Immigration, Migration, and Refugee History & Rights

A guide designed to provide general information and links to resources about DACA – Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals maintained by reference librarians at the ASU College of Law.

Learn about UTSA Dreamers' Resource Center and their library collection

This subject guide is created to provide introductory resources in the areas of ethnicity, race, migration, and indigeneity.

President Trump says the situation is a national emergency. Is he right?

President Trump vowed to crack down on undocumented immigration and empower the Border Patrol. Three years later, the agency is the target of outrage, protest and investigation into its mission and conduct, and many of the agents who have supported Mr. Trump say that morale is low. We spoke with one of them. Guest: Art Del Cueto, a Border Patrol agent in Arizona and vice president of the National Border Patrol Council. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Overwhelmed by desperate migrants and criticized for mistreating those in their care, many agents, whose work has long been viewed as a ticket to the middle class, have grown frustrated and bitter.

The Customs and Border Protection agency says it is doing its best to reduce impact to the environment and tribal citizens. Conservationists and Native Tribes in the area are not appeased.

A voyage across the US-Mexico border, stitched together from 200,000 satellite images.

Democracy Now! stories, posts and pages that relate to Border Patrol.

As 14 states and more than 130 cities across the U.S. celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day in place of Columbus Day, we go to Arizona, where Indigenous communities are leading resistance against the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall near a sacred spring inside the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. People’s “lives have been so severely impacted by not only this border wall, but the complete militarization of our homelands due to this irrational fear of folks on the other side, which are our relatives,” says Nellie Jo David, an O’odham water and land defender. This campaign of nonviolent protests comes as a federal appeals court issued an order Friday to halt the border wall construction in some areas of Arizona, along with Texas, New Mexico and California.

President Trump's former campaign CEO and White House adviser, Steve Bannon, is his sixth close associate to face criminal charges by the Department of Justice. Bannon and three others are accused of defrauding donors to We Build the Wall, a private effort to build a wall along the Mexican border, and redirecting funds to fund their own lavish lifestyles. We follow the money and look at how an investigation last month showed a private wall project the funds were used for is already eroding and could be in danger of falling into the river. We speak with Perla Trevizo and Lexi Churchill, two reporters at the ProPublica-Texas Tribune investigative unit. #DemocracyNow Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9AM ET: https://democracynow.org Please consider supporting independent media by making a donation to Democracy Now! today: https://democracynow.org/donate FOLLOW DEMOCRACY NOW! ONLINE: YouTube: http://youtube.com/democracynow Facebook: http://facebook.com/democracynow Twitter: https://twitter.com/democracynow Instagram: http://instagram.com/democracynow SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/democracynow iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/democracy-now!-audio/id73802554 Daily Email Digest: https://democracynow.org/subscribe

US president Donald Trump has visited the US-Mexico border and credited his new wall with stopping both illegal immigration and the coronavirus. In the blazing summer heat, Mr Trump briefly stopped to inspect a new section of the concrete and rebar structure where the president and other officials took a moment to scrawl their signatures on the wall. "It is the most powerful and comprehensive border wall structure anywhere in the world," said Mr Trump during a roundtable at the US Border Patrol Station in Yuma, Arizona. "It's got technology that nobody would even believe. Between sensors and cameras and everything else." For more, head here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/24/trump-vows-stop-left-wing-mob-pushing-us-chaos-arizona-rally/?WT.mc_id=tmg_youtube_offsite_televideo-youtubevideo_24JuneUS&utm_source=tmgoff&utm_medium=tmg_youtube&utm_content=offsite_televideo&utm_campaign=tmg_youtube_offsite_televideo-youtubevideo_24JuneUS Get the latest headlines: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Telegraph.co.uk and YouTube.com/TelegraphTV are websites of The Telegraph, the UK's best-selling quality daily newspaper providing news and analysis on UK and world events, business, sport, lifestyle and culture.

