New York Borders

Where I live in upstate New York, the border is located on Highway 13, somewhere between Wegmans Supermarket and Walmart. My own house is almost exactly 100 miles as the crow flies from the Canadian border, though I am not entirely sure on which side of the enhanced enforcement zone it sits. Around me are fields, sometimes planted in corn, sometimes sunflowers, and horses graze in the fields on my way to work. I hear coyotes sing in the woods behind my house almost every night. Deer are an ever-present menace. Once I saw a hungry fox looking longingly at the pheasants on the other side of the fence at the Reynolds Game Farm. There is a much-quoted bumper sticker here: “Ithaca, New York: Centrally Isolated,” and another that says, “Ithaca: Ten square miles surrounded by reality.”

Despite its isolation and rural setting, there are many borders that cross through here. The St. James AME Zion Church was a notable station on the Underground Railroad, perhaps the most famous of the dozen or so stations and safe houses around the city where individuals fleeing the Southern US slave states hoped to find  “freedom through forced migration,” in the words of my colleague Gerard Aching. When Ithaca declared itself a Sanctuary City, it was in memory and direct reference to this history, including its rejection of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This Sanctuary City status has been reiterated and reaffirmed by Ithaca Common Council resolutions in 2017 and 2025, and the surrounding region of Tompkins County has also reaffirmed its sanctuary status and goals. Fifty miles north of us, in Syracuse, a curious traveler might come upon the Jerry Rescue Monument in Clinton Square, commemorating a date in 1851 when a group of citizens of the city broke into the police station to free William (Jerry) Henry, a local cabinet maker and freed slave who had been taken up in accordance with the decried Fugitive Slave Act. In an echo of those times, in 2025 networks and hotlines are being resuscitated to ensure vigilance, and to keep our neighbors safe against a flurry of executive orders that take the place of congressionally enacted laws.

Today, we remain a rural area, in the heart of the state, four hours from New York City, three from Buffalo. This is Haudenosaunee territory, Trumpland, with over 30,000 farms and an estimated 50,000-75,000 farmworkers with mostly Guatemalan and Mexican origins. The farmers and other inhabitants in upstate by and large are MAGA supporters, strongly against immigration, and, at the same time, according to the Empire State poll, about 60% of them are highly favorably inclined towards their own local immigrants, who they see as hard working, essential members of their communities (Dudley et al). Dairy is one of the top enterprises on these farms, alongside the farming of beets and apples, and maple syrup and wine making. These workers are both protected and hidden by unwelcoming “private property” signs on farm driveways, and farmers have registered formal complaints if ICE trespasses (Nosowitz, Goldbaum). At the same time, the workers become hypervisible as brown faces in a sea of white when they go to the local Walmart for their grocery shopping, or attempt to attend church, or take their kids to the free clinic. This instability suggests that while the brown restaurant or construction worker within the Ithaca city limits may have a network to watch out for them, and a hotline to call, the upstate farmworker is far more likely to just disappear unremarked upon into the maw of the detention/deportation system, especially if they step off the farm.

In one of my classes, I had the students read Guatemalan American writer Sabrina Vourvoulias’ 2018 near-future novel, Ink. The novel is set in upstate New York, in a time when all legally documented immigrants and their US-born children are marked with prominent, color-coded, bar-code tattoos and GPS chips to control and track their movements (and ensure they are relegated to second-class citizen status). Ironically, undocumented immigrants in the novel mark themselves with fake/unofficial ink, so as to pass, as much as possible, into this hunted and unstable status. In the second section of the novel, “Once upon a time,” Mari tells the story of her encounter with one of the gangs of white supremacist vigilantes who roam these rural towns, abducting people, cutting out their chips, and dumping them across the border to die of exposure.  Mari is a US citizen whose father was from Toledo, but in this fictional world she is marked with a tattoo, and hence vulnerable:

One of the novelties of this plot is the northern setting. The vigilantes do not use the southern border desert as their killing ground, a more familiar trope in US dystopian fictions about migrant oppression that are so often located in the US Southwest. Instead, Vourvoulias has us picture a wintery northern forest expanse. This is a YA novel, with adventurous twists and magical turns, so there is plenty of plot to engage my students’ minds. However, when I ask them about where they think Vourvoulias has imagined dumping these unlucky and unwilling passengers in the vigilante van bumping across these conifer-lined dirt roads—I am assuming that they might guess Adirondack State Park or West Canada Lake Wilderness, or Thousand Islands State Park—all of my students say Texas.

