From the Borderlands artwork

From the Borderlands

20 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratings

In these captivating, compelling, sometimes tragic, yet always uplifting tales of humanity from the borderlands, host Sarah Towle, author of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, spotlights the extraordinary efforts of ordinary heroes to tear down the walls that divide us.

It's David meets Goliath in the age of global apartheid. But can the monster be slain this time?

Global nomad and ally to all, Sarah believes that "if you knew, you'd be outraged too!" Her tales of humanity from borderlands, worldwide, lift up the heroes still flying the tattered flag of values espoused in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- folks who show us, every day, that there is a better way. That we can welcome with dignity. That cruelty is not okay.

Formerly entitled Witness Radio, From the Borderlands is endorsed by Witness at the Border and is produced by Livia Brock.

Click here to support us on Patreon!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Episodes

Alvaro Enciso's Desert Monument to the Dead

June 25, 2022 13:33 - 32 minutes - 73.6 MB

It starts with a dream that becomes a dot. A red dot, representing a GPS coordinate on a map transformed into a hole, not too deep, cut into the earth with a pickaxe and shovel, then filled with moistened gravel and quick-dry cement into which Tucson, Arizona-based artist, Alvaro Enciso, plants a simple cross of rough 2x3inch pine strips painted a vibrant color and secured at the midpoint with a red dot made from metal trash he’s harvested from the floor of the vast Sonoran. Since the Octob...

How Walls, Deterrence & Title 42 Embolden Organized Crime

June 02, 2022 14:42 - 40 minutes - 55.8 MB

On Monday, May 23, 2022, as the world awaited the long-fought for lifting of Title 42, the United Nations dropped the bomb that there are now more than 100 million people forcibly displaced worldwide. That means 1 in every 100 people on the planet right now has been driven from their birthplace by war, conflict, crippling poverty, weather-related disasters, etc. Eighty percent of these people are in the Global South.  Title 42, an obscure public health provision under the US Centers for Dis...

Dora Rodriguez Lives to Tell the Tale: How Deterrence Emboldens Organized Crime

June 02, 2022 14:42 - 40 minutes - 55.8 MB

On Monday, May 23, 2022, as the world awaited the long-fought for lifting of Title 42, the United Nations dropped the bomb that there are now more than 100 million people forcibly displaced worldwide. That means 1 in every 100 people on the planet right now has been driven from their birthplace by war, conflict, crippling poverty, weather-related disasters, etc. Eighty percent of these people are in the Global South.  Title 42, an obscure public health provision under the US Centers for Dis...

Who Gets Welcomed? Who Gets to Move?

April 27, 2022 13:12 - 37 minutes - 86.1 MB

We begin the second season of Witness Radio with a mind-blowing treat. Witness Radio Executive Producer Camilo Perez-Bustillo and I join Nandita Sharma and Reece Jones to explore the question:  From the war in Ukraine to the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond: Who gets welcome? Who gets to move? We conclude with ideas about how to create a more inclusive world, one better able to confront such challenges as climate change, global pandemics, capitalist greed run amok, and the hardened, racialize...

Title 42 ReCast: It's Biden's Legacy Now

March 17, 2022 14:14 - 34 minutes - 79.1 MB

How hard is it to welcome immigrants with dignity in the US? To bring order, fairness, and humanity to an immigration system built on foundations of white supremacy and racial exclusion? Very hard. Especially when immigration is a voting issue for only one party.  The use of Title 42 is the perfect example. An obscure public health order, it was brought out of obscurity two years ago this month by Trump & Co, ostensibly to stop Covid-19 at the US Southern border but really to stop people, ...

