The Daily - What Migrants Are Fleeing

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

The Trump administration’s recent border policy is, in part, a response to the large numbers of migrants who have been making the journey to the United States from Central America. For many, staying in their native countries is no longer an option. Guest: Azam Ahmed, the New York Times bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, behind the decision to separate children from their parents was a flood of migrants from Central America that began under President Obama and hasn't stopped. What they are fleeing. It's Monday, June 25th. When I first started going to El Salvador, it was largely focused around this immense violence,

these gangs that had infiltrated practically the entire country and had been doing so for the last decade. It was such a pervasive phenomenon, there was almost nothing else to write about in a place like El Salvador. Azam Ahmed covers Central America for The Times. The latest and most bitter round of fighting in El Salvador's civil war has claimed thousands of lives. So El Salvador obviously had had a pretty violent and extreme civil war. And during that period, which bled into the 90s, many of the Salvadorians who were living through this sort of awful guerrilla war were fleeing to the U.S.

Their prime destination, Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the modern Ellis Island for Central America. Now, these new arrivals to Los Angeles were suddenly greeted by a different brand of poverty and violence there. It was not the ideological violence of the war they were leaving. It was criminal violence. It was sort of this self-protective violence. In the barrios of L.A., young refugees encountered criminal gangs and formed gangs of their own. That's where MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang were formed. In the U.S.?

In the U.S. They were mostly teenagers from El Salvador who had fled the growing conflict in their country and banded together here on the streets of Los Angeles, forming the gang mainly to protect themselves from other street gangs. The original kids that started MS were mostly stoner kids that were into heavy metal music. The MS-13 gang is an American creation. It was American-born on this soil right here in Los Angeles. Well, see, many of us had experienced violence in our home countries. You know, on the way to school, they used to see decapitated bodies.

That's why the gangs became an option. Now, as these gangs sort of start to grow and the criminality and violence that they exploit grow as well, the United States begins arresting and deporting these guys. We intend to target them. The FBI and the other investigative agencies are going to wage a coordinated war on gangs that involve juveniles in violent crime. We will do that. The Attorney General and I are very concerned about the problem of gangs, and there are too many violent gangs now which go out and try to involve juveniles in serious, serious

criminal activity. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before. Now, by now, the war in El Salvador has ended, and there is a treaty between both the guerrillas and the government, and there is this new kind of coalition government. But it's a broken country. So you've got what amounts to an institutionalizing,

informal gang forming roots in a country where there are no institutions, where it is sort of a free-for-all. But inevitably that begins to transform into something much more violent, into something more coherent, into something that looks more like a criminal organization. And it just got worse and worse. So by the end of the first decade of the 2000s,

you've seen these gangs mature and spread and become these cohesive, very difficult-to-root-out institutions. It's not just kids gangbanging on a corner. It is now sophisticated structures of extortion with hierarchical command structures. And it begins to seep into almost every facet of life in the larger cities and even out in the rural communities of El Salvador. Mothers and young children from Central America crowd a bus station in Phoenix, Arizona. In the past two months, tens of thousands of Central American

women and children have been escaping intolerable violence and poverty at home, believing they can get legal status in the U.S. And that was accompanied by a massive exodus of people fleeing that violence. Tens of thousands of people began to leave in the immediate aftermath. The Pentagon said today it is opening a third emergency shelter for thousands of unaccompanied children who are pouring into the United States from Central America. Over the last year, the number of children crossing illegally has surged from 24,000 to 47,000.

About 1,000 unaccompanied children who turned themselves in to the Border Patrol are being held in this warehouse in Nogales, Arizona. They were transferred from Texas, where government shelters have been overwhelmed. Small children crossing into the U.S., in many cases alone, without their parents, and then getting trapped in limbo. These images obtained by ABC News revealing people sleeping on what looks like foil. Tonight, just one snapshot of what some are calling now an urgent humanitarian problem.

And it was harrowing to see kids who weren't even old enough to have graduated from high school, some of whom were as young as elementary age, turning up by themselves, and it was for a variety of reasons. But among them, you had parents thinking, it's safer for my kid to take this journey on their own than it is for them to stay here. It's that devastating.

