The Border Chronicle

Otto Santa Ana, a linguist, once analyzed more than 6,000 of Donald Trump’s tweets, and his political speeches, for a Supreme Court case to defend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program. He’s also parsed the speeches of former Arizona Senator Russell Pearce, who sponsored SB 1070, as evidence for a constitutional and civil rights lawsuit against Pearce’s anti-Latino “show me your papers” legislation.

Listening to so much of Trump’s racist language, Santa Ana says, made him and some of the university students who assisted him in the court case physically ill. “People became physically and mentally exhausted listening to this tirade day after day,” he says, “It was like listening to your family and your community being sworn at.”

An expert in critical discourse analysis, Santa Ana is a professor emeritus at the University of California in Los Angeles, where he’s spent decades analyzing political speech and media representations of Latinos and immigrants. He’s the author of Brown Tide Rising as well as numerous other books and academic articles.

In today’s podcast, Santa Ana talks about why metaphor and narrative are so crucial to help us navigate the world. He also discusses America’s history of anti-immigrant and racist political speech. Santa Ana also has good advice for journalists, elected officials, and anyone else who wants to present a more equitable, inclusive narrative about the border and immigrants. “Provide the voices of the people who aren’t heard,” he says. “The families, the children, and the hard-working adults who want to make the lives of their children better.”

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

A note to readers that we will be taking next week off for a spring break (aka our kids will be out of school). We will be back starting on March 22 and will have a whole host of new stories, reporting, podcasts, analysis, and discussion threads for your reading and listening pleasure in the months to come. As always, we are happy to hear any of your ideas!

On January 29, 2019, immigration attorney Erika Pinheiro, the Tijuana-based litigation and policy director of the organization Al Otro Lado, was detained and denied entry into Mexico. As you will hear in vivid detail in the following podcast, she was one of 59 attorneys, journalists, and activists placed on a watch list by the U.S. government.

From her perspective as a target of invasive border surveillance, Pinheiro insightfully examines the border, past, present, and future. Pinheiro describes when she and her colleagues quit their day jobs to do the legal and humanitarian support—as well as policy advocacy and impact litigation—for refugees, deportees, and other migrants along the Tijuana-U.S. border for Al Otro Lado. Indeed, at that moment in 2019 when she found out she had an alert on her passport, Pinheiro was working on a family reunification project in the wake of the Trump “zero tolerance” policy.

Here, Pinheiro also analyzes the transition from Trump to Biden by (among many other things) criticizing official rhetoric around “welcoming” Ukrainian refugees while deporting Haitians by the thousands. She also discusses the future of the digital border and paperless expulsions, a surveillance future that is already here.

Happy Tuesday everyone! A quick note to stay tuned for a new discussion thread coming next Tuesday, March 1, beginning at 9 a.m. (MST). Look for the email in your inbox. We’ll answer any questions you might have from 10:00 a.m. to noon, and leave the thread open all day for your comments, suggestions, then circle back in the afternoon to answer more questions. Todd and I are very much looking forward to hearing your thoughts on how we’ve been doing and what you’d like to see The Border Chronicle cover in the future. Thank you for your support and hasta pronto!

In the summer of 2014, there was a large influx of unaccompanied children and mothers traveling with their children from Central America at the South Texas border in the Rio Grande Valley.

The governor at the time, Rick Perry, deployed National Guard and state police under a border enforcement initiative called Operation Strong Safety, which Perry and other lawmakers said would target drug smugglers and human traffickers at the border. Local law enforcement was offered overtime pay to participate in the operation, which would end up costing nearly $1 billion.

Eric Gamino, a police officer at the time, was working on his PhD dissertation and asked his boss at the police department whether he could participate in Operation Strong Safety and write about it. A lifelong resident of the Rio Grande Valley, Gamino wanted to know what his fellow officers thought about the border operation, and, among other things, he wondered what impact it would have on community policing.

Gamino was given the OK if he used pseudonyms for the police department and his fellow officers to protect their privacy. Last year, he published some of his findings in a study called “Border Splurge to Deter Border Surge,” which I first learned about from an informative piece by Ryan Devereaux in The Intercept about Texas’s current Operation Lone Star.

Gamino’s fellow officers nicknamed the border operation “Operation Netflix” because they spent so many hours watching movies in their squad cars, and some officers even took naps. Days would go by, Gamino wrote, when they wouldn’t do anything but stare at the Rio Grande from their squad cars for hours from their designated posts.

Now an assistant professor in criminology and justice studies at California State University, Northridge, Gamino talks to The Border Chronicle about his years policing the borderlands, working Operation Strong Safety, and his findings on how money would be better spent in border communities. “The border is often erroneously portrayed as a place of lawlessness and chaos, and that’s not the case,” he says. “I viewed myself as a performer,” he says of his time working the operation. “A tool of politicians for their own political agendas.”

