NO TIME FOR DESPAIR

Lean into the Anger. There, you will find the Courage we all need now.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

I can remember two other times when I felt this way — like the threat of an ending stole my breath away and I would never feel safe again:

The second time was in November 2016, when US voters were duped by a con man.

The first time was at 9/11, when the wall building around our hearts — and between each other — began in earnest, leading to the inexplicable phenomenon of US voters choosing the same convicted felon, rapist, and wanna-be strong man for another round of rule by fear and scapegoating.

Like then, I feel a great trust has been broken. Like all I really want to do is turn away.

Indeed, I spent much of November 6, 2024, in the dark of a New Brunswick, New Jersey hotel room. Though the sun shone brightly outside, I hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob and remained in bed with blackout curtains drawn, staring at the ceiling, searching for the motivation to shrug off the despair and get up to present before a crowd, like me, waiting for answers. I reached back to the lessons of my mother, which so often bridled me because they were so often cliched. I found solace in the words she attributed to our Irish ancestors:

The darkest hour of all is the hour before dawn.

That’s when I realized: we have only three months to mobilize — hardly enough time.

That’s when I understood that we cannot afford the luxury of despair. “They” want us to give up. But if we do, they win.

That’s when I remembered all the times that outrage fueled action and led to social change.

I summoned the anger caught deep in my heart, and I found enough courage to get out of bed and prepare to present.

If anger is all you have at this moment, I recommend that you lean into it. It is precisely our collective anger that we must harness right now. Only anger will help us to find the courage to tumble over, tunnel under, tear down, and otherwise stand up to the walls of hate and fear erected by Trump & Co. to divide us.

What follows is a version of the speech I gave at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center just minutes after finally emerging from my hotel room on November 6, 2024, fueled by my anger at a most devastating election result. And just like that, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands became a manual for a movement.

Who knew that’s what I was writing when this project began? I sure didn’t.

WALLS ARE VIOLENT

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, there were more or less 12 such barriers around the world. We thought the Cold War was over. We thought we were moving toward a kinder, more inclusive, more peaceful society and time. 

It turns out we were wrong.

There are now some 80 walls all over the world. And counting.

We live, today, in the security-obsessed world of the Border Industrial Complex — the offspring of the Cold War-era Military Industrial Complex — where our 20th-century commitments to every human being’s fundamental rights to safety, dignity, and protection from persecution, aka asylum, no longer appear to apply.

The Border Industrial Complex encircles the globe like a second equator, cleaving North and South asunder. It divides the wealthy, predominantly white world from the less-wealthy, less-white one, creating a Global apartheid, where borders have been weaponized as tools of in-group/out-group exclusion and are growing deeper, taller, angrier, and more violent all the time.

FAMILY SEPARATION & KIDS IN CAGES

Now, I’ll admit that I did not fully perceive the extent of the cruelty of the Border Industrial Complex until six years ago, in June 2018, when the cries of six-year-old Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid were heard ‘round the world.

I’m sure you remember it too.

A small child made to memorize a phone number in a moment of panic when her mother realized they were about to be pulled apart.

A six-year-old made to grow up all too fast, begging a border official to please call her auntie, reciting the number over and over through veils of tears while other children sobbed in the background and the agent charged with their “care” callously referred to their heartbreak as an orchestra without a conductor.

That muffled eight-minute recording was taken, we think, from the pocket of a whistleblower inside the Ursula “processing” center in McAllen, Texas — I put “processing” in quotes because let’s face it, processing centers, detention centers — these are facilities where people are put in cages. These are facilities encased in coils and coils of razor wire.

They are prisons. 

Prisons that are managed by the US federal government, where the flag of the so-called “exemplar of freedom and Beacon of Hope” flies above coiled weapons that glisten mockingly in the sunlight but were created, specifically, to shred human skin.

When we heard Alison Jimena’s cries, we rose up in collective outrage. 

You remember.

