It Could Happen Here - Biden's Border Policies

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Shereen and James discuss the fire in a detention facility in Juarez and how Biden’s border policies kill people trying to cross the border.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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My cat is grooming herself, so now's the time. Now's the time. Okay, great. We should just use that as our intro. Okay, good. I mean, I'm fine with that, whatever. Okay, let that's our intro that's the intro shireen's cat is grooming herself and that means that this is it could happen here uh and i am james stout and i'm joined by shireen eunice yes and not not her cat she's just she's justdy. And I have to really sometimes plan recording times around her schedule.

And it's just the way my life is now. And that's fine. That's the attention she deserves. None of this is as important as your cat. But it's a bit of a serious one, sadly. So I want to talk more again about the border, something we've spoken about a little bit, and something i kind of

want to keep coming back to because things haven't really got any better in fact they've potentially got worse so where i want to start is last month and we're recording this and what the fourth of april so uh just over a week ago i think a fire in the detention the 28th was it okay yeah what's that three yeah a week ago a week ago today a fire in a detention center in ciudad juarez killed 41 migrants being detained there more than two dozen other people were seriously injured and every single one of the about 100 people detained in the um migrant detention center was hurt in the fire the reason that that every single person was hurt became clear in a video obtained by Texas Public Radio and later confirmed by the government in Mexico. It shows two people dressed

as guards rushing to the camera frame. You can see people in the cells just really pulling and kicking and beating on the bars. The guards sort of run up to the doors, but they don't really appear to make any effort to open them or to let the people out of the cells instead they hurry away as clouds of smoke begin to fill the corners of the cells gradually the smoke fills up the whole screen until you can't see anything else and the men in the cells are left to die it's it's horrifying yeah it's one of the worst deaths that's available to a human being and the fact that people who are already incredibly desperate and have taken huge risks to get there and died like literally yards from the united states border it is just it's almost kind of unfathomably cruel

but what is in a way crueler is this statement made by the US ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar. He said the tragedy illustrated the dangerous rifts in traveling north. And he cited the loss of life in two recent smuggling incidents in San Antonio in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. These cases, he said, are a reminder of the risks of irregular migration. But what we're talking about here isn't a consequence of irregular migration really right because these people weren't in the hands of criminals or coyotes or cartels uh they were in the hands of the mexican government when they died and for him to blame this on irregular migration i think is is very indicative of the way the

biden administration has approached migration policy, which is to try and always obfuscate and shirk the responsibility for the cruel things that it's doing for the consequences of its policies and its actions, which I want to get into more. I don't want to linger on this fire too much because, A, it's unfathomably awful. And, like, I don't think we need to spend hours and hours like going over something for people to know that like there is no situation in which the government should burn fucking 40 people alive uh like um it's inexcusable um we know that like it was the shelter was set up in 2019 uh and i want to get into why

this shelter that which seems to have been a pretty terrible condition to begin with was set up in 2019 why people who claim to the united states to try and have a better life a safer life ended up in a shelter in mexico and how we've created a system where people keep dying at our southern border right some of this will be stuff we've covered a system where people keep dying at our southern border, right? Some of this will be stuff we've covered before. People have listened to the other stuff I've done on the border. People have listened to the Butterfly Sanctuary episodes. They'll be familiar with some of Biden's border policies,

but I wanted to address these. Did you see that they lowered the death toll from 40 to 38, I guess, after hospital visits? Like that's the one part that I've read that is nice so far. Is that two people have survived? Yeah, that is good. I's the one part that I've read that is nice so far. That's nice. Yeah, that is good.

I've seen 38, 39, and 41. I wasn't sure what the exact... So 38 is the newest one? Right now I'm reading 38 after... It was 40 and it was lowered to 38. Okay, wow. Two people were reanimated. Yeah. I mean, it's just like...

They're probably in terrible condition like they're probably going they're having like life-changing if not like all like it's just terrible no yeah and like access to care for those people i mean those people may have access to care right because what happened was high profile and within the news but like generally access to care for people like i have seen i have seen a person die because they don't have access to their medicines that are very cheap and very easily available um like again like we are talking feet like i could throw a tennis ball into the united states from where it was standing uh and that's because this system treats people like numbers not people um yeah yeah the migration center is like a big jail.

