It Could Happen Here Weekly 211

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Coolzone 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.

i conducted interviews for this series in spanish and french then i transcribed them and translated them and we had voice actors read them so when you're listening to this please remember that everything you're hearing in english was recorded in another language and it's through the lens of my translation that you're hearing these people's words As we always do, we have included the sources for this podcast in the show notes.

I've also included a link to Primrose's Legal Aid Fundraiser if people would like to help out.

Like most of you, I wasn't having a great day on the 20th of January of 2025.

I wasn't about to watch the inauguration, so I went for a run in the mountains instead.

I spent the next few weeks trying to focus on the things we could do, the things we had to do, to get through four years of fascism.

Just a few miles away from my house, I set out for my run, and unbeknown to me, my friend Primrose was staring down from the top of a 30-foot steel monument to hate that Donald Trump had built the last time he was president.

To be more accurate, it was one that he had modified. There have been versions of the border wall in San Diego for for decades.

They said, No, we have an option. We need to take you.
But you know, for me, I had to take a risk because

I was scared to stay in Mexico.

So they took us with under the bridge. I think the sewage, we were walking with our stomach, like under the bridge

to we get to USA and Mexican border. So they put ladder for us to help us.

Those people, when they saw American immigration came, they just removed the ladder. And me, I was on top.

So I had, yeah, I was stuck there and I had no choice. And Kim Balash was crying, like, come, let's go, let's go.

At that time, I knew nothing about it, but her daughter Kim had already jumped.

As the Biden presidency drew to a close, but before Trump began signing executive orders with pens he tossed into the crowd, she'd made it into the US.

Her mum was in the US as well. The wall is inside the border.
But the people who had helped her get up to the top of the wall had fled when Border Patrol arrived, taking their ladder with them.

And so Primrose was left atop the wall, the literal and metaphorical final hurdle in her long and dangerous journey that had begun in Zimbabwe and went through South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.

But before we come down from the border wall, I want to take you back to the Mist Soak Riverbank of Maragante last September.

Daddy, my fixer, and I had woken up at an ungodly hour, and so had the jungle birds.

Along with half the population of the village, we walked down to the riverbank, carrying the engines and fuel tanks to the Piraguas.

A few minutes later, a chorus of two-stroke engines and smoke fired up as the boat set off towards Bajo Chiquito.

I stood in the bow, still trying to master the use of the pole as we passed through the faster moving, shallower water. Daddy sat in the middle and laughed at me.

Despite my best efforts, we arrived in one piece at Bajo Chiquito, and I launched myself from the bow into knee-deep water.

On the rocky beach in front of us stood hundreds of people, patiently waiting for the Piragueros to take them north and out of the jungle.

Stretched like a snake all the way through town, the line of migrants must have totaled a thousand people.

I walked backwards, away from the boats, the only foreigner not leaving, look for people I'd met the day before.

About halfway down the line stood Primrose and Kim. I stopped while we chatted for a bit about what the boat ride was like and what they could expect next.

Yeah, I'm going there. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm going to the United States. Do you have family? No.
Yeah. No, you just make your American life.
No. It's okay, I think.
I'm just trying.

No, it's only me and my daughter. Yeah.

Despite this, they had found community on the journey. I can't describe how scary it must be for two women to set out on this journey alone.

It takes an awful lot to embark on that journey and to be able to trust people when everyone is a potential threat.

But if there's one thing I learned in a jungle, it's that in the hardest times and the hardest places, the only way forward is together.

Primrose reminded me of this, telling me how complete strangers had helped her.

Very nice.

Especially these Spanish people, they are very nice. I don't want to lie, because if you need help, you call them for help.

The other ones, they might run away, but the other ones they just come for help.

They even give us tablets on the road, give us energy drinks, give my daughter sweets for energy.

They push us like, let's go, guys, let's go, let's go, you make it.

And we really make it. Yeah.

That's really nice to hear. I asked Primrose a question.
I asked everyone there. What did she hope for when she got to America? What was her American dream? What do you hope for her in America?

What do you want to do in America? I want Uyoto

Santa to go to school, then she can

achieve something in life. I don't wish my daughter to go back to Siemo, no.
Yeah. Not at all.
No, it's very hard in Zemo. Yeah, it's it's it's really really tough.
Yeah. Even in South Africa.

I saw them a few days later in Las Blancas. After I'd sat with a group of little Venezuelan children playing a game where we'd throw bottle tops into a broken half cinder block.

We talked about the struggle they faced to pay for the bus north, and we didn't record anything that day. But as I was leaving for the evening, Kim asked me if I could buy her a drink.

I generally try not to splash my money around because I don't have enough money to help everyone, and I still have some scars from the ridiculous concept of objectivity that would lead some editors not to commission a story from me if I gave the subject a gift.

But this time I felt like buying her a drink, and I let her select the biggest bottle of cold soda she could find in the little store in the camp there.

I told her and her mum to stay in touch and wrote my number on a piece of my notebook, tore it out and gave it to them.

Months later, Kim was holding the same scrap of paper, looking up at her mum stuck on the border wall. A whole lot had changed since I last saw them.

A few days after my scripted podcast on the Daddy and Gap was released, the United States elected Donald Trump as its 47th president.

It was a shit month all round, but my phone, as it often does, lit up with messages from my daddy and friends asking me what this meant and if Trump was going to close the border.

I didn't really know how to answer those questions because if there's one thing we know about Trump, it's he changed his mind every few weeks.

As we got closer and closer to the day he was inaugurated, they got more and more concerned. Most of them hadn't made it out of southern Mexico.

Many of them had told me that things there were even worse than the jungle. They'd all been robbed, some of them had been sexually assaulted, some of them kidnapped, and some of them killed.

I'd heard about all of these things every day from September last year to January this year.

In the middle of a run, or when I was having dinner, meeting a friend for a coffee, my phone would ring, and I'd be confronted with terrible injustice, and I'd be totally powerless to set it right.

As time went on, I heard from fewer and fewer of them. I assume their phones were stolen, but there are, of course, course, more upsetting explanations as to why they might have stopped contacting me.

Noemi, the little girl who wanted to visit Minnie Mouse, video called me once from Tapachulo with a little tiny toy bear that I'd given her, and that she'd kept with her on the whole journey.

It made me happy to see them, and a silly little bear carved from soapstone that had travelled the lengths of South America with them.

Every few weeks after I'd left, I'd get photos of the bear in a different country, as the little Osito worked its way closer to Disneyland.

Some people who worked at Disneyland had reached out to offer suggestions about tickets. Other people had reached out offering to pay.

I was, despite the odds, hoping that one day I could help one little girl see her American dream come true.

When we spoke, she was with her mum and they were trying to log on to CBP1, hoping for an appointment, but it wouldn't work on their old Android phones.

I tried to find shelters with reliable internet that would take them in, and called friends and NGOs almost every week passing along questions or looking for resources.

I spent hours calling, finding it hard to accept that the capacity for mutual aid was so overwhelmed that nobody had a safe space for little girl and her mum, and wondering if it still felt like a pepper pig adventure, or if even little indomitable Noemi was scared now.

Even from where I was, with fast internet and a web of friends across the Western Hemisphere, I couldn't find the help people needed, and it made me increasingly angry and anxious the more I tried.

It sucked, but there was still a chance, however slim, that one day I might get to see Noemi meet Minnie Mouse. So I kept trying, and so did her mum.

Then, one day, I got no response from her mum's WhatsApp when I messaged her. Nobody picked up the phone when I tried to ring.
I still haven't had a response. But periodically, I'll keep trying.

Even the last messages and photos are gone now after my WhatsApp updated.

Like so many of the people who I shared my food with, whose little children held my hand in the darkness of the jungle, who I desperately wished and wish I could do more for, they're gone now.

That's what strong borders means. It means brave little girls disappearing so a politician who knows nothing of their struggles can point to a statistic.

I have listened to the interview I conducted with them so many times since last September.

I still can't really work out how anyone with a heart could hear that and think they wanted to live in a world where that little girl wasn't safe. But that's what people voted for, I guess.

I don't think they did, actually. I can't think they did.
I think people lied to them, and that's what they voted for.

But nonetheless, here we are now, sitting in a country that didn't want to help the little girl who flexed her arm muscles to show me how strong she was after climbing the mountains of the most dangerous land migration route in the Americas and told me it was, for her, all an adventure.

Her mother gave a different account.

I didn't want to cry because I didn't want her to see me crying, but sometimes I would explode because it's hard for your child to ask you for water, to ask you for food, and you don't have any.

To be in a place where you walk. You walk from five in the morning, it's five in the afternoon.

You're walking, you don't know what to do, going through more than a hundred rivers and asking God not to rain and not wanting it to get worse. It It rained, and the girl got a fever.
She got a fever.

But well, God is good that we pray a lot.

I say that we don't know God so much in the church, in the process, in the process that we are in, and we don't know we can be so strong until we go through that storm. And we see that he protects us.

He knows that he was always there watching over us, taking care of us at all times.

I don't want to dwell on this too long because talking in public about grief is something I'm bad at.

One of my friends died fighting in Ukraine this year. A colleague died just weeks before we'd planned a trip together.
Some of my Burmese friends died fighting.

But even as someone who talks to soldiers for a living, nothing really compares to the death toll inflicted by the US border regime.

In the little village in England where I grew up, there are memorials in every town and village for the young people who died fighting in the World Wars.

If we built those at the border, they'd soon be towering far above the wall that does so much of the killing. Things are as bad now as they've ever been.

The wall construction in the San Diego sector that the Trump administration has proposed will waive environmental and cultural protections and push migrants further into the desert.

In the desert, further from help, further from water, more of them will die.

I speak to migrants all the time, the ones who stayed in Mexico, even the ones who took the Venezuelan government's offers of flights home.

As much as they ask about America, they also ask about each other. Do I know what happened to the Angolans who shared their food so generously, they say? No, I haven't heard from them.

What about the Venezuelan trans girl who braided their children's hair? Well, she's still braiding hair. But she hasn't made it to the US.

Gradually, she did make make it, and then she was immediately deported back to southern Mexico.

How about Rose, they say, the Bolivian girl who came all on her own and found a family along the trail, only to be separated from them again. I haven't heard from her in a year.

Universally, they're happy to hear about Kim and Primrose. They're glad to hear that someone made it, that somebody can make it.

Because of the more than a hundred pages I tore out of my notebook with my phone number, they are two of the three people who let me know they made it here.

So let's hear from Primrose about what it looks like to make it here, how it feels to have the best outcome of anyone I met.

Let's pick up at Las Blancas, the now shuttered migrant reception center where hundreds languish for weeks and months trying to get together the money to pay for a bus to the Panama-Costa Rica border.

I think I spent seven days in Panama.

I was short with money, so I went to immigration trying to ask them if they can help me to take a bus to Costa Rica, of which they refused.

They said, No, you have to pay your sixty dollars, you and your daughter, which want to India.

So I paid that.

So I asked people, man,

the people I know, they helped me with money. So from Banama, we took a bus from Banama to Costa Rica.

This is a very common story. People borrow money from a huge range of friends and relatives along the way.
They hope to get to the US, work hard, and be able to pay it back.

The whole process takes every penny they've earned in their life and generates significant amounts of debt in most cases.

This is made worse by the fact that on arrival they will wait months, if not years, for a work permit. And their immigration judge can stop the clock on this at any time for any reason.

Primrose and Kim's case, Costa Rica moved into its territory quickly, as they do with nearly all migrants. Next, they arrived in Nicaragua.

Yeah, to Nicaragua.

Then in Nicaragua, I think we walk from Costa Rica border to Nicaragua border. Then we walk again.

I think it was eight hours walk from here to Nicaragua bus terminus.

We just walk. Then we, when we reach there,

we paid again to Honduras.

Then there's also a place we walked from Honduras, from Nicaragua to Honduras, bus terminus.

I think it this was a whole day.

Then from Honduras,

Guatemala,

yeah, in Guatemala, we spent three days again because

it was tough.

Guatemala people, they really need asking for a lot of money.

So my life was like asking people, asking people,

and do we get and do we reach Mexico?

Then, exhausted and broke, she and Kim made it to Mexico. Their journey began in Zimbabwe and took them from there to South Africa, then to Brazil and across the continent.

Now they had just one more country to go before they made it. But as they were to find out, this one country is the one that so many migrants don't make it out of.

Then in Mexico, my life was like ended

because

they were charging a lot of money in Mexico. In fact,

when we reached Mexico, we reached Tapachula. Ah, not before Tapachula.

I just forget the name.

So they took us

in the bush

where we paid money again. When we paid money, they start searching us.
If we don't have guns,

then they walk with us. It was 12 midnight,

they walk with us

till they get a transport to take us to Tapachula. So, when I reached Tapachula,

you know, people were giving information to each other. So, I was also following other people like from Cameroons and Venezuela.

So, when we reached Tapachula, we reached Tapachula on the 3rd of October 2024.

Tapachula, in the south of Mexico, is where thousands of migrants end up.

The Mexican government at the time had a policy of trying to keep people there and began offering them free bus rides north if they had a CBP-1 appointment.

But unlike places like Tijuana, where there have been migrants gathered for many decades, there are not as many services in Tapachula, and the shelters and services that exist there are overwhelmed by the demand.

The volume of migrants and the relative absence of services leaves a space open for abuse. That's what happened to Primrose and Kimberly.

They ended up paying someone who they thought could help them navigate the complicated and convoluted system of registration in Mexico, the CBP One app, and then traveling north to the USA, and ultimately being able to make their asylum claim finally.

In the end, what they got was the opposite of help.

Then the agents charged us $4,000 each, which is me $4,000 and my daughter $4,000,

of which I wasn't left that month.

Other people they were paying.

So I just talked to the agent. Then I said, No, can you please go down a little bit? Because

I'm a single parent and I don't have anyone to help me with that kind of money. Then he said, Okay, 3.5.

So I started asking people,

Bake home, the people I know, maybe they can help me.

So I have a lady who helped me with the money, which is she gave me four thousand. Yeah.

Then

my mom sell my land. I was having a land

with which she saw which

less money.

Then she sells even also years tough to get another man to complete seven thousand.

So

we asked someone to send it to America because in Mexico they don't receive money from Africa. So I found someone here in America to receive the money.

So he sent it to me in Mexico. But when I paid the man,

the agent took me, he said, I'm going to take you.

So he sent the guys, which they were four Mexican guys.

So they came to fetch us.

We were six, seven. Yeah,

I don't even know where they took us. So they took us to the

to the bush, which is Guadaradala. I I can't even remember.
Is it Guaderadala? I yeah, I think

So I spent there

from October up to January.

In the background here, you'll hear splashing. That's Kim playing in the pool, a little apartment complex where they were living in East LA.

As it's common for migrants, they shared a flat with someone else. I didn't have much in the way of furniture.
But the last time I saw Primrose and Kim, it was by the Tucesa River in Las Blancas.

There, the brown water was something to be afraid of.

Migrants died crossing the river every day, swept away by the fast-moving water and relying only on strangers to hold them as the current tried to pull them in.

A few times I walked out into that river, I felt the tug of the current on my boots, and wondered what it must be like higher up in the mountains.

At six foot three, the river I crossed never came above waist-high. It's deeper higher up.

But even then, reaching out my hand to carry someone's bag or grab a child's hand as they they came from the other direction and struggle to keep their toddlers and their few possessions out of the current, I get little jolts of fear when I stepped on a wet rock.

Here's Primrose talking about that part of her journey.

She was strong, but she was crying also, but she had got wounds all over the body.

Even me, I was crying myself. I was like, I want to just put myself in the water, then I can just go.
Both the jane was tough. Yeah, really, really tough.

The mountain, the stones, the river, it's not easy at all. It's not, it's not very.

I don't even recommended someone to say, Yeah, lose daddy and gap. No, and even myself, I did know about it.
Yeah, I was regretting myself. I was crying.
I was like, God,

I don't know my family, and my family, they don't know where I am right now.

Back in Los Angeles, Primrose told me that she'd fallen in the river, and two Venezuelan men had jumped in to pull her and Kim out.

Total strangers, on their own journey, had risked their lives to help a woman and child who they didn't know and with whom they couldn't even speak. The river kills people who drink it too.

The concentration of human waste and human remains in the water makes it incredibly dangerous to drink, even for people dying of thirst.

I couldn't stop thinking of that river and how much it scared people. I'm feeling so grateful that Kimberly could still enjoy the water after all of that.

Next time I said, they could take the train down to San Diego and we could all go to the beach.

Let's go back to Mexico now. To Guadalajara.

Where many migrants told me that of all the things they had endured, including the jungle, things were the worst of all.

Primrose's arrival in Mexico had not been great. And having paid one person, she was now being held by another group and asked for yet more money.

They were kidnapping me.

They were asking for $15,000 each. They said, We are not going to take you.

And I was crying. Kim was also crying.

The other people, they would get money paid

and leave.

I think for my group, for the people they were kidnapping, it it was only me left. And I came

and

I was crying,

depression.

I think in November,

I tried one to

escape, run away.

I fell down and my leg was something else. I didn't even go to hospital.
My leg was swollen, and the way they would treat us, it was bad.

Especially when I F came, the other one wanted touching me, the whole board. Like, I was like, please, if you want to do something, you can do it to me.

And plus, don't do it in front of my daughter because

she was also crying, disturbing. I didn't even go to hospital.
I asked them to go to the hospital. They refused.

Yeah, James, sir. I'm too emotional.
I'm sorry.

Primrose understandably had trouble even recounting this story. It's not the sort of memory that's easy to share.

But just when things seemed to be beyond repair, and when it seemed like there was nothing to hope for, it was Kimberly who came through to help her mum.

Yeah, then

so Kimberly was like

learning Spanish, so she was understanding

some of the words. So she's just telling me there's a guy also was like,

Where can you leave this woman? Because she doesn't have money

cause those people they took my phone they even broke it in front of my eyes the phone i was hearing from africa

kim's spanish was pretty good by the time i met them in los angeles this summer we went out for dinner and i asked kim what she'd like to eat she said she wanted to try seafood and practice her spanish so we went to a mexican seafood place complete with cabana decor, taxidermy fish on the wall.

And the waitress kindly helped Kim order in Spanish, patiently showing her different menu items and smiling as Kim read them off.

It was a happy moment for me, and one I didn't think I'd ever be having when I moved here in the Bush era. But that part of Southern California has always been a welcoming place for me.

When I was in my 20s and racing bikes for a living, I'd fly into LAX and often end up spending the night at Union Station or Alvera Street before taking a train to San Diego.

I speak Spanish, and I always felt like the people I met there were such a better reflection of LA than than the portrayal we see of it in the media.

Now, a decade and a half later, sitting in a Mexican restaurant while a lady from Nayarit helped a little girl from Zimbabwe speak Spanish, it felt like a little glimpse of the way we're told things are here, and the way they can be in working-class communities.

A nation built by migrants, yes, on stolen land, but one that nonetheless welcomed people who needed help and took the time to help them. Sadly, not everyone was helpful on Kim and Primrose's journey.

And when her captors realized she had no money to pay them, they eventually just decided to let her go.

Then I think on January is January 7th or 5th, I don't remember. Then they just re took us, then they just dumped us.