In days, we were in the streets, marching under the banner of Families Belong Together all over the world: 750 demonstrations around the globe, 600 in the US alone. And on June 20, 2018, Family Separation was supposedly ended by presidential Sharpie.

But it never really ended. 

And it didn’t start with Trump & Co.

THE INCITING INCIDENT

Family separation was the inciting incident that propelled me on a journey of awakening across the 2000-mile US-Mexico line that resulted in my book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands.

The narrative begins in a refugee encampment just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, on the threshold of the world’s richest nation. An encampment of 3000 people, thrust into homelessness and made to live in tents meant for weekend camping in some of the most dangerous places on earth by the so-called leader of the free world. Three thousand safety seekers who represented 70,000 thousand of the world’s “most vulnerable people” — in the UN’s terms — trapped in cartel-controlled Northern Mexico to be preyed upon, raped, extorted, tortured, murdered, sold into slavery, etc. as the same man just handed the keys to the White House for a second time looked on.

The book ends on two mass deportation flights — variously dubbed Death Planes, Flying Abu Ghraibs, and Boxcars in the Sky — the likes of which the future 47th president of the US promises to make a fact of daily life. 

It may be the only public document describing what happens on an ICE Airplane. Why? Because “they” do not want us to know.

Spoiler Alert: We should all be horrified.

This Is What Mass Deportation Looks Like...

INSIDE THE HEART OF DARKNESS

Incited to go to the border to see for myself the inhumanity I thought Trump had wrought, my first learning once inside the world of the Border Industrial Complex was that it did not begin with him. He and his acolytes had been enabled by many presidential administrations before them. All they had to do was crank the cruelty of the system to 11. 

But the cruelty was not theirs alone.

Other specters I encountered inside the world of the Border Industrial Complex include were as follows:

1) A bi-partisan project dating back decades to extend our borders across oceans and deserts and into other national territories as a way to make end-runs around the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Born of the shame of turning Jewish refugees back to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps, the 1951 Convention is the international treaty body governing asylum protections. It was written into US law as the 1980 Refugee Act, negotiated by President Jimmy Carter. It should be recognized today as the Law of the Land. But before the ink had dried on the legislation, Reagan and Bush 41 were already flouting it.

Their xenophobia and intolerance in the face of Haitians and afro-Cubans seeking safety in the so-called Land of the Free sparked the development of the next specter of the Border Industrial Complex I would come to discover:

2) The 200+ Immigration Prison Complex.

Eighty percent of which is run by for-profit contractors — companies such as GEO Group and Core Civic, Lasalle Corrections, and Ahtna — who are paid with our tax dollars to lock up as many as 41,500 peace-seeking people on any given day. 

These are people who have committed no crime. They have come to the so-called Beacon of Hope seeking safety from harm, horror, and hunger, only to find themselves shackled — wrists in cuffs, ankles manacled, both tied to heavy waist chains — then put into jumpsuits to be imprisoned for profit.

The very definition of enslavement.

Is this what makes “America” great? 

Again?

3) The Border Industrial Complex includes a 100-mile policing zone. 

Most of us, if we think of the policing zone at all, associate it with the US Southwest. But in reality, it traces the perimeter of the entire continental US: 100 miles inward from both land and sea coasts. 

It subsumes 2/3rds of the US population, 9 of our 10 largest cities, 6 whole states, by my count, and the District of Columbia.

It is the jurisdiction of a 60,000-member force — and counting — that knows no transparency and suffers little accountability and was turned on peaceful protesters exercising their 1st Amendment right to Freedom of Assembly and Speech during the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020.

I speak of Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol, who — owing to a series of dubious 1970s Supreme Court decisions — have the right to patrol via racial profiling. And do. Every day. In the 100-mile Customs and Border Protection jurisdiction “Constitution-compromised zone.”

And though this may not be felt by people who look like me, it is comprising all of our constitutional protections under the 4th and 14th Amendments.

