In recent years, Honduras has become a chief transit point for drugs bound for Mexico and the United States. Local gangs, like the Mara Salvatrucha, often collaborate with Mexican drug cartels and have far more power and authority in most parts of Honduras than police. The combined lawlessness has caused Honduras to become the country with the world’s highest murder rate.

On Friday, May 3rd, President Obama gave a speech in the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. Speaking to a small crowd of mostly Mexican students, Obama said that the time has come for the U.S. public to look beyond the “sensational headlines” of violence associated with the drug trade and for the United States and Mexico to begin working together on “mutual interests and [with] mutual respect.”

Arturo Ramirez has crossed the border as an undocumented migrant every few years to work in the Florida orange groves. He says that stricter border enforcement implemented after September 11 made entering the United States far more dangerous and costly. But despite the increased risks, Ramirez headed for the United States.

I have come to a deeply painful decision: I can no longer in good political conscience support the DREAM Act because the essence of a beautiful dream has been detained by a colonial nightmare seeking to fund and fuel the U.S. empire machine.

Pulitzer Prize winner Jose Antonio Vargas’s recent announcement disclosing his status as an undocumented immigrant put a face on the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the shadows of U.S. society. Unfortunately, the Vargas story is also a telling example of the media coverage of the immigration debate in the United States in recent years—inaccurate, incomplete, and insufficient.