Inside the Border Security Expo, Where Companies Sell Surveillance Tech to CBP
On demo day at the Border Security Expo, hundreds of law enforcement agents armed with M16s, automatic shotguns, pistols, and other high powered and military-grade weapons strolled around the grounds at the Bandera Gun Club outside of San Antonio. The sound of continuous gunfire from the “Sharpshooter Classic”—a multi-staged shooting competition put on by the Border Patrol Foundation—combined with the nearby buzz of a $100k surveillance drone hovering above a grass field in Texas Hill Country.
Why Violence Persists in New Mexico’s Indigenous Border Towns
This article appears in VICE Magazine’s Borders Issue. The edition is a global exploration of both physical and invisible borders and examines who is affected by these lines and why we’ve imbued them with so much power. Click HERE to subscribe to the print edition. One March night last year, two teenagers briefly sneaked away from a hotel party in Albuquerque, New Mexico, intent on murdering a Native American homeless man before returning to the festivities.
Church Rock, America’s Forgotten Nuclear Disaster, Is Still Poisoning Navajo Lands 40 Years Later
Early in the summer of 1979, Larry King, an underground surveyor at the United Nuclear Corporation’s Church Rock Uranium mine in New Mexico, began noticing something unusual when looking at the south side of the tailings dam. That massive earthen wall was responsible for holding back thousands of tons of toxic water and waste produced by the mine and the nearby mill that extracted uranium from raw ore. And as King saw, there were “fist-sized cracks” developing in that wall.
One Widow’s Quest to Make Border Patrol Pay for Killing Her Husband
On May 31, 2010, Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas, an undocumented immigrant and longtime resident of San Diego, died after being beaten and tased by US Customs and Border Protection agents.
He was allegedly resisting arrest upon reentering the United States from Mexico, where he was born.
The Immigrant Crackdown Is a Cash Cow for Private Prisons
An inmate in a GEO-run prison in California in 2013. Photo byJohn Moore/Getty Images Earlier this month Daniel Ragsdale, the second-in-command at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), confirmed he will be leaving his position to work at GEO Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison company. “While you may be losing me as a colleague, please know that I will continue to be a strong advocate for you and your mission,” said Ragsdale in a farewell email to his ICE colleagues.
Families Are Reuniting with Their Deported Loved Ones in the Middle of the Rio Grande
Last week, 22-year-old Denise Gomez and her mother waded into the Rio Grande River, straddling the border between El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico. Their feet were wrapped in trash bags as they crossed through the cold, shallow water to embrace one another. Gomez’s mother was deported to Mexico ten years ago and Gomez—an undocumented immigrant still living in the United States—has not seen her since. “We didn’t say much,” Gomez told me.
Lowriders Are the Beating Heart of Chicano Culture in the Southwest
Outside El Santuario De Chimayo, 20 miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Arthur “Lowlow” Medina leans forward on his wooden staff.
The local artist and one of the pioneers of New Mexico lowriding motions toward his prized 1976 Cadillac parked just up the street from the Chimayo church, the spiritual center of hispanic/chicano culture in the Southwest.
The Forgotten Victims of the First Atomic Bomb Blast
A outdoor museum at the White Sands Base, housing the varieties of missiles and rockets tested in the White Sands Missle Range located south of the Trinity blast. All photos by Gabriela Campos. July 16, 1945: At 5:30 in the morning in the mountains of south central New Mexico, something shook Barbara Kent out of her top bunk bed. The 12-year-old girl crashed down on the floor of the Ruidoso, New Mexico cabin where she was attending summer camp.
Inside the Abandoned Ghost Towns of New Mexico
“There used to be bars, stores, schools. Right over there was La Salla Dancehall.”
The Zozobra Festival Is a Neo-Pagan Ode to Spanish Colonialism
Last week, at a park in New Mexico’s capital city of Santa Fe, tens of thousands of people gathered to watch the annual burning of what may be the world’s largest marionette.
The creature is known as Zozobra, or “Old Man Gloom.”