Fourth Reich Archaeology - #074 - Down by Law, Part 1, Asylum for Mankind, Side B

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Here it is folks! Side B of the first episode in our brand new series, “Down by Law.” In this one, we continue our dig into immigration and the modern legal regime for asylum. We start off by taking a good hard look at the history of asylum law in the United States.  Even though you’d never guess it by the federal government’s utter lack of regard for human rights in the administration of the immigration system, the USA is a party to the 1967 protocol to the treaty on the rights of refugees. That means it is “the supreme law of the land” - with which even the federal government must comply as with the Constitution itself - to afford broad rights to asylum-seekers in danger of death or serious harm in their home countries.  After completing a historical survey, we then turn to some current events and examine how the Trump administration has weaponized the asylum regime in the United States to push immigrants out of the country. As a reminder, we recorded this before the DC National Guard shooting put asylum into the headlines, but the issue is more salient than ever. As Trump essentially seeks to end asylum as we know it, we trace the bipartisan roots of the whittling-away of immigrant rights, especially under the Obama administration. Put on your lawyer hats, it’s once again time to get down by law.

Good evening, America. Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I'm fixing it. Our border was open, and because of this, our country was being invaded by an army of 25 million people, many who came from prisons and jails, mental institutions, and insane asylums. They were drug dealers, gang members, and even 11,888 murders, more than 50% of whom killed more than one person. This is what the Biden administration allowed to happen to our country, and it can never be allowed to happen again. Starting on day one, I took immediate action to stop the invasion of our southern border for the past seven months. zero illegal aliens have been allowed into our country, a feat which everyone said was absolutely impossible. Do you remember when Joe Biden said that he needed Congress to pass

legislation to help close the border? He was always blaming Congress and everyone else. As it turned out, we didn't need legislation. We just needed a new president. We inherited the worst border anywhere in the world, and we quickly turned it into the strongest border in the history of our country. In other words, in a few short months, we went from worst to best. We're deporting criminals, restoring safety to our most dangerous cities. Just take a look at Washington, D.C. It's at levels of safety that we've never seen before. And they decimated the bloodthirsty foreign drug cartels. We did that all by ourselves with our people. He went cuckoo. I mean, he went nuts. And that happens too. It happens too often with these people. Do you see him?

But look, this is how they come in. This is how they're standing on top of each other. And that's an airplane. There was no vetting or anything. They came in unvetted. And we have a lot of others in this country. We're going to get them out. But they go cuckoo. Something happens to them. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. huge complex or combine either you are with us or you are with the terrorists and this international

power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources we found no evidence of conspiracy foreign or domestic the warring commission of science i'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life.

The primitive simplicity of their minds vendors the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're to CIA. Now, he has a mom. He knows so long as a die. I'm afraid of we never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure.

Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why, you think our country's so innocent? I don't want to see a day. I have a national globe. This is coming. Pothorish is coming.

Archaeology. Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick and I'm Don well hi there everyone welcome back to our show we are so glad that you're here with us today and we really do think you're going to enjoy the program that we are going to put out this week we are dropping side B of the first installment of our new series down by law now just to refresh your recollection with this series we are going to be exploring the law and the different legal regimes that the powers that be are you using and indeed have been using for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years as nothing more than just another tool, a tool in their greasy toolbox to keep all of us, all of us people under control. And just to further refresh your recollection here, we are going to be talking about immigration law today. We are picking up where we left off inside A and we are going to be

talking about asylum law in particular. So remember, asylum is a form of relief that the United States is obligated under the UN protocols, under international law. The United States is obligated to provide shelter for refugees, for people escaping bad situations in their home country, for those people who show up at our borders, who show up at our doorsteps and say we are looking for shelter from the storm, well, the United States is obligated by law to hear them out. And if they have a credible case, the United States has to give them a pathway to citizenship. Now, if this happens to be your very first time tuning

into our show, we are so glad you're here. Thank you so much for tuning in. Welcome. We are sure you're going to like what you hear. But please note that you're going to be. are tuning into the second half of a two-parter episode, and we strongly recommend that you go back and listen to Side A of this episode to get yourself oriented. Side A was released in early December, I believe it's episode number 72. And heck, while you're at it, why don't you just go back to the beginning and start listening to our program from Episode 1. You're going to love it. Trust me. Now, before we really get into it this week, I got to do our usual moment of gratitude. So thank you very much to every one of you out there. Thank you so much for

liking the pod, for going into your podcast app or listening device, whatever it is you're hearing us through. Thank you for going into that software as a service and giving us a five-star review and leaving a very positive comment about how great this podcast is. Thank you very much for all of you for tuning in week after week. We are absolutely floored by the amazing response and growth that this project has experienced, and it really has sort of shown us. It's sort of been a proof of concept this last year that two guys who are really passionate about this kind of stuff, well there are people out there who would appreciate what we are doing and we are so glad and so

grateful for every single one of you and now i just want to give a very special thank you to everyone who is in our patreon family you all are really the fuel that gives us fire we are so grateful for your financial support for all of you who are not. not members of our Patreon yet please if you are able to if you are a true believer in this project if you really believe that our message is worth pursuing join our Patreon head on over to patreon.com slash forthright archaeology and give us a donation give us a financial contribution in the amount that you think is fair and it's not for nothing you do get perks on our Patreon. For example, if you are a Patreon member, you would have already gotten this episode when

we released Side A. You would have gotten the full thing. So our Patreon family does get our full releases as they come out. They also get exclusive episodes. For example, this week, our Patreon family is going to get the first installment of our Hotline episodes. Now, some of you will remember that around the summertime, we started a hotline. Again, this is something that only our Patreon family has access to where we are accepting calls so if you call in and leave us a message we will hear you out and maybe we'll respond on air and we're going to do that on Patreon this week but unfortunately it's not available on the free feed so if you want that you got to join patreon and on top of that we are for our higher tiered members we are doing shoutouts we have been

doing shoutouts steady in every episode at the end of the episode. So if you really do have that extra juice, please do consider giving us a financial contribution. And if you can't swing the financial contribution, no sweat, thank you for being here. We love that you're here. Please enjoy the show. Please continue to enjoy the show. We ask that you please. Please ask that you please, however, please spread the word. Don and I, we are just two guys doing this thing out of love, out of love for the game in our free time, because we really believe in this message,

