It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 90

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by

an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. 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. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast which I'm recording at eight in the morning and thus without any of my colleagues. And I'm joined today to discuss the technological aspects of the border regime by Austin Coker of Syracuse

University and by Jake Wiener of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Hi, guys. Morning. How are you doing, James? I'm good. I'm very excited to talk more border stuff i like covering this even though it's sometimes terrible uh so what i wanted to start off with is i think our listeners will be familiar with cbp1 right the most cursed cell phone app uh of all time and both of you have written a lot and very uh insightfully about cbp1 so i thought we could kind of do a little bit of a breakdown of A, the issues with it and B, like with the issues with it as an app and then the fact that we're using an app being a problem inherently. So perhaps we could start with, I know Jake, you mentioned you wanted to

talk a little bit about the design of the app. So in the process of sort of commissioning it and making it, should we start there? Yeah. And I think this story is pretty interesting and unique because CBP One was built in-house by a small team at the Office of Field Operations in CBP. Yeah, which is, it's unique. Like there's one other app that they built and I don't really know of other mobile apps that have been rolled out with anything close to the size of cbp1 that have been designed by a government agency

yeah that's kind of an odd choice you know conceptually it's not something i'm critical of like i think if we're going to have a government that's providing services it's good for them to do things in-house like it means you're not relying on third parties who are able to like use information from the app and benefit off of it um but it doesn't mean you need the institutional competency to be able to design an app um yeah and so to just like provide a quick history basically a cbp one app was built off of the framework of an older app called cbp rome that app was used just for people boating on the great lakes because technically if you go like boating on lake michigan you will leave the united states if you chase a fish over the boundary of Canada.

Yeah. And CBP felt that it was very important that people who did that reported leaving and coming back into the United States. Yeah, right. It's questionable, but they built an app to let people do that. And the framework for that app used aps ping to verify when you're back in the u.s okay this is a small app you know i don't think they encountered too many problems with it because you have maybe a couple hundred visitors a day um and on that framework they built out cbp1 to do a couple of things um it's used for folks like customs folks. So if you're

importing goods into the country, you can do some of that reporting through CBP-1. You can also use it to apply for and obtain the I-94 travel form, which is the form that most folks coming to the United States are going to need. And then critically for our uses is that if you are applying for asylum you can use it to schedule an appointment yeah that's been the bulk of my reporting on it is that the bulk of its use i think so yeah okay and so that's i'm still blown away with the fact they designed in-house it's crazy uh did you ever find the job the job postings for the people who designed it or did they just like get some people who were good at IT to kind of take a swing at it?

So as far as I know from... I've talked to one of the people involved in the creation. I think Austin has as well. My understanding is that it was like an in-house team that already existed. Okay. But Austin, you may be able to clarify that. Yeah, that's my understanding too. I think they have a technology team within the agency that is using technology in various ways.

I don't think we have a full understanding of the scope of their responsibilities and the work that they've done. I think, to Jake's point, it is quite interesting that they produce something for the public. they produce something for the public. It's not unusual, of course, for large agencies to have teams in-house that deal with all of the general technological challenges that every agency in 2023 faces. Databases, keeping government cell phones working and secure and all of that kind of thing. But a lot of the things that are public-facing from federal agencies tend to be contracted out to a private vendor in some way. So it's quite unique. But I don't think we have a full scope

of what they are or aren't producing in-house. Yeah, that's interesting because they heavily rely on outside contractors for so much of that. There's a whole industry that starts here in San Diego and goes over to Tucson and probably further into New Mexico of people providing surveillance technology to Border Patrol. And then goes over to the West Bank too, where lots of it can be seen.

Having talked about their sort of unique approach to design, it's probably a good idea to then talk about the implementation of Zap, and it's kind of lackluster as an understatement. It just fucking sucks. It's terrible. So, like, in what many ways has it been unfit for the purpose that it's supposed to do? So I guess first we can talk about

its technological inadequacies, and then more broadly about why this isn't a problem you can really solve with an app on a telephone that needs broadband and wi-fi yeah so i'll start by saying that i think a lot of what's happening with the problem the cbp1 app is institutional blindness so the people who design the app i genuinely think want it to work well. And I think they're simply not asking the questions that you need to be asking. And when you design an app like this, which is who's really going to be using it, what are their needs? What technology, what wireless services do they have? What phones are they using?

Basically, like if you're someone on the southern border with very little money and probably an outdated phone yes are you going to be able to use this app not a great camera um and so i think the first place to start with that is simply the fact the app requires a strong wi-fi or cell signal to use which is not always present um and I think Austin has some good insight into the problems with insufficient Wi-Fi. Yeah, definitely. I think some of what's interesting here is the way not only that the app relies on Wi-Fi,

but then the kind of real-world social consequences here for how people then try to cope with these problems. I want to take one step back just really quickly and discuss the world that CBP was dropped into because there's some important context here. So as I know you've already covered, James, over the past three years, the dominant border control policy was Title 42, a COVID era policy that was purportedly motivated by concerns about public health. This is where Title 42 comes from. Title 42 of the U.S. Code pertains to issues of questions of public health. It's not an immigration policy. It was

a public health policy, although detailed reporting has, I think, pretty well established that it was more of a political moment of political opportunism rather than a legitimate public health concern. But regardless, that policy allowed Customs and Border Protection to effectively turn back anyone who arrived at the border, whether they attempted to cross unlawfully or not. turn back anyone who arrived at the border, whether they attempted to cross unlawfully or not. And the primary human rights concern here was people who were seeking asylum, which is their right to do. One of the aspects of Title 42 was that there was a rare exemption clause built in that allowed people who were particularly vulnerable, a particular humanitarian concern to attempt to effectively apply for this kind of exemption. And until January of this year, that process was run by nonprofit organizations. CBP had this sort of informal outsourced system where NGOs on the Mexican side of the border would effectively conduct massive amounts of intake and prioritization and triaging of these

cases, and then submit names to CBP to allow people to come through ports of entry. CBP1 effectively replaced that system in January, which meant that instead of migrants going through the NGOs, they would have to download this app, fill out the information and send it in. This is really important to mention because the groundwork was actually laid by a tremendous amount of effectively unpaid labor on the backs of NGOs on the southern side of the border. And, you know, it is it is fair and accurate to say that this was an extremely imperfect system and that there were absolutely significant issues with this. But one of the interesting things is that the role that NGOs played meant that people coming and seeking asylum would then, in some ways, be potentially connected with a broader network of NGOs, support services, advocacy, and so forth.

So the introduction of CBP1 purportedly bypassed the work of NGOs in screening people for the exemption process. However, NGOs still ended up performing all this kind of invisible labor because they're the ones who effectively were working with migrants to make Wi-Fi available. they're the ones who effectively were working with migrants to make Wi-Fi available. And it's not just Wi-Fi, it's actually charging your phone. When I visited shelters and camps on the southern side of the border at the end of 2022, a big part of having camps and shelters was actually providing electricity. You know, when I was there, and I know others have reported on this, James, I'm sure you've seen this too, people would be huddled around the outlets because they needed

to charge their phone. If their phone didn't work, if their phone wasn't charged, they didn't have access to CBP1. This was already a challenge because the primary form of communication with CBP was phone calls. Individuals would get phone calls. In fact, I interviewed a Russian family on the Mexican side of the border in Matamoros last November, and the family now, and many of the other migrants I spoke with, and this was also true for many migrants, by the way, the families, typically the wife and children, if there were a family unit, would stay either in a hotel or a shelter or someplace that was more safe. And then the men would effectively have nights on the street where they could actually get cell phone coverage

and things like that. So CBP1 introduced all of these kinds of technological demands. It's not that they weren't there before, but I think it's a different matter when you go from interacting with a network of NGOs to saying, now you're actually interacting with the US government, and this is the only way that you're going to be able to enter the country. I think those demands were quite high. They've clearly had some tremendously negative impacts from migrants trying to come through that way yeah definitely i know uh have one here but we bought so many of these like solar powered charging brick things and distributed those but uh i have so many photos of people's hands reaching through the wall and people trying to charge their phone on the other side of the wall you know and it's been a big demand for a while,

but it's certainly when CBP were detaining people in places where they didn't have power and then expecting them to also communicate using their telephones, that became a particularly sort of ridiculous issue. Very upsetting to see it, like, done like that. So, yeah, this app really isn't a solution for the problem we're facing which is as you said like a three-year backlog on people who have legitimate asylum claims being able to make those asylum claims and i guess can we talk about who it favors in you know implementing this system

as a catch-all right not an option but option. Who does that favor and who does it not? Yeah, before we get there, I think it might be helpful to just run through what it is like to use CBP1. Oh, yeah, let's talk about... All the steps you have to go through. Yeah, because it is a... Yeah.

And that's... And when you're thinking about that, think that every step is a potential failure point, right? Every step you could have a glitch, and anytime you have a glitch happen, it's going to kick you out of the app and you have to restart. Yeah. So if you're on the southern border, you need to apply for asylum. You've been walking for months from Venezuela, Guatemala, etc. You got your phone. First thing you have to do is log into the app through login.gov. That's the single sign-on service that many government agencies use.

It works fairly well, so you register yourself a profile. Then you're going to navigate over. Hopefully, you speak one of the languages that CBP1 is available in. As of now, I believe that's English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole, although they may have added a new language recently. You find the right place in the app. Not always super clear to submit your asylum application and try and schedule an appointment. And then you're going to have to fill out a ton of information. You're giving CBP your name, addresses, people you know in the U.S.,

big form to fill out, including often information on how vulnerable you are. So are you pregnant? Are you disabled? Have you been threatened in Mexico? Information that they want to use to prioritize you, hopefully. And then you're going to need to take a facial photograph. That's going to go into CBP and Department of Homeland Security's databases. It will be run against facial recognition searches that they populate with like this massive facial recognition system, the traveler verification service that can flag people who are on CBP's target list, TSA's target list. You could be wrongfully flagged by that because facial recognition is not a perfect technology.

You're also going to take a facial liveness scan. It's related to facial recognition, but it is different. It's a different technology and it is untested. There's been no government agency that has evaluated facial liveness or bias. And that basically is trying to figure out, are you a real person or are you like a picture of James that you're holding up? Yeah. Because you're trying to get James an appointment and then sell it to him later or something. Do the facial liveness scan. That's been the sticking point where folks with darker skin and indigenous folks have not been able to get through it.

