Consider This from NPR - Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico

Episode Date: March 9, 2025

Many migrants in Mexico journey north to the U.S. border by riding on top of freight trains. It's a dangerous trip: migrants have been kidnapped by cartels or killed by falling onto the tracks. And now, with the Trump administration suspending asylum applications at the border, the chances of crossing into the U.S. are even smaller than they were a few months ago.NPR's Eyder Peralta recently rode along with migrants through a frigid night to try to answer a simple question: why do so many still take the risk?For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Kids are going to be kids wherever they are. I remember there was this one kid who was putting plastic bottles on the train tracks just to see what happened to them. This is Eder Peralta, NPR's Mexico City correspondent. It was December, and he was in a train yard in northwest Mexico. So at some point I gave him a little coin so he could put it on the train track and see what happened to it. And indeed, I had never done this before. I did this when I was a kid.

Yeah, and it flattens it. It's like one of those machines. This was a moment of downtime between many periods of acute motion. Hundreds of migrants were waiting for freight trains, hoping to jump aboard and ride north toward the U.S. border. They have like their whole lives with them. You know, they have just bags full of coats and blankets and they have jugs of water. When a train would finally approach.

They're so heavy that like the earth beneath it sort of heaves as they move across, right? It almost feels like the gravity of the train pulls you toward it. The trains moved so fast that jumping on directly would be impossible for most of the migrants. So they have this term that they say, vamos a ponchar el tren, which translates to, we're going to puncture the train. And so the young people, they will put on gloves, like a ski mask to protect their face and their eyes. ski masks to protect their face and their eyes. And then as the train comes, they just sprint like right beside it and they somehow jump on and then they just start turning knobs and pulling levers.

And what they're hoping will happen is that it disrupts the train's air brakes. And so that would usually cause an emergency stop. The migrants Eder and his photographer were following finally found the train they wanted, and they got it to stop. They climbed up to the top of the train, and Eder and his colleague joined them.

They all spent a frigid night riding north at 50 miles an hour. In Mexico, this train is called La Bestia, the beast. It's a treacherous and often deadly leg of the journey to the U.S. border. Consider this. Despite the Trump administration's hard line on immigration, many migrants are still traveling north to the border. Today, we bring you a reporter's notebook, riding along with Adair on La Bestia to understand

why migrants still take this risk. From NPR, I'm Scott Detter. A lot happens in Washington every day, from the White House to Capitol Hill and everywhere in between. That's where we come in. On the NPR Politics Podcast, we keep you up to date on what happens inside Washington and what it means for you and your community. The NPR Politics Podcast. Listen wherever you listen.

On the Throughline Podcast, the myth linking autism and vaccines was decades in the making and was a major moment for vaccine hesitancy in America, tapping into fears involving the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government. No matter how many studies you do showing that this is not a problem, it's very hard to unring the bell. Listen to Throughline from NPR, wherever you get your podcasts. It's Consider This from NPR. Migrants have been riding libestia for decades.

The train can offer a way to travel north without paying smugglers. But the risks are great. Migrants have been kidnapped, assaulted, and extorted by cartels. Accidents are common. Migrants have been killed in Maine by falling from the tops of the freight cars. And now, with the Trump administration suspending asylum claims at the southern border, there are fewer avenues to entering the United States than there were even a few months ago.

So the question Adopralda had when he set out to join migrants on La Bestia was simple. Why take the risk? There was this Venezuelan woman who I met. And she had slung her little girl just on her shoulder. And I asked her, like, you know, why do this? And she had slung her little girl just on her shoulder. And I asked her, like, you know, why do this and why do this right now? And she sort of like looked at me, surprised, I think, at the question. And she said, you know, you guys think that the American dream is dead.

But for us, the American dream is still very much alive. And I think what the explanation for that, that I got over talking to dozens of migrants, is that the American dream is not this grand idea. It's a really simple idea. For her, it was that her two kids could get an education. I also met this mother and son from Venezuela as well, Brian and Yalitza, who was his mom. His mom was in her 50s and he was 23. Yalitza's husband died and she says she told Brian, you know, this is our

chance. I've got nothing to lose. We can do this and you can find a better life now. And so they left and so she told me why I'm doing this is because I think that that Brian, my son could become an entrepreneur, he can have a better life. And then talking to her son, he told me something much simpler, right? Which was that he had a little kid in Venezuela. And he hadn't been able to buy him a birthday present. What this trip could mean, what this American dream could

mean, is that one day his kid could have a birthday present. Even when the policy of the US government right now is we don't want you, we don't want to give you any of these resources, we want to arrest you or deport you for the country or both. Yeah. But they've, you know, I think another thing about these migrants, right, is that they've been told that throughout.

A lot of these migrants, they've been at this for years. A lot of these Venezuelan migrants, they first started in Colombia and then they crossed the jungle in Panama and then they went up to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras. And so we were catching these migrants at the tail end of a journey. I think that's a lot of why they're saying, we don't care what the American president says, we've been going through hell. And whatever he says is nothing compared to what we've already been through. Let me turn the why question to you. Mm-hmm.

Because obviously the immigration story is a major part of your beat, but you can and you have told that story a lot of different ways. Why to you was this story worth climbing on top of a two-story freight train and riding it as it traveled 50 miles an hour? You know, this story was born out of a conversation I had with my wife. You know, we live in Mexico City, and Mexico City is a stop along the way for migrants.