and we have been relying on nothing more than the word of mouth of our listeners to grow the project. And we are so grateful for that. And we hope that you all continue to fight for our, Cause. Now we are on social media. We're on Twitter and Instagram at Fourth Reich Pod. And we also have an email account, Fourth Reichpod at gmail.com. And we love hearing from our listeners. So if you are so inclined, please do write us today. Okie dokey-dokey artichokey. Let's get into today's episode. It's now been more than two weeks

since that gunman killed two National Guards members in Washington, D.C., which sparked the Trump administration's fury on millions of asylum seekers in the United States by freezing the whole assailum process for people coming from certain countries. And you might be asking, what does the D.C. shooting have anything to do with asylum law? well that is a very good question and as we talked about in our last episode the gunmen involved in the shooting of the national guards members in dc that gunman is a afghan national who sought refuge in the united states after the afghan war and this is something that the right wing and even donald trump has really glommed on to but what they have not glommed on to what they flat out

ignored is that this Afghan national, well, he wasn't your run-of-the-mill refugee. He wasn't your run-of-the-mill, Asai Lee. No, he was someone who was trained by U.S. intelligence, taken under the wing of the U.S. military, and served as an operative on the U.S. side of things during the Afghan war, and he was part of the CIA-backed Zero Unit, which can, I think, accurately be called a death squad. These are people that would go in using military force. They would go in and do the military's bidding by conducting these night raids in going into people's homes and often just killing many people, many families indeed through the process. And so this person, the shooter, the Afghan national that killed these two national guardsmen, he was programmed to

kill by the United States government. That's something that is really not making the news headlines enough and so not that it should be surprising or shocking to anyone but the trump administration is fully ignoring that part of the story and nonetheless using this tragic event as a basis to freeze asylum relief for something like two million plus people in the united states today and with that freeze in place weeks ago now the trump administration hasn't really communicated what it plans to do next about this freeze, how it intends to handle these millions of people put in this asylum limbo. What the Trump administration has done, however, is in the intervening weeks, they've moved to reopen something like over 117,000 immigration cases that were

previously administratively closed by the immigration court system. These are cases that immigration judges had administratively closed because the people that were involved in the cases, whether they were asylees or seeking some other form of relief, the immigration judges determined that these were low priority cases. These are families. These are people that have no criminal records. These are people who are not considered a danger or a threat of any kind. These are people who, in some cases, have been in the United States for more than a decade.

And in other cases, these are people who have actually left the United States in the intervening time, but the Trump administration has nonetheless sought to reopen their cases. And the reality is that these are cases, some of them that are so old that the person that is the petitioner in the case, or the respondent, I should say, the person involved in the case, they have died. So it is all sorts of fucked up out here. But this whole phenomenon, this reopening of these 100,000 plus cases, this is another example of the Trump administration doing what it can to use this legal regime of immigration law, of asylum law, to use this legal regime not as a way to help those in needs, not as a way to help the people coming into this

country and seeking refuge, but as a way to push immigrants out of the country. And I really hope that you all are paying attention because this latest 117,000 cases that have been reopened and this freeze of the 2 million plus people who are now in this asylum limbo, we're talking about a non-negligible number of human beings in the United States that are being put under the thumb of the immigration system. And before we get into it today, I just want to remind you all the same reminder from last time. We recorded this episode in late November before the shooting in Washington, D.C., before the asylum freeze, and before this new campaign to reopen these cases.

And the reason I bring that up is because I want you to think about that as you hear us talking about all of the stuff that the Trump administration is doing and just how prescient what we were saying was at a time before all of the shit went down at the end of November. And once again, I got to say the reason for that, the reason for how we are able to just call shots before they happen, well, that is largely due to our focus on history. And that is a good segue into this side B of this episode, because when we last left off, we were looking at the history of asylum law in the United States. And let's pick up

right there, and with that, let's get digging. So here we are in the colonial era of the United States. And we're talking about asylum here. And while there isn't that modern apparatus I was talking about involving USCIS and all of that nonsense, in this time period, in this late 18th century period, it was absolutely a recognized thing that people would come to America as a safe haven. as a place where they could be free of persecution. And, you know, indeed, this concept that, you know, a place, a physical space could be a refuge for the oppressed. It's been around since the beginning of time.

It's rooted in this idea of sanctuary, this idea that, you know, a church or a kingdom could offer an individual protection from their persecutors, from other kings, from powerful people. So migrants in the 18th century and the 19th century included in their ranks were very much included in their ranks for people that were fleeing persecution. But at that time,

there wasn't a specialized asylum process. You would just come through the door like any other, you know, any other migrant. It wasn't open borders exactly and there were restrictive laws to be sure and we will get into that. But you could come to America and of course once you got here,

yes, of course you could work. and you could live, but you were subject to all of the norms of the time, racism and bigotry and the tension towards people who were not white, tension towards immigrants. All of that has always been real, and even until back then, you know, back then what it meant was that there really wasn't, if you weren't white, you still fell under the laws and the norms of the time. So there was really no path to citizenship for you. Indeed, you know, I'm going to Just to be clear, again, the founding fathers, people like John Adams, for example, they were horrified with the notion of letting non-European immigrants a path to citizenship to giving them an equal footing. Yeah. And in fact, the founders of the United States, you know, in the moments leading up to the American Revolution, they in part were rebelling against the British crown precisely because King George.

Gorge decreed that American westward expansion should not extend past a certain point to the West. And so ironically, right, they were rebelling against restrictions on their freedom of movement. Of course, the freedom of movement kind of implicitly involved genociding all. of the Native Americans that were living west of the Adirondack mountain range, right? I think that was roughly where the line was. But it's ironic to think that the founding generation was very much in favor of unrestricted freedom of movement and also needed that extra labor, both in the form of

imported slave labor from Africa, as well as immigrated labor and white settlers to join the new nation after independence. So in that era, immigration was very much seen as not only a positive good for the country, but as a necessity to settle and develop the vast territory that came under American control. And I think we should just say there were, of course, laws that addressed immigration. Famously, the Alien Enemies Act or the Alien Seditions Act of 1798, which has come up in the news recently, and also the Naturalization Act. So, There was a process for immigration. I think the thing that really popped, you know, when everything really popped off,

is towards the end of the 19th century, where you have this influx of Asian immigrants, of Chinese immigrants coming to work in the West. And that's when you have these two laws, the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Page Act in 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. These are like the OG racist laws on Chinese immigration, you know, restricting the migration of Chinese individuals in America. And then shortly after, I mean, like I said, do you have laws going into the 1920s restricting the immigration of Catholics and Jews,

