endnotes | crossing the line

Every chapter in Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands is built on a combination of my personal experiences; ethnographic research, including first-hand observations, as well as interviews with featured story subjects and their collaborators; an extensive review of topic-specific and other related literature, including history texts and primary source materials, such as lawsuit filings, scholarly dissertations and other academic publications as well as research papers; journalistic reportage and more recently released non-fiction reflections on the subject of forced displacement and worldwide human migration.

Approximately one hundred people contributed to this project in ways both large and small—but always important. After obtaining their permission to capture their stories and share their voices, I invited everyone to collaborate in fact-, quote-, and chronology-checking. Roughly 85% of them rose to the challenge. For all others, I engaged professional fact-checkers to aid me in verifying all accounts through resources and statements already in the public record. Our methodology was to authenticate all stories through a two-factor verification process.

That said, memory is slippery and historical documentation—and truth—tend to evolve with time and distance. If errors remain, they are mine alone. I invite you to reach out to me here if you believe some aspect of the book would benefit from correction or updating. We can make changes in future editions.

This chapter was made possible thanks to personal interviews and interaction with Jodi Goodwin, Esq., as well as other Rio Grande Valley attorneys and humanitarians who worked with her, alongside her, or in observation of her throughout 2018 and 2019.

These collective accounts were further informed by the journalism of Jacob Soboroff (MSNBC) and Julia Ainsley (NBC), Ginger Thompson (ProPublica), Lomi Kriel (Houston Chronicle), Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Molly O'Toole (LA Times), Caitlin Dickerson (then of The NY Times), Hamed Aleaziz (then of Buzzfeed), Camilo Montoya-Galvez (CBS), Dianne Solis (Dallas Morning News), Kate Morrissey (The San Diego-Tribune), Miriam Jordan and Nick Miroff (WAPO), Robert Moore (Texas Monthly and El Paso Matters), Alicia Caldwell and Michelle Hackman (Wall Street Journal), and others who witnessed and reported on Trump & Co 1.0’s crimes against humanity, including Zero Tolerance and Family Separation as they unfolded in real-time.

To ground the chapter in historical context, I learned much from the work of Aura Bogado from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting on the issue of the treatment of unaccompanied children in the custody of the US Department of Health & Human Services and the Administration for Children & Families of the Office of Refugee Resettlement as well as such defense contractors turned extra-legal childminders like MVM Inc. In addition, writing for The Atlantic on August 14, 2018, Natalie Escobar exposed the practice of tearing families apart did not start with Trump: Family Separation Isn’t New: U.S. immigration policy has traumatized migrant children and parents for nearly a century.

I drew awareness, as well, from the work of Susan Schmidt and Jacqueline Bhabha in “Seeking Asylum Alone: Unaccompanied and Separated Children and Refugee Protection in the U.S.” (2006). Their work also serves the perspective developed in Chapter Nineteen: Locking up Family Values.

Finally, Ginger Thompson’s July 16, 2019, piece for ProPublica, took us right inside the Ursula lockup in McAllen to explain how such atrocities can be allowed to take place: A Border Patrol Agent Reveals What It’s Really Like to Guard Migrant Children: With the agency under fire for holding children in deplorable conditions and over racist and misogynistic Facebook posts, one agent speaks about what it’s like to do his job. “Somewhere down the line people just accepted what’s going on as normal.”

For a full understanding and fact-checking on both lawsuits mentioned in this chapter—Ms. L v. ICE and Dora v. Sessions (see pages 12, 13, 14, and 17)—I interviewed ACLU lead attorney, Lee Gelernt, and child psychiatrist Dr. Amy Cohen of Each Step Home, who captured many of the testimonies of separated parents highlighted in the latter-mentioned suit. Both Lee and Amy were instrumental in informing my research for Chapter Twenty: Barbarians at the Gate and Chapter Seventeen: Kidnapped by Uncle Sam, respectively.

Reporting on all the ways Trump & Co 1.0’s 2018 “zero tolerance” policy was a bumbling mess, beset with planning shortfalls, widespread communication failures, and administrative indifference to the needs of small children snatched from their parents, can be found in this Washington Post exposé based on an unpublished report by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog.

My research on the historical roots of asylum included a study of the 1848 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, the 2013 Cartegena Declaration on Refugees, which allows a broader category of persons in need of international protection to be considered refugees, and other treaty bodies that make up the International Refugee Protection Regime, including the 1980 US Refugee Act, as a participant of the Oxford Centre for Refugee Studies 2021 International Institute. This included, as well, insights into the ancient tradition of asylum as it is expressed in the sacred texts of the world’s major religions.

My understanding of how asylum practices and laws are under threat today was further informed by my bi-monthly access to the US-based nationwide Asylum Working Group from the fall of 2020, as well as the highly readable must-read book by John Washington, The Dispossessed (see Bibliography).

For a thorough mastery of the roots and codification of international human rights transgressions such as “crimes against humanity,” “genocide,” and “mass murder,” I am indebted to the work of scholar Philippe Sands (see Bibliography). 

Other books on the topic of family separation—during Trump’s one-term administration and otherwise—that informed this manuscript and which I recommend without reservation include: Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy; Laura Briggs, Taking Children: A History of American Terror, and Efrén Olivares, My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines (see Bibliography).

My gendered statement on page 7, “Having fled their home countries, in large part to protect their children, they were emotionally and psychologically traumatized at losing them, most cruelly, to men in uniform,” was not a mistake. Historically, as I lay out in Chapter Thirteen: The Education of a Border Patrol Agent, only 5% of Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol officers are women. My use of “men” here is, therefore, intentional.

The history, evolution, and importance of the Flores Settlement Agreement, mentioned in Chapter One, is further fleshed out in Chapters Twelve, Seventeen, Nineteen, Twenty-One, and Twenty-Two. Reporting on the statement in my closing paragraphs, that unaccompanied children under the care of the Refugee Office are transferred to ICE upon their 18th birthdays to be incarcerated as adults can be found in this reporting by John Burnett of National Public Radio.

Big thanks to the original Angry Tías and Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley—Jennifer Harbury, Cindy Candia, Joyce Hamilton, Madeleine Sandefur, Lizee Cavazos, Susan Law, and Elisa Filippone, as well as Nayelly Barrios—for the first-hand testimonies that provide the foundation for the stories to come. Not only does their collective story illustrate how the practice of “metering” traps the world’s most vulnerable people in danger and squalor in a government-sanctioned Catch-22, in defiance of US and international law as well as cultural and religious values, it also carries forward the thematic motif begun by Jodi Goodwin’s story in Chapter One: that once you bear witness the cruel injustices of the global Border Industrial Complex and so-called immigration systems, it is impossible to ever look away again—and why I entitled the Introduction of this book, The Subversive Act of Seeing.

Shoutouts of gratitude as well to the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project (ProBAR) and the Texas Civil Rights Project, as well as San Antonio’s Interfaith Welcome Coalition and Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) — all first responders to Trump & Co 1.0’s Family Separation and Metering debacles. 

Hit tip as well to journalist Ginger Thompson, of ProPublica, who broke the story of family separation with the recording cries of Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, which would alert the world to what journalist Jacob Soboroff calls "the most spectacular policy fail" of the US government and the greatest human rights crime of a lifetime. 

Thanks, too, to writer Daniel Blue Tyx who was the first to capture the Tías’ singular story in book form and whose text, gifted to me by Tía Madeleine on my first visit to the RGV, was foundational to the development of this chapter and story.

You’ll find citations to Jacob and Daniel’s books as well as to Tías Jennifer’s book documenting the use of torture by the US government and CIA, particularly in Guatemala, in the bibliography. 

Additional thanks to Texas journalist Robert Moore, whose reporting I was glued to at the time:

Moore, Robert. Texas Monthly. Homeland Security Promises to Prosecute 100 Percent of Illegal Immigration Cases: The policy shift means that parents will be separated from their children if caught while crossing borders illegally. May 7, 2018.

Moore, Robert. Texas Monthly. Successful Immigration Program to End April 30: The Legal Orientation Program provides guidance to those facing deportation and is praised for saving taxpayer money. April 23, 2018.

Moore, Robert. Texas Monthly. Sessions Reverses Controversial Decision to Shut Down Immigration Program: The attorney general told a congressional committee he was deferring to its concerns about stopping funding. April 25, 2018.

For reporting on the dire consequences for Central American women and girls that followed Jeff Sessions’ limiting access to asylum for victims of domestic and gang violence in June 2018, I recommend:

• Currier, Cora and Monica Wise. Trump Administration’s Limits on Asylum for Domestic Violence Put Guatemalan Women in Peril: In June, Attorney General Jeff Sessions placed new limits on the ability of domestic violence victims to receive asylum, with dire consequences for Guatemalan women. The Intercept, November 2, 2018.

• Siddiqui, Sabrina. Trump administration moves to end asylum for victims of domestic abuse and gangs: Planned directive to immigration judges marks dramatic shift likely to affect tens of thousands of migrants. The Guardian, 11 June 2018.

The then-Attorney General’s actions resulted in new guidelines for asylum officers who conduct credible fear interviews, leading to the denial of myriad legitimate claims and sending women right back into the hands of their abusers and potential femicide.

This chapter was made possible thanks to my interviews with Elisa Filippone and the other Angry Tías, as well as Michael Seifert; the five Texas school teachers who joined forces to become Team Brownsville—Mike Benavides, Sergio Cordova, David Liendo-Lucio, Melba Salazar Lucio, and Andrea Rudnick—and Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley; the late James Pace, Brownsville native son and author of Mother of Exiles: Interviews of Asylum Seekers at the Good Neighbor Settlement House, Brownsville, Texas (see Bibliography); and several other RGV voices that we meet in later chapters, including Deaconess Cindy Andrade Johnson and Brendon Tucker.

Sister Norma’s witness of the conditions inside the Ursula hielera can be found in this article by the Global Sisters Report of the National Catholic Reporter as well as in this reportage in CRUX by the Catholic News Service. The work of Casa Romero during Sister Norma’s novitiate years is centered in this 1984 article in the Washington Post. And the life of the “game changer,” who Pope Francis also dubbed his “favorite nun,” is summed up in this article by Melissa Guerra in NewWorlder.

The historical references to the birth of the Sanctuary Movement during the Dirty War era were informed by Aviva Chomsky’s 2020 book, Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration (see Bibliography); Susan Gzesh’s April 1, 2006, featured article in the Migration Policy Institute Newsletter; and this report by Kevin Sieff of the Washington Post, who writes about the Dirty War history repeating itself with Trump & Co’s Zero Tolerance and stepped up deportation machine, especially in El Salvador.

This Human Rights Watch February 2020 report, Deported to Danger, that US deportation policies do expose refouled Salvadorans to death and abuse upon return.

The reference on page 28 about “roughly seventy thousand families and an equal number of children traveling alone arriving at the border” in 2014 is explained in this Vox article by Dara Lind. The phenomenon is discussed in more depth again when it becomes the focus of Chapter Nineteen: Locking Up Family Values. 

Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration speech, in which he promised that the US “will again be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not now have freedom” as he simultaneously shut the border to the refugees his Dirty Wars created can be found here. You’ll find deeper dives into this theme in Chapters Eleven and Fourteen. 

You can find more about the spontaneous eruption of the Families Belong Together movement and how it led to the repeal of Trump & Co’s Family Separation policy in this CNN report. Unfortunately, the separation of families by US immigration policies didn’t stop with the June 20, 2018, executive order, nor did it start with Trump & Co’s Zero Tolerance policy, as I will allude to at the end of Chapter Six: An Epiphany of Epiphanies, then illustrate and explain in Chapters Seventeen: Kidnapped by Uncle Sam, Chapter Twenty-One: Barbarians at the Gate, and Chapter Twenty-Three: Six, Seven, Eight Degrees of Family Separation.

I have many people to thank for the story weaving in this chapter. It was created from the strands of personal interviews with Woodson Martin, Brendon Tucker, and Cindy Andrade Johnson; Sister Norma, Jack White, and James Pace; the five Texas teachers turned Team Brownsville: Sergio Cordova, David Liendo-Lucio, Melba Salazar Lucio, Mike Benavides, and Andrea Rudnick, as well as Kathy Harington, who joined Team Brownsville's board, along with Woodson Martin, before the chapter is over.

These folks kept the machinery of welcome churning, alongside Gaby Zavala, Pastor Carlos Navarro, Pastor Abraham Barberi, lawyer Jodi Goodwin, and shelter operator Victor Maldonado. They, too, contributed first-hand storytelling to this chapter, as did Tía Joyce Hamilton. The story of their efforts to continue offering welcome even after the general US population looked away from the border as family separation faded from view can be found in this New York Times article by Jim Rutenberg: At the Border Town That the News Cycle Has Left Behind.

Also in the New York Times, enterprise writer Nicholas Kulish documented that summer how Trump & Co’s policies of forcing safety seekers to stay in Mexico emboldened organized crime. Kulish reported on the exploitation of the world's most vulnerable by human traffickers cashing in on Trump & Co's rollout of metering, then MPP in this interactive piece on the reality of bribes and shakedowns, kidnapping and days locked up in hideaways without food, called What It Costs to Be Smuggled Across the U.S. Border.

New York Times reporters Michael D. Shear and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, meanwhile, wrote about Trump & Co's election-season weaponization of the US-Mexico border to whip up fears about a make-believe “invasion” with their reporting on Trump sending 5,200 troops to Tijuana and ordering more concertina wire be woven into the already impenetrable border fortification there. At the same time, Trump's claims that destitute, road-weary people, carrying all that they owned on their backs, constituted a threat to a nation of over 330 million people, were disproven by his own Department of Homeland Security, which reported in 2017 that the border had never been more secure.

Sister Norma’s contribution, captured in two interviews with me, was corroborated by the Catholic News Service in this 2019 article in CruxNow.

Ashley and Gabe Casale told their own tale in a Huffington Post article entitled, I'm Camping Out In Front Of A 'Tender Age' Shelter With My Son. Here's What I've Seen. It took me some time to track Ashley down, but when I did, she confirmed the tale woven here from recollections of Tucker, Sergio, and Cindy Johnson, as well as her Huffpo article.

Information on the for-profit child detention industry also included in Chapter Twenty-Two: Ninety Days in the Desert, can be found in Sludge, which does investigative journalism on money in politics. In a July 3, 2019, exposé called These Nonprofits and Businesses Are Making Millions From Detaining Immigrant Children, Alex Klotch provides eye-opening statistics on the dozens of nonprofit shelter groups and for-profit companies making eye-watering amounts of money by detaining and transporting unaccompanied children, including the highest-earning kids jail profiteer that year Southwest Key, operator of Casa El Presidente, where Ashley, Gabe, and Tucker mounted their vigil. 

Jack’s "descent into madness," as he calls it, when he had just 24 hours to fold immigrant and refugee communities into the services at Good Neighbor Settlement House can be found in this local news report here.

In addition to Brownsville's Good Neighbor and Ozanam shelters, I also spent time touring La Posada Providencia with Cindy Andrade Johnson in San Benito and Loaves and Fishes in Harlingen with Tía Joyce, who stepped me through the efforts of her community to help transport asylum seekers from the bus station to area shelters, as well as the airport. In Texas as we went to press with Crossing the Line, Governor Greg Abbott and his attorney general, Ken Paxton, are trying to establish laws, such as SB-4, that will make humanitarianism such as that expressed by Joyce, Jack, Gaby, and others in 2018-19 against the law. Indeed, they could face prison time if they extended the same kindness today.

Information about Sergio and Mike’s recognition as GoFundMe Heroes of the Year is published here.

For statistics on the dwindling asylum success rates commensurate with the establishment of MPP, I recommend to you the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonprofit and nonpartisan data gathering, data research, and data distribution organization in the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. TRAC was instrumental to me in providing and/or corroborating data throughout the process of writing of this book.

Research for this chapter was largely conducted at the Historic Brownsville and Stillman House Museums, which illuminated for me the centuries-long pattern of US demagogues and profiteers using “invasion” rhetoric as a pretext for war, human displacement, land-grabbing, and corporate greed. This historic reality, foundational to the birth of the US nation, was further brought to light by Juan Gonzalez in his impactful tome, Harvest of Empire (see Bibliography). It is thanks to Gonzalez that I found the link between Brownsville’s robber baron foundations and Citibank, which would contribute to the rape and pillage, and financial bleeding of Haiti, setting into motion the destabilization that continues to rock the island nation today. This will be further discussed in Chapter Eighteen: Who Built the Cages? But it starts here, with the founding of Brownsville, Texas, by father Charles Stillman and his son, Frank.

Equally important to this chapter were my interactions and interviews with Tía Cindy Candia, Lindsay from North Carolina, Sergio Cordova of Team Brownsville, as well as my old pal Roy and his friends and co-delegate from the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue. 

The story of the cautionary tale of how border walls create dead zones that decimate local meeting places and economic zones, can be found this February 14, 2020, report by John Burnett on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition.

Except for the research on the current movement of people and rates of displacement worldwide, this chapter was built upon first-hand observation and personal interviews conducted with refugees and volunteers on my second day in Matamoros, Mexico. I was able to erect walls of understanding onto the foundations provided by my guides and mentors that day—all of whom I’ve identified by pseudonyms to protect their identity—thanks to additional context gleaned from follow-up interviews with Melba Salazar-Lucio, her husband David Liendo-Lucio, and numerous Escuelita de la Banqueta volunteers from Austin; Pastor Abraham Barberi, Gaby Zavala, and Brendon Tucker; and finally with my personal doppelgänger from Global Response Medicine as well as Helen Perry, the handsome doctor, Dairon, and the affable young man with the gorgeous laugh, Ray—all of whom you’ll meet in greater depth in Chapter Seven: From Mosul to Matamoros and Chapter Eight: The First Big Lie. 

Crucial to the storytelling in this chapter, however, which is foundational to both the book’s structure as well as my journey of awakening to the issue of forced migration, was the week I spent in December 2019 as part of the Salzburg Global Seminar. 

¡Mil Gracias! to Clare Shine, former director of the Salzburg Global Seminar, for gifting me the invitation to attend the session on Education and Workforce Opportunities for Refugees and Migrants and become a Fellow of this incredible institution. This is where I met Patricia Vázquez, M.Ed., who in turn gifted me several copies of Bolay, by author and educator Irma Uribe Santibáñez on learning that I was headed to the refugee encampments of northern Mexico in January 2020.

I also have Tías Madeleine, Joyce, and Lizee—all birding enthusiasts—to thank for helping me to identify the great-tailed grackle and its seven splendid songs.

Finally, big shout-outs of thanks to Michael Benavides for all that he shared with me and taught me about the long-lasting effects and potency of trauma. Thanks to Mike, I sought training immediately upon returning home from that first trip across la linea in trauma-informed interviewing and writing techniques so that I would not cause any of my collaborators further pain by seeking to include their stories in these pages. This led, as well, to my subsequently obtaining a position with the Write to Life program of the UK-based non-profit Freedom From Torture.

I must start here by acknowledging GRM founder Pete Reid, who lost his life saving others in Bakhmut, Ukraine, in February 2023. I never had the opportunity to meet Pete. This chapter was constructed primarily from the oral histories of then-GRM director, Helen Perry, as well as her colleagues Blake Davis and Sam Bishop, who shared generously with me their expertise and experiences in crisis-based global health management as well as GRM reports from its unique beginnings in Iraq.