You know, I think my child is better marching a thousand miles through Mexico, which is by no means a safe country, to arrive at a border in an uncertain future than he is staying in our neighborhood in whatever municipality they're living at in El Salvador. It is a huge humanitarian crisis on the border right now. A gigantic, unprecedented surge of minors, most without parents or guardians, crossing our southern border on their own by the thousands. Captured by the border patrol as...

It wasn't just El Salvador. It was the rest of the so-called Northern Triangle countries, which includes Honduras and Guatemala. So you've got gang phenomenon, criminality, corruption, all of the sort of factors that lead to crisis present in these countries. You started to see tens of thousands of kids showing up at the U.S. border, reaching, it was almost double the previous year, which culminate in this 2014 migration crisis,

where suddenly 60,000 kids are showing up at the border and the United States has no idea how to handle it. They show the teens and younger children packed into fence cages and on hard floors. Advocacy groups today formally complaining to the Department of Homeland Security that 80 percent of the children had inadequate food and water supplies. And it was a public reckoning. It was the first time, and it was the Obama administration at the time, where they were like, wow, things are so bad, children are willing

to take this trip alone, and not just a few of them, tens of thousands of them. Our message absolutely is don't send your children unaccompanied on trains or through a bunch of smugglers. We don't even know how many of these kids don't make it and may have been waylaid into sex trafficking or killed because they fell off a train, we have no way of tracking that. So that is our direct message to the families in Central America. Do not send your children to the borders. So there was this crisis in the Obama administration. What are we going to do?

We have children showing up at our borders. They have to do something. It's the white hot focus of the news, this influx of children on the border. And so they reached out to Mexico. Welcome, everybody. Police and arrival. It is a pleasure to welcome once again President Peña Nieto, as well as his delegation. Now, in Mexico, for the longest time, it's just been a transit route. You know, you jumped on the train, you kind of transited through, because the destination was the United States. And what the U.S. government did was they asked the Mexican government,

can you start more carefully policing your southern border? Essentially extending the migrant dragnet all the way down to the border of Mexico and Guatemala. And what did Mexico do in response? Mexico complied. They launched a plan called Plan Fonterra Sur, which is basically Southern Border Plan. And they beefed up their security there. They beefed up their customs agents,

vigilance of the roads and various highways. And they started monitoring the train, this famous train known as the Beast, that migrants had been taking from both Mexico and Central America for years and years and years. That became a route that at least temporarily was shut off to people. The number of migrants that were detained in the U.S. dropped,

and pretty significantly. The problem was the actual number of migrants didn't drop. They just, instead of being detained in the United States, they were detained in the southern border of Mexico. So in reality, they didn't solve the problem. They just moved it. And the number of migrants continued going up and up. And the ironic portion of Obama's policy was that it actually made that trip more dangerous because now, rather than having sort of free passage through Mexico, these migrants were forced into taking circuitous routes,

relying on what they call coyotes or smugglers to get them through this terrain and ultimately taking a lot more personal risks. So in trying to inhibit the number of children showing up at the border, the Obama administration's policy actually made it far more dangerous for many of them to even begin their journey through Mexico. But wasn't the point to discourage them from trying it at all? I think one thing we've learned is that these policies don't really discourage people in the long term. When you want to leave, when you've made that decision, when you have decided that my life is not worth living here. These impediments, they're small in comparison to having had made that decision,

having to come to the conclusion I can't be at home anymore. We'll be right back. So in 2016, I wanted to actually see what it looked like. I wanted to see the ways in which this journey had changed. For so long, this train kind of loomed large on the transit from Central America to the United States. But now people were going on foot. So I went down to the state of Chiapas, which is on the border with Guatemala, and convinced a group of migrants to let me go with them.

