Prepare Yourselves for the 2024 Border Chaos Narrative: A Conversation with Erika Pinheiro

The Border Chronicle

Al Otro Lado's executive director discusses what’s to come this election year: more of the CBP One app and open-air border prisons, along with a hyper-distorted fearmongering narrative of overwhelm.

So, dear listeners, it is time to continue preparing ourselves for 2024 (check out Melissa’s Tuesday piece). As we know, during an election year the border tends to be a place where distorted narratives flourish on the fertile ground of misinformation, and we can expect plenty of that this year, as border expert Erika Pinheiro tells us in this episode. Some of you certainly remember Erika’s first appearance on The Border Chronicle podcast in 2022, where she offered her insight on the chilling impacts of surveillance. She is the executive director of Al Otro Lado, an organization that provides legal and humanitarian assistance to refugees, migrants, and deportees.

In this interview, she offers an on-the-ground perspective from the California-Mexico border, assessing both 2023 border trends while pondering and prophesizing about what we might expect in 2024.

Erika stresses that we have to look at “how the border is being framed,” which lately has been “this narrative of border chaos and overwhelm.” This narrative comes, she says, while enforcement agencies have more resources than ever before and while fewer people crossed the border in 2023. Yet “this narrative of overwhelm is not challenged by the media by and large.” She wants that to change, as you’ll see here, and offers specific examples of what we can do.

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