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JACOBANGLAIS, le blog d'anglais du Lycée Jacob Holtzer

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What are the consequences of the Mexican migration?

The Security Fence Act was suggested in 2005 and passed on October 26 th 2006.

The US government has authorized the construction of a 700-mile fence to prevent the illegal crossing of the US-Mexico border.

In September 2007, 70 miles of new fencing were built, doubling the length of the existing barrier.

In 2010, the fence project has been completed from San Diego, California to Yuma, Arizona

Document 3
a. Introduce the three documents and say what the general topic is.

The first document is an untitled cartoon (by Chapatte), the second document is a map entitled proposed fence on the southern border and the last document is a text entitled the US Mexico border fence . The three documents deal with the Mexican American border, which consists in a fence separating Mexico from the USA.

b. Explain what the fence is (where, why...). What is the aim of this fence? (doc 2 and 3)

The fence is a 700-mile barrier that has been built all along the Mexican American frontier. The building of this fence was decided by the US government and the goal is to prevent immigrants from entering the USA illegally.

c. Concentrate on document 1: describe what you see (who, where, what...) and explain what the document wants to highlight.

This cartoon deals with the Mexican American border. The picture is divided into two parts. A wall made of brick and barbed wires is dividing the land into two parts. On the left, we can see a man walking in the sand and judging from his hat, a sombrero, we can deduce that he is Mexican. It seems that he has been walking for a long time because he is sweating. He must be exhauted, hungru and thirsty.

The country beyond the fence is the USA. We can make out skyscrapers in the background and a Mc Donald's logo in the middle of the desert. Those two elements are symbols of the USA. Moreover, the Star-Spangled banner (the American flag) and a placard that reads US borders are placed above the fence.

In the middle of the fence, there is a custom agent at a counter. This character is problem here to check the ID's of people who want to cross the border.
Message = Mexican people are leaving their country because they are attracted to the USA (the American dream). As too many Mexicans want to cross the border, the USA has decided to build a border with barbed wires so as to prevent illegal crossings. Moreover, it is clear that the USA are ready to sell their goods, their products (their food and drinks in this precise case with Mc Do's) to Mexican people but they do not want them to cross the frontier. The USA want to take advantage of the Mexican money without letting Mexicans crossing the border. They do not want illegal people in their country but they do accet their money. II. Why is it an attractive border for Mexcian people?

Each year, over a million Mexicans cross the US border. Although the US authorities try to keep the Mexicans out, it is impossible to guard the 3,100 kilometer border. In addition, under the NAFTA agreement, there has been an increase in trade between the USA and Mexico.

This means that there are more vehicles crossing the border each day. Nearly 200 trucks legally cross the bridge between Juarez ( Mexico) and El Paso (USA) each day. It is impossible for customers to check them all.

About 300,000 Mexicans illegally enter the USA each year. This is largely a response to the push factors in Mexico and the perceived pull factors in the USA [...] There is a considerate amount of resentment on the part of the US population.

G. Naggle, "Development and Underdevelopment", Nelson 2004.

Document 2:
Magnard, section européennes
Document 3:

The border between Mexico and the USA is the most crossed over in the world. In Mexico, one of the consequences of free trade has been the proliferation of maquiladora factories. A new cross-border region has thus appeared, called Mexamerica. Foreign investments flow essentially to Mexico City. Other emerging metropolises such as Monterey have seen their activities diversified partly thanks to the international air links with Texas. International links have increased the tourist industry on the Atlantic coast, in Merida and Cancun, creating new urban developments.

Trade liberalization has had and will continue to have a dominant effect on Mexican imports which should significantly increase. In 1989, the commercial balance showed a deficit which has been increasing each year. Mexico has also suffered from a severe lack of investment. The unemployment rate is high (30% of the labor force) and social cohesion is weak in Mexico. In Mexico's case, NAFTA has accentuated regional differences within the country: the "rich" North has distanced itself still further from the "poor" South which is isolated from global integration.

* Maquiladora factories: Mexican assembly plants that manufacture finished goods for export to the United States. The maquiladoras are generally owned by non-Mexican corporations. They take advantage of plentiful low-cost Mexican labor, advantageous tariff regulations 'lessened somewhat as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement), and close proximity to U.S markets to produce such items as home appliances and automobiles.

a. Why is it difficult to control immigration between Mexico and the USA? (doc 1)

b. Who owns maquiladoras factories? What do maquiladoras take advantage of? (doc 3)

c. Explain the following sentence: " This is largely a response to the push factors in Mexico and the perceived pull factors in the USA [...]". What are the push factors and the pull factors? (doc 1 and 3)

d. Describe the cross border area (doc 2 and 3)

e. How can you account for the increase in trade between the USA and Mexico? What is NAFTA? What are its consequences on the border area?
III. The tragic consequences of the fence. Document 1:
Document 2: Oral comprehension - Illegal crossings at California Mexico border.

Document 3: Oral comprehension - Migrant families divided at Mexican border.

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TERMINALES - TOPIC 3: SPACES AND EXCHANGES - JACOBANGLAIS, le blog d'anglais du Lycée Jacob Holtzer

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SPACES AND EXCHANGES THE MEXICAN AMERICAN BORDER Why do Mexican people decide to migrate to the USA? What are the consequences of the Mexican migration? I. Discovering the border fence. Document 1 Document 2 Document 3: The US-Mexico border fence The...

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Cindy lives with her three children in a small bedroom in an apartment near a major American city. Two other adults also live in the apartment.

Cindy asked VOA to use just her first name for this story. She is not in the United States legally. She was born in Guatemala and brought to the United States when she was five years old.

So, Cindy considers the U.S. home.

"Even though I don't have papers, I feel that I'm from here. Of course, I'm proud of having been born in Guatemala, but I wasn't raised there. I don't know the culture over there. I don't know what it's like to live there."

She has worked since she was 17, holding different jobs. She is now 29 and pregnant. Cindy says she wants to stay in the United States so she and her family can have a good life. Her children were born in the United States, so they are citizens. Cindy says she is more scared than she has ever been of being deported to Guatemala. She says she wants to become a legal resident of the United States.

Cindy is among an estimated 11 million people living in the United States without government permission. Experts say more than half of them are from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Last week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, carried out raids around the country. They arrested 680 people. The agency said it was targeting people who had been found guilty of crimes while in the United States. ICE said the raids were no different than those that took place during the Obama administration.

In a statement this week, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said "President Trump has been clear in affirming the critical mission of DHS in protecting the nation, and directed our department to focus on removing illegal aliens who have violated our immigration laws."

Trump promised often during the campaign to stop illegal immigration. He said if he became president he would deport up to three million people involved in criminal activity. On January 25th, he signed a presidential order that expanded the powers of ICE to detain immigrants.

On Sunday, Trump wrote a message on the social networking site Twitter. He said "The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise. Gang members, drug dealers (and) others are being removed!"

His message seemed to differ from what ICE said about its actions: that they were usual -- no different from what the agency did when Barack Obama was president.

The Department of Homeland Security said 25 percent of those arrested last week had not been found guilty of criminal acts in the United States but were in the country illegally. It said their cases will be examined individually. It said they may be deported even if they are not criminals.

Angelica Satas is the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. She said she has been watching the operations of ICE for 30 years. She said last week's raids were "not normal." She said many more people called her organization than usual while a raid was taking place in Los Angeles. She said some people were being seized in their homes and as they traveled to their jobs.

Many immigrants are afraid. There are reports that ICE will be setting up checkpoint stations to stop and seize immigrants who entered the United States without permission.

Many people from Latin America live in the Columbia Heights area of Washington, DC. VOA spoke with some of them as they waited at a Catholic Charities center for free food. They said they feared being deported.

Rodrigo Aguirre works at Catholic Charities. He says he has noticed a difference from a year ago.

"We're seeing people just become a little bit more afraid about asking for help. Because they are fearful of the consequences -- fearful that their name might be given to immigration and then eventually deported."

VOA spoke to a Salvadoran woman named Hemelina while she was waiting for free food from the center. She said she came to the United States illegally last year. She said she fled El Salvador because her husband often hit her and she feared gangs -- groups of criminals.

Smita Dazzo is an immigration lawyer for Catholic Charities. She says Hemelina could be given asylum if she can show a judge proof that she would be harmed if she is returned to El Salvador. Dazzo says most of the immigrants she talks to have what the law calls a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country.

"The majority of people that are coming here really are fleeing for their lives. It's, it's really, really scary for these people and some of them really honestly feel like they have no choice."

Dazzo says Trump's election has caused many people in the U.S. illegally to begin the process of getting permission to stay.

But supporters of Trump's immigration policy say limits are required because there are so many people who want to come to, or stay in, the U.S.

Dan Stein is among these voices. He heads the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He says that in the past 40 years the United States has had the highest level of immigration in its history. He says that cannot continue.

"All countries have to deal in the real world. And there are simply far more people who would like to move to a country like the United States than we can possibly handle and still provide a good quality of life and a shot at the American dream for people who are here today."

It is not clear what will happen to the millions of people in the United States illegally who have not done a crime while they are here. They have families and jobs. Immigration activists say the solution is a law that lets them stay.

Dazzo says "there are a lot of people who come here as children that are really upstanding citizens. They work hard, they're family oriented. They're exactly what you hope that Americans are."

I'm Christopher Jones-Cruise.
VOA Correspondent Bill Rodgers reported this story from Washington. Christopher Jones-Cruise adapted it for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor. We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section, or visit our Facebook page.
________________________________________________________________

papers - expression immigration documents that show a person has permission to be in a country

deport - v. to force (a person who is not a citizen) to leave a country

resident - n. someone who lives in a particular place

affirm - v. to show a strong belief in or dedication to (something, such as an important idea)

critical - adj. extremely important

mission - n. a task or job that someone is given to do

focus - v. to direct your attention or effort at something specific (often + on)

crackdown - n. a serious attempt to punish people for doing something that is not allowed; an increased effort to enforce a law or rule

merely - adv. used to describe the only reason for something or the only effect of something

gang - n. a group of criminals

persecute - v. to treat (someone) cruelly or unfairly especially because of race or religious or political beliefs

handle - v. to do the work required for something; to deal with (a person, situation, etc.) successfully

upstanding - adj. honest and respectable

oriented - adj. designed to appeal to a certain kind of people; interested in a particular thing, activity, etc.

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Undocumented US Immigrants Fear Deportation

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Cindy lives with her three children in a small bedroom in an apartment near a major American city. Two other adults also live in the apartment. Cindy asked VOA to use just her first name for this story. She is not in the United States legally.

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Where do America's undocumented immigrants live? - BBC News

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Twenty metro areas are home to 6.7 million undocumented immigrants in the US.

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Destination America is a four-part documentary organized around some of the driving forces that have compelled individuals to immigrate to America for centuries and have remained constant throughout history. The films focus on the world the immigrants left behind, the roots that defined them, and the frustrations, hardships, discontents and ambitions that made and continues to make America their destination.

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The idea of banning an entire racial or ethnic group from entering the US isn't a new proposal. Donald Trump is far from the first person to propose it. In fact, this country has a long history of picking and choosing whom it lets into its borders - and whom it doesn't.

In 1790, the US banned nonwhite people from naturalizing as citizens. In 1798, the US authorized the president to detain or deport noncitizens who were considered "dangerous to the peace and safety" of the country. Fast forward 80 years, and the US started banning all Chinese laborers from immigrating to the country. Tilted quota systems and systematically biased policies shaped the kind of people who could come the country. It wasn't until the past 60 years - when racial quotas were repealed - that immigrant demographics showed any semblance of diversity.

The graphic above shows how these policies affect who enters the country. It shows 200 years of legal immigration into the United States - and how different policies and international dynamics affect the patterns of who gets let in. Migration into the United States has ebbed and flowed in tandem with who policymakers believe ought to be allowed refuge and who doesn't qualify.

And we're back again to talking about restricting entire immigrant groups from coming to the US. But we ought to do it with some idea of how this country has done so before.

200 years of immigration also show how today's population came to be

But this isn't just a story about immigration. It also shows how today's US population came to be.

In 1820, where the graphic starts, there were only about 9.7 million people in the United States, which is about the current population of Sweden. So as the graphic shows 80 million people flowing in from other countries over the past 200 years, it also shows the making of the US as we know it today. (Note: A reader pointed out that country-by-country data before 1910 is notoriously unreliable, although general trends hold true.)

It is these people, and their descendants, who largely make up today's US population. European immigrants were the first and largest group to arrive, and there were subsequent policies that made it much easier for people from those countries to come to the US. That said, a decent numbers of Canadian and Chinese immigrants also arrived early in this country's history, and over the years, different policies allowed greater numbers of Hispanics and Asians to immigrate.

At the end of the graphic, you can see how colorful the bars get, which is partially the reason why demographers predict the majority of the US will be minorities by the year 2044.

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Watch how immigration in America has changed in the last 200 years

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The idea of banning an entire racial or ethnic group from entering the US isn't a new proposal. Donald Trump is far from the first person to propose it. In fact, this country has a long history of picking and choosing whom it lets into its borders - and whom it doesn't.

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100 Women 2016: What women in Mexico think of Donald Trump - BBC News

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As part of the BBC's 100 Women 2016, we hear four Mexican women on Donald Trump.

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Mexicans are worried about what a cut to tax remittances sent to them by relatives in the United States could do to their lives and businesses.

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Mexico has condemned new guidelines issued by the United States, under which almost all illegal immigrants can be subject to deportation.

The new rules include sending undocumented people to Mexico, even if they are not Mexicans.

But Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray says his country cannot "accept unilateral decisions imposed by one government on another."

Two top US officials are in Mexico to discuss the measures.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the head of Homeland Security, John Kelly, will hold talks with President Enrique Pena Nieto, amid one of the most serious rifts between the two neighbours in recent years.

Mexico anger ahead of Tillerson visit

US widens net for immigrant deportation

What is changing?

The changes announced on Tuesday include plans to enforce an existing provision of the US Immigration and Nationality Act that allows authorities to send illegal immigrants back to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.

But it is unclear whether the US has authority to force Mexico to accept foreigners.

The Obama government focused on deporting immigrants convicted of serious crimes.

Now, the new priorities are broad enough to apply to almost any illegal immigrant, including anyone who has been charged with a crime, misrepresented themselves, poses a risk to public safety, or "abused any programme related to receipt of public benefits".

The new guidelines also allow Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport people immediately.

Expedited deportations can now be used against undocumented immigrants anywhere in the US, who are unable to prove they have been in the country for more than two years.

Previously, expedited removals were applied to people who had been in the country for less than two weeks and were within 100 miles of the border.

An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the US, many of them from Mexico.

Read more on the Trump administration and immigration:

Is the US on a new deportation drive?

A Mexican man killed himself, hours after being deported from the US

How an updated executive order from President Trump will attempt to revive the travel ban struck down by the courts

National Park Service police are investigating after a giant "Refugees Welcome" banner was illegally attached to the Statue of Liberty

What has Mexico said?

Mr Videgaray said on Wednesday that Mexico would not accept the new rules. "We are not going to accept that because we don't have to and it is not in the interest of Mexico."

"We also have control of our borders and we will exercise it fully," he added.

He said his country was prepared to go to the United Nations to defend the freedoms and rights of Mexicans under international law.

Roberto Campa, head of the human rights department of Mexico's interior ministry, said the plan to deport non-Mexicans to Mexico was "hostile" and "unacceptable".

Relations between the US and Mexico have been tense under Mr Trump, who has said Mexico will pay for a wall he wants to build on the southern border, expected to cost billions of dollars.

Last month, Mr Pena Nieto cancelled a planned meeting with the US president in Washington over disagreements over the wall.

What has the US said?

President Donald Trump made immigration and border control a key part of his campaign.

The government said the new guidelines would not usher in mass deportations, but were designed to empower agents to enforce laws already on the books.

Earlier, in Guatemala, Mr Kelly reinforced that the measures did not signal mass deportations.

"We will be looking primarily at criminal offenders first. But there will be no mass round-ups, and when we do take someone into custody, they're then put into the American legal justice system, that's the courts, and the courts will decide what'll happen to them," he told reporters.

Despite the tensions, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said on Wednesday that the relationship with Mexico was "phenomenal right now".

He said he expected a "great discussion" between US and Mexican officials. The talks are expected to also include drug trafficking and the North American Free Trade Agreement, among other issues.

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Mexico has condemned new guidelines issued by the United States, under which almost all illegal immigrants can be subject to deportation. The new rules include sending undocumented people to Mexico, even if they are not Mexicans. But Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray says his country cannot "accept unilateral decisions imposed by one government on another."

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What Mexicans think of Donald Trump - BBC News

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Donald Trump's past comments on immigration have caused an outrage - and some creative forms of protest.

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'Drug dealers, criminals, rapists': What Trump thinks of Mexicans - BBC News

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A look back at some of the things US presidential hopeful Donald Trump has said about Mexico during his election campaign.

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On 27 January President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting all refugee admissions and temporarily barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries.

The move sparked numerous protests and legal challenges. A week later a federal judge in Seattle suspended it nationwide, allowing banned visitors to travel to the US pending an appeal by the administration.

Mr Trump and his supporters say the controversial executive order makes good on election promises to "make America great again".

But what is the order, dubbed the "Muslim ban" by those rallying against it, and who exactly does it affect?

Here are some key points from the full text explained.

What is the order?

It brings in a suspension of the US Refugee Admissions Programme for 120 days

There is also an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees

And anyone arriving from seven Muslim-majority countries - Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen - faces a 90-day visa suspension. Some visa categories, such as diplomats and the UN, are not included in the suspension

The order also introduces a cap of 50,000 refugees to be accepted in 2017, against a limit of 110,000 set by former President Barack Obama

Priority will be given to religious minorities facing persecution in their countries. In an interview, Mr Trump singled out Christians in Syria

Exceptions could be made on a case-by-case basis

Victims vent fury World reaction Order sows seeds of panic
Who is affected by the ban?

All travellers who have nationality of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen are not permitted to enter the US for 90 days, or be issued an immigrant or non-immigrant visa.

People who have dual nationality with a non-restricted country are not affected, so long as they travel on the passport from the other country.

What about people with Green Cards?

Under the executive order, Green Card holders - permanent legal US residents - from the seven countries were initially subject to the same restrictions, causing widespread concern and confusion.

Two days after it was signed, the department for homeland security issued a statement saying that permanent legal residents would be determined on a case-by-case basis. But, it said, in the absence of significant information that they posed a threat, their permanent legal status would gain them entry to the US.

However, on 1 February, Donald McGahn, the legal counsel to the president, then issued a memo saying the travel ban did not apply to lawful permanent residents of the United States.

What did Trump say?

Mr Trump said the halt on the refugee programme was needed to give government agencies time to develop a stricter vetting system and ensure that visas were not issued to individuals posing a national security threat.

"To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting," the president said in a statement released on Facebook.

"This is not about religion - this is about terror and keeping our country safe. There are over 40 different countries worldwide that are majority Muslim that are not affected by this order."

Syrians applying for resettlement in the US were already subject to a complex process of background investigation and security screenings, in a process that could take between 18 to 24 months.

Mr Priebus said the seven countries had been included because Congress and the Obama administration had identified them as "the most watched countries harbouring terrorists".

But was it legal?

This is being hotly contested through the US court system, with dozens of lawsuits filed, and the issue thought likely to end up in the Supreme Court.
Key dates:
3 February: A Seattle federal judge suspends the order nationwide, in response to a challenge by the Washington State attorney general, who argued that the executive order violated a clause in the US constitution that prohibits the favouring of one religion over another.

