Richard Nixon was the first U.S. president who made a promise to close the U.S-Mexican border to illegal drugs and unwanted people part of an election-winning strategy. Speaking on the campaign trail from Anaheim, California, in 1968, Candidate Nixon promised to deal with the “marijuana problem” protested by parents of California’s youth by intercepting Mexican drugs at the border. Then, on September 21, 1969, just eight months after his inauguration, President Nixon’s Treasury and Justice Departments launched Operation Intercept along the almost 2,000 miles of southern border in a supposed attempt to enforce federal narcotics laws.

Spending $30 million USD, Intercept staffed the border with thousands of federal law enforcement agents who were charged with executing intense, time-consuming customs inspections. Nixon’s bottlenecks at the international bridges disrupted life and business on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. They also provoked resistance. The Mexican Chamber of Commerce led a brief U.S.-travel boycott on behalf of merchants who had lost trade in Mexican border communities, including Ciudad Juárez. Then Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz said Intercept “raised a wall of suspicion” between the two countries. Indeed, for almost three weeks, Intercept created a “wall effect” as the U.S. government turned a fluid border into an obstacle course.

Although the U.S. government officially ceased the operation of the program in October 1969, Intercept’s principles have guided border policy for every president since Nixon. In the late 1970s, Kent State University political scientist R. B. Craig called Intercept “a benchmark in United States-Mexico narcotics policy.” In 1999, U.S. Congressman Silvestre Reyes (D-El Paso) remembered Intercept because it “initiated new approaches to a problem of national magnitude.” Reyes would know. Prior to Congress, he was the El Paso sector Border Patrol chief, and in 1993, he designed and executed Operation Blockade/Hold-the-Line, placing agents at roughly 50-yard intervals along the urban border between El Paso and Juárez to stop smuggling and unauthorized immigration. Reyes immediately followed Hold-the-Line with an attempt to build a fence on the western outskirts of Juárez/El Paso. Similarly, law-and-order politicians, like former Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, fondly remember Intercept. As the New Yorker’s William Finnegan reported in 2009, Arpaio, who worked on Intercept with erstwhile Nixon operative G. Gordon Liddy, said the operation “nearly closed the border with Mexico.” The no-exceptions customs inspections became permanent after September 11, 2001.

Today, Donald Trump’s threatened U.S.-Mexico border wall—like Nixon he wants to keep unwanted elements from Mexico out of the U.S.—comes straight from Nixon’s playbook. As Grace Slick of the rock band Jefferson Airplane sang in 1970 in response to the dearth of marijuana in the U.S. for the months after Intercept, “Mexico is under the thumb of a man we call Richard.” As with Nixon, so too with Trump. And now, perhaps more than ever, Mexico must beware of the United States’ longstanding inclination for unilateral action on the two nations’ shared border. After all, Trump won’t so much build the wall as complete it: at present, a fence 18 feet tall lines 650 miles of the southern border.

Recognizing the renewed federal threat Trump’s wall presents to local, transfrontier metropolitan life requires understanding how Intercept reshaped communities to think and structure their life vis-à-vis a “hard” U.S.-Mexico border: increased anxiety, stress, and expense because of long wait times in traffic or pedestrian lines; severe U.S. Customs inspections; the presence of electronic and aerial surveillance, dogs, and armed Border Patrol agents increasing in number along the border; and, of course, fencing and walls.

Juárez/El Paso—which rivals Tijuana/San Diego as a significant border metropolis—is an excellent place to narrate and analyze how strict federal border controls have created this “wall effect.” Unlike their Californian cognates that are separated by 20 miles of highway and suburban sprawl, Juárez/El Paso are immediate to each other—or at least they were, before Intercept. Juárez/El Paso residents keenly felt Intercept’s tightened regulations. Customs inspections slewed northbound traffic to less than a standstill on heavily transited, previously swift international bridges. National news media projected images from both Juárez/El Paso and Tijuana/ San Ysidro of long lines of cars and pedestrians. The “border bottleneck” was born. It’s fair to say the United States still lives within Richard Nixon’s border, and that Donald Trump now wants that border cast in concrete.

