Masha Gessen on Trump and Russia, and a Former Border Agent on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Summary

Podcast Summary – The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode: Masha Gessen on Trump and Russia, and a Former Border Agent on the U.S.-Mexico Border
Date: February 23, 2018
Host: David Remnick
Guests: Masha Gessen (journalist and author), Francisco Cantú (former Border Patrol agent), Sarah Stillman (New Yorker staff writer)

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Overview

This episode explores the intersection of politics, authoritarianism, and personal experience from two unique vantage points. First, Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and expert on both Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s America, discusses democracy, totalitarianism, and the complexities of the Trump-Russia scandal. The second half features Francisco Cantú, a former Border Patrol agent, describing the psychological and ethical realities of working on the U.S.-Mexico border and grappling with the politics and emotions of border enforcement.

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Part I: Masha Gessen – Trump, Russia, and the Authoritarian Mindset

(00:48–17:19)

Background and Perspective

• On Her Unique Perspective
  • Gessen, raised in Soviet Russia and now a U.S. resident, feels "gifted with this special pair of eyeglasses" to spot authoritarian tendencies (04:19).
  • “I was brought up in opposition to the regime… I see things and I see them. I can point them out, which to me feels pretty easy.” (04:19)
• Family History
  • Both grandmothers were translators; family legends differentiated one as a conformist (a Stalin-era censor), the other as fearless—though reality was more nuanced (05:31–06:25).
  • “As a history teacher, I would have had to lie to children every day. So I couldn’t do that. So I got a job as a censor.” (06:14)

Emigration and the Soviet Experience

• Leaving the Soviet Union
  • They left in 1981, believing the USSR would never change. The subsequent arrival of perestroika was hard to process (07:48).
  • “Everyone was convinced that the Soviet Union was going to last forever… the opportunity to build a different life elsewhere was worth just about any sacrifice.” (07:48)
• Ambivalence About Leaving
  • Gessen was reluctant as a teen: “I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay where my friends were, where my grandmothers were.” (08:27)
  • Her mother’s words: “In this country, you can either sacrifice your life to fighting the regime or leave. And this country never did enough for us to sacrifice our lives for fighting the regime.” (08:38)

Putin, Trump, and the Russian Scandal

• On Putin’s Enduring Power
  • “Putin is still president… I want to take that controversial stand right now. I think he’s going to win [the March election].” – David Remnick (08:55)
• On Trump’s Russia Scandal—Skepticism and Realities
  • Gessen acknowledges interference but doubts it was decisive: “I’m very skeptical of using Russian interference to explain Trump.” (09:50)
  • She agrees with Glenn Greenwald: focusing excessively on the Russia investigation distracts from other important Trump administration actions (11:00).
  • “Every column inch that’s devoted to the Mueller probe is not devoted to some other thing that the Trump administration is doing that I think is often more important.” (11:00)

The Limits and Meaning of Scandal

• Foreign Influence Is Complex
  • Gessen challenges the oversimplification of “active measures”: “Public opinion is influenced by any number of factors. And I think that the statement that a foreign power cannot be allowed to influence the public opinion of a country… needs to be defended. It can’t be taken for granted.” (12:12)
• Trump’s Financial Ties
  • She doubts Trump is “beholden” to Russia financially:
    • “Trump, who has never paid his debts… I don’t think this guy can be beholden financially to anybody.” (13:02)
    • The real problem: “We have a thoroughly corrupt president who is using his office to make money … connections that are corrupt. But that's the direction I would go.” (13:16)

Democracy and Authoritarianism: What Have We Lost?

