View from the Texas borderlands

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump consistently said at rallies and in presidential debates: “We will have a wall. The wall will be built. The wall will be successful.” He said on Fox’s Hannity show: “It’s going to be a serious wall. It’s going to be a real wall.”

A Pew poll in July showed 84 percent of likely Trump voters wanted a wall, and interviews showed they typically expected a tall, physical wall. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Trump -supporter, scoffed at that: “1,200 miles from Brownsville to El Paso, 30-foot high … I know you can’t do that.”

Who’s right? The U.S.-Mexico border is almost 2,000 miles long, and the western 37 percent of it separates mostly dry land: California, Arizona, and New Mexico on one side; Mexico on the other. Walls and fences are already in place there, and builders could construct taller ones.

The Texas-Mexico border Perry spoke of is the harder part: 90 percent of it has no man-made barriers in place. The Rio Grande divides the two countries there, yet the river is not so grand anymore: Dams and use by farms and towns have decreased its flow by 80 percent, and its average depth is only 10 feet.

Building a wall along this border would be hard because creeks empty into the river, animals drink from it, and floods can powerfully disrupt man’s plans. Wall-building not in the flood plain would lose landowners thousands of acres.

LAST MONTH I TRAVELED 320 MILES along the Texas side of the river. My goal: to see what immigrants face when they cross illegally at places narrow enough for strong-armed Boston Red Sox outfielder Jackie Bradley Jr. to throw a ball from one bank to the other. Here are notes and photos from five of my stops.

Judge Roy Bean, who styled himself the only law in Texas west of the Pecos River, was known to chain drunken prisoners to mesquite trees in front of the building

Stop #1: Langtry, population 17.

A natural wall—tall cliffs—block off most easy access from Mexico, and several openings used for centuries by natives are easy to police. Now, three groups are out and about at night: border crossers, Border Patrol agents, and herpetologists collecting snakes. (One herper has 15 rattlesnakes in his home; another has 100.) Sights: On one cliff sits a green molded plastic chair strapped to a tree, probably for border agent use. Sounds: The bleating of sheep and goats on the Mexican side.

Residents say the border crossers don’t break into their homes “unless they’re about to die.” Langtry’s major draw is tourism: Judge Roy Bean ran his court out of his still-standing saloon from 1882 to 1903, styling himself the only law in Texas west of the Pecos River. He chained drunken prisoners to mesquite trees in front of the building and was cranky enough to become the subject of two Western movies and a television series. Bean also spoke of his love for the British actress Lillie Langtry, whom he never met. (She made it to Langtry in 1904, several months after he died.)

Stop #2: Kickapoo Reservation, population 400.

At one spot just south of Eagle Pass the river is narrow and the banks are low. From the river it’s easy to walk the length of a football field: There sits a wooden privacy fence with brick pillars, a 10-foot-tall chain-link fence with three strands of barbed wire above it, and an opening between the two. A border crosser entering the promised land would first see … a van announcing, “WINNING IS BIGGER IN TEXAS.”

Yes, about 1,000 feet from the wall/fence opening sits the only casino in Texas, the Lucky Eagle, in business because the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas has a 119-acre reservation. The casino, which brings busloads of Texans from other cities, has more than 3,300 slot games, as well as poker and bingo rooms. One evening hundreds of people, mostly age 50 and up, sat at push-button slot machines with names like Serpent Legends, Diamonds & Devils, and Viva Los Muertos.

The vast expanse contains 20 ATMs, numerous eating spots and bathrooms, swirling cigarette smoke, free soft drinks and coffee, cheap alcohol, and many Purell hand sanitizer stations. Border crossers would most likely skip the casino to avoid being detained or hypnotized by its swirling carpet and cacophony. They would head inland, perhaps passing the Eglesia Vida Eternal and choosing which ranch to traverse: Cactus Jack and La Esperanza are right across U.S. 83 from each other.

Stop #3: Laredo, population 236,000.

