294- Border Wall

Episode Summary

Title: Border Wall - In 2006, President Bush signed a law to begin building an 18-foot high fence along parts of the U.S.-Mexico border. Today it covers about a third of the entire border. - The border fence does not perfectly follow the contours of the Rio Grande River, which is the legal border. Some homes ended up on the Mexican side of the fence in a "no man's land." - In the 1960s, a disputed area called the Chamizal was finally ceded from the U.S. back to Mexico after a century of conflict. Thousands of residents were displaced. - In 2017, President Trump ordered prototypes to be built for his proposed border wall. Eight 30-foot high prototypes were constructed near San Diego. - There are already over 650 miles of various types of border barriers constructed over decades. New walls continue to be built based on 2006 legislation. - The prototypes were built by construction firms, not architects. Some cities have tried to ban contracting with border wall builders. - The future and effectiveness of the prototypes is uncertain. Border walls will likely continue to be built sporadically over time.

Episode Show Notes

Three stories about the physical border at the southern edge of the U.S.

Episode Transcript

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That's Joe Richmond from Radio Diaries and on this episode, with the help of Radio Diaries, we're going to tell a few stories about the physical border on the southern edge of the United States. SPEAKER_10: And what happens when instead of people crossing the border, the border crosses the people. SPEAKER_09: Joe Richmond. We'll take it from here. SPEAKER_09: In 2006, President Bush signed a law to begin building an 18-foot high fence along a few key parts of the U.S.-Mexico border. The project went by different names. Operation Gatekeeper in California, Operation Safeguard in Arizona, and in Texas they called it Operation Hold the Line. Today that fence looks like a somewhat random dotted line. It covers about a third of the entire border. Now the border fence has always been controversial, but it's based on a very human impulse to have an actual physical barrier that marks the imaginary one on the map. It's a simple idea. And like most things, it turned out to not be so simple. Hello. SPEAKER_02: Hello, is this Pamela Taylor? SPEAKER_09: It is. So can you tell me where you are right now? I'm in my living room. I'm looking out the window. I see my front yard. And beyond that is the fence. It is huge, iron, about 20 feet tall. The fence was put in there by Homeland Security. SPEAKER_02: SPEAKER_09: Pamela Taylor is 86 years old. You may have noticed she has a slight British accent, but she's an American citizen. After World War II, she married an American and they moved to a small brick house outside of Brownsville, Texas. That's the house she's in right now, and she's been there for more than 60 years. Now that house is technically in the U.S., but for the past six years, it's been on the wrong side of the fence. We're on the Mexican side. The fence is in front of my home. SPEAKER_09: So let me just go over this. For many people thinking about the border fence, they just assume it's on the border. SPEAKER_02: No, it's not true. SPEAKER_09: The Rio Grande River is the legal border between the U.S. and Mexico, but the border fence doesn't follow all the natural contours of that river. SPEAKER_02: If they followed the river, it would be a winding fence, whereas now it is a straight fence, and therefore they did not need to install that much fence. And in the beginning, we were told this fence was going to go right through my living room. SPEAKER_09: Luckily, they ended up building it about a mile north. Today, Taylor has about a half dozen neighbors in the exact same situation as her. Down the road, there's also a farm and a golf course, all on the Mexican side of the fence. SPEAKER_02: We've gotten used to it now. We just can't go on and be miserable about it. SPEAKER_09: So how would you describe where you are living? SPEAKER_02: Well, actually, it's a no man's land. And I firmly believe that I shouldn't be paying taxes. SPEAKER_09: A no man's land between two countries. That's what our next story is about. SPEAKER_17: The United States is not as big today as it was at this time yesterday. President Johnson and President Díaz-Ordáez of Mexico met at the border today and ended an old dispute. The Rio Grande River has been the border between the U.S. and Mexico ever since Texas became a state. SPEAKER_09: The problem is, rivers can move. And that's exactly what happened in 1864. Torrential rains caused the river to jump its banks and go south. All of a sudden, the border was in a different place. What that meant is that Texas had gained a square mile of land. It was called the Chamizal, named for the scrubby desert plant that grew there. The Chamizal was a thorn in the side of U.S.