I spend a lot of time in Ciudad Juárez, MX (right at the US border) and a lot of people seem to be interested in day-to-day border crossing life, so I figured I'd share a bit about what it's like.
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First off, Juárez and El Paso are essentially one city split by a border. A lot of people think about San Diego and Tiujana being close but those cities are ~40 mins apart. You can literally walk from Downtown El Paso into Downtown Juárez. 
The cities are so close that the border is my morning running route when I'm in Juárez. You can see that the city just basically ends, then 50 meters of nothing, then the fence. There's a parallel highway on the US side and a parallel highway on the MX side.
Border fence already exists anywhere that people live. (There's a great @Radiolab about this. US foreign policy for decades has been to try to push illegal crossings into remote areas because survival rate is low. Populated areas already have fence.)
There are three bridges (entry points) between the cities: the Santa Fe bridge (downtown), the Cordova bridge (a bit east) and the Zaragoza bridge (more east). (There's technically a fourth but it's far away.)
The Cordova bridge (colloquially called "Puente Libre" [Free Bridge]) is the most popular because there is no fee to cross. The other two have a nominal fee (~$1-2 dollars for a car or $0.25-0.50 for a pedestrian).
Thousands of people cross these bridges everyday. Many people live on one side and go to school on the other or work on the other. It's a way of life to simply cross over and over again.
My normal travel routine is to take a ~15 minute Uber from where I stay in Juárez to the Cordova bridge, walk across the bridge (~15 mins), then take another ~15 minute Lyft on the other side to the ELP airport. (I prefer Lyft but @lyft is not in Juárez yet.)
(Other quick side note about the rides: an Uber ride is approximately 1/3 the cost for the same distance on the MX side. I call this the Burritos Crisostomo Index [BCI]: Luxury expenses like restaurants or Uber rides, etc. are generally about 1/3.)
Why not just drive one car the whole way? Waiting times to drive into the US from MX can be as much as three hours. On a good day, maybe just an hour and a half. There's even a website juarez.cc with roughly real-time border crossing wait times so people can plan.
The waiting times for the walking line vary. At non-peak times, it can be less than five minutes. At peak times especially when kids are crossing for school, it can be 45 minutes or more, so I try to plan to avoid those times.
Here are some shots from the walk across the Cordova bridge. You can always see these coke bottles lining the side that are filled with liquid... that's because the truck drivers are waiting hours and hours and when you gotta go, you gotta go...
Vendors are always selling drinks, snacks, souvenirs, windshield wipers, or anything else they can think of. Drivers often have a newspaper or something else to occupy themselves during the wait.
A few months ago, US Customs & Border Protection started stationing guards in the middle of the bridge to ask for ID. Apparently, this is to stop asylum seekers from being able to get to the actual border to request asylum.
It seems like something should be done about this, but as of now it's a process that continues.
Upon arrival at the other side of the bridge, there can either be a big line or no line, and then it's essentially just like the passport control you would experience at an airport. (First three are short line. Last pic is from a long line.)
There's also a little office here for people to renew their permits. Even people who have a US visa need to renew their permit every 90 days and show proof of employment, taxes, etc. to make sure that they plan to return to MX.
There are checkpoints on roads/highways throughout TX/NM/AZ/CA that check to make sure people have a valid permit. With a visa and without a permit, people are only allowed to stay in the borderland zone.
Going the reverse direction from US into MX, there is no passport control. So, if you're walking, you just walk in. If you're driving, there can be a wait, but it's nothing like the wait going into the US. It will typically be 10-15 minutes, or during peak times up to an hour.
The busiest times going back into MX are usually Friday evenings. Can be an ordeal. But you just drive in. You can get a red light for a customs search, and trucks are checked (can’t bring in guns!), but the vast majority of people are waved in.
If you've traveled to Mexico City or Cancun, you may recall that you get a free seven-day visa or need to pay if your stay is longer. Well, since the Juárez borders have no passport control, how does that work?
Essentially, it's the same borderland zone concept as above in reverse. If you're staying in the border area, you can stay visa-free. If you're traveling further south in Mexico, there are checkpoints at airports and major roads at which you'd need to get a visa.
Last week, I began to notice new construction at the border. You can see in these shots that there is new fence going up.
My understanding is that this is simply standard maintenance/refreshing of existing fence, but it certainly is a different, stronger material.
The odd thing, though, is that this fence is in between about five other fences. Would this new, stronger fence actually be the deterrent that stops people from illegally crossing? Seems unlikely, but clearly it's being built.
We live in interesting times, and while to many people these crossing dynamics are normal, I understand to many it's a foreign idea so I just wanted to shed some light.
With @lopezobrador_ having just taken office, he's already made some changes at the border, including the doubling of minimum wage for the Maquila (factory) workers.
(Manufacturing is the driver of the Juárez economy with dozens of multinational companies manufacturing at the border.)
The income tax has also been lowered in Juárez. These are attempts to keep the people who have traveled this far north in MX where they can have a decent life. We'll see if these policies lead to change of any kind.
I'm not an expert in 🇺🇸 🇲🇽 border politics, and I'm not a journalist. I'm just a guy who crosses the border a lot. Happy to answer any questions you might have.
