The Border Chronicle

On March 12, Todd and Melissa were thrilled to moderate a panel with the distinguished authors: Luis Alberto Urrea and Gary Nabhan. Urrea has written several novels, including The Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America (about his great-aunt Teresita Urrea, known as the Saint of Cabora), as well as the Pulitzer Prize–nominated nonfiction book The Devil’s Highway. Nabhan, an ethnobotanist, agricultural ecologist, and Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, is one of the premier writers about the desert borderlands. He spoke about his latest book, Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance.

Both Urrea and Nabhan offered fascinating insights into their writing and research, and the long history of cultural resistance in the borderlands. Their talk was followed by a Q&A with the audience.

The event was part of the “Peek Behind the Curtain” borderlands speaking series created by Voices from the Border and Sierra Club Borderlands which The Border Chronicle has moderated since 2022. At the beginning of this podcast, you’ll hear Maggie Urgo with Voices from the Border making a case to the audience for supporting The Border Chronicle and local border journalism. This event was also a fundraiser for the Patagonia-based nonprofits Voices from the Border and the Patagonia Creative Arts Center.

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Ask an Expert: Austin Kocher

As promised, immigration expert Austin Kocher has answers for some of your most confounding immigration questions. We sent Austin your questions and he chose three of them to answer. We also tried something fun by doing this via video. Thanks so much to our readers who sent in your questions. Every one of them was great! And thanks Austin for taking the time to share your knowledge with us.

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This Week in The Border Chronicle:

More News from the Border:

Hundreds of troops could be headed to Presidio County, but officials lack firm details The Big Bend Sentinel

Trump team makes plans for military to hold migrants at border The Washington Post

A Deadly Passage Texas Monthly

Video: Bishop Michael Hunn Responds to Department of Homeland Security: Defending Our Border Ministry

“A mi país ya no regreso”: Juárez, de paso de migrantes a ciudad de refugio La Verdad Juarez

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David Bier, director of immigration studies for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, goes in depth on what really happened to the U.S. immigration system during President Trump’s first administration and President Biden’s administration. In his January testimony before Congress, Bier noted that more than 30 times the courts found that Trump was enacting immigration policies illegally and noted that the “assault on the rule of law was so relentless that many changes were not stopped.” Biden led the immigration system out of an “unprecedented calamity,” Bier said, but often moved too slowly and with lack of focus on reforms. And despite being labeled “Biden open borders” by Trump and his MAGA allies, Biden vastly expanded deportations and border-detention capacity, said Bier, illustrating that the detention and deportation system is a bipartisan project that Trump is now transforming into a massive deportation machine.

Bier, a former senior policy adviser for a Republican congressional member, also talks about what it’s like in Congress right now, and how the unfettered push to build Trump’s mass deportation machine will lead to unbridled corruption. “Republicans still think this [mass deportations] is a winning issue and that they should lean into the messaging about an invasion … And Democrats are running from this issue still. … It’s incredible how Democrats have shrunk from this moment,” Bier said.

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With Donald Trump, one thing has been constant since he announced his first campaign in 2016: the narrative that migrants are criminals. He says it with confidence and bluster, and he says it every day. But he goes beyond this, according to migration scholar César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández. Not only are migrants criminals, they are an “existential threat”—a threat to the fabric of life, to the entire country, to the very existence of the nation-state. What better way is there to justify and rev up an enforcement regime that could round up and expel millions of people?

According to García Hernández, however, Trump’s narrative didn’t appear out of thin air. “Trump is at the extreme edge of a decades-long campaign by elected officials, by intellectuals, by pundits to embrace this notion of migrant criminality, of dangerousness,” he says. Associating migrants with criminality or other unsavory traits, indeed, has been a longtime U.S. pastime. Look at Ronald Reagan, García Hernández points out, who called Central American migrants (many from Nicaragua) the “leading edge of the Soviet invasion.” Or George H. W. Bush, who described Haitians as “contagions.” Or Bill Clinton and his allies “going on and on about super predators,” and, subsequently, “the idea that young people coming from Latin America specifically … [will] engage in criminal activity.”

