The summer on the border

El Paso, 2014

My wife asked me a few days ago if I’d ever been to the border of the United States. Pausing to confirm with myself that I really had, I replied that I had spent the summer of 2014 in El Paso.

DHS Summer Scholars Institute

I was doing an REU at UTEP. My research project was run by some computer scientists who were working on natural language processing and its applications in intelligence analysis. The program was funded by the Department of Homeland Security Students in the program were split between being assigned academic projects or internships at the FBI, Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations, the local police department, and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (yup, ICE).

Most of the time I spent that summer was working through a very amateur approximation of a text analysis program that summarized intelligence documents in graphical representations. Perhaps that sounds fancier than it actually was. I just wrote a very simple Java program that took in text documents and output a graph where the nodes were all the proper nouns in the document. The connections between nodes was supposed to be based on something like the number of times those terms appeared in the same document, but I never got that part to work so the edges of my graph were just linking single nodes to one another based on the order they appeared in the document.

It’s honestly hilarious thinking back on that project and how long it took me to get even that simple version working. I was a sophomore statistics major and the only programming class I had taken up that point was with Scratch, a cartoonish program for kids. Compounded by the fact that I had very little guidance from my supervising professors, I was basically up shit creek and entering the chocolate rapids,

Three professors led this DHS funded project, and while they certainly must have done something to earn that money, I wasn’t quite sure what it was. I never even met two of the professors in the three months I was in El Paso, we only communicated once through email when I first arrived and that was it.

The third professor, an imposing Slavic man with a thin mustache, met with me every Friday, but instead of discussing the programming project he instead had me write a mathematics paper on some linear optimization technique. Our meetings were essentially a weekly address on my endless deficiencies: my ignorance of linear algebra beyond the introductory level, my lack of formal mathematics training in general, my horrid technical writing skills, my unfamiliarity with TeX Every week felt like a brutal exercise for a muscle I had just learned the existence of.

To his credit, at the end of the summer I gave him a very shoddy manuscript which he published it in a very small journal. When I read the published version later, I was shocked to find that he had almost completely rewritten my final draft and still gave me sole authorship, perhaps because the topic of the paper was such low hanging fruit that it really wasn’t worth his while to put his own name on it.

Naim

The only other person who helped me with the actual programming project was a beleaguered but kind graduate student from Bangladesh. He always seemed completely strapped with his own work, and I’m confident that he pulled the short straw in his research group and was assigned to babysit me at least once a week.

Our sessions were informal, typically held in the lobby of the engineering building Naim always wore a floor length linen garment and floppy sandles, so I could hear him walking across the room. We would pull out our laptops and sit them on the lobby coffee tables, so that both of us were hunched over at acute angles.

While I did all of the typing, he gave me guidance on how to solve whatever bug I was running into that day, and later fed me just general advice on good software engineering practice. Whenever I modularize my code, I always think of him and his gentle suggestions that I would have to do less typing if I wrote a few helper functions. “Always try to be a bit lazy.” he said. Those words have served me well in more ways than he imagined.

The city

El Paso itself was a beautiful town. The city is in the middle of the Chihuahua Desert, and crowned by the Franklin Mountains which poke up through the center of town, effectively splitting the city into two. One of the interns had a car and drove me to a famous local taco joint Chico’s which was located on the other side of town, meaning we had to circumnavigate the mountain. We got sweeping views of the desert, almost stark white in the daytime, the void broken up with red stone and green brush. On our way back, we decided to drive up the mountain instead of around it, and caught the sunset at the peak, the reds and purples above us and the shimmering city lights below us, it was like standing at the mast of a ship in hte middle of dark ocean.

One weekend we took a trip out to Balmorhea State Park, an enormous pool fed with clear blue spring water. Around us were families of all hues, the kids running around in the grass and jumping into the pool, shrieking with joy. Mothers and fathers waded in the shallows or in the shade of the cottonwood trees, chatting gaily. I swam down to the center of the pool where there was a single stone pillar which stuck out of the water. Holding on to the column, I peered into the dead center of the pool, the sunlight penetrating 25 feet deep and lighting the cerulean floor. Scuba divers were picking their way along the bottom, streams of bubbles emanating upwards like tiny schools of jellyfish. I’ve never had a summer experience like that, before or since.

In retrospect, El Paso was the city of many firsts for me. The first time I went to a nightclub, made more difficult by the fact that I was twenty at the time. The first time I went to a baseball game, seated in the grassy outfield of hte El Paso Chihuahuas. The first time I went to a Mormon service, simultaneously fun and overbearing, filled with a very well-produced film on the story of Joseph Smith, three hours of discussion, and very delicious food. The first time I asked for a girl’s phone number, although my intentions were merely to request more information about the city and truly aromantic.

Soon, summer was over

Despite the frigidity of the faculty and the waves of acute but superficial stress that only exists for undergrads who grew up in the suburbs, I somehow had a finished poster and presentation after ten weeks of work. That summer concluded with a symposium to various members from the stakeholder organizations. A good proportion of the alphabet soup agencies were represented, and I ended up winning an award for my presentation, although I can no longer recall what the award was specifically for since there were several winners. There was no cash prize, but I did get a tumbler with the DHS logo on it and I can remember walking around the El Paso airport carrying it with the emblem facing outwards as if it gave me some air of mystique. That moment right there was probably it. The closest I ever got of feeling proud to be an American, of knowing that I wanted to spend the rest of my life serving this great country. The feeling that this country, despite our warts and missteps, could be trusted to do what’s best for the average person, and adhere to its principles, synonymous with the comman values of humanity.