• Assessing Damage to Democracy
  • Gessen reframes the question: “I think it’s a question of how much we’re losing. Because… it took hundreds of years to build [institutions]. It’s what we’ve lost.” (14:05)
  • The biggest loss: “We’ve lost an ability to have a political conversation… a conversation in which people with different views come to agreements about how they’re going to inhabit the society together.” (14:43–15:02)
• Political Predictions and Uncertainty
  • On the unknowability of “what we prevent” if Trump leaves office early: “We will never know just how bad it could have gotten.” (16:23–16:38)
  • Gessen expresses cautious hope that resistance could reverse course but remains skeptical. “I’m just being the hysteric in the room.” (16:38)

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Part II: Francisco Cantú – The Border Patrol from the Inside

(19:01–34:33)

Motivation and Joining Border Patrol

• From Academia to the Border
  • Cantú’s mother was skeptical of his decision to join Border Patrol after studying international relations (19:01).
  • “All of that learning felt disconnected from the realities of the landscape and the people and the culture that I knew growing up.” (19:25)
  • “Another part of it was that sort of idealism that you have as a 23 year old…” (20:06)
• Naiveté about Institutional Power
  • He confesses: “I do look back on that as being naive… you have so much confidence in yourself… and you begin to lend all of these parts of yourself and your identity…” (21:14)

Daily Realities as an Agent

• Attraction to the Landscape, Disconnection from Consequences
  • “I love the desert… That was in a way exhilarating. But of course… you’re learning to understand the landscape in order to capture people.” (22:42)
  • Day-to-day: tracking, chases, and busts faded; “what really sticks out… are those human moments… interactions… people risking their lives to cross the desert… and I was taking them back to a cell…” (24:16)

Policies and Consequences

• Destruction of Migrants’ Supplies
  • Agents were told to destroy water and blankets to make migrants “quit and come out to the road” (25:04).
  • “That’s… such short-sighted, deadly thinking… people are lost and disoriented and people lose their lives that way.” (25:31)
• Effectiveness of Walls and Enforcement
  • Cantú observed how barriers were easily bypassed by smugglers (26:27).
  • “No matter what obstacle we put at the border, it’s going to be subverted… crossings were down… but border deaths along the desert actually went up.” (27:00)
  • He offers a vivid memory: his encounter with the corpse of a migrant and the agony of explaining to the deceased’s companions why they could not bring the body home (28:18).

Psychological and Physical Toll

• Nightmares and Teeth Grinding
  • Internalizing trauma: “All these dreams where my teeth were crumbling out… my teeth would explode inside my mouth… [the dentist said] you’ve ground through several layers of the enamel…” (29:57)
  • Discusses the “hyper-masculine world” and lack of dialogue about the psychological impact (31:40)

Reflections on Identity and the Nature of Borders

• Power of a Name
  • “A name is a reminder of where you’re from and it’s also sort of a reminder of your parents’ hope for you in the world.” (33:20)
  • Considers how he might have been different if he’d had the more Anglo name his parents first intended, and how that small arbitrariness echoes the randomness of border fate.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “It’s like I was gifted with this special pair of eyeglasses when I was born.” – Masha Gessen, on her ability to recognize authoritarianism (04:19)
• “An easy way to sort of comfort yourself is to say, but look, all the stuff that was here yesterday is still here… The fact that we still have them is not surprising. It’s what we’ve lost.” – Gessen, on institutional resilience and loss (14:05)
• “No matter what obstacle we put at the border, it’s going to be subverted. People will find a way up, over, under, around it.” – Francisco Cantú (27:00)
• “All these dreams where my teeth were crumbling out… when [the dentist] said, ‘you’ve ground through several layers of the enamel’… that was the first time I had a real world manifestation of that sort of, like, subconscious creeping horror.” – Cantú (29:57)
• “A name is a reminder of where you’re from and it’s also sort of a reminder of your parents hope for you in the world.” – Cantú (33:20)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• 00:48–17:19: Masha Gessen interview – origins, Russia, authoritarianism, Trump-Russia, democratic institutions
• 19:01–34:33: Francisco Cantú interview – motivation for Border Patrol, the realities of the job, policy critique, psychological effects, reflections on identity

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Tone & Language

The episode maintains an insightful, at times wry, and contemplative tone. Gessen is sharp, analytical, occasionally self-deprecating (“the hysteric in the room”), while Cantú brings measured reflection, raw honesty, and a sense of personal wrestling with guilt, responsibility, and empathy.

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This episode offers rare firsthand context on the rise of authoritarianism and the human dimension of border enforcement—essential listening for those interested in the balance of power, democratic erosion, and the cost of political and policy decisions on individual lives.

