For some, Donald Trump's dark border dreams are already a reality

Carlos Rodriguez was 17 when he first entered the US. In those days, at the spot close to the city of Tecate where he chose to cross, the border was marked by a simple chain-link fence. “It was 2ft high,” says Rodriguez, now 64. “I just stepped across and hitch-hiked to town.”

Today, Rodriguez waits in the shade outside Tucson’s Southside Presbyterian Church, hoping to be hired as a day-labourer. Over the decades, he has acquired a wife, a son and a green card that allows him to live and work in America indefinitely. Meanwhile, the border has become a militarised zone, fenced and patrolled around the clock by guards and drones.

The other men waiting with him in the sweltering afternoon are significantly younger than Rodriguez. The majority are undocumented, he says, and many of them trekked through the remote desert for days to dodge the Border Patrol on their way to America. They escaped death and deportation, which makes them the lucky ones.

“It’s much harder to cross the border now – but for some people it’s even harder to be in Mexico or El Salvador or Honduras,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what the border looks like, whether there’s a wall or not. People will find a way to cross.”

Before his presidential campaign dissolved into a pungent stew of bigotry and paranoia, Donald Trump entered the electoral arena with a simple, implausible promise: he would build a “big, beautiful” wall on America’s 2,000-mile southern border, and Mexico would pay for it.

The wall was seen by many not as a practical policy proposal, but as a symbol of Trump’s particular brand of chest-beating nationalism. Here’s the irony: if and when the property developer loses the election in November, the “wall” will exist anyway – because it already exists, and has done for more than 20 years. It’s not beautiful, but it sure is big.

As of now, around 700 miles of the US-Mexican frontier is fenced. The barrier cuts through the landscape south of major border cities such as San Diego, El Paso and Nogales, 70 miles south of Tucson, where a 20ft-high slatted steel fence is augmented by surveillance towers and by the Border Patrol SUVs that roam back and forth.

Since 1992, the US Border Patrol has proliferated, from around 4,000 agents to more than 21,000, part of an expansion that burgeoned under Bill Clinton and ballooned under George W Bush. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is the biggest federal law enforcement agency in the US, with a budget greater than every other agency combined.

The “prevention through deterrence” approach to border control was introduced by the Clinton administration, which erected the first stretches of the fence as a facet of the War on Drugs. Its intent was to build up border protections and surveillance at traditional urban crossing points, thus funnelling illicit border-crossers into more remote areas such as southern Arizona’s Sonora Desert, where at points the border is blocked by little more than a barbed-wire fence strung between concrete posts.

“The official logic was that the desert would act as a natural barrier, because it’s so dangerous and isolated,” says Todd Miller, author of the book Border Patrol Nation. “It can take days to walk through, so they believed only people who were out of their minds would attempt it. And then, from about 1995 to 2006, you had record-breaking immigration from Mexico.”

Since the turn of the century, some 2,000 people have died trying to make the crossing from Mexico to Arizona in the harsh desert conditions. The number of deaths for every border crosser apprehended alive by the authorities in the border’s Tucson Sector has increased five-fold over the past decade, according to the Arizona Daily Star.

“People come to the US for work, to reunite with their families, to escape violence,” says Robin Reineke, executive director of the Colibri Centre for Human Rights, a Tucson-based non-profit organisation devoted to identifying missing and deceased migrants. “They’ll try to make it across, whatever obstacles are in the way, because they’re already in a life-or-death situation.”

Building the wall of Trump’s imagination would not prevent migration, only make it more perilous. The drug cartels that already control much of the human traffic moving north through Mexico to the US have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to outflank American walls, smuggling drugs through tunnels, on boats or using unmanned drones.

A wall is only as effective as the people enforcing it, and corruptible Border Patrol agents have been caught abetting the smuggling of drugs and people. A 2015 report by the Department of Homeland Security found that corruption arrests among CBP personnel “far exceed, on a per-capita basis, such arrests at other federal law-enforcement agencies.”

This month, around 2,000 activists descended on Nogales to protest against the militarisation of the border, tying crosses to the fence and chanting “Walls cost lives”. Humanitarian groups have tried to reduce the number of migrant deaths by setting up desert camps to offer medical assistance and leaving caches of drinking water on well-trodden migrant trails.

In the past, those water stashes have often been slashed by anti-immigrant vandals, but last summer, the vandalism “took a really disturbing twist,” according to Maryada Vallet, a volunteer with the group No More Deaths. “Normally we will write messages on the water bottles in Spanish saying, ‘Pure water’, ‘God bless you’ and so on. But the vandals drew things like a skull and crossbones or horrible, racist messages,” she says.

“They put some kind of colouring in the water to make it look untrustworthy. That vigilantism is legitimised by an increasing climate of racism and xenophobia towards immigrants. And the things Trump has said during the campaign have fuelled that climate.”

For Reineke, the debate around the border wall is a distraction from the broader issue of immigration, its causes and its benefits. “The tragedy is that focusing on the wall as a national security issue really prevents a broader policy conversation about real solutions for deaths in the desert, for workers’ rights, for visa reform,” she says.

Much of the existing barrier was built after the passage of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, a Republican Bill that was supported by 27 Democratic Senators, one of whom was Hillary Clinton. The most recent comprehensive immigration reform efforts to be discussed in Congress included yet more stringent border enforcement measures, including thousands of extra CBP agents.

Yet a new poll for the Arizona Republic found that more than half of voters here in the Grand Canyon state opposed the construction of a complete border wall - and 42 per cent of them were "strongly" against the idea.

“Our response to Trump saying ‘more walls’ is to scream: ‘We’ve been there, we’ve done that!’ It’s a waste of money and it’s not the answer,” says Vallet. “But it’s not just about Trump. The policy of deterrence by death was introduced under Bill Clinton. So we’re bracing ourselves for whoever wins the presidential election. Whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, we know that we’ll have a lot of work to do.”