I hear the sound of faint bells in the distance. It is like a sound in a dream, or the jingling at the beginning of a Christmas song.

Jingle, jingle, jingle. The sound comes closer. Jingle, jingle, jingle.

And then they come in, seventy of them, all men, chained together, bound wrist and waist and foot.

They shuffle bright-sounding into the courtroom, a large bright room which is, for them, a chasm of hopelessness.

What you think is true of the country in which you have arrived is often true only of where in it you are.

I immigrated to small towns in Michigan. Later on, I went to New York City.

These places became my America, and their landscapes and ways of life became natural to me.

Other Americas—Salt Lake City, Anchorage, Honolulu—I knew by name only, and considered part of my America only through the imagination.

If I traveled to one of these distant Americas, I had to reimagine them. I only slowly understood how I was connected to life there.

This was my experience of Tucson, and of the Sonoran desert in Arizona which goes all the way up to and beyond the border with Mexico.

This dry and severely beautiful region, alive with traces of the old Spanish Missions, is the home of the Tohono O'odham.

Their land preceded Mexico or the United States and stretches across the current border.

And the border is incessantly crossed, by various people for various reasons, a matter of commerce, culture, law, and unhappiness.

The program, called "Operation Streamline," is about to jail and then deport these men.

Most of them are indigenous people from Mexico or further south, here in search of work, arrested in the desert or in town.

Seventy small dark men. For most of them, Spanish is a second language.

The brightness of the courtroom is like an assault.

They have been coached to say yes, to say no. They are charged with illegal entry, re-entry, or false claim to citizenship.

Soon—each gets less than a minute in front of the judge—they'll be taken back to detention.

They will be imprisoned for weeks or months, then put on a bus or plane to Mexico City, hundreds of miles away from home.