We can talk about that a little later. You're also going to do a GPS ping. So your phone pulling from both cell towers and GPS data is going to try and establish your location and send it to CBP that can create problems if you're pinging off a US cell tower suddenly it's less reliable might look like you're in the US

and once you get through all these steps then you're able to submit your information and you're in a lottery for whether or not you get an appointment great information and you're in a lottery or whether or not you get an appointment great uh yeah let's the photo thing i think has been covered i don't maybe i perceive it to have been covered extensively because this is what i do but uh i think maybe some people aren't aware of the complete inadequacy of those facial liveness scans and i know some non-profits in tijuana

have light booths which can help with that but it with that. But it's again, that money could be doing something more useful, right? And then making an Instagram booth for people who just want to exercise their legal right to claim asylum. So let's talk about that technology and how it's not working. Yeah, I think one really important factor here, and the reason I wanted to paint some of the context was, and partly selfish, because as a geographer, I'm always very eager to evangelize about the importance of understanding social geography for thinking about questions of human rights and asylum and immigration. So the facial likeness test is a great example of that. So, you know, it's hard to see this unless you've been on the ground in some of these places. world, obviously. Not everywhere, but obviously through colonialism, through settler colonialism and so forth, it's really shaped not just anti-Black racism, but anti-Black racism itself has produced many of the geographies that we have from red

lining, segregation, educational acts, all kinds of things. The way that the social world looks today is already shaped by these issues of racism. What that then means is questions like who has access to cell phone towers and fast Wi-Fi and who can afford up-to-date smartphones that can meet all of the threshold of require the technological requirements to use this, use this app and use the software is already distributed and fractured by questions of race and identity. What that means is even if the facial liveness test worked perfectly and there were no issues with the software, which is not true, but let's even just assume that, it is still true that access to that technology and software is already structured by race. So one of the things I noticed, you know, having spent time along the border was just

how much even in some of the shelters and where Black and African migrants had access to shelter was itself much tended to be more pushed to the outside of this, where you're less likely to get good cell phone coverage, less likely to have electricity, much more likely that the roads, even where I visited, were not paved. And I was there when it was raining in Reynosa one day. And, you know, some of the places where African migrants and African families were staying and black migrants, by the way, from Latin America. Let's just remind everyone that there are black Latinos living in Latin America. Right. We're also pushed, you know, more to the outskirts. And as a result of that, those factors contributed to access. So it wasn't just issues with the software itself, which may be there.

It's hard for me to evaluate. It's not because it's not like we've done our own evaluation of that. But it's also all of those contextual factors. And I just want to make a fine point on this. We know this already. CBP should understand that already and understand the various social factors that impact access. So simply saying, for instance, if one wanted to take a defensive position and say, well, look, we ran the test, the software works as intended,

there's no racial bias in the software, that doesn't get CBP out of the responsibility of saying, yes, but you absolutely had all the information and and a reasonable person should have known that this the access to this app had these kind of technological requirements and there were and that access was not evenly distributed yeah i think it's really important you said that actually because a lot of reporters it does get reported on there are people doing great work but like sometimes it gets missed because african migrants might not speak spanish black african migrants uh and a lot of reporters don't have the language skills to talk to people in i worked with a fixer who spoke um a romo and

to grion and and a lot of other like five or six other languages and and that helped to get me an insight into the very difficult situation that lots of african people face and you know that their isolation the relative lack of resources even in what's a pretty resource bar setting for everyone and i know haitian people i've spoken to a lot of haitian people um plus then you add that like if i think about last month the languages which i was able with through friends through translation to speak to people with you know vietnamese kumanji which is a dialect of kurdish french right swahili spanish evidently dutch aside from spanish those are not covered maybe if you're french you can i think it would be still hard to work in asian creole if you spoke sort of more um mainland french uh those are not covered by the app right

so you have to find a way to access that with via translation and then it's very the information makes you incredibly vulnerable to whom whomever if you're asking someone to share right like it's imperfect it's not a sufficient way to describe it, but it's an extremely flawed system. To Jake's point, like I'm also like kind of open-minded about, you know, about using an app like this. I mean, there's, I mean, Jake's right.

I mean, if you're going to have a government in 2023, like having some reasonably up-to-date ways to do things is not an unreasonable expectation. But there's just so many blatantly obvious sort of shortcomings that are not difficult to identify in preparing this app and understanding what people are likely to need. So to have those gaps, and then also to roll out the app at a time when the same policy announcement that rolls out this app is also a policy announcement that says this is the only way to do it. I mean, imagine if like your new policy for like healthcare for some particular healthcare, you know, thing was like, you have to go through this route. And we know that 80% of people aren't going to be able to use this. But now this is the

only treatment you have an option for. I mean, that would be that is just strange. I think I think one thing to just think about creatively here is I can imagine a phase rollout of this where they did improve it over time, but there were adequate, you know, outlets for people who didn't fit into the categories that they had built into the app. And I think that would be a more complex and more nuanced and maybe a more interesting way to do it. I just don't think I don't think it was rolled out responsibly in that way. Yeah, I think we should be honest that beta testing an app on hundreds of thousands

of the most vulnerable people in the world is incredibly irresponsible. Yeah, it's just cruel. It's not in any way appropriate. So I guess we've talked a lot about this app. Let's talk about, let's say you're fortunate enough to get an assignment appointment

to enter the u.s um you would then in most cases enter something which is called cbp's alternative to detention system isis isis sorry yeah you're right let's explain a little bit like why is it an alternative to detention what why would one be detained you haven't in theory done anything wrong well in many people's perspective haven't done anything wrong i guess uh and then what what does atd mean and then we can get into some of the uh privacy issues and the way that it affects not just migrants but also everyone yeah one thing before we go there i think would be great um just closing the loop on the racial bias discussion um this is like an element of my advocacy that I talk about all the time in different areas of like how facial recognition is used when it's using the criminal justice system is that there absolutely is bias in most facial recognition systems.

They work really well for white men and increase increasingly less well, basically, as you run down the privilege spectrum. That's an element of how these systems are designed, right? It's they get fed a lot of images of white men and fewer images of other folks. That's fixable, right? Like you can provide a training database that is a whole, you know, a good spread of people. It seems to not necessarily have been done with the facial liveness for CBP1, in part because the British company that designed it probably did not have access to a lot of images of the type of people who would be on the southern border. You're talking about like indigenous Mexican folks, Ishii folks, just a very large number of different ethnicities.

But any bias like that is, as Austin said, sitting on top of a series of other biases, of structural biases. And so the result we see with a lot of facial recognition systems, and this facial blindness system in CBP1 is no different, is that a little bit of, even a little bit of bias in how the facial recognition works gets amplified. And it's amplified by social biases. It's amplified by the biases of people who run the system and people who interact with it every day. And then it's amplified by institutional blindness as well, failure to recognize a problem. We had facial recognition systems rolled out on some level since the early to mid-2000s. And we didn't even know that bias was a problem in any facial recognition system until 2018.

know that facial that bias was a problem in any facial recognition system until 2018 so when you're thinking about and you're hearing about like bias testing and the fact that it's been bias tested those tests are never incredibly reliable because they're not done in the real world they're not done with the people actually using the technology they're done in a you know controlled setting and they're not welcome i Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails.

I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas,

the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the

chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm by people who have a nuanced understanding of how the technology impacts people yeah i think it's very important to remember that yeah there's

layers upon layers of bias and they stack to make it harder and harder for certain people coming to the united states to get again what's that right and often to just be safe right like some people especially the less advantaged you are sort of on a global scale the likely the less safe you are waiting in mexico uh to make an appointment for your asylum right like if you if you can't get into a shelter or you're from a group where you don't have community to look out for you you're just that bit more likely to be taken advantage of or have something bad happen to you or your family so yeah it all stacks up i guess to make for a very unfortunate situation for people yeah which means the consequence of having a glitch happen is way higher yes i've personally known people who have had terrible consequences from what should have

been a very very straightforward asylum application and and very easy to process very rapidly yeah it's it's it's a whole it's a whole mess and i know i'm trying to speak more to some of the folks who work with african migrants um because i think that often yeah their stories just don't get told especially at our southern border where like i think obviously there's this, like, uh, a lot of people like to report on the border, but not leave New York or, um, DC or wherever they have their studio or newspaper or what have you. And I think it's easy to miss that if you haven't, like Gossard said, like, like being around a lot and seeing all these things that stack up on top of one another.

But, uh, yeah, it's an important topic that we don't especially as like i know that it doesn't get reported on because everyone likes to report on ukraine and only ukraine but like as more wars in africa or wars in um you know people from myanmar it it's very hard for them to get to the southern border actually from hearing from thousands maybe different cases where people can't leave thailand but uh again the system you know when you have a whole other alphabet that you're trying to access the system in and it doesn't work for you then that makes it incredibly difficult for those people and that ladies and gentlemen is what we call a cliffhanger in the podcasting industry because

we will be back tomorrow with more on how ice tracks migrants and how that tracking of migrants can impact other people, people who live with them, people in their communities. I hope you'll join us then. Thanks. Bye. Hi, everyone. it's James and I am back with Austin and Jake to discuss ICE's Alternatives to Detention program today. If you didn't listen to yesterday's episode on CBP1 and a little bit of ATD, then I'd suggest starting there because there's a lot of context that you might be missing in today's episode. Let's talk about alternatives to detention a bit. This is a once inside the US system, right? So it's a little different.

It's people who've managed to get through the significant hurdles posed by CBP1. What happened to them then? Yeah, so ICE has the option of detaining people at immigrant detention facilities. This includes people who are facing deportation, most people who are facing deportation. Can you explain that, the Title VIII thing, because people might not be familiar. I've tried to explain that before, but I'd love you to explain that again, just so people are clear.

Regarding detention? Well, regarding filing a defensive asylum application and why people might be doing that, like the post-Title 42 sort of paradigm for processing asylum. Yeah, sure. Okay, so Title 42, which we talked about earlier, has gone away. Now, Title 8 is not like Title 42. It's the part of the US law which me now title 8 is not like title 42 it's the part of the u.s law which is about

immigration title 8 never went away um but it is now the dominant you know a section of code that's that that is shaping border enforcement and immigration processing when someone comes through cbp1 and they they get an, they go to their interview with the Port of Entry, then they come into the United States, they have not made an asylum application yet. So they still have to do that. And the United States has two options at this point. There's two agencies that can make decisions, can receive asylum applications and make decisions. that can make decisions, can receive asylum applications and make decisions. USCIS, which is historically the primary one, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, they have what are called asylum officers whose job it is to adjudicate asylum applications,

interview people, and so forth. Or people, the United States can file removal proceedings, deportation cases effectively against these individuals and put them into immigration court where an immigration judge can accept in front of a judge and has an ICE officer, an enforcement-related kind of attorney, effectively arguing against them in court. Technically, they're not supposed to be arguing against them per se. They're supposed to be finding the right outcome, but effectively, they're arguing against them. Almost like they're trying to apply for asylum in immigration court or in like a criminal court setting. Almost not really, but almost. Yeah. Right. So here's the two main differences. When those individuals, you know, historically, when people have been put into the immigration court system, ICE does have the option of detaining them or at least detaining them for an early part of that process until they meet some certain tolls. The Biden administration has decided largely at this point not to go that route.

