Thank you to NetGalley and the University of California Press for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review. Ieva Jusionyte's exploration of emergency services on the U.S.-Mexico border is an excellent mix of social ethnography, memoir, and scholarly research. Jusionyte argues that the border wall was deliberately designed to cause human injury and shame injured crossers for their actions and label them undeserving of mercy. She explains that "their wounds, rather than making border crossers qualified to receive care and protection, are read as proof of their crime."

The book is well-researched and annotated. Though a clear scholarly study, it is written in an accessible style appropriate for the topically-interested reader. As a member of the emergency responder family and a person who spent time in Nogales, Arizona, where much of Jusionyte's story is located, I deeply connected with the narrative on a personal level and appreciated her willingness to take a stand that while neutrality is necessary to do ones job, the border is anything but neutral.

Jusionyte does a great job of putting into words what many first reponders struggle to - that of feeling nothing and everything at the same time and living in moments of intensity for years after the fact.

"Injuries on the US-Mexico border have never been accidental," Jusionyte writes. The government has decided to penalize people who are seeking a better life and simultaneously victimizes those who are tasked with following inhumane procedures while trying to save lives. State boundaries are simply lines in the sand. Human beings will go to the ends of the earth to protect their families. No line in the sand will ever be enough to stop them, no matter how tall the wall on top of it rises.

Jusionyte has written a masterful text that should be required reading in any geopolitical classroom, for all politicians, and for the general populace as a whole.