It Could Happen Here - How Jim Desmond Lies & San Diego Fails Migrants

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

James talks to Erika Pinheiro of Al Otro Lado about how San Diego county and Biden’s administration have consistently failed migrants, and how county supervisor Jim Desmond lied about taxpayers funding the mutual aid response. https://alotrolado.networkforgood.com/projects/63833-al-otro-lado-fundSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hello everyone, it's me, James, and I'm joined today by Erica, who is an attorney, the director at Alotrolada, which is a binational non-profit that does legal humanitarian aid

between San Diego and Tijuana and we're here to discuss the open air detention sites and some things that Jim Desmond one of our county supervisors has been saying about them so welcome to the show Erica. Thank you for having me. Yeah of course it's nice to have you here thanks for taking the time. So I want to start off by talking about Jim Desmond today, which is something I like to do. If people aren't familiar with Jim Desmond, Jim Desmond is a supervisor in San Diego County. He's from District 5, which is northern San Diego County. He's a Republican. He's the former mayor of San Marcos, which is a city in North County. And before that, he was a pilot in the Navy. He's pretty much like a standard culture war boomer and a valuable reminder to us all that

there are people alive today who grew up when they put lead in children's toys. Notable Jim Desmond dances include his stance on climate change which I'm just going to read to you. Try and follow it if you can. It's a challenge. I think the climate has been changing since the beginning of time. The climate comes and the climate goes. The Great Lakes, the Great Plains, the Yosemite Valley, all formed by glaciers. They've been gone a long, long time. So you find seashells on mountaintops. You see where it used to be, you know, the land masses were Pangea, and then the land masses all change and move around.

So I say we may be part of climate change, but I think the only reason we're here, and we're still here today, is because we as a species learn to adapt to different climates and climate changes. Now maybe we're maybe exacerbating it a bit towards the end of the warming trend, but I don't know that.

So it's just it's about as about as convoluted as his governing strategy here in san diego county yeah it's uh he said a lot of words uh but it really conveyed very little meaning but yeah this is kind of he seems to like speaking but but maybe like he doesn't take quite as long as one would hope to plan out where he's going with his sentences before he delivers them he also has a podcast so i guess uh our podcasting rival uh did you have you listened to his podcast erica no i am but it might be entertaining so yeah i'll take a look at it definitely um i know it'll uh you can learn some things about coronavirus, for instance. God. Yeah, great.

It's good stuff. In May of 2020, he claimed there had been six pure, solely coronavirus deaths. The other 200 or so that happened in the county by then were not, quote-unquote, pure coronavirus deaths, I guess, by his estimation. pure coronavirus deaths, I guess, by his estimation. So this little escapade got him cited by Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan podcast, which must have been a great moment for Desmond. He hosted a ton of COVID skeptics on his podcast as well throughout the lockdowns.

He did, after he caused some controversy on Twitter, which is a recurring theme, he hosted an actual immunologist on his show and this was the only guest who he really kind of argued with um and in doing so he said i quote the herd needs to get it and he's talking about covid here and we'll have a better handle on it so to me the number of cases means the herd's getting it so that's a good thing um that his guest corrected him pointing out that uh there needs to be like immunity for there to be herd immunity and what he's just looking at is contagion uh not not

immunity uh so he he sort of he continued to make these claims throughout the pandemic right that the uh the lockdown was holding our jobs hostage bad for the economy he. He wasn't an anti-masker, interestingly. He said we should wear masks if that's what it took to open the businesses again. And he, I mean, he's always been pretty terrible on border stuff, right, Erica? I'm sure you've encountered some of his border stances before. I think all of the supervisors are terrible on border stuff, but at least he says the quiet part out loud. Yeah.

We'll get more into that later. Yeah, yeah. I want to talk about how the Democrats being terrible on the border is something that I think we can't say enough. In recent months, he held a press conference claiming the border should be shut down to prevent an influx. It's not a quote. It's a paraphrase here, but to prevent an influx of Hamas fighters. Which, I don't know, it shows a misunderstanding of a lot of things. Like how Hamas works and also how the border works.

The idea that A, one could leave Gaza at this time and B, that one could just fly into Mexico. leave Gaza at this time and B, that one could just fly into Mexico, where of course they wouldn't immediately notice that you had come armed and equipped to attack the US border. But I think just with the COVID stuff and with the border stuff, he is just throwing red meat to his base, but it's not necessarily aligned with what he does. And I would assume it's not aligned with what he actually knows like where the covid stuff he did set up vaccination clinics in his district

and so he's clearly not a complete skeptic at least that's not what his actions showed and i think for some of your listeners who are not in the United States or maybe not in California we are on the border in San Diego you can get to Mexico within you know if you're in Jim Desmond's district within half an hour you're in Tijuana and I assume he's been here for many years and so he has to know more about the border than he's letting on. It's just really like he's regurgitating the right wing narrative to garner political points. I think in a county where he's the last standing Republican on the board of supervisors. So I think that's important to remember, too. Definitely. It definitely seems like this is kind of and you see he does a lot of appearance on right-wing news channels right like he's often on uh fox but then our local kind of crazy right-wing news channel is kusi who have really doubled down on the culture war stuff since like 2020

and you'll you'll see him on there a lot and talking about the border a lot right it seems to as you say like either be like an attempt for re-election or perhaps for higher office i don't know but he um he'll make a lot of claims about the border which are just patently untrue which is what i want to talk about now so he spent his new year's day uh in hakumba making little videos for twitter and instagram um i was there on new year's day too i didn't actually see him, which is a shame. But that day there weren't many people at all who were in the open-air detention sites.

