“Sarah Towle has obliterated today’s dead-end arguments about immigration and transformed them into riveting, human stories. We forget that ideas—good and bad—have always crossed our borderlines; only human beings need a piece of paper.

We all deserve a narrative with clarity, and Towle has delivered. Spectacular!”

Ken Burns, filmmaker

“Harnessing the emotional truth, narrative power, and moral vision of Morrison, Kingsolver, and Zinn, Sarah Towle’s urgent and evocative journey of discovery reveals how the US immigration system evolved into a weapon to drive democracy into crisis.”

She Writes Press, Publisher

2024 Nonfiction Book Award Gold Medal Winner
2024 CIBA Nellie Bly Award First Place Winner for Journalistic Nonfiction
2025 RFK Human Rights Book Award Finalist
A SocialJusticeBook.org featured book for “Teaching About Immigration”

It was family separation and “kids in cages” that drove Sarah Towle to the US southern border. On discovering the many-headed hydra that is the US immigration system—and the heroic determination of those caught under its knee—she could never look away again. Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands charts Sarah’s journey from outrage to activism to abolition as she exposes, layer by “broken” layer, the global deterrence to detention to deportation complex that is failing everyone—save the profiteers and demagogues who benefit from it.

Deftly weaving together oral storytelling, history, and memoir, Sarah illustrates how the US has led the retreat from post-WWII commitments to protecting human rights. Yet within the web of normalized cruelty, she finds hope and inspiration in the extraordinary acts of ordinary people who prove, every day, there is a better way. By amplifying their voices and celebrating their efforts, Sarah reveals that we can welcome with dignity those most in need of safety and compassion. In unmasking the real root causes of the so-called “crisis” in human migration, she urges us to act before we travel much farther down our current course—one which history will not soon forgive, or forget.

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. 

Toni Morrison, 1995

About The author

Sarah Towle is an educator, researcher, and author; a human rights defender, nature lover, and choral soprano. She resides in an ephemeral borderlands, buffeted and buoyed by a diversity of languages, cultures, landscapes, and creeds. She has taught English language literacy, cross-cultural communication, conflict resolution skills, and the writing craft for three decades on four continents across the age span in myriad class contexts, including under the trees in refugee settings.

Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands has joined the ranks of “award-winning” reads:

• It received a Nonfiction Book Authors Association Gold Award within one week of publication.

• On April 5, 2025, it advanced from Finalist to First-place for the Nellie Bly Award for Journalistic Nonfiction presented by the Chanticleer International Book Awards program.

• On May 22, Crossing the Line was featured alongside books by Raymond Arsenault, Jonathan Blitzer, Steven Brill, Jonathan Kozol, and Wright Thompson, among others — all nominees for the 2025 RFK Human Rights Book Award.

“With a propulsive narrative and an engaging style, Crossing the Line is an important contribution to our understanding of the borderlands, and by extension, America itself.”

Reece Jones, author of White Borders

“I challenge any reader to pick up this book and not be shaken, disturbed, and ultimately committed to a better and more just world. Towle beautifully renders moments of humanity in a fundamentally inhumane system.”

John Washington, author of A Case for Open Borders