-Mexico relations for a century. And then finally, 50 years ago, the U.S. gave the land back to Mexico. But by that time, thousands of people had moved to the Chamizal and made it their home. And that is where this story begins. SPEAKER_06: My name is Maria Eugenia Trio. I grew up in the Chamizal area during the 50s and 60s. I lived one street away from the river, which was the division between the two countries. The river was just more like a highway that you had to cross to get to where you needed to be. There was a baseball team on the Mexican side, and then there was a team on the El Paso side, and they would just signal each other through whistles, and then they would cross. It was just life. Life with a river between us. SPEAKER_05: This is an interview. It's part of the Chamizal Oral History Project. So, Mr. Hinojosa, could I ask you to describe the neighborhood? Yes. There were a lot of tenements and a lot of small, I hate to say, shacks, but that's what they were. SPEAKER_28: They didn't have any electricity, no running water. But you build one room, and then you build another room, and then you build another room. One room after the other, they become, I guess, better off. My name is Victor Guzman Garcia. The Garcia clan goes back to about 386 years in this area. SPEAKER_25: A lot of Mexicans from the interior thought that the Chamizal, which was basically just a square mile of land, they thought it was as large as California, and that it probably had oil and gold. So every time there was an issue between two countries, Mexico would, of course, bring up the Chamizal. SPEAKER_08: My name is Paul Kramer, and I'm an historian at Vanderbilt University researching the history of the Chamizal. In Mexico, the Chamizal represented illegally occupied territory, but in the United States, very few Americans had even heard of it. And then, in the 1960s, that all changed in a really unexpected way. And this is NBC News, presenting today a new special, Crisis in Cuba. SPEAKER_19: This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past... SPEAKER_08: With the Cuban Missile Crisis, and specifically the fact that Mexico does not cut off its ties to Castro, the Kennedy administration becomes very concerned that Mexico could be vulnerable in the Cold War. Suddenly, there's a real willingness to remedy the Chamizal dispute, to use it as a kind of bargaining chip. And so the big question is, the residents of this tiny patch of land, what's going to happen to them? SPEAKER_06: This is a letter from the International Boundary and Water Commission to Mr. Luis Rivera. Dear sir, we advise that the appraisal of your property would be undertaken as soon as practical, preparatory to acquisition by the federal government. As kids are kids, we were eavesdropping, and we heard there was going to be removal. And we remember our fathers, stomping around the kitchen, saying, ¿Perez que no puede? No, they can't! We were Mexican by heritage, but we understood that we were American by nationality. People were given a choice of going back to Mexico. And only one man that we know of actually accepted to go back. Everybody else said, ¿No? But we all had to be out by October 1964. SPEAKER_05: This is an interview with W.E. Wood, former government real estate appraiser during the Chamizal settlement. How did most of the people feel about leaving their homes? SPEAKER_12: It was mixed. There's one case that I can recall. This lady had a very nice home, better than the rest of them in the neighborhood. And she was not going to let us in, and she couldn't speak English. SPEAKER_05: Do you speak Spanish? SPEAKER_12: Yes, enough to get by. And she told me that she was not going to give her house to those goddamn Mexicans in Mexico. And that they can go to hell, and I'm going to keep my house, and I will get my guns out, and I will fight. Then the day when it came to move, the United States Marshals picked her up bodily, and put her in a car, and put her furniture in storage. SPEAKER_04: My name is Angie Nunez. It was a very big disappointment because they did not pay for the house. They paid us for the land. My father had just built four extra rooms in our house. We had central heating. He even had the bricks made special, adove, with the hay, because the house was going to be that much thicker, that much warmer, that much whatever. And we had to leave all that. SPEAKER_06: One by one, the family started moving out. And what was left behind were empty shells of homes, and the windows were all boarded up. And then yellow ribbon was placed on them so that we couldn't even go into the backyards. So it looked like a crime scene with this yellow tape all over, until the only family left was ours. Ours, historically, was the last one. And I remember my dad said, don't look back. You are forbidden from looking back. SPEAKER_18: An enthusiastic welcome at the U.S.-Mexican border for Presidents Johnson and Gustavo Diaz-Hordas arriving together to settle a century-old border dispute. SPEAKER_25: I remember thousands and thousands of people on top of the bridge and everything. And I could see Johnson, I could see him sitting at the table, and Diaz-Hordas. SPEAKER_00: President of the United States of America, President Johnson. Pretty much the whole of the White House with Congressmen and Senators, and everybody was here. I mean, this was a big thing. SPEAKER_25: An unpredictable river has been converted into a controlled source of water for Mexicans and Americans alike. SPEAKER_01: Live in the city of Mexico and the United States. SPEAKER_08: By December 1968, Mexico and the United States jointly sponsor the digging of a cement-lined channel that will make the river go where the authorities want it to go in terms of maintaining the boundary that they want. After speeches, the two men walked over to press the buttons that would detonate a retaining wall about a mile away and send the water down its new channel. SPEAKER_08: At the appointed time, the two presidents approach this black box that's been set up on the