So for several days, we sort of made this trek through southern Mexico on the way up to the United States. And almost from the very moment it started, it was so clearly different. We were walking through the streets of this small town, and someone came up to us and warned us, hey, you know, the cops, and they call them migra, the migration authorities, they come through here a lot, and so the migrants thank the guy. And 30 seconds later, we hear a siren. And the cops start chasing us.

And so these guys just take off sprinting. So I sprint with them. And we run to the edge of town. And we start hiding sort of behind this slight rise on the edge of town. Within 20 minutes, a guy approaches us. Turns out he happens to be a smuggler. And he tells us, hey, guys, you know, luck would have it. I know how to get you out of this town and through the next several towns, and I'll do it all for X price.

And so the migrants, they were pretty sophisticated about what was happening. They began to quiz the coyote, asking him, okay, where are you going to take us? How's it going to work? I remember one of them pulled out this, it was a packaging for medicine, and he opened it up. It was cardboard, and on it, he had written by hand every city

that he was meant to go through. So he basically knew the route, and he began to quiz the smuggler, like, well, what's next? And the smuggler would name a city. He's like, okay, and what's after that? And he would name a city. And the guy was checking off to ensure

that this guy actually did know where he was. And this guy was promising the sun and the moon. Oh, I've got cars set up. I have people here. Yeah, they've got all these stops, but I know where all the stops are. So we'll drive up to it. You guys will get out. I'll lead you on a secure this route back onto the highway. And then we'll go again. The idea being you won't have to walk the entire time. This is like an interaction between a buyer and a seller. Exactly. They really didn't have a choice. They didn't know how to get out of this town. You know, the cops were swarming.

And after you've left your town, you've made that decision to make this trip, the last thing in the world you want to do is get sent back. The only option was to go with a smuggler, and so they did. And then what happened when they joined forces with a smuggler? We started walking. With a smuggler. We started walking. And it turned out almost everything the smuggler had promised was hollow.

There were no cars waiting for us. There were no buses. We took this incredibly circuitous route off of the highway, along the railroad, off in other sort of unmarked paths for 30 kilometers each of the days we were going. And the guys were soldiers. They didn't stop for breaks. They moved briskly. They were adamant about keeping the pace up. They didn't want to slow down. And it was, you know, pretty brutal conditions. You're talking about 90 plus degree heat, mosquitoes everywhere, very little shade. so you're out in the sun.

At the end of our first night, we wound up in this small town. It was about 10 p.m., 11 p.m. You know, we'd been walking since maybe 5.30 that morning. And as we walk into town, we pass a group of men drinking in sort of a central plaza, and they begin to yell threats. They see these migrants coming through, and they begin to call them names. They begin to threaten violence. The migrants started sprinting, running away from them. We raced to the safe house where the smuggler had sort of set up a place for everybody to spend the night. And some ladies across the street called us over, and they told us that we shouldn't spend the night in that house,

that people, in particular migrants, had been killed there before. This is the tragedy of this trip. You have to trust all these people along the way that you don't know whether you can trust. This smuggler, sure, he was going to get paid, but who knows, maybe it would have been worth more to kidnap everybody and sell them to a cartel or some other kind of racket. And this is just in one day. How do you understand that determination to march through the heat, the mosquitoes, with so little food and so little water and atrocious conditions? How do you understand that?

I think for a lot of these migrants, it's about survival. There's a lot of focus on, do these people deserve to get asylum? Are they truly threatened? There's a lot of focus on, do these people deserve to get asylum? Are they truly threatened? But ultimately, at the end of the day, I don't think there's a terribly massive amount of difference between my kid might get killed to my child has no future here. I think this obsession with how real is the threat, how imminent is the threat, it's missing the point. Nobody wants to leave home. Nobody wants to go to a foreign country where they know no one,

have no network, and restart without any real sense of promise there. People make these choices because they don't feel like they have an alternative. Various protests were held Saturday to oppose the government's handling of the migrant crisis, especially the separation of child migrants from their families. — I don't think people can even begin to imagine what it's like to put yourself in the shoes of a four-year-old child in a foreign land, speaking a foreign language, just in a cage like an animal. These are human beings, and they deserve to be treated as such. So when President Trump takes a step,

like beginning to separate children from their parents who are arriving from countries like El Salvador, what does that do to the flow? Because the message is clearly designed to be, look at the lengths we are willing to go to discourage you. So does it discourage? I mean, I think, to be completely fair, we have yet to see.

