The personal, financial, and environmental costs of a border wall in Big Bend, locals revive opposition after Trump's announcement of a refinery in Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley fights back after ICE shooting and raids, plus The Border Chronicle is seeking new paid subscribers!
“We love Big Bend the way it is. It does not need to change. We do not feel any danger, and we don’t want it to look like other places. And nothing makes a person who lives out here more mad than the idea of looking at a damn fence.”
Environmental advocates and residents say the long-proposed refinery threatens air quality and public health in a region already ringed by heavy industry.
Budd's new book "Against the Wall" takes an unflinching look at the systemic misogyny and racism in the Border Patrol, and overcoming a childhood of trauma and abuse.
For six years, Jenn Budd wore the green uniform of the U.S. Border Patrol. Before joining in 1995 Budd, who grew up in Alabama, says she knew little about the agency. Her harrowing experiences of misogyny, rape, sexual harassment, and with corruption at the agency would ultimately force her to resign.
But Budd says, leaving the Border Patrol was only the beginning on a long road of reckoning. Not only with her years as an agent but also with a childhood of trauma and abuse.
Her new memoir: Against the Wall: My Journey from Border Patrol Agent to Immigrant Rights Activist, takes an unflinching look at a Border Patrol riddled with corruption, racism, and misogyny. Raw and truthful, no one escapes judgement, not even Budd, who searches deep within herself to examine her own prejudices as a White southerner, and the role she played as a Border Patrol agent.
Budd’s book, which comes out in June, is also about healing from deeply inflicted traumas. After grappling with suicide, she eventually finds love and acceptance with her wife Sandy and becomes an activist for immigrant rights.
In this Border Chronicle podcast, Budd talks about her journey from Border Patrol agent to one of the Border Patrol’s fiercest critics.
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Environmental advocates and residents say the long-proposed refinery threatens air quality and public health in a region already ringed by heavy industry.
ICE raids and detentions, together with a high-profile killing, have led Rio Grand Valley residents to mobilize—including even some local Republicans.
Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel, Now I Surrender, is an epic about the U.S. and Mexico’s joint erasure of Apachería.
"I understand what people are going through because I lived it myself."
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
