WATCHER ZINE: THE BORDER WALL IS A DYSTOPIAN NIGHTMARE
Across April and May, San Diego responded to the harm inflicted by the wall
Days in Arbitrary Detention
A humanitarian crisis unfolded on our southern border from May 7th to the 15th. Across two camps in San Ysidro and three camps in Jacumba, thousands of asylum seekers languished under the sun without shade and in the cold of night without shelter. Migrants who journeyed to the US in search of safety as Title 42 expired were held in ad-hoc detention centers by Border Patrol agents.
San Diegans resisted the wall’s harms with mutual aid and protest.
As asylum seekers were dropped off between the walls, volunteers worked feverishly to coordinate and distribute aid through the pillars at San Ysidro. Pleas for warmer clothes and blankets were constant. Families with small children huddled in makeshift shelters of tarps, plastic bags, and mylar sheets. When I first arrived, an asylum seeker asked volunteers to hand him a discarded trash bag, so that he could cover up a tear in his makeshift tent. Infants’ cries pierced the low rumble of the multitudes and the shuffle of aid workers.
All but the most basic needs went unaddressed by Border Patrol agents—and those that were, were done so insufficiently. Agents distributed granola bars and single bottles of water twice daily, but thirst and hygiene outstripped the meager rations. Every day, volunteers distributed water by the armful to pleading hands outstretched from the other side of the wall.
Outside of immediate emergencies, asylum seekers’ injuries and illnesses were mostly neglected by Border Patrol. When street medics and nurses volunteered their time, these unmet needs were brought to the wall. One asylum seeker had suffered multiple fractures in their hand. They reached through the metal pillars with a swollen, discolored hand and contorted finger. A medic fashioned the asylum seeker a splint and bandaged it with tender care.
Border Patrol had medics they could deploy when needed. Despite this, asylum seekers’ injuries and sicknesses went untreated. Several pregnant women were not given medical attention until they’d already collapsed.
For acute medical emergencies, one agent instructed volunteers to call 911 rather than trying to flag down an agent. He did so after agents nearly missed a pregnant woman’s medical emergency along the wall—while responding to another pregnant woman in medical distress. His instructions seemed to contradict what volunteers had been told by other agencies.
One family’s needs was reported on by CBS8. Neda Iranpour’s tweet read, “This family speaking Farsi came to me in tears because their 9 month old baby girl has been crying all night. They asked for a kahseh (bowl) so they could light a fire and heat up water to make milk. They came to the San Ysidro border from Moscow and are now waiting.” The attached video depicts a father hugging his daughter.
I believe I photographed that same father at night, being told to extinguish his campfire by CBP.
Another asylum seeker pleaded with me for a hot meal, adding that their children craved a hot meal after so many days of scarcity. Had volunteers not taken to providing hot food, it seems that the camp would’ve subsisted on two Kirkland brand granola bars and two bottles of water per person, per day.
The Southern Border Communities Coalition has filed a complaint about the conditions at the San Ysidro camp. They contest that “CBP is detaining migrants in cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions in an open-air corridor in California.“
The complaint continues, “For months, CBP has been putting the lives in its custody at risk, and in the last week things have become far worse with migrants facing grave danger.”
CBP had a budget of $17 Billion in 2022. Biden’s proposed 2023 budget contains $25 billion for the agency. Despite this, CBP was guarded when it came to discussing the camps.
Border Patrol was tight-lipped about the other San Ysidro camp some miles west. For days, asylum seekers told press about the secluded camp where hundreds of men suffered thirst, starvation, and sickness. It wasn’t until the camps were being cleared out on the 14th that I’d gotten a headcount. A volunteer who had spoken with a Border Patrol agent relayed the numbers to me. A camp of 1,400 men had been reduced to 200 over the course of hours one day, suddenly. The camp was completely cleared by the end of that day. They were allegedly moved to a Border Patrol processing facility, but I’m not aware of CBP responding to any requests for comment on the matter. Neither media nor aid workers were ever given access to that second camp
I visited a camp in Jacumba after the ones at San Ysidro were cleared. The headcount I received from a volunteer coordinating the aid noted 800, 200, and 150 people across three campsites at their peak occupancies.