GRM’s Andrea Leiner also contributed to the storytelling in this chapter, as did Deaconess Cindy Andrade Johnson, Gaby Zavala, and Pastor Abraham Barberi, as well as Dairon Elizondo Rojas and Rainer Rodriguez, whose stories are featured in Chapter Eight: The First Big Lie.

Charlene D’Cruz, the focus of Chapter Nine: Sounding the Alarm, also added story strands into the weave of this chapter. So did all the members of Team Brownsville, including its board treasurer, Woodson Martin, as well as Tucker, Gladys Cañas Aguilar, and Joyce Hamilton of the Angry Tías. 

Yael Schacher of Refugees International confirmed Helen’s story of cold-calling US social justice and immigrant rights organizations to raise the money needed for GRM to establish a presence in Matamoros, government and UN funding being off limits to them there. Helen and Tucker were both instrumental in my growing understanding of the UN Refugee Agency's “Standards of Dignity”—standards the UN was unable to apply in the MPP encampments across the line without invitations from either the US or Mexican governments. That's why an organization such as GRM had to step in.

Larry Cox and Esther Garza, also grassroots healthcare providers of the once-thriving Casa Bugambilia shelter in Matamoros, were instrumental in providing background for this chapter. The story charting the rise and fall of Casa Bugambilia is recounted in Chapter Seventeen: Kidnapped by Uncle Sam.

The consortium of forty US law firms mentioned in this chapter and responsible for funding the dentist suite cum resource center is called Lawyers for Good Government. The legal clinics they helped to establish in northern Mexican border towns that continue to provide legal representation to asylum-seeking families and individuals still exist under the auspices of the L4GG's Projecto Corazon.

This chapter was made possible thanks to the oral accounts of Dairon Elizondo Rojas, Rainer Rodriguez, and Perla Vargas, corroborated by their GRM colleagues, significant others, and travel companions. 

The Trump “asylum ban” referred to in this chapter, as well as his administration’s other attempt to assassinate refugee protections one surgical cut at a time, are outlined in this December 2020 report by the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), A Timeline Of The Trump Administration’s Efforts To End Asylum

For information about Daniel Ortega’s about face and decent into authoritarianism—I was in Nicaragua following the overthrow of the Somoza-family dictatorship when Ortega was considered a popular hero, so way myself keen to learn more—I recommend this Guardian article as well as this reporting in La Républica.  

For citation and sourcing information regarding the work of Agathe Demarais to document the decades-long failures of US economic warfare through sanctions and how such actionscreate human displacement and migration, I refer you to the bibliography for Crossing the Line. You can access Juan González’s October 2023 report here: The Current Migrant Crisis: How U.S. Policy Toward Latin America Has Fueled History Numbers of Asylum Seekers.

Huge thanks to Charlene D’Cruz and Helen Perry for the first-hand testimonies that make up the bulk of this chapter. Added to their generous contributions are my own personal witness of their tireless efforts as well as that of colleagues at the watchdog organization, Witness at the Border. 

I take a deeper dive into the Dirty Wars that raged during the early years of Charlene’s career in Chapter Ten: Déjá Vu at the Border. But I also recommend this brief history of the US-funded Central American Dirty Wars that set the stage for human displacement and the refugee “crisis” we are experiencing today, written by Jeremy Scahill for The Intercept.

Trump’s 1990 celebration of an authoritarian’s act of massacre can be found here in Playboy. But if, like me, you can’t get behind Playboy’s member-only wall, no fear: this more recent recap in the US edition of the Independent surfaced after he harnessed Customs and Border Protection as his own personal police force during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

Reporting on CBP predator drone surveillance in general can be found in this article by Vice, while reporting on potentially illegal CBP predator drone surveillance over Minneapolis—illegal because Minnesota’s twin cities are outside CBP jurisdiction—can be found in this article, also published by VICE. Additionally, cybersecurity reporter Jed Pressgrove for the online magazine, Government Technology, sounds the alarm about government surveillance overreach as well.

For more on how BORTAC, the military arm of the US Border Patrol once deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, came to be weaponized and turned on peaceful protesters by Trump in Portland, OR, in 2020, see the following:

Echavarri, Fernanda. The Border Patrol Is the Last Thing We Need in American Cities Right Now: Undertrained, unaccountable, and emboldened: a powder keg waiting to explode. Mother Jones, July 22, 2020.

Jacoby, Karl. Op-Ed: The Border Patrol’s brute power in Portland is the norm at the border. Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2020.

Klippenstein, Ken. The Border Patrol Was Responsible for an Arrest in Portland: An internal memo, obtained exclusively by The Nation, details a coordinated program of domestic counterinsurgency. The Nation, July 17, 2020.

Olmos, Sergio, Mike Baker, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Federal Agents Unleash Militarized Crackdown on Portland: Federal authorities said they would bring order to Portland, Ore., after weeks of protests there. Local leaders believe the federal presence is making things worse. The New York Times, 17 July 2020.

Olmos, Sergio, Mike Baker, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Federal Officers Deployed in Portland Didn’t Have Proper Training, D.H.S. Memo Said: Rather than tamping down persistent protests in Portland, Ore., a militarized presence from federal officers seems to have re-energized them. 18 July 2020.

Pierce, Charles P. The Authoritarian Operation in Portland Is Only a Dress Rehearsal: A major American city is being softly Pinochet’ed in broad daylight. Esquire, July 17, 2020.

Pilkington, Ed.'These are his people': inside the elite border patrol unit Trump sent to Portland. The Guardian, 27 July 2020.

This national security briefing in The Hill covers how Customs and Border Protection agents came to be deployed as troops against peaceful protestors in DC’s Lafayette Square. To learn more about CBP’s little-known 100-mile border perimeter policing jurisdiction, I recommend this post by the Southern Border Communities Coalition, a program of Alliance San Diego.

For a complete chronology of SCOTUS’s 1970s rulings that chipped away our Fourth Amendment rights, you must read Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, by political geographer Reece Jones (see bibliography), who documents how the US CBP, which includes the Border Patrol, has come to operate outside the US constitution. You’ll find links to all Todd Miller’s books in the bibliography as well: the one referred to in this chapter is entitled Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security.

Matt Apuzzo and Michael S. Schmidt, reporting for the New York Times in 2014, chronicle how the Department of Homeland Security beat back President Obama’s attempt to curtail racial and ethnic profiling in Border Patrol policing. For more on the impunity of the Department of Homeland Security agency cultures, and how its security-first mandate puts all our rights at risk, I again recommend documentation by the Southern Border Communities Coalition. 

Equally sobering is this March 2021 ACLU-Michigan analysis which suggests that the militarization of the US northern border is increasing alongside more prevalent us of similar policing strategies: New ACLU of Michigan Report: Border Patrol Operates Far from the Border and Uses Racial Profiling and State and Local Police to Target Michigan Immigrant Communities.

My worries are echoed in this Washington Post column by Philip Bump, published on the 2020 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, who writes that unidentified law enforcement officers disappearing peaceful protestors into unmarked cars presents a dangerous new factor to US democracy, undermining all our values and weakening our constitutional rights.  

This chapter, centered around Tía Jennifer Harbury’s first-hand experience—as a civil rights lawyer and a wife—of the impunity of the Central American Dirty Wars, unspools time in reverse chronological order to explain the unacknowledged fact of US colonization of Latin America and Caribbean. Dating to the 19th century and unfolding at the intersection of government-supported corporate resource exploitation and military might, this chapter aims to show how US foreign and economic policies exported the Manifest Destiny mindset south of the line, becoming a major driver in displacement and northward human migration that we experience today. 

I draw Jennifer’s story and voice from existing interviews in the public domain, our own personal interactions, US and Inter-American court filings prepared by Jennifer and/or her colleagues, as well as reportage about those legal cases. But perhaps most informative to me in writing this piece were Jennifer’s three books:

Bridge of Courage: Life Stories of the Guatemalan Compañeros and Compañeras;

Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala; and

Truth, Torture, and the American Way. (See Bibliography for citation information.)

Other books cited in the Crossing the Line Bibliography that were instrumental to my research for this chapter include:

Peter Chapman’s must-read history, Bananas, about how the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) shaped worldwide corporate capitalism;

Aviva Chomsky’s long-overdue 2021 update on the US’s role in the region: Central America’s Forgotten History;

Lesley Gill’s 2004 exposé on the destructive force of the School of the Americas, to seed political violence throughout the Americas: The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas;

Juan González’s absolutely essential, Harvest of Empire;

Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop, as well as his End of the Myth; and of course,

War is a Racket by Major General Smedley Butler, whose 1935 premise—that war, while vicious, is profitable and nothing more than an amoral means to distract the general public as one corporate purse or another is filled—I adopt in this book with regard to the Dirty Wars, War on Drugs, War on Terror, and our current Securocratic War (as Jeff Halper calls it) or War on Illegality (following Todd Miller).

Also pertaining to the content of this chapter, I recommend again Jeremy Scahill’s December 2, 2018 article in The Intercept: A Brief History of the U.S. Dirty Wars in Central America that set the stage for the Refugee Crisis about the US’s longstanding addiction to setting fire to others’ homes, then standing in their way when they attempt to flee. This topic also undergirds Chapter Eleven: Modern Problems, Medieval Solutions and Chapter Twelve: The Long View. 

For compelling reporting on how the US created the Salvadoran gangs, I learned much from William Wheeler’s 2020 long-form story in The Guardian. Also in The Guardian is this 2017 photo journalism essay about La Bestia by Veronica G Cardenas that is worthy of your attention, as is this NowThis video. about the deathly train journey. 

Jennifer can be heard in conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! during the family Separation debacle, during which they discuss how the Angry Tía passed the cries heard ‘round the world from a Border Patrol whistleblower to Ginger Thompson of ProPublica. 

Taken together, the chapter explains how US foreign policy since before the Monroe Doctrine, and put into place with Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick bludgeoning of Latin America and the Caribbean, created the vicious cycle of repression and corporate self-interest the US is trapped in today with regard to its southern neighbors, giving new meaning to today’s US foreign policy rhetoric of  bringing “security and prosperity” in the Latin American region. In other words, it just means more of the same.

As I alluded to in Chapter Three: Line Stones in David’s Sling, a 20th-century underground railroad sprang from the US-Mexico borderlands and spread across the nation between 1981 and 1990, when Ronald Reagan slammed the doors of “the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope” on the very people his Dirty Wars displaced and sent into flight. I knew early on in the process of writing this book, therefore, that I would include a chapter on the Sanctuary Movement. 

Imagine my surprise, however, when I discovered that little has been written about the objectors who challenged US law and risked arrest to protect people fleeing chaos and violence in Central America in answer to a higher law of conscience.

That meant I had to go directly to the source.

I traveled several times to Tucson, Arizona to speak with Reverend John Fife, co-Padre of the Sanctuary Movement; the head of the movement’s legal effort, Margo Cowan; and the woman whose close call with death from environmental exposure kicked off the sanctuary effort: Dora Rodriquez.

As part of our storytelling collaboration, Dora and I went to the location under two palo verde trees where she was discovered in the process of passing in July 1980. We were beaten there by Arizona artist Alvaro Encisco, whose now-multi-year effort to turn the Sonoran desert into a cemetery, art installation, and memorial to the great unknown I recount in the Conclusion: Buried Dreams. Dora's attempt to cross into the US via the desert as part of a group of twenty-six resulted in thirteen excruciating deaths. Alvaro has so far planted six crosses in their memory. 

Dora generously shared her migration story with me over the course of several visits and numerous phone calls. I have woven her tale into the first-hand recollections of John Fife, who was adamant that I write not just about his journey to activism, but that of Jim Corbett and other borderlands faithful as well. He introduced me, in turn, to Margo Cowan, who also generously offered her testimony. All three—Dora, John, and Margo—engaged in fact, quote, and chronology checking to ensure this chapter came out just right. My gratitude to them knows no bounds.

For more information on the principle of non-refoulement under international human rights law, I refer you to this UN document from the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Likewise, for more about the US 1980 Refugee Act, which I dive into in more depth in Chapter Twenty-Seven: Death by a Thousand Cuts, I suggest studying its original governmental source.

And if you’d like to learn more about the life and death of Archbishop Oscar Romero, I have two texts to recommend:

Matt Eisenbrandt’s 2017 title, Assassination of a Saint: The Plot to Murder Óscar Romero and the Quest to Bring His Killers to Justice (see Bibliography) as well as Tom Gibb’s earlier counterargument, published in The Guardian in 2000, of US CIA duplicity in covering up the investigation so that counter-insurgency advisors would not lose their ears and eyes.

A useful fact sheet supporting my contention that Latin America is the world’s most economically unequal region in the world—and how to fix it—can be found at this link.

Reporting on the El Mozote massacre can be found in this January, 1982, New York Times article by Raymond Bonner and in this Washington Post piece by Alma Guillermoprieto filed the same month.

***

Editorial Note: I traveled to El Mozote in 1990 with the sole survivor of the masscre, Rufina Amaya. I wrote about that day for this book, but when my publisher insisted I cut 60,000 words from the original manuscript (which was 180,000 words long!), that was one of the tales my editor felt could go. In the era of digital storytelling, however, nothing need be lost to the cutting-room floor. I will be posting my El Mozote story to Substack and when I do, I will link it up here.

The content of this chapter was made possible thanks to numerous reporting sources. I remain indebted, again, to journalistic reports of the war in El Salvador, specifically by Raymond Bonner, and Anna Guillermoprieto (see endnotes Chapter 11), as well as Mark Danner’s 1994 poignant investigation, and memorial, to the forgotten victims of the Cold War Dirty Wars: The Massacre at El Mozote (see Bibliography). My thanks also go to Roberto Lovato, author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas (see Bibliography), whose personal memoir brought to life again my personal recollections of living and working in the northern war zone from 1990-1994, during which time I visited the site of the El Mozote Massacre with the sole survivor, Rufina Amaya.

The story of Jenny Flores’s flight and incarceration came from court documents, as well as long-form reporting on what children had to endure before Jenny brought their plight into the US courts as lead plaintiff in the 1985 class action lawsuit—finally settled in 1997—that Messers Carlos Holguín and Peter Schey filed to strike down the parents-only release policy and keep unaccompanied youth protected from horrendous living conditions in hotels turned prisons. The suit (Flores v. Meese; Flores v. Reno) now known as the Flores Settlement Agreement is still among the most powerful legal tools available to immigrant children’s advocates, as described in an American Bar Association explainer from Trump & Co’s Zero Tolerance and Family Separation debacles.

The first-person recounting of the story and history can be found in Georgetown University Law Professor Philip Schrag’s book Baby Jails (see Bibliography), as told to Dr. Schrag by Peter Schey. It is enlightened by this June 2019 piece by Jorge Barrera for CBC Radio: How a 35-year-old case of a migrant girl from El Salvador still fuels the border debate. It is further supported by the story of Jenny and Alma’s flight and incarceration as told to me by Carlos Holguín in December 2022.

Fact-checking was challenging owing to the passage of time and the elusive quality of memory. Where the two men’s tales and reflections differ, I defer to court records. And where such primary resources are also blurry, I say so in my storytelling.  

I was able to corroborate Mr. Holguín’s beautifully rich visual recollections of the Mardi Gras and other hotels turned INS detention centers through image searches in Google and the Library of Congress archives. 

The migration and refugee statistics I cite come from the trusted Migration Policy Institute blog archives from the era and more recently produced.

The antics of once-Hot Dog King turned INS Regional Commissioner turned champion for Tanton network anti-immigrant causes turned Californian politician known for his inflammatory rhetoric, Harold Ezell, are well documented in LA Times reporters’ notebooks—also my main source for how Ezell and Tanton’s Prop. 187 taught the nation’s top immigration-control group in 1994 how to win the White House in 2016.

The Southern Poverty Law Center holds a treasure trove of documents exposing his decades-long project to perfect fearmongering and foment hate. You can find essential background on how Tanton grew the network that would eventually reach to the White House here, as well as in Reece Jones's essential book on the nation-based art of exclusion, White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall (see Bibliography). For more on Tanton’s multiples skirmishes in service of a wider war, you can hear it from the hatemonger’s mouth himself in this oral history conducted by Otis L. Graham, Jr. Among his many skirmishes was republishing the words of the notorious French racist, Jean Raspail, which Tanton acknowledges and celebrates as a service to the English-speaking, Western world in this essay penned in his own hand.

I am grateful to the scholarly work of Timothy Dunn to trace the roots of Operation Gatekeeper, which kick-started the weaponization of the borderlands to deter people from crossing the line through the threat of death just as NAFTA opened the border to the free and unfettered movement of goods and money. For proof that Gatekeeper was instituted with the express intent to thwart northward migration, I refer you to the Border Patrol’s own 1994 study:  "Border Patrol Strategic Plan 1994 and Beyond: National Strategy". And for a sobering report on the deathly effects once implementented, I recommend this 2012 report: Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon, by Gabe Shivone.

As for the deleteriously effects NAFTA delivered to Mexican farmers due to dumping US agricultural surplus — an average loss of more than $1 billion per year during the nine-year period of 1997–2005 —, I point you to Timothy A. Wise’s 2011 study, “The Impacts of U.S. Agricultural Policies on Mexican Producers,” in Subsidizing Inequality: Mexican Corn Policy Since NAFTA, Jonathan Fox and Libby Haight, eds., (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas; University of California, Santa Cruz, 2010), 163–71. You can find an online introduction of the piece here.

***

Correction: In the first edition of Crossing the Line, I wrote that Operation Gatekeeper began six months after NAFTA. That may have been true informally within Border Patrol practice. But the official start was October 1, 1994, nine months after NAFTA began on January 1, 1994.

This chapter would not have been possible without the collaboration of justice warrior, Jenn Budd, who generously offered her time and tale in support of this book. My gratitude toward Jenn knows no bounds.

Our storytelling is scaffolded on numerous additional sources:

• public domain documents from the online Border Patrol archives;

• reporting by journalist-scholar Garrett M. Graff for Politico; and

• the work of such historians, memorists, and documentarians as

  • Carol Anderson,

  • Ken Burns,

  • Francisco Cantú,

  • Juan Gonzalez,

  • Kelly Lytle Hernandez,

  • Reece Jones,

  • Todd Miller,

  • Joseph Neivns,

  • Mae Ngai,

  • Javier Zamora, and

  • Pauline R. Kibbe, whose 1947 book outlined the issues of segregation, agricultural labor exploitation, unfair employment practices, and dangerous, substandard housing.

The influence of the research of all the above thought leaders can be felt throughout Crossing the Line (see Bibliography).  

Circling back to Jenn, you must read her memoir: Against the Wall. And here’s a Newsweek interview that digs further into her experience as a woman in a misogynistic federal agency during Border Patrol Training Academy.

For information on death by elemental exposure, I recommend you to

• No More Deaths,

• Humane Borders,

• Border Angels,

• Battalion Search and Rescue,

• the Colibiri Missing Migrant Project,

• Salvavison,

• Borderlinks,

• the Southern Border Communities Coalition, and

• the Samaritans of Tucson, Ajo, and Green Valley.

Contact any of these groups for information on volunteering your time to help with desert water drops as well as humanitarian searches for folks in search of safety who are stranded in the desert, left to die by US government policy. 

***

Author's Note: I wrote so as to show it, but it bears repeating: the US Border Patrol is the foundation onto which the entire US Department of Homeland Security apparatus was built. That is why cultures of racism, misogyny, impunity, and violence reign supreme inside the departmental agencies charged with keeping us "secure" as they conduct their so-called wars against drugs and terrorism as a means to stop people in search of safety. The cultural legacy of the US Border Patrol is a thing that crushes.

