Eyes on the Border

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to “close the border” on his first day back in office. That won’t happen, but he’s sure to clamp down on immigration in other ways. “The president and his legal team have four years to appoint new federal judges to change not only the operational landscape—more prosecution, detention, and deportation—but also the legal landscape of immigration enforcement,” writes John Washington in his November 10, 2024, essay for the NYR Online. “Humanitarian visas could disappear. Asylum protections will likely be further gutted, and more families intentionally separated. States may even be able to run their own immigration enforcement or deputize their own border forces.”

Washington is well positioned to analyze these developments. As an investigative journalist based in Tucson, Arizona, he has been reporting from the US–Mexico border for more than a decade. His first book tells the story of one Salvadoran man’s repeated attempts to secure asylum for himself and his daughter in the United States. “The Dispossessed offers what is perhaps the most complete narrative account of modern-day asylum and the politics of refusal that have come to define the current era,” Francisco Cantú wrote in an admiring review for our November 5, 2020, issue. Washington’s second book, The Case for Open Borders, “adds as a forceful voice in a deeply accusatory cause,” Colin Thurbon wrote in our October 17, 2024, issue. “Its power lies in advancing a compassionate and almost irrefutable ethical case.”

A staff writer at Arizona Luminaria, Washington has written for publications including The Nation and The Intercept, as well as contributed several articles to The New York Review. We corresponded this week over email about the ethics of befriending sources, the Democrats’ rightward drift on immigration, and his own family history.

Ratik Asokan: How did you start reporting on the US-Mexico border?

John Washington: My mother migrated to the US from Romania. Some of her family members had suffered persecution there and her uncle was forcibly disappeared. I grew up in an immigrant community in Ohio. So the interest in uprooted populations has always been there.

Around 2008, I started working with No More Deaths—a humanitarian organization in southern Arizona that is dedicated to helping migrants—as well volunteering in various migrant shelters in Mexico. That’s when I got more directly involved with the subject. I was immediately struck by the gap between media and political rhetoric about the border and the situation of vulnerable people on the ground. Politicians talk about “migrant crime” but overwhelmingly it is migrants who are criminalized. Politicians talk about repelling an “invasion” but migrants are only seeking safety or work. In many cases they are fleeing invasions—criminal, extractive, or the traditional military sort—of their home country.

It’s ironic that, in the push for “border security,” the US administration has made the border one of the most insecure, surveilled, lawless, and deadly places on earth. One of my principal journalistic aims is understand and fill that gap between the rhetoric and the reality.

How has American public opinion on undocumented immigration—and the subject of immigration more generally—changed since you began reporting?

It’s become less nuanced and more hateful. Not that there was much nuance or sympathy before. Immigration was always a divisive issue, especially during political campaigns. But this year’s presidential race was unprecedented. We all remember how Trump and his supporters heaped vitriol onto migrant communities. But Kamala Harris, too, made much of her background as a prosecutor in a border state and her record of targeting transnational criminal organizations. Her approach to immigration policy was generally aggressive: she praised the Biden administration for raising the asylum threshold and cracking down on border crossings, and hardly mentioned expanding the pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented people living in the US. Despite the near-constant bickering about the border, there was practically no discussion of the humanity or dignity of migrants.

What hasn’t changed is the phenomenon of immigration. People keep moving. People living in unlivable circumstances will do what they can to seek a better life, whatever is being said about them in the American media. The sooner our politicians understand this, the better. They can learn from the many humanitarian aid groups that work on both sides of the border, preserving, in the face of militarization, the diversity, fluidity, and beauty of the borderlands.

In your review of Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings, you note that the author “inches into an ethical quagmire” by forming close relationships with the smugglers he’s observing. Have you faced similar ethical challenges in your work?

