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The Trump administration has begun to pull most immigration officers out of Minnesota after immense protest and backlash.
There are under five hundred ICE agents remaining in Minnesota. That's off of the three thousand surge that we saw here.
Minnesota was one of the latest states to have hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents descending onto its streets. It was the largest immigration enforcement deployment in US history, and it reached a tipping point when two people were shot dead by federal agents. There was Renee Macklin Good.
Renee Good was a thirty seven year old US citizen and mother of three who moved to Minnesota just last year.
And Alex Pretty.
Alex Pretty was thirty seven years old. He worked as an ICU nurse taking care of critically ill patients at the Minneapolis VA Medical Sector.
And months before them, in Chicago, Silberio Dillegas Gonzalez was also gunned down.
Breaking news out of the Chicago area Homeland Security officialcy and ICE operation left an enforcement officer severely injured and the target of a traffic stop dead.
The country has been grappling with these images border patrol and ICE agents wreaking across major cities, But for a lot of communities living along the US Mexico border, these violent acts look pretty familiar. Jane Guerrero is a journalist, author, and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Jane was born and raised on the California Mexico border. She recently wrote about how immigration enforcement and how the violation of due process is now seeping away from the border
and trickling into other American cities. The violence is no longer quietly happening in the shadows of the borderlands.
So now it's happening on our streets.
In a lot of ways, the border has been a testing ground for all of this. Jane Guerrero also wrote about something else recently that made us want to have her back on our show something that has also been happening in the shadows hundreds of miles away in Honduras.
Do not want these startup cities because they do not want to be displaced.
Will actually build new cities in our country, These freedom cities, will reopen the frontier.
Gene argues that Onduras is a testing ground for something that may very well soon come to the US. They're known as startup cities. From Futuro Media, It's Latino USA. I'm Mariano Josa. Today a conversation with journalist Jean Guerrero how past border enforcement connect to the ice rates of today. Then we turn to the other testing ground, this time in Onduras, where tech billionaires are trying to build their own private societies.
So let's get to it.
We start by talking about how the recent surge of immigration enforcement across the US didn't come out of nowhere. A lot of people are shocked. You and I are not shocked.
Exactly. It's been happening under Republican administrations.
It's now my privilege to sign the Homeland Security Act of two thousand and two.
When you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally, you have to take the children away.
It's been happening under Democratic administrations.
President Clinton's decision in nineteen ninety four significantly increased the border wall. The twenty two years that followed, at least eighty three hundred people died and fifty five hundred disappeared while trying to cross.
CBS News has learned President Biden will issue an executive order this week that would partially shut down asylum processing.
And I think what's changed is just the brazenness with which it's being done so visibly in the middle of our cities and in our neighborhoods, whereas so much of this violence was previously confined to remote areas of the US Mexico border and to immigrant communities as well. But the sort of overt to braws and violence that we're seeing was something that border patrol was used to being
able to do with impunity. And this is why you've seen thousands of people die at the US Mexico border since the nineteen nineties when I was a high school student. It's actually what got me into immigration reporting in the first place. At the time, I was shocked as a teenager to discover what was happening just a few miles away from where I was growing up, but it was
happening systemically in the shadows. It was happening at a massive scale that we have not reckoned with until now because it's in our faces.
So because of the fact that you grew up watching this, can you take us to some of those memories as a young woman on the US Mexico border that kind of shifted everything for you.
My strongest, most powerful memory, it's actually from my early parts of my career, which is it actually threw me back to when I was in high school because what I was doing is I was walking the smuggling routes at the US Mexico border in Arizona over the course of multiple weekends with volunteers who go out there to search for lost migrants and for the bodies of migrants who've died in the desert to bring closure to their families.
What I was seeing, which was literally human remains every single time that when I went out there with those volunteers, a mass grave at the US Mexico border. This is something that I had first learned about when I was in high school and I was reading Luis albertore As The Devil's Highway where he talks about this group of Mexican men who died trying to cross the newly militarized border.