I don't even know. Then I stir I saw a immigration immigration officer with the gar with the car.
Then I stopped him.

Then I translate

to ask him to Then they said, Okay,

get inside the car, they took us to

immigration. So we get a pass from there

to another town

because I was like shifting, shifting, shifting, asking to get to Juana.

But those guys before they told me, like, wherever you go, even if you are here near in Mexico, we put a tracker for you.

So, if you tell anyone,

if you find you, we are going to kill you.

So, me, I was scared.

Yeah, I was scared.

So, I didn't tell even the immigration officer

till I get to Tijuana. So, we get to Tijuana on the 20th of January.

So, I just asked the Mexicans people.

Then, there's a guy who also said, Okay, I will try to help you, but you need to pay.

Then I said, I don't have money. I said, If you don't have money, we can't help you.
So I was like only asking people, asking if there were people to help me.

Yeah, the other people, they were just helping me because I said, People, look where I am with my daughter. I'm far.

But my family, the other family, especially my

other family member, they don't even know where I am.

So, those guys from Tijuana said, guys, if you are not crossing today, you are not going to cross. Because,

look, the president said he's going to shut down all the borders.

In between November and January, non-stop rumors circulated in giant WhatsApp groups. Trump was closing the border.
Biden was opening it.

Most migrants didn't have the means to get to the southern border, even if they tried. CBP-1 remained mostly useless, and people spent days, weeks, months refreshing it to no avail.

Those who did get appointments would find them cancelled once the new administration came into office.

Their reward for doing things in the so-called right way was to be left with no options in a country where they were anything but safe and far from home.

Mostly, my friends in the jungle have retained their incredibly good humor. Venetual friends video caught me once when I was on a hike.

They started laughing at me sweating, going uphill, and paused a conversation to shout encouragement for a while.

A year after I left the jungle, I would still be more than happy to welcome these people as my neighbours.

But it seems unlikely I ever will. Border crossings have dropped dramatically.
They are not, as the administration sometimes claims, zero, but they are lower.

People die crossing the border still.

Sometimes the volunteers you've heard in my last series have to hike miles into the desert and sift through sand and rocks to search for their remains, once nature scatters them like leaves blowing around the canyons.

Sometimes I'm there with them.

Sometimes we haul wooden crosses up mountains that don't have names on the map to mark the places where people's dreams died.

Those people don't get a viral video or a story in the New York Times because

even at a time where people are more engaged than they ever have been in my lifetime in advocacy for migrants, There's still not much attention paid to the actual border that every single migrant has to

Tomorrow, that's what we're going to talk about. Let's hear from Primrose about how that same day, January 20th, went for her.

Then they took us to

the border, but we couldn't get in because the gates were closed. Then they said, No, we have an option, we need to take you.
But you know, for me, I had to take a risk because

I was scared to stay in Mexico.

So they took us with under the bridge. I think the sewage, we were walking with our stomach like under the bridge

to we get to USA and Mexican border. So they put ladder for us to help us to, but we paid them 350, 350.

They charge. I found the other people, they also, we were 15, yeah, we were 15.

Yeah, then they helped us to jump.

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10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.

You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000.
This is when mindset comes in. Someone will be eliminated.
Pressure is coming down.

This is Trainer Games. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th.

This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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Some of us are illegal and some are not wanted.

Our work contracts out and we have to move on.

600 miles to that Mexico border.

They chase us like outlaws and rustlers like thieves.

Goodbye to my one, goodbye, Rosalita.

Adios and Miamigos, Pezos and Maria.

You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane.

And all I will call you will be deported

On the twenty eighth day of January, nineteen forty eight, a plane took off from Oakland, California.

On board were the crew, an Immigration Nationalization Service officer, and twenty eight people who had come to the US to work in the Bracero program.

They were being sent to El Centro, where they were to be deported to Mexico.

The pilot, Frankie Atkinson, had found a job flying DC-3s as a civilian after flying the legendarily dangerous hump route between India and China in the Second World War.

His wife, Bobby, herself, the daughter of a migrant mother, was filling in that day as the usual flight attendants weren't available.

On board were 28 passengers, all headed back to Mexico after the United States, where they'd come to work, had decided it didn't need or want them any longer. The plane never landed in El Centro.

It was overdue for maintenance and its left engine caught fire. Then its wing ripped off.
Above Kolinga, not so far from the fields where many of them had worked for year after year,

the passengers were pulled out of the plane and into the sky. Most of them had never flown before.

They must have been nervous before they took off, and now their worst fears were coming true.

And those who survived the loss of pressure and being ripped from the cabin, in some cases still strapped to their seats, must have had their very worst fears confirmed as they plummeted toward the ground that had only stopped being part of Mexico 100 years and four days before.

Their bodies, or parts of them, were scattered through the canyon as the plane slammed into the ground.

There weren't enough seats for all the passengers, and so three of them were forced to sit on their luggage at the back.

The plane was over its maximum weight capacity, and that might have been why the white smoke began pouring out of its left engine over Kalinga.

Frankie, the pilot, had survived crashes in his time in the Air Force, so hopefully he was able to keep his passengers and crew calm until the engine burst into flame.

Some witnesses reported seeing people jump from the plane after its left wing tore off and began to plummet towards the ground, but it's just as likely that they were pulled out.

The plane hit the ground about a mile east of Fresno County Industrial Road Camp, where incarcerated people were being forced to work.

Inmates were immediately dispatched to comb the hills for remains of people aboard the plane.

Locals, like Red Childers, whose riots the plane crashed on, rushed up there to join them, and they hoped to help the survivors. On finding none, they began to fight the fire around the wreckage.

Prisoners found luggage, women's shoes and babies' clothes, then bodies, some of them still in their seats littered throughout the canyon.

Only 16 sets of remains were ever identified, including the entire crew and the INS Guard. Bobby, identified by her engagement ring, was pregnant at the time.
She was buried with Frankie in New York.

Frankie's co-pilot Martin Ewing was buried with military honours. Frank Chaffin, the INS agent, was buried back in Berkeley.

The remains of the 28 deportees, or whatever had been found with them, were buried en masse in Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno.

Hundreds of local Latino people, most of whom didn't know them, turned up towards the twenty eight coffins, some of which were empty, be interred in the eighty four foot hole in the ground that was reserved for them.

The hole was covered with dirt and eventually with grass, and there they remained, without names, without their families being told, for three quarters of a century.

The next day the New York Times reported on the story, the worst aviation accident in California history.

The names, ages, and hometowns of the crew and the INS agent were given, along with, quote, 28 Mexican agricultural workers.

Their lives apparently were unremarkable, and even in death, they didn't deserve the dignity of being mentioned by name like people. It's a story that, 80 years later, is only too familiar.

The song we open this episode with is written by an American anti-fascist folk musician named Woody Guthrie. Like many of his songs, it's a protest song.
It recalls the plane wreck.

There's one home recording of him singing it to a tune that isn't used to sing the song today. It was only uncovered a few months ago.

Guthrie was moved to write it when he noticed that, in the reporting on the crash, none of the migrants who were being deported on the plane were named.

He wrote the song as a poem because at a time his Huntington's career had made it hard for him to sing and strum the guitar.

Later, a student at Colorado AM named Marty Hoffman set the poem to a Mexican branchera melody. It didn't become popular as a song until Guthrie's friend Pete Seeger began performing it at concerts.

Hoffman had played it to him when Seger had visited the campus ballad club.

Guthrie, whose guitar famously carried the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists, was in declining health by the time he wrote the poem in 1948 and he never lived to hear it sung.

Hoffman, who died by suicide in Red Rock, Arizona where he was teaching on the Navajo Reservation, died right as Joan Baez was recording the song in the studio.

Today, it's one of Guthrie's best-known works. Of course, when he wrote the song, to his disgust, Guthrie didn't know the names of the people on the plane.

He imagines them in his poem as Juan, Maria, Rosalita, the sort of people he might meet on any given day as a touring musician, who was fondly received by working people wherever he went.

I know a Juan, a Maria, and a Rose from the Darien Gap. I've also searched in the hills and the mountains for the remains of people whose names I don't know.
Eighty years later.

So the song resonates with me.

Rosalita. Adios me, amigo, quesusi, nobody else.

You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane. All they will call you will be

poor D.

The 25 men and three women aboard came to the US to fill labor shortages after World War II, as a result of an agreement between the two states called the Bracero program.

The Mexican government didn't want to lose its whole agricultural workforce and wanted to ensure that workers in the U.S. would send a portion of their wages home.

So it held these wages in accounts, which some of them never saw again. For years, the Mexican government refused to extend the program to Texas because of racist violence there.

People who entered the program waited months, and when they crossed the border, they were subject to abusive searches, spraying with DDT, and in some places, Zyklon B,

same gas used in the gas chambers, the Holocaust, was used to hose down their clothes. When they got to the US, many of them worked in very poor conditions.

Many chose not to wait, and instead crossed without papers.

Some farmers hired them for much less than the minimum Bracero programme wage and put them to work in worse conditions than the program permitted.

Others worked their allotted contracts in the programme and they stayed, hoping to make a better life in the USA or to earn some money they could keep before they went home.

Many of them came and went several times, returning home until the need to make more money overwhelmed the desire to remain and work their ajidos or parcels across Mexico.

The Mexican government wanted those who travel without a contract to be barred from being hired.

And in many cases, government officials in Mexico accepted bribes to allow workers to enter the program. Just as it is today, everyone made money apart from the migrants.

Bracero's letters were censored to prevent them asking their families to join them.

But nonetheless, a racist panic about undocumented migration began, especially after Frankie and thousands of others returned from the war and the manpower shortage was not so acute.

This, combined with demands from the Mexican government, led to Eisenhower eventually adopting a program whose name is a slur to catch, detain, and deport Mexican people to parts of their birth country they'd never been to, far from the border, far from their families and communities.

The operation, which focused on rapid deportations and border regions, is often cited as an inspiration for today's border regime.

76 years after Guthrie wrote his song, very little has changed in the way the legacy media covers migration.

Maybe that's why everyone from Dolly Parton to Bob Dylan, to Chris Christofferson, Wayland Jellings, Johnny Cash, Woody Nelson, and Bruce Springsteen has sung a version of this song.

Here's Johnny Cash describing the song before a TV performance. Johnny Cash, I understand this is a true story.
It's from our album, The Highwayman.

Johnny Rodriguez was on that album as well on this song. Yeah, understand it is a true story.
Woody Guthrie wrote this about a plane crash in

Los Catos Canyon, was it? Taking a plane load of Mexicans back after they worked for whatever they could get in this country. It's one of those old stories about maltreatment of aliens.

One of those old stories, he says. It seemed so hopeful in 1987.
Like we wouldn't be writing anymore because most people could accept that nobody should treat other people like that.

Anyway, that was before country music was entirely dominated by bootlickers. And here I am, playing it to you again, 80 years after it was written, because it is still relevant.

Here's Dolly Parton singing it. My father's own father,

he waded that river.

They took all the money

he made in his life.

My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees and they rode the truck till they took them and died.

The airplane caught fire

over Los Gados Canyon.

A fireball of lightning that shook all that he

are these dear friends all scattered like dry leaves?

The radio said

they were just people tease.

Goodbye to my one,

goodbye, Rosalie.

Idios,

mix of rigos, hey to send us.

As the song puts it, the bodies of the workers were scattered like dry leaves across Los Gatos Canyon.

The bodies of those 28 people, the parts that were recovered, were buried in a mass grave at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, marked later, thanks to a donation with a small plaque calling them Mexican nationals, although one of them was also Spanish.

The hard work of finding these people's names was taken up by people not even alive when that plane crashed.

Many of their relatives did not even know they were buried there until Carlos Rascon, the Fresno Diocese Director of Cemeteries, and Tim Hernandez, an author and professor at UT El Paso, dedicated themselves to naming them.

In 2013, a new headstone was erected with their names, in a ceremony which packed the cemetery.

Hernandez had found, after years of hard work, by locating one of their nephews, a copy of El Faro, a local Spanish-language newspaper, which provided a list that was more accurate than that in the Fresno County Records Department.

It wasn't until September 28, 2024, when I just left Primrose and Kimberley in Las Blancas, that a proper memorial was built for them in the canyon. Families traveled from across the U.S.

and Mexico to open the memorial. Some of them were funded by Woody Guthrie's grandchildren.
The names of all 28 of them were included.

They were Miguel Negrete Alvarez, Francisco Yamas Duran, Santiago Garcia Elisondo, Rosalio Paldia Estrada, Bernabe Lopez Garcia, Ramon Perez Gonzalez, Tomas Avina de Gracia, Salvador Sandoval Hernandez, Juan Lupe Ramirez Lara, Severo Medina Lara, Elias Trujillo Macias, Jose Rodriguez Macias, Tomas Padilla Marquez, Luis Lopez Maldina, Manuel Calderon Marino, Luis Cuevas Miranda, Martin Razo Navarro Ignacio Perez Navarro Roman Ochoa Ochoa Apollonio Ramirez Placencia Alberto Carlos Regosa Juan Lupe Hernandez Rodriguez

Maria Santana Rodriguez Juan Valenzuela Ruiz Wenceslau Flores Ruiz Jose Valdivia Sanchez Jesus Mesa Santos Baldomero Baldomero Marcos Torres,

Francis C. Atkinson, Lillian K.
Atkinson, Marian H. Ewing, and Frank E.
Chaffin.

I think about this song an awful lot. The first time I heard it was in a CD compilation of Spanish anarchist songs.

The fundamental decency of giving the deceased a name, treating them like people and not a human waste, seems so basic. And yet, three-quarters of a century later, reporting hasn't gotten any better.

A few times in my years at the border, I've searched for people and the remains of people whose names I don't know.

Just as some of my friends have erected little wooden crosses, some with names and some without, to people who we never got to meet but somehow still grieve.

There are lots of people whose names and faces I do know, who never made it to the USA. They didn't even get an anonymous story.

The people who die for the American green are totally ignored in the coverage of migration. The real cost of our border externalization.

Little children and loving parents who have to die so politicians of either party can brag about secure borders are completely invisible to most people in this country.

77 years, less one week after the Times published its story which erased people killed in the Los Gatos Canyon, it published a video. The video shows Primrose lying on the floor in agony.

She climbed the wall on the ladder and then fell into the USA. On landing, she broke her leg.
The story, just like that story in 1948, doesn't name her or Kim.

It refers to a group of migrants and calls Primrose one woman. To be fair, the piece did interview other migrants, but as is often the case, the migrants from Africa get the worst treatment of all.

The piece and the hundreds of other social media posts of the video from other outlets don't tell readers about the persecution and torture Primrose faced at home, about the fact she doesn't know where her father disappeared to, and that her whole family is in hiding.

It doesn't bother to mention that she and Kim walk for six months to get to the border, that they were kidnapped, robbed, and traumatised on the way. It doesn't even give their names.

Unlike the people who died in Los Gatos Canyon, Primrose is here to tell us how it feels to see her pain turned into page views by outlets with huge global platforms.

Yeah, that video, to be honest, even now I feel

it's embarrassing me because when I was in Texas, like if I met people, they said, Are you not the one who fell down?

For me, it's like something else because I was not happy for the person who put me in social media.

Even if when I go to the comments, some of the comments were bad, and the other people they don't even know what was

really happening to me.

I was running for my life,

but people, they just comment whatever they want. So

that video, even now,

I'm not even happy. Yes, I know people they make money with my video.
Maybe sh you you were supposed the person who posted me was supposed maybe to close my face or to do something.

And a lot of people

they even don't know where I am, but because of that video,

it went viral. Even

in my country,

people they were sending messages.

That's why uh the other people they went to my mom and started tortured here

because

they they thought maybe I'm in

in country.

But because of that video, they went to disturb my mum. She's not even where I grew up now in Nero, she just moved, she's somewhere else now.

So I don't even know who posted the video. And

I think I need to. I don't know what can I say, but

I'm very angry with the person who posted the video.

Maybe they should maybe ask me or to find me or to hide my face. And where's Kimberly? She was there, my daughter.

When you ask her about the video, she cries to be honest.

Just like those people who died in the plane crash, Primrose deserves better.

I first saw a video of her falling on TikTok, I think. I feel like it was shared by the Wall Street Journal, but I haven't been able to locate the post again.

Where I saw a friend. Someone else saw a way to make a bug.
It's a kind of extractive reporting that I've spent my whole career trying not to replicate.

The Times and plenty of other outlets have what they see as high standards of journalistic objectivity. I don't think it'll surprise anyone that I fall afoul of those, which is fine.

I don't want to be be trying to find the middle ground between someone running for her life and someone trying to make money from her misery.

Nonetheless, we have to live in a world where the vast majority of people get their information from outlets who see migrants as stories and a political issue, not as people.

We have to live with the consequences of that. We're seeing them all now,

every day.

This isn't a story about the New York Times.

A long time ago I realized my career wasn't going in the direction that was going to put me on the masthead of those big newspapers, Because I care about people like Primrose and Kimberley, and not about big newspapers.

This is a story about Primrose and Kimberley. So let's hear why they left Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe, if you don't know, has been ruled by the same party since 1980, the ZANU-PF.

The ZANU-PF has been led for three decades by Robert Mugabe.

It has been the only party to hold the presidency since independence, and the office has only changed hands once, when Mugabe's former VP replaced him after Mugabe resigned under threat of impeachment and a coup.

The opposition has taken different forms over time, but never managed to dislodge one-party rule. When it has got close, it has been met with extreme violence.
I think Primrose knows only too well.

It's not like we just, it's a luxury to come to come to America for beggars. If I wanted to come to America for beggars, I would maybe go and

apply for the visa. But us, as

youth, as people who want to change our country, they don't even

make you to find a way to go to make a visa. 'Cause Zimbabwe is a tough country, especially for us young people,

young generation.

They can even kill you in Zimbabwe. We can't even protesting for our rights in Zimbabwe'cause we scared for the government who is

running the country now, which is NPF. We are really scared.

I have people, a lot of people, I lose a lot of friends,

kidnapped, killed.

Me also in Zimbabwe, they even tortured me,

wanted to kill me.

So that's why

even I don't even know where he is

Kimberly's father. Since 2017, I don't even know where he is.
Maybe he's dead or he's not even dead. I don't even know where he is because he also ran away.

Even now, as I'm speaking right now, I'm stressed. Like, I don't even know where my father is.

Yeah, I don't even know where he is. Also, it just

so our governments, our Zimbabwe,

it's really tough for us.

Yeah,

they don't give us time or they don't give us as a

young generation, they think themselves

and they are

families, and the economy, there's no job. Even if you go to school,

there's no jobs. There's a lot of graduates, people

staying home.

They are vendors, workers, no jobs, nothing.

If you want to stay in the end for your rights,

they tortured you, killed you, disappear.

There's a lot of people who disappear in Zimbabwe

just because you need to change.

Under Mugabe, Zimbabwe experienced rapid economic decline and hyperinflation.

At various times, Mugabe has blamed this on former colonial powers, which is reasonable, and a quote, gay mafia, which is what you get when you have a single man in charge of your state ruling by whim from the moment of liberation until just two years before his death.

