It Could Happen Here Weekly 79

that it is. It's happening to you here right now. Bad things, good things, all sorts of things, because today we are talking about the ultimate and bad good things, Donald Trump's indictment and very brief arrest. Garrison Davis, James Stout. How are we all doing today? How we all feeling this week?

So I feel like now is a reasonably good time to talk about it. More may have, you know, occur since we occurred, since we recorded this. But broadly speaking, the thing that Trump got indicted by, as according to the thirteen page court filing outlining the case against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, was what's called a catch and kill scheme in which Trump and you know, his his Trump bets, would basically bribe people to not write bad stories about him. You know, it's a hush

money thing. My assumption is that basically everybody at that level of wealth and prominence does versions of the same thing, and these, in fact, are not crimes on their own. You can bribe somebody not to say a bad talk

about a bad thing you did to the press. Where things get illegal is that Trump, you know, made a series of payments, primarily these one hundred and thirty one thousand dollars in payments to Stormy Daniels, to buy her quiet, and then he had to falsify company records or his people falsified company records to disguise the payments as legal fees.

Bragg is arguing that not only is this a crime, but it's a felony crime because he did this, He falsified these records to these disguise these payments in order to further additional violations of the laws. And those additional violations of the laws, the actual like core crime here is that disguising under New York law, disguising these kind of payments in corporate records is a crime. It's typically a misdemeanor, but it's a felony if the business records

were intended to obscure a second crime. And in this case, the second crime appears to be the use of funds to advance his like presidential campaign, which was in violation

of campaign finance laws. So the core crime that makes the misdemeanor a felony is the fact that he was doing this in order to advance his presidential campaign, and thus like the payments that he was making were basically counted as part of the limited amount of money you can spend, you know, financing your campaign and he violated that right. That's that's the gist of it, as I understand, like what's actually being argued here.

political position. Prosecuting someone and failing to get your man is bad for your career, and if that man is the president who you indict for the first time in living memory, that would be really bad for your So my assumption is that Brag at least believes he's got a really strong case otherwise he because this is a tremendous risk for him right now. Obviously, can Trump wriggle his way out of it, well, Trump is extremely good at wriggling his way out of things, and he has

all of the money in the world for lawyers. So I think it would be foolish to say it's a slam dunk either way. People who are saying that, like, this is a weird thing to prosecute him for, I guess, but you know it does. I can see the logic that this guy that Bragg is kind of going with, and it's do I think this should be a felony?

or brought through the justice system. So if you're a prosecutor choosing to do that in a specific case, there's a degree of politics factoring into your decision, even if it's just as as simple as like, if I take on this case and I lose it, it could harm my ability to move forward in the ways that I want to in my career. So the fact that now

this is political perhaps a grander sense. I have no doubt that the fact that this is Donald fucking Trump and everything that's happened since twenty twenty has happened that he has been a party, and I have no doubt that that all factors into this. But I just don't see that as being like the fact that finally a prosecutor is making sort of a political prosecution of a man at the top of the hierarchy is not something that concerns me terribly.

argument that this will help him cinch the nomination. I don't really think that was super in doubt before, although he has definitely gained on Desantas since all of this, this whole process started, there is evidence I'm looking at a five thirty eight article right now, Trump's indictment might be making him more popular among Republicans. But kind of the point that's actually made is that the group that's that's getting more likely to back him is his base.

Like maybe it's people who were softer on him because he didn't back you know, the j sixth people. Maybe some of them are just folks who kind of drifted away because you know, it's the years in between a presidential election and that's a natural thing. So it may have galvanized his base. He's certainly he's raised four or five million dollars.

in the likelihood of Americans to support Donald Trump. About sixty nine percent of Americans, according to a very nice according to an economist you Go poll, say that in general, failing to report having spent campaign money on payments in order to keep someone silent about an issue to effect and affect the outcome of an election is a crime. About ninety percent Biden voters back this, while about fifty four percent of those who voted for Trump in twenty

twenty said the same, Which is interesting. Now, that doesn't mean they also think that this is what Trump did, right, They're just saying they think that that is a crime. About fifty seven percent of Republicans according to that same or according to a Yahoo News yugav poll, about fifty seven percent of Republicans and Republican leaners said they would support Trump and a head to head against Ron DeSantis,

who received thirty one percent. That's an increase in support for the president by about ten percent, but DeSantis has only gone down by like eight percent, so you can see like he basically what's happening is that this is causing people to flock from DeSantis to him, which is not kind of evidence that we're seeing like a broader national sweep. Quinnipiac University, n PR, PBS News Hour Marist Pole kind of broadly supported the idea that investigations into

Trump are popular among Americans, more popular than not. At least about fifty six percent of Americans say the investigations into Trump are fair, about forty one percent say they're a witch hunt. In dependants are pretty split on the issue, but obviously like Democrats, wildly supportive Republicans very much against. Most college educated adults come down on this being fair, as do most gin Z and millennial people. Adults without a college education, White evangelicals and those in small towns

are most likely to call it a witch hunt. An NPR, PBS News Hour Marist poll shows a plurality of Americans. Forty six percent believe Trump has done something illegal related to those investigations. Another twenty nine percent say Trump has done something unethical but not illegal, while only twenty three percent say he's done nothing wrong. Overall, fifty seven percent of Americans say that criminal charges filed against Trump should

disqualify him from a presidential bid. Thirty eight percent say it should not. That would be an area where I actually agree with the Republicans. I don't think that having charges against you should disqualify you from running for president. But man, I think if you are a fucking murderer, you should be able to run for president. People have the right to run for and vote for whoever the fuck they want, and I think that that is a

strong core belief of mine. Not going to vote for Trump, but I think the fact that he's getting charged with a bunch of felonies should not. If he was in jail, he should be able to run as people have in the past.

much better for working people in this country. But the fact that it gives them the option to pivot back to like Orange Man bad as their only campaign, as their only promise, as their only sort of principle, which like they put forward as a reason to vote for them,

is still bad. I think like it prevents even the mudicum of accountability that we have for all the shit that the Democrats have done and all the shit that they haven't done in the past what like three two, two and a half years since the election.

they've failed. I mean, this is the week where we're getting the announcement from Biden that he's essentially taking kind of the soft answer to the GOP attack on trans people participating in sporting events. We were also about a week out from his most recent announcement on or maybe actually it's been more like a couple of weeks. On the border shit, we just had that horrible fire over in Juarez like a week or so ago. Like, the Biden administration has let a lot of people down in

a number of ways. There's you know, some of the drilling shit that's about to start up again in Alaska is really unsettling to me. So I agree with you. I don't like the idea that they can make this be an Orange Man bad election again. And I'm hopeful that some of what we've seen, you know, particularly like the most recent election in Chicago, you know, maybe maybe there's kind of at least room at the state level for a lot more progressive to edge out kind of

centrist dims and force some consequences that way. But I also am worried about, you know, this authoritarian who threatened to jail and murder a bunch of people. I care about and like I want, I want him to spend the rest of his life tangled up in that shit.

this guy. And I am surprised that you've you've got someone willing to kind of throw the dice here, and I'm hopeful that maybe that inspires especially since this case, by the way, since I'm sure people are curious. No one I've looked at who knows more about the law

than me expects this to hit trial quickly. Again, Trump has all of the money in the world, and this is like probably going to be a pretty winding process outside of just the normal problems of like a rich man is being accused of a series of crimes and has many lawyers. The Secret Service has a lot to say and when and how the actual trial part of this commences, and that has a chance of extending it.

So my hope is that as this kind of winds on, maybe the fact that Bragg was willing to kind of take a shot in the dark here, so to speak, inspires some of these other prosecutors who have been, you know, poking at Trump to take a swing, and maybe with enough swings, you know, it'll be like that guy we had on Troy Hurtebes and his bear armor suit. You know, you get a bunch of bikers to surround him with two by fours and just swing.

in front of crowds have had. I don't see. There's so many people I've watched have takes on this who are like and that. One of the joys of Twitter is you'll see some guy who's I don't know, an analyst at some newspaper be like, wow, Trump was really low energy. He seems frightened. You know, I'm telling you, this is a scared man. He's worried about these charges. And then like someone else with almost the same CV at a different place will be like wow, Trump seems angry.

You know, he's about to he's about to lash back. Everybody better be ready for his counter strike. And honestly, I just thought it was like kind of perfunctory. It didn't see he certainly didn't seem low energy, but he didn't seem like he had He didn't seem like he had much to say other than kind of meander over some of his some talking points that are at this

point mostly pretty lukewarm. He kind of runs through at the start of this a laundry list of right wing talking points that like the Democrats spied on his campaign in twenty sixteen, that he was subjected to fraudulent investigations from the Russia and Ukraine stuff to the impeachments to the raid on mar A Lago. And then he broadens it by talking about how the FBI and the DOJ relentlessly pursue Republicans. And I was kind of expecting him to lean more into the I am your vengeance shit

that he's been doing lately. He doesn't really as much as I had expected him to in this Like you can, he kind of like dips his toes into it, But I think he's so focused on what's happening to him that he doesn't he doesn't like push that as much as I was kind of expecting. So this is what comes after him like ranting about the DOJ and the FBI relentlessly pursuing Republicans. He then kind of like goes

into the election fraud claimed stuff again. He gives a bunch of lies there about the election, then about there being like ballot stuffed and all that kind of shit. Then he like pivots straight from that to talking about how Twitter purportedly worked with the Biden family to hide information about Hunter Biden. This is like debunked Twitter file shit. Yeah, update on Twitter files. Matt to Beebe has just left

Twitter because post substances subseec. We do know obviously like they did stuff like say hey, please remove this video that shows Hunter Biden's penis, but also like that's not number one is not supposed to be stuff that's on Twitter. That's kind of like crossing the revenge porn line. And you know, both sides made requests that things be removed. Trump claims, and I'm not sure where he says that.

There's like like somebody calculated this, but I haven't been able to find who made this calculation that if Twitter hadn't intervened against him, he would have won the national election by seventeen points. And then he's like, and that's I didn't even need that many. You know, you could have dropped that by sixteen point eight and I still would have won, which is not true. Really again, it's all just lies.

crime and liberal you know, cities with liberal prosecutors. Again, it's all bullshit, but it's not a bad tactic for tying into like, well, let's make a link between this thing Trump is claiming that's hurting him and this thing that people see every night on like Fox News that has been a pretty durable talking point for the right for several years.

Like that is a I mean, he's been making that point for a long time, but it definitely it's one of those things I think is a little bit of a window into the man's thought process, because he clearly thinks and perhaps I mean it must have a degree of resonance with his base, but the idea that like America has been embarrassed because he's facing charges and because of you know, Biden's failures as he sees it over in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Like, embarrassment is a big thing

he tries to get across in this that like, you know, Lady Liberty's been caught with their fucking skirt up or something like that. It's a I don't know, it's interesting to me that that's such a focus for him. There's a couple of fun lines in the part about the military. He talks about how it's woke at the top, but under him, it was able to defeat Isis in four weeks, which, man, it took years, Like we know it took years.

with Georgia's secretary of state was even more perfect. It was the best call anybody's ever had. Nobody had a problem with it. Lots of guys were listening in and they all thought it was great.

never did this, I never did that. You know this is taken out of context or whatever. Trump's just like it was perfect. But you don't remember the last perfect call I told you about that people thought might have been a crime. Even more perfect. This is the most perfect phone call anyone's ever had. Yeah, then we get along derailment about the Biden, like, you know, the classified

document shit that got him rated. He talks about how Biden's possession of classified documents was like the worst that anyone's ever done and was criminal because he was just the vice president. But the president's allowed to do it, but everybody does it, but the way Biden did is the worst that anybody did it. Yeah, it's like, I don't know, it's there. It's not like it's not an interesting Trump speech. I don't think he's like panicked or anything.

