It Could Happen Here - DHS' Child Border Agents & Civilian Paramilitaries

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

Mia and James talk about ICE's program to train civilians into paramilitaries and the Border Patrol's training camp for children. Sources: https://documentedny.com/2024/10/01/ice-immigration-train-citizens-academy/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1768KW4pKjW1HGF8qEz5mwT0ncwiXH13b/view https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/09/03/after-ice-postpones-chicago-citizens-academy-local-immigrant-groups-breathe-a-sigh-of-relief-for-now/ https://www.newsweek.com/ice-launching-citizens-academy-course-how-agency-arrests-immigrants-1516656 https://www.beyondlegalaid.org/updates/2021/5/18/ice-academy-foia https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ULjGNO2WqhjXjjmpEFL41Qlp8HjZn9Lk/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hR8m3j1zffTn5fkdZj4YR-mWV07wmxn_/view https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-customs-and-border-patrol-agent-found-guilty-federal-civil-rights-and-kidnapping https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/05/01/police-explorer-sexual-abuse-boy-scouts https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/scouts-border-immigration-trump/ https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-border-patrol-facebook-group-agents-joke-about-migrant-deaths-post-sexist-memes https://www.help.cbp.gov/s/article/Article-1638?language=en_US https://www.kut.org/texas/2017-11-30/border-patrol-youth-program-trains-children-as-young-as-14-to-become-agents https://theintercept.com/2019/07/12/border-patrol-chief-carla-provost-was-a-member-of-secret-facebook-group/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/border-patrol-academy-rape-artesia-new-mexico-impunity/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose listen to better offline on the iheart radio app apple podcasts wherever else you get your podcasts from

iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. CallZone Media. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about ice training death squads, I guess. I'm your host

Mia Wong. I guess, I don't know if formerly or better is the correct word, but sometimes also known as the Ice Was Me Destroyed girl. So I'm mad about this one, and with me is someone else who's extremely mad about the existence of ice, which is James. Yep, I'm here. I'm mad, as always, I guess. Just another Monday. Yeah, this shit sucks. This does suck, yeah. Yeah, this shit sucks. This does suck, yeah.

You know, I had this realization. I get this on Twitter a lot, where I've realized that there are people who don't know what ICE is, because they're not from the US. Or they're like... Yeah, so ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The shortest description of what they are is that they are one of the four American border Gestapos.

Yeah, the number of agencies under DHS is fucking baffling. They're constantly rebranding every time they have a scandal or they kill too many people. But yeah, ICE is kind of their flagship evil program. Yeah, and they do raids

on fucking houses. They do raids on businesses. They suck. If you vaguely remember remember there was a whole bunch of protests in like 2018 over this stuff and that was mostly anti-ice stuff yeah if someone's getting deported it's ice for the most part doing it like yeah they also run detention centers where people go you know they work with jeff bezos on deporting people oh my my fucking god. Okay, I just remembered a story. I had a flashback to standing in a protest,

a very, very large protest in 2018. This is one of the big pro-immigrant rallies. And in this fucking protest, I saw a thing for this group called Heartland Alliance. Now, people who probably don't, outside of Chicago, probably don't know what this is, but the Heartland Alliance

runs, like, fucking child prison facilities, like, for ICE. Cool. And they were at this protest against ICE. Fucking, it was the worst. That shit was terrible. You know, this whole thing is all extremely bad. But what we've been learning more details about recently is this program called Citizens Academies, which is run by ICE's Homeland Security Investigations. I didn't think HSI was under ICE.

