It Could Happen Here - How the United States Shaped the Dominican Republic’s Immigration Enforcement Machine

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Starting point is 00:02:17 My name is Carlos Berrios Polanco, and I'm a journalist from Puerto Rico. I'm here with... It's me, James Stout. I'm a journalist who lives in San Diego. Thank you for being here, James. Today, I'm here to talk to you about the Dominican Republic's immigration. system and how it has been shaped by the U.S.'s immigration system to kind of function as a part of the U.S. border outside of what we would normally consider the U.S. border.

Starting point is 00:02:50 And instead of diving in immediately to that, I want to start this episode by talking a little bit about the tragic death of Ezra Francis Hullet, a trans person from the United States in immigration detention in the Dominican Republic. I should mention that they use both they them and he-him pronouns. However, I'm going to be using they-them going forward because that's what the friends and family of Hullet put as their pronouns in the Go-FundMe. They were found dead in the Haina Immigration Detention Center. The biggest immigration detention center in the Dominican Republic on June 23rd, 2025.

Starting point is 00:03:27 The Go-FundMe set up by their family to bring their body back to the states describes them as a compassionate and sensitive person who live with mental health issues and the after effects of childhood trauma. They were 24 and a really good artist from looking at their Instagram. Per the Dominican news show,

Starting point is 00:03:44 Elinforme with Alicia O'Rtega, who interviewed Hullet's mom. Hullet traveled to Puerto Rico without their family's knowledge and seemed to be in contact with a social worker here. I found a local Telemundo affiliate here in Puerto Rico

Starting point is 00:03:57 that reported that they went missing on September 3rd of 2024. However, the GoFundMe says that they were missing in PR since March of 2025, and Hollett's mom told El Informe that that's when they last spoke. Around that same time, Hullet flew to the Dominican Republic, according to El Informe. Shortly after that, they were detained inside a construction site where it appears that they were squatting alongside a Dominican man. After being detained by the tourism police, they were passed on to the Direction Generative de Migration, or DGM, which does immigration enforcement and manages detention. centers. Per El Informa, this was about 37 days after they entered the DR. I want to preface this next section by saying that the DR isn't particularly kind to trans

Starting point is 00:04:42 folks, which I'm sure affected Hollett's experience during immigration detention. Pollitt was initially sent to the male wing of Haina, not because the DR is particularly woke and sends people to detention based on their gender identity, but because they were male presenting and didn't have any ID on them. However, once the was able to identify Hullet, they were transferred to the female wing of Haina. To be honest, quite a bit of the reporting around Hullet in the DR and here in Puerto Rico is quite transphobic. And the way that these immigration officials talk about Hullet in this kind of mini documentary by El Inforbe is also quite transphobic. Videos published by Elinforme appear

Starting point is 00:05:24 to show Hullet curled up on the floor next to dozens of other people who were sleeping in two small rooms inside of immigration detention. Some of the notes and videos uncovered by Elinforme appeared to show that Hollett was suffering from a mental health crisis throughout the more than two months they were in immigration detention. Hullet's mom told Elinforme that Hullet suffered from schizophrenia. They also wrote about having asthma and being allergic to milk. Per Elinforme, Hullet's mom confirmed to them that they needed an inhaler and an epipen.

Starting point is 00:05:56 Although news reports say that DGM provided Hullet with some medicine for the apparent mental health crisis they were going through, I can't find any reporting that says that they ever got an inhaler or an epipen that they needed. A coroner's report found that they died from a heart attack, according to Notetiazine, a national news website there. Her information obtained by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, quote, at least four facilities that are being used as immigration detention centers present overcrowding, unsanitary conditions,

Starting point is 00:06:29 deficient food and lack of access to health care. The same report states that a newborn died in Haina on November 14 of last year. Ten. People I've spoken to who've been detained in Haina over the years have described the conditions there as horrific, particularly as the Dominican government has ramped up deportation efforts massively against the country's Haitian population. Detention centers are routinely overcrowded, and people have very little access to food water for days from what they tell me.

Starting point is 00:07:01 Other people I've spoken to, detainees are sometimes beaten or extorted by guards to be able to call their families to get their documents or for food. And I talk a little bit more about this later on in the episode. But the reason that I started with Hullet's story is twofold. First, because their deaf was significantly undercovered by English language media. And second, because they died as a direct result of an immigration system. This systematically abuses Haitian immigrants and has been historically shaped by the U.S. military and the American border apparatus. While they're organized in different ways within the law enforcement structures of their respective countries,

Starting point is 00:07:43 there are a lot of similarities between the DGM and ICE in the United States, particularly in their tactics and how they've terrorized immigrant communities. However, before diving into the current immigration situation in the Dominican Republic and how a lot of it has come as a result of collaboration. collaboration with American immigration enforcement, I want to give some historical context about how, in a very real way, the United States created the Dominican Haiti border. The Dominican Republic was originally a Spanish colony. Haiti was originally a French colony. Haiti became independent, then invaded the Dominican Republic, then they fought them back to become independent themselves. But throughout all of that time, the Dominican Haiti border was in amorphous space, not

Starting point is 00:08:29 the kind of quote unquote hard border that it is today. There had been agreements on where the border was supposed to be. People roughly knew where that border was supposed to be on a map and on the earth if they lived near that area. However, it was just kind of essentially an imaginary line that ran along the 240 miles of land that make up the border between the two countries. However, in 1905, the U.S. established a customs receivership over the Dominican Republic to force the Caribbean nation to pay its foreign debts and ostensibly protected from a possible European invasion, which is a classic Monroe Doctrine move, of course. Yeah, many such cases it is. Yeah. This agreement was officially ratified for a 1907 convention and created the Dominican border guard to police the frontier between the two countries.

Starting point is 00:09:29 and make sure that all duties were collected from commerce and people crossing the border, according to a journal article titled Haitians, Magic and Money, Rasa and Society, and the Haitian Dominican borderlands by a Lauren Derby. While these weren't the first border guards, they were essential to turning the borderlands into the border as it exists today, one of the most highly regulated and police borders in the Western Hemisphere, and I should also say that at some points throughout Dominican history, the military patrol the border.

Starting point is 00:10:00 Per a document from the Marines titled, Marines in the Dominican Republic, 1916 to 1924, North Americans were part of the Dominican Frontier Guard that regulated this border. Some would later go on to become part of the Guardia National Dominican, which was created by the American military government that controlled the DR between 1916 and 1924.

