Line. Fence. Wall.

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Speaker 2 This week, as part of our ongoing immigration series, we're going to explore the origins of the U.S.-Mexico border. Producers Christina Kim and Anya Seinberg take it from here.

Speaker 3 On WhiteHouse.gov, the official White House website, the Trump administration has posted a short video of the U.S.-southern border.

Speaker 4 White fans patrol the border fence. There's no people anywhere in sight.
All you can hear is the sound of wind and the slow crunch of tires on a gravel road.

Speaker 3 And then a caption flashes across the screen that says, the sound of a secure border, courtesy of the one big, beautiful bill.

Speaker 4 The one big, beautiful bill will infuse more than $100 billion into immigration enforcement and border security.

Speaker 4 Almost half of those funds will go towards maintaining and building more of the border wall. Watch the video and the wall looks totally solid.

Speaker 4 But go there in real life and it can be a little different.

Speaker 3 Hey, can you hear me?

Speaker 7 Can you hear me now? Hey, how are you? I'm good.

Speaker 3 This is Eduardo Condreras. He was born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, right on the U.S.-Mexico border, and now he's a local realtor.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I'm just turning on the lights real quick, and then I'll step outside.

Speaker 3 You're making the house look nice, like all realtors do.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's part of the job.

Speaker 3 He's giving me an online tour of a home that's for sale in the southmost neighborhood.

Speaker 8 It's your typical, you know, blue-collar, hard worker, American, and getting buying.

Speaker 3 Eduardo is showing me a house that's typical for the area. Your standard three-bedroom, two-bath house.

Speaker 8 A lot of them have, you know, the nice tile.

Speaker 3 It's really beautiful. Everything looks really brand new.
That kitchen.

Speaker 7 Yeah, look. Still has the wrapper.

Speaker 3 But I'm not here for the tiles. Wow.
Okay. And now I see we've got a kitchen door that leads to the backyard where my view is the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Speaker 8 Yes, ma'am. It's huge,

Speaker 8 about 20-some feet high, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 And that's the backyard. This is the backyard of the house we're seeing today.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it is. Yep.

Speaker 3 Buy this house and you can barbecue by the border wall. And that's not unheard of in this part of town.

Speaker 8 You have your typical border patrol agents, you know, circling around the area. And there's areas around that have your sensors and your cameras on the fence.

Speaker 8 And that's how they, you know, protect the area.

Speaker 3 Is this a hard house to sell because the fence is right there?

Speaker 7 Oh, I hope not.

Speaker 3 One thing that might make it easier is that the border wall here doesn't mark the actual border with Mexico. On the other side of the wall is US territory.

Speaker 8 The truth is, because Mexico is not literally on the other side, it's, to me, it's just another big fence in the back.

Speaker 3 That's also pretty normal. It's not always possible to build a fence on the actual border.
And what's more, the fence is full of gaps.

Speaker 8 There's parts of this fence that are open. It's not all like, you know, closed.
If you drive around this fence,

Speaker 8 there's areas where like it's opened and then there's traffic going in and out because, you know, there's people that live on the, on those ranches, or there's a small neighborhood that's on that side of that fence.

Speaker 3 While the wall isn't necessarily a selling point, according to Eduardo, it's partly why this newly built house even exists.

Speaker 8 That wall that you see over there wasn't constructed by itself. It takes people,

Speaker 8 man hours, money, you know, infrastructure. And look, that's why you have this beautiful new construction home.
Like, somebody's going to buy it.

Speaker 4 So did you put down an offer?

Speaker 3 No, he and I both knew I wasn't really interested in buying, but I couldn't stop thinking about what he showed me. A border wall that isn't on the border.

Speaker 3 An enormous, intimidating fence that also has big gaps. It's way more porous than we might think.
And contradictions like that have defined the border for hundreds of years.

Speaker 4 Right, since the first surveyors drew it.

Speaker 4 And that's where we're going to start today, way back at that first line in the sand, to see how we could get to a place where a 20-foot plus steel wall is going to be someone's backyard fence.

Speaker 4 I'm Anya Steinberg.

Speaker 3 And I'm Christina Kim. Today on Through Line, we're traveling back in time to three critical moments in the history of the border.

Speaker 12 From its origins, it wasn't a place in of itself. It was a place that people moved through.

Speaker 4 To the first fences.

Speaker 13 The fences were really just fences, like the way we imagine fences in our house.

Speaker 3 To walls of law enforcement.

Speaker 14 They're going to see a wall of border patrol vehicles and agents.

Speaker 4 And steel.

Speaker 16 This is Carone DeMars calling for San Antonio, Texas. I listened to NTR Through Line.
In fact, it is the only podcast that I have a paid subscription to because it's that valuable.