5 February: A request by Mr Trump's administration for an immediate reinstatement of the order is rejected by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

9 February: A three-judge panel in the same court rules unanimously against reinstating the ban, after hearing arguments from lawyers from the Department of Justice and Washington State.

In a series of tweets since the Seattle ruling, Mr Trump has criticised the suspension, saying the ruling came from a "so-called judge", and that the courts were "making the job very difficult!", and later describing the courts as " so political". After the San Francisco appeals court decision, he tweeted "SEE YOU IN COURT".

What are the legal arguments?

In the past, the US used to ban entrants from specific countries and entire regions.

But in 1965, the US Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act which said that no person could be "discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person's race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence".

So, the exclusion of all Syrians would be enough to challenge Mr Trump in court. The fact that they are all Muslim countries lends weight to the critics's argument that the order is "anti-Muslim".

Supporters of Mr Trump's order mentioned the post-9/11 attacks and the ability of the administration to take measures to protect national security.

And they cited the president's powers stemming from a 1952 law on "Inadmissible Aliens" to "suspend the entry" of "any class of aliens" that he finds are detrimental to the interest of the US.

They also suggested that US presidents can set aside the 1965 law. The most cited example is that of President Jimmy Carter who barred some Iranians during the 1980 hostage crisis.

How was the order implemented?

The order initially triggered a lot confusion and uncertainty. Before its temporary suspension on Friday, a federal judge issued a temporary halt to the deportation of visa holders or refugees stranded at US airports. More than 100 people were detained at airports or in transit

Air passengers were prevented from boarding US-bound flights

American citizens travelling to the seven countries could be detained for questioning as well in the future, Mr Trump's chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said

What do critics say?

Rights groups say Mr Trump's order targeted Muslims because of their faith and that no refugees had been convicted of terrorism-related crimes.

They also said that the most recent attacks in the US were carried out by US nationals or citizens from the countries not included in the travel ban:

Fort Lauderdale airport shooting (January 2017): A US citizen

Orlando nightclub shooting (June 2016): A US citizen with Afghan parents

San Bernardino shooting (December 2015): A US citizen with Pakistani parents, and a Pakistani citizen

Chattanooga shootings (July 2015): A Kuwait-born US citizen

Charleston church shooting (June 2015): A US citizen

Boston marathon bombing (April 2013): Two Russian citizens with Chechen ethnicity

While announcing the plan, Mr Trump cited the attacks of 11 September 2001. But none of the 19 hijackers who committed the attacks came from countries included in the suspension. They were from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt and Lebanon.

Some pointed out that the list did not include countries where President Trump had business interests - like Saudi Arabia - a suggestion dismissed by the president's chief of staff as not related.

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On 27 January President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting all refugee admissions and temporarily barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries. The move sparked numerous protests and legal challenges. A week later a federal judge in Seattle suspended it nationwide, allowing banned visitors to travel to the US pending an appeal by the administration.

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President Donald Trump has set in motion his plan to build an "impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wall" between the US and Mexico.

The border is about 1,900 miles (3,100 km) long and traverses all sorts of terrain.

Mr Trump says his wall will cover 1,000 miles and natural obstacles will take care of the rest.

But how much will it cost and who is going to foot the bill?

What is the estimated budget?

"I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I build them very inexpensively."

Mr Trump claims the total cost of the wall will be $10bn (£7.5bn) to $12bn. But estimates from fact checkers and engineers seem to be universally higher.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell estimated it will cost between $12-15bn, as he addressed reporters at a Republican conference in Philadelphia.

The 650 miles of fencing already put up has cost the government more than $7bn, and none of it could be described, even charitably, as impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful or beautiful.

There are other reasons the costs would be likely to escalate beyond Mr Trump's price tag - his plans require extending the wall into increasingly remote and mountainous regions, raising the building costs substantially.

Adding even more to the expense, the new 1,000 miles would crisscross private land, which would have to be purchased, perhaps by legal force, or financial settlements made with owners.

A study by the Washington Post estimated the cost of the president's wall would be closer to $25bn.

The row over payment

President Trump has always insisted Mexico will pay. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has been equally insistent he will not.

Needing to fulfil his election pledge to start building on day one, Mr Trump has signed an executive order setting it in motion.

He has accepted that US taxpayers will have to cover the initial funding.

Congressional approval would be needed and Republicans have suggested a supplemental appropriations bill could be fleshed out over the next two months.

There are a number of options, but nothing has been officially decided.

1. Raising tariffs on imports. Mr Trump's spokesman, Sean Spicer, said on 26 January that the president wanted a 20% tax on Mexican imports to pay for the wall, although he later added that it was one of several options still being considered. "By doing it that way we can do $10bn (£8bn) a year and easily pay for the wall, just through that mechanism alone," he told journalists. Forbes has argued that existing duties on Mexican goods would have to be quadrupled to pay for the whole of the wall, even if its cost were spread over 10 years. US companies would also almost certainly source products from elsewhere, reducing the revenue. The Mexican government could respond by removing tax benefits for US foreign investment. The investment totalled $101bn in 2013.

2. Remittances. Two possibilities here. President Trump could try to use laws aimed at preventing money-laundering to halt Mexicans working in the US from wiring money to families back home. The sector is huge - about $25bn a year. The hope is that the threat would cow Mexico into coughing up for the wall. The second option is to tax the remittances. Either a flat tax on all, or a far more punitive tax on those who cannot prove legal residence. But Mexicans affected by remittances might simply avoid using the wire companies and find undocumented third parties to transfer the cash.

3. Levying a "border adjustment" tax. House Republicans propose lowering corporation tax from 35% to 20% but base it on the place of consumption, not production. Imports would be taxed but not exports. A 20% tax, given the $60bn trade deficit with Mexico, would raise $12bn a year. Mexico could do little, the Washington Post reports, because border adjustments would apply to all US trading partners and would not therefore be seen as a singling out Mexico.

4. Increasing travel visa and border crossing fees. Targeting countries that have a bad record on illegal immigration, including Mexico, for higher visa fees would be popular among many Republicans. Along with increasing the fees on cars and individual people crossing the border it would raise revenue, but would probably not be enough alone.

Asked whether any of his solutions were realistic, he told the Washington Post: "It's realistic if you know something about the art of negotiating. If you have a bunch of clowns negotiating, it's not realistic."

Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr Trump was adamant that he would fortify the southern border with a wall ("a wall is better than fencing and it's much more powerful").

Concrete is the obvious choice. Ali F Rhuzkan, a New York-based structural engineer, estimated in an article for National Memo that a 1,900-mile wall - seemingly Mr Trump's original plan - would require about 339 million cubic feet (12.5 million cubic yards) of concrete - three times more than the Hoover Dam.

Mr Rhuzkan's estimate was based on a wall that ran 5ft beneath the ground and 20ft above. Mr Trump's claims for the wall range between 30ft and, more recently, 55ft. Even at 1,000 miles - vast amounts of concrete would be required.

That concrete, Mr Rhuzkan wrote, would need to be manufactured in slabs nearby - likely in dedicated plants - and transported to building sites, with all the enormous production and staffing costs involved.

However, since assuming office, Mr Trump's secretary of Homeland Security has said that parts of the wall will be transparent.

"There will be the physical wall and then parts of the wall that you can actually see through because it will rely on sensors and other technology," Secretary John Kelly told Fox News.

What about the environment?

Free movement between the US and Mexico is not just a human issue. What would the construction of a wall mean for animals that live near the border?

The US-Mexico border region is a delicate ecosystem with regular animal and bird migrations moving between the north and south of the American continent.

A number of species need to cross the border to mate with their genetically different cousins, including the endangered North American jaguar and black bears, which would be threatened without being able to mate with Mexican bears.

The wall would also have to take into account natural flooding zones as well as large areas of sand, where the ground effectively moves.

Then there is the detrimental impact to the landscape of a massive construction project - digging, road building, and the appearance of a concrete wall up to 50 feet high, notwithstanding Mr Trump's pledge that it will be "very beautiful".

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Donald Trump's Mexico wall: Who is going to pay for it?

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President Donald Trump has set in motion his plan to build an "impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wall" between the US and Mexico. The border is about 1,900 miles (3,100 km) long and traverses all sorts of terrain. Mr Trump says his wall will cover 1,000 miles and natural obstacles will take care of the rest.

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One of the first ways a new president is able to exercise political power is through unilateral executive orders.

While legislative efforts take time, a swipe of the pen from the White House can often enact broad changes in government policy and practice.

President Donald Trump has wasted little time in taking advantage of this privilege.

Given his predecessor's reliance on executive orders to circumvent Congress in the later days of his presidency, he has a broad range of areas in which to flex his muscle.
What are executive orders?
Here's a look at some of what Mr Trump has done so far:

Climate change policy reversal

Mr Trump signed the order at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) undoing a key part of the Obama administration's efforts to tackle global warming.

The order reverses the Clean Power Plan, which had required states to regulate power plants, but had been on hold while being challenged in court.

Before signing the order, a White House official told the press that Mr Trump does believe in human-caused climate change, but that the order was necessary to ensure American energy independence and jobs.

Environmental groups warn that undoing those regulations will have serious consequences at home and abroad.

"I think it is a climate destruction plan in place of a climate action plan," the Natural Resources Defense Council's David Doniger told the BBC, adding that they will fight the president in court.

Immediate impact: A coalition of 17 states filed a legal challenge against the Trump administration's decision to roll back climate change regulations. The challenge, led by New York state, argued that the administration has a legal obligation to regulate emissions of the gases believed to cause global climate change. Mars Inc, Staples and The Gap are among US corporations who are also challenging Mr Trump's reversal on climate change policy.

Travel ban 2.0

After an angry weekend in Florida in which he accused former-president Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower, Mr Trump returned to the White House to sign a revised version of his controversial travel ban.

The executive order titled "protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States" was signed out of the view of the White House press corps on 6 March.

The order's new language is intended to skirt the legal pitfalls that caused his first travel ban to be halted by the court system.

The updated ban:

Temporarily halts entry to citizens for 90-days of six Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen)

Removes Iraq from the previous list, due to increased vetting of its own citizens

Delays implementation until 16 March

Allows current visa holders to travel to the US

Does not affect permanent visa holders (Green Card holders)

Suspends the refugee programme for 120 days

Treats Syrians like any other refugee or immigrant

Removes the religious clause favouring religious minorities - namely Christians

Immediate impact: Soon after the order was signed, it was once again blocked by a federal judge, this time in Hawaii.
Trump signs new travel-ban directive
Undoing Obama-era waterway regulations

Surrounded by farmers and Republican lawmakers, Mr Trump signed an order on 28 February directing the EPA and the Army Corp of Engineers to reconsider a rule issued by President Obama.

The 2015 regulation - known as the Waters of the United States rule - gave authority to the federal government over small waterways, including wetlands, headwaters and small ponds.

The rule required Clean Water Act permits for any developer that wished to alter or damage these relatively small water resources, which the president described as "puddles" in his signing remarks.

Opponents of Mr Obama's rule, including industry leaders, condemned it as a massive power grab by Washington.

Scott Pruitt, Mr Trump's pick to lead the EPA, will now begin the task of rewriting the rule, and a new draft is not expected for several years.

Immediate impact: The EPA has been ordered to rewrite, or even repeal the rule, but first it must be reviewed. Water protection laws were passed by Congress long before Mr Obama's rule was announced, so it cannot simply be undone with the stroke of a pen. Instead the EPA must re-evaluate how to interpret the 1972 Clean Water Act.

Coal waste

A bill the president signed on 16 February put an end to an Obama-era regulation that aimed at protecting waterways from coal mining waste.

Senator Mitch McConnell had called the rule an "attack on coal miners".

The US Interior Department, which reportedly spent years drawing up the regulation before it was issued in December, had said it would protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests.

Business regulations

An attempt to cut down on the burden of small businesses.

Described as a "two-out, one-in" approach, the order asked government departments that request a new regulation to specify two other regulations they will drop.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will manage the regulations and is expected to be led by the Republican Mick Mulvaney.

Some categories of regulation will be exempt from the "two-out, one-in" clause - such as those dealing with the military and national security and "any other category of regulations exempted by the Director".

Immediate impact: Wait and see.
Trump moves to cut business regulation
Travel ban (first version)

Probably his most controversial action, so far, taken to keep the country safe from terrorists, the president said.

It included:

suspension of refugee programme for 120 days, and cap on 2017 numbers

indefinite ban on Syrian refugees

ban on anyone arriving from seven Muslim-majority countries, with certain exceptions

cap of 50,000 refugees

The effect was felt at airports in the US and around the world as people were stopped boarding US-bound flights or held when they landed in the US.

Immediate impact: Enacted pretty much straight away. But there are battles ahead. Federal judges brought a halt to deportations, and legal rulings appear to have put an end to the travel ban - much to the president's displeasure.
Trump border policy: Who's affected?
Border security

On Mr Trump's first day as a presidential candidate in June 2015, he made securing the border with Mexico a priority.

He pledged repeatedly at rallies to "build the wall" along the southern border, saying it would be "big, beautiful, and powerful".

Now he has signed a pair of executive orders designed to fulfil that campaign promise.

One order declares that the US will create "a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier".

The second order pledges to hire 10,000 more immigration officers, and to revoke federal grant money from so-called "sanctuary cities" which refuse to deport undocumented immigrants.

It remains to be seen how Mr Trump will pay for the wall, although he has repeatedly insisted that it will be fully paid for by the Mexican government, despite their leaders saying otherwise.

Immediate impact: The Department of Homeland Security has a "small" amount of money available (about $100m) to use immediately, but that won't get them very far. Construction of the wall will cost billions of dollars - money that Congress will need to approve. Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said the Republican-led Congress will need to come up with $12-$15bn more, and the funding fight - and any construction - will come up against issues with harsh terrain, private land owners and opposition from both Democrats and some Republicans.

The department will also need additional funds from Congress to hire more immigration officers, but the order will direct the head of the agency to start changing deportation priorities. Cities targeted by the threat to remove federal grants will likely build legal challenges, but without a court injunction, the money can be removed.

The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, along with Arizona Democrat Raul Graijalva, have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration.

They argue the Department of Homeland Security is required to draft a new environmental review of the impacts of the wall and other border enforcement activities as it could damage public lands.
How exactly will Trump 'build the wall'?
Two orders, two pipelines

On his second full working day, the president signed two orders to advance construction of two controversial pipelines - the Keystone XL and Dakota Access.

Mr Trump told reporters the terms of both deals would be renegotiated, and using American steel was a requirement.

Keystone, a 1,179-mile (1,897km) pipeline running from Canada to US refineries in the Gulf Coast, was halted by President Barack Obama in 2015 due to concerns over the message it would send about climate change.

The second pipeline was halted last year as the Army looked at other routes, amid huge protests by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe at a North Dakota site.

Immediate impact: Mr Trump has granted a permit to TransCanada, the Keystone XL builder, to move forward with the controversial pipeline. As a result, TransCanada will drop an arbitration claim for $15bn in damages it filed under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mr Trump made no mention of an American steel requirement. Construction will not start until the company obtains a permit from Nebraska's Public Service Commission.

The Dakota Access pipeline has since been filled with oil and the company is in the process of preparing to begin moving oil.
Keystone XL pipeline: Why is it so disputed? Dakota Pipeline: What's behind the controversy?
Instructing federal agencies to weaken Obamacare

In one of his first actions as president, Mr Trump issued a multi-paragraph directive to the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies involved in managing the nation's healthcare system.

The order states that agencies must "waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay" any portions of the Affordable Care Act that creates financial burden on states, individuals or healthcare providers.

Although the order technically does not authorise any powers the executive agencies do not already have, it's viewed as a clear signal that the Trump administration will be rolling back Obama-era healthcare regulations wherever possible.

Immediate impact: Republicans failed to secure an overhaul of the US healthcare system due to a lack of support for the legislation. That means Mr Trump's executive order is one of the only remaining efforts to undermine Obamacare.
Can Obamacare be repealed?
Re-instating a ban on international abortion counselling

What's called the Mexico City policy, first implemented in 1984 under Republican President Ronald Reagan, prevents foreign non-governmental organisations that receive any US cash from "providing counselling or referrals for abortion or advocating for access to abortion services in their country", even if they do so with other funding.

The ban, derided as a "global gag rule" by its critics, has been the subject of a political tug-of-war ever since its inception, with every Democratic president rescinding the measure, and every Republican bringing it back.

Anti-abortion activists expected Mr Trump to act quickly on this - and he didn't disappoint them.

Immediate impact: The policy will come into force as soon as the Secretaries of State and Heath write an implementation plan and apply to both renewals and new grants. The US State Department has notified the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that US funding for United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) would be withdrawn, arguing that it supports coercive abortion or involuntary sterilisation. The agency has denied this, pointing to examples of its life-saving work in more than 150 countries and territories.

This policy will be much broader than the last time the rule was in place - the Guttmacher Institute, Kaiser Family Foundation and Population Action International believe the order, as written, will apply to all global health funding by the US, instead of only reproductive health or family planning.
Trump's order on abortion policy: What does it mean?
Withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, once viewed as the crown jewel of Barack Obama's international trade policy, was a regular punching bag for Mr Trump on the campaign trail (although he at times seemed uncertain about what nations were actually involved).

The deal was never approved by Congress so it had yet to go into effect in the US.

Therefore the formal "withdrawal" is more akin to a decision on the part of the US to end ongoing international negotiations and let the deal wither and die.

Immediate impact: Takes effect immediately. In the meantime, some experts are worried China will seek to replace itself in the deal or add TPP nations to its own free trade negotiations, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), excluding the US.
TPP: What is it and why does it matter?

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One of the first ways a new president is able to exercise political power is through unilateral executive orders. While legislative efforts take time, a swipe of the pen from the White House can often enact broad changes in government policy and practice. President Donald Trump has wasted little time in taking advantage of this privilege.

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President Donald Trump has issued an executive order for an "impassable physical barrier" to be built along the US border with Mexico.

He also signed an action to strip funds from US cities that are sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants.

Mr Trump said in a TV interview with ABC News that Mexico would "absolutely, 100%" reimburse the US for his wall.

But Congress would have to approve funding for the structure, which is estimated to cost billions of dollars.

Building a 2,000-mile barrier along the Mexican border was one of Mr Trump's key pledges in the election campaign.

Trump starts a 'sanctuary city' war

How realistic is Donald Trump's Mexico wall?

What executive actions has Trump taken?

What Mexico said about Trump's wall plan

What did Trump say?

He spoke of a "crisis" on the southern US border as he signed the directives during a ceremony at the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday.

The orders also called for hiring 10,000 immigration officials to help boost border patrol efforts.

"A nation without borders is not a nation," he said. "Beginning today the United States gets back control of its borders."

Mr Trump said relations with Mexico - whose President Enrique Pena Nieto he is scheduled to meet at the end of the month - would get "better".

A ban on some Muslim-majority countries

The executive orders are among a flurry expected on national and border security this week.

Mr Trump is next expected to announce immigration restrictions from seven African and Middle Eastern countries.

An eight-page document that appears to be a draft executive order has been obtained by various US media and the BBC.

It suggests Mr Trump will suspend the Syrian refugee programme indefinitely and the wider refugee programme for four months.

The president also plans to suspend issuing visas from unnamed countries deemed to pose a threat to the security of the US.

Immigration lawyers have told the BBC they believe those countries are Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.

But the White House has refused to comment on the document, and it may be revised before being signed.

