El Sueño Americano

America’s southern border patrol is infamous. It has been criticized most aggressively by left wingers, in particular members of the ACLU who have called its culture one of "notorious abuse and impunity," and its agents, "militarized thugs." Recently another powerful criticism of the Border Patrol has come in the form of pictures: Tom Kiefer, who worked for eleven years as a janitor at a Border Patrol Facility in Arizona, created a project called “El Sueño Americano,” in which he displayed photographs of items confiscated at the border. The items include rosary beads, toothpaste, toothbrushes, hats, razorblades, earphones, t-shirts, wallets, canteens, hairbrushes, scrunchies, Snickers. They were confiscated from illegal immigrants on the grounds that they were “potentially lethal, non-essential” property. 

In talking to CNN, Kiefer said of his project, “These are pictures of how people and their personal belongings are treated. If someone wants to judge the ethics and morality of all this, it is up to them.” I don’t want to do that. I think it’s pretty arrogant to try to “judge the ethics and morality” of almost anything, and on top of that it’s very hard and not very fun. What I do want to do is point out a couple of delusions the United States Border Patrol seems to have about itself and the people it deals with – delusions that are pretty ludicrous on their surfaces, but which have serious consequences for a lot of people who suffer because of them.

Here’s the first delusion: if the border patrol is in the habit of seizing scrunchies on the grounds that they are “potentially lethal,” who, exactly, does the border patrol think it’s dealing with? Jack Bauer? James Bond? Colin Firth’s character from the movie Kingsmen? I know this seems, on its surface, like a cheap and goofy point to make. But it sets up a much more serious point: namely, that the United States Border Patrol is acting in a way that would only be reasonable if it were dealing with fictional characters. And that point, in turn, leads to the very most serious suggestion I want to make: the U.S. Border Patrol actually is set up to deal with fictional characters - characters born from imaginations inspired by opportunistic, fearmongering politicians who would have their citizens dream not of equality, but of a border under constant seige by dark, drug-slinging, towel-headed villains with the ruthlessness of a Bauer and the cunning of a Bond. Anyway, that’s the dream. The reality is that the vast majority of people trying to cross the border are much more helpless than dangerous.   

That, then, is the Border Patrol’s delusion about who it’s dealing with. Its delusion about who it is can be seen pretty clearly in the first paragraph of its online mission statement: “The priority mission of the Border Patrol is preventing terrorists and terrorists (sic) weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, from entering the United States. Undaunted by scorching desert heat or freezing northern winters, they work tirelessly as vigilant protectors of our Nation's borders.” The language in the second sentence is particularly funny, where Border Patrol agents are figured as military superheroes zooming around the periphery of our great, ecologically diverse country, braving whatever conditions they must in order to vanquish the evils of terrorism. No doubt this image is great marketing: it is designed to reassure those Americans who have been won by the fearmongerers, so that they will feel eternally grateful to the superheroes fighting the good fight, and also unwilling to, say, cut the superheroes’ funding. But the image the border patrol presents of itself is as intensely fictional as the image it has of the people it deals with. 

Now, before I finish, let me be clear that I am not saying the border patrol is deluded to think that it is engaged in counter-terrorism – it is. The real delusion of the border patrol is that it thinks and acts as if it primarily wars against terrorists, when in fact it primarily receives people who have chosen to pursue a dream with just a few of their most essential possessions in their packs: rosary beads, toothpaste, toothbrushes, hats, razorblades, earphones, t-shirts, wallets, canteens, hairbrushes, scrunchies, Snickers.

Michael Taylor is a 2015 Stanford grad with a degree in English. Since graduation he's been writing fiction on a farm in Cape Verde.