Buh Bye Kristi Noem, and who the heck is Markwayne Mullin? Trump's new pick for DHS secretary. Plus, an epic novel about the U.S. and Mexico's joint erasure of Apachería, and historian and author Lydia Otero on Tucson's racial and urban history, and more.
Historian and writer Lydia Otero on growing up in the borderlands, Tucson's racial and urban history, and their most recent book, Storied Property: María Cordova's Casa.
Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel, Now I Surrender, is an epic about the U.S. and Mexico’s joint erasure of Apachería.
The longtime migration expert talks about solutions, and what's missing in the debate around Biden's executive order to restrict asylum.
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.
"I understand what people are going through because I lived it myself."
Logan Phillips was born in Tombstone, Arizona—a town best known for Old West-themed gunfight tourism. In his new book, Reckon, Phillips explores his relationship to the unusual setting of his childhood through themes of masculinity, history, and land.
In the spirit of broadening the analysis beyond ICE, Border Chronicle cofounders Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller discuss the
Rollbacks to the Clean Water Act may have affected the borderlands more than any other region. States are stepping up—but there’s still more to do.
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
