The Border Chronicle

Alix Dick arrived in the U.S. more than a decade ago, fleeing violence in Sinaloa, Mexico, that tore her family apart. But the impact of living without legal status in the United States has been almost as brutal as the violence she fled.In her new memoir, The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman's Reckoning with America's Inhumane Math, cowritten with Stanford University sociology professor Antero Garcia, Alix Dick tallies the costs—spiritual, mental, physical, and economic—of being undocumented in the United States, especially as the Trump administration escalates its cruelty and persecution of people living without legal status.Alix and Antero discuss how they decided to cowrite her memoir, why they chose to publish it now, and how Alix worries that she might be unable to promote it publicly because of Trump's harsh crackdown. She also explains why many immigrants supported Trump in the election. “I believe when a society is so desperate for answers and leadership, and they lack identity, they will follow whoever seems the strongest,” she said.The two also run a Substack called La Cuenta, which is one of our recommended Substacks at The Border Chronicle. La Cuenta, launched in 2022, highlights the experiences and perspectives of people living without documents in the United States. It's crucial reading for Americans, especially in this era. The Cost of Being Undocumented will be released June 17.Subscribe and support The Border Chronicle at theborderchronicle.com

In an in-depth interview for The Border Chronicle, Maria-Elena Giner reflects on her tenure since being ousted last week by the Trump administration as commissioner for one of the most critical federal agencies on the U.S.-Mexico border. The full conversation has been edited for length and clarity.The International Boundary and Water Commission is a binational agency responsible for managing and enforcing treaties between the U.S. and Mexico that manage water sharing, infrastructure, pollution and other transboundary issues.Last week, Maria-Elena Giner, the U.S. Commissioner for the IBWC abruptly posted a letter of resignation addressed to President Donald Trump. Giner told The Washington Post that the Trump administration had demanded her resignation that same day without reason.Giner's sudden departure came as a shock for many. In 2021, Giner was appointed to a severely underfunded agency with no long-term plan for investing in and maintaining vital infrastructure. In a few short years, Giner gained impressive momentum forging agreements with Mexico for water releases in Texas, and working on the creation of a binational wastewater treatment plant in California.ShareThe first Latina to be appointed as U.S. commissioner, and a fronteriza from Ciudad Juárez/El Paso, Giner relied on deep cross-border community building to broker these binational agreements. Many of her major projects were coming to fruition when she was ousted by the current administration.In this interview, Giner discusses the numerous infrastructure needs on the border. She also touches on binational water politics, and how the lower Rio Grande river basin, which was just designated as endangered, might be saved.Listen to more podcasts at theborderchronicle.com

The Trump administration has begun issuing contracts for border wall construction. During the first Trump administration, contractors dynamited mountains and depleted groundwater, including the Quitobaquito, a sacred spring for the Tohono O'odham tribal nation, to produce concrete for the wall. Under the Real ID Act, dozens of laws protecting the environment, endangered species, and clean air and water can be waived for the wall's construction. Trump's Department of Homeland Security has already begun filing waivers.Earlier this month, Erick Meza, borderlands coordinator for the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, discovered that one of the sections slated for the upcoming border wall is southern Arizona's San Rafael Valley, a critical wildlife corridor for endangered species, including jaguars. “It's an ecological catastrophe,” he said of the proposed construction in the grassland valley. Meza spends much of his time traveling the borderlands documenting wildlife and the impacts of the border wall on an ecosystem under extreme stress from climate change and militarization.ShareIn this podcast, Meza discusses the proposed wall construction and its impact on the San Rafael Valley, as well as other areas where the wall is slated to be built. He also shares what biologists and conservationists are learning about the effects on wildlife and the environment from previous wall construction, and how this knowledge will inform their work in the future.What You Can DoSign a Sierra Club petition against the building of border wall in Arizona's San Rafael Valley. Sign here.Contact your congressional leaders and express your opposition to further border wall construction. Contact them here.Read and listen to more stories about the U.S.-Mexico border at theborderchronicle.com

In a lively conversation, The Border Chronicle founders grapple with the last three months of militarization and surveillance, and ponder what's to come.What is happening on the border three months into the Trump administration? Well, you've come to the right place. Here, Border Chroniclefounders Melissa and Todd spend the hour discussing just that.Among the topics covered are Stryker armored vehicles deployed in El Paso, including one conducting surveillance from a garbage dump; DHS secretary Kristi Noem recounting an epiphany about a Target store by Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele (this epiphany helps Bukele justify the 40,000-person capacity “terrorist” prison accepting U.S. deportees); the chilling surveillance tower known as the Torre Centinela looming over Ciudad Juárez; a DOD spokesperson telling Melissa that “you know more than we know”; and Todd sharing the story of how he got kicked out of the Border Security Expo 10 years ago (yes, there is some good old-fashioned humor as well).Militarization, surveillance, privatization, water, and climate change are all addressed as The Border Chronicle attempts to grapple with what has happened, what is happening, and what's to come.And since there is so much to discuss, we'd love to hear your perspectives about the last 100 days. Please feel free to comment below. What are your thoughts and opinions? Border residents, what have you seen? Anything of note? Please don't be shy about adding to our conversation. Also, here's a few of Melissa's favorite signs from the “Hands Off” protest in Tucson last week as mentioned in the podcast.The building in the distance is the Torre Centinela under construction in Ciudad Juárez. Photo taken from the El Paso side in late March. (Photo by Todd Miller).

On March 12, Todd and Melissa were thrilled to moderate a panel with the distinguished authors: Luis Alberto Urrea and Gary Nabhan. Urrea has written several novels, including The Hummingbird's Daughter and Queen of America (about his great-aunt Teresita Urrea, known as the Saint of Cabora), as well as the Pulitzer Prize–nominated nonfiction book The Devil's Highway. Nabhan, an ethnobotanist, agricultural ecologist, and Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, is one of the premier writers about the desert borderlands. He spoke about his latest book, Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance.Both Urrea and Nabhan offered fascinating insights into their writing and research, and the long history of cultural resistance in the borderlands. Their talk was followed by a Q&A with the audience.The event was part of the “Peek Behind the Curtain” borderlands speaking series created by Voices from the Border and Sierra Club Borderlands which The Border Chronicle has moderated since 2022. At the beginning of this podcast, you'll hear Maggie Urgo with Voices from the Border making a case to the audience for supporting The Border Chronicle and local border journalism. This event was also a fundraiser for the Patagonia-based nonprofits Voices from the Border and the Patagonia Creative Arts Center.

