Four years ago, after authorities in San Antonio found 53 immigrants dead in a trailer in San Antonio, Governor Greg Abbott knew exactly whom to blame. “These deaths are on Biden,” Abbott posted on social media about the then-president, going on to say that “deadly open border policies” encourage migrants to risk life and limb taking the dangerous journey to the United States through Mexico.

Abbott’s implicit pitch was that if he and his ally Donald Trump, since returned to the presidency, were given a free hand to secure the border, these types of tragic incidents would stop.

As I wrote at the time, this thinking is predicated on the idea that the U.S. government can somehow outdo the horrors of immigrating here—horrors that border hawks often accurately portray. Trump has tried to do just that. Masked federal agents roam U.S. cities scanning people’s faces and arresting them. Immigration officials have set up checkpoints in the country’s interior, occasionally vacuuming up U.S. citizens. Longtime residents are thrown in detention and pressured to leave the country. And, since he returned to the presidency, arrests at the border have plummeted.

Yet last month, seven people climbed into a cargo container, probably near Del Rio, for a journey by rail to San Antonio.

According to Laredo officials, the seven likely perished from heat stroke. One man who was carrying Mexican identification was apparently thrown off the train near San Antonio or escaped but died before finding help. The cargo container carrying the remaining six, some of whom were from Honduras and Mexico and one of whom was 14 years old, was sent back south to Laredo, where a railroad company employee found their bodies. 

A Border Patrol agent collects ladders used to cross over the border wall in Hidalgo in 2021. (Gabriel V. Cárdenas/Texas Observer)

The trains from Del Rio and nearby Eagle Pass to San Antonio have long been utilized by people trying to circumvent the Border Patrol checkpoints on U.S. 90 and U.S. 57 and, more recently, Abbott’s border deployment. Last year, federal authorities unraveled a smuggling scheme to cross the border from Eagle Pass on trains. 

It’s a dangerous route. Those riding on top risk falling off and losing limbs to the wheels. Those inside face sweltering conditions. In 2023, police in the region found five people dead in train cars and dozens of others suffering from heat exposure over just a few days.

Critics of Trump note that this latest tragedy coincides with his crackdown on legal immigration, including restricting refugee resettlement almost exclusively to white South Africans, refusing to hear asylum claims at the border, pressuring Mexico to restrict travel through its territory, and detaining people with pending asylum cases. While it’s tempting to try to tie these tragic incidents to a specific president’s actions, the reality is that U.S. immigration policy is deeply invested in what the Department of Homeland Security calls “prevention through deterrence.” 

This existed under Biden, who, despite his open-borders reputation, implemented some of the most draconian immigration policies of any modern president other than Trump, marooning asylum-seekers in Mexico regardless of their nationality and setting up a screening system that drove them into the arms of criminal groups. 

Extrajudicial punishment is a hallmark of immigration enforcement in this country. And despite Trump’s and Abbott’s insistence that their policies save lives, the Webb County medical examiner told the Associated Press that she’s seen a rise in deaths this spring compared to last year. Border Patrol’s data shows that agents arrested slightly more people on the southwest border in March and April of this year, the latest numbers available, over last. (Webb County Medical Examiner Corinne Stern didn’t respond to a request for comment, and getting accurate death data in Texas is notoriously difficult; activists interviewed for this story said they didn’t have reason to believe there have been more deaths this year than in years when border crossings were significantly higher, but they argued that deadly incidents are an inevitable result of U.S. policies even when crossings are down.)

“The more deterrence policies the United States implements, the more people are going to die,” said Ari Sawyer, a co-director of the Frontera Federation, which advocates for social justice on the border.

Sawyer said Trump’s crackdown may convince some people to defer their journey to the United States, but a range of factors beyond U.S. policy du jour impact people’s decisions to relocate, and when the risks of remaining at home outweigh the risk of emigrating, people will.

“It just depends on why they’re immigrating, what they’re emigrating from,” Sawyer said. “The people we’re finding now dying on the U.S. side of the border are the people who could not wait.”

