The Border Chronicle

On September 7, we had the honor of leading a discussion with Celia Concannon and Gustavo Lozano, two longtime residents and educators from ambos Nogales, who have spent years teaching music and theater in local schools. We then had a Q&A with audience members, which you’ll hear at the end. The event was held downtown in Nogales, Arizona, on Morley Avenue, at the beautiful Wittner Museum, which is brimming with amazing, whimsical paintings by Paula Wittner, who lives in nearby Patagonia.

The event kicked off an exciting new oral history project called “The Border Before,” which aims to elevate the voices and perspectives of border residents and examine how politics, migration, and border security policies have affected border communities in the last two decades.

“The Border Before” is the brainchild of the nonprofit organization Voices from the Border, with the help of the Sierra Club, The Patagonia Museum, La Linea art studio, the Pimeria Alta Museum, and We Love Nogales. A very special thanks to Maggie Urgo, India Aubry, Evan Kory, and others for organizing this event.

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Since Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, there have been alarming trends in detentions and deportations undertaken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC). For instance, the daily number of people detained has gone up 140 percent. Now there are 37,000 people locked up every day, up from 15,000 in 2021. And 90 percent of those people have been held in detention centers operated by private, for-profit companies in more than 190 prisons across the United States (a number that went up considerably during the Trump years).

According to the Snapshot of ICE Detention: Inhumane Conditions and Alarming Expansion, an NIJC briefing released last week, these facilities are notoriously abusive. Since 2021, 23 people have died in ICE custody, and there has been a 50 percent increase in solitary confinement. Now the Biden administration has requested proposals from private industry to further increase detention space.

This is why today The Border Chronicle is talking with the NIJC’s senior policy analyst, Jesse Franzblau. He conducts investigative research on rights abuses in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for the organization’s Transparency and Human Rights Project.

Franzblau and the NIJC were part of a large coalition of rights organizations, accompanied by past detainees, who converged on Washington on September 23 for a national day of action and advocacy. The coalition called for the Biden administration to halt its plans to open new detention prisons and expand deportations, to close down detention centers known for rampant abuse, and to release incarcerated people and allow them to navigate their cases outside the prison walls.

Franzblau talks about all this, and much more, on today’s podcast. He said the immigration detention and deportation apparatus “hasn’t always been this way. It was in the ’80s when it started to take shape during the Reagan administration, then during the ’90s it grew even further, and it grew directly parallel to the growth of the mass-incarceration system.” And now federal funding for ICE detention is five times what it was two decades ago.

For several years, author and journalist Jessica Pishko has investigated the power of right-wing sheriffs and their impact on democracy, elections, and border and immigration policy.

Her new book, out this month, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, is a must-read, especially during our most consequential presidential election in generations. In this podcast, Pishko talks about her new book, the right-wing constitutional sheriff’s movement, and how it was founded. And she talks about why this is important to border communities: because sheriffs in this movement have embraced far-right militia groups, white nationalists, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in his plans for mass deportations if he is elected. You can also read more of Pishko’s work at her excellent Substack, Posse Comitatus.

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Hello, cherished readers. In case you missed it, it’s The Border Chronicle’s third anniversary! On Tuesday, we sent out this post celebrating just that. To make this a sustainable endeavor, we need more paid subscribers. So if you haven’t subscribed yet, please consider doing so. We depend on you!

The other important thing that we had in Tuesday’s post was a survey that we’re hoping more people could take the time to fill out. So if you could, please let us know how we’re doing by clicking on the button below. Many thanks!

From Green Beret to Human Rights Activist on the Border: A Podcast with Mike Wilson and José Antonio Lucero

Tohono O’odham Mike Wilson’s story gives us a compelling, personal, and geopolitical glimpse into the borderlands across a history of militarization, resistance, and transformation.

How does one go from a U.S. Special Forces Green Beret in El Salvador to doing humanitarian aid work on the border? This is where Tohono O’odham Mike Wilson begins this podcast conversation, with a profound and personal story of transformation. It happened at the height of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in 1989, when Wilson accepted an invitation to eat dinner at a family’s house in Sonsonate, where he was stationed. At first Wilson took this as part of a military tactic to win the hearts and minds of the local population. But little did he know that it was his heart and mind that would be changed.

