A Mexican lieutenant with his soldiers. (Courtesy of Morgan Smith)
We left Santa Fe at 8 a.m., my wife, Sherry, and I with our two tiny dogs huddled in blankets in the back seat and a bag of sandwiches, apples, nuts, brownies plus a cooler with drinks. The temperature was a bitter 11 degrees. It’s about 325 miles to the border wall west of El Paso and Juárez and between Sunland Park and Anapra, Mexico, where we hoped to interview and photograph the Mexican soldiers who have been stationed there to keep migrants from crossing. For a decade, I crossed the border at least once a month to document conditions in the Juárez area as well as tiny Palomas to the west, but I have only crossed once since the pandemic began. This border wall idea was to be a substitute.