It’s a half mile from City Hall to the muddy, 20-foot banks of the Rio Grande topped by a 5-foot fence. Four well-guarded international bridges for cars and pedestrians, and a fifth for trains, beckon legal travelers. Those wanting to come illegally can wade much of the way. From the Tres Laredos Park on the American side (Laredo has sister cities in Mexico and Spain) Border Patrol agents wave at men in knee-high water near the Mexican side. People using picnic tables on the American side once had better shade, but the trees came down so visibility would increase.

A person from Mexico or points south who evades the Border Patrol can disappear easily into Laredo, the 10th-largest city in Texas, with a population that is 96 percent Hispanic. The North American Free Trade Agreement has grown the city—almost half of U.S. international trade headed for Mexico crosses through Laredo—and also opened up opportunities for corruption: Since 2014 authorities have arrested officials from the county commission, City Council, school district, and court systems on charges including bribery, money laundering, cocaine possession, and extortion.

In “Just Across the Rio Grande,” Reba McEntire sings, “The lights of Laredo dance on the water and shine in a young man’s eyes / who stands on the border and dreams of paradise. / He’s heard crazy stories of how good life is over in the promised land, / and sometimes it seems like God must live just across the Rio Grande.”

Stop #4: San Ygnacio, population 667.

One sign at an easy place to come ashore gives reasons not to, including “high voltage.” Another reason is Alfredo Garza, who’s been a Border Patrol agent for almost a year: He or another agent is on duty 24/7: They regularly apprehend people who go first to jail and then to Laredo’s detention center. Here as at other border crossings, numerous lights can turn night into day. Garza doesn’t see anyone building a wall there, where the Rio Grande sometimes rises and sends water all the way to a light pole 200 feet from the river.

Border crossers who evade capture can hide out in any of the many abandoned buildings in this town that dates from the 1830s and boasts of one National Historic Landmark, the Treviño-Uribe Rancho, which in the 19th century was a fortified compound with gunports that provided refuge from Indian raids.

Stop #5: Roma, population 9,929.

At the top of sandstone bluffs sits the grandly named World Birding Center, an area overlooking the river that provides good views of buff-bellied hummingbirds, Altamira orioles, and other species that do not need visas to cross the border. Sights: An abandoned striped shirt on one of the many paths that birders use to go down to the river and immigrants use to climb up. Sounds: A car radio on the Mexico side, along with rooster crows and dog barks.

Historically, Roma is a great case study of how tariffs affect trade. During the 1850s Mexico had high tariffs, so people would buy goods in the United States and smuggle them into Mexico. Then the Mexican state of Tamaulipas created an informal free trade zone on its northern border, so people imported into Mexico high-quality European goods and smuggled them into the United States.

Now, Border Patrol agent M. Cervantes notes his use of cameras, sensors, and other detection devices, and expects the number of agents and devices will grow, but he doesn’t see a wall as functional, and says he expects people to “keep coming, legally or illegally, until their economy at home improves.”

EVERY BORDER AGENT OR BORDER RESIDENT spoke to me similarly: Those who now constitute boots on the ground expect a little more wall, more fencing, and many more boots. The size of the Border Patrol doubled in the 1990s and more than doubled again in this new millennium, growing from about 4,000 persons to more than 20,000. Along the 320-mile stretch of the river I regularly saw green-and-white Border Patrol cars and trucks.

Texas supplements those guardians with 1,700 Department of Public Safety troopers—and the major highways heading north have checkpoints.

In 1972 I walked by the Berlin Wall, once 96 miles long, and more recently observed the wall that separates Jerusalem from Bethlehem, part of a planned 440-mile system of walls and fences designed to protect Israel from terrorists based in the West Bank. We’ll probably learn from the state-of-the-art Israel Defense Forces, which likes to see three fences: two outer ones topped by barbed wire, detection equipment in the middle, and patrol roads on both sides.

Responding to Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes, President-elect Trump recently said, “There could be some fencing.” Some Trump supporters will not be pleased to learn that “We will build a wall” was partly a metaphor, not a promise, but others will be glad to manage by results rather than bricks and mortar.

A “guest worker” plan like the Bracero Program, which brought in 200,000 Mexican workers each year from 1948 to 1964, would allow Mexicans to earn money in the United States for several months and then go home, with the opportunity to return the following year. That would drive down the number of those who stay here because they cannot travel back and forth freely.