Biden's Border Policies

Shereen and James discuss the fire in a detention facility in Juarez and how Biden’s border policies kill people trying to cross the border.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Okay, everything's recording. My cat is grooming herself, So when
now was the time? Now? Some time? Very great? But
should just use that as a rang tru Okay, I
mean I'm fine with that. Whatever, Okay, let's do it.
That's very in true. Sharine's cat is grooming herself, and
that means that this is it could happen here. And

(00:25):
I am James Stout and I'm joined by Sharine units
and not not her cat. She's just she's just rowdy
and I have to really sometimes plan recording times around
her schedule. And that's that's just the way my life
is now. And that's yeah, that's the attention she deserves.
None of this is important. It's okay, but it's a

(00:46):
bit of a serious one, sadly. And so I want
to talk more again about the border, something we've spoken
about a little bit and something I kind of want
to keep coming back too, because things haven't really got
any better. In fact, they've potentially got worse. So where
I want to start is last month, and we're recording
this and what the fourth of April, so still for

(01:07):
a week ago, I think a firing attention twenty eighth Okay, Yeah,
what's that three? Yeah, a week ago, a week ago today.
A fire in a detention center in sued Ad Huaras
killed forty one migrants being detained there. Well then two
dozen other people were seriously injured, and every single one
of the about one hundred people detained in the migrant

(01:28):
detention center was hurt in the fire. The reason that
every single person was hurt became clear in a video
obtained by Texas Public Radio and later confirmed by the
government in Mexico. It shows two people dressed as guards
rush into the camera frame. You can see people in
the cells just really pulling and kicking and beating on
the bars. The guards sort of run up to the doors,

(01:52):
but they don't really appear to make any effort to
open them or to let the people out of the cells. Instead,
they hurry away as clouds of smoke begin to fill
the corners of the cells. Gradually, the smoke fills up
the whole screen until you can't see anything else and
the men in the cells are left to die. It's horrifying. Yeah,
it's one of the worst deaths that's available to a

(02:15):
human being, and the fact that people who are already
incredibly desperate and have taken huge risks to get there
and died like literally yards from the United States border.
Is just it's almost kind of unfathomably cruel. But what
is in a way crueler is this statement made by
the US Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar. He said the

(02:38):
tragedy illustrated the dangerous grifts in traveling north and he
cited the loss of life in two recent smuggling incidents
in San Antonio in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
These cases, he said, are a reminder of the risks
of irregular migration. But what we're talking about here isn't
a consequence of irregular migration, really right, because these people

(02:58):
weren't in the hands of criminals or coyotes or cartels.
That they were in the hands of the Mexican government
when they died. And for him to blame this on
a regular migration, I think it is very indicative of
the way the bid administration has approached migration policy, which
is to try and always obfuscate and shirk the responsibility

(03:20):
for the cruel things that it's doing, for the consequences
of its policies and its actions, which I want to
get into more. I don't want to linger on this
fire too much because it's unfathomably awful, and like I
don't think it. I don't think we need to spend
hours and hours like going over something for people to

(03:40):
know that there is no situation in which the government
should burn fucking forty people alive, Like, um, it's inexcusable.
We know that, like it was, the shelter was set
up in twenty nineteen, and I want to get into
why this shelter, which seems to have been a pretty
terrible conditions to begin with, was set up in twenty nineteen,

(04:02):
Why people who claim to the United States to try
and have a better life, to say for life, ended
up in a shelter in Mexico, And how we've created
a system where people keep dying at our southern border. Right,
some of this will be stuff we've covered before. People
have listened to the other stuff I've done on the boarder.
If people have listened to the Butterfly Sanctuary episodes, they'll
be familiar with some of Biden's border policies. But I

(04:24):
wanted to address these. Did you see that they lowered
the death toll from forty to thirty eight, I guess
after hospital visits. Like that's the one part that I've
read that is nice so far. Yeah, that's good. I've
seen thirty eight, thirty nine, and forty one, and it
wasn't sure what being exactly, So thirty eight it's in. Yes,
right now I'm reading thirty eight after it was it

(04:45):
was forty and it was lowered to thirty eight. Okay,
Well two people were reanimated. Yeah, I mean it's I mean,
it's just like they're probably in terrible condition, like they're
probably going they're having like life changing if not like all,
like it's just terrible. Yeah, And like access to care
for those people. I mean those people may have access
to care, right because of what happened was high profile

(05:06):
and within the news, but like generally access to care
for people like I have seen I've seen a person
die because they don't have access to their medicines that
are very cheap and very easily available. Like again, like
we are talking feet, like I could throw a tennis
ball into the United States and where it was stalling.

