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Like most of you, I wasn't having a great day on the twentieth of January of twenty twenty five. I wasn't about to watch the inauguration, so I went for a run in the mountains instead. I spent the next few weeks trying to focus on the things we could do, the things we had to do to get through four
years of fascism. Just a few miles away from my house, I set out for my run, and unbeknown to me, my friend Primrose was staring down from the top of a thirty foot steel monument to hate Donald Trump had built the last time he was president. To be ir accurate, it was one that had modified. There have been versions of the border wall in San Diego for decades.
They said, no, we have an option. We need to take you.
But you know, for me, I had to take a risk because I was scared to stay in Mexico. So they took us with under the bridge, I think the sewage. We were walking with our stomach like under the bridge to get to USA and Mexican borders. So they put ladder for us to help us. Those people when they saw American immigration came, they just removed the ladder and me I was on top. So I had yeah, I was staged. Then I had no choice and the King Balish was crying like calm, let's go, let's go.
At that time I knew nothing about it, but her daughter Kim had already jumped as a Biden press. He drew to a close but before Trump began signing executive orders with pens, he tossed into the crowd. She'd made it into the US. Her mum was in the US
as well. The wall is inside the border, but the people who had helped it get up to the top of the war had fled when border patrol arrived, taking their ladder with them, and so Primrose was left atop the wall, the literal and metaphorical final hurdle in her long and dangerous journey that had begun in Zimbabwe, who went through South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Negaragua, Honduras,
Guatemala and Mexico. But before we come down from the border wall, I want to take you back to the miss Soak River bank of Maragante. Last September, Yah Daddy, my fixer, and I had woken up at no godly hour, and so had the jungle birds. Along with half the population of the village, walked down to the riverbank, carrying the engines and fuel tanks to the Piraguas. A few minutes later, a chorus of two stroke engines and smoke fired up as the boats set off towards Bajo Jaquito.
I stood in the bow, still trying to master the use of the pole as we passed through the faster moving, shallower water. Daddy sat in the middle and laughed at me. Despite my best efforts, we arrived in one piece in Bajo Chiquito, and I launched myself from the bow into knee deep water on the rocky beach. In front of us stood hundreds of people, patiently waiting for the Piragueros to take them north and out of the jungle. Stretched like a snake all the way through town. The line
of migrants must have totaled one thousand people. I walked backwards away from the boats, the only foreigner not leaving look for people i'd met the day before. About halfway down the line stood Primrose and Kim, and I stopped while we chatted for a bit about what the boat was like, what they could expect next.
Yeah I'm going there. Yeah, yeah, I'm going.
To Do you have family?
No?
No, you just make your American life. No, it's okay.
I think I'm just trying. No, it's only me and I do it.
Despite this, they had found community on the journey. I can't describe how scary it must be for two women to set out on this journey alone. It takes an awful lot to embark on that journey and to be able to trust people when everyone is a potential threat. But if there's one thing I learned in a jungle, it sit in the hardest times and the hardest places. The only way forward is together. Primrose reminded me of this, telling me how complete strangers had helped her.
Very nice.
This, especially these Spanish people, they are very nice. I don't know into life was. If you need yop, you forgot them for your look. The other ones they might run away by the other ones, they just for They even give us tablets on the road, give us energy drinks, give my daughter a sweets for enage. They push us like, let's go, guys, let's go, let's go. You make it, and we really make it.
Yeah, that's really nice to hear. I asked Primrose a question I asked everyone there. What did she hope for when she got to America? What was her American dream? What do you hope for her in America? What do you want to do in America?
I want to go to school, then she can I see something in life. I don't wish my daughter to go big, to same or no, not at all. Yeah, it's really really.
I saw them a few days later last Blancas I've read chat with a group of little Venezuelan children playing a game where we'd throw bottletops into a broken half cinder block. We talked about the struggle they faced to pay for the bus north, and we didn't record anything that day, But as I was leaving for the evening, Kim asked me if I could buy her a drink.
