The Daily - Dispatches From the Border, Part 2

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

After a 35-day government shutdown over a proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are negotiating over what border security actually means. We checked back in with Annie Brown from “The Daily,” who’s been driving the length of the border with the New York Times reporter Azam Ahmed. Their last dispatch focused on migrants in Mexico deciding whether to cross the border illegally. Now, we hear what can happen once they cross. Guests: Annie Brown, a producer for “The Daily,” and Azam Ahmed, the Times bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

After a 35-day government shutdown over a proposed wall on the southern border, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are now negotiating over what border security actually means. Is there a wall over here? I don't know. So we check back in with The Daily's Annie Brown. Oh, look, it just sort of stops and turns into a chain link. Who's been driving the length of the U.S.-Mexico border with reporter Azam Ahmed.

Their last dispatch focused on migrants on the Mexican side who are deciding whether to cross the border illegally. My wife, my two daughters, and one boy. Today, what happens once they cross? Irrespective of what the government, we know we're going to cross. We know we're going to cross. It's Tuesday, January 29th.

A few days into our road trip along the border, we found ourselves not on the border at all, but 80 miles north. Okay, driving to Brooks County. In a place in Texas called Brooks County, one of the deadliest counties in the country for migrants. Uh, what is today? Because after making the dangerous trek to the border, and then making it across successfully, it's not over. The next thing they face is the inhospitable landscape. The nature here is crazy. It's just kind of scrubland, untamed.

It's pretty remarkable. What they're up against now is not only being caught by Border Patrol, but getting lost in the brush, getting dehydrated, dying of exposure. Hello? Are you here? Yep, we're here. We just pulled up in front of the courthouse. So we went up to go meet a guy named Eddie Canales. Ah, okay, I see you.

Okay, I'll just park right where you are. He's basically dedicated the last few years, since 2013, helping to try and keep migrants from dying, essentially. And we're basically going to follow him around for the day. Hey, how are you doing? Hey, you've got more than one photographer. She is a radio show I told you about. Eddie works out of a small brick building across the street

from the courthouse in Brooks County. You know, I was born in Corpus. We grew up on the border. He's 71. His great-grandparents came over from Mexico, and he grew up along the border. I consider myself a fronterizo. What does that mean?

Border guy? Uh-huh. Border rat? For decades, he was a union guy, organizing immigrants, working as cleaners, builders, and janitors. He retired a few years ago. But then the death count in Brooks County spiked. But then the death count in Brooks County spiked. From 2004 to the present, there's probably 750 or so just in Brooks County alone.

In the last 15 years, the remains of 700 migrants have been found just in Brooks County alone. And, you know, oftentimes they're bleached bones with an empty jug of water beside them. It's a sort of grim still life of someone's final moments. You know, we've got to save lives. We've got to figure this out. We've got to do rescues and stuff. You know, you're desperate to try to do something. And Eddie decided he was coming out of retirement to find a way to keep so many migrants from dying. Welcome to the South Texas Human Rights Center.

Love it. Thank you. Yeah, we're... So as part of his work, Eddie sets up water stations at strategic locations throughout Brooks County. Some of the citizens are going to go out with us for the water station, water drops.

Those are our water stations. He's got a map of Brooks County with these little pushpins all over it. Ah, these are where you drop water off the water. What are you going to do? Are you going to follow? Yes, we're going to follow you. All right, all right, we'll squeeze in. So we went out with him on one of his chores,

which is essentially checking and replenishing water supplies. Watch where you step. Okay, please, when you open up the water station... We hop in Eddie's truck with a couple of volunteers. The bed is filled with hundreds of gallons of water. You know, look out for wasps and spiders and stuff. Mm-hmm. Okay. And we take off for the different access roads

that line the ranch land in Brooks County. How often do you go out and replenish these? In the summer, every week, and every two weeks in the winter. In surrounding, you realize just how desolate it is because you drive for miles and miles and miles, and there's nothing. There's these roads, but there's no structures, there's no stores, there's just sandy plains, scrub brush, and... I mean, even the plants don't look really alive. Why do you figure so many migrants wind up dying here in Brooks County?