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Speaker 5 Part 1.

Speaker 18 Wild, barren, and worthless.

Speaker 3 We're somewhere in the desert between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. It's a place of extremes.

Speaker 3 Temperatures can climb to 118 degrees under the beating sun.

Speaker 3 In the summer, rolling clouds bring dramatic monsoon storms and the rivers and arrollos swell. Otherwise, it's dry.

Speaker 12 Partly for that reason, it was sparsely settled in the 19th century. It's a place that many indigenous people passed through.

Speaker 3 Dozens of tribes called this area home for centuries, including the Yaqui, the Tauna Autumn, and the Kumeyay.

Speaker 12 But they wouldn't have thought of the border as a specific and distinct place.

Speaker 3 In 1850, the U.S.-Mexico border didn't exist yet, but it was about to.

Speaker 4 Hundreds of miles away, a man named John Russell Bartlett was busy packing up his things to head south. He had just been hired as the new U.S.

Speaker 4 Boundary Commissioner, the head of a team of men in charge of marking the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time.

Speaker 4 It's not quite what he imagined for himself.

Speaker 12 Bartlett was a bookseller from Rhode Island.

Speaker 4 A bookseller with big dreams. He'd gone to Washington, D.C., hoping to become something glamorous, like a U.S.
diplomat to Denmark. Instead, he landed this job.

Speaker 11 To cross a wilderness from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean, a distance of more than 800 miles, would at any time be a labor of difficulty.

Speaker 12 He had no experience in surveying.

Speaker 4 This is Rachel St. John.

Speaker 12 I'm associate professor of history at UC Davis.

Speaker 4 She also wrote a book called Line in the Sand, a history of the western U.S.-Mexico border.

Speaker 11 The work is one for the near completion of which we could not be too thankful.

Speaker 4 When Bartlett joined the survey, it had already been going on for over a year.

Speaker 4 And let's just say, the U.S. Boundary Commission was not known for its outstanding workplace culture.

Speaker 3 Bartlett was the fifth U.S. Commissioner to be hired.
One of his predecessors had left the job after being shot by his lead surveyor during a drunken argument.

Speaker 4 Quick pause for context here. The whole reason this survey was happening was to wrap up a war the US and Mexico had fought.
A war that was primarily about expanding US territory. And the US had won.

Speaker 3 In February 1848, the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Speaker 3 Mexico ceded a huge amount of land, what makes up Nevada, Utah, and California, plus parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.

Speaker 4 They had agreed on the border in the treaty. Now they needed to mark that border out on the land.

Speaker 12 If you read the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it looks like a clear blueprint, right?

Speaker 12 They say, what you need to do is you need to look at this map and these few places and just draw straight lines between them and then follow rivers. It'll be no problem.

Speaker 3 Famous last words.

Speaker 3 When the survey began, both nations sent their own team of men to meet at the border. And while American commissioners came and went, Mexico's commissioner, a man named Pedro García Conde, trudged on.

Speaker 19 He's demonstrated talents, his scientific knowledge, specific to the material at hand,

Speaker 19 but also his true patriotism and important service he has lent to the nation.

Speaker 3 García Conde was grizzled. He was an experienced surveyor.
And right from the start, he watched the American team fall into disarray.

Speaker 20 Without any real means and surrounded by the greatest misery and exposed to every danger imaginable, we are advancing the work as much as possible, given the disorganization of the American Commission.

Speaker 3 Which wasn't to say the Mexicans had it easy. Both sides were contending with forces outside their control.

Speaker 12 One of the problems they've run into is that the California gold rush starts.

Speaker 3 The American Commission couldn't find enough boats to take them to San Diego, where the survey was supposed to start.

Speaker 12 And so they end up getting stalled in Panama for a long time.

Speaker 3 When they finally got going, it was slow and hard.

Speaker 4 There was no GPS, no satellite imaging. Surveying was done using tools that have names I can barely pronounce, like sextons, the Autolites, and circumferenters.

Speaker 3 And to make matters worse, the Mexican government didn't have much money after the war to finance their boundary commission.

Speaker 3 García Conde had to draw on his personal line of credit to fund the expedition.

Speaker 3 So by the time Bartlett showed up, García Conde had been through it.

Speaker 4 When he meets Bartlett for the first time in Paso del Norte, present-day El Paso, Texas, he's not impressed.

Speaker 20 El Senor Bartlett que la preside, es un vellos sugeto, perosin idididas de los trabajos que tenemos quecer.

Speaker 6 Trajo siento painting genieros.

