Photographer Tom Kiefer has lived and worked in Southern Arizona for the past twenty years, studying the urban and rural landscape and the cultural infrastructure of the United States.
It is here that he became aware of the unsympathetic policies impacting migrants and those seeking amnesty in the United States and began his commitment to shedding light on these injustices.
Beginning in July 2003, he started working part-time as a janitor at a nearby U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility. A few years later when given permission to collect the food migrants and asylum seekers carried with them when crossing the desert he also found personal belongings seized and discarded by officials, which he collected. Kiefer resigned in August 2014 to work full time on photographing and archiving these personal items, a process through which he hopes to return to their rightful owners one day.
Toothbrush? Non-essential. Soap, too. Shoelaces: dangerous contraband. At the U.S. Border Patrol facility in Arizona, we discover the scant belongings of attempted immigrants who were apprehended in the desert, seized on their path towards “the American Dream.”
