Border Aid: Learn More

Page Purpose

This page collects additional media on borders, migration, enforcement, and mutual aid, providing a broader perspective on the patterns of history that the phenomenon of open-air detention sites and border aid are part of. For an introduction to open-air detention sites and the role of mutual aid at the border, see the What's Happening? page.

Table of Contents

Web Pages and Datasets

El Paso Sector Migrant Death Database

A searchable map of migrant deaths in New Mexico, made from data collected from "the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI), US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT), the El Paso County Office of the Medical Examiner (EPCOME), Hudspeth County Justices of the Peace District 1 and 2, the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrant Project, independent news sources, and statements from the Sunland Park Fire Department, as well as direct observation by volunteers in the field." A project by No More Deaths • No Más Muertes

Missing Migrants Project

Dataset created by the International Organization for Migration on "incidents involving migrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, who have died or gone missing in the process of migration towards an international destination"

Autonomous Community Response Networks

The border aid community is part of a tradition of mutual aid and autonomous community response movements that stretches back through history and across the globe. Here are a few other members of that history:
  • Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is "a grassroots disaster relief network based on the principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomous direct action".
  • New Orleanians formed the Common Ground Collective in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to meet each other's needs when nonprofits and government orgs wouldn't.

Beyond Border Patrol

A counter-recruiting pamphlet from War Resisters League discussing the history of Border Patrol and the lies told by CBP recruiters.

The War on Immigrants

A curated collection of investigations published by The Intercept, exploring the US border regime's systematic violence against migrants, and the dire ripple effects in borderland communities.

Books

Articles

Readings from Syllabi

From James Stout's Rendition of the Class "Blood, Soil, Boundaries: Nationalism in Europe"

Borders, nation-states, and the regimes that maintain them haven't always looked the way they do today. These texts introduce the reader to how the "Western world" conceptualized of and built these modern systems and ideas.

Podcasts

From Radiolab

Reported by - Latif Nasser, Tracie Hunte
Produced by - Matt Kielty
with help from - Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Latif Nasser

Series Description While scouring the Sonoran Desert for objects left behind by migrants crossing into the United States, anthropologist Jason De León happened upon something he didn't expect to get left behind: a human arm, stripped of flesh.

This macabre discovery sent him reeling, needing to know what exactly happened to the body, and how many migrants die that way in the wilderness. In researching border-crosser deaths in the Arizona desert, he noticed something surprising. Sometime in the late-1990s, the number of migrant deaths shot up dramatically and have stayed high since. Jason traced this increase to a Border Patrol policy still in effect, called “Prevention Through Deterrence.”

In a series first aired back in 2018, over three episodes, Radiolab investigates this policy, its surprising origins, and the people whose lives were changed forever because of it.


Border Trilogy Part 1: Hole in the Fence
October 13 2023

Episode Description We begin one afternoon in May 1992, when a student named Albert stumbled in late for history class at Bowie High School in El Paso, Texas. His excuse: Border Patrol. Soon more stories of students getting stopped and harassed by Border Patrol started pouring in. So begins the unlikely story of how a handful of Mexican-American high schoolers in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country stood up to what is today the country’s largest federal law enforcement agency. They had no way of knowing at the time, but what would follow was a chain of events that would drastically change the US-Mexico border.


Border Trilogy Part 2: Hold the Line
October 20 2023

Episode Description After the showdown in court with Bowie High School, Border Patrol brings in a fresh face to head its dysfunctional El Paso Sector: Silvestre Reyes. The first Mexican-American to ever hold the position, Reyes knows something needs to change and has an idea how to do it. One Saturday night at midnight, with the element of surprise on his side, Reyes unveils ... Operation Blockade. It wins widespread support for the Border Patrol in El Paso, but sparks major protests across the Rio Grande. Soon after, he gets a phone call that catapults his little experiment onto the national stage, where it works so well that it diverts migrant crossing patterns along the entire U.S.-Mexico Border.

Years later, in the Arizona desert, anthropologist Jason de León realizes that in order to accurately gauge how many migrants die crossing the desert, he must first understand how human bodies decompose in such an extreme environment. He sets up a macabre experiment, and what he finds is more drastic than anything he could have expected.


Border Trilogy Part 3: What Remains
October 27 2023

Episode Description The third episode in our Border Trilogy follows anthropologist Jason De León after he makes a grisly discovery in Arivaca, Arizona. In the middle of carrying out his pig experiments with his students, Jason finds the body of a 30-year-old female migrant. With the help of the medical examiner and some local humanitarian groups, Jason discovers her identity. Her name was Maricela. Jason then connects with her family, including her brother-in-law, who survived his own harrowing journey through Central America and the Arizona desert.

With the human cost of Prevention Through Deterrence weighing on our minds, we try to parse what drives migrants like Maricela to cross through such deadly terrain, and what, if anything, could deter them.


Videos

A look inside the journey asylum seekers make through Mexico to reach U.S. border

Published by PBS Newshour on April 3 2024

Migration and Climate Justice: A Border Symposium

Published by Allied Community Arts Brigade of UCLA on February 20 2024
Watch on YouTube
(embedding on other websites disabled)

Report from U.S.-Mexico Border as Title 42 Ends: Human Rights Violations, Funerals & Makeshift Camps

Published by Democracy Now! on May 16 2023

Biden's 'Unhinged From Reality' Immigration Policy | Erika Pinheiro | TMR

Published by The Majority Report on February 26 2023

What's Our Narrative About Migrants? (Pedro Rios | Ukrainians at the Border Webinar)

Published by Global Immersion on January 30 2023

The Public Has Never Seen the U.S. Government Force-Feed Someone — Until Now

Published by The Intercept on November 15 2022

Surveillance Capitalism Borders and the Police

Published by Tech Workers Coalition San Diego on April 15 2022

Deported Veterans and Military Families

Published by Border Angels on August 13 2021

Disappeared Part III: Left To Die

Published by No More Deaths • No Más Muertes on February 2 2021

Disappeared Part II: Interference with Humanitarian Aid

Published by No More Deaths • No Más Muertes on January 20 2018

Disappeared: How U.S. Border Enforcement Agencies are Fueling a Missing Persons Crisis

Published by No More Deaths • No Más Muertes on January 12 2021

ICE and Isolation: A Portrait of Torture in Immigration Detention

Published by The Intercept on August 29 2019

Border Kindness: Doing whatever it takes for migrants in Mexicali, Mexico

Published by ChangeStream Media on August 14 2019

Aid Worker Faces 20 Years in Prison for Providing Water and Shelter to Immigrants

Published by The Intercept on May 4 2019

Footage of Border Patrol Vandalism of Humanitarian Aid, 2010-2017

Published by No More Deaths • No Más Muertes on January 17 2018

Darien Gap: Desperate Journey to America

Published by CBS News on October 12 2017

Border militarization is problematic and dangerous

Published by American Friends Service Committee on February 13 2015