It Could Happen Here - Darién Gap: One Year Later | Part One: After The Jungle

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

In the first of a four part series, James catches up with Primrose and her daughter Kim, who he met in the Darien Gap. We hear about the journey from Panama to the USA’s southern border, and the challenges migrants face along the way. Primrose’s Legal Aid Fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/f/immigration-lawyer-for-primrose Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/world/americas/trump-us-mexico-border.html https://www.fresnobee.com/news/article299272524.html https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/woody-guthrie-deportee-song-immigrants-rare-recording-1235383582/ https://southkernsol.org/2024/09/30/marker-unveiled-at-1948-plane-crash-site-that-killed-28-mexican-passengers/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-orders/  http://www.toddmillerwriter.com/border-patrol-nation/  https://timzhernandez.com/all-they-will-call-you/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kev on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who have massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on?

What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Check out, Not My Best. moment with me kept on stage on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan?

Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. On this week's

episode of next chapter, I, TDJ, sit down with Denzel Washington, a two-time Academy award-winning actor and cultural icon for a conversation about change, identity, and

the moment everything shifted. I mean, I don't take any credit for it. It's nothing I did as special, you know, did knock down a few pegs and recognize it, but I just didn't put me first. I just put God first and he's carried me. Whether you're rebuilding, reimagining, or just trying to hold it together, this one will speak to you. Listen to the next chapter podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your. your podcast. New episodes drop weekly. Don't miss one of them.

I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast. Are You a Charlotte? The most anticipated guest from season three is here, The Tray to My Charlotte. Kyle McLaughlin joins me to relive all of the magical Trey and Charlotte moments. He reveals what he thinks of Trey giving Charlotte a cardboard baby and why he chose not to return to and just like that you listen to are you a charlotte on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts coalser media Like most of you, I wasn't having a great day on the 20th of January of 2025. I wasn't about to watch the inauguration, so I went for a run in the mountains instead. I spent the next few weeks trying to focus on the things we could do, the things we had to do, to get through four years of fascism.

Just a few miles away from my house, I set out for my run, and unbeknown to me, my friend Primrose was staring down from the top of a 30-foot steel monument to hate that Donald Trump had built the last time he was president. To be more accurate, it was one that he had been modified. There have been versions of the border wall in San Diego for decades. They said, no, we have a option. We need to take you. But, you know, for me, I had to take a risk because I was scared to stay in Mexico.

so they took us under the bridge I think the sewage we were walking with our stomach like under the bridge till we get to USA and Mexican borders so they put ladder for us to help us those people when they saw

American immigration came they just removed the ladder and me I was on top so I had I was stuck there and I had I had no choice in the Kim, but she was crying. Like, come, let's go, let's go. At that time, I knew nothing about it,

but her daughter Kim had already jumped. As the Biden presidency drew to her close, but before Trump began signing executive orders with pens he tossed into the crowd, she'd made it into the U.S. Her mom was in the U.S. as well. The wall is inside the border. But the people who had helped her get up to the top of the war

had fled when Border Patrol arrived. taking their ladder with them. And so Primrose was left atop the wall, the literal and metaphorical final hurdle in her long and dangerous journey that had begun in Zimbabwe and went through South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica,

Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. But before we come down from the border wall, I want to take you back to the Miss Soak Riverbank of Maragantee last September. Daddy, my fixer, and I, had woken up at non-godly hour, and so had the jungle birds. Along with half the population of the village, we walked down to the riverbank, carrying the engines and fuel tanks at Pidaguas. A few minutes later, a chorus of two-stroke engines and smoke fired up as the boat set off towards Bajaquito.

I stood in the bow, still trying to master. to the use of the pole as we passed through the faster moving shallower water. Daddy sat in the middle and laughed at me. Despite my best efforts, we arrived in one piece in Baho Chiquito, and I lodged myself from the bow into knee-deep water. On the rocky beach in front of us stood hundreds of people, patiently waiting for the Piraigueros to take them north and out of the jungle. Stretched like a snake all the way through town,

the line of migrants must have totaled a thousand people. I walked backwards, away from the boats. The only foreigner not leaving. Look for people I'd met the day before. About halfway down the line, stood Primrose and Kim. And I stopped while we chatted for a bit about what the boat ride was like, what they could expect next. Yeah, I'm going there.

