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 bipartisan practice that, according to my research, ultimately brought us to this wretched, demonic, dystopian place, where no one is safe under Trump & Co’s white supremacist regime:
Not Venezuelans, in particular.
Not people on the move, in general.
Not activists, like Jeanette Vizguerra, a mother of three US-citizen children and one of Time Magazine’s most influential people in 2017, who was then living in sanctuary in a Denver church. Jeannette was ambushed by ICE agents on St Patrick’s Day and is now locked up.
Not legal US permanent resident green-card holders speaking out against genocide, like Mahmoud Khalil, a man who has no criminal record, yet was arrested by ICE and passed from one black site to another, from New Jersey to Louisiana. He is a political prisoner, whose freedom of speech rights, if quashed, will undermine all our First Amendment protections.
So, not you, potentially, for protesting the rapid repeal of rights we’ve long held dear.
And not me, potentially, for shouting into the wind (even though it feels most of the time like no one is listening).
The American Civil Liberties Union compared the transfer of the roughly 250 Venezuelans on the move to Bukele’s notorious mega-prison with “the darkest episodes of human history, including slavery and Nazi concentration camps.” Sadly, it is not the first time the US has expelled people back to likely persecution and death. We said “never again,” the first time, following WWII. Yet, here we are, aiding and abetting mass misery and mass murder once more.
From Chapter 33: Boxcars in the Sky, I give you my observation of Trump & Co’s first mass deportation campaign. The one few people knew about. The one I document in Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, where “America” does not indicate a place but is code for white supremacy...
On May 13, 1939, a passenger ship called the MS St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, with more than nine hundred Jews aboard. Hitler’s rise to power had emboldened followers of Nazi ideology. They were confiscating Jewish homes and burning down synagogues and Jewish businesses. In the face of such unabashed, unacknowledged, unpunished hate-based crimes, the nine hundred Jews took flight. Now refugees, they were determined to seek safe haven in the United States of America.
They were prescient. The development of the Nazi gulag was already well underway.
The Jewish exodus faced an unforeseen hurdle, however, for such concepts as “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” had not yet been defined, much less codified. There was no Universal Declaration of Human Rights to provide a framework upon which to build a global refugee protection regime. There was no Refugee Convention to value the right to asylum and ensure that no human being ever face refoulement ever again.
The US had long been a Beacon of Hope for European Jews, and many of the refugees had family there. So the ship captain steered the St. Louis toward the so-called Land of the Free. But Cuba, then the gateway to the US, would not let the refugees dock. They met the same chilly response in sunny Florida.
After three weeks sitting with the Land of Immigrants in sight, the refugees were running out of food and water. The St. Louis was forced to reverse course and return its passengers to potential harm. It landed in Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17, 1939, minus a few individuals, who’d hurled themselves into the sea in fear of what was to come. Another 254 would number among the six million Jews rounded up, corralled, and deported in boxcars on one-way journeys to Nazi death camps, like Auschwitz.
Tracking Omni Air International N207AX as it flew its reverse course back over the Middle Passage was for me like witnessing boxcars in the sky.
Today, according to my colleague Tom Cartwright, who tracks the deportation machinery I describe in Chapters 29-33 of Crossing the Line, several charter airlines and other transportation companies collaborate in a sprawling, semi-secret network, operating within more or less thirty-five US airports engaged in trafficking people — always in chains — in an international infrastructure that extended to 134 airfields in 119 countries worldwide as of one year ago, when my book went to press. It is, quite simply, a machinery of destruction that mushroomed in the second decade of the 21st century, doubling in size since 9/11, until approximately 100 ICE Air planes expel an estimated 11,000 individuals every month on these Boxcars in the Sky.
I’ll reflect again on the horrors exacted upon people on these flights in another episode. Until then, consider this…
The ICE detention-to-deportation pipeline makes complicit every industry it touches. I’m talking about airport “fixed base operations” that provide fueling, hangaring, tying down, parking, and logistics. I’m talking about pilots and flight attendants and their unions. I’m talking about cleaning crews and other support staff.
It is also supported by all of us. The “suckers,” in the mindset of the mad “king,” who are still obligated to pay taxes. We fund his cruel, illegal, perhaps deadly pursuits. And they are expensive!
It’s time we stopped clinging to the definition of genocide written after the Holocaust. A new kind of genocide is underway. It has been building for years. It is the global mass persecution by the billionaire class that results in the increased displacement and forced migration of people each year, leading to their misery and potentially their murder whether by state or cartel violence, drowning, environmental exposure, prolonged detention, deportation and refoulement to Bukele’s notorious prisons, or right back to the persecutors one fled. Spearheaded by the United States, it is now a global cancer that has hardened hearts around the globe as it has used public monies to enrich the entrenched forces that comprise the Border Industrial Complex.
Perhaps it’s time to update the definition of genocide.
Perhaps my book’s original title, The First Solution, was not so far off after all.
The only way through this is together. So transform your outrage into action: Get smart — read Crossing the Line and join my story collaborators each month for the Hope Knows No Borders Book Club and Webinar Series — information and registration link below — then Get Going: Rise up; Speak out; Resist.
Crossing the Line is now available in print, e-, and audiobook formats and can be found wherever you listen to buy your books. Please, always support Indies, if you can.
If you're a Substack subscriber, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. If you’re an Apple or Spotify listener, please rate and review as really does help others find the show.
As for the next four years, there is no time for despair. Mobilize! We are all in this together. Remember, Hope Knows No Borders. And cruelty is not okay.
Recommended Reads:
*Goodman, Adam. The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants. Princeton University Press, May 2020.
**Miller, Todd. Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security. City Lights Publishers, March 2014.
***Shout out of thanks to
for the framework of the US now being governed by bullies for billionaires.
Share this post