Trump visits the border wall days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol

MCALLEN, Texas – Surrounded by political crises after inciting a deadly US Capitol insurrection, President Donald Trump on Tuesday returned to one of the basic issues that helped catapult him into office: the border wall.

Visiting the building near San Juan, in southern Texas, Trump seemed faithful to his old campaign self, waving to supporters and extolling the project’s progress as a political victory at a time when his legacy has been a great success.

“When I took office, we inherited a broken, dysfunctional and open border,” he told an audience during a brief speech. “We reformed our immigration system and reached the safest southern border in the history of the United States.”

In 2015, Trump said he would build the wall at almost half the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. But that number continued to drop. In his State of the Union address in 2020, Trump said that by the beginning of 2021, “we will have substantially more than 500 miles completed”.

The total is currently around 450 miles.

“Unlike those who came before me, I kept my promises,” Trump said on Tuesday.

Although Trump’s original promise was far from being fulfilled, his supporters insisted that the president was justified and celebrated his arrival. As her motorcade passed by at high speed, Ilsa Zamora jumped up and down, both arms up, tears in her eyes. “This is my president, this is my president!” The 45-year-old man shouted.

But where Trump sees success, critics see the scar of his four years in office – hundreds of immigrant children are still separated from their parents, the asylum system remains largely closed and a community of immigrants is still struggling to be used as scapegoat to feed hate during the campaign.

“It is so insulting for him to come to South Texas in particular,” Efren Olivares, deputy legal director for Immigrant Justice at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told BuzzFeed News. “It is a place that was the epicenter of family separations and where we have a refugee camp for immigrants along the Rio Grande, across the border with Mexico.”

“He’s going back to what was tested and what works for him,” added Olivares. “I think that’s why he’s here, and that’s why he’s going to use every opportunity he can to keep talking about immigrants as criminals.”

Trump must focus on the pandemic, which hit southern Texas hard, Olivares said. On Friday, the Rio Grande Valley was renamed as a “high hospitalization area” by state health officials.

“Instead, he is coming here to make a supposed lap of winning a prize, a meaningless project that has wasted millions and millions of dollars,” said Olivares.

Laura Pena, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyer, said she believed Trump was encouraged to make the trip as a way to prevent him from doing more damage to the Republican Party after last week’s deadly uprising.

She grew up in the Rio Grande Valley and said the area has always been a place where you can almost immediately see the impact of immigration policies on the border. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force in 1994, Pena began to welcome children from other parts of Texas into their classrooms, children whose parents worked in Mexican factories across the border.

Trips to Mexican cities like Matamoros were common, as people had family and friends who lived on both sides of the border, Pena said.

“I have memories of going to Matamoros to eat, dance, go to the dentist,” said Pena. “So, I have my most recent memories of trying to counsel a family that was recently kidnapped and tortured in the same area where I would celebrate New Year’s Eve two decades ago or close to the dentist.”

She now works as an advocate for immigrants’ rights, working with asylum seekers who have been forced to wait in Mexico while their immigration cases in the U.S. are completed. Along with other lawyers and volunteers, Pena has tried to help immigrants, some of whom live in a miserable camp on the border in fear that the cartels will kidnap or extort them.

She said it will take a long time for the Rio Grande Valley to clear the stigma of a crisis-stricken border area, where families have been torn apart and immigrants have been tortured in neighboring Mexico after being trapped under Trump’s policies.

“The valley has been used as a pawn for the past four years and we are not like that,” said Pena. “This was fertile ground, a starting area, for much of this cruelty. There was racism and phobias before Trump, but he definitely fueled many of these flames here, just as he did in other parts of the country, and that Trumpism really took root here. “

But as the motorcade carried Trump through crowds of fervent supporters and waving flags, the visit in the final days of his presidency left a different impression for Zamora.

“He started his campaign by saying it would be the wall, right?” she said. “Promises made, promises kept.”