(05:27):
And that's because this system treats people like numbers, not people. Yeah,
migration center is like a like a big jail, you
know what I mean, it doesn't even Yeah, it's like
an old timey fucking Western jail with people crammed it too,
cells with with you know, like legit bars on the walls,
so slow. Conditions in Mexican detention are often very poor,

(05:50):
and those conditions have been exacerbated by something called Title
forty two. People have probably heard about Title forty two
a lot. There's a lot to say about Title forty two,
but very briefly, it's a trump or a public health
policy that invokes a public health rule to push asylum
seekers out the US and into Mexico, regardless of whether
or not they might legally qualify for asylum. This shelter

(06:12):
was stood up as a consequence of something called the
Migrant Protection Protocol. People call it the Migrant persecution protocol
because that's more accurate. But I was going to say, like, wow,
doing a very job with that. Yeah, Like people enjoy
being wrong about George orwell, but this ship is perfectly
orwelly in yea To call a policy which kills little

(06:33):
fucking children the Migrant Protectional policy is dark, they call it.
It's often called remain in Mexico as well, which is
what it does. It requires people to remain in Mexico
while their asylum claim it's process, despite the fact that
this might not be a safe country for them, and
that this might violate various international laws and conventions on asylum.

(06:54):
But the US doesn't subscribe to all of those. As
we're going to find out now. Title forty two has
been through some legal ping pong recently, right with Biden's
sort of trying to get rid of it, also defending
getting caught a bunch of conservative states suing to keep it.
So let's expend a little bit of where we're at
with Title forty two right now. It's actually set to

(07:17):
expire on May the eleventh. The Biden administration is rolling
out plans that will continue to restrict migrant access after
May the eleventh because they're concerned about like a large
influx of migrants, which I just want to point out
was always going to fucking happen, right when you like
pushed people just the other side of your fictional line

(07:38):
in the sand, and then at some point you're going
to have to start because at some point, Mexico is
already the third most popular country in the world for
asylum and you can't force this all on them. So
since it was first implemented in twenty twenty, the government
has used Title forty two to expel migrants from the
US Mexico border nearly two point seven million times. That

(08:00):
doesn't mean you will see these statistics quoted constantly, credulously,
like people who don't understand what the fuck they're talking about.
And it really makes me angry. That doesn't mean two
point seven million people, right, Because Title forty two makes
people cross more than once. It creates this kind of
loop where DHS right normally CBP or bought a patrol, sorry,

(08:24):
picks people up and dumps them back in Mexico without
processing them. And those people are now in a place
they don't know, they don't have any family that have
any hope, they don't have any money, and all they
do is kick their heels until they can find a
way to cross again, or someone to cross them again.
And sometimes people who are facilitating those crossings will offer
them unlimited crossings, so they'll pay someone to smuggle them across, right,

(08:48):
and that person will say, well, you get unlimited crossings,
Like I didn't even realize. I didn't know it was
so like standard. They're like, Okay, this is gonna happen.
You're gonna get elimited cross, you know what I mean.
Like there's like they're expecting it to be this like
perpetual loop. Yeah, I mean they a few years ago,
maybe they wouldn't have done. But another way that this

(09:08):
is sometimes termed his catch and release, which they're not
fucking fish. Um shouldn't do that to fish either. It's
not really nice to fish. But using Yeah, it's extremely
fucking dehumanizing, right, and what it does and what I've
seen what I'm not it's not like a unique insight
of mine is that it forces people to cross in

(09:28):
more and more dangerous areas. Like you combine that with
a wall and the fact that like it's very well
documented that the Trump administration wanted to maximize the amount
of miles of wall that built. If you remember in
one of the presidential debates, he made a claim about
a certain number of miles of new wall he built. Yeah,
he was just speaking out of his ass. I've foyed