De León waded into a tricky situation: one of his sources became so financially dependent on him that, when he tried to cut the cord, the man staged his own kidnapping to try squeeze more money. I’ve never gotten anywhere near there, but I have formed very close ties with my sources: usually asylum seekers or migrants, occasionally gang members or smugglers. It’s a special and sometimes odd relationship, one that I would like to describe as a friendship, except that it’s circumscribed.

I won’t, for instance, pay them money, with some very minor exceptions—I’ve purchased groceries or meals a handful of times. I will frequently ask them probing questions or independently corroborate what they’ve said—which I would not do with a normal friend. In order to retain objectivity, it’s important that I maintain these basic rules.

De León is not engaged in journalism but rather in anthropology, a discipline with different ethical guidelines. Still, I think he went too far, as evidenced by the danger he caused himself and his sources.

In your report from the House of Mercy, a migrant shelter in Nogales, Mexico, you offer moving portraits of asylum seekers fleeing violence across Central America. From their perspective, what is the difference between a Democratic and Republican administration?

If you’re denied, you’re denied. If you’re stiff-armed by a state, it doesn’t hurt any less because the fist is representing a different party. The Biden administration enacted a lot of very Trump-like policies to block people from seeking asylum, putting some of the most vulnerable people in grave danger. His administration made using the CBP One App mandatory, which effectively continued family separations through the humanitarian exemption; gave for-profit corporations contracts to build detention centers; and celebrated increased detentions and deportations (see the ICE press releases). For those who were jailed, shipped back to the country they fled, or forced into incredibly dangerous journeys, the situation was already pretty bad.

Yes, the two parties are not the same. Trump 2.0 could hold cruel surprises. But there’s no denying that the Democrats have been enabling—and sometimes catalyzing—anti-immigrant excesses.

You are in the midst of a years-long investigation into excessive force and inhumane conditions at the county jail in Pima County, Arizona. Recently your work has come under legal attack. What happened?

There are some things I shouldn’t get into because of multiple potential investigations: the FBI, the US Attorney’s Office, and the state attorney general have all been asked to look into the matter. But essentially I was accused of colluding with the county sheriff’s opponent in the recent election to pay inmates for critical scoops. I did nothing like that, and I never would. To be clear, the investigations are primarily focused not on me but on the sheriff and his political opponent.

All I did was pay $20 to one impecunious inmate who was being charged extortionate fees by the for-profit company that regulates jail communication. He had been writing me letters and calling me on the phone for a year; the charges were adding up. I deposited the money in a reverse-ATM machine in the jail’s lobby, informed the sheriff’s department, and was reimbursed by my outlet. This is by no means an uncommon practice. If you don’t pay an incarcerated source for their calls or letters, they may not be able to afford to tell you their stories.

People stuck in the Pima County jail and the many other carceral institutions throughout this country face horrendous and sometimes deadly conditions. Yet the public knows too little about what happens behind bars. I’m committed to continuing to report on this subject.

What are some books that have shaped your understanding of border politics?

The work of Greg Grandin, especially The End of the Myth, explains the importance of the shifting border throughout American history and show why, after the final territorial expansions, the border has become a locus of such explosive tension.

Óscar Martínez’s The Beast—which I co-translated from Spanish into English with Daniela Ugaz—changed my and many other people’s understanding of how immigration works on the other side of the US border. It depicts, in sometimes excruciating detail, the human costs of border crackdowns and forced migration on communities in Central America.

Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Migra! gets to the heart of why the Border Patrol was founded one hundred years ago, revealing its origins in white supremacist ideology. Reading about the agency’s brutal treatment of Mexican migrants in the first few decades, you better understand what’s happening today.

Is it true that you are related to George Washington?

Yes, it’s true. George’s brother John Washington is my sixth great-grandfather. One perk of this connection is that it led to an early interest in history. And docents—who may have been dubious about our family origins, but didn’t ask for proof—have allowed us behind the ropes at Mount Vernon. It’s worth remembering in this context that, whatever his other flaws, Washington envisioned that the United States “might become a safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”