It Could Happen Here Weekly 86

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

The Trump administration cited this public health law in instructions to the Department of Homeland Security on restrictions for migrants entering the United States that very same day, Center for Disease Control Director Robert R. Redfield relied on this regulation to issue an order suspending the introduction into the United States of certain individuals who had been in quote unquote coronavirus impacted areas and quote who would be introduced into a congregate setting at the port of entry or a

border station. This includes individuals coming from Canada or Mexico who would normally be detained by CBP after arriving at the border, people including asylum seekers and accompanied children, and people attending to enter the United States between ports of entry. Citing the new CDC order, that same day, the Border Patrol began expelling individuals who arrived at the US Mexico

border without giving them the opportunity to seek asylum. Reports indicate the CDC scientists expressed opposition to the invocation of Title forty two, arguing that there was really no public health rationale to support it. Ever since then, public health experts outside the CDC have continued to agree, arguing that while international borders largely remain open to other travelers, there is no need to turn away refugees and expel them

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

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

in immigration law. But in a sense it doesn't. Immigration was complicated and cruel for migrants and profitable for people on both sides of the border before March of twenty twenty, and it's the same after Title forty two has gone, but nonetheless Title forty two represented a distinct change in how asylum works in the US, and especially when combined with other Trump policies that Biden has continued, a distinct change in how many people die when coming to this

country to try and have a better chance at a save future. By April of twenty twenty, Title forty two expulsions at the border overtook the previous record for expulsions under the so called Migrant Protection Protocol, which is better known as Remain in Mexico, that was set in August of twenty nineteen. Under an agreement reached with the Mexican government.

In late March of twenty twenty, the border Patrol began sending quote unquote back to Mexico most Mexican but also Guatemala and Honduran and Saldorean families and seeing adults encountered at the border. This group of nationalities remained unchanged until May of twenty twenty two, when the Biden administration came to an agreement with Mexico to accept quote unquote thousands of Cubans and Nicaraguans sent from the United States to Mexico.

But this doesn't really matter. You'll see that alone these episodes. Immigration law on the ground and immigration law in Washington, DC are two very different things. There has been extensive documentation of individuals expelled to Mexico who do not fit within these nationalities, including Haitian asylum seekers, some of whom I've spoken to myself. People who are expelled are often driven by bus to the nearest port of entry that's a land border crossing, and told to walk back to Mexico,

often without their luggage and other belongings. I found that luggage in belongings, including ID cards, clothing, and even little stuffed animals, all along the border in the three years since Title forty two has been in place. I asked my friend Paul to describe what we found in Texas when we've been for a walk along the border wall during our time reporting on the National Butterfly Center.

a giant pile of people's stuff. And some of it was obviously trash, you know, they were abandoning clothes after they changed from crossing and stuff like that, but a lot of it was full backpacks. A lot of ID documents just in piles, just piles of them. Yeah, yeah, just big piles of documents that proved who you were.

at the top. Whereas when you didn't have the anti climb barrier, you didn't actually have something to set it against. But once you put that on there, you could just lean the ladder up against it. It's like self defeating.

these are people I've met. It won't have escaped the listener's attention that those planes and buses and other means of detention and transport are indeed congregate settings, But that doesn't seem to matter here. Title forty two didn't stop people trying to come, but it made the journey more difficult. Instead of crossing and trying to turn themselves in for asylum or approaching a port of entry, people began crossing in more remote places, places without border walls or barriers,

with less frequent border patrols. In twenty twenty, the Border Patrol found two hundred and forty seven dead bodies along the border. This is unlikely to represent the full human toll of border enforcement. Many deaths in the desert go unreported and undiscovered, but it gives some kind of point of comparison for the twenty twenty one number. After a year of Title forty two, five hundred and forty six

people died that year. In twenty twenty two, third year of Title forty two, eight hundred and fifty seven people died. None of those people were guilty of any crime than wanting a better life, but under Title forty two, they lost their lives because the US didn't give them a safe way to exercise the human right to claim asylum.

One local advocate, Hamira Yusefi from a group called PANA, the Partnership for the Advance with New Americans, explain what Title forty two have been like for her as an advocate for asylum seekers.

And so we have had hundreds of cases of individuals who have gotten themselves injured, who the hospitals calling us because they tried to cross and got injured, and where we're trying to help them with getting some basic legal services and immediate shelter and those types of things.

or perhaps we're just using someone's first name. It's also for that reason that not everyone at the border always wants to talk, but we do have some interviews coming up for you tomorrow. Here's a clip from a discussion about this which I recorded the border last week.

which they will be expelled. However, in order to receive an official screening by an asylum officer for exemption under that provision, the CBP officer must first determine that the claim is reasonably believable. From March twenty twenty through September twenty twenty one, just two hundred and seventy two people were granted the right to seek asylum under this exception. The use of Title forty two has been despite the relative lack of outrage and surbide. The administration took office

bipartisan in twenty twenty one. A few weeks before Biden's inauguration, I spent some time talking to migrants at the other border for Slate. Many of them had come to a small tent city that popped up just feet from the pedestrian border crossing and the country that they had traveled thousands of miles to get to, but that they couldn't reach. You can see America through the fence there, but you can't get there. The camp was diverse in its composition.

On one trip, I interviewed folks from Haiti, Honduras, Salvador, Watemala, and Ethiopia. Here's what one of them said to me when he asked his message to President Biden. You recognize their voices Daniald's. That's because I don't have his permission to use his voice.

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

any better. Biden deported more Haitian people in a few weeks than the Trump administration did in a year, eight hundred and ninety five people reported in twenty twenty versus more than one thy two hundred people from January twentieth to March twenty second, twenty twenty one, while making declarations about showing compassion to migrants, the Biden administration packed Haitians onto crowded planes and buses and sent them back to Haiti in the middle of a pandemic. In March, the

US sent another pointed disinvitation to Haitians. The US Embassy in Haiti tweeted a picture President Joe Biden looking off into the distance with a caption in both English and Haitian Creole. In Creole, it read wing cardi sa bienk pavini. The translation above it was.

devastating earthquake in twenty ten. Following these announcements, the US diverted resources that it could have used to help people from suffering in a country which have been destroyed by a natural disaster, to stop them coming to this country. He was also overlooking that under both international and domestic law, asylum seekers are entitled to make claims no matter how they enter the country. Here's what may Orcas said at his press conference.

twenty two. This is because we're expelling people to places where they have no hope of a better future, and not leaving them with many options other than to try

again in more remote and risky settings. Meanwhile, there's much less concern from the right and from Democrats at the fact that Ukrainians are exempted from Title forty two and Russians and Ukrainians generally experience expedited processing of the sort which one would hope this country could offer to other people escaping conflicts around the world, including many that we started. I asked my friend Gustavo Solis, a border investigative reporter

at CAPE PBS in San Diego, to summarize it. By the administration to take on Title forty.

We know that Vice President Mike Pence pressured the top doctors at the CDC into doing this, basically saying, if you don't do this, you might lose your job. Because even then in March twenty twenty, doctors at the CDC knew that there was no real public health rationale for this. I mean, if you look at the order, it's supposed to stop COVID, but there weren't any exceptions for migrants who were vaccinated or there was no testing component to it.

So that's kind of the beginning of Title forty two. By the time Biden came in office, Biden had promised to end it along with Roman in Mexico and restore the humane asylum system, but he kept Title forty two in place. And he didn't just keep it in place, he expanded it to include nationalities that weren't included when Trump first rolled it out.

people at the border. The CVP one app aims to address that by telling micros, hey, instead of coming all the way to Mexico and showing up the border, just download this app and schedule an appointment to come here, and we'll let you to see if you're eligible for asylum or not. Another example of a policy in Washington, DC that has like no reality in what's going on the border because migrants live in shelters with really bad

Wi Fi access and they have crappy phones. So what I found in the reporting is that CBP one rewards people with the best phones, not necessarily people who are most vulnerable. And the story I came out with last week was about how data from the Mexican government shows that at least in Tijuana, about forty four percent of every microt who has gotten a CBP one application to enter the country is a Russian national and Russian nationals makeup at most ten percent of the overall migroant population

in Tijuana. So you have this situation where a relatively affluent ten percent of the population is getting almost half of these humanitarian protection appointments that are designed for the world's most vulnerable people. And that's what CEP one does.

won't like that. This is a This is not something that I think any competent software development house who would have done and not expected. So I have a hard time believing that the whole chain of everyone that's had to go through, from the developers on up to you know, anyone who does it or you know has authority of these things at CBP or Homeland Security. This is just it's it's it's like, I don't know, it's it's, it's it's it's hard to believe that this was an accent.

