U.S. Coast Guard officers patrol the Intracoastal Waterway as President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump spend the final holiday season of his presidency at Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 28, 2020.
San Diego, California – In the early hours of Saturday morning, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Active intercepted a small cabin cruiser drifting 22 miles off the coast of La Jolla. Aboard the 20-foot vessel were 11 migrants, all of whom claimed Mexican nationality. The boat had no navigational lights, a telltale signal in waters increasingly surveilled for smuggling activity. The Coast Guard apprehended the group without incident and transferred them to Border Patrol custody later that afternoon.
There is a clarity in the facts, but little detail beyond the basics. We are told nothing about the conditions onboard, nothing about who organized the voyage, or what the migrants hoped to find on the other side of that invisible maritime boundary. But the story, like so many others of its kind, raises a more pressing question: why the water?
Traditionally, most unauthorized migration across the U.S.-Mexico border has happened over land—through deserts, across rivers, by foot, by truck, often in dangerous and dehumanizing conditions. But as land-based routes grow ever more fortified, patrolled, and surveilled, the Pacific Ocean has become a tempting alternative. Maritime smuggling has surged in recent years, particularly off Southern California, where stretches of the coastline are poorly lit and relatively isolated. What once felt unthinkable—crossing international lines by open sea in a pleasure boat—has become a grimly logical risk.
A 20-foot cruiser is not a vessel meant for long-distance travel, especially not with 11 people aboard and under cover of darkness. But for those facing poverty, violence, or hopelessness at home, it may seem safer than the cartel-controlled checkpoints inland or the punishing conditions of the Sonoran Desert. The ocean, for all its danger, does not extort, rob, or shoot.
There’s also a shift in perception, one that authorities seem increasingly attuned to: the border is no longer just a line in the sand. It is fluid, diffuse, and migratory. It stretches into the ocean and into the skies, reshaping itself in response to enforcement patterns, climate pressures, and the ever-present human need for movement. The small boat off La Jolla is a fragment of that larger story—a reminder that for some, even 22 miles of dark ocean may feel like a path toward something better.
