It Could Happen Here - An Update on Border Patrol Outdoor Detention

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

James talks to John and Heval about the changing situation at the border in San Diego county, new outdoor detention sites, and how you can organize to solve problems in your area. https://www.gofundme.com/f/jacumba-migrant-camps See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and people putting them back together. I am back after a lengthy court battle.

I've been allowed to return to the podcast, which I'm very grateful for. And I'm joined today by John and Haval, two friends of mine who volunteer right here in Nkumba, a lot, a lot more than I do. And we're going to explain some developments that have happened, give you all an update on the situation here, and let you know how you could help. So welcome to the show, both of you.

Hello. Thank you. Good to be back. Yeah. Welcome back. If you'd like to just introduce yourselves, like your name, like whatever role you play out here, pronouns and any like affiliation with any organization you feel is relevant. So my name is John. I'm someone that lives in the area. This situation just kind of showed up in my backyard. I was kind of forced into it rather than volunteered into it. And I've been dealing with it nonstop since the beginning. Yeah.

I'm one of the main sets of boots on the ground. I'm Haval. I use they, them pronouns and I organize with direct action drum line and zine distro doing a lot of mutual aid which is how I got involved in all this and also with El Lucho Lado helping out on the ground since the beginning with John pretty much just a little after John started so yeah so that's what nearly six months if you're not counting May yeah yeah wow yeah so yeah it started in may and then uh it stopped during the summertime it picked up again in september and we've been dealing with it non-stop

yeah people will have heard briefly from john's father sam in our may episodes about title 42 which we did yeah it seems like forever ago uh but it also doesn't seem like very long ago it's just one big weird like collapsing of time so last time we spoke last time i spoke with with haval we had this situation where we had three distinct concrete camps right uh adjacent to gaps in the wall which volunteers were servicing with food water warm blankets we were building shelters, and we've heard a lot about those camps. Does one of you guys want to explain how things have changed since then, and really particularly in the last, what, six weeks? So yeah, it's changed quite radically, actually. So between the months of September and December, we were servicing these three camps,

kind of more or less in our immediate area. It was pretty straightforward. Our routine would consist of stopping to each camp two times a day and feeding people, providing them with all of the different things that the US government was not. And I kind of wish things were simpler like they were back then. Yeah. So at the end of the month of December, Secretary Blinken made a visit to Mexico. And I suspect that he pressured the Mexican government to police our border for us. One of the immediate changes that we saw as a result of that was the foundation of two Mexican National Guard camps at two of the gaps that feed into those camps in our area. And that has basically stopped any people coming through those areas. This has not made any less people come into the country, actually. The

numbers have been fairly consistent. It's just that people have been forced to go in through other areas. So there have been many, many new OA ads that have popped up. West of us, we have to drive quite a bit further towards San Diego to go and service those areas. The main one being Sliders, which we're seeing about 200 people come in sometimes in a night it's uh it's not a good scene uh whereas those uh three ones that we were originally servicing had dumpsters and porta potties at the very least yeah they still do they still no one coming in still there exactly yeah moving at the speed of government the new new ones don't have that. And people are having to spend... How long were the people there most during that crazy, crazy time

just like a few days ago? I think they were there for up to like 19 hours. Yeah, going on a day, right? Yeah. Because we first... So to backtrack to people, we heard from a member of the community that there have been people seen held

there right at sliders and then we went out there and we kept finding like uh warm fires like where people had clearly been there and built fires and we could see what people have scavenged to brush and a lot of documents ripped up around there yeah the telltale signs yeah yeah all these signs and so we were able to use that to to suppose that was a place where people were and then i guess was it eventually someone stayed the night there and that was what allowed us or we bumped into people there someone bumped into people there well we have an acquaintance uh that's been very helpful towards the cause that uh lives just close by to there and he's kind of the one that sounded the alarm

and from there it's like you said it's a lot more difficult right like it's probably a 30 minute drive it's a steep off-road so like when it rains it's hard to get to so that makes it more difficult for us to to provide stuff for people there and like i guess people should realize that like we didn't find out about this because border patrol called us and said like hey there are people here without food water or shelter they don't do that but yeah that's not a thing that they do we actually did uh one another volunteer brendan and i were driving out and we stopped on the road i don't think you were with us um john but uh we started talking to one of the agents because there was two or a group of people from i think egypt that were it was the day everyone