Once I took the Greyhound bus from Ithaca to Toronto, just because the five-hour drive and border crossing by car did not appeal. The bus stops in Rochester, about 90 miles from Ithaca to the northwest, before continuing to the border crossing at Buffalo, and then on up the QEW to Toronto. There was once a project for a fast ferry between Rochester and Toronto—the service was inaugurated in 2004 and lasted less than two years before filing bankruptcy, but it left behind an overstaffed customs and border patrol office, with very little for the staff to do. Some of us theorize that is why there is so much ICE presence in Rochester, and why the ICE/CBP agents tended to hang out at the Greyhound station instead of the unused ferry dock, checking the citizenship of bus passengers crossing the state from west to east. After the bus loaded all the passengers for the Rochester-Buffalo leg of the trip, official-looking agents boarded it, going from seat to seat and asking brown-looking people in Spanish where they were from. “Don’t answer!” I said to myself, rule #1 in the know your rights training, but of course they did. “Guatemala,” said one young man. “Mexico,” said another. “How did you get to the USA?” was the polite follow-up question. “The usual way, “ one of them answered. They were politely escorted off the bus, and the rest of us were on our way. The agents didn’t speak to me at all, not in Spanish, not in English; they just passed me by. Ironically, these men that ICE detained almost certainly traveled in the direction they had originally intended to go, but no more than 35 miles of that trip, to the Batavia Federal Detention Center, at the NYS 98 exit (exit 48) off I-90, between Rochester and Buffalo.

Batavia, one of the five facilities in the country that is fully owned and operated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, houses 600 men. As substantiated by the Batavia website at ice.gov, all of them are officially perceived as criminals in greater or lesser degree, and they are treated as criminals, with varying levels of severity in their crimes and correspondingly colored jumpsuits. They are criminalized at the very least for being present in the USA without authorization, whatever the reason for that status, whether entry outside of official ports, or overstaying a visa. Some are suspected of misdemeanors (speeding tickets, for instance); others accused of felonies (assault or larceny). There is stern certainty in the official language at the Batavia website; the facility holds people who represent a “danger to our national security, are a threat to public safety, or who otherwise undermine the integrity of our immigration system.”  The ACLU and others argue that US law on entry without authorization is highly ambiguous and not clearly a criminal act, and Cornell law clinics have been instrumental in freeing people, in a very few, very targeted cases. We often visit Batavia from Cornell with our Migration Studies students, or with Law School immigration clinics teams. Sometimes, usually, the officials let us in during pre-scheduled visits, especially if we have a specific individual we plan to meet. Occasionally, with no advance notice, we are turned away.

The bus continues past Batavia into the border city of Buffalo, 150 miles from Ithaca, now an infamously run-down (but recovering!) post-industrial city. Near the international border with Canada is Love Canal, another important border—this one a border between comfortable homes and the kind of affordable housing built over a substratum of industrial waste, the site of one of the most notorious environmental tragedies in US history. In the early 20^th century, William T. Love thought that building a short canal between the upper and lower Niagara rivers would provide impetus for power generation in the area, but the plan fell apart in 1910, leaving only a deep ditch. The Hooker Chemical Company filled the failed canal project ditch with hazardous waste during the 1920s, covered it over, and sold the property to the city for one dollar. The people who moved into the housing development on the site soon showed signs of high rates of cancer, birth defects, and other health problems. Then the site exploded. Literally exploded. This border site became the testing ground of the Superfund legislation, and, in the words of David Axelrod, “a national symbol of a failure to exercise a sense of concern for future generations" (Verhovek). It has also been a cornerstone reference for the essential importance of the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the federal agencies taken down in February 2025—a new sign popped up when I revisited the website in mid February 2025: “this content is not maintained and may no longer apply.”