I thought HSI was a different branch of DHS. I might be wrong, but they used to be under ICE as far as I know. And then they became HSI. Okay, I might be wrong about that because the stuff that I was reading was saying that they are still part of ice but they might not be it's also possible that it literally has gone back and forward multiple times in the last like

things fucking suck HSI also does like a lot of the times there's some people who like do like physically the people on the ground doing a raid will be HSI like fucking stormtroopers or whatever yeah they do arrests yeah often they appear in like these joint counter-terrorism tasks for task forces like when they especially when they're doing stuff with uh like drugs and that kind of

thing yeah these civilian academies are i think really the the only way you could describe them, even though this is not how it's being described, really, is that they're training random people to become death squads. Yeah, what's interesting is the protests that you talked about seem to have been the reason that they started this program, right? Yeah, we need to rewind this a little bit because they started in the US as a reaction to those protests, like specifically as like a PR thing. But the original versions of these programs started in Puerto Rico under Obama. Look, we don't give Obama anything like enough shit, right? Like fucking Obama just like in terms of killing people,

in terms of deporting people fucked up human being yeah he was the deporter in chief and like yeah part of part of what's sort of brutal about about the Obama administration was like a lot of his support had been from like the huge undocumented movement could like peak in like 2006 and he comes in on this and then just fucking deport everyone yeah as Democrats do every time yeah we're seeing this again with biden right it's like it's the same sort of process and under under obama these these programs start they're they're specifically as you're talking about they're specifically supposed to be these like training programs are supposed to be for community well okay so this is and this is one of these things was like this is what they say that

it's for and given what they're doing i don't know how much i believe them what they're what they say that it's for is it's because there's been all of these anti-ice things like i mean there's lots of people who now are like don't say shit about ice who like like aoc hasn't fucking said anything about abolishing ice in like half a decade right and she ran on that yeah of course yeah because of how powerful those social movements were i mean there's like sheen mcuey or whatever the fuck guy whose whole thing was abolished ice and then he became a democratic staffer and now he never talks about it again and he's like my absolute mortal nemesis like i will face at the end of days i will destroy his fucking traitorous ass and Yeah, many, many, many such cases.

But yeah, like, and I think probably peak, like, anti-ice sentiment was in the Trump era, right? When people started to look at immigration as the way that, like, people of immigrant communities and diaspora see it, right? Which is this thing that tears families apart, that destroys communities, that rips children from their parents. And people obviously recognized it was bad. tears families apart that destroys communities that rips children from their parents yeah and people obviously recognized it was bad and then biden got in and the democrats had to do this like kind of cover your eyes and turn away thing where they continue to do the same shit kids and cages are good now yeah yeah yeah kids and cages great democratic kids and cages incredible what if no cages what if we just leave them out in the fucking mountains and james's friend have to feed them beans or winter yeah but the thing is in 2017 2018 it's

not entirely clear that the democrats are going to swing that way no and so you get these programs and what's interesting about them and so a lot of this is coming from that there's a very very good piece by barizio guerrero in documented who got a bunch of foia documents about this program and what they were actually doing yeah and and one of the things that he discovers about this is that it's like a lot of rich guys like it's something like really rich it's also it's a lot of like bank employees yeah that was a funny one wasn't it i guess kind of it got through like that little social circle or whatever yeah and like there's a sort of feed-in program that that sends people into this and i actually i i realized i had vaguely known about these

but didn't quite understand how bad it was because we didn't have a bunch of the documents we have now but this was a big thing in chicago in 2021 where there was supposed to open one of these things it's like these like training centers for these like fucking people oh yeah and you know 2021 was still in chicago there was still like like there's some protest stuff going on because i mean there's you know like 2020 hadn't quite faded yet and there was also, like, our cops. We've talked about this a couple times on this show, but, like, shot a fucking 14-year-old, like. Yeah. It just fucking murdered him, cold blood.

And the protests were bad enough that, like, even Lori Lightfoot was like, like, fuck this. Like, this is Trump ice stuff. We can't let them do it. This was back when, like, these people, like, the Democrats were sort of pretending that they didn't like all of these like federal deportation machine things. But the things that we have now are, we have the actual, this is like, I think one of the probably most valuable part of this whole thing is that we

actually have a bunch of the documents now of what they were showing people. Yeah. I'd love to see the fucking foyer fight for this because i have foyered the department of homeland security a lot and getting any like i have a foyer out right now regarding the um cbp1 and the fact that it doesn't work on non-apple phones and they very clearly know this right like if i know it they know it and i would love to know if that was from the outset that they knew and they just didn't give a fuck like i would like to see those emails regarding it doesn't work on samsung uh i think i think they got it from a court

order okay so they they went to court to get yeah yeah every like people freedom information act is great it only works if you have a lawyer who's prepared to sue over it. Like, that is, especially with DHS, you're just not, like, I've got stuff so far in 2020. So just kick it down, can down the road. Like, I'm not going to get it. But yeah, kudos to them for doing it. Yeah, it's so hard.

