As President Donald Trump announced his plans for a wall on the United States border with Mexico, Border Patrol agents in San Diego on the lookout for drugs and smugglers drove all-terrain vehicles along a barrier that reaches 18 feet, topped by razor wire and reinforced by cameras and lighting.
A summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Mexican counterpart Enrique Pena Nieto next week is still on “for now", Mexico's foreign minister said on Wednesday, despite pressure at home to scrap it over objections to a border wall.
Earlier in the day Mr. Trump signed new executive orders, including one authorizing a wall on the U.S. southern border, just as a Mexican delegation led by Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray arrived at the White House for talks.
Mexico outrage
The timing caused outrage in Mexico, with prominent politicians and many on social media seeing at as a deliberate snub to the government's efforts to engage with Trump, who has for months used Mexico as a political punching bag.
“The meeting between the two Presidents in Washington next Tuesday is still confirmed,” Mr. Videgaray said. “The meeting, for now, is going forward,” he said.
President Enrique Pena Nieto said in a recorded message that he “disapproves” of Mr. Trump's order on the border wall and in response ordered Mexico's fifty U.S. consuls to extend legal help to citizens living in the United States.
“Wherever there is a Mexican migrant who needs our help, we should be there,” he said.
One source with knowledge of the government's thinking said the measure was intended to clog U.S. immigration courts with legal objections to deportations. The courts already face a backlog of half a million cases.
“Positive elements"
Mr. Videgaray said some “positive elements” resulted from the talks, including a blunt acknowledgment by Mr. Trump of the U.S. role in supplying illegal arms to Mexico. He also referred to Mr. Trump's public comments that he wanted to see a strong Mexican economy.
Mr. Videgaray said it had been “a day of contrasts,” adding that his delegation's talks with senior White House aides lasted eight hours.
Speaking as Mr. Trump gave orders to start work on the wall along the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border with Mexico, two-time presidential runner-up and leftist opposition leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the announcement was an insult to his country and called for international legal action.
“I respectfully suggest that the government of Mexico present a lawsuit at the United Nations against the U.S. government for violation of human rights and racial discrimination,” Mr. Obrador told a crowd of supporters north of Mexico City.
A former mayor of the capital, Mr. Obrador has led several early opinion polls ahead of the July 2018 election, and last week he announced plans for a tour of major U.S. cities in February to drum up support among Mexican-Americans.
Trump's broadsides
Mr. Trump's broadsides against Mexico have put Mr. Nieto under rising domestic pressure. His approval ratings are at the lowest level of any Mexican President in years.
The American's threats to tear up a joint trade deal and impose hefty border taxes on Mexican goods have also battered the peso. But his comments on Wednesday that he wanted to see a strong Mexican economy lifted the currency to a three-week high.
Mexicans shopped at an outlet mall that bumps up against the border. And dozens of migrants huddled in tents outside a shelter in Mexico hoping to get into the U.S. someday.
Concern to migrants
To them, Mr. Trump's executive order on Wednesday to build a wall seemed more like a symbolic and worrisome gesture of a new chapter in U.S.-Mexico relations than a real deterrent for people to enter the country illegally.
“Even if they build the wall, I will climb the wall. I bring a ladder the size of the wall, even from sticks or whatever, but I’ll make it, and I’ll jump over there,” said Josş de Jesus Ramţrez, a recently deported Mexican migrant whose wife and children are in the U.S.
Mr. Ramirez’s response echoed the mood along the border that was a combination of resentment, defiance and business as usual. A crew of laborers was actually building a fence on the border as Mr. Trump made his announcement. On a cold morning in the desert, the workers installed concrete blocks on which the 22-foot steel fence will stand between the town of Sunland Park, New Mexico, and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. The project has been under way for several months.
Friendship etched in stone
In Tijuana, a high school student went to a stone monument dedicated by both countries in 1848 as a sign of the friendship between the U.S. and Mexico. The monument once stood on the border but now is in Mexico, a few feet away from a giant wall of towering steel bars that lead into the Pacific Ocean.
The student, 17-year-old Brandon Dzul, said talk of another wall stirred up painful memories of his 34-year-old uncle who died in the desert six years ago after being abandoned by smugglers.
“He just had the American dream, you know, to make a better life,” he said. “I think now we aren’t going to be able to get in even with a visa.”
Nearby, about 150 people gathered in tents outside a 40-bed migrant shelter that has been overwhelmed since May, when large numbers of Haitians began stopping in the Mexican border city on their way to the United States. Many moved to Brazil after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake and went north after jobs dried up in the South American country.
Migrant shelters packed
U.S. authorities lack resources to process Haitians quickly enough, leading Mexican authorities to create a ticketing system that leaves them waiting in Tijuana for weeks. Migrant shelters are full, forcing many to sleep on the streets.
Fences and other barriers already blanket about 700 miles of border, much of it in California and Arizona. In San Diego, they helped to virtually shut down what was the busiest corridor for illegal crossings in the 1990s. It’s now one of the most fortified stretches of landscape on the 2,000-mile divide between the two countries.
Border Patrol sector chiefs were asked in November to identify areas where the fence could be expanded, though Mr. Trump and his advisers have yet to detail their next steps. Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council and a member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, supports building a wall in strategic locations and reinforcing existing barriers in certain areas but not where there are natural obstacles, like the Rio Grande river in Texas.
“We do not need a Great Wall of China from California to Texas,” Mr. Judd said in an interview last week.
Back home, Trump gets support
Away from the border, Mr. Trump drew support from his base. Tammy Allen, a 52-year-old supporter from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, applauded the President’s interest in curbing the number of refugees coming to the U.S. and building a wall.
“A lot of countries do. Why not us? Something has got to be done,” she said.
