From the Borderlands

Welcome new subscribers! And hello to one and all!

THE HOPE KNOWS NO BORDERS BOOK CLUB & WEBINAR SERIES kicked off on March 30, 2025, with a focus on providing Sanctuary & Building Railroads.

As the US Department of Homeland Security's 80k-member+ forces — ICE and Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol — continue their Reign of Terror, disappearing people with no criminal record into its 200+ prison Gulag, which now includes a high-security concentration camp in El Salvador, we must:

RESIST government overreach as a civic duty;

REFUSE government lawlessness as a legal responsibility;

RECLAIM our values as a democratic nation and communities of faith; and

RECALIBRATE our moral compass, letting it — not Fox News — be our guide.

There is a reason the MAGA party doesn’t want history taught in our schools: because there is much to be learned from the actions of folks who’ve walked before us, modeling how to wrangle the long arc of history toward justice. The only way to avoid allowing the worst of the worst human impulses to rear their ugly heads again is to examine and understand 1) how some among our predecessors excused evil, finding justification in the unjustifiable; as well as 2) how other more courageous souls stood against them, even at the risk of their personal safety, to say, No! We are better than this!

We must be willing to confront the human-made atrocities of our past — genocide, mass murder, enslavement for profit — in order never to repeat them; in order to stop them from ever happening again.

In this first webinar of the Hope Knows No Borders Book Club, we do just that. We dig into our immigration past to learn from the co-padres of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, Reverend John Fife and Dora Rodriguez (Crossing the Line, Chapter 11), of Tucson, Arizona, as well as current Sanctuary providers, Reverends Babs Miller and Jim Rigby, of Austin, Texas.

Among the many insights you will discover in this podcast are:

* We’re not the “Statue of Liberty country” we’ve all been taught to believe in. We are a white supremacist state from the founding. “We are South Africa with nuclear weapons.”

* Now as then … and the time before that … churches, universities, unions, individual dissenters, and communities allied in justice are being targeted for defending the most vulnerable among us.

* We must protect victims of persecution because, since the Nuremberg Tribunal following the Holocaust, human rights have taken precedence in international law over the actions of the state. They are the highest standard to which we can all be held.

* This historic moment is an opportunity to call this country to its conscience. But it will require us — the grassroots — to do it because we cannot rely on our elective officials right now.

* It is ALL our civic, moral, and legal responsibility to hold the federal government and its agency actors accountable for their violations of human rights and international law.

* Until these dark times are behind us, we must provide a bulwark against the monstrosities to come. We must commit to becoming a trillion tiny grains of sand that jam the gears of the machinery and keep it from turning.

When they come for your immigrant neighbors, family, colleagues, and friends, don’t look away because you think you’re not one of them. Understand that the denial of their due process and constitutional rights today means the denial of your due process and constitutional rights tomorrow. If Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, can be imprisoned and expelled simply because the people in power do not like his views, then all our constitutional rights to Freedom of Speech and Assembly are under threat. If Kilmer Abrego Garcia can be mistakenly caught in an ICE dragnet and renditioned to lifetime enslavement in a third-country prison camp without due process under the law, then all our due process protections are compromised.

REMEMBER the primary lesson from the Sanctuary Movement:

Activism is not “Civil Disobedience” when it’s the government crossing the line. It is our Civic Duty, as well as our moral, legal, and spiritual responsibility, to protect all victims of human rights violations and to hold all bad actors, even the federal government, accountable for their crimes.

To paraphrase Jim Corbett, who you’ll meet in this podcast, we cannot let the worst of the worst happen on our borders and in our communities in our lifetime.

On behalf of John Fife, Dora Rodriguez, Babs Miller, and Jim Rigby, and with my profound gratitude for their participation, I hope you make time for our timely and important discussion. (Transcript available behind the tab at the top.)

The only way through this is together,Sarah

The Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series:

* A monthly meet-up on urgent topics in immigration

* Every 4th Sunday of the month

* 2:30-4:00 pm ET

* via Zoom

Next Meeting date: April 27, 2025

Topic: On Criminalizing the Caregivers

Suggested Pre-reading: CROSSING THE LINE, Chapters 12, 15, and 20.

Thanks for reading From the Borderlands! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This time last year, with my publisher anxious to get Crossing the Line to press and into public hands during the 2024 US presidential campaign, I struggled to bring to a close what, it turns out, is a tale with no end.

Only so many pages can fit between the front and back cover of a book. And there was so much more I wanted to share:

- About the 140+-year history of mass expulsion from the United States that has resulted in the deportation of more than 60 million people since the 1880s.*

– About the 100+-year bipartisan project to target for deliberate exclusion those deemed unworthy of participation in American democracy;

– About the 40+-year bipartisan militarization of our borderlands against a series of made-up boogeymen fomenting made-up wars;**

– And the 30+ year go-to border management strategy of “prevention through deterrence” which operates under the theory – debunked by three decades of history – that if we make migration to the US as painful and perilous and dangerous and demoralizing as possible, people just won’t come.

All of the above, a grand historic failure brought to us by elected officials on both sides of the political aisle, created the conditions to enable a mad “king” and court of delusional jesters, posing as governors, attorneys general, high-court judges, Border Patrol chiefs, and self-proclaimed “czars,” to squander billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars to stop an “invasion.”

Except, there is no invasion.

There is no war.

There are only people. People doing what people have done since time immemorial: move away from danger and toward opportunity. Many of our own ancestors included.

Today, these folks arrive at our gates fleeing unspeakable violence, trauma we can never understand, and the tyranny of starvation. They come not bearing arms, but bearing children in their arms. They come carrying all that they own on their backs.

Yet, at this historical juncture, they crash into a reality so alternate, a mentality so destructive, it finds justification in the unjustifiable: victimizing the victims, criminalizing the caregivers, and celebrating the true barbarians — our elected officials and their gatekeepers — as the so-called “good guys” keeping us “secure.”

