Living in the Shadow of Arizona’s Border Wall
When Francis Glad was a child growing up in Nogales, Arizona, the U.S.-Mexico border near her home was nothing like it is now. “It was more like a neighbor fence, like you have at your house,” she remembers. “It was very symbiotic. Just people coming back and forth.”
But today, a towering 30-foot border wall, made of dizzying steel bollards, slices through the Nogales sister cities.
The economies of the two Nogaleses have always been intrinsically linked and mutually dependent on cross-border commerce, with residents from each side passing through to do their daily shopping or to visit with friends and family. Years ago, Glad’s mother ran a hotel in downtown Nogales, Arizona, which was almost always packed with businesspeople and tourists.
But, she says, the bustle has stopped. In part, Glad blames the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and lies about the borderlands. “Outsiders believe that Nogales is a war zone,” she says, “with ‘murdering, rapist,’ undocumented [people] climbing the border wall like the zombies from ‘World War Z,’ when it’s far from the truth.”
More recently, COVID-19 restrictions on “nonessential” border crossings have turned downtown Nogales into a ghost of its formerly busy self. In a small town with a $28k median income and a poverty rate of 33.9 percent, the slowing of traffic comes with potentially dire economic consequences for workers and small business owners.
But even before COVID-19, Glad says, “The parking lots [were] empty. And that was not the case prior to 2016.”
Glad moved away several times in early adulthood, but always returned home to Nogales. Every visit back, she noticed changes: new sections of wall. A larger Border Patrol presence. Today, Glad says that border militarization has changed her community – and the lives of the people in it.
As defined by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, border militarization is “the systematic intensification of the border’s security apparatus, transforming the area from a transnational frontier to a zone of permanent vigilance, enforcement, and violence.”
Over the past three decades, U.S. administrations have enacted federal policy with lasting consequences for border residents. In 1994, the Clinton administration launched a border patrol strategy called “prevention through deterrence,” aimed at curbing undocumented immigration by sealing off urban ports of entry. Towns along the U.S.-Mexico border were transformed by the addition of walls, surveillance towers, motion and thermal sensors, helicopters and drones, federal agents and roving Border Patrol checkpoints.
In some places, rural residents must stop at Border Patrol checkpoints just to go to the gas station or get groceries.
Today border peoples are hugely impacted by militarization. In some places, rural residents must stop at Border Patrol checkpoints just to go to the gas station or get groceries. Tohono O’odham tribal members – whose nation is literally severed by the U.S-Mexico border – report racial profiling by border agents; drone and tower surveillance; and disruptions to their traditional hunting and ceremonial practices. And tragically, militarization created a death trap for migrants, who now must navigate by foot through remote, dangerous terrain in order to cross the border. In the last two decades, nearly 8,000 migrants have been found dead along the southern border, but the real number of fatalities is certainly much higher. Thousands are missing.
There is perhaps no more tangible symbol of border militarization than the wall, which roils and alters landscapes and communities all along the border. Donald Trump campaigned on the promise to build a “big, beautiful wall”—after his predecessors had already completed 654 miles, ranging from steel panels to vehicle barriers. As president, Trump’s obsession with the wall has only intensified.
One hundred and 30 miles west of Nogales, the tiny town of Ajo, Arizona (population 3,300), has been inundated by a flurry of border wall construction. Despite concerns about COVID-19 transmission, out-of-state workers arrived in droves, hired to build a section of wall—part of a $524 million federal contract awarded to Southwest Valley Constructors. This summer, construction has seen contractors blasting through indigenous ceremonial sites, using so much water that a sacred spring is drying up, and chain-sawing through saguaro cacti, a protected species that can live up to 200 years. Day by day, the wall snakes further across the pristine Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, cutting off wildlife migratory corridors and access to water sources.
Arizona has also become a political hot spot, with national groups pouring millions of dollars into the newly recognized battleground state. Analysts say President Trump is far less likely to win the 2020 presidential election without winning Arizona. And both the Trump and Biden campaigns have their eyes on a key voting bloc: Arizona’s estimated 1.2 million Latino voters.
Both the Trump and Biden campaigns have their eyes on a key voting bloc: Arizona’s estimated 1.2 million Latino voters.
Trump won 28 percent of the national Latino vote in 2016. Today, an estimated 24 percent of Latino voters favor him – despite Trump’s overwhelmingly anti-immigrant stance. In addition to doubling down on the promise to build the wall over the last four years, the Trump administration has attacked DACA, carried out aggressive raids and deportations, and separated asylum-seeking parents from their children.
Amid the raging pandemic and spiking summer temperatures, President Trump is courting that vote. Between June and July, the Trump campaign spent more than $1.4 million in Spanish-language TV and radio ads to bolster his “Latinos for Trump” initiative. Both he and Vice President Pence have made multiple campaign visits to Arizona.
