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 was the last time I had anything close to a conversation with the Tornillo teens,” Joshua recalls. “A guard hurried over, and the boys shut down.” The next time Joshua walked along the soccer fields, the fence had been screened to block his view.
Joshua joined Facebook, creating a page he called Witness Tornillo. There, he began to share his daily observations as the camp continued to expand. “If there were one thousand kids there when I arrived, there were at least three thousand in the end.”
HOPE calculated that, all told, six thousand boys and girls passed through Tornillo’s patrolled gateway from June–December 2018, rivaling in size the largest federal penitentiary.
The kids weren’t just “inmates.” Taking a page out of Harold Ezell’s book, they were also being used as bait. Trump & Co obligated all members of a potential sponsor’s household to be fingerprinted and undergo background checks—not just the sponsor him or herself per previous practice. Information would be provided to authorities to hunt down and deport undocumented relatives. When intelligence resulted in raids on private residences, at school bus stops, and in churches, etc., many households ceased to cooperate, like Jenny’s mom had back in 1985. This trapped kids inside even longer, slowing the vetting process such that time served at Tornillo was stretching to a new average of ninety days in the desert.
By bearing witness, Joshua opened up space for others, near and far, to do the same. “In particular,” says Ashley, “the Jewish community. I had no idea how engaged they were, but they would give our organizing efforts both capacity and national attention.”
Congregation Hakafa in Glencoe, Illinois, for example, felt a kindred connection to the migrant children. For decades, Hakafa members, including Lee and Nancy Goodman, had been involved with immigrant justice issues. Since 2016, they had helped to resettle newcomers to the US. So, when the horrors of family separation became public knowledge, the Hakafa membership, led by Rabbi Bruce Elder, resolved to take action.
Though small, Ashley’s rallies had attracted a bit of media attention, “which made our efforts more visible. So, in a quick Google search,” she states, “Rabbi Bruce found me.”
He sent Lee to El Paso as Hakafa’s emissary to scope out opportunities for action. Ashley acted as Lee’s ambassador. They visited the internment camp with Joshua.
Meanwhile, Rabbis Josh Whinston and Miriam Terlinchamp from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Cincinnati, Ohio, respectively, were separately underway with plans for a nationwide caravan, destination: Tornillo. That summer, Rabbi Josh had met a mother whose three children had been taken from her at the border.
“Listening to her speak of such a harrowing experience sparked the beginning of my activism in this arena,”statesRabbiJosh.“As someone who believes deeply in Judaism’s justice texts, which espouse values that have been with us for thousands of years, whose passages I love to talk about and reflect on and quote, I had to ask myself: Was I willing to step up and take action in accordance with those principles?”
The answer was, Yes. By the time he and Rabbi Miriam joined forces with Rabbi Bruce, they had secured the participation of several congregations. “We knew we weren’t going to be getting kids out. So we decided our trip was to be about coverage,” states Rabbi Josh.
Faith In Action, a national network dedicated to dismantling systems of racial and hate-fueled injustice, agreed to set up rallies in the cities the caravan was to pass through—Indianapolis, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, and Dallas—en route to the Tornillo gates, where they planned an interfaith vigil for Thursday, November 15.
Then, on the day of Judge Kathleen’s community protest and fundraiser, everyone’s commitment was tested.
An anti-Semitic attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, violently cut eleven lives short on October 27, 2018. The connection the Jewish community felt to the migrant youth was never more stark. It paralleled the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. It recalled the centuries-long diaspora history; forced to move from place to place; refused welcome when most in need, even the children. It brought to mind the concentration camps of the Holocaust, and the US’s shameful turning away of roughly nine hundred Jews aboard the MS St. Louis in 1939. It summoned up the bone-chilling chants of Jews will not replace us by tiki-torch-bearing white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, the summer before.
“Rather than let some guy with a gun stop us,” Rabbi Josh told me, “in many ways, the hate crime energized us.”
Which is not to say he wasn’t scared. “I was nervous about attracting white supremacists, yes. They’d been given license by the Trump administration, and what we were about to do would be very public.”
The caravaners were fine until they reached Texas. “Then, a Reform synagogue in El Paso began receiving threatening calls.” But rather than back off, that congregation joined the pilgrimage to Tornillo, too, as did Christians and Muslims, who joined the caravan over the course of their four-day interstate drive.
An estimated two hundred people convened at the doorstep of the Tornillo internment camp on the morning of November 15 to send a message, states Rabbi Josh, that: “As one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it is our responsibility to welcome asylum seekers, rather than treating them as criminals.”
“You can’t imagine the scene,” recalls Camilo. “Into this sea of yarmulkes and prayer shawls came the busloads of girls from Loretto Academy, all dressed in their red and gray school uniforms. They descended the buses like a flock of beautiful birds.”
Also rolling into view during the rally were ICE buses—their blackened windows shut tight. “You couldn’t see kids,” Rabbi Josh remembers, “but you knew they were there.”
