Glasbruch (2024) | Guido Kulecki / CC BY 2.0
The southern border of the United States has been policed intensively for over half a century. Donald Trump and many other global political leaders have narrowed their policy focuses from bordering more generally to building walls. Even short trips to the US-Mexico border make clear that the wall is not a continuous integrated structure. On the contrary, the wall is fragmented by design. Attending to the materialization of the wall, to the bits and pieces, puts the question: How is political authority operating here? Rather than assuming fragmentation to be a sign of weakness, I suggest we shift in analysis of border policing from space to time. I draw evidence from government documents, site visits, and photographs.
For more than four decades now, US politicians have insisted we must “secure the border” before contemplating comprehensive immigration reform. For the most part, national political figures agree that the border is best secured by building a wall. The current poster child for border security politics, former President Donald Trump, declared repeatedly that he would build an even taller wall and make Mexico pay for it (C-SPAN 2015). Although rhetorically extreme, calls to securitize borders are not new; every president since Ronald Reagan has deepened US commitment to border fortification (Andreas 2009; Nevins 2002). President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act into law on October 26, 2006, mandating construction of 700 miles of border wall; neither former President Barack Obama nor President Joe Biden broke with calls for increasing border security. Media outlets amplify security politics by circulating photographs of refugee boats and border walls, making images a central vocabulary for border politics.1
And yet even short trips to the US-Mexico border quickly reveal that the wall is not one thing; the wall is discontinuous, made up of multiple sections, with large gaps in between. Indeed, at times the wall ends abruptly, leaving wall fragments standing alone, disconnected from other wall pieces.
What are we to make of these fragments? Why is the border wall built in segments? Is the wall largely performative—compensating, as Wendy Brown (2010) has argued, for waning of sovereignty? Or do the fragments signal a failure of political will or state capacity when it comes to border policy (Sundberg 2015; Washington 2016)? Or perhaps the wall bits manifest the inevitable slippage between formal and informal politics, as Mahmoud Keshavarz (2018) has argued?
Figure 1. Wall fragment, military highway, near McAllen, Texas. Photograph by author, March 2016.
My research points in another direction. Border wall construction and the accompanying government documents make clear that the United States border wall is fragmented by design. Congress, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Border Patrol all planned a discontinuous wall. Wall fragments are not material residuals left over from policy failures; they were planned. Taking border fragments at face value—as intentionally disaggregated—asks that we rethink bordering via gaps in the wall. The “Proposed Action,” as the border construction project in the valley was known, called for building 70 miles of border fence in Texas from Brownsville to Laredo. The Rio Grande Valley (RGV) wall fragments are not exceptional; the US-Mexico border wall is not continuous. Wall fragments, I argue, are best understood as rearticulations of state authority rather than as evidence of diminished state capacity (Jones and Johnson 2016; Mountz 2011; Weizman 2007).
Figure 2. Wall fragment, military highway, near McAllen, Texas. Photograph by author, February 2017.
Figure 3. Wall fragments, Los Indios, Texas. Photograph by author, February 2017.
I consider three policy initiatives—the Secure Fence Act, the RGV border wall, and the Department of Homeland Security’s “Border Calculus”—to document that the border wall was fragmented by design. Attending to gaps in the wall shifts the focus from policing space to regulating time. Doing so allows me to consider the diverse ways in which a range of government policies simultaneously obstructs and expedites cross-border mobilities of people and things. Unequal mobility rights across migration and trade are facilitated by the separation, or siloing, of multiple mobilities into different policy domains. Bringing trade and migration into the same analytic frame questions who and what ought to move. Reframing will not settle questions of differential mobilities in one fell swoop, but it politicizes questions of mobility in more generative ways than the current practice of focusing incessantly on walls. I conclude by turning to aesthetics and politics, specifically the role of images in unsettling presumptive accounts of political authority in general and border walls in particular.
Critics of immigration restriction, I conclude, might do well to shift their focus from walls to time. One way of doing so is through images. While border walls mesmerize, they also distract. The spectacular photographs of border walls allow the mobility privileges granted to trade to pass more easily under the radar. Placing photographs of expediting zones, international bridges, and cross-border production into circulation brings regulation and facilitation into the same analytic frame. Seeing mobility in all its aspects opens the window to more equitable mobility politics across domains.
