Recent passage of new legislation in Arizona has brought the divisive issue of immigration to the forefront of the national consciousness once again. This latest salvo comes on the one-year anniversary of the debut of our Busted Borders video series, in which BustedHalo.com — along with the help of a grant from the Carnegie Corporation — began covering the issue of immigration in a unique way.
Busted Borders is an attempt to use the web’s unfiltered nature to move the immigration debate away from abstractions and statistics to reveal the deeply human dimension of the issue. Instead of contributing to the glut of coverage about immigration, Busted Halo decided to feature stories by immigrants themselves about their experience. We distributed Flip video cameras to undocumented individuals and agencies across the country and asked them to start video blogging for a period of at least three months.
Over the past year we have published a total of twenty-four segments that have been viewed by thousands of visitors to BustedHalo.com. In addition, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today have taken note of the unique way Busted Halo covers the intersection of culture, politics and faith by featuring Busted Borders in their pages.
We’ve featured the lives of nine individuals thus far, specifically highlighting the stories of:
Additionally we have followed American citizens Nicole, from Ohio, and Giselle, from New York, whose husbands were deported to Mexico, in their struggles to reunite with their spouses. Throughout this journey many others have shared their stories with us, including Fatoumata, from Senegal, Roxroy, from Jamaica, and Facundo, from Argentina.
The following video compilation is an overview of the segments and stories we’ve featured over the past year:
