José Olivares is an independent investigative journalist and audio producer who reports on immigration enforcement, U.S. operations in Latin America, and human rights. He is also the podcast editor for The Border Chronicle, and we’re lucky to have him on our team.

In this episode, we discuss his recent investigation, “A Mexican Surveillance Giant You’ve Never Heard of Is Now Watching the U.S. Border,” conducted for the independent nonprofit outlets Rest of World and Type Investigations. José’s investigation focuses on the Torre Centinela, or Sentinel Tower, which is nearing completion in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. This massive 20-story surveillance tower is truly dystopian and stands as the tallest structure in the region, overlooking both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.

José toured the tower and examined thousands of government records related to Seguritech, the corporation overseeing the project. He found that surveillance in the borderlands is rapidly growing, often with little oversight, and that intelligence from the Sentinel Tower is being shared among Texas and U.S. federal law enforcement agencies. In Ciudad Juárez, which has faced violence for the past two decades, residents are voluntarily connecting their home security cameras to the Sentinel system with the promise of increased safety. But is it working? Listen to the podcast to find out!

Additionally, José explores the recent scandal involving two CIA agents who died during an anti-drug operation with state law enforcement in Chihuahua, which led to the resignation of the state’s attorney general.

Listen to the Border Chronicle podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

In January 2025, the Trump administration declared a national emergency at the southern border and directed the military to take control of large expanses of the border, which include major cities like El Paso, McAllen, and Brownsville, and designate them as “National Defense Areas”. In a recent Border Chronicle investigation “A War Zone: Minus the War” with the nonprofit The War Horse, which serves military communities, we examined the impact this is having on border residents, the types of military surveillance and hardware being rolled out in the national defense zones, and the impact these zones are having on the military and migration at the border, including federal prosecutors attempting to charge migrants for trespassing.

For this discussion, I joined Sonner Kehrt an investigative reporter with The War Horse, and David Roza, an independent journalist, who covers the U.S. military to talk about our collaboration, and catch you up on more recent military developments, including the Davis-Monthan Air Force base in Tucson hosting Space Force Guardians and Fort Huachuca near Sierra Vista, Arizona, which is developing a new mission for U.S. Space Force, whose somewhat bizarre official song— yes, this is real— you can listen to here.

When Alex González Ormerod, editor of the Mexico Political Economist, started researching his book about the Mexican right wing, he found an odd pattern: many of his interviewees didn’t identify as part of the Right. They called themselves liberals. But “liberal” was also the term used by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then the country’s left-wing president, to describe himself. For González Ormerod, it was a problem that Mexico’s democracy didn’t encompass the full political spectrum. He went on to title his 2025 book La derecha no existe (pero ahí está): Guía para entender su fracaso y su futuro en México [The Right doesn’t exist (but it’s there): A guide for understanding its failure and its future in Mexico]. The book is in part a history of the Mexican Right’s failures, and in part an argument for why a recovery of the Right would benefit the country’s democracy. He contends that this is important even for those who consider themselves staunchly on the Left. In this podcast, Caroline Tracey speaks with Alex about the history of the PAN party, including its odd and sometimes unhappy marriage of Catholics and businessmen, and about his arguments concerning the future of democracy in Mexico.

Resistance can take many forms. One of them, as Amy Juan of the Tohono O’odham explains here, is for people to come together to run in unity, prayer, and witness across traditional O’odham land, crisscrossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The annual Unity Run has taken place since 1995 with the purpose of “reinstating the tradition of running and carrying prayers,” which “unites us in respectful observance of preserving and healing our history, language, and culture,” according to the Native American Advancement Foundation.

Amy serves as the administrative manager of the San Xavier Co-op Farm. She was the first guest we interviewed on the Border Chronicle podcast, in September 2021. We also had an in-depth conversation with her after the Border Patrol’s killing of Tohono O’odham member Raymond Mattia. Conversations with Amy are always rich with insight and perspective, and this one is no exception.

Amy says that the Unity Run, which took place in March, offers a good example of O’odham resilience:

The way that we’re able to adapt to different things good or bad, when it comes to our responsibilities in carrying out these traditions and these ceremonies and different things, and making sure it continues because there are worries from our elders that we’re going far away from who we are. But when there are things like this, and we see there are little kids speaking the language, there are people still telling the stories, there are people who know the history. Those things are all important because they give us the strength we need to resist the border.

This resistance may be directed, as Amy explains, against the possible construction of a physical border wall on the Nation. But its lessons can also be carried to any part of the country where the Border Patrol and ICE are operating.

For Lydia Otero, researching the history of the Southwest is personal and political. Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, their family frequented a place they called La Calle that was bustling with shops and pedestrians. The family did not own a car, so they walked there.

Soon, the construction of I-10 through the city divided them from La Calle. Then, while Otero was living in Los Angeles working as an electrician and becoming active in LGBT+ organizing, La Calle was torn down as part of Tucson’s urban renewal initiative.

Otero decided to become the person to tell these stories. They returned to Tucson to pursue a PhD in history at the University of Arizona, where they later worked as a professor of Mexican American studies. They are the author of four books, including: "La Calle, a history of urban renewal in Tucson"; "In the Shadow of the Freeway and L.A. Interchanges", both memoirs; and the new "Storied Property: María Cordova’s Casa", which tells the story of one woman’s resistance to urban renewal and her efforts to save what Otero calls “the most important house in Tucson.”

For this episode of the Border Chronicle Podcast, reporter and editor Caroline Tracey is joined by Otero to discuss their life and work.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone familiar with Tucson, Arizona and anyone interested in doing their own place-based historical research and memoir writing.

Tombstone, Arizona calls itself “The Town too Tough to Die.” It has an Old West-themed Main Street and daily re-enactments of gunfights. For most people, it’s a place to briefly drop into in order to experience a Disneyland-style version of Arizona history.

For Logan Phillips, however, Tombstone was once home. The Tucson, Arizona-based poet was born in the town and grew up nearby. His father worked at the town’s Historic Courthouse Museum; his uncle was an actor in Westerns. Phillips’s new book, "Reckon," out now from University of Arizona Press, examines what it means to be from a place that glorifies violent, colonial masculinity—and seeks to find a way forward though family, relationships to land, and reckoning with history.

In this episode of the Border Chronicle podcast, Caroline Tracey is joined by Phillips to discuss his new book and what it means to be born in the contemporary “Old West."

In the spirit of broadening the analysis beyond ICE, Border Chronicle cofounders Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller discuss the leading role the U.S. Border Patrol has played in violent operations across the country.

We analyze how these shocking immigration sweeps—such as the one in Minneapolis that killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti—extend the U.S. border into the interior. To understand these operations, it is essential to examine the extraconstitutional powers that the Border Patrol has long exercised in the borderlands, where the agency has enjoyed impunity for its abuses. The people of the borderlands and border crossers have faced this ironfisted authoritarianism for decades.

Today, the United States appears to be entering a new phase of expanded border policing—similar to the Operation Gatekeeper deterrence of the 1990s or the sweeping powers and massive budgets that followed 9/11. Now the border can be anywhere, and the guns pointed at anyone—all with the enthusiastic support of the defense contractors who stand to profit.

But the good news is, people have had enough.