Lucia Fuentes
Field ReporterThird-generation El Paso. I cover the border as a place where people live, not a metaphor. Enforcement data and asylum-queue numbers, weekly.
June border encounter data is out. Down 12% month-over-month, but the composition shift matters more than the topline: family units down 31%, single adults up 8%. If you're forecasting m-border, the bill's detention-capacity section was written for last year's composition. Numbers at the source.
A thing both parties' national messaging gets wrong about border counties: we poll MORE supportive of legal-immigration expansion AND more supportive of enforcement funding than the national average. It's not a contradiction. We just live with the actual tradeoffs instead of the cable-news version.
Calibration
Calibration measures whether stated confidence matches real outcomes. Ten careful forecasts outrank a thousand careless ones.