I just kind of I don't know, maybe he's just sort of like checking off a thing on the to do box. But it's not it's not one of the it's not one for the speech books, right or for the history books. I don't know the speech books. That's not a that's not a thing. That's not a thing at all. There is a really fun moment where he's like kind of late in the speech, in between him complaining about Letitia James, he like points to his sons and he's like, I got two great sons, sons both

doing really great. And then he's like and bear, and then as an afterthought, he's like, Baron's gonna do a great job too, someday.

pulling people out, you know. Do I think there's a chance of you know, isolated terrorist attacks as you know, by people who see themselves as defending Trump or democracy or whatever. Certainly not a zero percent chance. But in terms of like things that I think are likely to have a mass to stabilizing effect, I'm not seeing it yet.

And I think a lot of that's due just to the fact that the Trump supporters who are kind of have the highest potential of being convinced to do that shit, are all scared as hell, both of the FEDS and of each other. The sheer number of them that have like turned not each other during the j sixth investigations like has means that whenever there's talk about doing another big series of rallies, it devolves in a lot of these online places into like, well, you know, this is

probably being set up by the Feds. This is probably a honeypot to trap us, which is I don't know, it's not a situation. I would say you should rely on lasting forever, but that does kind of seem to be where we are right now.

the Feds even potentially have? It certainly doesn't look like they're in the mood to do anything now, because I think that's the kind of that's the kind of thing we're going to see a lot more of in red states in order that what little resistance at listen, and that's concerning.

enemies for whatever reason of identity. That is, like the increasing criminalization of groups of people in Red States, the flight of folks from those states, the fact that you are kind of seeing the country settle into two blocks that have wildly different legal systems that are often opposed to each other. That's a conflict that is absolutely happening. There's no denying that it's occurring. This is not a debatable thing, and I don't see the FEDS having any

idea of how to fix this at the moment. We'll see where the elections go in twenty twenty four. The fact that Wisconsin that their Supreme Court election went well.

haven't really got any better. In fact, they've potentially got worse. So where I want to start is last month and we're recording this and what the fourth of April, so just over a week ago, I think a fire and a detation the twenty eighth it okay, yeah, what's that?

It shows two people dressed as guards rush into the camera frame. You can see people in the cells just really pulling and kicking and beating on the bars. The guards sort of run up to the doors, but they don't really appear to make any effort to open them or to let the people out of the cells. Instead, they hurry away as clouds of smoke begin to fill the corners of the cells. Gradually, the smoke fills up

the whole screen until you can't see anything else. Than the men in the cells are left to die.

by the US Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar. He said the tragedy illustrated the dangerous grifts in traveling north, and he cited the loss of life in two recent smuggling incidents in San Antonio in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. These cases, he said, are a reminder of the risks

of irregular migration. But what we're talking about here is in a consequence of irregular migration, really right, because these people weren't in the hands of criminals or coyotes or cartels, that they were in the hands of the Mexican government when they died. And for him to blame this on irregular migration, I think is very indicative of the way

the bad aministration has approached migration. Policy, which is to try and always obfuscate and shirk the responsibility for the cruel things that it's doing, for the consequences of its policies and its actions, which I want to get into more. I don't want to linger on this fire too much because a it's onfathomably awful and like I don't think

it I don't. I think we need to spend hours and hours like going over something for people to know that there is no situation in which the government should burn fucking forty people alive that like it's inexcusable. We

know that, like it was. The shelter was set up in twenty nineteen, and I want to get into why this shelter, which seems to have been a pretty terrible condition to begin with, was set up in twenty nineteen, Why people who claim to the United States to try and have a better life for safe for life, ended up in a shelter in Mexico, and how we've created a system where people keep dying at our southern border. Right,

some of this will be stuff we've covered before. If people have listened to the other stuff I've done on the border, if people have listened to the Butterfly Sanctuary episodes. They'll be familiar with some of Biden's border policies, but I wanted to address these.

it was stilling. And that's because the system treats people like numbers, not people.

probably heard about Title forty two a lot. There's a lot to say about Title forty two, but very briefly, it's a trumpier of public health policy that invokes a public health rule to push asylum seekers out the US and into Mexico, regardless of whether or not they might legally qualify for asylum. This shelter was stood up as a consequence of something called the Migrant Protection Protocol. People call it the Migrant Persecution Protocol because that's more accurate.

It requires people to remain in Mexico while their asylum claim is processed, despite the fact that this might not be a safe country for them, and that this might violate various international laws and conventions on asylum, but the US doesn't subscribe to all of those. As we're going to find out now. Title forty two has been through some legal ping pong recently, right with Biden's sort of trying to get rid of it, also defind of getting caught a bunch of conservative states suing to keep it.

So it's explained a little bit of where we're at with Title forty two right now. It's actually set to

expire on May the eleventh. The Biden administration is rolling out plans that will continue to restrict migrant access after May the eleventh, because they're concerned about like a large influx of migrants, which I just want to point out was always going to fucking happen when you like push people just the other side of your fictional line in the sand, and at some point you're going to have to start, because at some point, Mexico is already the

third most popular country in the world for asylum, and you can't force this all on them. So since it was first implemented in twenty twenty, the government has used Title forty two to expel migrants from the US Mexico border nearly two point seven million times. That doesn't mean you will see these statistics quoted constantly, credulously by people who don't understand what the fuck they're talking about, and

it really makes me angry. That doesn't mean two point seven million people, right, Because Title forty two makes people cross more than once. It creates this kind of loop where DHS right normally CBP or a border patrol sorry, picks people up and dumps them back in Mexico without

processing them. And those people are now in a place they don't know, they don't have any family, that have any hope, they don't have any money, and all they do is is kick their heels until they can find a way to cross again, or someone to cross them again. And sometimes people who are facilitating those crossings will offer them unlimited crossings, so they they'll pay someone to smuggle them across, right, and that person will say, well, you get unlimited crossings.

a new wall he built. Yeah, he was just speaking out of his ass I foied it like the next day, and they were like they provided a number of different numbers or many of which relied heavily on repairing existing border fence, but they just went like hammer and Tong was trying to build new sections of wall to include skipping areas where it was harder to build valleys, mountains,

that kind of thing. Right, So what this wall does is it forces people through the areas where it's hardest to cross, and those are the areas where it's easiest to die. And so these people are now forced to make risky and risky of crossings to try and avoid getting caught, or to wait in Mexico where they are at a very high risk of abduction or sexual assault, extortion or violence. Right, And will come on to maybe a couple of those stories later, just from people I've

talked to. The result of this policy is that border cities in Mexico are flooded with migrants, and often with soldiers sent there to supposedly keep the peace. Last month, the Mexican National Guard and the immigration authorities raided a hotel full of Venezuelan migrants in Hualez. Local news applets reported that the migrants there'stly young men threw stones at the officials and there broad ensued and eventually they called

off the raid. In another incident, authorities raided the church and dragged off a number of Venezuelan migrants who have been given sanctuary there. Some were beaten, and one advocate said they were essentially tortured. This prompted, yeah, this is horrific, right, like a lot of so a lot of the young men in the it was all men in the detention center that caught fire, and most of them were from Venezuela, place where I've lived in Venezuela. I have a lot of sympathy for those people.

like border mix up, right of folks. Unfortunately, often you won't see Haitian folks that there are sort of segregations even within the migrant community, and often Haitian folks is kind of segregated out, which is which.

A lot of the Haitian people come via Brazil where they've spent time like preparing for the Olympics that were there and building stadium and stuff. So a lot of them tell me they've come up from Brazil. And then obviously with like increased violence in Haiti, now you'll see more Haitian people. Again, there's a decent Haitian community that also is established in Tijuana and has it's that is their home now, right, Like I.

But yeah, you just there was a lot of parachute reporting on migration in the Trump era, some of it very bad, some of it by people who didn't have the language skills to be working there and didn't understand what was respectful and what wasn't and things like that. So I have strong feelings about how the migrant caravan in twenty eighteen was reported on, for instance. But yeah, you'll definitely see a ton of Haitian people and that

Biden has gone exceptionally hard. I'll I'll include a link at the bottom of like a piece I wrote for NBC about Biden's anty Haitian bullshit but like exceptionally hard, specifically against the Haitian. So so you can find a tweet from the Haitia the United States Embassy in Haiti, where it's just got a picture of Biden, and I

think it says, don't come I'm paraphrasing. Yeah, yeah, no, it's wild, Like you don't see this in other countries either, even you know they've made like they've made there's a ton of special exemptions for people from Ukraine. Right, it's hard not to see.

earlier on that he would end Title forty two. He then faced these lawsuits from conservative states, but at the same time that by the administration fiercely defended Title forty two litigation brought by the ACLU and other groups challenging the policy. Even the CDC right the CDC Center for the Dida's Control was like, now the shit isn't necessary

and it's cool, we should stop. The government has argued the public health concerns letting migrants into the country due to continued threat of COVID nineteen outweigh the possible harms done to migrants who return to cities like nogals Ijuana, Like you don't even need a COVID test to fly into this country now, I don't think right, Like if my family come visit me, so the end of the emergency kind of makes that a moot point, right, Like you can't have a public health order to protect us

from it, which you're saying isn't a problem anymore. But the damage that this has done will take years to rectify, and the backlog that it's created is already being used as an excuse to do more cruel and inhumane things to people who are just looking for a fair crack at life. Srean, do you know what won't build a wall around itself forced people to risk their life to get here?

policy of his own yet. Mostly he's just kind of failed to undo the damage Trump is done created a two TiO system in which white Ukrainians get to slip the line while back and brown migrants weight terrible conditions, And for some reason, he's gone as hard as fuck as he can to stop patients coming here, which the reason might be pretty obvious to some of you. Oh and we're still building the wall, but we're calling it

a barrier now of course. Yeah, it's totally different brand, yeah bread, Yeah, it doesn't have a little plate on the top. It's a slightly different shape. You can, like, if you scroll back far enough on my Twitter, you can find comparison pictures of the Biden barrier and the Trump Wall.

But we're more than halfway through Biden's term now, and we're beginning to see him take aim at something resembling a border policy on his own at the same time, because we're more than halfway through his term, or perhaps just because he never intended to fulfill his campaign policies about being kind to migrants, he's tried to move towards the center, and the center of US politics is like somewhere to the right of Attila the Hund these days.