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

A quick reminder to readers that in case you missed it on Tuesday, please check out Melissa’s vivid recounting of what is happening on the south Texas border and at the National Butterfly Center. I suggest reading all the way to the absurd and intense confrontation at the end.

On September 9, 2020, Tohono and Hia Ced O’odham members Amber Lee Ortega and Nellie Jo David were at the sacred Quitobaquito Springs, located on the U.S. side of the border in southern Arizona, when they heard the loud beeping sounds. Their response was automatic: both women jumped to their feet and ran to blockade an earthmover that had come to clear the way for the border wall. In the following audio interview, Ortega recounts this with vivid and personal detail, including a back-and-forth she had with officials who kept asking her to leave, to which she kept responding by asking them to leave. The ancestral land of the O’odham spans from Arizona to deep in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. The O’odham people, who have lived in this region for thousands of years, were not consulted when the border was drawn by the U.S. government, bisecting their land, in the mid 19th century.

In the interview, Ortega discusses the trial that followed their arrest and the surprising not-guilty verdict (she was charged with two misdemeanors) rendered in January. Throughout the discussion she weaves in the bigger picture: what the border is and what its ever-intensifying enforcement has meant for the O’odham people, and her deeply spiritual journey in resisting it from a young age (including speaking to agents in the O’odham language). Given the court ruling, Ortega’s resistance might now have set a precedent for fighting the border apparatus.

And lastly, to note, due to some audio difficulties we had to record this interview twice. So many thanks to Amber Lee Ortega for making time in her busy life as a student to do so. The audio challenges returned a little bit during the second recording, but luckily we did a backup! Please enjoy.

The Border Chronicle is excited to debut its new sonic ID today in our interview with journalist Patrick Strickland. A big abrazo to our audio editor Lilly Clark for creating this for us. Let us know what you think!

Also, please join us for a new discussion thread on smart borders this Thursday, January 27 at 11:30 PT/12:30 MT/1:30 CT/2:30 ET. We will be joined by a group of people who have done extensive work on border technology and its impacts including the Deputy Director of the Immigrant Defense Project Mizue Aizeki, Geographers Geoffrey Boyce and Samuel Chambers, and journalist J. Weston Phippen.

From now on we’ll be offering these discussion threads with invited experts 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 continue our reporting. 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!

One of our main reasons for creating The Border Chronicle is to create a space where people can have earnest, in depth discussions about the borderlands. At 12:30 pm (Mountain Time) on Thursday, Todd will kick off the discussion by posting a question, which will arrive in your email inbox. From there you are free to jump in at any time and pose a question or make a comment. Our first discussion on open borders and other alternatives was a resounding success and we look forward to this next one!

Standing Up to Armed Militias in the Borderlands: Author Patrick Strickland on Arivaca and Community Resistance

The author on his new book “The Marauders,” the rise of far-right extremism in Europe and the American borderlands and what communities can learn from Arivaca, Arizona

Today I’m talking with journalist Patrick Strickland about his new book The Marauders: Standing up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands which will be released in February through Penguin Random House. Patrick’s new book delves into the history of armed far-right militias in the small town of Arivaca on the Arizona-Mexico border. Arivaca’s history includes a tragic murder in 2009 committed by militia members against two of the town’s residents—one of them a 9-year-old girl.

A decade later, when armed militia men return in the Trump-era, the community of Arivaca forms a resistance campaign to push the militia out. And the story of how Arivaca comes together and forms this resistance is what makes The Marauders, I think, a particularly important book for border communities.

Currently the news editor at the Dallas Observer, Strickland for many years reported in the Middle East and Europe for Al Jazeera and other news outlets where he documented the rise of far-right extremist groups and anti-fascist movements. His work overseas led to his first book Alerta Alerta: Snapshots of Europe’s Anti-Fascist Struggle. His experience chronicling far-right movements in Europe, gives Strickland a uniquely global perspective when writing about the armed militias here at home, which are just one facet of a growing, global trend that threatens democracy everywhere.

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

The Border Chronicle is happy to announce that we will have a new discussion thread on smart borders on Thursday, January 27 at 11:30 PT/12:30 MT/1:30 CT/2:30 ET. We will be joined by a group of people who have done extensive work on border technology and its impacts including the Deputy Director of the Immigrant Defense Project Mizue Aizeki, Geographers Geoffrey Boyce and Samuel Chambers, and journalist J. Weston Phippen. Beginning this month, we’ll be offering these discussion threads with invited experts 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 continue our reporting. 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!

On America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants: An Audio Interview with César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández on the Politics of Immigration and the Road Ahead in 2022

The legal scholar and author of "Crimmigration Law" and "Migrating to Prison" on immigration detention reform, midterm elections, and what he’s watching for in 2022.

