Radiolab - Border Trilogy Part 2: Hold the Line

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, it's Latif again. We're on week two of replaying the border trilogy originally aired in 2018. Now when you make a story that is this grim, you almost hope it doesn't hold up so many years later. But since we made the decision to replay it, we've been doing a little reporting, reading government reports, watching local news coverage, talking to sources, things like that. And basically, the situation is almost exactly the same and yet still somehow even worse. We'll give you a small update at the end of this episode,

Starting point is 00:00:41 a bigger update at the end of the next episode. So here it is, border trilogy part two, hold the line. Yeah, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Three, two, one. So let's do first the previously on, I think. So the previously on is that we had, so it was December 1st, 1992. What's your favorite school? You have these Mexican-American high school kids from this poor neighborhood,

Starting point is 00:01:27 this high school, booey high school in El Paso, right on the border, they sue the border patrol, who is, they say is harassing them, who's hassling them because of really the color of their skin, and they win. They win this amazing and probable victory to get the Border Patrol to stop. So that's where we are now.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Right. And things are about to take some unexpected turns. OK. We're looking at the early 1990s. The lawsuit was filed in 1992. And right after that lawsuit, according to Tim Dunn, the sociologist who actually turned us on to this whole booey story, right after the booey victory,

Starting point is 00:02:09 the Border Patrol Chief in El Paso, Dale Musigades. Obviously. Kind of old school throwback. We're not accomplishing 100% of our mission. He's out. Musigades is replaced, and they bring in a new chief. Yes, my name is Sid Vesta Vays, and... So Vest. Ray Yes.

Starting point is 00:02:25 I've been a veteran of the US Border Patrol for 26 and a half years and he has a very different style. Great spot here. Yeah. This is one of my wife and nice favorite places. Where do you want me to sit here? I met Sylvester E. Ray as in this Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of El Paso.

Starting point is 00:02:42 He's a big guy, broad shoulders, kind of looks like a retired football player but who's now a grandpa. How are you, Mary Christmas? Merry Christmas. My name's General. Oh, I'm a young person. Coffee with cream.

Starting point is 00:02:56 Very kind face for a guy who revolutionized how we deal with the border. And you grew up here. I did. We're sitting here about a mile from where I was born. Yeah. Our farm was north west of here. We grew cotton. Okay. Alfalfa. Some watermelon, some onions. I'm the oldest of 10. Six brothers and four sisters. Yeah. He says that his brothers and sisters they'd all work on the farm along with a bunch of undocumented workers who came in from Juarez. Back then we had party line phones, so somebody would say, hey, the burpdros coming today,

Starting point is 00:03:30 but they didn't know what time or where. So whenever that happened, I was tasked to sit in a two and a half ton truck and he would watch the road. And I would blow the horn at the first sign of what we would refer to as La Migra. So to alert the workers. He actually calls it the greatest irony of his life because fast forward to college.

Starting point is 00:03:55 Like I drafted into the army. He gets drafted to go to Vietnam. It's been 13 months in Vietnam. I was a helicopter crew chief. When I came back from Vietnam, I was scheduled to go back. But what happened in 1968 was my dad, my second brother, was on his way to Vietnam. And so my dad was on his way to the airport, and he had an automobile accident and got killed.

Starting point is 00:04:21 So I was the oldest in the family, so they led me out to take care of the family. And so Rea's needed a job. Being a veteran, any federal exam they opened up for you. So he starts taking these federal job exams? The post office. Bureau of prisons. Customs, Border Patrol. I mean, just any test that I could, because I had to make a living.

Starting point is 00:04:46 And the very first place to call them back? Border Patrol. No. Yeah. That was what was available. Again, Tim Dunn. Yeah, so he becomes a kind of pioneer in the border patrol as one of the early Hispanic agents

Starting point is 00:04:59 when they were very few. The job was tough, because they didn't welcome you with open arms, because your name is Reyes and not Smith or Jones. But I kind of enjoyed the challenge. He said he was dead sat. I do everything. Twice as good and half the time.

Starting point is 00:05:13 And eventually, he moved from being an agent into management. And he works his way up through management. I was a first-line supervisor through the ranks. Second-line supervisor taught at the Academy. And he eventually becomes the first Hispanic sector chief. Which means he's in charge of a huge swath of the border in Texas. So then come 1993, you are a sector chief and you're assigned back here.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Right. I was moved here in late June and in early July I decided to assess the situation. And the situation in El Paso did not look good. No. The sector was a mess. So one of the first things Rhea's discovers is that... The border between the US and Mexico. El Paso is in a state of chaos. We were averaging about 10,000 illegal entries a day, a day, unprecedented numbers.

Starting point is 00:06:09 And the board told them to have enough people to get them on. So people were telling me that agents are pretty much regularly stopping Alpaso and running ramshackle through the city. Driving around the neighborhoods and questioning everybody stopping people. Asking for their immigration status. And they're doing this, despite the fact that they just got sued by these high school kids for doing essentially the same thing.

