It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 112

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

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Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. poetry will explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

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Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with

somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that we are recording for the first time. All of the audio worked perfectly. It was great. Yeah, the society that has put multiple human beings on the moon did successfully produce functioning audio software it's wonderful uh yeah and with me to celebrate this is carl eugene stroud he's a language teacher and anarchist bulletins and reed angles who's a bus driver and an anarchist member of the center for specific studies yeah both of you welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you for having us for this wonderful celebration of audio recording technology. It's all great. It's all wonderful. Speaking of things that are wonderful, this is why they pay

me the... Am I legally allowed to say that it's below market rate? It's why they pay me the slightly below market rate bucks. Yeah, so speaking of wonderful, we are here to talk about a, I guess, putting things back together project, which is Militant Kindergarten. And I guess we should start with talking about what Militant Kindergarten is and what it isn't in terms of like, it's not, we're teaching small children how to take apart buildings. Yeah. So, um,

militant kindergarten is a multi-month study of a text. And, uh, in that way, you know, we call it a seminar, but it's not that much different than a reading group or a study circle or any of those kinds of things. Uh, essentially what we're doing is we're using one text to revisit and have conversations with different people that are at various, you know, points in the path of radicalization. We're, you know, distinctly trying to spread the word about the importance and necessity of

militancy in our movements, but also teach people about a specifismo, which is an anarchist current that comes out of Latin America. But it's also like, you know, in, in the socialist movement anarchists can often be characterized by stereotypes that come from Marxists and that in the libertarian and anarchist movement, any kind of mass anarchism, any kind of class struggle anarchism can also be characterized by, you know, individualists and insurrectionists. And so we mean

to, you know, not convert people to a certain current of anarchism we see this as a kind of grouping of tendencies so all the participants come from different ideologies uh this is just a reading group so you've got to apply this stuff you know outside of this this isn't some kind of be all end all solution we're not uh you know educationalists thinking that this is going to be the first step in some like process that we're just already on. But at the same time, we think that educational space needs to be defended. That's why this is the third militant kindergarten. So yeah, maybe I'll let Reid talk about some of the ones and how we've gotten here. And yeah, kindergarten up to now.

Yeah, sure. I think that's a good explanation. The group basically started off in the wonderful, amazing complicated year of 2020. In the wake of the uprising over the summer, both of us live in a relatively small town with maybe an outsized, hundreds above its weight in terms of activism and anarchism. There's probably more anarchist tendencies here than there are anarchists. And something that we saw in the wake of the height of the uprisings was, one, a huge amount of burnout that people weren't really addressing. The solution to burnout that we saw being proposed was just do it again, more, harder.

And we also saw the burnout as kind of coming from a lack of strategy and organization on the ground. People sort of repeating tactics because that's what you do and that's what we were doing. So we're just going to try to keep doing it. And both of us were unable to participate in the more aggressive street actions that were going on at the time. So we decided we individually needed to study and get better at our understanding of strategy and organization and try to rethink some of the problems that had occurred and how to move on from there. And also to provide a space for people who are more active in different places. And also to provide a space for people who are more active in different places, the chance to meet together and reflect in a non-urgent space where you could just like pause and learn and discuss a topic. So we were, yeah, we hit upon, we were both kind of simultaneously interested in the specific seasonal current from Latin America.

And so we both just kind of decided, yeah, we want to read some of these texts. And we quickly came upon social anarchism and organization. We felt like, wow, this is a really comprehensive introduction, not only to this tendency, but also to anarchism and social anarchism broadly like it really covers just the basic anarchist principles and theory up to history and organizational theory strategy tactics ideology in a much uh higher more sophisticated and like i guess like modernized way than many other previous uh documents we'd read it's like if you took the platform you know the moxivis platform uh we should explain what that is because a lot of people are not going to yeah okay going back so it's it's the organizational platform of the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro, which is basically their foundational document.

And it's a very comprehensive look at the kind of theory and strategy and work that goes on behind founding an organization like that. It's similar to the anarchist platform written by the Makhnovists in exile in Paris, the Ukrainian anarchists in exile after the revolution in Russia. They wrote this platform saying anarchists should maybe be somewhat organized and unified in their tactics and their strategies and received a whole bunch of pushback from it, but founded the sort of platform as current of anarchism. But really, when you go back to the platform, there's not a ton there. It's more of a document for organizing a military force in an already ongoing revolution, whereas what we found in social anarchism and organization is it's a much more broad kind of introduction to social anarchist organization that is more widely applicable to a variety of situations yeah and you know okay so we've covered a specific mo on here with andrew

once i think we've talked about it a little bit in some other episodes but yeah do we want to get into what about Especifismo is sort of different from older kinds of like, well, just like other anarchist tendencies and other sort of kinds of platformism and talk a little bit about how it sort of came about? Because it's one of the tendencies, I guess, that some people adopted in the US, but I don't think it's as famous as a lot of other tendencies here. Yes. So, you know, a lot of the, the motivation behind organizing the center for us, the best of Fees most studies this came after, after us studying this text a few times locally, we decided to formalize this into Militant Kindergarten. And a lot of that came from the need to articulate what is especificismo in English, because a lot of the resources,

a lot of the ideas and writings come from Latin America. And so they're written in Spanish. A lot of the theory has been developed in Spanish. Especifismo originally comes from the Anarchist Federation of Uruguay. In the 1960s, they began to articulate a kind of organizational strategy that imagined what the way we've described it is kind of two rails for a train. And this train is bringing this revolutionary rupture. So these two rails are the social level, which includes all kinds of class struggle. This is class struggle against domination, exploitation and oppression. And that the other rail is the political organization and so this is um the anarchist principles and ideologies that um yeah i think we share probably pretty broadly with

most all anarchist currents at least uh you know coming out of the socialist movement But when it comes to the way to balance these and to keep them both working toward the same ends, we see a need to keep them theoretically distinct. specifismo studies is try to articulate these ideas in English so that we can start to develop what that means here and not just sort of translate or take a translation and sort of try to input an idea into our own context. So like you said, like, I think that some of the, we could take, for example, the Black Rose Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation in the U.S. That's the largest organization of Especifist anarchists in North America. They are distinctly influenced by this current. They have sister organizations in Latin America. current they have sister organizations in latin america and um but but uh they're they're just one kind of uh organization that's that's kind of known on a national level and as far as planting its you know uh ideas in north america we're definitely still doing that work so a lot of

what we've done is also develop second hand, uh, secondary resources. This includes like audio versions of this text, but also like, uh, things we've produced through our study and through these, uh, discussions that come out of kindergarten. So last year, for example, we made a, uh, a mini zine. There was like a kind of working group that worked on a mini zine to define some basic terms and make something really, really, really basic and introductory to a specifismo. We also, I've written a few pamphlets, one of which is how do you say a specifismo in English? And so that is, yeah, exactly trying to address this, this idea. And, you know, some people, they, they hear a specifismo and they're like, oh, that's, you know, exotic and cool and

like new. And that's a reason to be attracted to it. But then, you know, other people might hear that and they have kind of other reactions where they sort of try to put it into a really specific box. I mean, what our understanding is, is that it's important to be able to acknowledge what current you're kind of plugging into, where your ideas are coming from. It takes a lot of pressure off of us to not feel like we're inventing everything and we're supposed to be coming up with like the most perfect, cool ideas. But it's also a humbling experience of like, yeah, we know about this because other people have done this militancy before us to make these things available for us to have preserved these ideas. That's the political level of the two rails, right? So that is preserving this so that it is possible to say, I have this opinion about a specifismo and it relates to my context in this way, or likewise, that it doesn't.

You know, if we don't have anyone doing that militancy to preserve those ideas, then it's actually not even up to people to be able to pick them up and use them the way that they see fit. One of the sort of barriers is I think kind of what you were alluding to of like the specifismo as a tendency in the U S is that it wasn't like it wasn't really, it wasn't developed in the American context. And that has different sort of you know that that does that that that has sort of like a range of different effects um

and one of the things that i i think is very interesting about it that i think is definitely a product of the context that it was developed in is the strategy of social insertion um yeah and i was wondering if you could talk a bit about social insertion and how you see that working in the US and how sort of, like, how do we think about this sort of in the wake of 2020 and the kind of restructuring of what is sort of happening inside of social movements in the US?

Yeah, I think the 2020 lesson is very important for thinking about social insertion for anyone who doesn't know. It's just the practice of anarchists who are organized in the same organization being present in social movements within them, supporting them,

trying to help them achieve their own goals rather than take them over or something like you would see in maybe a entryism from trapeze or something um but yeah i think one of the major problems that we ran into when we started reading this stuff is like social insertion requires there to even be social movements yeah that was an issue in the u.s for a long time because we didn't really have social movements in the way that like latin america does right or when when we do they're like extremely spontaneous or kind of chaotic or they're also they could be

extremely co-opted or managed by a political party democrats Democrats, some socialist group, Republicans, whoever. And so that's kind of one of our major sort of projects of theoretical translation into North America. You can't just plug this into North America and say, okay, we're going to go join X social movement to achieve these goals and obtain this amount of influence there. And we really have to start. I think what is useful about that problem is that it forces us to start really trying to theorize what actually is happening here, what social movement actually is there. And that leads us to start thinking about things more literally like movement what does it mean to

be moving what is the role of anarchists in movement so we can think of an idea that we've developed is the idea of anarchists who are organized as anarchists the role of them in in movement is to actually literally be moving between different kinds of spaces different movements and starting through their movement to generate a kind of flow of people and of ideas and energy and momentum acting as a small motor within a big a big system if you will not driving it but getting things going. And so I think that's kind of more the level that we're at here in the US is we still need to just theorize what is out there and how can we help it? How can we plug into it? How can we start getting things moving in a direction that is actually going to meet

the needs of these movements or these movements that aren't yet articulated well? You know, you see this with like the rise of tenant unions and tenant organizing still in a very like nascent stage, but people are seeing that need and they're starting to get that moving from a variety of socialist tendencies. And I think, yeah, the idea is important in this context because we have to be finding these spaces, we have to be moving to them, and we have to be returning to our own spaces to be able to actually understand what we're encountering out there and figure out how to adjust course or move to something else or adapt to a new situation yeah like maybe uh

similar to reed said there this idea that um the politics need to be moving that anarchism needs to be a movement, and that in that way, like, we can't allow our ideas to be stuck in certain, you know, just stations or organizations or spaces that are friendly or that we're really familiar with. We need to be able to engage those ideas in the relevant spaces where we do live. That looks really different in different parts across the US and North America. So the idea that, you know, we would be able to just simply take one thing and apply it across the board would also like, yeah, be really limited here. And so I think a lot of what we're, a lot of what we've seen in terms of the utility of a specifismo as an influential current in the politics, in leftist politics in North America, is this theoretical aspect and how we can see both, like we learn more about social movements, more about the necessity of them being popular, more about popular power. And at the same time as in doing that, that shows us more about what is political unity. What is unity of theory? What is unity of commitment? And that those things we want to, as we keep learning about fade away, that there are ebbs and flows of the engagement. And that when we're talking

about a massive popular level, we should expect that even more, right? Plenty of people will only, even if they're engaging militantly, only be engaging militantly with social movements, not with political ideas, not with political organization. And so the idea that something needs to endure, someone even needs to be able to tell the story from the last time that things got spicy so that we understand even what happened without even necessarily having the critique or the analysis, even just simply the retelling is something that is grossly missing from our struggles in North America. And so that's where we see like there being a complete absence of political organizing, and especially when we think about being on a entirely different cycle. So that kind of goes back to kindergarten being an annual thing. And, you know, where we live, like in the winter,

there's not a lot you can do. And so it kind of made sense to develop a seasonal pattern of this, right? Where like, exactly as things are dying down, it's kind of like, well, the people who do still have capacity, the people who are still attempting to be active. How can we keep that little bit of movement moving and going? The idea of the metaphor of a small engine, a small motor is often used in a specifismo. often used in a specifismo.

And that's what the political level is trying to be, is a small motor, just assisting in something larger that's happening, but it needs to be connected to something larger that's happening. Yeah, and I think a key part of this for us that we've found is that in our context, there exists sort of these two levels to some extent.

