The aggressive response in Del Rio underscores an immigration system that prioritizes the spectacle of force over an investment in the construction of systems needed to process asylum-seekers.
Author Archives: Director
On September 1, Texas new law, SB8, restricting abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before most people know they are pregnant went into effect. Another law, SB4, limits the acquisition of “abortion pills.” For the Women’s Media Center’s I/DAR channel I analyze the new laws through the lens of political, economic and social power. But […]
Ten years ago today, September 21, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis. In 1991 a jury sentenced Davis to death for the August 19, 1989, murder ofSavannah police officer Mark Allen MacPhail in a Burger King parking lot.Without a weapon or any physical evidence, prosecutors relied largely oneyewitness testimony to persuade a jury that […]
This was bigger than abortion; I felt compelled to take a stand against the social, political and economic forces that bear down on our bodies in so many ways and
crystallize in the dismal state of our health care.
For The Baffler I wrote about the the Great Latinxpectations embedded within the convenient mythology of “Latino vote.” What is often referred to as the “Latino vote” is merely the propensity of political and media elites to fault Latino voters for not abiding by their expectations, even as actual Latinos delivered critical votes to preserve […]
My election coverage began in February with “Latinos and the Morality of American Politics” which appeared in Palabra, a new publication launched by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. I argue: If Democrats don’t have a message for Latinos, they don’t have one to disarm Trump. Without a coherent message that includes Latinos – who […]
If climate change is the existential crisis of our time, then it ought to provoke a reckoning for the news media. For The Nation I analyzed media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on race and inequality, as a preview of the challenge of covering our emerging world of “climate apartheid.” Before statistics […]
For Bon Appétit I returned to Matamoros and the camp where some 2000 asylum seekers wait for their cases to be heard in the U.S. This camp is unprecedented. It used to be that asylum seekers lived and often worked in the U.S. while their cases were pending in immigration court. Under a relatively new […]

Earlier this year I drove to San Antonio from Austin to have my pick-up truck repaired and I decided to wait it out by visiting Artpace museum. A selection of monographs featuring the work of each artist in the exhibition had been neatly laid out in the reading room. I flipped open one and the […]