Throughline - Line. Fence. Wall.

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

The U.S. - Mexico border, according to a video on the official White House website, is very quiet: nothing but tires crunching on gravel and the wind whistling around a high, solid-looking wall. But that's not the whole story. Today on the show, how that border went from a line in the sand, to a fence, to a wall.Guests:Rachel St. John, associate professor of history at U.C. Davis, and author of Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US Mexico BorderMiguel Levario, associate professor of history at Texas Tech University and author of Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the EnemySilvestre Reyes, former Congressman (D-TX), and former Border Patrol Sector Chief Eduardo Contreras, realtor in Brownsville, TexasTo access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. Hey, everyone. Run 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, 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 you? 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, hard worker, 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've 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 saying today. Yeah, it is. Yep. By 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 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 closed. If you drive around this fence, there's areas where it's open and there's traffic going in and out because, you know, there's people that live 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 was. 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 ThruLine, 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 of itself. It was a place that people moved through. To the first fences. The fences were really just fences, like the way we imagined 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 Corona de Mars calling for San Antonio, Texas. I listened to NPR. are through life. In fact, it is the only podcast that I have a paid subscription to because it's that valuable. Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. Part 1. 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 arroyos 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 including the Yaqui, the Tana Autumn, and the Kumiyai. 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 packing up his things to head south. He had just been hired as the new U.S. 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 distant, a distant 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 put a question. 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 Garcia-Conde, trudged on. His 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. Garcia-Conde was grizzled.

He was an experienced surveyor. And right from the start, he watched the American team fall into disarray. without any real 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 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, theautilites, and circumfer enters. And to make matters worse, the Mexican government didn't have much money after the war defrable. finance their boundary commission. Garcia-Conde had to draw on his personal line of credit to fund the expedition. So by the time Bartlett showed up, Garcia-Conde had been through it. When he meets Bartlett for the first time in Paso del Norte,

present-day Al-Passo, Texas, he's not impressed. But Mr. Barlett, who preside, is a beaio subject, but without ideas of the work we have to do. Mr. Barlet, who presides over it, is a fine fellow, but without any idea of the war 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 de la 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 bit. 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 19, 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 and the extreme.

One becomes disgusting. 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 Bartle 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 people still. Many of the tribes that lived there, like the Pima and Maricopa, aided the Boundary Survey. They served 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 proved 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 24, 1851. Dr. Vastbinder 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-Gonde 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... 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 Gadizia Gandhi 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 ThruLine because I love stories. And without further ado, you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. 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 Amos Nogales.

Well, actually, it's two towns, Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales Mexico. That's why it's called Amos Nogales. It means both Nogales. And the owner of this saloon, John Brickwood, has purposefully built it right on the border. 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.

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 Amos 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 Amos 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 Amos 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 Amos-Nagalas has 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, and Nogales, Arizona newspaper wrote, We speak of the two towns as one, for they are really such,

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

And as things got busier in Amos-Nogales, 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 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 build 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 Amos Nogales. They say, you know, in order to make clear where Mexican space stops and where American space begins, we need to move something. 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 troops. 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 Amos Nogales, too. 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 Amos Nogales 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 any way you tell it, the story. The story ends in violence. It was just after 4 o'clock in the afternoon. A Mexican carpenter named Cafferino Hillamadrid 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 Hillamadrid 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. It's immortalized in this Mexican song.

The Corrido 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 Nogalenses. It says, There were 1,500 gringos, did not let them advance in that Pueblo of Nogales. There were 1,500 gringos.

All were federal troops, and the people of Nogales 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 ten 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 Amos Nogales,

people on both sides expressed regret. The shooting was an unfortunate affair, started by irresponsible persons under U.S. undue stress of excitement. But the damage was done. 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.

And so one of the first U.S. built fences meant to divide people was built through Amos 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 U.S. 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 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 used today, were all in place.

I walked the border, and I saw examples. 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 ThruLines by NPR. 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, if I was a lookout against the Border Patrol, it was simple, just play on the truck. And when you see the jeeps come, because we could see the jeeps coming from far away.

says 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 Sylvester 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 and hide. The other Bracelos, they had their ID card, 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 is 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 of 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. Sylvester 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 border line itself. This is Miguel L'Ivario. 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' idea, a big show of Border Patrol strength called Operation Hold the Line. We're going to block people from coming into the country. Sylvesterre 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 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 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. 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 riffraff can't cross. And that was the point, was to be intimidating, was to be a deterrent. The way Sylvester 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 uncharted 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, Sevasté 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, and historically we've done this, we associate those increases with immigrants. But Sylvester'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. California's Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who was running for re-election in 1994, made immigration the center of his campaign.

In the word he used, was a legal immigrant, and he had these commercials at the time where he showed immigrants running through traffic near the border. Governor Pete Wilson sent the National Guard to help the border patrol, but that's not all. For California to work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws, I'm suing to force the first. 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. a way that then the government can evoke at different times, either for political reasons or to manage labor. Pete Wilson won his re-election 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 Diane 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 a 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-tough policy at our borders. They put up a bunch of new barriers,

so 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 public? 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 in San Diego, it would force migrants to consider entering through the Sonoran Desert or 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 migration 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're not, 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 policy.

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 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 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 del Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine 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 Katiyama. Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. It was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez.

Music for this episode was composed by Romteen and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvi, Cho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. Thank you to James Delahousi, Alison Silvera, Stephen McNally, Julian Niavizkiyat Godoy, and Bruno Ramirez for their voiceover work. Al-Corido de Nogales by Robert Lee Benton Jr. and Oscar Gonzalez is from the recording entitled Heroes and Horses, Coridos from the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands, 2002. It was used by permission, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways recordings. Thanks also to Johannes Durge, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show,

please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. And make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening. Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org.