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…
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 bastards 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 each week. No one was getting into the US, but they couldn’t leave Matamoros because they’d been promised a day in court to plead their case before a judge. They were literally stuck.
Tents crawled from the foot of the Gateway International Bridge, across the Matamoros Civic Plaza, and right up to the doorsteps of local businesses as well as governmental offices, including the headquarters of the Mexican agency tasked with immigration control: the Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM). When the plaza became full to bursting, tents worked their way up the embankment—or berm—of the floodplain that protects Matamoros from the Rio Bravo, as the Rio Grande is called in Mexico.
And that was just one tent city along the two-thousand-mile border. The Remain in Mexico policy would eventually stop more or less seventy thousand moms and dads, and sisters and brothers, and grandparents and children in their tracks.
Committed to the values expressed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—that everyone should enjoy the right to dignity and safety—borderlanders and visiting volunteers carried on doing all they could to make squalid conditions as livable as possible for those trapped in the Remain in Mexico web. Humanitarians kept the refugees from dipping into squalor, while also fighting for the inhumane program to be overturned.
This is where I found them five years ago, in January 2020, harmed but hopeful of getting their day in court or the end of Trump 1.0, whichever came first.
But waiting out evil was rough. And the usual international players were nowhere to be seen. That’s when a then-burgeoning international emergency medical team called Global Response Medicine, or GRM, saw a humanitarian crisis unfolding on the threshold of the world’s richest nation not unlike crises they had confronted in the war zones of the Middle East.
Now, here’s the reason I’m telling you this story. Because right now, our elected officials in the Senate and House of Representatives are talking about bringing back the Remain in Mexico program. One of the worst ideas that has already been tried and was proven to result in the most disastrous outcomes for humankind is being bandied about by folks inside the Beltway as a “solution” once again.
A “solution” to a crisis manufactured by Washington – as if you can will a reality away by pouring more fuel on it. But leaders who see some people as less than are capable of the dumbest and most despicable things.
We’ve been here before.
I hope after listening to this chapter excerpt from Crossing the Line, you’ll be compelled to do everything in your power to stop the Remain in Mexico program from ever staining the US national soul again…
Chapter 7: From Mosul to Matamoros
When the hell on earth that was that battle of Mosul finally drew to a close, the GRM team resolved to bring their model of “high-risk, low-resource medicine” to the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. They cast their gaze across the globe for other under-resourced flash-points: Yemen torn apart by civil war; Bangladesh overwhelmed by nine hundred thousand Rohingya chased out of Myanmar; the Mexican side of the US border.
On seeing a video of the Matamoros refugee camp, Helen Perry says, “I just had to go witness it to believe it for myself.” After a solo reconnaissance mission in early September 2019, she put out a call for help, returning in October with six other volunteers. These included Blake Davis, a firefighter and paramedic from South Portland, Maine, and Sam Bishop, a special operations combat medic in the US Army’s 3rd Ranger Battalion.
Sam, who was finishing his fifth year on active duty after tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq, had been contemplating medical school. In July, while still in the Middle East, he heard Helen speak on EMCrit, a podcast about emergency intensive care, trauma, and resuscitation. He reached out and agreed to help draft GRM’s trauma manuals as a way to start racking up volunteer hours for future med-school requirements.
Then came Helen’s late September call for veteran military medics to join her on the Tex-Mex border over the long October holiday weekend. In what would turn out to be a happy accident, the trip happened to fall as Sam’s military service was concluding. So he went.
“I didn’t get involved initially out of a passion for border issues,” states Sam. “I backed into that. Matamoros wasn’t even on my radar.” Armed only with backpacks filled with basic medications and blood pressure cuffs, Helen, Blake, Sam, and the others stepped off the Gateway International Bridge and into an ad hoc settlement of then roughly 750 tents. With an estimated three to four people living in each tent, they calculated a population of 2,500–3,000 people hoping to gain asylum in the US—up from about 200 just two months before, when MPP began in Brownsville.
“The place was mobbed,” states Blake. “But the numbers were still too low to warrant intervention by the UN or Doctors Without Borders.”
