From the Borderlands

Hello Subscribers! The revised edition of Crossing the Line launches tomorrow, October 7! And I’m back on the road talking about how immigration has been weaponized to drive democracy into crisis.

My goal is to aid in the building of the Resistance Choir, singing in glorious harmony, This is not the people we wish to be, one book talk, keynote address, and immigration study circle at a time.

I spent the weekend with my Amnesty International family, where someone dubbed my upcoming event schedule Sarah’s Sweet Resistance Tour.

Don’t you just love that?

Today, I’ll be in person at the Woods Hole Library in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Hope to see you there.

Over the weekend, I was in conference with the mightiest of human rights defenders, as I said.

And last week, I joined discussions in North Carolina, North Texas, and Minneapolis, with academic, faith-based, and advocacy groups, respectively, who’ve adopted Crossing the Line to guide them in their commitment to stand up to the demagogues and profiteers who are making bank off the “brokenness” of the US immigration system.

It’s a hybrid tour. So book your meetup now!

When detention of peace-seeking people is the point; when dehumanization is a feature, not a bug; when evil walks the land once more and the only way to confront it is together, how will you stand up for human rights, human dignity, and human decency?

Start by listening to this amazing conversation with the good folks at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Minneapolis, who understand that we only have a democracy if we fight for it. And we only have a democracy if we remember our shared humanity.

Click On The Play Button Above!

Big thanks to Joe, Rosey, Rose, and Meghan of St. Joan of Arc’s Welcome the Stranger Ministry. Thank you for your Witness!

Tales of Humanity is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome new subscribers! And thank you to all who’ve selected to become paid supporters of my newsletter, Tales of Humanity, and podcast, From the Borderlands. I haven’t had a chance to thank you all personally yet. But know that my gratitude to you knows no bounds! You’ll hear from me soon. I’m just super slammed right now, preparing for the launch of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, second edition, on October 7, as well as booking speakers for the Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series, and my forthcoming East Coast speaking tour.

The tour is taking me, so far, to Boston, Amherst, New Paltz, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and New York City. There is still room in my calendar. So, if you’d like me to engage with your community, whether in person or virtually, please don't hesitate to reach out.

For now, I give you my 95th publication here on Substack (can you believe that? I can’t!), with special thanks to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jenn Budd, Juan Gonzalez, Todd Miller, María de Jesús Puga Morán, and Dan Kowalski.

Introduction

A little-known fact, something I learned while researching Crossing the Line, is that the whole of the United States is encircled in a 100-mile policing zone. This zone traces the entire perimeter of the lower 48: 100 miles eastward and westward from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans; 100 miles southward and northward from land borders with Canada and Mexico.

This zone contains 2/3rds of the US population, 9 of our 10 largest cities, and 6 whole states, by my count, including Hawai’i, as well as the District of Columbia.

Also little-known is that this zone is the policing jurisdiction of a 60,000-member force — and counting — that knows no transparency. And since the second Trump regime dissolved its Civil Rights and Civil Liberties ombudsman and oversight bodies in early 2025, this force now knows no accountability, which should trouble us all, for these were the troops turned on all of us during the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020.

I speak of Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, one of 22 federal tentacles of the post-9/11 bulwark erected to combat terror with terror: the Department of Homeland Security, now the beating heart of the worldwide Border Industrial Complex, itself the offspring of the Cold War-era Military Industrial Complex.

When Customs and Border Protection was inaugurated in 2003, it subsumed the US Border Patrol. That force, dating to 1924 — when the US was in the grips of a nativist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant raging fervor much like it is today — was built on the rotten foundations of white supremacist ideology, The Border Patrol deputized members of the Ku Klux Klan, former Slave Patrollers who’d traveled west after the Civil War to become Texas Rangers or to ride with the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. The job of the Border Patrol was to exclude and eject those deemed unwelcome by a US government then under the influence of a quack-science, called Eugenics, which would animate the rise of fascism in Germany within a decade.

From the start, US Border Patrol policing practice relied on racial profiling. At the height of the civil rights movement, in the 1970s, the policy was questioned as unconstitutional. Yet, in a series of dubious decisions, the US Supreme Court gave the Border Patrol carte blanche to carry on as it had since its openly racist beginnings. It allowed for the relentless erosion of all of our constitutional protections, from unlawful searches and seizures, as enshrined in the 4th Amendment.

Enforcement through racial profiling was inherited by the agency of Customs and Border Protection when it became operational in March 2003. The Obama administration tried to curtail the practice, without success. One Department of Homeland Security official told the New York Times, “We can’t do our job without taking ethnicity into account. We are very dependent on that.”[1]

Racial profiling is now on its way to becoming the law of the land. On September 8, 2025, in a 6-3 decision made under its shadowy shadow docket, Trump’s Supreme Court declared that racial profiling by ICE is a-okay in LA; that ICE officers no longer need “probable cause” to pull someone’s car over or drag them out of their house or remove them from their job or their children in chains. Skin color, language, accent, and job description are now enough, in the so-called Land of Laws, to tackle, shackle, and put someone on a one-way bus to prison, then on a one-way plane to refoulement.