Increasingly, experts are warning that climate change is driving migration from the Global South, while also increasing the risk of heat exposure for travelers—as reportedly played out in South Texas last month.

The country’s current immigration framework fails to address two factors that have been constant for generations: the need for labor in this country and conditions across the hemisphere that drive people from their homes. The relatively less restrictive policies of Biden and the authoritarian tactics used by Trump have both ended up being unpopular with voters, and trying to track the impact of these shifting policies is also difficult. Trump ran on a platform of harsher immigration enforcement than his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, but in 2019 Border Patrol agents arrested 859,000 people, more than any year of the Obama presidency. Biden took office in 2021 and attempted to roll back Trump’s policies. Border Patrol arrests promptly hit new highs, but what gets lost is that the policies Biden kept in place were still far more restrictive than Obama’s, when the number of people crossing the border was much lower. 

“The way to stop smugglers is to create more lawful pathways and legal regulated pathways to the United States,” Sawyer said.

But, as after past tragedies, the solution proposed by authorities along the border has been more enforcement. In a news conference after the May deaths, Laredo Mayor Victor Treviño struck an empathetic tone while still hammering home the point that the seven people died outside his city’s limits.

“Based on preliminary medical reports, they did not pass away in our city,” Treviño told reporters. “But they were discovered here after hours of suffering, and eventually dying several hours before arriving from what is commonly known as severe heat stroke. This tragedy weighs heavily on all of us. We’re a tight-knit community that is considered one of the safest cities in our country. As mayor and a physician in this community, my heart goes out to the families and victims.”

At the same time, Treviño called for “investing in more personnel, equipping our agencies with more technology needed to detect and prevent these situations before they become tragedies,” something he repeated at a city council meeting a few days later. Treviño proposed the city look into adding more detection technology at the ports of entry, usually a federal responsibility, and facial recognition technology that could be tied to the Laredo Police Department’s body cameras. “Some of the facts associated with this heinous crime across multiple jurisdictions [are] a wake-up call to make sure that we have all the proper preparedness,” he said.

Max Prado, an organizer with the Laredo Immigrant Alliance, said that incessant border militarization—Laredo is already filled with law enforcement surveillance cameras, patrolled from above by drones and helicopters, and early in the Trump administration even prowled by a Stryker armored vehicle—is now being turned on residents.

“That equipment would not have prevented the deaths of the six people who were found on May 10,” Prado said. “How would such technology help prevent deaths in the future?”

Prado added: “The narrative is we need more enforcement, more surveillance to prevent these deaths, but I think they’re just doubling down. We’re going to keep seeing the same trends happening over and over again.”

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John Steinbeck was already suffering serious heart trouble when, in 1962, he and his dog clambered into a pickup with a camper topper for a cross-country trip chronicled in his famous final book, Travels with Charley.

Six decades later, Austin writer Lauren Hough sets out in a 2001 Dodge Ram van with her dog, a mutt named Woody, to discover whether they can survive a similar 10,000-mile trip in a much-altered America. The title of her resulting book comes from Steinbeck, who dubbed America: “a monster of a land.”

Tension crackles as Hough and Woody head almost immediately for the Deep South, a region where Hough had previously run afoul of a redneck sheriff during her stint in the U.S. Air Force. 

Hough is no wimp. Her past professions include, according to her bio, “an Air Force airman, a bartender, a bouncer, a construction laborer, a driver, a green-aproned barista, and a cable guy.”

Her prior book, an essay collection called Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, describes how she endured growing up in a cult, a stint in the military as an LGBTQ+ airman in a don’t-ask-don’t tell environment, incarceration in a solitary prison cell, and sexual assault.

Yet in her opening chapters, Hough is nervous enough about this particular road trip that she’s enormously grateful to the handy friend who built a solid base for her on-board toilet. In fact, she seems overly effusive about the elaborate private privy. Only later do readers learn that Hough views that throne as critical security, given attacks she’s faced as a tall Queer person with close-cropped hair in attempts to use public women’s bathrooms.

