Part 1 Life in the Shadow of the Wall

to look at new measures to tackle the use of laser pens after concerns

about their threat to air safety. They can cause blindness if shone

directly into people's eyes. Thanks for your company this morning on BBC

News. In Life In The Shadow Of The Wall, we travel the length of the

border to see how President Trump's proposal could affect life of people

on either side of the frontier. It was one of his main campaign

pledges - to build a wall A third of it already

has some sort of barrier, but what are the challenges

of trying to seal it off completely? I'll be travelling the entire

length of the US-Mexico border to find the stories

of the people who call the borderlands home,

to see how the fence that's already in place has

affected their lives, and to try to find out

what impact the wall that President Trump

wants to build could have. And the journey starts

here, at the very beginning of the border,

where the Gulf of Mexico This is the kind of place that,

to the Americans, justifies a wall. It is the most dangerous city

on the border, a battlefield to control a key route for migrants

and drug We are on a patrol with the special

forces that guard this Long gun battles between government

forces and drug cartels are common in this city, with people

often caught in the middle. It's a place where

local journalists have been attacked and threatened

for reporting on the drug cartels. The presence of

international media is rare here, and that's why we have

to take these security measures. It has been a quiet

shift, but it is not long before they are

called into action. So, the officers just

spotted two cars. And they have just got off

the pick-ups to check what's The police believe something

suspicious is going on. Here, different factions of cartels

are at the heart of a long and violent feud to dominate

a profitable business. According to the US

government, drug trafficking is a $64 billion

industry in the country. The police can't find anything,

so the suspects are not Then, proof of how difficult

it is to deal with the The colonel is listening

in to cartel members. The migrants who arrive

from the south, and those deported from the north, they are

also targets for the cartels. This refuge offers

them a respite in the These men have just

been sent back from the US, where there are an estimated

11 million unauthorised immigrants. This year, on average, the US

authorities have apprehended nearly 600 people a day trying

to cross the border. Sister Maria has seen more deportees

in the last few months. Jorge Torres was deported twice

in the last three weeks. He experienced this

threat first-hand. We are on our way to

interview a high-ranking official, to find out how

the goverment is coping with this We also want to ask him

what they are doing to prevent these people from becoming

easy prey for the powerful cartels This is the most dangerous

state along the whole border, and we need

an armed escort to travel to the capital, where

the This place has the nation's highest

number of disappearances - close to It is a disturbing figure that

could be much higher, since only a fraction

of all The government is in

a tough position. The local police was

so corrupt, it was From up here, it's

striking to see how close That river, called Rio

Bravo by the Mexicans, and Rio Grande by the Americans,

is the flowing border dividing and uniting both countries

for hundreds of kilometres. In most of Texas is the place

where the next phase of For many, that's a threat

to their properties Building the wall will be difficult,

and money may not be the biggest Getting the land is a major issue,

because over 90% of the Under the Bush Administration, many

landowners receive letters saying they would have to sell

their land to the goverment. Noel first received

a letter in 2008. For nine years, nothing

happened, but he Why do you think

there is no point in Because Homeland Security

has all the... They can do and not do

whatever they want. The land has been in his wife's

family for more than 250 years, since it was granted

by the King of Spain, before it was Mexican territory,

long before it became the Right now, we're on

the second bank of the This is the flood plain,

and this is all going to be... Supposedly, this is where

the wall's going to be. So, your land will be

on the other side of the wall? Yes, part of the property

will be on the It'll probably be approximately

20 acres, maybe a Will you be able to

access your property? They tell me that there's

going to be openings where we can But I mean, like, it

would be a continuous wall, More than likely, it'll be

just an opening, which would defeat the purpose of the

wall, but that's the goverment for Let's go and see what

the river looks like. Ultimately, Congress has

to approve President Trump's budget before

construction can begin. If and when it comes,

Noel doesn't believe Do you think the wall

will serve its purposes? Well, the wall's supposed

to keep people out, and I don't think it's

going to do that. In the history of mankind, I don't

think a wall has kept anything I think a virtual wall

would be more effective than any wall made out of mortar,

brick and what have you. This virtual wall that Noel

is talking about already exists, and my next meeting

is with the people who defend it. Border patrol agents

practice how to deal with The Rio Grande Valley

is popular with people trying 45% of all the apprehensions

on the border take But patrols of the river

are just one part of the We have centres, cameras,

agents on patrol, different types of infrastructure - bridges, roads -

that give us easier access to, like I said, those points that

are breached on the border. We have different

vehicles - cruisers, horses, bicycles and dirt

bikes - so we have a multilayered approach

to Agent Castro believes

fencing deters some, but the key is more people on the

ground, something President Trump The main needs are

personnel, technology and The technology so we can have

situational awareness of The infrastructure to get

to that detection or that And of course, you