That has not been true in the past. The Trump administration's detention numbers were up well over 60,000 people detained a day at one point. Right now, it's about half that. It's up from the beginning of the year, but it's about almost 30,000 people are in detention now. And people seem to be moving through even when they are detained relatively quickly. This is where alternatives to detention come in. We should not think of alternatives to detention as alternatives to detention. In fact, ICE itself has said on their website and in testimony before Congress, alternatives to detention. In fact, ICE itself has said on their website and in testimony before Congress, alternatives to detention is not an alternative to detention. It is an alternative to unsupervised release. So what it really is, is an electronic monitoring program that allows

the agency to effectively keep track of everyone that they want to keep track of. Now, the number of people in this alternatives to detention program is an extremely small fraction of the number of asylum systems in court. It is nowhere near saturating the total number of people that they could be. One wonders whether they consider 5% monitoring some kind of massive success when most people are actually not monitored. But one major change has happened, which is, in addition to the smartphone app that migrants use to even try to seek asylum, now migrants also have to download an app called SmartLink. Yeah. SmartLink. Now, this one is not built in-house. This is contracted out from an organization called BI that effectively mostly contracts with the criminal justice system, but they also

contract with ICE. So they have to download an app on their phone, and they have to check in regularly using a similar but different kind of facial technology. They can communicate with deportation officers, they can get alerts about their immigration court here, all this stuff. But the crucial part of that is under threat of detention, or redetention, redetaining, migrants have to check in on their smartphone. So it means that that same phone that one, you know, struggled with on the periphery of Reynosa, trying to just even get into the United States to pursue what is their legal right to pursue asylum. Now they're glued to their smartphone worried that if they don't respond to, you know, a text message or an alert or a ping on their phone, they could be redetained and,

you know, potentially deported in some way. So that that's currently how this is. So it's not for everyone. It's not as if everyone follows this exact same path. But it is true. And I think this is the big takeaway. It is true that asylum seekers today will start interacting with the US government may start interacting with the US government on their smartphone as far south as Mexico City, and then continue to have their primary contact and interaction with the U.S. government on their smartphone all the way through the border and to Columbus, Ohio, New York City, Seattle, Washington.

So the smartphone has become effectively this kind of what I am trying to think of and conceptualize as a kind of mobile border where migrants never really arrive and they never really leave. Yeah, which is kind of not to get too sort of, I guess, not conspiratorial is the wrong word, but since 2001, the border has come to you more and more and more, right? And you don't have to go to the border for the border to surveil you. And we can see this in hundreds of ways. Can we backtrack a little bit, just because our listeners will be familiar with some of the human stories that surrounded the end of title 42 some of those people to my understanding uh entered the united

states i'm doing heavy air quotes between ports of entry uh under title 42 but then were detained it is fairly obvious they they thought they were being detained it looked very much like they were being detained they weren't allowed to leave cbp apparently would argue that they were not detained um because the conditions were woefully inadequate by their own detention policies which don't exactly provide for luxurious conditions to begin with. And so what would the situation be for those people? Because they haven't, they were trying, at least some people I spoke to, to make CBP1 appointments from a place of detention,

which I don't think one can do. Maybe one can if one's not on a list or something, but you still have to get there, right? And you can't leave south or north to access. You have to be in Mexico to schedule an appointment on CBP1. Okay, yeah. These guys were in between the border walls. As Jake knows better than I do,

I mean, the issue with being along the border, and James, you know this because, I mean, you're there, which cell tower you're on if you're close to the border. Oh, yeah. because I mean you're there uh which cell tower you're on if you're close to the border uh oh yeah tricky isn't it I got um I so I use t-mobile but that's a free buzz marketing um but they I have free roam free roaming on my phone right very useful in the work I do but I remember in 2018 uh I was in Mexico a lot. And then I was obviously also just riding my bike a lot in places along the border.

And they were like, you've been in Mexico every day this month. You don't live in America. We're going to cancel your phone contract. I had been in Mexico like some days, but they had all just think, oh, you're pinging Mexican self-taught. Yeah, well, I was on a bike ride,

like in East County, San Diego. I wasn't in Mexico, but my phone thought I was. And yeah, the same thing can happen in reverse, right? Your phone can ping American cell towers when you're in Mexico. So those people might appear to be in the US when they're not. But in that situation, they couldn't make a CBP1 appointment. So I guess they're assumed to have, it's the same as if they'd um crossed the the fence somewhere else and been detained 10 miles inside the united states right what would their process be yeah so i think if we're talking about right now this is actually a really important is that the new rule called circumvention of lawful pathways that replace title 42 supposed to happen like three years ago yeah and it's it finally got passed

um basically there were a number of court challenges in which red states tried to keep title 42 in place um the same states mind you who were uh very critical of covid protections were extremely worried about lifting the ban on people on the southern border coming in because of COVID concerns. Part of what that rulemaking did was it worked a fundamental change in the way that asylum seekers work. And so like just context, claiming asylum is a human right, is a right guaranteed by international law, is a right guaranteed by US law, that you can show up and say, hey, I am not safe in the country that I'm coming from, and I need asylum in the States. And you have a right

to do that. And for the US or whatever country you arrive in to process your claim and decide if it's valid or not. So one of the changes in this rulemaking was that they are applying what is called, the government is applying a presumption of ineligibility to people seeking asylum, which means that if you did not show up in a proper manner to the United States, that means if you did not use the CBP1 app to claim asylum before you got to the border, and if you did not apply for asylum in every country that you traveled through along the way, if you traveled from Guatemala and you did not apply for asylum in Mexico before you got to the border, you are automatically deemed ineligible. And your asylum claim will be denied with no hearing, with no opportunity to say, Hi, I'm here because like,

my husband is a police officer somewhere in Guatemala, and he's trying to kill me and I can't stay in the country, right. And so that that is a fundamental change in the way the law works. And that's the starting point of someone who has crossed illegally, not used CBP1, and then is picked up. And that's new in the law in 2023. Yeah. And so they will immediately be filing a defensive asylum application to prevent that removal.

Yes. And basically, at that that point you're trying to argue for one of a tiny subset of exemptions yes um which there is virtually no guidance on how to implement those exemptions right like one thing you can claim is that you cross without a cvp1 appointment because you couldn't use the app. The idea of trying to prove to someone at the Customs and Border Protection that you were technologically unable to use an app seems basically impossible, given that the only proof that you have is that you didn't get the appointment, right? That you weren't able to submit it. That's not a strong record that a lawyer't able to submit it um that's not a

strong record that a lawyer would like to argue on i will tell you as a lawyer um and so the result is basically that people who have certainly legitimate asylum claims are likely to be turned away because they didn't comply with the proper process yeah even people we heard um what's it idalgo i can't remember where it was now where uh customs or officials in mexico have been threatening to detain people for longer than it so they couldn't make it in time for their cbp1 appointment right that they had already made they'd gone through that arduous and biased process made the appointment and then people were being detained unless they paid a bribe. And then if those people had crossed

illegally in between ports of entry, it would be very hard for them to prove that that had happened at all, right? Like what had caused them to do that. So those people are in an even more difficult scenario. If people then, through any of these processes, find themselves in an atd alternative to detention um there are numerous ways it could be surveilled austin mentioned that the

the phone app which i think is is the perhaps the like most recent and most common one um another one is ankle monitors right you can get like a parole kind of style of ankle monitor. And I know that, Jake, you've written a little bit about some of the consequences of those. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah. So first of all, an overview of the ATV program is that there are different levels of monitoring. And all of them are, I think, should functionally be viewed as incarceration, which is to say that you are not, you've not been released from custody. Just the location of your custody has been moved from a prison to somewhere out in the world where you're being surveilled and your movements are potentially tracked. But you are still in many ways as vulnerable as you would be if you were actually in a jail or a prison.

And so ICE has the option to decide at their discretion which level of monitoring you get. The levels of monitoring, the highest level is an ankle bracelet or an ankle shackle. That is a GPS device that is battery powered, has potentially only a few hours of charge on it. You might get a day of charge off of it and is constantly monitoring your location and sending that location back to both ICE and to the contracting staff of bi industries this prison technology company who ice has hired as case managers basically people who are providing like support for ice on keeping track of the usually eight to ten thousand people who are on the ankle monitor system um if you don't get quite that high level,

or if you get deescalated over time, you apply to ICE and you say, hey, I've been on my ankle bracelet for like three months. I've not strayed outside the area I'm supposed to go. I've always responded to check-ins. Then they might bump you down

to the SmartLink app, also provided by BI Industries on an extremely lucrative contract. Their last contract was like $2.2 billion. And that SmartLink app is either going to be loaded on your smartphone, if you have a smartphone that can handle it, or you'll be given a smartphone by ICE and told to use that smartphone to check in. You will be required to check in on a sort of regular schedule.

to check in, you will be required to check in on a sort of regular schedule. I don't have a strong sense for how often that is. Could be daily, could be less. To check in, you're going to open the app up. It's going to ping your GPS location, send it to ICE. And then you're going to take a facial recognition photograph. That photograph will be compared to make sure that you're actually you. That photograph is also potentially capturing your surroundings, the people you live with, whoever's in the frame.

And then you can communicate with your case manager on the app. You can potentially find information on when your immigration court hearings are, that type of thing. It's the middle level of monitoring. The lowest level of monitoring is voiceprint-based. So basically every once in a while, whatever your dedicated check-in time is, you're going to call into ICE on your phone. You're going to say, hi, I'm Jake Wiener.

I'm checking in. And ICE will run a voiceprint analysis and make sure that you are the person you say you are and confirm your location. At any point, if that system screws up, you are potentially in violation of the terms of your release. And at any point, ICE, if there's been an error, an ICE officer can show up and take you right back to jail. Let's talk a little bit about if you've there's been an error an ice officer can show up and take you right back to jail let's talk a little bit about that you've mentioned bi right you've both mentioned bi this is not a government agency this is a contractor but potentially they have access to your photograph details of your asylum case and we are we very clear on like certainly with the ice issued phones

people seem to have concerns like what is being monitored and what isn't being monitored on the phone right like is it only when they have the app open is everything on their phone now subject to like a review by ice and and potentially also by this third-party contractor right so how are those contractors vetting their personnel? How are they making sure that this very sensitive information is secure and private like it should be? Yeah, I have no idea how they're vetting their staff. They're not exactly forthcoming.