Both coming and going from Buffalo, the Greyhound bus passes through and near many small, rural towns. In the 19^th century, this part of New York State was known as the burned over district, notable for the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening: its support for abolition (Frederick Douglass lived in Rochester), the women’s rights movement (with much inspiration taken from the far more liberal practices of women leaders in the local indigenous nations), Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventists, Shakerism, and also vegetarianism, communalism of all sorts. The bus passes near, but does not enter, Auburn, known to many as the home of Harriet Tubman and site of her farm and her home for the aged and infirm. My children and I visited her home on South Street when it was for sale on the open market and marveled that it wasn’t already a historical park (it is a now a museum and park, administered by the AME Zion Church, with National Park status since 2017). 

Primarily, though, people in this part of the country know Auburn as “prison city.” There is even a pretty decent local brew made by Prison City Brewery. Unlike Batavia, which is not technically a prison, Auburn is a NY state-run, maximum-security prison for males, one of the oldest functional prisons in the USA, with 1,600 inmates. The proximity of the prison to the university, only 37 miles away, could lead us to all kinds of intellectualization in the Foucauldian vein about institutions and the disciplining of the body, as well as the way modern society makes itself modern by hiding away and invisibilizing certain segments of society—especially by moving criminalized bodies (and students) to remote rural environments. I won’t go down this road of analysis, however, and will merely mention that the relative proximity of the two institutions has created its own modest industry in accord with Cornell’s educational engagement mission of outreach to people in this state. The Prison Education Program is one of the few truly cross-college enterprises at Cornell, with faculty from Arts and Sciences, Agriculture and Life Sciences, Industrial and Labor Relations, and Law (and maybe other colleges as well). My theatre colleague Bruce Levitt is the facilitator of one of the longest running and most successful of these programs—The Phoenix Players, who have been producing performances in the prison since 2008. Any potential audience member driving up from Ithaca for one of these memorable performances will be very aware that we are crossing a significant border between races and classes, incarcerated and free. Bruce’s invitation informs us to dress appropriately, and to make sure to arrive in plenty of time to go through all the gate check and security measures, reminding us that we will be locked in the prison for the duration of the performance.

We also pass by Geneva, where Cornell has an agricultural outpost and experimental station. It is the location of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where several of my close collaborators work. My students did a performance once, in one of the Catholic Churches in town, of a play developed from upstate farmworker women’s testimonies, collected by a Hobart and William Smith colleague. The women who shared their stories brought their families to the show, prepared tamales for us, and hosted a reception after the play. There were tears, and warm praise, including inviting my students to tour the play around the north country, offering to host and feed them in lieu of any other support they were in no position to offer. Other connections ensued with sensitive ally teachers in Geneva’s public schools, that resulted in workshops with my Latinx students to help the teachers think about how better to meet the needs of the young Mexican-American and Guatemalan-American students that recently began appearing in their classrooms. We talked excitedly about tutoring programs, as these kids gradually moved into high school, and about visits to Cornell as part of a college preparedness.

Lately, sadly, neither the church nor the elementary school classroom offer safe places for these kids and their families. In fact, Geneva has recently been the site of one of the most fully reported ICE crackdowns in the upstate area. On February 8, 2025 a group of agents moved through the town, knocking on doors, hanging around outside the small Mexican grocery store and the church, while residents created an impromptu help network: texting, WhatsApping, calling their friends, taking videos, and posting on Facebook: look for these men, don’t answer the door, know your rights. In her report for The Daily News, Marnie Eisenstadt writes: “It was as much parade as raid. A few people were detained, but the message was clear: You could be next.” Immigrants have stopped going to work, “they are keeping their kids home from school. In Geneva, business at the Mexican grocery store fell off by 90% because everyone was afraid to go outside, according to the store’s post on social media. The store, Hernandez Grocery, began offering delivery” (Eisenstadt).

