Established in 1971 and inaugurated on its U.S. side by First Lady Pat Nixon, the United States–Mexico border-straddling Friendship Park is a singular public space in North America: an amity-exuding binational landscape where residents of both countries can come together (from Imperial Beach in San Diego on the U.S. side and the borough of Playas de Tijuana on the Mexico side) and converse—and even touch fingertips— in-person. Initially, a simple barbed wire fence cleaved the park, making cross-border interaction easy at the rather petite—it’s just a half-acre–space.
In the mid-1990s, however, the U.S. Border Patrol ramped up security measures along the San Diego–Tijuana border, including
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