Speaker 20 Mr. Bartlett, who presides over it, is a fine fellow, but without any idea of the work we have to do.

Speaker 20 We wrote 120 engineers, and except for two or three very average ones among them, the rest don't know a single word, nor do they obey the commissioner.

Speaker 4 But there's nothing he can do about it. This is the man he has to work with.

Speaker 3 And right away, the two of them run into a problem.

Speaker 12 They have where Paso del Norte actually is, where they're standing, and then they have where it was drawn on the map.

Speaker 3 They look at the treaty map and they realize it's wrong. Paso del Norte is a good 30 miles south of what the map says.

Speaker 3 And Paso del Norte is supposed to be their starting reference point for marking the border.

Speaker 12 But it is actually very tricky because depending on where they drew it, hundreds of miles were at stake.

Speaker 12 If they drew it from one place, they would shift to Mexico. If they drew it to another place, they'd shift to the United States.

Speaker 3 It wasn't just land at stake. People lived in this area too.
Depending on where the line landed, those people would either be Mexicans or Americans.

Speaker 12 These two boundary commissioners came up with a compromise where they decide to sort of split the difference.

Speaker 3 We won't bore you with the details, but Mexico got a little more land to the north, and the U.S. got a little more land to the west.

Speaker 12 They then went on their way.

Speaker 4 Bartlett kept a detailed journal of the expedition.

Speaker 11 April 19th, 1851.

Speaker 11 A wild and barren region lay before us.

Speaker 11 We toiled across these sterile plains, the sun glowing fiercely and the wind hot from the parched earth, cracking the lips and burning the eyes.

Speaker 12 He's constantly complaining.

Speaker 11 The country passed over in the last three days is uninteresting in the extreme. One becomes disgusted with the ever-reoccurring sameness of plain and mountain, plant and living thing.

Speaker 4 They were traveling with mules and huge wagons, sometimes where there weren't roads or even trails.

Speaker 11 We found ourselves all at once surrounded by steep hills, steeper mountains, ravines, gullies, and frightful canyons.

Speaker 4 They were plagued by breakdowns.

Speaker 11 The wagon turned bottom upwards, rolling down the ravine.

Speaker 3 By unreliable team members.

Speaker 11 My cook took the opportunity to get drunk during the night.

Speaker 4 And by a lack of food.

Speaker 11 We had not tasted a potato for a year, nor any other vegetables except a little wild asparagus.

Speaker 12 Most people on the commission are unexcited about this place, and Bartlett in particular at one point writes, Is this the land which we have purchased and are to survey and keep at such a cost?

Speaker 11 As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild, and worthless.

Speaker 4 For both commissions, this survey was supposed to be about staking a claim on this land on behalf of their nations. It was about marking out what belonged to Mexico and what belonged to the U.S.

Speaker 12 And what the boundary commissioners find, in fact, is that, no, this space is mostly inhabited by and in fact controlled by indigenous peoples still.

Speaker 4 Many of the tribes that lived there, like the Pima and Maricopa, aided the boundary survey. They served as guides, provided food and information.

Speaker 4 But the survey also ran into bands of Apache and Comanche people who saw the survey as an intrusion.

Speaker 12 Time after time, Native people

Speaker 12 prove to the boundary commissioners that they do not actually control this landscape.

Speaker 3 Throughout the survey, the commissions are constantly splitting up to survey different pieces of the border and then meeting up again. On one of his detours, Bartlett receives bad news.

Speaker 11 December 24th, 1851.

Speaker 11 Dr. Vasbinder arrived today, bringing the painful news that General Garcia Conde, the Mexican commissioner, had died.

Speaker 3 Garcia Conde had fallen ill days after Bartlett had last last seen him.

Speaker 6 Bartlett is shaken.

Speaker 11 He had ever shown himself ready to aid the American Commission in any way that lay in his power.

Speaker 3 Bartlett is ready for this grueling journey to come to an end. And the end was near.
Or so he thought.

Speaker 11 Everything required to ensure the speedy completion of the work was at hand. But all of my plans were frustrated by dispatches from Washington.

Speaker 12 Congress decides that they don't want to approve the boundary line and they'd suspended the commission.

Speaker 4 Bartlett was in big trouble.

Speaker 3 Remember when he and Garcia Condé compromised over where to start the survey?

Speaker 4 Turns out, Congress was not happy with Bartlett for the deal he'd struck. They thought he gave too much land to Mexico.

Speaker 12 The ultimate outcome of this is the two countries decide to renegotiate the boundary line.

Speaker 4 Congress forked over $10 million to buy a chunk of southern Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico. And so, the borderline moved again.

