“I don’t know where the bones come from”
On death and dehumanization at the border, and the long arc of American fascism
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” -Walter Benjamin, 1940
In this moment of spiraling state and stochastic terror, as the imperial boomerang slices through the Middle East like a mad butcher, bending back, blood-stained, to sling its terrible shock homeward, we might be inclined to focus on the unfamiliar—to perceive our apocalyptic present as a rupture from some stable past. This, to say it simply, is the myopia of privilege. It is the liberal analogue, or inversion, of Make America Great Again: a grasping for an era or ethos that never was, at least not for the people whose graves paved the way for its “progress.”1
“In America, we have due process.” “In America, we don’t have kings.” “In America, we don’t go to war without congressional approval.” “In America, we welcome immigrants.”
But what is due process to the thousands coerced into private prisons by plea deals or churned into detention camps by the bipartisan “consequence delivery system” known, officially, as Operation Streamline.2 What is a country without kings, when it is ruled by capitalists? What does it matter, to the victims, if Congress rubber stamps a war or the president unilaterally makes one? What does it mean to “welcome” some immigrants—displaced, in all likelihood, by U.S. destabilization—at the expense of a million more trapped behind the walls of our militarized borders? What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?
“To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence… There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States…” -Frederick Douglass, 1852
I don’t mean to downplay the seriousness of our situation. Quite the opposite. I have never been so horrified in my life. But if we hope to overcome it, we need to look at things squarely, and in context. We need to understand, as George Jackson said in 1971, that fascism is already here.
Trump is expanding the categories of disposability deployed by the state to determine the legitimate targets of its violence. He is consolidating power and chipping away at gains made through decades of social struggle. But he is not inventing systems of oppression from thin air—he is deepening ones that already existed, resurrecting their more primitive styles and retrofitting them for the era of AI slop and mass shootings. He is entrenching ideologies of hate born through colonization and nurtured by the bloody history of the United States. He is building on what has already been built, by both parties, and in many cases quite literally: ICE, for example, would not have the infrastructure, resources, and power it has today had Democrats not spent the past two decades bloating its budget, broadening its authority, and lending legitimacy to the narratives of criminality it uses to justify its racist terror.3
“The ultimate expression of law is not order—it's prison.” -George Jackson, 1971
This is also true at the level of geopolitics: as Trump hammers the final nail in the coffin of whatever remains of the liberal international order (its violent inadequacies and hypocrisies notwithstanding), remember: it was Biden who built the casket and dug the hole, in the name of Israel’s inalienable right to commit genocide.
This, I think, is why war with Iran, at least for those of us who were alive during the invasion of Iraq or know its history, feels at once earth-shattering and like déjà vu. Republicans, with the support of many of the same liberal politicians and institutions that beat the drums for war in 2003, have been chomping at the bit to bomb Iran for decades. And now, Trump and Netanyahu, the horsemen of hell and death, have let loose the reins.
“I looked, and behold, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed with him. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and hunger and plague.”
And so, like history’s angel, we turn toward the past, propelled into a future to which our backs are turned, the pile of wreckage at our feet growing ever skyward.
Deterrence through death: A bipartisan affair
With this in mind, I want to turn our attention away from the headlines, to the everyday cruelties at the southern edge of our rabid and dying empire.
With the national discourse focused on Trump’s racist crusade against working-class immigrants in LA and other cities across the country, and the arrests and manhandling of elected officials who protest ICE kidnappings, the familiar mainstage for fearmongering about the “migrant invasion”—the southern border—has been temporarily supplanted by the spectacle of urban lawlessness and the liberal politicians who supposedly support it. In part, this is because crossings from Mexico have been plummeting since last summer, after Biden subverted U.S. and international law to effectively ban asylum at the border, inflicting incalculable suffering and setting the stage—to keep with the theatrical metaphor, since much of this is precisely that: theater—for Trump’s full-blooded white supremacist onslaught.
Videos of Border Patrol agents and soldiers standing around the desert kicking dust and walking robodogs, with no one to hunt, harass, or handcuff, don’t make for the sort of sadistic propaganda that Trump’s base apparently likes, so it’s back to tackling day-laborers in parking lots and brutalizing teenagers in the anarchist jurisdictions du jour.
Nevertheless, while crossings continue to decline, still, every day, people risk their lives traversing an increasingly militarized border. They walk miles and days through the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, or the sprawling Texas scrublands, climbing walls, fording rivers, and putting their lives and the lives of their families on the line.
And every day, people disappear and die.
According to figures from the organization Humane Borders, so far in 2025, the remains of at least 40 migrants have been recovered from the Arizona desert alone. This does not include bodies found in other border states, or in Mexico, and as always, it is only a fraction of the actual, but unknowable, toll. “When accounting for the high rate of disappearance,” writes the aid group No More Deaths in a report I co-authored in 2021, “the true death toll on the border may be three to ten times higher than official counts, raising the potential death toll to as high as 90,000 since the adoption of Prevention Through Deterrence.”4
This is the reality of U.S. border policy. This is what it was designed to do, and this is what it is doing.