In July 2023, on the occasion of my second turn-in deadline with She Writes Press, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands had ballooned to a whopping 160,000 words. My project manager, Lauren Wise, turned the manuscript right back to me, with another one-month deadline extension, a new publication date, and the mandate to “cut the work by 40,000 words, at least, though 60,000 words would be better.” 

Most of those words had been written on the topic of the so-called War on Drugs.

A writer often discovers what she thinks about a topic by writing; she must unpack all its complexities in order achieve clarity of thought and figure out how best communicate that. I am no exception: I had to research, study, and write the story of the duplicitous and deadly decades-long US Drug War to understand how to weave it into the overarching tale I wanted to tell. The effort cost me months. 

Throughout it all, my editor had been patient and sympathetic. But he worried it was becoming a rabbit hole. He urged me, repeatedly, to crawl out of it. The issue was germane, he conceded, but it was also taking on a life of its own, becoming a whole other book or a rehashing of others' books. So when we were down to the wire -- with one month to excise a full quarter of the manuscript or run the risk of not going to press in time for the 2024 election season -- he began with this section, transforming what were originally three chapters into one tight historical sweep that kept all my narrative intentions in tact. 

So shout of thanks to James Hertling -- and to all editors, everywhere -- for making their authors better.

The only quote I regret not being able to keep is from a 1994 Drug War confessional by John Ehrlichman, Assistant to President Richard Nixon and Watergate Conspirator: 

 “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.” 

Chapter Fourteen was also greatly served by my personal interviews with University of Texas at El Paso Professor of Anthropology Josiah Heyman, who is also an Endowed Professor of Border Trade Issues and the Director of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies. Joe provided me with my own personal research syllabus, including many of his own essays as well as the works of the following scholars (see Bibliography): 

• Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace

• Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera

• John Gibbler

• Ioan Grillo

• Dawn Paley

• Jeremy Slack, Daniel E. Martínez and Scott Whiteford, and

• Tony Payan.

Also influencing this chapter are the theses of Howard Abinsky and Lisa McGirr (see Bibliography).

The public domain archives of the Office of the Inspector General on the CIA, Contra, Crack-cocaine controversy were critical to the fact-checking process.

I am also indebted to the brave endeavors of narco-journalist  Anabel Hernández García, as well as the Border Patrol reporting of Melissa Del Bosque, particularly as it pertains to the rise of the Douglas Mafia.

Finally, my thanks go to Warwick University author-scholar Benjamin Smith, who first encouraged me to strip the manuscript of all superscript numbers, move my then Footnotes to Endnotes, and make them and my Bibliography available online to ensure that Crossing the Line would meet academy muster, while simultaneously being more accessible to the general public. He did the same for his 2021 book, The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (see Bibliography), becoming my first inspiration.

The marriage of political and legal history as well as oral testimony and memory that brought this chapter to life was made possible thanks to extended conversations with the story’s central character, Robert Vivar; the esteemed input of Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, in his role as Policy Director at the American Immigration Council; and Magdaleno “Leno” Rose-Avila, a founding father of the gang prevention group, Homies Unidos, an organization set up by former gang members for gang members wishing to eschew violence and antisocial behavior in pursuit of productive, crime-free lives, while keeping young people out of gang life as well.

I had the honor of interviewing and shadowing Robert twice: the first time during his daily course of duties while still in exile in Tijuana, Mexico; then again north of the line after his—spoiler alert—November 2022 return home to California (see Chapter Twenty-three). In both places, Robert had committed himself to a life of service, seeing to the common good in the absence of governmental structures of compassionate care for the marginalized and destitute. He remains at the front lines of the movement to return unfairly deported US Veterans today.

When Robert and I met, I was already deeply ensconced in researching the “good” versus “bad” immigrant framing which, I agree with Silky Shah of Detention Watch Network, has caused the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to become dangerously and inextricably enmeshed with the US system of criminal judgment and punishment. Silky’s 2024 book, Unbuild Walls, is a must-read source on how the US came to build the largest, most-troubled, least transparent system of incarcerating peace-seeking people (see Bibliography).

The overlooked nearly forty-year project to expand of the legal distinction of “aggravated felony” bears all the blame for the structure many refer to as the “crimmigration” system. Not only has it provided the basis for the removal of tens of thousands of immigrants each year, writes Sarah Tosh of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; it has also led to such innocent-seeming promises from politicians, across the spectrum, that the deportation machinery will target “felons not friends” and “criminals not children,” thereby normalizing the trope that the vast majority of immigrants are criminals and perverts coming for your wives and your jobs. 

Robert Vivar defies this characterization, and yet he fell victim to a judicial system that penalized him not once but twice and threw his family into disarray. I include his story in Crossing the Line as one example in hundreds of thousands of lives that have been destroyed by the spate of 1980s and 1990s laws that Aaron Reichlin-Melnick stated to me must be turned back if we are ever to find any semblance of justice in our immigration system. In a world such as ours, where civil misdemeanors can rise to aggravated felonies just like that, the label of “criminal alien” has become a weapon – and one that goes unquestioned by the majority public. 

My profound thanks to Aaron for not only helping me to really understand the multiple legislative acts contributing to this hard and unjust reality, but for making sure I communicated them clearly and correctly in this book. 

Other top-line resources contributing to my understanding of the immigration-enforcement-and-incarceration business are

• Emily Kassie’s eye-opening report, Detained: How the United States built the largest immigration detention system in the world, a joint project for the Marshall Project and The Guardian

• German Lopez’s report for Vox, Mass incarceration in America, explained in 22 maps and charts, prepared in collaboration with The Sentencing Project

• This report, also by German Lopez for Vox and also germane to Chapter Fourteen, on how has the war on drugs changed the US criminal justice system: The Drug War, Explained

• Jeremy Raff’s piece for The Atlantic exposing the “Double Punishment” faced by non-citizens of color caught in the crimmigration trap

• Dara Lind’s explainer (one of many must-reads by her on Vox) entitled The disastrous, forgotten 1996 law that created today's immigration problem

• This Vox video by Madeline Marshall and Melissa Hirsch, called The law that broke US immigration and explaining how it forced so many undocumented immigrants to stay north of the line

The effects of the broad legislative “reforms” from the law-and-order 1990s, instituted to curb the growth of gang culture in LA and other US inner cities, is also a focus of Steven Dudley’s book on the making of MS-13 (see Bibliography). Dudley illustrates, and Leno concurs, that not only have the resulting policy practices failed to combat gang violence in the US, but they’ve turned Central America and Mexico into some of the most notorious homicide capitols in the world, spreading the phenomenon 100% Made in the USA to nations unprepared and ill-equipped to handle a problem foisted upon them and contributing to rise in transnational criminal organizations, many of which now traffic the individual the US myopia cause. 

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the work of California-based historian Kevin Starr (see Bibliography).

It’s a cautionary tale—one we’re repeating today—that comes from a xenophobic impulse to withhold welcome: “the tragic outcome of a tragic environment,” former gang member turned leader in gang prevention and violence intervention for Homies Unidos, Geraldo Lopez, states in his 2018 TedTalk.

My gratitude for the collaboration that resulted in this story chapter extends to many. It was Jenn Budd who suggested I include Anastasio’s story. In an Oct 25, 2022, blog post, Jenn reflects from her unique vantage point as a former Border Patrol agent on why justice for Anastasio has been so elusive: Biden Administration's Intended Coverup of the BPCITs.

The crime archives assembled by the Southern Border Communities Coalition, a program of Alliance San Diego, provided me with every detail of Anastasio’s dubious arrest and hideous murder, down to the names of the officers involved who were never held to account. You can find the full story on my Substack here. 

But it is thanks to María de Jesús Puga Morán, Anastasio’s partner of more than twenty years and the mother of their five children, that I got to know the man behind the story of US-government-sanctioned agency violence, driven by a culture of racial profiling and dehumanization without accountability. 

María, who agreed to speak to me when my journey across the line found me in San Diego in December of 2022, had just come away from a historic hearing under the auspices of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that put the US government on trial for impunity. María’s fortitude in taking on the most formidable foe in the world knows no bounds. My respect for her has no limits. Intercept reporter Ryan Devereaux also acknowledges María’s bravery in his February 4, 2021, article: Border Patrol Beat an Immigrant to Death and Then Covered It Up: Former DHS supervisors say the killing and cover-up were part of a pattern.

Hat tip to Maria’s lawyer, Andrea Guerrero, for arranging the meeting and acting as interpreter for María and me at what was a very busy time for her firm. 

For the one-page government resolution that sparked the global abrogation of 20th-century human rights commitments, unleashed our now security-first paradigm, and turbo-charged the transformation of the US southern border into a militarized zone where the US constitution no longer applies, click here.

In this April 2019 article, Why Was The Homeland Security Department Created?, Stuart Anderson, senior contributor for Forbes, joins me in questioning the purported versus actual role of the Department of Homeland Security. From a cabinet-level government entity created in 2002-03 “to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States [and] to reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism,” the department seemed to have quickly lost its way, writes Anderson. Rather than keeping the homeland safe, the focus of department and agency leadership has clearly shifted in the direction of immigration enforcement and, specifically, stopping poor and dark-skinned asylum seekers from stepping on US soil. Cyber warfare receives little attention by the agency in comparison to the trumped-up threat posed by Central American refugees seeking safety, Anderson rightly points out.

Before his 2019 exposé of the US Border Patrol’s decades of agency dysfunction cited in the previous chapter, historian and author Garrett M. Graff blew the same whistle Jenn Budd would in 2015. Graff’s late 2014 investigation for Politico,The Green Monster: How the Border Patrol became America’s most out-of-control law enforcement agency, illustrates what Jenn experienced firsthand: that the agency “mandated to keep us safe from criminals and perverts, are too often the perverts and criminals themselves. Yet, they are rarely, if ever, held accountable for their actions” (Crossing the Line, page 155). Graff goes on to question — now ten years ago as of this writing — why people fleeing harm, hunger, and horror, who’ve survived the Mexican and Central American gauntlet, then turned themselves in to US border officials to request asylum, should be seen as such a mortal threat to the homeland. How the resulting demagoguery leads to more arms, agents, fortifications, and fences rather than shelters, showers, social workers, and sandwiches for people in need. And why Congress continues, again and again, to cave to the largest, most troubled, and least transparent law enforcement agency in the land: the same forces that, when ordered to kidnap children, did. 

Also writing on the history of the U.S. Border Patrol, from its xenophobic founding to its assault on the Fourth Amendment to its auto-coronation as "the premier national police force," is Reece Jones. All of his books are must-reads. But his 2023 publication, Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, should be at the top of everyone’s list. When you’re finished reading this, grab Reece’s and Jenn’s books next as well as anything by Todd Miller and John Washington (see Bibliography).

Speaking of John Washington — Jenn is not the only person sounding the alarm on agency impunity. In his September 2018 account for The Intercept,  A Border Patrol Whistleblower Speaks Out About Culture of Abuse Against Migrants, John offers up the first-hand experience of Mario, a former Green Monster who left the force after two years because he could no longer stomach the routine inhumanity he witnessed, including withholding water from people in distress, including children.

Then there’s this 2014 reporting, by Andrew Becker for The Center for Investigative Reporting as well as The Washington Post, citing the words of once-Customs and Border Protection chief of internal affairs, James F. Tomsheck, ousted for attempting to bring accountability to his agency. When Tomsheck sought to investigate some agents' use of inappropriate use of lethal force, he found shooting cover-ups and corruption upward through the command structure, all the way to the top. Tomsheck confirmed Jones’ contention that the Border Patrol suffers from “institutional narcissism,” believing itself to be the premier federal law enforcement agency, believing itself to be above the law as well as the “constitutional constraints” it is meant to enforce. “It has been suggested by Border Patrol leadership that they are the Marine Corps of the U.S. law enforcement community,” Tomsheck told Becker. “The Border Patrol has a self-identity of a paramilitary border security force and not that of a law enforcement organization.”

Melissa del Bosque recounts in 2020, for ProPublica, how agents from Jenn’s era on the force, including Trump’s agency chief, Carla Provost, climbed to the top of the Border Patrol, then one by one retired, leaving corruption, misconduct, and a toxic culture in their wake. Carla Provost was one of 9,500 members of a secret Border Patrol Facebook group, writes A.C. Thompson in 2019, also for ProPublica, where agents joked about deaths of border crossers, posted sexist memes, and shared derogatory comments about female Members of Congress of Latin American origin.

Reporting for Mother Jones, Fernanda Echavarri decries ”the involvement of the largest—and in many ways least accountable—law enforcement agency in the country” in Portland, Oregon during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. Dressed in riot gear, members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) beat “demonstrators with batons, pepper-spraying them, shooting nonlethal bullets at them, and even dragging them into unmarked vans,” raising the specter, as Charlene D’Cruz did in Crossing the Line, Chapter Nine, that the Border Patrol was harnessed as the personal police of a certain president with autocratic aspirations and turned on its national brethren. 

In this factual (not fictional) scenario, the real terrorist threat to the homeland – and US democracy – could be said to be the Homeland Security cops, themselves. Even the conservative CATO Institute signaled the need for agency reform, if not abolition, in the face of another hiring surge by the Trump administration. This 2017 report cites the same widespread corruption and mismanagement as well as discipline and performance problems in Border Patrol ranks Tomsheck called out years before. 

Circling back to Alliance San Diego’s Southern Border Communities Coalition, it bears repeating that they are the only entity I know to be tracking the fatalities and life-long injuries caused by encounters with Customs and Border Protection. As I state in Chapter Sixteen, Congress does not obligate the agency to keep such records, despite funding their “law and order” impunity project at increased levels, year upon year upon year, according to Todd Miller, for the Border Chronicle. Todd has made tracking the growth of the Border Industrial Complex and its enrichment of Department of Homeland Security contractors his life's work.

For an examination of US policy toward Latin America is at the root of the historic numbers of safety seekers at the souther border, be sure to read The Current Migrant Crisis (October 20, 2023) by Juan González, Senior Research Fellow, UIC Great Cities Institute; and Co-Host of Democracy Now.

This chapter would not have been possible without Larry Cox opening to me his heart, his community contacts with the United Methodist Church and the former Casa Bugambilia, and his seven-year war chest of documentation. These included court filings; correspondence with legal representatives; letters to Texas politicians; email traffic with Department of Health and Human Services powerbrokers and Office of Refugee Resettlement bureaucrats; interviews with members of the press; messages of support addressed to US public servants on his and Nancy’s behalf; and the hundreds of messages from well-wishers and friends captured in a private Facebook group called Bring Keyla Home that express condolences as well as appeals not to give hope. I am especially grateful to the Cox family's inner circle and members of their sprawling legal team for corroborating Larry’s story from multiple angles.

For more information on Los Zetas and other transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) now active throughout Mexico and Central America — and the many ways in which the US contributed to their development, their cultures of impunity and violence, and the resulting capture of Mexican state authorities — I recommend the following titles (see Bibliography for details):

• Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace, A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the “Mexican Drug War”

• Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Los Zetas Inc.:Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico

• Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail

• John Gibbler, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War

• Grillo, Ioan, Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels, and El Narco: The Bloody Rise of Mexican Drug Cartels

• Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism

• Jeremy Slack, Deported to Death: How Drug Violence Is Changing Migration on the US–Mexico Border

• ​​Benjamin Smith, The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade

For more about the massacre that almost ended the life of Luis Fredy Lala Pomavilla and “Mexico’s gruesome war on migrants,” as Amnesty International dubbed it, see:

• This 2015 Amnesty International report; 

• This Guardian piece, citing the facts of an interview with Lala Pomavilla taken before he was disappeared into a witness protection program; 

• This analysis by Hannah Stone and this investigation by Gary Moore for InSight Crime; 

• This 2014 reporting published in the Independent implicating Mexico police officers in the routine mass kidnapping and massacre of people traveling to the US in search of safety;

• And my own story take published in Medium on the 10th anniversary of the crime for which no one has yet to be held accountable, entitled, “How Much is a Migrant’s Life Worth.” 

This 2010 New York Times opinion piece by the editorial board rightly states: “Mexico’s drug cartels are nourished from outside, by American cash, heavy weapons and addiction; the northward pull of immigrants is fueled by our demand for low-wage labor,” and is worth the read. It also exposes how “The American response to Mexico’s agonies has mostly been a heightened fixation on militarizing the border.” All facts that are no less true today, as is this: “We have delegated to drug lords the job of managing our immigrant supply, just as they manage our supply of narcotics.”

The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, also known as the Hague Adoption Convention, is an international treaty that aims to protect the interests of children, birth parents, and adoptive parents in intercountry adoptions. It also addresses child trafficking and child laundering. The convention, which is widely recognized and enforceable in over 100 countries, including the United States, establishes standards for Hague Accredited agencies to follow. They are intended to safeguard children and prospective adoptive families.

With the trafficking of women and children an increasing global concern, I don’t mean to criticize the intent of either the Hague Adoption Convention or the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. On the contrary, I believe we should increase the funding available to anti-trafficking programs and enshrine more rights for survivors.

My concern is that the US government has entrusted these treaty bodies to border cops trained in counter-insurgency tactics and indoctrinated to find everyone, even children, a potential threat to the homeland. Under their auspices, the tragedy of family separations is taking place every day! 

As with the critical task of making asylum eligibility determinations, the country needs a humanitarian body predisposed to see people as people, not as “criminal aliens” and “alien invaders.” As I crisscrossed the line from Brownsville to Tijuana asking borderlanders for their top-line solution to the border issues we face today, one common idea kept getting repeated and, according to Reverend John Fife (Chapter 11), it was floated all the way back in the 1980s: create a body dedicated to handling the delicate work of welcome to work alongside our bloated security agencies so that law enforcement entities can do what they were trained to do: stop baddies and drugs. 

Instead, US citizen volunteers are stepping up to wage a grassroots war of welcome. And our state and federal governments are criminalizing them for it!

For more on the 1997 outcome of the Flores Settlement Agreement and the protracted attack its protections endured during the Trump administration, I point you to this October 30, 2020 report by Human Rights First.

When Guerline and I met during her nine-hour Geneva-Los Angeles layover in London in August 2022, I pitched the idea of centering her family’s immigration tale at the heart of a larger, multi-generational saga I knew I had to tell: that of Haiti and how its sovereign rights to security and self-governance have been defiled again and again by western powers for well over two centuries. Haiti’s story represents the unacknowledged history of US interventionism and imperialism throughout the global south — the very story that has created the crises in forced displacement and migration we are failing to deal with responsibly today. It exposes the start of mass incarceration of peace-keeping people who also happen to be poor and of color, what many people impacted by the system have likened to “modern enslavement” and “state-sponsored kidnapping and torture.” It reveals the beginning of the end-run around the 1951 Refugee Convention that the wealthy world continues to perpetrate and which international Refugee Protection Regime seems unable to stop.  It illustrates how multiple US administrations crossed the line in repudiating their own legal obligations under the 1980 Refugee Act.

I pitched the idea to Guerline over a full English breakfast in Knightsbridge. And as we meandered eastward across London, from Kensington to Buckingham Palaces, through Green and St James Parks, over the Westminster and Millennium bridges, she shared the Jozef family odyssey you now see in Crossing the Line. We spoke non-stop for six hours, before I put her and her family into a cab bound for Heathrow.

