At this moment of rhetoric and fury around the U.S. - Mexico border, writer and former U.S. Border Patrol agent Francisco Cantú has written the new book - "The Line Becomes a River." The book is Cantú’s personal exploration of the border - its politics, gatekeepers, and victims on both sides of the line.
Cantú is the Mexican-American grandson of border-crossers, raised in Arizona by his mother, a park ranger and the daughter of a Mexican immigrant. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joined the Border Patrol. He and his partners learned to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights.
Cantú never imagined the number of bodies he would have to collect of people who died trying to cross the desert in the middle of the scorching summer. And he hadn’t expected the relentless teeth-gnashing nightmares that would plague him for years, nightmares so terrifying that they forced him to quit the Patrol.