Under Siege: Scenes from an Occupied Neighborhood, 2008

In the Sonoran Desert near the Mexican border, monsoon winds howl and scream, whorl and pummel, split yucca, and rip ironwood.Mightier still are the helicopters.The U.S. Border Patrol's Blackhawks pause in place over our houses, warping the air inside one's eardrums.My neighbor, Doa Rodriguez, runs into her yard, shaking her fist at the sky.Gritty, airborne sand chokes her carefully tended flowerbeds.She screams, curses, and spits.She rips at her apron, and her gray hair flies from its bobby pins.When the helicopters finally leave, she keens for a long time and paces back and forth between bent flowers, inconsolable.Like many of my neighbors, I long for the desert of before, when the wind that carves hollows in rock eventually gentles into a monastic silence that first drew me to this place.The desert was an open canvas of land and sky before the checkpoint's 40-foot stadium lights turned night into day and our entire neighborhood into a prison yard, and the outdoor speaker system blasted radio communications around-the-clock in all directions across the desert.I had always looked forward to coming home, before high-speed car chases happened daily and young trigger-happy Border Patrol agents with automatic weapons trespassed day and night through our backyards.The local elementary school was placed on lockdown more than once this year after a grim group of vigilantes from outside the area attempted to organize a community meeting on school grounds.Border Patrol's Ford trucks look just like the ones that animal control officers use that carry cages for animals in the back.The back of each truck is instead a detention box crammed with migrants.The officers unload their human cargo at transport