The Trauma at the Border

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Hi, Radio Atlantic listeners.

This is Isaac Dover, staff writer here at The Atlantic.

It's been a big week in politics.

If you haven't read the Mueller report itself yet, you should.

But, with everyone on the internet and on cable news giving you more than enough to digest about it, and the fallout from that report, we thought we'd focus on something that has been going on long before this week and will be going on long after, the situation at the border.

For the people who've been living their lives in pens and detention centers, those lives go on.

And while you probably saw Attorney General William Barr's press conference on Thursday morning pre-spinning the release of the report, What you may not have seen is the news from him on Tuesday when he ordered immigration judges to stop releasing asylum seekers on bail.

That won't impact families or unaccompanied children, but it signals an even fiercer immigration policy that could include the return of family separations.

Trump has been making a trip to the border every few weeks, and he tweets about it basically non-stop when he's not complaining about Mueller.

He's threatened to close the southern border, then backed off of that.

He fired Kirsten Nilsson, his Homeland Security Secretary, because she wouldn't go along with the hardliners on family separation.

And meanwhile, people who disagree with him explode with protest and recriminations.

But there are thousands of people who wake up with this every day and go to sleep with it every night.

We wanted to bring some of those stories to you, the stories that can get lost in the political news cycle.

So our guest today is Taylor Levy, the legal coordinator at Annunciation House, a Catholic charity based in El Paso that provides shelter to immigrants on both sides of the southern border.

El Paso has emerged as a hotspot for migration recently.

It's drawn national attention for the number of people crossing there and the conditions in which those people have been kept.

And Taylor Levy works with them every day.

We caught up with her in between the hearings she's been in this week with families facing the Trump administration's Remain in Mexico policy.

That new program is very controversial.

It asks asylum seekers to wait across the border while their cases are processed in the U.S.

Juarez and other places along the Mexican border are not safe places, especially for these vulnerable families who, remember, aren't from Mexico.

So Taylor, thanks for joining us here on Radio Atlantic.

Thank you so much for having me.

Your job is to be the legal coordinator.

So, what does that actually entail day to day?

It's a lot of dealing with emergencies.

We worked a lot with the family separation issues and trying to reunite families.

We're still working on that.

We still have at least one father who remains detained after almost a year in detention right now, separated from a six-year-old.

And we're still seeing new separations work on all of that.

And now, we've been working on the Remain in Mexico cases since the Trump administration has started implementing that.

So let's talk about what the landscape is that we're talking about here.

How many people are we talking about and

your role with Annunciation House?

It means that

you're doing what with them besides just representing them in court.

Yeah, so we tend to say that we have two main departments for Annunciation House.

Hospitality, which is our word for welcoming people, providing shelter, food, clothing, and helping them call their family members to continue on where they're going.

And then legal.

So I run the legal side of things, but when there's need, I help out on the hospitality side of things.

So Annunciation House is receiving,

with all of our network of partners, we're receiving between like 500 to 700, 800 people released every day.

And those are 500, 700 new people?

Yes, released to us every day, approximately.

Some days the numbers are a little lower, a little bit higher, but we're working with something like 20 to 30 different churches, faith-based communities, and also just secular organizations to provide hospitality to all of these folks who are mostly family units, mostly coming from Central America, also from Mexico and from Brazil, and sometimes from other countries as well.

Aaron Powell, and has that gone up over the last two years, or has that gone down, or how have those numbers looked?

Yeah, we didn't see this influx at all until 2014.

That's when we kind of across the border, there was the influx of more and more people coming, fleeing Central America.

It's definitely been higher than it has been in the past since about September.

The numbers have been kind of steadily creeping up higher and higher.

Aaron Powell, so you've got 500 to 700 people coming in per day that you guys are providing a bed for, food for.

That would strike some people as, I guess, a really high number.

Aaron Ross Powell, I mean, I think it's surprising for people who aren't here on the border.

I think that it is accurate that the apprehension numbers by Border Patrol are higher than they used to be.

Even then, though, we're not talking like they're higher than the history of Border Patrol.

They're higher than they were, I think, approximately in the last 15 to 20 years.