Starting point is 00:10:23 In 1921, the GND turned into the Policia National Dominican, which also stationed people at the border at that time, for more context, the American government was occupying Haiti at more or less the same time from 1915 to 34. This period of American occupation of La Spaniola greatly defined the relationship that both countries would have with each other going forward, as well as both countries' military and law enforcement. The military occupation of the Dominican Republic also led to laws that prevented the entry of workers, who weren't white unless they came through official border crossings and paid for temporary

Starting point is 00:11:01 residence permits. This is according to the book, more than a massacre racial violence and citizenship in the Haitian Dominican borderlands by Sabine Caddo. While there had always been racial prejudice on Hispaniola, this brought even more, leading to Dominican security forces to arrest people on suspicion that they'd broken this law, even if they hadn't. And it was later used to strip Dominicans of their citizenship. it also strengthened the idea of quote unquote

Starting point is 00:11:29 Dominicanidad as something closer to being white and European a sentiment that continues to this day and in some ways is even stronger now than it was then. What's entering my mind is, I think it was a tweet that said they're coming out with a new version of white that doesn't include you. Like whiteness as a liminal concept is something that can be hard for people from the US to understand.

Starting point is 00:11:54 But yeah, I've heard this directly elucidated to me many times that like Dominicanness and blackness are distinct. Absolutely. Or that Haitian people are black, which obviously is someone who's who's lived in the UK and the United States is difficult for me to understand. But like all of these things are socially constructed. It doesn't mean they're not real. It just means that people made them, people can move them. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:12:19 I have also had people, to my face, say that the Dominican identity is. completely separate from blackness, you know, and as someone who has lived in Puerto Rico, which is part of the United States or owned by it, that also to me was very, very strange. And I'd say this is someone whose mother is Dominican, right? So I was just kind of like stunned when the first time that I heard it. And sometimes it's called I Ventidad Kiskela is how it's being marketed by some people in the current day. Although I will say if you've seen the video of the, comedian, I think, saying, I know black I

Starting point is 00:12:58 Dominican, I have pretty much witnessed something exactly like that said completely seriously several times throughout my life. Yeah, it doesn't mean that like Dominican people coming to the US will not encounter anti-blackness because they will. Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:14 It's just that it also doesn't mean that on return to Dominican Republic, they cannot slot into a different structure, which puts them above Haitian people. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a very, it's a very interesting topic how those kind of identities are presented in separate ways, depending on where you live. Because for me, for example, if I went to the US, most people would say that I'm brown, but here in Puerto Rico, I'm kind of very explicitly a white person here, you know?

Starting point is 00:13:45 Yeah, it's so straight. It's such a short flight as well. Like that flight from Miami to Dominican way, you go Punta Cana or whatever, that airport there that's like out of Santa Domingo. and so much change is right you can literally get on that plane as someone who isn't considered to be black and then get off that and be treated by American law enforcement like you are

Starting point is 00:14:04 within like a one hour flight and yeah it's just this is like the nature of creating hierarchies right they can shift to include people and shift to exclude people to absolutely absolutely so I know I'm speaking to the choir about this but this kind of definition

Starting point is 00:14:20 of borders and national identity are an essential part of the nation state and immigration enforcement. Because if you don't have an established border, it's very hard to define the in-group that belongs inside of the nation and that group that doesn't, who can then be detained, penalized, and deported for crossing that imaginary line in the earth. These kinds of steps by the U.S. military government

Starting point is 00:14:44 were essential to creating this idea that Dominicans and Haitians are two completely different people. However, to be clear, it's not that this sentiment didn't exist beforehand. In particular, the Dominican elite hated Haitians a lot for the invasion of of DR by Haiti. That sentiment existed in the borderlands, but a lot of those people were bilingual, which is very different from kind of people inside of the metropole who saw themselves as kind of this one identity versus along the borderlines, which is usually what happens, right? There is a kind of melding identities in ways that isn't seen anywhere else.

Starting point is 00:15:21 Yeah, this is the same where I live, right? Like San Diego, Tijuana is effectively, like, it's not one large city. They're important and very, very, very real differences, but, like, in many ways, one community, right? Like, so many of our community members, like, I have students at the community college who cross every day. I've had students when I've taught high school classes who crossed every day. Like, I've got friends who couldn't make rent work in California. and so they go to Tijuana and like obviously yeah those people speak two languages or like both languages at the same time.

Starting point is 00:15:59 I think that's just a nature of living in the borderlands. Yeah, absolutely. So following the U.S.'s exit from the Dominican Republic, dictator Rafael Trujillo came to power in 1930. He was trained by the U.S. military and eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier General of the PND, then militarized it. And as a word dictator implies, he was not. not a good guy. Under him, the already burgeoning and existent anti-Hasian sentiment essentially exploded. He introduced the Cedula, a national identification document for all

Starting point is 00:16:33 adult men, so Haitians had to pay for the Cedula and a foreign residency permit, essentially ending the binational lifestyle of communities on the border, according to more than a massacre. If the U.S. started the border, then Trujillo marked it as a sign of utter violence by ordering his troops to ethnically cleanse the Dominican border of Haitians in October of 1947. This was known as the Parsley Massacre, and estimates of people killed vary, but the most common number I've seen used is roughly 20,000 Haitians killed over the course of about a week to two weeks, and this massacre, of course, came about as a way for him to define the border

Starting point is 00:17:17 by stripping Haitians of that land because it was mostly done inside of the Dominican side of the D.R. Haiti border. Yeah. It's called the Parsley Massacre because soldiers reportedly recognize Haitians by their inability to pronounce parsley in Spanish, Berejid. However, experts think that this was just a myth,

Starting point is 00:17:37 another way to separate Haitians from Dominicans according to more than a massacre. Also, as a not-so-fun fact, a lot of the violence took place along the massacre River, which a lot of people think is called that because of the 1947 massacre. But from the various Spanish language sources, I've read, they all essentially say that this isn't true, that it was, it's called the Massacre River because of the frequent violence that took place there between Spanish colonizers and French buccaneers in the 18th century.

Starting point is 00:18:09 And this is according to an article by Simont-Odriguez in Nacla, titled Dominican Republic and Haiti at the crossroads of the massacre river. The Dominican Immigration Agency, the DGM, was also established by Trujillo just two years after the Parsley massacre. Not only were they essential to deporting Haitians during Trujillo's reign, but they also forced the Haitian population into the sugar-producing regions of the country. And because he couldn't deploy overt state violence there in the same way that he did along the border, they came up with a new plan. Any Haitian immigrant detained in the area would just be brought back. to whatever sugar plantation would pay their immigration taxes, essentially creating these zones, which still very much exists to this day,

Starting point is 00:18:55 of Haitians living in and around these sugar plantations that they also work at. I should say that this wasn't a codified policy, but that it coexisted with other tactics throughout the years. The Trujillo government also instituted a policy that made all Haitians who owned land or businesses to not be able to work outside of, of the sugar-producing regions, according to a journal article titled A Vale of Legality by Amelia Hinson.