“The net effect,” states immigration attorney Dan Kowalski, is “that every non-White person in America is now a target for ICE, even if you are an American citizen.”[2]

For the moment, this new latitude afforded to ICE by the six conservative members of the increasingly criminal Roberts’ court is limited to Los Angeles. But it's just another in a long line of slippery slope; another tear in the fabric of the US Constitution; another step toward the normalization of authoritarian rule in the so-called “Beacon of Hope.”

It’s only a matter of time — unless we stop it — that this constitution-free immunity, heretofore enjoyed only by CBP and only in the 100-mile US border periphery, will roll into an interior domestic location near you, complete with masked agents riding around in armored vehicles, their guns and tear gas canisters at the ready in the US and under the auspices of ICE.

On the eve of engorging itself on a budget bigger than the DEA, ATF, FBI, Marshall’s Service, and Bureau of prisons, combined, ICE and CBP have been harnessed as the private paramilitary of a US president, just as I predicted they would be in my book Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands if given the keys to the Oval Office once more.

Now that warning has come true. From October 2025, federal agents operating under the Department of Homeland Security will be funded by Congress to patrol the so-called “Land of Free” like Hitler’s Brownshirts, like Pinochet’s military junta, like Central American death squads, which by the way, were 100% made in the USA.

How did we reach this wretched place?

* By never facing up to the fact that we are a nation born from the violence of enslaving other people and the genocidal displacement of human beings caused by manifest destiny.

* By legitimizing former Slave Patrollers and Bounty Hunters with guns and badges as Texas Rangers and Border Patrol agents.

* By imprisoning Black and Brown newcomers as far back as 1980, when the first immigration prison, set up in a decommissioned missile defense site in Krome, Florida, kicked off the development of the world’s largest immigrant enslavement system in the world, 80% of which is operated for profit.

* By developing laws that punish Black and Brown newcomers more harshly for misdemeanor crimes, while cutting off their pathways to citizenship at the same time.

* By erecting a terrifying so-called “War on Terror” behemoth on these same rotten white-supremist foundations upon which the Border Patrol was established.

* And by allowing for the 40-year evolution of a propaganda machinery which for too long has mainlined disinformation, hate speech, and lies into the veins of the US populace, posing as a purveyor of news, and creating the cult of MAGA.

The rise of fascism in the US is inextricably linked to what I call the “Foxification of America.” Its adherents love to squawk about how migrant workers, asylum seekers, and refugees are a strain on local economies. But the business of jailing and expelling folks seeking safety and dignified life, per their human and legal rights, is a booming business in the USA, particularly in Greg Abbott’s Ruby-Red Texas, Ron DeSantis’s Ruby-Red Florida, and throughout the once Confederate Ruby-Red Deep South.

According to the Sentencing Project, which advocates for prison abolition in the US, fewer than 5,000 immigrants were detained by the US federal government when, on September 11, 2001, the Pentagon was breached and the World Trade Center reduced to ash. As of this recording, on September 11, 2025…

Welcome back, everyone. I hope you have had a restful summer and that you’re returning to reality recharged and ready to resist!

To help get you motivated…

Dora Rodriguez and I are thrilled to share with you our August 3, 2025, conversation for the HOPE KNOWS NO BORDERS BOOK CLUB & WEBINAR SERIES:

It’s our 30,000-foot deep dive into the global leviathan that is the Border Industrial Complex with Petra Molnar and Todd Miller.

When it comes to the politics of deterrence, detention, and deportation, we can sometimes overlook that managing the movement of people around the globe is Big Business. Businesses funded by governments, and therefore paid for by us, are making Big Bucks at the intersection of migration and so-called “security.” They are developing the smart walls, surveillance systems, gulags, Gestapo forces, weaponized robotic dogs, and drones hiding in plain sight all around us, becoming more and more normalized, and impacting all our lives and all our rights — though some with more cruelty toward some than others.

Dora and my guests for Global Apartheid & the New Jim Code are two of the most incisive analysts of the industry that tracks and transports people as if they were packages, right down to each of our government-issued bar codes, facial biometrics, and pupil scans. We call it the Border Industrial Complex. And it is everywhere, giving truth to what journalist and author, Jean Guerrero, writes in her Aug. 29, 2025, New York Times Op-Ed: the border is indeed invading us.

Pop in the earbuds and pull up a chair. You won’t want to miss this critically important and informative conversation with Petra and Todd.

Remember, the only way through this … together,Sarah

Resources Referenced:

Articles

Guerrero, Jean. “The Border Is Invading America.” New York Times Opinion, August 29, 2025.

Lewis, Talila A. “Trump’s Rule Attacking Disabled and Low-Income Migrants Has Violent History: The rule uses the same criteria against migrants that were used to keep Black people enslaved.” Truthout, August 27, 2019.

Books

Miller, Todd. Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security. City Lights Publishers, March 2014.

Miller, Todd. Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security. City Lights Books, Aug 2017.

Miller, Todd. Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border around the World, Verso Books. Aug 2019.

Miller, Todd. Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders. City Lights Books, April 2021.

Molnar, Petra. The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The New Press, May 2024.