fucking suck, here's an advertising break. You might be wondering why Title forty two is ending now and how we got here, given that there seems to be a consensus in DC that the border is in crisis, and that that crisis is not that people were leaving to die on the streets on the other side or in the deserts of California and Arizona, but the people were allowing to come to the richest country that's ever existed, from countries that we've destabilized for decades to have a chance

in a decent life. Well, the answer is complicated. Some of it's a bit too complicated for me to really spend the time explaining, and you don't really need to know the ins and outs of court cases to understand that. Essentially, the Biden administration had planned to end Title forty two

in late twenty twenty two, right after the midterms. Title forty two actually became theoretically unenforceable in November of that year thanks to a court ruling, but the Supreme Court in December prevented the Biden administration from ending Title forty two. While the Justice is considered a request by a group of Republican led states that want to continue knew the expulsions,

which had previously been declared unlawful by lower court. Biden's Department of Justice had previously defended Title forty two as necessary to public health, but by the end of twenty twenty two, they were ready to end enforcement a Title forty two politically, even if they were nowhere near prepared on the ground. A coalition of Republican led States, however, managed to get a federal judge in Louisiana to prevent officials fromending Title forty two, saying the Biden administration had

not taken adequate steps required to terminate the policy. Then, on November fifteenth, another federal judge declared Title forty two un lawful, saying the CDC had not properly explained the policy's public health rational or considered its impact on asylum seekers. At the request of the Biden administration, The judge gave border officials five weeks until December the twenty first to

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

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

let them summarize what they see this to mean. According to the USCIS website, individuals who unlawfully cross the Southwest border will generally be processed under Title eight expedited Removal

authorities in a matter of days. They will be barred from re entry to the United States for at least five years if ordered removed, and they will be presumed ineligible for asylum under the proposed Circumvention of Lawful Pathways regulation an absent and applicable exception what this means and if you cross into the United States not at the port of entry, you will be assumed ineligible for asylum and the process to remove you from the United States

will begin immediately. You have a chance to file a defensive asylum claim against that, but the process can be rushed and more difficult. Despite this, and having almost three years to repair, they were by no means ready, let's hear from Gustavo again. Gustavo, can you explain to us a little bit about what you found that by the administration has been planning for the end of Title forty two.

the border being involved or told what's going on. So, like, I think it was the last week DHS Secretary Majorca did this press release about what they're doing in terms of processing centers in Guatemala and Columbia so people can just go there instead of coming all the way to the border, which actually there have been timelines of when

those will open. But they had asked all these things for like big picture things, right, to stop people from coming in the first place, expanding some legal pathways, like making it easier for people with families already here to get sponsors, fixing some of the little things with CVP one, But they don't talk about like on the ground logistics, right.

So for example, I went to Tijuana to talk to the head of the Department of migrant affairs there who told me this and I checked with him yesterday morning, who said, still to this day, less than forty eight hours before Title forty two ends, he doesn't know how many migrants CBP will allow to cross through the ports of entry in Sandy Seero. His guess is that maybe two hundred, because that's kind of the number that they floated around in December when they originally wanted to get

rid of Title forty two before their lawsuit. And if it's two hundred, he basically said, Tijuana's going to be screwed because two hundred doesn't even cover the number of new migrants coming in and deporties being sent to Tijuana. So it's gonna like we have this bottleneck of migration in Tijuana and all over the border because of Title forty two. For the last three years, no one's been

able to move. And if they just open it up to two hundred people, that's not really going to address any of the bottleneck.

moment for almost two years. So why is part of that plan and honor system?

like me who cover the border made plans. The day before, on the tenth, MYOCAS announced the title forty two would be enforced up until eleven fifty nine pm Eastern time, and in San Diego, Border Patrol offices closed down the port of entry at Sanisedra, the border town just south of San Diego, for a training exercise in which they lined up in front of the cars waiting to cross

the border with plexiglass shields and ryotgear. Meanwhile, in between the two thirty foot board offenses that divide Sanisedra from Tijuana, Border Patrol began corraling migrants. Afghans, Colombians, Vietnamese, Koreans and Golan Sudanese, Tagiks and Congolese people all shared little more than a few tarps and cardboard boxes for shelter as

they waited for something to happen. Despite having months to repair and years to plan, it appears at Department of Homeland Security totally failed to create so much as a scrap of shade or shelter, and instead chose to house people detain pending processing in the open air. In tomorrow's episode, We'll Hear from some of.

five hundred troops already deployed to the border. According to oppress release from Apartment of Homeland Security.

prepare for a potential increase in unaccompanied children. DHS also launched targeted enforcement operations and high priority regions along the border, including El Paso, to quickly process migrants and place them in removal proceedings. DHS last week also announced over two hundred and fifty million dollars in additional assistance for communities receiving migrants.

and Tijuana. I'm just for people familiar with San Diego and the Tijuana River Valley park by International Hill, where border patrol are holding people in between the two border fences. For those who thought we didn't have a border wall or weren't having a border wall, we have at least two, sometimes three, But right here we have two. People are

being put in between these fences by border patrols. So I just spoke to some young Colombian women who had crossed about fifteen miles east of here and then being relocated here and there in between these border walls. They don't have running water. What food and water they have appear to be in surplied by bottle tears. On the northern side, they've just been given space blankets, but a lot of people are literally sleeping under bin bags right now, blankets.

It's pretty brief. There's one portra toilet sort of thing that we can see about five hundred people. So I'm going to give you an idea of the conditions. Obviously those don't live up to the detention conditions that border patrol are supposed to hold people under. But here we are. I guess border patrol have just said that they're calling an ambulance. There have been a number of medical emergencies that nearly always are in these situations because you're holding people.

They're you know, old people, young people, sick people, and they're in the sun all day, they're in the cold all night. It rains, they get wet. If it's hot, they get hot. If it's cold, they get cold. Their little children were just asking me for a blanket a minute ago, which is always a pretty bleak thing. If you've not been here, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that. We have a double layer of wall separating us from

our neighbors in Tijuana. Both sections are now the Trump period design, but we're standing in a place we're not so very long ago. Nancy Reagan stood and said she hoped that there wouldn't be a fence here for very long. Now there are two towering walls, and their little children stuck sleeping in the dust between them or the a to These people had to go through the wall, too, and that meant no hot meals. Because the gaps are smaller than a plate. Someone tried to bring tents, but

they wouldn't fit. Everything from food to clothes to medical supplies had to go through the gaps. In the War Hamara Yusefie, a volunteer from the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, described to me what she saw that night.

They don't have jackets. They're trying to cover themselves with any kind of covering that they have. Some of them using trash bags, others using scarves and other types of things to cover themselves from the sun. We are in San Diego, so it's quite sunny here.

and that they're now technically inside the USA. Here's the advet a CBP broadcast in Spanish to encourage asylum seekers to download the app before they put them in a place they couldn't charge their phones.

comply with the strict requirements of the asylum process. In the majority of cases, it is assumed that migrants do not comply with the requirements for asylum, and you won't have the right to work unless you comply with the strict requirements. Again, if you are now in Mexico City or further north, download CBP one.

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

the threat of repatriation hanging over the person making the claim. Volunteers, local people, a mosque group, and a church group all showed up soon after CBP began dumping more people in between the fences. An hour after my own arrival, I'd given away all the charge cables that I had in my truck, which is a lot more charge cables than I thought I had in my truck, and all my charge bricks accrued over six years of getting free shared

at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. Later, I came back with a massive solar generator that I'd like to use when I'm living off grid. But I still need to write stuff. Even all my home electronics ephemera and the combined efforts of nonprofits, religious and mutual aid groups couldn't really make much difference to the five hundred people from around the world, mostly families with children being held between the two fences. When it got hot, they

got hot. When it got cold, they got cold. When the wind blew, they got dust in their eyes, and everything was constantly dirty. The only hot food volunteers could get to them was pizza. Some of the detained people had cash and they were able to order door dash on the Tijuana side, but again the meals had to

fit through a hole barely wider than my arm. The only way to get clean was with wet wipes and there was only one bathroom, There was no shade or shelter either, and the only way people could construct shelters were through tying tops to the border wall itself. I like Caber, one of the volunteers who came to help, describe what they saw when participating in Mutilated a couple of days after, but it was.

left several hours later. But the kind of I mean, I am right about the situation at the border, but the kind of matter of fackness of there's just several hundred people, including children, just kind of between this fence and they're just stuck there with nothing, and the sort of a matter of fatness of it all was I think, I think that struck me the most, and it's been a much challenge in the process.

years at a Title eight. This misunderstanding might in part be due to some of the misleading rhetoric put out by Majorcas and others, which focused on the harsh penalties for crossing between ports of entry an attempt to appear strong on the border to their colleagues in DC, they didn't place as much emphasis on the right to present

and claim asylum at a port of entry. But as we saw yesterday, it's virtually impossible to actually do that, and Tijuado is already full of thousands of people trying to do that exact thing. Given a set of circumstances, it makes sense that many people took the days before the end of Title forty two. At the final chance to cross before Title forty two ended, I spoke to Diana Rodriguez from Colombia about her understanding of what was going to happen.

in effect breaking a law. And what Article eight does is that they deport you and they put you in the registered database, saying that you broke the law, and they punish you for five years and you lose the right to request your asylum through legal channels.

deasert son from Colombia. Of course, in recent years there has been instability and violence there, which also drives migration. One of my sources also meant a lot of Colombian people had seen misleading information about immigration lawa on TikTok. Two days had passed since Janna arrived. She came with one of the girls she was now sharing a top with. I met another when they were all dumped in the camp together. In the days before they were detained here.

