The Border Chronicle

At three p.m. on May 3, 1887, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck Bavispe, Sonora, and reverberated throughout the borderlands. Some fifty people perished, crushed by collapsing roofs that moments earlier had been sheltering them from the May sun. Every house in Bavispe fell down. "The ground cracked and fissures splayed like veins in dry valleys throughout Sonora and into Southern Arizona," writes Mary Reynolds, author of The Quake that Drained the Desert, out now from the University of Nebraska Press. Over a century later, Reynolds learned about this catastrophe and began to research it from all angles. She traveled to Sonora to interview the descendants of people who had experienced the quake. She conducted archival research into the physician and photojournalist team from Tombstone and the engineer from Hermosillo sent to respond. And she pored over geologic documents to understand the science behind the disaster. She learned that the high school that she had attended in Tucson had been fitted with "earthquake bands" that would allow it to flex and give the people inside more time to evacuate in the event of a similar event. One of the most surprising threads she followed was the way the earthquake transformed the region's hydrology, altering the flow of springs and watercourses forever.

Founders Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller join editor and reporter Caroline Tracey to revisit the newsroom’s beginnings, the stories that have defined it, and to celebrate its next chapter.  

What’s bigger than the Hoover Dam or the Panama Canal? The Trump Administration’sspending of more than $46 billion in taxpayer money on border walls, and buoy barriers acrossthe 1,954-mile border. The government mega-project is being carried out with little governmentoversight, input from communities, and zero studies on environmental or wildlife impacts.There’s also been no reliable government data, or a way to publicly track the border wallconstruction, as it unfolds. This is why The Border Chronicle created a new community-poweredmapping project, Wall Watch, to track current awarded border wall contracts, surveillancetechnology and other border infrastructure.Border Chronicle cofounder Melissa del Bosque and Geographer Dugan Meyer, who built thedatabase for the interactive map, describe what you can find on Wall Watch from existing borderwall to community reports on wall construction, surveying, environmental impacts and buoybarrier installation. It’s easy for border residents to submit a community report, and it helps buildan accurate picture of construction as it is happening across the U.S.-Mexico border region.Del Bosque and Meyer also discuss the challenges of building Wall Watch, and finding reliablegovernment data for the map, how Wall Watch will help border residents understand the massivemega construction project as it impacts their communities, and how residents can help build amore accurate map by submitting reports on what they’re seeing on the ground. They also talkabout the kind of data you can find on Wall Watch, and how it’s available to anyone to download.And they discuss the administration’s plan to build a “wall system” that includes two walls withenforcement zones, patrol roads, surveillance towers and stadium lights along the entire southernborder. “When this administration is done, the southern border will look more like a federalprison with double walls draped in concertina wire,” said del Bosque. “You only have to look atSan Diego where the wall system is already in place, and where they used the enforcement zonebetween the two walls as an open-air detention site in 2023, to see what the plan is for the rest ofthe border.”

A vivid depiction of what has been happening during the last eight weeks of resistance of border wall construction in Arizona’s San Raphael Valley. It took several attempts to get this podcast interview with Kate Scott, cofounder and director of the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center. On one of the attempts, the people gathered in Lochiel, Arizona, to protect the one remaining cottonwood tree on the U.S.-Mexico border were dealing with a low-flying Customs and Border Protection helicopter that shook the treetop where a person precariously sat, as the group has been doing in rotation now for two weeks. On July 27, an excavator from the contractor Fisher Sand & Gravel killed three other ancient cottonwoods, who they say were obstructing border wall construction. Another podcast attempt was thwarted by a ferocious hailstorm, a staple of the rainy southern Arizona monsoon season. In other words, Kate is in it, in one of the biggest battles of our time, with the weather, with a multi-billion dollar Homeland Security force. People have been gathering at Lochiel since June 23, approximately eight weeks ago, when they got word that CBP was coming for the cottonwoods located in the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot buffer zone from the international boundary inland owned by the U.S. federal government. In this podcast, Kate goes into detail about all of this: the double border wall construction, the contractors, the destruction, the overall resistance, and what they plan to do going forward. We get stories of communion in what Kate calls the grandmother trees. And at the end, Kate reads a moving poem by nine-year-old Aurelia Neils Bugbee who insists that “our love will bring down this wall!” To supplement this podcast, we recommend that you check out this article by John Washington at LOOKOUT that came out this week.

