Just two days into his new job as a Border Patrol agent, fresh out of the training academy, Francisco Cantú and other raw recruits out in the desert found a cache of backpacks stuffed with clothes and food.
Their supervisor ordered the agents to destroy the provisions.
“I watched as several of my classmates ripped and tore at the clothing, scattering it among the tangled branches of mesquite and palo verde,” Cantú writes in The Line Becomes a River, his new memoir of his four years with Border Patrol. “…others laughed loudly and stepped on a heap of food. Nearby, Hart giggled and shouted to us as he pissed on a pile of ransacked belongings.”
It was the first—but not the last—time Cantú would see agents deliberately spoil lifesaving food in the remote wilderness; on other occasions he witnessed them slashing water bottles and dumping the water into the parched earth.
The rampage he describes in his book is “damning,” Cantú acknowledged last week during an interview at a Tucson café. “As a junior agent new to the field, I hung back and watched. I did not participate. It felt important to me. I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to step on people’s food or slash water bottles.’ But I was watching. I was there.”
Eventually, Cantú came to understand that he couldn’t absolve himself of guilt for the actions of an agency he was part of.
“After leaving, I recognized that it doesn’t matter that I did nothing,” he says. And slashing water bottles, as he learned, is common practice in the Border Patrol, despite being forbidden by the agency’s policies. “It’s part of a culture of destruction,” he says.
For four years, Agent Cantú worked deserts in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, routinely capturing desperate migrants and sending them on to a labyrinthine immigration system he didn’t know much about. He once apprehended a pregnant woman and her husband, bone-tired from a long trek through the desert, and did the paperwork to send them back home. On one burning August day, he came across a dead body, foaming at the mouth, one of the hundreds of corpses that are found in the southwest deserts every year. The man’s young nephew and another boy were alive, but distraught.
As a Spanish speaker and the grandson of a Mexican immigrant, Cantú had hoped that by showing compassion to beleaguered migrants like those kids and that pregnant woman, he could somehow make a difference. But even that satisfaction was elusive.
One day he took charge of an injured Mexican woman who had given up her journey and surrendered to the Border Patrol. Her feet were burning with silver-dollar size blisters, and Cantú carefully disinfected and bandaged her wounds. She watched him as he worked.
“‘Eres muy humanitario, oficial’ (you’re very humanitarian, officer), she told me,” as he writes in the book. “I looked down at her feet and shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not.'”
Wracked by guilt and despair, and tormented by nightmares about death, Cantú left the agency in 2012.
Cantú’s lyrical and haunting new book has been widely reviewed, but not without some sharp criticism, and he’s done multiple high-profile interviews, including with PBS and NPR. Coming back home to Tucson after a weeks-long book tour. Cantú, 32, will appear at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend.
“I was prepared for backlash on the right,” he says, and there has been social media pushback from Border Patrol agents, who’ve groused that he was just an agent who couldn’t cut it, and now is trying to make a buck at his former colleagues’ expense. But the greater criticism has come from the activist left, he notes, for working for the Border Patrol at all.
Shouting protestors at a bookstore in Austin accused him, among other things, of profiting from the sufferings of families he’d torn apart. Cantú sat down and listened to their criticisms, but after a similar disruption in San Francisco, an Oakland reading was canceled.
Cantú understands the anger. “I was complicit in perpetuating institutional violence and flawed, deadly policy,” he wrote in a tweet. “My book is about acknowledging that, it’s about thinking through the ways we normalize violence and dehumanize migrants as individuals and as a society.”
The reason he joined the Border Patrol, he writes, was to understand the border and find some answers to the conundrum of immigration. He’d studied the border and international relations at American University, but he itched, as he told his dubious mother, “to be on the ground, out in the field, I want to see the realities of the border day in and day out…I don’t see any better way to understand the place.”
Once he quit, he began writing partly to make sense of his own harrowing experiences. But that goal evolved. Writing it as a book while working toward an MFA in the UA’s creative writing program, he wanted “first and foremost to present the border as a place of complexity,” he says, and to “reject the simplicity” of President Trump’s oft-repeated plan “to build a wall” in a region scarred by hundreds of miles of already-existing border walls.
His second objective, he says, is to “call into question the policy of enforcement through deterrence. Hundreds of people die [in the borderlands] every year. Crossings are down, but deaths are up.” (A recent United Nations study calculated that deaths borderwide rose in 2017 to 412 bodies found, despite a 44 percent drop in the numbers of border crossers apprehended by Border Patrol.)
Cantú favors protest against border policies, and points to the success of social media campaigns, such as the widely seen video released online by No More Deaths showing Border Patrol agents slashing water bottles and dumping the water in the desert. He’s also making plans to contribute a portion of his book earnings to humanitarian aid groups in the Southwest.
