The Border Chronicle

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.

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.

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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 offering education programs, the Sidewalk School has grown into a provider of food, medical services, shelter, and even tech troubleshooting for the U.S. government’s glitch-filled CBPOne app, which asylum seekers in Mexico are required to use to request an appointment with U.S. border officials.

Rangel-Samporano doesn’t see the need ending anytime soon, and she worries that disinformation is playing an outsized role in shaping Americans’ views about the border and the humanitarian needs there. It’s also affecting asylum seekers who are starved for accurate information about the U.S. immigration system, Rangel-Samporano says. Both the federal government and the Texas state government, which is investing billions in apprehension and detention under its Operation Lone Star initiative, should provide that information so that asylum seekers can make the best choices for their families, she says. “Giving people correct, accurate information,” she adds, “will do way more than giving them no information and putting up barbed wire and walls.”

Rangel-Samporano also talks about the lack of visibility and resources for Black migrants, who face racism and harsher treatment on their journeys. And she says that family separation is still occurring at the border. “It happens all the time and in so many ways.”

“If you really want to know what’s happening on the Mexican side of the border, follow the humanitarian groups like the Sidewalk School, who are working there,” Rangel-Samporano says. “We are there every day, seven days a week.”

Follow the Sidewalk School on Facebook or on X at @SidewalkSchool

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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.  

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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.

The United States, he says, is facing two fundamental crises when it comes to migration. The first is that the workforce is aging, which means we need to bring in younger workers, which will have the added benefit of keeping social security alive. The second crisis is that, globally, many people see the asylum system as the only way to enter the United States. “It’s become this default mechanism,” he says. “Not only for people to enter the United States but also for our labor market.”

“Asylum is the defining nature of our country. People came here seeking refuge,” he says. “We are in danger of losing it if we don’t correct it.”

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

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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 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.”

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Last week, Panama’s government announced a new campaign to prevent people from taking the deadly journey through the Darién Gap, one of the world’s most dangerous migrant routes. In 2023, more than 300,000 people have already crossed through the jungle isthmus. Panamanian officials estimate the number will reach 400,000 by the end of the year, which is twice the number of people who made the trek in 2022.

An untold number of people on their journey north will never make it out of the Darién alive.

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 prejiduce 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.

* Read more of Yates’ work here and here

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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.”

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