They're the highest we've seen in 15 to 20 years.

In my opinion, that's not ancient history at all when you're talking about the history of the United States, when you're talking about even the history of the Border Patrol.

So yes, the numbers are higher than we're used to more recently, but

it's not unprecedented.

It's not shocking.

It's definitely a fair amount of work.

But one of the things that's been so amazing about it is seeing how many people in our community in El Paso, but also in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Anthony, Chaparral, are all coming forward to make sure that people are welcomed with dignity and respect and a chance to move on and reunite with their various family members, their friends.

They're all vetted by immigration prior to being released.

They have fingerprints, background checks.

They work with,

like, they're put through, I don't know, various different databases with the FBI, with Interpol, with the consulates to confirm that they're the real parents of the children, et cetera.

And then they're released most of the time with ankle bracelets.

The vast majority of the parents have GPS ankle monitors, and they're released to continue to pursue their asylum cases elsewhere in the United States.

Let me focus you in on an incident that got a lot of attention.

There was a couple of weeks ago under the bridge between Juarez and El Paso, a number of people who were detained that were kept in a sort of a pen under the bridge.

Yeah.

What happened with those people was, I think, very confusing.

There was a question of how did they get there in the first place?

And there was some attention to it because it happened to be right around when Betto O'Rourke was announcing his presidential campaign with a rally officially in El Paso.

And he went to visit the people who were detained there under the bridge the Friday afternoon before he spoke.

And then by the day after he finished speaking, they were gone.

So where did those people come from?

How many people of them

were there?

Yeah.

And where did they go to?

Yeah, so the under-the-bridge holding area I think was really

a travesty.

I mean, I spoke out against it quite a bit because I don't think that that is the people who we want to be.

I don't think that's the country that we want to be.

Just treating people in those types of deplorable conditions was completely unacceptable.

I think what's interesting about it is, as someone who's been on the border for, you know, almost a decade, I've never seen

ever Border Patrol or customs permit so much press to have such close access to people.

And that was before Beethoven came.

You know, the now acting

Secretary of Homeland Security, who was the CBP commissioner, he does his press conference, and then they actually walked over all of the press on that Wednesday to go and see and see where the people were being held and kind of videotaped them, et cetera.

So a lot of those people who are held under the bridge were released eventually per the usual policies of people are held by a border patrol for a couple days while they're processed, fingerprinted, background checks, etc.

So we definitely got multiple families coming to our shelters who had been held underneath there.

We spoke quite a bit about the fact that the conditions were so bad underneath the bridge.

I saw a six-year-old boy who they took off his shirt and they took off his pants to show me that his body was literally just speckled with bruises from sleeping on these big chunks of gravel.

It wasn't little gravel.

It was really big, huge chunks.

You tweeted a photo of the boy's hands.

Yeah, that was the little boy's sister.

So that was his five-year-old sister who her hands were bloody and chapped from being under the bridge.

And so they had been released, luckily, but not everyone was.

How does Border Patrol explain what happened there?

Border Patrol explains that they simply didn't have room.

And so that that's where they needed to keep people.

After all of the outrage, they stopped keeping people under the bridge and now they have them in

tents that aren't permanent tents and not even semi-permanent tents.

They're very kind of Army camp tents and they're still very unsanitary conditions.

I believe Representative Barragan, you know, wrote a lot about it after she came and visited about a week ago or so about how unsanitary the tent conditions are as well.

Trevor Burrus: But was there an influx right around when they started putting people under the bridge?

Does that hold up that there was all of a sudden not room?

Aaron Powell, I don't think anything was all of a sudden.

I think CBP knows very well that these numbers were increasing.

I think that the United States government has lots of intel throughout Mexico and Central America that they knew that the numbers were what they were going to be and that they had plenty of time

to come up with more humane ways to treat people and that they still do.

And that's part of why they announced in the last couple of days that they're going to be building these

soft wall tent facilities that are more hygienic and it will have laundry and showers, etc.

And when you talk about these children who are covered in bruises and they're bloody from sleeping on gravel,

what do they make of what's going on?

What do the children make of it?

Because they are five, six years old.

They don't know really what's happening.

