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"

UNHCR Refugee Data Finder

"The database contains information about forcibly displaced populations spanning more than 70 years of statistical activities. It covers displaced populations such as refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people, including their demographics. Stateless people are also included, most of who have never been displaced. The database also reflects the different types of solutions for ett displaced populations such as repatriation or resettlement." This refugee population data is also available as an R package

Migration Data Portal

"...the Migration Data Portal provides access to timely, comprehensive migration statistics and reliable information about migration data globally. Again, terrific dashboards and data visualization here. And most (or all) of what you see can be downloaded to work with on your own if that’s your cup of tea. Note that this is probably better for historical research than current month-to-month monitoring." (quote from Austin Kocher)

Migration & Asylum Lab at Stanford University

"The Stanford Migration and Asylum Lab leverages scholarly expertise in order to inform immigration courts about country conditions in Latin America, particularly in the context of asylum cases."
Of particular interest are their country bulletins, which "are painstakingly assembled through up-to-date research, all of which is relevant to asylum cases in the US. Their most recent bulletins for 2023 include Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela" (quote from Austin Kocher)

ICE Facility Outcomes

"This interactive dataset is composed of 73 detention facility outcomes scraped from ICE Facility Incident Reports, which in turn were reported retrospectively by facilities and gathered around time of inspection annually. Grievances are believed to have been reported to ICE headquarters directly by individuals detained in facilities. This data was reported from September 2018-August 2022, although not all facilities provide continuous data during this period."

Global Detention Project

"Every day, tens of thousands of men, women, and children are detained across the globe for reasons related to their immigration status: asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, refugees, trafficking victims, torture survivors, stateless persons, and others. The GDP relentlessly pursues information about where they are locked up and how they are treated to ensure that their human rights are respected."

Latino Data Hub

Data from the US Census Bureau, available in both English and Spanish, on issues impacting the Latino community.

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

"Blood, Soil, Boundaries: Nationalism in Europe" taught by James Stout at UC San Diego

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.

"Geographies of Migration and Mobility" taught by Austin Kocher at Syracuse University

Although human beings have always moved around the planet, migration has become a defining characteristic of the contemporary world with 281 million people—or 3.6% of Earth’s total population—now living outside the country of their birth. At the same time, growth in global migration has been accompanied by the unprecedented growth of new geographies of migration controls including border walls, immigration policing in everyday spaces, a global network of immigrant detention centers, and new restrictive immigration policies worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic has also prompted controversial new immigration restrictions. This course provides an in-depth examination of the relationship between global migration and migration controls through a critical geographic lens by examining the emergent spaces, places, and networks that make these controls possible.
Read the syllabus here

"Critical Geographies of Climate Migration" taught by Austin Kocher at George Washington University

Earth’s changing climate is dramatically rearranging the geographies of where people live. Each year, the consequences of climate change lead more people to relocate within their country, such as Californians leaving the state due to wildfires, or migrate beyond their borders, such as residents in North Africa facing extreme water scarcity. Yet too often, the relationship between climate change and human migration are assumed rather than interrogated. Critical Geographies of Climate Migration provides a graduate level introduction to the complex relationships between human migration and climate change, not as isolated phenomena, but as inter-related consequences of the geographic organization of society due to capitalism, nation-states and borders, colonialism, political conflict, and resource extraction. Although this course incorporates the latest research on climate science, the course investigates climate migration primarily through a critical geography lens that emphasizes questions of power, space, identity, and the conditions of possibility for meaningful change. Rather than starting from the assumption that a unique phenomenon called climate migration exists, the course scrutinizes this increasingly hegemonic framework both in terms of its empirical and analytical contributions as well as its limitations, contradiction, and absences. Course readings will draw eclectically from geographic scholarship, including recent work on the international migration and refugee system, climate nationalism, and the anthropocene; case studies across the Global North and South; recent government- and NGO-sponsored analyses of climate migration; and first-hand accounts of living in the most ecologically vulnerable parts of the planet.
Read the syllabus here

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

From China To US: The Illegal Trek Chinese Migrants Are Making To America | Part 1/3 - Walk The Line

Published by CNA Insider on May 18 2024

Cross The Wall Or Die Trying: Chinese Migrants Inch Towards American Dream | Part 2 - Walk The Line

Published by CNA Insider on May 18 2024

Can These Chinese Asylum Seekers Reach Their 'American Dream'? | Part 3/3 - Walk The Line

Published by CNA Insider on May 18 2024

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

Published by PBS Newshour on April 3 2024

Defend the Border Convoy

Published by Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan on February 29 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)

Border Patrol Arrest

Published by Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan on February 14 2024

Hopping the Border

Published by Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan on February 7 2024

Texas Border Crisis

Published by Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan on February 1 2024

Migrant Detention Camp

Published by Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan on January 21 2024

Arizona Border Crisis

Published by Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan on January 12 2024

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

Inside Dadaab, the 200,000-person refugee camp

Published by DW on December 17 2019

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

How Gang Violence Drives Migrants Out of El Salvador

Published by The New York Times on February 6 2019

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

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

On The Frontline Of The Mediterranean Refugee Crisis

Published by Journeyman Pictures on May 4 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