DW Gibson Releases 14 Miles

 

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In 2017, when the Department of Homeland Security announced an open call for prototypes for Trump's border wall, DW Gibson, an award-winning journalist and Southern California native, began visiting the construction site and watching as the samples were erected. Gibson spent those two years closely observing the work and interviewing local residents to understand how it was impacting them.

In 14 MILES: Building the Border Wall (Simon & Schuster; hardcover; 7/7/2020), Gibson takes us to the ecosystem surrounding the 14 completed miles of Trump's border wall in San Diego County - from a park that's home to anti-immigrant rallies to one that hosts bilingual church services, from a Methodist church housing more than 300 refugees to a small town that forms citizen border-watch groups, from the courts hearing asylum cases to the red-carpeted villa where a real estate developer boasts about his Carrera marble fountain and giant American flag - and shows what life is like for many living in the shadow of this "surreal political project"

In the book, we meet:

-April McKee, a border patrol agent leading a recruiting program called Explorers that trains local teenagers to work as agents.

-Manuel Rodriguez, the chief of police in a mid-size San Diego County town, who himself is an immigrant from the border town of Nogales, Mexico. He worries about how local law enforcement is perceived and the ways in which in which it impacts his department's effectiveness.

-Roque De La Fuente, an eccentric millionaire developer who uses the construction as a promotional opportunity.

-Aurelia Avila, a young Mexican-American woman who lives with her daughter and brother in a makeshift shanty just south of the border. She cannot cross back into the US because she lacks the documentation she needs to prove her citizenship. Aurelia and her family live closer to the prototypes than anyone else and have become inured to the hammering and drilling sounds.

-Bob Maupin, a resident of a rural town, population 315, who loves the idea of a wall and for years has led self-styled vigilante groups to catch border crossers-sometimes with government support. He has heard automatic weapon fire from his property and has been shot at.

-Civile Ephedouard, a Haitian refugee who spent two years migrating through Central America to the United States and anxiously awaits the results of his asylum case.

-Serge Dedina, who grew up surfing the slews at Imperial Beach, a town at the southwestern tip of the country that contends with incredible water pollution from nearby American factories in Tijuana. Dedina is now mayor and has been connecting with border patrol and military families to get clean-up work done. He believes border security includes improving air and water quality and that "you don't make borders more secure by dividing people." While most Americans think of the border as a dangerous place, Dedina insists otherwise: "It's actually a force of attraction that pulls people together. There is a functioning political, economic, ecological, and cultural ecosystem here."

Through the varied perspectives of the people he interviewed, Gibson shows how complex and dynamic the idea of a border actually is, raising questions about safety, community, capitalism and politics - both local and national. Fascinating, propulsive, and incredibly timely, 14 MILES is an important, absorbing work that explains not only how the wall has reshaped our landscape and countless lives but also how its shadow looms over our very identity as a nation.