A tireless advocate and ally to all, Guerline was one of very few story collaborators too busy fighting the good fight to participate in final fact-checking and verification of her chapter. Lucky for me, Guerline is a public figure, with numerous interviews, articles, and videos by and about her already in the record. Her views can be heard on the audio show she hosted, “Tales from the Borderlands and Beyond.” She was recognized by Politico in 2021 as one of the 40 Most Influential People on Race, Politics, and Policy in the United States, and has been featured in Forbes Magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Miami Herald, Democracy Now, and many other publications. She has been honored in the human rights and immigrant rights worlds, receiving such accolades as:

• Las Americas 2021 Border Hero Award;

• 2021 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award; 

• 2022 National Haitian-American Elected Officials Network Community Champion Award; and

• 2022 American Immigration Lawyers Association’s Arthur C. Helton Human Rights Award.

• She was a Haitian Times' Newsmakers of 2022 and received the prestigious Dutty Boukman award. 

I was, therefore, able to double- and triple-check her story against these resources (as Guerline states: Anpil Men Chay Pa Lou, Many Hands Make the Load Lighter). But journalists don’t always get the details right, and they never engage their subjects as collaborators – in that, my methodological process for this book is unique. So apologies if inadvertent errors were made.

Another resource was our podcast episode for From the Borderlands (formerly Witness Radio). It was during that chat, about the invisible wall created by Title 42, when Guerline first taught me about the recurring, multi-year Haitian exodus and diaspora.

Serendipitously, that story was further supported in May 2022 thanks to the five-part investigation by Emmett Lindner for the New York Times of the long, dark history of US and French anti-Black injustice against the Haitian Republic and people, known as the Double Debt. The piece recalls the confessions that Marine General turned whistleblower, Smedley Butler, disclosed in his 1935 exposé, War is a Racket (see Bibliography). It is also part of the tale told by Juan Gonzalez in Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, who first connected the dots for me that the original antagonists of Haiti’s tragic downfall — National City Bank turned CitiBank turned Citi — were the Stillman family robber barons of Brownsville, Texas, where my own journey of discovery begins (see Bibliography).

I have Haitian activist-scholars, Leslie Mullin and Judith Mirkinson, to thank not only for fact-checking the chapter draft but for gifting me a personal syllabus, which included the writings of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, who was twice deposed by corrupt elites with the aid of Western powers, most notably, the US. It is a reality about which far too many of us have no clue. Nor do we have a clue, writes Aristide, about the negative effects of the neoliberal economic experiment kicked off in the early ‘90s just as the Jozef family was displaced.

Aristide’s 2000 book, Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization, is a compassionate treatise on behalf of people marginalized worldwide, and a word of warning to the Global North that neoliberalism would only increase worldwide poverty and inequality — for when the only measure of value is profit and the only measure of human progress is economic growth, Aristide writes, people lose (see Bibliography).

Tragically, his message remains unheeded. 

It is from Aristide that I learned that, “In this age of unprecedented growth, more than 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day. Three billion people, or half the population of the world, live on less than two dollars a day.” That one percent of people control 45 percent of Haiti's wealth; 85 percent of the population could not read and write in the year 2000; and over 500,000 children, mostly young girls, then lived in Haitian households as unpaid domestic workers — carrying water, cleaning house, doing errands, receiving no salary and no schooling. Not much has changed in the intervening decades. Indeed, things have only gotten worse. 

That is why the Haitian people run: because, as Guerline states, “you don’t take your life into your own hands like that unless it is too dangerous to stay.” That is why it is morally reprehensible that the US government – having largely caused the problems Haiti faces, dating back more than two centuries – continues to drop people in need back into a house on fire. 

This July 1994 report by the Human Rights Watch National Coalition for Haitian Refugees discloses, as well, that the US government knew exactly the dangers it was returning Haitian women and girls seeking safety in the US: Rape in Haiti: A Weapon of Terror.

In addition to Silky Shah and Kristina Shull (see Bibliography), whose works document the private prison system sparked by the xenophobic reaction to the Mariel Boatlift, I have the following journalists and legal scholars to thank for helping me to mark the modern manifestation of the US making many of the bank of others’ misery:

• Frances Frank Marcus, who in an April 1986 special report for the New York Times introduces us to the first “prison for aliens” to open in Oakdale, Louisiana, with capacity to detain more people than all border facilities, at that point, combined. 

• Harold Hong Koh, Esq., lead counsel in Haitian Centers Council, Inc. v. McNary (1992), which tells about the Haitian interdiction program to Gitmo: “its origins, its illegality, and its moral failings.” Find the 1993 decision here.

• Rupert Neate’s report, Welcome to Jail, Inc., for the Guardian in 2016 that locking up immigrants is“terrific, terrific” business for the booming private industry supplying doctors and nurses to jails and prisons. Indeed, it’s pretty lucrative for the food catering industries, as well as jumpsuit, prison bar, and human restraint device making businesses, etc., too.

• Clyde Haberman’s parallel conclusion, written for theNew York Times in 2016, that the tough-on-crime spree of the '80s and ‘90s spawned the boom in big yields for the dehumanists willing to benefit off human misery, like the heads of CoreCivic and GEO Group.

• This 2019 Washington Post op-ed by Smita Ghosh, then immigration research fellow at Georgetown University Law Center, pointing out the parallels between the xenophobia of the Reagan ‘80s, when a prison uprising of detained Cubans was explained away as being the act of “harden criminals,” rather than the reaction of people denied freedom; when Haitian asylum seekers were labeled, as a group, to be “considered at increased risk of AIDS;” and when the narrative spread that country had “lost control of [its] borders” and would, without detention, “crumble under the burden of overwhelming numbers.”

It’s important to remember, however, that the US has a long history in incarcerating “the other,” as Freedom for Immigrants teaches us.

• 1892: the first dedicated immigration detention facility in the world opens at the Ellis Island Immigration Station in New Jersey.

• 1893: Congress passes the first law requiring the detention of any person the executive and legislative branches deemed were not entitled to admission.

• 1910: the second dedicated immigration detention facility in the US opens on Angel Island, California.

• 1942: Executive Order 9066 provides for the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II, as well as German-Americans and Italian-Americans suspected of serving as enemy spies.

The next round of mass immigration detentions came in response to the Mariel Boatlift, but also, as we saw in Chapters Ten and Eleven, to Haitian and Central American refugees fleeing US-supported dictatorships, like Duvalier regime, as well as US-funded genocide and civil wars.

For more on the Mariel Boatlift, history of Haitian migration, and the politics of race-based exclusion, I recommend this piece in the December 2021 edition of the Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal 17(2) by Monika Gosin. Also worth reading is David Engstrom’s case study of the Carter Administration's response to the Mariel Boatlift, Presidential Decision Making Adrift: The Carter Administration and the Mariel Boatlift (see Bibliography) Engstrom argues that a faulty decision-making structure and ignorance of the historical dynamics of Cuban immigration contributed to the government's mishandling of the refugee crisis. The importance of the long-term historical repercussions to US immigration and refugee policy cannot be overstated.

Carter may have blundered, but the anti-Black attitude of the Reagan-Bush administration was deliberate and its intent to make an end-run around the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1980 Refugee Act was surgical, giving permission to other world powers to do the same. By way of contemporary examples of “push backs” and other forms of border management externalization practices they modeled, we have the tragic abominations of Italy, Australia, and the European Union. Indeed, as the US border pushes southward and into Mexico, so do Fortress Europe’s boundaries extend into northern Africa where the E.U. has funded the creation of a shadowy, secretive prison system run by rogue militias, especially in Libya. Tasked with keeping newcomers out of Europe no matter the human costs, writer Ian Urbino shows us in The New Yorker, November 18, 2021 edition, that where such brutality abounds, there can be no hope that human rights commitments will prevail.

For more on the topic of the EU's abhorrent response to worldwide human displacement and migrations — and I warn you, it’s a very hard read — I recommend Sally Hayden’s 2022 My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route (see Bibliography.)

Big thanks to Lee Gelernt and Philip Schrag for fact-checking early drafts of this chapter. Resources referenced include:

Books (see Bibliography)

Schrag, Philip G. Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America. University of California Press, Jan 2020.

Documentaries & Films

The Least of These, 2009, explores one of the most controversial aspects of American immigration policy: family detention.

Journalism

Gagne, David, InSight Crime’s 2016 Homicide Round-up, Insight Crime, 16 Jan 2017.

Gogolak, Emily, What's Next for Immigrant Families in Detention? The New Yorker Magazine, July 30, 2015.

Lind, Dara, The 2014 Central American migrant crisis. Vox, Oct 10, 2014.

Meng, Grace. Trump Administration Seeks to Detain Children Indefinitely: Children Experience Severe Harms in Detention. Human Rights Watch Dispatch, September 7, 2018.

Reilly, Katie and Madeleine Carlisle. The Trump Administration’s Move to End Rule Limiting Detention of Migrant Children Rejected in Court. Time, August 21, 2019.

Rhodan, Maya. The Famiy Separation Policy Ended. Now the Trump Administration Is Pursuing a Family Detention Policy. Time, September 6, 2018.

Shear, Michael D. and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Migrant Families Would Face Indefinite Detention Under New Trump Rule. The New York Times, August 21, 2019.

Talbot, Margaret. The Lost Children, What do tougher detention policies mean for undocumented immigrant families? The New Yorker Magazine, February 24, 2008.

Reports

ACLU report: Landmark Settlement Announced in Federal Lawsuit Challenging Conditions at Immigrant Detention Center in Texas, August 2007.

ACLU report: RILR v. Johnson,report on the case brought on behalf of mothers and children who fled extreme violence, death threats, rape, and persecution in Central America; were found by an immigration officer or judge to have a "credible fear" of persecution; yet remained incarcerated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of "an aggressive deterrence strategy" by the Obama administration.

Schmidt, Susan and Jacqueline Bhabha, Seeking Asylum Alone: Unaccompanied and Separated Children and Refugee Protection in the U.S., The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, June 2006.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Global Study on Homicide, 2013.

My profound gratitude to Dylan Corbett, executive director of HOPE Border Institute, for entrusting me with the true story of the start of family separation under the Trump administration (or was it the Obama administration?) in El Paso. In addition to running HOPE, Dylan, a graduate of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, coordinates the Vatican's Migrants & Refugees Section in Mexico, Central America, and the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Before founding HOPE, Dylan was a staffer to the bishops of the United States at both the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Department of Justice, Peace, and Human Development and the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), the national anti-poverty and social justice program of the USCCB.

Among the many learnings Dylan provided was introducing me to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). One of the twenty-two Department of Homeland Security offices and agencies, the mission of the HSI is to dismantle Transnational Criminal Organizations and terrorist networks spawned by myopic US economic and foreign policies. 

Big thanks, as well, to ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, Camilo Perez-Bustillo then of HOPE now of Witness at the Border, and members of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center (who prefer to remain unnamed) for help with fact- and quote-checking this chapter.

Books (see Bibliography)

Davis, Julie Hirschfeld and Michael D. Shear. Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration. Simon and Schuster, October 2019.

Efrén Olivares, My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines.

Soboroff, Jacob. Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. HarperCollins, July 2020.

Journalism

Associated Press. Honduran Border Crosser Separated from Family Kills Himself in Texas Jail. June 10, 2018.

Blitzer, Jonathan. New Yorker Magazine. How the Trump Administration Got Comfortable Separating Immigrant Kids from their Families. May 30, 2018.

Blitzer, Wolf. CNN. Trump’s second of five Secretaries of Homeland Security, and a former Marine General, John Kelly, says the administration is considering separating children from their parents to deter families from trying to enter the United States in a manner the administration insists on referring to as “illegal.” though seeking asylum is never illegal. Mar 6, 2017.

Burke, Garance. Washington Post. Federal agency says it lost track of 1,475 migrant children. April 27, 2018.

C-Span. HHS Secretary Unable to Say How Many Parents Know of Migrant Children Whereabouts. June 28, 2108.

Dart, Tom. The Guardian. 2,000 children separated from parents in six weeks under Trump policy. Sat 16 Jun 2018.

del Bosque, Melissa. The Intercept. The El Paso Experiment: A Public Defender’s Lonely Fight Against Family Separation. November 1, 2020.

Hennessy-Fiske, Molly. Los Angeles Times. U.S. is Separating Immigrant Parents and Children to Discourage Others, Activists Say. February 20, 2018.

Holpuch, Amanda. The Guardian. Trump's separation of families constitutes torture, doctors find: Evaluations of 26 people by Physicians for Human Rights provides first in-depth look at policy’s psychological impact. February 20, 2020.

Juvonen, Jaana, Jennifer Silvers. Washington Post. Separating children from parents at the border isn’t just cruel. It’s torture. We already knew it was inhumane. It also violates international law. May 15, 2018.

Kopal, Tal. DHS: 2,000 Children Separated from Parents at Border. June 16, 2018.

Kriel, Lomi. Houston Chronicle. Trump Moves to End ‘Catch and Release.’ November 25, 2017.

Miroff, Nick. Washington Post. Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ at the border is causing child shelters to fill up fast. May 29, 2018.

Moore, Robert. Texas Monthly. Inside Texas’s New Tent City for Children: Texas Congressman Will Hurd visits a new detention center and rips Trump’s family separation policy.
June 16, 2018.

Moore, Robert. Texas Monthly. Trump Administration May Be Creating ‘Permanently Orphaned’ Immigrant Kids, Judge Says: The judge ordered the administration to begin finding missing parents and to reunite them with their children. August 4, 2018.

Moore, Robert. Texas Monthly. Dozens of Immigrant Parents Remain Separated From Their Children: A month after a federal judge’s deadline, more than 500 children remain in federal custody and away from their families. August 27, 2018.

Rose, Joel. National Public Radio. Doctors Concerned About 'Irreparable Harm' To Separated Migrant Children.June 15, 2018.

Thompson, Ginger. ProPublica. Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated From Their Parents at the Border. June 18, 2018.

The World (Reuters). US says nearly 2,000 families have been separated at the Mexico border. June 15, 2018.

Reports

Borderland Immigration Council, Simon, Theodora; Edith Tapia; and Dylan Corbett; with support from Anai Ramirez. Discretion to Deny Family Separation, Prolonged Detention, and Deterrence of Asylum Seekers at the Hands of Immigration Authorities Along the US-Mexico Border. November 25, 2017.

Borderland Immigration Council, Tapia, Edith; Camilo Perez-Bustillo; Eli Beller; and Dylan Corbett; with support from Alejandro Marquez, Karen De Anda, and Ms. Brittany Hear, graduate students at the University of Texas at El Paso; Ms. Calla Couch and Ms. Beth Herdmann, graduate students at the University of Dayton; and graduate students from the “Research in Latin America and Border Studies” class taught by Dr. Jeremy Slack, assistant professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. Sealing the Border: The Criminalization of Asylum Seekers in the Trump Era. January 2018.

US Government Accountability Office, GAO-19-163. Unaccompanied Children: Agency Efforts to Reunify Children Separated from Parents at the Border. Oct 09, 2018.

Many people contributed their testimonies to the convergence narrative of this chapter. In (sort of) order of appearance, they include:

• Judge Kathleen Olivares and Analisa Cordova Silverstein, Loretto Academy alumni, and organizers of El Paso Cares—Liberty for All;

• Ashley Heidebrecht, social worker and community organizer;

• Adriana Cadena and Fernando Garcia, Border Network for Human Rights;

• Dylan Corbett and Camilo Perez-Bustillo, HOPE Border Institute;

• Melissa Bowen Rubin, Joshua Rubin, Margaret Seiler, and other members of Don’t Separate Families, Brooklyn, NY;

• Diana Martinez, history professor and organizer;

• Production and camera crew of Carbon Trace Productions, Springfield, MO.

Books (see Bibliography)

Briggs, Laura. Taking Children: A History of American Terror. University of California Press, August 2021.

Journalism

Bogado, Aura and Patrick Michels. US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children. March 18, 2019.

Dickerson, Cailin. New York Times. Migrant Children Moved Under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City.Sept. 30, 2018.

Kates, Graham. CBS News. John Kelly joins board of company operating largest shelter for unaccompanied migrant children. May 3, 2019.

Miroff, Nick. Washington Post. Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ at the border is causing child shelters to fill up fast. May 29, 2018.

Miroff, Nick and Paul Sonne. Washington Post. Trump administration preparing to hold immigrant children on military bases. May 15, 2018.

Muldowney, Decca and Alex Mierjeski, Claire Perlman, Lilia Chang, Ken Schwencke, Adriana Gallardo and Derek Kravitz. ProPublica. The Immigrant Children’s Shelters Near You. June 27, 2018

Reveal: The Center for Investigative Reporting. The Office of Missing Children. December 21, 2018

Reports

Amnesty International. USA: Catastrophic immigration policies resulted in more family separations than previously disclosed. October 11, 2018.

Of Special Note

As of April 07, 2021, Caliburn International, LLC, calling itself “a leading provider of professional services and specialized technology solutions for the U.S. government and commercial clients worldwide,” announced its split into two new companies:

• Acuity International, which will be comprised of the company’s (i) Engineering & Technology, (ii) Advanced Medical, and (iii) Global Mission business units and;

• Valiance Humanitarian (“Valiance”), which will continue the company’s humanitarian efforts, primarily to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.

The story convergence continues with oral testimonies, copyediting, fact- and quote-checking by the following story collaborators (in order of appearance):

• Joshua Rubin

• Ashley Heidebrecht and Diana Martinez

• Lee and Nancy Goodman of Hakafa Congregation, Glencoe, Illinois, speaking for Rabbi Bruce Elder

• Rabbi Josh Whinston

• Judge Kathleen Olivares, speaking for the senior class at El Paso’s Loretto Academy

• Camilo Perez-Bustillo, then of HOPE Border Institute, speaking for Father Rafael Garcia of South El Paso’s Sacred Heart Parish as well as for National Book Award Winner Martín Espada

• Ryan Matlow, Stanford University child psychologist and trauma specialist

• Thomas Cartwright, Karla Barber, and Julie Swift of what would become Witness at the Border

Documentaries & Film

Witness at Tornillo follows 66-year-old Joshua Rubin from Brooklyn, NY, an activist who became a fixture of the #FamiliesBelongTogether protests. He helped draw national attention to the teen incarceration facilities in Tornillo, Texas, and Homestead, Florida, by bearing witness—what he defines as the “subversive act of seeing.” Carbon Trace Productions, 2020.

Journalism

Bracamontes, Aaron. KTSM El Paso. Michigan Rabbi helping immigrants in Tornillo. October 31, 2018.

Burke, Garance and Martha Mendoza. US waived FBI checks on staff at growing teen migrant camp. November 28, 2018.

CNBC. Nearly 15,000 migrant children in federal custody jammed into crowded shelters. December 19 2018.

Delgado, Edwin. The Guardian. 'A dangerous precedent': Texans outraged at prospect of tent cities for migrants: Soldiers based at Fort Bliss believe construction of detention center is imminent as locals speak out against Trump’s crackdown. November 18, 2018.

Delgado, Edwin. The Guardian. Carols at Tornillo: protesters sing for children held in Trump's tent city: Beto O’Rourke showed up to boost locals and activists seeking to give migrants some festive season cheer. December 24, 2018.

Espada, Martín. The Progressive Magazine. Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed Wire Fence. January 28, 2020.

Hernández, Arelis R. The Washington Post. Trump administration is holding record number of migrant youths. December 21, 2018.

Kelly, Caroline. CNN. Watchdog: HHS not conducting key background check for staff at children’s detention facility. November 28, 2018.

