Border Diary: “Whiskey 8” in San Ysidro

Robert Vivar at the American Friends Service Committee aid station at “Whiskey 8”

September 29, 2023

San Ysidro is a San Diego neighborhood bordering Mexico and home to the western hemisphere’s busiest land port of entry. It’s also home to Las Americas Premium Outlets—San Diego’s largest outlet mall and a showcase for US-style capitalism. It’s where you can eat a Korean Potato Corn Dog, buy a Gucci handbag, and watch your kids as they play in the mall playground. You can see, from here, the sheets of corrugated iron that make up the first layer of border fence that adjoins the mall property. You can see an assortment of Border Patrol vehicles driving past on the elevated road beyond. Just a little farther south, the dense sprawl of Tijuana begins. What you can’t see, from this vantage point, are the migrants on the other side trying to make it into the US.

Just a short drive west of the mall, there’s a stretch of border fence known as “Whiskey 8,” where you can get a better sense of the border crisis. It’s where the American Friends Service Committee runs an aid station for migrants trapped on the other side of the fence. 

Walking up to the station, I could see approximately 10 migrants through the fence posts. Even though they were on US territory, they were in a sort of No Man’s Land, between the primary fence bordering Tijuana and the closer secondary fence. I saw tables, covered by canopies, set up along the fence. American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) volunteers were on hand, working on various tasks. 

Adriana Jasso, the program coordinator for AFSC’s US/Mexico Border Program, was on hand to greet me and we talked for a bit.

“What we have here is a situation that developed back in May,” Jasso said. “This was a space that brought people from different parts of the globe, and it was an anticipation of the lifting of Title 42. We were out here for two weeks. And we saw an unprecedented number of people waiting in between the two fences.”

Title 42 refers to the Trump era policy which allowed immigration authorities such as Border Patrol to quickly expel migrants, even those seeking asylum. It was put in place during the COVID-19 emergency, ostensibly as a public health measure, but it expired on May 11, 2023.  

“The same situation developed on September 7,” Jasso explained, referring to the roughly 9,000 migrants wanting to make contact with Border Patrol at Whiskey 8 during the month of September to press their asylum claims. 

Once on US territory, and having been processed by Border Patrol, they would likely be released into the public with a notice to appear before an immigration judge, assuming they didn’t have a criminal record or weren’t on a terrorist watch list. This appointment, however, might not occur for years considering the enormous backlog of claims. 

As we talked, I could see a family of migrants taking shelter under tarps hung on the opposite side of the fence. They appeared African by their manner of dress and otherwise. 

There were five or so volunteers on the US side. They were able to hand items such as food, water bottles, or first aid supplies through the four-inch gaps between the fence posts, or bollards of the secondary fence. The primary fence was about 100 meters farther south, facing Tijuana. Beyond that fence I could see the highway leading from downtown Tijuana to the beach, a road I’d traveled many times. 

Jasso showed me the various stations set up to aid the migrants. “So here we have our pantry. We have baby food, we have things to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that are very popular. And then we have our cooking station right here,” she said.  

I asked Jasso if there was anything that AFSC was needing in particular at the present moment.

“We are seeing less numbers,” she explained. “We have about 40 to 50 people, mainly women. We had a pretty pronounced number of people from Africa. The nationalities vary by the day. We also have some women from Costa Rica, some women from Ecuador and a very pronounced number of people from Colombia. At the moment, we think we're okay with what we have in relation to the number of people that we have on the other side. That could change within the next hour or within the next day.”  

She pointed out the telephone charging station; one volunteer was taking cellphones from migrants and plugging them in. “As people run out of batteries, they don't have a way to communicate with their loved ones as to where they're at, how they will be waiting, how they're doing,” Jasso said.

She showed me the makeshift clothing dispensary, fueled by donations, which one volunteer was doing her best to organize. She showed me the medical station, although only limited care and a limited number of medications could be given to migrants on the other side.

