Radiolab - Border Trilogy Part 3: What Remains

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

While scouring the Sonoran Desert for objects left behind by migrants crossing into the United States, anthropologist Jason De León happened upon something he didn't expect to get left behind: a human arm, stripped of flesh. This macabre discovery sent him reeling, needing to know what exactly happened to the body, and how many migrants die that way in the wilderness. In researching border-crosser deaths in the Arizona desert, he noticed something surprising. Sometime in the late-1990s, the number of migrant deaths shot up dramatically and have stayed high since. Jason traced this increase to a Border Patrol policy still in effect, called “Prevention Through Deterrence.” First aired in 2018 and over three episodes, Radiolab investigates this policy, its surprising origins, and the people whose lives were changed forever because of it. Part 3: What Remains  The third episode in our Border Trilogy follows anthropologist Jason De León after he makes a grisly discovery in Arivaca, Arizona. In the middle of carrying out his pig experiments with his students, Jason finds the body of a 30-year-old female migrant. With the help of the medical examiner and some local humanitarian groups, Jason discovers her identity. Her name was Maricela. Jason then connects with her family, including her brother-in-law, who survived his own harrowing journey through Central America and the Arizona desert. With the human cost of Prevention Through Deterrence weighing on our minds, we try to parse what drives migrants like Maricela to cross through such deadly terrain, and what, if anything, could deter them. Special thanks to Carlo Albán, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve, Chava Gourarie, Lynn M. Morgan, Mike Wells and Tom Barry.CORRECTION: An earlier version of this episode, when it originally aired, incorrectly stated that a person's gender can be identified from bone remains. We've adjusted the audio to say that a person's sex can be identified from bone remains. CITATIONS: Books:Jason De Léon’s book The Land of Open Graves (https://zpr.io/vZbTarDzGQWK) Timothy Dunn’s book Blockading the Border and Human Rights (https://zpr.io/VTPWNJPusaCn)Joseph Nevin's book, Operation Gatekeeper (https://zpr.io/UTnHFzRstAEw)Articles:Rubio-Goldsmith, Raquel, Melissa McCormick, Daniel Martinez, and Inez Duarte. 2006. “The ‘Funnel Effect’ & Recovered Bodies of Unauthorized Migrants Processed by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 1990-2005.” (https://zpr.io/R3wSpyVCXQhJ) SSRN Electronic Journal.Check out more of Caitlin Dickerson's reporting for The Atlantic (https://zpr.io/GAfC2nfEaBeK). Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Hey, it's Latif. This is our third episode of our trilogy about the US-Mexico border that we initially ran back in early 2018. The first episode was from the border community's perspective. Second episode was from the government perspective. This episode is mostly from the migrants perspective. At the end, we have an update looking at weather and the degree to which these issues from the Trump era are still around in the Biden era. And before we start quick content warning, this episode includes graphic descriptions of human remains and may not All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab.

Radio. From W and Ys. Hey! Yeah. Ree-y. So we come back here where you see you at another case. Oh, and this really is a 18. What are those hairs? what that's dried muscle?

Oh, that's muscle closest I can the closest thing I can say is the muscle dries out So we get stringy and shredded. Okay, wait wait. Let's actually let's just start from the beginning Okay, so so we are in what what room is this again? We're in the special procedures room Pima County office of the Medical Examiner. And what we're looking at here is a case, mostly skull to remains. So we have a skull, we have a few, we have some parts of the spine.

Spine it looks like and then just two, and all three major bones of the lower limb. So the two thigh bones, the femurs, and the two tibias and the two fibulae. We know it's the male. He's an adult. Okay. 20 to 30 to 40-year-old migrant. He came in in late January, early February, and animals founded. Maybe 50% of his skeleton is missing. His upper limbs and his pelvis and most of his spine are missing and his hands and feet are missing. We have evidence here that a vulture was feeding, was feeding on the person.

I don't know if this is a beetle. That's a domestic beetle. That's called a height beetle. They're, they're found globally. Right. And these height beetles specialize in eating dry hard tissue. So he's still eating. Yes. Yes. Wow. He was in the body bag. He and his colony would have been on the body. Wow. In the body bag. And although we try to get most of them off during our exam, you can see there's lots of little crevices where a single bug could be. Wow. Oh, wow, that's so... yeah, wow. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crowley. This is Radio Lab.

And today we present the final episode of our Border Trilogy. With producers Lotta Fnasser and Tracy Hunt, and this is episode three. Which we're calling What Remains. Yeah, okay, so just to catch everyone up. Here's a lot of. The person I was just talking to, his name is Bruce Anderson. He's a forensic anthropologist

at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner in Arizona, which is where when they find a body of an unidentified migrant in the Sonoran Desert, that's where they bring them. And Bruce had been working there, on and off since the 1980s, but he told me that it was only in the early 2000s that he started seeing, you know,

just more and more and more of these migrant bodies being brought in. And we're just crushed by the weight of all the dead and all the missing persons reports. And, you know, it's like working a mass disaster when people are still dying and planes are still crashing around you. And you throw your hands up and there are some times

and you just think, once again, stop. And it hasn't stopped. The number of bodies found last year was in the same range as the year before. The number of people crossing did go down after Donald Trump's inauguration, but traffic is basically rebounded. So people are still coming through the desert, they're not being deterred. Which made us wonder, is deterrence that fundamental idea behind our current border policy?

