It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: Title 42, Pt 4: The Border Patrol

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

In the final episode James explains some of the history of the border and how CBP grew into an agency that operates without oversight across the USA and the world. Original Air Date: 6.2.23See omnystu...dio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. Johnny Knoxville here. Check out Crimeless, Hillbilly Heist, my new true crime podcast from Smartless Media, campside media, and big money players. It's the true story of the almost perfect crime and the Nimrods who almost pulled it off. It was kind of like the perfect storm in a sewer.
Starting point is 00:00:21 That was dumb. Do not follow my example. Listen to Crimless, Hillbilly Heist, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Ed Helms host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop?
Starting point is 00:00:48 What? Yeah, it's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Shearer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan, Clepper, Listen to Season 4 of Snafoo with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a vile sickness in Abbas Town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out.
Starting point is 00:01:17 From IHeart Podcasts and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe. Joel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
Starting point is 00:01:52 America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people. small towns. Listen to Graves County on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. The history of the border and its enforcement begins in 1492 with the colonization of what would become known as the Americas. It goes through the 1842 Mexican-American War
Starting point is 00:02:32 and a sale of indigenous peoples' lands without their knowledge or consent in the 1853 Gazden Purchase, and of course through the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and numerous other explicit attempts to prevent non-white people from moving to the USA. From there, it weaves its way through the Mexican Revolution and the First World War's German proposal to ally with Mexico to reclaim those territories it had lost in the decades before. Then, the Border Patrol story itself begins in May 1924. And in the 99 years since, it has encompassed everything from David Duke to 9-11 in its journey to becoming the biggest and least accountable law enforcement agency in the federal government. People from the colonial periphery have always migrated to
Starting point is 00:03:12 the metropole. It's why a man called Fat Led singing a song about Vindaloo is basically my country's second national anthem, and why every four years France accepts black French men onto its football team before it returns to vilifying them in other forms of discourse. Migration to the United States is no different. Climate change and US imperialism have destabilized and impoverished nations from the Americas to Afghanistan and driven people to the US border looking for a better life. What's distinct about the US is how obsessed it has become with keeping these people out and enforcing the longest land borders in the world. But the US border is much bigger than the land boundary between the USA and Mexico to the south and Canada to the north. If you're listening to
Starting point is 00:03:51 this in the United States, the chances are that you live in the border enforcement zone. This swore. of territory outside the Constitution has been established since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 established that a reasonable distance of the border would extend 100 air miles around the outline of the country. Two-thirds of the U.S. population live within this zone. Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, and Boston are all within it, and that means that CBP agents can search vehicles and vessels to look for property that's in the country without the right documents. They can board public transportation or set up interior checkpoints and stop, interrogate, and search citizens and non-citizens without the need for a warrant.
Starting point is 00:04:32 Within 25 miles of the border, they can enter your property, provide it's not a domicile. The Fourth Amendment, part of a foundational Bill of Rights that U.S. likes to tout as what makes it different from the rest of the world, doesn't apply when you're near the border. An all-encompassing history of the border and its enforcement is beyond the scope of this podcast. even a history of the southwest border could take up a whole bookshelf. But we will try and skim the high points here. Let's start with a Gadsden purchase, when a party of military surveyors
Starting point is 00:05:00 first bumped into the Horn Autumn elders, as they attempted to draw a line dividing the Horn Autumn people from the Horn Autumn people. The southern border is no more obvious today than it was then. And of course, to the autumn, it was and remains an aberration that divides them from much of their ancestral
Starting point is 00:05:16 and current homelands. It has, over the years, seen violent enforcement on members of the nation, and a growing encroachment of the Border Patrol into today's De Horn Autumn Reservation, which is the second largest in the USA, but only represents a fraction of the tribe's historical homeland. These surveyors were in the process of finalising most of the California and Arizona border, a border I drove most of in the days after Title 42. The southern border, as it looks now, was largely shaped by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,
Starting point is 00:05:46 in which Mexico lost 55% of its territory, including all of what is today California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and parts of what is today Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The Gadsden purchase of 1853 added more of southern Arizona in New Mexico. The specific border in San Jacidro was drawn so that San Diego Bay would fall to north of the line. The border in Acumba seems more arbitrary, a straight line in the desert that runs into a pile of rocks. Of course, long before the border divided San Jacira from Tijuana, this was Kumia land. Despite the border, it still is. The name Tijuana derives from Tijuana, which means by the sea
Starting point is 00:06:25 in Kumiyai. Despite this, the Kumai, and many other indigenous peoples, were ignored when the border crossed them, and it's becoming harder and harder for them to cross it. In parts of desert, it can be pretty hard to see the border at all. In 2020, while out with a group of Kumai people who are in ceremony to honour their ancestors, whose burial sites have been and continue to be desecrated by border war construction, I had to be wary of stepping over over it to better frame my shots. The emergency declaration Donald Trump made allowed war construction to sidestep legislation in place to protect archaeological and sacred sites, but it didn't allow me to sidestep into Mexico to get a better shot. Luckily, Bortak, a team of armed border patrol
Starting point is 00:07:06 agents who you might remember from Portland in 2020, provided a guy dressed like he was in the Battle of Fallujah to help me. I would say the border is a line in the sand, but at the time there wasn't a line that was visible at all. In Valley of the Moon, a few miles east to wear that Bortak patrol guard shouted at people for stepping too close in 2020. The border wall is about waist-high, rusty, and essentially comprised of a single-strand of barbed wire. In Hukumba, the 30-foot Trump wall pushes right up to a boulder pile, and then stops. The logic, as much as there can be any logic in spending $25 million a mile to desecrate sacred spaces and defile the landscape, is that people will be deterred from crossing by the harsh landscape brutally hot days and brutally cold nights.