If you are a First Amendment lawyer, hit me up. But okay, so the shit that's in this, one of these things, the first page of this is maybe the most deranged chart I have ever seen in anything. Which is, it is a picture of a naked human body. It's the front and back of it, right? And they've labeled all of the parts of the body by, and they've been been so we only have a black and white version of this but they've they've been they've been labeled by how effective it is to hit someone there with a baton yeah yeah and they're like green in the actual document they're green yellow and red i guess uh and then it says like reasoning for the red one i'll just read it highest level of

resultant trauma. Injury tends to range from serious to long-lasting rather than temporary and may include unconsciousness, serious bodily injury, shock, or death. So I guess, like, it's saying, like, don't hit them in the red area. No, that's the thing. That's the thing. They're not saying that. They're just saying these are your options.

Yeah. So part of this is supposed to be part of, like, a force escal the thing. That's the thing. They're not saying that. They're just saying these are your options. Yeah. So part of this is supposed to be part of like a force escalation thing. But the point of this is that it is actually like they're trying to explain force escalation. And their thing is that like, yeah, you actually can do this, but you can only do this if you're in like the highest level of force escalation or whatever. Okay. And if any of you have ever been around a cop, you know that those people jump to the highest level of force escalation at like a fucking... Again, we have literally seen an acorn drop and it caused

people to do this right and so what they're teaching these people this is like I think like genuinely horrifying it's like yeah they are teaching these people like the specific technical details of how you like fucking maim someone with a baton yeah I'm into reading the force escalation

this is and they actually did physical training right like i think they did weapons training i think they did a bunch of uh a bunch of simulation kind of exercises and then if you um if you scroll down this is like a powerpoint for those listening at home uh they gave an overview of like use of force to include a bunch of supreme court cases i think they're supreme court cases are certainly yeah supreme court cases about use of force none of these apply to you as a civilian and you know like unless you're a sworn law enforcement officer i guess i'm not entirely sure like what the use case for civilian baton training is aside from

like well I mean my guess and this is the way I've been like sort of looking at this program is that this is a thing partially being designed for PR but it's partially also being designed to create paramilitaries that if you're in a situation like 2020 but about the border

for example you suddenly have all of these people that you could just fucking call up because like part of what's going on with this too right you remember like actually i guess it is funnily enough like we are we have the only two of the four hosts who didn't end up having to deal with fucking bortak getting deployed in portland in 2020 but bortak is border patrols like SWAT teams yeah basically yeah their stated reason is like oh so, so this is so you understand what it's like to, like, be one of these people. How hard it is to be a cop.

But, like, I think the actual reason, again, is so that you could, you're training a bunch of people who you can just sort of call up and be like, we need a bunch of people to come, like, fucking obliterate a bunch of, like, protesters or whatever. Or help them do mass deportations. Yeah. Which is another thing, because, like, part of what this is, too, is, like, they're teaching them to do, like, raids on houses, right? And, like, how to, like, physically fucking deport people. So... This is, yeah, like, Trump-era

ICE, which were, well, there were open discussions of how many people can we deport, how much will it cost, how easy will it be. Yeah. And, like, right now, like, Trump is, like, his big, one of his big things can we deport how much will it cost how easy will it be yeah and like right now like trump is like his big one of his big things is mass deportations but i think people don't realize that the only reason that this stuff didn't happen under trump was that pushback to it was so enormous yeah that like like there are democrats now who are screaming about the border who in like 2018 were like sanctuary cities uh ice can't do raids here and sometimes

that was sure sometimes it wasn't yeah but like there was real systemic pushback to this and i and i think like we're heading to a place where there isn't the kind of reaction to this anymore where this can get really really scary really quickly and these are the kinds of programs that you would need in order to just do actual mass deportations. Yeah, like ICE doesn't have enough people. They have a lot of people, but they don't have enough people to deport several million people.

