Interview with Todd Miller
Todd Miller
Journalist, Author Build Bridges not Walls, 2021 Empire of Borders, 2019 Storming the Wall, 2017 Border Patrol Nation, 2014
In November of 2021, Todd Miller came to the Denver area as a part of a brief book tour promoting his new book, Build Bridges Not Walls. As a part of this book tour, the DU Immigrant and Refugee Rights Colectivo sat down with Todd Miller to discuss this new book and the overarching themes from his work as a whole. Our discussion centered around militarization of the U.S. immigration system and the systemic issues that perpetuate its cruelty. The following is an edited transcript of this discussion:
Interviewer 1: Colectivo is lucky to be here today with Todd Miller, who is a renowned journalist and author of books such as Empire of Borders, Storming the Wall, and, more recently, Build Bridges Not Walls, which is about border militarization, the intersections of immigration-related issues with other important issues, the relationships of individuals to systemic issues, and envisioning a future without borders. So, Todd, would you want to start off by giving a brief intro of yourself, if there’s anything else you want to add, and then maybe a quick overview of your book?
Todd Miller: Sure, it’s great to be here with you all today. Build Bridges Not Walls, which is the book that I am mainly talking about is my fourth book. My first one was called Border Patrol Nation, published in 2014. That one was looking at various angles of the post-9/11 massive expansion of the border and immigration enforcement apparatus. And then, of course, Storming the Wall, which was my second book and almost a sequel to Border Patrol Nation. It tries to connect the massive border apparatus in a global perspective and looks at climate displacement and climate change. The third was Empire of Borders, in which I literally did the journalistic maxim of “Follow the Money.” I followed U.S. federal government money to all these countries around the world to report on border programs that the U.S. was implementing with these countries. So I went to the Mexico-Guatemala border, the Guatemala-Honduras border, the Dominican-Haiti border, the Jordan-Syria border, the Philippines, the Kenya-Tanzania border, and to Israel and Palestine, and on.
So, Build Bridges Not Walls, the one that was published earlier this year, is almost a shift from the other books in the sense that its almost a meditation from all of these years reporting on this stuff and looking at it through those sorts of perspectives of gleaning the wisdom and trying to influence the conversations based on all this other reporting. So I bring a lot of the other reporting in from these other books. The title says where I’m going with this, and the subtitle is “Imagining a World Without Borders.” It’s not a rigorous academic argument, it’s more of a meditation trying to bring up new conversations. That’s more the intention. The cover of the book is actually a fence, and then a part of it turns into a bird, and then it’s backdropped by the ocean. So that idea of being able to imagine something new or look at something differently is there.
Interviewer 2: The first book that I ever read on immigration was Border Patrol Nation. After reading that book, I’m wondering what challenges you faced reporting and articulating on that and getting access to it? Or articulating any challenge on narrating what you’ve come across?
Todd Miller: Yeah, so, with this stuff, starting with Border Patrol Nation, I was just trying to pound on the doors of the Homeland Security apparatus. Trying to see if they’ll let me in and trying to report on the inside.
Interviewer 2: Did they let you in?
Todd Miller: They always reject you at first, but you just keep knocking. With the persistence of doing that, I ended up being able to get into many conventions. That’s where I start in Border Patrol Nation, where I first start reporting on the border-industrial complex and looking at the synergy between these vendors and different companies. And I was seeing it play out right in front of my face! Watching vendors talk with officials and the negotiation of meanings, how things are peddled, and those sorts of interactions. So seeing the palpable industrial complex play out before my eyes. It’s hard to get in those things, they try to stop you. But once you’re in, it’s all free. Everyone will talk to you once you're there. It’s funny. You talk to the vendors and they all want to talk about their jobs! It’s just their job, selling a surveillance camera. So they’ll just go on and on, and I’ve been able to get incisive and insightful quotes - quotes that are probably kind of damning too - of people just talking about how this apparatus works on the inside. Once you get in the tongues get a little loose.