Frimrose, like many in her country, like many people from all over the world, wanted a better future. It was something she and her family had advocated for.

But having seen people she loved disappear, never knowing if they were alive or dead, never even getting the closure of a funeral, she decided she couldn't risk leaving Kimberley alone.

And so she took her daughter and fled. They fled to South Africa, but violence followed them there.

Especially in South Africa, people are killed with this xenophobia, people are killed, you know, so it's not also even safe for us to stay in South Africa. That's why,

especially me, to be honest, the journey was not even planned. I was just asking people,

and when I reached Brazil, people they were just talking, let's go, let's go, let's go. I was also following those people

till I get here.

So, it's not like we came here for luxury or for what?

For me, I just came here for my life. I just ran for

my life. I just need my life and my daughter's life.

Because if I die today, I I don't know if anybody can look after my daughter.

Especially even in my country, because things are tough for my mom. Because my father just disappeared.

What people can't easily travel around the world, concepts like xenophobia, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, they're not just American issues, they're global issues.

And that's why we say nobody's free until everybody's free.

We just grew up in a

poor family, so

but it's tough to be honest. It's really tough

for me. I'm not even 100% okay.
I'm still have

lots of

memories, stress.

Yeah,

and I remember one of my friends,

her name was Memori. She died also.

We were together in Zimbabwe when they kidnapped us for five days.

So she just

died.

It was 2020, 2020. Yeah,

she just died

because we were fighting for our future.

Yeah,

but

it's tough.

Yeah.

Here's me talking to Primrose on that riverbank in Bahachikito about why she left South Africa.

Yeah. Was it hard to see a future for her there?

Yeah.

So

explain the situation there. Hola, buenas, holas.

The situation where in where in Zimbabwe.

The situation for me, it was tough. I just ran away to South Africa and South Africa was not safe, xenophobia,

and

they almost killed me and my boyfriend.

And even my

baby father was abusive,

too much abusive

because of the politics.

I'm an opposition

party, so it was difficult for me to leave. So that's why I ran out.
Even in South Africa, I was not safe at all. Because those people, they were like following me and my daughter.

So I spent three months months on the road coming here. I leave South Africa, I think,

4th of July till now. I'm in Panama.
I'm still working.

That was September. She finally entered the USA in January.
crossing into a very different country than the one she'd set out for.

Her story is unique. Every migrant story is, but it's not unusual.

If you spend as much time talking to migrants as I do, you will learn a lot about the hardships regular people face all over the world.

You'll also learn about the dreams people have and how little they really differ.

Let's take, for example, the protests we recently saw in Nepal. Those didn't come as a huge shock because I met dozens of Nepalese political opposition members.

Here's one I spoke to as we sheltered in the porch of Nembara House in Bahachikito in a rainstorm last September. The little little room was filled with sleeping pads and tired bodies.

I spent a lot of time there sitting on the floor talking to people. Anook's story is one of many I heard just in that one room from all over the world.

Because it's not safe in my country, that's why I want to go to the States, because there is right and freedom. Yeah.

What makes it not safe in your country?

There are many political reasons.

And I am from a different political like called Congress. Okay.
I am from Congress, just a small member, not a big, but still men. Yeah.

But

the opposition party, you know?

They won the

constitution. So.
Yeah.

So they kicked you out.

Okay.

If you're wondering how someone comes from the mountains of Nepal to a small village in the Panamanian jungle, and to be briefly sharing a tiny room with people from Venezuela, Cameroon, China, and Bolivia, all seeking the same thing, Here's how.

Then after that,

I went to Qatar.

From Qatar, I went to Brazil.

I stayed in the refugee camp for at least two weeks.

Then, after that, I came out from Brazil, took a bus, then traveled for

two months, long time, maybe 24 hours or 25 hours. Wow.

Then I went to, I caught up some friends. Yeah,

they took me to Bolivia.

We need to cross through Djungal.

But it was small,

not a long way.

It was good.

And after Bolivia, I took the ride to bus.

I took at least maybe 48 hours. In a bus.
Yeah. Wow, man.
Then I went to the border of Peru and there was some boat

to take us across.

And I went across to Peru, stayed in a hotel

that night. Then after that, came out and again rode the bus

for 26 hours

to Lima. Then after Lima, again 26 hours to Tulcan.

Then after Tulcan, I got a taxi and that taxi was to cross the border to Ecuador. Okay, and so I went to Ecuador in that taxi and they kept us in the hotel.

Stayed for two, two, three hours in the hotel. Then at night, again

traveling. Wow.
Then again, traveled to Colombia.

After Colombia,

rode another bus

and rode to

Colombia and Panama border to Nicoli.

to Nicoli and stayed

maybe one week in Nicoli.

After that, I took a boat to Kapurgana.

From Kapurgana,

there were some bikes.

A bike took us to a camp at the border. Oh, wow.

At the camp, I reached nearly at 6 p.m.

Then, after,

some people came there and they were responsible to cross the border to Panama. Yeah.
Then we walked to at 9 p.m.

We walked to maybe

we walked to till here 44 hours.

Wow. Yeah.
I asked Anuk what he had to say to people in America because he had excellent English and I have this platform to share.

He was more than aware of the US discourse around migrants. And he said he'd been watching videos about it.

We are just everyone is human being.

Yeah.

I haven't heard from Manouk since then. I've no idea where he and his friends are, or how the journey across three continents ended.

Like so many other migrants, he disappeared for me in the mass of humanity heading north.

I still think about all the people I haven't heard from.

Sometimes I'll see people who look like like them and I'll get excited, but if they're in the USA now, they're probably afraid of going out much.

They came all this way, they risked their lives, they saw people die, and now, once again, they're hiding from men in masks with guns. Here's Rose, a young woman from Bolivia.

I think about Rose a lot. She was a young mum travelling alone, trying to find a better future for her family and risking her life in the process.

She seemed young and happy most of the time, but she had a sort of tiredness in her eyes that really stayed with me after several conversations we had in Bahojiquito. I don't really know why.

It just seemed so sad that she was away from her kids and that someone who so obviously was predisposed to joy looked so tired and sad, all on her own there.

It felt like her only chance at a better future. She was very open about how hard it all was.

I remember one day, when I didn't feel like recording, just sitting on the side of the raised walkway in Bahojiquito, with her feet in the hot, wet mud, watching people walk by.

Talking with her like I'd talk with any other friend about our homes and our families and the election that was two months away at that point.

She was hanging out with a group of Venezuelans then, but they must have been separated because they've asked me about her since. Just like so many other people, I've no idea where she is.

It seems so sad to me that we've made a world where a woman who wants a future for her kids has to risk her life, maybe lose it for all I know, just to come here and ask for help, and then still be denied.

And then, if she gets here to be chased, harried, and harassed.

Yes. The situation there in Bolivia right now, we're practically economically...

Well, we're in very bad shape. It's kind of like Venezuela.

What motivates me to travel is, more than anything, work.

Because there, you can't work. You can't earn enough.
You know?

You have to work a lot.

But they pay you very little, you know?

So there's

a lot of poverty. So that's what motivates me to keep going, to work in another country,

to migrate.

Because I also have a family. I have children.
So that's what motivates me to go to another country to work.

It's a future for them. Yes.

A better future for them.

For my children.

I asked her to share her journey. How it had been just to get to this little wet village that welcomes people in the middle of the jungle.

We left Friday morning to go to the jungle.

Right?

Well, let me explain.

Honestly, it's not easy.

It's very hard because I've seen quite a few people.

There are many pregnant women.

There are women with children.

There are elderly people. There are adults.

There are people who come with crutches.

There are people who break bones if their feet fall off the edge.

There are people who faint.

There are quite a lot of people in a difficult situation

because you have to climb a hill, which takes at least eight hours.

You have to climb.

You have to carry your backpack, your food, your clothes, your supplies, everything you need for the journey, your water.

So it's very hard.

Very hard.

And you go up.

Up.

And you arrive at what is the border of Panama with Colombia,

which is called the flag.

You get there and from there you have to go down, down, down.

That takes at least another eight hours.

You have to go down all day.

On Friday,

it took us all day.

We had to sleep on the side on the edge of a riverbank, more or less.

There were about 200 of us, if I'm not mistaken.

We are

200 people,

150, 200 people traveling and sleeping there.

We camped, 200 of us. Yes.

There are children. There are babies.
Two months old, one month old, three months old, one year old.

So there are children.

And they are really the ones who suffer the most on this journey. Yes.

So that night we slept. The next day, which would be Saturday.
we came back again at 6 in the morning.

We set off walking all day.

We had to climb hills. We had to cross rivers that come up to your shoulders, up to your neck.

They really come up.

There are quite a few rivers.

There's mud.

There are mountains.

There are those rocks that you slip on and die.

There are mountains that you have to climb. Of course, if you don't want to go meet God, you have to climb mountains that are slippery with stones, rocks.

and you keep going like that all day

downriver walking

walking

there are people who got left behind

there are people who came with children they get stuck

they faint right

it's very hard

very difficult

and I know that all of us who immigrated here are doing the same thing.

We are not bad people.

We are good people. We do it for a purpose which is our family right our children

we need a good economy to support our family

our children

i asked race if there was a dream that kept her going

yes i have a dream to go there because just like everyone else, like every person, I need to get ahead financially to provide for my children, to get ahead. So my dream has always been to be there.

You know, I set that goal for myself before, but I didn't think it would be like this. So difficult.

And once you're in there, well, there's nothing you can do but get out, move forward, get out of there because you can't go back. You can't retreat.
You have to get out.

So my dream is that, to provide for my children.

I have two sons waiting for me.

I have my family,

my dad, my brothers.

So, for that reason, we set off to go there.

We are still going there.

The American dream is such a nebulous concept. Often it's used as a byword for exceptionalism, and the idea that the U.S.

offers a true meritocracy where hard-working people can thrive in the marketplace of ideas. That isn't true.
But dreams don't have to be true, nor do they have to be that far-fetched.

Most people coming to America know they'll work hard in the fields, cleaning homes, or maybe as a lion cook.

Their hands and knees and backs will do the labor that allows for privileged Americans to still believe in their version of the American dream, the one where millionaires become billionaires.

But the chance to work and be paid, to speak and not fear consequences, to be able to feed your kids enough that they grow up healthy and strong. Those are dreams too.

They're dreams that people are willing to risk their lives for.

And dreams dreams that I've seen them chase up and down mountains in the jungle and in the freezing cold and the baking heats of the deserts and mountains of California.

But now even those who achieve their humble dreams are in danger of losing them.

And tomorrow I want to talk about the end of the American Dream and the beginning of an American nightmare for millions of migrants who are already here.

Every time I hear the various versions of that Woody Guthrie song, I think about the friends I made in the jungle. who, as the song says, maybe went to heaven without any names.

So before I go, I want to share the whole Noemi's American Dream one more time.

Because I think it's important not to forget what the entire force of the most powerful state in the world has dedicated itself to destroying.

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For Rose, Noemi, and Primrose, and the dozens of other migrants I met in the jungle, the goal was to get here. Some of them had friends they wanted to stay with, but many did not.

They just wanted a chance. A chance to work and be paid a fair wage.
A chance for their kids to have a dream and a future. A chance to sleep safely at night.

Once they got across that line, over that wall or across that river, they wanted to make their case for asylum, to ask for help and someone to keep them safe, to give them an opportunity to build their lives again.

But even for the very few who made it, the risks weren't over.

Within hours of taking office, Trump had begun signing executive orders that would make life for migrants on the way to the USA and those already here even more difficult.

To the cheers of the crowd, he signed an order that kept TikTok online, pardoned the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and attempted to rescind birthright citizenship from the children of migrants.

He ended CBP One and with his Sharpie ordered the building of more walls and the resulting death of more people who came here to ask for help.

Within days of Trump taking office, federal agents from ICE, the DEA, the FBI, and other agencies have begun a campaign of made for social media raids.

In Colorado they raided apartment apartment buildings, which had played a load-bearing role in right-wing conspiracies about Terendiragua months before.

At universities, they grabbed young men and women off campus for the crime of opposing genocide.

People entering the country were stopped and had their devices searched, not just for evidence of crime, but also for evidence of mocking the president or the vice president.

Trump added various organized crime groups to the list of foreign terrorist organizations and attempted to totally ban asylum. including for the people fleeing those very organizations.

People who had waited months for an appointment on CBP-1 now had their appointment cancelled. They were left totally without hope, at risk, and with nowhere to go for help.

Trump used a border emergency declaration to justify his proclamation, and quickly followed up with more military deployments, wall construction, and a huge increase in the funding for state surveillance.

People still crossed, but their numbers decreased as many of them were quickly deported back to Mexico. Here's Kirsten Zitlau, Promosis's lawyer, explaining the new system.

So, there are

no new asylum cases. In other words, people who cross at the southern border are now detained only to be removed immediately, basically, or as soon as possible.

Under what's called 212F authority, it's under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Trump has used this authority, which basically broadly says that if the president finds a certain class of immigrants or the entry of immigrants would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.

They may by proclamation, you know, suspend all entry of said immigrants.

So whereas people used to get credible fear interviews or were paroled into the United States to be allowed to fight an asylum case, none of that is happening anymore.

And people are, if anything, only screened for what's called Convention Against Torture screenings to just determine like, hey, are they going to be tortured by their government or with the acquiescence of their government if they're returned to their home country, but even then, they are not allowed to remain in the United States or fight any relief in the United States.

That just means that they will be deported to a third country. For people inside the USA, the situation wasn't much better.

First, as a trickle, and then as a torrent, we started to see videos of masked, unidentified men jumping out of unmarked vehicles to grab people, many of whom were migrants, and detain them.

In most cases, these were federal agents from ICE and other federal agencies like the FBI, the ATF, and the DEA, whose officers were detailed to support ICE.

In an increasing number of cases, they were people imitating ICE.

For migrants, many of whom had fled totalitarian regimes where people were disappeared by the state, they were a reminder of what they'd run away from.

The place they had come to be safe started to feel like the place they'd had to leave because it wasn't safe. In Primrose's case, things were a bit different.

When Kirsten filed a motion to appear remotely, she got an extremely unusual response.

In ruling on my WebEx motion, I was emailed the order of the judge judge along with a notice that premiers should uh self-deport so judges are sending out these notices with routine other orders in cases where the immigrant has counsel is fighting their case

it's obvious they're fighting their case yeah so it's one of the things where you just feel very strongly this administration's influence are they obliged to do that or is that a choice that the judges make no not at all it's it's okay not at all and in fact it's completely inappropriate the immigration bar is taking a different approach to it

some are filing motions to recuse telling the judges hey you need to recuse yourself you're you're a non-neutral judge to send this out in the middle of the case is absurd it's a due process violation they're entitled to a neutral judge this is just one of the many areas where things are not as they have been the trump administration has flouted rules and even court orders and sent migrants to El Salvador's mega prison secode a place where torture is routine and where few people have ever left.

They attempted to bring criminal charges against migrants to justify their actions and eventually ended up in a prisoner change with the Maduro regime.

At the same time, Maduro's government began offering quote-unquote humanitarian flights to Venezuelans in Mexico, and some even took to navigating the Darien Gap southwards to return to Colombia, where they thought they might have some chance at a decent life.

In the USA, A country with more guns than people, everyone seemed to be holding their breath and worrying that we'd see an increase in lethal violence.

But after a few weeks, thankfully, that hadn't happened. But, more and more, where Ice agents showed up, local people also showed up.

They called them all number of things, fascists, cowards, traitors.

And then people began to organize, following ICE agents around and announcing their presence, identifying their hotels and making noise outside.

picking up neighbors' kids and getting their groceries so people wouldn't need to expose themselves to the risk of arrest. If ICE agents were spotted, people alerted their communities.

In cities across the US, people began to form networks to take care of their neighbors.

Some of this came from lifelong activists, but much of it did not. People even began using apps normally used for suburban racism, like Next Door and Ring, to call out the presence of ICE.

Raids were opposed, and ICE agents were shouted at across the country, but they still kept going.

It wasn't until June that we saw the first mass protest. Everyone wondered if we'd be in for another hot summer like 2020.

CBP officers had been deployed to LA to conduct a series of loud and once again curated for Instagram raids.

Board of Patrol's El Centro Sector Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino became the face of the operation.

Even before Trump had taken office, just a day after Congress had certified the results of the election, Bovino had sent 65 agents six hours north of the border to push the boundaries of what people would accept.

In California's Central Valley, not so far from Los Gatos Canyon, he led Operation Return to Sender, accosting Latino farm workers at convenience stores and on the way to work.

Bovino claimed the operation was targeted, but reporting from Cal Matters showed CBP had no prior records for 77 of the 78 people it arrested.

Bovino, who has bestowed the title of Premier Sector on the part of the border he oversees, has five agents on a team dedicated to producing videos. He likes to praise Eisenhower, whose Operation Wag

often flew migrants to El Centro before they were sent back to Mexico. The plane, which crashed in Noscatos Canyon, was headed there.

Bovino has a long history of these raids, dating back to at least 2010 in Las Vegas, and he is very much the face of the new Border Patrol approach.

While ICE numbers are growing, CBP still has several times more officers, and indeed some reporting suggests that ICE officers and some offices might be replaced with CBP personnel.

Border Patrol notionally operates within 100 miles of the border, an area which includes all US coastline and the entire shore of the Great Lakes.

And even then, this 100 miles is an interpretation and not a hard legal blog. This remit covers two-thirds of the population.
It gives them a wide leeway to infringe on the Fourth Amendment.

This has been the case for decades, since the Department of Homeland Security was founded after 9-11. But mass protests against CBP has been rare.

We've seen it on occasion, a lesson you'd think for an agency with such a broad remit in a country that seems so proud of the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

In LA though, people weren't having it. Following a series of violent raids, Border Patrol agents had been met with protest across the city.

They'd responded with tear gas, projectile weapons, and threats.

They'd arrested Dennis Huerta, leader of the Service Employers United International, one of the largest unions in the country, as well as dozens of other Angelinos.

They'd shot tear gas out of moving vehicles and launched projectiles into the faces of reporters and bystanders alike. Seeing this, doing what I do, I got on a train to Los Angeles.

But with it being Southern California, it took like five hours.

Are they throwing or shooting?

Did you get hit? You okay?

I'm going to that tree on the right.

Yeah, I'm going to be great.

After getting off the train in LA, and before I met my friend Charles McBride to work on some coverage together, I walked around Alverta Street, grabbed a coffee, and spoke to some of the local folks.

There were tags all over the walls and windows of the buildings around the train station. But that's always been how LA has expressed itself.
All I heard from people I met there was support.

One man expressed to me that his anxiety made protests very uncomfortable for him, but he was glad to see people standing up.

Obviously, crimes against property are something that parts of Los Angeles take very seriously. It's a spiritual home of conspicuous consumption.

But in this instance, it seemed everyone I've met either didn't care or was so mad they didn't care.

From mid-morning to early the next day, LAPD, who are not supposed to assist CBP, but who can enforce state law, chased angry angry kids around their own city.

In Skid Row and downtown LA, tear gas flooded the streets, and so did young people from across town. In between the tear gas and pepper balls, I managed to talk to a few of them.

Their stories were similar. They were those kids whose better futures had brought their parents here.