They certainly didn't make the decision to make the journey on their own.

I think the children mainly have just seemed kind of in shock and confused more than anything.

They've been really happy to see when they arrive at our various houses of hospitality and see

that we pretty much have as much food as they can eat, you know, available for them, that they can eat whenever they want, as opposed to, you know, one sandwich per day

or per meal.

You know, they would get one sandwich, two slices of white bread, one slice of cheese, and one slice of ham.

And that would be all you would get three times a day, kids or adults.

I think that's one of the biggest things, seeing coloring books, seeing stuffed animals, seeing really as much food as you can fit on your plate and want to eat is how we try and do all of our houses of hospitality.

And

I think that that's the biggest thing.

It's the parents that are kind of the most heartbreaking is listening to the parents talk about

how they never expected to be treated that way.

They never expected to be screamed at by the guards and said all these horrible things told to them.

Aaron Ross Powell, are they worried worried for their children?

Do they think that they are going to be separated from their children at this point?

Is that a concern?

Or have they just decided that they're going to make their way to the States and see what happens?

Aaron Powell.

Once they've been released to us, they're still really worried about the idea of being deported eventually.

I think that that's something that gets missing in the narrative.

A lot of times

with people who are against this, they say, oh, okay, they're released and then they're just going to disappear.

But study after study shows that asylum seekers have a much higher percentage rate of showing up for their court hearings than

other populations, and that the vast majority of people do show up for their court hearings, do go to their check-ins.

You asked me earlier if people call us back after they left.

The main reason why people call us back is because they can't find their check-in location, for example, because they all have to check in with ICE somewhere after two weeks after arriving.

And they'll call us panicked that they can't get a ride or that they just want to make sure that they should go, should they go at 9 a.m.

or should they go at 10 a.m.

and those types of questions.

Almost everyone we're talking to is completely planning on going to their check-ins, following through the process.

I think there's a lot of belief that the United States is this wonderful country that will welcome them and will understand that they're not bad people.

That's the words that they say

so many times is that, no, I'm not a bad person and the judge will understand and he'll see me and he'll know that I'm somebody who deserves to be here.

I think it's important to point out here that we're talking about people who've claimed asylum, who've said that in their home countries the conditions are too dangerous and that they have been forced to leave for the sake of their own lives.

Now, one of the things that we hear out of the administration and out of President Trump is that there are a number of people who are claiming asylum who are kind of faking it.

What are you hearing from the people who are coming of what conditions they're leaving behind?

The vast majority of the people we are talking to break down sobbing the second I sit down with them to have a consult.

This morning before coming to do this recording, I

think I spoke to around 14 people who had just arrived at the house and

needed a more legal consultation because of various things about their cases.

And

it was just a lot of crying people.

It was,

it's an interesting thing about the work of there's all these ethical lines and boundaries of how professional should you be.

And I definitely believe I'm very professional and very ethical, but I'm also someone who, you know, will hold my clients' hands and give them hugs.

And

there's absolute terror of the idea of being deported.

But what are they saying?

That they're going to be killed if they go back home.

Exactly, that they're going to be killed if they come back home.

A lot of people are.

Killed by whom?

By the madas, by the gangs, the gangs that, and the gangs that we, I feel like the thing that gets lost so frequently is when people use the word gang, I think so many people, Americans, imagine Westside's story, they imagine this, okay, kind of like, you know, street gang, not a big deal.

And that's not what these are.

These are like transnational criminal organizations that have huge networks.

Smartphones and technology have increased their power so exponentially because when people have been kidnapped or targeted, there's pictures taken of them.

People are showing us, you know, pictures of the threats that are sent to them, that their photo has been passed around.

So the idea of just, okay, if you've been threatened, move somewhere else in Honduras is ridiculous because these

gangs are not just gangs.

They're transnational criminal organizations that have reach everywhere.

One of the biggest...

Why are they threatening these people?

What is it that

these are people who are obviously fleeing from their circumstances?

They're not upper class members of society.

What is it that's getting them targeted by these

gangs?

I would say there's two biggest things.

So one is just the extortions, the massive amounts of extortions and protection money that you have to pay to not be murdered.

