It Could Happen Here Weekly 204

This is an iHeart podcast.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

Johnny Knoxville here.

Check out Crimeless, Hillbilly Heist, my new true crime podcast from Smartless Media, Campside Media, and Big Money Players.

It's the true story of the almost perfect crime and the Nimrods who almost pulled it off.

It was kind of like the perfect storm in a sewer.

That was dumb.

Do not follow my example.

Listen to Crimeless, Hillbilly Heist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be heard.

Winner, best score.

We the man to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We the man to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Your global campaign just launched.

But wait, the logo's cropped.

The colors are off.

And did Lego clear that image?

When teams create without guardrails, mistakes slip through.

But not with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.

Brand kits and lock templates make following design guidelines a no-brainer for HR sales and marketing teams.

And commercially safe AI, powered by Firefly, lets them create confidently so your brand always shows up polished, protected, and consistent everywhere.

Learn more at adobe.com/slash go slash express.

Cool zone media.

Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Hello, this is Mia from the future.

The whole crew is off this week, so you'll be getting a series of episodes from our past.

And this episode in particular, I wanted to rerun for Indigenous Peoples Day, but it is also from before I came out.

So

hope you all enjoy, and we will be back next week.

Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast that is on the cycle of being sort of okayly introduced.

When this episode goes out, it will be Indigenous Peoples Day.

And

so to talk about that more, we're going to talk to Dahlia Kilsback, who is a member of the Northern Cheyenne, or has Northern Cheyenne Tribal Citizenship and has studied and worked in federal Indian tribal policy.

Dahlia, hello.

How are you doing?

I am doing well.

Thank you for inviting me here today.

Of course.

Garrison is also here.

Garrison, hello.

Hello.

I'm currently also doing writing about Indigenous stuff, but within the context of Canada, which

people should will probably hear later this week.

So, yeah.

I guess first thing I wanted to talk about is a little bit is about what Indigenous Peoples Day is and why it is that and not the other thing.

Yeah, so Indigenous Peoples Day,

as many people know, is replacing, I'm going to say it,

Christopher Columbus Day.

That is still like a federal holiday, but multiple cities and states have opted to use Indigenous Peoples Day instead.

And the reasoning for that is acknowledging the atrocities that were committed by Christopher Columbus, who first of all did not discover America

but

continued to

not only use slavery but

commit different forms of genocide, rape, et cetera, all of these terrible atrocities.

And so rather than celebrating

somebody like that, Indigenous Peoples Day

has been implemented in order to recognize the people who are actually here first

and Indigenous peoples across the Americas, their

histories, cultures, and contributions.

Yeah, Columbus, real piece of shit.

Worst Christopher, like,

yeah, like, it really cannot be overstated how bad that guy was.

Even, you know, even people in that era who had committed their own genocides, like Isabel and Ferdinand, who, you know, expelled the Jews from Spain, where it's like, you know, if once you've reached the sentence, expelled the Jews from X, like

you're already in

the shit list of the worst people in human history.

And even they saw what Columbus was doing.

It was like what on earth bad bad guy bad name things are going to continue to go badly and yeah that was another thing that that i i wanted to talk about which is

federal indian policy and you know this is an incredibly broad

this is an incredibly broad area spanning like 300 years

So we're not going to be able to go into like an enormous amount of depth in it, but I think it's important that people

have an understanding of,

I mean, A, just what the U.S.

did and how everyone else has had to sort of deal with it.

And then also the fact that this is something that changes over time and has looked different.

It's been bad in different ways.

Yeah.

And so in talking about federal Indian policy,

I always like to contextualize it within a larger

sort of like Euro

American like teleology of colonial conquests and then moving on to settler colonialism and where we are with

federal Indian policy currently.

So how do we connect Christopher Columbus to where we are currently?

And this is the history of federal Indian policy and Western legal discourse.

and how

European powers throughout history have defined what it means to be an Indian person in relationship to Indigenous peoples' rights to their own land and to self-governance.

So when we're looking at the different periods of federal Indian policy,

prior to there being the United States government, we have the colonial period,

which is 1492 to 1776.

This is how federal Indian policy legal scholars divide that.

And it's really important to

kind of

give the difference between what is a colonial state versus a settler colonial state when you're talking about not just the United States government, but also the Canadian government and

different governments globally.

But I want to talk just a little bit about what I mean by the difference between a colonial government and a settler colonial government because because they're tied together.

So, by a settler colonial government, I mean what I mean is that

it is defined by the deterritorialization of indigenous populations.

And so, rather than in a colonial government, as you had with Christopher Columbus and the Spanish and with the English, etc.,

is rather than a state and sovereignty being

conceived as

all these resources are going back to the metropole, all these resources are going back to England or to Spain, etc.

And colonial occupation

is

conceptualized within this way in settler colonial governments.

The colonists come to these lands and stay and what they define as sovereignty is within this land that they define now as their own.

So and in order for that process to happen,

there needs to be different forms of genocide of the Indigenous populations.

And so that's what we saw with Christopher Columbus and throughout history

was just the depletion of a lot of our Indigenous populace.

And so when I mean about the United States

being a settler colonial state, I mean that this is current and ongoing.

And so when we talk about federal Indian policy, federal Indian policy is always in this conversation with

what started with Christopher Columbus as the doctrine of discovery.

And so that's how we define the colonial period.

And feel free to like stop me and ask me questions.

Also, I'm just going to try to move

quickly because there's a lot.

Yeah.

I think we probably should briefly talk about what the doctrine of discovery is,

at least before we get to sort of the Marshall trilogy and stuff.

For sure.

So what does that actually mean legally?

So legally,

it's the discovery of a quote-unquote newfound land by European colonial forces.

And the reason why it's called the doctrine of discovery was that Indigenous peoples on these lands were deemed unable to govern themselves and they did not know how to utilize their land up to the definition of what the European powers thought

land use was.

Indigenous peoples didn't have the same concept of property and same with

their relationship with

resources and resource extraction.

So when

Christopher Columbus and all of these other colonizers,

conquistadors, came to the quote-unquote new land,

they saw all of this rich, plentiful resource and thought to themselves, well, obviously these people don't know what they're doing because there's just so much.

They have not done anything with it.

And we're going to take this back to ours because obviously they're inferior beings and don't know what property is.

So legally,

the doctrine of discovery conveyed legal title to and ownership of American soil to European nations, a title that devolved to the United States.

And so

this definition is expansive,

and expansive discovery implies that Native nations have a right to lands as occupants or possessors, but they are incompetent to manage those lands and need a quote-unquote benevolent guardian.

such as a federal government who holds legal title.

And

so when we're talking about this legal title, it devolves to the United States later on in history after the American Revolution.

And so rather than being colonial states as the United States, like 13 original colonies, given the American Revolution and its own constitution and its creation of itself as a nation state, then that turns into a settler colonial government.

Yeah, and I think we can, yeah, we can get to what happens next then, because yeah, yeah, you, you have, you have this elaborate legal framework that lets you steal people's land and murder them and then control it.

And then the outgrowth of that is

this sort of weird event where the colonies go into rebellion and suddenly, yeah, there's not a colony.

They're not colonies anymore.

They just are the state.

And so, yeah, talk about what happens next after the sort of formation of the United States?

So, after the formation of the United States,

so we have this period, the American Revolution, which I'll not really dive that into, is 1776 to 1789, and it's called the Confederation period.

But next, we have the Trade and Intercourse Act era, which is from 1789 to 1835.

And so, this is defined with the United States Constitution and Congress's exclusive right to regulate trade relations and make

land secessions and enter into treaties with tribes.

So this is a treaty-making era with the tribes that only the United States federal government is able to.

And there's a distinction there because there had been a lot of contestation between states and the federal government as to who is going to now deal with these

these nations that are within our own settler colonial borders.

So, whose job is that to solve this issue?

So, within the United States Constitution, there are three clauses that define the United States' legal relationship to American Indians.

And so, these are the treaty-making clause, the commerce clause, and the property clause.

And so, this

movement from just relying on the doctrine of discovery and treaty-making processes between different European powers now is between the United States federal government and tribes.

And so what this does is now tribes are located within the United States territory, and this places Indians within the boundaries and jurisdiction of the United States.

and now they're a matter of domestic interest.

Something else is one of the sort of complicated questions that changes through this whole era, which is about

what does sovereignty mean for these tribes?

And to what extent do they even continue to possess it?

And how does that even sort of,

how does that work when you have this new state that sort of just

has claimed control here?

Right.

And also during this period,

well, well, later on when we have,

sorry, jumping ahead of myself, when we have the extermination of the treaty-making process, and this completely removes seeing tribes as independent sovereign nations.

So, I think that we'll kind of get more into that later.

But the thing with federal Indian policy

is that it's sort of self-prophesizing.

So, as settlers are moving across America, the United States government also has to create these policies in order to legalize these land cessations and movements.

And a pattern that we do see here throughout history and throughout time is that the United States federal government as a settler state is

over the rights of over the

rights to land and rights of Indigenous peoples themselves, you have a priority of the settler state in order to acquire land.

So a lot of the reason why

later these treaties will be broken, et cetera, is because settlers are moving into these lands, and the United States is then breaking these treaties in order to

have more lands, more land secession.

Yeah, yeah, so the law is sort of just following the violence, and it just becomes a sort of retroactive justification for

just breaking everything.

It's a self-justifying sort of sovereignty.

Yeah.

So, this is the removal period, and what a lot of people may have heard of.

So, it's from 1835 to 1861.

And what we have is the extinguishment of Indian title to eastern lands and the removal of Indian tribes westward.

So,

one of the most notable acts is the Removal Act, which was authorized by President Andrew Jackson, which moved Indians from the east to the west of the Mississippi River into what was called Indian territory.

And what brought about this

federal act

was a series of three foundational statutes within federal Indian policy dictated by Chief Justice John Marshall.

So first we have Johnson v.

McIntosh, Cherokee Nation v.

Georgia, and Worcester v.

Georgia.

And I won't go into too much detail, but what these essentially

did and legally defined tribes as being domestic dependent nations.

And so it clarified more that, again, tribal nations are underneath the federal government's overview, not the states.

So yeah, it placed tribes above state jurisdiction.

And what this was trying to do was

solve some issues that tribes such as the Cherokee Nation had with different states when it came to land and jurisdiction over said land.

But that is kind of the basis of

a lot of federal Indian policy and still remains true today.

And what is notable

in each one of these statutes,

I believe particularly in Worcester v.

Georgia, although it seems that it was supporting tribal sovereignty and that they were above state jurisdiction, a lot of these

statutes cited racist president and the doctrine of discovery.

So what you see for federal Indian policy is that a lot of the found well the foundation for federal Indian policy based on precedent is the doctrine of discovery, which is reliant on the idea that American Indians were savages and needed

federal benevolence and

paternalism in order to regulate their own affairs.

Yeah, and I think that's, well, okay, we should probably not just immediately skip to allotment, but yeah, because

there's also,

yeah, this is also the period we used.

Yeah, the thing you were talking about earlier is the thing you probably know about, which is,

okay, it's not true to say this is when this starts, but this is Indian Removal Act, Trail of Tears territory.

And

one thing, you know, I think one of the sort of running themes of this is that, you know,

the law in this context is just sort of, it becomes a sort of retroactive excuse to do whatever

needs to be done from the perspective, quote unquote, of the sort of, of the settler state to just take all of this land.

Yeah.

And I think maybe like one of the keystones of this is Andrew Jackson just straight up telling the Supreme Court to fuck off so that he can do, so he can do a trail of tears.

Yeah.

So

the Removal Act

happened after all of these statutes that you already had that supported federal Indian sovereignty.

And so the Cherokees in Georgia were one of the tribes that were removed.

And so you kind of see

what you talked about, the

retrograde kind of justifications for said removal despite the statutes that are there.

So although that, like Marshall in Worcester Beach, Georgia determined that the state of Georgia did not have jurisdiction over Cherokee territory,

although this territory was in the state's borders.

Later on, you see with the Removal Act that

although these statutes are still president in federal Indian policy, those were null in order for

there to be more expansion of settlers within these areas.

So, when it was decided that, oh, wait, we do need this land and we don't actually want these Indians here, let's put them to the side over past the Mississippi so that they're out of sight, out of mind, right?

So, we see more of this

justification for settler expansion.

And so, again, we bring it back to these themes of like settler colonialism in order to

kind of gain more of this land.

And a lot of these statutes are still cited, the doctrine of discovery in them.

And rather than supporting tribal policy, the relationship between the United States federal government and American Indians

was not based on the rights of Indians, but more that

they can't govern themselves.

Right.

And so, so, and that's the whole issue.

It's like people are like, they don't know what they're doing.

So we're going to push them and like take their land again.

So

I don't know if you want me to go too much into the Trail of Tears, but

you're seeing a lot of patterns here.

I think different forms of genocide, different forms of taking land.

And this was, this is all around the same time as the Indian Act in Canada as well, which did a very similar thing,

especially starting in the 1900s, it's starting in the 20th century as well with the expansion of the assimilation programs.

Yeah, and I think, I guess, the one other thing I want to point out about this is that, you know, so one of the things that happens with Trailer's Tears is that the Supreme Court

tells Jackson that he can't do this, and Jackson just does it anyways.

And I think that's a very interesting, important moment because, you know, this is, this is this thing, right, where the federal government can tell the Supreme Court to fuck off, right?

And there's nothing the Supreme Court could do about it.

And if you look at what they did it to do, the thing they did it to do was genocide.

And it's, I think it's, it's just, I think this is very sort of, I don't know, this incredibly grim, like, you know, encapsulation of like what this state actually is, which is this sort of genocide machine and whatever sort of, you know, this is what sovereignty is, right?

It's the ability to break your own rules in order to sort of maintain order to maintain the system.

So you, you know, you break your own laws.

And, you know, as we're going to get to in a second, like you break your own treaties continuously.

And you do this because the genocide machine has to keep moving.

Right.

And

there's a couple of federal indian policy theorists,

Bindala Jr., who's one of the most famous ones, and David E.

Wilkins, who talks about how there is no need for checks and balances within the federal Indian policy system.

So you have Congress that is able to

pass whatever act they want.

And

then you also have the Supreme Court and then you also have executive action, but it wasn't really delineated that well within, especially when it comes to this period as to who is going to be dealing with the Indians kind of thing.

And so this kind of confusion and not really completely defining what it means to be a domestic dependent nation, I think really just goes to show how much of a fragile edifice like

settler colonial policy is for it, is within the system.

But again, moving on, it comes back again to land.

So the reservation era in 1861 to 1887

has you have a lot of westward expansion of non-Indians, settlers, specifically to California.

You also have the creation of Indian reservations and resulting Indian wars.

So during this era, what you see a lot of are different types of attempts at assimilation

and a lot of warfare.

So you have a lot of the plains tribes, my tribe, for instance,

that are going through all of these battles fighting forced removal onto reservations.

One of the most famous ones was

the Battle of Greasy Grass or the Little Bighorn where General Custer was killed by Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos and different instances of battles such as those and also where a lot of tribes were forcibly removed to

areas that they were weren't originally from.

So like how the Cherokees were moved to Oklahoma, there was attempts of my tribe, for instance, Northern Cheyenne, to be moved down to Oklahoma as well.

And that's why there's some southern Cheyennes in Oklahoma and then my tribe, the Northern Cheyenne's in Montana.

Another thing that is happening during this period are boarding schools.

the boarding school era.

So this attempt at assimilation through education.

And assimilation is also

within the settler colonial kind of structure.

It's defined as a process where Indigenous people end up conforming to different constructed notions of

settler norms.

So if they're not absorbed within the state completely, then they're

attempt to be assimilated culturally.

through education, through languages, in terms of economics.

So now you have a bunch of different sort of bureaucratic structures on these reservations trying to make tribal governments appear to be

or

constructed as

settler colonial governments are.

So maybe it's the three branches

in ways that aren't just compatible with different tribes culturally.

And you also have the attempted attempted eradication of different kinds of spiritual and cultural practices,

and a lot of Christianity being forced onto different people, and just kind of terrible things that I think more and more people are becoming aware of due to current movements.

But we'll get into that a little bit later.

Do we want to talk about allotment briefly?

Because if I remember correctly, this is in the same period.

Yes, allotment period and forced assimilation.

So this is like 1871 to 1934.

And so this is the end of the treaty-making process.

So the whole idea of

trying to force

tribes onto reservations and sign these treaties were to, again, take land and make sure that the United States has more land and all the land, et cetera, that they could possibly have.

So, at this end of treaty making,

a federal allotment of Indian lands also happened in

the Dawes Act.

And so, what this was, was an attempt to further

shrink the reservation lands that tribes are already guaranteed within treaties.

So during this period, I think somewhere like 9 million acres were

taken from tribal reservations during the allotment process.

So what the allotment process did was it counted each and every individual Indian

that was eligible.

I think there were adults and

yeah adults that were eligible

And each one of them were given a certain parcel of land, a certain number of acreage.

And once all of this land was calculated, what you had was an excess of land, quote-unquote, excess of land that the tribes obviously didn't need because they had still too many people.

And so, what the excess of land

was utilized for is for pioneers and for settlers.

If it didn't go um

to the federal government it was to um incentivize settlers to colonize essential settle on um indian lands so trying its hardest to not stay true to its treaty making practices i think the other thing that was interesting to me about this is that like

Because one of the other goals of this is to sort of like, ooh, is the civilizing mission.

It's like, yeah, we're going to turn them into, we're going to turn all all these people into like

human farmers, like true American frontiersmen or whatever.

And it's just like,

it just doesn't work because economically that doesn't make any sense.

Like, you're breaking up all these

lands is like, it doesn't, you can't just give someone like a small patch of like shitty land and have them farm.

Like, this doesn't, like, this, it doesn't, it doesn't.

They certainly tried.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Like, that was one of the main thing, one of the main things in Canada was about getting them to adopt like uh like European farming practices, which which they they they already knew how to like get their own food, right?

They were trying to change this whole system of

food growth to to this like to this European way of farming and it just and they were just forcing them to.

And there's, yeah, it's it's it yeah, it's it gets it gets it gets super it gets super like dark and horrible once you like look at like the letters that were being written by like the heads of these programs um

like, you know, instructing like these agents who are stationed at these like reservations to like force people to be doing this horrible farming for like all day, every day.

And I think, you know, the

sign that this was like, like, this is

so bad that even the U.S.

government eventually is like, wait, this, this, like, this is fucked up and doesn't work.

So I think that's, yeah, you transition to sort of like

the next phase, I guess.

Yeah, a very short phase.

Yeah, so the next phase

is the Indian Reorganization Act.

And so this only lasted six years from 1934 to 1940.

So this is when allotment ended.

As you said, the United States government was like, wait, this isn't working.

What else can we do?

The Indians aren't dying off.

They're not assimilating.

They're not acculturating.

We don't know what to do with them.

