Drone Dreaming Along the Border: Trump, Immigration, and Rhetorics of Nostalgia

Drone Dreaming Along the Border: Trump, Immigration, and Rhetorics of Nostalgia
By Jonathan Tran

 I would like this evening to step into the crowded intersection of politics (narrowly and broadly defined), immigration, race and war. At this intersection, or flying high above it rather, are drones, hundreds and hundreds of government drones. What are these drones doing? Some are searching. Some are targeting. Some are delivering. Some of them are guarding. Some are just letting people know they, or we, are there. Many of them are weaponized or are able to be weaponized. Fueling these drones is a metadiscourse about America’s present determined by America’s past. And the drones, in turn, fuel the discourse, provoking dreams of a mechanized global future. US government drones, whether in some faraway country or along our national borders, raise ethical questions about appropriation dollars and government contracts, civil liberties and due process, relations between bordering nation states, and environmental and economic injustice. Ultimately, however, drones and what I will call “drone dreams” are about how we imagine our world—what we take to be its good, whether we believe it to be good at all, and what it means for us humans as the particular kinds of creatures we are to inhabit it, to receive it, to hold it, as either gift or possession. Much else that rightly concerns us, from government contracts to economic injustice, falls under a broader and deeper question about our humanity amidst late capitalism, and whether or not our humanity is still salvageable amidst those powers.

   In the following, I analyze one drone dream, one invoked as a rhetoric of nostalgia, where certain politicized habits of speech bring together politics, immigration, race and war. I do so by first examining the “Make America Great Again” logic of Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. Second, I try to show how such discursive rhetoric inspires drone dreams along the US border. I analyze what these dreams look like, what they dream of, as it were. Third, I show that the goals of the dream are not achievable because of certain perpetual features of human life and that, because of this, a brinksmanship mentality will result in escalating suffering; it is here that I will trace out the presence of God in Christ, who is both wretched of the earth and most powerful being. Following and concluding, I will offer something of an alternative in the quiet, gentle and careful work of my Baylor colleague, Lori Baker; Dr. Baker’s work of recovering, identifying, and returning bodies along the US border will be shown as receiving the dispossessed and persecuted body of Christ.

   It is, of course, easy to ridicule Donald Trump. One might even say that it is fun to make fun of “The Donald.” Yet, the ease of ridicule is exactly what makes ridiculing him not fun, but rather serious; and seriousness is something we are in need of at this moment in our public life. So, rather than poke fun at him, I want to attempt to examine his thought on issues related to immigration, and how they might inspire drone dreams. This will require me to get inside the mindset of the rhetoric and follow its logic. The point in doing so has less to do with Donald Trump and more to do with the millions of people who find something there worthwhile, attractive, even salutary and inspiring. What do we do with the people behind Trump, and the fact that the more troubling the things he says, the more some seem to support him? These are good people, we need to remember. I may think them not good just because they support policies I take to be morally problematic; but that is only to overestimate the goodness of my own judgments and underestimate what is good in what sometimes comes off as villainous. Through Trump, I want to think about these people and think through their seeming enthrallment with his words on immigration. 

   Just to qualify what I am about to say: I am not a Democrat or a Republican. I am not against Trump because I am for some other political candidate, say, Ben Carson, co-Republican leader, and someone I discuss briefly below. Three years ago, I gave a public lecture on the Obama administration’s massive expansion of the UAV drone program, a program that will, going forward, be viewed as the tip of the spear of American military power and probably American political diplomacy. I argued then that President Obama’s program is as ethically problematic as it is strategically expedient, and problematic because expedient. On theological grounds I characterized the program as morally disastrous and emblematic of the need for non-violent Christian witness in the face of global terrorism and America’s war on terror.[1] And so, while I take issue with Trump today, it is not because of some political agenda, at least none of the usual sort.[2]

   When speaking of nostalgic rhetorics, I have in mind Trump’s big statement on immigration that came forward this previous summer, the one that simultaneously incensed a lot of people while also bringing him millions of new supporters. This comes from a statement Donald Trump penned; and the fact that it was reiterated as a statement, rather than a throw-away comment or just a speech where anyone can be egged on, is important. Also remember that the broader theme of the statement, and the motto of his entire campaign, is “Make America Great Again.” The motto offers a lens through which to understand not only his summer immigration statement, but also much of the Trump presidential campaign.