When I first arrived, I found myself at the western entrance to the camp. It was located behind the property of a power company. The way was obstructed by a bus and asylum seekers who’d been sat on either side of the street. Border Patrol agents interfaced with the migrants as private security contractors with ISS Action patted them down. The men were handcuffed together. I’m told that men were separated from their families that evening in Jacumba, handcuffed and led away.
The desert was covered with makeshift shelters—brush, sticks, and tarps had been raised together into lean-tos and tents. The dry heat threatened sunstroke and heat exhaustion. After days, the heat becomes a deadly risk. A volunteer I spoke to told me as much—people were collapsing in the heat before water and tarp drops were coordinated.
A photographer who’d been on the scene for two days recounted some of his experiences to me. He told me that people in the camps were from all over the globe, and that all were in desperate need of shelter and power. He recalled how he saw an asylum seeker in medical distress at the feet of a Border Patrol agent who did nothing. He said another agent rushed to the scene on the verge of tears, cursing at their colleague. The photographer told me he worried the agent was content to watch the migrant die.
A handful of asylum seekers were brave enough to talk to press. Almost all described their journey to the US as arduous, and almost all said the same of their stay in the camp. One man brought his elementary-aged children with him. His face and arms were caked with sunscreen, and the skin underneath was reddened from the unyielding sun. He navigated the harsh terrain and violent people. He wanted a better life for his children.
He completed his journey only to make his asylum plea in the desert, in a camp of hundreds where Border Patrol provided no shelter and only two portable restrooms.
A USIPC survey of migrants at the Jacumba camp found that 53% said Border Patrol was not giving them enough water for the day. All said they were not given enough food. All said they were not given adequate shelter, “such as shade to protect from the sun.”
The United States’ role in catastrophes that migrants seek asylum from is often unacknowledged. Unfortunately, US foreign policy drives much of the humanitarian flight to its own borders. In 2016 and 2018, mass migration from El Salvador and Guatemala were covered in mainstream press as natural disasters of sorts—with terms like surges, floods, caravans. These two Central American countries suffered brutal civil wars that were funded by the US. In both cases, US-backed forces embarked on genocidal campaigns.
The asylum seekers at the southern border today hail from countries whose stories are tragically familiar. Asylum seekers from Columbia will know of La Violencia, a period of violence and mass killings sponsored in part by US General Yarborough; those from Jamaica may know that a CIA station chief ran a destabilization program against the Manley government in the seventies; long-exploited Haiti suffered the assassination of president Jovenel Moïse by Colombians and Haitian-Americans, and a US prosecutor is protecting classified information relating to the case; and numerous Kurdish people fled Turkey, where Erdogan seeks the destruction of the Kurdish people while purchasing weapons from the US.
Those who flee the consequences of US foreign policy are then treated as threats and burdens by the architects of their misfortune.
Literally and figuratively, the border wall cuts across humanitarian and ecological issues. As asylum seeking families were held on the US soil between the border walls, trapped in an institutional limbo, many families are separated by that same structure. The local advocacy group Friends of Friendship Park can attest to that matter. The group has spent years protecting a historic site of family reunification—one that has endured CBP’s efforts to transform the park into a prison.
Activism and Grassroots Historiography
The Friends of Friendship Park serve as caretakers for history. An appreciation of the park’s history informs what they do. Several of their events involve some form of teaching attendees about the park’s origins, and the tremendous human good its done since then.
On April 20th, Daniel Watman hosted an educational event for FOFP. He began by recalling the park’s origin: In 1971, Pat Nixon instructed her security detail to cut the fencing which separated her from Mexican citizens and elected officials. She joined the crowd and voiced her hope for a future where no fence divides the two countries. Pat Nixon would inaugurate the park, hoping to one day establish a truly binational park as can be found on the US’s northern border.
