The Border Chronicle

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