I generally try not to splash my money around because I don't have enough money to help everyone, and I still have some scars from ridiculous concept of objectivity that would lead some editors not to commission a story from me if I gave the subject a gift. But this time I felt like buying her a drink, and I let her select the biggest bottle of cold soda she could find in the little store in the camp there. I told her and her mum to stay in touch and wrote my number on a piece of my notebook,
tore it out and gave it to them. Months later, Kim was holding the same scrap of paper, looking up her mum stuck on the border wall. A whole lot had changed since I last saw them. A few days after my scriptured podcast and the Daddy and Gap was released, the United States elected Donald Trump as his forty seventh president. It was a ship month all round that My phone, as it often does, lit up with messages from my daddy and friends asking me what this meant and if
Trump was going to close the border. I didn't really know how to answer those questions, because if as one thing we know about Trumps, he changed his mind every few weeks. As we got closer and closer to the day he was inaugurated, they got more and more concerned. Most of them hadn't made it out of southern Mexico. Many of them had told me that things there were even worse than the jungle. They'd all been robbed, some of them had been sexually assaulted, some of them kidnapped
and some of them killed. I'd heard about all of these things every day from September last year to January this year. In the middle of a run, or when I was having dinner meeting a friend for a coffee, my phone would ring, and I'd be confronted with terrible injustice, and I'd be totally powerless to set it right. As time went on, I heard from fewer and fewer of them. I assume their phones were stolen, but there are, of course more upsetting explanations as to why they might have
stopped contacting me. Noemi, the little girl who wanted to visit Minnie Mouse Video, called me once from Tapatula with a little tiny toy bear that I'd given her and that she kept with her on the whole journey. It may be happy to see them, and a silly little bear carved from soapstone that had traveled the lengths of South America with them. Every few weeks after I'd left, I'd get photos of the bear in a different country.
As a little Losito worked its way closer to Disneyland, some people who worked at Disneyland had reached out to off was suggestions about tickets other people had reached out, offering to pay. I was, despite the odds, hoping that one day I could help one little girl see her American dream come true. When we spoke, she was with her mum and they were trying to log onto CBP one hoping for an appointment, but it wouldn't work on
their old Android phones. I tried to find shelters with her liable internet that would take them in, and called friends and endio's almost every week, passing along questions or looking for resources. I spent hours calling, finding it hard to accept that the capacity for mutual aid was so overwhelmed that nobody had a safe space for little girl and her mom, and wondering if it still felt like a pepper Pig adventure or if even little indomitable Miami
was scared now. Even from where I was was a fast Internet and a weather friends across the Western hemisphere, I couldn't find the help people needed, and it made me increasingly angry and anxious the more I tried. It sucked, but there was still a chance, however slim, that one day I might get to see Miami meet Minnie Mouse. So I kept trying, and so did her mom. Then one day I got no response from her mum's WhatsApp when I messaged her, nobody picked up the phone when
I tried to ring. I still haven't had a response, but artically I'll keep trying. Even the last messages and photos are gone now after my words up updated. Like so many of the people who I shared my food with, whose little children held my hand in the darkness of the jungle, who I desperately wished and wish I could do more for, they're gone.
Now.
That's what strong borders means. It means brave little girls disappearing so a politician who knows nothing of their struggles can point to a statistic. I've listened to the interview I conducted with them so many times since last September. I still can't really work out her. Anyone with a heart could hear that and think they wanted to live in a world where that little girl wasn't safe. But that's what people voted for. I guess I don't think they did. Actually I can't think they did. I think
people liked them, and that's what they voted for. But nonetheless, here we are now, sitting in a country that didn't want to help the little girl who flexed he around muscles to show me how strong she was after climbing the mountain into the most dangerous land migration route in the Americas, and told me it was for her all a adventure. Her mother gave a different account.
I didn't want to cry because I didn't want her to see me crying. But sometimes I would explode because it's hard for your child to ask you for water, to ask you for food, and you don't have any to be in a place where you walk. You walk from five in the morning, it's five in the afternoon. You're walking, you don't know what to do, going through more than one hundred rivers and asking God not to rain and not wanting it to get worse. It rained, and the girl got a fever. She got a fever.
But well, God is good that we pray a lot. I say that we don't know God so much in the church from the process and the process that we are in, and we don't know we can be so strong until we go through that storm and we see that He protext us. He knows that He was always there watching over us, taking care of us at all times.
I don't want to dwell on this too long, because talking in public about grief is something I'm bad at. One of my friends died fighting in Ukraine this year. A colleague died just weeks before we'd planned a trip together. Some of my Burmese friends died fighting. But even as someone who talks to soldiers for a living, nothing really compares to the death toll inflicted by the US border regime.