When I began to write Crossing the Line, I did so with a different title in mind. I wanted to call it The First Solution — a nod to my literary hero, Toni Morrison, who reminded us back in 1995 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.”

The question at the heart of my project from the start — what kept me peeling back the layers and layers of history to understand how we arrived at this wretched, demonic, dystopian place — was just this: Is the United States of America spearheading the commission of a quiet, unacknowledged genocide of people on the move? And if yes, how close to another “final solution” are we?

My publisher didn’t like The First Solution as a title because it didn’t state what the book is about: immigration.

My closest confidants, many of them Jewish, found the title too triggering. They welcomed the change.

Several scholars and first-readers questioned my use of genocide in this context as it did not comply with the word’s official definition under international law: acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

The concepts of “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” are only as old as the aftermath of World War II, created in the wake of one state’s mass murder of target populations during what came to be known as the Holocaust. These groups included activists and vocal dissidents of Hitler’s white supremacist regime; folks whose gender identities didn’t didn’t conform to the male/female binary; the itinerant Romani people; and six million Jews.

Today’s multiple global crises — such as our forever wars, climate breakdown, exploitative economic practices that have led to morbid extremes in wealth inequality — these factors have displaced, to date, more than one in every 100 people on the planet. They force folks every minute of every day, somewhere in our world, to pull up stakes and run; to move through inconceivable dangers in search of perceived safety.

It is therefore no longer just one national, ethnic, racial, or religious group that is being affected. Multiple national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups are under threat in today’s world. Together they create a new human social group — as of yet unrecognized in the official definition of genocide — when, their homes turned into the mouths of sharks, they flee.

Too many never make it to any promised land, however, as places of safety are walling themselves off, becoming islands buttressed by fortresses; their portcullises raised; their armies unleashed to patrol the gates and fences as well as to extend borders, conveniently, to places where human rights abuses can occur unchecked and with impunity.

While en route, this social group — people on the move — fall prey to the global scourge of human trafficking, itself a byproduct of our wall building and border externalization; itself perpetrated by Promised Land powers. Chief among them, the so-called leader of freedom and democracy. The civilization now in decline, governed not by the people for the people, but by the bullies for the billionaires.***

Indeed, the Ides of March 2025, saw a US administration invoke an arcane 227-year-old wartime authority — the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to justify the rapid arrest and deportation of Venezuelans on the move under the pretext of an alleged affiliation with a transnational criminal organization. The operative word here being “pretext” as the administration has yet to offer proof that the “over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua,” in the words of Secretary of State and Chief Sycophant, Marco Rubio, had anything to do with any gang at all. Many family members of the expelled have come forward to shout out that this is fake news of the most inhumane proportions.

Even Judge James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, DC, said, No! to Trump & Co. He said, You cannot abuse the 1798 wartime legislation to summarily deport these people for the simple reason that the US is not at war with their home nation.

For context, this is the same legislation that shamefully put Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants to the United States in concentration camps on US soil during WWII. Trump & Co had already tried to remove and intern these Venezuelans on the move at the US concentration camp in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, which I spoke about in an earlier episode of this podcast.

But that didn’t go over too well with the US courts and public. So, in two passenger planes operated by the ICE-Air contractor Global X, they suddenly emptied the offshore prison facility, whose name is synonymous with torture, in late February. Perhaps they had already secured the heinous deal to pay El Salvador $6 million as an offshore ICE contractor, for that is where Trump & Co sent these so-called gang members, and in defiance of Judge Boasberg’s order, too.

In other words, Trump & Co rejected federal court orders, abusing a wartime power despite there being no war, to remove roughly 250 individuals as young as 14 years of age, targeted for criminalization simply for being Venezuelan — a national group — without affording them due process under the law. Then Trump & Co trafficked this group to the unsafe third country of El Salvador.

A shocking highly produced three-minute video shows these 200-some-odd people on the move being dragged under armed guard into Nayib Bukele’s mega-prison, where people go in… and never come out. Where torture is the rule of law. Where the US has once again turned up the heat in the art of the cruel, cruel deal set in motion by “prevention through deterrence” in the 1990s. The very bipartis…

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This was Mama Sass’s demo version before heading into the studio. The Nashville Country Rock version can be found on YouTube here with an admittedly better chorus lyric:

(Begging forgiveness for all the IP credits I’m unable to cite.)

Thanks for reading From the Borderlands! This post is public so feel free to share it.

83 years ago—on February 19, 1942—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9066, which became the basis for the forced displacement and incarceration of over 120,000 people of Japanese descent during WWII. They were rounded up, taken to processing centers, and interned in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas. Interned individuals were allowed to bring with them only what they could carry, leading to the tragic loss of homes and businesses. About two-thirds were U.S. citizens. In too many cases, families were separated.

The annual Day of Remembrance observed across the United States on February 19, allows all of us to recall the horrors of forced removal and incarceration experience of those affected by Executive Order 9066. We remember this stain on the national soul so that it may never, ever be repeated. We gather in dialogue and discussion to educate and inform the public about the repercussions of governmental overreach and injustice to keep it from happening again.

This Day of Remembrance, 2025, is an urgent and poignant moment because history is indeed repeating itself, most notably at Cuba’s Guantámo’s Bay. But also in immigration prisons around the country, 80% of which are operated for profit.

Like our 120,000 Japanese-origin brothers and sisters, more recent newcomers to the US are being painted with the brush of criminality and ruthlessly interned by the US government or being expelled without due process to uncertain fates. We must stop it.

Here are the facts from the real world:

Trump & Co are right now making moves to triple the size, even quadruple the size, of the US immigration detention system, which is already way too big and way too costly. We’re talking imprisonment under ICE—US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A quasi-military law enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security that knows no transparency and suffers little accountability, and whose abysmal human rights record is already well established and well documented.