Perhaps there is no better person to assess the moment we are in than García Hernández, whose book Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the Criminal Alien (New Press, 2024), is a deep dive into, and rebuttal to, this narrative that Trump has come to master. His previous book, Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants (New Press, 2019), also masterfully deals with issues of utmost importance to this moment. As does his first book, Crimmigration Law (ABA, 2015). García Hernández is the Gregory H. Williams chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

In the podcast, García Hernández not only assesses Trump’s foundations but also examines the first three weeks of his new term in office. He also speculates on where we might be headed, including what resistance there might be.

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In 2021 Texas governor Greg Abbott created Operation Lone Star, a state-funded system for immigration enforcement and detention. At a cost of more than $11 billion, the system has deployed thousands of National Guard soldiers and state police to the Texas-Mexico border. These deployments have become the backdrop for the MAGA movement’s “invasion” messaging, and they helped Trump regain the White House. Now Trump is saying he will make Operation Lone Star a model for his national immigration policy.

Texas-based civil rights advocate Bob Libal, an U.S. consultant for the international nonprofit Human Rights Watch, has been monitoring Operation Lone Star since it began. In this podcast, Libal explains in depth what Operation Lone Star is and its many impacts on Texas and its border communities. “Every aspect of this program is utilized for maximum publicity and to gin up anti-immigrant sentiment that is increasingly radical,” Libal says. He also talks about the incredible resiliency of border communities and how they have fought back against the threats to their civil and human rights. “I think the rest of the country can learn from Texas border communities,” Libal says.

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Well, here we are at the beginning of 2025, and it’s time to continue preparing ourselves for what’s to come (I hope you all saw Melissa’s Tuesday report on the Border Chronicle Forecast for 2025). As we know, 2025 has all the makings of a historic year, with a new president taking office and many threats already on the horizon. Luckily, we have with us border expert Erika Pinheiro to break it all down. You probably remember that exactly one year ago Pinheiro—who is the director of the organization Al Otro Lado, which provides legal assistance and humanitarian aid in the borderlands—joined us to do the exact same thing. Then, she warned us that the narrative of “overwhelm” and “border chaos” would dominate the election year.

And now she joins us again (actually her third time; her first in 2022 was on the impact of surveillance). This time, she’s bringing an on-the-ground and insightful analysis about the first year of Trump and an assessment of Joe Biden’s last years in office. We discuss the exiting president’s border legacy, Trump’s plans for mass deportation, and the invasion narrative, which has invaded political and media discourse. Pinheiro makes the point that, far from the “open borders” narrative that droned on for four long years, “the Biden administration really teed up with infrastructure and a set of policies that will make the second Trump administration exponentially worse than the first.” She also talks about the potential for opposition, and its possible pitfalls, and she offers suggestions on how people can respond. In other words, Pinheiro offers a perspective simply not found anywhere else.

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On Sunday, The Washington Post, El Universal in Mexico, and Lighthouse Reports published “Death and Deterrence in the Rio Grande,” a yearlong investigation on drowning deaths of asylum seekers. As the U.S.-Mexico investigations editor for Lighthouse Reports, I helped collect the data, did reporting, and coordinated the binational investigation.

We wanted to examine how border militarization, including Texas’ Operation Lone Star, contributes to the growing number of drowning deaths in the Rio Grande/Río Bravo.

As a longtime border reporter, I had never encountered a comprehensive, binational investigation of this issue, so a year ago, we set out to document what was happening, especially in the Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras corridor on the Rio Grande, which has seen the highest number of drownings.

The investigation began November 15, 2023, when I and my colleagues Daniel Howden, director at Lighthouse Reports, and Justin Hamel, an independent photojournalist, set out from the boat ramp at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass. Leading us down the river was Jessie Fuentes, owner of Epi’s Canoes and Kayaks. We set out at sunrise as fog drifted across the river, lending it a ghostly, ethereal ambience. But we were soon met with a cold, hard reality: desperate families stranded on islands in the middle of the river. We came across a family of four, the father with a toddler on his shoulders, standing in the freezing water. Soldiers in Texas yelled at them to go back to Mexico. During our investigation, we found that in 2023, one out of every 10 people who died in the river was a child. Our trip down the river was a heartrending experience, one I’ll never forget.

