Overcoming American Exceptionalism and Moral Injury

I can still remember the intense feelings I would have every time we were told to stand and place our hands over our hearts. The butterflies I would get in my chest in trying to say every word correctly were the same I felt whenever they played the national anthem at the local Huntsville, Alabama rodeo. I was well aware of how fortunate I was to be born an American, a white American.

By the time I was six years old, my mother had taught me about the atrocities of the Holocaust. She reiterated over and over that I had Nazi blood in my veins. She insisted that my great grandmother was a Nazi because she came from Germany during the first world war. I was evil from birth she said. Unbeknownst to me at this age, she had started drinking Jack Daniels to deal with her manic-depressive disorder she would forever refuse to seek help for. Today we call that bipolar.

She died last October from her alcoholism eating her brain, never saying a word to me in over a decade. Perhaps because I became that Nazi. Six years of intentionally pushing men, women and children to their preventable deaths was not honorable as the Border Patrol motto insists. It was and still is an atrocity of enormous consequences for the victims and their families that we as a nation refuse to address. This is what motivates me to tell the truth even if few of you care to hear it.

I have had people confront me about my writing and the things I say. “Race traitor” and “beaner lover” are common. Insistence that I couldn’t have been a real agent or that I was a terrible agent abound although my records published in this blog prove otherwise. I am apparently lying about the tens of thousands we have killed knowingly with our deterrence policies. White men have attempted to come to my home and demand I take them to see the bodies. They offered to buy me lunch afterwards, but then claimed I was a fraud because I would not take them. The most interesting is when chiefs of the Border Patrol tell me I was never raped in the academy. The most notorious one, being the current head of CBP.

There are a variety of reasons for why people are so afraid of my voice and writing, for why they insist I am lying. People within the agency obviously are afraid of the consequences. They have been covering up crimes committing by agents since 1924. I have proven it time and again as have other writers who have expanded upon my work, yet we have seen few consequences and more cover ups. I expect this pushback from the government and the agency. I was not prepared for it coming from the public.

Naively, I believed that if I could be brave enough to tell the truth of my life in my book, if I could show how someone becomes one of these agents and why, how believing in exceptionalism leads to traumas…maybe it could help Americans understand how we become monsters through our belief that we are exceptional. Maybe we could stop ourselves from believing our government’s lies and ignoring our brutality. But what I have discovered in speaking and listening to the followup questions is that most Americans are hopelessly bound up in American exceptionalism just as I once was, and that is a tough nut to crack.

To overcome this, you must first be able to recognize it. This takes practice.

Recently, I spoke at Hofstra Law and stated there was little difference between republicans and democrats in immigration. The students’ faces questioned this comment and I replied, “Do you all think democrats are soft on immigration and republicans are strong and brutal?” Everyone nodded yes. This belief is based in propaganda sold to Americans via the media. This is not just right-wing media as main stream media often repeats what right-wing outlets report on immigration. The students in general believed that democrats were trying to get migrants into the country and republicans were for keeping criminals out. This idea of conflating “migrants” with “criminals” is an example of propaganda. They are not the same people.

The law students were shocked that Clinton began the genocidal deterrence policies that knowingly sent asylum seeking families to their deaths while quietly limiting who was eligible to apply legally. It was Obama who was the Deporter in Chief. He was also the president who built the child cages used by Trump. Obama also started taking newborns from asylum seeking mothers while returning the mothers to Mexico. Yes, Obama separated families long before Trump. Biden kept Trump’s brutal immigration policies for over three years even though he campaigned on ending them and stated the policies were inhumane. Biden was just as republican on immigration as Obama and Clinton.

Each president has built this inhumane system on the backs of the past presidents regardless of their political party. A current example of this is the Flores Agreement. This agreement concerns children and the regulations required to keep them safe while in immigration custody. Recently, media reported Trump was trying to get rid of Flores. The uproar was rightly huge as this would allow the government to keep children in custody with no oversight. This is concerning because with oversight, they still lose children, abuse them and neglect them to literal death. One can only imagine the blatant criminality that would fester without any oversight at all.