One aspect of the surveillance that I think is worth noting is that both ICE and BI don't just have your, whether you're on the smartphone or if you're on the ankle monitor, they don't just have your last GPS ping. They have your historical movements, which means if you're on an ankle monitor, they have a record of every single place you went for the entirety of the time since you've been on an ankle monitor. And they also know where you are right now. A little more limited on a smartphone, but that's information that's highly sensitive. Your location, and especially your historical location information, can tell you all kinds of things, like what church this person goes to. Have they been to Planned

Parenthood recently? Who do they associate with? What houses have they visited? And for ICE, that information is very valuable because most migrants don't live alone. They live in community with other people. Some of those people may be undocumented. And so as a migrant, you are now worrying every time you check in, am I exposing someone who's undocumented to ice surveillance am i exposing myself you know to just like tagging somewhere that ice doesn't want me to be and maybe an officer is going to show up for a check because of that it is created creating a ton of insecurity in a system that is already very insecure and the like psychological harms of that are manifest. There's good studies internationally that your risk of suicide and depression goes way up when you're on electronic monitoring. That your access to jobs goes way down. There's stigma with wearing an ankle bracelet.

stigma with wearing an ankle bracelet also concerns that if you take a job um you won't be able to check in at your home at the appropriate time it looks like you're absconding right so this level of monitoring is messing with people's lives in really fundamental and deeply cruel ways yeah definitely um and these like like you talked about sort of how your phone can make you a snitch. Mixed status families are very common, right? Especially in migrant diasporas. So it could be someone in your family who has a different immigration status from you. And to do what you need to do, you might be putting that person at risk.

It's a very scary thing to have that tag on you at all times. And like you said, it it's not just where you where you are but where you've been and i if if i'm right like they they they keep that data right that that data isn't anonymized or sort of like destroyed they can keep that data forever if they want to yes it's it's inputted into their systems, and that hangs around for, I think the retention period is 75 years. Okay, yeah, great. Depends a little bit.

Yeah. This technology that goes into these, right, this facial recognition, I know they also have number plate, license plate in America, recognition. They have, I'm trying to think which other technologies they have their cell phone site simulation uh a lot of that can also be transferred to local police agencies right through some of these like they're not tech transfer programs that's the wrong word but some of these grants and programs that ice and dhs more broadly has does that mean that local police agencies could also have access to some of

this data? Yeah, so I think there's two different types of programs, and it's worth breaking them apart. There are grant programs that are providing state and local police with the technology itself, right? That's like money to buy a license plate reader and pop it out in your community. money to buy a license plate reader and pop it out in your community. There is also the overlap between federal and special department of Homeland Security, ICE's databases, the systems that they house all this information in, and state and local police. They have their own databases. Those databases are very often linked or accessible,

which means that monitoring, you know, your local police department has a log of everyone they arrest. Very often that log is sent to ICE and vice versa. Right. done is through fusion centers, which is basically a federally funded state run technology center embedded in state or local police departments, where you have Department of Homeland Security agents who have access to their set of databases and state and local police department officers who have access to their set of databases sitting right next to each other. And those people can then talk and be like, yo, I need you to run this search into your system, which is theoretically only for federal use, but suddenly is getting used for state law enforcement and vice versa. One of the biggest problems with this is that cities that want to be sanctuary cities that don't want their police departments reporting and handing people over to ICE when they arrest undocumented folks.

City government is unable to control their local police departments and the information that is sent to ICE. So even a sensible sanctuary cities where the city says, we're not going to report this information, the way that these databases are tied together, especially license plate reader databases, but as well as arrest databases, all sorts of stuff, means that the city government

functionally cannot create a sanctuary city right uh which just in if we talk about my situation i'm in san diego uh our mayor uh is terrible and uh wants to turn all our street lights into spies right like put put little put little cameras on them so that they can watch what we're doing and like this information feeds into we know exactly where the fusion center is actually like i wrote about this in 2020 when the cops took someone's phone and used gray key to crack it open and so like the yeah the exposure for people who in the u.s who are not citizens of the u.s is is very high with these things um the last thing about these databases I wanted to talk about was those aren't the only databases that ICE has access to, right? Can you explain how they've managed to acquire some data about other people

and whether or not that is, strictly speaking, legal? Yeah. So we have a massive problem in America with data brokering, which is companies. The worst are LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters Westlaw. But there are hundreds and hundreds of data brokers who vacuum up all of the information that they can off the internet, off of utility records, off of publicly available information, and basically make massive databases that are tracking to the best that they can every aspect of people's lives. Credit reporting agencies, the people who like give you your credit score are also data brokers. They're pulling in all this information so that they can assign you your like credit, which is like where your credit cards are, how much money you have. All this information is super valuable, right? And it's valuable to advertisers.

It's valuable for, yeah, like for marketing, but it's also really valuable for law enforcement because you have everything from like addresses where people are spending money. Often you can pull from like phone advertising data, people's GPS location. And a number of these services have sold access to ICE. Both like Thomson Roads Clear, LexisNexis has several products that they sell to ICE, Nexus has several products that they sell to ICE, as well as LocateX, which is now Babel Street, which is specifically a GPS location company.

And ICE has basically managed to obtain, through contracts, information that they could not legally obtain through a warrant, right? Which is to say that if you, a police officer, an ICE officer, want to get information on a single person, you want their GPS location off their phone, you need to go to a court and say, hey, I'm looking for James Stout, and I think that he committed a crime or he broke immigration law. Here's my evidence. I need a warrant. You cannot get a warrant for mass monitoring. That's like a fundamental part of how the Fourth Amendment in the US Constitution works, is that it has to be individualized or very close to individualized. But there is currently no law that says that ICE can't just go buy the information on the open market and completely evade the warrant requirement.

So that's what's going on with LexisNexis, with LocateX, as well as some black social media surveillance companies. Right. Yeah. They're the same databases that I, as a journalist, use when I'm wondering if this Nazi is still living in this place or you know finding the sons of confederate veterans to check if they still work at the citadel university so i think a good way to finish this up would be to talk about once you're in you've gone through this process right

you've cvp1 you've atd'd uh and you enter into sort of the asylum hearing or you have your various different asylum processes. Austin, can you give us a very broad overview of like the likelihood of success and maybe a couple of, I know you're very good at monitoring the factors that determine the likelihood of success in an asylum application through TRAC. This is a great place to plug TRAC if you to um uh can you talk about like how likely folks are to uh to be successful

in that asylum application process yeah so we monitor um this federal data related to immigration other areas through track uh transactional records access clearinghouse at syracuse university where i'm at i'm also a research fellow at American universities. We have a kind of a fun partnership right now looking at different angles of connecting data to research on Latin American, Latino migrants. And so we keep really close track of what's happening with the immigration courts. We don't get data. Remember earlier, I described those two tracks of seeking asylum. We don't currently get data on that first track where people go through asylum officers at USCIS. We're interested in it, but they actually publish, not comprehensive, but they publish a decent amount of data. We would certainly like to get

more. But it's the immigration courts that we have focused very heavily on for the last decade, I would say. And so we get very detailed, granular data from the immigration courts on a monthly basis that allows us to see exactly what's happening. I would say currently, the success rate, denial rate, however you want to put it, in immigration court for asylum seekers is about 52 or 53% get denied. About 47 to 48% are granted asylum. But that varies widely by immigration court and by nationality. So migrants from Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala tend to have much higher denial rates, 70%, 80%, 90%. Whereas nationals from, let's say, Ukraine, China, some other countries, Cuba, have very high success rates.

Haiti actually is a good example of a country that has very low grant rates, very high denial rates, even though much like Northern Mexico, where we actually send people that we deport very often, there are all kinds of travel warnings. You know, the United States government does not want people going to Haiti because it's too dangerous, but we don't seem to have a problem deporting people back there who are seeking asylum. Right. And so that's what,

that's what we've seen in recent years. The denial rate was as high as 70% during the Trump administration. And so it's certainly much better under the Biden administration. I do want to say, though, that in addition to sort of policy-related issues that may drive this factor, geographic concerns, people are much more successful in New York City than, say, Houston or Atlanta, Georgia. But one of the really important factors here is, in addition to all of that, there's a threshold question, which is a lot of people, including a lot of people who are recently arriving to the United States, if they can't get an attorney, it's very unlikely that they will even be able to file an asylum application in the first place. So that 50, you know, that 48% grant rate is for people who file an asylum application. We're not seeing, you know, the people who don't even, who aren't even able to file an asylum application in the first place. And one of the most concerning things, recent developments, is that the Biden administration,

I think, not for no reason at all. I mean, there's 2.2 million pending cases in the immigration courts right now. The Biden administration is trying to push cases through faster. This is something the Obama administration tried, Trump administration tried it, Biden administration tried it. And every single time the cases get accelerated, including a large number of family cases, unfortunately, they simply don't have time to get an attorney and file a good asylum application. So what we're seeing is in addition to like geography, nationality, does someone get an attorney? It's also speed, just how fast the cases go through

and the reality is um if you try to force an asylum case through the immigration courts or frankly even through uscis in a matter of weeks um people are just not gonna win you you can't you can't speed things up and maintain a fair system you just can't it's also not great for people to wait you know know, five, six, seven, eight years for a hearing or for a conclusion. So that's not ideal either. But, you know, trying to force cases through and, you know, two or three months is just doesn't work. Yeah, I've spoken to people. I spoke to a friend a couple of weeks ago who was saying that now he's seeing people newly arrived. He's been in the United States for a few years,

gone through the process, but he's seeing people come in. He's been in the United States for a few years, gone through the process, but he's seeing people come in and the amount to pay for a lawyer if they want to get a private lawyer is going up. And like if people only have a few months or don't have the right to work, there's just no way for them to obtain that much money. And then the people who are doing it sort of,