As of this recording, Congress provides ICE funds to imprison 41,500 people on any given day, the majority of whom are not violent criminals but people seeking safety and a life free from persecution in the United States of America. Eighty percent of those hard-earned taxpayer dollars are passed onto prison profiteers such as ​​CoreCivic and GEO Group each of which brings in annual revenues in excess of $2 billion and runs between them running more than 200 immigration detention facilities in the US already.

As I explained in a recent podcast episode entitled, Who Are The Real Criminals In Trump 2.0's Mass Deportation Story?, these and other prison profiteers are more interested in their bottom line than in the health and well-being of the people they routinely rob of their freedom and dignity in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As with the xenophobic WWII internment of Japanese-Americans, this is modern enslavement. And the routine human rights abuses committed by for-profit prison contractors make us all complicit to their crimes against humanity because we’re paying for it.

Now Trump & Co 2.0 want to expand the already rotten system to three times its current size.

Even as they tear apart the US Department of Education, blow up the soft power of USAID, and attack what’s left of the social safety net in the US — itself already picked apart since the Reagan era — they are making moves to drastically expand the abusive detention-to-deportation pipeline by negotiating new contracts with private prison companies; by deputizing local and state law enforcement entities to conduct ICE raids for them; and building more black sites on military bases, the most notorious of which is Guantánamo Bay.

Again, with history as our guide, any use of Guantánamo Bay is never good.

Otherwise known as Gitmo, Guantánamo Bay is synonymous with US state-sponsored torture during the Bush 43 administration, following September 11, 2001, against individuals alleged to have links to Al Qaeda.

But perhaps less well known are the atrocities his father, Bush 41 permitted at Gitmo, 10 years before, that time against Haitians fleeing unspeakable violence in their homeland.

Bush 41 turned Gitmo into an open-air jail, greenlighting the now worldwide phenomenon copied by Australia, Israel, the UK, and the EU called “border externalization.”

It was his administration’s way of making an end-run around both the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1980 US Refugee Act, which state that anyone can request protection anywhere once inside the territorial boundaries of that nation no matter their means of arrival.

Through the winter of 1991–1992, nearly forty thousand Haitians took to the Caribbean Sea in dinghies and fishing boats, fleeing rape, repression, and extrajudicial massacres; forced disappearances and the violent plundering of entire neighborhoods by the Haitian military and para-military goon squad, called the Tonton Macoute, that operated under the brutal thirty-year father-son Duvalier dictatorship.

The preceding February, Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been sworn in as president of Haiti after winning 67% of the vote in what was heralded as the island nation’s first democratic election. A Salesian priest and liberation theologian, he promised to put food on the tables of Haiti’s slum dwellers and rural poor; and to redistribute property concentrated in the hands of the few wealthy landowners. But first, he had to dismantle the para-military and military forces that had for so long terrorized the Haitian people. Naturally, the goons didn’t think much of that plan, so they drove the former priest into exile just seven months after he took up residence in the presidential palace.

The US government did very little to stop the coup.

Then, by ordering the US Coast Guard to divert the boats of Haitian asylum seekers away from US shores and toward Guantánamo Bay, Bush 41 prevented folks in search of safety from stepping foot on US soil where they could exercise their legal right to request protection under international and US law. By caging the refugees indefinitely at Guantánamo, the US government under Bush the Elder effectively “offshored” the asylum process.

“You don’t take your life into your own hands like that unless it’s more dangerous to stay,” states Guerline Jozef, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. Guerline is a celebrated humanitarian and human rights defender. Among the many well-deserved accolades she received was being named one of the BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2024. She is also one of my 100 collaborators and mentors whose stories are centered in my 2024 exposé of the human costs of the broken US immigration system, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands.

As I write in chapter 18 of my book, in the winter of 1991-92, the Windward Passage, like the sandy Sonoran Desert, became a migrant graveyard. Many of Guerline’s Haitian brothers and sisters perished then, buried at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.

Like his presidential predecessor, Ronald Reagan, with regard to Central American refugees seeking safety in the US, Bush 41 refused to acknowledge that Haitians were indeed fleeing a “well-founded fear of persecution.” He labeled them “economic migrants” rather than “refugees” and instructed the US Coast Guard to interdict them outside US territorial waters and “push” them to the US naval base at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay.

There, everyone—even children—was held in a vast cage encircled in chain link and coils and coils of barbed wire. The Defense Department called the Guantánamo detention center a “humanitarian mission.” But the refugees were subjected to deplorable conditions.

Professor Brianna Nofil, author of The Migrant's Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration, states in a recent interview with Andrew Free on his Substack#DetentionKills, that the depths o…

Hey everyone, Sarah here. Thanks for joining me for another episode of From the Borderlands.

Today, I want to shine a light on the notion of “criminality” in US immigration enforcement because it’s a word that’s bandied about a lot without explanation. For example, Trump & Co state that ICE raids are targeted, that they are only going after “bad guys.” Border Czar, Tom Homan, says that every time a media outlet puts him on camera. But basic evidence would suggest otherwise: ICE is surveilling apartment buildings in Silver Spring, Maryland; boarding school buses in Alice, Texas; raiding places of business in New Jersey; racial profiling all along California byways.

The truth is that Tom Homan is not telling the truth.

Never mind my short list of collected first-hand reports, my friend and fave immigration data wonk, Syracuse University Research Professor Austin Kocher writes in his February 3, 2025, Substack newsletter [link below] that the numbers present a reality that is the polar opposite of White House and Department of Homeland Security blah-blah. Basically, there is simply no way for Trump 2.0 to achieve the mass banishment of their dreams without targeting non-criminals.

This difference between rhetoric and reality does not surprise me. My general takeaway after dealing with ICE while researching Crossing the Line is that the Department of Homeland Security agency—which knows no transparency and suffers little accountability—hides behind these fantastical statements issued by faceless spokespeople who rely on our taking their word as gospel. They rely on our believing that they have the best interest of people at heart.