I remember reading that extremely evocative, reported nonfiction account of their experiences and being horrified, How is it possible that our immigration policy could be designed to push people to their deaths? And I was outraged, And later I was just shocked to find that in my late twenties this was still happening, and happening on a much more massive
and cruel scale. This was under the Obama administration, and I remember I went out there because Trump was campaigning on a promise to build his wall and to bring about a much more brasingly cruel immigration policy, and I remember thinking it cannot possibly get more cruel than it already is. Like I was seeing human remains, skeletons everywhere. We have been pushing people to their deaths as a
fundamental component of our immigration policy. With Stephen Miller and Donald Trump are trying to do is there's a variety of tactics, but one of them is to make their lives so miserable here that they self deport. And one of the ways that they're doing that is by introducing a level of violence into our communities that we have never seen before, at such a shocking open level. And it's the same violence that caused those people to die in the desert.
Physical and psychological violence. I think most recently of five year old Liam Gonejo Ramos. You might have seen him in his blue little bunny hat. He became an international symbol of the trauma being inflicted on children across the country today.
Liam Goneho Ramos is a five year old pre kindergartener from Minneapolis. He and his dad were walking back from school when they were detained by immigration officers.
I mean, I wake up thinking about little Liam, but there are so many little Liams, whether they're in Minnesota, or they're in Chicago, or they're in LA I'm wondering what do you think will happen with these children who are being exposed to this. It wasn't new, but for children in places like Minnesota, like OHI, this is in fact going to change their experience as an American kid.
It's incredibly traumatizing even just reading about what was happening to me as the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and a Puerto Rican woman, and being part of a family of immigrants and people a mixed status family. It was shocking to me to learn about the in humanity with which the government was treating people like us simply because of our language, simply because of the national origin of
our families. It created a sense of not belonging, of not being wanted, and having to prove constantly my right to exist. And I think it's really interesting what we're seeing now because it seems that one of the reasons people are starting to care is because they're realizing something that the immigrant rights activists have been warning us for a very long time about, which is that the attack on immigrant rights is a trojan horse for an attack
on civil rights. The attacks on immigrant communities are being used as a testing ground and as a way to expand the erosion of our civil rights through the surveillance economy and just slowly eroding our ability to be autonomous, free citizens of this country. And people are trying to realize it. Even if you are a citizen, you are no longer safe. If you go out onto the street and you stand up to protect your neighbors, you are potentially going to be shot dead in the middle of
the street. That is what this is all about. It is about power, impunity, the ability to operate without any accountability whatsoever for governments that are in the pocket of corporations that surveil and jail human beings for profit.
When we come back, Jingeretro makes a direct connection between the recent presidential elections and tech billionaires.
You cannot understand the erosion of civil rights that we are seeing in the United States and the unleashing of federal agents on our communities without looking at what is happening in Hunters, because it is the most blatant example of Central America being used as a testing ground.
Stay with us.
Yes, it's Latino USA. I'm Maria Josa. I'm speaking with journalist jan Guerrero. We're going to talk now about a direct link between the newly elected right wing president of Hoduras nasri As Fua, and the billionaire tech world. Gin is going to tell us how all of this connects to the States and what it could mean for all of us. You recently wrote a piece for The New York Times titled Trump is not a nationalist, He's something worse.
And you say that what's happening in on Duras. Some people are like, wait a second, we're just trying to understand what's happening in our own country. You want us to understand what's happening in Onduas in order to see how this plays out here in the United States and the repercussions. So make those connections for our listeners.
You cannot understand the erosion of civil rights that we are seeing in the United States and the unleashing of federal agents on our communities without looking at what is happening in Hunduras, because it is the most blatant example of Central America being used as a testing ground. So the reason nadreyas Fuda is in power now in Hunduras is because Donald Trump did everything that he could to get him power.
Nazri Asfulla, the conservative businessman backed by US President Donald Trump, finally declared winner of the Honduran presidential vote.
Trump endorsed Nasiri as Fuda in November, saying on social media that he was the best candidate for Honduras and that the US could only work with him to fight so called narco communists. Trump berated the other candidates. He also threatened to cut off usaid if us Fuda did not win, but that wasn't the only outside influence happening in the country at the time.
MS thirteen was going around posing as election observers and telling Hundurance that if they didn't vote for the Trump backed candidate that they would kill them and their entire families.