Starting point is 00:06:29 And this lawsuit is still hanging over the patrol. How big a deal was that? There was a huge deal. It was making a chaotic situation worse. And Rhea says on top of all of this, there was a movement when I got here to push the border patrol out that the border patrols should be moved 25 miles out of the city to kind of create a borderless zone around the

Starting point is 00:06:53 city to Unite, El Paso and Juarez. It was kind of the spirit of NAFTA opening up. NAFTA is good for us because it will cut the tariffs on trade between the United States and Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement. An Aftas is going to open the border for the flows of goods and capital, but not people. And they're saying, well, how about right here

Starting point is 00:07:13 a little bit for people, too? So they felt that the borderline is an invading army. They're the problems instead of the solution. Yes, so what he finds is that they're really unpopular, and that's just half the reason they're unpopular. There's a whole bunch of other people that hate them for a whole different reason. Really? Yeah, when he got there, he went on this listening walking tour of the neighborhoods along the border. There's whole neighborhoods there. Like Chua Uita and Nelson

Starting point is 00:07:40 Gondobario. I walked those neighborhoods and I talked to them. And they thought the Border Patrol was a disaster. But instead of saying that the Border Patrol was overreaching that they were doing too much, they felt that the Border Patrol had failed them. They were upset that Border Patrol was not doing enough. Had let them down. And the people that lived on those neighborhoods, they felt like they were under siege. We have been organized three times by illegal immigrants. Our little girls scared.

Starting point is 00:08:08 People complained about burglaries, about loitering. People selling their fruits and knocking on doors, asking for money. They didn't like have to do with vendors all the time or people begging and they didn't like having stuff stolen off their backyard. A garden hose, a lawn chair. Stuff stolen off their clothes line. Gone, overnight. And so what these people living right on the border wanted was more border patrol to stop what they perceived

Starting point is 00:08:31 to be, you know, migrant petty crime. Huh, so he's really getting it from both sides here. Yeah, it's like the whole city's coming at them. We were with one foot on a banana peel of getting driven out of town. And so I had to change that. And I didn't have a lot of time to do that. Okay, so what does he do? Well he had an idea, a pretty radical idea.

Starting point is 00:08:53 I knew there would be political pressure, there would be public outcry. And so he takes this idea around to a bunch of high-level people. The Marivópacó. The Marivópacó. People at the Mexican Consul in El Paso. Our Consul in Huatis. The sheriff in El Paso. Chief of Police of Huatis in El Paso. And he's going to each one of them

Starting point is 00:09:14 and basically saying, look, if we're able to correct this thing. If I can quell the chaos, would they support the border patrol? And they said yes. Okay, so here's what I find so fascinating. It's September of 93. And while Reyes is hatching his plan at the same time at the El Paso Civic Center on this one particular weekend, the United El Paso people are having this big convention, talking about how we can try and create this borderless community. All sorts of local officials and civic leaders

Starting point is 00:09:47 are hammering out their proposals and everything and presenting to the audience. And that same weekend. So Vester Reyes rolls out his plan. He wanted this to be a surprise. So we launched the operation at midnight. So it's September 18, 1993. Saturday night.

Starting point is 00:10:03 Reyes gathers all of his Border Patrol agents, 400 Border Patrol agents, from all over his sector. And I briefed every single shift of agents myself. And I told him what was at stake. I told him that if this thing didn't work, they were going to run us out of town. My initial reaction was, wow, this is going to be interesting. Retired Border Patrol agent David Ham was there with his anti-drug smuggling unit. And he says after the briefing, and so he and his agents are waiting right at the Rio

Starting point is 00:10:40 Grand. The sun came up. And he said there, at the border, he just saw... Walls of all border shown. A wall of agents along the river. 100 yards apart. Each one in their trucks, light green trucks. There were helicopters buzzing low along the river.

Starting point is 00:10:58 There were floodlights everywhere, so the agents could be out there. Around the clock. 24 hours a day. Basically what Ray has done is he had created a human wall on the border at the river that stretched for like 20 miles. Oh, and I had told my guys we're in this for the long haul. What Reyes was doing, this was his plan, was to essentially change our strategy on the

Starting point is 00:11:22 border, how we police the border. From a strategy of apprehension, of letting migrants come in and running around chasing them, sending them back to one of the turns. And he called it, Operation Blockade, Operation Blockade. Day one. On Sunday morning, like they always did, hundreds of Mexican migrants,

Starting point is 00:11:44 vendors, construction workers workers housekeepers came down to the Rio Grande River waiting to cross into Alpaso for work but now they were confronted with the Berlin wall on the border border agents lining the entire river bank on the line where they would have to wait a month waiting to see when the border patrol agents will pack up and leave. By the time night falls, the migrants they just turn and go home and figure, okay, I guess, we'll just come back in the morning.