You need people like this. And the scale of this program was kind of small, but it's something that can be scaled up, right? Yeah. To train extremely large numbers of people fairly quickly. Yeah. You know what it reminds me of, Mia? Products and services that support this podcast. It does.

Yeah. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.

Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters,

this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture

to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be

done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives

in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. I hope you enjoyed this product of seven suits. We're back.

Let's go to like the other thing they were fucking doing. Oh yeah, there's more. Jesus wept. So I want to quote from the article. Yeah. Quote, Documents also contain presentations on how to shoot a gun, point at targets, and stand in position

to fire. The shooting practices include military-style rifles. Likewise, a training in Atlanta organized drills to shoot at human-like manicures and fires M4 assault rifles employed exclusively by the military. The training also included ISIS guidelines for use of force

encompassing deadly force one presentation suggests yelling drop the gun as potential cover when employing lethal force against someone so they're telling and this is specifically supposed to be a thing like oh if you're in plain clothes like you fucking yell police and yell drop your gun and then you shoot them and this is how you get away with it so like they're they are straight up teaching people how to murder people like how to get away with murder that's that's what's happening here yeah wild yeah the uh like the government's offered firearms trading for civilians like that's kind of what the nra wasn't a government initiative but like yeah this is not that this is not like no i would

broadly be in favor of the government funding free gun safety classes for people because i seen some shit with uh you know like that would be one of the useful things yeah but this is not that no and like and like the reason those specific classes like don't look like that anymore is because and i've talked about this in in some of the episodes on mlk assassination is like well yeah when the government taught a bunch of people how to use rifles, those people used those rifles to fight the cops in the streets. Now they're all this insane

shit that's teaching people how to get away with murder of their cop. I want to read a PowerPoint slide from that thing because it's the most deranged thing I've ever seen. Have you read the Graham vs. Connor one? Because it's one of the more powerful uses of passive voice I've ever seen. Oh, the graham versus connor one because it's one of the more powerful uses of passive voice i've ever seen oh no i haven't seen that yet let me read that

while you look for yours this one is just incredible instance of cop speak graham comma diabetic comma asked friend to drive him to convenient store for juice good like cop sentences here ran in and out of store comma officer observed the suspicious activity what suspicious activity dear listener uh i don't know we're left to imagine investigative stop made and graham was handcuffed by whom doesn't say weird graham received multiple injuries during the encounter with police like someone gave him the fucking injuries was it the cop it's just an incredible use of passive voice here throughout yeah there's this great tweet that was like the u.s has a a passive voice and an active voice and a special exonerative voice that's only used for

shooting yeah that is real it gets the exonerative voice. Yeah, Israel's in the greater cop nation. Yeah. Yeah, like, also, one of the things that I don't think people understand about the Supreme Court is, like, if you think that, like, Supreme Court rulings about abortions are bad, like, and they are, right? But, like, if you think those things are bad, look up the Supreme Court cases about police use of force. You will get 9-0 decisions, with like, all of like,

fucking like, like, fucking Thurgood Marshall, will be signing on, to like a 9-0 thing, where he says that, cops have the right, to just like,

shoot you in the back of the head, because if they couldn't shoot you, in the back of the head, like, that you, the police couldn't function, it's, it's fucking deranged,

like, the kind of shit they have, okay, I, I wanna read, I wanna read this slide, cause it's, it's amazing, it just says, in giant letters in giant letters it says survival and then there's like

bullet points and the bullet points are never give up never concede defeat i will not die this way i must go home to my family how you trade is how you will fight i'm just imagining like the you know the person who i go to at the bank when i need to take out large amounts of cash to go on one of my work trips learning that i will not die this way okay so that that's basically what i have about this program other than the bleak note that on a pr level these people won right they didn't win because of anything they did they won because the democrats decided that they fucking hated immigrants and because views of integration are largely driven by by party politics are driven by what your party tells you about immigrants

like yeah all the support that had been built in the late 2010s has evaporated and yeah even like I did a thing for my patreon yesterday that just then made me think of this like i was trying to just do a sort of listing of joe biden's immigration policies right from 2021 to present and like 2021 2022 i was selling stories to nbc to slate to the nation right about haitian migration about title, about remain in Mexico, about special immigrant visas for Afghans. And after 2022, you don't even get a response to your email.

