The Border Chronicle

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 Gabriella Sanchez, who for more than a decade has been researching smuggling, migrants, and states’ countersmuggling responses. She has researched and investigated these issues on the U.S.-Mexico border, where she’s from, but her work ranges across the Americas, North Africa, and Europe.

Sanchez is field research director at the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and she’s the author of Human Smuggling and Border Crossings (Routledge, 2016). She has also been the coauthor and editor of multiple articles and reports on this subject.

In other words, Sanchez is a top expert. And you certainly won’t want to miss this discussion. She takes on many misconceptions and myths head on, including my own (and she does correct the terminology I use). As she explains in the interview, “What we have in the Americas is the coupling of drug trafficking and migrant smuggling. . . . Why is that important? Because once again, these narratives depend on the racialization of men from the Global South and their creation as threats.”

What Sanchez offers is not only a new understanding of how smuggling operations work, and who is involved, but also a new and important framing that challenges an entrenched border narrative that so often obscures injustice and inequality.

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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 he worked to reunite.

The Border Chronicle is an ad-free, corporate-free, reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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 States (Counterpoint, 2022), we tackle these questions and more.

This is his fourth book on borders, which include White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall (Beacon, 2021), Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (Verso, 2017), and Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (Zed, 2012). You can read an interview that The Border Chronicle did with Reece in October aboutWhite Borders here.

I have learned so much from Reece’s extensive scholarship and research into borders, and Nobody Is Protected is no different. He writes this history of the Border Patrol in vivid, page-turning prose. Trust me, you won’ t want to put this book down. In the introduction he frames the book through three key stories: Portland (as mentioned above), a critical 1970s era Supreme Court case (listen and you’ll understand its importance), and an experience he had a decade ago of being pulled over five times by the Border Patrol in one hour. Our discussion begins here and ends with the question of whether the Border Patrol can be reformed. Please leave us a comment on the interview or about your experiences with Border Patrol in your community.

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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 Mission, Texas, discovered an empty pick-up truck parked outside the nature preserve, the engine still running, unlocked and with an assault rifle resting against the seat. The truck belonged to a National Guard soldier. This struck me as a perfect symbol of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star: careless, cruel, and dangerous.

There are so many men now, with so many guns, lurking in every corner of the borderlands. Governor Abbott, Arizona’s Governor Doug Ducey, and other Republicans tell us they are protecting us from the migrants crossing the border. But it’s the migrants who are dying and border residents in massacres perpetrated by young men with assault rifles, like the one that Treviño Wright discovered yesterday, outside the nature preserve she runs, and where children and tourists regularly visit.

Then there’s SCOTUS, and a woman’s right to an abortion stripped from the Constitution, which will overwhelmingly affect border communities, especially women of color. These days, every day, I walk around a running interior dialogue playing in my head: What can I do? How can I fight back? How can I make a difference?

And I think about cross-border solidarity, resilience, perseverance and organizing from the ground up. Because, clearly, no elected official in Washington D.C. is going to help us. And who knows that better than the borderlands? I think about people like Windy Goodloe, who you’ll hear from in this podcast, and the Black Seminoles who have been enslaved, discriminated against, and deceived by both the Mexican and American governments over many hundreds of years. And yet they persist today on both sides of the border. They honor and celebrate their history and culture. And they keep moving forward. And this gives me hope.

America is one long battle for equal rights. It never comes easy, and it never comes quick. And it is ongoing. And so, we keep going.

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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 to thank everyone who responded to our Tuesday post asking for support as we navigate the journalism world after our funding ends in September. The response and encouragement were both uplifting and deeply appreciated.

Last, we want to announce that we will have a discussion thread on Thursday, June 16, at 10 a.m. Pacific/11 a.m. mountain/noon central/1 p.m. eastern. The discussion will feature a comparative analysis of U.S. and European borders, and we will again be joined by experts who will both field questions and be in conversation with readers. Guests include Petra Molnar of the Refugee Law Lab (Petra has already made a valuable contribution to The Border Chronicle); Lauren Markham, author of The Faraway Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, who has also written extensively on European border enforcement; Mark Akkerman, a researcher at the Dutch organization Stop Wapenhandel (and Transnational Institute), who has examined the border industrial complex of Fortress Europe like no other; and David Alvarez, English professor at Grand Valley State, who brings a literary perspective, especially from the point of view of the Mediterranean coast of Gibraltar.