Transcript

[Francisco Cantu]

Floor 38.

[Craig]

I basically just think it would be interesting to look at the emergence of a criminal economy.

[Sarah Stillman]

And also I'm always amazed that there aren't more profiles of her out there. This really subversive, strange thing in rap.

[Francisco Cantu]

Especially, and see what their lives are like on both sides of the border.

[Narrator]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

[Craig]

Hi, I'm Craig. I'll be taking care of you tonight. The specials are on the board. I would highly recommend the veal shank. Also, we're sort of known for our burger. It's a half pound of grass fed beef served with gruyere cheese and our signature house made ketchup. That's right. Our ketchup is made in house with freshly diced tomatoes, a pinch of sugar, a, a touch of paprika, and it's disgusting. It's truly gross. Nobody likes it, but it's 100% fresh and it 100% sucks. Our ketchup is kind of an homage to an American classic. A foul, grotesque homage. It's like it's the 2011 remake of Footloose. Of ketchups. Bumpy. Bumpy is a word I would use to describe our ketchup. Also fucked up. That's another way I would describe it. Now, I noticed when I first mentioned that we make our own ketchup, you looked excited. You probably thought, wow, what a fresh, organic experience I'm about to have. My entire life, I've been conditioned to enjoy a corporate version of ketchup. And I have been deprived of what ketchup actually is supposed to taste like. Couple of things. One, don't think about ketchup like that. It's ketchup. Two, maybe you need to accept that Heinz just happened to perfect ketchup. That's why it has a crap ton of money. It makes really good ketchup. It is number one. And we're like number four billion. You know, we're just below the ooze that streams out of the alien's mouth and onto Sigourney Weaver's face. And above that is Hunt's. So anyway, that's our ketchup. It sucks. Now that that's out of the way, we also do our own little spin on chicken nuggets. And like the ketchup, they're disgusting.

[Interviewer]

Hey, Craig, can I talk to you in the back, please?

[Craig]

And I'm being fired. Thank.

[Francisco Cantu]

You.

[David Remnick]

We do our own little spin on ketchup by Seth Reiss. That piece was performed by Bill Hader.

[Interviewer]

Of Saturday Night Live and Trainwreck fame.

[David Remnick]

His new show, Barry, premieres on HBO in March. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. My colleague Masha Gessen has written or translated more than a dozen books. One is about genetics, one about mathematics, and she's written a biography of Vladimir Putin, not an authorized biography by any means. And her most recent is titled the Futurist How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen came to this country with her family as a teenager, but she did something that most immigrants don't. She moved back and forth between the United States and Russia as an adult. She's worked in Russia as a journalist and as a gay rights activist at a time when both of those occupations have become very dangerous. And her experience positioned Masha Gessen, almost uniquely to write about Vladimir Putin's Russia and Donald Trump's America and how they intersect at this very fraught moment.

[Interviewer]

Masha, there's so much to talk about, but I have to begin with this. You began a recent piece for the New Yorker by saying either jokingly or seriously, that somehow by being born in Russia in totalitarian Soviet Union, that was the perfect preparation for being a journalist in America today.

[Masha Gessen]

Right. So I think there's the. I've perfected the genre of the unfunny joke. I think that's what it is.

[Interviewer]

But you're after something there. What is it? What are you talking about?

[Masha Gessen]

You know, when I'm not joking about having built a career in the backs of dictators and demagogues, it's. There are things that I recognize. It's like I was gifted with this special pair of eyeglasses when I was born. And because I was brought up sort of in opposition to the regime, I see things and I see them. I can point them out, which to me feels pretty easy. And then other people see them, too. And that's like, the trick that I get to play over and over again since Trump got elected.

[David Remnick]

Okay, so then let's start with your.

[Interviewer]

Story before we begin with our crazy story, the national story. You were born in Moscow when and in what kind of milieu?

[Masha Gessen]

So I was born in Moscow in 1967. I come from the intelligentsia. My grandmother lived in the Writers Union Building, which is where I spent most of my childhood. And then when I went back to live in Moscow, I lived there as well. So very, very particular kind of Moscow, intellectual Jewish environment.