I guess, for nonprofits are just overwhelmed by the amount of demand. So yeah, those people are in a really tough situation. Yeah, I think we should talk a little bit about the fundamental unfairness of this system. So like, immigration judges are administrative law judges. They are not like real judges approved by Congress. They are hired by an administrative agency, which effectively means that there are much lower bars to who can be an administrative law judge. an immigrant do not have a right to an attorney sitting in front of an administrative law judge. And one of the things that the data frees out is that in every aspect of the system, having an attorney is the strongest indicator of a good result. So that's like how likely people are to know about their appointments. It's actually extremely hard if you are someone who does not speak English and has limited money and limited

access to the system. And frankly, does not understand how the American immigration law system works, which is reasonable because virtually no one understands how it works. It's really difficult to know when you have a court date, much less to show up and to understand what kind of information that you need to collect and present to a judge that will be convincing to this person, who again, is not an Article III judge that's been appointed by Congress, not the type of judges that you or I would have our cases heard by if we were arrested, or if we just filed a lawsuit. And so access to a judge is like the number one best indicator for whether your asylum claim is going to be successful or not or any kind of claim in the immigration system frankly um and we do not provide that to people who don't have

the money to hire a lawyer yeah which is fundamentally unjust right we also there's like not a guarantee that you'll have a quality translator yes yeah you'll be able to show up to court and at all understand what is happening in your legal case um which is a huge barrier to be able to get a good results to be able to communicate who you are and why you are will not be safe if you are deported from the country right yeah we heard that in in may where there were like they were basically asking if anyone could come and help trying to migrant advocacy groups you know does someone speak komanji does someone speak turkish uh does you know does someone speak vietnamese could they come down and help this person with their initial interview which it's just not

a uh not a just or even reasonable way to do these things but yeah that's where it's at right now i guess i think most people probably aren't aware of of much of that so it's good to explain how fundamentally unjust it is so where if people want to learn more about this if people want to follow along i know you both do some writing online uh Where can they find you and where can they find more of your writing about this? Yeah, so you can find my writing on the Electronic Privacy Information Center or Epic's website. That is epic.org. You can find me and my 150 followers on Twitter at real Jake Wiener. That's W-I-E-N-E-R.

at real jake weiner that's w-i-e-n-e-r um and hopefully in the near future you'll be able to find some scholarship for me as well oh cool yeah using the donald trump twitter format great how about you austin where can people find you you have many more followers on twitter.com yeah uh so uh it's austin coker last name is k-o-c-h-e-r uh peculiarity of that name is in my favor because you know pretty easy to search but um actually this is great timing i just had an article published this week detailed one on cbp1 it's called glitches and the digitization of asylum um it's an academic article but uh it is open access so there's no paywall there glitches and the digitization of asylum it's also up on my twitter page i'm on twitter It's an academic article, but it is open access. So there's no paywall there. Glitches in the digitization of Asylum.

It's also up on my Twitter page. I'm on Twitter at AC Coker. So A-C-K-O-C-H-E-R. And I also write pretty regularly on Substack. And that's like a weird thing to say. I'm slightly embarrassed to mention it, except that I'm not uh this academic article emerged actually out of stuff that i was initially exploring on substack so i really i loved that uh format for writing because it's given me a chance to work out concepts and ideas before they even go into like pure view

print so some if people want to get ahead of the curve on what I'm thinking, go check that out too. Nice. And don't forget to visit track.syr.edu to get all kinds of data on immigration courts, alternatives to detention, detention statistics, and so forth. Yeah. I like track. There's a Telegram channel as well, right? It's like the only time I can go on Telegram and not see dead people. So I appreciate it for that. That's right.

We put stuff out on Telegram and not see dead people. So I appreciate it for that. That's right. We put stuff out on Telegram and WhatsApp too. So if you don't want to have to be on Twitter, if you don't want to have to get an email on something like that, you just want to get a little, if you like some of those other messaging platforms, we have announcement threads on there. You can't interact. You just get the little notification, but, um, we try that, we try to diversify as much as possible, especially with the, uh, muskification of Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really a good move. Thank you very much for your time, both of you.

I really appreciate it. It was very insightful. Thank you, James. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world

as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters.

From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to the podcast, It Could Happen Here. It's me, James, and Shireen today. Hi, Shireen. Hi, James. Hi.

It's Shireen. Yeah, it's lovely to have you. Thanks for introducing yourself. I was a little confused about who I was talking to. I've done podcasts for a long time, and I never actually know how to introduce myself. But I'm really happy to be doing this episode with you because you're a very good episode partner.

Thank you, Shireen. I am also happy to be doing this episode with you. I think you're an excellent episode partner. What are we talking about, Shireen? You don't have to say that just because I said it. No, I do. I like them. It's good. It's good. We help people learn things. Well, today you're going to learn some more things about Palestine. It's been a minute since we had an update. And I mean, surprise, surprise, things aren't good. So we're going

to talk about some recent stuff that's been happening there's we mentioned some stuff that we've mentioned before in other episodes like the nekba or um just the ethnic cleansing that happened in 1948 um also some politics stuff so if you are interested in getting more detail and you haven't listened to those i would recommend listening to those just for more context if you desire. But yeah. Yeah, I think you're diving in probably at the deep end if you start here, but we're going to dive in at the deep end. So earlier this month, Omar Katin, 27, a father of two children, who worked as an electrician for the local municipality,

was killed when about 400 Israeli settlers marched down Tumasaya's main road, sending cars, homes, crops and trees ablaze as they went. It's not clear if he was shot by IDF troops or settlers, as both stormed the village carrying weapons. Under international law, Israeli settlements are illegal. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to build a thousand new housing units in the settlement of Eli in response to the deadly shooting of four Israelis by two Palestinian gunmen on Tuesday the 20th of June. The suspected assailants were later killed. One of them was quote-unquote neutralized by a civilian, the other by the IDF, but it appears the plan is to punish the whole

nation again. Our answer to terror is to strike it hard and to build our country, Netanyahu said. His right-wing government is dominated by settler leaders and supporters, and his statements came just days after the government gave far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich sweeping powers to expedite the construction of illegal settlements, bypassing measures that have been in place for almost 27 years.

The violence in Turmos Aya... Am I saying that right? I just looked it up. Yeah, Turmos Aya, it's a town in the West Bank for context, people that don't know. So yeah, it's in the Ramallah and El Bire governor in the West Bank.

Yeah, I'm going to get a little bit more into it of why this is all happening. We just wanted to kind of paint the picture for you, first of all, of the big events that have happened, I guess. So this violence against the people of this town and the shooting of four Israelis followed an incursion by the IDF and Israeli border forces into the Jenin refugee camp. It was an operation on a scale not seen for decades.

Soldiers used tear gas, stun grenades, and an attack helicopter. Seven Palestinians were killed, nearly 100 were wounded. And I feel like this is not the first time, if you've been following any Palestinian news, that you've heard of Janine, the refugee camp, or that it's being attacked. It might sound familiar, I'll get into it more later, but Shireen Abu Akleh was actually killed while reporting

there. So I want to get into just why exactly Israel keeps raiding the Janin refugee camp in particular, and I want to talk about the camp's history, why it's getting targeted, and why the latest raid was different than the ones before it. Janin is slowly becoming a symbol of Palestinian resistance. It was originally established in 1953 to house Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba of 1948, which forced some 750,000 people from their homes in order to make way for the establishment of Israel. And again, we've talked about this in other episodes if you want to revisit those. But essentially, it was just a very horrific example of ethnic cleansing and massacres and genocide and displacement. So the camp has seen much unrest over the decades, and it was nearly destroyed in 2002 when Israeli soldiers ambushed it during the Second Intifada. According to a Human Rights Watch investigation, at least 52 Palestinians,

including women and children, were killed during this period of time in 2002 during the Second Intifada. There were also at least 23 Israeli soldiers killed and several others injured that were reported. And since then, Janine has recently seen intensifying attacks by Israeli forces, especially since 2021, and it has slowly, along with Gaza, become a major symbol of Palestinian resistance. At this point, Palestinians are really fed up with the inaction of the Palestinian Authority, the PA, which is the government entity meant to oversee and quote-unquote protect the Palestinians within its governance. The Palestinian Authority was formed in 1994 following the Gaza-Jericho agreement between the PLO and the government of Israel, and it was only

intended to be a five-year interim body. Further negotiations were then meant to take place between the two parties regarding its final status. According to the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority was designated to have exclusive control over both security-related and civilian issues in the Palestinian urban areas, which are referred to as Area A, and only Palestinian control over Palestinian rural areas, which is called Area B. of the territories, including Israeli settlements, the Jordan Valley region, and bypass roads between Palestinian communities, were to remain under Israeli control, aka Area C. East Jerusalem was excluded from the accords. Negotiations with several Israeli governments had resulted in the authority gaining further control in some areas, but that control was then lost in some areas when Israel retook several strategic positions during the Second Intifada. At this point, the Palestinian Authority is an authoritarian regime

that has not held elections in over 15 years, and it doesn't really stand in the way of the Israeli government and the crimes they commit. So what concerns Israel is that in Jenin and elsewhere, young Palestinians are increasingly taking up arms because they see no other way out of the pressure of occupation and they're very disillusioned with the ineffectiveness of the Palestinian authority. Yeah, I think that's a really important way to like when we talk about like especially palestinian people taking up arms right or especially these these new groups which have come in the last like couple of years right um there's that lion's den group i think they're more from like noblest um janine brigades is another one uh it's in the context of like government failure or state failure uh like in

i guess when we look at like the formation of, it's called social contract theory, the idea that when we go and consent, which we don't do, we don't have a chance to consent to being in a state. Very obviously if you're from Palestine you're aware of this. We're supposed to give up some of our freedom and get some security but the the palestinian authority has repeatedly failed to protect people in janine right and in lots of other places too and so like this response like this this response of taking up arms is in the context of state failure right like people are trying to protect their own communities when there's been a complete failure by the people who are supposed to protect them the people who and that's both the PA and then like

the broader like the international community is kind of a pointless phrase it doesn't really mean anything but like international law is also a pointless phrase it doesn't really mean anything which I'm getting too far afield here but like the amount of times people in my replies on Twitter will be like, this is against international law. And like, are you going to go and fucking enforce it then? Yeah, like as if that matters at that point. It doesn't matter. Like we know it's bad.

Like that's not what's up for debate. What's up for debate is what the fuck are you going to do about it? How are you going to stop it? And like these people have decided that the way they're going to stop it is by taking up arms and like evidently israel sees them as terrorists um evidently there are some groups inside palestine who have killed civilians and done shit which is is you know like it not very nice um also the idf kills civilians all the time right um one of them is funded and armed by your taxes um and so like yeah it's an understandable response and and the

response of the idf is to sort of to paint the whole of Janine as harboring quote-unquote terrorists right which is and then to do these attacks which often cause civilian casualties which is not that distinct from suggesting that Israel is a terrorist state right and then attacking Israel which like but one of these things is more broadly condemned as terrorism and one is is not as broadly condemned as terrorism and then they're not to to my eye that morally different I guess yeah that makes sense I agree and I also think no it makes a lot of sense I think remembering the imbalance that it starts at is so important because Palestine has no army. It's not backed by any rich-ass nation. It's not trained by anything.