In this conversation, Wilson is joined by University of Washington political scientist José Antonio Lucero, a native of El Paso and chair of the UW’s Comparative History of Ideas Department. Lucero is the coauthor of their compelling and extraordinary new book What Side Are You On? A Tohono O’odham Life Across Borders. We conduct this audio interview in the same style of the book, with Wilson talking about his life story and the portrait it paints of the borderlands, and Lucero framing it in a broader geopolitical and historical context.

There is much to cover, since Wilson’s story starts with growing up indigenous in the segregated mining town of Ajo, Arizona in the mid-20th century, to the grave consequences of U.S. foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s, to the militarization of the border in the 1990s and 2000s, and finally to the humanitarian aid work that he still does to this day. We talk about all this, with the added bonus of hearing their thoughts on the U.S. elections and what it means for the borderlands.

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Luis Chaparro is a longtime border journalist from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. He specializes in reporting on criminal organizations, corruption, and binational affairs. He’s written for many publications in Mexico and the United States. And he’s one of the only journalists in the borderlands who consistently reports on and analyzes organized crime in Mexico. In July, I immediately went to Chaparro’s Substack newsletter, Saga, when the big news hit that Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and a son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, notorious leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, had touched down at a small airport in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, under the custody of U.S. law enforcement.

In this podcast, Chaparro and I discuss not only the El Mayo story, with its many twists and turns, but also how the notion of a “drug cartel” has become old fashioned, since these are now massive, multinational criminal enterprises, controlling markets for everything from avocados to water. We also talk about the dangers faced by reporters in Mexico, especially those who try to document the corruption of politicians and businesses who participate in criminal organizations. And Chaparro talks about the incoming Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and compares her stance on the DEA and its “kingpin strategy” in Mexico, in comparison to policies of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The latter has an extremely frosty relationship with the agency, which investigated whether he received drug money during his 2006 presidential campaign.

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It’s been a while, Border Chronicle readers and listeners. Since we took our annual July break, the U.S. political landscape has shifted considerably. At least partly because of this, we will take a ride here with historian Alexander Aviña through the electoral landscape, not only the forthcoming U.S. elections post-Trump assassination attempt and Kamala Harris candidacy, but the historic election of Claudia Sheinbaum in June, Mexico’s first female president and a climate scientist to boot. Aviña is a professor at Arizona State University, where he specializes in Mexico’s social and political history. His current research focuses on the political economy of drug wars and state violence in Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. And he has written a book titled Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford University Press, 2014).

In the conversation, we hit on a lot of points, on Kamala Harris’s positions, particularly on the border, the root causes of migration, and what they are (including, in Aviña’s analysis, the historic context of U.S. military and economic violence, especially in Central America).

And we talk about what will happen in Mexico under a Sheinbaum administration, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s mixed record, especially on border and immigration enforcement, and what this means going forward for the relationship between the United States and Mexico.

And finally, Aviña tells us where he finds optimism: in the transborder communities of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The hope is to find alternatives to what Aviña calls the Children of Men scenario, referring to the 2006 film that imagines a dystopic future broiled in climate change, refugees, and intense border surveillance (among other things). You’ll have to listen to see what Aviña means by this, but maybe these alternatives won’t be found in the White House or Los Pinos.

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In her classic utopian science fiction novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.” Author Silky Shah has framed an entire book around that quote, and Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition couldn’t have come at a better time. As the narratives about border and immigration continue to deteriorate with the election rhetoric, especially as Joe Biden and Donald Trump face off in a debate tonight, the longtime director of the Detention Watch Network talks withThe Border Chronicle about defying this inhumane status quo.

Here, she shares her in-depth and historical knowledge about how immigration enforcement, the prison-industrial complex, and deportations function and intersect with the criminal justice system. And she offers sharp insight into the current moment, talking about the simultaneous gutting of the asylum system and the ramping up of border enforcement, and the good immigrant–versus–bad immigrant narrative that shows up so often in campaign talking points.

