PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Hello. This is Sarah Towle, author of Crossing the Line. Thanks for joining me for another episode of From the Borderlands.
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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 of the US Border Patrol, endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time.ThatcandidatewasDonaldTrump. And the symbiosis seemed to embolden not just the Border Patrol, but all law enforcement agencies associated with the Department of Homeland Security in the El Paso Sector, including ICE.
Historically, Dylan explained to me, ICE has had broad discretionary powers to keep families together. Customs and Border Protection, too. This is essential in borderlands everywhere, where extended families live, work, worship, marry, give birth, and bury loved ones in regions that extend across two sides of a mapped line. But as spring 2016 rolled into summer, Border Protection and ICE appeared to pivot away from case-by-case humanitarian determinations. Without warning, the decisions of immigration judges were ignored and asylum candidates were being unexpectedly deported directly from their scheduled, in-person ICE check-ins. Those who’d requested asylum and been detained, what’s more, were bringing to their lawyers reports of troubling ICE behavior.
Dylan was not alone in his alarm. Faith- and community-based organizations, advocates, and attorneys, even El Paso federal court judges, were witnessing an increase in due process violations; the arbitrary use of prolonged detention; and the near-blanket denial of humanitarian parole. But more sinister still, the Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services came to suspect that kids sent into their care had been taken from their parents.
Under federal contract and muzzled by strict nondisclosure agreements, however, they couldn’t talk about it.
Private, low-cost, and pro bono attorneys, particularly at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy and Catholic Charities of Southern New Mexico, were picking up clues from their adult clients in ICE detention centers that their children had been taken from them. Shelter providers such as El Paso’s Annunciation House were hearing similar stories.
But it was so unthinkable, they didn’t know how to talk about it.
“It was like a strong undertow that took everyone by surprise,” states Dylan.
They decided to set up a new research body to document the patterns and look for trends. They called their forum the Borderland Immigration Council, and from September 2016 to January 2017, participating members conducted in-depth research on enforcement and detention policies and practices in the El Paso Sector. Attorneys recorded 120 interviews with clients detained under ICE. Researchers cataloged the emerging themes. It proved a critical and prescient move, for not only did it get area human and migrant rights stalwarts collaborating across traditional lines, states Dylan,“ but that’s also how family separation got on our radar.”
The resulting study, Discretion to Deny: Family Separation, Prolonged Detention, and Deterrence of Asylum Seekers at the Hands of Immigration Authorities Along the US-Mexico Border, was issued in February 2017, concurrent with Trump’s inauguration. It documented, among other things, that the separation of families by Customs and Border Protection and ICE was becoming disturbingly routine. And that the practice had detrimental impacts on legitimate asylum claims, as well as the mental and physical health of separated adults and children.
“So, everyone saw it, or thought they did,” continues Dylan. “But there was no memo, no indication that families were being separated as a matter of policy.”
Then, out of the blue, Dylan received an off-the-record phone call from a federal magistrate. “He told me that more and more parents were coming into his courtroom distraught, asking what happened to their kids.” Because Border Patrol agents are always present in immigration court hearings, the judge would turn to them and ask. But he never got an answer. “The caller implored us to act.”
Unable to get a meeting with local Homeland Security leadership, HOPE and the Borderland Council turned to Representative Beto O’Rourke, from their local Texas congressional district, for help. It took a while, but the Democrat’s office eventually convened a community meeting with the alphabet soup of federal law enforcement agencies on October 24, 2017. They gathered in a ballroom at the El Paso Community Foundation. ICE, CBP, and the Homeland Security Investigations teams all sent their local top brass. They were joined by the general counsel of El Paso’s immigration court, under the jurisdiction of the US Department of Justice.
As for the Border Patrol, it sent only a couple of line agents.
“Buried way down on the agenda was the issue of family separation. When I asked if it was happening,” says Dylan, “the heads of all the agency leaders shook, No. But the Border Patrol agents volunteered that, Yes, they were separating families.”
They quickly qualified their actions, Dylan told me. “They said, but it’s only policy in the El Paso Sector and only with fathers traveling with children over ten.” So, it wasn’t just a few agents gone rogue in the midst of a leadership change, which was their best-case scenario.
This was a feature of the pilot, not a bug, according to journalist Jonathan Blitzer. The “brain trust” behind Family Separation wished to ensure, at the very least, that the initial batch of children kidnapped by Uncle Sam would be able to identify themselves to authorities; state where they'd come from; and to whom they were meant to be going.
“That moment, when family separation was acknowledged in public, the air got sucked out of the room,” states Camilo Perez-Bustillo. Previously the director of the Border Human Rights Documentation Project at New Mexico State University, Camilo had joined HOPE as director of advocacy and research just that month.“We suddenly knew that what we most feared, what the federal magistrate blew the whistle on, was true.”