The same shit keeps happening. 2023 is the end of Title 42, right? It's when we see the beginning of outdoor detention, arguably the most heinous shit that the Biden administration has done. And it's not some pretty heinous shit. I mean, genocide is worse, evidently. But on the border, this is the worst.

Yeah, some of it's worse domestic policy. And you just can't tell stories. Literally, every time I post about this on Twitter, people will be like, what the fuck? Why didn't I read about this? Because an editor made a choice that they didn't matter, that the people out there in the cold, the wind and the rain didn't matter

and that they don't have rights because AOC or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris decided that that was how it was going to be. And apparently every corporate media outlet just kind of stepped in line and went, yeah, fuck them, we don't care anymore. Yeah. It's pretty bad.

Yeah. They've achieved their stated aim and they're now moving on to their unstated aim, which is mass deportation. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit,

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

works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game.

If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories,

struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything

from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're offline as you're unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

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

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died

trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Everything I know about the program that you were about to talk about comes from you, and that is, oh boy, it's not good. All right.

So I'm going to read you a small story, Mia, and then we're going to talk about whether or not it's a good idea for the Border Patrol to have programs for children. Okay. I'm going to give a content warning for sexual assault of children. Just in case you don't want to listen to this. In August of this year, Aaron Mitchell, a former CBP agent, was found guilty of a federal civil rights violation and also kidnapping.

On April the 25th 2022 in douglas arizona mitchell found a 15 year old girl waiting for school to begin and for this next part i'm just going to read directly from the department of justice presser he introduced himself as a law enforcement officer and asked for her papers next after flashing his police badge and credentials mitchell ordered the child into his car and explained that he was taking her to the police station. Instead, Mitchell drove the car miles away from her school, pulled over and restrained her hands and feet with two pairs of handcuffs.

The victim testified that, after being handcuffed, the defendant told her to do everything he said because he didn't want to have to hurt her. I'm not going to describe the next part in detail. He repeatedly sexually assaulted this young woman in his apartment, then returned her to the middle school where he had abducted her and reminded her not to tell anyone. Fortunately, she immediately reported the abduction to her friends,

family members, and multiple law enforcement agencies. During an interview with the police the defendant exclaimed exclaimed that the victim had better hope i don't get out of here which is an insane thing to say when you're being interviewed by the police yeah he also googled several times for how long does it take to smother someone and he googled a lot about sexual assault how to stop someone from screaming it's some of the darkest shit you're ever gonna read yeah oh my god this is one of the relatively few instances of a border patrol agent actually being convicted of sexual assault sexual assault is a massive fucking problem in the border patrol and the fact that it's such a big problem and people get away

with it is why we get shit that is horrific, like the incident that I have just related to you, right? Yeah. In 2019, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a ProPublica thing about this Facebook group, which had 9,500 agents in it. The Facebook group, they posted videos of migrant deaths, dead children, and rape fantasies, as well as doctored images including images of aoc at the time carla provost the border patrol chief condemned the group as inappropriate shortly thereafter the intercept revealed that she had been a member of it for years yep just classic stuff right yeah border patrol has consistently failed to hold its officers to account for rape yeah and like if you want to read more about this jen budd she's been on the show before is is the person to go to about this i'm