We offer our discussion threads for paid subscribers only. We are committed to offering as much of The Border Chronicle as we can for free. But as two working freelance journalists—as mentioned in our Tuesday post—we rely on paid subscriptions to keep the lights on. Please consider supporting The Border Chronicle with a subscription for just $6 a month or $60 annually (a deal!) and help us become sustainable in 2022. We appreciate ya!

Border Hacker: A Podcast with Levi Vonk

A rare in-depth look inside a migrant caravan and Mexico’s amped-up border enforcement, along with scathing revelations about humanitarian networks on the Mexican migrant trail

Right when the book Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run was published in late April, authors Levi Vonk and Axel Kirschner began to receive death threats. On one hand this extraordinary and page-turning book is about the unlikely friendship between an anthropologist from Georgia and a deported hacker from New York City (where he arrived at the age of one after his birth in Guatemala) after they met on a caravan in Oaxaca in 2015. On the other, Border Hacker is also a work of high-quality immersive journalism that not only gives close-up reporting on Mexico’s U.S.-pressured border enforcement apparatus, but also offers an intimate and scandalous view of the humanitarian network on the Mexican migrant trail. In other words, this book steps on some powerful toes. Levi talks about all this in the following interview, from the threats to a “shelter” that is really an auto shop, where migrants are detained and forced to work.

Border Hacker also dives into the friendship that forms between Axel and Levi. Through the prism of this bond, Levi makes a strong, persuasive case for taking a risk and fighting for a better world. Please enjoy.

The Border Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 only with her years as an agent but also with a childhood of trauma and abuse.

Her new memoir: Against the Wall: My Journey from Border Patrol Agent to Immigrant Rights Activist, takes an unflinching look at a Border Patrol riddled with corruption, racism, and misogyny. Raw and truthful, no one escapes judgement, not even Budd, who searches deep within herself to examine her own prejudices as a White southerner, and the role she played as a Border Patrol agent. 

Budd’s book, which comes out in June, is also about healing from deeply inflicted traumas. After grappling with suicide, she eventually finds love and acceptance with her wife Sandy and becomes an activist for immigrant rights.

In this Border Chronicle podcast, Budd talks about her journey from Border Patrol agent to one of the Border Patrol’s fiercest critics.

The Border Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 maybe we’d even get a few new subscribers. We do appreciate you very fondly, dear readers.

Climate Disaster, Displacement, and Divides: A Podcast with Amali Tower

“Now more than three times as many people are displaced by climate disasters and extreme weather events than conflict or violence.”

Climate change and displacement of people are accelerating across the globe. What does this have to do with the U.S.-Mexico borderlands? What can be done? And really, why on earth aren’t there more people talking about it? Please join us for a rich discussion navigating all these questions with Amali Tower, the director and founder of the organization Climate Refugees.

Since 2015, Climate Refugees has done advocacy and research to seek protection for people displaced by climate change. For this reason, Amali has long been considered one of the top, cutting-edge thinkers on accelerating climate displacement and what it means for our globe. Throughout our conversation, Amali demystifies the most pervasive myths surrounding climate displacement, offers a clear analysis of what is happening and what to expect, and what people can possibly do about it.

Some highlights include Amali connecting the dots between climate catastrophe and rich countries militarizing their borders: “And yet the countries that are responsible for the climate crisis—as well as wars and conflicts and the fossil fuels that is underpinning a lot of these conflicts—aren’t necessarily sharing those responsibilities, instead they are putting a lot of money into keeping people out.”

Amali underscores a need to focus on the right to stay home: “We’re talking so much about people migrating, when the conversation I think we need to be having is the right to not have to migrate in equal measure. And how much we are not doing anything to ensure that right.”

And she leaves us with this thought as to how we might reach a better world: “When I’m gone, I would love for us to have elevated the conversation. If that’s one contribution I can have made then OK. So be it. The next generation can hopefully have a better conversation … [a conversation that] holds our governments to a higher ideal.”

The Border Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. We appreciate ya!

I learned a lot from the discussion about what to expect when Title 42 is lifted in May (if it’s lifted). And also about who benefits if Title 42 remains (some interesting answers from our invited experts!). The Border Chronicle loves bringing knowledgeable people with diverse perspectives together to discuss the complex issues that border communities deal with every day. If you’re signed up as a free subscriber and find our work valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so we can continue our work and become sustainable in 2022.

I’m mixing it up with today’s post. Fellow journalist Ana Adlerstein hit the road with me on Saturday and we traveled to Yuma, Arizona. In this dispatch we included text and photos, and Ana included a five-minute audio piece she edited. Hope you enjoy it!