We don't know what's going to happen in the next few months. But if history is a guide, the various measures taken, the various draconian steps to inhibit this migration, this mass migration, none of them really worked. The thing behind all of this is that desperation hasn't really changed. 2014, we saw this flood of people. 2015, a flood of people. 2016, 2017, up to this year.

The numbers dipped slightly after Trump was elected, and then they went right back to where they were, which tells you one thing. This isn't changing. The only thing that's changed about this is the administration and their policy towards it. We have very bad laws for our border, and we are going to be doing some things.

I've been speaking with General Mattis. We're going to be doing things militarily. Until we can have a wall and proper security, we're going to be guarding our border with the military. That's a big step. So I think it's the draconian punitive measures that have changed. And

with what's happening now at the border, is the desperation that you're describing, is that why when presumably these migrants know that they might be separated from their children, is that why they're still willing to take this risk because of these conditions back at home, because of the pervasiveness of this sense that there's just nothing for them? of this sense that there's just nothing for them. I think from the outside, it might seem illogical.

Why would you go into a country where they could separate you from your children? But A, what you mentioned, that desperation is profound. It drives you out. And it, to many, I think seems like less of a threat than what's back home. And that's because they know what's back home. They've lived what's back home. They've seen it.

They've made that calculus in their head. Until you can match the desperation that is fueling this, until you can completely erase any glimmer of hope that would make a potential life in America better than what amounts to a horrible life in El Salvador, you're not going to change that dynamic. It's not advocating for more draconian policies. It's simply the fact that, like,

there's still some semblance of hope because you know what you're leaving. You know how bad it is. You've measured the contours of your desperation. So I don't think you change people's minds unless you make it worse than what it is in El Salvador. And even then, I'm not sure it's going to change their minds. From everything you describe,

the conditions in places like El Salvador are not improving. And it's reached a point where almost everyone in a country like that can argue that they are living in fear and need asylum, which raises an incredibly complicated question for the United States. Because if almost everyone in a country is living in fear and could make an argument that they need to come to the United States, what is the U.S. to do? It couldn't possibly absorb an entire nation. I mean, I think that's a defining question of our time. I think not just in the United States, but in Europe as well. Other countries where you see populations fleeing desperation,

trying to relocate, and governments trying to figure out, well, how do we manage this? When do we stop saying yes? And at what point do we start saying no? We can come up with policies to criminalize migrants. We can come up with ways to convince the Mexicans to do our job for us. But until those root causes are addressed, the problems of El Salvador are also the problems of the United States,

not in the same respect, not in the body count, not in the violence, but in the implications of that body count and that violence, in the way that it shows up at our borders in the form of a 14-year-old kid who's just trekked more than a thousand miles to look for refuge. It's a challenge that isn't about to go away anytime soon. Assam, those men that you traveled with through Mexico, from Central America, trying to reach the U.S. border. Do you know if they ever made it? Only two of them made it. The other eight, for varying reasons. Among them, they were robbed.

Some of them stayed in Mexico. One of them actually went back to Honduras and subsequently lost his life there. The migrant who sort of led the group actually wound up crossing into the United States on Christmas Eve. And I think that is ultimately the allure of this journey, that you can go there and find job as a dishwasher. That allure, you just need it to be better than what you're leaving. And for those two guys, it certainly has been. ¶¶

¶¶ Here's what else you need to know today. On Saturday night, three days after President Trump signed the executive order ending the separation of children and their parents, his administration announced it had reunited 522 families. But about 2,000 separated children remain in federal detention facilities. On Sunday, Trump once again doubled down on hardline talk about the situation at the border, calling for migrants arriving there illegally to be deprived of their due process rights. We cannot allow all these people to invade our country, the president tweeted.

When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no judges or court cases, bring them back where they came from. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.