MS thirteen literally drove voters to the polls to make sure they cast a ballot the right way.
And Trump's interest in the country continued. The following month. In December, Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, Orlando Ernandez, a move that shocked many people.
Demand that I pardoned was if you could equate it to us. He was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump. This was a man who was persecuted very unfairly.
In Nandez had been in a high security US prison after being convicted of drug trafficking. He was sentenced to forty five years.
He pardoned the former president Juan or Landoornandez, who not only was convicted of federal drug trafficking charges and his role in one of the largest, most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world. So somebody who sees this and doesn't understand why is probably utterly shocked of course, because
Trump supposedly is the worst nightmare of drug cartels. Why is he putting somebody or a party in power that has historically overseen huge waves of migration from people who were fleeing the Narco state.
On January twenty seventh, nasri As Fuda officially became President of Honduras when he was sworn into office. See both of these Honduran leaders, as Fuda and Ernandez belonged to the right wing party, and Jin Guerrero says this is important because Trump and his allies wanted the Honduran Conservative Party to win in order to allow tech billionaires to build so called startup cities.
I mean you look at Roger Stone.
Roger Stone as in the controversial political strategist who was close to Trump. Remember the gray hair, flashy suit guy. Think Russian interference.
He put out a blog within days of Trump coming into power in twenty twenty five saying that Trump needed to pardon at Nandez as a death blow to Shiamata Castor, the democratically elected progressive president of Honduras at the time, because she was against these startup cities that are backed by Trump aligned tach billionaires who want to be able to use Honduras to spread these neocolonial experiments where they take over Honduran land in violation of Hunduran sovereignty, create
their own laws, and they want to be able to do this with impunity.
And one of the biggest and most controversial startup cities is on a Honduran island. The city is named Prospera.
Prospera is building the fastest growing private city project in the world, elevating human potential through a radically decentralized private governance framework. Our platform is currently powering the next generation prosperous city in the island of Roatan in Honduras, as well as an emerging Prosperity hub on the Honduran mainland with more location.
Shamatacasto had said, no, you guys cannot do that, and the Hounduran Congress had voted to repeal the law that
allowed these startup cities to be created. And Rogers Stone told Trump, you need to pardoner and none this so that we can re empower the right wing party, so that we can protect Prospera, so that we can save prosper It's dizzying and it seems to contradict his other medaling in Latin America, like him capturing Minnesota's President Nicolas Maludo to bring him here on alleged federal drug trafficking charges.
Maludo responded that he is a man of God and a prisoner of war, kidnapped by the American.
Military, threatening to do the same with the Colombian president.
Columbia is very sick to run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.
Threatening to bomb cartels in Mexico tonight.
Mexico's president is urging closer coordination with the US after President Trump threatens land strikes on drug cartels that he claims are running Mexico.
It all seems contradictory, but actually there is a completely coherent logic to it, and what that lodge is that he is trying to empower a class of transnational elites and expand their territorial power. All of these actions do that, and in Hunters in particular, the real reasons for his pardon are hidden in plain sight. It's these transnational elites who want to operate across borders, who don't believe in national sovereignty, who do not believe in borders, and it
shows that Trump is not a nationalist. He claims he's all about patriotism, He's all about America first. But what these policies show is that he is in league with transnational elites who are actively working to accelerate the decline of the nation state globally.
We'll be right back, Yes, Hey, we're back.
I'm going to wrap up my conversation with Jing Guerero and we're going to talk more about Prospera and how the fate of working class Americans is intertwined with those in Onduras. So, Jing, you've laid out this concept of these independent cities within the country of Onduras. I think it might make some people stop for a second and say, how does what happens in Hoduras, in these independent cities prospera. How does that actually touch anybody that lives in the United States.
There's two main reasons that touches us, all aside from the fact that they are planning to bring these experiments here. I said this openly. Trump has openly said I'd love to have freedom cities in the US.
Will actually build new cities in our country. These freedom cities will reopen the frontier and.
What they're doing is it's this hub for human enhancement for the rich. So they are offering experimental gene therapies for life extension that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
I'm traveling to a remote island for an extreme medical procedure that could change the future of humanity. Humans have a one hundred and twenty year sailing and so far no one can punch through it. Gene therapy might be the answer. This is a journey in search of the fountain of youth.