A Tale of Two Presidencies: Proof that #ImmigrationISaBlackIssue

February 28, 2022 14:22 - 43 minutes - 99.9 MB

The past two years have brought the world changes never imagined: a global pandemic; the lockdowns and the losses; the border closures and the politics of avoiding illness, even death. But throughout it all, there is one thing that hasn’t skipped a beat: the US Deportation Machine.  This episode's featured guest is Thomas Cartwright, a member of the leadership team of Witness at the Border. Tom dedicated his time during the past 24 months of the global pandemic to collecting, compiling, an...

Is Family Separation What We Voted For?

January 24, 2022 12:26 - 34 minutes - 77.9 MB

Witness Radio's Sarah Towle and Camilo Perez-Bustillo kick off a second season with reflection on the Biden administration's one-year record on border and immigration, framed through the civil rights legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They start with the question, What would Dr. King have said about one of the greatest human rights crimes in recent US history: family separation? A civil rights lawyer and human rights scholar, Camilo was at ground-zero in El Paso, Texas when the practice...

Remain in Mexico or MPP 2.0: Can Inhumane be Less Inhumane?

December 22, 2021 12:10 - 49 minutes - 113 MB

The Grand Finale of Witness Radio's Inaugural Season A cruel, anti-asylum Trump-era policy is back under a president who promised a more humane border: the Migrant "Protection" Protocols, which never protected anyone at all. Biden maintains that his Remain in Mexico program, or MPP 2.0, will be a gentler, “lite” version of his predecessor’s policy. But can Inhumane be less Inhumane? That is the question Sarah Towle, Host and Director of Witness Radio, asks    Charlene D’Cruz, Lawyers f...

What's a Migrant's Life Worth?

December 17, 2021 11:12 - 35 minutes - 81 MB

In December 2018, Heads of State and Government met in Marrakech, Morocco under the auspices of the United Nations to adopt the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration, placing migration and refugee matters squarely on the international agenda.  Camilo Perez-Bustillo, the Executive Producer of Witness Radio, was there. In remembrance of both International Human Rights Day (Dec 10) and International Migrants Day (Dec 18), he sat down with Sarah Towle, Witness Radio Host & D...

The WRAP: African Asylum Seekers’ Tell-All Tale of ICE Torture

November 11, 2021 16:11 - 40 minutes - 92 MB

Following two ICE-Air mass deportation flights to Cameroon tracked by Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border in the fall of 2020, I couldn't escape the rumblings of attorneys and advocates for the roughly 80 individuals the US government went to extraordinary lengths — and taxpayer expense — to return to a country wracked by protracted violence:  When “Ray” protested being returned to certain harm, he says the ICE Military “bagged and tied” him to force all others to comply. “Godswill” st...

Kidnapped by Uncle Sam!

September 29, 2021 16:19 - 34 minutes - 79.7 MB

In a month that history will remember for the US welcoming Afghan refugees fleeing political chaos, violence, and persecution while expelling Haitians fleeing all these things and more, we perhaps lost sight of the nearly 13,000 children still being held captive by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Hidden from view by US government contractors in retro-fitted big box stores and "shelters" -- aka kid's jails -- many of these were separated from their families at the US border as...

Colombia's Summer of the Patriarch with Manuel Rozental

August 30, 2021 17:56 - 28 minutes - 65.9 MB

Violence and repression have been a national plague in Colombia for more than half a century. The latest turn in the vicious cycle came this summer when a post-pandemic tax hike aimed at the middle class and poor drove Colombians of all stripes into the streets. A peaceful demonstration, resembling a street party, erupted nationwide. The southwest city of Cali, population 2.2 million -- 60% of whom are Afro-Colombian, joined by an untold number of indigenous people driven off their land in ...

Climate Refugees: Humanity's Unacknowledged Migration Crisis

July 28, 2021 19:04 - 20 minutes - 45.8 MB

On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, Margaret Seiler of Witness at the Border sits down with Amali Tower, Founder and Executive Director of Climate Refugees, a research and advocacy organization that calls for the protection of those displaced by climate change. The latest driver of forced migration, climate change has had devastating effects throughout the Global South. Years of drought followed by back-to-back category-4 hurricanes, for example, have mad...