   The motto is something about America’s greatness, and pictures America as a place that used to be great, but no longer is. Notice the claim isn’t “make America greater,” but rather the notion that we were once great and no longer are. Both of those aspects is crucial—that we once were great, and that prior greatness is what we are trying to recover; we are trying here to recover America, which has been lost. It leaves undefined at this point what led either to the loss of greatness and what reclaiming greatness entails, but it does set up a formula that tightly relates the two. America used to be great because of X, but the loss of X means the loss of greatness (where the possession of X just is what makes us great), and therefore the recovery of X is what a Trump presidency enables.

   Hence, the motto and the vision and aims of the Trump campaign are nostalgic in structure; it looks back to a prior good, and it laments, depending on and creating an empathic sense of loss in the voting populace. Moreover, and this is critical, the slogan is activist in nature; it is, after all, an imperative “Make America Great Again” with the implied, “You, make America great again”, “you” fellow- Americans, “you” fellow-lamenters of a lost greatness, “you” who remember that greatness, and “you” of course the voter. Once the infrastructure of the rhetoric is set up, it allows one to plug anything in. The formula, I would argue, is more important than whatever content Mr. Trump adds. It is the rhetorical structure of loss, lament, empathy and active recovery that is most important here. The plugged-in content, whatever it might be, plays a secondary role. And while Trump has taken up different issues, and here I specifically deal with his approach to immigration, any number of things can complete this formula. He could, for example, bring up honeybees. He could say, “America used to be great because of honeybees; but the rapidly declining numbers of honeybees means the loss of America’s greatness, and therefore we need to, in order to be great again, get honeybees to have more honeybee babies; we need to genetically engineer honeybee Viagra.” Of course, Trump isn’t talking about honeybees (which by the way is a very serious issue, but one not much talked about, like other important issues (for example, education), in this current campaign).

So immigration plugged into Trump’s formula about loss, lament, empathy and active recovery issues in what? Let me quote from that summer immigration statement: “When Mexico (meaning the Mexican government) sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people! But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people. It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast…. I have great respect for Mexico and love their people and their people’s  great spirit. The problem is, however, that their leaders are far smarter, more cunning, and better negotiators than ours. To the citizens of the United States, who I will represent far better than anyone else as president, the Mexican government is not our friend…and why should they be when the relationship is totally one-sided in their favor on both illegal immigration and trade?”[3]

   In another speech discussing his proposed border wall, Trump says, “I will make Mexico pay for it. Believe me. They will pay for it because they have really ripped this country off. They have really ripped this country off. They have really taken advantage of us both economically and at the border. They will pay for that fence.”[4]

   Immigration plugged into Mr. Trump’s plug-and-play formula might be restated along these lines: I know a lot of you feel like your world is giving way, that the ground is coming out from under you, that the walls are closing in, that your world is getting smaller and smaller. Your kids’ futures are uncertain and the promise of jobs and employment has given out. You don’t have land like you once used to; you don’t feel safe like you once did; you aren’t free to say what you want, including all this. Well, let me explain it. This is our country. And it is, or has been, a great country. We and those who look like us are what make it great. Except now others are trying to take it away from us, and in the process we are losing what is great about America. They are, these usurpers and criminals, and they look like all the other criminals we have come to know as criminals. Worse still, we aren’t even allowed to speak truthfully about what is happening. And so not only are we violated, but we are silenced. Well, I will not be silenced. I will not be silent. I will stop this. And I will return to you all that is rightfully yours: your jobs, your lands, your futures, our greatness. And I will do so by keeping them out. I will make America great again.” The ethical sticking point here isn’t so much the xenophobia or the nativism but the nostalgic use of the xenophobia and nativism. Remember that Trump could say the same for our honeybee problem. I don’t know what Trump actually thinks about immigration; I’m willing to guess that his views on immigration largely follow the standard things we Americans tend to think about immigrants: When we need them, let them in; when we don’t, blame them for why we don’t. But his view on immigration, or honeybees, matters less than the nostalgic tenor of the whole discourse. A few weeks ago, Trump made a comment about Christmas. He had nothing really to say about Christmas, such as that it marks the incarnation of the second person of the trinity or that it is a time of tremendous economic pressure, but only that he misses how we used to say “Merry Christmas” and we no longer do.[5] Trump’s campaign is one built around a vanishing horizon of the past, which then can be secured, as promised, by whatever means necessary.