Nevins, Joseph. Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War On "Illegals" and the Remaking of the U.S.–Mexico Boundary. Routledge, February 2010.

Towle, Sarah. Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands. She Writes Press, June 2024.

Rodriguez, Dora. Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain. Resiliencia Publishing, July 2025.

Projects & Initiatives (and who mentioned them)

Blue Triangle Solidarity (Rosey)

The Border Chronicle (Todd)

Border Community Alliance (Steve)

Dora’s Salvavision (Father Ray)

Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series (Sarah & Dora)

Migration & Technology Monitor (Petra)

Sarah’s Immigration Study Circles:

Find a developing list of resistance strategies here:

Thanks for reading Tales of Humanity! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Welcome new subscribers! I’m thrilled to share that our community is growing. Slowly, but surely, we are turning into a mighty chorus, singing ever louder in glorious harmony: this is not the people we wish to be! I am deeply grateful to all of you who have pledged to support this work, and while I intend to keep this newsletter and podcast free, I may soon need to turn to donations to cover my mounting costs at the back end, especially to run the Hope Knows No Border Book Club & Webinar Series. Until then, if you find my Tales of Humanity newsletter and/or From the Borderlands podcast useful, please consider recommending it to your friends, family, and community. We’re growing the movement for JUST migration here, which, in the face of rising fascism, means being billions of tiny grains of sand thrown into the gears of the evil machinery to keep them from turning, until these dark days are behind us. Because they will end. And when they do, we’ll be ready to lock elbows to build a better world from the ashes.

The only way through this is … together. In Solidarity, ✊🏼 Sarah

On July 1, 2025, the MAGA-controlled US Congress voted to do what I warned in my book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, they would do if given the keys to the White House once more: turn the most-troubled, least-transparent law enforcement agencies in the land into a private presidential paramilitary. Bequeathed a purse greater than the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Bureau of Prisons (BOP), US Marshals Service, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) combined, and signed into law on July 4th, ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are now fully unleashed to feed Trump & Co’s detention to deportation pipeline.

Less than one week later, ICE rocked the quiet community of Camarillo, California, when it rolled into Glass House Farms in fortified military-grade vehicles, supported by National Guard forces and the local Ventura County Police Tactical Unit armed and outfitted for war.

In what is said to be the largest workplace raid in California history, 361 farmworkers were abducted and disappeared into the US gulag. One person fell to his death. Many others were injured. It was cruelty on a mass scale: one worksite; one day; 361 workers and their families — a harbinger of what’s to come.

But here’s what the armed intruders probably didn’t count on: The Ventura County community stood up in defense of civil liberties, human decency, and human rights. To me, an outsider looking on from afar, their response appeared organized. It looked coordinated. It was not. But within the grassroots response of family members, community organizers, and journalists alike, there is much to offer the growing resistance nationwide.

If you’re looking for strategic tips and tools to fuel your community’s efforts, you won’t want to miss this interview with folks on the frontlines of the July 10th Glass House Raids. I invited Glass House Farms leadership to comment as well, but they did not respond to my requests.

While the July 10th Glass House workplace raids may have been the largest in California to date, they were not the largest in US history. That would be the attack on the Swift meatpacking plants on December 12, 2006, which involved over 1,000 ICE agents with the support of local police, simultaneously targeting plants in Utah, Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, and Minnesota, and affecting as many as 20,000 workers and their loved ones. Then there was the August 7, 2019, raid on seven Mississippi poultry plants, involving more than 600 ICE agents and impacting 680 families.

We must remember that in every case, when the raids are over and the dust has settled, when insurance claims have been filed and companies have been reimbursed for the cost of damages incurred, parents are gone; families are torn apart, possibly forever; children cry themselves to sleep at night, traumatized for life, not knowing if they will ever see their loved ones again.

These are the real costs of our immigration policies.

And they are human.

If this is not the nation you wish to be, stand up for the children. Stand against tyranny and for the rule of law. Join the resistance today. Skill up on how we got to this wretched place with Crossing the Line: Finding America in the borderlands, available in print, eBook, and audiobook. Discounts available on books purchased by the box and ordered through me. DM me today.

Links for engagement, donations, training, etc…

* Humanitarian assistance: mixteco.org/donate

* Legal assistance: 805undocufund.org

* Civic engagement: buen-vecino.org

Thanks for reading Tales of Humanity! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

In this episode of From the Borderlands…

Author-activist and sister humanitarian, Abbey Carpenter, engages mi hermana de alma, Dora Rodriguez, and me on the topic of “Writing to Change the World” for the June meet-up of the Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series.

It was a special occasion for two reasons:

* We celebrated the coming launch of Dora’s new memoir, Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain, now available!

* And we marked the first anniversary of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands by announcing the second edition, with an all-new Author Foreword and revised Epilogue framed around the second Trump regime’s first 100 days, coming to bookstores near you on September 2!

Abbey drew inspiration for this webinar from a book by Mary Pipher called Writing to Change the World. A renowned psychologist and the author of 11 books, among them four New York Times bestsellers, Mary’s aim with Writing to Change the World is to help folks passionate about sharing their point of view craft clear and compelling messages, because, as Mary writes…

In these tumultuous times, don’t we all want to be heard? Who doesn’t want to transform the world?