bridge, which has these two red buttons. And they're supposed to hit the buttons and detonate these explosives to release the mighty Rio Grande into its new channel. In fact, there's just a puff of smoke. Nothing happens. And so very quickly, technicians bulldoze the dam and release the river, completing the ceremony. SPEAKER_16: It's taken 100 years, but it's finally done. Mexico has its piece of scruff land back, though perhaps it hasn't decided what to do with it. And the river is once again the international boundary. It cost $40 million, but it's very tidy this way. Jack Perkins, NBC News, El Paso. SPEAKER_06: Well, I'll show you. The river is now encased in cement. That poor thing. It's about five feet across. It looks like a muddy creek. Where we used to go, it was wide. Sometimes it had quite a bit of water. And it would ripple across. There's only so much control a man can do on a river. Sooner or later, I personally think that river is going to do what Mother Nature has taught it to do. To move. SPEAKER_11: Well, I woke up this morning to the door I did go. I found that I was living in Old Mexico. I got the chamis all blue. Just as blue as I can be. Because somebody came and took my house away from me. Well, I was born in America in El Paso. And now I'm a citizen of Old Mexico. I got the chamis all blue. The song you're hearing right now is called The Chamis All Blues, written and recorded by Bob Burns and the Teakwoods in 1963, a year before the Chamis All was handed back to Mexico. SPEAKER_10: This story was produced by Radio Diaries. That's Joe Richmond, Nellie Gillis, Sarah Kate Kramer, Ben Shapiro, and Deborah George, with help from historian Paul Kramer. SPEAKER_11: Just as blue as I can be. Because somebody came and took my house away from me. SPEAKER_10: Radio Diaries is one of the founding members of Radio-Topia and one of the true gems of public radio. I implore you to subscribe to their podcast. It's really for your own good. They produce many historical documentaries, but they specialize in giving recorders to ordinary people with extraordinary stories and turning their audio diaries into unforgettable radio. They basically won every award in journalism. And when we started Radio-Topia, I was so honored that they wanted to work with us. So if Radio Diaries is not part of your podcast diet, you are missing out. Find them at radiodiaries.org or at radio-topia.fm. At the tail end of 2017, our own Avery Trauffman took a trip to the border herself to look at the architecture of the border wall and the new border wall prototypes. We'll talk to her about what she found right after this. 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Visit better help dot com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's better help. H e l p dot com slash invisible. SPEAKER_21: Build that wall. Build that wall. Build that wall. Build that wall. Shortly after Trump took office in March of 2017, U.S. Customs and Border Protection put out a request for proposals asking private companies for designs of a wall that would divide Mexico and the United States. SPEAKER_10: There were two different requests for proposals or RFPs. One RFP was a wall design made of concrete. The other was for a design made of quote unquote other materials. They were to be between 18 and 30 feet tall. From the submissions they received, Customs and Border Protection selected eight and turned them into prototypes. Last October, our own Avery Treffelman went down to see what they looked like. SPEAKER_20: We're not live, right? Nobody's live here? Okay. SPEAKER_27: I found myself in a crowd of reporters from Reuters and The Guardian and Univision and Fox. And we had all been given hard hats and neon yellow vests. And we all piled into an air conditioned van where we were brought out to a construction site. The cameramen unpacked and hoisted their video cameras like great mechanical carcasses. Anchors applied fresh makeup and did warm ups. And then we swarmed around Roy Villarreal, all of us jostling to get our microphones in his face. First name is Roy, R-O-Y, last name Villarreal. V-I-L-L-A-R-E-A-L. SPEAKER_27: Villarreal was the acting chief patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol in the San Diego sector. He was showing us these eight prototypes for a new border wall between the United States and Mexico. SPEAKER_20: All prototypes are near completion. Seven of the eight have been completed and the eighth one should be completed by the end of the week. SPEAKER_27: These eight sample rectangles of border wall are massive. Each is 30 feet tall. It's striking in person. If they were actually formed into one continuous wall, they'd block off the mountains in the distance. By now you've probably seen pictures of these prototypes. Four are made of concrete. Four are made of other materials. One is bright blue. One has molding on the side to make the concrete look like cobblestone. Half of them have rounded tops to make it harder to grip. SPEAKER_20: And the determination of the ultimate design is based on the testing and evaluation. We have three specific requirements which are looking at the subterranean, the ability to dig underneath the prototypes, the penetrability, the aspect of being able to breach or in some way degrade the prototype, and scalability. The setup of the eight different prototypes certainly looked like a design competition. And so I asked Villarreal, will there be a winner here? SPEAKER_27: Will there be a winner in this? SPEAKER_20: Ultimately the winner is the U.S. government. It's going to be us in that this is going to enhance our border security. Nicely played. Conceptually what we may have is we could have a singular design that is going to be utilized in some segment along the border or we may have a combination of the designs paired together and then applied in different areas along the border. SPEAKER_27: It's not exactly clear what will happen with the prototypes. Customs and Border Protection never specified if they were intended for the entire border or parts of the border or to fortify existing walls. Because of course the part that Trump didn't mention in his campaign is that over one third of the U.S.