From the moment Donald Trump entered the White House on January 20th, he made going after immigrants a priority, day after day, week after week.

He has gone beyond that and also gone after Mexico as a country when it hasn't done what he's wanted it to.

He has threatened tariffs on Mexican imports, designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations,

and says he has renamed the Gulf of Mexico. And, well, the list goes on and on.

From Futuro Media and PRX, it's Latino USA. I'm Maria Innojosa. Today a conversation with journalists to better

understand what's going on at the U.S.-Mexico border and the delicate and long-standing relationship

between the two countries. Today I'm sitting down with Angela Kocherga, long-time journalist,

who's also the news director for KTP, the public radio station in El Paso, and also sitting down with renowned journalist and author Alfredo Corchado.

They're going to bring us context to help us understand the meaning of what we're seeing in U.S.-Mexico relations right now,

and to help us make sense of it without falling into the administration's trap of, you know,

basically being overwhelmed by everything all at once. Thank you so much for joining me on Latino USA from the wonderful desert in El Paso, Texas. It's great to have you on the

show. Our pleasure, Maria. It's been a while since we've all talked together, actually, but I think

the moment merits it, no? Absolutely. Yeah, a lot happening. So I want to start by asking if the both of you

could talk about your personal relationship to Mexico, to the United States, and to the border, because the three of us may know each other, but people out there may not know you. So we'll start with you, Alfredo. I'm from Durango, El-Satow, born there, grew up in Ciudad Juarez, because we were trying to connect with my father, who at the time was a bracero in the United States, between El Paso, Arizona, and California.

So from a very young age at the age of six, it was the border, and this really became home.

And I reported for the Dallas Morning News, among other publications, for over 31 years.

Well, I was born in Mexico City and also raised in Guadalajara.

And on the Texas-Mexico border, South Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, and so have lived a binationalnational life, binational, bi-cultural, bilingual,

and I've been covering the border both sides, which I think is really important, my idea,

for, as you said, decades now. We are OG reporters.

All right. So we are going to get into the issues that are happening today, into the Trump of it all, right?

But here at Latino USA, we actually think it's really important to look back at the history, at the ups and downs in the relationships between the U.S. and Mexico in order to understand the context of what's happening today.

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