So he sort of made videos in front of empty tents. It was a bit weird. In his first one, he wrote, Today I visited the border and migrant encampments in Hukumba. The chaos continues with dozens of people camping out, waiting for Border Patrol to take them to resource center paid for by county taxpayers and he's not like you can i'm sure erica you can explain this as well he's not wrong that they may eventually end up at the quote-unquote welcome center which is paid for by county funds which came uh from the american rescue

act which is of course federal money uh but it's a little more complicated than that isn't it yeah so the migrants are being held in what are essentially open-air prisons by border patrol we the collective of non-profits mutual aid groups and volunteers are the only ones who've been paying for water, food, medical assistance, shelter, etc. for people who are being held in these open air prisons, sometimes for days at a time, including the medically infirm and children. And so I think that's one piece of it to understand because he did say in his, when he was speaking in front of the empty tent, that the county taxpayers were paying for those things, which is patently untrue.

But then just, again, understanding the process is something that he has to understand. He's been here for decades. He has to know that these people are being taken into Border Patrol custody, processed, and then either released to the county funded welcome center or they are detained by immigration. And so it's the same legal process we've had for decades at the border where people have a right to seek asylum, whether they enter at a port of entry or not. whether they enter at a port of entry or not. And the real controversy here is the fact that Border Patrol is holding people outdoors for days at a time

without the things that they need to survive. Yeah. I want to get back to that claim that he made, right, that the county paid for it. We've got some audio of him making that claim, so we'll just play it. As we look inside this abandoned tent, there's a sandwich left in a baggie.

There's water, bananas, ponchos, crackers, snacks, and waters. And this tent is empty. Many of these tents are just the same way. There's no one here. Yet probably in the next day or so, there'll be more migrants coming, inhabiting this and then

being processed through san diego county being paid for with san diego tax dollars so in the caption that accompanied this video he wrote quote during my recent border visit i encountered an abandoned campsite filled with tents food drinks and campfires paid for by san diego county taxpayers this site is used as a temporary holding site before migrants are then processed into our country and and this like gets to the thing i think that louis where he like bullshitted too close to the sun because none of that as you said was paid for by taxpayers right all of that was paid for by right but yeah people like us non-profits mutual aid people and can you give a sense of like the the

amount of spending that alo trollado has had to take on to to make these open air prisons like survivable for people and even still they're deeply unpleasant even with all our work yeah um so we have acted as a fiscal sponsor for a lot of the smaller groups because we are able to receive foundation funding as a 501c3. And so we've used that legal status to support a lot of the mutual aid groups that have been spending tens of thousands of dollars. But I've gone through the budgets and we've spent an average of about $150,000 per month, which is a lot for us. But when you look at the Department of Homeland Security, which should be spending this money, they have $170 billion budget for 2023. I think it's even higher for fiscal year 2024. So it's really, you know, probably

what they spend on one of those autonomous surveillance towers that are sitting in the camps in like a day, right? So it's really nothing for them. You know, it's very clear that they're making a choice to leave these really vulnerable migrants to potentially die in the desert. And then when we look at the county funding, you know, they've allocated now $6 million to this welcome center, which, you know, we'll talk about in more detail, but it's really providing woefully inadequate services to the same population that's going through these open air detention sites after they've been released from Border Patrol custody. So so again it's like

it's a lot of money for us it's not a lot of money for the county um i would love it if the county would pay for it they've stated on multiple occasions that they will not it's been pure philanthropic funding and donations but yeah i mean we've been able to do a lot with very little and it really was the bare minimum to keep people alive so yeah if we had an actual infusion of county funding i'm sure we could have done a lot more yeah and like even we don't have access to the things that government has access to right like normally in a refugee situation we'd have unhcr tents we'd have uh humanitarian mres like we had to buy those on this we couldn't get the tents and we and the mres we had to find on the surplus market right like we we can't the state could do more for less but they're very much choosing not to as you said so what the result of this was rather amusing where a number of people from mutual aid groups uh including friends of ours from free shit collective took to desmond's office uh with

literal receipts right like receipts yes it was yeah it was a tremendous moment uh and we don't mean receipts like in the figurative sense we mean like pieces of paper from costco yeah oh yeah oh and and the fact is you know within a number of hours um the folks from free shit collective and others were able to just pull together over sixteen thousand dollars in receipts and that's like I mentioned a small fraction of what we've actually been spending that's probably just their receipts from the week and so so again, for us, it's like, that's an enormous lift. I know we're all exhausted. Those of us who've been working in the open air detention sites, it's exhausting to be there all the time. It's exhausting to try to raise enough money to