The UN must be invited by the country in which a refugee camp is located. But calling the UN institutions to the US-Mexico borderlands would be both a politically dangerous acknowledgment, by Mexico, that its northern neighbor had violated international law, and an admission that it was not up to the task of handling the fallout. As both the US and Mexican governments looked away from the mounting human crisis on their shared doorstep, the GRM advance team saw a gap they knew they could fill. The board was initially split. Some members felt their work belonged squarely in conflict zones where no other organization dared to go. But there, on the ground, Helen, Blake, and Sam were keenly aware that, while not a battlefield, Matamoros was no less perilous. Here, innocent people were caught in the crosshairs of a different kind of war—undeclared but no less political.
They ducked into Garcia’s Restaurant, a local draw for residents on both sides of the border, to talk through whether the GRM model of care was justified. While there, the skies opened up, dropping two inches of rain in an hour.
“When we came out,” recalls Blake, “the plaza was flooded. Everyone was soaked. There was this young mother with her newborn baby, two to three days old. They had neither tent nor sleeping bag. Another mother, holding her one-year-old close to keep her warm, was shaking and in tears. She looked absolutely traumatized, not knowing what to do.”
That night, the temperature plunged to a near-freezing 33°F (0°C).
“Back in our comfortable hotel,” continues Blake, “we couldn’t sleep, thinking about all the kids that might die of hypothermia overnight.” They concluded that the model developed in Iraq—to respond to immediate needs and refer bigger issues to local partners—was applicable where hostile powers gave up sobbing mothers and their infant children as fodder for the ravenous appetites of organized crime syndicates.
“The next day we stopped at Walmart on our way to the bridge and spent $40 on a blue pop-up tent—the kind you pitch in your yard in the summertime—and a plastic set of mobile drawers,” says Helen. From the tent, they hung a sign: medico. People immediately began queueing up. Sam and Blake ran triage, while Helen and an ER doc from the University of Pennsylvania handled patients.
“We saw ninety-seven people that first day. It was like an assembly line of care,” recalls Sam.
Everyone was sick, but with mostly preventable issues: diarrhea, urinary tract infections, sore throats, and coughs; asthma, infections, allergies, and pink eye—in some cases so far progressed, kids were going blind; skin rashes from bathing in the fetid river. They saw side effects kicked up from people running out of meds for chronic illnesses like high blood pressure and diabetes. They witnessed evidence of a brutal journey rife with sexual assault, “lots of bruised genitals and STDs.” They took blood pressure readings and measured the middle-upper arm circumference of children for signs of malnourishment.
They existed outside any formal health system. Yet no international NGOs had been asked to serve their population; no infrastructure had been established to meet their myriad needs. Many Mexican doctors flat out refused to treat Haitians and Africans, as well as members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
“Migrants are at the bottom of the food chain in Mexico,” says Sam. He, Helen, and Blake saw the same yawning gap the GRM founders witnessed in war-torn Iraq, though this time on the edge of the world’s richest nation. They took a meeting with local officials of Mexico’s National Migration Institute to pitch their no-cost solution to a problem neither country could just will away. The officers did not officially say “Yes.” They did not wish to give anyone a reason to stay put. They did not wish to attract others from coming.
But neither did anyone say “No,” for no one relished the idea—the potential political fallout—of people dying in their own front yard. So the GRM leadership set about re-creating the dual-mission model established from their improbable start in Iraq: to bring life-saving, low-resourced health care to conflict areas, while enhancing the capacity of local experts. They found their Matamoros partners, however, in unexpected places.
“Deaconess Cindy funded the majority of medications we needed through her ministry,” states Sam, becoming crucial to maintaining asylum seekers’ basic health as well as GRM’s bottom line. And when she and her GRM collaborators shifted to buying what they could at the nearby Garcia’s pharmacy, the local economy benefited as well.
The team gained a firm foothold in Matamoros thanks to the rare diplomatic talents, street savvy, and local knowledge of bilingual, bicultural, binational Pastor Abraham. He, like Deaconess Cindy, had been supporting the safety seekers since the earliest days of the encampment. Critically, he quietly aided the medical team in gaining access, affordably, to resources in cartel-controlled Matamoros.
They found two doctors, two translators, and a pharmacist from the refugee community itself.
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