Is it even possible? Now, in some ways that's a policy question, which we talked about in our last episode, but it's also a human question. Is Jason still there? I'm still here. And that's what led us back to the person who we started this whole journey with, the anthropologist Jason Delayon. All right, can you hear lots of two?

I sure can, good morning. Oh, good morning. Fantastic. Well, I feel like maybe we should just start off where we left off, which is that you're gonna tell us the story of Maricella. Sure. What was this, by the way?

This has been June of 2012. Okay. So we had been about two weeks into the pig experiment. This is a series of experiments where Jason and his team, mostly students, looked at how pigs decompose in the desert in order to understand how people decompose in the desert. And it wasn't until about two weeks into this experiment where we were out hiking one day with a group of about nine people.

Down in southern Arizona. And so on this particular day, on this trail that I had hiked many, many times, a student had run ahead to check stuff out and was taking pictures of us as we were walking up this hill, he turns around and starts yelling at us, he says, hey, you got to come up here, something has happened. So I threw my backpack down and it raced up this hill. And by the time I get up there, I see that he's kind of staring at this body that's just laying face down in the dirt on this trail.

Like a fully intact body. Yeah. A woman's body. We could tell it was a woman because she had long hair. She's wearing camouflage clothes, stretch pants, women's running shoes on. She's got a scrunchy around her wrist, but the rest of it, I mean her body was incredibly bloated I mean to the point where it looked like it was about to To pop from all the gases that had built up inside of her her body cavity I didn't know what to do at this point. I mean, you know, the students start walking up I mean these are young students. We had someone in the group who was 18-19

For some of the students this is the first time they've seen a dead body, one of them was crying. I tell everyone I say, hey, look, you gotta go sit down and give me a second here to figure out what, what is we're gonna do here. So first, he called the police. We do that and then we kind of had a conversation, are we gonna photograph this person, are we gonna record any information, is this, are we still doing research right now? And Jason decided, yeah, we should, we should document this.

You know, we took some notes down. Great agreeing discoloration about what she was wearing, brown to black discoloration of arms and legs. Took some pictures of the body. Her fingers have started to curl. Her ankles are swollen to the point that her sneakers seem ready to pop off. There's a steady hissing of intestinal gases. And then I just got to the point where I was like, okay, this is enough.

I don't want to do this anymore. And so they covered her with a blanket because Jason noticed the birds circling overhead for turkey vultures. And so at that point, they just sort of sat down and waited for the police to come, the sheriff. An hour went by, two, three, four, just waiting with the body. It was about five hours in that a sheriff and three border patrol agents show up and they had hiked three

miles to get to Jason with a stretcher. And so they bring the stretcher. The sheriff puts on gloves. He asks them a few questions like, did you guys put the blanket on there? And then they roll her into this white body bag. And as the authorities do that, Jason, because she was faced down, Jason gets to see her face for the first time.

And so he writes a paragraph in his book, and it's pretty gruesome, but I'm going to read to you the paragraph that he writes about it in his book. As her body turns, I see what is left of her face. It is frightening and unrecognizable as human. The mouth is a gnarled, purple and black hole that obscures the rest of the features. I can't see her eyes because the mouth is too hard to look away from. The skin around the lips is stretched out of shape as though it had been melted. Her nose is smashed in and pushed up.

She died face down and the flesh on the front side of her skull has softened and contorted to fit around the dirt and rocks beneath her. The scene is a pastiche of metallic gray and pea green. Whatever beauty and humanity that once existed in her face has been replaced by a stone-colored ghoul stuck in mid-screen. It's a look you can never get away from. I'm not sure if I can get away from it. After this thing had happened, it really just shook me in a lot of different ways. Jason says he just couldn't shake the question.

Who was this woman? How did she end up face down in the desert? So that night... I remember Jason calling me... Jason called a friend of his. A woman named Robin Reinecke. Him being really, clearly shaken and, you know, asking for advice. Robin actually runs this nonprofit.

And Tucson called the... Collebre Center for Human Rights. Collebre Center for Human Rights. And they do a lot of work with the missing and with bodies that have been recovered. So Jason tells her... Look, today we had this thing we found this person out here and... Could you help us ID her? Now the thing is Robin's office is actually in the medical examiner's office.