On August 18, Trump visited Yuma for the second time this summer, speaking for 45 minutes in the 104 degree heat. Yuma County, known for its winter vegetable production and seasonal population of migrant farmworkers, has been hit particularly hard by COVID-19.
“Nobody understands the border better than Hispanics,” Trump said. “They know what’s good, what’s bad. They don’t want bad people coming into our country, taking their jobs, taking their homes, causing crime. Hispanic Americans are the people who are most in favor of what we are doing at the border.”
But in her work as a volunteer with the Santa Cruz County Democrats, Francis Glad has spoken with hundreds of fellow Latino voters weighing the decision this November. “The stories again and again hold a pattern,” she says. “I do not like what has become of our city and country, our border. If anything, militarization of our border and the anti-immigrant stance has motivated many like me to become more involved… and to vote.”
It was a combination of factors that inspired Glad to become politically active. But near the top of that list was Trump’s racist rhetoric, referring to Mexicans as “criminals” and “rapists.” Even Glad’s own 6 year old son, who is not allowed to watch the news, has absorbed that sentiment.
“Am I Mexican, Mommy?” he asked her recently.
“Well, yes, baby,” she responded. “You are part-Mexican because of me.”
He paused, thinking, and then asked, “So, Trump doesn’t like me?”
“Oy, baby,” she managed, and wrapped him in a hug.
In 2018, Trump sent National Guard troops to Nogales and other border towns in a show of force against the unarmed migrant families traveling from Central America to request asylum. On Election Day 2018, troops installed razor-sharp concertina wire on the border wall, and in February 2019, additional wire was added, covering some parts of the wall from top to bottom. More than one year later, that wire is still there in Nogales – six coils high and within reach of playing children – despite outrage from local officials, who have demanded that it be removed.
“When they put up the concertina wire, it was a low blow,” says Glad. “It’s our community. Ours. And they went and did it without thinking about how it would affect us.”
“When they put up the concertina wire, it was a low blow. It’s our community. Ours. And they went and did it without thinking about how it would affect us.”Francis Glad, Nogales resident
She hopes such actions by the Trump administration will encourage fellow border residents and Latinos to vote for Biden in November. Last year, the Biden campaign launched “Todos Con Biden,” an initiative aimed at wooing Latino voters across the country. Of course, there is an elephant in the room: Biden’s role in the more than 5 million deportations that took place during the Obama administration.
While Biden has frequently cited Obama’s DACA executive order as evidence of the administration’s pro-immigrant policy, he was hesitant to address the deportations. But in February, Biden finally expressed regret in an interview with Univision. “We took far too long to get it right,” he said, “I think it was a big mistake.”
Now he promises a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and to address a spate of issues most important to Latino voters – expanding access to affordable health care, increasing the federal minimum wage to $15/hour, investing in education and passing commonsense gun legislation. Plenty of progressives wonder if that will be enough.
“If Mr. Biden takes a conventional approach and talks to the same little sliver of older Latinos in Arizona everyone talks to, he could be in trouble,” wrote Chuck Rocha, who served as senior advisor for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, in a New York Times op-ed. “But if he taps into the culture of activism in Arizona that registered 138,000 Latinos since Mr. Trump was elected, helped oust Joe Arpaio and is working to ensure Mr. Trump is next, Mr. Biden can reshape the electoral map and win.”
On August 4, Arizonans cast their ballots in the primary election. The following day, Glad admitted she was feeling “a bit disappointed” at the voter turnout, a number she’s been focused on for months now. “My goal is to make that voter turnout number go up,” says Glad. “I have actually put off having a regular job for that purpose.”
While the election turned out more voters in Santa Cruz County than any other primary election in the past 10 years — 30.2 percent, up from previous primary elections that typically hover between 22 and 25 percent — the countywide numbers were still lower than the 33.9 percent of voters statewide.
With her son home learning remotely, Glad is juggling her political volunteer work with the new realities imposed by COVID-19. While her son signs into his online classes, she makes phone calls to voters and joins her own virtual meetings.
Most of the calls from Spanish speaking voters get routed by the Santa Cruz County Democrats to her cell phone. Glad speaks with Latino voters of all ages, many of whom will be casting a vote for the first time in November. One Nogales resident in his 60s, a veteran, shared with her that he had never bothered to vote until now. “He was disgusted with what was happening to his country and to Nogales,” says Glad.
An elderly woman sought help in filling out her voter registration form. An immigrant to Nogales and a career nurse, she told Glad that “the country she immigrated to, the one who had given her food to eat when she was hungry and sheltered her when she needed it most, was not the same. That now immigrants are not welcomed and children are locked up.”
Glad says, “She told me she wanted to remain alive long enough to vote Trump out of office.”