There are political organizations and there are social movements. But what is often missing, like we were struggling with this, trying to find the way into one or the other. this kind of educational tendency of really open, really educational, really discussion-based learning kind of starts to generate that movement between the two. Like by having this space open to beginners and experts, so to speak, you're able to actually get more movement open between the two. So it opens up political organizations, people who have not participated in that before, don't have a way into it. And it opens up social movement to people who may be politicized, but are not organized in some sort of social. And it starts to mix everything together in this learning space where we can build trust as a learning community and assist each other in connecting these kind of two necessary levels of organization. how you were talking about how we don't have any kind of organizational continuity between movements and the kind of disorganization and the loss of just memory that happens with that.

And I think it's one of these weird things because you can find people who've been in like all of these movements, but if you're relying on just, you know, okay, well, you can get the story of what really happened in Occupy Oakland if you know exactly, like, the right four people. And you can't, like, you can't say their names because, like, you know. And this has always sort of been a problem with parts of social movements because, I mean, there's stuff that necessarily has to be clandestine. Like, you know, there's reasons for operational security but also just means that stuff gets lost and yeah i think having having a like having a thing that goes as a way to transmit got a thing that goes wow incredibly technical language

you know but having having an organization that can act as a bridge between these sort of moments and also is able to sort of you know allow people spaces for discussion for reflection for learning that's also sort of a bridge between like a like i don't know i guess like capital p political organization and the social stuff is it's a it's a really interesting idea and yeah i, I don't know. I think this is a very cool project. And yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what else comes out of it as the new session sort of approaches. Yeah, I think what you're just saying about

how do you learn about what happened to Occupy Oakland without having to go through three layers of signal chats or something to find the right person to learn from anonymously, everything is preface with allegedly this happened is a real problem that we've thought about. Like, I think a big thing for us that we've found is a role that we can play is that there is a need out there for there to be some sort of, we call it mask-off anarchism. Like, there needs to be a public-facing, approachable space where you can actually just learn about stuff. And yeah, there is definitely a need for And yeah, there is definitely a need for operational security culture or for clandestine things.

But those things don't need to be everything. For those to even exist, you need levels that are more open to people. Otherwise, those things just become increasingly lost. They go down the memory hole as they say or the latin american groups like to talk about anarchism becoming ghettoized further and further like separated from mainstream society and there's no ways in unless you like you know a guy so that was something that was a problem we were encountering and something that, from our particular circumstances, we felt like we could provide and maybe start modeling for people as a group. I think also, like you mentioned there, like this idea of memory and what Black Rose has referred to in their program as muscle memory, like for our organizations.

muscle memory like for our organizations this idea that like i mean organizing seems so mysterious to us because we don't have this like kind of active like uh living memory of of how to do that it's not just a thing we do by second nature like without without uh um really needing a lot of work and so i think in in that sense like um we could also think of there being two kinds of struggles going on where on the social level, the struggle is the class struggle and the antagonists are the dominant people in society. It is the ruling class. It is the status quo. It is the capitalist system. But on the political level, there's also struggle because it's not about everybody, you know, just being one uniform block. It is about that struggle, though, not being trying to topple each other, but instead trying to develop and create unity. It's not find unity. It's not look for the people you have the most consensus with, because that in itself is even really limiting. That we need to be able to form new agreement. We need to be able to find and

struggle for that unity with people who aren't trying to just aim for a divisive end. There needs to be an antagonist on the social level, but on the political level, the goal is unity. It's not struggle for the sake of taking down the opponent. And so in that sense, like something else that we do in Militant Kindergarten and in the Center for Especifismo Studies is not just try to do a reading, but try to produce a reading, try to leave behind some kind of trace of our reading. That's an important aspect of this. So all of our sessions, we take thorough notes and those notes are available to all the participants. People can go back through it later to look at what was said if they missed a session or if they'd like to follow along with those as the conversation goes to help add other aspects of support.

Then what we do is we have a whole other team that goes through those notes afterward and produces a kind of internal journalistic write-up of what happened in that meeting. And so we will also be releasing those this year as part of our like kind of monthly publishing that we'll be doing. So for people who are interested in this, when is it happening and how do you get involved? So for people who are interested in this, when is it happening and how do you get involved? It starts on January 13th and it runs till April 20th of next year, 2024. And we're going to be holding the session on Saturdays, 2 to 4 p.m. in Pacific time, U.S., which is not the greatest time for everybody, but it's where most of us are based, kind of on the edge of time here on the West Coast. And the best way to get involved is to just send us an email. We have

the email, especially these most studies at gmail.com. And that's the way to sort of start the enrolling process. You just need to take the one step, send us an email, and we'll get you signed up and all the materials and Zoom link and all that stuff. Yeah, and we'll put the email in the description. You have probably links to the website too. I think on that note, unless you two have anything else that you want to say or plug? No, I think that's it. Yeah, good breath. I would like to see people there.

It's going to be an interesting year. I can guarantee that. Yeah, we're... Yeah, like the literal year, 2024, who knows what's going to happen. And even kindergarten is going to be pretty interesting. We've had a lot more people contacting us than last year. So it's going to be a pretty big and diverse group. So it'll be interesting to see kind of what everybody is able to produce out of that,

that gathering and learning space. Yeah, you know, maybe maybe another thing just to say real quick is just that even if somebody doesn't feel like they could make that time, it's still worth reaching out to us. We, you know, will be developing other seminars and things in the future. And if you don't think that you'd be able to make it to all the sessions, like, don't worry about that either. That's part of why we do this every year is that we expect that, you know, working people without a lot of time will need more than one year to, you know, get all this information. So we expect people to need to kind of be cobbling together a few

sessions here and there for, for several times. And yeah, you're definitely welcome to do that. And shouldn't feel as if it's like a kind of start and then you're stuck and afraid to start. So, yeah. Yeah. It's a sort of an endurance study group so yeah we don't want anyone burning themselves now just do what you can start together and together yeah it sounds like it's going to be a great program and yeah excited excited to see what comes out of it and yeah if you want if you want to get your theoretical stuff in before fighting season presumably starts again around the election, yeah, now is the time. It's going to be really chaotic for the next long time.

So this is your opportunity now. Yeah, we'll need some good ideas to arm ourselves with. Yeah. This one, it's going to be rough. Yep. And yeah, on that note, this has been Nick at Appen Here. some good ideas to arm ourselves with this one it's going to be rough yep and yeah on that note this has been Nick it happened here you can find us on Twitter and Instagram

at full sun media etc etc yeah go go into the world and learn and then use that to make the world less god awful. 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

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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.

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It's another chicago episode it's it could happen here the podcast where things fall apart uh i'm your host neil wong uh this is this is another episode about chicago police departments who occupy a city groaning under its tyranny uh and with you to talk about some absolutely bat shit, Chicago police stuff. And also how Brandon Johnson, our mayor has also shit is Raven, the Chicago journalist from Jinx press. Hi, is our mayor ever not shit? You know,

no, it's holy shit. It's never not bad. It's never not bad. It's never not bad. And it's always like, you know, the progressive darling who ran on promises and then slowly breaks them and, you know, breaks everyone's hearts over time. Yeah, I will. I will say Brandon Johnson wasted absolutely no time on the heartbreaking part. Like he really, he really just wanted to rush that shit out.

And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of Brandon Johnson stuff that we could talk about and we will want, eventually we're going to do the episode on the migrant camp in the fucking, the, the, the, the migrant camp in the, the, the toxic waste dump. But that, that's's gonna happen next year right now we want to talk about a different utterly insane chicago thing well this is actually a thing in other cities too i wanted to talk about shot spotter so i guess to start with can you explain what shot spotter is for people who don't have it in their city or don't know? Well, it's in, I want to say like 130 different cities across the country.

So a lot of people probably do have it, but it's a, it's a gunshot detection system. Um, so basically just, you know, through a bunch of fancy tech stuff, which we won't get into, and I'm not even going to pretend to understand, you know, that side of it. It's these audio sensors that are installed all around the city. Right. And in predominantly black and brown neighborhoods, you know, they're specifically in Chicago. There's actually a lawsuit currently up and coming filed by the MacArthur

justice center over the fact that they are primarily installed in black and brown neighborhoods and not on like the north side and yeah it's just a bunch of fancy little stuff that detects noises that are supposed to be gunshots right so any loud popping or binging sound you know, could potentially set them off. Yeah. And unfortunately, as anyone who's ever been in a city and had a car backfire knows people are just indescribably dog shit at telling what is a gunshot and what is not a gunshot. Exactly. Exactly. And I mean,

there's so much evidence to like other than, I mean, our here in Chicago, like our office of the inspector general wrote like a whole report about all of shots, fires, failures. But there's a bunch of other research out there across the country about how inaccurate this is. And, you know, it's generating tens of thousands of also like unjustified cpd deployments like because when the alert goes off the cops get deployed and you know it doesn't tell you anything about uh even if there was a gunshot like who fired a gun you know all it's telling you is in this area you know this was determined so you can imagine like all of these you know all it's telling you is in this area you know this was determined so you can imagine like all of these you know police encounters happening in response to these alerts like all the shit that could go wrong yeah and it's cpd right like the chicago police department's motto is shoot first

don't ask questions later so right this is a this is an absolutely terrible idea. It's just sending all of these cops on random wild goose chases. Yeah, yeah. Well, and it's what happened with, I mean, most people probably remember the Adam Toledo shooting. Those cops, you know, were initially assigned to patrol that area because it was designated as a violence box you know and shot spotter brought them to the alley like where this 13 year old kid was you know shot and killed by police because another an older man was with him and fired a gun and then handed him the weapon yeah and that's another that's another one of the problems with this technology which is that even if it does detect a gunshot

the thing that detecting a gunshot does and send it to the police is send a bunch of like absolutely unhinged murderers to a place and like make them incredibly paranoid and then you know have them in like deal with the situation mode and what chicago cops do when they're in deal with the situation mode is they take out a gun they shoot a 13 year old and kill them yeah yeah and the you know the officer that shot him too had had this is like rarely talked about in the media i think i don't know it just wasn't something that came up much when that was all happening but like that officer had a weird incident that was recorded on body cam like a little bit before he shot and killed adam toledo i don't remember if it was like

months before i don't know the timeline but it was fairly close to that where he like pulled someone over at a traffic stop and was just acting really jumpy and strange. Uh, and it was kind of investigated as like, you know, an unjustified traffic stop. And, and nothing happened with that, but it's just an example of like how there were potentially warning signs.

