When the US banned alcohol production and importation in 1920, spirits from Mexico began illegally crossing the border. Alongside mass quantities of tequila was the lesser-known sotol: a north Mexican moonshine with a similar flavor profile. “We exported 300,000 liters during prohibition,” said Ricardo Pico, of the Chihuahua-based distillery Sotol Clande, who has spent years studying the drink.

The first memory Hilda Ramírez has of the United States is the sound of helicopters. Four years ago, she, her eight-year-old son, Iván, and five other migrants from Central America piled into a small raft on the southern bank of the Rio Grande, the final step in a perilous trip through Mexico that she had begun one week before.

Sacha Johnston was inching along a dirt road in a narrow canyon in northern New Mexico. “Just guide me,” Johnston said to her search partner, Cory Napier, who directed Johnston and her white Toyota 4Runner. “This road can be brutal.”. The pair had come to this starkly beautiful place, at the base of the Sangre De Cristo mountains, to hunt for a treasure rumored to be worth upwards of $2m.

Astro-artist Jon Lomberg, a longtime friend and colleague of Carl Sagan, on protecting future humans from America’s atomic past. This story appears in VICE magazine's Dystopia and Utopia Issue. Click HERE to subscribe to VICE magazine. At first, Jon Lomberg thought it was a joke. When the late Carl Sagan, his friend and mentor, told him about a US Department of Energy plan to future-proof an atomic waste site for 10,000 years, he wasn’t sure it could be real.

On a quest to taste every version of a fabled dish that’s both lowbrow and beloved, you just might discover New Mexico in a bag. IT ARRIVED IN A SMALL yellow bag, cut open lengthwise, with piping-hot red chile, ground beef, and beans poured directly over the corn chips inside, all topped with diced onions, yellow cheese, and lettuce.

Her husband died after being beaten and tased by border agents, and now Maria Puga gets a chance to shame the United States in an international tribunal.

Detaining immigrants has turned into a very lucrative growth industry. Earlier this month, Daniel Ragsdale, the second-in-command at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), confirmed he will be leaving his position to work at GEO Group, the nation's second-largest private prison company.

"The simple act of sticking something out on the street means now you are a criminal," said Ivan Michel, one of the artists. "Our art counters and is subversive. [It is] social and, in some cases, it's political," added Mario Guzman, another ASARO artist, speaking about the collective's mission to provide alternative commentary to the state-driven narrative which permeates Oaxacan society and silences dissent, often violently.

After her husband was jailed for entering the United States without papers, Gabriela Casteñeda vowed to help her peers live without fear. On a Wednesday morning in February, 25 undocumented immigrants sat in a crowded Sunday school classroom at the Holy Spirit Catholic church in Horizon City, a neighborhood on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas.

An event called Hugs Not Walls brought together 400 families who had been separated by deportation. Last week, 22-year-old Denise Gomez and her mother waded into the Rio Grande, straddling the border between El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico. Their feet

On Wednesday, John F Kelly, the head of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the department tasked with implementing President Donald Trump's immigration policy, laid out the administration's vision before Congress. It included increasing vetting

Tucumcari, New Mexico - Muhammad Malik stands behind a cluttered desk, his words punctuated by a soft ding as his forearm glances the dusty reception bell at his near-empty motel on Route 66. "I bought it because it was cheap," says Malik, 67, a former United Nations worker from Pakistan, who moved to Tucumcari in the early 2000s.

For decades Native Americans have been wholly misrepresented in the world of comic books, stripped down to a series of caricatured, homogenized tropes of the American Indian. "We have been prostituted and raped in the story world," said Jonathan Proudstar, creator of 'Tribal Force'—America's first all Native American superhero comic.

The recent event, the first of its kind in the world, represents the growth of the subcultural vanguard of indigenous-created media that is slowly working its way into the multibillion dollar comic industry. For decades Native Americans have been wholly misrepresented in the world of comic books, stripped down to a series of caricatured, homogenized tropes of the American Indian.

Oaxaca, Mexico - It is November 2, the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and the family of Anselmo Cruz Aquino has gathered by a cross on a roadside in Nochixtlan, Oaxaca. It marks the spot where the 33-year-old was shot and killed last summer during a clash between the federal police and a dissident wing of the Mexican teachers' union, the National Coordinator of Education Workers, or CNTE.

Oaxaca, Mexico - It is November 2, the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and the family of Anselmo Cruz Aquino has gathered by a cross on a roadside in Nochixtlan, Oaxaca. It marks the spot where the 33-year-old was shot and killed last summer during a clash between the federal police and a dissident wing of the Mexican teachers' union, the National Coordinator of Education Workers, or CNTE.