They crossed three countries on their way to what they hope was a better life for young women like them. I asked them to describe that journey for me.

from their xenophobic and outright incorrect online coverage. I asked Diana, what you'd want to say to folks who might have had their perspective influence by the constant demonization of migrants by right wing media.

see the kidnapping, you see the rape of girls, recruitment, extortion, death. Yes, so it's hard when we experience that and people say things like these migrants are coming to invade our country, we also ask them to treat us as people, because if we are here, it is not because we want to invade a territory. It is because we want to come to fight for a better future for our children without stepping on anyone. Nobody wants this. But where we

come from, we receive travelers with open arms. And it's hard when one is a migrant, when one lives the experience of being a migrant, it is a very hard thing to be a migrant, having to endure cold, hunger, rain, sun, that is, all these things, and then arriving here and seeing faces of contempt. It's hard. It is very hard. So yes, the important thing is that people must know that being an immigrant is not easy. Being an immigrant is not easy.

himself a migrant from Africa. He said that if migrants don't speak English or Spanish, it can be very hard for them to get information, and there aren't as many nonprofits set up to serve them as there are for Spanish speaking people, for example. They can often end up isolated and alone. I did get a better chance to talk to a Jamaican man called Joseph. It's his singing

you've heard at the start of this episode. Mostly we talked about things in America, about how he lost his phone on his journey, we got him another one at Walmart, and about things like football and music. I didn't record all of that because sometimes it's nice to just talk to people. Hopefully it makes their deair a bit brighter and gives them some information maybe they could help. He did let me record a bit of an interview and

some of him singing. He was pretty guarded on the recording, but as you can hear in this clip, we had a good time when we weren't recording.

gotta to eat and come back. I'm seeing Yeah, man, that's it. One love. That was beautiful. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm Joseph.

as well. Sadly, coming to the USA is also scary and confusing, even for me with three university degrees and all the intersectional privilege I have and fifteen years living here, and I've recently minted US passport. Now, I worried for years that maybe I'd made a mistake on a form or missed some kind of deadline. Speaking of deadline, what none of the migrants could tell us, what they all wanted to ask about was exactly what was happening to

them as Title forty two expired. A Congolese lady asked me if her passport would be confiscated. A lady from Senegal asked if she needed to pay a bribe like the one she'd paid in Mexico. It wasn't really clear at first if these people were being detained and under what process they were being received. Would they be sent back to Mexico and a Title forty two, repatriated under Biden's interpretation of Title eight, or given the right to plead their case as international and US law suggests should

be able to. CBP made people sit in lines all day with no indication of when they would be taken to the port of entry for processing. Sometimes I heard people saying if everyone didn't sit down, there would be nobody processed that day. But the only food, water, and medical attention available to the migrants with ZA which could be passed through the wall, and they had to get out of their lines to receive this aid. I'll let Kaber describe what this looked like.

also who they were going to choose to take. We assume We didn't know exactly where we were taking them, but we assume they were taking the port of entry in Sana Seat, which is about a mile away. And so what would always happen when they come and get a group is like three or four people from that group would sprint over to the world because we still had their phones and CBP wasn't going to wait for us to get the phones.

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

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

her children. Other folks took it upon themselves to try and walk to the camp for single men with water, and people constantly helped us find the owners of phone by wandering through the rows of people sheltering under taps and space blankets to look for people who had left us their devices to charge. In Noucumber, a town an hour or so east of San Diego, things were worse. Cumber's home to a cute hotel, a lovely lake, a

hot and an awful lot of big rugs. When the border war was being built in earnest before the twenty twenty election, they skipped some of the harder areas. Perhaps they figured it would be too hard to cross there, it's not Perhaps they wanted to maximize the mileage before election day. Well it didn't help much, but either way, for some reason, the wall just takes a little break

in Hucumber, and this makes crossing marginally easier there. However, the boulder fields, scorching hot days and cold nights make it anything but easy. On Thursday night, the eleventh of May, locals in Ucumber became aware that CBP were holding people on a dirt road in the open desert, just a few miles east of town and a few hundred feet from the wall. The people held they didn't have access to toilets, running water, or shelter. With every hour that

went past, the number of people grew. The biggest camp soon held over a thousand people desperately trying to scratch out a little shade in the desert. Other smaller camps popped up, one was apparently in someone's yard, and the people of this tiny desert town about helping as best they could. Soon they were joined by volunteers from all over the county. Katie was one of those volunteers. She doesn't live in a Cumba, but her friends do and

her family sometimes spends time there. Once she heard about what was happening, she knew she had to help. I let her describe her feelings after she saw the post online, and then drove out to cumber to see what she could do to help.

for you here. So when I first arrived, I thought it was kind of odd that everything was organized around a random road that has a gate, and there were five only five border patrol at the time, and about that was a larger camp, so I want to say at least eight hundred people, maybe a thousand. I didn't see them all because many of them would received their donations and the assistance and went back to their shelters.

their families from the elements. They slept on the dirt or in cardboard boxes left over from the food Volunteers fed them and under whatever folks and tiny desert count could find to give them. By the time I arrived, the migrants were gone and volunteers were cleaning up. The landscape was dotted with impressively constructed brush shelters. Volunteers from her Cumba set up tables to distribute food, blankets, water,

and clothing. Other volunteers stayed away from the camp itself and spent time packing things into individual sizes, perhaps combining hats and socks and maybe a toy for a child in one bag, or breaking down costco packages of snacks into individual portions. It's not necessarily the most rewarding task,

but it's an important one. I asked Marissa, another volunteer who had previously worked in Sandy Go for the Forest Service, what she felt when we were cleaning out some of those shelters together a couple of days later.

on a deeper level. It would make me emotional because it's like then you start to realize, like, wow, what if that was me and my child or I'm not a mother, but I can only imagine what that must be like for them to be going through these things as a as a woman, being on your on your period and being out and not having anything, you know, going to the bathroom out there. What do you use when you don't have those supplies?

position or another. I went out there purely for my love of humanity, and I think being able to support in whatever way I can that was the way that I felt like I could serve and be a support.

could help translate and distribute supplies. I asked her what it was like to see the supplies she'd purchased a few hours before end up in the hands of people who desperately needed them.

as much as the volunteers were. And unfortunately there was language barriers, you know, And so those that could speak multiple languages, whether they were border crossers or volunteers, were together in it and or and that was part of that organization that I'm talking about, you know. And and it was actually a very calm scene when we first came up. I saw my son's hat that I donated and a little boy hugging this jaguar stuffed animal. And the jaguar was really significant to my friend and I

when we found it. So it was really touching just to like see see the things that we were bringing being literally being distributed. Like sometimes when you think you're helping. I worked for a door to door campaign when I was in my teens and I got fifty percent of what I raised, and it was like disheartening, and you're like, oh, this is how it works. And in this case, money that I directly spent on resources that were needed was going directly to the people.

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

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

and to weather forecast and maps. Crossing in Arizona, a place known for cruelty and very hot weather doesn't make any sense when California offers a better political and weather climate, and with the mixed messages coming out about immigration law, these folks may not have been intending to evade border patrol, but to come to the USA and to take their

legal right to claim asylum. I spoke to Sam, a volunteer with extensive on the ground experience in humanitarian crises, about what he'd seen at the camp.

cumber received only one small water bottle each day. Despite the punishing weather. Although Customs and Border Protection did not seem to make any plan to shelter migrants in Cucumber, they did plan to have contractors paid forty dollars an hour to take them away. I found a job advert for a Southwest Border Transportation and Security officer at ISS Action Security. The agency photograph transporting migrants in the Cumber.