Mr Trump backed off an early campaign pledge to ban all Muslims from entering the US.

What are sanctuary cities?

The term applies to cities in the US that have policies in place to limit the assistance given to federal immigration authorities.

It got traction in the 1980s after Los Angeles told its police force to stop questioning people solely to determine their immigration status in 1979.

And in 1989, San Francisco passed an order that prohibited the use of city funds to enforce federal immigration laws.

Now there are hundreds of these areas - they are not always cities - and they include San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Austin and Boston

Trump's order to block federal grants could cost these cities millions of dollars. But the administration may face legal challenges, given that some federal courts have backed cities that say they cannot hold immigrants beyond their jail term at the say-so of federal authorities.

On Wednesday, Mr Trump was joined by parents whose children, he said, had been "horribly killed by individuals living here illegally".

He read out their names and invited the parents to stand.

"For years the media has largely ignored the stories of Americans and lawful residents victimised by open borders," he added.

'Mexico is going to pay for wall'

Earlier on Wednesday, Mr Trump told ABC News he would recoup costs of the wall from Mexico.

"There will be a payment. It will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form," he said.

Mr Trump has previously estimated the wall would cost $8bn (£6.4bn), but critics have said it could be nearly double that sum.

Earlier on Wednesday, Mr Trump also promised a "major investigation into voter fraud".

He tweeted that the inquiry would focus on those registered to vote in two states and dead registered voters.

This week he claimed that between three and five million illegal immigrants had voted for Hillary Clinton, but offered no evidence.

Mexicans see wall as racist - Will Grant, BBC News, Mexico City

Mexicans might disagree about a lot - especially on the political and economic direction of the country.

But if there is one thing around which almost all of Mexico can coalesce, it is their profound opposition to the US border wall.

From the Mexican side of the border, it is seen as a policy which is intended to break up families and prevent ordinary people from looking for seasonal work in the north - the kinds of jobs, they note, which prop up the US economy.

Others go further, and consider the entire border wall to be a racist and xenophobic policy.

Either way, Mexicans from the president's office to the factory floor agree that the country will not pay for a wall they don't want and didn't call for.

They say they won't finance the project either at the time of building or in the future.

That's not to say some Mexicans aren't in favour of changes to immigration.

Many are aware of the risks that their countrymen take by crossing illegally into the US, especially through dangerous border regions such as the Arizona desert.

Rather than a wall with their neighbour to the north though, they want to see comprehensive immigration reform including guest worker programmes and temporary work visas.

The view from the border - James Cook, BBC News, San Diego

President Trump's Great Wall faces formidable legal, diplomatic and logistical obstacles.

Even some border patrol agents say privately that they are not sure that the project is possible.

They do, however, welcome planned increases in resources and staffing.

But here in San Diego on the southern border of the United States, there is much fear in the shadows.

President Trump's action on immigration is bold, sweeping - and intensely divisive.

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President Donald Trump has issued an executive order for an "impassable physical barrier" to be built along the US border with Mexico. He also signed an action to strip funds from US cities that are sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants. Mr Trump said in a TV interview with ABC News that Mexico would "absolutely, 100%" reimburse the US for his wall.

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what it would take to build trump's border wall - cnn video

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What would it actually take to build a wall on the border between the U.S. and Mexico? CNN's Jason Carroll reports.

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It was not always a crime to enter the United States without authorization.

In fact, for most of American history, immigrants could enter the United States without official permission and not fear criminal prosecution by the federal government.

Subscribe to Newsweek from $1 per week

That changed in 1929. On its surface, Congress's new prohibitions on informal border crossings simply modernized the U.S. immigration system by compelling all immigrants to apply for entry. However, in my new book " City of Inmates," I detail how Congress outlawed border crossings with the specific intent of criminalizing, prosecuting and imprisoning Mexican immigrants.

Knowing this history is important now. On April 11, 2017, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced his plan to step up prosecutions of unlawful entries, saying it's time to "restore a lawful system of immigration." This may read like a colorblind commitment to law and order. But the law Sessions has vowed to enforce was designed with racist intent.

The Mexican immigration debate

The criminalization of informal border crossings occurred amid an immigration boom from Mexico.

In 1900, about 100,000 Mexican immigrants resided in the United States.

By 1930, nearly 1.5 million Mexican immigrants lived north of the border.

As Mexican immigration surged, many in Congress were trying to restrict non-white immigration. By 1924, Congress had largely adopted a "whites only" immigration system, banning all Asian immigration and cutting the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States from anywhere other than northern and western Europe. But whenever Congress tried to cap the number of Mexicans allowed to enter the United States each year, southwestern employers fiercely objected.

U.S. employers had eagerly stoked the era's Mexican immigration boom by recruiting Mexican workers to their southwestern farms, ranches and railroads, as well as their homes and mines. By the 1920s, western farmers were completely dependent on Mexican workers.

However, they also believed that Mexican immigrants would never permanently settle in the United States. As agribusiness lobbyist S. Parker Frisselle explained to Congress in 1926, "The Mexican is a 'homer.' Like the pigeon he goes home to roost." On Frisselle's promise that Mexicans were "not immigrants" but, rather, "birds of passage," western employers successfully defeated proposals to cap Mexican immigration to the United States during the 1920s.

The idea that Mexican immigrants often returned to Mexico contained some truth. Many Mexican immigrants engaged in cyclical migrations between their homes in Mexico and work in the United States. Yet, by the close of the 1920s, Mexicans were settling in large numbers across the southwest. They bought homes, started newspapers, churches and businesses. And many Mexican immigrants in the United States started families, raising a new generation of Mexican American children.

Monitoring the rise of Mexican American communities in southwestern states, the advocates of a whites-only immigration system charged western employers with recklessly courting Anglo America's racial doom. As the work of historian Natalia Molina details, they believed Mexicans were racially unfit to be U.S. citizens.

Western employers agreed that Mexicans should not be allowed to become U.S. citizens. "We, in California, would greatly prefer some set up in which our peak labor demands might be met and upon the completion of our harvest these laborers returned to their country," Friselle told Congress. But western employers also wanted unfettered access to an unlimited number of Mexican laborers. "We need the labor," they roared back at those who wanted to cap the number of Mexican immigrants allowed to enter the United States each year.

Amid the escalating conflict between employers in the West and advocates of restriction in Congress, a senator from Dixie proposed a compromise.

Blease's Law

Sen. Coleman Livingston Blease hailed from the hills of South Carolina. In 1925, he entered Congress committed, above all else, to protecting white supremacy. In 1929, as restrictionists and employers tussled over the future of Mexican immigration, Blease proposed a way forward.

According to U.S. immigration officials, Mexicans made nearly 1 million official border crossings into the United States during the 1920s. They arrived at a port of entry, paid an entry fee and submitted to any required tests, such as literacy and health.

However, as U.S. immigration authorities reported, many other Mexican immigrants did not register for legal entry. Entry fees were prohibitively high for many Mexican workers. Moreover, U.S. authorities subjected Mexican immigrants, in particular, to kerosene baths and humiliating delousing procedures because they believed Mexican immigrants carried disease and filth on their bodies. Instead of traveling to a port of entry, many Mexicans informally crossed the border at will, as both U.S. and Mexican citizens had done for decades.

When the debate stalled over how many Mexicans to allow in each year, Blease shifted attention to stopping the large number of border crossings that took place outside ports of entry. He suggested criminalizing unmonitored entry.

According to Blease's bill "unlawfully entering the country" would be a misdemeanor, while unlawfully returning to the United States after deportation would be a felony. The idea was to force Mexican immigrants into an authorized and monitored stream that could be turned on and turned off at will at ports of entry. Any immigrant who entered the United States outside the bounds of this stream would be a criminal subject to fines, imprisonment and ultimately deportation. But it was a crime designed to impact Mexican immigrants, in particular.

Neither the western agricultural businessmen nor the restrictionists registered any objections. Congress passed Blease's bill, the Immigration Act of March 4, 1929, and dramatically altered the story of crime and punishment in the United States.

Caged

With stunning precision, the criminalization of unauthorized entry caged thousands of Mexico's "birds of passage." By the end of 1930, the U.S. Attorney General reported prosecuting 7,001 cases of unlawful entry. By the end of the decade, U.S. Attorneys had prosecuted more than 44,000 cases.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, the vast majority of immigrants imprisoned for breaking Blease's law were Mexicans. Throughout the 1930s, Mexicans never comprised fewer than 85 percent of all immigration prisoners. Some years, that number rose to 99 percent. By the end of the decade, tens of thousands of Mexicans had been convicted of unlawfully entering or re-entering the United States. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons built three new prisons in the U.S.-Mexico border region: La Tuna Prison in El Paso, Prison Camp #10 in Tucson and Terminal Island in Los Angeles.

Only the outbreak of World War II halted the Mexican immigrant prison boom of the 1930s. The war turned the attention of U.S. Attorneys elsewhere and Mexicans workers were desperately needed north of the border.

With few exceptions, prosecutions for unlawful entry and reentry remained low until 2005. As a measure of the War on Terror, the George W. Bush administration directed U.S. Attorneys to adopt an "enforcement with consequences" strategy. In 2009, U.S. attorneys prosecuted more than 50,000 cases of unlawful entry or re-entry. The Obama administration continued the surge, betting that aggressive border enforcement would help bring a recalcitrant Congress to adopt comprehensive immigration reform. It did not.

By 2015, prosecutions for unlawful entry and reentry accounted for 49 percent of all federal prosecutions and the federal government had spent at least US$7 billion to lock up unlawful border crossers.

Throughout this most recent surge, the disparate impact of criminalizing unlawful entry and reentry has endured. Today, Latinos, led by Mexicans and Central Americans, make up 92 percent of all immigrants imprisoned for unlawful entry and reentry.

Attorney General Sessions still wants more. Traveling to southern Arizona to announce his plan to even more aggressively prosecute unlawful entry, he signaled that, in the years to come, most prosecutions will happen on the U.S.-Mexico border and will target Mexicans and Central Americans.

When the number of Mexicans as well as Central Americans imprisoned on immigration charges soon booms, there will be nothing unwitting or colorblind about it. Congress first invented the crimes of unlawful entry and reentry with the purpose of criminalizing and imprisoning Mexican immigrants and it has delivered on that intent since 1929. The Sessions plan will bear a similar result and, in the process, discharge the racist design of Blease's law.
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor, History and African-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

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The history of how crossing the US-Mexico border became a crime

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It was not always a crime to enter the United States without authorization. In fact, for most of American history, immigrants could enter the United States without official permission and not fear criminal prosecution by the federal government. Subscribe to Newsweek from $1 per week That changed in 1929.

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The landowners' strategy is clear: Use the courts to forestall construction and try to outlast the tenure of Mr. Trump.

Indeed, those closest to the perceived dangers of illegal immigration are providing perhaps the most formidable opposition to the president's plans. They are well aware that their land has become a major point of transit for drug traffickers and smugglers, and some have been victims of crime. But they also believe that the border is already heavily patrolled, by drones, federal agents and the local authorities, and contend that a wall would have mainly a symbolic value at the cost of their land.

While Mr. Trump made a border wall central to his presidential campaign, the concept is not new. In 2006, at the urging of Congress, President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, which mandated building physical structures to stop illegal crossings by people and vehicles. Nearly 700 miles of wall and fencing was ultimately built, mainly on federal land in California and Arizona.

But the government has taken very little land in Texas, which has 1,254 miles of the border with Mexico, most of it privately owned.

"Here in Texas, we take the concept of private property very seriously," said Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district includes nearly 300 miles of the border with Mexico. "We take pride in our land, which has often been passed down for generations. And Texans stand up for ourselves when the federal government tries to take what is ours."

Ms. Garcia's case shows how difficult seizing private land can be. Nearly a decade ago, officials from the Department of Homeland Security tried to take parts of her land in order to build a border wall. Ms. Garcia fought back in court, and this year the government decided that it didn't need her property after all.

But now, she thinks, Mr. Trump's plans could again imperil her land. "We're just waiting and watching as they start talking again about building a wall," she said.

Mr. Trump's proposed wall would run through a vast swath of the Rio Grande Valley. In March, the Homeland Security Department issued a request for proposals to build a "physically imposing" wall on the border with Mexico. More than 100 vendors have submitted proposals, and department officials say they may notify winning contractors as early as next week. The construction of several wall prototypes is supposed to begin in San Diego this summer.

In addition, Mr. Trump wants to hire 20 lawyers to obtain land in the Southwest on which a wall or other security facilities can be built.

The Rio Grande Valley is among the busiest smuggling routes on the Mexican border. Last year, Border Patrol agents seized 326,393 pounds of marijuana, second only to the agency's Tucson sector. It also seized about 1,460 pounds of cocaine, the most of any sector. Nearly 187,000 illegal border crossers were apprehended here in 2016, the most of any Border Patrol sector.

In documents presented to Congress, the Border Patrol has identified the Rio Grande Valley as a priority for new border fencing.

While the government has been able to persuade some landowners to give up land for barriers and walls, many of them balked, forcing the government into court to contest what landowners considered to be the unjust taking of their property. Over 300 condemnation cases went to court, records show. In total, the government spent at least $78 million to acquire land where fencing is now in place, according to congressional documents.

Efrén C. Olivares, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project in Alamo, Tex., said the federal government was likely to face similar opposition if it tried to construct a border wall in the area again.

"The sheer volume of condemnations the government will have to bring will bring significant delays," said Mr. Olivares, whose organization represents several property owners here.

For landowners like Ms. Garcia, the decision to oppose the wall was about more than money. The property where she lives has been in her family's possession since the late 1700s. The wall, she said, would have split the land where the little park she built sits, and would cut off access to the river.

"The Border Patrol said they would have built a gate in the wall so we could access the rest of our property, but who wants to do that?" she said.

Ms. Garcia said she had seen her share of drug smuggling and people crossing the border illegally. But she said the government should increase the number of Border Patrol agents and the use of security technology in the area rather than build a wall.

Others here in the community of 300 people share her view.

"They already have walls in some spots, and it hasn't stopped anyone," said Veronica Mendoza, Ms. Garcia's sister, who lives nearby. "They need more people, not more walls."

Along the 100 miles of Texas border where a wall was constructed, property owners have been trapped in what they call a neutral zone, where some homes and property are on the south side of the wall.

Jose Palomino, who lives in Los Indios, near Brownsville, said a concrete border wall bisects his property. The wall has also affected the value of the property, he said, and the government offered just $1,000.

"It's not a nice view," he said. "And to tell you the truth it hasn't stopped anyone."

While lawsuits are one obstacle to building a wall, the local geography is another, more permanent one.

The Rio Grande cuts a winding path through most of the area and spills over from the riverbed during heavy rains, prompting flooding and erosion that complicate construction.

Lawsuits and geography aside, another obstacle to the wall is bipartisan opposition from the Texas congressional delegation.

Senator John Cornyn, a Republican, has questioned the effectiveness of a border wall, telling reporters, "I don't think we're just going to be able to solve border security with a physical barrier because people can come under, around it and through it."

Others are more blunt.

"It's a stupid, stupid idea and a waste of taxpayers' money," said Representative Filemon Vela, Democrat of Texas, whose district includes a broad swath of the border. "We don't need a wall with Mexico. It's our ally and one of our largest trading partners."

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Trump's Wall Faces a Barrier in Texas: Landowner Lawsuits

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The landowners' strategy is clear: Use the courts to forestall construction and try to outlast the tenure of Mr. Trump. Indeed, those closest to the perceived dangers of illegal immigration are providing perhaps the most formidable opposition to the president's plans.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: During his run for the White House, president-elect Donald Trump made Mexico, perhaps more than any other individual country, a campaign issue.

Tonight, with the help of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, we begin a special two-part series from Mexico, and a look at Trump's promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and to build a wall along the U.S. Southern border.

Special correspondent Nick Schifrin and producer Zach Fannin begin their report tonight from the outskirts of the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez.

NICK SCHIFRIN: In the dry riverbed that separates Mexico from the U.S., the promise of a better life is only a few hundred feet away.

The woman is a 23-year-old Mexican from Juarez who asked to remain anonymous. Leading her is a half-guide/half-smuggler known as a coyote. Everything beyond the fence is El Paso, Texas. She's trying to cross illegally.

WOMAN (through translator): There's work here, but the wages are very low. You can barely survive here. Life there is better than here.

NICK SCHIFRIN: The coyote's been doing this for 10 years. Compared to when he started, today's border is much more secure.

MAN (through translator): It's more difficult now. Before, they used to cross just to have fun. Now they cross because they want to be there, like her, and live there.

NICK SCHIFRIN: She's part of a recent spike. From August to October, the number of people apprehended on the Southern border rose by nearly 20 percent. She's trying to get in before Donald Trump is inaugurated.

WOMAN (through translator): They say it will get more difficult, so I have to do it now.

NICK SCHIFRIN: What would happen if President Trump built a wall right here?

MAN (through translator): We would cross anyway. We're never going to stop crossing.

NICK SCHIFRIN: How would you cross if there were a wall there?

MAN (through translator): That's what we wondered when the fence went up. And we found a way. Here we are. There's always a way.

NICK SCHIFRIN: It's not easy. Tonight, a border guard scared them away. They will try again tomorrow.

Stopping this kind of illegal immigration was a central Trump campaign theme.

DONALD TRUMP (R), President-Elect: When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

On day one, we will begin working on an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful Southern border wall.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

NICK SCHIFRIN: The Mexico-U.S. border is nearly 2,000 miles' long. Right now, walls or fences, like this one west of El Paso, Texas, cover about 700 miles. The terrain can be rough.

But the distances between American and Mexican cities are often small. In some places, sturdy iron gives way to standard-issue chain-link fence, which is scheduled to be replaced. This fence couldn't keep this young man out.

U.S. border agents arrest a 17-year-old Mexican who crossed illegally. He's been arrested before trying to lead undocumented immigrants into the U.S. This time, he was spotted by a highly sensitive camera manned by an agent more than a mile away.

JOE ROMERO, Supervisory Agent, U.S. Border Patrol: They have got nighttime equipment, cameras they can use to look down and really cover a vast area with the technology they have available to them.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Joe Romero is a supervisory Border Patrol agent. He says there is no quick and easy solution to securing the border.

JOE ROMERO: Here, we have got an 18-foot fence. There's a guy in Mexico, I'm sure, making a killing off of 20-foot ladders. At the end of the day, people find a way to get through.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Every day, they patrol for eight hours. The vehicles and fences are meant to deter and stop would-be crossers. This increased presence, along with more aggressive prosecution, began a decade ago. It worked. Illegal crossings are down 84 percent since 2006, despite the recent spike.

Is the goal to bring illegal crossings to zero?

JOE ROMERO: I can't say that you will ever be able to stop crossings 100 percent. I just don't see that. And, really, that's not the goal. The goal is to mitigate the threats coming to our borders.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Truly separating these countries is nearly impossible, given their deep connections, not only geographic - I'm standing in the U.S., and everything beyond the water is Mexico - but also intertwined economies and families who straddle the border. Every day, more than a million people cross legally.

The Olivares Castro family's commute starts every day at 4:00 a.m. Mother Reina, behind the wheel, is a Mexican from Juarez; 12-year-old Anna wants to be a doctor when she grows up. To cross the border, she needs a binder full of papers and a student visa.

About 370,000 vehicles cross the Southern border every day. The wait can be more than an hour, all of this, so Anna can go to an American school that's better than any school in Juarez.

ANNA OLIVARES CASTRO, Student: They teach you more things. They get more deep into the subjects they teach you. I have more job opportunities. They recognize your talent.