So that means that just down the hall from Robin is the guy we met at the beginning, Bruce Anderson. A couple hundred people are at least bones of a person are in here. So Bruce is working on the medical examiner side. So anytime an unidentified migrant body comes in, Bruce tries to piece together who this person is, looking at... The dimensions and the shape of the skull and markers. Robustness of the bones. Like looking at the length of the shape of the skull and markers robustness of the bones that like looking at the length of the bones or the density of the bones by the

non fusion of these separate bones looking at whether some bones in the body are fused together which is something that happens right after puberty Bruce can actually figure out approximately what age the person is their sex their weight their height and in the case of the woman that Jason found, her body was surprisingly in relatively good condition. So pretty quickly, they were able to determine, she's probably in her 30s, she's five foot four, they were actually able to get fingerprints from her as well. Meanwhile, on the other side, on Robin's side.

Wow, so each of these tabs is a person, is that right? She's dealing with hundreds of missing persons reports. All day, every day. She spends her days taking calls, going through voicemail. Which is full of relative searching. I'm looking for my uncle. He disappeared in 2010.

Or I'm looking for my daughter. She crossed two weeks ago. We haven't heard from her. And she's also getting tips from different people, different aid organizations. And it's also getting tips from different people, different aid organizations, and it's actually one of those calls that leads to a break in the case of the body that Jason found. Huh, okay, so this is an email from me from 2012.

Hi, Jason, just a quick update regarding the woman that your group found. The case number is 12, 1567, and as of yet, she's not been identified. But Robin tells Jason that she got a call from an aid organization that had spoken to a guy found the case number is 12 1567 and as of yet she has not been identified. But Robin tells Jason that she got a call from an aid organization that had spoken to a guy who would cross the desert with a big group of people around the same time and around the same area where Jason found the body.

He said that he had recently left behind two fellow travelers who were in serious medical distress. He said one of them was an elderly man. 70 years old. And the other was a woman, maybe from Guatemala or Ecuador, late 30s or early 40s. It isn't certain that this group is related to ML12, 1567, but it's highly likely. I will contact Guatemalan and Ecuadorian consulates regarding new missing persons cases. And eventually, using all the information that got gathered,

Robin was able to determine that the body that Jason found, it's the body of a 31-year-old Ecuadorian woman named. Maricella Aguipoya. Maricella Zagui Puyas. Robin gets in touch with Jason Atalam, Jason then asks her, I would just appreciate if you could, help me at all connect with this family.

That request would, oddly enough, lead Jason to New York City. That story in just a moment. Chad? Robert Radio Lab. We are back with the third installment of our Border Trilogy, what remains. And when we left, Jason, along with Robin from the Calibri Center, had managed to ID the body of the woman he found in the desert. And so now he was trying to get in touch with her family.

I don't know. When people disappear, when they die in the desert, I think that the families make up, you know, lots of stories run through people's heads. And so I was hoping that if I could find this person's family, I could at least say, this is what it was like when we found her. This is what we think had happened. So Robin was eventually able to get Jason the contact information for... Maricella's brother-in-law who will call Fernando.

And I make the awkward phone call that says, hey, I'm the person that found Maricella on the deserts, and I would like to come and see you if that's possible. Turns out Fernando actually lives in New York City, but he had spoken to Maricella just before she left. When we heard his story, we decided, okay, we would have sent a reporter Tracy Hunt to talk with him. Oh, I want to visit Fernando at his apartment in Queens. He lives there with his three dogs. Friendly guy, a little shorter than me, neatly dressed. He's got, you know, dark hair, longer on the top, shorter on the sides,

and when I got there, he pulled out a bunch of photos of Mary Sela. So this is their marriage, their wedding photo. She was his brother's wife. Oh, they look so young. Were they 19 in the gunner? So in this picture that Fernanda showed me, it's his brother and Maricella. They're in a church and they're posing at the altar. She's in a white satin gown. Her hair is long

and dark and shiny and she's got kind of like an oval shaped face and you know she looks beautiful but even though it's her wedding day the thing that struck me is that she's not smiling, not even a little bit. Was she serious like that? Yeah actually that's part ¿Es el mismo que mi mamá como que de ser como? Sí, es una parte de la razón por que mi madre se no le gusta más en la beginning. Se le veía cara de pocos amigos como que si no. Se dice que siempre tiene un infección angrifais. Se parece como si alguien no tiene mucha gente. En el top de eso Fernándose,

también se ha habido de tener su brother en su trabajo. Y motále a mi hermano que se salga de la casa, Fernando says she also had a habit of getting his brother in trouble. You know, she would tell my brother to sneak out of the house to go see her, go dancing, parties, blood permission, you know, those kinds of things. But, Fernando says she eventually won the family over. She helped out at home. She treated my mom really well. Especially his mother. And I think my mother loved her more than she loved us.

So my cell and Fernanda's brother, they got married. They ended up having three kids, two boys and a girl. Maricella had a job in a factory that made kind of fit jeans, I think Levi's, and Fernando's brother, he would go around to different villages selling sodas. And they just couldn't really manage to make ends meet. They were living real rough at the time. I mean, when I went to the house and saw

where they had lived. So Jason, after he connected with Fernando, he actually ended up going down to Ecuador to meet Maricella's family. Before she had left, I mean, they were living in a one-room plywood shack with a dirt floor and animals running through the house. And, you know, and she had told her relatives,

she's like, look, my kids are literally starving here. So, come, since the time I was in the house, I was able to find my parents and also, at the time I was also helping build a house for my parents, where they were also going to go live. And so, I wasn't able to support them as much or help out with things like school. And so, you know, what she really wanted to do, you know, in order to, like, send her kids to school and all that, she really wanted them to have what she never had. Because she never had anything. And so that was really the pressure that she was under. So Fernando says in 2012 he called home.

