Alson media.
As we always do, we have included the sources for this podcast in the show notes. I've also included a link to Primrose's legal aid fundraiser of people would like.
To help out.
The week before you're hearing this, on a beautiful southern California winter morning, I met some friends in a parking lot near the border. We hopped into our trucks and drove along dirt roads so we reached a pull up. Once there, we threw on packs and hiked straight up of steep hillside. Even in late November, the south facing slope was hot. We're all sweating. By the time we reached the GPS location we've been given. It wasn't hard to spot a dark patch on the landscape where someone's
remains had returned to the earth. One friend had carried a heavy wooden cross up the mountain. We dug a hole in the rocky ground and then placed the white wooden cross in it. Silently, we filled the whole back up, stamped on the dirt until the cross stood straight up.
Then we decorated it with.
Marrow golds and seashells and dry flower petals, doing the best we could. One friend carefully picked the petals off the flowers, laid them on the arms of the cross. Another sprinkled poppy seeds into the ground. We stood in silence for a while that the construction of the secondary border wall didn't halt for a minute in silence, and then together we paid our respects to Graciela. Sonton Gormez
had an this. His last moments were spent looking at the same sky we were looking at, gazing down onto the two border walls that were built to separate us from her. She died in September in the heat wave the same month. A year before, I'd had to call nine one one for several migrants with heat stroke. I'd come across she died, a friend told me, with her clothes folded next to her, sheltering under a bush, looking from the place where erected the lonely little cross, that
was all we had left remember her. I could see four border patrol surveilled at Santanas. She was just a few hundred yards from the wall from the road, but it took weeks for anyone to find her.
Gracilasi and Gomez ls presently Gracilas vomits er lambs Gracila Gormez lands.
Obviously we arrived too late to help, but we arrived soon enough to ensure that least in death, she was afforded to dignity the world has denied.
Her in life.
Then I strapped half of fifty gallon barrels my backpack frame, where my friends carried slabs of water bottles.
As we walked.
A construction vehicle above us drilled holes into the earth for pylons that would hold a second thirty foot wall. On the sixty degree slope above the vehicle, a helicopter flew around, and then it flew back, and then he think we were at the date on water bottles and threw them minute barrel.
I tried to gain all.
Okay.
Doing this for years, we said goodbye to a fair share of people who he never got to say hello to and whose faces we never got to see. Last summer, I helped asserch to the remains of a migrant who had passed away in a canyon deep in the desert. Every time I do this fills me with a deep sadness, especially with all the friends from the jungle who I've lost touch with since then. It could be easy to look at everything I've laid out in this series and
feel hopeless. But I don't want you to. It could be easy to feel afraid as well, because now is the time that caring about other people is dangerous. It's possible currently for some folks to keep their heads down and try and keep themselves safe, or to confind their actions to are angry posting on social media. But our politics shouldn't be about anger. It should be about love. Now more than ever, it's important to remember that we don't act on our love and our solidarity with angry tweets.
We act on it by taking care of people. However many walls they build, however many masked men with guns they send. I don't believe it's within the power of the state to stop people caring about each other, and I hope that that care compels people to do something. In fact, I think seeing so much cruelty makes us all realize that it's up to us to care for one another. People have cared for Primrose and Kim in all kinds of ways since they came here, and today
we're going to hear from some of them. Friends bought Kimberly's school books where they were stuck in Mexico. Some other folks put on a burlesque performance here in San Diego to raise money for her lawyer. Hundreds of you reached into your pockets to help her pay for illegal living expenses when the state, both under Biden and under Trump, made her of Kimberly feel unwelcome.
You didn't.
I've carried my fair share of water into the desert under Biden administration as well. It was Biden's policies that left little Mioomi stuck in Mexico, not Trump's. It was Biden's policies to detain people in the open air and let them with no food or water or shelter.
And it was.
Everyday people like my friends and I who fed them and sheltered them and took care of them. We took donations and dived into dumpsters to grab tents, who worked hard every day to build shelters, cook food, and give away clothing so that people could feel welcome and safe.
Here.
Not a single elected official gave out a single sandwich, much less made one in the months that thousands of people were detained out doors in a cumbu and salusigital. But people from churches, goodwaras, latterday Saints people and quakers, as what as a whole lot of anarchists and crosspunks and just desert people with no particular politics did I'm not saying, mister Patus on the back, I don't think any of us really wanted to be mentioned at all.