Kopan, By Tal. The San Francisco Chronicle. ICE arrests undocumented adults who sought to take in immigrant children. Dec 10, 2018

Kotch, Alex. Sludge. These Nonprofits and Businesses Are Making Millions From Detaining Immigrant Children: Dozens of nonprofit shelter groups and several for-profit companies have made enormous amounts of money from detaining and transporting migrant kids. July 3, 2019.

Melson, Kayla. KTSM News, El Paso. Reports: Hundreds of migrant children transferred to Tornillo ‘tent city’. October 1, 2018.

Misra, Tanvi. Bloomberg. The Life and Death of an American Tent City: Over a period of seven months, a vast temporary facility built to hold migrant children emerged in the Texas border town of Tornillo. And now, it’s almost gone. January 15, 2019.

Moore, Robert. El Paso Inc. Democrats promise to review Tornillo migrant tent city if they win the House. Oct 21, 2018.

Moore, Robert. TexasMonthly. Relatives of Separated Children Are Now in ICE’s Sights: Unprecedented ICE access to ORR data turns safe placement screening into a mechanism for immigration enforcement, officials and activists say. June 23, 2018.

Moore, Robert. TexasMonthly. Tornillo Tent City Will Expand To Hold Even More Migrant Kids: The facility near El Paso will more than double its capacity for unaccompanied minors, expanding to 3,800 beds. September 11, 2018.

Moore, Robert. TexasMonthly. Tent City Operator’s Request for Policy Shift Could Reduce the Mass Detention of Migrant Children: Beto O’Rourke said the contractor is asking the Trump administration to stop sharing fingerprints of potential sponsors with immigration agents. December 15, 2018.

Moore, Robert. TexasMonthly. Thousands of Migrant Children Could Be Released With Trump’s Major Policy Reversal: Federal officials have reversed course and announced they will reduce fingerprint requirements of potential sponsors for detained children. December 18, 2018.

Moore, Robert. The Washington Post. U.S. opening 2,500-bed migrant facility in Tornillo, Tex., site of controversial child shelter.
July 12, 2019.

Parker, Richard. The Atlantic. After the Pittsburgh Shootings, a Thanksgiving Pilgrimage to the Texas Border: Rabbi Josh Whinston from Ann Arbor, Michigan, led his people to the desert in El Paso to help asylum seekers from Central America. November 22, 2018.

Vine, Katy. Texas Monthly. Behind Every Painting, a Desperate Kid: The “Uncaged Art” of Tornillo’s Detained Migrant Children. April 26, 2019.

Warikoo, Niraj. Detroit Free Press. Michigan rabbi leads caravan of faith to help immigrant kids in Texas. November 16, 2018.

Weixel, Nathaniel. The Hill. White House requests additional $190M for housing detained migrant children, Dem lawmaker says. December 6, 2018.

WNYC Studios. The Takeaway. Government Increasingly Uses Tent Cities as Number of Migrant Kids in Custody Surge. October 2, 2018.

Reports

American Academy of Pediatrics. Policy Statement: Detention of Immigrant Children. “In accordance with internationally accepted rights of the child, immigrant and refugee children should be treated with dignity and respect and should not be exposed to conditions that may harm or traumatize them.” May 1, 2017, reaffirmed, November 2022.

American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). Trump Administration Lines Up End Run Around Protections for Detained Children. September 6, 2018.

Corbett, Dylan, Marisa Limón Garza, Camilo Perez-Bustillo, and Edith Tapia. HOPE Border Institute, Border Observatory 2019: Hope and Resistance at the Border. 2019.

Celebrity Social Media

Milano, Alyssa. Broadcasting live with activist Joshua Rubin from Tornillo discussing #FamilySeparation and the child detention. ‬November 2108.

Of Special Note:

Under Section 287(g) of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, also written into the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996, ICE can deputize local police departments to engage in federal immigration enforcement activities. Many states and localities have historically refused to participate in the 287(g) program as it more than not leads to illegal racial profiling and civil rights abuses while diverting scarce resources from traditional local law enforcement functions. A largely unused distortion of immigration enforcement priorities, it was revived nationwide under Trump.

This chapter would never have been possible without the generous contributions of Angry Tía Lizee Cavazos and Jason and Cecilia Rochester to whom I hold deep wells of gratitude and appreciation.

In recounting the story of Marta, Pedro, and Esmeralda’s separation, it was Lizee who first opened my eyes to the multiple, less-visible ways in which government policies tear families apart — and have done for decades across presidential administrations on both sides of the political aisle. That reality would resonate again and again as my research progressed. It can be heard in Dora’s tale (Chapter 11); as well as Jenny’s (Chapter 12); in Robert’s story (15); as well as Larry and Keyla’s and Luis Freddy’s (Chapter (16); in Anastasio’s (Chapter 16) and in Guerline’s (Chapter 18).

It also rang out loud and clear in the testimonies of DACA recipients, such as Raymond Partolan, whose accounts informed this chapter greatly. While they did not make it into the text, they will be shared (if they haven’t been already) on my Substack and Podcast: Tales of Humanity from the Borderlands.

Jason and Cecilia were not the only couple subjected to forced separation that I would come to know and interview. Shout out here, too, to Ashley DeAzevedo, president of American Families United as well as Amanda Valencia and Ed Markowitz. All three were among the 1.4 million US-citizens whose spouses have been snatched from them and their children due to intransigent policies when Crossing the Line went to press. Another 2.8 million US citizens were then also facing the possibility of family separation. Like Jason, all three have made heroic sacrifices to keep their now severed families intact. Their first hand experiences provided me with strong foundations on which to build this chapter. I remain forever grateful.

In addition to these oral testimonies, I also call your attention to the following resources:

Books (see Bibliography)

Briggs, Laura. Taking Children: A History of American Terror. University of California Press, August 2021.

Lovato, Roberto. Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. HarperCollins, Sept 2020.

Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America – Updated Edition. Princeton University Press, April 2014.

Soboroff, Jacob. Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. HarperCollins, July 2020.

Zamora, Javier. Solita: A Memoir. Hogarth, Sept 2022.

Journalism

Bryant, Erica. Vera Institute, Children Are Still Being Separated from Their Families at the Border. Jun 23, 2022.

Burnett, John. National Public Radio, 'I Want To Be Sure My Son Is Safe': Asylum-Seekers Send Children Across Border Alone. November 11, 2019.

Williams, Joanna. America Magazine, Parents who send their kids across the border are not heroes or villains. They’re humans facing an impossible choice. April 6, 2021.

While this chapter focused on the role of the Migrant “Protection” Protocols in forcing a Sophie’s Choice upon parents, it continued under Title 42 implementation during both Trump & Co’s as well as Biden’s presidencies as described in this article by the Young Center, What Is Title 42 and How Does It Impact Children and Families? October 12, 2021.

Reports

American Civil Liberties Union, License to Abuse: How ICE’s 287(g) Program Empowers Racist Sheriffs and Civil Rights Violations, April 26, 2022. This research examines the records of sheriff offices and other law enforcement agencies that participate in Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) 287(g) program, revealing that racial profiling, poor jail conditions, and other civil rights violations are widespread among the 142 state and local law enforcement agencies ICE describes as participants in the 287(g) program as of April 2022, and the many ways the government could remedy the harm.

Migration Policy Institute. Profile of the Unauthorized Population: United States, 2019.

Of Special Note…

I’m happy to inform you that Marta was eventually reunited with Pedro and Esmeralda. They are together in New Jersey as of this writing. But still without status, they are forced to live in the shadows.

Huge thanks for the support with this chapter go first and foremost to the oral testimonies and moral support of Tía Madeleine, Michael Seifert, Steven Tendo, Manny, Keith, and Valery, as well as those of the dozens of Darién Gap survivors I interviewed, including Howard, Oscar, Godswill, Joel, and Ray.

This was one of the hardest chapters to write, as well as one of the most edifying. It was the chapter that sucked up and spat out whatever rose color might have remained in my glasses.

I was confronted, immediately, with my own internal bias that white supremacist attitudes are expressed only by white people. Indeed, there are examples throughout time of folks kicking off the bottom rung of the social ladder those coming up from behind — never mind if they bear the same religious beliefs, skin tone, and last name. When the only ladder available defines a culture whose institutions were built by white supremacists on an inherently cruel model that perpetuates inequality and injustice, “racism” is too simplistic an explanation. It is not merely a black-and-white issue. The root problem is the human capacity to “dehumanize,” which unleashes the phenomenon of “othering,” which can be oh so colorblind.

When applied in the US detention to deportation industrial complex context, the twin evils of “dehumanization” and “othering” play out as Brown-on-Brown violence within a white-supremacist architecture so all-pervasive and normalized and in-your-face it is beyond perception.

Isabel Wilkerson’s theory of the case — that it is not just “racism” but also “casteism” — resonated with me deeply. Héctor Tobar’s meditation on race and the meanings as well as myths of being “Latino” helped me to understand that, in the American context, the phenomenon of casteism reaches back well before 1619 and the genesis of “race” and racialized politics in the US. Kehinde Andrews' contention, that “whiteness” is a psychosis, explains everything.

I struggled for some time with how to express these social and historical intersections. One day, while in conversation with Guerline Jozef about how my Texas Roadhouse server, Maria, so easily and unthinkingly stepped into a role of jailing children, some from backgrounds similar to her own, Guerline reminded me: “You don’t know you’re in the Matrix until you know you’re in the Matrix.”

Then the muse delivered to me Tobar’s musings on the role of “race” at the “matrix of power and profit.” In the conclusion of Our Migrant Souls, he writes: “Race is a fairy tale created from the imagination of slave owners and slave traders, and by the leaders of armies bent on conquest and genocide.”

I was off and running.

Other resources that aided my exploration of the multi-billion dollar profiteering off immigrant incarceration, particularly at the Texas-based Port Isabel Detention Center and Juan Sanchez’s Southwest Key facilities; and my understanding of the economics and lawlessness of the modern state-sponsored, for-profit immigrant enslavement regime, include the following:

Books (see Bibliography)

Andrews, Kehinde. The Psychosis of Whiteness: Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World. Allen Lane, Sept 2023.

Hannah-Jones, Nikole. Edited by Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman and Jake Silverstein. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a comprehensive assessment of long-form journalism anthology that charts the history of slavery in the United States from the arrival of the first Africans and how its legacy has shaped and continues to impact society into the 21st Century.
One World (an imprint of Random House), November 2021.

Hefner, Tony. Between the Fences: Before Guantánamo, there was the Port Isabel Service Processing Center. Seven Stories Press 1st Edition, Paperback, July 2010.

Shull, Kristina, Detention Empire: Reagan's War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance, University of North Carolina Press, August 2022.

Tobar, Héctor. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.” MacMillan, May 2023.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Lies That Divide Us. Allen Lane, August 2020.

Journalism

Anapol, Avery. Private prison company moves annual conference to Trump golf course. The Hill, October 26, 2017.

Baumgart, Alex. Companies that funded Trump’s inauguration came up big in 2017. Open Secrets, January 19, 2018.

Separated migrant children are headed toward shelters that have a history of abuse and neglect

Taxpayers have paid more than $1.5 billion to private companies operating shelters accused of serious lapses in care, including neglect and abuse.

Bogado, Bogado, Patrick Michels, Vanessa Swales, andEdgar Walters. Separated migrant children are headed toward shelters that have a history of abuse and neglect: Taxpayers have paid more than $1.5 billion to private companies operating shelters accused of serious lapses in care, including neglect and abuse. The Texas Tribune, June 20, 2018.

Bogado, Aura and Patrick Michels. US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children. Reveal: The Center for Investigative Reporting, March 18, 2019.

Eisen, Lauren-Brooke. Trump's first year has been the private prison industry's best: The Trump administration has been a godsend for the private prison industry. Salon, January 14, 2018.

Emily, Jennifer. Texas nonprofit has received $1.5 billion in federal money to run shelters for immigrant children. The Dallas Morning News, June 20, 2018.

Fernandez, Manny. Inside the Former Walmart That Is Now a Shelter for Almost 1,500 Migrant Children. New York Times, June 14, 2018.

Gregory, Andy. Trump administration detains nearly 70,000 migrant children in record high: More children separated from their parents in US than any other country in the world, according to UN. The Independent, November 12, 2019.

Gruberg, Sharita. How For-Profit Companies Are Driving Immigration Detention Policies: Companies’ quest for greater profits is expanding the immigration custody system at the expense of the health, safety, and rights of immigrants. Center for American Progress, December 18, 2015.

Gruberg, Sharita and Tom Jawetz. How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Can End Its Reliance on Private Prisons. Center for American Progress, September 14, 2016.

Kotch, Alex. These Nonprofits and Businesses Are Making Millions From Detaining Immigrant Children. Sludge, July 3, 2019.

Kozlowska, Hanna and Jason Karaian. The first big winners of Donald Trump’s victory are private prison companies, whose stocks are soaring. Quartz,November 9, 2016.

Morwa, Rida. Geo Group: Put This 16% Yield In Solitary Confinement, Deep In Your Portfolio. Seeking Alpha, March 13, 2020.

Rawnsley, Adam and Spencer Ackerman. $800 Million in Taxpayer Money Went to Private Prisons Where Migrants Work for Pennies:Detention for migrants is big business—and a Daily Beast investigation reveals new details about just how lucrative it’s become. The Daily Beast, December 27 2018.

Reigstad, Leif. Records Reveal Southwest Key Cited for Hundreds of Violations in the Last Three Years. Texas Monthly, June 28, 2018.

Reuters. U.S. reverses Obama-era move to phase out private prisons. February 23, 2017.

Root, Jay. Juan Sanchez stepping down as CEO of Southwest Key Programs: In the wake of the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents — in turn swelling the number of kids in Southwest Key's shelters — Sanchez came under fire for a series of controversies. The Texas Tribune, March 11, 2019.

Fechter, Joshua. The business of owning real estate for immigration detention centers. San Antonio Express-News, Aug 5, 2018.

Sherman, Christopher, Martha Mendoza, and Garance Burke. US held record number of migrant children in custody in 2019. Associated Press, November 12, 2019.

Ware, Alex, Jennifer Epstein, and Jonathan Levin. Trump’s Immigrant Child Detentions Mean $458 Million for Nonprofit. Bloomberg Businessweek, June 19, 2018.

Zapoto, Matt and Chico Harlan. Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons. Washington Post, August 18, 2016.

Reports

Gotsch, Kara and Vinay Basti. Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons. The Sentencing Project, August 2, 2018.

Kassie, Emily. Detained: How the United States created the largest immigrant detention system in the world. The Marshall Project in collaboration with The Guardian, September 24, 2019.

Office of the Inspector General, US Department of Justice. Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Monitoring of Contract Prisons. August 2016.

US Securities and Exchange Commission, Form 10-K, CoreCivic, Inc. December 31, 2018.

US Securities and Exchange Commission, Form 10-K, The GEO Group, Inc. December 31, 2018.

Of Special Note:

The Trump quote on the wall of the child internment facility Casa Padre was taken from his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal.

I wish I were making that up.

The asylum system in the US is so complicated, it’s a wonder that anyone expects a newcomer to understand it. Perhaps that’s part of the system’s design.

I had to work hard to understand it, myself. Even then, it took several trusted experts checking ongoing drafts of this chapter to ensure I described the three-ring asylum circus correctly. In this endeavor I have three immigration esquires to thank: Fatma E. Marouf, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, and Cathy Potter. Without them, I could not have completed this chapter with confidence.

It must be said, however, that the chapter does not paint a full picture of the complicated asylum application process in the US. Because I was focused on immigration at the US Southern border, I was limited in this chapter to telling the story of only one type of asylum process: called “Defensive Asylum,” it refers to the process of applying for asylum for as a defence against prompt removal from the US. You can find the US government definition, as well as that of its counterpart process, “Affirmative Asylum,” here.

Th defensive asylum process applies to those who are “apprehended” by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — which under Trump & Co included those who lawfully requested asylum at official ports of entry — and are immediately placed in “expedited removal” proceedings. If given a chance to speak to an Asylum Officer — as many are not, even if they pass the “shout test” — and if found to have a credible fear of persecution or torture, they may apply for asylum, but only in this defensive posture.

It must also be said that unlike the criminal court system in the US, the government is not obligated to provide lawyers for individuals in immigration court proceedings, making it a system whose odds are never in the asylum seeker’s favor. It is, indeed, a guilty until proven “innocent,” aka credible, procedure.

Complicating research efforts, these two types of asylum processes are decided (at least at first) by two different federal agencies. This makes it difficult to know, at any given point, the actual number of asylum applications under review. What’s more, each time an administration implements a new asylum rule, the numbers and trends change again. To help parse and estimate these and other immigration-related data, I leaned heavily on the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. TRAC scholars work tirelessly to obtain court and other government records, many under monthly Freedom of Information Act requests, so that researchers and writers have data to analyze. Without TRAC, we simply would not know what transpires in the bowels of US immigration courts. Perhaps that’s part of the system’s design.

What we do know for sure is this: defensive asylum cases have been on the rise throughout the 21st century, creating an ever-increasing backlog as bolstering the system with additional Immigration Judges and Asylum Officers has not kept pace. Even TRAC scholars state that their numbers likely underestimate the actual total backlog of folks currently in the US who may still be awaiting their day in court, despite having been present in the country for years.

The easiest and most efficient course correction would be to make good on legal commitments under the US 1980 Refugee Act and to modernize the existing asylum system to meet shifting global realities regarding human displacement. The demagogues and profiteers who benefit from this system as it is, however, prefer to crank the cruelty. They advocate that Congress agree to 1) imprison asylum seekers inside the country until their claims can be adjudicated; 2) forbid asylum seekers outside the country from entering, necessitating — in the case of MPP — that kangaroo courts be brought to them; or 3) release asylum seekers into the country but under electronic surveillance — a system of virtual imprisonment known as “alternatives to detention,” or ATDs.

For further reading on the Migrant “Protection” Protocols under Trump & Co and its attempted rollback under Biden, thwarted by pro-Trump Texas-based judges, I recommend the following sources…

Documentaries & Film

Las Abogadas: Attorneys on the Front Lines of the Migrant Crisis, with Jodi Goodwin and Charlene D’Cruz, among others. Director: Victoria Bruce. Executive Producer: Careen Shannon. Producer: Laura Seltzer-Duny.

Oh Mercy—Searching for Hope in the Promised Land. Worldwide Documentaries.

Running to Stand Still: Migrants Search for Hope in the Promised Land. Worldwide Documentaries.

Journalism

Bova, Gus. Immigration Judge Slams ‘Remain in Mexico’ Tent Courts: “It's more like what you might see, perhaps, in China or Russia,” says Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. Texas Observer, September 24, 2019.

Çam, Deniz. Here’s The Company Behind Trump’s Controversial Border ‘Tent Courts’ For Migrants. Forbes, December 5, 2019.

Gutierrez, Gabe. Immigration judges decide who gets into the U.S. They say they're overworked and under political pressure: There's a backlog of 1.3 million asylum cases, and migrants keep coming. "We are holding death penalty cases in a traffic court setting," said one judge. NBC News, June 13, 2021.

Laughland, Oliver. Inside Trump's tent immigration courts that turn away thousands of asylum seekers: Under the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, into which House Democrats have launched an investigation, just 0.2% of cases result in relief. The Guardian, January 16, 2020.

Miroff, Nick. Along Texas border, Trump administration sets up tent courts for virtual asylum hearings: After passing a policy requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their cases can be heard, the administration has erected the tent complexes so immigration judges in San Antonio can hold hearings remotely. The Washington Post, September 18, 2019.