When Joe Biden administration took office in January 2021, there were promises of a new direction in border and immigration enforcement, and that the policies of Donald Trump would be left behind. Now a year later, it seems important to look at what has and hasn’t been done, and what’s to come.

In terms of the immigrant detention system, I thought there would be no better person to talk to than César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, author of Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants. In the following audio interview García Hernández breaks down the actual promises of the new administration, and how they have held up over the last year, including the promise that it would remove private companies from immigration detention. García Hernández discusses immigration detention as a “core component” to the Biden administration’s enforcement regime that follows the footsteps not of Trump, but rather of the previous Barack Obama administration. He also raises concerns to keep an eye on as we move into 2022, a year that will be politically defined by the mid-terms, especially the potential for the administration to drift right to appease Republican hardline pressure. Thanks for listening!

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández was born and raised in the South Texas borderlands in McAllen. He is an expert on the intersection of immigration and criminal law which was the subject of his first book Crimmigration Law, published by the American Bar Association in 2015 and updated in 2021. García Hernández is currently the Gregory William Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and a law professor at Ohio State University, and has been publishing crimmigration.com since 2009 where you can find a repository of his work.

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

Dear Friends,

It's the holiday season, the time of year when we take note of what we are grateful for, and ready ourselves for time with family and friends. We here at The Border Chronicle are grateful for you—our readers—and we thank you for your support. If you haven't yet signed up to be a paid subscriber, thank you for doing so today.

By becoming a paid subscriber you make sure that quality border journalism continues—plus you get more access to in depth reporting and analysis that only paid subscribers will receive. We’re going to start putting some content behind a paywall beginning in January.

Also, if you’re looking for a special gift for that someone in your life who loves journalism and the borderlands, consider buying them a one-year gift subscription for $60—and we'll send them a personalized note letting them know of the gift—just in time for the holidays!

The Most Beautiful Place in the World: An Audio Interview with Isabel Garcia about What the Border Could Be

Southern Arizona’s legendary human rights champion rates the Biden administration’s first year at the border and suggests the time has come for a “quiet revolution.”

With 2021 coming to a close, and one year of the Joe Biden administration under our belt, I thought there would be no better person to assess what has happened (and offer a way forward) than Isabel Garcia, the cofounder of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, based in Tucson, Arizona, a grassroots organization that has fought the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border—and promoted human and civil rights—since 1993. Isabel herself has been on the front lines of border struggles and immigrant rights since 1976, in the streets, at the border, in the courts (now retired, she was a legal defender for decades), and in the offices of policy makers.

In the interview, Isabel discusses the continuation of border militarization under Biden (including the Covid-era Title 42), the court case of a Tohono O’odham woman who blockaded the border-wall-constructing bulldozers with her body, the bipartisan nature of border fortification and the Democrats’ historic role, and activists’ decades-long attempts to stop it.

“Since 1976 we have been fighting for immigration rights,” she says. “I was a young woman. And we have fought within the Democratic Party. And we have fought the Democratic Party over and over and over again on the militarization of this border. Every single bill that comes along … it doesn’t matter what decade, it has been presented as a compromise, compromising what? Obviously compromising the border.”

Isabel says that if people understood the history of labor, immigration, and the border, the conversations today informing policy discussions would be much different. She suggests three major policy issues to tackle: U.S. foreign policy behind displacement, legalizing all noncitizens, and demilitarizing the border.

What stands out most is Isabel’s vision that in the borderlands—if we got rid of all the guns, gates, and guards—we could create one of the “most beautiful places in the world.” To do that, she suggests, there needs to be a “quiet revolution.”

We hope that Isabel’s words will inspire you to join our discussion for subscribers on Thursday, December 9, starting at 11 a.m. MT (10 PT/12 CT/1 ET). Isabel’s interview fits right in with a series of pieces we have done over the last few weeks that consider alternatives such as open and no borders, as well as demilitarization—which will be the general topic of the discussion. I will start it by posing a question that will arrive, I believe, directly into your inbox. From there I will moderate an approximately two hour discussion. You can jump in at any time! We know that in our readership there is a deep bed of knowledge, and we are excited to have this and many more good-faith conversations with you.

In this discussion, we will also be joined by the author of White Borders Reece Jones, former Border Patrol agent turned rights advocate and border activist Jenn Budd, and journalist John Washington who is currently at work on a book about open borders. Since this is the first one, it will be free, but future discussions will be for paying subscribers only.

Until July, Stephanie Leutert served in the Biden administration as a senior adviser for migration policy at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Leutert moved to Washington, DC, with the idea of helping end some of the worst, inhumane immigration policies implemented by the Trump administration, including the Migrant Protection Protocols program, often referred to as “Remain in Mexico.” The program stranded thousands of asylum seekers in tent camps and ad hoc housing in Mexican border cities, which have some of the country’s highest rates of crime and violence.

