641: The Walls

Ira Glass

Mohamedsalem is 33. And his parents want him to call his cousins on the phone. He doesn't want to. He doesn't like to. And I have to say, I'm with him. He's got a really good excuse.

Ira Glass

He never got to know any of his relatives because Morocco built a wall 1,700 miles long across the desert. It's actually several walls of piled up sand, plus ditches in between the walls, plus barbed wire, plus, reportedly, seven million landmines, plus 120,000 soldiers separating the rest of his family, who were in Western Sahara, from the place where Mohamedsalem was born and still lives today, a massive refugee settlement with an estimated 165,000 people in it on the other side of the wall. So he has all these cousins from eight aunts and uncles. And--

Ira Glass

Not that his parents get this.

Ira Glass

But the wall between the refugee camp where he's lived his life and the area where his family's from, where he says they belong, that wall is the central fact of his life, the rock on which everything else is built. If the wall weren't there, instead of his current life, where he spends his days doing politics, trying to draw the world's attention to the situation his people are in--

Ira Glass

There's a 1,700 mile wall between him and the ocean. When somebody builds a wall, we readjust our lives around that wall.

Ira Glass

In Belfast, Northern Ireland, it's been 20 years since peace was declared between Protestants and Catholics. But there are still these tall walls, some of them 50 feet high, that separate their neighborhoods with a few gates that allow traffic and pedestrians through. It's 6:30 at night, and the guard is closing the Northumberland Gate for the evening. It will reopen at 6:30 in the morning. Producer Conor Garrett talked to him.

Ira Glass

People are so used to having the walls and so nervous about the violence that might break out if they were torn down that two decades after the conflict officially ended when there was a modest proposal not to tear the walls down but to simply replace the sheet of steel that was the gate at the Workman Avenue crossing with a gate that is steel bars that you can see through to the other side, that took 18 months to convince local residents of. Ian McLaughlin is one of the organizers who pushed for that change.

Ira Glass

Once a wall is up, it seems hard to tear down. And more are going up these days around the world. India's building a 2,500 mile barbed wire fence on the border with Bangladesh. Kenya's built just a few miles of what it hopes will be hundreds of miles of wall on the Somalia border. Israel had 300 miles of walls between itself and the West Bank and then added another 245 miles on the border with Egypt in 2013.

The main reason walls are going up around the world right now is to stop unwanted immigrants. That's the reason for the wall that was just finished between Turkey and Syria, which is nearly 500 miles long. It's there to block terrorists and Syrian refugees. Journalist Maya talked to me from Kilis.

Ira Glass

Stopping immigrants, of course, is the reason for the wall that President Trump wants to build on the Mexican border, the one he shut down the government over.

Ira Glass

That was at his cabinet meeting this week. In San Diego last year, he inspected prototypes of different walls for the border.

Ira Glass

Stopping immigrants is the reason that Norway just built a wall that is a measly 650 feet long at the very tippy top of Norway at the Russian border. I talked to the mayor of the town on the Norwegian side of that border, Mayor Rune Rafaelsen, of the town of Kirkenes.

Ira Glass

If I could just talk to the liberals in our audience for a second, I know when you guys think of the Scandinavian governments, they seem so competent and functional with their universal health care and their broad social safety nets. And I just want to say, perhaps it will be comforting to you to hear that this particular project was just as bumbling as anything we do here in the United States. They built their fence a full year after migrants had already stopped trying to cross that particular border, so there were no migrants to stop. They accidentally started construction too close to the Russian border, then had to tear it down and move it back a foot and a half.

And they built their fence right next to a fence that Russia already had at the very same border, a way more effective fence that stretches 120 miles. Remember, the Norwegian fence is only 650 feet long. As the mayor pointed out, refugees will be able to simply walk around a fence that is that short. So why build it?

Ira Glass

A wall, apparently, just has its own gravitational pull that warps the logic of the world around it. And once the wall is up and is a fact on the landscape, it alters the human behavior on either side of it. At that point, it's like we accommodate the wall, and definitely not the other way around. We are the ivy that grows on it. It is the immovable object.

Today on our program, as our government fights over whether or not to build a big, beautiful wall that apparently Mexico is not going to pay for, we have stories about people and walls all over the globe. We hear about kids who use a border wall as a tool in their family relationships, people who devote themselves to conquering walls, and a wall that supposedly can only be seen from one side, and not the other-- no kidding.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Just Another Kind Of Outdoor Game."

