MENTAL BORDERS
Where do you envision when you hear the term border? If I asked you the same question two years ago, would you have the same response? Does the border feel closer today than two years ago? Five years ago? Ten years ago? The thing about borders is that they are always shifting. Both physically and in our minds.
Yesterday, I happened to catch a clip of CBS Mornings interviewing a Minneapolis cafe owner in the wake of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE.1 The journalist asked the cafe owner, “How do you think this ends?” To which the cafe owner responded, “ICE leaving.”
This begs the question, ICE leaving Minnesota to go where? Back to the South, as implied by the cafe owner’s response? That is part of the problem. ICE simply going back to the South does not stop ICE from continuing to harm and kill people like Keith Porter, Jr., Genry Ruiz Guillén, Serwit Gezahegn Dejene, Maksym Chernyak, Chaofeng Ge, Norlan Guzaman-Fuentes, Santos Banegas Reyes, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado, Miguel Ángel García Medina, Silverio Villegas González, Nenko Stanev Gantchev, Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, Oscar Rascon Duarte, Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez, Brayan Garzón-Rayo, Nhon Ngoc Nguyen, Johnny Noviello, Isidro Pérez, Tien Xuan Phan, Marie Ange Blaise, Huabing Xie, Leo Cruz-Silva, Hasan Ali Moh’d Saleh, Josué Castro Rivera, Gabriel Garcia Aviles, Kai Yin Wong, Franscisco Gaspar-Andrés, Pete Sumalo Montejo, Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani, Jean Wilson Brutus, Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, Jaime Alanís Gacia, Jesus Molina-Veya,2 and many others. The cafe owner’s response demonstrates the mental borders people draw.
Many people are only now beginning to decry ICE, if at all, as its presence has increased in the Midwest and the North. ICE has brought the border to their backyard. The border is no longer a far-off concept that they can keep out of sight and out of mind. I hate to break it to you all, but the border has always been in your backyard.
Who is your neighbor? Only the person in close proximity to you, or people generally? As humans, we are all neighbors to each other. Our lives are interconnected, and we are dependent on each other whether we know each other or not. The decisions we make impact others. The harm and cruelty others experience are a direct result of our collective choices. And if one person can be harmed, we all can be harmed. We cannot be oblivious to our neighbors’ needs and plight.
The words in the second-to-last line of Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem, “To live in the Borderlands means you…,” have always resonated with me since I first read them a decade ago in college. “You must live sin fronteras.”3 For non-Spanish speakers, “sin fronteras” translates to “without borders.”
The border is literally a front. An imperialist illusion center-stage on stolen Native land. Borders are not just maintained by physical demarcations and physical force, but also through mental, social, and cultural lines. It is through such abstract and conceptual delineation that physical borders can even exist. Borders must exist in our minds and beliefs before they can materialize in society.
These borders extend beyond immigration. We must expand our view of what borders are. White supremacist systems program us to associate borders with immigration, but if we look closer, we can see just how pervasive such borders are. For example, the Delmar Divide in St. Louis, MO, is not just a physical border, but also a racial, socioeconomic, and cultural border. Borders are not just geographic locations; they are deliberate and divisive tools of white supremacy. Jim Crow laws were violent borders. Gerrymandering is a border. Houselessness is a border. The alienation of our labor is a border. Environmental degradation is a border. Borders are mechanisms used to maintain white supremacy by violently outlining hierarchical strata of racial, ethnic, and class standing.
I say this all not to trivialize or detract from the very real violence that Black people, People of Color, and immigrants endured during the Jim Crow era and for years in connection with U.S. immigration policy and enforcement, but instead to contextualize and illuminate the inter-connectivity of these issues due to the intentional web that white supremacist systems have spun.
How do I think this ends? I will give you part of my answer, as the internet does not have a knack for nuance, and in our present panopticon, selectivity and subversion preserve those living for liberation. Abolish ICE and mental borders.
CBS Mornings: Timeline of Minnesota Immigration Operation (CBS television broadcast Jan. 27, 2026) https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/dNfPJDXXDQ12kxxbGomUMpsSuBlS777s/?p=22.
BreakThrough News, “(@btnewsroom), At Least 35 People Were Killed by Ice in 2025, Instagram (Jan. 14, 2026), https://www.instagram.com/p/DTgBhxqCeiF/?img_index=1.
Gloria Anzaldua, To live in the Borderlands means you, in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 194-95 1987.