Fragmented by Design
The US-Mexico border wall was designed to be built in segments. National legislation, regional plans, and implementation processes all refer to the discontinuous wall as “tactical infrastructure” intended to give US Border Patrol agents “operational control” of the border (Secure Fence Act 2006, sec. 2). The Secure Fence Act, arguably the high point of US bordering efforts, mandated that the federal government fence approximately 700 miles of border, which amounts to just over one-third of the 1,933.4 miles of US southern border (Beaver 2006).2 From the get-go, then, the state authorized a partial fence. At no point has the federal government authorized the construction of a continuous wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Moreover, when the location of the wall is specified, the statute identifies specific mile counts to be built around ports of entry in specific towns, often leaving large open areas or impassable terrain unfenced (Secure Fence Act 2006, sec. 3).
The Department of Homeland Security allocated almost 1.2 billion dollars for the installation of “fencing, infrastructure, and technology along the border” (DHS, CBP, and USBP 2007, 1-4). Not surprisingly, politicians and government officials moved quickly to claim the newly available resources. The Rio Grande Sector was no exception; DHS, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and US Border Patrol (USBP) proposed construction of a “tactical infrastructure” along the southernmost portions of Starr, Hidalgo, and Cameron Counties. From the outset, the Proposed Action was planned as 21 discrete fence sections (DHS et al. 2007, ES-3). The Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Proposed Action makes clear the wall was to be built in pieces:
The Proposed Action includes the installation of tactical infrastructure in 21 discrete fence sections (designated O-1 through O-21) along the international border with Mexico in the vicinity of Roma, Rio Grande City, McAllen, Progreso, Mercedes, Harlingen, and Brownsville, Texas. . . . The locations of the individual tactical infrastructure sections were proposed based on the situational and operational requirements of the USBP Rio Grande Valley Sector. Although some of the fence sections would be contiguous, each fence section would represent an individual project and could proceed independent of the other sections.
(DHS et al. 2007, 1)
Interestingly, the Proposed Action also assumed that the 21 sections would be of different lengths, ranging from 1 to 13 miles (DHS et al. 2007, cover sheet). The fragmented nature of the RGV wall can be grasped quickly from various maps in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement where the 21 segments are marked clearly by bright yellow squiggly lines (DHS et al. 2007).
Right from the start, quite formally, at the national level, the RGV border wall was planned to be made up of 21 discrete parts. It was never designed to be a continuous wall. The Draft Environmental Impact Statement is a remarkable document; it is 337 pages long and is filled with extensive maps and documentation. The little yellow squiggly lines in figures 4 and 5 document the plan to build a wall composed of differently sized and spaced wall segments.
Figure 4. General location of the Proposed Action, Rio Grande Valley Sector, Texas. Source: DHS et al. 2007, 1-2.
Figure 5. Locations of the proposed wall sections in the Rio Grande Valley Sector tactical infrastructure. Source: DHS et al. 2007, 2-4.
Wall fragmentation was further underscored the following year by two additional factors: passage of the Hutchison Amendment in the US Senate on July 26, 2007, and the interagency “fence alignment” undertaken in the RGV that same summer. Seven months after the Secure Fence Act was signed into law, and before the RGV Proposed Action was approved, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (Republican of Texas) and Representative Ciro Rodriguez (Democrat from San Antonio, Texas) introduced an amendment to the omnibus DHS appropriations bill H.R. 2638/ S. 1644. The issue for Hutchison and Rodriguez was not the mileage of the border wall itself, but the process by which the wall was to be sited. Many businesspeople, property holders, ranchers, universities, and RGV residents protested the DHS’s proposed location of the border wall.3 Opposition was widespread and vocal. The Hutchison–Rodriguez amendment required DHS to consult with the “Interior Department and Agriculture secretaries, local governments, Indian tribes and property owners,” as well as local Customs and Border Protection chiefs (Gamboa 2007; see also Hutchison 2007). On December 17, 2007, the day after the Hutchison–Rodriguez amendment passed into law, Representative Peter King, a New York Republican representing a South Shore of Long Island congressional district and sponsor of the Secure Fence Act, accused Hutchison of gutting the law by burying the amendment in the 3,500-page DHS omnibus spending bill (Miller and Dinan 2007; see also Dallas Morning News 2011). Establishing a timeline for border politics in the RGV is complex since many of the formal legislative warrants have political force before they are formally enacted. For example, the Hutchison amendment was passed in the Senate on July 26, 2006, but was not enacted into law until December that same year. Between June and December 2006, the pending policy was known by many and thus was influential, even though it had not yet been formally enacted. Passage of legislation often serves as a capstone to ongoing politics rather than a starting point.
