All the media.
It's me James, and before we listen to this episode today, I just did want to make you aware that I conducted these interviews in French and Spanish, mostly Spanish, and then transcribed and translated them. So what you're hearing is a translated interview that's being edited for brevity and content.
I hope you enjoyed the episode, just you.
Finding yourself there and seeing how the environment looks like you feel like you should give up. I cried it grace of work for you to actually stand by and say no, I'll keep on struggling. A lot of people who give up, a lot of someone dies. Let it die. People who were crying. Yeah, yes, we let people swear crying. They didn't know how they could continue. It's not an easy situation. It's not really an easy situation. Actually, it's just the grace of God for us surviving, because I
can't say it's by my strength. It's actually the grace of God. Because what we actually went through, we met people living collapsed. We had to help them. You meet your body, you give a lifting hand. It's not really an easy thing. It's not something that if we are fine tomorrow can advise any of our family members to go through, because it's so that it's risky if your family member is in there and it's not out. It takes the grace of God for you to even lie
on your bed and close all your eyes either. Once I survived, by the grace of God, I almost drowned. In fact, I was drowning.
By the grace of God.
I was rescued.
Yes, some guys that rescued me. I was already drowned. I was gone. I was gone.
I was drinking water.
Very readily all throughout the journey. North Margarets have little choice but to rely on one another and the solidarity of strangers. I heard dozens of stories that you've just heard in my time in the Daddy End. Total strangers who save each other's lives risk their own in the process. For vers, it could only be crossed to people from three different continents joined arms to form a human chain the children and smaller people could hold on to to
avoid being swept downstream. Not everyone can help. Just surviving the Dalian takes all of what many people have, But for the people who are in a position to even in desperate times, there's mutual support among the migrants.
Very few people who are ever will help you. They're very few people. Only people who are time can actually help. That people will pass you by, and that people if you have lost your strength, it's not easy for another person to actually break though. We can really appreciate those who help, because having your strength is another You must help yourself before you can help another person, right, so if you can really have their strength, it will be
difficult for you need to help another. So we don't really condemn them, but at least we are praying where we are bleeding on our brothers worst still behind, that if they meet people, if they have the ability to help, this should do so. Of course, it's not really uneasy something give.
Sometimes reporting on these places compete them as bleak, unwelcoming or just miserable and certainly very sad. Things happen in the jungle and in the camps, in human things, But just like war or a natural disaster, sometimes the horrible circumstances of the migration trail bring out the best in people. As I've said before in this series, I'm comfortable in the refugee camps at least in part because people there
are looking out for one another. Kids don't stop playing the moment they become refugees, not an adults stop laughing. In fact, these things become even more important that how we keep our humanity in a system that's inherently dehumanizing. And people don't stop organizing or caring about one another either. It's not just the migrants, of course. One of the families who've been stuck in Baho Jigito for almost a month was given some money by a local Sender Front
member to take a bus. In Mexico, those who don't have enough money to take buses will hop on freight trains and as they speed through towns and rail yards at night, local people will throw plastic bags of food, water, and clothing to them. In Panama City, I visited a Jesuit run shelter for migrants called Fate.
Well Numbers. Cordniho is Coordina or the Promotion Social Accompanimento.
Panama.
Alberto went down a Darien recently, and we know from firsthand experience that the difficulty they have is moving. So some don't go through the stations, but they stay, so they appear here in the city, and so they arrive here, and some decide to stay and forego all the difficulty of moving forward.
Despite having been set up as a refuge recent changes to Panamanian law had made that work difficult.
We had to start that service because the state literally prohibited us as agencies from providing a shelter, and under the premise that if we gave them shelter without them asking for it, they could consider us as human traffickers. So what we do now is we give them food and if they decide to stay well, we help them with certain processes that we can call humanitarian aid for sustainability.
I've seen a wide variety of faith based aid in my time at the border. Much of it has been fantastic, but with more than a decade of refugee camps from resource pot settings, I've also learned to be a bit wary of faith based charity. But something Elias said early in our talk gave me a great deal of respect for him. It's not justin he said it, but he took the time to address his comments to me as a journalist because he saw this as a problem in part created by the media. Ford it worth. I think
he's right. It's something that as we try and help my on a difficult journey. We must always keep in mind he might come from a very different background than my mutual aid group, but we do seem to share the same belief in solidarity with the migrants.