So when we were looking at border walls and fences around the world, one in particular stood out to us because if there were ever a place where you think you could build a physical barrier between two places and have it work, this would be the place. The fences are around the Spanish cities of Malilla and Ceuta. Now, the interesting thing about these Spanish cities is they are actually in Africa.

Right on the Northern coast of Africa, right there on the mainland, right on the edge of the water in what would otherwise be the country of Morocco, there are these two little dots, two cities that are officially part of Spain. Ceuta and Malilla are both very small. Ceuta is about seven square miles. Malilla is less than five square miles. And if you can make it into either of these cities from the rest of Africa, you're on European soil. You can try to claim asylum, or find some other way to stay and live in Europe.

But the Spanish government, with the assistance of the Moroccan government, has built a very impressive barrier. Around Ceuta, there are two layers of fencing almost 20 feet high with razor wire on the top. Around Malilla, there are four fences and a trench, basically a moat without water in it-- it's two meters deep-- also infrared cameras, and of course, guards.

And what has happened is that this has created a perverse and pretty dangerous obstacle course. Because, of course, people try to storm the barrier, sometimes in huge groups trying to get through it all at once, any way they can.

[SHOUTING]

Our producer, David Kestenbaum, talked to one man who thought he could make it.

David Kestenbaum

David is from Cameroon. And when I asked him to say his full name, just so I didn't mess it up, he gave this surprisingly long answer.

David Kestenbaum

I couldn't tell what was going on, because we were doing the interview through an interpreter. But it turns out he was explaining how he would introduce himself as an African.

David Kestenbaum

The names of his grandparents, and their parents, and theirs.

David Kestenbaum

Those are the 23 generations of my grandparents, he says, 23 generations of names. And yet despite all that history, in September of 2013, David decided to leave Cameroon and try to make it to Europe. He was 25 years old. David describes the whole thing almost as if you were a kid heading out on an adventure in some old novel.

Unlike a lot of people trying to get from Africa to Europe, he said he wasn't persecuted back home. He wasn't starving. He wasn't fleeing violence. He was just curious about the world and excited to see it. He wanted to live in a place with more opportunity, so he threw some stuff in a little backpack and he hit the road. He was well into his journey in Algeria when he first heard about the fences around Ceuta and Malilla.

David Kestenbaum

I've watched some of these videos. There are some brutal ones-- people with their hands sliced open from the razor wire, sometimes being hit by guards. But there are ones that, if you are preparing to try something like this, might give you hope.

David Kestenbaum

This one starts at a tense moment. There are bunch of men sitting on top of the last of the fences. Below them is Spanish soil, but also the Spanish police. In theory, the guys should be able to drop down and apply for asylum. But there are lots of reports of Spanish border guards grabbing people, unlocking a gate in the fence, and returning them to the other side. So the men on the fence want to get down somehow, avoid the guards, and run into town.

David Kestenbaum

Suddenly, one man drops down off the fence, then another. It's like they've got some plan. And apparently they do, because the two of them link arms. Then another guy joins them and another. They keep linking up, like it's a rugby scrum.

At this point, the police move in they're wearing vests and helmets. Some have those transparent shields you see in crowd control situations. And you can see the police are now in kind of a bind. It's going to be hard to pry these guys apart now that they've become this giant organism.

So the police do this thing that also seems smart. They form a human ring around the men to contain them. And for a moment, it seems like a stalemate.

But then the scrum starts to rotate, which makes them harder to contain. And a gap opens up in the ring of police. Then one guy from the scrum breaks off and starts sprinting. Then another spins off, and another.

David Kestenbaum

They run across this open field into town, and finally to the official immigration center where they celebrate like a team that's just captured the flag.

David Kestenbaum

I don't know how many of these people were granted asylum or allowed to stay. But can I just say there is something crazy about a system where countries build super tall, multi-layer razor wire fences that you are definitely not supposed to cross. But if you do cross them, well, maybe you can stay. It's as if Spain is saying, this is who we want to immigrate-- people who are really good at climbing fences.

David figured he had a pretty good chance of getting over the fences. He was young. He felt strong. He saw them up close soon after he got to Morocco. He made his way to this forest where he heard people camped out before attempting to cross. You could see Malilla from there, this piece of Europe surrounded by fencing.