David Bier, director of immigration studies for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, goes in depth on what really happened to the U.S. immigration system during President Trump's first administration and President Biden's administration. In his January testimony before Congress, Bier noted that more than 30 times the courts found that Trump was enacting immigration policies illegally and noted that the “assault on the rule of law was so relentless that many changes were not stopped.” Biden led the immigration system out of an “unprecedented calamity,” Bier said, but often moved too slowly and with lack of focus on reforms. And despite being labeled “Biden open borders” by Trump and his MAGA allies, Biden vastly expanded deportations and border-detention capacity, said Bier, illustrating that the detention and deportation system is a bipartisan project that Trump is now transforming into a massive deportation machine.Bier, a former senior policy adviser for a Republican congressional member, also talks about what it's like in Congress right now, and how the unfettered push to build Trump's mass deportation machine will lead to unbridled corruption. “Republicans still think this [mass deportations] is a winning issue and that they should lean into the messaging about an invasion … And Democrats are running from this issue still. … It's incredible how Democrats have shrunk from this moment,” Bier said.

One of the nation's top immigration scholars cuts through the crap and lays bare this moment of border and immigration control, how we got here, and where we're headed.With Donald Trump, one thing has been constant since he announced his first campaign in 2016: the narrative that migrants are criminals. He says it with confidence and bluster, and he says it every day. But he goes beyond this, according to migration scholar César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández. Not only are migrants criminals, they are an “existential threat”—a threat to the fabric of life, to the entire country, to the very existence of the nation-state. What better way is there to justify and rev up an enforcement regime that could round up and expel millions of people?According to García Hernández, however, Trump's narrative didn't appear out of thin air. “Trump is at the extreme edge of a decades-long campaign by elected officials, by intellectuals, by pundits to embrace this notion of migrant criminality, of dangerousness,” he says. Associating migrants with criminality or other unsavory traits, indeed, has been a longtime U.S. pastime. Look at Ronald Reagan, García Hernández points out, who called Central American migrants (many from Nicaragua) the “leading edge of the Soviet invasion.” Or George H. W. Bush, who described Haitians as “contagions.” Or Bill Clinton and his allies “going on and on about super predators,” and, subsequently, “the idea that young people coming from Latin America specifically … [will] engage in criminal activity.”Perhaps there is no better person to assess the moment we are in than García Hernández, whose book Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the Criminal Alien (New Press, 2024), is a deep dive into, and rebuttal to, this narrative that Trump has come to master. His previous book, Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants (New Press, 2019), also masterfully deals with issues of utmost importance to this moment. As does his first book, Crimmigration Law (ABA, 2015). García Hernández is the Gregory H. Williams chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.In the podcast, García Hernández not only assesses Trump's foundations but also examines the first three weeks of his new term in office. He also speculates on where we might be headed, including what resistance there might be.

In 2021 Texas governor Greg Abbott created Operation Lone Star, a state-funded system for immigration enforcement and detention. At a cost of more than $11 billion, the system has deployed thousands of National Guard soldiers and state police to the Texas-Mexico border. These deployments have become the backdrop for the MAGA movement's “invasion” messaging, and they helped Trump regain the White House. Now Trump is saying he will make Operation Lone Star a model for his national immigration policy. Texas-based civil rights advocate Bob Libal, an U.S. consultant for the international nonprofit Human Rights Watch, has been monitoring Operation Lone Star since it began. In this podcast, Libal explains in depth what Operation Lone Star is and its many impacts on Texas and its border communities. “Every aspect of this program is utilized for maximum publicity and to gin up anti-immigrant sentiment that is increasingly radical,” Libal says. He also talks about the incredible resiliency of border communities and how they have fought back against the threats to their civil and human rights. “I think the rest of the country can learn from Texas border communities,” Libal says. Listen to more podcasts at theborderchronicle.com

If you want to know about what's to come on the border—what to expect, how it got to this point, and ways to fight back—put everything down right now and give this a listen. Well, here we are at the beginning of 2025, and it's time to continue preparing ourselves for what's to come (I hope you all saw Melissa's Tuesday report on the Border Chronicle Forecast for 2025). As we know, 2025 has all the makings of a historic year, with a new president taking office and many threats already on the horizon. Luckily, we have with us border expert Erika Pinheiro to break it all down. You probably remember that exactly one year ago Pinheiro—who is the director of the organization Al Otro Lado, which provides legal assistance and humanitarian aid in the borderlands—joined us to do the exact same thing. Then, she warned us that the narrative of “overwhelm” and “border chaos” would dominate the election year. And now she joins us again (actually her third time; her first in 2022 was on the impact of surveillance). This time, she's bringing an on-the-ground and insightful analysis about the first year of Trump and an assessment of Joe Biden's last years in office. We discuss the exiting president's border legacy, Trump's plans for mass deportation, and the invasion narrative, which has invaded political and media discourse. Pinheiro makes the point that, far from the “open borders” narrative that droned on for four long years, “the Biden administration really teed up with infrastructure and a set of policies that will make the second Trump administration exponentially worse than the first.” She also talks about the potential for opposition, and its possible pitfalls, and she offers suggestions on how people can respond. In other words, Pinheiro offers a perspective simply not found anywhere else.

On Sunday, The Washington Post, El Universal in Mexico, and Lighthouse Reports published “Death and Deterrence in the Rio Grande,” a yearlong investigation on drowning deaths of asylum seekers. As the U.S.-Mexico investigations editor for Lighthouse Reports, I helped collect the data, did reporting, and coordinated the binational investigation. We wanted to examine how border militarization, including Texas' Operation Lone Star, contributes to the growing number of drowning deaths in the Rio Grande/Río Bravo. As a longtime border reporter, I had never encountered a comprehensive, binational investigation of this issue, so a year ago, we set out to document what was happening, especially in the Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras corridor on the Rio Grande, which has seen the highest number of drownings. The investigation began November 15, 2023, when I and my colleagues Daniel Howden, director at Lighthouse Reports, and Justin Hamel, an independent photojournalist, set out from the boat ramp at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass. Leading us down the river was Jessie Fuentes, owner of Epi's Canoes and Kayaks. We set out at sunrise as fog drifted across the river, lending it a ghostly, ethereal ambience. But we were soon met with a cold, hard reality: desperate families stranded on islands in the middle of the river. We came across a family of four, the father with a toddler on his shoulders, standing in the freezing water. Soldiers in Texas yelled at them to go back to Mexico. During our investigation, we found that in 2023, one out of every 10 people who died in the river was a child. Our trip down the river was a heartrending experience, one I'll never forget. In this special Backlight & Border Chronicle podcast, I discuss our investigation's findings with my Lighthouse colleagues Beatriz Ramahlo da Silva and Tessa Pang. And please check out the full investigation published by our media partners The Washington Post and El Universal. You can also read about how we undertook the lengthy data collection and analysis for this project at Lighthouse Reports. Support our work and local border journalism at theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