Starting point is 00:07:47 This logic, of course, fails to consider not just where people are going, but why they're leaving the places they've come from. Risking one's life crossing the border makes sense only when one considers the danger that many people and places around the world face every day. It hasn't always been this way. For your reference, here with Reagan and Bush talking about migration in 1980. I'm going to ask you what you would do about Cuba, but now we're going to have some questions from the audience.
Starting point is 00:08:18 Yes, my name is David Grosberg, and I'd like to know. Do you think that children of illegal aliens should be allowed to attend Texas public schools free, or do you think that their parents should pay for their education? Who are you addressing that, too? I think you're first in this. He was looking right at you. I said he was. Look, I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien problem
Starting point is 00:08:40 that would be so sensitive and so understanding about labor needs and human needs that that problem wouldn't come up. But today, if those people are here, I would reluctantly say, I think they would get whatever it is that they're, you know, what the society is giving to their neighbors. But it has, the problem has to be solved.
Starting point is 00:09:01 The problem has to be solved. Because as we have kind of made illegal, some kinds of laborer that I'd like to see legal, we're doing two things. We're creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law, and secondly, we're exacerbating relations with Mexico.
Starting point is 00:09:21 The answer to your question is much more fundamental than whether they attend Houston schools, it seems to me. I don't want to see a whole, if they're living here, I don't want to see a whole, I think a six- and eight-year-old kids being made, you know, one totally uneducated and made to feel that they're living with outside the law. Let's address ourselves to the fundamentals. These are good people, strong people. Part of my family is a Mexican.
Starting point is 00:09:50 And I add to that, I think the time has come that the United States and our neighbors, particularly our neighbor to the south, should have a better understanding and a better relationship than we've ever had. And I think that we haven't been sensitive enough to our size and our power. They have a problem of 40 to 50 percent unemployment. Now, this cannot continue without the possibility arising with regard to that other country that we talked about, of Cuba and what it is stirring up, of the possibility of trouble below the border and we could have a very hostile and strange neighbor on our border. Rather than making
Starting point is 00:10:25 them or talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they go on to go back, they can go back and they can cross and open the border both ways by understanding their problems. The modern era of border enforcement began, as far as we can pinpoint a single date, was Silvestre Reyes, the then sector chief of the Border Patrol in McAllen, Texas, and his operation hold the line. The community around McAllen had got tired of Border Patrol snooping around businesses and even schools in the Rio Grande Valley. And instead, Reyes deployed his agents
Starting point is 00:11:08 forward in a sort of human fence along the Rio Grande. Reyes would later become the chief of the El Paso sector and a democratic congressman. He lost his seat to be to O'Rourke in 2013. But this strategy would long outlive his career with Border Patrol. The following year, on September to 17, 1994, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno announced a start of Operation Gatekeeper. The first phase of the operation focused on the first five miles of the western border, including the place where I recorded all those interviews you heard earlier this week. According to a piece written a quarter of a century later in the LA Times, the strategy was to deter migrants from illegally crossing in the first place,
Starting point is 00:11:48 and, for those who remained undeterred, to encourage them to cross in more isolated wilderness areas to the east, where they could be more easily captured. There were already fences in 1994, first a chain-link fence, and then one made of helicopter landing mats left over from Vietnam that had horizontal struts that closely resembled and were used as a ladder. Anti-migrant rhetoric was already there, too. California Governor Pete Wilson
Starting point is 00:12:14 became an outspoken advocate for Prop 187, a ballot measure that cut off state services like health care and education to undocumented people. Here's a clip of Wilson's re-election ad. They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won't stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them. Governor Pete Wilson sent the National Guard to help the border patrol. But that's not all. For Californians who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws, I'm suing to force the federal government to control the border.
Starting point is 00:12:47 And I'm working to deny state services to illegal immigrants. Enough is enough. Governor Pete Wilson. Under the operation, a much higher number of agents were deployed to the border. Apprehensions increased, and with them, so did funding for border enforcement. It was around this time that the narrative around the border began to change. It was also around this time, a few months earlier, in fact, that the U.S., Mexico and Canada entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it easier than ever for capital to move across the border
Starting point is 00:13:18 and take advantage of lower wages at Mexico. To learn a little bit more about Operation Gatekeeper, I spoke to one of the agents who was tasked with executing it. My name is Jen Budd, and I'm a former Senior Patrol agent with the United States Border Patrol. I was a senior intelligence agent as well at San Diego sector headquarters. Jenna since left the Border Patrol, but she realized that the impact of Operation Gatekeeper on migrants was anything but positive. Yeah, Operation Gatekeeper started in 1994 in October of 1994, and I got to Campo in November of 1995. And so right afterwards, and the fence was just getting to Takate when I got there. most of my class
Starting point is 00:14:02 I think we had I don't know 40 people graduate or something most of them went down to Imperial Beach and they had a wall there and so that was the idea to fill the San Diego City area with as many agents and weapons and all this and then that would push the traffic
Starting point is 00:14:18 further out to the mountains making it more difficult for them to cross and some of them get injured and we knew some of them would die so it was intentional. The death and the injuries according to management would deter future crosses, but of course that that's not the case. Alan Burson, U.S. attorney in San Diego, was named the so-called border czar by President