The job posting, which was posted two weeks before the end of Title forty two, has a description that includes patting down all detainees and applying appropriate restraints prior to boarding vehicles. The process through its migrants become detainees normally involves processing which had not been done in Nucumber. But it seems the presumption of ineligibility announced on the day Title forty two ended came into effect here. This might

seem minor distinction, but it's important. It means that people have to file a defensive asylum claim and not an affirmative one. They have to plead why they shouldn't be deported, rather than why they have a right to stay. Many of the people who have been trying to cross before the end of Title forty two, like Diana, because they felt they would face a less serious penalty. Many of them flew to Tina, walked from further south in Mexico

or even in Central America. I likely spent their entire savings on a trip to the gap in the wall near Cucumber that ended with them being held by border patrol in the open desert with next to nothing in the way of shelter, sanitation, or sustenance. As a way to quantify this, I want a reference to UCSD US Immigration Policy Center report apparently had some pretty problematic practices,

but anyway, these are results from its survey. When asked whether border patrol gave them enough water for the day, over half of the asylum seekers that we interviewed, approximately fifty three percent said no. Border patrol distributed one water bottle to each migrant in the morning. When asked where the border patrol gave them enough food for the day, all of the asylum seekers said no. Border patrol did

not distribute any food. When asked where the border patrol provided adequate sanitation such as toilets, all of the asylum seekers that we interviewed, meaning one hundred percent, said no. Border patrol provided one porter body for the entire encampment. When asked where the border patrol provided adepriate shelter, such as shade to protect them from the sun. All of the asylum seekers that we interviewed said no. Border patrol

did not provide any shelter. When asked where the border patrol provided blankets to keep them warm at night, all but one of the asylum seekers we interviewed said no. Border patrol provided blankets. Some migrants, but the overwhelming majority, did not receive blankets. Altogether, two thirds of the asylum seekers we interviewed said that they agree or strongly agree with the statement if I did not receive food and water from volunteers, I would not get enough food and

water from border patrol to survive. These aren't exaggerations, as we'll see, several migrants did come very close to losing their lives in the five or more days that CBP detained people out in the open along the border. Medical incidents in this kind of attention are far from uncommon.

A lawsuit filed against Customs a Border Protection by the Southern Border Communities Coalition regarding their actions this week, stated that quote many migrants have fallen into medical distress because of the conditions and CBP has been slow to provide access to medical attention, often only responding at the insistence of advocates. As a result, one woman suffered life threatening allergies, a child suffered an epileptic seizure, and a man suffered

an unattended infection on his leg. Medical attention was slow to arrive, and when it did arrive, it was often insufficient. Arlet Kayber described the conditions they saw a couple of days after the end of Title forty two.

probably twitered to four hundred people there. I heard a couple of different citations of how often this toilet is serviced and cleaned and the waste removed anywhere from once or twice a week to once every week or two weeks. Either way, that's not remotely sufficient for four hundred people using the bathroom multiple times a day in this single

portable like just a construction site toilet. It was right next to the phone charging station on the other side of the wall, and I would just feel sick if I got if I sit too close to it. It was really vile. It was not safe. It is not a way for people to be helping. And I do know, I think a lot of thankfully people stop using it, but then they don't have any privacy or that's not you know, a sanitary in a situation to be in since I mean they don't have a feed in the

space anywhere, so that's definitely right. The way is that people are intention of help and safety.

and try to seek asylum. And she was just sleeping right here, and she has burns all over her body, has an infection.

anything to her. They brought her back here in the middle of the night, and she was freezing and so wet. That's why I came out here.

the most part. There was a situation where someone was having an ellergic reaction, a fairly severe one, and and I happy to carry an EpiPen, so I simply give that to be one of one of the street medics. And then they eventually did call this person. The reaction bot severe enough that it was an an hour or so later that nine one was called I assumed by one of the volunteers, and uh amby Villaince and Border patrol came to open the gate and and bring this

person in the country. They did eventually treat, but it was a very it was a long time an anti quatus someone as someone who has a flexis and actions, and something happened many times in her life that is absolutely terrifying. I cannot imagine how terrifying it would be to be experiencing a life priding situation when you worked for apps and and you know, there's no authority that

really cares that you're there. And I don't know if she would have been able to get help if there have been volunteers in the second while, especially once.

dan Adeath and that she had contracted the flu. Alvarez, her mother, said she spoke to both detention authorities and medical personnel at the station multiple times to explain her daughter was complaining of pain and shortness of breath and that she was getting worse. I'll quite the next part directly from the NBC story. They never listened to me, she said. Rayas said his daughter was in a lot of pain, a lot of pain. I begged them to

call an ambulance. Alvarez said, adding the authorities told her the girl's condition wasn't serious enough to warrant calling an ambulance. Alvarez said her daughter begged authorities as well, telling them she could not breathe from her nose or mouth. Alvarez says that eventually her daughter lost consciousness and died in my arms. She said authorities took the girl from her arms and put her on the floor trying to revive her.

My daughter died there in the station, she said. Ava said she feels authorities did not do enough to help her little girl. My daughter is a human being. They had to take care of her, she said. Despite what you might have heard on the network news, the asylum process is anything but easy. I've had several visas, a Green card, and a US passport, and I can completly tell you the only easy way I've ever seen to

come here is to be very rich. But even among the convoluted bureaucratic mess that is US immigration, the asylum process stands out as both rigorous and complicated. Asylum is a process by which people unable or unwilling to return to their country because of persecution or a well founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, politics, or membership of a particular social group may remain in a safe country. From the eleventh of May onwards, migrants

at the border were assumed ineligible for asylum. If they crosspitw Queen points of entry, they must enter the defensive asylum process to prevent themselves from being deported. What this means for people we heard from earlier is that they are now taken for whatever God for sake and holding area. They're in a bust to a processing facility where they're interviewed by an asylum officer to determine if they have

a credible fear of persecution. They may need to provide a translator if there is an interviewing agent who speaks their language, and if they're determined to have a credible fear, they're told to check in with the US Customs and Immigration Office and sometimes given a notice which may or may not be dated to appear in court. My colleague Joe tried to get into one of these hotels to talk to one of the people we'd spoken to at the border, but he was pretty quickly shut down.

for example. Once they get to where they're going to be, they check in with US Customs and Immigration Services in their new location and they're given a special phone which also tracks their movements. They may have a DNA sample taken in addition to fingerprints. Later, sometimes years later, they attend a court hearing or two to determine their eligibility to stay. I've heard of lawyers charging from five thousand dollars to twelve thousand dollars for these hearings, and nonprofit

legalists and services are totally overwhelmed. At the moment, the system's massively backed up, and court dates are being given as far out as twenty twenty seven already. They may or may not be able to work during that period. Another the table work is getting harder and harder to find.

Even if they do find work on less than minimum wage, it can be very hard to say about five thousand dollars for a lawyer A Migrants who can't find nonprofit help are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to their asylum hearings. Again, private security contractors, this time from Allied. We're transporting migrants to the hotel and guarding it. Like CBP. The private contractors you guard transport and incat rate migrants or rely on the broken in immigration system to make money.

Unlike CBP. The agents themselves aren't well paid. Nineteen dollars an hours are going rate for Allied, not much higher than San Diego's sixteen dollars and thirty cents minimum wage. But the company itself is huge. It's the third last year as private employer in North America after Walmart Amazon. Allied guards are at prisons, airports, and shopping malls across America, and it's alleged that some are underpaid, insufficiently trained, and

improperly vetted. The company grosses over twenty billion dollars, and it's affiliates are frequent political donors. All across this story you'll see this Allied security iss action, security people, smugglers, customs and border protection, contractors who build the war pieces, and contractors who install the war pieces, General Atomics who sell CBP drones, and the Israelian American companies who sell

the surveillance technology to the government. All these people make money, but the poorest people in the world are the only ones losing money and sometimes their lives when they cross our southern border tomorrow. We're here from some of the people who made no money and looked after the migrants and will continue to support them through the asylum process.

the spring. And on this Sunday morning, there are about fifty people outside an old petrol station, nervously pounding bottles of water, applying sunscreen and getting ready to head out of the desert to clear up the ad hoc migrant camp that's held as many as fifteen hundred people out in the open when Title forty two ended and Border Patrol made no plans to keep them anywhere. It was

a diverse bunch of people hidden beneath sun hats. There's an Australian film producer who was at a conference in Orlando and booked a fly over a grad student painter. The folks who were in the Hookumber Hotel who organize this whole thing, they're friends from the hospitality industry in San Diego. There were students and mums and dads and

about the entire population of this tiny desert town. There were also two former International Aid workers who are in a tower where you can look at the desert, which is actually a much cooler thing than it sounds. And there's also a museum of boulders right next to it. You should probably check them out. Dur in the area.

I spent the day helping out in Neucumber after the refugees, some of them in handcuffs, had been taken by private contractors to be processed by CBP's Office of Field Operations. We met at a petrol station in the middle of town. The space where the pumps should be was filled with tons, and I do mean tons of bottled water, masks, hand

sanitized and other necessary supplies. When I'd arrived the night before, around ten pm, the eerie green and yellow lights reflecting from the roof had lit up the palace of water like some kind of giant lava lamp, and driving across the desert, the town looked like it was glowing. The town certainly has had a bit of a glow up in the last few years. Three business partners purchased the cir Cumber hot Springs Hotel, a down in the mouth property that had once been a glamorous desert resort, and

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

than a thousand people in the desert. The town's lake, fed by a natural spring an old bath house used to be attractions. Today the bathhouse of roof has fallen off, but it still makes a pretty cool concert venue, and the whole town offers commanding views of the border wall, which sadly is only a couple of hundred yards from the main street. When I arrived in Cucumber. Everything was close. The mini mark was sold out, the hotel was still being worked on, and the hotel kitchen was churning out

food volunteers at the clean up effort. I asked Marissa, one of the volunteers I met that day, about her first impressions on arriving at a meeting point.

it as often as I can. I try and camp police once a month, But that night I was cold, even underneath my down blanket, and I couldn't help but think of how desperate it must have been to spend nearly a week out there with nothing but in my last base blanket and some thorny bushes to keep you warm. It's certainly not the welcome that one would expect from the richest nation on Earth, which had three years to repair.