Reporter’s Notebook: A Man and His Rake vs. Anti-immigrant Hate in Yuma, Arizona

The Border Chronicle visits with Fernando “Fernie” Quiroz, director of the AZ-CA Humanitarian Coalition that provides aid to asylum seekers in Yuma

In the most parched corner of the Sonoran Desert on the Arizona-California border sits Yuma, Arizona. It’s a place of extremes. A trickle of water that was once the mighty Colorado River runs through this desert, and there is row after row of waving wheat and green lettuce fields—part of a multimillion-dollar produce industry—which seems almost impossible, like a mirage.

Once, the Colorado River flowed through Yuma on its way to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. Now it’s a dried-up riverbed. What’s left of the Colorado has been reduced to a narrow concrete irrigation canal.

Fernando “Fernie” Quiroz, 49, remembers when the Colorado River still flowed to Mexico. In San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora, just south of Yuma, where his family is originally from, there was a bridge that the town’s residents used to cross the river into Baja California. “The river has been dry now,” he says, “for at least 30 years.”

The youngest of 13 siblings, Quiroz worked with his family picking crops in Yuma and in neighboring California. When he was 18, he stopped working in the fields, went to university, and earned a degree in molecular cellular biology. “I am a son of immigrants,” he says. “My mother came to this country for one reason, to give me a better life. And I had the opportunity to get that life. And why should I turn my back?”

Quiroz is referring to the men, women, and children who walk from Mexico through the dried Colorado River bed to request asylum from the Border Patrol agents waiting at gaps in the 30-foot border wall that divides Algodones, Mexico, from his hometown.

Quiroz is director of the AZ-CA Humanitarian Coalition, a volunteer group in Yuma that provides aid to asylum seekers who began arriving after the ports of entry closed under the Trump administration due to Title 42 and other measures. The coalition provides snacks and water. “We pushed for bathrooms to be put out there and water stations,” he says. “And Border Patrol has agreed to those things.”

But one of the biggest sticking points has been trash and recycling bins. Yuma Sector Border Patrol has made it a policy that each asylum seeker can bring only what they can fit into a small plastic Department of Homeland Security bag.

This means piles of shoes, makeup bags, toys, good-luck charms, prayer cards, and other belongings are left behind on the dirt levee road next to the border wall. In the media and among right-wing politicians and anti-immigrant militia groups, these belongings are often portrayed as “trash left by illegal immigrants,” says Quiroz.

Countering this message has become Quiroz’s mission. Nearly every day he shows up at the border wall with his rake and makes tidy piles of the items left behind, then bags it up and hauls it away. His 16-year-old daughter and six to eight other volunteers also do cleanup.

“It’s not that they’re leaving a mess,” he says. “When Border Patrol shows up, they tell them to drop everything and get in line.”

There used to be piles of clothes, shoes, and other personal items strewn all over the ground. Quiroz and the coalition worked with the county to have dumpsters left at the site to try and improve the conditions.

Quiroz says a lot of people, including some local officials, oppose what the coalition is doing. On weekends, a white-supremacist militia called the Arizona Patriots often comes out and patrols the same area, destroying the food that the coalition leaves out for asylum seekers. “They’re dressed in camo, they have guns, and they harass and tell the people as they’re coming across that they’re not welcome,” Quiroz says.

As he sifts through the abandoned items, Quiroz often thinks of the people who left them behind. He finds a pair of newly handmade shorts made of burlap, then picks up a worn wallet from the dirt that contains only a saint card and a typewritten prayer in Spanish for “protection from my enemies.”

Quiroz says he does the clean up because he wants people to see the asylum seekers as fellow humans in need, not to focus on the piles of items that are left behind, which then become the dominant narrative in the media. “That’s not the visual I want people to see,” he says. “The anti-immigrant message that takes away the human aspect of these people.”

Quiroz says he started doing the trash runs in 2021. Personal belongings were strewn everywhere, and it was a mess, he says. “My brother and I, we spent three days in a row from sunrise to sundown with a trailer to haul everything to the dump,” he says. “And there were no trash bins.”

His goal now, he says, is to save all the gently used clothing items and shoes that they find, and get them cleaned and washed so that they can be donated to migrant shelters. Quiroz and I examine the piles of things left next to the dumpsters, and there are Nike tennis shoes, women’s dress shoes, baby clothes, even a National Geographic exp...

