Of Borders and Dreams with Susan Mills

A border can be “a story of identity” or “a wound…in the landscape.” It is sometimes a place to be feared, and other times a place to be honored. Borders can, of course, be metaphors: the boundary between boy and man, or girl and woman; the thin line between sanity and madness; the final frontier between life and death. In any case, a border, as the journalist James Crawford writes, “is never simply a line, a marker, a wall, an edge. First, it is an idea.” I’m joined in conversation with Susan Mills, an immigration attorney whose law practice for over two decades focused on preparing asylum cases for thousands of immigrants from Central America, with a particular focus on unaccompanied teenagers. We go from borders to dreams and back again: “Wherever there are borders,” James Crawford says, “that’s where you are going to find the most concentrated injustice.”