Especially in that book, I was really trying to learn how to become a journalist and learning to not take no as an answer from officials and from the government. Like, you take no as an answer from other people, but not from that corporate or government official. There were a couple of times that I said, “You have to talk to me, you have to do this. It’s your obligation. I’m a journalist, I’m asking you to do this.” There’s a couple of times that I say, “If you don’t do this, it becomes part of the story.” And it literally does. Eventually, you’re just like, “Fine! It’s part of the story now. You not letting me in is a part of the story, so I’m going to interview you about that right now.”
Interviewer 2: I had a question going back to how you talk about people keeping the doors closed, but after you get in, they talk freely about their dehumanization strategies. A lot of these conventions are very incriminating. Do they ever make efforts to make a euphemism?
Todd Miller: I have to think it’s openly accepted because I hear it so much myself, and I’m a journalist. It’s interesting, though, when you get into the convention vs hearing from the Public Relations arm of Border Patrol. It’s completely different. Public relations will tell you, “Oh we’re all about saving lives.” You get it a lot more couched in humanitarian terms. Behind the scenes, that sort of language takes a back seat. They’re saying things Public Relations don’t. They give insight into what’s really going on and how things work. I thought one particularly important instance from Storming the Wall was this Admiral who said, “Yeah, it could be about saving the polar bears. Who cares about that? What this means for the US military is that we can be more lethal.” He made that point over and over again.
Interviewer 1: In all of your books, you talk about militarization and the border. I wanted to give you some time now to maybe discuss anything else you saw as important with regards to that.
Interviewer 3: And as an addendum, I’m curious about militarization and dehumanization. Can you have militarization without dehumanization?
Todd Miller: I honestly think that militarization relies on dehumanization. They’re kind of inextricably connected. I remember in Border Patrol Nation, I was interviewing a Border Patrol Agent - one of the agents who was a dissenting agent. He uses this term pseudospeciation when he talked about the Border Patrol, and he claims that to do their jobs, they have to dehumanize people. It’s an intrinsic part of it.
Interviewer 4: Do you think that’s part of the training for those jobs? Getting them into that mindset?
Todd Miller: I would think so. I don’t think they would say it that way. But seeing some of the training videos and knowing what the training entails and what they do makes me think so. The training is pretty harsh for the actual agents as well. Like they have to do jumping jacks and have law-enforcement grade pepper spray sprayed into their eyes while doing it. Or they have to dress up in big suits and then get two supervisors to beat the crap out of them and see how long they last. It’s not only the people they’re arresting, but it's also them themselves that have their humanity beaten out of them. So I see these training processes as a part of militarization. The whole thing is mass dehumanization using psychological operations. That’s the only way the border can function as it does - it brutalizes people. How else can you brutalize people like this thing does if it is not designed with dehumanization at heart?
To talk about the border in general, the prevention through deterrence strategy is basically the strategy now. It’s been in place since ‘94. It’s this same strategy that militarizes the cities to force people into the deserts, where a Border Patrol memorandum in ‘94 states puts them in danger. Tom, over here, when we met, we were doing the migrant trail walk. You walk 75 miles from the border to Tucson to protest the policy of death and to remember those who perished in the desert. More than 8,000 people have been identified. No More Deaths just came out with a report that estimates it to be 3-10 times more.
Tom: 18 years we’ve been doing that.
Todd Miller: You go back to the first year in 2004, and you think, “We’re going to walk against this policy and there’s no way that people keep dying in the desert.” 18 years later, we have to do this again. It’s still in place. All of that is the militarization of the border.
Interviewer 5: Do you think the US Mexico border, second to the Korean border, is one of the most militarized borders? Especially since 9/11 and how polarized immigration is?
Todd Miller: In terms of numbers, it definitely has the biggest budget. Of course, we’re talking about a 2,000 mile border. I was crunching numbers comparing the budget of the US-Mexico border with a couple of other places. By far, it has the most money going to it. Particularly, like you mentioned - the post-9/11 formation of DHS and its prioritization of counter-terrorism opened the faucet and tons of money went into the border. It’s the US-Mexico border, but it’s also the northern border, the coast, the Caribbean, etc.