So you see a lot of migrant families. And my wife had a question, right? She was saying, I don't know that I have the capacity emotionally to put my family through a trip like this. And what she was saying is, is I have a hard time understanding migrants who do. I was like, you know, that's probably a question that many of our listeners have. I had met this Mexican photographer, Pedro Anza, I had met him in Haiti when we were doing some coverage in Haiti, and he rides this train a lot. He's working on a long-term project on this train, and he had told me, you know, you should ride the train. It gives you a very different understanding

of the migrant experience. Was he right? Did, on the other side of that, did you feel like you understood this in a different way? I did. I have to say, I didn't realize how hard this was. You know, I was coming off of an assignment in Lebanon. I was there as Israel started bombing. It was missiles and you could feel the force of them, right? So like,

I was like, well, you know, what's getting on a train, right? Pete Slauson It's all relative. Scott Horne I was, but I was wrong. Pete Slauson Yeah. Scott, like, we spent a 12-hour part of that train ride was at night. And it was in the high 30s. And that train is moving at 50 miles an hour.

So just the wind, right? And is there any cover whatsoever up there? I assume no. No cover. And like one of the, there's this, there are these people who help the migrants. And this lady, like she saw me and the photographer I was with, and she said, you guys are crazy. Like, you don't know what you're getting into. And she gave us this very thin blanket. And I was like, I'm not gonna take this, give it to one of the migrants, right? Like, I, you know, I'm just here as a reporter. I'm not gonna take this give it to one of the migrants right like I you know I'm I'm just here as a reporter I'm not I'm not doing this

and she's like you're gonna want this and so like I took it sort of with a little shame and in the middle of the night I was just holding on to that blanket it is freezing out here. Everyone just woke up. The train has picked up speed again. It's like it was difficult and you're just you know there's so many people on that train that you can't you can't really move but there's also like not really body warmth that you're getting like from other people. Nobody's talking. It's so loud, the wind, right? You look up and all you see is like, there was like a full moon, right? And you really can't see anything on either side.

What were you thinking about on like hour six or seven or eight sitting on top of this tree? The sun. The sun. Literally all I could think about is, is what am I doing? Like, why did we do this? And when is that sun going to come up? That's a good segue, Ader, that you, I think probably more than anybody on staff right now at NPR, have a particular knack of finding yourself in tricky situations in the middle of a story and often maximizing that and using that situation to tell a better story and

to understand the topic that you're covering even more and help listeners understand that. You've been detained in South Sudan. I remember hearing live on the radio when you were reporting on something as people were throwing rocks at the tin roof of the building you were in. It was in Kenya. In Kenya as you did a live radio hit. How do you generally think about the pros and cons and at one point it's not worth it to keep going

for you personally. I think my editor always tells me like, Ader, you know, the chaos will be there tomorrow, right? Whatever chaos that is, right? Haiti will be there tomorrow. She's like, take, let's take a breath. Because my instinct, right, as a journalist is, is let's go. I grew up in Miami. And the first house we stayed at, it was like a corner house and like a big intersection, right. And so there was always car crashes. And like, no one could keep me from going to see the car crash, right. It was like the thing I did. So like I always want to run toward things, but there's always a conversation between me and my editors

about risk versus benefit. It's interesting because on this train, I had a different opinion than my photographer friend. You know, we had gotten on a couple of trains and they were moving in the wrong direction, everybody got off and I was not comfortable on top of that train. You know, you're two stories up, I'm afraid of like Ferris wheels. So like, I don't like heights. I'm with you on that. I can do roller coasters, but Ferris wheels, the slow height of it. Same.

No. And then like sometimes, you know know you have to walk on top of those things and you have to jump from cart to cart and that... I clenched up hearing that part of the story as you described it. That made me really uncomfortable. I rarely am physically scared, right? Yeah. I was physically scared and I sat down at some point with Pedro Ansa the photographer who was with me on this trip And I said and I said I'm not doing this and I'm like we don't we won't even use it for the story I said because

Actually in the end we used about one paragraph of that awful 12 hours overnight of Freezing cold and so in my mind I was making that calculation, right? And he stopped me and he said, you will never understand what they go through unless you get on the train with them. Aider, I want to end this conversation the way you ended this story, because the fact is for a lot of these people, maybe even a majority of these people, all of this long, long journey, which like you said, the very end of is riding across the desert, freezing cold on the top of a train. It's all for naught because you end the story by talking about

a family who they make it across the border, they turn themselves in and seek for asylum, and they're immediately kicked out of the United States. And yet, as you write in the story, they the next day, start heading north again. Yeah. You know, just as President Trump took office, I was in Ciudad Juarez at the border and I actually met some of the same migrants that had been on the train with me. The same people. The same people. And they were waiting in line because they had gotten a CPP-1 appointment,

which is this app that the Biden administration used to have. And that's kind of like, that is the glimmer of hope that was the glimmer of hope for so many migrants, right? And on that day, Trump takes the oath of office and that app goes offline just minutes after he does. And the heartbreak on that international bridge, it's hard to describe, honestly. You're just watching somebody's world crumble in a few minutes. And to know, I guess, to have felt what it's like for a little tiny period, right, of how hard that journey is. To watch it crumble on that day, I mean, you know, that's, I think it's difficult.

That's Eder Peralta, Mexico City correspondent for NPR. Eder, thanks for walking us through one of your stories and helping us understand how you think about all of this. Thank you, Scott. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell and edited by Adam Rainey and Courtney Dornig. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Scott Detro. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Consider This sponsor free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Consider This Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.