Jesus at the Border

Late one night in the early 1960s, U.S. Customs Inspector William Hughes drove to the Santa Fe Bridge, the oldest international bridge connecting El Paso to Juárez. The bridge was but a short distance down the foothills of the Franklin Mountains, south from Hughes’s own home on El Paso’s Schuster Avenue. Customs Inspector Hughes was the on-call supervisor that night. He had to respond to a subordinate’s telephone inquiry about a drug-carrying U.S. citizen who sought to re-enter the U.S. from Juárez. Hughes later recalled that he remembered the man, who called himself “Jesus,” because it occurred in the “time before hippies.” When Hughes arrived at the customs inspection house he saw Jesus—“a rather tall guy with long flowing sheets on and a big beard and a lot of hair.”

The story Hughes told about drug-carrying Jesus and why his subordinate called him to the international bridge reveals the world of the sometime fluid U.S.-Mexico border—a relic of the pre-Nixonian borderlands. Hughes reflected upon the era of changes to border inspections after Nixon’s Intercept to two oral historians from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in 1977. His recollections suggest that until the late 1960s, a manager did not have to be at post when acting as night Customs supervisor. Indeed, one of his colleagues, Robert T. Hudgins, whom Customs transferred to El Paso in 1966, also told UTEP oral historians that before Intercept the border barely existed as a place of inspections. “We were a group of greeters, we were public relations men,” Hudgins recalled. “You never opened a trunk; and if you did, and you didn’t catch a load of dope … We didn’t enforce the law. Nobody really cared.” Experiences of crossing the border between 1966 and 1969 informed his opinions. Hudgins “never got checked.” Hughes remembered that the only reason Jesus attracted the attention of U.S. Customs was because he traveled in a “painted over taxi”—“one of those funny cabs they have in New York”— and was accompanied by two cats that made it stink from days of overland travel.

When Customs inspectors stopped Jesus on the international bridge entering El Paso his exceptional experience proved that, at the time, federal officers rarely enforced the law at the border. Instead, federal agents often acted at their own discretion. But Jesus’ claim to divinity was not his only reason for refusing arrest. He also rejected the Customs inspector’s assertion that he had brought marijuana into the country. His “manicured marijuana” was from Brooklyn, and since Jesus did not perceive the nation-state border between the two cities on different sides of the Río Grande, he had not thought twice about carrying marijuana into Juárez and then back into El Paso. Jesus refused to agree that he could not return something to where he had bought it—in short, he did not see the border, and thus rejected that he was somehow a cross-border trafficker of an illicit substance.

Customs Inspector Hughes put Jesus straight: “You’ve been traveling across the country on your way to California, just thought you’d stop in this funny little border town of El Paso and go across and see what Mexico was all about.” Jesus replied by telling Hughes his assessment was correct. Customs officers took Jesus to El Paso’s county jail. His detention meant he had to wait at the border for three days. Just a few years later, after Nixon’s 1969 inauguration, Jesus’ exceptional story and long border wait would become the norm as federal agents imposed rigorous customs inspections as part of Operation Intercept. By 1993 with Operation Hold-the-Line border wait times settled into border life, establishing a firm hold after 9/11.

How unusual was Jesus’ idea that there was no international border dividing Juárez from El Paso in this time period? Not very it seems. Before Nixon, many U.S. and Mexican residents in the interdependent cities of Juárez and El Paso experienced a fluid border. Take, for example, María Concepción Irigoyen Provencio, whose mother was born in 1882 in Ciudad Juárez, and who contributed to an oral history conducted by scholars Ricardo Aguilar Melantzón and María Soccorro Tabuenca Córdoba about growing up along the border with El Paso. María Concepción’s mother told her how “before the First World War there were no passports. You came and went to El Paso just like that. It was, as they say, just one city.” She did not recall delays when crossing the border, except when the international trolley suffered mechanical failure.