The next day, the assistant chief counsel for Customs and Border Protection, Lisa R. Donaldson, sent an email to all Borderland Immigration Council members, trying to walk back the officers’ statement. “But that looked to us like a semi-veiled confession, too,” says Dylan.
The key part of the message read: “As a point of clarification: the Border Patrol does not have a blanket policy requiring the separation of family units. Any increase in separated family units is due primarily to the increase in prosecutions of immigration-related crimes.” (Emphasis in the original.)
Just as with the Mounted Guard in 1904; the Border Patrol’s first headquarters in 1924; the border fumigation baths, 1914–1954; Operation Blockade, aka Hold the Line, aka Operation Gatekeeper from 1993—El Paso was again the launchpad for border policy experimentation.
“Family separation was beta-tested here by local DHS leadership before being adopted in Washington as national policy,” says Dylan.
The practice had begun while Obama-Biden were still in office, possibly without their awareness. By October 2017, however, it was happening with the full knowledge of and in coordination with the US Department of Justice. According to government reports and a Border Patrol whistleblower who worked on the project, Sessions was applying the arcane Emergency Quota Act of 1921 in the El Paso Sector to criminalize asylum-seeking parents traveling north with children. Yet, Trump’s second Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, was denying that family separation was policy—just as her predecessor, General John Kelly, had done even after telling Wolf Blitzer on CNN in March of that year that Trump & Co were considering taking children away as a means to deter migration.
Now the Borderland Council had confirmation that Trump & Co had lied.
Word flew from community to Congress with the speed of a text message. Representative O’Rourke’s Washington office, however, brushed it off as a mistake, as something that could be fixed.
“But this was no mistake,” states Dylan.“We had a double admission.”
Local ICE stonewalled the Borderland Council. Even the agency’s community engagement officer, a Protestant minister named Bryan Van Dyke, refused to engage. Dylan remembers feeling threatened when Van Dyke told him, There’s a new sheriff in town. You better watch yourself.
The El Paso migrant rights community had solid data, a double confession, and alarming new suspicions that parents were being deported without their children, too. Kids, moreover, were being disappeared into the black hole of the Resettlement Office as its shelters began to swell. But even as these abuses accelerated under Trump, the borderlanders struggled to get anyone beyond Texas to care.
Writing for the Houston Chronicle, journalist Lomi Kreil first disclosed the Border Patrol agents’ screw-up on November 25, 2017. She went on to uncover additional instances of family separation, including that of a Congolese mother and her seven-year-old daughter at the San Ysidro port of entry. The mother, Ms. L, was held in California, while her daughter was sent to Chicago. Border Protection agents claimed they had doubts about Ms. L’s maternity, yet ICE waited a full four months to administer a DNA test.
Lomi’s reporting sparked an American Civil Liberties Union class-action lawsuit: Ms. L v. ICE. Led by attorney Lee Gelernt, the suit would bring a legal end to family separation under District Court Judge Dana Sabraw the following June. But Lomi’s scoop could have—and should have—put an immediate stop to the heinous practice.
“It’s as bad as anything I’ve seen in thirty years of doing this work,” Lee told me. “Little kids begging and screaming not to be taken from parents as they were being hauled off.”
“Media outlets outside Texas simply weren’t interested,” says Dylan. Frustrated and incredulous, disappointed but undaunted, HOPE and the Borderland Council carried on documenting the horrors. Their next report, Sealing the Border, The Criminalization of Asylum Seekers in the Trump Era, presaged the official rollout of zero tolerance, which would become commonplace along the two- thousand-mile line in a matter of months. This time, their research revealed that 94 percent of asylum-seeking adults arriving in the El Paso Sector between July and November 2017 had been separated from their children. Yet, as of the January 2018 release of the Borderland Council’s second study, Trump & Co were still claiming that family separation wasn’t a thing.
Jonathan White, then–deputy director of the Refugee Resettlement Office’s children’s programs, had been left out of the policy loop. When supposedly “unaccompanied” infants and toddlers began to arrive in unprecedented numbers on his proverbial doorstep, he surmised what was going on. White warned his new boss, Trump-appointee Scott Lloyd, that the practice would cause lifelong trauma for everyone involved. Lloyd told White: “There was no policy that would result in the separation of children.”
Finally, Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Los Angeles Times brought the story to national attention on February 3, 2018. Beating Jeff Sessions by six weeks, she warned us of what was soon to come: “According to public defenders and immigrant advocates, more and more immigrant families who come to the southern border seeking asylum are being charged in federal criminal courts from El Paso to Arizona. . . . Once a case becomes a criminal matter, parents and children are separated,” she wrote.
The Tanton network’s Center for Immigration Studies pushed out the counter-narrative that parents making the dangerous trek with children were no better than human traffickers. Criminal charges were, therefore, warranted, they argued.