did the mass exodus from uh uh, one seven, seven. So we stopped and we're talking to one of the agents and he did slip that there was another camp. He didn't name it. He didn't say where it was. He just said it was that way. And that was around the same time that Morgan had mentioned it to us. So it's, you know, we kind of pulled it out of this agent cause we were talking very nonchalantly with them and he was being generally nice, but yeah, they, they don't tell us about this stuff yeah and we have to find him myself and what i think that brings up is that there are potentially more right we we know for a fact there are we know that there are more and like i think it's obviously people people think of california and they think of la and they think of san diego and

they think of the beach and like pleasant weather but can you explain like it's been really cold out here and pretty miserable, right? With the wet weather we've been having. This is a pretty unknown part of Southern California. You know, we're a mountainous region, just, uh, just East of San Diego within San Diego County. It's, uh, I mean, it's not, it's not crazy high. It's, you know, it's about an average of 3000 to 4,000 feet above sea level, but yeah, it gets very windy over here. It gets very unpleasant. It often drops down to freezing. Yeah.

And if you're out there all night and you don't have any shelter and any way to get warm and you're potentially wet from crossing a river or crossing a stream that often pops up in the desert, it can be a really miserable situation. So it's important that these people receive help. And right now it's just through word of mouth and the local community that we're able to find them right and give them that help yeah yeah so going forward like we've seen like this movement of migration west what does that mean for the ability of volunteers to provide services to migrants and what does it mean for the safety like you said that the push factors haven't changed right so people are still

coming here and they still have things to get away from that lead them to come here but they're not coming the same way where we could so easily help them in these three concrete sites so like what does that mean well it's uh takes a lot more time out of our day just to drive there for one the main one sliders uh is up a very shitty road yeah so i think they call it sliders because it's so muddy and slidey over there when you're driving yeah i put someone's head into the roof of my truck driving up there not so long ago yeah and uh you know we're not the only ones that are displeased with this it's more it makes the life for uh the border patrol more difficult

makes life for the emergency medical services more difficult and of course it makes life for the migrants more miserable and the owner of the property and the owners of the property in which they're hosting these uh you know detaining these migrants yeah we i think they've every single one has been on private property so far right and i think we spoke to most of the property owners at this point and it just seems to come out of the blue at them like it's it's very strange permission is never sought yeah and uh i think i know one of them is suing the border patrol for it but i'm sure that would take months but obviously it does have an impact on the landscape as well people understand there'll

be a cold, so they're cutting down whatever they can to burn, to make shelter, to make their experience a little bit less miserable. So that's kind of a bargaining tool that we try and use when trying to convince the property owners to allow us to build shelters over there.

It's just to try and convince them that it'll be good for them to have migrants not be in a position to be forced to have to cut down the vegetation on their land and trash their land. And, you know, by allowing us to build shelters on their property and give firewood to the migrants that are being held on their property, it's better for them in the long run. Yeah. And the first time we went out there they

had created these shelters by just ripping brush and creating these like semi-circles that were maybe about a foot or some of them were very impressive yeah yeah like two three feet high and it was nice you know and enclosed so they had some sort of shelter but yeah they had to rip all that from the vegetation around the area which just ruins the ecosystem there i'm sure yeah and it must tear up your hands as well. Like lots of thorny bushes and stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, it's not desirable for anyone. Um, talking of things that aren't desirable, we unfortunately have to take an advertising break. Uh, so we will do that. Hit some stuff that you don't need.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to god things can change if we're loud enough so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot

of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

all right we're back uh those are some products and services uh now we're going to talk about the way john being very local to hakumba right how it is like organizing in a rural community and the way that obviously you have people of very disparate political leanings in in the area and like how you've managed to like phrase what we're doing and to organize in such a way that at the very least people aren't like actively pissed off at you yeah so first of all i'm a quaker come from a quaker family and uh first and foremost, I am doing this for religious reasons. And I like to try and remind people of that. So when people try and come at me with anti-immigrant sentiment, I just try and remind them that this is basically what you're supposed to do according to the Bible. And to hate on any of these people is very unchristian.