For the day, Title forty two ended to get a bit of background on the town, I spoke to Natalie.

I spoke to Sam, another volunteer, to get a sense of response. Now, Sam is a kind of guy who just looks like he's a home in the desert. His Wi brim hat, boots, and long cleeved shirt and pants told me he spent plenty of days under the baking sun out here, and his redness with an isoproble alcohol spray disinfect people's boots after walking in an area that was likely covered in human shit told me he'd been around one or two situations like this in the past.

meaningful way, a great deal of discomfort. It could have turned very badly if these people here had not stepped up, because the border patrol was completely overwhelmed, and so there was never that bad of a situation here compared to what I have seen in other places in the past.

she decided to make her own post. Asking for people to bring supplies that were needed soon. She was overwhelmed by the response.

like praying for the community that I love too. And the next thing I know, like my venmo was blowing up and there was one thousand dollars in my venmo sent from my family members. And so by the time my friend arrived, we were like, let's go and we filled our car with Amazingly, we found like organic, there's grocery outlet, right, so we found organic soup for you know, dollars something a can, and we spent a few hundred dollars.

And the next morning we met early and we stopped in El Cone on the way and we spent all the rest on We went to three or four thrift stores and bought every blanket and hat and baby carrier. Because we have both focused on motherhood in our careers.

for California Senator Steve Pidia. I wouldn't name her as I don't have her permission, but hopefully one days, soume, we'll be able to interview her. I'll let Katie describe the role this woman played.

paying attention to that. We were paying attention to the people that we were, you know, around, and no one that was out there. What didn't believe that we should be out there and that more help should be out there.

people are being tended to? And I literally heard her on the phone getting as many bodies on the ground to start going to those centers where they're being taken to make sure that they were that we would follow them through the entire process as best possible, monitoring their well well cared for, that they were well cared for, as well cared for as possible in a system and

a process like that. Yeah, yeah, but she literally said they're going to be busted off and putt in cages, and that they would do their best to make sure that that no one was split up and that everyone was fed, showered, and they weren't allowed to bring anything with them, so a lot of the cleanup was all of the things that everyone donated that had to be left behind, including some of the stuffed animals.

driving them out herself. She ended up doing like three trips just from her own talking to people and collecting. So just like the little impact that you know, everyone just kind of coming together and making a difference.

paper and those were those were a big hit. And tons of kids all came running over from the whole all the parts of the camp when they heard that there was there were toys being given out, so that was it was. It was heartbreaking, but it was also you know, it made me smile to.

on the first day it was chaos. I'll let Kber, who spent a whole day charging phones described the system that volunteers came up with to mitigate that chaos a little bit.

that doesn't have any kind of minimies or anything. So we had a system where they would pass the phone through, and we had we would we would put a piece of tape on it with their name and give their a piece of tape with their name the same name, and then they would give us that if they came back to give us the tape back, and we would match their names and in the phone, and and that was it worked well enough. I mean, it was still

extraordinarily chaotic process. I mean we had we always had at least one hundred phones on our side of the wallet any given time, and and some people had, you know,

some people like chargers, some people didn't. Some people had Android or Samsung or all the iPhones, and some people had well adaptors and some people didn't have the wallet ESA adapters, so we kind of had to every phone that came through was we had to find a way to get it, you know, basically chained into the set of generators that we had, which was do we have power strips? Do we have to write cables and and and we have space on those cables and and I think it was it was a bit of a puzzle

the whole time. The only part of it that really overwhelmed me was we did overload. Someone brought a bunch of uh USBC power strips and we blew out one of them, and so there was now eight phones attached to it that I had to find new spaces for. And I was just like as long as I was just frustrated by the situation. In addition affair, I think whatever happened to.

The American Friends Service Committee helped organize volunteers into groups to distribute food, package up wet white snacks, medicines, give out tarps, and do just about anything else that they could or anything else that they could fit into ziploc bags that could be passed through gaps in the wall.

but it was a very sweet moment. The father of the family had worked in the Army Corps of Engineers. He'd been to the border before to build this section of the wall. I didn't really need to ask him how it felt to see folks stuck behind it, but it said a lot that he and his family had taken the time to drive down, buy bags and supplies, and then come face to face with the people who

needed them and hand them out. Like dozens of other folks, they tried to pass whatever they could to little gaps in the wall to make someone's day a little bit brighter. Another volunteer who we heard from yesterday came from a local group called Pana. Hermira had been at the wall since five in the morning, and it was getting on

for five pm when we spoke. I normally ask people what they ate for breakfast, just to tune in the volume levels on my recorder a bit, but I'm going to include it this time, just so you can see how long her day had been and how hard she'd been working.

that they need to survive. And so that's why the community is out here today to do that.

removal of the historic murals in Chicano Park. Ogden organized gatherings in the park in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, and they resulted in a huge and overwhelming community response to defend the park, and this time Olgden decided to keep to himself, but Natalie ran into some people who weren't quite as shy about their opinions.

you know, supplies for the asylum seekers. And then I you know, like if you're from here, you kind of if you're in hookum, but you kind of already knew what was going on. And so him asking me that, I was kind of like mm, and then he just started laying into I've had illegals, you know, have broken into my house a few times. Why are you supporting illegals?

And I'm like, we're trying to let like make sure that people don't die, and he just kept going off on me, and so he, you know, his the whole all the talking points that people have about not allowing people to seek asylum here, and so.

do have the food. So where's the where's the breakdown? Like, is it our system that just doesn't allow for that happened? I don't know, And that that's where I like, I don't I don't understand it enough.

is what it what it felt like.

already have more American news here. But they are are pretty well known for kind of a lot of like misinformation, kind of scare mongering about and has people, immigrants, vaccines and and all that sort of sort of thing, but with kind of a local news sort of aesthetic to it. And they were, as far as I could tell, they were really the only identify the media that were there

throughout the day. I read articles eventually made me realize there were other reporters there, but they were identifying themselves the way that has I was, but they had signed was one cameraman just shooting the rule. I guess and he was walking to all the different parts of the wall and like all the different sort of stations for aid and like trying to really trying to get as many faces as possible. You could kind of tell that

that's like what he was doing. Every one was around I was, I was kind of oriented, and most of them with kind of their backband sort of analysts between people, and you know, when they saw the players trap, they're like a pappoints their masking, you know, and killing them in so where and I am don't you know, slightly identifying logo on my struct shirt which I take over so that you know that image wouldn't show up.

Kaiba thinks that some of the people who saw footage on k USI, or perhaps found the location posted on Ogden's blog came down to the border.

you know, they wouldn't approach directly. They would just kind of get out of their exceptionally large entivies and and just kind of just kind of watch, and they would kind of, you know, get a little bit closer at a time, and then you know a little bit closer and kind of whispered to each other and you know, point at things, and you know it's just kind of they were just watching, and you know, they got close enough that I could read their shirts and and the

shirts had a slogan that's associated with a Christian nationalism slogan. So as this whole family is kind of kind of sad that the kids would wear the shirts too, and and so I kind of, yeah, I figured out that that's what was going on. And I never talked to them.

I didn't approach them, but I stood when I was, you know, seeing they closer with this or I kind of positioned myself in between the rest of the volunteers and in this group, and and just kind of, you know, did never really stare at them, just kind of looked at them and and just made it clear with my body language that I, like I knew what they were doing, like they weren't you know, they weren't doing any kind of secret agent thing or whatever, like they were being

really really obvious. And and I just you know, stood and positioned myself in a way that dicated that you know, I know what you're doing, and you're not going to get close. You're not going to interfere with you know, what we're doing here. You're not going to contact to anyone or you trill anyone or like what everyone did. And eventually one of the people who is either volunteer or work for like one of the mngos contesting tell

there was something going on. So Sho went over and had a conversation with them that I could hear and eventually they decided to leave, and I think she was just kind of trying to be diplomatic, but just sort of like asked them if they wanted to help and if they don't want to help, you, yeah, somewhere else,

I suppose. And it was I mean, the sort of one Amazon prior to people that was that they apparently complained to this person about me because they said that I had been watching them and I was I was racially profiling them because they were white. And I realized now that this is an around this interview, but just for the listeners, I am very very white myself.