need the personnel. You can have all the technology

and infrastructure, but if you don't have the personnel to respond

efficiently and effectively, then it I'm making a short detour

from the border itself. We are on the outskirts

of a town where a border patrol checkpoint has

created a second frontier. Don White is a volunteer,

and he's looking for More often than not,

he only finds their remains. You look for the paths

that they travel, and then backtrack those to see

if anybody's been left behind. This toothpaste was

probably left behind by migrants hiding

in these ranchlands. And what is striking

is that we are more than 100 kilometres north

of the actual border with Mexico,

and you can hear the cars This is a major corridor

used by people-smugglers The migrants who made it

across the Rio Grande must still avoid detection as they

head to their final destinations. To circumvent the

checkpoint, migrants are forced to walk through

the surrounding brush for up to 40 This is not the place

where the migrants expect I'm not worried

about encountering the border crossers, I'm worried

about the drug smugglers. That's why I carry what I

carry, because that's They are carrying arms,

and I want to make Don works with the Missing

Migrant Initiative, a multi-agency project

led by the border patrol. Their aim, to recover

those left behind. It's easy to get lost,

and many migrants die More than 550 in

the last seven years. So, that was dropped

three or four months ago. Half an hour into our patrol,

Don finds something. A rancher found a skull one time,

called it in, it was collected. And the Sheriff asked

if I could do a follow-up search of the area

with some anthropologists. We went out there,

toward some rat mounds, Towards the rat mounds,

a huge cactus, found several more bones, a cellphone, a photo ID,

so that was an excellent follow-up Why does Don, who lives

three hours away, often Decades ago, his niece

was kidnapped and killed, and it took two months for her

remains to be found. If you've lost somebody

in your family and you don't know where they are lost,

you don't know where they are at, where they

are even buried, you have

nothing that you can bury, nothing you can go

and worship to, nothing you can visit

or put flowers on... It's hard on the families,

really hard on the So, I guess that's why I do it,

just for the families that My next stop is in Laredo,

where almost 60% of the trade between Mexico

and the US passes. Jose is a trucker who takes

cargo across every week. Today, he's starting out

on a trip to Tennessee This is also a lucrative

smuggling point. Jose just told me that

many of his colleagues cartels to carry drugs into the US,

and there's nothing they can do 850 trucks cross this bridge

every hour, making it the busiest commercial crossing

on the border and in the Western Many of them are

inspected over there. Many of them are not,

so goods and drugs flow into the US, goods and

guns come into Mexico. Would a wall be able to stop

all the illegal trafficking? So far, we've been through a lot

of built-up areas, but our next I'm at the Big Bend

National Park, a place with mountains, canyons,

where It's a stunning, dramatic

and desolate landscape. An Indian legend says that

after the creation, all the remaining rocks were

left in the Big Bend. Walls from another era,

hundreds of metres high, in a place for the border bends, and from

which the park takes its name. The river turns

frequently, and it's not always easy to see which side

is Mexico or the US. At this tiny border crossing

point, I've arranged She tells me the park has

the border's fewest illegal Routinely, the border patrol

tells us that here in the Park we have the lowest statistics

for any section of the US- Mexican border, and within the park,

we protect 12% of the US- Mexican Im this vast, remote and lonely

place, the binational cooperation is essential,

and borders are hard to distinguish. Just on the other side

of our river, well, we only have one half

of the The other half is preserved

by Mexican national parks, so we have canyons

here, but we can only preserve one half of

And then to have a partnership with Mexico to make sure this landscape

is preserved as part of a larger ecosystem,

that our vistas don't end at the political boundary, right in

the middle of the Rio Grande, is a truly beautiful thing

Many people who come here don't even realise that the other

half of our canyon is Mexico, for example.

The river is sometimes so shallow you don't even need a boat.

Mike Davidson has been visiting this area for over 40 years.

As a river guide, he knows this place

intimately, and he's agreed to take me downstream.

In terms of the number of people coming to the area,

and a certain amount of development, there's

been quite a few changes in

For me, when you still get into the national park and go on

the river, you can go places where you feel like you're the only

That's what I really like about this area.

As with other people that visit and work in this area,

You know, the whole experience of Big Bend, with a

big, tall, strong, beautiful wall, as they say, would severely degrade

This is a lot of our national treasures.

On the Mexican side is a small town called

Months after the 9/11 attacks, the port of entry

It wasn't reopened until four years ago, and Boquillas

And this is one of these one size fits all solutions, where they

treated the whole border like a big danger zone.

So, now, with all this talk about building a

border wall and really cracking down, you know, we worried that the

gains we've made in international relations here, we fear that that

may be left behind if they build this wall.

I have now completed the first half of the trip, and so far,

I have travelled along a border where the river is the natural

But from now on, I'm going to be visiting places where fences

So, we're going to be seeing much more

Join me next time, when I will be with a Mexican who is

helping the Americans build the wall.

What have your friends or relatives told you about building

They joke with me, tell me to leave just a little open

And we visit the tunnel capital of the border.