjacent to the border, with brand outlets including Coach and Ralph Lauren, has become a destination for shoppers from San Diego and Tijuana alike, generating millions in tax revenue.
“Back then, this was a complete wasteland,” Scott said. “We never envisioned this. We never thought we could make a difference.”
In the bushes a few feet from the fence, there were a few empty water bottles and dusty, discarded clothing - signs of people still attempting to sneak through. But Scott said the area had improved so much that the county was looking at proposals to open a campground in the parkland adjacent to the border fence.
Scott pointed to the many patches in the steel mesh where border agents have repaired breaches over the years. The mesh isn’t suited to an era of battery- operated power tools, he said. That fencing is being replaced by tall metal bollards.
Scott praised Trump’s plans for a bigger, better wall, disputing those who say the decline in illegal border crossings in San Diego means the threat has passed. “Smugglers always want to come back here because it’s so convenient for them,” he said. “This is most secure section of border now, but it’s time we do it right and put enduring infrastructure here.”
Toughening the California border in the 1990s pushed illegal traffic eastward into Arizona, but lately crossings have dropped there, too. The number of Central American migrants arrested now outnumbers those from Mexico, and Central Americans mainly cross in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, often surrendering to border agents to request asylum. Much of the new border fencing the Trump administration wants to build will go along the river levees there.
The huge wave of illegal Mexican migration that came across the San Diego border is over, according to Princeton immigration scholar Douglas Massey. The number of Mexicans who leave the United States each year - either voluntarily or by deportation - now exceeds the number of new arrivals, Massey’s research shows.
According to Massey, the transformation of the San Diego border is the result of demographics as much as of tougher infrastructure. Mexico’s fertility rate was nearly seven births per mother in 1960, and by the 1980s, as many young Mexican men reached adulthood, their small family farms could not sustain them. Millions headed north to California.
But Mexico’s baby boom ended decades ago, after the government invested in family planning to reduce rural birthrates. “Now it’s 2.2 children per mother,” Massey said.
At the same time, the hardening of the US border had a profound effect on migration trends, Massey’s research shows. “We made border crossing dangerous, difficult and expensive, cutting off what were once seasonal migration patterns. More people simply stayed in the United States.”
Before the 1990s, there were relatively few Mexican workers outside California, Texas and the greater Chicago area, he said. “We transformed a seasonal flow of male workers going to three places into a settled population of millions of Mexican families across 50 states.”
San Diego’s border has become the busiest drug crossing in no small part because the Sinaloa cartel controls the narcotics trade on the other side. It remains the most powerful trafficking organisation in North America, despite the 2016 recapture of its leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who is jailed in New York and awaiting trial. The Sinaloa group defends its dominance over the lucrative Tijuana smuggling corridor, known as a “plaza,” with ruthless, lethal force.
“We know that trafficking patterns depend on what (criminal organisation) controls the plaza,” said Pete Flores, the top US customs official for the San Diego field office.
That leaves Flores’s officers to hunt for needle-in-haystack loads of cocaine, meth and deadly fentanyl. The synthetic opioid is so potent that customs officers now open suspected drug packages inside a hermetic plastic box they call “the incubator” to avoid inadvertently sending particles airborne that could trigger an overdose.
The most innovative traffickers are experimenting with drones and other airborne techniques to fly smaller loads over San Diego’s border fences, and tunnels remain a constant threat. But Flores and others say the biggest challenge is still detecting drug loads hidden among the thousands of vehicles coming across round-the- clock.
The officers rely on drug dogs and tried- and-true techniques, scanning cars for suspicious alterations: screws that look too new, stitching that looks too clean, gas tanks that make a thud when they’re tapped, suggesting something solid inside.
The shortage of officers is a strain. “We have to have enough people to facilitate trade and travel, but also to do proper enforcement,” Flores said. “Balancing those two things, with our current staffi ng, makes it challenging for us.”
At the Otay Mesa crossing, the second-busiest in the San Diego area, customs officers have turned a small storage shed into an informal museum where trainees can see samples of smugglers’ ingenuity. There were oxygen tanks with false compartments for meth and cocaine, and modified construction equipment with hollow panels whose welds had been masked by sprayed- on dirt, as if applied by a make-up artist.
Then there were the “fi sh tanks,” airtight compartments built into fuel tanks. When tapped by officers’ probes, they sound normal, with liquid sloshing around. But each had room for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of narcotics, able to deliver loads across the border again and again. — Washington Post.