In mid-October of 2024, the Associated Press reported that 10 times as many individuals had died in New Mexico while crossing the U.S. southern border without authorization in each of the last two years compared with the death toll of five years ago. The first eight months of 2024 saw the recovery of 108 (presumably immigrant) bodies in New Mexico near the border, while 113 bodies were found in 2023. The corresponding figures for 2020 and 2019 were nine and 10, respectively.
The growth in fatalities in New Mexico emerges from two interrelated factors: the shifting of migration routes in the face of intensified border policing in the El Paso area, and a dramatic increase in migrant deaths across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands since the mid-1990s when the Border Patrol instituted its “prevention through deterrence” (PTD) strategy. By concentrating agents and policing infrastructure in and around urbanized areas, PTD pushes unauthorized border crossers toward remote areas characterized by harsh and dangerous terrain. This has compelled migrants to take ever greater risks, resulting in more deaths.
Two recent books help us make sense of how and why violence of multiple sorts has become so prevalent in the ever-expanding U.S.-Mexico borderlands: Michael Steven Wilson and José Antonio Lucero’s What Side Are You On? A Tohono O’odham Life Across Borders, and Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling. The two works shed valuable light on the deep roots of the violence and injustice that reflect and fuel border militarization and the fight against criminalized immigration. They also help readers to see beyond mainstream framings of migration and border politics, provoking important questions about international mobility, humanitarianism, and solidarity, while pointing the way toward a more just world.
Humanitarian Workers, Of Sorts
What Side Are You On? grows out of more than a decade of conversation and collaboration between its two co-authors. The illuminating book revolves around Wilson’s life history to explore Native American sovereignty, U.S. empire, and immigration politics in the U.S-Mexico borderlands. Wilson, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose reservation sits along the U.S.-Mexico divide in southern Arizona, is a former member of the U.S. Special Forces, a lay minister of the Presbyterian Church, and a longtime humanitarian aid worker. The text is a combination of testimonio and scholarly analysis, seeking to show “how imperialism is lived.” Each of the five interior chapters is composed of Wilson’s reflections followed by an “interlude” of background and analysis by Lucero, a professor at the University of Washington.
Born in 1949, Wilson spent much of his youth just beyond the western edge of the reservation in Ajo, Arizona, a mining town first built by Phelps Dodge, a powerful mining corporation infamous for its anti-union tactics. Emblematic of the City Beautiful Movement of the late 1800s to early 1900s, which sought to improve cities through urban planning, Ajo had amenities for its employee residents: an air-conditioned movie theater, playgrounds, and a swimming pool. Racial segregation, however, governed the use of the pool. Ajo’s company-owned housing was similarly apartheid-like, with residential neighborhoods called Indian Village, Mexican Town, and American Townsite. Using a lens of racial capitalism, Lucero explains how the making and policing of race-based differences “facilitate the economic work of exploitation, dispossession, and removal” and thus capital accumulation. The material expression of this analysis underlies Wilson’s recounting that “poverty was always present” during his youth.
Poverty is also shared by the many individuals who animate Jason De León’s gripping work. The book is a combination of ethnography and memoir of the many years he spent hanging out with human smugglers, or guías (guides), from Honduras, largely in Mexico’s borderlands with Guatemala. An anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, De León refuses to reproduce “the trope of the evil smuggler.” To do so, he contends, “is lazy and does nothing to help us understand why the system exists in the first place.”
Like Wilson, the smugglers profiled by De León have grown up in poverty. Their home countries, however, exhibit levels of material deprivation far more profound than the ex-soldier experienced growing up, as Wilson discovered during his time as a U.S. military adviser in El Salvador during the country’s civil war in the 1980s.
What Wilson encountered in El Salvador led him to question the United States’ role in the deep injustices that plague the Central American country and the larger region, as well as his own complicity. He eventually began working with the faith-based organization Humane Borders soon after its establishment in 2000. Over a dozen years, Wilson set up and maintained water stations in areas traversed by unauthorized migrants in the desert lands of the enormous Tohono O’odham reservation, which is roughly the size of the state of Connecticut.
Such work has been critical to the survival of countless individuals traversing the desert borderlands that both unite and separate Mexico and the United States. The same is true for smuggling, a fundamental tool for those fleeing what De León describes as “the familiar ingredients of the Third World: poverty, corruption, disenfranchisement, rage.” Such a characterization underlies his contention that smuggling is “a lifesaving necessity.”
De León admits that smugglers are sometimes active gang members, or even “thieves, traffickers, murderers, and/or rapists.” From the perspective of people in transit to the United States, however, smugglers are essential to navigating an ever more perilous and militarized borderland. De León follows and even befriends some of the smugglers, while maintaining a critical perspective on what they do and on his own position as a privileged “outsider” to their world. At the same time, he is sympathetic to the guías he gets to know. They are, he writes, “[d]estitute men and women who find themselves trapped in a world of violence and fast money while in search of hope.”
