In perpetually sunny Ajo, Ariz., about 40 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, Tom Kiefer keeps three photography studios in the town’s historic Spanish Colonial Revival plaza.
One studio is crammed with crates, drawers and tables that hold objects confiscated from migrants in the U.S. Border Patrol facility near Ajo. Kiefer photographs these objects to document how the U.S. government treats migrants who are detained after crossing the border.
He has become well-known for his project “El Sueño Americano / The American Dream”, which consists of about 800 photographs, yet he estimates that he has only captured around two percent of his collection.
“I could not in good conscience allow deeply personal belongings to be thrown away. I mean it was a crime against humanity, in a certain sense,” he said in an interview with the Tucson Sentinel.
Before coming to Arizona, Kiefer had a career as graphic designer and, later, as a successful antique shop owner in Los Angeles. Frustrated after 9/11, he moved to Ajo, a former copper mining town of less than 3,000 residents, in 2001.
He resolved to travel and photograph the United States in a humanistic but stark style inspired by Dorothea Langue and Walker Evans, both who documented the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s for the Farm Security Administration.
“Having the antique store grounded me in understanding the preciousness of objects that had a past history,” Kiefer said. “The graphic arts gave me a sense of how to compose things, how to present.”
In 2003, when his savings from selling the antique store ran low, he realized that the highest paying job available in Ajo was as a janitor at the nearby Border Patrol station.
Four years later, in 2007, he was horrified to find that belongings and food confiscated from migrants detained at the facility were being tossed in the trash, even if they possessed no safety risk.
With permission from his boss to take food to a local food bank, he started collecting the objects.
“Jeans, jackets, clothing, shoes. I would add first I started donating those to our Saint Vincent DePaul thrift store but then I realized, like, ‘Oh my God, I need to really have a record,’” he said. “I could talk and say all these things. But you know, they say without the receipts, who would believe me, and the receipts were the actual object.”
In 2014, he quit and began working on “El Sueño Americano / The American Dream.” It is particularly interesting in that the objects he has photographed were not discarded by migrants. They were instead what they most wanted to bring into their new life in the United States. His photography project has been exhibited around the country, including the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, Saugatuck Center for the Arts (Mich.), St. Louis University Museum of Art, and elsewhere.
“The majority of items that the migrants and asylum seekers carried with them were precious. These were the things that gave them hope,” he said. “Robbed and taken away and then thrown in the trash.”