May 25, 2022 • 27 mins
Robert and James head down to the Texas border to meet with the director of a butterfly sanctuary in the crosshairs of a far right culture war.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Unfortunately, some of these recordings haven't got the best sound quality.
We were walking around the Butterfly Center. We tried our
best to block the wind, but some of it's pretty
blown out, and we still wanted you to hear them,
so we've included them, but apologies that the sound quality
isn't what it could be.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
There was a time when you could have been forgiven
for believing that American fascism had been thoroughly beaten back, marginalized,
and damaged beyond the capacity for reconstitution. Only the very
foolish and dishonest believe that today. Every time the far
right has taken a serious beating in this country, they've
had a place to retreat, to a sanctuary, to reorganize, recoup,
and surge out again towards the halls of power. That
(00:45):
sanctuary is the US Mexico border. There's a song I
quite admire by the drive by Truckers named after our
young Mexican man, Ramon Casiano. In nineteen thirty one, after
the kind of stupid altercation young men have been having
since time in memorial, Ramon was murdered by another kid
named Harlan Carter. Harlan was convicted of murder and then
(01:06):
led off by another judge due to a procedural issue
with his case. It hardly needs to be said that
Harlan was white. He went on to join the Border
Patrol during a period when it was seen as a
model of good racial policy by the Nazi government in Germany.
Carter rose to lead the Border Patrol, helped to militarize it,
and then went on to run the NRA and turn
it from a simple gun advocacy organization to the far
(01:29):
right culture war institution. It became everything we're dealing with
today from the far right started at the border, and
to quote from that song, that's still where it is today.
But the border is more than just a battle ground
in America's endless culture war, and it is more than
just the system of violence men like Carter helped make
it into the United States's border with Mexico stretches from
(01:52):
the Atlantic to the Pacific, through the homelands of many
indigenous peoples, and across the migratory trails of numerous species,
and to many many people today, it's still just home.
Marianna Jones right, runs a butterfly sanctuary that has somewhat
improbably provoked the direct ire of a US president and
become the center of a series of conspiracy theories. She
(02:12):
also grew up along the border in the Rio Grande Valley.
In high school, she'd take trips to Discotheca's and bars
in Reinosa, just across the border from McAllen, Texas. Today,
she runs the National Butterfly Sanctuary just outside of the
nondescript town which seems to have less strip malls, big
box stores, and family run Mexican food joints. You can
go there and see wildflowers, walk in the woods, and
(02:34):
if you're lucky like we were, you might even find
a snake in some monarch butterflies making their way across
the continent without regard for borders or immigration checks.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
So you know, growing up here, we all let very
fluid lines. And I use that word to I mean
in the nineteen seventies during the mass crisis, you know,
when the order and we would literally drive to Mexico,
(03:03):
yes up for cars and then come back.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
We would be res for lunch and.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Cocktails and come back for class of class and come
back with football.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Names on the.
Speaker 6 (03:18):
Fronts sat points.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
We were all in Mexico, partying our hats, they had
the presiscos and clothes, and our parents were over there too,
having dinner.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
And I know people for citizens who live in Mexico
because it's more affordable, because they have reliable electricity.
Speaker 7 (03:41):
I mean, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Y'all are laughing, But the border for most people living there,
sometimes called is an inconvenience. You have to drive to
a certain crossing. Sometimes your truck gets checked, sometimes the
port of entries closed and you're late for work. But
in the public eye, actually during the after the twenty
sixteen presidential campaign, it looms like a scene from Lord
(04:05):
of the Rings, and since then it's also started to
look like one.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
So growing up here, I knew there was illegal immigration.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
It's impossible not to know. I mean nearly everyone knows
someone who came across. They here, visit family on a
short term, visited home, or they crossed the river somewhere.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
But you'll see here, our river is quiet and deep
and dangerous.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
It's deadly. When I was growing up here and I'm
fifty two, I.
Speaker 6 (04:55):
Have friends who lived in Mexico.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Their parents had homes and businesses here and there. Some
of them read rode the bus across the bridge every
day for school in the morning.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I mean it was nothing. We never thought of anyone's spies.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
You know, in terms of citizenship or.
Speaker 6 (05:19):
Mething else. And also.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Sort of liminals.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Where are up to lat Zoo?
Speaker 6 (05:31):
I have to those two passports.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
To navigate in both countries if we have citizens or
they have nothing, and there seems to be hardly any
in between.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
In mainstream media, the borders presented as dangerous, as are
the people crossing it. But it's hard to feel that
you're in danger when you're watching the sunset over the
Rio Grande and listening to the owls who begin their
work after dusk in the ever diminishing wild places along
the river's north bank.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
Up until a couple of months.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Ago, we were coming out here four or five times
a week, sometimes twice a day on our boat and
bringing a lot of journalists out.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
It almost never wound up in the reportage because they
never saw.