The little village in England where I grew up, there are memorials in every town a village for the young people who died fighting in the World Wars. If we built those at the border, they'd soon be towering far above the wall that does so much of the killing. Things are as bad now as they've ever been. The wall construction in the San Diego sector that Trump administration has proposed will wave environmental and cultural protections and push
micro further into the desert. In the desert, further from help, further from water. More of them will die. Speak to migrants all the time, the ones who stayed in Mexico, even the ones who took the Venezuelan governments offers of flights home. As much as they ask about America, they also ask about each other. Do I know what happens to the Angolans who shared their food too generously? They say, No, I haven't heard from them.
What about the.
Venezuelan trans girl who braided their children's hair, Well, she's still braiding hair, but she hasn't made it to the US. Gradually, she did make it, and then she was immediately deported back to southern Mexico. How about Rose, they say, the Bolivian girl who came all on her own and founder found me along the trail, only to be separated from them. Again. I haven't heard from her in a year. Universally, they're
happy to hear about Kim and Primrose. They're glad to hear that someone made it, that somebody can make it. Because of the more than one hundred pages I tore out of my note book with my phone number, they are two of the three people who let me know they made it here. So let's hear from Primerose about what it looks like to make it here, how it feels to have the best outcome of anyone I met. Let's pick up at Las Blancas there now shattered migrant
reception center. We're a hundred language for weeks and months trying to get together the money to pay for a bus to the Panama Costa Lika border.
I think I spent seven days in Banama. Oh what's short with money? So I went into immigrash trying to ask them if you can they can help me to take a bus to Costa Rica, of which they say no, you have to pay your sixty dollars.
You're in your daughter which one India? So I pay that?
So I ask you people, man, the people I know they helped me with money saw Fromanama. We took it a bus from Banama to Costa Rica.
This is a very common story. People borrow money from a huge range of friends and relatives along the way they hope to get to the US, work hard, and be able to pay it back. The whole process takes every penny they've earned in their life and generates significant amounts of debt. In most cases, this has made worse by the fact that on arrival they will wait months, if not years, for work permit, and their immigration judge could stop the clock on this at any time for
any reason. Primros and Kim's case, Costaly can move them through its territory quickly, as they do with nearly all migrants. Next they arrived in Nicaragua.
Yeah, to Nicaragua. Then in Nicaragua, I think we walk from Costatica border to Nicaragua border. Then we walk again. I think it was it was walk from Yah to Nicaragua bus team. In US we just walk. Then we when we reached there, we paid again to wander Us. Then there's also place we walked from Honduras from nicarag got to wander Us by stemin Us. I think it just was the all day. Then from wander Us Guatemalam. Yeah, in Guatemala we spent it three days again because it
was tough Guatemala. People they really need asking for a lot of money. So my life was like asking people, asking people and do it get and do we reach Mexico.
Then exhausted and broke, she came made it to Mexico. Then you only began in Zimbabwe and took them from there to South Africa, then to Brazil and across the continent. Now they had just warn more country to go before they made it. But I say, where to find out this one country is the one that so many migrants don't make it out of.
Then in Mexico. My life was like in this because they were charging a lot of money. In In fact, when we reached Mexico, we reached Tapatola and not before ta Patula. I just forget the name. So they took us in the bush where we paid money. Again, when we paid money, they started teaching us. If we don't live gus, then they walk with us. It was two of midnight. They walk with us till they get a
transport to take us to Tappatola. So when I reached Tapachola, you know people, we were giving information to each other. So I was also following other people like from Cameroons and Venezuela. So when we reached Tabachela, we reached Tarpatola the tend of October twenty twenty four.
Tapatula in the south of Mexico. It's where thousands of migrants send up. The Mexican government at the time had a policy of trying to keep people there and began offering them free bus rides north. They had a CBP one appointment. But unlike places like Tijuana, where there have been migrants gathered for many decades, there are not as many services in Tapatula and the shelters and services that
exist there are overwhelmed by the demand. The volume of migrants and the relative absence of services leaves a space open for abuse. That's what happened to Primrose and Kimberly. They ended up paying someone who they thought could help them navigate the complicated and convoluted system of registration in Mexico, the CBP one app and then traveling north to the USA and ultimately being able to make their asylum claim. Finally, in the end, what they got was the opposite of help.