keep thousands and thousands of people alive when they're forced into a deadly situation. And so it's, I think we were all pretty pissed off when we heard him taking credit for that even if he was trying to denigrate you know the idea of spending money on refugees yeah right like it's funny because he'll also say like it's inhumane it's unacceptable but like if you're not going to do anything to stop the humanity the inhumanity like i don't really find that a very believable claim like he was literally standing uh willows so like less than a mile from where we spent that day making sandwiches and cooking beans and and uh doing the things we do every day sorting out coats you know and he could have come

helped or even just come and said what you guys are doing is is great uh but he chose not to he just stood in front of his whoever was filming him and lied his proposed solution is to close the border which he knows is not an option because the refugee convention is still a thing the u.s is still a signatory you know we have legal obligations under both domestic and international law to accept asylum seekers in our country and so you know his solution to the inhumanity is to push people back over the mexican border where you know they're subject to all manner of state and criminal violence so i don't think the inhumanity is really

his priority to address it's really again just like throwing red meat to the base to you know this open borders hysteria that they all love to cite yeah uh talking of hysteria uh we should take a little break for some adverts for things that uh might try to get you to buy them by making you afraid and you shouldn't Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning

economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

offline.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 looks so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez Elian. 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 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 iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti.

And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions. Like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k?

Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year,

but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts we are back and yeah i want to talk a little more about that like this this idea of a closed border you see it a lot mostly from republicans right like it's like you say it's not only legally, it's not only legally impossible, but it's also like physically impossible. And we people enter the US through gaps in the border wall when people enter the US through gaps in the border wall.

I should add, because we've made it virtually impossible for them to get asylum appointments in a reasonable time frame and to be in a place that's safe while they make those appointments. And so like the idea that we could how do we close you know like the physical border um well just yeah i mean i just want to take a step back for one second because this sort of biden's open borders hysteria that we've heard so much from the right wing i think it's worth unpacking what this means because i've seen you know people in the democratic party or even people on the left really shy away from this idea of open borders when those of us who have first world passports already have a world of open borders i mean we can pretty much go wherever we want you know we gentrify other countries to their detriment like it's not there really are

not many restrictions on first world citizens moving around the world so i think that's one important thing to consider as we're kind of launching into this discussion it's like open borders are okay for me but not for brown people like yeah it's a little you know and that's kind of the underlying impetus behind a lot of what we're going to talk about in san diego county it's like people this underlying idea that people should not have the right to come here which is just ludicrous so i think that's one thing but when we're talking about asylum in particular, like I mentioned earlier, we are signatories with Refugee Convention and the subsequent 1967 protocol. This has been enshrined in domestic law in the 1980 Refugee Act.

And so refugees who are people outside of their country of origin fleeing persecution have the right to ask for protection at the U.S.-Mexico border, whether it's at a port of entry or between ports of entry. So those in Jacumba and these other open air detention sites are those crossing between ports of entry because it's been made impossible to approach the port of entry and seek asylum. And this is something that our organization has been litigating for years. You know, at first people were just being turned away then there was a waiting list in mexico now they have this stupid app that's just like glitches and there's not enough appointments and people have to wait for months in mexico just to get an appointment if they're one of the lucky ones who can

the app's also been hacked by organized crime. You know, certain nationalities are able to pay for appointments. It's just, it's a complete mess. It has nothing to do with this ideal, you know, that the refugee convention is supposed to enshrine. So regardless of, you know, all of the illegal things the U.S. government is doing, like, you cannot close a border to asylum seekers without withdrawing from the refugee convention and i just really don't see that happening for our country just because we like to you know talk about how we're a bastion for human rights etc which you know that's a whole other podcast i think yeah yeah we can uh yeah break that down a little bit but i think one thing that you said that i want to talk about is that you said

that open borders or like free travel for brown people is something that a lot of uh more privileged folks especially in in san diego even in san diego i should say are uncomfortable with i think we really saw like it's not just skin color but it's really hard for me to see skin color not playing a large role when I see people from Africa people from South America waiting for months if not years and then people from Ukraine coming at when the largest scale conflict in Ukraine began and effectively skipping the line right yeah so when the Ukrainians all came through tijuana i think there were maybe 20 000 or so who came through in a period of a month that was during title 42 which was a trump era policy that closed the border to asylum seekers based on public health reasons

but really it was because they wanted to close the border to asylum seekers. And so there were very few humanitarian exemptions granted to Title 42 at that time. But at the time the Ukrainians came, that exemption process had actually been shut down for quite a while. So I was watching people die in Tijuana because they didn't have access to the U.S. asylum system. I remember when the Ukrainians came, there was a child who caught pneumonia in one of the shelters. It was like a month-old baby who died. And then when the Ukrainians came, you know, the doors were flung open for them. CBP, which up until that point said they did not have capacity to process asylum seekers,

