Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

by Jacob Soboroff

The San Ysidro Port of Entry is the largest land border crossing in the world. Tens of thousands of cars and hundreds of thousands of human beings make their way between Tijuana and San Diego on a daily basis. So do an untold volume of narcotics—more than anywhere else along the entire southern border. As President Trump continued to make the case for his big, beautiful border wall, I was curious if it would do what he said: stop drugs from “pouring across” the southwest border. At least here, the answer was no way. Most hard narcotics come through legal ports of entry, like this one, and today was no exception.

That begged a question: If Mexican cartels were smuggling drugs mostly in places you had to show your passport, who was crossing in between the ports—where there were no walls—or trying to get around the ones that did exist? Mostly, it was Central American family members looking to seek asylum. It was a group now in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.

We reported that most undocumented immigrants come by air, not the southern border; that most drugs come through ports of entry; and while visiting Trump’s “big, beautiful” prototypes we watched a little girl wearing a pink backpack and her family declare asylum at the base of it after they were apprehended by officers on horseback.

Between 2012 and 2017, the report explains, “the United States has seen a shift in the demographics of migrants encountered at our borders—from a majority of adult males, often from Mexico seeking employment, to families, children, grandparents, aunts, and uncles fleeing together, seeking protection in the United States, coming mostly from Central America. Tragically, U.S. Immigration enforcement policies, instead of shifting to adapt to this significant change, have continued to try forcing a square peg into a round hole, and in doing so have compounded the vulnerabilities of families and protection-seeking migrants. Instead of promoting family unity, we as a nation are breaking families apart.”

“You build a fifteen-foot wall, they’ll build eighteen-foot ladders,” Commissioner Fuentes responds as my head dangles over the side of the levee, looking at the drop below. I don’t get it, I think to myself. What’s the point? If you build it, they will get around it. Maybe the Trump administration knows something I don’t.

Humanitarian groups believe the Clinton-era policy of “prevention through deterrence,” while leading to a drop in border crossings, also made those crossings purposefully more dangerous and deadly. It’s an uncomfortable conversation for some in “the resistance” to have: in nearly three decades of deterrence-based bipartisan immigration policy, starting with Clinton, the United States border with Mexico has become increasingly militarized. Consequentially, fewer migrants have attempted to cross the southern border, but the most desperate among them haven’t stopped trying. Moreover, the number of people who die trying to cross in more dangerous and deadly areas has remained constant.

After family separation, at least seven migrant children died in the custody of Customs and Border Protection. No child had perished in the previous ten years. A sadly predictable outcome to a punitive Border Patrol enforcement strategy based around “consequence delivery,” or “prevention through deterrence.” It was an outcome that an activist with No More Deaths, a humanitarian group that leaves water bottles for migrants in the Arizona desert, told me had happened before and would happen again so long as the border was militarized.