Abbey engaged Dora and me on several subjects:

* Our writing mission

* Why storytelling?

* Writing for catharsis

* Story structure and voice

* Writing to foster awareness and growth

* The psychology of change

* And how to end a story that has no end, as is the case in both my and Dora’s writing topic: immigration.

We discussed the power of storytelling to touch hearts and change minds, even if only a millimeter at a time. How storytelling allows us to memorialize the lives of those now tragically lost. And that by naming that which is ignored and discussing that which is so horrible and overwhelming, we can expand readers’ consciousness and move them to collective action toward bringing positive change to a flawed world.

It was such a joy to discuss the craft of writing for a change; to share this platform with my dear friend and Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series co-facilitator; and to connect with a new soul sister, Abbey Carpenter. We will reprise this craft talk when Abbey’s forthcoming book on her work for Battalion Search and Rescue, to find those lost in the US borderlands and bring closure to their families and loved ones, is ready for your review, so stay tuned to this space!

We hope you enjoy our discussion. Click the play button above to begin.

If you haven’t ordered, read, and reviewed our books already, you can find them here:

Thanks for reading Tales of Humanity! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Other Posts you might like by Sarah Towle for Tales of Humanity From the Borderlands:

Welcome new subscribers! I hope you’ll listen and share today’s video of the May meet up of the Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series. Talk about timely! Even my co-facilitator Dora Rodriguez and I could not have anticipated that our discussion topic would become a reality in Los Angeles just two weeks later. Click the button below if you’d like to learn more about our monthly series. Next event: June 22, 2:30-4:00 pm ET.

In Chapters 9 and 16 of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, I warned that Trump & Co, if elected again, could harness the enforcement entities of the Department of Homeland “Security” — ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes Border Patrol — to drive our democracy into crisis and toward authoritarian rule. These forces know no transparency. They suffer little accountability. They are trained in counterinsurgency tactics. They hunt, subdue, disappear, even kill, without worry about human rights and constitutional protections.

If you ask them why, they will tell you: We’re just doing our jobs.

While they are being, and have been, deployed like an army by the Trump regime, they are forces that were allowed to metastasize under administrations on both sides of the political aisle — for decades. Under orders now to deport 3,000 people a day, they are hunting and disappearing parents attending elementary school graduation ceremonies, families following the rules from their immigration court hearings, working people at Home Depots, in restaurants, at hotels, and on construction sites.

Trump & Co are committing this violence against unarmed, non-criminal offenders with a purpose:

* to provoke a citizen backlash, so they can

* invoke the Insurrection Act, in order

* to side-step the Posse Comitatus Act, so they can

* turn US forces against all of us.

And that, my friends, is martial law.

The MAGA-party regime — let us be clear, it is neither “Republican” nor an “administration” — built their entire messaging machine on whipping up fears about an “invasion” at the US southern border. Well, I crossed the US-Mexico line from 2020-2024, researching my book. I saw no tanks or uniformed troops bearing arms.

I saw only fathers and mothers bearing children in their arms, and all that they own on their backs.

The only places that I’ve witnessed uniformed troops bearing arms in the US today is in our cities, both in the borderlands as well as in the interior. First it was balaclava-clad ICE cops and Border Protection cowboys hunting and disappearing fathers and mothers and children, shamefully zip-tying behind their backs the arms of school-aged US citizens. Now federalized National Guard troops and Marines have joined ICE and CBP’s wretched band, and with them has come not calm but more chaos.

Let us be clear: The only invasion in the US today is the stepped-up southward-moving federal militarization of the borderlands, and the logarithmic escalation of the US Border Industrial Complex nationwide.

Here’s what too few US residents understand: The whole of the US is encircled in a 100-mile policing zone, which is the jurisdiction of CBP. This area is home to 2/3rds of the US population; nine of our 10 largest cities, including Los Angeles; as well as six whole states and DC. Owing to a series of dubious 1970s Supreme Court decisions, our Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful searches and seizures no longer apply here, especially if you're a person of color.

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Trump & CO harnessed CBP forces, along with their interior counterpart, ICE, to clear DC’s Lafayette Park of peaceful protestors and disappear demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, into unmarked vans. With fascism now ascendant in the USA, we should be horrified, especially as we see the made-for-Fox-TV US military invasion play out on the streets of LA.

My co-facilitator of the Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series, Dora Rodriguez, and I saw this coming, as have borderlanders from Texas to California — for decades. Indeed, a 2021 ACLU-Michigan report found that the expansion in Homeland "Security" policing and surveillance at the US northern border is only about 10 years behind the southwest.

Just days before Trump & Co’s invasion of LA, we assembled an august panel to ask:

What does the stepped-up militarization of the borderlands augur for the future? And what does it mean? Is it a prelude to martial law?

We hope you’ll click the play button above and listen to the conversation in full.

We hope, too, that you’ll share it far and wide because what’s happening in LA today could be coming to your town tomorrow, especially if you, too, are in the 100-mile policing perimeter that is the militarized US borderlands.