they were processing Ukrainians at a clip of 1000 a day. And it was heartbreaking to see. And, you know, after they shut off the spigot for the Ukrainians, after they stopped letting them in at the border, CBP said they only had capacity to process a few dozen non-white asylum seekers and so all of a sudden their capacity was just gone it was you know it just it was so transparent and so blatant and so hurtful for people who'd been suffering at that point for years with the asylum system closed off to them yeah it yeah it was really hard to see that and and and to know the people the people who i guess effectively they lost their place in line right or people come in front of them and and and to a large degree it's still much easier right we're not we're under title 8 again now not title 42 but it's still much

easier for wealthy white people to get appointments using cbp1 than it is for poorer non-white people, right? Yeah, because especially when the app was first launched, there's a point in the appointment process during which you have to take a photo of yourself and it maps your face for facial recognition purposes. And it wasn't working on really dark skinned people. A few of the organizations working in Mexico had to buy the construction style lights to shine on people's faces so that it wouldn't pick them up. But just even like you have to have a new phone. I think they probably made the app to work on an iPhone, which most people outside the United States don't have. Yeah.

Yeah. I got a tip on that. which most people outside the United States don't have. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I got a tip on that. I've not been able to confirm it, but someone at the eye store told the eye store, the Apple store told me that it wasn't working on certain Samsung and, uh, Huawei phones and that they were having people come in and buy like the

cheapest iPhone they could in bulk to try and access it. Well, we keep iPhones in our office in Tijuana exactly for that reason, because people need to be able to access the app. But now the app has been hacked for a while. So there's some groups that work, mostly I would say with Russian asylum seekers. They're charging, I think,

around between $500 and $1,000 for an appointment, maybe more sometimes. I'm not sure exactly how they're doing it. I know also there's been some hacking of the geolocation feature. So these criminal groups are selling appointments to people who haven't even left their home country. And meanwhile, you know, the shelters on the border are full of people with crappy phones and a weak internet connection who wait for months and months and months while the richer people who are paying for nice phones and appointments are able to get through much more quickly yeah it it's made a fucked up system even more fucked up and yeah that they designed it in-house as well which you know would i don't

they uh they appear to have overestimated their abilities there one day i'll get my foyers back about cbp1 and it will probably be some point in the middle of the next presidential administration which will make them irrelevant and really fucking annoying but well we're suing about it too so it'll probably be a few years before we get to discovery but yeah yeah. Okay. We'll have a race. Yeah. But you are assuming that they want the system to work, which they don't.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. So in that sense, it's working perfectly. Right. Yeah. And it's doing in a sense,

what like the unofficial under the tone of immigration policy has always been, which is that like, it's fine for wealthy white people to come here but we want to limit the number of non-white and non-wealthy people who come here and like they can say that loud like and maybe we should talk about this now the difference between trump and biden is that trump just said it and biden didn't and when trump said it like wealth well-meaning liberals in the midwest gave a shit and sent money like in 2018 things

were very bad in tijuana right with the um the people staying in el baratal but like at least people in america cared and sent money so we could help whereas now like you know major outlets who have given 10 front page stories to accusations of one woman plagiarizing in a dissertation that she wrote years ago haven't written a single piece about the open air concentration camps that our government has in a combo and other places well not just that i mean they've the media by and large has allowed this right-wing narrative of open borders to take over even though the policies are largely identical to the Trump administration, right? So they're even talking about now bringing back a Title 42 type restriction

that would turn away asylum seekers and send them back to Mexico. We have the asylum ban, which is very similar to the one that was litigated under the Trump administration. I mean, it's just, you know, family separation. maybe it's not the minor children being taken away but still thousands of families being separated i think there's a couple things like one is just people hate when trump does it but they don't hate when biden does it that's one yeah but also like you said, Trump says the quiet part out loud. And so people respond to that. Whereas Biden has co-opted the immigrant rights movement by putting us in a stakeholder relationship. And I can see among some of my colleagues that they value access to power more than the rights of the people that we are supposed to serve. power more than the rights of the people that we are supposed to serve and so they will go along with a lot of this stuff and you know basically enable it in many ways just to maintain that access to power and i've seen some of my colleagues who you know we were all finding on the same side during the trump administration have actually gone into the Biden administration and are implementing these policies. And so it's, you know, it's, it's really like pretty horrifying to see.

And also I would say that people in the Biden administration are in many ways smarter because it was easier to litigate under the Trump administration. We could knock down a lot of these policies because they were just dumb, not well-written, you know, it was like dumb yeah not well written you know it's like clearly unconstitutional you know they learned lessons during the Biden ministry or during the Trump administration so now the policies are written in a way that are that make it much more difficult to to litigate and the Supreme Court in 2022 in a decision called Aleman Gonzalez made it impossible to get class-wide injunctive relief

for violations of immigration law so what that means is that dhs can violate the law and there's no way to stop them from doing so on a large scale in the courts and they are banking on that when in current litigation they literally are relying on that to to continue breaking the law especially when it comes to turning asylum seekers away yeah and something else that desmond has asked for is he wants him to turn asylum seekers away before they get to the border and then quite understand what they uh like like that would be inside mexico which well that's what mexico is doing right now yeah yeah yeah they're um like i on i was in jucumbara like on friday thursday and they yeah national guard are like sitting at the little gaps in the