(09:50):
it like the next day and they were like, I
think they provide a number of different numbers or many
of which relied heavily on repairing existing board of vents.
But they just went like hammer and tongs, trying to
build new sections of wall to include skipping areas where
it was harder to build valleys, mountains, that kind of thing, Right,

(10:10):
And so what this wall does is it forces people
through the areas where it's hardest to cross, and those
are the areas where it's easiest to die. And so
these people are now forced to make risky and riskier
crossings to try and avoid getting caught, or to wait
in Mexico where they're at a very high risk of
abduction or sexual assault, extortion or violence. Right, and will

(10:33):
come on too, maybe a couple of those stories later,
just from people I've talked to. The result of this
policy is that border cities in Mexico are flooded with migrants,
and often with soldiers sent there to supposedly keep the peace.
Last month, the Mexican National Guard and the immigration authorities
raided a hotel full of Venezuelan migrants in Hualis. Local

(10:53):
news outlets reported that the migrants, mostly young men, through
stones at the officials and they're broad issued and eventually
they call off the raid. In another incident, authority to
raided the church and dragged off a number of Venezuelan
migrants who have been given to sanctuary there. Some were beaten,
and one advocate said they were essentially tortured. This prompted, yeah,
it's this is horrific, right, like a lot of so

(11:15):
a lot of the young men in the it was
all men in the potential center that caught fire. Most
of them were from Venezuela place like I've lived in Venezuela.
I have a lot of sympathy for those people. And yeah,
she actually I found like a breakdown. I guess there
is thirteen Hundurians, twelve Salvadorians, twelve Venezuelans, a Colombian and

(11:38):
an Ecuadorian. So I mean, even that's crazy, like there's
so many people from all those countries. It's I don't know. Yeah,
we'll see a bit later that there are certain pathways,
like for Venezuelan people, there are some pathways that don't
exist through other people then insufficient and they're they're how
do I say this unfair, but sort of they exist.

(12:01):
But yeah, those people from from those countries. We see
a lot of Haitian people at the border here too.
But yeah, that's a pretty common kind of like border
mix up of folks. Unfortunately, often you won't see Haitian folks.
That there are sort of segregations even within the migrant community,
and often Haitian folks is kind of segregated out, which

(12:22):
is which is unfortunately, Like I thought, the horrors one
is kind of that the population breakdown, Like wouldn't the
Haitian border crossing be like somewhere else. I don't think
to say it's dumb at all. I don't know what
they breakdown. I know there are Haitian people in ware Is.
I know the at the Cuban folks in Whuaireas too,

(12:43):
and they've kind of some of them have stayed in
wires and established kind of their own communities and that's
had some sort of some negative results for antimigrant feeling
in wire Is. From what I've heard, I know there
are a lot of Haitian folks in Tijuana. A lot
of the Haitian people come via Brazil, where they've spent
time like preparing for the Olympics that were there and

(13:04):
building stadio and stuff. So a lot of them tell
me they've come up from Brazil and then obviously with
like increased violence in Haiti. Now you'll see more Haitian
people again. There's a decent Haitian community that also is
established in Tijuana and has it's that it's their home now, right,
Like I had no idea to be honest, So now
I know, I'll accept being a little bit dumb. So
everyone it's not very well reported on, and I think

(13:28):
it's honestly people have stopped reporting on it since twenty
twenty as well, like since like Orange man Bad started
being like the prevailing like mass media message, no one
gives a fuck about microus anymore, Like there's a pronounced
drop off when I cross of people, and I don't know.
There are some very good reporters, of course, you know,

(13:49):
we've spoken to some of them in Tijuana and in
San Diego. But yeah, you just there was a lot
of parachute reporting on migration in the tramp Era, and
some of it very bad, some of it by people
who didn't have the language skills to be working there
and didn't understand what was respectful and what wasn't and
things like that. So I have strong feelings about how

(14:12):
the migrant care abound in twenty eighteen was was reported
on for instance. Yeah, but yeah, you'll definitely see a
ton of Haitian people and that Biden has gone exceptionally hard.
I'll include a link at the bottom of like a
piece I wrote for NBC about bidensti Haitian bullshit but
like um exceptionally hard, specifically against the Haitian so that

