SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — Daniel Watman and six other volunteers hiked across Border Field State Park on Thursday morning intent on doing some landscaping at the binational garden located on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Since the Border Patrol restricts access to the area, Watman and the others knew they would be trespassing on federal property and faced the likelihood of being arrested.
“There hasn’t been access allowed to the garden on the U.S. side for almost two years since October 2021,” said Watman. “We’re going to go in there and hope to get attention to that and hopefully use the garden as leverage to shed light about how the park in general needs to have friendship and cross-border contact.”
The garden is part of Friendship Park, an area where the people have traditionally met and talked with others on the Mexican side of the border with the barrier between them.
But access to this area was stopped when the coronavirus pandemic began, and it has yet to be restored.
“In the garden, there’s actually three full circles, each has a theme, and they’re right up against the wall and so the Border Patrol has said they will let us remove plants when they bring in the wall, but that’s impossible,” Watman said.
Watman believes the ongoing border wall construction is wiping out the garden.
“If they destroy the garden, it’s not acceptable to the community in order to build a 30-foot wall,” he said. “We’re not willing to start all over around a 30-foot wall.”
The Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol have said the new walls are needed to replace existing barriers that are falling apart because the structures have become a danger to the public, migrants and the agents who patrol the area.
The Border Patrol has indicated in the past that it will allow for public access to the area once the construction work is done.
Watman doubts this will actually happen.
“I’ve learned the Border Patrol priority is enforcement, so they don’t really have a lot of room in their policies for things like a garden or people making friends or families uniting,” said Watman. “That symbolic space is not what they’re interested in; The message of the park is friendship, but they’re sending a message of division and separation.”
Watman and the others were given a chance to pull weeds and clean the garden for at least an hour before Border Patrol agents asked them to leave the area.