As the late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano put it in his book Upside Down: A Primer for a Looking Glass World, the terminology used in mainstream political discourse often describes precisely the opposite of reality. Cut-throat capitalism is free trade. Violence is law and order. Extraction of natural wealth from communities is increasing revenue.
So where does “border security” fit in to this? Part of the answer is that borders do not produce security but subordination. This point has been made for two decades now by sociologist Nandita Sharma (see the essay “Why No Borders?,” which she cowrote with Bridget Anderson and Cynthia Wright). The point of borders is not to keep people out but to keep them in line. Borders are foundational to a global system fraught with injustice.
The struggle for no borders, Sharma explains, is a practical political project.
Sharma is the author of two books, Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of “Migrant Workers” in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020). She teaches at the University of Hawai‘i.
During our conversation, I wondered aloud whether “no borders” is still a practical political project, now that Donald Trump will take office for a second term. She responded without hesitation, “It’s not only a viable step, it’s the only step.”
As we concluded, we discussed the provocative quote from Italian thinker, philosopher, and Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying. The new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
Those monsters are easy to identify with the incoming Trump administration and the nation-state it represents, along with increasing climate catastrophe. “This is the moment of solidarity,” Sharma said. “This is the moment for mutual support.” Indeed, she hinted, the moment has arrived to not only imagine but also to work for another possible world.
]]>As the country prepares for a new Trump administration in January, The Border Chronicle is reaching out to border organizers and experts about what they see on the horizon regarding Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations. The first Trump administration was chaotic for U.S.-Mexico border communities—it adopted the cruel family separation policy, it destroyed wildlife and fragile ecosystems to construct a border wall, and it deployed active-duty military into border communities before the 2018 midterm, amid Trump’s fearmongering about migrant caravans. More migrant camps appeared in Mexico, where people were trapped between organized crime and a shutdown of asylum in the United States. This took place under the Remain in Mexico policy, which Trump said he will revive.
This time around in interviews and on Monday, Trump again confirmed that he’ll undertake a military-led mass deportation operation and declare a national emergency. He’s also said he’d use local police and the National Guard. It’s still unclear, exactly, what will unfold, but Trump has tapped former acting ICE director Tom Homan as “border czar” to lead the operation. In this capacity, Homan will not need congressional confirmation. Border Chronicle readers will be familiar with Homan from the recent investigation we published about his influence and propaganda operation, Border 911.
Trump has also named Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy and adviser on Homeland Security, which also doesn’t require congressional approval. Miller pushed for family separation, the Muslim ban, and other xenophobic policies during the first administration, and he has called for a military-led mass deportation plan this time around.
The Border Chronicle spoke with Jessica Pishko, journalist and author of The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy. You can also check out Pishko’s work at her Substack, Posse Comitatus, and listen to our podcast with her. Pishko has researched and written about sheriffs and their involvement in extremist and anti-immigrant movements for many years. In this Q&A, Pishko talks about what she sees coming on the horizon in January, and the ways that sheriffs and local law enforcement might interact—or resist—Trump’s deportation plans.
So the current landscape is one where we have a few states that in the past couple of years have passed measures that require local law enforcement, including sheriffs, to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For example, Florida and Texas already implemented state laws that mandate that sheriffs basically contract and cooperate with ICE. But there’s also a handful of states where local law enforcement is not allowed to cooperate with ICE too. California is one of those states. The general gist is they’re not supposed to have a 287 (g) agreement [a federal program that gives law enforcement more leeway in deporting people]. But it’s not foolproof. Sheriffs have done different things to get around it, and it’s possible the Trump administration could challenge these laws in court again. It’s really going to depend in many cases, county by county.
When you look back at the first Trump administration, there were many local law enforcement entities that resisted. A lot of local sheriffs were elected or stayed in office by saying that they would not cooperate with ICE, and they would not participate in the deportation of immigrants. I think this time we will also see some sheriffs who say they’re not going to participate. And those are the places where I think the Trump administration will send ICE agents or federal agents.
My thought on the mass deportations is that I think a lot of people are, in my view, wrongly looking for something like a military coup, which would look like deputizing the military to go house to house and sweep up immigrants or people who might be immigrants. But I think that it’s going to look a lot more like policing, like policing people are used to, which is why I’m concerned. Because I worry that when it’s not immediately obvious to everybody, that they will say, “Oh, well, whatever. He can’t really do it.” And there’s been a lot of press about, it’s too expensive to do mass deportations. There’s no place to hold people, etc. And I’m like, look, you have states already doing it, and the costs have evidently not been a barrier. Not saying it doesn’t cost money, but it really hasn’t been a barrier.
Operation Lone Star [a Texas taxpayer-funded detention and deportation system] is incredibly expensive and illegal. It really is a waste of money, which has been pointed out again and again, but that has not stopped Texas from doing it. The cost to sheriffs is not going to be that high. Because they share deputies and borrow local law enforcement from other jurisdictions to help them do the day-to-day policing, and they get state money to do some of that.
During the Biden administration, more federal money was given to local law enforcement to do immigration enforcement. Grants like Operation Stone Garden to buy equipment and pay for overtime more than doubled from what they were under Trump. Trump was very stingy with money. He did not spend big bucks on law enforcement.
Counties will reinstate their agreements with the federal government. And they will be reimbursed by the federal government for that. Currently, the federal government has higher standards for immigrant detention than the states, because you have to meet government standards of care. Many of these county jails are considered too awful to be housing immigrants. But in the first Trump administration he got rid of those standards of care, and that’s what enabled sheriffs like Joe Arpaio [of Maricopa County, Arizona] to detain people in tents. It just blows my mind that Jerry Sheridan [a former lieutenant under Arpaio] was just elected sheriff in Phoenix. And he’s already talking about setting up tents again like Arpaio did.
Currently, under the 287 (g) agreement, sheriffs have to follow federal rules that they can’t discriminate or racially profile, otherwise the Department of Justice can go after you. There was a sheriff [Terry Johnson] in North Carolina who had a 287(g) agreement and was arresting every Latino in the county. He finally stopped because the Department of Justice said he was racially profiling people. If the Department of Justice hadn’t told him to stop, he would have kept doing it. I think in five years, one study found that he drove out at least 10 percent of the Latino population in the rural county. And he said very ugly racist stuff. The racial animus was not subtle. I assume that under Trump, the DOJ is not going to prosecute law enforcement for racially profiling people. During his first administration he didn’t give law enforcement much in the way of money or resources. He just gave them permission to do whatever they wanted. So you’re just going to see these extreme excesses.
So a sanctuary city is technically broader than just the 287 (g) agreement you enter into with the federal government to do some amount of immigration enforcement. Local law enforcement can still arrest someone and run that person through the database, and if they find that they are deportable, they could either call ICE, or sometimes ICE will issue a detainer and say, “Could you hold this person?” Some jails have an ICE agent who just reviews intake and then pulls out people they think are deportable.
In a sanctuary city, they’re not supposed to do any of those. Local law enforcement is not supposed to consider who might be deportable. One reason is that there are mistakes in the system. You could have DACA status, for instance [deferred deportation action for childhood arrivals]. One common scenario goes like this: a group of teenagers are hanging out on a corner. The police arrest them all. It turns out they weren’t really doing anything serious and were not charged with a crime. But if they’re immigration paperwork isn’t in order, they’re going to be flagged as deportable, even if they didn’t commit a crime.
Much of the backlash was because of Arpaio. He used the 287 (g) agreement to justify staging his own raids. He would just park his police car, for instance, outside of a library and arrest people coming out who were janitors. He just arrested every brown person he could find under the theory that they might be deportable. So when that happened, the Obama administration changed the 287 (g) agreement to prohibit that. Now they also altered the 287 (g) agreement so that it takes place only in jail and applied to people arrested for crimes. So you can’t just drive around and grab people to deport. You have to arrest them for a crime. But now you have these state laws where they can arrest you for violating immigration laws.
I expect he will write a blank check to local law enforcement who want to be more aggressive in policing people who are immigrants or people who look like immigrants. I anticipate a massively more coordinated effort to be harsher on policing. A lot more sheriffs will join 287 (g), a lot more jails will start holding immigrants. I think some of these jails will be places you don’t expect. Like New York State has several depopulated jails, and I think sheriffs will start housing immigrant detainees there for the financial benefit.
]]>The incoming Donald Trump administration is already moving fast on border and immigration enforcement in preparation for its second term. Thomas Homan—who ran ICE from 2017 to 2018 and was the architect of Trump’s family separation policy—was appointed “border czar,” a title that has been used sporadically over the decades (despite the Trump campaign’s claims, it was never a role played by Vice President Kamala Harris). After his appointment, Homan called on migrants to “self-deport” and said “we know who you are and we’re gonna come and find you.” It also appears that hard-liner Stephen Miller will be the deputy chief of staff for policy, ensuring that border and immigration enforcement will remain front and center. At a speech at Madison Square Garden in late October, Miller said that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
Today we talk with San Diegan Pedro Rios, who since 2003 has run the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S. Mexico Border Program, to hear his thoughts on the Trump election and what it means historically. For more than two decades Rios has been documenting abuses by law enforcement, advocating for policy change, and working with migrant communities to develop collective leadership across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In the interview Rios also talks about what people can do: “We must not allow fear to cause us to despair so much that we become immobilized. I would suggest people plug in locally and where possible, by building protective communities with principles that uphold our shared humanity.”
”
I was dismayed but not surprised. The convergence of all things politics had been pointing in that direction—from the daily polls to the Democrats’ inability to read the room (err, country), even to Joe Rogan’s miserable three-hour Trump interview. But it still felt like a punch to the gut.
For a while, I could only think of the red “revenge tour” yard sign posted down the street on a neighbor’s lawn. What would “revenge” mean for an unbridled Trump and the government trifecta that was developing before our eyes? Will it become a no-holds-barred command with no arbiter to call out the unconstitutional?