For their journey, Hough and Woody, a husky pit rescue named after the iconic singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, must rely on their not-so-trusty transportation, which Hough describes as a “2001 Dodge Ram van that looked like it might belong to a retiree over the meth cook and over the next few months would confound every mechanic who agreed to look at it.” Hough attempted to improve their survival odds by affixing a few corny fishing stickers to the bumper.

She also preps by reading Travels with Charley for the first time. She learns that other authors and critics have skewered Steinbeck’s nonfiction as heavily fictionalized. Notably, he hides that his wife joined him for more than half the trip and that he rarely slept overnight in his trusty travel trailer. Instead, he favored fancy hotels, resorts, and the estates of wealthy friends. (My Luxury Sojourns with Elaine and Charley) would have been a very different book.)

Hough’s stops tend to be spartan, if not dodgy. She seeks out dog-friendly beaches and remote forest roads and, at times, follows directions down unmarked dirt roads from wanderers, including people who consider themselves modern hobos or missionaries, rather than homeless or, in more liberal parlance which Hough sometimes mocks, “the unhoused.” 

In 2010, journalist and author Bill Steigerwald delivered a blistering indictment after retracing Steinbeck’s 11-week journey that hit 40 states in a book dubbed Dogging Steinbeck. After cross-comparing maps, letters, and biographical materials and retracing the author’s route, Stigerwald concluded that most of the characters Stainbeck encountered were likely fabricated and his settings altered. In a related 2011 essay, “Sorry Charley,” he labeled Steinbeck’s work “something of a fraud.”

Yet Seigerwald’s strong critiques seem to ignore the differences between the 2010s and the era of Steinbeck’s trip, On the road, Steinbeck, the author of classics like Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, and Cannery Row, certainly would have attracted attention from eccentric characters who were either down-on-their-luck or over-the-top. And many more proudly weird and eccentric people, from hippies to cult members to draft dodgers, were hitchhiking in 1960s America.

In the 2020s, Hough offers Steinbeck appreciation for not ending his book by killing off poor Charley ( and thus increasing the trauma she experienced as a dog-loving child by reading Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows).

“Thank fuck the dog survives,” she muses. Nor does it offend her that Steinbeck—who undertook a 10,000-mile road trip in his 50s and suffered heart trouble after a lifetime of smoking—might crave comforts after driving long hours with a dog. (Steinbeck died in 1968, six years after his travel book appeared.)

Hogue’s 2020s travelogue set in post-COVID-apocalypse America offers some of Steinbeck’s seemingly fanciful 1960s characters’ modern street cred—given the very colorful folks she meets in her own rambles. Unlike Steinbeck, who took few notes and likely relied on memory–or imagination–Hogue perpetually stops to record her journey, eventually filling a whopping 900 pages that, under editors’ orders, is boiled down to 310, some 50 pages longer than Travels with Charley. 

Some of her most memorable musings come after Hough engages people who wander without her resources. One early encounter occurs in New Orleans, the city where Steinbeck called off his road trip and headed home.

Just outside the city’s famous Cafe du Monde, Hough spots an unnamed elderly New Orleanian wearing a tracksuit who is ignored and insulted as she begs from individuals waiting in a line for beignets. Hough joins this queue—along with Woody, since the restaurant offers a handy outside cash-only window—and overhears a trio of obnoxious snobs rebuff the woman, first claiming they have no cash and then scoffing: “She doesn’t even look homeless.” 

Hough sees the woman retreat to lean against a brick wall and then waves her over. 

“Her name was Dorothy,” Hough writes. “I could hear the pride in her voice when she told me she was born and raised just over in the Ninth Ward.” Dorothy, Hough learns, lost her home, like thousands of others, in Hurricane Katrina about two decades ago. And three years prior she’d suffered a stroke and lost her job. 

Their conversation is interrupted when another tourist hollers out a warning and misgenders Hough: “Hey bro, it’s a scam.” 

Instantly, Hough and her dog decide to hate him. 

