Azam Ahmed

<h1>TIJUANA, Mexico — A busy Friday at the Tijuana crossing between the United States and Mexico: Some 90,000 people stream across the lofted footbridge, a mix of tourists, shoppers, workers and students moving in a symbiotic rhythm.</h1>

They spend, work and study on both sides of the border, with this back-and-forth flow happening in the face of arguably the most fortified part of the wall that sits between the United States and Mexico along the nearly 2,000-mile border.

Reinforced walls have been a relatively recent addition to the local landscape. From the crossing between San Ysidro in San Diego and El Chaparral in Tijuana, one can see earlier, less foreboding iterations of the wall, like the one signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

In the years since, the wall has been added to, adjusted and amplified — a living testament of sorts to the enduring and often political nature of wall-building along the border.

On the immigration issue, Tijuana has long been a hot spot of political and media attention, a sort of stand-in for the border writ large, however mistaken the idea.

And it was no different on a recent visit.

Thanks to the arrival in the city of thousands of migrants, traveling in caravans for safe passage from Central America, and because of the hectoring focus of President Donald Trump, Tijuana has attracted the bulk of attention.

It has become the flashpoint and symbol for all that is happening along the border: the supposed chaos, the real desperation and the political crisis that has both bound and distanced the governments of the United States and Mexico.

And so it was on a recent Friday that dozens of journalists, lawyers and aid workers gathered in the concrete plaza just outside the Tijuana crossing, waiting for the latest chapter in the border crisis to unfold.

In an awkwardly coordinated effort, the U.S. and Mexican governments had announced that they would start a “Remain in Mexico” program.

The policy was aimed at forcing asylum-seekers to the United States to return to Mexico while they awaited a decision on their application.

The decision was sudden, and for migrants, devastating.

Having endured the trek north, through routes brimming with thieves and smugglers, the migrants found that the road to asylum in the United States would end, for now, in Mexico.

The United States applauded what it called a binational effort.

Mexican officials insisted, however, that the plan was forced on them and that they had no say in the matter, but that they would take the asylum-seekers back in the spirit of humanitarianism.

Those gathered to respond to the ramifications of the deal — reporters to cover it, along with lawyers and activists to offer counsel and assistance — filled the plaza in tribal clusters and waited for a returnee to pass back through the gates, which would be a repudiation of decades of asylum practices in the United States.

Instead, the only thing that passed through the crowd was rumor.

Someone heard that the first returnee was due at any moment. Within seconds, a line of journalists staged themselves in front of the exit. A family approached, carrying suitcases and small bags. They paused to look at the phalanx of journalists, then passed without a word. They were not the returnees.

As the crowd waited for someone to come back, white vans were lined up in a parking lot, preparing to take another set of migrants across to apply for asylum.

Volunteer aid workers stood pressed against the white metal bars, whispering goodbyes and shedding tears.

They grew hostile as journalists took pictures, with a few of the volunteers shouting at the photographers to stop. These were asylum-seekers under threat, the volunteers said, and they could be endangered if their image surfaced in the media.

When that request didn’t work, the volunteers began sticking their hands in front of cameras to block them. A few tugged at camera straps. A Mexican journalist took issue with an American activist.

“I have a right to do this,” he said in Spanish. “I’m following the law, in my country. When I’m in your country, I’ll follow the law there. But don’t tell me how to act in my country.”

His aggressor recoiled, and then claimed the high ground. She told the crowd she was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the migrants, who seemed to have no problem at all with the journalists taking pictures and asking questions.

“I’ll take a black eye if I have to,” she announced, although the threat she seemed to be describing wasn’t immediately apparent. “I mean, I don’t want to, but it’s worth it to protect these people.”

The standoff continued for a few more minutes, until the vans had loaded everyone up and driven away.

The knot of journalists and activists loosened, and eventually, with no sign of any returnees, everyone left.

Four days later, the first returnee, a bleary-eyed Honduran man worn from his multiday ordeal, would pass back into Mexico. Upon entry, he was whisked away by Mexican officials before he could be interviewed.

If theatricality has become a reality along the border here, one could argue that Trump is its full-time producer.

The language of crisis and chaos, however unfounded, has prompted a wave of coverage, especially in the United States.

In Mexico, forcing migrants to wait months to cross and apply for asylum has left thousands in a state of man-made crisis.

Some leave. Others find work in Mexico and wait for better days, or cross illegally elsewhere. A few have attempted to rush the wall, only to be beaten back with tear gas.

Those images can lend credence to the border-as-chaos plotline — that the United States is under threat and that only walls and deterrence can protect it. That anyone, if given the chance, would gladly sneak across to make a new life in the United States.

But where the border comes to its western end, where the wall dives into the Pacific Ocean and its barnacled stanchions split the crashing surf, another image prevails.

On the United States side, the beach is abandoned, undeveloped, barren. In the distance, San Diego is barely discernible in the evening haze.

The entire beachfront on the Mexico side pulses with life. The portraits of misery and desperation give way to a Friday on the beach in Tijuana.