Montoya-Galvez, Camilo. House Democrats demand docs for probe into Trump's "Remain in Mexico" policy. CBS News, January 14, 2020.

Reuters. Denied U.S. entry, Mexican cuts own throat on bridge over Rio Grande. January 9, 2020.

Schenk, Lindsay. An Era of Hope: The Wind-Down of the Migrant Protection Protocols. American Bar Association, April 14, 2021.

Spivakovsky-Gonzalez, Pedro. “Remain in Mexico” Remains: A View from the Tent Courts in Brownsville. American Bar Association, July 13, 2022.

Thompson, Alex. ‘We’re done’: Immigration advocates stage walkout on Biden administration: Frustration at the administration’s continuation of Trump-era immigration policies is bubbling over. Politico, October 16, 2021.

Willis, Haley, Christoph Koettl, Caroline Kim, and Drew Jordan. Trump Is Having Tent Courthouses Built Along the Border. Here’s What They Look Like. The New York Times, August 29, 2019.

Press Releases

Department of Homeland Security. DHS Issues A New Memo to Terminate MPP. October 29, 2021.

Reports

Human Rights First. Remain in Mexico: Fatally Flawed. This series of reports documents how the so-called Migrant “Protection” Protocols (“Remain in Mexico” program) targeted for horrific kidnappings, torture, and violent harm the “world’s most vulnerable people” (the UN’s term): legitimate asylum seekers who were forced to wait in cartel-controlled northern Mexico while their claims were heard in border-hugging US immigration tent courts.

Meissner, Doris, Faye Hipsman, and T. Alexander Aleinikoff. The US Asylum System in Crisis: Charting a Way Forward. Migration Policy Institute, September 2108.

Neusner, Julia, and Kennji Kizuka. “Remain in Mexico” Policy Should Never Be Revived. Human Rights First, September 13, 2022.

TRAC. MPP (Remain in Mexico) Deportation Proceedings—All Cases, through November 2022.

With deep gratitude to those who share my belief that locking men, women, and children up for money is not what the US — or any professed democratic nation —should be doing, I give thanks to the following individuals for their willingness to bear witness and for their invaluable contributions to the making of this chapter:

• Members of the leadership team of Witness at the Border who laid eyes on the Homestead Child Internment Camp:

  • Karla Barber

  • Lee Goodman

  • Joshua Rubin

  • Margaret Seiler, and

  • Julie Swift

• Other witnesses to the horrors of for-profit child detention, including but not limited to those individuals I interviewed for this chapter:

  • Nannette Bartels

  • Tina Marie Davidson

  • Nancy Goodman

  • Alessandra Mondolfi

• Rabbi Josh Whinston; and, of course,

• Ali Wicks-Lim and her children, Summit and Mason.

Thanks must go, too, to the US Members of Congress who also agree that locking up children for money defies human decency as well as US law:

• Representatives Judy Chu, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, and Eric Swalwell;

• Senators Jeff Merkely; Bernie Sanders, who called the facilities "racist child prisons”; and Elizabeth Warren, who rightly pointed out that at $775/day there is no incentive for-profit companies to return captive, lost, and traumatized children to their families.

There have been no other books written, to date, that document the horrors of the Homestead Teen Internment facility. But you can find video and journalistic documentation here:

Video Documentation

Warren, Elizabeth. I'm going to Homestead, featuring Nannette Bartels. June 26, 2019.

Warren, Elizabeth. There are a lot of different ways that we get in the fight. And one of them is that you show up. I'm at the Homestead detention center today and I hope you'll be watching. June 26, 2019.

Wicks-Lim, Mason.Homes Instead. Jan 16, 2020.

Wicks-Lim, Mason. Ali Speaks about Homestead at Abolish ICE & CBP National Day of Action. Jul 13, 2019.

Journalism

Andersson, Hilary, and Anne Laurent. Children tell of neglect, filth and fear in US asylum camps. BBC News, May 24 , 2021.

Burnett, John. Inside The Largest And Most Controversial Shelter For Migrant Children In The U.S. National Public Radio, February 13, 2019.

Burnett, John. Migrant Youth Go From A Children's Shelter To Adult Detention On Their 18th Birthday. National Public Radio, February 22, 2019.

Çam, Deniz. One In Six Migrant Children In The U.S. Are Staying At A Shelter Operated By A Private Equity Tycoon. Forbes, Apr 12, 2019.

Iannelli, Jerry. Five Awful Stories About Miami's Child-Migrant Compound. Miami New Times, November 4, 2018.

Iannelli, Jerry. Here's a History of John Kelly's Ties to Miami's Child Migrant Camp. Miami New Times, May 4, 2019.

Iannelli, Jerry. Elizabeth Warren Calls for Homestead Child-Migrant Shelter to Be Shut Down. Miami New Times, June 26, 2019.

Iannelli, Jerry. Homestead Congresswoman Says Migrant Camp Operators Keep Ignoring Her Questions. Miami New Times, July 9, 2019.

Jordan, Miriam. Migrant Children Are Spending Months ‘Crammed’ in a Temporary Florida Shelter. The New York Times, June 26, 2019.

Kates, Graham. Facility for migrant children extends offer letters on the spot amid rapid expansion. CBS News, January 11, 2019.

Kates, Graham. Migrant children in U.S. are being held in unlicensed shelters, lawyers say. CBS News, January 23, 2019

Kates, Graham. John Kelly joins board of company operating largest shelter for unaccompanied migrant children. CBS News, May 3, 2019.

Kates, Graham. Migrant children facility in Homestead, Florida, to close. CBS News, October 29, 2019.

Luscombe, Richard. Inside America's biggest facility for migrant teens: Managers of the Homestead camp in Florida call it a shelter, but activists have decried its ‘prison-like feel’. The Guardian, March 7, 2019.

Madan, Monique O. Thousands of kids live in tents in Homestead. Do the feds have a hurricane plan? Miami Herald, June 3, 2019.

Madan, Monique O. Sex abuse claims revealed at Homestead shelter, where staff was not vetted for child abuse. Miami Herald, July 15, 2020.

Misra, Tanvi. Inside Homestead: A tour of the Florida camp for migrant children: The shelter has become a site of ‘resistance’ in recent months — a magnet for protesters and politicians alike. Roll Call, July 25, 2019.

Navarro, Mireya. Last of Refugees From Cuba In '94 Flight Now Enter U.S. The New York, Times, February 1, 1996.

Shammas, Brittany. Children at the Homestead Migrant Shelter Share Stories of Grief, Trauma, and Fear. By the time they arrived in Homestead, the migrant children had already taken an unwitting tour through American detention facilities with nicknames such as "la hielera" — "the ice box" — and "la perrera" — "the dog kennel." Some had been separated from their parents at the southern border, usually after begging for a goodbye that guards refused to allow. Miami New Times, June 20, 2019.

Withers, Scott. Reporter's Notebook: Inside a Florida shelter for immigrant children: There are more than 1,000 immigrant children at the shelter in Florida. ABC News, June 22, 2018.

Special thanks for the story contents of this chapter go to witnesses Karla Barber, Margaret Seiler, and Tom Cartwright, in particular, for their oral and written contributions as well as for the ICE Air deportation watch and tracking effort spearheaded by their actions in early 2020. Tom’s monthly reports remain an invaluable resource for my ongoing research into the US Border Industrial Complex deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation machine.

Gratitude to journalist Debbie Nathan, as well, for kicking off a project that is now consulted by writers, journalists, and policy makers across the globe. And to Terri Burke for connecting the dots and sounding the call that got eyes on documenting how US taxpayer dollars are used to “cross the line” during an average of 100 ICE Air deportation flights each month, according to Tom’s data.

Finally, to all my contacts and information sources within the Dignity Village Collaborative and Matamoros humanitarian communities (Angry Tías, Global Response Medicine, Resource Center Matamoros, Team Brownsville, Gladys Aguilar, Abraham Barberi, Casa de Paz, Sister Norma Pimentel, etc.): my gratitude knows no bounds for their extraordinary efforts to pivot from waging a grassroots war of welcome to keeping vulnerable people alive. Also, for trusting me to document and deliver their first-hand testimonies with the care they deserve.

“Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence.” — Ellen Willis, Three Elegies for Susan Sontag. New Politics, Summer 2005.

Books (see Bibliography)

Davis, Julie Hirschfeld, and Michael D. Shear. Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration. Simon and Schuster, October 2019.

Goodman, Adam. The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants. Princeton University Press, May 2020.

Guerrero, Jean. Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. HarperCollins Publishers, August 2021.

Documentaries & Film

Running to Stand Still: Migrants Search for Hope in the Promised Land. Worldwide Documentaries.

Journalism

Averbuch, Maya. Mexico Can’t Handle Your Tired, Poor, and Huddled Masses: Ever since Donald Trump's election, America's southern neighbor has become a growing destination for migrants—and the country is already buckling under the strain. Foreign Policy Magazine, July 30, 2018.

Barnes, Robert. Supreme Court says Trump administration can begin denying asylum to migrants while legal fight continues. Washington Post, September 11, 2019.

Blitzer, Jonathan. How Stephen Miller Manipulates Donald Trump to Further his Immigration Obsession: Donald Trump’s senior advisor has been the true driving force behind this administration’s racist agenda. How far will he go? The New Yorker, February 21, 2020.

Cuffe, Sandra. One Year into “Remain in Mexico,” the U.S. Is Enlisting Central America In Its Crackdown on Asylum: Mexico is doing the work of Trump’s wall, keeping migrants from the U.S. Now the administration is trying to push the border to Central America. The Intercept, January 29, 2020.

DeParle, Jason. How Stephen Miller Seized the Moment to Battle Immigration: Behind Mr. Miller’s singular grip on the Trump anti-immigrant agenda are forces far bigger than his own hostility toward the foreign-born. The New York Times, August 17, 2019.

Dickerson, Caitlin, and Michael D. Shear. Before Covid-19, Trump Aide Sought to Use Disease to Close Borders. The president’s chief adviser on immigration, Stephen Miller, had long tried to halt migration based on public health, without success. Then came the coronavirus. New York Times, May 3, 2020.

Egan, Lauren. Trump calls coronavirus Democrats' 'new hoax'. NBC News, February 29, 2020.

Fernandez, Manny, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Flu Outbreak Prompts Largest Border Detention Center to Stop Processing Migrants. New York TImes, May 22, 2019.

Finnegan, Conor. Trump may sign asylum deal with Guatemala that critics call illegal and dangerous: The agreement would force asylum seekers in the US to be directed to Guatemala. ABC News, July 13, 2019.

Goodfriend, Hilary. An Alliance for Insecurity: US policy in Central America under Trump appears to be shifting from bad to worse. Jacobin, June 14, 2017.

Kanno-Youngs, Zolan. Immigration Officers Say Asylum Deal With Guatemala Is Unlawful: The policy returns a vulnerable population “to countries in which their lives and freedom are directly threatened,” a union of asylum and refugee officers said in a brief. New York Times, March 6, 2020.

Miroff, Nick, and Josh Dawsey. Stephen Miller has long-term vision for Trump’s ‘temporary’ immigration order, according to private call with supporters. Washington Post, April 24, 2020.

Ramos, Jorge. The AMLO-Trump Deal Is Punishing the Most Vulnerable. A new U.S.-Mexico immigration agreement may slow down the Central American immigration wave but won’t stop it. It’s simply too powerful. New York Times Opinion, June 17, 2019.

Rogers, Katie. Before Joining White House, Stephen Miller Pushed White Nationalist Theories: A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center seeks to illustrate how Mr. Miller brought anti-immigrant beliefs to the White House and turned them into policy. New York Times, November 13, 2019.

Seiler, Margaret M. Diary from a Genocide in the Making. The Brooklyn Rail, April 2020.

Shear, Michael D., and Maggie Haberman. No Secret Immigration Deal Exists With U.S., Mexico’s Foreign Minister Says. New York Times, June 10, 2019.

Wolfe, Daniel, and Daniel Dale. 'It's going to disappear': A timeline of Trump's claims that Covid-19 will vanish. CNN, October 31, 2020.

Legal Code

8 U.S. Code § 1158 - Asylum. Legal Information Institute, Cornell University.

Podcasts

Wickenden, Dorothy and David Remnick with Jonathan Blitzer. Stephen Miller, the Architect of Trump’s Immigration Plan. The New Yorker, February 24, 2020.

Press Releases

Acer, Eleanor. Guatemala Not Safe for Refugees. Human Rights First, July 12, 2019.

Reports

American Immigration Council. Fact Sheet: Asylum in the United States. January 15, 2024.

Center for Human Rights, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Hidden in Plain Sight: ICE Air and the Machinery of Mass Deportation. University of Washington, April 23, 2019.

Center for Human Rights, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Abuses in the Air: Sports Travel and the Deportation Industry. University of Washington, June 14, 2022.

Report on the protest by CSI Aviation, Inc. to the issuance of an order to Classic Air Charter, Inc. (CAC), of Huntington, New York, by the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), under request for quotations (RFQ) No. HSCECR-17-Q-00005, for air charter services valued at $646 million. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Feb 07, 2018.

Center for Preventive Action, Global Conflict Tracker. Criminal Violence in Mexico. Center on Foreign Relations, Updated October 09, 2024.

Hatewatch. Stephen Miller: The Breitbart Emails.Before the 2016 election, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller regularly emailed Breitbart News editors. Hatewatch evaluated more than 900 of those correspondences. This series includes Hatewatch’s investigative analysis of those messages that reveal Miller’s alignment with white nationalist thought and far-right extremism. Southern Poverty Law Center.

Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse American (LEDA). Origins of Federal Quarantine and Inspection Laws. Harvard Law School.

Refugee Act of 1980. National Archives Foundation.

Schacher, Yael, Ariana Sawyer, and Rachel Schmidtke. Deportation with a Layover: Failure of Protection under the US-Guatemala Asylum Cooperative Agreement. Human Rights Watch, May 19, 2020.

UNHCR The Refugee Agency. Global Trends Forced Displacement 2018, published on 17 June 2022.

UNHCR The Refugee Agency. The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol: the key legal documents that form the basis of UNHCR’s work. They define the term 'refugee' and outline their rights and the international standards of treatment for their protection.

There are so many people to thank for the multi-layered story-weaving that resulted in this chapter:

• Asylum seekers Dairon Elizondo, Ray Rodriguez, and Perla Vargas, who in addition to being GRM’s pharmacist also took over management of Team Brownsville’s Escuelita de la Banqueta during lockdown;

• Sam Bishop, Blake Davis, and Helen Perry, as well as Brendon Tucker and Gaby Zavala of Global Resource Management (now Medicine) and the Resource Center Matamoros, respectively;

• Cindy Johnson Andrade, Pastor Abraham Barberi, Sister Norma Pimentel, and Felicia Rangel-Samponaro.

All of these individuals remained constant and reliable sources during the long months of lockdown asylum seekers to the US were forced to endure, while thrust into deliberate homelessness on a floodplain in cartel-controlled northern Mexico under Title 42 by the so-called “leader of the free world.”

Also contributing to this chapter, from their vantage point north of the Matamoros refugee encampment during the global pandemic, I have the Angry Tías & Abuelas and the leadership team of Team Brownsville to thank.

In addition to the individuals and groups mentioned above, my gratitude abounds for the latest voices to be folded into the Dignity Village Collaborative: Erin Hughes, Christa Cook, and Chloe Rastatter, the three young female engineers who separately answered Helen’s call for help just as the Title 42 curtain descended; then became Solidarity Engineering by the side of Honduran preacher and asylum seeker Dison Valladare.

I cannot express the enormity of the efforts realized by everyone named here — and many others besides — motivated to see to the common good and keep people alive until Title 42 would be rolled back — we thought, hoped, and voted for — under a Biden-Harris presidency. They are representative of the myriad ordinary people, like you and me, whose extraordinary acts of everyday kindness inspired me to write Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands.

Supporting the oral testimonies that make up the bulk of this chapter are the following resources:

Documentaries & Film

COVID-19 Mobile Field Hospital - Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico, with Helen Perry. Global Response Management, April 30, 2020.

Tour of the GRM Field Hospital and Isolation Zone for COVID Patients in the Matamoros Refugee Camp, with Erin Hughes and Brendon Tucker. Global Response Management, September 15, 2020.

Journalism

Baddour, Dylan. A refugee camp grows on the US-Mexico border, including the fallacious quote by Matamoros City Hall spokesman Miguel Garay. Al Jazeera, 12 February 2020.

Brown, Marcia. An Asylum Seeker’s Long Wait in Mexico: Melvin was a victim of gang violence in Guatemala and kidnapping in Matamoros, Mexico. He still hasn’t received entry into the U.S. The American Prospect, 11 March 2021.

Glass, Ira, and Aviva DeKornfeld. This American Life: The Out Crowd. Reports from the frontlines of the Trump administration's "Remain in Mexico" asylum policy. We hear from asylum seekers waiting across the border in Mexico, in a makeshift refugee camp,  and from the officers who sent them there to wait in the first place. November 15, 2019.

Kanno-Youngs, Zolan, and Kirk Semple. Trump Cites Coronavirus as He Announces a Border Crackdown: The Trump administration says it will no longer detain most undocumented immigrants at the border, citing the coronavirus as a threat to detention facilities and personnel. New York Times, March 20, 2020.

Reports

Brown, Daniel P., Robbie Berg, and Brad Reinhart. National Hurricane Center Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Hanna, 23–26 July 2020. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Weather Service, February 11, 2021.

Human Rights First. Marking Two Years of Illegal, Inhumane Title 42 Expulsions: Nearly 10,000 Violent Attacks on Asylum Seekers and Migrants. March 17, 2022.

Of Special Note

While asylum seekers forced by the Trump 1.0 administration to remain in Mexico faced hurricanes in camping tents, Customs and Border Protection spent $40.4 million in July 2020, to keep MPP tent courtrooms (that had been unused and shuttered since March) for six more months. That was on top of the $12.4m CBP paid in May to maintain empty tent courts.

This chapter would not have been possible without Pastor Steven Tendo, one of the bravest souls I have ever met, and Tía Madeleine Sandefur, one of the most just and kind. Madeleine introduced me to the good pastor after my first visit to Port Isabel Detention Center, described in Chapter 24: The Gulag. I became one of his many lifelines, along with Madeleine and Steven’s legal team, during the COVID pandemic when Trump & Co’s ICE cut all asylum-seeking inmates off from non-law enforcement human contact.

This meant, unfortunately, that I was subjected to extortion by GEO Group. It was imperative that I deposit money into Pastor Steven’s account on the inappropriately named phone-calling app, Getting Out. Without these funds, Steven would not have been able to call anyone. Thankfully, he contacted me near-daily throughout his ordeal, describing to me in every ugly detail and providing further proof, as in the words of Godswill, “Under ICE, the blacker the skin, the worse you have it.”

Steven also passed my phone number to other detained asylum seekers, such as Carl from Cameroon. This inadvertently put me on alert to conditions inside other ICE lock ups, particularly in the Deep South, as my number moved along with folks who ICE continued to shift people—and the coronavirus—around the country.

Last but not least, it was thanks to Steven’s and Carl’s harrowing descriptions of the conditions of his attempted deportation in September 2020 that I became alerted to ICE’s abuse of a human restraint device called The WRAP (see Chapter 33).

Supporting Steven’s story, I am grateful for the reporting noted below as well as the eye-witness testimony of Sarah Decker, an attorney with Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, who corroborated my hunch, again thanks to Steven’s detailed accounts, that ICE’s Alexandria Staging is, indeed, a panopticon.

