The Long-Distance Run

A road trip through the American West leads to a haunting lesson about a past atrocity—and inspiration from longtime border activists, who share what keeps them going as we enter a dark new chapter.

A 19th century hide painting of the Sand Creek massacre made by artist Stone Rabbit of the U.S. military attacking Cheyenne tribal leader Black Kettle. (Photo: creative commons)

When your job is to pay close attention to our dire political moment, digest the information, and make sense of it in clear, concise words, it can be hard to disconnect. But damned if I didn’t try for my own sanity.

In mid-July, as I drove north on I-25 to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then Denver, billowing clouds floated over the rust-colored, juniper-studded hills, and the green plains of Colorado spread out before me, with the snow-fringed Rockies on the distant horizon.

It was almost as if life were normal.

Before leaving for my road trip, I had promised myself that for a week I would stop scrolling on social media, where there were countless videos of heavily armed, masked agents kidnapping people off the streets. And I would not spiral over the Trump-produced horror show in Los Angeles or Governor Ron DeSantis’s concentration camp in Florida.

I won’t say I was entirely successful, but I did mostly stay off social media. I also learned something new. In Denver, I wandered into the History Colorado Center and soon found myself at an exhibit about the Sand Creek Massacre, a chapter of U.S. history that I had never heard of.

In November 1864, at least 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho women, children, and elders were massacred by U.S. soldiers, even though the U.S. government had promised to leave them alone if they stayed on their ratified treaty land near Fort Lyons, a U.S. Army outpost. Three months earlier, Colorado’s governor had issued a proclamation authorizing the arming of militias to “pursue and destroy” any Indigenous people who did not move their camps near a military fort.

At sunrise on November 29, U.S. Army Colonel John Chivington commanded his men to open fire on the unarmed settlement of Cheyenne and Arapaho. Many soldiers followed his order, butchering women and children as they pleaded on their knees for mercy. Army Captain Silas Soule refused the superior officer’s order and held back his troops, despite being threatened with hanging. Later, in a letter to another military superior recounting Chivington’s massacre, Soule wrote, “Any man who would take part in the murders, knowing the circumstances as we did, was a low lived cowardly son of a bitch.”

Capt. Silas Soule’s family were part of the underground railroad. A friend to abolitionist John Brown and poet Walt Whitman, he testified against his military superior about the massacre at Sand Creek.

Afterward, at a military tribunal, Soule testified to the barbarity he had witnessed. The whole country learned of the horrors at Sand Creek and Chivington’s brutality.

At the end of the trial, the congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of War issued its ruling. Chivington had massacred innocent people, then manufactured a story that it was the Arapaho and Cheyenne who had attacked his soldiers—all to burnish his political career and win a promotion in Washington. “As to Colonel Chivington, the committee can hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct,” the committee wrote. “It is thought by some that desire for political preferment prompted him to this cowardly act; that he supposed that by pandering to the inflamed passions of an excited population he could recommend himself to their regard and consideration.”

Chivington resigned from the military, his reputation in tatters. But he never spent a day in jail. Not long after the military tribunal and Soule’s testimony, Soule was shot dead in the streets of Denver. His killer was never brought to justice.

As I left the museum with all of this swirling in my mind, I spotted a fading image on a brick wall in an alleyway. Later, I looked up this image online. It was Chief Little Raven, an Arapaho tribal leader who had survived the Sand Creek Massacre and, despite the barbarity and greed of the white men who had killed his people, devoted his life to negotiating peace.

Arapaho peacekeeper Chief Little Raven in Denver. (Photo credit: Melissa del Bosque)

There are many dark chapters like this in America’s history. As I stood there in the exhibit, it was hard not to relate our brutal past to the present. The corrupt Chivington had “pandered to the inflamed passions of an excited population” to bolster his career and seek wealth, all the while convincing others to join him in committing atrocities. Sound familiar?

As Americans, we find ourselves again at the beginning of one of these chapters. The pages are still unwritten, but we have all the familiar ingredients that signify tragedy. With the spending bill passed on July 4 by Republicans in Congress, $170 billion will go to building a national police force under the command of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. The massive and dysfunctional DHS, created after the 9/11 attacks, was already politicized by MAGA and, under its current secretary, Kristi Noem, is tasked with neutralizing and punishing political opposition, building out detention facilities and concentration camps—essentially a private for-profit American gulag—and walling off our land borders, which are being placed under military control.

It sounds like a dystopian science fiction movie. I wish it were. The nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America has a full breakdown on the MAGA spending bill, which starkly lays out the consequences as billions are transferred from working families and our social safety net to law enforcement and private corporations for detention and surveillance.

Here are just a few key points:

● ICE and private detention contractors receive an additional $45 billion to spend on detention over the next four years and three months.

● ICE and private transportation contractors receive $14.4 billion over the next four years and three months. That is in addition to half a billion dollars for land-border deportations into Mexico and $100 million to deport unaccompanied children.