They were citizens, raised in the USA, to believe in the right to free speech and assembly, something they were now using to make their voices heard.

I mean, my family,

they're, you know, susceptible to all the the ICE raids and stuff like that.

And, you know, being a citizen here, I feel like it's my duty to come out here and, you know, speak out, you know, for those who can.

It made me think of Primrose and Kimberly and the future they might both have.

I sincerely hoped that one day, Kimberly and every other kid I met in the jungle would feel brave enough to be out here and despite everything be strong enough to stand up against state violence.

Unbeknown to me, Primrose and Kim weren't that far away. They had a check-in with ICE at the DTLA Federal Building that day.

And as they rode by in a bus, past the protesting crowds, Kim said to her mum, Look, it's Uncle James. Her mum, of course, told her it couldn't have been, but she was right, it was.

After nine months of only speaking on the phone, Kimberly somehow recognized me, despite me being wrapped up in a helmet and a plate carrier.

When they first arrived, they went to stay with someone they knew in Texas. I planned to go and visit them there and accompany them to their court hearing.

At this point, ICE agents had already begun snatching people in the corridors of courthouses after the government withdrew their cases and placed them in expedited removal proceedings, which meant mandatory detention.

There's not much any of us could do about this, but I didn't want them to be alone. Then I got COVID and couldn't go.
Here's Kirsten explaining how this process works.

So INA section 235 applies to people who entered within less than two years, like you said.

They can be then subject to what's called expedited removal.

That means that they have to take a credible fear interview and be detained and that they only get to fight a case if they pass their credible fear interview.

They do not qualify for an immigration judge bond. So they only get out if ICE lets them out, which of course ICE is letting nobody out.

So

the administration wants to have people detained under this authority, this 235 authority, as much as possible to have have to fight their case detained and either lose the will to do so

and or not be able to afford an attorney because detained cases move along a lot quicker and are very costly as well for that reason.

So what they're doing is anybody who was here two years or less, but was paroled in. So they're in the regular immigration court proceedings.
They got out. They're under 240 proceedings.
It's called.

So DHS attorneys in court are terminating those proceedings.

They are asking the judge to terminate the the 240 proceedings, so then that case is closed, and then they immediately restart a case under section 235.

That hearing went relatively smoothly. Their lawyer, who is now working for whatever Primrose could fundraise, was able to help them make their case.
They left with another hearing scheduled.

Soon after, they decided to move to LA to stay with another friend after the housing situation in Texas fell through. They were living in East LA when they had their next ice check-in.

Yeah, I was having an appointment.

And you said they went back to get some documents and they made the hours. Yeah.

Yeah, I went there, I think, around Africa

p.m.

At first, they came and gave me my papers. They said, go to chat with, which is close to where you stay, than to came here in LA downtown.

So when I walk away,

I realized there was no other documents. Then I walk,

I go back, I said to Kim, let's go back inside.

Then I go to the reception.

Then I ask the lady, and she was rude at first. Then she took my documents, then said, Oh, okay, let me go and find it.

Three hours, four hours, not coming back. Then she came and called me, I think 4 p.m.

Then the ICE officer is just telling me, I'm going to detain you.

I said, Oh, why?

Said, um, we are going to explain more

where you are going. I said, Oh, okay.

Like thousands of other migrants who are trying to do as they're asked, Primrose was detained at her check-in, along with Kim.

Previously, she'd been given ice check-ins in Riverside, despite living in East LA. I'd helped her navigate the four and a half-hour bus route to get there on time.

I wondered how on earth someone who doesn't have a friend here or who doesn't speak English is expected to do this.

She went out of her way to make sure she was there, and she had her documents in order despite all of this. But she and Kimberly were detained anyway.

It's not hard for me to see why people in LA were mad.

Then they took me to Santana.

We were just sitting, not even

one ICE officer came talk to me, nothing. I was just sitting.
And the other thing, they just took my phone same time. They said, switch it off.
Then I said, can I tell even one of my friends?

Maybe they'll.

They are worried now. Say, no, no, we are going to give you a phone later on.
I said, okay.

So, in Sandana, they took us in a hotel to sleep. Then the following day,

they took back us to Sandana detention center.

Not even one officer. I was asking the security, they said, We don't even know.

We spent the whole day sitting,

doing nothing. We were just sitting.
Then they took us, I think, around 6 p.m.

back to lossengers.

Then, when

that's where I saw the ice officer then she explained to me we are going to detain you we are going to put you somewhere because the rules are changing every day i even asked her did i do something she said no

i've heard this from a lot of migrants the ice agents managing their non-detained docket as opposed to those in enforcement removal or detention seem to be struggling to keep up with the pace of the changes in rules.

Many of the migrants I'd heard from had decent relationships with the officers who do their check-ins, and they can't understand why other officers working for the same organization would detain them, even though they're doing exactly what they're asked to do.

They are doing things, quote-unquote, the right way, but that's not enough for an agency desperately driven by quotas and the desire to purge the nation of people who had risked their lives to become Americans.

Let's hear how this felt for Primrose.

Then he said,

Do you have a lawyer? I said, Yes. Then she said, Okay, it's fine.
So she gave me another document to sign. Then I signed, like, they are going to detain me.

Then I asked for how long? She said, I don't think you guys, where you are going, are going to stay more than 14 days, maybe less than 14 days.

I said, okay. Then I asked a phone to call a lawyer.
She gave me a phone.

Then I contacted the lawyer. The lawyer, the phone was off.
Then I tried to contact

one of my friends. Then he answered, I said, Yo, we wanted to go to the police to ask because we were worried because your phone was off.
And

the ICE officer, the ICE officer, the boss was having a GPS.

So my GPS was off. So they were phoning

the person who helped me in Texas looking for me.

Then he also replied, said, I'm also looking for you. I don't even know where she is.

So people, they were worried. Maybe

someone kidnap you, something happened to me. Yeah,

yeah, so

yeah, the other officer were looking for me. They were even sending messages on their app, yeah, yeah, asking where are you charging your GPS.
And the other ICE officer was detaining me.

Then, I even explained to her, she said, Oh, no, no, it's okay. Then she took the scissors, then she cut the GPS,

she cut it off. Then we spent, I think, one hour.
It was around seven.

Then they said, Okay,

oh, there's someone is coming to take you and your daughter, so to take you somewhere which is safe with your child. I asked where

those people they said, We don't know, we don't know.

Then I said, Oh, okay.

Then they searched me.

They said, Do you want to take your bag? I said, No, no, it's it's fine. I can ask if you and someone, because I know I was leaving house key for the apartment.

Primrose, like many people seeking asylum, had to wear a GPS ankle tag, part of ICE's Alternative to Detention program.

There are various parts to the programme, including facial recognition check-ins via a smartphone app, home visits, and the Intensive Supervision Appearance program, which is administered by Behavioural Interventions, a Geogroup subsidiary.

ICEAP, as it's known, includes an app through which people can check it, as well as the GPS monitors and smartwatches which can monitor GPS and do facial recognition.

Very obviously, they're not being used in a systematic way, as one branch of ICE was detaining Primrose while another was using a GPS tag to try and find her.

All of the GPS devices used as alternatives to detention represent massive surveillance overreach, an invasion of privacy, and a huge government dragnet of data they can use to track down migrants and the people they're with.

Despite this, they're also better than detention, which is where Primrose ended up, but not directly.

I thought maybe they are going to deport me.

I can't go with the keys.

Then they took my bag, said, Okay, we are going to put somewhere.

After one hour, they took us to

Lux Airport.

They put us in a hotel.

It was around 12. Yeah, 12 p.m.

that time. And they said, okay, Sven, you can have a shower.
Then you can have a nap. So me, I was in the shower, and Kimberly was

already uh on the bed sleeping.

Then the lady came and knocked, said, Oh, make fast.

We are going to we want to go back to pick another person where we came from.

Ah, then I wake I I wake Kimberly. I saw Kimberly was crying, she was like, I want to sleep because she was having a headache.
Then they said, No, no, no, it's okay, let's go.

You are going to sleep where we are going. We spent the whole night

up and down.

We came back again to LA downtown to pick another guy with his son with his son. Then they took us to San Diego Airport.
I think we arrived there, I think it 5 a.m.

to take the flight to San Antonio, Texas.

Then

after that,

and the other lady, she was rude. The other one, she was nice, she was fine.
The other one, if you ask her, she was like, she was rude.

Then I just keep quiet.

Then

I think at the airport, we spend three hours sitting, then we catch our flight at 8 a.m.

to San Antonio.

Yeah, they took us to delay immigration.

They welcome us, nice, everything, yeah. Then they put us inside.

But for me, I was

I was crying to be honest.

Yeah,

I was even crying, like

you know, the only person makes me strong is Kim, and it's worse for her. Like,

since last year,

since last year,

your life is something else. I'm just moving from one place to another, moving from one place to another, you know.

She's a strong girl, but sometimes you can see when you see her sitting down, starting crying, she will just remind you something.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

The Flores settlement governs detention of children by immigration authorities. It limits the time they can be held to 20 days and establishes minimum standards for their detention and treatment.

It was a lawsuit based on this Flores settlement that eventually ended the Biden-era policy of outdoor detention. The settlement is widely flouted, but it was the best hope Primrose and Kimberley had.

Kirsten, their lawyer, who we heard from earlier, worked tirelessly to demand they be treated according to their rights.

And how was it? You caught me a few times in Dilly, right? Like how

Kim wasn't having a good time.

At first, at the first week, it was hard even for both of us. Yeah.
Yeah.

Even the food me, I wasn't even eaten. At first, it was very hard for both of us.

But you know, kids, um, she was like used to.

Primrose called me a few times from detention. I'd pick up the phone to a robot voice, and the number would identify itself on my phone as federal detention or something like that.

At first, obviously, I was afraid, but I had an idea of what it could be. Yet another connection.

that began with a little piece of waterproof paper in the jungle and was now nine months later leading to a phone call from a prison for families in Texas.

I'd pick up the phone and then I'd have to press one or two to accept the call. I always wondered what I was about to hear.

I could tell she was trying to put on a brave face, but she sounded so small it was difficult, really hard to hear. She said Kim wasn't eating the food, which I've often heard is terrible.

I spent hours trying to find out how to put money on their commissary account so she could get something a little better. Kirsten fought on and on to try and get them released.

I remember at one point hearing from Primrose, locked up with with her daughter for the crime of asking this country for help on the 4th of July.

It would be too cliché if I made that up, but nothing this year really seems believable.

Even in ICE detention, which is a miserable place for anyone, Primrose and Kim had an especially hard time as most of the migrants they were detained with spoke Spanish.

And where's the other thing? Is like those people

they were, especially the room they put me, all of them, they were Spanish.

And me, I don't even understand the Spanish. I even asked the ICE officer, Can you please maybe because there's an another lady also, two ladies, I think Africans, we were only four families.

So we even asked them, Can you put us in one room so that we can understand each other? Even especially for the TV, you know, kids

they refuse.

So sometimes

I even had a

report one of the ladies, she was very rude to us.

She came and speak something. So me and

Kim, we don't even understand like what she says.

So I just saw people there doing something. Then later on, she was like, Hey, I came here and I said this and that and this and that.
Hey, when you came here, you just speak Spanish.

You didn't even explain with English. And of which me, I don't understand English.
So she just write a

report to your boss. So your boss came and called me.
Then I explained to her.

Then she was like, Oh, okay.

Then they called here.

She wanted to say, No, no, no. I even explained to English.
Then there's another woman inside my room. Then she spoke with Spanish.

I didn't even hear, but she was telling the officer, No, no, no, this woman, she's lying. She just came and speaks Spanish, yeah, not English.

So these people, they were just sleeping, they didn't even know what to do because she just only

spoke Spanish only.

I've heard this from lots of migrants. They end up serving as translators for each other because the agency that is funded better than most countries' militaries seemingly won't provide them.

Often, people who speak indigenous languages have to find a translator into Spanish or Russian or whatever other language they have a colonial relationship with.

Other times, there's just nobody to help them, and they're even more alone and afraid.

Luckily, Primrose wasn't alone. She had Kim with her.
And as they always do, they looked out for each other. These aren't things a child should have to do.
Certainly not a child as young as Kimberly.

But in the end, it was Kimberly who could help work out what was going on.

Then the ICE officer

started crying. Like, then they took me to a psychologist.
Then I said, I know it's okay.

I think I even spent three days at that site. They removed me in the room, then they put me back.

So, Kimberly was learning and

standing Spanish. So, sometimes she's helping me.
Oh, mommy,

they said this and that, they said this and that. I even write a note to complain.
Like,

when these people came, then we have to accommodate all of us because it's not like, oh, we are all Spanish

and we don't understand Spanish. Along with being overcrowded and underfed, migrants in ICE facilities are often incredibly bored.

I've heard of some of them trying to teach yoga or share stories, but for the most part, they're so afraid and isolated that they are forced to sit with their anxieties day after day.

I can't imagine what this is like for parents who have to try and maintain their own mental health and take care of their children. But to be honest, we were just sitting.
So time goes, oh, yeah.

Because

I remember one day we went to play

to the gym to play, I think, soccer with Kim.

I just fell down.

I just fell down. They took me to hospital.
I think I spent

I think three hours, then I wake up.

Yeah.

Yeah, because I think it's depression. Yeah.

So they put me in depression pills till I get it out.

Yeah, because my biblio was high every time, each and every time, each and every time.

Yeah, but I asked my ICE officer about my case.

Then she just replied, Me, I'm just waiting for ICE to close your case, so then we can start for asylum. So I was just sitting doing nothing.

Despite what the detention was doing to her, Primrose remained determined to keep fighting her case. Every Thursday, an ICE officer would come by and she would be able to ask about her case.

She'd been looking forward to the only point in her week when she might get some good news, or at least some news, about what was happening to her and why.

Sadly, that's not how it went.

Yeah, there was an ICE officer very rude, to be honest.

Everyone just walked away without,

and people were crying, complaining.

Then it was like,

I went to him, straight to him. I wanted to ask him a question.
He said,

I don't have time.

The only thing I can even

tell you guys: if you are tired of staying here,

you can

because they were putting papers for self-deportation in our rooms. Like, if you want to deport, you can anytime you can just sign, you put your A number, your phone number, everything.

Then they can make you

ticket here.

In her lowest moments, Primrose said, she felt like giving up. Maybe it all wasn't worth it, she thought.
And she would do anything to get away from the hell of the detention center.

That's the goal of these places, to break people. But Kimberly reminded her what they'd come all this way for.
Of course, when I was in detention,

there's a time I was like, I'm going to sign a deportation form. Oh, he screamed.
She said, no.

People, they are going to kill you if you want to go back.

Oh, it's fine. It's up to you.
If you want to go, die, go. Not me.
Sign your paper, not my paper. You must sign yours, then you can go.
Don't sign my name.

No.

I would rather stay here because I know people, because there's a lot of people happening in the AI,

especially in my country, also.

So she still remembers

everything.

The depression, hunger, boredom, and misery that characterizes ICE detention is not a bug, it's a feature.

It's supposed to force people into breaking, into signing those papers, into getting sent back to whatever they came here to escape.

However, the tenacity that brought Primrose's fire hadn't left her, and she made sure to let them know she was not willingly going back.

Then I said, No, me, I'm not going anywhere because

my life is in danger. Then he said,

I don't care,

even if they kill you, I don't even care.

You have to take a form and sign if you are tired. Then I said, Okay, at least tell me my case.

Because when they catch me, it was like everyone was asking me, Where did they catch you? I explained.

The other officer was like, So, who detained you?

I said, I don't even know the name.

But that

ICE officer, he was very rude. He said, I don't care.
Do you think I care? I don't even care whether you go back to your country, whether they killed you. It's none of my business.
I have my family.

I have a lot. Oh.

So people,

they were like shouted him. Those Spanish, they were even crying, shouted him.
He just walked away and leave us.

So people just also starting to walk away, go around.

We even write a note, we put like a complaint, but no one even come and

help us until the day they just come and call me.

They are going to release me.

Kirsten had spent weeks calling, emailing, and demanding that Primrose and Kimberly be treated according to their rights under the Florida settlement.

I wasn't sure if it was a lost cause, but it was the only option we had. And I was happy that Kimberly, unlike so many others in that detention centre, had someone to fight for her.

In fact, she had hundreds of people, people all across the country, had donated to our legal aid fund. Here in San Diego, people put on shows and took collections to pay for her legal fees.

Listeners to this show dipped into their pockets to support Primrose and Kimberley. But thanks to them, she had a chance to get out.

Like many other legal rights that migrants have, Flores was being widely ignored. And it's likely the Trump admin will take a run at removing it altogether soon.

But for now, in this one case, it still applied. But even once ICE conceded that Primrose and Kimberly had a right to be freed, they still took their time doing it.

They released me on the 10th, yes.

I remember you called me just on the 10th. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I called you. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

The release felt like a victory, but she still faced the same difficulties she had before. Primrose could not legally work.

She was still in LA, where Border Patrol under Bavina were conducting violent raids on people accused of no crime other than crossing the border between ports of entry.

And because it was the summer, Kimberly still hadn't resumed her education.

So

that was July, like we're in August now.

Yeah.

You said your work permit still hasn't come, right?

Yeah, they clear everything. I was supposed to get my work permit

on June, this July, but they clear everything. Like,

I'm new, everything. They just clear everything.
So starting

August, yeah.

It's November now, and there's still no permit. Here's Kirsten explaining in May of this year how this system works.

You have a work permit clock, right? Which is another absurd thing for asylees that once they file their asylum application, they have to wait 150 days before they can apply for a work permit.

And of course, they're expected to be independently wealthy during those five months or, you know, or starve or I don't know what they're expected to do. Yeah, rely on the generosity of others.

Like exactly.

So if you do something like try to change venue or a motion to continue, if you, if you do something in your case that the judge perceives as not moving the case along and rather like kind of trying to stall it or possibly pausing it or slow it down, the judge will stop the work permit clock, the days,

and it's a whole thing. So Primrose's was stopped because the judge wanted her to get an attorney.

So then

usually when the case is set for a final hearing, that code, adjournment code, they call it, we have the access to the codes and what stops the clock and what doesn't. And it always

restarts the clock because you moved your case along because you're setting it for trial. It's, you know, obviously moving your case along.
Hers was not restarted.

That video is still on Primrose's mind as well. It still comes up when she goes to a new church or meets new people.
Even 11 months later, one of the worst days of her life still follows her.

And

the person who posted me on my video, please,

I don't know how to say, but the comments I was reading, it was really bad. And people, they just judge people without even know their status, where they came from.

Yeah, I can't control them,

but

deep down I'm not okay. And you see, even now, I'm struggling

for my knee. Yeah.

And the other people, they will laugh at me.

Like,

yeah.

But it's not funny. And I wish if the person maybe was supposed to cover my face

or to cover Kimberly's face. Yeah.

But I didn't want their time in LA to entirely be defined by their detention. And I didn't want them to think that everyone in this country doesn't want them here.

I never really expect the government to make people feel welcome here. I think that's something we should do.
These people are joining our communities.

They risk their lives to come and live here, with us. And it's us who should welcome them.
We can't leave that to the whims of the Electoral College.

