by Suketu Mehta
So the refugees bicycled across the border. Five hundred a week. Thousands of migrants, pedaling on rickety bikes, across the magic line to Europe. The bureaucrats had not thought of banning bicycles.
* * *
Ever since the invention of passports, the right to a home, to a nation, exists in conflict with the right to move freely, to leave home, and to find another home. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” It says nothing about what happens when someone leaves his country, or whether or not he has a right to reside in another country. Article 14, though, gives everyone the right to political asylum in another country, and Article 15 gives everyone the right to a nationality and the right to change that nationality. These contradictions are what the world is grappling with today.
* * *
During the Great Depression, an Okie named Woody Guthrie began traveling around the country, listening and gathering stories and songs. In 1944, he recorded a song that, after the Weavers popularized it, has become America’s alternative national anthem. Most Americans are familiar with the opening and closing lines of “This Land Is Your Land.” But what is less known is that in other variants, there are additional verses which make it a protest anthem, and a prophetic one at that. One of these verses was handwritten by Guthrie in 1940:
Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
A sign was painted, said “Private Property.”
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.
Another version of the song contains these two verses:
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back.
This land was made for you and me.
With those three verses, the Guthrie song becomes not just the American anthem, but a universal migrants’ anthem, wherever in the world they come from, and wherever they are going. This land is their land; this land is our land.
2
THE FENCE: AMARGO Y DULCE
For years, if you didn’t have papers or lacked the authorization to leave the United States without the right to come back, the only place along the two-thousand-mile U.S.-Mexican border where you could meet your family face-to-face was at the end of the line: a small patch of land adjoining the Pacific Ocean between San Diego and Tijuana. It was inaugurated by First Lady Pat Nixon in 1971 as a “friendship park” between the two nations and originally did not have a fence. Families on both sides could meet and have picnics together without hindrance. “May there never be a wall between these two great nations,” Nixon said. “Only friendship.”
In 1994, as part of Operation Gatekeeper, the Clinton administration decided that “only friendship” was no longer the case; it would erect a barrier—a fence—between these two great nations. Families could meet across the barrier of twelve-foot-high steel bollards and pass food back and forth. In 2009, the Obama administration shut down the American side of Friendship Park and put up a second fence behind the first one. After protests, Friendship Park reopened in 2012, but with a thick double mesh; if a child wanted to touch her mother, for instance, she could stick her pinky inside the fence, and her mother could do the same on the opposite side, and the tips of their pinkies could touch: the dance of the fingers, the “pinky kiss.” “Amargo y dulce” is how the migrants describe the experience. Bittersweet.
Every once in a while, in its magnanimity, the government opened a door adjoining Friendship Park, and people could actually hug their family members—for no more than three minutes. This wasn’t done often; the door was opened only six times after 2013. On one of those occasions, in November 2017, a couple showed up on opposite sides of the border wearing wedding clothes, got married under the watchful eye of the Border Patrol, and then went back, separated again. The groom on the American side, as the newspapers later found out, was awaiting sentencing for a drug conviction. Ten months earlier, a customs search of his Volkswagen Jetta at the nearby San Ysidro port had uncovered forty-three pounds of heroin, forty-seven pounds of methamphetamine, and forty-three pounds of cocaine. The newspapers called it the “cartel wedding,” and the Border Patrol had egg all over its face. It had, unwittingly, provided armed security for the drug dealer.
The next month, a Border Patrol officer named Rodney Scott took over the San Diego Sector and shut the Door of Hope for good. The Border Angels, a local nonprofit, had been working on a seventh opening of the gate, so that parents whose children were disabled, but were on the other side, could hug them for a few minutes. Scott declared that this gate would no longer open for human beings. “It’s a maintenance gate … to be used for maintenance purposes only.”
Scott also came out with a list of new restrictions on families visiting Friendship Park: They could meet only from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays for ten to thirty minutes at a time. And only ten people at a time would be allowed in, down from twenty-five previously. And they couldn’t take any photos or videos or even record their family members’ voices on a tape recorder. The government’s explanation? “The U.S. Border Patrol is committed to ensuring the safety and security of those who visit Friendship Circle.” How taking a photo of a family member, with armed guards watching, compromises anyone’s safety or security was not in the explanation.
* * *
The fence is a heavily rusted mesh structure, ugly, industrial, foreboding. It snakes down the hillsides and all the way into the sea. People on horseback trot onto the American beach from the dude ranches that line the road to the park. On the Mexican side, there is liveliness, food, crowds. “Musica, musica, musica,” offer the strolling men dressed in cowboy hats, carrying accordions or guitars, to serenade the reunions.
The Border Patrol doesn’t check the papers of most people entering the park. It’s not an official policy to tolerate those they suspect of being illegal aliens at Friendship Park; but of the thousands of visitors in 2017, only one or two were arrested for being undocumented.