Speaker 7 (06:25):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
They were like, yes, take us out on the river.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
We want to see the illegals crossing were life.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
We're like, dude, the only way to do that is
to hook up with the.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
Campaign officials working with the world.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Some of the most beautiful and fragile landscapes in the
country along the southern border. Part of Marianna's work is
introducing kids to them. I've been lucky enough to spend
time in many of them. Camping in East County San Diego,
where the PCT begins, is one of my favorite things
to do. Riding my bike in southern Arizona is an adventure.
I take it every opportunity, and I'm not the only one.
(07:02):
From jaguars to butterflies, many species of wildlife live along
the border and pass over it on a daily basis.
The border might look serious on a map, but for
much of the last century, you'd have struggle to point
to it on the ground, nless you had a GPS
device and far too much free time on your hands.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
These kids that will be here this week as part
of their academic study, they thought the Rio Rand Valley
was a desert. They didn't know that you know that
we had eleven biologically distinct ecosystems in a four county
region that would fit inside San Diego County, California. That
(07:38):
you know that we have the river that's not a
trickle when everybody flushes their toilets, you know, like it
can be an ol Passo. I mean, they had no
idea that we're the edge of subtropical you know, America,
the Neotropics and America.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Since nine eleven, though, the border has become a physical thing,
a landscape thriving with life that's somehow found a way
to exist in places that can kill you with heat
in the day and cold the night, and sometimes both
in twenty four hours, has been torn apart to provide
people who have never been there with a chance to
grandstand about security, and various government contractors a chance to
(08:20):
line their pockets. Ted Cruz recently posed in a boat,
wearing body armor and standing next to a machine gun,
just feet away from where we watched recreational boaters sail
lazily along the river. As we walked from the center
(08:42):
down to the river, we spotted some trash on the
grill and went to pick it up. Turned out to
be a battery, the kind used in a tactical flashlight
or weapon light. Marianna doesn't use those, and it wasn't
there last time she walked down a trail. It's not
just the wall that's ruining this landscape, she says, it's
a constant presence of militarized border patrol. We see the
(09:03):
area as a conflict zone, not a conservation one.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
As I was saying, they're the ones who leave the trash,
never use for other stuff as well.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
But they're very commonly used on the kind of lights.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yeah, a little lily, there's so expensive.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Marianna knows this only too well. Her butterfly center backs
up to the Rio Grande. It's a beautiful, peaceful place,
but since twenty seventeen it has been under threat from
the relentless militarization of the Southern Border. The butterflies, she says,
are important for a number of reasons.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
So butterflies are critical pollinators to all of the green stuff,
most of which we don't eat. People know bees pollinate
about one third of our food, and so they care
about bees now because everyone would hate to lose one
third of our food. But butterflies pollinate all of the grasses,
(10:04):
wild flowers, shrubs, and trees on the planet. The ones
that reduce erosion by holding the ground in place against
wind and against rain and floods. The plants that reduce
(10:24):
the radiant heat that would come off of the earth
if we didn't have the green stuff. They filter the
water going into the water table, and they produce oxygen
for us. They filter our air. That's why butterflies matter,
and that's why everybody should care about them and do
what they can in their communities with their native plants
(10:48):
to provide habitat for butterflies.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
It's not just the butterflies who are in danger either.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
It's disgusting, but it is I hate to say entirely predictable, but.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
It's fairly predictable in an in stage capitalist society. We're
removing from military doesn't cooks to a border security one
where border walls and security are the United States how one.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
Exploit and had Most people don't even know about fourtech.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Way. I have been shot at my wopeck many times
and people don't realize here, what's the CBP drugs that
were flying overhead in Minneapolis matter.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
To understand exactly what is at stake, both for the
border and the butterflies, it's important to understand exactly what
the border wall looks like on the ground. The border
wall ecosystem is not just a wall. It's a towering
thirty foot steel structure topped with anti climb plates along
the barrier, which is often hundreds of yards from the
actual border. There's a road wide enough for two of
(12:06):
the expensive pickup trucks the CBP drives to pass each
other in remote areas. A road to allow construction vehicles
to get to the wall also had to be built
for landscapes that had been untouched for centuries. It's been catastrophic.
That's why the National Butterfly Sanctuary fought the border wall.
In the summer of twenty seventeen, they found contractors on
their land using heavy equipment to destroy the plants they
(12:28):
had worked so hard to protect.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
After we found the contractors here illegally clearing our land
with no right of entry, no eminent domain exercise, no
waiver of NIPA, and other laws we know, we filed
suit against the federal government. That brought some publicity and
(12:51):
with it a lot of people who said, you know
that we if we opposed border wall, we must be
for illegal immigration, as though the issue is that simple.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
The wall, in addition to being a colossal expense, much
of which is funneled to Zeckelmann Industries, a Canadian owned
steel company, which was fined nine hundred and seventy five
thousand dollars by the FEC for legal donations to the
Trump campaign in twenty twenty. Is pretty useless.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
That the border wall is built miles inside the United States,
that Border Patrol picks up ladders every day to share
photos of ramps built so vehicles could literally drive over
border wall like you know the old range rover commercials,
(13:42):
and also other breaches. We also got a chance to
explain to them that up until President Trump, the Border
Patrol Union itself had opposed border wall. They had called
it a waste of moneies, ineffective, and really irrelevant to
(14:07):
their mission of preventing illegal entry to the United States.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Walking along the border, we found half a dozen ladders
constructed from old wooden pallets. Alongside them were IDs, clothing,
and detritus that migrants had either abandoned on their journey
north or had thrown out for them by Border Patrol
agents who'd apprehended them. Either way, these discarded things told
a sad story of young people, sometimes parents and sometimes
children with siblings, crossing a river and then a wall
(14:34):
to try to get a chance at a better life.