NICK SCHIFRIN: She says this private school treats her with respect. This family and many Mexicans believe that president-elect Trump disrespects a country of 120 million.

REINA OLIVARES CASTRO (translated): Not everyone is a criminal. They need us Mexicans, they need us Latinos, and we need them.

ANNA OLIVARES CASTRO: He's telling lies. And all those people think that we're what Donald Trump says. But we're not like that. We're good people.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Two thousand three hundreds miles north, the Latino community in Columbus, Ohio, feels the same frustration and fear.

JOHN RAMOS, LULAC, Columbus, Ohio: Here in the Midwest, in Ohio, now all Latinos seems to fit a profile.

NICK SCHIFRIN: John Ramos heads the local office of the pro-Latino rights organization LULAC. He is most concerned by Trump's promise to deport millions of undocumented workers.

DONALD TRUMP: I am going to create a new special deportation task force focused on identifying and quickly removing the most dangerous criminal illegal immigrants in America who have evaded justice.

NICK SCHIFRIN: That promise seems to have awakened previously hidden racism and nationalism.

This undocumented Mexican immigrant, who was too scared to show her face, gave birth nine months ago in Ohio. That means the daughter's a U.S. citizen, and the U.S. is obligated to provide her Social Security. But when the mother tried to get her baby a Social Security card, a local official threw her out of the office.

WOMAN (through translator): He told me: "I can't help you. Get out of here." And his voice was upset. I told him: "It's not Social Security for me. It's for her."

And he told me: "You don't have documents. How dare you come here?"

NICK SCHIFRIN: Is that a federal official effectively going rogue?

JOHN RAMOS: I would say so. It's not in his position as a Social Security employee, federal employee, to request a person to show proof of their citizenship.

NICK SCHIFRIN: The mother returned with a lawyer, and the government official gave the baby the Social Security card. But he improperly forced the mother to provide her address. Ramos says that's never happened before.

JOHN RAMOS: If you have to provide right now your residence, your point of contact, your phone number, you're providing a track, a documentation to follow up on you.

NICK SCHIFRIN: And that has sent a chill into Columbus' Latino community.

JOHN RAMOS: It's all the hate. It's all these comments that he would say about, like, "Oh, I would just punch him in the face."

DONALD TRUMP: Like to punch him in the face, I will tell you.

JOHN RAMOS: So you would have people now thinking that they could probably come up to you and just act on their own and attack you.

NICK SCHIFRIN: The day after Donald Trump was elected president, something happened to you at school. Tell me what happened.

GIRL: This kid was making fun of me at school. And he was like: "Are you going to go pack your bags? Are you going to go back to Mexico? Are your parents getting ready?" and all that.

NICK SCHIFRIN: The 9-year-old girl is an American, born in Ohio, and goes to a local public school. Her father is an undocumented Mexican who has been here for 11 years. They're also scared and didn't want us to identify them.

He runs a taco truck. He pays taxes on relatively steady income. His customers are mostly fellow undocumented immigrants. They have always felt welcomed, he says, until Donald Trump began his campaign.

MAN (through translator): Inside the Mexican communities, people go to work with fear. And the kids' grades can go down because they're worrying about what's going to happen. The impact has been like a bomb. It's affecting the children, the young people, the innocents.

NICK SCHIFRIN: In response to those fears, Mexican Foreign Secretary Claudia Ruiz Massieu released a video featuring Mexico's consul generals. They urge the five-plus million undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. to stay calm.

CLAUDIA RUIZ MASSIEU, Foreign Secretary, Mexico: We are alert. That is why I have instructed my 50 consulates to increase their outreach to our community.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Massieu says she wants to work with the incoming administration, but she warns that if Trump follows through on all his promises, it's not only Mexico that would be harmed.

CLAUDIA RUIZ MASSIEU: If the environment were to become more hostile, I'm sure the United States would also feel a negative effect in its economy, in prices, inflation, in loss of jobs, and in loss of people that really contribute a lot to different communities throughout the United States.

NICK SCHIFRIN: But even before Trump's taken office, illegal immigration has risen, as has the panic among Mexicans on both sides of the border.

For the "PBS NewsHour" I'm Nick Schifrin in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

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How will Trump affect intertwined lives of U.S. and Mexico?

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Stopping illegal immigration and creating a new deportation task force was a central campaign promise for President-elect Donald Trump, who rallied for building a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. But truly separating these two countries is nearly impossible, given their deep connections.

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Shock, sadness, anger and fear spread across Mexico on Wednesday as the nation woke up to the reality of a U.S. president who has threatened to deport millions of its countrymen, rip up trade deals and make it pay for a wall along the American border. The electoral victory of Donald J. Trump was already shaking the Mexican economy before dawn, with the peso weakening in after market and Asian trading by 13 percent-its most rapid loss since the 1994 "Tequila crisis," which decimated the country. Mexico's stock exchange then opened to fall 4 percent.

But market losses paled next to the long-term risk of facing a highly antagonistic U.S. government for the first time in generations. "The United States became a superpower after the Second World War and since then we have never had to face it being openly hostile towards us," says Alejandro Hope, a former member of Mexico's federal intelligence agency. "It is far more powerful than us, and it holds all the cards. If Trump takes a very aggressive stance to Mexico it could do overwhelming damage."
Read More: The Making of President Donald Trump
Trade between the two nations has mushroomed since the passage North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, and last year Mexico exported $316 billion worth of goods and services to the U.S., accounting for almost a third of its $1.1 trillion economy. But Trump has promised to rewrite or scrap NAFTA to try and bring manufacturing jobs back north. There are also 11 million Mexicans living in the United States, about half without papers, and they sent back almost $25 billion in remittances last year. But Trump promised to step up deportations, at one point calling for a new "deportation force."

"I feel uncertainty and indignation about where this will lead," said Sandra Ramirez, a social worker in Ciudad Juarez, which borders El Paso, Texas. "The election of Trump reflects an intolerant society with a racism that has been woken up." Like many in Juarez, Ramirez crosses the border back and forth into El Paso on an almost daily basis. But she fears that Trump's presidency could lead to much harsher inspections on the border as happened in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when fear of terrorists crossing over from Mexico created backups that made many suspend going into the U.S.
Read More: After Trump's Win, Megyn Kelly Is a Star Without a Base
The Mexican government tried to give reassurances that it was ready for the Trump effect. "Mexico is in a position of strength to confront the new environment," Finance Secretary Jose Antonio Meade said in a joint news conference with the head of the central bank. Meanwhile, President Enrique Pena Nieto tweeted that he was open to working with Trump. "I trust that Mexico and the United States will go on strengthening their links of cooperation and mutual respect," he wrote. In August, Trump went to Pena Nieto's presidential palace in Mexico, a meeting that garnered widespread criticism here for pandering to a candidate seen as offending Mexicans. In a survey before the election, 83 percent of Mexicans said they had an unfavorable view of Trump.

However, some Mexicans have more nuanced views to the Trump victory. Bernardo Estevez, who runs an orange juice stand near the Mexico City center, says he respects Trump's nationalism. "He wears the t-shirt of his nation and he says that he is going to look after his people and screw everybody else," Estevez says. "Here our politicians just steal from us and take the money out of the country." Mexico has suffered a series of high profile corruption cases, including that of the governor of Veracruz State Gov. Javier Duarte who went on the run last month following embezzlement allegations, and is alleged to have more than 100 houses in the United States.
Read More: Donald Trump's 'Brexit-Plus' Victory Leaves Some U.K. Lawmakers Cold
Others believe that Trump's bark may be worse than his bite. Academic Jorge Chabat, who specializes on U.S.-Mexico relations, says that Trump will be constrained by both the courts and U.S. businesses. "He will be the president of the United States but not the owner of it and not the king of a small country in Africa who can do whatever he likes," Chabat says. "If he sticks a 35 percent duty on goods coming from Mexico, the first to complain will be the businesses in Texas and California who benefit from cheap Mexican imports."

Another figure who weighed in on the Trump victory was presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist who hopes to replace Pena Nieto when his term runs out in 2018. Lopez Obrador, who champions an anti-establishment nationalism that some have compared with Trump's discourse, released a video telling Mexicans not to worry. "You must not forget that Mexico, because of the efforts and sacrifices of our founding fathers, is a country that is free, independent, sovereign," he said. "It is not a colony. It is not a protectorate. It doesn't depend on any foreign government."

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A Wary Mexico Wakes Up to President-Elect Trump Next Door

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Shock, sadness, anger and fear spread across Mexico on Wednesday as the nation woke up to the reality of a U.S. president who has threatened to deport millions of its countrymen, rip up trade deals and make it pay for a wall along the American border. The electoral victory of Donald J.

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MEXICO CITY - Democrats had gathered here for a "Hillary Clinton Victory Party" at a popular barbecue joint. But Donald Trump's historic, upset victory early Wednesday sapped their enthusiasm.

Americans in the group said they've always felt welcome in Mexico, even as Trump unleashed tough talk about America's southern neighbor, calling some Mexican migrants "rapists" and robbers and promising to build a border wall paid for by Mexico to stem illegal entries. Some wonder how they will be treated here now that Trump has won the U.S. presidency.

"They don't blame us for Trump," said Rosa Baum, a San Francisco native who works with a human rights group. "They're often expressing empathy."

Jennifer Long, a teacher from Kansas, recalled positive attitudes toward Americans in Mexico during the Obama administration. "I'm nervous because I never thought the American people would vote for someone that is ... anti-everyone," Long said.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Wednesday congratulated the United States for its electoral process but stopped short of congratulating Trump, whose August visit to Mexico sent Peña Nieto's popularity tumbling.

"I trust that Mexico and the United States will continue tightening their links of cooperation and mutual respect," Peña Nieto tweeted.

Trump is the most openly anti-Mexico U.S. leader since President James Polk, who waged the Mexican-American war, said Christopher Albi, a history professor at the State University of New York-New Paltz. "But Trump will find the two countries too intertwined to want to hurt Mexico," Albi said, adding that such actions "hurt the U.S., too."

Trump's victory, given his attacks on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), sent the Mexican peso tumbling to an all-time low before it recovered slightly. The Mexican economy has benefited greatly from the trade pact, which Trump said costs American jobs as factories move to lower-cost sites south of the border. His NAFTA bashing helped the peso fall nearly 10% this year prior to election night.

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Analysts said there are few good options for the Mexican government, though Bank of Mexico governor Agustín Carstens told Milenio TV there are contingency plans.

"The government can't really do anything at this point but wait," said Esteban Illades, editor of the Mexican magazine Nexos. "I think the entire country is shocked. "We thought they (American voters) were more responsible."

Some took to Twitter to express worry for their country - and the world.

"A civilized and democratic world will have to once again confront EVIL," tweeted Mexican historian Enrique Krauze, a Trump critic. "Once again, with blood, sweat and tears, it will be defeated."

A rising tide of protectionism in the United States, as evidenced by Trump's victory, is causing concerns that Mexico will fall into a recession.

"In the short term, markets would probably go haywire in the midst of a mass confusion in terms of what his presidency would actually mean," said Jonathan Heath, an independent economist in Mexico City.

Mexico and the U.S. have increased cooperation in areas such as security and combating drug cartels, while Mexico has detained and deported record numbers of Central Americans trying to cross through Mexico to reach the U.S. border. The U.S. has provided technical assistance in areas such as implementing a fairer judicial system.

"It's a terrible feeling of uncertainty," said Armando Regil, director of a think tank focusing on youth issues. "We cannot change geography. We'll have to find new ways to understand each other and get along."

"We have to look for dialogue, but we have to let it be known we will not tolerate more insults or rude remarks," Regil said.

As the peso sinks, American imports will become more expensive, which could reduce demand among Mexicans seeking cheaper foreign competitors.

"Right now, all bets are off," said Ralston Darlington, president of the Democrats Abroad chapter in Mexico City. "We need to reassure Mexicans that not all Americans are anti-Mexican or racist," Darlington said.

Others fear mass deportations of undocumented immigrants under a Trump administration. "How could you create new jobs for 2 or 3 or even 4 million of deportees?" asked Rodolfo Soriano-Nuñez, a sociologist in Mexico City.

Trump's promise to build a wall is considered a non-starter in Mexico. But Soriano-Núñez said, "If they actually go for the wall, the pressure will be very hard on the Mexican government" to resist.

Ironically, Trump's emergence comes as surveys show Mexicans increasingly cast aside anti-American attitudes. Some wonder if that will endure. Mexicans regularly patronize U.S. chains such as Starbucks and Walmart, watch Netflix shows and speak ever more English.

"It's so sad to see an ideology that's so demeaning to the Mexican population," said Elizabeth Téliz, a university student. "We're so close. We should have good relations."

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Mexico worries about U.S. relations under President Trump

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CLOSE MEXICO CITY - Democrats had gathered here for a "Hillary Clinton Victory Party" at a popular barbecue joint. But Donald Trump's historic, upset victory early Wednesday sapped their enthusiasm.

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President-elect Donald Trump has promised to build a wall along the border between the US and Mexico. After his electoral triumph over Hillary Clinton, many are wondering whether he'll actually pull this off, or any of his other controversial pledges.

Mexicans, along with many other minorities in the US, were railed against by Trump during his campaign. In the run-up to the election, he vowed to rid the US of "bad hombres". Yet despite this adding to his record of xenophobic language, Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States.

The real estate billionaire promised to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) on grounds that it favoured Mexico at the expense of US workers. He has also threatened to tax the money sent home from the US by Mexican migrants to pay, in part, for the aforementioned wall.

We spoke to Mexicans in the US and Mexico about the election of Trump, and how they think his presidency might affect their lives. Here's what they said.

'Americans underestimate the consequences that damaging our economic ties can have on them'

I feel shocked, saddened, dismayed and deeply disappointed. As bad as that sounds, the worst part is feeling powerless. We don't have a say in an event that can have catastrophic consequences to our economy. In the US we are seen as collateral damage. Even those opposing Trump seem indifferent to the economic and human pain this situation can inflict on us.

I understand the economic pain that people in the rust belt are feeling. Successful trade agreements transfer some jobs from one country to another but are net job creators to all involved countries. Under Nafta, the US gained jobs in the south at the expense of the rust belt. Similarly, Mexico's north gained and the south has suffered, but this is the result of failed compensating measures within both countries. Nafta boosted wealth across the subcontinent. Cutting ties with Mexico will also harm the US. It surprises me that during the campaign no one pointed this out and Americans perceive that trade is a zero-sum game.

Under Nafta, the US gained jobs in the south at the expense of the rust belt ... it surprises me this wasn't pointed out

Enrique, Mexico City

If, as president, Trump adopts a pragmatic stance, the damage can be limited to a further decline in my purchasing power owing to the peso devaluation and a difficult business environment while expectations are better anchored. If he feels obligated to deliver on the promises made to his voters and revokes Nafta, things could be much worse.

Our government has little leverage because Americans underestimate the consequences that damaging our economic ties can have on them. They are self absorbed and busy inflicting pain on one another.

- Enrique, 53, Mexico City

'Deportations of Mexicans ... will probably send us into an even deeper recession'

The power Trump has over us, over our economy, over our geography, our perception of our freedom of movement, over the way the world will see us is terrifying and he is not even the president yet.

Today we woke up to find the exchange rate at 20.50 pesos for the dollar. We went from 18.70 per dollar on election day, to 20.20 yesterday and 20.50 today. It's expected to reach 30 by the end of the year. We have been humiliated in front of the world.

The deportations of many Mexicans, who live and work in the United States, who send money home and who contribute tremendously in that way to our economy will probably send us into an even deeper recession.

His misogyny is worse than any machismo we have ever see. We're surprised how many Americans love him, adore him

Flor, Mexico City

We are more than willing to welcome in any American who wishes to make Mexico their home for the next four years, bring your families, come live here, bring your dollars, help us out. We are a friendly, welcoming country with amazing weather, fantastic food, great cities with interesting museums and landmarks and restaurants and cafes. We hope they will seriously consider it. That goes for British people who want to escape the post-Brexit UK.

In our collective imagination, the American democracy was something to aspire to. The spell has been broken in many ways. In Mexico, even the least educated among us believe this man to be a buffoon. His ideas are uninspired and poorly expressed, that his misogyny is worse than any machismo we have ever seen. We are surprised by how much and how many Americans love him, adore him.

We are now wondering where to turn to for inspiration and what way of life and ideology will now inspire us.

Is this America? we ask ourselves.

- Flor, Mexico City

'He has created a dangerous stereotype of Latinos in the US'

I have a visa and I can travel throughout the US whenever I want, which is a lot. But I am concerned of the increase of hate or that as a result of the stereotype. I live in Cancún, a place visited by a lot of American tourists. I worry that they will think that I am undocumented, or that they think I am a drug dealer or a rapist.

It is not fair that a presidential candidate has blamed Mexico because of issues they have. He has created a dangerous stereotype of Latinos in the US. Yes, there are a lot of undocumented migrants, but a lot of us are living legally in the US.

Many drugs go the US through the Mexico border, but what they forget is the US is the first drug consumer worldwide. What they don't say is that they are in part responsible for the drug cartel violence in some areas.

In Mexico we make jokes about it. We now say that we are no longer the country with the stupidest president in the world.

- Milton, Cancún

'The silver lining is that Mexico perceives Trump as a common enemy'

Factional politics in Mexico can find common ground to make front to his politics and maybe force the common efforts by different parties before the 2018 Mexican presidential election. I really hope Margarita Zavala will engage in alliances with other parties to win the presidency.

Mexico will suffer irremediably if Trump imposes tariffs on imports - renegotiating Nafta for example - or tax the remittances. The fiscal situation in Mexico is already strained owing to low oil prices and corrupt politicians with vast regions of the country in hands of "narcos" or organised crime. Trump adds chaos to the already dismal state of government with inept and corrupt politicians like President Enrique Peña Nieto and the foreign secretary, Claudia Ruiz Massieu.

Trumps adds chaos to the already dismal state of government with inept and corrupt politicians

Federico, Mexico City

Prices are going to soar, inflation and currency devaluation will spike making day-to-day expenses more difficult. Recession is already showing its claws and jobs cuts are on the rise in major banks as we speak.

The silver lining is that Mexico perceives Trump as a common enemy.

- Federico, Mexico City

'Hillary Clinton ended up being popular in the wrong country'

At first it was a feeling of disbelief, then it was a surprise - we did not stop laughing with all the irony. In Mexico those fear campaigns of the media work very well, it's surprising that they wouldn't work at all in the US. All that money spent to promote Clinton and his hate campaign would have been used for something useful. Hillary Clinton ended up being popular in the wrong country.

Many things could change in Mexico. If Trump complies with the construction of his wall, good things could happen in Mexico. The reactivation of the local economy destroyed by Nafta, the reactivation of small businesses currently neutralised by big foreign corporations.

I hope Trump will comply in the destruction of Nafta and keep away ​US compaines that have damaged our country so badly

Chio, Mexico City

If the wall is also for the Mexican oligarchy, it could fall from power and give way to a leftwing government that Mexico needs so badly. The fall of the government without the support of Washington's neoliberals would be wonderful.

I hope that Trump will comply in the destruction of Nafta and keep away US corporations and mining companies that have damaged our country so badly.

After that, I hope that he fulfils a good relationship with Mexico without interventionism or imperialism: simply keep away and in peace.

- Chio, Mexico City

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Mexicans on Trump's election: 'The power he has over us is terrifying'

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President-elect Donald Trump has promised to build a wall along the border between the US and Mexico. After his electoral triumph over Hillary Clinton, many are wondering whether he'll actually pull this off, or any of his other controversial pledges. Mexicans, along with many other minorities in the US, were railed against by Trump during his campaign.

