Biden Administration Plans to Close Friendship Park and Expand Border Wall

Aug 15, 2022

Despite its condemnation of Trump’s border wall policy, in some areas the Biden administration continues to build on it. This includes the construction of a secondary wall 200 feet away from the border along Friendship Park, which runs along the San Diego-Tijuana border. Friendship Park is the only binational park between the U.S. and Mexico. It was built with the express purpose of allowing friends and loved ones across the border from each other to spend time together. But with two walls running through the park separated by 200 feet, visitors in either side of the border will no longer be able to hear each other.

Activists and people who frequent both sides of the border have protested the recent plans to close it, that it is the only way they can see friends and family.

In 1971, the Nixon administration inaugurated Friendship Park, stating that on both sides of the border people could reunite and enjoy each other’s company. At that time, there was only a short fence marking the border, and people could freely touch and embrace one another... legally.

Sometimes, people on both sides of the border traveled long distances to come to Friendship Park just to see each other for an afternoon.

But over the years, the U.S. government placed ever more restrictions. Under the Clinton administration, authorities placed a 30-foot fence in the middle of the park. Visitors were no longer able to embrace one another. They resorted to “fence kisses,” pressing their fingers through the fence as the only means to embrace one another.

Despite their condemnation of Republicans’ rhetoric toward the U.S.-Mexico border, the Democrats implement the same basic policy of dividing families and building ever more walls. The only difference is that the Democrats do it a bit more quietly.