We've got new merch! Pedro Rios documents the gradual walling off of Friendship Park in San Diego, and Amy Juan on long-distance running and resilience for the Tohono O'odham plus more from across the borderlands.
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Each year since 1995, the Tohono O’odham Nation has held the Unity Run. “These runs,” Amy Juan says,“not only have their purpose as prayer for the people and the land but also put us on the ground to actually see what is happening” on the border.
“What we allow them to do on the border, is what they will do to you.”
Longtime organizer and former Pima County Legal Defender Isabel Garcia starts the conversation off with an assessment of U.S. public knowledge of important historic issues such as the genocide of Indigenous people, slavery, labor, and immigration.
“What do people,” she asks, “know about immigration in this country?” This is the question that guides our conversation that spans decades, even centuries, but ultimately ends up assessing the current state of things under Donald Trump.
“What we allow them to do on the border,” she warns, ”is what they will do to you.”
Isabel is the co-chair of the organization Coalición de Derechos Humanos, and has been on the frontlines of border and immigrant rights since the 1970s. In this conversation, filled with story-telling and biting analysis, Isabel tells listeners how she debated John McCain in the 1990s and schooled Bernie Sanders at the border during his first presidential run.
She also challenges us to “imagine what we can be,” and talks about the coalition they are forming called Defensa y Resistencia, which has a Stop the Kidnapping Campaign that directly confronts current ICE tactics. “We are openly going to protect our neighbors.” Isabel challenges listeners to do just that, by speaking up and plugging in.
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Each year since 1995, the Tohono O’odham Nation has held the Unity Run. “These runs,” Amy Juan says,“not only have their purpose as prayer for the people and the land but also put us on the ground to actually see what is happening” on the border.
For more than two decades, San Diego resident Pedro Rios has documented the gradual walling off of the binational International Friendship Park. Now the Trump administration is sealing the rest of California’s border with Mexico.
A few days after the United States launched Operation Epic Fury in Iran, the Border Patrol changed its policy on visits to the border wall, denying a church group permission to pray there, “for their own safety.”
The Colibrí Center for Human Rights was a vital link between families and their missing loved ones. But now it's gone dark.
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