Starting point is 00:19:23 I visited some of these sugar plantations in 2023, and many of the Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent who live there are descendants of the ones Trujillo pushed into the region. While anti-Hasianism already existed before Trujillo, he cemented it into the political structures of the Dominican Republic to the point that it still continues incredibly strong into the modern day. About 51% of Dominicans believe that immigration harms the country per a 2024 poll by the polling firm Latino Barometro. Many Haitians come to the Dominican Republic seeking a better life for themselves and their families, much like immigrants in the U.S. And similarly to the U.S., getting a visa or becoming a citizen for them is extremely difficult. This isn't to say that there aren't

Starting point is 00:20:12 a lot of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic, and I should also say that they are by far the largest immigrant group in the country, which makes sense because they're next door neighbors. Yeah. The construction and the sugar-cutting industry are completely dependent on cheap Haitian labor. The sugar-cutting industry is heavily reliant on this labor, a lot of which has done by undocumented immigrants. Many people over the years have called it a quote-unquote modern form of slavery. I've been to these camps and what they endure for extremely little pay is horrific. I went there at the tail end of 2023, and while there are some places set up by the companies

Starting point is 00:20:57 that own those sugar-producing regions that are, they're called Batalles inside of the sugar cane mazes. Some of the battalillas have like houses made out of cement with electricity, and some are completely degraded, made from wood that's rotting, and they have no access to running water. Jesus. Or electricity, there have been over the years attempts by both human rights groups and the companies that own those regions. It wasn't benevolently, is my opinion on it.

Starting point is 00:21:32 But more because of the pressure that they've received. over the years to move these people into somewhat better conditions. And thankfully, for some of them, they have for others. They have not. A lot of the Haitian migration in the last decades has come after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jevinel Moise. The two events, as well as other crises, have caused people in Porto Prince, the capital of Haiti, to experience significant violence and hunger crises.

Starting point is 00:22:04 Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced out of their homes and left the country over the last decade per the Migration Policy Institute. For many, the national path of migration out of Port-au-Prince is towards the border and towards the Dominican Republic. And as we've seen, a lot of those Haitian migrants have also tried to go into the U.S. through Latin America. And, I mean, not to say that they exclusively go there, of course, but they try to go wherever they're able to go. Yeah, I wrote a piece for NBC, God, when you could still write things critical of the Biden administration at NBC. And like in 2021, right, when the United States Embassy in Haiti had a picture of Biden. It was translated into Creole, right? But it was like essentially do not come.

Starting point is 00:22:52 That we'll turn you around and send you back. Like this is the guy who'd run, you know, like months before on a kindness where Trump had done cruelty. I remember like right around that time, 2021. So there was a large number of migrants, of course, who had been stuck in, in Tijuana because of Title 42. They tried to cross and he kept getting bounced back, right? And so I would cross to talk to them. They moved to, like, right by where the Pedest, pedestrian crossing is now. And they were camping there in the square.

Starting point is 00:23:22 Like, literally you go over the border bridge that goes over the road. You pop out your first step on, like, on the ground. The bridge is probably in Mexico at some point. But they're right there. I remember speaking to Haitian folks there about like they had genuinely hoped for a little bit better from the Biden administration, which of course they didn't get. A very common pathway is to Brazil to do underpay construction work for the Rio Olympics and then finding yourself without work, without much of a chance at citizenship or permanency, deciding to come north. That was a very common pathway at a time too. Pride is like love.

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Starting point is 00:25:03 Here at the Happiness Lab, we're serving up some hot takes for the summer. Big ideas that just might reshape how you think about your well-being. Like, we've been thinking about the loneliness epidemic all wrong. You can be lonely in a marriage. You can be lonely at a party. I don't think loneliness is actually about solitude. Loneliness is about something much bigger. Or that we should get rid of small talk altogether.

Starting point is 00:25:27 We talk about current events. We talk about what you do for a living. But not, do you love what you do for a living? Is this your dream job? or that the mental health crisis isn't what we think it is, and that kids today are doing better than we assume. It was really disorienting for us as researchers to be so wrong about our hypothesis. We are so scared that we are going to underreact to a severe challenge that we tend to overreact.

Starting point is 00:25:51 For more surprising ideas backed by psychological science, check out our new series, Happiness Hot Takes. Listen to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Lorry Santos, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Every story has a point where it's balanced on a knife's edge. That's where we begin. For some, it's a confrontation no parent ever expects. They finally admit we're here to take your children. The department has taken custody and we're here to take your kids.

Starting point is 00:26:19 It was just shock and horror and desperation. For others, it's surviving the unthinkable. As they're having this gun battle, thousands of feet up in the air, many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft. I thought we were going to die then. The Knife is a podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant. We talked to the people who lived it, unpacking what happened, how they got through it, and what came next. And on our off-record episodes, we go even deeper into the reporting and answer the questions you can't stop thinking about.

Starting point is 00:26:54 New episodes drop every Thursday on the exactly right network and the IHeart Podcast Network. Listen to the Knife on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So about 200,000 displaced Haitians are believed to have moved to the DR in the months after the earthquakes, according to the international organization for migration. And after that flow of migrants to the DR and the rising tide of anti-Hasianism, which had been building for a very long time, in 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic ruled that people born in the Dominican Republic. two immigrant parents without a regularized migration status had never been entitled to Dominican citizenship. This ruling is called La Sentencia, the Judgment. What this essentially did was that if you do not have at least one parent who is a Dominican citizen, then you do not have Dominican citizenship.

Starting point is 00:28:00 In the U.S., we have Earthright citizenship or Giussol. which means that if you're born on this land or inside the U.S., you are an American citizen. This, of course, applies almost everywhere except certain colonies like American Samoa. So essentially, in the Dominican Republic, if one of your parents was not Dominican, you did not have citizenship. The thing about judicial decisions is that they typically only go forward in time. But what was particularly evil about La Sentencia was that it applied retroactively to 1929. And I want listeners to sit with that for a second. Even if it applied just going forward, it would be a horrible thing.

