Torre Centinela, a Mexican surveillance hub that will share intelligence with U.S. and Texas law enforcement is slated to open soon. Olivares discusses his investigation on Torre Centinela and the private corporation running it.
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Like environmental regulations, cultural-and historic-preservation laws are being systematically waived for wall construction—and border communities are paying the price.
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.
Torre Centinela, a Mexican surveillance hub that will share intelligence with U.S. and Texas law enforcement is slated to open soon. Olivares discusses his investigation on Torre Centinela and the private corporation running it.
"The history of migration through El Paso is one that’s been forgotten and overlooked, even though these workers—and not just workers but intellectuals, activists, and poets—helped shape the American Southwest as we know it today."
With more than 40 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border now under military authority, we discuss our Border Chronicle/The War Horse investigation examining this unprecedented expansion of federal power and its impact on border communities.
“For a long time, a big proportion of the American public said that border security was their most important issue. People are starting to realize what that means in terms of the violence entailed.”
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