A child runs in circles on the damp sand, screaming with delight as a small dog chases close behind. A group of hippies dance in a drum circle. Young couples saunter down to the water’s edge to snap selfies in front of the wall.

Music rains down from the short bluffs overhead, as restaurants and bars begin to fill. Families spread blankets on the sand to watch the sunset. Beachfront stands sell sticks of grilled shrimp.

An openness prevails. Amid the cacophony, a brass band begins a set of folk tunes, a sonic dissonance no one seems to mind.

This article originally appeared in <a id="291c8460-acd4-451c-ad4e-55d0d4da1f74" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/us/22border-print.html">The New York Times</a>.

Crowded Plaza, Anxious Migrants and a Bolstered Wall

They spend, work and study on both sides of the border, with this back-and-forth flow happening in the face of arguably the most fortified part of the wall that sits between the United States and Mexico along the nearly 2,000-mile border.

Crowded plaza, anxious migrants and a bolstered wall

<h1>AJO, Ariz. — “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”</h1>

So begins Section 2 (c) of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a federal law that today protects some 110 million acres in the United States.

It is also, today, being used to underpin a criminal complaint that has sent chills through the immigrant rights community.

Last year, federal prosecutors charged a group of activists with illegally entering the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, a rugged area in southern Arizona that spans some 800,000 acres of sepia-toned desert and pleated mountains along the border with Mexico.

Their crime: entering without permits to search for migrants who went missing after crossing into the United States illegally and then leaving behind water and other goods when they could not find them.

Four people were convicted this month, and more face trial.

Although not the first time the government has gone after the activists, the breadth of the campaign against them, and the use of the Wilderness Act, appears to be a first.

Ordinarily, people caught wandering the refuge without a permit might be sent off with a warning or perhaps a summons. The Trump administration opted for the most severe approach.

“The cases are on their surface about wilderness, but I think sitting in the courtroom and watching the trial really laid bare the fact that it’s not just about wilderness,” said Parker Deighan, one of the volunteers awaiting trial on a misdemeanor charge in the case. “It is about targeting humanitarian aid and targeting care for folks who cross the border.”

In convicting the activists, a federal judge said their actions had eroded “the national decision to maintain the refuge in its pristine nature.” And “pristine” is a word that could be easily applied to much of the border area. Tracts of ridged desert populated by barrel cactus and giant saguaros that hug the skyline are untouched reservation land for 75 miles of the border.

And yet a wall could be coming. This despite the fact that one already exists.

The government’s action against the activists, whatever the legal merit, raises broader questions along the border, in particular here, where Arizona abuts its Mexican counterpart, Sonora.

Among them: Who exactly owns the land and gets to say what can or cannot be done to it? Who can make permanent man’s touch on the wilderness, and who suffers for it?

A short drive from Cabeza Prieta lie lands held by the people of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Here, the trammeling of the land has been done exclusively by the U.S. government in its campaign to seal off the dry edges of the United States.

“It is sort of a contradiction what they are doing here,” Verlon Jose, the Tohono O’odham Nation vice chairman, said on a recent tour through a section of the nearly 3 million acres granted to the tribe. “No one wants this wall, and they are saying they are going to build it anyways.”

The tribe has occupied the land for thousands of years, since before there were countries to separate with borders. Its land once stretched from central Arizona all the way down to Hermosillo, Mexico, but geopolitics forced a retreat.

Today, the tribe is fighting to preserve what’s left.

Jose and others are in a pitched battle to halt the construction of any more walls on their land, which is a wilderness in all but name, replete with saguaro forests, untamed brush and tracts of desert arroyo and washes that flood every spring.

The wall that exists now is a welded chain of X-barriers that form a straight line across the southern edge of Tohono O’odham land. To the side, a dirt road has been scratched out of the plains.

This was, to many on the reservation, already a sore point.

More than 2,000 members of the tribe are registered in Mexico. Graveyards sit across the fencing in place now, accessible through a few unmanned border gates exclusively for tribe members.

A new wall would upend nature entirely — from the unspoiled views across a landscape indifferent to borders to the animal life whose free passage between sides would end.

“It’s our backyard,” said Jose. “There’s not just the physical effect of a wall. It’s psychological and emotional as well.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="663030a1-293b-495c-b9e8-7c006ba2ddc8" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/world/protecting-a-wilderness-trammeling-it-too.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Protecting' a wilderness, trammeling it, too

It is also, today, being used to underpin a criminal complaint that has sent chills through the immigrant rights community.

<h1>As President Donald Trump fights to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, journalists Azam Ahmed and Meridith Kohut are driving along the approximately 1,900-mile border and sending occasional dispatches.</h1>

FALFURRIAS, Texas — It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive from the nearest border crossing to the town of Falfurrias, the seat of Brooks County, Texas.

From the highway, Texas unfurls in wide sheets of scrubland, dense understories of small trees and thorny brush that rise in gnarled stands along the sandy plains. Patches of mesquite, blackbrush and huisache crowd the horizon.

Like the border itself, which lies some 80 miles away, it is an unwelcoming place for migrants.