wall i mean you've seen it too you see national guard mexican national guard drive up they kind of check out the situation and leave and then the travel agents come and and drop off the migrants and so it's something very much that you know can be controlled to a great extent within mexico and the u.s is very obviously you know working with mexico publicly obviously working with mexico to stop migrants from reaching the u.s mexico border and working with countries further south to stop people from reaching the u.s mexico border so this is definitely a regional project yeah one thing i want to talk about is as people come through those countries further south um there's this it's it's

like in recent days even like we're recording this on uh on monday uh people are here on wednesday but i've seen this narrative and i think it's coming from the fact that uh funding for ukraine was tied to funding for the border and and people have lost their minds uh over the conflict in ukraine and and and they have silly dog pictures on on twitter and um and it'd become a replacement for a personality for a certain type of divorce guy like so so like the the army of divorced dads has um like turned on the border and like one of the things you'll say is like oh like the border is like a like like this is how like bad actors are getting in the u.s you know like you know hamas again like the hamas are really otherwise engaged in the minute but like yeah

they're busy they're busy yeah yeah like there's a whole lot of people who would love to leave gaza uh and we absolutely should welcome those people here but uh they can't and that's fucked up but yeah this idea that like isis uh hamas uh the russian secret of the russian fsb i'm sure some someone will have suggested like north korea or the prc are coming through hakumba as well like they see it seems to admit what happens to people on entering mexico and indeed other countries further south right like can you explain how people seem to think that the u.s is the only state with the capacity for surveillance which is manifestly untrue can you explain how people are like surveilled and and um like like negligible on their way north there are multiple

multilateral and bilateral information sharing agreements that connect to criminal and you know quote-unquote intelligence databases so when you are traveling internationally, you are subject to a web of surveillance that is, you know, in many ways connected to the United States. So the US government knows you're coming, like, you know, when you are countries away, just by virtue of using a passport. But then for people who are traveling through irregular means, there's also a web of biometric collection stations that have been set up by the Department of Homeland Security, most notably north of the Darien Gap. And so extra continental migrants, those from outside of the Americas, as well as some Venezuelans and a few other nationalities, have their fingerprints taken, iris scans, pictures

taken for facial recognition. And that is entered into a database that is shared directly with the US government. There's several other bilateral information sharing agreements that are focused particularly on biometrics with several Central American countries and with Mexico, obviously. with several Central American countries and with Mexico, obviously. And Mexico has just insane enforcement in Southern Mexico. If you've ever tried to travel over land from Tapachula to Mexico City, you will go through numerous checkpoints where your information is taken. A lot of times you're just paying a bribe to keep going, but it's something where they know who's coming. that's why you hear all the time in the media like this many

people are coming through the darien gap how do they know that well they have these biometric you know information collection stations but i think just more broadly like coming through the southern border as a refugee or just as a migrant is probably the stupidest way to come into the united states if you are trying to you know do a terrorist attack because like border patrol despite what they like to say they are not overwhelmed you know if you divide the number of people coming over by the number of agents it's far less than one migrant per agent per day. So they have a pretty good lock on the border. There's not a lot of people getting through undetected. Those who turn themselves in, which is the vast majority of people, they are subject to all of the same

surveillance and security checks I just mentioned. They get their DNA sample taken at the border. They give all of their information, and then they are not let out of custody if they trigger any kind of security flag. And it can just be like, they're from Yemen, they're from Afghanistan, sometimes they're just detained because of that. But any of those, if any of those checks are triggered, they're detained for the duration of proceedings, they never see that outside of a prison so this idea that terrorists are sneaking over the border is frankly stupid i think you know if we think back to 9-11 i think they all came on visas yeah yeah and like the system makes it so much easier for someone who is wealthy and white uh and

otherwise privileged to come to this country that like it's ridiculous to think that a state actor like russia wouldn't take advantage of that rather than uh yeah yeah attempting to to walk someone through the border where they're about to like encounter some of the most intense state surveillance that can happen to a person and you start off in a prison so like why would you do that and you may never leave it any sense yeah it doesn't make any sense. I'm sure there's like, you know, some people who have ties to foreign intelligence. Sure. I mean, it could happen, but it's like, so the number is so vanishingly small.

