Divided over Trump wall

Photo: The Canadian Press

Donald Trump's ambitious plan to build a giant wall on the border hits close to home for people like Berenice Andrews.

The front door of her family's home is just feet away from a fence separating the U.S. and Mexico. The home is so close to Mexico that the sounds of schoolchildren at play south of the border can be heard. So can buses along a main thoroughfare on the Mexico side.

As the presidential contest shifts to Arizona and its Tuesday primary, Trump's wall stirs up a range of emotions among border-area residents like Andrews. For some, nothing short of a wall will do. For her, the fence that currently divides the U.S. and Mexico is a good enough barrier.

"For him to even propose something like that is complete insanity," Andrews said.

Trump has not provided specifics about the wall but says it would cost between $10 billion and $12 billion. He has said he would make Mexico pay for it. Mexico has scoffed at the idea.

There are already about 650 miles of fencing, including the steel fence that divides the sister cities of Nogales in Arizona and Mexico and ranges from 18 feet to 26 feet tall. Much of the border fence was built in the last 15 years as immigration surged. The cost has been in the billions.

Everywhere Jim Chilton goes on his sprawling cattle ranch along the Mexican border in Arizona, he has a gun at the ready. Guns at his front door. Guns in his pickup truck. Guns on his horse's saddle.

For Chilton, illegal immigration and drug smuggling isn't just something he hears about on the news. He lives with it every day as smugglers routinely cross the border on his property. He supports just about anything to stop it, including Trump's plan to build a wall from one end of the border to the other.

"We need a wall. We need forward operation bases. We need Border Patrol to be down there all the time," Chilton said. "We just need to secure that international boundary at the border, period."

Artist Kate Drew-Wilkinson lives in Bisbee, Arizona, where she owns a gallery a few miles north of the border. Drew-Wilkinson opposes Trump and his wall proposal, saying he's a bully who is dangerous to the United States.

With her shop so close to the border, Drew-Wilkinson sees the Mexican people as neighbours and not enemies. She also views Trump's plans to forcibly remove immigrants and build a wall as not only preposterous but impossible to carry out.

"I don't think he has a real understanding of the geography or the sheer difficulty of building a wall of that kind," said, Drew-Wilkinson, an England native who moved to the U.S. in the late 1960s. "And it's ugly. The whole thing is really ugly."