Yeah, I'm going to United States. Do you have family there? No. No, you just make your American life? No. It's okay, I think. I'm just trying, no. It's only me and my daughter. Despite this, they had found community on the journey.

I can't describe how scary it must be for two women to set out on this journey alone. It takes an awful lot to embark on that journey and to be able to trust people when everyone is a potential threat. But if there's one thing I learned in a jungle, it's it in the hardest times and the hardest places, the only way forward is together. Primrose reminded me of this, telling me how complete strangers had helped her.

very nice especially these Spanish people they are very nice I don't want to like because if you need help people call them for help the other ones they might run away but the other ones they just come for

for help they even give us tablets on the road give us energy drinks give my daughter sweets for energy they push us like let's go guys let's go let's go let's go you make it

and we really make it Yeah, that's really nice to hear. I asked Primrose a question I asked everyone there. What did she hope for when she got to America? What was her American dream? What do you hope for her in America? What do you want to do in America? I want to go to school, then she can achieve something in life.

I don't wish my daughter to go back to Zemu, no. Yeah. Not at all. No, it's very hard in Zim. Yeah. It's really, really tough. Yeah. I saw them a few days later in the group of

I saw them a few days later in Las Blancas after it sat with a group of little Venezuelan children playing a game where we'd throw bottle tops into a broken half cinder block we talked about the struggle they faced to pay for the bus north and we didn't record anything that day But as I was leaving for the evening, Kim asked me if I could buy her a drink. I generally try not to splash my money around because I don't have enough money to help everyone and I still have some scars from a ridiculous concept of objectivity that would lead some editors

not to commission a story from me if I gave the subject a gift. But this time I felt like buying her a drink and I let her select the biggest bottle of cold soda she could find in the little store in the camp there. I told her and her mum to stay in touch and wrote my number on a couple. piece of my notebook, tore it out and gave it to them. Months later, Kim was holding the same scrap of paper, looking up at her mum stuck on the border wall. A whole lot had changed since I last saw them. A few days after my scripted podcast from the Dalian Gap was released, the United States elected Donald Trump as its 47th precedent. It was a shit month all round that my phone, as it

often does, lit up with messages from my daddy and friends, asking me what this meant, and if Trump was going to close the border. I didn't really know how to answer those questions, because if there's one thing we know about trumpets, he changed his mind every few weeks. As we got closer and closer to the day he was inaugurated, they got more and more concerned. Most of them hadn't made it out of southern Mexico. Many of them had told me the things there were even worse than the jungle. They'd all been robbed, some of them had been sexually assaulted, some of them kidnapped, and some of them killed. I'd heard about all of these things. every day from September last year to January this year.

In the middle of a run or when I was having dinner, meeting a friend for a coffee, my phone would ring. And I'd be confronted with terrible injustice, and I'd be totally powerless to set it right. As time went on, I heard from fewer and fewer of them. I assumed their phones were stolen, but there are, of course, more upsetting explanations as to why they might have stopped contacting me.

Noemi, the little girl who wanted to visit Minnie Mouse, video called me once from Tapachulo, with a little tiny toy bear that I'd given her and that she'd kept with her on the whole journey. It may be happy to see them, and a silly little bear carved from Soap Zone that had traveled the lengths of South America with them. Every few weeks after I'd left,

I'd get photos of the bear in a different country as a little Osito worked its way closer to Disneyland. Some people who worked at Disneyland had reached out to offer suggestions about tickets. Other people had reached out offering to pay. I was, despite the odds, hoping that one day I could help one little girl see her American dream come true. When we spoke, she was with her mum, and they were trying to log on to CBP1, hoping for an appointment. But it wouldn't work on their old Android phones.

I tried to find shelters with reliable internet that would take them in, and called friends and NGOs almost every week, passing along questions or looking for resources. I spent hours calling, finding it hard to accept that the capacity for mutual aid was so overwhelmed that nobody had a safe space for little girl and her mum, and wondering if it still felt like a pepper-pig adventure, or if even little indomitable Noemi was scared now. Even from where I was, with the fast internet and a web of friends across the Western Hemisphere, I couldn't find the help people needed, and it made me increasingly angry and anxious the more I tried.