And I think another important thing to note is when people are processed, they have an obligation to attend an immigration court hearing. And when I looked at the statistics for russian asylum seekers in particular because i've seen a lot of this rhetoric of like russia sending spies over the border so 98.5 of them show up to their immigration court hearings are you going to do that if you're a spy you're going to subject yourself to another round of security checks and you know spill your entire asylum story subject yourself to cross-ex security checks and you know spill your entire asylum story subject yourself to cross-examination no you're not so i don't know people have watched

that film uh the tv series the americans a little too much uh losing their minds okay so i think yeah it's really important to also point out like when we're talking about the potential for bad actors like yeah like sure maybe there's someone who's come who's done something bad or maybe there's someone who comes who will do something bad it doesn't mean that everyone else who came is in any way complicit in that like we haven't given them another way to come here it's not like they had to take the bad guy route because they chose to like you no one would be picking up their children and walking across the desert and then spending sometimes up to a week in camps which are currently below freezing

at night sometimes with you know like a blanket or like a tent or maybe a wooden shelter if they're lucky like like no one will be doing that if there was an easier option and it's ludicrous to like claim that these people's asylumicrous to like claim that these people's asylum claims or or the fact that they should be welcome here is in any way impacted by the actions of somebody else who might have taken the same yeah i mean the other thing too is just because the border is so closed off by policies that restrict access to asylum it has supercharged the strength of criminal groups that bring people to the border. And I will say that they are spreading a lot of

misinformation. You know, they use this reporting from the right wing calling the border open to advertise their services. And they might very well tell people that it's a lot easier than it actually is and that they have an easier chance to get asylum than they actually do. I mean, I don't discount the power of misinformation, but those I have seen over the past six, seven years, especially since the Trump administration really tried to close off access to asylum. I've seen those groups grow in power. I've seen the price that people pay to cross the border grow, both financially and just in the amount of suffering that they have to endure. So when we talk about border security and national security, I would argue that border

restrictions actually make us much less safe because, you know, criminal groups now completely control the border. Whereas, you know you know a decade ago even a person who just wanted to cross the border on their own could do so you know if they knew the way they could just try to cross and now if you try to do that without paying the criminal groups who really control it you will be killed yeah and that's happened uh multiple times in the last few months we're talking of misleading advertising claims uh we have to take a short break to hear some of them. And 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 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 González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone.

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

Listen to this week's episode of let's talk offline on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts okay we're back um one thing that i want to talk about that we haven't got to yet is that like the the failed government response isn't just federal or well it is both federal and local but I wanted to talk a little bit about this that the federal funding that San Diego County got that it reallocated towards a quote-unquote welcome center right and so yeah we're both very familiar with the welcome center it got it got three million dollars initially and then it got it got three million more uh because apparently uh none of us are doing anything useful anywhere else and don't merit any help

and do you want to talk first of all about just like what the conditions are like at the well like you've just come out of being detained in the desert uh for maybe up to a week it's cold uh we feed you but like we wish we could feed you more and better you don't have a change of clothes right then you've been detained you could have been detained for one night two nights several more nights and then you hit this welcome center so can you like i can think what how we would like to treat people who have just been through all that but can you explain to us how people are treated when they when they arrive at a welcome center well it's they're not arriving there they're picked up from detention by the

non-profit that's administering the welcome center in what look like prison buses right i mean it's i can't i can't imagine that someone getting on one of those buses understands that they're not just at another stage of detention, right? So they get to this fenced-in, abandoned school. They are lined up, and they're forced to give all of their information to the nonprofit workers. They you know mostly not spanish i think maybe like 40 spanish speakers i'm not sure the exact percentage but there's people from all over the world there's no paid interpreters on site and so you know they do have this little

script that they read in the beginning saying like, you're not detained. Like this is a welcome center, whatever, but they run it through Google translate and then play the Google translate like over the megaphone, which it's like, have you ever tried to like understand someone screaming something into a megaphone? Nevermind the fact that it's like Mandarin Google translate,

like people, I guarantee you, they still think they're in prison and so then they go they have to sometimes wait for hours in this intake line only then they're given a ticket to eat like probably some of the worst food i've ever seen like i you know people are not eating a lot when they're at the open air detention sites and then they're really not eating a lot when they're in detention and i've seen people refuse the food there because it's that bad and it's like they're standing in a line for hours not having eaten probably not having slept and god knows how long yeah you know having this garbled message played to them over a megaphone um so anyway they get

through all that and then um they're told they have to make their own way, you know, to their sponsor. And those who don't have the money to do so are provided with, I think it's up to maybe two or three days of shelter, or a hotel room before they are shipped off to another part of the country. And so the goal of the Welcome Center is to get rid of the migrants to get them elsewhere. So you know, 95% to 99% do have a place to go. They don't all have the means to get there. But most of them do almost all have the means to get there. The other few like the other, you know, one to 5%, they need help. They need, you know, maybe a place to stay for a couple five percent they need help they need you know maybe a place to stay for a couple months they need help getting a work permit they might need help you know applying for asylum but instead of investing in the resources that we need locally

to help them they're shipped off to new york chicago or other places that have invested in those resources um and that's really the same thing greg abbott was doing from texas but you know we're just putting a nicer we call it a welcome center yeah yeah somehow better yeah yeah and the welcome center like like we could go deeper into its funding but i think it's fair to say that like it's for one thing it's doing things that cbp should do right like uh like the transport specifically the transport specifically but also like this idea of doing an intake with every single person who comes through there is such a waste of money because it's like it's infantilizing

these people have traveled across the world you think they can't get to the airport on their own yeah you know it doesn't focus resources on that, you know, one to 5% of people who really do need help. It wastes resources on people who really don't. They need Wi-Fi. They need a phone charger.

