CROSSING THE LINE

Towle, an educator and activist, confronts America’s immigration system in this debut nonfiction book.

“Whatever the answer” to America’s immigration crisis, writes the author, “a dream deferred—dried up like a raisin in the sun—is indeed justice denied.” To refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants from around the world, America has long stood as a haven of peace, prosperity, and freedom. Over the last two decades, however, the U.S. has been at the forefront of a new global paradigm that prioritizes national security above human rights, per Towle’s eye-opening narrative. Focusing on what she calls the “Border Industrial Complex,” the author outlines the ways in which the U.S. and Europe have forged a system of “global apartheid” through draconian visa requirements, passport controls, border walls, and other anti-immigration policies. The book offers readers an astute analysis that provides a well-researched overview of the current immigration system as well as historical context for the ways in which racism and xenophobia have shaped American policy in the past. Bipartisan in her critiques, Towle traces the modern roots of America’s anti-immigration ethos from Reagan through Clinton to the post-9/11 Bush administration, though she also holds the Obama and Biden administrations to account for their subsequent complicity. The book stands out by centering the lived experiences of the victims of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), particularly the subagency known as Enforcement and Removals Operations (“aka ICE Air, ‘the deportation machine’”). Working with the Texas A&M University School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic and the Cameroon Advocacy Network and privileged with white skin that allowed her to “cross borders with relative ease,” Towle shares her firsthand experiences at the U.S.-Mexican border, where she met freedom-seekers whose home countries spanned from Central America to Cameroon. The author’s observation that merely seeing and documenting the experiences of victims is a “subversive act” powerfully underscores the stories of mothers ripped away from their children, men detained indefinitely without due process during the Covid-19 pandemic that “turned prisons into death traps,” and asylum-seekers returned to the violent battlefields of war-torn countries.

A powerful exposé of the human costs of America’s immigration policies.