SPREAD KNOWLEDGE, NOT FEAR.
join the Hope Knows No Borders
book club & Webinar series
A learning community, spanning borders of geography, politics, faith traditions, and the coincidence of birth, facilitated by Dora Rodriguez, author of Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain, and Sarah Towle, author of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands.
We aim to engage one and all in a collective journey of discovery as we dive into texts, documentaries, and other creative works that are like beacons of hope, lighting the way through these deeply troubling times and compelling us all to do better.
We meet (mostly) on the 4th Sunday of every month, 2:30-4:00 pm ET, via Zoom.
All discussions are thematically driven with suggested readings posted here in advance of each monthly meet-up. Discussions are video recorded for Book Club members, then shared with the public as audio tales on Sarah’s podcast: From The Borderlands.
Next Event:
On Global Apartheid & the Border Industrial Complex
August 3, 2025, 1:00-2:30 pm ET*
We should all be appalled at what is happening in the US today under ICE and other emboldened Department of Homeland “Security” agencies. But anti-immigrant cruelty is not unique to the Trump regime. Rising violence and crimes against humanity targeting people in motion are not solely a US phenomenon. As I write in Chapter 25 of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, what began in 1980 as an “Emergency Influx Shelter” set up in Krome, Florida, has metastasized into a living, breathing many-headed Hydra that decides who gets to move — and who doesn’t — as it deters, detects, divides, detains, deports, destroys, and disappears human beings for profit.
In this session of the HOPE KNOWS NO BORDERS BOOK CLUB & WEBINAR SERIES, we will take a high-altitude view of the cruel and costly Border Industrial Complex, whose growth across continents continues to accelerate even as it gobbles up and spits out post-WWII commitments to human rights.
Joining co-facilitator Dora Rodriguez and me to share their research and first-hand observations of Border Industrial Complex expansion are lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar and journalist Todd Miller. Both have been eyewitnesses to the evolution of “smart” frontiers worldwide and the Global Apartheid and New Jim Code dystopian reality they have spawned.
You’ll find links to their must-read titles below!
Among our possible topics of discussion will be:
The technologies tested at frontiers worldwide that are now being utilized by US Customs & Border Protection and ICE,
The international laws that are being compromised by the Border Industrial Complex globally,
The Corporate Interests that are making bank off the human misery the Border Industrial Complex causes, and
The ramifications of ICE becoming the largest federal policing entity in the history of the US, with a budget bigger than the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals Service, and Bureau of Prisons, combined…
TO HELP YOU PREPARE:
Suggested Readings from Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands:
Chapter 16, The Border Hardens
Chapter 25, The Gulag
Chapter 32, Locked In
I also recommend adding to the top of your to-be-read pile (if you haven’t read them already):
Miller, Todd. Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security. City Lights Publishers, 2014.
Miller, Todd. Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border around the World. Verso Books, 2019.
Molnar, Petra. The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The New Press, 2024.
*Note that our final meet-up for the summer of 2025 will take place, exceptionally, between the 4th Sunday of July and August to accommodate speakers’ holiday schedules as well as to avoid the US Labor Day weekend. We have also decided to shift the start time as the four of us are currently spanning 12 time zones. We apologize for any inconvenience caused, but we will record it and publish it as a podcast on Sarah’s Substack for everyone’s edification. It’s going to be most compelling!
ENJOY THE RECORDINGS OF OUR previous meet-ups:
June 22, 2025: On Writing to Change the World
In this engaging conversation facilitated by Abbey, we dig into the craft of writing to inspire movements. Taking Mary Pipher’s book Writing the Change the World as her point of inspiration, Abbey leads Dora and me in a discussion of the transformative power of storytelling to touch hearts, change minds, and turn outrage into action.
I’d like to think that this workshop speaks to the power of the art and the creative process to aid the resistance against the rise of fascism in the US and elsewhere today.
May 25, 2025: We ask the question: Is there an invasion at the US-Mexico border? and we determine that…
In light of recent events in LA and their continuing aftermath, this webinar playback could not be more timely. Though our discussion centered on the militarization of the borderlands as a prelude to invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law, we also reminded participants that the militarization is taking place all over the country and in particular in the 100-mile constitution-free zone policed by Homeland "Security" forces.
LA is now poised to be occupied by not just "security" forces in collaboration with LAPD, but federalized National Guard and possibly the Marines. I put to you that this was intentional — Trump & Co want their violence to lead to violence so they can declare war on their own citizens in time for Trump's North Korea-style military parade. Are we looking at a new Tiananmen Square massacre? We'll see in just a few days.
April 27, 2025: On Shifting the Paradigm By FINDING THE WORDS TO TOUCH HEARTS & CHANGE MINDS
“I'm Not an Alien. I Don't Bleed Green." I Bleed Red Just Like You.”
Sarah and Dora together in Organ Pipe National Monument paying respects at Dora’s “sacred spot” where the Sanctuary Movement was born, now immortalized by Alvaro Enciso’s commemorative crosses.
In this workshop, Dora and I take as our starting point that language matters (it’s not “just semantics”) because words and phrases influence thought. And the dehumanizing, anti-immigrant rhetoric of our politicians, parroted by the media — both right-wing and mainstream — has enabled the fascist takeover of US democracy. Meeting this historic moment head-on, we call for a language revolution that reclaims the narrative and tugs the nation back to its senses. To accomplish this, we provide tools and resources for touching the hearts and changing the minds of folks we meet at the dinner party, in the grocery store line, on the bus, etc., who are brainwashed… and don’t even know it.
It is a regime, for example, not an administration. They are abducting our friends and neighbors, not arresting them. They are imprisoning them, not detaining them; trafficking and disappearing them, not deporting them, to concentration camps and torture chambers. This makes Trump & Co and their Gestapo — ICE and Customs and Border Protection — the true terrorists in this tale. And who wants to be complicit in that level of cruelty?
March 30, 2025: On Offering Sanctuary & Building Railroads
”We’re Not the Statue of Liberty Country.”
As the ICE Gestapo fills its 200+ prison Gulag with our neighbors, family, colleagues, and friends abducted off the streets and forcibly disappeared by US federal agents, featured speaker Reverend John Fife, co-padre of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, and sanctuary providers Reverends Babs Miller and Jim Rigby, share with us when the movement began and why and how to revive it to meet the demands of today.
The time is NOW, they urge us, to call this country to its conscience, or melt down Lady Liberty.
