The Border Chronicle

It’s tough enough to get Americans to realize that if Donald Trump wins in November, it would most likely mean the end of representative democracy in the United States. Even tougher, however, is to make Americans aware that even if Trump doesn’t win, many authoritarian policy changes are already being rolled out in states like Texas and Alabama. So says Heidi Beirich, an expert on far-right movements in the United States and Europe. Leading the charge, Beirich says, is the Heritage Foundation, a longtime conservative think tank that has steered to the extreme right in recent years. In April 2022, the foundation and a coalition of think tanks and organizations released a 900-plus page blueprint, called Project 2025, for radically restructuring the U.S. government by integrating it with Christian nationalism. Beirich, cofounder of the Global Project against Hate and Extremism, discusses Project 2025 and the Far Right’s efforts to convert the United States into an authoritarian, Christian nationalist country. Beirich also discusses how the antidemocratic movement in the United States mirrors other movements globally, which are on the rise and target immigrants, people of color, women, and LGBTQ communities. “We are very close to losing our system of government,” she warns.

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A defining issue of this century will be people on the move and where they settle. Wealthier countries like the U.S. are responding by walling themselves off from the rest of the world and investing in deterrence and detention, which only contributes to more deaths and misery while providing no long-term solutions.

There must be a better way. This was John Washington’s thought as he launched his latest book project, The Case for Open Borders, which takes a deep dive into more humane responses to global migration and examines the history of borders and nation-states, which are relatively recent in human history. Washington, based in Tucson, Arizona, is a longtime border journalist and staffer at the nonprofit journalism outlet AZ Luminaria. He is also the author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Beyond.

When it comes to border and migration policies, Washington notes, “People are hungry for ideas on what we could push for—other than a defensive posture. … But what do we want? How do we have a more just and open world?”

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There is a scene in the short documentary Shura in which octogenarian Shura Wallin is standing at the U.S.-Mexico border as people cross under a string of barbed wire. She hands each person a granola bar. You can hear the voice of someone else, off camera, as they hand out bottles of water. They are part of the humanitarian aid group the Samaritans. The scene stands out for many reasons—the cinematography is something else (a slow-moving camera holds and intimately contemplates the scene) and, above all, this is an act of welcome through what is otherwise an infrastructure of exclusion.

In the following interview, The Border Chronicle talks to Shura and David Damian Figueroa, who directed the film alongside Kayvon Derak Shanian. When you are on the border, Figueroa says, “the Border Patrol has machine guns, the border security for the construction company has machine guns, sometimes the vigilantes are out there and they have machine guns, and also right across the wall or the fence, or whatever you want to call it, is the cartel, and they are packing machine guns as well. The Samaritans are out there doing the work, and they have water and they have food.”

The documentary, he says, is “a love letter to the Samaritans.”

Our interview follows the same spirit. Both David and Shura recall how they first met, talk about the importance of humanitarian aid and the importance of kindness, among many other things.

Shura, besides being a humanitarian aid volunteer (30 hours a week!), is also a black belt in karate and a Buddhist Jew. She is originally from Illinois but has been in southern Arizona since 2001. The documentary begins with Shura quoting the Dalai Lama: “Kindness is my religion.” David is an artist, filmmaker, author, activist, photographer, and humanitarian aid volunteer. He grew up in a family of farmworkers in southern Arizona and has been involved with social justice and civil rights his entire life.

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The U.S.-Mexico border is the most talked about region in this year’s presidential election. So far, most of the media coverage is about which candidate scored the most political points during his appearance in a border community, and who is the toughest on border security. But what does real security look like from the perspective of a border community? If the Rio Grande dries up because of climate change and overuse, what good is a 30-foot wall, especially when, as in the case of El Paso, much of your access to the river is south of that wall?

In this podcast, Todd and Melissa get into real border issues that remain unaddressed in this year’s presidential election. And they talk about some of the biggest stories at the U.S.-Mexico border—including a new investigation, Smoke and Lies, which Melissa worked on with news outlets Lighthouse Reports, La Verdad in Ciudad Juárez, and El Paso Matters in Texas, as well as Todd’s reporting on climate change and water scarcity in the borderlands. We hope you’ll give it a listen and leave a comment on what you think are the most pressing issues facing the borderlands.