And it's an extremely unbalanced, quote-unquote, battle. No one's deploying an Apache helicopter when the IDF kill a journalist, right? Exactly. And yeah, like Shireen Abu Akhli was a U.S. citizen. Not that it matters, but it should matter just in the idea of what the U.S. can do or like the outrage it can have. But it doesn't do anything. As a journalist who goes to dangerous places and is a U.S. citizen now,

like it's fucking infuriating. And obviously like, and I particularly think that like, you know, like daddy government is coming to save me i'm not like you know if you're laboring under that illusion you're probably a little bit naive but um it is just incredibly frustrating to see the value of some quote-unquote american lives like it's it's it's always wrong to shoot journalists of course but like it's just the u.s basically condoning that it is yeah as as again this isn't the first fucking uh like arab journalist that the u.s who is a u.s citizen who has been killed by an authoritarian regime

that the u.s has done fuck all about. No, I think it's just a slap in the face for her family and just the entire community of like both Arabs and journalists and that crossover there. But I did want to mention just the terrorism acts on both sides are obviously terrible. I just think you have to remember where they started and the imbalance that is there, especially if the entity that is supposed to protect the Palestinians isn't doing shit. And the only way Palestinians can fight back or defend themselves is with violence. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.

It's just frustrating when people point out the violence on just the palestinian side and we'll get into the news version of what that means and the biases of what that means in a little bit but yeah i just that's explaining exactly why these groups have risen yeah there's um just to be an absolute fucking dweeb for a second the introduction to wretched of the earth that jean-paul sartre wrote and it's a france fanon book is fantastic when talking about violence and violence in the decolonial process and like how uh it's very nice that these colonial states apartheid states like israel um speak in the language of rights yeah and they encourage to colonize people to make their

claims in the language of rights but every time they fucking do they get met with violence right like and it is entirely understandable that when the state speaks to you only in violence you will reply using the same language that is spoken to you with right like that that is that is how how decolonial struggles have been right from algeria to vietnam to palestine um and like this isn't a particularly like under theorized concept like it's there in fanon in the 1960s um that's always something i like to suggest people read i think it's a very good kind of distillation of what's occurring yeah no i like that you mentioned that because it does seem like this is like a Palestinian problem that they have, that they are violent and that they hate the other side. And it is just another good example of the effects of colonialism and the occupied people and their only choice of retaliation. and their only choice of like retaliation anyway i don't want to get into that too much but i i do want to emphasize why exactly that they were disillusioned the palestinian youth

especially during this time because the idf has been extremely violent and the pa still is really inactive and doesn't do anything so that's kind of the reason why there yeah yeah we have a little more on shireen abu akhla if you want to oh yeah i have we have an episode about her i believe um yeah and i'm going to mention her a little bit here the jen and refugee camp it houses armed fighters and they are from several factions but this means israelis they consider it a hub for what they call terrorist activity rather than resistance so the entire camp is then dubbed a terrorist site but most of the people that the idf has killed are not engaging in any sort of violent activity and in some cases they are clearly marked as press wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet like Al Jazeera journalist Sharina Buakle for one.

She was shot dead by an Israeli sniper in May 2022. And in her case, the IDF said they were aiming at armed Palestinians who were shooting at them and responding with fire. And after, I don't know, a lot of inconclusive proof in the IDF sticking to that story. A ballistics analysis proved that that story wasn't true and there was no fire coming from the other side. But regardless, no one cares about that. And this happened all in Janine. So I think it's very clear why this camp has become a symbol of resistance simply because the atrocities that have happened there are tremendous and they keep fighting back and I think it's a example of how exactly a Palestinian symbol comes to be like Gaza like this whatever it is. I wanted to include a quote from the Israeli

military spokesman Ran Kuchov. Um, he told army radio, which I guess is not exactly a kind of neutral arbiter here, uh, that she was filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians. They were armed with cameras. If you will permit me to say so, which like, no,

like we should not, we should not fucking permit someone because like, you know, I I'll go to all kinds of dangerous spots with the camera like i've never fucking shot someone with a camera because it's a fucking camera right like it doesn't it doesn't that's not what cameras do they take videos that is the most like i can't believe that's an actual quote that someone said and got away with yeah what the fuck is wrong with like what and it's just incorrect

operation of the human brain to use the fucking phrase arm with camera like what is wrong with you uh it's i know people get really people got really mad briefly when russians were shooting journalists in ukraine in in the start of the conflict uh and like that i guess they were kind of as mask off about this but like yeah, yeah, it's a fucking camera. If your security is threatened by someone filming the shit that you do, it's because you shouldn't be doing it, and you know you shouldn't be doing it, right? And again, I've experienced that,

like people doing stuff they don't want to be filmed are getting mad that I'm filming it, but maybe if you're not prepared to defend what you're doing, you shouldn't be doing it. You don't, you know, you don't suggest that the camera is, the camera is a neutral object here. It's not the camera that shot a woman in the head. Yeah, I mean, that sentence is infuriating.

The fact that literally it says they were amidst armed palestinians and then you could you could stop there and people can just like click out and read and like move on with their day thinking that they had fucking guns and the next sentence is literally they're armed with cameras like are you i don't know that's just so infuriating to me that that's like a real thing that was said and accepted it seems to be like almost deliberately insulting or yeah i don't know like it's definitely an attack on like i don't know if you're a journalist and and you don't see that attack on all of us then you know maybe examine your biases i guess yeah and then the ballistics

analysis that i mentioned earlier uh where she was it showed that where she was shot there were several targeted shots one of which hit her head because there were shots in the tree that was behind her so she was clearly targeted yeah because she was shot by a sniper out the back of one of their apcs right they have a little little um like murder hole uh and she was shot from 200 meters away which is not very far with a magnified sight and like yeah you don't just uh it wouldn't look like that i guess like three little holes behind where her head was suggested someone fired like single shots targeted not just like spraying it yeah spraying bullets around yeah i don't want to talk about it too much because

there it is that's not the topic of this episode but i do want to just say that i think it's so ironic that the idf is supposed to be this advanced military body, this highly trained thing, and then in the same breath, their defense is sometimes they made a mistake, oops. You know what I mean? Like they made this grave mistake. They thought she was carrying a gun or she was around people with guns. I just think that's a very silly, I don't know.

Yeah, I'm being sure that it's scary. Those things can be true I suppose and you can you can make mistakes but if you make mistakes you own them you can still be like oh yeah we

we 100% fucked up and like we need to examine how we fucked up you know yeah that's just their defense so many times it gets really fucking old

but okay before we continue and talk about the recent attack in Janine let's take our first break and we'll be right back and we're back let's go back to talk about the recent attack in janine let's take our first break and we'll be right back and we're back let's go back to talk about the latest raid on the janine refugee camp the israeli army launched its latest raid on the janine refugee camp in the early hours of monday

june 19th five people including a 15 year old were dead by the time it withdrew its forces in the afternoon. Others died the following day because of their injuries. Several journalists were shot at, and they were surrounded, and one was injured. This raid ironically took place near the location where Shireen Abu-Akhle was killed. Several ambulances were also fired upon with live ammunition, and at first they were denied access to the injured, which is nothing new to the IDF. They do this consistently, but they block medical aid to reach the people that are injured. The Israeli army said the raid was to arrest two suspects, one of whom was a former Palestinian prisoner, Asim Abu al-Hajjah, who was the son of an imprisoned Hamas leader. I just want a quick reminder, a refresh. I know I say this in most of the episodes about Palestine, especially the ones

I've done in the beginning of this year, but in 2022, Israeli forces killed more than 170 Palestinians, including at least 30 children, in occupied East Jerusalem and in the West Bank. And this is described as the deadliest year for Palestinians and those living in those areas since 2006. Since the start of 2023, Israeli forces have killed at least 160 Palestinians, including 26 children. And it's June. The death toll includes 36 Palestinians killed by the Israeli army during a four-day assault on the besieged Gaza Strip between May 9th and May 13th of this year. I just want to put that into context because if 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the last 20 years, and we're essentially already there by six months into this new year, it's just, it's really disturbing and it's really heartbreaking that it's truly, there's no slowing down. And this raid is a great example of them just like upping the ante. And what was different about this raid?

Israeli offenses into Janine are nothing new, but it appeared that the raiding soldiers were caught off guard this time. but it appeared that the raiding soldiers were caught off guard this time. Shortly after the raid began, videos showed an Israeli military Panther APC being hit with a roadside improvised explosive device. And there is a video of this. I haven't seen it because I just personally don't want to, but it's there if you choose to see it. Military helicopters then began shooting and launching rockets and flares while surveillance aircraft hovered above. It was the first time in 20 years that Israel deployed helicopter gunships in the West Bank. By the end of the raid, reports suggested that at least five Israeli military vehicles had been damaged by explosive devices and bullets deployed by armed Palestinians. This was the first time the IDF was

met with this understandable degree of resistance and defense in Jenin and their response was overwhelming in return. Hi everyone, it's James and Shireen again and we're here today for a little update. It's the 3rd of July as we're recording this just because there's been a significantly larger IDF incursion into the Jenin refugee camp. And because we know this is coming out at the end of the week, we wanted to make sure you had a little bit more update to date information. So as best I can kind of piece it together, what happened is that some Israeli military

vehicles were hit with an IED. This is a bomb, right? Roadside bomb, improvised explosive device. And Israel responded by going fully ham on a scale that we haven't really seen since the second Intifada. So there's air attacks, drones, helicopters, armoured vehicles. I saw them using an anti-tank missile against a house. I saw videos of armoured bulldozers tearing up roads in the camp. And perhaps, Shireen, you could kind of give a scale of what this has done,

not just to roads, obviously, but to the people who live there. Yeah, like James was saying, they're continuing to attack with drones and rockets. And the Janine refugee camp is very densely populated. It has about 20,000 people. And they are targeting infrastructure like homes and roads. And the mayor of Janine, Nidal Obaidie, he said the attack was a real massacre and an attempt to wipe out all aspects of life inside the city and the camp. Those being targeted now are not just the resistance fighters, but civilians are being killed and wounded as well. And water and electricity services have also been cut off from the camp since the attack has started. And the Palestine Red Crescent said that at least 3,000

people were evacuated from the camp. Yeah. And then as far as like a time of recording which is monday afternoon eight people have been killed one more person was killed in ramallah uh the two youngest victims were identified as nurudin hassam yusuf marshud who was 15 and 17 year old majidi yonis Saud Ararawi so both of them like under 18 but the oldest person was 23 so these are all very young people sadly dead now um and then they estimate that Palestinian Red Crescent estimates that 3,000 people have left the camp which I think like paints a picture of like emptying or cleaning or whatever colonial word you want to use to make it seem less brutal than it is, but emptying the space of human beings

so that it can be colonized or that other folks can move there, right? Yeah. In addition to... Some places are saying eight have died, some places are saying nine, but regardless, there are over 100 people that are injured. And so, I don't know.