So he's been hit pretty hard by the Republicans on immigration, and it's worth pointing out that he's been hit pretty hard on largely on just shit that's made up or misunderstandings of this. The number of interactions that border patrol has or wilful or on wilful, I don't know, but many of the cretiques are in pretty bad faith. But nonetheless, like it's been an area where they've criticized him, right, And so he's trying to move towards the quote unquote

center on that with these new policies. So he's proposed that his administration has proposed something called a transit band, So transit band, people might remember, And the initial kind of proposal of this was made by Stephen Miller due to looks like a lollipop and also like a white nationalist.

then you'd have to travel through another country. Right, And they're saying that you should apply for asylum there In practice, this would bar most Nonxican asylum seekers unless he took advantage to one of the programs that Biden has proposed to allow people in Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela with a US sponsor under a humanitarian parole program where they apply from their home country and then get to credentials

to travel, so they'd stay in Cuba or whatever. This might not be safe for some people to do in those countries, but they have a means to get here and it's metered I think at thirty thousand a month. Those people from those same countries and during the same conditions, if they came here on their own and then applied to asylum as is, they're right under US law once

they entered the country right. And it's worth noting that like most people coming in that wanted to apply for asylum, so they wanted to turn them That might have changed it law with Title forty two, but previously people were seeking to turn themselves in right and say hey, I'm here to apply for asylum. They can now be expelled under this legislation.

I worked with a colleague who spoke a Romo. I speak French his Spocationian Creole, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, right, like, like those are people I interviewed in in an afternoon, you know, there are dozens of languages, so the app isn't available in those languages. The app is a giant cluster. Fuck, it doesn't work. It crashes all the time. Like you can find like little kids, little kids who come up from Tijuana to go to school, who like can tell

you ten things that are wrong about this app. But you can also find people who make six figure salaries in Washington.

what if no people in charge? So migrants crossing the border without documents can be subjected to explicited removal, as it said, the proposed regulations indicate the migrants from Cuba, Nicaraguo, and Venezuela, who generally cannot be deported due to strain relations with the governments there, would face deportation to Mexico instead, which fucking just again makes someone else's problem, right. A dozen Senate Democrats called the proposed asylum restrictions unlawful and counterproductive.

They joined thousands of migrant advocates and organizations, including the United Nations Refugee Agency, in employing the administration to immediately withdraw the regulation. So there's a period of public comment, which is what's happening at the moment. Right, So he's found a policy which no one likes, both from the right end from the people are allowed to live with dignity. So that's hard to do.

In Mexico, asylum seekers have to stay in the state where they apply, and that's resulted in large numbers people being concentrated in uh placed like Tapatula on the southern border with Guatemala, and that creates like an infrastructure issue there, right, which it's also worth I'm sure people are well aware that. I wonder why all these countries have been fucking destabilized, right, I wonder if there was a country which helped do that for deca their home, Like why can't they go back home?

home country safely. Mexico abides by something called the Katahena Declaration, which promises a safe haven twenty one's threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights, or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order. The US currently observes a narrow definition that requires a person to

have been individually targeted. That's a distinct thing. Right for limited reasons are spelled out in the UN Refugee Convention. But it appears that the bad administration has plans to retrain DHS agents, and they're currently telling them, or they seem to be proposing to tell them. I should say, to let migrants enter the US to pursue protection only if they qualify under the International Convention against Torture, which is an absurdly.

It's also on the inside of the administration. Recently has reported that the Biden administration is considering reviving the practice of detaining migrant families caught crossing the US Mexico border illegally. So this is this is the thing that that all the people were very upset about. It the normal kids in cages thing, mm hmm. But we fucking do that

again as well. I guess they likely won't do like separation of minders, which which is what they did before, right, they took the kids away from their parents entertained them separately, which is just fucking like I cannot imagine. It's still just.

her teddy bear behind. She wanted a teddy bear, And like this, little girls are cleaving in a fucking tent.

on my shoulders, you know. And at this point, the way that they were getting people to leave that area and go to another area was by cutting off their access to water. Oh my god, so like we were able to get some water, and we were able to give them like as much water as we coabin credit cards. And I asked her like what she wanted. She said she had to leave her teddy bear behind. It just fucking broke my heart, like without like you know, going

into too much personal trauma. Details like that shit kept me from sleeping for weeks. Uh, and I found it so hard to come back. It was like twenty eighteen, around November, I guess, and like go to like a I remember someone's having some Thanksgiving thing and just I just wanted to fucking shout at everyone and be like what the fuck is wrong with you? Anyway? So when bought her.

That's how I met them for the first time. Number of those people actually were surveilled by border patrol, as we found out two years later, and had warrant on them, etc. But everyone who came came like not because it was their job, because it was the right thing to do, and like, there wasn't a day I was down there that there weren't people turning up with trucks full of stuff.

This is my friend and I. Someone managed to get us a projector from their workplace and how they got a projector from their workplace, I didn't care, and a bunch of DVDs. My friend used to be an electrician. And they moved everyone to a nightclub. It was a nightclub and another part of Tijuana at our old nightclub, the old and massive thousands of people were in this big kind of opening nightclub situation. It was very strange.

They had the women and the young children in one area that like very clearly had been a pole dance room, so like anyway, and they had like these bars ort of like you know, like a balcony area. So we went up to the balcony area, and then me and a couple of these older kids who with the migrant group were able to get like climb across the room, find some wires connected projector and do a little make

a little movie theater for the children. And they remember they were watching like Beverly Hills, Chihuahua when I left, and yeah, they were having like just.

My message is this, if you're trying to leave Coolba, Nicaragua or Haiti have agreed to begin a journey to America, do not do not Just shut up at the border, stay where you are and apply legally starting today. If you don't apply through the legal process, you will not be eligible for this new parole program. Anyway, Joe Biden can go fuck himself. But I think that I hope that obviously lots of little anecdotes have helped. But we shouldn't see these people as statistics or numbers, and we

should see them as people. So I've got a couple of interviews I've done, and to just one as I went back to some notes and found so I was just going to read them out, so I won't give their names just for their own security. But sometimes I've used pseudonyms on the publicies. Sometimes I have used the names when they're willing to use their names, like it's their choice, right, but it should always be their choice.

If you're a fucking reporter and you're filming children without their consent or their parents consent.

with my daughters. It's hard to get work here. That's an immigrant. There are some jobs, but not the sort that are for me. I have to try and be an example to my kids. One day I was juggling by the traffic lights and some guys tried to pick me up. They said they knew where I lived and they would hurt me and my daughters, who I didn't work for them. They made me work in a bar.

I escaped, but that's how I broke my hand. I didn't want to go to the US, but I need to leave this country now for the same reason I left my own. Well, then I'll read one more. We came from one daughters to flee the violence. We have come to this camp in the last few days, but it's scary here. We don't feel safe. There are people coming or taking photos of the children of the women. Men of for the women here money to go with them. They tried to get them to sleep with them. It's

a woman here filming us as well. We found out she's a big activist for Donald Trump. This was in twenty twenty one. Some people came to snatch a child here. Between the group, we're working to make a security committee to protect the children because there are people who would take the children here. We aren't a caravan. We're just people from all over the world who have come here for a better future. We're asking Biden. We know it's complicated and he has a lot to sort out, and

we have patients. We know he has to make compromises, but please think of us here. We're in danger. Please give us a solution.

you can donate to the public. Comment is still available for the Biden to propose new restrictions, so I guess you can come out of that if you think that will help. I guess this is an area sometimes where talking to politicians might help, because they make the laws that affects people's right to kind of live with basic dignity. But yeah, I don't have a great solution to this, especially like if people aren't in a place where they know people here are struggling to get by. I understand

that not everyone can afford to donate, of course. Yeah, but yeah, this is pretty bleak. And just because it's not like being beamed into your living rooms anymore, because orange Man bad doesn't mean that lick it's still not impossibly cruel.

for Johnson and forty eight percent for Vallus. As Mia says, this lets to a lot of people on the left no longer have to keep up the charade of, oh, Johnson's the best thing that has happened to us in slice bread. For if you are like more of a like Democratic Party loyal progressive voter, this is a very very good thing in your eyes.

Harold Washington did were specifically overturned by Paul Vallis. Yeah, like he's the guy you did a bunch of educational reforms that fucking sucked, that destroyed Washington stuff.

with it. But every so often someone good comes along, or at least someone better, And if you get them into office the first time, and if you get them to survive their first reelection campaign, then they get to be one of the people who's on the ballot forever and who never dies. And slowly but surely you can make Chicago politics less shitty. But yeah, as Mia said, this is going to be the first progressive Chicago mayoral administration since Harold Washington. And Johnson won the same way

as Harold Washington did. On Yeah, the backbone of Johnson's coalition, just as with Harold Washington's, was black voters. Johnson got about eighty percent of the black vote. Because in Chicago elections are usually more about race than anything else. But in addition to the black vote, Johnson won with progressives in white and non black communities of color, as well as LGBTQ voters, and finally fulfilling the dreams of the Here's how Bernie can still win people from twenty fifteen.

A actual turnout surge of millennial and Gen Z voters the Chicago Board of Elections is. I don't think that anyone would call them great, but they do produce some nice live statistics on election day as the votes are tallied, and voters under forty five had a turnout surge of I think it was about twenty percent, whereas voters older than sixty, the raw number of their votes actually went down.

And this likely does almost entirely account for Johnson's margin of victory, that he was able to turn out young voters and that old people just like stayed home.

their assets off and it actually seems to have worked. And I don't know, I mean, you know, it has to be seen the extent to which this was about, like the fact that Vallas is like probably would have been the worst mayor of Chicago in like.

lot of national attention and that mattered. That's not to say that it like literally hasn't happened anywhere else. I'm just saying I can't think of any off the top of my head. But like, in twenty twelve, Barack Obama became the first person to be elected president of the United States with less than forty percent of the white vote, a feat that has never since been repeated. Clinton got less than that and lost. Trump obviously won, and Biden

won because white voters swung left in twenty twenty. So like, this is a turnout and coalitional puzzle that most people fail to put together and that Brandon Johnson miraculously pulled off. Yeah, And I think, on the.

political science question. On the other hand, most of the people attempting to answer it have just all my fuck God, Like if I if I have to read another New York Times article writing about this that's like like just clearly cobbled together from three Wikipedia articles, Like I'm gonna literally go insane.

Like the ideological lines were a lot clearer in this election than previous mayoral races. But the foundation of Brandon Johnson's electoral victory was the eighty percent of the vote that he got in black majority neighborhoods. Black voters in Chicago selected the black candidate because they looked at the white guy and said, oh, we think you're going to

be a massive dipshit. And beyond that, you have a couple of other things working in Johnson's favor, So like one, when it comes to the youth vote, I cannot really believe I'm saying this because I when this was announced. It's not that I thought it wouldn't help. It's just

that I wasn't sure that it would help enough. But Johnson got a lot of national progressive figures to endorse him, including Bernie Sanders, and his campaign literally flew Bernie in for a rally on a college campus here in Chicago. And I think that genuinely did actually get a lot of young people to realize that there was an election that they should pay attention to, which is well because like.

that was good enough. He actually probably won the Latino vote, it would. It wasn't like a huge win, but it

was a win. But the problem is that turnout in on the Southwest side of Chicago, which is where the majority of Chicago's Mexican American residents live, was just super low, just like really really atrociously in the tank, like to the extent like this is the kind of turnout that fires the online jokes about how no one ever bothers to vote level bad turnout on the Southwest Side, So if Hispanic turnout had been on the same level as white and black turnout, the race probably would have been

a lot closer. Vallas also won Chinatown, which is something that got a fair amount of attention on social media. But Johnson was able to win the two other Asian ethnic enclaves in Chicago, which are the Vietnamese neighborhood in Uptown called Asian Argyle, as well as the Deci neighborhood on the far North Side. And I don't think we can really say how Asian voters overall voted definitively because Asian voters in Chicago are pretty well diffused through the city.

