Longtime organizer and former Pima County Legal Defender Isabel Garcia starts the conversation off with an assessment of U.S. public knowledge of important historic issues such as the genocide of Indigenous people, slavery, labor, and immigration.
“What do people,” she asks, “know about immigration in this country?” This is the question that guides our conversation that spans decades, even centuries, but ultimately ends up assessing the current state of things under Donald Trump.
“What we allow them to do on the border,” she warns, ”is what they will do to you.”
Isabel is the co-chair of the organization Coalición de Derechos Humanos, and has been on the frontlines of border and immigrant rights since the 1970s. In this conversation, filled with story-telling and biting analysis, Isabel tells listeners how she debated John McCain in the 1990s and schooled Bernie Sanders at the border during his first presidential run.
She also challenges us to “imagine what we can be,” and talks about the coalition they are forming called Defensa y Resistencia, which has a Stop the Kidnapping Campaign that directly confronts current ICE tactics. “We are openly going to protect our neighbors.” Isabel challenges listeners to do just that, by speaking up and plugging in.
How did the first Trump administration crack down on providing water and aid for migrants? And what insights we can gain from that now?
In 2019 geographer and humanitarian aid volunteer Scott Warren faced 20 years in prison for doing humanitarian work on the border. After two long trials, a jury acquitted him in November of two felony charges of harboring and one count of conspiracy to harbor. Here, Warren reflects on what happened, giving a detailed account of how he became a humanitarian aid volunteer, what led to his arrest by the Border Patrol, the trial itself, and what he is doing now.
The trial took place during the first Trump administration. Now Warren can offer a grounded perspective on the current situation at the border. We grapple with the question of how to effect real change when, as Warren puts it, “the popular-level consensus in the U.S. seems to be militarize and militarize and militarize no matter what.”
At the same time, he says, the border “is a place that does need peace and healing from the layers and layers of trauma stacked on top of the place, wove into it, and the dispossession of people.”
What can we do?
For the next year Warren will be pondering just that in a collaborative speaking and discussion series. If you are interested in having him come to your university, organization, or community group, contact him at scottdw1@gmail.com.
Filmmaker Alex Rivera debuted Sleep Dealer, his groundbreaking border science fiction movie, at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. The film won several awards but did not receive the wide commercial release it deserved. Over the years, Sleep Dealer has been rereleased on digital platforms and become a cult classic.
The Border Chronicle is proud to announce that on October 15, viewers will have the opportunity to see Sleep Dealer on the big screen at the Fox Theater in Tucson as part of the Cinematic Borderlands Film and Conversation Series, presented by the Fox Theater, Cinema Tucsón, Cinema Tropical, Borderlands Cinematic Arts, The Border Chronicle, and other community partners.
In this podcast, Melissa del Bosque speaks with Rivera about what inspired him to make Sleep Dealer and about collaborating with his life and creative partner, Cristina Ibarra. Both were awarded MacArthur Foundation grants, often referred to as “genius grants,” in 2021. The two filmmakers created the innovative half-documentary/half-scripted film The Infiltrators in 2019 and founded Borderlands Cinematic Arts, a filmmaking lab based in Los Angeles that is part of Arizona State University’s Sidney Poitier New American Film School, where Rivera is also an associate professor. The lab focuses on creating authentic and nuanced cinematic works about the borderlands.
Sleep Dealer touches on many social and political issues, including the border security industrial complex, migration, and social and economic inequality. Check it out on the big screen on October 15 at 7 p.m., followed by an audience Q&A moderated by The Border Chronicle’s Melissa del Bosque.
Also, don’t miss Ibarra’s wonderful documentary Las Marthas, about Laredo’s Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball celebration, screening on October 8 at 7 p.m. as part of the Cinematic Borderlands Film and Conversation Series. Last, don’t miss Take It Away, a documentary about the legendary Tejano music host Johnny Canales, screening on October 22 at 7 p.m.
You can buy tickets and learn more about the films here.
Watch a short film on the making of Sleep Dealer here
The authors break down the billions generated by private immigration detention companies. An industry, they show, that is based on a false narrative.