[Interviewer]

And you had two grandmothers who did radically different things.

[Masha Gessen]

Well, actually, My two grandmothers did the exact same thing. They were both translators. By the time I was growing up, they were both translators. They translated from different languages, and they were also best friends. But one of them, sort of, according to family legend, was the conformist. And she had worked as a censor under Stalin. And the other one, according to family legend, never conformed and was always fearless. And she was always fearless and never compromised. And then as I started researching the book, I realized that she had actually accepted a job with the secret police because the secret police at the time really needed translators from Hebrew because the state of Israel had just come into existence and they had already exterminated everybody who spoke Hebrew in the Soviet Union. And so they had a very difficult time finding someone. They found my grandmother.

[Interviewer]

So people listening will think to themselves, wait a minute, Masha, you say you came from, you know, dissident or dissident, ish and intelligentsia circles. One grandmother was a censor. The other one was in the secret police, not so dissident.

[Masha Gessen]

She didn't actually get the job in the secret police because she failed her medical exam. It turned out she found out at the age of 28, or whatever it was, that she was blind in one eye. She argued she wasn't going to perfect for a spy. Well, and she argued that she. She wasn't going for a job as a sniper. You know, who cares if a translator is blind one eye? But that didn't go very well. Well, so for. And, and for my other grandmother, she was always, I think, very ashamed of having been a censor. But she also articulated that as a moral choice. And that, to me was the most interesting thing about the whole story, is that she. She said she was educated to be a history teacher. And she said, but as a history teacher, I would have had to lie to children every day. So I couldn't do that. So I got a job as a censor. And that was, in her view, it was a mechanical job. Someone else would have blacked out all the same words that she blacked out.

[Interviewer]

So, Masha, your family decided at a certain point, when you were a teenager, I guess you were 12, 13, right. Time to go. This is now the mid-70s. It's the middle of what's called the era of stagnation. Zastoy under Brezhnev. Why did your family decide to leave? And you're also leaving behind a lot of people.

[Masha Gessen]

So first of all, everyone who decided to leave in the 70s, and we ended up. It took a few years to get out. So we ended up leaving in 1981. Everyone was convinced that the Soviet Union was going to last forever. And so they made their life choices based on that because it was going to last forever. The opportunity to build a different life elsewhere was worth just about any sacrifice, because nothing was ever going to change in that country. So for a lot of people, the fact that perestroika started four years after we left was a really difficult thing to come to terms with.

[Interviewer]

You had ambivalence about it even as a teenager?

[Masha Gessen]

Well, I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay where my friends were, where my grandmothers were. And my mother said, you know, in this country, you can either sacrifice your life to fighting the regime or leave. And this country never did enough for us to sacrifice our lives for fighting the regime.

[David Remnick]

So now here we are.

[Interviewer]

Putin is still president. He's running for Russian president in March of 2018. And I'm betting that he's going to win. I want to take that controversial stand right now. I think he's going to win. And we're in the midst of a ongoing scandal having to do with Russia and the United States. And you are as ferocious a critic of Putin and Putinism as exists on this planet. And at the same time, you're very skeptical in certain ways of the scandals you see it. I'd love to know what your position on this is right now, as we see the president continue to praise the Russian president. There have been indictments handed down by Robert Mueller. There's probably more to come. This scandal is likely to go on for months and months more, and yet you're skeptical of it.

[Masha Gessen]

I think that several things can be true at the same time. It can be true that Russians meddled in the election, and it can be true that Trump is not pursuing the kind of policy toward Russia that would be reasonable and at this point, legally mandated. I mean, he has not imposed sanctions that he is legally legally mandated to impose. And that Russian interference, we still don't know whether it had a decisive effect on the election. And I'm very skeptical of that connection. Right. I'm very skeptical of using Russian interference to explain Trump.

[Interviewer]

Right, but you're not skeptical of it being a factor or a reality?

[Masha Gessen]

No, I'm not skeptical of it being a factor or reality.

[Interviewer]

I just think that I'm separating you. In other words, what I'm trying to get at is Glenn Greenwald, among others, believes that in large measure, not to be unfair to him, but in large measure that this is a digression from what we should be concentrating on, and it's a. And really the so called scandal is no scandal at all, that we're putting too much trust in institutions like the FBI, the CIA, et cetera.