Like many of us, some of my happiest memories were the days we fed strangers, then sat around fires, sharing stories and sometimes songs. Since then, I've been privileged to share the joys and struggles some of those people faced in their new lives here. I've attended their weddings. I've tried to help them understand that by action accents, but I've helped them come to terms with the fact that you simply can't get around large parts of this country
without a car. I'm saying this because I think it's important that whatever happens after this current administration, we can't ever go back to the way things were before. We can't let migrants be invisible in our communities. We can't let them keep dying at the border. Let's talk about what carrying looks like. In Primrose's case, this time last year, I just released my Darien gap podcast, and a few weeks after, I received a direct message about my Patreon newsletter.
It was from a guy called Matt. My name's Matt.
I'm just a normal person who listens to a lot of podcasts.
I didn't know him and he didn't know me, but he listened to the podcast I made.
I can still very vividly remember where I was when I listened to that, which was I was coming back from a dirt biking trip in Michigan, and so I had a seven hour drive and I was like, oh cool, here's a three hour podcast that.
I listened to, and then I started listening.
To it, and then I was just like I got into that mode where I was just like I couldn't not finish it, you know. I was like absolutely hooked and just needed needed to get all you needed to get all the way to the end, and was just really really moved by by the whole thing.
Like many Americans, until read to be late in by an administration, Met knew about immigration, but he hadn't really grappled with the fact that what secure borders means is killing innocent people in the jungle, in the desert and everywhere in between. That's how deterrence works. That's how it's supposed to work.
Like, I didn't realize that that was like intentional. And then hearing you know, hearing hearing yours, I was just sort of like, oh, right, Like just the fact that people would go to such a just such lengths of a danger on a journey just across a continent and knowing that once they get here they're not even welcome, Right, We're gonna intentionally put up this like kind of life or death obstacle.
Course, I kept.
Thinking about it, and the next day I was like, let me like see if you've done anything else on it, and I found a couple of your couple of your other your other episodes on it, and I was like, wow, this, this is this is wild. And that was you know you you were you're talking about the open air detention in the Hakumba area, and and I was like, this is crazy, Like this is just happening just right outside of San Diego.
I mean, it's just wild.
Matt felt like now that he knew this, he couldn't not do something about it, so he took some of his vacation time at work and came to southern California, The.
Thing that was crazy is seeing all the equipment, you know, the equipment if you can call that, left behind by the people traveling through these places where it's just like normal chose and just like cheap Walmart backpacks and just you know, the basic stuff that you would just like where to school.
Matt joined friends and mine in the mountains, carrying water and helping with some techi shoots we've been wondering about. He saw the wool, and he saw the damage he does. He saw the difficult terrain people have to cross just to get a chance to ask for help here, the ways they have to risk their lives even after they make it to the USA. He also got to experience the where the helping other people helps us.
As I was heading back home, I definitely had this feeling about like like way less despair getting together with people to just do something, to just do something useful to help people, even if it's just like in a tiny way, like even if somehow it doesn't help, but it's like it probably will. But importantly doing it with other people it made me feel a lot better. It made me not feel so like just everything is fucked, like the world is descending into fast, or when there's nothing.
I can do about it. It's like.
There are a lot of people who want to help doing stuff with them is like is good.
Soon after, like all of us, he saw the board it bringing its violence into cities across the United States.
I mean, like just masked federal agents, we assume, mostly refusing to identify themselves, just randomly picking people up. I mean, it's crazy and this is ah.
I mean, I literally am a loss for words.
I mean, it's just it's so the opposite of what America is all about, straight up like fascism. Like I just I never thought I would live through something like this. I always just thought that's the kind of thing that happens in other countries, you know.
I guess a lot of us thought that.
A lot of us probably thought this kind of state violence was confined to other places, and other times we wondered, perhaps absent mindly, what we might do in that places and times for years, as a historian and a reporter, have thought about them, read about them, visited them. Now I'm living in them.
It's always just sort of like, in the same way that you would think, what would happen if I was in this I don't know, movie like it's not real.
Just think like, oh what if I was Jason Bourne. Matt Knight stayed in touch.
One day he was in LA on business and I mentioned I've been helping Primrose Naver get the mass transit nightmare that is Los Angeles so she could get to her ICE appointment. He offered to stop buy it if you needed a ride anywhere. I connected them. He saw her place and he offered to help. I guess with furniture as well. Then it was time for him to fly home every day like I do. He had to
worry about someone he knew being snatched. The Florida settlement doesn't stop ICE from redetaining people, and in LA they seem to be detaining anyone they could any way they could. Kim had been afraid to go out now because she didn't want to go back to detention. So once again Matt decided he wanted to do something, and he asked if Kim and Primrose might like to come and stay with him on the East Coast. That's not an easy choice to make. No no need doesn't mean sharing a space.
It also means taking yourself out of a safe group and accepting that the states I have surn might fall on you.
Now, you know.
I talked it over with my wife and we were like, you know, both wanted to do this, and but you know, we had to acknowledge like it might mean that like these assholes and masks show up at our house, like where our kids are and are like gonna haul away just this family. That might happen in like right right over there. I mean, I don't like it, but I.
Just I don't know.
I've just I feel like you gotta do just gotta do something, you know. The end, he says, it wasn't a hot decision to make.
I mean, it was a lot easier because my wife was actually just like one hundred percent let's do it.
And I was like, well, hold on a.
Second, we should at least think through the outcome.
She's like, I don't care whatever, just do it.
Like a lot of people, Matt had always done things to help people, but nothing like this, nothing that directly put him in between someone who needed to be kept safe and the people who.
Didn't want them to be safe. Yeah. I mean, nothing is dangerous. I mean.
Charity stuff, but you know, sometimes with time, but usually just like giving money to people to you know, who need it or whatever. But you know, this is definitely the most like direct involvement to help someone who needs it. Certainly is the first time that I've exposed my family to any thing like this.
So one day, this autumn promotion and Kimberdy said goodbye to Los Angeles, got on a plane, flew to the East coast.
I thought I was waiting at the right spot, but they let him out at a different so they actually walked past me in the airport. I didn't even see it, but I eventually figured it out. Luckily, the airport is not that big, and so I could just sort of walk, just walk all the baggage claim Mary and I eventually found them.
Then they went for sushi, then for ice cream, a perfect suburban stripmall American evening, the sort of evening people cross jungles and deserts be able to enjoy, the sort of evening the hundreds of people I met in the jungle will never be able to enjoy. Of course, it's hard to sit in a cold stone and talk about the things people enjoyed to come here. MAT's is sometimes it's still difficult to even comprehend what his new friends had been through.
It's hard to answer, like you're asking me a very good question about like, well, what was it like? And it's like the difference the distance between like our shared experience is so vast it still often almost doesn't seem real.
I've had that same thought. It's hard to hear stories from migrants and really think of them as human ex experiences, not just stories. That's why I go into the mountains and the desert. That's why I spent a decade asking Gettus to send me to this daddy in. I didn't think I could understand migrants journeys if I hadn't experienced a little part of them. And I don't think we could write about migrants or not write about what they go through to get to a strip mall sushi place.
Of course, Primrose isn't done with her interaction with immigration authorities yet. They've had visits from ICE in her new home, but not from enforcement removal operations.
I mean, like they know where she lives. We told them where she lives, so like she lives in my house, so you know, yeah they might. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I guess I'm.
Like not as afraid of that. I have to say that the ICE people in seem just like a bunch of cheery folks. Like it's seems pretty different than I mean, like I met many of them, yeah, part of this process, and they were not the like you know, play carriers and guns guys. They're just like the you know, they work in the office and decide whether you get to move here or not. You know, yeah, yeah, and they were like very friendly and downright helpful.
Promos are settling in at Matt's place now, but it's Matt explained, the struggle isn't over yet.
Now, Like our energy is more on how do we help her make her case because she has an asylum case that you know, she needs to win. And it's you know, I'm not a lawyer, but wow, sounds like what asylum is for literally running from a hostile government that she was protesting and was going to jail and torture her. Like what what is asylum for? If not for that?
Of course, interacting with the asylum system has shown that some of its absurdities, like the work permit clock for our bus rides to riverside, the endless changing regulation. So one has to navigate or trying to survive without the ability to legally work.
In what way can you do this legally without some you know group helping you, without like just somebody saying, fine, I will take you and pay for your living expenses. What is the legal way to like seek asylum. You come here, they put you in jail. You stay in jail, which is fucking jail. Yeah, they let you out of jail. Good, hooray, we're out of jail, and now you're homeless. Yeah, you have no possessions and no ability to legally work. At least let them work. I mean, come on, just let
them get a legal job. That's just like the sort of bureaucracy version of the forcing people across the desert.
It's like, well, okay, you won't die in the desert in this one.
In this one, you will die or you will suffer under homelessness.
More deterrence.
You know, everyone always says, oh, what I support an immigration just got to be legal, you gotta do it the right way. But they have no idea what they're talking about, Like, what is the right way. I believe everyone who says that has no idea what the right.
Way is.
Changing that making a law's line up with what anyone would see is basic decency isn't coming anytime soon. In the meantime, they have to navigate the asylum system. In as many contradictions, Primer has never got any follow up care for her leg injury. The only way she could access care in her new home was once again totally impractical for someone without a car, just another example of how the system says peep it up to suffer and fail.
