The border is invading America | It has become unmoored from geography, dragging its violence into the schools, courthouses and workplaces

# The violence inherent in restrictive border enforcement has spread to the interior

> 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 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?

> 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, dramatically 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.”

# Democrats’ aggressive border enforcement has hurt not only unauthorized immigrants but legal immigrants, native-born Americans, and themselves

> 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 Beautiful 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.”

!ping IMMIGRATION

I hope I live long enough to see a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for US law enforcement.