[Masha Gessen]

I completely agree with Glenn Greenwald that this is, that's a digression, right? Because we don't have infinite mental bandwidth and even the papers that have infinite Internet still don't have infinite column inches. And every column inch that's devoted to the Mueller probe is not devoted to some other thing that the Trump administration is doing that I think often is more important. But if you wait a minute, how.

[Interviewer]

Can it not be important that Russian secret services interfered with an American election? Whether it was decisive or not, I don't think we'll ever know. But that's a very important thing.

[Masha Gessen]

Well, so the kind of interference that we're talking about, right, if we're talking about Twitter bots, and basically, if the theory of the case, and that's the theory in the intelligence report, the declassified intelligence report from last December, if the theory of the case is that Russians influenced American public opinion, that really kind of isn't much of a scandal there. I agree with Glenn Greenwald. That's what, you know, I mean, because.

[David Remnick]

Of the history of active measures on both sides, because of the history of.

[Masha Gessen]

Active measures on both sides, because public opinion is influenced by any number of factors. And I think that the statement that a foreign power cannot be allowed to influence the public opinion of a country actually is a statement that needs to be defended. It can't be taken for granted.

[Interviewer]

When you read about in the New Yorker, the New York Times and elsewhere about Trump's business dealings, the fact that he clearly could not get cash at a certain point from American banks and therefore went to Deutsche bank and Russian sources and started doing branding exercises abroad with all kinds of characters, Russian and not Azerbaijani, Georgian people who are highly, highly corrupt.

[David Remnick]

Do you not worry that he is.

[Interviewer]

In some way influenced by this and behaves politically in a certain way because of his.

[Masha Gessen]

You know, I actually think that Trump, who has never paid his debts and who is known for screwing over everybody that he deals with, I think the theory that he can be financially beholden to somebody is a little bit tricky to advance. I think it is important that we have a thoroughly corrupt president who is using his office to make money, Right. And that he has come in with all sorts of baggage and habits and connections that are corrupt. But that's the direction I would go in with that information, not the direction of, oh, he's beholden to Putin? Because actually, I don't think this guy can be beholden financially to anybody.

[Interviewer]

How would you assess the scorecard so far in this country in terms of Trump's authoritarian instincts, his desire to put pressure on all kinds of democratic political assumptions and institutions that we have and what's broadly called the resistance?

[David Remnick]

Who's winning?

[Masha Gessen]

See, I don't think it's actually a question of who's winning. I think it's a question of how much we're losing. Right. Because an easy way to sort of comfort yourself is to say, but look, you know, all the stuff that was here yesterday is still here. We still have the courts, we still have, you know, we still have the New York City government. We still have sanctuaries. We still have all sorts of stuff. The fact that we still have them is not surprising. You know, it took hundreds of years to build them. It's what we've lost. Right. And I think that we've lost a lot.

[David Remnick]

Now, what have we lost?

[Interviewer]

That's maybe the most important thing to assess.

[Masha Gessen]

So I think we've lost. We've lost an ability to have a political conversation. And again, that didn't start yesterday, that didn't start with Trump, but he really has stomped it into the ground.

[David Remnick]

What do you mean by that?

[Interviewer]

It seems like all we have is political conversations.

[Masha Gessen]

No, we have conversations about politics, but we don't. I mean, a political conversation is a conversation in which people with different views come to agreements about how they're going to inhabit the society together. We don't see that happening in Congress. We don't see that happening in the streets. We don't see that happening, I think, at kitchen tables. I think at maximum, we see sort of temporary compromises about how to get the, you know, how to keep the government functioning. But, you know, imagine a Congress in which Republicans and Democrats come to the table, again, with different ideas about immigration. Right. Not with an effort to stem the tide of. Not with an effort to minimize the damage of the war on immigrants or an effort to maximize the damage, but with different ideas about how we're going to think about immigration and this country vis a vis immigration and the people who are coming in and like that will be a political discussion.

[David Remnick]

I know that prediction is the lowest.