Debbie Weingarten
Capital & Main
Blake Gentry says
Debbie,
You did a good job of covering the ethos of the border wall and border community reactions, and with the pathos of our reactions. But the logos of how we got there needs a little work. The large jump from Bill Clinton’s NAFTA invoked border re-design to Trump border wall building lets the rest of the USA off the hook.
Reagan’s brutal backing of militarizes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and In Honduras (against the Sandinistas) was coupled with two key polices. The Brady Bonds Bill expanded US taxpayer funding of debt bailouts for over 19 countries, meaning they could then be eligible for expanded trade by heir elites agreeing to US conditions for lower tariffs, thus killing domestic production. Thus the trade deal, Caribbean Basin Initiative (with Dominican Republic and Panama added later) was followed by NAFTA (1994) followed by CAFTA 2004 in completely bipartisan legislation. By 2013, NAFTA And CAFTA produces 6.6 million displaced agricultural workers, whom then came to the United States (Gentry: Deprivation, not Deterrence, 2014) The physical border previously and since has acted as Jorge Bustamonte described, as the “sluice gate” of labor. However, it was always only relatively enforced, relative to the needs of cheap labor markets in the the US Interior.
Then 9/11/2001 happened. The border militarization that came about post facto 911 was then due to the 2002 Homeland Security Act and border building around 2006. 911 was largely played out as a national security response on the Southern Border, a very bipartisan act which sought to blame immigrants as terrorists (taking a line from Reagan in the 1980’s) even though there was no evidence of a single terrorist crossing the southern border before or since. (footnote: Minnesota actually has the highest concentration of convicted Terrorists: 13, and no Border Wall building in the land of a Thousand Lakes has been proposed, wonder why?)
The national security doctrine has since been driven by military companies’ quest for never ending contracts in the wake of the Iraq war pull out. this is how Biden keeps his Iraq war investor friends and disavows the war he approved of – at the same time.
Thus another sector was fed taxpayers dollars to also hyper-pump the border as a “containment area” through prison detention center construction while suspending the constitution (goodbye 1st amendment rights) in the 100 mile zone next to the border. This National security state has made many Republicans and Democratic politicians very very rich, while Democratic politicians now decry asylum abuses, as the underlying industries keep the K Street lobby well greased on both sides of the aisle.
Now finally, the rest of the country knows what militarization looks like, having paramilitary and military on the streets of Washington DC and Portland. The unchecked power of the Department of Homeland Security is not a mere matter of “border policy” but of the same kind of national security state the US imposed on Central American countries. It is no accident that many Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans migrate to flee economic ruin, violence, and narco-states, but (though equally poor) Nicaraguans mostly stay put. While Nicaragua has repressed its population as well, the deep seated hollowed out state has not occurred to the same extent. The US Southern Border build up also facilitates the same constant flow of 80% + of hard narcotics through the vastly improved and enlarged Ports of Entry on commercial trucks from Mexico. So we can conclude that real Free Trade at the border, where it actually transpires though Customs and Border Patrol agents, has vastly improved, not border security,but the narcotics trade. Ironic, that.
The same Ports of Entry where conservatives said immigrants should “legally” apply for asylum, and as soon as they did, the Trump administration essentially shut asylum down, deporting over 8,000 unaccompanied children so far in 2020.
It was the Obama administration that beefed up the 287-G program coupling ICE and local police / sheriff to dragnet Latino communities, which according to a study by professors at the University of Chicago, targeted Latino communities in the border zone. The national security state explains why that “progressive” President fell into line and then deported 2 million immigrants while throwing pancakes for aid to Central America for, as you may have guessed it, “security aid”. Security aid does not feed families.
While Trump used the National Security State (diverting money from the Pentagon) for wall building, a highly ineffective strategy against narcotics and human immigration, he has done it for political gain.
The other politicians must ask themselves if their 911 justification for militarizing the US SW border States where 26% of all Americans live, is going to be a multi-generational effort and investment. It has absolutely killed local commerce, and will soon kill wildlife, while blowing up with explosives Quitobaquito, an natural traditional oasis of the Tohono O’odham and Hia-Ched O’odham Peoples in Organ Pipe National Monument at the border. Seeing how my US federal government used dynamite in broad daylight to blow up a hill side where native O’odham grave sites remained in order to build a “new” wall (which the press keeps repeating ad nauseam) but rather actually to just REBUILD the same EXISTING WALL, helps me appreciate the fictional book I read about the Boer War in South Africa, entitled Barbarians at the Gate.
When the gates are looked through from the other other side by legitimate asylum seeking refugees, what they see here now in the United States, are us, the Barbarians.
Blake Gentry (Cherokee)
Indigenous Languages Office
Alitas Shelter, Tucson