With big gratitude to:

* Dylan Corbett, Executive Director, Hope Border Institute, El Paso, Texas

* Amerika Garcia-Grewel, Border Vigil, Eagle Pass, Texas

* James Holeman, Battalion Search and Rescue, Silver City, New Mexico

* Dora Rodriguez, Salvavision, Tucson Samaritans, Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series, Tucson, Arizona

URGENT Call To Action:

Contact your senators today. Tell them to VOTE NO to Trump & Co’s “Bill, Beautiful Bill,” aka the “Mass Murder Bill” (Anat Shenker-Osorio), aka the “Terrible, Tyrannical Bill” (Stacy Abrams). It is an abomination, seeking to give more power to ICE and CBP. And that is a genie that cannot be rebottled.

Thanks for reading Tales of Humanity! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Welcome new subscribers! Thank you for joining the movement for JUST migration. I aim to post podcast episodes, webinar recordings, stories, news, event announcements, and calls to action weekly, though sometimes life and other writing deadlines get in the way. Like last week. Following an exciting update regarding Crossing the Line, my to-do list was unexpectedly hacked. But for a good reason! Stay tuned for more on that in my next post. Today, I’m thrilled to finally bring you Part II of Crossing Lines: Cruelty, Compassion, & the Real Border Crisis…

In April 2025, I had the great honor of keynoting a Southern California Immigration Teach-In — a model event I believe communities across the nation should emulate.

The gathering was the brainchild of Peyton Trilling, a high school junior at Agoura Hills High School, and Gina Muscatel, former Indivisible chapter leader and current Malibu Democratic Club co-facilitator. They pulled in long-time immigrant rights stalwarts and community organizers from Freedom for Immigrants, Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), and Buen Vecino, as well as immigration attorney Gabriella Navarro-Busch, Esq., and immigration scholar, Dr. José Alamillo, CSU Channel Islands. These amazing speakers formed a powerhouse panel moderated by former California State Treasurer John Chiang.

We hit a few roadblocks, including the original event host backing out at the last minute. But in true Southern California spirit, Gina and Peyton decided the show had to go on! They and found a new venue. However, there was no time for a sound check, resulting in quality issues with the audio recording — hence the delay in getting this post to you.

We all felt it well worth doctoring, however, because the discussion was strung with wise pearls. And to aid your listening experience, we prepared a transcript of the event, which you’ll find below.

If you haven’t listened to my keynote address yet and would like to, please find it here:

But first, before you push play, I invite you to spread the love!

With deep gratitude to Gina, John, José, Gabriella, Arcenio, Laura, Willy, Peyton and her family, and all those whose lives are being upended by rising US fascism and the the most aggressive federal assault on immigrants in modern US history, I am making this offer to all groups, like them, wishing to raise awareness and grow the movement for Just Migration through community outreach and education:

* Turn Outrage Into Action! Share Parts I and II of Crossing Lines: Cruelty, Compassion, & the Real Border Crisis

* Create a Book Club or Study Circle with Crossing the Line.Obtain books at a generously discounted rate on boxed purchases of 24, if ordered through me.

* Zoom Me In For Group Discussions.I can also share with you the model harnessed by Gina & Peyton for our April SoCal Teach In: Crossing Lines: Cruelty, Compassion, & the Real Border Crisis

And now I give you Crossing Lines: Cruelty, Compassion, & the Real Border Crisis, Part II (push play above)

Transcript:

Gina Muscatel, Host:

Okay, now it is my honor to introduce to you today our panel moderator. Oh, but first, I ask our lovely panel to come on up and take your seats. Thank you. These are the people doing the work who are going to hopefully teach us what we can do to jump in there and help.

Okay, so as they get settled, I will go ahead and introduce our panel moderator. He's a dedicated public servant, a visionary leader, and someone who has made a lasting impact on California's fiscal landscape.

Throughout his remarkable career, John Chiang has consistently demonstrated a deep commitment to the people of California. Serving as state treasurer from 2015 to 2019, he managed the state's finances with unwavering focus on fiscal responsibility, innovation, and transparency.

Under his leadership, California was able to navigate some of the toughest financial challenges with resilience. Beyond the numbers and policy decisions, though, John's commitment to social equity and financial justice has set him apart. He has consistently fought for solutions that create economic opportunities for all Californians, especially those in underserved communities. And he has been a strong advocate for education, affordable housing, and environmental sustainability.

Today, as we gather here, we have the privilege of hearing from someone who has not only shaped California's landscape, but has also worked tirelessly to build a more equitable and sustainable future for all.

Please join me in welcoming John Chiang.

John Chiang, Moderator:

Well, good afternoon.

It's an incredible pleasure to be with all of you. I am an FOP — a friend of Peyton —since her birth. I had the incredible fortune of as my old office mate, her Dad, and I had the pleasure of watching Andy and Heather meet and date, and then witness their joy and four apples in their eyes, the birth of their incredible four daughters, when my sister was still with us.

My sister was an immigration attorney for a formidable congressman, Congressman Howard Berman, and then went to work at the INS as an immigration attorney. She, like you, had this incredible conscience. She had this incredible courage, and I just wanted to thank you and hope you have a great future.