strict quotas on the number of people that were to come into the country. And there's also this growing idea of how the people who are coming in are not as capable. And this idea of what we'll get into maybe today, maybe in a later episode of the public charge. And you have politicians, I have a quote here from Senator David Reed from the time where they're saying, and they're referring to this new crowd of immigrants is saying they arrive sick and starving and therefore less capable of contributing to the american economy and unable to adapt to american culture and this guy read was one of these like a mega eugenis who was really trying to keep the the immigration limited to the what he would call the highest stock and highest standards

people. And it's this notion that is, you know, growing and it exists even today is this idea that immigrants coming in and being a drain on the economy. And that was never separate from the racial element. Oh, for sure, 100%. And the racial element in those days, you know, it started out aimed against non-whites. And you have to remember that at that time, Russians, Italians were not considered white on the same level as your Germans, as your English Protestants, right? So there's all of these subcategories of race that perhaps today have less importance, but it's all part of the greater eugenic project. Just like the pathway to citizenship, it takes many years for your peoples to be recognized as

white in America. So take some time before you get brought into the fold of whiteness. Some people be waiting still. I was wondering about our yesterdays and digging through the rubble and to say to least somebody went to a hell of a lot of trouble to make sure that when we looked things up we wouldn't fare too well and we would come up with totally unreliable pictures of ourselves but I've compiled what few facts I could I mean such as they are to see if we could find out a little bit of something

and this is what I got so far first white folks discovered Africa they claimed it fair and square Cecil Rose couldn't have been robbing nobody because hell it wasn't nobody there and white folks brought all the civilization because there wasn't none around how could the folks be civilized

when there wasn't nobody writing nothing down and just to prove all of their suspicions well didn't take too long they found out that there were whole tribes of people in plain sight running around with no clothes on that's right the men the women the young and the old Righteous folks covered their eyes.

And no time was spent considering the environment. Hell no, this just wasn't civilized. And another piece of information they had, or at least this is what we were taught, is that unlike the civilized people of Europe, these travel units actually fought. And yes, there was some crude implements, and yes, there was primitive art.

And yes, they were masters of hunting and fishing and courtesy came from the heart. And yes, there was love and, medicine, religion, intertribal communication by drum. But no paper, no pencils, no other utensils, and hell, these folks never even heard of a gun. And this is why the colonies came to stabilize the land, because the dark continent had copper and gold, and the discoverers had themselves a plan. They would discover all the places with promise.

You didn't need no titles and deeds. Then they would appoint people to make everything legal to sanction the trickery and greed. And back in the jungle, when the natives got restless, they would call. called it guerrilla attack. And they would never describe that the folks finally got wise and decided that they would fight back. And still, we are victims of word games, semantics is always a bitch.

Places once referred to as underdeveloped and now called the mineral rich. And the game goes on eternally. Unity kept just beyond reach. Egypt and Libya used to be in Africa. They've now been moved to the Middle East. just to get back on track to to asylum and the modern form of asylum the system we know today that comes out of world war two i want to point out again i want to do some myth busting

so this framework that we exist that exists today that it wasn't around before world war two and i found this gallop poll and i want to just point out like expectation versus reality in America. And so even in the face of what was going on in Europe in the late 1930s and the early 40s, as the long-time listener will know, America was firmly a nativist country, firmly against immigration. A Gallup poll taken two weeks after Kristallnacht, where, you know, a wave of, there was just like a massive anti-Jewish pogroms in Germany and there was a poll and 72% of Americans said that the US should not allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the US and so you have like very very much so even

in the face of genocide I guess it shouldn't be too surprising for the for the folks listening but even even in the face of that Americans were pretty much against immigration Fast forward to 1951 in the wake of World War II when the reality was that the world bore witness to some of the most horrific atrocities that history has ever bore witness to with millions of people killed and millions of people displaced. So the United Nations, this group of countries, the so-called victors of World War II, they got together, and I'm talking about the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, China, these countries get together and they form a series of treaties and a series of instruments really to manage and administer. international law. And through the United Nations, there are the series of instruments drafted that do things like define a refugee and define the categories of people who qualify for this

relief called asylum. And I'm just going to read and somewhat paraphrase here from the 1951 convention defining a refugee as anyone who cannot return to his or her home country, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. And if you recall from closer to the top of the hour, this is really the framework that is still in use today domestically in U.S. as the U.S. administers asylum. Now, the U.S. signed on to the U.N.'s protocol in 1967, and this creates this comprehensive system for granting asylum in the United States. Yeah, and if I may read another key provision of the international instrument to which the United States,

States exceeded, namely the protocol to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the fundamental principle, right, once you have a definition of what a refugee is, the obligation that a state owes to a refugee boils down largely to the principle of non-refoulement. And that basically means what it's defined as in Article 33 of the Convention, it says that no contracting state shall expel or return. That's what refoulet means, right? A refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race. religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. So, hand in hand, those two principles, right, the definition of a refugee and the principle

of non-refoulement work together to prohibit any government, including the United States, from deporting or removing a person to a place where their life will be. be in danger on account of these protected characteristics. And of course, under the United States Constitution, we've mentioned it before, but there's something called the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. And the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution says that the Constitution and the treaties to which the United States as a party shall be the supreme law of the land, which places the Constitution on equal footing with international treaties,

and that equal footing is head and shoulders above, for example, federal law of the United States Congress, and state laws of the many states of the union. So in principle, at least, it is just as necessary for the government to abide by the U.S. treaty obligations, including the principle of non-refoulement, as it is to abide by, for example, the constitutional protection of freedom of speech. As we've discussed many times on this podcast, as they have since wiped their ass many times over with all of these so-called supreme laws of the land, they being the rulers of this empire.

What it basically boils down to is that if someone from some other country comes to the United States and declares asylum, we got to hear them out, right? and remember when they declare asylum they're saying i can't go back to my home country because i have a well-founded fear that i'm going to get hurt or killed because of some immutable characteristic because i'm a certain race because of my religion because of my gender and the u.s has to hear that person out and if the u.s. determines that that person has a credible case, they got to give them a path to citizenship. They got to give them permanent

resident and they have to give them a path to citizenship. And you may be wondering, listener, why would the United States in the 1960s, the country that was on the verge of committing genocide in Vietnam at the time that it signed this treaty? Why would it subject itself, to these international legal obligations. Oh, can I guess? Can I give a guess? Oh, yeah, please. My guess is that the Cold War was going on, and they wanted to show that they were morally superior to the Red Menace.