Trump’s first run to the White House was all about building the border wall and contriving a fictional “bad hombre” bogeyman to fear and loathe. This time around, his tactical dehumanization of migrants was an extension of his 2016 campaign, but with a rabid vigor. He pushed false stories about Haitians eating pets and about Venezuelans having Aurora, Colorado, under siege. He helped mainstream the fringe white supremacist replacement theory that Democrats intentionally allow migrants into the United States to vote and change the electorate, ultimately to supplant white power. All of this with a militant Christian nationalist movement supporting him that has practically anointed him a divine intervention to a declining United States afflicted with liberalism.
For border communities, barbarism will be a hallmark of his second term, as it was for his first one. Decimating asylum will be a priority. Building more deadly border walls and infrastructure that disfigures sensitive ecological landscapes. Emboldening boots on the ground, since the Border Patrol union was an active cheerleader of his campaign. More people detained, including from the mandated mass deportations assaults, in open-air conditions and in expanded for-profit jails. All this will create needless suffering. It’s depressing.
They are not wrong about being the true border enforcers. It’s been their MO for decades.
But now it’s become a political miscalculation because they don’t know how to propose policy grounded on anything else but deadly deterrence measures. The Democratic Party’s campaign on the border has prioritized enforcement since the 1990s, and the succeeding administrations, be they Republican or Democratic, have stacked their enforcement policies on the foundation that promotes human suffering.
The Border Patrol pressed forward operations in border communities that envisioned a militarized enforcement regime under President Clinton. He then pushed for criminalizing migrants and facilitated their deportations or ensured that private prisons would be busting at the seams from their profits. Thousands of migrants have died, turning the borderlands into nameless graveyards. Many people believed they could have found a better life in the United States, and many others were already living in the United States and got caught up in the deportation machine, tried to return to their families, and perished.
From this context, Vice President Kamala Harris erred in adopting the same old, tired Democratic Party formula that centers deadly deterrence instead of championing serious proposals addressing humanitarian needs or human rights protections for migrants.
She peddled a bipartisan Senate bill that Trump ordered Republicans to shoot down. That bill would have severely hampered asylum, increased the number of Border Patrol agents, and built more border walls. Sound familiar? There was nothing inspiring in her platform on reforming the immigration system.
Trump has spelled out what he will do in his second term, and it will be relentless rounds of punishing, cruel, and heartless measures that his advisers, some known to be white supremacist ideologues, will push forward. He campaigned on the promise of launching the largest deportation program in history, and that there will be no budgetary ceiling to stop it. He wants to strong-arm local and state governments by withholding federal funding, which could include disaster relief money, if they refuse to be complicit in the deportation operations. He is floating the idea of declaring a national emergency to access greater resources, of invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military, and of using the Alien Enemies Act to detain migrants without due process.
As has been the trend across the political spectrum, Trump, much like his predecessor, will increasingly rely on surveillance technologies to augment unaccountable policing in border communities and to expand its reach into the interior. This is a threat to civil liberties and privacy rights everywhere and for everyone.
Increased detention will likely happen, and even using military facilities for this purpose. I don’t doubt that they will continue to use open-air detention sites, as Border Patrol does now, to hold people for days without having to comply with their national standards. People will suffer, and Trump and his advisers don’t care.
And the border wall? New 30-foot border wall projects went up at Friendship Park in San Diego and in other places during Biden’s term, and it appeared that a Harris administration would have also permitted the same in the Senate compromise bill. I have no doubt that under a Trump administration, new destructive and deadly walls will be built.
We are assessing our resources nationally and consulting with our coalitions to prepare for a difficult term ahead. In San Diego, we are also consulting with community groups to identify ways to support people on the ground. There is already a lot of field experience with how to respond to immigration raids while keeping families safe. We are calling on all organizers to share their knowledge with others about best practices. We will continue to document mistreatment and abusive practices at the border and beyond. In California, existing networks with extensive experience are discussing strategies to create firewalls against policies that could jeopardize people’s lives.
We understand that working-class families will need to make hard decisions about how to protect themselves if they are targeted. Fear is a real, tangible threat that paralyzes communities when they don’t have the resources and the knowledge about how to defend their rights. But we must not allow fear to cause us to despair so much that we become immobilized. I would suggest people plug in locally and where possible, by building protective communities with principles that uphold our shared humanity. That is the type and scale of resistance we will need.
]]>Last December, I stood at the border wall in Arizona, near the Lukeville port of entry, and watched a Fox News cameraman in action. As I described it in my post, “The Lucrative Business of Border Chaos,” I listened to the steady patter of outrage coming from the Fox News anchors, through a live feed on his cell phone mounted on his camera. “Bodies,” “raise the fear … the credible fear threshold,” and “Haitians of concern.”
Having been in media half my life, with a five-year stint in Texas politics, I understood that these words and the fear-based framing were intentional. They would be beamed throughout America to keep people angry, fearful, and glued to their television sets as people continue to turn away in droves from the old legacy medium. They would also help Donald Trump win back the White House.
Before the cameraman took his live shot from the border wall, we had exchanged pleasantries. A weary trail of women, men, and children walked along the wall, searching for a Border Patrol agent so that they could request asylum. They were exhausted, and in a simple act of humanity, the Fox cameraman and I pointed the way toward a tent structure that held water and food, which had been erected by humanitarian groups, where they could wait for the Border Patrol agents.
On the Mexican side of the wall, a family sold coffee and sandwiches, and a skinny puppy darted back and forth between the gaps in the bollards of the border wall, from Mexico to the U.S. and back again, looking for scraps.
The Fox cameraman and I were standing at the border wall, surrounded by asylum seekers, and we were not scared. But with the right editing and words, the people watching his news feed in their homes in Iowa, Wisconsin, or Kansas would be filled with anxiety and told that we were under invasion.
But it almost seems quaint now to write about television, as it continues to lose viewers, as all legacy media—newspapers and radio—have done. We now live in the fragmented states of America, where different realities, curated by algorithms, and manipulated by billionaires, are pumped through different social media platforms to dominate our thoughts and impulses. As someone who has reported on the U.S.-Mexico border since the late 1990s, I have felt this shift in a profound way. It has polarized people’s thinking, spurred more extreme, corrosive political speech, and elevated lies over reality. It is increasingly robbing us of our empathy and of human connection, when we need it the most, as we come out of the anxiety-filled and isolating pandemic years. And now, worst of all, it has brought our democracy to the brink of destruction.
There is a vast right-wing network of influencers, content creators, and grifters who make money from “border chaos” and from amplifying fear and hatred toward immigrants and others. It serves the billionaires and authoritarian leaders like Trump—who are always searching for an imagined enemy—and it will be used and expanded in the next four years to make sure that Trump, Vance, and other authoritarians can consolidate their power.
We rely solely on our subscribers to fund this work. If you are new to The Border Chronicle, we are Melissa del Bosque, and Todd Miller, two longtime border journalists based in Tucson, Arizona, as well as part-time editors Steev Hise and Pablo Morales. If you have the means, we hope that you will step up today and support our work with a paid or founding member subscription, to help us prepare for the next four years. A subscription is just $6 a month or $60 a year. Founding subscriptions are $150 and come with two additional paid subscriptions for friends and family. You can also donate to The Border Chronicle via PayPal.
Having reported from the border during the first Trump administration, we witnessed the brutality of family separation, the tent camps, and active military deployed to border communities; the surveillance and persecution of border humanitarian workers and journalists; and the destruction of the environment as mountains were dynamited to make way for a wall that doesn’t work. This time, with Trump and his allies believing that they have a mandate from the American people, it will be much worse.
There will be endless volatility and “border chaos.” The next four years will make Trump, Elon Musk, and other oligarchs even richer. And it will make the rest of us a lot poorer. It will accelerate climate change, and it will not stop people from migrating or arriving at our southern border.
There is nothing we can do now but expose the lies and hold elected officials accountable for their actions, as we champion human rights and free speech, and report on the reality at the border, as we experience it. In the face of the coming chaos, we rely on our neighbors and our beautiful and resilient border communities that have met every challenge at the border with dignity, compassion, and human decency.
]]>The man was sitting on a bench in front of the 20-foot rust-colored border wall near where the public buses passed. He was jotting in a small notebook in the bustling center of Nogales, Sonora. It was Tuesday, Election Day in the U.S. I approached him and told him I was a journalist and was interested in what he thought about the election in the United States, especially since the border—which I pointed to right before us—was one of the election’s biggest issues.
His answer was terse: “It’s another country.”
The man told me he coordinated the buses and spent a lot of time on that bench. He preferred not to use his name. It was midday, and the sun was rising to the top of a clear, blue sky, and I had just crossed the border. The tension was already heated in the United States, and it was a relief to be in Mexico.
At first I thought the bus coordinator was being dismissive, and I was going to move on. But then he asked, “Who do you think is going to win? Trump?” I told him that according to the polls it was 50/50. This was before we knew what we do now: that Donald Trump was about to win the election decisively.
The bus coordinator said, “I hope Harris wins.” He paused. “Because she’s a woman. Would this be the first woman president in the United States?” I nodded. “We also have our first woman president in Mexico,” he said, referring to Claudia Sheinbaum, who was inaugurated on October 1.
My plan was to walk along the wall and perceive the U.S. elections from the Mexican side. Even though our conversation was brief, the bus coordinator was exactly the person I hoped to talk to. Here was a place where U.S. elections would affect people blatantly, viscerally, and palpably—as border policies have for decades—yet they had no say in the choice at all. I wanted to capture people’s sentiments.
I also wanted to converse with the wall itself. Let me explain: There is a stark difference between the wall on the Mexican side and the wall on the U.S. side. The U.S. side is dominated by the enforcement apparatus, which has become the source and the logic of the presidential campaigns, from both parties. In U.S. campaign and national narratives, it was difficult to hear the border characterized in any other way. On the Mexican side, however, the offering was a more complex and alternative story, whether it be the graffiti and art on the wall, or simply the words of people like the bus coordinator, people who worked, lived, went to school, and walked around the wall.
