Plan paused for new border walls at oceanfront park

SAN DIEGO — The Biden administration has agreed to suspend plans for a double border wall that critics say would effectively destroy a 51-year-old oceanfront park that symbolizes friendship between the United States and Mexico.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus said he wanted to hear community concerns before settling on a wall design for Friendship Park, which then-first lady Pat Nixon inaugurated 1971. For decades, park visitors could easily converse between San Diego and Tijuana but access gradually diminished from the U.S. over the last 15 years and stopped entirely for more than two years.

Magnus, a former police chief of Tucson who took office December, ordered the pause a week after Friends of Friendship Park met with Border Patrol officials to ask for a 120-day halt to construction, which was expected to begin shortly.

“We have heard concerns about the project as currently planned, and it is important to me to be responsive to the local community on this issue,” Magnus said.

Its design has not been made public but Friends of Friendship Park said Border Patrol officials recently told the group that there would be two 30foot-high tightly spaced steel bollards, like much of the hundreds of miles of wall that were erected during Donald Trump’s presidency. Currently a double wall in Friendship

Park is shorter or easier to see through.

Views from Tijuana would be severely diminished, said the Rev. John Fanestil of Friends of Friendship Park. “We view the current proposal as a nail in the coffin of Friendship Park,” he said.

Fanestil applauded the construction pause as “a step in the right direction,” but Friends of Friendship Park said opening the park two days a month — the minimum that CBP pledged — would be inadequate for a garden of native plants, crossborder religious services and other community events.

President Biden halted construction on border walls, one of Trump’s highest domestic priorities, immediately upon taking office, but has allowed work in very limited circumstances. Recently, the administration said it was filling four gaps of an incomplete Trumpera wall in Yuma, Ariz., which has become one of the busiest corridors for illegal crossings.