What the border wall does do very effectively is funnel
people through the giant gaps in it, from Texas to California.
The Trump administration has rushed to build as much wall
as it could in order to live up to the
wildly exaggerated claims that Trump made in his twenty twenty
election debates.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
We now have as strong a border as we've ever had.
Were over four hundred miles of brand new wall.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Of that over four hundred miles, three hundred and fifty
odd were repairs to existing barriers or secure fences as
they are technically termed, But the rest was built in
places that were easiest to access. In southern California, mountains
and valleys are simply skipped. The wall stretches across the
flat lands in between. People are forced to cross in
these gaps and the hardest places, and as a result,
many more of them die. The Butterfly Center isn't one
(15:21):
of the hard places, but Marianna has found dozens of
identity documents, some of them in evidence bags labeled Department
of Homeland Security. She says that people aren't dumping them,
they are being stripped of their documents when they are detained.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
I know that the other side, as with videos of
Pear and plane at the end of.
Speaker 6 (15:41):
January, lad Lane and the clart health.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
The rance of their sears An Act.
Speaker 6 (15:55):
The migrants keep phons, pith hate the family to say
you have to send more money. You know, operated scar
the phone is the.
Speaker 8 (16:10):
Bank lifeline, but not only uh you know needs the
immigrant the cartel and that's the only way that you paid.
Speaker 9 (16:24):
And the fact that border patrol is making people undocumented
is something folks in the.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
United States don't understand.
Speaker 7 (16:38):
They don't see that we find herbage bags full of
medical records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, ideas and other things
from monuments that they have brought your your identities and
their illness or the violence that they they've suffered in
(17:00):
everything to make their asylum cases.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
But water patrol trashes all of that.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Throughout the four years of the Trump presidency, the Butterfly
Center fought to protect the ecosystem they had created and
to keep the pristine riverbank for barn owls, not border
patrol trucks. Marianna isn't alone. The South Texas Birding Preserve
was forced to back out of a deal with the
FEDS after a Coennity outcry at the thought of the
loss of one of the very few wild places in
the area. While they have so far been able to
(17:29):
stop the construction of portions of the border wall, they
have not been able to stop the multiple armed agencies
that police the border and often each other, from encroaching
on the center's land.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
County. In Texas, there are several overlapping missions to protect
the border. Under Operation loan Stock, Texas National Guard soldiers
are deployed to protect the border and prevent drug smuggling
and chasing, at least according to the Office of Governor
Greg Abbott. Sadly, they're not able to protect themselves from
each other. So far, four soldiers have died by suicide,
(18:12):
two in accidental shootings. Texaslow allows National Guard soldiers to
bring their own personal weapons, which were responsible for both deaths,
and one drowned trying to save migrants from the river.
Because the troops are deployed under state orders, not federal ones,
they receive fewer benefits and their families are not compensated
as well in the event that they die. In addition
(18:33):
to the ten thousand Texas troops, there are also four
thousand National Guard soldiers on federal orders along the Border.
Task Force Phoenix, as it's called, is a combination of
thirty four different Guard units stitch together with very little
cohesion or prior experience working together, and has been blighted
by low morale. Troops in disdeployment are three times more
(18:53):
likely to have a car accident than seize illegal drugs,
and a battalion deployed to McAllen had three soldiers die
the same number as the rest of the National Guard
combined that year. Duiues are so common the breathalyzers are
being issued to units. The crisis isn't at the border.
The crisis is the border. It's not only United States
(19:15):
soldiers dying along the southern border, it's also migrants. According
to the Missing Migrants Project, and state is admittedly better
viewed than it is heard, migrants coming from Central or
South America are far more likely to die at the
USA's southern border than they are at any other point
on the way there. One two hundred and forty eight
people died or went missing last year, making the trek
(19:37):
north five hundred and ninety five of them at the border.
Given that the border, both under Republicans and Democrats, is
a weapon that's increasingly effective at killing people and increasingly
present and political debate. It's surprising how many people have
never been there. The border, at least the bits of
it without the wall, doesn't feel violent. One night, while
(19:58):
we were in Texas, we sat the bank of the
Rio Grande and looked across the river as the sunset.
