On the Arizona border, life under Trump means new risks, limbo and delays

“I need some sort of stability to grow my business,” he said. “When the president of the United States says, ‘I’m going to close the border; I want to close the border now; now I’m going to give Mexico a year and then maybe I’ll close it’ — how do I plan three, four, five years ahead? How do I plan ahead when he’s saying at any point in time the ports of entry could be closed?”

Chamberlain, who said his company imports more than 150 million pounds of Mexican fruits and vegetables a year, said all this uncertainty led him on Tuesday to cancel a planned $1.6 million investment to expand his business with a grower in Mexico.

“I get it, we have a problem with so many migrants and asylum seekers,” he said. “But you cannot fix it by making the ports of entry weaker, and that’s what you’re doing.”

At Nogales’ Mariposa Crossing, the one primarily dedicated to commercial vehicle traffic, CBP has in recent years opened the port on Sundays from February or March to May, during the peak months for Mexican fruits and vegetables. But the shift of customs officers from the port of Nogales led CBP last weekend to halt that program for this year, after just two Sundays, said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, a Nogales-based organization that represents produce importers.

“In Arizona, if the port is closed down on Sunday, companies have to think about sending their produce somewhere else,” said Jungmeyer. “It’s harmful to us.”

Jungmeyer noted that shifting customs officers over to help the Border Patrol is drawing on an agency that has already been short-staffed at ports of entry for months. According to the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents customs officers, as of last month CBP had 1,600 officer vacancies and was seeking funding for 1,900 additional hires. In Nogales, the union said, customs officers routinely were being asked in recent months to work back-to-back eight-hour shifts to make up for the shortfall.

Beyond commercial traffic, the shortage of CBP officers affects other everyday crossers, too.

Down on North Arroyo Boulevard on the Arizona side on Wednesday afternoon, three high school students walking toward the border and back to their homes in Nogales, Sonora, stopped outside a money exchange business to chat with a reporter. Many students on the Mexican side have dual citizenship and cross daily into the United States for school. But these days, unpredictable delays at the border mean making a very early start to avoid arriving late.

“It’s worse now,” said Laysha, a junior. (CNN is using only first names because the students are minors.) She said the wait times have grown longer but also less predictable in recent weeks. “It can be half an hour, it can be an hour,” added Diana, also a junior.

To get to Nogales High School on time, the girls said, they now leave at 5:30 a.m., two hours before classes start, to make sure they can get across the border and catch a bus for the 4-mile trip. “If we’re early, we just go to the cafeteria,” said Nicole, a sophomore.

Then there are the asylum seekers and other migrants trying to seek legal admittance at the port, who face increasingly long wait times to get a hearing. Roughly a mile away, on the Mexican side of the border, Arturo Garcia, his wife Rosario, and their four children walked past a graveyard decked colorfully with flowers and ribbons that afternoon to line up with more than 100 other migrants outside a soup kitchen run by the Kino Border Initiative, a Catholic humanitarian organization. Garcia, who used to harvest avocados, said they fled from the town of Tlacotepec, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, because of fighting between rival cartels.

“We came to Nogales because we were told it would be faster to cross here,” he said. But the Garcias have been waiting for just over a month, “and we’re told it will be another month and a half, maybe more, before it’s our turn,” he said.

In the Kino’s dining area, advocacy director Joanna Foote Williams helped a migrant woman pick out some donated clothes. The typical wait for asylum seekers has increased sharply since December, Williams said, as the list maintained by another aid group of those waiting on the Mexican side to make asylum claims has grown to more than 400 people from 150.

Border Patrol agents stationed at the fence on Tuesday and Wednesday declined to give their names. One said he had found the razor wire does help with marijuana smugglers who go over the fence.

“It slows them down … a little,” he said. “They don’t come over as often.”

In Nogales, one of the few Border Patrol agents who would speak to a reporter agreed.

“I’ll just say, we ask them to follow the rules, so we should follow the rules,” he said.