Starting point is 00:12:11 They came back Monday, and we were still there. And that's when this starts to get... Kayaud. Day two. Seven's Amy Jacobs' in a standing by live under the Paso Del Norte Bridge where the incident occurred. Hundreds of Mexicans took to the main bridge that connects El Paso and Juarez.

Starting point is 00:12:31 An estimated 800 Mexican protesters closed the Paso Del Norte Bridge and confronted border patrol. They burnt tires, they blockaded traffic. They began throwing rocks and bottles of agents. There were skirmishes, one agent was struck in the face with a rock. Blood and bandages still littered the area. Now by that time, there was screaming going on. It's our racist, it's our mental racism. There are all these headlines in the newspaper.

Starting point is 00:12:57 There are better ways to do this. Basically saying this new strategy, this is rock. Operation blockade is nothing more than an attempt to divide the community. Reis says the mayor of El Paso, who he briefed about the operation, is denying ever knowing about it. So I called him and I said, Mayor, he says, Chief, I just didn't know what to do. How many children are going hungry because their parents cannot come to El Paso to work? The local bishop came out and criticized Reis. He said it was inhumane to do what I was doing.

Starting point is 00:13:27 How many will suffer cold this winter if the blockade continues? And this is only day two of the blockade by day three. A strong of around 200 occupied the Paso del Mar Things continue to get worse. Day four, more protests, day five, six, seven. At the end of the week, people were starting to get really desperate. But a remarkable thing happened that I didn't plan for. The banners on private property are out to show support for Operation Blancade.

Starting point is 00:14:01 The support for the board drone just skyrocketed. They're out there enforcing the laws. People that lived on those neighborhoods that felt like they were under siege and the board control had failed them. They came out with these huge banners of we support our board of patrol. They tied ribbons on their cars.

Starting point is 00:14:18 They came out with donuts and coffee. For the board of patrol agents who are on the line, it was like all of a sudden there was this sort of flip People locally loved it across racial and ethnic lines Because over time what happened during this blockade was two things one We've seen it reduce crime is one of the most popular reasons these El Pasoans are in favor of operation blockade Crime goes down now. It's hard to tellowans are in favor of Operation Blockade. Crime goes down. Now, it's hard to tell whether this is actually because of the blockade, but there's a reduction

Starting point is 00:14:49 in petty crime, something like 15%. For the local residents, that's the bottom line. And the second thing, and this is way more surprising, was that for Mexican Americans, who'd been harassed by the Border Patrol presence in their neighborhoods, they start to notice that... You just don't see the agents anymore? The agents were gone. Right, right. It completely cleared them out.

Starting point is 00:15:09 Because now they were all down on the border. So there's this, you know, this tidal wave of support. Like, virtually everybody locally in El Paso, both sides are really happy with what he's doing. He seemed to solve the problem and one fell swoop. What was the reaction at Bui High School? The principal called me. are really happy with what he's doing. He seemed to solve the problem in one fell swoop. What was the reaction at Bowie High School? The principal called me.

Starting point is 00:15:29 Paul Strelsen was his name, he's passed away now. He called me and he said, Chief, I hope you thought this out because you have given us our campus back. But right in the midst of all of this, So Vesorea gets a phone call, a phone call from Washington DC. Saying, you gotta stop this. We'll tell you all about that phone call and what falls out of that call after the break. This next part of the episode contains some moments that are very graphic, that depict

Starting point is 00:16:41 death and a pretty brutal way. If you're squeamish or you're listening with kids, maybe think about skipping this part. Chad. Radio lab. This is part two of our board of patrology from report a lot of Nonser. When we left the story,

Starting point is 00:16:57 Silvesta Reyes had put into place Operation Blockade. Which was then renamed Operation Hold the Line. And everyone in El Paso seemed happy. Very happy. Yeah, but people in Washington DC were not. Because the Clinton administration, they're about to have this vote on NAFTA. They're talking about free trade. And then this guy, this little guy in El Paso, he's created a blockade.

Starting point is 00:17:21 And it's looking like it's going to be a little closer than they thought. And the last thing the Clinton administration needs is any controversy over this. He's created a blockade. And it's looking like it's gonna be a little closer than they thought. And the last thing the Clinton administration needs is any controversy over this. And so right in the middle of Operation Blockade, Reyes gets a phone call from his bosses, bosses, boss. So you're a Matt Jenner Reno? No.

Starting point is 00:17:38 Janet Reno, who's the attorney general. And her general. She's a big lady. Very imposing. I like her. I mean, even back then, when she was hammering away at me, I liked her. And she wanted to talk to me. And she started using talking points why it was the wrong thing, political consequences, international ramification, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 00:18:00 He has this sense, okay, I'm about to be fired. Oh, yeah, but he says to her I said Madam Attorney General with all due respect to me one favor I said come and visit El Paso just come and visit El Paso Yeah, I said because you are making these statements with all due respect without knowing The difference that it's made in El Paso. I said, please come to El Paso. She silenced and I said, oh crap, but she says, I will be there Tuesday. So Janet Reno flies to El Paso. Reyes sets up a bunch of meetings for her. And I told her, I said, look, I'm not going to be there

Starting point is 00:18:40 because I want you to hear it unfiltered and without me being there. As he tells it, Janet Reno sat down for all these meetings with all these local business people and she was so blown away by what she heard, how happy everyone was with the situation that she put aside the fact that Mexico was pissed, put aside NAFTA. And she came back and she shook my hand. Very impressive. What you've done here is amazing. What people are telling me is incredible. I mean, she went on and on.