Speaker 4 By the time Bartlett got the news, it had been nearly two years since he and Garcia Gonde had made their initial compromise. Now it would have to be redone.

Speaker 4 The U.S. and Mexico sent out a new survey team, and they replaced Bartlett with another commissioner.

Speaker 3 The survey was finally finished in October 1855. It ended up taking six years.

Speaker 4 The finished product was a nearly 2,000-mile-long line that followed the Rio Grande River, then stretched into the desert until it reached the Colorado River, and continued across land until it reached the Pacific Ocean.

Speaker 4 In many places, the only sign that it existed was the occasional boundary monument, these short obelisks made of stone.

Speaker 3 But it was still a border,

Speaker 3 a line that both nations could begin to define themselves against as they grew and changed.

Speaker 4 And soon, the land that Bartlett called wild, barren, and worthless would start to fill up. That's coming up.

Speaker 16 Hi, it's John V from Dallas, Texas, and I love Through Line because I love stories. And without further ado, you're listening to Through Line from NPR.

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Speaker 3 Part 2.

Speaker 2 Good fences make good neighbors.

Speaker 4 We're at a saloon in southern Arizona known as the Exchange.

Speaker 4 There's men sitting around, drinking and gabbing, just like any old-timey Western saloon.

Speaker 3 The saloon is in a town called Ambos Nogales. Well, actually, it's two towns, Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico.
That's why it's called Ambos Nogales.

Speaker 6 It means both Nogales.

Speaker 4 And the owner of this saloon, John Brickwood, has purposefully built it right on the border.

Speaker 12 So he could sell American liquor. without any duty on it from inside the bar and then he had a little box on the outside that was actually in Mexican territory.

Speaker 12 And so he could sell Mexican cigars from the box without having to pay the duties on them there as well.

Speaker 3 It's been a few decades since the U.S.-Mexico border was drawn. And in places like Ambos Nogales, it's still pretty theoretical.

Speaker 3 In the town's early days, you could basically only tell the difference between the Mexican and U.S.

Speaker 3 sides because the Mexican buildings were made of adobe, while the Americans preferred to build with wood.

Speaker 4 For most of the 1800s, there wasn't much going on here. The town was mostly railroad workers and the gambling saloons and brothels that served them.
They were building a train stop in Hambos Nogales.

Speaker 12 And the cities really take off when a railroad connects across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Speaker 4 The railroad was finished in 1882, and it ran right through Ambos Nogales. It brought merchants and traders to the town.
The ability to move between the U.S.

Speaker 4 and Mexico was actually a huge economic draw.

Speaker 12 And I think it's important to recognize that these government agencies and the border towns around them are initially made to support trans-border movement.

Speaker 4 And things were pretty friendly between Mexico and the U.S. along the border in these early years.

Speaker 12 They would have parades and celebrations that would bring both sides of the community together. One of the things about Empos Negalis is lots of buildings and streets are called international.

Speaker 12 There's a celebration of

Speaker 12 people being together, Mexicans and Americans, in a shared vision of development.

Speaker 4 They took pride in their interdependence.

Speaker 23 A Nogales Arizona newspaper wrote, We speak of the two towns as one, for they are really such, being divided by imaginary line only.

Speaker 12 As those towns get more heavily developed, as lots of buildings cluster close to the border, it becomes hard at times, particularly for government agents, but also for regular people, to distinguish between when they're in Mexico and when they're in the United States.

Speaker 3 One of the only signs that there was a border was a marker outside of Brickwood's saloon.

Speaker 12 The boundary marker that the surveyors had put in was just a big pile of rocks.

Speaker 3 And as things got busier in Ambos Nodales, that pile of rocks wasn't quite cutting it.

Speaker 12 Customs officers start saying, you know, this is impossible for us to police this space if people can just walk through John Brickwood's saloon and we can't see if they're entering the US or Mexico.

Speaker 3 So a new survey team came to town to mark the border more clearly.

Speaker 12 They put a new boundary monument and they build it on the porch.

Speaker 3 A giant white obelisk, the new boundary marker, smack dab on the porch of the saloon.

Speaker 4 In a picture taken from that time, it's taller than the men around it. And it was just the first step towards something much larger.

Speaker 3 In 1897, then-U.S. President William McKinley issued a proclamation to clear a strip of land 60 feet wide and two miles long, right through Hambos Nogales.

Speaker 12 They say, you know, in order to make clear where Mexican space stops and where American space begins, We need to move some of these buildings out of the way.

Speaker 12 We can't just have buildings right up and onto the border.

Speaker 4 John Brickwood's saloon and a slew of homes, businesses, and barns were given 90 days to vacate.