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On the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump supporters wait for the wall

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In the Texas border town of Del Rio, Trump's proposed wall is met with conflicting views.

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President Donald Trump's longtime campaign promise of building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border could be one step closer to fruition after he signed an executive order Wednesday announcing a series of steps to deter "illegal immigration from Central America."

But some 700 miles of border fencing had already been completed along the country's nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico, much of it during Barack Obama's presidency, as part of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was signed by George W. Bush.

The type of fencing that extends from California to Texas varies according to the terrain and the population of the areas it borders, according to images released by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2011. The types of fencing includes wire mesh, chain link, post and rail, sheet piling, concrete barriers for vehicles and X-shaped steel beams for livestock.

Jose Luis Gonzalez/REUTERS

Trump has said he wants a concrete barrier as high as 55 feet tall and has described his proposed wall as "impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful."

Under the Secure Fence Act, the pedestrian border fencing completed in fiscal year 2007 was estimated to cost about $2.8 million per mile, according to a 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office. It was constructed using mostly the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Guard, according to the Congressional Research Service. The 2009 report also found that fencing constructed in fiscal year 2008, which mostly used private contractors, cost about $3.9 million per mile.

"Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders, gets back its borders," Trump said Wednesday at the Department of Homeland Security after signing two executive orders related to immigration. The executive order calls for the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border to achieve "operational control," which it defines as "the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband."

Building a new 1,000-mile wall could cost as much as $40 billion, according to an analysis published in the MIT Technology Review. Maintenance of barriers along the southern border will also be costly. The Congressional Research Service estimated in 2009 that double layer fencing would cost an estimated $16.4 million to $70 million per mile over 25 years, depending on the amount of damage sustained.

During Wednesday's press conference, Trump did not specify how he plans to pay for the wall, but in the executive order he asks to allocate available sources of federal funding to the "planing, designing, and constructing of a physical wall" as well as to project long-term funding requirements from the Congressional Budget Office. He also calls for each executive department and agency to identify and report all foreign aid to Mexico.

Earlier this month, Trump said that Mexico will reimburse the U.S for the cost of building the wall. Mexican officials have repeatedly said they will not pay for the wall.

The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2017

On Wednesday, the new president said that he has "deep admiration for the people of Mexico," adding that he looks forward to meeting with Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto and that he "truly" believes that the U.S. and Mexico can improve relations going forward.

Peña Nieto may cancel a visit with Trump scheduled for next week in response to today's announcement, a Mexican official told ABC News. The Mexican president has been under fire in his country recently for being seen as too accommodating to Trump.

EPA

During his confirmation hearing earlier this month, newly-minted DHS Secretary Gen. John Kelly said that "a physical barrier in and of itself will not do the job."

"It has to be a layered defense," he said, adding that even with a wall extending from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, you would still have to back that wall up with patrolling by human beings, sensors and observation devices, he said.

Border Patrol already employs a "digital wall" composed of about 8,000 cameras, which monitor the southern fence and ports of entry. Its resources also include more than 11,000 underground senors, 107 aircraft, eight drones, 175 mobile surveillance units and 84 boats.

"We can spend billions of dollars to build a 10-foot wall on top of a 10,000-foot mountain," former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said in November, "but if you've come all the way from Central America, it's not going to stop you."

AFP/Getty Images

The president predicted Wednesday that his executive orders will "save thousands of lives, millions of jobs, and billions and billions of dollars."

ABC News' Geneva Sands and Jordyn Phelps contributed to this report.

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Nearly 700 Miles of Fencing at the US-Mexico Border Already Exist

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President Donald Trump's longtime campaign promise of building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border could be one step closer to fruition after he signed an executive order Wednesday announcing a series of steps to deter "illegal immigration from Central America." But some 700 miles of border fencing...

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In America's modern history, few U.S. presidents have come to power as openly hostile to their southern neighbor as Donald Trump. His opening campaign salvos - describing Mexican immigrants as criminals or rapists - seemed almost tame by the time he clinched victory, after so many threats to cut off jobs going to Mexico, deport millions of unauthorized immigrants and build a wall on the border.

His victory stunned, saddened and worried Mexicans, forcing the country's highest government officials Wednesday morning to call for calm and pledge to work with the United States. The wave of national anxiety sent financial markets here into turmoil as a new, uncertain era in relations with the United States began.

"We will have for the next four years, at least, a president of the United States who actively campaigned and centrally campaigned against Mexico's interests. Full stop. Period," said Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister. "It's an unmitigated disaster for Mexico."

Mexicans are unnerved about the lasting economic damage that a Trump presidency might bring. Those concerns are focused most on his promises to rewrite the trade deal that has undergirded Mexico's economic progress over the past two decades.

Mexico's top economic officials, Finance Minister José Antonio Meade and Central Bank governor Agustín Carstens, tried to calm fears here. In a morning news conference, Meade said the U.S. election increased uncertainty in world financial markets and heightened the volatility of Mexico's currency. But he added that Mexico was in a strong economic position.

"It's important to remember that the functioning of markets has remained orderly," Meade said. "The result of the election doesn't imply an immediate impact in the norms that regulate the commerce of goods and services, financial flows or the capacity of people to travel between both countries."

[Markets staggered by Trump's shock victory but stage partial recovery]

Mexico's Central Bank has regularly raised interest rates over the past year in an attempt to contain the peso's losses and tamp down inflation. The peso, which was trading around 18 to the dollar on Tuesday, dropped to more than 20 to the dollar after Trump's win appeared imminent.

President Enrique Peña Nieto tweeted his congratulations to the United States on its electoral process Wednesday and expressed to Trump "the will to work together in favor of bilateral relations."

For many Mexicans, Trump was something of a joke when he became a presidential candidate last year. They built piñatas out of his image and fashioned his face into Halloween masks. Only after he won the Republican nomination did a sense of urgency set in among the business and political elite.

Fears of a Trump victory and possible damage to the Mexican economy prompted Peña Nieto to invite the candidate to Mexico City in September to improve ties. That meeting caused a huge backlash as Mexicans protested their leader's welcoming treatment of the Republican candidate.

As the results of the presidential election came in Tuesday night, Mexicans watched with growing horror as Trump captured state after state. Mexico's foreign minister, Claudia Ruiz Massieu, rushed to the presidential palace, Los Pinos, to discuss the results with Peña Nieto. The headline of an editorial Wednesday in one of Mexico's leading newspapers, El Universal, simply read: "A dark future."

"The American people chose yesterday the path of racism, hate and intolerance," it began.

The most urgent questions here centered on the potential gap between Trump's words and his actions as president. Andrés Rozental, a former Mexican ambassador to Britain, said that promises Trump made to energize working-class and rural white voters who feel they have suffered from international trade might soften once he takes office.

"It's clear that much of what happened yesterday, and much of what brought Mr. Trump to the White House, relates to deep-
seated anger and deep-seated fear of the outside - the outside includes, very immediately, Mexico," Rozental said. "I think the most important thing right now in Mexico, for the government and all of us, is to find the ways we can deal with this reality."

"We are neighbors; we need to have a relationship; we need to make it as constructive as we can," he added.

Others found no reason to be optimistic.

"The new mistake that people here are going to be making, along with many of their American friends in Washington, is a not-to-worry attitude," said Castañeda, the former foreign minister. He added that Trump "will deliver on some of his promises some of the time, like all politicians."

[After Trump's victory, the world is left to wonder: What happened to America?]

Beyond the short-term market volatility, some Mexican economists predict a recession if Trump pursues the plans he has outlined. Trump has regularly disparaged the North American Free Trade Agreement, which took effect in 1994 and has helped Mexican exports grow while attracting far more foreign investment into the country. More than $1 billion worth of exports and imports cross the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border every day.

"I think there will be some tinkering with the U.S. approach to international trade, but I don't see wholesale reversal of U.S. trade policies. There's too much at stake here, and any change on that scale would take years and years," said Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. "I think we're looking at the beginnings of a conversation about where we want to be as a country in our international trade relationships. So we're moving away from a model of free trade and back to a paradigm of managed trade."

Mexicans are also worried about Trump's threats to deport millions of illegal immigrants from the United States.

"This is a very difficult situation; we have to prepare ourselves," said Jeffrey Weldon, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

Raúl Benítez Manaut, a professor at Mexico's National Autonomous University, noted that the Trump victory followed the British vote to leave the European Union and the Colombian vote to scrap a peace plan with left-wing guerrillas. "The traditional parties don't respond to the needs of the people," he said.

The election also reshuffled the deck on Mexico's domestic politics. The country's parties are just getting into campaign mode with a presidential election two years out. Many observers speculated that a nationalist backlash could be expressed in that vote.

"Politically, this will energize politicians tapping into a traditional strain of anti-Washington feelings in Mexico, as leaders are compelled to stand for the dignity of Mexicans in both countries," said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas and the Americas Society, who was an adviser to the Clinton administration in the late 1990s.

Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

Read more

Inside Mexico's bizarre decision to invite Trump

How Mexico secretly launched a crackdown after Penn met 'El Chapo'

On the Mexico border, a surge of migrants ahead of a possible 'Trump Wall'

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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With Trump victory, Mexico's worst fears are realized

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In America's modern history, few U.S. presidents have come to power as openly hostile to their southern neighbor as Donald Trump. His opening campaign salvos - describing Mexican immigrants as criminals or rapists - seemed almost tame by the time he clinched victory, after so many threats to cut off jobs going to Mexico, deport millions of unauthorized immigrants and build a wall on the border.

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For nearly 700 miles along the American border with Mexico, a wall already exists.

It passes through the silt deserts of Sonora, where cacti grow like organ pipes. Farther east, heavy steel X-frames cut through the flat miles of sun-bleached grass like battlefield markers. In Texas, the red-tinged beams that make up parts of the border fence are cold, hard and rough to the touch. In Tijuana, two fences - one old, the other more recent - plunge all the way into the ocean, where waves corrode the stanchioned metal.

The border spans 1,900 miles across four states - California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. Where a fence already stands, the surrounding dirt and grass tell the stories of those who try to cross it, those who patrol it and those who live next to it.

There are old cell phones between the beams. Wind-torn plastic bags with toothpaste and toothbrushes inside. Discarded clothing. Scattered sunflower seeds, spit out by Border Patrol agents sitting in their vehicles as they watch, and watch, and watch.

About 40 miles past Ciudad Juárez, the wall of metal mesh abruptly ends, like a half-finished thought. The remaining border is marked by the Rio Grande. But hundreds of miles in rural Texas, including Big Bend National Park, are unfenced and lack any man-made barriers or walls whatsoever.

In Tijuana, two border fences run the length of the city: one of corrugated metal rusted by time, and another, a few hundred feet away, of dense metal fencing draped in concertina wire.

The walls sweep past homes, highways and parks before plunging into the ocean. One resident recalled a few migrants drowning in the surf while trying to cross, subsumed by the waves.

Build two walls, or three walls, it's not important. Those who want to cross will cross.

Roberto Ramírez, 46, remembers when there was no wall - merely cables running between wooden posts to casually mark the division. Children played soccer in the open fields while parents planted cucumbers and tomatoes. Now, with two walls, he wonders what the point of another would be. The desperation that forces migrants to seek opportunity in the United States won't be stopped with physical barriers, he says, no matter how big - or how numerous - they are.

Like a metal curtain, the wall cuts through the undulating hills of Nogales, a border town where long lines of traffic, both of vehicles and people on foot, make the daily trek from side to side.

The wall here is made of tall steel beams in rows. The current version is new enough that teenagers still remember its construction. Outside of town, the wall slices through the vacant and arid countryside. From a hilltop, the vista is one of division, separating communities on either side.

Jose Pablo Sanchez Carillo

Through each year of my life, this wall has grown. I don't know, it seems like the distance between us just keeps growing.

José Pablo Sanchez Carillo, 18, lives directly beside the wall in the Buenos Aires neighborhood, where he grew up. He bristles at the idea that Mexico will be forced to pay for a new wall. On a recent day, he sat outside with friends, talking about President Trump's promise to bill Mexico for it. "This guy is supposed to be a billionaire, right?" he asked. "Why the hell can't he pay for it himself, then? He's the one who wants it."

Through deserts, mountains and golden pastureland, the border wall transforms from 20-foot hulking metal panels, to battered sheeting along desolate stretches of sand, to X-shaped barriers on the open plains. At times, it disappears in the knuckled ridgelines of border mountains.

About 40 miles outside of Ciudad Juárez, a midpoint along the border, the border fence halts abruptly. Many towns have been emptied by crime and drug trafficking. Elsewhere, rows of wheat and alfalfa fill the farmland along the edge of Mexico. If a new wall comes, farmers wonder what will happen to their fellow Mexicans, and even to Americans who rely on migrant labor.

If the president of the U.S. throws out all of the Mexicans, who will harvest the fields?

Catarino Nuñez, 74, was working his land, preparing to irrigate a field of wheat. He inherited the land from his father, and has worked it for most of his adult life. He recalls when the wall went up behind his parcel, and the effect it had on migration and labor. Migrants passing by on the way to work American fields stopped and helped with his harvest. Now, finding the extra help has grown harder.

In this city of 680,000, the border fence juts up against neighborhoods, playgrounds and $400-a-month apartments. It is a two-story wire-mesh structure atop a concrete slab, with layers of older chain-link fencing in front of it. After school, the ice cream van makes its rounds parallel to the fence on Charles Road.

We're so used to seeing people crossing over that we just see them and say, 'Oh, O.K.'

Mannys Silva Rodriguez, 58, and her husband were in their backyard in a neighborhood known as Chihuahuita when their dog started barking one recent afternoon. As they watched, a group of people on the other side of the border fence hooked a ladder to it and climbed up. Then, three men and a woman used one of the fence beams to slide down while Ms. Rodriguez and her husband, Miguel, worked on their son's pickup truck.

"We could see them jumping over," she said. "We're so used to seeing people crossing over that we just see them and say, 'Oh, OK.'"

Ms. Rodriguez has lived here her entire life. "At first, we were opposed to it," she said of the current wire-mesh fencing, which was built around 2008. "We were so used to all of the greenery from the Rio Grande and the canal. We had the trees and then this came up. We didn't like it at first. But then we got used to it."

A small, colonial town, Guerrero sits on the edge of the Rio Bravo. Though the town has been named a Pueblo Magico - a designation granted by the federal government for its historic preservation and charm - a sense of fear lingers on the streets, thanks to an increase in criminal activity along the border. Residents say armed men and gang members have appeared suddenly in the past five years, seizing farmland.

Guerrero, Coahuila, Mexico

I am actually glad he is building that wall, because maybe it will help undermine all those illegal activities.

Enrique Cervera, 78, the town chronicler in Guerrero works at an archive in City Hall. He recalled a time when Americans came to visit their relatives on Christmas, trips that ceased as violence began to increase in the area. As a historian of sorts, he takes the vow to build a wall in stride, at least when compared to past hostilities with the United States - such as the Mexican-American war, when his nation lost swathes of territory to its northern neighbor.

Reynosa is a place where illegal immigration, drugs and weapons converge. Numerous stores have shut down, and though the main international crossing is busy at all times of day, many residents say the movement across the border has slowed ever since a turf war between cartels struck the city.

Nightclubs used to be full of Americans, and dentists and medical practices were once filled with American patients, residents say. That has changed, but many people here still have relatives, friends or children who live or work in the United States.

Adalberto Josúe Argüelles, Mexico

There would be very very few of us over there if the borders were as protected and surveilled as they are today.

Agustín Ramírez operates tractors in the corn fields on the outskirts of Reynosa. He says he used to be a migrant smuggler and lives a little more than half a mile away from the Rio Bravo, the border with the United States. "We use to swim this river all the time in the old days," he said. "No one cared. No one was watching. That all has changed. Now they catch everyone."

At the edge of this town of 13,000, the border fence lines the Old Hidalgo Pumphouse, a decommissioned water-irrigation facility that is now a museum and birding center. One afternoon behind the pumphouse, teenagers on hoverboards sped by on the biking trail, as residents ordered teriyaki chicken at the nearby Rock & Roll Sushi.

This is basically saying, 'Don't come here. You're not welcome here.'

Selena Aguirre, 20, a student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, stood on the biking trail, pondering the fence here. It was not a cohesive barrier but a jumble of obstacles - a chain-link fence stretching out in the distance on one end, a towering steel-beam fence directly behind the pumphouse with a vehicle-entry gate and an old concrete chest-high wall at the other end.

"It's a metaphor," Ms. Aguirre said as she stood in front of the steel fence. "This isn't a wall and it's not really a fence." She pointed to the chain-link fence and the concrete wall on either end. "That's a fence and that's a wall. This is neither. This is basically saying, 'Don't come here. You're not welcome here.' It's a barbaric way to take care of a situation."

Here in the southernmost point on the border with Mexico, the fence serves as the backdrop of everyday life. It forms the back of bus stops and cuts alongside schools and an old golf course. One day in this city of 180,000, two horses grazed in a rural area while tied to the fence's steel beams - with the border fence as a hitching post.

The fact that the construction and the investment of billions of dollars is going to begin again is almost laughable.

Tony Zavaleta, 69, drove his pick-up truck here on a dirt road. He stopped and looked out toward an empty spit of overgrown brush and trees, with a border fence - a line of vertical spikes atop a solid concrete base. This used to be his late father's land, until the federal government seized it to build the fence during the Bush administration. His family was paid $3,500 for roughly three acres.

"They put the border wall right through the middle of it," he said. "The federal government didn't ask me. They could have made a call, sent a letter. No, they just sued us. It's not a good feeling."

Mr. Zavaleta is opposed to Mr. Trump's wall. "The fact that the construction and the investment of billions of dollars is going to begin again is almost laughable," he said, adding that he preferred the current transparent fencing to any potential solid wall. "When you have a solid wall, there's no question that you have the feeling of being boxed-in."

Produced by Craig Allen, David Furst, Troy Griggs and Derek Watkins

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Azam Ahmed, Manny Fernandez and Paulina Villegas

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Before the Wall: Life Along the U.S.-Mexico Border

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For nearly 700 miles along the American border with Mexico, a wall already exists. It passes through the silt deserts of Sonora, where cacti grow like organ pipes. Farther east, heavy steel X-frames cut through the flat miles of sun-bleached grass like battlefield markers.

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On 22 December, Mr Trump tweeted his desire for the US, under his leadership, to "greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability".

The following morning, the President-elect was given a chance to clarify his position . In typically cautious fashion, Mr Trump told the news anchor Mika Brzezinski: "Let there be an arms race, because we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all."

If Mr Trump were to expand the US' nuclear capability, it would be an unprecedented reversal of the US defence policy of recent decades.

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

2. A climate change sceptic is now head of the Environmental Protection Agency

A number of Trump's cabinet picks have been highly controversial - and none more so than Scott Pruitt, an Attorney General who has spent his political career battling many of Barack Obama's attempts to curb America's sky-high carbon emissions. In his LinkedIn bio, he attacks the agency he is about to take charge of, describing himself as a " a leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda"

Mr Pruitt has sued the Environmental Protection Agency no less than fourteen times. In an article published in May, he stated his belief that the climate change debate is "far from settled".

3. The spike in hate crime has levelled off, but is still above pre-election levels

In the days immediately following Mr Trump's election, the Southern Poverty Law Centre recorded more than 1000 hate crimes. The group said that they would normally expect to see this kind of figure over a six month period.

