Trump's big buoys arrive in Eagle Pass, a border resident arrested for nonviolent protest against wall construction in Zapata County, and catch our podcast with Yes Men prankster, political activist Jacques Servin and Todd who entirely reframe "border security."
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."
This month, Hull’s worst fears came true as contractors for Southwest Valley Constructors and Kiewit started bulldozing and scraping land near her home to construct a 30-foot border wall.
Immigrant detention has doubled during Biden, which now wants to expand it more. But not if rights groups can help it, explains the senior policy analyst for the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Since Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, there have been alarming trends in detentions and deportations undertaken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC). For instance, the daily number of people detained has gone up 140 percent. Now there are 37,000 people locked up every day, up from 15,000 in 2021. And 90 percent of those people have been held in detention centers operated by private, for-profit companies in more than 190 prisons across the United States (a number that went up considerably during the Trump years).
According to the Snapshot of ICE Detention: Inhumane Conditions and Alarming Expansion, an NIJC briefing released last week, these facilities are notoriously abusive. Since 2021, 23 people have died in ICE custody, and there has been a 50 percent increase in solitary confinement. Now the Biden administration has requested proposals from private industry to further increase detention space.
This is why today The Border Chronicle is talking with the NIJC’s senior policy analyst, Jesse Franzblau. He conducts investigative research on rights abuses in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for the organization’s Transparency and Human Rights Project.
Franzblau and the NIJC were part of a large coalition of rights organizations, accompanied by past detainees, who converged on Washington on September 23 for a national day of action and advocacy. The coalition called for the Biden administration to halt its plans to open new detention prisons and expand deportations, to close down detention centers known for rampant abuse, and to release incarcerated people and allow them to navigate their cases outside the prison walls.
Franzblau talks about all this, and much more, on today’s podcast. He said the immigration detention and deportation apparatus “hasn’t always been this way. It was in the ’80s when it started to take shape during the Reagan administration, then during the ’90s it grew even further, and it grew directly parallel to the growth of the mass-incarceration system.” And now federal funding for ICE detention is five times what it was two decades ago.
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
Development Director Amelia Natoli discusses building community with recently arrived refugees and Tucson volunteers through harvesting food, making art, and fostering connection.
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.
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
