The Border Is Invading America
Ms. Guerrero, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and author.
The U.S.-Mexico border is no longer just a line on a map; it is a roaming force, drifting through our cities and ravaging schools, courthouses and workplaces. It has become unmoored from geography, dragging its violence and impunity into the heart of American life.
Once confined to the borderlands, the Border Patrol — with its culture of Wild West impunity — is now operating across the country, joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement in raids far from ports of entry. Gun-toting agents, sometimes in cowboy hats, are treating places like Los Angeles and other cities deep in the United States as if they were lawless outposts on a hostile frontier. ICE, the Border Patrol and other agencies have been deputized to carry the border with them — to enforce its racialized, exclusionary logic wherever they go. It has become routine to see masked agents jump out of unmarked vans to detain people violently, based on their skin color.
The border no longer divides only countries. It snakes between white and brown, between families and neighbors, between citizens and the rights they once thought were inviolate. The brute force that it once unleashed out of sight, in remote desert regions at the nation’s edge and behind the locked doors of detention centers, is beginning to erupt in broad daylight.
In Southern California on Aug. 16, masked federal agents surrounded a truck, shattered its windows and then opened fire as the family inside the vehicle tried to escape. Two days before, Carlos Roberto Montoya, a 52-year-old father, was struck by a vehicle and killed on a freeway while fleeing an immigration raid at The Home Depot in Monrovia, Calif. Weeks earlier, Jaime Alanís, 57, died of a broken neck a few days after falling from a greenhouse roof while desperately trying to escape a raid at a cannabis farm in Ventura County, Calif.
Our immigration system has always been deadly.
Human rights groups estimate that as many as 80,000 people have died at the border since the 1990s, when the United States began to militarize it against migration from Mexico. In “The Land of Open Graves,” the anthropologist Jason de León describes the border as “a killing machine that simultaneously uses and hides behind the viciousness of the Sonoran desert.” That machine is powered by the desert’s brutal heat and rising walls from which immigrants fall and break their backs. By the rivers threaded with barbed wire. By the Border Patrol bullets fired at unarmed teenagers.
Now the barbarity that has long defined that machinery is bursting out of the margins, coming not only for immigrants but also for anyone with the skin tone or tongue of the undesirables. The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift a temporary restraining order against its use of racial and linguistic profiling in Los Angeles and other parts of California.
How did we get here — to this place where the border has become unfixed, a ghost fence snagging flesh and freedom? Some Democratic leaders have expressed outrage at the border’s inward creep. But Democrats and Republicans colluded to let it loose, and we must reckon with the bipartisan nature of our immigration regime if we are to restrain it. It was not an invention of President Trump. It was built, brick by brick, by both parties.
It was the Clinton administration that oversaw the birth of “prevention through deterrence,” a policy that set the stage for Stephen Miller’s embrace of cruelty to discourage migration. First outlined in 1994, the strategy was simple but brutal: to seal off safer urban crossing points at the U.S.-Mexico border and funnel migrants into the deadly terrain of the desert. Then, in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed two sweeping immigration laws — the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, greatly expanding the grounds for deportation, eroding due process and making re-entering the country after deportation a federal felony.
Years later, President Barack Obama became known as “deporter in chief,” deporting three million people from the country, more than any previous president. One of those deportees was Anastasio Hernandez Rojas. A decade before a police officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd, a federal agent knelt on the neck of Mr. Hernandez Rojas after he was intercepted trying to reunite with his wife and U.S.-citizen children in San Diego, where he had lived for more than two decades. In May 2010, he was hogtied outside the San Ysidro Port of Entry, surrounded by Department of Homeland Security agents. Several kicked and punched him. One tore his pants off. Mr. Hernandez Rojas sobbed and cried for help. “Please,” he wept. “Help!” Witnesses filmed on their phones as agents repeatedly used a stun gun on him. One bystander shouted: “Why are you guys using excessive force on him? He is not resisting!”
Mr. Hernandez Rojas suffered a heart attack during the confrontation with federal agents and later died. When Mr. Floyd died of a cardiopulmonary arrest 10 years later, it reignited a national movement against police brutality. The case of Mr. Hernandez Rojas did not inspire a similar campaign against the violence of our immigration system.
Despite years of pressure from immigrant rights advocates, Mr. Obama’s Department of Justice declined to bring criminal charges in the case. Most Americans moved on, and there was no accountability. In 2014, the second Obama administration also decided against removing exceptions for racial and ethnic profiling in immigration enforcement, despite issuing new guidance restricting profiling in other law enforcement. The Biden administration made the same decision. In doing so, both administrations affirmed a two-tiered system of justice — one in which immigrants, and those who merely look like immigrants, have fewer rights.
Impunity for the Department of Homeland Security was built into the system. In 2022, under President Joe Biden, immigrant rights advocates uncovered the prevalence of Border Patrol “critical incident teams,” specialized units that investigated serious deaths and serious injuries involving agents, securing the scene and collecting evidence. Their mission, though, according to advocacy groups, was to shield agents from accountability — just as they did in the killing of Mr. Hernandez Rojas. The advocates asked officials for congressional investigations and oversight hearings. “We were explicitly told, ‘We don’t want to make a Democratic administration look bad,’” Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego, told me. She said the units, which continue to operate in different forms, were pushed “so far under the rug.”
That instinct — to protect the Democratic Party over the people it claims to champion — turned the border loose on innocent people, ensnaring not only those without legal status but also Americans, green card holders and other legal immigrants. Meanwhile, the mass surveillance industry grew to profit from the border’s expansion. Tech companies like Palantir and Anduril are making billions by building A.I.-powered surveillance towers and other technology, potentially to spy on all of us. These companies, backed by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, will be cashing in on Mr. Trump’s big domestic policy bill.