Fence Trades
In the summer of 2007, approximately 20 stakeholders met for a four-day alignment meeting to establish the location of the RGV wall. Three days were spent in the field, and a final day of meetings was held indoors to complete the paperwork. On day one, with DHS maps in hand, participants met at the Arroyo Ramirez Wildlife Refuge, west of the town of Roma, Texas, and walked for three days, plotting all 21 sections all the way to Brownsville. Representatives from the Department of Homeland Security, Army Corps of Engineers Corpus Christi office, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as Border Patrol field officers from each station, were there for 12–14 hours a day. The days in the field were long and intense. On the last day, they met at the Harlingen CBP Station to review what they had agreed on. During the meetings, Border Patrol field officers identified “problem areas” where larger numbers of undocumented migrants and goods were known to cross, the assumption being that these were the high priority areas in need of fencing. There was no agreed-upon segment size; rather, the length of fence segments and their final placement were negotiated during these four-day meetings. At one point during the alignment process, participants realized they had forgotten to fence a school in Roma. The oversight provided an opportunity to exchange a mile-long segment of wall from the Arroyo Ramirez Wildlife Refuge to the Roma school. Moving the mile-long section of fence from one location to another allowed DHS and CBP to secure the more populous area around the school while sparing highly valued wildlife corridors from being interrupted by the wall. The Roma–Arroyo Ramirez fence trade can be seen clearly in the 2007 Draft EIS report in Appendix F, map 1 (DHS et al. 2007; Multiple Mobilities interviews 2015, 2016).
One participant captured the dynamics of fence placement in a particularly interesting way: “when we did the alignment, we did not know that we were doing the alignment.” It was not a formal process with steps mapped out and mandated by DHS in advance. There was an ad hoc aspect to the fence placement, but it was neither a casual nor a local matter. At the time, participants understood that the meetings were vital even as the specific process was uncertain. The fence alignment was simultaneously loosely planned and malleable, yet understood as enormously consequential (Multiple Mobilities interviews 2015, 2016).
The funding of the border wall construction opened the door for several stakeholders to lay claim to resources for other regional projects by bundling them with the border initiative. Hidalgo County, for example, had wanted to build a levee near the Old Hidalgo Pump House museum for years; the border wall funding created a new opportunity to secure federal funding by combining the levee and the wall. What is more, they succeeded. Today, the border wall in Hidalgo is perched on top of the large concrete levees; funding has a way of redirecting old projects. Other stakeholders established the mitigation banking system of land protection and conservation as a way of trading habitat for border projects. Finally, some institutions, property owners, and political figures challenged the placement of particular wall segments through the courts. The University of Texas at Browns-ville famously used the courts to force DHS to relocate the proposed fence placement that had been planned to run right through the middle of its campus (Sundberg 2015). However, even before stake-holder pressure, DHS had planned to use multiple and variable fence segments. Alternative fence placements were presented (see table 1). Specifications of routes A and B in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement make clear that the border wall was planned in pieces—variable pieces. Think Lego blocks that can be moved about rather than brick wall (DHS et al. 2007, 2-6).
Importantly, geographer Juanita Sundberg (2015) points out that part and parcel of the negotiation was the adjustment around wealthy landowners and polluted land sites whose remediation would have increased the cost of the wall. No doubt multiple factors went into the negotiation. The main point for my purposes is that we have come a long way from notions of a continuous wall. The DHS, CBP, and USBP’s notions of “tactical infrastructure” made trading wall segments easier than if the wall had been conceived as a more tightly integrated structure. There is a parallel here to air rights in New York City; in both, stakeholders are able to disaggregate and then trade parts of wholes. Border walls and air rights can be shifted about to accommodate the multiple demands placed on these collective resources and infrastructures. The border alignment negotiations brought several, but by no means all, stakeholders to the table to negotiate where specific fence segments ought to go.