Starting point is 00:19:12 She says, I'm going back and I'm going to tell the president that he needs to hear you talk about this operation. Wow. I said, the president of the United States, yes. Wait, she just changed her entire view after one visit? That's what he says. And apparently she was barely there for a day. What? I wish we could get Jan Arinos take on this,

Starting point is 00:19:33 but unfortunately she died in 2016. But her change of heart actually makes a certain kind of sense. I mean, there was a real, a very important political element to all of this. That's Doris Mystner. She was at the time the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, basically Janet Reno's number two when it came to the border.

Starting point is 00:19:54 And she says that at that moment, the Janet Reno was in Texas, touring El Paso. The Clinton administration had a big problem on his hands because about a thousand miles west. Californians are up in arms about the illegal immigration that is coming into California. We're 40% of the babies born on Medicaid and California today are born of illegal immigrants. Look at, of course, you can divorce the boys. I agree. We are going to take back California.

Starting point is 00:20:24 You had this wave of anti-immigrant sentiment and initiatives like Proposition 187. Proposition 187 attempts to solve the state's illegal immigration problem by denying services to illegal immigrants. Super hardline measure passed by 59% of the state's vote passed by a wide margin and the Clinton administration was definitely paying attention. Because California is California. The largest electoral college prize in November's presidential election.

Starting point is 00:20:54 And keep in mind, California had been a red state from 1968 all the way to 1992. Clinton was the guy who broke the cycle, and if he was gonna get reelected. California had to continue to vote for the Clinton administration. So one of the things that might have changed Janet Reno's mind, or more importantly, her boss Bill Clinton's mind, was that they saw in El Paso a potential solution to the California problem. If they could make illegal immigration way less visible, as Reyes had done in El Paso a potential solution to the California problem. If they could make illegal immigration way less visible as Reyes had done in El Paso,

Starting point is 00:21:30 maybe they could hold the state. I'm pleased to be here today with the INS Commissioner, Dara Smizer. February 7, 1995. And special heroine, Ma'am, Chief Sylvester Reyes of the El Paso Border Patrol. We have just come from a meeting with President Clinton, which time he signed a presidential memorandum, directing our agencies to move forward with new initiatives to gain control of our border and better enforce our immigration laws. This is the first national border patrol strategy.

Starting point is 00:22:07 That's right. I spent a great deal of time on it. Things had not been done that way before. And it was a fundamental change in strategy. According to Doris Meisner, and she really was the architect of this strategy, the idea was to take what Reyes was doing which was very clarifying, and scale it up.

Starting point is 00:22:27 There were basically four major crossing corridors along the southwest border. In each of those four spots, they were going to have a mass border patrol agents on the border. Not behind the border, not in the city, where they piss off the locals, but directly on the border. Concentrate resources. Starting, of course, in California. Our strategy was to start in San Diego because that was the highest crossing corridor.

Starting point is 00:22:56 Maybe 45 to 50 percent of the crossings across the entire southwest border were happening in the San Diego sector. We start in San Diego with Operation Gatekeeper. That's what that one was called. We then moved to, I believe, Arizona, and I'm just trying to think of what we named that operation. Safe guard? Was I? Safe guard, that was right.

Starting point is 00:23:16 Exactly. And then the fourth was South Texas. All of us said now, in 1994, the Border Patrol publishes what's called the strategic plan, also known as prevention through deterrent. This is Jason De Leon again, the anthropologist who started us off on this whole series. They write in this policy document, we know the border cuts across a whole bunch of very difficult environments. If we disrupt traditional crossing places, urban ports of entry, and we push people towards these extreme environments,

Starting point is 00:23:46 they will have to cross rushing rivers, mountainous terrain, places where you can freeze to death, where you can die of dehydration, but the extreme environment will slow people's movement, will make them easier to catch, and will also perhaps stop them from coming. In other words, after Reyes, it became our national strategy to push people away from urban areas and use the desert as a kind of natural deterrent. The thinking was that that would be a natural geographic ally that would take care of the

Starting point is 00:24:24 rest. Now one of the things of course that we learned is that that didn't hold. Because in the 90s the Mexican economy was struggling so people still needed jobs and that on the American side farms and businesses were still happy to hire them so people still crossed. Except now they weren't crossing through the cities, they were crossing through the desert where no one was watching. Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass, so sunstruck, they didn't know their own names.