One time when I called home, my mom said that she wanted to talk to me. So I said, OK. Madisela got on the phone. And she told me that she wanted to come here. She told him that she and his brother, they wanted to follow in his footsteps, that if they could come to New York like he had, they can make money, send it back home,

and help out their kids. That that was the only way. And immediately, Fernando was like, projuntamente que no, que no que no es bueno, absolutely not, no. So Fernando told her no because he didn't want her to go through the same thing he went through 10 years before.

Eh, bueno, ¿aí cuando salí de ahí? O fuimos conmigo. 2001, he was 17 years old, about to turn 18, and his aunt was about to go to New York, and she convinced him and his parents that if he went to New York, he'd be able to get a job, make more money, and support his family from there. To have a better life, to have things we needed. So my father thought about it and gave his permission, but he told me not to stay here too long.

And so he used his grandfather's land as collateral and took out a loan for $12,000. $12,000? Yeah. Do you know what the interest rate was on the loan? 10%. 10%. Yeah. So one thing that a lot of people have talked about is the fact that prevention through deterrence, it professionalized the human smuggling business. Because not only these migrants need, you know, guidance from all these South and Central American countries, they also need guidance through the desert.

So now you have the smuggling business that's more expensive and also more dangerous. Fernando says he is on to go bust from Ecuador to Peru and then from Peru they flew to Panama. And then somewhere in Costa Rica, I don't remember the path in really mountainous. There was river, all that. This bus pulls over and the coyote who was with them at that point just said, okay, you have to get off here. And then we got out, they took our luggage and threw them on the ground towards the river. And they said, you have to cross the river and someone will find you there and signal to that person.

And we were left there like that, with my aunt saying, hold on, that wasn't the deal. The deal was to take us all the way to Mexico and cars, but from that point, when we started crossing mountains on foot, that's when horrible things started to happen. From that point on, they were packed into the trunks of taxis, hidden in basements, chicken cubes and huts, and three months into this journey, a journey that was supposed to take just 15 days, somewhere in Mexico, Fernández says that he and his aunt are taken to this rundown Hacienda, this just sprawling

ranch house. Inside the ranch house, there were more than 250 people there. From all over the world, Chinese, Central Americans, from every country. From all over South America. There's all these ruins filled with people, and Fernando actually says that there were all these arm guards all over the place. Nobody was allowed to leave.

And so we were, um, passed a month in Cerados de I, pending there for about a month. And while he was there, this part of didn't tell Jason what happened to me there. I was abused sexually. Fernando says that he was sitting outside the Hacienda when they with his aunt when a group of men approached him and told him that he had to go inside with them.

And he said no, that he was fine sitting there, you know, outside. My aunt begged them not to hurt me. She said, no, don't worry. They only wanted to ask some questions inside, but that wasn't what they wanted. They told Fernando, look, you can come at this now or you can come at this later after we beat up your aunt. So finally, Fernando relented and went with them and when they got inside the Hacienda they went into a room.

And once we were inside, they raped me three times. After a couple of weeks, Fernando and his aunt finally got out of this hacienda and they start their trek into the desert. Fernando thinks that he went through the same desert that Maricella would try to cross 10 years later. He's actually caught by the Border Patrol and held for about a month before he manages to bail himself out of detention and make his way to New York. And Fernando says he shared all of this with Maricella except his own rape, but he did tell her that migrants do get

raped, that he's seen it happen, that he knows it happens. Even when I told her all of that, she said, none of that would happen to her. She knew how to defend herself and if she had to, she would hit people. And then he told her, you might have to go without food or sleep outside. But she said that it didn't matter. That all that mattered was getting here because the kids are the ones that matter most. And then he doesn't talk to her anymore. That's actually the last phone call they ever have because he thinks that if he cuts her off, maybe she'll just give up.

But she goes to one of her brothers. And her brother says that he would only pay for her to go, but he's not going to pay for her husband to go. When you found out that she was going to come by herself, did you try to tell your brother, look, you shouldn't let her come here by herself? Come at all, I should think. Yeah, yeah, I called, but my brother said that there wasn't another option,

and that he wanted to go first, but her brother had put the condition that she go first. And because they didn't have another option, she said she would go. In May of 2012, Madicella left Ecuador. About three weeks later, right before she walked into the desert, Madicella sent her family a message on Facebook. She told them, I don't know how I'm going to get there, but I am going for my family.