It's not on the border. What is it about the county? Well, there's a checkpoint, right? So the checkpoint being so far... There's one main road that runs through Brooks County, and there's a Border Patrol checkpoint on it, which means you can't really transit via car if you're a migrant because you're going to get stopped and your car is going to be reviewed, which forces people out into this scrubland

and into this inhospitable climate where they have to walk essentially around that checkpoint, presumably get picked up on the other side. And it's by design, right, that they're going to force them into the brush. They're going to force them to walk. It's part of this idea of deterrence. You know, that's the way that they have it set up.

I think people think it started with Trump, but this is a Clinton-era initiative. If we make it harder on people, if we push them into more desperate conditions, it might dissuade them from coming. You're actually forcing people into the more remote, very harsh areas, you know, very isolated areas. The one thing we've learned is that doesn't actually work.

It's not working today with making it harder to cross legally to ask for asylum. People just cross illegally. In the same way, making them take this treacherous journey through Brooks County, the number of people who have died over the last 15 years, it hasn't stopped them. It hasn't stopped people from dying.

It hasn't stopped them from taking that track. I mean, there's so much death. We'll show you. See how that fence is down? Yeah, they're jumping that. They're stepping. So basically, we pulled off to the side of one of these roads, and everybody jumps out. It's difficult to find shade out here. Look how bad that is. It's incredibly dry and brittle plant life.

Everything's got thorns. Everything's got thorns. It'll tear your clothes, it'll rip your skin. There's no shade overhead. There's a few trees, there's live oaks, but they're sparse. For the most part, it's just exposed. We have a barrel, a 55-gallon barrel, blue for water. It's symbolic. And inside the barrel, we have six gallons, seven gallons of water. Okay, we need two. He pops the lid of this blue bin open. Okay. They just took enough water that they needed.

Okay. To check on the water supply. So let's put one in there, and that's one point. There's a flag planted beside it. You know, the most expensive part is really the flag. It's very, it's important. It's a tall metal pole, and essentially there's just a white cloth at the end of it. But it's just a signal to migrants if they're crossing through this area that there's something here there's water here. Have you come across any migrants while you're doing the work?

Yes and one of the ranches I remember going in there to check the water and there were two guys that were in the corner there so I went around and I asked them if they needed water or food we gave them everything we had, because they had been walking around the ranch for three days. Oh my God. Three days they had been in the ranch and done the, you know,

vueltas, you know, going around and around. And I said, look, I said, you go there, right there, the high wire, you get that high wire, you jump that fence, and you head north, and you just stay on the perimeter, you'll be fine. In general, people try to stay off the road. Instead, they trek through these ranches, which can be hundreds of acres, and with no

landmarks or mountains to orient them, they sometimes wander in circles for days. So when you talk to the ranchers, I mean, what do most of them say to you when you say, look, will you allow me to put water on your property? Will you allow me to at least do that? My approach to them is a humanitarian approach. I'm not going to try to talk politics to them. And I introduced myself. I'm the guy that's putting out water stations out there. We're trying to save lives. I'm going to say, do you have traffic in your ranch? And he used the term traffic, but he means people, migrants crossing their land. I said, if you have traffic,

could a water station help you? It affects the county, the cost of the county and the community in terms of having this image of the valley of death. He's convinced a few ranchers here and there to let him put water stations on their land since most of the migrants don't pass along the main roads where he's able to put his stations, but it's not as good as he'd like. He's not able to access a lot of the private land. The guys who tell you no, though, why? What do they say?

Oh, some people say, nah, I don't need one of them stopping in my ranch. You know, that type of attitude. No, no, no, it's, I don't want them trespassing or anything like that. You know. It's difficult to, How many's in there? Four? Okay, we need two.

Okay. We spent four hours filling up water stations with Eddie. Next station. Let's do stickers on all of those. Okay. We've been at it for a while. We've got over 160 stations. Another station. Singer Ranch SR number one. Just driving one after the next after the next.

