As If We Had Been Imprisoned: The Migrant Reception Center

I hope you enjoyed the episode. At some of you recognize the audio that we opened this show with, and then if you won't, it's a sample from the fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle that Manuchow used to open his shows with. It's a piece of music that's very emotive for me. Obviously, I'm a white leftist guy in my thirties who learned Spanish and decided to live in Barcelona. So I have a story about running into Manuchow once where he was busking, but that's not what I want

to share today. Because I'm technology challenged, I can't seem to get my phone to download songs, but I've managed to download the same Manuchow playlist, and I ripped off a rewriteable CD when I was in high school and put it on the various headphones and garment and watch it that I've had of the last two decades or so. When I'm away for work, I like to run whenever I can. Obviously, I wasn't just going to go for

a jog straight into the Darien Gap. But once we were out of Bajajiqito, it gave me some time to run and think and process the things that I've seen. And while I do that, I listen to the same does not al so MP three files. I was listening to this song one day after I got back from LaaS Blancas as I sweated my way up ahead in the rainforest, hoping to see a sloth. I didn't see a sloth, but it seemed like an appropriate soundtrack. Manuchow

himself is a child of refugees from Francoist Spain. He sings in French and Spanish, while off and Galician and Portuguese, among other languages, often several of them in the same song, the product of growing up among other migrants of diverse backgrounds. I like the way he plays with language because it reminds me of the way I so often speak to

my friends Spanglish, for example, or Frannglais. It's the way people talk in border regions and refugee camps, languages that don't have the support of a state or the academy, but nonetheless convey so much meaning for so many people. That song in particular reminds me of my first time reading about Zapatismo in a tiny anarchist cafe in the West Midlands. I remember struck as a kid from Europe who would frequently drive to France or Belgium to race

bikes and buy cheap beer. That the USA still maintained a fortified border with Mexico. People couldn't travel freely, but money could. It was its realization and the writings in particular Soucomante Marcos, along with my talks in Spain to old anarchists, that encouraged me to learn Spanish, which I pursued by spending months in Spain and Venezuela and learning

thanks to the patient to the people around me. It was a new anarchism which came from the periphery, not only a liberal corps, which gave me my first serious politics. I traveled to Venezuela to understand the revolution there. I did a PhD to try and understand the revolution in Spain. It's all very well understanding things, but I think it's much more important to do things, and I tried to

practice mutual aid as much as I can. Since I got back from the daddy En, I've loaded up a heavy backpack and carried water into the desert and spent hours trying to connect the friends I made in the jungle with services along the way. In the face of so much cruelty, it's good to be doing something to help and carrying the waters away. I can make a material difference in a terrible situation. But in all my time reporting, I've really never felt as disempowered and helpless

as I did in Last Blancas. Here at the first official migrant reception center after Daddi Enne. The Panamanian government registers migrants NGOs, offer a few services, and the US funded process of deportation for migrants from Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela and India begins. Some of those sent to India might well be Nepalese who often travel on fake Indian passports.

The Siddle cluster of cheap tents, shipping container offices, un shelters, and barbed wire fences is where the rubber meets a road for the USA's border and migration policy, and it's heartbreaking to witness as migrants were called up to the security office to begin the deportation process. I tried to narrate the scene into my voice recorder, but I struggled, in part because their family members asked me questions, hoping

I can help. Yeah, plankings on a say, But in a larger part this was also difficult because I couldn't help, and I deeply wanted to. The best I could offer was an arm around someone's shoulder and the promise to email anyone who I could think of and ask what was going on. This guy's just sobbing. Ah. Yeah, that's really tough. Some people's parents, some people's partners, And I'll explain exactly what was happening in a moment, but first

I want to explain how I got here. On the day we left Maragante, we set off at the same time some migrants who are making their own journey to last Blankets is carrying only myself and my fixed daddy and Aguero. So we're moving a lot faster than the boats full of migrants on the way north. We passed them, they smiled waves. We rode by many of them had met me the day before. All of them were ecstatic to have survived to daddy En and be heading north.