Cause this guy was also like a war veteran, you know, and jumpy to begin with. Uh, and so yeah you're sending these guys into these areas who are already ready to go off at a trigger right yeah and you know and there's like there's no actual good outcome of this because like i guess arguably the best possible outcome is the cops show up there's nobody there and turns out to have been a false alarm but that means we're paying the cops an unbelievable amount of money to do nothing and that's the best outcome right and the the way the alerts work also too

is like unless the police file a complaint that an alert was false like a false alarm it's automatically flagged in the system as like a positive because there's all this algorithmic stuff that happens like with the the shot starter detection where like yeah the the system detects it but then also it goes to like their i don't know their whole system like researchers or whatever to kind of put it all together and like package a report about what happened and so unless the police complain and are like oh you know this one was false or this was a this one was wrong this was a firework this is a car backfiring and of course like cpd is not doing that yeah because and i mean i mean this is one of the problems with the system just inherently even if even if you think that on some level this technology could work is

that both the company shot spotter and the police have an enormous inherent incentive to make like a very least pretend that every single one of these detections is real because if you're a police officer right and you can point it oh hey look at how many shots are being fired around the city all the time you know you need to give us more funding this is incredibly useful for them if you're shot spotter you don't want everyone to know that your system detects like a bird dropping an acorn out of a tree next to your sensor or whatever like you don't actually want people to know that your your system brings up false positives all the time it is actually basically completely useless right yeah so the incentive structure is just bad it's just it's only going to produce bad results yeah well and it's kind of like somebody i don't i forget where i read this but somebody likened it to if you had an informant

working for you and they were wrong nine times out of ten would you still use them well cpd would like to be fair to be fair but like if you were a journalist and uh you had a source that lied nine times out of ten you know or was wrong nine times out of ten would you uh would you call them back would you trust that source you know well and the other thing too is this isn't even it's not even just like this is an informant right because you know shots butters wrong and enormous percentage of the time. But the thing is, you don't have to pay informants $8 million a year, which is what we're paying for this dogshit ShotSpotter system. Yeah, well, and I mean, the company itself also,

they're so embedded with what's going on like with police departments you know they're shot spotters leveraging their own money to try to like win police contracts that include shot spotter you know they advise different police departments on how to respond to requests about shot spotter so it's like it's not just like this this uh i don't know this neutral tool that's just like out there that they're just using it's like shot spotter has this vested interest in uh strengthening the police and vice versa yeah and then it gets into one of these very very i mean it's a very common thing for the cops right but one of these unbelievably messed up spirals

where like, yeah, like everyone involved has, you know, the cops want more power. These guys want more money. And the more money you give them, the more money they have to then turn around again and put back into the political system to continue buying more power, which they can again turn into more money

every single time another contract comes up. Right, right. And which they just did. Brandon Johnson just turn into more money every single time another contract comes up. Right. Right. And which they just they just did. Brandon Johnson just gave them more money in their contract. Yeah. And we should talk about this because. OK, so Brandon Johnson ran a weird campaign in respect to the police in the sense that he didn't really run a. He didn't run an anti-police campaign, I i guess like his campaign was pretty pro-police but it also originally had things like taking cops out of schools and very specifically he ran on canceling the shot spotter contract which is a thing that everyone in like people in chicago who aren't who

don't live in like cop neighborhoods basically like it's pretty popular to cancel this contract because it's, it's millions of dollars a year going to nonsense that just throws cops everywhere. And then he got into office and his budget still has the shot spot or shit in it. So, Oh, electoralism win.

Yay. Yeah. I mean, it was an explicit, it was an explicit campaign promise. Like, it wasn't just like, oh, we were hoping that he would do this because he's like our big movement guy. It was like he explicitly made it part of his platform, was ending the contract with ShotSquatter. And now he is not.

And there's some time left before the budget hearing. I think it's like, I don't know, like 55 days. I might be off by a few days there. But there's only around, you know, two months left. And since he's been elected to like the other thing, I mean, this is like the shady part, too. Like since he's been elected, he's been asked whether he'll extend the contract and he's just like refused to answer. Which is a really great politician stuff like you know you uh you know your politicians being completely normal and nothing uh everything is above board when they just straight up refuse to answer questions only good things ever result from that

yeah and it's been there's been like a lot of uh similar sort of just like uh i don't know lack of transparency kind of incidents with him over the last however long it's been since he's been elected god it's been a long year uh it's kind of like there's this pattern now. So, yeah, I mean, there were people who kind of, look, he was never like the abolitionist, like I'm going to abolish the police mayor. And like, I get that. I think a lot of people get that. Um, but there's a pretty big departure kind of between how he's approaching policing and what, yeah, a lot of movement people or leftists or abolitionists want, you know, every encounter with a cop is a potential for violence. Right. And he's coming at it more from the side of like well we just need to rebuild trust in the police and and the community just needs to you know like we're just going to rebuild trust and we're going to we're going to get these bad cops out we're going to have only good cops left

and then everything i don't i don't know what the logic there is personally but but the you know the logic is that we'll just have good police encounters then and it's just like this refusal to acknowledge that like policing itself is a problem yeah we are on year 50 of the mayor says we need to restore trust in the police uh we'll get rid of the bad cops everything like year 50 we are on what what number of torture scandals are we on since people first started saying this? Like, it's just right. We shouldn't be laughing at torture, but it's like, yeah, it's like every I don't know, every month there is a new Chicago police scandal. I literally cannot keep track. Yeah. And OK, so we're going to talk about one of those scandals. But first, we're going to talk about ads. I was going to do uh we're gonna talk about ads i was gonna do like

a you know what else is a scandal but i don't know it's really late i have been up for an outrageous number of hours and we are back so okay speaking of chicago scandals, there is a lot. I mean, the CPD is always having scandals because Chicago cops are just evil. But yeah, do you want to talk about the specific shot spotter one that we're having right now? Yeah, I mean, there are there are other Chicago police shot spotters scandals. But no, this most recent story, you know, that just came out, there's a political journalism site slash blog. They're also our homies. We've done a lot of work with them called People's Fabric.

And they wrote, you know, an analysis of some videos that they obtained of what is like essentially a cpd gang i mean everybody's heard of like the lapd gangs well not everybody but i'm sure a lot of listeners have followed the the story out of out of la with like the sheriff's deputies gangs um just roaming around and and committing committing horrible acts against people in these sort of like crews of bad cops. And this is definitely not the first instance of something like that happening in Chicago, but there was a lot of video evidence against these guys. One of them has been indicted.

I don't know if the other three have. But yeah, they were just driving around basically terrorizing this community. You know, a lot of just unlawful stops, stopping people on the street, shaking them down for cash, drugs and a lot of guns. And they were filing false reports about found guns. So like they would stop somebody, take their gun, and then log it as like a gun that was found. And you know, in one instance, they said that they were a mile away from where a shot spotter alert had gone off. And claimed that they looked around and just happened to find a gun on the ground. They had taken the gun from a woman, you know, they didn't find it on the ground,

but they were able to use the fact that there was a shot spotter alert that went off in that area as uh like a way to cover their tracks basically yeah and this is something so we talked about on the show like oh god was that like two years ago maybe it was a year ago a while back we talked about on this show um the chicago's uh used to have this police unit called special operations section sos which was disbanded after it was revealed they were doing literally the same thing which is they would go up to people and rob them and one of chicago has one of these scandals about once it like once a decade there's like a big one of these and we're kind of due for one we haven't had a really big one of these specifically there's an entire section of the cpd that's just a burglary

or a drug ring so i i suspect we're gonna find out more about this stuff because it's it's about time that another one of these turns up but yeah i, I mean, they're just rolling up on people just going, give me your gun and then driving away and saying don't tell anyone, which is really... Really, yeah. Also, for seemingly

no reason in some instances, there are, I mean, look, we can't know all of their motivations for everything. And a lot more is going to come out, I'm sure, like in the court proceedings. But it's like, were they trying to pad the gun retrieval statistics? And or were they trying to do something else? You know, they were like a tactical team. So I presume, I mean, I think it's the case that like there are certain gun retrieval statistics

that CPD wants to make. But, you know, the other stuff, like obviously taking cash from people, you know, like there's other things they were doing, you know, and there've always been, look, there have, I'm not going to allege anything that isn't proven in this specific instance, but I will say that there have always been rumors about Chicago police officers

specifically taking things like guns to like sell back, you know, to gangs basically. And same with drugs, right? You know, these guys were, were, were logging some of them at least, but what, what if there were ones that they weren't logging like we don't know i mean this is just what we know happened and what was caught and i mean they were dumb enough to like have some of this caught on their body cams it's like they were turning their cameras off for like some parts of these stops but like not others or like the camera would be on and there's like you know

cash and drugs and then like oh the camera goes off and it's like well any logical person can deduce what may have happened here like why are you turning your camera off right um and so yeah there have always been rumors about kind of like what these crews driving around are like ultimately doing with this kind of stuff and i think think it just, it varies depending on them. But I would also add, you know, the, what you mentioned, the special operations section, you know, we only recently learned there was like a Sun Times investigation into all the Chicago cops who were on the Oath Keepers membership role.

And a number of those guys were in uh sos actually so that's a fun little fact also yeah that's another one of the another episode in the endless parade of of chicago police department scandals like yeah a bunch of these are in far-right militias um which is – it's just really interesting. So we did an episode pretty recently that was talking about David Graeber. One of the points that he makes in this essay on Batman and the problem of constituent power, which is a wild thing to be citing in a police thing but you know one of the points that he makes is one of the one of the sort of key like fascist convergences is this cooperation between the police the far right and organized crime and the cpd is this incredible nexus of it right i mean you it's literally the same person is all three of these things at the same time it is a cop who is in a far-right militia who is also like literally just doing organized crime at the same time it's really yeah you you used to have to sort of like make metaphors

and you no longer have to do that the metaphor just is real you're just physically describing the event it's really something yeah i mean i i when you when you really think about it i think policing in and of itself is just like a cult like anything else and it makes sense that like the same people who gravitate towards like militia groups and like white supremacist groups any any like i don't know group where people kind of have those like hardline beliefs about the world um and then it's also just like a lot of these guys are like um especially the ones on like tactical teams they're all like fucking like traumatized war veterans you know they all have kind of these long backstories of like

military service and and just like to get onto like special ops or like a tactical unit you know etc they tend to look for people with military experience not always but like frequently um and so there's also that intersection there too of like militarism and abroad and then like policing at home right yeah and that's a really common thread i mean just in like across the entire world this is a thing where like the the police off like the police groups that are the most likely to go completely rogue and either just start murdering people randomly or turn into organized crime things like are these special operations units there was like in 2020 there were these huge protests like anti-police protests in nigeria that were

specifically about trying to get one of these special operations like police special operation things i like abolished because special operations guys just kept shooting everyone and this you know like every single like this happens just everywhere in the world that these it is like you know i mean obviously normal cops also do crime. And we talked also in another episode about some kind of normal cops who did a cartel in like the 2010s. But the special operations groups go off the rails at a rate that is staggering, which you would think you would think someone in government would look at this. which you would think you would think someone in government would look at this. Like even if you're a pro police person, you would look at this and go, wait, maybe it's a bad idea to have specifically formed these units that every single time turn into a cartel. But no, no, I never do this because the point of cops is not to not form cartels.

cartels well i think also too there's like a very uh i don't know i guess neoliberal sort of line of thinking about like policing and how like we really really need like the tactical high skill kind of units right like there's always like we're giving the cop we're always giving the cops more money and that's for training training is a big justification for why we're always giving the cops more money and that's for training training is a big justification for why we're always giving you the more money but so is like you know skills and sort of technology and like i think um as we're dealing with i don't know like mass shootings and like all this really horrible stuff just like going on around us at all times too now it's like it's a really i think um easy way to justify policing to people is like under the guise of these like tactical units or or units with like a lot of firepower to deal with like

the really really bad guys quote right like you know maybe those people might be like oh we'd like fewer cops patrolling our neighborhoods you know we're kind of we get like you know black lives matter whatever but they're like but we really need to you know have the big guns ready for when something bad comes to our neighborhood and so i think that's also like a sticking point for a lot of people on the on the way to like actually thinking about abolishing the police too is like what would we do without these units some guys with like all these skills and all these crazy weapons to like help us if if a if a bad guy comes and um of course the guy like the bad guys are those guys like well there's the more cynical

side of it too which is like you know if you're if you're the mayor of chicago it's like well someone has to shoot the black panthers right like you need you need to have guys whose job it is to like when when you know when like revolutionary movements start up you need like someone has to start shooting those guys so yeah yeah so i i want to go back to talk a bit more about the, the like shot spotter and the budget stuff that's been happening because, so the current, the current budget has, what is it?

I think it like doubles the, the, the annual raises of that, that cops were getting. Is that the right number i don't know if it doubled but i read that it was actually wait yeah so it's it's five percent up from like 2.5 yeah it's doubled it's also the largest package of raises for any city employee union in modern history i mean i'm directly quoting a better government analysis, but, but, but yeah, no, like literally

it is, it is an enormous, it is an enormous race. And here's the thing. The cops were thrilled with this contract. Uh, the head of FOP, John Catanzaro, who is just like a racist, misogynistic, horrible, just like garbage dump of a person, you know, was thrilled with, with this contract was thrilled with this being passed, you know, was thrilled with, with this contract, was thrilled with this being passed, you know, and that's like, number one sign that your mayor sucks is when like the cops are thrilled about something he did. So, so yeah, I mean, it's a huge amount of money. There's, there's a bunch of other stuff in it, like, you you know salary grade

changes and like stipends for stuff and bonuses and uh there's some changes to like the body worn camera policy too which are kind of concerning um but but ultimately it's like yeah brandon johnson is now the fund the police mayor, I don't know how you can say that he's not when you, when you look at this, like this is just handing the cops more money. Yeah. And Chicago cops are already just unbelievably dog shit. Overpaid Chicago teachers are unbelievably underpaid.