Next stop. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The others are good. The others are good. So five. So five good? Yeah. I think we're done.

Yeah, this is the end of the road here. We can't go no further. A lot of it was along the main roads because Eddie can't get access to some of the ranches where migrants are more likely to stop. And, you know, I couldn't help but notice that most of these were still full. The water hadn't been drunk.

And it made me wonder what happened to all the people that Eddie couldn't reach. It made me wonder what happened to all the people that Eddie couldn't reach. We'll be right back. And describe where we're going. We're going to the Sacred Heart Burial Park, where the cemetery is owned by the county. So in Brooks County, there's a cemetery called Sacred Heart. Yeah, and you'll see how they're trenching based on... Let me park where I'm out of the way here.

For the past few years, Eddie's been working with a team of scientists there, basically to search the cemetery for anonymous migrant graves. I'm just giving her a rundown. 2013 was the first exhumation. 2014, the second one. Because what had been happening here over the years is that people in the county, when they'd find bodies of migrants on their

property, their remains were brought here and buried wherever there was space. The county cemetery looks almost like any other county cemetery you'd come to. Grassy, few big trees, quite full, fake flowers banked against headstones. But after we parked, we began to walk in and see these long trenches being dug. And there's these small, almost encampments of people digging. being dug. And there's these small, almost encampments of

people digging. As of yesterday, there were 13. There were 4 more. So there's now 17 there. You can spot them. Wow, they're inside. Just as we arrived, they'd found something.

Over here, in a bag. So, you remember? Oh my God. in a bag. It's a black plastic trash bag that's been worn thin and inside are just bones stacked on top of one another. It's a bag because Jesus because yes, it says, you know,

the disintegrated, right? So, carefully. It was obvious from the condition that this person had died long before they were buried. Yeah, and this is Dr. Case Bradley. Hi. Nice to meet you. Hi. Annie, nice to meet you. You can ask any questions. Okay. I Spradley. Hi. Nice to meet you. Hi. Annie, nice to meet you. You can ask her any questions.

Okay. I'll answer them, too. Eddie introduced us to the anthropologist leading the dig, Dr. Kate Spradley. The Texas Criminal Code of Procedure and the Texas Health and Safety Code mandate that... So in Texas, there are now laws that require DNA samples to be taken from every body found for years. In Brooks County, that wasn't happening. That wasn't happening. And there were so many people dying here.

In this particular county in 2012, you had 130 deaths, and that's too much for this county to handle. This county, overwhelmed with the number of people, was finding wherever they could in the cemetery to bury these individuals. They buried them anywhere they could find. Without a map, without taking DNA samples, without gravestones. It's body bags and it's just

digging shallow holes and throwing people in. Literally anonymously. But in 2013, things changed and the South Texas Human Rights Center helped the county get the money they needed to send remains to a medical examiner. So what we're dealing with is people who died before 2013 that are buried in this cemetery. So at a baseline, they're exhuming these bodies to take DNA samples so that they can then compare those to databases of families who have missing loved ones. Essentially, she is trying to reclaim people from anonymity.

We found 16 so far. This is the potential 16th. This is the potential 16th. This is not the 16th. The 16th, you see the white in the corner over here, above that scale? There's a little white coming through. It looks like it's going to be another bag of remains.

Since they started, they found more than 150 bodies in the cemetery. And with them, they often find the things they carried. They're carrying a toothbrush and toothpaste. This is something, you know, you and I are not carrying that right now. That's something that somebody is traveling. People carry just different things. There's been stuffed animals, baseball cards, a luchador mask. It's really interesting because you can see also through looking at the personal effects

how some people prepared for this trip one person had photocopied money and put the photocopy money in his pockets and then he sewed in a little pocket inside the pants with his real money so just by looking at this and documenting it, you can tell how they prepared for this. Many of the families that have missing loved ones have placed their DNA in a database, and essentially using that database, they compare it with the samples that come in from the bodies they exhume, and they occasionally match.