Behind us was a wall funded by private donations to
a group called We Build the Wall. It's built so
close to the river that the weight from the border
patrol boats will see it undermined and washed away in
less than five years. Across from us, little cabanas and
bars studied the shoreline. It looked to dilic or were
(20:22):
it not for the thousands of armed people who make
it their job to stop it, it would have been
quite nice to swim across for a drink. Swimming over
was out of the question, But the peaceful border we
encountered was not the one you'd recognize if you've seen
Fox News over the past four years. For much of
Middle America, the border is constructed as a lawless land
(20:43):
somehow also as a desert, despite the fact that twelve
hundred miles of it are marked that river and a
place where cartel violence goes unchecked. Human trafficking runs rampant.
The young children are snatched away from their families and
sold into sex slavery. Of course, young children are snatched
away from their family at the border, but that's your
taxpayer money at work, not the Zetas or Cartella Lisk
(21:05):
gone away with dinner Athion. Sadly, the Butterfly Center's opposition
to the wall combined with this political theater at the
border to place a group of people who just wanted
to be left alone, to be nice to butterflies, at
the center of a culture war it wanted nothing to
do with. At some point, the Trump White House became
aware that one hundred acres of Texas grathlands were holding
out against all the legal and questionably legal efforts a
(21:29):
Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration to destroy
the little haven along the real ground.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
We know that Jared Kushner said in May of twenty
nineteen in the Oval Office, we solved the butterfly thing.
And Steve Bannon had been the former former special adviser
to President Trump, and then he is the one who
started this syop. And they took aim at us, and
(22:01):
instead of us being against the wall and possibly for
open borders, they declared that we were a cartel front
and actively engaged in trafficking humans and drugs, that we
(22:21):
were not about conservation at all, but we were selling
women and children into sex slavery.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Marianna's Twitter bio at a time of writing reads do
no harm, take no shit in that approach she took
as the MAGA community began to sling an increasing amount
of shit at her. The North American Butterfly Association filed
suit against Brian Colfage slash we Build the Wall, Tommy
Fletcher slash Fisher Sand Gravel slash TRG Construction, A Lance
(22:54):
New House slash new House, and Sons. On December third,
twenty nineteen, calf Age, a US Air Force veteran, attempted
to crowdfund the war after Congress wouldn't fund it to
the ridiculous extent that Trump desired. He raised over twenty
five million. In August of twenty twenty, Colfage was indicted,
along with Steve Bannon two other co defendants, on federal
(23:16):
charges of defrauding one hundreds of thousandth of Rebuild the
War donors. Federal prosecutors said that despite repeatedly assuring donors
that Colfage would not be paid. The defendants engaged in
a scheme to divert three hundred and fifty thousand dollars
to Colfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle.
Colfage was separately indicted in May of twenty twenty one
(23:39):
on federal charges related to his falsification of tax returns.
In April of twenty twenty two, Calthage entered a guilty plea,
having accounted for about ten million in spending a little
under five miles of actual war. Colfage's attempts to build
the war in Texas were hampered by the National Butterfly
Center lawyers, who are argued that it was a flood
(24:01):
risk because it is, and by various tax issues at
colf Edge's team seemed entirely unaware of. While they hoped
to transfer the war they built, which they called the
Lamborghini of Walls, to federal ownership, CBP wanted nothing to
do with it, as they were building their own wall
outside of the floodplane. After ignoring a twenty nineteen ruling,
(24:22):
Colfage eventually built about three miles of wall in Texas
and then declared the project complete November of twenty nineteen,
with litigation on going, colf Age took to Twitter to
accuse the National Butterflies Center of having a rampant sex
trade taking place on your property and the death sick bodies.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
When we first saw Brian Colfage's tweets and the rebuild
the Wall videos using my image and talking about the
Butterfly Lady and everything and the Butterfly Center, at first,
you know, we we kind of reacted with humor, like
(25:07):
this is too funny, Like who in their right mind
would believe any of this? And you know, we even
tried addressing I mean, I didn't know who Brian colfag
was at the time, but you know, we replied like
you have a very very active imagination or you're a
really uh, you know, twisted person. And we use the
(25:31):
hashtag liar liar pants on fire because we really did
think it was ridiculous. But any notion that this was
not deadly serious was soon dismissed. And now I've become
(25:51):
this liked.
Speaker 4 (25:56):
Extremism.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
You know, we're in the politics as unfold others. Yeah,
I've had a lot of the journalists ask me what
does it feel like to be at the crossroads of
the culture wars in America, and I'm like, I'm not
at the crossroads of the culture war. I live in
the borderlands, which are the proving grounds for fascism in America.
(26:21):
That's where I live.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
And we're going to see it more and more. Everybody's
going to see it more and more. They test things
like the aerostat balloons here, and the fact that we
didn't cut them loose and shoot them down and set
them on fire.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
The fact that we were like, oh, that's kind of
a pretty innocuous, you know, white balloon in the sky.