So maybe we'll we'll have them adopt these constitutions and a lot of them were just templates so regardless of whether or not they were um

i think

compatible with tribal different tribes way of life they were like you have these constitutions now um now you're you're a tribe and this is what each tribe has to look like in order for us the federal government to recognize you as a legitimate entity uh

and

um and then so you have the establishment of these um tribal governments that consists of tribal councils and business committees etc however this period is fleeting very fleeting um and next

um you have the termination era so this is the period of time where the federal government

essentially even more so wants to just get rid of the quote-unquote Indian problem, problem, which is the existence of Indigenous peoples

that are reminders to the government, essentially, that they are a settler colonial force and they don't know what to do with us because they tried to commit genocide, they tried to remove us, et cetera, et cetera.

It's still not working.

They decided that our tribal governments

aren't legitimate and they just decide, well, it's too much to

try to keep up with our treaties and what we promised them when it comes to health, care, education, housing, et cetera, et cetera.

How about we terminate our federal responsibility, our trust responsibility that are delineated in federal reunion policy and in our treaties,

and give them off to the states to decide what to do with?

And so, during this period, you see

sort of the federal

dissolution of some tribes, such as the Menongi

and other ones

as well.

So this is

another dark time.

The dark times just keep on coming.

And what federal immune policy scholars have

characterized federal immunity policy as a pendulum.

So swinging from side to side between

this termination of tribes.

So the federal indian government is trying to get rid of tribes especially as you can see in this era and then the pendulum of the other side is self-determination but both of these are held within the context of goals of assimilation so um

this is just another phase of terribleness yep well i think this this phase also like one thing i think that also like is important people understand is that like

like it's not like people aren't fighting this like the whole time

i mean even going like even going back to the stuff the seventh cavalry like the seventh cavalry lose like boars they lose battles all the time people are fighting constantly and this is this period the termination period is also where you see the uh the the the rise of the american indian movement yeah a lot of these periods can be like dove into more and all of these different things um

in every instance in every instance of federal indian policy you have resistance which we're not covering here right now

but you have instances throughout history where indigenous peoples have fought for their rights to land to

for their community to being sovereign nations etc and that's why the federal Indian the federal government not federal Indian government the federal government has not been able to eradicate us much to their dismay

and so now I'm going to switch into the era that we are considered to be in, which I had mentioned when I talked about the pendulum of federal Indian policy.

So now we are in the self-determination era, which began in 1962.

And we have the right, it's characterized with the revitalization of tribal entities.

So going kind of

back to when there was the Indian Reorganization Act.

So we have our tribal councils.

There's restoration of some tribes under federal recognition who were terminated.

Again, not all of them.

We also have the Indian Civil Rights Act.

So

this kind of guaranteed individual Indians some rights,

not just characterized by their tribes.

Also the self-determination policy.

So this is when

Nixon condemned the termination policy and gave more control to Indians rather than the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was a federal bureau.

And just kind of like other policies that

have given the tribes more rights to

determine for themselves and their own

people

to a certain degree underneath the federal government.

as domestic dependent nations.

And again,

I think that we have seen a lot more movement, but within the context of being within a settler colonial state,

it's always, I think,

a possibility that the federal Indian government or the federal government, I keep saying Indian, the federal government will try

to take more and more.

And I think,

for instance,

when it comes to issues of fishing rights, issues of hunting rights with states, not even just with the federal government.

So, you have a lot of states

throughout history, but still ongoing, that attempt to encroach on tribal treaties.

And again, treaties are the basis of federal Indian policy.

Without these treaties, the lands would have never been seceded to the United States.

And so, there's this sort of like

legal conundrum, I would say, of where all these, all treaties in the history of the United States with Indian tribes have been broken in some way, shape, or form.

But still,

American Indians have to live on their reservations instead of having their land back.

And so nowadays, a lot of movement has been towards

land back, what this means, what is this process.

And I think it means a lot of different things for different people, Indigenous people,

because again,

there's 574 federally recognized tribes.

And so it's not one monolith of ideas, monolith of beliefs.

But by just by saying land back,

that's like recognition that

this was our land first and you're not.

keeping your side of the deal and never have been.

Could you maybe go a bit more into land Back as a topic?

Because like specifically the past five years, it has really

gained a lot more like popularity as like a slogan.

But I think for

a lot of people who like chanted and hear it don't always really know exactly what it means.

There's a lot of mixed opinions on what it means.

Of course, on like the more like reactionary side, it's like people will be like, what?

You're going to like kick white people out of these areas like that's kind of that's what a lot of like the reactionary takes on land back is um

and i'm sure most people who are listening to this podcast that's not what they think um but they may not really know exactly what it means either um they may think it sounds like a good idea but they're not quite sure what it is do you mind kind of talking about how land back has like developed as as an idea and

what like what like you mean by it personally at least

yeah i think i could talk about more about like what i mean by it personally and what i've understood it to mean to other people um because i think um

land back itself it means like a lot of different things and i don't think that

there has been a concrete kind of idea of what it means but i think a lot of the movement i want to like contextualize it within a lot of the uh

sort of act activism that we've seen in the recent years um So, for instance, No Dapple, the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.

And kind of, I think that's one of the more recent events that have really illustrated on a wide scale, like globally, about Indigenous movements,

sovereign movements, and especially when it comes to environmental justice.

But what you saw there was encroachment on tribal treaty land within um

the when it had to do with the dakota access pipeline um so although it didn't cross some of the current reservation borders it was in treaty land you know yeah that kind of thing

yeah same same thing with stopline three how it it encroached on like the hunting land and the farmland that was not technically in the like residential, like

not in like the reservation area where people live, but it's in the surrounding area that is for hunting that is specified in the treaty.

So,

people are trying to use these like loopholes to get the pipelines through.

Right, right.

And so, I think what you see is a lot of solidarity across tribes because this is not new.

This has never been new.

And a lot of tribes can relate to that.

And what you've seen, and what I've hoped that I've highlighted throughout this kind of very brief overview of federal new policy is the different ways that Indigenous rights to land and sovereignty sovereignty has been attacked in different forms by settler and colonial governments.

And I think that the day and age that we live in now has allowed for

sort of more widespread solidarity, especially over social media.

And so when we say land back, for me, how I interpret it as what people mean when they're saying it is recognition of our tribal sovereignty, of our right to this land that has not been respected.

And then I also think that it means:

well,

if these treaties aren't being respected, then how is this treaty still valid, right?

How come we aren't getting our land back because you're not upholding your end of the deal?

Well, some people also might mean and recognize that this whole United States government is a settler state, right, based on the doctrine of discovery, which is based on

denying tribes and American Indians of their rights to this land.

So some people might take it to this whole other context of, yeah, well, maybe

this is all of our land, et cetera, et cetera.

But in practice, what does this look like?

And I think in practice, a lot of people

are seeing it.

with

reparations or people buying land back for tribes and giving it back to tribes.

And we have seen some of that or also just people interrupting the narrative in their own mind of their Euro-American identity.

So

non-American Indians and primarily European settlers and their history of their own families taking part of the settler colonial process.

And how has that,

what about their lands?

There's

everyone who

descends, I guess, from these settlers.

And I want to be specific when I'm talking about Euro-American settlers

and how they currently benefit from these systems.

And I think by saying land back,

we're able to highlight this movement for tribal sovereignty and recognition on a global scale instead of searching for justice within the quote unquote like,

searching for justice within the courts of the conqueror.

How do we expect

for the conqueror to be held accountable for all of these atrocities, attempts at genocide, assimilation, etc.,

by taking it more towards a global scale, such as No Dapple, highlighting these to other people as these are injustices.

Um,

this is this is ongoing genocide.

I think that land back has many, like a plethora of meanings in that sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I hope that answers your question.

I myself um might use it in in some some different ways um

because land as we conceive it to be property kind of grew that concept grew in conversation with euro-american yeah absolutely yeah conceptions of property so i think that

moving forward when we talk about decolonization as a process and not like a metaphor,

that thinking of land back,

not within that whole idea of Euro-American property as well.

That's that's kind of another thing to consider.

Yeah, I think, I think land back will just be a whole other thing that will pay someone more qualified than our team to talk about on this show.

Because yeah, that's definitely like, you know, like all of the things we've discussed, they deserve their own deep dives by people that are

not me, Robert, and Chris.

Let's see, is there any kind of

resources, either books or stuff online that you would recommend for people wanting to learn more about this history?

And then any kind of ways to,

I don't know, I guess show support in these kind of like efforts that are going on?

Yeah, for sure.

So, in terms of resources and reading,

I have read Lorenzo Berricini's

book on settler colonialism.

That's really helpful when you're trying to understand that framework in terms of getting to know kind of more of the basics of like current issues impacting tribes.

The National Congress of American Indians does a lot of work on the federal level.

If you want to talk more about

kind of lived current lived experiences of American Indians, there's Illuma Natives

and getting more involved in those as well.

I think that they have some tips.

But I would recommend everyone getting more familiar with the land that they are on currently, the tribes within their state, and what they can do.

not just on the local level, but on the state level to support tribal sovereignty.

Because a lot of issues,

for instance, I worked

on the state policy level in Washington and in Montana, and both of those have a significant amount of tribes.

But you have a lot of legislation that's trying to happen that infringes on tribal treaty rights.

And the thing is, is

as ugly as it may be to say, but sometimes voices of

non-Indigenous peoples are listened to more within those contexts.

So you need to get more involved on those levels, what sort of like

nonprofit organizations work with your tribes or and what sort of issues are impacting tribes.

And again, these are all going to probably be surrounding tribal sovereignty.

So maybe it's

fishing access, access, hunting rights, et cetera.

I think that's a really good way to make some more

tangible change to feel like you're doing something to support tribal sovereignty while you're also educating yourself and making sure that their voices are at the forefront.

And that's also applicable to the federal level.

especially with, as you already said, like stop line three in Minnesota, contacting your legislators, et cetera, et etc.

And I think also when it comes to

one of the larger issues besides

environmental justice for Indigenous peoples, such as pipelines, you have right now missing and murdered Indigenous women.

So

looking into that.

a little bit more and who you can support who's addressing those issues along with

um

there is

another movement with boarding schools right now because there's been a lot of bodies of young children

that have been uncovered and

this is not an issue that happened a long long time ago.

Like for instance, my grandmother went to a boarding school.

There's still schools that,

although they're not called boarding schools right now, that were boarding schools but are still in operation under different names, etc.

Um, so kind of familiarizing yourself with those histories, and then also there's a

national,

I think it's called the National

Boarding School Healing Coalition based out of Minnesota, and looking into them and supporting their efforts with this issue is also a good place to start.

Is there anywhere that people can find you online?

Yes.

I don't really use

social media that much.

Good for you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I try not to.

I don't know if I want people to find me.

Do not.

Yeah.

Don't do it.

They probably can't find me.

It's better not.

It's better that people don't find anyone online.

It's better we're all just

posting into the void.

There's nothing.

Just the void.

Well, that is, I think, gonna wrap up what we have today.

Chris, do you want to close us out with a funny bit?

Light your local gas station on fire.

Wow.

Well, Jesus Christ.

Killing it here.

Oh my god.

Jeez.

Wow.

All right.

Goodbye, everybody.

Life's messy.

We're talking spills, stains, pets, and kids.

But with Anibay, you never have to stress about messes again.

At washable sofas.com, discover Anibay Sofas, the only fully machine-washable sofas inside and out, starting at just $699.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics.

That means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime.

Need flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.

That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch.

Upgrade your space today.

Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life.

That's washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Big color, baker savings.

It's Sherwin-Williams' biggest super sale.

Get 40% off paints and stains October 17th through the 27th with prices starting at $29.39.

Whether you're refreshing your interior or exterior, we've got the colors to bring your vision to life.

And with delivery, getting everything to your door is easier than ever.

Shop online to have it delivered or visit your neighborhood Sherwin-Williams store.

Click the banner to learn more.

Retail sales only, some exclusions apply, C-Store for Details delivery available on qualifying orders.

When it's time to think Halloween, think Oriental trading.

Sure, we started out as a carnival prize supplier way back in 1932, but now we are the destination for all things Halloween.

Need costumes?

Check.

Decorations?

Yep, we have them.

Candy?

Hundreds of delicious options.

And don't forget the party decorations, tableware, party favors, non-candy handouts, and crafts.

All the best Halloween stuff is just a click away, and it's all backed by our 110% low-price guarantee.

Order now at OrientalTrading.com and get fast-free shipping straight from Omaha, Nebraska.

Looking for an exceptional driving experience?

Find it behind the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz SUV.

Experience the power, precision, and intelligence of an iconic Mercedes-Benz SUV at your local Mercedes-Benz dealer today.

You probably don't remember the passage of Title 42, let alone that of Title 42, Chapter 6A, Subchapter 2, Part G, Section 264.

But it's the part of U.S.

federal law that gives the government the authority to take emergency action to keep communicable diseases out of the country.

The portion which allows a sweeping disregard for asylum law, passed in 1944, reads in one giant run-on paragraph sentence as follows.

Whenever the Surgeon General determines that by reason of the existence of any communicable disease in a foreign country, there is serious danger of the introduction of such disease into the United States, and that this danger is so increased by the introduction of persons or property from such country that a suspension of the right to introduce such persons and property is required in the interest of the public health.

The Surgeon General, in accordance with regulations approved by the President, shall have the power to prohibit and whole or in part the introduction of persons and property from such countries or places as he shall designate in order to avert such danger, and for such period of time as he may deem necessary for such purpose.

Before President Donald Trump's administration used it on March 20th, 2020, it had been used only in 1929 to keep ships from China and the Philippines from entering U.S.

ports during a meningitis outbreak.

But in March of 2020, when you probably weren't paying much attention because the world was falling apart, and when I just returned from a work trip to Rwanda, where I was months before any precautions appeared in the USA, screened for a novel coronavirus, the Trump administration cited this public health law in instructions to the Department of Homeland Security on restrictions for migrants entering the United States.

That very same day, Center for Disease Control Director Robert R.

Redfield relied on this regulation to issue an order suspending the introduction into the United States of certain individuals who had been in quote-unquote coronavirus impacted areas and quote who would be introduced into a congregate setting at the port of entry or a border station.

This includes individuals coming from Canada or Mexico who would normally be detained by CBP after arriving at the border, people including asylum seekers, unaccompanied children, and people attempting to enter the United States between ports of entry.

Citing the new CDC order, that same day, the Border Patrol began expelling individuals who arrive at the US-Mexico border without giving them the opportunity to seek asylum.

Reports indicate the CDC scientists expressed opposition to the invocation of Title 42, arguing that there was really no public health rationale to support it.

Ever since then, public health experts outside the CDC have continued to agree, arguing that while international borders largely remain open to other travelers, there is no need to turn away refugees and expel them to their home countries or send them to Mexico.

Despite this, DHS has been applying Title 42 to migrants for three years since then, and people have been turned away without getting a chance to plead their case for asylum three million times.

Now, Trump is no longer president, but Title 42 has persisted.

It's actually persisted for much longer under Biden's watch, two years and four months, than it did under Trump, ten months.

But we'll get to that part later.

First, let's look at what this bureaucratic wrinkle does when it's applied for three years across a land border spanning 3,145 kilometers, that's 1,954 miles for the Americans listening, at a time when climate change, economic decline, and state and non-state violence are driving more and more people towards the USA's southern border in the hope of a better life.

We're talking about Title 42 this week because it ended on May 11th.

In a sense, this marks an important change in immigration law, but in a sense it doesn't.

Immigration was complicated and cruel for migrants and profitable for people on both sides of the border before March of 2020.

And it's the same after Title 42 has gone.

But nonetheless, Title 42 represents a distinct change in how asylum works in the US and, especially when combined with other Trump policies that Biden has continued, a distinct change in how many people die when coming to this country to try and have a better chance at a safe future.

By April of 2020, Title 42 expulsions at the border overtook the previous record for expulsions under the so-called Migrant Protection Protocol, which is better known as Remain in Mexico.

That was set in August of 2019.

Under an agreement reached with the Mexican government in late March of 2020, the Border Patrol began sending quote-unquote back to Mexico, most Mexican, but also Guatemalan, Honduran, and Saladerian families and single adults encountered at the border.

This group of nationalities remained unchanged until May of 2022, when the Biden administration came to an agreement with Mexico to accept quote-unquote thousands of Cubans and Nicaraguans sent from the United States to Mexico.

But this doesn't really matter.

You'll see that a lot in these episodes.

Immigration law on the ground and immigration law in Washington, D.C.

are two very different things.

There has been extensive documentation of individuals expelled to Mexico who do not fit within these nationalities, including Haitian asylum seekers, some of whom I've spoken to myself.

People who are expelled are often driven by bus to the nearest port of entry, that's a land border crossing, and told to walk back to Mexico, often without their luggage and other belongings.

I've found that luggage and belongings, including ID cards, clothing, and even little stuffed animals, all along the border.

in the three years since Title 42 has been in place.

I asked my friend Paul to describe what we found in Texas when we'd been for a walk along the border wall during our time reporting on the National Butterfly Center there.

You'd find driver's licenses.

I believe at one point we found

like an almost an information packet for like it was for a teenager, a teenage girl.

I remember that because we got pictures of it.

And then when we took that long walk, remember we walked down the border wall?

It was two, two and a half mile walks, something like that.

When we got to the very end of the wall where the

river was,

there was just a giant pile of people's stuff.

And some of it was obviously trash.

You know, they were abandoning clothes after they changed from crossing and stuff like that.

But a lot of it was full backpacks.

a lot of ID documents just in piles.

Just piles of them.

yeah yeah just big piles of documents that proved who you were the other thing we found were ladders tons of them apparently someone built a gazebo out of them the wall varies in design a bit along the border depending on when and by whom it was built but the trump design has a flat anti-climb plate at the top i'll let paul describe how that's going it was literally like somebody went to the hardware store uh bought two of the longest or actually sorry three of the longest two by fours you could put two of them beside each other, and then just nailed steps up them.

So, you know, they were like 16, 20 feet long,

which was enough to just climb over the wall.

Like,

there weren't many places.

Actually, because most of the wall had that anti-climb barrier at the top.

Whereas when you didn't have the anti-climb barrier, you didn't actually have something to set it against.

But once you put that on there, you could just lean the ladder up against it.

It's like self-defeating.

Sometimes these expulsions are not as straightforward as a bus to nearest port of entry.

CBP has carried out what are called lateral transfers by plane or bus, taking migrants to another location along the border, to towns like San Diego or El Paso, even if they entered in Arizona or California.

This leaves families stranded in a town where they have no connections, no resources, and no community.

Again, these are people I've met.

It won't have escaped the listener's attention that those planes and buses and other means of detention and transport are indeed congregate settings, but that doesn't seem to matter here.

Title 42 didn't stop people trying to come, but it made the journey more difficult.

Instead of crossing and trying to turn themselves in for asylum, or approaching a port of entry, people began crossing in more remote places, places without border walls or barriers, and with less frequent border patrols.

In 2020, the Border Patrol found 247 dead bodies along the border.

This is unlikely to represent the full human toll of border enforcement.

Many deaths in the desert go unreported and undiscovered.

But it gives some kind of point of comparison for the 2021 number after a year of Title 42.

546 people died that year.

In 2022, third year of Title 42,

857 people died.

None of those people were guilty of any crime of them wanting a better life.

But under Title 42, they lost their lives because the U.S.

didn't give them a safe way to exercise their human right to claim asylum.

One local advocate, Hamira Yousefi, from a group called PANA, the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, explained what Title 42 had been like for her as an advocate for asylum seekers.