Yeah. And maybe like a hard email. You know, they're getting the Wi-Fi and the phone charger, which is not provided by the organization that receives $6 million. It's provided by

one of the few organizations including my own who are there providing services without county funding because we didn't want to be associated with this debacle yeah and another thing you do is family reunification there right you guys are helping take care of that yeah which again i think people are unaware that families need to be reunified but they're still very much separated when they're in detention. Well, they're separated at open-air detention sites. They're separated in detention. We've documented since September, I think it's over 1,100 families now that have been separated.

Almost half of them are spousal separations. But a lot of times when, you know, wife wife and husband are separated the kids are with one spouse or another so you know technically it's a separation of a child we see a lot of separations of like 18 year old children from the rest of their families where they're sent to detention facilities and the rest of the family is released so there's all you know grandma from grandkids or niece and nephew sibling separations i mean it's all traumatic right it's just not the particular brand of trump separation that people seem to care about right yeah yeah they quote unquote kids in cages and right but yeah oh they're still in the

cage yeah yeah yeah yeah sadly that has not gone away now yeah or their dad but not both sometimes oh my god yeah it's it's equally it's equally tragic but it's more tragic that somehow we've normalized it and like with this the immigration stuff only seems to be able to ratchet one way and it's further towards like insane degrees of cruelty right like yeah the fact that biden is doing what trump did doesn't mean that trump will do what biden did if trump is elected again right like it somehow they will find a way to make this even worse oh absolutely and i think the open air detention sites are preview of what we'll see you know it's this idea of it being normal to deny people food water shelter and medical care because they've you know committed this awful

crime of crossing the border which is like a misdemeanor by the way um and it's not even supposed to be illegal if you're seeking asylum. The Refugee Convention actually prohibits criminal prosecution of folks who cross borders irregularly to seek asylum. And by and large, the US attorneys, at least during the Biden administration, have stuck to that. regularly and you then apply for asylum generally the charges will be dropped so but like this invader rhetoric right like oh they're invading our country and whatever the white replacement theory all of that is really driving this really normalization of the inhumane treatment of border crossers yeah the point you made about like yeah you can cross between ports of entry and then claim asylum and it's it's one that seems to be completely missing from the discussion. Like I've seen countless times I've seen that like misrepresented in other articles. And it's in almost every single one.

Yeah, it's really disappointing. Like I have very little respect left to lose for a lot of people who work like especially folks who wish to report on the border without visiting the border i just like um what are you are you sparing yourself the trauma of seeing little children staying outside because like their trauma is much greater than yours you know and the things that they're coming away from are much greater than any trauma you're going to take on i understand it's not very nice but like we should face up to the not very nice things that our country does well you're also members of congress who legislate on the border or trade away the rights of asylum seekers without ever having met any of them and those who do come to

the border just go on the border patrol tour and don't actually talk to the migrants. And so that's even worse, you know? But yeah, I agree. Like this idea that they're illegal is completely wrong. They're an illegal process. They're not prosecuted for illegal entry by and large, you know, unless they've tried multiple times. And even then, if they pass a credible fear interview, a lot of times those criminal charges

are dropped. And so they're not illegal. This is a legal process it's a legal way to access that process especially when the ports of entry have been closed off to them yeah and i think they've done to enter the u.s or like at any part of their journey disqualifies them from asylum as you say makes it like a quote unquote illegal which is just kind of i don't know loaded language anyway but yeah they've taken every step to take to make a legal asylum claim and lots of them will be like extremely aware of having done that like not wanting to like if people wanted to walk out of uh the

oh wait the open air detention sites they could that they're not quote unquote detained right but like people are so cautious that they don't want to do anything that might imperil their asylum claim yeah and it's really sad because they already have by crossing the border between ports of entry that's what biden's asylum ban addresses yeah and so they're sort of coming from a defensive posture with respect to their eligibility for asylum by virtue of having done that but the criminal groups that are organizing their transport tell them that that's the legal way and people who are coming into open air detention sites believe they are following a legal process which you know they are to a certain

extent but there's definitely legal consequences for having access the system that way yeah yeah even though like yeah many of these people like i have sat with dozens of people maybe hundreds of people as they've explained to me the amount of time cbp1 crashed on their phone the their attempts to go to the u.s embassy in a city that might not be safe for them or to like transit through it you know look at a regime that wants them dead uh hundreds of kurdish people have shared with me that they've tried to get visas for the u.s and failed and uh they've tried every other option before trying this one and yeah most people have most people have no one would do this you know it's not fun it's it's not fun at all no the last thing i wanted you to explain erica is people are placed when they come through this whole system right in

a defensive or they make a defensive asylum claim can you explain what that is and what the difference between affirmative and defensive asylum for people because again it's in a lot of reporting i've seen this is missing yeah so if i came to the u.s on a visa and then decided i wanted to apply for asylum i would be applying affirmatively. So that means that I've never been apprehended by immigration. I've never been placed in any kind of removal or deportation proceeding. Removal is just like the legal term for deportation. And so when you apply affirmatively, your initial screening is before an asylum officer. It's ostensibly a non-adversarial hearing, but I've been in a lot of them