David Kestenbaum

In the woods, there was this whole community of people. They'd organized themselves by country. There was a group from Mali and Gambia, Guinea, and one from his country, Cameroon. He slept with them that night.

David Kestenbaum

The next night, David and a small group he'd been traveling with went to check out the fences. But David said they didn't really know what they were doing. When they got there, they saw Moroccan border guards. David and the others figured, well, we'll just wait till they move. But hours went by. They waited until 2:00 AM, but always, there were guards.

The next time, he had better luck. One of the tricks the people in the forest told him was to go in large groups. If you've got the numbers, they can't catch all of you. So this time, David goes with a big group of 200 or 300 other people. It was early in the morning, 4:00 or 5:00 AM. They run toward the fences.

The first obstacle, before you can even get to the fences, is that trench. It's pretty deep, David says. He drops down into it OK, but getting out is hard. It's like six or seven feet straight up. He says everyone kind of helps each other. One person gets up, then pulls the next one up.

David Kestenbaum

I usually think of a border wall or a fence as this thing that's supposed to stop someone. But as David was discovering, that's not how these things are actually designed. His opponents had a strategy too.

The Malilla border is an example of something called defense in depth. In the US, it's used around nuclear facilities. The idea is to have many layers. Each can be beat, but they slow you down enough so that, before you can get to the other side, the guards are there. In this case, to pick you up and send you back to start.

That's what happened to David that day. The guards got him before he could clear the final fence, and they sent him back to Morocco. He was frustrated, but also felt kind of good. He'd made it to the third fence on his first try.

David returned to the camps in the forest, which he says is OK. But I think it's not what a lot of people would call OK. He had to dig around in trash cans for food. And sometimes after they'd gone to sleep, the Moroccan police would come and chase them out, destroy what they'd set up.

When there was downtime, people would sometimes sit all facing the same direction and just kind of stare out at Malilla and talk about how to get past those damn fences. There were rules that have been passed down by people who'd gone before them with the goal of not making things harder for the next people trying to cross. One of the rules was no weapons-- another, no cutting the fence.

David Kestenbaum

They tried over and over, but it seemed impossible to beat the guards. They had cameras that could see at night and helicopters. David met people who'd been living in the forest for four or five years who still had never made it to Europe.

David checked out the fences around Ceuta, the other city, but again, no luck. He tried 20 times, 30 times. A year pased. At some point, it started to feel kind of crazy that this is what his life had become, trying to get over this barrier to this little piece of land.

David Kestenbaum

I wondered what all this looked like from the other side of the fence, to live in one of these cities five or seven square miles in size with fences around it, where in some years, you get people rushing up every few weeks, this whole mass of people outside trying to get in. There's this one photo from the Spanish side of two people playing golf. They're standing on this lush green fairway, palm trees. One of them, a woman, is teeing off in a bright white golf outfit.

And right behind them, there's the fence. And on top of the fence, about a dozen people straddling it. I couldn't find any surveys of how people in the towns felt about the fences. But one journalist who lives in Malilla told me that photo is kind of the way it is for a lot of people. They're used to it now.

When the fences started being built in the '90s, some people thought they were ugly or sad. But then the fences became something else. They became invisible.

David Kestenbaum

Even a fence with a spirit in it is still a fence. And as with a lot of fences, if you follow them far enough, there is a place where they end. Malilla and Ceuta are not totally surrounded. They're on the coast. And where the fences hit the water, they stop. They go out a ways into the water, but then stop.

These places, of course, are very heavily guarded. And in the previous year, a bunch of people had died trying to cross this way. The Spanish police used tear gas and rubber bullets. At least 15 people drowned. And David can't swim.

But one day, in the forest around Ceuta, he runs into a group of people who want to try this place where the fence ends. By this time, he's been at it for a while. He knows the way. He helps lead them there.

There's no trench here and only a single fence. And so when it's dark out, David and a group sneak up to it through this wooded area. There are over a hundred of them, and they start running along the fence, trying to get to the beach and finally where it extends into the water.

When they reach the beach, some people start trying to climb the fence. Guards are gathering, but David notices they aren't doing the thing that he's had problems with in the past. They aren't hitting people's fingers as they climb. So up he goes.

David Kestenbaum

He means the razor wire at the top.