Two little girls on either side of the fence run off from their families for a bit, and the older one bends down to touch the younger one’s finger. She is so young that even her index finger fits through the mesh. The girl on the Mexican side is eating from a bag of fried food; she tries to push some through to the girl on the American side, but the yellow lump of food is too big to go through the hole, and it falls to the ground.
The girl’s mother, who has been talking to a man on the other side, turns to look for her daughter; her eyes are red from crying.
Another family shows up from Colorado Springs. Their mother has come from Ciudad Juárez. The little ones are lifted up to peer at their abuela. They all try to touch fingers.
* * *
Alfredo Varela walks into the enclosure. He is from Irvine, California, he tells me, and hasn’t seen his brother for twenty years. He came over at thirteen with his mother, who later returned to Mexico and can’t come back. He is a facilities technician and is on “something like DACA,” which allows him to stay in the country but not cross this fence to hug his only brother.
Alfredo, who grew up in Tijuana, is a keen amateur photographer; he likes to take photos of sunsets on the ocean. He points to the sea and says, “We used to ride our bikes on that beach”—back and forth beyond the two countries, when he was a kid. Nobody bothered them. They would carry their passports with them in case anyone asked. His brother was more adventurous and would go farther out into San Diego; Alfredo stayed on the beach.
His brother finally arrives, and Alfredo walks
up toward the barrier. He is standing a little apart from the fence, smiling. Then he leans in. He takes off his sunglasses and his cap, showing his closely cropped head, his face. There is laughter from the other side. He leans forward and puts his hand up to the metal. So does his brother.
Alfredo comes back the next day, on a Sunday, to speak to his brother some more before he goes back to Guadalajara, a two-and-a-half-hour flight away. “I did the math and realized it was actually twenty-five years since I’ve seen him,” he tells me, wonderingly. He’s been putting pressure on his brother to get a passport so that he can get a tourist visa to come visit him.
In a way, Alfredo is glad they could only talk through the mesh, because it felt less than satisfactory to his brother: “He feels like he’s visiting me in jail.” Now his brother will feel motivated to visit him, even though it’s a risk. It costs $160 to even apply for a tourist visa, which is a lot of money in Mexico, and the application could well be rejected.
There was an unexpected family bonus on this trip for Alfredo. He was looking through Facebook to see if he knew anyone in San Diego and happened to come across his uncle, his father’s brother, whom he hasn’t seen since he’s been in the United States because the uncle is undocumented and won’t risk taking the highway out of the city, where there are multiple Border Patrol checkpoints. So Alfredo met his uncle, met his nephews, in their house. It made him feel good, meeting the only other family he has in this country, and they made plans to meet again soon.
Alfredo has a work authorization, which he has to renew every two years but which doesn’t allow him to go out of the country. If there’s an emergency, like a funeral or the impending death of a close relative, he could apply for a waiver. But he misses his family at Christmastime. “All I want for Christmas is to give my mother a hug,” he says.
A lesbian couple, a schoolteacher and her partner who’re moving from Southern California to Seattle, have come to the park with their two puppies, pugs named Guinness and Modelo, after the beers. One of them hasn’t had his rabies shot, so they can’t take him to Mexico. So they’ve come to show their “children” to the schoolteacher’s mother across the fence. The puppies put their legs up at the fence; the mother tries to touch them.
A man and a woman walk out of the meeting point. The woman is sobbing, and the man has his arm around her. They turn out to be a brother and sister who are Dreamers. They came here at ages eleven and twelve. They’ve just met their parents for the first time in ten years. “I could smell them,” he says with happiness.
For two days straight, I have been speaking to children, parents, siblings, and best friends, moments after they’ve seen their loved ones after years and years. Most of them end up weeping. I’ve never seen so many people break down in such a short amount of time; it is the Park of Tears. If you’ve ever stopped speaking to someone in your family, go to this park and watch the families separated by a government trying to talk to one another through the wire mesh, trying to force their pinkies into the little holes to touch their mother’s or their grandmother’s finger. Friendship Park is at once a monument to bureaucratic stupidity and the absurd rules that lawyers make as well as to the power of love and family to surpass them. It is the cruelest and the most hopeful place I have ever seen.
* * *
I drive out with Rae Ocampo, a genial young Filipino Border Patrol officer, for a tour of the entire fourteen-mile border fence that starts in the mountains and winds down to Friendship Park, just before it ends in the sea. The residents of the slums abutting the wall in Mexico have thrown heaps of garbage over the fence into the United States. Ocampo spends most of his days driving up and down the fence line, peering into Tijuana. He has never been there. “I might run into someone I’ve arrested. It’s not safe.”
