Window (Wall) dressing at the border
In recent weeks, two top officials from the Trump administration have visited Imperial County. Both Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen made quick visits to the U.S. Border Patrol El Centro Sector Headquarters and Calexico to inspect the border fence improvements.
They made the most of their short visits, but the biggest takeaway from both visits is not about who they met, but rather who they seemed to ignore or avoid during their visits.
Though it’s important to note and acknowledge these officials for visiting and thanking the local members of the Border Patrol and, in Pence’s case, the men and women stationed at the Naval Air Facility in El Centro, what is troubling is that neither appeared to reach out at least to local officials.
Just as the administration’s policies are meant to deter individuals who they don’t like from coming into the country, their visits here seemed orchestrated to avoid anyone who may have challenged their views. By and large, they limited their interactions to federal employees and steered clear of local officials, at least in California.
In their Arizona visits, it was different as both met with the state’s Gov. Doug Ducey and took more time to address the media once they were out of California.
On the morning of April 17, one day before Nielsen visited the Valley, we received a notification of her visit and was surprised to learn local officials were unaware of the visit.
The next day, during her visit, Nielsen spoke to Border Patrol personnel in Imperial, where members of the media were allowed to be present for only the first five minutes. Later, when the secretary visited Calexico’s border fence, media had to follow from a distance.
Even more concerning was the most recent visit made by the vice president on Monday. Not only were most top local officials kept in the dark, but local media also was largely frozen out.
After reports came last Friday of Pence visiting Calexico from media outlets outside of the Valley, I spoke to a few of my colleagues in different local news outlets who asked me for additional details, which unfortunately I didn’t have.
News outlets in San Diego, Riverside County, and Arizona were told about the visit and followed Pence in his tour but the local outlets in the Valley were reached out to.
Props to my colleague Julio Morales who had to be resourceful and creative to do the best he could under these strange circumstances.
Even an elected official like the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors Ray Castillo could only watch the visit of the vice president from a distance.
In addition to speaking with federal employees, the main purpose of the visits was to further advance the administration’s goals of securing funding for a proposed border wall and paint a picture of a crisis at the border.
It was only window dressing. It allows them to say they came here to understand what’s happening on the ground while purposely avoiding some of the people in a position to offer an informed opinion.
It’s troubling enough to have private individuals form their own echo chambers, but it’s a lot more troublesome to have an administration that exists in an ideological bubble where it’s their way or the highway, and everyone outside their bubble inherently is seen as a bad hombre.