The Border Chronicle

Hello, cherished readers. In case you missed it, it’s The Border Chronicle’s third anniversary! On Tuesday, we sent out this post celebrating just that. To make this a sustainable endeavor, we need more paid subscribers. So if you haven’t subscribed yet, please consider doing so. We depend on you! The other important thing that we had in Tuesday’s post was a survey that we’re hoping more people co...

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 S...

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...

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 narrat...

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 asylu...

The stakes couldn’t be higher. We believe that now, more than ever, it’s vital to be on the ground reporting, analyzing, and challenging the disinformation being spread by antidemocratic forces. But it’s tough these days for journalism. Publications of all sizes are closing around the country in the midst of one of the most consequential elections in history. The Border Chronicle began three years...

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 f...

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 moveme...

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...

There is a scene in the short documentary Shura in which octogenarian Shura Wallin is standing at the U.S.-Mexico border as people cross under a string of barbed wire. She hands each person a granola bar. You can hear the voice of someone else, off camera, as they hand out bottles of water. They are part of the humanitarian aid group the Samaritans . The scene stands out for many reasons—the cinem...

The U.S.-Mexico border is the most talked about region in this year’s presidential election. So far, most of the media coverage is about which candidate scored the most political points during his appearance in a border community, and who is the toughest on border security. But what does real security look like from the perspective of a border community? If the Rio Grande dries up because of clima...

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 t...

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 Ame...

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;...

The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with s**t . — Steve Bannon , February 2018. Folks, it’s hard to watch the national media take the bait with Texas governor Greg Abbott’s grandstanding on the border in the town of Eagle Pass. Since 2020, MAGA Republicans have been rolling out a concerted messaging campaign around an inv...

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...

The holiday season abounds with stories of couples and loved ones going great distances to be together, often with great feelings of love and romance. But what happens when there is a global border apparatus in the way? Well, today we have the perfect person to talk to about that: author, writer, and journalist Anna Lekas Miller . In this podcast, she explains how people attempt to manage this dau...

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 i...

In 2019, Felicia Rangel-Samporano, a stay-at-home mom in Brownsville, Texas, joined forces with Victor Cavazos, a software engineer, to start the nonprofit Sidewalk School . At first, the Sidewalk School focused on educational programs for children living in migrant camps in the Mexican cities of Reynosa and Matamoros, right on the other side of the Rio Grande. Five years later, in addition to off...

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...

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...

“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 thro...

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...

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 th...

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 Chronicle caught up with Cowan in her Tucson office to hear her side of the story. This story includes...