The New Yorker Radio Hour - From Mexico, the Reality of the Migrant Caravan

Episode Date: November 2, 2018

Jonathan Blitzer spent a week in Mexico with the so-called caravan—a group of about five thousand migrants, most of them from Honduras, who are making a dangerous journey on foot to the U.S. border. Donald Trump, who has described the caravan as “invaders” who might include terrorists and criminals, is using the issue to galvanize Republicans for the midterms. The reality, which Blitzer describes to David Remnick, is remarkably different: exhausted people walking thirty miles a day in sandals and Crocs, sleeping largely in the open, and wholly dependent on townspeople along their route and a few aid groups for food and water. They travel in a group for protection from kidnappers, criminals, and the notoriously severe Mexican immigration authorities. They know little about how their trek has been politicized in the U.S. Those who make it to the U.S. border will likely be greeted by an overwhelming show of American force, but, for these migrants, almost any uncertainty is better than the certain poverty and violence of their home country. Plus, a group of progressive women in rural Texas has been organizing in secret, but some of them are ready to speak out. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The election this week is going to be, quote, an election of the caravan. That's according to the president of the United States. Donald Trump has talked about the migrant caravan that it's now in Mexico, relentlessly, unceasingly, he's trying to whip up as much fear as he can on the eve of the midterm elections. He's described it as an invading army with potential terrorists and criminals in their midst. The reality of the caravan is something entirely different, and one of our reporters is on the ground to describe it.

The New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer spent a week reporting on the caravan, walking alongside them, and talking all day long with the thousands of people who have been heading north. I reached Jonathan Blitzer in Mexico. John, you've spent a week embedded in the migrant caravan, as it's been called, traveling from Honduras north toward the border between Mexico and Texas, although I'll just. a long way away. Where did you join up? How far into the journey has it been? And how many people were along? By the time I joined the group, they had been traveling for a few weeks. I met them in southern Mexico in the state of Chiapas, as they were in a small city of about maybe 50,000 residents called Mapastepec. And by then, the group had pretty much been, you know, steady at a little over 5,000 people.

And what they've been doing is they've been kind of skirting the western edge of the state of Chiapas, moving north, bit by bit, walking about 25 to 30 miles a day. How many hours a day is that? Yeah, I mean, they start, so they start early. They start before the sun is up. So they started around four in the morning, sometimes even earlier, because it's so hot. And once the sun comes up by eight in the morning, and it's 90, 95 degrees. And they're walking along a highway, and so the heat really builds because of the concrete. the pavement rather. And so, you know, you start to see people arrive in the next destination as early as midday,

and then kind of trickling in through the evening before they start the next trip for the next city. Well, what are the logistics of things? In other words, how do people eat and get water and charge their phones? It must be immensely complicated. It is, and it's kind of an amazing thing to behold. I think roughly, I mean, just in terms of the basics, water, food, caravan members are entirely dependent, really, on communities along the route, making donations. There's kind of a weird patchwork of relief agencies and groups that are traveling along with them. People bring food to the town square. There's medical attention that some of the migrants can get through this network of relief agencies.

And so what they do is when they arrive in a place, there's kind of this, that the city, wherever it is, becomes almost a refugee camp, a kind of refugee camp for basically 24 hours. Well, where are they sleeping? They're sleeping on the street. Sometimes they're sleeping inside. But for the most part, it's outside in parks. It's just on the street. It's in fields along the route.

Some of them sleep along the side of the road. It's that, it's striking. Now, John, I think we want to know, above all, where these people are from, what they want, And what is the common story that you keep hearing? The vast majority of people on the caravan, if not nearly all of them, are from Honduras. And the story you hear to a person is that life in Honduras is just no longer sustainable. There's no work. The cities and communities across Honduras are incredibly violent and dangerous.

