Sand and Blood: America's Stealth War on the Mexico Border

Description

The unofficial war on the US-Mexico border has turned the southern states into conflict zones, spawned a network of immigrant detention centers, and unleashed an army of ICE agents into every town and city in America. As award-winning journalist John Carlos Frey reveals in this groundbreaking book, this conflict has been escalating for decades. Politicians, defense contractors, and lobbyists laid the groundwork for it in the 1980s and 1990s. After 9/11, while Americans' attention was trained on the Middle East, a War on Terror was ramping up on our own soil. It has been propelled by defense contractors seeking profits in a new theater; congresspeople who rely on racist fear-mongering about immigrants to turn out voters; and governors along the southern border who use the threat of terrorism to increase their budgets. Tens of thousands have casualties of it: economic migrants, refugees, and families who are seeking jobs, opportunity, and freedom, or are fleeing various forms of violence; as well as undocumented people who have lived in the US for years and are now living in fear or are locked in shockingly abusive detention centers. Taking readers to the border patrol outposts, unmarked graves, detention centers, and city streets where these battles are being waged, Sand and Blood is a frightening, essential story about a war we ignore at our peril.

John Carlos Frey is an investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles. A three-time Emmy Award winner, he is a special correspondent for The Marshall Project and PBS NewsHour, and a longtime Investigative Fund journalist at The Nation Institute. His investigative work has been featured on 60 Minutes, PBS, and Dan Rather Reports, and in the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, Salon, Need to Know online, the Washington Monthly, and El Diario. His documentary films include The Invisible Mexicans of Deer Canyon, The Invisible Chapel, The 800 Mile Wall, and The Real Death Valley. He is the 2012 recipient of the Scripps Howard Award and the Sigma Delta Chi award for his Investigative Fund/PBS reporting on the excessive use of force by the US Border Patrol.

[A] searing eyewitness report--Foreign Affairs A must-read book for any American citizen interested in breaking down immigration rhetoric on both sides of the aisle...It is imperative that we come to understand the factors that drive people to cross the border...Frey's work is a crucial step in that direction.--AmeriQuests