Leutert was tasked primarily with shutting down Remain in Mexico. In Nuevo Laredo—a city in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas where many asylum seekers were sent—Leutert has so far documented 150 kidnappings. Most of the kidnapped people are women and children who were held for ransom by members of organized crime after they were returned to Nuevo Laredo under the MPP program in the Trump era.

In July, Leutert resigned prior to a federal judge in Texas ordering the Biden administration to restart Remain in Mexico. The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by attorney generals from Texas and Missouri to reinstate the program.

On Friday the Department of Homeland Security issued a new memo in an attempt to once again end the MPP program, which has “endemic flaws” and has “imposed unjustifiable human costs,” “pulled resources and personnel away from other priority efforts,” and failed to “address the root causes of irregular migration,” in the words of DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Despite the new memo, the Biden administration is still bound by the judge’s ruling to restart the program until the court injunction is lifted. The rollout, according to the administration, will happen this month.

Leutert, now director of the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas in Austin, talks about what reinstating MPP means for border communities and asylum seekers. Leutert also talks about the friction within the administration between those who want to create the more “humane border” Biden promised and those more concerned about short-term political consequences. “There’s no clearly articulated vision of what the next two years is going to look like at the border,” she says.

We hope you’ll like this interview. The Border Chronicle is slowly edging into starting its own full-fledged podcast. In January, we plan to reveal more on this front. Let us know how we’re doing. Also subscribe and tell your friends! Help us grow The Border Chronicle and make it sustainable. We appreciate ya!

Correction: Leutert resigned in July, not August as previously reported.

Some books not only challenge our preconceptions but also change our worldview. One of these is Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican Culture, by the Juarense author and scholar Oswaldo Zavala. In the following audio interview, which you can also download like a podcast (see link above), he explains what he means by the provocative title of his book, first published in Spanish in 2018 (the English translation will be coming out early next year). By challenging the term cartel, he reveals an entire world behind the drug war, one that is anchored in official national security discourse.

In the interview Zavala talks about his time as a reporter in the 1990s in Ciudad Juárez and how that experience informed the argument of Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. We talk about what Zavala calls the “national security storytelling machine” and how the exaggeration and caricaturizing of drug smugglers (also reflected in the broader culture in television shows) justifies mass militarization (including, of course, the ever-increasing fortification of the U.S.-Mexico border) while masking other elements at play, such as huge extractive projects. These projects are often happening in the same places where the media focus on drug cartels in combat.

Zavala’s paradigm-shifting book also connects the waves of violence and homicides in Mexico over the last 15 years to the upsurge in this militarization, rooted in counternarcotics operations unleashed by the Felipe Calderón administration in 2006 under pressure from the United States, which provided help and eventually financing. But listen for yourself. I guarantee you won’t think about the war on drugs the same way again.

If you like what we’re doing at The Border Chronicle, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s just $6 a month or a discounted $60 for an annual subscription. Or even better, become a founding member and receive four additional subscriptions for your friends and family. This helps us make The Border Chronicle sustainable so that we can continue challenging narratives and keep the government and corporations accountable for their actions.

With today’s post, we inaugurate our first audio Q&A. The Border Chronicle is excited to launch into an audio series of in depth interviews with compelling borderlanders, like today’s guest Amy Juan of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Amy works for the International Indian Treaty Council and is a longtime cultural activist who grew up on the border in the town of Newfield on the Nation. In the 19th century, the United States imposed its southern boundary with no consultation of the O’odham people. The Nation, located in Southern Arizona, is the size of Connecticut, but traditional O’odham lands reach deep into Mexico.

Amy, who was born in the 1980s, says she comes from the last generation to experience freedom of movement before the Border Patrol occupied their land. The Border Patrol increased its presence particularly after 9/11, when it put up checkpoints on every paved road leaving the Nation, installed Forward Operating Bases (modeled after bases used in US military operations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan), and erected surveillance towers. And as Amy mentions in the interview, in 2017 she took a trip to Israel/Palestine to learn more about where these surveillance towers were first created and tested, before being installed in her own community.

We’re excited to dive into our first audio interview and the rich history of the US-Mexico borderlands in the voices of the people who live here. Also, soon Melissa and I (Todd) will have a discussion about The Border Chronicle, why we created it, and why border journalism is vital. I also hope that today’s enriching conversation with Amy outshines any of the minor technical guffaws that are all my fault. Consider any guffaw just part of the learning process.  And major thanks to Lilly Clark, our wonderful audio editor, for helping me edit and finesse the production side, and edit out the guffaws.

I’ve known Amy Juan for nearly a decade, initially because of her activism fighting Border Patrol abuses and surveillance, and since then I have come to know her as an educator and, dare I say, a visionary. Please enjoy and please consider subscribing to The Border Chronicle.