Starting point is 00:25:06 Just like in Ureia's book, The Devil's Highway. Couldn't remember where they'd come from. Had forgotten how long they'd been lost. And so that's why, in the late 90s, you see the number of people dying in the Sonoran Desert overnight start to skyrocket. You go from 5 to 10 bodies to hundreds. By 2002 or so, the numbers in Arizona are upper end, 150 deaths per year, a couple of years after that,

Starting point is 00:25:34 it goes over 200. Those are the official border patrol numbers that they report based on the number of bodies found. But after Jason had that experience, finding an arm in the desert and not being able to locate the number of bodies found. But after Jason had that experience, finding an arm in the desert and not being able to locate the rest of the body, he started to wonder whether those numbers were accurate or not.

Starting point is 00:25:54 How many more people might be dying out there who are never found, never counted? Yeah. Which, for Jason at least, became a scientific question. About what happens to bodies in the desert How fast do they decompose and what ends up happening is I just kind of hit the library scoured the literature, you know There's body farms where we do this tendency Texas

Starting point is 00:26:16 Jason found this one paper that suggested that when bodies are decomposing in the desert the heat and the dryness can drastically slow that process down this idea that the desert is going to conserve a body that's going to mummify and that people will be out there forever. According to that paper, it could take up to six months for a body to decompose to the point where you'd be able to see the bones. But the remains in that study were collected in a bunch of different areas under different conditions, sometimes even indoors. No one had done it kind of in C2 in the desert.

Starting point is 00:26:45 We had literally no scientific data on that at all. And so I started getting really interested in, is there a way to do some science around this? He eventually roped in an assistant named Kate Hall. Kate Hall, and I'm a physical anthropologist. What's a physical anthropologist? A physical anthropologist is someone who studies, they study human bones and they try and infer what someone's life and death was like from skeletal remains. And Jason pretty much came up to you and told me that he'd been thinking about getting

Starting point is 00:27:23 some pigs. Pigs. Pigs. Pigs have long been the common proxy for human bodies. You know, for crime scene stuff like they shoot them, they bury them, and they use them for these different sort of decomposition experiments. So Jason and Kate and the research team had down to Arizona. University of Arizona has a meat laboratory that deals with live animals. So we called up Jerome, the pig euthanizer, and he came out in this big truck. He comes out with these animals.

Starting point is 00:27:56 Two pigs. 150 pounds each. Alive. Jerome shoots the pigs in the head right in front of them. And then Kate and Jason. We got shoes and socks. Dressed their pigs, bra panties, jeans, t-shirts,

Starting point is 00:28:09 enclosed that migrants would wear, because they wanted to recreate the conditions exactly. And then they took these dressed dead pigs out into the desert. Aravaca, Arizona. It's like another planet. It's like nowhere else I have ever been on earth. It's hot and saying it's hot doesn't really do it justice.

Starting point is 00:28:33 It was like 110, 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Whoa. So, Jason and the research team get together. In this big field and we had one one pig under a tree in light shade. We were trying to replicate like, if someone was tired, I'd need to take a rest somewhere. And for the second pig, Jason had heard from anecdotes from migrants. Stories about people dying in their groups

Starting point is 00:28:55 and they would say, well, we didn't want to leave this person behind, but we had to because they were dead. So they would cover their body with rocks. It hopes of protecting them from animals. So they placed these two pigs, one in the shade, one under rocks in the sun, and they set up a series of motion-sensing cameras all around the perimeter of the area

Starting point is 00:29:11 to watch both pigs. These are the kinds of cameras that turn on if something moves. Right. We set up the cameras under a very, very hot sun. And then they waited. And remember, based on what Jason had read, the prevailing idea was that bodies in the

Starting point is 00:29:27 desert don't decompose until, you know, six months in, and that would make the likelihood that they'd be found higher, which might suggest that the official numbers are accurate. Regardless, the assumption was that these bodies would be laying around for a while. But pretty quick, something moves and triggers the camera. So this is footage of the pig that was in a shade. And on the cameras, you see this pig just under a tree lying on its side. It's wearing his little white shoes.

Starting point is 00:30:04 It has jeans on. It's it's wearing his little white shoes, it has jeans on. It's bloated, but it's intact. And then... Later that night, camera comes on again, it's night vision. You can see the pig again, and then you see this vulture. A few feet away from the pig. Kind of looking at it, kind of checking it out. Just standing there. And then after a couple of hours, camera comes back on

Starting point is 00:30:37 and the other eight vultures on top of this pig. Packing and tearing. A few hours later, they they go in, they make a hole in the back of the neck, kind of like kind of right behind the ear and they're trying to get at the brain and then they pull off the shirt, they eventually ripped the jeans off. By noon of the 50, there are hordes of vultures. You see them attack the abdomen, rip open the stomach, and then you see intestines being pulled out, and then you have two vultures come in front of the camera, and they are playing tug of war with these intestines and they start to take apart the limbs. They'll actually like carry them away. They'll carry limbs

Starting point is 00:31:31 as like convenient packages of meat that they can eat later. On day seven. They dragged what was left of the body about 20 meters up a hill. And within nine days, they had picked it clean. Everything's been pulled apart and just scattered all over the place. After nine days, there was hardly anything left. Nine days? Yeah. So they thought it might take nine months and now it's down to nine days? Mm-hmm. And that was the pig in the shade, the pig in the little rock

Starting point is 00:32:07 hut, that pig went way faster. Yeah, that was within 24 hours. What Vultures had started feeding and just got in underneath the rocks and ripped it up because we had really forgotten that that rocks conduct heat. So it literally cooks the body and speeds up this process. It will completely defied expectations. This wasn't all you were expecting at all.