In an episode that you've surely been waiting for, Melissa and Todd discuss what Trump's election might mean for the border. This includes addressing the question, What is a “border czar”? The Donald Trump campaign seemed to know, spending the last several months claiming (falsely) that Kamala Harris had held this somewhat imaginary position under Joe Biden. And, then, after the election, it took Trump only a few days to appoint his own border czar, former ICE commissioner Thomas Homan, who might be the first such czar since Alan Bersin in the late 1990s. Melissa talks about Homan's background and his central role in a border disinformation network—known as Border911—that profits off the migrant “invasion” narrative. She even coins a new term: the MAGA ego system. This is but one point of many discussed in this podcast episode. Melissa and Todd talk about Trump's mass-deportation promise and the Democrats' uninspiring ironfisted campaign on the border. Todd talks about what it was like to cover Election Day from the Mexican side of the border. And Melissa analyzes the election results in Arizona. As always, there is a bit of a media critique and a recommendation on where to look for hope and solutions: the border communities themselves. Please feel free to use the comment section as a discussion forum for any of your own concerns, thoughts, or observations about the election and what's to come. We appreciate the collective knowledge and wisdom of our subscribers. Also, we wanted to let you know that we will be pausing for a week for the Thanksgiving holiday. We are grateful to have you here with us. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

As the late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano put it in his book Upside Down: A Primer for a Looking Glass World, the terminology used in mainstream political discourse often describes precisely the opposite of reality. Cut-throat capitalism is free trade. Violence is law and order. Extraction of natural wealth from communities is increasing revenue. So where does “border security” fit in to this? Part of the answer is that borders do not produce security but subordination. This point has been made for two decades now by sociologist Nandita Sharma (see the essay “Why No Borders?,” which she cowrote with Bridget Anderson and Cynthia Wright). The point of borders is not to keep people out but to keep them in line. Borders are foundational to a global system fraught with injustice. The struggle for no borders, Sharma explains, is a practical political project. Sharma is the author of two books, Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of “Migrant Workers” in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020). She teaches at the University of Hawai‘i. During our conversation, I wondered aloud whether “no borders” is still a practical political project, now that Donald Trump will take office for a second term. She responded without hesitation, “It's not only a viable step, it's the only step.” As we concluded, we discussed the provocative quote from Italian thinker, philosopher, and Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying. The new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Those monsters are easy to identify with the incoming Trump administration and the nation-state it represents, along with increasing climate catastrophe. “This is the moment of solidarity,” Sharma said. “This is the moment for mutual support.” Indeed, she hinted, the moment has arrived to not only imagine but also to work for another possible world. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

It's democracy vs. fascism in the most consequential election of our lifetime. We talk about its implications for border communities. Also, Todd talks about his latest reporting from Mexico, where migrants are continually being sent back to the country's southern border, creating a cycle of futility and suffering. Melissa recalls reporting on Trump's Operation Faithful Patriot, in which Trump set up military camps at the U.S. southern border before the 2018 midterm election. He also used special Border Patrol teams to kidnap protesters in Portland, Oregon. If he's elected, it will be much worse this time. We also discuss Kamala Harris's tough stance on border security and the bipartisan bill rejected by Trump, and the broader implications of this for human rights and migration. And we get into misconceptions about “open borders,” and we talk about the role of “robodogs” and other technology in border enforcement. And much more. Give it a listen and leave a comment. How are you feeling leading up to November 5? Leave a comment Also, during the podcast, neither Todd nor Melissa could remember the name of a great book on immigration policy under the Trump administration  (it's been that kind of a month): it's Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration, by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear. It's chock-full of details about what went down inside the administration during that chaotic era. And here's a post featuring the infamous robodogs from March, when Todd crashed the annual Border Security expo in El Paso, Texas, even though the expo banned journalists. And one last thing—don't forget to vote. Our democracy depends on it! Read and listen to more at theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

On September 7, we had the honor of leading a discussion with Celia Concannon and Gustavo Lozano, two longtime residents and educators from ambos Nogales, who have spent years teaching music and theater in local schools. We then had a Q&A with audience members, which you'll hear at the end. The event was held downtown in Nogales, Arizona, on Morley Avenue, at the beautiful Wittner Museum, which is brimming with amazing, whimsical paintings by Paula Wittner, who lives in nearby Patagonia. The event kicked off an exciting new oral history project called “The Border Before,” which aims to elevate the voices and perspectives of border residents and examine how politics, migration, and border security policies have affected border communities in the last two decades. “The Border Before” is the brainchild of the nonprofit organization Voices from the Border, with the help of the Sierra Club, The Patagonia Museum, La Linea art studio, the Pimeria Alta Museum, and We Love Nogales. A very special thanks to Maggie Urgo, India Aubry, Evan Kory, and others for organizing this event. Read or listen to more of our work at https://www.theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Immigrant detention has doubled during Biden, which now wants to expand it more. But not if rights groups can help it, explains the senior policy analyst for the National Immigrant Justice Center. Since Joe Biden's inauguration in January 2021, there have been alarming trends in detentions and deportations undertaken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC). For instance, the daily number of people detained has gone up 140 percent. Now there are 37,000 people locked up every day, up from 15,000 in 2021. And 90 percent of those people have been held in detention centers operated by private, for-profit companies in more than 190 prisons across the United States (a number that went up considerably during the Trump years). According to the Snapshot of ICE Detention: Inhumane Conditions and Alarming Expansion, an NIJC briefing released last week, these facilities are notoriously abusive. Since 2021, 23 people have died in ICE custody, and there has been a 50 percent increase in solitary confinement. Now the Biden administration has requested proposals from private industry to further increase detention space. This is why today The Border Chronicle is talking with the NIJC's senior policy analyst, Jesse Franzblau. He conducts investigative research on rights abuses in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for the organization's Transparency and Human Rights Project. Franzblau and the NIJC were part of a large coalition of rights organizations, accompanied by past detainees, who converged on Washington on September 23 for a national day of action and advocacy. The coalition called for the Biden administration to halt its plans to open new detention prisons and expand deportations, to close down detention centers known for rampant abuse, and to release incarcerated people and allow them to navigate their cases outside the prison walls. Franzblau talks about all this, and much more, on today's podcast. He said the immigration detention and deportation apparatus “hasn't always been this way. It was in the '80s when it started to take shape during the Reagan administration, then during the '90s it grew even further, and it grew directly parallel to the growth of the mass-incarceration system.” And now federal funding for ICE detention is five times what it was two decades ago. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