Jasso told me that the AFSC volunteers were able to ask basic questions about symptoms and illnesses and give out some medicines.

 “All of us have become doctors and nurses in a matter of weeks and then we have a supply of diverse and feminine products,” she said. 

Jasso had come to work with AFSC because she was in sync with its social justice advocacy, and having come from a history of migration.

“My grandparents were Braceros in the ‘40s and 50s,” she said. “My father was a farm worker in California. And I came as a child as a minor. I was 14 years old when I came to the US. In some way, their experiences are reflective of my experience, not as harsh and difficult as the conditions that we are seeing today. But there are some similarities.”

I didn’t get a chance to question here on what she saw as the similarities and the differences as Jaso had to go off to answer a question put to her by one of her volunteers. 

I walked to the border fence.

Whiskey 8 Panorama

I surveyed the area in between the fences: it was basic California desert; much of it looked like a dumping ground. In the distance at the foot of the hill that rose up towards Tijuana, a woman was squatting, attending her toilet needs, and I averted my eyes. As the area served as an open-air detention facility, under the oversight of Border Patrol, this didn’t give me much confidence in their ability to manage the ongoing Border crisis.

I turned my attention back to the fence in front of me. A man was standing on the other side, within a few feet of me, the only man in the area as far as I could see. His name was Mohamed. He was waiting on his cellphone to be charged. He had come into the no man’s land behind the fence with members of his extended family including two small children, and a woman holding an infant. They were all taking shelter from the sun under tarps. He was from Guinea, he said, when I asked him, in French, where they were from.  He told me that they had just arrived in the morning. He was telling me that they had traveled to the US border—first arriving by plane in Nicaragua—when a Border Patrol vehicle arrived. 

He excused himself from our conversation and walked towards the van.  A BP agent got out of the vehicle and started talking to the migrants gathering around. He was likely fielding questions from the migrants about when they could expect to be transported out to a processing center.  

One of the volunteers, Robert Vivar, was making turkey and cheese sandwiches to hand to the migrants for lunch so I helped assemble them. We chatted a little bit, as we tried to get our rhythm down. He put down the bread and cheese and I layered in the lunch meat.  It turned out that I was volunteering with a man well-acquainted with the border.

Vivar knew more than a little about immigration law. He was born in Mexico in 1956 but he moved to California at the age of six and grew up there. He worked for decades in various cities in the states, including a stint as a station manager for Aeromexico Airlines at Los Angeles International Airport. In the late 1990s, he became addicted to drugs. In the early 2000s he pled guilty to possession of methamphetamine precursors. He pled guilty, thinking he would be placed into a drug treatment program. Instead, he was deported to Mexico, the victim of bad legal advice. In 2018, Vivar filed a motion to overturn his conviction in the California courts, but that motion was denied. The Supreme Court later found that Vivar’s counsel failed to inform him that pleading guilty would get him deported. Furthermore, the Court found that, had Vivar been properly informed, that he would not have pled guilty,  Consequently, Vivar was allowed to return to the US in May, 2021.  But I didn’t know any of this as we were making sandwiches. Only afterwards did we get into a conversation.

A few years back, I had actually written a story about a project Vivar had been depicted in, the Playas de Tijuana Mural Project which depicted people who had been deported from the US into Mexico.  The series of murals, 20 feet high and 150 feet across, can be found on the Mexican side of the border fence on the Tijuana beach.   

While living as a deportee in Tijuana, Vivar worked as co-director of another mural project, the  Leave No One Behind Mural Project, which portrays the veterans, early-childhood arrivals, and deportee family members who have somehow run afoul of US immigration policy and found  themselves deported to Mexico.  

I mentioned to Vivar that I had been on the other side of the border and that I had seen the work of many muralists on the Mexican side of the border fence.

Vivar appreciates the power of murals to raise awareness. In 2017, when US Customs and Border Protection unveiled eight border wall prototypes in Otay Mesa, next to the border fence on the US side, he worked with artists to draw attention to the plight of migrants, including deported veterans.    