   For many in the US government, the means to that promised end is unmanned aerial systems, UAS’s, UAV’s, or, simply, drones. And, while Trump hasn’t talked about drones, it is easy to imagine his use of this technology as a virtual version of that wall he proposes to build. What drones afford us is constant surveillance. When that summer immigration statement of his talks about rapists and criminals and terrorists, saying, “we don’t know what’s happening,” he is gesturing to greater surveillance—surveillance that is uninterrupted, mobile, actionable  and efficient, what is called in the UAS community “the lidless eye.” In the same way that UAV’s proved the game-changer in America’s war on terror, so might their success, it is claimed, be brought to this other pressing problem, which at least rhetorically relates to the war on terror.

   You’ll notice that there is no causal relationship between our nostalgia of a lost American greatness and the use of drones. Technology, I submit, doesn’t quite work that way; it is rather that technology creates and encourages our dreams. The dream begins by seeing the technology used effectively in other places, and then spurs the imagination to its new application. Recall the strategic benefits of military drone use: They take non-American life without risking American life; they are financially viable; they are largely politically unaccountable; their presence is untraceable; so on and so forth. Notice how possibility quickly turns into responsibility, availability to normativity. The presence of the technology demands its use: Why would you risk American life when you could accomplish the same thing without that risk? If drones along our borders can keep us safe, how could we in good conscience not make use of them? No matter that the main people advocating for drones are also the very people selling them; but that is always the case with modern technology, which simultaneously identifies both a problem and its solution, where the problem often did not exist prior to its solution. Writ large onto the broader landscape of nostalgia, drones are inscribed as both diagnosing our ills and proscribing their cures. The existence of a highly effective drone system gives the impression that the dream of America can be had again. It cannot. But the drones make it seem like it can, and the seemingness of the dream, its utter possibility, is enough for some people to pursue its use. The presence of drone technology and the possibility of a recovered greatness go together; greatness is the content and drones are the form.

   America has been using drones for border control since the early 2000s. Drone technology was active there by the 1990s but it was 9/11 that really precipitated drone research and development, especially at California-based General Atomics, which happens to be the primary and, some say, exclusive supplier of US drones, and coincidentally the chief lobbyist for the expansion of their use. It was originally the Department of Homeland Security, not Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—the governmental organ charged with border control—that initiated drone use along the border. Not until 2005 did CBP, under the auspices of its Office of Air and Marine (OAM) division, begin using drones for border control. According to CPB at the time, “The UAV program focuses operations on the CBP priority mission of anti-terrorism by helping to identify and intercept potential terrorists and illegal cross-border activity.”[6] The initiative is one transplanted from the war on terror, where tools of that war are redeployed for similar strategic outcomes, albeit upon a different theater of engagement. So the original rationale for government drone use in America had to do with the war on terror, with immigration politics really only along for the ride.

