Only months later, as I watched images of the concertina wire proliferating on my social-media feeds, did I finally understand what those ladders had been for. It can seem distant until it reaches out to touch you. The militarization of the borderlands has become so commonplace that one often grows numb to its manifestations. In December, as I walked through the pedestrian crossing, I passed by uniformed soldiers transporting long ladders to one side of the port of entry, but I barely registered their significance. Living in Tucson, barely an hour north of the border, I have become familiar with both sides of Nogales, crossing over the border to shop, attend meetings, take gifts or supplies to deported friends, or volunteer at a soup kitchen for migrants. It is something “only found in a war, prison, or battle setting.” Such wire has only one purpose, the resolution declared-to harm or to kill. By February, concertina wire covered the wall from top to bottom, and the Nogales City Council passed a unanimous resolution calling for its removal. But, in the weeks and months that followed, additional coils were gradually installed along the length of the fence by active-duty troops sent to the border by President Trump, giving residents the sense that they were living inside an occupied city. The barrier has been a stark feature of the town’s urban landscape for more than twenty years, rolling up and over hilltops as it cleaves the American town from its larger, Mexican counterpart. On Election Day, 2018, residents of Nogales, Arizona, began to notice a single row of coiled razor wire growing across the top of the city’s border wall.
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