The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story Paperback – 21 April 2020

This story is incredible to say the least. I lived in Douglas, Tucson, Marana and now Mescal. I am involved in search and recovery of UDI's who go missing after crossing the border of Arizona and work closely with border patrol. I've quail hunted off the Geronimo trail which is a corridor for those jumping the fence for a better life. I've dined in many restaurants in Agua prieta during my residency in Leslie Canyon. This book moved me in ok many ways especially the mentioning of the adverse childhood trauma as it plays a huge part in this characters life and her decision making ability. It always amazes me to see writers and authors who go to great lengths to write about immigrant struggles? Interesting as if they are looking thru a window. How many are dead due to our country's own policies? Check out human borders death map? I served in Iran Contra, witnessed many children starving to death, this may be why I walk miles in the desert to find the loved ones of central America? Well written, lived the interlaced stories. Kudos to the author for keeping me invested in this young lady struggle

After 38 years of practice in the field of Immigration law, I retired last year. I find this book to be insightful, accurate and educational.The story is more typical than most laypeople could imagine. Many of my clients were equally imperfect and had cases that were equally compelling. Although I am from San Diego, California, many of my clients were transferred to the detenion facility in Eloy before I could stop the transfer. I even experienced a telephonic bond hearing with Judge Phelps (Aida's Judge). As most Immigration Attorneys would do, I investigated Judge Phelp's reputation and record of the percentage of asylum cases he granted. I based my decision of counseling my client not to proceed with his case based on the information I disovered.The global explanation of the evolution of US immigration laws clarified for me why the Amnesty program became law in the mid 1980s. It had previously been a mystery to me why these laws were insituted by Republican President Ronald Reagan. This account explains the interdependence of the US and Mexico and why it was necessary to bring labor into our country after immigrant quotas were placed on Western Hemisphere countries for the first time in US history.What was also clarified for me is that the Immigration Crisis is provoked by the government who profits from the enforcement arm both through job creation and through detention facilities. I visited the Corrections Corporation of America regularly close to our southern border and to me, there is no denying that it is a jail - not just a detention facility.I applaud the author, Aaron Bobbrow-Strain for creating a very readable book that sets out clearly and demystifies what is happening today. I will recommend this book every chance I get. I have spoken on various panels for different organizations intertested in Immigration law and I have used and will continue to use this book as a research tool in my advocacy for immigration rights.

This is a work of non-fiction that reads like a novel. It is compelling reading, well researched and well done. I became emotional reading this book. At base, this is a book about the extraordinary suffering and struggle of one woman caught in immigration hell. But it also takes you in many directions you are not expecting. If you think it might be a Republican vs Democrat type thing, it absolutely is not. No one has solved these problems. It's a book written from the human perspective, and that makes all the difference.

Aida Hernandez is a pseudonym for a woman who was born in Mexico whose mother brought her and her siblings across the border from Agua Prieta into Douglas, Ariz., when Aida was too young to have any say in the matter. In her youth, workers, shoppers, friends and family ricocheted back and forth between the two towns and countries. The towns’ mutual dependence and interactions were such that people called them collectively DouglaPrieta, but by the time Aida was a teenager, a new policy of immigrant “deterrence” complicated and criminalized movement across the border. What had been considered a normal ebb and flow became risky—even dangerous, and the economy on both sides of the border tanked.Aida, her mother, and her sisters face joblessness, economic insecurity, and abuse by men on both sides of the border. Trapped into accepting a dangerous job in Agua Prieta by single motherhood and poverty, Aida is stabbed repeatedly in a late-night attack by a stranger, leading to her brief “death” and her last trip across the border into the U.S. for emergency medical attention.Over the twenty-five first years of her life, the period covered in this narrative, Aida makes mistakes—many mistakes, some minor, some major—all piling up to form a mountain of physical, emotional, and legal challenges that threaten her quest for legal residency and portend a life-long battle with chronic PTSD. The book is in part a narrative about Aida, her family, and her friends—people stuck on one side or the other of the border by virtue of their place of birth. It’s in part a narrative about the exponential growth in this nation’s border-control industry and the counter-intuitive decisions that have exasperated rather than resolved the issue of immigration over our southern border.In a back-of-the-book essay, “About This Book,” the author, a professor of politics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, which he credits with providing support for the research and completion of his book, makes the point of his book explicit: border policy isn’t “broken,” as is so-often stated. Instead, it is working well for many: politicians, private corrections firms that run detention centers like prisons, smugglers, law-enforcement job-seekers, and government contractors—even Western Union—all of whom profit from a system that stigmatizes, punishes, and destroys people based on their birthplace, their geographic and career ambitions, their big and little (but human) errors.This is a big book—a book that pulls more weight than its relatively modest 340 pages of narrative (not counting back-of-the book material) might suggest. First, Aida’s story is complicated—the kind of story that would lead many authors or journalists to abandon the project and look for a simpler, more completely sympathetic protagonist. Many of Aida’s troubles are self-inflicted, but others are the result of circumstances out of her control. Once they begin to add up, it’s hard to tell one kind from the other.The book is chock-full of detail and history about our complicated, expensive, ever-expanding, and often counterintuitive and irrational border-control agencies, laws, and systems. It records the decline of Douglas, a once-vibrant, multi-cultural border town where Mexican men and women made decent wages and felt safe raising their families. The town’s major industry today is border “security” and most of its residents are transient law-enforcement employees with no connection to the community. Finally, it’s a story about battered women and families—a subject which the author didn’t know he would have to address in such detail until Aida’s story made it clear how integral abuse is to much of what happens to women at the border.The subject matter is so big, in fact, that at times I found myself checking how much of the book I’d read, compared with how much I had left to read, as if I were back in school and the book was a class assignment, wondering how much more I could stuff into my head without losing the string of the narrative.That is not criticism. The author’s ambition is admirable, and his book illustrates how much the media over-simplifies and dumbs-down both the stories of migrants’ journeys and our border policy in covering the “crisis at the border.” Even multi-page articles in the New York Times—for example, a recent one that followed a migrant family from the border through several states—can’t do these stories justice. Don’t get me wrong: I also understand how the limits of media resources and the average readers’ patience make the kind of examination this book undertakes impossible.So, bravo for Bobrow-Strain for taking up the slack, and for his publishers for accepting this hefty manuscript for publication. I heartily recommend his book for anyone who wants more than a superficial understanding of what has really happened at our border, and how we have ended up with a bloated anti-immigration industry that, by 2012, was costing us more than “the FBI, the DEA, Secret Service, ATF, and the U.S. Marshals Service combined, with enough left over to run all of the country’s national parks for a year.” One can only imagine how much more it is costing today in both budget and ruined lives.

I enjoyed this story. It’s a true story. It provided information on the United States Immigration law. I didn’t know a lot about these laws and I was shocked by some of them. Aida was brought here illegally as a child by her mom. As she grew up, Aida saw her mom being abused by her father and stepfather. When she grew up she too faced an abusive husband. As an adult, she faced being deported several time. Finally after being held in detention center for an indefinite period, she took her life into her own hands and fault for citizenship. This book tells this story of her fighting for a new life while dealing with PSDC from traumatic events she faced during her life. I would recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in learning what life is like for people who come here undocumented.