Right before I crossed the border I talked to Gustavo Lozano of the Border Beatz Music Collective in Nogales, Arizona. He told me, “None of the politicians, not Trump not Harris, no representatives of their cabinets—Republicans and Democrats—the very people that have influence in where we are going as a country, none of them know what the borderlands actually are, that the borderlands are a deep source of riqueza, wealth.” Here, he told me, there is an interchange of culture, a sharing of culture, knowledge, and skills. Lozano talked about revitalization projects in Nogales. He talked about creating an arts corridor. He talked about the galleries with challenging, provocative art, art that created conversations about the border, that transcended the border, that subverted the border. I didn’t realize this at first, but as I walked along the borderline, it was this type of inspiration that I sought, the omitted or unheard stories.
As the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote, “Walls are the publishers of the poor,” and the Nogales border wall was no exception. Written on the bollards—the thick steel bars—in one section was the message: “Nuestros sueños de justicia no los detenienen ningún muro,” No wall can stop our dreams of justice. In another place the prose expressed that “América es una sola casa,” “America”—in the Latin American sense of the word, that is, the combined North and South American continents, “is a single house.” Later I stood mesmerized before a rendition of the U.S. flag made on the border wall made of clothes, T-shirts, children’s clothes, undergarments, the same clothes that tear on the razor wire, or are sometimes found discarded in the desert. And farther down the wall are the papier-mâché sculpted faces near where three dogs napped in the shade.
I interviewed another man who was waiting for a bus in another area named Manuel. He told me he wasn’t from here but from Ciudad Obregón, about five hours to the south. He told me he didn’t understand the U.S. electoral process. He said, “Why Tuesday?” In Mexico elections happened on Sunday. I agreed it doesn’t make sense to have elections on a workday. But I told him in many places people can vote early. He said, “Doesn’t that create more possibilities that the vote can be manipulated?” I told him that I appreciated his skepticism. Like the bus coordinator, Manuel treaded the election question carefully. He said he “didn’t dislike” Trump. I told him that he could dislike him, I wouldn’t mind. He asked me, “What is this threat of mass deportation?” This threat would be repeated by Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt on November 5 (the next day) after his victory was announced. She reiterated Trump’s promise to undertake the “largest deportation in the history of the country” and said this operation would begin on day one. There was an immediate spike in the stock price for the private prison company Geo Group, a company that had also been doing well under the Biden administration. Manuel thought the mass deportation would be “mutually damaging,” especially since Mexico, he understood, would be corralled into helping with the expulsions. He said this would create a ripple effect of suffering.
I wandered up a block from the border to where two women were selling secondhand clothes, in front of the apartment they rented together. As I approached, I noticed one of the T-shirts they were selling; it was black with white letters: “I don’t give a fuck what you think.”
I asked the women about the election and the border. Like other people, they eyed me cautiously and asked me who I wanted to win. I gave them my thoughts, which seemed to put them more at ease. Their names were Bertha and Mariana. Bertha told me she had two kids in the United States and that they were voting for Trump. “Do you know why?” I asked. She shrugged. Then she told me she wanted Harris to win. The women told me—like the bus coordinator—that Mexico has its first woman president, whom they liked. They told me her government was going to help them. They’re going to help especially, Mariana said, “madres solteras,” single mothers, like they were. There were “ayudas” for housing, for education, for health. We need all of that. “Would that be the same with Harris?” they asked. I wasn’t sure.
“Would the wall come down?” one of them asked. I said I’m not so sure about that either. In fact, I admitted, Harris had said that she would build it more. “Es muy triste,” Mariana said, “para el mexicano” (That is very sad for the Mexican people). I wondered, again, why the Democrats chose the hardline campaign stance on the border. I had heard from people who justified this campaign strategy as practical, inevitable, that they had to do it. I found this perplexing, especially since in 2020, the Democrats ran a campaign on a more humane border, and they won.
Later, I discussed this with longtime Nogales organizer Marycruz Sandoval Pérez, from the Colonia Flores Magón. “They [by they, all politicians of all parties] always put us down as an excuse when there are elections,” she said. “But they know perfectly well that we are a ‘bad necessity’ in the United States.” Because, she asked, who else would pick the food, wash the dishes, clean the hotel rooms? It was precisely this constrained perspective that Sandoval Pérez described, the constant commodification of people, that I wished to break free of on my walk.
But now I was headed back. Near the DeConcini port of entry, I passed a man who strummed a mandolin and sang “La Llorona” with the voice of an opera singer. The song stopped me in my tracks, and I listened with complete attention. Then I began to jot down inspired notes about how hope doesn’t lie with the politicians from the upper echelons but rather from below, in art, in conversation, in song, in graffiti, in normal everyday people. I have heard “La Llorona” hundreds of times before, but this rendition soared, and I realized I was seeking something much more than an election assessment. I was searching for the source of change, how things really move, how they transform. It usually does not come from above, but from below, like a passionate song.
I realized that what I was craving was the inspiration that comes from the borderlands, not as a place of chaos and violence—as Trump will now loudly and endlessly portray it—but precisely the opposite: a place of creativity, a fertile ground where solutions are found. Bertha and Mariana have them. Gustavo Lozano has them. Marycruz Sandoval Pérez has them. Now, as the Trump administration barks out its plans, it is more important than ever to listen.
]]>It’s Election Day. The day we’ve been anticipating, dreading. Tucson finally has cooler weather, which means I will be taking long walks today, and deep breaths while we wait for the results. And if you missed it, Todd and I had an interesting conversation on the last Border Chronicle podcast about Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and their border and immigration policies. We covered everything from robodogs and surveillance to the binational effort to shut down asylum.
The takeaway from our podcast was that whatever happens in the election, people migrating and communities in the U.S.-Mexico border region have suffered historically under both parties. So there’s a lot of work to be done to restore human rights in the borderlands. Today’s Q&A with Nicole Ramos is about this very topic, and about how to set your compass on the seas of uncertainty. Ramos, who lives in Tijuana, is director of the Border Rights Project for the nonprofit Al Otro Lado, which started as a binational volunteer effort during the Obama era. After Trump took office, Ramos and Al Otro Lado were surveilled and harassed by the U.S. government, along with other border advocates and border journalists.
In 2017, Al Otro Lado sued Trump’s Department of Homeland Security for turning back asylum seekers at ports of entry. In doing this, DHS claimed that there were no more daily asylum slots available. This is a practice called “metering,” which is contrary to U.S. asylum law. Seven years later, in October, Al Otro Lado and the asylum-seeker plaintiffs finally prevailed when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court that metering is illegal. Ramos talks with The Border Chronicle about what’s next after the court’s ruling, how she’s weathering the election, and what she sees on the horizon for 2025.
We’ve had several readers asking us about the metering lawsuit and what it means for the future. How is it going to impact asylum seekers at the border?
Right now, we are monitoring what is happening at ports of entry in terms of people being turned away. We imagine that CBP [Customs and Border Protection] is probably not going to be allowing access and will tell everyone they need to apply through CBP One [a government smartphone app], which would appear to be a violation of the court’s decision in this case, which finds that they are required to process people upon arrival.
We filed a separate lawsuit last July, arguing that CBP One is the same as metering, forcing people to wait in dangerous border cities [in Mexico] where they don’t have any shelter, immigration status, work authorization, or access to medical care, and where they are expected to wait for indeterminate periods of time, which the court found was not acceptable in the metering lawsuit. Our position is that CBP One is just a digital metering policy. We think the recent court ruling puts us in a good position for our CBP One litigation.
It does feel like since you filed the lawsuit in 2017, it’s become layer upon layer of more restrictions to asylum.
The point of access to asylum has become smaller and smaller. And then with Title 42, it was virtually nonexistent. Anytime an organization like Al Otro Lado, ACLU, or Raices gets a win on asylum access, the U.S. government creates another policy to evade their obligations under that decision.
It’s also interesting how Texas has added another layer to those restrictions already applied by the federal government. Now you have a state government basically usurping the federal government in Texas, pushing people back and not allowing them to access asylum.
We don’t have those same sets of issues here [on the California-Mexico border]. We do have incidents of CBP officers pushing people back and not through formal processes such as a removal order or an expulsion order. They are pushing people back by threat of violence, and sometimes violence itself.
You used the term “pushback,” a term they use in Europe but not here in the United States. It’s a term used when asylum seekers and refugees are forcibly returned, often using violence, without any formal process or acknowledgment by governments. I wonder if we shouldn’t start using the term here too, since this type of aggression is unfortunately becoming more common here.
We are regularly in contact and conferencing with organizations in Europe around pushback and turn-back issues, which is where we have gotten that language from. We call it a pushback if it is along the borderline and not at a port of entry. If it’s at a port of entry, we call it a turn-back.
What are your thoughts on the election, and what are your biggest fears? Do you have any hopes?
I have no hope. And that’s just because I’ve been at the border since 2014. This is my third administration, second Democratic administration. There is no difference. They’re all looking to use immigrants and asylum seekers as an easy chit to call in for political points. So I don’t see Kamala Harris winning and revamping border processing or the asylum system or the immigration system in a way that’s fair or favorable to immigrants and their human rights. And as far as if Trump is elected, unfortunately, what will happen is that probably a lot of philanthropic foundations will throw a lot of money at the issue. They withdrew when Biden was elected, because they assume that there’s a difference in the policies, not realizing that the Biden administration defended many of the Trump policies in court in order to not repeal them. So I don’t have a lot of hope. I don’t see a lot of difference.
It was the same with media coverage. Once Biden took office, a lot of the national media left the border. Just like the foundations. Then the vacuum was filled with Fox News and far-right content creators, who built this whole narrative about us being under invasion, which has now pushed the Democrats even further to the right.
