The Border Chronicle

🚨 NEW: Wall Watch, the first interactive map tracking border wall and buoy barrier construction across the entire U.S. Mexico border. Community powered, continuously updated, publicly accessible. Report what you're seeing or explore the data 🗺️🔗🦂: wallwatch.theborderchronicle.com?ref=theborde...

ICE has never been less popular, and Democrats are favored to retake the House. So why do so many border-district Democrats sound like their GOP opponents on enforcement? We checked House races from Arizona to Texas to California to see who’s actually offering something different. Read article 🔗🦂:

We turned five under Tucson’s stars, and we’re now a nonprofit newsroom. This week: Dugan Meyer on Wall Watch’s new contractor database, Erin Patrick O’Connor’s video from Lochiel, and Dawn Marie Paley on Cuban elders deported to southern Mexico. Gracias to everyone who showed up! 🦂 Full Roundup🔗:

427 Cubans over 60 were deported to Mexico between June 2025 and July 2026, per Deportation Data Project. Dawn Marie Paley meets Fidel Forten García, 66, who spent 40+ years in Phoenix, and shelter manager Josué Martínez Leal in Villahermosa. Read full report:🔗🦂:

New from The Border Chronicle: the Wall Watch Contractor Database. Search border wall projects by location, contractor, and waiver, with federal contract links and accurate mileage CBP’s map gets wrong. Free and public. Explore it at: www.theborderchronicle.com/wall-watch/

This week at The Border Chronicle: a Q&A with Martin Castro on what Laredo can learn from El Paso and Tucson about water conservation, and a podcast with Mary Reynolds on her book The Quake that Drained the Desert. Plus poetry, and just 7 tickets left to our Oct. 22 party! Read Full Roundup🦂🔗:

Laredo relies solely on the shrinking Rio Grande for its water. So city officials traveled to El Paso and Tucson to see how desert cities built resilience. Martin Castro of the Rio Grande International Study Center tells us what they learned. 📸:Nic Lewis Read full Q&A🔗🦂:

We reported on Border Patrol’s tactical unit sent against protesters defending a century-old cottonwood grove in Lochiel, and Liliana Frankel visited a Tapachula school welcoming immigrant students. Plus poetry from Matt Flores. About 10 anniversary tickets left! Read full Weekly Roundup🦂🔗:

Two years ago, an evening program at a Tapachula high school had 60 students. Now it has about 150, and roughly 80% are immigrants. Liliana Frankel reports on how one school is opening its doors to kids stranded on Mexico's southern border.  Read full story 🔗🦂:

It’s Scott Nicol week. His Wall Watch report sparked our investigation into a $1.1 billion wall built from salvaged, probably-illegal bollards,  plus his own piece on how vehicle barriers always become 30-foot walls, a warning for Big Bend. New poetry from Matt Flores, too. Full Weekly Roundup🦂🔗:

Bulldozers tore through Big Bend in August CBP called it survey work. We've seen this before in Arizona, temporary vehicle barriers became 30-ft walls, drained endangered-species habitat, and turned floods into dam breaks. Now it's coming for Big Bend & Seminole Canyon. Read full investigation 🔗🦂:

$1.1B for 34 miles of border wall, double the old cost per mile. Our reporter found it's being built with rusted, sanded-down 2020 bollards, using funds Congress set aside to protect the Santa Ana refuge. Rep. Cuellar says it could be illegal. Read full investigation 🔗🦂:

Big News! We're throwing our 5th birthday party October 22 in Tucson, dinner and music included. This week, an essay tracing writer José Revueltas through three new border books, plus a review of "Leave if You Can." And our poetry supplement wraps its fourth installment. Read Full Roundup🔗🦂

600,000+ Hondurans deported in a decade, most young men already trapped between rival gang territories. New review by Joseph Nevins on Amelia Frank-Vitale's "Leave If You Can,” why deportation doesn't deter migration, it just repeats it. Read Full Review🔗🦂

Come celebrate 5 years of The Border Chronicle! 🦂🥳 🗓️ Thu, Oct 22 · 6-9 pm · La Indita
Food, live music & poetry, and a tropical desert dance party with DJ Meleena. Come raise a glass to 5 years of independent borderlands journalism! 🎟️ $30 Get your tickets🔗: www.theborderchronicle.com/event-ticket/

