Paulina Ochoa Espejo
@pochoaespejo.bsky.social
Political Theorist. University of Virginia. Mexicana de acá de este lado, como dice el corrido. All opinions here are only mine
🥲 igual que con México y toda América Latina…
Indrapramit Das@indrapramitdas.bsky.social · last wk.It is wild the degree to which being on Bluesky (as opposed to Twitter, which feels like walking into the clamour of an Indian railway station) feels like hitting mute on India right now, with the whole nation at a turning point.
El agua ya es el centro de la política (¿y yo alguna vez terminaré el condenado libro?)
EL PAÍS México@elpaismexico.bsky.social · 2d ago“¡El agua es para los humanos!”: La rebelión contra los centros de datos se convierte en la sorpresa bipartidista de las ‘midterms’ dozz.es/1ev4ev
My guess: many Latinos are/see themselves as white. So when the President gets racist, they think he’s not talking about them. Republicans capitalized on this ambiguity for ‘24. But now, with DHS targeting legal migrants and visitors, it seems clear that, yes, the racism was against all “Hispanics”
Greg Sargent@gregsargent.bsky.social · 2d agoICYMI: Latino early voting is currently outpacing where it was at the same time in 2024 in RAW VOTE TOTALS, a new study finds. That's astounding. Turnout is usually much higher in presidential years. This election will bury the Myth of Multiracial MAGA. New from me: newrepublic.com/article/2164...
What would happen if you got rid of ICE? Nothing. There’s no baby in that dirty bathwater. ICE is designed to exacerbate the problems that it is supposed to solve. It’s meant to turn solvable situations into existential crises so that it seems indispensable.
Paulina Ochoa Espejo | Abolish ICE! – Abolition 13/13Paulina Ochoa Espejo | Abolish ICE! – Abolition 13/13
blogs.law.columbia.edu
Today is, again, a good day to re-post this essay that I wrote five years ago. “Border control regimes—like the beams that crumble when you try to drive a screw into them— are rotten, and cannot be fixed. These border regimes should come down.”
Paulina Ochoa Espejo | Abolish ICE! – Abolition 13/13Paulina Ochoa Espejo | Abolish ICE! – Abolition 13/13
blogs.law.columbia.edu
So— what are we going to do to stop this nonsense?
I love this (soon to be long and amazing thread), because I also finished a review and need to get my new books! Add yours!
Okay I have credirs to spend at OUP. Tell me which book I should buy, especially if it's paperback, and yours.
We have a new date for this author-meets-critics event. Hope to see some of you there! forms.gle/t9WdQA6aJqPk... @wpsa.bsky.social
If people are bothered by anthropomorphizing whales, they could try remembering that we are animals. A mother’s grief is an animal thing, that’s why our heart breaks.
Meade Krosby@meadekrosby.bsky.social · 5d ago“It's not anthropomorphizing to say that they're probably going through a form of grief.” Impossible to see this and not grieve, too. Southern Resident killer whales aren't getting enough Chinook salmon to successfully reproduce. Climate change threatens Chinook at every stage of their life cycle.
Look what I found!
The Defoe Society@defoesociety.bsky.social · 5mo agoNew Publication Alert Espejo, Paulina Ochoa. "The Character of Territory: Robinson Crusoe’s Island and Indigenous Land Defenders as Political Myths." Democratic Theory 13.1 (2026): 42-60. #danieldefoe #defoe #18thCentury #C18th #18thC
🚨new working paper🚨 Chris Blair (@chriswblair.bsky.social), Jeremy Weinstein, and I describe here The Dataset of World Refugee and Asylum Policies, in which we code de jure asylum policy for 205 countries, from 1951-2022. We hope you will find the paper and data helpful. osf.io/preprints/so...
The Dataset of World Refugee and Asylum Policies (DWRAP): de jure asylum policy for 205 countries, 1951-2022
More than two-thirds of the world's refugees and asylum-seekers are hosted in the developing world, yet the national laws governing their reception have never been measured comprehensively across coun...
osf.io
A year ago, @propublica.org told you immigration agents had detained more than 170 U.S. citizens. We’ve updated our count, and we’ve got all the receipts. The tally: At least 506 citizens detained. Sometimes held at gunpoint, handcuffed, or even deported. projects.propublica.org/american-cit...
More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown — ProPublica
The government doesn’t track how often immigration officers detain U.S. citizens. So ProPublica did. We’ve found more than 500 Americans who were held against their will during this Trump administrati...
projects.propublica.org
Here's what's replacing four 200-year-old cottonwood trees, the last of which went down today after a 71-day tree-sit protest ended with aggressive arrests. So bleak. Mason Kumet photo from azluminaria.org/2026/10/05/f...
James Stout@jamesstout.bsky.social · last wk.They went for the tree as soon as possible. Wild way to drop a tree.
This book will be out this Thursday. It will become required reading for all liberal democrats, unfortunately.
