An artist who said she wants to “erase the border” between the United States and Mexico created a mural featuring the images of migrants who were deported from the United States.

Lizbeth De la Cruz Santana created the mural, which is on the border wall along Tijuana’s beach and is interactive. Visitors can scan a barcode on the mural next to each image to access audio that tells the migrant’s story.

The Mexico News Daily reported on the project:

The subjects are a United States veteran, two mothers who were forced to leave behind their U.S.-born children and a man who was deported just months before he would have qualified for DACA — the 2012 program designed to shield from deportation people who were brought to the U.S. when they were young.

De la Cruz Santana, 28, herself the child of a Mexican migrant, said that each of those depicted in the installation is someone she knows and that she felt compelled to share their stories to bring awareness to the dangers and hardships faced by migrants during their journey north and during deportation.

De la Cruz said that while mounting the installation she was struck by the stark contrast between the bustle and liveliness of beachgoers, restaurants, bars and a bullring on the Mexican side of the border fence, and the nervous quiet of parked Border Patrol vehicles on the U.S. side.

“If you look past this wall on the U.S. side, there’s nothing,” De la Cruz said. “I wanted to erase the border.”

The mural is for De la Cruz’s doctoral dissertation and was funded through the U.S.-based Mellon Public Scholars Fellowship.

The mural paints a rosy picture of migrants who have been deported and does not address some of the dark stories of those who have been deported multiple times but returned to the United States and committed crimes, including murder. It also does not highlight the migrants who escaped justice for their crimes in the U.S. by being deported.

Breitbart News has reported on many of these migrants, including Carlos Zuniga-Aviles, an illegal alien who was deported five times and repeatedly returned to the U.S. illegally. 

In April, he was back in the U.S. and, this time, he was charged with murder after he kicked a four-month-old infant to death when he learned he was not the baby’s father.

In another case, 22-year-old Pierce Corcoran was killed in an accident caused by 44-year-old illegal alien Francisco Eduardo Franco-Cambrany. A toxicology test was never done, and the man was eventually deported to Mexico without facing any charges in Corcoran’s death.

“Now he’s returned home to his family, and it’s kind of a hard thing because our son is forever separated from us,” Wendy Corcoran told Breitbart News.

De la Cruz said in the Mexico Daily News story that she hopes her project will help raise money to provide legal assistance for deported migrants.

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