Speaker 3 They knocked it all down and the saloon was no more.

Speaker 3 In its place was a clear strip of land.

Speaker 3 Still, in Ambos Nodales and all along the border, there weren't many fences. The ones that were there were actually built to control the movement of cows, not people.

Speaker 3 But that was about to change.

Speaker 3 The Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910.

Speaker 12 Border towns became particularly important because they had ports of entry where people pay their customs duties. So if someone can take over a border town, they can take that money.

Speaker 4 Different Mexican revolutionary factions would raid American towns along the border. And as Mexico became increasingly unstable, more more Mexicans started emigrating to the U.S.

Speaker 3 Violence along the border increased.

Speaker 4 And then, in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, World War I began. That brought a whole new set of anxieties.

Speaker 3 The U.S. feared that German spies could infiltrate through the border.
All of a sudden, people who had long been neighbors were suspicious of each other.

Speaker 4 The U.S. started to send all kinds of people to the border to address these different threats.

Speaker 12 The U.S. government deploys the military to the border to protect people on the U.S.
side. You also have

Speaker 12 intelligence officers operating on the border looking out for spies,

Speaker 12 more customs agents coming out trying to watch for smuggling of guns and money. And then you have immigration officials who are trying to manage the flow of refugees.

Speaker 3 Those big changes on the border were coming to Hambos Nogales too.

Speaker 3 The mayor of Nogales, Mexico, ordered construction of a wire fence on the Mexican side to make it easier to manage the flow of crossings. But Ambos Nogales had already become a powder keg.

Speaker 4 And on August 27th, 1918, the fuse was lit.

Speaker 3 You might hear different versions of this story depending on who you ask, but anyway you tell it, the story ends in violence.

Speaker 3 It was just after four o'clock in the afternoon.

Speaker 3 A Mexican carpenter named Teferino Gil Lamadrid was leaving the U.S. after finishing work.
He was carrying a bulky package under his arm as he approached Mexico.

Speaker 12 He was ordered to halt by American officials.

Speaker 3 They wanted to inspect the package.

Speaker 12 Mexican officials told him he should keep coming.

Speaker 3 The U.S. customs official raised his rifle to force Gil Lamadrid to come back for an inspection.
What happened next is still disputed today.

Speaker 4 Someone from either side of the border, it's unclear who, fired the first shot.

Speaker 12 And violence broke out actually between the two sides of the border.

Speaker 4 It was chaos.

Speaker 4 Mexican civilians grabbed guns and joined the fight.

Speaker 3 It's immortalized in this Mexican song. El Corrido de Nobales tells the Mexican version of the battle.

Speaker 3 The song goes, when a Mexican crossed the border line, a gringo fired a shot at him. That was the beginning of the story.
The corrido is all about the bravery of the Nogalences.

Speaker 3 It says,

Speaker 3 There were 1,500 gringos. All were federal troops, and the people of Norales did not let them advance.

Speaker 4 But things were escalating. At some point, a Mexican consul tried to negotiate with an American soldier.
If they both raised a white flag, it could all be over. The American replied, Go to hell.

Speaker 24 American troops don't carry white flags and don't use them. If the Mexicans don't hoist a white flag within 10 minutes, U.S.
soldiers will march in and burn Nogales Sonora.

Speaker 4 The Mexican side raised a white flag.

Speaker 4 The battle lasted more than two hours.

Speaker 4 As many as four Americans and 129 Mexicans were dead, including the mayor of Mexico's Nogales.

Speaker 4 And hundreds of people were wounded.

Speaker 3 After the Battle of Amos Nogales, people on both sides expressed regret.

Speaker 23 The shooting was an unfortunate affair, started by irresponsible persons under undue stress of excitement.

Speaker 4 But the damage was done.

Speaker 12 And that leads a lot of government officials along the border to say, we need a fence. We need to be really clear about marking this space.

Speaker 3 And so one of the first U.S.-built fences meant to divide people was built through Amos Nogales.

Speaker 12 Whenever I think about this, I think of the Robert Frost poem where he talks about how good fences make good neighbors, right?

Speaker 12 That these fences are built in a very different mindset than the border wall of today. This is not seen as an imposition by the U.S.

Speaker 12 government on Mexico, but rather a joint effort to better demarcate where Mexican and American space end.

Speaker 3 The fence wasn't about keeping Mexican people out of the U.S.

Speaker 12 Mexican people in general are not seen as an immigration problem.

Speaker 12 No one cared about immigration at all on the U.S.-Mexico border until the very late part of the 19th century.

Speaker 3 And if people were concerned about who was coming through the southern border, that concern was mostly about Chinese immigrants. Which isn't to say immigration wasn't a big issue in the U.S.