There's a fortunate.
Unfortunately much of the media narrative.
What they do is they victimize and ridicule people in family groups and turn them into pariahs and beggars. Then that is insulting to the dignity of the person. So the way they portray migration is shameful in some cases, and this is very difficult. Well for this, yes, I think that's very important.
After this, I figured I address the issue head on. I'm asking about the many churches in Christians I see preaching hate against people coming to the southern border of the US.
There is a sector in the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church that opposes it and is more closely linked, and they are in fact they are they're benefactors of Trump's campaign. So this one and this one are there, well, well, those are like groups that are rejecting, let's say, the basic principle of the church, which is that we must
welcome migrants and refugees. So they fundamentally reject it. So they invent all these narratives that Haitians practice voodoo and they eat pets and this and that or that and it's shameful mean, or like the Venezuelans, that the majority of them are from Triande Aragua gang or that they come from areas that are what you call problematic or chauvannista, and that.
They are infuriating or that or that.
All the same narrative that was created when when the Maritos left Cuba. And it's not that the Cuban government is sending all the prisoners on the Mariel boats to.
Invade the un United States. It's the same narrative.
Then they asked what he thought of the government's plans to close the day Enda if they could even do that.
People ask me, do you think the Darian gap is going to close and that migration is going to disappear? And I say, ask the Mexicans and the North Americans if the Sonara Desert has stopped being a corridor for people after Trump, Because there was a time when all the media was focused on the migration that passed through the Sonara and everything continues to happen, But then it became invisible and ceased to exist for them. But people continue to pass through and people continue to die. So
as you say this, this is going to continue. Maybe not a half a million people, but the flow is going to continue.
It's going to continue.
And then the question we should ask ourselves is what are we going to do or how are we going to accompany this flow? How are we going to accompanies these lives? And in what way can let these people's lives impact us?
But like so many of us who work along the board, he says, he's constantly fighting. It's negative messaging that encourages people not to follow the natural impulse to help and take care of one another.
So it's not a question of how I always say, and sometimes they tell me, oh that you always speak so badly of Panama, But it's not speaking badly of Panama. I love my country and I feel that we in general, the Panamanian communities are very welcoming and very affectionate with the migrants. The problem is the narrative that is created and then it generates to stimuli that end up with
a situation where are not seen so positively. And consequently, last week we had a meeting perhaps on national reality, and we touched on the subject of immigrants, and the first reaction was, no, it's not the state that pays the fare of the migrants.
It's not that. I mean, they pay their own fare.
After a week of my interview requests being declined by NGOs and government offices, I found my talk with Father Alias refreshing. It's nice to know that you're not the only one who sees the system as it is, which is fundamentally flawed and entirely propped up by misinformation, hatred and ignorance. But I don't want to get bogged down on that. Father Alias told me that when he sees migrants, he sees God in them, and that he experiences his
faith by helping others. My early experienced religion came in high school from a priest who was a teacher who'd been part of the anti apartheid movement in South Africa. I'm not a religious person in myself, but I can understand how seeing God and other people is not that far from my own politics. Lifit seeing God and know the people that in pels people stand up against apartheid or to dedicate their lives to helping migrants. Then I
respect that. So after we come back, I want to try and answer the question that pythea Alias ask, what can you do?
Ran into them.
After getting back from the Dad End and hearing the migrants share their struggles as they waited in Mexico for an outlest designed to lay and discourage them, I really struggled to come to terms with everything I'd seen and was hearing. A bid to plenty of dangerous places, and
seen war, state violence, and terrorism. I know the tragedy of death and violence, but the slow and deliberate suffering inflicted on migrants, for people who lied to us every day on television, is particularly hard to bear for me. As I mentioned at the start of this series, I think the grim reality of our migration system. On my first day in Barjiguito, little girl's head hanging limply from
a makeshift stretcher a strangers carried her into town. It's also cruel, so deliberate, and so unnecessary, and it felt so disempowering. But that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. It doesn't mean there's nothing I can do.
