The Border Chronicle

Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller
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The Border Chronicle podcast is hosted by Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller. Based in Tucson, Arizona, longtime journalists Melissa and Todd speak with fascinating fronterizos, community leaders, migrants, activists, artists and more at the U.S.-Mexico border.

  1. JAN 20

    An Autopsy of the Biden Years at the Border: A podcast with Andrea Flores

    Since the Obama years, Andrea Flores, an attorney and immigration policy expert, has worked with Democrats on immigration strategy at the national level. During the Biden administration, she served as director of border management on the National Security Council but left in frustration after realizing that President Biden wasn’t going to roll back many of President Trump’s border policies from his first administration. Raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Flores said that very few policymakers in Washington, D.C., truly understand the border. Democrats, she said, have continually failed to listen to border communities or create policies and messaging to counter Trump’s and MAGA’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and authoritarian agenda. In this podcast, Flores talks about the culture within the Department of Homeland Security, which hamstrung the Biden administration’s efforts at reform, and the division within the administration over how to handle immigration policy changes, which led to confusion on the ground at the border. She also discusses how Democrats stood by while Trump and the MAGA media ecosystem set the national narrative for the border, helping Trump win the election. “We thought we had the public with us, but we offered them nothing in terms of vision or explanation of what we were trying to build,” she said of Biden’s first year. “And I fear that could happen again if we just oppose everything President Trump is doing,” she said of Democrats, without offering new policy solutions or standing up for immigrants. Recently, Flores launched a Substack called America’s Promise as a forum where Democrats can discuss how to modernize the immigration system and create narratives countering the MAGA movement’s fear-based, anti-immigrant messaging, which has dominated the national discourse around migration and the border for years. “My hope for the platform is that people feel better equipped to judge and expect more from their elected officials than just saying ‘I promise immigration reform.’ We’re going on decades of that promise, right? Get more specific,” Flores said. “Offer something connected to how it’s going to help people, especially American citizens. Because when you leave out American citizens from the immigration argument, you too often make it inadvertently an ‘us versus them’ issue. But immigrants are of our community. And when the system works well for them, it works well for Americans too.”

    56 min

  2. 12/11/2025

    This Immigration Judge Loved His Job. But Then He Was Fired: A Podcast with Jeremiah Johnson

    Jeremiah Johnson was an immigration judge in San Francisco. On November 21, he was fired by email without explanation. “I didn’t even have time to print out the letter before the system was shut down and I was locked out,” he said. The email arrived with the subject line “Termination.” Johnson is now one of more than 100 immigration judges who have been fired nationwide since Trump took office. A former asylum officer for the Department of Homeland Security, Johnson was appointed as an immigration judge in 2017 under the first Trump administration. He is also the vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. Until his firing, Johnson had a full docket and handled cases from the Eloy Detention Center, located midway between Phoenix and Tucson and run by the private prison company CoreCivic. Johnson discusses the differences in working as an immigration judge under the two Trump administrations and the fate of the immigration case backlog, which currently stands at 3.4 million cases as more judges are fired. Recently, the administration started advertising for “deportation judges” and has deployed military judges to hear immigration cases, which constitutional experts say could violate posse comitatus. Johnson also discusses how the system could be fixed, noting that remaining immigration judges are wondering who will be next to be fired. “It is disheartening to see your colleagues being fired. People are worried that they will be next,” Johnson said. “If no cause is given, there’s no way to address the reasons to fire someone. So morale is extremely low.” Read and listen to more of The Border Chronicle at https://www.theborderchronicle.com

    1h 7m

  3. 11/25/2025

    Kafka’s Merry-Go-Round of Hell: A Podcast with Laura St. John

    Dive into the delusions of detention and deportation under the Trump administration. The Florence Project’s legal director offers a new way to understand and challenge them. The legal director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Projectprovides an on-the-ground analysis of and reckoning with year 1 of the Trump administration’s detention and deportation regime. What happens after an arrest? How many people have been detained? And what happens to asylum seekers? And what exactly is Kafka’s merry-go-round of hell? Laura St. John answers these questions and more. But, perhaps most importantly, St. John provides practical answers for what concerned people might do about it. She offers an antidote to the “sense of hopeless inevitability” that the Trump administration is purposefully creating for undocumented people. For 15 years, St. John has been working for the Florence Project—an organization that provides legal assistance and advocacy for undocumented people in detention.

    34 min

  4. 10/30/2025

    “Telling the Truth about Immigration”: A Conversation with Isabel Garcia

    Longtime organizer and former Pima County Legal Defender Isabel Garcia starts the conversation off with an assessment of U.S. public knowledge of important historic issues such as the genocide of Indigenous people, slavery, labor, and immigration. “What do people,” she asks, “know about immigration in this country?” This is the question that guides our conversation that spans decades, even centuries, but ultimately ends up assessing the current state of things under Donald Trump. “What we allow them to do on the border,” she warns, ”is what they will do to you.” Isabel is the co-chair of the organization Coalición de Derechos Humanos, and has been on the frontlines of border and immigrant rights since the 1970s. In this conversation, filled with story-telling and biting analysis, Isabel tells listeners how she debated John McCain in the 1990s and schooled Bernie Sanders at the border during his first presidential run. She also challenges us to “imagine what we can be,” and talks about the coalition they are forming called Defensa y Resistencia, which has a Stop the Kidnapping Campaign that directly confronts current ICE tactics. “We are openly going to protect our neighbors.” Isabel challenges listeners to do just that, by speaking up and plugging in.