● ICE’s annual budget will likely exceed $30 billion a year, and it will be hiring at least 10,000 more agents. When combined with regular appropriations, ICE’s new budget will be larger than most military budgets around the world.

As I returned to Tucson, the Sand Creek Massacre was lodged in my mind as I pondered how to meet this moment—documenting it, weathering it, and retaining a shred of hope for our country. More than 160 years later, many white Americans still don’t accept that the Sand Creek Massacre happened. But the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and countless other Indigenous Americans have held this truth for generations. In 2000, the Arapaho began a new tradition, running from the site of the massacre all the way to Wyoming over several days and hundreds of miles. Along the way, they reinforce their connection with their ancestors and sacred places to heal their trauma.

As an American, I draw hope from Chief Little Raven and Captain Silas Soule, and marvel at their physical and moral courage. I am also buoyed by the countless Americans today who are working to alleviate suffering and provide hope and sustenance to those who are being terrorized and marginalized.

This week, I reached out to longtime border human rights advocates to ask how they and their communities are coping and preparing for what’s ahead. I also asked them, How do you find hope? How do you take care of yourself so that you can continue to help your community during these dark times?

The Border Chronicle also wants to ask you, dear reader, how you and your community are coping. How do you find hope? Are you working alone or with an organization? Please let us know, so that The Border Chronicle can highlight your work.

(San Diego, California) Pedro Rios is the director of the U.S.-Mexico border program for the American Friends Service Committee. Rios has worked on border and immigrant rights justice programs for more than 25 years.

It’s just been staggering to have conversations with people who are changing how they do things in a dramatic way. I would call it social paralysis. I was at a family get together recently, and a friend told me her husband had not been out of the house in weeks. The whole family is glued to the news, trying to figure out whether they will be targeted by ICE or Border Patrol. They’re living in a way that is not sustainable—emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually. At the same gathering, a relative shared how a friend of his, who was present, had his dad picked up by ICE and was deported. He passed away at a shelter in Tijuana because he couldn’t access the medication he needed. Another woman was deported to Tijuana. Now her three children—the youngest eight years old—are being cared for by neighbors. Their mom left one day for work and never came home. I don’t know how an eight-year-old processes that, and the harm will probably live with them for a long time.

It is definitely unprecedented in my lifetime. The closest comparison I can think of, where this level of fear was present, is the months after 9/11, when there was targeted enforcement of specific groups of people. Now it’s much more indiscriminate targeting, with blatant disregard for constitutional protections and due process, and it seems that the administration and its enforcement bodies simply don’t care.

I have been doing this work for a long time, and I think I have a pretty good internal way of coping. I’ve learned how to build a rhythm with my work that allows me to remain within the thresholds that prevent me from developing a health issue. But if you were to ask my wife, she might disagree. The biggest issue right now is this feeling of being unable to support others who are in immediate need. There are several families, for instance, who were targeted a few days ago by ICE and are seeking shelter. They are temporarily staying in hotels, but their money is about to run out. Now they don’t have employment, and their loved ones were apprehended. So, the level of urgency is 10-fold, 100-fold, 1,000-fold, right? It keeps growing as even more people are affected by state violence.

What gives me hope is that so many people are stepping up to help. They’re not affiliated with organizations. They’re just stepping up and helping in any way they can.

I’ve never done therapy. It’s a slow process and not as culturally relevant as I would want it to be. If I want to share something based on my Mexican heritage or my Chicano political identity, is a white therapist going to understand? I doubt it. What I do is run. I’m a long-distance runner, although that has suffered over the past year. I’ve become a mid-distance runner, just because I can’t find the time, or I wake up constantly with headaches these days. I also find some escape in photography, which has been extremely helpful in interpreting the current reality. Many of the exhibitions I’ve submitted to have a theme connected to the current circumstances, whether it’s the closure of Friendship Park, the ICE raids, or how the conditions we’re living through here connect to other situations around the world, such as what’s taking place in Gaza, for instance, and trying to imagine what intersectionality might look like through a photograph. That allows me an opportunity to relieve some of that stress.

(San Diego, California) Jenn Budd is a researcher and border human rights advocate. A former Border Patrol agent, Budd turned whistleblower and wrote a searing 2022 memoir about being raped while in the Border Patrol academy and the many abuses she witnessed while serving as a senior agent. Read more of her work at Borderland Talk with Jenn Budd.

I have a history of mental health issues. I see a therapist, and day to day, I maintain a schedule. I make sure to take the dogs for a walk every morning. I have a big garden and listen to jazz. My wife encouraged me to give up cable news, which has been a huge help. Now I’ll just watch the nightly news before bed and read the rest of my news.