For several years, author and journalist Jessica Pishko has investigated the power of right-wing sheriffs and their impact on democracy, elections, and border and immigration policy. Her new book, out this month, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, is a must-read, especially during our most consequential presidential election in generations. In this podcast, Pishko talks about her new book, the right-wing constitutional sheriff's movement, and how it was founded. And she talks about why this is important to border communities: because sheriffs in this movement have embraced far-right militia groups, white nationalists, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in his plans for mass deportations if he is elected. You can also read more of Pishko's work at her excellent Substack, Posse Comitatus. Listen to more at https://www.theborderchronicle.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Tohono O'odham Mike Wilson's story gives us a compelling, personal, and geopolitical glimpse into the borderlands across a history of militarization, resistance, and transformation. How does one go from a U.S. Special Forces Green Beret in El Salvador to doing humanitarian aid work on the border? This is where Tohono O'odham Mike Wilson begins this podcast conversation, with a profound and personal story of transformation. It happened at the height of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in 1989, when Wilson accepted an invitation to eat dinner at a family's house in Sosonate, where he was stationed. At first Wilson took this as part of a military tactic to win the hearts and minds of the local population. But little did he know that it was his heart and mind that would be changed. In this conversation, Wilson is joined by University of Washington political scientist José Antonio Lucero, a native of El Paso and chair of the UW's Comparative History of Ideas Department. Lucero is the coauthor of their compelling and extraordinary new book What Side Are You On? A Tohono O'odham Life Across Borders. We conduct this audio interview in the same style of the book, with Wilson talking about his life story and the portrait it paints of the borderlands, and Lucero framing it in a broader geopolitical and historical context. There is much to cover, since Wilson's story starts with growing up indigenous in the segregated mining town of Ajo, Arizona in the mid-20th century, to the grave consequences of U.S. foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s, to the militarization of the border in the 1990s and 2000s, and finally to the humanitarian aid work that he still does to this day. We talk about all this, with the added bonus of hearing their thoughts on the U.S. elections and what it means for the borderlands. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Luis Chaparro is a longtime border journalist from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. He specializes in reporting on criminal organizations, corruption, and binational affairs. He's written for many publications in Mexico and the United States. And he's one of the only journalists in the borderlands who consistently reports on and analyzes organized crime in Mexico. In July, I immediately went to Chaparro's Substack newsletter, Saga, when the big news hit that Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and a son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, notorious leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, had touched down at a small airport in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, under the custody of U.S. law enforcement. In this podcast, Chaparro and I discuss not only the El Mayo story, with its many twists and turns, but also how the notion of a “drug cartel” has become old fashioned, since these are now massive, multinational criminal enterprises, controlling markets for everything from avocados to water. We also talk about the dangers faced by reporters in Mexico, especially those who try to document the corruption of politicians and businesses who participate in criminal organizations. And Chaparro talks about the incoming Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and compares her stance on the DEA and its “kingpin strategy” in Mexico, in comparison to policies of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The latter has an extremely frosty relationship with the agency, which investigated whether he received drug money during his 2006 presidential campaign. You can read and listen to more news from the U.S.-Mexico border at theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Take a ride on the electoral rollercoaster--and how it impacts the border and U.S.-Mexico relations--with one of the most insightful historians out there. It's been a while, Border Chronicle readers and listeners. Since we took our annual July break, the U.S. political landscape has shifted considerably. At least partly because of this, we will take a ride here with historian Alexander Aviña through the electoral landscape, not only the forthcoming U.S. elections post-Trump assassination attempt and Kamala Harris candidacy, but the historic election of Claudia Sheinbaum in June, Mexico's first female president and a climate scientist to boot. Aviña is a professor at Arizona State University, where he specializes in Mexico's social and political history. His current research focuses on the political economy of drug wars and state violence in Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. And he has written a book titled Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford University Press, 2014). In the conversation, we hit on a lot of points, on Kamala Harris's positions, particularly on the border, the root causes of migration, and what they are (including, in Aviña's analysis, the historic context of U.S. military and economic violence, especially in Central America). And we talk about what will happen in Mexico under a Sheinbaum administration, Andrés Manuel López Obrador's mixed record, especially on border and immigration enforcement, and what this means going forward for the relationship between the United States and Mexico. And finally, Aviña tells us where he finds optimism: in the transborder communities of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The hope is to find alternatives to what Aviña calls the Children of Men scenario, referring to the 2006 film that imagines a dystopic future broiled in climate change, refugees, and intense border surveillance (among other things). You'll have to listen to see what Aviña means by this, but maybe these alternatives won't be found in the White House or Los Pinos. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

In her classic utopian science fiction novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.” Author Silky Shah has framed an entire book around that quote, and Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition couldn't have come at a better time. As the narratives about border and immigration continue to deteriorate with the election rhetoric, the longtime director of the Detention Watch Network talks withThe Border Chronicle about defying this inhumane status quo. Read or listen to more news from the border at theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

In June, President Biden issued an executive order restricting asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. The new restriction was supported by many prominent newspaper columnists—few of whom offered alternative solutions or examined the order's impact on human rights, says Adam Isacson, a longtime expert on Latin America and U.S. immigration policy. “The Biden administration made a choice to restrict asylum at the border,” he says, “instead of adding asylum judges and officers to fix the asylum system.” In this podcast, we discuss solutions to fix the asylum system, and Isacson shares insights from a recent trip to Colombia and the impact that organized crime has on migration routes, including the Darién Gap. We also talk about migration at the border as extreme summer temperatures take hold. Read or listen to more independent reporting from the U.S.-Mexico border at https://www.theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

If you want to learn about border technology, listen to this conversation about a new book on surviving migration in the age of artificial intelligence. Last week I attended the 17th annual Border Security Expo in El Paso, Texas, which focused on border enforcement technology. I mention this because I can't think of a better person to talk to about this than anthropologist and lawyer Petra Molnar, whose new book, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, is hot off the presses. I've been awaiting this book for years, and I was fortunate enough to interview Molnar for this podcast while she was in Tucson for a book event. It is essential to know about border technology and its evolution, and how it affects people crossing borders and people living in borderlands around the world. Molnar, on the leading edge of reporting and analysis on this issue, helps us understand how border tech connects to larger political and economic power structures, and how it is not a humane alternative to a wall. She splits her time across the hemispheres, in North America and Europe, which brings a global perspective to the book, and underscores the omnipresence of surveillance. And this is not Molnar's first appearance at The Border Chronicle, check out her article on robotic dogs from 2022. You should also see her work at the Migration Tech Monitor and the Refugee Law Lab. After we recorded the podcast, we took a trip to the border in Nogales. Lengthwise across the bollards was a narrow metal track that looked exactly like the encasement for a sensor system that I saw displayed by a company at the Border Security Expo. It was the first time I had seen this addition to the wall. Indeed, the walls do have eyes. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

