Crossing the Line: How Women Activists Expose America's Immigration Cruelty
Sarah Towle centers the "Angry Tías" of the Rio Grande Valley, revealing how radical care becomes the ultimate resistance against systemic cruelty.
BOOK REVIEW — In Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, Sarah Towle accomplishes something rare in immigration journalism: she transforms policy abstractions into human truth while elevating the voices of those fighting daily battles for dignity at the US-Mexico border.
This second edition, updated to reflect the darkening reality of a second Trump administration, is both historical document and moral reckoning—a book that doesn’t just inform but demands we reconsider what American values actually mean in practice.
What distinguishes Towle’s work is her deliberate centering of women as the moral backbone of border resistance. The Angry Tías & Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley emerge as the book’s beating heart—aunties and grandmothers who transformed familial care into radical political action.
Susan Law, Cindy Candia, Elizabeth “Lizee” Cavazos, Madeleine Sandefur, Joyce the archivist—these women become Towle’s guides through the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the…