   What is interesting is how the script has now been flipped, 10 years later, where the war on terror no longer provides the rationale for drone use. These days, it is not about terrorism, which now takes the backseat, but illegal immigration as its own threat. Before, the rationale went something like, “Among those 100 illegals, there might be one terrorist sneaking across the border” so we need to stop the whole lot of them; now it is, “there are 100 illegals sneaking across the border”—full stop. What has changed to flip the script? One can speculate, with the largest economic recession since the Great Depression proving the usual suspect, and the way rhetorics of nostalgia blame our economic woes on undocumented workers. This would demonstrate not an efficient but a material causal relationship between nostalgia and drones; but in some ways that is neither here nor there. What is important is that drones and immigration now go together like drones and terrorism used to go together.

   The Guardian recently offered this report of America’s current use of drones for border control: “The government has operated about 10,000 drone flights under the strategy, known internally as ‘change detection,’ since it began in March 2013. The flights currently cover about 900 miles, much of it in Texas, and are expected to expand to the Canadian border by the end of 2015. Border missions fly out of Sierra Vista, home of the US Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, or Corpus Christi, Texas. They patrol at altitudes between 19,000 at 28,000 feet and between 25 and 60 miles of the border.”[7]

   Nowhere are these drone dreams more apparent than in the aspirations of the Republican-sponsored “Secure Our Borders First Act”, the proposed H.R. 399 authored by Texas Congressman Michael McCaul, chair of the congressional Committee on Homeland Security. The bill’s rationale is as it sounds—that before we can reform immigration, we need to secure US borders. The bill has as one of its chief determinative acts the redeployment of “Department of Defense assets from warzones to borders.”[8] Drones are specifically mentioned and imagined by the bill, and will continue to be so even though a recent Inspector General report rigorously questioned the effectiveness of drones for border control.[9] The main thing to be noticed is how the script is flipped; terrorism plays only a secondary role, namely identifying the theater from which available technologies can be drawn toward what is now the primary objective, US border control, which instructively now goes by the name “border security,” bringing full-circle the issues of terrorism and immigration. Currently a majority of Americans support the use of drones for the securing of American borders and other domestic applications and, since 2010, we have increasingly seen government encouragement toward weaponization, usually to the tune of non-lethal force.[10]

   No current presidential candidate has made a case for the weaponized use of drones along US borders. Most mention drones in terms of surveillance, but no one is pitching armed drones for bombing missions. Well, no one except Ben Carson, Trump’s co-front runner for the Republican nomination. Recently Dr. Carson, while speaking of government drones, said, “Along that border we have miles and miles of fences. I went there last week and didn’t see any Border Patrol people. And those fences are so easy to scale, it’s almost like not having them there. There are caves that they utilize. Those caves can be eliminated.” Carson qualified himself in the days that followed, “I’m not talking about killing people. No people with drones.”[11] But given the reality of how drones work, much more like the proverbial machete than the purported scalpel, the qualifications may prove rather hollow. Also consider that weaponized US military drones are already being used in conjunction with the Mexican government in its all-out war on what is called “narcoterrorism.”[12] 

   Part of the problem with our attempts at border control is they seek to impede a most basic tendency of humans, that is, to move toward sustenance, security and shelter. Humans, like all animals, adapt and move to places where they feel safe. They will settle there for as long as they can until they need to move again. And then they will move on. The people currently coming to America feel as if they need to come here. They might be right or wrong about that, but still, they desperately want to come here. And nothing  seemingly will keep them from it. The people currently in America also came and moved and adapted to this place for sustenance, security and shelter. We now feel safe here. Our feeling safe here makes it unlikely that we will see these others now wanting to come here as anything but competitors. The conceptualizations of capitalism further this sense under notions of scarcity and their zero-sum rationales upon which the mechanisms of supply and demand and their predications of private property find traction. So what you have is dynamic between immigrants who find themselves in search of a home and we who do not feel as if we can accommodate them—that our home is not sharable; the immigrants can’t stop moving and we will not let them in; the more the immigrants move in the more we fight them. Any number of things can contribute to one’s need to move; whatever it is, we will militate against it. This is called brinksmanship and it is an intractable situation. We are seeing this right now in real time in Europe as people flee Africa and the Middle East, just as we are seeing it in America as people flee Central America and Mexico for the United States. We are also seeing the protest put up against the Syrian refugees, and again the parallel here in America.

