The Border Chronicle

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

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

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

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

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