Yeah. So, you know, I mean, we are, we are once again, paying a bunch of people to rob us it's really it's good stuff yeah and and they they get a lot of time off too i mean look they have a they have

a ton of benefits there's a ton of you know privileges and things that that the cops get but it's kind of like he he could have given them slightly less money like it was almost this contract almost feels like the way I've seen some people describe it is it almost feels like an act of like goodwill towards the cops like an almost like I was like I'm giving you this thing that you really want in the in the hopes of like I don't know i don't know what he's trying to get out of it i mean i don't know what what the motivation is but it's like you could have done you could have done less and you're going for like a lot so what's what's the deal there and you know the new superintendent too is like hugely concerning he picked a guy who's too is like hugely concerning he picked a guy who's uh like an expert in surveilling communities ahead of like the dnc coming next summer uh the former head of the counterterrorism bureau you

know like it's just it's a lot of really disappointing moves and And I think a lot of people were really hoping to see, I guess, a more abolitionist kind of streak, but, but ultimately it's like he ran as a liberal, like we knew this was coming, but there was like almost like taking advantage, I guess,

of like movement groups to sort of get, get the power behind him um during the campaign but look our alternative was also like an evil like lying maniacal paul valis so it's just like a shit sandwich it's like bad choices all around right yeah and i mean that just is chicago i mean it's illinois electoral politics in general is a choice between the guy who gives the police more money and the other guy who gives the police more money so yeah it's not good exactly again it really seems like we're going to get more shot spotter of this technology that is wrong over 90% of the time. So it's great.

It's really, well, there's a few months left. I mean, hopefully look, hopefully this is, I don't know. There's arguments to be made for and against harm reduction,

I guess. And whether it's like a worthwhile goal, but maybe there's still like a shot at like, at least getting this part scratched out i mean there is like i said like this big lawsuit um and if nothing else you know perhaps he and his administration could be concerned about just like you know the bad press around it if it if it's included and so many people are opposing it. But this is also an administration that didn't care about the bad press that came with saying we're building a detention camp on polluted land.

Yeah, well, look, this is the thing that the fight over the police budget is distracting from, which is that we need to find a second toxic waste dump to build the migrant concentration camp on. So, you know, progressive values are happening either way. Look, I frequently said all mayors are bastards. It's true. Corny, but I think um you just it's fine look it's fine to vote i guess if that is your thing just don't convince yourself that once you leave the voting booth that like the struggle is over

because whatever happens like this person this authority figure in charge is your enemy like it doesn't matter how nice he is doesn't matter how many jokes he cracks like whatever whatever you're trying to like resist or like liberate like this person is going to stand in your way just by virtue of being the mayor like it's baked into like what that is so i think it's just a matter of being like clear-eyed about that rather than like convincing yourself that you can somehow like co-run the city like with the government yeah i mean i'm gonna okay i'm gonna take a a shot at a city on the other side of the world but fuck it i'm still mad about this okay so the the the nominal best case scenario

for this inside an electoral framework was when uh barcelona and camus which is this uh sort of left-wing platform in barcelona made of a bunch of ex-anarchists i like managed to get managed to get a semi-stable majority of the city council than the first time they got their mayor elected. The first thing that that fucking mayor did, like a week into office, was she knew where all the squats were in Barcelona. And the first thing she fucking did was she knew which immigrant squat didn't have enough community support behind them to stop them from getting evicted. And she had them evicted. So, you know, this is what happens when you put activists in charge um they they do a more efficient job of uh being the kind of insurgency so oh my god yeah this is this is this is what you're getting into oh my god well yeah and i mean then it also becomes like

its own smoke screen you know like just using the fact that like oh I was elected by activists or like I was elected by movement people so like you know I'm on your side and just using it as like a shield against like every move and being like well I know this looks bad but like you guys know like I'm I'm your guy like I'm one of you. Like, like, just trust me. Like we're doing this for the, for the right reasons. It might look bad, but because I'm your guy, you know, it's okay. I mean, it's the same thing with like Biden and the, and the border wall. Now I think ironically, our episode on that is going to be the episode that comes out right before

this. So wait, sorry, sorry. Two episodes. Sorry. It'll be two episodes before. Yeah. Oh, wait sorry sorry two episodes sorry it'll be two episodes before yeah oh and and two episodes after well it's also going to be border wall shit so yeah border wall bad fuck biden for border wall well but it's like it's biden's border wall he's doing all this shit and then you know it's just, if it was Trump, we know what the response would be from supposed progressives. Yeah, don't let people, like, put a coat of paint on a turd and hand it to you and be like, no, it's good, actually. We don't have to do this. Right.

But, I mean, also the border wall, do you remember, there was a brief flash of time in october when when brandon johnson and his team announced they were going to visit the border wall and then it only lasted like 24 hours 72 hours i don't know when but but at some point then they like very quickly reversed the decision when they realized how bad that would look. At that time, there were thousands of migrants who had traveled here and staying on police station floors. And they were going to have this publicity stunt where they went to visit the border wall. And then they changed their minds about it and were like oh yeah this is probably a bad idea but it's become this this like pilgrimage site i mean like i know aoc went there it's like liberal

politicians like go there to be like oh this is so terrible and then they like you know, just kind of let Biden make it worse. Yeah. So this, this has been, uh, this, this, this has turned into the, uh, liberal groups elected on big promises make your life worse episode. Well, this has been naked happened here. You could find us in the places. Uh, where can people find you? Uh, just, you know, on on the hell site which i know you're back on now um unfortunately unfortunately yeah you know we have jinxpress.org per site and then yeah twitter instagram all that stuff yeah so go check out the drinks press people

they do they do great work and yeah cops bad cops bad cops always bad cops keep being bad hi i'm ed zitron host of the better offline podcast and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tex 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, or 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. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. 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 percent. I'm not saying you're going to get 15 percent 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.

Hi everyone, it's James and today I've got a two-part episode for you. Initially I'd planned to have my friends Emmett and Dave talk to me about the shelters that we've all been building in Hukumba because the weather's getting worse and worse but we were able to connect with Amos who is one of the migrants who has spent time in outdoor detention, sadly, and then in indoor detention, as you'll hear. And I really wanted to sort of refocus this episode on sharing Amos' story, because I think, as I've said countless times, right, that if we don't send to migrants and are reporting about migration, then we're doing it wrong. And so you will hear introductions from Dave and you will hear introductions from Emmett and you'll hear a little bit from them next episode about how we're building the yachts but we'll we'll bring you that episode another time because I wanted this episode to be mostly about Amos's migration journey. Hello everybody it's me James I am hosting It Could Happen Here today again, and I'm joined by my friends Amos and Emmett,

and potentially later our friend David. We're going to talk today again about the situation in Hillicumba. Amos is one of the people who was detained in the outdoor detention sites, and he's going to explain some of his experience. And then Emmett is someone who has been working with a group of people, including myself, to build shelters for migrants, to build slightly more permanent, slightly more windproof shelters. Unfortunately, Border Patrol has taken upon themselves to instruct migrants to destroy those shelters. And so we're going to talk about how we built them, what we learned when we're building them, and unfortunately, the fact that they have been destroyed. So I'm going to ask my three guests to introduce themselves. David is here now so we'll start with you Amos and then Emmett and then David just tell us who you are and anything you think is relevant about yourselves I guess.

Thank you for the invite. I appreciate the opportunity to add whatever I can to this very, very important subject. I happen to be, I call myself an accidental illegal immigrant, if you want to put it that way. following the new migratory road that has taken me through, I lost count, 10 or 12 countries, starting from North Africa all the way to the border with the United States. So that's me. I would love nothing more but to add to this conversation. Thank you, Amos. Hi, my name is Emmett. I am a volunteer with Borderlands Relief Collective.

And then David, would you like to finish up by introducing yourself? Hi, my name is David. I'm a volunteer with Borderlands Relief Collective, as well as Detention Resistance. I do water drops, and I've also been helping out as a volunteer in the Border Patrol open-air detention sites, doing work as a medic and helping out building these shelters. Great. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much, everyone. So I think everyone will be interested in hearing Amos's story.

So as far as you're comfortable sharing, Amos, and there's no need to share anything that you're not comfortable with or don't want to share. Can you tell us about your journey from North Africa to the United States? And I think we'd be particularly interested in how people are

finding out about these obviously these big gaps in the wall that are in her Cumberland and how people are ending up there from all over the world now. Right? Well, buckle up. It's a long journey, James, it's a long one. So for me, personally, So for me personally, it started with sort of an accidental separation from my family, my wife and kids, for reasons, unfortunate reasons, had to go back to the United States. And I was denied the visa to join them. They went initially to mourn the loss of a brother-in-law. And unfortunately, I was not able to get there by obtaining a visa to do so. So I spent six, seven months arguing with the embassy, was not given any legal reasoning for why my visa was denied. I've lived in the United States for over 16 years.

I've had a clean criminal record with one arrest and release, and it was part of a protest that really that had been happening in Los Angeles and we were released right away and basically uh I left uh in 2015 with uh I'd like to think of clean hands no issues and then going back to Tunisia where I where I uh where I was with my new family. Anyhow, so basically I was denied visa. I really wanted to do, I've never done anything illegal in my life. I wanted to do the legal route, following what's been always told, like, you know, follow the legal route.

Don't come illegally. So that was not even a question in my mind. You know, you know, the wife is American, the kids are American. I mean, I just, it shouldn't be an issue, but, um, I really was confronted with, I mean, I can safely say by, by now it's biased. It's, uh, it's gotta be some racism just by, by, by deduction, really. I, because when you run out of reasoning, uh, you have to start making these sad conclusions.

So, yeah, so basically, again, that took me on a long and painful depression and anxiety and a cocktail of mental health issues that I'm still actually dealing with right now. And it took my kids, my two kids, my beautiful kids through therapy, and they're still going through therapy. My wife is going through therapy. I'm going through therapy. It blew apart this family.

We're still trying to figure out why so much, you know, nothing can define it but hate, really. There's no other way of putting it. can define it but hate, really. There's no other way of putting it. And again, the discussion with my friends in America has been very difficult because they have no understanding or concept of what the diplomatic corps is doing and what these embass there is no, there is no access to them by Americans. It's just usually foreigners who do. And that really creates like this black hole of tax money going to these embassies.

And then what they're doing is just, just with a stroke of a pen, yes or no, no explanation. You can't sue, You can't appeal. You can't do it. It's absolute power. And then, you know, I'm mentioning this, the embassies, because through my journey, through this long and painful journey, I've met time and time again other fellow immigrants who, again, tried to go through the legal route were denied with no reason with no written reason

no valid reason so again this discussion on and off again among American citizens as to why people are showing up in the border at least in part what I see

is no accountability whatsoever to the embassies. Like time and time again, you have these embassies denying people who are trying to do it the right way, trying to do it. They either have family or work or whatever, and they're denied time and time again.

And then you have, you know, in the hundreds of thousands going through that process. And of course they try, they try, and then eventually they have no choice. So I'm not saying this is the only explanation, but it's a big part of it. I've spoken for people who are crossing and who are on the way from anywhere from Brazil to Colombia to Ecuador to Panama to Nicaragua to Guatemala to Belize and Mexico. All across, I've come across so many people, and at least, I mean, my little humble math,

I would say 50% to 60% have tried through embassies, but unfortunately, they just turned down. So this is an issue that is not talked about this is an issue they really get away with scot-free i mean they really don't there's zero kind of i mean they are gods i mean the ambassador have zero accountability now i mean he he is absolutely he has all the power and no accountability i I mean, rarely you see an ambassador being recalled by Congress. Rarely you see an ambassador being questioned, hey, why are these visa demands being declined? What are you doing about it? All that stuff.

