Today, we’re launching season three of our podcast “Views on First: Speech & the Border,” exploring the ways our government uses the border as a justification for censorship and surveillance. While we conceived of this season long before last week’s election, the specter of a second Trump administration makes these conversations all the more urgent.
Hosted by Knight Institute attorneys, including George Wang, Anna Diakun, Ramya Krishnan, and Alex Abdo, “Speech & the Border” considers the ways our government uses its expansive authority over the border to control the exchange of information and ideas. Episodes feature conversations with scholars, journalists, filmmakers, and activists whose work has focused on or whose lives have been shaped by government censorship or surveillance at the border.
In the episode that dropped today—What are we so afraid of?—George Wang talks to lawyer and historian Julia Rose Kraut about the history of ideological exclusion and the government’s authority to bar individuals from the country on the basis of their speech, beliefs, and associations. Illustrating how these policies continue to bear on noncitizens today, immigration activist Ravi Ragbir shares his ongoing fight with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s attempts to target him for deportation based on his activism and organizing, a fight that started during President Trump’s first term.
Future episodes will explore government surveillance of visa applicants’ social media; the search of travelers’ laptops and cellphones; the limitation of Americans’ right to engage with foreign speakers and to access foreign communications platforms; and the ways that foreign governments reach across borders to surveil and suppress the speech of journalists and dissidents. Future guests will include Joseph Cox (404 Media) and Faiza Patel (Brennan Center); Stephanie Krent (Knight Institute) and Akram Shibly (Filmmaker); Anupam Chander (Georgetown Law) and Meredith Whittaker (Signal Foundation); and Carlos Dada (El Faro), Nelson Rauda Zablah (El Faro), and John Scott-Railton (Citizen Lab).
Please listen and subscribe wherever you get podcasts.
Lorraine Kenny is the Knight Institute’s communications director.