Has it been little more than a month or 10 years since President Trump took office? It feels like the latter.
Trump’s election campaign, built around the false narrative of a border invasion, has now turned into a border-invasion presidency. The whole federal government, from the IRS to the Department of Defense, is being repurposed for mass deportations and to react with U.S. military might to an imaginary invasion.
We live at the border. We’re not going to let Trump be our assignment editor and report on his every bizarre edict. We’re going to stay laser focused on the issues important to border communities, from water scarcity and the rising heat index to targeted ICE raids and attacks on the civil liberties and freedoms of our friends, families, and neighbors. We’re also going to highlight innovation in the borderlands, such as community-led solutions to water scarcity in the desert, and the mutual aid and humanitarian networks that literally save lives. In short, we’re going to report on the reality at the border and hold political leaders accountable.
Along those lines, we are thrilled to announce that Pablo de la Rosa, a bilingual multimedia reporter from the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, is joining The Border Chronicle. In the past, Pablo has reported for Texas Public Radio and National Public Radio. He was also host of a Spanish-language daily newscast in Texas, Noticias al Dia. Pablo will be covering the Texas-Mexico border and helping us with community engagement through social media platforms, including our new YouTube channel.
We’re also thrilled to have author and journalist Caroline Tracey, who is also bilingual, and based in Tucson, working with us, covering the arts and environment in the borderlands. She recently kicked off a series for us about Mexico’s ambitious and controversial renewable-energy plan, Plan Sonora, which will include Latin America’s largest solar array. Tracey’s grant-funded work will run through April, and we are working feverishly to find the funds to keep her on at The Border Chronicle.
And there’s another exciting change! We realize you’re being bombarded by news, enough to make you want to holler and throw up both your hands, in the words of the late, great Marvin Gaye. Some folks are checking out from the news altogether, or drastically reducing their intake for sanity-preserving reasons. We totally get it. But we can’t take our eye off the ball now, so what do we do? In our reader survey, most of you advocated for a weekly roundup. That way, you get all your border-related news in one post. And we think it’s a good idea, so we’re going to launch it this Friday. Starting this month, every Friday, we’ll publish The Border Chronicle weekly roundup, which will include the Chronicle’s posts for that week, along with links to important news from local border outlets, as well as reports, studies, etc., that will helps us better understand the border region.
We’re also going to start an “ask an expert” section, where readers can submit their questions for a chosen border expert. Twice a month, we’ll pick the top two questions and answer those in the following week’s roundup. We’d like to get creative with the roundup, and we’re considering a video or audio version. We are also looking at the roundup as a way to build community and uplift local border journalism, which we will highlight every week at The Border Chronicle. Look out for our first weekly roundup this Friday.
This leads us to a heartfelt request to you, our readers: if you value our work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. If just 10 percent of our subscribers supported our work with a paid subscription, The Border Chronicle’s two founders, Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller, would have a sustainable wage. It would also allow us to focus full time on The Border Chronicle so that we can raise funds to support our editors, Steev Hise and Pablo Morales, and our reporters, Pablo del la Rosa and Caroline Tracey, as well as to produce more community events and expand our readership.
It’s been a long road from The Border Chronicle’s launch in September 2021, as a scrappy start-up publication and podcast, and we are incredibly thankful to you, our readers and podcast listeners, for traveling this road with us. We are the only outlet entirely devoted to on-the-ground reporting, context, and analysis from the U.S.-Mexico border region, from a border perspective. And we think that’s important. We hope you do too, and that you will support our work today by donating through Paypal or a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor. Or support us by becoming a paid subscriber, or, better yet, becoming a founding member for $150, which comes with two additional paid subscriptions. We thank you for your encouragement and support of The Border Chronicle.
With much gratitude and thanks from Tucson,
Melissa and Todd
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