4) The Border Industrial Complex also includes a 20,000-member force — and counting — which we all know as ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE polices the interior of our nation in collaboration with local police forces thanks to agreements dating to 1952 and upheld in 1996, under the Clinton administration, that allow the federal agency to deputize cops to do its job for them. 

ICE, too, knows no transparency or accountability though the agency’s routine acts of violence, brutality, and impunity are legion and well documented. Yet Congress provides the agency more money — and more power — year upon year upon year.

Local jurisdictions that refuse to enact 287(g) agreements are our Sanctuary Cities. 

They will be under attack from January 20, 2025.

5) Both ICE and Border Protection agencies operate under the Department of Homeland Security, whose roots I’ve been able to trace back to the Slave Patrols of the pre-Civil War era.

As today’s Homeland Security was built on the foundations of White Supremacy, it’s little wonder that the National Border Patrol Council, the agency union, endorsed Trump’s candidacy for president not once, but twice — the only presidential endorsement the Council has ever made.

6) The Border Industrial Complex includes a for-profit transportation machinery of buses, armored jails on wheels, for-profit chartered airplanes, and restraining devices turned into instruments of torture.

This is an existing infrastructure that works hand-in-glove with the immigration prison complex to whisk peace-seeking people away — and ICE agency crimes along with them — in daily expulsion missions that return folks in need of safety, in shackles and chains, back to the very harms and fears — and dictators — they fled. 

In the hands of a wanna-be strong man, it is ready to be deployed at any time.

7) Finally, in the world of the Border Industrial Complex, our legal obligations on the part of folks seeking a safe and dignified life — per their international legal and human rights, as well as US Law — play out every day in Kangaroo Courts.

These courts, many of them buried in the bowels of our 200+ immigration prisons, have so compromised the promise of due process under the law that one immigration judge once likened her job to hearing Death Penalty cases in traffic court-like settings. I can attest, having borne witness to a fair few.

THE BORDER INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX IS FAILING US ALL

The entire Rube Goldberg — or Many-Headed Hydra, as I call it — the Goliath that is the Border Industrial Complex was built on the foundations of a single theory:

Prevention through Deterrence. What I prefer to call Deterrence through Cruelty. 

The theory posits that if we make northward migration as dangerous and difficult and as painful and perilous as possible, those who survive it — and many don’t — will send word back home: Do Not Come. Do Not Come.

But they continue to come.

Because Deterrence through Cruelty does not work.

Now 30 years old, Deterrence through Cruelty was unleashed on October 1, 1994, nine months after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opened the borders to the free and unfettered movement of goods and money. 

This is when our manufacturing plants, our monoculture agribusinesses, our extractive industries, etc., were incentivized to go south in search of low wages, no environmental protections, and low to no taxation.

The State Department realized — it is documented — that this would cause displacement and drive northward migration. So Deterrence through Cruelty began with a military-styled intervention called Operation Gatekeeper, which continued the process of sealing the southern border to people — a process begun 100 years ago in 1924 with the establishment of the US Border Patrol.

But all Deterrence through Cruelty has ever done is exact tremendous human misery and harm. 

It is an abject failure. 

Why?

Because for as long as there have been people on this planet, we have moved. 

It is part of our human story. 

We move away from harm, horror, and hunger. We move toward better. 

Recall your family’s migration story: unless you hail from Native American roots; or of African American heritage and brought here in chains across the middle passage, we are all immigrants. Todos somos inmigrantes.

That includes the next president, his wife, his Immigration Czar — a product of refugees fleeing hate crimes against Jews — and his exceedingly wealthy and incredibly dangerous campaign backer, who was himself an illegal immigrant to the US.

Like Elon Musk, we all move toward opportunity.

HOPE KNOWS NO BORDERS. OUR CRUELTY IS NOT OKAY.