Starting point is 00:14:39 Bill Clinton a few years later to implement that same gatekeeper strategy across the rest of the southwest border. Burson saw things a little differently. Neither side claims it, but gatekeeper was probably the most important domestic achievement accomplished in a purely bipartisan manner through three administrations, and the greatest accomplishment since President Eisenhower and the Democrats put together the state highway system in the mid-1950s. But in fact, while apprehensions did drop in San Diego, they spiked by 591% in the Tucson sector between 1992 and 2004. The LA Times quotes the non-partisan congressional research service as saying, one unintended consequence of this enforcement posture
Starting point is 00:15:21 and the shifted migration patterns has been an increase in the number of migrant deaths each year. on average 200 migrants died each year in the early 1990s compared with 472 migrant deaths in 2005 many of those deaths are now in a sector that encompasses the autumn reservation the desert there is particularly hard to cross and the enforcement that began with Operation Gatekeeper pushes more and more people onto the reservation to hauna autumn people used to travel between the United States and Mexico
Starting point is 00:15:51 fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family go to school visit a doctor or perform their traditional ceremonial practices. But after 9-11, the United States and its Border Patrol began a more visible and violent occupation of the reservation. It started with a vehicle barrier in 2007, and it continued with CBP's quote-unquote virtual wall of surveillance technology, cameras and drones. The Israeli company Elbit Systems has built fixed surveillance towers, which they pioneered in the West Bank on tribal land, with the permission of tribal council. Meanwhile, other members of the nation strongly opposed the militarization of their homeland, in the name of security of whatever homeland the Department of Homeland Security
Starting point is 00:16:35 is securing. I'll quote here from Tob Miller, his excellent work on the border is required reading for anyone interested in the subject. Amy Juan and Nellie Joe David, members of Tahorn Autumn Hemajum Rights Network, T-O-HRN, joined a delegation to the West Bank in October 2017, convened by the Palestinian organization to stop the war. It was a relief, one says, to talk with people who understand our fears, who are dealing with militarization and technology. In 2017, the Horn Autumn Vice Chairman Verlon Jose said that a war will be built, quote, over my dead body. And the tribe released a video, saying there is no autumn word for war. The 62 miles of the border on their reservation would remain without one, they said. By 2020, the Trump administration,
Starting point is 00:17:24 had fought through a wall on much of the border using what is known as the Roosevelt Reservation. This is a 60-foot-wide strip of land that the federal government owns along the border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Although much of the autumn nation remains wall-free, and some has what's called a vehicle barrier or a Normandy barrier, approximately one-third of the Roosevelt Reservation is on tribal land. Since 2005's Real ID Act, environmental surveys and laws have been waived for border security, and this gave the Trump administration a way to justify the destruction of Autumn and Kumiye burial grounds, Sawaroktai for the Autumn Sea as relatives, and other sacred sites along the border,
Starting point is 00:18:02 despite efforts by tribal members and allies, to stop the construction. Members of the Tahana Autumn Nation have been pepper sprayed, beaten, tailed and shot by Border Patrol. In 2002, a Border Patrol agent ran over and killed an Autumn teenager. Last week, the same night I was waiting down by the border for the end of Title 42, Border Patrol agent shot and killed Raymond Matia, an odd to a man who had called and asked him for help. He was shot 38 times, just two feet from his front door, according to his family. While Mr. Matia's death is still being investigated,
Starting point is 00:18:38 the Border Patrol has a long tradition of literally getting away with murder. This is because they investigate themselves, using so-called critical incident teams. I talked to Jen about what those teams do. And so what they would do is they would get there first on the scene because we would call them first. We wouldn't call anybody else. We'd call them first. And then they come, they get rid of the witnesses,
Starting point is 00:18:59 they set the scene up the way we want to be done and they tell you the narrative that you're going to stick with, you talk to your union reps, and it's all this giant cover-up. Here's John Carlos Frey, a journalist who covered CIT cover-ups, talking to democracy now about how these teams work. Within the actual agency of the U.S. Border Patrol, there is an investigative body called SIF, the critical incident team. They are tasked with investigating incidents that involve Border Patrol, and it can be anything from a car accident to, in this case, an individual who's killed at the hands of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Starting point is 00:19:35 In this particular case of Anastacio Hernandez-Rohas, Border Patrol agents deleted video. They collected evidence at the scene. They were present in the hospital when Anastacio was being. treated. They were present at the autopsy. They fudged reports. They deleted reports. They co- they coached their own agents on what kind of testimony they were to give. They were present at every one of the depositions. They made sure that they were the victims in this case. And when I say that, what I mean is that Border Patrol agents, sit-team agents, make sure that Border Patrol agents are looked at as the victims in any sort of an incident, meaning that they are allowed then to use lethal force. If a Border Patrol agent has rocks thrown at them or in the case of
Starting point is 00:20:22 Anastasio, they alleged that Anastasio was violent and that he was kicking and punching, and he needed to be subdued. If we take a look at the videotape, that's not actually what happened. He's handcuffed. He's prone on the ground. His face is down. Agents are on top of him. but if you read the reports in this case that were prepared by Sitt, Anastasia was a violent man and needed to be subdued. In 2021, Border Patrol was ordered to disband these teams. But Jen says they simply moved them somewhere else and gave them a different name. So then they said that they disbanded them because we brought the truth out and how they did all this.
Starting point is 00:20:57 And we proved it. But what they actually did is they did a retention. So they had the Border Patrol agents resign from the Border Patrol and move over to CBP, OPR, and rehive. hired them under there. So the team that likely went to go investigate the Tihonum Odom killing, I believe his name is Matia, Raymond Matia, is likely the Border Patrol sit teams. So if the Border Patrol agents, a lot of people don't understand, it's like a cult, you know, they always say you bleed green, you know, and you don't go back from green and probably one of the few that ever left, you know, and tells the truth.