Starting point is 00:28:41 But going back nearly 100 years is just horrendous. Because what the ruling caused was a chain reaction that stripped entire families of their citizenship. Because if your grandparents weren't citizens, then neither was your dad. If your mom wasn't a citizen then, then neither are you. Of course, this ruling also affected anyone who did legally still have citizenship, but didn't have the documentation going back that far to prove it if the government came knocking. So, yeah, essentially, imagine if you had to prove that your great-grandparents were citizens in 1929. I mean, I don't think I personally would have that documentation for my great-grandparents.

Starting point is 00:29:23 Especially living, like, in the lower 48 in the U.S., it's just more likely that one might have documentation of ones like great-grandparents. living in parts of the D.R. But yeah, essentially for me, it would be incredibly hard to have that documentation for my great-grandparents. I couldn't imagine someone who has moved throughout their lives inside of the Dominican Republic to also have that documentation. And then there's also the fact that because of the anti-Aceanism that was there, a lot of people who did or were supposed to legally still have citizenship were rolled up in the people. whose citizenship this law took away. In total, the decision impacted about 245,000 Dominicans, of which

Starting point is 00:30:12 211,000 were Dominicans of Haitian descent according to the Center for Migration Studies. I, of course, say Dominicans, because they were legally speaking, Dominicans at the time that the Sentencia took place, but now they have been stripped of that citizenship. the Dominican government tried to backtrack this decision just a year later after a lot of international criticism and provide a path to the stateless, but the damage was done. In 2023, it's estimated that as many as 130,000 people remain stateless per CMS. There is no law that provides a path to citizenship for the children of the stateless. So even after this 2014 law that tried to make people back. into citizens or provide a pathway to citizenship.

Starting point is 00:31:01 If you have a child, that child was not going to have citizenship. Yeah. Because so many people were affected by it. And a lot of the slowness of the government, the ways that government doesn't work, you have this wave of denationalizations. And because of a lot of the problems of the government, some people who should have had that pathway to citizenship provided to them still don't have it. Right.

Starting point is 00:31:26 It's going to be so much harder to. get those people back. And like, understandably, it's going to be very hard to get those people to engage with the state in any way. Absolutely. Because why the fuck would you? It just told you like the you, that you don't belong, right? Like, the state is a danger. Yeah. To those people. And of course, not to mention that the anti-Hasian sentiment that the government has, you know, that maybe the government at the top decided to go back, but that anti-Hasian sentiment is still there from the top down, of course. So,

Starting point is 00:31:58 So yeah. Yeah, it takes a long time to get over something like what happened under Trio, right? Like the massacre and then the ongoing like the state being used as a weapon against you. Like yeah, people aren't going to just be like, okay, well, this is a benevolent entity now. Let me go, let me go chat with them. Tell them where I live and make sure they got all my information up to date. Like it's just, it takes a long time to rebuild that trust. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:32:23 So at the same time that this was happening, the Dominican government created. a sprawling immigration enforcement apparatus that has systemically punished Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent that they made stateless. These numbers are honestly quite horrifying. In 2025, the DGM registered 379,553 deportations, according to their self-published numbers. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean 3759,553 people. were removed from the country because of possible double or triple counting if a person crossed the border more than once and were detained than deported. But even if you cut that figure in half or in freeze, that still is a staggering amount of people's lives who have been touched and

Starting point is 00:33:17 affected by this deportation apparatus. To give some more recent numbers, in May of 2026, the DGM said that they deported 35,305 migrants, according to their own numbers. And the thing about the Dominican Republic is that essentially every law enforcement agency does immigration enforcement. The great majority of those migrants deported in May were detained by the DGM, the Direction General de Migration. About 5,800 were detained by the Dominican Army. and about 2,300 by the specialized land border security corps, which is known as CESFront.

Starting point is 00:34:00 They essentially patrol the national border with Haiti, and about 1,500 of those people were detained by the national police. These numbers are so staggering because all of these law enforcement agencies are trying to meet a 10,000 a week quota that President Luis Albinader set for the Dominican government in 2020. 24 and continues to follow. This number, to me, is really, really staggering, and it's kind of horrific because you read it on paper, and it's hard to really understand the immensity of this mechanism to forcefully move people out of the country, and as well as all of the law enforcement work and immigration enforcement work that goes into detaining those people in the first place, then sending them to to immigration centers and then deporting them outside of the Dominican Republic.

Starting point is 00:34:54 And the way that that usually happens is that they are loaded into these trucks, which are converted horse trucks. Sometimes they're like the little short ones that sometimes are the very long ones that you see to move pallets of stuff that have this cage built onto the back. And people are just stuffed to the brim inside of there. It's really incredibly inhumane. Yeah, damn. It's rough. So migrants are routinely extorted while in immigration detention. For an anonymous source that spoke with Listin Diario a national paper in the DR,

Starting point is 00:35:31 that detainees are routinely hit up for bribes during immigration raids and during their detention. Per the article, guards in Haina, the largest immigration detention center in the DR, were charging about $200 and $270 to be freed, which might not seem like an instrument amount of money in the U.S., but it's about half of the average monthly salary in the DR, and these migrants are making much, much less than that. Yeah. The same report says that guards sometimes charge migrants' families so detainees can get food while detained.

Starting point is 00:36:09 So much of the rhetoric that Abinader and other Dominican officials used to justify their actions, especially in recent years, is that immigration contributes to the destabilization of their society. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Haitian immigrants are just trying to live in peace and escape the violence or crisis that they're facing in their home country. And like I said earlier, a lot of industries in the DR rely on cheap Haitian labor. And I would be remiss to mention that a lot of the people that the Dominican Republic's immigration enforcement are deporting are people that the Dominican Republic made stateless in the first place. So they essentially, created this gigantic group of people that they are now

Starting point is 00:36:54 supporting, right? It's the way that the nation state operates to kind of push people to push people that it considers undesirable out of that nation's borders. Yeah, this is like Ben Anderson, right, when he's writing about nations, says no nation can be coterminous with all of humanity. And then when we combine the nation with the state, that's when we get, if no nation can be coterminous with all humanity and the state is policing who and it's not, is it's not part of the nation and expelling those are not.

Starting point is 00:37:26 Like, that's when we get what we see here, right? And what we see here in the U.S. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but whenever I talked to Haitians or Dominicans of Haitian descent about immigration enforcement in their country, they pretty much tell me the same thing. So the Dominican government, everyone black is Haitian. And we talked about this and how the conception of Domenicalidad has become separate from the way that they view Haitians as black. Many civil society and human rights organizations have documented how the DGM uses racial profiling as the justification to detain pretty much whoever they want. This got so bad that in 2022, the American State Department issued a travel warning for quote unquote darker-skinned Americans about the risk of, being swept up in the country's immigration crackdown.