More than 700 have perished in transit through Brooks County over the last 15 years, claimed by heat and dehydration while trying to find their way along the parched tracts of ranchland. The real number is surely higher. The local sheriff, Benny Martinez, thinks only 1 in 5 is ever found.

Migrants disperse here after crossing into the United States, avoiding a border patrol checkpoint. They trek through the dried-out terrain, seeking shade under the boughs of live oaks. Hunters occasionally stumble across hats, empty water jugs and leathered remains banked against trees.

Despite the risk, migrants continue to make the journey through the wilds of Brooks County year after year, carried along by hope. And every year, dozens die. No one believes his or her journey will end like this. They can’t. Here, the dead do not teach the living.

For years, the remains were conveyed to the county cemetery in Falfurrias, then interred in the open space along its peripheries, often in plots too small or poorly located to sell.

No one is quite sure how many were buried; until 2013, the county kept no records.

But Eddie Canales, founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center, has forced the remains into the open, hoping to rescue them from anonymity.

Since 2013, anthropologists have been coming with their students to exhume the bodies and extract DNA samples. With no maps or records, they dig narrow trenches guided by the memories of local gravediggers. The samples are then cross-referenced with missing-person databases.

Of the more than 150 remains unearthed in this cemetery, 30 have been identified.

“It’s for the families of the missing,” said Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist from Texas State University overseeing the effort.

Spradley stood nearby as a team of students brushed the dirt away from a set of remains buried several feet deep. A worn trash bag, blistered by age, held the bleached bones stacked neatly inside.

The bodies tell their own stories, Spradley explained. One man carried photocopied money in his pockets to throw off robbers. Others are buried with stuffed animals. Some are buried clothed; others as skeletons, having died long before they were found.

Each new discovery brings conflicting emotions, a sense of satisfaction tempered by sorrow. She wonders if they will ever find all of the remains.

“You look around and you just think, ‘There’s an open space, there’s an open space,'” she said, scanning the verdant grounds, where fresh cut flowers lay against polished headstones. “And there could be a migrant buried anywhere there.”

She paused for a moment. The sound of shovels striking dirt filled the cemetery.

“I always think, you know, what if one of my family members went to another country and never came back,” she said. “Would anyone pick up the phone to help me? And if they picked up the phone, would they care enough to help me?”

That was when Canales decided to come out of retirement to found the human rights center, after a career as a union organizer. A 70-year-old Texan with an easy laugh, he applied the same principles to human rights as he did to union organizing.

“Developing a connection, basically,” he said, as he drove the public roads that demarcate thousands of acres of ranchland. “And then, you know, I mean, I’m still the same pushy guy.”

Canales was on his way to replenish water stations that he maintains for migrants passing through. A little more work for him might mean a little less for the gravediggers. The large blue bins sit along the roadside every half-mile or so, and carry up to 6 gallons of fresh water. He has planted a flag near most, to help migrants spot them from the brush.

In the borderlands, of course, not everything is dark and serious. People live their lives as they do anywhere. Whatever the broader political debate, to most, this place is just home. And for some, it feels as if politicians who know little about the area are just trying to gain political points.

“There’s certainly no crisis or state of emergency here,” said Phillip Gómez.

Gómez was seated at the Jalisco Restaurant along the edge of the highway into town. The television was on over the bar, playing the highlights of President Donald Trump’s speech in McAllen, Texas, about an hour and a half’s drive away.

But no one was paying attention to that. The DJ was gearing up for karaoke night. Regulars began filing in, introducing themselves to diners as if they owned the place.

Gómez, a 64-year-old technician for DirecTV, sported a white handlebar mustache, plaid shirt and cowboy hat with a pair of sunglasses perched on top. He remained seated while he sang a slightly off-tune rendition of “The Chair” by George Strait.

Afterward, he didn’t much care to talk politics, though he allowed that everyone else seemed to want to talk about the border whether they lived there or not.

He agrees with Trump, he said, and though he feels bad for migrants fleeing violence, that’s no reason to let everyone just come into the U.S.

“Why do people have walls in their backyard?” he asked, passing off the microphone for the second time that night, after a second George Strait song. “Because they don’t want people in there. There’s no difference. Explain the difference to me.”

Gómez, who speaks Spanish and whose great-grandparents immigrated from Mexico, doesn’t feel as if the system can bear much more.

“I’m all for helping people,” he said. “But too many people are going to bring down our system.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f3b3ab5f-598a-4309-9173-b076254d3618" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/us/they-were-buried-without-names-nowsome-at-least-have-recovered-their-identities.html">The New York Times</a>.

Day 5: Hoping to Put Names to the Nameless

FALFURRIAS, Texas — It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive from the nearest border crossing to the town of Falfurrias, the seat of Brooks County, Texas.

Day 5: Hoping to put names to the nameless

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Azam Ahmed

Articles written by the author

Crowded plaza, anxious migrants and a bolstered wall

'Protecting' a wilderness, trammeling it, too

Day 5: Hoping to put names to the nameless