The uniformed agents heaved at the huge iron bolt and pulled at the gate. It resisted, groaning and complaining, until it capitulated and swung open.
On the other side of the door was Mexico.
Reporters with cameras huddled around the door, peering at their counterparts in the United States, laughing and waving as they recognized one another.
A few minutes later, as a family hugged in the doorway, nobody was laughing anymore. A crowd of people watched in silence, punctuated only by the cries of sea birds and the occasional sniffle.
This is what has been happening regularly for the past couple of years for Día del Niño — Mexico’s Day of the Child — at Friendship Park, the only place of its kind in the country, where people regularly meet for cross-border conversations and events.
For Children’s Day, a small selection of families, vetted and prepped, are allowed to meet at the gate for a binational hug. Often, they are meeting relatives they haven’t seen in years. The event is carefully curated and monitored by Border Patrol: each family gets no more, and no less, than three minutes.
Gabi Esparza, 23, wiped away tears as she and her 2-year-old son Leonel broke away from her mother’s and sister’s embrace. A Border Patrol agent standing by blinked back tears and looked up at the sky.
“It’s been nine years that I haven’t seen them,” she said, later. “It was an amazing feeling. We’re hoping that we do it again next year.”
Esparza comes to Friendship Park to talk to her family through the wall on a regular basis, but normally the only way people can touch is with the very tips of their fingers through the chicken wire, which they call “pinky kisses.”
The wall that divides the United States and Mexico at Friendship Park is a formidable thing. Its bars and wire rear up over the beach, and its towers and floodlights — used to detect people who might be trying to climb the fences under cover of darkness — dominate the park on the U.S. side and Playas in Mexico.
As a result of the walls here, migration has been forced eastward, away from the water and toward less forgiving environments. This has, in turn, done two things: caused the deaths by exposure of considerably more crossers as they try to negotiate the arid, rocky mountains of Arizona, and and reduced cross-border migration everywhere else.
The end result of this is that border crossings have been reduced 75 percent since Operation Gatekeeper was launched in 1994. An estimated 6,000 people have died making the trek since (estimated because nobody keeps an exact count of deaths on the border), which has also kept potential crossers from making the journey: a victory for Border Patrol and strong-border advocates, but a tragedy for families who haven’t seen one another in person for years.
“The reason I’m here is to support the families who want to reunify,” said congressman Juan Vargas, who attended the event and helped push open the gate. “It seems to me that the tide is changing.”