Starting point is 00:38:19 And to me at the time, having written about that, it's kind of incredible to see an American agency be like, hey, the racism, this country is so bad, you should be on the lookout. Yeah, yeah, like you might not want to go. Exactly. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah. So the DGM routinely performs midnight immigration raids on Haitian communities,

Starting point is 00:38:43 break down their doors and drag people kicking, screaming, from their beds, then load them up on the repurposed cattle trucks and horse trucks that I was talking about earlier. There are usually about 30 or so people in those immigration trucks, the small ones pushed up against the metal bars, and I've seen this personally at the DR Haiti border, where they're taken from immigration detention centers and then dropped off and essentially forced to walk into the Haiti. When I was at the border in 2023, the ones I saw and was able to speak to had grabbed everything that they could as they were getting detained because they knew that it was possible they could never make it back. Some of these people included mothers carrying

Starting point is 00:39:25 small children and babies. One worker who I spoke with worked in construction and he claimed that he was being deported because his boss had called immigration enforcement on them because they were talking about getting paid more. Yeah, Taylor's old time with undocumented labor, sadly. Absolutely. And this is big. in the sugar cane cutting regions as well, or at least it used to be. Yeah. And it's a kind of a recurring system because, you know, they get deported, but there's not really any work or safety in some cases in Haiti,

Starting point is 00:39:58 so they're forced to come back over the border to do the same job. Yeah. Many Haitians live in fear, hiding from immigration authorities as much as they can while trying to work to feed their families. It's especially bad for pregnant mothers who can't go to hospitals for fear of being swept up by immigration rates. There have been several women who were deported very quickly after being discharged, according to a report by the Guardian. And I've personally seen a pregnant mother with a small child forced across the DR-Hady border after being dumped there by DGM.

Starting point is 00:40:31 Similar to how the American government essentially created the Dominican Haiti border and shaped its border guard in the early 1900s, they also routinely provide training for several law enforcement agencies who enforce the Dominican immigration laws. For example, agencies from the Dominican Republic routinely received training from international law enforcement academies, which are international police academies administered by the U.S. State Department, where U.S. law enforcement trained police and other law enforcement agencies from other countries. A training schedule from 2024, I found, showed that the Dominican Republic participated in

Starting point is 00:41:12 nine sessions throughout the years with agencies like ICE and CBP. However, when it comes to being trained by the U.S., no one beats the Querpo Specialized DeS. Fronteries Alterrestre, known as CESFront, or the specialized land border security corps. They are in charge of securing and, quote-unquote, protecting the Dominican border with Haiti. They are an arm of the military and were created in 2006. That same year, unidentified, quote-unquote, U.S. experts,

Starting point is 00:41:42 reported that there were a, quote, series of weaknesses that will lead to all kinds of illicit activities along the border, according to a 2006 article from Dominican today. Per the same article, the military patrolled the area beforehand, but the study revealed the lack of and bad shape of the Dominican Army's facilities, the lack of training, logistics, weapons, vehicles, garments, as well as low wages, and bad nutrition for these soldiers. And I should say that's a quote from the Dominican today's article. And I want to talk a little bit about the border before I explain it later on in more detail. But a lot of the border that I've been to between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is along the massacre river where part of the parsley massacre happened.

Starting point is 00:42:29 And you essentially have this very big cement and iron and steel border wall going up that has completely separated this contiguous. this piece of land where people were once upon a time over 100 years ago, able to more or less walk between and walk over without much restriction at all. And, you know, the place where they've built the barrier, this was not like what, you know, whenever someone from Puerto Rico, whenever someone talks to me about the U.S. border, I'm imagining the big iron wall throughout the desert. This was not that this was kind of very lush green mangroves. They used to be one big forest, but now they created a bade strip of land that now separates that forest that once was one and then put the border wall there. So a lot of this modern history of collaboration

Starting point is 00:43:21 between the U.S. and the DR immigration enforcement is recorded in Todd Miller's Border Patrol Nation and Empire of Borders, both of which I recommend everyone go read. Yeah, Miller's great. Yeah, Miller's books are fantastic. I know we both really enjoy them by there. Yeah. Yeah, a real resource for anyone looking to understand the border and its history and like how we got to this situation wasn't hard to see it coming actually. Yeah. And a lot of Border Patrol Nation is from the early 2010s too, so it was really kind of prescient in many ways.

Starting point is 00:43:54 Yeah, very much so. Like, I remember reading that book and then like thinking about it a lot as I was in the Dominican Republic and even when I was in Panama last year, like the Biden administration, right, was financed. deportations from Panama of people who had just crossed a Darien Gap, like chiefly to Colombia, almost entirely Colombian young men. I literally watched these guys get like, I watched a family who I'd known from the jungle, right?

Starting point is 00:44:23 And then we reconnected in La Hasblancas, which is a reception center. Reception centers are pretty euphemistic term there. It's not a great place to be. I think it's close now, actually. But they would come and call out names and was like, huh, what's going on? Like, maybe we're getting taken somewhere.

Starting point is 00:44:39 where like maybe this is, they want to check our passports and then to start loading men into the same thing got like a flatbed truck. And I remember one guy like having to give his baby to his wife. And I was there and he was like, hey, what are they doing? And I was like, I don't know, man. Like I don't know that some guy was like, this is how they deport people. It was a very, yeah, it's horrible. And then his wife was just like standing there next to me and like, I was horrible.

Starting point is 00:45:02 Like I put my arm around her and she was just sobbing. And of course, like, like, separated from her partner and the father of her child. But yeah, it's rough to think that then I went home and did my work and paid my taxes and paid my little share of that family getting torn apart. But yeah, that was a blue team. That wasn't a Trump thing. Like, this is the U.S. has been trying to move that traumatic violence further and further from its population for a long time. That's what strong borders are, right? Strong borders are violent.

Starting point is 00:45:32 Strong borders are tearing families apart. Strong borders are people dying. And there was an understanding shared by both parties. that Americans don't like seeing dead people. They don't like seeing families torn apart, as we've seen in the last few years, a couple years. And so they have sought to move that violence further away from the metropole rather than stopping doing the violence. Yeah, absolutely. Miller talks a lot about this in his book, right?

Starting point is 00:45:58 Where part of the U.S.'s internal migration policy as it relates to foreign policy, is that if you can stop migrants from coming into the U.S., at another border, that means that they won't be able to reach their border, right? Yeah. An academic who described it to Todd Miller as kind of border sets in ways that the borders go there. Yeah, like clusters or something, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's a dude who he's like a veteran and he was like in Afghanistan and saw Border Patrol out there. I was like, what the fuck.

