The project:

An intimate, novelistic portrait of both migrants trying to enter the US and the Americans who are willing to kill to stop them, The Migrant and the Murderer tells the story of Gabriel Cuen Buitimea, who was killed while walking through George Alan Kelly’s Arizona ranch. The book explores Kelly’s 2024 murder trial, which ended in a hung jury. Peeling back the layers of the case, Cornell illuminates the historical and ongoing epidemics of vigilante and state-sponsored violence against immigrants on American soil.
 

From The Migrant and the Murderer:

Anyone who wishes to cross the southern border of the United States without the government’s permission must choose an enemy: man, or nature. If you cross in a more urban area, if you go over or under or through the wall, your journey is shorter, but the risk of arrest is higher. If you go around the wall and through the mountains or desert, you are less likely to be caught and jailed but more likely to get lost, sprain an ankle, run out of water, or slowly die from the heat or cold.

On that Monday in January, it was cold, just above freezing when Gabriel Cuen Buitimea woke up in his family’s home on the Mexican side of the border city of Nogales. He put on several layers: sweatpants, tan cargo pants, a camo-colored shirt, and a greenish jacket. He wore two pairs of socks and sturdy boots. He carried a wallet and a cell phone. He did not carry keys.

He looked into the bedroom of his two sons: Gabriel Jr. and Tadeo. The baby of the family, Tadeo was a few days shy of his tenth birthday, and an avid soccer player. His father had recently paid an exorbitant 8,000 pesos—about 400 dollars—for him to play in a tournament in Monterrey. The night before, Gabriel's mother-in-law had heard Gabriel through the wall telling the boys how much he loved them. Now, he simply kissed them and let them sleep on. Yesica, who at twenty had recently become a mother herself, was the oldest of Gabriel’s children at home and the only one awake to see him off. He didn’t finish his coffee, which made her uneasy—he usually took such pleasure in it. When it was time for him to go, Yesica carried her baby out to the sidewalk in front of the house and watched him leave.

The town of Nogales had first sprung up in the 1880s, a few buildings around one of the first railroads to connect the United States with Mexico. To avoid import fees, the original downtown was built right on top of the border—you could enter a saloon from the United States and be in Mexico by the time you stepped out to its cigar counter. By the late 1910s, a fence with gateways was erected down the middle of parts of International Street, which runs along the border. But residents continued to go back and forth at will, for work or school or to visit family who lived on the other side of town. The poet Alberto Álvaro Ríos, who grew up on the American side of Nogales in the 1960s, recalls how the downtown gates were thrown open during holidays so that parades could run through them.

Since Gabriel had moved to Nogales in the mid-nineties, however, he had observed the construction of new barriers down the middle of International Street. The latest one was made of thirty-foot slabs of steel that had rusted to a rich burnt red. From the hilltops on either side of town, where Gabriel liked to hike with Tadeo, the wall looked like an infinite scab on the dry skin of the Sonoran Desert. In reality, it ended about six miles outside of town, giving way to metal sawhorses meant to stop cars but not people. It was here, at the end of the wall, that Gabriel would cross.