Confused by competing messages about Title 42, and ever-changing immigration policies at the border? Our invited border experts will have some answers. Please join us this Thursday, April 21 for a discussion thread beginning at 10 am PT/ 11 am MT/ 12 pm CT/ 1 pm ET. Todd will host the discussion which will arrive in your email inbox at 10 am Pacific Standard Time (because we don’t do daylight savings in Arizona). From there you can type your questions or make a comment, or both!

We are excited to host this diverse slate of experts including Jesse Franzblau with the National Immigrant Justice Center, Noah Schramm with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, Blake Gentry with Alianza Indigena Sin Fronteras (a southern Arizona organization that works in tandem with Casa Alitas a migrant shelter in Tucson), Immigration Journalist Gaby Del Valle, co-founder of Border/Lines (one of our recommended Substack reads for the latest on immigration policy), and Immigration Attorney Erika Pinheiro with the nonprofit Al Otro Lado.

We’re offering these discussion threads for paid subscribers only. We are committed to offering as much of The Border Chronicle as we can free of charge. But as two working freelance journalists we rely on paid subscriptions to keep the lights on. Please consider supporting The Border Chronicle with a subscription for just $6 a month or $60 annually (a deal!) and help us become sustainable in 2022. We appreciate ya!

Acts of Resistance and Faith: The Reverend John Fife on Founding the Sanctuary Movement, and the Ongoing Struggle for Human Rights in the Borderlands

In the 1980s as civil wars raged in Central America, spurred on by U.S. government intervention, thousands of Central American refugees fled persecution and political violence, arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead of being granted political asylum, Central Americans were held in U.S. detention facilities then deported. Many to their deaths.

To save lives, the Reverend John Fife helped found the sanctuary movement, modeled after the 19th century Underground Railroad which ferried escaped slaves to freedom. Fife’s church, Southside Presbyterian in Tucson, was the first in the United States to give refuge to refugees from El Salvador. From that small church in Tucson grew an international sanctuary movement.

In 1985, the U.S. government indicted Fife and 10 others for violating U.S. immigration laws. Fife was deemed guilty and received five years’ probation. After the civil wars ended, and as migrant deaths began to mount in the Sonoran Desert, due to the U.S. policy of prevention through deterrence, Fife helped found the nonprofit No More Deaths which provides food, water, and aid to people migrating through the desert.

Now 83, Fife is pastor emeritus at Southside Presbyterian and still very much involved in humanitarian work in the borderlands. In this interview, Fife talks about how the sanctuary movement formed, the future of immigration policy and humanitarian work, and the long arc of history when it comes to acts of resistance and faith to create social change.

*A very special thanks to Ana Adlerstein for helping me record this interview with Rev. Fife at Southside Presbyterian and to Lilly Clark, our audio editor.

The Border Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you are confused by competing messages about Title 42, and the ever-changing policies at the border, please join us on Thursday, April 21 for a discussion thread. (We still have to confirm some things, but tentatively we will start at 10 am PT/ 11 am MT/ 12 pm CT/ 1 pm ET, so please pencil us in!)

Invited experts will include people from the National Immigrant Justice Center, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, the Alianza Indigena Sin Fronteras (a southern Arizona organization that also works in tandem with a local migrant shelter, and will offer insight on shifting policies from that on-the-ground perspective), as well as others to be determined.

The discussion thread will be for paid subscribers only. We are committed to offering as much of The Border Chronicle as we can free of charge. But as two freelance journalists we rely on paid subscriptions to keep the lights on. Please consider supporting The Border Chronicle with a subscription for just $6 a month or $60 annually (a deal!) and help us become sustainable in 2022. We appreciate ya!

“Lines of Life and Death”: A Podcast with Geographer Joseph Nevins on Global Apartheid and the Right to the World

Lauded border scholar Joseph Nevins dissects the global border apparatus, shows its parallels with South African apartheid, and calls for both freedom of movement and the right to stay home

Who has passports? Who can get visas? Which people have to risk their lives crossing lines, and who can fly and cross borders with ease? And what if heavily policed borders are actually a human rights violation? What would be the remedy to that?

In today’s podcast we welcome geographer Joseph Nevins to discuss all this. Joe is the author of two important books on border and immigration policing, Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War On “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary and Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid. He is a professor at Vassar College.

I have known Joe now for more than a decade, and over those years he has been a mentor, and inspired me with his insight, wisdom, and scholarship. Please join us in this conversation as we take a step back and unpack the global border apparatus, talk about global apartheid and the right to the world, and discuss what those “lines of life and death,” as Joe puts it, really mean.

The Border Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.