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Waging a Nonviolent Civil War Against Borders
What we choose to love fully and unconditionally is Planet Earth itself—a planet without borders—and all who live within it.
Feb 01, 2026
And here I am, an American, staring at the border again... and slowly coming to realize the paradox of it. Borders don’t actually exist. They’re invisible lies. They’re also virtually everywhere.
Consider the border Alex Pretti crossed on January 24, on a street in Minneapolis, as he stepped between some US Border Patrol agents and the woman they had just pushed down. He crossed the border that separates ordinary people from the federal Proud Boys (or whoever they are), the masked invaders who were occupying the city to enforce The Law. Pretti interfered with them! He dared to try to protect the fallen woman, who herself had just crossed the same border. In so doing, they both went from being ordinary citizens to “domestic terrorists.”
“Yet our greatest threat isn’t the outsiders among us, but those among us who never look within.”
The words are those of poet Amanda Gorman, who wrote a poem honoring Alex Pretti after the agents shot him, almost 10 times. Another killing! Oh my God! Another cut to the American soul—a cut, by the way, that comes with complete immunity, according to Team Trump. They’re waging civil war against those who cross the border that separates right from wrong. “Fear not those without papers,” Borman’s poem continues, “but those without conscience.”
Oh, let us evolve toward a trans-border world! This is the core of the American civil war that is now, seemingly, getting underway.
You know what? As terrifying as the idea of a new civil war sounds, I prefer it to something worse: a great national shrug and acquiescence to the Trump agenda. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as so many people have pointed out, is acting like the Trump Gestapo, as his administration rids sacred (white) America of the brown-skinned other, who may or may not be immigrants. What matters is that they’re different from “real” Americans. Right?
Regarding the whole concept of the border: It seems so real and viable until you start questioning it, which includes looking into its history.
As Elisa Wong and Raymond Wei write:
The way we think of borders today, as firm boundaries that are violently enforced, is a relatively new thing, and we would argue it doesn’t serve humanity’s best interests. While ‘strong borders’ are often argued as a necessity for our security, we think they limit humanity’s potential as a global community.
In ancient times, rivers, oceans, and mountains marked the boundaries of territory... As humans began building kingdoms and empires, more walls began to form, thus more firmly delineating borders.
And in Medieval times, from around 1000 to 1700 AD, European kingdoms started engaging with each other in a state of unending warfare, violently squabbling over the limits of their territory. And plunk! Global borders were created, and whole contents started getting divided almost randomly into European territorial possessions.
“At the Berlin Conference in 1884,” Wong and Wei write, “European leaders met to carve up Africa for themselves, which split local tribes across arbitrary lines and laid the groundwork for ethnic conflicts that still rage today’”
Oh, let us evolve toward a trans-border world! This is the core of the American civil war that is now, seemingly, getting underway. This is why protesters are flooding the streets in Minneapolis and across the country. This is why they’re enduring pepper spray and tear gas and flash bang grenades. This is why some people are being killed. But the rational—effective—response to violent aggression is not counterviolence.
“Anger and hatred are natural in response to such atrocities,” David Cortright writes, “but it is essential to avoid causing physical harm, to maintain a nonviolent intention and commitment despite increasing government provocation. A major outburst of protester violence would be disastrous, diverting attention from the message of support for victimized communities. That’s exactly what the White House is hoping for—to cover up ICE abuses, reinforce their lies about violent protesters, and justify additional domestic militarization.”
And he quotes—who else?—Martin Luther King: “Hatred multiples hate. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Violence multiplies violence.”
Yeah, that’s the world as we know it: endless war. But America’s new civil war must not—will not—go that way. “Loving ICE” doesn’t mean accepting their actions or their purpose, but rather, challenging it head on, courageously and nonviolently. What we choose to love fully and unconditionally is Planet Earth itself—a planet without borders—and all who live within it. Yes, that includes ICE agents. It includes Donald Trump. But loving them also means standing up to them—and handing them their conscience.
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How Immigrant Fiction Can Reshape American Realities
As the politicos do their darndest to render the Statue of Liberty little more than a New York City tourist trinket, what can American immigrant literary fiction offer our nation in terms of imagining a more welcoming, inclusive, and promising future?
Aug 20, 2025
Immigrants have been reshaping America since the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Or perhaps earlier than that fateful day in 1620, if you count Viking excursions dating back to 1021 and Spaniards landing in Florida in 1513. After the subjugation and genocide of the continent’s Indigenous people, and the establishment of the United States, wave after wave of newcomers from all over the globe, forced and unforced, have helped build what so many call “a nation of immigrants.”
