It Could Happen Here Weekly 204

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode, So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hello, this is Mia from the Future. The whole crew
is off this week, so you'll be getting a series
of episodes from our past, and this episode in particular,
I wanted to rerun for Indigenous People's Day, but it
is also from before I came out, So hope you
all enjoy and we will be back next week.

Speaker 4 (00:51):
Welcome to Ick It Up and Here, a podcast that
is on the cycle of being sort of okayly introduced.
When this episode out, it will be Indigenous People's Day
and so to talk about that more. Where we're going
to talk to Dalia Killsback, who is a member of
the Northern Cheyenne or has a Northern Cheyen tribal citizenship

(01:12):
and has studied and worked in federal India Tribal Policy Dahlia. Hello,
how are you doing?

Speaker 5 (01:18):
I'm doing one all. Thank you for inviting me here today.

Speaker 4 (01:21):
Of course Garrison is also here. Garrison Hello, Hello.

Speaker 6 (01:26):
I'm currently also doing writing about indigenous stuff, but within
the context of Canada, which people should. We'll probably here
later this week.

Speaker 4 (01:36):
So yeah, I guess first thing I wanted to talk
about is a little bit is about what Indigenous People's
Day is and why it is that and not the
other thing.

Speaker 5 (01:48):
Yeah. So, Indigenous People's Day, as many people know, is
replacing I'm going to say it, Chris chrispher Columbus to
day that is still like a federal holiday, but multiple
cities and states have opted to use Indigenous People's Day instead.
And the reasoning for that is achnology. The atrocities that

(02:12):
were committed by Christopher Columbus, who first of all, did
not discover America, but continue to not only use slavery,
but commit different forms of genocide, rape, et cetera, all
of these terrible atrocities. And so rather than celebrating somebody

(02:35):
like that, Indigenous People's Day has been implemented in order
to recognize the people who are actually here first and
Indigenous peoples across the America's their histories, cultures, and contributions.

Speaker 4 (02:56):
Yeah, Columbus, real piece of shit, worst Christopher, Like, yeah,
it really cannot be overstated how bad that guy was.
Even you know, even people in that era who had
committed their own genocides like Isabelle and Ferdinand, who you know,
expelled the Jews from Spain, where it's like, you know,
if once you've reached the sentence expelled the Jews from X,

(03:18):
like you're already in the shit list of the worst
people in human history.

Speaker 7 (03:22):
And even they saw.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
What Columbus was doing, it was like what on earth?
Bad bad guy, bad name. Things are going to continue
to go badly. And yeah, that was a'n everthing that
I wanted to talk about, which is federal Indian policy.
And you know, this is an incredibly broad it's an

(03:44):
incredibly broad area spanning like three hundred years, So we're
not gonna be able to go into like an enormous
amount of depth in it, but I think it's important
that people have an understanding of, i mean, a just
what the US did and how everyone else has had
this sort of deal with it, and then also the

(04:05):
fact that this is something that changes over time and
has has looked different. It's it's been bad in different ways.

Speaker 5 (04:12):
Yeah, and so in talking about federal Indian policy, uh
I always like to contextualize it within a larger sort
of like euro American like teleology of colonial conquests and
then moving on to settler colonialism and where we are
with federal Indian policy currently. So how do we connect

(04:37):
Christopher Columbus to where we are currently? And this is
the history of federal Indian policy and Western legal discourse
and how European powers throughout history have defined what it
means to be an Indian person and relationship to indigenous

(05:01):
people's rights to their own land and to self governance.
So when we're looking at the different periods of federal
Indian policy prior to their being a United States government,
we have the colonial period, which is fourteen ninety two
to seventeen seventy six. This is how federal Indian policy

(05:24):
legal scholars divide that, and it's really important to kind
of give the difference between what is a colonial state
versus a settler colonial state when you're talking about not
just the United States government, but also the Canadian government
and different governments globally. But I want to talk just

(05:47):
a little bit about what I mean by the difference
between a colonial government and a settler colonial government, because
they're tied together. So by a sutler colonial government, I
mean what I mean is that it is defined by
the de territorialization of indigenous population populations. And so rather

(06:11):
than in a colonial government as you had with Christopher
Columbus and the Spanish and with the English, et cetera,
is rather than a state and sovereignty being conceived as
all these resources are going back to the metropoal, all
these resources are going back to England or to Spain,

(06:31):
et cetera. And colonial occupation is in is conceptualized within
this way in set the colonial governments. The colonists come
to these lands and stay and they're what they define
as sovereignty is within this land that they define now
as their own. So and in order for that process

(06:54):
to happen, there needs to be different forms of genocide
of the indigenous populations. And so that's what we saw
with Christopher Columbus and throughout history was just the depletion
of a lot of our indigenous populace. And so when
I mean about the United States being a setlar colonial state.

(07:18):
I mean that this is current and ongoing, and so
when we talk about federal Indian policy, federal Indian policy
is always in this conversation with what started with Christopher
Columbus as the doctrine of discovery. And so that's how
we define the colonial period. And feel free to like

(07:40):
stop me and ask me questions. Also, I'm just going
to try to move quickly because there's a lot.

Speaker 4 (07:46):
Yeah, I think we probably should briefly talk about what
the doctory discovery is, at least before we get through
the Marshall trilogy and stuff, for sure. So what does
that actually mean legally?

Speaker 5 (07:58):
So the it's the discovery of a quote unquote newfound
Land by European colonial forces. And the reason why it's
called the doctrine of discovery was that indigenous peoples on
these lands were deemed unable to govern themselves and they

(08:19):
did not know how to utilize their land up to
the definition of what the European powers thought land use.
Was that indigenous peoples didn't have the same concept of property,
and same with their relationship with resources and resource extraction.

(08:44):
So when Christopher Columbus and all of these other colonizers
conkystic doors came to the quote unquote New Land. They
saw all of this rich, plentiful resource and thought to themselves, well,
obviously these people don't know what they're doing because there's
just so much they have not done anything with it,

(09:07):
and we're going to take this back to to ours
because obviously their inferior beings and don't know what property is.
So legally, the adoption of discovery conveyed legal title to
an ownership of American soil to European nations, a title

(09:28):
that devolved to the United States, and so this definition
is expansive and expansive discovery implies that Native nations have
a right to lands as occupants or possessors, but they
are incompetent to manage those lands and need a quote
unquote benevolent guardian such as a federal government who holds

(09:51):
legal title. And so when we're talking about this legal title,
it to the United States later on in history after
the American Revolution, and so rather than being colonial states
as the United States like thirteen original colonies, given the

(10:15):
American Revolution and its own constitution and its creation of
itself as a nation state, then that turns into a
settler colonial government.

Speaker 4 (10:29):
Yeah, and I think we can, Yeah, we can get
to what happens next then, because yeah, yeah, you have
this elaborate lab or framework that lets you steal people's
land and murder them and then control it. And then
the outgrowth of that is this sort of weird event
where the colonies go into rebellion and suddenly, yeah, there's
not a colony. They're not colonies anymore. They just are

(10:51):
the state. And so yeah, what happens next after the
sort of formation of the United States.

Speaker 5 (10:58):
So after the formation of the United States, so we
have this period the American Revolution that's all not really
dive that into. It is seventeen seventy six to seventeen
eighty nine, and it's called the Confederation period. But next
we have the Trade and Intercourse Act era, which is
from seventeen eighty nine to eighteen thirty five. And so

(11:21):
this is defined with the United States Constitution and Congress's
exclusive right to regulate trade relations and make leans since
land secessions, and enter into treaties with tribes. So this
is a treaty making era with the tribes that only
the United States federal government is able to and there's

(11:42):
a distinction there because there had been a lot of
contestation between states and the federal government as to who
is going to now deal with these these nations that
are within our own settler colonial borders. Whose job is
that to solve this issue? So within the United States Constitution,

(12:08):
there are three clauses that define the United States' legal
relationship to American Indians, and so these are the treaty
making clause, the commerce clause, and the property clause. And
so this movement from just relying on the doctrine of
discovery and treaty making processes between different European powers now

(12:31):
is between the United States federal government and tribes. And
so what this does is now tribes are located within
the United States territory, and this places Indians within the
boundaries and jurisdiction of the United States, and now they're
a matter of domestic interest.

Speaker 3 (12:50):
Something at least.

Speaker 4 (12:50):
It's one of the sort of complicated questions that changes
through this whole era, which is about what does sovereignty
mean for these tribes and to what extent they even
continue to possess it, and how does that even sort
of you know, how does that work if when you
have this new state that sort of just has his

(13:10):
clean control.

Speaker 5 (13:11):
Here, right, and also during this period, well, well later
on when we have sorry jumping ahead of myself, when
we have the extermination of the treaty making process, and
this completely removes seeing tribes as independent sovereign nations. So

(13:34):
I think that we'll kind of get more into that later.
But the thing with federal Indian policy is that it's
sort of self prophesizing. So as settlers are moving across America,
the United States government also has to create these policies

(13:55):
in order to legalize these land cessations and movements. And
pattern that we do see here throughout history and throughout
time is that the United States federal government, as a
settler state, is over the rights of over the rights
to land and rights of indigenous peoples themselves. You have

(14:18):
a priority of the settler state in order to acquire land.
So a lot of the reason why later these treaties
will be broken, et cetera, is because settlers are moving
into these lands and the United States is then breaking
these treaties in order to have more more land, more

(14:41):
land successions.

Speaker 8 (14:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (14:43):
Yeah, the law, the law sort of just following the
violence and it just becomes a sort of retroactive justification
for yes, just.

Speaker 5 (14:51):
It's it's a self justifying sort of sovereignty. So this
is the Removal period, and what a lot of people
may have heard of. So it's from eighteen thirty five
to eighteen sixty one, and what we have is the

(15:14):
extinguishment of Indian title to eastern lands and the removal
of Indian tribes westward. So one of the most notable
acts is the Removal Act, which was authorized by President
Andrew Jackson, which moved Indians from the east to the
west of the Mississippi River into what is was called

(15:35):
Indian Territory. And what brought about this federal Act was
a series of three foundational statutes within federal Indian policy,
dictated by Chief Justice John Marshall. So first we have
Johnson B. McIntosh, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia.

(15:57):
And I won't go into two to detail, but what
this these essentially did and legally defined tribes as being
domestic dependent nations. And so it clarified more that again
tribal nations are underneath the federal government's overview, not the states.

(16:19):
So yeah, it placed tribes above state jurisdiction, and what
this was trying to do was solve some issues that
tribes such as the Cherokee Nation had with different states
when it came to land and jurisdiction over said land.
But that is kind of the basis of a lot

(16:42):
of federal Indian policy and still remained truth day. And
what is notable in each one of these statutes, I believe,
particularly in Worcester the Georgia, although it seems that it
was supporting tribal sovereignty in them and that they were
above state jurisdiction, a lot of these statute cited racist

(17:08):
president and the doctrine of Discovery. So what you see
for federal Indian policy is that a lot of the founder,
well all the foundation for a federal Indian policy based
on President is the Doctrine of Discovery, which is reliant
on the idea that American Indians were savages and needed
federal benevolence and paternalism in order to regulate their own affairs.

Speaker 4 (17:37):
Yeah, and I think that's well, okay, we should probably
not just immediately get to allotment, but yeah, because there's
there's there's also yeah, this is also the period used. Yeah,
the thing you were talking about earlier, the thing you
helped me know about, which is, Okay, it's not true
to say this is when this starts, but this is
Indian Removal Act, Trail of Tears territory. And yeah, one

(17:58):
thing that you know, I think one of the sort
of running themes of this is that, you know, the
the law in this context is just sort of it
becomes a sort of retroactive excuse to do whatever needs
to be done from the perspective quote unquote of the
sort of of the settler state to just take all
of this land.

Speaker 5 (18:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (18:17):
And I think maybe like one of the keystones of
this is Andrew Jackson just straight up telling the Supreme
Court to fuck off so that he can do so
he can do a trail of tears.

Speaker 5 (18:30):
Yeah. So the Removal Act happened after all of these
statutes that you already had that supported federal Indian sovereignty.
And so the Cherokees in Georgia were one of the
tribes that were removed. And so you kind of see

(18:52):
what you talked about, the the retrograde kind of justifications
for said removal despite the statutes that are there. So
although that like Marshall in Worchester feed Georgia determined that
the State of Georgia did not have jurisdiction over Cherokee
Territory all this although this territory was in the state's borders.

(19:17):
Later on, you see with the Removal Act that although
these statutes are still president in federal Undian policy, those
were null in order for there to be more expansion
of settlers within these areas. So when it was decided that, oh, wait,

(19:38):
we do need this land and we don't actually want
these Indians here, let's put them to the side overpast
the Mississippi so that they're out of sight, out of mind, right,
So we see more of this justification for settler expansion.
And so again we bring back to these themes of
like settler colonialism in order to and kind of gain

(20:01):
more of this land.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
And a lot.

Speaker 5 (20:04):
Of these statutes are still cited the doctrine of discovery
in them, and rather than supporting tribal policy, the relationship
between the United States federal government and American Indians was
not based on the rights of Indians, but more that
they can't they can't govern themselves, right and so so,

(20:26):
and that's the whole issue is, like people were like
they don't know what they're doing, so we're gonna push
them and like take their land again. So I don't
know if you want me to go too much into
the trail of tears, but you're seeing a lot of
patterns here, I think, different forms of genocide, different forms
of taking the land.

Speaker 6 (20:47):
This was this is all around the same time as
the Indian Action Canada as well, which was a very
similar thing, especially starting in the nineteen hundred's, starting in
the twentieth century as well with thee like expansion of
the like assimilation programs.

Speaker 4 (21:04):
Yeah, and I think I guess one other thing I
want to point out about this is that, you know,
so one of the things that happens trails here is
that the Supreme Court like tells Jackson that he can't
do this, and Jackson just does it anyways. And I
think that's a very interesting important moment because you know,
this is this is this thing right where the federal

(21:24):
government can tell the Supreme Court to fuck off, right,
and there's nothing that the Streme Court could do about it.
And if you look at what they did it to do,
the thing they did it to do was genocide, and
it's I think it's it's just I think this is
very sort of I don't know, this incredibly grim, like
you know, encapsulation of like what this state actually is,

(21:45):
which is this sort of genocide machine and whatever sort
of you know, this is what sovereignty is, right, the
ability to break your own rules to sort of art
to maintain the system. So you you know, you break
your own laws and you know, as we're going to
get to in a second, like you break your own
treaties continuously, and you do this because you know, the
gene slide machine has to keep moving, right.

Speaker 5 (22:03):
And there's a couple of federal Indian policy theorists Bendelari
Junior who's one of the most famous ones, and David
Wilkins who talks about how there is no need for
checks and balances within the federal Indian policy system. So
you have Congress that is able to pass whatever act

(22:25):
they want, and then you also have the Supreme Court,
and then you also have executive action. But it wasn't
really delineated that well within especially when it comes to
this period as to who is going to be dealing
with the Indians kind of thing, and so this kind

(22:46):
of confusion and not really completely defining what it means
to be a domestic dependent nation. I think really just
goes to show how much of a fragile edifice like
settler colonial policy is for it is within the system.
But again moving on, it comes back again to land.

(23:09):
So the reservation area era in eighteen sixty one to
eighteen eighty sevens you have a lot of westward expansion
of non Indians settlers, specifically to California. You also have
the creation of Indian reservations and resulting Indian wars. So

(23:33):
during this era, what you see a lot of are
different types of the times that assimulation and a lot
of warfare. So you have a lot of the planes
tribes my tribe for instance, that are going through all
of these battles fighting forced removal onto reservations. One of

(23:55):
the most famous ones was the Battle of Greece Grass.
There was a little Big Horn where General Custer was
killed by Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapahos, and different instances of
battles such as those, and also where a lot of
tribes were forcibly removed to era areas that they were

(24:19):
weren't originally from, so like how the rapes were moved
to Oklahoma. There was attempts of my tribe, for instance,
Northern Cheyenne, to be moved down to Oklahoma as well,
and that's why there's some Southern Cheyennes in Oklahoma and
then my tribe, the Northern Chan's in Montana. Another another

(24:41):
thing that is happening during this period are boarding schools,
the boarding school era. So this attempt at assimilation through
education and assimilation is also within within the settler colonial
kind of structure. It's it's defined the process where indigenous
people end up conforming to different constructed notions of setular norms.

(25:10):
So if they're not absorbed within the state completely, then
their attempted attempt to be assimilated culturally through education, through languages,
in terms of economics. So now you have a bunch
of different sort of bureaucratic structures on these reservations trying
to make tribal governments appear to be or constructed as

(25:39):
as setular colonial governments are. So maybe it's the three
branches in ways that aren't just compatible with different tribes culturally,
and you also have the attempted eradication of different kind
of spiritual and cultural practices and a lot of Christianity

(26:04):
being forced on to different people and just kind of
terrible things that I think more and more people are
becoming aware of due to current movements. But we'll get
into that moment later.

Speaker 4 (26:26):
Do we want to talk about a lot of pass
if in the same.

Speaker 5 (26:31):
Period, Yes, a lotment period and force a similation. So
this is like eighteen seventy one to nineteen thirty four,
and so this is the end of the treaty making process.
So the whole idea of trying to force tribes onto
reservations and sign these treaties were to again take land

(26:53):
and make sure that the United States has more land
and all the land, et cetera that they possibly have.
So at this end of treaty making and federal allotment
of Indian lands also happened in the the DAWs Act.

(27:14):
And so what this was was an attempt to further
shrink the reservation lands that tribes were already guaranteed within treaties.
So during this period, I think that somewhere like nine
million acres were taken from tribal reservations during the allotment process.

(27:39):
So what the allotment process did was it counted each
in every individual Indian that was eligible. I think there
were adults. Yeah, adults that were eligible, and each one
of them were given a certain parcel of land a
certain number eight bridge. And once all of this land

(28:04):
was calculated, what you had was an excess of land
quote unquote excess of land that the tribes obviously didn't
need because they had still to too many people. And
so what the excess of land was utilized for us,
for pioneers and for settlers if it didn't go to

(28:26):
the federal government, it was to incentivize settlers to colonize
the secil on Indian lands, so trying its hardest to
not stay true to its treemaking practices.

Speaker 4 (28:45):
I think the every thing that was interesting to me
about this is that like because one of the other
goals of this is to sort of like, oh is
the civilizing missions, Like yeah, we're going to turn them
into We're gona tell these people into like like yeoman farmers,
like true American fintiersmen or whatever. And it's just like
it just doesn't work because economically it doesn't make any sense,
Like breaking up all these like lens is like it

(29:06):
doesn't you can't just give someone like a small patch
of like shitty land and have them farm like this
doesn't like this, it doesn't it doesn't.

Speaker 5 (29:13):
It's like they.

Speaker 6 (29:15):
Certainly tried and then yeah, yeah, yeah, like that was
one of the main thing, one of the main things
in Canada was about getting them to adopt like, uh,
like European farming practices, which which they they they already
knew how to like get their own food, right, they
were trying to change this whole system of of of
like of food growth to to this like to this

(29:38):
European way of farming, and it just and they were
just forcing them to and there's yeah, it's it's yes,
it gets, it gets, it gets super, it gets super
like dark and horrible. Once you like look at like
the letters that were being written by like the heads
of these programs, like you know, instructing like these agents
were stationed at these like reservations to like force people

(30:00):
to be doing this horrible farming for like all day
every day.

Speaker 4 (30:06):
And I think, you know the sign that this was
like like this is this is so bad that even
the US government eventually is like wait this like this
is fucked up and doesn't work. So I think that's yeah,
your transition to sort of like the next phase, I guess.

Speaker 5 (30:26):
Yeah, a very short phase.

Speaker 9 (30:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (30:29):
So the next phase is the Indian Reorganization Act. And
so this something lasted six years from nineteen thirty four
to nineteen forty. So this is when allotment ended. As
you said, the United States government was like, wait, this
isn't working. What else can we do? The Indians aren't
dying off, they're not assimilating, they're not a culturating. We

(30:50):
don't know what to do with them. So maybe we'll
We'll have them adopt these constitutions and a lot of
them just templates. So regardless of whether or not they
were I think compatible with tribal different tribes way of life,

(31:12):
they were like, you have these constitutions. Now now you're
you're a tribe, and this is what each tribe has
to look like in order for us, the federal government
to recognize you as a legitimate entity. And then so
you have the establishment of these tribal governments that consist
of tribal councils and big business committees, et cetera. However,

(31:36):
this period is fleeting, very fleeting, and next you have
the termination era. So this is the period of time
where the federal government essentially even more so, wants to
just get rid of the quote unquote Indian problem, which
is the existence of indigenous peoples that are reminders to

(32:00):
the government essentially that they are a setlar colonial force
and they don't know what to do with us because
they tried to commit genocide, they tried to remove us,
et cetera, et cetera. It's still not working. They decided
that our Chibel governments are aren't legitimate, and they just decide, well,

(32:21):
it's too much to try to keep up with our
treaties and what we promised them when it comes to
health care, education, housing, et cetera, et cetera. How about
we terminate our federal responsibility, our trust responsibility that are
delineated in federal Unian policy and in our treaties and

(32:42):
give them off to this to the states to decide
what to do with. And so during this period you
see sort of the federal dissolution of some tribes such
as the monogamy and other ones as well. So this

(33:03):
is another dark time there. The dark times just keep
on coming. And but Federalumbian policy scholars have characterized federal
run new policy as a pendulum. So swing swinging from
side to side between this termin this termination of tribes,
So the federal Indian government as trying to get rid

(33:26):
of tribes, especially as you can see in this era,
and then the pendulum of the other side of self determination.
But both of these are held within the context of
goals of assimilation. So this is just another phase of terribleness.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (33:43):
Well, I think this this phase also like one thing
I think that also like is important people understand is
it like like it's not like people aren't fighting this
like the whole time. I mean even going like even
going back to the stuff the Seventh Cavalry, like the
stuff of cavalry loose was like bors Dayli's bells all
the time. People are fighting constantly, and this is this period.

(34:06):
The termination period is also where you see the rise
of the American Indian movements.

Speaker 5 (34:12):
Yeah, a lot of these periods can be like dove
into more and all of these different things. In every instance,
in every instance of federal Indian policy, you have resistance,
which we're not covering here right now, but you have
instances throughout history where Indigenous peoples have fought for their

(34:32):
rights to land, for their community, to being sovereign nations,
et cetera. And that's why the federal Indian the federal government,
not federal Indian government, the federal government has not been
able to eradicate us, much to their dismay. Yeah, and

(34:52):
so now I'm going to switch into the era that
we are considered to be in, which I had mentioned
when I talked about the pendulum of federal Indian policy.
So now we are in the self determination era, which
began in nineteen sixty two, and we have the right
it's characterized with the revitalization of tribal entities. So going

(35:17):
kind of back to when there was the Indian Reorganization Act,
that we have our tribal councils. There's restoration of some
tribes under federal recognition who were terminated, again not all
of them. We also have the Indian Civil Rights Act,
so this kind of guaranteed individual Indians some rights, not

(35:43):
just characterized by their tribes. Also the self determination policy,
so this is when Nixon condemned the termination policy and
gave more control to Indians rather than the Bureau of
Indian ferris which just a federal bureau and just kind
of like other policies that have given the tribes more

(36:06):
rights to determine for themselves and their own trust, their
own people to a certain degree, underneath the federal government
as semess of dependent nations. And again I think that
we have seen a lot more movement, but within the
context of being within a settler colonial state, it's always

(36:31):
I think a possibility that the federal unding government, or
the federal government I keep saying Indian, the federal government
will try to take more and more. And I think,
for instance, when it comes to issues of fishing rights,

(36:51):
issues of hunting rights with states, not even just with
the federal government. So you have a lot of states
throughout throughout history but still ongoing that attempt to encroach
on tribal treaties. And again, treaties are the basis of
federal Indian policy. Without these treaties, the lands would have

(37:16):
never been seceeded to the United States. And so there's
this sort of like legal legal conundrum I would say,
of where all these all treaties in the history of
the United States with Indian with Indian tribes have been
broken in some way, shape or form.