I also feel like people don’t understand the reasons why people are coming. Many are coming because of conditions that we helped put in play through our foreign interventionist policy and support of international corporations extracting all the resources, and destabilizing governments. It’s astounding how we can be so angry about receiving what are the victims of our own foreign policy.
Are there examples of other countries or policies where you feel like they are doing it right or building a humanitarian infrastructure for people who are displaced? Anything out there that you find encouraging?
I can’t say that there is. It just feels like countries in the Global North are hell-bent on locking the gate so that anyone from the Global South can’t enter. All their policies are leaning more toward detention, monitoring, and limiting movement than about integration and providing support.
You live in Mexico. It seemed like the security situation wasn’t discussed much during the Mexican presidential election, which I found surprising. Is it getting any better?
It continues to get worse. There is not a week that goes by where there is not some kind of news of, you know, a narcomanta [a threatening banner put up by drug gangs], a car full of bodies. There’s a lot of people disappeared. There’s a lot of violence, a lot of shootings. It’s very difficult sometimes to navigate here [in Tijuana]. There’s a lot of security concerns just about going out and doing normal things.
It’s also not normal that we are receiving, every single day, dozens and dozens of people fleeing Michoacán and Guerrero, which I think at this point are the two highest sending states. It should be an alarm bell for everyone when you have communities just emptying out and fleeing to the border.
The federal government has not, in all the years that I’ve been here, figured out a way to make these regions more peaceful, because people don’t want to leave. It’s beautiful there. They have land, they have their traditions. They don’t want to come to the border or go to the United States.
How difficult is it for Mexicans to receive asylum in the U.S.? And really, they’re the ones who are being turned back under the latest executive order from Biden, right?
It’s incredibly challenging. A lot of judges assume that Mexico is a very big country and that it’s easy to just relocate internally. But that ignores the fact that if organized crime wants to harm you, it’s very easy for them to get information about you, because the systems are vulnerable to hacking. There are also government workers who are on organized crime’s payroll and will give out that information. You have to live completely outside of the system, off the grid, if you want to hide, because every place that you’re working, enrolling your kids in school, or you’re participating in the public health care system, you’re providing your INE [Instituto Nacional Electoral number], which makes you easy to find.
What do you see on the horizon for the kinds of things that you’ll be tackling next year?
The work is always evolving. Regardless of the presidential administration, the trend is to restrict access and make it more difficult to seek asylum. And so every time a new policy is rolled out, we have to shift or expand. So we anticipate that is what we will have to do, whether we have Kamala Harris as president or whether we have Donald Trump, our work has increasingly expanded to also include humanitarian aid, helping asylum seekers get their children enrolled in school, making sure they have access to the health care system. Also, identifying individuals among the asylum seekers that we are serving who have serious medical vulnerabilities and trying to get them across on humanitarian parole. Until we get some kind of ruling on whether CBP One is legal, we’re going to be attending to the basic needs of asylum seekers who are now waiting here [in Tijuana] for up to 13 months for an appointment.
(Correction: In a previous version of my post I wrote that Al Otro Lado started during the Trump administration. It actually started during the Obama administration.)
]]>The following piece was done in collaboration with Zócalo Public Square, an online platform that publishes essays on a variety of topics and whose mission is to connect people to ideas and to each other. This is part of Zócalo’s Election Letters series which collects dispatches from people around the United States—and the world—about their on-the-ground experiences of the elections.
Also, Happy Halloween and Feliz Día de Muertos from The Border Chronicle!
Several rows of coiled razor wire drape the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Nogales, Arizona. The Trump administration put them there in 2018. Later, when Biden took office, the mayor of Nogales asked him to take the razor wire down—besides being visually and emotionally abrasive, it was dangerous, especially for children.
But the sharp coils remained. Recently, I stood in front of the wall with a group of around 30 teachers, looking at the wire sagging in disrepair, its barbs holding bits and pieces of clothing, presumably from the occasional person who tries to scale it (most do not). The teachers and I were there to talk about the history of the border wall, and how it became what it is today. While it may be fashionable to think that the border wall began with Trump, the wall is actually a monument to many presidents. Standing in front of it, you can see layers of history that go back more than three decades, some associated with individual presidential administrations, some blurring across partisan lines.
It was just over two weeks before the 2024 elections, and I was excited to be in Nogales with educators from all over the United States and the world to talk about inserting border analysis into their curriculum. Meanwhile, the campaigns raging along in the background continued to distort the border. Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are really one city, with shared families, geographies, and circumstances divided by a political line. But the unnuanced, uncontextualized portrayals of the border that dominate election season rarely reflect this reality.
This is the third presidential race in a row in which the border has become a central villain. If you watch television in Arizona, the endless campaign commercials come across like horror movies, laden with grainy images of border walls, depicting the people who cross the border as criminal. Kamala Harris’ ads say that Donald Trump is not serious on the border, and that she—a former prosecutor—will be. She says she’ll work to pass a bipartisan, enforcement-heavy border bill (rejected earlier this year by the Republicans at the behest of Trump). She’ll hire more Border Patrol agents, build more wall, and bring in more technology.
On the other side, Trump continues to be Trump. He’s promised mass deportations of 15 to 20 million people. He mentions the border as much as possible on the campaign trail, painting it as a place of chaos and violence. He repeats deeply eugenicist remarks about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Contemplating Trump’s rhetoric decrying U.S. “open borders” while in the shadow of the wall is absurd. Up the hill from where I stood with the teachers, a tall post holding several cameras—a remote video surveillance system, in official parlance—stares along the international boundary and into Mexico. I’ve been coming to this border—an hour away from my home in Tucson, Arizona—for 30 years, and these cameras have been here the entire time. Underneath them, Border Patrol agents watch the boundary line, unmoving during eight-hour shifts. This three-pronged logic of border enforcement dates back to the 1990s Clinton administration: barrier, armed agents, and technology.
While Trump campaigned in 2016 as if there were no wall, its construction here began in 1995, when I arrived at the Nogales border for the first time. That year the government replaced chain-link fences with a 15-foot wall of rusty-looking metal once used as makeshift landing strips during the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars. They were the blueprints for a new strategy, still in place today: prevention through deterrence. Block off the traditional crossing routes in the border cities, and the surrounding deserts would be potentially “mortal,” a 1994 Border Patrol memorandum explained. It was a prophecy: At least 10,000 people have died crossing the border since then.
During the Clinton era, border and immigration enforcement budgets nearly tripled—from roughly $1.5 billion to over $4.2 billion in 2000. Then came 9/11. In its aftermath, the George W. Bush administration brought enforcement to unseen levels, converting the border into another flank in the War on Terror.
At the time, I crossed the border several times a week for work, and I watched it transform and deform before my very eyes. The days when Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence Day parades crisscrossed the boundary line were long over. By the end of the Bush administration in 2008, the annual combined U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget ascended to $14.4 billion, the most money put into the border under a single president. This investment spurred the largest hiring surge in Border Patrol history—8,000 new agents in three years. Meanwhile, the government awarded a nearly $2 billion contract to the Boeing Corporation to use technology to construct a virtual wall, and Congress funded the construction of more physical barriers through the 2006 Secure Fence Act (passed with yes votes by future Democratic presidents and presidential candidates Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton).
In 2011, during the Obama administration, I watched the machinery from the Secure Fence Act arrive in Nogales—easily removing the original landing-mat wall as if it were plucking out a set of bad teeth. Thick steel bars resembling that of a prison cell replaced the rusty metal sheets. Shortly after, in 2012, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed an unarmed 16-year-old-boy through those bars. As the teachers and I walk up the hill—past the agent, past the surveillance tower—we find artificial flowers on the border wall honoring José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, and when we looked down into Nogales, Sonora, a small cross and altar. Ten bullets hit José Antonio in the back and head as he walked on the Mexican side of the wall; Border Patrol claimed he was throwing rocks.
While the Biden administration ignored Nogales’ mayor’s request to take down the coiling razor wire in 2021, earlier this year—for a moment—it seemed something had changed. CBP removed the razor wire from a large swath of wall. Observers speculated that the wire might finally come down. But when I called CBP to figure out what was going on, an information officer told me that wasn’t the case. They were only taking it down to put up what he called a new “capability.”
I pointed to the section where the wire had been replaced with metal casing and black cable out to the teachers. CBP hasn’t made much more information public, but in May, I went to El Paso for the Border Security Expo, an annual event that brings together top brass from CBP and ICE with private industry. There, I talked with representatives of a company whose product looked exactly what I had seen stretched along the top of the Nogales border wall. It was a sensor system—a “smart” wall. It can detect if a person is touching the wall, or “sawing through it,” the vendor told me. At the expo, I felt as though I was glimpsing what the next 30 years of border enforcement may look like, especially the future technological layers to be added to the wall. While the two parties have distinct positions and rhetoric on the border, it’s clear that they’ll move, as their predecessors have, in the same direction. It may become something out of science fiction, but the razor wire is here to stay.
]]>Editor’s note: This report is part of “Seeds of Distrust,” an investigative collaboration between Lighthouse Reports, where Melissa del Bosque is an investigations editor, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, the Texas Observer, palabra, and Puente News Collaborative. Article edited by Ricardo Sandoval-Palos, founding editor of palabra.
Arvin West is the iconic borderland sheriff in far-west Texas’ deeply rural Hudspeth County. His distinctive drawl and no-nonsense policing have made him a darling of conservative politicians and fellow sheriffs nationwide, who are convinced that migrants pose a threat to the upcoming presidential election and democracy itself.
West is a Democrat-turned-Republican. In 2005, he helped start the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition. His rising national profile helped him lobby for multi-million-dollar grants so local law enforcement could fight powerful transnational smuggling organizations.