“The reason we painted those murals is because we knew that we would not be able to get our message to the media in protest of the prototype wall,” he told me.  “We thought, well, if we do some murals on the wall in front of the prototypes, the media is going to be here and they're going to see those murals.”  

The media indeed took note of the mural making on the Mexican side of the border. One of the artists involved was Enrique Chiu, an artist whose ambition was to create a 700-mile “Brotherhood Mural” on the Mexican side of the border wall as a response to the Trump administration’s anti-migrant rhetoric and policies. Vivar told me he knew Chiu, an artist I’d interviewed in the past. Like Chiu, whose activities range from mural making to cultural ambassadorship to entrepreneurship to promoting his own artmaking, Vivar wears many hats.

Vivar is co-director of the Unified US Deported Veterans Resource Center, an organization that provides assistance to US veterans who have been deported to Mexico. In that role he has fought for the right of veterans to return to the US, which is headquartered in Tijuana. In addition, he has a leadership role in the Friends of Friendship Park, an organization that advocates for the increasingly-under-threat and never-fully-realized bi-national park at at the Tijuana Beach (Las Playas de Tijuana)

It turned out that we made too many sandwiches for the migrants on the other side of the fence: we made upwards of fifty sandwiches and there were barely any takers, so I did my best to cover them up to protect them from flies, in case there were any takers later in the day. 

It was hard to prepare for the inflow of migrants on the other side of the fence when that was impossible to predict.  While the Border Patrol sometimes coordinated with AFSC as far as transporting migrants to locations such as Whiskey 8 where there was food and water available,  there was essentially no support from Border Patrol or any other government agency as far as providing food and water to migrants once they crossed into US jurisdiction.

That work was left to volunteers.  Fortunately, at Whiskey 8, there were plenty of them to go around. Some of this surely had to do with the fact that Whisky 8 had been named in at least three articles in the San Diego Union-Tribune about the aid station since May 11, 2023.   

A dude named Mike arrived at Whiskey 8 not too long after our sandwich making debacle. He told me he worked in the restaurant industry, he had swung by to see if there were any excess provisions that could be used at a nearby migrant aid site. He was in luck, I said, suggesting the sandwiches. He took them. 

I suggested that someone should create an app for such situations, but he told me that the personnel in AFSC and other groups were in constant contact with one-another through email and chat. It occurred to me that my ideas wasn’t particularly brilliant or useful, and that my time would at the border would be better spent listening than talking.

I couldn’t stay for long at Whiskey 8. I had to go back north to La Jolla, as I needed to be back by 6 p.m. to my parents’ residence. My mom is dealing with multiple issues including dementia and severe arthritis that often make getting out of bed a challenge, so I’ve been spending more and more time assisting them.  I would, however, be taking three weeks off to drive my sister’s car across the country. She had come into the possession of a Nissan Rogue she didn’t need but she knew my daughter didn’t have a car and wanted me to drive it back to my home in Indianapolis so that she could have it.  But I wanted to drive it back home by way of Brownsville, Texas, and volunteer with migrant aid groups along the way to get a sense of the border crisis, and to put my impressions into writing. I considered it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I told Jasso about my plan.

She told me I should head to Jacumba, which was about 60 miles east along the border, which was seeing a huge surge in migration and the aid organizations were struggling to keep up with the needs of thousands of migrants in open air encampments.  

“There are so many organizations and so many people doing amazing work,” Jasso told me. “So I think it's great to have a broad sense of what's happening. If you are going to volunteer with Humane Borders already is great because that's gonna give you a different sense of the landscape and a different approach. If you end up with a lot of time at home not having anything to do. You know how to get here, we've met, you're welcome to come back here.”  

I thanked her and went on my way. Indeed I would return, again and again.

Correction: The original version of this article stated that President Biden lifted Title 42 on May 11. It’s more accurate to say that this was the day that the Trump-era public health code expired.