And when I do so, it's very hard for them to come at me with any of that stuff. But still, yes, for the most part, the community over here have not been very helpful towards this. They have not been very enthused with all these migrants coming in. And, you know, they've been very regrettably misinformed about it all. They're still looking at various crazy sources for their news, like YouTube channels and stuff like that. And it's kind of hard to believe. It's like you guys live in the area. You can just drive straight out there.

You can talk to me, a person that you guys know, yet you still choose to look up all these various whack jobs on YouTube. Yeah, yeah. We've had something of a problem with it. The YouTube people, right? Like there's a whole info, a whole ecosystem of right-wing YouTubers that I think probably most folks don't know about.

Even if you take an interest in other like right-wing conspiracy stuff as a whole ecosystem of right-wing border YouTubers who have been, I mean, describe what you've seen, right? We've had like a new right-wing fascist out every day it seems there's oreo express uh antonio guero's been out here uh jlr investigates jlr roger ogden was out here the other day classic it's kind of calmed down though in the last last couple of days but there was a period uh in late february where it seemed like

they were coming out every single day yeah just a different guy in a different lifted jeep yeah exactly just after that whole border what was it that take back our border convoy yeah yeah i got them all riled up to come out actually what really set them off to to be aware of all this is when fox did their big piece out here and they were out here for multiple days. Yeah. That's what kind of like turned on the tap. Yeah. And that's very common anywhere you go on the border, right? Like Fox has a border reporter, Bill Malugan. People will be familiar with Bill Malugan from publishing a story in 2020, which suggested that the police officer had a tampon, a used tampon put in his Starbucks coffee,

which was demonstrably false and didn't really very much look like a tampon. You can Google more about that if that's interesting to you. But like someone who perhaps should have lost their journalistic credibility at that point, is now doing border reporting for Fox. And this is when I speak to people all along the border right here, Arizona, Texas, yeah, the stuff that Fox puts out very strongly correlates with anti-migrant sentiment, both, both locally and with like these,

these folks coming in and streaming. And they're always asking for donations, right? Like it's not a, uh, it then they're, they're not like, uh,

advert funded or like publicly funded. Like they're, they're funded by donations for what? Yeah. Well, I forget the channel that Aguero was on, but he's constantly asking for donations and like, Oh,

thank you. You just dropped $10. Thank you for the five spot blah blah like they're sitting in his car hustling that's that's what they're grifters that's that's what they're out there for every it seems like a third of their broadcast time is spent asking for donations right yeah yeah it's like a like a charity stream except it's it's the opposite of charity i guess exactly so pay me to do hateful things streams yeah and i think like that as we get as we look between now and november i think it's really important that like the border will be a topic that people who never come to the border will argue about constantly between now and november right fox news will have reporting on it nbc will have reporting on it like and both of

them will have reporting that isn't anchored on what we see every single day out here which is a wide variety of people from all over the world who are having a very difficult time right here and need our help right and we're doing what we can to help them so i guess what like people who are listening to this will in the next i don't know how long it is till november what six months seven eight months um they'll have conversations with their family members with their friends with people in bars whatever regarding the border what do you think they should know about like what we're seeing and like what what the thing because there's this whole border invasion narrative right and like this is not an invasion we were just out joking with some people and helping them get their firewood prepped like

these people are not threat i think people often make the mistake of uh considering this issue to be a political issue it really is just a humanitarian issue. The vast majority of the people that I've talked to have very legitimate reasons for needing to come into this country. Whether they're from Ecuador, you know the situation over there. Recently, there were gangsters that took over a TV station. Right. Or in Guatemala, where I spoke to a man who told me that his children with college degrees

can't make enough money to feed their families. Or even in Afghanistan where people have literally had the Taliban threaten their families lives. Same with eat on and the Ayatollah escaping all of the Kurdish people in Turkey. I mean, the list goes on or, you know,

climate refugees like the Mauritanians that we just spoke with earlier yes they're they're coming and they have really reasonable grounds for asylum over here yeah and it wouldn't be a such an quote-unquote invasion if they were just allowed to walk through the port of entry this it's this process is so silly because they cross they could just do this all at the port of entry they really could but the policies just choose not to do this yeah right that's the part that really doesn't make sense is like we're letting them in anyways why do we need to make their lives so uncomfortable yeah you know and dangerous right dangerous i mean john you and i were on a water drop uh maybe two months ago now, six weeks ago, in slightly west of here, right?

