The following essay is adapted from Ian Volner’s The Great Great Wall: Along the Borders of History from China to Mexico, published by Harry N. Abrams in June.
In October 2017, in a patch of desert down the road from California’s Otay Mesa border crossing, I got my first glimpse of the border wall prototypes: eight towering monoliths, all of them 30 feet by 30 feet and varying only in tone and the occasional detail. Standing just in front of the Vietnam Era metal slats of the existing fencing, just a few yards away from the secondary fencing of the Bush era, the nearly identical structures did not resemble security systems of any kind, not individually and definitely not in the aggregate, ranging across the site in a regimented row with the mountains to the east and nothing behind them. All the artistic and architectural adventurers, the ones who had variously lampooned or reimagined the wall, could not have foreseen this—the most powerful nation on Earth had created something that looked alarmingly like an architecture show.
“This odd open-air architecture gallery,” as then–Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Hawthorne called it, had an undeniable sway, a cumulative effect of looking at the slabs in ensemble over an extended period. What had begun vaguely as Executive Order 13767, commanding Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to pursue the “immediate construction of a physical wall,” had produced this, a trial run. The designers of the individual protoypes were almost entirely construction companies, including Caddell, W.G. Yates & Sons, Texas Sterling, and KWR.
All the artistic and architectural adventurers, the ones who had variously lampooned or reimagined the wall, could not have foreseen this—the most powerful nation on Earth had created something that looked alarmingly like an architecture show.
The chilling sublimity of the site was undeniable—and discomfiting. Mirroring the debate about anti-wall resistance art, there emerged in the wake of the prototypes’ unveiling a new round of arguments about whether critiquing them risked validating them. “Is it inspired or irresponsible to call Donald Trump’s wall prototypes ‘art’?” That was the headline of a Los Angeles Times article written by the critic Carolina Miranda, who quoted local architect René Peralta: “It would be irresponsible, easy and lazy to consider it as an aesthetic object.” No one had lavished this much attention on the fences that had been built in the mid-2000s; why the sudden interest now? To grant so much exposure to the prototypes—which were never likely to lead to a real wall—was to carry the administration’s water, perpetuating the illusion of progress by raising their visibility.
Ranking the Prototypes, Aesthetically
Theoretically, of course, CBP intended the prototypes to be more than just prototypes. Over the next several months, they were subjected to a series of tests: Special Forces teams mounted assaults on the walls, assailed them with jackhammers and saws, attempted to climb them; analyses were made of the ease of construction and repair and of the soundness of the engineering. All of this was documented in a report, completed in February 2018, that San Diego’s KPBS public radio and television station eventually obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. Highly redacted, it left unclear the particulars of the testing process, though it did reveal that CBP had devoted inordinate energies to assessing one particular aspect: aesthetics.
A special team from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory was commissioned to help devise a series of criteria that could determine which of the prototypes demonstrated the greatest visual élan. The report laid out the aspects under consideration:
Color—hue, intensity, brightness, depth
Texture—look/feel of the physical surface, smoothness, roughness, shape, configuration
Pattern—large visual shape, arrangements, decorations
Wall top style—appearance of top of the wall, top in relation to rest of wall [ … ]
Apparent difficulty to breach/scale—difficulty to get past the wall, impenetrability
Provision of situation awareness—ability to understand activity near, around, by the wall
The method used to assign scores in these criteria, CBP explained, was the “analysis of input from 72 participants on the aesthetics of each prototype”—interviews and surveys conducted with individuals in various fields. Many of these individuals did not see the prototypes themselves; rather, they were shown photographs and asked their impressions. While the authors concluded with a ranking of the aesthetic value of each design, which one was deemed most effective was among the blacked-out segments of the report.
As the document put it, “The effective use of aesthetic choices can make a design resonate with a target audience.” Truer words were never spoken (at least regarding the wall). It was only unfortunate that the individuals who rendered aesthetic judgment on the prototypes were not obliged to see them in all their unnerving grandeur—though they were not the only ones who had stayed away.
Despite his repeated claims that he would be personally involved in the selection process, the president of the United States did not undertake to see his “beautiful” prototypes until four months after I did. The visit, scheduled for the afternoon of March 13, 2018, should have been the ultimate photo op for the publicity-obsessed politician: If nothing else were ever to be built, the prototype tour represented a once-in-a-presidency chance to boast about something real, something tangible that emerged from all the administration’s faltering efforts. But it was not to be.
Symptomatic of this White House’s uniquely clumsy messaging strategy, the tour was effectively upstaged when, mere hours before it was set to begin, word reached media outlets that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had submitted his resignation. His departure consumed the public conversation that day and for much of the week. So far as public awareness was concerned, the prototypes slipped beneath the waves.
According to the GAO, CBP did not factor in the costs of building on sloping terrain when assessing the prototypes; the two proposed initial locations for the wall had been chosen without any prior study, almost entirely at random; and no documentation existed as to what and how exactly the agency intended to proceed with any future construction in the San Diego area.