4. Trump's approval rating has plummeted

The most recent set of opinion polls have indicated that Mr Trump's approval rating has nosedived since the election. Of course, the President-elect was quick to hit back with claims that the polls were "rigged".

The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before.
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 17, 2017

5. The President-elect has threatened to go to war with his own intelligence agencies

More recently, the President-elect has accused the agency of leaking the explosive dossier which alleged that Russia had gathered compromising information on Mr Trump, which Vladimir Putin and his allies are using to influence him.

Mr Trump also (falsely) claimed that his intelligence briefing on Russian hacking had been delayed - and suggested that this was because the CIA needed more time to fabricate "intelligence".

The "Intelligence" briefing on so-called "Russian hacking" was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017

6. The value of the dollar rocketed

The value of the US dollar surged in the weeks after Mr Trump's election, reaching a 14-year high against other currencies in a global index, as the markets reacted to his pro-business campaign promises. Mr Trump's will mark one of the best performances for stocks for any presidential transition period of modern times; the stock market index is up 5.8 per cent since the vote.

7. ...while the Mexican peso crashed to an all time low

Meanwhile, the Mexican economy is badly suffering. Mr Trump's threats to pressure American companies to move factories out of Mexico, impose tariffs on Mexican products, and renegotiate the terms of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement have plunged the peso down to an all-time low against the dollar.

8. The anti-abortion movement is gaining momentum

Mr Trump has repeatedly aligned himself with the pro-life movement, and has said he would like to see Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court ruling which legalised abortion in the US, overturned.

The Century Foundation found that US legislators introduced more than 400 measures aimed at limiting abortion access in 2016. Mr Trump has also threatened to defund Planned Parenthood, the country's largest abortion provider, and is expected to reinstate the global gag rule, a Reagan-era policy which prevents foreign NGOs from receiving any US aid if they offer terminations.

9. Trump has broken a series of campaign promises

Unsurprisingly, the President-elect has already backpedalled on a number of his pledges.

Mr Trump repeatedly told rallies that he would build a "great wall on our southern border" - and that Mexico would pay for its construction. The "great border wall" was one of the most memorable political memes of the entire campaign.

However, Mr Trump was recently forced to admit that he would initially use US taxpayer's money to fund the $14bn dollar project.

He also promised to "drain the swamp" of politicians and corporate power in Washington - but has instead appointed experienced Republicans, Goldman Sachs alumni, and multiple billionaires to the top jobs in his administration.

The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2017

10. Cities across America have said they will refuse to comply with Trump's immigration policy

At least 37 cities across America have said they will not comply with Trump's more aggressive immigration policies. These "sanctuary cities" include liberal centres like San Francisco, New York, and Portland, Oregon.

Mr Trump has vowed to deport three million illegal immigrants on his very first day in office.

11. People have donated millions to activist organisations

Progressive causes have seen a huge spike in donations since Mr Trump's election. Planned Parenthood, whose future is severely threatened by the incoming administration, has received more than 300,000 individual donations in the six weeks since the election, 40 times its normal rate.

Many of these donations - 82,000, to be precise - were made in the name of Mr Trump's staunchly pro-life Vice-President, Mike Pence. Planned Parenthood mail a certificate of thanks to Mr Pence's office every time a donation is made.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has vowed to mount legal challenges to a number of Trump's policy proposals, has also raised $23 million since the election.

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11 things that have happened since Donald Trump's was elected

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On 22 December, Mr Trump tweeted his desire for the US, under his leadership, to "greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability". The following morning, the President-elect was given a chance to clarify his position .

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The number of people applying for asylum in Mexico has soared by more than 150% since Donald Trump was elected US president, as more Central American migrants seek refuge in Mexico rather than take their chances in the United States.

Mexico's refugee agency (Comar) received 5,421 asylum applications between November 2016 and March, a 150% rise from the same period the previous year.

The number of detentions along the south-western US border has fallen about 4% over the same five-month period, as Trump's tough immigration proposals sent a chill through neighbouring countries.

Like the vast majority of Mexico's asylum applicants, many of those detained on the US border come from the violence-plagued "Northern Triangle" of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Meanwhile, the number of Central American families stopped at the US-Mexico border has dropped steadily since Trump's election victory to just over 1,000 in March - a 93% fall from December, according to Department of Homeland Security data.

Trump won the 8 November election after vowing to crack down on illegal immigration by deporting millions and building a wall on the US-Mexico border - measures some Central Americans say have scared them into putting their travel plans on ice.

Fewer Central Americans appear to be entering Mexico. Just less than 15,000 Central Americans were detained by Mexican immigration agents in the first two months of this year - a 27% drop in detentions from the same period in 2016.

This could be a result of Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric or because people are unable to afford the rising fees demanded by coyotes, or people smugglers in the wake of tighter border controls.

The fall in detentions could also be partly explained by the Mexican government has declared intention to use immigration - specifically Mexico's key role in stopping migrants reaching the US border - as a bargaining chip with the Trump administration.

Analysts say that it is too early to say whether Trump's rhetoric has directly influenced the recent upsurge in refugee applications in Mexico.

"The views that people have about a political change, they definitely impact everyone's consciousness," said Cinthia Pérez, a director at Comar.

But even before Trump, more and more people forced to flee the deadly mix of violence, impunity and poverty in the northern triangle were seeking refuge closer to home rather than risk the perilous journey to the US border.

In Mexico, applications have been rising steadily in recent years, with 8,781 applicants in 2016, up from just under 3,500 in 2015.

Pérez said it was not yet fully clear whether the Trump factor was contributing to a rise in asylum applications that stretches back several years. But she said it was a possibility the agency would need to study further by asking applicants more Trump-focused questions.

Comar predicts it could receive over 22,500 asylum applications in 2017, and Perez said she did not believe Trump's arrival at the White House had significantly altered that estimate.

Perez added that Comar's work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other civil society groups in identifying the types of people who could be eligible for asylum had also helped drive up the numbers.

The UNHCR's spokeswoman in Mexico, Francesca Fontanini, said better conditions for Central American migrants arriving in the country, coupled with efforts to reunify families, were also contributing to the jump in the numbers of applicants.
This report includes material from Reuters

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Asylum applications in Mexico have soared 150% since Trump's election

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The number of people applying for asylum in Mexico has soared by more than 150% since Donald Trump was elected US president, as more Central American migrants seek refuge in Mexico rather than take their chances in the United States.

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In this series titled 'Border Project 2017' AFP Photographers have explored the US / Mexico border to capture life on both sides of the fence.

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A day at the world's busiest land border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico

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A day at the world's busiest land border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico

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Europol director Rob Wainwright told BBC News there was an escalating threat worldwide, following Friday's initial cyber-attack.

A virus took control of users' files, demanding payments; Russia and the UK were among the worst-hit countries.

Read more

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Cyber-attack: Firms 'must patch before Monday morning' - BBC News

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Europol director Rob Wainwright told BBC News there was an escalating threat worldwide, following Friday's initial cyber-attack. A virus took control of users' files, demanding payments; Russia and the UK were among the worst-hit countries.

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The United States and Mexico announced they discovered a long tunnel used to smuggle drugs into the U.S.

They said the tunnel began in a restaurant in Mexicali, Mexico and ended about 365 meters away in a new, three-bedroom home in Calexico, California. Calexico is a small city about 193 kilometers east of San Diego. About 40,000 people live there.

American officials say drug traffickers bought land in Calexico for $240,000 in April 2015. They spent $86,000 to build the house, which was completed in December.

The announcement about the tunnel was made after police arrested four people in the U.S. and two in Mexico. Two women were arrested in Arizona, including a person who reportedly bought the property in Calexico.

Police seized 1,350 pounds of marijuana in West Covina, near Los Angeles. Officials say the traffickers began smuggling illegal drugs through the tunnel February 28. Officials say they began watching the criminals when they started using the tunnel.

Laura Duffy is the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California. She said "this house and this tunnel were constructed under the watchful eye of law enforcement. For the builders, the financiers and the operators of these passageways, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. We will seize your drugs and your tunnel before you even have a chance to use it."

Officials say this is the first time they have discovered a completed tunnel in Calexico in 10 years. They say drug gangs usually do not build tunnels into the city because the soil is hard.

Officials say the drug gangs prefer to dig tunnels near San Diego. The clay-like soil there is easier to dig. And the area is near the Mexico border and has many large storage buildings where drug gangs can store drugs.

More than 75 tunnels have been found in the past five years, mostly in California and Arizona. Many of them were not complete. The tunnel between Mexicali and Calexico was the 12th completed tunnel that American anti-drug agents have found along California's border with Mexico since 2006.

Officials say the Sinaloa drug group in Mexico has for many years controlled drug trafficking along the border of California's Imperial Valley. Long, well-built roads, called interstate freeways, let the traffickers easily transport drugs from the Valley to Los Angeles, California and Phoenix, Arizona.

The drug group has been led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. He escaped from a prison in Mexico through a tunnel in July. He was recaptured in January.

I'm Christopher Jones-Cruise.

Christopher Jones-Cruise adapted this story in VOA Learning English from reports by the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies. Kathleen Struck was the editor.
We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section, or visit our Facebook page.
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Words in This Story

tunnel - n. an underground passageway

smuggle - v. to illegally transport drugs or people

drug traffickers - n. criminals who transport illegal drugs

financier - n. a person or group that provides money for projects

light at the end of the tunnel - expression ​hope of success, happiness or help after a long period of difficulty; sign of improvement in a situation that has been bad for a long time

prefer - v. to like (someone or something) better than someone or something else

clay - n. heavy, sticky dirt or earth

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It began at a restaurant in Mexicali, Mexico and ended at a house in a quiet part of Calexico, California. Police have been watching it since it began being used in February. More than 75 tunnels have been found along the border in the last five years.

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Inside US-Mexico border 'drug tunnel' - BBC News

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Security forces in Mexico have discovered an underground tunnel leading to the United States.

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Photographer Charles Ommanney drove nearly 2000 miles along the US-Mexico border from Brownsville, TX to San Diego, CA where he photographed and filmed the border fence, and gathered testimony from US citizens along the border. The result is a unique perspective on the immigration debate through a conceptual exploration of the economic, political, environmental, and humanitarian costs of the construction of this fence.
Charles Ommanney/Getty Images Reportage for MSNBC.com

CREDITS

Director: Charles Ommanney
Photography and Video: Charles Ommanney
Editor and Producer: Andrew Hida
Motion Graphics: Andrew Hida
Executive Producers: Richard Wolffe and Amy Pereira

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They leave their communities and loved ones behind for a better life in the United States. The journey is perilous and survival is not guaranteed. Illegal immigration. Which side of the fence are you on?Walk in the footsteps of these Migrants. 

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They leave their communities and loved ones behind for a better life in the United States. The journey is perilous and survival is not guaranteed. Illegal immigration. Which side of the fence are you on?Walk in the footsteps of these Migrants. 

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Illegal Immigrants Face Dangerous Mexican/US Border — One Story

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They leave their communities and loved ones behind for a better life in the United States. The journey is perilous and survival is not guaranteed. Illegal immigration. Which side of the fence are you on? Walk in the footsteps of these Migrants. Watch Borderland, Sundays only on Al Jazeera America.

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We Took A 2,428-Mile Road Trip Along The Mexico Border: Here’s What We Saw

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The New York Times > Week in Review > Interactive Feature > A Harsh Path of Hope

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"A short documentary about a family divided by the US/Mexico border..."

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"A short documentary about a family divided by the US/Mexico border..."

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A short documentary about a family divided by the US/Mexico border. Abril lives in the US with her 2 year-old son Julián. They are undocumented. Julián's father was deported back to Mexico for a minor traffic violation. In order to see each other, every Sunday Uriel, Abril and Julián travel to the border to spend time together through the wall.

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The reaction to candidates, like the perception of inkblots, helps to divulge the nation's character, underlying disorders and emotional condition. Donald Trump's unexpected victory showed that America had a split personality.

It also revealed that, among his 62 million supporters, rage and fear were over-riding emotions. Make America Great Again not only became a mission statement but a nostalgic catch-all. For many of his white working class supporters, it implied a return to an era when the homeland was more homogenised and the world was less globalised.

The first 100 days of an administration, though in many ways a bogus measure, can also be diagnostic. They can reveal the character of a presidency and set the tone.

Also they are indicative of the health of US democracy: the functioning of its institutions, executive, legislative and judicial; the workability of the US constitution and the dispersion of political, economic and cultural power.

Inauguration day was a celebration for some, a convulsion for others. What is the state of the nation now?

The Character of the Presidency

What has become clear since Donald Trump delivered his inaugural address is that he has changed the presidency more than the presidency has changed him.

The vocabulary of President Trump, if not all his policies, is much the same as that of candidate Trump. To the White House he has brought the same aggression and plain-speaking that characterised his insurgent campaign.

Social media remains his favoured conduit with the American people. Twitter is to Trump what television was to JFK and radio was to FDR. But it is his means of expression, more than the utilisation of a new medium, that marks such a break from the past.

At his inaugural ball he vowed to keep tweeting. By choosing Frank Sinatra's "My Way" for his first dance, he also gave us a musical clue as to how he would govern. Trump would be Trump. The anti-politician had morphed into the anti-president.

His so-far unsubstantiated allegation that Barack Obama ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower - "Bad (or sick) guy!" he tweeted - emphasised how he does not feel bound by presidential protocols or conventions. Here he disdained the longstanding tradition that incumbent presidents avoid savage attacks on their predecessors.

From his ongoing refusal to release his tax returns to his stonewalling of requests to disclose visitor logs at the White House, he has indicated normal rules do not apply to him.

All this continues to horrify his critics but not most of his supporters. They voted for unorthodoxy, and seem to have granted him dispensation to flout norms so long as he delivers results.

And yet, he has received highest marks when he is at his most conventionally presidential.

His speech to the joint session of Congress, which was similar in language and tone to normal State of the Union addresses, was probably the highpoint of his first 100 days. It got far better reviews than his inaugural, both from Republicans and some Democrats.

His decision to strike Syria also trod the path of orthodoxy. Cool-headed and cogent, his late-night statement explaining his decision to strike was also standard presidential fare. Even some of his detractors remarked how in these two moments he truly assumed the mantles of president and commander-in-chief.

Lauded by many Democrats who wished Obama had enforced his red line on chemical weapons, the strike on Syria angered some hardline loyalists.

Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and Michael Cernovich, a self-styled "American nationalist", were dismayed that pictures of dying children moved him so easily and that he acted like a neo-conservative rather than a neo-isolationist. Unsurprisingly perhaps, conformism infuriates the alt-right.

Flip-flops on Syria, Chinese currency manipulation and Nato have made Trump's foreign policy appear erratic and incoherent. The confusion over whether or not his administration continues to support a two-state solution in the Middle East displayed a lack of clarity that perplexed foreign diplomats.

His congratulations to the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan following a referendum granting him more authoritarian powers was markedly different from the cautious reaction of European leaders. Ahead of the French presidential election, Trump said of Marine Le Pen "she's the strongest on borders and she's the strongest on what's been going on in France".

His words, which came close to an endorsement, prompted this shocked response from former Bush speechwriter David Frum: "Collect jaw from floor, reinsert in head."

Had one of his predecessors implied support for a far-right candidate, the political storm would have lasted days, and possibly overshadowed their entire presidency. But the response to Trump's remarks was more like a passing shower. It spoke of how quickly the abnormal has become quotidian under this presidency.

There's an argument to be made that Trump is at his most successful in foreign affairs when he's at his most unpredictable for the simple reason that is when he's most feared. The Assad regime will surely hesitate before ordering another chemical strike.

Nato's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said he's already seeing the effect of Trump's focus on financial burden-sharing within the military alliance. The American aid worker Aya Hijazi was released after three years in detention only when Trump raised her case with President Sisi.

At the United Nations, there's a new focus on reform, especially of peacekeeping operations. This is partly because there is a new reformist Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, but mainly because of the fear that the US, by far the organisation's biggest donor, could pull funding. Trump has brought a fear factor to the American presidency often absent during the Obama years.

Richard Nixon labelled this kind of strategic unpredictability the "Madman Theory," and saw it as an essential diplomatic tool. Communist bloc leaders, the theory went, would not provoke America because of the unpredictability of the president's response. It might be crazed. Nuclear even.

But the fact that Nixon used this approach in Vietnam shows its shortcomings. In the present context, it's a risky approach to apply to North Korea, but the Trump administration clearly believes "the era of strategic patience" towards Kim Jong-un is over, and that sabre rattling will jolt the Beijing into pressuring Pyongyang. The next 100 days, presumably, will tell.

Overall, there's a "good cop bad cop" dynamic to the Trump administration's diplomacy. Mainstream foreign policy types such as Defence Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson adopt the more conventional approach. Trump lends menace, often through his tweets.

Sometimes the very administration seems to have a split personality. Yet the first 100 days have probably yielded more results in the foreign realm than the domestic.

Noticeable in these first 100 days has been the corporatisation of the presidency. There's a chairman-of-the-board feel to his daily routine, with its meetings and photo opportunities that often place him in a leather-backed chair in the presidential boardroom - the West Wing basically has two, the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room - surrounded by corporate chiefs. His cabinet is also packed with fellow billionaires and multi-millionaires.

This raises the question of whether a super-rich president at the head of a super-rich cabinet can remain a working class hero in the all-important Rust Belt. After spending time last week in the Ohio River Valley, which is dotted with derelict steelworks, what struck me was how few of his supporters cared. "No one works for a poor man," said one Trump devotee.

There's a nagging sense one business that's undoubtedly seen an uptick is Trump Inc.

Potential conflicts of interests abound, and it is hard sometimes to differentiate where the presidency ends and the family business begins.

There's been criticism that Trump spends so much time at resorts owned by the Trump Organization. The mixing of business with the presidency could yet be his undoing .

An aim of staffing the administration with so many executives was to vest government with corporate know-how and efficiency. But this presidential start-up has been surprisingly accident-prone, critics would say incompetent.

What has Trump achieved so far?

Has Trump kept his campaign promises?

Seven ways the world has changed since Trump became president

Whether with big-ticket items such as the original travel ban or fairly trivial matters, like misspelling Theresa May's name in a White House memo handed to reporters, it has often shown itself to be slapdash.

Turf battles between hardline figures like Steve Bannon and moderates like Jared Kushner also belie Trump's boast that it is a "fine-tuned machine". David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, has labelled it "a golden age of malfunction".

When a new administration fumbles what should have been a pro-forma presidential statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day you sense there is a problem. When the White House spokesman claims that Hitler did not use chemical weapons against his own people, it suggests it has lost the historical plot.

These last examples showed not only a disregard for detail but also an apparent disdain for truth. The first 100 days has produced a litany of falsehoods. A scorecard compiled by the website Politifact found that of Trump's statements 69% were either mostly false, false or "pants on fire".

Alternative facts: Kellyanne Conway was lampooned when she first used this Orwellian-sounding phrase, but it perfectly captured the twilight zone of truth often found at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Under Donald Trump, the White House is no longer a reliable source.

Victories are often lost in the swirl of controversy. Illegal crossings over the southern border have fallen sharply, by 40% during the first month of Trump's presidency, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

That's the steepest decline since 2009. With immigration arrests up by almost a third in the first month, there's a feeling among his supporters that he is delivering on his pledge to protect America's border, even if construction has not yet started on his famed wall.

Trump would argue he has already made the homeland safer.

A by-product of Trump's troubled presidential launch has been to burnish the reputations of his predecessors. For Democrats, the idolatry of Barack Obama gathers pace. George Herbert Walker Bush, recently ailing in hospital, has become even more of a revered national elder.