It's tough enough to get Americans to realize that if Donald Trump wins in November, it would most likely mean the end of representative democracy in the United States. Even tougher, however, is to make Americans aware that even if Trump doesn't win, many authoritarian policy changes are already being rolled out in states like Texas and Alabama. So says Heidi Beirich, an expert on far-right movements in the United States and Europe. Leading the charge, Beirich says, is the Heritage Foundation, a longtime conservative think tank that has steered to the extreme right in recent years. In April 2022, the foundation and a coalition of think tanks and organizations released a 900-plus page blueprint, called Project 2025, for radically restructuring the U.S. government by integrating it with Christian nationalism. Beirich, cofounder of the Global Project against Hate and Extremism, discusses Project 2025 and the Far Right's efforts to convert the United States into an authoritarian, Christian nationalist country. Beirich also discusses how the antidemocratic movement in the United States mirrors other movements globally, which are on the rise and target immigrants, people of color, women, and LGBTQ communities. “We are very close to losing our system of government,” she warns. For more from the U.S.-Mexico border, read or listen to The Border Chronicle. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

A defining issue of this century will be people on the move and where they settle. Wealthier countries like the U.S. are responding by walling themselves off from the rest of the world and investing in deterrence and detention, which only contributes to more deaths and misery while providing no long-term solutions. There must be a better way. This was John Washington's thought as he launched his latest book project, The Case for Open Borders, which takes a deep dive into more humane responses to global migration and examines the history of borders and nation-states, which are relatively recent in human history. Washington, based in Tucson, Arizona, is a longtime border journalist and staffer at the nonprofit journalism outlet AZ Luminaria. He is also the author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Beyond. When it comes to border and migration policies, Washington notes, “People are hungry for ideas on what we could push for—other than a defensive posture. … But what do we want? How do we have a more just and open world?” Check out The Border Chronicle for more podcasts and articles about the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Water, climate change, and the right-wing disinformation ecosystem...The Border Chronicle founders discuss what should be on everyone's radar when we talk about the borderlands this presidential election season. Read or listen to more of The Border Chronicle at www.theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Join us for an illuminating conversation about borders, belonging, myths, and oracles. She warns, “What we have created is a ruinous map for a ruinous future.” I was so happy to get a chance to talk with writer, author, and journalist Lauren Markham about her insightful and page-turning new book A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. In this conversation we take a journey through the layers of this book starting with a deadly 2020 fire at the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos in Greece, we talk about borders and bordering throughout the world, maps, getting lost (both psychically and physically, as Lauren puts it), mythology and confronting myths, the layers of history both personal and global, journalism, and, sweetly, how oracles can be medicine. As Lauren told me in the interview, “What we have created is a ruinous map for a ruinous future.” Please read A Map of Future Ruins, you won't regret it. Lauren Markham has also written the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Her writing and journalism can be found in many places including The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New York Times Magazine. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

In January, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity confirmed an exciting discovery near the Arizona-Mexico border: the first sighting of a jaguar never previously identified in Arizona. Russ McSpadden, a Southwest conservation advocate at the center, has been tracking the jaguar population in the borderlands for several years. The rare and elusive creatures once lived throughout the American Southwest. But they've nearly disappeared over the past 150 years due to habitat loss and government programs to protect the livestock industry. For decades, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity has worked to protect jaguars, successfully lobbying for them to be listed in 1997 as an endangered species. And in December 2022 the center petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to reintroduce jaguars to New Mexico and designate more critical habitat in New Mexico and Arizona. In this Border Chronicle podcast, McSpadden discusses this exciting new discovery and the work that the center and others are doing to bring back the endangered jaguar population in the United States. Read and listen to more stories about the borderlands at www.theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

As widespread election border theater kicks in, the director of the Surveillance Resistance Lab talks about smart borders, border externalization, “identity dominance,” and what can be done about it. Well, this week has been a doozy on the U.S.-Mexico border. There is the continued Texas standoff between the federal government and Operation Lonestar; the “Take Back the Border” convoy (also known as “God's army”)and their political backers annoying and intimidating border communities such as in Eagle Pass; the failed impeachment of Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; and a shot-down so-called border bill, to name a few things. If you were wondering if border theater was going to kick in to overdrive this election year, you were correct. Border theater's problem, of course, is that it tends to be myopic, based on distorted narratives, and ahistorical. So often the result of this theater is a reductive conversation in the media: While some aspects of the border receive hyper attention, others—such as the massive border surveillance apparatus and its corporate sponsors—do not. Luckily, today we are joined by the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Resistance Lab, Mizue Aizeki, to help us see the bigger picture. The Surveillance Resistance Lab is a think and act tank that builds research, strategy, campaigns, and networks of collaboration to scale up people's ability to take on the threat of surveillance. Mizue is also coeditor of the book Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (out this month from Haymarket Books), as well as coauthor of many reports, such as The Everywhere Border: Digital Migration Control Infrastructure in the Americasand Smart Borders or a Humane World? Mizue mentions all these works in our conversation—as we look at the border, its digitization, its externalization and expansion, and omnipresence in an election year that by all indications will put the border front and center. Throughout the conversation, Mizue flips the border theater narratives on their head. She asks, “What if we acknowledge that borders are a form of state violence that enforce global inequality and unequal access to life? … What if the rules people are being asked to follow are fundamentally unjust, exclusionary, and punitive? … Just like most reasonable people wouldn't see Jim Crow or apartheid as neutral legal regimes, we have to start seeing the U.S. immigration regime in the same way.” --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

How did right-wing media hijack the narrative around the U.S.-Mexico border? You've probably heard the terms “military age men,” “invasion,” and “Biden's open borders” bandied about in the media and among congressional leaders. These deliberately dehumanizing terms have shaped the way Americans view the U.S.-Mexico border as the 2024 election season unfolds. In his research, AJ Bauer focuses on right-wing media and conservative movements in the United States. We talk about mutual aid movements in New York and Chicago and the trajectory of right-wing media from fringe to mainstream and its domination by the MAGA movement. Read and listen to more at theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Al Otro Lado's executive director discusses what's to come this election year: more of the CBP One app and open-air border prisons, along with a hyper-distorted fearmongering narrative of overwhelm. So, dear listeners, it is time to continue preparing ourselves for 2024 (check out Melissa's Tuesday piece). As we know, during an election year the border tends to be a place where distorted narratives flourish on the fertile ground of misinformation, and we can expect plenty of that this year, as border expert Erika Pinheiro tells us in this episode. Some of you certainly remember Erika's first appearance on The Border Chronicle podcast in 2022, where she offered her insight on the chilling impacts of surveillance. She is the executive director of Al Otro Lado, an organization that provides legal and humanitarian assistance to refugees, migrants, and deportees. In this interview, she offers an on-the-ground perspective from the California-Mexico border, assessing both 2023 border trends while pondering and prophesizing about what we might expect in 2024. Erika stresses that we have to look at “how the border is being framed,” which lately has been “this narrative of border chaos and overwhelm.” This narrative comes, she says, while enforcement agencies have more resources than ever before and while fewer people crossed the border in 2023. Yet “this narrative of overwhelm is not challenged by the media by and large.” She wants that to change, as you'll see here, and offers specific examples of what we can do. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