God willing, I will get there. When did you finally hear what actually happened to her? Someone called me. He told me they were from the consulate, and I said, OK, finally she's been found. And then they told me. Yo dije que pasó, entonces yo me dijeron que Maricela está muerta y no saben qué día. Maricela was dead,

y no lo sé lo que él ha hecho, pero que él ha sido de la vida de la semana. Exactamente murió, pero más o menos que él ha tenido un mes muerta. dead for about a month. Exactly. Mente morio, pero más o menos que hayá tenía un mes muerto. It was just really difficult, wondering if I'm going to do more damage than good by going to meet these folks. Eight months after Marisol's death, Jason came to New York to meet Fernando, and he brought

with him the pictures of Maricella's body that he took when he found her in the desert. He was like just right now showing me the photos, and I was just dancing around that for over an hour. Jason warned that the photos were really upsetting. There were so many like that, but I said that it's okay to show them to me. I give him this book of photos that I've printed out. And it's got pictures of this shrine that we built for her. In the desert, it's got pictures of my students who were there.

And then eventually, it's just pictures of the back of her head. So it's her hair. It's some of the clothing. It's her hand. I saw the photos and the truth is that it tore me to pieces to see or imagine everything she had to endure in the desert.

She tried to keep going, dragging herself. Eh, Jason brought me photos of how she was found and her body outstretched, trying to keep going. Before Maddie Sellett's body was sent back to Ecuador, Fernanda decided they should have it sent to New York first. When I talked to my family, I said, you know, her dream was really to arrive here. And so I thought at least we can fulfill that dream with her body. To be able to have a wake for her here. They held a wake at a funeral home in Queens. Almost 100 family members and friends came to celebrate Madi Sela's life.

They were told to keep the coffin shut. The next day, her body went back to Ecuador. Fernando had to stay in New York because he knows if he were to go back to Ecuador, it would just be way too hard to try to come back to the United States. He says that right now he's just trying to fulfill a promise.

The promise that I made to Maricela's body when it arrived here that I was going to look after her children. Y como le prometí al cuerpo de Maldicella, el que me ha hecho cuando él era aquí, que era que estaba buscando la vida de su familia. Era que él quería darles lo que él quería para ellos. ¿Pero pensé que esa conversación? ¿Dónde pensé que había algo que se que se ha dicho que había hecho su vida? Creo que lo dije de todo, dije... ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal?

¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal?

¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal?

¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? ¿Qué tal? And it's worth pointing out, you know, I mean, more generally, prevention through deterrence, as a strategy, it hasn't deterred people from coming to the US either. The annual budget for the Border Patrol is roughly $3.5 billion bigger than it was in 1990. We have about five times as many Border Patrol agents, and yet the number of people, immigrants living here undocumented, has more than tripled during that time, from 3.5 million to about 11 million. And more people are coming every year, every day,

and more people are dying along the way. Yeah, let's have just do it here. About a year after Maricella died, Jason got a call from her family again. Do you want, you want Maverick or Iceman? You have to name the drones. Guys are top content. Another family member had disappeared in pretty much the same place Maricella did. So which is this?

I think that's Maverick. That's Maverick. I'm going back to the Arizona Desert, basically because Maricella had a cousin, who, a 15-year-old cousin named Jose Takuri, who disappeared almost one year to the day that she died. I was able to kind of triangulate based on interviews with people who he was with and with information from various folks where we think he went missing. I told his mom that I would not stop looking and it took me a couple of years to figure

out a way to do that. But right now, we'll go back and we'll use these drones and see what we can come up with. What? What? And you know better than anyone that what happens to bodies in the desert now, I think. I mean, why are you still looking for him? Or why, you know, yeah, as Carlos says that question sounds, I guess.

For me part of it is I just don't know what else to do. If you feel so hopeless. I told this mom, like I won't stop looking for him. I'll do whatever I can, whatever little thing that I can do. And if I can't find him, well, maybe I'll find somebody else. I'm getting mad at me now, so we will... What was that? It's getting mad at me because it's running out of batteries. I'll do one more.

One more run. The immigration issue poses real problems and challenges and is always provides great opportunities for the American people. It is a big common place where men will make great money. We are 40% of the babies born on Medicaid. Let's try my got to testify. Based on my fifth amendment constitutional rights on the advice of council, I invoke my fifth amendment. You like America? Yeah, what's your move?

Yes, it's my organization 187 and 189. It's a mythical division between these two cities and it's just that it's just a... We're out. It's a pleasure to have you on the 29th or 7th place for the mission of the National Revolution. It's a really close and a bit... That's the most expensive. When Ageddale used the gate, that's about 40 bills to defy him, he just wants to save you.

They can't just arbitrarily stop you just for a group of months. We'll be apprehending. I want to use my favorite member. We'll leave it to you. We're four men in the world together. We're going to take a picture. We're going to take a picture. We're going to take a picture. We're going to take a picture. We're going to take a picture. We're going to take a picture.