The San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge marks the convergence of the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts in a grassland valley at the base of the Peloncillo mountains. The only place in the world where black bears and jaguars cross paths. The wildlife here now faces never-before-seen challenges because of the U.S. border wall. ➡ Subscribe: http://bit.ly/NatGeoSubscribe About National Geographic: National Geographic is the world's premium destination for science, exploration, and adventure. Through their world-class scientists, photographers, journalists, and filmmakers, Nat Geo gets you closer to the stories that matter and past the edge of what's possible. Get More National Geographic: Official Site: http://bit.ly/NatGeoOfficialSite Facebook: http://bit.ly/FBNatGeo Twitter: http://bit.ly/NatGeoTwitter Instagram: http://bit.ly/NatGeoInsta TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@natgeo Tenor: http://on.natgeo.com/31b3Koc Wildlife Disappearing at the Border | National Geographic https://youtu.be/5mLZovvKmqo National Geographic https://www.youtube.com/natgeo

A damning portrait of the U.S.-Mexico border, where militaristic fantasies are unleashed, violent technologies are tested, and immigrants are targeted. Over the past three decades, U.S. immigration and border security policies have turned the southern states into conflict zones, spawned a network of immigrant detention centers, and unleashed an army of ICE agents into cities across the country. As award-winning journalist John Carlos Frey reveals in this groundbreaking book, the war against immigrants has been escalating for decades, fueled by defense contractors and lobbyists seeking profits and politicians--Republicans and Democrats alike--who relied on racist fear-mongering to turn out votes. After 9/11, while Americans' attention was trained on the Middle East and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the War on Terror was ramping up on our own soil--aimed not at terrorists but at economic migrants, refugees, and families from South and Central America seeking jobs, safety, and freedom in the U.S. But we are no safer. Instead, families are being ripped apart, undocumented people are living in fear, and thousands of migrants have died in detention or crossing the border. Taking readers to the Border Patrol outposts, unmarked graves, detention centers, and halls of power, Sand and Blood is a frightening, essential story we must not ignore.

The instant New York Times bestseller, "A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything." --Esquire For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.

"An anthology of writing by Mexican journalists, historians, novelists, and artists on the immigration crisis in the United States"--;Despite the extensive coverage in the U.S. media of the southern border and Donald Trump's proposed wall, most English speakers have had little access to the multitude of perspectives from Mexico on the ongoing crisis. Boullosa and Quintero redress this imbalance with this collection of essays, translated into English for the first time, drawing on writing by journalists, novelists, and documentary-makers who are Mexican or based in Mexico. They discuss important questions, including the history of U.S.-Mexican relations, and questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and borders. -- adapted from jacket

"Fencing in Democracy is an ethnography examining groups that are usually left out of national discussions about the border wall: the communities living right on the border. Drawing on extensive primary research, the authors argue that a variety of factors, including media narratives, complex political maneuvering, and purposefully marginalizing discourse, have placed border communities in a state of necrocitizenship - a set of citizenship practices produced in response to exclusionary regimes that emphasize death. Throughout the book they show necrocitizenship as operating on three levels; the increasing militarization of border regions, the building of walls along international boundaries, and the privileging of the patriotic subject, one who is willing to die for one's country"--

"The twenty-first century has been an era of hardening borders--increased borderland patrols, surveillance and militarization are widening the chasm between those who can vacation (or do business) where they please, and others whose movements are restricted by armed guards. But as journalist Todd Miller finds in Empire of Borders, the US border is also becoming increasingly fluid, expanding thousands of miles outside of US territory often to protect Washington's interests. In places like Argentina, Kosovo, Honduras, Jordan and Afghanistan, US border patrol works alongside local agents to block migrants, terrorists, drug runners and smugglers from ever approaching the US. Empire of Borders traces the rise of this border regime, along with practices of "extreme vetting" and the vast global industry for border and homeland security. But in visiting the Jordan/Syria border, as well as Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico and the Philippines, Miller finds instead a global war against the poor"--