Tom Homan himself is a product of the anti-immigrant Tanton Network that’s been infiltrating our politics—and groupthink—for decades. Another falsehood he maintains is that ICE has the highest standards of incarceration of any nation in the world. Well, if that’s true, we should all be horrified. The routine brutality and human rights abuses experienced by people trapped under the cruel knee of ICE are legion and well documented. It isn’t common knowledge, but you have only to scratch the surface to find that the civil rights and civil liberties complaints committed by agency actors are myriad and mounting.

Sadly, this shouldn’t surprise anyone either, given the fact that 80% of ICE prisons are run by for-profit corporations, like GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, whose priority interests are not the health and wellbeing of their captives. Their priority interest is their bottom line.

They are running a business. Their revenue model is warehousing people until they are expelled. So why feed them enough? Why spend on their medical needs? Why provide soap and masks even during a pandemic?

Basically, it is modern enslavement.

But getting back to Homan’s claim that his agents are only targeting “criminals”—there is nothing original in this strategy. It is part of the dehumanizers’ playbook going back to the dawn of time: to paint the “other” with the brush of “criminality” in order to justify committing cruelties against them.

It’s been a part of the US immigration landscape since Congress put Chinese workers under attack in the late 1800s. But today’s tale of US federal officials tarring everyone with the trope of “criminality” dates back to a 1916 book called, The Passing of the Great Race.

The language parroted by Trump, Homan, Stephen Miller, Fox News talking heads, and their anti-immigrant ilk can be found in this book, which posits that too many non-whites in the US will augur the eventual collapse (read: replacement) of the “greatest, most desirable, and superior human race on earth.”

The book was the work of a lawyer and conservationist named Madison Grant, who espoused a quack science, called eugenics. His conclusions were harnessed by the Trumps of his day to whip up fears that anyone not of Northern European stock was something to be feared: a “diseased and criminally inferior” devil walking among the folk. This created a moral panic following 40 years of unprecedented migration from eastern and southern Europe, that non-whites posed a threat to the future greatness of the US nation.

It was perhaps the country’s first Culture War, and it played an active role in Congress passing the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Known as Title 8, § 1325, of the US legal code, this is when we first see humans referred to as “aliens” and when entry into the US without inspection by a border official first becomes criminalized. The legislation also put into place for the first time caps on how many newcomers would be permitted to set foot on US soil and where they could originate from.

The follow-up Immigration Act of 1924, Title 8, § 1326, also known as the National Origins Act, further tightened the quotas, made them more durable, and stipulated penalties for what was now considered “unlawful entry.” Mexicans, who had moved throughout the region without issue for centuries, who lived and worked and had family on both sides of the line, were no longer allowed to cross unless they could pass a literacy test and purchase a visa.

The quota system, which advantaged northern Europeans with wealth and those who already had family ties in the US, remained in place until 1965, keeping America white for several generations. Then came the Civil Rights Movement, and the quotas came under attack for being racially discriminatory. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolished a quota system. Since then, racist white guys from John Tanton to Donald Trump have fretted about their people becoming an endangered species in the US; about their people being replaced by the “wrong sorts.”

They’ve been out to reverse the effects of the Hart-Celler Act ever since. It’s been a long haul, but they’ve finally arrived at their destination, aided by a steady 40-year transformation of legislation that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle fell for… if they even noticed it was happening.

It started—as so much of today’s crises do—with Reagan. His 1988 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act invented the concept of “aggravated felony.” It defined the term narrowly at the time, limiting it to murder and trafficking in drugs or firearms, which didn’t raise any flags. But it also made immigrants deportable for such offenses and mandated indefinite detention of all noncitizen “aggfels” until their deportation could be realized.

This would provide a legal loophole just waiting for determined white supremacists to manipulate.

That opportunity came six years later under Clinton. His 1994 “Crime Bill” brought 100,000 new cops onto the nation’s streets and built 125,000 new prison cells, amped up federal surveillance capabilities, and further enlarged the definition of “aggravated felony.”

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 added still more bullet points to the “aggfel” category. But the coup de grace came later that year when Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

Referred to as IRA-IRA, this legislation expanded the list of “aggravated felonies” yet again, as it simultaneously closed off pathways for relief for immigrants by stripping from federal courts the ability to hear civil rights cases on their behalf. Since then, even a misdemeanor can leave an immigrant subject to criminalization as well as mandatory detention and deportation, with little hope of appeal. Since then, there can be no second chances for noncitizens.

Even now, 30 years later, the category of offenses considered to be “aggravated felonies” apply only to immigrants and may not be “aggravated” at all. They include civil transgressions that might warrant a wrist-slap, monetary fine, or community service for a US citizen, like me. What’s more, the application of IRA-IRA was made retroactive, meaning a hard-working 40-year-old father of three could be picked up, detained, and deported for, say, a marijuana posses…

In less than 10 days, the full fury of Trump & Co 2.0’s agenda has been revealed. Among staff purges and funding freezes, the country’s top immigration enforcers, ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in paramilitary-style actions reminiscent of Hitler’s Gestapo, have exposed that the US is now well beyond the first and second, even the third, stages outlined by Toni Morrison’s Ten Steps Towards Fascism. Indeed, after reading them over, I’d say we’ve reached the endgame.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarianism, reminds us that Trump & Co’s use of dehumanizing rhetoric, profane and crude discriminatory language toward immigrants, and fearmongering about the “enemy within poisoning the blood of the nation,” echo the language of mid-20th-century tyrants like Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco as they rose to power.

Today, the very people who brought us Family Separation and Remain in Mexico—just two of the myriad inhumane practices to forever stain the US national soul—now rule the US through terror. They are separating families again. They are determined to deport millions, build more prisons, and bring back Remain in Mexico.