also going to include in the show notes links to a story about a border patrol agent who was sexually assaulted at the academy which i know is a thing that is not unique to her this is a problem border patrol is 95 percent male at this point they call the women the fierce five percent but uh it's like it's probably the most like gender biased of the federal agencies like border patrol agents by and large like do not do well around women this is something i've observed this is something other volunteers have observed like it's such a like masculine agency i guess and they just don't encounter women in a professional capacity very often so i think with this in mind i want to talk about the border patrol explorers right it's a youth program that

teaches kids the skills of a patrol agent from as young as 14 jesus fucking christ yeah what's really weird there's been very little coverage. The two places I would send people, these will be in the notes, would be Morley Music, wrote a really good piece in The Nation, and Todd Miller's book, Border Patrol Nation, which is a book that everyone should read, I think, really details the beginning of how Border Patrol became what it is today. Those are really two of the very few places you'd read about it the training that they do is insane they'll learn firearms drills they learn to do checkpoints they learn to make arrests i'm going to read from an interview from molly music's piece fabian explained why his post would practice shooting sometimes and then this is in like parentheses undocumented

migrants are not compliant when we find them he said they paid all this money to get here to start another life they're just not going to give up when they see us some would fight back some would be compliant maybe they try to kill you or threaten you sometimes they pick up an element a rock lying around anything and that can be used to kill you this is not the stuff that 14 year olds should be reckoning with right yeah this is also like i know people have done the like connect the border to palestine thing so much that it's like hackneyed but like that is straight up that could be lifted from a press release like from the idf yeah yeah about why they shot someone yeah and it's like

yeah i mean you shouldn't be teaching anyone this you especially shouldn't be teaching 14 year olds yeah that someone might throw a rock at them and that's a reasonable way to pull out a gun and shoot them yeah like if you back that into your mind at 14 i would argue that makes you very unsuitable to carry a gun in public later in life kids start out by doing this kind of boot camp style uh academy and then they they pretty much begin doing stuff like drill pt they practice conducting vehicle stops and tracking border patrol on their website they claim to have more than 700 explorers spread over 28 posts around the country it's very hard to find anything about them like it's not something that they talk about a great deal you have to sort of apply i looked at how one would apply this one is san ysidro right you sort of fill out this form and

you get some kind of clearance and then i'm guessing they're checking that people are eligible to be like hired by border patrol right but if there is data on how many of these kids go on to be hired by bp i haven't found it but i did find one i think this is again from molly music's piece one extremely amusing incident the douglas arizona chapter of the explorers teamed up with a local high school drama club and they had the kids play migrants in role play scenarios yeah yeah jesus christ many of these people will themselves be like first generation or like ah yeah wild anyway this country cannot be allowed to continue yeah imagine like what are we doing at school today oh the the theater kids are gonna get arrested by the the border patrol kids jesus christ some of the theater kids got really into

character uh one of them cried, I guess. Several of them managed to avoid arrest and give the young agents the slip. Yeah, good for them. And then they got told by the agents overseeing the exercise that they'd done it wrong. Because they'd outsmarted the junior cops. There's a story. I can't remember what fucking town it was.

In the 50s, the army was running these infiltration drills where they would have a town, and they'd talk to people in the town, and they'd be like, okay, we're going to unleash a communist subversive agent into the town, and then you're going to help the army capture them. And instead what happens is everyone just hid the agent

because it was funny. I just had a great time like hiding him around and stuff reminds me of that that is the american spirit it's it's the people of douglas arizona we salute you one of the things i found really interesting in in the molly music piece was this idea of like defensive asylum only being for criminals so it seems like the students learned this very binary immigration law where defensive asylum, which is when you claim asylum as a defense against being deported. Yeah.

It's only for people who are criminals versus affirmative asylum is for the people who like really needed or whatever. We fast forward making an affirmative asylum claim is extremely difficult right now. You know, I spoke to a hundred people who wanted to come to this country in the Darien. Every single one of those people told me that they wanted to use CBP1, that they wanted to do it the correct way, that they wanted to wait their turn and do an interview. But every single one of those people is now reckoning with the fact that if they can

make CBP1 work on their phone, they will wake eight or nine months in Mexico. That is not a safe place. If you're a woman on your own, God forbid, if you're a trans woman They can make CBP1 work on their phone. They will wake eight or nine months in Mexico. That is not a safe place. If you're a woman on your own, God forbid, if you're a trans woman or a gay person, like aside from like within certain communities, it's not a safe place. I think Mexico is the second highest rate of killings of trans people anywhere in the world.

