What does it take to secure a border?
Border Patrol agents share lessons learned from wall dividing San Diego and Tijuana
SAN DIEGO — From here, where Southern California greets Mexico along steep canyons, images of a border gone awry once inflamed the nation’s immigration debate.
“The place was completely out of control back then,” recalled Oscar Pena, a veteran Border Patrol agent who recently stood atop a mesa looking down on an iconic site — the “soccer field,” where U.S. authorities long struggled to hold back the assembled migrants poised to head north.
The soccer field — so called because border crossers occasionally kicked around a ball — epitomized immigration police chaos, but has since reverted to a desolate and relatively serene swath of brush, bisected by two security fences, where few migrants venture.
“If you look behind me now ... the soccer field is barren,” said Pena, gesturing to the arid tableau below. “There’s nobody on it.”
In many ways, the story of the soccer field’s transformation from a kind of lawless, latter-day Ellis Island into a forsaken backwater reflects the nation’s incendiary debate about illegal immigration — its high emotion, challenges and cost, both in resources and lives, and the inherent contradictions and misperceptions.
The images of unchecked immigration persist — evident in President Donald Trump’s determination to build a border wall — even as the reality on the ground has shifted dramatically.
“It’s nothing now like it used to be,” said Miguel Fernandez, 35, who was staying at a Tijuana Salvation Army shelter after being deported last year.
He initially crossed as a youth in the early 1990s, when “it was all so easy — you just followed everyone else.”
Between the 1980s and early 2000s, migrants would gather en masse at the soccer field, which sits entirely on U.S. soil in San Diego’s San Ysidro district, after descending through the adjacent Tijuana neighborhood of Colonia Libertad. They would loiter until dusk as vendors hawked tacos, roasted corn and drinks. The site was known in Tijuana as Las Canelas, after a homemade, cinnamon-flavored beverage, sometimes spiked with tequila, sold at makeshift stands.
The mood among the northbound legions was often festive, something akin to the atmosphere at a Mexican market, though many, especially women and children, betrayed apprehension about the journey to come. They spoke in hushed tones of planned reunions with loved ones in the north.
As nightfall came, the smugglers, or coyotes, would signal that it was time and groups large and small would begin fragmenting and venturing to the north, along dirt trails through the dark canyons. The odds were stacked against the heavily outnumbered U.S. agents.
From time to time, frustrated U.S. authorities would mount large-scale, empire-strikes-back operations that included aid from Tijuana police, who would move in from the south as Border Patrol agents converged on the soccer field from the north, east and west, helicopter spotlights illuminating the pincer assault. On one such operation, Pena recalls agents arresting some 1,200 immigrants.
“That was about the entire population of my hometown,” noted Pena, a native of rural Texas, who was still in training when agents on foot, on horses and in vehicles swooped in. “I remember thinking: ‘What in the world am I getting myself into?’”
The soccer field also became a go-to spot for politicians, who called for tougher security against the backdrop of the migrant-packed canyon. Other favored TV images included cinematic “banzai” runs, in which scores of migrants bullrushed the international boundary through lanes of traffic.
“They keep coming,” intoned an inflammatory 1994 campaign ad for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, over footage of migrant families darting up Interstate 5 at the San Ysidro port of entry. At the end of the spot, Wilson declared: “Enough is enough.”
Among the unintended consequences of Wilson’s rhetoric was a surge in California’s Latino electorate — citizenship enrollments spiked dramatically — contributing to the state’s steep left turn into the Democratic camp.
President Trump, too, has evoked the border chaos with his signature vow to build “a big, beautiful wall” along the border, while labeling Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”
But Trump’s provocative campaign oratory harked back to soccer-field-style chaos of decades past and ignored a pivotal development — a dramatic plunge in illegal entries into the U.S.
Border Patrol apprehensions tumbled from a nearhistoric high of more than 1.6 million in fiscal year 2000 to 415,816 in 2016.
Borderwide, from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, more and more agents have been arresting fewer and fewer border-crossers.
The 1,200 immigrants whom Pena helped arrest that evening in 1985 would today represent more than a twoweek haul in the Border Patrol’s entire San Diego sector, which stretches 60 miles east from the Pacific.
Since 1992, the Border Patrol has seen an almost fivefold increase in its ranks, to nearly 20,000 agents nationwide. The Trump administration wants to hire another 5,000.
In 1992, the Border Patrol recorded about 300 arrests for each agent. That number plummeted to about 21 arrests for each Border Patrol agent in 2016.
Prototypes of Trump’s wall — which may end up being a combination of fences and other structures — are expected to be unveiled along the San Diego border later this year. In announcing the prototype plan in June, a top administration official invoked the makeover of the San Diego border, especially the buildup of agents, barriers and technology, such as lights, cameras and sensors, following the launch in 1994 of Operation Gatekeeper.
“Where there was once lawless and undeveloped land ... neighborhoods were built and commerce grew,” Ronald Vitello, acting deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told reporters in Washington.