The fact that the oldest person was only 23 years old should really paint the picture of who exactly is being targeted and killed. Because there's no way their defense of targeting terrorists can play here. Even though it probably does in the long run. But I just, I think it's really fucked up and unfair uh the white house meanwhile said the united states quote supports israel's security and right to defend its people against hamas palestinian islamic jihad and other terrorist groups and they also highlighted the need to protect non-combatants, which hasn't happened. And none of those people are actually being targeted or there's nothing to defend at this point.

I really don't, I don't know. I'm at a loss. It's also weird that, I don't know, it just seems such a knee-jerk response. Maybe this is just me being a dweeb or whatever, knee-jerk response. Maybe this is just me being a dweeb or whatever. But at least one of the IEDs

was claimed by Janine Brigades, I think the one earlier last week. But to call out groups by name and then not call out the group who are claiming responsibility for at least one of these attacks, it just seems so like, okay, press play on the tape.

Yeah, they're also naming things that people are probably more familiar with, almost to justify or entice fear of being like, oh my God, yeah, Hamas, attack Hamas, or whatever they think will happen with that response. And the international response, yeah. The international response has also been dog shit,

surprise, surprise, because it's always just talk and nothing really happens. Turkey's foreign ministry voice is deep concern over the attack. They warned that it can trigger a new spiral of violence. It already has. And they called the Israeli incursion a heinous crime. The need for international community to move urgently to protect the Palestinian people was very necessary. And then Jordan condemned the escalation as a violation of international humanitarian law, which Israel has been breaking for years. So nothing has happened. And then Egypt, on the other hand, it warned of serious repercussions and it called on other international people to intervene and then the UN said the situation is very dangerous like all these things I think have already been said every time that's why I just think it's so empty and I don't know I nothing if it's just words and no actions like how are we how are we supposed to even take anything seriously i guess i don't know yeah it's the uh it's the thoughts and prayers of the international like the un is

always deeply concerned but it never does fuck all right so yeah i guess to wrap up um we should talk about like what this means for janine as a place or as a community? Yeah, we mentioned this in our previous recording last week, but Israel's attacks on Janine are part of an effort to crush resistance with the young Palestinians that are increasingly taking up arms because they're disillusioned with the PA. And according to analysts, Israel's hard right government is likely to continue its heavy-handed approach toward Palestinians in the West Bank. Palestinian lawyer and analyst Deanna Batu said, Israel wants to do whatever it can to crush Janine and any other form of resistance.

Israel has made it clear that there are three options available for Palestinians. Option one is to leave. Option two is to remain as residents but not as citizens of any state. And option three is if you resist, we are going to crush you. This is what they are implementing. Yeah, yeah, I think that's well said. Yeah. Hassan Ayyub, who is a Palestinian political science professor at NNJ National University in Nablus, he agreed with the lawyer's statement and he said, the end game is to make Palestinians give up any hope of achieving self-determination or being

recognized as a people. Janine has a long history of resistance. It is a model for the masses that Israel wants to eliminate. But for Palestinians, the question is a matter of principle and their end game is to end this occupation. And essentially, Israel intends to crush what Ayyub referred to as, quote, the Janine phenomenon or any form of Palestinian resistance. Yeah, the Israeli aggression, it raised fears of an escalation that continues to happen in areas such as the Gaza Strip, because that's another symbolic place of resistance for Palestinians.

And yeah, that's where we are now. That's pretty much it. I reached out to some people I know, but people generally don't like to be on their phones when this stuff is happening. So maybe we'll update you with some more information. Yeah. Hopefully, I mean, updates like this are always kind of like uh unfortunate because i don't think we want to update that more shitty things are happening but especially with stuff like this uh it doesn't seem like israel

is going to back down anytime soon um So yeah, that's the update. Okay, yeah. So I wanted to talk about some of the people who were killed. One of the people who was killed was Amjad Aref Aljas. He was 48. His son, age 22, was killed in the Jenin massacre that occurred in January this year. I should kind of give you a sense of like the risk that,

I guess, one incurs unwillingly by existing in what is a fucking refugee camp. His son wasn't the only young person killed. Another person who was killed was Sadil Najha Nahia. She was 15. And a few days later, her classmates attended her funeral, all in their school uniforms and it's pretty sad there are obviously images of it if you want to go look them up but you can see lots of little school girls burying their friend in a town which is covered in in burned detritus right

it's i don't know no one should have to bury their kids it's horrible, kids shouldn't have to deal with this shit but there are plenty of pictures of little school girls standing by her grave, it's awful so horrible yeah the other victims are identified as Ahmed Saka

Ahmed Darachma Khaled Dawish Qasem Faisal Abu Siria they were 15 19, 21, 19, and 29, respectively. The day after this occurred, the aforementioned attack on settlers in Eli took place. Two gunmen shot into a gas station or restaurant. One was killed on the scene, and one was killed later. It was a response to the massive attack on Tumasaya that occurred a few days before.

And I want to highlight how the NYT covered this because I think it's important to dissect how Palestine is covered by the US, right? Because obviously the US is one of the biggest state supporters of Israel and specifically one of the people who continues to equip the IDF to do this stuff right so I'm quoting here directly last week two Palestinians killed four Israelis and injured

four others near the Eli settlement escalating month-long violence between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank the next day some 400 settlers descended on several Palestinian villages the next day some 400 settlers descended on several palestinian villages including tul messiah a prosperous town near ramallah where reportedly they torched cars and homes that i want to i want to stop right there because it is not reportedly right like we we do not have to qualify this with like maybe or like we've just seen this on twitter.com like you could probably see this shit on google maps right like they torched a town there's there's massive damage done even the new york times itself didn't qualify it as a reported incident in in its own reporting and this isn't we don't hear the same thing with the the two palestinian government

right i'll just to read the first opening sentence again last week two palestinian terrorists killed four israelis it's just stated as a fact right and and these just within those couple of sentences you can see so much of of the bias in the way this is reported, so much of the different perspectives through which state violence... I would encourage people not to use terrorism. I would encourage them to see things, especially in this context, in terms of political violence, right? There is political violence done by both sides. One of those sides is a state actor, the other side is a non-state actor. But qualifying one and making it distinct from the other i think it's shoddy journalism and i don't think it really helps us understand this situation and so what happened right like

15 homes were burned 60 vehicles were burned and the writer's sort of quote unquote sort of saying this is reportedly it's not it's true it's a thing that really happened another kind of phrasing that i've found really objectionable in this instance is is clashes right like often you'll see clashes in janine uh and like that casts a a lens of parity or like it looks at these things through a lens of parity, which I don't think is real on the ground. It's not a clash when a helicopter is firing rockets, even if it is firing rockets at people with Kalashnikovs. That's not a clash.

There's not really a parity there. And it also kind of downplays the violence of what's happening right it's an attack it's an assault i think this constant use of clashes right it's nearly always you don't really see it used anywhere else of if you if you do it's for it's for much less severe violence like like clashes between rival football fans not that that can't be very violent it can but you don't really see this word used to characterize like state violence on this scale anywhere else and and so i would really encourage people when they're reading especially coverage of this right which is an issue that the u.s cannot get its head out of its ass about uh to look for this biased language and if you're reading

coverage or anything else right if you're if you're reading coverage something and you start to notice that like i would perhaps question where you're getting your coverage from and i know you had some shit to say about the new york times shireen i mean yeah i i one really like what you said about referring to it as state violence versus terrorism, because I think that's a huge point that I also want to adopt, because I didn't even really transfer that over until just now when you said it. And I think it's a really important distinction. So thank you for that. But yeah, the New York Times, as well as many, if not most news organizations, they're incredibly biased when it comes to Palestine-Israel reporting. and the New York Times in particular has been absolute dogshit in their coverage of Palestine for quite a while now. There has been a persistent pattern of bias when it comes to Israel and Palestine. I'm going to go in chronological

order, and then James will jump back in with the recent article about the New York Times and this terrible thing that it has within it that I'm not going to give away right now. But let's go back in time to February 2011, when the New York Times published a piece on JVP activism in the Bay Area. JVP stands for Jewish Voices for Peace. And this article said, the activists say they are not working against Israel, but against the Israeli government policies they believe are discriminatory, which is, yes, correct. But in the editor's note, the Times later wrote that one of the article's two authors was a pro-Palestinian advocate and that he should not have written the article and should not have been allowed to write it. So it initially seems like good reporting because it's true. You're protesting against the Israeli government.

But then to say that a Palestinian advocate can't write it is ridiculous. So fuck you, New York Times. And then in 2015, a study was done analyzing the New York Times publications during the period of September 10th and October 14th in 2015. September 10th and October 14th in 2015. At the time of the study in 2015, 2,000 Palestinians had been injured while 83 Israelis were injured, just for context of what the reporting was about. And the study analyzed 36 articles. In these articles, the New York Times talked about Palestinian quote-unquote violence 36 times and Israeli violence two times. The word attack was used to describe Palestinian actions 110 times and Israeli actions 17 times. They used the word terrorist 42 times to refer to Palestinian violence and one time, one time,

to refer to Israeli violence. More than half of the New York Times headlines during that whole year depicted Palestinians as the instigators of violence. Zero headlines depicted Israelis as aggressors. None. And nothing has changed. I know that's from a period in 2015, but that's basically consistent, if not more so prevalent now. It just seems like the New York Times editorial board refuses to incorporate Palestinian perspective into its editorials, even though there have been many calls to do so. And this leads it to fundamentally misread the reality on the ground in Palestine, and it clearly shows the newspaper's bias when it comes to what it chooses to include about Palestine and from whom. Of the

2,490 opinion pieces about Palestinians that the New York Times published between 1970 and 2019, only 46 were written by actual Palestinians, which is an average of less than 2%. With the lack of Palestinian and Arab columnists that are even employed by the New York Times, a kind of groupthink has inevitably emerged there. And this groupthink consistently places Israel, Israeli framings, and Israeli perspectives above those of Palestinians. A keyword search of the Times editorials that discuss Palestinians is like this. that discuss Palestinians is like this. Between 1970 and 2019, the word peace appeared 1,112 times, but justice only appeared 86 times. Terror was mentioned 649 times, but occupation was only mentioned 219 times. 219 times. I want to also remind you, this is from starting from 1970. 19 times. I want to also remind you this is from starting from 1970. Israel's security,

quote unquote, was written 90 times, but Palestinian freedom was mentioned just three times. While keyboard searches alone do not tell the whole story, they do help us get a sense of the overall tenor of the Times coverage. And over the last five decades, Israel has been unquestioningly presented by Times editors as a close ally, while the Palestinians have been consistently framed as a problem. So I want to talk about this. There was an excellent piece that came out in Study Hall, I believe it's based on some reporting in a Canadian outlet called Passage. Study Hall is a a Canadian outlet called Passage. Study Hall is a freelance journalist group, but they also do some editorial work. It's talking about this Israeli nonprofit, or it's really funded nonprofits based in the US and also in Israel, called Honest Reporting. What it is is a 501c3. Essentially essentially what they've done is what Shireen

describes, where they've found, I believe, mostly Palestinian reporters, perhaps also non-Palestinian reporters who are reporting from this, I guess, from what I would describe as a facts-based approach to this, which is describing what's happening as an apartheid. And they've dived into these people's background, their previous tweets, their previous writing, their other work to describe them as biased and get their articles taken down. And they've done this to some very, like,

this has happened to the Times, right? And this is at a time, like, I know Shireen mentioned something that happened in 2011, but I know that in 2010, the Jerusalem Bureau Chief of the Times had a child serving in the IDF. Right. So, like, you know, if I was a journalist and I said, yeah, you know, I actually have a son who's in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, they're not going to commission my piece. But for instance, Hossam Salem, have you seen Hossam's work? I don't know. My brain doesn't work anymore.

