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In a nondescript parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, the toxic politics of immigration are omnipresent. I am here for the launch of a Republican car rally, where 100 vehicles clad in rightwing regalia have congregated in the dry heat in this southern part of the state, about 60 miles from the border with Mexico. Trump, who launched his political career in 2015 by describing Mexican migrants as “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” has since plunged the discourse to even lower depths. From unhinged falsehoods about the consumption of pets in Springfield, Ohio, to the brandishing of thousands of signs reading “Mass Deportation Now!” at the Republican convention earlier this year, any nuanced leadership on the right has been largely superseded by a disturbing lust for cruelty.
Among the drivers here is a Trump supporter named Lupe Hernandez, a Mexican American who tells me she arrived in the US with a visa in November 1963 on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated. But she has cousins, nephews and nieces who came to the US without paperwork decades ago. They are all good, hardworking people, she says. I ask how she feels about Trump’s plans for mass deportation, given it could mean these members of her own family would be targeted for forced removal. She is happy about it, she says: “They could be deported, but they can apply to come back.”
It is a striking reminder of just how entrenched Trumpist extremism has become – and a stark contrast to the era in which Hernandez arrived, shortly after Kennedy had made a call to embrace “A Nation of Immigrants”. Polling now suggests a majority of Americans favour brutal crackdowns – in some cases, evidently, at the expense of their own kin. The dark political strategy of blaming migrants for almost all of the US’s failures – from housing shortages to natural disaster responses – is now so ubiquitous it becomes easy to dissociate from reality.
Throughout Trump’s first term, I witnessed what these mass roundups actually look like, from the depravity of child separation at the southern border, where I sat in Texas courtrooms watching parents beg to be reunited with their toddlers, to secretive, overcrowded detention centres rife with rights violations and suffering. A second Trump term would be even harsher.
Shortly before the car rally takes to the streets, I ask people if such measures could be achieved without deliberate harm. Most people seem uninterested. “I don’t know [how],” says one woman. “But I’m confident Trump can do it.”
The next day, I hitch a ride out to the Sonoran desert, about 20 miles from Mexico, with the group Humane Borders. It is a non-profit that leaves out blue water barrels for passing migrants and have logged more than 4,000 deaths out here since 2000. The risks of crossing have intensified in recent years, with routes becoming longer and more perilous.
We trek a few hundred metres across the sand as the sun beats down and the temperature reaches more than 37C (100F). I stumble over a shrub that leaves a scattering of thorns that embed themselves through my trainers into my feet. As blood oozes out, the prospect of a five-day journey here feels unimaginable.
Although the volume of border crossings has dropped significantly this year, they reached a record high at the end of 2023 – explained by a complex mesh of changes to global migration patterns, an eventual rowing back of Trump-era restrictions, and more family groups making the journey from Central America.
Joel Smith, my guide and a volunteer with Human Borders, points to bullet holes in the water barrel we have come to inspect that have been plugged with glue. Smith’s life-saving water stations are frequently targeted by rightwing vigilantes, drunk on QAnon conspiracy theories falsely asserting the desert is home to migrant child sex camps. He brushes the threat off with admirable nonchalance.
Smith has maintained these stations for decades now, and points to bipartisan failure in Washington to explain what he describes as a humanitarian crisis. Congress has passed no significant immigration reform since the 1980s. “It doesn’t matter if we’re talking Barack Obama, Donald J Trump or Joe Biden. It’s all the same,” he says. “Death is the policy.”
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Tucson itself is the setting for one of the most competitive congressional races in the country. The incumbent Republican Juan Ciscomani faces the Democrat Kirsten Engel, whom I meet early one morning before the sun begins to scorch.
Engel is a progressive, campaigning on climate science, an end to Arizona’s abortion ban and expanding healthcare access. When she ran for the same seat two years ago, she was also keen to push back on rightwing characterisations of the border, denouncing portraits of “this out-of-control place with … criminals swarming into our country”.
While her critique remains accurate two years on, it’s one she is reluctant to reiterate now. Like many other Democrats, including Kamala Harris, Engel now supports a bipartisan border bill, which contains a number of pragmatic solutions to amend the country’s broken immigration apparatus, but also actions to appease hardline conservatives, including $650m (£496m) for more of Trump’s border wall. (In a move of nihilistic cynicism, Trump shut the deal down earlier this year to score points in the election.)
There are elements of this compromise – such as border-wall funding and pausing, in effect, the right to asylum – that would have been off limits for progressives eight years ago. I wonder if Engel is concerned that Trump is influencing her own party’s lurch to the right.
She acknowledges, candidly, the former president’s partial influence – one that has moved the country far beyond the promises made by JFK decades ago, for fair, flexible and generous immigration. “The United States has always been a harbinger of hope,” she says. “We want to stay that way. But we also have to have an orderly process.”