David Kestenbaum

But not all the way down. David and the others stay on the fence. They're just below the very top, maybe 18 feet off the ground. And they start clambering sideways, horizontally along the fence trying to get to the water.

David Kestenbaum

They were moving very slowly.

David Kestenbaum

They get to the end of the fence. There are two people ahead of David. The first one jumps down.

David Kestenbaum

Which seemed bad. A Moroccan guard would keep him in Morocco. The next guy is the kid in front of David. He jumps down onto the rocks at the base of the fence.

David Kestenbaum

David is next in line, the third to try.

David Kestenbaum

Then others make it into the water. They sit on this big rock.

David Kestenbaum

This goes on for hours. They're cold, but singing and shouting, waiting for the city to wake up, hoping someone will come and help them-- the Red Cross, journalists. Eventually, they do get out of the water. They're taken to a police station and fingerprinted. David figured he'd be sent back to Morocco like all the other times.

The police station was right there on the border. But it didn't happen. Instead, someone got him some food and a place to sleep. After almost two years of attempts, he'd made it. He felt joy, like, is this really happening? For a couple of days-- and then he felt something else.

David Kestenbaum

David is in Madrid now. In a little bit, he'll be able to apply for residency so he can work. After almost two years thinking about the fence, he doesn't anymore. It was just a barrier, one among many.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum is one of the producers of our program.

Ira Glass

David from that story is trying to make it as a musician. He wrote this song about the border fence.

[MUSIC - "BARRIER DE POLICE" BY DAVID]

Ira Glass

Coming up, the wall that is 150 miles long and completely invisible from one of its sides. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "The Walls." We have stories from around the globe looking at the way that life morphs and adapts around any wall that gets built anywhere. A version of today's program was first broadcast last year, but we thought we would update and bring it back with our government shut down over a wall.

And one thing that I've found myself thinking about a lot these last few weeks has been the president's promise to have Mexico pay for the wall. And I think a lot of people don't remember that that just wasn't a thing that was said in rallies. There was an actual step by step plan on how to do it. And I've wondered, whatever happened to that?

Ira Glass

This is Robert Costa, national political reporter for the Washington Post. He says that when he and Bob Woodward asked then-candidate Trump in 2016 for details about exactly how he would pay for his wall, to their surprise, two days later, they got this step by step memo outlining how it would happen, written, he says, by Stephen Miller, now one of the president's top aides.

Ira Glass

Here's the plan. They say that under the Patriot Act, the president has powers to do all kinds of things, including, if he wants to, he can make it impossible for undocumented Mexicans living here to wire money home to Mexico. And it's a lot of money, the memo says, $24 billion a year. The actual number is probably much smaller than that, but still in the billions, significant to the Mexican economy.

Mexico, as the memo notes, would not like this. And so the memo says we would tell the Mexican government that it could avoid all this unpleasantness if it would just send us $5 to $10 billion for the wall. And then we won't make the change to our regulations. We will let people wire money home to Mexico.

Ira Glass

If that didn't work, the memo lists other threats that we could make. Trade tariffs-- we could cancel work and tourist visas. We could charge higher visa fees, all with the idea that this would force Mexico to cough up billions for the wall.

Ira Glass

Act Two, "No One Has Seen Them Made or Heard Them Made."

Of all the walls all over the world that we learned about for today's program, this next one is the most mysterious-- a wall that may or may not even exist. Brian Reed looked into it.

Brian Reed

I read about this possible wall in a blog post. It's a travel blog by an Australian guy, and he tells the story of a bizarre tour he took in North Korea. The post is titled, "North Korea's Loch Ness Monster, The Concrete Wall."

For decades, the North Korean government has complained about the huge Concrete Wall that divides North and South Korea, a wall, it claims, that South Korea put up at the urging of the United States as a permanent barrier to reunification, a wall that's been a source of anger for the North Koreans for years. For them, it's a symbol of the duplicity and bad will of South Korea.

One peculiar thing about this wall, though, North Korea says it can only be seen from the northern side, that you can't see it from the south. It also doesn't show up on Google Earth or satellite images. But in North Korea, there's a place where tourists can go see it. That's where the blogger went.

According to the post, he arrived at a small bunker where a North Korean colonel delivers a whole lecture about the Concrete Wall. He stands there in uniform with a pointer stick-- there's a photo of this on the blog-- with a big mural behind him of the wall snaking along the border. Though, curiously, it's not a photograph of the wall. It's a painting.