(14:33):
you can find a tweet from the Haitiana of the
United States Embassy in Haiti where it's just got a
picture of Biden. I think it says, don't come. I'm
paraphrasing that special account. Yeah, yeah, no, it's wild, Like
you don't see this in other countries either, even you
know they've made like they've made it. There was a
ton of special exemptions for people from Ukraine, right, it's

(14:55):
hard not to see that it's RACI of course, yeah,
of course as Ukraine. Yeah yeah, because then it's yeah, great,
but also you have to look at the like why
did that happen? Right, And if we can't like express
like Russian bombs killed kids in the m two Russian
bombs killed kids all over fucking Africa, and if we
can't have solidarity with them, or we can with Ukrainian people,

(15:17):
and then it's hard for me not to see that
as to do with their skin color. Yeah, and then
that is bullshit, and so yeah, Title forty two were
end in May when the COVID Public Health Emergency Order expires.
Biden said earlier on that he would end Title forty two.
He then faced these lawsuits from conservative states, but at
the same time that by the ministration fiercely defended Title

(15:38):
forty two and litigation brought by the ACLU and other
groups challenging the policy, and even the CDC right the
CDC Center for these control was like, now the shit
isn't necessary and it's cool, we should stop. The government
has argued that public health concerns for letting migrants into
the country due to continued threat of COVID nineteen outweigh
the possible harms done to migrants who return to cities

(15:59):
like or Tijuana. Like, you don't even need a COVID
test to fly into this country, now, I don't think, right,
like my family come visit me. So the end of
the emergency kind of makes that a moot point, right, Like,
you can't have a public health order to protect us fromidities,
which you're saying, isn't the problem anymore. But the damage
that this has done will take years to rectify, and

(16:22):
the backlog that it's created is already being used as
an excuse to do more cruel and inhumane things to
people who are just looking for a fair crack at life. Sure,
do you know what won't build a wall around itself
and force people to rest their life to get here?
You tell me, James, what is it? It is these
silver coins that have Ronald Reagan on them, who probably

(16:45):
outflanks our current immigration Yep, Uncle ron Okay, we're back,
Thank you, Ronald Reagan. Or maybe it was a gold advert.
I hope it was a gold vause I know that

(17:07):
everyone enjoys so so much. Please don't message Sophie about
the fucking gold things. We know, yeah, we know, we know,
trust us, we know. Yeah. It's also it's just funny.
It's funny to me that someone's buying gold adverts and
presumably none of our listeners are buying gold and get
I have healthcare now, I mean it must be working somewhere,

(17:28):
like you know what, I mean, why how else would
they afford to keep advertising? I don't know, Yeah, someone's
doing something. It's like one guy if you are that
steadfast listener who buys everything we advertise, Like, thank you
so much for our We salute your dedication. So Biden

(17:49):
hasn't really come up with a distinctive immigration policy of
his own yet. Mostly he's just kind of failed to
undo the damage Trump has. Don't created a two tia
system which white Ukrainians get to slip the line well
back and brown migrants wait terrible conditions, And for some reason,
he's gone as hard as fuck as he can to
stop patients coming here, which the reason might be pretty

(18:10):
obvious to some of you. Oh and we're still building
the wall, but we're calling it a barrier now of course.
So yeah, it's totally different, Brandy. Yeah, it doesn't have
a little plate on the top. It's a slightly different shape.
You can, like, if you scroll back far enough on
my Twitter, you can find comparison pictures of the Biden
barrier and the Trump Wall. But it's like literally just
like a glow up, like like like a terrible, horrifying

(18:32):
glow up. Yes, yeah, the walls having it's a little
it's a freedom wall now or something. But if you
don't follow the butterfly sanctuary, it's well high value Twitter
account and sometimes stealing automatic rifles. Not stealing, I should say,
but National Guard leaving automatic rifles on her property that
she takes care of. But yeah, you can listen to

(18:53):
our Batterfly Sanctuary episodes for more on like the Biden barrier.
But we're more than halfway through Biden's term now, and
we're beginning to see him take aim at something resembling
a border policy on his own at the same time,
because we're more than halfway through his term, or perhaps
just because he never intended to fulfill his campaign policies
about being kind to migrants. He's trying to move towards