They're offering cybernetic implants for what they call self sovereign cyborgs.
I also recently got myself like an implant into my hands.
Here you can program several things into it, like opening Tesla car.
It's part of this transhumanist movement that I personally see as the successor to the nineteen hundreds eugenics movement in the United States, where it's about breeding a superior race of humans using technology. And what's interesting about it is that it's only accessible to the rich because the people who are advocating for transhumanism as it is unfolding in Prospera,
and as it is unfolding in many other cities. They believe that only certain people should have access, and they believe that the world should be structured to allow for humanity to reach what they call technological maturity at any cost. So if that means destroying the earth, if that means killing billions of human beings, they are fundamentally okay with that.
It's part of this movement that is gaining power, and some of the most wealthy individuals are subscribers to this movement, and Prospera is key to that movement because they were creating this hub for human enhancement.
There geneses that it's important to recognize that Prospero was built in a special economic zone, a model that was originally pioneered in Puerto Rico.
After World War Two, the.
US government and Puerto Rico's own leadership cited that the island needed to modernize its economy, so they pitched this grand Plan Industrialize, bring in US factories. The government gave huge tax breaks and incentives to American companies to set out factories on the island. Puerto Rican workers were promised jobs and prosperity, but the factories often paid low wages. The profits went right back to the mainland.
I'm Puerto Rican. My mother and all of my family members left Puerto Rico because of the lack of economic opportunity, the widespread unemployment, and that all started because of the entire island of Puerto Rico being transformed into a special economic zone. So startup cities are using special economic zones to proliferate. And they always say that these special economic zones are going to create economic prosperity and all kinds
of opportunities for the domestic populations. But that is the biggest lie, because you look at history, you look at what happened in Puerto Rico. Most Puerto Ricans live outside of Puerto Rico because of what they did there, and so now they're trying to multiply this and ultimately bring it here. It is not just about these other places.
The other places are just the start. In the same way that immigrants were used in the United States to erode the rule of law and civil rights for all citizens, these regions are being used as a testing ground for
similarly bringing that here. As I argue, I say, the interest of working class native born Americans is not really in conflict with the interests of indigenous communities across the Americas, and if we're able to help people understand how their faiths are intertwined, how these startup cities that are being used to displace people in Latin America are eventually going to come here. I think if people start to understand those connections, then then there is a way out of
this nightmare. Like people talk about immigrants in a way that makes other people think that it has nothing to do with them, but it has everything to do with them. As long as we allow the most vulnerable members of our society to be rounded up, to be disappeared, we are basically creating a situation where we are not going to have a country. We are not going to have rights, we are not going to have law and order any of us. People aren't seeing immigrants as equals. They're seeing
them as lesser, as as people who are suffering. And it's like no, no, no, Our fates are deeply, deeply entwined, and we are equals here and we need to fight like equals.
Jan Guerrero contributed to The New York Times journalist and author, Thank you so much for joining me again on Not the New USA.
Thank you, Maria.
This episode was produced by Rinaldo Leanos Junior. It was edited by our managing editor Fernando Echavari. It was mixed by Stephanie Lebou and JJ Carubin. Fact checking for this episode by Roxana Aguire. Nancy Truchuillo is our production manager. The Latino USA team also includes Julia Caruso, Rebeccai Barra Res, Luna dorimr Marquez, Julieta Martinelli, Monica Morales Garcia and Adriana Rodriguez. Bennilee Ramirez and I are executive producers. I'm your host
Mariao Josa. Latino USA is part of Iheart's Michu Dura podcast network. Executive producers at iHeart are Leo Gomez and Arlene Santana. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on social media, and don't forget to join Futuro Plus. Dear listener, you get to listen to everything ad free Plus, You'll get bonus episodes, and by joining, you'll support the kind of reporting that makes episodes like this one possible.
So muchas gracyes to it now, don't y Yes.
Joe, Latino USA is made possible in part by the Ford Foundation working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide, the Tao Foundation and the Heising Simons Foundation, unlocking knowledge, opportunity and possibilities.
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