The colonel runs through the wall's dimensions, which are listed on the mural, as well as geometric diagrams demonstrating the ingenious engineering that makes it only visible from the North. It's built into a hill, so from the South it just looks like green land. It's invisible. Which, the colonel explains, allows South Korea and the United States to claim that there isn't a wall between North and South Korea, which is exactly what those countries say.

And then, the colonel invites the tour group outside to see for themselves. The blogger is handed a pair of binoculars. The blogger writes that he half expects there to be a stencil of a wall taped on the lenses when he looked through. There isn't. But as he stares out from the observation deck into the DMZ, or Demilitarized Zone, the four kilometer-wide stretch of land that buffers North Korea from South, he does see something.

He includes a photo he took of it. Could this be what the North Koreans were talking about, he writes? Lean in and see what you make of it.

I did lean in. And honestly, I could not tell what the hell was going on in this photo. It's super blurry, taken from kilometers away on a hazy-looking day. There are shrubs and hills in the DMZ, and then, yeah, some type of brownish structure on top of the hills. But it's really hard to make out. It is like one of those Loch Ness photos.

This blog post confused me. Was there a wall between North and South Korea, or not? The news media seemed unequivocal on this question. The reports I read said the wall's not real. One headline from Reuters-- "North Korea asks South to tear down imaginary wall."

The blogger didn't want to be interviewed. So I ended up on the phone instead with a tour guide, named Simon Cockerell, who runs one of the most popular tour companies that takes people into North Korea. Simon says he's been in North Korea more than 160 times.

Brian Reed

Simon says he's done that whole tour the Australian blogger did.

Brian Reed

That "ugh" is Reuters journalist, reporter in Korea for five years, and author of the article with that headline, Jon Herskovitz. And he sticks to his guns-- no wall.

Brian Reed

All that said, Jon may have been to the border a bunch of times, but he has not been to the observation point in the North that the blogger and Simon went to. He hasn't tried to view the wall from North Korea, which is convenient.

Brian Reed

Jon says it'd be hard to miss a giant concrete barrier that's 62 feet thick, several stories high, running for more than 150 miles across the Korean peninsula. In the decades this wall's supposedly been around, someone would have bumped into it or glimpsed it on satellite. I told Jon I'd actually just talked to someone who says they've glimpsed it with their own eyes 40 or more times, the tour guide, Simon.

Brian Reed

Tank barriers, or anti-tank barriers-- Jon admits that these do exist in the DMZ between North and South Korea. South Korea's also copped to this. They're tall. They're big. You can't walk through them. They may even be made of concrete. But they do not come close to spanning the entire length of the peninsula, like North Korea claims.

Simon, the tour guide, admits he's only ever seen the wall from one spot. He doesn't know if it stretches the entire peninsula. He only knows what he knows, which is that claiming there's no wall, to him, is absurd.

Brian Reed

It might seem silly to get into a semantic debate over the meaning of the word "wall," but that's where we are. When it comes to walls, apparently semantics matter. Jon pointed out to me that the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea is probably the most fortified border in the world.

There's razor wire fence on either side of it that does stretch across the entire peninsula. There are landmines everywhere inside. North and South Korea have about 2 million troops on either edge, with artillery and missiles and air forces at the ready.

This border does not need a concrete wall to stop people from crossing it or attacking, and yet the North Koreans felt the need to invent one anyway. It needed to be a wall. Even if it doesn't do much to actually stop people, even if it's imaginary, calling it a wall makes a difference.

Ira Glass

Brian Reed is the senior producer of our program and the host of the podcast S-Town.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "He Is All Pine, and I Am Apple Orchard."

Our next story takes place at the border between Pakistan and India. Nearly 2,000 miles, the border is heavily patrolled, lit at night, fenced in parts, a border between two countries that have gone to war four times-- 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999.

It is still tense between India and Pakistan. Each has nuclear weapons. And there's only one road on that long, long border where you can cross from one country into the other, and that's in a town called Wagah, at a place they call the Berlin Wall of Asia.

Mariya Karimjee grew up in Pakistan. And the thing that she knew about Wagah was that they do this flag lowering ceremony there. It happens every day at sundown. Soldiers from both sides of the border do this elaborate, stylized, choreographed performance. Here's Mariya.