   The brilliance of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” strategy is its ability to tap into this most intractable of realities, to lay at its feet the many ills that plague us, the things that have robbed us of our greatness, and to promise that Trump can fix it. The brilliance of the campaign slogan as related to immigration issues is that it detracts from the truth that this is not a problem that can be fixed, not at least by border policy and control; further militarization of the US border will only increase the stakes for us, since for the immigrants the stakes could not be any higher; that is why they are willing to leave home and family and risk death and worse to get to America. Trump taps into a perennial and even a Biblical problem and stakes America’s future on his ability to solve it, even though it cannot be solved. What a brilliant strategy. This is what is meant by an empty campaign promise, a promise that is empty of any ability to fulfill it.

    In their book Empire, critical theorists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that globalization is now outstripping a modern political imagination that conceptualizes the world as individual nation-states demarcated by national borders. It has always been the tendency of capitalism to envision the earth as smooth, where capital flows fluidly upon its surface, going in any and every direction, settling at each crevice, irrespective of borders, nationalities, sovereignty and the like. They argue that we are already seeing, and have been seeing for some time now, the end of political arrangements based on discrete nation-states as bordered entities. Indeed, it is not even so much that that arrangement is ending, but that it was always only temporary, something that could hold only for so long simply because it, and its artificial fixations, cannot forever hold back the masses, masses who move. Negri and Hardt call these masses “the multitude” and inscribe them as “postcolonial heroes” of a “coming civilization;” I quote Negri and Hardt here at length: “The postcolonial hero is the one who continually transgresses territorial and racial boundaries, who destroys particularism and points toward a coming civilization. Imperial command, by contrast, isolates populations in poverty and allows them to act only in the straightjackets of subordinated postcolonial nations. The exodus from localism, the transgression of customs and boundaries, and the desertion from sovereignty …mean the destruction of boundaries and patterns of forced migration, the reappropriation of space, and the power of the multitude to determine the global circulation and mixture of individuals and populations. The Third World, which was constructed by the colonialism and imperialism of nation-states (and its attendant mechanism of geographical and ethnic regulation of populations) is smashed. It is destroyed when throughout the ontological terrain of globalization, the most wretched of the earth becomes the most powerful being, because its nomad singularity is the most creative force and the omnilateral movement of its desire is itself the coming liberation. The movements of the multitude designate new spaces, and its journeys establish new residencies. Autonomous movement is what defines the place proper to the multitude. Increasingly less will passports or legal documents be able to regulate our movements across borders. A new geography is established by the multitude as the productive flows of bodies define new rivers and ports. The cities of the earth will become at once great deposits of cooperating humanity and locomotives for circulation, temporary residencies and networks of the mass distribution of living humanity.”[13]

