The Border Chronicle

Greetings from the Border Security Expo in El Paso, Texas. This annual convention brings private industry together with high brass from Customs and Border Protection. It will serve as an interesting backdrop to tonight’s lifting of Title 42 (at 11:59 p.m.). So stay tuned for stories on this in the coming weeks. On May 25, we will be hosting an online discussion forum on water, climate change, and...

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 an...

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 albu...

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 speak...

Kendal Blust and Murphy Woodhouse have been reporting from Hermosillo, Sonora , for the Phoenix public radio station KJZZ since 2018. They are the only permanent full-time reporters based in the Mexican state of Sonora reporting for a U.S. audience, which let’s be frank, isn’t often aware of what’s happening south of the border. In the following interview, Kendal and Murphy talk about what it’s be...

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 wa...

This is the last and third part of my series on the border in Kenya. If you missed the first two articles, never fear! The first piece focused on the United States’ externalization of its border to Kenya. The second one comes from a trip I took to the border with Maasai leadership from the Kenyan side. It’s “reporter’s notebook” style. I describe scenes and impressions and add context to a situati...

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 A...

Sheriff David Hathaway is a fifth-generation rancher from the U.S.-Mexico border in Santa Cruz County, Arizona. He’s also a former supervisory agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and he participated in the DEA’s largest-ever homicide investigation, Operación Leyenda, to track down the killers of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in the 1980s. Hathaway’s participation in Camarena’s murde...

One of the best books I read in 2022 was the engrossing and page-turning Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run . Some of you probably heard the interview The Border Chronicle did with author and anthropologist Levi Vonk in June. Although we do encourage you to listen to the previous interview (and to read the book!), please don’t worry if you haven’t. Today’s...

Right now there are more border walls on Earth than there have ever been in the planet’s history. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there were 15, now there are 77 around the world. As border scholar Jenny Stümer says in the following podcast, “In order to build border walls you need the support of a lot of people, in order to get that you have to tap into a particular imaginary.” The narrative so...

Between the state funded shipping container walls, and the Biden administration “filling in the gaps” of Trump’s border wall, it’s hard to tell what’s going on, exactly. What we do know is that border wall building under the current administration has not stopped, even if the Biden administration calls it something else. Scott Nicol is an artist, educator and environmentalist in South Texas who ha...

For today’s podcast, The Border Chronicle welcomes back Oswaldo Zavala to discuss his new book , The War Within the Words: An Intellectual History of the “Narco” in Mexico (1975–2020). In this discussion, Zavala examines and disassembles drug war narratives in official discourse and mainstream storytelling, both in news media and fictional accounts. Zavala, a Juarense professor of Latin American l...

Dora Rodriguez was once an asylum seeker. She escaped the death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s during the U.S.-backed civil war . On her journey to the United States, her group was abandoned in the Sonoran Desert south of Tucson, Arizona. Thirteen people traveling with her died, and Rodriguez barely survived. Since then, she’s devoted her life to social work and to helping migrants in the Sono...

This month The Border Chronicle is focusing on a series on the climate crisis, displacement, and borders, and today’s podcast is a continuation of that . I am happy to be joined by insightful researcher Nathan Akehurst and by Petra Molnar, an anthropologist, lawyer, and top expert on border technology . Petra is also the associate director of the Refugee Law Lab , and she helps run the Migration T...

Zachary Mueller, political director for America’s Voice , an immigrant advocacy nonprofit, has been tracking anti-immigrant and xenophobic campaign messaging since 2018. Mueller traces the deadly path from the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacy rally to this year’s great replacement messaging embraced by GOP candidates in the midterm election season. Mueller also offers advice on what listeners...

As you all know, dear readers, we are in a new era at The Border Chronicle . Our fellowship with the Substack local initiative ended on September 9, and now, financially speaking, we are sailing solo. To continue our on-the-ground reporting, analysis, podcasts, etc., we will need your support. So we are very happy to announce that starting today, we will be accepting group subscriptions . This mea...

Challenging Smuggling Myths on the U.S. Mexico Border: A Podcast with Anthropologist Gabriella Sanchez “The focus on organized crime prevents us from seeing how enforcement and inequality disproportionately targets the poor.” Sometimes you run into people whose work and words profoundly challenge worldviews and established narratives. One such person is sociocultural anthropologist and author Gabr...

In the summer of 2018, Efrén Olivares was a human rights lawyer in South Texas who became a crisis worker on the front lines of Zero Tolerance representing hundreds of families in court. In his new and deeply moving memoir “My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines” Olivares weaves his own personal story of family separation with that of the hundreds of families who h...

Have you ever wondered how the Border Patrol got so much power? How it can roll into places like Portland, Oregon, in unmarked vehicles and snatch protesters off the streets? Or why it is permitted to racially profile? In this discussion with the prolific geographer Reece Jones , author of the new book Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United...

It’s Tuesday and we’re not okay. As I write this, 46 people were found dead Monday in a tractor trailer in San Antonio, Texas. More victims of a cruel border deterrence system designed to kill. Predictably, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, took no time at all to use the tragedy as a talking point for his re-election. Also Monday, Marianna Treviño Wright, who runs the National Butterfly Center in Mis...

Greetings from 106 degree Tucson! Today we have a few announcements to make before we get started. First, we have a special offer . The first five people who become paid subscribers after this podcast publishes will receive a free copy of the book Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run . Listen to the podcast and you’ll see why this is a score. Second, we want...

For six years, Jenn Budd wore the green uniform of the U.S. Border Patrol . Before joining in 1995 Budd, who grew up in Alabama, says she knew little about the agency. Her harrowing experiences of misogyny, rape, sexual harassment, and with corruption at the agency would ultimately force her to resign. But Budd says, leaving the Border Patrol was only the beginning on a long road of reckoning. Not...

First, a special thanks to Brenda Maytorena Lara for her wonderful debut editing job here on this podcast. We are so happy to have Brenda with us this summer! Also, we are in crunch time here at The Border Chronicle ! Our goal for September is to have 1,000 paid subscribers to be able to continue this endeavor sustainably. If you could help us share our pieces widely, it would be wonderful and may...

A big abrazo to everyone who participated in our discussion thread last Thursday on Title 42. It was a big success! Thank you once again to our guests: Gaby Del Valle from BORDER/LINES , Blake Gentry of the Alianza Indigena Sin Fronteras , Erika Pinheiro of Al Otro Lado , Jesse Franzblau from the National Immigrant Justice Center , and Noah Schramm from the Border Action Team of the Florence Immig...