All right, Basically, what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna go this way. I mean, we're gonna start. We're gona go down into this well, We're gonna go that way and see where the light break is on the mid of the hill in between those hills running cut up. I'm up in that area.
That's James card Era of Border Kindness, sitting at the roof of a group of five of us set out on a water drop in the mountains east of the Cumber. It's an area called Valley of the Moon, where boulders the size of trucks stack up against each other, where people have been crossing the border for decades. This is a remote area and not unlike the daddy En. Much of it is nearly impossible to access in a car.
To get water out here, we have to walk. And if you run out of water or injure yourself, you can't walk out of here. It's possible you'll die, just like the migotes do in the jungle. People get robbed here, just like in the dad Enn And if it wasn't for the five of us with our backpacks full of water, people could die of first here just like they do in the jungle. I thought I was packing water bottles into my frame pack. I thought about little kids I've
met in Baho Chiquito. This isn't the place for children either, but over the last eighteen months, I've met hundreds of them out here. I've given them my jackets and hats, warmed up milk for babies in my camping stove, and even wrapped a little girl up in a milar blanket
with me to warm her up last year. Just like the Dadienne, the suffering here is out of sight and out of mind for most Americans, and in a year where we're constantly being told democracies under threat, I think a bear is mentioning that migrants are treated as humans without rights even when they're inside this country, and that their lives are seen as dispensable so long as whoever is in office can look quote tough on migration and
make TV pundits and big money donuts happy. There weren't any TV pundits or big money dons on our water drop a few of us everyday people. Some people come out here because their family members across the desert. Some come out because everyone who crosses a desert is part of our family. Like Bonnio said, in all humans are brothers, and none of us want our brothers or sisters to die in their mountains, whatever their passport might say. And so nearly every weekend, people all along the border load
up heavy bags for supplies. On this drop, each of us filled our packs with water, cans of tuna, pineapple soup, some warm clothing, and in this case an audio.
Recorder recording recording in progress.
Of course, just gave me an opportunity to discuss my life's calling. Ensuring the correct fit of backpack harness systems.
Yeah, you can release those, Yeah, it.
Just doesn't wrap the cantrap.
You either haven't drum the weight out or like, please have adjustable frames so you can make them fit with those days.
Bad for that. With everyone suitably adjusted and ergonomically optimized, we twisted on the audio record as I'd attached the straps of our packs and set off.
I just feel bad for you.
What are.
From the edge of the dirt road we took our first steps into the desert.
The first part is gonna be a little slippery. You eat shit, It's okay, and don't be embarrassed. It happens.
This part of the border isn't that far from a Cumba where this time last year James and I spent a freezing night trying to keep people alive, running our camping stoves on full blast, giving away our own jackets who needed them more than us. At that time, I just returned from a trip to North and East Syria, which was stressful in its own way, and seeing both what people are leaving and how we treat them when
they arrive here really piss me off. A year later, with bags full of water, JMS and I spoke about things and how they got so much worse in the last two years, but press coverage and more importantly, donations have been way lower. It's same story up and down the border, record deaths, newer and harder migration routes, different migration patterns, and the people who cried outside ice detention centers in Trump's first term cheering for more walls and
bigger DHS budgets. Meanwhile, unlike the Trump era, we don't have the support of thousands of liberal people in California's big cities. After the Democrats cynically use migrant suffering in their twenty twenty campaign, they abandoned them upon acquiring power, and their supporters have mostly followed them, so that left five of us this particular morning to load up bags
and do the life saving work of dropping water. On top of all the state violence, there's been more and more interference with the water drops, and as we got further into our route, we made the increasingly calmon discovery that someone had taken it upon themselves to destroy our supplies. O smn of ice.
See that's probably.
Slash ye sorry by the person's making a smirnoff ice.
Yeah he's wrong. Yeah, they all lunched motherfuckers.
I mean, I'm assuming it's a person who brought the smirnoff ice because it seems like a smirnofvi's activity feed fella. Yeah, I don't see a VP agent rolling threw with the smirnoff Iyes.