There's no way to get her to the doctor. Well, okay, there is a way a way. Technically we could drive like an hour and twenty minutes way out to this place that like as a thing with the ice that they will say like, well that's your approved like medical provider, Like, I'm not gonna drive, just do some minor thing. Yeah, So we pay out a pocket So we go to a doctor and we go here's the problem we have.
We don't have insurance.
Let's get this done for as little money as possible, because in the United States, if you don't have insurance.
It is going to costume. Yeah, it loves and mercifully. My wife and I both know a number of doctors that we can sort of run ideas by and if we didn't have that, like, I don't know what we would do. It would not be good. I mean, well I know what we do. We would drive an hour and twenty minutes to the place and we would just be like, okay, doctor help.
But like, because you know, we have connections and we are also willing to pay a little bit out of pocket.
She needed to get some medicine. Medicine is super expensive. Yeah, so you go to.
The CBS and you're like, well, you know, oh, we don't have your insurance on file, and we're like, I know, but how much is this going to really cost? And dude, drugs are so expensive? Like it's just.
What are what are those people supposed to do?
It's brokensistent and it's not when we can really rely on goverment to change whoever is in office.
The Democrats don't have a great answer for this either. I wish they did. I mean I will still vote for them because they're at least less bad. You know, what are the choices do you have? It's like, if there was a better party, I would be that one that I mean, if they had a chance of winning, right, yeah, yeah, no other party has a chance of winning so yeah, man, I'm a Democrat, and I will help the Democrats try to win elections. They push it in the direction that
it needs to go. But the Democrats are part of the problem. I mean, like they're not radically changing policies that would change this thing we've been talking about for the last hour.
When I first moved to the US, jeoj W. Bush as president. Soon after I got har Obama was elective and it was Thanksgiving. I didn't know much about Thanksgiving, and I didn't have much time history that overlooks set like colonialism anyway. But the day before where it's riding my bike down the coast and I ran into some folks who were also riding their bikes. They asked what plans I had for the next day, and I told them I was just going to ride my bike all
day and that's what I like to do. They, having just met me, invited me into their home and the next day they fed me and we talked for hours and became friends. A decade and a half later, on the night before Thanksgiving, my friends cooked as many beans as they could fit in their giant pot that we boiled above a propane burn and made from half a beer cake and the cold of the desert. Some Kurdish guys helped us ladle out scoops of hot stew for
hundreds of people. I still don't go in for set like colonism very much, but I felt thankful to be in a position where I could welcome people now. That same year, on Christmas Eve, I was sitting on the tailgate of a pickup in the desert, kicking my feet so my toes wouldn't burn with cold. I spent the entire day building shelters for people out in the desert left therefore up to a week by the Bide administration.
We'd handed out all off food again. But some folks who've been taking care of their kids or trying to find a warm place how the desert went to sleep had missed out on eating. So I'd find a few boxes of htrs, which are kind of like a worse but vegan version of MREs, and I took them from the truck and went over to the people who had missed dinner. They heated them up somehow on a piece of scrap metal over the fire. I can't really remember
them thinking it was really janky. I struggled to describe how special it felt for me to be able to share a little of the welcome I received with other people like Matt. I feel more hopeful knowing that not only are other people just as upset as I am, but that alongside those other people, I can do things that I wouldn't have thought possible if I hadn't seen them with my own eyes, had done them with my own hands. From Obama to today, it's been up to
us to welcome migrants. Obama set records for deportation, Biden beat them, albeit including Title forty two removals, and Trump will probably beat both this year. In the meantime, it's upt to regular people to help one another. That shouldn't make us feel hopeless. It should make us feel strong. Matt's doing something remarkable, but I don't think he was in a very remarkable situation before. He was just a person lucky enough to have some spare time and some
space to look after someone. But there are millions of people like that in this country. There are millions of people who are mad right now. The anger alone is not going to help us take care of people. That's what the priority should be right now. I don't want to paint Matt as the only person who helped Primrose, because hundreds of people helped Primrose from the Mberllane, the Jungles of Panama, and her fellow migrants while she crossed Daddy and Gap. People across a continent took their time
and their resources to help a stranger. I've heard of this from countless migrants as well. Some of them rode the train from southern Mexico up to the border, and people threw them food and warm jumpers to total strangers who they'd never met, who they'd never even get a chance to see. Across thousands of miles. When states ignored their suffering, the hundreds of migrants I have talked to found food, shelter, and solidarity from ordinary people. And those people in their own way benefited too.