It's been almost a year since the U.S. government rolled out the CBPOne app, which was meant to reduce the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. But a historic number of people continue to arrive. In Lukeville, Arizona, people from all over the world line up to be processed by Border Patrol with the aim of applying for asylum, while in Matamoros, Mexico, migrants wait for months in camps with no running water or toilets for an appointment on CBPOne. And in Tijuana, and other border cities, wait lists grow for vulnerable migrants, just as they did for Title 42 exemptions. “I've never seen it so complex as it is now,” says Caitlyn Yates, a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of British Columbia, who released a new report, along with fellow migration expert Stephanie Leutert, giving us a snapshot of the increasingly complicated puzzle that is asylum policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. Give a gift subscription Yates joins us from Panama, where she studies the migration flow through the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous migratory crossings in the world. This year, the jungle crossing will have seen a historic number of migrants, she says, most of whom are on their way to the U.S.-Mexico border. Read more at theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

The co-founder of the Sidewalk School, which provides services to asylum seeking families in Mexico's migrant camps, talks about racism and Black migration, border disinformation, and how governments could alleviate suffering at the border. Check out more local border journalism at theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

“It's not difficult to understand that a population that makes its livelihood off the land would find climate change oppressive, and would find climate change to be tantamount to persecution.” All signs indicate that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, yet again. If this sounds like something you've heard before, it is. Every year it seems like records are set, broken, and then broken again in cities, states, countries, and regions across the world. The heat, droughts, floods, and storms are putting pressure on people and their livelihoods, primarily in the Global South. As founder and executive director of the organization Climate Refugees, Amali Tower explains in this podcast, these climate disruptions are causing more and more displacement in the world, and each year the number of displaced people increases by the millions. Border Chronicle readers should recognize Amali's name: this is not only her second podcast (please check out the first one here), she also wrote a piece for us one year ago titled “Finding a Solution to Climate Displacement: Time to Divert Border Enforcement Billions into Loss and Damage Finance”. In this conversation, as we approach the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference in the United Arab Emirates (that begins on November 30), Amali offers a provocative reframing of climate change and its impact on people. Climate change, she says, is a form of oppression for the majority of the world. By placing climate as an equivalent to persecution (similar to political, economic, or racial persecution), she challenges prevalent Global North narratives and offers new ways to view, think about, and tackle climate and displacement in the world. She asks listeners to consider this following question when thinking about people on the move: “How has the situation risen to such an oppressive level that I have absolutely no recourse but to leave my home country?” And, finally, Amali insists that it is the people with these lived experiences who should be leading the important climate conversations.  Listen to this podcast and you might not think about climate and migration in the same way again.   --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Muzzafar Chishti, a lawyer, is a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and director of MPI's office at New York University School of Law. He specializes in immigration policy and has spent years researching and writing about the United States' outdated asylum system, which he says is “built on a 1952 architecture.” Chishti discusses how the system could be meaningfully changed, including how Congress could make it both more humane and responsive to the country's needs. Check out more of our border journalism at The Border Chronicle. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

The legendary storyteller takes us on a trip through the Arizona borderlands, its sky islands, flora and fauna, all the way to the border wall with Mexico. “The borderlands are beautiful.” That's how Petey Mesquitey always ends his weekly show Growing Native on the Tucson community radio station KXCI. And that was my first question to Petey in this interview: Why are the borderlands beautiful? What follows is the legendary storyteller's observations from more than 30 years of living in the rural borderlands, what it's like to walk every morning through diverse biomes, what it's like to see a bear, a coatimundi, or a box turtle; what it's like to experience a forest of saguaros or a forest of oak trees. In other words, a description of the borderlands that is much different from what we usually get, with sparse adjectives like dusty and desolate. Petey is an expert storyteller who lets the words tumble out of his mouth in all directions—a chaotic, coherent, sweet, and joyful poetry—and this interview is no different. It was a joy, as it has been for decades, to hear his descriptions and see with fresh eyes what a unique and beautiful place the borderlands is. He also talks about all the changes that he's seen in his time here. “When I moved here,” he says, “I had a friend who had a ranch on the other side of the San Bernardino in Mexico. We just jumped back and forth through the barbed-wire fence—to go in and out, in and out—to look at plants. Wait, there's a plant on the other side of the border, but it's in Mexico. It would just crack you up. It's so sweet. I'm in Mexico. I'm going back and forth. And, you know, there's always the history—of course, workers came through. People expected them to come through. I don't know how it all went to hell. And became such dreadful, angry, hateful thing.” On a side note, I am moving (within Tucson) and somehow lost my recorder. I apologize if the sound is off at all. I think it still sounds pretty good, especially because of the magic of our audio editor. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Recorded at the Tin Shed Theater with the wonderful people of Patagonia, Arizona, we talk about Taylor's fascinating career as an educator and artist who challenges our perceptions of borders. David Taylor is a visual artist who works with drone footage, photography, and other art forms to question our sense of place, territory, history, and politics. His artwork challenges how we see the increasingly militarized zone that divides the United States and Mexico. His work is provocative, playful, and harrowing all at once. Taylor, who is also a professor in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, joined Melissa and Todd from The Border Chronicle for a fascinating conversation and Q&A with the audience in August at Patagonia's Tin Shed Theater. Among many things, Taylor talked about his work Complex, which looks at massive immigrant detention facilities from a drone's eye view. He also discussed DeLIMITations, a work in which he embarked on a cross-country journey with Mexican artist Marcos Ramirez ERRE placing steel obelisks along the U.S.-Mexico boundary as it existed in the early 19th century, ranging from Brookings, Oregon, to the mouth of the Sabine River near Port Arthur, Texas. The Border Chronicle wishes to thank Voices from the Border, Sierra Club Borderlands, Hilltop Gallery, and La Linea Art Studio for sponsoring this talk, and a very special thanks to Maggie Urgo and India Aubry for their organizing efforts. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Roberto Lopez, born and raised in South Texas's Rio Grande Valley, leads the Texas Civil Rights Project's Beyond Borders Program, which works to defend the civil and human rights of border communities and of the people migrating through the borderlands. Inspired by the United Farm Workers movement, the nonprofit Texas Civil Rights Project was founded in 1990. It has taken a strong stand against the illegality of Texas's Operation Lone Star. Beginning in March 2021, Operation Lone Star sanctioned the deployment of National Guard and state police—from Texas and other states—to the Texas-Mexico border. Under the initiative, asylum seekers and migrants are charged with criminal trespassing when they enter Texas. They are then held in state-run prisons. Recently, at least 14 Republican-led states have sent police and National Guard to Texas border communities under Operation Lone Star. Lopez says residents have no idea what policies these out-of-state police are operating under, including their policies on use of force. And holding them accountable is very difficult. “When we talk about law enforcement in border communities and the operations they conduct, it's often in remote parts of the state,” Lopez says. “We could see a situation where a Florida police officer goes beyond his authority … let's say in apprehending immigrants. … It's really hard to document what's happening on the ground.” Read and listen to more at The Border Chronicle. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