(19:15):
the center, and the center of US politics is like
somewhere to the right of Attila the hun these days.
So he's been hit pretty hard by the Republicans on immigration,
and it's worth pointing out that he's been hit pretty
hard on largely on just shit that's made up or
misunderstandings of this, the number of interactions that border patrol

(19:36):
has or willful or unwilful, I don't know, but many
of the critiques are in pretty bad faith. But nonetheless,
like it's been an area where they've criticized him right,
And so he's trying to move towards the quote unquote
center on that with these new policies. So he's proposed
of his administration has proposed something called a transit bans,

(19:57):
a transit ban, people might remember, and the initial kind
of proposal of this was made by Stephen Miller. Dude
who looks like a lollipop and also like a white nationalist.
That's a great His head is too big for his neck.
He's shiny. Yeah, yeah, that's not the only thing that's
wrong with him. So this proposal would render migrants ineligible

(20:20):
for US asylum if they crossed the southern border illegally
after failing to US for humanitarian refuge in another country
they travel through, such as Mexico. Right, So unless you
somehow come straight to the US, which you can't do
because you can't get on a flight to the US
without the correct travel documents, then you'd have to travel
through another country, right, And they're saying that you should

(20:41):
apply for asylum there. In practice, this would bar most
northern Mexican asylum seekers, unless he took advantage of one
of the programs that Biden has proposed to allow people
in Nicaragua Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela with a US sponsor
under a humanitarian parole program where they apply from their
home country and then get to credentials to travel, so
they'd stay in Cuba or whatever. This might not be

(21:05):
safe for some people to do in those countries, but
they have a means to get here and it's metered
I think at thirty thousand a month. Those people from
those same countries enduring the same conditions if they came
here on their own and then applied to asylum, as
is their right under US law once they entered the country, right.
And it's worth noting that like most people coming in

(21:28):
that want to apply for asylum, so they wanted to
turn up. That might have changed a little with Title
forty two, but previously people were seeking to turn themselves
in right and say hey, I'm here to apply for asylum.
They can now be expelled under this legislation. Right, So
if they don't use this or they don't have a
US sponsor, which kind of creates you shouldn't have to
know someone in America right to come here and avail

(21:50):
yourself of basic human rights. Yeah, it's just it's it's
purposely like getting people out of the group that can
go in you know what I mean, Like it's excluding
people but yeah, like yeah, right, thousands of people and
this legislation now allows them for them to be for
expedited processing expulsion. Um. If people do want to apply

(22:12):
for asylum at the southern border, they need to use
an app which is called CBP one. It's just the
craziest thing I've heard in a while. Yeah, it is
like I'm on another point, like what what I don't know?
It is incredibly powerful, like lib brain to be like,
don't worry, We've made the app. We've got you. Like
it assumes that people have the apple. It's not available

(22:35):
in all the languages, so people speaking like of course
not like last time I was at the border, like
I had. I worked with a colleague who spoke a Romo.
I speak French. He's Spocasian, Creole, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, right
like like those of people I interviewed in an in
an afternoon. You know, there are dozens of languages, so

(23:01):
the app isn't available in those languages. The app is
a giant cluster. Fuck, it doesn't work. It crashes all
the time. Like you can find like like little kids,
little kids who come up from Tijuana to go to school,
who can tell you ten things that are wrong about
this app. But you can also find people who make
six figure salaries in Washington. You think is great? Right, regardless,
it's a fucking app on a fucking device that is

(23:22):
just like like, I don't know, I think it's just
so lazy. It's lazy and stupid. I don't like it. Yes,
it is both of those things. It assumes people have
a cell phone, which is yes, very elitist, Yes exactly. Yeah,
like it maybe your phone could get stolen being fucking
someone could book all these train game like there's a
million ware. It assumes you got fucking broadband connectivity, you know, WiFi,

(23:47):
all these things. It's yeah, it's just insane, Like it's
amazing how detached one can be from reality and still
be the person in charge. Yeah, what if no people
in charge? So migrants cussing the border without documents can

(24:11):
be subjected to expected removal of the said and the
proposed regulations indicate the migrants from Kuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela,
who generally cannot be deported due to strain relations with
the governments there would face deportation to Mexico instead, which
fucking just again makes us someone else's problem, right. A