It sucked, but there was still a chance her was slim, that one day I might get to see Noemi meet Minnie Mouse. So I kept trying, and so did her mum. Then, one day, I got no response from her mum's WhatsApp when I messaged her. Nobody picked up the phone when I tried to ring. I still haven't had a response. But periodically I'll keep trying. Even the last messages and photos have gone now after my WhatsApp updated.

like so many of the people who I shared my food with whose little children held my hand in the darkness of the jungle who I desperately wished and wish I could do more for. They're gone now. That's what strong borders means. It means brave little girls disappearing so a politician who knows nothing at their struggles can point to a statistic.

I have listened to the interview I conducted with them so many times since last September. I still can't really work out how anyone with a heart could hear that and think they wanted to live in a world where that little girl wasn't safe. But that's what people voted for, I guess. I don't think they did, actually. I can't think they did. I think people lied to them, and that's what they voted for. But nonetheless, here we are now,

sitting in a country that didn't want to help the little girl who flexed her arm muscles to show me how strong she was after climbing the mountains of the most dangerous land migration route in the Americas, and told me it was, for her, all an adventure. Her mother gave a different account. I didn't want to cry because I didn't want her to see me crying, but sometimes I would explode because it's hard for your child to ask you for water, to ask you for food, and you don't have any.

So be in a place where you walk. You walk from 5 in the morning, it's 5 in the afternoon, you're walking, you don't know what to do, going through more than 100 rivers and asking God not to rain, and not wanting it to get worse. It rained, and the girl got a fever. She got a fever. But while God is good that we pray a lot, I say that we don't know God so much in the church,

in the process, and the process that we are in, and we don't know we can be so strong until we go through that storm, and we see that he protects us. He knows that he was always there watching over us, taking care of us at all times. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan.

It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Edmund Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person?

I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Showgame on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith. This is Jacob Goldstein.

And we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people. Horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson.

Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what?

They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the Electoral. listen to business history on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast what up y'all it's your boy kev on stage i want to tell you about my new podcast called not my best moment where i talk to artists athletes entertainers creators friends people i admire who had massive success about their massive failures what did they mess up on what is their heartbreak and what did

they learned from it. I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest.

We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like,

we got into the small talk. And they were just like, so what do you got? what, what ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out not my best moment with me, Kevin on stage on the Iheart radio app, Apple podcast, YouTube,

or wherever you get your podcast. I don't want to dwell on this too long because talking in public about grief is something I'm bad at. One of my friends died fighting in Ukraine this year. A colleague died just weeks before we'd planned a trip together. Some of my Burmese friends died fighting, but even as someone who talks to soldiers for a living,

nothing really compares to the death toll inflicted by the US border regime. The little village in England where I grew up, there were memorials in every town, a village, for the young people who died fighting in the world wars. If we built those at the border, they'd soon be towering far above the wall that does so much of the killing.

Things are as bad now as they've ever been. The war construction in the San Diego sector that Trump administration has proposed will waive environmental and cultural protections and push migrants further into the desert. In the desert, further from help, further from water, more of them will die. I speak to migrants all the time, the ones who stayed in Mexico, even the ones who took the Venezuelan government's offer as flights home. As much as they ask about America, they also ask about each other.

Do I know what happens to the Angolans who shared their food so generously, they say? No, I haven't heard from them. What about the Venezuelan trans girl who braided their children's hair? Was she still braiding hair? But she hasn't made it to the US. Actually, she did make it, and then she was immediately deported back to southern Mexico. How about Rose, they say, the Bolivian girl who came all on her own and found a family along the trail, only to be separated from them again.

I haven't heard from her in a year. universally they're happy to hear about Kim and Primrose they're glad to hear that someone made it that somebody can make it because of the more than a hundred pages I tore out of my notebook with my phone number they are two of the three people who let me know they made it here so let's hear from Primrose about what it looks like to make it here how it feels to have the best outcome of anyone I met let's pick up at La Hasblancas the now shuttered migrant reception center were a hundred's language for weeks and months

trying to get together the money to pay for a bus to the Panama Costa Rica border. I think I spent seven days in Panama. I was short with money, so I went to immigration trying to ask them if they can help me to take a bus to Costa Rica, of which they refuse.