You know, even a child's going to play wherever child's going to play, and like that little toy of little hopefully it brought that kid some joy in that moment, you know, if it was there a little piece of home or someone gave it to him or what, you know, it was Yeah, the reality, it was like it was like a person, you know, like a little artifact of someone who was actually there.

country because they want to. They leave because they have to, but they feel like they have to. And you know, it's i mean, just respecting and honoring and understanding the privilege that you're.

and maybe bringing a sad child of stuffed animal. Here's Katie talking about the community response.

fix it, because then people will die. Yeah, you know, I mean that's the reality is if that community didn't activate, there would have been a lot of dead people in the desert.

fruit snacks for other little kids. They didn't see those kids, but when the adult said they're gonna be so happy to get that package, they felt like they made a difference. And those little girls are gonna grow up and not be afraid to step up and make a difference. I think a lot of people think like they can't do enough, so they don't do anything. And if we all just do a little bit or what you can, then I

think we would see a very large impact. Kumba is a town of five hundred and they just fed thousands, house thousands, closed thousands, hugged and welcomed thousands of human beings. And those people in that town don't have much excess, and they made a difference.

in the bucket, it actually does make a difference. And I think that stops us sometimes when we think what we have isn't enough to give, but when someone has nothing, what you have is more than what they can.

From there, it weaves its way through the Mexican Revolution and the First World Wars GEMA proposal to ally with Mexico to reclaim those territories it had lost in the decades before then. The border patrol story itself begins in May nineteen twenty four and in the ninety nine years since, it has encompassed everything from David Duke to nine to eleven in its journey to becoming the biggest and least accountable law enforcement agency in the federal government. People from

the colonial periphery have always migrated to the metropol. It's why a man called fat LEDs singing a song about vinderlou is basically my country's second national anthem, and why every four years France accepts black Frenchmen onto its football team before it returns to vilifying them in other forms of discos. Migration to the United States is no different. Climate change in US imperiodism have destabilized and impoverished nations from the Americas to Afghanistan and driven people to the

US border looking for a better life. What's distinct about the US is how obsessed it has become with keeping these people out and enforcing the longest land borders in the world. But the US border is much bigger than the land boundary between the USA and Mexico to the south and Canada to the north. If you're listening to this in the United States, the chances are that you

live in the border enforcement zone. This swath of territory outside the Constitution has been established since the Immigration and Nationality Act of nineteen fifty two. Established at a reasonable distance of the border would extend one hundred air miles around the outline of the country. Two thirds of the

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

for a warrant. Within twenty five miles of the border, they can enter your property provide it's not a domicile. The Fourth Amendment, part of a foundational bill of rights at US likes to tout as what makes it different from the rest of the world, doesn't apply when you're near the border, and all encompassing history of the border and its enforcement is beyond the scope of this podcast. Even a history of the Southwest border could take up a whole bookshelf, but we will try and skim the high

points here. Let's start with a Gadsden Purchase when a party of military surveyors first bumped into horn Art and elders as they attempted to draw a line dividing to Horn Autumn People from to Horn Autum people. The southern border is no more obvious today than it was then, and, of course, to the Autumn it was and remains and aberration that divides them from much of their ancestral and

current homelands. It has over the years seen violent enforcement on members of the nation and a growing encroachment of the Border Patrol into today's to Horn Autumn Reservation, which is the second largest in the USA. It only represents a fraction of the tribe's historical homeland. These surveyors were in the process of finalizing most of the California and Arizona border, a border I drove most of in the

days after Title forty two. The southern border as it looks now, was largely shaped by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which Mexico lost fifty five percent of its territory, including all of what is today California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and parts of what is today Colorado. Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The Gaston purchase of eighteen fifty three added more of southern Arizona. In New Mexico, the specific border in Santa Ciedro withdrawal so that San Diego Bay would fall to

the north of the line. The border in a cumba seems more arbitrary, a straight line in the desert that runs into a pile of rocks. Of course, long before the border divided San Asidra from Tijuana, this was Cuma land, and despite the border, it still is. The name Tijuana derives from Tijuan, which we by the sea in Kumiai. Despite this, the Kumii and many other indigenous peoples were ignored when the border crossed them, and it's becoming harder

and harder for them to cross it. In parts of desert, it can be pretty hard to see the border at all. In twenty twenty, while out with a group of Kumi people who were in ceremony to honor their ancestors whose burial sites have been and continue to be desecrated by border war construction, I had to be worried of stepping over it to better frame my shots the emerging declaration.

Donald Trump made allowed war construction to sidestep legislation in place to protect archaeological and sacred sites, but it didn't allow me to sidestep into Mexico to get a better shot. Luckily, Bortac, a team of armed border patrol agents who you might remember from Portland in twenty twenty, provided a guy addressed like he was in the Battle of Falluja to help me.

I would say the border is a line in the sand, but at the time there wasn't a line that was visible at all in Valley the Moon, a few miles east to Wear that Bortec patrol guard shouted at people stepping too close in twenty twenty. The border wall is about waste, high, rusty, and essentially comprised of a single

strand of barbed wire in cucumber. The thirty foot Trump wall pushes right up to a boulder pile and then stops the logic as much as there can be any logic, and spending twenty five million dollars a mile to desecrate sacred spaces and defile the landscape, is it. People will be deterred from crossing by the harsh landscape, brutally hot days and brutally cold nights. This logic, of course, fails to consider not just where people are going, why they're leaving,

the places they've come from. Risking one's life crossing the border makes sense only when one considers the danger that many people in places around the world face every day. It hasn't always been this way, fear reference here in Reagan and Bush talking about migration in nineteen eighty.

work out some recognition of our mutual problems. Make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and.

of the Olpaso sector and a Democratic Congressman. He lost his seat to be to a rok in twenty thirteen, but this strategy would long outlive his career with border patrol. The following year, on September seventeenth, nineteen ninety four, US Attorney General Janet Reno announce the start of Operation Gatekeeper. The first phase of the operation focus on the first five miles of the western border, including the place where I recorded all those interviews you heard earlier this week.

According to a piece written a quarter of a century later in the La Times, the strategy was to deter migrants from illegally crossing in the first place, and for those who remained undeterred, to encourage him to cross in more isolated wilderness areas to the east, where they could

be more easily captured. There were already fences in nineteen ninety four, first a chain link fence and then one made of helicopter landing mats left over from Vietnam that had horizontal struts that closely resembled and were used as a ladder. Anti migrant rhetoric was already there too. California Governor Pete Wilson became an outspoken advocate for Prop One eighty seven, a ballot measure that cut off state services

like healthcare and education to undocumented people. Here's a clip of Wilson's reelection ad.

of low wages in Mexico. To learn a little bit more about Operation Gatekeeper, I spoke to one of the agents who was tossed with executing it.

The death and the injuries, according to management, would deter future crosses.

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

the reservation. Dahn or Autumn People used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, go to school, visit a doctor, or perform their traditional ceremonial practices. But after nine to eleven, the United States and its Border Patrol began a more

visible and violent occupation of the reservation. It started with a vehicle barrier in two thousand and seven, and it continued with CBP's quote unquote virtual wall of surveillance technology, cameras and drones. The Israeli company Elbit Systems has built fixed surveillance towers, which they pioneered in the West Bank

on tribal land with the permission of tribal council. Meanwhile, other members of the nation strongly oppose the militarization of their homeland in the name of security of whatever homeland the Department of Homeland Security is securing. I'll quote here from Todd Miller, whose excellent work on the border has

required reading for anyone interested in the subject. Amy Juan and Nellie Joe David, members of the Horn Autumn her Magicum writes Network Tohrn joined a delegation to the West Bank in October twenty seventeen, convened by the Palestinian Organization to Stop the War. It was a relief, one says, to talk with people who understand our fears, who are

dealing with militarization and technology. In twenty seventeen, to Horn Autumn vice chairman Verlin Josse said that a war will be built quote over my dead body, and the tribe released a video saying there is no Autumn word for war. The sixty two miles of the border on their reservation would remain without one, they said. By twenty twenty, the Trump administrator had fought through a wall or much of the border, using what is known as the Roosevelt Reservation.

This is a sixty foot wide strip of land that the federal government owns along the border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Although much of the Autumn Nation remains war free and somehows what's called a vehicle barrier or a normandy barrier. Approximately one third of the Roosevelt Reservation

is on tribal land. Since two thousand and five realized the Act, environmental surveys and laws have been waived for border security, and this gave the Trump administration a way to justify the destruction of autumn and Kumi burial grounds, swad or cacti that the Autumn Seas relatives, and other sacred sites along the border. Despite efforts by tribal members and allies to stop the construction, members of the Tahana Autumn Nation have been pepper sprayed, beaten, tailed, and shot

by border patrol. In two thousand and two, a border patrol agent ran over and killed an Arthumn teenager. Last week, the same night I was waiting down by the border for the end of Title forty two, border patrol agents shot and killed Raymond Mattia, an odd to man who had called and asked him for help. He was shot thirty eight times just two feet from his front door. According to his family, well, mister Mattia's death is still being investigated. The Border Patrol has a long tradition of

literally getting away with murder. It is because they investigate themselves using so called critical Incident teams. I talked to Jen about what those teams do, and so.

evidence at the scene. They were present in the hospital when Anastasio was being treated, They were present at the autopsy. They fudged reports, they deleted reports, They coached their own agents on what kind of testimony they were to give. They were present at every one of the depositions. They made sure that they were the victims in this case.