Who profits from immigrant detention, and how is the money made? Geographers Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon have investigated these questions for 10 years, producing one of the most thorough examinations of the industry. In today’s podcast, we discuss their findings in the new book Immigration Detention Inc: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants.
This book comes at a crucial time as the Trump administration attempts to carry out a mass deportation plan that will be financed by an estimated $45 billion budget, via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
We discuss all of this: the billions made not only by major prison companies like Geo Group and CoreCivic but also by subcontracted services such as food, medical care, and commissary. The authors highlight that substandard food and health services are part of the business model. We discuss the financial dependencies that local governments have developed through their revenue-sharing agreements with ICE. Additionally, we examine the rapid growth of the detention industry—from 7,000 people in the early 1990s to 60,000 today—and how this growth has accelerated in the last eight months under Trump.
Finally, the authors suggest solutions. “Chip away that detention is effective or necessary … this is really a false narrative,” Hiemstra says, and “peel away what makes detention profitable, and peel away the ability to make money off it.”
Hiemstra is also the author of Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Enforcement Regime. Conlon and Hiemstra also coedited the book Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention.
Jesse Franzblau is a senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center, a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides legal services to immigrants and advocates for their rights.
Franzblau spent years documenting rights abuses in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for the organization’s Transparency and Human Rights Project. He now advocates for better immigration policies in Congress.
In this podcast, Franzblau explains how the U.S. became home to the world’s largest immigrant detention system, and how it was built by both Republicans and Democrats. From the beginning, private prison corporations such as CoreCivic and the Geo Group built immigration detention, which has become its own booming industry, especially now that Trump’s massive spending bill, passed on July 4, will pour billions into the detention and deportation system over the next four years. In addition to defining the problem, Franzblau shares how the for-profit immigrant detention economy could be dismantled.
For more context:
A guide for members of congress visiting detention facilities: https://immigrantjustice.org/press-release/ice-detention-oversight-toolkit-release/
An explainer on the impact of HR1 funding: https://immigrantjustice.org/research/explainer-how-congress-codified-hateful-and-extreme-anti-immigrant-policies-by-passing-trumps-budget-bill/
Support independent journalism with context and analysis. Become a paid subscriber today at theborderchronicle.com for just $6 a month or $60 a year.
A discussion about security as U.S. health care gets cut to fund the most gargantuan border enforcement bill ever passed. How do we create a counterforce to this?
Why is it that when the word “security” is uttered, all thought and analysis go out the window? This is especially the case when people talk about “border security.” In this podcast, however, Border Chronicle founders Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller put on their thinking caps, analyzing the first seven months of the Trump administration. They crack open the word “security” and examine its interior, hoping to better understand it and find a way out of our predicament.
The discussion was spurred by the passage of the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which designates $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement over the next four years (also see how Melissa put this bill into a deeper historic context last week). This enforcement will be funded, in part, by significant cuts to U.S. health care, including the possible cancellation of insurance coverage for 12 million people.
Does security mean more walls, more technology, more armed agents, and a border that resembles a military base? Or, as Melissa and Todd discuss in the podcast, could peacemaking play an important role in creating real security for everyone? Peacemaking is not just about ending conflict; it also means creating a world where people can be healthy and flourish.
A lively conversation about how surveillance tech, created and tested in Israel & the US, targets climate refugees across the world. And how refugees have much better solutions than more of the same.
In this episode the executive director of Climate Refugees, Amali Tower, crosses the globe from Israel/Palestine to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to look at the technology that connects the seemingly disparate realities of warfare, surveillance, and immigration raids, putting them in the context of climate change and increasing global displacement. When people arrive to the U.S.-Mexico border, Tower says, they get “the same digital fortress, the same technical fortress, the same virtual wall, and the same physical wall that has been battle tested in Palestine and on Palestinians.”
Stay to the end of the conversation, when we turn to alternatives and what people can do to make the world a better place. Amali talks about her visit to Arizona and Sonora last year, when we visited the binational fair trade coffee cooperative Café Justo in Agua Prieta. As you’ll hear, this is a thriving example of an alternative to border militarization and an assertion of the right to stay home.