   I imagine Negri and Hardt’s use of “exodus” imagery as intentional, as well as their paschal invocation of the “wretched of the earth.” Those who refuse the bordered terms of the nation-state force an apocalyptic reimagining of the future. By immigrating on their own terms, they put tremendous pressure upon political orderings that for them and their kind are not sustainable. The state’s response of course is to garrison their walls so as to withstand these pressures, which from their perspective are equally unsustainable. And so the back and forth between pressure and counter-pressure, each side ratcheting up not only what it is willing to do, but also the rhetoric, as instantiated tonight by Trump’s summer statement. Those of us in countries like the United States can hope that conditions in southern nations might improve so that the movement is precluded at its source. But I don’t think it is too controversial to say that such hopes will prove fallow for the foreseeable future. What we will be left with, what we are left with, is lots and lots of people trying to get into California, Arizona, and Texas because they want to live, and we Americans putting up lots and lots of barriers to keep them out. Increasingly, the only way to keep these people at bay, the thinking goes, is to make it so difficult for them, so dangerous, so nightmarish, that they will turn back. Since 1994, US border control has been directed by a strategy called “prevention through deterrence” which has the goal of forcing migrants into “more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.”[14] But these immigrants have not stopped coming and will not turn back; they have not, and they won’t for the simple reason that no difficulty, danger, and nightmare they face at the border is worse than those from which they flee. Between these difficulties, the ones from which they come and the ones we put in their way, between the dangers, the ones from which they come and the ones we create, and the nightmares, the ones from which they come and the ones we dream up for them, will be a whole lot of death and suffering. According to a 2014 report by the International Organization for Migration, since the new millennium, about 40,000 people have died trying to reach more prosperous countries, a rate of about eight deaths per day. While the majority of those occur in Europe, usually along the Mediterranean, still, approximately 6,200 of those deaths have taken place along the US border with Mexico. Most experts agree that these numbers are conservative, and that the actual number is significantly higher, such that some refer to “prevention through deterrence” as “death as deterrence.”[15] And if we add the number of non-fatal casualties of this journey to the north, including extortion, kidnappings, robbery, rape, forced trafficking, violences suffered disproportionately by women, the numbers rise exponentially.[16] Include the reality that women suffer violence.  This is what I mean by brinksmanship.

   The multitude’s forced rethinking of borders and migration we can describe as apocalyptic. The suffering resulting from the brinksmanship can be described as Christological. These are Christological realities that gesture not simply toward a dim apocalyptic future, but a salvific one, where the great exodus of peoples and the mixture of identities bring about an “ontological” creation of new spatial and temporal realities in the form of the earth’s new Jerusalems. This is the new humanity, one that refuses to understand humanness in terms of nationality and property. I want to say: To claim this new humanity is to reclaim our own humanity in it, to renew how we think of others beyond the zero-sum games. And to participate in this new humanity is to participate in the one who gathers the multitude to himself as given to it, and the multitude as given and participant in God’s own story of exodus and liberation.

   Last month, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, of which my church, Calvary Baptist, is a part, offered the following litany in prayer for the Syrian refugees. “Lord God, who fled his home with his family on a wave of violence and death, guard and protect the refugees of the Syrian Civil War in order that the whole world might know you are the God of the dispossessed and persecuted. We pray this in the name of our crucified Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.”[17] Notice how the litany relates the Syrian refugees to the story of Christ, and notice the two arcs of that emplotment, first the story of the dispossessed and persecuted Christ in exodus from imperial command and, second, the arc of the Son’s movement in the Spirit from the bosom of the Father into a wave of violence and death, only to return, again in the Spirit, to that life a recapitulated humanity. God in Christ doing so has the effect of both showing the world what it means to be God, the crucified Lord as the fullness of God, and what it means to be human, the dispossessed and persecuted as the fullness of humanity. To participate then with the multitude is to participate in most powerful being, breaking down dividing walls and transgressing customs and boundaries. To participate is also to participate in the dispossession of immigrants, to receive and to indeed carry their burdens and to serve their needs, to be counted with these border transgressors and to forgive them their transgressions, as they forgive us ours, and so then to identify ourselves with their dispossession and persecution.

   I said at the beginning that the question of drones and drone dreams is a question of whether we might still recover our humanity in an age of globalization. Well, now I say that our road to recovery travels the path taken by the multitude in exodus. To find ourselves there with them is to find ourselves pressed up against a new humanity, which in late capitalism might be a last chance. To receive them is to receive not simply their burdens and their needs, but also to receive the great gift of their refusal of the terms of the old world, to receive the apocalyptic and the Christological. This is where Christ is to be found—with the wretched of the earth, for he, having counted himself with them, is nothing more and nothing less than the wretched of the earth. To take in these strangers, as Christ himself said in Matthew 25, is to take him in. To feed and clothe and to visit in detention centers is then also to feed and clothe and visit him who now and for all time counts himself among them, that the whole world would know that he is God.