Starting point is 00:21:38 about it. Of course, the vast majority of people whose families will never find justice because of these CIT teams are not white. And of course, Border Patrol has long-rooted links to white nationalism. In 1977, about 45 minutes from San Diego and another 45 minutes from Hocumba, David Duke, Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan at the time, announced the official beginning of Klan Border Watch. Duke claimed there were hundreds of clansmen on the border, but local newspapers of Desert Sun reported that there were, in reality, at least 10. I'll quote directly from the debit sons reporting at a time here. Duke said Klansman would refrain from direct contact with illegal aliens. If any are found,
Starting point is 00:22:19 he said, Klansman would not talk to them or contact them. But if any illegal crossings are seen, they're going to use CB radios to relay the information to Border Patrol, Duke said. Duke, of Metairie, Louisiana, claimed the clan has the support of the American people and helping the Border Patrol stem the influx of illegal aliens into this country. He claimed the illegal aliens take jobs away from US citizens. We feel this rising tide washing over our border is going to affect our culture, he told reporters at the time, in a statement that wouldn't sound out of place on Fox News today. In response, more than 1,500 brown berries threatened to rally against Duke,
Starting point is 00:22:57 and protest far outnumbering his patrols popped up along the border. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Texas Knights for the KKK leader Louis Beam, a Vietnam war veteran who had helped to organize and promote Duke's border stunt, established paramilitary camps around Texas, and trained children's young as eight in the deadly guerrilla warfare tactics he learned overseas. He rallied white fishermen against Vietnamese migrants and burned their boats. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafoo, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What?
Starting point is 00:23:42 Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, And a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched.
Starting point is 00:24:00 You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the
Starting point is 00:24:22 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a vile sickness in Abbas Town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed. You know how waking up from a dream? A familiar place can look completely alien.
Starting point is 00:24:50 Get back, everyone's your necks. And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him. Burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Starting point is 00:25:21 or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in Abistown. All I know is what I've been told, and that to have truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist,
Starting point is 00:25:49 and a handful of girls, came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling.
Starting point is 00:26:12 I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said it. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good. people in small towns.
Starting point is 00:26:53 Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. and mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down, and I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power.
Starting point is 00:27:44 Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother tried to solve my problems. through hypnotism. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time. Being more able to look people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to Heavyweight on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:28:04 In 2019, a Border Patrol agent from Lugart. named Matthew Bowen was accused of knocking down a Guatemala man with his vehicle and then lying to a court about the incident. The prosecutors in the case showed the jury text Bowen sent, including one which called migrants, quote, disgusting subhuman shit unworthy of being kindling for a fire. In several text messages, Bowen references, quote, tonks. This is a derogatory term for border crossing migrants. The origin is a term a little bit unclear, but it seems to be derived from the sound of a flashlight hitting the back of someone's head. In argument against admitting the text, defense lawyer Sean Chapman wrote that he would argue
Starting point is 00:28:56 certain terms are, quote, commonplace throughout the Border Patrol's Tucson sector. This is part of the agency's culture, and therefore it says nothing about Mr. Bowen's mindset. Jen says this kind of language and attitude was not uncommon in her time in Border Patrol, for the mid-90s to the early 2000s, but things have got worse since. there have been some definite changes in the Border Patrol in the training from before 9-11 to after 9-11 and what you also see um so their vocabulary has changed so like they refer to migrants and asylum seekers as invaders we never used that term prior to 9-11 and we did have racist words that we used for them and i i use them as well i'm not denying that of course
Starting point is 00:29:43 This kind of language isn't just restricted to border patrol. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems. Thank you. It's true. And these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you.
Starting point is 00:30:13 They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. There has been white supremacist violence at the border ever since Duke, and long before. Often it's been at the hands of groups outside of the state. Sometimes it's been at the hands of the state. In Arizona, groups like Arizona Border Recone and Minutemen American Defense have terrorized border communities for decades, and gained renewed momentum from Trump's consistent demonization of migrants. I spent a bit of time looking for them in the desert in Arizona last week, but I didn't see much, not that I really wanted to. Interaction with these militias, probably far more often than we
Starting point is 00:31:00 have documented evidence for, can be fatal, just like interaction with customs and border protection. Here's just one example, called from David Newart's excellent book, and Hell followed with her. On May 30th, 2009, Shawna Ford, Jason Eugene Bush, and Albert Gaxiola, all members of Ford's Vigilante Group Minuteman American Defense forced their way into Raoul Flores Jr's home in Alavica, Arizona, by pretending to be Border Patrol agents. The group planned to steal and sell drugs that they thought Flores had in his house. The FBI knew about this, but did nothing to stop them.
Starting point is 00:31:37 Finding no drugs in the house, the vigilantes murdered Flores and he had. his nine-year-old daughter, Brissenae's wife and Brissena's mother, Gina Marie Gonzalez, was shot three times. She played dead, but when attackers returned, she exchanged fire with them using her husband's handgun. In doing so, she hit Bush. Bush had previously been charged with a September 1997 execution of an Aryan Nation associate for the supposed crime of being a race traitor. Both Ford and Bush are currently on death row in Arizona. The KKK was not the only group recruiting children for border patrolling. Since the mid-1980s, the Border Patrol's Explorer Program has recruited young men and women of high school age.
Starting point is 00:32:21 The program is chartered through Learning for Life, which is a subsidiary of the Scouts of America. For kids, often the children of immigrants, living in border towns where industry has long since gone and a decent wage is hard to come by, the program offers the chance at a starting salary of $62,000, twice a median income in some of these towns. Young explorers will learn tracking, survival, shooting, and how to detain and process undocumented migrants, people who in some cases are walking in the footsteps of their own parents. According to an article by Morley Music in the Nation, young explorers have to earn the right to their uniform by participating in their 60-hour Basic Explorer Academy, at which they learned CPR, drills, and the methods of conducting vehicle stops. It also offers courses in radio communications, public speaking, report writing, and ethics and integrity and introduces the use to criminal juvenile immigration of Fourth Amendment law. While I was writing, yes, I checked out the San Diego sector page, which seems to show young people running, shooting, and one who looks like he's just been maced in the face.
