A Rationale for a Protest
When a tyrant lacks the support of his people, he resorts to overwhelming force to enact his will. When he lacks a cogent argument for his policy, he lies. When he lacks a moral center, his edicts are haphazard, furtive, and doomed. When he lacks the love for his people that great leaders possess—unable & unwilling to bring his nation together—he knows that his only strategy for retaining power is to divide and conquer. When the dividing finally ends we’ll see it clearly: the us will be one man denouncing his enemies, the them will be the rest of us who’ve finally realized our common humanity and our disgust with how our nation has been defined.
We’re gathered here at the edge of another ill-defined military solution. A few miles to the west, within view, is the newly declared National Defense Area. On April 12, the current President placed 109,000 acres of New Mexico public land under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense—another in a flurry of executive orders, launched before the people and their leaders in Congress could debate the wisdom of militarizing the border of our state. In order to bypass the will of the people, he had to declare a national emergency, an invasion, a war at our southern border. The last time an American President invoked the Alien Enemies Act, the Japanese military had two months earlier attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor; 2400 Americans died in the surprise attack. We ask you for a moment to draw a stark contrast between Pearl Harbor and our southern border. And let us admit, even during that internment of Alien Enemies, our treatment of Japanese families tarnished our national commitment to justice and upended thousands of lives.
Like the man in the proverb who, armed only with a hammer sees every problem as a nail, the current President sees military force as the tool to address complex problems—including our principled dissent. Like a father who answers his son’s honest, troubling questions with the back of his hand, this administration attempts to silence us with threats and violence. For a moment, the elder may quell the dissenting voice, but as the son runs his palm along his swollen jaw, he sees through the old man’s blunt ignorance.
Perhaps someone who supports this militarization will point out that illegal crossings along the border are at a 21st-century low now. Let me point out that the crossings were at a 21st-century low before American military troops were ordered to the border. Perhaps defenders of militarization will say, “The flow of deadly drugs across the border has been stanched.” In response, let me cite a statistic that may surprise and enlighten you as it did me: Using Customs & Border Patrol data, the Project on Government Oversight found that, of the 5.8 million migrants stopped by Border Patrol between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, drugs were seized from only 249 people—and half of those seizures were of marijuana. The great river of illegal drugs overwhelmingly flows through our official ports of entry, not through the Border Wall.
If you squint into the sun, you can see what does flow through the Border Wall: people. The squares cut with cheap power tools—and then rewelded into place by government contractors—speak to the nature of the stream. A leader with overwhelming media access and underwhelming ethics can claim that mostly murderers, criminals, animals, and rapists are gushing through those breaches; but the individual human stories show otherwise. When we reflect rather than react with anger that serves the leader, we realize that there are murderers, criminals, and rapists on both sides of the Border Wall, and we two nations address our societal failures with domestic police officers and courts of law.
The government mission here is to control the narrative, and to do that, certain truths must be overlooked. That mission must refuse to admit that our border policy, with its current refusal to allow asylum seekers to enter our country through the southern border, has spawned a cataclysm of unintended consequences. It can pretend that a Stryker perched on a landfill will prevent this human catastrophe, but I think we will find that it won’t. An army can’t halt a changing global climate, the cruelty of corrupt regimes to the south—some of them a consequence of American foreign policy—and hemispheric global economic inequality that, when we see it up close, appalls us. The overwhelming percentage of people cross this border to become part of what they dream will be a more just community for themselves and their families; they hope to become Americans.
Rather than sending an army of immigration attorneys and judges to the border, this administration sends an army of soldiers. Let me state clearly that I am standing here today not to condemn the women and men who serve in in the nation’s military. We respect your courage to put your lives on the line to defend your people. Our condemnation is reserved for the powerful men & women who sent you here. The President’s pledge, in two separate Januarys, was to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” Instead, he treats that 236-year-old document like it’s a list of suggestions for naïve idealists. When it proves inconvenient to his consolidation of power—military, economic, and political—he grinds over the Constitution like a Stryker.
When a leader serves himself rather than his people, his minions come in masks and deport refugees to foreign hell-holes. When he can’t meet his quota of deportable, disposable humans, he lures them into government courts where he can punish those law-abiding residents with separation from their families. When citizens come to the aid of the undocumented people they love—people who have labored to feed and house us for decades, who pay taxes that make police forces and fire departments and medical benefits and Social Security possible—the leader brings in the military, again with a show of overwhelming force aimed against those with the courage to resist the moral vacancy of the regime.
Fear is the hammer in this administration's meager toolbox. We come here today to overcome fear, to declare, calmly, together, the illegality and the immorality of border militarization. We come today with a clear eye to the future, in response to a leader who has sworn he will meet protestors “with a very big force,” that he will call upon the National Guard and the military to “very easily handle” “the enemy within.” Should this brazen public land-grab proceed in relative silence, we may regret foregoing the smaller resistance we could have mounted that might have ended the larger authoritarian project. We must not look back in a year and regret the opportunity we missed immediately after the President claimed these public lands as his own—Why didn’t we raise our voices against what was clearly wrong? Today we take a confident step in forestalling regret. We remind the people gathered here that this land is your land—protected by law and custom from performative shows of overwhelming force. We’re insisting on a different narrative than the President’s, founded on principle and evidence. We come with a plea to wise state and national lawmakers to create a just, humane immigration policy that lives up to the better angels of the American nature, to serve a republic founded on the labor of immigrants who came to this land in search of dignity and a simple abundance. We will persist in our quest for justice as long as the military zone is occupied and as long as our government treats people on both sides of this wall as Alien Enemies.
Kind regards,
Jim McIntosh
Silver City, New Mexico