So this is some of the stuff I want to add to the conversation because nobody has ever mentioned this. Nobody talks about this. It's very important. I think your experience it's far from unique as you've said right i have seen hundreds of people carrying visa rejection letters come across the southern border they've shown them to me right they are people who have been victims of some of the worst things that can happen to human beings and they've survived them and we've still refused to give these people a safe place so they've had to take their journey in a more dangerous way i mean i didn't see a single brown person in the at the embassy it's all right again i'm i'm i hope you guys don't feel like i'm being like too i'm just being honest

because i see it and i'm i'm up to date on what people are talking about and all the discussions and i see it like you know almost have a level of a of a right-wing supremacy style like you know i mean it's just you feel it you feel it it's there you have to be a quote-unquote brown person or a minority person to feel it i don't expect others to understand it but we we feel it and this is a discussion i've had in detention with a lot of the fellow detainees there is that sense there's a sense that you know we're being looked down at not on our merits but on you know a little bit of you know assumptions because of where you're from assumptions like you go in and it's already baked. It's already baked.

It's already, and this is me. I've had a visa from the US for 16 years. I mean, it should be a slam dunk. So my two kids are American. My wife is American. We are, until today, are so confused as to why the denials happen. I mean, I've called Congress members, and David was with me today when I was at the Congress member shift, Adam Schiff, in Burbank, California.

And we, you know, even they don't have an answer as to why the denial happened. And, you know, I mean, to close my personal issue, James, it's interesting because I was told that perhaps you were illegally in the United States between 2013, 2015. And then but they can't say for sure that was the reason. But in detention, when they did all the research on me, none of that existed. None of that. There's none of that. They released me because they have nothing against me. Nothing. And this is the USCIS. This is the

immigration service. Not the embassy coming up with some of these bogus ideas. So again, it's a mess and I feel like these embassies need to be looked into more because the border patrol ends up feeling the blunt of all this.

But where does it start? Where is the source? It's always the question of where is the source? Well, the source is, yes, there's economic issues. There is physical abuse. There's all kinds of stuff. But then also there's tax dollars being spent in the billions, in the billions, hundreds of billions on these diplomatic corps.

I mean, to be fair, my journey was not as difficult as many, many, many, many, many stories that I've heard. Heartwarming. I mean, really heartbreaking stories. My journey really, you know, I'm somewhat of a sophisticated life in the sense that I spent a lot of time. Again, most of the time that we wasted was waiting on the embassy because they kept on dragging and dragging their feet,

six, seven months waiting while my kids are crying on the phone. And we don't have the income to be able to have them come back to Tunisia, where I was. So anyhow, so yeah, it started by researching, researching, reading a lot of articles, researching. As far as North Africa, the route that is being used right now, mostly by a lot of Mauritanians and West Africans, goes through Turkey.

And then from Turkey, they're going to Nicaragua because Nicaragua, Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, they have allowed for visa on arrival. And then from Managua there is literally almost like travel companies

doing packages for upwards to $6,000-$7,000 from there to uh and then six thousand dollars from nicaragua but from but before nicaragua there's at least three four thousand dollars so i'm told by uh i think uh yeah the four mauritanians that were detained i'm told about ten thousand dollars which comes down to their local currency about 45 000 of their local currency which is a lot i mean a lot so uh they so like i said so they managed to get the flights to nicaragua uh managua has visa on arrival for 30 days for

north africans and then from there, you got literally the journey through, I don't know, coyotes, whatever you want to call them, facilitators, whatever. Well established with buses through El Salvador, through Honduras, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala,

and then through Mexico. So that's the route that's been, you know, upwards of 6,000, 7,000 Mauritanians and West Africans as far as the last articles that I've read have taken that route. So I looked into it. I couldn't afford it, to be honest with you. I was sending money to my kids and wife because she had to be on welfare.

She just arrived there, and she had to keep the kids at school and there's a lot of struggle. So I had to kind of try to help with that. On the same time, I was waiting on the embassy and the wife was calling them to see if, can we expedite? Can we do this? Can we do this? But they were literally rude and, you know,

treated her like a second-class citizen. I don't know why. We still can't figure that out. Anyhow, so another route right now, which is a difficult route, is through Brazil because Brazil has – I don't know if you guys know. I think they do that for Americans too. Yeah, so Brazil has sort of – I don't know the word, but the equivalency. That means if you impose a visa on Brazil,

Brazilians will impose a visa on you. They do that to Americans too. Yeah. So, you know, where I'm from, they don't have a visa as far as for Brazilians. So we don't. So a lot of Africans can go to Brazil and from Brazil take the route all the way. So David mentioned the Amazon Strait

where they cross the jungle from Colombia to Panama and so on and so forth. That is... Darien Gag. I mean, yes, the famous Darien Gag. That is, to me, personally, man, it gives me chills because two or three guys that one of them did it on his own with Google Maps, man. I don't know how

the hell he did it. I have no clue how he did it. I was listening and trying to understand him. It was just heartbreaking, you know, the suffering. So, but yeah, through Brazil and then Colombia and keep on going that way. That's another route. For me, again, I booked flights. I didn't go through that trouble, to be fair. I didn't go through that trouble, to be fair.

But I've had some issues with visas because North Africans don't get a lot of visa access around Latin America. We don't have a lot of embassies there. We don't have a lot of trade. We don't have a lot of commerce between our countries. So it's kind of an unknown commodity in the sense that, you know, everything is, you know, is new. For me, I was able to get a visa to Colombia. And I'm very grateful to choose Colombia because it's affordable. It's been a good experience for myself to get out of, I mean, get closer. And on the same time, figure out the lay of the land and understand where I'm going.

So I'm grateful for that and from there my goal was to get a visa to mexico and a lot of and most of my american friends get are still confused that's why i would need a mexican visa that's a whole nother discussion and then the mexican visa has become extremely difficult almost as difficult as the american visa because of pressure from the United States to stop the flow. So, again, we end up making it very difficult for people who want to legitimately do this.

So, finding an appointment for a Mexican embassy, then you find out which embassy of Mexico has appointments available. Some of them don't have ever. Some of them have them two years from now. Some of them have them for

a particular visa but not the other. Anyhow, so for me, it was Colombia and then I found an appointment for a Mexican visa in Belize. But unfortunately, I ended up in going from

Colombia to Panama to Nicaragua to Guatemala and then Belize, because Belize has not a lot of flights from Latin America. And then when I got to Guatemala, all the previous countries allowed me to transit without a problem, but Guatemala decided to put me in a detention for almost 40 hours and then wanted to return me back to

original country because they yeah, so I'm like my plane departs in a few hours, I'm going to Belize, why are you doing this? Please, I don't need a visa to Guatemala, I'm not my plane departs in a few hours. I'm going to Belize. Why are you doing this? Please. I'm not, I don't need the visa to,

to Guatemala. I'm not going to Guatemala. Nothing, no discussion. Just, they threw me in there, cockroaches, you name it,

the whole enchilada. I mean, no food, no water, no nothing. I mean, you know, it's just a sad,

very sad, very sad, very sad. That was a really bad experience. And then, so I was sent back to Panama, then from Panama to Colombia, and then Colombia,

they were going to send me back to North Africa. So it was going to be a really mess. So I had to use some of my customer service skills that I've learned through the years to wiggle myself where I last minute was able to help some friends buy a ticket to like, you know, in the midnight hour, really, they were going to send me. So I bought a ticket to Ecuador where I had a visa for 90 days.

So I was able to get out of that mess, stay in Ecuador for a couple of weeks and then try to get to Belize again. And the next time I was successful in going to Belize through Panama and then Nicaragua, then straight to Belize, avoiding Guatemala. And in Belize, I was there for a couple of weeks. And then I was able to get a visa to Mexico. Thank God. And there was a lot of Russians. There was a lot of Turks.

There was a lot of, no, no, no Turks, no. Russians and a lot of East Europeans trying to get a visa there too for Mexico. And basically, yeah, from there, it was the journey of taking a bus from Belize to Cancun, Cancun to Monterrey, Monterrey to Cabo. I found a job, a volunteering job in Puerto Escondido. I'm a yoga practitioner and I found a yoga retreat there to try to help with my mental health and all that stuff so yeah so they're doing a great job it's in the middle of the wilderness they really

present you know working on natural preservation and beautiful job they're doing there and then from there Cabo San Lucas, Cabo San Lucas I volunteered at a hotel to kind of be able to eat and sleep. And then from there Tijuana, and then Tijuana I met someone earlier in Cancun, a Colombian who was all the time I was in Mexico, I was trying to do the app, the CPB1 app.

Yeah, and how was your experience with that? Horrible, absolutely horrible. Absolutely horrible, absolutely horrible. I mean, it's just basically useless. It's useless. And I met people who've been there for two months on the app and it didn't work. Explain to me what didn't work about it.

Like, did it log you out? Did it? I wish I can send you screen. I have screenshots that I can send you so you can understand. So it tells you, it tells you, it tells you, you're, you're, uh, so you sign up, you put your information, your passport and all that stuff. And then basically what you're doing is you're, the queue and there's like a lottery system where they see how long you've been waiting, how old are you, where are you from.

It's like a lottery system that randomly selects people. But again, out of close to 100 people in my detention cell room, everybody's saying we all tried and none of them got an appointment. I mean, everybody wants an appointment. I mean, who's in his right mind would choose to forego an appointment and go through all that trouble? And if we do a little bit of math, eventually at some point I spoke to the supervisor of the Border Patrol Detention Center,

and he told me there's 1,800 people at any given point in that place. So out of 1,800 people, and if my cell, there was about six cells or something, or more than that, much more, much more, six cells and then four blocks, I mean, if out of 100, then you have nobody was able to use the app, then what's to tell out of the 1,800? Maybe 99%. I mean, all of them, really, because if they did have appointments, they would have been not in there, right? I mean, that's the key, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So, I mean, it's just a flawed system. I was telling my wife yesterday, it's like a lipstick on a pig because, you know, you're just trying to make it look like you're doing something. But it's really, it's really like there's nothing being done about it. So I'm still dazed and confused. I mean, I'm trying to understand the situation. So I literally, I was the last one to get in. And literally, I'm sitting there and I'm standing there at the border itself, at the wall. And I'm like, what's going on? Where is the border patrol? Where is the port of entry?

Where is this? I'm like confused. After finding himself unable to make an appointment through CBP1, Amos has started to make his way to Jocumba, like thousands of other migrants. And I think it's worth pointing out here that nothing that he has done up to this point is breaking any laws, right? It's not illegal to drive around in Mexico. It's not illegal to approach the border from the south. All of this stuff is the legal way to move around. No crimes have been committed. And it is, of course, legal to cross the border and present yourself for asylum immediately upon doing so, even to cross between ports of entry. It's at the discretion of the administration or the prosecutors to charge for

that crossing. But that is a legal means to claim asylum. And so we'll let Amos pick up again here as he takes his first step into the United States. The first thing I see is I'm pretty sure that there's some Fox News stuff because they were, they were so aggressive with the camera and a brand new Jeep. And they were like, Hey, cool, cool, cool, shoot, shoot. And then, you know, ladies and dudes and everybody was running and they were like hey cool cool cool shoot shoot and then the you know ladies and dudes and everybody was running and they were running after them to shoot them with the i mean with the camera i mean i mean that's what i mean yeah and uh you can tell there is malicious intent behind

what they're doing it was not like uh trying to be uh sort of neutral or anything they were just you know anyhow so i'm looking for a border patrol. I'm trying to say, hey, I'm filing for asylum. Where are you? What's going on? Nothing. There's nobody. So I'm just walking around with a, around the wall. I called my wife. I called some friends.

Thank God I still had signal. And then, yeah, I mean, you know um the first border patrolman that i saw he was pissed off he said f you f you f you this uh move out of my way fine cool uh i told him whatever i said if it didn't like i said i'm sorry and then i moved on and nobody's interested even to talk. So, and then I moved closer, closer to the crowd. And I don't know if that's when I saw David, but it was about almost, almost, almost. Yeah. And even when I saw David initially, but then I kept going to do, to have an idea of the

whole campaign camp and the whole, like, understand what's the dynamics. I saw some National Guardsmen, I saw some DHS police, and I saw some border patrolmen. It's like a whole mix of people. And I think there was Park Rangers, if I'm not mistaken. BLM Rangers, yeah.