Despite those facts, immigration has always been a topic of debate and a lightning rod for racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, a tool of political manipulation that appeals to people’s worst instincts and fears. Since the political rise of Donald Trump and his descent down that golden escalator in 2015, the debate on immigration and the US-Mexico border has shifted considerably to the right, after decades of centering on moderate concepts calling for comprehensive immigration reform and enhanced border security.
In the 2024 election cycle, both parties have skewed further in the same direction, narrowing the debate and placing immigrants and their advocates in an ever-tightening corner, with Republicans calling for mass deportations and Democrats supporting limits to asylum for refugees and backing away from providing public services (such as health and education) to undocumented immigrants and their children.
As the politicos do their darndest to render the Statue of Liberty little more than a New York City tourist trinket, what can American immigrant literary fiction offer our nation in terms of imagining a more welcoming, inclusive, and promising future?
Humanity, New Visions, and Hope
We are all human beings. To me, that’s what any good book reminds us of at its core. Authentic immigrant stories chronicle the desperation, urgency, and desire for safety and progress that drive immigrants to America’s shores in the first place. Immigrant and multicultural literature explore the process of becoming American, the rifts between immigrant generations and those born and raised here, and the sacrifices and rewards experienced by families and communities through acculturation, assimilation, and simply the act of living in a country full of promise yet also torn apart by a legacy of racism and discrimination. But, no matter where the readers and the writers come from, when one walks in the shoes of another, one gains empathy. In this way, immigrant literature builds bridges that foster unity in our shared humanity and multigenerational American experience.
Before embarking on my own journey as a writer of literary fiction steeped in the immigrant experience, some of the books that most deeply touched me were likewise immigrant or multicultural narratives. Even though they may not have been specifically about the Latino perspective, I saw myself and my family reflected in their characters’ struggles and dreams. At an early age, that experience as a reader opened my mind to cultures other than my own.
I did not get to New York City until I was a college student in New England, but I felt like I’d been there as a child making Jewish friends in the tenements of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. I never spent a night in Harlem, but I could feel the dust on the floorboards and the tension between father and son in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. I’d never seen a ghost, but I saw myself and began to recognize my own voice as a writer in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
When we recognize our genuine shared God-given humanity, the man-made machinations of maps fall into the shadows and the hope of who we could be and what we could do if we embrace each other lights the way in a blaze of glory.
When we see each other as more the same than “other” and “different,” we see that artificial constructs—such as borders and citizenship and legal documents providing permission for human beings to live in peace on various patches of the Earth’s soil drawn on maps by men who waged and won wars decades or centuries past—are just that: artificial, man-made, and by their very nature should be malleable. To connect and lift each other up, we must work toward more togetherness and less division.
Immigrant fiction is a laboratory for the creation of new visions for where we could go as a nation, as a continent, as a people united rather than divided. Just like science fiction has laid out blueprints for many of the high-tech devices and inventions that are now either fixtures in our daily lives or soon to revolutionize the way we live, immigrant fiction can help us imagine, envision, and thus create a new reality.
In my novel, The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez, I imagine a world where a multigenerational utopia is built on a city that straddles both sides of the Rio Grande, a place where not just the borders between nations fade away but also those between life and death. In a manuscript I’m currently working on, I envision an America where someday there will be no borders at all. The walls and fences will be pulled down. The coils of razor wire will be retired. The militarized forces will be deployed elsewhere, far from the fertile farmlands of the Rio Grande Valley, far from the vast and perilous Chihuahuan Desert. The river will gleam with promise and flow in tranquility as it snakes its way like a shimmering serpent toward the Gulf of Mexico. Bridges will be built. And people will move safely back and forth, north and south, along with trade and commerce. When this happens, cultural harmony will rise, economies will boom, and illegal narcotics, weapons, and human trafficking will become ancient history.
Imagine that. Instead of masses huddled along fences and politicians saber rattling and fearmongering, countries will work together to solve the hemispheric problems that they cannot solve alone. Stronger than ever, fueled by access to opportunity and more affordable labor, the combined Americas will be able to compete with the surging global powerhouses of China and India.