We can live with it means that now it's gone
out from under DHS to DoD and it's being deployed
across the United States, coming soon to a community.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
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Unfortunately, some of these recordings haven't got the best sound quality.
We were walking around the Butterfly Center. We tried our
best to block the wind, but some of it's pretty
blown out, and we still wanted you to hear them,
so we've included them, but apologies that the sound quality
isn't what it could be.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
There was a time when you could have been forgiven
for believing that American fascism had been thoroughly beaten back, marginalized,
and damaged beyond the capacity for reconstitution. Only the very
foolish and dishonest believe that today. Every time the far
right has taken a serious beating in this country, they've
had a place to retreat, to a sanctuary, to reorganize, recoup,
and surge out again towards the halls of power. That
(00:45):
sanctuary is the US Mexico border. There's a song I
quite admire by the drive by Truckers named after our
young Mexican man, Ramon Casiano. In nineteen thirty one, after
the kind of stupid altercation young men have been having
since time in memorial, Ramon was murdered by another kid
named Harlan Carter. Harlan was convicted of murder and then
(01:06):
led off by another judge due to a procedural issue
with his case. It hardly needs to be said that
Harlan was white. He went on to join the Border
Patrol during a period when it was seen as a
model of good racial policy by the Nazi government in Germany.
Carter rose to lead the Border Patrol, helped to militarize it,
and then went on to run the NRA and turn
it from a simple gun advocacy organization to the far
(01:29):
right culture war institution. It became everything we're dealing with
today from the far right started at the border, and
to quote from that song, that's still where it is today.
But the border is more than just a battle ground
in America's endless culture war, and it is more than
just the system of violence men like Carter helped make
it into the United States's border with Mexico stretches from
(01:52):
the Atlantic to the Pacific, through the homelands of many
indigenous peoples, and across the migratory trails of numerous species,
and to many many people today, it's still just home.
Marianna Jones right, runs a butterfly sanctuary that has somewhat
improbably provoked the direct ire of a US president and
become the center of a series of conspiracy theories. She
(02:12):
also grew up along the border in the Rio Grande Valley.
In high school, she'd take trips to Discotheca's and bars
in Reinosa, just across the border from McAllen, Texas. Today,
she runs the National Butterfly Sanctuary just outside of the
nondescript town which seems to have less strip malls, big
box stores, and family run Mexican food joints. You can
go there and see wildflowers, walk in the woods, and
(02:34):
if you're lucky like we were, you might even find
a snake in some monarch butterflies making their way across
the continent without regard for borders or immigration checks.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
So you know, growing up here, we all let very
fluid lines. And I use that word to I mean
in the nineteen seventies during the mass crisis, you know,
when the order and we would literally drive to Mexico,
(03:03):
yes up for cars and then come back.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
We would be res for lunch and.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Cocktails and come back for class of class and come
back with football.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Names on the.
Speaker 6 (03:18):
Fronts sat points.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
We were all in Mexico, partying our hats, they had
the presiscos and clothes, and our parents were over there too,
having dinner.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
And I know people for citizens who live in Mexico
because it's more affordable, because they have reliable electricity.
Speaker 7 (03:41):
I mean, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Y'all are laughing, But the border for most people living there,
sometimes called is an inconvenience. You have to drive to
a certain crossing. Sometimes your truck gets checked, sometimes the
port of entries closed and you're late for work. But
in the public eye, actually during the after the twenty
sixteen presidential campaign, it looms like a scene from Lord
(04:05):
of the Rings, and since then it's also started to
look like one.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
So growing up here, I knew there was illegal immigration.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
It's impossible not to know. I mean nearly everyone knows
someone who came across. They here, visit family on a
short term, visited home, or they crossed the river somewhere.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
But you'll see here, our river is quiet and deep
and dangerous.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
It's deadly. When I was growing up here and I'm
fifty two, I.
Speaker 6 (04:55):
Have friends who lived in Mexico.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Their parents had homes and businesses here and there. Some
of them read rode the bus across the bridge every
day for school in the morning.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I mean it was nothing. We never thought of anyone's spies.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
You know, in terms of citizenship or.
Speaker 6 (05:19):
Mething else. And also.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Sort of liminals.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Where are up to lat Zoo?
Speaker 6 (05:31):
I have to those two passports.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
To navigate in both countries if we have citizens or
they have nothing, and there seems to be hardly any
in between.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
In mainstream media, the borders presented as dangerous, as are
the people crossing it. But it's hard to feel that
you're in danger when you're watching the sunset over the
Rio Grande and listening to the owls who begin their
work after dusk in the ever diminishing wild places along
the river's north bank.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
Up until a couple of months.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Ago, we were coming out here four or five times
a week, sometimes twice a day on our boat and
bringing a lot of journalists out.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
It almost never wound up in the reportage because they
never saw.