We've identified 30 people so far. That's incredible. I work and live in Mexico, and it's just a dark hole. Nobody ever finds out where their loved one is. And give me context for that. What does it mean that they've matched 30 in this case? I mean, it means that there's 30 families who have closure. There's 30 families who know what happened. We identified two individuals. Their families were in Houston, closure. There's 30 families who know what happened. We identified two individuals. Their families were in Houston. So they came to visit their remains in our lab before they were sent

back to their country of origin. And you really got to see how this information impacted them. You know, it let them just, I think, finally breathe for a moment. You know, they've been on pins and needles. They didn't know what happened. They asked questions like, well, how long were they out there? You know, we called this person, we called this person, we called this agency. Is there anything more we could have done? And we say, no, you did everything that you could. Then they actually viewed the remains. They held the remains and they wrote letters and put them in the box to go back with him for burial. It's very nice to see that side of it

and to see the impact and the meaning that it carries. The effort has largely been a success in Brooks County, but there are still hundreds if not thousands of people whose bodies are never found, and if they're never found, they're never identified. Will we ever find the rest? That's what I really start thinking. Will we ever be able to clear this cemetery? Will we ever find the rest? That's what I really start thinking. Will we ever be able to clear this cemetery?

Will we ever find all of the individuals? How many people will we leave behind? And how many families will never know what happened to their loved one? For every recovered body, there's one other body that's still out there. Or more. Or more. They're all accidental discoveries. Nobody's out looking for them.

So it's just a ranch hand or somebody, a property owner is doing something and they happen upon a body and find them. If you could go out and do systematic searches, I think you would find a lot more. We're just scratching the surface. You know, all this debate and everything about a wall and all the government shutdown and everything, We're just scratching the surface. You know, all this debate and everything about a wall and all the government shutdown and everything,

people are still dying. Everybody says the system is broken, the immigration system is broken, right? And you have deterrence policy. So as long as you have migrant deaths, is that okay, you know, for the system? No, it's not okay. Not one life should be a consequence

of a system that is broken. You know, we'd driven 80 miles away from the border that day, and I don't think I realized until later that that was still the border, even though geographically it was not technically on the border. The same sort of realities applied. Thank you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Nice to meet you.

You know, when you're in Brooks County with Eddie, it's hard to imagine why someone would want to stand in this guy's way. I mean, he's just trying to save lives. But there are moments when we're with him, it becomes clear that not everybody does want him to succeed. Right there at Milojos, three of the bottles have been slashed. While we were on the water run with him, there was one water station where all of the jugs had been punctured, and the water had been allowed to seep out.

It was clear. I mean, you could tell where somebody took it. And he said on really bad days, sometimes the entire water station can disappear just thrown in the back of someone's truck and taken. But this was a flagpole. It was a... At one of the water stations, we went to check on. So one of these flagpoles that are used to designate where the water stations are

has been bent completely down to the ground. I don't know, maybe the wind in itself. It can get pretty windy out here. At first, Eddie suggested it might have been the wind, but I think that was wishful thinking. So it's like either the elements or a person knocked this thing down? I'd be surprised if the wind bent it down all that way. Yeah, yeah, no. It was sort of laying flush with the ground. Somebody could have just came here and bent it down completely. Well, somebody got mad and decided to bend it down. And people, people are like that that people not like what you do sometimes yeah yeah

there's some people that are like that and so you know he spent several minutes using his body weight to try and lift the pole back up and bend it back into shape but ultimately ultimately he couldn't. It was too badly bent. But I'll refurbish the flagpole. And so it sort of sat there. Eventually, when we left, half in the air, kind of bobbing. You guys, we can give you guys a ride to where you're going. We have some extra seats. So Eddie took some of the volunteers home,

and then came back and asked us if we wanted to go to dinner. So we followed him to his Thursday night dinner spot, a restaurant called Jalisco's, right on the highway into town. It's like a Tex-Mex standard restaurant, you know, and a few families here and there. But they were setting up for karaoke night. By the bar, we see a guy with a white handlebar mustache, cowboy hat, cowboy boots, queuing up for karaoke.