I think Brazil is maybe more. Yeah, Brazil I think is the highest. I don't know if that's like raw numbers because Brazil is a bigger country or if it's like yeah it's just a population yeah my memory is that it's the rate but i i'm not 100 sure either way that people who are coming to be safe or not to be in a place where they're in danger and that is what they face right and so undoubtedly some of those people who wanted to come the right way will cross between ports of entry they will surrender themselves to border patrol and if they get a chance to file for

asylum at all because it's it's a shout test now but there are numerous incidents that i've seen described in court cases of people doing what sounds to me like asserting an asylum claim and not having a chance to then make their case if they do at all it'll be defensive asylum yeah right and these are the people who are like textbook asylum places you know like i'm a trans person in a place where that might well be punishable by death de facto if not de jure right i am a political dissident in a country where my political views would be a reason to kill me i am a woman from iran who doesn't wear hijab niqab whatever you know like these are like why asylum exists there are lots of people who deserve our help who are not covered by this little bucket so we put people in to for

asylum but even people who are who falls like slap in the middle of what your average Midwestern liberal dad would be like, yeah, that's an asylum case. We should help that person. They have to come and they file a defensive asylum. And that's what we're teaching, I guess, these Border Patrol kids. These are the quote-unquote bad guys. And they're not. And yeah, they're doing this over 28 posts it's just one i read a terrible account

of a young woman who was sexually abused by a cop in a police explorer program like these explorer programs go all across law enforcement they are administered by the boy scouts of america they have a serious problem with abuse of young people a serious problem and it seems like it's not getting i mean it does get some coverage like there's this this piece about um the agent in douglas got some coverage right the piece about this this cop but like i mean look this country we still have the catholic church just because people abuse kids doesn't mean they get shut down but like yeah i don't don't don't send your kids i guess you're listening to this you're quite unlikely

to send your kids to be junior cops but like I get young people living in small towns on the border who don't have many economic opportunities. I know those towns. I spent a lot of time in those towns and I get the guys who joined border patrol. They have big trucks. They have nice houses, right? It's one of the few areas of economic opportunity. I get that. None of that is worth having your kid abused. And like, I'm not saying that, of course, all of these programs result in child abuse.

They don't. But like law enforcement explorer programs absolutely have a problem with child abuse. And yeah, yeah. There was a whole thing in like the last couple of years about this happening in detention facilities in Chicago. Or not even detention facilities, things that were supposed to be migrant housing. If that got reported,

weirdly, the Chicago press has actually been pretty good on immigration stuff, but it's literally solely because they hate Brandon Johnson, and Brandon Johnson's the one running it. And so because of this, we've actually gotten a bunch of good coverage of it. Yeah, reporting the accident. Yeah.

Yeah, many such cases. But yeah, like the culture of Border Patrol is not one that you want to be introducing a child to. Yeah, absolutely not. You know, I would really encourage people to read Todd's book, Border Patrol Nation. Like he talks about this use of, they invented a new slur,

which, you know, is cool. Good for them for expanding the English language, I guess. They call people tonks. Oh, yeah, yeah. it's a noise that makes when you hit someone on the head with your torch your flashlight yeah yeah just uh really great stuff some of the worst people who've ever lived yeah don't don't volunteer to be a cop don't do it for money either like that's what i got for you yeah yeah i think i think that's all we've got for today yeah shit fucking sucks i don't know we gave you we gave you some less depressing episodes but yeah now we're back we've ruined your week actually i can promise i can promise tomorrow's

episode is going to be a lot brighter for this one um yeah come back tomorrow to be less horribly depressed yeah i got nothing good for you coming up for the near future to be honest i'm right i think about the darian gap and having to take little walks outside yeah yeah go for a walk it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going.

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