Throughline - Why the wall was built

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

As the United States expanded into a global superpower, it simultaneously strengthened its national borders and began to limit who could come in and out of the country. In this week’s episode, the story of how one of the very first walls meant to divide people was built on the US Southern border. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Randad de Fetda. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. Last week, we talked about the expansion of the United States into a newfound global power. But even as the country was expanding its borders around the world to include places as far away as the Philippines in the late 19th century, it was also limiting what was and wasn't part of the United States by creating boundaries and borders,

especially along the border between the U.S. and Mexico. We need to be really clear about marking this space. And that leads a lot of government officials along the border to say, we need a fence. Today on the show, through line producers Anya Seinberg and Christina Kim take us to the border city of Amos Nogales to tell us the story of one of the first walls on the U.S. southern world. border. That story, after a quick break. 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. This is Rachel St. John. She's a professor of history at UC Davis. 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. 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. 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.

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, 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. 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 the U.S. sent a survey team 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. But that marker was just the first step towards something much larger. In 1897, then U.S. President William McKinley issued a proclamation to create a clear strip of land, 60 feet wide and two miles wide, right through Amos Nogales. The goal? To demarcate the border more clearly. John Brickwood Saloon and several homes and businesses were knocked down. And for a few years, the border stayed that way.

until 1910, when the Mexican Revolution changed life on the border once again. 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 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 Ambrose Nogales had already become a powder keg. And on August 27, 1918, the fuse was lit.

It was just after 4 o'clock in the afternoon. A Mexican carpenter named Cepferino 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 we 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. Mexican civilians grabbed guns and joined the fight. It's immortalized in this Mexican song. The Corridor de Nogales tells the Mexican version of the battle. The song goes, when a Mexican cross the board, 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. 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 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 Amos 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 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. 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. By the mid-1920s, the infrastructure of the border, the fences, the manpower, and the law enforcement, the tools that we used today, we're all in place.

Today, there are over 700 miles of border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. In 2025, President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocated over $170 billion, over four years, towards increasing immigration enforcement. Roughly 50 billion of those dollars are intended for new construction and reinforcement of the border between the U.S. and Mexico. The administration has said it aims to complete

the entire southern border wall by the end of President Trump's second term. That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear more about the first border wall, check out the full-length episode, Line Fence Wall, which is a part of our larger series on how immigration enforcement became political and profitable. And join us next week when we go back and look at the people in America who were literally fighting for change from within. There's this idea that the whole community is invested on this.

If Johnson wins, the Negroes around the country are going to riot, they're going to revolt, they're going to get the idea that they can fight back. They're going to get the idea that they're not inferior. The story of Jack Johnson, the first black American heavyweight boxer in the world, who fought for much more than a title. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Mogher. them and edited by Christina Kim with help from the throughline production team.

Music as always by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your hosts, Rand Abd al-Fattah. And Ramtin Arablui. Thank you for listening.