I worked with Hossam before. He's a friend of mine. He's an incredibly gifted photojournalist. People should follow him on places where they see photographs. He's blacklisted by the Times based on an honest reporting probe into his quote-unquote bias, which his photos of Gaza are some of the most emotive photographs of Gaza like I've ever seen.

I worked with him on a piece that will one day become a podcast about parkour in the Gaza Strip. But, yeah, Hossam is a fantastic photojournalist and absolutely, like, it's utterly ridiculous to have him blacklisted by a major news organization, which, whether we like it or not, that is where a lot of Americans get their news. In one instance

this organization managed to get the toronto star to scrub all uses of palestine from their stories so like to include shit like yeah like they were profiling a dj who was palestinian and then like which i think it's like incredibly illustrative, right? That this organization presents itself as fighting anti-Israeli bias, which I'm sure that is a thing that exists. It fucking does not exist in the US media. I'm not a Palestinian person, but I speak as a person who has pitched articles about conflict in various parts of the

world, and I can tell you that that is not a bias that I have come across having worked with almost every big outlet that it is possible to work for in the US. It's not doing that. It's trying to erase Palestine and Palestinian people, not only their perspectives, but their whole existence, right? This is something that i harp on a lot but like i think we should do more conflict reporting that's about people unless it is about numbers and battles and such like that's why i want to write about uh little girls who surf in gaza and and young men who do parkour because like when israel bombs gaza it it doesn't just bomb people who are part of Fatah or Hamas

or whatever they want to say they're targeting, right? Like the Lion's Den or Janim Brigades, whatever. When they're bombing these places, they're also bombing children. They're also bombing places where little kids want to go and play football. They're bombing towns where little boys want to... I mean, they bomb hospitals and schools. Yeah. This is where people just like you live. There's a very clear desire to kind of erase Palestinian civilians, I guess, from our narrative. And it's really important that we,

as journalists and as people, don't allow that to happen, I guess. We'll link to this in our sources at the end of the month, but I think it's an excellent piece. It's worth reading. Thank you for mentioning that. Before we continue with some really excellent new things, let's take our second break

and we'll be right back. Yes, we're back. And I want to talk a little bit more about the, I guess about the Israeli political context behind the increased aggression towards Jenin and Palestine in general. So of the 165 Palestinian deaths, about 86 were in the northern West Bank, mostly in the areas of Jenin and Nablus, which cannot coincidentally are the areas where we're seeing new armed groups emerging.

Despite this, Israel is readying to massively step up settlement in the West Bank. Earlier in June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ratified a policy allowing pro-settler finance minister Bezalel Smotrich to bypass the six-stage process for building settlements, effectively giving him the ability to make settlement decisions on his own. In recent years, Israeli politicians and settlers have become more and more open about their goals of annexing most, if not all, of the West Bank. So in March of this year, Smotrich claimed that Palestinian people were an invention of the last century. It's probably worth taking a moment to point out

that all national identities are inherently constructed. Humanity did not come to earth with flags. Those are things that came to exist in the 19th and 20th century. So is Israel, right? We can kind of put a date on that one. That's literally projecting. An invention of the last century is literally Israel, whatever. The state of Israel yeah in nations calling other nations constructed is kind of the pot calling the kettle black like yeah yeah but uh so in so much as if we're going to do that I think Israel is throwing stones from a glass house um yeah exactly uh it's like it doesn't really fucking matter either right like it doesn't matter how long one group of people has had one flag.

You still shouldn't fucking kill children, which applies to anyone involved in the killing of children. Smatrich said that there was no such thing as a Palestinian because there is no such thing as the Palestinian people. In a speech in Paris at a memorial for Jacques Kupfer, an activist of Israel's right-wing Likud party. Do you know who are the Palestinians? He said, I'm a Palestinian.

Going on to describe his late grandfather, who he said was a 13th generation Jerusalemite as a true Palestinian, which is somewhat... Look, these people are supposed to be contradictory. It's not really worth fucking pointing this out, but you can't simultaneously say, there aren't no Palestinians, Palestine doesn't exist,

also I'm a Palestinian. Right. Again, not the point, I guess. He was a resident, he is a resident in one of the settlements himself. He's an advocate for theocratic law, the segregation of maternity wards. He doesn't want Arab and israeli women to

give birth in the same ridiculous yeah it's his justification for it is like even worse but i won't bother with that uh he's also openly homophobic and he supports the conspiracy theory that yitzhak rabin was killed by israel security agencies. All around top guy. Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu's party, likes to use names for the West Bank that you might find in the Bible, and has made accelerating a legal settlement there a priority. Since it took office, Netanyahu's coalition has approved 7,000 new housing units, many in the occupied West Bank.

The government also amended law to clear the way for settlers to return to four settlements that have previously been evacuated within a week of having the power to make these decisions smotrich approved 5 000 new units um we this is a great time to draw attention to one of the most fucking uh infuriating paragraphs that has ever been written, which I found in a New York Times article that suggested... Yeah, I can't believe this is real. James sent it to me before this,

and it is crazy. I like to censure into stuff that I know will make her angry. Of course, not all West Bank settlers are ultra-nationalists who believe that living in the land of the Bible is a religious edict. Most settlers, in fact, including hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews,

move there seeking affordable housing. I am fucking, like, I cannot. I lost it. When I got to affordable housing, I checked out mentally. I catapulted myself into outer space. I don't want to be here anymore. That is ridiculous. I have decided to curl up into a ball and no longer exist this is from the newspaper as well that went so fucking ham on people in 2020 taking milk from a target you know

like seeking affordable dairy products I guess could have been an alternative framing of that they didn't go for just fucking unbelievable the shit that Freakonomics has done to people's brains framing of that they didn't they didn't go for it just fucking unbelievable like the like the shit that free economics has done to people's brains uh is it's really next level um but people more people listen to our podcasts in their podcasts because we're winning in the marketplace

of ideas and so all in 750 000 people live in these settlements but being illegal under international law doesn't really mean anything unless that law is enforced. And it really is. We spoke about this before, right? Just like the US, which frequently violates domestic and international law on its own border, Israel is simply not held to account for its crimes. United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine, Francisco Albanese, told Al Jazeera that international law has a quote-unquote problem of enforcement. There is a problem of double standards, because clearly, when it comes to Palestine,

there is a cognitive dissonance, especially among Western countries, and reticence in applying these coercive measures and all the prohibitions international law affords, Albanese said. Yeah, we already mentioned how just even the phrase international law, it's just make-believe. You always hear about Israel even committing crimes against humanity. None of that even seems to matter when it comes to Israel because there's never a repercussion.

Yeah, it doesn't matter anywhere that there's no direct interest to capital to enforcing that law. It doesn't matter when young women in myanmar get raped by soldiers it doesn't matter when villages get burned down there it doesn't matter in tigray in in ethiopia and eritrea because there's no interest to finance capital of solving that problem it's not just a a palestine thing it's it's it's a thing all over the world and it like it laws are fundamentally like backed up by violence right like in america if you get a parking ticket and you don't pay your parking ticket and you have to go to court you don't go to court eventually someone with a

gun will come and kick down your door and like all laws are based in violence and there ain't no one kicking down israel's, right? And no one will. And so it doesn't matter. International law doesn't matter. It's not, it's nice that it's there. We can point to it and say, look, we've all agreed this is bad, but we all know it's bad.

Like we don't really need a bunch of like old men in suits to tell us it's bad. We knew it was bad. What we need is to fucking make it stop. And that's not happening. Yeah. I think it's also interesting to mention that internationally, even when you get better quote unquote reporting about Palestine, it still is not enough because

it's usually about peace and both sides or a conflict or whatever. So I just think, I mean, that also goes back to news and how it's reported. But this stubborn insistence on blaming both sides is reflective of a deeply flawed, quote-unquote, peace framework, and it has dominated the international understanding of the Israel-Palestine, quote-unquote, conflict for decades. The framework of peace centers on identity politics and ignores the structural violence that the state perpetuates against oppressed groups. It instead focuses on acts of spectacular violence committed by those groups in response to the oppression they face, and it also blames them for escalating conflict and then uses it to justify their oppressive violence by the more powerful forces. To go back to the New York Times briefly, many of the Times editorials over the last 30

years since the advent of the Oslo Accords have been steeped in the peace framework. They treat Israelis and Palestinians as having equal power when they clearly don't. They praise Israel for minor adjustments to its daily structural violence against Palestinians, but in the same breath, they scold Palestinian leaders and society for acts of violence done in turn. And the word conflict is also problematic in and of itself, because Palestine isn't some conflict or problem for Israel to sort out. It's a cause for everyone to fight for. Since 1948, the Israeli state has prevented Palestinians from living in their homeland with freedom and dignity, whether it's by banning refugees from returning to their homes or discriminating against Palestinian citizens inside Israel

or keeping millions of Palestinians under military occupation. If there is a problem to be solved, that problem is the regime itself. is a problem to be solved that problem is the regime itself but this fact of bias and shitty reporting and the fact that the truth is not out there that fact seems to have eluded the times editorial board because rather than recognize the systemic violence discrimination and colonization perpetuated by Israel against Palestinians, the board blames quote-unquote both sides for a vastly asymmetric situation. This both-sides-ism may give the appearance of balance, but it does not reflect the reality in which Israel holds almost total political, economic, and military power over the lives of every palestinian in a system that growing

numbers of scholars human rights groups and legal experts are defining as apartheid but i do hope some of this was at least uh helpful and i mean we'll probably be back to do the same kind of thing soon because israel is relentless and stupid and I hate it. So until then, fuck the IDF and have a nice day. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as 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. Thanks for listening. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow of Wrath. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

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