Starting point is 00:46:30 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, so the way that veteran, that person explains it is that these borders are created in such a way to keep people from flowing into the United States, but able for people inside of the United States to more very easily leave them and pass through them, right? So, for example, let's say a migrant from Haiti wanted to go into the U.S., they would be faced with an incredibly uphill battle of passing several borders. It might be the border from Haiti into the Dominican Republic, then into Puerto Rico, or it might be Haiti to some Latin American countries,

Starting point is 00:47:12 then several Central American countries, and then onto the U.S. southern border, right? Yeah. But versus, let's say, if I wanted to go to Haiti, it would be pretty incredibly easy for me to go there, right? And this is, you know, what we see. Yeah, yeah. The way that these, this mechanism is constructed for the in-group to be able to move freely around the world and the out-group to have an incredibly hard time. actually coming into the U.S.

Starting point is 00:47:40 My friend, Erica from Al-Ola-Lada, like to say, we already have open borders. We already have no borders, just only for some people. Yeah, exactly. And of course, I'd be remiss not to mention that capital flows very easily through borders as if they do not exist. Yeah, because they don't for money. Yeah.

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Starting point is 00:48:59 please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Here at the Happiness Lab, we're serving up some hot takes for the summer. big ideas that just might reshape how you think about your well-being. Like, we've been thinking about the loneliness epidemic all wrong. You can be lonely in a marriage. You can be lonely at a party. I don't think loneliness is actually about solitude.

Starting point is 00:49:27 Loneliness is about something much bigger. Or that we should get rid of small talk altogether. We talk about current events. We talk about what you do for a living. But not, do you love what you do for a living. Is this your dream job? Or that the mental health crisis isn't what we think it is. And that kids today are doing better.

Starting point is 00:49:43 than we assume. It was really disorienting for us as researchers to be so wrong about our hypothesis. We are so scared that we are going to underreact to a severe challenge that we tend to overreact. For more surprising ideas backed by psychological science, check out our new series, Happiness Hot Takes. Listen to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every story has a point where it's balanced on a knife's edge. That's where we begin. For some, it's a confrontation no parent ever expects. They finally admit, we're here to take your children.

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Starting point is 00:51:13 As Miller lays out an empire of borders, post 9-11, the U.S. adopted a very strong policy of considering terrorism against American interest, quote, over there, needing to be regarded in the same way as terrorism over here, right? And, of course, terrorism, the way that the U.S. government sees it is probably extremely different from the way that you and I see it, James. So this ideology essentially pushed the American border everywhere, because everything that the U.S. didn't agree with was a threat to its interest. This is essentially kind of the same reasoning as the Monroe Doctrine, and the American Empire just massaged it for the modern world in some ways.

Starting point is 00:51:54 This is why international collaboration between American immigration enforcement and border security agencies has skyrocketed since the dawn of the millennium, to the point that CBP agents have traveled around the world to show countries how to enforce their country's borders, so that people inside of those countries wanting to leave and reach the United States borders, are never able to do so. We talked a little bit about this. I can't remember if it was on air or off air about how Bovino did that in Honduras. Yeah, that's right.

Starting point is 00:52:24 That was something I found recently I was reading some document about this border externalization and he's one of the people interviewed. It's like when he was in Bortak, right? Bovino was a member of Bortec. And they were going out on patrol with, I guess, I don't know

Starting point is 00:52:40 Honduras has Border Patrol or I don't quite know what the structure there under is. But they were going on patrol with him. And then the Bortech guys are armed and running around, but technically not the ones making arrests. Yeah, like you can read this in the Miller books. This is a thing that the U.S. does all over the world. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:52:59 And Miller traveled to a lot of countries where people were agents of their countries, border security apparatus or an agency, were like, yeah, I've been trained by the U.S., of course. Yeah, like talking about the Kailets. Like in, yeah, anyway, everyone should read the book. I'm not going to ever recount the book. It's a good book. So if you look at the border enforcement or immigration agencies around the world, you'll find that they may look like the United States

Starting point is 00:53:29 because they are modeling themselves off of the trainers that train them or help shape their creation. Césfront takes after its border patrol Big Brother in many ways. But one of the most salient is in the wall that they patrol. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, in 2022, the Dominican Republic started construction of a Mexico-U.S.-style border wall that, if it's finished, would span almost half of the border with Haiti. When the project is completed, it will be the second longest border wall in the Americas, the first being the Mexico-U.S. wall. It is supposed to be high-tech containing a series of cameras, radars, and drones that are supposed to run the length of the wall. This wall, like many other border walls, has done intense environmental damage along the course of the border, particularly to the mangroves that run along the border where the wall is being built.

Starting point is 00:54:20 In 2023, I visited Dahabong, a town in the northern section of the R Haiti border to report on the Dominican Republic's immigration enforcement apparatus for myself. Dahabong is where the SESFront has a very important base, and as I mentioned earlier, it's a place where a lot of the violence. of the parsley massacre took place. Says France base in the habong is painted in a beige-brown camouflage pattern that makes it stick out like a sore thumb against the green forest background where it's stationed.

Starting point is 00:54:52 However, it does blend in to that strip of land where they've cut out to make the border wall. You know, in many ways, the government tries to reshape the land in nature to fit its image. Yeah, it's kind of the same here. Like, that's in a desert this weekend.

Starting point is 00:55:09 And I was like climbing up into mountains there and you can look down at the border wall and it's like a, it's like a scar across the landscape. You can, for miles as far as you can see, it's looked like somebody sliced through this, in this case, this pristine desert landscape, right? And yeah, I can see it being the only worse in these areas where, like, it's so lush and green. Yeah, absolutely. From aerial drone images that I've seen of the border, it definitely looks like a kind of sand-colored scar, especially in that the ha-bonne, area where you have green on both sides and then that sand color line running through it. Yeah. So the Dajaban border crossing is extremely close to Sestfran's base there.

Starting point is 00:55:51 When I was there, the border between the two countries was officially closed because of a dispute over the canalization of the Massacre River. Haitians needed the water for agriculture along the border, but Dominican officials said that the canalization would take water away from their own purposes. A couple weeks after I was there, they opened up the border again, which was extremely necessary because border towns like Dahabong and Wanamint, which is the town on the Haitian side, rely on each other a lot for trade. And this has been that way since time immemorial in that region, right? Yeah. The binational market in Dahabong is pretty much the only place where Haitians are legally allowed to enter, but they have to leave the same day they came in.