Aviva Chomsky on the Real Root Causes of Migration

June 29, 2021 14:09 - 36 minutes - 84.4 MB

Everyone’s talking about “root causes of migration” these days. We’re hearing a lot about poverty, corruption, violence. But we’re not hearing much about what’s behind that poverty, corruption, violence, or the climate-related disasters and failing economies that force people to pull up stakes and flee. Why? We’re also hearing a lot about bringing “Security and Prosperity” to the Central American region. But does this herald a new policy direction, or is it simply a euphemism for more of t...

March for Detained Children

May 27, 2021 08:00 - 31 minutes - 72.7 MB

No Place for Kids. Let Our Children Go! It was April 30th, 2021, Mexico’s Children’s Day — El Dia de las Niñas y Niños, which happened to coincide with the 100th day of the Biden administration. Witness at the Border, together with over 80 national and international sponsors, and in collaboration with local partners — the Border Network for Human Rights, the Coalition to End Child Detention, and the Hope Border Institute — convened at the Paso del Norte Bridge in the borderlands of...

Episode 2: March for Detained Children

May 27, 2021 08:00 - 31 minutes - 72.7 MB

No Place for Kids. Let Our Children Go! It was April 30th, 2021, Mexico’s Children’s Day — El Dia de las Niñas y Niños, which happened to coincide with the 100th day of the Biden administration. Witness at the Border, together with over 80 national and international sponsors, and in collaboration with local partners — the Border Network for Human Rights, the Coalition to End Child Detention, and the Hope Border Institute — convened at the Paso del Norte Bridge in the borderlands of...

Episode 1: Title 42 - The Invisible Border Wall

April 21, 2021 09:21 - 74.5 MB

If you've never heard of Title 42, I'm not surprised. It's a super obscure part of the United States public health code. In this inaugural episode of Witness Radio, we unpack the evils lurking behind Title and explain why everyone should demand President Biden and DHS Secretary Mayorkas to rescind it...Now! On the night I joined Guerline Jozef, Thomas Cartwright, Camilo Perez-Bustillo, and Joshua Rubin to discuss the tragic unintended consequences of Title 42, the Biden administration had a...

Episode 1: Title 42, The Invisible Border Wall

April 21, 2021 09:21 - 74.5 MB

If you've never heard of Title 42, I'm not surprised. It's a super obscure part of the United States public health code. In this inaugural episode of Witness Radio, we unpack the evils lurking behind Title and explain why everyone should demand President Biden and DHS Secretary Mayorkas to rescind it...Now! On the night I joined Guerline Jozef, Thomas Cartwright, Camilo Perez-Bustillo, and Joshua Rubin to discuss the tragic unintended consequences of Title 42, the Biden administration had a...

Title 42 - The Invisible Border Wall

April 21, 2021 09:21 - 32 minutes - 74.5 MB

With Guerline Josef of Haitian Bridge Alliance If you've never heard of Title 42, I'm not surprised. It's a super obscure part of the United States public health code. In this inaugural episode of Witness Radio, we unpack the evils lurking behind Title and explain why everyone should demand President Biden and DHS Secretary Mayorkas to rescind it...Now! On the night I joined Guerline Jozef, Thomas Cartwright, Camilo Perez-Bustillo, and Joshua Rubin to discuss the tragic unintended conseque...

Witness Radio Trailer

March 25, 2021 15:19 - 8 minutes - 23.8 MB

Meet the mighty band from Witness at the Border. Find out what it means to Witness and to be a Witness. Learn how witnessing is different (and not so different) from activism, and how YOU can become a Witness at the Border today! In order of appearance: Joshua Rubin Camilo Perez-Bustillo Julie Swift Karla Barber Lee Goodman Thomas Cartwright Margaret Seiler and Witness Radio host & creator, Sarah Towle. Click here to support us on Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy f...