The Border Chronicle Forecast for 2025
A booming border chaos economy. Billionaires and algorithms support autocracy. The criminalization of immigration, and worsening water woes. But also good news: Meet our new reporter!
Welp, it’s 2025. Here we go!
Todd and I hope you had a restful holiday break. I visited with my husband’s family in Mexico City, and the question from everyone was “What’s going to happen with mass deportations and Trump?”
Mexico’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has been preparing to receive thousands of deported citizens. Mexican officials are testing a cell phone app that Mexicans in the U.S. can use to alert consular employees and relatives that they’re being deported, and the governor of Baja California announced that the state is setting up 25 shelters to receive deported Mexican citizens.
Having reported on the first Trump administration, I believe that the incoming president will try to do most of what he said he’d do on the campaign trail. Some of it will be hamstrung by legal and funding challenges, but this time around there will be fewer judicial and congressional guardrails to protect us or the environment from the administration’s worst impulses. In mapping out what Trump and Project 2025 have planned on border and immigration policies, I found it helpful to read an analysis by Laura Bingham, a law professor at Temple University and executive director of the Institute for Law, Innovation & Technology. Bingham kindly gave me permission to share her analysis with our readers, which you can find here.
Billionaires Double Down on Weaponizing the Information Space
Billionaire Elon Musk, who owns the X platform recently advocated for a Nazi-embracing political party to win Germany’s election and last week, wrote that the U.S. should “liberate the people of Britain from its tyrannical government.”
The world’s richest man, and adviser to Trump, must never sleep, he’s so busy trolling the globe, spreading disinformation, and threatening various elected officials in democratic countries. As 2025 unfolds, the trick will be not to get caught up in the administration’s nonstop drama and alternate reality. At The Border Chronicle we plan to document the impact of Trump’s policies, expose those who profit from them (Musk and co.) and how, and what these policies will mean for our battered democracy.
One of Trump’s chief propaganda ministers, Steve Bannon, once said, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Sadly, this strategy works very well. In an era of artificial intelligence slop, pink slime media outlets (yes, this is a thing), and social media influencer grifters, people are choosing to opt out of the news altogether. I can’t say I blame them.
Billionaires like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg now control the information space through social media platforms. They are burying fact-based news while their algorithms favor conspiracy-flavored, extremist content that enables authoritarian leaders like Trump.
At the same time, the collapse of legitimate journalism—meaning outlets that, among other things, check their facts, clearly reveal their sources, and transparently issue corrections when they print something incorrect—is now almost complete. Further hastening this crisis, billionaire owners of legacy media outlets, such as the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, have increasingly cozied up to Trump and censored reporters and cartoonists critical of his policies.
A Booming Border Chaos Industry
Get ready for the border crisis rhetoric to escalate. Where would Trump and the MAGA movement be without the border as its favorite piñata? And such a lucrative piñata it is. Last year, Todd wrote that the total border and immigration enforcement budget for 2024 (CBP and ICE added together) exceeded $30 billion for the first time ($30.2 billion). Todd has been covering border security spending since 2012. “Since the 1980s,” he wrote, “enforcement budgets have increased year after year, regardless of party and president.”
Expect Trump to top Biden’s record spending. Mass deportations alone are estimated to be as much as $315 billion or more. Musk, Peter Thiel, and other Silicon Valley billionaires are already lining up at the trough. Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz flagged this article in December noting that Musk, Thiel, and others will be making a bid for defense and security billions to build AI weapons, surveillance, and other dystopian tools. We will also keep an eye on Musk’s request to establish his SpaceX base, just north of the Texas border city of Brownsville, as an official city called Starbase, Texas.
Meanwhile, as Trump did during his first administration, border humanitarian workers will be painted as criminals and persecuted, as will journalists, people migrating, and any elected officials who refuse to carry out mass deportations and openly criticize the administration’s policies. Civilian militias emboldened by Trump have already begun escalating threats and harassment against immigrant shelters and humanitarians.
Worsening Water Woes
While Trump and his allies are ginning up fear about people seeking protection at our southern border, what they should be focused on is the survival of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo. At historic lows and choked with miles of razor wire in Texas, one of the world’s 10 most endangered rivers is a ticking time bomb for both Mexico and the United States. With climate change and the river over-allotted to agriculture and industry, water scarcity has already led to riots in Mexico and deaths. Todd, who is working on a book about climate change and the Rio Grande, wrote a moving article in December about communities who depend on this water, and what’s at stake as U.S. and Mexican officials continue to kick the can down the road.
And Now Some Good News!
Author and journalist Caroline Tracey, who is based in Mexico City and Tucson, Arizona, will be joining us at The Border Chronicle to cover the environment and the arts in the borderlands. Caroline has written for several outlets in both Mexico and the United States, including Nexos, High Country News, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. She is also the author of a forthcoming book called Salt Lakes, which weaves a memoir of her queer coming-of-age with scientific writing about conservation and delicate salt lake ecosystems.
Caroline’s work has been made possible through grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona, and we are very proud to have such an accomplished author and journalist working with us. She will also be translating her environmental articles into Spanish for The Border Chronicle. The grants will fund Caroline’s work for the first five months of 2025, and we hope to find additional funding to keep her on for the rest of the year. We’ll be publishing her first environmental piece later this month.
As I wrote earlier, we are in the infancy of rebuilding journalism—which still has no viable model for funding. After three years, The Border Chronicle finally achieved 1,000 paid subscribers in October thanks to our readers and podcast listeners. We are incredibly thankful to everyone who has supported our work. We still, however, need another 1,000 paid subscribers so that Todd and I can (almost) make a living wage. We also need to pay our audio editor, Steev Hise, and Pablo Morales, our text editor. At the moment, we still have to have second jobs to pay the bills, which makes it more difficult to run The Border Chronicle. We are applying for grants to underwrite this work, but it’s been a difficult road. If you are a funder or foundation, and you’d like to support The Border Chronicle, please reach out to us at theborderchronicle@protonmail.com.
Additionally, if you’d like to support our work with a paid subscription, we could really use your help as we launch into a difficult year along the border. It’s just $6 a month or $60 a year. Or even better, become a founding member for $150 and you’ll receive an additional two annual paid subscriptions for friends and family.
You can also donate to us via PayPal.
As 2025 unfolds, we want to experiment with building a community around important issues affecting border communities, and journalism based at the U.S.-Mexico border. It might be through hosted talks with border residents and experts on Zoom, or through more in-person community events. And as I wrote in my intro, a lot of you will be tempted to check out of the news altogether in the next four years. So what to do? In September, we ran our first survey as we celebrated our third-year anniversary (where has the time gone?). One idea that most of you liked was a Friday round-up of important news about the border.
We think a Friday news round-up might be a good idea. People often ask us which outlets or articles they should trust as legitimate news. The plan would be to post top articles from the border every Friday and include a recap of our own as well. We want to uplift quality journalism from local border outlets. Support your local journos! We’re not sure yet when we might launch this. (See lack of funding and working two jobs above:-) If you have any thoughts on these ideas or comments, please drop us a line! And thank you as always for your support of The Border Chronicle. Without you, we wouldn’t exist!
Thank you, as always, for your work. Every time I'm asked an icebreaker question about a favorite podcast/what I'm reading, I try to mention you! You mentioned organizing more in-person events... it would be a dream come true if one of those happened to fall during the week of March 10-13 when I happen to be bringing a group of university students to Tucson from Utah to learn about the border... just putting that out there. :)
I appreciate your work and also how hard it is to find funds. Thank you! A Friday round up is a great idea.