Amali says that in the 10 years that she’s been looking at the intersection of climate and displacement, she sees “blatant hypocrisy from countries seemingly supposedly caring about saving the planet for future generations to come” while they are simultaneously undermining “all those goals and plans and adaptations and all these wonderful things we are supposed to be doing for the so-called existential threat.”
Instead, she continues, “When it comes to war and militarism, when it comes to borders, when it comes to keeping people out, it’s incredible how we only have language and infrastructure and architecture to do that.”
Here are links to sources mentioned in the conversation: a look at climate change in Israel/Palestine, and the IPCC report and one by Amali on the Mediterranean basin as a climate hot spot. And here is Amali’s piece written in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, “If Black Americans Were to Seek Asylum, They Could Qualify.”
The separation wall in Bethlehem, Palestine in 2021. (Photo credit: Amali Tower).
Dora Rodriguez fled the death squads in El Salvador during the civil war. Seeking asylum in the United States in 1980, she nearly died crossing the Sonoran Desert but miraculously survived. She remained in Tucson, Arizona, becoming a social worker and a formidable organizer and advocate for immigrants and for human rights.
Her story embodies multitudes, from social justice activist to social worker to mother, grandmother, and founder of Salvavision, an immigrant advocacy organization in Tucson, and cofounder of Casa de la Esperanza, a migrant resource center in Sasabe, Sonora.
To this impressive list of accomplishments, Rodriguez can now add author. On Saturday, July 5, at 10:00 a.m., her new memoir Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain, cowritten with Abbey Carpenter, will be released during a celebration at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, where the Sanctuary Movement started, spurred by the deaths of 13 of Rodriguez’s traveling partners, who perished in the desert south of Tucson.
In this podcast, Rodriguez talks about fleeing El Salvador, her rescue in the desert, and her role as an advocate and campaigner for human rights at the border. She also talks about what keeps her fighting and how she remains inspired by everyone who works alongside her in the struggle for social justice. “There might be a big ugly, tall wall, but in our hearts, we know we are a community, and we will continue to build bridges,” she says.
Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain (Resilencia Publishing, 2025) is an inspiring book and a must-read at this critical moment in history, as an increasingly repressive U.S. political administration targets immigrant communities across the country.
Alix Dick arrived in the U.S. more than a decade ago, fleeing violence in Sinaloa, Mexico, that tore her family apart. But the impact of living without legal status in the United States has been almost as brutal as the violence she fled.
In her new memoir, The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman’s Reckoning with America’s Inhumane Math, cowritten with Stanford University sociology professor Antero Garcia, Alix Dick tallies the costs—spiritual, mental, physical, and economic—of being undocumented in the United States, especially as the Trump administration escalates its cruelty and persecution of people living without legal status.
Alix and Antero discuss how they decided to cowrite her memoir, why they chose to publish it now, and how Alix worries that she might be unable to promote it publicly because of Trump’s harsh crackdown. She also explains why many immigrants supported Trump in the election. “I believe when a society is so desperate for answers and leadership, and they lack identity, they will follow whoever seems the strongest,” she said.
The two also run a Substack called La Cuenta, which is one of our recommended Substacks at The Border Chronicle. La Cuenta, launched in 2022, highlights the experiences and perspectives of people living without documents in the United States. It’s crucial reading for Americans, especially in this era. The Cost of Being Undocumented will be released June 17.
Subscribe and support The Border Chronicle at theborderchronicle.com
In an in-depth interview for The Border Chronicle, Maria-Elena Giner reflects on her tenure since being ousted last week by the Trump administration as commissioner for one of the most critical federal agencies on the U.S.-Mexico border. The full conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The International Boundary and Water Commission is a binational agency responsible for managing and enforcing treaties between the U.S. and Mexico that manage water sharing, infrastructure, pollution and other transboundary issues.
Last week, Maria-Elena Giner, the U.S. Commissioner for the IBWC abruptly posted a letter of resignation addressed to President Donald Trump. Giner told The Washington Post that the Trump administration had demanded her resignation that same day without reason.