(24:31):
dozen Senate Democrats called the proposed asylum restrictions unlawful and counterproductive.
They joined thousands of migrant advocates and organizations, including the
United Nations Refugee Agency, in imploring the administration to immediately
withdraw the regulation. So there's a period of public comment,
which is what's happening at the moment. Right, So he's

(24:52):
found a policy which no one likes, both from the
right and from the people are allowed to live with dignity.
So that's that's hard to do. Well, you're never he's
never gonna have fucking imput like I don't know what
they're like trumplicants want, but like it's some version of
machine guns on top of a wall killing little children. Yeah,
and you could just be a decent person, or you

(25:13):
could try and implicate fucking psychopathic Fox News people. So
Mexico is already the third most popular destination for people
seeking asylum in the world after United States in Germany.
In Mexico, asylum seekers have to stay in the state
where they apply, and that's resulted in large numbers of
people being concentrated in a place like Tampatula on the

(25:35):
southern border with Guatemala, and that creates like an infrastructure
issue there, right, which it's also worth lick. I'm sure
people are well aware that. Like, I wonder why all
these countries have been fucking destabilized, right, I wonder if
there if there was a country which helped do that
for deca leaving their home, Like why can't they go
back home? Like? Yeah, what I mean there? Yeah, if

(25:58):
only the clash had written song about it for us
to understand better. So, Mexico granted sixty one percent of
asylum requests from January through November last year, compared to
forty six percent in the US. For fiscal year twenty
twenty two. There is an increase of allow of twenty
seven percent under Trump, but it's still suggested more than

(26:19):
half the people get sent back. Right, where the fuck
do they get sent back to? If they can't reliably
go back to their home country safely. Mexico abides by
something called the Cartagena Declaration, which promises a safe haven
to anyone's threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts,
massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have
seriously disturbed public order. The US currently observes a narrow

(26:43):
definition that requires a person to have been individually targeted.
That's a distinct thing. Right for limited reasons are spelled
out in the UN Refugee Convention. But it appears that
the BIOD administration has plans to retrain DHS agents and
they're currently telling them, or they seem to be proposing
to tell them. I should say, to let migrants enter

(27:03):
the US to pursue protection only if they qualify under
the International Convention against Torture, which it's an absurdly high yeah,
like against torture. Wow, yeah, I thought you were going
to say after all that. Yeah, it's it's a ridiculously
high bar. Like there are very real things you could

(27:24):
be afraid of. Like I've spoken to people who've have
escaped like forced sex work, right, who've had members of
their family killed for it's made to their own lives.
Maybe the forced sex worker is torture, but maybe some
of those things wouldn't meet that bar. But I think
any reasonable human being, right, if you met someone in
the street and they said, hey, so you know so

(27:45):
and so killed my daughter and my father and my uncle.
And they said they're going to kill me. You'd say, like,
come into my house, I'll look after you. But there's
a country we're saying, fuck you, You're on your own. Yeah,
that's that's not how you be a good neighbor. And
I saw also on the inside of the administration. Recently
has reported that the bid administration is considering reviving the
practice of detaining migrant families called crossing the US Mexico

(28:06):
border illegally. So this is, this is the thing that
that all the people were very upset about, the normal
kids in cages thing, We're fucking doing that again as well,
I guess't. They likely won't do like separation of minders,
which which is what they did before they took the
kids away from their parents and obtained them separately, which

(28:28):
is just fucking like I cannot imagine. Um still just yeah,
it's just unspeakable trauma. And like just like for both
for everybody involved. I mean, like same with the wall though,
like it's just the same thing where the same thing
is happening, it's just like marketed differently. It's just like

(28:48):
packaged in a different way. And it's still fucking terrible. Yeah, Like,
I just I don't know what you expect these fucking
people to do, Like, and I don't know how you
how you expect someone like even if you're purely self
interested and you're just concerned about like US security and
like you know, making America great again or whatever, um,

(29:09):
like if you luck little children up, like they're going
to fucking hate you and you can't blame them, like,
it's it's inhumane. It's it's what dictators do. It's it's
fucking unfathomable. But it also like drives me, like it's
just insane to think about people that are actually there
in the flesh like that see people like like children