Books (see Bibliography)

Foucault, Michel. Alan Sheridan (Translator). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, April 25, 1995.

Journalism

Aguilar, Julián, and Perla Trevizo. Migrants say COVID-19 fears led to disturbance in Texas immigration detention center: About 60 detainees in the South Texas ICE Processing Center staged an uprising this week. Some detainees say fear of infection sparked the incident; Immigration and Customs Enforcement disputes that account. The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, March 25, 2020.

Aleaziz, Hamed. Immigrants Afraid Of The Coronavirus Outbreak Are Protesting Inside ICE Facilities. There have been four known use-of-force incidents this week at ICE facilities as fear and anxiety spreads among detainees over COVID-19. BuzzFeed News, March 26, 2020.

Bachtell, John. Immigrant detainee hunger strikes spread amid COVID-19 danger. People’s World, April 23, 2020.

Borden, Lisa. UN Report: US fails to implement terms of treaty on eliminating racial discrimination. Southern Poverty Law Center, September 09, 2022.

Davila, Gaige. PIDC detainee pleads for life after being issued final deportation order. Port Isabel Press, South Padre, June 26, 2020.

Dias, Isabela. The (Almost) Unbelievable Tortures of Steven Tendo: A snake pit. Severed fingers. COVID. A US immigration judge. Mother Jones, February 24, 2021.

Foster-Frau, Silvia. Detained migrants pepper sprayed for rioting amid coronavirus fears. ExpressNews, March 31, 2020.

Hafezi, Parisa. Iran temporarily frees 85,000 from jail including political prisoners. Reuters, March 17, 2020.

Hathaway, Bill. As pandemic prison populations fell, proportion of Black prisoners rose. Yale researchers, colleagues say pandemic rise in proportion of Black prisoners highlights racial disparities in sentencing. Yale News, April 19, 2023.

Holpuch, Amanda.Immigrants lacked soap as Covid spread at Ice detention centers, report finds: Detainees also faced retaliation for raising safety concerns over lack of basic prevention measures at facilities. The Guardian, January 12, 2021.

La Gorce, Tammy. ‘Everybody Was Sick’: Inside an ICE Detention Center. The New York Times, Published May 15, 2020.

Lanard, Noah. It’s Still Too Painful to Put Clothes On: An ICE Detainee Reports He Was Pepper-Sprayed and Sent to Isolation. “This is a kidnapping. We are kidnapped by ICE.” Mother Jones, March 25, 2020.

Lanard, Noah. Civil Rights Groups Sue ICE to Force Release of Detainees Vulnerable to COVID-19: The lawsuit covers people being held at for-profit immigration jails in the South. Mother Jones, March 31, 2020.

Montoya-Galvez, Camilo. "Don't let us die": Women in ICE custody plead for release amid coronavirus pandemic. CBS News, April 3, 2020.

Montoya-Galvez, Camilo. "Powder kegs": Calls grow for ICE to release immigrants to avoid coronavirus outbreak. CBS News, March 19, 2020.

Morel, Laura C. Inside ICE lockdown: Face masks made of socks, no hand sanitizer and growing tensions. Reveal, Center for Investigative Reporting, April 7, 2020.

Nathan, Debbie. Women in ICE Detention, Fearing Coronavirus, Make Video to Protest Unsafe Conditions: Women at a Louisiana ICE detention center are using video visitation software to communicate their fears of contracting the coronavirus. The Intercept, March 30, 2020.

Sheridan, Erin. Detained Immigrants Warn Of A Lack Of COVID-19 Protections Inside The Port Isabel Detention Center. People Live Here, April 5, 2020.

Sheridan, Erin. Cases of COVID-19 continue to increase at detention center. My RGV.com, June 12, 2020.

Shoichet, Catherine E. After violence erupted in an ICE detention facility, a message left on a window said, ‘HELP US.’ CNN, Fri May 22, 2020.

Stone, Judy. Immigrant Detainees Are Sitting On A COVID-19 Time Bomb - First Infection Reported. Forbes, March 24, 2020.

Suliman, Adela, Andy Eckardt, and Gabe Joselow. Coronavirus prompts prisoner releases around the world: Iranian state media announced it would temporarily free about 70,000 prisoners to combat the spread of the disease. NBC News, March 26, 2020.

Towle, Sarah. The Face of Desperation: COVID-19 Pandemic Provokes Protests & Hunger Strikes Inside ICE’s For-Profit Prisons. Where social distancing is impossible, immigrant detainees are panicked and pleading for their lives. Medium: The First Solution, Apr 8, 2020.

Towle, Sarah. Dear Americans, Please Consider this July 4th Plea: “The Only Condition Necessary for Evil to Continue is When Good People Do Nothing,” Letter from the Port Isabel Detention Center, Port Isabel, Texas. Medium, July 4, 2020.

United Nations. Defending rights of Iranian prisoners amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Office of the High Commissioner, May 21, 2020.

United Nations. UN rights chief urges quick action by governments to prevent devastating impact of COVID-19 in places of detention. UN News Global perspective Human stories. March 25, 2020.

Legal Briefs & Urgent Actions

Amnesty International. Urgent Action: Free asylum seeker at risk of deportation. Steven Tendo is a 35-year-old pastor and asylum-seeker who fled from torture and other severe human rights violations in Uganda and requested asylum in the USA. Since December 2018 he has been detained at an immigration detention facility in Los Fresnos, Texas. He is at risk of being imminently returned to danger in Uganda while his health is deteriorating from inadequate medical care for diabetes amidst a COVID-19 outbreak in the detention facility. We demand authorities stop Pastor Steven’s deportation and release him immediately on parole while he continues to fight for the right to seek asylum. September 2020.

Bernal, The Honorable Jesus G. Opinion. Fraihat v. U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement. April 20, 2020.

Center for Victims of Torture. Stress Positions: When people think of torture, they often think of scars and wounds. However, torturers often use methods that are painful and create long-term injuries but which leave no scars. The use of stress positions is one of these torture methods and is commonly used by repressive regimes. These positions force a prisoner into a painful physical position, such as forced standing, awkward sitting positions or suspension of the body for prolonged periods of time. Stress positions can lead to long term or even permanent damage, including nerve, joint and circulatory damage, and muscle and joint pain. August 4, 2023.

Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. Case: Fraihat v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement 5:19-cv-01546. U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, case ongoing.

Faour Abdallah Fraihat v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (5:19-cv-01546), District Court, C.D. California, 560 Prisoner Petitions: Civil Detainee: Conditions of Confinement. Filing date, Aug 19, 2019.

#FreePastorSteven. Contacts for Calls and Letters. Angry Tías & Abuelas, summer 2020. “The Trump administration’s policies of abusing and endangering refugees must come to an end,” states Lisa Brodyaga, immigration attorney, Harlingen, Texas. “We ask that Steven be released forthwith to his sponsor,” states Jennifer Harbury, immigration attorney, Weslaco, Texas, and that “the Office of the Inspector General investigate and remedy the racial bias against African asylum seekers in PIDC release practices.”

Reports

American Ops. ICE Special Response Team, page 16.

Amnesty International Report 2017/18 - Uganda. Republic of Uganda Head of state and government: “Yoweri Kaguta Museveni” (term of no games). Refworld Global Law and Policy Database, February 22, 2018.

Goff, Timantha, Zack Mohamed, Ronald Claude, Moussa Haba, Monitoring Fellow, Famyrah Lafortune, and Amanda Diaz. UNCOVERING THE TRUTH: Violence and Abuse Against Black Migrants in Immigration Detention. Freedom for Immigrants, Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project (BLMP), Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), and UndocuBlack Network, October 2022.

Immigrant Defense Fund and Center for Constitutional Rights. Cruel by Design: Voices of Resistance from Immigration Detention. February 2022.

Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. Shadow Report to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). July 28, 2022.

United States Department of State. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2019: Uganda. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

Truth be told, I did not set out to write an exposé of the inherently cruel, abusive, shadowy, and secretive US deterrence to detention to deportation pipeline when I landed in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas in January 2020. Even when I received a publishing contract from She Writes Press in September of 2021 — which happened, serendipitously, while traversing the Border Patrol road between Sasabe and Nogales, Arizona, passing bottles of water through Trump’s odious bollards to those dying from dehydration on the other side — I thought I was writing about the inhumanity of family separation, metering, and the Migrant “Protection” Protocols.

But then came COVID. And Trump & Co’s abuse of the US Public Health Code to close the border to people seeking safety under Title 42. When this led to the suspension of the MPP Kangaroo Courts, trapping legitimate asylum seekers in cartel-controlled Mexico, indefinitely, it appeared my book would never end.

As I waited for the pandemic to be over so my research could resume, my involvement with Witness at the Border and its deportation watch began. I met Steven Tendo, who triggered my participation as a virtual detention visitor. My phone number spread among ICE inmates; I became connected with immigration attorneys and activists; and my own advocacy on behalf of African-origin individuals seeking asylum in the US grew, especially when it became evident that Trump & Co’s ICE was not letting Black people out of their prisons — even when said prisons became death traps for the coronavirus.

A parallel project kicked off for me: tracking ICE violations against the populations enslaved by the for-profit US immigration industrial complex. Still, I did not understand until the summer of 2023 that this was the story destined to be the climax and conclusion of Crossing the Line.

The book demanded me to broaden my witness beyond border externalization and deterrence to include the entire 3-D pipeline: deterrence to detention to deportation. And as any writer will tell you, the book is always right.

Part V of Crossing the Line was thus written in almost real-time, as events unfolded from the summer of 2020 through March 2024, when Crossing the Line went to press. The content is based entirely on my own and others’ original reporting. The many individuals and organizations I have to thank for contributing to the storytelling in Chapters 30-33 are all named in the text — anonymously in the case of those still vulnerable to further ICE retribution.

My deepest appreciation and heartfelt thanks go to heroes like Pauline Binam and Nurse Dawn Wooten, who stepped forward and stood up for justice only to be punished for it. I hope my book will keep the memory of their courage alive.

My gratitude, too, to the myriad immigrants’ rights and legal aid organizations and practitioners all across the US that have been working tirelessly to bring to an end our no-good, really bad, truly deathly, and democracy-compromising immigration detention system. Through them, only a few of whom are named below, as signatories to the 2020 legal complaints against ICE, I learned that ICE is a truly irredeemable institution. It cannot be reformed. The only appropriate response is to do away with it altogether.

Additional resources that informed my storytelling include the following:

Books (see Bibliography)

Hayden, Sally. My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route. HarperCollins UK, March 2022.

Shah, Silky. Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Haymarket Books, May 2024.

Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. University of California Press, December 2015.

Washington, John. The Case for Open Borders. Haymarket Books, Feb 2024.

Documentary Film and Podcasting

Ko, Lisa. Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States. This compilation of visual storytelling, Beyond the Films, reveals the shameful role the US has played in coercing sterilization as a means of controlling “undesirable” populations — immigrants, people of color, poor people, unmarried mothers, the disabled, the mentally ill — in federally-funded sterilization programs in 32 states throughout the 20th century, January 29, 2016.

Machles, Maren. Bad Watchdog: The award-winning investigative podcast that explores how accountability failures in Washington D.C. impact the lives of people all over the country, showcasing the investigators, experts, and activists who keep our government working for the people. Project on Government Oversight, Season 1, January-June 2023.

Journalism

Aguilera, Jasmine. More Than 40 Women File Class Action Lawsuit Alleging Medical Misconduct by ICE Doctor at Georgia Detention Center. Time Magazine, December 22, 2020.

Aguilera, Jasmine. Senate Committee Finds Medical Abuse of Detained Women at Georgia ICE Facility. Time Magazine, November 16, 2022.

Armus, Teo. Congressional Dems say women in ICE custody who blew whistle on gynecologist should be able to apply for special visas. Washington Post, November 19, 2020.

BBC News. ICE whistleblower: Nurse alleges 'hysterectomies on immigrant women in US'. September 15, 2020.

Bryant, Miranda. I’m back on food stamps’: Nurse who exposed ‘uterus collector’ still faces consequences: Dawn Wooten raised the alarm more than two years ago after detained immigrant women accused a gynaecologist of performing non-consensual procedures. The Guardian, October 15, 2022.

Chapin, Angelina. ICE Tried to Deport a Woman Who Says She Was Sterilized in Custody. The Cut, Sept. 17, 2020.

Dickerson, Caitlin. Inquiry Ordered Into Claims Immigrants Had Unwanted Gynecology Procedures: Members of Congress and the D.H.S. are investigating claims by a nurse and lawyers that immigrant detainees in Georgia were complaining of unwanted procedures and rough treatment. The New York Times, September 16, 2020.

Dreisbach, Tom. Government's own experts found 'barbaric' and 'negligent' conditions in ICE detention. All Things Considered, National Public Radio, August 16, 2023.

Ehrlich, Judith. Daniel Ellsberg: A Profound Voice Against the Doomsday Machine. Stop the War Coalition, April 26, 2023.

Fatica, Ryan. Black August Hunger Strike at Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center. Perilous Chronicle, August 25, 2020.

Fernelius, Katie Jane. "Someone Needs to Listen to Us": Why African Asylum Seekers Went On Hunger Strike: Inside a protest against racism at a Louisiana immigrant detention center. In These Times, October 7, 2020.

Flores, Adolfo. ICE Force-Fed Immigrants Who Went On Hunger Strikes To Protest Poor Conditions, A New Report Says: "You feel hopeless, like a piece of trash." BuzzFeed News, June 23, 2021.

Gilmer, Ellen M. Detained Immigrants Faced Invasive Medical Care, Senate Finds. Bloomberg Law, Nov. 15, 2022.

Government Accountability Project. “If There is Not a Change, There is Not Going to be a Change”: Dawn Wooten’s Impact, One Year Later. September 17, 2021.

It’s Going Down. Asylum Seekers from Cameroon Launch Hunger Strike in Louisiana ICE Detention. March 12, 2020.

Lanard, Noah. Whistleblowers Say an ICE Detention Center Used Deceptive Tricks to Conceal COVID Outbreak: One was instructed to crank the AC to “freeze out” high-fever detainees who ICE wanted to deport. Mother Jones, July 21, 2020.

Leonnig, Carol D. DHS watchdog declined to pursue investigations into Secret Service during Trump administration, documents show. Washington Post, April 20, 2021.

Madeson, Frances. African asylum seekers jailed in Louisiana stop eating in protest. Advocates want congressional investigation into treatment of Black asylum seekers. Louisiana Illuminator, August 21, 2020.

Merchant, Nomaan. More migrant women say they didn’t OK surgery. Associated Press, September 18, 2020.

Mok, Julian. The Unseen War for Independence from Cameroon. Via News, January 25, 2020.

Narea, Nicole. A woman in ICE detention says her fallopian tube was removed without her consent: Pauline Binam has come forward after a whistleblower complaint on hysterectomies of immigrant detainees in Georgia. Vox, September 17, 2020.

Narea, Nicole. The outcry over ICE and hysterectomies, explained: The latest developments suggest that a whistleblower complaint from a detention center nurse is part of a broader pattern. Vox, September 18, 2020.

Ndofor, Hermann A., and Charles A. Ray. Cameroon: Africa’s Unseen Crisis. Foreign Research Policy Institute, May 9, 2022.

Olivares, Jose, and John Washington. “He Just Empties You All Out”: Whistleblower Reports High Number of Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Facility. September 15, 2020.

O’Toole, Molly. 19 women allege medical abuse in Georgia immigration detention. The Los Angeles Times, Oct. 22, 2020.

Padilla, Mariel. A whistleblower complaint alleging ‘high rate’ of hysterectomies in ICE detention centers parallels grim U.S. history: The allegations call to mind a history of sterilization laws in the United States dating back to the early 1900s that usually targeted the poor, disabled and women of color. The 19th, September 16, 2020.

Pandya, Rohan. Authoritarianism, the Anglophone Crisis and Crumbling Democracy in Cameroon. Human Rights Pulse, August 3, 2020.

Paul, Kari. Ice detainees faced medical neglect and hysterectomies, whistleblower alleges: Nurse Dawn Wooten says she was demoted and reprimanded when she spoke out about practices at Georgia detention center. The Guardian, September 15, 2020.

Penney, Joe. The Hunger Strikers of Pine Prairie Protesting Indefinite Detention by ICE: Someone seeking refugee status would normally be held for forty-five days, but the African asylum-seekers there have been detained for more than a year. The New York Review of Books, September 8, 2020.

Penney, Joe. Pauline Binam Says She Never Gave ICE Doctor Consent to Remove Her Fallopian Tube. Binam said she agreed to a minor surgery in ICE custody and, when she awoke, was told she could no longer have children naturally. The Intercept, October 2, 2020.

Rigby, Jennifer, and James Crisp. Fortress Europe. The Telegraph, 2022.

Rose, Joel. ICE Almost Deported Immigrant Woman Who Says She Got Unwanted Surgery While Detained. National Public Radio, September 16, 2020.

Sacchetti, Maria. More immigration detainees allege subpar gynecological care at Georgia facility. The Washington Post, October 23, 2020.

Schwellenbach, Nick. A Conversation with Former DHS Official Who Resigned over Family Separation. Project on Government Oversight, December 5, 2018.

Schwellenbach, Nick. DHS Watchdog Staff Call on Biden to Fire Inspector General Cuffari. Project on Government Oversight, September 23, 2022.

Schwellenbach, Nick, and Adam Zagorin. DHS Watchdog Nixed Alert to Congress About Purged January 6 Texts, New Docs Show: Inspector general’s top aides embroiled in prior controversy. Project on Government Oversight, August 11, 2022.

Shuchart, Scott. Careless cruelty: Civil servants said separating families was illegal. The administration ignored us. Washington Post, October 25, 2018.

Sur, Priyali. Why Record Numbers of African Migrants Are Showing Up at the U.S.-Mexican Border: Europe’s failure to help refugees in Libya is driving them across the Atlantic. Foreign Policy Magazine, June 26, 2019.

Treisman, Rachel. Whistleblower Alleges 'Medical Neglect,' Questionable Hysterectomies Of ICE Detainees. National Public Radio, September 16, 2020.

Urbina, Ian. The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe: Tired of migrants arriving from Africa, the E.U. has created a shadow immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias. The New Yorker, November 28, 2021.

Vinson, Liz. Desperate asylum seekers ‘starving for justice’ in immigrant prison hunger strikes across Louisiana. Southern Poverty Law Center, February 12, 2020.

Legal Complaints (in order of submission to Inspector General Cuffari and rotating Heads of the Office of CRCL):

Call for an Immediate Halt to and Investigation of Detention, Violence, Repression and Racism Against Peacefully Protesting Cameroonian and Black Asylum Seekers, and other Asylum Seekers, at Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center; and the release of all Black Hunger Strikers from Solitary Confinement. Filed by: Cameroon American Council, Freedom for Immigrants, Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy (ISLA), Southern Poverty Law Center, August 26, 2020.

Lack of Medical Care, Unsafe Work Practices, and Absence of Adequate Protection Against COVID-19 for Detained Immigrants and Employees Alike at the Irwin County Detention Center. Filed by: Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network, September 14, 2020.

OLDAKER, et al. v. ICE, ICE Atlanta Field Office, US Department of Homeland Security, US Attorney General, Irwin County Detention Center, LaSalle Southeast, LLC, Irwin County Hospital, Dr. Mahendra Amin, et al., a CONSOLIDATED AMENDED PETITION FOR WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS AND CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF AND FOR DAMAGES, filed by National Lawyers Guild (NIPNLG), December 21, 2020.