The lawyer and longtime community organizer talks about her two-year ban from practicing immigration law, how she is responding to it, and her history of border organizing and advocacy in Arizona. In July the Board of Immigration Appeals ordered that prominent federal immigration lawyer and longtime community organizer Margo Cowan be barred for two years from practicing law in immigration court for “violating the rules of professional conduct.” For this week's podcast interview, The Border Chroniclecaught up with Cowan in her Tucson office to hear her side of the story. This story includes Cowan's long history of advocacy and organizing in the community—including know-your-rights campaigns in Tucson in the 1970s, work with the Sanctuary Movement and HIV/AIDS awareness in the 1980s, and working for the Tohono O'odham Nation in the 1990s, where she witnessed the onset of border militarization on the native reservation that, she asserts, has now become an “occupied” territory. (By the way, here is the link to Cowan's book about the Tohono O'odham, cowritten with historian Guadalupe Castillo. We mention the book in the podcast). Throughout the conversation, Cowan talks about her work as a public defender, work that led to the founding of the organization Keep Tucson Together in 2011. KTT is a pro bono legal clinic whose mission is to stop deportations and family separations in southern Arizona. In the interview, Cowan explains the two-year ban and how she is appealing the ruling, and she vividly describes just how intimidating immigration court is. “I hate immigration court,” she says. “I hate what they do to our community. I hate the fact that they are cloaked in some quantum of respectability. But, having said that, people need representation.” --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Why do people keep risking their lives in the Darién? Caitlyn Yates, a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of British Columbia, has spent years researching this question. Yates has been traveling to the Darién Gap since 2018 to document changes in the region and interview hundreds of people who have chosen to take the risky journey. Her work has especially focused on Black migrants who face some of the worst prejudice and treatment on their journeys north. “They risk being robbed, kidnapped or detained repeatedly, which other migrants don't face to the same degree,” says Yates. For more check out www.theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

“The mass shooting of August 3, 2019, demands a reckoning. It must be situated in a recent and vicious amplification of preexisting U.S. border and immigration policy.” On August 3, 2019, a mass shooting took place in El Paso, Texas. After hearing reports of the shooting, anthropologist Gilberto Rosas tried to call his parents, who live in El Paso, his hometown. At first, they did not answer the phone. At a Walmart about a mile away from the U.S.-Mexico divide, the shooter was on a white-supremacist rampage that would kill 23 people and wound many others. As Rosas describes in the following interview, these harrowing moments intensified until his parents finally answered. That moment would turn into a book: Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the U.S.-Mexico Border. This was the associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign's second book. (His first was Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier.) In the interview, Rosas told me, “As someone who grew up on the border, who knows the literature on the intensified militarized policing of the border, as someone with roots in that region, I felt compelled to analyze [the massacre] as an outgrowth of the hardening of the U.S.-Mexico border.” And that he did. Alongside his narrative-challenging analysis, Rosas also explains why he doesn't use terms like “migrant” or “detained/detention.” He talks about his own “dignified rage” in grieving the mass shooting's victims, and how this concept can be channeled by people and communities to challenge power. And he offers this keen observation about Washington and the border (one that we often make here at The Border Chronicle): “If policy makers were to listen to people from the borderlands, these kinds of discursive, ideological, and material conditions would not be as severe.” For more subscribe to theborderchronicle.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Alejandra Spector is a practicing psychotherapist and licensed master social worker, from El Paso, Texas. Spector, who now lives in Austin, grew up in a bilingual family of border activists. Her father, Carlos Spector, is a well-known asylum and human rights lawyer, and her mother, Sandra Spector, is a longtime community organizer who runs the family's law practice. Social justice work can be incredibly rewarding. But it can also lead to burn out and take a physical and mental toll. Spector stresses the importance of self-care. “Are you eating enough, drinking enough water, and getting enough sleep? Are you finding things you enjoy outside of social justice work?” she says. “Having people who really know and care about you is important. Who is in your life, and who is helping you?” Her therapy practice reflects her border upbringing by focusing on the mental health impacts of systemic oppression, racism, and forced displacement, which leads to migration. Most of her clients are people of color, including DACA recipients who are struggling with complicated stressors outside their control. “A lot of therapists don't have any sort of political analysis, and that hurts people,” Spector says. “I always ask, ‘Are you internalizing and blaming yourself for something that is actually systemic?' A lot of depression and anxiety we're seeing is about the world we live in.” Show notes: Mexicanos en Exilio The Ulysses Syndrome The Juarez Valley Read or listen to more at The Border Chronicle. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Tohono O'odham leader Amy Juan describes the May 18 killing of Raymond Mattia and the long context of border militarization that led to it. On May 18, Raymond Mattia stepped out of his house after he saw the U.S. Border Patrol arrive. He lived in the small community of Ali Chuk (also known as Menagers Dam), located about one mile from the U.S.-Mexico international boundary on the Tohono O'odham Nation in southern Arizona. Mattia had called the Border Patrol a few hours earlier to report people moving through his land. He was about two feet from his front door, witnesses said, when agents fired, hitting him 38 times. Tohono O'odham leader Amy Juan joins us today to discuss what happened from an on-the-ground perspective, drawing from the testimony of Ali Chuk's community members. She also explains the context of the incident, in what she calls “one the most militarized communities” on the Nation, where the Border Patrol has been increasing its presence for decades. Amy has been my go-to person on border issues on the Nation for more than decade. I met her after she helped found the organization Tohono O'odham Hemajkam Rights Network to raise awareness about and take action on the Border Patrol's militarization of her community. Now she is the administrative manager at the San Xavier Cooperative Farm and the tribal and community liaison in Arizona for the International Indian Treaty Council, where she focuses on border issues, among other things. To note, Amy was also the guest for The Border Chronicle's first ever podcast in September 2021. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