You know, it's a pretty busy stretch of river that's probably three or four piaguas full of migrants. Hello, there, kids shanging and men taught them some English words yesterday and they're shouting them back to me today, which is nice. I got it family from Panama. They might be Indio people or something. They little Bill shocked to the whole scene. Here we are patting another bit agua. Now they're all

waving in me. It's got to be uncomfortable. Pack that dancy into a bi agua one, two, three, four or five, six, seven, eighty nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirty forty sixteen people. Yeah, once they boath arrived, they did embark in Las Blancas. The next day. I was there to meet them. They're just walking into LaaS Blancas. It's hectic here. So it's a new shop here, and outside the shop they've made like a line of outlets to charge people. It's a

dollar an hour to charge your telephone. As we go in, there are a row of like kind of sheds which represent shops and then further in every ngo has its own little kind of shed. They're all covered in tarps. They're like canvas and tarp tents. Actually here so see UNISEF see oh I am. Yeah, they have that sort of little tent office here. I guess see here as for example has route information, psychological supports. They space for women,

WUNISEF has. There's some workshops for children. And then in the hours, I guess, nice little chairs in there, yeah, seas then you can't take photographs in there, which is good. Yeah, And then it's just a crowd of people coming out. And there's also Mormon, little little Mormon situation.

at the jungle. Then you they'll be moving forward the next day, and for a few bucks they can get anythink they needed in the village. The locals told me that if kids didn't have the money to eat, they fed them for free. I didn't see this, but nobody seem like they're having a very hard time in any of the days have visited the village, at least not for financial reasons. Magots can get as far as Baho

Jiguito on a few hundred dollars in their tenasty. They pay Columbian guides a few hundred bucks to bring them across the ocean from Necopie and to walk them from the border, and they parried Embarra Perraguero's twenty five bucks for a ride up the river. But once they get to last Blankerts. For a good number of migrants, their journey grinds to a halt. Many of them told me they've been stuck in the camp for weeks or even months because they couldn't get that sixty dollars that they

needed to pay for their travel north. There's no Western Union in the camp, and the only way to transfer money is very local interomediay who charges between twenty and twenty five percent of the sum being transferred as a fee. In the morning, migrants arrive on their peraguas, just as we did. I drop down the boat ramp when I them to help with their bags, and I'll go about their journey from there. They formed two lines, one for men and one for women and children. They have their bag

search and their passport checked. They're given a welcome kit for the Red Cross with some basic necessities toilet paper, a toothbrush, some soap, stuff like that, or some of them get a kid. When the kids ran out, it was long before the line of people did. By the time the men were finished, they were given little more than a shrug and good wishes better Red Cross volunteers and allowed to head off into the camp. Within the camp, there are a few rows of small casitas that are

allocated to u accompany children and families. They're little more than four walls in a roof, but they offer a bit of privacy for most migrants, though there isn't space and they have to search for a spot of empty ground in the crowded camp where they can pitch the same tents they bought a neckockley the Wi FI which a Red Cross usually provides, wasn't working when I arrived, so I had to let people hot spot off my phone all day. At least the promised food really was free,

but the migrant told me it was far from good. Still, this is supposed to be a temporary camp. People register here, get any medical attention they need, and then move forward to Costa Rica. That's the theory anyway. In practice, if you can't get the sixty bucks, you need to move forward, or someone stole it for me in the jungle, or you are forced to walk to the camp because you didn't have twenty five bucks for the boat and then someone rubbed you. Then you're stuck.

to hold on here a little longer. We don't have any family members can give us support.

expected to do. If they don't have the money and can't get someone to send us seventy five dollars, they'd need to cover their travel costs and the twenty five percent transfer.

idea is to move forward to get further ahead. We brought our children to look for a future, not to be locked up here in Panama, as if we've been in prisoned.

the first buses have arrived. It's about noon. The first bus is going to be followed people who had been waiting in line for hours already, so they're kind of lining up by the bus.

bus crash. This year, seventeen were intured in a crash in August. Now, migration offices ride in each bus with the migrants to check on safety protocols and make sure they don't get off anywhere else in the country just like everywhere else on their journey. People make money off the migrants in last blankets. A bus costs sixty dollars ahead and has fifty five passages three thousand, three hundred dollars a bus. More than a dozen buses leave every day.

They even half of a thousand or so people who arrived us a transfer service to get their bus fare. That's seven five hundred dollars in transfer fees alone. Of course, not everyone in the community is making thousands of dollars off the migrants. I interviewed local shopkeeper who still sits just outside the camp gates, and I asked him to explain his stock, which included the oddly popular I backed the blue, thin blue Lion T shirt. So I'd seen several people across the daddy and gap.

can buy. There are certain people who buy, of course, if everyone bought, but there are very few who can buy something to leave here. Almost seventy percent leave dirty because they don't have anywhere to get money, and the little they can get often comes from selling their phones, their watch, a cap, or their sneakers to be able to get money to pay for their fare to keep going.

very low. However, the immigrant is there and he's picking fruit, going to the fruit trees, going to the vegetable fields, going to the garbage dumps, going picking up things that many Americans who live there don't do, of course, and so they need them to say that they don't go. They need the support of the immigrant to be able to have the balance that they have today.

bustling city pretty challenging a lot of ways. I find I'm oddly comfortable amidst the chalos and trauma of a refugee camp. It's a familiar environment for me, and I know how to conduct myself. I feel safe with the migrants, and I tend to find them very open and welcoming to me. I can talk to anyone and they can talk to me. I bring toys for children and try to bring resources for adults, and sometimes I bring my harmonica if I being really cliche in a weird way.