Since he returned to civilian life, he’s also learned—painfully—about the real-life consequences of harsh border policies on undocumented families. The final third of the book zeroes in on Cantú’s friendship with a co-worker he calls José, a hardworking father of three boys.
José returns to Mexico to be at his dying mother’s bedside, and on the way back home to Tucson he’s caught crossing the border. Processed through Operation Streamline, he serves a month behind bars, then is quickly deported to Mexico.
Cantú tracks José down in Mexico. His friend explains to him that the border wall, no matter how big, will never stop anyone as determined as he is to return to his family.
“I will walk through the desert for five days, eight days, ten days, whatever it takes…they can lock me away, but I will keep coming back,” José says. “I will keep crossing, again and again, until I make it, until I am together again with my family.”
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2018.
Cantu makes a PERFECT argument for the WALL!
For more than a DECADE I’ve ACTED to STOP the exploitation of Mexico’s poor by Fat-Cat Gringo contractors and factory owners AND the Law Enforcement, Criminal Justice, Prison Industrial Complex which THRIVES on a never ending stream of Mexico’s poor to catch, prosecute, defend, adjudicate, imprison, etc.
Got it?
Put UP the Wall and Keep Mexicos poor OUT of American prisons!
If anything this book makes me proud of our Border Patrol agents knowing they are disregarding the dictations of a traitorous president by enforced our immigration laws and our constitution. The only sad part is they had to leave trash in our desert because of this UN-American’s policies. Thanks to all Border Patrol Agents who read this and please ignore any negative remarks and keep up the good work. May obamanation go on record as the most anti-American president on record. May he rot in h*ll and god bless Trump.
And yet the Weekly and Star continue to support policies that ensure illegal immigration, and all the problems that come with it, will continue into the foreseeable future.
Just pass mandatory E-Verify and enforce it. It’s better for poor working class Americans, including many minorities.
BSLAP:
The Weekly employs the COMMUNIST tactic of first CREATING SOCIAL MISERY in order to make REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE.
The Weekly ENJOYS the misery THEY help create!
At first, I thought your original comment was sarcastic. Then I read the above and it proved what your true meaning was meant to be. Your comment reminds me of the statement that the NRA spokeswomen, Dana Lorch made about how the “legacy” media enjoys mass shootings. The accusation that the Weekly creates the social misery that results from ones desire to better their lives, however dangerous and deadly that may be, just shows how inhuman your beliefs are.
Note to the lawless: We are a nation of laws.
As I am out in the desert at least once a week between the border and Tucson, I have some random questions.
Regarding trash…
I have seen old tires, car batteries, carpet scraps, Fisher Price children’s toys, old sofas, heaps of appliances like refrigerators, car parts, electronics, lumber, pallets, and more…entire sets of kitchen cabinets, trash from campers or hunters, bicycles, toys, yard refuse, rotten mattresses, and more…brought over the border to be dumped in this fragile desert by immigrants? I think not. Sadly this desert is spoiled with trash from people who are too lazy to take their stinking garbage to the dump. All this on public land! Recently I found (and I am not being hyperbolic), literally a pick up truck load of Budweiser and Bud light bottles and cans dumped in the desert. Those Mexicans sure came a long way to dump their trash in the USA. Disgusting.
Where are your grandparents from?
Migration is nothing new. It has been going on before there were borders or superficial lines in the sand. Walls will not stop the natural urge to live free and escape oppression. Trump and his racist attitude toward world migration is naive, short sighted, and inspired by fear and hate. Remember, this was Mexico long before it was Arizona/USA.
John Canally: OF COURSE the Weekly helps to create the social misery!
It’s a classic Communist tactic.
Do YOU know how many children are kidnapped by cartels each year and sold into sexual slavery?
Have YOU read about “Rape Trees?”
Do YOU understand the misery visited upon Illegals by the act of Illegal Entry?
Go to Federal Court, SIT in on some trials, and find out!
If YOU or the rest of the Left wing were TRULY “humanitarian” YOU would help put up the WALL!!
Only then WILL we have “No Mas Muertes!”
Thanks to ronko for serving up the standard collection of open borders bromides:
– “Americans dump trash in the desert too.” That’s right. They shouldn’t do that. We also shouldn’t add to the problem by permitting hundreds of tons of trash and human waste to be dumped in, and hundreds of miles of wildcat trails to be cut in, our public lands.
– “People have always moved.” Immigration is not an inevitable law of nature, like winter or the tides. It is the result of a policy choice. We could end illegal immigration tomorrow with border security, internal enforcement, and mandatory e-verify. Illegal immigration occurs because we choose to permit it. We can make different choices.