Table 1. Proposed Fence Sections under the Proposed Action
Border Calculus: From Walls to Time
The Border Calculus diagram4 in figure 6 documents that fence fragments were part of DHS’s initial plan. More interesting still, the diagram makes manifest links between wall fragments and the policing of time. Gregory Giddens, director of the Secure Border Initiative Program in DHS, presented the diagram at the hearing of the Subcommittee on Management, Integration, and Oversight of the House of Representative’s Committee on Homeland Security on November 15, 2006.
Figure 6. DHS Border Calculus diagram. Source: Secure Border Initiative 2006, 13.
First, note that the image is an imaginative rendering rather than a data visualization. The notion of calculus gives an air of formality to the DHS imaginary. Second, note that the wall fragments are placed in the center of the diagram, represented by the row of Xs placed at the port of entry. Third, note the references to time— “time to border” and “time to vanishing point.” Indeed, the loopy dotted “vanishing point” line on the top half of the diagram is a visualization of time. The closer the dotted line to the border, the more quickly “illegal aliens” can disappear, hence construction of the fence to manage time. A California border patrol agent made a point of explicitly saying, “The wall was not to stop crossing, but to slow them down, thereby giving us time to apprehend them” (interview with CBP agents, 2013). Within the DHS logic, wall fragments extend time.
Giddens’s congressional statement captures the importance of time in the Secure Border Initiative: “We recognize that in order to secure the border, we cannot just focus on the line; we have to think about what is happening beyond the border as well as at the border and in the interior” (Secure Border Initiative 2006, 4–5). But Giddens does not stop there. He moves quickly from networks to time. His statement is worth quoting at some length:
My last chart, while it looks very complicated, it is not. It basically uses a time dimension to look at the border. And what it is trying to indicate with the top line that is indicating the vanishing point is trying to lay out a very simple algorithm that our ability to respond to a border incursion needs to be much less than the time it takes an illegal alien to get to a vanishing point. . . .
The middle of the chart has borders, barriers, and fences along the port of entry. If you think about a border town such as Nogales, the time that someone would get to that vanishing point is very short, so you would want to use technical infrastructure to slow them down and allow us to have more response time. This basic border calculus chart and its governing algorithm . . . is what is going to guide us in a very systematic, disciplined manner to lay out the solution in each part of the border by understanding that it will change as we go forward. As we go forward in secure areas, the coyotes and the smugglers are going to react to that, and they are going to use different routes and different parts, and we need to be able to be less bureaucratic and more nimble in our approach so we can be more responsive to that so we can try to predict some of that, so we can be ready.
(6)
DHS has been thinking in terms of time for almost 20 years. For Giddens, border walls are one element within a larger strategic plan to get operational control of the border. Echoing the work of recent border scholars, DHS sees fence fragments as part and parcel of a larger border protection project in which border security and time are intimately connected (Secure Border Initiative 2006, 5; see also Hattam 2022; McNevin 2020; Mountz 2011; Ochoa Espejo 2020; Weizman 2007).
Attending to time also brings other border policies into view. The Trusted Traveler Programs—Global Entry, NEXUS, SENTRI, and FAST—all establish special visa categories that can be used to speed border crossing for some. “Laser visas” programs, first introduced in 2002, are used to facilitate cross-border shopping for Mexican nationals in the United States (US DOJ 2002; US CBP n.d.). To be sure, one must apply for the special visa programs, but if approved, mobility privileges follow. Two thousand managers per day cross from the town of McAllen, Texas, to maquiladoras (manufacturing assembly plants) in Reynosa, Mexico (interview with Olaguibel, 2017). With the right papers, one can move. Perhaps even more important than the various trusted visa programs is the proliferation of expediting zones and freight forwarding services. In Laredo, like many other border towns, industrial parks and free trade zones are located in close proximity to the ports of entry—facilitation and regulation sit side by side. Attending to these adjacencies underscores the importance of mobility and immobility as two sides of bordering. Expediting zones and ports of entry are where contradictory multiple mobilities are navigated (interviews with Garcia, 2016, 2017; interview with Patridge, 2018; Easterling 2014; Hattam 2022).
The rather bleak industrial spaces shown in figures 7 and 8 are also integral parts of cross-border movement, even though at first it might seem there is nothing to see here. The expediting companies’ logos contrast dramatically with the typical border images. Walls are replaced with arrows and swishes encircling the globe. If maps are part of the representation, it is to visualize regional connections; nation-state boundaries rarely are shown. Facilitation and regulation are pursued simultaneously. We need to keep an eye on both time and space, as both are central to border crossing. Walls alone should not take up all the analytic oxygen.