Refgue camps are a little safe space for me, and even though I know it's bad, I can console myself that I'm helping a little or at least giving people some hope and some information. That made me feel a bit better. But in the city I found it hard knowing that people were in a terrible situation and that nobody hears seem to care. I went for a running the jungle near the city, trying to get some perspective and clear my head, but I just ended up screaming

and didn't consider it driver. I was angry at them for they're hitting me, but I was just angry at everyone all over the US and even here in Panama City, for their indifference as so much human suffering. The lack of concern about migrants in Panama City made what I saw next at Last Blankets even more surprising. An announcement of the loudspeakers called several Colombian passport holders to the

migration office. At first, it seemed like they were just going to a little wooden shed with a couple of CENTA Front officers in it to return their documents. I had already noticed that some migrants, and seemingly most of the African migrants, were being called to a different shed to do biometric scans. I wondered if this was part of the same process. But shortly thereafter a truck rolled

up and several of the Colombians were loaded in. Apparently neither they nor their partners knew what was going on. They're taking some of the Columbian guys away to report them. You can hear a little kid crying for his dad, okay, listen, and taking his brother and his brother's wife, taking some other lady's husband, some of little kid's dad and making them sit on the floor. I don't know why, Yeah, I don't know what they're going to do now. She's trying to give her husband the money and a SIM

card so you can call her. You're gonna go get some more food. Other morguts approached me to us if I knew, which I didn't. The one lady who'd been there for weeks told me that people who leave this way never come back and they end up being deported, So we assume that's what's happening here. Yeah, this really sucks.

Now they're taking the deportation by. There's men crying, I said, wives are on their women crying, their husbands are on their kids are crying, their parents are on there, and they've just done this crossing and now they're going to send them back. By the time I got back to the city, I was getting texts from migrants with photos of them and handcuffs. More and more of them were

being deported, particularly the Colombians. One of them, texting me after being returned to Columbia on a flight, gave the following account of detention.

a chance to appeal their deportation. Instead, they were detained for eight days, spent their last US dollars, and were then kicked out of the country. They were not detained or arrested upon reaching Columbia, which makes it a little more difficult for me to believe the claim that only people without standing warrants in Columbia were being deported. These

weren't the only allegations of mistreatment. I heard Margarets came to me and whispered about the abuse of black migrants who were forced to walk to Lahas Blancos because they couldn't afford the boat ride. I should note that it wasn't the migrants who had been robbed or abuse that came to me. It was other migrants. It was a group of guys had given a water filter too. While

they were leaving to walk from Lahas Blancas. I hadn't been able to join them, but when they got there, we ran into each other again, and they came up to meet to share their concerns for the black men who had walked with them. In one instance, one migrant told me he was robbed by what he called quote police dressed as thieves. The deportations, which seemed to be

increasingly commonplace, are being funded by US taxpayer dollars. The same day that Molino took office in July, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Majorcas, himself the child of migrants, visited Panama.

Panama's a relatively young country and one which the US occupied part of for much of the last century, but despite a real struggle for independence, the Panamanian government didn't seem concerned that the U S Secretary of Homeland Security was present at the inauguration of a president in a

country that decidedly not the U S homeland. The official DHS readout of his trip notes that the US has enjoyed a flourishing strategic relationship with Panama for over one hundred years, which is certainly one way to sum up decades of occupation, violence, and profit from the Panama Canal and one of the more brutal dictatorships in the long list of authoritarian regimes that the US preferred to minister,

even socialist governments in the Western Hemisphere. They also announced that the US government would quote help the Panamanian government to remove foreign nationals who do not have a legal basis to remain in Panama. Obvious yet to take this moment to note that under the United Nations Refugee Convention, refugees do have a legal right to travel through a country on route to another. His Erica describing that right.

in Bajojigito. Because Panama's government and Venezuela's government have ceased relations after the election, Panama is now struggling to deport Venezuelan's back to Venezuela, and it's actively searching for a third country into which to deport them. But even if the program resulted in one plane loaded day, which it hasn't yet, that would be roughly ten percent of the total daily in traffic, and far fewer planes are traveling. What it will do, like so many other DHS policies,

is play into the hands of smugglers. Already new ocean routes are being used, which see migrants, many of whom cannot swim, taking long journeys around Panama on ill equiped boats. This doesn't help anyone apart from the DHS contractors and staff equipping and training Panamanian personnel, and the human traffickers making more and more money from migration. I also a shopkeeper. His opinion on this.

get ahead and give well being to your children. Now, ten percent of those who go are going to destroy the good name of the migrants, But what people really want to do is help their family, and this balance unbalances everything that is being done by good people, because there are many good people who want to get ahead, and I think that the United States should support give support to people who really want to fight and move forward.