For that to happen, we must stop seeing the border as a problem and seize it as an opportunity. We need stories that inspire hope in us, faith that we can see past each other’s differences and find the common ground that binds us together: a love of family and freedom; a desire for each generation to do better than the one that came before; a respect for our fellow human beings regardless of where they were born, the color of their skin, or the language their mother whispered into their ears as newborn babies cradled in their arms.
We all have hearts that ache for love, minds that crave understanding, souls that yearn to be seen. This human connection—cognizant of the pain we all bear as living, bleeding beings but fiercely determined to cling to an optimistic view of the future we can share—drives the narrative arc of my new novel, The Border Between Us. It is the story of an immigrant family, of a young American raised on the border and kept afloat by the love of family and irrepressible buoyancy of the American dream. And many people who have read it have told me how they were touched by it in varied ways.
People didn’t focus so much on the border or the immigrant aspects when they shared their reactions. They mention seeing their own lives reflected in the novel: the strains of complex parent-child relationships, the balancing act between pursuing one’s own aspirations while living up to family responsibilities and obligations, the grief and hardship of losing loved ones before their time. When we recognize our genuine shared God-given humanity, the man-made machinations of maps fall into the shadows and the hope of who we could be and what we could do if we embrace each other lights the way in a blaze of glory.
Listen to me, America. I’m from the border, born and raised. I love the border. And, I believe the borders should be erased. Anyone supporting the proposed mass deportations (as well as the racial and ethnic profiling and vast detentions these would entail) should read Farewell to Manzanar, chronicling the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. They should also do some research on the inhumane Operation Wetback, through which over 1 million Mexican migrant workers were deported in the 1950s. These are cautionary tales from our not-so-distant past.
We can be more than we are today as a nation and as a people. For that to happen, we must avoid the errors of the past, stop limiting ourselves, and expand our horizons. Until then, pick up some immigrant or multicultural fiction, learn from history, and imagine the possibilities. Someday, we can turn honest memories and empathetic visions into a new and more welcoming reality.
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When Walls Are the Only Answer, We’re Asking the Wrong Question
Border barriers respond to only one question: How do we stop them? Our starting point should be: Why are so many people on the run?
Aug 08, 2024
The U.S. Border Patrol turns 100 this year, marking a century of hunting people; stoking vigilante violence; and erecting physical, technological, and bureaucratic barriers—many lethal—against human beings in need. But walls have never been the solution. Indeed, they are the reason cruelty, chaos, and corruption prevail at our crossroads, especially along the U.S. frontier with Mexico. Patrols and checkpoints, gateways and guns, militarization—in lieu of humanitarian mobilization—these represent the real crisis at our borders today: the hardening of the human heart, a world in which empathy has seemingly expired.
Border barriers respond to only one question: How do we stop them?
Our starting point should be: Why are so many people on the run?
Over the last 40 years, a deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that daily flouts legal due process has grown up all around us, hiding in plain sight just outside our privileged view.
History matters, and this history is no exception because much of what we’re dealing with today was Made in the USA. It is the legacy of climate breakdown, driven largely by our stubborn dependence on fossil fuels. It is the consequence of U.S. economic imperatives that incentivize corporations to migrate south in search of low wages, little taxation, and no environmental controls. It is the heritage of a foreign policy perspective wherein Latin America and the Caribbean exist for U.S. enrichment.
From the Banana Wars to the Dirty Wars, through the so-called Wars on Drugs and Terror, the U.S. role in rendering whole regions unlivable, thus forcing human displacement, is little discussed. While there is significant and excellent academic scholarship documenting this reality, it is kept swept under the rug, out of sight and out of mind, as if the powers that be don’t want us to know.
So here’s what you should know.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the power and wealth accumulated by the Cold War iron triangle at the intersection of bureaucracy, industry, and self-interest was threatened. So the military-industrial complex pivoted to managing and maintaining borders worldwide. A border-industrial complex was born, and the betrayal of the international refugee protection regime began.
There were about a dozen walls around the world when Berlin’s came down. There are now close to 90 built or in the works. And while erected much as their medieval counterparts had been—to divide and exclude—modern walls are no longer exclusively physical. They extend to the outer limits of linked surveillance systems and troop movements. As a result, the U.S. southern border of 2024 stretches as far as Colombia; Fortress Europe can be felt throughout North Africa, deep into the Sahara Desert.
Though the militarization of the U.S. southern border began well before the shattering events of September 11, 2001, that event propelled the border-industrial complex into overdrive, with the wealthiest and most privileged nations already primed to turn their backs on post-WWII human rights commitments. Favoring a security-first paradigm, 21st-century profiteers and demagogues are now making bank—or political hay—in thwarting the movement of humans fleeing hunger, horror, and harm.