They said, no, you have to pay. your $60, you and your daughter, which went to India. So I pay that. So I ask people, man, the people I know, they helped me with money. So from Panama, we took a bus from Panama to Costa Rica. This is a very common story. People borrow money from a huge range of friends and relatives along the way. They hope to get to the U.S., work hard and be able to pay it back.

The whole process takes every penny they've earned in their life and generates significant amounts of debt in most cases. This is made worse by the fact that on arrival, they will wait months, if not years, for a work permit, and their immigration judge can stop the clock on this at any time for any reason. Primrose and Kim's case, Costa Rica moved them through its territory quickly, as they do with nearly all migrants. Next, they arrived in Nicaragua.

Yeah, to Nicaragua. Then in Nicaragua, I think we walk from Costa Rica border to Nicaragua border. Then we walk again. I think it was eight hours walk from, yeah, to Nicaragua bus terminus. We just walk. Then when we reached there, we paid again to Honduras. Then there's also a place we walked from Honduras, from Nicaragua to Honduras, birth terminus.

I think this was a whole day. Then from Honduras, Guatemala. In Guatemala, we spent three days again because it was tough. Guatemala people, they really need asking for a lot of money. So my life

was like asking people, asking people until we get, and do we reach Mexico. then exhausted and broke she and Kim made it to Mexico their journey began in Zimbabwe and took them from there to South Africa then to Brazil and across a continent

now they had just one more country to go before they made it but as they were to find out this one country is the one that so many migrants don't make it out of then in Mexico my life was like in it because they were charging a lot of money in Mexico. In fact, when we reach Mexico, we reached Tapachula.

Not before Tapachula. I just forget the name. So they took us in the bush where we paid money again. When we paid money, they started searching us if we don't have guns. Then they walk with us. It was 12 midnight. They walk with us. get a transport to take us to Tapachula. So when I reached Tabachula, you know people, we were giving information to each other. So I was also following other people, like from Cameroons and Venezuela.

So when we reached Tabachula, we reached Tabachula on the 3rd of October, 2024. Tapachula in the south of Mexico is where thousands of migrants end up. the Mexican government at the time had a policy of trying to keep people there and began offering them free bus rides north if they had a CBP1 appointment

but unlike places like Tijuana where there have been migrants gathered for many decades there are not as many services in Tapachula and the shelters and services that exist there are overwhelmed by the demand the volume of migrants and the relative absence of services leaves a space open for abuse. That's what happened to

Primrose and Kimberley they ended up paying someone who where they thought could help them navigate the complicated and convoluted system of registration in Mexico, the CBP One app, and then traveling north to the USA, and ultimately being able to make their asylum claim finally. In the end, what they got was the opposite of help. Then the urgent charge us $4,000 each, which is me $4,000 and my daughter $4,000, of which I wasn't left that man. other people they were paying so I just talked to

the agent and I said no can you please go down a little bit because I'm a single parent and I don't have anyone to help me with that kind of money then he said okay 3.5

so I started asking people be the people I know maybe they can help me so I have a lady who helped me with the money which is she gave me 4,000 years. Then

my mom sold my land. I was having a land with which she sold with less money. Then she sold even also his stuff to get another month to complete 7,000. So

we ask someone to send it to America because in Mexico they don't receive money from Africa. So I found someone here in America to received the man. So he sent it to me in Mexico. But when I paid the man, the agent took me, he said, I'm going to take you. So he sent the guys, they were four Mexican guys. So they came to fetch us. We were six, seven, yeah. I don't even know where they took us. So they

took us to the bush, which is Guajaradala, I can't even remember. Is it Guadalya? Yeah, I think. So I spent the day from October up to January. In the background here, you'll hear splashing. That's Kim playing in the pool, a little apartment complex where they were living in East L.A. As it's common for migrants to share a flat with someone else, didn't have much in the way of furniture. But the last time I saw Primrose and Kim, it was by the Toucessa River in Las Blancas. There, the brown water was something to be afraid of. Migrants died crossing the river every day, swept away by the fast-moving water, and reliant only on strangers to hold them as the current

tried to pull them in. A few times I walked out into that river. I felt the tug of the current on my boots, and wondered what it must be like higher up in the mountains. At six foot three, the river I crossed never came above waist high. It's deeper higher up. But even then, reaching out my hand to carry someone's bag or grab a child's hand as they came from the other direction and struggled to keep their toddlers and their few positions out of the current. I get little jolts of fear when I stepped on a wet rock.