When the pandemic hit,

we saw that Title 42 heavily restricted those who were able to seek asylum in this country.

So while there was chaos happening and folks around the world who were trying to come to the United States for refuge, they were unable to do so.

And what this resulted in is people taking an even more dangerous path, right, than before and going between the ports of entries in order to try to seek refuge.

And so we have had hundreds of cases of individuals who have gotten themselves injured, who the hospitals are calling us because they tried to cross and got injured.

And we're trying to help them with getting some basic legal services and immediate shelter and those types of things.

Since Biden took office, Human Rights First says it's identified more than 13,000 incidents of kidnapping, torture, rape or other violent attacks on people blocked or expelled to Mexico under Title 42.

That's because it's easy for violence to follow people who have no resources and no community to protect them.

It's for that reason that you won't always see faces in my photographs at the border, and that some of the names in this series have changed, or perhaps we're just using someone's first name.

It's also for that reason that not everyone at the border always wants to talk, but we do have some interviews coming up for you tomorrow.

Here's a clip from a discussion about this, which I recorded at the border last week.

I can't speak to what they're doing.

That's what I'm doing.

I don't know about other people.

You should ask.

You should, if you think someone's taking a photo of you, it's okay.

I don't have it.

People who are subject to Title 42 expulsion are not given an opportunity to contest their expulsion on the grounds they would face persecution in the country to which they will be expelled.

There's a very limited exception to Title 42 for people who quote-unquote spontaneously inform CBP officers that they fear being tortured in the country to which they will be expelled.

However, in order to receive an official screening by an asylum officer for exemption under that provision, the CBP officer must first determine that the claim is reasonably believable.

From March 2020 through September 2021, just 272 people were granted the right to seek asylum under this exception.

The use of Title 42 has been, despite the relative lack of outrage since the Biden administration took office, bipartisan.

In 2021, a few weeks before Biden's inauguration, I spent some time talking to migrants at the southern border for Slate.

Many of them had come to a small tent city that had popped up just feet from the pedestrian border crossing, and the country that they had traveled thousands of miles to get to, but that they couldn't reach.

You can see America through the fence there, but you can't get there.

The camp was diverse in its composition.

On one trip, I interviewed folks from Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Ethiopia.

Here's what one of them said to me when he asked for his message to President Biden.

You recognize the voice as Daniel's.

That's because I don't have his permission to use his voice here.

We are appealing to President Biden.

We aren't bad people.

Our goal is to work and get ahead in the world for our children.

We don't want to go back.

They will kill us.

So we are here.

Some of them wore Biden t-shirts, which I suspect were actually a plant by a right-wing agent provocateur looking to make the new administration look weak.

They needn't really have bothered with all the effort.

Biden would do plenty in the next few months to make himself look cruel and unkind.

Before we talk about that, I want to play you a clip from Biden's first press conference as president.

You just listed the reasons that people are coming talking about in-country problems, saying that it happens every year.

You blamed the last administration.

Sir, I just got back last night from a recording trip to the border where I met nine-year-old Jose, who walked here from Honduras by himself, along with another little boy.

He had that phone number on him, and we were able to call his family.

His mother says that she sent her son to this country because she believes that you are not deporting unaccompanied minors like her son.

That's why she sent him alone from Honduras.

So, sir, you blamed the last administration, but is your messaging in saying that these children are and will be allowed to stay in this country and work their way through this process encouraging families like Joseph's to come?

Well, look,

the idea that I'm going to say,

which I would never do, that if an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we're just going to let him starve to death and stay on the other side.

No previous administration is dead either, except Trump.

I'm not going to do it.

I'm not going to do it.

That's why I've asked the Vice President of the United States yesterday to be the lead person on dealing with

focusing on the fundamental reasons why people leave Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador in the first place.

In the coming months, some of which I covered for an op-ed in NBC, about the Biden administration's cruel treatment of Haitian migrants, things on the border didn't get any better.

Biden deported more Haitian people in a few weeks than the Trump administration did in a year.

895 people were deported in 2020, versus more than 1,200 people from January 20th to March 22nd, 2021.

While making declarations about showing compassion to migrants, the Biden administration packed Haitians onto crowded planes and buses and sent them back to Haiti in the middle of a pandemic.

In March, the US sent another pointed disinvitation to Haitians.

The US Embassy in Haiti tweeted a picture of President Joe Biden, looking off into the distance with a caption in both English and Haitian Creole.

In Creole, it read:

The translation above it was, I can say quite clearly, don't come over.

In July of that year, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, himself a child of parents who fled from Cuba, said that Haitians and Cubans fleeing unrest in their countries will not find safety in the US.

even if they have a credible claim for asylum and especially if they flee by sea.

In doing so, he was echoing statements that the US broadcast from planes flying over Haiti following the devastating earthquake in 2010.

Following these announcements, the US diverted resources that it could have used to help people from suffering in a country which had been destroyed by a natural disaster to stop them coming to this country.

He was also overlooking that under both international and domestic law, asylum seekers are entitled to make claims, no matter how they enter the country.

Here's what Majorca said at his press conference.

Allow me to be clear.

If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States.

Part of this hard line is because of a perceived crisis at the border.

You don't have to go far on Twitter.com before you run into people like Fox News's Bill Malugan.

Yep.

The tampon in the coffee guy is now a border reporter.

And he's shamelessly repeating CBP statistics about apprehensions on the southern border.

Here he is, talking to his buddy Tucker Carlson.

Do you remember that guy?

Bill Malugin has covered the border more closely than any reporter in the United States for the last two years.

And today,

in his estimation, the single largest caravan of illegal aliens flowing into this country in his two years of watching crossed today.

He broke the story.

He's got remarkable video for us.

He's live at the border now.

Bill, great to see you.

What did you see?

Tucker, good evening to you.

You mentioned it right off the top.

This was easily the biggest group we have ever seen during our 19 months of covering this border crisis.

And they all crossed illegally into El Paso last night.

And we got some pretty wild camera footage to show you.

Take a look at this.

This was last night in El Paso.

A massive caravan of over 1,000 illegal immigrants crossing into El Paso last night.

Local media, they're reporting it was potentially up to 2,000 people, and that it was possibly the biggest mass crossing in the city's history.

Now, as you look at the video, you'll see just wave after wave after wave of these people walking across the river and then gathering on the U.S.

side of the river where they kind of form a single-file line.

But it's not just Fox News doing this.

You'll see NPR and other more liberal outlets quoting these same statistics without the necessary context.

They're not lying.

Apprehensions are higher.

But that is in some part because migrants are now crossing more than once.

In 2019, before Title 42 went into effect, just 7% of migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol had previously been apprehended.

The re-apprehension rate grew to 27% in fiscal year 2022.

This is because we're expelling people to places where they have no hope of a better future and not leaving them with many options other than to try again in more remote and risky settings.

Meanwhile, there's much less concern from the right and from Democrats at the fact that Ukrainians are exempted from Title 42.

And Russians and Ukrainians generally experience expedited processing of the sort which one would hope this country could offer to other people escaping conflicts around the world, including many that we started.

I asked my friend Gustavo Solis, a border investigative reporter at KPBS in San Diego, to summarize the Biden administration's take on Title 42.

On paper, the rationale is there's a pandemic going on.

We need to stop or slow the spread of COVID-19.

So, because of this extraordinary circumstance, we need Title 42 to shore up the border.

That was bullshit.

And we know that now through reporting, that it was total bullshit.

We know that from as early as 2018, Stephen Miller, Trump's White House aide, wanted to use Title 42

to stop this type of migration.

We know that Vice President Mike Pence pressured the top doctors at the CDC into doing this, basically saying if you don't do this, you might lose your job.

Because even then, in March 2020, doctors at the CDC knew that there was no real public health rationale for this.

I mean, if you look at the order, it's supposed to stop COVID, but there weren't any exceptions for migrants who were vaccinated or there was no testing component to it.

So that's kind of the beginning of Title 42.

By the time Biden came in office, Biden had promised to end it along with Roman in Mexico and restore the humane asylum system.

But he kept Title 42 in place and he didn't just keep it in place.

He expanded it to include nationalities that weren't included when Trump first rolled it out.

Even as the legal battle went back and forth, another major bottleneck emerged in the migration system in the form of the never-ending clusterfuck that is the CBP-1 app.

Again, I'll let Gustavo explain his reporting here.

It actually kind of started with the Ukrainians.

That was kind of how they started using it for the asylum context.

But

CBP-1 is essentially

a phone app for asylum.

And on paper, it kind of makes sense, right?

Instead of like,

you know, Joe Biden and the Dems are really terrified of the optics of a lot of people at the border.

And they, a lot of their policy is revolved around stopping that, right?

They don't want masses of people at the border.

The CBP1 app aims to address that by telling migrants: hey, instead of coming all the way to Mexico and showing up at the border, just download this app and schedule an appointment to come here and we'll vet you to see if you're eligible for asylum or not.

Another example of a policy in Washington, D.C.

that has like no reality in what's going on at the border, because

migrants

live in shelters with really bad Wi-Fi access and they have crappy phones.

So

what I found in the reporting is that CBP1 rewards people with the best phones, not necessarily people who are most vulnerable.

And the story I came out with last week was about how data from the Mexican government shows that at least in Tijuana,

about 44% of every migrant who has gotten a CBP1 application to enter the country is a Russian national.

And Russian nationals make up at most 10% of the overall migrant population in Tijuana.

So you have this situation where a relatively affluent 10% of the population is getting almost half.

of these humanitarian protection appointments that are designed for the world's most vulnerable people.

And that's what CEP1 does.

Like

they call it the ticketmaster of asylum, and that's not a compliment.

That is like ticketmaster fucking sucks.

Nobody likes it.

I also spoke to Kaba, an activist who participated in mutual aid at the border.

We talked about the app because Kaba has some professional insight into the technologies used.

I do data science and machine learning related things for a living.

And the problem of building these systems trained entirely on databases of white faces and then them not working for

people of other

ethnic backgrounds is very well known in this field.

That is a very well documented issue for more than a decade.

And anyone who could tell you that building a facial recognition or some kind of a camera app that does image processing and

only training it on white faces, it won't like that

this is not something that I I think any competent software development house would have done and not expected.

So I have a hard time believing that

the whole chain of everyone has had to go through from the developers on up to

anyone who does IT or

has authority over these things at CBP or at Homeland Security.

This is just, it's like, I don't know.

It's hard to believe that this

Anyway, before we get too far from discussing things that fucking suck, here's an advertising break.

You might be wondering why Title 42 is ending now, and how we got here, given that there seems to be a consensus in DC that the border is in crisis, and that that crisis is not the people we're leaving to die on the streets on the other side or in the deserts of California and Arizona, but the people we're allowing to come to the richest countries ever existed, from countries that we've destabilized for decades, to have a chance at a decent life?

Well, the answer is complicated.

Some of it's a bit too complicated for me to really spend the time explaining, and you don't really need to know the ins and outs of court cases to understand that, essentially, the Biden administration had planned to end Title 42 in late 2022, right after the midterms.

Title 42 actually became theoretically unenforceable in November of that year, thanks to a court ruling.

But the Supreme Court in December prevented the Biden administration from ending Title 42, while the justices considered a request by a group of Republican-led states that want to continue the expulsions, which had previously been declared unlawful by a lower court.

Biden's Department of Justice had previously defended Title 42 as necessary to public health, but by the end of 2022, they were ready to end enforcement of Title 42 politically, even if they were nowhere near prepared on the ground.

A coalition of Republican-led states, however, managed to get a federal judge in Louisiana to prevent officials from ending Title 42, saying the Biden administration had not taken adequate steps required to terminate the policy.

Then on November 15th, another federal judge declared Title 42 unlawful, saying the CDC had not properly explained the policy's public health rationale or considered its impact on asylum seekers.

At the request of the Biden administration, the judge gave border officials five weeks until December 21st to end Title 42.

19 Republican-led states asked several courts to delay Title 42's recession indefinitely, warning that chaos would otherwise ensue.

After their request was denied by lower courts, the states asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

On December 27th, the Supreme Court said it would suspend the lower court order that found Title 42 to be illegal until it decided whether the Republican-led states should be allowed to intervene in the case.

That's some Christmas spirit for you.

Eventually, with the end of the federal emergency over COVID-19, Title 42 just kind of went away.

Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency which put up the most staunch resistance to vaccine mandates, would begin processing migrants under Title VIII of US immigration law on the 11th of May 2023.

I'll let them summarise what they see this to mean.

According to the USCIS website, individuals who unlawfully cross the southwest border will generally be processed under Title VIII expedited removal authorities in a matter of days.

They will be barred from re-entry to the United States for at least five years if ordered removed, and they will be presumed ineligible for asylum under the proposed circumvention of lawful pathways regulation, absent an applicable exception.

What this means is that if you cross into the United States, not at the port of entry, you will be assumed ineligible for asylum, and the process to remove you from the United States will begin immediately.

You have a chance to file a defensive asylum claim against that, but the process can be rushed and more difficult.

Despite this, and having almost three years to repair, they were by no means ready let's hear from gustavo again gustavo can you explain to us a little bit about what you found thereby the administration has been planning for the end of title 42

yeah well i what i found is they haven't really been doing much planning right i i mean they talk about i think with title 42 it's it's a clear example of immigration policy being decided in Washington and no one really from the border being involved or told what's going on.

So, like, I think it was last week,

DHS Secretary Mallorcas did this press release about what they're doing in terms of

processing centers in Guatemala and Colombia so people can just go there instead of coming all the way to the border, which

actually there have been timelines of when those will open.

But they announced all these things for like big picture things, right?

To stop people from coming in the first place, expanding some legal pathways, like making it it easier for people with families already here to get sponsors,

fixing some of the little things with CBP1.

But they don't talk about like on-the-ground logistics, right?

So, for example, I went to Tijuana to talk to the head of the Department of Migrant Affairs there, who told me, and this, and I checked with him yesterday morning, who said, Still, to this day, less than 48 hours before Title 42 ends, he doesn't know how many migrants CBP will allow to cross through the ports of entry in San Isidro.

His guess is that maybe 200, because that's kind of the number that they floated around in December when they originally wanted to get rid of Title 42 before the lawsuit.

And if it's 200, he basically said Tijuana is going to be screwed because 200 doesn't even cover the number of new migrants coming in and deportees.

being sent to Tijuana.

So it's going to like we have this bottleneck of migration in Tijuana and all over the border because of Title 42 for the last three years.

No one's been able to move.

And if they just open it up to 200 people, that's not really going to address any of the bottleneck.

Right.

There's like, I think, is it 16,000 people are waiting like an asylum application right now?

Yeah, I hear different numbers thrown around, like 10,000, 15, 16, and nobody really knows because there's like a network of official shelters and there's a bunch of unofficial shelters.

And there's a bunch of Russian dudes staying in hotels and Airbnbs.

But I think, yeah, tens of thousands, I think 16 is an accurate number.

I think it's instructive here to listen to the Fox News coverage of this and how much Secretary Mayorkis tries to pander to them.

I want to be very clear.

Our borders are not open.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkis says when Title 42 expires at midnight tonight, anyone who arrives at the southern border will be presumed ineligible for asylum and face consequences.

But with holding facilities already overwhelmed, the the administration is ratcheting up tough rhetoric while also clearing the way for mass releases into U.S.

communities with no way for authorities to track people.

You said at the beginning that you've prepared for this moment for almost two years.

So why is part of that plan an honor system?

Oh, it is it is not an honor system.

They are a subject of our apprehension efforts.

But under parole release, authorized by the U.S.

Border Patrol Chief last night, migrants do not receive an alien registration number for authorities to track them.

They don't even get a court date.

Instead, migrants are asked to turn themselves into ICE within 60 days to start immigration proceedings on themselves.

The American people are watching this.

They know what they see.

They see a wide-open border.

Florida's Attorney General is suing the administration, arguing the parole plan is identical to a policy a federal judge struck down earlier this year.

We have confidence in the lawfulness of our actions.

Plans to release migrants at bus stops, gas stations, and supermarkets was first detailed last year, according to a memo uncovered by the the Florida legal proceedings.

Today, Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent a busload of migrants to the vice president's residence.

Greg Abbott's disgusting antics aside, there was a real attempt by the Biden administration to come to the Republican side on migration that we can see clearly here.

In the hours before we expected Title 42 to die, folks like me, who cover the border, made plans.

The day before, on the 10th, Mayorkas announced that Title 42 would be enforced up until 11:59 p.m.

Eastern Time.

And in San Diego, Border Patrol officers closed down the port of entry at San Isidro, the border town just south of San Diego, for a training exercise in which they lined up in front of the cars waiting to cross the border with plexiglass shields and riot gear.

Meanwhile, in between the two 30-foot ball offensive that divides San Isidro from Tijuana, Border Patrol began corralling migrants.

Afghans, Colombians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Angolans, Sudanese, Tajiks, and Congolese people all shared little more than a few tarps and cardboard boxes for shelter as they waited for something to happen.

Despite having months to repair and years to plan, it appears that the Department of Homeland Security totally failed to create so much as a scrap of shade or shelter, and instead chose to house people detained pending processing in the open air.

In tomorrow's episode, we'll hear from some of them.

Man, grateful, man, grateful.

I'll wear nothing I go on, man.

I smile, yeah.

Once there is life,

God alone give everything for some five,

yeah.

No sacrifice.

Big up to Jamaica.

We gotta do it and come back home.

Seeing?

Yeah, man, that's it.

One love, peace out.

On the 11th of May this year, Title 42 finally ended.

I actually began to write this episode the day before on the 10th of May.

But it was that day that DHS announced that Title 42 would be enforced until 8:59 p.m.

Pacific, or midnight Eastern.

They kept Title 42 in place for every single minute they could.

And that same day, 500 active duty troops arrived in El Paso, and a thousand more set off for other border towns to join the 2,500 troops already deployed to the border.

According to a press release from the Department of Homeland Security, CBP and U.S.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement are further expanding detention capacity, ramping up removal flights, and shifting agents and officers to high-priority regions along the southwest border.

This week, CBP opened two new holding facilities, and the Department of Health and Human Services is increasing its bed capacity to prepare for a potential increase in unaccompanied children.

DHS also launched targeted enforcement operations in high-priority regions along the border, including El Paso, to quickly process migrants and place them in removal proceedings.

DHS last week also announced over $250 million in additional assistance for communities receiving migrants.

On the ground, this assistance and planning didn't exactly meet the task at hand.

Albeit, the specific call of El Paso does suggest that they saw their task as not looking bad in the right-wing media.

Here's some audio recorded after a couple of hours walking around talking to people at San Isidro, where Customs and Border Protection had detained around 500 people in between the two 30-foot fences that make up the border between San Isidro and Tijuana.

I'm just

for people familiar with San Diego, like in the Tijuana River Valley Park

by International Hill, where Border Patrol are holding people in between the two border fences.

For those who thought we didn't have a border wall or weren't having a border wall, we have at least two, sometimes three, but right here we have two.

People are being put in between these fences by border patrols.

So I just spoke to some young Colombian women who had crossed

about 15 miles east of here and then been

relocated here.

And they're in between these border walls.

