Of all the promises Donald Trump made on his way to the White House, the most concrete and vividly evoked was the “big, beautiful wall” that he pledged would transform the United States – a country whose self-perception was forged around the idea of an ever receding frontier – into a self-contained and impenetrable fortress.
And yet the prototypes of impregnability are themselves being treated with the kind of care one might expect for a Fabergé egg.
The city and county of San Diego have together spent more than $1m on security for the eight 30ft tall prototypes erected just north of the existing border fence, according to public records requested by the San Diego Union-Tribune. Included in that outlay is $118,092.66 on a chain-link fence to protect the towering hunks of concrete and steel that are supposed to protect American citizens from American citizens who object to their presence.
In a year that has seen unprecedented mobilizations and deadly clashes between white nationalists and counter-protesters, San Diego officials could be forgiven for expecting chaos. Shortly before construction of the prototypes began, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued an intelligence alert warning local law enforcement that the site could attract protests on the scale of the opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline.
But no such protests have materialized. The prototypes have attracted visits from dozens of media outlets, helpfully ferried to the site in buses by CBP, but have largely been ignored by local immigrant rights activists. Even as Trump’s visit looms, locals appear determined to turn their backs on what many described to the Guardian as flimsy “political theater”.
“We know how to mobilize,” said Christian Ramirez, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition. “We’ve had hundreds of thousands of people in the streets demanding reform.”
But when San Diego was selected as the site for prototype construction, Ramirez said the coalition of local activists sensed “a trap in which protests create a negative view of our community being belligerent and violent”.
Ramirez said: “There was this narrative and desire to create tension between protesters and law enforcement and we didn’t want to be part of that. We went the route of fulfilling our obligation as citizens to push our elected leaders to respond legislatively.”
To residents of San Diego, Trump’s fixation on the southern border is representative of a political discourse that is largely ignorant of life along the border, where family ties bridge two nations and “the wall” is as mobile as CBP officers in their SUVs.
“The border wall sounds good to people that don’t live here,” said Ricardo Favela, who was born and raised in Fallbrook, a small town north of San Diego best known as home to avocado groves and a notorious Ku Klux Klansman. “It plays to their imagination of what they think is happening at the border, but it doesn’t speak to the reality.”
Favela is the coordinator of Alianza Comunitaria, a rapid response network that warns residents of northern San Diego county – 40 miles and more from the actual border – via text message and social media alerts when CBP sets up immigration checkpoints where drivers are asked to produce papers proving their right to be here.
Since Trump’s inauguration, Favela said, the construction of the wall prototypes has been secondary to the “increase in rumors of checkpoints and confusion and fear” around CBPs roving patrols.
In December, seemingly credible rumors of immigration raids on a certain day prompted the Alianza’s network of volunteers to coordinate patrols of immigrant neighborhoods starting at 5am. Not seeing any abnormal activity, the group was able to send an alert later in the morning to let people know the coast appeared clear.
“We don’t know to what level Trump will go,” Favela said. “He has the full force of the Department of Homeland Security at his service.”
Across the border, activists with Comité Estratégico de Ayuda Humanitaria Tijuana, a group formed to assist migrants, drew similar distinctions between the physical border wall and the actual barriers preventing asylum seekers from entering the US.
“I don’t think the wall is the threat, per se,” said Paulina Olvera, who has been working to help Haitian migrants stuck in Tijuana get jobs or enter school. “Migrants know that they’re not welcome in the US.”
“CBP is the real wall,” added Soraya Vazquez, a human rights lawyer who said migrants attempting to claim asylum have been turned back at the ports of entry by border agents. “We’ve had a wall since 1985. For us, there’s no difference.”
The prototypes have proved fodder for some symbolic acts of protest.
Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s US-Mexico Border Program, said that his organization has commissioned the creation of eight pinatas of eight border-wall prototypes for a state of the union watch party.
And in November, a group of artists and activists used the real-life prototypes as a canvas for light graffiti: using a spotlight and stencils, they projected images onto the walls from Mexico, including a ladder, the Statue of Liberty, and “¡LLEGALE!” – a play on words between the Spanish, which means “come in”, and “illegal”.
“There’s nothing like a laugh, a fart, an inappropriate comment – to break the spell that politicians want to cast over the public,” Jill Marie Holslin, a Tijuana-based artist who designed the “¡LLEGALE!” image, said by email. “So we wanted to do the same thing with the prototypes – they are absurd, and we wanted to make them look like the absurdly stupid things that they are.”