Speaker 10 (37:37):
But still.

Speaker 5 (37:40):
American Indians have to live on their reservations instead of
having their their land back, and so nowadays a lot
of movement has been towards land back. What this means?
What is this process? And I think it means a
lot of different things for different people, Indigenous people because
again and there's there's five hundred and seventy four federally

(38:03):
recognized tribes, and so it's not one monolith of ideas,
the monolith of beliefs. But by just by saying land back,
that's like recognition that this is our this was our
land first, and you're not keeping your side of the
deal and never have been.

Speaker 6 (38:21):
Could you maybe go a bit more into land back
as the topic, because like specifically, like the past five years,
it has really gained a lot more like popularity as
like a slogan ye, But I think for a lot
of a lot of people who you like, chanted and
hear it don't always really know exactly what it means.

(38:43):
There's a lot of like mixed opinions on what it means.
Of course, on like the more like reactionary side, it's
like people be like, what you're gonna like kick white
people out of these areas, Like that's kind of that's
what a lot of like the reactionary takes on land
Back is and I'm sure most people are listening to
this podcast that's not what they think, but they may

(39:05):
not really know exactly what it means either. They may
think it sounds a good idea, but they're not quite
sure what it is. Do you mind kind of talking
about how land back has like developed as an idea
and what like you mean by it personally?

Speaker 5 (39:20):
At least? Yeah, I think I could talk about more
about like what I mean by it personally and what
I've understood it to mean to other people, because I
think land back itself it means like a lot of
different things, and I don't think that there has been
a concrete kind of idea of what it means. But

(39:43):
I think a lot of the movement I want to
like contextualize it within a lot of the sort of
activism that we've seen in their recent years. So for instance,
you know, Dapple the Dakota Access Pipeline in twenty sixteen,
and kind of I think that's one of the more
recent events that have really illustrated on a wide scale,

(40:07):
like globally about indigenous movements, sovereign movements, and then especially
when it comes to environmental justice. But what you saw
there was encroachment on tribal treaty land within what it
had to do with the Dakota Access pipeline. So although

(40:29):
it didn't cross some of the current reservation borders, it
was in treaty land, you know that kind of thing.

Speaker 6 (40:37):
The same thing with Stop line three, how it encroached
on like the hunting land and the farmland that was
not technically in the like residential like like like, not
in like the reservation area where people live, but it's
in the surrounding area that is for hunting that is
specified in the treaty, and keep trying to use these
loopholes to get the pipelines through.

Speaker 5 (40:58):
Right right, And so I think what we see as
a lot of solidarity across tribes because this is not new,
this has never been new, and a lot of tribes
can relate to that. And what you've seen and what
I've hoped that I've highlighted throughout this kind of very
brief overview of vetereral new policy is the different ways

(41:20):
that indigenous rights to land and sovereignty has been attacked
in different forms by settler and colonial governments. And I
think that the day and age that we live in
now has allowed for sort of more widespread solidarity, especially
over social media. And so when we say land back,

(41:45):
for me, how I interpret it as what people mean
when they're saying it is recognition of our tribal sovereignty,
of our right to this land that has not been respected.
And then I also think that it means, well, if
these treaties aren't being respected, then how is this treaty

(42:05):
still valid?

Speaker 11 (42:07):
Right?

Speaker 5 (42:08):
How come we aren't getting our land back because you're
not upholding your end of the deal. Well, some people
also might mean and recognize that this whole United States
government is a settler state right based on the doctrine
of discovery, which is based on denying tribes and American

(42:30):
Indians of their rights to this land. So some people
might take it to this whole other context of yeah,
well maybe this is all of our land, et cetera,
et cetera. But in practice, what does this look like?
And I think in practice a lot of people are
seeing it with reparations or people buying land back for

(42:52):
tribes and giving it back to tribes, and we have
seen some of that, or also just people interrupting the
narrative in their own mind of their euro American identity,
so not non American Indians and primarily European settlers and
their history of their own families taking part of the

(43:14):
setler colonial process, and how has that what about their lands.
There's everyone who descends, I guess, from these these settlers,
and I want to be specific when I'm talking about
Euro American settlers and how they currently benefit from these systems.

(43:34):
And I think by saying land back, it's we're able
to highlight this movement for tribal sovereignty and recognition on
a global scale instead of searching for justice within the
quote unquote like searching for justice within the courts of
the conqueror, How how do we expect for the conqueror

(43:55):
to be held accountable for all of these atrocities attempts
of genocide is simile, et cetera. By taking it more
towards a global scale, such as no adaptle highlighting these
to other people as these are injustices, this is this
is ongoing genocide. I think that land back has many,

(44:16):
like a plethora of meanings in that sense. Yeah, yeah,
I hope that answers your question. I myself might use
it in in some some different ways because land as
we conceive it to be property kind of grew. That

(44:37):
concept grew in conversation with Euro American conceptions of property.
So I think that moving forward, when we talk about
decolonization as a process and not like a metaphor, that
thinking of land back not within that whole idea of

(44:59):
your American profit video as well. That's that's kind of
another thing to consider.

Speaker 6 (45:04):
Yeah, I think I think lend back will just be
a whole other thing that will pay someone more qualified
than our team to talk about on this show, because yeah,
that's definitely, like you know, like all of the things
we've we've discussed, they deserve their own deep dives by
people that are uh, not me, Robert and Chris. Let's see,

(45:29):
is there any kind of resources, either books or stuff
online that you would recommend for people wanting to learn
more about this history and then any kind of ways
to I don't know, I guess show support in these
and these kind of like efforts that are going on.

Speaker 5 (45:48):
Yeah, for sure. So in terms of resources and reading,
I have read Lorenzo Ercini's Settler Book on settler colonialism.
That's really helpful when you're trying to understand that framework
in terms of getting to know kind of more of

(46:08):
the basics of like current issues impacting tribes. The National
Congress of American Indians does a lot of work on
the federal level. If you want to talk more about
kind of lived current lived experiences of American Indians, there's
illuminatives and getting more involved in those as well. I

(46:34):
think that they have some tips, but I would recommend
everyone getting more familiar with the land that they are
on currently, the tribes within their state, and what they
can do not just on the local level, but on
the state level to support tribal sovereignty because a lot
of issues. For instance, I worked on the state policy

(46:59):
level in Washington and in Montana, and both of those
have a significant amount of tribes, but you have a
lot of legislation that's trying to happen that infringes on
tribal treaty rights. And the thing is is as ugly
as it may be to say, but sometimes voices of

(47:24):
non indigenous peoples are listening to more within those contexts,
So you need to get more involved on those levels.
What sort of like at nonprofit organizations work with your
tribes or and what sort of issues are impacting tribes

(47:45):
and again, these are all going to probably be surrounding
tribal sovereignty, so maybe it's fishing access, hunting rights, et cetera.
I think that's a really good way to make some
more tangible change, to feel like you're doing something to
support tribal sovereignty while you're also educating yourself and making

(48:10):
sure that their voices are at the forefront. And that's
also applicable to the federal level, especially with as you
already said, like stop line three in Minnesota, contacting your legislators,
et cetera, et cetera. And I think also with when
it comes to one of one of the larger issues

(48:32):
besides environmental justice for Indigenous peoples such as pipelines, you
have right now missing a murdered Indigenous women, So looking
and looking into that a little bit more and who
you can support who's addressing those issues along with there

(48:53):
is another movement with boarding schools right now, because there's
been a lot of bodies of young children that have
been uncovered. And this is not an issue that happened
a long long time ago, like for instance, my grandmother

(49:15):
went to a boarding school. There's still schools that, although
they're not called boarding schools right now that we're boarding
schools but are still in operation under different names, et cetera.
So kind of familiarizing yourself with those histories. And then
also there's a national I think it's called the National

(49:39):
Boarding School Healing Coalition based out of Minnesota, and looking
into them and supporting their efforts with this issue is
also a good place to start.

Speaker 6 (49:51):
Is there anywhere that people can find you online?

Speaker 5 (49:56):
Yes?

Speaker 7 (49:59):
I don't.

Speaker 5 (49:59):
I don't really use social media that much. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I try not to. I don't know if I want
people to find.

Speaker 6 (50:13):
Me, don't do it better. But it's better that people
don't find anyone online. It's better we're all just just
posting into the void. There's nothing, just just the void.
Well that that is I think gonna wrap up what
we have today, Chris, Do you want to close us

(50:35):
out with a funny bit?

Speaker 4 (50:37):
I light your local gas station on fire. Wow, Jesus
Christ killing here? Oh my god, geez wow. All right,
goodbye for buddy.

Speaker 7 (51:16):
You probably don't remember passage of Title forty two, let
alone that of Title forty two taped to six a
sub chapter two, Part G Section two sixty four. But
it's a part of US federal law that gives the
government the authority to take emergency action to keep communical
diseases out of the country. The portion which allows a
sweeping disregard for asylum. Law passed in nineteen forty four,

(51:40):
reads in one giant run on paragraph sentences.

Speaker 12 (51:42):
Follows, whenever the Surgeon General determines that, by reason of
the existence of any communicable disease in a foreign country,
there is serious danger of the introduction of such disease
into the United States, and that this danger is so
increased by the introduction of persons or property from such
country that a suspension of the right to introduce such
persons and property is required in the interest of the

(52:03):
public health. The Surgeon General, in accordance with regulations approved
by the President, shall have the power to prohibit in
a whole or in part, the introduction of persons and
property from such countries or places as he shall designate,
in order to avert such danger, and for such period
of time as he may deem necessary for such purpose.

Speaker 7 (52:20):
Before President Donald Trump's administration used it on March twentieth,
twenty twenty, it had been used only in nineteen twenty
nine to keep ships from China and the Philippines from
entering US ports during to meningitis outbreak, but in March
of twenty twenty, when you probably weren't paying much attention
because the world was falling apart, or when I just
returned from a work trip to Rwanda, where I was

(52:42):
months before any precautions appeared in the USA screened for
a novel coronavirus. The Trump administration cited this public health
law in instructions to the Department of Homeland Security on
restrictions for migrants entering the United States. That very same day,
Center for Disease Control Direct Robert R. Redfield relied on

(53:02):
this regulation to issue an order suspending the introduction into
the United States of certain individuals who had been in
quote unquote coronavirus impacted areas and quote who would be
introduced into a congregate setting at the port of entry
or a border station. This includes individuals coming from Canada

(53:23):
or Mexico who would normally be detained by CBP after
arriving at the border, people including asylum seekers and accompanied children,
and people attending to enter the United States between ports
of entry. Citing the new CDC order, that same day,
the Border patrol began expelling individuals who arrived at the
US Mexico border without giving them the opportunity to seek asylum.

(53:47):
Reports indicate the CDC scientist expressed opposition to the invocation
of Title forty two, arguing that there was really no
public health rationale to support it. Ever since then, public
health experts outside the CDC have gones continue to agree,
arguing that while international borders largely remain open to other travelers,
there is no need to turn away refugees and expel

(54:07):
them to their home countries or send them to Mexico.
Despite this, DHS has been applying Title forty two to
migrants for three years since then, and people have been
turned away without getting a chance to plead their case
for asylum three million times.

Speaker 8 (54:24):
Now.

Speaker 7 (54:24):
Trump is no longer president, but Title forty two has persisted.
It's actually persisted for much longer under Biden's watch two
years and four months than it did under Trump ten months.
But we'll get to that part later. First, let's look
at what this bureaucratic wrinkle does when it's supplied for
three years across the land border spanning three one and

(54:44):
forty five kilometers. That's nine hundred and fifty four miles
for the Americans listening at a time when climate change,
economic decline, and state and nonstate violence are driving more
and more people towards the USA's southern border in the
hope of better life. We're talking about the title forty
two this week because it ended on Mail eleventh. In

(55:06):
a sense, this marks an important change in immigration law,
but in a sense it doesn't. Immigration was complicated and
cruel for migrants and profitable for people on both sides
of the border before March of twenty twenty, and it's
the same after Title forty two has gone. But nonetheless,
Title forty two represented a distinct change in how asylum
works in the US, and, especially when combined with other

(55:27):
Trump policies that Biden has continued, a distinct change in
how many people die when coming to this country to
try and have a better chance at a save future.
By April of twenty twenty, Title forty two expulsions at
the border overtook the previous record for expulsions under the
so called Migrant Protection Protocol, which is better known as

(55:48):
Remain in Mexico, that was set in August of twenty
nineteen under an agreement reached with the Mexican government. In
late March of twenty twenty, the Border Patrol began sending
quote unquot quote back to Mexico most Mexican, but also
Guatemala and Honduran and Saldarrean families and seeingle adults encountered
at the border. This group of nationalities remained unchanged until

(56:12):
May of twenty twenty two, when the Biden administration came
to an agreement with Mexico to accept quote unquote thousands
of Cubans and Nicaraguans sent from the United States to Mexico.
But this doesn't really matter. You'll see that alone these episodes.
Immigration law on the ground and immigration law in Washington,
DC are two very different things. There has been extensive

(56:36):
documentation of individuals expelled to Mexico who do not fit
within these nationalities, including Haitian asylum seekers, some of whom
I've spoken to myself. People who are expelled are often
driven by bus to the nearest port of entry that's
a land border crossing, and told to walk back to Mexico,
often without their luggage and other belongings. I've found that

(56:59):
luggage and belong including ID cards, clothing and even little
stuffed animals all along the border in the three years
since Title forty two has been in place. I asked
my friend Paul to describe what we found in Texas,
and we've been for a walk along the border wall
during our time reporting on the National Butterfly Center.

Speaker 13 (57:16):
There you'd find driver's licenses, I believe. At one point
we found like an almost an information packet for like
it was for a teenager, a teenage girl. I remember
that because we got pictures of it. And then when
we took that long walk, remember we walked down the
border wall, it's two two and a half mile walk

(57:39):
something like that. When we got to the very end
of the wall where the river was, there was just
a giant pile of people's stuff. And some of it
was obviously trash, you know, they were abandoning clothes after
they changed from crossing and stuff like that, but a

(58:01):
lot of it was full backpacks, a lot of ID
documents just in piles, just piles of them. Yeah, yeah,
just big piles of documents that proved who you were.

Speaker 7 (58:15):
The other thing we found with ladders, tons of them.
Apparently someone built a gazebo out of them. The wall
varies in design a bit along the border, depending on
when and by whom it was built, but the trum
design has a flat anti climb plate at the top.
I'll let Paul describe how that's going.

Speaker 13 (58:32):
It was literally like somebody went to the hardware store
bought two of the longest or actually sorry, three of
the longest two by four as you could put two
of them beside each other, and then just nailed steps
up them, so you know, they were like sixteen twenty
feet long, and which was enough to just climb over
the wall Like there weren't There weren't many places actually,

(58:57):
because most of the wall had that anti climb at
the top, Whereas when you didn't have the anti climb barrier,
you didn't actually have something to set it against. But
once you put that on there, you could just lean
the ladder up against it. It's like self defeating.

Speaker 7 (59:13):
Sometimes these expulsions are not as straightforward as a bus
to nearest port of entry. CBP has carried out what
are called lateral transfers by plane or bus, taking migrants
to another location along the border, to towns like San
Diego or El Paso, even if they entered in Arizona
or California. This leaves families stranded in the town where

(59:33):
they have no connections, no resources, and no community. Again,
these are people I've met. It won't have escaped the listeners'
attention that those planes and buses and other means of
detention and transport are indeed congregate settings, But that doesn't
seem to matter here. Title forty two didn't stop people
trying to come, but it made the journey more difficult.

(59:57):
Instead of crossing and trying to turn themselves in for
asylum or approaching a port of entry, people began crossing
in more remote places, places without border walls or barriers,
with less frequent border patrols. In twenty twenty, the Border
Patrol found two hundred and forty seven dead bodies along
the border. This is unlikely to represent the full human

(01:00:18):
toll of border enforcement. Many deaths in the desert go
unreported and undiscovered, but it gives some kind of point
of comparison for the twenty twenty one number. After a
year of Title forty two, five hundred and forty six
people died that year. In twenty twenty two, third year
of Title forty two, eight one hundred and fifty seven

(01:00:39):
people died. None of those people were guilty of any
crime other than wanting a better life, but under Title
forty two, they lost their lives because the US didn't
give them a safe way to exercise the human right
to claim asylum. One local advocate, Hamaira Yusefi from a
group called PANA, the Partnership for the Advance with of
New Americans, explain what Title forty two have been like

(01:01:03):
for her as an advocate for asylum seekers.

Speaker 14 (01:01:05):
When the pandemic hit, we saw that Title forty two
heavily restricted those who were able to seek asylum in
this country. So while there was chaos happening and folks
around the world who were trying to come to the
United States for refuge, they were unable to do so.

(01:01:26):
And what this resulted in is people taking an even
more dangerous path right than before and going between the
ports of entries in order to try to seek refuge.
And so we have had hundreds of cases of individuals
who have gotten themselves injured, who the hospitals are calling
us because they've tried to cross and got injured, and

(01:01:47):
where we're trying to help them with getting some basic
legal services and immediate shelter and those types of things.

Speaker 7 (01:01:54):
Since Biden took off his human rights first says, it's
identified more than thirteen thousand incidents of kidnapping, torture, rape,
or other violent attacks on people blocked or expelled to
Mexico and a Title forty two. That's because it's easy
for violence to follow people who have no resources and
no community to protect them. It's for that reason that

(01:02:15):
you won't always see faces in my photographs at the border,
and that some of the names in this series have changed,
or perhaps we're just using someone's first name. It's also
for that reason they're not everyone at the Border always
wants to talk. But we do have some interviews coming
up for you tomorrow. Here's a clip from a discussion
about this which I recorded the border last week.

Speaker 15 (01:02:35):
I'm trying to get people's face, and that's what everybody
is doing.

Speaker 10 (01:02:39):
I can't speak to what they're doing. That's what I'm doing.

Speaker 15 (01:02:41):
I don't know about other people.

Speaker 7 (01:02:43):
You should ask. You should if you think someone's taking
a photo of you, it's okay.

Speaker 8 (01:02:47):
I don't have a why.

Speaker 16 (01:02:51):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
I wish I could.

Speaker 7 (01:02:53):
I could tell you people who are subject to Title
forty to expulsion are not given an opportunity to contest
their expulsion on the grounds it would face persecure in
the country to which they will be expelled. There's a
very limited exceptions Title forty two for people who quote
unquote spontaneously inform CBP officers that they fear being tortured
in the country to which they will be expelled. However,

(01:03:13):
in order to receive an official screening by an asylum
officer for exemption under that provision, the CBP officer must
first determine that the claim is reasonably believable. From March
twenty twenty through September twenty twenty one, just two hundred
and seventy two people were granted the right to seek
asylum under this exception. The use of Title forty two
has been despite the relative lack of outrage sin sur

(01:03:34):
Bide the administration took office bipartisan in twenty twenty one.
A few weeks before Bileen's inauguration, I spent some time
talking to migrants at the southern border for Slate. Many
of them had come to a small, tense city that
popped up just feet from the pedestrian border crossing and
the country that they had traveled thousands of miles to
get to but that they couldn't reach. You can see

(01:03:57):
America through the fence there, but you can't get there.
The camp was diverse in its composition. On one trip,
I interviewed folks from Haiti, Honduras, Ol Salvador, Gatemana, and Ethiopia.
Here's what one of them said to me when he
asked his message to President Biden. You recognize the voices Daniel's.
That's because I don't have his permission to use his voice.

Speaker 12 (01:04:17):
Here we are appealing to President Biden. We aren't bad people.
Our goal is to work and get ahead in the
world for our children. We don't want to go back.
They will kill us, so we are here.

Speaker 7 (01:04:28):
Some of them wore Biden T shirts, which I suspect
rightually a plant by right wing our Jean provocateur looking
to make the new administration look weak. They needn't really
have bothered with all the effort Biden would do plenty
in the next few months to make himself look cruel
and unkind. Before we talk about that, I want to
play you a clip from Biden's first press confidence. President.

Speaker 17 (01:04:47):
You just listed the reasons that people are coming talking
about in country problems, saying that it happens every year.

Speaker 3 (01:04:54):
You blamed the.

Speaker 17 (01:04:55):
Last administration, Sir. I just got back last night from
a recording trip to the border where I met nine
year old Jose who walked here from Honduras by himself,
along with another little boy. He had that snout on him,
and we were able to call his family. His mother
says that she sent her son to this country because

(01:05:16):
she believes that you are not deporting unaccompanied miners like
her son. That's why she's sent him alone from Honduras. So, Sir,
you blamed the last administration, But is your messaging and
saying that these children are and will be allowed to
stay in this country and work their way through this process,
encouraging families like Jo says to come.

Speaker 1 (01:05:38):
Well, look.

Speaker 18 (01:05:44):
The idea that I'm going to say, which I would
never do. If an unaccompanied child ends up at the border,
We're just gonna let him starve to death and stay
on the other side. No previous administrations dead either except Trump.
I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to
do it. That's why I've asked the Vice President of

(01:06:07):
the United States yesterday to be the lead person I'm
dealing with focusing on the fundamental reasons why people leave Honduras, Guatemala,
or Salvadora in the first place.

Speaker 7 (01:06:20):
In the coming months, some of which I covered for
an op ed in NBC about the Biden Administration's cruel
treatment of Haitian migrants. Things on the border didn't get
any better. Biden deported more Haitian people in a few
weeks than the Trump administration did in a year, eight
hundred and ninety five people reporting in twenty twenty versus
more than one two hundred people. From January twentieth to

(01:06:42):
March twenty second, twenty twenty one. While making declarations about
showing compassion to migrants, the Biden administration packed Haitians onto
crowded planes and buses and sent them back to Haiti
in the middle of the pandemic. In March, the US
sent another pointed invitation to Haitians. The US Embassy in

(01:07:03):
Haiti tweeted a picture President Joe Biden looking off into
the distance with a caption in both English and Haitian Creole.
In Creole, it read wing kadi sa bienkie pavini. The
translation above it was.

Speaker 12 (01:07:17):
I can say quite clearly don't come over.

Speaker 7 (01:07:22):
In July of that year, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Majorcas,
himself a child of parents who fled from Cuba, said
that Haitians and Cubans fleeing unrest in their countries will
not find safety in the US even if they have
a credible claim for asylum, and especially if they flee
by sea. In doing so, he was echoing statements to
the US broadcast from planes flying over Haiti following the

(01:07:45):
devastating earthquake in twenty ten. Following these announcements, the US
diverted resources that it could have used to help people
from suffering in a country which have been destroyed by
a natural disaster to stop them coming to this country.
He was also overlooking that under both international and domestic law,
asylum seekersts are entitled to make claims no matter how

(01:08:07):
they enter the country. Here's what Mayoka said at his
press conference.

Speaker 12 (01:08:11):
Allow me to be clear, if you take to the sea,
you will not come to the United States.

Speaker 7 (01:08:17):
Part of this hardline is because of a perceived crisis
at the border. You don't have to go far on
Twitter dot com before you run into people like Fox News.
Is Bill Malugan yep, the tampon in the coffee guy
is now a border reporter and he's shamelessly repeating CBP
statistics about apprehensions on the southern border. Here he is
talking to his buddy Tucker Carlson. Do you remember that guy?

Speaker 11 (01:08:38):
Bill Malujin has covered the border more closely than any
reporter in the United States for the last two years,
and today, in his estimation, the single largest caravan of
illegal aliens flowing into this country in his two years
of watching crossed. Today he broke the story. He's got
remarkable video for us. He's live at the border now.

Speaker 1 (01:08:57):
Bill. Great to see you.

Speaker 19 (01:08:58):
What did you see, Tucker, Good evenings. You mentioned it
right off the top. This was easily the biggest group
we have ever seen during our nineteen months of covering
this border crisis. And they all crossed illegally into El
Paso last night, and we got some pretty wild camera
footage to show you. Take a look at this. This
was last night in ol Paso. A massive caravan, over
one thousand illegal immigrants crossing into l Paso last night.