We're going to take a picture. We're going to take a picture. We're going to take a picture. We're going to take a short break now, but when we get back, we're gonna discuss the many things that have happened since we first produced this series, what's changed, what hasn't changed, so stay tuned for that. Nancy, can you hear me? I can. Oh me? I can. Oh, great.

Okay. Who's mom Nancy happened to be sitting in on the interview and who I chatted with while we sorted out some tech issues? Your daughter can't hear me, but I can tell you. Your daughter is awesome. Oh, thank you. She's doing such vital reporting. It's so important.

And so anyway, so I'm not going to tell any of that stuff to you because it'll just go to your head, you know. Please don't, yeah, I'll turn red and crawl into the table. Ha ha ha. Caitlin is a staff writer at the Atlantic. And I tend to write about immigration. If you've done any amount of reading about the board, you probably know about Caitlin's work. She won a Pulitzer for her investigation into the Trump policy of family separation at the border. We had actually called her up when we made the original border trilogy.

And so to update it, we decided to call her back. Welcome back. Thank you so much for doing this. And basically what I want is a sort of a snapshot of what is going on now. So how many people are showing up to the Southern border and how does that compare to years past? A lot are showing up. So if you recall, at the beginning of the Biden administration,

border crossings really shot up. They were going up and up and up. And then in June of this year, border crossings went down. And so the thinking at the time and the argument, the Biden administration was making at the time was we fixed it. The bands that we've put into place have worked. Our deterrent strategies are effective. Border crossings are going down.

They started holding press conferences. You started seeing news articles published saying, quoting Biden administration officials, saying that they were doing a great job of mitigating border crossings and you know things were headed in the right direction. And I'm sitting there thinking, what are all these people going to say when the numbers go back up again? Because this is just what happens on the border. Numbers flare, numbers go down, numbers flare, numbers go down. And sometimes it's because of weather, sometimes it's because of a political situation unfolding abroad, sometimes it's because a smuggling network was able to sell a particularly good package deal

to a bunch of people at any given time. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. And in August of this year, 232,972 people crossed the border. That was an increase of almost 100,000 from just a couple of months earlier. this year, 232,972 people crossed the border. That was an increase of almost 100,000 from just a couple of months earlier. Well. And having followed this for years, if those ebbs and flows ever coincide

with changes in enforcement policy, a lot of times people who work in the border patrol or for a DHS, its parent agency will say, well, look, our policy is working or they'll say, well, we ended this policy and look, see what happened, numbers went up. If you zoom in and you're only looking on a week to week or month to month basis,

you can make these totally inaccurate arguments and draw causal links that are not scientifically zoned. Right. And just sort of allowing for seasonal ebbs and flows in general, for example, over the last five years, is the baseline moving up or is it sort of just the same year after year? It's really hard

to talk about a baseline because it is hard to do a kind of objective count. I think you can say in general, the American immigration system is kind of like the stock market. So if you look at a line graph of the growth of the stock market over the years,

when you zoom in and you look at just five years at a time, you see a lot of turbulence and a lot of up and down. But when you zoom out, you see a very clear upward trajectory. Got it. Got it. Right now, Venezuela is sending huge, huge numbers of people to the United States on top of the large flows of people coming in from Central America. Even numbers of people crossing into the United States

from Mexico has increased. And that's not to speak of people coming from Afghanistan, from Ukraine. Each time there's a new international crisis, increased. And that's not to speak of people coming from Afghanistan, from Ukraine. Each time there's a new international crisis, it brings some people to the United States. Sometimes a lot of people to the United States. Okay, so you've kind of given me this portrait of the numbers spiking and cresting, but generally going up. And maybe also, can you just talk about like, where are we with deterrence as a strategy?

So, what's going on now is that the Biden administration continues to reach for the same deterrent tools that have been in use for decades, despite being very expensive and carrying with them huge casualties. So I wanted to kind of cycle through four specific deterrents to see sort of what is the status of them and if they're at all working or, quote, unquote, working, but, okay, the four things I wanted to talk to you about were the desert and the migrants going through the desert. One is the wall, one is Operation Loan Star in Texas,

and one is Family Separation. Yeah, I think those are good categories. Okay, great. So let's just start with the desert, which is the majority of what this series that we're updating is about. What is happening in the desert are migrants still dying and do you know about the numbers there?

Migrants continue to be pushed into the desert in order to try to get access to the United States, particularly as other enforcement strategies like walls, like more boots on the ground from Border Patrol agents, have pushed people to try to find new routes into the country. And at the same time, as you well know, the world is getting hotter. The last two summers have been the highest on record in the world. And so deaths are unsurprisingly increasing because of that. So last year, 568 people were found dead in the desert between Mexico. So just to show our sources real quick, that's the number that Border Patrol reported

for fiscal year 2021. Since then, the New York Times and others have reported that Border Patrol's number for fiscal year 2022 is even higher, 853 deaths. That's the largest number that we have recorded, and it's also probably an undercount, a really serious undercount. I know that the Biden administration made a little bit of news. They were putting up all these rescue beacons in the middle of the desert to try to curb

