Twenty-five years ago on Sept. 11, Celia Concannon was a theater and arts teacher at Rio Rico High School. She didn’t listen to her car radio that morning during her work commute. When she walked onto campus, she hadn’t heard about what happened in New York.
“But our band director was there. Wes Brewer. And he had such a look on his face and he just said: ‘You're not going to believe this,’” Concannon said.
They gathered in her classroom and turned on the television. It was old — black-and-white, with rabbit-ear antennas.
“And we watched that as if we were watching a black-and-white movie that was a long time ago … That's what made it look even more unreal,” Concannon said.
The same morning, about 10 miles south in Nogales, Arizona, Luis Torres’ dad woke him up.
“He said, ‘Hey, come here, come here, look what’s happening,’” Torres said. “We were all sad (about) what was going on.”
Torres regularly commutes to Nogales, Sonora, where he works as an accountant. But that day, he called out of work, unsure of whether he’d be able to cross into Mexico.
“Our fear was that the border would be shut down,” he explained.
The ports of entry remained open in Nogales on Sept. 11, 2001. Still, local residents remember panicking over the mere possibility.
“Rumors like, ‘Oh, they're going to close the border, everyone’s going to be going to be stuck,’” recalled Carlos Francisco Parra, who was attending Nogales High School at the time.
While the border did not shut down that day in Nogales, the 9/11 attacks marked a turning point for the border region.
The 9/11 hijackers did not enter the United States through its southern border. Nonetheless, the attacks prompted a wave of widespread border security measures, often met with bipartisan support in Congress.
Two-and-a-half decades later, residents like Concannon, Torres and Parra describe a more stringent border — one that has changed vastly over the years.
“Obviously, yes, the nature of what's going on right now has to do with 9/11 completely,” Torres said. “Everything goes back to 9/11, how we try to create more barriers.”
‘A lot of adapting’
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration had already started tightening the screws on border security — deploying more Border Patrol agents, building more barriers, and passing more punitive immigration laws.
After Sept. 11, those measures escalated.
“What had been this sort of simmering debate, if you will, becomes this boiling thing that lifts the lid off of the pot,” said Parra, now a history professor at the University of Arizona.
A slew of border security measures trailed the attacks, including, but not limited to, the following:
- In 2002, Congress voted to establish the Department of Homeland Security, which in turn created Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
- In 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, which authorized about 700 miles of new border barrier.
- In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security mandated that U.S. citizens must present a passport or other accepted documents when traveling into the country through a land port of entry.
Between Fiscal Year 2001 and Fiscal Year 2008, the Bush administration more than doubled border security funding, reaching a $10.4 billion budget.
In Nogales, the changes were palpable.
In the weeks following 9/11, crossing through the Nogales ports of entry became cumbersome, Parra recalled. Immigration agents asked more questions. They inspected more people. The officers were tense, he said.
Typical 15-minute wait times ballooned to one or two hours, affecting people like Parra’s grandparents, who crossed regularly from Mexico for family visits.
“We were like the type of family that didn't let the border cut us in half,” Parra said, “but it did involve a lot of adapting.”
The economic fallout
Time passed, and wait times at the ports decreased somewhat, but didn’t return to their pre-9/11 levels, Parra said.
Before 9/11, “there were hardly any lines,” said Torres, the accountant who commutes to Mexico for work.
“A very long waiting time at the border using a car would be an hour, hour and a half. But that would be a very, very, very long time,” he said. “Now that's the norm: an hour.”
As crossing through the ports of entry became more difficult, the effects reverberated to small businesses on both sides of the border. For generations, departments in Nogales, Arizona, largely depended on shoppers from Mexico, who often traveled for hours to walk along the city’s downtown corridor. Since 9/11, many of those businesses have since closed – though other factors, like big box stores, and a weakened peso, likely came into play.
Meanwhile, Torres said, U.S. citizens became more hesitant to travel to Nogales, Sonora. The trend hurt the city’s “curios” — small businesses that sold Mexican art and other artisanal items. He added that a spike in cartel-related violence in the 2000s, along with subsequent media coverage, didn’t help.
‘They’ll build a 35-foot ladder’
Today, the southern edge of downtown Nogales is lined with a 30-foot-tall bollard fence, built in 2011. A cascade of razor wire clings to the fence — an addition from the first Trump administration in 2018. Twice in recent years, the Nogales City Council has asked the federal government to remove the wire. It remains.
Reflecting on the past 25 years, Torres said he missed the pre-9/11 days of quickly crossing the border. But he understood the rationale behind some of the border security measures.
“I'm not saying that I like the wall, but I mean, the country has to protect itself,” he said.
Still, Torres said, “people that want to cross eventually will find a way to cross the border. Build a 30-foot wall and they'll build a 35-foot ladder. OK? Or a tunnel. Well, they'll go under.”
As post-9/11 border fence construction flourished, undocumented immigrants did not stop trying to enter the United States. Instead, many started crossing in more desolate areas — miles away from the Nogales ports of entry. Since the attacks, the Pima County Medical Examiner has recorded more than 4,200 migrant deaths in the Arizona desert alone.
As a teenager, Parra — the Nogales High School graduate and current history professor — watched the border change around him. On one occasion, he recalled, U.S. customs agents stopped him before he crossed into Mexico, questioning why he wasn’t in school.
It had been a half-day at school, Parra told the agents. He was crossing to Mexico to visit his grandmother.
“I wasn't carrying anything. I was literally just walking across the border into Mexico, and yet even in the U.S. I kind of got stopped for all that,” he said.
The interaction stuck in his mind — a divergence from previous years, where immigration agents at the ports often knew or recognized the local residents crossing back and forth.
“‘American citizen?’ That’s what (the agents) would say. ‘American citizen?’ ‘Yes,’” Concannon said, recalling her days crossing the border in the 1980s. “And we’d just go on, and there we were, back in the United States.”
As the years went on, Concannon noticed that her own students — who were Latino — were coming to class with more stories of being stopped and inspected by Border Patrol agents. It disturbed her.
“Everybody's more on high alert and that's was what it was,” she said. “A lot of people would say that's exactly what the terrorists wanted. They wanted the United States to feel less secure.”
This story is part of the AZPM News series "Remembering September 11," exploring how 9/11 affected Arizonans and continues to shape our communities.