I just wrote a piece thinking about Haitians arriving in Del Rio. The border goes right up to the shores of Haiti. When you look at some of the natural disasters, it’s amazing how quickly some of the coast guard cutters end up in Haitian waters. I looked into the earthquake in 2010. A jumbo jet was sent over Haiti with the voice of the ambassador speaking in Creole saying, “Do not leave. If you leave, you will be interdicted, you will be sent back.” The GEO group is in charge of some of the detention centers in Guantanamo bay. They opened these for some of the Haitians that were going to leave. This is also an extension of the border.
Interviewer 1: It reminds me of what you were talking about with the Border Patrol agents themselves. There was a quote in the new book that stood out to me as I was going through it: “As a border patrol agent, you have a muted sense of empathy that you just don’t know how to cope.” Your argument in the book is that empathy is needed, but yet they do so much to keep empathy out.
Todd Miller: Yes, I would argue it totally is. It goes back to that quote talking about the training. They get their humanity beaten out of them, then that quote is of almost no surprise. In that case I was interviewing an agent who was actually relaying one of the most intense episodes of empathy I have ever heard. He was holding a young man who, turns out, was dying - and he was helping hold him with his brother. They held hands, and when he looked at the younger brother of the man and thought it was his own brother. He lost sense of who he was. The muted empathy quote was while he was explaining this story of him losing sense of who he was, thinking that someone who died in his arms while crossing the border was his brother.
Interviewer 1: And then, on that point, when he was telling that story to his supervisor, I remember that his supervisor told him, “Don’t worry, they were drug mules.” As if that made the whole situation ok.
Todd Miller: Yeah, that’s what he was trying to say. When he relayed that part of it to me, he looked at me and said, “What did I care?” At this point, he had already changed. It was beyond that sort of stigmatization anymore.
Interviewer 3: This is a more abstract question for you. I know that many of us have volunteered with Casa de Paz, and they do visitations for the ICE detention center. I remember the first time I did that, or maybe one of the times I went back, one of the guards was yelling and beating somebody in front of my eyes. I then went in and did my visitation, but when I was walking back out, I saw the same guard crying on the phone with their daughter saying, “Oh I’m so sorry I’m missing your third birthday” And it was weird to see this display of empathy for one human being but then the complete stripping of another person's humanity! I’ve never been able to reconcile how that person is the same person. So I guess my question is, how do you recognize the humanity in people that are trained and specialized to strip the humanity away from others?
Todd Miller: That’s a great question. I could talk about my personal ideas. Again, I do think that with the Border Patrol agents, people’s humanity is beaten out of them. I think I wrote about this a little bit in the Build Bridges book, but it really happened when I was writing Border Patrol Nation. I interviewed so many agents for that. Just by getting them off to the side and away from the public information officer, you hear more stories and more reasons. Quite frankly, I realized I was humanizing the border patrol. And the humanization of the border patrol was an important part of an epiphany in that book in the sense that it revealed a huge, massive system that was around them and made them. The border patrol is on the front line, but in a way, those agents and the corrections officers (at GEO) are just a part of a whole apparatus of people making decisions. It’s a top-down command structure. They take their orders and they have to follow them. I was looking at the whole private apparatus too. There are people building the walls, maintaining things, etc. You start putting it all together, and this thing is massive! The border patrol is just one part of it, and they are put on the frontlines.
Interviewer 4: I feel like it has to do with the system as a whole, like we have to take a systematic approach to understand it. They are just one small part of a larger system, acting in the ways that the system requires them to. From this approach, how do we as individuals, as also part of that same system, can also respond to these larger issues?
