Sheriff Tony Estrada of Santa Cruz County stands against Trump's border wall, advocating for community ties over division, reflecting local sentiments on immigration.
New Delhi, India Jul 11, 2026 ALN: NOGALES, Ariz. — Tony Estrada is the law here — not President Trump.
The well-worn crossing along the Mexican border is a place where President Trump’s strident campaign rhetoric aimed at Mexican immigrants still throbs. And few feel the sting more than the 73-year-old Santa Cruz County sheriff.
Born in neighboring Nogales, Mexico, Estrada arrived in the United States at the age of 1, and now occupies the local public safety building that bears his name. His personal story is a familiar one in the dusty town that for decades has marked the beginning of thousands of hopeful immigrant narratives.
Yet this place and Estrada’s deep roots here underscore some of the most complicated issues confronting the Trump administration’s contentious efforts to secure the border, from a White House directive authorizing local police to assist with federal immigration enforcement to the proposed wall.
During the campaign, Trump often celebrated the endorsement of Joe Arpaio, the former Phoenix-area sheriff whose hard line on illegal immigrants foreshadowed the then-candidate’s border agenda. But just 179 miles to the south in Nogales, and all along the nearly 2,000-mile southwest border, Trump’s plans are playing to a much more skeptical, if not adversarial, audience.
Estrada and his co-workers are flatly against the centerpiece of Trump's plan: the wall structure. "The wall structure is not the solution," said Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez, the coalition chief executive whose own Texas region includes 84 miles of boundary with Mexico. Among the principal obstructions, Martinez said in a recent interview, the new administration has failed to reconcile intricate environmental and social conditions natural to the boundary that make such an enormous undertaking (cost estimates have topped more than $20 billion) "impractical."
Even though Santa Cruz County (population: 46,000) represents perhaps the poorest stretch of the Arizona-Mexico boundary, Estrada's strong bi-national relationships here have cast him among the most forceful and vocal competitors of Trump's unfolding boundary strategy.
Each time the new leader identifies his programs for a "great, great wall," as he did most recently in an address before a joint session of Congress, it reopens profound wounds first inflicted on many here during Trump's preliminary appearance as a candidate when he described Mexican immigrants as murderers and rapists.
"He insulted my people," Estrada said. "When he said that, I personally took it. That isn't right. He must not be discussing people like this, people he does not really know. If he knows them, he's probably seen them doing his construction work."
The meticulously preserved photograph is the official record of the Estrada family's formal entry to the United States from Mexico more than 70 years ago. The mother, wearing a serious expression befitting a journey into an uncertain future, is surrounded by her four boys. Balanced on her lap is the youngest of the brood, whose sleepy appearance elicits a warm smile from the now gray-haired man peering into the mirror of his own arrival in the United States, in 1944.
"Yes, that's me," Sheriff Estrada said, pointing to the young boy, mouth slightly agape.
The antique-colored photograph underscores the deep connection to a swath of the border that straddles many generations of families, and explains, at least in part, why the administration's border agenda has struck such a dissonant chord along much of the rugged territory that currently serves as the international dividing line.
"A wall would only represent a slap to the face of our Mexican neighbors," Nogales Mayor John Doyle said. "It sends the wrong signal to the rest of the world." Like Estrada, Doyle, 65, also represents an unbroken link to what locals call the "other side of the line." His mother was born in Cananea, a copper mining town in the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora. His cowboy father, an immigrant from the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, for years drove cattle on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border.
In the community that's more than 80% Hispanic, Doyle said it would be more unusual to find someone with no connection to the Mexican city that even shares the name of its U.S. neighbor.
"Our families are connected, our economies are connected, but our government is doing its best to drive us apart, it seems," the mayor said.
On the Mexican side, government officials are also making a vocal case, warning that a wall would represent a "closed door" to vital economic interests between the two countries.
Graco Ramirez, governor of the Mexican state of Morelos and president of the Mexican Governors Conference, was urging his U.S. counterparts gathered last week in Washington to seriously consider how Trump's border enforcement policies could potentially affect Mexico's status as a top trading partner with three of the four border states: Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. (Mexico also ranks as the third-largest trading partner with the United States, with trade valued at $525 billion.)
"People don't want more walls, they want more exchange,"
Already, officers said, a sweeping set of purchases released late last month by the Office of Homeland Security, aimed at accelerating the deportation of undocumented immigrants, is sending a shiver through boundary community economies and corporations. Doyle said there's been a noticeable drop in local foot traffic downtown, perhaps a sign that even Mexican citizens with current documents who cross the border daily for business or shopping are worried about being embroiled by U.S. authorities.
The mayor is concerned that resident children enrolled in local schools, whose parents' immigrant status may be in jeopardy, could instantly find themselves alone and funneled into the area's humble foster care system. "You can find real dread that even valid renewable card holders could easily get picked up if they don't answer a question properly," the mayor said. "Heck, I'd be afraid. From the shame that people have to live under these conditions."
Ultimately, it will be Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly who will be tasked to carry out President Trump's immigration directives. And when he arrived here last month to take stock of existing border security — already highlighted by a 20-foot-tall steel fence that indelicately knifes through sections of downtown neighborhoods on both sides of the divide — Sheriff Estrada was a prominent member of the local delegation bent on persuading the secretary to take Trump's wall somewhere else.
Estrada and the border sheriffs' coalition raised similar concerns in 2006 when the Bush administration pushed forward with an elaborate border fencing plan — part of its own effort to slow illegal immigration and shield border communities from a feared spillover of violent crime linked to warring Mexican drug cartels.
The sheriff refers to past fencing programs, beginning in earnest in 1995, as akin to erecting "iron curtains." Mexican traffickers immediately responded by tunneling under them. Since the mid-90s, Estrada said authorities have discovered more than 100 tunnels in the area.
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