The Border Chronicle Weekly Roundup: September 4

The Border Chronicle launches its new poetry series today, resistance halts the border wall in Lochiel and Big Bend for now, and the Maasai face climate change, plus immigration policy is maternal health policy.

Drone footage of the protest encampment at Lochiel in Southern Arizona that halted border wall construction this week. (Photo credit: Erick Meza)

By Caroline Tracey & Melissa del Bosque

It’s been a tough week with the fatal shooting at the Venture-N bar, which killed two beloved Tucson residents in a hate crime targeting the LGBTQ community, and with the onslaught of border wall construction across the region, threatening the environment, wildlife, and communities. There is some good news to report, however. Community resistance is slowing things down in Big Bend, Texas, and at Lochiel in Southern Arizona, activists have stopped construction after weeks of protest. Something else to celebrate is our launch of The Border Chronicle’s new poetry series today, with a poem by award-winning Tucson poet Raquel Gutiérrez. Starting today, we will feature a borderlands poet in our weekly roundup each Friday. This poetry series was made possible through a generous grant from the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona. You can read more about Raquel’s work in last week’s roundup.

Also, you may have noticed that The Border Chronicle has moved to a new publishing platform called Indiegraf. We did this because we are transitioning to becoming a nonprofit newsroom. We started as a two-person newsletter on Substack in September 2021 and are celebrating our fifth year in existence this month! And we’re excited to be working with so many talented journalists as we grow into a larger publication, all thanks to our readers, supporters, and a generous grant from The MacArthur Foundation. Let us know how we’re doing and what else we should be covering. You can leave a comment at the bottom of the post, thanks! And if you believe in independent journalism, please consider supporting our newsroom by becoming a paid subscriber today for just $6 a month or $59 a year, or share this post with friends. You can also make a one-time donation. Every dollar goes directly to our reporting at the U.S.-Mexico border.

This Week in The Border Chronicle:

More News From Across the Border Region:

After Abbott’s order limiting Flock cameras, DPS to continue using its vast surveillance network The Texas Tribune

“They Were Genuinely Who They Were”: Tucson Remembers Venture-N Shooting Victims Lookout

Brownsville commissioners approve disannexation of future SpaceX property My RGV

De la frontera a las redes: cómo la desinformación y los bulos impulsaron la llegada masiva de migrantes a Ceuta y ahora alimentan el racismo Infobae

He moved to Mexico after decades of being undocumented in the US. Then he got a $1.8 million fine from DHS CNN

The U.S. Has Killed 227 Civilians in Boat Strikes During “A Year of Murders” The Intercept

Banished to the South: The Human Cost of Deportation WOLA, Kino Border Initiative, CDH Fray Matias

San Diego area ICE arrests hit record in second Trump term, signaling a shift Inewsource

Why is the Border Patrol detaining immigrant truckers in Arizona? The Arizona Republic

Authors

Caroline Tracey covers the environment and arts and culture for The Border Chronicle. She is the author of the book Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, a blend of environmental reportage and memoir published in March 2026 by W.W. Norton.

Outside of The Border Chronicle, Caroline’s reporting about the US Southwest, Mexico, and the borderlands has appeared in the New Yorker, n+1, New York Review of Books, High Country News, as well as in Spanish in Mexico’s Nexos. Her literary and art criticism appears in the Nation, the New Republic, and elsewhere, and has been commissioned by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art.

Caroline’s work has received a Fulbright fellowship, the Waterston Prize for Desert Writing, the Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Journalism and Human and Civil Rights, a Silvers Foundation Work-in-Progress grant, and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, among other honors. In 2025 she received the inaugural On the Brinck | Places Prize for writing about the Southwest and in 2026 she received a State of the Art prize from Creative Capital. She holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley.

Outside of work, Caroline likes to spend her time reading, swimming, and walking her dog, Sandro.

Melissa del Bosque is Co-founder and Executive Director of The Border Chronicle. Melissa has written about the U.S.-Mexico border since 1998 for various media outlets, including ProPublica, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Texas Observer, and The Intercept.

Her work has been recognized with numerous U.S. and international journalism awards, including a Gabo Award and the Internacional Rey de España de Periodismo award, as the U.S.-Mexico investigations editor for Lighthouse Reports. In 2020, del Bosque received the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award as part of a ProPublica group reporting project “Inside the Border Patrol.” In 2016, she received the Hillman Prize for her investigative feature “Death on Sevenmile Road” about the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2015, del Bosque’s four-part series with The Guardian on migrant deaths in South Texas won an Emmy and a National Magazine Award. 

Del Bosque is also the author of Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty. She has a Master’s in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, a Master’s in Public Health from the Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health, and a Bachelor’s in poetry and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.

In her spare time, Melissa loves to travel, spend time with her family, and explore the Sonoran Desert.

Join us for our 5 Year Anniversary Party October 22nd  →

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