But it's very clear that Vallas did not get the runaway win with Asian voters that Eric Adams, for example did in New York City.

dog shit place for Johnson. And yeah, and I want to say this about Chinatown and this is something like I mean you just you can know this something like I've been tracking for a while, I mean just by like walking through it Chinatown during the pandemic and kind of after it, and it was having a bit before has gotten just notably more fascist, Like oh yeah, there is a lot of stuff there. I mean, the anti

homelessess stuff is really really really intense. They've been going really hard on the d And that's the thing that kind of makes sense, right, like this this is a thing that you would kind of expect out of like yeah, of course small business owners are going to like go right like that's like that's that's you know, that that's the you can you can you can find Marx writing about this phenomenon in like eighteen forty eight, right like this this has been a thing since the beginning of time.

But I don't know, it's gotten, it's gotten legitimately kind of scary down there.

I think from what I saw, like the reaction on the North Side among these Asian enclaves was pretty overall supportive of the protests, whereas down in Chinatown as well as in McKinley Park, which is a Hispanic majority neighborhood but has a pretty significant Asian population, those neighborhoods had this really really big like surge of anti black racism in response to the protests. Like there were quote unquote neighborhood watch groups that got formed.

and like he's very progressive. So there has been this very sharp divergence in how the Asian neighborhoods in Chicago have responded to some of the social events of the last few years.

and Brandon Johnson's win pretty much seals this. And it's not that the people are gone or that like the you know, the logistical operations of the machine are completely dead. But the machine has now lost two elections in a row. Because as much as Laurie as much as Lauri Lightfoot sucked, and she sucked so much. She also was an anti machine candidate, like she was like capital a anti machine when she ran. And Brandon Johnson is not anti machine in the way that Laurie was, but he definitely was

not the candidate of like the machine. So like they lost two elections in a row. Mike Madigan has now been like indicted and he's probably going to prison for a very long time.

like machine politics has gone from Chicago. It's more that instead of a machine, there are now going to be a bunch of smaller machines, which is going to make it easier for like normal everyday people to actually have some saying the political process, which is a good thing.

and a half. But they yeah, they really they really fucked it, like Chicago was like the political machine, and you know, like I mean like they're in large part responsible for the creation of Obama's career and they've parlayed that into losing to like the least popular mayor in like a generation, and then losing again branded like somehow to Brandon Johnson, and it's I don't know, they've they've they've failed spectacularly and fuck them, they're awful.

would not cut the police budget. But aside from like those literal words, he very much is in line with the progressive priorities of de emphasizing like using people with guns to go through like six weeks of training or whatever. So he wants to pass a bill called Treatment Not Trauma, which is replacing cops with mental health responders for nine

to one one calls about mental health crises. He wants to pass another bill called the Peacebook Ordinance, which would expand restorative justice and violence intervention like projects and programs in the city. And he also wants to pass an ordinance to put somegnificant restrictions on police department raids and like the police department's just actual ability to do raids altogether.

There is a very infamous contract here in Chicago called the Shop Spotter Contract, which is this dumb software that is supposed to be able to like tell police when a gun goes off, and like, as far as I can tell, doesn't And it's just like straight up doesn't work. So Johnson wants to get rid of that. He also wants to eliminate the Gang Database, which, if you are

from Chicago you probably know what we're talking about. Is this very infamous list of about one hundred and twenty thousand people, ninety five percent of whom are either black or Latino. And they are on this list called the Gang Database, more or less because one day some random Chicago police officers decided to put them on the list. It's very dumb, it's very racist, it's very blatantly unconstitutional, and hopefully Brandon Johnson is able to get rid of it.

and you know. I mean, one of the things about this election, right is that the people who are actually affected by crime vote for Johnson.

people getting shot, which is fucking shit. Then you're also dealing with the CPD, who are like function most of the time, are functionally a cartel about every like we're kind of due for another set of like prosecutions for them, Like roughly every like seven or eight years, there's a massive series of IRA by the FBI or like the fence come in and like discover that there's like a giant there's a giant artelle operating out of the CPD.

these people, and oh, it sucks. It fucking sucks. And like the Chicago is kind of in many ways not the ground zero, but like a ground zero for a

phenomenon where you have these poor neighborhoods of color. Who you know, the people who live in these neighborhoods, they are simultaneously over policed and under police because the police don't bother to show up half the time when like they're theoretically needed, right like someone gets shot, you call nine one one, and the cops don't bother showing up for hours if they bother showing up at all. And at the same time, when they do show up that

you often cause more problems than they solve. Like Chicago has really truly horrific clearance rates of violent crime. And this is mostly because CPD just insists on maintaining this really awful balance. You know, if you do believe in police, you want there to be a pretty healthy balance between beat cops and detectives. Right.

in a patrol car. So these neighborhoods, like you know, you go down to the South Side or the West Side, a lot of these A lot of the residents in these neighborhoods would tell you, because they're not leftists, right, so they would tell you that they want more police officers, but they don't want more beat cops necessarily, like they want more detectives, and they want officers who are actually going to care about them as people. Unfortunately, the Chicago

Police Department is made up of fascists. So like, ugh, you know, low chances on that front. But it's like that is the problem these neighborhoods are facing, is that like the police don't bother to care, and when they bother to show up, they often make things worse.

of their big consernives was legal guns. And then the other big conserve was just like the fact that there's these places are really poor and there's no opportunities for.

neighborhoods in Chicago. And the other thing was mental health, like you know, and that's one of the other things that Johnson wants to do is he wants to reopen the mental health clinics that got closed down by rom or rom Emmanuel, who is a previous mayor of Chicago, who is currently being inflicted upon the people of Japan as the US ambassador, and you know they deserve it.

He also wants to expand public transportation in Chicago. Like there are a lot of proposals flying around for expanding the train lines and bus lines and bike rid There are also, as me and I were talking about before we started recording, there are a lot of lead pipes like water pipes in Chicago. Yes, and and like Chicago is like supposed to be replacing them, it's proceeding very slowly.

Johnson wants to speed that up. There's like just very genuinely a lot of research on the books directly linking lead poison into a lot of social problems, and so it's very much one of these things where it's like, you know, if you replace the lead pipes, crime will go down.

just won't show up. There are buses that are basically unusable because it's it's like you're basically sitting there trying to roll double ones as to whether the bus will fucking show up at all. The wait times are enormous, Like it's a real shit show, and like it's it's substantively way worse than it was when I was in this and like fifteen nineteen. Yeah, it's really really bad and it's it's atrocious.

homelessness problem. And this is directly linked to the fact that the city just does not want to give people housing. And so what ends up happening is that a lot of Chicago's homeless residents, especially in the colder winter months, they end up on the trains, especially the two lines

that run twenty four hours a day. And you know, these are people who are really you know, they're living in really really terrible conditions, Like they don't have regular access to clean food and water, let alone like clean access to like like regular access to like hygienic facilities.

And so ridership really plummeted on the lines where homeless people started to like just go on in order to stay warm, and so you get the hit because rider fares are now down because people don't want to deal with being on the same train line as homeless people who you know, frankly just don't smell that good or have mental health problems. And the city doesn't want to give these homeless people housing, let alone like even like smaller things like like access to bathing facilities or healthcare

or anything like that. And so it becomes a self reinforcement cycle of now fares are down, so there's less investment, so more people abandon the system, and it is the same were like this will this would get solved if Chicago committed to giving homeless people housing, but that's just not where the city has unfortunately been.

benches in them, so you can't sit in them. Yeah, it sucks, like it's it's you know, it's they have this really just like the hatred of homeless people is turned basically into a war against all society waged the city, and yes, it's atrocious.

So you know, you know, fingers crossed on that one, because that, I think, along with the public safety measures, is really the thing that the city needs the most. And Johnson also on the housing front, he wants to liberalize zoning laws, which I know is a very big debate on the left at the moment about, you know, how we go about approaching building more housing. Johnson very much is on like the probe development end of things.

He wants to liberalize zoning laws and make it so that it's easier to build multi family housing and previously like single family housing zoned areas. He does also want to pass just cause for eviction, so like your landlord would not be able to throw you out just because, which is a good thing. Chicago's landlords are really shit. They're terrible. I have seen across the born terrible.

is that Johnson wants to cap property taxes. So one of the things that has been driving a lot of reactuctionary politics in Chicago is that property taxes here are linked to inflation, which means that if you are a property owner in Chicago in the last couple of years, your property taxes went up by like fifteen plus percent, which understandably made a lot of people mad because you know, if your taxes go up by that much that fast, you at least wanted to be going to do something

good and under our previous well soon to be previous mayor Lord Lightfoot, that absolutely was not happening. Yeah, cop over time or some shit like Yes, So Johnson is he campaigned on decoupling property taxes from inflation so they would no longer just automatically go up, which would bring a lot of financial relief to a lot of Chicago families.

And also he would basically like wants to pass a lot of taxes focused on wealthier residents as well as big businesses to help fund some of the programs which brings us to the City Council. And how much of a chance he hasn't getting this past, which is better than you might think if you are familiar with Chicago politics. Something that surprises people who don't live in the city

is that Chicago is not run by progressives. There has actually pretty much never been a progressive majority on the City Council, and there isn't there will not be a progressive majority on the new one. That comes in with Johnson. He is going to be presiding over a minority government in parliamentary terms, which I think we should use more often because I'm a nerd and I find it fun. But basically, there are fifty members of the Chicago City Council.

They are called aldermen because we insist on having a city council that is the size of a state legislature here, and about twenty two of them are going to be aligned with Johnson mo less, so he's going to be three votes short on a lot of things. At least from the beginning. He is going to be negotiating with the black political establishment here in Chicago, which is one of the smaller machines that is left in the aftermath of Madigan's indictment. And we are going to see how

this goes. Some of those black aldermen are friendlier to Johnson from the get go, partially because of ideology and partially because a lot of them just like personally know him and like him. Some of them are very against him for similar reasons, like they either ideologically don't line up or they just dislike him on a personal basis.