Nada más deprimente que cuando se le pregunta al pueblo, y el pueblo contesta pendejadas…
"Before Stonehenge was raised, before Egypts first pyramid broke ground,before the Nazca people drew their famous lines across the Peruvian desert,someone in what is now southern Arizona shaped a 272-foot fish into the earth On April 23,2026,"a border-wall contractor drove heavy equipment across it"
Trump's Border Wall Construction Destroys 6,500-Year-Old Arizona Geoglyph – Older Than Stonehenge
Arizona's 6,500-year-old Las Playas Intaglio, the oldest dated geoglyph in the Americas, was irreparably damaged by border wall construction in April 2026.
gadgetreview.com
I just went to the supermarket. Yikes! Groceries are Texas-flipping expensive…
I have not seen this reported in English. What’s wrong with our media?
Le Monde@lemonde.fr · last wk.Au Texas, la justice suspend le chantier frontalier de l’administration Trump dans le parc national de Big Bend
Similarly, people keep asking me if immigration will get much better if Democrats retake Congress and the answer is "probably not." ICE is largely insulated from Congressional pushback (the 2026 budget reconciliation bill funded them through 2029) and hearings and subpoenas can only do so much.
Matthew Gertz@mattgertz.bsky.social · last wk.They're holding up a major escalation in Iran and a crackdown on abortion until after the midterms to limit political damage. To the extent that the last two years have been a right-wing smash-and-grab operation, the next two will be worse.
Rivers facing #HydrologicalExtremes, Round 1, Matchup 2: Amu Darya River vs Ganges-Brahmaputra Basin See facts below! VOTE HERE: www.agu-h3s.org/rivercup #RiverCup2026
Rivers facing #HydrologicalExtremes, Round 1, Matchup 1: Lake Chad Basin vs Zambezi River. Check out facts below and VOTE HERE until 10/5: www.agu-h3s.org/rivercup #RiverCup2026
🌳 |El Senado aprobó por unanimidad el dictamen de una nueva ley contra la deforestación. De 2001 a 2024, México perdió 4.8 millones de hectáreas de bosque. No es sólo un tema ambiental: la tala ilegal genera pérdidas de hasta 97 mil millones de pesos.
Senado aprueba por unanimidad ley contra la deforestación
Senado aprueba dictamen de ley para combatir deforestación. México perdió 4.8 millones de hectáreas entre 2001 y 2004.
fabricadeperiodismo.com
Ya ven que si nos íbamos a convertir en país escandinavo (miren la foto de Euronews…)
Euronews@euronews.com · 2w agoElectric cars account for more than 95% of new car registrations in Norway, the highest share in the world. About one in four new EVs registered there are from fully or partly Chinese-owned brands.
The Global Witness report found that 124 environmental defenders were killed in 2025, 85% in Latin America, with organized crime implicated in >33% of the deaths. Causes: expanding criminal activity in Indigenous territories and declining international assistance www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s...
People protecting nature and land set up self-defence units amid threat of murder
Defenders of forests and rivers killed at rate of one every three days in 2025, with 85% of deaths in Latin America
theguardian.com
We're launching a podcast series on how jurisdictions across Latin America are protecting people from violence *without* eroding democracy or human rights. Here's a great conversation with Ernesto López Portillo from Mexico's IBERO University, about experiences with police reform. More to come.
Security Reimagined: “Police reform isn’t decreed; it’s managed” (Spanish audio, English subtitles)
YouTube video by WOLA: Washington Office on Latin America
youtube.com
My latest: Picture a river in your mind. Is it sinous, single channel, uninterrupted? Only 11% of rivers in the world fit that standard. The river of the real world is dammed, braided, tidal, frozen -- and often left out of models, a pathbreaking NASA satellites shows.
Satellite reveals a world of ‘weird rivers’ shaped by humans
SWOT is exposing humans’ effects on rivers—and challenging flood prediction models
science.org
Not bizarre. My generation was trained to see *any* reference to race as “not rigorous.”
@lastpositivist.bsky.social · 3w agoOne of the basic points in Mills' The Racial Contract (originally published in 1997!) was that, if nothing else, White Supremacy deserves to be taken seriously as one of the great motivating ideologies of modernity and it's bizarre that political philosophers are so disinclined to treat it as such.
NEW: @apnews.com confirms that ICE has begun electronically "disappearing" people in the agency's custody who have final orders of removal. As of last week, anyone jailed by ICE with a final order of removal will NOT appear in the ICE Online Detainee Locator System, making them effectively vanish.
AP Exclusive: ICE hides locations of thousands of detainees with final removal orders
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding most detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, in a move that has made it harder for lawyers an...
apnews.com
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 3w agoStay tuned for more on this from mainstream reporting hopefully later today, but Bob's got the gist of it; last week, it appears that ICE began disappearing people from the Online Detainee Locator System the moment they get a final order of removal. Yes, this is as deeply screwed up as it sounds.
