By Adrian Florido
Fronteras

SAN DIEGO — The big rig’s trailer was painted in the Border Patrol’s signature olive green; the agency’s name emblazoned across it in white block letters. As it rumbled onto a residential street in Logan Heights on Jan. 10, neighbors peered out from their windows and yards.

If the truck aroused suspicion in the largely Mexican immigrant neighborhood that day, it was unfounded. The Border Patrol, it turned out, was making a special delivery.

Workers unloaded a stack of rusted corrugated metal panels and deposited them onto the dimly lit ground floor of a former bread factory as architect Jim Brown, the building’s owner, looked on.

He was now in possession of roughly 100 feet of the U.S.-Mexico border fence.

The Border Patrol recently replaced about 900 feet of the fence at Border Field State Park near Imperial Beach. It’s part of the ongoing effort to heighten, thicken and refortify the fence in strategic areas along the border where it says drug and human smuggling are a problem.

But in San Diego, activists didn’t want to see the fence’s old panels just tossed out. Much of the fence on the Mexican side was covered in murals and graffiti painted by artists who oppose the fence on principle.

When members of a local advocacy group called Friends of Friendship Park found out private contractors were going to sell the old fence’s panels for scrap, they asked the Border Patrol to let them keep them.

They got…

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