His relationship with like the old machine was very bad, but he is definitely part of a machine that is tied up and like the institutional labor unions that have a lot of sway and democratic politics here, including the Chicago Teachers Union, which, like you know, Vallas's whole stick during the run off was that Johnson would be a stooge for the teachers Union, and the teachers Union really just like the teacher This is actually kind of funny

because like the Teachers' Union really just swept the board here, not just with Johnson, but with like a lot of the city council races where they weighed in. So if you are a member of the Chicago Teachers Union who does not approve of their leadership, buckle up, because the next several years they are going they are almost certainly going balls to the wall of like, well, if we can get a mayor, we can get a lot of other people too.

like kind of resistance liberals on steroids. Like they're not going to be like frontliners and a socialist revolutionary time soon, but like they are definitely on the far left of the Democratic Party coalition.

so like one thing to talk about. Like they actually do go on strike, which is the thing that a lot of unions struck don't like.

love the Chicago Teachers Union. Like when the teachers last one on strike, the public was over overwhelmingly on their side,

which is why they won. And c TOU also like their twenty nineteen strike against Lory Liefoot was very much like the inspiration that touched off a lot of the teacher strikes that happened in red states over the next several months, Like they very much kind of led the way in some in some areas, like so they are like like Mia, I have complicated feelings about the CTU, but overall they're a good thing for city politics and like they make Chicago a more progressive place.

that's not true. In Chicago. The progressive movement and the left, like the leftist movement, on an electoral level in Chicago is very much driven by people of color. And you saw this in the City Council election results. Almost every single seat that progressives flipped on the City Council was in a black or brown ward, and even the two wards, like the two white majority wards where they flip seats, the new aldermen or Alder women in both cases are

people of color. So, like, this is just like context for those of you who are not from Chicago. This is not a case of like white leftist gone wild. Like this very much is a rainbow coalition, not just in the sense that Brandon Johnson won the election off of rainbow coalition, but in the sense of the electoral left in Chicago is very very much a rainbow coalition and has been very effective because of that.

a bunch of cops live there. But most of the racially integrated neighborhoods of Chicago are also the most progressive neighborhoods, and that like really just flies in the face of the whole like white lake Front liberal narrative and is something to pay more attention to.

have I don't know. I mean, it's just the sort of like ideological bankruptcy of like like the sort of like capitalist establishment is like they have nothing right they're they're like the only thing they have left is like calling a black guy white.

how do you handle anti Semitism? And I think there are just unfortunately a lot of really dipshit consultants in the Democratic Party who hear the words anti Semitism and think you have to talk about Israel, which is really truly an ironically anti semitic of them to think, like, yeah, I think he was probably told to say that I'm not going to go out on a limon. I guess what his actual beliefs on Israel Houstine are, but I'm pretty confident that that was his consultants being dumb.

effort predates him, like that's in the world. Like he definitely immediately came out and said like, yes, I'm in support of this, yeah, which is like some people don't understand why. Okay, So, like the thing that happens when when when national convention comes to your city is that your city is occupied by the cops and then like wherever the convention is happening based we turned into a war zone because anyone who comes out to trying to protest them just gets like the ship beaten out of them.

a thing that brings a lot of cops into the fucking city he's in theory supposed to be trying to have policing done by like people who are cops. That's gonna suck if it works.

So for those of you who are not paying attention to this, which is likely even more than the people who were not paying attention to Chicago, because state Supreme Court races, most people if you tell them about those, react with that's a thing. Yeah, and I mean to be fair.

Like the areas of the state that have been trending towards Republicans experienced massive reversion back towards Producewits and the areas of the state that have historically been a Republican also really shifted left. And the reason this happened, the single reason it happened, is because of the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and brought American gender dynamics

back by a solid seventy five years. Pro to Saywits successfully turned the campaign into a referendum on abortion rights, which is why she won by the margin she did. There was huge turnout in Madison, Milwaukee and college campuses. There were multiple college campuses, I think where there were more votes cast in this state Supreme Court election than

there were in the midterms last November. So this really was like every single thing that possibly could have gone right electorally for the Democrats in Wisconsin did obviously with very very like grim background context of the overturning of Row, but a good sign for the future of the abortion rights movement that you know, people voters did not forget about Dobbs after the midterms, like this is still an active force in national politics that is pushing people to the left.

by a bunch of just deranged Christian nationalists whose opinion reflect maybe tour like thirty percent of the country max.

insanity of trying to do this. His reasoning was that, you know, this man wrote a ruling saying that the Constitution guarantees fetal personhood, which is a which we you know would result in a complete and total ban on abortion nationwide under all circumstances, and that's a viewpoint that is shared by less than ten percent of Americans. So like, it's just, you know, the Republican Party has gone off

the cliff after they went off the cliff here. Yeah, And you know, I don't know, I think this whole I think.

be saved, and they finally lost it. And now it's like, you know, it's the thing that's like, it's it's it's it's the electoral issue that's coming to bail them out of their like.

But the you know, now that abortion rights are gone on a national level, we are seeing this electoral backlash and it is having the impact of like you know, Republicans have been unable to effectively make the national conversation about inflation, or about crime, or about trans athletes, which is also a losing issue for them, but god knows, they keep trying, but they have been unable to make the national conversation about those topics because voters are now

looking at them like, but you're the freaks that took our abortion rights away? What's wrong with you? And in terms of Wisconsin, pro to say, which being on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is almost certainly she doesn't take office until August, which is a really weird amount of time for her to have to wait, Like I don't know

why Wisconsin is like that, but it is. But once she is in office, Wisconsin should have restored abortion access, I would say almost immediately, basically, like as soon as someone can file a lawsuit over it, because right now, abortion is currently illegal in Wisconsin under a law from eighteen forty nine that the only exception to the law is to save the life of the mother, which, like.

If the fetus that you are carrying, you know, whether you wanted an abortion or not, if that fetus has some kind of fatal defect, that is going to mean that your baby dies within hours or days after being born and is going to be and pain the whole time. Abortion is not an option for you. If you are pregnant because of sexual violence or because of incest, abortion

is not an option for you. And it's it's like, you know, I am a cisgender man, so like I can't personally understand, but like I can only guess how

terrifying of a reality that is. And the you know, the only good news out of this is that once prodi Saywans is in office, that law is probably going to go away as quickly as possible, which is a much needed victory for the people of Wisconsin and hopefully is you know, carries the momentum forward for like post twenty twenty four, hopefully we have a democratic trifecta again that can legislate abortion rights nationally and take it out of the ability to take away the ability for courts.

twenty ten, twenty eleven. I think that really restricted the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions, and like this sparked a recall campaign against Walker, which failed and proto Sawitz has said on record she said it in a campaign appearance because this race really just discarded all pretensions of like judicial impartiality. But she said in a campaign appearance that she wanted to get rid of that law. So that law is probably going away, or hopefully we'll

be going away. Wisconsin also has very gerrymandered state legislative maps that are almost certainly going to be struck down. Same thing with its congressional maps, which means that Democrats can probably count on two more seats in the House post twenty twenty four, and also on a basic like do we live in a democracy or not?

in Wisconsin ever since. Wisconsin was one vote away from just three throwing out the popular election results, like the popular vote results, so there, you know, pro to say what's winning is literally an insurance policy for continuing to have the state of Wisconsin be a democracy. Yeah, which is good, Like I don't know that.

swing state. It is reliably going to be close to fifty to fifty, but especially on social issues, it has a liberal majority, and a lot of people paid attention to this race and they saw correctly the opportunity to dismantle the dictatorship that effectively has had control of Wisconsin for the last decade plus.

because you know, we don't want to be like the days of the Republican Party not wanting to be two on the nose about the racism are long gone. But yes, so, But overall, good things happened in Wisconsin on Tuesday, and some some of the really terrible things that were put into law in that state in the last decade are hopefully about to go away. Yeah, there were some other places, mostly in the Midwest because once again the coastal regions

of the country let us down. But there were some other places where liberals or progressives did well on Tuesday. Saint Louis, Missouri, has had a progressive city council, and there was a very strong kind of law and order challenge to that progressive majority based in the city's white majority. Wards and after Tuesday night, it's pretty clear that progressives will continue to have a majority on the city council.

In Kansas City, on the other end of the state of Missouri, we are probably going to get the most progressive city council that the city has ever had. The main left wing group got all of its candidates through to the general election which is on June twentieth, and the main right wing tough on crime group seems like it's going to be capped at winning two seats. So you know, once again, the Midwest is the engine of

American progressivism and the West coast can suck it. Yeah, there is one more piece of good news, which is that in Illinois there was a set of far right groups that ran a bunch of school board candidates on the like anti critical race theory, anti queer, anti trans platforms, and actually I'll just say the names of the groups because people should know. These groups are Awake Illinois, Moms

for Liberty, and the seventeen seventy six Project. Basically, these groups are you know, if you went to the South in the nineteen seventies, you had the Klan and then you had the White Citizens Council, which was the supposedly more respectable face of white nationalism in the South in the sixties and seventies, and groups like Moms or Liberty and Awake Illinois are kind of the equivalent to groups like the Proud Boys and very you know, fittingly with

the analogy here, these groups are primarily run and staffed by conservative women, just like white citizens councils were down South about fifty years ago, and thankfully, these candidates almost all went down in flames. I think there is a school board election in me and I's hometown, which is very notoriously conservative for people in the area, and even

in that in our hometown, they've lost. And like these losses extended into downstate Illinois too, and like there's a small city called Quincy in western Illinois where it's like, this is a place that votes Republican routinely by like thirty points, like a sixty five percent majority, and these far right school board candidates lost in Quincy, Illinois. So thankfully people saw through the bullshit and were like, actually, you people are weirdos, and we're not going to hand you power.

through the Department of Education. This got a lot of attention on Twitter in the last couple of days because I'm going to be as charitable as I can here to all of the people involved. But there was a panic on in progressive circles on social media, especially queer in trans circles, because the Washington Post decided to frame this rule in like the most like hyperbolic way possible. And this is not me saying that the rule is good,

because the rule could definitely still be bad. But the Biden administration is essentially, from what I can tell, trying

to include trans kids in Title nine protections. The proposed wording of their rule is not great and definitely needs to be improved, But the outcome here can be good in the sense that it would ban blanket prohibitions on trans kids in K through twelve sports, and it would require exceptions to like It would require like any exceptions to pretty much be like, you know, you have to prove that there is a danger to like fair competition here, which is the standard that Title nine uses for sports

for cisgender men and or cisgender boys and cisgender girls. So like can be good? Will you know if you are invested in this. The public comment period on that rule is about to open. It's definitely a place where you should speak up and say, like, hey, the wording of this is a little shit, Like, let's be clearer here that the presumption should be that trans kids should be allowed to participate in on teams that align with

the gender they identify as. And thankfully, because a lot of these dipshit school board candidates lost, hopefully some of these school boards will be taking the right side of history here.

own personal opinion on the rule. But basically, go yell at the Biden administration and tell them to insert language into the rule that makes very clear that the legal presumption that must be overcome should be that trans kids get to compete on the teams of the gender they identify with.

Denver let us down. On Tuesday night, the mayor's election is going to a runoff between two candidates who both have pretty awful platforms on homelessness, and there is one that is worse. So if you are looking for the candidates to hold your nose and vote for, right now, you know see how it goes. But right now I would say that is Mike Johnson, not because he has anything good to say, he doesn't, but because his opponent, Kelly Brow says that she would have homeless people arrested

if they refuse to leave camps in public parks. So she just fucking blows and she should be, you know, never be allowed anywhere in your power. The other bit of Denver news I think we should talk about is there was a housing referendum where the proposal was to turn an old golf course that is not currently being used into a housing development that would have I think twenty five percent affordable units, and it would part of

it would also be turned into a park. And truly, what I thought was the dumbest thing that happened on Tuesday night. The proposal lost, and the Denver branch of DSA was campaigning against this housing development on the premise that building more housing is bad if someone profits off of it. And I definitely understand that. Listen, Like profiting off of housing is bad. We also need more housing,

and Denver especially desperately needs more housing. And somehow we got this incredibly stupid coalition of nimbi's and like green space environmentalists and the Denver DSA that all came together to stop the housing development. And Miah, I'm sure you probably think a little differently about this than I do, but I saw this and I was like, what the hell, man?