Bingo, yeah, not only the moral superiority, but also they wanted to encourage and a huge part of U.S. Cold War policy was, of course, encouraging emigration out of the so-called iron-curtain countries to the so-called free world. And as we all know very well, defectors of various stripes were absolutely gold from the perspective of, for example, the CIA. in to have defectors on side who could tell the world about the horrors of communism with a fat check from the CIA, well, that was certainly a valuable thing to have in hand. You know, all of this discourse and law and legal regimes around human rights really needs to be

understood in the context in which it emerged, which was this Cold War, where the U.S. was really trying to use human rights offensively against its enemies, you know, for example, by supporting the career of a gross anti-Semite like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, you know, the author of the Gulag Archipelago, or many other. such cases, both refugee laws and other human rights protections were constantly being bandied about as justifications for American moral superiority on the world stage, even as the U.S. was overthrowing governments, committing genocides, assassinating duly elected. world leaders and what have you.

I mean, you're absolutely right. Like, I would say as soon as the asylum process really pops off in the 60s and 70s, the main, the people that were coming were from the Soviet Union. They were coming from Vietnam. They were coming from Cuba. But what is really interesting, what starts to happen is that the people coming to the states are people coming from countries? where America has really fucked shit up and it's almost like it's like clockwork it's like

America goes into a region or a place you know destabilizes the government fucks up the economy you know totally does its number on the society and like clockwork people from that place obviously want to escape the terrible lot that they've been placed in They come to the U.S. And for example, it's like what was going on in the 80s in Bolivia, Colombia, in Chile, you have those folks coming up in the 80s. And then you have, of course, the shit that goes down in the Middle East. And then in the early 2000s, you have, you know, an influx of folks from the Middle East. And for our purposes, I think the focus will really be on this Latin American contingent, right?

The shit that was going on in Latin America in the 80s, all the dirt, the U.S. intelligence was doing, those chickens have come home to roost in the 2010s, the 2020s. Yeah. And throughout the whole period, there's always this kill switch built in to the refugee process. So one provision of the 1967 protocol to which the U.S. exceeded is that a person shall not be entitled to protection to asylum if that person is legitimately accused of some criminal act in their country of origin. And so where you have dictatorships that are propped up by the United States, like, for example, Pinochet in Chile, a person who has been convicted by that dictatorial regime of some sort of subversive act, that person who is likely, you know, some kind of a leftist, a communist most likely,

and therefore undesirable as a immigrant in the United States, the U.S. could exclude that person, could deny that person's claim to asylum on the basis that it violated the laws of what the U.S. considers a legitimate government, even though, of course, that legitimate government is guilty of all sorts of crimes against humanity. And so by the same token, you can kind of control where your assailies are coming from.

And I think that the Cuba example that you mentioned is particularly salient given that the assailies from Cuba who were fleeing Castro were fleeing the communist government's expropriation of the traditional mass. estates owned by the slave-holding elite of that island with roots in the Spanish colonial era or in the American colonial era of Cuba and find a very welcoming home in South Florida and now make up so important a part of the American political establishment, including little Marco Rubio, such a vicious anti-immigrant ghoul in power today. There's nobody in the Senate that can lecture me on immigration. This is not a political issue.

I've lived it my whole life. This is not immigration. 3.3 million people released into the country. Five to 10,000 people a day illegally arriving in the country. That's not immigration. Immigration is a good thing. Mass migration. It's a bad thing.

Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away the regime. You're saying it could be more than 300 users. I hope. At some point I hope we run out because we've gotten rid of all of them, but we're looking every day. There are a lot of sad stories around the world. Millions and millions of people around the world, it's heartbreaking. We cannot assume millions and millions of people around the world.

No country can. So we just covered the international source of the law, the law that's eventually enshrined in federal law in the Immigration and Nationality Act. And what that law says is that if you are on American soil, you can make a claim for asylum. Remember, this is a law that's coming from a treaty, those agreements with the UN on the international stage between all of those post-war countries

that made out so well after the war, those treaties get enshrined into federal law, and so they become the law of the land, and those treaties, they have the same weight as the Constitution. So here is this heavy law that commands the United States to hear these asylum claims and to give these people access to the asylum process and now let's just talk nuts and bolts for a little bit for about how asylum works today and some of more specifics about the process because you really need to know the nitty gritty before you can understand and really discuss how everything is working today and how the levers of power are being used so let's just take a moment and go over asylum because there are a couple different types and there's some

nuance that we should cover. So we'll start up by saying there are two types, two general categories of asylum. There's the affirmative asylum case versus the defensive asylum case. Now for asylum cases, the applicant can be detained or not detained. So a detained applicant would be someone who is in ICE custody and a non- detained of course is someone who is free and I'll explain all of that in a bit so let's talk about affirmative asylum first affirmative asylum is when someone comes to the United States and at the port of entry at the border they find a federal agent and they claim asylum it can also be an instance where someone has lawful status let's say their student on a student visa or they're here employment visa. And while they have lawful status,

they file for affirmative asylum and make an asylum claim. When they do this, they file a form. It's called an I-589. It's I-589. And they send that form along with evidence, maybe a declaration and affidavit, any sort of supporting forms, if they have mental health evaluations, if they're newspaper clippings, maybe there are human rights reports, things that will help their case. They package all of that up and they send it off to USCIS. There is a process of what's called biometrics. They will get their fingerprints. If the person wants to work, they will have to apply for a work permit. And eventually there's an interview and the USCIS determines whether this person has a credible fear of returning home. And if everything works out, the applicant gets a grant of asylum

and down the line, they can adjust their status, get the green card, and voila, they are a lawful permanent resident, and down the line, they become an American citizen. But let's say if it doesn't work out. Well, if it doesn't work out, remember, they're on American soil. You have to apply for asylum when you're on American soil. So if it doesn't work out, they get put in removal proceedings, and deportation proceedings, and they are effectively scheduled to leave, right? Now this brings us to defensive asylum. This is when someone comes here not through a recognized port of entry. Let's say they come here undercover, or perhaps they're here on a visa, but their visa expires,

and they, let's say, overstay their welcome. And then they're intercepted by the government. It might be that they're intercepted by local police. It might be that they get put into custody through the federal system somehow. It might be that Customs and Border Protection or CBP intercepts them at the border. It might be that immigration and customs enforcement finds them in one of America's major cities. By the way, customs and border protection, those are the law enforcement officers operating around America's borders.