As I just told you, they give a lot of benefit they contribute to the country.

costantly on the bus. From there, they crossed quickly into Nicaragua and Guatemala before arriving in the Mexican border city of Tapachula in the state of Chiapas and ironically not so very far from whether Zapatista's made their revolution thirty years ago. Once they crossed the southern border of Mexico, migrants can begin their application for asylum using the CBP one app that we've talked about so much on the

show before. They can use it in Tabasco and Chiapas, the southern border states, and then once again when they're north of Mexico City. To recap very briefly, the app is terrible and almost every way, including its inability to recognize blackfaces. It's limited functionality on Android phones, which is a vast majority of devices used by migrants. It's constant crashing an eight to nine month wait time for stylum appointments. His' erico explaining some of those problems.

at all. The goal of the app is to make it harder for people, even those with very legitimate asylum claims, to obtain asylum in the USA. As we heard yesterday, the CHNV program is no better. A recently Reddit thread of applicants who've been waiting nearly two years. What it didn't mention yesterday is a parallel program for another group of migrants, which I'll let Erica explain.

that I'd booked. I have, however, a serious problem with a Biden administration which left people who fought alongside its own US troops to die in Afghanistan and turned away migrants small over the world, but then opened its arms to a country that just happened to have the majority of its citizens be the same race as the president. It's cruel and it's wrong, and it's barely ever even mentioned in national media coverage. But that's not fortunate enough

to be Ukrainian. Here's what waiting in Mexico looks like.

them have spent several thousand dollars. Once they're in Capatula, they faced with the astronomical costs for the trip north off just several thousand dollars more, and many of them, their fund exhausted, have slept on the streets. Those didn't speak Spanish struggle to find refuge. Those who did wanted to move quickly north, but struggle to find the money here. The Iranian migrants you heard earlier in the series explaining what they'd already heard about CBP one.

Margarets absolutely have been robbed or kidnapped on their way to their appointment and missed it as a result, but they're just as honorable in the eight or nine months that they have to wait for one. Margarets and Tapajula are at a very high risk for kidnapping and are often held until their families pay ransoms, but without money or an appointment, they have little means of leaving the city.

Some choose to travel a little further north and then hop on a freight train known as Labstia the Beast, an extraordinarily risky endeavor that several of the people I spoke to for this series have undertaken. The only place to ride on these trains is on top of carriages, exposing migrants to freezing temperatures in the desert night. Even

on the train, they're not safe from kidnapping. Like many migrants, the Iranian group were well informed about domestic politics in the US, and they said that when they made their journey north, they wanted to be sure to avoid the states where local law enforcement was likely to turn them over for deportation. In reality, that could be any of the states. But they're probably right that their life would be a little easier on the West Coast.

passed twenty five hundred. In fact, this is the continuation of extremely punitive and cruel politics that have been in place since he was finally forced to stop using Title forty two, which, if you're not aware, is a public health law used by the Trump administration and embraced by

the Biden administration as an asylum law. It has already resulted in the deportations of people back to places where they have extremely credible fears of harm and created a system whereby migrants have no idea how they will be treated on any given day. Again, it's play into the hands of anyone seeking to smoke or migrants into the country undertake well also harming innocent people coming to this

country to US for protection. He's Erica's short history of Biden's asylent policy since last year.

exceptions are almost never applied at ports. There's been a few kind of alternative programs run by shelters or local governments where people with extreme medical vulnerabilities, for example, can be let in without an appointment, but we don't know whether the ban applies to them once they enter without that appointment, right, So it's like I said, inconsistently applied exceptions. If you enter between a port of entry, you're presumed

and eligible for asylum. Again, unless you meet some narrow exceptions, and what that means is you can still apply for other types of protection in the United States. So there's two principal types of protection. One it's called withholding a removal, which is like asylum but with a higher standard. And then the other is Convention against Torture, which you just have to prove it's more likely than not that your own government will torture you, which is more extreme than persecution.

But is it necessarily based on a protected ground. So the torture could be for any reason, but it's a high hurdle. But the most important thing is those two types of protection are not path to citizenship and they do not allow you to petition for your family. So, for example, if you get asylum in the US and then you want to ask for your life and children to join you, there is an avenue for that, and

all of you can eventually become citizens. Withholding a removal and Convention against Torture, you basically get a work from it. If conditions in your country change, they can deport you and you can never leave the United States and you can never reunify with your family, and you could never become a citizen.

you can do to support them. When the state works, it could happen.