Starting point is 00:56:35 It's essentially this giant market and there is a steel wall that runs along the outer perimeter of it, which is where you have CESFront border guards. So if you pass for the border crossing, you do the whole immigration check. You're able to go into the market. Yeah. And you could essentially do like a circle around it. So you're able to go into the market and then you leave the backway, which connects to another border crossing. Oh, so you're in like a bubble.

Starting point is 00:57:04 Yeah, essentially. Like that you, yeah, okay. Yeah, essentially. That's crazy. They're like going that hard to be like, we want your money, we just don't want you. Exactly, exactly, yeah. And it's really, it really shows the hypocrisy of these border systems because, you know, they're, these two towns are extremely reliant on one another.

Starting point is 00:57:24 But the countries that represent both towns are like, no, we need to enforce this, this border. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, this market in the ha bong is. where a lot of people on the Haiti side of the border are able to buy and sell a lot of stuff they wouldn't otherwise have access to. Sure.

Starting point is 00:57:43 So the bridge that runs over the massacre river that connects the Habong to what I mean is within feet of the national market and like I mentioned, all encircled by Sisfunds guards. Any Haitian who would try to pass that fence without going past the official checkpoint would likely be detained and deported immediately if they're caught by the border guards.

Starting point is 00:58:03 And as we know, even if a border presents itself as extremely rigid. A lot of it is for show, at least in my experience with the DR Haiti border. A lot of it is theater, security theater. Yeah. Yeah. So when I was there, I spent the better part of my time there just watching DGM trucks bring dozens of people to the border, then watched as CISFront guards herded them out of the Dominican Republic.

Starting point is 00:58:31 Jesus. Yeah, it was incredibly inhumane. heartbreaking. I remember taking this picture of a little girl with a suitcase who was just, and this wasn't a person being deported by the trucks, but this was a Haitian person who was leaving, of a little girl just waiting for her dad with a suitcase. Jesus.

Starting point is 00:58:52 I know, that image really sticks in my mind. Yeah. Yeah. So the thing about the border, as I mentioned earlier, even if it seems to be incredibly hard, it's still porous in several places. When I was in the Batalles in the sugar-producing regions, which are the little towns that they have, or little settlements that they have inside of the sugar cane maze, I spoke to someone who had been detained outside of the sugar cane areas without their work permit and then deported. His family had to pay a buskong, essentially what the U.S. would call a coyote to bring them back across the border.

Starting point is 00:59:27 However, this forced him into what's essentially debt bondage to the buskong, because the work. worker couldn't really pay because of the sugar plantations pay a pittance. So they were essentially in a recursive cycle of some part of my money has to go to the buscong and then whatever's left has to go to paying for my family and my needs. And it was never enough, sadly. Yeah. So one of the news videos that I watched as part of research for this was at PBS, like a seven-minute clip where they talked to a Haitian man as they were being deported along the border.

Starting point is 01:00:02 And when they went to talk to the guy's family the next day, the guy who had been deported was there because he crossed the border through the river overnight. And you can hear the astonishment in the narrative's voice, even though that script reading was probably weeks later. And it's just an example of how these borders are more porous than the state wants them to be and wants them to appear to be. So I wanted to start finishing off by mentioning that the Dominican. government is now actively collaborating with the Trump administration's deportation campaign by agreeing to accept third country deportees from the U.S. under the initiative. This agreement, as I hope I've shown throughout the course of this episode, is another action in a long line of collaboration between the DR and the U.S. when it comes to immigration

Starting point is 01:00:53 enforcement. Noticably, the agreement leaves out Haitian nationals and the U.S. is supposed to provide funding to ensure that these deportees have a quote-unquote adequate conditions per the global detention project, which really remains to be seen if that's the case. But if the conditions in the current immigration detention centers are anything to go by, I'm really not holding out hope that they're adequate conditions. So before I finish the episode, I want to return to Hulletstaff in Haina, a facility systematically created with a deep racism towards the Haitian migrants who make up the vast majority of the people detained there. Hullet was killed by a system that the United States

Starting point is 01:01:34 helped create and then shaped. The probability that the DGM agents who were at Haina at the time that Hullet died, the probability that they were trained by U.S. officials is not zero. And right now, we're seeing the immigration systems that the U.S. helped train outside of the country boomerang back towards us. What I thought was only a thing of the Dominican Republic, where you have a kind of paramilitary style, immigration force, raiding everyone in sight and, you know, kind of systematically terrorizing a population has now become a common reality for millions of people inside of the U.S. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:14 I hope that we live long enough to see these border walls become ruins. Yeah. Yeah, me too. I often thought like it would be a good book project. Just go to look at border walls. Absolutely, yeah. I just don't particularly want to do it because it would fucking suck. A human experience.

Starting point is 01:02:29 But yeah, like if you've lived in the US in the last 20 years, you've paid for border walls and border violence all over the world. And in Europe, to be fair, like the EU does this too, right? If you've lived in the global north, you probably have a hand in the death of migrants just through paying your taxes. And that fucking sucks. It shouldn't be that way. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:02:50 Yeah, it's tragic. I want to thank the person who reached out to us to share this story with us as well, because I wouldn't have been aware of it. Otherwise, there's so much horrible shit happening in the immigration system that, you know, we miss things. Yeah. So thank you for doing that. Absolutely. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:03:09 Yeah. Thank you for showing that with us. It's a long time. I used to ride my bicycle around the Dominican Republic a lot when I was there. And it was always nice to go out to those areas, like get out of the Santo Domingo and like, see how folks live in these rural areas. but then also to be reminded of how two-tiered rural existence was, especially for people, like you say, Cain and Cain. Like, it's a brutal way to make a living too.

Starting point is 01:03:34 Like hard, back-breaking work under the hot sun, like a machete, like swinging a machete all day. Like, you can fuck yourself up pretty easily. Yeah, they'll do this for like between 10 to 14 hours a day, day after they, you know, it's just them. And sometimes a big hat and some clothes. to protect them from the sun and a little bit of water, but it's like backbreaking labor that they're working on.

Starting point is 01:04:03 And historically, there was a movement of Haitian laborers from the Haiti to the DR who would come for the Safra, which is the sugar cane cutting season. And then they would leave after about six months. But as the border hardened, those people had to make a decision whether they stayed in Haiti or stayed in the place where they could get work. And a lot of them decided that they had to stay in the places where they could get work. Yeah, much the same as it is in the United States, right? Like, a lot of seasonal agricultural laborers would have did the same.

Starting point is 01:04:33 Of course. Yeah, it reminded me kind of that guy you're saying, he'll pop back the next day over the river, it reminded me of that Woody Guthrie song, where he's talking about the Los Gatos Canyon plane crash and how all those people had, many of those people had traveled multiple times from their homes in Mexico to the U.S.