In these dark times, we must all be willing to stand up for the rights of our neighbors, colleagues, and friends. Because it appears our present Congressional representatives won’t. And if we don’t, when Trump’s Gestapo comes knocking at our door, there may be no one left to stand up for us.

I hope you find inspiration in this and other episodes of From the Borderlands as well as from my book, Crossing the Line. Because "The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.” — Toni Morrison, 1995

The only way through this is together.XO Sarah

Sarah is available to address your community or lead your book club…

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

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. This is Sarah. Thanks for joining me for another episode of From the Borderlands.

On November 5, 2024, 77 million US voters decided to return to the White House the very people who brought us family separation—Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump. They ripped apart 5,500 families. Over 1,000 are still not reunited—I’ve read potentially as many as 1400 children still have no contact with their biological parents—because Trump 1.0 didn’t intend to bring severed families back together again. And so they did not keep records.

Then, on their first day, Trump 2.0 abolished the task force set up by the Biden administration to try to put families back together again—just one of many heinous and inhumane actions the heartless b******s took.

In fact, Trump & Co are tearing families apart again already, because one of the “eight degrees of family separation” I uncovered while researching Crossing the Line is the separation that happens when ICE raids a place of business, a community soccer game, or a post-church fellowship gathering.

Trump & Co have now been greenlighted to raid hospitals and schools.

People are terrified. Because ICE raids are terrifying. Even the threat of an ICE raid rains terror upon the land. It is state-sanctioned domestic terrorism. And it is not right.

Now, Homan says they are targeting only “bad guys.” Never fear. And we have no way of verifying that. The definition of “criminal” is in the eye of the beholder when you’re undocumented. And when the beholder is an anti-immigrant, racist cabal with access to all the law enforcement agencies in the land, everyone’s a criminal. Even children, like six-year-old Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid.

When Alison’s cries, recorded from within the Ursula lock-up in McAllen, Texas, during Trump 1.0’s family separation debacle, were shot ‘round the world, our outrage sent us into the streets. Mass mobilizations—750 around the globe; 600 in the US alone—forced the now Convicted-Felon-in-Chief to end the practice by presidential Sharpie on June 20, 2018.

But another abomination that also caused family separation continued to tick on—the practice of metering asylum: a take-a-ticket-and-wait-in-line sort of system. But in this case, the line was indefinite. It forced the world’s most vulnerable people to hang out in some of the most dangerous places on earth, just for the privilege of being able to request protection from persecution.

Metering was easier to hide from the US public because its worst consequences—kidnapping, extortion, torture, rape—were kept out of sight and out of mind on the other side of the line. Both people and truth were locked in a liminal space.

The Obama-Biden administration piloted metering when Haitians seeking asylum began to show up at the San Ysidro port of entry for the first time in 2015. But when it drew criminal gangs to prey upon the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, grandparents and children trapped and waiting for an audience with border officials when their numbers came up, the practice was acknowledged as a humanitarian disaster. Obama-Biden did the right thing: they called it to a halt.

Trump 1.0 didn’t care if metering harmed people. They knew it would harm people. They didn’t care that stuck in cartel-controlled northern Mexico and under threat, folks would be forced to try their luck with the river, the desert, or the wall—now standing 30 feet in places; a fall not easily survived. They wanted no more immigration. And they sought to end it by closing as many doors as possible.

In the spring of 2018, they instituted the practice all across the 2000-mile US-Mexico line, creating a valve at the border that slowed northward migration. But it didn’t stop people from coming in hopes of finding safety. It just made life hellishly more dangerous for those who came.

It was wrong. And people all across the line recognized this. They still do. They stepped up to see to the common good, committing extraordinary acts of daily kindness, as the richest nation in the world—a land supposedly of laws—abdicated any responsibility both for the conditions that cause human displacement and drive people northward, as well as the further horrors they deliberately inflicted upon them. Trump & Co exacerbated the already cruel situation with denial and rotten, detrimental policy after rotten, detrimental policy.

From mid-summer 2018, groups in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley—like Team Brownsville, the Angry Tías & Abuelas, the Good Neighbor Settlement House, Catholic Charities, to name just a few—harnessed the goodwill of volunteers and donors to feed, shelter, and orient newcomers on both sides of the line. A role they continued to play as the US government and US Department of Homeland “Security” agencies failed to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis they caused.

One year and one month after Family Separation supposedly ended, the bottlenecks at the International Bridges began to back up. The numbers of those requiring assistance began to mushroom for on July 19, 2019, Goliath stomped back into Brownsville, bigger and angrier than ever. That’s when Trump 1.0 erected the most impenetrable wall of all thus far: the Migrant “Protection” Protocols, or MPP, which didn’t protect anyone at all. It’s otherwise known as Remain in Mexico.

Rolled out in San Diego on January 24th of that year, the “Remain in Mexico” program didn’t just slow the processing and eventual release into the US of those in need of protection. It barred folks from entering the US until their asylum claims were resolved. Which meant you’d be living in a tent meant for weekend camping in the murder capitals of the world for at least ten months, if you were one of the lucky one percent whose asylum review was successful.

Customs and Border Protection closed the Hidalgo port of entry in McAllen, TX, pushing those fleeing harm to Matamoros, where the existing shelter system was already overwhelmed. The tent city that popped up under metering began to grow and grow and grow, adding another one hundred or more people ea…

On November 6, 2024, the day after…

I had the great honor of joining colleagues from El Paso’s Hope Border Institute and members of the New Jersey Immigrant Rights team of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) at the beautiful New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, to introduce the premiere of the latest film by Robert Bilheimer and Worldwide Documentaries: Running to Stand Still - Migrants Search for Hope in the Promised Land. Graciously hosted by the New Brunswick Development Corporation (DEVCO) in partnership with AFSC, Good Faith, and Retreat to Broadway, we knew in advance that convening an event on the day after the most consequential election in US history would be risky. But as the evening’s facilitator, Erin Dolan, stated in her opening remarks, we did not expect the razor’s edge race to yet be called.

