Scenes from the border in Nogales, Ariz. West of the city, the border fencing ends, and this barbed wire, on Dan Bell’s ranch, is the international boundary.
Photographer: Kirsten Luce for Bloomberg BusinessweekAmerica’s Virtual Border Wall Is a 1,954-Mile-Long Money Pit
Tony Sedgwick steers his red Nissan pickup to the edge of his vast Arizona ranch in the Sonoran Desert, unlocks a cattle gate, and continues rattling south along a dirt road until he reaches the U.S.-Mexico border. He climbs out of his truck and follows the undulating line of towering vertical steel beams as the ground slopes down into a dry riverbed. Here, the beams give way to crisscrossing shoulder-height iron bars. The white-haired cowboy removes his hat, hikes up his Wranglers, scissors over one iron bar, and ducks under the next. “I mean, I’m a 66-year-old man, and I have no trouble going through this fence,” he gripes. “You can see the senselessness of this.”
After ambling around for a half-hour, Sedgwick spots a white-and-green U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) truck bumping up and down in a cloud of dust. It slows, and Sedgwick tips his hat and waves. The agents nod and drive on. He explains that we probably tripped one of the hundreds of sensors buried in secret locations under his pebble-specked ranch. Sedgwick points to another possibility on a hilltop about a mile away. “You see that little tower there?” he asks. A slender latticed edifice pokes into the blue sky, radar antennas and cameras affixed to the top.