You know what I mean? It doesn't even, I don't know. Yeah, it's like an old timey fucking Western jail with people crammed into cells with legit bars on the walls. So shelter conditions in Mexican detention are often very poor. And those conditions have been exacerbated

by something called Title 42. People have probably heard about Title 42 a lot. There's a lot to say about Title 42, but very briefly, it's a Trump-era public health policy that invokes a public health rule to push asylum seekers out of the US and into Mexico, regardless of whether or not they might legally qualify for asylum. This shelter was stood up as a consequence of something called the migrant protection protocol um people call it the migrant persecution protocol because that's more accurate but i was gonna say like wow doing a great job with that yeah uh like people enjoy being wrong about georgia orwell but this shit is perfectly orwellian oh yeah um to call a policy which kills

little fucking children the migrant protection policy is dark. It's often called remain in Mexico as well, which is what it does. It requires people to remain in Mexico

while their asylum claim is processed, despite the fact that this might not be a safe country for them and that this might violate various international laws

and conventions on asylum, but the US doesn't subscribe to all of those, as we're going to find out. Now, Title 42 has been through some legal ping pong recently, right, with Biden sort of trying to get rid of it, also defending it in court, a bunch of conservative states suing to keep it. So let's explain a little bit of where we're at with title 42 right now um it's actually set to expire on may the 11th uh the biden administration is rolling out plans that will continue to restrict migrant access after may the 11th because they're concerned about like a large influx of migrants which i just want to point out was always going to fucking happen when you like pushed people just the other side of your fictional line in the sand.

At some point, you're going to have to stop because at some point, Mexico is already the third most popular country in the world for asylum, and you can't force this all on them. So since it was first implemented in 2020, the government has used Title 42 to expel migrants from the US-Mexico border nearly 2.7 million times. That doesn't mean you will see these statistics quoted constantly, credulously, by people who don't understand

what the fuck they're talking about, and it really makes me angry. That doesn't mean 2.7 million people, right? Because Title 42 makes people cross more than once it creates this kind of loop where dhs right normally cbp or border patrol sorry picks people up and dumps them back in mexico without processing them and those people are now in a place they don't know they don't have any family they don't have any hope they don't have any money and all they do is any hope, they don't have any money. And all they do is kick their heels until they can find a way to cross again

or someone to cross them again. And sometimes people who are facilitating those crossings will offer them unlimited crossings. So they'll pay someone to smuggle them across, right? And that person will say, well, you get unlimited crossings. I didn't even realize, I didn't know it was so um like standard they're like okay this is gonna happen you're gonna get a limited cross you know what i mean like there's like they're expecting it to be this like perpetual loop yeah i mean

they a few years ago maybe they wouldn't have done but another way that this is sometimes termed is catch and release which they're not fucking fish um you shouldn't do that to fish either it's not very nice to fish but um i mean it's dehumanizing yeah it's extremely fucking dehumanizing right and um what it does and what i've seen what i'm not it's not like a unique insight of mine is that it forces people to cross in more and more dangerous areas like you combine that with a wall um and the fact that like it's very well documented that the trump administration wanted to maximize the amount of miles of wall that built if you remember in one of the presidential debates he made a claim about a certain number

of miles of a new wall he built yeah he was just speaking out of his ass um i foiled it like the next day and uh they were like i and they provided a number of different numbers, many of which relied heavily on repairing existing border fence. But they just went hammer and tongs trying to build new sections of wall to include skipping areas where it was harder to build, valleys, mountains, that kind of thing. So what this wall does is it forces people through the areas where it's hardest to cross. Those are the areas where it's easiest to die. So these people are now

forced to make riskier and riskier crossings to try and avoid getting caught or to wait in Mexico where they're at a very high risk of abduction or sexual assault, extortion or violence. We'll come on to maybe a couple of those stories later, just from people i've talked to the result of this policy is that border cities in mexico are flooded with migrants and often with soldiers sent there to supposedly keep the peace last month the mexico national guard and the immigration authorities raided a hotel full of venezuelan in Juarez. Local news outlets reported that the migrants, mostly young men, threw stones at the officials and a brawl ensued,

and eventually they called off the raid. In another incident, authorities raided a church and dragged off a number of Venezuelan migrants who had been given sanctuary there. Some were beaten, and one advocate said they were essentially tortured. This prompted... Yeah, this is horrific, right?