Here's primrose talking about that part of her journey. My daughter, she was strong. She was strong, but she was crying also, but she had got wounds all over the body. Even me, I was crying myself. I was like, I want to just put myself in the water, then I can just go, both the jane was tough.

Really, really tough. The mountain, the stones, the river. It's not easy at all. It's not, it's not very, I don't even recommended someone to say, use daddy and gave, no. And even myself, I did know about it.

Yeah. I was regretting myself. I was crying. I was like, God, I don't know my family. And my family, they don't know back in Los Angeles Primrose told me that she'd fallen in the river and two Venezuelan men had jumped in to pull her and came out. Total strangers, on their own journey, had risked their lives to help a woman and child who didn't know, with whom they couldn't even speak. The river kills people who drink it too. The concentration of human waste and human

remains in the water makes it incredibly dangerous to drink, even for people dying of thirst. stop thinking of that river and how much it scared people. I'm feeling so grateful that Kimberly could still enjoy the water after all of that. Next time, I said, they could take the train down to San Diego and we could all go to the beach. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster,

hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link.

Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff.

I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast. Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption

rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Robert Smith. This is Jacob Goldstein. And we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history and some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story.

We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the electric chair.

Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Podcasts. best moment where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo. Somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding.

But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal felt through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk and they were just like, so what do you got? What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out not my best moment with me, Kevin on stage on the Iheart radio app, Apple podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Let's go back to Mexico now. Let's go back to Mexico now. to Guadalajara.

When many migrants told me that of all the things they had endured, including the jungle, things were the worst of all. Promot's arrival in Mexico had not been great. And having paid one person, she was now being held by another group and asked for yet more money. They were kidnapping me.

They were asking for $15,000 each. They said, we are not going to take you. And I was crying. Kim, she was also. crying the other people they will get money paid

and leave I think from my group for the people they were kidnapping it was only me left and he came and I was crying

depression I think in November I tried I tried one to escape run away I fell down

and my leg was anything else. I didn't even go to hospital. My leg was swollen and the way they would treat us, it was bad. Especially when I F came, the other one wanted touching me, the whole board, I was like, please, if you want to do something, you can do it to me. And plus, don't do it in front of my daughter because she was also crying, disturbing. I didn't even go to hospital. I asked them to go to hospital, they refuse. Yeah, James, I'm too immunoshi now, I'm sorry.

Primrose, understandably, had trouble even recounting this story. It's not the sort of memory that's easy to share. But just when things seemed to be beyond repair, and when it seemed like there was nothing to hope for, it was Kimberly who came through to help her mom. Yeah, then, um, so, Kim Malish was like learning Spanish, so she was understanding some of the ways. So she's just telling me this.

A guy also was like, why can you leave this woman? Because she doesn't have money. Because those people, they took my phone. They even break it in front of my eyes. The phone I was hearing from Africa. Kim Spanish was pretty good by the time I met them in Los Angeles this summer. He went out for dinner and asked Kim what she'd like to eat. She said she wanted to try seafood, and practiced her Spanish.

So he went to a Mexican seafood place, complete with cabana decor, taxidermy fish on the wall. And the waitress kindly helped Kim order in Spanish, patiently showing her different menu items and smiling as Kim read them off. It was a happy moment for me, and what I didn't think I'd ever be having when I moved here in the bush era. But that part of Southern California has always been a welcoming place for me. When I was in my 20s and racing bikes for a living, I'd fly into ever. LAX and often end up spending the night at Union Station or Alvera Street before taking a train to San Diego. I speak Spanish, and always felt like the people I met there were such a better reflection of LA than the portrayal we see of it in the media. Now, a decade and a half later,

sitting in a Mexican restaurant where a lady from Nai'ri helped the little girl from Zimbabwe speak Spanish, it felt like a little glimpse of the way we're told things are here, and the way they can be in working-class communities, a nation built by migrants, yes, on stolen land, but one that nonetheless welcomed people who needed help, and took the time to help them. Sadly, not everyone was helpful on Kim and Primrose's journey. And when her captors realized she had no money to pay them, they eventually just decided to let her go. Then I think on January, this is January 7 or 50, I don't remember. Then they just took us, then they just dumped us.