Ira Glass

Mariya Karimjee.

Ira Glass

Act Four, "We Keep the Wall Between Us As We Go."

The very first official border wall between the United States and Mexico was actually just a fence in 1918 on the border between two cities with the same name, Nogales, Mexico, and Nogales, Arizona. Since then, the US has installed a much bigger fence-- thick, rust-colored steel rods. And every day at that spot at the border in Nogales, white buses from Homeland Security roll up full of people with deportation orders who are sent across the border into Mexico from the United States.

Lots of them are parents with kids who are still in the States. They then just take up residence right on the other side of the wall. There's no official estimate of how many. It's probably in the thousands. And one of the saddest premises for a community that you can imagine-- all these parents separated from their own children, who are US citizens, who stay behind, sometimes with the parents' approval and best wishes, sometimes not. Reporter Lizzie Presser was curious about how these parents of kids remake their family lives around all this-- one family, in particular.

Lizzie Presser

Many of the parents who get dropped off don't exactly decide to stay on the Mexican side of Nogales. It's more that they never make the decision to leave. They have no friends or family here. Their original hometowns in Mexico are hundreds of miles away. But Nogales is the closest they can be to their kids, who aren't that far away in places like Arizona, Nevada, or Utah.

Local officials told me that this population of deported parents is a new one. They started showing up under President Obama. Their numbers picked up even more under President Trump.

We hear about kids who get left behind in the States. But in Nogales, it's the parents who are orphaned. You can find these parents all over town. I met Emmanuel outside of a gym. He got deported two years ago.

Lizzie Presser

I then spotted this woman on the street wearing an Arizona Wildcats T-shirt and stopped her.

Lizzie Presser

This is Griselda Espinoza. Her kids are in Mesa, Arizona.

Lizzie Presser

She scrolls through her kids' Facebook pages every night before bed. I talked to another mom who said she sometimes spends hours on Google Earth tracing the streets in her old neighborhood in Phoenix.

I met parents all over the city. They work all day in factories and call centers and then come home to rooms they've decorated for their kids, who aren't there. One dad with a two-year-old still in Phoenix told me he installed a TV in his son's room, decked it out with Tonka trucks and Hot Wheels. When friends come over, he shuts the door to keep the room clean.

But when I asked him the last time his son came to visit, he said it was more than a year ago. Sometimes, it's a really long wait for kids to cross over from the States. The mom I spent the most time with is Gloria Marin.

Lizzie Presser

This is her early one morning last fall. She talked to her kids on the phone, and it sounded like they were coming today. So Gloria was making her son Angel's favorite dish, chili colorado, a red sauce she mixed with beef and cactus.

I've known Gloria and her family for a year and gotten close to them. She used to live in Phoenix with her four kids. She raised them there as a single mom. Now she lives in a small room behind a friend's house. She keeps a couple extra beds propped up against her wall and got a chihuahua for her daughters. Like a lot of the other deported parents in town, she always wants to be ready for her kids.

Gloria has been in Nogales for more than five years. She's short with wavy black hair. She's quiet and kind of wistful when she talks. She wasn't expecting her kids until lunch, but she woke up at 5:00 AM to get ready. She wanted to look nice.

Lizzie Presser

Gloria's saying, I showered. I got dressed. I brushed my hair. I cleaned the house. I made the food.

Lizzie Presser

And I wait for them.

Lizzie Presser

That's all.

Gloria and her kids spent all their time together when they were in Phoenix. They did Friday movie nights, took camping trips, sold toys together at a swap meet on the weekends to make extra money. And then one day back in 2010, Gloria got arrested while her kids were at school.

She'd been working as a housekeeper for a couple months when her boss got charged with running drop houses, places where undocumented immigrants spend the night after crossing the border. The prosecutors charged Gloria as an accomplice. She says she knew nothing about her boss's work, but she spent two years in prison. And then, since she wasn't documented, she was deported.

During that time, her kids lives started to unravel. The youngest was seven and the oldest 15. Her kids were split up and put into foster care. They could rarely talk to their mom or to each other.

Gloria spent her first year in Nogales trying to regain custody of her kids. But by the time she could convince Arizona's family court, only Gloria's youngest, who was 10, ended up joining her for a little. The others had been through hell, and they felt estranged from their mom.

