Border Patrol — views from inside
Former agent puts elusive line between U.S., Mexico into personal perspective
“Border Patrol agents — these are people that know more about the border than anybody will ever know.” So said Donald Trump when running for president in 2016. Two years later, one of those “great people,” as Trump called them, is opening up about his time in the Border Patrol. Trump probably wouldn’t like what this former agent is saying. Descended from Mexicans, Francisco Cantú worked for the Border Patrol, against his mother’s wishes, from 2008 to 2012. The 32-year-old Arizonan chronicles his experiences in a new memoir, “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border.” The book is a deeply thoughtful assessment of a young man’s attempt to better understand the border firsthand. Cantú admits to being naive when he joined the Border Patrol, at age 23, but the job in law enforcement allowed him to view a highly contentious issue from a different perspective. Not all are buying it. At recent bookstore readings, the first-time author was shouted down by protesters who accused him of profiting from others’ suffering. Some of them said they hadn’t read the book, nor did they intend to read it. A group of demonstrators showed up at Cantú’s reading at San Francisco’s Green Apple Books on the Park, on Feb. 19, and the author decided to cancel a Feb. 20 event at East Bay Booksellers in Oakland. Cantú spoke to The Chronicle while in San Francisco. His answers have been edited for length.
Q: What compelled you to become a Border Patrol agent?
A: My mom was a park ranger, so I grew up very close to the landscape, and I grew up in the desert. And when I was in college studying immigration border issues, I was in D.C., far from the Southwest. I looked at the decision to join the Border Patrol as an extension of my education. I thought that I would see things that other people hadn’t been exposed to. And I thought if I did that for five or six years, I would come out of it and have these answers that I could use as an immigration lawyer or a policymaker.
Q: In your book, you describe violent nightmares that were brought on by your work as an agent. You also write about how you feared the job had the potential to make you violent. What kept you from quitting?
A: So much of the training in the Border Patrol, just like most law enforcement and military jobs, is really set up to break you down and rebuild you in the image of a law enforcement agent. My experience was that those questions that I came in with and the perspective that I was seeking to gain, all of that was so quickly by necessity moved into the background of my mind in order just to wake up and do the job every day. And so much of the day-to-day stuff I normalized.
Q: What do you miss about the Border Patrol?
A: The things that I miss about the Border Patrol are thankfully things that I can find in other ways (laughs). But being outdoors every day — I’ve never become so intimate with a landscape in my life. I know that corner of the desert better than any place I’ve ever known except for the streets of my hometown where I grew up. Of course, looking back at it, the way that you’re made to understand the landscape in the context of being in the Border Patrol is almost this more weaponized way of understanding it. The intimate knowledge that you have or that you are taught of a landscape in order to capture someone. And that’s not the way that I want to understand a landscape.
Q: In the book, you don’t bring up the president or his proposed wall. Had that always been your intention?
A: The first full draft of this book was finished in May of 2016. So the presidential race was under way but hadn’t really fully taken shape. I always imagined that the book would be published in a much different political landscape than the one that we’re in. I imagined that it would be sort of a relic of this uglier time. And, of course, it’s not. Q: So, what do you make of this idea of a border wall?
A: It amazes me that we’re having the same conversation because it’s a conversation that I distinctly remember when I was in college in 2005 and 2006. During the Bush presidency, there was a build-the-wall bill that passed through Congress that was the Secure Fence Act of 2006.
And I think a lot of people don’t realize that there’s already a lot of walls and fencing, and my experience in the Border Patrol was that smugglers figured out a way to use hydraulic jacks and lift these huge steel panels up from the ground high enough to drive cars underneath, and they would use welders to carve openings big enough for people to come through. So my perspective is that that’s not an argument for a bigger, stronger, more impenetrable wall. My experience is that no matter what barrier we put there, people are going to find a way over, under, around it. And I think that this conversation we’re having now about building a wall and hiring more Border Patrol agents does the exact same thing that we’ve already done. And we know what the results of that will be without policy reform. We’re just repeating this enforcement through deterrence, pushing people through more and more remote, dangerous areas. Q: Your book is about more than your experiences with the Border Patrol. After leaving it, you write affectingly about how you came to befriend José, an undocumented worker who generously shared his meals with you when you were working in a coffee shop. After many years of living in the U.S., though, José was forced back into Mexico, separated from his wife and children. Do you know what’s become of him?
A: I’m still in touch with José. I avoid really revealing anything about his current situation because, like so many other people on either side of the line, he’s in a very precarious situation. But what I can say about José is that seeing the way that his story unfolded even all those years after leaving the Border Patrol, it just completely opened my eyes to this whole other side of things. I mean, José was somebody who had lived in the United States for 30 years. He had three U.S. citizen children. I never knew that he was undocumented. We were friends for two years, and then he was just gone. And I knew that he had gone to see his mother, who was dying, and then when he didn’t come back three or four weeks later, it was like, where is this guy? And that’s when I found out that he was undocumented and that he had been apprehended trying to get back into the United States. And it was like attempting to shepherd his family through the deportation industrial complex that he was thrust into.
That really made me grapple with all the ways that the border extends so far beyond the actual physical landscape where it runs. I mean, the way that the border was brought into the lives of his boys who had never crossed a border, who are United States citizens who had no knowledge of Mexico, didn’t speak much Spanish, and that just gave me this deeper understanding of the extent to which the border can rip through people’s lives.
Q: You’ve given readings that were disrupted by people who claimed you’re profiting, as one protester put it, “off the murder of innocent people.” What’s your answer to that?
A: I think the place that a lot of those protests are coming from is a place that I agree with, to the extent that I think a lot of the critique that’s being leveled against the book is about who gets to speak and who gets a platform. I think that the undocumented “Dreamers,” people who are living with the threat of deportation, are crossing borders, those are the people who have the most to tell us about these issues — more than I do, more than any politician or policymaker does. And it’s really made me rethink about events related to this book. Several solo readings, I’ve decided not to read and to cede that space. And moving forward, it feels like I almost shouldn’t be giving an event unless it’s with the participation of these other voices or of advocates and activists and members of the undocumented community or other writers.
I think the hope of any writer is that by putting your writing into the world, you’re participating in a conversation, and you have the naive hope that your work can move the needle in the right direction. I think if people are debating and discussing a book instead of a tweet or some ridiculous policy proposal, I think that’s good. I’m happy that people are thinking critically about my book.
Also, I make much less money as a writer than I did as a Border Patrol agent. I work three jobs. I’m a part-time coordinator for a fellowship program at the University of Arizona. I teach part time at the university, I write and freelance, and I’m a bartender (laughs). That being said, I do think a lot about the money that I make from this book. I absolutely plan to give a percentage of the advance and royalties to different advocacy groups. Q: “The Line Becomes a River” is your first book. Will there will be others? A: Absolutely. I see myself as a writer and a translator and a writing instructor. That’s my identity now. My identity is not at all Border Patrol. I intend to continue writing and I intend to continue looking at the question of borders. To me, the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s almost like a microcosm of all these questions that we have about our modern world and how we live together.