That August, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report under the heading “Southwest Border Security: CBP Is Evaluating Designs and Locations for Border Barriers but Is Proceeding Without Key Information.” While the title says it all, some of the study’s more enlightening passages—the product of extensive interviews with Department of Homeland Security staff and review of agency records—were hidden in the dense document: that, according to the GAO, CBP did not factor in the costs of building on sloping terrain when assessing the prototypes; that the two proposed initial locations for the wall had been chosen without any prior study, almost entirely at random; that no documentation existed as to what and how exactly the agency intended to proceed with any future construction in the San Diego area.
Returning to the Site
I came back to Otay Mesa for the second time almost exactly a year after my first visit. It was October again, and by some conspiracy of the weather it had clouded over once more, giving the place the same subdued menace it had had the last time. The building site, now devoid of any press, felt doubly forsaken, while the prototypes appeared the worse for wear, the testing process and the elements having taken their toll. The monoliths were stained in places, bleached in others, their façades pockmarked. And there was one additional difference, more outstanding than the rest.
“It just happened a couple weeks back,” said Agent Vincent Pirro, the CBP officer detailed as my escort. The Vietnam War surplus fence that had stood on the Tijuana border since the Clinton years had been replaced, just prior to my arrival, by a new line of beveled steel pikes topped by solid horizontal panels—some of the 124 miles of new and improved fencing approved by Congress, the closest thing to a wall the administration had yet managed to finagle. Ostensibly they marked an improvement over the earlier model, taller by far and not so weather-beaten, while their transparency made them, if not quite inoffensive, at least less obtrusive. The openwork structure had produced one other effect: The stray dogs that I had previously spotted roaming the dusty road on the southern side were now able to slip through the verticals, and several of them frisked at the feet of the prototypes. “They would get through before, too,” said Agent Pirro. “Just dig under.”
“Is it inspired or irresponsible to call Donald Trump’s wall prototypes ‘art’?”
They weren’t the only ones. Driving westward, following the track that runs between the primary fence (now the pikes) and the secondary barrier (the loftier chain-link model, born of the 2006 Bush-era law), Pirro pointed out a set of warehouses on the Mexican side directly adjacent to the Tijuana airport. He then traced his finger across a distance of a thousand feet to the American side: This was the length of just one of the tunnels that had run under the area and served the illicit drug trade. Since 2017, 12 such subterranean passages have been discovered in the sector, many as long as or longer than the airport tunnel; the primary fence, though improved, would still be of only limited utility against them. Continuing along the track, Pirro pointed to patch after patch on the secondary fencing where smugglers, of both human and material contraband, have vaulted the primary fence and cut through the chain link of the secondary. “They can do it in seconds,” said Pirro; the perpetrators are so deft, and so brazen, that they can be spotted by CBP yet still slip away uncaught. The freshly installed slats might slow them a bit, but not much—in the little time they had been there, a few had already been damaged, and subsequent testing would prove they could be sawed through with common instruments.
Throwing the Prototypes Under the Bus
The wall had fallen before it was even built. Less than a month later, Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Nancy Pelosi—set to become Speaker of the House again in the upcoming session—were summoned to the Oval Office. In front of the gathered press—despite Schumer’s suggestion that they “debate in private”—their host insisted, as he had for months, on at least $5 billion in additional border-security funding, most of it for additional infrastructure, and proudly proclaimed his willingness to shut down the government. It availed him nothing; nor did the shutdown that followed, even when it became the longest in American history; nor did the purported concession, during the first Oval Office address of the administration, that the White House would be happy to accept a steel rather than a concrete structure, “at the request of Democrats.” Given that no such request had been made, this last bout of lexical gamesmanship seemed especially pointless: At a single stroke, it simultaneously disregarded the proven failings of the newer steel fences, while officially throwing the much-ballyhooed prototypes under the bus.
On Jan. 25, 2019, the two-year anniversary of the executive order commanding the “immediate construction” of the wall, the second shutdown ended with no additional wall funding. With that, the federal purse strings were drawn closed for the duration of the 116th Congress. Minor improvements to current fencing there might be, and potentially a few dozen miles of new fences as well, but nothing on the order of what had been promised, or even what had been built under the previous administration. While declaring an emergency to fund the wall remained a presidential prerogative, the long delay in making such a move, as well as the uncharacteristic sheepishness with which it was finally debuted in February, was a good augur of its likely course: stymied in courts, whittled away by future congressional action, thwarted by landowners and protesters and bureaucratic mismanagement.
Not to say that that, or anything else, will alter the determination of Donald Trump to build it. The economic and cultural divide that had brought him to power, and the existential angst that accompanied it, are still present, and his reelection will hang on his ability to fill his sails once again with those same winds. If he fails, his prototypes will stand as a monument to that failure, so much sound and fury signifying nothing; if he succeeds, they may yet portend a new political order for the U.S., a future cast forever into shadow by huge slabs of concrete.