Speaker 3 It was.

Speaker 4 In 1924, Congress passed one of the most restrictive immigration laws in its history, setting strict quotas for who can enter the U.S.

Speaker 4 Congress also established the Border Patrol to control immigration, though it mainly ended up enforcing prohibition.

Speaker 3 By the mid-1920s, the infrastructure of the border, the fences, the manpower, and the law enforcement, the tools that we use today were all in place.

Speaker 27 I walked the border and I saw example after example of a border that was totally out of control.

Speaker 26 We have to gain control.

Speaker 3 That's coming up.

Speaker 10 This is Rachel from San Diego, California. You're listening to Dru Line from NDR.

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Speaker 7 Part 3.

Speaker 3 The border is everywhere.

Speaker 14 I was born and raised on a farm here in El Paso. We grew cotton, alfalfa, stuff like that.

Speaker 3 This is Silvestre Reyes. He was born in 1944.

Speaker 14 As a young boy, I was a lookout against the Border Patrol. It was simple, just play on the truck and

Speaker 14 when you see the Jeeps coming, because we could see the Jeeps coming from far away.

Speaker 27 Just when you first see them, start blowing the horn.

Speaker 14 And if the Border Patrolman asks you what you're doing, tell them you're playing.

Speaker 14 I was thoroughly briefed.

Speaker 3 When Silvestre was a kid, a federal initiative called the Bracero Program gave work visas to Mexicans who came to the U.S. for short-term contracts, mostly in agriculture and on railroads.

Speaker 3 But some workers still crossed without papers.

Speaker 14 On the farm, the undocumented ones. They're the ones that would run and hide.
The other braceros, they had their ID cards, so they were okay. Although I will tell you, sometimes they would run.

Speaker 14 just to be decoys. It was fun times.

Speaker 3 It was fun. You remember that as a fun memory.

Speaker 21 Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 14 They were trying to catch people that were undocumented, but the only thing they would do was catch them, process them, and then we would see the same guys back a couple of days later.

Speaker 4 Then, as now, the agricultural economy relied on immigrant labor.

Speaker 12 The attitude towards Mexican immigration in the 20th century United States is that workers from Mexico are necessary,

Speaker 4 but that they are not people who necessarily are going to become part of the united states because there's a long history of anti-mexican sentiment within the united states and it comes up in these different flashpoint moments moments like mexican repatriation during the great depression or operation wetback in the 1950s when the federal government led massive deportation campaigns targeting mexicans and at times u.s citizens of mexican descent But Rachel says even those efforts weren't meant to halt immigration.

Speaker 12 They're never trying to close the border.

Speaker 12 They're trying to control the border in such a way that it will allow the seamless entry as much as possible of things that they deem good, valuable, and desirable in the country, and to block as seamlessly as possible those things that they deem bad that need to be kept out of the country.

Speaker 4 By the late 1980s and 90s, immigration had become a big political issue.

Speaker 3 And by that time, Silvestre, who grew up moving back and forth across the border, I used to go with my grandpa to buy groceries in Juarez. Had joined the Border Patrol.

Speaker 27 Oh, I was excited and

Speaker 27 my family was excited. I remember my grandpa was so proud.

Speaker 14 I guess it was part of the American story.

Speaker 3 Silvestre served on the patrol for more than 25 years. He became the first Latino Border Patrol sector chief, serving first in McAllen and then in his hometown of El Paso, Texas.

Speaker 15 I attended an all-boys Catholic high school

Speaker 13 right there in the downtown El Paso.

Speaker 21 So we were

Speaker 13 maybe a mile, if not less, from the borderline itself.

Speaker 4 This is Miguel Levario. He wrote Militarizing the Border when Mexicans became the enemy.
And he grew up on the outskirts of El Paso, just like Silvestre Reyes had some 40 years before.

Speaker 13 So we had to drive into downtown El Paso every every morning.

Speaker 4 September 20th, 1993 started off like any other Monday.

Speaker 4 Miguel was on his way to school with friends when.

Speaker 13 My friend who was driving was like, what is going on?

Speaker 13 And we all look up and we see, you know, the Border Patrol trucks, they were lined up every 100 yards, like, you know, they were about to face off with somebody.

Speaker 13 And I remember vividly thinking like, oh my gosh, what is happening?

Speaker 14 So I briefed every single agent and i said when people wake up they're going to see a wall of border patrol vehicles and agents all across this 20 mile area that we want to control what miguel saw on his way to school that day was sylvestre reyes' idea a big show of border patrol strength called operation hold the line we're going to block people from coming into the country.