They don't have running water.

What food and water they have appears to be being supplied by volunteers on the northern side.

They've just been given space blankets.

A lot of people are literally sleeping under bin bags right now, blankets.

It's pretty brief.

There's one port toilet sort of thing that we can see, about 500 people.

So it kind of gives you an idea of the conditions.

Obviously those don't live up to the detention conditions that Border Patrol are supposed to hold people under.

But here we are, I guess.

Border Patrol have just said that they're calling an ambulance.

There have been a number of medical emergencies.

There nearly always are in these situations, because you're holding people,

they're, you know, old people, young people, sick people,

and they're in the sun all day, they're in the cold all night.

If it rains, they get wet.

If it's hot, they get hot.

If it's cold, they get cold.

The little children were just asking me for a blanket a minute ago,

which is always a pretty bleak thing.

If you've not been here, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that we have a double layer of walls separating us from our neighbours in Tijuana.

Both sections are now the Trump era design.

But we're standing in a place where not so very long ago Nancy Reagan stood and said she hoped that there wouldn't be a fence here for very long.

Now there are two towering walls, and their little children stuck sleeping in the dust between them.

All the aid to these people had to go through the wall too, and that meant no hot meals because the gaps are smaller than a plate.

Someone tried to bring tents, but they wouldn't fit.

Everything from food to clothes to medical supplies had to go through the gaps in the wall.

Hamara Yousefi, a volunteer from the the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, described to me what she saw that night.

I see about 500

beautiful, smiling faces of people who are desperately trying to get

to safety, and they're confused.

They don't know what's going on.

They don't know how long it will take them.

You know,

many of them are aware that something is happening today.

Many of them are asking, does this mean that I'll I'll be turned back?

What is going on?

I see,

you know,

people who don't even have, many kids don't have shoes.

They don't have, I talked to individuals who lost everything on them.

They don't have jackets.

They're trying to cover themselves with any kind of covering that they have.

Some of them using

trash bags, others using scarves and other types of things to cover themselves from the sun.

We are in San Diego, so it's quite sunny here.

The first thing I noticed on arrival was the dozens of hands sticking through the wall, holding phones and charges.

That's because people need to use the CBP One app to interact with border enforcement, but they've been detained by the same border enforcement in between two walls in an open field where there obviously isn't any electricity.

They also need their phones to stay in touch with their families.

to let them know they survived a difficult and dangerous journey and that they're now technically inside the USA.

Here's the advert a CBP broadcast in Spanish to encourage asylum seekers to download the app before they put them in a place they couldn't charge their phones.

Attention migrants in Mexico City or further north in the country.

Why do you need to download CBP1?

It's a free and legal way to get an appointment guaranteed at a port of entry.

It's a clear way to solicit asylum, and you have the possibility to work while your case is being processed.

If you present without an appointment, you can be prohibited from entering the U.S.

for five years.

You will be subject to expedited deportation unless you comply with the strict requirements of the asylum process.

In the majority of cases, it is assumed that migrants do not comply with the requirements for asylum, and you won't have the right to work unless you comply with the strict requirements.

Again, if you are now in Mexico City or further north, download CBP1.

As we heard yesterday, CBP-1 has been an unmitigated disaster and has shown a very clear bias towards certain types of wealthy and white asylum seekers.

Despite that, it seems to have been the only plan in place for the end of Title 42.

The hundreds of people detained in between defences presumably didn't have appointments, and with no way to charge their phones, they couldn't make them.

It's not clear if making them would have helped, as it seems that they were already being detained and thus they would have to file defensive asylum claims, effectively stopping the repatriation process by claiming that they couldn't safely be sent back to their country of origin.

This is opposed to making an affirmative asylum claim that people should have been able to make at the border with a CBP wallet appointment.

These would not have to be argued with the threat of repatriation hanging over the person making the claim.

Volunteers, local people, a mosque group, and a church group all showed up soon after CBP began dumping more people in between the fences.

An hour after my own arrival, I'd given away all the charge cables that I had in my truck, which is a lot more charge cables than I thought I had in my truck, and all my charge bricks accrued over six years of getting free shit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Later I came back with a massive solar generator that I like to use when I'm living off-grid, but I still need to write stuff.

Even all my home electronics ephemera and the combined efforts of non-profits, religious and mutual aid groups couldn't really make much difference to the 500 people from around the world, mostly families with children, being held between the two fences.

When it got hot, they got hot.

When it got cold, they got cold.

When the wind blew, they got dust in their eyes, and everything was constantly dirty.

The only hot food volunteers could get to them was pizza.

Some of the detained people had cash, and they were able to order DoorDash on the Tijuana side, but again, the meals had to fit through a hole barely wider than my arm.

The only way to get clean was with wet wipes, and there was only one bathroom.

There was no shade or shelter either.

and the only way people could construct shelters was through tying tarps to the border wall itself.

Alec Kaber, one of the volunteers who came to help, describe what they saw when participating in mutual aid a couple of days after.

But it was,

um,

it definitely was.

I don't think it really struck me until you know, after, after

everything, and you know, after I left several hours later, but

the kind of, I mean, I am right about the situation at the border, but the kind of matter-of-factness of there's just several hundred people, including children, just kind of between

this fence

and they're just stuck there with nothing um and and the sort of matter-of-factness of that all um was

i think uh

um i think the part that struck me the most uh um and it's been the most challenging to process in the days before the end of title 42 confusion had reigned at the border A lot of people I talked to mentioned that they thought they had to cross before the end of Title 42, or they would be ejected and not able to apply for five years under Title VIII.

This misunderstanding might, in part, be due to some of the misleading rhetoric put out by Majorkas and others, which focused on the harsh penalties for crossing between ports of entry in an attempt to appear strong on the border to their colleagues in DC.

They didn't place as much emphasis on the right to present and claim asylum at a port of entry.

But As we saw yesterday, it's virtually impossible to actually do that, and Tijuana is already full of thousands of people trying to do that exact thing.

Given the set of circumstances, it makes sense that many people took the days before the end of Title 42 as the final chance to cross.

Before Title 42 ended, I spoke to Deanna Rodriguez from Colombia about her understanding of what was going to happen later that night.

Deanna Rodriguez, the Colombia.

Deanna was with two friends, all of them wearing little daisies in their hair and sharing a tarp shelter they'd made by tying a blue tarp against the wall so they could get some shade and privacy.

I asked her where the flowers had come from.

You hear the rest of the interview voiced by Shireen.

Oh, the flowers.

The flowers, uh, well, there are these little flowers, flowers that are growing here like in a garden.

So when we went and took a walk over there and we found them, we put them on and they're pretty.

We call these the little yellow flowers of hope, and they match the color of our bracelets.

We picked them on the day we arrived, and we knew that we needed a little bit of encouragement.

We got the yellow bracelets because we arrived on on Tuesday.

Everyone got the same bracelet.

I asked Deanna what you'd heard about Title 42, which was ending a few hours after we talked.

Yes, it's the end of Title 42.

Title 42 is the one that endorses mass deportations.

Yes, and well, it's a question of

you not just getting deported, but being repatriated.

In other words, after this, they do a full repatriation.

But right now, you are not registered in the system.

But what they do is that they only return you.

They don't register you.

But let's say, on the basis of Article 8, is that if you, at least we, are invading American territory, then we are in effect breaking a law.

And what Article 8 does is that they deport you and they put you in the registered database saying that you broke the law and they punish you for five years and you lose the right to request your asylum through legal channels.

People at another camp in Hacumba heard the same thing from Colombians.

And it seems like there are even news pieces run on domestic television explaining that the US plan to return many Colombians in the coming months and this might be the last best chance to cross the border without permanent consequences if you got caught.

In Hacumba, volunteers estimated that two-thirds of the people corralled under the Desert Sun were from Colombia.

Of course, in recent years, there has been instability and violence there, which also drives migration.

One of my sources also mentioned that a lot of Colombian people had seen misleading information about immigration law on TikTok.

Two days had passed since Diana arrived.

She came with one of the girls she was now sharing a tarp with, and met another when they were all dumped in the camp together.

In the days before they were detained here, they had crossed three countries on their way to what they hoped was a better life for young women like them.

I asked them to describe that journey for me.

Eight days, eight days more or less, walking from Colombia, from El Salvador to Guatemala, then Mexico to here.

All that time walking and taking the bus.

There's a part 15 or 20 minutes from here where the wall ends, and we crossed there.

There was a Mexican patrol, and when they changed shifts, we ran.

And here we are on American soil.

We arrived on foot, and the police brought us here.

They opened the gate and dropped us here.

Along the way, she said, they've run into a lot of people.

The migrant journey north is such a common trek that people living along the way have found a way to make a bug, but also a way to make a difference.

It's not uncommon for migrants to be extorted, robbed, or threatened.

It's also not uncommon for them to be fed by strangers, perhaps handing off bags with food in them to passing trains or buses, or perhaps given a place to sleep for the night by someone they might never see again.

There were parts where we were extorted.

They took all the money we brought.

They robbed us, they stole our passports, they stole our documents.

So it's always quite dangerous.

Let's say that it's dangerous to take this journey.

Yes, just as we have met some bad people along the way, we have also met some very good people, people who have given us a hand, people who have helped us, people who have collaborated with us in ways you least expect.

I asked Gianna what she hoped for, now she was technically inside the USA.

Yes, let's say the hope is that they will listen to our case, listen to our case, and let us fight the case inside.

Yes, because we want to be able to explain the conditions we are in and the reasons that those of us who are here came here.

Things like extortion, kidnapping, and because our lives are in danger in Colombia.

So we wish that they at least listened to our case and let us plead our cause.

Before we started recording, Deanna asked what network I was with.

I thought that was an astute question.

Networks like Fox show up at the border, although I didn't see any Fox National reporters on my trip.

Certainly local news channel KUSI was there, but their reporting on the ground differed from their xenophobic and outright incorrect online coverage.

I asked Deanna what she'd want to say to folks who might have had their perspective influenced by the constant demonization of migrants by right-wing media.

There are many people who, let's say, are in a mindset of not wanting migrants and they view them with contempt.

Because where xenophobia exists, it's hard for us, because we suffer along the way.

We would like you to change your way of seeing things and your way of thinking, so that you don't look at us with contempt.

We have a saying in Colombia that says that he who was born in a golden cradle never suffers or never sees what he does not know.

So it's hard when you're born in a golden cradle and you don't see beyond what you have.

So there are people that in our case, in my case, I lived a very hard life where you see the war between armed groups.

They exist outside the law and they can control an area.

And you see the kidnapping.

You see the rape of girls.

Recruitment.

extortion, death.

Yes, so it's hard when we experience that and people say things like, these migrants are coming to invade our country.

We also ask them to treat us as people, because if we are here, it is not because we want to invade a territory.

It is because we want to come to fight for a better future for our children without stepping on anyone.

Nobody wants this.

But where we come from, we receive travelers with open arms.

And it's hard when one is a migrant, when one lives the experience of being a migrant.

It is a very hard thing to be a migrant, having to endure cold, hunger, rain, sun, that is all these things, and then arriving here and seeing faces of contempt.

It's hard.

It is very hard.

So, yes, the important thing is that people must know that being an immigrant is not easy.

Being an immigrant is not easy.

One of her friends who she was sharing a top with leaned over to give an example.

Everyone despairs because everyone wants to leave.

So everyone sees each other as enemies.

So, let's say, for example, right now, when they are sending cars to collect people to process, So everyone there thinks, I hope they take me.

Then when they don't, it gets to a point where, yes, where you despair.

I mean, it's desperate.

But, well, everyone.

Everyone is in the fight together.

All in the fight.

After yet another dusting down from a CBP agent who really liked to rouse his squad bike past the mutual aid tables, I spoke to a man from Angola.

I'll leave his name out, as he preferred for me not to share it.

He'd been in Tijuana for three days, he said, and was waiting his chance to plead his case for asylum.

It's just me and my sister.

We suffered a lot.

There were bandits.

We came here to be safe.

It's no way to live.

People broke into our house to violate women to look for people, and I was injured then.

Yeah, why did I leave to come here?

Over there,

they're not the means to live.

We didn't get a chance to talk for long, and some of the recording I got wasn't very good.

He was waiting in line for food, and to be quite honest, honest, I don't like prodding people to share their trauma.

But with so many journalists crowding the border, asking them to do just that, it tends to be what people offer.

Lots of African migrants can be quite cautious of the media because talking to the media at home could get them in trouble.

I spoke to a friend of mine, himself a migrant from Africa.

He said that if migrants don't speak English or Spanish, it can be very hard for them to get information.

And there aren't as many non-profits set up to serve them as there are for Spanish-speaking people, for example.

They can often end up isolated and alone.

I did get a better chance to talk to a Jamaican man called Joseph.

It's his singing you've heard at the start of this episode.

Mostly, we talked about things in America, about how he lost his phone on his journey.

We got him another one at Walmart.

And about things like football and music.

I didn't record all of that because sometimes it's nice to just talk to people.

Hopefully it makes their day a bit brighter and gives them some information.

Maybe they could help.

He did let me record a bit of an interview and some of him singing.

He was pretty guarded on the recording, but as you can hear in this clip, we had a good time when we weren't recording.

My name be a legend like Bob Morley.

Scoring off north going like Lee and L Messi.

He ain't for the sky that me and Pre.

The mamma says, Son, push free and glory.

For them, say my smile, them know my story.

Pierre gonna talk, and I watch me.

Hey, man, grateful, man, grateful.

I'll wear nothing I go on, man.

I smile, yeah.

Once there is life,

God alone give away everything for some five.

Yeah,

no sacrifice.

Big up to Jamaica.

We got to eat and come back home.

Seeing, yeah, man.

That's it.

One love.

Peace out.

That was beautiful.

Yeah, I'm

Joseph.

I asked him about some of the stuff we spoke about before, but he didn't want to share it.

Yeah, yeah,

that's the whole testimony.

Me and you and God have to go into church for that.

But I'm going to give you that the next time.

Okay.

Joseph experienced a lot of personal harm from conflict back home in Jamaica and had a difficult journey here with his five-year-old son.

Yeah, it's rough.

It's rough out there, man.

You know, it's rough.

How did you come?

Like, you come.

I asked him how his young son had dealt with the journey.

It's not a safe or easy one for an adult, let alone for a little child.

It's

just kind of scary, but he pulled you.

Yeah, that's good.

You have my energy inside.

That's good, yeah.

How's he finding it here in the camp?

Oh, yeah, the camp.

I don't know, but

that guy is just like me.

We just don't make anything better.

Yeah, but

it's working here because you guys give me the strength and support in us, you know?

Joseph wanted me to know that he wasn't giving up his home.

He loves Jamaica, but he also wants a better life for his son.

It's not that.

It's not that.

It's not like I'm giving away my home.

My home is a good place.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a good island.

Nice place to be.

Of course, this perspective is very common.

And it's one that often gets left out of reporting.

Coming to the USA is a very hopeful act.

It's not abandoning your family or your home.

It's trying to make their lives better and your life livable.

Joseph was quite guarded with his story, and that's fine.

It's his to share as much or as little as he wants.

I came to the USA without having to get persecuted or hurt, and people who don't look like me should have that same right as well.

Sadly, coming to the USA is also scary and confusing.

Even for me, with three university degrees and all the intersectional privilege I have and 15 years living here, and a recently mitted US passport now, I worried for years that maybe I'd made a mistake on a form or missed some kind of deadline.

Speaking of deadlines, what none of the migrants could tell us, what they all wanted to ask about, was exactly what was happening to them as Title 42 expired.

A Congolese lady asked me if her passport would be confiscated.

A lady from Senegal asked if she needed to pay a bribe like the one she'd paid in Mexico.

It wasn't really clear at first if these people were being detained and under what process they were being received.

Would they be sent back to Mexico under Title 42?

Repatriated under Biden's interpretation of Title VIII?

Or given the right to plead their case as international and US law suggests they should be able to.

CBP made people sit in lines all day with no indication of when they would be taken to the port of entry for processing.

Sometimes I heard people saying if everyone didn't sit down, there would be nobody processed that day.

But the only food, water, and medical attention available to the migrants was that which could be passed through the wall.

And they had to get out of their lines to receive this aid.

I'll let Keiba describe what this looked like.

They had people waiting in lines the whole time.

They could to sit in a line

in a specific assigned spot.

But it wasn't always clear how those lines actually worked because they would kind of take people from lots of places.

I think they might have been prioritizing families with children or people with some kind of medical needs or something like that.

But

you would never know when they were going to come.

And we didn't seem to know also who they were going to choose to take.

We didn't know exactly where they were taking them, but we assumed they were taking them at the port of entry in San Estra, which is about a mile away.

And so what would always happen when they come and get a group is like three or four people from that group would sprint over to the wall because we still had their phones.

And CBP wasn't going to wait for us to get the phones.

One thing a lot of people we talked to shared was that there was another camp, which we later found housed as many as 800 single men.

It's fairly usual to keep single men apart from families, but keeping them in an inaccessible place without adequate food or water is not usual.

The camp was further west, and despite repeated requests from myself and others, including those delivering aid, we were not allowed to access it.

One pair of Jamaican twins, both young men, told me they had walked up there and that things were very bad.

People were only given one small water bottle and a granola bar every day, they said.

One person told me they'd heard people were eating grass.

I asked CBP's press office for information on this, but they didn't respond.

Here's one clip of a man trying to explain how bad things were there.

It's hard to communicate across language barriers, and with a wall between you, it's even harder.

But I could tell he was very concerned for the folks that we couldn't get to.

Despite myself and others trying, and me addressing this issue directly in emails to CBP, I never got any response on why people were not allowed to help the single men in the other camp.

Just not helping.

One water.

One chocolate.

Nothing else.

No food, no water, blankets,

clothes,

nothing

and my little daughter.

I'll go try and go up there.

I don't know.

Even with these camps being pretty desperate places, folks look after one another.

We spoke a lot with one lady who spoke English.

She was there with her own family.

But she was also looking after two Tajik children who'd come alone.

Their mother spoke a little English, so she relayed news to the children by calling their mother and having her translate it for her children.

Other folks took it upon themselves to try and walk to the camp for single men with water.

And people constantly helped us find the owners of phones by wandering through the rows of people sheltering under tarps and space blankets to look for people who had left us their devices to charge.

In Ukumba, a town an hour or so east of San Diego, things were worse.

Cumba's home to a cute hotel, a lovely lake, a hot spring and an awful lot of big rocks.

When the border wall was being built in earnest before the 2020 election, they skipped some of the harder areas.

Perhaps they figured it would be too hard to cross there.

It's not.

Perhaps they wanted to maximise the mileage before Election Day.

Well, it didn't help much.

But either way, for some reason, the wall just takes a little break in Hucumba, and this makes crossing marginally easier there.

However, The boulder fields, scorching hot days, and cold nights make it anything but easy.

On Thursday night the 11th of May locals in Ocumba became aware that CBP were holding people on a dirt road in the open desert just a few miles east of town and a few hundred feet from the wall.

The people held they didn't have access to toilets, running water or shelter.

With every hour that went past, the number of people grew.

The biggest camp soon held over a thousand people, desperately trying to scratch out little shade in the desert.