(01:09:21):
Local media they're reporting it was potentially up to two
thousand people and that it was possibly the biggest mass
crossing in the city's history. Now, as you look at
the video, you'll see just wave after wave after wave
of these people walking across the river and then gathering
on the US side of the river where they kind
of form a single file line.

Speaker 7 (01:09:39):
But it's not just Fox News doing this. You'll see
MPR and other more liberal outlets quoting these same statistics
without the necessary context. They're not lying. Apprehensions are higher,
but that is in some part because migrants are now
crossing more than once. In twenty nineteen, before Title forty
two went into effect, seven percent of migrants apprehended by

(01:10:01):
the Border Patrol had previously been apprehended. The reapprehension rate
grew to twenty seven percent in fiscal year twenty twenty two.
This is because we're expelling people to places where they
have no hope of a better future and not leaving
them with many options other than to try again in
more remote and risky settings. Meanwhile, there's much less concern

(01:10:23):
from the right and from Democrats at the fact that
Ukrainians are exempted from Title forty two, and Russians and
Ukrainians generally experience expedited processing of the sort which one
would hope this country could offer to other people escaping
conflicts around the world, including many that we started. I
asked my friend Gustavo Solis, a border investigative reporter at
KPBS in San Diego, to summarize the Biden administration to

(01:10:47):
take on Title forty two.

Speaker 20 (01:10:48):
Now, on paper of the rationalists, there's a pandemic going on.
We need to stop or slow the spread of COVID nineteen.
So because of this extraordinary circumstance, we need Title forty
two to shore up the order that was bullshit, and
we know that now through reporting that it was total bullshit.
We know that from as early as twenty eighteen, Stephen Miller,

(01:11:11):
Trump's White House aid wanted to use Title forty two
to stop this type of migration. We know that Vice
President Mike Pence pressured the top doctors at the CDC
into doing this, basically saying, if you don't do this,
you might lose your job. Because even then in March
twenty twenty, doctors at the CDC knew that there was

(01:11:32):
no real public health rationale for this. I mean, if
you look at the order, it's supposed to stop COVID,
but there weren't any exceptions for migrants who were vaccinated
or there was no testing component to it. So that's
kind of the beginning of Title forty two. By the
time Biden came in office, Biden had promised to end
it along with Roman in Mexico and restore the humane

(01:11:55):
asylum system. But he kept Title forty two in place.
And he didn't just keep it in place, he expanded
it to include nationalities that weren't included when Trump first
rolled it out.

Speaker 7 (01:12:06):
Even as a legal battle went back and forth, another
major bottleneck emerged in a migration system in the form
of never ending clusterfuck. That is the CBP one app.
Again a let Gustavo explain his reporting here.

Speaker 20 (01:12:19):
It actually kind of started with the Ukrainians. That was
kind of how they started using it for the asylum context.
But CBP one is essentially a phone app for asylum,
and on paper it kind of makes sense, right instead
of like, you know, Joe Biden and the Dems are

(01:12:39):
really terrified of the optics of a lot of people
at the border, and they a lot of their policy
is revolved around stopping that right. They don't want masses
of people at the border. The CBP one app aims
to address that by telling micros, hey, instead of coming
all the way to Mexico and showing up the border,
just download this app and schedule an appointment to come here,

(01:13:03):
and we'll let you to see if you're eligible for
asylum or not. Another example of a policy in Washington,
DC that has no reality in what's going on the
border because migrants live in shelters with really bad Wi
Fi access, and they have crappy phones. So what I've

(01:13:28):
found in the reporting is that CBP one rewards people
with the best phones, not necessarily people who are most vulnerable.
And the story I came out with last week was
about how data from the Mexican government shows that at
least in Tijuana, about forty four percent of every migrant
who has gotten a CBP one application to enter the
country is a Russian national, and Russian nationals makeup at

(01:13:52):
most ten percent of the overall migrant population in Tijuana.
So you have this situation where a relatively affluent ten
percent of the population is getting almost half of these
humanitarian protection appointments that are designed for the world's most
vulnerable people. And that's what if you one does like

(01:14:13):
it they call it the Ticketmaster of asylum, and that's
not a compliment. That is like ticketmaster fucking sucks. Nobody
likes it.

Speaker 7 (01:14:21):
I also spoke to Caba, an activist who participated a
mutual aid at the border. We talked about the app
because Caba has some professional insight into the technologies used.

Speaker 8 (01:14:31):
I do data science and machine learning the native things
for a living. And the problem of building these systems
trained entirely on databases of white faces and then the
motain working for people, you know, the backgrounds is very

(01:14:51):
well known in this field. That is a very well
documented issue for more than a decade. And anyone that
could tell you by building a facial recognition or some
kind of a camera app that does image processing and
and I'm only training it on my face, is it
like that this is a This is not something that
I think any competent, separate development house would have done

(01:15:14):
and not expected. So I have a hard time believing
that the whole chain of everyone's had to go through
from the developers on up to you know, anyone who
does it or you know has authority of these things
at CBP or Homland Security. This is just it's it's

(01:15:35):
it's like, I don't know, it's it's, it's, it's it's
hard to believe that this was enough.

Speaker 7 (01:15:42):
Anyway, before we get too far from discussing things to
fucking suck, he's an advertising break. You might be wondering
why Title forty two is ending now and how we
got here, given there seems to be a consensus in
DC that the border is in crisis, and that that
crisis is not that people were leaving to die on
the streets the other side or in the deserts of
California and Arizona, but the people were allowing to come

(01:16:05):
to the richest country that's ever existed from countries that
we've destabilized for decades to have a chance of a
decent life. Well, the answer is complicated. Some of it's
a bit too complicated for me to really spend the
time explaining, and you don't really need to know the
ins and outs of court cases to understand that. Essentially,
the Biden administration had planned to end Title forty two

(01:16:26):
in late twenty twenty two, right after the midterms. Title
forty two actually became theoretically unenforceable in November of that
year thanks to a court ruling, but the Supreme Court
in December prevented the Biden administration from ending Title forty two,
while the Justice is considered a request by a group
of Republican led states that want to continue the expulsions,
which had previously been decaarred unlawful by lower court. Biden's

(01:16:49):
Department of Justice had previously defended Title forty two as
necessary to public health, but by the end of twenty
twenty two, they were ready to end enforcement a Title
forty two politically, even if there were no way when
near prepared on the ground. A coalition of Republican led states, however,
managed to get a federal judge in Louisiana to prevent
officials fremending Title forty two, saying the Biden administration and

(01:17:10):
had not taken adequate steps required to terminate the policy. Then,
on November fifteenth, another federal judge declared Title forty two
are lawful, saying the CDC had not properly explained the
policy's public health ration art or considered its impact on
asylum seekers. At the request of the Biden administration, the
judge gave border officials five weeks until December the twenty
first to end Title forty two nineteen, Republican led States

(01:17:33):
asked several courts to delay Title forty two's resision indefinitely,
warning that chaos would otherwise ensue. After their request was
denied by lower courts, the States asked a Supreme Court
to intervene. On December twenty seventh, the Supreme Court said
it would suspend the lower court order that found Title
forty two to be illegal until it decided whether the
Republican led States should be allowed to intervene in the case.

(01:17:56):
That's some Christmas spirit for you. Eventually, with the end
of the federal emergency over COVID nineteen, Title forty two
just kind of went away. Customs and Border Protection, the
federal agency which put up the most staunch resistance to
vaccine mandates, would begin processing migrants under Title eight of
US immigration law on the eleventh of May twenty twenty three.

(01:18:16):
I'll let them summarize what they see this to mean.
According to the USCIS website, individuals who unlawfully cross the
Southwest border will generally be processed under Title eight expedited
removal authorities. In a matter of days, they will be
barred from re entry to the United States for at
least five years if ordered removed, and they will be

(01:18:38):
presumed ineligible for asylum under the proposed Circumvention of Lawful
Pathways regulation absent and applicable exception. What this means is,
if you cross into the United States not of the pordamentry,
you will be assumed ineligible for asylum and the process
to remove you from the United States will begin immediately.

(01:18:58):
You have a chance to file a de into asylum
claim against that, but the process could be rushed and
more difficult. Despite this and having almost three years to repair,
they were by no means. Ready, let's hear from Gustavo again. Gustavo,
can you explain to us a little bit about what
you found that by the administration has been planning for

(01:19:20):
the end of Title forty two.

Speaker 20 (01:19:23):
Yeah, what I found is they haven't really been doing
much planning, right, I mean they talk about I think
with Title forty two, it's a clear example of immigration
policy being decided in Washington and no one really from
the border being involved or told what's going on. So, like,
I think it was last week the HS Secretary Majorca

(01:19:48):
did this press release about what they're doing in terms
of processing centers in Guatemala and Colombia so people can
just go there instead of coming all the way to
the border, which actually there have been timelines of when
those will open. But they had asked all these things
for like big picture things, right, to stop people from
coming in the first place, expanding some legal pathways, like

(01:20:10):
making it easier for people with families already here to
get sponsors, fixing some of the little things with CVP one,
but they don't talk about like on the ground logistics right. So,
for example, I went to Tijuana to talk to the
head of the Department of Migrant Affairs there who told
me this, and I checked with him yesterday morning, who said,

(01:20:34):
still to this day, less than forty eight hours before
Title forty two ends, he doesn't know how many migrants
CBP will allow to cross through the ports of entry
in Sandy Seerro. His guess is that maybe two hundred,
because that's kind of the number that they floated around
in December when they originally wanted to get rid of
Title forty two before their lawsuit. And if it's two hundred,

(01:20:56):
he basically said, Tijuana is going to be screwed because
two hundred doesn't even cover the number of new migrants
coming in and deporties being sent to Tijuana. So it's
gonna like we have this bottleneck of migration in Tijuana
and all over the border because of Title forty two.
For the last three years, no one's been able to move.
And if they just open it up to two hundred people,

(01:21:18):
that's not really going to address any of the bottleneck.

Speaker 7 (01:21:21):
Right There's like, I think, is it sixteen thousand people
are waiting like an asylum application right now?

Speaker 1 (01:21:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 21 (01:21:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 20 (01:21:29):
I hear different numbers throwing around, like ten, thy, fifteen, sixteen,
and nobody really knows because there's like a network of
official shelters, and there's a bunch of unofficial shelters, and
there's a bunch of Russian dudes staying in hotels in airbnbs.
But I think, yeah, tens of thousands. I think sixteen
is an accurate number.

Speaker 7 (01:21:47):
I think it's intructive here to listen to the Fox
News coverage of this and how much Secretary of my
Orcus tries to panda to them.

Speaker 20 (01:21:53):
Want to be very clear, our borders are not open.

Speaker 22 (01:21:57):
Home in Security Secretary Alejandro Majorcis said when Title forty
two expires at midnight tonight, anyone who arrives at the
southern border will be presumed ineligible for asylum and face consequences.
But withholding facilities already overwhelmed, the administration is ratcheting up
tough rhetoric while also clearing the way for mass releases
into US communities with no way for authorities to track people.

(01:22:19):
You said at the beginning that you've prepared for this
moment for almost two years. So why is part of
that plan and honor system.

Speaker 1 (01:22:28):
Oh, it is not an honor system.

Speaker 20 (01:22:30):
They are a subject of our apprehension efforts.

Speaker 22 (01:22:32):
But under parole release authorized by the US Border Patrol
Chief last night, migrants do not receive an alien registration
number for authorities to track them. They don't even get
a court date. Instead, migrants are asked to turn themselves
into Ice within sixty days to start immigration proceedings on themselves.

Speaker 2 (01:22:49):
The American people are watching this.

Speaker 10 (01:22:50):
They know what they see.

Speaker 23 (01:22:52):
They see a wide open border.

Speaker 22 (01:22:53):
Florida's Attorney General is suing the administration, arguing the parole
plan is identical to a policy a federal judge struck
down earlier this year.

Speaker 1 (01:23:01):
You have confidence in the lawfulness of our actions.

Speaker 22 (01:23:03):
Plans to release migrants at bus stops, gas stations, and
supermarkets was first detailed last year, according to a memo
uncovered by the Florida Legal Proceedings. Today, Texas Governor Greg
Abbott sent a busload of migrants to the Vice President's Residents.

Speaker 7 (01:23:17):
Greg Abbot's disgusting antics aside, there was a real attempt
by the Biden deministration to come to Republican side on
migration that we can see clearly here in the hours
before we expected Title forty two to die. Folks like
me who cover the border made plans the day before.
On the tenth, Majorcas announced the Title forty two would

(01:23:38):
be enforced up until eleven fifty nine pm Eastern time,
and in San Diego, Border Patrol offices closed down the
port of entry at Sandy Sedra, the border town just
south of San Diego, for a training exercise in which
they lined up in front of the cars waiting to
cross the border with plexiglass shields and riotgear. Meanwhile, in

(01:24:00):
between the two thirty football offenses that divide San Asidra
from Tijuana, Board of Patrol began corraling migrants Afghans, Colombians, Vietnamese,
Koreans and Golan Sudanese Tagiks and Congolese people all shared
little more than a few tarps and cardboard boxes for
shelter as they waited for something to happen. Despite having

(01:24:22):
months to repair in years to plan, it appears at
Department of Home Land Security totally failed to create so
much as a scrap of shade or shelter, and instead
chose to house people detain pending processing in the open air.
In tomorrow's episode, We'll hear from some.

Speaker 24 (01:24:38):
Of them went on yelling and Genlink Bob, Molly, it's
going off, not going likely, and Elma see im for
the sky and Mama said, some push free and for
them must smile them. No, no, i'must and Red vie
Gannata gonna watch me. Hey man, grateful man, grateful I

(01:25:03):
when not in an aguan MANASMI Yeah, once there is
a live got a'll want give me everything for some
five Yeah love sakries pick up to dom, I got
to eat on combakom sin Yeah man, that's it one
love Oh.

Speaker 7 (01:25:22):
On the eleventh of May this year, title forty two
finally ended. I stually began to write this episode the
day before, on the tenth of May, but it was
that day the DHS announced that Title forty two would
be enforced until eight fifty nine pm Pacific or midnight Eastern.
They kept Title forty two in place for every single
minute they could, and that same day, five hundred active

(01:25:42):
duty troops arrived in El Paso and one thousand more
set off for other border towns to join the two thousand,
five hundred troops already deployed to the border. According to
a press release from the Apartment of Homeland Security.

Speaker 12 (01:25:55):
CBP and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement are further expanding
detention compared, ramping up removal flights, and shifting agents and
officers to high priority regions along the southwest border. This week,
CBP opened two new holding facilities, and the Department of
Health and Human Services is increasing its bed capacity to
prepare for a potential increase in unaccompanied children. DHS also

(01:26:18):
launched targeted enforcement operations and high priority regions along the border,
including El Paso, to quickly process migrants and place them
in removal proceedings. DHS last week also announced over two
hundred and fifty million dollars in additional assistance for communities
receiving migrants.

Speaker 7 (01:26:35):
On the ground. This assistance and planning didn't exactly meet
the task at hand, albeit the specific call out of
El Paso does suggest that they saw their task as
not looking bad. In the right wing media hitse Mordiere
recorded after a couple of hours walking around talking to
people at Santisedra, where Customs and Border Protection had detained
around five hundred people in between the two thirty foot

(01:26:56):
fences that make up the border between Santisedro and Tijuana.
I'm just for people familiar with said, you've got like
in the Tijuana River Valley park by International Hill, where
border patrol are holding people in between the two border fences.
For those who thought we didn't have a border wall

(01:27:16):
or weren't having a border wall, we have at least two,
sometimes three, but right here we have two. People are
being put in between these fences by border patrol. So
I just spoke to some young Colombian women who had
crossed about fifteen miles east of here and then being
relocated here and there in between these border walls. They
don't have running water. What food and water they have

(01:27:39):
appear to be in surpied by volunteers on the northern side.
They've just been given space blankets, but a lot of
people are literally sleeping under bin bags right now. Blankets.
It's pretty brief. There's one portal toilet sort of thing
that we can see about five hundred people, So I
kind of give you an idea of the conditions. Obviously
those don't live up to the detention conditions at border

(01:27:59):
patrol are supposed to hold people under. But here we are,
I guess have just said that they're calling an ambulance.
There have been a number of medical emergencies that nearly
always are in these situations because you're holding people, you know,
old people, young people, sick people, and they're in the
sun all day, they're in the cold all night. If

(01:28:20):
it rains, they get wet. If it's hot, they get hot,
if it's cold, they get cold. Their little children were
just asking me for a blanket a minute ago. She's
always a pretty bleak thing. If you've not been here,
you'd be forgiven for not knowing that. We have a
double layer of wall separating us from our neighbors in Tijuana.
Both sections are now the Trump period design. But we're

(01:28:40):
standing in a place we're not so very long ago,
Nancy Reagan stood and said she hoped that they wouldn't
be a fence here for very long. Now there are
two towering walls and their little children stuck sleeping in
the dust between them. Or the aid to these people
had to go through the wall, too, and that meant
no hot meals because the gaps are smaller than a plate.
Someone tried to bring tents, but they wouldn't fit. Everything

(01:29:03):
from food to clothes to medical supplies had to go
through the gaps in the wall. Hamara you Sephi, a
volunteer from the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans,
described to me what she saw that night.

Speaker 14 (01:29:15):
I see about five hundred beautiful, smiling faces of people
who are desperately trying to get to safety. And they're confused.
They don't know what's going on. They don't know how
long it will take them. You know, they many of
them are aware that something is happening today. Many of

(01:29:38):
them are asking, does this mean that I'll be turned back?
What is going on? I see, you know, people who
don't even have many kids, don't have shoes, they don't
have I talked to individuals who lost everything on them.
They don't have jackets. They're trying to cover themselves with

(01:30:00):
any kind of covering that they have, some of them
using trash bags, others using scarves and other types of
things to cover themselves from the sun. We are in
San Diego, so it's quite sunny here.

Speaker 7 (01:30:13):
The first thing I noticed on arrival was it dozens
of hands sticking through the wall holding phones and charges.
That's because people need to use the CBP one app
to interact with border enforcement, but they've been detained by
the same border enforcement in between two walls and an
open field where there obviously isn't any electricity. They also
need their phones to stay in touch with their families,

(01:30:34):
to let them know they survived a difficult and dangerous
journey and that they're now technically inside the USA. Here's
the advert a CBP broadcast in Spanish to encourage asylum
seekers to download the app before they put them in
a place they couldn't charge their phones.

Speaker 5 (01:30:49):
Attencion migrane at.

Speaker 12 (01:30:51):
Attention migrants in Mexico City or further north in the country.
Why do you need to download CBP one. It's a
free and legal way to get an appointment guaranteed at
a port of entry. It's a clear way to solicit asylum,
and you have the possibility to work while your case
is being processed. If you present without an appointment, you
can be prohibited from entering the US for five years.

(01:31:14):
You will be subject to expedite a deportation unless you
comply with the strict requirements of the asylum process. In
the majority of cases, it is assumed that migrants do
not comply with the requirements for asylum, and you won't
have the right to work unless you comply with the
strict requirements. Again, if you are now in Mexico City
or further north, download CBP one.

Speaker 7 (01:31:37):
As we heard yesterday, CBP one has been an a
mitigated disaster and has shown a very clear bias towards
certain types of wealthy and white asylum seekers. Despite that
it seems to have been the only plan in place
the end of Title forty two. The hundreds of people
detained in between defenses humbly didn't have appointments, and with
no way to charge their phones, they couldn't make them.

(01:31:58):
It's not clear of making them would have helped, as
it seems that they were already being detained and thus
they would have to file defensive asylum claims, effectively stopping
the repatriation process by claiming that they couldn't safely be
sent back to their country of origin. This is opposed
to making an affirmative asylum claim that people should have
been able to make at the border. With a CBP
one appointment, these would not have to be argued with

(01:32:20):
the threat of repatriation hanging over the person making the claim. Volunteers,
local people, a mosque group, and a church group all
showed up soon after CBP began dumping more people in
between the fences. An hour after my own arrival. I'd
given away all the charge cables that I had in
my truck, which is a lot more charge cables than
I thought I had in my truck, and all my

(01:32:41):
charge bricks acrued over six years of getting free shared
at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. Later, I
came back with a massive solar generator that I'd like
to use when I'm living off grid, But I still
need to write stuff. Even all my home electronics ephemera
and the combined efforts of nonprofits, religious and mutual aid
groups couldn't really make much difference to five hundred people
from around the world, mostly families with children being held

(01:33:04):
between the two fences. When it got hot, they got hot.
When it got cold, they got cold. When the wind blew,
they got dust in their eyes, and everything was constantly dirty.
The only hot food volunteers could get to them was pizza.
Some of the detained people had cash, and they were
able to order door dash on the Tijuana side, but
again the meals had to fit through a hole barely

(01:33:26):
wider than my arm. The only way to get clean
was with wet wipes, and there was only one bathroom.
There was no shade or shelter either, and the only
way people could construct shelters were through tying tops to
the border wall itself. I like Kaber, one of the
volunteers who came to help, describe what they saw when
participating in mutual aid a couple of days after, but.

Speaker 8 (01:33:47):
It was definitely was I don't think it really struck
me into you after everything, and you know, after I
left several hours later. But I mean, I am right
about the situation at the the kind of matter of
fackness of there's just several hundred people, including children, just

(01:34:09):
kind of between this fence and they're just stuck there
with nothing, and the sort of matter of factness of
that all was I think that's struck me the most,
and it's been a much challenge in the process.

Speaker 7 (01:34:27):
In the days before the end of Title forty two,
confusion had reigned at the border. A lot of people
I talked to mentioned that they thought they had to
cross before the end of Title forty two or they
would be ejected and not able to apply for five
years at a Title eight. This misunderstanding might in part
be due to some of the misleading rhetoric put out
by MAJORCAS and others, which focused on the harsh penalties

(01:34:49):
for crossing between ports of entry an attempt to appear
strong on the border to their colleagues in DC. They
didn't place as much emphasis on the right to present
and claim asylum at a port of entry. But as
we saw yesterday, it's virtually impossible to actually do that,
and Tijuana is already full of thousands of people trying
to do that exact thing. Given a set of circumstances,

(01:35:11):
it makes sense that many people took the days before
the end of Title forty two and the final chance
to cross before Title forty two ended. I spoke to
Diana Rodriguez from Colombia about her understanding of what was
going to happen.

Speaker 25 (01:35:23):
Later that night, Dianna Rodriguez the Columbia.

Speaker 7 (01:35:27):
Diana was with two friends, all of them wearing little
daisies in their hair and sharing a tarp shelter they'd
made by tying a blue top against the wall so
they could get some shade in privacy. I asked her
where the flowers had come from. You hear the rest
of into your voice by cherin.

Speaker 26 (01:35:44):
Oh, the flowers, the flowers are well, there are these
little flowers, flowers that are growing here, like in the garden.
So when we went and took a walk over there
and we found them, we put them on and they're pretty.
We call these the little yellow flowers of hope, and
they match the color of our bracelets. We picked them
on the day we arrived, and we knew that we

(01:36:06):
needed a little bit of encouragement. We got the yellow bracelets.
Because we arrived on Tuesday, everyone got the same bracelet.

Speaker 7 (01:36:13):
I asked, Diana, which you'd heard about title forty two,
which is ending a few hours after we talked, Yes,
it's the end.

Speaker 26 (01:36:21):
Of title forty two. Title forty two is the one
that endorses mass deportations. Yes, and well it's a question
of you not just getting deported, but being repatriated. In
other words, after this they do a full repatriation. But
right now you are not registered in the system. But

(01:36:41):
what they do is that they only return you. They
don't register you. But let's say, on the basis of
Article eight, is that a few at least we are
invading American territory, then we are in effect breaking a law.
And what Article eight does is that they deport you.
They put you in the registered database saying that you

(01:37:02):
broke the law, and they punish you for five years
and you lose the right to request your asylum through
legal channels.