His son, George W, the one-time Toxic Texan, has been subject to some speedy historical revisionism. Not only has his newly published collection of portraits of wounded warriors won acclaim, as a work of the hand and the heart, his reported remarks at Trump's inauguration - "That was some weird sh**" - have come close to making him a folk hero of the left.

Might Trump one day be subject to this kind of reassessment? The hostile commentary on him is similar to the scorn heaped on Ronald Reagan. Yet the movie star president is now widely seen as the leader who, by winning the Cold War, ended America's long national nightmare after Vietnam and Watergate.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was pilloried as a racist vulgarian, but nonetheless enacted transformative legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, dismantling segregation, and launching Medicare.

History remembers John F Kennedy's early presidency for the elegance of his inaugural address and the photogenic beauty of his New Frontier, but his first months in office were full of missteps.

They included the Bay of Pigs, a string of congressional setbacks and a disastrous summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, which emboldened the Soviet leader to build the Berlin Wall. While Trump cannot yet boast much of a record of accomplishment in these first 100 days, there are still 1361 to go.

Checks and Balances

A "civics lesson from hell" was how the Harvard academic Louis Menand described the contested aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, with its hanging chads, thwarted recounts and litigation. Not since the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Bush versus Gore has the US constitution faced such a stress test.

Now, as then, we have learned where power in America truly lies, and how the checks and balances hard-wired into the US system operate in practice.

Donald Trump's executive power has continually been constrained. After signing that early executive order banning entrants from seven mainly-Muslim countries, the courts intervened to block him.

It was an early constitutional test. But although Trump railed against the "so-called judges" who thwarted him, using unusually vehement language, his administration abided by the court's decision and kept within the law. With the checks and balances working as the founding fathers intended, a constitutional crisis was averted.

With Trumpcare, it wasn't the courts that blocked Trump but Congress. As he sought to repeal and replace Obamacare, Trump could not even secure a simple majority in a House of Representatives under Republican control.

Had his healthcare proposals cleared that hurdle in the lower house, parts of the reform package would have run into trouble in the Senate. There the Republicans also enjoy a majority but not one big enough to enact bills into law without bipartisan support. With the legislative branch restraining the executive branch, again the constitution worked as intended.

The Republican leadership, frustrated by these checks, successfully removed one of them: the use of the filibuster in blocking nominees to America's highest court - in this instance, Trump's nominee Neil Gorsuch.

This did not involve an amendment to the constitution, rather a revision of Senate rules, but it was nonetheless momentous. This nuclear option, as it is called, delivered a clear win for the president: the elevation of Judge Gorsuch to the bench. However, the filibuster remains intact to block his legislative agenda, and Democrats will use it to thwart Trump.

In recent years, as Washington has become more ungovernable, there's been a growing literature about the inoperability of the constitution, and how its checks and balances have acted more like spanners in the works.

Just as Republicans, the great practitioners of the politics of No, used the constitution to stymie Barack Obama, Democrats are relying upon it to impede Donald Trump. For them, the constitution must now seem timeless and timely. A number of Democrats have told me that the genius of the Founding Fathers was to anticipate this kind of presidency.

In these first 100 days, we have been reminded of the power of states and municipalities. We have seen an inversion of the doctrine of states' rights. For decades, states' rights was the battle-cry of white supremacists determined to uphold segregation in defiance of federal court orders demanding integration. Now progressive states are using this principle.

Some of the biggest cities in the country, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC, are wilfully obstructing Trump's immigration crackdown. Thus, sanctuary cities have become to the progressive left what segregationist citadels were to the racist right, emblematic battlefields in a tug of war between local government and the federal government.

Similar battle-lines have been marked out over climate change.

Protest power has also emerged as a significant force, as something akin to a national passion play has unfolded on the streets. The sea of pink pussy hats at the massive woman's marches on the first weekend of the presidency vividly highlighted a new sense of personal political empowerment: people ready to take matters into their own hands.

The speed at which demonstrators congregated at US airports in the immediate aftermath of the ban surely had an emboldening effect on the state attorneys general who successfully challenged it in the courts.

The death certificate of Trumpcare may have been signed in the House of Representatives, but mortal wounds were inflicted in those angry town meetings, which alarmed Republican lawmakers. Maybe one of the reasons President Donald Trump has not yet returned to Trump Tower in Manhattan is the fear of massive demonstrations in the city of his birth.

For the past eight years, popular anger was on the right of US politics. Now it is on the left. The pertinent political question over the coming years will be to what extent the Democratic Party can harness this street agitation.

Will there be a Tea-Party-style mobilisation of progressives that translates into real political power? Or are opponents of Donald Trump pinning more faith in pressure groups than the Democratic Party?

100 Voters for 100 Days

Five ways Trump has changed the US

What executive actions has Trump taken?

The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has witnessed a fundraising bonanza. The ACLU raked in $24m (£18.7m) in online donations the weekend after the first travel ban, six times the amount it normally raises in a year.

Constrained by Congress, the courts and his own party, so far this has not been an imperial presidency, the phrase coined by the historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr to describe the Nixon White House, which was accused, even before the Watergate break-in, of pushing constitutional bounds.

Rather it has been an inhibited presidency, in which Donald Trump has been made all too aware of the limits of his executive power.

Economy, Business and Culture

Donald Trump's promise to Make America Great Again was primarily an economic pledge, and there were early signs of a Trump Bump on Wall Street and Main Street.

Just three trading days after the new president took the oath of office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average broke through the 20,000 mark for the first time in its history. Investors expected him to slash corporate taxes and set fire to business regulations. Not since 2000, a report suggested last month, has consumer confidence been so buoyant.

This rosy soft data has not been matched by hard economic data. The US economy added just 98,000 jobs in March, almost half of what some economists expected. Industrial production and housing starts were lower than expected.

Retail sales, which should have risen with consumer confidence, actually fell by 0.2% in March, their first decline in over a year. The markets, having watched the healthcare debacle, are no longer so confident Trump can deliver lower corporate tax rates and a $1tn infrastructure spend. Barron's, the weekly financial newspaper, recently opined: "Trump bump, we hardly knew ye."

As for the impact of Trump's "Buy American, Hire American" doctrine, it is too early to judge. Industry groups have voiced concerns it will raise costs, making it prohibitively expensive to build the new bridges and roads. The tech sector is worried Hire American policies will block or discourage high-skilled immigrants. The tourism industry is reporting a "Trump Slump," because of the off-putting effect of the travel ban and its author.

After signalling his willingness to name and shame corporations accused of exporting US jobs abroad or stiffing the federal government, there's evidence it has had a chastening effect. Presumably, no senior executive of a publicly traded company wants to reach for their smartphone in the morning to find their name on his Twitter feed, if only because of the effect it can have on the share price.

Boeing, a company that Trump shamed publicly during the transition, says it's made progress with the administration over bringing down the costs of the replacement for Air Force One. The Trump administration also claims to have created jobs by pressuring major corporations to invest in new American plants.

Most of these expansion plans were in place, however, before Barack Obama left office.

That's true of Ford's Michigan investment, ExxonMobil's Gulf Coast expansion, and Intel's Arizona plant, all of which were touted by the administration as totems of Trumpism.

Arguably, the main effect of his self-congratulatory tweets about saving US jobs has been political rather than economic.

It has persuaded blue-collars voters that this billionaire populist is battling on their behalf. As for his tweets lambasting business? They've created a love/fear relationship with the corporate sector, which welcomes his deregulation and proposed tax cuts but not necessarily his efforts to rollback globalisation.

One sector that has undoubtedly benefited from a Trump bump is the media. The New York Times and Washington Post have seen subscriptions soar. CNN, a network of which obituaries were being written only a few years ago, is enjoying a ratings windfall. Twitter, whose once stagnant user numbers have risen, is finally winning again.

Despite high-profile exits, Fox News remains the most influential news channel in America, if only because its breakfast show Fox and Friends is what Trump watches in the morning.

Overall, the response of the US journalistic community to Trump's presidency has been to become more adversarial. Reporters like Jim Acosta, anchors like Jake Tapper, and even mild-mannered Wolf Blitzer have adopted a more hard-edged approach. The New York Times has replaced bland headlines with more judgmental wording.

A headline three days into his presidency signalled its new approach: "Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers."

Elsewhere, cultural lines are being blurred, an inevitable response perhaps to a president who turned politics in a new reality show genre. Comedians, faced with the dilemma of satirising a self-satirising White House, have adopted a more journalistic persona. John Oliver and Samantha Bee mix gags with serious reportage, much of it directed against Trump.

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Stephen Colbert, who struggled at first as David Letterman's successor after shedding his mock right-wing persona, may overtake apolitical Jimmy Fallon in the late-night ratings.

The mimicry of Alec Baldwin and the casting of Melissa McCarthy as Sean "Spicey" Spicer has once again made SNL appointment viewing.

In the arts, the expectation is that Trump will produce a burst of creativity, in line with the "Take your broken heart, make it into art" plea from Meryl Streep at this year's Golden Globes. But much of that art, whether paintings, screenplays or novels, may still be unfinished.

Just as we await the great Trump-era movie - a Doctor Strangelove, The Deer Hunter or Wall Street - there's not yet been a great Trump-inspired novel. For now, literary classics are filling the void. George Orwell's 1984, with an assist from Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts", rose to the top of bestseller lists.

Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which imagines as president Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who became the spokesman of the America First Committee in the early years of World War II, has also enjoyed a revival. Hulu is streaming a dramatisation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which imagines a totalitarian America.

On Broadway, a stage adaptation of 1984 is in the works. Then there has been the unexpected success of Come From Away, a feel good 9/11 musical of all things, which tells the story of the nearly 7,000 airline passengers stranded in Gander, Newfoundland, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Foot-tapping and tear-jerking, the show is all about making outsiders feel at home. Rather pointedly, the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took Ivanka Trump to see it.

Next month unveils the fifth season of House of Cards, but in the wake of accusations of Russian meddling, its plotlines, once considered so outlandish, now seem more run-of-the-mill, a case perhaps of life overtaking art.

Two Americas

To journey from the major coastal cities into the American heartland feels right now like travelling between different countries. There has long been two Americas, one that favours pick-up trucks over Prius hybrids, Walmart over Whole Foods, Duck Dynasty over This American Life. This age of Trump, as well as accentuating those divisions, has brought with it new identifying markers.

Do you wear a scarlet Make America Great Again baseball cap or a pink woollen hat? Would you buy an Ivanka Trump dress? Do you agree with Alex Jones, the host of the far-right Infowars, or Van Jones, CNN's leading pundit? Or, more simply, do you have faith in the president? Increasingly, how you respond to Trump determines which America you inhabit.

Barack Obama entered office vowing to bring together red and blue state America, though he was a deeply polarising figure who singularly failed in that endeavour. Donald Trump has not tried particularly hard to be a unifying figure.

His travel largely has been to states that voted for him. Many of his appearances outside the White House and Mar-a-Lago have essentially been campaign rallies. His Attorney General Jeff Sessions, angry that a judge had challenged the latest travel ban, even referred to Hawaii, which achieved statehood in 1959, as "an island in the Pacific".

My own travels around the country, mainly into the Bible and Rust Belt, suggest he remains strong in the regions that sent him to the White House. Last week on the Ohio River Valley, businessmen told me how the Trump Bump is for real. They see it on their balance sheets, with the relaxation of Environmental Protection Agency rules over coal often cited as the reason for the turnaround.

Many Rust Belt voters continue to adore Trump because liberals hate him so. They voted for the billionaire partly to punch sneering bicoastal liberals in the nose. They are enjoying the sight of elite blood being shed in such quantities.

Because of the shadow cast by the Russian allegations, these first 100 days have sometimes felt like the final days of an ailing administration. Trump is routinely cast as a modern-day Richard Nixon. Yet while it is difficult sometimes to see how this administration can remain viable in its present form, it is harder to imagine how it would be brought to a premature end.

Barring some catastrophic revelation emerging from the FBI's investigation into Team Trump's alleged links with the Kremlin or some massive financial scandal, the Republican leadership is unlikely to move against him. In the unlikely event that it launched impeachment proceedings, here the constitution is his friend.

It is hard to dislodge an incumbent president.

The Founding Fathers, who came up with a governing model that has constrained Trump, also came up with an electoral model, the Electoral College, which has already helped him and may do so again. That will be true if the Rust Belt remains a stronghold.

My overwhelming sense, based on the popular vote in November and opinion polls since, is that more Americans are anti-Trump than pro.

But my sense also is that many blue-collar battlers remain fiercely loyal. So to write him off would be to repeat the same analytical mistake commentators have made since he first announced for the presidency, that of underestimation.

For while Democrats regard their new president as a national embarrassment, many of his supporters continue to view him as a potential national saviour.

One hundred days into a presidency the like of which this country has never seen before, the state of the union is disunion.

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100 days: America in a time of Trump - BBC News

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Trump's election was a celebration for some, a calamity for others. What's the state of the nation now?

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A Mexican man has apparently taken his own life just half an hour after being deported from the United States.

Guadalupe Olivas Valencia, 45, jumped from a bridge at the border after he was deported for the third time.

He was found unconscious next to a plastic bag with his belongings and died in hospital a short while later.

His death came as the Trump administration issued new guidelines to widen the net for deporting illegal immigrants from the US.

Witnesses said Mr Olivas was shouting that he did not want to return to Mexico and seemed to be in severe distress.

He jumped off a bridge just yards from El Chaparral, the main border crossing point between the US city of San Diego and Tijuana in Mexico.

Local media said a plastic bag like those US customs officers put migrants' belongings in was next to the man.

Mexican officials said it was the third time Mr Olivas had been deported from the US.

He died of a heart attack and concussion.

Mr Olivas was a native of Sinaloa, one of Mexico's most violent states and the stronghold of a major drug cartel.

Many Mexicans cite violence as a reason for leaving for the US.

The US released two memos on Tuesday aimed at speeding up the removal of undocumented migrants.

One memo, from Homeland Security chief John Kelly, includes instructions to enforce an existing provision of the US Immigration and Nationality Act that allows authorities to send some people caught illegally at the border back to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.

It is unclear whether the US has authority to force Mexico to accept foreigners.

But Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said Mexico would not accept the "unilateral" immigration proposals.

Mr Kelly and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson are due to arrive in Mexico later on Wednesday.

Mr Videgaray said the new border guidelines would now be the main point for discussion during those meetings.

He also said Mexico would take legal action to defend the rights of Mexican citizens abroad, and take the issue to the UN if necessary.

An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the US, many of them from Mexico. US President Donald Trump made immigration and border control a key part of his campaign.

Read more from BBC News on the Trump administration and immigration:

How an updated executive order expected soon from President Trump will attempt to revive the travel ban struck down by the courts

National Park Service police are investigating after a giant "Refugees Welcome" banner was illegally attached to the Statue of Liberty

More on the border crisis

"I'm afraid to open the door" - Living in fear of US deportation raids

"All my life is in the US" - Sent "home" to a Mexico that feels like a foreign country

Ever wondered where exactly undocumented immigrants live in the US?

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Mexican man kills himself after being deported from US - BBC News

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He jumped off the bridge linking the US and Mexico after he was deported for the third time.

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Mexico has condemned new guidelines issued by the United States, under which almost all illegal immigrants can be subject to deportation.

The new rules include sending undocumented people to Mexico, even if they are not Mexicans.

But Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray says his country cannot "accept unilateral decisions imposed by one government on another."

Two top US officials are in Mexico to discuss the measures.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the head of Homeland Security, John Kelly, will hold talks with President Enrique Pena Nieto, amid one of the most serious rifts between the two neighbours in recent years.

Mexico anger ahead of Tillerson visit

US widens net for immigrant deportation

What is changing?

The changes announced on Tuesday include plans to enforce an existing provision of the US Immigration and Nationality Act that allows authorities to send illegal immigrants back to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.

But it is unclear whether the US has authority to force Mexico to accept foreigners.

The Obama government focused on deporting immigrants convicted of serious crimes.

Now, the new priorities are broad enough to apply to almost any illegal immigrant, including anyone who has been charged with a crime, misrepresented themselves, poses a risk to public safety, or "abused any programme related to receipt of public benefits".

The new guidelines also allow Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport people immediately.

Expedited deportations can now be used against undocumented immigrants anywhere in the US, who are unable to prove they have been in the country for more than two years.

Previously, expedited removals were applied to people who had been in the country for less than two weeks and were within 100 miles of the border.

An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the US, many of them from Mexico.

Read more on the Trump administration and immigration:

Is the US on a new deportation drive?

A Mexican man killed himself, hours after being deported from the US

How an updated executive order from President Trump will attempt to revive the travel ban struck down by the courts

National Park Service police are investigating after a giant "Refugees Welcome" banner was illegally attached to the Statue of Liberty

What has Mexico said?

Mr Videgaray said on Wednesday that Mexico would not accept the new rules. "We are not going to accept that because we don't have to and it is not in the interest of Mexico."

"We also have control of our borders and we will exercise it fully," he added.

He said his country was prepared to go to the United Nations to defend the freedoms and rights of Mexicans under international law.

Roberto Campa, head of the human rights department of Mexico's interior ministry, said the plan to deport non-Mexicans to Mexico was "hostile" and "unacceptable".

Relations between the US and Mexico have been tense under Mr Trump, who has said Mexico will pay for a wall he wants to build on the southern border, expected to cost billions of dollars.

Last month, Mr Pena Nieto cancelled a planned meeting with the US president in Washington over disagreements over the wall.

What has the US said?

President Donald Trump made immigration and border control a key part of his campaign.

The government said the new guidelines would not usher in mass deportations, but were designed to empower agents to enforce laws already on the books.

Earlier, in Guatemala, Mr Kelly reinforced that the measures did not signal mass deportations.

"We will be looking primarily at criminal offenders first. But there will be no mass round-ups, and when we do take someone into custody, they're then put into the American legal justice system, that's the courts, and the courts will decide what'll happen to them," he told reporters.

Despite the tensions, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said on Wednesday that the relationship with Mexico was "phenomenal right now".

He said he expected a "great discussion" between US and Mexican officials. The talks are expected to also include drug trafficking and the North American Free Trade Agreement, among other issues.

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Mexico has condemned new guidelines issued by the United States, under which almost all illegal immigrants can be subject to deportation. The new rules include sending undocumented people to Mexico, even if they are not Mexicans. But Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray says his country cannot "accept unilateral decisions imposed by one government on another."

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Among Grassani's subjects were a large group of Central Americans, walking hundreds of miles from homes in Guatemala and Honduras to the US:

"They were very strong at the beginning, walking like crazy. I spent four days with them - day by day you could see them getting tired because they had no food, nothing with them."

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Among Grassani's subjects were a large group of Central Americans, walking hundreds of miles from homes in Guatemala and Honduras to the US: "They were very strong at the beginning, walking like crazy. I spent four days with them - day by day you could see them getting tired because they had no food, nothing with them."

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President Donald Trump has issued an executive order for an "impassable physical barrier" to be built along the US border with Mexico.

He also signed an action to strip funds from US cities that are sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants.

Mr Trump said in a TV interview with ABC News that Mexico would "absolutely, 100%" reimburse the US for his wall.

But Congress would have to approve funding for the structure, which is estimated to cost billions of dollars.

Building a 2,000-mile barrier along the Mexican border was one of Mr Trump's key pledges in the election campaign.

Trump starts a 'sanctuary city' war

How realistic is Donald Trump's Mexico wall?