Importantly, there is a direct connection between ICE detentions in the interior and death and suffering at the border: When people are kidnapped from their communities, separated from their families, and expelled from the country, more often than not, they will do whatever it takes to get home—and they will face a gauntlet of draconian deterrence in the process. Many will make it, many will not.
While the cruelties of Border Patrol and ICE are notorious, these agencies do not operate alone; they enjoy the cooperation of law enforcement at all levels (as demonstrated recently in Los Angeles and other “sanctuary cities,” where despite that designation, ICE has relied on the protection of local police to carry out its kidnappings—a topic we discuss in an interview I published earlier this month). At the border, government agencies that are nominally uninvolved in immigration enforcement—county sheriffs’ offices or the National Park Service, for example—nevertheless perpetuate and normalize the crisis of death and disappearance at the border.5
I decided to write on this topic last week, when I came across a disturbing quote from a New Mexico county sheriff in a story published in the The Texas Tribune. The story highlights a trend that, incidentally, was originally documented statistically and mapped by No More Deaths in early 2024: more migrants have died in El Paso and the surrounding area in recent years than ever before. And while many of these people died in the desert backcountry, a shocking number perished in the city and its outskirts, within view of roads, houses, parks and playgrounds.
But if you ask the sheriff of Doña Ana County—the New Mexico county that borders El Paso to the west—this exhaustively documented crisis might not even be real, but instead, some sinister conspiracy concocted by the snow birds and retirees who volunteer with church groups and aid organizations to leave water in the desert for people dying of thirst—aka, terrorist and cartel sympathizers.
“I don’t know where [the bones] come from. I don’t know how long they’ve been there. I don’t know if they’ve been planted there,” Sheriff Kim Stewart told local El Paso news station KTSM late last year. “If [the volunteers] are not going to stand by until we arrive, because [they] are too busy roaming the desert looking for I don’t know what, we’re not going to take these very seriously.”
This accusation is absolutely insane, of course, but it betrays a pervasive attitude of dehumanization that is structured into the culture of law enforcement in counties along the border. Local police, like Border Patrol, are so thoroughly desensitized to migrant suffering that they do not treat the deaths of the undocumented as meaningful events, much less tragedies deserving of proper care or crimes meriting meticulous forensic attention—just as they do not consider the life-threatening emergencies of migrants lost in the backcountry to be real emergencies experienced by real people, as documented in another report published by No More Deaths in 2023: Separate and Deadly: Segregation of 911 Emergency Services in the Arizona Borderlands.
How else to justify leaving someone to die, or leaving their body to disappear in the desert?
It bears emphasizing that these deaths are the direct and desired result of Governor Abbott’s Operation Lone Star and the Biden administration’s efforts to deny asylum (namely: Title 42, “metering” through the glitchy and racist CBP One app, and transit bans—all continuations or revisions of policies originally implemented under Trump). It is one of many examples of how discourses of partisan difference mask the normalized structure of the violence: Despite the dominant media and political narratives that portrayed the Texas governor as a rogue Republican at war with the Democrats’ “open borders” agenda, in reality, these state and federal policies functioned together, in a lethal, if unofficial, alliance of razor wire and bureaucracy (bolstered by Mexican enforcement deployed on behalf of the Biden administration).
Migrants are dehumanized in death as they are dehumanized in life. When aid workers call to report human remains encountered in the desert, police sometimes don’t respond at all, or if they do, they arrive annoyed, make insensitive or offensive comments, toss some bones in a bag, and leave. More often than not—and despite the commendable efforts of NGOs and medical examiners scraping by on small budgets while the state pours billions into the agencies causing the crisis—the victims are never identified, their families are never notified, and their bodies are buried in unmarked or mass graves.
When people who become lost or injured while crossing the border call 911, they are often berated, yelled at, hung up on, and left to die by dispatchers and Border Patrol. As a matter of unofficial but standard protocol, when emergency dispatchers in border counties receive a call from someone speaking Spanish, or broken English, who says anything about being lost in the desert, they immediately—and often without warning—transfer that caller to Border Patrol.
I have listened to hundreds of these call recordings, obtained via public records requests, and the conversations all go more or less the same, with varying levels of Spanish proficiency and intensities of verbal abuse on the part of dispatchers and Border Patrol. Here’s a typical example:
Pima County 911 Dispatch: “911, where is your emergency?”
Caller: “No hablo inglés.”
Disptach: “I’m sorry?”
Caller: “No hablo inglés. No English.”
