Shadow Lives USA is a two-decades-long project that humanizes, in a highly intimate fashion, the experiences and lives of the millions of men and women who leave their homes in search of a better life in the United States. Overwhelmingly, these men and women leave to escape the brutal social violence and grinding poverty that increasingly define the conditions of life for poor and working people from Central America. I have witnessed the dangers undocumented immigrants face in their homelands, including a brutal smuggling trade that systematically exploits them, an increasingly punitive legislative environment in the United States, and a far tougher global economy in which they compete.
To show this reality, I have documented social violence in Guatemala, deportation flights from the United States to Mexico and Guatemala, illegal border crossings into the United States, undocumented migrants who’ve been handicapped while working on the job, migrant deaths in the desert, and the increasing militarization of the US/Mexico border. I have spent considerable time with families torn apart by the schizophrenic federal immigration policy, and have also followed the intense effort by the migrant community to organize and fight for a place in their new country.
I began this project in the year 2000 and have been following this issue ever since. During this time, I spent years covering the issue of social violence in Guatemala and Mexico, crossed borders with undocumented immigrants, did ride-alongs with Border Patrol, covered deportation flights with ICE, and much more. I’ve witnessed the incredible resilience of the men and women who seek to improve their lives within their home countries as well as the intense reality of life on the migrant trail from Central America through Mexico into the interior of the United States.
My father left Germany at age 4, alone on the Kindertransport, and was only reunited with his family two years later after spending time in England. He always imparted to my brothers and I the true gift that coming to the United States was, and helped newly arrived immigrants whenever he could. Today, this is becoming a fully fledged refugee crisis. I believe it is imperative to publish and disseminate this work as widely as possible as Donald Trump pushes hard to close the borders further and take a truly reactionary and xenophobic stand against migrants of all kinds.