They are the enforcement arm of DHS, and then you have Immigration Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and those are really the jackboots. And these are the law enforcers. And so if you get caught by them, you end up in a detention center. This would be a detention center operated by ICE. This would be a detention center that is operating for this very process of deporting individuals, and you get placed in removal proceedings. It is in these removal proceedings, in these deportation proceedings that you then make a claim for asylum and again file that I-589 form and say, hey, you know, I may be in these deportation proceedings, but by the way, I can't go back to home country because I have a well-founded fear of persecution. And assuming you have made that claim within the one-year statutory bar, so I should say that, that if you are an asylum applicant, a candidate for asylum, you have to make that claim within

one year of entering the United States. So assuming you've done that, even if you are in deportation proceedings, if you make that claim for asylum, the immigration court system has to hear you out. And this is a good time to talk about the immigration court system, which operates under the executive branch. You are routed through the court system, through deportation proceedings in what's called the Executive Office of Immigration Review or E-O-I-R. This is immigration court. It's a federal court that operates under the Department of Justice. So it's really strange because the attorney general is in charge of like the whole thing. So something that can happen is notwithstanding whatever the case law in the lower immigration courts is, notwithstanding what the precedent

says, the attorney general can issue a memo that then becomes the law of the land for immigration court purposes. So this becomes relevant. And for things like that, remember that particular social group class of asylum seekers, historically you had attorney generals like Jeff Sessions and William Barr issued these restrictive memos that would say things, for example, that women who suffer domestic violence in Honduras at the hands of gangs, they're not recognized as a particular social group. Yeah. And as a foundational, constitutional, point, the Constitution divides the three branches of government in the three first articles. So Article 1 establishes the legislature, Article 2 establishes the executive, and Article 3 establishes

the judiciary. So you'll hear a lot of times the phrase Article 3 courts. that describes the Supreme Court, the Circuit Courts of Appeal, and the district courts of the various states, whereas immigration courts all fall under Article 2, albeit with some appellate rights to the Article 3 courts after the process has run its course. And the immigration court, the EOIR, that is where most asylum claims are being heard these days. It's in these removal proceedings. It's in these defensive postures where you can already guess just by the numbers, and I'm not saying it's causation or what, but defensive asylum cases are not as likely to be granted as affirmative cases. And part of that is that these defensive cases, they're before the immigration court, court. They're an adversarial court process where the applicant is before a judge, but then there's also a lawyer for ICE prosecuting the asylum claim. It's not an interview like the one with the affirmative case. It's not an interview with an USCIS agent. It's a very much an adversarial process that involves cross-examination of the applicant and harsh criticism. You have situations where ICE will be

pulling up evidence and trying to impeach the applicant. The other thing about these immigration courts is they're dispersed across the country and depending on where your case is pending, you might have a very different result. For example, if you are sitting in an immigration court in Atlanta, Georgia, or in Texas, you are likely to have a very poor outcome during your proceedings. You're likely to be denied asylum. On the other hand, places like New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. or Alexandria, I should say. These places tend to have immigration courts with higher grant rates, asylum grant rates.

So based on where you are in the country, your result might vary. And now to bring all of this together, when you have a situation where in order for the United States to hear your asylum claim, you have to be on American soil, and you have a situation where more and more year after year, you have more and more assailees filing their asylum claims in deportation proceedings, in removal proceedings, you have a situation where the courts are overburdened, where you have a backlog of cases. And indeed, today, there's just under three million or so of these petitions pending, meaning that there are something like around two and a half to three million people in the United States today that are petitioners for asylum. So they're not U.S. citizens. They're migrating to the United States under this claim that if they were to return to home country, they would face persecution based on one of these protected characteristics.

So when you think about it, you have these three million cases and they're pending and you have people here for years. If you're the Trump administration, you're looking at this population and the millions and you're thinking, this is a good opportunity to flush some immigrants out. To pinch the straw. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. To borrow a phrase from Barack Obama, to stem the tide. What we have been seeing is exactly that.

everything the Trump administration has been doing in the second term, Trump 2, it's been just squeezing the asylum process. Do you want to talk about how they've been doing that, or should we point the flashlight for a moment at all of the Democratic administrations that have brought us to this point? Because I think we do want to ensure that nobody. comes away from this episode with the idea that somehow the Democratic Party has clean hands or a humane approach to immigration in contrast to the Republicans. Obviously, Trump has a fascist of point of view towards immigrants on both those eugenic grounds

of excluding non-whites, which rings resoundingly through the rhetoric of your Stephen Miller's and company, as well as the exploitation rung where the use of terrorism directed at immigrant communities is a surefire way to keep people scared to keep people from asking for their rights, not only their immigration rights, or their basic constitutional rights, like the right to liberty, but also their labor rights. You know, if you have a jackbooted cartel, which is ice, that could come down on you at any minute, you're not going to ask your boss for a raise. You're not even going to ask your boss for a paycheck if your boss decides not to pay you on that day. So that's obviously where we are today, but I do think that it would be deeply misleading and incorrect for anyone to give a pass to the Democrats because they are beyond complicit in the path to the present moment.

They have led us here by so many tricks and deceptions, most notably those of Barack Hussein Obama, although it goes back even further than that. So do you want me to talk about that or do you want to talk about that, Dick? By all means, take it away. I would hope that any of our listeners at this point would realize that we are totally and completely equal opportunity haters here. I mean, we are certainly giving the Republican Party a lot of grape, simply because they're such low-hanging fruit there.

But please, please, please do not be confused. The Democrats, well, they have blood on their hands too. And indeed, this anti-immigration sentiment, it is a bipartisan issue. Oh, yeah. It is one of the most bipartisan issues, you know. And again, this is like our whole point here. Immigration, war. The biggest issues of our society are very much bipartisan. The disputes are around the edges, around the presentation, but not so much at the heart of the substance of it all. And in the immigration context, you know, I will give a shout out here to Daniel Denver, host of The Dig podcast and author of the very great book, All-American Nativism, published in 2020. I would recommend that listeners check that out for a very comprehensive and accessible, much more detailed narrative of the historical development of immigration law

than the kind of crash course that we've given here. But one of the key events that he points to is a memorandum from everyone's favorite little fucking turd, Rom Emanuel, to President Clinton in the 90s. where he advised President Bill Clinton, aka Bubba, to treat immigration the way that he was treating crime for political points, that if he could make strides towards criminalizing immigration in the United States, that it would take away an arrow in the policy quiver of the Republican Party.