Call for Immediate Investigation into Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers’ Use of Punitive Solitary Confinement as a Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic and Other Public Health Crises. Filed by: Al Otro Lado, American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Cameroon American Council, Center for Constitutional Rights, Freedom for Immigrants, Haitian Bridge Alliance, Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, Louisiana Stop Solitary Coalition, National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, Operation Restoration, Project South, Puentes New Orleans, Rapid Defense Network, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund, and the Tulane Immigrant Rights Clinic, June 21, 2021.

OLDAKER, et al. v. ICE, et al., CONSOLIDATED SECOND AMENDED CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF AND FOR DAMAGES, filed by National Lawyers Guild (NIPNLG), December 1, 2022.

Reports

Amnesty International. Cameroon 2023. Amnesty International Report 2023/24.

Cho, Eunice Hyunhye, and Joanna Naples-Mitchell. Behind Closed Doors: Abuse and Retaliation Against Hunger Strikers in U.S. Immigration Detention. American Civil Liberties Union and Physicians for Human Rights joint report, June 23, 2021.

Cho, Eunice Hyunhye. More of the Same: Private Prison Corporations and Immigration Detention Under the Biden Administration. The Biden administration is filling private prison beds emptied out by its own Executive Order with immigrant detainees. ACLU National Prison Project, October 5, 2021.

Human Rights First. Cameroonian Asylum Seekers Increasingly Detained, Denied Asylum Under Trump Administration. FACT SHEET: November 6, 2020.

Human Rights Watch. Cameroon | Country Page.

Human Rights Watch. World Report 2020: Cameroon.

Jünemann, Annette, Nicolas Fromm, and Nikolas Scherer, Eds. Fortress Europe? Challenges and failures of migration and asylum policies. Council of the European Union and the European Council, 5 April 2019.

Medical Mistreatment of Women in ICE Detention, Staff Report of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, United States Senate. Jon Ossoff, Chairman; Ron Johnson, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. November, 15, 2022.

Shuchart, Scott. Building Meaningful Civil Rights and Liberties Oversight at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties needs new authorities and higher expectations to oversee the Trump administration’s abuses in immigration and domestic security. Center for American Progress CAP 20, April 2, 2019.

TRAC Immigration Reports. Judge W. Scott Laragy, Oakdale Immigration Court. Syracuse University, FY 2018-2023.

U.S. Department of State. 2022 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Cameroon.

Ward, Nicole, and Jeanne Batalova. Refugees and Asylees in the United States. Migration Policy Institute,
June 15, 2023.

This chapter and the next two would not have been possible without the close contact I ultimately formed with the more or less five dozen asylum-seeking Cameroonians directly impacted by the routine violence of US ICE and ICE ERO agents as well as guards and wardens of profiteering prison operators: GEO Group, CoreCivic, and Lasalle Correction. Many of my sources can also be found cited in the multi-party complaints leveled against ICE in the waning months of 2020 that also inform this chapter.

Through trauma-informed interview practices, I was able over time to obtain the testimonies of these courageous and resilient people, and their consent to weave their accounts into the climax chapters of Crossing the Line. As their first-hand experiences began to merge with and verify the tales of others, personal stories evolved into eye-witness testimonies as well, resulting in solid evidence of routine abuse and acts of retribution committed by officers and contractors of the US federal government. All my sources suffered injustices at the hands of actors operating under the auspices of the US deterrence to detention to deportation pipeline. They all also bore witness to the violations suffered by others, providing me not only with the details of harm and horror described in these concluding chapters but with the confidence to publish them as proof of a broader, quasi-legal, state-sponsored, and morally reprehensible way of doing the business of immigrant incarceration in the US.

The stories contained in these pages, in other words, are not unique. They are happening every day to mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, and children of all national, linguistic, and religious origins. The Cameroon story illustrated in Crossing the Line is just one example: one that happened to be seen.

Additional shout outs of gratitude for their collaboration with this chapter go to Thomas Cartwright, Anne-Marie Debanné, and “Hannah.” They were just three of the many individuals and groups to coalesce quickly at a confusing and very stressful time to stand up for human rights and become a bulwark against wanton injustice.

I beg the forgiveness of all involved for not calling each of you out by name: I feel that if I neglect to namecheck a single person it would be a disservice to everyone and there were quite a few of you I never met or got the chance to interview. Please know that you are all heroes to me. Your generosity of service to humanity knows no bounds, and I will appreciate and respect you, always.

Other sources crucial to the reporting of this chapter included:

Documentaries & Film

Immigration Nation. A documentary looking inside the world of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. Netflix Series. 2020.

Journalism

Devereaux, Ryan. “Burials Are Cheaper Than Deportations”: Virus Unleashes Terror in a Troubled ICE Detention Center. As the coronavirus pandemic spreads to the Deep South, detained immigrants are becoming increasingly desperate. The Intercept, April 12, 2020.

Donnelly-DeRoven, Clarissa. Immigrants Detained by ICE Say They Were Thrown in Solitary for Requesting Covid-19 Tests: During an outbreak at Etowah County Detention Center, immigrants say solitary confinement was also used as medical isolation, against ICE guidelines. In These Times, December 2, 2020.

Ismail, Aymann. Immigration Nation Lets ICE Agents Tell Their Side of the Story. They’re Still the Villains. Slate, July 30, 2020.

Kassie, Emily, and Barbara Marcolini. How ICE Exported the Coronavirus: An investigation reveals how Immigration and Customs Enforcement became a domestic and global spreader of COVID-19. An investigation by The New York Times and The Marshall Project, July 10, 2020.

Kushner, Rachel. Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind: In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice. The New York Times Magazine, April 17, 2019.

Lanard, Noah. 7 Detainees Sued ICE. Then They Were Transferred to a Notorious Alabama Jail. The cross-country transfers are putting vulnerable people at increased risk of COVID-19. Mother Jones, July 21, 2020.

Moses, Paul. ‘The Worst Place Ever’ Is ICE’s Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama: Williamson was a healthy 45-year-old man when he and Reynolds, held by ICE pending deportation, arrived at the county-run Alabama jail after a snow-delayed, double-shackled trip.... Daily Beast, June 8, 2018.

Seville, Lisa Riordan, and Hannah Rappleye. Immigrant detainees land in limbo in Alabama jail: The Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Ala., holds as many as 350 suspected undocumented immigrants for open-ended stays as they await deportation. Critics say conditions in the rural lockup are "inhumane." NBC News, August 21, 2012.

Shah, Khushbu. Etowah: the Ice detention center with the goal to ‘make your life miserable’: Campaign is underway to close Alabama facility routinely identified by advocates and detainees as one of the worst in US. The Guardian, December 2, 2018.

Washington, John. He Fled Persecution — and Then Was Locked Up in U.S. Detention for Over 800 Days: After leaving Cameroon for the United States, Nelson Achiri Geh was shuffled between three detention centers; at one point, he didn’t see the sun for six months. GEN: Medium, July 22, 2019.

Washington, John. ‘An Experience I Wouldn’t Wish My Worst Enemy to Undergo’: In ICE detention for more than two years, a man from Cameroon pens a plea for mercy. The Nation, May 18, 2020.

Washington, John. ICE Mismanagement Created Coronavirus “Hotbeds of Infection” In and Around Detention Centers: A Detention Watch Network report blames ICE for nearly a quarter-million coronavirus cases throughout the country. The Intercept, December 9, 2020.

Legal Complaints (in order of submission to Inspector General Cuffari and rotating Heads of the Office of CRCL):

ICE is Using Torture Against Cameroonian Immigrants to Coerce Deportation, According to New Complaint Filed by Immigrant Rights Groups. Cameroon American Council, Freedom for Immigrants, Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention. Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Detention Watch Network (DWN), Natchez Network, Haitian Bridge Alliance, and Families for Freedom, October 8, 2020.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s Pattern of Torture in Signing of Deportation Documents for Cameroonian Migrants. Freedom for Immigrants, Southern Poverty Law Center, Detention Watch Network, Families for Freedom, Haitian Bridge Alliance, Louisiana Aid, and Witness at the Border, November 5, 2020.

Reports

TRAC. Judge-by-Judge Asylum Decisions in Immigration Courts, FY 2019-2024. Syracuse University, Nov 7, 2024.

Of Special Note

In July 2023, Jackson Parish, the site of intense and well-documented brutality against Black people seeking a safe and dignified life only to be forced onto ICE Air deportation flights in chains, celebrated the completion of a $6 million taxpayer-funded renovation. The area schools and clinics were not so lucky.

This was the hardest chapter to write. It took many, many tries. Few felt authentic. My initial concept was to retell the experience of mass deportation through the voices of those who lived through it. I wove together a tapestry of quotes that highlighted the thoughts, fears, feelings, and visceral sense memories of my story collaborators, mentors, and guides.

But it was too long for a book chapter; and too long to be the climax tale. Indeed, it could have been its own book.

I asked Godswill, Benedict, Kyle, and Ray if they would co-write the chapter with me. But they couldn’t. They didn’t want to relive the pain. They suggested, instead, that I climb into everyone’s skin and imagine being on the flight with them.

When I shared this draft with all involved, the feedback among those who were able to read it — some were too triggered — was the same: It’s as if you were there, they told me. Don’t change a word.

The storytelling in this chapter goes beyond just bearing witness. It represents the power that seeing holds to inform and subvert.

I hope it touches hearts and changes minds. I hope you will agree: this is not how the US government should be treating people. This is not how our elected officials should be spending our tax dollars.

This abomination must end.

Here are a few resources that support the storytelling…

Books (see Bibliography)

Sharpless, Rebecca A. Shackled: 92 Refugees Imprisoned on ICE Air. University of California Press, February 2024.

Documentary

ICE is Torturing Black Immigrants. UndocuBlack Network, October 12, 2021.

Journalism

Borger, Julian. US Ice officers 'used torture to make Africans sign own deportation orders’: Cameroonians say officers choked, beat and threatened to kill them, as lawyers tell of pre-election removal drive. The Guardian, October 22, 2020.

Borger, Julian. US to send asylum seekers home to Cameroon despite 'death plane' warnings: Move by the Trump administration comes despite reports that other deportees have gone missing since being repatriated. The Guardian, November 10, 2020.

Borger, Julian. Cameroonian asylum-seeker sues US for alleged assault by Ice officers: Acheleke Fuanya claims officers knelt on his neck in the attack at a Louisiana prison to force him to accept deportation. The Guardian, August 12, 2021.

Human Rights Initiative of North Texas, Inc. URGENT! DEPORTATION OF CAMEROONIANS CAN START ANY MINUTE. October 13, 2020

Murdza, Katy. ICE Deported Cameroonian Immigrants Despite Protests and Congressional Intervention. Immigration Impact. Oct 14, 2020

Solis, Diane. Protests grow over pending deportations to Cameroon, amid abuse allegations. “We ran from our countries to be protected here. Now, when they are deporting us, our lives will be at risk.” Dallas Morning News, Oct. 12, 2020.

Towle, Sarah. Grim Stories from Asylum Seekers Caught in America’s Cranked-up Deportation Machine: They Fled Here from Some of the Most Dangerous Places Only to be Forced Back. The Boston Globe, December 31, 2020.

Press Releases

Center for Constitutional Rights. Newly Obtained Documents Detail U.S. Government Officials’ Racist Views of Black Migrants. February 6, 2023.

My interest in finding and interviewing the folks on the October and November 2020 Omni Air Death Planes began with an interest in understanding what it meant to “bag and tie” grown men and “stuff them into a sack.” When that curiosity uncovered the conscience-shocking wrong of using a full-body restraint device, The WRAP, to force compliance on the many through the torture of the few, my anger reached a fever pitch.

I could never look away again.

Moved by family separation to outrage and by MPP to action, this “discovery” propelled me toward abolition.

My gratitude to Luz Lopez for seeing what I saw; to Fatma Marouf for agreeing to further investigate the abuse and take on ICE with me; to Lauren Seibert for engaging in a parallel research process on behalf of violated Cameroonian asylum seekers; to Human Rights Watch for its never-ending mission to remind world leaders to respect the inherent dignity of all people, according to the law; and to the hard work by everyone who coalesced as the Cameroon Advocacy Network Humanitarian Parole Working Group to advocate for bringing these wrongly and egregiously expelled people back for a second chance at legal due process under US and international asylum law.

The now global deterrence to detention to deportation pipeline is a cancer on all our souls. It was built on rotten, racist foundations. It is maintained by greed and the belief that some people are more supreme than others. It is a means by demagogues and profiteers to distract us from the real ills we face as a people today. It is increasingly becoming a new holocaust.

It must be unbuilt. It must be torn down. We must overcome the psychosis of “whiteness.”

Books (see Bibliography)

Andrews, Kehinde. The Psychosis of Whiteness: Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World. Allen Lane, Sept 2023.

Beltrán, Cristina. Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy. University of Minnesota Press, August 2020.

Jones, Reece. White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall. Beacon Press, Oct 2021.

Nevins, Joseph. Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid. City Lights Publishers, Dec 2013.

Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America – Updated Edition. Princeton University Press, April 2014.

Shah, Silky. Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Haymarket Books, May 2024.

Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Haymarket Books, February 2021.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Lies That Divide Us. Allen Lane, August 2020.

Documentary & Film

The U.S. and the Holocaust explores the USA's response to the Holocaust, and how it challenged the ideals of democracy. Directors Sarah Botstein, Ken Burns, and Lynn Novick.

Journalism

Albaladejo, Angelika. Safety claims for body restraint used by US authorities based on disputed study: Wrap device used by Ice says it can be used without restricting breathing but investigation shows claims based on anecdotes. The Guardian in partnership with Capital & Main, February 3, 2021.

Bengali, Shashank. They gambled, and lost: Dozens of migrants braved thousands of miles of jungles, seas and bandits to reach the U.S. Then they were sent home. Los Angeles Times, Dec. 24, 2016.

Biddle, Sam. Amazon Co-Owns Deportation Airline Implicated in Alleged Torture of Immigrants: Activists are pressuring Amazon to divest from Omni Air International, a company at the center of ICE's deportation machine. February 17, 2022.

Nazaryan, Alexander. Deportation airline secures $67 million in coronavirus bailout. Yahoo! News, June 23, 2020.

Ken Klippenstein. ICE Authorized New List of Restraining Devices Under Trump. The Young Turks, September 26, 2018.

Lanchin, Mike. SS St Louis: The ship of Jewish refugees nobody wanted. BBC News, 13 May 2014.

Nam-Sonenstein, Brian. New Methods Of Restraining Inmates Have Deadly Outcomes. ShadowProof, August 11, 2016.

Rohrlich, Justin. The sole airline willing to operate “high-risk” deportation flights is price-gouging ICE. Quartz, December 5, 2019.

Reuter, Dominick. Amazon owns a significant stake in a private air company that the US uses to deport people and has been accused of human rights abuses. Yahoo! Tech, Business Insider, February 17, 2022.

Stahl, Aviva. South Asian migrants say they were put in 'body bags' for deportation from US: Immigration officials admit using ‘minimum force’ but deportees claim they tased, punched and kicked a group of 85 Bangladeshis, Nepalis and Indians. The Guardian, May 27, 2016.

Legal Complaints & Statements

Amnesty International. Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment During Forcible Deportation. July 1, 1994.

Complaint Regarding ICE’s Use of The WRAP as a Restraint Device. Filed by: African Communities Together, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Cameroon Advocacy Network, Haitian Bridge Alliance, Texas A&M Immigrant Rights Clinic, UndocuBlack Network, Witness at the Border, October 13, 2021.

K.N.N., R.N., C.M., E.U., Plaintiffs, —against UNITED STATES OF AMERICA; U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY; ALEJANDRO N. MAYORKAS, in his official capacity as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT; and PATRICK LECHLEITNER, in his official capacity as Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Defendants. Filed by: Sarah T. Gillman and Sarah E. Decker, ROBERT F. KENNEDY HUMAN RIGHTS; Fatma E. Marouf, Sara Zampierin, Emma Blackmon, Harris R. Dubin, Donté D. Houston, Ana Martinez, Payton Molina, CIVIL RIGHTS CLINIC & IMMIGRANT RIGHTS CLINIC, TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW.

Reports

Center for Human Rights, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Hidden in Plain Sight: ICE Air and the Machinery of Mass Deportation. University of Washington, April 23, 2019.

Center for Human Rights, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Abuses in the Air: Sports Travel and the Deportation Industry. University of Washington, June 14, 2022.

Holocaust Encyclopedia. Voyage of the St. Louis. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Mathema, Silva, and Zefitret Abera Molla. The Urgency of Designating Cameroon for Temporary Protected Status: The U.S. government should immediately grant Temporary Protected Status to Cameroonian nationals in the United States, given the extraordinary and deteriorating conditions in the country that make a safe return impossible. Center for American Progress (CAP 20), Mar 3, 2022.

Seibert, Lauren. “How Can You Throw Us Back?” Asylum Seekers Abused in the US and Deported to Harm in Cameroon. Human Rights Watch, February 10, 2022.

Weissman, Deborah M., Angelina Godoy, and Havan M. Clark. The Final Act: Deportation by ICE Air. Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 49:437, pp. 437-498, 2021.

USA spending.gov. RECIPIENT | SAFE RESTRAINTS. Sept 2015-2021.

Of Special Note

Safe Restraints. Inc.

The WRAP: Basic Application Training Manual.

Toni Morrison, Convocation Address: The Ten Steps to Fascism. Howard University 128th Anniversary, March 3, 1995.

A book about the failures of “Prevention through Deterrence” would not be complete without focusing the lens on how the US government has weaponized the Sonoran desert to massacre people seeking their fundamental right to a safe and dignified life. And while this is my now dear friend Alvaro Enciso’s story, I spent a lot of time in the Arizona borderlands and engaged with many people and organizations willing to open their hearts, homes, and projects to me. These heroes have been waging a grassroots war of welcome these many decades despite their facing increasing criminalization:

• Reverend John Fife,

• Humane Borders,

• Border Search and Rescue, and

• No More Deaths.

• The Tucson, Green Valley, and Ajo Samaritans,

• Dora Rodriguez and her teams at Salvavison and Casa de Esperanza in Sasabe, as well as the

• People Helping People in Arivaca.

• All the good folks associated with the Kino Border Institute,

• The volunteers and advocates of the Eloy Detention Visitation & Accompaniment program, and

• Everyone at the Border Community Alliance, with a special hat tip to their Film and Literary Circle.

• Margo Cowan and the volunteers at Keep Tucson Together as well as the former Manzo Council,

• Greg Hess and his team at the offices of the Pima County Medical Examiner, who’ve led the thankless charge of counting the uncountable deaths from environmental exposure.

• Journalists Todd Miller and Melissa del Bosque of the Border Chronicle,

• John Washington, now of AZ Luminaria, formerly of The Intercept and The Nation.

• Filmmaker David Damian Figueroa, whose new film Shura, who sparked the Samaritan movement, says it all.

• My first desert guide, Gail Kocourek, who was with me when I received the contract from She Writes Press.

• My dear friend and polyglot Ruhá Temlock, who is always willing to help me communicate with speakers of Spanish, French, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.

• And in recognition of the fact that it isn’t just two-legged migrants who are adversely affected by border walls and the cruelty of surveillance, my gratitude to Kate Scott and Tony Heath of Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center and their colleagues and friends in the Arizona biodiversity and nature conservation coalition for their defense of four-legged migrants and water sources as well.

We can do better, people. We must do better.

Hope knows no borders. Cruelty is not okay.