“Donald Trump has famously and repeatedly promised to seal the border with a wall if he’s elected. He and others have promised to send people who illegally crossed the border—a number that appears to have leveled off—back to Mexico. For these people, the border wall isn’t an abstraction. Many parts of the border are already covered in fences. In other spots, the wall is not made of bricks, but out of scanners, drones, and guards.

“Photographer James Whitlow Delano has visited the border several times in the past decades as these walls have gone up. These are his photos and stories:

“In the photo above, the border wall separates Jacumba, California, from Jacume, Mexico, in the high desert. Even after the first border barricade was built here in the mid-1990s to disrupt human and drug traffickers, residents of Jacume could cross freely into Jacumba to buy groceries or to work, and children would be brought across to go to school or to the health clinic. Since September 11, 2001, security has turned a ten-minute walk into a two-hour drive through the official border crossing in Tecate, segregating these communities from each other. After ten years, Jacume, a village of 600, was called “a black hole,” where even Mexican federal agents had been held hostage for attempting to extort money from smugglers.” Click here for the article and more photos.

Also, there’s a startling video from Aeon, showing just what a wall would look like. “Best of Luck with the Wall, an imaginative, dizzying short documentary that uses 200,000 satellite images downloaded from Google Maps, makes clear the sheer magnitude of the US-Mexico border, and the mindbogglingly massive challenges any full border fence would face in separating the two countries.”