Line. Fence. Wall.

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Hey everyone, Rund here.

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 Steinberg take it from here.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Hey, can you hear me?

Can you hear me now?

Hey, how are you?

I'm good.

This is Eduardo Condredas.

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

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

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

Yeah, it's part of the job.

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

It's your typical, you know, blue-collar hardworker American and getting by.

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

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

It's really beautiful.

Everything looks really brand new.

That kitchen.

Yeah, look.

Still has the wrapper.

But I'm not here for the tiles.

Wow.

Okay.

And now I see we have got a kitchen door that leads to the backyard where my view is the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Yes, ma'am.

It's huge.

About 20 some feet high, that's for sure.

And that's the backyard.

This is the backyard of the house we're seeing today.

Yeah, it is.

Yep.

Buy this house and you can barbecue by the border wall.

And that's not unheard of in this part of town.

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.

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

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

Oh, I hope not.

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 U.S.

territory.

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

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.

There's parts of this fence that are open.

It's not all like, you know, closed.

If you drive around this fence,

there's areas where like it's opened and 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.

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

That wall that you see over there wasn't constructed by itself.

It takes people,

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.

So did you put down an offer?

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.

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.

Right, since the first surveyors drew it.

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.

I'm Anya Steinberg.

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.

From its origins, it wasn't a place in and of itself.

It was a place that people moved through.

To the first fences.

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

To walls of law enforcement.

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

And steel.

This is Carone DeMars calling for San Antonio, Texas.

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Part one

wild, barren, and worthless.

We're somewhere in the desert between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean.

It's a place of extremes.

Temperatures can climb to 118 degrees under the beating sun.

In the summer, rolling clouds bring dramatic monsoon storms, and the rivers and arrollos swell.

Otherwise, it's dry.

Partly for that reason, it was sparsely settled in the 19th century.

It's a place that many indigenous people pass through.

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

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

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

Hundreds of miles away, a man named John Russell Bartlett was busy busy packing up his things to head south.

He had just been hired as the new U.S.

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

It's not quite what he imagined for himself.

Bartlett was a bookseller from Rhode Island.

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.

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.

He had no experience in surveying.

This is Rachel St.

John.

I'm Associate Professor of History at UC Davis.

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

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

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

And let's just say, the U.S.

Boundary Commission was not known for its outstanding workplace culture.

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.

Quick pause for context here.

The whole reason this survey was happening was to wrap up a war the U.S.

and Mexico had fought.

A war that was primarily about expanding U.S.

territory.

And the U.S.

had won.

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

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

They had agreed on the border in the treaty.

Now, they needed to mark that border out on the land.

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

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.

Famous last words.

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.

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

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

García Conde was grizzled.

He was an experienced surveyor.

And right from the start, he watched the American team fall into disarray.

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.

Which wasn't to say the Mexicans had it easy.

Both sides were contending with forces outside their control.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

El Senor Bartlett que la la Preside es un vellos sugeto, pero sin idididas de los trabajos que tenemos quecer.

Trajo siento painting genieros.

Mr.

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

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.

But there's nothing he can do about it.

This is the man he has to work with.

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

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

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, and Paso del Norte is supposed to be their starting reference point for marking the border.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

They then went on their way.

Bartlett kept a detailed journal of the expedition.

April 19th, 1851.

A wild and barren region lay before us.

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.

He's constantly complaining.

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.

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

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

They were plagued by breakdowns.

The wagon turned bottom upwards, rolling down the ravine.

By unreliable team members.

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

And by a lack of food.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

Many of the tribes that lived there, like the Pima and Maricopa, aided the boundary survey.

They served as as guides, provided food and information.

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

Time after time, Native people

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

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.

December 24th, 1851.

Dr.

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

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

Bartlett is shaken.

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

Bartlett is ready for this grueling journey to come to an end.

And the end was near.

Or so he thought.

Everything required to ensure the speedy completion of the work was at hand.

But all of my plans were frustrated by dispatches from Washington.

Congress decides that they don't want to approve the boundary line.

And they'd suspended the commission.

Bartlett was in big trouble.

