TransBorder Project

Reforming the country’s most challenging policy issues that intersect on the U.S.-Mexico border: immigration, drug laws, mass incarceration, border control and homeland security.

Through investigative reporting and policy advocacy, the TransBorder Project aims to clarify, and to help reform, several of country’s most challenging policy issues that intersect on the U.S.-Mexico border:  immigration, drug laws, mass incarceration, border control and homeland security. Rising concerns about budget deficits and overreach by the federal government bring into question the vastly increased expenditures in these areas in the name of homeland security.

Current program goals include:

• Leverage political budget-cutting pressure to impose a moratorium on new border security funding – more than $10 billion annually in Homeland Security and Justice Department spending.
• Contribute to building momentum to end drug prohibition policies through policy analysis and reporting examining how border security operations are both ineffective and contribute to the horrific drug-related violence plaguing Mexico.
• Produce a major investigative and policy report, “Shadow Prison Industry,” that examines DOJ and DHS policies that have made immigrant imprisonment the driving forces in growth of the private prison industry.
• Support policy reform efforts at federal and state levels with analysis and reporting that examine how border security initiatives to support Mexico’s drug war are filling state prisons with low-level drug violators at a time when efforts to end drug prohibition and reduce prison population are gaining new prominence.