Like, a lot of... So a lot of the young men in the, it was all men in the detention center that caught fire. Most of them were from Venezuela, right? A place like I've lived in Venezuela. I have a lot of sympathy for those people. Yeah. Actually, I found like a breakdown, I guess. There was 13 Hondurians, 12 Salvadorians,

12 Venezuelans, a Colombian and an Ecuadorian. So, I mean, even that's crazy. There's so many people from all of those countries. I don't know. Yeah. We'll see a bit later that there are certain pathways. For Venezuelan people, there are some pathways that don't exist for other people. They're insufficient and they're, how do I say this, unfair, but sort of they exist. But yeah, from those countries, we see a lot of Haitian people at the border here too. But yeah, that's a pretty common kind of border mixup of folks. Unfortunately, often you won't see Haitian folks, that there are sort of segregations even within the migrant community,

and often Haitian folks are kind of segregated out, which is unfortunate. I thought the horrors one is kind of that's the population breakdown. Like wouldn't the Haitian border crossing be like somewhere else? Is that a dumb thing to say? No, no, no.

That's not dumb at all. I don't know what the breakdown... I know there are Haitian people in Juarez. I know there are a lot of Cuban folks in Juarez too. And they've kind of, some of them have stayed in Juarez and established kind of their own communities. And that's had some sort of, some negative results for anti-migrant feeling in Juarez

from what I've heard. I know there are a lot of Haitian folks in Tijuana. A lot of the Haitian people come via Brazil where they've spent time preparing for the Olympics that were there and building stadiums and stuff. So a lot of them tell me they've come up from Brazil and then obviously with increased violence in Haiti now, you'll see more Haitian people again.

There's a decent Haitian community that also is established in Tijuana and has it's they that it's their home now right like I had no idea to be honest so now I know I'll accept being a little bit dumb so everyone can learn not at all not at all it's it's not very well reported on um and I think it's honestly people have stopped reporting on it since 2020 as well like since Orange Man Bad stopped being the prevailing mass media message. No one gives a fuck about migrants anymore. There's a pronounced drop-off when I cross of people. And I don't know.

There are some very good reporters, of course. We've spoken to some of them in Tijuana and in San Diego. But yeah, there was a lot of parachute reporting on migration in the Trump era, some of it very bad, some of it by people who didn't have the language skills to be working there and didn't understand what was respectful or what wasn't and things like that. So I have strong feelings about how the migrant caravan

in 2018 was was reported on for instance yeah but yeah you'll definitely see a ton of haitian people and that biden has gone exceptionally hard and i'll include a link at the bottom of like a piece i wrote for nbc about biden's anti-haitian bullshit but like um exceptionally hard specifically against the haitian so you can find a tweet um from the Haitian the United States embassy in in Haiti uh where it's just got a picture of Biden I think it says don't come I'm paraphrasing but it's the official account yeah yeah no it's wild like you don't see this in other countries either even you know they've made like they've made um there's a ton of special exemptions for people from Ukraine.

It's hard not to see that shit as racist. Of course. Yeah. Of course it's Ukraine. Yeah. Right. Because they're the only country. It's also great.

But also you have to look at the, like, why did that happen? Right. And if we can't express, like, Russian bombs kill kids in Myanmar too, right? Russian bombs kill kids all over fucking Africa. And if we can't have solidarity with them and we can't with Ukrainian people, then it's hard for me not to see that as to do with their skin color.

Yeah. Then that is bullshit. So yeah, Title 42 will end in May when the COVID public health emergency order expires. Biden said earlier on that he would end Title 42. He then faced these lawsuits from conservative states. But at the same time, the Biden administration fiercely defended Title 42 in litigation brought by the ACLU and other groups challenging the policy.

Even the CDC, right, the CDC, Center for Disease Control, was like, no, this shit isn't necessary and it's cool. We should stop. The government has argued that public health concerns for letting migrants into the country due to continued threat of COVID-19 outweigh the possible harms done to migrants who return to cities like Nogales, Juarez, or Tijuana. You don't even need a COVID test

to fly into this country now, I don't think. Right? If my family come visit me. So the end of the emergency kind of makes that a moot point. You can't have a public health order to protect us from a disease which you're saying isn't a problem anymore but the damage that this has done will take years to rectify and the backlog that it's created is already being used as an excuse to do more cruel and inhumane things to to people who are just looking for a fair crack at life and shereen, do you know what won't build a wall around itself

and force people to risk their life to get here? You tell me, James. What is it? It is these silver coins that have Ronald Reagan on them, who probably outflanks our current immigration policy to the left. That's our guy. Yep. Uncle Ron. Uncle Ron. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series,

Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Okay, we're back. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. Or maybe it was a gold advert. I hope it was a gold advert because I know that everyone enjoys us so much. Please don't message Sophie

about the fucking gold things. We know. Yeah, we know. We know. Trust us, we know. Yeah. It's also, it's just funny it's funny to me that someone is buying gold adverts and presumably none of our listeners are buying gold

and yet i have health care now i mean it must be working somewhere like you know what i mean like why how else would they afford to keep advertising i don't know yeah someone's doing something yeah someone's buying guy it's like one guy. It's like one guy doing something. If you are that steadfast listener who buys everything we advertise, like, I guess... Thank you so much for our paychecks. We salute your dedication.

So Biden hasn't really come up with a distinctive immigration policy of his own yet. Mostly he's just kind of failed to undo the damage Trump has done, created a two-tier system in which white kind of failed to undo the damage Trump has done, created a two-tier system in which white Ukrainians get to slip the line while black and brown migrants wait in terrible conditions. And for some reason he's gone as hard as fuck as he can to stop Haitians coming here, which the reason might be pretty obvious to some of you. Oh, and we're still building the wall, but we're calling it a barrier now.

Of course. Yeah, it's totally different. Rebrand. It's rebranded. Yeah, it doesn't have a little plate on the top. It's a slightly different shape. You can, like, if you scroll back far enough on my Twitter, you can find comparison pictures of the Biden barrier and the Trump wall.

It's like literally just like a glow up, like a terrible, horrifying glow up. Yes. Yeah, the wall is having its little uh it's a freedom wall now or something but uh if you don't follow the butterfly sanctuary as well high value twitter account and sometimes stealing automatic rifles not stealing i should say but uh national guard leaving automatic rifles on her property that she takes care of but yeah you can listen to our butterfly sanctuary episodes for more on like the biden barrier but we're more than halfway through biden's term now and we're beginning to see him take aim at something resembling a border policy on his own at the same time because we're more than halfway

through his term or perhaps just because he never intended to fulfill his campaign policies about being kind to migrants he's trying to move towards the center and the center of u.s politics is like somewhere to the right of attila the hun these days so he's been hit pretty hard by the republicans on immigration and it's worth pointing out that he's been hit pretty hard on largely on just shit that's made up or misunderstandings of this the number of of interactions that Border Patrol has, or willful or unwillful, I don't know. But many of the critiques are in pretty bad faith. But nonetheless, it's been an area where they've criticized him, right? And so he's trying to move towards the quote-unquote center on that

with these new policies. So he's proposed, or his administration has proposed, something called a transit ban. The transit ban, people might remember, and the initial kind of proposal of this was made by Stephen Miller, a dude who looks like a lollipop and also a white nationalist. That's a great description. His head is too big for his neck.

He's shiny. Yeah. Yeah. That's not the only thing that's wrong with him. So this proposal would render migrants ineligible for US asylum if they cross the southern border illegally after failing to ask for humanitarian refuge in another country they traveled through, such as Mexico.

So unless you somehow come straight to the US, which you can't do because you can't get on a flight to the US without the correct travel documents, then you'd have to travel to another country, right? And they're saying that you should apply for asylum there. In practice, this would bar most non-Mexican asylum seekers, unless you took advantage of one of the programs that Biden has proposed to allow people in Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela with a US sponsor

under a humanitarian parole program, where they apply from their home country and then get credentials to travel. So they'd stay in Cuba or whatever. This might not be safe for some people to do in those countries, but they have a means to get here. It's metered, I think, at 30,000 a month. Those people from those same countries enduring the same conditions, if they came here on their own and then applied to asylum as it's their right under US law once they entered the country, right? And it's worth noting that most people coming in that want to apply for asylum, so they wanted to turn... That might have changed a little with Title 42,

but previously people were seeking to turn themselves in, right? And say, hey, I'm here to apply for asylum. They can now be expelled under this legislation, right. So they, if they don't use this, or they don't have a US sponsor, which kind of creates, you shouldn't have to know someone in America, right. To come here and avail yourselves of basic human rights. Yeah. It's just, it's,