We want people, we want especially you, who have a better view of our humanity and will act upon it. So, thank you so very much for all your hard work.

I am so excited to moderate. I will stay out of the way of an incredible panel. They bring a great cross-section of academic expertise from industry, an immigration law practitioner and civil rights advocate, those who lead community and nonprofit organizations, who can share the experience of those who are affected, those who take bold action, and tell us how we address this and how we come together.

As stated by Sarah and your beautiful remarks, I appreciate the incredible imagery from the narrative of your book, and what we need to do to heal and grow together.

To make sure we can create a diverse humanity, and focus on a leadership example to many countries.

And so our first panelist is a distinguished professor from nearby Cal State University Channel Islands, José Alamillo.

Dr. José Alamillo, Panelist:

Yeah, I'm not distinguished, though.

John Chiang, Moderator:

We don't want to use a distinguished academic or formal term, distinguished in your work.

He has a doctorate from UC Irvine, he has a great sense of perspective on immigration. And so, Dr. Alamillo, if you would share, especially in these current times, the immigration points and narrative history that you think are most relevant to the audience?

Dr. José Alamillo, Panelist:

Yes, thank you, John.

I teach immigration history at Cal State Channel Islands, just down the road in Camarillo, and I think a couple of things that Sarah pointed out, I think are really important, is that we really need to understand the roots of migration.

And always, you know, in my immigration class, when students are, you know, fairly new to the subject, I always make sure that they understand one phrase, at least. Something that they can take with them. And that is immigrants are here because we were there, meaning that they're here with us as neighbors, as our, you know, co-workers, because the U.S. was in their homeland, in their country.

And so we really need to understand the reason for migration. That's one of the central points that I try to teach my students. Not only with, like you mentioned, the U.S. intervention in Central America, but they can be next door.

You know, the U.S. was next door to Mexico. At the turn of the century, we had U.S. railroad and agricultural companies buying up land all over Mexico that created a displacement of many of the citizens who then would migrate to cities to find jobs. But if they couldn’t find jobs in the cities, they would have to then go to the border area. And in the border area, they were either recruited or enticed to go and work in the same industry that they were in their homeland, like agriculture and …

Welcome new subscribers! I hope you find the latest podcast episode beneficial. It was recorded as part of my monthly community discussions and workshops with fellow author-educator-activist Dora Rodriguez. The next meet-up of our Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series is Sunday, May 25, and we hope you’ll register to attend. You’ll find more information following the post below. In the meantime…

The Revolution Will Be Broadcast

Things are bad out there, folks. No doubt about it. ICE is sowing terror across the land, hunting and abducting our community members with the complicity of local police, Customs and Border Protection, the FBI, National Guard, etc. As the Trump regime chips away at what few rights remain for the newcomers and safety seekers among us, so go our rights as well.

Many of us are struggling to understand how we got to this wretched place. But as I illustrate in Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, it has been a multi-decade project during which our elected officials, on both sides of the political aisle, as well as first the right-wing then, increasingly, the mainstream media, effectively pulled us further and further and further to the right.

The result has been 40+ years of very bad policy making, leading to very bad budget appropriations and congressional expenditures that have funded and fueled the unbelievable expansion of the Border Industrial Complex, creating a cruel deterrence to detention to deportation pipeline fraught with human rights abuses that the pundits and politicians love to decry as “broken” but which they just can't seem to fix.

Why?

Because it works just fine for the demagogues and profiteers who benefit from it.

Where are we now?

Rising fascism. A government run not by the people for the people but by the bullies for the billionaires and Broligarchs, in the words of Anat Shenker-Osorio. A wannabe authoritarian regime that has harnessed the ICE gulag and Gestapo handed to them by their presidential precursors. A xenophobic regime that has weaponized immigration and immigrants to whip up a moral panic and drive US democracy ever closer to a constitutional crisis, if we’re not there already.

The Trump regime and its congressional MAGA-party sycophants are right now attempting to expand the ICE Gestapo and gulag system with 10,000 additional ICE raiders and another 80,000 ICE prison beds through a shadowy budget process — called reconciliation — that aims to decimate such social benefits as public education while it boosts spending into the hundreds of billions dollars for more southern border militarization and mass deportation. All to fund a made-for-Fox-TV “invasion.”

Folks, we're living in the upside-down…

…where the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, rules 9-0 — an unprecedented outcome, I might add, for the conservative Roberts court — that the Trump regime must facilitate the return of a man they abducted and forcibly disappeared into a concentration camp in El Salvador only to find that evil-wizard-behind-the-throne Stephen Miller manages to convince half the nation that it was a 9-0 decision in the regime’s favor just by saying it’s so.

We're living in the upside-down…

…where the regime gets to turn off admissions for legitimate refugees that have been waiting in line for years — decades even — determined to migrate to the US the “right way,” as it fast-tracks resettlement and citizenship for white descendents of South Africa’s former apartheid state, claiming that the are running from a genocide that simply does not exist.

Eschew the Language of Fear and Division. Choose Language That Touches Hearts and Changes Minds.

Now, I know folks are feeling desperate. I know I am. But we can resist: We can refuse their lies, and we reclaim the narrative. And what better way to do that than with our language?