Ocampo shows me a whole series of patches on the bottom of the outer fence, covering openings that the coyotes have made with wire cutters. It is these openings that Trump had viewed on a visit here, as he demanded his big, beautiful wall. Eight prototypes for that wall are now set up, some solid concrete, some nine-foot pillars. They are monstrous and inhuman, meant not just to be insurmountable but intimidating—deliberately brutalist. A signal to America’s southern neighbors: keep out.
It remains to be seen if a wall, no matter how high, will deter desperate migrants who have no other option but to cross. The Border Patrol regularly finds tunnels emerging in the warehouses near the border, though they are too expensive to dig solely for human cargo and are mostly used for drug smuggling. As the number of people crossing illegally drops, the amount of drugs coming across increases. In 2017, 782 pounds of fentanyl, enough for 200 million lethal doses, was intercepted at the San Diego border—up six times from the previous year. No wall is going to stop these drugs from coming, because the cartels are increasingly smuggling their shipments through the official border crossings; they’re hidden inside trucks or even disguised to look like parts of the trucks themselves.
We drive past a spanking new private airport in Tijuana, which is connected to the other side of the border by a land bridge. From America, you can pay sixteen dollars to cross the bridge and take a flight from the airport to anywhere in Mexico and many Latin American destinations. The flights cost considerably less than you would pay at San Diego International, a twenty-minute drive north. When you return, you will be greeted with welcoming smiles by the U.S. customs officers, who are paid by the owners of the airport. So there is one system of entry into the United States for the rich coming from the airport and another for the not-so-rich pedestrians who often have to line up for hours for the free crossings nearby. Just like you can pay for business-class airfare, you can now pay for business-class immigration counters.
* * *
I am standing in Friendship Park when Rodney Scott, the San Diego Sector chief, comes by. He points out a white pillar beyond the fence. It indicates the actual demarcation of the border, but it is on the Mexican side, surrounded by families, food vendors, and mariachi bands. He wants to move the fence to the boundary.
There are around twenty thousand Border Patrol agents now, compared with nine thousand in 2000, and the agency’s budget has quadrupled. (Its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, is the largest law enforcement agency in the country, with over sixty thousand employees.) The Border Patrol’s territory is divided into twenty sectors. Each is a fiefdom in which the sector chief has absolute authority.
Scott is a white man in his forties, speaks with a midwestern accent, and has the air of a viceroy. He has decided that there is to be no hugging. He alone decides. The families do not decide; they have no voice. He decides that the Friendship Garden shouldn’t have painted tires buried in the ground to mark the perimeter. He doesn’t like the look—it’s too Mexican—and so it has to go.
I have a simple question for him: Why won’t he let families hug? Why won’t he let Alfredo give his mother and his brother a hug for Christmas?
“I understand that the people want to hug through the border fence. It’s really not the purpose, though. We won’t be doing that,” he says with finality. He says he’s had evidence that, in areas close to the border, “sensitive information for the United States was being passed through the fence on thumb drives.”
There will be no hugging through the fence now or in the future, Scott says, because the people who want to do so are usually criminals. “There are three hundred and twenty ports of entry in the country where you can cross the border pretty easily. The only reason that people couldn’t—not the only reason, but the majority of people—they can’t cross the border to actually physically meet their relatives, there’s some kind of crime they’ve committed that put them into that situation. The normal American and/or the normal Mexican can actually get a border-crosser card, or actually just cross very easily.”
I bring up the case of people who have work authorizations that don’t allow them to leave the country, like Alfredo, or the Dreamers.
The Drea
mers are here illegally, Scott says. He compares them to line-cutters at public events. “Pick any amusement park that you want, or any movie, or even Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, where people line up for hours or days in advance to get into the event, right? So, in any one of those events, if you’re standing in line and a family cuts in front of you in that line to get in, you’re gonna be a little bit angry about it … Now, you complain, and security walks up and grabs the parents and says, ‘You can’t do this, but it’s not your kids’ fault that you cut in line, so we’re gonna let the kids go in.’ Ahead of your family, ahead of all the people that’ve been waiting in this line—that’s for years in some cases, but in my analogy, overnight. Is that fair? So that’s why it’s so complicated. It’s not a simple, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s not the kids’ fault.’”
When the fence was open, people were passing “stored-value cards,” among other things, to their relatives, according to Scott. “That’s actually currency smuggling.” He now wants the relatives to move even farther apart. He’s planning a bollard-style fence, which would allow people to see their families better than the current mesh does but would move them four feet apart. “So you still won’t be able to pass things through it, you still won’t be able to hug through it, or shake hands, but you’d be able to actually see the person that you are talking to.” Not even a pinky could kiss under Scott’s plans for his fence.
Scott is a devout Christian and thinks of his profession in Christian terms. “I believe that my job is my calling. I ended up here for a reason somehow.”
“What happens when you have to separate a child from its mother?” I ask, bringing up the Trump administration’s recently announced policy of forcibly separating migrant children from their parents. “How do you reconcile that with your biblical principles of giving hospitality to a stranger?”