Fluid border crossings between Juárez and El Paso continued even after the introduction of passports, as historian Deborah Kang shows in her newly-released book about the pre-Nixon period, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1917–1954. Into the 1960s, memories of the “one city” of Juárez/El Paso run throughout testimonies produced by people familiar with the region prior to Nixon’s presidency. Diplomat Oscar J. Olson, Jr., a commercial officer for the U.S. Department of State, served in Juárez from 1964 to 1966—about the same time that Hughes and Hudgins began work as customs inspectors in El Paso. Though he and his wife and three young children lived in Juárez, Olson remembered how they socialized with people from both sides of the border. “Then it was much easier to cross the border in either direction. Several of us from the consulate would often pop over to El Paso for lunch on workdays,” Olson told the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Oral History Project in 2004, undoubtedly aware of the obstacles to border-crossing culture presented by enhanced inspections after September 11, 2001. What’s more, the diplomat remembered border fluidity warmly, describing moments of Juarense solidarity with El Paso, especially around college sports. “Juárez … had close ties to Texas Western [College] with a number of Juárez residents enrolled there,” Olson recalled. When underdog Texas Western beat top-ranked Kentucky to win the NCAA basketball championship in 1966, the U.S. diplomat said that Juarenses celebrated the victory with firecrackers. The community of Juárez/El Paso was not divided—yet. That would come later.

People who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio—the South El Paso neighborhood next to the international bridge and cornerstone of Mexican culture in El Paso—neither saw the border nor experienced it as an obstacle. Segundo Barrio youngsters remembered the lack of division between the two cities well into adulthood. “There was never a physical division at that time between the two countries, other than the river,” recalled Segundo Barrio resident Maria Eugenio Trillo, speaking to historian Paul Kramer in 2014.

Descriptions of El Paso in the Texas Almanac, an annual guide to facts and figures about the Lone Star State, did not even mention the border between Juárez/ El Paso before Nixon’s Intercept. In the 1961–1962 edition of the Almanac, El Paso appeared as “a place of interstate and international significance” and was referred to as “unique among cities of the United States.” Juárez simply made El Paso bigger and more attractive: “In Juárez there are many Mexican restaurants and places of amusement and the visitor to El Paso will want to cross the Río Grande for a visit to the Mexican City,” wrote the Almanac’s writers, adding that “the two cities are connected by a toll bridge.” The Almanac omitted mentioning the border; the river was the division and for a small fee could be crossed.

By the early 1970s, though, post-Intercept, El Paso became drenched in border symbolism. In its 1972–1973 edition, the editors of the Almanac accentuated El Paso’s place on the “mutual border” with Juárez. El Paso was now described as the “largest U.S. border city.” Similarly, in its 1980–1981 edition, the Almanac referred to El Paso/ Juárez as the “largest urban area on the U.S.-Mexico border.” In a feat of remarkable cognitive ignorance, it so too spoke of El Paso’s “Spanish heritage,” evident in its “Spanish architecture” and “colorful Spanish costumes.” The photographs published to illustrate the West Texas city in that edition of the publication clearly portrayed a woman with a Mexican sombrero and serape. Nixon’s border had erased Mexico as one source of cultural influence, creating the effect of walling off Mexico as a source of influence on the United States.

Friends: Juárez and El Paso Before Nixon

In the 1960s, the U.S.-Mexico border resonated in national politics. Prior to Nixon Democratic Party politicians and others continued to work under the principle of the Good Neighbor Policy, seeing the border as a way to engender goodwill—rather than spark -division—in Latin America. And progressive politicians were not the only ones to emphasize inter-American unity over American nationalism. Exactly the same week that Intercept blocked the border, Apollo XI astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and their respective wives arrived in Mexico on a goodwill tour to celebrate the moon landing. Reporter George Natanson of CBS Evening News broadcast from Mexico City that Armstrong told of “seeing [the] United States and Mexico joined from outer space.” What the moonwalker articulated viewing from high above was something that people on the border already knew.