Pat’s hopes would be dashed. The Carter administration added fencing to the southern border that decade. From the Clinton administration’s Operation Gatekeeper to the establishment of DHS under Bush 2, San Diego’s southern border has seen only increasing fortification and militarization. Friendship Park, as a result, has suffered a gradual shuttering of access and incremental expansion of restrictions.
In 2006, Border Patrol took possession of the parkland from the state of California and built walls through it. In 2012, they allowed reunifications to resume, albeit obstructed by a coarse metal mesh. Hours were heavily restricted, open only between 10AM and 2PM on Saturdays and Sundays in 2016.
The park has been closed for three years now, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. But, advocates say this is nothing new. They argue that CBP has always found justifications for reducing access to the park. Whether that entails building new, larger, more impermeable walls or reducing hours of operation, CBP has moved inexorably toward destroying the park in form or function.
The park has been home to numerous cross-border activities, including a binational friendship garden of indigenous plants, yoga and other group activities, and the Border Church. The latter unites worshippers on either side of the wall for a sermon on Sundays, although successive new walls have hindered the distribution of the sacrament.
While Border Patrol has promised that reunification visits may resume in the park after the new walls are up, Watman indicated that such access is predicated upon the agency’s assessment of “safety.”
The park has facilitated 40-50 family reunifications per week according to Border Patrol’s own figures. That would account for two-thousand reunifications per year. Activists are skeptical that Border Patrol will allow visitors into the park once construction is done. The agency’s past behavior—like the destruction of the cross-border friendship garden in 2020 or this year’s construction of new walls—contributes to activists’ profound distrust.
When speaking about past Border Patrol outreach, Watman asked, “how can I trust someone whose job is to separate people when I’m trying to bring people together?”
Despite the Biden administration’s campaign promise of no new walls—and full-throated rebukes of the Trump administration’s border wall project—construction has resumed in several places on the southern line. Under the guise of repairs, Friendship Park is being bifurcated by yet another outgrowth of the wall. Defying the will of local voters, the wall’s construction has persisted beyond the administration that conceived it.
Crossings are infrequent at Friendship Park. CBP’s persistence in this pursuit can’t be disentangled from the agency’s broader strategy of deterrence. By their own admission, CBP hopes to harden migration corridors that are easy to navigate. Their aim is to alter the choices that migrants are presented with—specifically, CBP wants to remove the option with the highest rate of survival. The thirty-foot walls are built to maim or kill should a migrant fall from it. The remaining corridors are arduous journeys, fraught with unnavigable terrain and hostile climates.
In 2022, over 850 migrants were found dead by CBP. The total number of casualties caused by the agency’s deterrence strategy is likely much higher.
As San Diego is a coastal city, some migrants hope to cross over the sea. This, too, can be deadly. In March of this year, eight people died attempting that very journey.
On the day before Watman’s presentation, Border Patrol commenced the replacement of its 18-foot walls with 30-foot ones. Watman witnessed the construction first-hand. He described how workers had to cut the old wall and dig up new, deeper trenches to accommodate the larger panels.
Since then, Watman has continued to document the process. Panels of sterile metal are erected alongside the old, rusted wall. Slowly, day by day, the new wall grows and consumes the last bastion of human decency in CBP’s border enforcement area.
THE FRIENDS OF FRIENDSHIP PARK TAKE ACTION
From April through May, FOFP has coordinated multiple protest actions to raise awareness of CBP’s ongoing project to build thirty-foot walls through the park. CBP is erecting the new walls under the guise of repairs—circumventing the administration’s commitment. Instead of a like-for-like replacement, CBP is tearing down the eighteen-foot walls to replace them with the thirty-foot spec.
Earlier this year, FOFP protested outside Border Patrol’s offices in the Chula Vista. Weeks later, the group protested at the border wall, some miles inland from Friendship Park. In April and May, the group took to protesting at the very site of CBP’s construction.
On Good Friday, FOFP went down to the southern side of Friendship Park—El Parque de la Amistad in Tijuana—to commemorate the crucifixion. Testimonies of the suffering inflicted by the border wall were threaded through the ceremony.