Speaker 7 (06:25):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
They were like, yes, take us out on the river.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
We want to see the illegals crossing were life.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
We're like, dude, the only way to do that is
to hook up with the.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
Campaign officials working with the world.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Some of the most beautiful and fragile landscapes in the
country along the southern border. Part of Marianna's work is
introducing kids to them. I've been lucky enough to spend
time in many of them. Camping in East County San Diego,
where the PCT begins, is one of my favorite things
to do. Riding my bike in southern Arizona is an adventure.
I take it every opportunity, and I'm not the only one.
(07:02):
From jaguars to butterflies, many species of wildlife live along
the border and pass over it on a daily basis.
The border might look serious on a map, but for
much of the last century, you'd have struggle to point
to it on the ground, nless you had a GPS
device and far too much free time on your hands.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
These kids that will be here this week as part
of their academic study, they thought the Rio Rand Valley
was a desert. They didn't know that you know that
we had eleven biologically distinct ecosystems in a four county
region that would fit inside San Diego County, California. That
(07:38):
you know that we have the river that's not a
trickle when everybody flushes their toilets, you know, like it
can be an ol Passo. I mean, they had no
idea that we're the edge of subtropical you know, America,
the Neotropics and America.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Since nine eleven, though, the border has become a physical thing,
a landscape thriving with life that's somehow found a way
to exist in places that can kill you with heat
in the day and cold the night, and sometimes both
in twenty four hours, has been torn apart to provide
people who have never been there with a chance to
grandstand about security, and various government contractors a chance to
(08:20):
line their pockets. Ted Cruz recently posed in a boat,
wearing body armor and standing next to a machine gun,
just feet away from where we watched recreational boaters sail
lazily along the river. As we walked from the center
(08:42):
down to the river, we spotted some trash on the
grill and went to pick it up. Turned out to
be a battery, the kind used in a tactical flashlight
or weapon light. Marianna doesn't use those, and it wasn't
there last time she walked down a trail. It's not
just the wall that's ruining this landscape, she says, it's
a constant presence of militarized border patrol. We see the
(09:03):
area as a conflict zone, not a conservation one.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
As I was saying, they're the ones who leave the trash,
never use for other stuff as well.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
But they're very commonly used on the kind of lights.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yeah, a little lily, there's so expensive.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Marianna knows this only too well. Her butterfly center backs
up to the Rio Grande. It's a beautiful, peaceful place,
but since twenty seventeen it has been under threat from
the relentless militarization of the Southern Border. The butterflies, she says,
are important for a number of reasons.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
So butterflies are critical pollinators to all of the green stuff,
most of which we don't eat. People know bees pollinate
about one third of our food, and so they care
about bees now because everyone would hate to lose one
third of our food. But butterflies pollinate all of the grasses,
(10:04):
wild flowers, shrubs, and trees on the planet. The ones
that reduce erosion by holding the ground in place against
wind and against rain and floods. The plants that reduce
(10:24):
the radiant heat that would come off of the earth
if we didn't have the green stuff. They filter the
water going into the water table, and they produce oxygen
for us. They filter our air. That's why butterflies matter,
and that's why everybody should care about them and do
what they can in their communities with their native plants
(10:48):
to provide habitat for butterflies.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
It's not just the butterflies who are in danger either.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
It's disgusting, but it is I hate to say entirely predictable, but.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
It's fairly predictable in an in stage capitalist society. We're
removing from military doesn't cooks to a border security one
where border walls and security are the United States how one.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
Exploit and had Most people don't even know about fourtech.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Way. I have been shot at my wopeck many times
and people don't realize here, what's the CBP drugs that
were flying overhead in Minneapolis matter.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
To understand exactly what is at stake, both for the
border and the butterflies, it's important to understand exactly what
the border wall looks like on the ground. The border
wall ecosystem is not just a wall. It's a towering
thirty foot steel structure topped with anti climb plates along
the barrier, which is often hundreds of yards from the
actual border. There's a road wide enough for two of
(12:06):
the expensive pickup trucks the CBP drives to pass each
other in remote areas. A road to allow construction vehicles
to get to the wall also had to be built
for landscapes that had been untouched for centuries. It's been catastrophic.
That's why the National Butterfly Sanctuary fought the border wall.
In the summer of twenty seventeen, they found contractors on
their land using heavy equipment to destroy the plants they
(12:28):
had worked so hard to protect.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
After we found the contractors here illegally clearing our land
with no right of entry, no eminent domain exercise, no
waiver of NIPA, and other laws we know, we filed
suit against the federal government. That brought some publicity and
(12:51):
with it a lot of people who said, you know
that we if we opposed border wall, we must be
for illegal immigration, as though the issue is that simple.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
The wall, in addition to being a colossal expense, much
of which is funneled to Zeckelmann Industries, a Canadian owned
steel company, which was fined nine hundred and seventy five
thousand dollars by the FEC for legal donations to the
Trump campaign in twenty twenty. Is pretty useless.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
That the border wall is built miles inside the United States,
that Border Patrol picks up ladders every day to share
photos of ramps built so vehicles could literally drive over
border wall like you know the old range rover commercials,
(13:42):
and also other breaches. We also got a chance to
explain to them that up until President Trump, the Border
Patrol Union itself had opposed border wall. They had called
it a waste of moneies, ineffective, and really irrelevant to
(14:07):
their mission of preventing illegal entry to the United States.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Walking along the border, we found half a dozen ladders
constructed from old wooden pallets. Alongside them were IDs, clothing,
and detritus that migrants had either abandoned on their journey
north or had thrown out for them by Border Patrol
agents who'd apprehended them. Either way, these discarded things told
a sad story of young people, sometimes parents and sometimes
children with siblings, crossing a river and then a wall
(14:34):
to try to get a chance at a better life.