This isn't unique to border kindness. Someone has been shooting supplies left by Borderlands Relief Collective half an hour west of here recently, up and down the border. The combination of total liberal inattention and xenophobic right wing hate whipped up by streamers who I won't name and pseudo journalistic grifters who I will name, like Bill Maluganlugan, of course, was previously famous for claiming that the cop had a tampon dropped in his coffee. In twenty twenty. Spoiler alert
if you're not familiar, this wasn't true. Belugan now works as a quote unquite border reporter for Fox.
Danny, Good morning to you. We are in Santa Siegro, a part of San Diego, right now, where hundreds of illegal immigrants have just been massed street released from border patrol custody. This bus you see right here is apparently an NGO or volunteer organization bus. They've all just gotten off a border patrol bus. Two of them actually, they're now waiting to board this bus. I've talked to several of them from Peru, from India, from Colombia. The group
from Peru told me they are here to work. They are going to Atlanta and Minneapolis to see if we can talk to some of them real quick. Old espanon the so Ecuadora. Don't us in New York going to New York. They're don the so On, They're on the so Costa Rica. Don't they have us in Los Atlanta.
New Jersey?
Don't the New Jersey, New Jersey. Don't they've us in Chicago? Chicago, Colombia, Columbia, Kerebaja, no, no I see they yet they say they want asylum, they don't want to work, they've done their son. Well, where are you from?
Sag Sanag?
I think Senegal? From Senegal? We saw a lot of Senegalese in Lukeville, Arizona. Where in the US do you want to go to? What city?
Francis France? Frosse France, France speak France.
Oh he speaks French. I obviously do not speak French.
The Loogan's lack of language competency isn't the only issue here. It's a holy ecosystem of media built up of hyuristically filming migrants without giving them a chance to humanize themselves. And it's not just a right wing issue.
This week, each day has been marked by new daily records of migrants, both crossing the southern border and landing in custody. The federal government is struggling to keep up. Three Homeland security official say Customs and Border Protection is holding about twenty seven thousand migrants and processing facilities as of yesterday. President Biden spoke with Mexico's president about the issue earlier today, and NBC News Homeland Security corresponding, Julie
joins me now to dig into this trend. So Julia, first, just give us some perspective here. How is Customs and Border Protection operating right now and what are your sources saying about this historic rise in migrants at the border.
Well, in some ways, there's actually a small victory here, is in clay when you look at the fact that CBP is seeing a record number of migrants, that they've been at a record high now for three days in a row. They broke the record of twelve thousand, maintained that and there are now almost twenty seven thousand migrants in CBP custody. When we got to just about twenty thousand and twenty nineteen under the Trump administration, there were migrants who were there for weeks and couldn't lie down
to sleep because they were so overcrowded. Now, because of the technology, they're actually able to not even hold people past seventy two hours and very quickly release them. But the tragedy comes after that. There are a lot of migrants who are being released on the streets without being taken to nonprofits, and some of them don't exactly know where they're supposed to go, even though CBP does try
to coordinate with the cities where they are released. That's definitely happening in the Tucson, Arizona area and Eagle Pass, Texas. Even though they are scrambling as fast as they can to release migrants, that are still thousands who remain in the field, a lot of them crowded under a bridge an Eagle Pass, just waiting for CBP to take them in. The reason a lot of people can give you different reasons. One, perhaps Mexico is interdicting as many migrants as they were
earlier in the year. They're now lower on funds because of these record highs. Another reason, sometimes migrants will say that they're worried about a future Republican administration or a future Trump administration that might be harder ANDed, so they think now is the time to come.
Two minutes into this report and we haven't actually heard from a single migrant. All we hear is numbers. We also haven't heard about door detention, which is the time this was released with at its peak. Again, it's just numbers and CBP statements.
I should also.
Point out that lots of people are held for more than seventy two hours or three days. The Department of Homeland Security office who inspected general report published in November twenty twenty three, month before the new segment that you just heard, said that fifty six percent of people were held for longer than that, for some people being held for more than a month. This information is publicly available and even had a press release. I found it very quickly,
and they're reported on at the time. But NBC chowse not to seeing migrants as a quote homeland security issue, not as people. It's fundamentally the problem, and the way we fix that is showing up as people to help. Despite the massive media focus on the border in the last year, I very rarely see other journalists actually at the border.
To give him credit.
