Hey, everyone. Sarah here. Thanks for joining me for another episode of From the Borderlands ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼.
Podcast Transcript:
Six years ago this week, I landed in Brownsville, Texas, to see for myself the inhumanity I then believed had been wrought by Trump, his acolytes, and puppeteers, folks like Stephen Miller, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, and acting director of ICE, Thomas Homan (to name just a few). The Family Separation crisis brought on by their zero-tolerance for border crossers, even those seeking safety, had been replaced by policies such as metering and the Migrant “Protection” Protocols (AKA the Remain in Mexico policy), which trapped the “world’s most vulnerable people,” borrowing the UN’s terms, in some of the most dangerous places on earth… and didn’t offer them any protection at all.
Whether tearing families apart or turning them back to become fodder for organized crime, cruelty was their point.
I went to bear witness. I went to learn and to serve. It turned out to be an Epiphany of epiphanies as I realized that the militarization of the US southern border and the systemic cruelty it spawned did not start with them: Trump & Co.
Rather, they had been bequeathed a deterrence to detention to deportation pipeline characterized by the cruel and quiet enslavement of the many for the financial benefit of the few. This for-profit machinery of imprisonment and expulsion, what’s more, suffered no transparency or accountability, and human and civil rights abuses within it were rife.
It was a system of misery that had grown up all around me — all around all of us — hiding in plain sight in the so-called Land of the Free. A bipartisan project, kick-started by the Reagan administration but allowed to expand by politicians on both sides of the aisle, including Democrats such as Clinton, Obama, and Biden.
That my service coincided with an Epiphany celebration in the Matamoros, Mexico refugee camp of roughly 3,000 mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, grandparents, children, and tiny babies — an encampment, just one of many, created by US government policy — brought home this realization a well: that US administrations and citizens alike had largely betrayed the most enduring teachings of the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran,
to welcome the stranger and treat foreigners as you would “the native among you,” for by doing so, “you might show hospitality to angels,” or, indeed, to the son of God himself.
Instead, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, son of an avowed Alabama segregationist and a lifelong church-goer, invoked Romans 13 to defend their cruelty toward newcomers, stating that God created governments to maintain social order and that we would be wise to obey Trump & Co’s authority. It was the same scripture used to justify the enslavement and routine daily torture of Black people in his ancestral prison labor camps, aka plantations.
He insinuated that Trump & Co’s governance was divine and that if we allowed kindness and compassion to stand in their way, there would be hell to pay — fire and brimstone all the way, for showing empathy.
It was the stuff of Christian Nationalism, an ideology that “talks religion, but walks fascism,” which we’d seen unleashed under the banner of Unite the Right in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017. What I saw on the border during Epiphany 2020 was a potential standing paramilitary army posing as a border “protection” and “security” apparatus that could be harnessed and turned against us at any time: a Gestapo-like force infiltrated by white supremacists in the democratic USA that operated a for-profit gulag of then over 200 prisons that targeted Brown and Black people with deprivation and abuse.
I saw a modern ethnic cleansing, or dare I say, a new kind of genocide.
I decided to write a book for those like me who, if they only knew, would be outraged too. I entitled it The First Solution: Tales of Humanity from the Borderlands, a hat-tip to my literary mentor, Toni Morrison, who wrote in 1995:
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution,there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third.The move toward a final solution is not a jump.It takes one step, then another, then another.”
But my publisher, editor, and first readers agreed: the title would be too triggering for some; and too obtuse for others, particularly those too young to remember the Holocaust under German fascism; or those denied the opportunity to learn about it in schools taken over by Christian Nationalists intent on (literally) white-washing history. My editorial team changed the title to Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, in which “America” does not connote a place, but is code for White Supremacy.
During the feast of Epiphany one year later, on January 6, 2021, the same proto-fascist so-called Christians attempted to keep a would-be dictator in the White House through a violent insurrection that he fomented.
And during the Epiphany feast of 2026, the same crackers who produced a made-for-Fox-TV “invasion” to whip up a moral panic among an indoctrinated electorate — folks programmed to look the other way as their white supremacist leadership carries out an ethnic cleansing of our Brown and Black neighbors while wielding an upside-down bible — these same crackers invaded a sovereign nation with which the US was not at war, and kidnapped that country’s president. With our money and in our name, they killed innocent people in the buildup, as well as in their wake, in an act of aggression that clearly defies international law.
Then they launched a new White House website that rewrites the history we all witnessed with our own eyes on January 6, 2021.
Another of my literary heroes, George Orwell, wrote decades ago:
“... terrible things follow when leaders can create their own facts.”
Trump & Co say their illegal act of aggression against Venezuela was intended to stop Nicolas Maduro from trafficking fentanyl to the US. But fentanyl isn’t produced in Venezuela, nor is fentanyl mentioned in the charging documents against Maduro and his wife. Cocaine is. But Trump & Co just let a known cocaine trafficker out of a life sentence in US federal prison, former president Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras. So cocaine trafficking can’t be the reason for their illegal invasion of Venezuela either.
Could it be about oil, as Trump himself indicated? That would be on point.
Could it be about distracting us from the regime’s intransigence to produce the Epstein files, which surely link their leader to a global sex trafficking ring from which he benefited? Most assuredly.
Could it be about Putin’s hard-on for territorial expansion? The Danes, Canadians, and Cubans certainly think so, as do those who’ve been sounding the alarm for years that Trump is a Russian asset, a plaything of Putin.
Could it be that Trump is a mob boss eager to enrich himself on the global drug trade as the head of the most powerful cartel angling to usurp all other cartels?
Only time will tell.
What is evident, today, is that Trump & Co have unleashed a war to seize our freedoms for the benefit of billionaires — and now a trillionaire — worldwide.
They are the Worst of the Worst. And they are in the White House. And they do not wish to leave. Not. Ever.
Crossing the Line was meant to be a historical chronicle. On November 3, 2020, we thought Trump & Co’s crimes and impunity were finally behind us. But on November 5, 2024, the book became a bellwether of what was to come in 2025, prompting my publisher and editor to agree: We are in the throes of a paradigmatic global shift, in which people seeking safety and dignity per their legal right under the post-WWII new world order are enslaved and disappeared, courtesy of the US taxpayer.
On October 7, 2025, a second edition of Crossing the Line hit bookstore shelves. In the new Author Foreword, I offer some thoughts on how we, the people, can and must resist. Because these dark days will end, they always do. And we must be ready to build a more humane world from the ashes.
Only we can fix this. But not if we stand down, or stand by.
I hope you’ll find some inspiration from the all-new Author Foreword of Crossing the Line, second edition. Click on the play button above ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼.
Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in your ears soon with more Tales of Humanity From the Borderlands, which are now everywhere, including right in your backyard.
Until then, stay strong, everyone. The only way through this is…Together.
Sarah ✊🏼
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