Gorgeous day at the @latimesfob.
Listening to some of my favorites talk about how Mexican music is American identity.
You can see this in El Paso’s history, too. Ahí los veo a las 4:30 pm! ❤️🔥🇲🇽
Not sure! But yes, Steve is the best. ❤️🔥
For this week’s newsletter, we spoke to @jazmineulloa.bsky.social about her book “El Paso” and what the borderland city teaches us about the American experiment www.latimes.com/delos/newsle...
Thank you for including me! ❤️🔥🇲🇽
Here’s a small tribute to the people who opened their doors to me, who trusted me with their heirlooms, their memories, and the stories that history almost lost.
This book is about bloodshed at the border. But it’s also about a different kind of blood: blood that binds, blood that ties us through space, time and distance. It’s about family. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711804...
Across a century, they moved through borders that kept shifting — lines on maps, laws on paper, the expanding machinery of detention and deportation. They moved through a hundred years of battles over immigration, the southern border, and who gets to belong in the United States.
Five families: The Martinezes, the Chews, the Rubios, the Holguins, and the Mura’ls. They came from northern Mexico, from southern China by way of Peru, and the Ixil Maya world of Central America.
I’ll be talking writing and immigration with former LAT colleagues Steve Padilla and Andrea Flores and a whole host of talented authors. Come through, come through. www.latimes.com/events/festi...
I’ll be talking writing and immigration with former LAT colleagues Steve Padilla and Andrea Flores and a whole host of talented authors. Come through, come through. www.latimes.com/events/festi...
We fanned out across the country to speak to Americans about the war in Iran as it extends into its seventh week and a truce feels shaky. Many expressed bewilderment about a conflict that came with little warning. Masterfully threaded together by Jack Healy www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/u...
Two weekends, two cities.
I’ll be in San Antonio first, then Los Angeles.
If you’re in Texas or California — come through. Thank you to @sabookfestival + @latimesfob + De Los Angeles Times for the invitations. ❤️🔥
We spent months looking into how the Trump admin has remade the immigration courts by purging judges and pressuring those who remain to accelerate deportations.
HT @nicknehamas.bsky.social for steering and @datab.ae, Allison McCann, @haleaziz.bsky.social + many more
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/u...
I wrote about overt memetic propaganda: the Lego videos from Iran, the video game content out of the White House, and how state actors use culture and novelty to get audiences sharing, whether they actually approve of the message or not.
time.com/article/2026...
This weekend I’ll be at the San Antonio Book Festival talking El Paso, American myth, and identity with Texas Monthly writer John Phillip Santos.
If you’re around, come find me. And thank you to @sabookfestival for the invitation. sabookfestival.org/schedule-eve...
ICYMI, @londonoe.bsky.social’s reporting has been a master class in staying on a story.
In his latest, he and colleagues obtained video that complicates the official account of an ICE shooting in Minneapolis. What was described as a threat looks different on tape. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/u...
In South Texas, Andrea García and her siblings are carrying on in a home reshaped by fear, loss, and new responsibility.
Edgar Sandoval reports on American citizens now raising themselves, as the Supreme Court weighs birthright citizenship. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/05/u...
Good morning! We’re in the midst of our Spring Fundraising drive at @thebarbedwire.com — and I’d like to take a minute to share some gratitude to our readers for fueling my ferocious, delusional sense of hope. 🧵
thebarbedwire.com/2026/04/07/i...
The Big Bend region has a way of making visitors feel wonderfully small.
Amid confusion over shifting plans for a possible border wall in the area, we asked our staff to reflect on their memories and share pictures of their time spent there. Then we asked you, our readers.
New from me and @haleaziz.bsky.social: Months before the ICE arrest this week of a WI mosque leader, Secretary of State Marco Rubio found him to be a threat to the US foreign policy interest of combating antisemitism, according to federal officials and gov records. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/u...
Calhoun’s theories have made a dramatic comeback with Trump, whose policies are guided by an unmistakable racial determinism. Trump warns that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and that many immigrants have “bad genes,” telling a white Fox News host that “they are not exactly your genetic.” Trump has focused his ire on immigrants from “third world” countries. He has virtually reimposed the eugenics-inspired immigration restrictions of the early 20th century, while instituting a Jim Crow–style system for refugees that prioritizes white South Africans. Trump’s reasoning for what he called a “permanent pause” in “third-world migration” was that instead of people from countries such as Norway or Sweden, we “always take people from Somalia,” which he called “disgusting.” The Democrats of Calhoun’s day, similarly, were not anti-immigrant, so long as only white people could naturalize. After all, the protection of slavery required white men, even those born in Dublin or Berlin. In January, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller posted something even more revealing on X: “Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights.” Miller’s disgust here is not with the “importing” of a “foreign labor class.” It is with such a class having the same rights as he does.
The birthright citizenship case shows how Trump-era Republicans have embraced the convictions of the proslavery Senator John C Calhoun, who believed America was a “white man’s government” and the integration of nonwhites onto the polity would destroy the country www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
A heartwrenching but beautiful must read from @la-ley.bsky.social on grappling with the Cesar Chavez fallout as a Mexican American and a granddaughter of a farmer worker in Hidalgo County, where the movement helped change lives.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/n...
New ICE arrest data just dropped via the Deportation Data Project's FOIA lawsuit. I spent hours validating it so you don't have to. Here's what the numbers actually show. 🧵
The death of a nearly blind refugee from Myanmar who was found on a Buffalo street in February — five days after Border Patrol agents left him at a doughnut shop — has been ruled a homicide, authorities said Wednesday. https://to.pbs.org/3NZGHsz
The latest on the rising number of deaths at US detention centers: Mexico plans to issue a friend-of-the-court brief as part of a class action lawsuit over conditions at US detention centers.
Reporting w/ Tim Arango and Allison McCann
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/u...
Nearly 50 people have died in U.S. immigration detention since Trump returned to power.
“… places where disease and illness are rampant and detainees are often denied sufficient food, clean drinking water, medications and medical care.”
On this edition of Pressing Issues, Jazmine Ulloa explores how the history of the United States flows through El Paso.
@jazmineulloa.bsky.social is a national reporter at the New York Times and a proud fronteriza.
Read more:
pressingissues.org/five-questions-with-jazm...
As the number of people in detention climb, so have the deaths: The 33 fatalities in 2025 were the most in a single year on record since the Department of Homeland Security started operating in March 2003.
Reporting w/ Allison McCann and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/u...
New edition of PressingIssues.org is out. I connected with @jazmineulloa.bsky.social about her new #ElPaso book.
Five Questions with Jazmine Ulloa
How the history of the United States flows through El Paso
A court just ordered the government to facilitate the return home of Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez, the DACA recipient who was arrested at her green-card interview and deported last month.
My interview with Maria and her daughter Damaris is now live at @thecut.com:
www.thecut.com/article/mari...