The faithful walked the stations of the cross along the state’s violent architecture, tracing the path to the crucifixion. They gathered beneath the wall, a towering wound in the earth. They marched along a monument to the state’s capacity for violence—and they did so in remembrance of their messiah, who was executed by the state.
Attendees shared testimony at the stations. One woman, a mother, described how she understood Mary Magdalene’s pain. Where the state had executed Christ, the state prevented the speaker from re-entering the US and her daughter from leaving it. As Mary was separated from her son, this mother was separated from her daughter for thirteen years.
Others still recounted how the park allowed them to reconnect with loved ones when it was open. For those who are deported to Mexico from San Diego, the park becomes one’s last remaining link to the city. For those who aren’t local to the region, the park served as as a beacon on the coast. While covering FOFP events, I’ve met travelers who planned to reunite with their family along the wall beneath the lighthouse.
Another speaker recalled how she fled her bigoted family in Honduras, only to suffer exploitation in Guatemala. She then journeyed to the US, but was made to wait in Mexico—where she was again victimized and exploited. From where she spoke, one could see Border Patrol’s no-man’s-land and the placid coast beyond.
On Mother’s Day, the FOFP marched to the park to protest the border wall and its impact on mothers.
Selene Gutierrez was among the protesters who had a chance to speak. She shared that she able to see her grandmother at the park before she passed, reunifying in spite of the border and the separation it entails. Had the park closed sooner, Gutierrez wouldn’t have had this opportunity—and CBP’s ongoing construction threatens reunifications throughout the region.
Gutierrez told attendees that CBP’s construction will make people feel they’re visiting a prison, not a park.
People are not only trapped on the southern side of the wall. In the US, people who are awaiting a hearing on their immigration status can not leave the country as it would harm their standing before the court. DACA recipients can apply for Advance Parole to travel outside the US—but they may not be granted reentry. Undocumented immigrants might choose to stay in the US due to the challenges presented by getting back in—some of whom immigrated decades ago, before subsequent waves of border militarization.
Families of mixed immigration status may find themselves constrained by many of the aforementioned issues all at once.
The protesters carried crafted butterflies and a puppet of a mother who longs to see her children. On the other side of the wall, attendees in Mexico rallied as well—with a puppet of a child who has been separated from their mother.
Like the mother who was not permitted to enter the US, and her daughter who was not permitted to leave it, protesters chanted “queremos ver nuestras hijos.”
The translated chant would read, “we want to see our children.”
The following week, hundreds rallied and marched to the border wall. They called on elected officials to stop the construction. Dr. Stanley Rodriguez, an indigenous leader and mentor, spoke of the border’s effects on indigenous communities. He noted that this issue is tri-national, in that the US and Mexico are not the only parties impacted by this wall. Native people like the Kumeyaay are harmed too, as their traditional territory is cleaved apart by the 30-foot walls. He reminded attendees that there are Kumeyaay people on both sides of the wall.
“Some things are legal but they are not moral. Some things are moral, but not legal. I would rather choose to walk the high road,” said Dr. Rodriguez.
The group marched 1.5 miles to the coast and south along the shore. Protesters walked along the walls to witness the new construction, and marched through the lawn outside the park as Border Patrol agents watched from a cruiser.
Back on the beach, hundreds watched and cheered on both sides of the border as protesters approached the wall to hold space with people on the other side. Folks touched hands through the fence, and protesters on the US side brought food as an ofrenda.
The actions of April and May are an object lesson in the arbitrary nature of nation-state borders. Members of FOFP frequently made reference to the atmosphere on the other side of the wall—of the perpetual celebration at El Parque de la Amistad. While the US side is closed, while it has had curtailed access doled out in meager portions by militarized federal police, the Mexican side has seen comparative freedom. From the south, one can freely approach the wall. From the north, one can only approach with the approval of Border Patrol—that much was made clear when agents attacked faith leaders protesting the wall in 2018.
