El Paso barrier not proof walls are answer, locals say
People EL PASO, TEXAS — walking over the Paso del Norte Bridge linking this West Texas border city to Mexico can watch President Donald Trump’s border wall getting bigger in real time.
Workers in fluorescent smocks can be seen digging trenches, pouring concrete and erecting rust-colored slabs of 18-foot-high metal to replace layers of barbed wire-topped fencing along the mud-colored Rio Grande, which is usually little more than a trickle.
Most of the more than 70,000 people who legally cross four city bridges daily — to shop, go to school and work — pay the construction in the heart of downtown no mind. But on a recent weekday, one man stopped and pointed, saying simply “Trump.”
In his State of the Union address, the president said a “powerful barrier” had cut crime rates and turned El Paso from one of the nation’s most dangerous cities to one of its safest. He’s holding a rally here Monday to show why he’s demanding more than 100 miles of new walls, costing $5.7 billion, along the 1,900-mile border, despite opposition from Democrats and some Republicans.
But many in this city of dusty desert winds and blistering salsa, bristle at the prospect of their home becoming a border wall poster child.
It’s had border barriers for decades, but that isn’t why it’s a safe place, they say. El Paso, population around 800,000, already had one of the lowest violent crime rates in the U.S. That’s despite being just across the border from drug violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
They argue that El Paso embodies a cross-border spirit that transcends walls rather than proving more are needed.
“The richest of the rich, the poorest of the poor, we all have different reasons for wanting to cross, and people cross every day,” said El Paso City Council member Peter Svarzbein.
El Paso lays bare the mixed feelings the border inspires. Even native Beto O’Rourke, a former Democratic congressman now mulling a presidential run, says barriers are inevitable but that Trump’s calls for an expanded wall are the “cynical rhetoric of war, of invasions, of fear.”
O’Rourke will help lead a Monday evening march opposing the wall with dozens of local civic, human rights and Hispanic groups at the same time Trump is holding his rally.
For centuries, virtually nothing but an often easily wadable Rio Grande stood between the city and Juarez. But worsening eco- nomic problems in Mexico increased the flow of immigrants into the United States in the 1970s, prompting Congress to approve chain-link fencing here and in San Diego dubbed the “Tortilla Curtain.” More barriers were added in the 1990s and 2006.
Public reaction to the secu- rity measures initially was positive in some quarters because it helped reduce vagrancy and petty crime. But many residents now complain Trump’s demands have gone too far, making their home sound like a war zone.
“The border is fluid culturally, economically,” said Cesar Blanco, a Democratic lawmaker who lives a stone’s throw from the wall. “We are a binational community.”
Those who live near the wall say they see few people climbing the barriers now. In fiscal year 2017, about 25,000 people were apprehended in Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, down from 122,000-plus in fiscal year 2006.
Instead, those crossing illegally now tend to do so outside the city in desolate deserts where deaths from exposure have risen.
Many Republicans, though, say the low crime rate here is not a coincidence.
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report shows that El Paso’s annual number of reported violent cri me s dro pp ed from nearly 5,000 in 1995 to around 2,700 in 2016. But that corresponded to similar declines in violent crime nationwide and included times when the city’s crime rates actually increased yearover-year, despite new fencing and walls.