JULY 9-11: From the People's Book in Tacoma Park, Maryland, to the People’s House in DC, I Walk in the Footsteps of Giants

In the perfect denouement to the long journey that began with me bearing witness to the inhumanity I assumed Trump had wrought, only to discover he had been enabled by decades of bipartisan complicity, the good folks at People’s Book embraced me and Crossing the Line in the company of Maryland-based family and their dear friends. It was an intimate and very interested gathering of compassionate and committed folks, some of whom had been in Central America in the Dirty War era as I had been. Others of whom were providing welcome and pro bono support to asylum-seeking individuals and families right here, right now, at home.

Following an extended and in-depth discussion of the issues, the event continued beyond the bookstore with dinner and drinks of tacos and margaritas at a popular Tacoma Park watering hole. All in all, it was the perfect conclusion to Phase I of my 2024 GOTV effort that traces its roots to the 2018 Family Separation crisis when I was first awakened to the fact that there was something dark and rotten the heart of our immigration and asylum systems. A rot that we must root out if we are ever to “save the soul of the nation” in the words of then-candidate Biden, who as president did many historically great things. But pushing back against the deliberate cruelty of the deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline was not one of them. Though critical of Trump & Co’s cranking the cruelty to 11, Biden and Harris did little to attenuate the volume. Quite the opposite.

Will a Harris-Walz administration do better? Only if we demand it; only if we all raise our voices in harmony to say, “The cruelty is NOT okay! This is not the nation and people we wish to be!” Because Congress isn’t going to do anything but fund the relentless march of border militarization until we say, “¡Basta!”.

That is why I will be heading out again soon, on tour with Phase II of the Beacon of Hope Book Tour:

My goal is to educate US voters about how the post-WWII promise of human rights to dignity and equal protection under the law has been forgotten and brushed aside in our now obsessively security-first world.

Folks fleeing harm, horror, and hunger hold in their hearts a hope that knows no borders. Our national cruelty in the face of their hope is not okay. We must not only respect their right to migrate, but their right to stay home, too. The root causes forcing so many people to pull up stakes and run must be recognized as the consequence of neoliberal economics, climate breakdown, and forever wars — global pressures that, in truth, are failing us all.

When it becomes more dangerous to stay, people move. We always have. We always will. We have fled harm, horror, and hunger in search of better since the dawn of time. It’s part of the human story.

We must be willing to see the pain and trauma our policies have caused, be outraged by it, and be willing to take action in response to that outrage.

Once on the ground, in January 2020, to aid the humanitarian volunteers called to see to the needs of 70,000 people, a third of them children, tossed into harm’s way and ignored by two national governments, the United Nations, and its typical cast of international characters, I could never look away again. I was far from alone. Thanks to the subversive act of seeing, a phrase I borrow with gratitude from my colleagues and friends of the watchdog group, Witness at the Border, I was taken by the proverbial shoulders and shaken into action by the Muse herself. She insisted I pour my outrage into documenting this historic moment which, much like the years leading up to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, will not soon be forgotten, much less forgiven.

Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands became the fruit of those labors: the ultimate act in bearing witness as I opened my eyes to see the worst and the best of humanity: our extraordinary capacity for love and kindness as well as our unrelenting capacity for evil.

Until sometime in 2023, when my publisher rightly suggested it was too triggering, the book was entitled The First Solution in a nod of thanks to my literary mentor, Toni Morrison, who wrote in 1995:

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

In the months and years that followed my original act of witness, during the family separation crisis, to the publication of Crossing the Line, I grew from outraged citizen to activist citizen investigator to advocate for abolition.

What do I mean by “abolition,” Sarah? I can almost hear you say.

Well, you’ll have to read Crossing the Line to find out.

For now, please join me in thanking the good folks at People’s Book in Tacoma Park, Maryland for hosting the final event — and perfect denouement — in the Beacon of Hope Book Tour Phase I, as well as to those members of the US Congress who continue to fight the good fight for JUST immigration. May their wishes soon prevail. And may you, in reading Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands — what I call a “manual for the movement” and “a handbook for a more humane world” — find your preferred pathway, tool, and methodology for joining the struggle.

If we each become a pebble and throw ourselves into this wretched pond, we can overturn its banks. If we each raise our single voices, we will become a choir, singing in loud and glorious harmony the words of Sergio Cordova in the last lines of Crossing the Line, Chapter 3:

“Being born in the US makes you lucky, but it doesn’t make you better. Humans are humans. Our hearts beat the same blood. We all suffer the same pain.”

Let’s make some good trouble. For “the way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” —Ida B. Wells.

What I learned…

As the Beacon of Hope Book Tour swept the nation from the Redwoods of California to the swamplands of the Chesapeake Bay, what I learned to be true and equal in the hearts of everyone, no matter their political persuasion is this: there is a hunger for a “narrative with clarity,” to use Ken Burns’ words, on the issue of immigration. Folks from Sea to Shining Sea seem to understand on some level — despite what’s being fed to them by the right-wing disinformation machine and parroted in the misinformation of the so-called mainstream press — that they are being lied to on this issue. Again, quoting Burns: “

“Sarah Towle has obliterated today's dead-end arguments about immigration and transformed them into riveting, human stories. We all deserve a narrative with clarity, and Towle’s has delivered. Spectacular!”

Sadly, what I have written is nothing new. It’s nothing that hasn’t been said before. Indeed, there’s nothing “great” about an “America” built on white supremacy. The national blindness it causes, even in the hearts of those who see themselves as compassionate, and then state, “But there are just too many of them” is not something we should strive to go back to.

When our starting point becomes, Why are so many people on the run? Rather than asking only, How do we stop them? That is when we will begin to be better.

We can be better, people. We must be better.

In solidarity,

Sarah