Border fence project to limit family get-togethers at Tijuana-San Diego beach
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Meetings between family members and friends on the beach and the park that lie along the international border between San Diego and Tijuana are to be limited by the Department of Homeland Security’s border fence project.
Despite the project’s budgetary difficulties, construction will begin next month on the extension of the fence through the park and down onto the beach and into the ocean.
As a result, a 90-foot-wide no man’s land will be created on the U.S.-Mexico border, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune.
The new fence will bring an end to the cross-border picnics, yoga sessions and meet-ups that friends and families held at the border with people in Mexico who don’t have legal permission to cross north into the United States.
The current fence on the beach is made of thick black poles that protrude out of the sand. Gaps between the poles allow people who are on different sides of the fence to touch each other and talk. From the U-T story:
It was like any seaside picnic, with family members sitting on folding chairs, colorful umbrellas and a cooler full of sodas. The only unusual thing was the steel mesh fence running through the middle of it. On a recent Sunday, the Sotomayor family of Riverside rose early, packed a lunch and drove south to Border Field State Park, where the fence that separates the United States from Mexico meets the ocean. As many Mexican-American families have done for years, they were there to spend the day with relatives unable to legally cross north to hug them and must be content to visit at the see-through fence. This binational social scene, as it exists now, is unique along the southern border of the United States. Soon, it will be a memory.
However, federal officials said a gate in the new fence would allow visitors to reach the 1851 border monument that marks the point where the United States and Mexico agreed on a common border after the Mexican-American War. Arrangements over a roughly 40-foot-wide space surrounding the monument are being worked out but may give members of families access to one another.
Meanwhile, when the gate is closed, visitors will still be able to see into Mexico, but any socializing will be limited to waving from a distance.
Read the rest of the report on the border fence between Tijuana and San Diego here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City