Starting point is 00:33:24 The next photo on the Facebook page dedicated to this Border Patrol sector shows a man in handcuffs. Above this is a video of someone dropping a child from the top of the border fence. Without figures from the CVP, it's hard to tell if participation in the Explorers has dropped as public awareness of family separation, assault, another behavior doesn't exactly fit with the Border Patrol's motto on a first has spread. I asked Jen for her take on the Explorer program. Well, I call it Border Patrol youth, because it reminds me a lot of the Hitler youth, where we go into the high schools and we get the kids that are in trouble. and typically they are Latino dominant high schools and we teach them how to be many Border Patrol agents
Starting point is 00:34:05 and we teach them to hate somebody else instead of themselves. We indoctrinate them into the same stuff that I was indoctrinated to. But it's even gone so far now as to they do the dog and pony shows at the elementary school. So they're getting them when they're like six, seven years old and they go there with a little Border Patrol Bulletproof Fest and put them on them and take pictures and put it on social media. and they have them sit in their trucks and turn the sirens on and all this other stuff.
Starting point is 00:34:31 That indoctrination is crucial to Border Patrol culture, and to be honest, the reason I wanted to talk to Jen was to understand it better. In Hocombo, I'd seen a young Border Patrol agent, a woman giving volunteers rides. I'm not about to get into a Border Patrol truck myself, and I wasn't going to get a response if I asked the agent how she squared up her role in holding people in the desert with the fact that some volunteers said she'd spend her own money buying supplies. Jen said that this kind of behavior can be pretty common with young agents. And I had intended to go to law school to be a civil rights attorney when I joined the Border Patrol.
Starting point is 00:35:04 And for me, I ignored my core values and ignored that I was enforcing laws that sent thousands of human beings to their death. Because I felt like I was trying to survive. I was raped in the academy by a fellow agent and they covered that up. and I was really trying to get out of the South and start my life. I often say, like, especially with female agents, they call us the first 5%, because there's never been more than 5% women in the Border Patrol ranks. And they say, oh, it's because it's very hard. It's not because it's very hard.
Starting point is 00:35:39 I mean, it is very hard to get through, but it's also it's because there's actually insulting us all the time in the academy and harassing us. So I go back and forth in my mind, and I would imagine this young woman, you know, she has days where she arrests some pretty decent criminals every now and then once in a blue moon. But the majority of them, if she's paying attention and not completely self-absorbed, she'll realize that they're not criminals and their family is just simply seeking asylum. So she at some point has to decide in her mind, is this what I got into? Is this what I want to do with my life?
Starting point is 00:36:18 In the wake of 9-11, and quite tellingly, the Border Patrol moved from oversight by the Department of Justice to the new Department of Homeland Security. This move, from Justice's Security, has been echoed in its recruiting, which once drew heavily on those with humanitarian aid experience, and now tries to appeal to veterans of the two decades of war that have accompanied the growth of DHS since 2001. When the DHS was first established, the name struck many as problematic. In the 2002 article in the New York Times, Elizabeth Becker wrote that the name had worrying similarities to the way the Nazis talked about their fatherland. And it didn't really fit with the way American spoke.
Starting point is 00:36:56 Nobody in 2001 was talking about the homeland. But two decades and billions of dollars later, it's hard to find much in a way of criticism of the agency in DC, despite the fact that the 2022 budgets of CBP and ICE were 16 and 8 billion respectively. And every year since 2001, DHS has obtained more guns, more drones, and more surveillance technology that is inevitably used to spy on citizens as well as non-citizens. Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafoo, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons.
Starting point is 00:37:38 Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?
Starting point is 00:38:03 Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the I-Hart Radio app, podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it.
Starting point is 00:38:33 Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed. You know how waking up from a dream? A familiar place can look completely alien. Get back everyone. And if you see the dead, Never walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him.
Starting point is 00:38:57 Burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. the devil walks in Aberstown All I know is what I've been told and that's a half truth is a whole lie For almost a decade
Starting point is 00:39:36 The murder of an 18-year-old girl From a small town in Graves County, Kentucky Went unsolved Until a local homemaker, a journalist And a handful of girls Came forward with a story I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people,
Starting point is 00:39:58 and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her Or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said it
Starting point is 00:40:24 They literally made me say that I took a match And struck and threw it on her They made me say that I poured gas on her From Lava for Good This is Graves County A show about just how far Our legal system will go In order to find someone to blame
Starting point is 00:40:42 America y'all better work the hell up Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
Starting point is 00:41:12 I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down, and I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power. Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother try to solve my problems.
Starting point is 00:41:46 Through hypnotism. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time. Being more able to look to people in the eyes. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to Heavyweight on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1995, there are about 4,000 CBP agents.
Starting point is 00:42:16 2020, there were 20,000, with 17,000 stationed on the southern border. This is a slight drop from a peak of just over 21,000 under Obama, who is often called the Deporter-in-Chief for his fondness for expelling people from the United States for crimes like having a pipe or financial misconduct, the so-called aggravated felonies and crimes of moral turpitude that only exist for non-citizens. These agents today have the ability to operate in what the ACLU calls a constitution-free zone, and can conduct suspicion-free searches of electronic devices, use cell site simulators, and sweep up data about thousands of people never accused of any crime. One of the more notable examples of this happened only a few yards from where I was recording last week in Santa Cedar.
