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.