Donald Trump’s wall will irrevocably change America’s south-western border

ON A CRISP clear morning in November Fidel Baca, a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent in El Paso, was driving west on Cesar Chavez Highway, which runs alongside the Rio Grande. Mexico was just yards away, behind a few mesh fences and the reddish-brown trickle of river. An alert came on the radio telling him that a surveillance camera had caught four people emerging from the river’s concrete channel on the American side. Stopping by the side of the road, he pointed first to a couple of fresh footprints, and then, just behind them, to fresh wet sand atop the highway barrier: someone had just jumped it. The chain-link border fence behind the barrier showed a fresh cut.

Less than a mile away from where Mr Baca patrolled, a new wall is rising, and it will not be so easily sliced through. America’s new border wall is made of 30-foot-tall (18 in some places) steel bollards filled with concrete, sunk six feet deep into a concrete foundation and topped with five-foot slabs of solid steel designed to impede climbing. Though American taxpayers rather than Mexico are paying the bill, and it is far from “beautiful”, Donald Trump is honouring his promise to build a wall along America’s border with Mexico.