It had been three years since they all lived together. Also, they didn't know Mexico, and they were scared to move there. They were US citizens whose lives were in Phoenix, three hours away.

Lizzie Presser

Gloria told me, when I was young and my kids were little, I thought that I could never live without them. I never thought that one day they'd grow up, and I'd be far away from them.

Lizzie Presser

But you have to learn how to live like this.

Lizzie Presser

It's like a hope. It's the hope that any moment they'll say, Mom, I'm going over. And I'll be here waiting for them.

Lizzie Presser

I'm always just sitting around nervously, just waiting. I always await their visits thinking that, at any minute, they'll come.

Lizzie Presser

But they never really plan anything.

Lizzie Presser

Today, they said they'd visit. But what Gloria didn't know was that they weren't planning on coming across the border to her house and eating her chili colorado. They only wanted to come as far as the wall. There's a small visitor's section where the wall is just a mesh fence where people from the two sides go to talk.

Lizzie Presser

This is Gloria's daughter, Yesi. She's 22, and she's bringing her two young children, one of whom has never met Gloria. And she just couldn't bring herself to tell her mom that she doesn't want to cross over into Mexico today.

Lizzie Presser

She says it's really painful to see her mom. Gloria's house is a plywood shed, and she's working at a factory making $15 a day. Her health isn't great. She has diabetes.

Sometimes, she starts crying. And Yesi feels like there's nothing she can do to help her situation. It messes her up to see her mom that way.

Lizzie Presser

And that was at the wall. Yesi hasn't crossed over to visit her mother's house since 2014. It's not that she doesn't love her mom. They talk on the phone, text, send each other cute emojis.

But in the past, when Yesi's gone to see her mom, she's left her ID at home on purpose then told her mom it was an accident. That way, crossing wasn't an option. She could only meet Gloria at the wall and talk there. She wouldn't have to see her at her house. It just wasn't as intense. The wall is helpful for Yesi. It helps her keep some emotional distance.

Staying on the US side of the wall helps Yesi in another way. The last time she crossed over to visit Gloria in her home, four years ago, she'd only planned to visit for a few days. But she almost didn't come back. She ended up living there for four months with her daughter, who was just a toddler.

She hadn't felt that comfortable in years. She and Gloria talked about how Yesi could get a job on the US side of the border, commute there during the day, and then stay in Mexico with Gloria at night. And for months, Yesi let herself believe it was possible.

But then her real life caught up with her. She couldn't keep putting off school, her kids' dad, who was in Arizona. She had too many responsibilities. And ever since, seeing her mom just reminded her of what she couldn't have.

Lizzie Presser

Her little brother, Angel, is also ambivalent about seeing their mom. And today, he plans to stay on the US side of the fence with Yesi.

Lizzie Presser

Angel's 18 now. He was 10 when Gloria was picked up. And in those eight years, Gloria has changed a lot. In prison, Gloria became really religious. Now she goes to mass three times each week, and she's always talking to Angel and Yesi about God, reading them passages from the Bible.

She used to stroll into school to pick them up in ripped Guess jeans and a big perm. At home, she'd blast Madonna and Michael Jackson while they cleaned the house together. Now she wears long dresses and "church lady" shoes. She's reserved.

Angel's kind of a goof, and he used to crack his mom up all the time. But now, he says, she's lost her sense of humor. He feels like he can't be himself around her.

Lizzie Presser

Do you feel like she used to appreciate this part of you?

Lizzie Presser

Angel and Yesi both can't let go of the way their mom used to be back in Phoenix. Yesi wants her to act more like a mom, to fake that she's happy even when she's not, to tell her what to do.

Of course, they have practical reasons for not visiting. They don't have much money for bus tickets. Yesi's kids need her attention. It's easy to blame it on that stuff and not talk about the rest of it, though it's hard not to feel guilty.

Lizzie Presser

Angel's not completely disconnected from Gloria though. He's discovered that she has a very specific physical effect on him that no one else has. After Gloria was arrested, Angel stopped being able to sleep through the night. But when he visited her at her home in Nogales for the first time, Gloria lay down next to him. At the time, he was just 14.

Lizzie Presser

Gloria told me, yes, but I don't know.

Lizzie Presser

They can't come so much. I don't know.

Lizzie Presser

So I never thought that this would happen, that they'd make the decision to not come.

Lizzie Presser

But now, I just want them to feel good so that they want to come again.