But don’t miss the last part, when Shah offers a new framework beyond these stale talking points, and focuses on creating a world where every person can thrive. As Le Guin writes in The Dispossessed, “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

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In June, President Biden issued an executive order restricting asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. The new restriction was supported by many prominent newspaper columnists—few of whom offered alternative solutions or examined the order’s impact on human rights, says Adam Isacson, a longtime expert on Latin America and U.S. immigration policy. “The Biden administration made a choice to restrict asylum at the border,” he says, “instead of adding asylum judges and officers to fix the asylum system.”

At the very least, Isacson says, journalists such as the New York Times’ Nikolas Kristof should acknowledge policy alternatives that would preserve protections for asylum seekers. “None of these columns talks about making the U.S. asylum system viable, and faster, adjusting it to a new era of historic worldwide migration. They don’t even mention it as an option to be discarded,” Isacson wrote recently.

In this podcast, we discuss solutions to fix the asylum system, and Isacson shares insights from a recent trip to Colombia and the impact that organized crime has on migration routes, including the Darién Gap. We also talk about migration at the border as extreme summer temperatures take hold.

Isacson directs the Defense Oversight Program for the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America, in Washington, DC. He also contributes to WOLA’s Migration and Border Security program, which tracks the impact that policies have on migrants’ human rights, including their access to asylum.

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The stakes couldn’t be higher. We believe that now, more than ever, it’s vital to be on the ground reporting, analyzing, and challenging the disinformation being spread by antidemocratic forces.

But it’s tough these days for journalism. Publications of all sizes are closing around the country in the midst of one of the most consequential elections in history.

The Border Chronicle began three years ago this September with a vision to cut through that chaos, but we can’t do it without your help.

Migration, humanitarian work, and the border region are being used by authoritarians to fearmonger and intimidate Americans into voting away their freedoms in this next election.

As we near our publication’s three-year anniversary and celebrate the people and communities whose stories we’ve had the privilege of sharing, we’re asking you to help us reach The Border Chronicle’s original funding goal.

More than 900 of our readers have already committed to the paid subscriptions that have made these stories possible so far. We need 2,000 members of our community in total, including these 900, to make it possible for Todd and I to do this work full time and to take The Border Chronicle to a level above what it is today.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to The Border Chronicle. A subscription is just $6 a month or $60 a year.

We also have a founding member tier for $150, which comes with two additional paid subscriptions for friends and family and a very stylish Border Chronicle tote bag sewn by the women’s cooperative DouglaPrieta Works in Agua Prieta, Sonora (available in black or beige).

We’re proud of our work and we hope you’ll continue reading about the communities in the big and beautiful U.S.-Mexico border region and staying informed. Thanks for watching and supporting The Border Chronicle!

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Last week I attended the 17th annual Border Security Expo in El Paso, Texas, which focused on border enforcement technology. I mention this because I can’t think of a better person to talk to about this than anthropologist and lawyer Petra Molnar, whose new book, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, is hot off the presses. I’ve been awaiting this book for years, and I was fortunate enough to interview Molnar for this podcast while she was in Tucson for a book event.

It is essential to know about border technology and its evolution, and how it affects people crossing borders and people living in borderlands around the world. Molnar, on the leading edge of reporting and analysis on this issue, helps us understand how border tech connects to larger political and economic power structures, and how it is not a humane alternative to a wall.

She splits her time across the hemispheres, in North America and Europe, which brings a global perspective to the book, and underscores the omnipresence of surveillance. And this is not Molnar’s first appearance at The Border Chronicle, check out her article on robotic dogs from 2022. You should also see her work at the Migration Tech Monitor and the Refugee Law Lab.

After we recorded the podcast, we took a trip to the border in Nogales. Lengthwise across the bollards was a narrow metal track that looked exactly like the encasement for a sensor system that I saw displayed by a company at the Border Security Expo. It was the first time I had seen this addition to the wall. Indeed, the walls do have eyes.

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