This past week, the Trump administration took two more steps toward its campaign promise to keep undocumented immigrants out of the US.
On Friday, it revealed the four construction companies that will build a prototype of the border wall. On Tuesday morning, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced plans to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program starting March 2018. Instituted in 2012, the Obama-era policy protects nearly 800,000 young immigrants who came to the country as children, some without their parents, from deportation.
Steel fencing with razor wire, sensors, and surveillance cameras line most of the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border today. But in 1971, the US fundamentally changed a section of the barrier: The Nixon administration built Friendship Park, the only federally designated bi-national meeting place along the US southern border.
Until 1994, the park between San Diego and Tijuana did not include any fencing. Anyone could spend time there during the day, monitored by the US Border Patrol. But border security tightened over time, and today families can barely touch fingertips through Friendship Park's thick steel fence.
Friends of Friendship Park, a local community organization formed in 2006, is now attempting to work with the San Diego Border Patrol to allow unrestricted access to the park again.
"Every weekend dozens of families travel long distances to visit the park, and in almost every instance, they do so because they have no other recourse for seeing their loved ones," a reverend and the coalition's leader, John Fanestil, told Business Insider.
Take a look at the park's history below:
SEE ALSO: 26 photos that show the US-Mexico border's evolution over 100 years
First Lady Pat Nixon inaugurated Friendship Park on August 18, 1971, when it was declared a national monument. Over 100 years prior, in 1848, the US built a pyramid-shaped statue on the San Diego beach to mark the end of the Mexican-American War.
Source: NBC News
“May there never be a wall between these two great nations,” the first lady said. “Only friendship.”
Source: The Washington Post
Today, there are 276 such monuments to the war along the border; the one in Friendship Park was the first.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider