President Trump’s pardoning of Joe Arpaio is despicable. But many politicians who have denounced it have also supported anti-immigrant policies and helped fuel the violent drug war in Mexico.
While southern Arizona continues to be ground zero for the most extreme measures of border militarization today, it is also home to powerful nodes of civil resistance. On December 8, local residents from Arivaca and the surrounding area held their first protest at a Border Patrol checkpoint—one out of about a dozen located throughout the region. I documented the event in the video posted below.
A new report from the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona shows that high numbers of migrant deaths continue to occur in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands—this despite a decreasing number of unauthorized crossings of the international divide. In other words, the borderlands are becoming increasingly deadly.
The arrest of a parent of young U.S. citizen children, repeated countless times daily across the United States, caught the ire of a young day labor organizer riding by on his bicycle. After exhorting law enforcement not to arrest the dad, he crawled under the vehicle about to take him away.
The struggle against Arizona's infamous anti-immigrant legislation, SB 1070, continues. A key component of the fight-back involves a grassroots campaign in Tucson against the state's private prison industry via a broad community coalition called Fuerza!
As the Border Security Expo 2012 shows, the Arizona-Mexico border region is Ground Zero for the development of an immigration enforcement apparatus which soon enough may travel from the U.S. southern border to a neighborhood near you.
This collection of photographs, taken on the U.S.-Mexico border between Arizona and Texas, depicts the story of an often silent and often deadly war. The photo essay is in memory of Alfonso Martinez Sanchez who lost his life to this war in the Arizona desert in early May, trying to reunite with his family in California after his deportation in March.
A week after the scandal broke around Arizona sheriff Paul Babeu's threat to deport his ex-lover, Mexican Jose Orozco, I traveled to Pinal county to a community meeting where the sheriff was recruiting a volunteer armed posse for law-enforcement duties. It was here I caught whiff of the real scandal, the one that is pervading Arizona and, in many ways, the entire United States.