Most of the people I've been talking to have tried pretty much everything they could think of. They've tried changing their jobs. They've tried moving to different places within the country. And so there's a real sense of desperation among pretty much everyone who's undertaking this trip. I don't know how fixated everyone is on the U.S. People are really so desperate just to get on the move that they haven't even all considered what the U.S. looks like, what the border policy would involve, kind of whether or not they could go through the full asylum process. And so we've heard numbers like 5,000, too.

is that number growing larger or getting smaller over time? I think that number is roughly consistent. The group is thinning a little bit, increasingly what people are doing, is they are trying to hitch rides. In some cases, church groups have arranged van and truck transport. And so it's a little bit more diffuse than it initially was, but there is still a basic kind of core logic to the way the caravan advances. The idea is that you can't get too far ahead of the caravan,

because then you lose all the benefits of traveling with this large of a group why they traveling in such a big group it's what's the purpose of a caravan as opposed to twenty five people traveling together and hitching rides or whoever they would do it well really the caravan give them protection uh... and the whole point of the caravan it's funny when we look at the caravan from from the u s side it looks like this overtly political act of symbolic act uh... sort of a collective

stand against the authorities along the way really what it is is uh... tool to get through Mexico. The route itself through Mexico is extremely dangerous. There are armed groups, there are gangs, there are criminals who kidnap you, extort you, beat you, brutalize you. I mean, these are all very real risks. And on top of that, Mexican immigration authorities are actually in Central America famously brutal for how they deal with Central American migrants. Mexico has deported more Central Americans back home than the U.S. has over the last several years. And so the idea, by traveling in this group, you kind of enure yourself against

Mexican authorities just converging on the group, arresting everyone, and deporting them. It's too hard for the Mexican government to deal with a group this large. Once the group, if the group, can eventually hit the U.S., and that's uncertain, and that's many weeks away at a minimum, the idea of the caravan no longer has the same utility. Then people will kind of disperse and make their particular asylum claims or sort of try to cross as they can. John, you're not alone there as a journalist. There must be some awareness that people in the United States are watching this, that this is the focus of attention, particularly on right-wing media, and Donald Trump has been calling it an invasion. Invasion is the word that has become the talking point for the Republican right about this. Do people talk about this in the caravan? The people I'm talking to, people are very aware of how aggressive Trump is on this subject. But I don't think they have much of a sense at all of the midterm context of how the right in the U.S. is kind of using this as a rallying cry.

So they're not aware of the election coming in a matter of days. And of course, you know, in some ways, why would they be? Because they're not going to arrive at the U.S. border for several weeks still. The midterms will be over by the time some of these people arrive at the U.S. border. So when Trump tweets that criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in with the Hondurans in the caravan, it seems like a code for terrorists and lots of rhetoric about bad people, to use his phrase. Are there any signs of this in the group? None at all.

Is anyone armed? No one that I've seen, no one that I've heard about. You know, the group, there are little, as you can imagine, there are tensions and fissures within the group. They've been traveling for weeks. They've been doing this grueling journey. There are rumors sometimes that circulate within the group that while I was in one of these towns in the southern tip of Wohaka, there were rumors that someone was stealing babies, and everyone

in the camp panicked and looked for this culprit. And in fact, within hours, it turned out that, okay, there was nothing had happened. But that's really the extent of it. I mean, there's nothing at all aggressive or violent or dangerous about this group. You're seeing children. You're seeing mothers. You're seeing fathers. You're seeing people who are making this grueling 30-mile-a-day trip in crocs, in sandals, in flip-flops.

It is a thoroughly unintimidating group of people. So when they start hearing about thousands of troops being sent by Trump to the border, what's the reaction? I think for the most part people expect the U.S. border to be hard to cross. but I don't even think that that's an immediate concern of theirs quite yet. In some ways, the more immediate political concern for them is what's happening in Mexico. This is something that's frequently been overlooked in the context of the caravan. In early December, a new president will take over in Mexico, and he's, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and he's thought to be much more sympathetic to the plight of migrants, at least compared to his predecessor.

and there's some uncertainty within the group about what will happen come December 1st when Mexican leadership changes. This is a president who said he'd stand up to Trump, who very much wants to be seen as a man of the people. I mean, the Mexican government is actually between Iraq and a hard place here. I mean, you have Trump breathing down their necks to stop this entire caravan in its tracks. The Mexican government can't exactly do that. It also has partners, obviously, in the region, and so it can't be seen as being too brutal

with this caravan as it moves north. John, last week, of course, Robert Bowers broke into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 people, wounded more. And his message on social media was a hysteria about what he called invaders, a word that we're now hearing on Fox News all the time, a word that we hear from the president.

Invaders, in his words, that come in to kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered, is what Bowers wrote. He talked about massive human caravans invading America as the motivation for his fury and eventually his murderous rampage in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. And I wonder, as you were making this trek alongside these migrants, how you process this reality of what's happening.