some of these migrant deaths, like a button that you'd push if you were stranded in the middle of nowhere. Has that done anything, do you know? So initiatives like that are a little bit odd in that if you're in the right place at the right time, you might be saved by the same institution that's pushing you into the desert in the first place. And so, yes, every year, the tactical units of the board of patrol,

the search and rescue, will point to rescues that have taken place sometimes they'll release annual statistics, or they'll send out a press release of a particularly harrowing scenario that they're very proud of, often including women and children who they've saved. And from their individual perspective, that's true. proud of, often including women and children who they've saved. And from their individual perspective, that's true. It's only when you zoom out and point out that maybe these people didn't ever need to

be in the desert in the first place that the whole system doesn't really make sense. And so the Biden administration is really kind of trying to have it both ways by pointing to efforts it's making to try to save more people, while also doubling down on deterrent strategies that put the men harms way in the first place. Well, that's a great segue to the second deterrent we were going to talk about, which is the wall and the fact that the Biden administration is resuming construction on a part of the wall. Can you explain what is happening? Yes.

So, the Trump administration had a huge border wall project that was disputed all four years. But what it came down to was 450 miles of wall that was built, you know, $11 billion of taxpayer money. And then kind of tools put down as soon as President Biden was set to take office because of a moratorium that he called on border wall construction. Biden was saying, you know, not a single additional foot of wall will be built.

He said he didn't believe that the wall was effective, but he's had run-ins with a Congress that does. And so a couple of times now, Republicans have forced Democrats to agree to put money toward a border wall in fights they were having over the budget and keeping the government running. And the Biden administration says that it's tried to reprogram these funds, tried to avoid

spending them on a border wall, but hasn't been able to. And so some additional wall is being built now. To jump in quick, what Caitlin says is true, administration's decision feels like more than just inertia. Current Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wrote of, quote, an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers in the vicinity of the border in order to prevent unlawful entries.

Also, the Biden administration actively waived 26 federal laws, including the Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Danger Species Act, in order to allow and expedite the construction. It does feel like, on some level, the administration made a choice to build 20 more miles of border wall. We're talking about 30-foot high steel structures that were supposed to be a new and improved technology, except again, they haven't worked. I mean, as soon as this new type of wall was debuted, smuggling organizations started cutting through it, and not only were they cutting through it, they were using regular power tools

to cut through it. Wow. They were building ladders with scrap wood and rope and foisting people over the wall, foisting drugs over the wall, although it remains true that most illegal drugs that make their way into the United States come through legal ports of entry. And so, you know, what it amounts to is $140 million of additional funds being put toward a border wall that we know isn't going to do much at all. And I think a few people will say in and of itself, you know, a wall is going to fix the

immigration system. But what you hear again and again from the border patrol is just the sense of overwhelm. We'll take anything. We'll take what we can get. Feels like we're doing something. It feels like doing something. All right, let's move on to the next deterrent. What is Operation Loan Star in Texas? So Operation Loan Star is Governor Greg Abbott

in Texas effort to take border enforcement into his own hands and try to use state law, state resources and state law enforcement, Texas state troopers, and Texas National Guard to try to combat migration. And it also involves efforts to arrest people on trust passing charges for violating Texas law. And it seems of a piece with the sort of deterrence mindset is that right? Absolutely everything that I just described is considered to be a deterrent Measure jumping in again after we talk to Caitlin

We also talk to another reporter Todd Miller who has written multiple books about the border as well as a weekly post for the border chronicle He told us that Texas has spent 4.5 billion, billion with a B dollars on this operation. And from his visit to the border, he told us what it looks like. Razer wire everywhere, floating barriers with chainsaw blades in the Rio Grande, National Guard, Jeeps, and Troops all side by side. He said it was eerily reminiscent of the operation we covered in our second episode, Operation Hold The Line. What we've heard and read from Caitlin and Todd and many others is that this giant project has that basically negligible effect on migration. All right, let's move on to the next deterrent, which I know you have written about most,

which is family separation. The series we made was actually before that became a big story in 2018. Can you just briefly tell us what happened? So the idea was to take kids away from their parents if they attempt to cross the border together as punishment, as a way to make border crossing into the United States so painful that people would stop doing it. And so that, of course, happened thousands of times during the Trump administration. What is the status now with family separation?

Have all of those families that were separated in 2017, 2018 have they all been reunited or no? No. No. No, I mean, there are still hundreds of families according to the federal books that have not been reunited. Wow. So, there are no more kids in the custody of health and human services, which is where separated

children went initially, all have been released to sponsors. But some sponsors are family friends or extended relatives, who parents may not have approved of their children going to in the first place. And there is an unknown number of sponsors. This hasn't been made explicitly clear by the Biden administration, who were part of a foster care system, who had no relationship to the child. By now, children may have been adopted by families they had no connection to. So, this is why it gets really tricky to try to trace family's operations. And many of those parents, the government just doesn't even know where they are.