We have to do it ourselves, just like the people in Bahoji Guito did.

So I drove up to LA. Primrose and Kim had another ICE appointment, and I arranged to meet them after.
I freaked out a little bit when I couldn't get through to them, but eventually I did.

The big ice building has no signal inside, it turns out. The place in LA is where I conducted the interview you heard.

I took them out for a manicure first, because it seemed like something that would make them feel taken care of. And I got Kim some bubble tea because she wanted to try it.

Sitting in the little manicure shop, watching a Vietnamese lady take great care over their nails, felt like another glimpse of the communities we aspire to build, where people from all over the world can come and be safe.

By this time I hadn't heard from Norway for months, and I'd started to realise I might not ever again. So I decided I wasn't going to let Kimberly live so close to Disneyland and not go.

One of my colleagues has family who work there, and we got Primrose and Kimberly day passes. It felt really nice just to give them a day to be a family and not to worry.

I didn't go with them and record. I wanted them to enjoy the day on their own.
and by all accounts they did. Primrose sent me pictures of them smiling outside various rides and exhibits.

And I felt a a little bit better to have helped make someone's American dream a little less of a nightmare.

Tomorrow, I want to talk more about welcoming people in our communities and taking care of them. Because now more than ever, I think that's what we have to do.

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This is when mindset comes in. Someone will be eliminated.
Pressure is coming down.

This is Trainer Game. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th.

This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

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It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.
Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

All they have left is a life raft and each other.

This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan. Listen to Adrift, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House.

Follow and listen on Apple podcasts.

The week before you're hearing this, on a beautiful Southern California winter morning, I met some friends in a parking lot near the border.

We hopped into our trucks and drove along dirt roads till we reached a pull-up. Once there, we threw on packs and hiked straight up a steep hillside.

Even in late November, the south-facing slope was hot. We were all sweating by the time we reached the GPS location we'd been given.
It wasn't hard to spot.

A dark patch on the landscape where someone's remains had returned to the earth. One friend had carried a heavy wooden cross up the mountain.

We dug a hole in the rocky ground and then placed the white wooden cross in it. Silently, we filled the hole back up, stamped on the dirt until the cross stood straight up.

Then we decorated it with marigolds and seashells and dried flower petals, doing the best we could.

One friend carefully picked the petals off the flowers, laid them on the arms of the cross. Another sprinkled poppy seeds into the ground.

We stood in silence for a while, but the construction of the secondary border wall didn't halt for a minute.

In silence, and then together, we paid our respects to Graciela Suncion Gomez Hernandez, whose last moments were spent looking at the same sky we were looking at, gazing down onto the two border walls that were built to separate us from her.

She died in September, in the heat wave. The same month the year before I'd had to call 911 for several migrants with heat stroke I'd come across.

She died, a friend told me, with her clothes folded next to her, sheltering under a bush.

Looking from the place we erected the lonely little cross that was all we had left to remember her, I could see four Border Patrol surveillance antennas.

She was just a few hundred yards from the wall, from the road, but it took weeks for anyone to find her.

Presente.

Graciasuncion Gomes Hernandes.

Presente.

Graciela Assunción Gómes Hernandes.

Presente.

Obviously, we arrived too late to help,

but we arrived soon enough to ensure that at least in death she was afforded the dignity the world has denied her in life.

Then I strapped half a 50-gallon barrel into my backpack frame while my friends carried slabs of water bottles.

As we walked, a construction vehicle above us drilled holes into the earth for pylons that would hold a second 30-foot wall on the 60-degree slope.

Above the vehicle, a helicopter flew around, and then it flew back.

Underneath it, we were at the date on water bottles and threw them in a barrel.

Doing this for years, we've said goodbye to a fair share of people who we never got to say hello to, and whose faces we never got to see.

Last summer I helped to search for the remains of a migrant who had passed away in a canyon deep in the desert. Every time I do this, fills me with a deep sadness,

especially with all the friends from the jungle who I've lost touch with since then. It could be easy to look at everything I've laid out in this series and feel hopeless, but I don't want you to.

It could be easy to feel afraid as well, because now is a time that caring about other people is dangerous.

It's possible, currently, for some folks to keep their heads down and try and keep themselves safe, or to confine their actions to angry posting on social media.

But our politics shouldn't be about anger. It should be about love.

And now more than ever, it's important to remember that. We don't act on our love and our solidarity with angry tweets.
We act on it by taking care of people.

However many walls they build, however many masked men with guns they send, I don't believe it's within the power of the state to stop people caring about each other.

And I hope that that care compels people to do something.

In fact, I think seeing so much cruelty makes us all realise that it's up to us to care for one another.

People have cared for Primrose and Kim in all kinds of ways since they came here. And today we're going to hear from some of them.

Friends bought Kimberly's schoolbooks while they were stuck in Mexico. Some other folks put on a burlesque performance here in San Diego to raise money for her lawyer.

Hundreds of you reached into your pockets to help her pay for her legal and living expenses.

When the state, both under Biden and under Trump, made her and Kimberly feel unwelcome, you didn't.

I've carried my fair share of water into the desert under the Biden administration as well. It was Biden's policies that left little Noemi stuck in Mexico, not Trump's.

It was Biden's policies that detained people in the open air and left them with no food or water or shelter.

And it was everyday people like my friends and I who fed them and sheltered them and took care of them.

We took donations and dived into dumpsters to grab tents. We worked hard every day to build shelters, cook food and give away clothing so that people could feel welcome and safe here.

Not a single elected official gave out a single sandwich, much less made one, in the months that thousands of people were detained outdoors in a cumbo and sanissidro.

But people from churches, guruaras, Latter-day Saints people and Quakers, as well as a whole lot of anarchists and crustpunks and just desert people with no particular politics did.

I'm not saying this to pat us on the back. I don't think any of us really wanted to be mentioned at all.

Like many of us, Some of my happiest memories were the days we fed strangers, and then sat around fires sharing stories and sometimes songs.

Since then, I've been privileged to share the joys and struggles some of those people faced in their new lives here. I've attended their weddings.

I've tried to help them understand Appalachian accents, and I've helped them come to terms with the fact that you simply can't get around large parts of this country without a car.

I'm saying this because I think it's important that whatever happens after this current administration, we can't ever go back to the way things were before.

We can't let migrants be invisible in our communities, and we can't let them keep dying at the border.

Let's talk about what caring looks like in Primrose's case.

This time last year, I just released my Darien Gap podcast. And a few weeks later, I received a direct message via my Patreon newsletter.
It was from a guy called Matt. My name's Matt.
I'm just

a normal person who listens to a lot of podcasts. I didn't know him and he didn't know me, but he listened to the podcast I made.

I can still very vividly remember where I was when I listened to that, which was I was coming back from a dirt biking trip in Michigan. And so I had a seven-hour drive.
And I was like, oh, cool.

Here's a three-hour podcast that

I listened to. And then I started listening to it.
And then I was just like, I got into that mode where I was just like, I couldn't not finish it.

You know, I was like, absolutely hooked and just needed, needed to get all, needed to get all the way to the end and was just really, really moved by the whole thing.

Like many Americans, until relatively late in the Biden administration, Matt knew about immigration, but he hadn't really grappled with the fact that what secure borders means is killing innocent people in the jungle, in the desert, and everywhere in between.

That's how deterrence works. That's how it's supposed to work.

Like, I didn't realize that that was like intentional.

And then hearing, you know, hearing, hearing yours, I was just sort of like,

oh, right. Like, just the fact that people would go

to such a, just such lengths of

danger on a journey just across a continent.

And knowing that once they get here, they're not even welcome, right? We're going to intentionally put up this like kind of life or death obstacle course.

I kept thinking about it. And the next day I was like, let me like, see if you've done anything else on it.
And I found a couple of your, a couple of your other, your other episodes on it.

And I i was like wow this this is this is wild that and that was you know you you were you're talking about the open air detention in the hocumba area and and i was like this is crazy like this is just happening just right outside of san diego i mean it's just wild matt felt like now that he knew this he couldn't not do something about it So he took some of his vacation time at work and came to Southern California.

The thing that was crazy is seeing all the equipment, you know, the equipment, if you can call it that, left behind by the people traveling through these places where it's just like normal shoes and just like cheap Walmart backpacks and just,

you know,

the just basic stuff that you would just like wear to school. Matt joined friends of mine in the mountains, carrying water and helping with some tech issues we've been wondering about.

He saw the wall and he saw the damage it does. He saw the difficult terrain people have to cross just to get a chance to ask for help here.

The ways they have to risk their lives, even after they make it to the USA. He also got to experience the way that helping other people helps us.

As I was heading back home, I definitely had this feeling about like

way less despair. Getting together with people to just do

something, to just do something useful, to help people,

even if it's just like in a tiny way.

Like even if somehow it doesn't help, but it's like it probably will. But importantly, doing it with other people,

it made me feel a lot better. It made me not feel so like just everything is fucked, like the world is descending into fascism, or when there's nothing I can do about it.
It's like

there are a lot of people who want to help. Doing stuff with them is like, is good.

Soon after, like all of us, he saw the border bringing its violets into cities across the United States.

I mean, like just masked federal agents, we assume, mostly, refusing to identify themselves, just randomly picking people up. I mean, it's crazy.

And

this is,

I mean, I literally am at a loss for words. I mean, it's just, it's so the opposite of what America is all about.
straight up like fascism.

Like, I just, I never thought I would live through something like this. I always just thought that's the kind of thing that happens in other countries, you know?

I guess a lot of us thought that. A lot of us probably thought this kind of state violence was confined to other places and other times.

We wondered, perhaps absentmindedly, what we might do in those places and times. For years, as a historian and a reporter, I've thought about them, read about them, visited them.

Now I'm living in them. It's always just sort of like, in the same way that you would think, what would happen if I was in this, I don't know, movie? Like, it's not real.

Just think, oh, what if I was Jason Bourne?

Matt and I stayed in touch.

One day he was in LA on business, and I mentioned I'd been helping Primrose navigate the mass transit nightmare that is Los Angeles, so she could get to her ICE appointment.

He offered to stop by if you needed a ride anywhere. I connected them, he saw her place, and he offered to help her get some furniture as well.
Then it was time for him to fly home.

Every day, like I do, he had to worry about someone he knew being snatched. The Florida settlement doesn't stop ICE from from re-detaining people.

And in LA, they seemed to be detaining anyone they could, any way they could. Kim had been afraid to go out now, because she didn't want to go back to detention.

So once again, Matt decided he wanted to do something. And he asked if Kim and Primrose might like to come and stay with him on the East Coast.
That's not an easy choice to make.

Not only does it mean sharing your space, it also means taking yourself out of the safe group. and accepting that the state's eye of Sauron might fall on you now.

You know, I talked it over with my wife, and we were like,

you know, both wanted to do this. And, but, you know, we had to acknowledge like

it might mean that like

these assholes and masks show up at our house, like where our kids are and are like gonna haul away just this family that might happen in like right over there.

I mean, I don't like it, but I just, I don't know. I just, I feel like you gotta do, just gotta do something, you know.

In the end, he says, it wasn't a hard decision to make. I mean, it was a lot easier because my wife was actually just like, well, 100%, let's do it.
And I was like, well, hold on a second.

We should at least think through the outcome. She's like, I don't care.
Whatever. Just do it.

Like a lot of people, Matt had always done things to help people, but nothing like this, nothing that directly put him in between someone who needed to be kept safe and the people who didn't want them to be safe.

Yeah, I mean, nothing is dangerous. I mean, you

charity stuff, but

sometimes with time, but usually just like giving money to people to, you know, who need it or whatever. But, you know, this is definitely the most like

direct involvement

to help someone who needs it. Certainly is the first time that I've exposed my family to anything like this.

So one day this autumn, Primrose and Kimberly said goodbye to Los Angeles, got on a plane, flew to the East Coast.

I thought I was waiting at the right spot, but they let him out at a different

airport.

So they actually walked past me in the airport. I didn't even see them.

But I eventually figured it out. Luckily, the airport is not that big.
And so I could just sort of walk, just walk all the baggage claim area, and I eventually found them.

Then they went for sushi, then for ice cream. A perfect suburban strip-mall-American evening.
The sort of evening people cross jungles and deserts to be able to enjoy.

The sort of evening the hundreds of people I met in the jungle will never be able to enjoy. Of course, it's hard to sit in a cold zone and talk about the things people endure to come here.

Matt says sometimes it's still difficult to even comprehend what his new friends have been through. It's hard to answer.

Like you're asking me a very good question about like, well, what was it like, et cetera.

And it's like, the difference, the distance between like our shared experience is so vast, it still often almost doesn't seem real. I've had that same thought.

It's hard to hear stories from migrants and really think of them as human experiences, not just stories. That's why I go into the mountains and the desert.

It's why I spent a decade asking editors to send me to Zarian.

I don't think I could understand migrants' journeys if I hadn't experienced a little part of them.

And I don't think we should write about migrants or not write about what they go through to get to a strip more sushi place.

Of course, Primrose isn't done with her interaction with immigration authorities yet. They've had visits from ICE in her new home, but not from enforcement removal operations.

I mean, like, they know where she lives. We told them where she lives.
So, like,

she lives in my house. So,

you know, yeah, they might. I don't know.
I mean,

yeah, I guess I'm like not as afraid afraid of that. I have to say that

the ICE people in

seem just like a bunch of cheery folks.

Like

it

seems pretty different than,

I mean, like I met many of them

part of this process. And

they were not the like, you know,

plate carriers and guns guys. They were just like the, you know,

they work in the office and decide whether you get to move here or not.

Right. Yeah.
Yeah.

And they were like

very friendly and downright helpful. Primrose is settling in at Matt's place now.
But as Matt explained, their struggle isn't over yet. Now, like our energy is

more

on

how do we help her make her case.

Because she has an asylum case that

she needs to win. And it's, you know, I'm not a lawyer, but wow, sounds like what asylum is for.

Literally running from a hostile government that she was protesting

and was going to jail and torture her.

Like,

what?

What is asylum for if not for that?

Of course, interacting with the asylum system has shown Matt some of its absurdities.

Like the work permit clock, the four-hour bus rides to Riverside, and the endless changing regulations that one has to navigate while trying to survive without the ability to legally work.

In what way can you do this legally without

some, you know, group helping you? Without like just somebody saying, fine, I will take you and pay for your living expenses.

What is the legal way to like seek asylum?

You come here, they put you in jail, you stay in jail which is jail yeah or they let you out of jail good hooray we're out of jail and now you're homeless yeah like you have no possessions and no ability to legally work at least let them work i mean come on like just

let let them get a legal job that that's just like the the sort of bureaucracy version of the forcing people across the desert it's like well okay you won't die in the the desert in this one.

In this one, you will die or you will suffer under homelessness. More deterrence, you know? Everyone always says, oh, I support immigration.
Just got to be legal. You got to do it the right way.

But they have no idea what they're talking about. Like, what is the right way?

I believe everyone who says that has no idea what the right way is.

Changing that, making our laws line up with what anyone would see as basic decency isn't coming anytime soon. In the meantime, they have to navigate the asylum system with many contradictions.

Primrose never got any follow-up care for her leg injury, and the only way she could access care in her new home was, once again, totally impractical for someone without a car.

Just another example of how the system sets people up to suffer and fail. There's no way to get her to the doctor.
Well, okay, there is a way. A way.
Technically,

we could drive like an hour and 20 minutes way out to this place

that like has a thing with the ice that they will say like well that's your approved like medical provider like i'm not gonna drive an hour and 20 minutes each way

just do some minor thing yeah but we pay out of pocket so we go to a doctor and we go here is the problem we have we don't have insurance let's get this done for as little money as possible because in the united states if you you don't have insurance, it is going to cost you.

Yeah, a little.

And mercifully,

my wife and I both know a number of doctors that we can sort of run ideas by.

And if we didn't have that, like, I don't know what we would do. It would not be good.
I mean, well, I know what we do.

We would drive an hour and 20 minutes to the place and we would just be like, okay, doctor, help.

But like, because

you know, we have connections and we are also willing to pay a little bit out of pocket. She needed to get some medicine.
Medicine is super expensive. Yeah.

So you go to the CBS and you're like, well, you know, oh, we don't have your insurance on file. We're like, I know, but

how much is this going to really cost? And dude, drugs are so expensive. Like,

it's just,

what are, what are those people supposed to do? It's a broken system. And it's not one we can really rely on government to change whoever's in office.

The Democrats don't have a great answer for this either. I wish they did.
I mean, I will still vote for them because they're at least less bad. Yeah.

You know,

what other choice do you have? It's like, if there was a better party, I would be that one. that i mean if they had a chance of winning right yeah yeah

you don't

no other party has a chance of winning so yeah man I'm a Democrat. Like, and I will help the Democrats try to win elections.
They push it in the direction that it needs to go.

Like, but the Democrats are part of the problem. I mean, like,

they're not radically changing policies that would

change this thing we've been talking about for the last hour.

When I first moved to the US, George W. Bush was president.
Soon after I got here, Obama was elected, and it was Thanksgiving.

I didn't know much about Thanksgiving, and I didn't have much time for history that overlooks settler loneliness anyway.

But the day before, I was riding my bike down the coast, and I ran into some folks who were also riding their bikes.

They asked what plans I had for the next day, and I told them I was just going to ride my bike all day. That's what I like to do.
They, having just met me, invited me into their home.

The next day they fed me and we talked for hours and became friends.

A decade and a half later, on the night before Thanksgiving, my friends cooked as many beans as they could fit in their giant pot that we boiled above a propane burner made from half a beer keg.

In the cold of the desert, some Kurdish guys helped us ladle out scoops of hot stew for hundreds of people.

I still don't go in for settler colonialism very much, but I felt thankful to be in a position where I could welcome people now.

That same year on Christmas Eve, I was sitting on the tailgate of a pickup in the desert, kicking my feet so my toes wouldn't burn with cold.

I spent the entire day building shelters for people out in the desert, left there for up to a week by the Biden administration.

We'd handed out all our food again, but some folks who'd been taking care of their kids or trying to find a warm place out the desert to sleep had missed out on eating.

So I'd found a few boxes of HTRs, which are kind of like a worse but vegan version of MREs, and I took them from the truck and went over to the people who had missed dinner.

They heated them up somehow on a piece of scrap metal over the fire. I can't really remember other than thinking it was really janky.

I struggle to describe how special it felt for me to be able to share a little of the welcome I received with other people.

Like Matt, I feel more hopeful knowing that not only are other people just as upset as I am, but that alongside those other people I can do things that I wouldn't have thought possible if I hadn't seen them with my own eyes and done them with my own hands.

From Obama to today, it's been up to us to welcome migrants. Obama set records for deportation.
Biden beat them, albeit including Title 42 removals, and Trump will probably beat both this year.

In the meantime, it's up to regular people to help one another.

That shouldn't make us feel hopeless. It should make us feel strong.
Matt's doing something remarkable, but I don't think he was in a very remarkable situation before. He was just a person.

lucky enough to have some spare time and some space to look after someone. But there are millions of people like that in this country.
There are millions of people who are mad right now.

But anger alone is not going to help us take care of people. That's what the priority should be right now.