Whether you have a tiny taco stand or a tortillerilla or you're a taxi driver or even what we're starting to see more and more of is people who are extorted who don't even have businesses at all.

They're just extorted every day they are on their way to walking to the bus.

They have to pay by the people who walk by.

And if people know that folks have family in the United States, then they're extorted more because

there's this idea that your family in the United States can send you money or you're going to be killed.

And then the next biggest thing I would say we're seeing is forced gank recruitment of

teenagers, you know, of teenage boys in particular, but also of the teenage girls, where there's this concept that's kind of colloquially referred to as gang girlfriend, but it's not a girlfriend.

It's about forcibly kidnapping young women, usually like 12, 13, 14 years old.

And all of a sudden, a gang member will take an interest in you, think you're pretty, and say, okay, you belong to me now, and you're going to be essentially my sex slave.

And okay, that's you're my girlfriend, but it's not girlfriend.

We're repeatedly seeing those stories.

Moms and dads coming up here with their 12, 13, 14-year-old daughters who have been

forced by the gangs to become the girlfriend of one of the gang members, maybe have escaped that, or maybe they left luckily before the threats culminated in an actual attack.

Aaron Powell, so when they get to the border, at that point,

even though it's terrible conditions, it's and I don't mean to minimize it, it's worth having the terrible conditions at the border to get away from what they were fleeing from.

100%.

At least they are marginally safe.

And I mean, I think that that's a good segue into talking about this program, Remain in Mexico, or the migrant protection protocols that has been implemented in the last month or so here in El Paso and just how truly horrific that has been to watch.

Yeah, what are we talking about?

Because I think that the important thing to remember there for people listening is that, yes, these people are

on the Mexico side of the U.S.-Mexico border, but they're not Mexican, and they're just as

legally

up in the air in Mexico as they are in the United States.

They're from Honduras, they're from Guatemala, they're from other countries.

And so that leaves them in this precarious position when they do get to Mexico, especially when they're near the border and there are targets on them on the Mexican side.

Yes, exactly.

So we saw, I believe they began returning people to Mexico to await their court hearings here in the United States, their asylum court hearings.

I believe in El Paso sector, they began returning them around March 25th.

So the first hearings of people coming back for their hearings were held last Wednesday.

There was one a week ago.

And then just the last two days, there were the second and third sets of hearings on Wednesday and Thursday.

So I accompanied those families on Wednesday and Thursday in their court hearings here in the United States.

What happens is they were held.

They were held for several days in the border patrol conditions.

Multiple of the families we were talking to say they were held underneath the bridge

because they were returned right around that same time period.

They were held underneath the bridge for about three to four days and then they were returned and sent back to Mexico to await for their court hearings.

They're given a piece of paper and told to show back up on whatever date and then they show up at the bridge.

They are taken back into custody by customs and borders enforcement, you know, border protection officers.

And then they are taken by armed guards to the courthouse.

We're given an hour to speak to them before their court starts.

And then they have their first court hearing, deportation hearing,

and then they get put back into customs and border protection custody, and then they will be sent back to Mexico.

I'm sitting here in a studio having had a good night's sleep and having trouble keeping track of the process that you just explained.

Do the people who are going through it, do they...

Do they understand what they're going through?

Do they have a sense of this?

Or is it just that

they're trying to keep up and you guys are trying to keep up for them?

They have no understanding of what's going on.

It was so clear.

Exactly.

Like, you're a very educated individual.

I'm explaining it to you as calmly as I can, and it sounds insane.

And so when you imagine that there were,

oh, I believe there were 23 people on the docket yesterday who we had about 45 minutes to talk to when everything was said and done, myself and two immigration attorneys.

And we were trying to to explain this entire process in 45 minutes as all of the respondents just sat and cried and cried and shook and cried and told us how much danger they were in in Mexico and that if they got sent back, they were going to be on the streets.

And please, please won't the judge understand that they can't do this to us?

The judge will help me, right?

And the problem is the way the jurisdiction works, the way the law works, that judge is not the person person who has any power to order the people to stay here.

Do they trust you?

Do they trust the people who are coming to help them, or do they think that you are part of it too?

I think it's a big mix.

