Mexican officials installed a remnant of the Berlin wall near the U.S. southern border last month to teach “a lesson” about knocking down walls and building bridges.
The historic concrete slab right was placed next to the border wall in Tijuana – across from San Diego – with a message that seemed to advocate for allowing more illegal immigrants refuge in the United States. The move comes as record numbers of families crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in August and as critics say President Joe Biden’s immigration policies have caused the “Biden Border Crisis.”
“May this be a lesson to build a society that knocks down walls and builds bridges,” a plaque by the base of the Berlin Wall relic reads.
Montserrat Caballero, the mayor of Tijuana, Mexico, and Marcelo Ebrard, a former Mexican foreign secretary, are the two individuals behind its placement, according to Fox News. Caballero is the one who penned the open-borders message, the outlet reports.
In mid-August, after a ceremony unveiling the remnant of the Berlin wall, Caballero posted, “We are a government that believes more in building bridges, than walls that are useless,” according to a translated version of her Instagram post.
Los Angeles-based producer Marcos Cline-Marquez helped bring the 3-ton piece of wall to Friendship Park, San Diego-based KPBS reported in August. Initially, the plan was reportedly to present it to President Donald Trump while he was still in office, but the White House declined.
“You draw parallels between the Berlin Wall, a wall that was built to divide not protect, and the wall on our southern border,” Cline-Marquez said. Caballero had similar sentiments, acknowledging that while the “social and political conflict is different than the Berlin Wall” it’s still “a wall at the end of the day.”
Caballero did concede that the U.S. has a right to enforce its border, even as she claimed the border wall represents “violence,” “family separation,” and “division.”
As Mexican officials are denouncing the wall and even some Americans are advocating for open borders, the U.S. arrested 91,000 illegal immigrants who crossed the border as families in August – a record high, according to The New York Times. Many are released into the U.S. awaiting court dates. In July, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 183,503 encounters with illegal immigrants, Fox News reported.
Since President Biden took office in 2021, at least 6.2 million illegal immigrant encounters have been recorded – resulting in more than two million migrants being released into the U.S., according to the Heritage Foundation.
Despite signing an executive order stopping the construction of a new border wall, Biden is finishing small projects that had previously been contracted out. This includes replacing the border wall on the Tijuana-San Diego section, the Associated Press notes.
Many pieces of the Berlin Wall have been placed in various locations across the world, including hotels, schools, and parks, the outlet notes.