But these days, West is evolving. He pushes back against far-right rants of ultra-conservative politicians and so-called constitutional sheriffs about threats migrants might pose to the November 5 vote. He speaks forcefully about being a local sheriff in a border county that’s always been home and where Latinos (including those in his own family) are not enemies but voters who’ve kept him in office – most recently in an unusually tough primary election campaign earlier this year.
Just ahead of a monumental presidential vote that pivots around migrants and immigration, West is more measured and reflective. He looks at his recent years raising hell about the border and underscores why he’s taking a different tack: It’s not so much that he’s suddenly stopped being a conservative and tough on border security. He’s concerned that too much talk about the border and the people crossing is not just extreme, but deepening political divisions. He also says he’s fed up with politicians distorting issues of immigration and drug trafficking and playing ideological favorites with policing grants and incentives.
A former football middle linebacker in high school and the Friday night play-by-play announcer for Sierra Blanca ISD, West is characteristically straight to the point about his growing frustration with political gamesmanship on immigration that has distorted the truth about the southern border.
Most folks don’t understand the border and its people, he says, adding that many spread misinformation about migrants while politicians earmark grants to locals who parrot claims of immigration chaos and migrants usurping U.S. jobs and public benefits.
“I know what works for Hudspeth County. I know what works on the border,” West says. “And I don't care who wants to come across that border to work … Put a checkmark on their forehead ... But if they want to bring drugs in, if they want to come (to) commit crimes here, then we need to stand hard on that.”
After an incursion by what he calls a “Mexican military” onto U.S. territory in January 2006, the media spotlight turned to West. He spoke in colorful language about perceived threats of immigration and being outgunned at the border by smuggling cartels.
The attention changed Sierra Blanca, a small community in the heart of Texas’ rural Hudspeth County. The town hugs Interstate 10 southeast of El Paso and has no traffic lights. It does have a declining population, now around 800, surrounded by a county of about 5,000 people. Sierra Blanca is sandwiched between the larger town of Van Horn and a notorious U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint whose drug-sniffing dogs are credited with bringing down — on possession charges — rap star Snoop Dogg, songstress Fiona Apple, and country singer Willie Nelson. They’re among the many caught by the “checkpoint to the stars,” jokes Oscar Carrillo, West’s longtime friend and sheriff of neighboring Culberson County.
Carrillo says the celebrities often found themselves jailed briefly alongside migrants held in Hudspeth County jail for violating local laws or not possessing documents. (West recalls that he and Nelson spent most of his time in custody talking about performing at a future sheriff’s conference in Houston.)
Drivers used to zoom through the county, unless they needed gas or craved a bite at Delfina’s Mexican restaurant. More recently, throngs have flocked to the area for a glimpse of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origins rockets, flaring into wide-open skies northeast of Van Horn.
The community has also gained favor among media and conservative politicians who’ve come for West’s border security witticisms. While his immigration rhetoric has moderated, there are still days when West’s turf is popular with social media influencers taking selfies, and fear mongering about the porous border, with the CPB checkpoint or desert hills as backdrops.
West doesn’t shy away from hard talk about the border, but he says he’s also tried to keep extremists and militias well away from Hudspeth County.
Others have been welcomed. At the peak of his celebrity, West deputized headliners like actor Steven Seagal. He accepted invitations to address lawmakers in Austin and Washington, D.C., where he lambasted the federal government for “abandoning the border.” He shared dramatic stories about a drug war that came to his county, about that Mexican military invasion, and about the constant threat of terrorists crossing the border. He warned reporters about Qurans he discovered in a motel.
His words on the border and crime sometimes aligned with the anti-immigration canon of sheriffs in the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). West says he was supportive of the group’s insistence that sheriffs are the ultimate lawmen in their counties, but he disagreed that the authority allowed them to defy the U.S. Constitution and pick and choose the laws they’d enforce.
“I took an oath to support our nation's Constitution,” he says. “Other than that, you know, right is right and wrong is wrong.”
(CSPOA advocates such things as leapfrogging federal statutes in favor of state and local intervention in immigration enforcement.)
While he sometimes rode with the constitutional sheriffs — and not always at the same pace, he says — he was making old friends increasingly uncomfortable at home. Bill Addington, chairman of the Hudspeth County Democratic Committee and West’s neighbor, has consistently voted for his lifelong Republican buddy. “He’s a thoughtful person,” Addington says. “That’s something the national media doesn’t get.”
But Addington has criticized West’s portrayal of the border, which he likens to a political “feeding frenzy. The more you bash the border, the more resources you may get.”
West “has toned it down these days,” says Carrillo, the Culberson County sheriff, referring to West’s past rhetoric.
West and Carrillo go back more than 35 years, to when West was a chief deputy in Presidio County and Carrillo was the police chief in Marfa. Back when they mused about someday becoming sheriffs.
Carrillo says he’s long admired West’s blunt talk.
But unlike West, Carrillo keeps a low public profile, especially on politics, given the divisive times in Texas. He quietly supported former U.S. Rep.Beto O’Rourke in a failed bid to unseat Governor Greg Abbott, and today he backs the campaign of Rep. Colin Allred, who’s in a close race against U.S. Senator Ted Cruz.
Culberson County, population 2,196, is another flashpoint in a polarized debate about immigration. The county seat is a two-hour drive from the Mexican border, following a quiet highway that slices through a wind-swept desert interrupted only by the touristy Prada Marfa, a quirky shoe-store-as-art installation near the tiny town of Valentine.
Culberson is surrounded by the equally rural Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, and Presidio counties. They’re connected by busy commercial highways and one of Texas’ most iconic, picturesque roads, U.S. Highway 90 and 67, which run adjacent to the vast Chihuahua Desert. Too many migrants die there each year from heatstroke, dehydration, or a winter freeze, left behind by smugglers who favor the corridor’s isolation.
“Sometimes we forget we’re dealing with human beings,” Carrillo says.
Carrillo sees no end to the debate about migrants, especially their smugglers, often found speeding along the same highway on their way to Interstate 10 and big cities beyond. Like West, Carrillo blames the U.S. district attorney’s office for not holding the true criminals accountable.
“Why are we putting ourselves at risk, the public at risk, if at the end of the day, nobody’s gonna get prosecuted?” he asked. “They’ll deport the deportable, but there’s no real accountability.”
Carrillo’s “aha” moment came after the mysterious death of Border Patrol agent Rogelio Martinez in 2017 east of Van Horn.
Martinez and a fellow agent were found in a culvert area with traumatic head injuries. “... None of the more than 650 interviews completed, locations searched, or evidence collected and analyzed have produced evidence that would support the existence of a scuffle, altercation, or attack,” according to an FBI statement at the time.
The tragedy catalyzed the likes of the National Border Patrol Council, which sought more federal money for agents and technology. The union initially insisted Martinez had been bludgeoned with rocks, an unfounded allegation that became fuel for Trump’s clarion call for a border wall.
Carrillo was one of the first responders at the scene of Martinez’s death. He suspected, from the start, that the incident was probably an accident – a position that won him scorn from conservatives and the Trump administration.
“(It seemed) facts no longer mattered,” Carrillo recalls. Asked whether this incident was his turning point, he added, “Yeah, like we were going too far, (following) this rabbit down the hole, yeah.”
Still, Texas law enforcement seemed inclined to get tougher than ever.
Operation Lone Star, the multi-billion dollar state border enforcement initiative spearheaded by Abbott, deployed 10,000 National Guard troops along the more than 1,200-mile Texas-Mexico border. Referring to sheriff deputies from states including Florida, Ohio, and South Dakota who spent off-duty time supporting local deputies, Carrillo smirked and asked, “What do they know about the border? It’s just a show, a circus, and we’re the starring characters.’'
That didn’t stop Carrillo, the Democrat, from signing on to Abbott’s border disaster declaration.
“… Not for politics. I’m just practical. We need to be reimbursed for more than $300,000 we spent on the migrants who’ve died (crossing the border).”
But the money never came.
West says his department once thrived on outside funding for equipment and training and government grants that underwrite Texas’ defiance of federal immigration law and its rogue brand of border enforcement.
West said the grants were a mixed bag, at best. People lived high and low, he recalls. Money, he says, with a slight grin, made even his deputies do crazy things. When money flowed, deputies worked overtime, enough to make the family happy with things like new cars. Then, the money dried up, leading to divorces, unhappy marriages, and negative work environments.
Moreover, the cost of the extra policing isn’t fair to local taxpayers, he says.
“For 90 days, I feed them. I take care of them, take them to the doctor, whatever they needed … Then the district judges bonded them out on personal recognizance to never see them again … Why should I stack my jail with these people, and then they never get prosecuted? It just doesn't make any sense.”
West grows visibly angry when he talks about state funding he says is now owed to Hudspeth County for the extra patrols he assigned to go after unauthorized migrants and suspected traffickers. But compensation for that has been slow or non-existent, he adds, while other sheriffs, sometimes hundreds of miles from the border, enjoy greater financial support from the state and police organizations that used to donate to Hudspeth County.
“... We're not any closer to stopping this,” West says of border lawlessness. “And then you compound that to the next level, where I've got my guys out here running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, arresting people and trying to bring them to justice ... We arrest them, we bring them to jail and there is no prosecution. You have to ask yourself: Is this a game? A charade?”
Looking back at decades of screaming and shouting about more boots on the border grounds, walls, fences, drones, constitutional sheriffs, more state troopers, and National Guardsmen, Carrillo says he has mixed feelings about his and West’s place in the issue. Carrillo is all about security for his constituents, he says, but, “It’s been a whole lot of failure … We’ve only inconvenienced people and for what, a grant? Some TV airtime? It’s a sick game, and there is no end in sight.”
Recently, the two sheriffs met in the Hudspeth County sheriff’s office and displayed hundreds of case files, some 300 misdemeanors and felonies that their offices filed over the past two years. All were dismissed by county prosecutors.
“It's embarrassing. It's frustrating. It pisses us off,” said Carrillo, adding he feels “burned.”
