Border Hacker

A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run

By: Levi Vonk

Narrated by: Levi Vonk, Axel Kirschner

An unlikely friendship, a four-thousand-mile voyage, and an impenetrable frontier—this dramatic odyssey reveals the chaos and cruelty US immigration policies have unleashed beyond our borders.

Axel Kirschner was a lifelong New Yorker, all Queens hustle and bravado. But he was also undocumented. After a minor traffic violation while driving his son to kindergarten, Axel was deported to Guatemala, a country he swore he had not lived in since he was a baby. While fighting his way back through Mexico on a migrant caravan, Axel met Levi Vonk, a young anthropologist and journalist from the US. That chance encounter would change both of their lives forever.

Levi soon discovered that Axel was no ordinary migrant. He was harboring a secret: Axel was a hacker. This secret would launch the two friends on a dangerous adventure far beyond what either of them could have imagined. While Axel’s abilities gave him an edge in a system that denied his existence, they would also ensnare him in a tangled underground network of human traffickers, corrupt priests, and anti-government guerillas eager to exploit his talents for their own ends. And along the way, Axel’s secret only raised more questions for Levi about his past. How had Axel learned to hack? What did he want? And was Axel really who he said he was?

Border Hacker is at once an adventure saga—the story of a man who would do anything to return to his family, and the friend who would do anything to help him—and a profound parable about the violence of American immigration policy told through a single, extraordinary life.

©2022 Levi Vonk (P)2022 Bold Type Books

Critic reviews

“If this book were a novel, you’d say it was too implausible: an unlikely friendship, a dangerous journey, an apparent benefactor who turns out to be the opposite. But it’s all true, and Levi Vonk brings this extraordinary story to life with verve and zest.” (Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost)

“Our twenty-first-century American hero is a deported DREAMer hacker, cruelly cast out from the only country he’s ever known into the lawless labyrinth of statelessness, surviving on bravado and genius skill, while forming the most improbable partnership with a young string-bean ‘cracker’ academic whose generosity and courage never fails - and whose initial naivete is honed on this journey into the knowing, thoughtful voice of the chronicler of this book. Border Hacker is by turns heartbreaking, terrifying, hilarious, enraging, and inspiring. To say it humanizes contentious issues is a profound understatement.” (Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy)

“Jack Kerouac, move over. In Border Hacker, Levi Vonk and Axel Kirschner’s unlikely friendship makes for the ultimate on-the-road buddy story. Suspenseful, intimate, and superbly told, Border Hacker is an amazing book, and as a tell-all account of the modern migrant experience, it kicks ass and takes no prisoners.” (Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che: A Revolutionary Life)

Who’s voice, whose narrative?

The Border Hacker is an important and timely book, but I won’t comment on that but on the audiobook itself. While there are many wonderful voice actors out there, it’s common to experience non-fiction narratives in a voice that’s removed from those telling the stories. Here, Levi & Axel’s narration of the audiobook adds a depth to the overall story and makes an important intervention in who actually can narrate the stories of migration, how truth takes on its audible form. Wonderful production and would highly recommend everyone listen to this.

I call bullshit! Mex city on $10/ day. Or even $7/day

I lived in Mex df 1977-1988.
Cheap comida corrida $30 pesos ea
Rent 2200 pesos Private room. Shared bath nice neighborhood

I don’t buy Axels $ problems.

Intense immersion into an incredible epic!

Border Hacker gripped me immediately with the Author’s Note preface. Fascinating insights. Once the story begins, I love this new genre of narrative nonfiction, how the authors’ two very different voices tell the larger-than-life tale in turns. Such impact. Axel is scrappy and streetwise, brilliant and denied. Levi is measured and academic, anguished and naive. Their meeting is cosmic, and hopefully, a catalyst for world change. Through Border Hacker we see what vulnerable people risk to migrate, and why, and the horrible, grueling experience of how. This enlightening, informative journey exposes not the migrants, but those who prey upon them. From backwater coyotes to religious figureheads, to indifferent bureaucrats in three countries, those in power are revealed to be agents of crime, corruption, or callous destruction. Again, and again, and again. There are thousands upon thousands of the unseen, struggling for a simple, safe existence. For humanity. This book gives them a voice.

The story is riveting, infuriating, gritty, hilarious, gut-wrenching - a surreal, epic search for humanity against all odds. An absolute must have.