Other smaller camps popped up, one was apparently in someone's yard, and the people of this tiny desert town set about helping as best they could.

Soon, they were joined by volunteers from all over the county.

Katie was one of those volunteers.

She doesn't live in Acumba, but her friends do, and her family sometimes spends time there.

Once she heard about what was happening, she knew she had to help.

I'll let her describe her feelings after she saw the posts online and then drove out to Acumba to see what she could do to help.

At first, I was just super touched by the activation and the caring, and

my son was

asleep comfortable in his car seat you know in our Mercedes van

and my husband is

still trying to get citizenship after being here since he was two years old

so and we're married and he pays taxes and

when I saw our friends activating it, I just told him tomorrow's Mother's Day and I need to come back here and it's not safe for you here.

So when I first arrived,

I thought it was kind of odd that everything was um

organized around a r a random road that has a gate

and there were five um only five border patrol

at the time.

And about

that was a larger camp, so I want to say at least 800 people, maybe 1,000.

I didn't see them all because

many of them received their donations and the assistance and went back to their shelters.

A few days after the migrants arrived, I camped out in Hucumba.

I was cold in my sleeping bag at night and dizzy in the sun in the day.

It's not a place where you'd want to be stuck outside for long, but it's a place where fifteen hundred or so people were held for days, with little more than the shelters they built out of creosote and mesquite to protect their families from the elements.

They slept on the dirt or in cardboard boxes left over from the food volunteers fed them, and under whatever folks in tiny desert town could find to give them.

By the time I arrived, the migrants were gone and volunteers were cleaning up.

The landscape was dotted with impressively constructed brush shelters.

Volunteers from Hakumba set up tables to distribute food, blankets, water and clothing.

Other volunteers stayed away from the camp itself and spent time packing things into individual sizes, perhaps combining hats and socks and maybe a toy for a child in one bag, or breaking down Costco packages of snacks into individual portions.

It's not necessarily the most rewarding task, but it's an important one.

I asked Marissa, another volunteer who had previously worked in San Diego for the Forest Service, what she felt when we were cleaning out some of those shelters together a couple of days later.

I don't know the best way to say this, but

what hit me deeper was when,

and this might seem strange, but when I saw women's sanitary napkins or the diapers or

the babies, like it was kind of like a fabric padded crib bassinet type thing,

that suddenly hit me on a deeper level it'll make me emotional because it's like

then you start to realize like wow

what if that was me and my child or i'm not a mother but i can only imagine what that must be like for them to be going through these things as a

as a woman being on your on your period and being out and not having anything, you know, going to the bathroom out there.

What what do you use when you don't have those supplies?

So,

yeah, it just,

that was when it hit me deeper.

And

I knew I was doing the right thing by being out there and helping in whatever way I could.

Because I don't, I don't, when it comes to the politics side of it, when it comes to

like legality and just different aspects of it in that way.

I don't have necessarily an opinion one way or another.

I'm not educated enough to feel like I can argue one way or another or defend one position or another.

I went out there purely for

my love of humanity and I think being able to support in whatever way I can, that was the way that I felt like I could serve and be a support.

Katie hadn't expected to meet migrants at the camp when she first showed up.

She knew it was important not to flood the camp with volunteers, and their help was needed packaging and preparing aid drops, which she was happy to do.

But in the end, she travelled up to the camp with a friend who spoke Portuguese so they could help translate and distribute supplies.

I asked her what it was like to see the supplies she'd purchased a few hours before end up in the hands of people who desperately needed them.

They don't even have a grocery store in

Hacumba.

They have one mini mart with

nothing in it.

And that was sold out the first day.

So

these people who we would look at without a lot of resources

passing the abundance of what they actually have.

I saw a lot of families.

I could tell that there were leaders within the group because they were helping organize as much as the volunteers were.

And unfortunately,

there were language barriers,

you know.

And so, those that could speak multiple languages,

whether they were border crossers or volunteers, were together in it.

And that was part of that organization that I'm talking about, you know.

And

it was actually a very calm

scene.

When we first came up, I saw my son's hat that I donated and a little boy hugging this jaguar stuffed animal.

And the jaguar was really significant to my friend and I when we found it.

So it was

really touching just to like

see the things that we were bringing being

literally being distributed like sometimes when you think you're helping i worked for a door-to-door campaign when i was in my teens and i got 50 of what i raised yeah you know and it was like disheartening and you're like oh this is how it works and in this case

money that i directly spent on resources that were needed was going directly to the people.

In all likelihood, people crossed in a specific spot because someone dropped them there, telling them it would be easy.

In fact, it was anything but.

People die crossing around here.

In the dirt around Hucumba, I found discarded flight itineraries and documents from Turkey, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Mexico.

There were also little children's toys, shoes, and hundreds of empty water bottles, which we diligently picked up.

But none of the more than 1,000 people who the Border Patrol held in this camp had planned for what they got, which was several days being detained in the desert by CBP with insufficient water, no shelter and very little food, and no information on what was happening or how long they could expect to be there.

Sadly, I didn't get there in time to speak to any of them.

I was in Arizona looking for border vigilantes and wondering what CBP had been doing to migrants there, where they have the full support of local law enforcement and a large percentage of the aging population.

To my surprise, I didn't find much.

It seemed like most people had crossed in the San Diego County area.

Many had flown or walked to Tijuana.

Of course, migrants just like us have access to the news and to weather forecasts and maps.

Crossing in Arizona, a place known for cruelty and very hot weather, doesn't make any sense when California offers a better political and weather climate.

And with the mixed messages coming down about immigration law, these folks may not have been intending to evade border patrol, but to come to the USA and stake their legal right to claim asylum.

I spoke to Sam, a volunteer with extensive on-the-ground experience in humanitarian crises, about what he'd seen at the camp.

Oh, my name is Sam Schultz.

He said many of the people who found themselves in Hacumba had likely been told by people smugglers that this was an easy way into the U.S.

In the end, it was anything but.

I mean, I know they didn't expect that they were going to just waltz across the border at a normal check station, but they thought it was going to be.

They were sold a bill of goods.

Let's put it back away.

Yes, that's it.

And so,

I mean, I feel sorry for anybody who's taken advantage of it like that, but most of the people that I met, again, who are not Colombians,

were of the wealthier side on their countries.

I met some Uzbekis, some Kazakhis, a bunch of people from India, a couple of Pakistani guys, My Marine.

I mean, they didn't get here cheap.

The wall behind the people in Hokumba cost $25 million a mile on average.

The border patrol agents drove around in F-150 Raptor trucks that start at $80,000 and each make a starting salary of over $60,000 in their first year.

Surveillance towers that dot the desert, including including one which provided a tiny scrap of shade to migrants resting under its solar panels, can cost a million dollars apiece.

But people in Acumba received only one small water bottle each day, despite the punishing weather.

Although Customs and Border Protection did not seem to make any plan to shelter migrants in Hucumba, they did plan to have contractors paid $40 an hour to take them away.

I found a job advert for a Southwest Border Transportation and Security Officer at ISS Action Security.

The agency photographed transporting migrants in Hucumba.

The job posting, which was posted two weeks before the end of Title 42, has a description that includes patting down all detainees and applying appropriate restraints prior to boarding vehicles.

The process for which migrants become detainees normally involves processing, which had not been done in Hucumba, but it seems the presumption of ineligibility announced on the day Title 42 ended came into effect here.

This might seem a a minor distinction, but it's important.

It means that people have to file a defensive asylum claim and not an affirmative one.

They have to plead why they shouldn't be deported rather than why they have a right to stay.

Many of the people will have been trying to cross before the end of Title 42, like Diana, because they felt they would face a less serious penalty.

Many of them flew to Tijuana or walked from further south in Mexico or even in Central America.

and likely spent their entire savings on a trip to the gap in the wall near Hacumba that ended with them being held by border Patrol in the open desert with next to nothing in the way of shelter, sanitation or sustenance.

As a way to quantify this, I want to reference a UCSD U.S.

Immigration Policy Center report.

It apparently had some pretty problematic practices, but anyway, these are results from its survey.

When asked whether Border Patrol gave them enough water for the day, Over half of the asylum seekers that we interviewed, approximately 53%,

said no.

Border Patrol distributed one water bottle to each migrant in the morning.

When asked whether Border Patrol gave them enough food for the day, all of the asylum seekers said no.

Border Patrol did not distribute any food.

When asked whether Border Patrol provided adequate sanitation, such as toilets, all of the asylum seekers that we interviewed, meaning 100%, said no.

Border Patrol provided one port of body for the entire encampment.

When asked whether Border Patrol provided adequate shelter, such as shade to protect them from the sun, all of the asylum seekers that we interviewed said no.

Border Patrol did not provide any shelter.

When asked whether Border Patrol provided blankets to keep them warm at night, all but one of the asylum seekers we interviewed said no.

Border Patrol provided blankets to some migrants, but the overwhelming majority did not receive blankets.

Altogether, two-thirds of the asylum seekers we interviewed said that they agree or strongly agree with the statement, if I did not receive food and water from volunteers, I would not get enough food and water from Border Patrol to survive.

These aren't exaggerations.

As we'll see, several migrants did come very close to losing their lives in the five or more days that CBP detained people out in the open along the border.

Medical incidents in this kind of detention are far from uncommon.

A lawsuit filed against Customs and Border Protection by the Southern Border Communities Coalition regarding their actions this week stated that, quote, many migrants have fallen into medical distress because of the conditions, and CBP has been slow to provide access to medical attention, often only responding at the insistence of advocates.

As a result, one woman suffered life-threatening allergies, a child suffered an epileptic seizure, and a man suffered an unattended infection on his leg.

Medical attention was slow to arrive, and when it did arrive, it was often insufficient.

Alec Kaber described the conditions they saw a couple of days after the end of Title 42.

That's really the part that is hard to understate.

The conditions there were not safe or sanitary.

I guess this is sort of related to the medical issues, but there was, it's been, you know, to their credit, this aspect has been reported in the media, but there was a single portable toilet for anywhere from, I guess there's probably 200 to 400 people there.

I heard a couple different

citations of how often this toilet is serviced and cleaned and the waste removed, anywhere from once or twice a week to once every week or two weeks.

Either way, that's not remotely sufficient for 400 people using the bathroom multiple times a day in this single portable, like just a construction site toilet.

It was right next to the phone charging station on the other side of the wall, and

I would just feel sick if I got if I sit too close to it.

It was really vile.

It was not safe.

It is not a way for people to be healthy.

And I do know, I think, a lot of,

thankfully, people stop using it, but

then they don't have

privacy or that's still not a sanitary situation to be in.

They don't have a feedback space where they're.

So that's definitely one of the ways that people are being neglected in terms of their health and safety.

Here's Hamira, who we'll hear more from tomorrow, describing another medical incident.

And the call that I got this morning was of a woman who was rushed out because she had an emergency situation, taken to the hospital.

The hospital didn't know what to do with her, so they sent her right back here in the middle of the night.

In the middle of the night, and they brought her here.

She doesn't have any documents.

CBP didn't get a chance to process her yet.

So she doesn't even have any proof that she actually came to the port of entry and tried to seek asylum.

And she was just sleeping right here.

And she has burns all over her body, has an infection.

I read

the seven medications that they gave her.

And she speaks Dadi.

She's from Afghanistan.

Her husband got taken by the Taliban and she escaped running for her life.

And she's here and she has sunburns all over her face and she has nowhere to go.

She thought she was still detained.

She actually thought she was still detained.

She was just trying to get back to the other side of the border.

She thought she was still in Mexico.

No one explained anything to her.

They brought her back here in the middle of the night and she was freezing.

And so we brought, that's why I came out here.

I talked to her.

The other folks who were out here didn't know why she was just sleeping here.

And I came out and tried it and translated.

And now we have her at a hotel.

Caba witnessed one of the emergencies described in the Southern Border Communities Coalition lawsuit when they visited the camp.

Here's him describing it.

In terms of, you know, medical care as well, like I said, one of the parts of the aid operation that was going on was people,

I think there's a combination both of people who

were in dentistry medicine as well as people who were like nurses, volunteering their time and things like that.

And mostly taking care of just kind of routine first aid for the most part.

There was a situation where someone was having an allergic reaction,

a fairly severe one.

And I happened to carry an EpiPen, so I simply gave that to

one of the street medics.

And then they eventually did

hold this person.

The reaction got severe enough that it was an hour or so later that

911 was called, I assume, by one of the volunteers and

the ambulance and border patrol came to open a gate and bring this person into the country.

They did eventually treat her, but it was a very, it was a long time after the onset of symptoms, which is someone,

as someone who has anaphylaxis reactions to food, and has had that happen many times in their life, that is absolutely terrifying.

I cannot imagine how terrifying it would be to be experiencing

a life-threatening situation when you are trapped and

there's no authority that really cares that you're there.

And I don't know if she would have been able to get help if there there hadn't been volunteers on her second wall, especially ones with medical training.

Where volunteers weren't, things were worse.

In Texas, Anadis Tane Reyes Alvarez, an eight-year-old girl born in Panama to Honduran parents, died in CBP custody.

Rocel Reyes, the girl's father, told NBC News that they gave authorities documents about the girl's medical conditions, congenital heart disease and sickle cell anemia, while they were in immigration custody.

They said that a doctor there examined Anadith and that she had contracted the flu.

Alvarez, her mother, said she spoke to both detention authorities and medical personnel at the station multiple times to explain her daughter was complaining of pain and shortness of breath and that she was getting worse.

I'll quote the next part directly from the NBC story.

They never listened to me, she said.

Reyes said his daughter was in a lot of pain, a lot of pain.

I begged them to call an ambulance, Alvarez said, adding that authorities told her the girl's condition wasn't serious enough to warrant calling an ambulance.

Alvarez said her daughter begged authorities as well, telling them she could not breathe from her nose or mouth.

Alvarez says that eventually her daughter lost consciousness and died in my arms.

She said authorities took the girl from her arms and put her on the floor, trying to revive her.

My daughter died there in the station, she said.

Avara said she feels authorities did not do enough to help her little girl.

My daughter is a human being.

They had to take care of her, she said.

Despite what you might have heard on the network news, the asylum process is anything but easy.

I've had several visas, a green card, and a US passport, and I can confidently tell you the only easy way I've ever seen to come here is to be very rich.

But even among the convoluted bureaucratic mess that is US immigration, the asylum process stands out as both rigorous and complicated.

Asylum is a process by which people unable or unwilling to return to their country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, politics, or membership of a particular social group may remain in a safe country.

From the 11th of May onwards, migrants at the border were assumed ineligible for asylum if they crossed between points of entry.

They must enter the defensive asylum process to prevent themselves from being deported.

What this means for people we heard from earlier is that they are now taken for whatever god-forsaken holding area they're in and bused to a processing facility, where they're interviewed by an asylum officer to determine if they have a credible fear of persecution.

They may need to provide a translator if there isn't an interviewing agent who speaks their language.

And if they're determined to have a credible fear, they're told to check in with the US Customs and Immigration Office and sometimes given a notice, which may or may not be dated, to appear in court.

My colleague Joe tried to get into one of these hotels to talk to one of the people we'd spoken to at the border, but he was pretty quickly shut down.

Hey there.

I'm a freelance journalist.

I'm here reporting for my boss James Stout.

He's at iHeartMedia.

I'm wondering if you're letting media in here to see the conversation.

Absolutely not.

Okay.

And also, we ask you guys not to constrict any of this area here.

Okay.

So if you're going to set up, it has to be on this side of the line because we have a lot of traffic and it's very dangerous for you, okay?

So like beyond here or past the car?

Yeah.

From here over.

Okay, cool.

I'll stay on your way.

Thank you, sir.

One of the folks we'd met was able to stay in touch via WhatsApp and share the hotel rules with us.

They were pretty strict.

Migrants are confined to their rooms, they can't have visitors, and they can't even order food delivery.

From the hotel, where they're hosted by Catholic charities, migrants need to get to their sponsor in the United States if they have one.

If they don't have one, they can be sent just about anywhere.

I've heard of East African folks having ended up in Alaska, for example.

Once they get to where they're going to be, they check in with US Customs and Immigration Services in their new location, and they're given a special phone which also tracks their movements.

They may have a DNA sample taken in addition to fingerprints.

Later, sometimes years later, they attend a court hearing or two to determine their eligibility to stay.

I've heard of lawyers charging from $5,000 to $12,000 for these hearings, and non-profit legal assistance services are totally overwhelmed at the moment.

The system's massively backed up, and court dates are being given as far out as 2027 already.

They may or may not be able to work during that period, and under the table work is getting harder and harder to find.

Even if they do find work, on less than minimum wage, it can be very hard to save up $5,000 for a lawyer.

And migrants who can't find non-profit help are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to their asylum hearings.

Again, private security contractors, this time from Allied, were transporting migrants to the hotel and guarding it.

Like CBP, the private contractors who guard, transport and incarcerate migrants all rely on the brokerman immigration system to make money.

Unlike CBP, the agents themselves aren't well paid.

$19 an hour is the going rate for Allied, not much higher than San Diego's $16.30 minimum wage.

But the company itself is huge.

It's the third largest private employer in North America, after Walmart and Amazon.

Allied guards are at prisons, airports and shopping malls across America, and it's alleged that some are underpaid, insufficiently trained and improperly vetted.

The company grosses over $20 billion

and its affiliates are frequent political donors.

All across this story you'll see this.

Allied security, ISS action security.

People smugglers, customs and border protection, contractors who build the wall pieces and contractors who install the wall pieces, General Atomics, who sell CBP drones, and the Israeli-American companies who sell the surveillance technology to the government.

All these people make money.

But the poorest people in the world are the only ones losing money, and sometimes their lives when they cross our southern border.

Tomorrow, we'll hear from some of the people who made no money and looked after the migrants, and will continue to support them through the asylum process.

Try and carpool, try and shove into cars as best you can, just so that we don't have a mile-long

line of cars.

We have trash bags, we have gloves, we have things that we're bringing up there.

So we have cars that you can get all of that out of.

Once we pull over, we're also setting up a couple pop-ups.

Cocumba, California is a tiny town.

You've probably never heard of it.

It's actually really charming.

There's a hot spring and a gorgeous hotel, a few stores selling art, trinkets, that kind of thing.

There's a lovely lake fed by the spring.

And on this sun-baked morning, there are about 50 people outside an old petrol station, nervously pounding bottles of water, applying sunscreen, and getting ready to head out into the desert to clear up the ad hoc migrant camp that has held as many as 1500 people out in the open when Title 42 ended.

and Border Patrol made no plans to keep them anywhere.

It was a diverse bunch of people hidden beneath sun hats.

There's an Australian film producer who was at a conference in Orlando and booked a flight over.

A grad student painter.

The folks who own the Hucumba Hotel who organise this whole thing.

They're friends from the hospitality industry in San Diego.

There were students and mums and dads and about the entire population of this tiny desert town.

There are also two former international aid workers who own a tower where you can look at the desert, which is actually a much cooler thing than it sounds.

And there's also a museum of boulders right next to it.

You should probably check them out if you're in the area.

I spent the day helping out in Acumba after the refugees, some of them in handcuffs, had been taken by private contractors to be processed by CBP's Office of Field Operations.

We met at a petrol station in the middle of town.