In 2020, Dr. Alexander Tenorio, a neurosurgeon based in San Diego, noticed a sharp increase in people suffering traumatic brain and spinal injuries. These cases, he soon discovered, were the result of people falling from the newly expanded and elevated border wall. Under the Trump administration, the border wall's height was raised to 30 feet, which has challenged border hospitals and had deadly consequences for migrants. Falls from the border wall have left many paralyzed or unable to function independently. Most of the injured are in their 20s and 30s and are their families' breadwinners, so the debilitating injuries have a devastating ripple effect throughout communities. In April, Tenorio wrote an opinion editorial for the Los Angeles Times about the record number of traumatic injuries he's treated due to falls from the border wall. In the editorial, he cited a recent report by the Mexican government that 646 Mexican nationals were hurt or killed crossing the border from 2020 to 2022, and that the main cause of injury “was wall-related.” Tenorio and other physicians and researchers are studying the phenomenon. To date, they've published two studies looking at patients on the California-Mexico border, and Tenorio says they plan to extend their research to include the rest of the nearly 2,000-mile-long border, as well as cases from Mexico. “As a neurosurgeon,” Tenorio says, “I feel it's my duty to notify the world of the atrocities that are occurring because of the border wall extension. The increase in the border wall height has led to a humanitarian crisis and international public health crisis.” Listen to more at The Border Chronicle. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

For the first time in the history of The Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller have done a podcast together. Don't worry, it comes with the requisite banter, especially at the beginning. But the brunt of the conversation is a deep dive into Melissa's chilling, page-turning article in The New Yorker, “A Covert Mission to Solve a Mexican Journalist's Murder,” published in April. We talk at length about the harrowing story of Miroslava Breach, the Mexican journalist who covered stories that upset the powerful and who, in March 2017, was murdered in the city of Chihuahua. We look into the narcopolitics Breach was covering in the Sierra Tarahumara and the emergence of a secret collective that helped bring her killers to justice. Melissa reflects on this story, how she wrote the article, and what it means to her as a border journalist. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

Texas is once again in the throes of its biennial legislative session, which will wrap up at the end of May. One of the more dangerously authoritarian bills introduced this session is HB 20, authored by Matt Schaefer (R-Tyler), which would create armed citizen militias under the control of the governor. Their mission would be to hunt down undocumented people. Bob Libal, a longtime immigration and criminal justice reform activist based in Austin, attended the bill's hearing on April 13 at the Texas Legislature, where nearly 300 people signed up in opposition. Despite this, at least 52 Republicans in the Texas House have signed on to HB 20. Libal, now a U.S. consultant for the international nonprofit Human Rights Watch, talks about how the passage of HB 20 would set a dangerous authoritarian precedent. “They would be setting up a system where people who believe that undocumented migrants are invaders could be enforcing this Texas-specific immigration proposal—and they'd be armed,” he says. Read more at The Border Chronicle. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

An in-depth conversation with the Sikh musician and educator about growing up as a child of immigrants and turning to music for solace and inspiration. Launching from last week's Q&A with Sonny Singh, a Sikh musician and educator, we delve into his role in the film From Here, an eloquent and moving documentary that follows the stories of four children of immigrants who confront racism, xenophobia, and an oppressive immigration system with creativity and activism. Sonny is a musician with the band Red Baraat. In 2022 he released a solo album called Chardi Kala—in which he returns to the Sikh devotional music of his childhood (which we discuss at length in this podcast). Sonny has also spent decades working as an educator on social justice issues. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

The U.S. government is doubling down and expanding its surveillance technology in border communities. But many residents don't know the extent to which they're being watched, given that the government rarely seeks their input. This month, the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation released new data and an interactive map of surveillance towers, which are part of the “virtual wall.” Melissa speaks with Dave Maass, EFF's director of investigations, about his organization's mapping and data project, which tracks the proliferation of surveillance tech at the southern border. Contrary to public perception, the majority of these surveillance towers aren't in the middle of nowhere, says Maass. “We hope to provide the evidence that really undermines that myth,” he says of the new project. “Many of [these towers] are in urban areas, residential communities and in the middle of public parks.” Learn more at The Border Chronicle --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

With media coverage shrinking, this two-person news bureau based in Hermosillo, Sonora, fills a vital role informing U.S. audiences about Mexico. https://www.theborderchronicle.com/p/the-importance-of-cross-border-journalism#details --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/border-chronicle/support

In 2019, former President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the border, making border wall construction a top priority. Some of that wall was slated for the city of Laredo, Texas. Tricia Cortez, Executive Director of the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center, based in Laredo, talks about her community's “David vs. Goliath” battle against the Trump administration's 30-foot wall. Now her community faces a new onslaught of proposed border wall construction by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. For more about the U.S.-Mexico border read The Border Chronicle. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/border-chronicle/support

Twenty years ago, Maasai leader Meitamei Olol Dapash snuck across the Kenya-Tanzania border to report on what the Otterlo Business Corporation was doing. In today's podcast he explains what he saw then: The company was capturing animals, sending them to zoos, and starting a trophy-hunting operation. And now, two decades later, this company wants to expand its business into more land. This has led to attempts by Tanzania to violently evict Maasai communities from their ancestral land. Last week, I wrote about this ongoing crisis. Here, Meitamei gives a firsthand account of arriving on the scene in June after police attacked Maasai communities. Many people were seriously injured and had to run for their lives. And he describes the humanitarian aid effort. Meitamei is the director of the Dopoi Center located in the Maasai Mara in Kenya and one of the founders of the Institute for Maasai Education, Research, and Conservation. Meitamei has dedicated his life to working for Maasai culture and land rights. His mother was born in Tanzania, across the colonial border, as he calls it. As Meitamei describes, the Maasai are a “transborder” community, and the international boundary itself was and still is an imposition by European powers. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/border-chronicle/support

This is the second part of The Border Chronicle's conversation with Sheriff David Hathaway of Santa Cruz County, located on the Arizona-Mexico border. Hathaway talks about “fuzzy” border statistics, which can be used to convey anything a person wants, and his battle to take down a U.S. Customs and Border Protection “spy blimp” over the city of Nogales. He also gets into his opposition to former Arizona governor Doug Ducey's 10-mile shipping container wall along the border, as well as his support for the protesters who stopped what he calls an “ugly eyesore” of a wall. You can listen to the first part of our conversation here, where Hathaway talks about his years as a DEA agent and how he assisted in the murder investigation of fellow agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, only to discover that the CIA was involved in Camarena's death. You can learn more and support The Border Chronicle here. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/border-chronicle/support