Malgan does sometimes show up, but he doesn't stay long and he doesn't really have the capacity to interview migrants, even if you wanted to. The border is vast and mostly empty. It's a place I've come to know and come to love, and my time dropping water and recreating
and doing other mutilaid projects out here. Now they have a better understanding of the journeys people go through to get here, even more determined to make this small part of their trip less dangerous, and besides, I get to see cool rocks.
Oh say, mister potato here like he's dying off. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay okay.
No, I see that. Well, now you say it like that.
It looked very yet the eyes are real close to each other. Yeah, it's a very melting potato.
Among the cool rocks.
Last weekend I found a mini mouse doll. It reminded me of Miami, the little girl i'd met him Baio. I give my number to hundreds of people before leaving Panama and heard from dozens, but up until that I hadn't heard from Miami and her mum. I heard of people being kidnapped, robbed, raped, and ransomed in Mexico. Some of them have been caught by authorities and pushed back to Chiapas, and others have been unable to leave Tapatula
after having all their money stolen. I wanted which if any of these fates had before been Miami, and if she was still having a pepper pig adventure. Sadly between where I met her where I found a mini male, There's nothing else I can do. They're here in the mountains outside San Diego, where the wind blows so strong sometimes you can barely stand up. I can do something without the ability to do something, something which I know is meaningful. I don't know how I'd managed to stay
on this beat. It's just too heartbreaking to meet good people, share meals and laughter, in deep conversations with them, and then see them fed into a teeth of a machine that robs, brutalizes, and kills them. So that Joe Biden can stand on a podium and say that border crossing to.
Down this month.
They are down, and that's allowed you due to enforcement in Mexico. But I want to make sure that everyone who does cross the border can do so safely and they don't have to die on US soil after fighting so hard to make it here. This hasn't been the case for everyone this year. My friends up and down the border have carried far too many little memorial crosses into the mountains. And depending on the election results next week, what we're doing might be illegal soon, but that'll never
make it wrong. Since early September, nine people have died in a little part of southern California alone by friends who searched for them, sometimes found their remains and undertaken the thankless task of sharing the bad news with their families, then constructive memorials in their memory. This is just one of the many dangerous parts of the migration route north, but it's the one that I can help with. If you're nearby are visiting for a while. There are several
organizations dropping water on the border. Border Angels, Border Kindness and Borderlands Relief Collective here in San Diego, Arho Samaritans, Noms, Motes in Arizona, groups you search and rescue as well. Obviously, not everyone lives here at the USA is Southern border, but more than half of the population does live within one hundred miles of a border. Even if you don't live in the USA, or maybe you do but you don't live anywhere near the border, I guarantee there are
migrants in your community. In the last year, I've worked with migrant welcome committees in Maryland, church groups in the rural south, Sikhs on the West Coast, occurred on the East Coast, to name just a few. Without a type of fanfare, people all over this country are making space in their homes and their hearts for strangers, feeding them, housing them, and helping them get set up in a new place. For the most part, it doesn't get coverage.
Not a democratic administration, it doesn't get much of public support either, but that doesn't mean it isn't necessary. Aside from all the reasons it's important, dropping water on the border is also fun for me. It's helped me learn more about where I live. I appreciate the desert and make new friends who generally share my outlook on the world. I love being outdoors, and I'd be outdoors anyway, but it's way my hiker is about much more than myself.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does that mean when you get somewhere with signal? Yeah yeah, Please to all of you, please share it. I'd like to follow your journey if that's okay, and maybe we can talk again when you're in America. Yeah.
I gave my number to hundreds of people in the dady In as well as some websites they might find useful. One to NGOs explained the CBP one app are the ones that might direct them to resources along their route. Last Sunday night, as I was absent by and least thrumming through a shotgun reloading manual in my living room, as I love to do. My phone started buzzing. It's
done this so many times in the last months. Mostly it's a photo of someone I met updating me on their journey, or one of the little wooden animals that they give to children, which has made its way to Mexico and hopefully giving them some comfort along the way. Often it's less positive news. Someone's been robbed or simply run out of money and they need help. But I
got two messages this Sunday which lifted my spirits. Miami little girl who had an adventure like Pepper Pig in the jungle, I did you know how I was doing? And she sent me a photo of the tiny stone bear that I'd given her. She also wanted to know if we could still go to see Minnie Mouse, who she came to America, which I assured her we could. I think it would be quite apt to visit a place which bills itself as the happiest place on Earth, where someone I met in one of the most desperate
parts of the planet. The second message was from one of the migrants I'd met in the jungle, telling me she'd made it to America, not just to America, but to a part of the border where I've been dropping water with my friends. Just a few weeks before I left for Panama, she sent me a photo of a rock with a message on it one way, which I'm very familiar. She told me about her walk, one which I've made myself, and she taught me how hard it was.