Speaker 7 (01:37:10):
Law people at another camp in cu Cumba heard the
same thing from Colombians, and it seems like there are
even news pieces run on domestic television explaining that the
US planned to return many Colombians in the coming months
and this might be the last best chance to cross
the border without permanent consequences. You got caught in a
Cumba volunteers estimated that two thirds of the people corraled

(01:37:31):
under the deasert son from Colombia. Of course, in recent years,
there has been instability and violence there, which also drives migration.
One of my sources also mentioned a lot of Colombian
people had seen misleading information about immigration law on TikTok.
Two days had passed since Janna arrived. She came with
one of the girls she was now sharing a tarp with.

(01:37:51):
I met another when they were all dumped in the
camp together. In the days before they were detained here,
they crossed three countries on their way to what they
it was a better life for young women like them.
I asked them to describe that journey for me.

Speaker 26 (01:38:04):
Yes, eight days, eight days more or less walking from
Columbia from El Salvador to Guatemala, then New Mexico. To
hear all that time walking and taking the bus. There's
a part fifteen or twenty minutes from here where the
wall ends, and we crossed there. There was a Mexican
patrol and when they changed shifts, we ran and here

(01:38:26):
we are on American soil. We arrived on foot and
the police brought us here. They opened the gate and
dropped us here.

Speaker 7 (01:38:34):
Along the way. She said, they've run into a lot
of people. The migrant journey north is such a common
trick that people living along the way have found a
way to make a buck, but also a way to
make a difference. It's not uncommon for migrants to be extorted, robbed,
or threatened. It's also not uncommon for them to be
fed by strangers, perhaps handing off bags with food in
them to passing trains or buses, or perhaps given a

(01:38:55):
place to sleep for the night by someone they might
never see again.

Speaker 26 (01:39:00):
Parts where we were extorted, they took all the money
we brought, They robbed us, they stole our passports, they
stole our documents. So it's always quite dangerous. Let's say
that it's dangerous to take this journey. Yes, just as
we have met some bad people along the way, we
have also met some very good people, people who have
given us a hand, people who have helped us, people

(01:39:21):
who have collaborated with us in ways you least expect.

Speaker 7 (01:39:25):
I asked Dianna what she hoped for now she was
technically inside the USA.

Speaker 26 (01:39:30):
Yes, let's say the hope is that they will listen
to our case, listen to our case, and let us
fight the case inside. Yes, because we want to be
able to explain the conditions we are in and the
reasons that those of us who are here came here,
things like extortion, kidnapping, and because our lives are in
danger in Colombia. So we wish that they at least

(01:39:51):
listened to our case and let us plead our cause.

Speaker 7 (01:39:55):
Before we started recording, Deanna asked what network I was with.
I thought that was in stute Qui question. Networks like
Fox show up at the word, although I didn't see
any Fox National reporters on my trip. Certainly local news
channel kus I was there, but they're reporting on the
ground differed from their xenophobic and outright incorrect online coverage.
I asked Deana what you'd want to say to folks

(01:40:15):
who might have had their perspective influence by the contentt
demonization of migrants by right wing media.

Speaker 26 (01:40:21):
There are many people who, let's say, are in a
mindset of not wanting migrants, and they view them with contempt.
Because wherea xenophobia exists, it's hard for us because we
suffer along the way. We would like you to change
your way of seeing things and your way of thinking
so that you don't look at us with contempt. We

(01:40:41):
have a saying in Columbia that says that he who
was born in a golden cradle never suffers or never
sees what he does not know. So it's hard when
you're born in a golden cradle and you don't see
beyond what you have. So there are people that in
our case, in my case, I lived a very hard
life where you see the war between armed groups. They

(01:41:03):
exist outside the law and they can control an area,
and you see the kidnapping, you see the rape of girls, recruitment, extortion, death. Yes,
so it's hard when we experience that and people say
things like these migrants are coming to invade our country,
we also ask them to treat us as people, because

(01:41:24):
if we are here, it is not because we want
to invade a territory. It is because we want to
come to fight for a better future for our children
without stepping on anyone. Nobody wants this. But where we
come from, we receive travelers with open arms. And it's
hard when one is a migrant, when one lives the

(01:41:46):
experience of being a migrant, it is a very hard
thing to be a migrant, having to endure cold, hunger, rain, sun,
that is all these things, and then arriving here and
seeing of contempt. It's hard. It is very hard. So yes,
the important thing is that people must know that being

(01:42:09):
an immigrant is not easy. Being an immigrant is not easy.

Speaker 7 (01:42:16):
One of her friends, who she was sharing a top with,
leaned over to give an example.

Speaker 26 (01:42:20):
Everyone despairs because everyone wants to leave, so everyone sees
each other as enemies. So let's say, for example, right now,
when they are sending cars to collect people to process,
so everyone there thinks, I hope they take me. Then
when they don't, it gets to a point where, yes,

(01:42:41):
where you despair. I mean it's desperate, but well everyone
everyone is in the fight together, all in the fight.

Speaker 7 (01:42:57):
I have to get another dusting down from a cbpah
and who really like to RaSE his squad bike passing
Mutulaid tables. Spoke to a man from Angola. I leave
his name out, as he preferred for me not to
share it. He'd been into Juana for three days, he said,
I was waiting his chance to plead his case for asylum.

Speaker 12 (01:43:13):
No, it's just me and my sister. We suffered a lot.
There were bandits. We came here to be safe. It's
no way to live. People broke into our house to
violate women, to look for people and I was injured, then, Yeah,
why did I leave to come here? Over there? They're
not they're not the means to live.

Speaker 7 (01:43:34):
We didn't get a chance to talk for long, and
some of the recording I got wasn't very good. He
was waiting in line for food, and to be quite honest,
I don't like prodding people to share their trauma, but
with so many journalists crowding the border asking him to
do just that, it tends to be what people offer.
Lots of African migrants can be quite cautious of the
media because talking to the media at home could get
them in trouble. I spoke to a friend of mine

(01:43:56):
himself a migrant from Africa. He said that if migrants
don't to be English or Spanish, it can be very
hard for them to get information, and there aren't as
many nonprofits set up to serve them as there are
for Spanish speaking people, for example. They can often end
up isolated and alone. I did get a better chance
to talk to a Jamaican man called Joseph. It's his
singing you've heard at the start of this episode. Mostly

(01:44:18):
we talked about things in America, about how he lost
his phone on his journey we got him another one
at Walmart and about things like football and music. I
didn't record all of that because sometimes it's nice to
just talk to people. Hopefully it makes their dair a
bit brighter and gives them some information maybe they could help.
He did let me record a bit of an interview
and some of him singing. He was pretty guarded on

(01:44:40):
the recording, but as you can hear in this clip,
we had a good time when we weren't recording.

Speaker 27 (01:44:54):
Up up.

Speaker 10 (01:44:59):
You know it's journally is it going on yelling gen length?

Speaker 24 (01:45:03):
But Molly, it's going off, not going lengthy, and let
me see Ian for this sky and me I'm pre
my mama says something push free and glow and read
for them, say might smile them, No normals do and
read beIN gonna talk.

Speaker 10 (01:45:17):
Can I watch me? Hey man? Grateful man, grateful? I
went not and go my smile. Yeah.

Speaker 24 (01:45:26):
Once there is life. God, I want to give you
everything for some fune. Yeah, love suck pick up to
job me a car. I got to eat and come back.
I'm seeing Yeah, man, that's it one love.

Speaker 10 (01:45:40):
Oh that was beautiful. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm Joseph.

Speaker 7 (01:45:44):
And asked him about some of the stuff we spoke
about before, but he didn't want to share it.

Speaker 24 (01:45:48):
Yeah, that's the whole testimony, Me and you and God
have to go into church for that.

Speaker 10 (01:45:53):
But I'm gonna give you that the next time.

Speaker 7 (01:45:55):
Okay, buddy, all right, just experienced a lot of personal
harm from conflict back home in Jamaica. I had a
difficult journey here with his five year old son.

Speaker 10 (01:46:03):
Yeah, it's rough. It's rough out there, man, you know
it's rough.

Speaker 7 (01:46:06):
How did you come like you come? I asked him
how his young son had dealt with the journey. It's
not a safe or easy one for an adult, let
alone for a little child.

Speaker 24 (01:46:14):
It's like he's just kind of scary, broll he pulled you.

Speaker 1 (01:46:19):
Yeah, it's good.

Speaker 10 (01:46:20):
You have my energy inside.

Speaker 1 (01:46:23):
That's good.

Speaker 10 (01:46:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:46:24):
Are you how's he finding it here in the camp?

Speaker 10 (01:46:27):
Oh? Yeah, that camp. I don't know why. That guy
is just like me.

Speaker 24 (01:46:31):
We just don't make anything better us. Yeah, what's it's
working here? Because you guys give it a strength and
supporting us.

Speaker 7 (01:46:39):
You know, Joseph wanted me to know that he wasn't
giving up his home. He loves Jamaica, but he also
wants a better life for his son.

Speaker 24 (01:46:46):
It's not that, it's not that. It's not like I'm
giving away my home. My home is a good place. Yeah, yeah,
it's a good island, nice place to be.

Speaker 7 (01:46:55):
Of course, his perspective is very common, and it's one
that often gets left out of reporting. Coming to the
USA is a very hopeful act. It's not abandoning your
family or your home. It's trying to make their lives better,
in your life livable. Joseph was quite guided with this story,
and that's fine. It's his to share as much as
little as he wants. I came to the USA without

(01:47:16):
having to get persecuted or hurt, and people who don't
look like me should have that same right as well. Sadly,
coming to the USA is also scary and confusing, even
for me with three university degrees and all the intersectional
privilege I have and fifteen years living here, and I've
recently minted US passport. Now, I worried for years that
maybe I'd made a mistake on a form or missed

(01:47:38):
some kind of deadline. Speaking of deadlines, what none of
the migrants could tell us, what they all wanted to
ask about, was exactly what was happening to them as
Title forty two expired. A Congolese lady asked me if
her passport would be confiscated. A lady from Senegal asked
if she needed to pay a bribe like the one
she'd paid in Mexico. It wasn't really clear at first

(01:47:58):
if these people were being detained and under what process
they were being received. Would they be sent back to
Mexico and a Title forty two repatriated under Biden's interpretation
of Title eight, or given the right to plead their
case with international and US law suggests it should be
able to CBP made people sit in lines all day
with no indication of when they would be taken to

(01:48:19):
the porta Entry for processing. Sometimes I heard people saying
if everyone didn't sit down, there will be nobody process
that day. But the only food, water, and medical attention
available to the migrants was that which could be passed
through the wall, and they had to get out of
their lines to receive this aid. I'll let Kaber describe
what this looked like.

Speaker 8 (01:48:38):
And they had people waiting in lines that you had
to sit in a line and sign spot and but
it wasn't always clear if these how those lines actually
worked because they would kind of take people for some
lots of places. I think they might have been prioritizing
from children, people with some kind of medical needs or

(01:48:58):
something like that that you would never know when they
were going to come, and we didn't seem to know
us that they were going to choused to take. We
assume we didn't know exactly we were taking them, but
we assume they were taking the point of entry in
Senna Secret, which is beout a mile away, and so
moment always happened when they come and get a group
is like three or four people from that group would
sprint over to the world because we still had their

(01:49:20):
phones and side people wasn't going to wait for us
to get the funds.

Speaker 7 (01:49:25):
One thing a lot of people we talked to shared
was that there was another camp, which we later found
house as many as eight hundred single men. It's fairly
usual to keep single men apart from families, but keeping
them in an inaccessible place without adequate food or water
is not usual. The camp was further west, and despite
repeated requests from myself and others, including those delivering aid,

(01:49:46):
we were not allowed to access it. One pair of
Jamaican twins. Both young men told me they had walked
up there and that things were very bad. People were
only given one small water bottom the granola bar every day,
they said. One person told me they'd heard people eating grass.
I asked CBP's press office for information on this, but
they didn't respond. Here's one clip of a man trying

(01:50:10):
to explain how bad things were there. It's hard to
communicate across language barriers, and with a war between you,
it's even harder. But I could tell he was very
concerned for the folks that we couldn't get to. Despite
myself and others trying, and me addressing this issue directly
and emails to CBP, I never got any response on
why people were not allowed to help the single men
in the other camp.

Speaker 10 (01:50:30):
Just not helping.

Speaker 28 (01:50:34):
What little water, chocold nothing else, No food, no water, blankets,
blows nothing.

Speaker 7 (01:50:51):
I'll go try and go up there. Even with these
camps being pretty desperate places, folks look after one another.
We spoke a lot with one lady who spoke English.
She was there with her own family, but she was
also looking after two Tagik children who'd come alone. Their
mother spoke a little English, so she relayed news to
the children by calling their mother and having her translated

(01:51:13):
for her children. Other folks took it upon themselves to
try and walk to the camp for single men with water,
and people constantly helped us find the owners of phone
by wandering through the rows of people sheltering under taps
and space blankets to look for people who had left
us their devices to charge. In Nucumber, a town an

(01:51:34):
hour or so east of San Diego, things were worse.
Cumber's home to a cute hotel, a lovely lake, a
hot spring, and an awful lot of big rugs. When
the border war was being built in Earnest before the
twenty twenty election, they skipped some of the harder areas.
Perhaps they figured it would be too hard to cross there,
it's not perhaps they wanted to maximize the mileage before

(01:51:54):
election day. Well it didn't help much, but either way,
for some reason, the wall just takes a little break
in her Cumber and this makes crossing marginally easier there. However,
the boulder fields, scorching hot days and cold nights make
it anything but easy. On Thursday night, the eleventh of May,
locals in a Cumber became aware that CBP were holding

(01:52:15):
people on a dirt road in the open desert, just
a few miles east of town and a few hundred
feet from the wall. The people held they didn't have
access to toilets, running water, or shelter. With every hour
that went past, the number of people grew. The biggest
camp soon held over a thousand people desperately trying to
scratch out a little shade in the desert. Other smaller

(01:52:35):
camps popped up. One was apparently in someone's yard, and
the people of this tiny desert town sod about helping
as best they could. Soon they were joined by volunteers
from all over the county. Katie was one of those volunteers.
She doesn't live in a cumber but her friends do
and her family sometimes spends time there. Once she heard
about what was happening, she knew she had to help.

(01:52:57):
I let her describe her feelings after she saw the
posts on, and then drove out to Kumba to see
what she could do to help.

Speaker 25 (01:53:04):
At first, I was just super touched by the activation
and the carrying, and my son was asleep, comfortable in
his car seat, you know, in our Mercedes van, and
my husband is still trying to get citizenship after being

(01:53:29):
here since he was two years old. So and we're
married and he pays taxes. And when I saw our
friends activating, I just told him tomorrow's Mother's Day and
I need to come back here, and it's not safe

(01:53:50):
for you here. So when I first arrived, I thought
it was kind of odd that everything was organized around
a random road that has a gate, and there were
five only five border patrol at the time, and about

(01:54:17):
that was a larger camp. So I want to say
at least eight hundred people, maybe a thousand. I didn't
see them all because many of them were received their
donations and the assistance and went back to their shelters.

Speaker 7 (01:54:37):
A few days after the migrants arrived, I camped out
in Hucumber. I was cold in my sleeping bag at
night and dizzy in the sun in the day. It's
not a place where you'd want to be stuck outside
the law, but it's a place where fifteen hundred or
so people were held for days, little more than the
shelters they built out of career certain mesquite to protect
their families from the elements. They slept on the dirt

(01:54:57):
or in cardboard boxes left over from the foodolunteers fed
them and under whatever folks and tiny desert count could
find to give them. By the time I arrived, the
migrants were gone and volunteers were cleaning up. The landscape
was dotted with impressively constructed brush shelters. Volunteers from her
Cumba set up tables to distribute food, blankets, water, and clothing.

(01:55:20):
Other volunteers stayed away from the camp itself and spent
time packing things into individual sizes, perhaps combining hats and
socks and maybe a toy for child in one bag,
or breaking down costco packages of snacks into individual portions.
It's not necessarily the most rewarding task, but it's an
important one. I asked Marissa, another volunteer who had previously
worked in San Diego for the Forest Service, what she

(01:55:42):
felt when we were cleaning out some of those shelters
together a couple of days later.

Speaker 29 (01:55:46):
I don't know the best way to say this, but
what hit me deeper was when this might seem strange,
but when I saw women's sanitary napkins.

Speaker 26 (01:55:59):
Or the diaper or.

Speaker 29 (01:56:02):
The babies like it was kind of like a fabric
padded crib basinet type thing that suddenly hit me on
a deeper level. Would make me emotional because it's like
then you start to realize, like, wow, what if that
was me and my child or I'm not a mother,

(01:56:25):
but I can only imagine what that must be like
for them to be going through these things as a
as a woman, being on your period and being out
and not having anything, you know, going to the bathroom
out there. What do you use when you don't have
those supplies?

Speaker 4 (01:56:44):
So yeah, it just.

Speaker 29 (01:56:50):
That was when it hit me deeper and I knew
I was doing the right thing by being out there
and helping in whatever way I could. I don't when
it comes to the politics side of it, when it
comes to like legality and just different aspects of it.

(01:57:10):
In that way, I don't have necessarily an opinion one
way or another. I'm not educated enough to feel like
I can argue one way or another or defend one
position or another. I went out there purely for my
love of humanity, and I think being able to support

(01:57:31):
in whatever way I can that was the way that
I felt like I could serve and be a support.

Speaker 7 (01:57:37):
Katie hadn't expected to meet migrants at the camp when
she first showed up, She knew it was important not
to flog the camp with volunteers, and the help was
needed packaging and preparing aid drops, which she was happy
to do. But in the end she traveled up to
the camp with a friend who spoke Portuguese so they
could help translate and distribute supplies. I asked her what
it was like to see the supplies she'd purchased a

(01:57:57):
few hours before end up in the hands of people
who but you needed them.

Speaker 25 (01:58:01):
They don't even have a grocery store in Hukumba. They
have one mini mart with nothing in it, and that
was sold out the first day. So these people who

(01:58:22):
we would look at without a lot of resources, passing
the abundance of what they actually have, well, I saw
a lot of families there. I could tell that there
were leaders within the group because they were helping organize
as much as the volunteers were. And unfortunately there was

(01:58:45):
language barriers, you know, and so those that could speak
multiple languages, whether they were border crossers or volunteers, were
together in it and or and that was part of
that organization that I'm talking about, you know. And it

(01:59:08):
was actually a very calm scene when we first came
up I saw my son's hat that I donated and
a little boy hugging this jaguar stuffed animal, and the
jaguar was really significant to my friend and I when
we found it. So it was really touching just to

(01:59:31):
like see the things that we were bringing being literally
being distributed, like sometimes when you think you're helping. I
worked for a door to door campaign when I was
in my teens and I got fifty percent of what
I raised, and it was like disheartening, and you're like, oh,

(01:59:53):
this is how it works. And in this case, money
that I directly you spent on resources that were needed
was going directly to the people.

Speaker 7 (02:00:07):
In all likelihood, people crossed in a specific spot because
someone dropped them there telling them it would be easy.
In fact it was anything but people die crossing around here.
In the dirt around Cucumber, I found discarded flight circtineries
and documents from Turkey, Nicaragua, Columbia, Mexico. There were also
little children's toys, shoes, and hundreds of empty water bottles

(02:00:28):
which we diligently picked up. But none of the more
than one thousand people who the Boarder Patrol held in
this camp had planned for what they got, which was
several days being detained in the desert by CBP with
intefficient water, no shelter, and very little food, and no
information on what was happening or how long they could
expect to be there. Sadly didn't get there in time

(02:00:49):
to speak to any of them. I was in Arizona
looking for border vigilantes and wondering what CBP had been
doing to migrants there where they have the full support
of local law enforcement and a large percentage of the
aging population. To my surprise, he didn't find much. It
seems like most people had crossed in the San Diego
County area. Many had flown or walked to Tijuana. Of course, migrants,

(02:01:10):
just like us, have accessed the news and to weather
forecast and maps. Crossing in Arizona, a place known for
cruelty and very hot weather, doesn't make any sense when
California offers a better political and weather climate, and with
the mixed messages coming out of immigration law, these folks
may not have been intending to evade border patrol, but
to come to the USA and take their legal right
to claim asylum. I spoke to Sam, a volunteer with

(02:01:33):
extensive on the ground experience in humanitarian crises about what
he'd seen at the camp.

Speaker 1 (02:01:39):
Oh, my name is Sam Schultz.

Speaker 7 (02:01:41):
He said, many of the people who found themselves in
Cucumber had likely been told by people smugglers, but this
was an easy way into the US. In the end,
it was anything but.

Speaker 30 (02:01:50):
They I mean, I know they didn't expect that they
organic waltz across the border at a normal check station,
but they thought it was going to be.

Speaker 1 (02:01:57):
They were sold in bill the goods.

Speaker 30 (02:01:58):
So let's put it back, Yes, that's it, And so
I mean, I feel sorry for anybody who's take advantage
of all like that. But most of the people that
I met again who are not Colombians, were of the
wealthier side of the on their countries. I met Tomspecks,
some Kazakis, a bunch of people from India, a couple
of Pakistani guys, minery.

Speaker 1 (02:02:20):
I mean, they didn't get here cheap.

Speaker 7 (02:02:23):
The wall behind the people in Hookumba cost twenty five
million dollars a mile. On average. The border patrol agent
drove around in f one to fifty rapped to trucks
that started eighty thousand dollars and each make a starting
salary of over sixty thousand dollars in their first year.
Surveillance towers that dot the desert, including one which provided
a tiny scrap of shade to migrants to restic under

(02:02:44):
its solar panels, can cost a million dollars apiece, but
people in the Cumba received only one small water bottle
each day despite the punishing weather. Although Customs and Border
Protection did not seem to make any plan to shelter
migrants in a cumber, they did plan to have contractors
paid forty dollars an hour to take them away. I

(02:03:04):
found a job advert for a Southwest Border Transportation and
security officer at ISS Action Security. The agency photograph transporting
migrants in Hakumba. The job posting, which was posted two
weeks before the end of Title forty two, has a
description that includes patting down all detainees and applying appropriate
restraints prior to boarding vehicles. The process through its migrants

(02:03:29):
become detainees normally involves processing which had not been done
in Nucumber, But it seems that presumption of ineligibility announced
on the day Title forty two ended came into effect here.
This might seem a minor distinction, but it's important It
means that people have to file a defensive asylum claim
and not an affirmative one. They have to plead why
they shouldn't be deported rather than why they have a

(02:03:50):
right to stay. Many of the people who have been
trying to cross before the end of Title forty two,
like Diana, because they felt they would face a less
serious penalty. Many of them flew to Twinea. I walked
from further south in Mexico or even in Central America.
I likely spent their entire savings on a trip to
the gap in the wall near Heucumber that ended with
them being held by border patrol in the open desert.