Starting point is 00:43:00 It's a story worth recounting in detail, because it brings together the themes we've spoken about so far, demonisation of migrants, government overreach, and a frank disregard for international and national law. In late 2018, I was enjoying a break from work in a caravan near Ensonada. If you think back to that time, right before the midterms, you might remember some of the rhetoric that circulated around a large group of migrants making their way to the southern border. I'll play some of the clips from Fox that NPR cut together in their coverage of the issue. The sympathetic, overwrought coverage of this invading horde is, you know, calling it a caravan
Starting point is 00:43:35 is a misnomer, and frankly sickening. Or sample the chipper morning show Fox and Friends. cutting so many email from people who said, don't call it a caravan. Call it an invasion. Yes. Is that fair? Host Steve Ducey put the question to conservative pundit Michelle Malkin. Of course it is.
Starting point is 00:43:52 It is a full-scale invasion by a hostile force. And it requires our president and our commander-in-chief to use any means necessary to protect our sovereignty. CNN's Brian Stelter found that Fox News featured segments using the phrase invasion more than 60 times this month about the migrants. On Fox Business Network, Lou Dobbs's program invoked it, dozens of times. Trump ordered 5,000 troops to the border. He tweeted yesterday, quote, this is an invasion of our country. And Trump has, without evidence, claimed gang members and criminals and Middle Easterners are among them. Over on Fox, guests have similarly, without supporting facts, suggested people from ISIS and the Taliban might be among those migrants.
Starting point is 00:44:31 Even so, the network's chief news anchor, Shepard Smith, tried to put on the breaks yesterday. Tomorrow is one week before the midterm election, which is what all. All of this is about. There is no invasion. No one's coming to get you. There's nothing at all to worry about. This month, Fox hosts and guests have repeatedly questions whether the migrants might bring in infectious diseases. Again, without evidence.
Starting point is 00:44:56 Laura Ingram. We don't know what people have coming in here. We have diseases in this country. We haven't had for decades. I'll leave you to process the incredible irony of the network that killed a decent percentage of its viewers by denying that COVID was serious or a disease or that vaccine. and masks are useful, panicking about infectious diseases just two years before the pandemic began. The Tree of Life Shooter, who we won't name here, who is currently facing a death penalty trial for murdering 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue was obsessed with the caravan.
Starting point is 00:45:25 The victims of the largest anti-Semitic mass murder in U.S. history included a beloved community doctor, a great-grandmother, and a couple who'd gotten married at the same synagogue more than 60 years earlier. The shooter's last post on hate speech social media site Gab posted just minutes before the synagogue massacre began, spells it out. With a reference to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Jewish non-profit that resettles refugees in the United States. Hi, I'd like to bring invaders to kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.
Starting point is 00:45:56 Screw your optics, I'm going in. The shooter was obsessed with the idea that a caravan of migrants was not a group of people trying to save their own lives, but a coordinated and somehow Jewish-led invasion an attempt to demographically restructure the United States. If you're wondering where he got that idea from, here's America's favorite job seeker Tucker Carlson on the caravan. Over the past month, a caravan of Central American migrants
Starting point is 00:46:18 has gradually made its way up from Honduras through Mexico all the way to Tijuana, opposite San Diego. At one point, Mexican authorities claimed they broke up the group, and American media, of course, dutifully reported that they did. But they didn't. That was just a PR gesture and a temporary one. In fact, during parts of the trip, Mexican police escorted the migrants northward. In other words, the Mexican government abetted illegal immigration into this country, as it has done for many years.
Starting point is 00:46:46 Well, tonight, the caravan is on our southern border. Rather than wait for the crossing station at San Yusidro to open, many of them just jumped the fence. Some waived Honduran flags when they got to the top. And that tells you everything. When you arrive in a country to contribute to it and to assimilate into its culture, you don't wave flag of a foreign nation. That's when you do in triumph when you invade a country. On my way home from Encinato in 2018, I saw that, quote, invading horde in the Benito Juarez sports complex, and promptly turned around and went back. My instinct as a journalist is to cover
Starting point is 00:47:20 things like this, but my instinct of the person is to help first. On the first day I was there, with two friends I know from the weird world of pro-cycling. Things were pretty bad. We'd obtained a backpack full of stoop waffles that a friend who makes stoop waffles had given us, once we gave those out and talked to a few people about what they needed. We coordinated with mutual A groups in Tijuana, and offered to support however we could. In the next few weeks, my friends and I spent $10,000 of thousands of dollars at a Tijuana Costco, received thousands of dollars in donations from people we hadn't seen in years, and in one memorable instance, rigged up a projected at someone who tactically obtained from an office to a DVD player which we'd
Starting point is 00:47:55 installed in the roof of a dilapidated nightclub full of little children and their mothers, so they could watch Beverly Hills Chihuahua and forget about the fact that the country they were traveling to was portraying the little infants as invaders. I have a lot of very complicated memories of those few weeks. Little girls braiding my hair. Little boys and girls trying to comprehend exactly how I could be this bad at football. And people from San Diego churches, Tijuana Anacus Kitchens, and mutual aid groups around the region coming together to look after a group of people who've been so heavily demonized by folks who had never met them or even been here. Here's Trump defending, calling the caravan an invasion and simultaneously explaining why migrants' low-wage labor is
Starting point is 00:48:33 desirable for people like him. Thank you, Mr. President. I wanted to challenge you on one of the statements that you made in the tail end of the campaign in the midterms. Here we go. Well, if you don't mind, Mr. President, that this caravan was an invasion. As you know, Mr. President, the caravan was not an invasion. It's a group of migrants moving up from Central America towards the border with the U.S.
Starting point is 00:48:58 Thank you for telling you. And why did you characterize it as such? Because I consider an invasion. You and I have a difference of opinion. But do you think that you demonized immigrants in this election to try to keep? I want them to come into the country, but they have to come in legally. You know, they have to come in, Jim, through a process. I want it to be a process.