The border region of the Sonoran Desert, which spans southern Arizona in the United States and northern Sonora, Mexico, has attracted national and international attention. But what is less discussed in national discourses is the impact of current border policies on the Native peoples of the region. There are twenty-six tribal nations recognized by the U.S. federal government in the southern border region and approximately eight groups of Indigenous peoples in the United States with historical ties to Mexico--the Yaqui, the O'odham, the Cocopah, the Kumeyaay, the Pai, the Apaches, the Tiwa (Tigua), and the Kickapoo. Divided Peoples addresses the impact border policies have on traditional lands and the peoples who live there--whether environmental degradation, border patrol harassment, or the disruption of traditional ceremonies. Anthropologist Christina Leza shows how such policies affect the traditional cultural survival of Indigenous peoples along the border. The author examines local interpretations and uses of international rights tools by Native activists, counterdiscourse on the U.S.-Mexico border, and challenges faced by Indigenous border activists when communicating their issues to a broader public. Through ethnographic research with grassroots Indigenous activists in the region, the author reveals several layers of division--the division of Indigenous peoples by the physical U.S.-Mexico border, the divisions that exist between Indigenous perspectives and mainstream U.S. perspectives regarding the border, and the traditionalist/nontraditionalist split among Indigenous nations within the United States. Divided Peoples asks us to consider the possibilities for challenging settler colonialism both in sociopolitical movements and in scholarship about Indigenous peoples and lands.

"In personal stories from twenty years of activism and reporting, an award-winning journalist calls on readers to imagine a world without borders. Every year an untold number of people perish attempting to cross the border into the United States. Thousands of families who do make it across are apprehended and separated, often with children languishing in cages. In light of the harm it unleashes, does our increasingly militarized border policy make anyone more secure? To answer that question, Todd Miller draws upon over twenty years of work investigating international borders. In a series of anecdotes, he relates his encounters with U.S. Border Patrol agents, deportees, migrants, human-rights activists, and scholars, taking readers on a journey from the deserts of the Southwest, to the mountains of Chiapas and Guatemala, and to border zones across the globe. Through the lens of his stories and personal reflections, Miller tackles big questions in clear and inviting prose, encouraging us to honestly reckon with our own beliefs about how best to meet the critical challenges of a world in migration. This pocket-sized, easy-to-read edition is a must-have for all those who hope that a better world is possible. In a clarion call to our collective humanity, Todd Miller makes a case for tearing down barriers-both at the borders and in our own minds-as the necessary first step to achieving security by building bridges, not walls"--

"Today the United States is home to more unauthorized immigrants than at any time in the country's history. As scrutiny around immigration has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. The result is a population of new Americans who are more entrenched than ever before. Crossing harsher, less porous borders makes entry to the US a permanent, costly enterprise. And the challenges don't end once they're here. In The Border Within, journalist Kalee Thompson and economist Tara Watson examine the costs and ends of America's immigration-enforcement complex, particularly its practices of internal enforcement: the policies and agencies, including ICE, aimed at removing unauthorized immigrants living in the US. Thompson and Watson's economic appraisal of immigration's costs and benefits is interlaid with first-person reporting of families who personify America's policies in a time of scapegoating and fear. The result is at once enlightening and devastating. Thomspon and Watson examine immigration's impact on every aspect of American life, from the labor force to social welfare programs to tax revenue. The results paint an overwhelmingly positive picture of what non-native Americans bring to the country, including immigration's tendency to elevate the wages and skills of those who are native born. Their research also finds a stark gap between the realities of America's immigrant population and the policies meant to uproot them: America's internal enforcements are grounded in shock and awe more than any reality of where and how immigrants live. The objective, it seems, is to deploy "chilling effects" -- performative displays aimed at producing upstream effects on economic behaviors and decision-making among immigrants. The ramifications of these fear-based policies extends beyond immigrants themselves; they have impacts on American citizens living in immigrant families as well as on the broader society"--

