“It’s about blood. I cover a lot of bloodshed in the book, but I also talk about a different kind of blood: blood that ties, blood that binds families across time and distance.” — Jazmine Ulloa

Kristi Noem is gone. Under her tenure, 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 — double the previous year’s toll. But Jazmine Ulloa, the New York Times’ national immigration reporter, doesn’t think much will change. Noem wasn’t really the point. The MAGA spectacle rolls on. Stephen Miller’s violently anti-immigrant agenda remains. And hysterical conservatives like Peter Schweizer are still writing books about how the Mexican government is “weaponizing” immigration.
Ulloa grew up three minutes from the Walmart where 23 people were killed by a white supremacist in 2019. That massacre inspired her to write El Paso: Five Families and 100 Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory — a chronicle of El Paso as the 21st century Ellis Island.
Her argument: El Paso is not an exception to America. It is America. Latino identity has always been American identity. The detention and deportation machine was built by both parties. Trump didn’t invent it. He simply applied his scattershot cruelty to it. What’s new is how El Paso has become every American city — the same tactics now rolling into Minneapolis and Chicago. Citizens are coming out in their pajamas to document it. Perhaps the country is finally paying attention.
Jazmine Ulloa’s El Paso is also a love letter — to the city, to its 80% Hispanic population, to the corrido tradition, to a place where magical realism is not a literary device but a way of life. “Borders or bridges?” is the question El Paso has always been answering. Now America is asking the same question.

Five Takeaways
• The Machine Predates Trump. Built under both parties across many decades. Trump amplified it; he didn’t invent it.
• Noem’s Exit Changes Nothing. Miller’s agenda intact. Same challenges, different face at DHS.
• El Paso Is America’s Mirror. 80% Hispanic, straddling two nations — the place where immigration policy meets real lives.
• Nativism Is Structural. From Chinese Exclusion to the KKK-backed 1924 Johnson-Reed Act — fear of the outsider is woven in, not grafted on.
• The Border Is Moving Inward. What border communities have lived with for decades is now spreading into the heartland. People are noticing.

About the Guest
Jazmine Ulloa is the national immigration reporter for the New York Times. Her book El Paso: Five Families and 100 Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory is out now. Born and raised in El Paso.
References
El Paso by Jazmine Ulloa: https://www.amazon.com/El-Paso-Families-Migration-Memory/dp/0593538935
Episode 2830 — Peter Schweizer: https://keenon.substack.com/p/so-are-all-immigrants-manchurian

About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:33 Kristi Noem fired: what it means for immigration
00:03:00 Jazmine’s personal connection to El Paso
00:03:26 The 2019 Walmart massacre and the Great Replacement
00:04:54 El Paso: Five Families and 100 Years…
00:07:05 Mexican, American, or both?
00:08:35 Shifting borders, shifting identities
00:09:55 El Paso as the new Ellis Island
00:11:00 Peter Schweizer and the conspiracy fringe
00:12:08 The deep roots of nativism
00:16:47 Choosing the five families
00:20:53 Immigration policy beyond Trump
00:25:44 Breaking the cycle
00:27:38 Magical realism, corridos, and storytelling
00:31:07 What the Walmart massacre taught about America