Corinne Bancroft is a 20-year-old Tucson native studying at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. She spends her vacations volunteering with No More Deaths, a humanitarian group focusing on the U.S.-Mexican border.

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As a volunteer for No More Deaths, I walked down a canyon near the border that looks like the wash behind my parents' house. It has the same sand, sun and soul as the creeks on Mount Lemmon where my Pocahontas-self played and is similar to the "river" I ran along in high school.

Last February in this canyon, my friend found and recovered the body of 14-year-old, Joseline Hernandez Quintero.

When I was 14, I went camping for the first time in the Tumacacori Mountains barely miles from where she died. I hiked her canyon once at noon to leave water and supplies. In the middle of the day, our desert turns to hell; the sand burns through my boots, the sun sucks sweat from beneath my skin, and an emptied pack seems heavy.

In New York, I struggle to explain what it is like to live in Tucson — to see migrant deaths and militarization be commonplace, almost taken for granted.

I have a professor who keeps a garden. During the winter, she plans her plants the way we wait for monsoons. In the spring, she works in it and shows it off to guests the way I would the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. I wonder what she would do if law enforcement in Oneida County, N.Y., started using her garden as a corridor for poor workers. If her flowers turned to claws that catch people's clothes.

Homeland Security uses our desert as a death trap for people migrating. They've built a wall in border cities and are connecting it across the desert, funneling people toward the most isolated and dangerous places — natural deterrents.

If fences can barely keep 5-year-olds away from our pools, I do not see how walls could keep fathers and mothers from jobs that could potentially feed their children. As long as there is a market for cheap (and therefore illegal) labor, and as long as migrant workers cannot make ends meet in their homes, they will walk here to satisfy the economic law of supply and demand.

As long as U.S. citizens buy illegal drugs, desperate people will smuggle them.

If our government is serious about border security, they will redirect enforcement resources to improve the economies of Southern Mexico and Central America, thus eliminating the incentive for people to migrate.

A single death in my professor's garden would inspire her to act. Unlike me, she would do more than simply offer humanitarian aid. She would hold her government accountable for the use of her backyard and the people she finds in it.

We, the Tucson community, need to hold our government accountable for the human and environmental tragedy occurring in our backyard.