Welcome new subscribers! And thank you to all who’ve selected to become paid supporters of my newsletter, Tales of Humanity, and podcast, From the Borderlands. I haven’t had a chance to thank you all personally yet. But know that my gratitude to you knows no bounds! You’ll hear from me soon. I’m just super slammed right now, preparing for the launch of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, second edition, on October 7, as well as booking speakers for the Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series, and my forthcoming East Coast speaking tour.
The tour is taking me, so far, to Boston, Amherst, New Paltz, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and New York City. There is still room in my calendar. So, if you’d like me to engage with your community, whether in person or virtually, please don't hesitate to reach out.
For now, I give you my 95th publication here on Substack (can you believe that? I can’t!), with special thanks to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jenn Budd, Juan Gonzalez, Todd Miller, María de Jesús Puga Morán, and Dan Kowalski.
Introduction
A little-known fact, something I learned while researching Crossing the Line, is that the whole of the United States is encircled in a 100-mile policing zone. This zone traces the entire perimeter of the lower 48: 100 miles eastward and westward from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans; 100 miles southward and northward from land borders with Canada and Mexico.
This zone contains 2/3rds of the US population, 9 of our 10 largest cities, and 6 whole states, by my count, including Hawai’i, as well as the District of Columbia.
Also little-known is that this zone is the policing jurisdiction of a 60,000-member force — and counting — that knows no transparency. And since the second Trump regime dissolved its Civil Rights and Civil Liberties ombudsman and oversight bodies in early 2025, this force now knows no accountability, which should trouble us all, for these were the troops turned on all of us during the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020.
I speak of Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, one of 22 federal tentacles of the post-9/11 bulwark erected to combat terror with terror: the Department of Homeland Security, now the beating heart of the worldwide Border Industrial Complex, itself the offspring of the Cold War-era Military Industrial Complex.
When Customs and Border Protection was inaugurated in 2003, it subsumed the US Border Patrol. That force, dating to 1924 — when the US was in the grips of a nativist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant raging fervor much like it is today — was built on the rotten foundations of white supremacist ideology, The Border Patrol deputized members of the Ku Klux Klan, former Slave Patrollers who’d traveled west after the Civil War to become Texas Rangers or to ride with the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. The job of the Border Patrol was to exclude and eject those deemed unwelcome by a US government then under the influence of a quack-science, called Eugenics, which would animate the rise of fascism in Germany within a decade.
From the start, US Border Patrol policing practice relied on racial profiling. At the height of the civil rights movement, in the 1970s, the policy was questioned as unconstitutional. Yet, in a series of dubious decisions, the US Supreme Court gave the Border Patrol carte blanche to carry on as it had since its openly racist beginnings. It allowed for the relentless erosion of all of our constitutional protections, from unlawful searches and seizures, as enshrined in the 4th Amendment.
Enforcement through racial profiling was inherited by the agency of Customs and Border Protection when it became operational in March 2003. The Obama administration tried to curtail the practice, without success. One Department of Homeland Security official told the New York Times, “We can’t do our job without taking ethnicity into account. We are very dependent on that.”[1]
Racial profiling is now on its way to becoming the law of the land. On September 8, 2025, in a 6-3 decision made under its shadowy shadow docket, Trump’s Supreme Court declared that racial profiling by ICE is a-okay in LA; that ICE officers no longer need “probable cause” to pull someone’s car over or drag them out of their house or remove them from their job or their children in chains. Skin color, language, accent, and job description are now enough, in the so-called Land of Laws, to tackle, shackle, and put someone on a one-way bus to prison, then on a one-way plane to refoulement.
“The net effect,” states immigration attorney Dan Kowalski, is “that every non-White person in America is now a target for ICE, even if you are an American citizen.”[2]
For the moment, this new latitude afforded to ICEby the six conservative members of the increasingly criminal Roberts’ court is limited to Los Angeles. But it's just another in a long line of slippery slope; another tear in the fabric of the US Constitution; another step toward the normalization of authoritarian rule in the so-called “Beacon of Hope.”
It’s only a matter of time — unless we stop it — that this constitution-free immunity, heretofore enjoyed only by CBP and only in the 100-mile US border periphery, will roll into an interior domestic location near you, complete with masked agents riding around in armored vehicles, their guns and tear gas canisters at the ready in the US and under the auspices of ICE.
On the eve of engorging itself on a budget bigger than the DEA, ATF, FBI, Marshall’s Service, and Bureau of prisons, combined, ICE and CBP have been harnessed as the private paramilitary of a US president, just as I predicted they would be in my book Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands if given the keys to the Oval Office once more.
