At three o’clock in the afternoon on this day in 1999, the odors of sizzling meat and hot tortillas waft through the hot air at a taco stand next to two fast-food establishments in Nogales, Arizona, about a half mile from the border that severs this community from Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. In 1994, Joint Task Force-6 (JTF-6), a branch of the U.S. military involved in domestic drug enforcement efforts along the U.S.-Mexico border region, renovated the fence that separates these two communities with artifacts from another war. Surplus mobile military runways from the 1991 Gulf War were used to transform the chain link fence into a fourteen-foot-high, two-mile-long steel wall, and at the same time, the number of Border Patrol agents in the area tripled.
