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President Biden ought to name off development crews gathering on the southernmost fringe of California’s shoreline to erect a border wall that epitomizes Trump’s dystopian imaginative and prescient.
The deliberate double-layered, 30-foot-tall metal wall would create one other heartbreak at a historic web site for binational unity, Friendship Park, inaugurated 52 years in the past by First Girl Pat Nixon. Again then, just some strings of barbed wire separated the U.S. and Mexico. Archival footage of the park’s 1971 inauguration reveals the primary girl disturbed by fence on the mesa and asking that it's taken down so she might hug and shake fingers with folks in Mexico. “I hope there received’t be a fence too lengthy right here,” she mentioned. The dream was for a spot symbolizing the shut relations of two neighbors, not not like Peace Arch Historic Park on the U.S.-Canada border.
That outdated footage is a window into an alternate universe, removed from the Republican Social gathering’s vicious rhetoric in regards to the border now. It’s additionally a reminder of what the GOP could possibly be, whilst Democrats show to be disappointing on border points.
Opinion Columnist
Jean Guerrero
Jean Guerrero is the creator, most lately, of “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.”
It was President Clinton who oversaw the desecration of Pat Nixon’s dream with development of a metal wall within the Nineteen Nineties as he pandered to nativists. It ran throughout the sand and down into the ocean. Following the assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, the border was additional militarized with surveillance cameras, sensors and extra. A secondary fence topped with barbed wire and parallel to the first one was constructed below President Obama.
Entry to the park got here below Border Patrol’s management and discretion after 2007. The company oversaw binational actions within the space between the 2 fences for a couple of hours on weekends, generally much less: non secular actions, civic gatherings and tearful reunions between folks standing on the Mexico facet and their family members on the U.S. facet, generally touching by way of the slats of the wall.
Border Patrol stopped all actions throughout the pandemic and has stored the park closed, claiming that deteriorating boundaries wanted changing. Though they could possibly be changed with comparable constructions, Customs and Border Safety authorised a plan to erect new boundaries at practically double their 18-foot peak.
Now, if Biden strikes ahead with constructing a wall on the park, it received’t be Trump or the Republicans who might be remembered for remodeling one of many border’s final hopeful locations into one other place of anguish.
Trauma physicians in San Diego are already coping with a surge in traumatic mind accidents and spinal accidents resulting from falls from the taller border wall constructed east of Friendship Park. Scripps Mercy Hospital has handled a whole lot of sufferers who’ve fallen from the taller wall in different components of San Diego since January 2021.
Final yr, UC San Diego noticed a fivefold improve in admissions of sufferers with traumatic accidents. Between 2019 and 2021, it handled 375 such sufferers, in contrast with only some dozen within the earlier three years. Trauma physicians name it an “unseen public well being disaster.”
Earlier this month, the Mexican Consulate in San Diego launched information displaying that practically 4 dozen Mexican nationals have fallen to their deaths within the final yr within the San Diego-Tijuana border space.
These numbers are solely a fraction of the full deaths and accidents from falls alongside the two,000-mile border. “If we had a greater sense of how many individuals are literally being injured, the dialog with policymakers can be way more pressing,” mentioned Pedro Rios, a human rights activist in San Diego.
U.S. Customs and Border Safety paused the wall undertaking final August to take public remark. But it surely resumed work this month, saying it had made a concession: retaining the peak of 1 layer at 18 ft for a 60-foot stretch. The remainder of the 0.6-mile undertaking might be 30 ft tall, as will the entire secondary fence. “It’s only a joke,” mentioned John Fanestil, a pastor and a frontrunner at Mates of Friendship Park.
The company mentioned it is going to restore public entry to the park for “designated durations” after development finishes in six months. However Fanestil is skeptical. “That is a part of a years-long marketing campaign to shut the park,” he instructed me. “They’ll be capable to say they’re quick on workers. They at all times give you excuses for retaining it closed.”
Border Patrol doesn’t cover its hostility to the park. In January 2020, the company bulldozed the binational backyard of native crops on the U.S. facet with out warning, claiming the foliage was offering cowl for smugglers. Fanestil remembers a time between 2008 and 2009 when he used to serve cross-border communion by passing the sacramental bread by way of the wall. Officers deemed it contraband.
In Tijuana, Friendship Park is Parque de la Amistad, a preferred vacation spot for households to absorb vistas of the California coast. It’s vibrant and bustling, not like the militarized U.S. facet. Murals beautify the wall. Youngsters play on the seaside, gingerly approaching the fence. Households eat and luxuriate in music by a historic obelisk, the primary monument demarcating the border, from the mid-1800s.
Wall development would injury the Mexican facet of the binational backyard as a result of its roots lengthen into the U.S.. The wall would additionally hinder cross-border views, showing strong at an angle.
The World Design Group, which acknowledges socially and environmentally good design, named the San Diego-Tijuana area the 2024 World Design Capital. It’s the primary binational area to win, and consists of an alternate design for the park. Biden ought to pause development till he can assessment the design, which might be showcased subsequent yr. However he’s clearly extra involved with showing powerful on the border.
In the meantime, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has performed little to influence the Biden administration to halt this proposal, regardless of being one of many nation’s boldest fighters for immigrant households. If anybody can break Democrats’ cycle of cowardice on the border, it’s him. He mustn’t let Biden destroy one in all California’s nice treasures: one of many world’s strongest symbols of human interconnectedness.
Jean Guerrero’s ebook “Crux” was revealed this month in paperback. @jeanguerre
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