Francisco Cantú, author of “The Line Becomes a River,” remembers watching the heated rallies engulfing his home state of Arizona. To one side were immigration advocates, activists who demanded the migrants running for their lives through the Sonoran Desert be treated as human beings, regardless of their citizenship status. To the other, were vocal, angry crowds, carrying signs and calling for increased fortification along the divide between the U.S. and Mexico, more Border Patrol agents, and a wall between the two countries. This was not the 2016 presidential election. This was a decade earlier, in 2006, and the people with the signs ended up getting just about everything they wanted. Cantú was in college at the time, a student of international relations obsessed with untangling the knotted policy fights that surround the borderlands. After graduation and a stint at a non-profit, Cantú concluded there was a world of information critical to understanding those fights that was beyond his grasp. So, at 23-years-old, Cantú signed up for the U.S. Border Patrol, joining one of the final waves of new recruits in the last major push to bolster the size of the agency. Cantú’s mother opposed the decision. A former federal employee herself, she reminded her son that his employer was a paramilitary organization, and that such organizations have a way of bending, stretching, and breaking the moral limits of even the most principled of employees. “You must understand you are stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people,” she warned. Self-assured and idealistic, Cantú told himself that he would be one of the good ones. His grandfather was born in Mexico, he spoke Spanish, he came from the border — maybe, down the line, he could bring his unique experiences to bear to change policy for the better, to help people. “I’m not going to become someone else,” Cantú assured his mother.

Over the next four years, as he patrolled the vast expanses of the American southwest, where U.S. enforcement strategies have driven migrants into some of the country’s deadliest terrain, culminating in thousands of deaths, Cantú was proven wrong. While he was granted the ground-level view of immigration enforcement that he had been looking for, it came at a cost. There was no way to be half-in, he learned. When you become a cog in “the thing that crushes” — a name Cantú later gave to the U.S. immigration enforcement apparatus — your good intentions have a way of evaporating and you become implicated whether you like it or not.





Sitting on a stage in the ornate Wachenheim Trustees Room at the New York Public Library earlier this week, Cantú was thousands of miles from the desert and a world away from the life he used to live. His green uniform was gone, replaced by a sharp ensemble of blue. Cantú was in town to promote his new book. Broken into three acts, the memoir details Cantú’s decision to join the Border Patrol and the psychological unraveling he experienced during his time on the job, which eventually led to his exit from the agency. It ends with Cantú outside of law enforcement, working to support the family of a friend caught in the machinery of deportation. Sitting on a stage in the ornate Wachenheim Trustees Room at the New York Public Library earlier this week, Cantú was thousands of miles from the desert and a world away from the life he used to live. His green uniform was gone, replaced by a sharp ensemble of blue. Cantú was in town to promote his new book. Broken into three acts, the memoir details Cantú’s decision to join the Border Patrol and the psychological unraveling he experienced during his time on the job, which eventually led to his exit from the agency. It ends with Cantú outside of law enforcement, working to support the family of a friend caught in the machinery of deportation. In the week since “The Line Becomes a River” was released, Cantú has appeared in a nonstop string of media interviews. The book has enjoyed critical acclaim, but it has not been without controversy. In California, Bay area activists called on local bookstores to cancel Cantú’s readings on the grounds that he was a cop, and cops deserve no sympathy, particularly at time when millions of immigrants across the country are living in fear of law enforcement. The readings were not cancelled. In Austin, Texas, demonstrators called Cantú a “traitor,” and accused him of profiting off migrant pain. The radical news website It’s Going Down, further argued that Cantú possess an “insidious ability to minimize complicity,” and that he has “built his career and fame as a writer through participating in the culture of cruelty that typifies Border Patrol.” The broader sentiment behind the pushback is not difficult to understand. In recent years, the Border Patrol hiring surges that Cantú was part of, which President Trump seeks to repeat, have been followed by startling increases in serious misconduct by agents. And, as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez, author of “Migra,” has noted, the agency’s history is littered with examples of Border Patrol agents serving as a frontline force executing draconian and punishing immigration enforcement policies. Just last month The Intercept highlighted a report by the faith-based humanitarian group No More Deaths, which operates out of Cantú’s hometown of Tucson, Arizona, documenting Border Patrol agents systematically destroying water left for migrants crossing the desert. Hours after the report was published, one of the group’s volunteers was arrested by Border Patrol for providing food and shelter to two undocumented immigrants. More than a half-dozen other volunteers with the group have been hit with federal charges in recent months for leaving water in the desert. Responding to the criticism he’s received, Cantú tweeted last week, “To be clear: during my years as a BP agent, I was complicit in perpetuating institutional violence and flawed, deadly policy. My book is about acknowledging that, it’s about thinking through the ways we normalize violence and dehumanize migrants as individuals and as a society.” He added: “I’m not here to defend BP. But I am here to listen and learn from the ways my writing may be construed to normalize, eroticize, or beautify border violence, and the ways my voice may amplified at the expense of those who suffer from it. Ultimately, I’m here to work against it.” There’s no getting around the fact that Cantú’s work in law enforcement will, for some, render his contributions to the conversation around immigration null and void. In this view, one might argue, Cantú willingly contributed to the problem he wishes to address and conclusions that, yes, in fact, the system is broken are far from revelatory — and certainly do not require participation in that system to prove. But while there’s a coherence to the critique, to dismiss Cantú’s work entirely would be to risk missing out on a unique glimpse inside a closed-off set of institutions with tremendous power. In the years since September 11, the publishing world has produced a wealth of literature, mostly novels, from veterans who came of age in the aftermath of the attacks and fought in the wars they led to. In a 2015 article for Harper’s Magazine, Sam Sacks made the case that the significant praise these works have received can be attributed, in part, to the general public’s alienation from the wars it underwrites. Sacks also wrote that these accounts are almost always “stories of personal struggle that are built around abstract universal truths,” which typically refuse to grapple with the critical context surrounding the conflicts in which they are set. This appears to be no accident, Sacks added, given that nearly all of the post-9/11 veteran writers who have succeeded in recent years have emerged from the same creative writing and MFA programs.

“I think that what these humanitarian groups are doing by putting water out in the desert, is they’re attempting to fill a deadly void that is left by our border policy,” Cantú said.