A Day at the Steel Fence Where Immigrants Get the Only Glimpse of Their Families Esther Yu-Hsi Lee and Jack Jenkins - ThinkProgress
go to original November 14, 2014

When former First Lady Pat Nixon traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border in 1971 to inaugurate what is now Friendship Park just south of San Diego, California, she observed the then-thin string of barbed wire separating the two countries and reportedly said, “I hate to see a fence anywhere.” The implication, people thought, was that neither nation would ever build one.

But they did build a fence. Two, in fact. Today, a pair of massive metal walls — both constructed by the U.S. government and each roughly 18 feet high — separate most of Friendship Park from Mexico. The first is incomplete, porous, and encircling only one section of the park. But the second fence, expanded and reinforced multiple times since the early 1990s, represents the formal border between the two countries. It currently extends east as far as the eye can see and westward down to the beach below, where a weathered-looking series of iron pylons stretches out into the Pacific Ocean. The Mexico side is home to the bustling city of Tijuana, where crowds of people can often be seen strolling across the sand and bodysurfing through the crashing waves. The U.S. beach, by contrast, is usually deserted, save for the occasional low rumble of a border agent vehicle on patrol.

On Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., however, a small crowd comes from miles around to gather at the American section of the fence. That’s when U.S. Border Patrol officers open the first gate, allowing people to walk up to the second fence and talk to people on the other side. This makes Friendship Park one of the only places in the world where people in the United States and Mexico can physically see and speak to each other without the aid of electronics — or the risk of deportation. It attracts a wide variety of guests, most of whom have visceral and often frustrating experiences with America’s immigration system.

Read the rest at ThinkProgress

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!