One of the women who I was talking to yesterday was Indigenous Guatemalan.

She speaks Quiche.

I was able to get an interpreter on the phone, and it was the first time anyone had spoken to her in her language during this entire process.

She was incredibly confused about why she had been sent back, where she was going to live, what was going on.

I ended up spending about 20 minutes with her of those 45 minutes.

So interviewed fewer people than I could.

We didn't even get to everyone just because I was trying so hard to explain it.

There's all these logistical hurdles of trying to represent someone in Mexico.

What we're hearing over and over again is even for some of the families who have been returned, and we think in El Paso sector, it's roughly 500 some people who have been returned so far.

We can't get any firm numbers, but these are based on various leaks and rumors.

that even families who might have money to be able to pay for an asylum case, I have so far only been able to find a small handful of attorneys who say they're willing to take these cases because attorneys in El Paso are scared to travel to Wadas because of the violence as well.

On Wednesday, Wednesday, there were nine families who presented, and of the nine families, two had been kidnapped on Tuesday.

They had been released after around about three hours of having been kidnapped and beaten.

It was only the fathers of the families who had been kidnapped, luckily.

Both of those two families,

they're with it was husband and wife pairs.

Both of the wives were pregnant and both had small children.

And both of those families had been held under the bridge for several days before being returned.

And the fathers were out, they were at a store just like buying some groceries when they were kidnapped in the parking lot

and really badly beaten.

And they were covered in bruises and marks from having been beaten and kidnapped the day before their hearings.

So basically, you have a situation where there are people who have run from situations in their home countries being extorted or blackmailed or

raped by gangs.

Then they get to the Mexican border and they are

they have to fight for shelter space where a place to sleep.

And if they leave the shelter to get food, they might get kidnapped.

And if they leave the shelter to go to court, they'll lose their spaces there.

Exactly.

Everyone knows that the kidnappers hang out outside of the migrant shelters and they hang outside of

the bridge.

So those are the two most dangerous places for these people to be going back and forth between.

So when they come to the bridge for their court hearings, you know, because there's always going to be multiple hearings, all of these hearings were reset for mid-May.

They are once again going to be put at risk because if they're returned to Mexico, who knows if they're going to find a spot in the shelter?

The areas outside the shelters are where the kidnappers are.

The areas outside of the bridge is one of the most dangerous areas in Wades, especially for folks who look visibly Guatemalan, look visibly Central American.

Or if you just say the wrong word, like camión versus camioneta, you know, different words like that, you can tell tell instantly that someone's a Central American.

And if you make that mistake, that's how you get targeted by the kidnappers.

You don't like the word crisis.

I mean, it sounds like a crisis, even though when the president was running, when he came into office, he was facing a situation where immigration was at a historic low.

He called it a crisis then, right?

Why is crisis not the right word to describe what's going on?

I just don't think the crisis is an immigration crisis or a border crisis.

I think the crisis is in the lack of humanity

and the response from so many people.

It's the lack of ability

for so many people to be able to care about their own children and care about their own children's safety.

but to be able to imagine the quintessential Mary and Joseph with their baby and to think that it's perfectly fine that you're going to be sent back to Mexico to allegedly wait for your due process in one of the greatest nations in the world to have your chance to ask for asylum and ask for help

but you're going to be kidnapped and beaten and killed quite possibly simply because we don't want to make more space at the table.

That's the crisis.

It's not a border crisis.

It's not an immigration crisis.

It's It's a crisis in the lack of humanity that so many Americans are having towards these people.

And the bright side is how much humanity and love and welcome we are seeing.

And we have literally thousands of volunteers who are going every day to these various hospitality sites in El Paso and Las Cruces and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and are showing the good of humanity and are showing how much love can be given.

And we see it every day at at the airports, too.

Of even people who aren't our volunteers, we see just random people at the airport, random people at the bus stations, you know, buying people hamburgers because they see their little kids are hungry and giving them extra food and helping them to find their gates.

So there's a lot of blessings that we see in the midst of all of the

darkness.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back back with more with Taylor Levy in a moment.

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We're back talking with Taylor Levy of Annunciation House.