I don't want to paint Matt as the only person who helped Primrose, because hundreds of people helped Primrose.

From the Embarray in the jungles of Panama, and her fellow migrants while she crossed the Darien Gap, people across a continent took their time and their resources to help a stranger.

I've heard of this from countless migrants as well.

Some of them rode the train from southern Mexico up to the border and people threw them food and warm jumpers to total strangers who they'd never met, who they'd never even get a chance to see.

Across thousands of miles, when states ignored their suffering, the hundreds of migrants I have talked to found food, shelter, and solidarity from ordinary people.

And those people, in their own way, benefited too. It was enlightening to me that, A, I wasn't, it wasn't just me.

Like, it's not just, oh, I, for some reason, I'm the only one who's like really upset by all this.

You know, there are other folks who, who, who are like this, but, but also just like a lot of other people are absolutely willing to take risks, be generous with their time and money.

Like, there's a lot of them. There's a lot of people who like want to help.
And that kind of community aspect of it, it was a surprise to me that the doing it with other people was so powerful.

Like I thought it was just about the doing,

the actual act of helping people somehow, but doing it with other people was just surprisingly good. Made me feel much more optimistic about our ability to get through this collectively.

I asked Matt what he wanted people to know about his experience. Well, I mean, I guess.

What I would like people to know is it's not as hard as you might think to help folks like Primrose.

Like it sounds insurmountable, like, oh no, I'm exposed to all this risk and danger and legal hassle or whatever, but it's like, it's not that complicated.

It's like they fill out a form and it just says like, oh, now I live here. And then once they prove it, then they live there.

The hard part is finding someone, especially now that migrants are more worried than ever to be out and in the community. Any database would be a risk to them.

But maybe that's not a problem that someone can solve. It's kind of like an information sharing problem.
Because, like, these folks are all across the United States.

And the people who could host them are similarly all across the United States.

But you don't have to take someone into your home. There are hundreds of things you can do wherever you are.

You can feed people who are hungry, pick up someone's kids from school or take their dogs for a walk. Fix someone's car so it doesn't get towed or ticketed, or drive someone to a doctor's appointment.

Creating safe communities for migrants is not a distinct act from creating safe communities for everyone.

I've never been a big political theory reader, but I think I've learned everything I need to know about politics in refugee camps in the deserts and mountains and jungles that migrants traverse to get to this country.

In Panama, I met with a priest who houses migrants. In California, I've helped Sikhs and Quaker friends hand out warm food in the cold.

We can come from a broad range of perspectives and still get to the same place. When someone needs help, you help them.
And if we all do that, then when we need help, someone will help us.

You don't have to wait four years to start. You can do it right now.

While there are only some things we can do in the face of a government that doesn't want to help people like Primrose, there is an awful lot that we can do.

For all the people who didn't make it to the USA from the jungle, we can help the people who did. We can also take this principle and make it a cornerstone of all our politics.

The more people come to know migrants, the more they will see how broken our system is. The more people who see that, the more people will demand change.

And I hope that they won't stop until we get a system that doesn't look at little children who aren't safe and say, We don't want to help you.

Until we get a system that doesn't make them walk across jungles and through deserts before they even get a chance to ask for help.

Before I go, I thought I would play a part of the interview I did with Senor Bonillon about Hojiquito last year. I spoke to his son on Monday and he said his his dad's still doing well.

Truly, the migrants on this route are not here because they want to be.

They are here because the economy in their countries is terrible

or something. Everything is going badly in their countries.

How could we mistreat them knowing that?

We won't.

Not us.

Never.

This is a belief that we have. We are all children of God.

God made the world and humanity, and we are not that different.

We are all brothers.

I want to leave the last word today to Primrose. Because really, this is a story about her and Kim and the incredible tenacity and courage they showed to get here.

Even if I say I can, me myself, I can say thank you. I don't even know how to say thank you, but I'm just

God knows. God, please bless those people who put hands on me and Kim.

I thought maybe I'm alone, but I realize I'm not alone here. I have also people who help me.

You guys helped me so much. I never even get helped even in my country, the way I get helped here in America.

And

I'm really, really

glad. I'm very glad for those people who helped me.

I have,

especially since when I was, even in when I was in Mexico,

in my prayers, I just say, God, just bless those people who put hands on me. You make me feel better.
You put a smile in my face. And even came.

Because when we came here, I wasn't even having clothes. to wear

nothing. They just only the clothes they gave us in detention where they detain us.
That's the clothes I was using. I was

when I want to wash it, it was a t-shirt jacket. I just removed the top, then I wash the

inside the t-shirt. When it's dry, then I we bother and put the new one.
We were like,

but for now,

I'm really, really appreciated

a lot.

I really appreciate a lot because

my life is like changing now, so yeah,

and

it's

like you were saying

the things Kim will have will be so different from the chances you have, right?

She can go to school, she speaks English, she speaks Spanish, she

can go to school here.

Yeah, does that make you happy when you think about it? Yeah, um,

I'm maybe even if I even told you, Kim, I was asking you one day, I said, Kim, what if I die today?

She was even mentioning your name. I said, I will just ask him, maybe I can just go to school.

Yeah, she wish also she was like, Mommy, I want to write my book. When I start high school, I need to write my story of my life because

we have been through a lot.

But now we are happy. I don't want to live with your support, guys.
I'm really appreciative.

Yeah, because if she go to school i'm happy

i know she

i want you to have a better life yeah

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This is when mindset comes in. Someone will be eliminated.
Pressure is coming down.

This is Trainer Game. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th.

This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.

Today I'm joined by James Stout and Sophie Lichterman. This episode, we are covering the week of November 24th to December 4th, an extra long week.
Somehow, they squeezed a few more days in there.

To open us up, James, what are some important small stories we don't want to overlook? Okay, yeah, yeah. A lot because of our extra long week, right? Yeah.

The United States is flying manned ISR flights over Nigeria and possibly parts of the Sahel as well. It's not entirely clear because the flights kind of go dark once they take off.

Sources familiar with the matter have suggested that UAV strikes might begin soon. It seems that the ISR flights are targeting ISWAP and JNIM.

I'm going to write about this on my Patreon probably because I think it requires visuals and I think it's too much to go into in-depth here, but if you want to check that out, you can.

Can you explain some of those acronyms? No, I just love to find out. Yeah, I was about to say.

It's great when you report on military shit because it's just a wall of... acronyms.
Okay. ISR flights.
These are intelligence flights, right?

Intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, I believe, is the acronym.

They're looking for stuff. UAV.
Unmanned aerial vehicle? There's a gender-neutral term that I can't remember. Unpiloted aerial vehicle.
Woke is back. Hard.

Yeah, that's the Biden-era thing, right? When you get killed by an unaccountable drone, but it's gender-neutral. The ISWAP.
That's the Islamic State William in that part of the world.

So like province, West Africa province, I think it stands for. These are the targets of these flights and strikes.

And JNIM being another jihadist group that is not associated with the so-called Islamic State. Got it.
Got it. Wow.
Yeah. Okay.
Hit you with another acronym, A FOIA.

I think we know that one.

Filed by the Cato Institute has revealed that the FBI, under Biden, was investigating the SRA. That's a socialist rifle association.

It didn't bring charges against any of the members, but it did apparently investigate them for some time.

Finally, the National Park Service has announced a new fee schedule and quote-unquote modernized graphics for passes. Is this the horrific image you sent us? Yes, it's a picture of Donald Trump.
Yeah,

that's how they've modernized it. It's

not very nice.

I know there are better things in the parks, I feel like. Like, you know, the half dome is nice.

The Yosemite Valley.

Pretty cool shit in Wrangell St. Elias that you could do instead.
That's like him trying to rename that Peace Institute after himself. He just keeps trying to put

his face and name on everything.

Yeah, well, when you're a dying man, legacy becomes very important. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. But that's exactly it.

The U.S. Institute of Peace is being renamed for Trump.
Really? Yeah.

Oh,

I know. I miss that.
Great, cool. It's feeling very similar to that where he's just putting his face and name on everything.
Yeah.

So, two things, right? Electronic passes for parks, fully a good thing,

and a hundred dollar upcharge for non-United States. I think it's residents as opposed to citizens in the 11 most popular parks.
How can they even check that?

I might just ask, like, this, this sounds like a tourism thing, right? Like, they just want people that are like visiting the states to pay more. To be clear, other countries do this.

I still think it's bad. Like, some of the, like, the Grand Canyon is part of the cultural patrimony of all of humanity.
Yeah. Yeah.

The National Park Service itself isn't exercising settler colonialism, but we can talk about that forever. Yeah.

I've seen some stuff with gate ranges be like, I'm absolutely not asking for your green card. Yeah, no, that's silly.
Fee rangers. But yeah, I think they were just kind of assuming good faith.

A lot of other countries do do this. Like it's not unusual.
I still think it sucks.

There's also an interagency pass. It's $2.50 for non-residents and $80 for residents.
So those are the big changes there.

Speaking of of big changes, a pretty big update in a case that has lasted nearly five years.

This morning, Thursday, December 4th, a suspect was arrested in connection to the pipe bombs placed around the Capitol the night before January 6th, specifically at the DNC and RNC headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The suspect has been identified as 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr. from Woodbridge, Virginia.

Federal law enforcement sources have told the New York Post that the suspect may have had quote-unquote anarchist leanings, unquote. This could mean anything, right?

This could mean anything from like anti-government violent extremism, like militia movement-type extremism, boogaloo boys, accelerationists, as well as possible left-wing anarchist leanings. Sure.

It could be any number of things. There's still very limited information about this, even in the like DOJ press conference that just wrapped up a few minutes before we started recording.

They're being pretty tight-lipped about details. Anything about his gait? Well, yes,

people are asking about his gate. And allegedly, he had begun building explosive devices in 2019.

Okay. Okay.
So like some background.

This arrest does partially discredit a report from the Blaze, which Robert has talked about on this show before, which falsely identified a former Capitol police officer as the bomber based on gate analysis.

Yeah, if they prosecute someone else, the Blaze is going to get sued out of existence, I would imagine. Yeah, critical support to former Capitol Police officer who puts the Blaze out of business.
Wow.

Poor one up for Glenn Beck.

This suspect lives at a home associated with both their parents. It's unclear if their parents are still married.

Suspect's dad runs a bail bond business, which the son is supposed to have worked for, and the mom is a real estate agent.

Not much online presence can be found yet on Brian Cole Jr. I've spent hours looking.
And so far, not much there, but we'll see if that changes over time. Yeah.
A developing story. Yeah, yeah.

We'll do a whole episode if it merits it later, I guess. Sure.

Talking of terrible indictments, Garrison, would you like to hear about a terrible indictment out of Texas? I'm going to say yes,

but no. I don't know if I'd like to for work reasons.
I feel like you're going to do it anyway, so I'll play along.

Two Texas men have been indicted for a plan to invade a small island off Haiti, kill all the men, and sexually enslave all the women and children. What? I'm sorry.
What?

Yeah,

this is a wild one. The indictment says they hope to, quote, lead an unlawful expeditionary force to the island of Gonave, which is part of the Republic of Haiti.

for the purpose of carrying out their rape fantasies.

Weisenberg and Thomas plan to purchase a sailboat, firearms, and ammunition, then recruit members of the District of Columbia area homeless population to serve as a mercenary force as they invaded Gunave Island and stage a coup d'etat.

Weisenberg and Thomas intended to murder all of the men on the island so they could turn all of the women and children into their sex slaves. That is what is alleged in the indictment, right? Look,

be an interesting case.

One of them had joined the Air Force in 2025 to get some military experience, or was in the Air Force this year to get some military experience, and has successfully been transferred to nearer to DC

from where they hope to recruit unhoused people to serve as mercenaries. This is absolutely insane.

Who are these two Texas men? Why do they think this is like a thing that can be like

are

it's borderline something I considered not including because like this people are probably pretty unwell, it seems like are they just obsessed with like Eric Prince? Like, I don't, I don't understand.

I don't.

Yeah, like, if the guy hadn't passed all the background checks to get into the Air Force, I feel like this would be less remarkable, right? But

while planning to invade a small island and enslave everybody, he got into the Air Force.

uh that that in itself like uh like should be a story and of course this is all alleged right it's all in an indictment we don't know what the evidential basis for a lot of this is Well, that was disturbing.

Yeah, it's a wild one. I guess we'll keep you informed.
What?

Garrison has.

I like can't even compute. Like, that's one of the most insane things I've heard in a really long time.

Well, first of all economic news,

let's throw it to tariffs. Let's go to tariff talk with Mia.

Tyrreet don't like it.

This is Mia Wong with Tariff Talk.

So, obviously, the biggest tariff news right now is the impending Supreme Court ruling on the legality of a broad swath of the tariffs that Trump has imposed using unbelievably dubious legal and economic authority.

And by unbelievably dubious, I mean it is so patently illegal.

It is an astounding demonstration of the complete abdication of the Supreme Court's pretensions at being one of the branches of government that this hasn't already been overturned.

But this ruling has not dropped yet. Everyone's waiting.
So in the meantime, what we have is a bunch of Trump administration officials have been going on TV and talking about trade policy.

And they're saying something that we've been hearing for a while now, which is that they believe that they can use different set of legal authority to impose the same tariffs.

Whether they can do this or not is, I mean, they shouldn't be able to do this. Like all of the authority they're using is pretty ridiculous, but this has been, this has been their strategy.

They've been reiterating their strategy.

On the other side, we've seen some interesting movement in terms of the opposition, which is that Costco has become sort of the biggest company to join in this trend of companies like going to court with lawsuits to try to recoup the money that they've spent on these tariffs.

Because if the Supreme Court ruling overturns... the legality of these tariffs, these companies can get their money back retroactively.

Costco is the biggest company we've seen so far sort of move to attempt to do this remedy through the courts. So

we will keep an eye on this. And this is, you know, I think, I think, especially if this becomes overturned, we're going to see a lot of companies trying to make moves for this.

This is something that is going to piss off the Trump administration because they've been talking a giant game about how, oh, these are going to fund the like $2,000 tariff checks you're never getting.

Trump is literally talking about, and this is the, you know, this is an old sort of right-wing thing, but he's talking about how, oh, tariffs revenue is going to replace income tax, which no, it's not.

Like, just nonsense, gibberish. Numbers don't work.
Orders of magnitude off. Just nonsense.
Can't work. But you know, this is these are things that they're saying.

And there's probably going to be an increasing conflict between the sectors of capital that just want their money back from these tariffs and the Trump administration, which you know wants this money for its nebulous political purposes.

There's been some sort of interesting political developments in terms of Trump and Lula.

So people will probably remember from listening to this show that there have been very, very high tariffs on Brazil that are effectively political tariffs for for actually putting one Jair Bolsonaro in prison for, you know, the mere crime of attempting to overthrow the government to install himself as the ruler of Brazil.

Now, there has been over the past few weeks, there's been some sort of ratcheting down of a lot of the tariffs.

There's been a bunch of goods that have been exempt from the tariffs as part of Trump's sort of widespread efforts to like lower food prices because there's a bunch of food goods that are being exempt from this stuff.

And there was also very recently, we got an actual call between Trump and Lula, which seems to have gone fairly well. You know, at least it seems to have been cordial.

The two seem to both be coming out of it saying, like, oh, we agree on things. Ah, it's going to go great.

And this is, to a large extent, an attempt to do a replay of Lula's positive relationship with the Bush administration the last time he was in power, where, and this is, you know, this has been a trend in the, in the sort of the original pink tide and in this government, where you have a kind of mix of the sort of pink tide center-left governments in Latin America, where you know, Lula has traditionally been the one who's been sort of playing with the U.S.

more.

And, you know, as we're seeing right now, you have the U.S.

gearing up for, you know, like potentially a war in Venezuela.

And there's been a whole bunch of conflict with Colombia, but Lula seems to be trying to sort of play the role that he played in the 2000s. We'll see how that goes.

Trump is astonishingly, significantly more unstable than George W. Bush, which is

just good lord. Oh, God.

Okay,

enough. Oh, my God.
They finally found a president who's less coherent and more unhinged than George W. Bush.
The final piece of news that we need to touch on is

the U.S.'s chief trade negotiator gave an interview with Politico, and this is per Yahoo News.

Basically talked to Politico and told them that Trump is considering, you know, is talking about leaving or renegotiating the USMCA, which is the trade agreement that he negotiated to replace NAFTA in 2020.

Roll this back again. This is his deal.
He's talking about leaving or renegotiating his deal. This was his big thing in 2020.
One of his big things was, oh, I abolished NAFTA. Oh, I created this deal.

And, you know, everyone at the time was like, well, this is just like NAFTA with like the, I just filed off, you know, but like, this is sort of the point that we're at in Trumpian trade policy where it's like, ah, we're getting ripped off by Mexico and Canada in the trade deal that I signed.

As Garrison is fond of saying, the defining political question of our time is who is president in 2020. Brother,

you did this.

This was your trade deal. And somehow, somehow.

Now,

in terms of real terms, right, this is actually a massive deal. So this deal has a six-year term.
It was negotiated in 2020, which means it's coming up next year.

And this is a big enough deal that there's already sort of a full court press in the press.

You can see the New York Times running it, where every single faction of capital, not every single faction, but a whole bunch of factions of capital are getting every single think tank and lobbying group and, you know, like policy research institute or whatever together to be like, please don't get rid of this.

Because the thing about the US MCA, and this is something we've talked about to some extent in terms of Canada and Mexico tariffs.

But one of the really important things about the tariffs that have been imposed on Mexico and Canada, and the tariff rates are extremely high,

is that those tariffs haven't been applied to goods that are covered by the US MCA. And this has been a crucial lifeline to allow trade to not be annihilated by those American tariffs.

And if Trump pulls out of it and suddenly those goods are covered by these tariffs, it's going to be a really, really significant economic hit for everyone in the world eventually. But for the U.S.

and Mexico and Canada, this is going to be a massive deal. And I want to kind of close on a kind of broader point about this for a second, which is that like, we're not pro-NAFTA.

Like, no, NAFTA was bad.

Part of the reason the Trump administration was able to do this was because of the ways that NAFTA sort of hauled out and destroyed vast sections of the American working class and also the Mexican working class.

This has not been good for anyone really involved in this. One of the things that happens if you go into the economic literature, one of the episodes I did a while back talking about U.S.

and Mexico and the history of like trade policy,

there sort of talks about this, which is that if you go back into the economic literature, all of the economics people have had to admit that the leftists from the 90s or whatever were right, that this was not going to benefit the Mexican working class.

It hasn't.

But on the other hand, Trump's sort of...

This is also not benefiting the Mexican or American working classes.

Nothing that these people do on either side really do.

If you want to look at what actual sort of resistance to NAFTA looks like and what effective resistance to NAFTA looks like, look at the Zapatistas whose rebellion was sparked by NAFTA and who went into revolt on the day that NAFTA went into effect.

But Trump has been able to very effectively kind of

be the person who comes in as the, I'm the champion of the workers,

et cetera, et cetera, because I'm renegotiating the evil trade deals.

And now like our good American workers will no longer be exploited by like evil Mexican or Chinese workers, which, you know, has been an extremely effective political strategy for him.