Starting point is 01:04:52 whenever there was an expense so they couldn't cover with like whatever they could sell from their ostensia rate they would come come across and labor or young people would come across in labor in order to like establish themselves in life and then go back and then if they you know needed they had an expense their children it but they would come back in labor some more or some people would just come back in labor every year and then one time on the way back their plane crashed and they all died like it's uh yeah it's so much needless suffering that happens because of borders. It's rough to think about people in those detention centers.

Starting point is 01:05:27 Like that always kind of makes me sad. Yeah. Having spent a lot of time around them, it's pretty fucking miserable in there. Yeah, yeah. Especially like, for me, you know, I became a Dominican citizen in 2024 after I had been there. And I always think about, you know, I was seeing these people, some of which they had spent their entire lives in the Dominican Republic and knew nothing else outside of it.

Starting point is 01:05:50 but they were stateless because of this, this 2014 decision, right? And I was thinking, you know, they've spent their whole lives here. And I have more of a right to citizenship than them just because my mom was born there and then left when she was a small child. Like to me, I don't know,

Starting point is 01:06:06 it was an extremely bleak, bleak thing to realize just how, how the state prefers some people under it and then others not. You know, it was. Yeah. I always think like, you know,

Starting point is 01:06:20 is a person who is a Dominican. Like, this is so, so, like, culturally more Dominican than I could ever be, but I'm the one who legally is entitled to citizenship. Yeah. Yeah, I used to think about that a lot when, like, I would go there and, like, we'd try and have Haitian folks come over to join us at the time I was, helping with some diabetes education, nonprofit diabetes education for folks there, and how much harder it was for the Haitian folks, even if they...

Starting point is 01:06:50 In some cases, they had family who were there. They had spent most of their lives there. Like, for them, it was so much harder than it was for me. Who, like, you know, I'm just a guy from Britain. Like, I have no stake in this at all, but I could, you know, no one batted in eyelid when you fly into that airport there and come on through. You don't even need a visa. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:12 I also think, like, and this might be getting two into the weeds. But my great, great grandparents had to leave Spain. because of the monarchy and they were part of the people who were, or my family falls into part of the people who get citizenship through the Les of Memoir Historica. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:33 I've seen videos of so many videos and read so much about migrants trying desperately to reach Europe. And that, to me, is like, you know, I get to legally become a citizen because some guy that I've never met had to leave Spain. and I'm just like, this is crazy. Like, I wish I could just pass it on to somebody else because they need it. And, you know, some people who've lived there

Starting point is 01:07:58 their entire lives deserve it, like much more than I ever could, right? Yeah, right. It's such a strange lottery that gives you the right to, yeah, to go there, reside there, work there, whatever, and someone who deeply wants to and whose life will be in danger they weren't able to, who might die trying to, can't have it.

Starting point is 01:08:18 and they're very determined to keep it from them. Like, it's such a stupid hierarchy or however you want to put it like system. But, yeah, unfortunately, it happens all over the world. Like, it's only getting worse, right? Like, as we're recording this, people in Belfast are fucking attacking people who, specifically, I guess, like, I spoke to some people in Belfast today. And they were like, yeah, it's not all of us. It's a small group of loyalists who are very, very racist and have been for a very long time.

Starting point is 01:08:46 Yeah. But nonetheless, right? Like, I don't know, there's a crime think sticker that I think of a lot that says the border doesn't protect you, it controls you. And like maybe Americans are realizing that now that Border Patrol are murdering U.S. citizens in U.S. cities. You know, I said this the other day and we're talking about Gregory Bovino. Like, there is no reforming this shit. Like the nature of what we have done for decades with borders is that it kills people who did nothing wrong. And if we want to get away from the place we're at now when this shit needs to be torn down, all of it.

Starting point is 01:09:23 The way to building by the wall now is very clearly with the understanding that they just need to build as much as possible because no administration will ever tear it down. Absolutely. And that's what they did in the first Trump administration too. They literally skipped the hard parts. I remember being out there in late 2020, even after August, September, October, November, December. And they're like skipping the difficult heli bits just to put more miles of wall. And they're building now, they're kind of filling some of those gaps and just building wall in places where we never thought they would because they have unlimited money. And like they're doing it because they were right in 2020, right?

Starting point is 01:09:57 Biden didn't tear it down. In fact, he repaired and maintained and continued to build it. Like, we need to really think about rolling this shit back if we ever want to make sure that this can't happen again. Yeah, absolutely. The depths of the mechanism have to be destroyed because, like you said, There's no reforming it. And I specifically use, like, kind of mechanism or machine to describe it, right? Because even if you think that the only thing it applies to is, you know, immigration enforcement in the U.S.

Starting point is 01:10:33 and seeing ICE and CBP, you know, terrorizing the streets, like, I hope I've evidenced in the episode. This is a global project. Yeah. They're not only doing immigration. enforcement in the U.S. They're helping and sometimes doing immigration enforcement outside in, you know, if they could, they would probably go to every country on Earth and be like, hey, this is how you harden your borders and do immigration enforcement.

Starting point is 01:11:00 Yeah. Yeah, I just say it's a part of colonialism and spreading our violence around the world. Well, thank you for sharing that story with us. Where can people find you if they want to read more of your work? Follow you online. I'm at Vacero 2XL, V-A-Q-U-E-R-O-2-X-L on all social media, and I'm also actually working on a series of many documentaries about immigrant communities in Puerto Rico

Starting point is 01:11:28 for a local website here called Noemiones, and I'm an editor at the Latino newsletter where I have been reporting a lot of immigration enforcement here in Puerto Rico. Yeah, thank you, James. Thank you for, thank you for sharing it with us. I look forward to hitting for you again soon. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

Starting point is 01:11:52 visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. This Black Music Month, The Questlove Show celebrates the visionaries,

Starting point is 01:12:09 shaping culture through sound, from country trailblazer Mickey Gaidon It's a hip-hop icon Fad 5 Freddie, the sonic genius of Thundercat and the revolutionary voice of Chuck D. I want it loud. Look, what's the timing might be off,

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Starting point is 01:13:14 Do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got, like, so much more to do. Like, Prince, he dropped, like, 30 albums. We dropped, like, five right now. Like, that's the rate we gotta be going. Yep, that's a good attitude. No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations.

Starting point is 01:13:32 Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is, getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is, getting a new one put up in its place. I'm Akela Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city, in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.

It Could Happen Here - How the United States Shaped the Dominican Republic’s Immigration Enforcement Machine

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