So how do we get it done, if you, you know, without just turning it over to the real estate lobby, because obviously that would also be really shitty. But the answer cannot be don't build more housing.

of this. If you don't want a city that's just like absolutely horrific, you need to have a strong tennis movement, and you need to you need to have a tennis movement that's willing to move beyond things like rank control and move towards like actively like fighting to seize buildings from like from developers, and that's the thing that's happening, that there are places where people are doing this.

been doing that for a long time. So would you guys like to introduce yourselves and just tell us your names and any relevant affiliations in your pronouns.

And at that point, Marius May and Eric McDavid were in prison with twenty year sentences for eco sabotage activity or in Eric's case, being entrapped for such and so it eventually changed to be about Marius and Eric after Jeff was released, and then Eric McDavid also got out of prison, and since then it expanded to all long term anarchist prisoners.

So are there like things that people can do How can they do that, like so that people I guess people who are incarcerated can hear them or hear from them.

provide that those services. But I mean, if if you're looking for people, you have stuff in coming with they're particularly political things kind of carrying on the struggle and including their name in those activities as part of that. And and if you are in communication with them, talking to them about those things. Getting their input and helping them feel included in those struggles goes possibly the longest way.

by you know, locking up and damaging the people who are kind of most prone to action. And I think doing stuff like this like not only helps kind of heal those the distrust that is inherently planted by the state when they do stuff like this, but also helps the people who are kind of most targeted and who have suffered the most for the cause not feel like they're swinging in the wind, you know.

There's still activity in defense of the earth and animals and land defense, and there's still really militant queer self defense, and there's still a lot of like a ton of activity against police and against racist police violence and murder, and like as much of those as much as those things are repressed, like, it doesn't stop them, and they just keep getting stronger.

may be. And providing prisoner support and continuing to keep people who are in prison apprized of those struggles, continuing to engage in those struggles can really function to refocus on that central message, even despite the fact that state repression is a very effective drain on movement resources and a very effective distraction from movement messaging.

have people listening in other countries. This is not just a America thing, right, Like British cops literally fucking married people in the like in the early two thousands. It's part of their undercover a situation. And one of them also went to clown school, which is funny. That is a charming story. Yeah, well, thank you not to refer to.

many years. And that's sort of what we refer to as the green scare, right, the criminalizing of environmental movements. And I talk about criminalized behavior and criminalized identity a lot, so I'm actually just going to take a second and.

of any unlawful behavior. So the movements against environmental degradation were heavily policed, targeted, infiltrated, and many federal grand juries and setups and entrapments and successful prosecutions stemmed from that

criminalizing of environmental movements, and Marius's case was among those. Basically, the state managed to turn Marius's former partner into an asset and effectively charged him, prosecuted him for several acts of politically motivated destruction of property, all of which were calculated not to harm human beings. He pled guilty and

was sentenced in two thousand and nine. Had the offenses to which he pled guilty not been perceived as politically motivated, he would have probably gotten about seven years because the prosecution argued that his behavior was politically motivated, which I mean I think is true. He was hit with a terrorism enhancement which increased the severity of his punishment on the basis of house serious an offender he was then deemed to be. The prosecution asked for twenty years. The

judge imposed twenty two. So here's an example of how beliefs are criminalized. At his sentencing, the judge and the prosecution both invoked and referred to what I think most of us would view as really unremarkable political behavior in

ways that really cast it as very sinister. And so Marius's contact with people who were on his support committee, who were engaged in various kinds of civil disobedience about which Marius likely knew nothing was cast as Marius being in continued contact with people engaged in crimes as a violation or would have been a violation of his bond conditions.

And on the basis of that claim that Marius was violating his bond conditions by being in touch with these people who again were engaged in what I think most of us would see as completely unremarkable civil disobedience constitutionally protected political behavior. This was one of the bases on which the judge imposed this sentence that was even longer

than the prosecution had asked for. And there's a number of other examples of this kind of criminalization of routine political behavior, one of which is very significant, which is that when Marius finally went to prison, he started a reading group, and based on the content of the books that they were reading, he was transferred from a lower security facility pretty close to his family, to facility, and not just a facility, but a particular wing of a facility,

which was the administrative segregation unit at FMC Carswell in Texas, which was much much farther from his family and was involved all kinds of extremely stringent conditions that I would argue were First Amendment violations, So you know, we see not only the really intense surveillance and targeting of social movements, but the really disproportionate punishments and sort of retaliatory behaviors all the way down, all the way from investigation to

through to incarceration and conditions of confinement.

It operates similarly, right, there's a predicate act and then if it's politically motivated, you know, so you could, for example, potentially have something like politically motivated trespass right or politically motivated graffiti, and they could charge it as domestic terrorism. The enhancement is a sentencing mechanism, but it certainly is

not new. What we're seeing in Atlanta, I would say, is it is remarkable, but it is a continuation of the same kind of targeted policing, efforts to chill social mod movements, efforts to disrupt social movements, to isolate people to fractionate movements. It's the same kind of thing that we have seen really since the beginning of policing in this country, and.

to understand what's going on. So like with these people facing you mentioned a couple of the other people who would face political persecutions and were incarcerated and then had their sentences reduced, and maybe we could explain like how that was able to happen, right, because that's obviously like a desirable outcome.

all those things. But the thing that I hear a lot is like people want to see the projects and

the struggles that they're involved in continue. So if that's like defense of the earth, if that's against the police or or whatever it is, like people like to see that because it's you know, it's not just about their own case, but yeah, about those movements that they come from and or somebody's you know, radicalized inside these things that they have committed to and been written from participating in a huge way, not entirely, but you know, people

like to see to see that continue and see see victories, see like creative attempts and things like that.

I was trying to write to a guy in one federal in tear hote and they wouldn't let the person email me because they claimed that the keyboard was like a high touch surface and this yeah, right, like and which people were getting COVID in this facility all the time. But how would folks go about, like, let's say they wanted to to write to Marius and just say, like, you know, we wanted to express the solidarity and say

sucks that this is happening to you or whatever. How would they go about doing that.

mail to the prisoner. There's also if you go to NYCABC dot WordPress dot com or any of the other Anarchist Black Cross websites. NYC ABC is my home chapter, so that's the one I'm familiar with. But if you go to the Anarchist Black Cross websites, there are zines and I think a whole list that is pretty well updated of all of the anarchists political prisoners and instructions

on how to write to them. One of the things that is on those websites that I would highly encourage you to take seriously our instructions about how to responsibly write to people who are under increased monitoring and surveillance while they are being confined. Because retaliation against prisoners, even for things that the prisoners themselves have not done, is

very commonplace. And so if somebody while we very much want to make sure we keep in touch with people and give them news of the outside world, including news about their social movements, one thing that can happen is that those letters simply will not be delivered. And another thing that might happen is that the prisoner themselves may face disciplinary consequences, formally or informally just as a result

of having been the intended recipient of that news. So you know, I would say, as I often say, discretion is the better part of valor.

set of struggles, I'm happy to talk about it. But suffice it to say for now that if you go to support Mariusmason dot org, there should be some instructions about how to write to him, and I'll make sure that the support group puts up clear instructions, but unfortunately you do have to put his dead name on that envelope or it will.

right right? Obviously, like people should keep on this ongoing correspondence. I think that's really important. And I would speaking to someone from their Leonard Peltier free lended peltya group the other day, and I know a lot of people write to lend A Peltier and like, I know that that's a great source of like strength for him, especially as

he's like aging in prison. I was wondering what people could do on June eleventh to sort of further discourse, spread the word take actions to solidarity kind of things to people.

people have participated in. I know, with the revitalization of of this as like an international base of solidarity, there was an interest in trying to think outside the box more. You know, it's it's difficult to like, no one's going to reinvent the wheel, or you know, maybe they that's as much as they're doing. But but there is a variety different activities. In last year's theme was sort of like doing something different than you might normally do, just diversify what is happening.

to write letters. But you know, people do things like art shows like mo mentioned like a lot of people paint, a lot of people write poetry, and to integrate that into like maybe already have like you know, a community around poetry readings, or something like that, and just to bring that into into whatever like little corner of the world or whatever kind of activities that were already involved in for these things to like reference each other, right

like we reference our prisoners and they can reference these things that are happening outside that are like integrating them.

do community building, to do letter writing. But I think it's also something that even if you are, you know, relatively isolated, you know, you can just make a commitment today, I'm gonna send five bucks to somebody's commissary.

that memory. And so I hope with June eleventh we can like kind of build bridges like generationally, you know, like I wasn't really around with Marius, you know, during the Green Scare and Marius got arrested, and it's something that I learned about and got involved in later. And I hope that, you know, with new people that we meet and new people who like we share projects with, we can tell them about our prisoners. And also you

know where I happened to live. There's occasional I meet somebody who used to know Marius from you know, twenty years ago, and so kind of in both directions like into the past and into into the future, like, yeah, just trying to spread awareness about these people.

that creates the actual foundation for for positive change. And you know, we have there's this kind of Hollywood brain thing I think we all have where where we get bent out of shape when when change doesn't kind of come and in the form of these kind of calamitous moments and and kind of culminations of struggles and stuff.

But it's it's, you know, the the process of winning is the process of like part of it is the process of showing up for the people who are uh casualties, you know, who are being.

eleventh prisoner, Eric King. Yeah, from my beloved colleague Sandy Freeman, who represented him successfully recently and got a not guilty verdict for him after he was charged with assaulting a corrections officer, which is, I mean, if you know anything about federal indictments, a magnificent coup. So Eric currently has a Clan Act conspiracy in Bivens lawsuit pending against more than forty state defendants. His team is trying to achieve release from the ADX by a writ of habeas corpus.

He's not currently getting access to communications, visits, or programming, but he is still strong and resilient, and his recent victories are an object lesson in the fact that we really can fight back and win. Please donate to his support fund and please uplift what is happening, because this

is the future for anti fascists in the Bureau of Prisons. Nevertheless, we do continue to struggle and sometimes even to win, and I think our stories of triumph are not frequently enough told, and so one thing that we could do this June eleventh is try to gather all of those stories and make sure that those stories do get told.

like we're not going to storm the Winter Palace necessarily. Yeah, we can build up our in different ways, and this is a way of doing that. I'm thinking of like more international like cases. I know, for instance that where I come from, the British government fucking loves to put people who volunteered to fight for the YPG in prison or their parents if they send them money for food, which yes, great country, But I know that like all over the world in Spain and Catalonia where I've lived,

like this is a thing too. So are there any other like international cases that you want to sort of draw attention to?

used against Masia bosses. But you know, in the classic state misinterpreting anarchism has considered Alfredo a leader and particularly and so locked him away without access to almost any means of communication, and uh, and so he's he's had a lot of health problems as a result of this. You know, he was originally locked in for shooting a nuclear executive in the knee, uh, after some particular couss

remarks from him following the Fukushima disaster. And that nuclear company has ties with like the you know, the larger war machine, the manufacturing of of weapons for war and uh, you know he's he's caught other charges while being in prison for previously alleged activities, including just being an anarchist essentially kind of what you talked about, the straight criminalizing

political sensibilities. You know, Italy has been doing that. Chile has been doing that previously against people like Monica Caballero and Francisco Solar, who have been in and out of prison for years now in a curly facing more charges for allegedly sending bombs to police training facilities and such

down in Chile and in your own England. Toby shown is someone who got out recently after being receiving terrorists charges for allegedly being involved in the anarchist website called three two five and financing terrorism through like accepting donations

for their work and things like that. But he did not get convicted of that he usually got convicted of some minor drug charges and so he's been released to kind of a halfway house now, but they continue to try to mess with his terms of release because of his politics, because he's an anarchist and unrepentant, they continue to try to mess with him.

like collectively organize and like share radical history, Like you know, they have a have a role in it too, and our support for them can like resonate far beyond just an individual.

