Happy 250th America! In a new podcast, Melissa and Todd discuss surveillance, and unconstitutional policing migrating into the country's interior, and ancient rock art faces demolition in Texas. Plus more news from across the border region.
Border Chronicle founders, Todd and Melissa, talk about how law enforcement surveillance, high-speed chases instigated by Border Patrol, unwarranted searches and seizures, and other heavy-handed policing that border communities have endured for decades has now moved into the interior of the country.
A $2.6 billion border barrier through Texas' Lower Pecos Canyonlands has archaeologists warning that irreplaceable indigenous rock art and sacred sites could be destroyed.
Bier breaks down the differences between the Trump and Biden years in the US immigration system.
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.
Border Chronicle founders, Todd and Melissa, talk about how law enforcement surveillance, high-speed chases instigated by Border Patrol, unwarranted searches and seizures, and other heavy-handed policing that border communities have endured for decades has now moved into the interior of the country.
With interior Border Patrol checkpoints to the north, and the border to the south, DACA recipients in border communities feel under threat by multiple layers of law enforcement, from ICE to local police. Nowhere more so than in Texas.
This conversation, hosted by Todd Miller, about a great borderlands adobe brick building project is going great, until Jacques Servin—of the political performance artist trickster and activist troupe called the Yes Men—fails to grasp the meaning of the term "border security."
Gabriela Rangel, executive director of Tucson’s Museum of Contemporary Art, was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. As a
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