It would remove from the Republican arsenal the use of immigration to attack the Democrats, right? The idea being that if Clinton were to go to the right of the Republicans on immigration, then they wouldn't have anything to bring against him on that issue. And so Clinton did, through a couple of different pieces of legislation that he supported, do just that, including a law called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which really ramped up immigration enforcement, the militarization of the border. This is where the actual border wall started, right? Trump did not actually... originate that idea, it was already in place, as anybody, for example, from San Diego

knows perfectly well, that fencing was already built in the southern border. And this is the beginning, or if not the beginning, at least a substantial augmentation of the militarization of the border. And with that commencement, Bush is actually running on this compassionate conservatism that draws back and that harkens back to the Reagan period when Ronald Reagan actually granted amnesty to well over two million immigrants who had come without authoritative authorization and of course 9-11 changes all of that and the slate of legislation including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the creation of ICE under George W. Bush it pushes things in a rightward direction and rather than scaling that back Obama comes in

and does even more than both of his predecessors combined to increase border militarization, to increase deportations, as you said earlier in the episode, you know, he put Bush's numbers to absolute shame and set records and to develop a new approach to immigration enforcement that would deputize not only these federal troops in the form of ICE and CBP, but also the local and state law enforcement officials throughout the entire country. So it was Obama who instituted what is called secure communities whereby all cops have to share their data with ICE, with DHS, and have to cooperate with any federal immigration order. And that is really the biggest fundamental building block that the Trump administration has used

to erect its edifice of repression against immigrants. It really cannot be overstated the degree of anti-immigrant repression that the Obama administration advanced, notwithstanding his DACA program, notwithstanding his bullshit statement that he would be focused on felons, not families. Notwithstanding any of the lies that the Democrat establishment and its media representatives have spouted and propagated over the years, simply to contrast with the cruelty on display from the Trump administration, you know, during the Obama administration, I myself had

the opportunity to meet a six-year-old boy who had been separated from his mother and who had become nonverbal as a result of the trauma he experienced being incarcerated in what was called la yelera, the ice box, a concrete box. with those foil blankets on the floor and chicken wire fencing all around and the lights on at all times of day. It was really like a Guantanamo Bay for children and families and women and men and certainly some dangerous people as well. There was no shortage of abuse that went on in the cages as well, you know, both by the guards and by other inmates against other inmates. It was a crime against humanity, one of the many committed by the Obama administration,

that has essentially gone not only unpunished, but forgotten. And I don't want the juxtaposition of the Trump administration's goon squad, Gestapo black-bagging people off the street to bury that absolutely essential history. This is bipartisan. This is the Fourth Reich. This is the message we are trying to convey through this show. Absolutely. This is a bipartisan issue.

And what you have laid out, Don, I think, tease us up pretty nicely for this next segment of the episode. and the first case we're going to discuss today. This is a Supreme Court case, Noam v. El Otro Lado. This is a case that's going up to the Supreme Court right now and would expect a decision in June or sometime around that. But basically the issue before the court is whether this practice that is called metering or turnbacks, whether that is permissible under the law. And what is metering?

Well, that's when you have the CBP turn back individuals at the border. They turn them back and they say, no, we're actually at our limit today. So quite literally, the CPP would limit the number of individuals who are permitted to access the asylum process each day at ports of entry across the border. something that the Trump administration, even in Trump one, was very much interested in doing and very much used this tactic of metering to deter asylum applications. But the M-night-Sharmelon twist on all of this is that this is an Obama policy. So metering actually came out of the Obama administration, the Obama DHS. In 2016, in response to a surge in the number of Haitian immigrants seeking asylum in San Diego at the border, Obama's DHS initiated this policy

known as metering. And what they've done is they've basically at this point expanded this practice across all ports of entries across the United States. And it's been formal. and it's now very much an executive policy where the number of asylum applicants that are permitted to come in through the border, they're being limited. They're literally turning people away. Remember, this is something that under international law, under the laws that are the equivalent of the Constitution of the United States, the United States is required to hear these asylum cases but through this technicality through this weird process of turning literally turning people away when they try and make these claims the the executive is basically

burying their head in the sanders a we don't even want to hear them and if we don't want to hear them then we're not going to an unfortunate consequence of all of this and this happened in 2016 the listener might remember at the border in san diego on the Mexico side, there's these shanty towns, these communities of people that are just waiting week after week, month after month, waiting for the day that they can go to the border and make their asylum claim. Yeah, and we should also point out kind of the perverse incentives that this creates, right? Because all the people on the other side of the border who are forced to await entry into the United States whilst facing threats from their home countries, let's say that

that threat comes from a gang. They're very well maybe gang members prowling around in what pop up as shanty towns and encampments of assailies or immigrants that, accumulate in these border areas and they become recruitment grounds for the gangs and they become recruitment grounds for drug traffickers for human traffickers for all kinds of organized criminal activity that the U.S. then cites as this existential threat that it is in fact fighting against by restricting immigration in the first place. So it creates this vicious cycle where you have a pretense of law enforcement, of preventing or diminishing crime that causes you to force people into situations that are criminogenic,

that give rise to criminal activity. And it just creates a feedback loop that ultimately benefits the increased militarization and surveillance and policing and exclusion and brutality that we have been focusing on. For sure, this policy of metering, this is obviously not only squeezing the immigration system, flushing out the unwanted immigration, as we've been discussing. but it also creates this environment for crime, for criminal activity, for the further oppression of these people. And I have no doubt that what it's also doing is these people that are waiting on the border, they are going to cross either way, right? If I'm fearing for my life, if I'm trying to get to the center of empire, as you've said, I'm just going to do it. And so I'm coming to America one way or another. I'm going to cross the border.

and what does that do? That puts me in a position where if I'm caught, I get put into those deportation proceedings. I get put into that defensive process. Now let's talk about the developments in that defensive process in removal proceedings. And the way we'll do that is with another court case. This one is from the Board of Immigration Appeals. It's a BIA decision, so that's in the immigration court system. It's the appellate court of the immigration court system. It's the matter of H-A-A-V, and basically what's happening by way of context. So the application for asylum, this is a form.

