Line. Fence. Wall.

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The U.S. - Mexico border, according to a video on the official White House website, is very quiet: nothing but tires crunching on gravel and the wind whistling around a high, solid-looking wall. But that's not the whole story. Today on the show, how that border went from a line in the sand, to a fence, to a wall.

Guests:

Rachel St. John, associate professor of history at U.C. Davis, and author of Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US Mexico Border

Miguel Levario, associate professor of history at Texas Tech University and author of Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy

Silvestre Reyes, former Congressman (D-TX), and former Border Patrol Sector Chief

Eduardo Contreras, realtor in Brownsville, Texas

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Rachel Martin. I'm the host of Wildcard from NPR.
0:03.5	For a lot of my years as a radio host, silence sort of made me nervous.
0:08.7	That pause before an answer, because you don't know what's going on on the other side of the mic.
0:13.5	But these days, I love it.
0:15.5	Hmm.
0:16.2	Ah.
0:17.2	Gosh.
0:18.5	Give me a minute.
0:19.4	Yeah, yeah.
0:20.0	Think.
0:20.5	Listen to the Wildcard podcast only from NPR.
0:24.2	Hey, everyone. Run here.
0:25.9	This week, as part of our ongoing immigration series, we're going to explore the origins of the U.S. Mexico border.
0:33.9	Producers Christina Kim and Anya Steinberg take it from here.
0:39.5	On Whitehouse.gov, the official White House website, the Trump administration has posted a short video of the U.S. southern border.
0:48.5	White fans patrol the border fence. There's no people anywhere in sight. All you can hear is the sound of wind and the
0:56.5	slow crunch of tires on a gravel road. And then a caption flashes across the screen that says
1:06.8	the sound of a secure border, courtesy of the one big beautiful bill.
1:12.6	The one big beautiful bill will infuse more than $100 billion into immigration enforcement and border security.
1:21.6	Almost half of those funds will go towards maintaining and building more of the border wall.
1:26.6	Watch the video and the wall looks totally solid.
1:30.4	But go there in real life and it can be a little different.
	...

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