It was enlightening to me that a I wasn't it wasn't just me, Like, it's not just oh I for some reason, I'm the only one who's like really upset by all this. You know, there are other folks who who are like this, but also just like a lot of other people are absolutely willing to take risks, be generous with their time and money, Like there's a lot of them. There's a lot of people who like want to help, and that kind of community aspect of it. It was a surprise to me that the doing it
with other people was so powerful. Like I thought it was just about the doing the actual act of helping people somehow, but doing it with other people was just surprisingly good. Made me feel much more optimistic about our ability to get through this collectively.
I asked Matt what he wanted people to know about his experience.
Well, I mean, I guess what I would like people to know is it's not as hard as you might think to help folks like primos, Like it sounds insurmountable, like oh no, I'm exposed to all this risk and danger and legal hassle or whatever.
But it's like it's not that complicated.
It's like they fill out a forum and it just says like, oh, now I live here, and then once.
Prove it, then they live there.
The hot pot is finding someone, especially now that migrants are more worried than ever to be out in the community. Any database would be a risk to them. But maybe that's not a problem that someone can solve.
It's kind of like an information sharing problem because like these folks are all across the United States, and the people who could host them are similarly.
All across the United States. But you don't have to take someone into your home. There are hundreds of things you can do wherever you are. You can feed people who are hungry, pick up someone's kids from school, or take their dogs for a walk, fix someone's car so it doesn't get towed or ticketed, or drive someone to a doctor's appointment. Creating safe communities for migrants is not
a distinct act from creating safe communities for everyone. I've never been a big political theory reader, but I think I've learned everything I need to know about politics in refugee camps and the deserts and mountains and jungles that migrants traverse to get to this country. In Panama, i met with a priest who houses migrants. In California, I've helped Seeks and Quaker friends hand out warm food in the cold. We can come from a broad range of
perspectives and still get to the same place. When someone needs help, you help them. And if we all do that, then when we need help, someone will help us. You don't have to wait four years to start You can do it right now. While there are only some things we can do in the face of a government that doesn't want to help people like Primrose, there is an awful lot that we can do. For all the people who didn't make it to the USA from the jungle.
We can help the people who did. We can also take this principle and make it a cornerstone of all our politics. The more people come to know migrants, the more they will see how broken our system is. The more people who see that, the more people will demand change.
And I hope that they won't stop until we get a system that doesn't look at little children who aren't safe and say we don't want to help you, until we get a system that doesn't make them walk across jungles and through deserts before they even get a chance to ask for help. Before I go, I thought I would play a part of the interview I did with Senor last year. I spoke to his son on Monday and he said his dad's still doing well.
Truly, the migrants on this route are not here because they want to be. They're here because the economy and their country this is terrible or something. Everything is going badly on their countries. How can we mistreat them knowing that we won't, not us never. This is a belief that we have. We are all children of God. God made the world and humanity, and we are not that different. We are all brothers.
I want to leave the that's word today to Premieres, because really is the story about her and kid and the incredible tenacity encourage they show to get here.
Even if I say again me and myself again say thank you. I don't even know how to say thank you, but I'm just God knows. God, please blease those people put ins on me and Kim. I thought maybe I'm alone, but I realize I'm not alone here if also people who have me.
You guys, will helped me so much.
I never even get helped even in my country the way I get helped in America.
And I'm I'm really really glad. I'm very glad for those people who helped me.
I have especially since when I was even in when I was in Mexico. In my prayers, I just say, God, just blame those people who putings on me. You make me feel better, You put smile in my face and even came when you came here. I wasn't even heavy clothes to way nothing. They just only the clothes they gave us in detention. When they tetainers that the clothes I was leaving, I was when I want to wash it was a T shirt jacket.
I just removed the top, then I washed.
The the inside the T shirt when it's dry.
Then I we bother and putting you.
And were like, but for now, I'm really really appreciated a lot. I really appreciate a lot because my life is like changing now.
So yeah, and it's like you were saying, things Kim.
Will have will be so different from the chances you had. Right.
She can she speaks English, she speaks Spanish, she can go to school here.
Yeah.
Does that make you happy when you think about?
Yeah? Maybe even if I even told you, Kim, I was asking you one day, I said, Kim, what if I die today? She wasn't mentioning your name, said I would just ask him maybe I can just go to school?
Yeah, yeah, wish.
Also she was like, Mammy, I want to write to my book when I will stuty high school. I need to write my total of my life because we have been through a lot, but now we are happy. I don't know unt to lie with your support. Guys, I'm really appreciated. Yeah, because if you go to school, I'm happy.
I know she. I want you to heave a better life.
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