We were wrong. Indeed, by the time I checked into my New Brunswick hotel at 11 pm on November 5, it was clear the direction the election was going. My hotel receptionist, a self-styled “Afro-Latino New Jerseyan,” was alone and weeping. His family had all swung Red, he said. He was incredulous. His only explanation?

They’d been taken in by the lies fed to them, and the enemy manufactured for them, incessantly day after day after day on Fox News.

He had a live stream running surreptitiously on his phone. We watched together. We cried together. We witnessed American democracy descend into darkness together.

In those early moments — before pundits and democratic party operatives would pick apart all that went wrong — all my new friend and I saw were the walls of deceit that had been erected for months on Fox and other extreme-right media channels, as well as in the deep recesses of the internet, like in gaming spaces and on podcasts where few dare to venture. The fearmongering and enemy-making had made their mark — exacerbated by the failure of voices from both the Center and Left to push back.

The 2024 election put on high relief just how divided we have become.

We are now 20 years into the age of Global Apartheid. It snuck up on most of us, especially those of us who believed in the durability of the 20th-century promise of human rights for all. There are now more than 80 physical walls around the world — and counting — raising deeper, taller, angrier, and more violent barriers between us all the time.

But the walls that divide us are ideological, too. As more and more media sources get purloined and purified by Broligarchs all too willing to bend the knee to a man of questionable wealth and intellect, a bully on an illegitimate pulpit, the walls of deceit disrupt our ability to discuss and address the real issues we face today, as the nation — and the world — burn.

Like the Wizard of Oz states when Elphaba realizes he’s an emperor with no clothes, “Back where I come from,” which we all know is MAGA-party faithful Kris Kobach’s Kansas, “everybody knows that the best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”

Today’s enemy is people on the move: “the world’s most vulnerable people,” in the UN’s terms. And the most hardened walls of all are the walls that encircle the hearts of those who would seek to harm folks seeking safety in the so-called promised land.

In a subsequent post, I will discuss the role of walls historically: what purposes they’ve served and whether they’ve ever really worked. For now, I hope you like my speech from “The Day After” on the stage at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.

Strap in, everyone. The next four years are going to be bumpy. And the only way through them is together.

Wishing you a Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day.Keep your eyes on the prize,XO Sarah

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

Sarah Towle is an educator, researcher, and human rights defender; a choral soprano, charismatic speaker, and author of the award-winning book: Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands. She has taught English language literacy, cross-cultural communication, and the writing craft for three decades on four continents across the age span and in myriad class contexts, including under the trees in refugee settings. Sarah resides in an ephemeral borderlands, buffeted and buoyed by a diversity of languages, cultures, landscapes, and creeds.

Her latest initiative, the Hope Knows No Borders Network, seeks to link up immigration rights advocates, attorneys, and organizations nationwide. DM Sarah if you’d like to take part.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Hello. This is Sarah Towle, author of Crossing the Line. Thanks for joining me for another episode of From the Borderlands.

~ ~ ~

Five years ago this week, my journey of discovery of the many-headed hydra, that is the U.S. immigration system, began in Brownsville, Texas, with the act of bearing witness to the inhumanity of the Remain in Mexico program, otherwise known as the Migrant “Protection” Protocols, which didn't protect anyone at all.

Family separation was the inciting incident that drove me to the border to see for myself the humanitarian crisis I then believed had been wrought by Trump & Co.

I would quickly learn that though they had cranked the cruelty to 11, the cruelty of the immigration system was not theirs alone.

My first day on the ground was spent in a refugee camp on the threshold of the world's richest nation. A camp of 3,000 mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, and tiny babies that represented 70,000 people thrust into homelessness and danger by an unwelcoming U.S. president and nation.

That first day of my journey of discovery was Epiphany Sunday, and it was an Epiphany of epiphanies, let me tell you. And though it was my intention to start this podcast there, at the start of my journey to bear witness, that eventually led me to write and publish a book, I find that I cannot.

My best-laid plans have been taken over by global events.

It is with a heavy and already weary heart and best wishes for all my friends and family in Los Angeles, for all the lives that have been impacted, and for all that has been lost to climate change — including truth — that I kick off this week with a question:

Have U.S. Customs and Border Protection gone rogue?

Trust me, there is a logic here. Let's start with the facts from this week, which are these:

* With Joe Biden still in the White House

* and more than 900 incarcerated individuals joining firefighters from Mexico and Canada to help their US counterparts battle an inferno,

* Border Patrol agents chose to move on a different so-called “foe”: farmworkers.

As fire ripped through the Pacific Palisades on the wings of hurricane-speed Santa Ana winds, devouring homes and histories in its wake, Border Patrol agents descended upon hard-working folks on their way to work in the vast agricultural holdings of Kern Country, just north of LA.

A least 30 people were detained on Tuesday, January 7, one day after Congress certified the 2024 election — the same ceremonial transfer of power disrupted by the loser and his insurrectionist army four years before — and with two weeks still two weeks to go until the actual transfer of power.

[NOTE: On January 13, reporter Melissa Montalvo of The Fresno Bee updated the number of arrests to 78.]

No one was prepared — neither those who were targeted nor the local businesses that serve their needs and rely on their labor. It was panic and confusion, according to journalist Sergio Olmos, writing for Cal Matters.

Agents driving unmarked SUVs raided a Bakersfield gas station popular with field workers who stop in for a warm breakfast on their way to the fields. The agents preyed upon day laborers waiting for rides outside the Home Depot. They stopped cars along Highway 99, profiling people, pulling them out of their cars, and demanding to see their papers.