(02:04:11):
Was next to nothing in the way of shelter, sanitation,
or sustenance. As a way to quantify this, I want
a reference to UCSD US Immigration Policy Center report apparently
had some pretty problematic practices, but anyway, these are results
from its survey. When asked whether border patrol gave them
enough water for the day, over half of the asylum

(02:04:33):
seekers that we interviewed, approximately fifty three percent said no.
Border patrol distributed one water bottle to each migrant in
the morning. When asked whether border patrol gave them enough
food for the day, All of the asylum seekers said no.
Border patrol did not distribute any food. When asked whether
border patrol provided adequate sanitation such as toilets, all of

(02:04:55):
the asylum seekers that we interviewed, meaning one hundred percent,
said no. Bordert troll provided one porter body for the
entire encampment. When asked where the border patrol provided adepriate shelter,
such as shade to protect them from the sun, all
of the asylum seekers that we interviewed said no. Border
patrol did not provide any shelter. When asked whether border

(02:05:16):
patrol provided blankets to keep them warm at night, all
but one of the asylum seekers we interviewed said no.
Border patrol provided blankets some migrants, but the overwhelming majority,
did not receive blankets. Altogether, two thirds of the asylum
seekers we interviewed said that they agree or strongly agree
with the statement. If I did not receive food and

(02:05:37):
water from volunteers, I would not get enough food and
water from border patrol to survive. These aren't exaggerations, as
we'll see, several migrants did come very close to losing
their lives in the five or more days that CBP
detained people out in the open along the border. Medical

(02:06:02):
incidents in this kind of attention are far from uncommon.
A lawsuit filed against Customs of Border Protection by the
Southern Border Communities Coalition regarding their actions this week, stated
that quote, many migrants have fallen into medical distress because
of the conditions, and CVP has been slow to provide
access to medical attention, often only responding at the insistence
of advocates. As a result, one woman suffered life threatening allergies,

(02:06:26):
a child suffered an epileptic seizure, and a man suffered
an unattended infection on his leg. Medical attention was slow
to arrive, and when it did arrive, it was often insufficient. Kay,
but describe the conditions they saw a couple of days
after the end of Title forty two.

Speaker 8 (02:06:41):
That's really the partct that hard inter state. The conditions
there were not safe or sanitary. I guess this is
sort of related to medical issues, but there was that's been,
you know, to their credit. A suspect has been reported
in the media that there was a single portable toilet

(02:07:02):
for anywhere from I guess there's probably a twilet to
four hundred people there. I heard a couple of different
citations of how often this toilet is serviced and cleaned
and the waste removed anywhere from once or twice a
week to once every week or two weeks. Either way,
that's not remotely sufficient for four hundred people using the

(02:07:25):
bathroom multiple times a day in this single portable like
just a construction site toilet. It was right next to
the phone charging station on the other side of the wall,
and I would just feel sick if I got if
I sit too close to it. It was really vile.
It was not safe. It is not a way for

(02:07:46):
people to be helping. And I do know, I think
a lot of thankfully people stop using it, but then
they don't have any you know, a privacy or that
that's still not you know, a sanitary situation to be
in since I mean, they don't have a future space anywhere.
So that's definitely one of the way is that people

(02:08:07):
intention to help safe.

Speaker 7 (02:08:08):
He's Samara who hear more from tomorrow describe being another
medical incident.

Speaker 14 (02:08:12):
And the call that I got this morning was of
a woman who was rushed out because she had an
emergency situation, taken to the hospital. The hospital didn't know
what to do with her, so they sat her right
back here in the middle of the night, in the
middle of the night, and they brought her here. She
doesn't have any documents. CBP didn't get a chance to
process her yet, so she doesn't even have any proof

(02:08:35):
that she actually came to the port of entry and
try to seek asylum. And she was just sleeping right here.
And she has burns all over her body, has an infection.
I read the the seven medications that they gave her,
and she speaks daddy. She's from avon Astan. Her husband
got taken by the Taliban, and she escaped, running for

(02:08:56):
her life. And she's here and she has sunburns all
over her face and she has nowhere to go. She
thought she was still detained. She actually thought she was
still detained. She was just trying to get back to
the other side of the border. She thought she was
still in Mexico. No one explained anything to her. They
brought her back here in the middle of the night,
and she was freezing, and so we brought That's why

(02:09:18):
I came out here. I talked to her. The other
folks who were out here didn't know why she was
just sleeping here, and I came out and tried to
translate it, and now we have her at a hotel.

Speaker 7 (02:09:29):
Cable witness one of the emergencies described in the Southern
Border Communities Coalition lawsuit when they visited the camp. He's
him describing it in.

Speaker 8 (02:09:37):
Terms of you know, medical care as well. Like I said,
one of the parts of the aid operation, I was
my n most people. I think there's a permonation both
of people who were you know and the true medicine
as well as people who were like nurses volunteering their
prime and mostly taking care of just kind of retained

(02:09:57):
first aid for the most part. There was a situation
where someone was having an ellergic reaction, a fairly severe one,
and and I happen to carry an EpiPen, so I
have simply give that to the one of one of
the stegematics, and then they eventually did call this person.

(02:10:23):
The reaction got severe enough that it was an an
hour or so later at that nine one was called,
I assumed by one of the volunteers, and uh Amber
Villaince and Border Patrol came to open the gate and
and bring this person in the country. They did eventually
treat her, but it was a very it was a
long time. I connunced it acceptance, which is someone as

(02:10:47):
someone who has anaphlexis reactions food and it's had that
happened many times in their life. That is absolutely terrifying.
I cannot imagine how terrifying it would be to be
experiencing uh A her wife priding situation, and when you
worked for APPS and you know there's no authority about
many parents that you're there, and I don't know if

(02:11:08):
she would have been able to get help if there
have been volunteers in the s while especially once.

Speaker 7 (02:11:14):
We're training, where volunteers weren't. Things were worse in Texas.
And Rees Alvarez, an eight year old girl born in
Panama to or On daur and parents, died in CBP custody.
Roselle Rees, the girl's father, told NBC News that they
gave authorities documents about the girl's medical conditions congenital heart

(02:11:37):
disease and sickle cell anemia while they were in immigration custody.
They said that a doctor there examined danideath and that
she had contracted the flu. Alvarez, her mother said she
spoke to both detentional authorities and medical personnel at the
station multiple times to explain her daughter was complaining of
pain and shortness of breath and that she was getting worse.

(02:12:00):
I'll quite the next part directly from the NBC story.
They never listened to me, she said. Veas said his
daughter was in a lot of pain, a lot of pain.
I begged them to call an ambulance, Alvarez said, adding
the authorities told her the girl's condition wasn't serious enough
to warrant calling an ambulance. Alvarez said her daughter begged

(02:12:22):
authorities as well, telling them she could not breathe from
her nose or mouth. Alvarez says that eventually her daughter
lost consciousness and died in my arms. She said, authorities
took the girl from her arms and put her on
the floor trying to revive her. My daughter died there

(02:12:42):
in the station, she said. Avare said she feels authorities
did not do enough to help her little girl. My
daughter is a human being. They had to take care
of her, she said. Despite what you might have heard
on the network news, the asylum process is anything but easy.
I've had several visas, a green card and a US passport,

(02:13:03):
and I can completly tell you the only easy way
I've ever seen to come here is to be very rich.
But even among the convoluted bureaucratic mess that is US immigration,
the asylum process stands out as both rigorous and complicated.
Asylum is a process by which people unable or unwilling
to return to their country because of persecution or a
well founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, politics,

(02:13:29):
or membership of a particular social group may remain in
a safe country. From the eleventh of May onwards, migrants
at the border were assumed ineligible for asylum. If they
cross between points of entry, they must enter the defensive
asylum process to prevent themselves from being deported. What this
means for people we heard from earlier is that they
are now taken for whatever God forsake and holding area they'rein,

(02:13:53):
and bust to a processing facility where they are interviewed
by an asylum officer to determine if they have a
credible fear of persecution. They may need to provide a
translator if there is an interviewing agent who speaks their language,
and if they're determined to have a credible fear they're
told to check in with the US Customs and Immigration
Office and sometimes given a notice which may or may
not be dated to appear in court. My colleague Joe

(02:14:15):
tried to get into one of these hotels to talk
to one of the people we'd spoken to at the border,
but he was pretty quickly shut down.

Speaker 15 (02:14:22):
Yeah, how you doing either, I'm a freelance journalist. I'm
here reporting for my boss, James Stout, he's at iHeartMedia.
I'm wondering if you're letting media in here to see
the causa.

Speaker 10 (02:14:33):
Okay, also the act you guys and I took the
strict any of this area here? Okay.

Speaker 1 (02:14:38):
Well, if you're going to set up, it has to
be on the side of the line.

Speaker 10 (02:14:40):
Because they have a line of traffic.

Speaker 23 (02:14:42):
Yeah, and it's very dangerous for your ka.

Speaker 10 (02:14:44):
So like beyond here, past the college. Yeah, from here
over okay, cool, I'll.

Speaker 31 (02:14:48):
Say how you're way.

Speaker 16 (02:14:49):
Thank you.

Speaker 7 (02:14:50):
One of the folks we'd met was able to stay
in touch for our WhatsApp and share the hotel rules
with us. They were pretty strict. Migrants are confined to
their rooms, they can't have visitors, and they can't even
order food delivery from the hotel where they're hosted by
Catholic charities. Migrants need to get to their sponsor in
the United States if they have one. If they don't
have one, they can be sent just about anywhere. I've

(02:15:12):
heard of East African folks having ended up in Alaska,
for example. Once they get to where they're going to be,
they check in with US Customs and Immigration Services in
their new location, and they're given a special phone which
also tracks their movements. They may have a DNA sample
take and in addition to fingerprints. Later, sometimes years later,
they attend a court hearing or two to determine their

(02:15:34):
eligibility to stay. I've heard of lawyers charging from five
thousand dollars to twelve thousand dollars for these hearings, and
nonprofit legalists and services are totally overwhelmed. At the moment,
the system's massively backed up, and court dates are being
given as far out as twenty twenty seven already. They
may or may not be able to work during that period,

(02:15:54):
and under the table work is getting harder and harder
to find. Even if they do find work on less
than minut wage, it can be very hard to say
about five thousand dollars for a lawyer. A Migrants who
can't find nonprofit help are at a significant disadvantage when
it comes to their asylum hearings again private security contractors,
this time from Allied. We're transporting migrants to the hotel

(02:16:15):
and guarding it. Like CBP, the private contractors you guard,
transport and incarce rate migrants or rely on the broken
in immigration system to make money. Unlike CBP, the agents
themselves aren't well paid. Nineteen dollars an hours are going
rate for Allied, not much higher than San Diego's sixteen
dollars and thirty cents minimum wage. But the company itself

(02:16:36):
is huge. It's the third last year as private employer
in North America after Walmart and Amazon. Allied guards are
at prisons, airports, and shopping malls across America, and it's
alleged that some are underpaid, in sufficiently trained, and improperly vetted.
The company grosses over twenty billion dollars, and it's affiliates
of frequent political donors. All across this story, you'll see

(02:16:59):
this Allied Security iss action, security people, smugglers, customs and
border protection contractors who build the wall pieces, and contractors
who install the wall pieces, General Atomics, who sell CBP drones,
and the Israelian American companies who sell the surveillance technology.

Speaker 1 (02:17:15):
To the government.

Speaker 7 (02:17:17):
All these people make money, but the poorest people in
the world are the only ones losing money, and sometimes
they're lives when they cross our southern border. Tomorrow we're
hear from some of the people who made no money
and looked after the migrants and will continue to support
them through the asylum process.

Speaker 17 (02:17:43):
Try and carpool, try and shove into cars as best
you can, just so that we don't have a mile long.

Speaker 13 (02:17:50):
Line of cars.

Speaker 17 (02:17:52):
We have trash bags, we have gloves, we have things
that we're bringing up there, so what we have cars
of you can get all of that out of.

Speaker 10 (02:18:03):
Once we pull over.

Speaker 29 (02:18:04):
We're also setting up a couple.

Speaker 10 (02:18:06):
Of pop ups.

Speaker 7 (02:18:06):
Hoocomber, California, is a tiny town. You've probably never heard
of it. It's actually really charming. There's a hot spring
and a gorgeous hotel, a few stores selling trinkets that
kind of thing. There's a lovely lake fed by the spring,
and on this sunbake morning, there are about fifty people
outside an old petrol station nervously pounding bottles of water,
applying sunscreen, and getting ready to head out to the

(02:18:27):
desert to clear up the ad hoc migrant camp that
has held as many as fifteen hundred people out in
the open when Title forty two ended and Border Patrol
made no plans to keep them anywhere. It was a
diverse bunch of people hidden beneath sun hats. There's an
Australian film producer who was at a conference in Orlando
and booked a fly over, a grad student painter. The
folks who were in the Hookumber Hotel who organize this

(02:18:48):
whole thing, they're friends from the hospitality industry in San Diego.
There were students and mums and dads and about the
entire population of this tiny desert town. There were also
two form international aid workers who are in a tower
where you can look at the desert, which is actually
a much cooler thing than it sounds. And there's also
a museum of boulders right next to it. You should
probably check them out during the area. I spent the

(02:19:10):
day helping out in Acumber after the refugees, some of
them in handcuffs, have been taken by private contractors to
be processed by CBP's Office of Field Operations. We met
at a petrol station in the middle of town. The
space where the pumps should be was filled with tons,
and I do mean tons of bottled water, masks, hand
sanitized or and other necessary supplies. When I'd arrived the

(02:19:32):
night before around ten pm, the eerie green and yellow
lights reflecting from the roof had lit up the palace
of water like some kind of giant lava lamp, and
driving across the desert, the town looked like it was glowing.
The town certainly has had a bit of a glow
up in the last few years. Three business partners purchased
their cumber hot Springs Hotel, a down in the mouth
property that had once been a glamorous desert resort, and

(02:19:55):
they've been restoring the place for nearly two years. Inadvertently,
they also purchased a lot of land and a few
other rundown buildings in a town that were sold as
a lot with the hotel. It was in one of
these buildings, the old gas station, that they set up
a de facto mutual aid hubbo almost overnight. The hotel's
not finished yet, and they probably didn't make much progress
on it during the week when they were feeding more

(02:20:16):
than a thousand people in the desert. The town's lake,
fed by a natural spring, an old bath house used
to be attractions. Today the bathhouse of roof has fallen off,
but it still makes a pretty cool coincert venue, and
the whole town offers commanding views of the border wall,
which sadly is only a couple of hundred yards from
the main street. When I arrived in Cucumber, everything was close.

(02:20:38):
The mini mark was sold out, the hotel was still
being worked on, and the hotel kitchen was churning out
food for volunteers at the clean up effort. I asked Marissa,
one of the volunteers I met that day, about her
first impressions on arriving at the meeting point.

Speaker 29 (02:20:52):
I was incredibly impressed by what the people of Hukumber
and the hotel group of individuals that have organize this,
Like I couldn't believe seeing their donation depot in that
old car wash, just to how well organized everything was,
and that they provided so much for the volunteers, and

(02:21:12):
they just the level of love and compassion and was Yeah,
it was an amazing opportunity to be part of very humbling.

Speaker 7 (02:21:21):
I've been there since late the night before after visiting
border crossings in California and Arizona, and Jeff, one of
the co owners a hotel kind you let me put
up my truck in some desert behind his house. Now,
I'm a person who enjoys sleeping outside, and I do
it as often as I can. I try and camp
police once a month. But that night I was cold,
even underneath my down blanket, and I couldn't help but

(02:21:43):
think of how desperate it must have been to spend
nearly a week out there with nothing but in my
last base blanket and some thorny bushes to keep you warm.
It's certainly not the welcome that one would expect from
their richest nation on Earth, which had three years to repair.
For the day, Title forty two ended to get a
bit of background, or I spoke to Natalie.

Speaker 21 (02:22:01):
So the previous owner bought it at an auction, and
I don't think that the previous owner didn't realize how
much she was getting, and he kind of just like
neglected a bunch of it, you know. And then he
was older, and so he finally sold off the hotel.
He thought he was just buying the hotel, but he
buying all the land as well, so they when they
bought the hotel, they acquired all the land and they're

(02:22:24):
actually putting money into it and fixing everything up, which
is really wonderful.

Speaker 7 (02:22:28):
The hotel in Lake and hot Spring really are wonderful.
But the scene that had played out there on the
eleventh of May with anything but within a short period
of time, more than a thousand people of all ages
and nationalities will be held in the open desert and
left defend large for themselves. I let Natalie describe the
space there in.

Speaker 21 (02:22:44):
There's lots of cactuses everywhere, so there's environmental like a
watch out where you're walking that it's hot. It's hot
in the day and really cold at night. Because it's
the high desert, there can be gusts of wind that
can just take over, get dust in your eyes, your hair,

(02:23:04):
everything is. You're just filthy and lack of food. I mean,
there's no resources. You're in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 7 (02:23:10):
I talked to a lot of the volunteers, many of
whom have been in the desert for Mediet Week. It'd
first been made aware of the impending humanitarian crisis late
on Thursday night, but one of the people working on
the renovation of the Hotsprings Hotel got a call about it.
Within a few hours, the hotel z owners and all
their staff were running what became very nearly the only
source of food, shelter, and water for more than a
thousand people trapped and held in the desert by CBP.

(02:23:34):
I spoke to Sam, another volunteer, to get a sense
of response. Now, Sam is a kind of guy who
just looks like he's a home in the desert, his
wire brim hat, boots, and long cleaved shirt and pants.
Told me he spent plenty of days under the baking
sun out here, and his redness with an isoprople alcohol
spray to disinfect people's boots after walking in an area
that was likely covered in human shit, told me he'd

(02:23:57):
been around one or two situations like this in the past.

Speaker 30 (02:24:00):
I spent a great deal of my life as his
second career, working for in developmental relief logistics in Southeast Asia,
mainly working with large age organizations for example, World Food Program,
Doctors without Borders.

Speaker 1 (02:24:14):
Shoe units, many many different place things.

Speaker 7 (02:24:17):
In the context of that kind of experience, it's easy
to understand why people come to the United States, but
I asked Sam to put the situation here into perspective
for me. It's understandable that folks came to the US,
but why into a tiny desert town of five hundred people.

Speaker 30 (02:24:31):
These people were radically unprepared for what they were going
to go through because they were sold to BILLI Goods
by coyotes on the other side about what was going
to happen to them, you understand. So they had really
no idea what they were getting into at all. And
so there was not anything in the way of life
threatening situations for any of those people in any meaningful way,

(02:24:55):
a great deal of discomfort.

Speaker 1 (02:24:57):
It could have turned.

Speaker 30 (02:24:58):
Very badly at these people here had not stepped up
because the border patrol.

Speaker 1 (02:25:02):
Was completely overwhelmed.

Speaker 30 (02:25:04):
Yeah, and so there was never that bad of a
situation here compared to what I have seen in other
places in the past.

Speaker 7 (02:25:12):
A sound pointed out the migrants were now gone, but
we were still surrounded by times of supplies. But at
the time there was no way of knowing the scope
or scale of the need, and people reacted as best
they could.

Speaker 30 (02:25:23):
Actually, it was overkilled, but you had no way of
knowing right at the time.

Speaker 1 (02:25:28):
There's just no way to know. How do you know
ahead of time?

Speaker 30 (02:25:30):
You always ask for as much as you can get,
because why would you not.

Speaker 1 (02:25:34):
I mean, you never know.

Speaker 30 (02:25:35):
You don't know how many children with babies are on
the other side of that wall right now.

Speaker 1 (02:25:39):
Might be zero, might be five hundred. You have no idea,
you know.

Speaker 7 (02:25:43):
Before anyone knew how if this was going to end,
or really what even was going on, dozens of people
across the county decided to help. One of them was Katie.
Here she is describing some of the volunteers she worked alongside.

Speaker 25 (02:25:55):
There was a hard hodgepodge of people and as volunteers
and leading it were some of the owners of a
hotel out there and that was the main organizers. But
who showed up were people from the town, people that
I knew and recognized. There were some really devout, like

(02:26:20):
they're twenty four hours a day, and then there was
some coming in and out. But I met people from
all over the county and most of them answered the
call through instagram of the hotel.

Speaker 7 (02:26:37):
All those volunteers called their friends, who called their friends,
who gradually coordinated response. Natalie first became aware of this,
as many volunteers did, through an Instagram post by Melissa,
another the three co owners of the Comba Hotel. On
Thursday night, just as title forty two was ending, Natalie
saw the post and decided to help. At first, she
wanted to leave right then at one am as soon

(02:26:58):
as she'd seen the post, but often consulting her family,
she decided to make her own post, asking for people
to bring supplies that were needed. Soon she was overwhelmed
by the response.

Speaker 21 (02:27:08):
Yeah, I mean immediately, even at one in the morning,
I was getting messages because I posted it. That's when
I posted the story. I immediately got messages from front
say I'll bring a blanket over.

Speaker 5 (02:27:21):
What's your address? Yeah.

Speaker 21 (02:27:24):
Everyone just kind of rallied and started bringing supplies over,
collecting money as well. Some friends started collecting money and
then bought stuff and brought loads of food and things
to my house.

Speaker 7 (02:27:36):
Her husband ferried the supplies to Komba, where they were
joined by donations from all over the county in the
old petrol station. Like Natalie, Katie also saw a post
and immediately felt compelled to help. She called a friend
and some members of her family instead about raising funds
and buying supplies.

Speaker 25 (02:27:54):
So I met my friend at a cafe and in
that in the meantime, and I don't know how much
of this is really important. So in the meantime, I
text my mother and my two sisters who live on
the East Coast, and just it was late at night
for them, and I just said, I would love for

(02:28:17):
you to send prayers, because.

Speaker 5 (02:28:26):
That's something that I believe in.

Speaker 25 (02:28:30):
I believe in prayer or intention and thought reality. So
and some of it was just because I felt so touch,
like praying for the community that I love too. And

(02:28:53):
the next thing I know, like my venmo was blowing
up and there was one thousand dollars in my venmo
send from my family members. And so by the time
my friend arrived, we were like, let's go, and we
filled our car with Amazingly, we found like organic, there's

(02:29:15):
grocery outlet, right, So we found organic soup for you know,
dollars something a can, and we spent a few hundred dollars.
And the next morning we met early and we stopped
in El Cone on the way and we spent all
the rest on We went to three or four thrift
stores and bought every blanket and hat and baby carrier

(02:29:40):
because we have both focused on motherhood in our careers.

Speaker 7 (02:29:49):
I asked people I spoke to about a week later
how the experience had impacted them.

Speaker 21 (02:29:53):
It was overwhelming, just the way the community really came
around and supported the people in Cucumber that were just
finding help. You know, after we finished cleaning up, when
we were back at the gas station, the Amazon driver

(02:30:16):
was delivering, like I think he delivered three hundred and
fifty boxes, and so we had to open them up
and sort them, and there was so much food. I
think that it was insane amount of food, and it
was awesome. It was really cool just to see how

(02:30:36):
many people stabbed.

Speaker 32 (02:30:38):
Up and donated.

Speaker 7 (02:30:39):
I like some of the people I saw in Santa Sedro. Natalie, Katie,
Sam and Marissa are not part of an NGO or
a mutual aid collective. They're just people who wanted to help,
and that describes most of the people in Hucomber. Whether
some of them did have previous and regular volunteer experience
with excellent groups like Border Kindness. I asked Katie to
reflect on the mutual aid approach and the absence of massive,

(02:31:01):
multimillion dollar organizations.

Speaker 1 (02:31:03):
Yeah, wasn't there.

Speaker 25 (02:31:04):
Race, No, they weren't there. We were told that the
Red Cross couldn't come unless Border patrol called, and Border
patrol told us that they weren't allowed to call the
Red Cross.

Speaker 7 (02:31:15):
That's a pretty expanded The one institution that did show
support to people in ucumber was one that you might
not expect, given the support for this cruel immigration policy
by almost all the Democrats in DC. But things are
different when you can see the results of these policies
with your own eyes. Perhaps that's why I didn't see
a single elected official in my entire week at the border.
But one person I missed who everyone mentioned was a

(02:31:38):
lady who worked for California Senator Steve Pidea. I won't
name her as I don't have her permission, but hopefully
one day soon we'll be able to interview her. I'll
let Katie describe the role this woman played.

Speaker 25 (02:31:49):
There was someone from Steve Padia's team, and that's the
woman I rode with, and she was incredible. Her her
brother in law is the chef at the hotel, so
I think, I mean, she might have came anyway, but

(02:32:09):
she came faster and there was true connection and she
stood up to the border patrol and said, you know,
said we're allowed. We're here on behalf of the senator. So,
I mean I saw some like had had like arguments
about our right to be there, and most of us didn't.

(02:32:33):
Weren't paying attention to that. We were paying attention to
the people that we were, you know, around and no
one that was out there didn't believe that we should
be out there and that more help should be out there.