Nixon’s Intercept upended a decade of attempts by Democratic politicians, beginning with Kennedy and followed by Johnson, to use the U.S.-Mexico border—and especially the section between Juárez and El Paso—to foster amicable relations with Latin America. The Chamizal Treaty negotiated by Kennedy and executed by Johnson in many ways stands as counterpoint to the controversial Cuba policy characterized by the disasters of the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis. The Treaty finally settled a lengthy, simmering conflict between Mexico and the United States over a piece of contested land between Juárez and El Paso thrown into dispute by the changing course of the Río Grande. (In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo placed the border along the river bed but subsequently the mighty river moved southwards, meaning that a piece of land, once Mexican, became de facto American.) Kennedy began negotiations with Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos to resolve the disagreement, exchanging parts of the disputed territory and pouring concrete river channels to prevent the river shifting again. The governments also built new bridges to increase traffic flow, turning them into humpbacks soaring over El Paso’s railway lines.

Kennedy himself visited El Paso three times: as senator in 1956, on the presidential campaign trail in 1960, and again as president in 1963. He called the city “part of the Old West but also part of a new America.” Democratic El Paso mayor, Raymond Telles, the first Mexican-American mayor of a major U.S. city, was a significant bridge toward Kennedy’s new America. After Telles’ tenure as mayor, JFK appointed him ambassador to Costa Rica. In the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson made him head of the U.S.-Mexican Commission for Border Development and Friendship (CODAF). But in preparation for Intercept, Nixon fired Telles in May 1969. Shortly thereafter, Nixon liquidated CODAF, the only official U.S. organization charged with cultivating friendly relations with Mexico.

Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey tried to use JFK’s and LBJ’s progressive border policies on the 1968 campaign trail against Nixon. Humphrey campaigned from El Paso’s airport on October 23, 1968, about a month after Nixon’s Anaheim speech in which the California Republican promised to cut off incoming Mexican drugs. There Humphrey eschewed talk of law and order, emphasizing instead how the Democrats supported Mexican Americans, thus casting Mexico and the United States as allies, not antagonists. “The Republican Party has forgotten, if it ever remembered, people of Spanish surname,” Humphrey said, “They have forgotten what we call ‘Mexican-Americans’ … You can read the record of the Republican Party … and my friends, you’ll never find anything about El Paso. You’ll never find anything about a Spanish-speaking American.” Rally goers bid farewell to Humphrey with cheers in Spanish, shouting “Arriba Humphrey.” On Election Day, Humphrey carried El Paso, beating Nixon by nearly 2,000 votes.

Taking the Democrats’ word that they were friendly to border communities’ interests does not explain where Nixon took the idea of Intercept.

In fact, the border crackdown was not a Republican innovation so much as it was built upon the findings and recommendations of a 1967 report compiled by the Democratic Johnson administration’s own Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. That report, entitled The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, had identified that most marijuana smuggled into the United States came from Mexico, and that interceptions of both “drugs and the people” could “reasonably be expected if the capacity to enforce customs law was increased.”

But in 1969, Nixon went where even the Commission feared to tread—given Democrats’ obvious sensibilities toward border friendship the Party had shied away from restrictive U.S.-Mexico border policies. In its report, the Commission wrote, “it must be understood that illegal importations of drugs can never be completely blocked.” As the report’s authors put it, the “measures necessary to achieve this goal, routine body searches being one obvious example, would be so strict and would involve such a burden on the movement of innocent persons and goods that they would never be tolerated.” But Candidate Nixon, speaking in Anaheim, pledged he would “triple the number of custom agents on the international borders, as recommended by President Johnson’s National Crime Commission.” Indeed, the introduction to Nixon’s Task Force Report, Narcotics, Marijuana & Dangerous Drugs, published in June 1969, employed the same language as the LBJ commission: “Most of the marihuana in the United States today comes from Mexico and is smuggled across the border by various means.” The solution, according to the Task Force, was “Prevention and Control of Drug Smuggling at the Mexican Border.”