I mean, I really needed to compartment. environmentalized because to see, I mean, to see news like that, tragic, tragic news, to hear the president continue even after that, even after that massacre to sort of gin up the base about this, about this totally unfounded fear of the border being overrun. It's just, it's so plainly at odds with what's happening here on the ground that it's too overwhelming even to try to take stock of. You know, here on the ground, they're two, they're worlds apart. I mean, there's no, the people marching north are in a state of exhaustion, desperation, almost unfathomable uncertainty, and the U.S. remains to many of them in abstraction.

What isn't abstract to them is, you know, the blisters on their feet, their thirst, their uncertainty about where they'll sleep at night. But the thing that was probably for me most striking about it was that around the time, basically a day after the shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, the caravan itself, about 5,000 people strong, arrives in southern Wohaka and is preparing to advance to a tiny village, and this is where we were based, called Santiago Niletepec. Population, 4,000. So, smaller population than the caravan itself.

And, you know, I'm listening to rhetoric in the U.S., the president sending troops to the border, telling voters across the country that we're about to be wiped out because, this band of marauders is advancing on our border. And here, I'm in a small town where there are actually more migrants arriving and there are residents. And it was kind of this amazing moment of parallel universes. And you just watched as a community dealt with this incredibly complex and intractable thing, the arrival of 5,000 people.

And they felt a fear and a desire to kind of recoil from the migrants as they arrived. At the same time, they felt a moral responsibility to help. and over the 24-hour period that the caravan was in this tiny town of Santiago Nilepec, you watched the community in a really organic and kind of soulful way deal with this insane situation. It really devastated me to see. So that was kind of the landscape for us as we were taking in that news. Eventually, these people will reach the border, presumably.

What would be a humane, a sane and pragmatic? way to deal with them when they do reach the border? These people who do reach the border, and to be clear, you know, of the 5,000 people on this caravan, it's not at all certain that all of them or nearly all of them, or for that matter, half of them. Caravans that have been more than 1,000 people large, who have tried to advance to the U.S. typically have only a few hundred arrive at the U.S. border seeking asylum. But in any case, when members of this caravan do arrive at the U.S. border, probably later in

November. There is an asylum process in place at the border, and those who have claims of credible fear of being persecuted in their home countries will and should by law, by international and U.S. law, have the right to present those claims to immigration agents at the border and to have U.S. authorities weigh those claims. The problem is, of course, that I'm not even confident that those who have legitimate claims of asylum will have the opportunity to pursue it in the U.S. But the humane response for the U.S. government is to follow international law and to give those seeking refuge in the U.S. a chance to make their claim and at least let the cards fall. Jonathan Blitzer is speaking to us from Mexico. Thanks so much, John. Thanks, David. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.

Hi, this is BJ. Oh, poo. I mean, I got so many voters yesterday. Being a campaign volunteer isn't easy, on any campaign, and especially not if you're a progressive in rural Texas, canvassing for Beto O'Rourke. Last Saturday, I had seven volunteers to Blockwalk in the town of Burrhus.

which is a teeny, teeny, tiny place. So I go up to this house and it was absolutely a shack. I was scared. It looked a little uncomfortable. There's black screen netting over where the door is, so there's no door to knock on. And I have my Beto t-shirt on. And all of a sudden I hear this guy's voice come out and he says, hey, you're either damn brave or damn stupid to be on a porch in this neighborhood, and I started to back off, and he goes, but don't worry, honey, I'm going to vote for Beto. Around here is in many places. Some people whose views are to the left, just keep it to themselves. They're afraid of backlash from their communities, their friends, even their families.

But we found out about a group of women who are so angry at the state of the country that they've begun to organize, in secret. WNYC's Amanda Oranchic told their story for the podcast, the United states of anxiety. Emily? Hello. Hey. A few weeks ago, I called up Emily Van Dune. She's at the University of Texas at Austin doing research into politics and communication. After the election, an acquaintance told her about this group of women who meet in secret with the blinds drawn at an undisclosed location. At first, she wasn't welcome at their meetings. But eventually, once they had built trust, some of the women agreed to be interviewed for an academic paper. I asked her to read me what

