Peacemaking in the Borderlands: A Reflection on the Farce of “Border Security”
Border “security” is an act of war. It’s time to look to the peacemakers, who just might hold the answers.
L. J. was outside her house, about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border in rural Arizona, when she saw five people slowly walking down her driveway, all dressed in camouflage. At first she was startled. But after talking to the small group, she found out that they were from Guatemala en route to jobs up north. Agents had come down on them with a helicopter, stirring up so much dust that they ran. Now they were afraid Border Patrol was on their tail. They were lost, disoriented, thirsty, and hungry.
This happened several years ago.* I highlight this story because of what L. J. did next. She could have called Border Patrol and turned the group in. She could have given them water and sent them on their way. But she did something else, going above and beyond in a way that cut through the dire narratives that often plague the borderlands.
Before I get to that, though, let’s review what militarization looks like on the border today. Since Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has deployed 8,500 active-duty military to the U.S.-Mexico border, turned vast areas of the border into restricted military zones known as National Defense Areas, deployed Stryker combat vehicles to the NDAs, and built large detention camps on military bases like Fort Bliss in El Paso. This is only the last eight months, but it follows three decades of persistent border militarization executed by multiple administrations, both Democratic and Republican. Over these decades, the U.S.-Mexico land border has become one of the most militarized and deadly places on the planet.
In other words, it is time to retire the term border security. It is inaccurate. What we are witnessing on the border is an act of war. This war has been underway for a long time, whether we date it from the Pentagon’s low-intensity conflict doctrine (which spawned border strategy in the 1980s, partly based on counterinsurgency operations in Central America) or in the aftermath of the 1848 Mexican-American War, in which the U.S. seized nearly 50 percent of Mexican territory, the origin of much of today’s 2,000-mile border.
A long historic process has created the conditions enabling the Trump administration to go to the extreme, to effectively declare war at the border without using those precise words, justified by the tactical, repetitive use of “invasion” as a pretext. That process is made possible by the mind-numbing term border security, which obscures violence and war, twisting it into “protection.” And how could anyone oppose protection?
The border wars are unconventional. No heroic military documentary would feature a group of defenseless Guatemalans getting dusted by a helicopter. Most border brutality occurs far from the media’s cameras, in distant deserts and seas, not just on U.S. borders but around the world. It’s not very cinematic, since enforcement targets some of the most vulnerable people on the planet—people who have suffered greatly from violence and persecution, war, environmental devastation, and severe economic inequality—sometimes all four at once. Globally, the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project has documented more than 72,000 deaths of people crossing borders since 2014, which the organization stresses is an undercount, possibly a massive one. Last year was the most deadly yet for migrants. If border security were a person, it would be arrested for assault; it would be arrested for murder.
In the end, it is an act of war. And the silver lining is that war summons the peacemakers.
In late July, I attended the Veterans for Peace annual conference to speak on a panel about border issues. It was inspiring to be around so many people who had witnessed the horrors of war and who now promote and practice peacemaking, often at great risk, including court-martial. Throughout the weekend, a large screen featured a feed from a freedom flotilla, with a VFP representative aboard, carrying food aid to the Gazan shores. As anticipated, the feed abruptly cut off when the boat was intercepted by the Israeli military. The flotilla evoked the world’s historic peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, among many others. There is a common thread among those who have intervened in places of great injustice, articulating a new vision during those interventions—a vision profoundly different from the local reality, brought forth at great risk to their own well-being. I looked across the conference hall and saw hundreds of people like this including Dora Rodriguez, who sat right next to me, the founder of the human rights organization Salvavision.
Later, I thought about what L. J. did that day on the border. The borderlands are filled with peacemakers—whether organizations, communities, or individuals. They just need to be recognized, brought out from behind the illusory blockade of “border security.”
That group of Guatemalans who walked up L. J.’s driveway had the hardened faces of people who had been through this border war. L. J. invited the group into her house, served them fresh, clean water, and opened up her bathroom for them to take showers. Then she began to make breakfast. Except it wasn’t just breakfast; it was a feast, like a holiday feast. She put a leaf in the dining room table. She laid out cloth napkins. She made scrambled eggs the Guatemalan way, with onions and tomatoes; she made black beans, heated corn tortillas, cut avocado, fried potatoes, and produced a fruit plate piled high with melons, peaches, and cherries. “I had baked blueberry muffins the day before, and not a crumb was left,” she told me.
A friend of L. J.’s later told her, “You didn’t have to do that.” The friend said, “They were already used to eating whatever canned food they could carry” and drinking cloudy water, possibly from a cattle trough and infested with bacteria. L. J. responded, “We need for people to feel like the human beings they are.” L. J. said this knowing that at any moment, Border Patrol could storm her house and accuse her of several felonies. When I asked her if she was afraid of that, she smiled and said there was nothing else she could do.
L. J.’s actions, however small, carried a vision of not only a world where people help each other, but also the type of world that Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about in The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, a world where everybody flourishes. “A perception of abundance,” Kimmerer writes, “based on the notion that there is enough if we share it, underlies economies of mutual support.”
Perceptions of abundance and mutual support, however, become difficult with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Trump’s crowning achievement, signed into law in July), which cuts health care, housing, clean energy, among other things, to fund what would amount to the most significant increase in border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history. While this follows a long history of reducing basic human services as border and military budgets rise, the bill puts these two distinct trends together with crystal clarity.
But the good news is that the opposite can also be done. Border budgets can be cut back to fund, say, programs like Medicaid.
Perhaps part of the peacemaking task in the borderlands is to reclaim the word security from militarism, to discard border security and replace it with human security—a distinct approach to security that prioritizes the well-being of individuals and communities, that empowers people, and that addresses any threats to their livelihood, dignity, and survival.
Border funding could be cut to finance a system in which people don’t drink poisoned water, as in Flint, Michigan; don’t end up bankrupt after going to college or a hospital; have a roof over their heads. It could even fund an authentic and durable response to the changing climate. Real security measures.
At the very least, in these times, we have to set aside the dire, predictable narratives attached to the borderlands and explore new ways of thinking. This might come at a risk, but like L. J. said, what else is there to do?
Bring on the peacemakers.
* This story is taken from my book Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders.
A big "Amen" to what you have written, Todd. Thank you for the beautiful "prayer" near the end, calling for an end to the nightmare of "border security" in favor of an expansive security for all. Yes, let us bring on the peacemakers. May we become them.
Inspiring and affirmational, thank you.