That is why mi hermana Dora Rodriguez and I focused the April meetup of our Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series on how language has enabled the relentless, propaganda-fueled shift to the right. We believe that with awareness as to how commonly used nouns, frequently brandished slogans, and empty positional arguments perpetuate the regime’s fearmongering and hate, we can encourage people to think more critically and, in turn, use language to confront their disinformation, rewrite their heinous narrative, and tug the nation back to its senses.

The Revolution Begins Now. With Us.

Like all revolutions, the revolution in speaking the truth will have to start with us. If each and every one of us chooses our words more carefully, we can influence the thinking of the people and communities we touch until even members of the media and of government are using labels to describe things as they really are:

* not arrests, but abductions;

* not detention, but imprisonment, for profit;

* not deportations, but renditions to concentration camps

to name just a few examples.

In solidarity and with high hopes for engendering deep social change at the thought level, Dora and I offer you the audio of our April 2025 workshop:

Shifting the Paradigm: Finding the Words to Touch Hearts and Change Minds

Join us for our next workshop, May 25, 2:30-4:00 pm ET, on the human and environmental impacts of the unrelenting expansion of the Border Industrial Complex. Click the image to register…

If you find this podcast and project worthy, my friends, please share it far and wide because the only way through this is…

Together.

In Solidarity,Sarah

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Welcome new subscribers! And apologies if my first posting for you is a repeat of Austin Kocher's recent interview with me, published on May 8, the date Germany surrendered to the Allied Forces 80 years ago. It was such an animated interview that Austin and I decided it deserved to be shared out via my Substack, too. And as I'm just getting back from a research trip to Berlin, during which I traced the parallels between today’s rise of US Fascism with that of Hitler’s Third Reich, I am a bit behind with my own postings. I am thrilled, therefore, to rev my content-creation efforts back up by re-circulating Austin and my book talk. And I’ll be back in your inboxes with Berlin reflections as well as the recording of the last Hope Knows No Borders Webinar shortly. Until then…

In Solidarity and With Gratitude

I am profoundly grateful to Austin Kocher for so many reasons. To start, his dogged determination to track ICE knows no equal. ICE is a notoriously opaque immigration law enforcement institution. Since I began bearing witness to its actions in 2018, ICE has only grown more dangerously Gestapo-like, aiding and abetting the Trump regime as it transforms the US into a police state.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, while on tour with Crossing the Line, I often fielded concerns about a second Trump & Co regime harnessing the US military against its own people. That may well happen. But I commented regularly that they don't need the military, at least not right away, because they have ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — a combined 80,000-member force (and counting) that acted as the first regime's paramilitary army during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. I write about how both Homeland “Security” agencies have already been turned on us in Chapters 9 and 16 for Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands.

ICE and CBP suffer no transparency and little accountability, as evidenced by today's balaclava-wearing hunters and kidnappers of our community members, colleagues, family, and friends. If ICE had its way, we would know nothing of its missions and abusive actions. Thanks to Austin's constant tugging at the veil, we still have at least a clue as to its reach and breach of our constitutional rights and democratic values. For this reason, I urge one and all reading this post to subscribe to Austin's Substack today.

Austin's scholarship, what’s more, is admirable and prolific. The rate at which he pumps out data analyses and ICE explainers here on Substack is a sight to behold. More than that, his perspective is astute, which is why I approached him, back in the fall of 2023, to ask if he would consider blurbing Crossing the Line pre-publication. I was then new to writing on the topic of immigration. I was without any academic or media affiliation. Yet, Austin said yes, and he followed through. His generous assessment of my book buoyed me, lifted my confidence, and helped to fuel me in what for any writer are the final, exhausting, deadline-filled months leading up to launch day and the marketing journey beyond.

This is what Austin wrote:

"Crossing the Line is a well-researched yet accessible exposé of border policies that harm migrants and undermine the promise of America. From the ‘family separation’ policies of the Trump administration to the massive growth of immigrant detention, Towle’s ability to weave together first-hand stories of accidental activists—including priests, attorneys, and concerned locals—with the broader policy context is on display in an ambitious book infused with a profound commitment to humanity and justice. Every concerned citizen should read this book.”

“Every concerned citizen should read this book.”

My gratitude for Austin's endorsement knows no bounds. He didn't just read my book; he understood and articulated back to me the underlying mission I set out to achieve: to raise awareness among folks who, if they only knew, would be outraged, too, about US cruelty toward newcomers and safety seekers. That is why, when he asked to interview me about the book and my writing process, I jumped at the opportunity.

Our hour-long chat was rich and varied. In his introduction, Austin writes, "Sarah and I talked about the brokenness of the U.S. immigration system, yes—but also about the people who refuse to look away. Drawing from extensive on-the-ground research along the U.S.-Mexico border, Sarah brings readers into contact with the individuals and communities who are doing the real work of welcome and resistance."

We discussed the outsized contribution of women to both humanitarian aid and migrant survival, and why storytelling matters in a landscape flooded with rhetoric. We talked about language, discussing why slogans like “Save Asylum” often fall flat, while simple human truths like “Their Hope Knows No Borders” and "Our Cruelty Is Not Okay" have the power to touch hearts and change minds.