Speaker 7 (02:32:51):
Sadly, part of that familiarity with the system this woman
brought to the team also meant a familiarity with the
cruel and arbitrary nature of it. Katie says that they
had to organize for that as well.

Speaker 25 (02:33:02):
So my friend and I we ended up writing in
her truck, so in Steve Padia's Senator Padilla's assistant truck.
So we had the opportunity to ask some questions that
probably everyone out there wanted to know, including the migrants,

(02:33:25):
And it was like, what will happen in what's the
process from here? And how do you know that these
people are being tended to? And I literally heard her
on the phone getting as many bodies on the ground
to start going to those centers where they're being taken

(02:33:45):
to make sure that they were, that we would follow
them through the entire process as best possible, monitoring their
well cared for that they were well cared for as
well cared for as possible in a system and a

(02:34:08):
process like that.

Speaker 7 (02:34:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 25 (02:34:12):
Yeah, but she literally said they're going to be busted
off and putt in cages, and that they would do
their best to make sure that that no one was
split up and that everyone was fed, showered, and they

(02:34:34):
weren't allowed to bring anything with them, So a lot
of the cleanup was all of the things that everyone
donated that had to be left behind, including some of
the stuffed animals.

Speaker 7 (02:34:54):
For all the volunteers I spoke to, the chance to
be of service was empowering. Here's Natalie discussing that, Yeah.

Speaker 21 (02:35:00):
I mean, well, like and so many times do you
like feel overwhelmed with like so much suffering in this world,
and like what can one person do?

Speaker 10 (02:35:08):
You know?

Speaker 21 (02:35:08):
And so it did feel good that to actually see
an immediate impact, like I'm doing this and this is
a result, because sometimes you can just get discouraged, you know,
like we're just one person.

Speaker 32 (02:35:20):
What can we really do?

Speaker 21 (02:35:22):
And can we really make an impact and just seeing
that and being able to see directly how that one
person can impact, you know, can rally. Like the scene
how my friends came together, you know, went shopping, bought things,
gathered money, collected money. You know, my really good friend Sam,
she went to her local bar after she collected a

(02:35:45):
bunch of money, went and dropped stuff, supplies off at
my house. She was just down at her local bar
and just chatting with them and like, oh, what did
you do today, And so she told them, oh, I
collected money and I bought supplies, and then the people
She ended up collecting about two hundred more dollars at
the bar from people hearing her story. And so then

(02:36:06):
the next day she went and bought more supplies and
she actually ended up driving them out herself. She ended
up doing like three drips just from her own talking
to people and collecting. So just like the little impact
that you know, everyone just kind of coming together and
making a difference.

Speaker 7 (02:36:43):
Santas Dre a pretty diverse range of San Diegans came
to help. On the first night, I personally left at
about one in the morning after spending almost two hours
trying to leave but needing to get charge phones back
to their owners by loudly in Spanish and French, then English,
describing the backgrounds on the phone or the color of
their case. It wasn't a great system, and by the weekend,

(02:37:17):
Caber and others had seen that more help an organization
was needed and they decided to plan a response. He's
Caba describing how they prepared for that.

Speaker 8 (02:37:26):
Yeah, yeah, we met target near my area. Anxiety. Maybe
I'll just grab some I was paying attention to people
and what supplies they were saying was needed. A particular
store near me has like a wall of travel size

(02:37:46):
time prodestionally just scoop out one hundred hands and past
and things like that.

Speaker 7 (02:37:52):
Caber met up with some other members of a local
mutual aid group. I'll make sure to include donation links
for all the groups I've mentioned at the end of
this series, so please make sure to listen right through
to the end.

Speaker 8 (02:38:01):
I met up with him and he had just received
a bunch of donations through through mutually networks, so we
were not even more of a travel size I got
some truth Truth hygiene kits and guderate and and a
bunch of friends and papers because because the kids that
are between the walls don't really have actually do unfortunately,

(02:38:26):
so so that those were those went really fast and
so we got a whole bunch of bags of all
those kinds of supplies and then we drop down the
border from there.

Speaker 7 (02:38:35):
By the time they arrived, various organizations had organized areas
along the wall for different kinds of aid to be
passed through. Everything from clothes to food to medical supplies
and toilet paper was piled up given out the.

Speaker 8 (02:38:48):
Watch donations and you know, organized the toilet paper, food,
everything like that, and peopleould just come up to the
wall and if their family needed something, they would just
kind of point to it and were asked us if
we were able to, you know, if there was a
common languae there. So yeah, we just kind of you know,
do things as people needing them. I know that I
helped them out some prints and pads of paper and

(02:39:09):
those where those tons of kids all came running over
from the whole all the parts of the camp when
they heard that there was there were twys being given out.
So that was it was it was heartbreaking, but it
was also you know, it made me smile.

Speaker 7 (02:39:26):
Through smiled because of the need to use CBP one
and of course they need to stay in touch with
families back home. There was a constant and overwhelming demand
for phone charging. News reporters took phones back to charge
in their cars. Some people bought charge bricks and power strips,
and mutual aid groups wrote names on the back of
the phones using painters tape and sharpie so they wouldn't

(02:39:48):
get separated from their owners. By the second day it
was a better system, but on the first day it
was chaos. I let Kaber, who spent a whole day
charging phones, described the system that volunteers came up with
to mitigate that also a little bit.

Speaker 8 (02:40:01):
And obviously they couldn't charge their phones if they're just
in this kind of desert gap between between these walls
that doesn't you know, have any kind of amenities or anything.
So we had a system where they would pass the
phone through, and we had we would we would put

(02:40:21):
a piece of tape on it with their name and
give them a piece of tape with their name, the
same name, and then they would give us that if
they came back a couple hours later and give us
the tape back, and we would match their names and
in the phone, and and that was It worked well.

Speaker 10 (02:40:36):
Enough.

Speaker 8 (02:40:37):
I mean it was still extraordinarily chaotic process. I mean,
we had we always had at least one hundred phones
on our side of the wallet any given time, and
and some people had you know, some people had chargers,
some people didn't. Some people had Android or Samsung or
or the iPhones, and some people had wall adaptors, and

(02:40:58):
some people didn't have the wallet says, So we kind
of had to every phone that came through was we
had to find a way to get it, you know,
basically chained into the set of generators that we had,
which was do we have our power strips and we
have to write cables and and we have space on
those cables, and and I think it was it was
a bit of a puzzle the whole time. The only

(02:41:18):
part of it that really overwhelmed me was we did overload.
Someone brought a bunch of USBC power strips and we
blew out one of them, and so there was now
eight phones attached to it that I had to find
new spaces for. And I was just like that was

(02:41:39):
the really point where I was just I was just
frustrated by the you know, this whole situation. And in
addition to the fact that I'm just the phones were
plug that plug in the net strip had been charging
for who knows how long since that been is I
think short, sparticular or whatever happened to it.

Speaker 7 (02:41:57):
It was chaos, but it was a good nature chaos.
Over several days that migrants would attained in the open
with no shelter and inadequate sanitation, just about two miles
from the discount mall where you can buy cheap Ralpherend's
shirts if that's your jam. People showed up in ever
increasing numbers. The American Friends Service Committee helped organize volunteers
into groups to distribute food, package up wet white snacks, medicines,

(02:42:20):
give out tops, and do just about anything else that
they could, or anything else that they could fit into
ziploc bags. It could be passed through gaps in the wall.
At least people who had been immigrants themselves or who
were the children of immigrants were not to be numerous
among the volunteers. I spoke to one of them.

Speaker 23 (02:42:37):
My name is Lantai.

Speaker 33 (02:42:39):
I'm a part of Asian Soliday Collective, a grass with
organization here in San Diego. I've been cooming over here
since yesterday. I came here around five six yesterday, and
then I came back through here this morning and been
here since. I got home at twelve last night and
woke up, dropped my kid off, and came right back
with more supplies. I've been reaching out to family, friends

(02:43:00):
and community to help donate supplies and things like that, food, whatever,
whatever they may have.

Speaker 23 (02:43:06):
And I've pretty much been driving around city.

Speaker 33 (02:43:09):
And collecting from from folks that can't make it so
I could bring it down here myself.

Speaker 23 (02:43:14):
So that's what I've been doing.

Speaker 7 (02:43:15):
LUNCHA explain to me why it was so important to
show up my community.

Speaker 33 (02:43:20):
I'm pretty sure they they they're sympathetic to this because
I'm coming from I'm a first generation uh Cambodon American
here in the US, and when my parents and my
family fled their country, they went through this as well.
So somebody somewhere came and provided to support, provided to
aid the donations for them to be able to make

(02:43:42):
it to America to crossover, and able to provide out
here for for me growing up out here, you know.
So it's just I just sympathize with it, with the
whole thing. I mean, I mean, everybody should should should
feel the same way. Because somewhere down the line, our
families went through similar situations. If you're not an indigenous,
then then then your family somewhere down down to history

(02:44:04):
went through the same thing.

Speaker 23 (02:44:05):
So you know that everybody should have a heart for
this and be able.

Speaker 33 (02:44:07):
To come down here and and and and donate or
donate their time or supplies, whatever the case may be.

Speaker 23 (02:44:12):
You know, come out in help.

Speaker 7 (02:44:13):
He also explained why he feels it's important to encourage
empathy for refugees.

Speaker 33 (02:44:18):
Well, it's it's you have to, you have to, you
have to be keep in mind, there's there's this families
out here, there's this young children, there's babies. I mean,
it takes a lot for for for a mother to
pick up her infant child and to leave where she's
coming from.

Speaker 23 (02:44:31):
So that just says a lot about where.

Speaker 33 (02:44:33):
What's going on where she's coming for for her to
to to trek and to go through this, to to
sit out here in the cold and stuff.

Speaker 23 (02:44:39):
Because if she would rather endure her endure this.

Speaker 33 (02:44:41):
And and and and take the risk and the chances
that means where she's coming from is not as you know,
she's willing to take that risk.

Speaker 7 (02:44:50):
Latest that night I saw an Afghan family come to
help the other Afghan families. Their kids talk to other
Afghan kids separated by the border war. They passed crayons
to the war and coloring books, and the little daughter
asked her dad if she could give her watch to
the Afghan girl being held in the camp. Her dad said,
of course, I don't record or photograph people's children, certainly

(02:45:10):
not without asking, and I wasn't about to interrupt them,
but it was a very sweet moment. The father of
the family had worked in the Army Corps of Engineers.
He'd been to the border before to build this section
of the wall. I didn't really need to ask him
how it felt to see folks stuck behind it, but
it said a lot that he and his family had
taken the time to drive down, buy bags and supplies,

(02:45:31):
and then come face to face with the people who
needed them and hand them out. Like dozens of other folks,
they tried to pass whatever they could through little gaps
in the wall to make someone's day a little bit brighter.
Another volunteer who we heard from yesterday came from a
local group called Partner Hermira had been at the wall
since five in the morning, and it was getting on
for five pm. When we spoke. I normally asked people

(02:45:53):
what they ate for breakfast, just to tune in the
volume levels on the recorder a bit, but I'm going
to include it this time, just so you can see
how long her day had been and how hot she've
been working.

Speaker 14 (02:46:01):
Okay, do you know what you want me to say? Second,
we have a breakfast again. I don't remember anymore French
showsts FRESD shosts, but my name is Hamaira y Safi,
and I'm with a Partnership for the Advancement of New
Americans PANA, or an organization in San Diego that fights
for the full inclusion of refugees and those who come

(02:46:22):
from refugee producing countries.

Speaker 7 (02:46:24):
We spoke about the emergency that had kept our hair
all day.

Speaker 14 (02:46:27):
So in terms of this morning, I mean I was,
I was, you know, very concerned because there was an
asylum seeker who had an emergency and was rushed out
of this place where now, like for example, where we
are at right now, is people who are being detained
and the most inhumane way possible. This is going against

(02:46:49):
CBP's own protocols and policies as to how they're being
detained with no they're not giving them food, they're not
giving them bathrooms, they're not giving them basic, basic things
that they need to survive. And so that's why the
community is out here today to do that.

Speaker 7 (02:47:08):
Sadly, not everyone who showed up at the makeshift detention
facility was showing up in solidarity. Local anti migrant activist
and blogger Roger Ogden showed up.

Speaker 16 (02:47:17):
Now.

Speaker 7 (02:47:17):
Ogden might be familiar to some listeners due to his
attempts to host he called a Patriot picnic and his
advocacy for the removal of the historic murals in Chicago Park.
Ogden organized gatherings in the park in twenty seventeen and
twenty eighteen, and they resulted in a huge and overwhelming
community response to defend the park. And this time Olden
decided to keep to himself, but Natalie ran into some

(02:47:39):
people who weren't quite as shy about their opinions.

Speaker 21 (02:47:42):
You know, a lot of the people in the community
are you know, lower income, and you know, they are
struggling in their own struggle on their and so I know,
you know, maybe I don't know, it's like for those people,
I don't know, like, yeah, it's hard.

Speaker 5 (02:48:04):
I don't know.

Speaker 21 (02:48:05):
I mean towards the end, like when I was walking
to my car, this man, this man in a car
like pulled up and he's excuse me, what's going on
over there? And I was like, Oh, we're gathering, you know,
supplies for the asylum seekers. And then I you know, like,
if you're from here, you kind of if you're in Hookumba,
you kind of already knew what was going on, and
so him asking me that, I was kind of like,

(02:48:27):
m and then he just started laying into I've had illegals,
you know, have broken into my house a few times.
Why are you supporting illegals? And I'm like, we're trying
to let like make sure that people don't die, and
he just kept going off on me, and so he,
you know, his the whole.

Speaker 5 (02:48:47):
All the talking.

Speaker 21 (02:48:48):
Points that people have about not allowing people to seek
asylum here, and so I just walked away.

Speaker 7 (02:48:57):
Maurica didn't run into the same kind of vocal opposition,
but she said in her conversations and attempts to process
everything she'd see, she ran into some of the sort
of need jate responses. So people can only really make
about immigration when they haven't looked the cruelty that they're
advocating for in the face.

Speaker 29 (02:49:12):
It took me a little while to kind of work
through just how I felt about it on an emotional,
maybe a spiritual level.

Speaker 5 (02:49:25):
You know.

Speaker 29 (02:49:25):
I spoke with family and friends about it, about my experience,
and it's difficult to I found it difficult to explain
my experience because I don't know that somebody can really
truly understand that unless they've actually been out there and
done it themselves. Because the arguments or they're kind of.

Speaker 5 (02:49:53):
Debate, so to speak.

Speaker 29 (02:49:55):
What they would come back at me with when I
was sharing that is, but we don't have enough food
or housing to be able to support that many people
coming in. And I'm like, but we just had so
many people and so much money put out there to
help in a very short amount of time. Look how

(02:50:16):
many donations were donated, how much money was contributed in
a short amount of time from not that many people.
I'm like, obviously we do have the money, Obviously we
do have the food. So where's the breakdown? Like, is
it our system that just doesn't allow for that happened?
I don't know, And that that's where I don't understand

(02:50:36):
it enough.

Speaker 5 (02:50:37):
But I feel like.

Speaker 29 (02:50:40):
It just made me realize that I don't know that
anybody that I spoke to afterward really understands it enough,
either because their arguments or they're a defense. And what
they tried to share on the opposite side of me
going out there and supporting just felt like it was

(02:51:02):
just something to say, you know, and like what they
what they hear from the general media out there, and
they also don't really they can't quite grasp it, so
they're just kind of throwing something out there, I guess,
is what what it felt like.

Speaker 7 (02:51:17):
Kaber also ran into some less in charitable San Diegans,
this time down in Santasiedra.

Speaker 8 (02:51:22):
Yeah, so I guess the first part is why they
might have how they might have found us there, which
is there's a local news organization in San Diego which
is kind of a I would describe as a local
equivalent of something like one American News, which is really
unfortunate because we already have American News here, but they

(02:51:46):
are pretty well known for kind of a lot of
like misinformation, kind of scared wandering about and has people
immigrants scenes and all that sort of sort of thing,
but with kind of a local news sort of aesthetic
to it, and they were, as far as I could tell,

(02:52:07):
they were really the only identify the media that were
there throughout the day. I read articles eventually made me
realize there were other reporters there, but they were identifying
themselves the way that has I was. But they sign
was one cameraman just shooting b rule, I guess, and
he was walking to all the different parts of the
wall and like all the different sort of stations for

(02:52:29):
aid and like trying to really trying to get as
many faces as possible. You could kind of tell that
that's like what he was doing. Everyone who I was
around I was. I was kind of you know, oriented
mostly with kind of like sort of like anapist mutual
aid people. And and you know, when they saw the
Kaside truck, they were like, okay, I'm wanted to their

(02:52:49):
mask on, you know. And I'm still in in ninety
five with me, so I'm more of that. And I
I had a you know, slightly identifying logo on my
sweatshirt which I take over so that you know, that
image wouldn't show up.

Speaker 7 (02:53:06):
Now k us I have drifted further and further right
since twenty twenty along with their relatively miniscule viewership. These days,
they engage in fake news culture war stuff, like repeating
the recent false accusations that Target was making tuckable swimming
costumes for kids, or labeling everyone in the asylum process
illegal immigrants. It's sadly pretty standard for writing news organizations now.

(02:53:27):
Kaba thinks that some of the people who saw footage
on k Usi, or perhaps found the location posted on
Ogden's blog, came down to the border.

Speaker 8 (02:53:34):
That's where that's the one started to see people you know,
kind of went buy and we could tell that they
weren't advantage because like when people who like playing people
who weren't even necessarily volteer, which are on buy and
so like, hey, I just went watching man I brought
a pitch of manner and they bring up a matter
and then they drive away. But the people who are

(02:53:55):
doing who are like here where I think you know,
kind of some kind of intimidation where you know, the
approach directly they would just kind of get out of
their exceptionally large entivies and and just kind of just
kind of watch and they would kind of, you know,
get a little bit closer at a time and then
you know, a little bit closer and kind of whispered

(02:54:16):
to each other and you know, point at things, and
you know, it's just kind of they were just watching,
and you know, they got close enough that I could
read their shirts, and and the shirts had a slogan
that's associated with a Christian nationalism slogan, so as this
whole family is kind of kind of sad that the
kids wore wearing shirts too, and and so I kind of, yeah,

(02:54:40):
I figured out that that's what was going on. And
I never talked to them. I didn't approach them, but
I stood when I was something to get closer closer,
I kind of positioned myself in between the rest of
volunteers and and this group and and just kind of,
you know, didn't really stare at them, just kind of
looked at them and just made it clear with my

(02:55:01):
body language that I, like I knew what they were doing,
Like they weren't you know, they weren't doing any kind
of secret agent thing or whatever, Like they were being
really really obvious. And I would just you know, stood
and position myself in a way that indicated that you know,
I know what you're doing, and you're not going to
get close. You're not going to interfere with you know
what we're doing here. You're not going to contact any
wine or you thrill anyone or like what everyone do.

(02:55:25):
And eventually one of the people who is either volunteer
or work for like one of the m gas contestently
tell there was something going on. So she went over
and had a conversation with them that I couldn't hear,
and eventually they decided to leave. And I think she
was just kind of trying to be diplomatic, but just
sort of like ask them if they wanted to help,
and if they don't want to help, and you know,

(02:55:47):
you go be somewhere else, I suppose. And and it was,
I mean, the sort of one amusing part, if you
call it, that was that they apparently in the complaint
to this person about me, because they said that I
had been watching them and I was I'm traditionally profiling

(02:56:09):
them because they were white, and I realized that this interview,
but just for the listeners, I am very very white myself.

Speaker 7 (02:56:18):
I think it's important when we discuss volunteering to honor
how hard this kind of experience can be on people. Obviously,
the trauma associated with seeing people brutalized by the state
and capital. It's not the same as being brutalized by
state and capital yourself, but that doesn't mean it's easy.
I asked Natalie to reflect a little on children's toys
we found in the shelter when we were cleaning up
the camp, like.

Speaker 21 (02:56:38):
As a mom, like I have my own children, and
it just really its emotional.

Speaker 5 (02:56:43):
It's like it's just.

Speaker 21 (02:56:46):
Like I'm like, who's who, Like childhood is playing with this,
you know here in this space, and you know that
no child should be ever in, you know, an encampment
like that or it just no one should be living outside,
no one should be doing that. But also it's like
kind of like the humanity in a way like that,

(02:57:07):
you know, even a child's going to play wherever child's
going to play, and like that little toy of little
hopefully it brought that kid some joy in that moment,
you know, if it was there a little piece of
home or someone gave it to him or what, you know,
it was Yeah, the reality, it was like it was

(02:57:27):
like a person, you know, like a little artifact of
someone who was actually there, you know, like it was
a little more tangible than you know.

Speaker 1 (02:57:34):
A sock.

Speaker 21 (02:57:35):
You know, that's not that's not I'm not think you
know who wore that sock. But think of who who
was playing with that toy?

Speaker 16 (02:57:41):
You know?

Speaker 5 (02:57:42):
Was it a little boy, a little girl? Hold were
they did they bring up home? Are they missing it?

Speaker 21 (02:57:47):
When they When I saw they have that, she needed
people to clean up, it was like, Okay, I took
a day off of work and went out there and
just felt overwhelming almost, I mean, and just one day
of me working out there was really emotional. I can't
imagine how you know, Melissa and all the people that
were on the ground just dealing with it. I know

(02:58:09):
they're just struggling a little bit and just processing it
all has been really hard, you know, really hard. It's
just just just how how privileged we are. You know,
like no one leaves their country because they want to.
They leave because they have to, but they feel like
they have to. And you know, it's I mean, it's

(02:58:33):
respecting and honoring and understanding the privilege that you're in
and not taking it for granted because it's very easy.

Speaker 7 (02:58:41):
To both Katie Marisias said they don't really identify as
political and that they wanted to be there as people.
Sometimes often politics can become a complicated game of numbers
and statistics, but it's important to remember that what this
is really about is organizing in such a way that
we can take care of one another, and that the
most important politics of war is the politics of feeding

(02:59:02):
how many people and maybe bringing a sad child of
stuffed animal's Katie talking about the community response.

Speaker 25 (02:59:10):
I think I'm a really compassionate person, and I'm not
very political in the sense that, like, I don't really participate.
My life in my community's life is solution oriented. So
I saw like that on a large scale, the like

(02:59:34):
when people come together, we create solutions when and you
don't wait for someone like the government to show up
and fix it, because then people will die. Yeah, you know,
I mean that's the reality is if that community didn't activate,

(02:59:58):
there would have been a lot of dead people in
the desert.

Speaker 7 (03:00:01):
Katie shared with me that she's been having a difficult time,
feeling guilty for not having the language skills to do
more and questing her own worthiness to be their helping
But in the end, she said she felt that what
she'd done was right and important. I'll leave you with
her thoughts and tomorrow I'll be back to talk about
the people who put everyone in this situation in the
first place, the Department of Homeland Security.

Speaker 25 (03:00:24):
I think an important thing is like so many times
we hear about things and we say, isn't that awful,
and we kind of shut down because we don't feel
empowered or we don't know how to help. And literally,

(03:00:45):
a smile makes a difference. A feeling of like I
see you and you belong on this planet makes a difference.
And you know, little kids packing up canned goods and
fruit snacks for other little kids. They didn't see those kids,

(03:01:09):
but when the adult said they're gonna be so happy
to get that package, they felt like they made a difference.
And those little girls are gonna grow up and not
be afraid to step up and make a difference. I
think a lot of people think like they can't do enough,
so they don't do anything. And if we all just

(03:01:32):
do a little bit or what you can, then I
think we would see a very large impact. Kumba is
a town of five hundred and they just fed thousands,
house thousands, clothed, thousands, hugged and welcomed thousands of human beings.

