Five Letters. Zero Accountability.

Tuesday morning. My neighbor's kitchen. She's hunched over her phone, tapping away at Wordle before her coffee's done brewing. Five letters. Six guesses. She does it every day like clockwork. And honestly? Good for her. We all need our rituals.

But here's what I can't shake: while 43 million Americans open that little green-and-yellow grid every morning, Border Patrol agents are pulling bodies out of the Rio Grande. While we agonize over whether the answer has a double vowel, ranchers in Kinney County are finding dead migrants on their land — sometimes dozens per month.

The Wordle craze isn't the problem. Human nature to play games is fine. The problem is that we've turned the border crisis into something equally abstract. A puzzle. A word problem. A political riddle that nobody's actually trying to solve.

What the Numbers Actually Say

In fiscal year 2023, Customs and Border Protection recorded over 2.4 million encounters at the southern border. That number is staggering enough on its own. But the ones that don't get counted are the ones I think about most — the gotaways, the bodies, the people who didn't make it to any official tally.

The Missing Migrants Project, which tracks deaths along global migration routes, documented at least 853 deaths along the US-Mexico border in 2022. That's the number they could confirm. The actual figure is higher. How much higher? Nobody knows, because the desert doesn't keep records.

Border Patrol agents will tell you the same thing off the record: they're overwhelmed, demoralized, and watching the crisis metastasize while Washington treats it like a talking point rather than a tragedy.

I spent two days at a processing facility in Arizona a couple of years ago, embedded with a group of reporters. The agent who walked us through — a fifteen-year veteran named Rodriguez — had the look of a man who'd stopped expecting anything from his superiors. "We're not law enforcement anymore," he said. "We're social workers without the training or the budget." He wasn't wrong. The paperwork alone consumed hours that should've been spent patrolling.

The Game We're Playing Instead

Here's the thing about Wordle: the answer eventually comes. You either get it or you don't, and then it's over. Five letters. Clean resolution. Tomorrow there's a new one.

Border policy doesn't work that way, but our political class has decided to treat it like it does. Every election cycle is a new game. New five-letter word. New guesses. New outrage. And when the session ends, the border is exactly where it was — or worse.

The Biden administration caught over 200,000 people crossing illegally in a single month — May 2023 — and the response from the Democratic side of the aisle was to argue about the framing. Not the fact. The framing.

This is what I mean when I say we've abstracted the crisis. Real people are dying real deaths in real desert heat, and Washington is playing word games about whether we call it a "crisis" or a "challenge."

The Only Answer That Matters

I don't have patience for the people who tell me border security is complicated. Of course it's complicated. Governing always is. But complicated doesn't mean impossible, and it doesn't excuse inaction.

The answer isn't a puzzle. It's a policy: enforce the laws already on the books, finish the wall where it's needed, return to the Remain in Mexico protocols that actually worked, and hold the cartel networks accountable through every legal and economic tool available.

None of those things require cracking a code. They require political will.

And that's the word nobody in Washington wants to guess: will. W-I-L-L. Five letters. Fits perfectly. Nobody playing.