In this special Backlight & Border Chronicle podcast, I discuss our investigation’s findings with my Lighthouse colleagues Beatriz Ramahlo da Silva and Tessa Pang. And please check out the full investigation published by our media partners The Washington Post and El Universal. You can also read about how we undertook the lengthy data collection and analysis for this project at Lighthouse Reports.

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In an episode that you’ve surely been waiting for, Melissa and Todd discuss what Trump’s election might mean for the border. This includes addressing the question, What is a “border czar”? The Donald Trump campaign seemed to know, spending the last several months claiming (falsely) that Kamala Harris had held this somewhat imaginary position under Joe Biden. And, then, after the election, it took Trump only a few days to appoint his own border czar, former ICE commissioner Thomas Homan, who might be the first such czar since Alan Bersin in the late 1990s. Melissa talks about Homan’s background and his central role in a border disinformation network—known as Border911—that profits off the migrant “invasion” narrative. She even coins a new term: the MAGA ego system.

This is but one point of many discussed in this podcast episode. Melissa and Todd talk about Trump’s mass-deportation promise and the Democrats’ uninspiring ironfisted campaign on the border. Todd talks about what it was like to cover Election Day from the Mexican side of the border. And Melissa analyzes the election results in Arizona. As always, there is a bit of a media critique and a recommendation on where to look for hope and solutions: the border communities themselves.

Please feel free to use the comment section as a discussion forum for any of your own concerns, thoughts, or observations about the election and what’s to come. We appreciate the collective knowledge and wisdom of our subscribers. Also, we wanted to let you know that we will be pausing for a week for the Thanksgiving holiday. We are grateful to have you here with us.

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As the late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano put it in his book Upside Down: A Primer for a Looking Glass World, the terminology used in mainstream political discourse often describes precisely the opposite of reality. Cut-throat capitalism is free trade. Violence is law and order. Extraction of natural wealth from communities is increasing revenue.

So where does “border security” fit in to this? Part of the answer is that borders do not produce security but subordination. This point has been made for two decades now by sociologist Nandita Sharma (see the essay “Why No Borders?,” which she cowrote with Bridget Anderson and Cynthia Wright). The point of borders is not to keep people out but to keep them in line. Borders are foundational to a global system fraught with injustice.

The struggle for no borders, Sharma explains, is a practical political project.

Sharma is the author of two books, Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of “Migrant Workers” in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020). She teaches at the University of Hawai‘i.

During our conversation, I wondered aloud whether “no borders” is still a practical political project, now that Donald Trump will take office for a second term. She responded without hesitation, “It’s not only a viable step, it’s the only step.”

As we concluded, we discussed the provocative quote from Italian thinker, philosopher, and Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying. The new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

Those monsters are easy to identify with the incoming Trump administration and the nation-state it represents, along with increasing climate catastrophe. “This is the moment of solidarity,” Sharma said. “This is the moment for mutual support.” Indeed, she hinted, the moment has arrived to not only imagine but also to work for another possible world.

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It’s democracy vs. fascism in the most consequential election of our lifetime. We talk about its implications for border communities. Also, Todd talks about his latest reporting from Mexico, where migrants are continually being sent back to the country’s southern border, creating a cycle of futility and suffering. Melissa recalls reporting on Trump’s Operation Faithful Patriot, in which Trump set up military camps at the U.S. southern border before the 2018 midterm election. He also used special Border Patrol teams to kidnap protesters in Portland, Oregon. If he’s elected, it will be much worse this time.

We also discuss Kamala Harris’s tough stance on border security and the bipartisan bill rejected by Trump, and the broader implications of this for human rights and migration. And we get into misconceptions about “open borders,” and we talk about the role of “robodogs” and other technology in border enforcement. And much more.

Give it a listen and leave a comment. How are you feeling leading up to November 5?

Also, during the podcast, neither Todd nor Melissa could remember the name of a great book on immigration policy under the Trump administration  (it’s been that kind of a month): it’s Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration, by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear. It’s chock-full of details about what went down inside the administration during that chaotic era. And here’s a post featuring the infamous robodogs from March, when Todd crashed the annual Border Security expo in El Paso, Texas, even though the expo banned journalists.

And one last thing—don’t forget to vote. Our democracy depends on it!

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