-Mexico border is already covered by a wall or a barrier of some kind. So now we are here in this administration which ran on a platform that said I'm going to build a wall and everybody claps and says yay, finally someone's come to build a wall. SPEAKER_07: There's already 650 miles of wall in place. This is Ronald Rael, professor of architecture at UC Berkeley and author of the book Border Wall as Architecture. SPEAKER_27: In his book he writes about the long history of the border wall. SPEAKER_07: It has a long life and it's been around for some time. It's evolved from stone cairns. These are just stones placed along the border to say where the border was because it's just a frontier. Originally Rael says no one knew where that borderline actually was and engineers from both Mexico and the United States went to this kind of no man's land frontier zone after 1848 just to figure out where to place these demarcation stones. SPEAKER_07: So piles of stones were put up and later monuments, fences were constructed. Mostly the fences were constructed to keep cattle out because there were ranches on both sides. But eventually some of those fences became more aggressive, especially between cities, particularly between San Ysidro and Tijuana. SPEAKER_27: In 1990 the Army Corps of Engineers came to that Tijuana border. They brought over 40,000 carbon steel corrugated planks, each plank 12 feet long and a quarter inch thick. These had been made for the Vietnam War as portable landing mats for helicopters. And these helicopter landing mats were turned up on their sides into the first official border wall. More and more landing mats were added and today there are over 60 miles of this landing mat wall. And then in other parts of the border other kinds of walls and fences were built of different materials, all varying based on the topography. There's pedestrian fences that allow for visibility on both sides, vehicular fences that are meant for cars not to cross. SPEAKER_07: In his book, Rael lists over a dozen types of border wall. SPEAKER_27: One that's very expensive is called the floating fence and this is here in the Algodone Dunes in California. SPEAKER_07: The floating fence snakes over huge mountainous dunes and has these mechanical buttresses that keep it from sinking into the sand. SPEAKER_27: So it's designed to be lifted and placed back on the dunes. Otherwise if you just let it go it just sinks into the dunes. It's amazing. SPEAKER_07: The border wall is already a building project with significant weight behind it. SPEAKER_27: It's unfettered by laws that regular building projects have to abide by. And that's particularly because of the Secure Fence Act which passed in 2006 back when George W. Bush was president. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 was created so that it could usurp any other law that existed in the United States. SPEAKER_07: So any environmental protection laws, this is more important. Any Native American Heritage Acts, this is more important. Any Wildlife Act, the Secure Fence Act is more important than any of those. And so the wall can be constructed uninhibited. Which brings us back to those new prototypes that are being considered and the press junket I went to back in October. SPEAKER_20: The border is very dynamic. It's fluid, it's dynamic, there's crime of some form happening every day here. The prototypes will help influence the future development of our border infrastructure system. When the request for proposals went out, architects were like, what do we do? SPEAKER_27: A number of architecture firms submitted some designs for border walls and other architects submitted blank sheets of paper to waste judges' time. But ultimately, Customs and Border Protection didn't choose any architects at all. These prototypes, like the vast, vast majority of the built environment, bridges, tunnels, towers, houses, airports, luxury apartments and prisons, were mostly made by general contractors. These giant construction firms are very practical. They safely erect huge structures on time and on budget. Their goal is to appease the client, which in this case is the U.S. government. The eight prototypes were manufactured by six different companies. Would you mind walking us through who these companies are and how they can have signings? I'm going to defer that to Mr. DeSao because I don't know them. SPEAKER_27: Ralph DeSao is the spokesperson for Border Patrol and he wasn't quite familiar with the construction companies either. The best he could do was read them off a list. E, L, T, A, North, that's Cadel, Cadel, Sterling, KWR, Fisher, Sand. I mean, that's how I read. SPEAKER_00: To be fair, at the time, I didn't know these companies either. I had never heard of them before. SPEAKER_27: But