CityLab Daily: Inside the Massive U.S. 'Border Zone'

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What We’re Following

Bordering on: While the weight of border patrol operations is felt heaviest along the southwest border of the United States, immigration agents possess expanded search and seizure powers in a wide swath of the country known as the “border zone.” The zone, which hugs the entire edge of the United States and runs 100 air miles inside, includes some of the densest cities—New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago—and is home to around 75 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, according to a CityLab analysis based on data from location intelligence company ESRI.

Inside this space, agents can enter private property and set up highway checkpoints; and have wide discretion to stop, question, and detain individuals they suspect to have committed immigration violations. CityLab’s Tanvi Misra reports on what it’s like to live or travel within the massive border zone—and how towns and activists are challenging the checkpoints that have become borders themselves.

—Andrew Small

More on CityLab

West flight story

After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, nearly 400,000 Puerto Ricans left the island, and found shelter in Florida, New York, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Now, we know more precisely where people went because a New York-based tech company called Teralytics harvested data from 500,000 cell phones to track migration patterns after the storm.

Using that data, CityLab’s Martín Echenique and Univision’s Luis Melgar look at where Puerto Rico’s residents went after the storm—and when they came back.

The map above is just a snapshot of that post-Maria diaspora logged from September 2017 to February 2018. The streams of red show the exodus from the island territory, followed by waves of returnees in blue.

What We’re Reading

The future of transportation is the bike... (Wired)

… also, the future of transportation is the bus (The Verge) #BusToTheFuture

How could D.C. absorb Amazon HQ2 if it can’t handle housing and gridlock now? (Washington Post)

Black Oakland throws a big cookout to protest where a white lady called the cops (The Root)

These 95 apartments promised affordable rent in San Francisco. Then 6,580 people applied. (New York Times)