Title 42, Pt 4: The Border Patrol

prevent non white people from moving to the USA. From there, it weaves its way through the Mexican Revolution and the First World Wars German 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 Led singing a song about Vindulu is basically in my country's secon national anthem, and why every four years France accepts black french Men onto its football team before it returns to vilifying them in other forms of discourse.

Migration to the United States is no different. Climate change in US imperiodism have destabilized in 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 board 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 aberrations 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 the 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, and 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 Cedro withdrawn that San Diego

Bay would fall to the north of the line. The border in Cucumber seems more arbitrary, a straight line in the desert that runs into a pile of rocks. Of course, long before the border divided San Asiedra fifty one, this was kumia Land, and despite the border, it still is. The name Tijuana derives from Tijuan, which means 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 Kumii 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, Bortak, 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. Sally the Moon, a few miles east to where that Bortac patrol guard shouted at people stepping too close in twenty twenty. The border wall is about waist 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 that 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 and 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.

relations with Mexico. The answer to your question is much more fundamental than whether they attend Houston schools. It seems to me, I don't want to see a whole if they're living here, I don't want to see a whole I think is six and eight year old kids being made one totally uneducated and made to feel that they're living with outside the law.

Now this cannot continue without the possibility arising with regard to that other country that we talked about off Cuba and what it is stirring up of the possibility of trouble below the border, and we could have a very hostile and strange neighbor on our border, rather than making

them or talking about putting up a fence. Why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they go on to go back, they can go back, and they can cross and open the border both ways. By understanding their problem.

Opaso sector and a Democratic Congressman. He lost his seat to be to Aro 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 announced 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 to eighty seven, a a measure that cut off state services like healthcare and education to undocumented people. Here's a clip of Wilson's reelection ad they.

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

don't know, forty people graduate or something. Most of them went down to Imperial Beach and they had a wall there there, and so that was the idea, is to fill the San Diego City area with as many agents and weapons and all this, and then that would push the traffic further up to the mountains, making it more difficult for them to cross, and some of them get injured, and we knew some of them would die, So it

was intentional. The death and the injuries, according to management, would deter future crosses, but of course that that's not the case.

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 are 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 borders 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 Jsse 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 administration had four 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 waved for border security, and this gave the Trump administration a way to justify the destruction of autumn and Kumi burial grounds, sawad 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 Taharanna 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 Artham 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, recording 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. This 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 Anastasio 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.

is likely the Border Patrol fitteens. 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 from 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 clansmen 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 Clans one would refrain from direct contact with it leagal aliens if any have found, he said, klansmen would not talk to them or contact them, but if any illegal crossings a scene, they're going to use CBE

radios to relay 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 train 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 Logales named Matthew Bowen was accused of knocking down a Guatemala man with his vehicle, then lying to a quart 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 boy patrols too, so on sector, this is part of the agency's culture, and therefore it says nothing about mister Bowen's mindset. Gents 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 off and then 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 excellent book and health 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 min at Man American Defense, forced their way into Raoul Flores Junior's home in Alavika, Arizona, bar 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. CI Vigilante's murdered Flores and his nine year old daughter, Bricennia, Flora's wife and Brisennia'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 KKAK 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 of America. For kids, often the children of immigrants living in border towns where industry has long since gone in a decent wage 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 Moraling Music in the Nation, young Explorers have to earn the right to their uniform by participate 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 US to criminal juvenile immigration of Fourth

Amendment law. While I was writing so checked out the San Diego sector page, which seems 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 chart

from the top of the border fence. Without figures from the CVP, it's hard to tell of participation in the Explorers has dropped as public awareness of family separation assault anw 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.

indoctrinating into. 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 you a little Border Patrol bulletproofess and put them on them and take pictures and put it on social.

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 would say like, especially with female agents, they calls it ers five percent, because there's never been more than five percent of women in the Border Patrol rates. 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 halassing 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 they're not criminals and their families just simply seeking asylum. So she at some point has to decide in her mind, is this what I got into? 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, and 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 stations 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. RI 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 exists

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

where I was recording last week in Santa Cidro. 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 midterms, you might remember some of the rhetoric thats 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.

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, spells it out with a reference to the Hebrew immigrant Aid Society, the Jewish nonprofit that resettles refugees in the

United States. Hiat liked to bring invadives to kill our people. I can't sit by on 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 coordinated and somehow Jewish led invasion an attempts to demographically restructure the United States. If you're ending where he got that idea from, he is America's favorite job seek at. Tucker Carlson on the caravan.

the migrants northward. In other words, the Mexican government a did 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 at Sania Sidro to open, many of them just jumped the fence. Some waved on during 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 wave 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 a groups in Tijuana and off its support or have a weeked.

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 a 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 was portraying these little infants as invaders. I 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, Tijuana anarchist kitchens, and mutual a groups around the region coming together to look after a group of people who'd 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 is desirable for people like him.

of that caravan was only just starting. In the months have followed journalists who'd covered the caravan, as well as those who offered assistant to caravan members, so they felt they'd 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 trucks soil 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 caravan when they crossed the border. Individuals in that database were often subjected to hours long screenings and in some cases had

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

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 journalists brook Ben Cowsey to describe her experience of increased border scrutiny in twenty eighteen.

day they're having or whatever. So in my case, I 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.

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 aged white woman. So I say this, and they bring over some guy and he goes, ma'am, can I help you? I'm like, yeah, what the fuck? You know, why are

you treating me this way? Why did any of this happen? And he goes, oh, yeah, I'm sorry. Your name's on a list summer you've been flagg And I'm like, so every time I've crossed, I've been flagged. He's like, yeah, and yeah, you've been. There's a flag on your passport or against your name and that's why. And I said, well, why is there a flag against my name? And he goes, I don't know, You're going to have to do a

Freedom of Information Act request or something. I don't even know if he knew I was a journalist.

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 where one mistake can be fatal. I know for 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. Dehydration, 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 Margalita and Paula Santosarthe 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 us when you are Medicano 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 camped 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 cross 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 SAR reception and corn nine to one one. By the time boor 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 cash 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 are now. Then we might never know. Not being able to follow stories is the sad part of this reporting. Sometimes knows people all have my phone number, but they might not any more have their phones or this scrap of paper are wroteed 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 Customers 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 from the Spanish 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 for the Clash and the Mansue 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 tracked 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 nonperforming 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, it'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 an unprecedented and uncontrollable scale. But what you 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 a difference. Now, 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 gomber and sant Asedra, 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 rector. They are the Asian Solidarity Collective, Alo Trollaro, the American Friends Service Committee, Border Kindness, Borderlands Relief Collective, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans and PREVENKASA pr E V E N C A s 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. It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.