Trump border-wall project begins on beach

The morning after Trump signed the executive order to build a wall (January 25), a couple of workers in a white van installed a 60-yard section section of chain-link fence on the existing barrier that divides Playas de Tijuana and Imperial Beach. The fencing is about a yard shorter than the pile-driven rails that make the long-existing barrier and would seem to make the wall easier to climb.

This part of the border wall is different than the rest. Gaps on the barrier are large enough for children or small people to go through. The new fencing was seemingly placed to prevent this.

A video of a little kid crossing through a gap and staking a red and black flag was uploaded by UnoTV on March 24, 2016. A skinny female friend of mine who was visiting Tijuana from Mexico City was able to go through the barrier last summer. She took a couple of steps on the U.S. side of the beach and then rushed back into Mexico when Border Patrol started heading her way.

If crossers can’t fit through the barrier gaps, they opt to swim across. On December 19, 2016, a chubby man swam around the wall and was captured by Border Patrol shortly thereafter.

A surfer who I know as Victor once told me that he and his friends sometimes go out to the open waters with their surfboards before dawn and head north. They surf in Imperial Beach and swim back to the U.S. coast afterward. He claims to have been doing this for more than five years a couple of times a year.

Big ocean swells damaged some of the new fencing the day after it was installed. It won’t be long until the whole fence is rusted.