Starting point is 00:32:28 Were vultures the only scavengers that you were noticing? Not the only scavengers, so we saw some ravens. Domestic dogs. So this town of Aravakia, where we work in, a lot of people died nearby, and they have these kind of ranch dogs that are pretty wide-ranging. And people have, I'd heard stories of people saying,

Starting point is 00:32:45 you know, my dog in home with a piece of human bone, but these animals were on our property eating these pigs. I'm just now thinking of it from the point of view of the dog owner, I'm like, this dog comes in, gets on the couch, looks your face. That's the same tongue that might have been gnawing on a human arm. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:33:04 And after the vultures and crows and dogs had had their way with these pigs, Jason K told us that the desert started working in smaller, almost invisible ways. I had never seen this before, like we used to fly in some beetles, but we have footage of ants, consuming parts of long bones. They're chipping off pieces of the bone and carrying them off to this ant hole a meter away. That was really shocking. And it kind of hinted to the fact that you leave someone out there for long enough

Starting point is 00:33:32 and they will completely disappear. This is an environment in which people can become really easily just erased. Well, there is something about when you were describing the first moment when the vultures really sort of tear end of the body. I found myself kind of recoiling, trying to protect my abdomen. I still have that reaction.

Starting point is 00:33:55 There's something just so overwhelmingly human about this. You can't not take this personally. What can we talk about the numbers for a second? Okay. Because if bodies are decomposing and disappearing this fast, those border patrol numbers start to look suspiciously low. Do you have any sense based on the speed of the decomposition, how many people we might be missing?

Starting point is 00:34:27 Well, you know, it just depends. I mean, when people die, what time of year? I mean, if you, I guess a better way to do it is, if you compare the number of missing persons reports with the numbers of recovered bodies, there's a discrepancy of thousands. These are missing persons reports from... Yeah. These are people, like like leaving from Latin America and missing persons reports are either filed in the US by families already here or from these sending countries, but thousands of missing persons reports more than the actual recovered bodies. Thousands a year? Thousands of people go missing a year during this process.

Starting point is 00:35:01 Obviously missing persons reports don't equate to deaths in the desert, but pretty much everyone I talk to, including some retired board patrol agents, agree that the official number is an undercount. Now, when it comes to the actual number of deaths, nobody knows for sure, depending on who you ask, the real number could be anywhere from twice to 10 times the official count. And if you think about the fact that that has been happening for 20 years, then what that high school history teacher once I brought Coronado told us at the end of our last episode doesn't sound so crazy.

Starting point is 00:35:37 Because of us, fences were built. Because the fences were built, maybe 10,000 people have died in the desert. Again, there's no way to verify that number or any number, but the potential scale of it kind of forces you to ask, who is responsible? And that's the part of this equation we're going to dig into right after the break. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crowwich. This is Radio Lab.

Starting point is 00:36:09 And we are back with the second episode in a series of three about the US-Mexican border. And right before the break, we learned that the number of bodies that the Border Patrol reports finding in the desert might be just wrong or inaccurate. Mostly because the desert is a hot and dangerous place and things that die there get eaten or desiccate that is they just go to disappear into nothing. Sometimes in a matter of days, sometimes literally in a matter of hours. And we heard about a science experiment which sort of plays this out very gruesomely. And it left us with a question, which is,

Starting point is 00:36:45 if the potential number of people dying in the desert is way higher than we thought, who's responsible for that? Who could help fix or at least mitigate the problem? And one of our reporters for this series, let if NASA is going to take it from here. Yeah, so some of these people I've talked to said that the Mexican government needs to do more

Starting point is 00:37:03 to stop people going into these areas. Others blame the smugglers who bring people over. Some people have said that the migrants themselves, it's their responsibility. They knew they were making this decision to come if they die, it's on them. But the other obvious question is, what about us? Yeah. And what's clear, you know, according to Jason, is that US policy makers weren't exactly clueless about this. There were points where people were saying things like, if we do this,

Starting point is 00:37:32 if we funnel them towards the Sonora Desert of Arizona, if we funnel them towards the sort of back woods of Texas, people are going to get hurt, people are going to die. But if enough people die, perhaps that will be the deterrent then that they'll stop coming. And they'll wait, is that written down? That if the death equals deterrents? There's a chart that I cite in the book, and this is one of the moments where I was, when I was doing the kind of archival research

Starting point is 00:37:56 that just shocked me, where there was a point where someone had written this policy document, and then in one of the follow-up reports by the government accountability office, some number cruncher or some policy maker is sitting at a computer in D.C. making an Excel chart where they're putting out different metrics to measure the effectiveness of this policy. And one of the metrics is an increase in migrant death. So there was a recognition that if death goes up, it means that this policy is working.