It's very much a standardized form. I invite the listener to go check it out. You can find it on the USCIS website. It's like a 12- or 15-page document. At the end of the day, it is a form, and the people that are going through this immigration court process, it's very much like the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy or like Brazil. It is just bureaucratic red tape, one thing after another, and they have a right to make their case. Now, what we've been seeing in this Trump II administration ever since the spring of 2025, is this move from ICE attorneys in immigration courts where they're moving to dismiss these

applications on a technicality, right? So maybe the applicant failed to properly fill out the form. Maybe they didn't fill out the form all the way. And rather than working through like that deficiency, they are just moving to dismiss. And this was an issue that was sort of percolating through the courts, then this decision matter of H-A-A-V came out, and it basically blessed this idea of summarily dismissing applications for asylum, this idea of what's called pre-termissions. This is something that has been around in both the affirmative and the defensive context, but in this new decision, it's sort of enshrining this precedent where you can conclude that there isn't this requirement of a full evidentiary.

hearing for an asylum case. And indeed, the government can just terminate these proceedings based on the application itself. And you can imagine if someone fails to check the right box or fails to fill out their form sufficiently, that the, you know, the case gets dismissed. And then you are in, you know, you're in for your deportation and you're out of there. So in this case, the matter of HAAV, what had happened was this individual filed their asylum application and they were commanded to come to a master calendar hearing. The master calendar hearing is usually uneventful. It's just a scheduling hearing. You go in and you decide with the judge and with the lawyer and with the government lawyer when you're going to have your actual

merits, what's called the merits hearing, which is where you put on your evidence. for your case. It's like your big day in court. And in this instance, this individual showed up for the master calendar hearing, and the ICE attorney moved to dismiss their case based on that I-589 application, claiming that it was deficient, and it could not, as a factual matter, establish a claim for asylum, and therefore there was no need for any evidentiary hearing. And the immigration judge agreed with the ICE attorney and this is usually what happens is the immigration judge will have a baseline of like giving deference to the ICE attorney and this person was given a deportation order and they were ordered to be removed what's scary about this is

that you are also seeing situations where you are having these pretermissions these dismissals on effectively technicalities you have this happening. happening at master calendar hearings. And then what's literally what's happening is someone shows up to their master calendar hearing. They're thinking it's a scheduling hearing. They go to the judge and the ICE attorney is going to dismiss their case. And then once they have that dismissal order entered, as the person is like leaving in the hallway of the building, they are just getting picked up by ice and they're, you know, they're out of there. They're they're toast. They're gone. And so here, two, you're seeing another way, another opportunity for the executive to flush out these

asylum applications. Yeah, I think we should maybe set down the distinction a little bit between USCIS and ICE, just because, you know, we do want to kind of start at level one. ICE, as the listener knows, is Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. It's a law enforcement agency that has police essentially on the streets and also has lawyers working to prosecute deportation cases, including the so-called glomar responder, right the Nazi ICE attorney who as of this recording you know notwithstanding that he was exposed now eight months ago way back in February we're recording in November and that guy James Rodden who was a ICE attorney in Dallas was a Nazi an open Nazi managing a Nazi Twitter account

it was exposed he was brought to the attention of the administration and of the Department of Homeland Security and still no employed still no update yeah exactly he's still deporting people with his racist ass on the other hand USCIS is kind of the softer side of the immigration bureaucracy and USCIS processes immigration applications submitted through those narrow legal channels that Dick you described earlier on in this episode. So USCIS is the agency that has the interviews with asylum applicants, that processes visa applications, and the like. it is not a gun-toting or a black-bagging operation. It is very much a office job, a bureaucracy, a paper-pushing organization. I just wanted to make that distinction because, at least in theory, both of these organizations

have different functions, but in practice, of course, they are both answerable to the president of the United States to the Attorney General and to the Secretary of Homeland Security. Absolutely. And I think that was a great overview and good distinction between USCIS and ICE. I want to just talk about the immigration court specifically as well. Recall that these immigration judges, they are under the DOJ. They are appointed by the Attorney General. They are technically permanent positions but they serve at the pleasure of the attorney general and there is a limited number of spots right so the attorney general can't get more permanent positions there is an avenue however for temporary judges and the reason i'm bringing all of this up in the mix when you add

the fact that okay so you have this rise of dismissal these technicalities, these dismissals on technicalities that don't really require these merits hearings, these evidentiary hearings. It's just a process to flush these cases out. Well, the Trump administration has just done this thing where they've gotten the something like 600 or 700 jag officers. These are judge advocates with the military. Military lawyers, they're basically on loan to the immigration courts to serve as immigration judges. These are not qualified people to be serving in this role. Nonetheless, and this is pure speculation here,

but if I am the executive and I want to flush as many of these applications out as possible, I could see a world where Donald Trump appoints these judges through his attorney general appoints these attorneys to serve as these immigration judges strictly to dismiss cases. So you'll have the ICE attorney show up and do a motion to dismiss, and then basically the temporary judges there is a rubber stamp. Right. And as military officers, it's important to note that they are in the chain of command

and must respond to orders from their. superiors up to, and including, of course, the commander-in-chief Donald Trump. So to the extent that there's any wiggle room for operation for these immigration prosecutors, and as I understand it, there is some bargaining, right? They can engage in some discussions. there's not always a top-down control exercised on every single little decision taken by a line prosecutor, although, of course, nobody's really going to step too far out of line. But with these JAG Corps officers, you can guess that if an order comes down in mass is going to be followed.

100% plus think about the what those JAG officers are carrying with them like someone who is not at all experienced with the immigration system someone who maybe harbor certain views on immigrants and they're in charge of handling you know removal proceedings that's it's a scary thought yeah do you want to talk about the potential for AI and for the text sector to get in so we talked about the military getting into the game oh yeah and whenever you have the military whenever you have the military these days tech is not far behind and so you know like we've discussed here ultimately the the asylum application it's that it's a form it's a document you guys i invite you all to look online at what the form really looks like it's you know i think maybe 10, 15 pages, and it's a standardized document. And this is another thing I'm going to say is like Fourth Reich archaeology speculation, but assuming that this trend of pretermissions is happening and is on the rise, assuming that the immigration system is now going to be

working in a way where these applications can be denied on these technicalities in this way. It seems like a sort of rote task that can be handled by AI. Oh, yeah. Yep. You just feed the forms right into the old clanker, and they will look for und dotted eyes, uncrossed tease, any possible technicality that can be used. as a pretext to reject an application and do so in summary fashion without so much as a pair of

human eyes on the document. And we're not saying that that is happening currently. We are again speculating that it may be happening currently and it is surely on the horizon as companies like Palantir, Anderrill, all of these military tech industrial complex participants are eager to please the big checkbook of the federal government and take their piece of the pie. Take your hard-earned tax dollars listener to the extent that you pay taxes to the United States government. and to do so in a way that under the auspices of enhanced efficiency, right, think about all of the bullshit jargon that is used to describe these maneuvers, which are really facial violations of international law,

because the procedures to be followed, to ensure the protection of assailies, and to ensure adherence to the principle of no refulment, those procedures are utterly inconsistent with the type of summary proceeding that is the trend to which things are going. okay let's talk about one more sort of phenomenon one more thing that is really popping off these days in this realm and it's again another way that the executive is putting the pressure on the asylum process this one again is a little forward looking it's a little speculative i think but it's rooted in some real concrete concerns. We're coming back to this idea of the public charge exception to permanent residency. Remember, this is something that's been around for over 100 years, this idea that people who are left in the public charge, people who become primarily dependent on the government,

