US-Mexico Border Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

A Quiet Border and the End of Asylum?

Episode 9

July 21, 2025 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Hiroshi Motomura and Cristina M Rodríguez

Our guest speakers are Lee Gelernt, Deputy Director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, and Gretchen Kuhner, Director El Instituto para las Mujeres en la Migración, a Mexican NGO that seeks to protect the rights of migrant women and families.

North America

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

A review of Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border

May 22, 2025 • by Jeremy Robson

In her work along the US–Mexico border, Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University, kept coming across similar stories: people fleeing from gun violence. The fruit of years spent in the field with journalists, federal agents, and members of organized criminal groups, her latest book, Exit Wounds: ...

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

Migration

The Supreme Court’s DACA Ruling & Me

On being superfluous

July 1, 2020 • by José Ángel Navejas

When I crossed the border from Mexico in 1993, there were no doubts about what I would do once I arrived in Chicago: find a job in a factory, or wash dishes, or get down on my knees to scrub dirty toilets, whichever came first. In Mexico, I had grown ...

Activism

When the Trump Circus Came to Town

The fallout from a 2019 visit to Greenville, North Carolina

June 18, 2020 • by Amanda Klein

Trump’s propaganda machine was running full tilt in the summer of 2019, in the weeks leading up to a rally Trump would hold in Greenville, North Carolina, the town where I live and work (teaching at Eastern Carolina University). The year before, the administration had abruptly implemented a brutal policy ...

Feature

Beyond the Separation of Families

A view from Mexico on the crisis of the migration system

July 11, 2018 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso

An original version of this piece was written in Spanish for the Mexican magazine Letras Libres, focusing on Mexico’s response to the issue of family separation in the context of the July 1 presidential election. The separation of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters at the U.S.-Mexican border, part of the Trump administration’s ...