Yeah. Do you remember we were driving down to where we're going to get off and we met that family from Guinea? There was like, do you want to just describe what you saw? Because I think it was like, at least for me, that was like, I've seen this a lot, but it still emotionally affected me. So yeah, there was a Guinean woman and her kid. I think he might've been like what, four or something. Three.

Yeah. And, uh, and there was also a Nigerian woman, you know, Nigerians speak English and Guineans speak French. They weren't really able to communicate with one another. And, uh, yet they were still traveling side by side because they, they just teamed up because they were in a desperate situation together one of them was was she in sandals?

one of them didn't have shoes at all didn't have shoes at all right yeah six weeks is a long time you know when you're doing this yeah well you see horrible things every day yeah it's been a very eventful time every day feels like a new story yeah and they just kind of sat on the side of the

the road and uh were out of breath and they were just basically asking us to help them yeah i remember the little girl because we were obviously concerned with this lady who didn't have shoes and trying to help like bandage her feet and stuff but then i remember the little girl just wasn't saying anything and i suddenly realized oh this little girl's probably very cold and she was like you know early like uh mildly hypothermic yeah so i had her wrapped up in a little uh mylar blanket with me to warm her up and it's just i don't know it just for one reason or another that was a moment where i was like why on earth are we doing this to a three-year-old like what what possible reason could there be yeah this three-year-old girl to have hypothermia here in like the richest country in the world who who could possibly agree that this is a good thing

yes yeah or another experience I had in the beginning of February where there was this Colombian man who was in tears who approached me and told me that his daughter was very, very ill. And he dragged me over to a porta potty. And she was there bundled up with like nine blankets or something, not really responding to my questions. He was trying to contact 911. But the responder on 911, or the dispatcher didn't speak Spanish. So I had to communicate with them and navigate the whole situation turns out she did have hypothermia yeah and uh but the ambulance would not take him along with uh the mother and the child to the hospital so again it's another case of family separation who knows what might have happened they would have gotten processed separately he could have ended up in louisiana and she could have ended up in riverside or somewhere yeah and at

that point once again it's not the government or your taxes that will pay for those people to be reunified right like that's work that's done by ngos and voluntary organizations exactly yeah despite the massive amount of money we spend on and we were just talking the other day about how the like the architectural marvel of sections of the border wall, right? Where they've poured concrete at like a 45 plus degree angle and spent millions of dollars for every yard of that. And we don't have enough money to give this three-year-old girl a blanket or to get that family back together. It's pathetic. It's, yeah, it's mind boggling.

Yeah, even today with that dude from Brazilzil he came up to me when we first got here they were starving wanted food water and he was like i'm sick i have a fever so i hooked him up with some cold medicine that we had in our med kit and then later when we went back to do the second round of feeding he got more food and he was like thank you so much we're starving we were told to when we were dropped off to wait in the mountains at 6 p.m to 6 a.m so they were just hadn't really i don't know if they were on the American side yet or how that worked. Didn't really describe it, but had to wait in the mountains before crossing. And so people are getting sick out there.