(03:01:59):
And those people in that town don't have much excess,
and they made a difference. And I was proud to
be a part of that community in a way that
I'm on the fringe of it, and it made me
want to be even more a part of it. My

(03:02:23):
feelings and intuition about that town were confirmed by watching
the simplest action make an incredible impact on real lives
and real people, and that this isn't demographics. It's real

(03:02:49):
bodies that have beating hearts and breathe and we all
share the same air in the same water, and we're
all connected. And when you make one little drip in
the bucket, it actually does make a difference. And I
think that stops us sometimes when we think what we

(03:03:13):
have isn't enough to give, but when someone has nothing,
what you have is more than what they can imagine.

Speaker 7 (03:03:33):
The history of the border and its enforcement begins in
fourteen ninety two with the colonization of what will become
known as the Americas. It goes through the eighteen forty
two Mexican American War and a sou indigenous people's lands
without their knowledge or consent in the eighteen fifty three
Gasden purchase, and of course through the eighteen eighty two
Chinese Exclusion Act and numerous other explicit attempts to prevent

(03:03:53):
non white people from moving to the USA. From there,
it weaves its way through the Mexican Revolution and the
firm World Wars German proposal to ally with Mexico to
reclaim those territories it had lost in the decades before then.
The Border Patrol story itself begins in May nineteen twenty four,
and in the ninety nine years since it has encompassed
everything from David Duke to nine to eleven in its

(03:04:14):
journey to becoming the biggest and least accountable law enforcement
agency in the federal government. People from the colonial periphery
have always migrated to the metropol. It's why a man
called fat Led singing a song about Vindulu is basically
in my country's second national anthem, and why every four
years France accepts black Frenchmen onto its football team before
it returns to vilifying them in other forms of discourse.

(03:04:36):
Migration to the United States is no different. Climate change
in US imperialism have destabilized and impoverished nations from the
Americas to Afghanistan, and driven people to the US border
looking for a better life. What's distinct about the US
is how obsessed it has become with keeping these people
out and enforcing the longest land borders in the world.
But the US border is much bigger than the land

(03:04:57):
boundary between the USA and Mexico to the south, Canada
to the north. If you're listening to this in the
United States, the chances are that you live in the
Border Enforcement Zone. This swath of territory outside the Constitution
has been established since the Immigration and Nationality Act of
nineteen fifty two. Established at a reasonable distance of the
border would extend one hundred air miles around the outline

(03:05:19):
of the country. Two thirds of the US's population live
within this zone. Washington, d C. San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans,
and Boston are all within it, and that means that
cbpagents can search vehicles and vessels to look for property
that's in the country without the right documents. They can
board public transportation or set up interior checkpoints and stop,
interrogate and search citizens and non citizens without the need

(03:05:41):
for a warrant. Within twenty five miles of the border,
they can enter your property provide it's not a domicile.
The Fourth Amendment, part of a foundational bill of rights.
At US likes to tout that's what makes it different
from the rest of the world. Doesn't apply when you're
near the border. An all encompassing history of the border
and its enforcement is beyond the skill this podcast. Even
a history of the Southwest border could take up a

(03:06:03):
whole bookshelf, but we will try and skim the high
points here. Let's start with a Gadsden purchase, when a
party of military surveyors first bumped into the Horn Autum
elders as they attempted to draw a line dividing to
Horn Autumn people from to Horn Autumn people. The southern
border is no more obvious today than it was then,
and of course, to the Autumn it was and remains

(03:06:24):
an aberration that divides them from much of their ancestral
and current homelands. It has over the years seen violent
enforcement on members of the nation and a growing encroachment
of the border patrol into today's to Horn Autumn Reservation,
which is the second largest in the USA, only represents
a fraction of the tribe's historical homeland. These surveyors were

(03:06:44):
in the process of finalizing most of the California and
Arizona border, a border I drove most of in the
days after Title forty two. The southern border as it
looks now was largely shaped by the Treaty of Guadalupihidalgo,
which Mexico lost fifty five percent of its territory include
all of what is today California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah,
and Nevada, and parts of what is today Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas,

(03:07:07):
and Oklahoma. The Gaston Purchase of eighteen fifty three added
more of southern Arizona. In New Mexico, the specific border
in Santa Cidro withdrawn so that San Diego Bay would
fall to the north of the line. The border in a
cumba seems more arbitrary, a straight line in the desert
that runs into a pile of rocks. Of course, long
before the border divided San Asidra from Tijuana, this was

(03:07:28):
Cumia Land, and despite the border, it still is. The
name Tijuana derives from Tijuan, which means by the sea
in Cumiai. Despite this, the Cumii and many other indigenous
peoples were ignored when the border crossed them, and it's
becoming harder and harder for them to cross it. In
parts of desert, it can be pretty hard to see
the border at all. In twenty twenty, while out with

(03:07:51):
a group of Cumi people who are in ceremony to
honor their ancestors whose burial sites have been and continue
to be desecrated by border walk construction, it had to
be worried of steppe over it to better frame my shots.
The emerging Declaration Donald Trump made allowed war construction to
sidestep legislation in place to protect archaeological and sacred sites,
but it didn't allow me to sidestep into Mexico to

(03:08:11):
get a better shot. Luckily, Bortac, a team of armed
Border patrol agents who you might remember from Portland in
twenty twenty, provided a guy ad dressed like he was
in the Battle of Falluja to help me. I would
say the border is a line in the sand, but
at the time there wasn't a line that was visible
at all in Valley the Moon, a few miles east
to where that Bortec patrol guide shouted at people stepping

(03:08:32):
too close in twenty twenty. The border wall is about
waist high, rusty, and essentially comprised of a single strand
of barbed wire in Hoocumber, the thirty foot trump wall
pushes right up to a boulder pile and then stops
the logic as much as there can be any logic,
and spending twenty five million dollars a mile to desecrate
sacred spaces and defile the landscape is that people will

(03:08:53):
be deterred from crossing by the harsh landscape brutally hot
days and brutally cold nights. This logic, of course, fails
to consider not just where people are going, why they're leaving,
the places they've come from. Risking one's life crossing the
border makes sense only when one considers the danger that
many people in places around the world face every day.

(03:09:14):
It hasn't always been this way. Fear reference here in
Reagan and Bush talking about migration in nineteen eighty, heait.

Speaker 34 (03:09:21):
I'm going to ask you what you would do about Cuba.

Speaker 16 (03:09:23):
But now we're going to call you.

Speaker 35 (03:09:25):
Now we're going to have some questions from the audience.

Speaker 4 (03:09:29):
Yes, my name is David Grosberg, and I'd like to
know do you think that children of illegal aliens should
be allowed.

Speaker 31 (03:09:34):
To attend Texas Public schools free or do you think
that their parents should pay for their education?

Speaker 8 (03:09:40):
Who are you addressing that?

Speaker 35 (03:09:41):
I think you're first in this.

Speaker 8 (03:09:43):
He was looking right at you. I said that he
was what I'd.

Speaker 36 (03:09:47):
Like to see something done about the illegal alien problem.
That would be so sensitive and so understanding about labor
needs and human needs that that.

Speaker 20 (03:09:56):
Problem wouldn't come up.

Speaker 5 (03:09:58):
But today, if.

Speaker 12 (03:09:58):
Those people are here, I would.

Speaker 36 (03:10:01):
Reluctantly say I think they would. They would get whatever
it is that they're you know, what the society.

Speaker 8 (03:10:07):
Is giving to their neighbors.

Speaker 36 (03:10:09):
But it has the problem has to be solved. The
problem has to be solved because as we have kind
of made illegal some kinds of labor that I'd like
to see legal, we're doing two things. We're creating a
whole society of really honorable, decent, family loving people that
are in violation of the law. And secondly, we're exacerbating

(03:10:30):
relations with Mexico.

Speaker 7 (03:10:31):
The change.

Speaker 36 (03:10:32):
The answer to your question is much more fundamental than
whether they attend Houston schools. It seems to me, I
don't want to see a whole if they're living here,
I don't want to see a whole. I think a
six and eight year old kids being made, you know,
one totally uneducated and made to feel that they're living
with outside the law. Let's address ourselves to the fundamentals.

(03:10:53):
These are good people, strong people.

Speaker 7 (03:10:56):
Part of my family is in Mexican.

Speaker 35 (03:10:58):
Then I added that I think the time has come
that the United States and our neighbors, particularly our neighbor
to the south, should have a better understanding and a
better relationship than we've ever had. And I think but
we haven't been sensitive enough to our size and our power.
They have a problem of forty to fifty percent unemployment.

(03:11:19):
Now this cannot continue without the possibility arising with regard
to that other country that we talked about of Cuba
and what it is stirring up of the possibility of
trouble below the border, and we could have a very
hostile and strange neighbor on our border. Rather than making
them or talking about putting up a fence, why don't

(03:11:39):
we work out some recognition of our mutual problems. Make
it possible for them to come here legally with the
work permit, and then while they're working and earning here,
they pay taxes here, and when they go on to
go back, they can go back and they can cross
and open the border both ways by understanding their problem.

Speaker 7 (03:11:57):
The modern era of border enforcement began. As far as
we can point a single date was Silvestre Reyes, that
then sector chief of the Border Patrol in McAllen, Texas,
and his operation Hold the Line. The community around McAllen
had got tired of border patrol snooping around businesses and
even schools in a Rio Grand valley, and instead Rayes

(03:12:18):
deployed his agents forward in a sort of human fence
along the Rio Grand. Rayes would later become the chief
of the El Paso sector and a Democratic Congressman. He
lost his seat to be to A. Rourke in twenty thirteen,
but this strategy would long outlive his career with border patrol.
The following year, on September seventeenth, nineteen ninety four, US

(03:12:38):
Attorney General Janet Reno announced the start of Operation Gatekeeper.
The first phase of the operation focus on the first
five miles of the western border, including the place where
I recorded all those interviews you heard earlier this week.
According to a piece written a quarter of a century
later in the La Times, the strategy was to deter
migrants from illegally crossing in the first place, and for

(03:12:59):
the who remained undeterred to encourage them to cross in
more isolated wilderness areas to the east where they could
be more easily captured. There were already fences in nineteen
ninety four, first a chain link fence and then one
made of helicopter landing mats left over from Vietnam that
had horizontal struts that closely resembled and were used as
a ladder. Anti migrant rhetoric was already there too. California

(03:13:23):
Governor Pete Wilson became an outspoken advocate for Prop One
to eighty seven, a ballot measure that cut off state
services like health care and education to undocumented people. Here's
a clip of Wilson's reelection ad.

Speaker 37 (03:13:35):
They keep coming two million illegal immigrants in California. The
federal government won't stop them at the border, yet requires
us to pay billions to take care of them. Governor
Pete Wilson sent the National Guard to help the border patrol.

Speaker 8 (03:13:49):
But that's not all.

Speaker 16 (03:13:50):
For Californians who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws,
I'm suing to force the federal government to control the
border and are working to deny state services to illeg
Enough is enough, Governor Pete Wilson.

Speaker 7 (03:14:04):
Under the operation, a much higher number of agents were
deployed to the border. Apprehensions increased, and with them, so
did funding for border enforcement. It was around this time
that the narrative around the border began to change. It
was also around this time, a few months earlier in fact,
that the US, Mexico and Canada entered into the North
American Free Trade Agreement, which made it easier than ever

(03:14:27):
for capital to move across the border and take advantage
of lower wages in Mexico. To learn a little bit
more about Operation Gatekeeper, I spoke to one of the
agents who was tasked with executing it.

Speaker 32 (03:14:38):
My name is Jen Budd and I'm a former senior
Patrol agent with the United States Boarder Patrol. I was
a senior intelligence agent as well at San Diego Sector Headquarters.

Speaker 7 (03:14:48):
Jenner Sin's left the Border Patrol, but she realizes the
impact of Operation Gatekeeper on migrants was anything but positive.

Speaker 16 (03:14:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 32 (03:14:55):
Operation Gatekeeper started in nineteen ninety four, in October of
nineteen ninety four, and to Campo in November of nineteen
ninety five, and so right afterwards the fence was just
getting to Takata. When I got there, so most of
my class, I think we had I don't know, forty
people graduate or something. Most of them went down to

(03:15:17):
Imperial Beach and they had a wall there, and so
that was the idea, is to fill the San Diego
City area with as many agents and weapons and all this,
and then that would push the traffic for that to
the mountains, making it more difficult for them to cross,
and some of them would get injured, and we knew
some of them would die. So it was intentional. The
death and the injuries, according to management, would deter future crossings.

(03:15:41):
But of course that that's.

Speaker 8 (03:15:43):
Not the case.

Speaker 7 (03:15:44):
Alan Bersin, US attorney in San Diego, was named the
so called Borders Are by President Bill Clinton a few
years later to implement that same Gatekeeper strategy across the
rest of the Southwest border. Burst In saw things a
little differently.

Speaker 12 (03:15:58):
Neither side claims it, but Gatekeeper was probably the most
important domestic achievement accomplished in a purely bipartisan manner through
three administrations, and the greatest accomplishment since President Eisenhower and
the Democrats put together the state highway system in the
mid nineteen fifties.

Speaker 7 (03:16:13):
But in fact, while apprehensions did drop in San Diego,
they spiked by five hundred and ninety one percent in
the Tucson sector between nineteen ninety two and two thousand
and four. The La Times quotes the non partisan Congressional
Research Service as saying, one unintended consequence of this enforcement
posture and the shift in migration patterns has been an

(03:16:34):
increase in the number of migrant deaths each year. On average,
two hundred migrants died each year in the early nineteen nineties,
compared with four hundred and seventy two migrant deaths in
two thousand and five. Many of those deaths are now
in a sector that encompasses the Autumn Reservation. The desert
there is particularly hard to cross, and the enforcement that
began with Operation Gatekeeper pushes more and more people onto

(03:16:57):
the reservation. Dahn Autumn people to travel between the United
States and Mexico fairly easily a roads without checkpoints, to
visit family, go to school, visit a doctor, or perform
their traditional ceremonial practices. But after nine to eleven, the
United States and its border patrol began a more visible
and violent occupation of the reservation. It started with a

(03:17:18):
vehicle barrier in two thousand and seven, and it continued
with CBP's quote unquote virtual wall of surveillance technology, cameras
and drones. The Israeli company Elbit Systems has built fixed
surveillance towers which they pioneered in the West Bank on
tribal land with the permission of tribal council. Meanwhile, other
members of the nation strongly oppose the militarization of their

(03:17:41):
homeland in the name of security of whatever homeland the
Department of Homeland Security is securing. I'll quote hear from
Todd Miller, whose excellent work on the border has required
reading for anyone interested in the subject. Amy Juan and
Nellie Joe David, members of the Horn Autumn, Hermagicum Writs Network.
Tohrn joined a delegation to the West Bank in October

(03:18:03):
twenty seventeen, convened by the Palestinian Organization stopped the war.
It was a relief, one says, to talk with people
who understand our fears, who are dealing with militarization and technology.
In twenty seventeen, the Horn Autumn vice chairman Verlin Jose
said that a war will be built quote over my
dead body, and the tribe released a video saying there

(03:18:26):
is no Autumn word for war. The sixty two miles
of the border on their reservation would remain without one,
they said. By twenty twenty, the Trump administration had fought
through a wall on much of the border using what
is known as the Roosevelt Reservation. This is a sixty
foot wide strip of land that the federal government owns
along the border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Although

(03:18:47):
much of the Autumn Nation remains war free and some
has what's called a vehicle barrier or a Normandy barrier,
approximately one third of the Roosevelt Reservation is on tribal land.
Since two thousand and five, realized the Act Environmental Survey
and laws have been waived for border security, and this
gave the Tramp administration a way to justify the destruction
of Artum and Kumi burial grounds, swad or cacti that

(03:19:08):
the Autumn Seas relatives, and other sacred sites along the border.
Despite efforts by tribal members and allies to stop the construction,
members of the Tahana Autumn Nation have been pepper sprayed beaten,
tailed and shot by Border patrol. In two thousand and two,
a Border patrol agent ran over and killed an Artam teenager.

(03:19:29):
Last week, the same night I was waiting down by
the border for the end of Title forty two, border
patrol agent shot and killed Raymond Mattia, an ardum man
who had called and asked him for help. He was
shot thirty eight times just two feet from his front door,
recording to his family. While mister Mattia's death is still
being investigated, the Border Patrol has a long tradition of

(03:19:50):
literally getting away with murder. This is because they investigate
themselves using so called critical incident teams. I talked to
Jen about what those teams do, and so.

Speaker 32 (03:20:00):
What they would do is they would get there first
on the scene because we would call them first. We
wouldn't call anybody else, we'd call them first. And then
they come, They get rid of the witnesses, they set
the scene up the way we want to be done,
and they tell you the narrative that you're going.

Speaker 8 (03:20:15):
To stick with.

Speaker 32 (03:20:15):
You talk to your union reps, and it's all this
giant cover up.

Speaker 7 (03:20:19):
Here's John call Us Free, a journalist who covered ci
T cover ups talking to Democracy Now about how these
teams work.

Speaker 27 (03:20:26):
Within the actual agency of the US Board Patrol, there
is an investigated body called SIT, the Critical Incident Team.
They are tasked with investigating incidents that involve border patrol
and it can be anything from a car accident to
in this case, an individual who's killed at the hands
of the US Border Patrol. In this particular case of

(03:20:46):
Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, border Patrol agents deleted video, they collected
evidence at the scene. They were present in the hospital
when Anastasio was being treated, They were present at the autopsy.
They fudge reports, they deleted reports, They coached their own
agents on what kind of testimony they were to give.

(03:21:09):
They were present at every one of the depositions. They
made sure that they were the victims in this case.
And when I say that, what I mean is that
Border Patrol agents SIT team agents make sure that Border
Patrol agents are looked at as the victims in any
sort of an incident, meaning that they are allowed then
to use lethal force if a Border Patrol agent has

(03:21:31):
rocks thrown at them or in the case of Anastasio,
they alleged that Anastasio was violent and that he was
kicking and punching, and he needed to be subdued. If
we take a look at the videotape, that's not actually
what happened. He's handcuffed, he's prone on the ground, his
face is down, agents are on top of him. But
if you read the reports in this case that were
prepared by SIT, Anastasio was a violent man and needed

(03:21:54):
to be subdued.

Speaker 7 (03:21:55):
In twenty twenty one, Border Patrol was ordered to disband
these teams gentsas they simply moved them somewhere else and
gave them a different name.

Speaker 32 (03:22:03):
So then they said that they disbanded them because we
brought the truth out and how they did all this
and we proved it. But what they actually did is
they did a retention. So they had the Border Patrol
agents resigned from the Border Patrol and move over to
cbp OPR and we hired them under there. So the
team that likely went to go investigate the tahonum Otum killing,

(03:22:26):
I believe his name is Matia Matia Raymond Matia is
likely the Border Patrol sit teams. So if the Border
Patrol agents, a lot of people don't understand it's like
a cult, you know, they always say you bleed green,
you know, and you don't go back from green, and
probably one of the few that ever left, you know,

(03:22:48):
and tells the truth about it.

Speaker 7 (03:22:50):
Of Course, the vast majority of people whose families will
never find justice because of these cit teams are not white,
and of course Border Patrol has long rooted links to
white nationalism. In nineteen seventy seven, about forty five minutes
from San Diego and another forty five minutes from Komba,
David Duke, grand Dragon of the Knights of the klu
Klux Klan at the time, announced the official beginning of

(03:23:11):
Clan Border Watch. Duke claimed there were hundreds of clansmen
on the border, but local newspapers The Desert Sun reported
that there were in reality at least ten are quote
directly from the Desert Suns reporting at a time here,
Duke said clansmen would refrain from direct contact with illegal
aliens if any have found. He said, klansmen would not
talk to them or contact them, but if any illegal

(03:23:34):
crossings are scene, they're going to use CBE radios to
relay the information to Border Patrol, Duke said. Duke of Metairie, Louisiana,
claimed the clan has the support of the American people
and helping the Border patrol stem the influx of illegal
aliens into this country. He claimed. The illegal aliens take
jobs away from US citizens. We feel this rising tide

(03:23:56):
washing over our border is going to affect our culture,
he told reporters at the time, in a statement that
wouldn't sound out of place on Fox News today. In response,
more than one thousand, five hundred brown Berries threatened to
rally against Duke. A protest fire out numbering his patrols,
popped up along the border. In the late nineteen seventies
and early nineteen eighties, Texas Knights of the KKK leader

(03:24:16):
Louis Beam, a Vietnam war veteran who had helped to
organize and promote Duke's border stunt, established paramilitary camps around
Texas and trained children as young as eight in the
deadly guerrilla warfare tactics he learned overseas. He rallied white
fishermen against Vietnamese migrants and burned their boats. In twenty nineteen,

(03:24:37):
a Border patrol agent from Logales named Matthew Bowen was
accused of knocking down a Guatemala man with his vehicle
then lying to a quart about the incident. The prosecutors
in the case showed the jury text Bowen sent, including
one which called migrants quote disgusting, sub human shit unworthy
of being kindling for a fire. In several text messages,

(03:24:58):
Bowen references quote tonks. This is a derogatory term for
border crossing migrants. The urging is determined a little bit unclear,
but it seems to be derived from the sound of
a flashlight hitting the back of someone's head. In argument,
again submitting the texts, defense lawyer Sean Chapman wrote that
he would argue certain terms are quote commonplace throughout the

(03:25:19):
Border Patrols twos on sector. This is part of the
agency's culture and therefore it says nothing about mister Bowen's
mindset genses. This kind of language and attitude was not
uncommon in her time in border patrol from the mid
nineties to the early two thousands, but things have got worse.

Speaker 32 (03:25:34):
Since there have been some definite changes in the Border
Patrol in the training from before nine to eleven to
after nine to eleven, and what you also see so
their vocabulary has changed, so like they refer to migrants
and asylum secrecis invaders. We never use that term prior

(03:25:54):
to nine to eleven, and we did have racist words
that were used for there. I mean I use them
as well. I'm not denying there.

Speaker 7 (03:26:03):
Of course, this kind of language isn't just restricted to
border patrol.

Speaker 31 (03:26:07):
The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems.

Speaker 5 (03:26:18):
Thank care.

Speaker 31 (03:26:21):
It's true, and these are the best and the finest.
When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.

Speaker 7 (03:26:30):
They're not sending you. They're not sending you.

Speaker 31 (03:26:34):
They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're
bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime,
they're rapists, and some I assume are good people.

Speaker 7 (03:26:49):
There has been white supremacist violence at the border ever
since Duke and long before. Often it's been at the
hands of groups outside of the state. Sometimes it's been
at the hands of the state. In Arizona, groups like
Arizona Border Ricon and Minutemen American Defense have terrorized border
communities for decades, engaged renewed momentum from Trump's consistent demonization
of migrants. I spent a bit of time looking for

(03:27:11):
them in the desert in Arizona last week, but I
didn't see much, not that I really wanted to. Interaction
with these militias, probably far more often than we have
documented evidence for, can be fatal, just like interaction with
customs and border protection. Here's just one example culled from
David Newitt's excellent book, and Hell followed with her. On

(03:27:33):
May thirtieth, two thousand and nine, Sean of Ford, Jason
Eugene Bush, and Albert Gacxiola, all members of Ford's vigilante
group Minuteman American Defense, forced their way into Raoul Flores
Junior's home in Aravika, Arizona, by pretending to be border
patrol agents. The group planned to steal and sell drugs
they thought Flora's had in his house. The FBI knew

(03:27:55):
about this, but did nothing to stop them, Finding no
drugs in the house. Civitilante's murder Flores and his nine
year old daughter, Bricennia, Flora's wife and Brisenia's mother, Gina
Marie Gonzalez, was shot three times. She played dead, but
when attack has returned, she exchanged fire with them, using
her husband's handgun. In doing so, she hit Bush. Bush

(03:28:18):
had previously been charged with a September nineteen ninety seven
execution of an Aryan Nation associate for the supposed crime
of being a race traitor. Both Ford and Bush are
currently on death row in Arizona. The KKAK was not
the only group recruiting children for border patrolling. Since the
mid nineteen eighties, the Border Patrol's Explorer program has recruited

(03:28:39):
young men and women of high school age. The program
is charted through Learning for Life, which is a subsidiary
of the Scouts of America. For kids, often the children
of immigrants living in border towns where industry has long
since gone in a decent wage is hard to come by,
the program offers the chance at a starting salary of
sixty two thousand dollars twice a median income. In stide

(03:29:00):
some of these towns, young Explorers will learn tracking, survival, shooting,
and how to detain and process on documented migrants, people
who in some cases are walking in the footsteps of
their own parents. According to an article by Moraling Music
in the Nation, young Explorers have to earn the writer
their uniform by participating their sixty hour Basic Explorer Academy,

(03:29:21):
of which they learned CPR drills and the methods of
conducting vehicle stops. It also offers courses in radio communications,
public speaking, report writing, and ethics and integrity, and introduces
the youth to criminal juvenile immigration of Fourth Amendment law.
While I was writing it, so checked out the San
Diego sector page, which seems to show young people running, shooting,

(03:29:42):
and one who looks like he's just been mased in
the face. The next photo on the Facebook page dedicated
to this Border Patrol sector shows a man in handcuffs.
Above this is a video of someone dropping a chart
from the top of the border fence. Without figures from
the CVP, it's hard to tell of participation in the
Explorers has dropped as public awareness of family separation assault
now the behavior doesn't exactly fit with the Border Patrol's

(03:30:03):
motto on a first has spread. I asked Jen for
her take on the Explorer program.