So, family separation was a deterrent strategy that did not work. And we have really good evidence of this. The largest number of border crossings that occurred under the Trump administration was the year following family separations. So, you know, the harshest deterrent measure we've ever used, which what does that tell us? Obviously not that people were excited about getting their kids taken away. And so they decided to come to the United States for that reason. Of course not.

What it tells us is that the factors that we're pushing people into the United States in the first place and that we're drawing people into the United States in the first place, and that we're drawing them here from within the country, our demand for their presence and for their labor, were just more powerful. When I talk to individuals who have worked on these efforts to track down parents and try to help reunite families, I've been told that they'll ask, right? So, you know, would you have come to the United States if you knew this was going to happen? And of course, on the one hand, this is the most painful thing they've ever experienced in their lives, but on the other, many people will tell you, well, I was gonna die or my child was gonna die. And so so yes, I would have come anyway. We just have 25 plus years

of data to show us that deterrence is just not working. Right. All of the push factors that bring people to the United States in the first place remain the same or worse than they were under the Trump administration. All of the draws in the United States are dependence on the labor of immigrants. The way in which our country continues to absorb people as it always has, all those things are exactly the same. What needs to happen is a process of coming up with new border policies that really wants and for all

gets rid of this idea of the gospel of deterrence. I don't know who first said that, but I hear it all the time. The gospel of deterrence? The gospel of deterrence. There are too many people in Washington politics right now who are just into deep on deterrence. There's a lot of fear within both parties of trying anything new. One thing that I will say that's different under the Biden administration.

I've been hearing this since the president took office is that there is now open conversations certainly within the aspects of the White House that focus on border issues, open conversations about how deterrence doesn't work. And so what's more frustrating, you know, a Trump administration where there was kind of a top to bottom belief in deterrent strategies in the face of evidence that they weren't working, or is it more frustrating to know that in the White House, there are people who are openly talking about how what our government is doing is totally ineffective, and then they're doing it anyway.

I don't know. This is a very, very depressing picture, and I wonder, do you see anything hopeful going on, anything solution oriented? Something around the corner here? I do think that there's some hope. I don't think that it's around the corner. I think it's further off than that.

The hope actually lies in people who are going to be willing to take the political risk to start fresh. So acknowledging that the United States needs immigrants, the United States wants immigrants and allotting visas in a way that allowed for people who wanted to come to work here to do so legally, even if they're not wealthy or very highly educated, which is the only way of entering the country that exists now. And so it just takes somebody who's willing to risk what that might mean for their own career. The primary architect of the deterrence strategy, or the initial person, even before Doris

Meisner, was Sylvester Reyes, who is this, you know, border patrol sector chief, who is like, I'm going to shake things up. I'm going to try a totally different thing. And it feels like, that's what we need. We need that energy. We need somebody to say, okay, I'm tired of doing this the way that we've always been doing it. That is clearly not working. We need to do a new thing.

And the thing that he did was operation hold the line, but like, we need the new version of that. Exactly. It's interesting to trace the history in Congress of how national origins quotas were eliminated from the American immigration law, race-based quotas that we had in place from the 1920s until the 1950s.

And that was a very long fight. And there were certain people in Congress who were just willing to stick with it and stick their necks out to say, this immigration system just doesn't comport with American values. So it may come from Congress, it may come from Congress It may come from the White House. It probably won't come from within the ranks of DHS

But I completely agree with you that it just takes somebody who's willing to be bold enough to Propose something different and who can do it in a way that doesn't alienate everybody else because that's the key Yeah, but you're not you're not seeing that yet. No, no. But that said, politics is funny. With immigration reform specifically, I have as a reporter who's been looking at this story often on since 2012, have been left at the altar many times.

There have been many times when it seemed like immigration reform was very close to becoming a reality and then it didn't. But sometimes politics surprises you and there isn't this really long arm ramp. It's just simply the right person in the right place at the right time who has enough leverage to push something over because again it's not like we're talking about things that we don't know to be true. Once you learn all of this you can't unlearn it you can't unsee it and so once you realize how much it doesn't make sense moving on wouldn't

wouldn't quite feel right either. quite feel right either. This episode was reported by Tracy Hunt and me, Lathafnasser. It was produced by Matt Kieltey and Tracy Hunt. Jason De Leon's book, which inspired this series, is called The Land of Open Graves. Special thanks to our interpreter, Allison Corbett, and for giving voice to Fernando in English, Carlo Albano, and Carlos Manager Ted Brunson. Thanks also to Hayden Stewart, Raul Raspastrana, Paulina Alonso-Savez, and Ambassador Jacob Prado from the government of Mexico, and to the staff at the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office, as well as the Calibri Center for Human Rights.

My name's Lottifnasser, thank you for listening. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler, Lulu Miller and Lotto Fnasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, a Kedi Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nyanasambada, Matt Kilti, Annie McEwan, Alex Nisen, Saurakari, Alyssa John Perry, Sarah Sambak, Aryan Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster,

with help from Timmy Broderick. 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 finance foundation initiative, and a John Templeton foundation. Dandational Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.