What executive actions has Trump taken?

What Mexico said about Trump's wall plan

What did Trump say?

He spoke of a "crisis" on the southern US border as he signed the directives during a ceremony at the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday.

The orders also called for hiring 10,000 immigration officials to help boost border patrol efforts.

"A nation without borders is not a nation," he said. "Beginning today the United States gets back control of its borders."

Mr Trump said relations with Mexico - whose President Enrique Pena Nieto he is scheduled to meet at the end of the month - would get "better".

A ban on some Muslim-majority countries

The executive orders are among a flurry expected on national and border security this week.

Mr Trump is next expected to announce immigration restrictions from seven African and Middle Eastern countries.

An eight-page document that appears to be a draft executive order has been obtained by various US media and the BBC.

It suggests Mr Trump will suspend the Syrian refugee programme indefinitely and the wider refugee programme for four months.

The president also plans to suspend issuing visas from unnamed countries deemed to pose a threat to the security of the US.

Immigration lawyers have told the BBC they believe those countries are Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.

But the White House has refused to comment on the document, and it may be revised before being signed.

Mr Trump backed off an early campaign pledge to ban all Muslims from entering the US.

What are sanctuary cities?

The term applies to cities in the US that have policies in place to limit the assistance given to federal immigration authorities.

It got traction in the 1980s after Los Angeles told its police force to stop questioning people solely to determine their immigration status in 1979.

And in 1989, San Francisco passed an order that prohibited the use of city funds to enforce federal immigration laws.

Now there are hundreds of these areas - they are not always cities - and they include San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Austin and Boston

Trump's order to block federal grants could cost these cities millions of dollars. But the administration may face legal challenges, given that some federal courts have backed cities that say they cannot hold immigrants beyond their jail term at the say-so of federal authorities.

On Wednesday, Mr Trump was joined by parents whose children, he said, had been "horribly killed by individuals living here illegally".

He read out their names and invited the parents to stand.

"For years the media has largely ignored the stories of Americans and lawful residents victimised by open borders," he added.

'Mexico is going to pay for wall'

Earlier on Wednesday, Mr Trump told ABC News he would recoup costs of the wall from Mexico.

"There will be a payment. It will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form," he said.

Mr Trump has previously estimated the wall would cost $8bn (£6.4bn), but critics have said it could be nearly double that sum.

Earlier on Wednesday, Mr Trump also promised a "major investigation into voter fraud".

He tweeted that the inquiry would focus on those registered to vote in two states and dead registered voters.

This week he claimed that between three and five million illegal immigrants had voted for Hillary Clinton, but offered no evidence.

Mexicans see wall as racist - Will Grant, BBC News, Mexico City

Mexicans might disagree about a lot - especially on the political and economic direction of the country.

But if there is one thing around which almost all of Mexico can coalesce, it is their profound opposition to the US border wall.

From the Mexican side of the border, it is seen as a policy which is intended to break up families and prevent ordinary people from looking for seasonal work in the north - the kinds of jobs, they note, which prop up the US economy.

Others go further, and consider the entire border wall to be a racist and xenophobic policy.

Either way, Mexicans from the president's office to the factory floor agree that the country will not pay for a wall they don't want and didn't call for.

They say they won't finance the project either at the time of building or in the future.

That's not to say some Mexicans aren't in favour of changes to immigration.

Many are aware of the risks that their countrymen take by crossing illegally into the US, especially through dangerous border regions such as the Arizona desert.

Rather than a wall with their neighbour to the north though, they want to see comprehensive immigration reform including guest worker programmes and temporary work visas.

The view from the border - James Cook, BBC News, San Diego

President Trump's Great Wall faces formidable legal, diplomatic and logistical obstacles.

Even some border patrol agents say privately that they are not sure that the project is possible.

They do, however, welcome planned increases in resources and staffing.

But here in San Diego on the southern border of the United States, there is much fear in the shadows.

President Trump's action on immigration is bold, sweeping - and intensely divisive.

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President Donald Trump has issued an executive order for an "impassable physical barrier" to be built along the US border with Mexico. He also signed an action to strip funds from US cities that are sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants. Mr Trump said in a TV interview with ABC News that Mexico would "absolutely, 100%" reimburse the US for his wall.

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Broken lives of immigrants deported from US to Mexico - BBC News

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The hidden life of an undocumented US immigrant

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US election 2016: Life on the US-Mexico border - BBC News

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Start Of Mexican American Gangs In Los Angeles

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What does it mean to be Mexican-American?

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Subscribe to BBC News www.youtube.com/bbcnews More than 30 million Americans trace their roots back to Mexico - but what does it mean to be Mexican-American? Subscribe to BBC News HERE http://bit.ly/1rbfUog Check out our website: http://www.bbc.com/news Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bbcnews Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/bbcworld Instagram: http://instagram.com/bbcnews

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In a remote town in northern Mexico, a 10-year-old-boy is struggling with his homework. His name is Oscar Castellanos, and the fifth-grader is getting extra help from his father because he's having trouble adjusting to his new school.

The student enrolled at Leona Vicario Elementary in the town of Cananea is technically a foreigner in his father's land. Oscar was born in Arizona and is a U.S. citizen. He recites the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance by memory without hesitation. His English accent is that of a boy raised in the American Southwest.

Oscar's family moved back to Mexico after the state of Arizona approved some of the toughest immigration laws in the United States. Now they live in Cananea, a mining town of 30,000, about 35 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

When asked whether it's been difficult to adjust to life in Mexico, his answer is "kind of." Pressed to elaborate, he adds that one of his main challenges is having "to speak another language."

Oscar says he misses the abundance of books available to him in U.S. schools. In Mexico, textbooks are free, but finding additional reading material is often a challenge, especially in a provincial town that's a 23-hour drive from Mexico City.

Oscar's 6-year-old sister, Angie, also is an American citizen. Just like her brother, she was born in Tucson, the second largest city in Arizona, with a population of just over a half a million people.

When asked about the things she misses about the United States, she mentions "the stores, bigger houses and parks."

The children's parents, Oscar and Maria Castellanos, lived in Arizona for 13 years as undocumented immigrants, doing all kinds of odd jobs to survive and provide for their children. They had managed to buy a house and a car when the law, known as SB1070, was passed in April 2010.

The state law originally authorized police to arrest undocumented immigrants without warrant, if there were probable cause to believe that they had committed offenses that could lead to their deportation. It made being in Arizona without immigration or government identification documents a state crime. And it banned unauthorized immigrants from seeking work.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down those provisions in June but let stand a further clause that allows police to check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws, but by then, the Castellanoses had gone.

Maria, 44, says they finally made the decision to return to their country to protect their mental sanity. "We would feel persecuted and harassed. We felt bad. It was nerve-wracking, especially when we had to go outside to go to work."

For Oscar, 41, the most difficult part was to abandon everything they had worked so long to build. They left their three-bedroom house and sold their Volkswagen Touareg SUV.

Now they live in a two-bedroom house and drive a Tsuru, an economy Nissan sedan not sold in the United States. "It was difficult, because we had everything there. We had to leave everything behind and return to Mexico. It was difficult," Oscar says.

Oscar Castellanos says they endured years of living in fear in the U.S. but also hoped they were building a better life for their children.

It's nearly impossible to estimate how many Mexican immigrants went back home after states like Alabama and Georgia also pushed legislation to crack down on illegal immigration, following in Arizona's footsteps.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, net migration from Mexico to the United States fell to zero or less from 2005 to 2010.

This means the number of immigrants entering the United States is likely equal or smaller than the number leaving, although, the study adds, some left the U.S. unwillingly: They were deported.

In Mexico, Angie Castellanos sings her ABCs in English to her family. She has yet to learn them in Spanish.

The Castellanos family is among the fortunate ones. Oscar was able to find a job as a miner just a few months after returning to his hometown in northern Mexico. Maria is managing a restaurant, and both kids are enrolled in school.

Maria has been helping Angie with her Spanish while Oscar teaches math to his son.

Both parents say they try not to think about what might have been, while the children frequently seem to miss the life they had across the border.

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mexicans feeling persecuted flee u.s. - cnn.com

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By Rafael Romo, Senior Latin American Affairs Editor

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Mexicans feeling persecuted flee U.S. - CNN.com

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A family of undocumented workers tells how they fled the U.S. feeling persecucted by new state immigration laws.

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Donald Trump plans to construct a border wall with Mexico to cut the number of illegal immigrants. This is how the border looks now.

19 Photos

1.

A gap in the U.S.-Mexico border fence is pictured in El Paso, Texas, Jan. 17, 2017.

The great wall on the U.S.-Mexico border that President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail took a big step closer to becoming reality when he signed two executive orders aimed at curbing illegal immigration on Jan. 25.

The executive actions include redirecting existing Homeland Security money to erect what the administration described as a "very large" wall on the southern border with Mexico.

4.

A woman talks to her relatives across a fence separating Mexico and the United States, in Tijuana, Mexico, Nov. 12, 2016.

In January, Trump said the building project would initially be paid for with a congressionally approved spending bill and Mexico would eventually reimburse the U.S., though he has not specified how he would guarantee payments.

Trump will meet with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto at the White House in late January.

5.

A gap in the U.S.-Mexico border fence is seen outside Jacumba, California, on Oct. 7, 2016.

In claiming authority to build a wall, Trump may rely on a 2006 law that authorized several hundred miles of fencing along the 2,000-mile frontier. That bill led to the construction of about 700 miles of various kinds of fencing designed to block both vehicles and pedestrians.

The Secure Fence Act was signed by then-President George W. Bush and the majority of the fencing in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California was built before he left office. The last remnants were completed after President Barack Obama took office in 2009.

9.

Wooden crosses are placed on the border fence in memory of migrants who died crossing into the U.S., in Nogales, Mexico, on Nov. 10, 2016.

Other executive actions expected Wednesday include bolstering border patrol agents and ending what Republicans have argued is a catch-and-release system at the border. Currently, some immigrants caught crossing the border illegally are given notices to report back to immigration officials at a later date.

If Trump's actions would result in those caught being immediately jailed, the administration would have to grapple with how to pay for jail space to detain everyone and what to do with children caught crossing the border with their parents.

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Here's What the U.S.-Mexico border looks like before Trump's wall

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Donald Trump plans to construct a border wall with Mexico to cut the number of illegal immigrants. This is how the border looks now.

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For nearly 700 miles along the American border with Mexico, a wall already exists.

It passes through the silt deserts of Sonora, where cacti grow like organ pipes. Farther east, heavy steel X-frames cut through the flat miles of sun-bleached grass like battlefield markers. In Texas, the red-tinged beams that make up parts of the border fence are cold, hard and rough to the touch. In Tijuana, two fences - one old, the other more recent - plunge all the way into the ocean, where waves corrode the stanchioned metal.

The border spans 1,900 miles across four states - California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. Where a fence already stands, the surrounding dirt and grass tell the stories of those who try to cross it, those who patrol it and those who live next to it.

There are old cell phones between the beams. Wind-torn plastic bags with toothpaste and toothbrushes inside. Discarded clothing. Scattered sunflower seeds, spit out by Border Patrol agents sitting in their vehicles as they watch, and watch, and watch.

About 40 miles past Ciudad Juárez, the wall of metal mesh abruptly ends, like a half-finished thought. The remaining border is marked by the Rio Grande. But hundreds of miles in rural Texas, including Big Bend National Park, are unfenced and lack any man-made barriers or walls whatsoever.

In Tijuana, two border fences run the length of the city: one of corrugated metal rusted by time, and another, a few hundred feet away, of dense metal fencing draped in concertina wire.

The walls sweep past homes, highways and parks before plunging into the ocean. One resident recalled a few migrants drowning in the surf while trying to cross, subsumed by the waves.

Build two walls, or three walls, it's not important. Those who want to cross will cross.

Roberto Ramírez, 46, remembers when there was no wall - merely cables running between wooden posts to casually mark the division. Children played soccer in the open fields while parents planted cucumbers and tomatoes. Now, with two walls, he wonders what the point of another would be. The desperation that forces migrants to seek opportunity in the United States won't be stopped with physical barriers, he says, no matter how big - or how numerous - they are.

Like a metal curtain, the wall cuts through the undulating hills of Nogales, a border town where long lines of traffic, both of vehicles and people on foot, make the daily trek from side to side.

The wall here is made of tall steel beams in rows. The current version is new enough that teenagers still remember its construction. Outside of town, the wall slices through the vacant and arid countryside. From a hilltop, the vista is one of division, separating communities on either side.

Jose Pablo Sanchez Carillo

Through each year of my life, this wall has grown. I don't know, it seems like the distance between us just keeps growing.

José Pablo Sanchez Carillo, 18, lives directly beside the wall in the Buenos Aires neighborhood, where he grew up. He bristles at the idea that Mexico will be forced to pay for a new wall. On a recent day, he sat outside with friends, talking about President Trump's promise to bill Mexico for it. "This guy is supposed to be a billionaire, right?" he asked. "Why the hell can't he pay for it himself, then? He's the one who wants it."

Through deserts, mountains and golden pastureland, the border wall transforms from 20-foot hulking metal panels, to battered sheeting along desolate stretches of sand, to X-shaped barriers on the open plains. At times, it disappears in the knuckled ridgelines of border mountains.

About 40 miles outside of Ciudad Juárez, a midpoint along the border, the border fence halts abruptly. Many towns have been emptied by crime and drug trafficking. Elsewhere, rows of wheat and alfalfa fill the farmland along the edge of Mexico. If a new wall comes, farmers wonder what will happen to their fellow Mexicans, and even to Americans who rely on migrant labor.

If the president of the U.S. throws out all of the Mexicans, who will harvest the fields?

Catarino Nuñez, 74, was working his land, preparing to irrigate a field of wheat. He inherited the land from his father, and has worked it for most of his adult life. He recalls when the wall went up behind his parcel, and the effect it had on migration and labor. Migrants passing by on the way to work American fields stopped and helped with his harvest. Now, finding the extra help has grown harder.

In this city of 680,000, the border fence juts up against neighborhoods, playgrounds and $400-a-month apartments. It is a two-story wire-mesh structure atop a concrete slab, with layers of older chain-link fencing in front of it. After school, the ice cream van makes its rounds parallel to the fence on Charles Road.

We're so used to seeing people crossing over that we just see them and say, 'Oh, O.K.'

Mannys Silva Rodriguez, 58, and her husband were in their backyard in a neighborhood known as Chihuahuita when their dog started barking one recent afternoon. As they watched, a group of people on the other side of the border fence hooked a ladder to it and climbed up. Then, three men and a woman used one of the fence beams to slide down while Ms. Rodriguez and her husband, Miguel, worked on their son's pickup truck.

"We could see them jumping over," she said. "We're so used to seeing people crossing over that we just see them and say, 'Oh, OK.'"

Ms. Rodriguez has lived here her entire life. "At first, we were opposed to it," she said of the current wire-mesh fencing, which was built around 2008. "We were so used to all of the greenery from the Rio Grande and the canal. We had the trees and then this came up. We didn't like it at first. But then we got used to it."

A small, colonial town, Guerrero sits on the edge of the Rio Bravo. Though the town has been named a Pueblo Magico - a designation granted by the federal government for its historic preservation and charm - a sense of fear lingers on the streets, thanks to an increase in criminal activity along the border. Residents say armed men and gang members have appeared suddenly in the past five years, seizing farmland.

Guerrero, Coahuila, Mexico

I am actually glad he is building that wall, because maybe it will help undermine all those illegal activities.

Enrique Cervera, 78, the town chronicler in Guerrero works at an archive in City Hall. He recalled a time when Americans came to visit their relatives on Christmas, trips that ceased as violence began to increase in the area. As a historian of sorts, he takes the vow to build a wall in stride, at least when compared to past hostilities with the United States - such as the Mexican-American war, when his nation lost swathes of territory to its northern neighbor.

Reynosa is a place where illegal immigration, drugs and weapons converge. Numerous stores have shut down, and though the main international crossing is busy at all times of day, many residents say the movement across the border has slowed ever since a turf war between cartels struck the city.

Nightclubs used to be full of Americans, and dentists and medical practices were once filled with American patients, residents say. That has changed, but many people here still have relatives, friends or children who live or work in the United States.

Adalberto Josúe Argüelles, Mexico

There would be very very few of us over there if the borders were as protected and surveilled as they are today.

Agustín Ramírez operates tractors in the corn fields on the outskirts of Reynosa. He says he used to be a migrant smuggler and lives a little more than half a mile away from the Rio Bravo, the border with the United States. "We use to swim this river all the time in the old days," he said. "No one cared. No one was watching. That all has changed. Now they catch everyone."

At the edge of this town of 13,000, the border fence lines the Old Hidalgo Pumphouse, a decommissioned water-irrigation facility that is now a museum and birding center. One afternoon behind the pumphouse, teenagers on hoverboards sped by on the biking trail, as residents ordered teriyaki chicken at the nearby Rock & Roll Sushi.

This is basically saying, 'Don't come here. You're not welcome here.'

Selena Aguirre, 20, a student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, stood on the biking trail, pondering the fence here. It was not a cohesive barrier but a jumble of obstacles - a chain-link fence stretching out in the distance on one end, a towering steel-beam fence directly behind the pumphouse with a vehicle-entry gate and an old concrete chest-high wall at the other end.

"It's a metaphor," Ms. Aguirre said as she stood in front of the steel fence. "This isn't a wall and it's not really a fence." She pointed to the chain-link fence and the concrete wall on either end. "That's a fence and that's a wall. This is neither. This is basically saying, 'Don't come here. You're not welcome here.' It's a barbaric way to take care of a situation."

Here in the southernmost point on the border with Mexico, the fence serves as the backdrop of everyday life. It forms the back of bus stops and cuts alongside schools and an old golf course. One day in this city of 180,000, two horses grazed in a rural area while tied to the fence's steel beams - with the border fence as a hitching post.

The fact that the construction and the investment of billions of dollars is going to begin again is almost laughable.

Tony Zavaleta, 69, drove his pick-up truck here on a dirt road. He stopped and looked out toward an empty spit of overgrown brush and trees, with a border fence - a line of vertical spikes atop a solid concrete base. This used to be his late father's land, until the federal government seized it to build the fence during the Bush administration. His family was paid $3,500 for roughly three acres.

"They put the border wall right through the middle of it," he said. "The federal government didn't ask me. They could have made a call, sent a letter. No, they just sued us. It's not a good feeling."

Mr. Zavaleta is opposed to Mr. Trump's wall. "The fact that the construction and the investment of billions of dollars is going to begin again is almost laughable," he said, adding that he preferred the current transparent fencing to any potential solid wall. "When you have a solid wall, there's no question that you have the feeling of being boxed-in."

Produced by Craig Allen, David Furst, Troy Griggs and Derek Watkins

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Azam Ahmed, Manny Fernandez and Paulina Villegas

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Before the Wall: Life Along the U.S.-Mexico Border

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For nearly 700 miles along the American border with Mexico, a wall already exists. It passes through the silt deserts of Sonora, where cacti grow like organ pipes. Farther east, heavy steel X-frames cut through the flat miles of sun-bleached grass like battlefield markers.

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The 1,933-mile barrier cuts through towns, rivers and desolate terrain and across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Here's a look at how the US-Mexico border looks before the construction of the wall begins:

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trump wall: what the us-mexico border looks like now - cnn.com

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Kelly Chen, Bernadette Tuazon and Benazir Wehelie

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What the US-Mexico border looks like now

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On his sixth day in office, President Donald Trump signed executive orders to begin construction of a wall between the United States and Mexico.