who are a drain on the economy, they cannot get a permanent resident status in the United States. historically this exception has been pretty narrowly interpreted it's like someone who would need long-term institutionalization or you know someone who would need medical care long-term someone who is you know incompetent can't work can't you know can't take care of themselves tuberculosis was probably a big concern actually and animating this principle back in the early 20th century when it became a big deal truly and what the Trump administration has done just this past week I should say last week is they rescinded the former guidance on public charge on the on the definition of what you know what is a public charge and I'm not saying that they're

doing this next but I am saying the Trump administration has been awfully full focused on SNAP benefits and you know these no cash public benefits and social safety programs this was a huge huge focus on the government shutdown right they were trying to get rid of so many social services and safety net programs I would bet anyone dollars to donuts that we will see a new promulgation of this rule on the public charge and I would not be surprised if you see something along the lines of, you know, if you're getting SNAP benefits, if you get cash, you know, no cash public benefits, for the purposes of immigration, for the purposes of lawful permanent resident status, you are exempt. You cannot get that status

because you are in the public charge. What do you think? I think maybe given the amount of information that we've covered, it may be appropriate to do a little bit. bit of a recap of this first episode before we tie it off yeah absolutely so in this episode you know we started out with this idea of helping to contest this really difficult narrative that immigration is a problem and that however much sympathy we may have for people who are trying to come to the United States, ultimately they better do so through the legal means. And even Bernie Sanders, who I don't know if our listeners still consider him to be a voice of authority on anything, if they do, maybe rethink that. But even Bernie Sanders has taken

this kind of labor approach to praising Trump's policy on the border and saying, you know, well, if you don't have borders, you don't have a country and stuff like that. And what we've tried to do is to unpack that, to say, one, the roots of immigration restrictions in this country are deeply foundational. in racism, and that is not our opinion. That is the fact that the first really restrictive immigration law ever passed was literally called the Chinese Exclusion Act. And subsequent immigration laws have likewise ratcheted up the racial element and the policy objective of maintaining racial purity, or at least racial balance, if not racial purity,

among the population. The Supreme Court's latest statement in Justice Kavanaugh's concurring opinion in Noam v. Vasquez-Perdomo, essentially authorizing racial profiling of anyone with either an appearance of being Latino, speaking Spanish, speaking with an accent, congregating in a place that day laborers are looking for work, those people are all now fair game to be targeted by immigration enforcement officers, in obvious violation of their right to equal protection under the law, right? I mean, the Constitution very clearly prohibits the unequal treatment of people based on race or ethnicity, and yet now the Supreme Court has essentially walked that back

so that it doesn't apply to people who bear racial appearance of potentially being here illegally. And I don't think we mentioned the number, but as of this recording, at least 170 U.S. citizens, according to ProPublica, and likely many more, not to mention vastly more legal. immigrants with either permanent resident status or some other legal status have been rounded up and detained by immigration officials. Talk about a violation of the fundamental constitutional right to liberty, to liberty. And so to ignore the racial and racist element of immigration enforcement and to accept the idea that there's some neutral policy consideration behind immigration control that is consistent with a notion of equal justice for all is to fall into a trap

and really to repeat propaganda that has for decades, if not, you know, centuries, taken hold of the American mind. The other element of this, of course, is exploitation. We said that that was the other pillar on which immigration law is really built, and that is both on the international scale, whereby the U.S. and capital, heavy, rich, and powerful countries are able to enforce conditions of poverty on poorer countries, on former colonies in order to exploit their labor power and get cheap stuff to import and to sell and to profit off of. And also, the very bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid, the people with nothing in those global periphery countries, regardless of any controls placed on immigration, you could have an electric fence

a hundred feet tall, and there are still going to be people desperate enough in the unequal and unjust and inequitable global. capitalist system that we all inhabit, who are going to try and come to where the jobs are. That is a fact of life, and it's not necessarily a problem, it's only made a problem by the prioritization of maintaining the exploitative and the unjust status quo. And so from there, we went on to discuss a little bit of that history of how immigration law developed over the 19th and the 20th centuries and how the concept of asylum developed, you know, from its ancient origins to its modern iteration in the post-war period built from the international, conventions of the 1950s and 60s, and we talked about how the U.S.'s accession to those treaties, one, enshrined those treaty obligations as the supreme law of

the land, and therefore theoretically binding on the United States government, and two, were again motivated by this Cold War offensive reality whereby the U.S. wanted to not only impose upon itself obligations to protect refugees, but really to incentivize the enemies of its enemies to become its friends by coming to the U.S. and setting up shop and joining with the four. forces of reaction in the global war against communism. And finally, we spent the last portion of this episode talking about a number of aspects of the way the asylum process works, the way that it was really restricted under the Clinton,

Bush and Obama administrations, and the ways in which the Trump administration has turned all the dials up to 11 to ensure maximum repression, minimum protection, notwithstanding the fact that all of these policy shifts in the direction of anti-immigration are blatantly inconsistent with the United States international legal obligations. Oh, I didn't miss anything that we talked about, but I do just want to point out, just to put an exclamation mark on the racism of all of this. I mean, look at the refugees that the Trump administration is prioritizing now. It's white South Africans that are allegedly

in danger of a white genocide that is going on in South Africa, an utter mythology concocted, at least in part in response to South Africa's leading the charge against the actual genocide that has been going on in Gaza since October 7, 2023, by bringing, of course, the criminal case in the International Court of Justice against Israel. So it's all politics, human beings are crushed in the gears of the machinery of this political apparatus and the spectacle of humanitarianism is but a thin veneer that hopefully over the last two hours or so, we have done a little bit to chip away to help you see things for what they are

and maybe even change the minds of some of your conventional wisdom poisoned, propagandized friends and relatives this holiday season. Folks, thank you so much so much for tuning in, be safe this holiday weekend. Next week. In the meantime, I'm Dick. And I'm done. Saying farewell. And keep digging.

And thank you very much to all of our generous supporters on Patreon. We love you. We see you in the world. about to hear your name shout out to Mick G and Al and Kelly and Annie and Wizard of Choice and Mike and John and simply anchovy and shout out to Frank and shout out to Caleb shout out to Fern and shout out to David thank you so much we are so grateful for your support that's all folks tune in next week and in the meantime be well.