Dispatch: “¿Estás perdido en el desierto? [Are you
lost in the desert?]”
Caller: “Sí, estoy perdido en el desierto. [Yes,
I’m lost in the desert]”
Dispatch: “Okay, un momento [transfers call to Border Patrol]”
When No More Deaths analyzed a set of emergency cases referred to Border Patrol by humanitarian volunteers—who run hotlines that migrants or their families can call to request help, to fill in for the lack of adequate government recourse—in 63% of cases, the agency did not conduct any confirmed search at all. In fact—and in contrast to Border Patrol’s propaganda, which paints its agents as heroic saviors who perform daredevil rescues on the daily—No More Deaths found that the agency is actually twice as likely to cause a person to go missing, through dangerous enforcement tactics, than they are to find or rescue anyone.
Border Patrol—operating under CBP, which operates under DHS—orchestrates and enforces this madness, but they can’t do it without the cooperation of local police. As Bryce Peterson, an aid worker and one of the authors of the No More Deaths report on migrant mortality in the El Paso area, explained to me recently: “Local emergency and law enforcement agencies are supposed to be reimbursed from Border Patrol when they respond to migrant cases, but that money usually never comes. This makes these agencies reluctant to respond to 911 calls or reports of deaths, and when they do, they try really hard to include BP. So it's a choice, but it's also something very much enforced by BP.”
“When it comes to ‘emergency’ response to undocumented people crossing the border, Border Patrol’s search and rescue practices normalize human disappearance as an outcome.” -No More Deaths
Border Patrol also relies on the support of federal agencies like the National Forest Service and National Park Service, which administer large swaths of land along the border, including Organ Pipe National Monument in southern Arizona—an infamous corridor of death west of the Tohono O’odham Nation.
Consider this account that a friend and fellow aid worker shared with me recently, about an incident that happened in 2018:
We were on Organ Pipe, I think it was Solstice, 2018, and we’d just put a ton of water out in the Growler Valley, which is an area where there are dozens of known migrant deaths every year. We were putting water out in a line, dropping gallons every 50 feet or so, perpendicular to how folks are moving, and we found someone who had died pretty recently. I don’t want to share too many details, but nobody should have to see another human being like that. Park Service law enforcement showed up and told us we were parked illegally, then left the person’s body for hours while they went and removed a bunch of the water we had put out. They filled their truck with empty gallons, then hung out by the road. When we confronted them about it, they told us our water just made people walk farther and die in the valley. We were all extremely upset and distraught, I remember telling the agents that my first thought on finding this person was that if we had left water in that area a few weeks earlier, maybe he would still be alive, but now I realized that even if we had been there, they might have destroyed the water and he still would have died. I don’t understand how a person can treat someone else like that, when the impact is so clear.
In other cases, federal land agencies have detained and cited humanitarian volunteers for the crime of trying to stop people from dying in the wilderness.
At every level, law enforcement in the borderlands operates under the assumption—sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit—that migrants are not fully human. There are exceptions, of course, but they only prove the rule. In any case, whether an individual agent claims to care about migrants as much as citizens ultimately does not matter: structurally, the system is designed to discriminate, just as it is designed to kill on the basis of that discrimination.
Efforts to end the crisis of death and suffering at the border must begin by acknowledging this basic fact, just as attempts to fight fascism must recognize the role that liberalism, which obstructs transformative change at any cost, has played in enabling its rise and entrenching the systems that comprise the machinery of its power. For many people—migrants, prisoners, the children of Gaza—the distinction between democracy and dictatorship, like the distinction between Republican and Democratic, has materialized as little more than a technical detail.
“And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind—it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.” Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1950.
Operation Streamline began in 2005 under under the Bush administration and continued through Obama, Trump and Biden. It is a system of routine show trials, in which dozens of people apprehended while crossing the border plead guilty en masse to “illegal entry” or “re-entry,” after meeting with a public defender for precisely the time it requires the accused to be told that they cannot, under any circumstances, plead innocent.
For more on this history, see Silky Shah’s excellent book Unbuild Walls (2024). This interview is also really good.
Prevention Through Deterrence is a U.S. border policy implemented in 1994 under President Clinton that deliberately pushes people to cross in remote areas, with the intention of making them suffer and die. It remains Border Patrol’s guiding enforcement strategy, perhaps best described by the historian Rachel Nolan as “a legal euphemism for leaving people to die on purpose.”
Law enforcement is reportedly exempt from the layoffs at federal land agencies.
Thank you for this thought-provoking piece, Max. The truth can be deeply disturbing but it must be told. You are fearless in exposing the unspeakable inhumane treatment of migrants at the border and in the interior. You connect the dots and remind the reader of patterns in the past that point to how we got to the present. Keep up the great work. 💜
Max you are right and your words have wings. If that's your way of being right-wing, so be it!❤