I spent six years as a Border Patrol agent and suffered moral injury, and I was diagnosed with PTSD. I can tell you that what these agents are doing now is breaking the law every single minute of every single day. I was inside that system. Ignoring that trauma and moral injury led to my suicide attempt. Becoming an activist saved me.

I know there are a lot of agents suffering right now: primary trauma, secondary trauma. Everybody’s suffering because of what is happening. The migrants are suffering, the agents are suffering, the immigration attorneys are suffering, and the reporters are suffering because of the shit they see. But then there are those corporations and people who are profiting from this, right? And they are all fine with it.

Activism is a form of therapy for me. It makes me feel good when I’m giving a talk or writing something, and somebody says, “God bless you, thank you for your work.” It means a lot knowing that I’m on the right side of history.

(Eagle Pass, Texas) Amerika Garcia-Grewal is the cofounder of Frontera Federation, a border-wide human rights nonprofit, and the cofounder of Border Vigil, which honors the dead and helps identify the missing at the border.

I see a therapist, and I think of them as strength and conditioning coaches. My therapist is lovely, but a lot of what she talks about is internal stuff. But what if the threats are external? I told her, I need something else. For example, when I taught disaster management, we had a 3+3+3 interval protocol. Say your car skids off the road and plunges into the river. Three minutes is how long you can survive without oxygen. What can you do in that instant to survive? Three days is how long you can go without water. What are you going to do? Three weeks is how long it takes until you can start rebuilding. How do you work with that time? So, anyway, I’m explaining this disaster management framework to my therapist, and I started thinking, “Wow, the answer was beside me all along.”

When the Big Ugly Bill passed on July 4, I was thinking every single kid in the Eagle Pass school district gets a free lunch. Half the kids I know went to college with Pell grants. Our hospitals and every single place I look, we have something that we received from the federal government, not the state government, because the state government just takes from our community. With the cuts from this bill, we’re fixing to be in a world of hurt. And people are very stressed. So maybe we should look at this as disaster management, as well as therapy?

The Border Vigil was founded because when we got the news about the first bodies caught in the buoy barrier on the river, it was almost too much. We were still processing the Uvalde shooting and all the COVID deaths, because there were so many people who died. And I’m looking around at my friends and family, and I’m thinking, we don’t need action. We need to take a moment, take that deep breath, and acknowledge this deep, deep sorrow that we have.

I’ve spent time in the South Pacific, and it’s incredible because people still recognize a one-year mourning period. I had a Tongan friend who, when her father passed away, wore nothing but black for a solid year. It was really interesting to see how it was a social cue. It was like, “How are you doing? Tell me a memory of your father.” You had that moment to say, “Let’s not jump into the next thing. Let’s talk about where you’re at.” Coming back to the States, we have all this loss, but we don’t have any acknowledgment of it.

Collecting biometrics for Operation Identification and doing search and recovery with Aguilas del Desierto gives me hope, because it is providing answers for family members. Your loved one has been identified, and now you know what happened. As Joan Baez said, “Action is the antidote to despair.” There’s a significant amount of sorrow, but by taking action, we can help alleviate the despair that others feel. It’s something I can do right here, you know, think globally, act locally. We all have that opportunity. We just have to listen for it, watch for it, and jump in where we are with what we’ve got.

(El Paso, Texas) Alma Maquitico is the executive director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. She has been involved in immigrant rights and border justice work for more than 25 years.

With each presidential administration, we’ve seen a compounding effect of militarizing the borderlands, and now we have digital technologies being used in immigration enforcement as well. What is different about this administration is that the racial animus and xenophobia are much more explicit. We’re seeing the deployment of the military as law enforcement, with federal law enforcement carrying military weapons when conducting immigration operations, which is becoming normalized. Tanks have also been deployed in our community. There’s one in Sunland Park, and it’s actually closer to the neighborhoods than it is to the border.

There were decades of work by human and civil rights leaders to ensure that we had protections, and now there’s this backlash, not only against those civil rights protections but against the organizations involved in human rights and immigrant rights work. There was never any question about the legality of this work before.

So when you ask, “How are we coping?” I’m not sure how to respond, except to say that we are recognizing this as a new environment in which we’re working and that we have to protect ourselves and the communities we work with.

We are monitoring and documenting the situation with a team of lawyers and faith-based leaders. In El Paso, we are witnessing courthouse arrests and entire families being detained. We are also seeing Border Patrol agents deployed to various neighborhoods who say they are looking for specific people. But we have not seen the kidnapping off the streets like they have done in other states.

We are documenting and corroborating information so that we can continue to inform community members. We are also educating them about their rights, particularly those derived from the U.S. Constitution, which still exist. And we are fighting the normalization of what’s happening right now.

What gives me hope is the amazing musicians and poets who are writing not only about the issues we see in our communities but also about our roots. We are blessed in El Paso to have incredible historians who are giving presentations in the community that put this moment into perspective. It helps to consider what’s happening now in the context of history, knowing that this period has both a beginning and an end.