In all this reporting about ending the Flores Agreement, everyone forgot it was Biden who began to dismantle it. In May of 2024, the Biden Administration stated the Flores Agreement was no longer needed because the Department of Health and Human Services was taking care of kids needs.

This brings me to the most important lesson of overcoming American exceptionalism, there is no better side. Both sides have championed some heinous, racist, brutal policies. The only difference I see after thirty years of working and studying the US immigration system is that republicans will brag about their brutality, democrats lie about their humanity. Both are selling American exceptionalism. Both refuse to address the rampant corruption and rape culture of the immigration agencies and their oversight agencies.

One of the reasons it is so difficult for Americans to see their country for what it is, is because it is quite easy to live in this country siloed away from reality. If you do not want to hear about migrants dying in the deserts or that Border Patrol agents actually commit a higher percentage of violent crimes than the people they arrest, you are in luck because no news outlet will tell you that. They will tell you about all the lives they save, but without noting the fact that it is because they have closed all legal avenues to cross legally giving them no other options. It’s a bit like tying them to the train tracks, then photographing yourself saving the damsel just before impact.

This is where the moral injury comes in.

Moral injury is:

In traumatic or unusually stressful circumstances, people may perpetrate, fail to prevent, or witness events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations (1). When someone does something that goes against their beliefs this is often referred to as an act of commission and when they fail to do something in line with their beliefs that is often referred to as an act of omission. Individuals may also experience betrayal from leadership, others in positions of power or peers that can result in adverse outcomes (2). Moral injury is the distressing psychological, behavioral, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of exposure to such events (3). A moral injury can occur in response to acting or witnessing behaviors that go against an individual's values and moral beliefs.

Moral injury is related to PTSD and many of the consequences are the same such as depression and suicidal ideation. While PTSD is more associated with lived or experienced traumas such as war and policing or being the victim of a violent crime, moral injury can be experienced from afar as well as collectively.

When I look back over my fifty-four years in this country and I think back on collective moral injuries, they tend to come when the veil of American exceptionalism is pulled back. In my lifetime, I can recall when they let everyone go for the Enron scandal. I don’t know much about investing, but it seemed as if there was no justice, no outcome other than shrugged shoulders. Then there was Flint, Michigan and their tainted water supply. Katrina and the ignoring of victims. 9/11 and nothing to see here type of results. The wars we started and never finished in the Middle East and for what we are not entirely sure. The murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Covid. We never talk about the trauma of Covid and watching the president tell people to inject bleach into their veins, or the semis full of dead loved ones or the trauma the hospital staffs went through. It’s always some sort of nada que ver (nothing to see) announcement, and we move on collectively.

Believing in American exceptionalism, that we are somehow better, smarter, more capable than other countries, that our government can do no wrong and is not lying to us…this has led to a what experts call a collective epidemic of moral injury. Are you angry and tired of America? Confused morally because the government claimed they would only go after violent criminals? Distraught because the great American democracy is now kidnapping people off the streets and trafficking them to other countries and holding them in concentration torture camps? Do you feel betrayed because Trump publicly states he is not cutting social security and other benefits while he literally does those things? Lost? Hopeless? Are you muttering, “This is not my country?” Is your mouth still agape at having a president who is a convicted felon?

There was one older woman in the Hofstra law class from Yugoslavia. At the end, she turned to her younger fellow students (some disbelieving and some asleep from my confessions), “She is right.” She explained that when she came to the US seeking asylum because of the civil war in the 1990s, most women who could not cross legally because there was no legal avenue were told to cross illegally on the Canadian border because US Border Patrol agents in San Diego would demand sex on the southern border. She stated emphatically that over the years that most who were forced to cross into San Diego were sexually assaulted. I was working at the time that most were sexually assaulted and did not know this then.

Today, I do not doubt her words because I can recognize the lies of the Border Patrol and can spot American exceptionalism.

This is moral injury. Our leaders have failed us, and we need to stop believing in that shining city on the hill. We are only exceptional in our brutality and our ability to ignore it. Start questioning your leaders regardless of party. Begin demanding accountability. Face reality. That is how we begin to make change and become free.

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