TEAR DOWN THIS WALL:

The chase was over. U.S. Border Patrol agent Brendan Lenihan had finally caught up with the group of undocumented migrants he'd been diligently tracking. Yet when he came face-to-face with the first man of the group in a remote stretch of the Las Guijas Mountains that marked the Arizona border with Sonora, Mexico, he didn't arrest him.

There was something in the man's eyes, Lenihan told journalist and author Todd Miller in a dramatic scene detailed in Build Bridges Not Walls.

Appearing at the midpoint of Miller's book, the "open-hearted Border Patrol agent" is the centerpiece of Miller's book. Echoing the book's theme of seeking bridges between people to overcome the borders that wreak such death and destruction throughout the world, Lenihan had an out-of-body experience, shearing him of "his uniform, badge, laws, and gun," Miller writes. "In their place was a bridge, across which [Lenihan] could see and feel the world from [the migrant's] side--his longing, his love, his family, and his anguish and despair."

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