The space where the pumps should be was filled with tons, and I do mean tons, of bottled water, masks, hand sanitiser, and other necessary supplies.

When I'd arrived the night before, around 10pm, The eerie green and yellow lights reflecting from the roof had lit up the palace of water like some kind of giant lava lamp.

And driving across a desert, the town looked like it was glowing.

The town certainly has had a bit of a glow up in the last few years.

Three business partners purchased Socumba Hot Springs Hotel, a down-in-the-mouth property that had once been a glamorous desert resort, and they've been restoring the place for nearly two years.

Inadvertently, they also purchased a lot of land and a few other rundown buildings in the town that were sold as a lot with the hotel.

It was in one of these buildings, the old gas station, that they set up a de facto mutual aid hubbo almost overnight.

The hotel's not finished yet, and they probably didn't make much progress on it during the week when they were feeding more than a thousand people in the desert.

The town's lake, fed by a natural spring, an old bathhouse, used to be attractions.

Today the bathhouse's roof has fallen off, but it still makes a pretty cool concert venue, and the whole town offers commanding views of the border wall, which sadly is only a couple of hundred yards from the main street.

When I arrived in Hookumba, everything was close.

The mini-mart was sold out, the hotel was still being worked on.

And the hotel kitchen was churning out food for volunteers at the cleanup effort.

I asked Marissa, one of the volunteers I met that day, about her first impressions on arriving at the meeting point.

I was incredibly impressed by what the people of Hucumba and the hotel group of individuals that have organized this.

Like, I couldn't believe seeing their donation depot in that old car wash, just to how well organized everything was and

that they provided so much for the volunteers and that just the level of love and compassion and

was,

yeah, it was an amazing opportunity to be part of, very humbling.

I've been there since late the night before after visiting border crossings in California and Arizona.

And Jeff, one of the co-owners of the hotel, kindly let me pull up my truck in some desert behind his house.

Now, I'm a person who enjoys sleeping outside, and I do it as often as I can.

I try and camp at least once a month.

But that night, I was cold, even underneath my down blanket.

And I couldn't help but think of how desperate it must have been to spend nearly a week out there with nothing but a Mylar space blanket and some thorny bushes to keep you warm.

It's certainly not the welcome that one would expect from the richest nation on earth, which had three years to repair for the day Title 42 ended.

To get a bit of background on the town, I spoke to Natalie.

So the previous owner bought it at an auction.

And

I don't think that the previous owner didn't realize how much he was getting.

And he kind of just like neglected a bunch of it, you know, and then he was older.

And so he finally sold off the hotel.

He thought he was just buying the hotel, but he was buying all the land as well.

So when they bought the hotel, they acquired all the land.

And they're actually putting money into it and fixing everything up, which is really wonderful.

The hotel and Lake in Hot Spring really are wonderful, but the scene that had played out there on the 11th of May was anything but.

Within a short period of time, more than a thousand people of all ages and nationalities will be held in the open desert and left to fend largely for themselves.

I'll let Natalie describe the space they're in.

There's lots of cactuses everywhere, so that it's environmental, like to watch out where you're walking.

It's hot, it's hot in the day and really cold at night because it's the high desert.

There can be gusts of wind that can just take over,

get dust in your eyes,

your hair.

Everything's just, you're just filthy.

I don't lack of food.

I mean, there's no resources.

You're in the middle of nowhere.

I've talked to a lot of the volunteers, many of whom had been in the desert for nearly a week.

They'd first been made aware of the impending humanitarian crisis late on Thursday night, when one of the people working on a renovation of the Hot Springs Hotel got a call about it.

Within a few hours, the hotel's owners and all their staff were running what became very nearly the only source of food, shelter, and water for more than a thousand people trapped and held in the desert by CBP.

I spoke to Sam.

another volunteer, to get a sense of response.

Now, Sam is a kind of guy who just looks like he's at home in the desert.

His wide-brim hat, boots, and long-sleeved shirt and pants told me he spent plenty of days under the baking sun out here.

And his readiness with an isopropyl alcohol spray to disinfect people's boots after walking in an area that was likely covered in human shit told me he'd been around one or two situations like this in the past.

I spent a great deal of my life as his second career working in developmental relief logistics in Southeast Asia, mainly working with large-aged organizations.

For example, World Food Program, Doctors Without Borders,

UNICEF, many, many different placements.

In the context of that kind of experience, it's easy to understand why people come to the United States.

But I asked Sam to put the situation here into perspective for me.

It's understandable that folks came to the U.S., but why into a tiny desert town of 500 people?

These people were radically unprepared for what they were going to go through because they were sold a bill of goods by coyotes on the other side about what was going to happen to them.

You understand?

So they had really no idea what they were getting into at all.

And so

there was not anything in the way of life-threatening situations for any of those people in any meaningful way, a great deal of discomfort.

It could have turned very badly if these people here had not stepped up because the Border Patrol was completely overwhelmed.

Yeah.

And so

there was never that bad of a situation here compared to what I have seen in other places in the past.

As Sam pointed out, the migrants were now gone, but we were still surrounded by tons of supplies.

But at the time, there was no way of knowing the scope or scale of the need.

And people reacted as best they could.

Actually, it was overkill, but you had no way of knowing at the time.

There's just no way to know.

How do you know ahead of time?

You always ask for as much as you can get because why would you not?

I mean, you never know.

You don't know whenever.

You don't know how many children with babies are on the other side of that wall right now.

Might be zero, might be 500.

You have no idea.

Before anyone knew how or if this was going to end, or really what even was going on, dozens of people across the county decided to help.

One of them was Katie.

Here she is describing some of the volunteers she worked alongside.

There was a hodgepodge of people and as volunteers, and leading it were

some of the owners of a hotel out there.

And that was the main organizers.

but who showed up were people from the town um people that i knew and recognized um there were some really devout like there 24 hours a day and then there were some coming in and out but i met people from all over the county um

and most of them answered the call through instagram of the hotel all those volunteers called their friends who called their friends who gradually coordinated a response.

Natalie first became aware of this, as many volunteers did, through an Instagram post by Melissa, another of the three co-owners of the Okumba Hotel on Thursday night, just as Title 42 was ending.

Natalie saw the post and decided to help.

At first, she wanted to leave right then, at 1am, as soon as she'd seen the post.

But after consulting her family, she decided to make her own post, asking for people to bring supplies that were needed.

Soon, she was overwhelmed by the response.

Yeah, I mean, immediately, even at one in the the morning, I was getting messages because I posted it.

That's when I posted the story.

I immediately got messages from friends saying, I'll bring a blanket over.

What's your address?

Yeah, everyone just kind of rallied and started bringing supplies over, collecting money as well.

Some friends started collecting money and then bought stuff and brought loads of food and things to my house.

Her husband ferried the supplies to Hucumba, where they were joined by donations from all over the county in the old petrol station.

Like Natalie, Katie also saw a post and immediately felt compelled to help.

She called a friend and some members of her family and set about raising funds and buying supplies.

So

I met my friend at a cafe and in that, in the meantime,

and I don't know how much of this is really important.

This is great.

Just keep going.

So in the meantime, I text my mother and my two sisters who live on the East coast and just it was late at night for them and I just said I would love for you to

send prayers

because

that's something that

I believe in I believe in prayer or intention

and

thought reality so

and some of it was just because I felt

so touched like praying for the community that I love too

and

the next thing I know like my Venmo was blowing up and there was a thousand dollars in my Venmo

sent from my family members and so by the time my friend arrived we were like let's go and we um

filled our car with uh

amazingly we found like organic

there's grocery outlet right so we found organic soup for you know a dollar something a can and and we spent

a few hundred dollars and the next morning we met early and we stopped in El Cone on the way and we spent all the rest on we went to three or four thrift stores and bought every blanket and hat and baby carrier because

we have both focused on

motherhood in our careers.

I asked the people I spoke to about a week later how the experience had impacted them.

It was overwhelming.

Just

the way the community really came around and supported

the people in Hokumba that were trying to help.

You know,

after we finished cleaning up, when we were back at the gas station um the

amazon driver was delivering like i think he delivered 350 back boxes

and so we had to open them up and sort them and it was there was so much food

um i think that it was insane amount of food.

And it was awesome.

It was really cool just to see how many people stabbed up and donated.

Unlike some of the people I I saw in San Isidro, Natalie, Katie, Sam, and Marissa are not part of an NGO or a mutual aid collective.

They're just people who wanted to help.

And that describes most of the people in Hocumba, although some of them did have previous regular volunteer experience with excellent groups like Border Kindness.

I asked Katie to reflect on the mutual aid approach and the absence of massive multi-million dollar organizations.

Yeah, the Red Cross wasn't there, right?

No, they weren't there.

We were told that the Red Cross couldn't come unless Border Patrol called and Border Patrol told us that they weren't allowed to call the Red Cross.

The one institution that did show support to people in Hocumba was one that you might not expect given the support for this cruel immigration policy by almost all the Democrats in DC.

But things are different when you can see the results of these policies with your own eyes.

Perhaps that's why I didn't see a single elected official in my entire week at the border.

But One person I missed, but who everyone mentioned, was a lady who worked for California Senator Steve Steve Padilla.

I won't name her as I don't have her permission, but hopefully, one day soon we'll be able to interview her.

I'll let Katie describe the role this woman played.

There was someone from Steve Padilla's team, and that's the woman I rode with.

And

she was incredible.

Her brother-in-law is the chef at the hotel.

So I think,

I mean,

she might have came anyway, but she came faster.

And there was true connection.

And she stood up to the Border Patrol and said, you know, said, we're allowed, we're here on behalf of this senator.

So, I mean, I saw some like

head-to-head like arguments about our right to be there.

And most of us didn't weren't paying attention to that.

We were paying attention to the people that we were, you know, around.

And no one that was out there

didn't believe that we should be out there and that more help should be out there.

Sadly, part of that familiarity with the system that this woman brought to the team also meant a familiarity with the cruel and arbitrary nature of it.

Katie says that they had to organize for that as well.

So,

my friend and I, we ended up riding in her truck, so in Steve Padilla's

Senator Padillas

assistants truck so we had the opportunity to ask some questions that probably everyone out there wanted to know including the migrants

and it was like what will happen and

what's the process from here and how do you know that these people are being tended to

and I literally heard her on the phone getting as many bodies on the ground to start going to those centers where they're being taken to make sure that they were that that we would follow them through the entire

process

as best possible, monitoring they're well well cared for, that they were well cared for, as well cared for as possible

in a system

in a process like that.

Yeah.

But she literally said though they're going to be bussed off and put in cages.

And that they would do their best to make sure that the that no one was split up and that um everyone was fed, showered,

and um they weren't allowed to bring anything with them.

So a lot of the cleanup was all of

the things that everyone donated

that had to be left behind, including some of the stuffed animals.

For all the volunteers I spoke to, the chance to be of service was empowering.

Here's Natalie discussing that.

Yeah, I mean, well, like, and so many times you like feel overwhelmed.

with like so much suffering in this world and like what can one person do you know and and so it did feel good that to actually see an immediate impact, like I'm doing this and this is a result.

Because sometimes you can just get discouraged, you know, like we're just one person.

What can we really do?

And can we really make an impact?

And just seeing that and being able to see directly how that

one person can impact, you know, can rally.

Like just seeing how my friends came together, you know, went shopping, bought things, gathered money, collected money.

You know, my really good friend Sam, she went to her local bar after she collected a bunch of money, went and dropped stuffed supplies off at my house.

She was just down at her local bar and just chatting with them and like, oh, what did you do today?

And so she told them, oh, I collected money and I bought supplies.

And then the people, she ended up collecting about $200 more at the bar from people hearing her story.

And so then the next day she went and bought more supplies and she actually ended up driving them out herself.

She ended up doing like three trips just from her own talking to people and collecting.

So just like the little impact that, you know, everyone just kind of coming together and making a difference.

If you need medicine, right here.

Si selectesita, Melissina.

Se ponga del ninyaqui.

You need

In San Isidro, a pretty diverse range of San Diegans came to help.

On the first night, I personally left at about one in the morning after spending almost two hours trying to leave, but needing to get charged phones back to their owners by loudly in Spanish, then French, then English, describing the backgrounds on the phone or the color of their case.

had the wire behind me.

It wasn't a great system.

By the weekend, Caber and others had seen that more help and organization was needed, and they decided to plan a response.

Here's Kaber describing how they prepared for that.

Yeah, yeah, we met

up at a target near my area because I had already

thought that, you know, maybe I'll just grab some.

You know, I was paying attention to people I knew who were doing aid and what supplies they were saying was needed.

A particular store near me has like a wall of travel size, like these giant tubs where you can basically just scoop out a hundred deodorant pens and toothpaste and things like that.

Kevin met up with some other members of a local mutual aid group.

I'll make sure to include donation links for all the groups I've mentioned at the end of this series.

So please make sure to listen right through to the end.

I met up with him.

And he had just received a bunch of donations through Mutual Aid Network.

So

we know even more of the travel size.

I got some

tooth hygiene kits and deodorant and

a bunch of trans and papers

because the kids that are between the walls don't really have

much to do

unfortunately.

So

those went really fast.

And so we got a whole bunch of bags of all those kinds of supplies and then we drove down the border from there.

By the time they arrived, various organizations had organized areas along the wall for different kinds of aid to be passed through.

Everything from clothes to food to medical supplies and toilet paper was piled up, given out.

I know that I

helped give out some of the friends and pads of paper, and

those were a big hit.

Tons of kids all came running over from

all the parts of the camp when they heard that there were toys being given out.

So that was, it was, it was heartbreaking, but it was also,

you know, it made me smile too.

Seeing them smile made me smile.

Because of the need to use CBP1, and of course the need to stay in touch with families back home.

There was a constant and overwhelming demand for phone charging.

News reporters took phones back to charge in their cars.

Some people bought charge bricks and power strips, and mutual aid groups wrote names on the back of the phones using painter's tape and Sharpies so they wouldn't get separated from their owners.

By the second day, it was a better system, but on the first day, it was chaos.

I'll let Kaber, who spent a whole day charging phones, described the system that volunteers came up with to mitigate that chaos a little bit.

And obviously, they couldn't charge their phones if they're just in this kind of desert gap between

these walls that doesn't have any any kind of amenities or anything

so we had a system where

they would pass a phone through and we had

we would we would put a piece of tape on it with their name and give them a piece of tape with their name the same name and then they would give us the if they came back a couple hours later they give us the tape back and and we'd match the names and get them the phone

And that was, it worked well enough.

I mean, it was

still an extraordinarily chaotic process.

I mean,

we always had at least 100 phones on our side of the wall at any given time.

And some people had,

you know, some people had chargers, some people didn't.

Some people had Android or Samsung or old iPhones.

Some people had wallet adapters and some people didn't have the wallet AC adapters.

So we kind of had to, every phone that came through was we had to find a way to get it

daisy chained into the set of generators that we had, which was do we have our power strips?

Do we have the right cables?

And do we have space on those cables?

And I think it was a bit of a puzzle the whole time.

The only part of it that really overwhelmed me was we did overload.

Someone brought a bunch of

USB-C power strips and we blew out one of them.

And so there was now eight phones attached to it that I had to find new spaces for.

And I was just like,

that was the only point where I I was just frustrated by

this whole situation.

And in addition to the fact that I'm just

the phones and

plugins trip had been charging for who knows how long since that thing, since that thing short-circuited or whatever happened to it.

It was chaos, but it was a good-natured chaos.

Over the several days that migrants were detained in the open with no shelter and inadequate sanitation, just about two miles from the discount mall where you can buy cheap Ralph Arren shirts if that's your jam, people showed up in ever-increasing numbers.

The American Friends Service Committee helped organize volunteers into groups to distribute food, package up wet wipes, snacks, medicines, give out tarps, and do just about anything else that they could, or anything else that they could fit into Ziploc bags that could be passed through gaps in the wall.

At least, people who had been immigrants themselves, or who were the children of immigrants, were notably numerous among the volunteers.

I spoke to one of them.

My name is Lon Chai.

I'm a part of Asian Solidary Collective, a grassroots organization here in San Diego.

I've been coming over here since yesterday.

I came here around 5-6 yesterday and then I came back through here this morning and been here since I got home at 12 last night and woke up, dropped my kid off and came right back with more supplies.

I've been reaching out to family, friends, and community to help donate supplies and things like that, food, whatever they may have.

And

I've pretty much been driving around city and collecting from folks that can't make it so I could bring it down here myself.

So that's what I've been doing.

Lancha explained to me why it was so important to show up.

My community,

I'm pretty sure they're sympathetic to this because I'm coming from, I'm a first generation Cambodian American here in the U.S.

And when my parents and my family fled their country, they went through this.

as well.

So somebody somewhere came and provided the supports, provided the aid, the donations for them to be able to make it to America, to cross over and able to

provide out here for me growing up out here.

You know, so it's just, I just sympathize with it, with the whole thing.

I mean, I mean, everybody should...

should feel the same way because somewhere down the line, our families went through similar situations.

If you're not Indigenous,

then your family somewhere down the history went through the same thing.

So, you know, everybody should have a heart for this and be able to come down here and donate or donate their time time or supplies, whatever the case may be, you know, come out and help.

He also explained why he feels it's important to encourage empathy for refugees.

Well,

you have to be, keep in mind, there's families out here, there's young children, there's babies.

I mean, it takes a lot.

for a mother to pick up her infant child and to leave where she's coming from.

So that just says a lot about what's going on, where she's coming for, for her to trek and to go through this, to sit out here in the cold and stuff.

Because if she would rather

endure this

and take the risk and the chances, that means where she's coming from

is not as, you know, she's willing to take that risk.

Later that night, I saw an Afghan family come to help the other Afghan families.

Their kids talked to other Afghan kids, separated by the border wall.

They passed crayons through the wall and coloring books, and their little daughter asked her dad if she could give her watch to the Afghan girl being held in the camp.

Her dad said, of course.

I don't record or photograph people's children, certainly not without asking, and I wasn't about to interrupt them, but it was a very sweet moment.

The father of the family had worked in the Army Corps of Engineers.

He'd been to the border before, to build this section of the wall.

I didn't really need to ask him how it felt to see folks stuck behind it, but it said a lot that he and his family had taken the time to drive down, buy bags of supplies, and then come face to face with the people who needed them and hand them out.

Like dozens of other folks, they tried to pass whatever they could through little gaps in the wall to make someone's day a little bit brighter.

Another volunteer who we heard from yesterday came from a local group called Pana.

Hamira had been at the wall since 5 in the morning, and it was getting on for 5 p.m.

when we spoke.

I normally ask people what they ate for breakfast just to tune in the volume levels on my recorder a bit, but I'm going to include it this time, just so you can see how long her day had been and how hard she'd been working.

Okay.

Do you want to say second?

Tell me what you have for breakfast.

Let me get that.

I don't remember anymore.

French toast.

French toast.

My name is Hamira Yousafi and I'm with the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, PANA, or an organization in San Diego that fights for the full inclusion of refugees and

those who come from refugee-producing countries.

We spoke about the emergency that had kept her here all day.

So in terms of this morning, I mean, I was, you know, very concerned because there was an asylum seeker who had

an emergency and was rushed out of this place.