*Also, become a founding member today for $150 (which comes with two additional paid subscriptions) and you’ll get a limited edition Border Chronicle tote bag. They’re going fast! (They also come in black).

Support independent journalism from the U.S.-Mexico border. Become a paid subscriber today for just $6 a month or $60 a year.

I was so happy to get a chance to talk with writer, author, and journalist Lauren Markham about her insightful and page-turning new book A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. In this conversation we take a journey through the layers of this book starting with a deadly 2020 fire at the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos in Greece, we talk about borders and bordering throughout the world, maps, getting lost (both psychically and physically, as Lauren puts it), mythology and confronting myths, the layers of history both personal and global, journalism, and, sweetly, how oracles can be medicine. As Lauren told me in the interview, “What we have created is a ruinous map for a ruinous future.” Please read A Map of Future Ruins, you won’t regret it.

Lauren Markham has also written the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Her writing and journalism can be found in many places including The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine.

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

In January, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity confirmed an exciting discovery near the Arizona-Mexico border: the first sighting of a jaguar never previously identified in Arizona. Russ McSpadden, a Southwest conservation advocate at the center, has been tracking the jaguar population in the borderlands for several years.

The rare and elusive creatures once lived throughout the American Southwest. But they’ve nearly disappeared over the past 150 years due to habitat loss and government programs to protect the livestock industry.

For decades, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity has worked to protect jaguars, successfully lobbying for them to be listed in 1997 as an endangered species. And in December 2022 the center petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to reintroduce jaguars to New Mexico and designate more critical habitat in New Mexico and Arizona.

In this Border Chronicle podcast, McSpadden discusses this exciting new discovery and the work that the center and others are doing to bring back the endangered jaguar population in the United States.

Well, this week has been a doozy on the U.S.-Mexico border. There is the continued Texas standoff between the federal government and Operation Lonestar; the “Take Back the Border” convoy (also known as “God’s army”) and their political backers annoying and intimidating border communities such as in Eagle Pass; the failed impeachment of Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; and a shot-down so-called border bill, to name a few things. If you were wondering if border theater was going to kick in to overdrive this election year, you were correct. Border theater’s problem, of course, is that it tends to be myopic, based on distorted narratives, and ahistorical.

So often the result of this theater is a reductive conversation in the media: While some aspects of the border receive hyper attention, others—such as the massive border surveillance apparatus and its corporate sponsors—do not. Luckily, today we are joined by the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Resistance Lab, Mizue Aizeki, to help us see the bigger picture. The Surveillance Resistance Lab is a think and act tank that builds research, strategy, campaigns, and networks of collaboration to scale up people’s ability to take on the threat of surveillance. Mizue is also coeditor of the book Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (out this month from Haymarket Books), as well as coauthor of many reports, such as The Everywhere Border: Digital Migration Control Infrastructure in the Americas and Smart Borders or a Humane World? Mizue mentions all these works in our conversation—as we look at the border, its digitization, its externalization and expansion, and omnipresence in an election year that by all indications will put the border front and center.

Throughout the conversation, Mizue flips the border theater narratives on their head. She asks, “What if we acknowledge that borders are a form of state violence that enforce global inequality and unequal access to life? … What if the rules people are being asked to follow are fundamentally unjust, exclusionary, and punitive? … Just like most reasonable people wouldn’t see Jim Crow or apartheid as neutral legal regimes, we have to start seeing the U.S. immigration regime in the same way.”

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The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with s**t.

—Steve Bannon, February 2018.

Folks, it’s hard to watch the national media take the bait with Texas governor Greg Abbott’s grandstanding on the border in the town of Eagle Pass.

Since 2020, MAGA Republicans have been rolling out a concerted messaging campaign around an invasion at the border, backed by the MAGA media ecosystem, which is in overdrive this election season as the GOP implodes.

In December 2022, there was a similar showdown at the Arizona border with former Republican governor Doug Ducey, who dumped a three-mile junkyard wall of shipping containers in the middle of a federally protected forest. Political sabers were rattled, and a fantastical lawsuit filed by Ducey claiming an invasion at the border and that the federally owned “Roosevelt Reservation” in fact belonged to Arizona. For weeks, headlines were dominated by rhetorical gibes over whether federal officers with U.S. Fish and Wildlife would stop Ducey’s illegal junkyard wall.

