From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

The U.S.-Mexico border has become a national fixation.

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that there is indeed a crisis at the border.

Of course, there's wide disagreement about the nature and the causes of that crisis.

Panic over so-called illegal immigration has been stoked by rhetoric and policies coming straight from the White House.

But the majority of people in America are outraged by the separation of families at the border.

An inhumane treatment of people seeking asylum and economic opportunities in this country continues.

Things seem to have reached a boiling point.

But rights abuses at the border are by no means unique to the current administration, and the

question of what America's borders should look like speaks to who we are as a nation.

This week's guest is Mitra Abadolahi, a staff attorney with the ACLU of San Diego's border

litigation project. She's been working tirelessly to push back against the most outrageous

civil rights and civil liberties abuses at the U.S.-Mexico border, and it's an honor to have her in the studio today.

Mitra, thanks very much for joining us. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

I want to start by talking about the border as a concept. Why do you think it looms so large in the American imagination? What does it symbolize for people?

I think it's always really helpful to think about what things were like just a little while ago.

In 1994, there were only 4,000 Border Patrol agents.

The border itself was far less militarized.

The structures, the physical structures of the border were far fewer

and less permanent. And that was the way things had been for dozens or hundreds of years.

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