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

Turns out, Congress was not happy with Bartlett for the deal he'd struck.

They thought he gave too much land to Mexico.

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

Congress forked over $10 million to buy a chunk of southern Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico.

And so, the borderline moved again.

By the time Bartlett got the news, it had been nearly two years since he and Gator Gonde had made their initial compromise.

Now it would have to be redone.

The U.S.

and Mexico sent out a new survey team, and they replaced Bartlett with another commissioner.

The survey was finally finished in October 1855.

It ended up taking six years.

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.

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

But it was still a border.

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

And soon, the land that Bartlett called wild, barren, and worthless would start to fill up.

That's coming up.

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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Part 2.

Good fences make good neighbors.

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

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

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.

It means both Nogales.

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

So that 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The railroad was finished in 1882 and it ran right through Hambos Nogales.

It brought merchants and traders to the town.

The ability to move between the U.S.

and Mexico was actually a huge economic draw.

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.

And things were pretty friendly between Mexico and the U.S.

along the border in these early years.

They would have parades and celebrations that would bring both sides of the community together.

One of the things about Embos Nogales is lots of buildings and streets are called international.

There's a celebration of

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

They took pride in their interdependence.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 saloon and we can't see if they're entering the U.S.

or Mexico.

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

They put a new boundary monument and they built it on the porch.

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

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.

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 Nogades.

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.

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

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

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

In its place was a clear strip of land.

Still, in Amos 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.

But that was about to change.

The Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910.

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.

Different Mexican revolutionary factions would raid American towns along the border.

And as Mexico became increasingly unstable, more Mexicans started emigrating to the U.S.

Violence along the border increased.

And then, in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, World War I began.

That brought a whole new set of anxieties.

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.

The U.S.

started to send all kinds of people to the border to address these different threats.

The U.S.

government deploys the military to the border to protect people on the U.S.

side.

You also have intelligence officers operating on the border looking out for spies.

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.

Those big changes on the border were coming to Ambos Nores too.

The mayor of Nores, Mexico, ordered construction of a wire fence on the Mexican side to make it easier to manage the flow of crossings.

But Amboz Norales had already become a powder keg.

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

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

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

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.

He was ordered to halt by American officials.

They wanted to inspect the package.

Mexican officials told him he should keep coming.

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.

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

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

It was chaos.

Mexican civilians grabbed guns and joined the fight.

It's immortalized in this Mexican song.

El Gorrido de Nogales tells the Mexican version of the battle.

The song goes, when a Mexican crossed the borderline, a gringo fired a shot at him.

That was the beginning of the story.

The corrido is all about the bravery of the Norgalenses.

It says,

There were 1,500 gringos.

All were federal troops, and the people of Norgales did not let them advance.

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.

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.

The Mexican side raised a white flag.

The battle lasted more than two hours.

As many as four Americans and 129 Mexicans were dead.

including the mayor of Mexico's Nogales,

and hundreds of people were wounded.

After the Battle of Ambos Nogales, people on both sides expressed regret.

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

But the damage was done.

And that leaves a lot of government officials along the border to say, we need a fence.

We need to be really clear about marking this space.

And so, one of the first U.S.-built fences meant to divide people was built through Ambos Nogales.

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

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.

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

The fence wasn't about keeping Mexican people out of the US.

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

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

And if people were concerned about who was coming through the southern border, that concern was mostly mostly about Chinese immigrants.

Which isn't to say immigration wasn't a big issue in the U.S.

It was.

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

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

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.

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

We have to gain control.

That's coming up.

This is Rachel from San Diego, California.

You're listening to Drew Life by NDI.

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Part 3.

The border is everywhere.

I was born and raised on a farm here in El Paso.

We grew cotton, alfalfa, stuff like that.

This is Silvestre Reyes.

He was born in 1944.

As a young boy, I was a lookout against the Border Patrol.

It was simple.

Just play on the truck.

When you see the Jeeps coming, because we could see the Jeeps coming from far away.

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

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

I was thoroughly briefed.

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.

But some workers still crossed without papers.

On the farm, the undocumented ones.

They're the ones that would run run and hide.

The other Brazilos, they had their ID cards, so they were okay.