Figure 7. Fama Forwarding Inc., Modern Lane, Laredo, Texas. Photograph by author, March 2016.
Aesthetics and Politics
Bordering in the United States is not a one-size-fits-all proposition: differential treatment is the name of the game. Unequal mobility privileges have been established via two interrelated dynamics. On the one hand, the act of separating different kinds of movement into distinct policy domains blinds us to certain comparisons. The separation of trade and migration is key. We do not have a department of mobilities, with a cabinet post and building in Washington. Instead, trade and migration are continually presented as if they were quite different entities. US institutions and policies highlight their differences rather than their commonalities. Doing so allows differential treatment across migration and trade to fly under the radar. Siloing obscures comparison, thereby allowing inequalities to coexist more easily.
Figure 8. Lopezadri, Modern Lane, Laredo, Texas. Photograph by author, March 2016.
Bureaucratic structures not only separate, but also bundle, yoking together disparate elements into different classificatory schemes. Consider US Customs and Border Protection; its bureaucratic initials— CBP—suggest a unified bureaucratic structure, but the bureaucratic nomenclature misleads. Despite being identified as a single entity, Customs and Border Protection are two quite distinct administrative tasks being housed within the one agency. The complex interplay of unity and difference became readily apparent upon visiting the World Trade International Bridge at the Laredo Port of Entry (interview with Limon, 2017). Administrative offices for Customs and for Border Protection are located in different buildings, each with its own parking lot; the two sets of employees even wear differently colored uniforms: blue for Customs, and brown for Border Protection. I was surprised to learn there are different bridge directors at the International Bridge. Attending carefully to the look of things—the uniforms, buildings, and bureaucratic titles—brings the arbitrary siloing of movement into distinct policy channels.
How, then, might we begin to de-silo bordering and trade? Let me conclude where I entered—with images. Photographs are a generative site for politics. Two different but complementary aspects of visuality might help shift the presumptive political terrain. First, beware the spectacular image. Mobility often is reduced to a series of inflammatory images of people on the move. Whether people move by land or sea, the images often reinscribe old narratives of invasion and otherness. Walls are an especially powerful trope and need to be consumed with considerable skepticism. The particular way border images are framed often deceives, creating a sense of completeness while obscuring the gaps and fissures. The false sense of coherence often distorts assumptions about how power and authority work (Asoulay 2010). The wall fragments presented in figures 1, 2, and 3 unsettle easy assumptions about sovereignty, territory, and political authority. The very idea of border security begins to wobble: How is power operating here? The images ask that key spatial presumptions of border policing be revisited.
Second, I want to suggest that we consider how to visualize time. The Border Calculus diagram is powerful precisely because it takes on this task. Moving images, rather than stills, might have greater capacity for visualizing time, but given the prevalence and ease with which photographs circulate, it is worth considering how we might reframe time photographically. How might movement of people be recontextualized visually within a broader set of multiple mobilities? Perhaps a curatorial project collecting images used by both expediting companies and wildlife organizations would help generate a more expansive visual vocabulary for reimagining human mobility. And this is to say nothing of the creative arts. Politics is an imaginative undertaking, and images are a generative medium for that work.
Notes
1. Interestingly, neither the Secure Fence Act nor the president’s signing statement specified construction of 700 miles of fence even though that is what the act is known for. In fact, the act specified particular mile counts around certain cities and towns. The press quickly aggregated the separate sections into a 700-mile count (see Fletcher and Weisman 2006; Stout 2006).
2. The US-Mexico boundary is made up of 675 miles of land boundary, 24 miles of Colorado River boundary, and 1,255 miles of boundary in the Rio Grande River. See the International Boundary and Water Commission, a binational agency, at https://ibwc.gov.
3. On June 8, 2007, Raul Salinas, the mayor of Laredo, Texas, refused the wall (NPR 2007).
4. Scott Nicol from the Sierra Club Borderlands Project generously alerted me to the Border Calculus diagram and Kay Hutchison’s amendment discussed earlier.
This essay was first published in Social Research: An International Quarterly, a John Hopkins University Press publication, in its Winter 2024 edition. Reprinted with permission.
