"Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!"

On the delusion of "fixing" the border

It was a gorgeous late winter day in the desert: a sky of high drama penduluming between shivering and hot while sunshot drizzle spilled through nearby mountains — craggy-green and beautiful — followed by minutes of hail.

But there was also the wall, that steel scar dynamited and then cemented into place, running up and down the steep hills between Sasabe and Nogales, Arizona. A year ago, there were more than 20 gaps in the wall — ranging from a few feet wide to about 20 feet —across an approximately 24-mile span just east of Sasabe. These gaps, used by wildlife and migrants and smugglers, are currently being filled in (“remediated”) by “not-another-foot” Biden.

I was tagging along with some humanitarian aid workers to see how things have changed along this span of wall. The first stop for the aid workers was in Mexico to deliver supplies. I hadn’t realized we’d be going to Mexico, so hadn’t brought my passport. But it wasn’t a problem: I just checked in with the border guard and let him know before heading south. He looked at me — white face, unaccented English — and gave a dismissive wave.

About a half an hour later, on our way back north, I handed over my driver’s license, smiled, and crossed the border.

Easy.

Soon afterwards, dark clouds started rolling in, the wind picked up, and rain started spattering.

That was when we came across four people who would never be waved through a U.S. port-of-entry: an older man from Honduras and three people from Guatemala (the city of Sololá) including a sister and brother, 19 and 23 years old. The siblings were in bad shape. The woman, who’d twisted her knee, was walking in thick socks and sliders, a red bandana knotted over her pant-leg. Her brother — red eyes; chapped, trembling lips — started crying. The aid workers hugged them and handed them granola bars and water. We told them they could try flagging down Border Patrol who might give them a ride (there were eight steep and muddy miles left to walk). We said awkward goodbyes and buen viajes — or whatever we muttered — and, as the rain picked up, drove on.

We started seeing people walking west wearing high-vis rain gear given to them at a nearby makeshift camp. In recent incidents migrants have been stranded in dangerously inclement weather, and local aid organizations have stepped up to save lives, providing water, clothing, food, and shelter. The patched-together camp was little more than a dozen or so tents, along with tarpaulin strung between mesquite trees, a few plastic tables, and two propane stoves. Here, people who have crossed the border can wait out rain or snow, drink water, eat something. The wait for border patrol can stretch for days.

Some migrants can’t wait. Some are sick, scared, desperate. Some don’t know or trust that anyone will ever come for them, and so they walk, walking the hills west to the border patrol station in Sasabe.

It was a rare sight, watching people almost glowing in their yellow vests, trekking up and down the steep hills. But not everyone had rain gear or even remotely adequate clothing. Such was the case with the group of nine people from India and Bangladesh, including one family with two children, the youngest a small nine-year-old boy. They were Sikhs from the state of Punjab. The mother flagged us down just as the rain was hitting.

They needed shelter, and so we ducked under a convenient roof. In a way I’m familiar with because of my four-year-old — the bodily freedom of children — the nine-year-old Punjabi boy, recognizing the hasty need to cram together, jumped straight into my lap. I put my arms around him because that is what you do with a child shivering in your lap. I could feel how deeply the damp had sunk into him, how truly wet he was, how cold and thin. We were fifteen minutes or so like that, his older brother on his mom’s lap, he on mine, and then cloudburst ended, and — that fast weather-changing afternoon — a few minutes later the sun was dropping shadow and the family regrouped.

We made it with them to the camp where there was a smoldering fire. My jeans were wet-darkened from where the boy had been sitting on me.

How many hours had he been out in that cold, in that occasional windgust and hail? How many hours had he walked? How many months ago had he left his home in the Punjab? How many months until he finds, if he does, a home?

At the camp the aid workers dished out hot tea and snacks, heavy duty plastic garbage bags to double as ponchos. The Punjabi mom started cooking packets of ramen in a wok. She asked me for a ride, gesturing to her two wet children. I told her we couldn’t give her a ride. She nodded and offered me ramen.

If we had given them a ride, we could have been charged and prosecuted for aiding in the furtherance of their unlawful presence in the country. Prosecutions of transporting undocumented migrants have gone up under the Biden administration. Penalties range, but it could have meant months in jail.