Starting point is 00:49:18 And I want people to come in, and we need the people. Your campaign. Wait, wait. You know why we need the people, does you? Because we have hundreds of companies moving in. We need the people. Trump, as you heard in a clip, used a migrant caravaner to prop for its racist and bigoted midterm campaign. It didn't work, and he lost control of the house, but he did succeed in forcing these people
Starting point is 00:49:37 to spend months in the cold, first in a sports stadium, and then in an old nightclub. Even as the migrants gradually reduced in number, with many finding work and a new life in Mexico, and some finding their way north, the long legacy of that caravan was only just starting. In the months have followed, journalists who'd covered the caravan, as well as those who offered assistance to caravan members, said they felt they'd become targets of intense inspections of scrutiny by border officials. I got pulled into secondary only once during this time, and that was entering Mexico. The worst I got was a chance to inspect my 1980 pickup truck's oil pan.
Starting point is 00:50:11 But for others, things weren't so easy. Homeland Security Investigation Special Agent turned whistleblower Wesley Petternag helped NBC to document that, under the umbrella of what was called Operation Secure Line, the Department of Homeland Security created a database of activists, journalists, and social media influencers tied to the migrant caravan. When they crossed the border, individuals in that database were, were often subjected to hours-long screenings, and in some cases had flags placed on their passports. A PowerPoint slideshow, which Pettenac leaked to NBC7, lists some of the people. Some of them have been guests on this show. They include 10 journalists, seven who are
Starting point is 00:50:49 U.S. citizens, a U.S. attorney, 48 people from the U.S. and other countries who are labeled as organizers, instigators, or having unknown roles. The target lists also includes organizers from groups like Border Angels and Pueblos in Fronteras. I asked journalist Brooke Benkowski describe her experience of increased border scrutiny in 2018. If you don't have a pre-approved card, you have to go through, wait in light, wait in this long-ass line, and then you go and get vetted by CBP, they ask you some questions, or they just wave you through, depending on what kind of day they're having or whatever. So in my case, I started getting pulled into secondary inspection more and more,
Starting point is 00:51:28 so they would wave my car over and then take me into the secondary place. where it's sort of like this back, it's like a Quonset pet sort of, and in it, like all these cars drive in and out, and they'll go through your things, they'll get in your face, you know, they'll do all kinds of stuff. And I don't, there have to be cameras in there somewhere, but I've never seen any. So I just kept getting pulled into secondary more and more, as though I was a suspicious person, as though I was suspected of something. And every time I ask, they'd be like, I don't know, it's just random, ma'am, it's just random. So actually this started about 2014 for me, but it started to escalate in 2017-2018, 2017-2018 started
Starting point is 00:52:07 to escalate. And I was like a fucking Trump administration, of course, it's going to escalate, right? Under Trump, she said things got worse. From 2017 through 2018, it kind of worked, where it pushed back and I'd be like, you need to let me fucking go. You know, I'm sentry. I'm already pre-checked. If you think that there's something wrong that I'm doing, then take my fucking century away. And I want to talk to your manager type of stuff, right? So I was doing that. That worked until 2018, and then it started to get really gnarly. Eventually, things came to a head the day before the migrants of the caravan were tear gassed, and they've seen most people remember from 2018.
Starting point is 00:52:39 So, but on that night, as I was coming back, I drove through and I did the century thing, you know, the usual stuff and got pulled into secondary. And this time, it was really, like, gnarly. The time before that had also been really gnarly. Like, nobody hurt me, nobody did anything. But they got really close to my. face like right in my face you know and started screaming at me like screaming over me and I kept going I'd like to speak to your manager you know sir like please please get out of my face sir and um it was it was gross and they were going through my shit and that was gross like they didn't find anything but it was just an invasive hostile disgusting thing and that was when um so i said can
Starting point is 00:53:23 I speak to your manager, which is a magic phrase when you're a middle-aged white woman. So I say this and they bring over some guy and he goes, ma'am, can I help you? I'm like, yeah, what the fuck? You know, why are you treating me this way? Why did any of this happen? And he goes, oh, yeah, I'm sorry, your name's on a list somewhere. You've been flagged. And I'm like, so every time I've crossed, I've been flagged.
Starting point is 00:53:47 He's like, yeah, and yeah, you've been, there's a flag on your passport or against your name. And that's why. And I said, well, why is there a flag against my name? And he goes, I don't know, you're going to have to do a freedom of information act request or something. I don't even know if you knew I was a journalist. Sadly, Brook Glass crossed in 2018. And since I photographed those Kumai folks in Ceremony near Campo, the border wall has only got longer.
Starting point is 00:54:10 Every mile it stretches out means another mile into the desert people have to walk. And that means that more people won't walk out of that desert. Those people who lost their lives in attempt to save them are marked with little red dots on the various maps that attempt to put the humanitarian crisis into a visual form. Those dots begin in South America as people die travelling north, but they're sparse and isolated. Where that changes is the places I've been driving all week. Eastern California, Southern Arizona, places I know from years of hiking, climbing and cycling. Places where one mistake can be fatal.
Starting point is 00:54:44 I know from my friends who spend time resupplying water caches and searching for missing people that you don't have to make any mistakes to die in the desert. especially if you're young or old or sick or afraid to ask for help. These are the places we force people to travel through, on foot, to come here and create a better future for themselves. Dehydration, exposure and drowning, all rank highly as caused a death along the border. Last year saw a record for border deaths and was Biden attempting to take a hard line going into 2024, and climate change and instability continuing to drive migrants north, to the place that causes so much of that climate change and instability,
Starting point is 00:55:23 there's no reason to believe things will get better. I want to point to one tragic loss, one of thousands, that happened not far from where I live. In February of 2020, Juana, Margarita, and Paola Santos-Aarthe, were travelling by foot from Oaxaca to their future in the United States, along a trail, sometimes known of the Shrine Trail. Their family told media back home that they were searching for El Sweenio-American, the American dream.