We ran into that dude with the dog bite on 177. We always go check this one camp because there hasn't been since Guardia Nacional have put their camp on the other side. There hadn't been a whole lot of people crossing in this area, but we go check it periodically. And one morning, yeah, we saw this man hobbling towards us as we're driving down the road with a stick. And we're like,

why is he walking like this pulled over? And he was bitten by a dog. He said he went to take a drink of water and some dogs attacked him. Two dogs. I think. Yeah. Yeah. He described it as a wolf,

right? Yeah. So we called EMS and they picked them up and took him to the hospitals right but if you hadn't been there it's a long way to walk with a dog bite in your leg yeah and who knows border patrol might not even have ems'd him out they might have just tried to process him with the dog bite yeah could get it could have gotten infected yeah yeah but uh just to go back on the the mutual aid uh question that you had earlier it hasn't all been negative it's actually been uh a really great experience in which i've met really great people from all kinds of walks of life who have just joined together

because they see a problem and just and know that they're the only uh they're the only ones that can make a difference. And it is a sure, easy way to be really important and make a difference in other people's lives. You don't really need to have much more than a good heart and a willingness to work. Yeah. I think we should talk about that more because not that some of us had some prior life experience working with refugees or migration, but I think most of us just were people who were like, yeah, this isn't right. And I am able to help. And so I'm going to help. And so can you talk about like how people can help?

And then, like you said, I think I've actually got a lot out of this and I feel more affirmed in my belief that like we can look out after each other without the need to control each other. And like we don't necessarily need people with guns and badges for to create a society that cares for people who need taken care of and so perhaps you could describe like how people can help and then what it is that you've got out of this that keeps you wanting to do this well first of all yeah we don't we don't have a clear structure of uh authoritative structure over here it's um we take ideas as a collective different people have contributed different things there's a woman that really nailed down the pb and j making system and we've all just been following her lead there some people came up with the idea of having a cell phone charging station that was you and uh it's just the list goes on and uh if you wanted to help

you could just come by to the border come to one of these sites and just start distributing food or teaming teaming up with us somehow or by donating to the gofundme yeah what's the gofundme john uh so it's a gofundme that was set up by my by my dad i don't actually know what it's titled like hakumba migrant aid i think if you search go fund me hakumba migrant aid it comes up samuel schultz i think is by samuel schultz you'll know because it has like fifty thousand dollars on it and like maybe seven words as a description it's like google because not much else is going down here i guess um but yeah people can help that way and we've had people come who listened we had two people this morning right

who'd heard about it on the podcast and it come and helped yeah and it made a really really great difference yeah they camped out at the sliders and really held it down which is really important i mean for some of us we you know like john and i we kind of do like a morning shift where we get up really early and make sure to do everything that we need to do, prepping sandwiches, checking on all the camps. But a lot of people come in in the middle of the night. Sliders had people come in, what, at midnight or 1 a.m.? Oh, yeah, all throughout. A group came at midnight, a group came at 1 a.m., and then there were also more that came at 4 a.m yeah so like having someone on site camping you know making

sure that people's needs are met and that if any emergencies take place that they're taken care of and it's just that smiling face when they get here it makes a huge difference like that dude from brazil like earlier he was saying to me he was like thank you so much like this is like this is humanity right here like i'm a human and i'm like yes we will treat you like humans here like at the end of the day you know uh these people coming through central america and mexico they go through so much you know uh extortion people ripping them off just feeling unwelcome throughout that whole voyage yeah just having a group of people welcome them into the country and treat them with dignity is worth more than any bottle of water or sandwich that we can give them. And, you know, that's the main thing that we're doing, I would say.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if

we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti.

And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone.

Mm-hmm. But you also have a lot of questions, like how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a

raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to emphasize that people can help in so many ways that you can send us stuff you can send us money or you can just show up if you just have a weekend that's totally fine or a day it's totally fine or if you just want to come and make sandwiches that's totally fine like um it we're a very diverse group of people and some people have had more time than others but yeah everyone

