The border encampment in Matamoros that had become a makeshift community for thousands has now been emptied of the final 700, or so, souls still living there when Biden announced the end of MPP. But not all 700 camp inhabitants, like Perla, have been allowed to cross. Roughly 70 individuals with “complex cases” remain in […]

The brothers were ambushed on the Ides of March 2019. It happened as they walked toward their childhood home in Quetzaltenango. Guatemala’s second-largest city, boasting a rich Mayan heritage and a dramatic natural backdrop, Xela (as it’s known to locals) is where I went to buy presents for my host family when I lived in […]

Perla has been a professional pharmacist for 22 years. Even as a political refugee living in a tent meant for weekend camping, trapped by circumstance and a cruel immigration policy, the Nicaraguan grandmother managed to ply her trade and make herself useful to the thousands of other refugees halted at the US border by the […]

When Gabriel and his family pitched their tent in the Matamoros refugee camp, they thought it would be for a few months. They were broke, exhausted, and confused. They decided they could endure the indignity of living in the mud on the banks of the Rio Bravo at least until their first asylum hearing. When […]

On Christmas Eve, 2018, in a remote corner of the Texan desert, Esperanza Project editor Tracy Barnett interviewed activists organizing a creative resistance against the detainment of thousands of youths at the now defunct Tornillo Child Detention Center. It was deep in winter and the wind bit at the chain-link fence as she spoke with […]

I met Nathan Boddy and his wife, Dr. Johanna Dreiling, on a recent trip to Matamoros, Mexico, on the border with Brownsville, Texas. I was there to report on the surge of grassroots volunteers responding to the crisis in the absence of a government or major NGO response. Dr. Johanna was working at the camp […]

In the absence of big NGOs, volunteers regularly cross into one of Mexico’s most dangerous cartel zones to support asylum seekers stranded there by U.S. policy.

Terror plagues asylum seekers, but defenders are fighting back. 

Perhaps no other Native people knows better than the Lummi the risks of megaprojects imposed on indigenous communities without consultation or consent. The tribe’s ancestral territory is located at a prime Northwest Pacific Coast shipping juncture. Battling against proliferation of toxic oil pipelines and coal ports, the heirs of Washington state’s original human settlements took […]

There haven’t been many moments of joy in the US immigration space these past four years. But March brought celebration to the borderlands as we witnessed the good guys — and gals — prevail over the evil villain, Hollywood-style — if only for a moment. That’s when we saw men, women, and children crossing the […]

It’s been a year since we launched our Patreon site on Earth Day 2020. “Esperanza is the Antidote,” it was called, and it was launched in the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic with a campaign to support our special hope-based approach to journalism.  It was not a good time for a campaign of this […]

With less than a week to Election Day, the eyes of the world are on the United States. What happens next Tuesday is of grave importance not only to the future of the planet but to many hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants as well. Perhaps no issue is more demonstratively clear in terms of […]

One day deep in June 2018 — she can’t remember the exact day because she’d been working seven days a week, 16 hours a day, at least, since April — Jodi Goodwin received a curious phone call. It was from a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation officer stationed at the Port Isabel Detention Center (PIDC), where her most […]

Update: The day we published this article, a federal judge in California extended Judge Dolly Gee’s deadline, giving Trump & Co. 10 more days to ponder the fates of 366 migrant children — until July 27. Those children have been detained with their parents already for far more than the 20 days allowed by the 1997 […]

Whatever I was expecting, Brendon Tucker was not it. A young man with a big presence in the Brownsville/Matamoros humanitarian community, he’s the Angry Tías favorite nephew and Team Brownsville’s prodigal son; the backbone of GRM and the right and left hands of Resource Center Matamoros (RCM). While only 25, his journey here is fascinating, for Tucker was brought up on a diet of right-wing media and racist bile.

What Cindy, Nayelly, Jennifer and Joyce saw was injustice, plain and simple. They were angry. They began a coordinated response to the humanitarian crisis unfolding before their eyes: not only at the bridges, but at courthouses, detention centers, bus stations, and processing centers all across the Rio Grande Valley.

MATAMOROS, Mexico — On the morning of New Year’s Eve, a woman named Angela stood ankle-deep in the Rio Grande, washing clothes — or as they call it on this side of the border, the Rio Bravo. Bravo means fierce in this context: A few paces from where Angela, a Salvadoran asylum seeker, was doing […]