Statement of purpose

I initially applied for the UTEP program after finding an advertisement online. After gathering my transcript (there wasn’t much on it at the time) and some letters of recommendation, the final attachement was a statement of purpose. That specific document is thankfully long lost on some cracked laptop, but putting myself back into the simple mindset I had at the time, I could probably rewrite a faithful replica of what I submitted. That of a fullthroated belief in the United State of America as a force for global good, for protecting the rules-based order. That we were a welcoming and kind people as long as you followed said rules, though exceptions could be made for the most pitiful of cases. That anyone from anywhere in the world can come to the United States and share in our creed, shed the skin of their old world if they so choose and be reborn under the Stars and Stripes, in equal company to those whose family lines stretched all the way to the colonial era. That America is the home of the free because of brave, and goddammit I’m young and talented and I’m ready to serve a mission greater than just myself.

John Winthrop himself probably couldn’t have written a statement of purpose with more exceptionalism.

ICE

When ICE started getting more notoriety during Trump’s first term and really hitting the limelight in his second, it was a strange moment for me. I had met ICE agents during my time in El Paso since a large chunk of the summer program involved tours of different govnerment facilities around the city. The facilities ranged from plain office buildings lined with cubicles to tactical compounds, filled with different live fire training courses. The requirements were high, and a lot of the training resembled footage I had seen of SWAT exercises. Additionally, all of them had to have a minimum conversational level of Spanish, which was included as part of their training.

El Paso has a very strong government presence, so ICE, Border Patrol, and HSI all cooperate frequently and it was sometimes tough for me to gauge where the jurisdiction of ICE ended and another agency began. At one point during a tour of an immigration facility, an ICE agent and a USDA agent were discussing all the fruit and produce that needs to be inspected at the international crossings for drugs or harmful pests. There was a room in the facility chock full of different contraband produce, some of it sliced up so that the innards could be inspected. When I left El Paso in 2014, that was the most lasting impression of ICE. A dorky balding man holding up a bisected chayote.

Even the Border Patrol seemed to have a high degree of professionalism. They drove us out to the border wall, a twenty foot tall array of overlapping metal gridded fences, rusted and red in the burning sun. We stood in its slight shadow, with nothing but sand and dry grass around us for miles. Looking left and right, the wall stretched for miles and split the flat earth like a sword.

They took us to their facility afterwards. As soon as we stepped in, we could see holding cells seemingly along every other wall in the building. The cells were simply concrete rooms with windows all along the inward facing side so that agents could look across the entire room without entering. I was struck by the age of the detained, they were all younger than me or at least seemed that way. An agent explained that they were seeing a deluge of unaccompanied minors stuck in an endless cycle in which they would cross, get captured, get released into Mexico, and attempt to cross again the next day. This almost invariably repeated the cycle, some of those agents saw those kids more than their own.

Looking at the young people in there, the only word I could really think of was pitiful. They looked dirty, haggard, but more than that they looked hopeless, stuck in this endless purgatory where the only difference between days is the number of minutes it takes before you get caught.

There was one kid who couldn’t have been more than nine years old who was wearing a Pikachu shirt. In that moment, I understood that the only thing separating me from him was that I was born on the right side of the border. Whether we were separated by a border fence or separated by panes of wire glass, there was always going to be some manmade wall in between. As if whether he and I were on one side or the other was assigned, predestined by the Universe, but some random diffusion of atoms trillions of years ago.

The agent, probably not clairvoyant enough to know what I was thinking but resonding to it nonetheless replied to the effect of “It’s now a fun job, bringing these kids in. It’s an endless cycle for us too.” She didn’t revel in the suffering that she was inflicting on other people. To her, it was nothing more than a job. No joy, no malice, just business.

Part of me wants to believe that makes her better. New ICE relishes in what they do, they derive a great and cruel joy out of doing it. Nothing brings a smile to their face faster than arresting someone brown or black, bonus points if they are old, frail, or young. The dripping contempt in some of the voices of these men, you just know instantly that they have been smacking their lips all day thinking of the moment they get to steal someone off the street or provoke legal observers. To new ICE, these are not people, they are dangerous subhuman illegals destroying our nation and they are lucky we don’t terminate them on site.

If someone wants to try and convince me that the reason America is failing is because of a Bangladeshi grad student, and not the person trying to violently and illegally remove them, I would hope they would try so at least I know afterwards to say away from them.

But New ICE loves parading around their trophies, making their memes, photoshopping and using AI to make people look more scored, more hysterical, raise the heat more and more. The genus of man designed for those expensive hunting trips, posing with a thumbs up and a rifle and kneeling on an endangered wild animal full of bullet holes. These are the exact kind of people who lead Abu Ghraib or My Lai.

Can I convince myself that the agent from 2014 wasn’t the kind of person who would torture helpless men?

But maybe at the end of the day it doesn’t matter to a deportee if the person cuffing them feels bad about it or not, it’s naive to think it matters when the outcomes is the same. Maybe that agent twelve years ago was still a willing perpetuator in the banality of evil. Maybe I was too, for how much I bought into DHS during that summer on the border. It is time to reckon with my own complicity.