“This is a police state. This is Arizona…”

“This is a police state. This is Arizona, and worse, this is my country. I must remember this moment. I must not forget even if I want, even if, when I’m back home in bed, the whole scene seems impossible.”

— From Day 5 of Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s trip to the Arizona-Mexico border. You can check out everything she wrote about the trip on her blog. She went there to volunteer with No More Deaths, a group devoted to ensuring that migrants don’t die of thirst and other serious health issues in the desert.

These are really fascinating accounts and a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in what’s happening on our border. Her blogs are horrifying and real and human and sad.

Photo of a water bottle left for migrants by No More Deaths, slashed by a Border Patrol Agent.

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Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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