Speaker 4 Silvestre saw the border as a problem.

Speaker 4 At the time, he told reporters in Texas that he was trying to fix the, quote, institutionalized, undocumented entry through the Rio Grande that people had gotten used to for decades.

Speaker 14 I walked the border and I saw example after example after example of a border that was totally out of control. People congregating, ready to rush into El Paso.

Speaker 4 So his idea was simple. The border patrol would become a wall.

Speaker 26 We have to gain control.

Speaker 14 I put the agents right on the border where I didn't care if they apprehended anybody as long as they deterred them from crossing.

Speaker 4 Silvestre deployed 400 agents in their trucks and lined them up on the border over a stretch of 20 miles. They planned to stay out there day and night.

Speaker 3 And that's what Miguel saw.

Speaker 13 I'll be honest with you, as a 16, 17 year old kid or even younger, we didn't really get like what was the whole point.

Speaker 14 Now the mage can't get back.

Speaker 15 The gardeners and

Speaker 14 the riffref can't cross.

Speaker 13 That was the point, was to be intimidating, was to be a deterrent.

Speaker 3 The way Silvestre saw it, too many people were crossing back and forth without papers and with no regard to the official ports of entry.

Speaker 3 So he ordered the border patrol agents under his command to not back down.

Speaker 14 People are in unchartered territory.

Speaker 3 The line held for a week.

Speaker 14 There's never been an operation that's been kept in place for a week.

Speaker 3 People couldn't get to work. There were protests on both sides of the border.
Still, the line held, and it would hold indefinitely.

Speaker 4 Right away, Sebastian Deyas claimed the operation was a victory.

Speaker 14 All of a sudden, the Border Patrol became heroes. Oh my God, the crime rate in El Paso for stolen cars dropped 98%.

Speaker 4 That's an exaggeration.

Speaker 4 And Miguel says it's hard to assess the correlation between crime rates and the border blockade.

Speaker 13 Of course, as always, and historically we've done this, we associate those increases with immigrants.

Speaker 3 But Silvestre's narrative of success prevailed. It seemed like he'd done what decades of immigration reform had failed to do, limit the number of immigrants coming in.

Speaker 4 Money, on the other hand, started pouring in. And the strategy went national.
In San Diego with Operation Gatekeeper and Arizona with Operation Safeguard.

Speaker 4 Over the course of five years, the number of Border Patrol agents on the southern border more than doubled.

Speaker 18 In the seven months since hundreds of federal immigration agents were deployed along the banks of the Rio Grande here, the traffic of illegal workers from Mexico has all but stopped.

Speaker 18 But the flow of politicians to the border here has surged.

Speaker 3 In the 1990s, the issue of illegal immigration and the need to solve it became a hot political issue.

Speaker 18 The politicians are prompted by polls showing that the issue is gaining in importance among voters who polls say are increasingly worried about the economic impact of immigrants and their effect on American culture.

Speaker 4 The country was coming out of a recession. Unemployment remained high.

Speaker 4 People were on edge and they wanted change.

Speaker 3 This was also the era of tough on crime policies, the so-called welfare queen.

Speaker 3 And as the number of legal and unauthorized immigrants coming into the country rose in the 90s, illegal immigrants became another political target.

Speaker 29 They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California.

Speaker 4 The federal government. California's Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who was running for re-election in 1994, made immigration the center of his campaign.

Speaker 12 And the word he used was illegal immigrant, and he had these commercials at the time where he showed

Speaker 12 immigrants running through traffic near the border.

Speaker 29 Governor Pete Wilson sent the National Guard to help the Border Patrol. But that's not all.

Speaker 30 For Californians who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws. I'm suing to force the federal government to control the border.

Speaker 12 It's associating migrants with the threat of invasion.

Speaker 12 And part of what played into Wilson's politics around that is that you do see increases in immigration over time across the border, particularly as the Mexican economy is destabilized in the 1970s and 1980s.

Speaker 12 that category of the illegal alien gets increasingly attached to Mexican people in a way that then the government can evoke at different times, either for political reasons or to manage labor.

Speaker 4 Pete Wilson won his re-election campaign and other politicians followed suit.

Speaker 13 Immigration is basically a political ace card.

Speaker 3 And it wasn't just Republicans. Democrats also took up the issue.

Speaker 28 From California Senator Dianne Feinstein, the day when America could be the welfare system for Mexico is gone. We simply can't afford it.

Speaker 4 All the way to President Bill Clinton.

Speaker 5 Two years ago, when I took office,

Speaker 5 I was determined to do a better job of dealing with the problem of illegal immigration.

Speaker 12 The Clinton administration steps in and really embraces a hard border policing model where they really focus on border control.