it's purposely like getting people out of the group that can go in. You know what I mean? It's excluding people, but it's just by default. Right, thousands of people. And this legislation now allows them to be expedited processing and expulsion. If people do want to apply for asylum at the southern border, they need to use an app, which is called CBP1. That's just the craziest thing I've heard in a while sorry yeah it is i'm on another planet like what what i don't know it is incredibly powerful like lib brain

to be like don't worry we've made an app uh we've got you like it assumes that people have the app is not available in all the languages that people speak. Of course not, yeah. Like, last time I was at the border, I worked with a colleague who spoke Oromo. I speak French. He spoke Haitian Creole. Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian. Those are people I interviewed in an afternoon.

There are dozens of languages. So the app isn't available in those languages. The app is a giant clusterfuck. It doesn't work. It crashes all the time. You can find little kids who come up from Tijuana to go to school who can tell you 10 things that are wrong about this app. But you can also find people who make six-fig in washington you think it's great right regardless it's a fucking app on a

fucking device that is just like like i don't know i think it's just so lazy it's lazy and stupid i don't like it yes it is both of those things it assumes people have a cell phone which is yes very elitist yes exactly yeah like maybe your phone could get stolen um fucking someone could book all these trying game like there's a million ways it assumes you've got fucking broadband connectivity you know wi-fi all these things it's yeah it's just insane like it's amazing how detached one can be from reality and still be the person in charge yeah yeah what if no people in charge welcome i'm daniel thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify

the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

So, migrants crossing the border without documents can be subjected to expedited removal, as I said. The proposed regulations indicate that migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, who generally cannot be deported due to strained relations with the governments there, would face deportation to Mexico instead. Which fucking just

again makes this someone else's problem. A dozen Senate Democrats called the proposed asylum restrictions unlawful and counterproductive. They joined thousands of migrant advocates and organisations, including the United nations refugee agency in imploring the administration to immediately withdraw the regulation so there's a period of public comment which is what's happening at the moment right so um he's found a policy which no one likes uh both from the right and from you know

people are allowed to live with dignity so that's that's hard to do that's hard to do well you're never he's never gonna fucking improve like i don't know what they're like tramplicants want but like it's some version of machine guns on top of a wall killing little children yeah and uh you could just be a decent person or you could try and placate fucking psychopathic fox news people so me Mexico is already the third most popular destination for people seeking asylum in the world after the United States and Germany. In Mexico, asylum seekers have to stay

in the state where they apply. And that's resulted in large numbers of people being concentrated in places like Tapachula on the southern border with Guatemala. And that creates like an infrastructure issue there, right? Which it's also worth like, I'm sure people are well aware that like, I wonder why all these countries

have been fucking destabilized, right? I wonder if there was a country which helped do that for decades. Why are they leaving their home? Like, why can't they go back home? Like, you know what I mean? Why isn't it safe there? Yeah.

If only The Clash had written a song about it for us to understand better. So Mexico granted 61% of asylum requests from January through November last year compared to 46% in the USA for fiscal year 2022. That is an increase of a low of 27% under Trump, but it still suggests that more than half the people get sent back, right? And

where the fuck do they get sent back to if they can't reliably go back to their home country safely? Mexico abides by something called the Cartagena Declaration, which promises a safe haven to anyone threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights, or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order. The US currently observes a narrow definition that requires a person to have been individually targeted that's a distinct thing right for limited reasons as spelled out in the u.n refugee convention but it appears that the bayern administration has plans to retrain dhs agents and they're currently telling them or they seem to be proposing to tell them i should say to let migrants enter the u.s to pursue protection

only if they qualify under the international convention against torture which is an absurdly high bar right yeah like against torture wow yeah i thought the word i thought you were going to say after all that no yeah it's a it's a ridiculously high bar like there are very real things you could be afraid of like i've spoken to people who's have escaped like forced sex work right who've had members of their family killed threats made to their own lives none of those maybe the forced sex work is torture but um maybe some of those things wouldn't meet that bar but i think any reasonable human being right if you met someone in the street and they said hey so my you know so-and-so killed my daughter and