(29:32):
crying or something, and like just there's so much terrible
things going on and no one does there's not enough.
I don't know. I just I can't imagine doing that
at least be like, Okay, my job is this and
I'm gonna continue. I don't know. I don't like it.
I don't like it. No, I don't like it either,
Like this of all the things I've reported on and
like I've put it on some dark shit and like

(29:54):
being to some dangerous places et cetera. Like, nothing has
been harder for me to get over then little kids
at the border, Like I have hundreds of stories about it,
but I remember one little girl. This shit makes me
want to cry. I remember it's one little girl whom
she had left her teddy bear behind. She wanted a

(30:15):
teddy bear. And like this, little girls are cleaving in
a fucking tent. Right. This is in twenty eighteen, when
when like the mid terms were happening. So they were
holding a large group of people right next to the border,
right they were staying in a baseball stadium, and myself
and some friends had gone to help. And this little
girl was just like the sweetest little kid. Like she
came out, she was holding my hand, and then I

(30:37):
asked if she wanted to go on my shoulders. She
wanted to go on my shoulders, you know. And at
this point, the way that they were getting people to
leave that area and go to another area was by
cutting off their access to water. Oh my god, they
wanted so like we were able to get some water,
and we were able to give them as much water
as we could buy on our credit cards. And I
asked her what she wanted, and she said she had
to leave her teddy bear behind, and it just fucking

(31:00):
broke my heart, like without like you know, going into
too much personal trauma. Details like that shit kept me
from sleeping for weeks, and I found it so hard
to come back it us like twenty eighteen, around November,
I guess and like go to like a remember someone's
having some Thanksgiving thing and just I just wanted to

(31:21):
fucking shout at everyone and be like, what the fuck
is wrong with you? Anyway, So I went and bought her.
It's especially from a from a child, you know, like
their their experience, in their perspective is just like just
I don't know, you see how rad is Yeah, Like
I don't know. Children shouldn't be treated about that, forced
up like we shouldn't be standing in the parking lot

(31:44):
of a fucking Tommy Hill Figure discount store in San
Diego launching tear gas at little children in Mexico. It's
one of the like the images of like what America
does to people that will stick with me forever. It's yeah, yeah,
I'm glad you were down there helping though, Like especially again,

(32:05):
according their access off to water is like the most
like one of the most inhumane things, but then against
all very inhumane Yeah, and that time was difficult for
everyone involved. That was also one of the most impressive.
This is one of the times when large NGOs weren't
allowed to operate because of various concerns and legal things.

(32:27):
So the entirety of the aid effort for those people
was done through mutual aid, right through completely ad hoc mechanisms.
That were church people, people from various migrant advocacy groups
in San Diego, people from my love to Alado, who
we've spoken to on the podcast. That's how I met
them for the first time. Number of those people actually

(32:47):
were surveiled by border patrol, as we found out two
years later, and had warrants on them, etc. But everyone
who came came like not because it was a job,
because it was the right thing to do, and like
there wasn't a day I was down there then there
weren't people turning up with trucks full of stuff. This
is my friend and I. Someone managed to get us

(33:11):
a projector from their workplace. And know how they got
a projector from their workplace, I don't care, and a
bunch of DVDs. My friend used to be an electrician
and they moved everyone to a nightclub. It was a
nightclub and another part of Tijuana at our old nightclub
Old and massive thousands of people were in this big
kind of open at nightclub situation. It was very strange.
They had the women and the young children in one

(33:32):
area that like very clearly had been a pole dance
room like anyway, and they had like these bars that
were like, you know, like a balcony area. So we
went up to the balcony area and then me and
a couple of these older kids who with the migrant
group were able to get climb across the room, find
some wires connected projector and do a little a little

(33:54):
movie theater for the children. And they remember they were
watching like Beverly Hills Chihuahua Sweet when I left, And yeah,
they were having like just little gestures are so important though,
like yeah, I mean, it doesn't fucking fix anything, but
if they can have two hours of watching a film
about a dog or whatever like not that that yeah exactly. Yeah,

(34:16):
yeah they deserve that, and they deserve a lot more
than that. But yeah, it was those little nice things
that made it bearable, I guess. But yeah, there was
I still have like fairly disturbing recollections of lots of
things asking on the border. So let's just do a
quote from Joe Biden, because we do do love a

(34:38):
bit of Joe Biden. My message is this, if you're
trying to leave cool By, nickar Owaga or Haiti have
agreed to begin a journey to America, do not do
not Just shut up at the border, stay where you
are and apply legally starting today. If you don't apply
through the legal process, you will not be eligible for
this new parole program. Anyway. Joe By can go fuck himself.