Democrats’ unwillingness to confront their record and their collaboration with restrictionists has betrayed citizens and noncitizens alike. They also undermined their own credibility with voters and normalized anti-immigrant cruelty among the general population. I have repeatedly asked Trump voters about his immigration policies, such as his first term’s family separations. They tend to reply by shrugging their shoulders and pointing at similar actions by Democratic leaders, saying, “Obama put kids in cages” or “Obama separated families, too.”
Mr. Trump’s zero-tolerance policy was distinct, separating children from asylum-seeking parents at the border as a spectacle to discourage migration. But Mr. Obama did in fact preside over widespread family separations through his mass deportations, which tore primary breadwinners and other parents from their U.S.-citizen children. In January 2021, I urged Mr. Biden in an essay in these pages to reunite the families separated when he was vice president, such as the family of Lucía Quiej, a Guatemalan mother who asked the Democratic candidates at a 2016 debate what they would do to reunify families like hers. “I will do everything I can to pass laws that would bring families back together,” Hillary Clinton pledged. “I will do everything that I can to unite your family,” Bernie Sanders said. But after Mr. Trump won, they treated his separations as a shocking new horror unique to Republicans. They acted as if families like Ms. Quiej’s didn’t exist.
The Democratic Party’s longstanding indifference to immigrants — except when wielded as a cudgel against Mr. Trump — worked symbiotically with the racism of some Republican leaders to enable the border’s violent encroachment into America. Mr. Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, is a student of liberal hypocrisy. He grew up in the coastal city of Santa Monica, Calif., which prides itself on progressive values, even as working-class and immigrant residents have been pushed into overcrowded apartments or out of the city altogether amid rising rents. He saw and understood the performative nature of some Democrats’ compassion for immigrants. Years later, as Mr. Trump’s speechwriter, it was not hard for him to convince millions that Democrats defend immigrants only because they want cheap labor, or because they think it’ll win their votes.
Since Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, the Democratic Party leadership has largely fallen silent on immigration. For the 2024 election outcome, many Democrats blame not their selective outrage or insincerity, but an excess of pro-immigrant zeal. The delusion would be comical if it weren’t so costly.
A month before Mr. Trump announced his first campaign in 2015, when I was a local immigration reporter, I covered the fifth anniversary of the killing of Mr. Hernandez Rojas. His widow, Maria Puga, was seeking accountability for the agents involved under Mr. Obama. She told me: “Nothing has been done. So much time has passed, and nothing has been done. Where is justice?”
Weeks later, I watched Mr. Trump announce his candidacy and felt a pit in my stomach. I couldn’t imagine our immigration system becoming more inhumane than it already was. As the reality TV star campaigned on promises of a bigger border crackdown, I traveled to the border and reported on the human remains scattered across the desert. I told the stories of the men behind Mr. Obama’s record-high deportations — the “felons, not families,” who in many cases had wives, children and homes and had committed only misdemeanors or the felony of illegal re-entry.
After being deported, many of those men ended up living in encampments along the Tijuana River canal, bearing tattoos of San Diego and other U.S. cities — symbols of the homes and families they’d been torn from. The Tijuana police raided the canal, arresting the men as perceived nuisances to American tourists and residents. “I’m illegal all over again here,” one of them told me. To escape the police, some of these men ran onto an adjacent freeway, where at times they were struck and killed. When I learned of Montoya, the man who recently died on a Los Angeles freeway fleeing an immigration raid, I remembered the bloodstains on Tijuana’s freeway. The terrain has shifted — from a Mexican border town to a U.S. city — but the violence remains the same.
The border is invading America. It hunts people, reappearing wherever they try to rebuild their lives. It is no longer a place; perhaps it never was. It is a stalking power, a mobile regime of racial control that snakes through the Americas, leaving bruises, breaking bones, ending lives.
This year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights — an autonomous human rights tribunal of the Organization of American States, made up of 34 independent nations in the Americas, including the United States — determined that U.S. agents tortured and killed Mr. Hernandez Rojas, and that border officials attempted to cover it up. The tribunal demanded a reopening of the criminal investigation and reparations for the family. But that seems unlikely. One of those alleged to be central players in the cover-up, Rodney Scott, is now the head of Customs and Border Protection. And most Democratic leaders remain silent on this case — just as they were under Mr. Obama.
The Southern Border Communities Coalition, a project of Alliance San Diego, has tracked fatal encounters with the Border Patrol since 2010, when Mr. Hernandez Rojas was killed. Their data shows something uncomfortable: Fatal encounters with Customs and Border Protection have tended to be higher under Democratic administrations than Republican ones. In their desperation to appear “tough on the border,” it’s possible that Democrats have at times had a stronger bite than Mr. Trump’s bark.
Now many Democrats seem convinced that to regain voters’ trust, they have to sidestep the immigration issue, or channel the right’s antipathy. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has advocated cutting back on health care benefits for undocumented immigrants, and signed a budget in June that will bar them from new enrollment in the state’s Medicaid program.
As Democratic leaders like him appear to see it, their party’s failure isn’t inhumanity or incoherence, but rather an overabundance of compassion for the foreign-born. This delusion is a gift for the anti-immigrant movement, which uses the disconnectedness of Democrats to stoke resentment toward all liberals — and to bolster the false perception that immigrants are to blame for everything.
We need a reckoning with the structural abuses embedded in our immigration system, and with how elites in both parties play a role in sustaining them. Otherwise, the border will continue to coil inward like an ouroboros, devouring not just immigrant rights, but the rights of all but an elite few. That is the final shape of our immigration system as it stands.