my father and my uncle and they said they're going to kill me you'd say like come into my house i'll look after you but there's a country we're saying fuck you you're on your own and yeah that's that's not how you be a good neighbor um a source on the inside of the administration recently has reported that the biden administration is a source on the inside of the administration recently has reported that the biden administration is considering reviving the practice of detaining migrant families caught crossing the u.s mexico border illegally um so this is this is the thing that uh that that all the people were very upset about with the no more kids in cages thing but we can do that again as well i guess we won't they likely won't do

uh like separation of minors which which is what they did before right they took the kids away from their parents entertained them separately which is just fucking like i cannot imagine um they can still it's just yeah it's just unspeakable trauma and like, just like for both, for everybody involved. I mean, like same with the wall though. Like it's just the same thing. The same thing is happening. It's just like marketed differently. It's just like packaged in a different way and it's still fucking terrible.

Yeah. Like I just, I don't know what you expect these fucking people to do. Like, and I don't know how you, how you you expect someone like even if you're purely self-interested and you're just concerned about like u.s security and like you know making america great again or whatever um like if you lock little children up like they're going to fucking hate you and you can't blame them like it's it's it's inhumane It's what dictators do It's fucking unfathomable It also like Drives me like Just insane to think about people

That are actually there in the flesh Like that see people Like children crying or something And like just there's so much terrible Things going on and no one does There's not enough I don't know i just i can't imagine doing that at least be like okay my job is this and i'm gonna continue i don't know i don't

like it i don't like it no i don't like it either like this of all the things i've reported on and like i've reported on some dark shit uh and like being to some dangerous places etc like nothing has been harder for me to get over than little kids at the border like i have hundreds of stories about it but i can remember one little girl um this shit makes me want to cry um i remember this one little girl who um she'd left her teddy bear behind and she wanted a teddy bear and like this little girl's like living in a fucking tent right this is in 2018 when um when the like the midterms were happening so they were holding a large group of people right next to the border right they were staying in a baseball stadium and myself and some friends had gone to help and this little girl was just like the sweetest little kid like she came up

she was holding my hand um and then i asked if she wanted to go on my shoulders she wanted to go on my shoulders you know and at this point the way that they were getting people to leave that area and go to another area was by cutting off their access to water oh my god so they wanted so like we were able to get some water and we were able to give them like as much water as we could buy on our credit cards and i asked her like what she wanted And she said she'd had to leave her teddy bear behind. And it just fucking broke my heart. Like without like, you know, going into too much personal trauma details, like that shit kept me from sleeping for weeks. And I found it so hard to come back.

It was like 2018 around November, I guess. And like go to like, I remember someone's having some Thanksgiving thing and just uh i just wanted to fucking shout at everyone and be like what the fuck is wrong with you anyway so i went and bought her a teddy bear it's especially from a from a child you know like their their experience and their perspective is just like just i don't know you see how raw it is yeah like i know, children shouldn't be treated by that full stop. Like, we shouldn't be

standing in the parking lot of a fucking Tommy Hilfiger discount store in San Diego launching tear gas at little children in Mexico. It's one of the, like, the images of, like, what America does to people

that will stick with me forever. It's's yeah. I'm glad you were down there helping though. Like especially getting, carting their access off to water is like the most, like one of the most inhumane things, but then again, it's all very inhumane.

Yeah. And that time was difficult for everyone involved. That was also one of the most impressive. This is one of the times when large ngos weren't allowed to operate because of various concerns and legal things so the entirety of the aid effort for those people was done through mutual aid right through completely ad hoc mechanisms there were church people um people from various migrant advocacy groups in san diego people from el otro lado who we've spoken to on the podcast that's how i met them for the first

time a number of those people actually were surveilled by border patrol uh as we found out two years later and had warrants on them etc but everyone who came came like not because it was a job because it was the right thing to do and like there wasn't a day i was down there that there weren't people turning up with trucks full of stuff and this is my friend and i uh someone managed to get us a projector from their workplace i don't know how they got a projector from their workplace i don't care uh and a bunch of dvds my friend used to be an electrician, and they moved everyone to a nightclub. It was a nightclub in another part of Tijuana, an old nightclub, old and massive.