I said, I knew, but really I don't know, because I wasn't carrying months of trauma with me on the mountain. She's the only person out of one hundred son I met who's made it here. Most of them are in Mexico now, and most of them will remain there or maybe get sent back home, or maybe they'll make a desperate attempt across this week. As you hear this before the election, it made me so happy to see someone
safely here, one person out of a hundred. For so many of the migrants I met, America was a dream and the journey with a nightmare. Since the series began airing, I've seen videos of people I care about clinging to freight trains that bruce bodies after being beaten. I've helped them find healthcare after they were sexually assaulted, and tried
to find room at overcrowded shelters. I've helped trans ladies navigate all of this and transphobia and misogyny, and tried to find resources in French and English and Portuguese for non Spanish speakers. I'd hope that I'd finished this series with a single good story, a story of someone who made it, who's living the American dream that people died
for in the jungle. But I can't because even the people who made it here are here temporarily and broadcasting anything about their journey would put them at risk whoever wins the election next week. So instead, I want to end with how you can make a difference, and I'll start with a story and how little things can make big differences. One day in bar Juquito, of sitting around with a few Venezuelan kids, probably four to eight years old, ripping pages out of my right in the rain note
book to make paper aeroplanes. Before I interviewed their parents, I asked him about the jungle. They said it was scary and they had nightmares. Now, I often find kids in these places get scared of the dark, and I used to bring these crappy little electric lights for them, but they're bulky, and they're not very good. Recently, I've been carrying the little packets of fishing glow sticks instead. They gasped about ten bucks for maybe one hundred of
the little green lights. So I poured out my glove sticks, cut my hands and snapped one. The children remaze of the little glowing road, so I gave them the rest of the packet. I told them they could keep them for any time they were scared of the dark. Nearly a month later, I sometimes get a message on my phone with a photo of a little tiny glow stick on a note of thanks.
One thing that.
Father Elia said that really impacted me is that when he meets migrants, he asked what he sees of God in them, and his work for them is where he finds what there is of God and himself. Think I've struggled so much with this serious impart because I've seen so much of the best of other people, and indeed the best of myself into such hard play. I always struggle a little to readjust after trips like this, but
this one's been particularly hard. In the jungle, I saw people helping, and in a sense, we were all in it together. When it rained, we all got wet, and when it got hot, we all huddled together in the shade. We shared bottles of water, We sat at the same tables and ate together. I can't really begin to experience a full, varily inexperience because I've been lucky enough never to have anything that bad to run away from. Better have experienced incredible solidarity and kindness of the people who
went through it. I've also experienced the incredible indifference of people at home, and indeed of the states and governments of the world. The Colombian friends I met Las Blancas and Barbjigito, who are handcuffed and deported and ripped from their families, have already invited me to come and stay in their homes in Colombia. But if their families make it here, they won't encounter that kind of hospitality. Just last week, I helped to translate for a Venezuelan family
living on the street in San Diego. Some of my friends do sponsor migrants, and that's something any one can do if you're able to. It's an incredible thing you can do to change someone's life, and I can't encourage you enough to do so. I really do see the best of myself, of my friends, and of humanity, and I work to help migrants. I would say that on reflection.