To this effect, Nixon’s Task Force made 11 specific recommendations to control the border. Appearing over six typed pages, these included: profiling “the kind of person who smuggles contraband articles;” persuading Americans to travel by foot into Mexican border cities by building car parks on the U.S. side; and extending “existing fences” that “were currently near authorized points” because “their extension would enhance efforts to restrict unauthorized crossings.” The Task Force also recommended building 30-foot easements near lawful crossings, noting that “the lack of sufficient easements at the border, particularly at metropolitan points, compounds the problem of choking off traffic at unauthorized entry points.” In other words, the Task Force implied that it knew its recommendations would create border bottlenecks.

Finally, the report detailed drug detection methods and devices. These included aerial interdiction using pursuit planes and radar as well as new requirements that private planes file flight plans with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for all “international flights between Mexico and the United States.” (Canada warranted nary a mention as a source of drugs in the report). The Task Force also recommended the implementation of “perimeter detection devices” that would allow Border Patrol to “detect more intruders than could possibly done with the human eye at night.”

The hard tacks inside the report came down to personnel. Three federal agencies—the Bureau of Customs, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BND), and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—would be given “greatly increased manpower to carry out the duties and responsibilities of their respective agencies.” The BND would“form specialized mobile units, and expand undercover operations and conspiracy-type investigations.” Customs would be charged with expanding its investigations of drug smuggling operations. The Border Patrol, as the enforcement arm of the INS, would receive new agents “at border areas other than designated crossing points.” This, according to the Task Force, would “make it more difficult to avoid the points of entry and discourage potential smugglers from using unauthorized entry areas.” In the late 1960s, there were only around 1,500 Border Patrol agents. By 2006, there were more than 12,000 agents—11,000 of them posted to the southern border. And by 2012, that number increased to 21,000 agents. The trend, if not the specific details, is clear: since Nixon, the Border Patrol has been instrumental to creating the wall effect.

Crucially, it must be noted that in 1993, Operation Blockade/Hold-the-Line, President Bill Clinton’s major border offensive, deployed Border Patrol agents using Intercept’s very principles. The fatal effects of Hold-the-Line and other operations that drive people away from urban unauthorized crossings are well known: instead of directing unauthorized crossers to ports of entry where they could be discovered—in the Task Force’s odd logic—migrants and traffickers have pursued routes deeper and deeper into the hostile, mountainous desert, many succumbing to exposure or violence.

Intercept, From the Air and the Street

G. Gordon Liddy—the infamous Watergate burglar—was Intercept’s foreman and Joe Arpaio his henchman. Lieutenants in Nixon’s Justice and Treasury Departments, Richard Kleindienst and Eugene Rossides, sent then Special Agent to the Treasury Liddy to towns along the border in the summer of 1969 to lay out the border operation. Bob Ybarra, a reporter for the El Paso Herald-Post remembered Liddy’s visit to El Paso in an oral history interview in 1994. “This is the way we are going to do business from now on,” Ybarra recalled Liddy saying, referring to how Intercept changed border inspections to a no-exceptions-to-inspections regime. Prior to Intercept, the New York Times reported, customs officers “took less than a minute to process a vehicle and its passengers. Only one car in twenty was given the present three-minute treatment, including thorough scrutiny of the trunk and engine areas, under seats and behind cushions and door panels.” According to Ybarra, it was Intercept that brought “the phenomenon of long lines [to the border].”

Liddy agreed with Ybarra’s assessment. Not long after Intercept had begun, Liddy took an aerial tour of the U.S.-Mexico border near Tijuana to watch travelers’ unfolding terrestrial torment. In his autobiography, he would write how Intercept created a “world-class traffic jam,” calling the border operation “an exercise in international extortion, pure, simple, and effective, designed to bend Mexico to our will.” After just two weeks, Mexico “caved in,” to use Liddy’s words, giving Nixon exactly what he wanted: the Mexican government’s assistance in illicit drug interdiction inside Mexico. Even though the Mexican government had already been pursuing drug traffickers for years before Intercept, Nixon laid the groundwork to initiate his hemispheric war on drugs in 1971. In essence, the Nixon administration, through Intercept, turned the U.S.-Mexico border into its first anti-drug laboratory, and in so doing, it began to drive the border wedge between Juárez/El Paso.