(35:01):
But I think that I hope, I hope that obviously
lots of little anecdotes of help, but we shouldn't see
these people as statistics or numbers, and we should see
them as people. So I've got a couple of interviews
that I've done and needs to just one as I
went back to some notes and found so I was
just going to read them out. So I won't give
their names just for their own security. And but sometimes

(35:26):
I've used pseudonyms on the publicies. Sometimes I have used
their names when they're willing to use their names, like
it's it's their choice, right It should always be their choice.
If you're a fucking reporter and you're filming children without
their consent or their parents concent you camp just a
spectacle for your story. Yeah, exactly. You can jog on
and I hope someone throws your camera in a river,

(35:48):
so he's one. I have three daughters, age thirteen, ten
and six. I've always had my own business selling food,
and I paid what we would call extortion money, but
with the pandemic, I couldn't pay welly over three or
four months. They said that I didn't pay, they would
burn down my shop and me and my daughters would
be raped and killed. With what little I had left,
I left with my daughters. It's hard to get work here.

(36:11):
That's an immigrant. There are some jobs, but not the
sort that are for me. I have to try and
be an example to my kids. One day I was
juggling by the traffic lights and some guys tried to
pick me up. They said they knew where I lived
and they would hurt me and my daughters, who didn't
work for them. They made me work in a bar.
I escaped, but that's how I broke my hand. I
didn't want to go to the US, but I need

(36:32):
to leave this country now for the same reason I
left my own. Then I'll read one more. We came
from Mondoras to flee the violence. We have come to
this camp in the last few days, but it's scary here.
We don't feel safe. There are people coming or taking
photos of children of the women. Men off for the
women here money to go with them. They tried to

(36:52):
get them to sleep with them. There's a woman here
filming us as well. We found actually a big activist
for Donald Trump. This was in twenty twenty one. Some
people came to snatch a child here. Between the group,
we're working to make a security committee to protect the
children because there are people who would take the children here.
We aren't a caravan. We're just people from all over
the world who have come here for a better future.

(37:13):
We're asking Biden. We know it's complicated and he has
a lot to sort out, and we have patience. We
know he has to make compromises, but please think of
us here. We are in danger. Please give us a solution.
It's sucking, heartbreaking, Yeah, it is heartbreaking. Shit. I wish
there was like some kind of happy ending I can
put on this or I don't know there are great

(37:36):
things you can do with mutual a groups. There's a
group that I'm hoping to interview next week called Borderland's
Relief Collective in San Diego, who do kind of a
lot to help people crossing the border. There are groups
like Altro Lalo you can donate to. The public. Comment
is still available for the Biden to propose new restrictions,

(37:57):
so I guess you can come out on that if
you think that will help help. I guess this is
an area sometimes we're talking to politicians my help, because
they make the laws that that affects people's right to
kind of live with basic dignity. But yeah, I don't
have a great solution to this, especially like if people

(38:18):
aren't in a place where they know people here are
struggling to get by. I understand that not everyone can
afford to donate, of course. Yeah, but yeah, this is
pretty bleak. And just because it's not like being beamed
into your living rooms anymore because Orange Man bad doesn't
mean that it's still not impossibly cruel. Yeah, it's I mean,

(38:39):
just because another old guy took over, it doesn't mean
like the same things were already there. It's not like
they just poofed into thin air, like all the terrible
things that were already happening. That's what I don't understand
is like people just assume. I don't know what they assume.
I'm not going to ramble on like that, but it's
heartbreaking and you should donate if you can. Yeah, yeah, donate,

(39:01):
Do you stuff, shout at people and do whatever you
think we'll make a difference because it's pretty bad. It
could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

(39:23):
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.