   Often and increasingly as conditions worsen in places like Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico, Baylor anthropologist Dr. Lori Baker will get a call from some small Texas town too poor to have its own medical examiner and therefore too under-resourced to know what to do about a body found somewhere along its back roads. Dr. Baker will make the hours-long journey south and will get on her hands and knees digging in the dirt, carefully looking for the corpses of immigrants who died along the way to sustenance, security and shelter. Sometimes Dr. Baker finds one body; often she finds many more. And then it is left to Lori Baker to unearth and tell their stories. Doing so usually entails taking the bodies, in whatever state of decomposition, and assessing forensic evidence in order to identify through documentation, DNA, dental or whatever means, if any, can be found. Hers is a different kind of looking than those drone dreams of ours. Baker too is looking for bodies, desperate bodies in the desert, but toward entirely different ends. And Baker’s longings for recovered stories are of another kind than Donald Trump’s nostalgia. The visibility she offers is how someone lived their last moments, such as Rosa Cano Dominguez whose recovered body revealed a broken ankle, suggesting that Ms. Dominguez broke her ankle and so had to be left behind by her equally desperate companions to die alone in the desert.[18] Sometimes forensic evidence will tell a different kind of story, perhaps a gunshot wound on the skull, hinting at some of the profiteering that takes place between the desperation of the immigrants to get in and our militarized efforts to keep them out.[19] 

   In some cases, Dr. Baker gets lucky and DNA evidence will match a body with government databases kept by Mexico or other nations, and it is part of her Reuniting Families Project to return these bodies to their families who can go years and decades with no idea what happened to their children or parents or spouses or siblings.[20] In recent years, Baker estimates that around 70 such matches have been made. She says of reuniting families, “Every mother I speak to says, ‘Now I have a place to go and pray, or now I have a place to lay flowers.’” In most cases, no matches are made, and hundreds of bodies remain stored in Baker’s lab. Dr. Baker sees her role as keeping faith with the dead, carrying their burdens, taking them in. Dr. Baker tells of “a young boy in the lab, probably somewhere around 15-years old, who carried this backpack with a soccer ball in it. And we have no idea who he is, and it’s just devastating. And I probably think about him at least once a day, if not more, and have no idea what else we can do. It overwhelms me quite a bit. But I realize in public that this is the grief of the families; it’s not my grief and it’s not my place to feel as I do. So I usually save it until I’m in the laboratory by myself, and at night when I’m with my husband. And I hold my boys close, and I cry for all of these families.”

   Baker, a molecular scientist by training, finds little joy in her work, and explicitly wonders how she ended up in an occupation where every case means something has gone terribly wrong. She is also not unaware of how government policies create conditions that make for immigrant death. With minimal institutional support—Baker’s research doesn’t exactly fit the “basic science” label and so hardly qualifies for standard funding—for a job that can raise government and institutional suspicion, vocation drives Baker’s work: “I can’t imagine if my family were tasked with finding me in a foreign nation. And so I can imagine what these families must be going through in trying to find information and being so desperate, and so little being done on our side of our border. I’m also driven by my faith. I’m a Catholic and I believe all life is sacred, and it seems my duty to give dignity to these individuals by giving them a name.”[21] Given all of that, Baker can imagine a good use for border patrolling drones, namely search and rescue, though no government literature I’ve come across dreams of drones for those purposes. I think it safe to say that Baker is possessed of different kinds of dreams. She is, like she says, Christian, and so imagines her life as receiving these lost ones, the most wretched, literally of the earth. And if that CBF litany is right, then it is not simply her duty but her great privilege to receive these ones, for in doing so she receives the one who goes with them—a perpetual dia de muertos, the welcoming in of God’s marching saints.

Jonathan Tran is   Associate and Graduate Professor of Religion, Faculty Master, Honors Residential College at Baylor University. This paper was delivered as the Kendrick-Poerschke Memorial Lecture at Furman University, October 2015.

Footnotes found online at www.christianethicstoday.com

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