A Visit to the Border

In July, 2018, I went to Brownsville Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, with two friends.

That spring had seen the implementation of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration. We’d heard about children taken from their mothers’ arms; parents deported without their kids; children lost in the “system”; toddlers representing themselves at immigration hearings. We’d seen images of children sleeping in metal cages under Mylar blankets and mass trials of shackled prisoners. On a covertly recorded audiotape, children, in a detention center, cried out for their mothers. I began to feel a compulsion to go to the border, to see what it was like, at least so I could tell people what I’d seen I’d agreed to give a talk in Dallas, and I knew that the border was only a short flight away. It seemed possible to go. But where? Laredo? El Paso? And what would I do when I got there?

I contacted a reporter named Debbie Nathan, who had been writing, for The Intercept: level-headed, informative, lucid articles about the border and the immigration crisis. She wrote back almost immediately, saying she lived in Brownsville and would be glad to show me around.

Meanwhile two