Holy Smoke - the 3rd picture - what/where is that? Is that a drop off in front of those people - a trail or what? Is that Mexico to the left and NM to the right where the tracks are?
I wouldn’t care how bad things were where I lived if I had to face a trail like that...No way!!
The picture is of one of the Stations of the Cross (green cross) placed along the trail to the statute at the top. Mexico is at left, New Mexico at the right. There is a 2.4 mile gap between the end of the fence at Anapra and where it picks up again at the Rio Grande river.
A recent and excellent video of the trail and trek to the top is at the link. The young lady narrating notes correctly that the hike is not to be taken except during Catholic Holy days (Good Friday for example) or during other scheduled events. The reason is that without a wall gangs, drug traffickers and illegals prey upon individuals or small groups. As you will see in the video, on Holy or event days, security is present (sort of like in Israel I imagine). I strongly recommend watching the video.
“where is that?”
From the article: “near Sunland Park, a community just west of the busy border city of El Paso, Texas.” On the other side of the mountain in the foreground of the picture (where the pedestrians are coming from) is the edge of the El Paso suburbs. The urban area on the left of the picture is the end of the Western suburbs of Juarez, in Mexico.
The long line on the ground is one of the first stretches of border barrier completed during the Trump Administration. It is basically divides the Western flank of the El Paso/Juarez urban area, extending out into the desert along the border.
Before, it was a long walk for an average Joe to walk around the Western edge of the barrier from Juarez to El Paso. Now, as you note, it is TOO far for an average guy to walk in a day. A twenty mile run of that new barrier was put there.
That place was prioritized because of the high rate of human and drug traffic that used to occur there. A great bulk of that traffic has now been stopped/re-directed.
The traffickers now bus these large groups of migrants to temporarily overwhelm the Border Patrol officers in the area as a distraction, to open a better window for their drug mules.
And those tracks that pass so close to the border became infamous for cross border train robberies a few years ago.
They stole all kinds of things from slow passing trains, the railroad had to post guards.