I wanted to push the workers to give her a ride, but I knew it would imperil the little help they are able to legally offer.

We said more awkward goodbyes and started the drive back towards Sasabe, passing and waving to a hundred or so migrants as they hoofed up and down the hills, many of them flagging us to stop, asking for food, water, a lift. We spoke with people from Guinea, Cameroon, India, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, and we kept on driving.

During his recent State of the Union address, President Biden said, “Look, folks, we have a simple choice: We can fight about fixing the border or we can fix it. I’m ready to fix it. Send me the border bill now.”

That was when Dems in the audience started chanting “Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!”

Their call reveals an inherent paradox of bordering. To fix something is to presume that it was once in working order. But the border itself, at least in its current guise, is not only broken but is an act of perpetual breaking. Militarized bordering is an act of de- not con-struction, an act that doesn’t protect but, for all involved, exposes and makes vulnerable.  

But I don’t expect people, even lawmakers, engaged in herdish chanting to be so careful. They were just politically exclaiming — a type of vociferation not known for nuance. Still, their puerile cries presupposed that the border used to be in a certain whole or functional state to which it could be returned, which is a false and ahistorical understanding. There has been no moment, at least not in this nor in the last century, when the border wasn’t considered — and wasn’t also, in fact — broken.

The particular proposal, explicitly mentioned by Biden in that same address, was the tripartisan (including Independent Kyrsten Sinema) Senate bill which was revealed in early February. That bill would have further broken the border. It would have funded more border militarization, allowed a president to “shut down” the border, and raised the threshold for people seeking asylum to obtain protection. It would further endanger migrants like the thin, wet, desperate Punjabi boy who sat on my lap.

MAGA Republicans, despite getting most of the legislative crackdown that they sought, scuttled the bill within hours of its release.

The Republicans in this case are guilty of prioritizing politics over people (let’s call it predatory delay) as well as a gross misunderstanding of how borders function. Democrats are guilty of worse: moral obnubilation and outright cowardice. The concessions Dems have caved to are so conciliatory that their immigration strategy amounts to playing dead.

As we drove back towards Sasabe, we came across a young couple from the Mexican state of Guerrero. The woman, another 19-year-old, was pregnant — in her first trimester. Her husband told us that she’d been having stomach pains. The woman had been crying, her eyes rimmed with red. She wore a bright yellow rain jacket draped over her head and was dragging her feet through the mud. They asked us for a ride.

We gave her applesauce in a small squeeze pouch. We turned a milk crate upside down and waited with her under the upswinging back door of the truck. When Border Patrol came, we flagged them down, pointed to the woman, and told them she was pregnant and in pain. They said they’d come back for her. We waited, debating whether or not we could give her a ride.

Sitting down and eating the applesauce revived her. We kept waiting. Finally, after about an hour, another Border Patrol truck rolled up. The agent gave a few orders, telling the couple to throw their bags in the truck bed. I used to work as an EMT, and I know the importance of passing along medical information when you’re handing off a patient. I told the agent that the woman was pregnant, that she’d been in pain. He didn’t acknowledge me.

Get in, he told the couple.

One of the aid workers thanked the agent. He didn’t respond.

We pay people to chase down and arrest migrants like this young woman, and we threaten to punish the people who want to help her.

Our laws have it backwards. They have it broken. They are constantly breaking.

After the Border Patrol truck kicked up mud and drove away, we, too, got back in our truck and drove west. Along the way we waved and handed out more water and bars to walking, rain-drenched migrants. To the dozen or so who asked us for rides, we said No, sorry, we can’t.

(The thing is, we could.)

Some links

I’ve been writing about asylum for AZ Luminaria. You can find a couple recent stories here. And for a primer on the current situation, you might check out my recent piece, 8 Things to Know about Asylum.

There’s also my recent book, The Case for Open Borders, which addresses all of this and more. The presentations and many interviews I’ve done for the book have been moving, but it could still use some love, some Amazon and Goodreads reviews, and please remember to read and support your local bookstores and media outlets.