Then the agents judge US four thousand each, which is me four thousand, my daughter four thousand, of which I was I wasn't lift that man other people that we're paying. So I just talked to the agent. Then I said, okay, you please go down a little bit because I'm a single party. And then I don't have anyone to help me with that kind of money. Then he said, okay, three point five. So I started asking people become the
people I know, maybe they can help me. So I have a lady who helped me with the money, which is she gave me four thousand years. Then my mom sell my land. I was saving a land with which she saw which lays money. Then she saw even also stuff to get another man to complete seven thousand. So we asked someone to send it to America because in Mexico they don't do this money from Africa. So I found someone here in America to receive the man. So he sent it to me in Mexico. But when I
paid the man, the agent took me. He said that way I'm going to take you. So he sent the guys, which there were four Mexican guys. So they came to feature us. We were six seven. Yeah, I don't even know where they took us. So they took us to the to the bush which is Guajaradella. I can't even remember it. Gajadella, Yeah, I think so. I spent the day from October up to.
January in the background. Here you're here splashing. That's came playing in the pool. A little apartment complex where they were living in East La I just comment for migrants to share a flat with someone else. Didn't have much in the way of furniture. The last time I saw Primrose and Kim, it was by the Tuquesso River in Las Blancas. There the brown water was something to be
afraid of. Migrants died crossing the river every day, swept away by the fast moving water and relying only on strangers to hold them as the current tried to pull them in. A few times I walked out into that river. I felt the tug of the current on my boots. I wondered what it must be like higher up in the mountains. At six foot three. The river I crossed
never came above waist high. It's deeper higher up. But even then, reaching out my hand to carry someone's bag or grab a child's hand as they came from other direction and struggled to keep their toddlers and their few positions out the current, I get little jolts of fear when I stepped on a wet rock. His primrose talking about that part of her journey.
I was good, my daughter, she was strong, she was strong, but she was crying also, but she had what wounds all over their body? Even me, I was crying myself. I was like, I want to just put myself in the water, then I can just go both. The gain was tough, really really tough. The mountain, the stones, the river. It's not easy at all. It's not very I don't even recommended someone to say you use that and give no. And even myself I did know about it. I was
regretting myself. I was crying. I was like, God, I don't know my family, and my family they don't know where I am right now.
Back in Los Angeles, primers told me that she'd fallen in the river and two Venezuelan men had jumped in to pull her and came out total strangers on their own journey, had risked their lives to help a woman child who didn't know, with whom they couldn't even speak. The river kills people who drink it too. The concentration of human waste and human remains in the water makes it incredibly dangerous to drink, even for people dying of thirst.
I couldn't stop thinking of that river and how much it scared people, Feeling so grateful the Kimberley could to enjoy the water after all of that. Next time, I said, they could take the train down to San Diego and we could all go to the beach. Let's go back to Mexico. Now to Guadalajara, where many migrants told me that of all the things they had endured, including the jungle.
Things were the worst of all. Promoter's arrival in Mexico had not been great, and having paid one person, she was now being held by another group and asked for yet more money.
They were kidnipping me. They were asking for fifteen thousand dollars each. They said, you're not going to take you and I was crying. Kim, she was also crying. They are that people. They will get money paid. Leave I think from my group for the people they were kids napping. It was only me left and they came and I was crying depression.
I didn't know, but I tried.
I tried, you want to escape, run away? I failed down and my leg was something else. I didn't even go to hospital. My leg was swollen. And the way they would treat us it was paid. Especially when I came. The other one wanted touching me the whole board like I was like, please, if you want to do something, you can do it to me, and plus don't do it in front of my daughter because she was also crying disturbing. I didn't even go to hospital. I asked
them to go to hospital. The refuse, Yeah, James, I'm doing no. I'm sorry because.
Primrose understandably had trouble even recounting this story. It's not the sort of memory that's easy to share. But just when things seemed to be beyond repair and when it seemed like there was nothing to hope for, it was Kimberly who came through to help her mom.
Yeah, they no, so Kim Madish was like, uh, lending Spanish, so she was understanding some of the winds.
So she just tell this guy.
Also was like, why can't you leave this woman because she doesn't live money. Because those people they took my phone, they even break it in front of my eyes.
The fue I was leaving from Africa.
