“It’s a waste of money, period,” said Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio, whose jurisdiction sits opposite Matamoros, one of the most dangerous corners of Mexico. “It’s not going to work. I don’t care what [Trump] is saying.”
The Rio Grande Valley is one of the busiest smuggling hubs on the Mexican border. Border Patrol agents in the area seized 516,664 pounds of marijuana in 2015, second only to the agency’s Tucson sector, and 1,809 pounds of cocaine, the most of any sector in the continental U.S. Altogether last year, the Border Patrol seized more than 1.5 million pounds of weed, 11,220 pounds of cocaine, 8,282 ounces of heroin, and 6,443 pounds of meth. Still, those totals are likely just a fraction of the illicit drugs entering the U.S.
Taylor says she’s witnessed smugglers throwing bags of “dope” over the fence to people waiting on the other side, who pick up the bundles and drive off. She claims she once found a duffel bag with 40 kilos of marijuana stashed in the bougainvillea flowers in her front yard, and she started leaving out coolers filled with water and soft drinks to discourage thirsty migrants from breaking into her house. She also keeps a shotgun, a bulletproof vest, and a Border Patrol hat hanging outside her bathroom as a deterrent.
The wall is easily surmountable. South of McAllen, Texas, along the border with the Mexican city of Reynosa, Scott Nicol, an opponent of the border wall and the co-chair of the Sierra Club’s Borderlands Team, points to a section of wall where he routinely finds makeshift ladders that have been piled up on the U.S. side by the Border Patrol.
“I think there’s some guy with a shop near the river and he just bangs out ladders all day long,” Nicol said. “The Border Patrol piles ’em up, the county hauls ’em off to the dump. It’s been the cycle of the wall for years.”
Cabrera, the Border Patrol agent, says he’s seen smugglers easily scale the wall even without the help of a ladder. In January, a Mexican TV network filmed two men with large vacuum-sealed packages strapped to their backs scaling the wall. When the men realized they were being filmed by a news crew, they fled back across the border. It took them about 43 seconds to shimmy up and over.
“That’s like ‘American Ninja Warrior ‘ — I mean that’s some crazy stuff,” Cabrera said. “They get up over that wall in a hurry.”
Beyond old-fashioned technology like ladders, smugglers have been caught using a drone, a catapult, and a homemade cannon to launch drugs over the wall. Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is infamous for tunneling beneath the wall, and the DEA reports that federal authorities have detected more than 75 cross-border smuggling tunnels in the last five years, mostly in California and Arizona.
But even the most imposing wall would do nothing to stop the vast majority of drugs from entering the U.S. According to the DEA’s 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment, Mexican cartels send “the bulk” of their drug shipments over the border through legitimate points of entry, hidden in vehicles or disguised as commercial freight. Tens of thousands of trucks and $1 billion in trade come across the U.S.-Mexico border daily, and there’s no way to thoroughly inspect every vehicle.
For people like Taylor, the woman who is stuck south of the wall in Texas, the frustration over the GOP’s fixation on the border fence is palpable. “To throw more money at it when we need it for education and so many other things, it would be ridiculous,” she said.
Taylor is no fan of Hillary Clinton and she doesn’t support allowing undocumented immigrants into the country, but she’s certain that a wall isn’t the solution to smuggling.
“Trump is talking about building a bigger wall,” Taylor said. “Then we’re going to have bigger ladders.”
The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