one of the women said. So one woman mentioned she felt the need to do a secret handshake upon arriving at the first meeting by nightfall. She said just the day of driving in, in the middle of nowhere, in the country, and seeing taillights and taillights and tail lights behind you. I think I was the first one to pull in and then every car after that, people getting out. It was truly a feeling of like we should do a secret hands. handshake and look around us in the bushes. It was a very surreal kind of feeling. And then seeing who they were and not having had a clue before that those people felt the same way as I did, I don't know it was a very unique experience. Of course I wanted to go to a meeting, but the women

didn't want a journalist there. It took Emily months to be welcomed at the meetings, and so I sent her with a recorder instead. Hi, Amanda. This is Emily. I am driving to the meeting, so I figured I'd give you a little background noise of the windy road on my way there. They won't disclose what county they're in, but I know this. It's rural Texas. There are ranches and farms. And it's a place where at night you can see every light for miles and miles. I am pulling into the place where they meet.

One more detail. In the last election, this community voted, overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Emily arrives an hour before the meeting is scheduled to start. Only two of the women agreed to speak with me. Okay, I think that we are recording. So what I'm going to do is hand off the phone to the first woman that you're going to interview. Okay.

One second. The first woman didn't want us to use her real name, so we'll call her Eleanor. When I first moved here, it's been some years, I was told personally, when they found out who I was and where I had moved here from. She's originally from the South, but she lived in a blue state for many years. So someone said to her, why don't you go back to where you came from? You know, we don't want you here, really. There were two occasions that that happened to me,

and we became withdrawn in terms of speaking out about how we felt for that very reason. She realized back then that to be welcome in this community in Texas, she couldn't be politically active. She'd have to stop talking about politics. I have a very large extended family in the area, and they are die-hard Republicans, and I guess you could call them evangelicals, and they are very, very much opposed to what I believe and what I think.

Are you able to still get together as a family? No, but that happened long ago. It happened to be an atheist. I'm not a Christian, and they are very much upset. by that, they have accused me of being the devil and various other things like that. So we have a delicate relationship, we'll put it. And my sister in particular, I still have a relationship with,

but the day after the election, she came over gloating to my house about the fact that Trump had won, and that almost ended our relationship right there. Trump's win was a shock for Eleanor. And on the day after the election, all she could do was call up her best friend. We were crying over the telephone. We said we have to get together. And so we met and literally just drove around in her car, just kind of crying and talking and saying, what could we do? And we kind of spontaneously said, well, we need to have some type of a therapy session.

She said, we're grieving. And I said, yes. So they send an email to women who they think might be like-minded. They get together for wine and cheese and crying. Then after that, they meet again, and the group starts to grow. How do new people join if it's secret? Like, do you have to know somebody in the group? Yes. Someone has to know them and invite them and bring them.

Yes. Okay. Once you're joined this group and you sign an agreement agreeing to keep the rules of this group, then I send an invitation for them to join the secret Facebook group. Everyone has agreed to follow the same rules. Rule number one, you have to be a woman. Rule number two, you have to be invited by someone who knows you well. And rule number three, outsiders shouldn't know who's in the group.

And now that secret Facebook group has over 130 women in it. What do you worry about for them or what do they worry about? Well, they worry about being affected by the fact that they're democratic. And I personally know one member of our group who, was fired from her job because she voiced liberal democratic ideas. I know two other women that think that they would lose business. So then I know several in the group that have spouses that do not agree with their point of view and are so adamant that they keep it hidden from their spouse what they're doing.

In some ways, Eleanor's story is a cautionary one. Some of the women in the group don't want to jeopardize their relationships, like she did. They don't want to go home to their families or their husbands and have the same fight night after night, so they stay quiet. The other woman who agreed to speak with me, I'll call her Margaret. She's also in the group, and she keeps it a secret because she doesn't want to out any of the other women, but she has less at stake. Like, I don't have young children depending on me. I'm not a single mother trying to run my own business with three little kids, trying to manage all alone in the world

and I'm dependent on all these people's business. I'm not. You know, I'm older. I'm retired. And I don't have to worry about that kind of stuff anymore. And so that allows me a certain amount of freedom than a lot of these other women don't have. When the group started to be less of a therapy session and more of a political action group,

they all mailed out postcards and made get-out-the-vote calls. But unlike the women who want to stay anonymous, Margaret's even gone to a few protests. It's there that she's seen the tensions in her community. I've been at protests where there were counter-protesters, and it was unbelievably hostile. She says there was this one time where she was part of a small protest

outside a congressperson's office. But even though it was just a few dozen people with some handmade signs, counter-protesters showed up and set up across the street. They all pulled in with their pickup trucks with guns on their gun racks. They get out of their pickup trucks and they're nasty and belligerent

and shouting obscenities at us and they're drinking beer. So here you have people who are publicly intoxicated who are being aggressive and have guns on their gun racks. And the drunker they got, the more personal and obnoxious

what they were yelling at us became to the point where they were saying, well, yeah, y'all, you know we got guns here. All we got to do is cross this here street and come after you. Emily Van Dune, the researcher who introduced me to these women, helped me understand why this secret group exists in rural Texas and not somewhere like New York City.