I'm joined today by Emmett and David from the Borderlands Relief Collective and we're going to talk a little bit about people doing mutual aid on the border, the situation on the border, and for those of you who live a long way away from it, and a sort of pretty shitty thing that border patrol did to some supplies which were left out on the border earlier this month.

So yeah, David, if you'd like to sort of introduce yourselves and expend a little bit about the roles you play, that would be great either.

and freedom in your life. So I work in several organizing spaces trying to shut down different detention centers as well as supporting folks just make ends meet in San Diego and also supporting people keeping their lives and staying alive in this extreme border border lands that we on.

a surgeon. I've been living in San Diego for about ten years and I've been doing humanitarian volunteer work in the Borderlands, which we call doing water drops for something like six years, got started with Border Angels and also did volunteer work with Order Kindness highly recommend that organization, and more recently have been doing water drops in a mountainous area between San Diego and TJ with friends and we just recently found a name for our group and it's Orderlands Relief Collective.

and twenty degrees fahrenheit in the summertime. And as far as the geography of migration, it really goes back to you know, it's a direct consequence of federal border policy. I think many people will be familiar with the term prevention through deterrence, which is sometimes elaborated as prevention of migration through environmental deterrence, and the whole concept is going

way back to Clinton administration. The areas of the border near cities like San Diego were increasingly militarized with high border fence, intense patrol by armed officers, and increasingly recently electronic surveys, with the idea of relying on the extremely harsh terrain of the deserts and mountains to form a kind of a natural But they quickly found out within within you know, basically the first year or so of that federal policy that numbers of people crossing the border

did not decrease. However, deaths skyrocketed. And that's something we understood, you know, people in Washington, d C. Understood many many years ago. But the policy persists. So the bottom line is people who are crossing the border from Mexico to the USA often resort to crossing in the most remote and dangerous areas of the border. So the area that we're going to be talking about, this mountainous region between

San Diego and Tijuana. Literally folks are going up and over the tallest mountain in the area, literally up and over the mountain, extremely arduous walk. When we do these water drops, we're well rested. We hike all day and we come home exhausted, and we look at our Gaya apps and find that we've only hiked a very small portion of the actual total journey, and we're always humbled by just the resilience and determination of people who do this crossing.

Being where they were is a risk. I think a lot of people will maybe have become more engaged with border policy during the Trump heira certainly like the legacy media narrative focused on the border very briefly, Like maybe it peaked around the midterms in twenty eighteen, I think, and then people have lost a lot of interest since then. So for those of us who live on the border,

it's remarkable how little has changed. I think maybe it's not particularly remarkable because I don't think we're really expected to, but like, can you explain what if anything has changed since twenty twenty one and how things have sort of remained the same in many ways?

of really understanding or characterizing the conversation in general, or speaking by the fact that in San Diego or in California at large, more than half of the farm workers who kind of create this city that we are or the state that we are, and support the very backbone of the fact that we're all still having our hearts beat our migrants, and that our economy at large, as well as just the fabric of our nation is based

on migrants in immigration. So for us to pick and choose what that looks like is not only missing the majority of the point, but is using as a talking piece, is really as a talking piece for certain identities to feel vindicated to spend money and support certain for profit corporations like for example, cour Civic, one of the largest prison corporations prison corporations.

never been a part of the conversation. It's more to basically capitalize off of people in their suffering, whether wuther that be to the you know, to be a storyline that US is is helping people, or is a savior of others, or is trying to crack down on armed bandits or or criminals who are cross crossing this borderland.

government to basically put more people in detention. So that's a huge underpinning of this whole conversation is who is getting money and how does it kind of further the certain aims of corporations, but also agencies that basically get a larger amount of federal funding through apprehension of people.

patrol is a part of Customs and Border protection. It's a giant pyramid of people putting people in prison, and it's also worth like reinforcing I think for people that these people have done nothing wrong at the point which they are incarcerated, right, Like they have a bayed or relevant laws and are in conditions which we've decided are not befitting prisoners in the United States, but are okay for these people. Not that anyone should be incarcerated, but yeah,

there's still a two tier system. So can you explain a little bit about your efforts to do mutual aid and to like do a little bit of kindness on the border and make things a little bit better out there for people who are coming north.

we supply there directly because we know that people have died UH in those locations or required rescue. We work in very close relationship with other volunteer organizations that focus on search and rescue and search and recovery, search and recovery meaning recovering human remains of people who have died. So there's a number of outstanding organizations that operate in California, Arizona, Texas. These include Eagles of the Desert, Armadillos, many other organizations.

Most of these are actually made up of volunteers who are first generation immigrants, mostly from Mexico, and so when people die or require rescue, we do find out from our friends and comrades in these SAR organizations and we build water drop roots directly around that knowledge. So yeah, it really boils down to, yeah, we don't want more people to die making making this, uh, this journey. And so as far as what kind of supplies we leave,

it's what we think may make a difference. We leave bottles of water, energy, drinks like electrolyte, gatorade and so on. Cans of food with pop tops, all kinds of cans of fruit, beans, you know, chili, you know, whatever we think people may need. Of course, we tailor it based on the time of year. In the mountains, in the winter gets freezing cold, lots and lots of rain, so we've been leaving waterproof ponchos, warm clothing. And the summer,

of course, it gets scorching hot. In the desert. People die of hyperthermia. They literally cook to death. That's where electrolytes come in here and the sun hats, bandanas, baseball hats, first aid kits. We we leave kids full of medical supplies. Uh, and more recently, you know, just observing the kind of used items that we find on the trail. Uh, kids stuff, diapers, pacifiers, Uh, you know, we leave you know, tampons, you know that

kind of stuff. Uh, containers of infant formula. So it's a it's a it's kind of an iterative process, just leaving what we think people need and yeah, that's that's kind of what we do.

So they're in Arizona, Nomas Motes became part of a conversation about providing critical medical support, and that was a court case that really tested the limits of what it means to be in this great area and what was really important and the nuances in that conversation were what constitutes aiding in a betting or so called aiding in a bedding of legal immigration, which is basically again a very large gray area between are you, are you enticing people to cross? Are you being paid as a smuggler

to cross? Are you doing something which is encouraging people to cross? None of which was activity that was engaged with the most modes or us, but in their case specifically providing medical aid across the boundary, and they were raided their their their their camp and their impromptu field uh tents where they were providing life saving medical support where it was raided.

Amendment of preserving people's right to practice their religion. So that was a case that kind of established a lot of what we're working under is these basic protections to be humanitarian aid workers following basic belief systems. What we're doing specifically is leaving supplies, so leaving supplies. The most egregious thing you can basically say about that is that

we're littering, or that we're abandoning property. And so again Nomas Martes, and in this, in this larger conversation, was established in the court that leaving humanitarian aid supplies that were with the intent of saving lives is not litter.

it's been less than ten days. So basically I guess just to say that nothing we're doing is illegal from any standpoint, and also the case in Arizona kind of helped make a distinguishing, make some distinctions between whether our activity is is also frowned upon in public land, which it is not, because it is constituting humanitarian aid in a place that is desperately needed.

a barrel last time I was out there. Let's talk about how quickly those supplies are consumed, because I think again that will be like news to some people, right, Like you guys are out there every week, and like how much stuff you're dropping and how quick does it go?

we can leave this supply. So emmine and I and many other of the members of our organization, Borderlands Relief Collective, we also are active in border kindness and in the past with border Angels, and so we're used to a certain rhythm of doing a water drop, circling back usually a month later, and we're happy if maybe half of the supplies have been consumed, that's a good day. When we started doing water drops in this mountainous region, first of all, we were just blown away by the evidence

of heavy foot travel. I mean, these are even though you'll never find a hiker, a recreational hiker on these trails,

they look like established trails. They're worn in trails. And when we started doing these water drops, there's just a river of discarded water bottles, clothing, food wrappers, and just things that we have never seen before, that that amount of human activity, literally on the top of a mountain where you never would think why would someone cross over a top of a mountain to get from point eight to point B. So, like I said, we're still learning

what the proper interval is. Some of these locations that we drop, we come back a week later and they're pretty much one hundred percent consumed. So yeah, we really it's become apparent. We have been having a lot of discussions that we're very eager in trying to expand our number of volunteers because the more we do this in this mountainous region, the more we learn how pressing need is.

So we're having a hard time just supplying essentially one path that goes up and over the mountain, and we know that this is just one of many paths that are used by people in this region. So really we're finding one hundred percent consumption every week or two at most of our drop spots.

safe in the process of of going to ourselves. So as we we left our first drop and then a second and went down to our final drop and turned back and started going back up the mountain, and we came to our second drop site, and as we arrived we found something that was kind.

its contents thrown around the area. We had left bags of socks and hats and those were covered in beans and fruit and again thrown into bushes.

So after it happened, we had kind of put two together and were wondering if this agent had followed us down the trail to the site, and then while we had left, stayed behind and destroyed the goods.

first of it. After a while there was five of them with their guns and they're large guns out as well as their basic intention to use intimidation, their sheer numbers, as well as this kind of perverse authority they have as the soul of agents in charge of this public land, this is wilderness and BLM land, which they have no authority over us, yet use this sense of just power and ability to cause harm to minimize anybody else being able.

did you destroy our water? And they repeatedly said, well have you seen have you seen what they do and then kind of also saying well, yeah, we we try to clean things up, we try to pick them up. But but but that specific site was too far, so we just left it. We just destroyed it and left it.

Which as on the on the piggybacking on their conversation about this trash and that we're littering and they're accusing us of aiding and abetting illegal immigration, they basically have nothing left to say about what their actions meant and without their their purview, their mandate of their jobs, and it was an act you could tell they were uncomfortable with because they were not within their job description. And we asked for their supervisor. They said they're going to

on the phone supervisor. The supervisor never materialized, and we can only assume that they had a conversation with somebody, uh in a superior saying back down, what you're doing is is not correct and don't engage further. And since then we've had a conversation with with their superiors and with with CVP offices to the effect of saying that this was not within their job description, and this they did not condone this activity.

stage and prey. It's yeah, I mean the militarization if you somehow can't conceive the care of people dying in the desert, the militarization of the border still affects everyone here and it makes our lives left safe. There's a crime crime thinks logan that I always like to like use in these things, which is the border doesn't protect you, it controls you, which I think is kind of apt

for this. So now that they've trashed your supplies, right and you found ot they weren't supposed to, I'm interested like how going forward, does that mean that you can't use that rout, you can't drop stuff there? Anymore because you're worried about happening again, or because you're worried about them hanging out there to intercept people who are using your like supply cash.