I think is valued and like you said I think like we're the way that we organize without anyone like we organize horizontally has allowed us to be so much better like do you remember the day there was a day when we ran out of plates uh and we were we were like down in willow and it was just it was like chaos um and then uh someone who just arrived that day was like oh what if we put the beans in a sandwich bag and give people. That was actually Peter. Who's back now after, after going on room springer for a while. But yeah. Uh, like if, if we had been like, no, I'm in charge, we've been doing this for longer

than those people wouldn't have got fed. Right. But because we were like willing to listen, then the people got fed fed and like we were all happier because the people got fed right like it worked better that way so like as things change because like border patrol have said explicitly that they're trying to push people west right what do you think like what do we need going forward what do you see like the situation being and like it would be good to explain the context of like the changing seasons here as well yes so uh i think what we're gonna see more of is people that are crossing in uh unorthodox areas more people that are hopping the fence more people that are cutting holes in

the walls just popping up all over the place so yeah it would be great to have eyes along the border people that are willing to travel up and down along the border to find out where these people are coming through because for the most part we don't know a lot oftentimes where these people are coming through um there are a couple of new oads open air detention sites that are relatively close to us that we can't find even right yeah like maybe if we had a super fancy drone we could find them or just boots on the ground a nice off-road vehicle yeah yeah then these are all things that cost money that we don't have but like we've all put lots of miles on our trucks and lots of miles on our boots trying to trying to help out my exhaust is

falling off all these bumps yeah my uh my transfer case took a beating but like yeah if we had more people some of us could focus on feeding people here because there was what how many people were there when we just left now 120 something like that yeah oh no actually probably more uh if you count the new group i think you know a conservative estimate would have been maybe 140 yeah so that's we've made 140 sandwiches to feed them today and we've chopped firewood and taken that out and uh we've given all that out right that was after the same thing at breakfast time that doesn't leave much time to go meander along the border and look for another site so if we have more people we could do that and that will

be really valuable also if you have connection to firewood yeah yeah if you're a person who can bring us a lot of firewood we have one homie right now and he's breaking his back cutting wood for us so um yeah that's a definite big need out here yeah is there other stuff like that that people who maybe aren't here but have connections to or they could they could send that's particularly needed a nice off-road vehicle if they've got one lying around. Firewood is definitely a big thing. That's a huge need. Yeah, it's getting really cold up here,

especially in sliders too. I think it's higher in elevation. So exposed too. There's nothing between you and the wind. Yeah. It's very cold out there. Yeah, and just other things that are that are easier for us to get but we just constantly need such as jackets blankets bread yeah we make

a lot of pbngs yeah yeah tents all these things right like the wind and the sun destroys everything that we've stockpiled after a while and we have to keep reinventing the wheel and then sometimes border patrol destroys our stuff as well or uh sometimes some some chads come and destroy our stuff which which oh the chads destroying our stuff yeah we should talk about the destruction of the shelters before we finish i guess just to end on a sad note um well it's a happy note because we built them again and they're fine so there were some shelters i think uh mostly they were ones that had been built well they're all ones that have been built volunteers yeah and what john you saw what happened to the shelters right yeah so uh we built some shelters at one of the sites at um one of the main sites uh you know it was very simple just by uh having

a plywood as the frame holding it up and then uh uh nailing down some tarps on it with battens it was uh it was a nice thing it stood up to the heavy winds that we have here very well it's incomparably better to not having a shelter out there oh yeah it's a it's a completely different yeah they're instantly used once people cross and it's awesome to see like adults that are alone will get out and force families children in the shelters like yeah you get it first for sure yeah and uh yeah we built those it was working out good then one day the border patrol showed up or a company that was subcontracted by them and demolished them all using skip loaders and bulldozers and such uh we showed up the following day we rebuilt all the

shelters and uh we're really happy about it you know it was kind of a big fuck you to them you can tear down our stuff but we'll just come back and build more yeah uh but then um what was it like a three four days later or the next day maybe i'm not that wasn't the next day two days it was close yeah uh some guys just showed up and they tore it all up with hammers they finishing a tiny little finishing yeah yeah luckily they didn't really come equipped like maybe with the with the tools uh they didn't really know what they were doing yeah i think it's fair to say that but still it's it's annoying when you put the time into building it right and border patrol didn't destroy contractors didn't destroy the shelters

at first we were like oh maybe they're not using this but there are 140 people there right now like in in the shelters that got rebuilt for a third time so like i guess even we do appreciate people donating and we understand that people's resources are scarce and like the economy is bad and uh the rent is too damn high etc but like every time we build up enough stuff we have to like we're always running uphill because like stuff just gets destroyed either by the by the weather or by the border patrol or by volunteer border patrol judge so like we could i guess desperately need your help and like at some point the news cycle will move on from the border. And that doesn't mean that we will be able to move on from having people to help here.