As the operation continued into Wednesday, multiple wildfires burned just two hour’s drive away. While flames engulfed Altadena, Border Patrol sowed a firestorm of fear amongst the population of essential workers who pick the produce that fills our grocery stores and graces our tables, foreshadowing what awaits communities all across the US — what we thought last week still awaited us — when Trump & Co 2.0 actually assume office and make good on their promise to deport folks living and working in the US en masse — which will come in a larger, more terrifying package that includes raids, mass detention, and family separation.

The Bakersfield raids were unannounced, throwing doubt on the likelihood that the mission was green-lighted by President Biden and his outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas.

On social media, Gregory K. Bovino, the Border Patrol chief in El Centro, identified the sweeps by name: “Operation Return to Sender.” He stated similar operations are being planned for Fresno and Sacramento.

Which is why I ask the question: Have Customs and Border Protection gone rogue?

Both ICE and Customs and Border Protection have only ever endorsed a single candidate for president, and they did so three times: in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Each time, they chose Trump.

Their members-only websites are chock-full of anti-immigrant propaganda churned out by so-called “think tanks,” such as the Heritage Foundation; the Federation for American Immigration Reform, whose acronym, FAIR, suggests the opposite of what it really is: a hate group; and the Center for Immigration Studies, whose animating principle has always been that “immigrants are criminals and perverts coming for your wives and your jobs and a burden on the U.S. economy,” and whose statisticians will torture any data set to make sure that belief appears true, particularly on Fox News.

These groups have long been ground zero for stirring up moral panics through disinformation and fake news. They have been working for decades to make America white again. And according to my sources in El Paso, this is not the first time Homeland Security agencies have appeared to act under their own steam — not under the orders or even the knowledge, quite possibly, of the US president.

Indeed, my friends saw Family Separation being trailed right before their eyes, though El Paso Sector top brass would gaslight their claims and deny what was clear and plain as the noses on their faces. My collaborators in El Paso saw family separation happening all the way back in 2016, while Obama was still sitting behind the Resolute Desk.

That is the story we tell in Crossing the Line, Chapter 20: Barbarians at the Gate, which — like the story of Border Patrol’s reprehensible behavior in January 2025, while LA burned — also illustrates just how blind the United States has become to global and national priorities.

These stories are a bellwether, a harbinger of what's to come. They should make us all demand answers now as to who really controls the agencies associated with the Department of Homeland Security; and to interrogate whether or not these agencies are really making us secure.

And now, from Crossing the Line, Finding America in the Borderlands, Chapter 20, Barbarians at the Gate.

“Toward the end of the Obama administration, we saw an increasingly harsh application of US immigration laws here in the El Paso borderlands, particularly by ICE, and particularly with respect to asylum seekers,” recalls Dylan Corbett, founding executive director of the El Paso–based Hope Border Institute (HOPE). Working across borders of geography, ethnicity, and race in an area of roughly one million people spanning three Catholic dioceses and two countries, HOPE builds bridges of solidarity between communities of faith, social justice, and politics. HOPE does “good theology in a practical way,” states Bishop Mark Seitz, leader of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, head of the El Paso Catholic Diocese, and an outspoken voice for US immigration reform.

For Bishop Seitz, Dylan, and their allies, “practical” involved no small dose of “political” when a shift in ICE tactics rolled into town with a new agency boss in December 2015. His name was Corey Price. And as ICE field office director of the El Paso Sector, he brought with him a culture of legal and human rights abuses that spread like a cancer through ICE “detention centers” from West Texas through New Mexico—and one hundred miles northward.

It wasn’t until late March 2016, however, when the El Paso community really felt the sting of change. That’s when the National Border Patrol Council, the 18,000-member labor union representing agents and support staff o…

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Hi there. This is Sarah Towle, author of the award-winning book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands.

It was family separation, kids in cages, and refugee camps on the threshold of the world's richest nation that incited me to go to the U.S. southern border to see for myself the inhumanity I then believed had been wrought by Trump 1.0.

Once there, however, it didn't take me a hot minute to realize that the cruelty was not theirs alone. Indeed, they had been enabled by presidential administrations dating back decades on both sides of the political aisle to simply crank to 11 the dehumanizing cruelty and racism already baked into the U.S. immigration system.

I sought a single resource that might explain to me how we arrived at this wretched place: where more than one in every 100 people on the planet today has been forcibly displaced from their homes. That's one in every 100 people of the global population now on the move and seeking safety, only to find themselves villainized by the wealthy, predominantly white world.

When I couldn't find that resource, I decided to heed the call of my literary hero, Toni Morrison, who once said, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands is now published—launched for World Refugee Week 2024. And I hope you'll read it if you haven't already because I truly believe that if you knew, you'd be outraged too.

Crossing the Line charts my journey from outrage to activism to abolition as I expose, layer by broken layer, the now global, multi-billion dollar deterrence to detention to deportation pipeline that I believe is failing everyone, save the demagogues and profiteers who benefit from it.

Crossing the Line documents all that took place in the immigration space under Trump 1.0. It begins in a refugee camp just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. And it ends on two horrific mass deportation flights, the likes of which the regime of Trump 2.0 is promising to make a daily fact of life.

Crossing the Line is one of only three public-facing documents, that I'm aware of, to reveal what actually takes place on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement expulsion mission precisely because they don't want us to know.

Spoiler alert: the human rights violations committed by agents of the U.S. Federal government are legion and beyond the pale. They defy international commitments to human rights. Written into the post-World War II rules-based refugee protection regime, fundamental rights to safety and dignity now tossed aside and seemingly forgotten in the 21st-century shift to a security-first paradigm.

Crossing the Line is now being called a clarion call to action, a primer text for the immigration issue, and a manual for mobilization as we hurdle pell-mell toward the world of Trump 2.0. It holds up to the light the voices and actions of roughly 100 ordinary people who express extraordinary acts of kindness despite the odds. Folks who represent myriad others worldwide who show us every day that there is a better way, that we can welcome newcomers with dignity, and that we'd be a much better people for it.

