When I was living on the road a few years ago I spent most of the time in Arizona and New Mexico camping on BLM and National Forest lands. Sometimes I was in areas close to the US/Mexico border. I recall one night driving around searching for the Walmart in Nogales AZ, when suddenly I came upon the road sign “Last U-turn before entering Mexico”. Clearly I had made a wrong turn somewhere. Fortunately, I saw the sign in time to avoid crossing the border.
Another time, I had camped on desert BLM land near Tucson, AZ. The next morning, two guys who were working on commercial property nearby walked over to check out my off-road camper. I gave them a mini-tour and told them about my journey. One of the guys said, “Son, you seem like a good man. You probably don’t realize this, but you are in a bad spot. This is an area where the Mexican gangs smuggle people and drugs through to the US. It’s not safe for you to be here.”
We were miles from the Mexican border so I never suspected this would be a crossing area. He suggested a few other places. Taking his advice, I packed up my gear and moved on.
I crossed the Mexican border many years earlier when I was in middle school. That summer, we visited my Grandparents who lived in Texas. They took on a trip to Mexico. We crossed at El Paso, TX into Juarez. It was an adventure to see how my wealthy grandparents lived. We traveled in one of their two brand new Ford Bronco II SUVs, stayed in a fancy Embassy Suites hotel in Mexico and at a mountaintop resort in New Mexico, ate at an upscale Mexican restaurant and a Texas Smokehouse, and visited a Mexican street market where they bought me a sombrero. I remember thinking… “this is what being rich is like.”
On the same trip, I witnessed abject poverty. There were neighborhoods in Juarez where the homes were hand built shacks. Their roofs were corrugated aluminum sheets held down by old car tires or cinder blocks. I saw a man traveling in a homemade cart pulled by a donkey. There were streets that looked like they were from the old Wild West – unpaved, dirt roads without sewers, sidewalks or electricity. I had never seen anything like this before. I didn’t know people still lived like that.
Crossing the border into Mexico was easy. We drove up to the checkpoint booth and were waived through. Returning to the US, there were 6 lanes of bumper-to-bumper cars. It took at least half an hour to inch up to the border checkpoint. We were questioned by a Border Patrol Agent and ended up having to leave a bottle of Tequila at the checkpoint because we had too many.
I crossed the US border into Canada (and back) near Niagara Falls a few years later when I was in high school on a field trip. I don’t remember the checkpoint at all. We were on 2 chartered buses. I imagine we were either waived through or our field trip chaperones took care of all the paperwork.
I left the US only one other time. My wife and I went on a company paid vacation to Barcelona in 2010. We filled out declaration forms while on the plane for customs and then handed these form along with our passports to a custom’s agent inside the airport. They stamped our passports and passed us through quickly. I cannot remember if they asked us any questions (although they might have asked if we had brought any fruit – I recall there being several signs prohibiting this). When we passed through customs after our return flight to the US, the process was similarly straightforward.
As easy as it was for me to cross the border these 3 times, there’s no way I’d go near the US border today if I could avoid it – especially if I was not a US Citizen.
Given Trump’s crackdown on immigrants and his zeal for deporting people, it seems likely that Border Patrol and ICE agents will be aggressively focused on potential immigration violators. Of course, as always, the news is going to promote the most egregious cases of people being hassled, detained and refused entry. Still, until procedures and protocols are worked out, my plan would be to avoid getting hassled – or god forbid, detained – by staying far away from the border.
I have to imagine that other tourists, travelers and business people think the same way. I’d expect legitimate, legal border crossings for tourism, family visits and business trips will drop as a result.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I don’t know.
But it’s where we are today.