So BLM Rangers, yeah. So it's a whole huge mix of people. And right away, my survivor instincts kind of, you know, I saw David and I saw tools and my eyes opened up because, you know, I built my farm from scratch in North Africa, and my tools are everything to me. So anyhow, so I'm glad I did see that familiar sight.

And I appreciate that. But you, David and Cesar, you guys were terrific. And yeah, I mean, nobody spoke English. Nobody spoke English. Nobody. Yeah. And everybody's being treated like, I mean, I told one border patrolman, I have cows. I have sheep. i treat them better than

the way you treat these guys i really do i truly do and they were didn't like that kind of talk but anyhow so um yeah i mean it got really cold i mean uh fairly quickly and right away david and caesar thank God, had some tools. And we started, you know, working on getting some tents up and running. And, I mean, they did most of the work, really. I was just there helping. So, and it was, dude, my heart was really pain, giving me a lot of pain. Because in my mind, I had my boy and my girl in my mind

and i'm just trying to get to to them but i've seen these kids man that was that was horrific man that was not right that was not right in that cold it was just not right and uh i'm telling you it's still in my mind right now i mean i'm not gonna let you it's it's it's just it's embedded you know yeah it affects all of us. Like, I was there last night, and there was a little baby there, and I couldn't sleep coming home. I mean, you know, geez, dude.

The thing is this. Again, I told David, it's not a question of left or right. The question is, I get it. I spoke to a bunch of border patrolmen. Again again i couldn't sleep at night i basically kept on going after david and caesar left i tried to sleep i couldn't sleep i called my kids they sleep at 8 40 or 8 30 so i spoke to them and then they were asleep and then

i got up and i kept walking around some people had a lot of wood some people didn't have enough wood so and some people didn't want me to take some lot of wood. Some people didn't have enough wood. And some people didn't want me to take some of their wood. I had to go pick up some wood and try to make sure everybody's fire is up and running. And then, you know, when everybody had the fire and everybody kind of somewhat settled in, I figured, hey, let me talk to this border patrolman i spoke to the first one he was kind of you know not yeah didn't want to talk but still said a few things yeah but then another one originally from san diego cool guy really cool guy he gave me the picture i mean

look listen i mean you know we're here to work and it's stressful it's a lot we're here we try and do the best we can it's not our fault and it's not you know i mean you know we're here to work and it's stressful. It's a lot. We're here. We try and do the best we can. It's not our fault. And it's not, you know what I mean? You know, you know, and he told me, listen,

you can go back to Tijuana or you can go in the United States or do whatever you want. But if I pick you up outside of this area, you're going straight to deportation. That's the bottom line. But if you stay here, you'll get to be picked up and processed and you'll have a chance to file for your assignment.

So again, excellent information with the exception of, to be picked up and processed and you'll have a chance to file for your asylum. So, again, excellent information with the exception of even they don't know the process because you don't get to file for asylum in detention. In detention, they release you on your reconnaissance and then later on you file for asylum.

Yes, yeah. And that's a misconception because everybody is saying Everybody that I spoke to initially said yeah, you can fight for your asylum right in here, but it's not true. So But anyhow, so and then I spoke to a couple of National Guardsmen a couple of kids that the early 20s from New York from New York and from New York, from New York. And I mean, you know, just a couple of kids. We started talking about hunting.

We started talking about, you know, fishing and stuff like that. And they were, you know, what do you expect? You know, they're doing their job. And they're human beings doing what human beings do. So, I mean, I can absolutely sympathize and understand, you know, these guys' jobs. My only beef is like, do you have to be, I mean, yes absolutely sympathize and understand you know these guys jobs my only beef is like do you have to be yes you're pissed yes it's a lot of work yes it's frustrating yes it feels like your country is invaded blah blah

we get all that but is you being mean rude or downright evil is that going to change anything it's not these guys went through freaking the Amazon I mean at some point i swam with a crocodile i didn't even know the crocodile was around i'm just saying it's so weird that they're educated and they're informed yet they still have that attitude

it's just like you know what i mean it doesn't it doesn't go anywhere yeah it doesn't it doesn't help and like look it doesn't matter what you think about policy like if there's a baby crying because it hasn't healed no they get cold they became cold-hearted and it sucks because again i spoke to this guy from san diego which i really appreciate his you know sort of you know he's he's he was very forward with me and i appreciate that because it probably doesn't get to talk to anybody because nobody speaks English. So, and then the idea is, you know, they're frustrated with the system. They're frustrated with the capacity, with the positions they're put in. Okay, I absolutely sympathize.

You cannot go wrong with that. I mean, you have every right to, to be that way. Again, my beef is why do you like good morning, F you? Good afternoon, F you? Good night, F you? Like, like, it becomes so sad. It's just like, you know, it loses its importance. Even the F word is no longer important. know what i mean so yeah it's just too much so much it's very dehumanizing isn't it like everyone who participates in it gets humanized absolutely absolutely and i mean eventually uh i got inspired by david and caesar and i think they did a freaking amazing job i mean i just uh it was a shock in my system to see the contrast between, I think it's the biggest necessary contrast in that specific place. You need to see the two sides of the American spirit. Right there, you have volunteers saying F you to the system, and you have border men saying F you to the system. You know what I mean?

Like, you know, it's just a huge contrast. And that's what really gives hope for anything going forward. So I appreciate it. I don't think David and Cesar really understand how important what they're doing. It's extremely important. It's very valuable. So to me personally, it's just the shock and awe, the initial shock, it just went away really quickly because I saw tools and I saw David

and I knew what's going on because I volunteered in shelters in L.A., in Los Angeles. I volunteered at the mission down at, you know, downtown L.A., you know, in Skid Row, if you hear of Skid Row. I volunteered there. I know very well what homelessness looks like. So I've done Christmas service. I've done food service.

Automatically, when I saw David, I just completely kicked in, and it was a natural thing for me to jump aboard and help. And then, again, I couldn't sleep. Early in the morning, like 4 or 5, I started seeing some border patrolmen coming in. And right away, the huffing and puffing starts. You know what I mean? The trawling and all that business. Okay.

And initially, I mean, again, I hate to use the word I, but I helped organize the crowd a little bit because they were fighting. a little bit because they were fighting because they were the BP was BP was picking up people that have been there that they just arrived and leaving the people that were there longer you know for the the ones that were that I stayed with were there for four days they didn't get picked up and so that it's a logistical issue. And people were just not being organized. So we did a line, demarcation line. Those were here for three days. They need to be here two days, one day.

We did that. And then the first border patrolman that showed up on a Jeep started yelling at me. You're doing our job. Okay, sorry, sorry, sorry. I backed up. I backed up. i minded my business and then another border patrolman tells me hey listen listen listen i needed to do 47 on this side 47 on this side i need you yeah i'm like what's going on here i mean again i dropped my ego i don't care as long as these guys get a chance to get through

because there was a lot of frustration where they're picking up people random and they're picking up or leaving people that have been there for a long time. You had families that did not want to be separated. You had families that have been there longer. And you had, you know, so it's just a huge mishmash of situations. so it's just a huge mishmash of situations. Anyhow, so, yeah, I mean, eventually on the next day, early in the morning, we did some organizing,

and it seemed to me that we were much more fluid, and the border patrolman filled up the bus, and I happened to be one of them, one of the people that were picked up. Yeah. Anyhow, so... But what a story. What a journey. Right?

It's insane. I'm still processing, man. Of course. I mean, that's a hugely traumatic experience. Yeah. It's just, I guess, one story.

And like you said, there are thousands of them. Thousands. Thousands. All right. That's what we're going to cut it off today. And we will pick up again

tomorrow to hear more about Amos' journey, how he's found himself in the United States, where he's going and where he is now. Thank you so much. 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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. 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 Toot, 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I wanted to ask so one of the people on the call is Emmett

Emmett had helped build some other shelters you may not know there are three camps maybe David shared this with you similar to the one that you were in there are three in different locations some of them are even colder than the one that you were in there were three in different locations um some of them are even colder than than the one that you stayed in um and uh volunteers including myself including

emma had built shelters um emma perhaps you could describe like how you sort of decided to do that and came up with the the shelter design that you came up with. Yeah, definitely. And I just want to say I'm processing also, Amos is also hearing your story and appreciating like for all of us coming to build shelters, it's realizing there's all these stories that we are not knowing. And all of us have these lives that are so independent, individual

and showing up and meeting folks who've been through whatever they have been. And it does stuff to us all. And I think hearing you right now, I'm just processing what you're saying. And I hope many people hear how you're framing all this. you're framing all this guys really appreciate how you're framing the story and how you're sharing both your perspective but also what it means to just be confused um to think for some for for me like i i just i felt so even after many years of working um in this space just so confused by how or by how cbp is treating people in the in the oasis at least in this desert right now um but uh basically it's winter time now in in in california um and for the last several months

people uh have been kept overnight in in the desert on the borderlands, which has been brutal and it has been terrible and inhumane for CPP to keep people in the desert. But as it became winter, it became deadly. And the risk of extreme hypothermia events for hundreds of people became so severe that a lot of our day in, day out, uh, work to making sure people had food. And if there were babies that they were taking care of as needed, or if, if folks had specific health issues that we could show up for them. But, but the thought of, um, just doing that, um, and hope, you know, bringing as many blankets as we could, uh, we're bringing up blankets and tents and tarps,

things to keep people off the ground. You know, basically looking in our basements and asking all of our friends like, hey, we're looking behind every gas station for boxes of cardboard or whatever it is. But that just didn't seem enough. It seemed like we were actually doing a harm to be the ones who had seen this. And that's something we deal with is realizing there's so many folks who just don't know what's going on. So for us to be a community seeing this and not, not taking to the next, the next level. And it's still, I feel this way, but, um, it, it felt like we were not doing, um, or we were actually doing a harm by not, by not kind of addressing the winter, um, as it was happening. So the idea of building shelters, uh, was, was to try to, um, basically do, do something

more than just bringing out supplies and letting people, uh, you know, fend for themselves, but creating something that might actually create, uh, more of a long-term safety. And then again, I mean, these are detention sites. We are working as volunteers inside of a basically informal detention site that CBP is operating. So it's very confusing for us to know we're here trying to be with people directly, trying to see what people are wanting and needing and what is their needs. But we're also kind of navigating around this very erratic system that is sometimes denying us entry to these sites,

sometimes trying to have us do things for them, and other times kind of allowing us to be there and bringing food because it serves them, things for them and other times kind of allowing us to be there and you know um you know bringing food because it serves them serves the ep for us to keep people alive um but that's a really confusing process so anyways there was a lot of talk going on about uh making shelters and people have been assembling pallets and one day i was um just talking with with some of the other organizers and they're thinking well i'll just do this. I'll come back tomorrow and we'll start. And so with some volunteers from the Dollar Lunch Club

from UC San Diego, we set out and to the campsite we call Tower 177 and started building this. And immediately, kind of as you're saying, also Amos, we had about a team of 10 people from Colombia and Kyrgyzstan helping us build this shelter from pallets, cardboard, plastic sheeting, tarps. And James and myself and some other folks had been talking the night before, what are the different shelters and using all of our outdoor experience, wilderness experience and kind of putting it all together and having kind of a roundtable discussion like, well, I've seen this work before. I've done this before. I mean, this might work. This might be a nice way of using these palettes, trying to find something that would be stable to withstand wind conditions, it being kind of, you know, resource smart, making sure we're not overusing whatever would we have in some sort of super intricate design, and also something that we could assemble

quite quickly and would be versatile. So something we could do in different settings. And also building something and building a design that wouldn't be super hard for people to use. So yeah, so it just felt like we were kind of just like kind of putting our heads together. And that's what we came up with was basically this super shelter that has basically a backbone of six pallets. And maybe, I don't know, James, it's possible to link some photos

or whatnot, but putting together basically, great, right. Yeah, some sort of yurt-like structure that can be kind of designed or can be changed as it would be. And especially something that anybody who's using it gets to actually have, mimic their own home, their own setup. So it's not something that we're kind of dictating

how it needs to be used. But yeah, we've had a really positive experience and a lot of expertise from folks from Kyrgyzstan to kind of lead the way. So we brought the tools and other folks who were going to use it basically created it themselves. So that was our first experience. Amos' point was really a good one. And it's one I'd consider too.