Given Border Patrol’s history with protest action in the region, their position on the mesa overlooking the beach was not mere surveillance. Their presence serves as a promise of violence, like all the state’s apparatuses built to harm. Federal officers observing from the high ground does not facilitate freedom of expression. At best, the leering agents have a chilling effect on free speech.
At worst, they wait to signal agents to descend from their private road like raiders from the mountaintop, as in 2018.
At these actions, there is a hope held in common on both sides of the wall: that the people of this region will see the wall fall within their lifetimes. Implicitly, they hope for the fall of proto-fascist institutions that rose up around the wall like so much scaffolding.
THE WALL: A CRUEL, GLUTTONOUS BEAST
The wall is not solely material—it is supported by a network of surveillance technology and enforced by flesh. To the latter, CBP has failed to meet its hiring quota since 2014. To the former, the border wall and ports of entry utilize invasive surveillance technologies. These serve to harden broad swaths of land dividing the US and Mexico.
The agency is determined to improve its capacity for detection. Border Patrol has deployed oblong balloons equipped with night-vision cameras on the Arizona-Mexico border to spot migrants. Those initial two were joined by ten others along the border, although now they’ve been reduced to four. CBP has other aerial surveillance equipment, such as Predator B drones that the agency has flown since 2006. CBP had 135 smaller drones as of 2020—with 60 more on the way.
A greater capacity for detection demands an infrastructure that precedes intrusion. As such, the border is pockmarked with myriad sensors—cameras, lidar, radar, and ground sensors alert agents to motion. That is, much of those 1,950 miles are home to perpetual watchers that can call unmanned drones or Border Patrol agents. There are thousands already, and there are plans to deploy numerous others.
Like other federal agencies, CBP has embraced mission creep. Like other federal agencies, CBP purchases cellular device location data from agencies like Venntel. Such data is used to identify and arrest undocumented migrants. CBP also utilizes cell site simulator technology to intercept cellular data in real time—and then locate the source of that data. These simulators mimic legitimate cellular towers and facilitate the capture of text messages, voice calls, and other data.
CBP’s operational scope creeps northward from the southern border, as both substations and surveillance infrastructure belonging to CBP expand away from the wall. The agency has proposed more surveillance towers in and around San Diego. In fact, CBP’s authority is no longer contained to the border itself: according to our government’s interpretation of the constitution, federal authorities do not have to respect certain constitutional rights within one-hundred miles of the border. The ACLU has discussed this, but it suffices to say that extraordinary authority granted to Border Patrol is still routinely overstepped by its agents.
The entirety of San Diego is within that so-called Border Enforcement Zone.
CBP’s surveillance technology has marched inward from the border in parallel with the agency’s legal jurisdiction. The facial recognition system employed by CBP at ports of entry have become untethered, living in the CBP One app itself. The asylum process now requires applicants to submit their photos for a facial recognition scan through the app. As asylum seekers are granted humanitarian parole, they are encouraged to use the app “to complete a pre-screening process prior to entry at an airport,” or use the “I-94 feature also allows CBP to collect users’ GPS location for certain uses.”
The American Immigration Council argues “tools employed by CBP One may expose users to inherent risks, such as the potential for surveillance or the possibility that they may be disparately treated due to the inherent flaws within the app’s functions.”
The AIC also notes that “the app has become essentially mandatory for individuals to access certain immigration processes with limited exceptions.”
Predictably, the all-but-necessary CBP One is notoriously unreliable. Black asylum seekers have alerted press to the app’s inability to recognize Black faces, hampering the asylum application process. Migrants have also complained that the app crashes regularly. Applicants can only request appointments at particular times, but are required to wrestle with an app that crashes as the request period opens. The thousands of applicants desperate for an appointment shrinks the window to mere minutes—meaning a single crash can cause applicants to miss the day’s window entirely.
