14 Miles
Building the Border Wall
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
An esteemed journalist delivers a compelling on-the-ground account of the construction of President Trump’s border wall in San Diego—and the impact on the lives of local residents.
In August of 2019, Donald Trump finished building his border wall—at least a portion of it. In San Diego, the Army Corps of engineers completed two years of construction on a 14-mile steel beamed barrier that extends eighteen-feet high and cost a staggering $147 million. As one border patrol agent told reporters visiting the site, “It was funded and approved and it was built under his administration. It is Trump’s wall.” 14 Miles is a definitive account of all the dramatic construction, showing readers what it feels like to stand on both sides of the border looking up at the imposing and controversial barrier.
After the Department of Homeland Security announced an open call for wall prototypes in 2017, DW Gibson, an award-winning journalist and Southern California native, began visiting the construction site and watching as the prototype samples were erected. Gibson spent those two years closely observing the work and interviewing local residents to understand how it was impacting them. These include April McKee, a border patrol agent leading a recruiting program that trains teenagers to work as agents; Jeff Schwilk, a retired Marine who organizes pro-wall rallies as head of the group San Diegans for Secure Borders; Roque De La Fuente, an eccentric millionaire developer who uses the construction as a promotional opportunity; and Civile Ephedouard, a Haitian refugee who spent two years migrating through Central America to the United States and anxiously awaits the results of his asylum case.
Fascinating, propulsive, and incredibly timely, 14 Miles is an important work that explains not only how the wall has reshaped our landscape and countless lives but also how its shadow looms over our very identity as a nation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this empathetic, voice-driven account, journalist Gibson (Not Working) reports from the U.S.-Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana during the development and construction of a 14-mile stretch of President Trump's border wall. Visiting the area between 2017 and 2019, Gibson interviews people living on both sides of the border, including Aurelia Avila, a young Mexican-American woman who collects recyclables in Tijuana; Civile Ephedouard, a Haitian refugee seeking asylum in San Diego; and Lance LeNoir, a member of the San Diego Sector Confined Space Entry Team, who patrols subterranean passageways between the U.S and Mexico. Their overlapping perspectives set the book apart from more didactic, issue-driven accounts. Gibson quotes an ICE special agent who asks "how many people is our infrastructure designed to take?" and relates the story of a retired Methodist minister and aid worker whose neighbor once said that the value of her home was more important than the value of a refugee's life. More philosophical meditation on the meaning and function of a border than hard-hitting expos , Gibson's multifaceted portrait makes a meaningful contribution to the question of what a humane and sensible immigration policy would look like. Readers will be left with a lot to ponder.