But there were no dueling pistols at the hokey corral. Residents and activists occupied the construction site, slowing the junkyard wall’s advancement. The courts sent Ducey and his lawsuit packing. A lame-duck governor, with Democrat Katie Hobbs taking office in January, Ducey finally agreed to remove the shipping containers. Hobbs was left with the cleanup and costs, which were more than $200 million for Arizona taxpayers.

Honestly, Ducey’s great wall of junk just didn’t make good visuals for the MAGA-media sphere. Not like Abbott’s multibillion-dollar police and military apparatus at the border under Operation Lone Star, which comes with uniforms, miles of razor wire, and military equipment. Abbott’s Lone Star is the perfect meme-able backdrop for the MAGA invasion fever dream, perpetrated by Bannon and other former Trump cabinet members, and underwritten by the same millionaires and billionaires who are supporting Trump’s 2024 candidacy.

It’s time to flush the toilet on Bannon and his crew.

This all leads me to the question: How did right-wing media hijack the narrative around the U.S.-Mexico border? You’ve probably heard the terms “military age men,” “invasion,” and “Biden’s open borders” bandied about in the media and among congressional leaders. These deliberately dehumanizing terms have shaped the way Americans view the U.S.-Mexico border as the 2024 election season unfolds. In a 2022 poll, NPR found that more than half of Americans believe there’s an invasion at the southern border. The poll found that 76 percent of those who identified as Republican believed the narrative. NPR found that these beliefs hinged on party affiliation and on whether a person watched right-wing media outlets like Fox News.

In his research, AJ Bauer focuses on right-wing media and conservative movements in the United States. We talk about mutual aid movements in New York and Chicago and the trajectory of right-wing media from fringe to mainstream and its domination by the MAGA movement. Bauer, an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama, holds a PhD in American studies from New York University and is coeditor of News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2019). In addition to academic venues, Bauer has written for The Texas Observer, the Guardian, TV Guide, Politico Magazine, and Bloomberg. He’s currently writing a book about the history of conservative press criticism in the United States, called Making the Liberal Media.

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So, dear listeners, it is time to continue preparing ourselves for 2024 (check out Melissa’s Tuesday piece). As we know, during an election year the border tends to be a place where distorted narratives flourish on the fertile ground of misinformation, and we can expect plenty of that this year, as border expert Erika Pinheiro tells us in this episode. Some of you certainly remember Erika’s first appearance on The Border Chronicle podcast in 2022, where she offered her insight on the chilling impacts of surveillance. She is the executive director of Al Otro Lado, an organization that provides legal and humanitarian assistance to refugees, migrants, and deportees.

In this interview, she offers an on-the-ground perspective from the California-Mexico border, assessing both 2023 border trends while pondering and prophesizing about what we might expect in 2024.

Erika stresses that we have to look at “how the border is being framed,” which lately has been “this narrative of border chaos and overwhelm.” This narrative comes, she says, while enforcement agencies have more resources than ever before and while fewer people crossed the border in 2023. Yet “this narrative of overwhelm is not challenged by the media by and large.” She wants that to change, as you’ll see here, and offers specific examples of what we can do.

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The holiday season abounds with stories of couples and loved ones going great distances to be together, often with great feelings of love and romance. But what happens when there is a global border apparatus in the way?

Well, today we have the perfect person to talk to about that: author, writer, and journalist Anna Lekas Miller. In this podcast, she explains how people attempt to manage this daunting circumstance, sometimes against all odds. She starts the conversation talking about her own romance and how that inspired her new book, Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World. She tells us about how she fell in love with Syrian journalist Salem Rizk, now her husband, in Istanbul. Just as their romance was getting started, the Turkish government began a crackdown on both Syrians and journalists, of which Salem was both. Authorities kicked him out of the country. As Anna puts it, they went from “fun and flirty” to “how are we going to be together?”

This forced Anna to think about other people across the world who are in a similar situation: in love but divided by borderlines. Here, she gives us a taste of the stories she details in the book, and while doing that she talks about passports, statelessness, Gaza, and the strange plot twist with her own attempts to get papers with Salem.

At the end, Anna offers a solution. One that, rest assured, would be a wonderful holiday gift for so many people:

“If we had this political imagination to decriminalize borders the way that something like marijuana has been decriminalized in many places in the United States, I think that could change a lot of people’s lives for the better.”

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