And is, you know, also this sort of, this sort of like national

fascist program that he's running is sort of based on, you know, on, on this kind of trade policy and on manipulating the sentiments of people who got like actually screwed over by by NAFTA.

So yeah, that's where we're going to kind of close on this as Trump is thinking about pulling out. That is a huge deal.
And

yeah, this has has been Tariff Talk.

Let's go to an ad break real quick. We'll be right back.

And we're back.

Garrison,

tell me something less horrific than what James just told us before Mia's tariff text.

I missed a part. I missed a part.

Do you want to guess how they were making money for part of this, according to the indictment?

This is the Texas men who wanted to invade the island. How are they making money? Crypto.
No, it's worse than that. That's a good guess, Sophie.

But you've said it's worse than that. Oh, no.

Manipulating cam girls? In a sense, it appears they were producing child sexual abuse material. Oh.

Yeah.

Wow. This is one of the worst.

I mean, obviously it's still allegedly, but like, this is one of the worst things I've ever heard, and I don't even know how to react. Huh.
Yeah, he was,

he was prosecuted on the UCMJ

for that. Previously?

This year, yeah. He was prosecuted in,

I'm just reading a task and purpose article, which builds on the indictment, but there it says,

so he was arrested in July and has since been court-martialed. Ah.

So,

good times. Good times in the

Air Force. Yeah.

Well,

I can't believe the Air Force has done something wrong.

Finally. The first blight on our proud and glorious Air Force.

Maybe the biggest national news story kicked off the day before Thanksgiving, not just because of what happened, but then all of the fallout.

that has resulted from this incident, which James will report on afterwards.

But let's go back to the day before Thanksgiving, where two National Guard troops from West Virginia on assignment in Washington, D.C., as a part of Trump's crime crackdown, were shot on patrol a few blocks away from the White House.

Other guard members fired back and tackled the shooter. One of the National Guard members, a 20-year-old named Sarah Beckstrom, died from gunshot injuries on Thanksgiving.

The other, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, has so far survived and remains hospitalized. Wow.
Yeah.

A 29-year-old man, Romanula Lachenwal, is charged with first-degree murder and assault with intent to kill. The criminal complaint alleges he shouted Al-Akbar as he fired.

Lachenwald came to the United States as a part of Operation Allies Welcome in 2021, which moved U.S. assets out of Afghanistan as the Taliban gained control of the region.

Lachinwal was later granted formal asylum under Trump. this past April.

Friend of the alleged shooter told the New York Times that Lachenwell joined the CIA-backed paramilitary squad, Unit Zero Three, to earn money for his family and get medical training rather than for ideological reasons.

And when he returned from stints with the Zero Unit, his personality changed and he was less socially outgoing.

To quote from the Times, quote, Lockenwald told others in his village that he had been shaken by seeing so many bodies and bloodshed in his role with the Zero Three unit.

According to a volunteer who who worked with his family, Lachenwell's mental health started rapidly declining in early 2023.

He began self-isolating, withdrawing from work and family, stopped paying rent, and faced eviction.

In 2024, this volunteer wrote in an email to an immigrant nonprofit group, which was obtained by the AP in the New York Times, which reads that Lockenwell, quote, has not been functional as a person, father, and provider since March of last year, 23.

His behavior has changed greatly, unquote. When Lockham Hall emerged from quote-unquote dark isolation, it was to engage in quote-unquote reckless travel, according to this volunteer.

Long, seemingly pointless road trips across the country. Yeah.

And he seems to be behaving in a way that, like you said, suggests he has some PTSD or like... No, PTSD from engaging in combat.
This is very common among veterans.

mental health support for specifically these people in in this in this paramilitary unit probably doesn't exist.

Probably does not exist the same way it does for veterans of the United States military, which already is a lacking service. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly.
Yeah.

I mean, these, the shit that these guys did was dark.

I've included in the show notes a link to a Human Rights Watch report, but like, there's a reason that they weren't specifically under, in theory, they were under the Afghan Ministry of Defense command, but in practice, they operated outside either chain of control.

They did kill or capture missions. There are multiple reports of them killing everybody in a house and then it being the wrong house, like really

stuff that is going to stay with someone, right? And unless they're like, you know, pretty nuts. No, extremely horrifying.
Yeah, terrifying stuff.

Pretty much immediately after the Trump administration

began

calling for

various immigration restrictions based on this, right? Now, it's worth noting that Lachenwald entered the United States as part of Operation Allied Welcome, right?

But then he received asylum under the Trump administration. So that would have been this year, right?

Like, I'm not entirely sure where he went asylum rather than special immigrant visa, then both are pathways that are open to Afghan people, right?

SOV has some benefits, but also it has some different things that they'd have to jump through.

Like, one of them would be, I believe, to get an officer to write a recommendation, and maybe maybe CIA folks aren't into doing that. So following this, the U.S.

immediately began to call for a crackdown on Afghan migrants.

And as we'll see more broadly on migrants, I think it's important to contextualize this globally because it's part of a crackdown on a nation which has seen nearly half a century of war, right?

90% of the 10 million people who fled Afghanistan reside in Pakistan or Iran.

I've reported on this before on the show, but Iran has deported more than a million Afghan people since 2023, right?

And they have very few pathways to permanent residency anywhere, like among refugees. Afghan people have it particularly difficult.

On Tuesday, the USCIS Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a memo ordering its employees to place on hold all asylum, green card, and citizenship form applications from quote-unquote high-risk countries and to investigate all arrivals from them since 2021.

They are also placing a hold on all forms I-589, which is the application for asylum and for withholding of removal, regardless of where the person is from.

So we have this specific halt on asylum for Afghan nationals that comes first. And then following that, we have these 19 high-risk countries.

The high-risk countries are listed in Presidential Proclamation 10949, which was issued back in June. I'll just read out the names so people are aware.

Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

If you recall us covering this back then, you will remember that the reason cited in that proclamation is percentage of visa overstays. This doesn't have anything to do with risk, right?

Other than risk of overstaying one's visa. They do not justify the inclusion of these countries based on the potential for people there to do terrorism, right? At least not all of them.
Yeah.

It's worth pointing out, I guess, that percentage of visa overstays isn't that useful of a figure because if you have 10 people and one overstays, then that's only one person, but it's also a 10% overstay rate, right?

Like, so it doesn't look at like raw numbers. Nonetheless, this would mean, from the way I'm reading it, that any application with these people on it might be paused.
So that could include like

if someone had applied to have a spouse or family member come over and obtain legal status, right?

Or if someone was sponsoring someone and they were a dual national, they're like a Burundian American, for example. And we will see how long this lasts.

Trump has previously failed failed to get a total asylum ban. But for the meantime, like this is catastrophic for people attempting to seek asylum or permanent residency in the US.

The only sort of upside that I can see on an upside, but like, you know, not terrible thing is that I don't think this would pause the work permit clock.

So people have been listening to my series this week. They will have learned about the work permit clock, right? Because this is government action, not an action from individuals.

I don't think it will pause that clock.

I guess to just wrap up the migrant crackdown stuff, Trump announced via a truth that, quote, I am as president of the United States hereby terminating effective immediately the temporary protected status program for Somalis in Minnesota.

In the Thanksgiving message, he also repeated a number of

claims about migrants and used a slur to describe Tim Walls. Yeah, he called him R-word, and I think it is worth saying.
Yeah. He has reiterated this multiple times on camera when asked by reporters.

Yeah, great stuff.

And this is specifically in reference to reporting which has come out of Minnesota about a series of fraudulent claims based on COVID-19 food and housing assistance programs this state was running and people who were abusing those programs for their own financial benefit.

And some of these specific instances are now being used to attack the entire Somali community in Minnesota.

Yeah, it's worth noting that the percentage of the Somali community, which is on TPS, is very small. It's probably a few hundred people.

I don't know how those COVID assistance programs like overlap with one's immigration status, right? But it's worth noting that.

It's also worth noting, like I've linked to the statute in the show notes. The Somali TPS extends until March of 2026.
It probably won't be renewed then, right?

That's what the Trump administration has been doing is sunsetting TPSs for all kinds of people.

The statute does not give the president power to end the TPS, certainly not on a state-by-state basis, right?

Yeah, that's a good point. The notice of revocation would appear in the Federal Register, and the TPS would then have 60 days.

If it was being revoked, the people would have 60 days to act on that information, right? You can't just post it. That's not how this works.

As of today, when I checked the Federal Register, the last entry for the Somali TPS was its renewal last year. So there appears to have been no actual legal action taken on this.

But nonetheless, there has been ICE enforcement, right? There are videos of ICE officers specifically asking people if they are Somali in Minnesota, which is troubling.

I think that's about all the ICE crackdown stuff I have. I guess Greg Bavino's in Louisiana now.

So there's been a lot of discussion this week and house hearings about the drone strike that began the United States campaign of drone strikes against small boats.

in both the Caribbean and the Pacific, right? So-called narco-terrorists, James. Yeah, so yeah, I think so-called is doing a lot of work there.

There seems to be a lot of debate about whether Pete Hegs directly ordered a second strike on survivors from the first strike.

Hegses had denied this, saying, quote, the thing was on fire and it exploded. You can't see anything.
This is called the fog of war. That's not the fog of war.

Yeah, it's not what it means. You're not at war.
You're in a suit in a room watching a TV screen.

It doesn't refer to like literal smoke and fog. I'm sorry.
This is like absurd. Yeah, it's a ludicrous claim, right?

Yes, there have been times where I have been in places, like for instance, I was in Rojava a couple of years ago and we were being bombed, right?

The way for me to get information, it was better for me to like go online and find stuff because the access to information on the ground in conflict times can be difficult.

That is not the case when you're in DC watching a screen readout, right? That is why we have people who are not in combat making these decisions.

The White House has claimed that Admiral Bradley, who was JSOC commander at the time, ordered the strike.

Tom Cotton today claimed that two people in the video were trying to roll the boat to get back in the fight. What? That's not a thing that one can do.

Like, they're not in, just to be clear, they're not in like a kayak here.

Like, this is in what I would call a cigarette boat, like, like a fast speed boat. You can't roll those like that.
I don't understand.

They were not engaged in combat. No, like, I don't see any evidence that these people were equipped to, like, certainly not to fight against a drone, right?

No.

I guess, why does this matter, right? Because these people are dead regardless. Yeah.
Why does the emphasis on this second strike

matter more than simply attacking them the first time? Why is could this result in Hag Seth being in

a degree of trouble? Why are they so defensive about the second strike? Fair question. It is a very clear violation of the U.S.

military's own law of war manual, which I have linked and the Geneva Conventions to kill someone who's demonstrably ordered to combat, right? Like out of combat, i.e. a shipwrecked sailor, i.e.

a wounded soldier who's thrown away their weapon. These people were very clearly not fighting from every report that we've seen.
This has been part of the way that war is conducted for centuries.

right like picking up shipwrecked sailors after sinking a boat etc like i'm not saying this has always happened the u.s has done double tap strikes for a long time. Yeah.

There has been, I should just clarify, I guess, there has been some debate about the semantics of the word double tap.

First of all, that's not important.

What is important is that they killed people who were not fighting, who are out of combat and who are clinging to a burning shipwrecked boat.

A double tap does generally refer to a strike and then a subsequent strike, which is focused on killing the people who came to rescue the people hit in the the first strike.

There was no one to rescue these people.

But I don't think that, like, that's, that's not what's at stake here, right? That, like, that is, it doesn't matter what term we use to describe this, other than war crime.

There were double-trap strikes at the time that I spoke about when I was in Rojava when they did bomb ambulance crews. And yeah, that shit is absolutely reprehensible.

But what happened here is also reprehensible as it's being recounted to us. Eventually, this video will come out, I'm sure.

More broadly, the United states seems to be signaling intent to continue its campaign against maduro saying it will begin land strikes quote unquote soon what

yeah like this is extremely worrying right like yeah

trump of course the great peace president who has ended what is it like nine wars trump the dove i think is what he prefers to be called sure okay perfect uh it's a hell of a visual um

the people at venezuela are the ones who are going to suffer right like it's not going to be regime officials for the most part yeah venezuela is a vast mountainous jungly country uh it's an easy place for us to do land war not a particularly easy place for us to do drone warfare either you know i've written a lot about the uh the united states drone campaign in syria and the disaster that was right and the amount of what they considered to be acceptable civilian casualties We don't have any indications from this DOD or like from Hegseth that like he he will seek to minimize those right like this this could be shaping up to be a disaster for the people of Venezuela I mean yeah I find it unlikely that Hagseth will actually fall into trouble international law because of this people always get away and I mean you can see how Trump already pardoned a number of war criminals earlier this year and in his first administration right and in his first administration yeah as much fun as it is to to be like ha ha

i i'd like to i'd like to see old pate hegseth wiggle his way out of this jam Yes, he will. I think he's expected to do so quite easily.

I mean, international law doesn't exist for

people in the global north. It's a thing that they do to prosecute African people for the most part.
But yes, very unlikely that we will see Pete Hagseth in The Hague for this. Still bad, though.

We'll go on another ad break and be right back.

All right, we are back.

We would like to now expand and clarify some of our

previous discussion of Zoran's White House meeting with Donald Trump and some statements around ICE raids and ICE detainers. Let's start by clarifying this 170 serious crimes number.
Yeah.

While answering the question, Zoran said, quote, we discussed ICE in New York City, and I spoke about how the laws we have in New York City allow the city government to speak to the federal administration about roughly 170 serious crimes.

Unquote. This 170 number is in reference to Local Law 58

Administrative Code 9-131, which was passed in 2014 and strengthened New York's sanctuary laws and required that they only honor ICE detainers when presented with a judicial warrant issued by an Article III federal judge or federal magistrate judge based on probable cause and when the subject of the detainer and warrant is either listed in a terrorist database or has been convicted of a violent or serious crime.

Now, the term violent or serious crime refers to a list of approximately 170 crimes, which is listed in local law 54. I think there's a five-year limit as well, right?

Like it has to be within five years. So there's a number of like they like stack on each other.
Yeah, like there's this, this is just a one of many like amendments strengthening their sanctuary laws.

And I'm mentioning it specifically to clarify where this 170 number comes from and where people can find all of the criminal codes that are listed, which is, again, approximately 170 170 crimes. Yeah.

And the change that this local law did is that this person does not have to just be accused of one of these crimes, but actually be convicted or listed in a terrorist database. Yeah.

And these are mostly like violent felonies. Yeah.
The law that Garrison refers to lists them by penal code number.

So I'm working on expanding those into a list of like words that human beings can understand. Yeah, sure.
Just because I think people generally don't understand sanctuary protections.

Sanctuary laws are not like a, they're not the same in every state. They're not the same in every city in every state.

And I think a lot of people have an understanding of them, which could do with being improved. So I'm going to probably do a whole episode on that.

I think with regard to the list of crimes in New York, I would prefer to do that as a print piece because it's just better if someone can find it on the internet.

And that doesn't work as well with podcasts. Other stuff regarding this, just so people are aware, right?

Like federally, one could be deported for a huge range of crimes, from violent violent crime to theft of over $10,000 to a vast range of quote-unquote crimes involving moral turpitude.

The problem, of course, is that we have 50 different states with 50 different sets of laws, and we have to map federal regulations onto them. There is some Supreme Court case law about how we do that.

Crimes involving moral turpitude can be things that you might consider extraordinarily minor, like turnstile hopping.

Yeah, I'm going to do a whole episode on these because, again, I think you could see in that press conference when Zoran spoke about immigration, Trump tried to move the topic to deporting criminals.

Yeah. And the people who are being deported as criminals, like whilst the DHS Twitter feed wants to highlight people who have been convicted of murder and things, and that's by far like an edge case.

Yeah, and I think that's why he mentioned the 170 like serious survival crimes. And like specifically,

those are the ones that the New York sanctuary laws

do have this

quote unquote cooperation on.

And like in a meeting, Zoran said that he and Trump talked about how current ICE operations in New York City have quote unquote very little to do with serious crime, with these, with the crimes listed on these detainers.

Yeah, and that's a broad thing across the United States, right?

Like even, you know, we spoke about this a couple of weeks ago, but like if you look at Charlotte, right, where they have They are legally bound to honor all ICE detainers by HB 10, you've still got ICE out and about raiding people, And you have sheriffs complaining about ICE not picking people up.

The detainer, I guess I should explain what a detainer is as well. A detainer is an extra 48-hour hold.
It doesn't mean that you just like lock them up forever.

It means that you hold them for 48 hours such that ICE can come in and collect the person.

Because ICE is so focused on,

I don't know what you want to call it, grabbing people off the street. Yeah.
It seems that they're not collecting these people.

There's been some pushback pushback like on straight up economic grounds in some states because

detaining people is quite expensive, right? So detaining people for long periods of time and ICE just not showing up.

I can see how not to give support to sheriff's departments or whatever, but like rural sheriff's departments, which run limited budgets, would start to get pissed off after a time about holding people.

But yeah, that is what a detainer. is.

Got it. ICE doesn't necessarily have to abide by local sanctuary laws.
And what we have seen is that, like, cops are cops and they will make mistakes.

And if someone gets handed over, you can't take them back if the cops fuck that up. Yeah, I mean, this is part of the other things that Zorang campaigned on to like strengthen sanctuary protections.

And

specifically in the section of his policies on quote-unquote Trump-proofing New York City, he talks about like ending illegal ICE cooperation on Rikers Island, where ICE is currently stationed, which does go against sanctuary laws.

And you talked about ending that, as well as providing $165 million in funding for immigration legal defense services in the cities, which would be a massive increase than what is currently provided.

Yes.

As well as just like limiting interactions with police, right? Because the more you interact with the police, the more likely it is that you might accidentally or quote-unquote accidentally.

get put into trouble, even though, you know, police in New York are not supposed to ever ask someone what their immigration status is or cooperate with ICE requests that do not

fall under this specific attainer law. But I mean, in terms of like ways to limit interactions with police, this goes back to some very basic ideas on like

addressing the economic conditions that create crime in the first place, as well as the Department of Community Safety, which Zoran intends to create, which will provide new mental health services, crisis response, and homeless outreach outside of the NYPD.

Yeah, like not criminalizing homelessness or not criminalizing parking are probably two of the most meaningful things that you can do to limit police interaction and specifically police interactions for undocumented people.

Yeah. And I mean, in terms of like turnstile hopping or like fair evasion,

it's complicated in New York. I mean, this isn't going to be

something that they honor a detainer for.

But in terms of like, you know, just talking about like the, yeah, how weird and specific each state's laws are, like, turnstile hopping can be a misdemeanor crime in New York due to like theft of services.

It can also just be a civil infracture.

But it's up to to the officer to decide whether they want this to turn into a criminal misdemeanor or a civil infracture and just pay a hundred dollar fine.

Even this has like caused confusion among like immigrants and immigrant rights attorneys over like dealing with like old, old fare evasion cases and being like, does this now like disqualify me from certain things?

Or does this

like, you know, present a threat of being deported if I, if I declare this in like whatever like citizenship or the green card meeting they may, they may have scheduled. Yeah.

And yeah, not criminalizing fare evasion would be huge.

And if someone's able to make free buses, that'll do a considerable dent in preventing cases where fare evasion could be used as a pretext to federally deport someone. Yeah.