Starting point is 00:55:47 Along their route is a small religious shrine, which marks the last point from which you can see in Mexico. It's well inside the US, along a dry creek bed in the Laguna Mountains. It can be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Last November I camped out there, and even with thousands of dollars in gear, I was dangerously close to cold injury. I've also rescued hikers with dehydration symptoms near here. The desert and the weather might be part of the story. But the desert doesn't kill people on its own. It's the border that forces people deep into the desert that kills them.
Starting point is 00:56:23 The desert is just a tool for a system that uses death as a deterrent. When the gills crossed the border near Campo on the 9th of February, it was raining. As they climbed to the Laguna Mountains, it started to snow. They huddled under a boulder for warmth, and the two men smuggling them across struck out to get cell reception and call 911. By the time Borestar, Border Patrol searched trauma and rescue team arrived. two of the girls had died. As they tried to save Juana, their request for air support was declined,
Starting point is 00:56:52 and she died with one of the agent's jackets wrapped around her, and another agent's beanie on her head. For some reason, the girls' remains were not recovered right away, and they were not re-warmed. And so they lost their last chance at the American dream and their life. Today, their final resting place is marked by three crosses and a cache of supplies, placed there by volunteers. At the time I'm recording this, we don't know where all the folks we met at the border are now, and we might never know.
Starting point is 00:57:22 Not being able to follow stories is the sad part of this reporting sometimes. You know, as people all have my phone number, but they might not anymore have their phones. Or the scrap of paper I wrote it on. Often these things can be taken for them in custody. What we do know is it on May 18th, exactly one week after Title 42 ended, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, tweeted a video. of Customs Enforcement and Removal Operations agents walking down the corridor of a flight full of of masked people. The caption read, Ice conducted multiple removal flights, including Ecuador,
Starting point is 00:57:56 Guatemala and Honduras as part of dozens flights conducted each week. On the wall of my office as I write this, there are several propaganda posters from the Spanish Second Republic. One is as simple as it is heartbreaking. The poster depicts a squadron of fascist bombers and the dead body of a child. The slogan underneath reads, if you tolerate this, then your children will be next. The poster was, of course, correct. It was the inspiration for songs by the clash and the Manxbury preachers, which of what in turn made me want to learn about the Spanish Civil War. The slogan, coined in 1937, feels as relevant today as it does then. It was one that folks on the border might as well have been screaming by 2018, but one that went ignored
Starting point is 00:58:39 just as it did in 1937. In 2020, folks began to realize what it meant, when Border Patrol drones circled the skies around Minneapolis, and cell phone signal interceptors tracked citizens all over the US when they came together to demand that the police stop murdering people. It became more real in 2023, when under DeSantis, Florida began the process of legalizing state kidnapping of trans and gender non-conforming kids from their loving families.
Starting point is 00:59:05 But that all began when the state ripped indigenous children from their families in the 19th and 20th centuries, and tried to destroy their culture by punishing them for wearing their clothes, speaking their languages or using their names. It wasn't a big leap from there to Trump's family separation policy, which attain kids on their own,
Starting point is 00:59:21 away from their families, as a means of punishing and deterring migrants. And it's reached its obvious end point in Florida, because, despite all the people chatting about kids in cradies in 2020, this almost universal bipartisan agreement on treating people of our southern border like humans without rights. And because for two decades,
Starting point is 00:59:39 allowed the border's surveillance industrial complex to grow to an unprecedented and uncontrollable scale the watches us all. Changing things now will be very difficult. DHS aren't numbers many nations' armies, and it's considerably better equipped. But unless people show up and take action, things are going to get considerably worse, regardless of who you vote for, or what they say in order to get you to vote for them. As Katie said, little things can make a difference, and if you listen this far, I hope you'll take the time to try and do those little things. Before we go, I want to update you on what's happened in the week we've been publishing this. Although there are no longer people held out in the open in Hocomba and San Ysidro,
Starting point is 01:00:18 there are still many people trying to present themselves at a San Jacero border to claim asylum. Today I was told there are about a hundred of them. They're waiting there often for days. Most of them are getting turned away. They're all frustrated with CBP1, which continues to be buggy, offer no appointments, and struggle to photograph black faces. I also wanted to mention some of the organizations you can find and donate to if you'd like to support their efforts. They are the Asian Solidarity Collective, Al-O-Trolado, the American Friends Service Committee, Border Kindness, Borderlands Relief Collective, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, and Prevenkasa, P-R-E-V-N-C-A-S-A.
Starting point is 01:01:04 I'd also like to thank Joe O'Reana. His Twitter is at Joe Orphoto for his reporting, which very much contributed to this series. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen here updated monthly
Starting point is 01:01:33 at CoolZonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Johnny Knoxville here. Check out Crimeless, Hillbilly Heist, my new true crime podcast from Smartless Media, campside media, and big money players. It's the true story of the almost perfect crime and the Nimrods who almost pulled it off.
Starting point is 01:01:52 It was kind of like the perfect storm in a sewer. That was dumb. Do not follow my example. Listen to Crimless, Hillbilly Heist, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Ed Helms host of Snafoo, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.
Starting point is 01:02:18 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Yeah, it's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Shearer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan, Klepper. Listen to season four of Snafoo. with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a vile sickness in Abbas Town.
Starting point is 01:02:45 You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years, until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Starting point is 01:03:43 And to binge the entire season, ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

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