    58 min

  5. 09/25/2025

    Humanitarian Aid Is Never a Crime: A Podcast with Scott Warren

    How did the first Trump administration crack down on providing water and aid for migrants? And what insights we can gain from that now? In 2019 geographer and humanitarian aid volunteer Scott Warren faced 20 years in prison for doing humanitarian work on the border. After two long trials, a jury acquitted him in November of two felony charges of harboring and one count of conspiracy to harbor. Here, Warren reflects on what happened, giving a detailed account of how he became a humanitarian aid volunteer, what led to his arrest by the Border Patrol, the trial itself, and what he is doing now. The trial took place during the first Trump administration. Now Warren can offer a grounded perspective on the current situation at the border. We grapple with the question of how to effect real change when, as Warren puts it, “the popular-level consensus in the U.S. seems to be militarize and militarize and militarize no matter what.” At the same time, he says, the border “is a place that does need peace and healing from the layers and layers of trauma stacked on top of the place, wove into it, and the dispossession of people.” What can we do?  For the next year Warren will be pondering just that in a collaborative speaking and discussion series. If you are interested in having him come to your university, organization, or community group, contact him at scottdw1@gmail.com.

    1h 10m

  6. 09/23/2025

    Filmmaker Alex Rivera on his Cult Classic "Sleep Dealer", and Creating a New Cinema for the Border

    Filmmaker Alex Rivera debuted Sleep Dealer, his groundbreaking border science fiction movie, at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. The film won several awards but did not receive the wide commercial release it deserved. Over the years, Sleep Dealer has been rereleased on digital platforms and become a cult classic. The Border Chronicle is proud to announce that on October 15, viewers will have the opportunity to see Sleep Dealer on the big screen at the Fox Theater in Tucson as part of the Cinematic Borderlands Film and Conversation Series, presented by the Fox Theater, Cinema Tucsón, Cinema Tropical, Borderlands Cinematic Arts, The Border Chronicle, and other community partners. In this podcast, Melissa del Bosque speaks with Rivera about what inspired him to make Sleep Dealer and about collaborating with his life and creative partner, Cristina Ibarra. Both were awarded MacArthur Foundation grants, often referred to as “genius grants,” in 2021. The two filmmakers created the innovative half-documentary/half-scripted film The Infiltrators in 2019 and founded Borderlands Cinematic Arts, a filmmaking lab based in Los Angeles that is part of Arizona State University’s Sidney Poitier New American Film School, where Rivera is also an associate professor. The lab focuses on creating authentic and nuanced cinematic works about the borderlands. Sleep Dealer touches on many social and political issues, including the border security industrial complex, migration, and social and economic inequality. Check it out on the big screen on October 15 at 7 p.m., followed by an audience Q&A moderated by The Border Chronicle’s Melissa del Bosque. Also, don’t miss Ibarra’s wonderful documentary Las Marthas, about Laredo’s Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball celebration, screening on October 8 at 7 p.m. as part of the Cinematic Borderlands Film and Conversation Series. Last, don’t miss Take It Away, a documentary about the legendary Tejano music host Johnny Canales, screening on October 22 at 7 p.m. You can buy tickets and learn more about the films here. Watch a short film on the making of Sleep Dealer here

    44 min

  7. 08/28/2025

    Immigration Detention Inc.: A Conversation with Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon

    The authors break down the billions generated by private immigration detention companies. An industry, they show, that is based on a false narrative. Who profits from immigrant detention, and how is the money made? Geographers Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon have investigated these questions for 10 years, producing one of the most thorough examinations of the industry. In today’s podcast, we discuss their findings in the new book Immigration Detention Inc: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants. This book comes at a crucial time as the Trump administration attempts to carry out a mass deportation plan that will be financed by an estimated $45 billion budget, via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. We discuss all of this: the billions made not only by major prison companies like Geo Group and CoreCivic but also by subcontracted services such as food, medical care, and commissary. The authors highlight that substandard food and health services are part of the business model. We discuss the financial dependencies that local governments have developed through their revenue-sharing agreements with ICE. Additionally, we examine the rapid growth of the detention industry—from 7,000 people in the early 1990s to 60,000 today—and how this growth has accelerated in the last eight months under Trump. Finally, the authors suggest solutions. “Chip away that detention is effective or necessary … this is really a false narrative,” Hiemstra says, and “peel away what makes detention profitable, and peel away the ability to make money off it.” Hiemstra is also the author of Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Enforcement Regime. Conlon and Hiemstra also coedited the book Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention.

    51 min

  8. 08/12/2025

    How ICE Detention Was Built

    Jesse Franzblau is a senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center, a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides legal services to immigrants and advocates for their rights. Franzblau spent years documenting rights abuses in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for the organization’s Transparency and Human Rights Project. He now advocates for better immigration policies in Congress. In this podcast, Franzblau explains how the U.S. became home to the world’s largest immigrant detention system, and how it was built by both Republicans and Democrats. From the beginning, private prison corporations such as CoreCivic and the Geo Group built immigration detention, which has become its own booming industry, especially now that Trump’s massive spending bill, passed on July 4, will pour billions into the detention and deportation system over the next four years. In addition to defining the problem, Franzblau shares how the for-profit immigrant detention economy could be dismantled. For more context: A guide for members of congress visiting detention facilities: https://immigrantjustice.org/press-release/ice-detention-oversight-toolkit-release/ An explainer on the impact of HR1 funding: https://immigrantjustice.org/research/explainer-how-congress-codified-hateful-and-extreme-anti-immigrant-policies-by-passing-trumps-budget-bill/ Support independent journalism with context and analysis. Become a paid subscriber today at theborderchronicle.com for just $6 a month or $60 a year.

    55 min
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About

The Border Chronicle podcast is hosted by Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller. Based in Tucson, Arizona, longtime journalists Melissa and Todd speak with fascinating fronterizos, community leaders, migrants, activists, artists and more at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Information

  • Creator
    Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    84
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller
  • Show Website
    The Border Chronicle

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