The foot soldiers in this cruel war against the world’s most vulnerable people—those who’ve been forced to leave home because home has become too dangerous to stay—include the U.S. Border Patrol.
A sub-agency of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection since 2003, the U.S. Border Patrol became official 100 years ago, on May 28, 1924. The first appointed agent, Jefferson Davis Milton, was the son of a Confederate governor and enslaver. Offspring of an era when Slave Patrols carried out the dictates not of law, but of plantation “justice,” Milton became a Texas Ranger in the late 1870s, when still a teen. Tasked with the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples, the recapture of formerly enslaved Black people, and the suppression of Mexican-origin property holders who took issue with white colonial settlers moving in and moving them off their land, the Texas Rangers of Milton’s day relied on the same raw, physical violence and brutality bequeathed to them by their Slave Patrol forebears.
Then came the 1875 Page Act, Congress’ second-ever legislation restricting immigration. It sought to check the numbers of Chinese laborers lured to the U.S., first by the discovery of California gold, then by the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The subsequent Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it harder for expelled Chinese to get back into the U.S.; and impossible for new Chinese arrivals to gain entry at all.
Of course, Congress needed an armed guard to enforce this legislation as well as an office to maintain the force. So, in 1904, the first U.S. immigration police force was born: the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. It was made up of former Slave Patrollers, Klansmen, and Texas Rangers, like Milton. The human link between yesteryear’s slave and today’s border patrols, Milton brought to the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors the same “shoot first and ask questions later” attitude he learned as a ranger. From 1924, he passed that culture of impunity to his new Border Patrol recruits just as U.S. lawyer, conservationist, and hardened eugenicist, Madison Grant, became a household name with his 1916 publication, The Passing of the Great Race. Claimed by Hitler as “my Bible,” the book is the bedrock of the Fox News/Breitbart/MAGA-party “Great Replacement Theory” today.
The fear-mongering Madison’s book kicked up in the 1920s might have been the country’s first Culture War. It certainly played an active role in Congress passing the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, with humans still referred to as “aliens,” even in the modern era. The follow-up Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act; authorized the creation of the Border Patrol; further tightened the quotas; and stiffened punishments for what was now called “illegal” entry," criminalizing the act of crossing the line “without inspection” by a border official. The National Origins Act would remain in place until the 1960s, as would the blatant exploitation of Mexican laborers.
Mexicans had moved throughout the borderlands without issue for centuries. They helped to expand and grow the U.S. economy; they turned California’s Imperial Valley into some of the most productive land on Earth. From 1924, when the U.S. southern border was closed and Mexican migration thwarted, treaties had to be negotiated when labor was needed to keep crops from dying in the furrows and factory assembly lines from failing to meet their projected yields. A political compromise was forged between Congress and the southwestern land barons: They could have their cheap labor as long as it was kept temporary and marginalized. This is when the Border Patrol went from merely hunting people to herding folks for the captains of U.S. corporate agriculture, too.
Fast-forward to the 2010s. When whole families as well as unaccompanied children began to arrive at the U.S. southern border—fleeing violence, starvation, climate breakdown, and other repercussions of U.S. political interference, military operations, and economic exploitation—that might have caused us to consider the human costs of our global adventurism; it should have triggered a humanitarian response at our southern border and a rethink of our outmoded immigration and asylum systems. But it didn’t.
Instead, the model of “prevention through deterrence”—unleashed 10 months after NAFTA became official in January 1994 and built on thwarting human migration through the cruelest of means—hardened. Over the last 40 years, a deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that daily flouts legal due process has grown up all around us, hiding in plain sight just outside our privileged view. It is now the global behemoth that many decry as “broken” but which is working just fine for the demagogues and profiteers that benefit from it. In their world, where the outsider is to be feared and our so-called “security” reigns paramount, the 20th-century promise of the universality of human rights no longer applies.
But when home becomes too dangerous to stay, people move. We always have, and we always will—part of the human story since the dawn of time.
That is why deterring humans with walls has never worked, except to inflict misery and to kill. And why the 100-year birthday of a federal agency tasked with people-hunting and herding; prone to stoking vigilante violence; and intent on erecting physical, technological, and bureaucratic barriers—many lethal—against human beings in need is nothing to celebrate.
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