At the Border, No One Can Know Your Name
A volunteer helping families cross over into California shares the painstaking process
I spent the second week of 2019 in Tijuana, Baja California. Or rather, I spent the nights of that week in San Diego, and every morning — as the sun rose over parking lots and outlet malls and border fences — I’d walk across the footbridge at PedWest, 7-Eleven coffee in hand, flash my passport at a Mexican border guard who, by the third day recognized me and waved me through without even looking, and put my backpack through the X-ray machine. Just after climbing down a maze of concrete ramps that looked like a diagram of Dante’s Hell, past a security guard with an AK-47 strapped to his front who spent his mornings texting, I’d exit the turnstile and into a plaza with waiting taxis and 10-foot-high letters that said: MEXICO TIJUANA.
I was in Tijuana as part of a response caravan, coming from all over the country, to help meet the needs of the group of Central Americans who had walked northward from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador in the thousands. By then, the midterms were over: the caravan was no longer in the news every day, anchors were no longer bloviating about the possibility of Muslims, or rapists, being smuggled in alongside pregnant mothers with small children in tow. I thought I’d be going…