“It’s bullshit,” adds West.
El Paso Public Defender Kelli Childress blamed “chaos” for the dismissals and acquittals. “…That’s inexcusable.”
The El Paso’s District Attorney’s office, responsible for overseeing prosecutions of felonies in Culberson and Hudspeth counties, did not respond to multiple phone calls from the Puente News Collaborative regarding the allegations.
The dismissals deepened the bond between the two sheriffs.
“He’s a diehard Republican, and I'm a diehard Democrat. We’re totally political opposites, but … we know we need to work together,” he says. “We have … common highways. We got common criminals. We have common challenges. You know, the terrain, the border, todo. And … when I can't get the resources from the feds to come in to help or the state, you know, this guy's my constant…. I mean, we have to. Our communities are so isolated we have to turn to one another for support and resources. There’s not much else between us.”
West’s ire becomes a lecture on the nuances of the border, the complexities that are too often overlooked.
To be clear, West insists he still leans hard toward tough border enforcement. But he now also emphasizes his full name: “Arvin West Ramirez, a GMC: a gringo, Mexican combination,” he says, noting that his mother is Mexican and his father is “a gringo.”
His roots run on both sides of the border. And though he once toyed with becoming a Border Patrol agent, he discarded the fleeting thought. “I didn’t want to be chasing my own primos,” his family members from the Mexican side of the line.
Border problems are more complex than just migrants crossing, he adds.
There’s been too much conflating of the drug and immigration issues, he says. “It’s a mistake … The drug aspect we all know, it's horrible, terrible. It kills people … For 42 years, I’ve fought this war on drugs, and we ain't no closer (to winning) than we were 42 years ago.”
Making things worse, he contends, are federal and state officials who don’t offer real solutions while they use the border as political theater.
Trafficking must be stopped, West insists, but politicians have turned that into a talking point that makes immigration loom as a bigger threat to democracy.
Is he worried about noncitizens voting this November or any past November?
“No, no. That young lady sitting over there,” West says, pointing to a woman sitting at a desk in the county office, “She's our voter registrar here, and she's pretty good on it, she stays on it, and (voter fraud and non-citizen voting has) never been an issue in this county … You know our American system may not be the best, it may not be the greatest system, but it's the best system in the world.”
And West is quick to add that he has respected, and will respect, the outcome of federal elections.
“If President Trump loses, he loses. I mean, simple as that.”
“There are some radical sheriffs out there,” he adds. “There is no reason to even try to sugarcoat it or deny it … But why? … All you're going to do is cause ill feelings. Your job, our job, my job, is to protect the safety of the citizens.”
West says he’s talked with CSPOA founder and former Graham County (Arizona) Sheriff Richard I. Mack.
“He talks about things that we need to do to protect our citizens from the federal government. I agree with that. I agree with that wholeheartedly. But on the same token, we don't resort to violence or anything like that… When I get that badge on, I’m only here for my citizens,” West says.
But the extreme talk leaves West sure that he’ll follow a middle path.
“I think I would classify myself as a very conservative Democrat or a very liberal Republican. Does that make sense? The bottom line is, we're all Americans. We have to live with each other personally. Let's get rid of the party system, Republican or Democrat.”
“Let's vote for whoever we think is the best person. Bottom line.”
West’s practical approach to politics was hardened by a contentious reelection bid against one of his former deputies, Carlos Chaparro, – a race he won last spring by a slim margin.
“I love the job … as sheriff,” West says. “And, for lack of better words, what I don't like is political bullshit. Well, it comes with a job, right? It comes with a job, but it's getting old, and I … probably don't have high tolerance for that anymore.”
]]>It’s democracy vs. fascism in the most consequential election of our lifetime. We talk about its implications for border communities. Also, Todd talks about his latest reporting from Mexico, where migrants are continually being sent back to the country’s southern border, creating a cycle of futility and suffering. Melissa recalls reporting on Trump’s Operation Faithful Patriot, in which Trump set up military camps at the U.S. southern border before the 2018 midterm election. He also used special Border Patrol teams to kidnap protesters in Portland, Oregon. If he’s elected, it will be much worse this time.
We also discuss Kamala Harris’s tough stance on border security and the bipartisan bill rejected by Trump, and the broader implications of this for human rights and migration. And we get into misconceptions about “open borders,” and we talk about the role of “robodogs” and other technology in border enforcement. And much more.
Give it a listen and leave a comment. How are you feeling leading up to November 5?
Also, during the podcast, neither Todd nor Melissa could remember the name of a great book on immigration policy under the Trump administration (it’s been that kind of a month): it’s Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration, by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear. It’s chock-full of details about what went down inside the administration during that chaotic era. And here’s a post featuring the infamous robodogs from March, when Todd crashed the annual Border Security expo in El Paso, Texas, even though the expo banned journalists.
And one last thing—don’t forget to vote. Our democracy depends on it!
]]>Please join The Border Chronicle on Thursday, October 24, for a discussion thread on the U.S. elections and the border. We welcome all perspectives for what we hope will be a provocative and respectful discussion that I (Todd) will facilitate. We feel that this is something that will be useful to Border Chronicle readers (and ourselves!), especially as the elections—with all their points of contention—are just a couple of weeks away.
So we want you to come and to let it rip with comments, questions, worries, hopes. We anticipate that along with a vibrant conversation, there will be disagreements with this potentially polemic topic, so we encourage a good-faith debate. Anybody who strays from that (by name calling, for example, or worse) will be removed from the conversation. Please join us at 10 a.m. Pacific time, 11 a.m. Mountain, noon Central, 1 p.m. Eastern.
The discussion will be text based, so all you have to do is click the link we’ll send to your inbox on October 24 and type away. If you’re new to discussion threads, it’s a written forum in real time.
]]>For a retired federal employee, Tom Homan, an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration, is a very busy man. For the last year, he’s crisscrossed the country with a team of former state and federal law enforcement officers, who call themselves Border911, speaking in theaters and event halls from Phoenix, Arizona, to Mission, Texas, to Ronkonkoma, New York, to promote the propaganda that the U.S.-Mexico border is under invasion and that President Joe Biden and his allies are admitting “illegal aliens” so that Democrats will “be in power for years to come.”
Homan, the president and CEO of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc., and his group’s members have largely flown under the radar, receiving little coverage outside of right-wing media. But if Trump were to win this November, Homan, the architect of Trump’s family separation initiative, and his allies could receive prominent posts. Trump already promised at a rally this summer that he is “bringing back” Homan in 2025.
“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan vowed during a July immigration panel in Washington, D.C. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
The mission of Homan’s tax-exempt Border911 Foundation, formed in Virginia in October 2023, is to “educate the American people about the facts of a non-secure border,” according to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings. But, by promoting disinformation about a “border invasion” of “illegal immigrants,” Homan's Border911, the nickname he often uses for the foundation, is helping to lay the groundwork for challenging November’s election if the results don’t favor Trump.
Border911 remains linked to a 501(c)(4) group, called The America Project, a major funder of election conspiracy efforts. Unlike a 501(c)(3) charity, 501(c)(4)s can legally support political campaigns, and they are sometimes referred to as “dark money” organizations because they aren’t required under U.S. tax law to reveal their donors. However, they lack one important advantage of a 501(c)(3)–their donors’ contributions are not tax-deductible. (Homan also in 2023 created another 501(c)(4) he called Border911 Inc.)
Border911 Foundation, and its members, identified on its website, are promoting extremist policies, such as declaring an invasion at the border, to elected leaders and law enforcement officials and falsely portraying the country as beset by voter fraud, according to a joint investigation by a multistate team of journalists from Lighthouse Reports, the Texas Observer, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, and palabra based on dozens of interviews, attendance of various Border911 events, and reviews of public records, videos, speeches, and social media posts.
Border911’s policy agenda foreshadows Trump’s most extreme immigration proposals, which include mass deportations and deploying troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. The nonprofit has already had an impact in Arizona, where several Border911-backed bills have been introduced and where Republican lawmakers are pushing a controversial November ballot initiative that would formally declare a border invasion and empower state and local officials to become immigration enforcers.
Despite his background in law enforcement, IRS filings show that Homan’s foundation and his Border911 dark money organization may be skirting federal tax law, according to tax documents and interviews with experts, that prohibits tax-exempt charitable organizations from participating in “any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office.”
Border911 associates have testified in Congress as law enforcement experts, instead of as Trump-aligned activists, and spread disinformation in media interviews, calling the Biden Administration's handling of the U.S.-Mexico border "the biggest national security threat to the American people since 9/11." Meanwhile, these same players are securing lucrative border security contracts for themselves or for-profit companies that employ them, documents show.
“BORDER911 is a team of operators with decades of experience,” Homan posted on X last November, announcing the group. “We helped create the most secure border in history. The war on America is going to be won when we band together. … The cavalry is on its way. … The border is our theater of war.”
Homan’s cavalry, who are publicly featured as team members, includes former state and federal law enforcement, some of whom have intelligence backgrounds, including Rodney Scott, former Border Patrol Chief; Derek Maltz, a former Drug Enforcement Agency special agent; Victor Avila, a former agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI); Sara Carter, a Fox News contributor; and Jaeson Jones, a former Texas Department of Public Safety captain turned NewsMax correspondent, according to public records and the Border911 Foundation’s website.
For the last several months, the group’s members have been targeting battleground states and cities “to educate them [about the] border crisis,” Homan said on a March podcast. At a July conference in El Paso, Homan claimed that “Millions of people heading to sanctuary cities will be counted in the next census.” When seats are apportioned for Congress, he said, “That’s going to create more seats in Congress for Democrats. They sold this country out. It’s almost treasonous.”
Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee in August, the gruff-talking and pugnacious Homan has attacked her on Fox News, where he is a contributor. The former federal agent, who got his start as a police officer in West Carthage, New York, before becoming a Border Patrol agent then moving to ICE, characterized Trump’s Democratic opponent on Fox as “disgusting” and said that Border Patrol and ICE agents did not respect her. She “broke the border,” he said.
Homan claims he launched his nonprofit as a purely self-funded passion project. “I started Border911 with my own funds because every day I wake up pissed off,” Homan said in a March 2024 interview. “And we have to educate Americans why border security matters.”
But before it became its own foundation, Border911 was part of The America Project, an organization founded by serial election deniers: former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security advisor.
At a raucous White House meeting on December 18, 2020, Byrne and Flynn were part of a group of advisers that counseled Trump to use National Guard soldiers to seize voting machines to overturn the election. When martial law was not imposed, the two formed The America Project. And Byrne poured $27 million of his own money into that project, according to a post on X, including funding a sham election audit in Arizona, and recruiting radicalized individuals as poll workers with an emphasis on those with military and law enforcement backgrounds.
For part of 2023, Homan served as CEO of The America Project, then he launched Border911 Foundation Inc. in October of that year as a nonprofit. Homan is no longer the CEO of The America Project, but, as of June 2024, he was still listed as a board director. It’s unclear what salary and compensation, if any, he has received from The America Project.
Homan declined to be interviewed for this article, and he referred questions about Border911 to Steve Lentz, a corporate attorney in Virginia. Lentz said he didn’t know how much Homan was paid as CEO of The America Project or whether Byrne or The America Project supported Border911. “I don't know whether the foundation has received any money from them or not,” he said. Regarding the Border911 organizations, Lentz said that “Mr. Homan received no compensation in 2023, and will receive $1.00 in 2024.”
In addition to Homan’s tax-exempt charity, IRS tax filings show that in October 2023 he created Border911, Inc, the 501(c)(4), and both organizations list their corporate headquarters as a UPS store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Both Border911 organizations also declare the same purpose in tax filings: to “educate Americans about a non-secure border.” In 2023, both of Homan’s Border911 organizations reported almost the same expenses – about $87,000 – but the 501(c)(4) claimed zero revenue. (The groups have not yet disclosed figures for 2024.)
Two nonprofit compliance experts who examined Border911’s 2023 tax documents said it was unusual to see nearly identical expenditures for the two entities, while one of them—the dark money organization—reported no revenue. It appears, they said, that the tax-exempt charity money may have been passed through the dark money organization, which would violate IRS tax law. “I don't have any explanation for how the (c)(4) can bring in zero money in its first year and be able to spend tens of thousands of dollars,” said Robert Maguire, vice president of research and data at the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
It would be particularly concerning, he said, if ex-law enforcement officials openly flouted federal law. “These are hard and fast rules, to make sure that people aren’t misusing nonprofits for purposes they weren’t meant for,” he said. “You would hope that someone who cares about the rule of law would care about making sure their donors have the confidence that they are not misusing the funds.”
Lentz, the attorney who serves as a spokesman for Border911, said the 2023 tax filing for the dark money organization was incorrect. “There was an entry in the [501](c)(4) that shouldn’t have been there,” he said. “It should be all zeros. We’re going to amend that 990 for Border911, Inc.” Lentz added that the 501(c)(4) was created in 2023 but not operational until March 2024. That month, ABC News reported that Border911’s tax-exempt charity appeared to be illegally backing Trump’s campaign, which Lentz told ABC was “inadvertent.”
After being informed of Lentz’s statement, Maguire said: “Still, even if the explanation is more innocent, the impact can be such that it obscures their activities and makes it more difficult to hold them accountable. I certainly hope that if these were honest mistakes, they will correct them and endeavor to do better in the future. After all, these documents are all signed under penalty of perjury.”
Reporters for this story also requested comment from five people named on the Border911 website as team members, whom Lentz said are reimbursed for expenses by the foundation.
Two members replied to questions via email–former Border Patrol official Rodney Scott and former DEA special agent Derek Maltz–emphasizing that they joined Border911for philosophical reasons and were not paid employees. Maltz said he wanted “to educate America about border security and the growing fentanyl crisis.” Maltz deferred questions about his compensation to a Border911 Foundation representative but said that most work there is on a “volunteer basis.”
Scott said that he was “a member of the Border911 Foundation’s speaker’s team.” The organization “will normally reimburse me for limited/reasonable (coach) travel,” he said and that he has “been compensated for larger speaking events that required travel and extensive time.” Sara Carter, Jaeson Jones, and Victor Avila did not respond to requests for comment by publication date.
Homan has made no secret of his close ties with Trump, who promoted him to acting director of ICE where he initiated and pushed for separating families at the border before retiring in 2018. “I’m a Trump guy and not ashamed of it,” he said in a video announcing The Border911 Foundation, which Trump promoted on his Truth Social media platform last year.
It’s unclear when Homan first met Byrne, the Overstock.com millionaire, who has funded numerous election denial groups across the country through The America Project. (Byrne did not immediately respond to an interview request.) But, in April 2023, only a few months before Homan started Border911 as “his organization,” Byrne celebrated Homan’s hire as CEO of The America Project at a fundraising event in a gilded ballroom at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “What an honor it is to be turning the command of this vessel over to a real national security professional,” he said.
Byrne then launched into a speech. “I’m not sure that the affluent people who I’ve met know what’s coming for them,” he said. Under President Biden’s America, we are “living through a Chavista Revolution. It’s a classic Maoist doctrine coming at you in all stages,” he told the audience. “I have literally poured 90 percent of my liquidity into this effort because there is no country, no future, if we don’t win this.”
Homan nodded from the stage. “I’ve never met a man who loves his country more than Patrick Byrne,” he said. “I’m honored that you even asked me.”
A year later, Homan would return to Mar-a-Lago heading his own fundraiser for the Border911 Foundation with Trump in attendance. Lentz, the attorney representing Homan and the Border911 organizations, said an individual donated the Mar-a-Lago venue to Homan’s group for the April 2024 fundraiser, but he said he didn’t know who it was. The attorney also said that he had no idea how much the group had raised at the event, but that the amount would be reported in their 2024 tax filing next year.
Prior to becoming CEO, Homan had already participated in America Project events: In January 2023, he appeared alongside Arizona state Representative Steve Montenegro, who had been serving as the America Project’s national political director, at a Phoenix press conference to promote a slate of Border911-endorsed bills, followed by a speaking event two days later with MAGA-aligned Arizona legislators, which included free entry and meals for active-duty military.
At the press conference, the men repeatedly tied fentanyl deaths to the border “invasion,” insinuating migrants were bringing in the drugs, even though most fentanyl is smuggled by U.S. citizens through ports of entry, according to a recent study by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “This border is out of control. It's a crisis,” Homan told reporters. “Anybody who argues differently is ignoring the data, and they're lying to you.”
Two days later at a nearby theater, Montenegro publicly touted a “Border911” legislative agenda for the 2023 session that included declaring cartels foreign terrorist organizations, repurposing the Arizona National Guard as a border force, allowing unauthorized immigrants to agree to orders of deportation to avoid prosecution, and prohibiting migrants from pleading down charges if they caused the death of an American citizen, mirroring some initiatives that Texas had already adopted under Republican Governor Greg Abbott. (Trump has suggested cartels be designated as foreign terrorist organizations as part of the justification for his proposal, if reelected president, to use his emergency powers to deploy even more active duty military to police the border and protests elsewhere.)
“We’re going to focus on educating representatives and senators on what their authority is … so that we can start passing the right legislation,” Montenegro told the audience. Then, he added, “We’re going to replicate what we’re doing here” in other states “so that the entire country understands that every state is a border state.”
Montenegro introduced bills in 2023 and in 2024 that would’ve furthered Border911’s goals. Much of this legislative work coincided with Montenegro’s tenure as the America Project’s national political director, which he followed up with paid consulting work, according to state disclosure forms. Yet he never filed a personal financial interest statement with legislative officials before introducing or voting on Border911-aligned bills, a House clerk confirmed.
It's unclear how much The America Project has paid Montenegro, since Arizona doesn’t require legislators to disclose compensation amounts. Whether Montenegro remains on the group’s payroll is also unknown, since his most recent state filings don’t cover 2024. The lawmaker did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Receiving money from an outside group while advancing its legislative agenda raises ethical questions, according to Paul Eckstein, a longtime Arizona attorney and expert in legislative conflicts of interest. “If he's receiving … $10,000 or more, if I were giving the advice, I would say he's got a substantial enough financial interest that he should not be involved in any way, in any (related legislative) action,” Eckstein said.
Some Border911-backed bills have made it through the Republican-controlled House and Senate only to be vetoed by Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat. But Montenegro and other Republicans successfully referred the “Secure the Border Act” to the November ballot, which, if approved by Arizona voters, would authorize state and local law enforcement to act as immigration officers—even though Arizona border sheriffs have said they lack the manpower and funding to carry it out. One ex-border sheriff, a Republican, called it an “ill-conceived political stunt.” (Similar bills have previously been approved, and largely struck down by the courts, in Arizona and other states.)
By May 2024, Homan was running the Border911 Foundation as a separate nonprofit, but he was still collaborating with Montenegro and The America Project. In his capacity as a state elected official, Montenegro approached city leaders in Tombstone, Arizona, in May and requested and received a special permit on behalf of The America Project for a Border911 “Borders and Elections” town hall meeting. Alongside Montenegro at the city council meeting was Shawn Wilson, CEO of a private security firm called Mayhem Solutions Group. “We partner with [Mayhem] them for data and intel coming across the border, not to mention with our law enforcement,” Montenegro said of The America Project’s relationship with Mayhem. (Wilson, who describes himself as an Army veteran, previously volunteered with Arizona Border Recon, a paramilitary group that claims on its website to provide intel and security services to federal agents.)