Yeah, because that person or that person could leave New York and be somewhere else, right? Or they could just get swept up in a nice workplace raid and that could be used as a pretext.

Like there are many reasons why, even if it's sanctuary protected, that person could still be vulnerable because of that prosecution, like you said.

Yeah, I mean, and those sorts of raids are still happening in New York. An attempted raid happened in Canal Street

last week. It was prevented from being carried out by people who literally blocked ICE from leaving the parking garage that they were in.
And the NYPD then arrested a few protesters.

It remains to be seen how Zoron will handle incidents like this going forward. He still does not become the mayor for about 30 days.
Right.

But a spokesperson for the mayor-elect has said that Zoron, quote, has made it clear, including the president, that these raids are cruel and inhumane and fail to advance genuine public safety.

New York City's more than 3 million immigrants are central to our city's strength, vitality, and success.

And the mayor-elect remains steadfast in his commitment to protecting the rights and dignity of every single New Yorker, upholding our sanctuary laws, and de-escalation rather than use of unnecessary force, unquote.

I believe that last sentence could be read as in reference to the police conduct while handling anti-ITS protests. Yeah, quote-unquote, de-escalation rather than use of unnecessary force.

But this is not something that they have talked about much. Curious to see when he's actually the mayor, what will happen here? Yeah.
Yeah.

I mean, and that's, that's, that's a part of like what governing is going to look like in this case, which is just kind of sure. It's hard to say.

We've never really had a high-profile, like, you know, DSA person who previously advocated like defunding or abolishing the police become the mayor of a city. Yeah.

And I think this kind of relates to like so much of what the project in New York is around New York City, DSA, and Zoron to rather than just like, you know, be like chasing electoral cars and then crashing once you have control.

Like Zoron's more interested in like actually running the city and providing a legitimate example that democratic socialist policies can deliver on promises for workers and improve life in New York.

And if this project succeeds, it can be pointed to and replicated by others. And there's a very strict focus on like making sure that he's able to succeed on a section of like economic policies.

He's not in a federal position, right? He's not running on abolishing ICE as he can't as the mayor mayor of New York.

And like, I think it's very unclear right now, like what a politics of abolishing ICE really looks like outside of like this like contemplative, like reflexive and like judgmental politics, which falls further and further away from like taking steps to do action, right?

Yeah, I mean, the politics of abolishing ICE looks like the United States up until 2001, right? Like we didn't have ICE.

Well, but like from now, like what would it mean to actually stop deportations completely? Like what will that look like? What can be done politically to do that? Right.

And Zoran's not doing this because Zoran's the mayor of New York City. He cannot run for president.
People in his orbit could run for the House and Senate and push forward bills to do this.

And they might over time.

But like there is a difference between being the mayor of a local municipality and like what a legitimate politics of actually stopping our current process of deportations, what that really looks like and how to actually achieve that, which very little thought is being

put towards among the American left right now.

And it kind of falls back on these like reflective or like contemplative statements.

Yeah, there have been proposals put forward for a long time on what it would look like to create better legal pathways and fewer deportations, right? Like those have existed. Sure.

Like you can look specifically at what people were trying to get Biden to do in 2020, right? Which he obviously completely failed to do. Yeah.
And in fact, made things much worse.

But like those policy proposals exist and they're well thought out and well planned from people who've been working in the space for decades. Right.

What Mamdani can do is like what they call in political science, like the coattails effect. Totally.
Right. As a very popular candidate, people can ride on his coattails.

And I think it's important in that sense that he continues rhetorically. to oppose what ICE is doing, which like that statement you read did, right?

But it's very important that he, if he's able to successfully have his administration in new york and like we we will see how shit goes in that regard but if he is and there is an electoral project that can arise based on that then like yeah it is very important that they remain in lockstep that like we are not going back we're not gonna have a democrat come president 28 and to steward joe biden again right where things get worse like yeah so in that sense i think it like it needs to be something that everyone in the movement retains.

I guess like, not uniformity is her own word, you know, but you know what I mean?

It continues to be something of a North Star for whatever is emerging to the left of the DNC.

Yeah. And like, I just also like, I guess, clarify some things I would have said last week.
I'm not claiming that sheerly the

process of honoring these detainers will like vaguely in a causal sense result in less ICE raids in the city.

I mean, these detainers are, they are legally required, even under the sanctuary laws, to be

to be followed. And I think part of what Zorno was doing was trying to redirect the president's thought away from these larger raids to these specific serious crimes.

And I think, and some of this is based on Trump kind of has like the last person in the room syndrome of he kind of just likes

or follows or parrots whoever the last person in the room. was and like what they told him.

I'm not saying that like honoring these legally required detainers is like, is simply harm direction in that sense.

This is more so in reference to the ongoing negotiations between Mamdani and Trump to limit ICE action in the city outside of these detainer requests, which do address serious crime, which Trump and Mamdani saw as a point of commonality on is they want New York to be a safe place for people.

Focusing on that as opposed to these general ICE raids.

And there's been like some slight movement on this.

Raids have continued, but there's been slight movement in terms of Trump, at least for now, pulling out of of his plans to deploy National Guard to assist ICE.

And like that is the single point where we see some movement on.

And this will be something that, in terms of raids, like on Canal Street, well, we'll see if this actually makes a larger impact once he takes office and continues these negotiations.

If National Guard are assisting ICE, is that like, because they can't directly do the immigration enforcement, right? Well, I mean, assisting ICE in the way that they have in Washington, D.C.

Yeah, like in terms of like quote-unquote protecting officers or quote unquote.

And, you know, the proposals to do so in Chicago and Portland, which are caught in like legal limbo. But I mean, the Portland was more specifically for the ICE facility.

Yeah, protecting federal buildings kind of deal. Versus in Washington, D.C., they were like on patrol with ICE.
Like they were like roving around and doing roadblocks and shit.

Yeah, and like much of this quote-unquote crime crackdown, as Bridget's reported on our show, really is actually a way to do like enhanced immigration enforcement.

Yeah. There's There's a lot of fear in New York and discussions with people in New York on like, how are we going to handle this happening here? Yeah.

And this is like the one point of movement that we've seen is Trump pulling out of these plans, which previously were quite certain he wants to like go one by one and like invade these cities. Yeah.

New York, you also have the like the added factor that like New York is technically in that border enforcement zone. Right.
So

as is Chicago. Yeah, I guess most of these places have been.
Chicago, Portland is.

Los Angeles is because of the, like, so in Los Angeles, they deployed Border Patrol, right? Like, that's another thing that

could happen in New York, but like thus far hasn't on a massive scale. But yeah, it remains to be seen, right? Like Trump has this like

operation at large that Bovino controls that he could deploy to New York and it'll be deployed to Boston where Michelle Buk has like taken a different approach, right? Like, and

I guess we'll have to continue waiting and seeing. It's really heartening to me that people showed up in New York as well.
You know, like, oh, yeah. That people in New York showed up on Canal Street.

Like, that is.

Yeah, and prevented ICE from doing any detentions or arrests. Yeah.
And I think, like, they, they, like,

like, ICE eventually had to leave to New Jersey, is that right? Like, they had to go through the tunnel or whatever, like, to

the tunnel of shame. Yeah, yeah.

But, like, that is, uh, like, that is what kept those people safe, right?

Like, they didn't have to wait for Eric Adams or banner or anyone else like it was members of their community yeah yeah which is cool talking of communities

do you want to want to talk about the campus campus community and how freedom of speech is under threat on our campuses uh well freedom of religion is under threat james okay um religion to

freedom to i'm so so tired freedom to

cite a vibes-based interpretation of the religious i mean yeah this unfortunately this story didn't infringe upon my freedom to not read horrible college essays.

Garrison, that is a freedom that I have not had for many years.

No, no, and this is why I'm interested in your thoughts on this.

A transgraduate instructor has been suspended from the University of Oklahoma after issuing a failing grade to a student's assignment to write a 650-word response to a study on if gender conformity is linked to popularity or bullying in middle school.

This 20-year-old psychology major, a junior, wrote in her response that she does not consider bullying a problem because, quote, God made male and female and made us different from each other on purpose and for a purpose, unquote.

The response was entirely personal opinion.

It does not even properly cite specific scriptures in the Bible.

If I was to write like an unhinged, like Christian response,

the least you could do is cite specific things. Should that be valid? No.
But even this was not done. It's like Bible fanfic.
These are the vibes I get from Jesus.

Well, yeah, she just, she just gestured to her own interpretation of biblical gender roles. Right.
Sure. Sure.

Quote, women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires in our heart. Unquote.
She's women, you know, like

females, I guess. Maybe she was going for a.

It's all circular reasoning like this, all based on based on these biblical gender roles.

And later the essay goes on to self-contradict itself on ideas of gender norms versus gender stereotypes. And it's all just very poorly written.
James, did you read the whole essay? No. Okay,

it's not long. We are not going to read it all on error.
I'll read it right now. I want you to read the whole thing and just give me

your immediate thoughts. I dropped it in the Zoom chat.
You have to understand that I might experience what's called a trauma reaction. It's only two pages.

So it's based on a review of an article. Based on a review of an academic study.
Yeah. On if gender conformity impacts bullying or popularity in middle school.
Okay.

Jesus Christ.

That's what she said.

But not yet. She hasn't cited him specifically.
No, she never cites Jesus. Yeah.

God.

Oh, hell yeah. I love it when they get into like Hebrew.
Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

I'm just getting to penultimate paragraph.

What class is this in? Psychology.

A psychology course. I'm going to sign this for a psychology class.

Wow. Yeah.

Can I just read like the last part out loud? Okay, Sophie, you can read the last part.

Yeah.

My prayer for the world and specifically for American society and youth is that they would not believe the lies being spread from Satan that make them believe they are better off as another gender than what God made them.

I pray that they feel God's love and acceptance as who he originally created them to be. Sophie already inhabited that role beautifully.

Thank you. Yeah.
Thank you. Previously, in like the paragraph before, I do you want me to do it? Yeah, you could do it so

I unfortunately feel like I could really

embody

embody this horrific person. Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic.
It severely harms American youth.

I do not want kids to be teased or bullied and stuff. That's enough.

So, James, as a college, college professor, what is your thoughts on this? It's just a bad response to the question, right? There is not a single citation.

The person has not done what they were instructed to do. They have just, it's a classic example of the you have answered the question you wanted me to ask, not the question I have asked genre.
Sure.

And in this case, like I'm presuming there was some kind of rubric for grading, like it seems like

the sort of assignment that you would set once a week, right? I don't know if it's an online course or they're just using an online LMS, but

the comment is clearly from an online LMS. Yeah, they do have the rubric that TPUSA published.

The rubric was that you must write this 650-word reaction paper demonstrating that you have read the assigned article and includes a thoughtful reaction to the material presented in the article.

Please remember that your reaction paper should not be a summary, but rather a thoughtful discussion of some aspect of the article.

Possible approaches to reaction papers include a discussion of why you feel the topic is important and worthy of study or not, or an application of the study or results to your own experiences.

That's a broader prompt than I had otherwise imagined. Yeah, go ahead.
Other section is:

reaction papers are graded on a 25-point scale and are evaluated based on the following. Does the paper show a clear tie to the assigned article? 10 points.

Does the paper present a thoughtful reaction or response to the article rather than a summary? 10 points. And is the paper clearly written? 5 points.

The best reaction papers illustrate the students have read the assigned materials and engaged in critical thinking about some aspect of the article.

Yeah, I mean, they, the way you would do that is to reference the article more than in the first line of your paper and then never again, right? Sure. Which is what this person has done here.

Like, like at no point do they quote from the article, mention anything specifically the article says other than that it was very thought-provoking.

And then like they've seen the word gender and just gone off like a dog after a squirrel, right? Like, yes. And then completely gone off on one about God.

Yeah, like that's a pretty broad prompt. It's broader than I would generally write a prompt, but that's okay with different approaches.

They haven't specifically said in the prompt that they want people to cite their sources, which I normally do. But yeah, they haven't really shown any engagement with the article right.

This isn't a freshman. This isn't a software.
This is the junior well, well into this semester.

The response from the instructor was, quote, please note I'm not deducting points because you have certain beliefs, but instead I'm deducting points for you posting a reaction paper that does not answer the questions for this assignment.

It contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.

While you are entitled to your own personal beliefs, there is an appropriate time or place to implement them in your reflections.

I encourage all students to question or challenge the course material with other empirical findings or testable hypotheses.

But using your own personal beliefs to argue against the findings of not only this article, but the findings of countless articles across psychology, biology, sociology, et cetera, is not best practice.

Unquote. Yeah.
So.

This is a science class, I guess, right? Lee? Like, this is not a scientific response. It is

entirely vibes-based. Before becoming a national news story, this grade was reviewed and approved by another instructor.

This isn't just one instructor who happens to be trans. This isn't just their personal grade.
This was reviewed by another instructor. But

on Thanksgiving, TP USA used this story to start a media blitz targeting this quote-unquote mentally ill professor, this graduate student instructor, which has resulted in her being placed on leave as the university reviews this incident concerning illegal discrimination based on religious beliefs.

That's not what that is, right? Like, I have watched a short form video about discrimination many times over my years instructing students.

And like, this person wasn't discriminated against because of their beliefs. They were discriminated.

They weren't discriminated against they were graded for their response which was poor for failing to follow the rules of the assignment

and again not not not even as like a freshman who needs more clear like you know like

uh first year at unich like no yeah this is this is this is a psychology major in her junior year yeah writing this response as a part of it's as a part of a scientific as a scientific psychology course where it's not about science at all you're just talking about your own impression of what God wants out of gender roles and citing, not even citing, but like pointing towards the Holy Spirit and the Heavenly Father.

Yeah, and some Hebrew shit that you've translated. I know

that most instructors who teach at universities now are very concerned about exactly this, right?

About a student writing a paper which is just bad, and then them going to the pretty much TP USA's TP USA. Right.
And being like, yes, they came against me because they hate Jesus.

And I can imagine that that is worse for trans and gender non-conforming and otherwise

squeezer instructors

from conversations, right? Like, no, absolutely. And like TP USA first gained popularity for its like professor watch list where people could report their like woke liberal professors.

And this is this is a core part of the TP USA model is attacking academics and people who work in university.

And this instant has like caused speculation of like how much of this essay was genuine versus was this intentionally bad essay to provoke this response, which

we can't see.

But the student has like risen to the ranks of like a minor conservative celebrity in these past two weeks

because of this incident and is doing like TP USA like speaking, speaking appearances, news appearances. There's been dozens of articles across right-wing outlets on this.

It's turned into a legitimate story for them. Yeah, I do want to say as well.

It appears, Garrison and I discussed this before, but it appears that this person is a grad student and not like a

tenured professor.

Yes, certainly not tenured, right? Sure. Therefore, they are much more vulnerable and that they have many fewer protections than a tenured professor would have.
I don't know if they're unionized.

It depends on where they're teaching, right? But like University of Oklahoma, that is questionable. Yeah,

I mean, possibilities points to no, but like, this is a serious fucking problem for anybody teaching in these fields, right?

Especially graduate students, like I say, especially, I mean, imagine you're a graduate student on a student visa, right? Like, how do you approach teaching this

when you know that you could end up on the TPUSA Instagram? It's trying to chill speech, right? This is, this is part of what they're doing.

They're turning this into a free speech crusade for religious discrimination.

But what this is actually doing is chilling speech at universities by making it so that you can't teach certain topics, especially if you happen to be trans yourself.

Otherwise, TPA USA and the right-wing media ecosystem is going to turn your life into a living nightmare. Yeah, I've repeatedly seen a First Amendment cited a reference to this.

This has not got anything to do with the First Amendment. Like the First Amendment doesn't give you the right to get a good grade for saying what the fuck you want.

That's not in the First Amendment. But yeah, like Garrison Garrison said, it is chilling speech.
Good news. Oklahoma University Workers United is a union.
Sick. Okay, cool.

And it includes grad student instructors. Unclear.

Okay, hit us up, O-U-W-U,

and let us know.

Before we close, I do want to mention another story that's happened this week, which is going to prompt a future episode, probably next week. The online gambling platform

Kalshi. I've never said it before.
I'm saying Kalshi has

partnered with CNN. That's Kashi.

I don't even know what you're talking about anymore.

But the online gambling platform Calchi has partnered with CNN and CNBC this past week to allow the news companies to use quote-unquote real-time prediction data for TV news segments and online content.

This is not entirely surprising if people have been watching CNN like I have, like a complete maniac.

Because specifically this past November, and like this whole election season, news pundits on CNN have been using betting odds in place of polling data to weigh the likelihood of candidates winning elections.

This has become an increasingly common practice, specifically at CNN. And now it appears spreading to other news platforms like CNBC.

Cal She announcement of the CNN partnership reads, quote, CNN chief data analyst Harry Enton is an expert in translating what what data and polling are saying on any given issue.

And through this integration, he can tap into real-time prediction markets data to better inform and fact-check his reporting. Unquote.
What?

Fact-checking his reporting with gambling data, gambling odds. From people who are betting on like if people are going to starve in Gaza, right?

This is the sort of stuff that they bet on on Khaleesh, not just who wins elections. Absurd.
Jesus. I like that you've pronounced the name of this company several different times.

See, I used to call it Khaleesh. This is the problem.

I think it's Kalshi. I think Kalshi is correct.

There is one possible benefit to this.

Will it stop Nate Silver being so fucking annoying? No, it'll cause him to be more annoying, James. How can you not see that?

This is a part of the Nate Silver. The silverification of everything.

And this is what I want to talk about in the full piece.

no, there was a CNA news segment in October 2025 where this data analyst talked about how the odds of Democrats winning the midterms are going down via citing the Cauchy odds.

And then he did like three minutes of analysis using selective midterm voting data from 2017 and 2018 to support the movement in the gambling odds.

Like that was the core piece of data he was trying to explain. What the fuck?

How big is this marketplace? Pretty big. Pretty big.
Okay. So I couldn't just come in with like 500 bucks and

tip it. No, no, no.
I mean, it depends on what you're doing. For like these sorts of big, these like big races, no.

But part of the real problem is, is if you're just tuning into CNN and reading the graphics, it's really hard to tell that these are gambling odds. You're just seeing big percentages.

And they're only going to mention that it's from quote-unquote betting markets or prediction markets, like once at the beginning of the segment.

After that, they treat the numbers like actual polling data. So it's really, really manipulative.

And unless you're like super paying attention to this whole segment, it'd be very easy to interpret these gambling numbers as genuine, as genuine poll information. Wow.

It's incredibly dangerous to democracy. And

overall, kind of bad and fucked up. And it's going to be spreading.

The Calci competitor Polymarket partnered with X, the Everything app, and Yahoo Finance earlier this year to integrate their quote-unquote prediction data into content on X and Yahoo Finance.

It's only going to become more and more common. Well, you're going to do a long-form episode on this.
I will. Yeah, this sucks.
I'm just looking at this website now. It's bad.
This sucks.

I don't like this at all.

If you would like to email us, you can do so by reaching out to coolzone tips at proton.me. That does it for us that it could happen here.

We reported the news. And now you can bet on the news.

We reported the news.

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.

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