Speaker 5 One of the cornerstones of our fight against illegal immigration has been a get-to-borders.

Speaker 12 They put up a bunch of new barriers, so, you know, infrared cameras and all sorts of high-tech stuff. It's sort of, it's the 90s, I think, where we really see that

Speaker 12 the birth of that highly militarized border.

Speaker 3 And the irony here is that Clinton was securing the border at the very same time that he was opening it up.

Speaker 22 Good morning. This week, at a time when many Americans are hurting from the strains of the tough global economy, our country chose courageously to compete and not to retreat.

Speaker 22 With its vote Wednesday night for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the House of Representatives sent a message to the world.

Speaker 22 Yes, the Cold War is over, but America's leadership for prosperity, security, and freedom continues.

Speaker 3 NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect in 1994, a year after Operation Hold the Line.

Speaker 3 And what it did was essentially open up the borders for the flow of goods between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada.

Speaker 4 There was a fair amount of anxiety around this.

Speaker 28 Is it right to move your jobs to Mexico where people live in poverty?

Speaker 4 So, right as manufactured goods were starting to flow in like never before across the border, the Clinton administration built some of the first metal border walls.

Speaker 12 They have these huge metal walls that go up outside Tijuana.

Speaker 12 And showing that in a very public way was a way to balance out the increased movement that was going to be going across the borders with NAFTA.

Speaker 4 One part of the San Diego Wall was built on Imperial Beach and now extends some 300 feet into the ocean.

Speaker 13 The idea that we close off El Paso and San Diego, it would force migrants to consider entering through the Sonoran Desert, one of the harshest environmental landscapes in all of North America.

Speaker 27 And they thought they're not going to do it. It's too harsh.

Speaker 26 It's too difficult and they won't do it.

Speaker 13 What we learned is that desperate people will do desperate things.

Speaker 14 And we learned that people did do it.

Speaker 3 What do you say to people that say all it does is it pushes migrants to areas outside of ports of entry, to deadlier parts of the desert, that it doesn't really stop

Speaker 3 undocumented immigration into this country, right? Like it's not effective in that way.

Speaker 3 What do you say to that?

Speaker 21 Well,

Speaker 14 it depends what you think we were trying to prove.

Speaker 3 Well, what were you trying to prove?

Speaker 3 You were there, you were the head of it.

Speaker 26 Well, that the border

Speaker 14 The border can be managed.

Speaker 14 The border can be managed, people can be re-educated to

Speaker 14 understand

Speaker 14 that

Speaker 21 we no longer can tolerate that.

Speaker 3 Silvestre eventually became a Democratic congressman. And in the 30 plus years since Operation Hold the Line, politicians of both parties have continued to support aggressive border policies.

Speaker 4 Today, there are over 700 miles of border wall.

Speaker 12 Why is this space that is so peripheral, by definition is the periphery of the nation, why is it so important in American politics?

Speaker 12 It's a place where you can really see how government works, what government priorities are, how they try to enforce them in different ways, and how local people respond to and navigate that.

Speaker 12 The Trump administration is actually moving

Speaker 12 the dynamics of immigration into the country. They're extending this border politics away from the border.

Speaker 12 I think it remains to be be seen whether what has been so politically effective when isolated to a border space, which is a space that most people don't inhabit and will never be to, you know, will never visit, if that can work on a national scale.

Speaker 3 This episode is part of our series on how immigration enforcement became political and profitable.

Speaker 4 Next week.

Speaker 31 The idea that you can just basically have a detention footprint in every community in America is really, really intriguing.

Speaker 4 The business of immigrant detention.

Speaker 2 And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randab Dilfattah.

Speaker 32 I'm Ramteen Arab Louis, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 17 This episode was produced by me, and me, and Sarah Wyman, Amber C, Casey Miner, Julie Kay, Lawrence Wu, Anya Steinberg, Christina Kim, Devin Katayama, Irene Naguchi.

Speaker 2 Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vokel. It was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez.
Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

Speaker 25 Naveed Marvy, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

Speaker 2 Thank you to James Dellahussi, Allison Silvera, Stephen McNally, Julian Niavisquig Diadcudoy, and Bruno Ramirez for their voiceover work.

Speaker 2 Al Corrido de Nocales by Robert Lee Benton Jr. and Oscar Gonzalez is from the recording entitled Heroes and Horses, Corridos from the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands, 2002.

Speaker 2 It was used by permission, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways recordings. Thanks also to Johannes Durgee, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

Speaker 32 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at mpr.org. And make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app.

Speaker 32 That way, you'll never miss an episode.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening.

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