Lizzie Presser

So these days, that's Gloria's entire strategy. She tries to play it cool when she's on the phone with them. She doesn't want to sound needy or talk about how hard things are for her.

In the morning, back in Phoenix, Yesi put on full makeup. Brisa, the youngest kid, braided Angel's hair. The three of them packed into the car around 7:00 AM with Yesi's kids and headed south to stand on the Arizona side of the border and talk to their mom through a fence.

In Nogales, Gloria finished cooking and then sat on her bed, watching the clock, still unaware that her kids weren't planning to cross over. When it hit 10:00 AM, Gloria left her house, got in her car, and started driving to the border to pick them up, 10 minutes away.

[PHONE RINGING]

Suddenly, her cell phone rang.

Lizzie Presser

It was her kids.

Lizzie Presser

Gloria's saying, are you guys coming?

Lizzie Presser

Wait, you're there? I'm on my way.

Lizzie Presser

Her kids had all crossed. I don't think it was because I was with them recording. They'd had a massive change of heart. Brisa, the youngest, had been telling her siblings that Gloria was doing fine, and they needed to chill out and stop making such a big deal out of visiting her house.

And so when they got to the border, the siblings didn't talk about it. Nobody said anything. Angel looked down and saw his feet walking across the border. They pushed through a metal gate. Suddenly, they were in Mexico. Gloria pulled up and honked.

Lizzie Presser

Yesi went to hug her. She told her mom that her hair smelled good. Everyone kissed each other and piled into the car.

At Gloria's house, the kids immediately sat down to start eating. They only had an hour. Angel had to get back to Phoenix for work that night.

For all their talk about their hang ups with their mom, they got casual really fast. Yesi's bodysuit was bothering her, so she unsnapped it and let the flaps hang loose. Angel was trying to learn how to say "burp" in Spanish.

Lizzie Presser

Gloria wasn't eating. She was just watching them. She had this dreamy smile on her face. This was the first time they'd all sat around a table together since 2010.

After lunch, they all climbed into Gloria's bed, insisting they had food comas. But really, they just wanted an excuse to cuddle with their mom. Angel curled up. He's about 5 feet, 90 pounds. He'd insisted on wearing a baggy sweatshirt that day so he didn't look too skinny. Gloria started rubbing his head. It was like a magic trick.

Lizzie Presser

Angel closed his eyes, and then it was time to leave. Yesi and her kids stayed behind with Gloria, but just for three extra days this time. They talked again about living together in Mexico.

Yesi told her she'd move down there in a month or so. She'd buy Gloria a plot of land with a small house, just big enough for the whole family. Yesi told me it made them both happy, just saying all those things, even though she knew and her mom knew that it wasn't going to happen. And for the first time, that was OK.

Ira Glass

Lizzie Presser. To help report this story, Lizzie got a grant from the International Women's Media Foundation as an Adelante Fellow. She was also supported by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute

[MUSIC - "WHEN THE WALLS CAME DOWN" BY THE CALL]

(SINGING) Well, they blew the horns, and the walls came down. They'd all been warned, and the walls came down. They stood there laughing. They're not laughing anymore. The walls came down.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by David Kestenbaum and Louise Sullivan. The people who put our show together includes Elna Baker, Elise Bergerson, Ben Calhoun, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Stephanie Foo, Michelle Harris, Kimberly Henderson, Miki Meek, Alvin Melathe, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Our senior producer is Brian Reed. Our managing editor is Susan Burton. Production help from Anna Martin and Stone Nelson.

Special thanks today to Robert Frost, to California Sunday Magazine, The Kino Border Initiative, Carmen Noriega, Catalina Maria Johnston, Vicky Cosstick, Peter Curran, Mark Gordon, Zeynep Bilginsoy, Matt Alesevich, Zach Campbell, James Hathaway, Rebecca Hamlin, Jesus Blasco de Avellaneda, Nick Fountain, Nate Rott, Charles Maynes, Frankie Quinn, Brahim B. Ali. Interpreting today by Daniel Sherr.

Our website, where this week we have this incredible interactive map where you can fly around to see all the walls in today's stories all over the globe, created by International Mapping. See that at thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio station by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he just showed us our new office plan. We are all moving into cubicles-- very, very tiny cubicles. He likes them small.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - "WHEN THE WALLS CAME DOWN" BY THE CALL]