They remind us that when deeper, taller, angrier, and more violent walls are the only answer…we're asking the wrong questions.

They offer us strong shoulders on which to stand up a movement—a metaphorical choir singing louder and more courageously all the time that Hope Knows No Borders. And Cruelty Is Not Okay.

As we approach Inauguration Day 2025, we cannot afford the luxury of despair. We must harness our collective outrage, as we did during Trump 1.0, but now in greater numbers and with more deliberate collaboration to tumble over, tunnel under, tear down, and otherwise stand up to the walls of misplaced anger and fear erected in order to divide us.

We must organize.

So yes, get pissed, but don't stop there. Harness that anger to get educated and then get going.

May my book and this podcast be tools to support you in that effort because the borderlands are everywhere and the stakes have never been higher.

In this first episode of From the Borderlands, formerly called Witness Radio, I'd like to begin with a shout-out of thanks to Leti Garza, an award-winning singer-songwriter, producer, and recording artist based in Austin, Texas, who reminded me just the other day that this holiday season marked a very important anniversary.

It was known as Christmas at Tornillo, and it was a grassroots mobilization that began with one man on a lone vigil at the gates of a desert internment camp, for teens.

Because here's the thing, when you separate families deliberately in order to be cruel for the cameras, an unintended consequence, perhaps, is that you're going to have a lot of children that need to be taken care of. And when Trump and Co did that six years ago in 2018, they had a whole lot of children left behind that they needed to house.

So they stood up two internment camps: one on an Air Force Reserve base in Homestead, Florida; and the other in Tornillo, Texas, about 40 miles southeast of El Paso.

In both places, children were caged. In many cases, for months at a time.

Both facilities were eventually shut down thanks to popular protest, the likes of which we're going to have to see much more of in the years to come. Both of those stories are detailed in my book.

Today, I want to focus on the Tornillo tale because it is thanks to a grassroots mobilization that culminated in the event called Christmas at Tornillo that resulted in children finally being let free as the calendar turned from 2018 to 2019, six years ago.

It took a little longer at Homestead, but by this time, in 2019, there were no more teens incarcerated at the open-air jail in Tornillo, Texas, stood up by Trump & Co.

And now with additional shout-outs to @Joshua Rubin, Camilo Perez-Bustillo, and all my dear friends at what would become Witness at the Border; to Rabbi Josh Whinston of Ann Arbor's Temple Beth Emeth; and to Diana Martinez, Ashley Heidebricht, all the good folks at Hope Border Institute, and so many others of the El Paso immigrant rights community, I give you from Crossing the Line, Finding America in the Borderlands…

Chapter 22, 90 Days in the Desert…

Wearing a wide-brimmed olive green Tilley camping hat and binoculars slung around his neck, Joshua was largely alone his first month and a half in Tornillo. “It was like my forty days in the desert,” he states.

To help pass the time and coax up intelligence about the goings on inside the Tornillo teen prison, he’d chat up the delivery drivers and service contractors. The encampment’s lifeline, they brought in generators, tents, beds, and Port-a-Potties, as ICE brought in busloads of boys and girls, ages twelve through seventeen.

“More kids went in than came out,” Joshua witnessed.

They trucked in potable water, “at the rate of seventy thousand gallons a day,” and hauled equal amounts of gray and black water out again. “I learned the most from the guys who moved water from the hydrants into the camp tanks.”

He’d ask them: Do you know what you’re supporting? If they didn’t, he’d tell them: It’s a jail. A jail for kids.

When he wasn’t interrogating service and delivery men, he was walking the camp’s perimeter, sometimes more than once each day. The youth were brought into the yard in formation, “marched, single file, like soldiers, like prisoners,” continues Joshua. “Once there, they were allowed to be ‘at ease.’ But they remained under constant surveillance.”

He tried to communicate with the teen “inmates” when they were outside—contact the guards roundly discouraged. One day he managed a short conversation.

“I found out that a Salvadoran boy had been inside for three months. Another boy shouted, cuatro meses, four months, and another said, cinco, holding up five fingers.” That would put him on the inside since the opening of the camp—a clear violation of the Flores Settlement.

“That wa…

It starts with a dream that becomes a dot. A red dot, representing a GPS coordinate on a map transformed into a hole, not too deep, cut into the earth with a pickaxe and shovel, then filled with moistened gravel and quick-dry cement into which Tucson, Arizona-based artist, Alvaro Enciso, plants a simple cross of rough 2x3inch pine strips painted a vibrant color and secured at the midpoint with a red dot made from metal trash he’s harvested from the floor of the vast Sonoran.

Since the October 1, 1994 launch of Operation Gatekeeper, the Sonoran desert, one of the hottest places on Earth in the summertime, has destroyed the lives and stolen the dreams of an estimated 10,000 souls. Forcing upon them a death most cruel, the US government remains steadfast in its nearly 30-year bet that the agony of some will deter others from coming. It hasn't. So what started as a dream “to reveal to the world the US government’s responsibility for turning the Sonoran Desert into a graveyard” has resulted in Alvaro transforming the desert into a cemetery, an art installation, and a memorial to the needless suffering of the unknown.

To date, he has marked the red dots of 1,200 (and counting) of the 10,000 (and counting) fallen. It's a work of monumental art, exposing government-sanctioned inhumanity. Art without sentimentality. Art without end. Art intended to lift up the lost while informing the living. It's a symbolic expression of who we should not be as a country. 

Alvaro's Desert Monument to the Dead screams quietly at us to rethink the policy of “Prevention Through Deterrence,” our First, Second, and possibly Third Solution.

Find Alvaro's tale alongside other stories of how art keeps good alive in the worst of times in the now available collection from She Writes Press: Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis, in which women writers reveal that in tumultuous times such as these, we need poets more than we need politicians.

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