Kim Spanish was pretty good by the time I met them in Los Angeles this summer. We went out for dinner and I asked him what she'd like to eat. She said she wanted to try seafood and practice of Spanish. So we went to a Mexican seafood place, complete with cabin decord, taxidermy fish on the wall, and the waitress kindly helped Kim order in Spanish, patiently showing her different
menu items and smiling as Kim read them off. It was a happy moment for me and what I didn't think i'd ever be having when I moved here in the bush Era, But that part of southern California has always been a welcoming place for me. When I was in my twenties and racing bugs for are Living, I'd fly into Lax and often ended up spending the night at Union Station or Alvera Street before taking a train
to San Diego. I speak Spanish. I always felt like the people I met there were such a better reflection of la than the portrayal we see of it in the media. Now a decade and a half later, sitting in a Mexican restaurant where a lady from Nadiqe helped a little girl from Zimbabwe speak Spanish, it felt like a little glimpse of the way we're told things are here and the way they can be in working class communities.
A nation built by migrants, yes, on stolen land, but one that nonetheless welcome people who needed help and took the time to help them. Sadly, not everyone was helpful on Camen Primaries this journey, and when her captains realized she had no money to pay them, they eventually just decided to let her go.
Then I think on Januarist seven or fifth, I don't remember. Then they just really took us. Then they just done us. I don't even know. Then a star I saw an immigration immigration officer with the guy with the car. Then I stopped him. Then I translate to ask him to Then they said, okay, get inside the car. They took us to immigration, so we get a pass from there to another town. Because I was like shifting, shifting, shifting,
asking to I get to Joanna. But those guys before they told me like, wherever you go, even if you are here in Mexico, we put uh a tricker for you. So if you tell anyone, if we find you're going to kill you. So me, I was scared. Yeah, I was scared. So I didn't tell you. Even the immigration officer. Yeah, yeah, Do I get to tea Joanna? So I we get to join on the trendred of January. So I just asked the Mexicans people. Then there's a guy as I said, okay, I will try to help you, but you need to pay.
Then I said, I don't leave money. He said if you don't have maney, we can't help you. So I was like, oh, I only asking people asking every people to help me and the other people that were just opening me was I said, people, we look where I am with my daughter, I'm far. But my family, the other family, especially my my other family mem By, they don't even know where I am. So those guys from Tijuana, the guys, if you're not crossing today, you're not going
to cross cours. Look the president and you said he's going to shut down all the borders.
In between November and January, non stop roomors circulated in giant WhatsApp groups. Trump was closing the border, Biden was opening it. Most migrants didn't have the means to get to the southern border even if they tried. CVP one remained mostly useless, and people spent days, weeks, months refreshing it to no avail. Those who did get appointments would find them canceled once a new administration came into office.
Their reward for doing things in the so called right way to be left with no options in a country where they were anything but safe and far from home. Mostly my friends in the jungle have retained their incredibly good humor. Delithuel and friends video caught me once an hour on a hike. They started laughing at me sweating going uphill, and paused a conversation to shout encouragement for a while. A year after I left the jungle, I would still be more than happy to welcome these people
as my neighbors. But it seems unlikely I ever will border crossings that drop dramatically. They're not as the administration sometimes claims zero, but they are lower. People die crossing the borders still. Sometimes the volunteers you've heard in my last series have to hike miles into the desert and sift through sand and rocks to search their remains. Once nature scatism like leaves blowing around the canyons. Sometimes I'm there with them. Sometimes we all wouldn't cross it up mountains.
So don't have names on the map to mark the places where people's dreams died. Those people don't get a viral video or a story in the New York Times, because even at a time where people are more engaged than they ever have been in my lifetime in advocacy for migrants, there's still not much attention paid to the actual border that every single migrant has to cross Tomorrow. That's what we're going to talk about. Let's hear from Primrose about her. That same day, January twentieth, went for her.
Then they took us to the boat to the border, but we couldn't get in the gates while they were closed. Then they said no, we have an option, we need to take you. But you know, for me, I had to take it. It's because I was scared did to stay in Mexico. So they took us with under the bridge, I think the sewage. We were walking with our stomach like under the bridge to we get to USA and Mexican borders. So they put ladder for us to help us to but we paid them three fifty three fifty.
They judge I found the other people. They also we were fifteen years Yeah, then the up does to jump.
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