Now that warning has come true. From October 2025, federal agents operating under the Department of Homeland Security will be funded by Congress to patrol the so-called “Land of Free” like Hitler’s Brownshirts, like Pinochet’s military junta, like Central American death squads, which by the way, were 100% made in the USA.
How did we reach this wretched place?
* By never facing up to the fact that we are a nation born from the violence of enslaving other people and the genocidal displacement of human beings caused by manifest destiny.
* By legitimizing former Slave Patrollers and Bounty Hunters with guns and badges as Texas Rangers and Border Patrol agents.
* By imprisoning Black and Brown newcomers as far back as 1980, when the first immigration prison, set up in a decommissioned missile defense site in Krome, Florida, kicked off the development of the world’s largest immigrant enslavement system in the world, 80% of which is operated for profit.
* By developing laws that punish Black and Brown newcomers more harshly for misdemeanor crimes, while cutting off their pathways to citizenship at the same time.
* By erecting a terrifying so-called “War on Terror” behemoth on these same rotten white-supremist foundations upon which the Border Patrol was established.
* And by allowing for the 40-year evolution of a propaganda machinery which for too long has mainlined disinformation, hate speech, and lies into the veins of the US populace, posing as a purveyor of news, and creating the cult of MAGA.
The rise of fascism in the US is inextricably linked to what I call the “Foxification of America.” Its adherents love to squawk about how migrant workers, asylum seekers, and refugees are a strain on local economies. But the business of jailing and expelling folks seeking safety and dignified life, per their human and legal rights, is a booming business in the USA, particularly in Greg Abbott’s Ruby-Red Texas, Ron DeSantis’s Ruby-Red Florida, and throughout the once Confederate Ruby-Red Deep South.
According to the Sentencing Project, which advocates for prison abolition in the US, fewer than 5,000 immigrants were detained by the US federal governmentwhen, on September 11, 2001, the Pentagon was breached and the World Trade Center reduced to ash. As of this recording, on September 11, 2025, that number is over 61,000 people. And Trump & Co are en route to incarcerating 100,000 people, or more, most of whom — the large majority of whom — have committed no crime, no matter what pundits spew on Fox News. No matter what statements the White House and DHS spokespeople spin.
That’s another thing I learned while writing this book: opaque federal agency spokespeople lie. They just lie. They just tell people what they want them to believe.
By inauguration day 2017, writes American history professor and scholar of fascism and authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “the anti-democratic policies and actions that followed 9/11 had become normalized. Zones within the federal government, like DHS, rewarded authoritarian attitudes and policies.”[3]
In other words, the US government’s response to 9/11 paved the way to our current democratic crisis. The first Trump regime tried, but the second Trump regime has succeeded in weaponizing immigration to drive a stake into the heart of US democracy. And the infrastructure of surveillance and repression born from the 9/11 attacks bequeathed to a sociopath the foot soldiers of fascism now training their arms upon us.
From Chapter 16 of Crossing the Line…
I give you the origin story of the Department of Homeland Security, which, from its beginnings, has failed to keep any of us safe at all. Click the link above.
Conclusion
With the MAGA party in control of both Congress and the White House, the courts are now the principal battlefield where the fight for the soul of the nation is now being waged. As I record this in the wake of yet another nihilistic decision by the highest court in the land, whether the judiciary can safeguard our rights is a chillingly open question.
Have Trump & Co succeeded in harnessing immigration to drive us into a constitutional crisis?
Or can we, the people, save US democracy?
For Strategies of Resistance…
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For a deeper understanding of how we reached this wretched place…
I invite you to read Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, available wherever print, e-, and audiobooks are sold.
And if you would like to convene an Immigration Study Circle with your community, I’m ready to support you with discounts on purchases of books by the box, if ordered through me, and virtual meet-ups. Contact me through my website: sarahtowle.com. Or click the image below…
For now, stay strong, everyone. The only way through this is… together.
XOXO Sarah
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[1] Apuzzo, Matt Apuzzo and Michael S. Schmidt. U.S. to Continue Racial, Ethnic Profiling in Border Policy. New York Times, Dec. 5, 2014.
[2] Kowalski, Dan. All People of Color: And some White folks, too. Involuntary Departure, Sept 10, 2025
[3] Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. 9/11 as Shock Event: The Path to Illiberal Politics. Lucid, Sep 11, 2022.
