From the Field: Learning Under Surveillance. An Encounter with American Border Authoritarianism
Leah Montange is a human geographer who researches, writes, and teaches about immigration enforcement, incarceration, borders, labour, and resistance. She was the Bissell Heyd Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Toronto (2022-2025) and is about to begin her role as a Research Lead with the Understanding Precarity in BC project. She co-hosted the podcast In-care-ceration. You can read her work in journals like the Annals of the American Association of Geographers; Environment & Planning D: Society & Space; Globalizations; Population, Place, & Space; and more. Rooj Ali is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, studying Peace, Conflict & Justice, and History. She has participated in and led various initiatives centred around nuclear weapons disarmament, refugee education, and resettlement. Rooj co-led Winnipeg’s successful Campaign for the ICAN Cities Appeal in 2021 and went on to author and produce the RTT ICAN Cities Appeal: How to Manual. In recognition of her work for peace and youth advocacy, she was recently awarded the Kim Phúc Award for Youth Peace Leadership by the Voice of Women for Peace.
August 2025
Going to the US-Mexico border and encountering humanitarian aid there on our undergraduate study abroad trip allowed us to see through mainstream narratives about the border and into the authoritarian nature of border control. Engaging with the bordering apparatus required that we stop learning through the perspective of accountability and justice, and to distance ourselves entirely from empathy when engaging with the space.
Whiskey 8 is a place west of San Ysidro, California, where the US-Mexico border wall stands two layers deep. In between the walls is a stretch of dirt, grasses and shrubs. Pedro Rios, the Director of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)’s US-Mexico Border Program, suggested that our class meet him there for a guest lecture, during our February 2025 trip to San Diego, California. The course, a University of Toronto field course in American Studies entitled “Transnational America”, examines the transnational dimensions of space in the Southern California region.
Rios told us that Whiskey 8 is an Open Air Detention Site where until recently AFSC provided humanitarian aid, and he gave us coordinates rather than an address. We drove there on a public road and there were no signs indicating we were off limits or trespassing. Nevertheless, as our minibus drew close to the border wall at Whiskey 8, there was a prevailing sense of being out-of-bounds.
We reached a sun-bleached parking lot with two cars in it. Two canopy tents abutted the border wall; these housed the Solidarity Aid Station operated by the AFSC US-Mexico Border Program. Rios brought us into the tents where he explained the scenario to us:
In 2023 and 2024, smuggling networks brought people seeking asylum from all over the world here to breach the first of the two border walls. The wall was built 30’ tall, high enough to disorient a person. This was intentional, so that the wall would endanger those who attempt to climb it. Back in 2022, surgeons from the University of California, San Diego's level 1 trauma center had already published a study reporting significant increases in number of injuries, severity of injuries, and mortalities from border wall falls in the region after the 30’ wall replaced shorter ones in 2019. According to Rios, after scaling with a rope ladder provided by smugglers, asylum seekers were instructed to slide down the long metal slats of the wall into the zone between walls, and wait for Border Patrol so that they could claim asylum. People would arrive with injuries from the descent, sometimes needing emergency healthcare, as well as dehydration, hunger, and exhaustion. They were left to wait hours and sometimes days between the walls, waiting for Border Patrol agents to apprehend them.
A land surveyor could tell you that the space between the walls is US territory. Border Patrol could tell you that they alone control the gates to enter and leave the space between the walls. When Border Patrol finally did come, they would order people where and how to stand. But Border Patrol also maintained for a long time that the people between the walls were neither in their custody nor their responsibility until they were inside a Border Patrol vehicle on their way to a detention facility.
The walls were a structure designed to disorient, damage, trap, and then control. Border Patrol was putting space to use, to simultaneously control and abandon those between the walls. In a very matter-of-fact way, Rios shared devastating stories with us of people falling to their deaths or injury, being denied water and adequate food, and left to self-soothe wounds. The narratives that politicians and media weave for the public are far removed from this situation, and the border itself. Mainstream narratives dissolve upon encountering this space and those who are stationed there, providing basic necessities to those who cross the wall.
Rios and the AFSC US-Mexico Border Program team, alongside other community-based organizations, set up at Whiskey 8 in September 2023 to provide food, hydration, and information. They also found ways to activate the law in this space that is at once saturated with authority and evacuated of law. They provided documentation and evidence for litigation; a federal judge affirmed that the children stuck between the walls were de facto detained and therefore subject to the limitations on childhood detention under what is known as the Flores Settlement Agreement. This means that Border Patrol now must take responsibility for rapidly processing any child caught between the walls. And, if children were considered to be detained, then so were the adults, and thus Border Patrol must provide water, porta potties, and access for emergency health services.
Activity between the walls dwindled and came to a stop as the US banned asylum claims of those who cross without authorization, a change that took place in June 2024, before Trump was elected – an indication of the turn towards immigration restriction across the US political spectrum. The restrictionist shift is emblematic of a creeping illiberal liberalism that welcomes authoritarian modes of governance. Crackdowns and restrictions on immigration, while ostensibly in defense of the rule of law and the protection of the rights and freedoms of non-citizens, gear state authorities towards enforcement and control. They narrow the purview of who has the right to be recognized, protected, and governed by law and who is subject to authoritarian methods.
As Rios spoke with us, we had moved outside and stood next to the wall’s tall rust-colored slats. We could see the gate that Border Patrol officers could unlock and step through. A Border Patrol truck cruised by, back and forth along the road that traces the wall, until it stopped near us. Its driver got out and wanted to talk to Rios. He was telling us to move away from AFSC’s canopies, and into the parking lot.
We complied and talked some more. And then a student pointed out that an ATV had pulled up, its driver wearing a tinted black motorcycle helmet; he faced us silently. This was another Border Patrol vehicle, telegraphing to us that we should move on. We had broken no rules, but in this space, the rules can be warped and changed at will. Carrying these realizations, we ended the conversation early, and our class hurriedly left, attempting to make sense of what had just happened.
We drove to a nearby park where we debriefed, all of us in a degree of shock. The thing that they needed to stop was us learning and seeing reality in clear terms. In our positions of privilege and sureness of our legal rights, we were unprepared for the encounter. For one of us, a Syrian refugee with migration trauma, the incident triggered feelings of fear and panic, resulting in an uncontrolled outburst of emotion. Others in our group walked away seemingly grounded, yet undeniably unsettled. The truth was glaringly obvious: it didn’t matter whether we were allowed to be there or not. When we arrived too close to the site where the widespread delusion of an invasion of America by “violent criminals” is punctured, we unwittingly brushed with fascism at its weak spot.
When fascism sweeps across a system, one of its first commands is the blurring of protections afforded to a marginalized group. Of course, it would be incorrect to claim our experience with the border agent was an example of this blurring effect, but it was indicative of the growing suspicions toward anything that appears aligned with the scapegoated group.
Our visit to the border wall did not break any written rules or laws. Nevertheless, going to see and listen to people discuss their humanitarian activities at the border, evidently was a transgression of the border authority. To voluntarily go to Whiskey 8 simply to learn about the abandonment and dehumanization that happened there required an acute awareness that the bordering apparatus was violent and can legitimately be challenged; it was as though to observe was to challenge.
This thinly veiled attempt to censor our access to information revealed how insecure the system really was. We were not trying to "saw through the wall" as the border agent claimed to fear, but we were trying to see through it. In doing so, we had aligned ourselves against the mechanisms designed to divide an us from a them, mechanisms that turned border agents into the wardens of an oppressive illusion. The incident revealed clearly how borders and border authority work as an entry point for authoritarianism.
This article was originally published on Border Criminologies