We have this decision, this order from the Attorney General, William Barr,

earlier this week.

It's sort of complicated what it is.

What it does is it directs immigration judges not to release migrants on bail once their cases have been approved for expedited removal proceedings.

And that can only be done if they've established that they have a credible fear of persecution or torture back home.

What does that mean in practice?

That's very legalistic language.

Yeah, it is.

What are we talking about?

It's a very complicated decision, but what it essentially means is

anybody crossing the border who expresses a fear of return and ICE decides to detain them rather than the releasing them for various operational capacity reasons, which is the majority of family units are still released.

This is mostly going to affect singles at this point, single men and single women.

We know that it likely will be applied.

We believe that it'll likely be applied eventually to the family context.

But at this point, what it means for single men and single women in detention is it means their detention is 100% decided at the whim of the discretion of the Department of Homeland Security.

And the only way way the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, can make a decision to release someone from custody is based on urgent humanitarian reasons, which essentially means that single adults will be held in custody the entire time for the entire pendency of their case.

And judges are no longer allowed to grant bonds for people who are shown to have no flight risk, shown to not be a danger to the community, and who want to fight their cases, have very strong cases, and want to fight their asylum cases outside of detention.

It just means that fewer people are going to be granted asylum, right?

It means that way fewer people are going to be granted bond, but it exactly means fewer people are going to be granted asylum because so many people cannot take being in prison for a year or a year and a half in these horrific conditions.

And we see more and more deaths in ICE custody year after year.

We've seen in the last three months, two to three months, we've seen a complete reversal of

the Department of Homeland Security's policy in terms of how it detains trans individuals.

There's a special pod in Sierra or in Cebola, New Mexico, specifically for trans women, but they are having it practically empty and instead they're just detaining trans women with adult men across the United States in random facilities with no special care whatsoever.

The argument that you'll hear from some people who

favor a more hardline policy here or a set of hardline policies is this is not supposed to be nice.

This is not supposed to be a good situation.

We don't want people to come.

That's why we're doing all of these things.

Family separation, yeah, it's bad.

Don't come with your families.

Sleeping on gravel, it's bad.

Don't come.

Right?

And that that's part of the sensibility here.

What would you say to those people?

I guess there's two points.

I mean, one point is simply that's not what the law says.

That's detention, immigration detention is always meant to be administrative only.

There's clear case law on that.

There's clear statutory law on that.

Asylum seekers in particular and immigrants in general, it's not supposed to be punitive.

It's not supposed to be a punishment.

It is supposed to be administrative holding.

But apart from all of that legalese, it's simple humanity.

A lot of what we do

is speaking to people

who are trying to make this next decision.

And

the way Trump talks about that sometimes is that immigration lawyers are going and coaching people to lie about their cases.

As somebody who knows intimately how horrible these conditions are, I can never know how bad it is compared to an actual asylum seeker ever, but I've talked to literally thousands of these people about the conditions in custody, about suicidal people,

worked very closely with the little girl, Jacqueline, who died with her father and one part of her legal team.

Despite all of that,

over and over and over again, we hear from people still in Mexico who are considering crossing or perhaps from people who are here in El Paso who didn't get caught and are asking for help to turn themselves into Border Patrol because they want to do things the right way.

We're hearing from them that this is their only option.

And that even though the holding conditions are terrible and even though they might lose their case eventually, at least they're alive.

At least their daughter is alive.

At least their son is alive.

And that they simply can't take any more murders.

They can't take any losing any more of their family members.

And that they're going to do it anyway.

So if the point is deterrence,

I'm not seeing that from my end.

I'm not seeing people saying, I wish I had never done it.

I'm seeing people who are traumatized and crying and terrified and feel a lot of shame and guilt sometimes over what they put their children through.

But I am simply not seeing people saying to me, I wish I had stayed.

Almost ever, just really almost never, do I have people who tell me, I wish I had never come.

It's so rare.

I spoke to a man yesterday who still, after all, all of it, he told me he's still happy that he came.

But I spoke to a man yesterday who was separated from his two-year-old for over a month, even though he's his biological daughter and he brought her birth certificate that immigration accused him for some reason of it being a fake birth certificate.