 Back home in Ithaca. My house is part of a small development of four ranch-style houses on a former farm. The woods behind the house were an old apple orchard, and there is an undeveloped field next to me  that is sometimes planted in corn, and sometimes has bird observation posts for Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology. Ithaca is on the Marcellus shale, which causes our farmers no end of grief with rocky soil. More saliently right now, this shale traps the natural gas that flows under Pennsylvania and ends just south of Syracuse, another border. The owners of that undeveloped field next to my house live in Rochester, and when the oil and gas industry came around offering serious money to lease the land for hydrofracking in 2010, they signed right on, as did many other neighbors. We soon learned that extracting the natural gas is a hugely environmentally damaging process involving injecting proprietary chemicals deep underground to force out natural gas for “clean” energy needs, and that New York State had already banned fracking in the New York City watershed because of these environmental concerns. Upstate was fair game at that time, however, and the field next to my house was scheduled to be turned into a drill pad, I heard. 

Luckily, I live across the border from the town of Ithaca in the township of Dryden, and that little town made national news by taking on big oil and winning. When our locals realized what hydrofracking meant for the environment, they were appalled. They wanted to get out of the leases they had signed, but the fine print of the contracts made it impossible to do so. The promise of clean fuel for others did not convince us to admit devastating contamination in rural towns. NIMBY: Not in my back yard. Not another Love Canal in central New York. Horrified lease holders and neighbors formed a group that met weekly to come up with a plan to stop the drilling from happening in our region. That solution, which became a model for the country, was for the town of Dryden to enact a zoning ordinance—basically, confirming that the gas company has the right to drill in the lands they leased as per their agreements with the landowners, but in Dryden they are prohibited from driving heavy trucks on our roads. The Anschutz Exploration Corporation appealed, of course, right up to the New York Court of Appeals, until they finally gave up after their loss in New York’s highest court. Local lawyer Helen Slottje won the Goldman Environmental Prize (considered the Green Nobel Prize) for her legal research developing this novel approach. A few years later, in 2024, the state enacted a fracking ban for the whole state. Thirty-five miles from my house is the Pennsylvania border, and on the other side of that border fracking is allowed, with the resulting contamination of lands and waters in that state. The profits, though, mostly go to Houston (Raimi).

It probably goes without saying that my neighbors in Dryden are mostly white—and that the activism to prevent environmental destruction was possible largely because of that privileged status. In other parts of the state, as in other parts of the country, other Love Canals continue to fester, and in those locations, economically disadvantaged people, disproportionately people of color, make their homes. Borderlands are subject to intense surveillance, but they also have blind spots. Distance provides cover for abusive authorities and greedy corporations.

My home and Cornell University itself are in an exceptionally beautiful part of the country, with hills covered by second-growth forests, deep glacial lakes, streams that cut gorges through the slate and leave behind a legacy of waterfalls, with many of the largest bearing indigenous names: Taughannock, Shequaga, Cohoes, Niagara. Here in this part of central New York, we are located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫɁ (Cayuga Nation), the only one of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations that does not have any designated reservation territory in the state—it was all whittled away in various shady treaties and suspicious land sales between 1789 and 1796. Ironically enough, it seems I have come full circle in some ways; my small family farm in my home state of Wisconsin bordered on the reservation where my grandmother grew up, speaking Oneida with her friends. That reservation was founded by Haudenosaunee people pushed out of New York in the 1820s, who (im)migrated west, and purchased five million acres of land from the Winnebago and Menominee. The Oneidas confirmed their rights to the territorial borders of the reservation by the Treaty of Buffalo Creek, New York in 1838, two years after Wisconsin became a US territory.  

Unlike my grandmother, I do not speak Oneida, or any language of this land, only a couple of the colonial languages of those who have crossed many borders to get here.