"In his scathing and deeply reported examination of the U.S. Border Patrol, Todd Miller argues that the agency has gone rogue since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, trampling on the dignity and rights of the undocumented with military-style tactics ... Miller's book arrives at a moment when it appears that part of the Homeland Security apparatus is backpedaling by promising to tone down its tactics, maybe prodded by investigative journalism, maybe by the revelations of NSA leaker Edward Snowden ...Border Patrol is quite possibly the right book at the right time ... "--Tony Perry,Los Angeles Times "At the start of his unsettling and important new book,Border Patrol Nation, Miller observes that these days 'it is common to see the Border Patrol in places--such as Erie, Pennsylvania; Rochester, New York; or Forks, Washington--where only fifteen years ago it would have seemed far-fetched, if not unfathomable.'"--Barbara Spindel,Christian Science Monitor "Miller's approach inBorder Patrol Nation is to offer a glimpse into the secretive operations of the Border Patrol, reporting with a journalist's objectivity and nose for a good story. Miller's book is full of facts, and it's clear he's outraged, but he gives voices to people on every side of the issue ... Miller's book is a fascinating read ... and bring the work of Susan Orlean to mind."--Amanda Eyre Ward,Kirkus Reviews "Todd Miller's invaluable and gripping book,Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security is the story of how this country's borders are being transformed into up-armored, heavily militarized zones run by a border-industrial complex. It's an achievement and an eye opener."--Tom Engelhardt,TomDispatch "What Jeremy Scahill was to Blackwater, Todd Miller is to the U.S. Border Patrol!"--Tom Miller, author,On the Border: Portraits of America's Southwestern Frontier "Todd Miller has entered a secret world, and he has gone deep ... Powerful."--Luis Alberto Urrea, author ofThe Devil's Highway: A True Story "Journalist Miller tells an alarming story of U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland Security's ever-widening reach into the lives of American citizens and legal immigrants as well as the undocumented. In addition to readers interested in immigration issues, those concerned about the NSA's privacy violations will likely be even more shocked by the actions of Homeland Security."--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review Armed authorities watch from a military-grade surveillance tower as lines of people stream toward the security checkpoint, tickets in hand, anxious and excited to get through the gate. Few seem to notice or care that the US Border Patrol is monitoring the Super Bowl, as they have for years, one of the many ways that forces created to police the borders are now being used, in an increasingly militarized fashion, to survey and monitor the whole of American society. In fast-paced prose, Todd Miller sounds an alarm as he chronicles the changing landscape. Traveling the country--and beyond--to speak with the people most involved with and impacted by the Border Patrol, he combines these first-hand encounters with careful research to expose a vast and booming industry for high-end technology, weapons, surveillance, and prisons. While politicians and corporations reap substantial profits, the experiences of millions of men, women, and children pointto staggering humanitarian consequences.Border Patrol Nation shows us in stark relief how the entire country has become a militarized border zone, with consequences that affect us all. Todd Miller has worked on and written about US border issues for over fifteen years.

Winner, Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2020 From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet. Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction--"compensatory building" designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

"This volume offers a critical investigation of the risk and the physical toll of migration along the U.S. southern border"--

"An esteemed journalist delivers a compelling on-the-ground account of the construction of President Trump's border wall in San Diego-and the impact on the lives of local residents. In August of 2019, Donald Trump finished building his border wall-at least a portion of it. In San Diego, the Army Corps of engineers completed two years of construction on a 14-mile steel beamed barrier that extends eighteen-feet high and cost a staggering $147 million. As one border patrol agent told reporters visiting the site, "It was funded and approved and it was built under his administration. It is Trump's wall." 14 Miles is a definitive account of all the dramatic construction, showing readers what it feels like to stand on both sides of the border looking up at the imposing and controversial barrier. After the Department of Homeland Security announced an open call for wall prototypes in 2017, DW Gibson, an award-winning journalist and Southern California native, began visiting the construction site and watching as the prototype samples were erected. Gibson spent those two years closely observing the work and interviewing local residents to understand how it was impacting them. These include April McKee, a border patrol agent leading a recruiting program that trains teenagers to work as agents; Jeff Schwilk, a retired Marine who organizes pro-wall rallies as head of the group San Diegans for Secure Borders; Roque De La Fuente, an eccentric millionaire developer who uses the construction as a promotional opportunity; and Civile Ephedouard, a Haitian refugee who spent two years migrating through Central America to the United States and anxiously awaits the results of his asylum case. Fascinating, propulsive, and incredibly timely, 14 Miles is an important work that explains not only how the wall has reshaped our landscape and countless lives but also how its shadow looms over our very identity as a nation"--

Two O’odham women arrested at the border were taken to a private prison where they were denied access to the outside world.

Amber Ortega was arrested for physically blocking construction machinery at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument last September

The destructive legacy of Trump’s border wall campaign cannot be measured in miles alone and will not be easily undone.