Vigilante Rule at the Border

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The border as we know it is a modern invention. Arizona did not become a state until 1912, and the US did not make it a crime to cross its borders without permission until 1929. As late as 1980, during a Republican primary debate, Ronald Reagan summarily dismissed the idea of a border “fence.” Even before the border was built, however, there were border vigilantes.

In the NYR Online this week, S. C. Cornell writes about violence at the United States’ southern border, where for many years armed vigilantes have been given significant leeway by local and federal authorities to search for people hoping to cross over from Mexico. They profess to be assisting the Border Patrol in rounding up suspected undocumented immigrants, but, as in the recent killing of Gabriel Cuen Buitimea, they sometimes take the law into their own hands.

Below, alongside Cornell’s essay, we have collected five essays from our archives about immigration in the US.

Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in The Apprentice

S. C. Cornell
Death in Nogales

An unarmed Mexican migrant was shot dead on an Arizona ranch. The response revealed widespread support for violence at the border.

Ad: The World Atlas of Honey by C. Marina Marchese

Bill McKibben
Where Will We Live?

“I fear very much that this tension between liberal and radical solutions to migration will simply be overwhelmed in the years ahead. If the climate modelers are even close to correct, one or three billion human beings attempting to move away from rising heat and drought, and from flooding cities, will make their own geopolitical reality.”

—October 6, 2022

A person who has been detained standing near a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) grievance box in the high security unit at the Theo Lacy Facility, a county jail that also houses people arrested by ICE, Orange, California, March 14, 2017

Jacob Kang-Brown and Jack Norton
America’s Hidden Gulag

The nationwide federal detention of immigrants in county jails perpetuates a profit-driven system of mass incarceration.

—February 19, 2021

Drawing of a woman in immigration detention by Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple
Waiting with Immigrants

To be an immigrant in America is to wait. This goes double for the millions of immigrants who have found themselves at the sour end of the ICE bureaucracy—and triple in the age of Trump.

—January 29, 2019

Preliminary drawing of the torch from the Statue of Liberty

Sue Halpern and Bill McKibben
The Americans We Need

America is not just doing refugees a favor by letting them in. They’re doing America a favor by coming here—revitalizing our economy, sure, bringing new talent and energy and enterprise to every part of our society, but also helping shore up our culture at its weakest spots.

—January 30, 2017

Esmeralda Soto, an immigrant from Mexico who was sexually abused by an officer while she was detained at a California immigration facility.

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow
Immigrant Detainees:
The New Sex Abuse Crisis

There is abundant evidence that rape is a systemic problem in our immigration detention facilities—for women, for men, and for children.

—November 23, 2011

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