Giner's sudden departure came as a shock for many. In 2021, Giner was appointed to a severely underfunded agency with no long-term plan for investing in and maintaining vital infrastructure. In a few short years, Giner gained impressive momentum forging agreements with Mexico for water releases in Texas, and working on the creation of a binational wastewater treatment plant in California.
The first Latina to be appointed as U.S. commissioner, and a fronteriza from Ciudad Juárez/El Paso, Giner relied on deep cross-border community building to broker these binational agreements. Many of her major projects were coming to fruition when she was ousted by the current administration.
In this interview, Giner discusses the numerous infrastructure needs on the border. She also touches on binational water politics, and how the lower Rio Grande river basin, which was just designated as endangered, might be saved.
Listen to more podcasts at theborderchronicle.com
The Trump administration has begun issuing contracts for border wall construction. During the first Trump administration, contractors dynamited mountains and depleted groundwater, including the Quitobaquito, a sacred spring for the Tohono O’odham tribal nation, to produce concrete for the wall. Under the Real ID Act, dozens of laws protecting the environment, endangered species, and clean air and water can be waived for the wall’s construction. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has already begun filing waivers.
Earlier this month, Erick Meza, borderlands coordinator for the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, discovered that one of the sections slated for the upcoming border wall is southern Arizona’s San Rafael Valley, a critical wildlife corridor for endangered species, including jaguars. “It’s an ecological catastrophe,” he said of the proposed construction in the grassland valley. Meza spends much of his time traveling the borderlands documenting wildlife and the impacts of the border wall on an ecosystem under extreme stress from climate change and militarization.
In this podcast, Meza discusses the proposed wall construction and its impact on the San Rafael Valley, as well as other areas where the wall is slated to be built. He also shares what biologists and conservationists are learning about the effects on wildlife and the environment from previous wall construction, and how this knowledge will inform their work in the future.
What You Can Do
Sign a Sierra Club petition against the building of border wall in Arizona’s San Rafael Valley. Sign here.
Contact your congressional leaders and express your opposition to further border wall construction. Contact them here.
Read and listen to more stories about the U.S.-Mexico border at theborderchronicle.com
In a lively conversation, The Border Chronicle founders grapple with the last three months of militarization and surveillance, and ponder what’s to come.
What is happening on the border three months into the Trump administration? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Here, Border Chroniclefounders Melissa and Todd spend the hour discussing just that.
Among the topics covered are Stryker armored vehicles deployed in El Paso, including one conducting surveillance from a garbage dump; DHS secretary Kristi Noem recounting an epiphany about a Target store by Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele (this epiphany helps Bukele justify the 40,000-person capacity “terrorist” prison accepting U.S. deportees); the chilling surveillance tower known as the Torre Centinela looming over Ciudad Juárez; a DOD spokesperson telling Melissa that “you know more than we know”; and Todd sharing the story of how he got kicked out of the Border Security Expo 10 years ago (yes, there is some good old-fashioned humor as well).
Militarization, surveillance, privatization, water, and climate change are all addressed as The Border Chronicle attempts to grapple with what has happened, what is happening, and what’s to come.
And since there is so much to discuss, we’d love to hear your perspectives about the last 100 days. Please feel free to comment below. What are your thoughts and opinions? Border residents, what have you seen? Anything of note? Please don’t be shy about adding to our conversation.
Also, here’s a few of Melissa’s favorite signs from the “Hands Off” protest in Tucson last week as mentioned in the podcast.
The building in the distance is the Torre Centinela under construction in Ciudad Juárez. Photo taken from the El Paso side in late March. (Photo by Todd Miller).
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.
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.
One of the nation’s top immigration scholars cuts through the crap and lays bare this moment of border and immigration control, how we got here, and where we’re headed.
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.
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.
Listen to more podcasts at theborderchronicle.com
If you want to know about what’s to come on the border—what to expect, how it got to this point, and ways to fight back—put everything down right now and give this a listen.
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.
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.
Support our work and local border journalism at theborderchronicle.com
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.
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.