Border Hacker
A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
An unlikely friendship, a four-thousand-mile voyage, and an impenetrable frontier—this dramatic odyssey reveals the chaos and cruelty US immigration policies have unleashed beyond our borders.
Axel Kirschner was a lifelong New Yorker, all Queens hustle and bravado. But he was also undocumented. After a minor traffic violation while driving his son to kindergarten, Axel was deported to Guatemala, a country he swore he had not lived in since he was a baby. While fighting his way back through Mexico on a migrant caravan, Axel met Levi Vonk, a young anthropologist and journalist from the US. That chance encounter would change both of their lives forever.
Levi soon discovered that Axel was no ordinary migrant. He was harboring a secret: Axel was a hacker. This secret would launch the two friends on a dangerous adventure far beyond what either of them could have imagined. While Axel’s abilities gave him an edge in a system that denied his existence, they would also ensnare him in a tangled underground network of human traffickers, corrupt priests, and anti-government guerillas eager to exploit his talents for their own ends. And along the way, Axel’s secret only raised more questions for Levi about his past. How had Axel learned to hack? What did he want? And was Axel really who he said he was?
Border Hacker is at once an adventure saga—the story of a man who would do anything to return to his family, and the friend who would do anything to help him—and a profound parable about the violence of American immigration policy told through a single, extraordinary life.
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Anthropologist Vonk and undocumented Guatemalan immigrant Kirschner deliver a harrowing account of exploitation along the migrant route from Central America to the U.S. In 2015, Vonk joined a caravan organized by associates of the humanitarian activist Fr. Alejandro Solalinde. The plan was to travel 300 miles from the Guatemala border to Ixtepec, Oaxaca, through some of the most heavily patrolled areas in Mexico, to call attention to a secret "quasi-army" that was "catching and deporting as many Central American migrants as possible... at the behest of the United States." During the journey, Vonk met Kirschner, who grew up on Long Island and was deported to Guatemala after he got in a traffic accident and the other driver reported him to the police. The two form a fast friendship, though inconsistencies in Kirschner's story begin to make Vonk suspicious. After the caravan ends, Kirschner reveals to Vonk that he is a computer hacker; he also alleges that activists and politicians associated with Father Solalinde conspired to keep him from reaching the U.S. in order to exploit his hacking skills. Combining Vonk's in-depth reportage on U.S. border policy, predatory shelter operators, and the links between cartels, kidnappers, and the police with Kirschner's first-person testimony, the two unspool a riveting and disturbing story. Readers will be aghast.