Starting point is 00:38:25 I ended up finding the document Jason was referring to. It's a report from the government accountability office from 1997, and it also mentions that in other areas, deaths might also go down, but I wanted to talk to Doris Meisner about it. She's remembered the former INS commissioner that helped take... So Vester Reyes is, hold the line strategy national. And I actually read part of the report to her. Yes. And there was this kind of one appendix in it.

Starting point is 00:38:49 So it's called appendix five, and it's indicators for measuring the effectiveness of the strategy to deter illegal entry along the Southwest borders. And one of the indicators was deaths of aliens attempting entry. And basically what it says is that, I'm sort of quoting it, that if the attorney general strategy is successful, deaths may increase as enforcement in urban areas,

Starting point is 00:39:13 forces aliens to attempt mountain or desert crossings. In fact, saying that if the strategy, if deaths increase in these treacherous areas, that's a sign that the strategy is working. I do, I think I recall reading that because it's so, you know, it makes you gasp when you have to really think about what the, all of the implications of all these things are. I mean, you know, this is one of the paradoxes of how is it that you go about doing work like this.

Starting point is 00:39:47 It's absolutely clear for so many reasons that there needs to be border security. But I think it is fair to say that the idea that we had at the time and the thinking that we put into place at the time was too simple. What was much more difficult to take into account has been the tenacity of people coming to the United States wanting to come to the United States and the lengths to which people will go in order to do that. But there's another way to read this. The appendix five, the thing that, in your words, you said, you know, could make you gasp.

Starting point is 00:40:36 What that sort of says, I mean, one way to read that is that we took a problem that was very visible and we pushed it to places where we can't see it anymore. And we did that with full knowledge that that people dying means we're doing the right thing. To me, Appendix five begs the question, I mean, what responsibility do we have for this? It doesn't quite feel like this is something that we can just shrug and say,

Starting point is 00:41:04 we didn't know this is going to happen. It feels like we knew Dan Well this is going to happen. You know, when you ask the question, what is our responsibility and when you say our, I think, and I take that to mean what is our responsibility as a nation. The answer at the time and the answer still is that the enforcement will do everything that it can to prevent people from crossing in dangerous areas, but that cannot include no longer doing enforcement across the border. Now Doris says that once they started to realize these numbers had spiked and that people were going through these areas, they started doing a lot of public awareness campaigns,

Starting point is 00:41:45 information campaigns, warning people about the dangers of the desert, efforts devoted to safety on the Mexican side, and they created a whole new search and rescue unit. So there were all kinds of efforts to address it, but I will be absolutely frank with you, the idea of abandoning any kind of strengthened border enforcement

Starting point is 00:42:09 because of that consequence was not a serious, not a point of serious discussion. And the policy never really changed in any substantive way. There was a later report that came out from the government accountability office in 2006 that basically said, you look, you've done all these safety measures, but the deaths in the desert are still going up. Doris Meissner was no longer head of the INS at that point, but after reaching out to a whole bunch of people who wrote that report and the people who received it

Starting point is 00:42:39 and hearing nothing back, frankly, I finally got in touch with the commissioner of customs and board protection under President Bush at the time, Ralph Basham, now retired. And he told me he remembered reading that report. He said that he thought about those deaths all the time every day. But in the end, he said it was just politically infeasible to back off the enforcement at the major crossing points, or to get enough board of patrol to really control dangerous areas like the desert. And in the end, the US government didn't make any substantive changes in response to the rise in deaths. And I guess you could read that as a lack of political will or indifference,

Starting point is 00:43:16 but Jason actually argues that we were giving a sort of tacit blessing to this system that was killing all these people because it kept this problem just swept under the rug. Yeah Are you saying that the U.S. government or whatever portion of it is responsible for this policy is knowingly Killing people I would say it's knowingly putting people in harm's way and they know that there is a high likelihood that certain percentage of people are going to die and have been dying.

Starting point is 00:43:54 So it's like they're having nature do their dirty work? That's kind of what you feel like. Absolutely. I would say 100% that nature is an agent of the Border Patrol. It's this kind of unsung hero of the border patrol. They're not on the payroll, but they do all this work. The environment beats up on migrants, and then those who don't make it, it cleans up the mess as well.