– “Illegal immigrants come to live free and escape oppression”. Is Mexico substantially un-free or oppressive? Studies on this topic indicate that illegal immigrants come to the United States for better paying jobs, not because they are suffering human rights violations.
– “This land was once Mexico!” This land was Mexico from 1821 to 1853 – 32 years. For perspective, Russia claimed California and the Pacific Northwest for about the same amount of time. But we wouldn’t permit boatloads of Russians to land on California’s shores. This land has been part of the United States for 165 years. THIS land, i.e., the land of the Gadsden Purchase, was freely sold by Mexico, at above market prices, because Mexico was having trouble pacifying the apaches, and it couldn’t settle it. At some point, it’s ours, and we have the same right over it that any other nation state has over its sovereign territory – the right to decide who we invite to join our national community. That’s our right. We get to decide. Not them.
Well isn’t his heart bleeding, the point is don’t cross into this country illegally through the dessert and you won’t need stashed food and clothing. Come here the right, legal way. If that is not good enough for you I’m sorry but it is our law.
Dear Narco,
You are most welcome.
While I would never expect you to agree with me, or change your opinion of which I respect, I will simply explain my thinking.
First, you are correct in saying that Mexico is not necessarily oppressive toward it’s people (currently). They do have a bad track record in Chiapas however, and in how they treat the poor and indigenous…as does this country. Most of the migrants crossing without papers for quite some time are from the Honduras and El Salvador, where people have a choice to either become gang members or leave. Those are essentially failed states.
NAFTA did a serious number on Mexican independent farmers. It was cheaper for Mexicans to buy our government subsidized corn (a main staple) than to purchase it locally within Mexico. That put many small farmers out of work. That is why in the early 2000s there was a flood of migrants from Mexico. Some are still coming or trying to recover economically.
I fail to believe that a bigger Trumpian gold clad wall will make much difference. Who will pay for it?
Hell Arizonans don’t even like to pay taxes for better roads, teachers, or trash pick up…(witness all the home grown crap in the desert). The difference must come from policy from both countries. Our elected congress and house has done nothing since the W administration. W had a reasonable migration plan that even a dominating Republican Congress would not pass. Since then it has been gridlock. What do these lawmakers get paid to do?
As far as Russia goes, they’ve put their claim in for the entire USA in the last election.
Now that the three countries have or are adjusting to NAFTA, to rip it out may not be the best idea. Certainly we should see how it can be tweaked to improve things regarding the economy and issues of migration.
Here is my final bleeding heart bromide.
I am the grandson of immigrants. Dirt poor Polish and Hungarian immigrants, who had very little money, no education, and no language. They learned the language, paid taxes, obeyed the law, and kept fine, neat houses. Just about everyone in my home town was the child or grandchild of immigrants. Our folks may not have made it to college, but they held 2 jobs much of their lives so my brother and I could attend. I guess I simply believe in the system, the fact that even under our current baby president, this is the greatest country on earth. I am patriotic, and if I make a mistake, I hope it is on the generous and loving side, rather than one of xenophobic hatred.
If my heart bleeds for other human beings, it does so proudly. It’s how I was raised.
Ronko, I find your virtue signaling tiresome. You oppose immigration controls because you think it makes you a good person, morally better than those nasty Trumpian xenophobes. Let me ask you a question: where does it stop? There are about a billion humans on this planet who would come to this country if they could. Do we let them all in? You would overload the lifeboat just so you could be smugly satisfied in your own righteousness as everyone, including you, goes to the bottom and drowns.
I have a different conception of my moral duty. I believe that the founders of my country established it to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity. I believe that hundreds of thousands of my forebearers died to conquer and secure this land so that it could be passed on to their descendants. I believe that I hold this country in trust for my children, and my as yet unborn grandchildren, and then I am morally obligated to pass this nation on to them at least as good as I found it. That means it is immoral for me to give it away to anyone who can walk here.
Never said I opposed regulations. You are working too hard to hate me. Re read my piece. George W. Bush, dunce president and certified liar, actually had a reasonable plan for migrants in this country from south of the border. His conservative controlled congress did not want it.
Give me some statistics re the billions. I write about what I have experienced first hand, or have read in credible history sources. I’ve traveled in Mexico often and the fact is all the Mexican people I have met want to stay in their country, near their families.
Your moral duty is your biz. I congratulate you that you are even thinking about a moral duty. You are light years ahead of our baby prez.
It’s easy to hate…it takes work and commitment to love. I go for love.
It’s a complex world. It isn’t black and white. It’s black, brown, yellow, red, and white and many colors in between. And it is going to keep changing. Nothing stays static. What is your moral duty to the indigenous who your and my founders walked in on stole their land, and claimed their own?