Calling it a "primer" text on the immigration issue as well as a "manual" for mass mobilization, Austin highlighted the capacity of Crossing the Line to help grow the movement for Just Migration. We expressed our shared commitment to that cause and our shared hope that by moving so fast to devolve our democracy into an autocracy, Trump & Co may have sparked their own undoing by giving more people more reasons to resist.

Resistance is stronger with knowledge.

For this reason, Austin and I hope you'll consider reading or listening to Crossing the Line to enable your personal journey toward demanding:

* The abolition of the for-profit mass incarceration of peace-seeking people;

* An end to the mass deportations, in shackles and chains, of the world's most vulnerable among us;

* A more thoughtful interrogation of how our foreign and economic policies create the conditions for others' displacement; and

* The creation of pathways to citizenship for all our neighbors, colleagues, family members, and friends who have been denied fair treatment for too long, by a racist society whose powerbrokers love being able to make big bucks off their labor and/or prolonged incarceration.

Because asylum is never illegal; humans are never aliens; and enslavement and oppression take on many forms.

One final comment before you press "play" and another point Austin and I touched upon in our talk...

Until we, as a nation, face up to the worst aspects of our collective past, including the practices of chattel slavery, genocide, and punitive "law and order" policing policies, we will never heal, and thus cannot progress. In this, we need only look to post-WWII Germany as an example. More about that in a future post, very soon.

Stay strong, dear friends. The only way through this is... Together.Sarah

"If you're interested in immigration, public policy, or just trying to understand how we got here and what we can do differently, I hope you’ll listen [to this conversation]. Sarah’s voice is a powerful one, and this conversation reminded me again that we all have a role to play—even if it looks different for each of us."

Austin Kocher, Syracuse University

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Last year, from June 10 to Thanksgiving, 2024, I criss-crossed the United States, engaging with faith- and community-based organizations as well as learning groups of all ages and stages on the central topic of my book:

How our “broken” US immigration system works just fine for the demagogues and profiteers of the Border Industrial Complex that benefit from it, which is why we’ve achieved no human-centered reform to the system in four decades.

For seven months, I traveled from sea to shining sea, raising awareness about the deathly deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline: an infrastructure of destruction and an instrument of oppression, hiding in plain sight all around us, that

* has been used by administrations on both sides of the political aisle against the most vulnerable among us;

* could be used against all of us, and was during the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020 by Trump 1.0; and, I warned,

* would be used “on day one” from a second Trump administration in a way that would challenge both our values and our self-understanding, if the monsters gained access to the White House once more.

As I traversed the country, a powerful presentation model quickly emerged — one that I recommend to all those now seeking to thwart the regime’s use of the cruel and unrelenting machine:

Wherever I spoke, I endeavored to include on stage with me local grassroots warriors of welcome who’ve been tirelessly working on behalf of Just Migration for years.

My thinking was this…

Though Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands is being read and studied by more and more Book Clubs and Social Justice Groups nationwide, for which I am grateful, I was just passing through. If, however, after introducing my book, offering my rallying cry, and calling audience members to action, I could then pass the mic to the area leadership to share all the ways folks might get involved right outside their front doors, that would enable a more sustainable effort to pierce the pro-immigration echo chamber and bring more people into the movement for Just Migration.

So, when Gina Muscatel and Peyton Trilling approached me about flying to Los Angeles to speak to members of the Civic Engagement Program at Peyton’s school, I shared this model with them. The result was a sight to behold!

Gina, the founder of her local Indivisible chapter and co-facilitator of the Malibu Democratic Club, invited the participation of one local leader, who engaged the commitment of another, until the event included additional learning communities, detention watch groups, and farmworker advocacy networks, in addition to area Democratic Clubs and Indivisible chapters. Coordination grew, too, taking this idea of combining awareness-building with local leadership engagement and resource sharing to new heights, even as the march of the MAGA regime to squash dissent and frighten immigrant rights activists into silence came to LA with my arrival.

Agoura Hills High School got cold feet, canceling the event while I was in the air. But Peyton would not be thwarted. She and her family found another venue. And the event swiftly transformed into a broad-based community Teach-In.

It was an honor to be invited to keynote what turned into a model event for communities across the nation to emulate. So, as a way to give thanks to Gina, Peyton, and all the Crossing Lines event facilitators and participants, as well as to further spread their love, I am making this offer to groups like them, wishing to raise awareness and grow the movement for Just Migration in their local area:

* Call your members to action! Share with them my keynote address by tapping the play button on the link above.

* Create a Book Club or Study Group, using Crossing the Line.And obtain books at a generous discounted rate on purchases made by the box.

* Zoom me in for group discussions, at no additional cost.

Contact me directly for details on any or all of the above. Meantime, enjoy Part I of Crossing Lines: Cruelty, Compassion, & the Real Border Crisis. Part II to follow.

Don’t forget my workshop with Dora Rodriguez this Sunday, April 27, 2:30-4 pm ET: Changing the Paradigm: Finding the Words to Fight Back.

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