If you’ve been watching the news over the past few weeks, you might have heard that there is a crisis at the US-Mexico border. Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Alejandro Mayorkas has already made three visits to the border since taking office in February. In Congress, House minority leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy has proclaimed a “Humanitarian crisis, public health crisis [and] national security crisis” unfolding at the US-Mexico border.

Political concern has, in turn, spurred a wave of media coverage. The Washington Post declared recently that the Biden administration faced the biggest “border surge” in twenty years, predicting that there may be as many as “two million migrants at the southern border.” This story was seemingly so urgent that ABC News chose to run the entirety of a recent edition of “This Week,” the network’s Sunday news talk show, from the El Paso section of the border wall.

The alarming statistics presented in this media coverage are often juxtaposed against images and videos of people in desperate situations, living in informal settlements, or sitting stranded in the shadow of the border. Rhetorically, the people in these images are reduced to floods, waves, or surges threatening to overwhelm the laws, institutions, and government officials that claim to keep us safe.