None of this will stop them and it wouldn't stop us either

A view from the border, where clashes between migrants and law enforcement bring all the obvious conclusions.

A friend texted me Friday night wanting to know “what kind of non-lethal rounds” that law enforcement on the border are allowed to use. He thought I would know and I did because I’m very well-versed on the tools used by U.S. law enforcement to shoot at people. But the other reason he asked was because he was struck yesterday while photographing migrants by the river that separates El Paso and Juárez by something that felt “like being sandblasted when hit.” After talking it over with him while he walked back into the United States on the Paso del Norte bridge we concluded that it was probably pepper balls that the Texas Department of Public Safety and maybe even the National Guard fired at migrants on Friday through the concertina wire set up to try to prevent them from getting close to the walls and fences that separate the two cities along the river. Probably, we thought, they shot the pepper balls through the razor wire and they shredded, the stinging juice inside turning into fast moving liquid particles that felt more like sand when they hit human skin.

I don’t know if there are more migrants arriving at the border than there have been historically and I don’t really care. But this is the part in the news story where you’d provide that information and explain what both sides are saying about it. There could be a million people camped on the river between Juárez and El Paso and it wouldn’t alarm me — I still wouldn’t think that shooting at them would be the right thing to do. Imagine how silly we all look, sending well-armed and provisioned soldiers down to an imaginary line in the sand to shoot through razor-sharp metal wire at a bunch of poor people who have been camped out next to a filthy river for weeks without much food and water. Imagine how stupid and reactionary and petty this will look when our children and grandchildren learn about this phase of the immigration wars. 

Anyway, my friend, the photographer Justin Hamel, was there Friday, as he has been for the last few days since migrants broke through the concertina wire that had been put into place by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Abbott, like many people throughout human history who think they’re the first person to have certain thoughts and experiences, has now learned the same lesson as many others who thought walls and soldiers could stop people from making better lives for themselves and their families. The concertina wire worked until it didn’t. Walls work until people climb over them. The soldiers stop people until the soldiers are overrun. History books are filled with these obvious conclusions. But here, we think we’re going to change all of that.