And I wasn't really an anarchist until twenty eighteen, when I watched a state to the world abandoned thousands of migros in Tijuana and climbed a fence with my friends to take care of them, and specifically to distribute three huge backpacks full of waffles and another friend had sent from his waffle factory. I'd stopped believing in the benevolence of the state a long time before, but it wasn't really until then that I really understood the power of
people organizing horizontally to provide each other with dignity. Ever since then, I've drawn a lot of hope for humanity in the same place as I despair for people. Maybe that's why I keep going back. Since then at the border, I've seen people die. I've held crying babies and crying parents. I've also shared meals with people from around the world, made friends for life, and learned curdish disco songs about killing people. I've danced around campfires with people I couldn't
imagined meeting. I i' Sparde my own journey here. Last Christmas, when i'd normally be at the bar with my friends, I stand the rock in the desert, eating a cold vegan m Marie with an Ecuadorian family and some of my friends. And all the Christmases I can remember, I never felt so much like I was in the right place, doing the right thing, with the right people.
What.
I've seen a lot of terrible things at the border, in the jungle, and I'll never forget those. More importantly, I've seen that together we can do incredible things, and we can make the state irrelevant, especially in the places it's chosen to be absent. I don't think we should make demands of a state anymore. It's simply not in its nature to care. But I do think we should make demands of ourselves. I don't believe in God, and I've written a whole dissertation about people who burn churches.
But I think I see something that's just as special to me in the experience of mutual aid, and in a way it fulfills not only people's material needs, but also our human desire for dignity and mutual respect. When I drop water at the border, or carry someone's bags in the jungle. I see myself in them, and I
hope they see themselves a little bit of me. But right now asylum system is so broken the very few people even make it far enough to drink the water I leave at the border, And despite the border featuring heavily in this year's election, there seems to be no national concern about the way our tax dollars brutalize people across the continent. So I want to end by asking you what you can do. It might be coming to unhere to drop water. It might be sending some money
to one of the links un included the description. It might be offering to translate for asylum seekers. It might just be talking to people and helping to change the narrative. You can vote or not next week, but there isn't a box you can take that will change the things I saw in the jungle. Trump wanted to deport millions more people. Harris wanted to pass a bill that will kill more people. You can't pass your commitments off to someone whose box you take every four years. You have
to take them on for yourself. The way we change things, it's in the way we do things every day every week, no one's every four years. I want to end with NOI's mum and her message to the American people. I also want to ask if anyone of those how to get cheap tickets to Disneyland, because I have just looked that up and I cannot stress enough ho but I am to afford it.
Please excuse us because we know that we are knocking on that door. There are a lot of us, but we are desperate because complaining about the president we have is not helping us. No, he's doing almost nothing. So our children have no future and our country won't support us. It's not easy to leave our parents, our friends, our relatives, our grandparents, and we do not know if we will ever return or if we will ever see them again. It is not easy. But we also think about a
future for our children. And I do not know what has happened, but we feel like living in a dictatorship. We are living something very unpleasant and we do not get any help. But those who help us, we want to say thank you. They opened that door for us. They have opened many doors for many ven as wing so well we hope in faith that they will open them for us.
I want to take this opportunity to thank a few people who made this possible. Firstly, Daddy and use my Fixer. She was incredible. Secondly, I want to thank iHeart for paying for this. Like I said, it's been nearly a decade that I've been asking to do this story and I'm just really happy that they trusted me to do it. Thirdly, I want to thank everyone who trusted me with their stories,
everybody who stayed in touch as they've come north. I want to thank border Kindness and Borderland Relief Collective who have both welcomed me on their drops. And it's not always easy to be around a journalist. It's not easy to let someone record everything you're doing out there and their inherent risks to that, and I really appreciate them trusting me. I want to thank Dutch where Hammocks who rush shipped to me a Hammock when my old one
tour right before I left. And I think most of all, I want to thank all of you for listening, taking the time, and all the listeners who have reached out to say they're listening to the series, people who have reached out to ask how they can help. I would love to organize a way to help the people I've spoken to. I spoke to someone just this morning who's still stuck in Tapachula because she was robbed and her and her daughter are five hundred bucks short for the
bus to ride north to Tijuana. I don't have the capacity to organize that right now, but if someone else does, they should reach out to me, because I would really like to help these people who have become my friends and who I care about, and who are right now stuck in a very dangerous place because someone in Washington, DC has made a choice to treat them with cruelty and not kindness. So if that's you, if you're the
person who's going to minister that, please let me know. Thanks, and I hope you enjoyed the series.
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