What the border wall does do very effectively is funnel
people through the giant gaps in it, from Texas to California.
The Trump administration has rushed to build as much wall
as it could in order to live up to the
wildly exaggerated claims that Trump made in his twenty twenty
election debates.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
We now have as strong a border as we've ever had.
Were over four hundred miles of brand new wall.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Of that over four hundred miles, three hundred and fifty
odd were repairs to existing barriers or secure fences as
they are technically termed, But the rest was built in
places that were easiest to access. In southern California, mountains
and valleys are simply skipped. The wall stretches across the
flat lands in between. People are forced to cross in
these gaps and the hardest places, and as a result,
many more of them die. The Butterfly Center isn't one
(15:21):
of the hard places, but Marianna has found dozens of
identity documents, some of them in evidence bags labeled Department
of Homeland Security. She says that people aren't dumping them,
they are being stripped of their documents when they are detained.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
I know that the other side, as with videos of
Pear and plane at the end of.
Speaker 6 (15:41):
January, lad Lane and the clart health.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
The rance of their sears An Act.
Speaker 6 (15:55):
The migrants keep phons, pith hate the family to say
you have to send more money. You know, operated scar
the phone is the.
Speaker 8 (16:10):
Bank lifeline, but not only uh you know needs the
immigrant the cartel and that's the only way that you paid.
Speaker 9 (16:24):
And the fact that border patrol is making people undocumented
is something folks in the.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
United States don't understand.
Speaker 7 (16:38):
They don't see that we find herbage bags full of
medical records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, ideas and other things
from monuments that they have brought your your identities and
their illness or the violence that they they've suffered in
(17:00):
everything to make their asylum cases.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
But water patrol trashes all of that.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Throughout the four years of the Trump presidency, the Butterfly
Center fought to protect the ecosystem they had created and
to keep the pristine riverbank for barn owls, not border
patrol trucks. Marianna isn't alone. The South Texas Birding Preserve
was forced to back out of a deal with the
FEDS after a Coennity outcry at the thought of the
loss of one of the very few wild places in
the area. While they have so far been able to
(17:29):
stop the construction of portions of the border wall, they
have not been able to stop the multiple armed agencies
that police the border and often each other, from encroaching
on the center's land.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
County. In Texas, there are several overlapping missions to protect
the border. Under Operation loan Stock, Texas National Guard soldiers
are deployed to protect the border and prevent drug smuggling
and chasing, at least according to the Office of Governor
Greg Abbott. Sadly, they're not able to protect themselves from
each other. So far, four soldiers have died by suicide,
(18:12):
two in accidental shootings. Texaslow allows National Guard soldiers to
bring their own personal weapons, which were responsible for both deaths,
and one drowned trying to save migrants from the river.
Because the troops are deployed under state orders, not federal ones,
they receive fewer benefits and their families are not compensated
as well in the event that they die. In addition
(18:33):
to the ten thousand Texas troops, there are also four
thousand National Guard soldiers on federal orders along the Border.
Task Force Phoenix, as it's called, is a combination of
thirty four different Guard units stitch together with very little
cohesion or prior experience working together, and has been blighted
by low morale. Troops in disdeployment are three times more
(18:53):
likely to have a car accident than seize illegal drugs,
and a battalion deployed to McAllen had three soldiers die
the same number as the rest of the National Guard
combined that year. Duiues are so common the breathalyzers are
being issued to units. The crisis isn't at the border.
The crisis is the border. It's not only United States
(19:15):
soldiers dying along the southern border, it's also migrants. According
to the Missing Migrants Project, and state is admittedly better
viewed than it is heard, migrants coming from Central or
South America are far more likely to die at the
USA's southern border than they are at any other point
on the way there. One two hundred and forty eight
people died or went missing last year, making the trek
(19:37):
north five hundred and ninety five of them at the border.
Given that the border, both under Republicans and Democrats, is
a weapon that's increasingly effective at killing people and increasingly
present and political debate. It's surprising how many people have
never been there. The border, at least the bits of
it without the wall, doesn't feel violent. One night, while
(19:58):
we were in Texas, we sat the bank of the
Rio Grande and looked across the river as the sunset.