In the El Paso Sector, the detention of people seeking asylum had become the rule, not the exception, despite objections from public defenders that prosecuting this population was not permitted under federal or international law. Parents were promised their children back if they renounced their asylum claims and “volunteered” for their own refoulement. This, too, was a lie, for as Trump’s Homeland Security operatives failed to keep records, they couldn’t reunite families even if they wanted to. Many asylum-seeking parents were returned to harm under false pretenses, without their kids.
Criminalizing asylum was now the latest chapter in the thirty-plus-year “prevention through deterrence” playbook. The new policy, which Sessions announced on April 6, 2018, declared zero tolerance for all who dared to cross the border between ports of entry, even those seeking asylum. However, the accompanying practice of metering effectively closed ports of entry to this population. Made to wait in Mexico, families were sitting ducks for organized crime syndicates, driving them to entrust their lives to traffickers ready to cross them over the line for ever-increasing sums of money.
It was the perfect government-sanctioned Catch-22, forcing folks wishing to immigrate “the right way” into the water, through the desert, or over the wall now as high as a three-story building in some places—a fall not easily survived.
The world beyond El Paso was finally catching on that Trump & Co were ripping families apart. Scenes of barbarity made international headlines, shaking us to the core: A mother shackled by agents of the federal government for protesting when her suckling infant was pulled from her breast. A man dead from suicide on being denied information regarding the whereabouts of his wife and three-year-old son. A little girl in a red sweater, no taller than an officer’s knee, appealing to her captor with tears welled up in her eyes and streaming down her face.
It was so hard to believe, let alone to feel. Then an insider—someone protesting their odious job—snatched an eight-minute recording from deep inside the Ursula hielera.
The largest Border Patrol station in the US, Ursula is a sprawling 77,000-square-foot warehouse, retrofitted under the Obama-Biden administration to detain up to 1,500 people at a time. Outside, it looks like it could be part of the IDEA Los Encinos Secondary School complex on McAllen’s Ware Road, right next door. Until you spot the US and Border Patrol flags waving above the screened, razor wire–topped fencing requisite of all Border Industrial Complex fortifications.
Inside, off-limits to all but guards and prisoners, are chain-link cages like those containing captive dogs at a pound. But in 2018, the cages contained kids.
In one, a little girl, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, is heard begging a Border Protection officer to call her auntie. She has memorized the phone number. She is reciting it, through sobs, over and over and over. She is six.
The recording, which at times sounds muffled, as if it was made from within the whistleblower’s pocket, was passed to Tía Jennifer, who shared it with journalist Ginger Thompson, who shared it with the world via ProPublica.
In early June 2018, the Department of Homeland Security disclosed that 1,995 minors had been separated from 1,940 adults from April through May 31. As of June 26, that number was revised to 2,047 kids. But when Trump & Co finally owned that they’d been experimenting with separations in El Paso from July 2017, affecting another 281 families, the official tally of children kidnapped by Uncle Sam jumped to nearly 4,000. Then, reports emerged that the Department of Health and Human Services, the Resettlement Office’s parent agency, had previously lost track of another 1,475, which brought the number of children rendered “unaccompanied” by the family separation policy closer to 5,500.
Faith leaders decried the practice as “deeply immoral.” Amnesty International said family separation was “tantamount to torture.” The American Academy of Pediatrics warned it would trigger “toxic stress” in the young, disrupting and potentially arresting brain development. Physicians for Human Rights predicted—and has since proven—that the mental, emotional, and physical toll of both family separation, as well as prolonged detention away from loved ones, will hamstring its victims for a lifetime.
Returning to the Bakersfield raids of the second week of January 2025:
None of the regular farm workers showed up at the raided gas station to buy breakfast on Wednesday morning. No one was waiting outside Home Depot.
As word spread through farmworker communities that ICE and Border Patrol had begun corralling and detaining people in anticipation of Trump 2.0’s mass deportation campaign, folks now stay away from the fields. Their kids are no longer going to school.
Operation Return to Sender will most certainly disrupt US food supply chains, leading to food shortages as produce rots in the fields. It will result in higher prices at the grocery store, not less.
If the Bakersfield rollout is any indication, Trump’s Border Patrol is targeting essential workers not “bad hombres.” Through Operation Return to Sender, they will separate families and throw women and children into destitution. They will cause economic devastation.
Mass deportations are Trump and Co's new wall, their new tool for executing family separation. And as in El Paso in 2016, it would appear that Homeland Security agents in California are already doing the bidding of the new administration.
As with family separation under Trump 1.0, ICE and Border Patrol are already practicing. They are already getting prepared.
The sooner we stand up to this madness the better. The only way through this is together. Mobilize!
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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.
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