In spending as much time as he can with smugglers, De León sometimes even parties with them. His accounts of these experiences depict the importance of drugs and alcohol to their lifestyles. But rather than reproduce the image by U.S. authorities of smugglers as dangerous drug consumers, De León emphasizes the perils associated with their job. These hazards, he writes, “encourage (if not necessitate) drug and alcohol consumption to deal with the constant fear that things can turn very bad at any moment.”
Such fear grows out of the intensifying policing apparatus, central to the Mexican government’s Programa Frontera Sur (Southern Border Program). Beginning in 2014 in response to pressure from the Obama administration, the initiative involves checkpoints, raids, and deportations of unauthorized individuals within Mexico to prevent Central American migrants from reaching the U.S. southern boundary.
De León sees the program as an extension of the PTD strategy. But rather than relying on a weaponized desert to stymie migration, “Mexico’s vast geography and bolstered immigration security services now also act as an impediment to movement.” Given the resulting hardships, people in transit have had to increasingly rely on guides to traverse the country. In doing so, they create “new moneymaking opportunities for cartels and gangs.” This demonstrates how the externalization of the southern border and expanded PTD strategies create pressure for smugglers to charge high prices, as they have to share “their income with criminal networks who monitor and tax their networks.”
De León’s work highlights the highly complicated and fragmented nature of the smuggling enterprise, one which is “subject to rapid change and constant reorganization.” Roles can shift frequently, blurring the boundaries between “migrant” and “smuggler” and “authority.” Such groupings, De León notes, “often defy the tidiness of social science.”
Nonetheless, from the perspective of state authorities, smuggling is clearly defined as a problem to be eradicated. The author himself admits that the smuggling of human beings “is exploitative and violent.” He also contends that it cannot be stopped through a misguided strategy of deterrence.
Rather than being the problem, smuggling is a symptom of a multifaceted disease. “The monstrous injustices created by capitalism that drive migration are the problem,” writes De León: “Poverty, political corruption, the drug trade, transnational gang violence, climate change patterns created by the richest countries and disproportionately felt by the poorest.”
An “Empire of Borders”
De León’s stance is emblematic of how both books, despite approaching border policing from different angles, push their readers toward profound ethical considerations about what to do in the face of ever-hardening borders between rich and poor peoples and places. From Wilson’s vantage point, for the supposed beneficiaries of boundary policing, it is the classic choice between God, or one’s highest moral calling, and Caesar, in the form of the state and its laws. For Wilson, the word of God provides clear instruction.
A key component of What Side Are You On concerns Wilson’s struggle with the governing bodies of the Tohono O’Odham and his own church. In 2002, a local council on the reservation denied Humane Borders’s request to install water stations, a decision Wilson characterizes as “anti-migrant, anti-human rights, and un-Christian.” Under pressure from the council, his local Presbyterian church in the town of Sells, the Tohono O’odham seat of government, endorsed the resolution prohibiting Wilson from putting water out in the desert. The decision left him in disbelief. The church members are not true Christians, he concludes, “because Christians would not threaten to fire their pastor for doing God’s will.”
These experiences underlie Wilson’s critique of Native sovereignty (and national sovereignty more broadly). “Saving lives trumps sovereignty,” he declares. Lucero complements this declaration with a thoughtful exploration of the conflict between what philosopher Greta Gaard calls “ethical context,” in this case, the framework of Native sovereignty, and “ethical content,” the associated policies and practices that unfold within. Such experiences also inform Lucero’s position that emancipatory politics requires imagining and enacting ways of being beyond colonial logic. National sovereignty, he suggests, with its fixed boundaries and hierarchical notions of “us” and “them”—and related practices of exclusion—are incompatible with basic decency.
We live at a time in which U.S. border and immigration policing is more intense and geographically spread out than ever before—involving the enrollment of other national governments and their agents into the U.S. apparatus of mobility control. Under Trump, there is little doubt that it will only get worse. This “empire of borders,” as Todd Miller calls it in his eponymous book, allows a global elite to cross national boundaries with ease while stymieing the movement and futures of a poor global majority.
It is also a time in which growing numbers of people across the world find the places they call home unviable. In the face of such conditions, as Jason De León asserts, “humans will forever seek places where they and their loved ones can thrive and feel safe.” As long as places of wealth and privilege work to stymie the mobility of others, there will be a need for smugglers—fueling “a billion-dollar global industry that will only become more important as parts of our planet grow to be less and less livable,” writes De León.
And there will also be a great need for people like Mike Wilson to provide comfort and aid to them along the way. May we follow his example.
Joseph Nevins teaches geography at Vassar College. Among his books are Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books), and Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge).