[Interviewer]

Form of journalism, but how far and how long do you think Trump and Trumpism will last?

[Masha Gessen]

Can we go back to whether Putin is going to win the presidential election on March 18?

[Interviewer]

That's easier.

[Masha Gessen]

I'm pretty sure of that one. I don't know and the thing is that if it doesn't last, if he doesn't last, then as Tim Snyder has said, we will never know what we've prevented.

[Interviewer]

We'll never know just how fragile things are.

[Masha Gessen]

Right. Just how bad it could have gotten. I think there's a possibility that the Democrats will rally this year and retake Congress and this tide will be turned. I'm not terribly optimistic about it. I think there are huge things in the way of getting that done, but it's possible. So I'm not making predictions. I'm just being the hysteric in the room.

[Interviewer]

Masha Gessen, the hysteric in the room, that's her words, not mine, writes for the New Yorker so brilliantly. And I have nothing but gratitude for you. Thank you so much for coming by.

[Masha Gessen]

Thank you.

[David Remnick]

Masha Gessen joined us as a staff writer just last year. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Much more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And welcome back. When Francisco Cantu graduated from college with a degree in international relations, he did something that surprised his mother. He decided to join the Border Patrol. He told his mother that it would give him a perspective on border issues that was missing from his classroom. She was skeptical. She told him, you make it sound like you'll be communing with nature and having heartfelt conversations all day. Those heartfelt conversations, no surprise, never happened. But Cantu wrote a book reflecting on the four years he spent on the border patrol in the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. It's called, and it's a lovely title. The Line Becomes a River. And although Cantut clearly takes a liberal view, one that's critical of border policy, there are some on the left who have attacked him in the book as too complicit somehow with the policies that he was carrying out. Francisco Cantu spoke with staff writer Sarah Stillman, who's covered immigration and the border for the New Yorker.

[Sarah Stillman]

So really early in the book, you have this difficult conversation with your mother about your decision to join Border Patrol, and she points out that you've just graduated with a college degree in international relations. And she kind of implies the job is beneath you or and you say that you're sick of reading about the border in books and you want to be on the ground. So I'm wondering if you can just tell us a little bit more about why you joined the Border Patrol.

[Francisco Cantu]

I think my mom would be really terrified to hear this. Well, she knows this now. I think she would have been terrified to hear it at the time, but because she was a park ranger while I was growing up, and because we lived in the Southwest and I had grown up close to the desert, I think that's kind of one of the essential components of what I felt was missing from being at university in college and doing all this book, learning about the border and about immigration. I went to school in D.C. so very far from the border itself. And all of that learning felt disconnected from the realities of the landscape and the people and the culture that I knew growing up. And so that was part of it. And of course, another part of it was that sort of idealism that you have as a 23 year old when, you know, you're just coming out of college. And I think I was also idealistic thinking that I would be able to sort of, you know, enter this large system, as a lot of young people do, I think, enter this large institution and sort of remain intact with my morals and my ethics and like, move through it and just, you know, collect observations and answers. And I thought that I would really see things that would help me unlock these questions about the border, about immigration. I thought I would, you know, then I told myself I'd be able to go, I'd be able to become an amazing policy maker or some great immigration lawyer.

[Sarah Stillman]

Do you look back on that as naive or. I remember your mother says in the book, you know, the Border Patrol is not the Park Service, it is a paramilitary police force.

[Francisco Cantu]

I do look back on that as being naive. I think, especially when you're a young person, you have so much confidence in yourself and who you are, and when you. When you join an institution, you begin to lend all of these parts of yourself and your identity and, you know, your soul in order to, you know, help the institution accomplish its goals, further, the institutional goals. And that happens in subtle ways, slowly. And so I think, you know, by the time I was out in the field doing the job, I had already put aside a lot of those questions just in order to be able to do the work. And I think, you know, that really terrified somebody like my mom, who was the one person, you know, holding me accountable, vigilantly watching, you know, to see if I was losing track of myself and who I was and the person that I had been outside of that job.

[Sarah Stillman]

Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the work. I mean, you really go into the nitty gritty of the daily field work of being a Border Patrol agent. And I'm wondering if you can tell us just what you actually did what you encountered on a typical day in the field. What was the work like at a granular level?