If you wore a Make America Great Hat and you walk down Broadway, you would probably get harassed. And so I would not at all be surprised to find out that there's a secret Trump group that meets, you know, and they don't tell their friends. And, you know, what is the difference between that and this group? Yeah, I think the unique part about this group, is that the small nature, the tight-knit nature, the dependence on their community as a rural area,

necessitates the secrecy some because they just do not have the choice in their community to just find other people. If you put a betto sign in your yard, everyone knows you live at that house and who you're voting for. There's no anonymity in rural Texas. But it's not like these women want to move somewhere else.

They like it there. In some ways, they have a lot in common with their neighbors. It's a patriotic community. They start every meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance. And they have a flag at the front of the room that they put into this easel. And they would just like tuck it in there so it's like elevated and everyone can see it. So that when they're, you know, doing the Pledge of Allegiance, they're actually looking at a flag. And so in the middle of the meeting, the easel, which is just like old buckles and the flag comes like flying out of this easel.

And just such a strong memory of them yelling from the back of the room, grab that flag, because it was going to hit the ground. At that moment, I was like, I'm in the middle of rural Texas. Everyone outside of this room essentially voted for Donald Trump. The people in this room did not. But they are so patriotic. They're willing to meet in this secret place and still pledge allegiance to the flag and still run to catch it before it hits the ground.

And that's so powerful and so meaningful. As a group, do you think there's anyone who suspects what you guys are up to? Oh, there are people that suspect what we're up to, yes, but they haven't been able to figure it out exactly. Really? Yeah, well, we've heard, we had a spy in the Republican Party meeting and who came back and said, oh, they're worried, but they can't figure out what you're doing and where you're doing it.

What did they say, though, like, oh, we hear there's a group of women. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, there's this group. You know, they're on the rise. You better look out for them. You know they're campaigning and they're making phone calls. It seemed like they were starting to have an impact. There was even an article in the local paper noting that voter registrations were up.

And a part of it, we believe, is because of all the calling and campaigning and walking and whatnot that we've done. And at the very, very end of the article, there was just a little line that says, oh, yeah, those Democrats are out beating the bushes. If you could predict, what do you think is going to happen? I think that we'll have a new Democratic senator. And as far as down the ticket, I don't know. I think that that's less possible. But our candidate for Senator Beto has done an excellent, excellent job of visiting every county in Texas. And he has a lot of enthusiasm.

And he's winning over people that have maybe been borderline because he's not running a nasty campaign. He's running a campaign that says, here is what we can do. that's good and right and decent. The women are really hopeful. But I think even if their candidate doesn't win, this has been pretty transformative for them. They're not necessarily all in the political closet anymore. What is it about the group that makes the difference?

Oh, gosh, you know, if you're alone somewhere and you feel like you're on an island, but yet you're surrounded by thousands of people, it's pretty lonely. And having this group of women has made an enormous difference to me and knowing, just knowing that there are people out there that support me and what I believe in, support our country and are working for the same goals, it just really, really makes a difference to me.

Living in Texas for all these years, Eleanor swallowed a part of herself. She'd convinced herself that voting, privately, all alone in the vote, voting booth was enough. So every time there's an election, she would vote. And she's like, that's fine. I did my job. But since Trump won, she feels embarrassed that she thought that voting was enough. And now she's out of the political closet. I don't care if my business suffers. I don't care if I suffer. I don't care if, you know, what they say to me or do to me, that's it. I'm done. And I'm not backing down anymore. I'm not keeping my mouth shut. I'm going out. No holes barred. while Eleanor, as we've called her, says she's going to go public.

Others in her group are not, and they continue to hold their meetings in secret. Amanda Orancich reported for the United States of Anxiety, a podcast from WNYC Studios. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Look for a fresh episode every Friday and Tuesday. I'm David Remnick. See you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by M.

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