The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

Doris Meissner, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 to 2000, told The Arizona Republic that during the adoption of this strategy, which came to be known as “Prevention Through Deterrence,” enforcement officials and policy makers believed “that geography would be an ally to us” and that border crossings “would go down to a trickle once people realized what it’s like.” But migrants continued to cross despite the new dangers of the journey, endangering their lives in the desert in ways they had never done before. Even as it became obvious that large numbers of people were risking the crossing, resulting in an unprecedented number of deaths in increasingly remote corners of the desert, the government did not change course. “I will be absolutely frank with you,” Meissner told an interviewer when asked to look back on the policy of deterrence in light of migrant deaths—“The idea of abandoning any kind of strengthened border enforcement because of that consequence was not a point of serious discussion.” Meissner’s damning admission—that the sustained loss of hundreds of migrant lives on America’s doorstep each year was not enough to cause the government to re-evaluate policy—reveals the extent to which the desert has been weaponized against migrants, and lays bare the fact that the hundreds who continue to die there every year are losing their lives by design. Deterrence-based enforcement has steered the immigration politics of every administr...