I don't even know. Then I saw an immigration officer with the car, then I stopped him. Then I translate to ask him to... Then they said, okay, get inside the car, they took us to immigration. So we get a pass from there to another town because I was like

shifting, shifting, shifting, asking to I get Joanna. But those guys before, they told me like, whatever you go, even if you are here in Mexico, we put a tracker

for you. So if you tell anyone, if we find you, you are going to kill you. So me, I was scared. Yeah, I was scared. So I did. So I tell even the immigration officer until I get to Tijuana.

So we get to Tijuana on the 20th of January. So I just asked the Mexicans people. Then there's a guy also said okay, I will try to help you but you need to pay. Then I said, I don't have money.

If you don't have money, we can't help you. So I was like, only asking people asking everywhere, people to help me. And the other people, they were just hoping me. I said, people, look where I am with my daughter, I'm far. But my family, the other family, especially my other family member, they don't even know where I am. So those guys from Tijuana, they said,

guys, if you are not crossing today, you're not going to cross. Look, the president, and he said he's going to shut down all the borders. In between November and January, non-stop rumours circulated in giant WhatsApp groups. Trump was closing the border, Biden was opening it. Most migrants didn't have the means to get to the southern border even if they tried. CBP1 remained mostly useless, and people spent days, weeks, months, refreshing it to no avail. Those who did get appointments would find them cancelled once a new administration came into office. Their reward for doing things in the so-called right way,

was to be left with no options, in a country where they were anything but safe and far from home. Mostly, my friends in the jungle have retained their incredibly good humour. Dead of Whelan friends' video caught me once when I was on a hike. They started laughing at me sweating, going uphill, and paused a conversation to shout encouragement for a while. A year after I left the jungle, I would still be more than happy to welcome these people as my neighbours. But it seems unlikely I ever will. Border crossings have dropped dramatically. They're not, as the administration sometimes claims zero, but they are lower.

People die crossing the border still. Sometimes the volunteers, you've heard in my last series, have to hike miles into the desert and sift through sand and rocks to search their remains. Once nature scatters them, like leaves blowing around the canyons. Sometimes I'm there with them. Sometimes we haul wouldn't cross it up mountains, so don't have names on the map. to mark the places where people's dreams died. Those people don't get a viral video

or a story in the New York Times because even at a time where people are more engaged than they ever have been in my lifetime in advocacy for migrants, there's still not much attention paid to the actual border that every single migrant has to cross. Tomorrow, that's what we're going to talk about. Let's hear from Primrose about how that same day,

January 20th, went for her. Then they took us to the border, but we couldn't get in because the gates were closed. Then they said, no, we have a option. We need to take you. But, you know, for me, I had to take a risk because I was scared to stay in Mexico. So they took us under the bridge. I think the sewage, we were walking with our stomach like under the bridge. Two, we get to USA and Mexican borders.

So they put ladder for us to, we hope us to, but we paid them, $3.50, $3.50. They charged. I found the other people. They also, we were 15, yeah. We were 15. Yeah, then they hoped us to jump. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone. Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzone Media.com, or check us out

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from you?

I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Check out Not My Best Moment with me kept on stage on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc.

And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business. plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. On this week's episode of next chapter, I, TDJ, sit down with Denzel Washington, a two-time

Academy Award winning actor and cultural icon for a conversation about change, identity, and the moment everything shifted. I mean, I don't take any credit for it. It's nothing I did as special, you know, did knock down a few pegs and recognize it. But I just didn't put me first. I just put God first and he's carried me. Whether you're rebuilding, reimagining, or just trying to hold it together, this one will speak to you. Listen to the next chapter podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes drop weekly. Don't miss one of them. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte?

The most anticipated guest from season three is here. The Trey to My Charlotte. Kyle McLaughlin joins me to relive all of the magical Trey and Charlotte moments. He reveals what he thinks of Trey giving Charlotte a cardboard baby and why he chose not to return to it just like that. You listen to Are You a Charlotte on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human. Thank you.