And so the way border angels responded was number one, to change their tactics to start dropping supplies a deeper in the back country where the border patrol agents. You know, it's rare to find a BP agent that's motivated enough to really hike, hike for too far away from their air conditioned vehicles in the summertime. So number one, they were going farther away from the roads and highways to the actual routes that people are are walking. Number Two,

they punched back hard in public using social media. Back then it was Facebook. You know this is going to be you know, right when Instagram was getting but just you know, getting the word out. And Border Angels is an organization that's been around for decades. They have a big following, the word spread and just like many bullies, you know, they kind of back down if you get in their face sometimes. So that was our experience with this practice of Border patrols slashing gallons in the desert

with Border Angels. So when this this crime occurred on March eighteenth in the mountains, we knew we could not back down. So we met back a few days later. That's when, as Emmett mentioned, we witnessed Border Patrol helicopter for about an hour flying about. You know, it seemed like, you know, ten fifteen feet off the ground, really really low, using the rotor wash to flush of flush human beings out of the brush as if they were hunting animals.

And then we were back, you know, the next seven days later, after they destroyed the supplies, we went back with a good group number one to clean up this shameful mess these two border patrol goons left. We cleaned up all of all of that stuff, and we left probably what three times the amount of original supplies, and on our milk rates, we actually left laminated signs that addressed one by one all of the accusations that these border patrol agents tried to make against us. So the

signs say, do not destroy, do not remove. This is not garbage, we are not littering, and this is not abandoned property. Is these are humanitarian aid supplies protected by federal case law, the nineteen ninety four Protection of Religious Freedom Act, and so on and so forth. So we put those signs just prominently on the milk rates, uh, you know, just to send a message that no, we're not going to back down. We are going to leave supplies.

up the spot as it were. You know, we're bringing heat to a route that's that's needed by people making a crossing, and so we are we are mindful of that, you know, we don't we We try to go to different places on different weekends, uh, and not try to bring too much attention to these paths.

this spot, where the two agents destroyed the supplies. Emmett has actually brought a mountain climbing rope just to make certain sections easier where we're kind of repelling down this dry waterfall, so really really steep, very loose trails, very easy to break an ankle, and it just in that context,

it really it really hits you. We see so many shoes and boots along the path and just have to kind of just pause and think, well, this person lost their shoe, if the if they're the sole of their boot melted off in their hours away from the nearest road, what does it mean? How did they complete the journey?

Did they complete their journey? So yeah, a little bit hard to describe, but I guess any yeah, anybody who's I guess kind of familiar with with the southern California steep, steep mountains, loose terrain kind of get the picture.

But I guess what's been true for me and in kind of my conversations with my community as over the last couple of years, just trying to share this. There is so much pain that is being inflicted upon this landscape, and there is so much harm that is.

of someone who is who is making these decisions. And as Dave was saying, we're coming across people's clothing, food, underwear, places they've slept, and the amount of the poignancy of human desire to be safe, to to come to a place where they feel like their lives can be.

And furthermore, just living in a community where you know, from the top of the mountain we can see downtown San Diego and all of the luxury of this military town, all of the universities and all of this opportunity that we enjoy, and just a couple miles away, the lack

of access to just water. The feeling how similar humans are to each other in our basic needs and how that's being taken from people is really is really harmful, And particularly as you were saying, these are areas held sacred by the Kumii people and have been places of

migration for at least ten thousand years. These are places that were difficult to travel and that people did for similar reasons to survive, to be safe, and there is a legacy of oyas of clay pots buried in the sand for travelers that has been ongoing for thousands of years.

And for our current administration and government to create this wall in this place of so much pain is just testament to just the insanity of our desire to protect border against something else, actually the borders against something that we feel is harmful to us. Meanwhile, this migration is fundamentally how we survive and how we respond to these moments of change in humanity, and criminalizing that and closing hard with that is just barbaric.

There are more people dying than ever. As far as as a volunteer who spends most weekends out in the borderlands, the only thing I noticed is they stopped building Trump's thirty foot high fence and they started pouring all that money into electronic surveillance, where every single month we see more towers popping up all along the border with all kinds of very very fancy, military grade surveillance equipment and

as well as aerial surveillance. Lots of airplanes, helicopters. I'm not sure if they're using drones, but we certainly there's a lot of aerial surveillance. But what we see as far as the human dimension is in the old days, you know, we see footprints, We see shoe covers, you know, which people wear on their feet to hide their footprints from border patrol. We see the empty water bottles and

discarded clothing. But now we're encountering people pretty much every time we do a water drop because the number of people crossing is so high. People are crossing in the daytime, whereas in the past usually they would cross at night. So wouldn't you say, emmittt like pretty much it's it's pretty much every time we go out, at least one of our volunteers, if not the whole group, sees or

even interacts with a migrant on the paths. And you know, and of course we respect, we respect their autonomy, their privacy. We don't engage with them if they don't want to engage with us. But the thing that I'll never forget is about a month ago, we were out in this exact same area, supplying the same path, and it was a rainy day, cold, we were wearing our gortex insulated clothing.

We'd done a water drop. While we were doing the water drop, we can see on the next mountain peak Border Patrol helicopter landing to pick up somebody who required rescue. And this is a case that we had been getting updates all night with Armadillos, one of the search groups, and thankfully this person was found alive and Border Patrol was so called rescuing him another word for arresting him.

And after we witnessed that, we hiked back to our vehicles, and just as we were getting to the trailhead, the exact same location where on March eighteenth, Emmett and other volunteers had this interaction with the two Border Patrol agents who destroyed the humanitarian aid supplies, the exact same parking spot.

We pop out and start walking toward our vehicles and it starts snowing, and two individuals come out of the mist and approach us and start talking to us in Spanish and talking to the these two people, these two men, one one young, one middle aged in the course of the conversation. You know, sorry, I kind of choke up when I talk about this stuff.

We gave them literally the you know Gorte's winter coats offer backs to warm up and once you know, the dad was shivering violently, really really showing signs of clinical hypothermia. And talking to the younger man, who was in better physical shape, he was explaining that the two of them were hiking through the mountains because his mother was already living in the USA. They were trying to reunite with her and they had been in this mountainous region for

the past two days. And looking at them, they're wearing hoodies, you know, like you know, sweatshirts, sweatpants and sneakers in this and anybody who lives down here in southern California.

You know, we've had a very unusual winter, lots and lots of rain, so it had been raining heavily over the past two days and nighttime temperatures in the thirties, and these two men had been out there for two days soaked to the bone, and that's why they approached us, because they were in trouble and were asking for help. So after they warmed up, we discussed the options. Of course,

you know, we we we respect their autonomy. You know, they have the option to try to continue going on their way with with supplies or if they felt it was unsafe to do so we were ready to help them.

The heartbreaking thing is, you know they did ask us could we let them ride in our vehicles off the mountain, and we had to explain that, you know, we're we're pretty much guaranteed to encounter Order patrol agents on that road and that really it's not something that we could do because you know that that that you know, we we could be arrested and charged, you know, for federal felony crimes. But we said, look, you know, if you

really feel you can't continue, we will help you. Contact you know, call nine to one one that we explained that's that's one hundred percent going to result in border patrol coming because as folks may know, you know, you know, in the USA along the border, you know, emergency medical response, search and rescue is unfortunately considered in the domain of

law enforcement. So if you are a US citizen, or if you are someone from another country that happened to come here and have a visa or just be considered the good type of foreigner, you know, you're going to have a very impressive response with sheriffs, Sheriff's Department, search

and rescue, volunteer organizations. If there's any hint that you may be a so called undocumented person, you immediately get sent to border patrol and you have you know, boor Star respond the Border Patrols Search and Rescue group, which is a far cry from the civilian search and rescue folks. So we explain to them if we call nine one one, you're going to be apprehended, You're going to be arrested

by border patrol. And after thinking about it and discussing, they said, yeah, we you know, we cannot continue where you know, this is too dangerous. So we did call nine one one, and border patrol did come and frisked them and cuff them and uh, yeah, yeah I did arrest them. And yeah, that's not not the only time too often we have witnessed human beings being arrested by border patrol.

to fucking inflate the numbers. It's often the same people, but it each one of those is a tragedy every time someone has to make a choice between risking their life in one place or risking their life coming to another place just so their kids can have a crack at growing up safely, or so they can be safe, so they can experience like one tenth of the things that we take for granted every day, Like, that's an

incredible human tragedy. And yeah, they happen every single day, every hour of every day at our border because of the things that our government does there. And yeah, it's important to feel that stuff because I think that's it should provoke in all of us a very strong reaction it's pretty messed up that it's almost universal bipartisan agreement that it's fine and okay by people who have never been hearing and don't understand.

in half traditional Cuma territory. When we do these water drops out in the desert or in the mountains, you know, these these paths that that people are using to migrate are often or in many many cases traditional Cumi paths.

And we see evidence of that every time we, you know, do a water drop, especially out out in the desert area where it's a rare water drop, that we will not find pottery sharp lying lying in the sand, or come across rock shelters, uh, some with pictographs and uh the you know, it's just uh, you know, very poignant juxtaposition of of Kumai cultural artifacts with modern day you know, shoe covers, discarded water bottles, and of course many people

who do migrate are indigenous uh them themselves. So yeah, personally, you know, I view all of these border issues through the lens of history culture, with with the core truth that this is indigenous land, this is Cumi land, and it has always been and uh, the modern so called border is a very recent, uh political creation, you know that, you know, mid nineteeth century. You know, before that this was Mexico and now now where we call it the USA.

But this is all recent and from my perspective, unless you are a Kumie, I really don't know how anybody could can really get on their high horse and really speak with any authority about who belongs here, who belongs here, who doesn't belong here, Because the rest of us, we are all guests on Kumie ied land. That includes every single border patrol agent. And that's that's something I always like to remember.

isn't a thing anymore. But yeah, they're all across the border, right, not just here that the Yaki, the all across the border is native. The whole of the circle the United States is Native land, and it's not Indigenous folks out there trying to kill people in the desert. Is there anything that you wanted to add?

really precarious moment. It just feels so so hypocritical to police people's sovereign tees to find safety and to be in safety. You know, we we have all of these ideals in our country around respecting each other's freedoms, and also as we are importing and exporting so many goods and also so much culture and so fundamentally intertwined with

the lives of people from all over the world. For us to say what is wrong and what is right in this moment, and for us to have this this moral authority to to put people in prison just for for for seeking safety for many years, and of course I have many people I know and live with who have been in in who we're in attention for for several years, for seeking that the amount of just how twisted it is that we are comfortable spending our lives

as Americans never considering or never really critically engaging.

own cells, and they're their their their labor is actually being exploited as well. You can't distinguish the fact that there is the history of policing in our country, in the history of prisons is specifically a project to continue white supremacy. And you can see particularly the differential policing of immigration currently and the differential way that certain people from certain countries are or are not valid UH to UH to enter this country and and at.

including Armadillos and Aggi las Egos of the Desert. Very very proud to be in this community of people who are trying to help people in the borderlands.