Residents of Juárez/El Paso, like other transfrontier communities, did not appreciate the federal government’s dislocation of border life. In 1979, UTEP researchers Ellwyn Stoddard, Oscar J. Martínez, and Miguel Ángel Martínez Lasso wrote that the “unilateral action” of Intercept had “disrupted the normal flow of traffic and business” between the cities for nearly a month in 1969. “Tight bridge inspections caused tempers to flare,” the researchers wrote, “and business barometers on both sides showed a paralyzed condition while both El Paso and Cd. Juárez officials publicly criticized Washington, D.C. for its ineffective and immature judgment in this case.” Intercept’s “negative economic and social repercussions,” the report continued, “were far more devastating than the limited amounts of illegal drugs seized in the campaign.” Even Barry Goldwater, a Republican from the border state of Arizona, inveighed in derogatory terms. He criticized “bureaucrats and legislators without vision” for destroying “cordial interamerican relations” saying of Intercept, “the man who ordered it must be a mental retard.”

In Mexico, the dramatic collapse in Juárez’s fortunes—the sensation that an entire bi-national community depended on its neighbor’s border regulations— provoked nationalist reaction in the form of Operación Dignidad (Operation Dignity). Spearheaded by the Mexican Chamber of Commerce, Dignidad urged Mexican residents in Juárez not to cross to the United States, according to historian Froylán Enciso. Journalist Ybarra described the campaign as “a piece-meal effort at capturing the dollars Juárez residents had long been spending in El Paso stores.” It involved “flyers, personal persuasion, and radio broadcasts to stay in Juárez and not be humiliated by the intensified border searches.” Stoddard, Martínez, and Martínez Lasso called it a largely symbolic attempt to channel the “smoldering resentment felt by Mexicans at the series of unilateral actions initiated against their country by the U.S. over the years.” The effort ultimately failed.

Instead of boycotting El Paso, Juarenses responded to the inconvenience brought on by Intercept by using more efficient modes of transport to cross the border. In the middle of the Intercept crisis, the El Paso Herald-Post reported that border crossers had turned to walking for sake of convenience. Pedestrian crossers totaled 30,000 in Intercept’s first week. “The added pounding of shoe leather corresponded to a drop off of nearly 68,000 motorists, who quickly learned that it was easier on patience and gas mileage to leave their parked cars in Juárez or El Paso and leg it over one of the three bridges rather than submit to the intensive automobile inspections for narcotics,” the reporter wrote. Parking cars on one side of the border might seem like resistance to a high-handed policy. But Nixon’s Task Force Report, the group that designed Intercept, posited that the border-crossing culture cultivated opportunities for smuggling, and that one way to reduce U.S.-bound traffic to Mexico was to build car parks on the U.S. side of the border.

Operation Intercept shaped border thinking and thus also conditioned behavior. Ever an astute observer on the El Paso/Juárez region, Ybarra narrated what he called the “setbacks to both El Paso and Juárez” brought on by Intercept. His article of October 21, 1969, published a month after Nixon’s border operation began, focused on the response of the Juárez business community to heightened border security. The businessmen were now “aware of how much they depend economically on the U.S. and how much their residents spend in El Paso,” he wrote. The journalist referred to this dependence as an “Achilles heel.” While the way in which El Paso/Juárez could work together once had been seen as an asset, both on the border and in Washington, D.C., the Nixon administration’s decision to upend established behavior turned an asset into vulnerability.

Intercept forced Mexican businessmen to recognize their inferiority, both in the eyes of Mexican residents and U.S. tourists. Consulted in private, Ybarra reported that Juárez businessmen railed against so-called “green card commuters”—Mexicans with access to Juárez who traveled to El Paso for cheaper and better quality products. Across the length of the border, Intercept put into relief that Mexican residents shopped in the United States because the products were “new and not available” on the Mexican side of the border.