[Francisco Cantu]

You know, I think when I first entered the job, there were a lot of things that I was very drawn to. First and foremost, being outside. I mean, I, I love the desert and I've never been closer to a landscape than the area that I worked, where I got my field training and where I worked for those first two years as an agent. And of course, you, you do all of this disconnecting between what you're learning and what it is that you're learning it for. You know, to me it was to learn how to track and to learn how to, you know, cut for sign, as we call it. To learn every pass in a given range of mountains, to know every mile marker of, of a stretch of highway. You know, that was in a way exhilarating. But of course, looking back on it, you're learning to understand the landscape in order to capture people. And of course, that's not what you're thinking at the time. At the time you're thinking, wow, I'm learning, learning so much. And then, you know, there's the regular stuff that you would expect, you know, like car chases, drug busts, and I think that can be really distracting. But when I left the border patrol and I look back on it, what really sticks out to me are those human moments, those interactions, all that other stuff that might seem exciting faded away. And what I was left with was trying to grapple with all these people that I had apprehended and interacted with. And then they had been risking their lives to cross the desert. And at the end of the day, I was taking them back to a cell and sending them back to the places that they were risking their lives to flee.

[Sarah Stillman]

Yeah, right. On that note, you actually write about destroying the supplies of migrants. At one point, that water gets destroyed, blankets, food, the stuff that's left along the crossing routes. Why does border patrol do this? And why did, if I understand correctly, you do this?

[Francisco Cantu]

You know, when I was being trained, I actually never witnessed this happen and I never partook in that. But you know, I had it kind of like explained very casually by, you know, by like the, the training agents, you know, like, oh, you get rid of all of their supplies and then it just makes, it makes it easier because then they'll quit and they'll come out to the road, it's easier to catch them, you know, and that's just, that's such a short sighted, deadly thinking. And so for me, you know, having seen a dead body in the desert, when I think about that man, he died from dehydration in August in, you know, the hottest part of the summer. And if he had found a water bottle, if he had had access to that aid, like he would have lived because people are. People are lost and disoriented and people lose their lives that way.

[Sarah Stillman]

So there's not a ton of politics in the book. And of course, in the age of Trump, where the border is so heavily politicized, it was striking for me to realize how much, at least in the beginning of the book, you really process being an agent as a physical challenge, a challenge of the landscape in some ways. And of course, we hear the President and his rhetoric around what a wall would do for us. But having seen it on the ground, what's your sense of that?

[Francisco Cantu]

In the station where I worked, we had several miles of 20 foot high steel mesh fencing. And my experience with the wall is that smugglers had figured out a way to pry open these steel panels and using hydraulic jacks, lift them high enough that they could drive vehicles underneath. And for just a group of people, they would weld an opening big enough for people to crawl through. And so I don't think that that's an argument for a bigger, stronger, more impenetrable barrier. I think that that shows us that no matter what obstacle we put at the border, it's going to be subverted. People will find a way up, over, under, around it. And what we also know is that if we keep building more walls, if we hire more border patrol agents, we've done both of those things. We know that the same consequences will happen. Last year, how many times did you hear that crossings were down? I think crossings were at their lowest point in 14 years for a while. And you heard that over and over again. But what we haven't heard is that the border deaths along the desert actually went up. So, you know, for me, when I think about that fact, it's not abstract to me. What I think about is the man whose body I encountered in the desert. And, you know, I remember what he looked like and I remember these details, like, you know, the ants crawling across his body or like the foam that collected at the edges of his mouth. And what I think about even more than that man are the two boys who were with him. He was with his 19 year old nephew and the nephew's friend. They were all from the same village. They made the crossing together, they got lost and left behind. And I was the person, because I spoke the best Spanish of the people who were there, who had to explain to these boys who wanted to stay with his body, who wanted to bring his body back to the village where they came from. Because in Mexico and in so many other places in Latin America or Central America, if you don't have the body, you have nothing. You don't know what happened to that person. And so I had to explain to them why they had to leave the body. And all I had were these bureaucratic, okay, the county medical examiner is going to come and determine the cause of death. And then the body will turned over to the Mexican consulate. And you'll contact the Mexican consulate. Maybe the Mexican consulate will give you some paperwork that you can bring to your family. Then you'll rearrange with them for the repatriation of the body. And, you know, I remember that those boys just nodded because they saw a man in uniform telling them things, and they knew that they had to nod.