Thousands of people were in this big kind of open-air nightclub situation. It was very strange. They had the women and the young children in one area that very clearly had been a pole dance room. Yeah. Anyway, and they had these bars

that were like a balcony area so we went up to the balcony area and me and a couple of these older um kids who with the migrant group were able to get like climb across the roof find some wires connect a projector um and uh do a little make a little movie theater for the children and they remember they were watching like beverly hills chihuahua uh sweet when i left I remember they were watching like Beverly Hills Chihuahua when I left and yeah they were having like just

those little gestures are so important though like it's yeah I mean it doesn't fucking fix anything but if they can

have two hours of watching a film about a dog or whatever and be like not there for a moment let them have that

yeah exactly yeah yeah they deserve that and they deserve a lot more than that but yeah it was those little nice things that made it bearable I guess but yeah exactly yeah yeah they deserve that and they deserve a lot more than that but yeah it was those little nice things that made it bearable i guess but yeah there was i still have like fairly disturbing recollections of lots of things

i've seen on the border uh so let's just do a quote from joe biden um because we do do love a bit of joe biden. My message is this. If you're trying to leave Cuba, Nicaragua, or Haiti, have agreed to begin a journey to America, do not, do not just show up at the border. Stay where you are and apply legally. Starting today, if you don't apply through the legal process, you will not be eligible for this new parole program.

Anyway, Joe Biden could go fuck himself but um I think that I hope I hope that obviously lots of my little anecdotes have helped but we shouldn't see these people as statistics or numbers and we should see them as people so I've got a couple of interviews I've done and these are just ones I've went back to some notes and found. So I was just going to read them out. So I won't give their names just for their own security. Yeah. But sometimes I've used pseudonyms on the publicies.

Sometimes I have used their names when they're willing to use their names. Like it's their choice, right? But it should always be their choice if you're a fucking reporter and you're filming

children without their consent or their parents' consent in a refugee camp. They're not just a spectacle for your story. Yeah, exactly. You can jog on reporter and you're filming children without their consent or their parents consent camp yeah they're not just a spectacle for your story yeah exactly you can jog on and i hope someone throws your camera in a river um so uh here's one i have three daughters aged 13 10 and 6 i've always had my own business selling food and i paid what we would call extortion money but with the pandemic i couldn't pay what I owed for three or four months.

They said if I didn't pay, they would burn down my shop and me and my daughters would be raped and killed. With what little I had left, I left with my daughters. It's hard to get work here. As an immigrant, there are some jobs,

but not the sort that are for me. I have to try and be an example to my kids. One day I was juggling by the traffic lights and some guys tried to pick me up. They said they knew where I lived and they would hurt me and my daughters

if I didn't work for them. They made me work in a bar. I escaped, but that's how I broke my hand. I didn't want to go to the US, but I need to leave this country now for the same reason I left my own. I'll read one more. We came from Honduras to flee flee the violence we have come to

this camp in the last few days but it's scary here we don't feel safe there are people coming and taking photos of children of the women men offer the women here money to go with them they try to get them to sleep with them there's a woman here filming us as well we found out she's a big activist for donald trump this was in 2021. Some people came to snatch a child here. Between the group, we're working to make a security committee to protect the children because there are people who would take the children here. We aren't a caravan. We're just people from all over the world who have come here for a better future. We're asking Biden. We know it's complicated and he has a lot to sort out and we have patience. We know he has to make

compromises, but please think of us here.'re in danger please give us a solution it's fucking heartbreaking yeah it is heartbreaking shit i wish there was like some kind of happy ending i could put on this or like i don't know um there were great things you could do with mutual aid groups um there's a group that I'm hoping to interview next week called Borderlands Relief Collective in San Diego who do kind of a lot to help people crossing the border. There are groups like Alotrolado who you can donate to.

The public comment is still available for the Biden's proposed new restrictions. So I guess you can comment on that if you think that will help. I guess this is an area sometimes where talking to politicians might help uh because they make the laws uh that that affect people's right to kind of live with basic dignity but yeah i don't have a great solution to this especially like if people aren't in a place where they you know people here are struggling to get by i understand that not everyone can afford to donate of course yeah but yeah this is pretty bleak and just because it's not like being beamed

into your living rooms anymore because orange man bad uh doesn't mean that like it's still not impossibly cruel yeah it's i mean just because another old guy took over uh it doesn't mean like let's say the same things were already there it's not like they just poofed into thin air like all the terrible things that were already happening that's what i don't understand is like people just assume i don't know what they assume i'm not gonna ramble on like that but it's just heartbreaking and you should donate if you can uh yeah donate do stuff shout out people um do whatever you think will will make a difference because it's pretty bad it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit

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