Juliette Silvers: Life Divided
Over the dusty gravel of the Sonoran Desert moves a tortoise leg, scaled and wide. Then another leg. Then a third. Then a fourth. Then stop. The way is blocked. Something hard and hot. So the tortoise turns. It keeps moving forward, the corner of its shell grazing one rusty slat after another. If it never gives up, the tortoise will patiently plod along until it is too hot, too tired, too shriveled, and it will die.
The border wall stretches miles to the east, miles to the west. It runs along highways, along rivers and canals, through parks and wildlife preserves. It runs through towns, including one called Nogales.
It is raining in Nogales. It hardly ever rains in November, but drops are falling. They seem to pause, suspended against the gray sky, and then rush past the brown slats of the wall and clinging wheels of razored wire. The rain hits the road, slicking the concrete. A black coat is tangled in the metal overhead. Above the train tracks, someone’s shredded underwear hangs limply from the barbs. A trio of black birds dip and glide out of Mexico, into America.
Colorful, rundown storefronts are tucked into the streets beside the wall. There is a taqueria, menus taped to the front windows. The store on the corner has wedding dresses on sale for $25. There is also “Nogales Tactical,” where each laminated window holds a photograph of a man with a military-style weapon, aiming at passersby. 200 feet away, at the border crossing, a propped-up sandwich board tells south bound cars “No Guns in Mexico.”
People shop, they work, they drive home. There is a hulking divide, repelling one half of their lives from the other, but they can go through. As a line of cars inches past loitering border agents, a woman in pink fleece pants eats her afternoon snack, a man rolls down the window, spits something out, and rolls the glass back up. Their days are punctuated by the hateful, fearsome barrier, but life goes on. They are like the birds. They have paper wings. Others are not so lucky.
“In the first five months of [2024],” the Council of Foreign Relations reports, “[border] agents encountered more than nine hundred thousand migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The majority hailed from just six countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, and Colombia.” People are leaving these homes because of violence, poverty, climate change. They are coming to the U.S. because things might be better here—there are jobs, although often hard ones, and, in some ways, there is safety. Getting in, however, is far from safe.
The wall cutting through Nogales is solid. It’s twenty feet tall. Cameras scrutinize it from every nearby rooftop—that is, on the U.S. side. There are green-clad border agents and white patrol cars. 100 years ago, the border was 6 wires, strung between fence posts. 200 years ago, Nogales did not exist.
The wall doesn’t push migrants away. It forces them out into the desert, up into the mountains, down into rivers—to places where the wall stops and they can get through. Places that are scorching and dry, freezing cold, treacherous. The U.S. Border Patrol makes it worse. Where the wall ends, they do not. They chase migrants, trying to detain them—with dogs, cars, ATV’s, helicopters. In the dark, on jagged cliffs, towards fences, towards water. Border Patrol does this, and people get lost, get hurt, die.
Mike Wilson is a human rights activist. For 12 years, he left water in the desert for migrants crossing the Tohono O’odham reservation, along the Mexican border. When he started, he told us, there were “a lot of undocumented migrants coming across through the reservation lands, and they were dying, and they are dying now.”
Every year, the aid organization Humane Borders releases a map of Arizona, peppered with red dots. Each dot is a body. Someone who died on their journey across the border into the United States. There are so many of them. “It's like the map is hemorrhaging,” says Mike.
For decades, the U.S. government has stacked fear and hatred on the southern border. And now, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there are 654 miles of barrier. The wall blocks off rivers, extends through dynamited pieces of mountain, and is flanked by barren strips of “enforcement zone.” Because of a law passed in 2005, the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Antiquities Act, and Native American Graves Protection Act, among others, can all be violated by the wall. It pries life apart where it has always been fluid, together, and connected.
For 5 years, the Sky Island Alliance has recorded wildlife along the Arizona-Mexico border. They have seen in 100,000 photos that border fences are navigable, but the steel bollard slats of the wall leave room for only smaller creatures to crawl through. Desert tortoises, black bears, pronghorn antelope, and many others are left with their habitat sliced in half. They lose space, food, and water. Cut off from neighbor populations, they lose the strength of genetic diversity, too. And as the climate warms, creatures may be unable to flee north.
Francesca Claverie, from the Borderlands Restoration Network, explains that “from human migration to animal migration … All of this for 1000s and 1000s of years, has been migration corridors. So whenever you start messing with that, things kind of go awry.”
Back in Nogales, a little gray cat pads along the curb. It can wind between the wall’s towering rusty bars and around the legs of people in the street. Music plays across an empty parking lot, from a stereo in Mexico. Plants unfurl between the houses on the hill. Life is beautiful, resilient, and connected. It is waiting, reaching. As long as the concrete and metal stand though, it will reach in vain.
Additional Sources:
https://www.cfr.org/article/why-six-countries-account-most-migrants-us-mexico-border
https://www.wildlandsnetwork.org/news/the-border-walls-cascading-impacts-on-wildlife
https://www.britannica.com/place/Nogales-Arizona
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/raging-controversy-border-began-100-years-ago-180969343/
https://humaneborders.info/app/map.asp
http://www.thedisappearedreport.org/
https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/border-wall/border-wall-system-frequently-asked-questions
https://earthjournalism.net/stories/how-the-us-mexico-border-wall-harms-wildlife
https://skyislandalliance.org/our-work/science/borderwildlife/
https://www.audubon.org/magazine/winter-2020/the-border-wall-has-been-absolutely-devastating