The DJ walks over, hands him the mic, and he starts singing a George Strait song. Well, excuse me, but I think you got my chair. Behind his head, the TV's playing, and it's showing highlight reels of President Trump's speech that day about the border wall. But nobody, I mean, nobody was even looking at it. Everybody was just focused on him and this song. No, I went up there. I went up there.

Thank you. And the mic just starts getting passed around. And the song choice was kind of an interesting border mix of, like, Mexican songs and Texas country songs. And it goes, like, it was actually a really fun vibe. Everybody just totally being themselves. So about an hour in, I walked over to the guy with the handlebar mustache and invited him to sit down with us.

You know, I'd spent the whole day with Eddie and sort of had been seeing the county through his eyes and I wanted to know what other people thought. So his name was Philip Gomez and he was the grandson of Mexican migrants. had been seeing the county through his eyes, and I wanted to know what other people thought. They have no idea. They have no clue. So his name was Philip Gomez, and he was the grandson of Mexican migrants. Philip actually supported the wall. I don't care who's president whatsoever. Everybody's making a big deal about Trump, but he's right.

He said he didn't care who was president, but that President Trump was right. Why do people have walls in their backyard? He said, why do people have walls in their backyard? Because they don't want people in there. There's no difference. Explain the difference to me. So Eddie starts eavesdropping

on Philip and I having this conversation. So he kind of interjects. Starts by asking Philip, you know, oh, you're in favor of the wall? And Philip says, yeah. And Eddie starts to tell him, you know, I, you're in favor of the wall? And Philip says, yeah. And Eddie starts to tell him, you know, I was born here, I'm from here, my family's Mexican. You know, I see it as a symbol of racism.

And it was interesting. There's these two guys, both Mexican-Americans, both speaking in Spanglish, both in their late 60s, early 70s, having this conversation from absolutely opposite sides of the divide, at least until it's time for the next song. And someone comes over, hands Philip the mic, and we convince him to sing from our table. from our table.

I don't want to be the kind to hesitate. And he launches into his next song. I don't care what they say other lovers do. I just want to dance with you. Eddie sat back, took a sip of his beer and smiled. Then, like everybody else, he started humming along. So let it show, let it shine If we have a chance to make our heart of two I just want to thank you. Yeah, I heard it. I heard it. The Daily will keep checking in with Azam and Annie

as they continue their trip west along the border. Here's what else you need to know today. Thank you. Thank you. Today, Treasury took action against Venezuela's state-owned oil company, Petrovesa, to help prevent the further diversion of Venezuela's assets by former President Maduro. On Monday, President Trump's Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, announced a set of sanctions

designed to weaken Nicolas Maduro by keeping revenue from the country's state-owned oil monopoly out of Maduro's hands. He's not the proper leader of the country at this time. And I've said these are valuable assets that we are protecting for the benefit of Venezuelan people. Mnuchin said the sanctions would only be lifted once Maduro concedes his claim to the presidency to a U.S.-backed opposition leader, Juan Guaido.

We continue to call on all of our allies and partners to join the United States in recognizing interim President Guaido and blocking Maduro from being able to access pay-to-visa funds. Thank you with that, and I'd be happy to answer some questions. And the Times reports that the U.S. and the Taliban have taken the biggest step yet toward ending the 17-year-long war in Afghanistan, agreeing on Wednesday to a draft framework for a peace deal. As part of the framework, the Taliban must guarantee that Afghan territory is never used by terrorists,

as it was for the September 11th attacks, a condition that could lead to a full pullout of American troops from the country. But for the deal to move forward, the Taliban would have to agree to negotiate directly with the Afghan government, something the Taliban has long been unwilling to do, since it views the government as a puppet of the U.S. The question hovering over the negotiations, the Times reports, is whether the U.S. is motivated by a desperation to withdraw from an unwinnable war or by a genuine commitment

to create a lasting peace in Afghanistan that can actually be enforced. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.