“I wished Woody was an attack dog. I wanted to ask him how the fuck breakfast is a scam,” she writes. Hogue offers Dorothy $20 for food, which her new acquaintance is forced to gum, given that while “living rough” she has been robbed of her last set of dentures.

A few miles later down a Gulf Coast highway, Hough crosses the Mississippi state line and reaches the Redneck Riviera, where she learns that the feds’ post-Katrina efforts did help rebuild another American’s home—the stately Mississippi plantation of slave-owner Jefferson Davis, the president of the rebel Confederate States of America. 

“The good news is that, since it is designated a historic landmark, federal funds that might’ve been used to fix literally anything else were used to rebuild the traitor’s last residence. Glad we took care of that,” Hough writes.

Some of Hough’s anecdotes are sharp, some musings are laugh-aloud funny, a few are rants filled with a stream of expletives over setbacks or maddening on-the-road realizations as Hough explores an America that, in many ways, seems just as divided by political and economic differences as it was during Steinbeck’s trip. 

Hough cannot time-travel to make her comparisons. She does attempt to avoid the cell phone’s siren call and steers clear of the interstates that arrived in the 1970s. While navigating backroads, she tries to ignore constant text alerts from friends and fans, as well as social media feeds that tend to magnify our divisions and our anger. That’s tough for Hough, a social media influencer whose posts on a Twitter account based on her prior dog often went viral. Yet In face-to-face encounters, she and Woody find far more tolerance and friendliness than expected.

Given the risks she takes and the attacks she’s faced, readers will be holding their breath for a major loss, scary breakdown, homophobic attack, or life-changing disaster for her or for Woody. Indeed, some disasters inevitably occur. 

Spoiler alert: Hough survives her solo trip as an openly queer veteran, writer, and dog-lover to deliver a travelogue full of pathos, insights, solidarity—and some side-splitting and spot-on observations.

The post A Queer Texan Retraces Steinbeck’s 10,000-mile trip appeared first on The Texas Observer.

From deep within I heard: “not a woman.”

The desert stretched out in front of me as I drove. For months, feelings I couldn’t put my finger on simmered. I realize in the rearview mirror that my egg had been cracking, a term that refers to the process of discovering one’s transness.

I am the first out transgender and queer person in my lineage, but I would be foolish to think I am the first altogether. 

Self-portraiture and family photos serve as a mirror and a portal; looking into my reflection, I am looking for those who came before. I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams. 

I grew up in a high-control fundamental Christian environment. In one of my lowest points as a young person, following an unexpected pregnancy and subsequent abortion in college, I moved to Texas for the first time at 21 years old.

In San Antonio, I found the space and freedom to explore and reinvent myself. I’ve found community, connection, and dreams of possibility in the three times I’ve moved to this beautiful place with its rich history of Indigenous, Black, and brown people fighting for liberation.

I first heard John Denver’s famous song about the West Virginia mountains as a young teenager. I clasped on to the romantic song as a symbol of a special place and time of belonging, something I had yet to authentically experience. Now, as a big kid, I believe where I belong is exactly where I am: San Antonio.

Well-intentioned friends and family members in other parts of the country raise their eyebrows and in a hushed tone ask me what it’s like living in Texas. I don’t disagree; the state is increasingly transphobic—but so is our country. Trans people represent a sense of possibility and self-determination that undermines the colonial project that is America. Still, I remain hyper-aware of my surroundings when I leave the sanctuary of my home.

In these images and collages, I look back to see where I come from and orient myself toward the person I want to be. As the one so often behind the camera, I step in front of it to place myself in the story. Collaging and physically manipulating photographic prints, these images span moments of curiosity as I wander on mylifelong journey to find home within.

I am present. I am here. Not a woman and not a man: Conveying my experience of gender with words is clumsy at best. I find peace when I occupy the place in between.

Like mighty agave plants, defending themselves as they take up space, trans people are majestic, precious, and not going anywhere.

The post A Mirror and a Portal appeared first on The Texas Observer.