Like it's quite, I don't want to compare the difficulties we encounter as volunteers to the difficulties Amos has just encountered and has just kind of shared with us in his journey because they're not the same. But like,

it can be quite different. I speak quite a few languages, but still with large groups of people who you can't speak to you want to connect you want to be like i what's happening to you is it's it's disgusting and disgraceful and it's not me i'm not i don't want it to happen and i it shouldn't be and i want to be in community with you as much as i can and so when we don't have that language, the way that we can connect, um, one of the ways that we can connect is to grab a hammer or a screwdriver or something and start building something. I love it.

You're so right. You're so right. James, you are so on point. No, I mean, you know, it's just, uh, seeing that, that real big drill was like heaven to me. I mean, I swear not to give any brands or whatever. I'm just saying. It's not my favorite brand for sure.

But you really, really, I mean, truly, like you guys say, I mean, it's just such a universal sort of language. As men and as women and as people, we want to build, say. I mean, it's just such a universal sort of language. As men and as women and as people, we want to build, we want to protect. I mean, I'm taking this journey to come to my kids and show them support and safety and protect

and it's happening right now. I was talking to them earlier and they're excited to see their dad soon and just that feeling of warmth. I mean, this is what they're excited to see their dad soon. And, you know, just that feeling of warmth. I mean, this is what we do. This is what we do. And if you want to narrow it down and break it down to the basics, it's just what it is. It's the human level.

It's the human condition. I mean, really? So these guys are going to go through this pain? For what? I mean, clearly, they're going through, you know, worse things. And that's the whole point. That's what they're trying to do so um and then uh before i forget and then i don't hope i hope my phone doesn't you know die on me let me just give you the detention if you guys uh have a minute let me give you yeah yeah so yeah yeah before i you know uh so basically

So basically on, I think it was Monday, we get rounded up to what is, can easily be compared to cattle, a ranch cattle kind of process where, you know, here, take off your belt and everything. Yeah, that's familiar, but, you know, there's a little extra. your belt and everything. Yeah, that's familiar. But, you know, there's a little extra. The bus driver is cussing at you like it's nobody's business. And, you know, gratuity is humiliation. And, you know, maybe you have one of them is nice, but the rest are just, you know, absolutely want to just tear you down as much as they can.

And anyhow, so we're lined up. We're onto this bus that's behind the camp, closer to Highway 80. I believe Highway 80, yes. And basically, we're lined up. We're tagged. We're basically stripped of everything that could be, quote, unquote, dangerous. We're left with only one shirt in the middle of a cold morning and

it doesn't matter men, women everybody is treated the same I appreciate their quality on that issue so and then we are on a bus journey that's about an hour and a half, maybe two hours maybe more

I'm trying to remember this very well because it's just, you know, it's important, I guess. San Diego, the San Diego sorting facility, San Diego District Sorting Facility, a.k.a. MCU, that's what they call it. And basically, you know, your stuff is sorted and anything that needs to be thrown away thrown away and you're uh given you become a let me be clear you become a subject you're a subject now you're not an alien you're a subject james make sure you understand this you're a subject sir let's be clear about the naming structure. You are a subject.

All right. So I'm given a subject number. And yeah, exactly. I mean, I can't believe in this day and age. I got used to the whole alien thing, you know, alien number. But now it's a subject number. So anyhow, so we're done. We've gone through that.

And then, you and then you just look at people and the daziness and the confusion. Elders, women, babies, it's just heartbreaking. And again, you have a couple of military border patrolmen tall and acting like they're in the Marine Corps. They're just shouting left and right

and they're like, you know, treating people like they were disposable. So that's right there. Anyhow, so that's the – they call it the intake. So you're doing the intake, and you're lined up, and you're being – not stripped, you're searched. You're searched, and then your backpack is taken away. You open it up in front of them as if you were at the airport,

and then they throw away stuff that's, even though they're not, what's crazy is the backpack is going to be zipped and they're going to be tagged and put away. So I'm not sure why throwing away food from the backpack is going to add anything or, you know, some things don't make sense. But I guess that's what it is. So then you're done with the intake. You sit down inside the central area, and you're waiting to be processed. Processing means fingerprints, picture, and then you write down. and then you write down they take a copy of your passport and in there you write down the address

in which you will be quote unquote released later on so that's that and then basically a couple hours later you're assigned a detention cell, it's a big place, it's not a cell like a small cell

it's probably, I don't know 20 by, I don't know, 20 by, I don't know. I'm bad with distances. But anyhow, the point is we're there. We're taken to this place. I don't know, James. I don't know what you think of this. So they don't put handcuffs on us.

Right. But they tell you to put your hands behind your back as you're walking. Yeah. Very strange. I don't understand what's the point of that. Like they insist on putting your hands as if they were handcuffed behind your back. Yeah. As you walk it, as you, as you're walking, that is a big rule. And if you don't do it, they get pissed at you. And I, I'm not gonna lie to you.

I'm always testing the water and i pissed them off a number of times i did put my hands forward because i'm like what are you trying to get to you know anyhow so you get into your cell mine was 2a all right 2a yeah pod i'm sorry it's called they're called pods yeah yeah yeah because you know we're we're we're into share uh what is it work share spaces basically yeah we work here we go we work anyhow so we were there you're giving um gym mats gym mats and then you know when we when we all put our gym mats on the floor imagine there is zero space in between like the whole pod is covered with gym

mats no you have to walk on gym mats basically anywhere you go alright so that's that's the fact and then you're giving these what do you call them this the not thermals the little alloy foil blankets, whatever you call them. Oh, yeah, the Mylar blankets. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah, those guys. And they do kind of work, but for me, they're too small. I mean, I guess I'm a tall guy.

I mean, I don't know. So either your feet are sticking out or your head is sticking out or whatever. And I'm not the only one. There's a lot of people like that. or your head is sticking out or whatever and i'm not the only one there's a lot of people like that so uh and then ac is blasting full speed 24 7 light full bright light 24 7 and uh yeah and then a lot of you know again they teach this in school in psychology 101 so light 24 7 ac freezing ac Light 24-7. AC, freezing AC. We're only allowed a shirt, one shirt, one shirt. And then I'm talking about probably they have it on 55, 60, 60, 60. No more than 60 degrees for sure.

All right. And then you have people cold and getting sick. And then they clean three times a day to their credit where we all have to get out so the cleaning crew can come in. But here's the key. They clean at 8 in the morning, at 5 in the afternoon

and at midnight. So you can't sleep. Come on, dude. Really? Seriously? And God forbid you ask. God forbid you ask. Because that's just not allowed. So midnight, exactly midnight, sharp, get out.

Everybody sleep. Everybody sleep. Get up. Get up. Get up. Get out. And again, we know these tactics. We read about these.

This is like torture in a way. I bet you somewhere in the geneva convention there's something about this i mean i'm sure you know so so you know i didn't want to create too much drama the first day james the second day i started testing the water i'm like you know i'm being nice to everybody nobody speaks english so i have to kind of speak up for people you know some people need to go uh medicine I mean you know medicine or whatever I speak for them whatever and then some people are just uh don't understand when their name is called for it because it's misspelled so I'll help with that

you know in general like you know I literally would walk around and ask for extra blankets and things like that this all I've been doing I hope the video will come out that we're doing a few freedom of Information Act requests. Hopefully, we can get that. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, we'll share that with you. I mean, it takes...

I mean, they're going to fight it tooth and nail. They're going to fight it tooth and nail. Yeah, it'll take years. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Thank you. Thank you. Exactly.

So, anyhow. So, yeah. After the second day, again, they give you food. I mean, food. I guess food. Yeah. They give you food. the second day, again, they give you food. I mean, food, I guess food. Yeah, they give you food.

The second day, I started asking the question, okay, when am I going to get my phone call? The first person said, oh, I'll pass on the request. By the end of the day, I've asked like three, four times to three, four different people. So the pods area is supervised by DHS police. And then the processing in the central area is done by BP. And BP and Customs and DHS hate each other. I mean, that's just clear. They told me that to my face.

They don't get along. All right? Right. So when you are talking to DHS police, because they're the one kind of the prison guards, they just don't, they don't talk to BP. They don't convey the information that you're as a prisoner. So that's been difficult. So you would want to ask to go to the nurse or something.

So on the way, you can try to pass on information. So, you know, so I kind of located a situation. And then on the second day I asked three times, I need my phone call. They came out and told me you're crazy. We don't do phone calls.

Stop asking. So you're telling me I'm in us soil. I, you know, I don't get to see the, the, the, the outdoor 24 seven. And you don't let me make a call to

my lawyer or family and that's when i just lost my shit so so that by the end of second day i entered into a um um hunger strike oh wow my body yeah my body shut down complete my body shut down completely people were that have known me to be constantly active i do i do yoga i do i did yoga i did you know people will start following me doing activities and trying to be sharp uh you know stay sharp they saw me shut down completely i didn't i didn't eat or drink anything. I mean, completely. I shut down everything, all systems aboard. That's it. So right away, my eyes are closed. The next day, they start freaking out.

They bring in the wheelchair. But before they, you know, just to let you know, before they put me on the wheelchair, with a baton, they're just hammering me to make sure this is real. They're hammering. I still have bruises. I still have like a red dot on on my chest you know what i mean so so yeah i mean you know the kindness of their heart yeah again they're very hateful because of where they are and what's going on so yeah so uh yeah so i'm taking to the nurse. The nurse tells me, what's going on?

I tell her, look, my body has shut down. My wife and kids don't know where I'm at. They don't know if I'm alive or dead. And I just can't eat or drink or anything. Listen, sir, it's okay if you don't want to eat, but you have to drink at least water. Or we're going to put the IV. We can give you IV or antidepressants or anti-anxiety medicine. Listen, lady, I've never had antidepressants or medication. I rarely take medication.

I will not have medication. That is not an option. I don't want the IV. I don't want you to touch my body, period. This is me, fully aware of what the consequences are. And unless I get a hold of my Laura or call my family and tell them that I'm alive and where I'm at, this is going to – last time I did this, I did it for four or five days, no problem. So they started freaking out, James.

Really, they called the big guns. I think he was a lieutenant or whatever the ranking is. He came in, listen, what's going on? What are you doing, man? You can't be doing this in my house. Again, my house. The guy owns the place. All right. I'm like, listen,

I'm done. If you don't give me my call, expect me to do this for the... I'll go to the end. I've done this against corrupt governments. And when I was arrested in Tunisia or whatever, I can do this all day long, man, all day long. So he's like, you can't do this. This is ridiculous.

I have 1800 people here. You're going to start a problem. I don't want problems here. So he takes me straight up to the central area, puts me in front of phone, give me the phone number. I give him the phone number. He does my wife. Bam, bam, shazam.

I call her. They were still asleep at 7 in the morning. They have school at 830. So I gave her a voicemail. I later found out that she did get the voicemail. Thank God. And then she felt really good when she heard my voice and she knew what was going on. Yeah.

So I don't know what to tell you, man. You know, it's just a no man's land. And it's just, and dude, when I got to talk to the supervisor, when I escalated, because they took my DNA, like what, I told him, look, what's going on? Why are you taking people's DNA? Like, what's going on?

I told him, like, what are you accusing us for? Like, what is the accusation exactly? He said, you're not accused of anything. And what am I guilty of? You're not guilty of anything. So why are you taking my DNA? And then when he just, because this is the guy, the main guy, this is the guy that I saw coming in on the intake

and then later on in the outtake. He's got like 20 screens in front of him. He's manning the border. He's like, you know, it's the main guy. Like, it's him. So I told him, do you have your DNA, your own dna taken he said yes i did okay i told him if your dna was taken and you can take mine that's fine so they're taking people's dna to put it in their database and if you don't sign they don't let you they don't let you out so you can stay there indefinitely

until you do your dna How is this okay? Yeah. And you're not guilty of anything, James. You're not guilty of anything. That's the key. So you're not guilty of anything. I mean, I understand if you're arrested for a misdemeanor or a felony, and in states they take your DNA, I get it. But if you're – there is no accusation, there's no guilty,

and yet you're taking my dna for what for what so pretty crazy so so it was really rough it was really rough and then they were very very nasty i mean one lady miss diaz i will never forget her officer diaz i mean she was cussing left and right left and right left and right and then i lost it man when i when when she had me for i think they had me do uh signed papers again all right so i was simply asking why am i signing the same papers again do you want to leave or you don't want to leave do you want to leave or you don't leave and then on the same time james as she talks to me she pauses she looks at her colleagues and she's smiling to them and she's talking to them so nice i simply thought why are you talking nicely

to your friends and you're so mean to us like why why are you doing this like what is what is the problem did i did i did i call your names did i say something bad no but you're not my friend yeah but even if i'm not your friend why are you cussing at me? Why are you saying these bad things? That shut her down. That totally shut her down, James. I mean, it was a completely different person after that because it was in front of her boss. It was in front of her boss.