Where now, like, for example, where we are at right now, is people who are being detained in the most inhumane way possible.

This is going against CBP's own protocols and policies as to how they're being detained.

With no, they're not giving them food, they're not giving them bathrooms, they're not giving them basic, basic things that they need to survive.

And so, that's why the community is out here today to do that.

Sadly, not everyone who showed up at the the makeshift detention facility was showing up in solidarity.

Local anti-migrant activist and blogger Roger Ogden showed up.

Now, Ogden might be familiar to some listeners, due to his attempts to host what he called a Patriot Picnic and his advocacy for the removal of the historic chamurals in Chicano Park.

Ogden organised gatherings in the park in 2017 and 2018, and they resulted in a huge and overwhelming community response to defend the park.

And this time, Ogden decided to keep to himself.

But Natalie ran into some people who weren't quite as shy about their opinions.

You know, a lot of the people in the Hukunbo community are, you know, lower income.

You know, they are struggling in their own struggle on their own.

And so I know,

you know, maybe, I don't know, sympathetic, like for those people, I don't know, like

it's hard.

I don't know.

I mean, towards the end, like when I was walking to my car,

this man, this man in a car, like pulled up and he's like, excuse me, what's going on over there?

And I was like, oh, we're gathering, you know, supplies for the asylum seekers.

And then I, you know, like, I, if you're from here, you kind of, or if you're in Hocumba, you kind of already knew what was going on.

And so him asking me that, I was kind of like,

and then he just started laying into,

I've had illegals.

you know, have broken into my house a few times.

Why are you supporting illegals?

And I'm like, we're trying to let, like, make sure that people don't die.

and he just kept going off on me and so he you know his the whole um

everything all the talking points that people have about not um

um allowing people to come seek asylum here um and so i just walked away marissa didn't run into the same kind of vocal opposition but she said in her conversations and attempts to process everything she'd seen She ran into some of the sort of knee-jerk responses that people can only really make about immigration when they haven't looked the cruelty that they're advocating for in the face.

It took me a little while to

kind of work through just how I felt about it on an emotional,

maybe spiritual level.

And it's difficult to

I found it difficult to explain my experience because I don't know that somebody can really truly understand that unless they've actually been out there and done it themselves.

Because the arguments or their kind of

debate, so to speak, what they would come back at me with when I was sharing that is, but we don't have enough food or housing to be able to support that many people coming in.

And I'm like, but we just had so many people and so much money put out there to help in a very short amount of time.

Look how many donations were donated, how much money was contributed in a short amount of time from not that many people.

I'm like, obviously, we do have the money.

Obviously, we do have the food.

So, where's the breakdown?

Like, is it our system that just doesn't allow for that to happen?

I don't know.

And that's where, like, I don't, I don't understand it enough, but I feel like

it just made me me realize that I don't know that anybody that I spoke to afterward really understands it enough either, because their arguments or their defense

and what they tried to share on the opposite side of me going out there and supporting just felt like it was

just something to say, you know, and like what they what they hear from

the general media out there and they they also don't don't really they can't quite grasp it so they're just kind of throwing something out there i guess is what it what it felt like kaba also ran into some less than charitable san diegans this time down in sana cedro yeah so um i guess the first part is is why they might have or how they might have found us there um which is there's a uh a local uh news organization in san dato called caba si um which is

um kind of a I would describe as a local equivalent of something like One American News, which which is really unfortunate because we already have One American News here.

But they

are

pretty well known for kind of

a lot of like

misinformation,

kind of scaremongering about unhoused people,

immigrants,

vaccines and all that sort of sort of thing, but with kind of a local news sort of aesthetic to it.

And they were, as far as I could tell, they were really the only identifiable media that were there throughout the day.

I read articles eventually that made me realize there were other

reporters there that weren't identifying themselves the way that he wished I was.

But they had seen this one cameraman just shooting B-roll, I guess, and he was walking to all the different parts of the wall and like all the different sort of stations for aid and like trying to, like really trying to get as many faces.

as possible.

You could kind of tell that that's like what he was doing.

Everyone who I was around, I was kind of you know, oriented mostly with kind of the like sort of like anarchist mutual aim

people.

And, you know, when they saw the KYSI truck, they were like, okay, everyone is their mask on.

You know,

I still had

M95 with me, so I wore that.

And I

had a, you know, slightly identifying logo on my select shirt, which I taped over

so that, you know, that that image wouldn't.

uh show up.

Now, KUSI have drifted further and further right since 2020, along with their minuscule viewership.

These days, they engage in fake news culture war stuff, like repeating the recent false accusations that Target was making tuckable swimming costumes for kids or labeling everyone in the asylum process illegal immigrants.

It's sadly pretty standard for right-wing news organizations now.

Kaba thinks that some of the people who saw footage on KUSI or perhaps found the location posted on Ogden's blog came down to the border.

Like several hours later, that's like when we started to see people, you know,

kind of

coming by and and and we could tell that they weren't volunteers because like people when people would drive like plenty of people who weren't even necessarily volunteering would drive by and say like hey I just remotely and I brought a case of water and and they'd bring in the water and then they drive away but the people who are doing who are like here to I think you know kind of do some kind of intimidation where you know they wouldn't approach directly they would just kind of get out of their

exceptionally large SUVs and and just kind of just kind of watch

and they would kind kind of, you know, get a little bit closer at a time and then, you know, a little bit closer

and kind of whisper to each other and point at things.

And, you know, it's just kind of they were just watching.

And, you know, they got close enough that I could read their shirts.

And the shirts had a slogan that's associated with a Christian nationalism slogan.

So it was this whole family.

It was kind of sad that the kids were wearing shirts too.

And so I kind of,

you know, I figured figured out that that's what was going on.

And I never talked to them.

I didn't approach them.

But I stood,

when I was seeming to get closer and closer, I kind of positioned myself in between the rest of the volunteers and this group

and just kind of

didn't even stare at them, just kind of looked at them and just made it clear with my body language that I knew.

what they were doing, like they weren't, you know, they weren't doing any kind of secret agent thing or whatever.

Like they were being really, really obvious.

And And I just stood and positioned myself in a way that indicated that I know what you're doing and you're not going to get close.

You're not going to interfere with what we're doing here.

You're not going to come talk to anyone or troll anyone or whatever you want to do.

And eventually, one of the people who is either a volunteer or worked for one of the NGOs could definitely tell there was something going on.

So she went over and had a conversation with them and I couldn't hear and eventually they decided to leave.

And I think she was just kind of trying to be diplomatic, but just sort of like asked them if they wanted to help.

And if they don't want to help, then, you know, you could

go be somewhere else, I suppose.

And

it was,

I mean, the sort of one

amusing part, if you call it that, was that they apparently the complained to this person about me because they said that

I had been watching them and

I was racially profiling them because they were white.

And I realize now that this is an Elon Musk interview, but just for the listeners, I am very, very white myself.

I think it's important when we discuss volunteering to honor how hard this kind of experience can be on people.

Obviously, the trauma associated with seeing people brutalized by the state and capital is not the same as being brutalized by state and capital yourself, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

I asked Natalie to reflect a little on children's toys we found in the shelter when we were cleaning up the camp.

Like as a mom, like I have my own children and it just really,

it's emotional.

It's like, it's just,

like, I'm like, who's who, what child was playing with us, you know, here in this space and,

you know, that no child should be ever in, you know, an encampment like that.

Or

it just, no one should be living outside.

No one should.

be doing that.

But also it's like kind of like the humanity in a way, like that, you know, even a child's going to play where every child is going to play.

And like that little toy of little,

hopefully it brought that kid some joy in that moment, you know, if it was their little piece of home or someone gave it to him or what, you know,

it was, yeah, the reality.

It was like, it was like a person, you know, like a little artifact of someone who was actually there, you know, like it was a little more tangible than.

you know, a sock, you know, that's not, that's not, I'm not thinking, you know, who wore that sock, but think of who, who, uh, who was playing with that joy you know was it a little boy a little girl how old were they did they bring it home are they missing it when they saw when i saw they have that she needed people to clean up it was like okay i took a day off um of work and um went out there and just felt overwhelming i almost i mean just one day of me working out there um was really emotional i can't imagine how you know melissa and all the people that were on the ground just dealing with it and i know they're just struggling a little bit and just

processing it all has been really hard, you know,

really hard.

It's just, it just, just how privileged we are, you know, like no one leaves our country because they want to.

They leave because they have to,

or they feel like they have to.

And, you know, it's, I mean,

just

respecting and honoring and understanding the privilege that you're in and not taking it for granted because it's very easy to.

Both Katie and Marissa said they don't really identify as political and that they wanted to be there as people.

Sometimes, often, politics can become a complicated game of numbers and statistics.

But it's important to remember that what this is really about is organizing in such a way that we can take care of one another.

And that the most important politics of all is the politics of feeding hungry people and maybe bringing a sad child or stuffed animal.

Here's Katie talking about the community response.

I think I'm a really compassionate person and I'm not very political in the sense that like I don't really participate.

My life and my community's life is solution oriented.

So

I saw like that on a large scale.

Like when people come together, we create solutions when and you don't wait for

someone like the government to show up and fix it because

then people will die.

You know, I mean, that's the reality is if that community didn't activate, there would have been a lot of dead people in the desert.

Katie shared with me that she'd been having a difficult time, feeling guilty for not having the language skills to do more and questioning her own worthiness to be there helping.

But in the end, she said she felt that what she'd done was right and important.

I'll leave you with her thoughts, and tomorrow I'll be back to talk about the people who put everyone in this situation in the first place.

The Department of Homeland Security.

I think an important thing is like so many times

we hear about things and we say, Isn't that awful?

And we kind of shut down because

we don't feel

empowered or we don't know how to help

and

literally a smile

makes a difference

a feeling of like I see you and you belong on this planet makes a difference and

you know little kids packing up

canned goods and fruit snacks for other little kids they didn't see those kids but when the adults said they're gonna be so happy to get that package,

they felt like they made a difference.

And those little girls are gonna grow up and not be afraid to step up and make a difference.

I think a lot of people think like they can't do enough, so they don't do anything.

And if we all just do a little bit or what you can,

then

I think we would see a very large impact.

Hacumba is a town of 500 and they just fed thousands,

housed thousands, clothed thousands, hugged and

welcomed thousands of human beings.

And those people in that town don't have much excess

and

they made a difference.

And I was

proud to be a part of that community in the way that I'm on the fringe of it.

And it made me want to be even more a part of it.

My feelings and intuition about that town were confirmed

by watching the simplest action make an incredible impact on real lives and real people.

And that this isn't demographics

it's

real real bodies

that have beating hearts and breathe and we all share the same air and the same water and

we're all connected and when you make one little drip in the bucket it actually does make a difference

and i think that stops us sometimes when we think what we have isn't enough to give.

But when someone has nothing, what you have is more than what they can imagine.

The history of the border and its enforcement begins in 1492 with the colonization of what would become known as the Americas.

It goes through the 1842 Mexican-American War and the sale of Indigenous people's lands without their knowledge or consent in the 1853 Gasdon Purchase, and of course through the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and numerous other explicit attempts to prevent non-white people from moving to the USA.

From there, it weaves its way through the Mexican Revolution and the First World War's 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 1924, and in the 99 years since, it has encompassed everything from David Duke to 9-11 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 Metropole.

It's why a man called Fat Lez singing a song about Vindaloo is basically my country's second 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 and U.S.

imperialism have destabilized and 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 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 established that a reasonable distance of the border would extend 100 air miles around the outline of the country.

Two-thirds of the U.S.'s population live within this zone.

Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, and Boston are all within it.

And that means that CBP agents 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 25 miles of the border, they can enter your property provided it's not a domicile.

The Fourth Amendment, part of a foundational Bill of Rights the US likes to tout as what makes it different from the rest of the world, doesn't apply when you're near the border.

An 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 the Gadsden Purchase, when a party of military surveyors first bumped into Tohono Autumn elders as they attempted to draw a line dividing Tohono Autumn people from Tohono Autumn people.

The southern border is no more obvious today than it was then, and of course to the autumn it was and remains an aberration 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 Dahon-Autumn Reservation, which is the second largest in the USA, but 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 42.

The southern border, as it looks now, was largely shaped by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico lost 55% of its territory, including all of what is today California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and parts of what is today Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 added more of southern Arizona and New Mexico.

The specific border in San Isidro was drawn so that San Diego Bay would fall to the north of the line.

The border in Acumba seems more arbitrary, a straight line in the desert that runs into a pile of rocks.

Of course, long before the border divided San Isidro from Tijuana, this was Kumeya land, and despite the border it still is.

The name Tijuana derives from Tijuana.

which means by the sea in Kumeyay.

Despite this, the Kumeyay 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 2020, while out with a group of Kumeyai people who were in ceremony to honour their ancestors, whose burial sites have been and continue to be desecrated by border war construction, I had to be wary of stepping over it to better frame my shots.

The emergency 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, Bortac, a team of armed border patrol agents who you might remember from Portland in 2020, provided a guy dressed like he was in the Battle of Fallujah 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.

In Valley of the Moon, a few miles east of where that Bortac patrol guard shouted at people for stepping too close in 2020, the border wall is about waist high, rusty, and essentially comprised of a single strand of barbed wire.

In Hucumba, the 30-foot trump wall pushes right up to a boulder pile and then stops.

The logic, as much as there can be any logic in spending $25 million 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, but 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 in places around the world face every day.

It hasn't always been this way.

For your reference, here are Reagan and Bush talking about migration in 1980.

Yes, my name is David Grossberg, and I'd like to know, do you think the children of illegal aliens should be allowed to attend Texas public schools free, or do you think that their parents should pay for their education?

Who Who are you addressing that to?

I think you're first in this.

He's looking right at you.

I said he was.

Look,

I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien problem that would be so sensitive and so understanding about labor needs and human needs that that problem wouldn't come up.

But today, if those people are here,

I would reluctantly say I think they would

get whatever it is that they're, you know, what the society is giving to their neighbors.

But it has, the problem has to be solved.

The problem has to be solved.

Because

as we have kind of made illegal some kinds of labor that I'd like to see legal, we're doing two things.

We're creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law.

And secondly, we're exacerbating 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 thing of six and eight year old kids being made, you know, one, totally uneducated and made to feel that they're living with outside the law.

Let's address ourselves to the fundamentals.

These are good people, strong people.

Part of my family is a Mexican.

Can I add to that?

I think the time has come.

that the United States and our neighbors, particularly our neighbor to the south, should have a better understanding and a better relationship than we've ever had.

And I think, but we haven't been sensitive enough to our size and our power.

They have a problem of 40 to 50 percent unemployment.

Now, this cannot continue without the possibility arising with regard to that other country that we talked about, of 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 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 problems.

The modern era of border enforcement began, as far as we can pinpoint a single date, with Silvestre Reyes, the then Sector Chief of the Border Patrol in McAllen, Texas, and his operation Hold the Line.

The community around McCallan had got tired of Border Patrol snooping around businesses and even schools in the Rio Grande Valley, and instead, Reyes deployed his agents forward in a sort of human fence along the Rio Grande.

Reyes would later become the chief of the El Paso sector and a Democratic congressman.

He lost his seat to Beto O'Rourke in 2013.

But this strategy would long outlive his career with Border Patrol.

The following year, on September the 17th, 1994, U.S.

Attorney General Janet Reno announced the start of Operation Gatekeeper.

The first phase of the operation focused 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 them to cross in more isolated wilderness areas to the east.

where they could be more easily captured.

There were already fences in 1994, 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 187, a ballot measure that cut off state services like healthcare and education to undocumented people.

Here's a clip of Wilson's re-election ad.

They keep coming.

Two million illegal immigrants in California.

The federal government won't stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them.

Governor Pete Wilson sent the National Guard to help the Border Patrol, but that's not all.

For Californians who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws, I'm suing to force the federal government to control the border, and I'm working to deny state services to illegal immigrants.

Enough is enough.

Governor Pete Wilson.

Under the operation, A much higher number of agents were deployed to the border.

Apprehensions increased, and with them, so did funding for border enforcement.

It was around this time that the narrative around the border began to change.

It was also around this time, a few months earlier, in fact, that the US, Mexico, and Canada entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it easier than ever for capital to move across the border and take advantage of lower 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.

My name is Jen Budd, and I'm a former senior patrol agent with the United States Border Patrol.

I was a senior intelligence agent as well at San Diego sector headquarters.

Jen has since left the Border Patrol, but she realizes the impact of Operation Gatekeeper on migrants was anything but positive.

Yeah, Operation Gatekeeper started in 1994 in October of 1994 and I got to Campo in November of 1995.

And

so right afterwards, and the fence was just getting to Tecate when I got there.

So most of my class, I think we had, I don't know, 40 people graduate or something.

Most of them went down to Imperial Beach and they had a wall 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 out to the mountains, making it more difficult for them to cross.

And some of them would 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 crossings.

But of course,

that's not the case.

Alan Burson, U.S.

attorney in San Diego, was named the so-called border czar by President Bill Clinton a few years later to implement that same Gatekeeper strategy across the rest of his southwest border.

Burston saw things a little differently.

Neither side claims it, but Gatekeeper was probably the most important domestic achievement accomplished in a purely bipartisan manner through three administrations and the greatest accomplishment since President Eisenhower and the Democrats put together the state highway system in the mid-1950s.

But in fact, while apprehensions did drop in San Diego, they spiked by 591% in the Tucson sector between 1992 and 2004.

The LA Times quotes the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service as saying:

One unintended consequence of this enforcement posture and the shift in migration patterns has been an increase in the number of migrant deaths each year.

On average, 200 migrants died each year in the early 1990s, compared with 472 migrant deaths in 2005.

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.

The Horner Autumn people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily.

on roads without checkpoints to visit family, go to school, visit a doctor, or perform their traditional ceremonial practices.

But after 9-11, the United States and its Border Patrol began a more visible and violent occupation of the reservation.

It started with a vehicle barrier in 2007, 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 Tob Miller, whose excellent work on the border has required reading for anyone interested in the subject.

Amy Juan and Nelly Jo David, members of Tehon Autumn Hemajkum Rights Network, TOHRN, joined a delegation to the West Bank in October 2017.

convened by the Palestinian organization Stop the War.

It was a relief, Juan says, to talk with people who understand our fears, who are dealing with militarization and technology.

In 2017, Tohorana Autumn vice chairman Verlon Jose said that a wall will be built, quote, over my dead body.

And the tribe released a video saying there is no autumn word for war.

The 62 miles of the border on their reservation would remain without one, they said.

By 2020, the Trump administration had forced through a wall on much of the border using what is known as the Roosevelt Reservation.

This is a 60-foot-wide strip of land that the federal government owns along the border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Although much of the Ottum nation remains wall-free, and some has what's called a vehicle barrier or a Normandy barrier, approximately one-third of the Roosevelt Reservation is on tribal land.

Since 2005's Real ID Act, environmental surveys and laws have been waived for border security.

And this gave the Trump administration a way to justify the destruction of Ottum and Kumiai burial grounds, Saguaro Cacti that the Ottum see as relatives, and other sacred sites along the border, despite efforts by tribal members and allies to stop the construction.