Although I will tell you, sometimes they would run just to be decoys.

It was fun times.

It was fun.

You remember that as a fun memory.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

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.

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

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

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.

They're never trying to close the border.

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.

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

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.

Oh, I was excited and

my family was excited.

I remember my grandpa was so proud.

I guess it was part of the American story.

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.

I attended an all-boys Catholic high school

right there in the downtown El Paso.

So we were

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

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.

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

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

Miguel was on his way to school with friends when

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

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.

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

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 Sylvester Reyes's idea, a big show of Border Patrol strength called Operation Hold the Line.

We're going to block people from coming into the country.

Silvestre saw the border as a problem.

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.

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.

So his idea was simple.

The border patrol would become a wall.

We have to gain control.

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.

Silvestre deployed 400 agents and their trucks and lined them up on the border over a stretch of 20 miles.

They planned to stay out there day and night.

And that's what Miguel saw.

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.

Now the mage can't get back.

The gardeners and the

riffref can't cross.

That was the point.

It was to be intimidating, was to be a deterrent.

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.

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

People are in unchartered territory.

The line held for a week.

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

People couldn't get to work.

There were protests on both sides of the border.

Still, the line held and it would hold indefinitely.

Right away, Sylvester Diaz claimed the operation was a victory.

All of a sudden, the Border Patrol became heroes.

Oh my god, the crime rate in El Paso for stolen cars dropped 98%.

That's an exaggeration.

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

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

But Sinvesta'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.

Money, on the other hand, started pouring in.

And the strategy went national.

in San Diego with Operation Gatekeeper and Arizona with Operation Safeguard.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The country was coming out of a recession.

Unemployment remained high.

People were on edge and they wanted change.

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

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

They keep coming.

Two million illegal immigrants in California.

The federal government.

California's Republican governor Pete Wilson, who was running for re-election in 1994, made immigration the center of his campaign.

And the word he used was illegal immigrant.

And he had these commercials at the time where he showed

immigrants running through traffic near the border.

And Governor Pete Wilson sent the National Guard to help the Border Patrol.

But that's not all.

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

It's associating migrants with the threat of invasion.

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.

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.

Pete Wilson won his reelection campaign, and other politicians followed suit.

Immigration is basically a political ace card.

And it wasn't just Republicans.

Democrats also took up the issue.

From California Senator Dianne Feinstein, the day when America could be the welfare system for Mexico is gone.

We simply can't afford it.

All the way to President Bill Clinton.

Two years ago,

when I took office,

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

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

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

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

the birth of that highly militarized border.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

There was a fair amount of anxiety around this.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

And they thought they're not going to do it.

It's too harsh, it's too difficult, and they won't do it.

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

And we learned that people did do it.

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

undocumented immigration into this country, right?

Like it's not effective in that way.

What do you say to that?

Well,

it depends what you think we were trying to prove.

Well, what were you trying to prove?

You were there.

You were the head of it.

Well, that the border.

The border can be managed.

The border can be managed.

People can be re-educated to understand

that

we no longer can tolerate that.

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.

Today, there are over 700 miles of border wall.

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

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.

The Trump administration is actually moving the dynamics of immigration into the country.

They're extending this border politics away from the border.

I think it remains to 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.

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

Next week.

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

The business of immigrant detention.

And that's it for this week's show.

I'm Randab De Fattah.

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

This episode was produced by me.

And me, and Sarah Wyman, Amber C, Casey Minor, Julie Kay, Lawrence Wu, Anya Steinberg, Christina Kim, Devin Katayama, Irene Naguchi.

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vochl.

It was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez.

for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvy, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

Thank you to James De Lahussi, Allison Silvera, Stephen McNally, Julian Nijabiski Diadcudoy, and Bruno Ramirez for their voiceover work.

El Corrido de Nocales by Robert Lee Benton Jr.

and Oscar Gonzalez is from the recording entitled Heroes and Horses: Gorridos from the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands, 2002.

It was used by permission, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways recordings.

Thanks also to Johannes Durgee, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

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 MPR app.

That way, you'll never miss an episode.

Thanks for listening.

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