In February, the country broke an ominous record: over 68,000 people were being held in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more than ever before. President Trump has set a goal of deporting one million people from the United States annually—aiming to blow past the previous record, from 2013, of 432,000 deportations in a year.In order to achieve these draconian indicators of success, agents tasked with arresting and detaining immigrants are looking everywhere for possible targets. In an April 2025 speech, Border Czar Tom Homan told undocumented immigrants to “be looking over your shoulder.” Since then, immigrants—including many with legal status or on a path to adjusting their status—have been arrested everywhere from the grocery store to the courtroom. On any given day, some 60,000 people, most without any criminal record, are held in the more than 200 detention centers scattered across the United States.What can local communities who want to fight back do about this? Journalist John Washington’s new book, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight against Immigrant Detention, offers some possible answers. Coming out July 21 from Haymarket Books, the book offers a history of the use of detention camps in the United States, but it also provides a detailed compilation of resources for communities looking to investigate licenses, contracts, and environmental compliances as possible pressure points.John spoke with Border Chronicle reporter Caroline Tracey about How to Close a Camp for this week’s podcast and about how, as he writes, “understanding that immigration detention camps are not abstract federal machines. They are, rather, deeply embedded in local political economies [via] zoning permits and tax breaks, local health departments that license medical providers, and municipal governments that issue for food services and utility hookups. Every one of these nodes is a potential pressure point.”

Border Chronicle founders, Todd and Melissa, talk about how law enforcement surveillance, high-speed chases instigated by Border Patrol, unwarranted searches and seizures, and other heavy-handed policing that border communities have endured for decades has now moved into the interior of the country. They also discuss Todd’s upcoming book on climate change and the Rio Grande, and recent Border Chronicle community events in the borderlands —stay tuned for more in the Fall! And they talk about the Trump administration’s attempt to install 500 miles of buoy barriers on the Rio Grande, and walls that are currently being built through environmentally sensitive areas, sacred sites and areas where there has historically been little migration.

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" — at least how it’s conveyed to the world by the high brass of the Department of Homeland Security. Though frustrating at first, this leads to a fruitful philosophical conversation and then a possibly paradigm-shifting one. Listen all the way to the end for a provocative proposal about next year’s Border Security Expo.

 Gabriela Rangel, director of Tucson’s Museum of Contemporary Art, was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. As a curator focusing on Latin American art, she’s worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Americas Society in New York City, and the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. In the fall of 2025 she became the director of Tucson's Museum of Contemporary Art.  In this podcast with Caroline Tracey, The Border Chronicle’s arts & culture editor, Rangel discusses how the concept of Latin American art" didn’t come from Latin America, the necessity for politics in art, and what it’s like living and working in the Sonoran Desert “This is a borderland city,” she says of Tucson. Of how the border figures into contemporary art, she adds: “Urgent matters in the repertoire of contemporary art are also crucial for the borderlands: water, ecosystems and immigration—these are issues that contemporary art has adopted in their concerns....Contemporary art is about what’s happening in the present.”

José Olivares is an independent investigative journalist and audio producer who reports on immigration enforcement, U.S. operations in Latin America, and human rights. He is also the podcast editor for The Border Chronicle, and we’re lucky to have him on our team.In this episode, we discuss his recent investigation, “A Mexican Surveillance Giant You’ve Never Heard of Is Now Watching the U.S. Border,” conducted for the independent nonprofit outlets Rest of World and Type Investigations. José’s investigation focuses on the Torre Centinela, or Sentinel Tower, which is nearing completion in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. This massive 20-story surveillance tower is truly dystopian and stands as the tallest structure in the region, overlooking both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.José toured the tower and examined thousands of government records related to Seguritech, the corporation overseeing the project. He found that surveillance in the borderlands is rapidly growing, often with little oversight, and that intelligence from the Sentinel Tower is being shared among Texas and U.S. federal law enforcement agencies. In Ciudad Juárez, which has faced violence for the past two decades, residents are voluntarily connecting their home security cameras to the Sentinel system with the promise of increased safety. But is it working? Listen to the podcast to find out!Additionally, José explores the recent scandal involving two CIA agents who died during an anti-drug operation with state law enforcement in Chihuahua, which led to the resignation of the state’s attorney general.Listen to the Border Chronicle podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

In January 2025, the Trump administration declared a national emergency at the southern border and directed the military to take control of large expanses of the border, which include major cities like El Paso, McAllen, and Brownsville, and designate them as “National Defense Areas”. In a recent Border Chronicle investigation “A War Zone: Minus the War” with the nonprofit The War Horse, which serves military communities, we examined the impact this is having on border residents, the types of military surveillance and hardware being rolled out in the national defense zones, and the impact these zones are having on the military and migration at the border, including federal prosecutors attempting to charge migrants for trespassing.For this discussion, I joined Sonner Kehrt an investigative reporter with The War Horse, and David Roza, an independent journalist, who covers the U.S. military to talk about our collaboration, and catch you up on more recent military developments, including the Davis-Monthan Air Force base in Tucson hosting Space Force Guardians and Fort Huachuca near Sierra Vista, Arizona, which is developing a new mission for U.S. Space Force, whose somewhat bizarre official song— yes, this is real— you can listen to here.