I assume, I don't know, but I assume it was a problem with the verification with the consulate that sometimes there's computer glitches.

And his daughter was taken away from him and he was, she's little, she's only two.

He was just interrogated by the officers for hours and hours about being a trafficker and having been a kidnapper and that he must like raping this girl, and that's why he has her, so he can be a rapist, and that he's going to go to prison and he's going to get raped in prison, and that that's what he deserves.

And they took his daughter away for a month, and he didn't see her, he didn't talk to her, he didn't know anything about her.

And then, all of a sudden, yesterday, or I think it was the day before, it was, oh, whoops, never mind.

Sorry, we realized the birth certificate was real.

Here you go, here's your daughter back.

And he was released to us.

And when I asked him if, just after all of that trauma, after all of that worry, would he still have come?

He was steadfast 100%, absolutely.

This was the only way to keep my daughter alive.

Multiple of his siblings had already been murdered.

Let's close just thinking about where things are headed here.

We

have the president who has threatened to close the border.

We've had

reports that he told Kevin McAlene, who was in charge of Border Patrol and is now the acting Homeland Security Secretary, that he should refuse asylum seekers at the border and that if he were brought to court, that he should

just count on getting a pardon from the president.

What would happen if the border were closed down?

If the checkpoints were closed down,

where does that that go to?

I don't know if I have a good answer for it because it's just kind of absurd.

It just

makes my brain tickle or something because it's like, how do you even answer that?

Because the vast majority of the folks coming to seek asylum aren't going to the bridges because they're being turned back illegally, in our opinion, right?

There's lots of lawsuits about that.

Just yesterday morning, I watched a Central American family get turned away at the middle of the border so they could go put their names on this list.

And the waiting list right now is three to four months in the El Paso area.

And

so if you close the ports of entry, all you're doing is encouraging more people to cross in an irregular fashion, right?

Cross outside of the ports of entry.

And so to just say that Border Patrol agents should stop arresting them makes no sense

because they're just going to come in then.

It just doesn't make any sense.

I don't even know how to talk about it.

Like we have a lot of fencing, the you know, so-called wall in El Paso area, like a lot of fencing.

But the way the border works, the fence has to be built on U.S.

soil.

We can't build a wall or a fence on Mexican soil.

So by the time the people get to the wall, they're already on U.S.

soil.

You can't just like ignore them and turn your backs on them.

It just doesn't make any sense logically.

What do you think if you could have your way of

changing things

in one crucial way that would

make things better in your mind, what would it be?

No detention of asylum seekers whatsoever.

Immigration detention is

horrific.

Processing is one thing, humane, secure processing.

I am someone who is very, very vehement about the fact that I do think the government should be verifying that children legally and

morally, et cetera, belong to the parents who they're with.

Even the administration's own stats show that less than 1% of cases are

fraudulent.

But I think it's very good that they have been able to find that 1%

because

some of those children may be in precarious situations.

So

I absolutely think that processing is important, but that processing should be done humanely and ethically and with a child-centric approach.

But processing and fingerprinting and verification of family units, et cetera, all totally fine with me if done in a humane manner, not underneath the bridge and the dirt and the gravel.

But after that, there should not be family detention.

Carnes needs to close.

Burke's needs to close.

Dilley needs to close.

and

asylum seekers should be given the chance to be welcomed into our communities.

There's plenty of people who want to welcome them, want to provide hospitality across the nation,

and given a chance to work and wait for their court hearings.

And if the courts decide that they need to be sent back, okay.

And hopefully they will find a way to be safe in that way.

But

these humane treatment of asylum seekers shouldn't just be for family units.

It also needs to be for individuals.

Asylum seekers should not be criminalized.

They should not be forced to spend one year, two years in detention fighting their cases because it's not just and it's not fair.

I asked you if there's one thing, but

that's all one thing.

After living through this all.

That was just one really broad.

There's a lot that you would change.

Yeah, that's true.

Well,

Taylor, I'm going to let you get back to the work of doing this.

Taylor Levy, thank you for joining us here on Radio Atlantic.

All right, thank you so much for having me.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, to our podcast fellow, Patricia Jacob, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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