Members of the Tahano Autumn Nation have been pepper sprayed, beaten, tailed, and shot by Border Patrol.

In 2002, a Border Patrol agent ran over and killed an Autumn teenager.

Last week, the same night I was waiting down by the border for the end of Title 42, Border Patrol agents shot and killed Raymond Mattia, an Autumn man who had called and asked him for help.

He was shot 38 times, just two feet from his front door, according to his family.

While Mr.

Matthia'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 what they would do is they would get there first on the scene.

because we would call them first we wouldn't call anybody else we call them first and then they come they get rid of the witnesses they set the scene up the way we want to be done, and they tell you the narrative that you're going to stick with.

You talk to your union reps, and it's all this giant cover-up.

Here's John Carlos Frey, a journalist who covered CIT cover-ups, talking to Democracy Now about how these teams work.

Within the actual agency of the U.S.

Border Patrol, there is an investigative body called SIT, the Critical Incident Team.

They are tasked with investigating incidents that involve Border Patrol, and it can be anything from a car accident to, in this case, an individual who's killed at the hands of the U.S.

Border Patrol.

In this particular case of Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas, Border Patrol agents deleted video.

They collected 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 face is down.

Agents are on top of him.

But if you read the reports in this case that were prepared by SIP, Anastasio was a violent man and needed to be subdued.

In 2021, Border Patrol was ordered to disband these teams.

But Jen says they simply moved them somewhere else and gave them a different name.

So then they said that they disbanded them.

because we brought the truth out and how they did all this and we proved it.

But what they actually did did is they did a retention.

So they had the Border Patrol agents resign from the Border Patrol and move over to CBP OPR and we hired them under there.

So the team that likely went to go investigate the Tehonam Odom killing, I believe his name is Matia

Matia, Raymond Mattia,

is likely the Border Patrol sit teams.

So if the Border Patrol agents, a lot of people don't understand, it's like a cult, you know, they always say, you bleed green, you know, and you don't go back hungry.

And probably one of the few that ever left, you know, and tells the truth about it.

Of course, the vast majority of people whose families will never find justice because of these CIT teams are not white.

And of course, Border Patrol has long-rooted links to white nationalism.

In 1977, about 45 minutes from San Diego and another 45 minutes from Hagoomba, David Duke, Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan at the time, announced the official beginning of Klan Border Watch.

Duke claimed there were hundreds of Klansmen on the border, but local newspaper The Desert Sun reported that there were, in reality, at least ten.

I'll quote directly from the Desert Sun's reporting at the time here.

Duke said Klansmen would refrain from direct contact with illegal aliens.

If any are found, he said, Klansmen would not talk to them or contact them.

But if any illegal crossings are seen, they're going to use CB radios to relay the information to Border Patrol, Duke said.

Duke, of Metairi, Louisiana, claimed the Klan has the support of the American people in helping the Border Patrol stem the influx of illegal aliens into this country.

He claimed the illegal aliens take jobs away from U.S.

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 1,500 Brown Berrys threatened to rally against Duke, and protests far outnumbering his patrols popped up along the border.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, 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 trained 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 2019, a border patrol agent from Logales named Matthew Bowen was accused of of knocking down a Guatemala man with his vehicle and then lying to a court about the incident.

The prosecutors in the case showed the jury texts Bowen sent, including one which called migrants, quote, disgusting subhuman 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 of the term are a little bit unclear, but it seems to be derived from the sound of a flashlight hitting the back of someone's head.

In an argument against submitting the text, defense lawyer Sean Chapman wrote that he would argue certain terms are, quote, commonplace throughout the Border Patrol's Tucson sector.

This is part of the agency's culture, and therefore it says nothing about Mr.

Bowen's mindset.

Jensen's kind of language and attitude was not uncommon in her time in Border Patrol from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, but things have got worse since.

There have been some definite changes in the Border Patrol and the training from before 9-11 to to after 9-11.

And what you also see,

so their vocabulary has changed.

So, like, they refer to migrants and asylum seekers as invaders.

We never used that term prior to 9-11.

And we did have racist words that we used for them, and I use them as well.

I'm not denying that.

Of course, this kind of language isn't just restricted to Border Patrol.

The U.S.

has become a dumping ground

for everybody else's problems.

It's true.

And these are the best and the finest.

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.

They're not sending you.

They're not sending you.

They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us.

They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.

There's been white supremacist violence at the border ever since Duke, and long before.

Often it's been at the hands of groups outside of the state.

Sometimes it's been at the hands of the state.

In Arizona, groups like Arizona Border Recon and Minutemen American Defense have terrorized border communities for decades.

and gained renewed momentum from Trump's consistent demonization of migrants.

I spent a bit of 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 often than we have documented evidence for, can be fatal, just like interaction with customs and border protection.

Here's just one example, culled from David Newart's excellent book, And Hell Followed With Her.

On May 30, 2009, Shauna Ford, Jason Eugene Bush, and Albert Gaxiola, all members of Ford's vigilante group Minuteman American Defense, forced their way into Raul Flores Jr.'s home in Aravica, Arizona, by 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, the Vigilantes murdered Flores and his nine-year-old daughter, Brisenia.

Flores' wife and Brisenia's mother, Gina Marie Gonzalez, were 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 the September 1997 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 KKK was not the only group recruiting children for border patrolling.

Since the mid-1980s, the Border Patrol's Explorer program has recruited young men and women of high school age.

The program is chartered 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 and a decent wage is hard to come by, the program offers the chance at a starting salary of $62,000, twice the median income in some of these towns.

Young explorers will learn tracking, survival, shooting, and how to detain and process undocumented migrants, people who in some cases are walking in the footsteps of their own parents.

According to an article by Morley Music in the Nation, young explorers have to earn the right to their uniform by participating in their 60-hour Basic Explorer Academy, at which they learn 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 youth to criminal, juvenile immigration and Fourth Amendment law.

While I was writing this, I checked out the San Diego sector page, which seems to to show young people running, shooting, and one who looks like he's just been maced 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 child from the top of the border fence.

Without figures from the CBP, it's hard to tell if participation in the Explorers has dropped as public awareness of family separation, assault, and other behavior that doesn't exactly fit with the Border Patrol's motto, Honor First, has spread.

I asked Jen for her take on the Explorer programme.

Well, I call it Border Patrol youth because it it reminds me a lot of the Hitler youth where we go into the high schools and we get the kids that are in trouble.

And typically they are Latino dominant high schools.

And

we teach them how to be mini Border Patrol agents and we teach them to hate somebody else instead of themselves.

And we indoctrinate them into the same stuff that I was indoctrinated into.

But it's even gone so far now as to they do the dog and pony shows at the elementary schools.

So they're getting them when they're like six, seven years old.

And they go there with, you know, little Border Patrol Bulletproof Vest and put them on them and take pictures and put it on social media.

And they, they have them sit in their trucks and turn the signs on and all this other stuff.

That indoctrination is crucial to Border Patrol culture.

And to be honest, the reason I wanted to talk to Jen was to understand it better.

In Hokumba, I'd seen a young Border Patrol agent, a woman, giving volunteers rides.

I'm not about to go into a Border Patrol truck myself.

And I wasn't going to get a response if I asked the agent how she squared up her role in holding people in the desert with the fact that some volunteers said she'd spent her own money buying supplies.

Jen said that this kind of behavior can be pretty common with young agents.

And I had intended to go to law school to be a civil rights attorney when I joined the Border Patrol.

And for me,

I ignored my core values and ignored that I was enforcing laws that sent thousands of human beings to their deaths

because I felt like I was trying to survive.

I was raped in the academy by a fellow agent and they covered that up.

And I was really trying to get out of the South and start my life.

But I often say, like, especially with female agents, they call us the first 5% because there's never been more than 5%

women in the Border Patrol rapes.

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 sexually assaulting us all the time in the academy and harassing 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 family is 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?

In the wake of 9-11, and quite tellingly, the Border Patrol moved from oversight by the Department of Justice to the new Department of Homeland Security.

This move, from justice as security, has been echoed in its recruiting, which once drew heavily on those with humanitarian aid experience, and now tries to appeal to veterans of the two decades of war that have accompanied the growth of DHS since 2001.

When the DHS was first established, the name struck many as problematic.

In a 2002 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 2001 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 2022 budgets of CBP and ICE were 16 and 8 billion respectively, and that every year since 2001, 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 1995, there were about 4,000 CBP agents.

By 2020, there were 20,000, with 17,000 stationed on the southern border.

This is a slight drop from a peak of just over 21,000 under Obama, who is often called the deporter-in-chief for his fondness for expelling people from the United States for crimes like having a pipe 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 San Isidro.

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 2018, I was enjoying a break from work in a caravan near Ensonada.

If you think back to that time, right before the midterms, you might remember some of the rhetoric that circulated around a large group of migrants making their way to the southern border.

I'll play you some of the clips from Fox that NPR cut together in their coverage of the issue.

is, you know, calling it a caravan is a misnomer and frankly sickening.

Or sample the Chipper Morning show, Fox and Friends.

I've gotten so many emails from people who said, don't call it a caravan, call it an invasion.

Yes.

Is that fair?

Host Steve Ducey put the question to conservative pundit Michelle Melkin.

Of course it is.

It is a full-scale invasion by a hostile force.

And it requires our president and our commander-in-chief to use any means necessary to protect our sovereignty.

CNN's Brian Stelter found that Fox News featured segments using the phrase invasion more than 60 times this month about the migrants.

On Fox Business Network, Lou Dobbs' program invoked it dozens of times.

Trump ordered 5,000 troops to the border.

He tweeted yesterday: quote, this is an invasion of our country.

And Trump has, without evidence, claimed gang 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, Shepard Smith, tried to put on the brakes yesterday.

Tomorrow is one week before the midterm election, which is what all of this is about.

There is no invasion.

No one's coming to get you.

There's nothing at all to worry about.

This month, Fox hosts and guests have repeatedly questions whether the migrants might bring in infectious diseases, again without evidence.

Laura Ingram.

We don't know what people have coming in here.

We have diseases in this country we haven't had for decades.

I'll leave you to process the incredible irony of the network that killed a decent percentage of its viewers by denying that COVID was serious or a disease or that vaccines and masks were useful, panicking about infectious diseases just two years before the pandemic began.

The Tree of Life shooter, who we won't name here, who is currently facing a death penalty trial for murdering 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, was obsessed with the caravan.

The victims of the largest anti-Semitic mass murder in U.S.

history included a beloved community doctor, a great-grandmother, and a couple who'd gotten married at the same synagogue more than 60 years earlier.

The shooter's last post on hate speech social media site Gab, posted just just minutes before the synagogue massacre began, spells it out, with a reference to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Jewish non-profit that resettles refugees in the United States.

Hayas likes to bring invaders to kill our people.

I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.

Screw your optics, I'm going in.

The shooter was obsessed with the idea that a caravan of migrants was not a group of people trying to save their own lives, but a coordinated and somehow Jewish-led invasion and attempts to demographically restructure the United States.

If you're wondering where he got that idea from, here's America's favorite job seeker Tucker Carlson on the caravan.

Over the past month, a caravan of Central American migrants has gradually made its way up from Honduras through Mexico, all the way to Tijuana, opposite San Diego.

At one point, Mexican authorities claimed they broke up the group, and American media, of course, dutifully reported that they did.

But they didn't.

That was just a PR gesture and a temporary one.

In fact, during parts of the trip, Mexican police escorted the migrants northward.

In other words, the Mexican government abetted 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 San Yosidro to open, many of them just jumped the fence.

Some waved Honduran 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 invade a country.

On my way home from Esonado in 2018, I saw that quote invading horde in the Benito Juarez sports complex and promptly turned around and went back.

My instinct as a journalist is to cover things like this, but my instinct as a person is to help first.

On the first day I was there with two friends I know from the weird world of pro-cycling, things were pretty bad.

We'd obtained a backpack full of stroop waffles that a friend who makes stroop waffles had given us.

Once we gave those out, I'd talked to a few people about what they needed.

We coordinated with mutual aid groups in Tijuana and offered to support however we could.

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 projector that someone had tactically obtained from an office to a DVD player which we'd installed in the roof of a dilapidated nightclub full of 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 aid 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.

Here's Trump defending calling the caravan an invasion and simultaneously explaining why migrants' low-wage labor is desirable for people like him.

Thank you, Mr.

President.

I wanted to challenge you on one of the statements that you made in the tail end of the campaign

in the midterms.

Here we go.

Well, if you don't mind, Mr.

President,

that this caravan was an invasion.

As you know, Mr.

President.

I consider it to be an invasion.

As you know, Mr.

President, the caravan was not an invasion.

It is a group of migrants moving up from Central America towards the border with the U.S.

Thank you for telling me.

And

why did you characterize it as such?

Because I consider it an invasion.

You and I have a difference of opinion.

Do you think that you demonized immigrants in this election to try to?

I want them to come into the country, but they have to come in legally.

You know, they have to come in, Jim, through a process.

I want it to be a process.

And I want people to come in, and we need the people.

Your campaign...

Wait, you know why we need the people, Darjee?

Because we have hundreds of companies moving in.

We need the people.

Trump, as you heard in the clip, used the migrant caravan as a prop for his racist and bigoted midterm campaign.

It didn't work, and he lost control of the house.

But he did succeed in forcing these people to spend months in the cold, first in a sports stadium, and then in an old nightclub.

Even as the migrants gradually reduced in number, with many finding work and a new life in Mexico, some finding their way north, the long legacy of that caravan was only just starting.

In the months that followed, journalists who'd covered the caravan, as well as those who offered assistance to caravan members, said they felt they'd become targets of intense inspections and scrutiny by border officials.

I got pulled into secondary only once during this time, and that was entering Mexico.

The worst I got was a chance to inspect my 1980 pickup truck's oil pan.

But for others, things weren't so easy.

Homeland Security Investigation Special Agent turned whistleblower Wesley Petternak 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 influencers 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 flags placed on their passports.

A PowerPoint slideshow which Petanak leaked to NBC 7 lists some of the people.

Some of them have been guests on this show.

They include 10 journalists, 7 of whom are US citizens, a US attorney, 48 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 Infronteras.

I asked journalist Brooke Binkowski to describe her experience of increased border scrutiny in 2018.

If you don't have a pre-approved card, you have to like go through, wait in line, wait in this long ass line.

And then, you know, you go and get vetted by CDP.

They ask you some questions or they just wave you through, depending on what kind of 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 quonset hut sort of and um in it like all these cars drive in and out and they'll they'll go go through your things they'll get in your face you know they'll do all kinds of stuff um and i 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 a 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 ma'am it's just random so actually this started in about 2014 for me um but it started to escalate in 2018 2017 2018 started to escalate and i was like uh trump administration of course it's going to escalate, right?

Under Trump, she said things got worse.

From 2017 through 2018, it kind of worked where I'd push back and I'd be like, you need to let me fucking go.

You know, I'm sentry.

I'm already pre-checked.

If you think that there's something wrong that I'm doing, then take my fucking sentry away.

And I want to talk to your manager type stuff, right?

So I was doing that.

That worked until 2018.

And then it started to get really gnarly.

Eventually, things came to a head the day before the migrants of the caravan were tear guests.

And a scene most people remember from 2018.

So, but on that night, as I was coming back, um, I drove through and I did the sentry thing, you know, the usual stuff, and got pulled into secondary.

And this time, it was really like gnarly.

The time before that had also been really gnarly, like, nobody hurt me, nobody did anything, but they got really close to my face, like right in my face, you know, and started screaming at me, like screaming over me.

And I kept going, I'd like to speak to your manager, you know, sir.

Like, please, 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, why did any of this happen and he goes oh yeah um i'm i'm sorry your name's on a list somewhere you've been flagged 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 um

why is there a flag against my name and he goes i don't know you're gonna have to uh do a freedom of information act request or something i don't even know if he knew i was a journalist sadly brook last crossed in 2018 And since I photographed those Kumei folks in Seremonini Campo, the border wall has only got longer.

Every mile it stretches out means another mile into the desert people have to walk.

And that means that more people won't walk out of that desert.

Those people who lost their lives in an attempt to save them are marked with little red dots on the various maps that attempt to put the humanitarian crisis into a visual form.

Those dots begin in South America as people die travelling 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, hiking, climbing, and cycling.

Places where one mistake can be fatal.

I know from 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 all rank highly as causes of death along the border.

Last year saw a record for border deaths, and with Biden attempting to take a hard line going into 2024, 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 2020, Juana, Margarita, and Paula Santos Arce were traveling by foot from Oaxaca 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 El Sueño Americano, the American dream.

Along their route is a small religious shrine, which marks the last point from which you can see 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 as a deterrent.

When the girls crossed the border near Campo on the 9th of February, it was raining.

As they climbed the Laguna Mountains, it started to snow.

They huddled under a boulder for warmth, and the two men smuggling them across struck out to get to cell reception and call 911.

By the time Borstar, Border Patrol's 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 jackets wrapped around her and another agent's beanie on her head.

For some reason, the girls' remains were not recovered right away, and they were not rewarmed.

And so they lost their last chance at the American dream and at life.

To day their final resting place is marked by three crosses and a cache 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, and we might never know.

Not being able to follow stories is the sad part of this reporting sometimes.

You know, as people all have my phone number, but they might not anymore have their phones, or the scrap of paper I wrote it on.

Often these things can be taken from them in custody.

What we do know is that on May 18th, exactly one week after Title 42 ended, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, tweeted a video of customs enforcement and removal operations agents walking down the corridor of a flight full of masked people.

The caption read, ICE conducted multiple removal flights, including Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as part of dozens of 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 by The Clash and the Manning Street Preachers, which are what in turn made me want to learn about the Spanish Civil War.

The slogan, coined in 1937, feels as relevant today as it does then.

It was one that folks on the border might as well have been screaming by 2018, but one that went ignored just as it did in 1937.

In 2020, 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 stop murdering people.

It became more real in 2023 when under DeSantis, Florida began the process of legalizing state kidnapping of trans and gender non-conforming kids from their loving families.

But that all began when the state ripped Indigenous children from their families in the 19th and 20th centuries and tried to destroy their culture by punishing them for wearing their clothes, speaking their languages, or using their names.

It 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 and deterring migrants.

And it's reached its obvious end point in Florida, because, despite all the people chanting about kids in crages in 2020, there'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 surveillance industrial complex to grow to an unprecedented and uncontrollable scale that watches us all.

Changing things now will be very difficult.

DHS outnumbers many nations' armies and is 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.

And 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 Hokumba and San Isidro, there are still many people trying to present themselves at the San Isidro border to claim asylum.

Today I was told there are about 100 of them.

They're waiting there often for days.

Most of them are getting turned away.

They're all frustrated with CBP1, which continues to be buggy, offer no appointments, and struggle to photograph blackfaces.

I also wanted to mention some of the organisations you can find and donate to if you'd like to support their efforts.

They are the Asian Solidarity Collective, Palo Trolado, the American Friends Service Committee, Border Kindness, Borderlands Relief Collective, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, and Preven Casa, P-R-E-V-E-N-C-A-S-A.

I'd also like to thank Joe Oreana, his Twitter is at JoeOrPhoto for his reporting, which very much contributed to this series.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Thanks for listening.

This is an iHeart podcast.