Right. Because like John said, there were people and people always deserve to be treated with dignity. Is there anything else that you guys think that people should know about the situation here? We wrap up. It's kind of chill it is really nice like I like being here

I come here because it makes me happy and my friends are here yeah and like the Sliders location is located in a really awesome like you can see down just past the border wall

there's like a nice little train track that used to go from US into Mexico I guess and just beyond that there's like sheep on a farm

that you can see in the distance, rolling hills. The clouds come through. It's a really beautiful place to be and to hang out. And a lot of the locals that don't hate what we're doing are very nice. The people at the hotel are very supportive. Yeah, we're a great group, really good people. It's always really fun to do

anything like this people are generally enamored by our project and want to be involved and come back a second time i mean we're kind of like cowboys i mean we're doing this all on our own we're driving up and down looking at the sites looking around and all that whole responsibility is on our shoulders yeah it feels good to take responsibility for something. It definitely does. We're doing this. Yeah. It's like no one else will. So we got it.

We'll just do it. Like, that's fine. It's, it's very like, it reminds me of the punk scene growing up, but like, it's a big,

important thing. Like, like you said, Fox, every national news network has been down here. Every grifting streamer has been down here, but at the end of the day, it's a,

it's a few dozen random people who are actually the ones making sure that people don't die here yeah for all the government attention for the millions of dollars spent it's just us yeah working on a fraction of the but i mean it costs them more to fly a helicopter for a few hours than it does for us ever spent in our entire gofundme yeah and yeah like we get it done we are we're very efficient i guess in that sense but yeah we would love more people people have come because i listen to podcasts and that also like just for me personally means the world to me like most of the time we just talk into a microphone and then you can't really see who you're talking to unless unless you go on like social media and that's not always the best reflection of humanity.

So it really means the world to me that someone listens to this when they're driving to work or going on a jog or whatever they're doing. And it's like, no, I will go and I will help. Because I think that is how we solve so many of our problems. There is a massive problem with people not being able to afford rent living on the street in this country. And we solve it in the same way by just showing up for each other and there's also different ways to get plugged in like if the desert's not your thing it doesn't i mean this is like where the process

starts as far as like the spectrum of the whole border crisis or not crisis but the whole border humanitarian situation we have going on here so this is what we're doing out here but there's also airport runs a lot of them get ditched in the airports. So I think We All We Got SD and maybe MDF, Immigration Defense Law Center, kind of hold down. They do airport runs. Border Patrol just, I guess at night, they don't drop them off like after 10 or something.

They don't drop them off at the Iris station. They'll just drop them straight off at the airport. So they need help being fed. A lot of them don't have plane tickets. They need to kind of some, you know, people need blankets because they have to sleep there so we all i mean we all we got is great for that you can plug in with them and i think um alotrolato and who else is it mdef as well that's doing the irish street releases so when the border patrol just releases them on the street like a lot of people just get in a cab and go they have the

resources they can do that they're already planned but some people don't have any money or they got robbed on the way here. So they have nothing. They need a lot of help. They need to figure out where to go. They need a place to stay. So there's the street releases. There's the airport. There's, I think that's kind of. Or by just helping with shelters and organizations in whatever city you happen to be living in you know the majority of the migrant well not the majority but a very typical answer migrants give me when i ask them uh where in the united states they're going to is new york city or chicago or any of these major cities yeah lincoln nebraska yeah you do you get some weird ones like that yeah yeah it's gonna be uh idaho have fun yeah we know it's beautiful it is

yeah yeah there was a guy haval and i met from minority ethnic group in russia we met in september like i remember one of those first really cold nights and i was talking to this person and uh they were in pennsylvania and i checked in with them a few weeks ago and they're like happily living in pennsylvania can't understand a word anyone else is saying it's nice to see and yeah you can help those people in in whatever community you're in and like if you're further along the border there's uh ahas samaritans there's no masuertes there's humane borders um tucson samaritans as well right yeah all along the border you know there are the uh there are lots of good people in texas right it's a sidewalk school in brenosa matamoros uh there are people at the national butterfly center they're very nice people who we've heard from before like all along the border and like all