Todd Miller: That’s a good point. When you recognize the larger system, and then you recognize that you yourself contribute in some way, it now looks like we have responsibility too! Like, if we realize that our tax money does this, we take responsibility as well, and that does shift things. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s often looked at in this way, and it seems to me that if we looked at it in this way, there might be more change.
Interviewer 4: Yes, but at the same time, it’s also a system that people are used to and benefit from. It’s something that feels comfortable, so coming up with something to change or even abolish the system would be difficult.
Todd Miller: I would argue, though, that people don’t really know what’s going on at the border. Having gone around and talked about this all over the place, it is so amazing how many people don’t know. It’s amazing that Donald Trump could say that he was going to build a wall in 2016 and that so many people didn’t know there were already 650 miles of barriers on the border. Billions of dollars going into these budgets, a huge hiring of border patrol.
It seems like one of the things I remember during the Donald Trump years was the 2018 family separation. When the reporting was done, people were like, “Holy shit, they’re ripping children away from their parents.” And when people saw that with their own eyes, they said, “No!” There was a galvanization of people saying no, and it reached the upper echelons. Granted, that was just one of those moments of cruelty, but the border is designed to do that. It’s designed to rip families apart, it does it in many different ways. It seems to me that if people knew that more, could see the budgets, could unpack what is going on, could have a higher awareness of what it is and what it is doing, then maybe that awareness could change.
Tom: We’re talking about the militarization of the border, but we’re also talking about militarization of our society, like how much we spend on defense. When a person joins a military organization, or a paramilitary organization (like CBP or, potentially, the police), we are not born to go and kill people. You have to be trained to pull the trigger. That’s why the training when you go into the military or the border patrol focuses so much on dehumanization. You have to see the person on the other end of your rifle as the enemy. You have to dehumanize them and see them as a threat. That’s the harm that’s been done by Trump and the right-wing takeover of the Republican party and the discourse in this country. It’s to dehumanize. They make this conscious decision to see the person on the other end of the gun or the other end of the border as less than human, and as a threat. You ask the question, what can you do? Demonstrate in front of GEO, or work with Centro Humanitario to get wages recovered. You do these things, and that’s how you kill fascists. It’s up to us to make that happen. It’s about militarization and dehumanization. That’s why I was so happy to see Todd’s latest book tell stories of people who are affected because it re-humanizes.
Interviewer 1: That bridges perfectly to where I kind of want to end this conversation, and that is by asking what you think this issue looks like moving forward.
Todd Miller: I think that’s one of the things I was thinking of in writing this new book. It seems like the national conversation or the media conversation or the conversation in Washington is stuck in these really narrow parameters about what can be thought about or discussed about the border or immigration in general. We’re stuck in these parameters. What I was trying to do in this book is no sort of academic thing, but really trying to break through these conversations. We’re stuck in a status-quo. Biden could go ahead and reverse things like Title 42 and Remain in Mexico, but he’s not. But even if he were to accomplish all of these things, if he were to continue the longer-term trends as far as budget increases, prevention through deterrence, etc, it still would just be the status quo. This really needs to be addressed, and it’s not.
It’s hard to say where to go. In Build Bridges not Walls, I look at a few things. I draw from abolitionist thought, from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who is a prison abolitionist. One of the things she’ll often say is that 1% is about destroying the prison, and 99% is building a world of justice in which the prison shouldn’t even be a part. That goes back to what Tom was saying, about the little or big things that we can all do. Do we wait for the Biden administration? I don’t think so. Maybe we can pressure the administration, but it seems like there are things that people can do, big and small, potentially even involving politicians. And that’s a way to pressure things to get done. It seems to me that Democrats at least seem to respond to pressure.
I don’t really know, right? In the book, I just try to raise questions. I think the conversation has gotten stuck in this status quo, and I think it needs to shift. Probably what all of you are doing is probably already it! All of this is super important. What I think about when I write these books, like with Storming the Wall, if I had just cataloged all of the things that I found that people were doing to combat climate change, I would have had a book that would have been up to the ceiling. What if all of this was put into one place? Then it becomes much bigger.