Photos

I assumed this fence near Los Indios, Texas, wasn’t finished when I photographed it, but two years later nothing had changed. Today it functions more like a sculpture than a barrier.

The caretaker of a playground in Gadsden, Arizona, says that the adjacent wall ruins the sunset.

In the 19th century, obelisks called border monuments—like this one in Patagonia, Arizona—marked the divide. 

I spied this target range, where U.S. Border Patrol agents practice marksmanship, while driving to the Gulf of Mexico along Texas’s Boca Chica Boulevard. I had to work quickly for these shots, so I mostly used my iPhone. But this was one case where I could use a medium-format camera.

Surveillance towers—like this one framed against a gorgeous sky near Algodones Dunes, California—are strategically placed along the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor human traffic and to complement other means of migrant detection, such as ground sensors and tire drags.

Border Patrol agents drag tires—like these near Calexico, California—behind their trucks to smooth the terrain. The process is based on a Native American tracking technique called cutting for sign, used to reveal footprints and other evidence of passage.

In 2009 I discovered more than a dozen scarecrow-like figures—enigmatic effigies made from discarded migrant clothing and placed on agave stalks—in the arroyos of California. It’s not clear if they were intended as art, warnings to migrants, or anti-Border Patrol symbolism.

In the Tijuana Estuary south of San Diego, California, a border wall plunges into the Pacific Ocean. That makes it relatively easy for a boat or a Jet Ski—or even a decent swimmer—to bypass.

Older walls are often crude, made from barbed wire or steel panels. But some built in the past decade have been aesthetically conceived. This one—east of Nogales, Arizona—could be mistaken for a Richard Serra sculpture or Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s “Running Fence.”