And when I say that, what I mean is that Border Patrol agents sit team agents make sure that Border Patrol agents are looked at as the victims in any sort of an incident, meaning that they are allowed then to use lethal force if a Border Patrol agent has rocks thrown at them or in the case of Anastasio, they alleged that Honosta was violent and that he was kicking and punching and he needed to be subdued. If we take a look at the videotape, that's not actually

what happened. He's handcuffed, he's prone on the ground, his faces down, agents are on top of him. But if you read the reports in this case that were prepared by sid Anastasio was a violent man and needed to be subdued.

likely the Border Patrol fit teams. So if the Border Patrol agents, a lot of people don't understand it's like a cult, you know. They always say you blee green, you know, and you don't go back hung green, and probably one of the few that ever left, you know, and tells the truth about it.

Clan Border Watch. You claim there were hundreds of Klansmen on the border, but local newspapers The Desert Sun reported that there were in reality at least ten are quote directly from the Desert Suns reporting at a time here, Duke said clansmen would refrain from direct contact with illegal aliens if any have found. He said klansmen would not talk to them or contact them, but if any illegal crossings, they're going to use CBE radios to relate the information

to border patrol, Duke said. Duke of Metairie, Louisiana, claimed the clan has the support of the American people and helping the border patrol stem the influx of illegal aliens into this country. He claimed, the illegal aliens take jobs away from US citizens. We feel this rising tide washing over our border is going to affect our culture, he told reporters at the time, in a statement that wouldn't

sound out of place on Fox News Today. In response, more than one thousand, five hundred brown Berries threatened to rally against Duke. A protest far out numbering his patrols, popped up along the border in the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties. Texas Knights of the KKK leader Louis Beam, a Vietnam War veteran who had helped to organize and promote Duke's border stunt, established paramilitary camps around Texas and trained children as young as eight in the

deadly guerrilla warfare tactics he learned overseas. He rallied white fishermen against Vietnamese migrants and burned their boats. In twenty nineteen, a border patrol agent from Logali's named Matthew Bowen was accused of knocking down Aguaatemela Maunt with his vehicle and then lying to a quarter about the incident. The prosecutors in the case showed the jury text Bowen sent, including one which called migrants quote disgusting sub human shit, unworthy

of being kindling for a fire. In several text messages, Bowen references quote tonks. This is a derogatory term for border crossing migrants. The origins are determined a little bit unclear, but it seems to be derived from the sound of a flashlight hitting the back of someone's head. In argument against submitting the texts, defense lawyer Sean Chapman wrote that he would argue certain terms are quote commonplace throughout the Border Patrols tuson sector. This is part of the agency's

culture and therefore it says nothing about mister Bowen's mindset. Genss' kind of language and attitude was not uncommon in her time in border patrol from the mid nineties to the early two thousands, but things have got worse since.

demonization of migrants. I spent a bit of time looking for them in the desert in Arizona last week, but I didn't see much, not that I really wanted to. Interaction with these militias, probably far more often than we have documented evidence for, can be fatal, just like interaction with customs and border protection. Here's just one example, called from David Newitt's a excellent book, and help followed with her. On May thirtieth, two thousand and nine. Seana Ford, Jason

Eugene Bush, and Albert Gacxiola. All members of Ford's vigilante group minu at Man American Defense, forced their way into Raoul Flores Junior's home in Alavika, Arizona, by pretending to be Border Patrol agents. The group planned to steal and sell drugs they thought Flores had in his house. The FBI knew about this, but did nothing to stop them. Finding no drugs in the house, c vigilantes murdered Flores and his nine year old daughter, Bricennia, Flora's wife and

Briisenia's mother, Gina Marie Gonzalez, was shot three times. She played dead, but when attackers returned, she exchanged fire with them, using her husband's handgun. In doing so, she hit Bush. Bush had previously been charged with a September nineteen ninety seven execution of an Aryan Nation associate for the supposed crime of being a race traitor. Both Ford and Bush are currently on death row in Arizona. The k k K was not the only group recruiting children for border patrolling.

Since the mid nineteen eighties, the Border Patrol's Explorer Program has recruited young men and women of high school age. The program is charted through learning for Life, which is a subsidiary of the Scouts from America for kids, often the children of immigrants living in border towns where industry has long since gone in a decent wag it is hard to come by. The program offers the chance at a starting salary of sixty two thousand dollars twice a

median income in some of these towns. Young Explorers will learn tracking, survival, shooting, and how to detain and process on documented migrants, people who in some cases are walking in the footsteps of their own parents. According to an article by Moray Music in the Nation, young Explorers have to earn the writer to their uniform by participating in their sixty hour Basic Explorer Academy, of which they learned

CPR drills and the methods of conducting vehicle stops. It also offers courses in radio communications, public speaking, report writing, and ethics and integrity, and introduces the youth to criminal juvenile immigration, a Fourth Amendment law. What I was writing so checked out the San Diego sector page. We seem to show young people running, shooting and one who looks like he's just been mased in the face. The next photo on the Facebook page dedicated to this Border Patrol

sector shows a man in handcuffs above. This is a video of someone dropping a chilt from the top of the border fence. Without figures from the CVP. It's hard to tell if participation in the Explorers has dropped as public awareness of family separation assault now the behavior doesn't exactly fit with the Border Patrol's motto on a first has spread. I asked Jen for her take on the Explorer program.

same stuff that I was indoctrinating too. But it's even gone so far now as to they do the dog and pony shows at the elementary school, so they're getting them when they're like six seven years old, and they go there with a little Border Patrol bulletproof fessed and put them on them and take pictures and put it on social media, and they have them sit in their trucks and turn the signs on and all this other stuff.

said she'd spend her own money buying supplies. Jen said that this kind of behavior can be pretty common with young agents.

my life. I oft would say, like, especially with female agents, they calls it's five percent, because there's never been more than five percent of women in the Border Patrol rings. And they say, oh, it's because it's very hard. It's not because it's very hard. I mean, it is very hard to get through, but it's also it's because they're actually assaulting us all the time in the academy and

lansing us. So I go back and forth in my mind, and I would imagine this young woman, you know, she has days where she arrests some pretty decent criminals every now and then once in a blue moon, but the majority of them, if she's paying attention and not completely self absorbed, she'll realize that that they're not criminals and their families just simply seeking a sound. So she at some point has to decide in her mind, is this what I got in two? Is this what I want to do with my life?

the name struck many as problematic. In the two thousand and two article in The New York Times, Elizabeth Becker wrote that the name had worrying similarities to the way the Nazis talked about their fatherland, and it didn't really fit with the way Americans spoke. Nobody in two thousand

and one was talking about the homeland. But two decades and billions of dollars later, it's hard to find much in the way of criticism of the agency in DC despite the fact that the twenty twenty two budgets of CBP and ICE was sixteen and eight billion, respectively, and every year since two thousand and one, DHS has obtained more guns, more drones, a more surveillance technology that is inevitably used to spy on citizens as well as non citizens.

In nineteen ninety five, there are about four thousand CBP agents. By twenty twenty there were twenty thousand, with seventeen thousand station on the southern border. This is a slight drop from a peak of just over twenty one thousand. Under Obama, who is often called the deporter in Chief, is fondness for expelling people from the United States for crimes like having a PieP or financial misconduct, the so called aggravated felonies and crimes of moral turpitude that only exist for

non citizens. These agents today have the ability to operate in what the ACLU calls a constitution free zone and can conduct suspicion free searches of electronic devices, use cell site simulators, and sweep up data about thousands of people never accused of any crime. One of the more notable examples of this happened only a few yards from whereas

recording last week in Santasidro. It's a story worth recounting in detail because it brings together the themes we've spoken about so far, demonization of migrants, government overreach, and a frank disregard for international and national law. In late twenty eighteen, I was enjoying a break from work in a caravan near in Sonata. If you think back to that time, right before the mid terms, you might remember some of the rhetorics was circulated around large group of migrants making

their way to the southern border. I'll play some of the clips from Fox that MPR cut together in their coverage of the issue.

members and criminals and Middle Easterners are among them. Over On Fox, guests have similarly, without supporting facts, suggested people from Isis and the Taliban might be among those migrants. Even so, the network's chief news anchor, Shepherd Smith, tried to put on the brakes yesterday.

a Pittsburgh synagogue was obsessed with the caravan. The victims of the largest anti Semitic mass murder in US history included a beloved community doctor, a great grandmother, and a couple who'd gotten married at the same synagogue more than sixty years earlier. The shooter's last post on hate speech social media site gab, posted just minutes before the synagogue massacre began, spells it out with a reference to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Jewish nonprofit that resettles refugees

in the United States. HIAS liked to bring invaders to kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in. The shooter was obsessed with the idea that a caravan of migrants with not a group of people trying to save their own lives, but a coordinate and somehow you led

invasion an attempt to demographically restructure the United States. If you're ending where he got that idea from, he is America's favorite jobs, you get Tucker Calson on the caravan.

the migrants northwards. In other words, the Mexican government abedded illegal immigration into this country, as it has done for many years. Well tonight, the caravan is on our southern border. Rather than wait for the crossing station a Sanya Sidro to open, many of them just jumped the fence. Some waved Honduran flags when they got to the top, And that tells you everything. When you arrive in a country to contribute to it and to assimilate into its culture,

you don't waive the flag of a foreign nation. That's what you do in triumph, when you invader country.