Behind us was a wall funded by private donations to
a group called We Build the Wall. It's built so
close to the river that the weight from the border
patrol boats will see it undermined and washed away in
less than five years. Across from us, little cabanas and
bars studied the shoreline. It looked to dilic or were
(20:22):
it not for the thousands of armed people who make
it their job to stop it, it would have been
quite nice to swim across for a drink. Swimming over
was out of the question, But the peaceful border we
encountered was not the one you'd recognize if you've seen
Fox News over the past four years. For much of
Middle America, the border is constructed as a lawless land
(20:43):
somehow also as a desert, despite the fact that twelve
hundred miles of it are marked that river and a
place where cartel violence goes unchecked. Human trafficking runs rampant.
The young children are snatched away from their families and
sold into sex slavery. Of course, young children are snatched
away from their family at the border, but that's your
taxpayer money at work, not the Zetas or Cartella Lisk
(21:05):
gone away with dinner Athion. Sadly, the Butterfly Center's opposition
to the wall combined with this political theater at the
border to place a group of people who just wanted
to be left alone, to be nice to butterflies, at
the center of a culture war it wanted nothing to
do with. At some point, the Trump White House became
aware that one hundred acres of Texas grathlands were holding
out against all the legal and questionably legal efforts a
(21:29):
Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration to destroy
the little haven along the real ground.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
We know that Jared Kushner said in May of twenty
nineteen in the Oval Office, we solved the butterfly thing.
And Steve Bannon had been the former former special adviser
to President Trump, and then he is the one who
started this syop. And they took aim at us, and
(22:01):
instead of us being against the wall and possibly for
open borders, they declared that we were a cartel front
and actively engaged in trafficking humans and drugs, that we
(22:21):
were not about conservation at all, but we were selling
women and children into sex slavery.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Marianna's Twitter bio at a time of writing reads do
no harm, take no shit in that approach she took
as the MAGA community began to sling an increasing amount
of shit at her. The North American Butterfly Association filed
suit against Brian Colfage slash we Build the Wall, Tommy
Fletcher slash Fisher Sand Gravel slash TRG Construction, A Lance
(22:54):
New House slash new House, and Sons. On December third,
twenty nineteen, calf Age, a US Air Force veteran, attempted
to crowdfund the war after Congress wouldn't fund it to
the ridiculous extent that Trump desired. He raised over twenty
five million. In August of twenty twenty, Colfage was indicted,
along with Steve Bannon two other co defendants, on federal
(23:16):
charges of defrauding one hundreds of thousandth of Rebuild the
War donors. Federal prosecutors said that despite repeatedly assuring donors
that Colfage would not be paid. The defendants engaged in
a scheme to divert three hundred and fifty thousand dollars
to Colfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle.
Colfage was separately indicted in May of twenty twenty one
(23:39):
on federal charges related to his falsification of tax returns.
In April of twenty twenty two, Calthage entered a guilty plea,
having accounted for about ten million in spending a little
under five miles of actual war. Colfage's attempts to build
the war in Texas were hampered by the National Butterfly
Center lawyers, who are argued that it was a flood
(24:01):
risk because it is, and by various tax issues at
colf Edge's team seemed entirely unaware of. While they hoped
to transfer the war they built, which they called the
Lamborghini of Walls, to federal ownership, CBP wanted nothing to
do with it, as they were building their own wall
outside of the floodplane. After ignoring a twenty nineteen ruling,
(24:22):
Colfage eventually built about three miles of wall in Texas
and then declared the project complete November of twenty nineteen,
with litigation on going, colf Age took to Twitter to
accuse the National Butterflies Center of having a rampant sex
trade taking place on your property and the death sick bodies.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
When we first saw Brian Colfage's tweets and the rebuild
the Wall videos using my image and talking about the
Butterfly Lady and everything and the Butterfly Center, at first,
you know, we we kind of reacted with humor, like
(25:07):
this is too funny, Like who in their right mind
would believe any of this? And you know, we even
tried addressing I mean, I didn't know who Brian colfag
was at the time, but you know, we replied like
you have a very very active imagination or you're a
really uh, you know, twisted person. And we use the
(25:31):
hashtag liar liar pants on fire because we really did
think it was ridiculous. But any notion that this was
not deadly serious was soon dismissed. And now I've become
(25:51):
this liked.
Speaker 4 (25:56):
Extremism.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
You know, we're in the politics as unfold others. Yeah,
I've had a lot of the journalists ask me what
does it feel like to be at the crossroads of
the culture wars in America, and I'm like, I'm not
at the crossroads of the culture war. I live in
the borderlands, which are the proving grounds for fascism in America.
(26:21):
That's where I live.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
And we're going to see it more and more. Everybody's
going to see it more and more. They test things
like the aerostat balloons here, and the fact that we
didn't cut them loose and shoot them down and set
them on fire.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
The fact that we were like, oh, that's kind of
a pretty innocuous, you know, white balloon in the sky.
We can live with it means that now it's gone
out from under DHS to DoD and it's being deployed
across the United States, coming soon to a community.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening,
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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