Starting point is 00:44:17 And nobody has to be accountable for this because it just disappears. We asked Customs and Border Protection, which oversees Border Patrol, to comment appears. We asked Customs and Border Protection, which oversees Border Patrol to comment whether they had tried to change their strategy to avoid migrant deaths, and they declined to answer. I wonder if you feel somehow ambivalent about it. Obviously, there are trade-offs for everything. Every plan has unintended consequences,

Starting point is 00:44:47 but now this has happened and these deaths are also happening. I wonder how you feel about it, if you feel somehow ambivalent about it. I feel deeply ambivalent about it. I feel deeply sorry about it. I am very conflicted about it. I also know that migration is by its very nature

Starting point is 00:45:10 and incredibly dangerous enterprise, when it's illegal immigration, people coming up well before they ever get to the US border. People coming up through Mexico, through very dangerous areas where they are robbed and kidnapped and extorted. I mean, there are awful, terrible things that go on in this quest for a better life. What I wish is that we would be able, as a country, to put immigration policies into effect, that actually allow for people to come here legally whom our economy is asking for in terms of the jobs

Starting point is 00:45:48 that exist in the country. This system that we've been involved with for now decades of allowing illegal immigration to occur in sizeable numbers, having work for people in this country is indefensible. And the enforcement agencies are caught in between that. They're required to create border security. And yet there are these terrible costs. Those terrible costs would not be there

Starting point is 00:46:22 if we as a country and as a political system would come to grips with the issue that is right in front of our eyes and that we simply won't come together politically to answer. We are a nation of immigrants. We are a country that believes in the rule of law, it is indefensible in light of that history and those values to have allowed this kind of illegal immigration picture to go on in the way that it has for all these many years. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean,

Starting point is 00:47:12 I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, not gonna do anything. I mean, we know that, you know, I spend a lot of time now, most of my time is not spent with smugglers who love the idea of a wall. Because they're like, man, I can charge twice as much for this, for my services, even though it's really not gonna be that much harder. I mean, because people dig underneath it,

Starting point is 00:47:39 they crawl over it, they fly over it, they take a boat around it. I mean, the wall itself is never gonna be a deterrent. And on top of that, I actually, I didn't even know this when we talked to Jason, but if you listen to the things that President Trump has said about the wall since coming into office... That doesn't mean 2,000 miles of wall because you just don't need that, because of nature, because of mountains and rivers and lots of other things. wall since coming into office. It would end up just being a sort of even stronger version of this policy. An even stronger funnel into these very places that are killing people and erasing any evidence of their death.

Starting point is 00:48:52 Okay, so we reported all of that back in 2018 under the Trump administration. It's all still true. Hundreds of migrants are still dying in the desert every year on route to the US. Latest numbers I could find are from the UN's migration agency documenting 686 deaths along the US-Mexico border in 2022. Like all the other migrant death numbers for this region, no matter who's collecting them, that number is almost certainly an undercount. In September 2023, that same UN migration agency deemed the US-Mexico border a quote, the deadliest land route for migrants worldwide on record.

Starting point is 00:49:32 In a few ways, the Biden administration has pulled back from the deterrent strategy, so for example, promoting more legal pathways for asylum and migration from certain countries, but despite that, deterrence is still central to American border policy. I mean, now Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Here's a clip from a CNN interview, Dana Bash did with President Biden's Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorquez in 2022. He told me on the show last year that your message was, do not come. That was your message to migrants. What's your message now? The same. The very same. Because our border is not open. Do not come.

Starting point is 00:50:23 Now, it's one thing for someone considering migrating to hear that message coming from a high level bureaucrat in the US government. It is quite a different thing to hear it coming from a family member, a loved one who has already done that very journey saying, do not come. And that's what our next and final episode in the Border Trilogy will be about, a single story of a single family that will crystallize the personal emotional landscape of deterrence. This episode of our Border Trilogy was reported by me, Lotha Fnaassur, with Tracy Hunt. It was produced by Matt Kilti, with Bethel Habtay, Sara Kari, and myself. Big thanks to Jason De Leon, whose book is called The Land of Open Graves, to Timothy

Starting point is 00:51:18 Dunn, who's written a lot about this, including the book, blockading the border and human rights. Special thanks to Oscar Servantes, Jose Romero, Erica King, Joe Reyes, the rest of the agents that we met from US Border Patrol in El Paso, as well as to David Ham, Liz, and the rest of the staff at the Border Patrol History Museum. Thank you to Veronica Reyes Centrone, to former El Paso Mayor Larry Francis, retired Border Patrol Secretary Chief Ron Sanders, as well as Robin Reyniki at the University of Arizona, and Todd Miller at the Border Chronicle.

Starting point is 00:51:49 That's it, thank you so much, I'm Lathafnasser, this is Radio Lab next week, the finale of our Border Trilogy. Catch you then. Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Kusik, Aketty Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nyan Asambada, Matt Kielte, Annie McEwan, Alex Niesin, Saurakari, Alyssa John Perry, Sarah Asambak, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick.

Starting point is 00:52:43 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Tamara from the Pasadena, California. Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Dundational Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Radiolab - Border Trilogy Part 2: Hold the Line

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