Once we gave those out, I talked to a few people about what they needed. We coordinated with mutual ad groups in Tijuana and offered support her for wee could.

In the next few weeks, my friends and I spent tens of thousands of dollars at a Tijuana costco, received thousands of dollars in donations from people we hadn't seen in years, and in one memorable instance, rigged up and projected as someone had tactically obtained from an office to a DVD player which we'd installed in the roof of a dilapidated nightclub for little children and their mothers so they could watch Beverly Hills, Chihuahua and forget about the

fact that the country they were traveling to, portraying the little infants as invaders. Have a lot of very complicated memories of those few weeks. Little girls braiding my hair, little boys and girls trying to comprehend exactly how I could be this bad at football, and people from San Diego churches, tijuan anarchist kitchens and mutual a groups around the region coming together to look after a group of people who've been so heavily demonized by folks who had

never met them or even been here. His Trump defending calling the caravan an invasion and simultaneously explaining why migrants low wage to labor it is desirable for people like him.

of that caravan was only just starting. In the months have followed journalists who'd cover the caravan, as well as those who offered assistant to caravan members, so they felt they've become targets of intense inspections of scrutiny by border officials. I got pulled into secondarily once during this time, and that was entering Mexaco. The worst I got was a chance to inspect my nineteen eighty pickup truck oil pen.

But for others, things weren't so easy. Homeland Security Investigation special agent turned whistleblower Wesley Peternac helped NBC to document that, under the umbrella of what was called Operation Secure Line, the Department of Homeland Security created a database of activists, journalists, and social media influences tied to the migrant caraban When they crossed the border. Individuals in that database were often subjected to hours long screenings and in some cases had

flags placed on their passports. A PowerPoint slideshow which Petanac leaked to NBC seven lists some of the people, some of them have been guests on this show. They include ten journalists, seven of whom were US citizens, a US attorney, forty eight people from the US and other countries who

were labeled as organizers, instigators, or having unknown roles. The target lists also includes organizers from groups like Border Angels and Pueblos in Frontellas I asked journalist brook Ben Cowsey to describe her experience of increased border scrutiny in twenty eighteen.

started getting pulled into secondary inspection more and more. So they would wave my car over and then take me into this secondary place where it's sort of like this back it's like a Quonsett pet sort of, and in it like all these cars drive in and out, and they'll they'll go through your things, they'll get in your face, you know, they'll do all kinds of stuff. And I don't there have to be cameras in there somewhere, but

I've never seen any. So I just kept getting pulled into secondary more and more, as though I was this suspicious person, as though I was suspected of something, and every time I asked, they'd be like, I don't know, it's just random, ma'am, and ma'am, it's just random. So actually this started about twenty fourteen for me, but it

started to escalate in twenty eighteen. Twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen started to escalate, and I was like, a fucking Trump administration of course going to escalate.

like please please get out of my face, sir. And it was it was gross, and they were going through my shit and that was gross, Like they didn't find anything, but it was just an invasive, hostile, disgusting thing. And that was when so I said, can I speak to your manager? Which is a magic phrase when you're a middle.

Those dots begin in South America's people die traveling north, but they're sparse and isolated. Where that changes is the places I've been driving all week, Eastern California, southern Arizona. Places I know from years of hiking, climbing, and cycling,

places when one mistake can be fatal. I know from my friends who spend time resupplying water caches and searching for missing people, that you don't have to make any mistakes to die in the desert, especially if you're young or old, or sick or afraid to ask for help. These are the places we force people to travel through on foot to come here and create a better future for themselves. Hydration, exposure and drowning or rank highly as

caused a death along the border. Last year saw a record for border deaths, and with Biden attempting to take a hard line going into twenty twenty four, and climate change and instability continuing to drive migrants north to the place that causes so much of that climate change and instability, there's no reason to believe things will get better. I want to point to one tragic loss, one of thousands,

that happened not far from where I live. In February of twenty twenty, Juana Margarita and Paula Santosar were traveling by foot from Wahaka to their future in the United States along a trail sometimes known as the Shrine Trail. Their family told media back home that they were searching for a Senor Americano the American Dream. Along their route is a small religious shrine which marks the last point

from which you can see in Mexico. It's well inside the US along a dry creek bed in the Laguna Mountains. It can be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Last November I can out there, and even with thousands of dollars in gear, I was dangerously close to cold injury. I've also rescued hikers with dehydration symptoms near here. The desert and the weather might be part of the story, but the desert doesn't kill people on its own. It's the border that forces people deep into

the desert that kills them. The desert is just a tool for a system that uses death of the current. When the girls crossed the border near Campo on the ninth of February, it was raining. As they climbed the Laguna Mountains, it started to snow. They huddled under a bolder for warmth, and the two men smuggling them across struck out to get Star reception and call nine to one one. By the time bor Star Border Patrol Search Trauma and Rescue team arrived, two of the girls had

died as they tried to save Juana. Their request for air support was declined, and she died with one of the agent's jackkits wrapped around her and another agent's beanie on her head. For some reason, the girl's remains were not recovered right away, and they were not rewarmed, and so they last their last chance at the American dream and not life. Today, their final resting place is marked by three crosses and a cache of supplies placed there

by volunteers. At the time I'm recording this, we don't know where all the folks we met at the border around now then we might never know. Not being able to follow stories is a sad part of this reporting. Sometimes knows people all have my phone number, but they might not. Only more have their phones or this scrap of paper are wroted on. Often these things can be

taken for them in custody. What we do know is that on May eighteenth, exactly one week after Title forty two ended, Immigration and Customs Enforcement also known as ICE, tweeted a video of Customs Enforcement and Removal Operations agents walking down the corridor of a flight full of mass people. The caption read ICE conducted multiple removal flights including Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras as part of dozens flights conducted each week. On the wall of my office as I write this,

there are several propaganda posters Second Republic. One is as simple as it is heartbreaking. The poster depicts a squadron of fascist bombers and the dead body of a child. The slogan underneath reads, if you tolerate this, then your children will be next. The poster was, of course correct. It was the inspiration for songs by the Clash and the Mansrud preachers, which are what in turn made me

want to learn about the Spanish Civil War. The slogan coined in nineteen thirty seven feels as relevant today as it does then. It was one that folks on the border might as well have been screaming by twenty eighteen, but one that went ignored, just as it did in

nineteen thirty seven. In twenty twenty, folks began to realize what it meant when border patrol drones circled the skies around Minneapolis and cell phone signal interceptors track citizens all over the US when they came together to demand that the police stopped murdering people. It became more real in twenty twenty three when under DeSantis, Florida began the process of legalizing state kidnapping of trans and gender non performing

kids from their loving families. But that all began when the state ripped Indigenous children for their families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who tried to destroy their culture by punishing them for wearing their clothes, speaking their languages,

or using their names. Wasn't a big leap from there to Trump's family separation policy, which detained kids on their own away from their families as a means of punishing a deterring migrants, and it's reached its obvious endpoint in Florida because despite all the people chanting about kids in courages in twenty twenty, there's almost universal bipartisan agreement on treating people of our southern border like humans without rights.

And because for two decades we've allowed the border surveillance industrial complex to grow to an unprecedented and uncontrollable scale, the watches us all changing things now will be very difficult. DHS aren't numbers many nations armies, and it's considerably better equipped. But unless people show up and take action, things are going to get considerably worse, regardless of who you vote for or what they say in order to get you

to vote for them. As Katie said, little things can make it difference, And if you listen this far, I hope you'll take the time to try and do those little things. Before we go, I want to update you on what's happened in the week we've been publishing this. Although there are no longer people held out in the open in ho Goomba and San Asedro, there are still many people trying to present themselves at the sant Asedra border to claim asylum. Today, I was told they are

about one hundred of them. They're waiting there, often for days. Most of them are getting turned away. They're all frustrated with CVP one which continues to be buggy, offer no appointments, and struggle to photograph black faces. I also wanted to mention some of the organizations you can find and donate

to if you'd like to support their efforts. They are the Asian Solidarity Collective, Alo Trollao, the American Friends Service Committee, Border Kindness, border Lands Relief Collective, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, and PREVENKASA pre ev e ncas A. I'd also like to thank Joe Oriana his Twitter is at Joe or Photo for his reporting which very much contributed to this series.