The extended period of detention faced by asylum seekers this month demonstrates CBP One’s negative externalities. It is both an expansion of the agency’s surveillance infrastructure, and a force multiplier for the hardships of poverty. One can understand why those fleeing oppressive governments, economic hardship, and war would be anxious to keep in touch with loved ones. For asylum seekers, phones are not just a means of reaching out to friends and family. The devices become a fickle gatekeeper.
Border Patrol did not provide charging facilities to asylum seekers. Volunteer workers had to fill that gap. In San Ysidro, aid workers ferried migrants’ phones between generators and their outstretched hands. In Jacumba, too, volunteers provided batteries and cables for asylum seekers who had been neglected by agents. In both cases, there was never enough power to go around. I and many other reporters witnessed the constant, desperate pleading.
By requiring the use of CBP One and detaining asylum seekers without the means to charge their phones, CBP arms itself with a means to circumvent Title 8 with plausible deniability. In theory, the agency empowers itself to deny asylum seekers, and to surveil those the agency admits into the US.
Given the circumstances that compelled many to seek asylum, and Border Patrol’s decision to turn away migrants at ports of entry for not using CBP One, asylum seekers’ desperation to keep their phones on was logical.
A PROGENY OF NEW BORDERS
The crises at San Ysidro and Jacumba have not been resolved. Rather, they have changed shape.
In Jacumba I’d heard a rumor that the US was negotiating some sort of mass deportation with Mexico whereby the majority of asylum seekers would be expelled to Tijuana. I was never able to corroborate this. However, the president of Refugees International has reported that the migrant shelters in Tijuana are overfull—while those in the US are hardly occupied at all.
Asylum seekers in the Jacumba camp had approached me to ask if I knew where they would end up. Implicit in their uncertainty about the future and possibility of deportation was a lack of communication on the part of Border Patrol agents.
But now, with Konyndyk’s reporting, I can’t help but wonder if asylum seekers were reacting to the same rumor I’d heard.
Another rumor crossed my desk: Senator Padilla’s office intends to tour facilities where asylum seekers are being detained. I saw one of his staffers’ in Jacumba, and a photographer told me that staffer had held agents to account. I doubt any apparatus of the state can sufficiently regulate a monster it birthed to circumvent regulation, but perhaps there will be change in our lifetime.
Working off of inquiries and tips, I was able to locate a hotel where asylum seekers are being held. I’ll refrain from naming the hotel, given that even those speculated to house migrants have been subjected to harassment in past weeks.
The grounds of the hotel had been fenced off. All but one of its access gates were closed. The single point of entry was manned by private security, some of whom were armed. Border Patrol agents drove buses in and out of the site, as did independent contractors. Asylum seekers were dropped off beneath a tent in the parking lot, where they were processed before seemingly being moved into the hotel. I was not allowed onto the grounds.
James Stout, a local investigative reporter, kept in touch with an asylum seeker who was placed in one such state-run temporary shelter. They were not allowed to leave their room during their stay, and were not allowed visitors.
I was able to see signs of life in the hotel—asylum seekers sitting on balconies, laundry hanging from the rails and changing over the hours.
There is something banal and evil about these institutions. They can only function by recreating the southern border, with its walls and checkpoints. These institutions choose to do so before deigning to house asylum seekers, placing security theater before humanitarian concerns.
I’m told of another hotel in Jacumba where asylum seekers are being held. I’m told of separate Border Patrol processing facilities as well, but I haven’t been able to verify those claims. I’m told of agents making reference to the future for asylum seekers at Jacumba, directing them to be “dropped at the sallyport.” The agency’s resistance to transparency makes it difficult for press to evaluate the conditions migrants are being held in, let alone determine where they’ll end up, or how long the US will house them.
A Tohono O'odham man named Raymond Mattia was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents on May 19th. He had called the agency for assistance in removing undocumented migrants from his land. Despite the agency’s enormous budget, warlike armaments, and dense network of surveillance technology, it killed Mattia because “he threw something and abruptly raised his arm.”
An eight-year-old girl died in CBP custody on the 18th in Harlingen, Texas. The girl’s mother claims agents ignored her pleas for medical assistance.