I mean, I'm telling you, man, this is what happens when you have zero accountability. Zero. I mean, anybody. This is basic Freudian understanding of psychology 101. That if you give someone ultimate power, they're going to take advantage. And, you know, I don't know what to tell you, man. I feel bad for the people in that detention. Because, you know, I'm not saying they're being tortured. But it's just an you know the little drops of water on your head yeah you know the little you know after a while you can turn some

there's one guy from russia that was there for three weeks wow three weeks there's one guy from brazil that was there for for a week come on man i mean seriously like that's too much yeah that's too much so it's a crazy you know that was horrific and then when i was leaving uh i found out that they put the wrong address on my release form and then you know i don't know if you know anything about the u.s immigration bureaucracy james it is horrific it is horrific all it takes is the one the wrong digit in the address they send the paperwork to the wrong address oh we did it we sent it we don't care we don't care you know what i mean and then you're basically waiting all your life and then and that's pretty much what happened to me before

when i was in the united states and then you know they don't care always to take it up with the with the u.s postal postal service are you serious like you know you're gonna put someone in jail and because you send them the wrong address anyhow so anyhow so i came back from the bus the bus is loaded we're leaving i came back to look you got you know you got the wrong address here like you know what's going on do you want to leave or do you want to stay do you want to leave that's all that's all they talk about it's like a favor she's doing it's not like a law thing it's not the due process no no i'll be more than happy to stick you in there because you complain about a mistake that we made on your

forum it's just the whole thing it's just there's no need to make it as cruel and as hard and people have died in the outdoor detention

in another site not the place where you are but in san diego right like and it's a tragedy and it it doesn't have to happen and it doesn't have to be disindignified and yeah i don't i think maybe people would have disagreements about the immigration the different immigration laws and they might feel differently to the way i do or you do or emma and david do but i don't think anyone in their right mind would really justify the way you've been treated and and you can multiply that by thousands right and you you're fortunate enough to be in relatively good health and not too young or not too old or not too sick for this to be a deadly trip or right and, it's obviously had a massive effect on you. And I can understand why.

I mean, I'm having a little bit of nightmares, to be honest with you, because what bugs me the most is those kids. And then on top of it, it's overwhelming because I was thrust in a position where, sadly, I mean, I had to pick up for a lot of people. I mean, you know, yes, my family tragedy, I mean, is an issue. But I mean, you know, I don't want to talk too much about what I did in Tunisia, but I was standing up against corruption and against bribery and things like that. And that cost me a lot of problems and it cost me, I mean, being in a blacklist in a government that's ever going negatively, you know, and jailing activists and jailing citizens for speech. now is turning into another dictatorship sadly so um you know i didn't want to use that as a reason but i mean it is what ruined my personal life because i was constantly being

you know uh harassed and and pushed and chopped by tunisian you know a-holes uh and then here i am to find myself in you know like with a deja vu kind of feeling with these gratuitous insults for nothing. So that kind of triggered me a lot, big time, James. Yeah, I can imagine. And then it felt like, you know, what is life worth? I mean, I know I'm coming from kids and they're the love of my life and my wife as well. But, you know, I want them to remember

their dad as someone who sticks up for others. You know, the you know, James, the most difficult part was David mentioned the Persian guys,

the running guys. You know, I got annoyed a little bit, James, because they were really lining up behind me and holding my hand, begging me to help them get out. Yeah. And because I'm the only one that spoke the language, and it felt like, you know like they didn't have any recourse and a detention center.

I'm not going to lie to you, James, that was very difficult. That was very difficult. That was very difficult. I felt like when I was leaving, I was leaving friends, brothers, sisters, brothers behind. And that stuck with me, dude.

Yeah, I understand. It's just a few people specifically that really, really, really, really were stuck on me. And it's just, what is this world for? What are we doing all this for? These are genuine, decent human beings. This country needs as many workers and as many new citizens as possible. Instead of just shoving these people with hatred,

just align them, just give them a chance, just rehab, just kind of make sure they know the language. They do all this and they're good. They all want to work. They all want to work. They all want to be good. Nobody that I met there is into drugs or anything. You know, it's just, it sucks because it's like shooting yourself in the foot. It doesn't make sense.

And I really felt really sad. and I really felt really sad. And on a lighter note, getting into eventually released and getting on the bus and going to the Central Elementary, I believe it's called. And I just got out of the bus, and I can hear the voices. Amos, Amos, Amos, everybody's calling. And I'm like, it's getting dark and I can't see. I can't see the people.

But I found like at least 20 or 18 people that were with me there. And they were like, they were crying and they were like, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you thank you and uh you know it was it was it was really heartwarming it was really was really heartwarming and i appreciate that the that they uh recognized what we did we tried to do a bunch of more italians colombians mexicans uh ecuadorians uh I mean you name it it was just a Turkish

an older gentleman an Iranian, the Iranians the same Iranians that I helped get onto the bus from Willow, the same guys eventually all I found them at Central and it was really nice to see them

and for them to just literally jump on me almost and tell me thank you and in so many languages i appreciate that so um i just hope all this this this this kind of get somewhere where they understand that it doesn't have to be this way it really doesn't and we're not asking i'm not asking either get more people or do this i'm just saying there is little tweaks that are not meant to increase the immigration or or make it impossible or anything it's just little tweaks to you know to get this system a little better that's all that's all i'm saying personally yeah make it a little kinder and and i think like it's always that way right like it's people helping each other even when the government doesn't help them and like yeah yeah yeah we just got news oh i was there yesterday that that all the shelters at one of the sites were torn

down so like it's we'll have to go back and build them again. But yeah, people will because I think we all, at least all of us here think that people should be treated with dignity and that they deserve a little better than they're being given currently. And, and have you been able to reunite with your children yet? Or is that still in your future? Yes, it's kind of technically on Thursday, I'm supposed to run out of them. I am getting there on steps. I'm financially not viable right now. I'm relying on some friends

to who got me up to Los Angeles right now. And then we're collecting money for gas and my wife Lauren will be coming down on Thursday with the kids, and then we're going to go to her mom's in Lancaster for a Christmas party that she does. And then from there, we'll make it back up to Pismo. And in Pismo, my wife was sheltering at her sister's, but the house is overcrowded, and there's no way I can stay there. So that's something that I'm trying to figure out and where to stay, and I don't have friends up there.

I don't have anything. So it's a problem that I'm having to deal with. And at the same time, I was given April 12th as a court date in Van Nuys, and I have to deal with a lawyer, and we contacted lawyers, and they're expensive, the pro bono lawyers that we called. They're not taking new cases. So I knew it was going to be difficult, but when you're in it and you think that it will be kind of a little better, but it's definitely not looking good.

But, you know, I'll be close to my kids somehow, and that's what matters to me. But it's just a struggle. I was at Congressman Schiff's office. I mean, what kind of resources you have for immigrants? I just need a little bit of a start so I can get back on my feet. And I kept them in touch since I was in Africa through the trip. They're the only Congress office that at least interacted with us, me and my wife.

But, you know, she looked at me from behind the glass door and she said, good luck. She sent me the county immigrant affairs office link and she told me good luck and said bye-bye. And that's all that she did. and said bye-bye and that's all that she did so it's uh it's tiring and not giving up of course but uh it's just it's very difficult James yeah no it's yeah it shouldn't be this hard or this complicated or this taxing especially when your family are here already I'm just trying to be I don't I mean my wife is on

welfare and they keep cutting her welfare smaller and smaller just we have two kids i just need a chance to get up get back on my feet and be a good father to work and i can't work right now i'm not allowed to work yeah and i have to find money money for the lawyer i have to find money for the lawyer. I have to find money for me and my kids. It's really quite a humbling experience. And I know I don't want to rely on anybody, but I mean, it's just hard. It's hard. Yeah, no, it is.

And I don't know how people are expected to pay for their legal representation when they're also expected not to work. It's just a system that seems to design to be as cruel and complicated as possible. Yes, you know, the jobs are available. The jobs are available, James. I mean, I contacted about four or five places.

My previous work experience in L.A. and in California was logistics and car rental and stuff like that i called my previous bosses they all told me come over like you know get your stuff figured out and come over we'll find a job so we have plenty of vacancies basically i mean you know so um uh but you know here you are here you are here you are yeah man look it's it's i've heard so many of these stories but they don't stop upsetting me um and i'm glad in a way because you know they're bad and they shouldn't they should be upsetting to everyone who hears them and i'm sure everyone who hears this will want to do whatever they can to make this a little easier are there like any orgs or non-profits that have been helping you since you've

got in the U S that you think people should, oh man, nothing, nothing. I mean, it's been, you know, those who call very centric as far as Asian Americans or this or that is very specific, but migrants have the hardest time of everyone i'm telling you no joke and if you're a father trying to make it to your kids and try to you know what i mean do right by your kids doesn't mean anything nothing absolutely nothing so that's terrible man that's yeah yeah this is the first christmas this is the first christmas for the kids outside of their where they grew up i really wanted to make it as family friendly and happy as possible but i don't even have the capacity to give them gifts or anything or or even i don't know. It's just gonna be hard.

Yeah, fuck man. Man, sorry. I know, it's okay. I'm just a drop in an ocean of despair when it comes to immigrants. I'm getting messages from

some of them in New York, some of them in North York, some of them in North Carolina, some of them in Illinois, a couple in California. I mean, they're still desperate for help, especially with language and all that. So, you know, I'm grinding and I'm doing the best I can. But, you know, it's a and I'm doing the best I can, but, um, you know, it's a reality check. It's a reality check.

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's really, I mean, it's sickening how quickly you can be cut down to nothing when the state doesn't care about you. I want to thank you so much for giving us your story and your time and being so open with us, because I think that's the only way that this stuff changes is that people hear like numbers are

great and your story is one of tens of thousands but I think sometimes we need to hear individual stories to understand the human impact of this true true true we'll stay in touch you have my phone number absolutely

anything you need anything we can do for you, we're here. Yeah, I mean, I can't wait to come down to the border. I'm not giving up on the border, dude. I'm not. I want to bring, at some point, my kids to see the price. And then I want to contribute. I want to find a way to give back. I want to – I know I can't do it right now, but it's in my mind and I know I'm not going to give up on that,

on that dream of coming back there and continue to help with the volunteers. That's very kind of you. Yeah, but when you come down, let me know. I'll bring some Roe v. Tools and we can build some stuff. Sounds good. Sounds good. Fuck, I mean, sorry. I'm just like, I'm just for processing.

Yeah, me too. For processing this and like hearing Amos say all this is like, fuck, like that's the conversation, right? Just what he's saying and his accountability, his human nature. Like something in the way that he was saying that I was just like taking a pause on everything that I wanted to share. Because I really like it hit to the core of the like my own frustration with our response is it's not getting to the point that like uh what he was what he was sharing i don't know the words right now to say that my mind is now totally mush um we'll end it there i do want to give both of you a chance to plug any uh and all organizations that you think

can help and because the people are going to listen to this we'll break it up into two parts uh people will want to alleviate the suffering and there are people including yourselves and myself trying to do that so uh if there's an organization that you'd like to plug fundraiser you'd like to plug please do well just the way the conversation ended um the thing that i was thinking is uh you know just a a uh you know anybody listening to to the to what amos has said just one one very small but perhaps meaningful thing would be to do something to enable him to buy some presents for his kids. I think that would be pretty cool. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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 at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

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