Now, I know it sounds dire. And it is. But in the world of the Border Industrial Complex, I also found hope: 

I found hope in the mentors and guides and story collaborators you will meet in the pages of my book, should you read it — and I hope you will. 

I found hope in the myriad of ordinary folks — people like you and me — all across the line and all over the US! — who express extraordinary acts of daily kindness in the face of what is truly a manufactured crisis: A “crisis” created for the cameras to whip up an emotional panic to distract us from the real problems facing our nation — and our world — today; an illusion resulting from fearmongering and scapegoating — the oldest tricks in the authoritarian playbook — that just carried a racist convicted felon and rapist back into power.

The real “crisis” at our southern border today is not the number of people coming northward. 

The real “crisis” is the hardening of a human heart.

The real “crisis” is the hardship and suffering caused by our walls — whether physical, legal, militaristic, or bureaucratic. 

Walls are to blame for creating the now global market in human trafficking.

Walls are to blame for a market that has metastasized into a vast global network of transnational criminal organizations that prey upon the world’s most vulnerable people routinely trapped in some of the most dangerous places on earth by US immigration policies and practices.

I WRITE TO HUMANIZE 

My book aims to humanize today’s seemingly intractable immigration debate through the transformative power of storytelling. It documents the lived experiences of global migration in the early 21st century not only by the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, and children, like Alison Jimena, caught under the system’s cruel knee but by the courageous first responders, who show us, every day, that there is a better way:

That we CAN welcome newcomers with dignity. 

And that we’d be a better nation for it.

These folks are providing the answers to the seemingly intractable situation we face today. These are the heroes we should be looking to and voting for: the members of a growing choir of individuals and groups who, compelled to bear witness to the cruelty of our borders, can never, ever, look away again. 

We, as I am now proud to be counted in their number, are among tens of thousands moved by anger to sing louder and more courageously all the time that the 21st-century shift to a security-first paradigm has obliterated the 20th-century promise of civil liberties as a human birthright. 

JOIN THE CHOIR

In the dreadful aftermath of the most consequential presidential election in US history, my book transformed from what I thought was a “handbook for a more humane world” to a manual for a much-needed movement.

Crossing the Line exposes the stakes faced by folks on the move today. 

It paints the picture of what’s to come if we step back and allow it to happen. 

It is a Call to Action to safeguard humanity’s fundamental right to have rights. 

It is my invitation to you to join the choir if you haven’t already, because:

• The borderlands are everywhere, not just in the US Southwest.

• The militarization of our borderlands did not begin with 9/11. That was just an excuse.

• Nor is the system “broken” as pundits and politicians would have us believe. As we saw on November 5, 2024, the system is working just fine for the demagogues and profiteers who benefit from it, which is why we’ve seen no human-centered reform to this system in almost four decades.

The Border Industrial Complex is an existing infrastructure of pain and destruction that has been deployed against all of us already. And it may well be again.

CALL TO ACTION

Today, we grieve for our democracy lost.

Tomorrow, we ready ourselves — we prepare — with a clear and full education about the forces we are up against. My book has been called “The primer text to the immigration issue.” So get started there, then dig into my Bibliography and Endnotes for more.

Then, we mobilize.

For the next three months, we must all find our place in the choir so we are ready to push back against the worst impulses of the next US administration.

We know what they are going to do. They’ve shown us already. It’s all in my book.

But their last time in the White House was just practice. This time…it’s for real.

We must summon our outrage — as we did during Family Separation, as we have had to do so many times before — to harness the courage necessary to take action. We are called upon in this dark hour before dawn to:

• mobilize (potentially underground) communities of welcome;

• push back against the misleading “criminal invasion” narrative; and

• ready ourselves to stand up for our friends and neighbors who will soon be targeted by a president whose theater of hate and fear was created to mask his grift and greed, as well as that of the billionaire opportunists who surround him.

Recalling the learning of Pastor Niemüller — that when “they” came for him, there was not one left to speak up for his rights because no one was left — we might even be required to put our lives on the line.