Speaker 32 (03:30:08):
Well, I call it Border Patrol Youth because it reminds
me a lot of the Hitler youth, where we go
into their high schools and we get the kids that
are in trouble, and typically they are Latino dominant high schools,
and we teach them how to be Many Border Patrol agents,
and we teach them to hate somebody else instead of themselves.
We indoctrinate them into the same stuff that I was

(03:30:31):
indoctrinating into. But it's even gone so far now as
to they do the dog and pony shows at the
elementary school, so they're getting them when they're like six
seven years old, and they go there with you a
little Border Patrol bulletproof vest and put them on them
and take pictures and put it on social media, and
they have them sit in their trucks and turn the
signs on and all this other stuff.

Speaker 7 (03:30:51):
That indoctrination is crucial to border patrol culture. And to
be honest, the reason I wanted to talk to Jen
was to understand it better. In Ocomber, young border patrol agent,
a woman giving volunteers right, I'm not about to get
into a Border Patrol truck myself, and I wasn't going
to get a response by asked the agent how she
squared up her role in holding people in the desert

(03:31:12):
with the fact that some volunteers said she'd spend her
own money buying supplies. Jen said that this kind of
behavior can be pretty common with young agents.

Speaker 32 (03:31:19):
I had intended to go to law school to be
a civil rights attorney when I joined the Border Patrol,
and for me, I ignored my core values and ignored
that I was enforcing laws that sent thousands of human
beings to their deaths because I felt like I was
trying to survive. I was raped in the academy by

(03:31:40):
a fellow agent, and they covered that up, and I
was really trying to get out of the South and
start my life. I oftould say, like, especially with female agents,
they cause it ers five percent, because there's never been
more than five percent women in the Border Patrol rates.
And they say, oh, it's because it's very hard. It's
not because it's very hard. I mean, it is very

(03:32:00):
hard to get through, but it's also it's because they're
sexually assaulting us all the time in the academy and
halassing us. So I go back and forth in my mind,
and I would imagine this young woman, you know, she
has days where she arrests some pretty decent criminals every
now and then once in a blue moon, but the
majority of them, if she's paying attention and not completely

(03:32:23):
self absorbed, she'll realize that they're not criminals, and their
families just simply seeking asylum, so she at some point
has to decide in her mind, is this what I
got into?

Speaker 8 (03:32:35):
Is this what I want to do with my life?

Speaker 7 (03:32:38):
In the wake of nine to eleven and quite telling me,
the Border Patrol moved from oversight by the Department of
Justice to the new Department of Homeland Security. This move
from Justice as security has been echoed, and it's recruiting,
which once you heavily on those, it's humanitarian aid experience
and now tries to appeal to veterans of the two
decades of war that have accompanied the growth of DHS

(03:32:59):
since two thousand and one. When the DHS was first established,
the name struck many as problematic. In the two thousand
and two article in The New York Times, Elizabeth Becker
wrote that the name had worrying similarities to the way
the Nazis talked about their fatherland, and it didn't really
fit with the way Americans spoke. Nobody in two thousand
and one was talking about the homeland. But two decades

(03:33:20):
and billions of dollars later, it's hard to find much
in the way of criticism of the agency in DC,
despite the fact that the twenty twenty two budgets of
CBP and ICE was sixteen and eight billion, respectively, and
every year since two thousand and one, DHS has obtained
more guns, more drones, and more surveillance technology that is
inevitably used to spy on citizens as well as non citizens.

(03:33:42):
In nineteen ninety five, there are about four thousand CBP agents.
By twenty twenty there were twenty thousand, with seventeen thousand
stations on the southern border. This is a slight drop
from a peak of just over twenty one thousand under Obama,
who is often called the deporter in Chief, is fondness
for expelling people from the United States for crimes like
having a PieP or financial misconduct, the so called aggravated

(03:34:05):
felonies and crimes of moral turpitude that only exist for
non citizens. These agents today have the ability to operate
in what the ACLU calls a constitution free zone and
can conduct suspicion free searches of electronic devices, use cell
site simulators, and sweep up data about thousands of people
never accused of any crime. One of the more notable

(03:34:26):
examples of this happened only a few yards from where
I was recording last week. In Santa Cudro. It's a
story worth recounting in detail because it brings together the
themes we've spoken about so far, demonization of migrants, government overreach,
and a frank disregard for international and national law. In
late twenty eighteen, I was enjoying a break from work
in a caravan near in Sonata. If you think back

(03:34:48):
to that time, right before the midterms, you might remember
some of the rhetoric that's circulated around a large group
of migrants making their way to the southern border. I'll
play some of the clips from Fox that MPR cut
together in their coverage of the issue.

Speaker 9 (03:35:00):
Sympathetic, overwrought coverage of this invading horde. Is calling it
a caravan is a misnomer? In a frankly sickness.

Speaker 38 (03:35:09):
Or sampled that Chipper Morning show Fox and Friends.

Speaker 11 (03:35:11):
I've gotten so many email from people who said, don't
call it a caravan, call it an invasion.

Speaker 1 (03:35:17):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (03:35:17):
Is that fair?

Speaker 38 (03:35:18):
Host Steve Doocy put the question to conservative pundit Michelle Malkin.

Speaker 5 (03:35:21):
Of course it is.

Speaker 29 (03:35:22):
It is a full scale invasion by a hostile force,
and it requires our president and our commander in chief
to use any means necessary to protect our sovereignty.

Speaker 38 (03:35:31):
CNN's Brian Stelter found that Fox News featured segments using
the phrase invasion more than sixty times this month about
the migrants. On Fox Business Network, Lou Dobbs's program invoked
it dozens of times. Trump ordered five thousand troops to
the border. He tweeted yesterday, quote, this is an invasion
of our country, and Trump has, without evidence, claimed gang
members and criminals and Middle Easterners are among them. Over

(03:35:54):
on Fox, guests have similarly, without supporting facts, suggested people
from Isis and the Taliban be among those migrants. Even so,
the network's chief news anchor, Shepherd Smith, tried to put
on the brakes yesterday.

Speaker 39 (03:36:06):
Tomorrow is one week before the midterm election, which is
what all of this is about. There is no invasion,
No one's coming to get you. There's nothing at all
to worry about.

Speaker 38 (03:36:19):
This month, Fox hosts and guests have repeatedly questions whether
the migrants might bring in infectious diseases, again without evidence.

Speaker 9 (03:36:26):
Laura Ingram, we don't know what people have coming in here.
We have diseases in this country we haven't had for decades.

Speaker 7 (03:36:33):
I'll leave you to process the incredible army of the
network that killed the decent percentage of its viewers by
denying that COVID was serious, or a disease, or the
vaccines and masks are useful panicking about infectious diseases. Just
two years before the pandemic began, the Tree of Life shooter,
who we won't name here, who is currently facing a
death penunty trial for murdering eleven people in a Pittsburgh synegogue,

(03:36:54):
was obsessed with the caravan. The victims of the largest
anti Semitic mass murder in US history included a beloved
county doctor, a great grandmother, and a couple who'd gotten
married at the same synagogue more than sixty years earlier.
The shooter's last post on hate speech social media site gab,
posted just minutes before the synagogue massacre began, spells it
out with a reference to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,

(03:37:17):
the Jewish nonprofit that resettles refugees in the United States.
HIAS liked to bring invaders to kill our people. I
can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw
your optics, I'm going in. The shooter was obsessed with
the idea that a caravan of migrants with not a
group of people trying to save their own lives, but
a coordinated and somehow Jewish led invasion and attempts to

(03:37:37):
demographically restructure the United States. If you're ending where he
got that idea from, He's America's favorite job seeker. Tucker
Carlson on the caravan.

Speaker 11 (03:37:46):
Over the past month, a caravan of Central American migrants
has gradually made its way up from Hunduras through Mexico
all the way to Tijuana opposite San Diego. At one point,
Mexican authorities claimed they broke up the group, and American media,
of course dutifully reported that they did, But they didn't.
That was just a pr gesture and a temporary one.
In fact, during parts of the trip, Mexican police escorted

(03:38:09):
the migrants northwards.

Speaker 1 (03:38:10):
In other words, the.

Speaker 11 (03:38:11):
Mexican government embedded illegal immigration into this country, as it
has done for many years. Well tonight, the caravan is
on our southern border. Rather than wait for the crossing
station at Sanya Sidro to open, many of them just
jumped the fence. Some waved Honduran flags when they got
to the top. And that tells you everything. When you
arrive in a country to contribute to it and to

(03:38:32):
assimilate into its culture. You don't wave the flag of
a foreign nation. That's what you do in triumph when
you invade a country.

Speaker 7 (03:38:40):
On my way home from Mansonado in twenty eighteen, I
saw that quote invading Horde in the Benito Juadi Sports
Complex and probably turned around and went back. My instinct
as a journalist is to couple things like this, but
my instinct to the person is to help first. On
the first day, I was there with two friends I
know from the weird world of pro cycling. Things were
pretty bad. We'd obtained a backpack full of stroop waffles

(03:39:02):
that a friend who makes stroop waffles have given us.
Once we gave those out, I talked to a few
people about what they needed. We coordinated with mutual a
groups in Tijuana and offered to support her for we could.
In the next few weeks, my friends and I spent
tens of thousands of dollars at a Tijuana costco, received
thousands of dollars in donations from people we hadn't seen
in years, and in one memorable instance, rigged up and

(03:39:22):
projected as someone had tactically obtained from an office to
a DVD player which we'd installed in the roof of
a dilapidated nightclub full of little children and their mothers
so they could watch Beverly Hills, Chihuahua and forget about
the fact that the country they were traveling to was
portraying these little infants as invaders. I have a lot
of very complicated memories of those few weeks, little girls
braiding my hair, little boys and girls trying to comprehend

(03:39:44):
exactly how I could be this bad at football, and
people from San Diego churches, tijuan anarchist kitchens, and mutual
a groups around the region coming together to look after
a group of people who'd been so heavily demonized by
folks who had never met them or even been here.
His Trump defending calling the CA caravan an invasion and
simultaneously explaining why migrants low wage labor it's desirable for
people like him.

Speaker 34 (03:40:05):
Thank you, miss President. I challenge you on on one
of the statements that you made in the tail end
of the campaign, uh in the mid terms, that here
we go that well, if you don't mind, miss President,
coming that this caravan was an invasion, as you know,
consider it to be. As you know, miss President, the
caravan was not an invasion. It's a it's a a
group of migrants moving up from Central America towards the

(03:40:27):
border with the US. Thank you. And why why did
you why did you characterize it as such?

Speaker 16 (03:40:33):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (03:40:34):
Because I consider an invasion. You and I have a
difference of a button.

Speaker 34 (03:40:37):
Do you think that you demonized immigrants? Not this election
to try.

Speaker 10 (03:40:41):
I want them.

Speaker 20 (03:40:42):
I want them to come into the country, but they
have to come in legally.

Speaker 23 (03:40:45):
You know, they have to come in Jim.

Speaker 20 (03:40:46):
Through a process.

Speaker 31 (03:40:47):
I want it to be a process, and I want
people to come in.

Speaker 1 (03:40:50):
And we need the people.

Speaker 34 (03:40:51):
Your campaign, your campaign.

Speaker 23 (03:40:53):
You know why we need the people, does you?

Speaker 20 (03:40:55):
Because we have hundreds of companies moving in.

Speaker 23 (03:40:57):
We need the people.

Speaker 7 (03:40:58):
Trump, as you had a clip, used a migrant caravan
as a prop for his racist and bigoted midterm campaign.
It didn't work and he lost control of the House,
but he did succeed in forcing these people to spend
months in the cold, first in a sports stadium and
then in an old nightclub, even as a migrant gradually
reduced in number, with many finding work and new life
in Mexico, some finding their way north. The long legacy

(03:41:21):
of that caravan was only just starting. In the months
have followed journalists who'd covered the caravan, as well as
those who offered assistant to caravan members, so they felt
they'd become targets of intense inspections of scrutiny by border officials.
I got pulled into secondarily once during this time, and
that was entering Mexaco. The worst I got was a
chance to inspect my nineteen eighty pickup trucks oil pen.

(03:41:42):
But for others, things weren't so easy. Homeland Security Investigation
special agent turned whistleblower Wesley Peternak helped NBC to document that,
under the umbrella of what was called Operation Secure Line,
the Department of Homeland Security created a database of activists, journalists,
and social media influences tied to the migrant cart When
they crossed the border. Individuals in that database were often

(03:42:04):
subjected to hours long screenings and in some cases had
flagspaced on their passports. A PowerPoint slideshow which Peternac leaked
to NBC seven lists some of the people, some of
them have been guests on this show. They include ten journalists,
seven of whom are US citizens. A US attorney forty
eight people from the US and other countries who are

(03:42:24):
labeled as organizers, instigators, or having unknown roles. The target
lists also includes organizers from groups like Border Angels and
Pueblos in Froontella's I asked journalist brook Bin Cowsey to
describe her experience of increased border scrutiny in twenty eighteen.

Speaker 40 (03:42:40):
If you don't have a pre approved card, you have
to like go through wait and line, waiting this long
ass line, and then you know, you go and get
vetted by CDP. They ask you some questions or they
just wave you through, depending on what kind of day
they're having or whatever. So in my case, I started
getting pulled into secondary inspection more and more. So they
would wave my car over and then take me into

(03:43:01):
this secondary place where it's sort of like this back
it's like a Quonsett pet sort of, and in it
like all these cars drive in and out, and they'll
they'll go through your things, they'll get in your face,
you know, they'll do all kinds of stuff. And I
don't there have to be cameras in there somewhere, but
I've never seen any. So I just kept getting pulled

(03:43:22):
into secondary more and more, as though I was this
suspicious person, as though I was suspected of something, and
every time I asked, they'd be like, I don't know,
it's just random, ma'am, and ma'am, it's just random. So
actually this started about twenty fourteen for me, but it
started to escalate in twenty eighteen. Twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen
started to escalate, and I was like, a fucking Trump administration,
of course going to escalate right on.

Speaker 7 (03:43:42):
The Trump she said, Things got worse.

Speaker 40 (03:43:44):
From twenty seventeen through twenty eighteen. It kind of worked
where you push back and I'd be like, you need
to let me fucking go. You know, I'm century, I'm
already pre checked. If you think that there's something wrong
that I'm doing, and take my fucking century away, and
I want to talk to your manager type stuff, right,
So I was doing that that were until twenty eighteen,
and then it started to get really gnarly.

Speaker 7 (03:44:03):
Eventually things came to a head the day before the
migrants of the caravan were tea guessed. And I've seen
most people remember from twenty eighteen.

Speaker 40 (03:44:10):
So but on that night, as I was coming back,
I drove through and I did this century thing, you know,
the usual stuff, and got pulled into secondary and this
time it was really like gnarly. The time before that
had also been really gnarly, like nobody hurt me, nobody
did anything. But they got really close to my face,
like brighten my face, you know, and started screaming at me,

(03:44:32):
like screaming over me.

Speaker 5 (03:44:33):
And I kept going, I'd like to speak to.

Speaker 40 (03:44:36):
Your manager, you know, sir, like please, please get out
of my face, sir. And it was it was gross,
and they were going through my shit and that was gross.
Like they didn't find anything, but it was just an invasive, hostile,
disgusting thing. And that was when so I said, can
I speak to your manager? Which is a magic phrase

(03:44:58):
when you're a middle aged white woman. So I say this,
and they bring over some guy and he goes, ma'am,
can I help you?

Speaker 5 (03:45:05):
I'm like, yeah, what the fuck?

Speaker 40 (03:45:07):
You know, why are you treating me this way? Why
did any of this happen? And he goes, oh, yeah,
I'm sorry. Your name's on a list somewhere. You've been
flat And I'm like, so every time I've crossed, I've
been flagged. He's like yeah, and yeah, you've been there's
a flag on your passport or against your name and
that's why. And I said, well, why is there a
flag against my name? And he goes, I don't know,

(03:45:28):
You're going to have to do a Freedom of Information
Act request or something.

Speaker 5 (03:45:31):
I don't even know if he knew I was a.

Speaker 7 (03:45:32):
Journalist sadly broke Glass Crossing twenty eighteen, and since I
photographed those Cumi folks in ceremony near Camper, the border
wall has only got longer. Every mile it stretches out
means another mile into the desert people have to walk,
and that means that more people won't walk out of
that desert, Those people who lost their lives, and an
attempt to save them. A mark with little red dots
on the various maps, at attempt to put the humanitarian

(03:45:54):
crisis into a visual form. Those dots begin in South
America's people die traveling north, but they're sparse and isolated.
Where that changes is the places I've been driving all week,
Eastern California, southern Arizona. Places I know from years of hiking, climbing,
and cycling. Places when one mistake can be fatal. I

(03:46:15):
know from my friends who spend time resupplying water caches
and searching for missing people, that you don't have to
make any mistakes to die in the desert, especially if
you're young or old, or sick or afraid to ask
for help. These are the places we force people to
travel through on foot to come here and create a
better future for themselves. Dehydration, exposure, and drowning or rank

(03:46:37):
highly as caused a death along the border. Last year
saw a record for border death, and with Biden attempting
to take a hard line going into twenty twenty four,
and climate change and instability continuing to drive migrants north
to the place that causes so much of that climate
change and instability, there's no reason to believe things will
get better. I want to point to one tragic loss,

(03:46:59):
one of thousands, that happened not far from where I live.
In February of twenty twenty, Juana Margarita and Paula Santosarthe
were traveling by foot from Wahaka to their future in
the United States along a trail sometimes known as the
Shrine Trail. Their family told media back home that they
were searching for us. When you are Americano, the American dream.
Along their route is a small religious shrine which marks

(03:47:22):
the last point from which you can see in Mexico.
It's well inside the US, along a dry creek bed
in the Laguna Mountains. It can be hot in the
summer and cold in the winter. Last November I camped
out there, and even with thousands of dollars in gear,
I was dangerously close to cold injury. I've also rescued
hikers with dehydration symptoms near here. The desert and the

(03:47:45):
weather might be part of the story, but the desert
doesn't kill people on its own. It's the border that
forces people deep into the desert that kills them. The
desert is just a tool for a system that uses
death of a torrent. When the girls cross the border
camp on the ninth of February, it was raining. As
they climbed the Lagoona mountains, it started to snow. They

(03:48:06):
huddled under a bolder for warmth, and the two men
smuggling them across struck out to get Star reception and
call nine to one one. By the time boor Star
Border Patrol Search Trauma and Rescue team arrived, two of
the girls had died as they tried to save Juana.
Their request for air support was declined, and she died
with one of the agents jack kits wrapped around her
and another agent's beanie on her head. For some reason,

(03:48:30):
the girl's remains were not recovered right away, and they
were not rewarmed, and so they last their last chance
at the American dream and not life. Today, their final
resting place is marked by three crosses and a cash
of supplies placed there by volunteers at the time I'm
recording this, we don't know where all the folks we
met at the border are now. Then we might never know.

(03:48:52):
Not being able to follow stories is a sad part
of this reporting. Sometimes you know its people all have
my phone number, but they might not. Only more have
their phones or the scrap of paper are wrote it on.
Often these things can be taken for them in custody.
What we do know is that on May eighteenth, exactly
one week after Title forty two ended, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement also known as ICE, tweeted a video of Customs

(03:49:15):
Enforcement and Removal Operations agents walking down the corridor of
a flight full of mass people. The caption read ICE
conducted multiple removal flights, including Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras as
part of dozens flights conducted each week. On the wall
of my office, they write this. There are several propaganda
posters from the Spanish Second Republic. One is as simple

(03:49:38):
as it is heartbreaking. The poster depicts a squadron of
fascist bombers and the dead body of a child. The
slogan underneath reads, if you tolerate this, then your children
will be next. The poster was, of course correct. It
was the inspiration for songs for the Clash and the
Man Three Preachers, which are what, in turn made me
want to learn about the Spanish Civil War. The slogan,

(03:50:00):
coined in nineteen thirty seven, feels as relevant today as
it does then. It was one that folks on the
border might as well have been screaming by twenty eighteen,
but one that went ignored, just as it did in
nineteen thirty seven. In twenty twenty, folks began to realize
what it meant when border patrol drones circled the skies
around Minneapolis and cell phone signal interceptors tracked citizens all

(03:50:21):
over the US. When they came together to demand that
the police stop murdering people. It became more real in
twenty twenty three, when under DeSantis, Florida began the process
of legalizing state kidnapping of trans and gender nonperforming kids
from their loving families. But that all began when the
state ripped Indigenous children for their families in nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, who tried to destroy their culture by punishing

(03:50:43):
them for wearing their clothes, speaking their languages, or using
their names. Wasn't a big leap from there to Trump's
family separation policy, which detained kids on their own, away
from their families as a means of punishing the deterring migrants,
and it's reached its obvious endpoint in Florida because despite
all the people I think about kids in courages in
twenty twenty, it's almost universal bipartisan agreement on treating people

(03:51:05):
of our southern border like humans without rights. And because
for two decades we've allowed the border surveillance industrial complex
to grow to an unprecedented and uncontrollable scale. But what
you us all changing things now will be very difficult.
DHS aren't numbers many nations armies, and it's considerably better equipped.
But unless people show up and take action, things are

(03:51:26):
going to get considerably worse, regardless of who you vote
for or what they say in order to get you
to vote for them. As Katie said, little things can
make a difference, and if you listen this far, I
hope you'll take the time to try and do those
little things. Before we go, I want to update you
on what's happened in the week we've been publishing this.
Although there are no longer people held out in the

(03:51:47):
open in ho Goomba and sant Asedra, there are still
many people trying to present themselves at the sant Asedra
border to claim asylum. Today I was told they are
about one hundred of them. They're waiting there, often for days.
Most of them are getting turned away. They're all frustrated
with CVP one which continues to be buggy, offer no
appointments and struggle to photograph black faces. I also wanted

(03:52:08):
to mention some of the organizations you can find and
donate to if you'd like to support their efforts. They
are the Asian Solidarity Collective, Alo Trolao, the American Friends
Service Committee, Border Kindness border Lands Relief Collective, the Haitian
Bridge Alliance, the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans

(03:52:30):
and PREVENKASA pr e v E NCASA. I'd also like
to thank Joe Oriana his Twitter is at Joe or
Photo for his reporting which very much contributed to this series.

Speaker 2 (03:52:46):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 41 (03:52:52):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.

Speaker 5 (03:53:03):
Listen to podcasts.

Speaker 41 (03:53:04):
You can now find sources for it Could Happen Here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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