Three of this year's most essential borderlands books, by Rivera Garza, Enrigue, and Mendoza, all open with an epigraph from the same Mexican writer. Caroline Tracey traces why José Revueltas is suddenly everywhere, and what his revival is telling us. Read full story🦂🔗

A federal appeals court just ruled agents can search your phone at the border with no warrant, no suspicion. This week we report on how CBP One and CBP Home are the same control system, and we turn five. Our founders and editor talk about what's next. (There's a party involved.) 🌵💛🤎 Full Roundup🔗🦂:

In Laredo, a hot midterm battle for Congress is taking place between conservative incumbent Democrat Henry Cuellar, and Democrat-turned-Republican Tano Tijerina. Tijerina is endorsed by Trump but casts himself as a political outsider.

CBP One and CBP Home look like opposites, one framed as access, the other as self-deportation. They're built on the same digital infrastructure of control. New analysis from the Everywhere Border Project breaks down the continuum most coverage misses. Read full breakdown 🔗🦂📲:

Twenty-five years ago today, everything changed for the borderlands we cover. This week, that legacy is still unfolding, Tohono O'odham members are resisting two new walls on their own sovereign land, and a Mexicali collective is fighting to save the city's last wetlands. Full Weekly Roundup🦂🔗

For a decade, a small collective has shown up nearly every Sunday to steward the last intact wetland in Mexicali, planting trees, filing complaints, forming human chains against encroachment. Now officials say protection might finally be coming. They've heard that before. Read full article 🔗🦂:

A million wildebeest cross the Kenya-Tanzania border with no leader, no wall, just instinct and swarm intelligence. Todd Miller reports from the ground with Maasai elders on what freedom of movement could teach us about the climate crisis. Read full article 🔗🦂:

New research from El Paso, harsh immigration enforcement is showing up in mothers' bodies, elevated rates of preeclampsia & gestational diabetes, even among U.S. citizens. As border-style policing spreads inland, so will the health toll. Immigration policy is maternal health policy. Full article🔗🦂:

Our new website is live! Five years from a Substack side hustle to a full-time newsroom, thanks to you. This week, a review of Elma Correa's award-winning Mexicali novel, and a podcast on how to use Wall Watch to track the border's $46 billion mega-project. Read full Weekly Roundup🦂🔗:

A childhood disappearance. A secret shared by two friends. And the borderlands of Mexicali shaping everything that comes after. Caroline Tracey explores Elma Correa’s award-winning Donde termina el verano and its haunting portrait of friendship, guilt and memory. Read full story 🔗🦂:

BREAKING: Armed and masked agents of the U.S. government have invaded the sovereign Tohono O'odham Nation.

A reminder, we launched Wall Watch, our mapping tool for border wall construction, 20+ reports in already. Plus this week, the San Juan Hotel's civil rights battle in the RGV, and a photo essay on Friends across Borders, showing unity, not the war zone they sell you. Full Weekly Roundup🔗🦂:

A crumbling hotel in San Juan, TX holds a violent, buried history, and the city wants to tear it down. A small civil rights museum down the road says, not so fast. Michael Gonzalez reports on the fight over memory, land, and whose story gets to stand in the RGV. Read full article🔗🦂:

A wrong turn in Douglas led straight into Border Patrol trucks and surveillance towers. The real gathering was on the other side, a binational 5K, yoga on the wall, tamales, and music that cannot be policed. A photo essay from Agua Prieta. Read the full photo essay📸🦂🔗:

This week, the Wall Watch launch, community reports pouring in, a fight to save a 200-year-old cottonwood in Arizona, and more proof that border residents, not press releases, know what's really happening on the ground. Full Roundup🔗🦂: www.theborderchronicle.com/the-border-c...

How to use Wall Watch.📱💻 We built this app so border residents can document construction, buoy barriers, and surveillance infrastructure in their own communities in just a few taps. Every report is reviewed and verified. Full how to guide at the bottom of the page🦂🔗: wallwatch.theborderchronicle.com

Today in @thenation.com: a harrowing piece written from inside the Dilley ICE detention center by Maryam Tahmasebi, a green card holder who's been locked up along with her husband and son for months despite none of them committing any crime. www.thenation.com/article/soci...