>>> This is KPBS Midday Edition I am Maureen Cavanaugh. Border patrol agents say they want to be the do their job and generally support strict enforcement of immigration laws. But watching the effects of those immigration laws on individual human beings can change hearts and minds. Former border patrol agent Francisco Antoon has written a memoir of his four years and the agency serving in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. His book is called the line becomes a river dispatches from the boarder. Francisco Cantu joins me now. Welcome to the show. You have studied the boarder in college. What made you want to be a border agent? >> I grew up in Arizona. My mom was a park ranger. I grew up very close to the desert and the landscape of the boarder. When I was in college, studying immigration and water issues, a lot of the book learning I was doing felt very disconnected from the landscape and the actual place I had grown up in. So when I first started thinking about being in the border patrol, it seemed like a opportunity to be out in the desert and to see the actual realities of what happens on the boarder. For myself. Beyond that, I had all of these questions, a lot of the same sort of policy questions that we have right now. I felt I would somehow see something that would unlock these questions for me. I thought I would come out of that experience being able to become a policymaker or an immigration lawyer and have all of the answers, so to speak. >>> Could you describe some of the people you apprehended crossing the border? >> There is a wide variety of people you encounter in that job. I definitely apprehended loads of drugs and people smuggling drugs, I apprehended people with extensive criminal histories, but the majority of the people I apprehended, of course, were people who were crossing over looking for a better life. People who were trying to reunite with families, coming for work, humble, hard-working, kind people. >>> That started to trouble you? >> The border patrol is like a lot of law enforcement or military jobs where the training process is designed to really break down who you are and rebuild you in the image of a law enforcement person. For me, I came in with the naïve hope that I would sort of be able to do good within the agency. I looked at it as something I could step into and also sort of helped people. I became trained to be an EMT, administer eight. At the end of the day, I always came home and had to grapple with the fact that I was sending these people back, even if I gave somebody aid or bandaged somebody's foot or helped them. I was still sending them back to the place they risk their life to flee. My presence was of everything that they were avoiding that was driving them into the most remote dangerous parts of the Desert. I think, I didn't really think a lot about that immediately at the time. But in the back of my mind, it began to pile up. It sort of came out in my subconscious more than anything. >>> What sort of dangers did you and other agents face? What did you have to contend with? >> You are often working alone. You are often working at night. You are almost always if you're apprehending a group and quite often you might not know if it is smugglers or a group of people who are just crossing for jobs. You are almost always outnumbered. There is danger in that. When I look back at what kept me safe, honestly, it was the ability to speak Spanish and to understand. I think that that enabled me to control situations, to communicate clearly, and to sort of know what was being said and what was happening. >>> Some of the readings on your book tour have been interrupted by my great -- migrant advocates. They accuse you of exploiting migrant narratives. Should former border agent be telling the stories of the people he deported? >> I think the argument is based on the issue of whose voices get heard. I think that is a really valid criticism of the book and of the place of power and privilege that I am narrating the story from. I think that I agree that the migrant voices of the voices that we most need to hear. The Undocumented dreamers, the people who cross the border, the people who live in fear of deportation, those other people that have more to tell us about immigration and border issues than I do or than any politician or policymaker. I thought about this in structuring the book. The narrative in the final third of the book is really given over entirely to the story of my friend José who I became close two years after I left the border patrol. It was his story. He had lived in the United States for 30 years. He had three U.S. citizen boys that were born here. He led the country because his mother was dying and he could not get back across he was captured and deported seeing his story unfold, and the other side, and the deportation industrial complex that someone enters after they are apprehended along the border, that really changed me. It is his voice that ends the book. I think it is my hope that the book leads people to those people to voices of people like José. >>> In looking back, did working for the border patrol give you the answers you were looking for about the boarder? Speak into short answer is no. I left the border patrol with more questions than I had ever joined with. I left the border patrol feeling that those issues that I had come in to interrogate and to get close to were so much more massively and overwhelmingly complex than I had even imagined stepping into. But after I had distance or left that job, but I carried with me where the stories and the encounters that I had with the people that were count -- crossing the border. It was not the drug bust or the arrests or anything like that, it was the voices of these people that I had, that I was sending back every day. I guess the argument to me that we are having in this country feels very disconnected from those voices and from those stories. I think that we minimize the migrant with our rhetoric. I think we dehumanize the migrant with the way we talk about policy change and emigration. And I hope that the book works against that. >>> My guest Francisco Cantu will speak about his book the line because -- becomes a river at Woolworth's bookstore in La Jolla. Francisco, thank you so much.
After Francisco Cantú studied immigration in college, he found himself constantly thinking about the border, even dreaming about it. He felt the only way to answer the questions he still had was to steep himself in the desert.
“Other than being a drug runner or a migrant, the Border Patrol seemed like the only way to do that,” Cantú said.
“The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border” is Cantú’s account of his four years as a border agent in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. He helped capture migrants and drug smugglers and said the way people talk about the Border Patrol dehumanizes crossers and paints agents as saviors.
“Of course, I never found those answers,” he said. “I only came away with more questions, and that’s what led me to write about the experience.”
Cantú is speaking Thursday at 7:30 pm at Warwick’s. He joined KPBS Midday Edition on Tuesday with more on the dangers Border Patrol agents face in the desert and his critique of the agency as “the thing that crushes.”
