In 1904, the El Paso Herald called for “a barb wire fence along our side of the Rio Grande” to keep out “undesirable aliens.” The newspaper wasn’t referring to Mexicans, but to Chinese immigrants, many of whom responded to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by avoiding the surveillance at U.S. Pacific ports and crossing through Mexico.
At the time, barbed wire had already been employed in warfare during Spanish, American and British colonial wars in Cuba, the Philippines and South Africa. The three imperial powers used settlements surrounded with barbed wire during these conflicts to forcibly relocate civilian populations, primarily women and children. More than 100,000 civilians died, mostly from malnutrition and disease, in what the press at the time called “concentration camps.” Stainless Steel Mesh Sheets
But barbed wire hadn’t been used yet to demarcate international boundaries.
The proposal for a barbed fence at the U.S.-Mexico border to cut the flow of immigration did not become a reality until more than a century later. Today, borders and razor wire are practically synonymous.
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Under President Donald Trump, soldiers and Marines installed several hundred miles of concertina wire along the border from California to Texas. That prompted a 2019 resolution from the City Council of Nogales, Ariz., condemning the federal government for “placing coiled concertina wire strands on the ground [that are] typically only found in a war, battlefield or prison setting and not in an urban setting such as downtown Nogales.”
In 2021, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began an $11 billion border security initiative known as Operation Lone Star. Texas National Guard soldiers have strung more than 100 miles of concertina wire, manufactured by inmates at a minimum-security prison in Palestine, Tex., along the banks of the Rio Grande. There have been numerous reports of migrants being left bloodied by the razor-sharp barriers along the Rio Grande, sometimes after Texas National Guardsmen pushed them back toward the water. Last year year, hospitals in Eagle Pass, Tex., treated an unprecedented number of migrants, including several children, for lacerations and wounds that had to be stapled shut.
On Monday, in the latest skirmish over barbed wire at the border, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration and allowed border patrol agents to remove razor wire installed by Texas officials while the barrier’s legality is considered in court.
Barbed wire, or the “devil’s rope,” as Native Americans called it, was controversial from the start. Initially, after it was first patented by Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden in the 1870s, it was mostly used to restrict the movement of cattle and other animals. The most dangerous type of long-spiked barbs, known as “vicious wire,” would cut through the cattle’s hide, resulting in screwworm fly infestations.
Barbed wire was one of most effective tools White settlers used to dispossess Natives of their lands. It closed off traditional hunting grounds and broke up the communal structure of their societies.
In the 1880s and 1890s, fence-cutting wars broke out in the borderlands and the Southwest. In Texas, open-range ranchers snipped fences to allow their cattle to pass. In New Mexico, Mexican American villagers reclaimed their communal land rights by cutting down the barbed-wire fences put up by Anglo-American squatters and land speculators.
On Jan. 31, 1904, the Washington Times reported on a congressional bill for “a barbed wire fence barrier [to] be constructed along the Canadian border with electrical warning connections, to make the smuggling of Chinese into this country more liable to detection, and it is proposed to make use of the same plan along the Mexican border.” That year, Congress voted to make the Chinese exclusion law permanent — it previously had to be renewed every 10 years — and expanded it so it barred new migration from China and mandated the deportation of all Chinese immigrants already in the United States.
In 1916, Maj. Cornelius Vanderbilt III proposed installing “electrified barbed-wire entanglements” next to a 1,950-mile military road running from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, as the solution to “protecting the Mexican border.” His great-grandfather had founded a railroad empire during the Gilded Age, and Cornelius III had left his mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue to join the New York National Guard in 1901. In 1916, he pitched the border barrier while serving as chief inspector among 150,000 Guardsmen sent by President Woodrow Wilson to the southern border during the Mexican Revolution.
Vanderbilt got his idea by observing the battlefields in Europe during World War I. “The use of [barbed-wire] entanglements is a development of warfare adopted by all armies, and greatly resorted to by the warring nations of Europe,” Vanderbilt explained. “It has been found to be one of the most efficient methods of delaying and barring the passage of disputed lines.”
The use of barbed wire to protect defensive positions was effective because it was cheap, easy to install and resistant to artillery fire. When artillery shells hit the wire strands, the resulting mass of compressed wires often became even more formidable. During World War I, soldiers noticed this and wound up barbed-wire strands that could later be deployed by extending them like accordions — effectively improvising the first concertina wire.
In 1915, Germany built what was perhaps the first electrified barbed-wire fence to seal off an international boundary: a 125-mile barrier that separated Belgium from the Netherlands. The 10-foot-high razor wires were charged with 2,000 volts. The Germans officially called the border fence the “High Voltage Border Obstacle.” The Dutch referred to it as the “Wire of Death,” or simply “The Wire.” Between 2,000 and 3,000 people were electrocuted trying to cross from occupied Belgium to neutral Holland.
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In 1919, Rep. John Nance Garner (D-Tex.), who would later serve as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, tried to implement Vanderbilt’s earlier plan for a high-voltage fence at the U.S.-Mexico border with federal and state funding. He called for a “military highway” next to the electrified barrier from Brownsville to Yuma to be patrolled by 40,000 troops.
A San Antonio Evening News editorial titled “No Fence Needed” gave three reasons for its opposition to the barrier. First, it was too expensive, at an estimated $20 million (about $350 million in today’s currency). Second, it wouldn’t work, “except to keep out cattle and other animals that are without reasoning faculties.” And third, “a barbed wire fence along the Rio Grande would be denominated a ‘spite fence,’ and we are engaged in cultivating more friendly relations with Mexico, rather than provoking Mexicans to hostile feelings.”
Calls for a barbed-wire border fence would be occasionally repeated over the next few decades. During Prohibition, Grover Wilmoth, director of the federal immigration service in the El Paso district, called unsuccessfully for a high-voltage fence around the border city’s Cordova Island to curb liquor smuggling, with Mexico and the United States paying jointly. In 1961, during the height of the Cold War, the House Appropriations Committee denied an Immigration and Naturalization Service request for $1.3 million to build a 22-mile barbed-wire border fence with concertina wire on top. That was the same year the East German government began to build the Berlin Wall, topped with electrified barbed wire and denounced around the world for restricting freedom of movement and dividing families.
In 1979, under President Jimmy Carter, a controversial fence was built along 27 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. Because of strong opposition from Mexican American civil rights groups to the “Tortilla Curtain,” the federal government built a chain-link fence — without razor wire that would cause injury to migrants.
Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, construction of a new American border wall began in earnest, with its first sections in San Diego and El Paso going up during the early 1990s. But not until the 21st century, almost exactly 100 years after Garner’s proposal for a high-voltage fence, would calls for a deadly electrified border barrier be expressed again.
According to the New York Times in 2019, Trump wanted his border wall “electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh.” But if Trump thought he was proposing something new, he was off by a century.
Construction Fence Mesh David Dorado Romo is a historian and author of “Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez, 1893-1923” and “Borderlands and the Mexican American Story,” forthcoming in August.