and that's not always the case. But you don't have a government attorney cross-examining you. It's just the asylum officer who's supposed to be nice, but they're not always. And then if you win, if they approve your case,

that's the end, you just get asylum. And then, you know, that's a path to citizenship. If you are not approved, then you would be placed in removal proceedings where you could present your asylum case before an immigration judge. And so defensive is when you are apprehended, or you turn yourself in at the border you are placed in removal proceedings so you don't get that first asylum interview before the officer you just go straight to immigration court and so when you're presenting your case in immigration court there's a government attorney who's actively trying to deport you i think most of the judges used to be government attorneys. And so many times it feels like they're also trying to deport you. And the success of your claim is pretty much completely dependent on where it is adjudicated.

And less also has to do with your nationality so if you are applying for asylum before the atlanta immigration court pretty much 99 of those cases are denied and there's some judges who've denied 100 of cases and that's true for a lot of jurisdictions within the southeast and then you know you have your friendlier jurisdictions like san francisco san diego is not too bad actually but you know you have other courts where you have a better chance depending on the judge but it really depends on the location the judge that you happen to get you could present the same exact claim in different cities before different judges and have a completely different outcome yeah there's no objective criteria and the people know this too

but unfortunately like to get yourself to san francisco and then survive there just as an example right until your court day comes up is unfathomably expensive like for me i couldn't afford to get myself to san francisco and make rent there and uh it's barely uh possible in san diego so yeah and you don't you don't qualify for work authorization until i think you can apply five months after you've submitted your application for asylum. And in many cases, you don't get your initial court date for months that clock going on your work authorization. And so people I see very commonly are waiting at least a year to get work authorization. So, you know, not only would you have to survive in a high cost of living city, but without the legal ability to work. And so it's really hard for people when they first come to the United States. And, you know know unlike what is spouted many times in the right-wing media space there are no benefits available to someone who's

seeking asylum they're not getting any kind of government money yeah yeah yeah there's a uh i remember what it is you have to be it's like a burden of the state or something thing that you have to ward of i can't remember when you you public charge so like on top of all this people aren't aware of that it's very uh it's sad like like i've had a bunch of people who i've interviewed or just befriended when i've been helping out in akumba who have been like hey like how do i find work like well like uh do you know do you have they didn't realize they wouldn't be permitted to work like and even like we spoke to amos the other day he has offers of work right from his old employer but they that he can't take them up on that because as you say he's he's got to sit doing

nothing uh for five months until he's he's legally allowed to work which is it doesn't help anyone right it doesn't doesn't help migrant it doesn't help us like um it it just forces people to work for cash or for for low-wage jobs which leaves them ripe for abuse or for non-payment right and like it's a system that doesn't doesn't really work for anyone they have no rights as workers right they can also be end up doing very dangerous work and we've seen that a lot well i think something too that's important to note is that there's obviously all these push factors toward migration but a huge pull factor is the employment market in the united states so we have you know hundreds of thousands of open jobs and you know people have to leave their country but they also choose to go to a certain place so

many of them like i said almost all of them have some kind of tie to the united states like family or friends you can host them but it's they're not going to come here if they can't get a job and so it's important to note that as well and i think what you're saying about the exploitation of migrants in the labor industry is really important because i think that you know that's part of why there are so many restrictions because when you do not provide a path to citizenship you create a permanent underclass that is very vulnerable to exploitation and i think that's by design yeah look it it it works, right? Like it increases for people who are unconcerned with the well-being of other humans.

Like it creates a constant pool of cheap and disposable labor. Yeah, because if they're invaders, you know, and they start to act up and demand their rights, it's very easy politically to just get rid of them. Yeah. And some of those same people who are deploying this close to border rhetoric, I'm sure sure are also exactly advantage of that undocumented labor and erica if people want to help they want to donate uh they want to learn more um about this is there a place where they can find you

uh or or al otro lado on the internet yeah so they can go to our website, which is alotrolado.org to donate. There's a donate button there on the homepage, or you can put alotrolado.org slash donate. on all of the social media platforms. And if folks have people in their lives who are migrants who want more information about the asylum system, I would recommend going to our TikTok page, which has multiple videos in over a dozen languages, including many indigenous languages on the asylum process. And then for those of us who are wanting to learn more, our Instagram page is more public facing perfect yeah that's great you guys have some excellent merch as well are you still selling your chingada migra t-shirts oh yeah yeah we

have tote we have tote bags and mugs too so okay yeah just like uh npr but cooler Just like NPR, but cooler. Well, I think we can customize the messaging too. You know, I can think of a few that probably aren't appropriate to say in polite company, but if folks have suggestions for what they'd like to see in our merch, we'd be more than happy to take those suggestions on our info at alotronado.org email.

Perfect, great. Yeah, I'm sure you'll be.org email. Perfect. Great. Yeah. I'm sure you'll be flooded with ideas. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me. 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 wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly

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