The purpose of the event, where Border911 member Victor Avila, the former HSI agent from Texas, was identified as a speaker, would be to “sound the alarm” about the “current administration failing to do its job” when it came to securing the border, Montenegro said, according to the city council meeting minutes. “We’re trying to sound the alarm … not just in the state of Arizona, but we're trying to reach out to every state in the union.”
In addition to a press conference and a Border911 panel with elected officials, they would meet privately with “law enforcement intel officers and other folks that collect data intelligence,” he said. The America Project would also deliver food to local Border Patrol and law enforcement, Montenegro said, and give the local sheriff an award.
Border911 members have held and filmed similar events in Texas, New York, and elsewhere. Team members often produce and distribute strategically edited video from the border that bolsters MAGA conspiracy theories about invasion and immigrants as criminals. Like Homan, Sara Carter, another Border911 team member, is also a Fox News contributor who often talks about “criminals flooding the border.”
Jaeson Jones, the former captain in Texas DPS’s intelligence division, who identified himself at one point as Border911’s vice president, creates “invasion” content as a correspondent for the far-right NewsMax, and has been featured on Fox News. Those two media companies separately settled multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuits with voting machine companies after falsely alleging voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trying to overturn that election was The America Project’s initial focus, and election denial remains a major theme of Trump’s reelection campaign.
Jones and Mayhem Solutions Group use the same video production company, Cine 48, co-founded by the media director of the far-right group Turning Point USA. (Turning Point USA is yet another 501(c)(3) charitable organization with an eponymous dark money group for political purposes.) Jones and Border911 have also regularly produced content about the border for a Turning Point USA series called “Frontlines,” as well as a mini-series co-starring Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, whom Jones has called a “close friend.”
Lamb is closely aligned with the far-right constitutional sheriffs movement, and he is a promoter of election conspiracies, including about non-citizen voting.
In one presentation to a Central Texas GOP chapter, Jones showed videos that he said revealed armed cartel members driving around Arizona. He attributed the footage to his firm Omni Intelligence and to Mayhem Solutions Group and bragged of embedding with Pinal County deputies in Arizona.
The tactic of portraying the border as under invasion has proved useful for efforts to undermine confidence in the election—and has proved profitable for Border911’s members.
Last summer, Maltz, the former DEA special agent, and Jones, the former DPS captain, testified in Washington, D.C., before the House Homeland Security Committee about the border, identifying themselves only as private citizens and former law enforcement. Jones didn’t mention his Border911 public relations role, his private intelligence company, or the $20,000-30,000 speaker fees he advertises that he charges as a border expert.
Maltz did not disclose his Border911 speaker role or his job with a firm that has earned more than $250 million in federal government security contracts. Maltz is the executive director of government relations for PenLink, Ltd., a tech firm that sells surveillance tools to law enforcement, including software that can track cell phones without a warrant. The tech has been purchased by ICE, the DEA, and Texas DPS, among other agencies. Maltz said his job with PenLink includes interacting with the firm’s U.S. government and foreign customers, but he’s not registered as a lobbyist because his position does not involve lobbying. He said he became a member of Border911 because of his concern about Mexican cartels, Chinese organized crime, and escalating fentanyl deaths: “My work with the Border911 Foundation is completely independent of my role with Penlink. … I am a member of the Border911 Foundation’s speaker’s team, but I am not a board member or employee.”
Maltz isn't the only Border911 team member linked to a firm that’s cashing in on border security-related government contracts. Rodney Scott, the ex-Border Patrol chief, founded a consulting firm in July 2021—about a month before retiring from the federal government. At the time, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group in California filed a complaint alleging that founding the firm, Honor Consulting, while serving as Border Patrol chief violated federal law and ethics rules. (The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the complaint. The FBI and Homeland Security inspector general’s office said they could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.) In an email response to questions for this story, Scott said that prior to founding the firm, he consulted with U.S. Customs and Border Protection legal counsel, who, according to him, said there were no legal issues or concerns. When asked about the complaint, a CBP spokesperson said the agency does not comment on personnel matters.
In 2023, Scott incorporated a new company with a similar name: Honor Consulting Plus. Some of the firm’s customers include Republican Wisconsin Congressman Bryan Steil’s re-election campaign, and the Texas Office of the Attorney General, records show.
In May, the Texas Attorney General’s office granted Scott’s firm, Honor Consulting Plus, a $50,000 contract to advise on the state's lawsuit defending Governor Abbott’s contentious floating buoy barrier on the Rio Grande, part of the governor’s multibillion-dollar militarized immigration enforcement initiative called Operation Lone Star. Scott is tasked with providing expert testimony in the case and is approved to invoice $600 an hour, with no monthly billing limit, according to the contract. Scott referred questions about the contract to the AG’s office.
Since 2018, Homan has also had his own for-profit firm, Homeland Strategic Consulting. His Virginia-based firm registered to lobby in Texas in 2021, though state filings show no activity. Public records reveal only a handful of clients, including $32,000 to provide “strategy consulting” for failed U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, one of the 11 Arizona Republicans who falsely claimed he had been authorized to cast the state’s electoral votes for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Homan also has been personally paid $1,300 in travel reimbursement funds from Trump’s campaign, according to Federal Election Commission data.
Border911 team member Avila has focused less on government contracts and more on aspirations for public office, making unsuccessful bids for city council, Texas Land Commissioner, and Congress. A year ago, Avila launched Border Patriot PAC, which to date has endorsed a single candidate, John Fabbricatore, a former ICE agent running as a Republican for a congressional seat in Colorado. Fabbricatore, who resides in the Denver suburb of Aurora, contributed to nationwide misinformation about a Venezuelan prison gang taking over an apartment complex in his city—a false story the Trump campaign repeated.
Otherwise, Border Patriot PAC hasn’t done much. According to its July 2024 filing, the PAC only had $19,000—of which $15,000 came from Wilson’s Mayhem Solutions Group.
In the weeks before the election, members of Border911 have joined a final America Project-backed blitz called “Operation Restore Freedom,” giving speeches about the border along with other pervasive election conspiracy theorists in Texas and in crucial swing states like Nevada and Arizona that Trump needs to win.
If Trump does prevail, Homan and other Border911 members may get the chance to fundamentally reshape national security and immigration policy.
If Trump loses, Homan and his former military and law enforcement allies at Border911 and the America Project will likely be on the frontlines sowing doubts about the election for months to come.
At speaking events, Homan sounds confident in Trump’s victory. At an America Project fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, Homan said he’d pledged to Trump, as they dined together in Las Vegas, that the former president would win the November election, and he’d serve under him again. “I can’t wait to be back,” Homan said. “He’s going to be our next president whether you like it or not, and I will be at the White House with him.”
The following reporters and editors contributed to this report: Charlotte Alfred, Justin Casimir Braun, Daniel Howden, Ariadne Papagapitos with Lighthouse Reports; Brandon Quester with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting; Gus Bova, Lise Olsen, Ivan Flores with Texas Observer; Valeria Fernandez, Yunuen Bonaparte and Joshua Phillips with palabra; and Alfredo Corchado with Puente News Collaborative.
]]>Please join The Border Chronicle on October 24 for a discussion thread on the U.S. elections and the border. We welcome all perspectives for what we hope will be a provocative and respectful discussion that I (Todd) will facilitate. We feel that this is something that will be useful to Border Chronicle readers (and ourselves!), especially as the electio…
]]>Two weeks ago, we wrote to ask for your help. Our paid subscriptions had taken a nosedive as we lost quite a few subscribers in the “dreaded churn.”
This is when subscriptions come up for renewal. And because we launched in September, our annual subscription renewals come due that month. And that’s when the precipitous plunge …
]]>As with many, educator, researcher, and writer Sarah Towle’s awareness about border issues substantially shifted during the Donald Trump presidency and the horrors of family separation. But for her, this awareness did not lessen with the election…
]]>On September 7, we had the honor of leading a discussion with Celia Concannon and Gustavo Lozano, two longtime residents and educators from ambos Nogales, who have spent years teaching music and theater in local schools. We then had a Q&A with audience members, which you’ll hear at the end. The event was held downtown in Nogales, Arizona, on Morley Avenue, at the beautiful Wittner Museum, which is brimming with amazing, whimsical paintings by Paula Wittner, who lives in nearby Patagonia.
The event kicked off an exciting new oral history project called “The Border Before,” which aims to elevate the voices and perspectives of border residents and examine how politics, migration, and border security policies have affected border communities in the last two decades.
“The Border Before” is the brainchild of the nonprofit organization Voices from the Border, with the help of the Sierra Club, The Patagonia Museum, La Linea art studio, the Pimeria Alta Museum, and We Love Nogales. A very special thanks to Maggie Urgo, India Aubry, Evan Kory, and others for organizing this event.
]]>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.
]]>Welp, folks, early last month we were soaring when it came to paid subscriptions. Thank you to everyone who responded to our third-anniversary post and subscribed. We were feeling good. We were just six shy of 1,000 paid subscriptions. Triumph was so close; we were about to break out the bubbly.
And…
]]>Thirty years ago there were drastic changes underway at the U.S.-Mexico border, epitomized by the U.S. Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. Never would the since disfigured borderlands look …
]]>For several years, author and journalist Jessica Pishko has investigated the power of right-wing sheriffs and their impact on democracy, elections, and border and immigration policy.
Her new book, out this month, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, is a must-read, especially during our most consequential presidential election in generations. In this podcast, Pishko talks about her new book, the right-wing constitutional sheriff’s movement, and how it was founded. And she talks about why this is important to border communities: because sheriffs in this movement have embraced far-right militia groups, white nationalists, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in his plans for mass deportations if he is elected. You can also read more of Pishko’s work at her excellent Substack, Posse Comitatus.
]]>This interview originally appeared at Yale Climate Connections.
For nearly three decades, Arizona-based writer and journalist Todd Miller has immersed himself in the real-life people and policies defining the U.S.-Mexico border.
When the Department of Homeland Security too…
]]>