Mexican merchants also confronted the fact that U.S. tourists only bought south of the border when they were in search of cheaper prices. But for just cheap goods they would not tolerate waiting in traffic to return to El Paso. This pattern has repeated itself over the years. When crossing the border became more than an inconvenience—whether because of drug war violence in Juárez or long wait times—U.S. shoppers caused a slump in Mexican border city commerce by voting with their feet: they stopped going to Juárez.

Some U.S. citizens in El Paso directly protested the hardening of the border and the disruption it caused local life. Local merchant Mrs. Quinn Boyd told a reporter for the El Paso Herald-Post that she would travel to Washington, D.C. at her “own expense” and would remain “as long as it takes to get some action” against Intercept. Seeking appointments with Texas Republican Senator John Tower and Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, she said, “My protest is not on behalf of business but because we have worked in El Paso for years to promote good relations with the people of Juarez which we call our ‘Sister City.’ In two weeks, the Federal Government has destroyed the dignity of that country. Washington needs to be informed of local opinion.” Boyd went on to tell of her “many friends in Mexico, people who were raised and educated in El Paso,” but who were “mortified and degraded by Operation Intercept.”

Mrs. Boyd was not alone. In a letter to the editor of The Prospector, UTEP’s student newspaper, a student wrote, “Operation Intercept was born of fools and as its reward must die, as all fools do, which is their reward.” The student played with words, referring to “Operation Inept” rather than “Intercept,” perhaps inspired by similar critical language used by Texas Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough. But as it turned out, he wrote too soon; what the student and others could not foresee was that Nixon had taken a decisive step toward building a hard-regulated border, pushing away from the Democrats’ policies of inter-American friendship and local consultation by permanently increasing federal officers and agents on the border empowered by federal law and controlled from Washington. The ultimate result, locally speaking: the creation of the “wall effect” to divide the transfrontier metropolis of the upper Río Grande valley.

While the wall plays well to certain communities in the United States, its effects devastate the communities it bisects. Ever since Intercept’s wall effect, border wait times have become a regular feature of border-crossing life. After the events of 9/11, such practices have been made an ever-more permanent part of the U.S. national security state. Waiting to cross at the southern border has damaged and continues to challenge the U.S. economy, hurting U.S. workers particularly hard. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a report about the economic costs of wait times on the southern border. In 2008, waits time cost the U.S. economy $5.8 billion USD, the report contended. For 2017, the same report suggested that wait times would cost the U.S. 54,000 jobs and as much as $12 billion USD. The projections for 2035 stagger even more: $54 billion USD, costing 850,000 jobs at the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border alone. Today’s nationalist boosters of Trump’s border wall do not even consider these costs of hardening the border. Indeed, following Nixon, frustration and the political symbol of a hard border projected throughout the media are the point of the border wall. Nixon laid the foundation for Trump’s wall.

Nixon biographer Tim Weiner has shown that the Nixon administration used deceit and cunning to sow international chaos to achieve its political objectives. Moreover, Weiner finds that in many contemporary U.S. policies, Nixon’s tragic legacy of using international relations for domestic political gain persists. Given the wall effect’s Nixonian foundations we must cast an eye to this history in the late 1960s in order to ascertain the heights to which Trump’s wall might ascend. By looking at the wall’s Nixonian beginnings, thinking about how Intercept caused conflict and resistance among residents of Juárez and El Paso, and tracing the reappearance of hard border policies in successive presidents’ border control operations, this history of the origins of turning the border into a wall of agents and physical obstacles, shows that Trump might yet finish what Nixon started. That fact alone should give us all pause.

Thanks to Ethan Blue, Josiah Heyman, Laura Weiss, and Joshua Frens-String whose comments or assistance strengthened this article. Froylán Enciso inspired this investigation into Nixon’s anti-drug border antics. Errors, omissions, and oversights are the author’s.