around this country there are there are things you can do to help and like i want to reinforce it it's not like this penurious thing we do that's miserable and we all get together and cry every night like we we do have a nice time even though we we have seen some really stressful things like we all look after one another and hold space when people do need help or extra time to process something but uh it's a very supportive community and we support each other through lots of other things like aside from this and i think a lot of people in general in the 21st century america struggle with isolation and that's a thing that uh that capitalism does to people right it isolates us from each other and so hopefully

like i think this is a solution for me this this has been a really positive thing but like generally my sense of hope and yeah and like what we're doing this kind of does it's disaster humanitarian relief effort it's kind of with the way the climate is going in the world and climate uh yeah it's not gonna get less common yeah this will just be getting more common and like this kind of like preparing and building community and like this disaster scenario is gonna yeah definitely be more in common so it's not that easy to do i mean it's not that hard to do uh mean it's not that hard to do uh you know you just got to have the intention and then you just got to get together

and do it that's all that's all you really need to do don't think that it's like if this if someone had said to us what plus or minus 50 000 people probably have come through i've no idea on the numbers but somewhere around there yeah probably more than that yeah if we like i remember in may when we cleaned up the i remember in may when we cleaned up the first oads um when we were like when i first met your mom and dad john like we were cleaning up the first oads and and we were like wow that was a horrible thing that happened that was really fucked if someone had said right well between now and uh next march 50 000 people will come through here and it's mostly going to be you guys who are here picking up trash and that's

that's all it's going to be like it's on you it would have been it would have seemed overwhelming right but it i don't think people should feel afraid to confront these big problems because like between the group of people who who we've assembled here we've been able to confront this problem and make it survivable and treat people with dignity and bring some dignity and humanity into a situation where there wasn't any right no yeah there's a role for everybody no matter what you do you can find your niche of what you know you makes you feel good or something that you're good at you know yeah it's finding the little fascists that destroyed our things online and doing all that online footwork or it's building shelters

or it's making pb and j's or our friends made a website they made a really good website website yeah or even yeah just being someone that speaks multiple languages is a huge need out here especially i mean spanish is pretty common um but the harder languages like um i mean mandarin is huge yeah yeah if you speak mandarin and you reach out to us and we can call you then that would be huge right that could be

in a medical emergency that could be a life or death thing yeah so there are a ton of ways to help and I really encourage people to get involved if they can

where can people follow along with you two do you have like social media or anything that you want to plug I don't

I'm going to keep mine private no I don't we're depriving the world of such a beautiful thing. How I got involved in this is through members of a drumline that I am part of. So we show up for protests, have been since 2020. Direct action drumline on Instagram. We post a lot of different stuff from organizing for Palestine to, you know,

we were doing a lot of Black Lives Matter stuff early in 2020. And now it's, you know, kind of cross-mixed with Border Raids since I've been out here. So we occasionally will make posts so you can follow along there. Alo Jalado is a good one to follow on social media. Incopal Wellness on Instagram. Borderlands Relief Collective. I'm sure a lot of the people listening already follow a lot of these people,

but yeah, there's a network through all of that. And so once you start following one or the other, we all tag each other and reshare each other's stuff. So you can get involved that way and figure out what's going on. Yeah. And the book, is it board? What's the website for?

That's a great resource. Border a.github.io. I think these, if you give it a Google somewhere, somewhere around that, you'll find it. that's a great resource. BorderAid.github.io, I think. If you give it a Google somewhere around that, you'll find it. It is a good website. And like, if you are facing similar issues

in your community, wherever you are, whatever it is, like we've definitely made a lot of mistakes and we've learned a lot. And so we've tried to document the things that we've learned

so that you guys don't have to reinvent the wheel somewhere else, right? Like, you know, you can be an efficient PB&J maker just like us. Learn Shirley's technique all right thank you so much guys i really appreciate your time likewise thank you cheers it could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit

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