[Sarah Stillman]

It seems to have also taken a physical and psychological toll on you. At one point in the book, you visit your dentist, you find out you had started to grind your teeth, and your dentist actually looks in your mouth, quote, it's getting kind of ugly in there. So did you understand in real time what was happening to you and what was your body telling you?

[Francisco Cantu]

That moment in the dentist's office was an interesting moment for me because I think border patrol, much like any law enforcement, is sort of the culture is such that you don't really talk about. You don't really talk about your work, or you don't really talk about the ways that you might be internalizing violence. Right. And even if you had asked me during that time, you know, how are you? I would have been fine. Like, how's your job? Oh, it's fine. But that moment, I had all these dreams where my teeth were crumbling out or where I was clenching my jaws and couldn't stop clenching them to the point to where, like, my teeth would explode inside of my mouth. And so when I went to the dentist after having those dreams for years, and he said, you know, you've ground through several layers of the enamel on your teeth, I was like, that was the first time I had a real world manifestation of that sort of, like, subconscious creeping horror. And I think a lot of people ask me about that in interviews, and it almost makes me uncomfortable to, like, talk about having bad dreams, because, you know, I was that entire time I was in a position of power and privilege over people. And I think that grappling with power and our relationship to it. And what do we do once we, you know, realize the ways that we've wielded power? I think that's another really important part of the conversation that we're having right now.

[Sarah Stillman]

How have your former Border Patrol colleagues interpreted the book if they've read it?

[Francisco Cantu]

So I've shared the book primarily with former colleagues that are somehow represented in the book or people in the Border Patrol that I was close to. So kind of just a handful of agents. And the response from a lot of them has been sort of, oh, I didn't realize you were having such a hard time. I didn't realize that the work was hard for you. One of my co workers called me just last week because he had finished reading the book, and he said, hey, man, I want to apologize. Like, I'm so sorry. I could kind of tell that something was amiss, and I never asked you about it. And I said, you know, don't apologize. Like, it's not the culture of the Border patrol, just like it's not the culture of the military or law enforcement or any of these sort of hyper masculine worlds to talk about how sort of violence might be affecting you, like the violence that you partake in, how you might be internalizing that.

[Sarah Stillman]

You wrote that your parents initially planned to name you Joshua Tyler Cantu Simmons instead of Francisco Cantu. And you also write that if that name had stuck, you would be a different person. And so I thought that was a very salient point in a book that's partly about the arbitrary nature of the lines that we draw. So I'm just wondering how you would be different if you were Joshua Simmons. Would you have written this book? Could this book exist?

[Francisco Cantu]

My mom talks a lot about that. And, you know, what she says is that at the hospital, they made her put a name on the birth certificate before leaving with me. And they hadn't really decided. And she was with my dad, who she, very soon after I was born, separated from. And they had talked about this name, Joshua and Tyler. And then, like, as soon as I got home, you know, my mom started calling me this other name. And, you know, by the time I was becoming adult, like, that name, you know, like, that's what drew me to speak Spanish. I mean, I was like, I can't go through the world as Francisco can, too, not speaking Spanish. But I didn't grow up speaking Spanish. My mother didn't grow up speaking Spanish. And so, I mean, I think it just kind of goes to show you the power of a name you know, a name is a reminder of where you're from and it's also sort of a reminder of like your parents hope for you in the world.

[David Remnick]

Francisco Cantu was a Border patrol agent from 2008 to 2012. His new book is the Line Becomes a River and he spoke with Sarah Stillman, a staff writer for the New Yorker. I'm David Remnick. That's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next time, Jennifer Lawrence on the new thriller Red Sparrow. I hope you'll join us.

[Narrator]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Botin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby Kalalea, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Myth Lee Rao and Steven Valentino, with help from Terence Bernardo, Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.