When they disappeared behind the fortress of metal and barbed wire, states the Rabbi, “It shocked me just how easy it was to hide several thousand teenagers. You could be outside the gates and have no idea what was going on inside.”
Thanks to the mounting activism, Father Rafael Garcia, from South El Paso’s Sacred Heart Parish, gained entrance to the tent city to celebrate Sunday Mass. He was followed inside by monitors for the Flores Settlement Agreement, including Stanford University child psychologist and trauma specialist Ryan Matlow, as well as Camilo. Their assessment was unequivocal: “The kids of Tornillo were by all indications suffering.” They painted a picture of psychological distress due to the indefinite confinement. They noted little to no psychosocial support.
Meanwhile, Trump touted Tornillo as a model, with talk about creating another child prison inside El Paso-based Fort Bliss. Equal in size to the state of Delaware, the Army base’s impenetrability sparked additional public outrage.
Tornillo had become a national flashpoint. The Washington Post updated the number of children and teens then in the custody of the federal government to roughly 14,600. Not since the Japanese internment have so many young non-offenders been imprisoned. Yet, Congress allocated another $367.9 million in the last quarter of 2018 to keep Tornillo operational.
Then, CNN and the Associated Press disclosed that, among the more than 2,100 Tornillo employees, none had undergone rigorous FBI background checks. This was in violation of Health and Human Services’ and the Resettlement Office’s own guidelines.
Exhausted but undaunted, El Paso activists and their allies picked up their protest, heading into the holiday season with a plan. Ashley secured the participation of US Representative-Elect Veronica Escobar (D-TX) for a rally on December 15. Representative Judy Chu (D-CA) and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) agreed to come, too. Three days later, they introduced their Shut Down Child Prison Camps Act.
Diana began to organize the first in a series of events that would come to be called Christmas at Tornillo. The Carbon Trace crew teased the outside world with images from their coming documentary, Witness at Tornillo, alongside invitations to attend.
As Joshua continued speaking through Facebook, his following grew and grew. Word began to spread.
Actress and activist Alyssa Milano came to interview Joshua outside the detention site. Their conversation reached tens of thousands over Twitter.
More people came, showing up from far and wide. They arrived in camper vans. They slept in cars. They pitched tents.
The caroling began on Sunday, December 23, and continued into January.
Tom Cartwright, a retired financial executive, came with a massive professional sound system, which sent participant speeches and songs soaring right over the encampment walls.“When the kids were outside and waving to us, we knew they could hear our music and messages,” recalls Tom.
Camilo remembers seeing soccer balls fly back over the fortification in response—“the perfect symbol of resistance.” In “Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed Wire Fence,” 2021 National Book Award winner for Floaters, Martín Espada, transformed the bid for freedom into poetry.
During Christmas at Tornillo, Beto O’Rourke, again at the gates, promised that the encampment would be shut down. Sure enough, the Tornillo teen prison operator, BCFS Health and Human Services—the second-highest grossing kid-jailer that year after Southwest Key—gave in to the mounting negative press attention. Its director, Kevin Dinnin, announced that the camp would be emptied and broken down by the end of January 2019.
This forced Trump & Co to rescind the background check requirement for all members of a sponsor’s household. Suddenly, twenty-five hundred young people were released to loved ones, proving that the unnecessary and prolonged incarceration at Tornillo had always been at the discretion of the administration. It was cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Another attempt to deter the inevitable, for human migration is a fact of life. Especially when forced to run for your life.
“I feel so grateful and appreciative of anyone who did anything,” states Ashley. “From every phone call made and dollar donated to every song sung and letter written, it’s a testament to what humankind can achieve when we work together for a common cause, regardless of belief systems or methodologies. If any one component had been missing,” she believes, “it would not have been a success.”
Joshua’s vigil at Tornillo was over. He returned home to Melissa for New Year’s Eve, as promised. A new pair of witnesses, now forever committed, took over to see the Tornillo internment camp all but erased.
“Once the last of the children were gone,” remembers Karla Barber, “our role was to watch and document the dismantling of the place to verify that is was taken down.”
“All fencing, tents, toilets, generators, mobile kitchen, soccer goals, everything, were packed up and carted away,” says Julie Swift. “They literally scraped the ground clean. Like there were never children there. They even swept the sand to remove any traces that the camp ever existed.”
Thanks for listening!
And stay tuned for more Tales of Humanity from the Borderlands, where I'll be providing commentary on current events, interviews with immigration advocates and experts, as well as folks caught under the system's cruel, cruel knee, and more excerpts from Crossing the Line that push back against the dangerous narrative of Trump World's disinformation machine and offer a narrative from the real world, one that puts people at the center of the immigration discussion.
Crossing the Line is now available in print, e-, and audiobook formats, and can be found wherever you listen to or 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 it 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.
Share this post