I've likely been in one of their structures somewhere, in one of their tunnels or airports or office buildings. The companies that made these walls are W.G. Yates & Sons from Mississippi, Elta North America, an Israeli company based in Maryland, Cadel Construction in Alabama, Texas Sterling Construction out of Houston, KWR Construction from Arizona, and Fisher, Sand and Gravel from Arizona. Now, because of the wall prototypes, people know these companies and they're talking about their relationships to them. Weeks after I returned from the border, I went to an Oakland City Council meeting where they were considering passing an ordinance to forbid contracting with any of the companies bidding on the border wall. I want to thank my colleagues in Vance for supporting our resolution on the border wall to make sure that none of our tax dollars are spent being invested with any contract or any business that is building this divisive wall that will do nothing to make us safer. SPEAKER_24: Similar measures have also been proposed in other municipalities around the country, including New York City and L.A. SPEAKER_27: And they've been floated on the state level in Arizona, California, Illinois, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. SPEAKER_26: This is a prohibition on the city of Oakland doing business with contractors who build the Trump border wall. And the city of Oakland should have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it. SPEAKER_27: But there are also critics of these kinds of ordinances, like Cherie Smith, a representative from Associated General Contractors, or AGC, who stood up at that Oakland City Council meeting and testified on behalf of the contractors' freedom of choice. AGC opposes any policy or regulation that prohibits a contractor from bidding a construction project because contractors should be able to choose which projects they wish to bid on without fear of reprisal or discrimination. SPEAKER_23: But the ordinance passed, and now companies entering contracts with the city of Oakland, say to build a tunnel or a condo complex, will be required to declare that they are not a part of border wall construction and do not plan to be. SPEAKER_27: And this goes beyond those companies already involved in the prototypes, because new border construction is happening separately from those eight prototypes on the San Diego-Tijuana border. SPEAKER_03: When I've talked to Customs and Border Protection people, their thinking is that, you know, he's the president, this is what he wants, so we're going to follow his orders. So they're going through the motions, they're building these prototypes, but when it comes down to it, that's not going to work. That's Melissa Del Bosque, a reporter from The Texas Observer. SPEAKER_27: And according to an article she published last year, there are already plans in motion for the first new section of the border wall, which will run through a wildlife refuge in South Texas. It will be built by Michael Baker International, a construction firm who was not involved in the prototypes at all. The proposed design will be a levee wall, which is not among the designs in the prototypes. In terms of the prototypes, what should we make of them? SPEAKER_03: I don't know. I think they're going to sit there like Stonehenge, probably. SPEAKER_27: You just view them as a symbol. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, totally. I don't think they mean much other than fulfilling his campaign promise. So whether or not these particular prototypes on display will ever actually be built, there will be more walls. SPEAKER_07: I imagine what will happen is what has been happening for decades, and it's not special to the Trump administration at all, which is that some walls are going to be constructed. Because this has been happening through many presidencies, Republican and Democrat alike. SPEAKER_27: Professor Ronald Rael again. And so I imagine that's what's going to happen. There's going to be some walls built. SPEAKER_27: Rael has been studying the various border walls for years, and he's come to believe they're ineffective and inhumane. So when he first saw the pictures of Trump's prototypes, he thought of the famous saying, Show me a 20-foot wall and I'll show you a 21-foot ladder. SPEAKER_07: And so Rael got to work on a simple act of protest using his skills as an architect. SPEAKER_27: Based on the images of the wall prototypes, he drew up some designs for ladders. SPEAKER_10: The team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Shreef Yousif, Taryn Mazza and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Dexter Walcott, Ashton Hamm, Patrick McAndrews, James Hurd, Peggy Diemer and the rest of the Architecture Lobby, a group of concerned architects doing work around the border wall. Find them at architecture-lobby.org. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. SPEAKER_10: We're one of the founders of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by our listeners. So keep sending me pictures of your freshly applied sticker badges. They make me very happy. You can find 99% Invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. SPEAKER_10: You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org or on Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit, too. But all people of every nationality are free to hang out at our place at 99pi.org. SPEAKER_10: Radio-Topia from PRX. 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