Throughline - Throughline Presents: White Lies

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

It all started with a photograph. A photograph from 1991 of a prison takeover in rural Alabama. A photograph of a group of men on the roof of that prison holding a bedsheet scrawled with a message: "Pray for us." In the first episode of the new season of White Lies, hosts Chip Brantley and Andrew Beck Grace go searching for answers to the questions raised by this photograph. Who were these men? What on earth had made them want to take over that prison? And what became of them after? As they search, they uncover a sprawling story: a mass exodus across the sea, a secret list, and the betrayal at the heart of this country's ideals. This week, we're bringing you an episode of White Lies, a series by NPR's documentary podcast Embedded, which unearths the stories behind the headlines.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey, it's Rand and Ramteen. More than 2.5 million undocumented migrants crossed the U.S. southern border in 2022, hundreds of thousands more people than the previous year. U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the increase has been largely driven

by migration from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. There's a certain irony here. Because the current state of the U.S. immigration system, the detentions, the deportations, the question of who has rights and who doesn't, can actually be traced back, at least in part, to a mass migration from Cuba more than 40 years ago. In 1980, the migrants came by boat on what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. Then-Cuban President Fidel Castro opened a port for any Cubans who wanted to leave the country, and more than 100,000 people did. The story of what happened to some of

those migrants once they arrived in the U.S. helps explain a lot about our current immigration system and the deep divisions that surround it. And that's the focus of the latest season of White Lies, an investigative series from NPR hosted by Chip Brantley and Andrew Beckgrace. Today, we're giving the mic to them. Coming up, a tale of mass migration and indefinite detentions that starts in an unexpected place, Talladega, Alabama. Before we found the man in Vancouver, before we sued the State Department, before we snuck into the graveyard of a federal penitentiary, and before we received the brown paper package that changed everything,

all we had were the photographs. We just stumbled onto them. We were in the photo archives of a newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama, looking through rows of filing cabinets, each one containing small manila envelopes with negatives organized by year. And we were looking for something else entirely when we found them. They were in envelopes dated 1991. One envelope read,

Talladega Federal Prison Hostage Situation. And another, Cubans Take Over Federal Prison. Most of the images inside were unremarkable. Cops milling about, press conference with the warden, news vans all in a row. But then we found the photos of the men on the roof. These were taken on a hilltop hundreds of yards from the prison. They were taken with a telephoto lens, so the angle of view is very narrow and the images are blurry, especially around the edges.

They show a group of men standing on top of the roof of the prison. You can't really make out their faces, but they're holding bedsheets with messages scrawled across them. Please, media, justice, freedom, or death, reads one. Another says simply, pray for us. These images had been here in this filing cabinet unseen for decades. And at least for the people in Alabama, the story they depicted had been mostly forgotten. When we asked around, hey, do you know anything about this prison riot in Talladega in the 90s? Hardly anyone remembered it, despite the fact that it had been by far the longest prison takeover in the state's history. One of the longest in the entire country. And for those who did remember something about it, the memory was always vague and precise.

Oh yeah, that thing with the Cubans, they'd say. It was like this decades-old story. It just kind of faded away around here. Not every moment in the past can be remembered. There's a burden to remembering, a convenience to forgetting. Sometimes it's just easier to look away. But still, there was something about these photographs of the men on the roof. Something about not being able to really make out their faces. Something about Cuban men in a prison in rural Alabama holding a bed sheet that said, pray for us. Just the incongruity of it all. But it didn't take much to realize that those

telephoto images had framed out an unimaginable human drama. A mass migration across the sea, back-channel Cold War communiques, family separation, and the creation of a secret government list. And these men had been sent to that prison in Talladega, Alabama because their names were on this list. And in 1991, when they took to the roof of the prison, they were not being held as prisoners. None were serving time for a sentence. They were immigration detainees, and some of them had been indefinitely detained for over a decade. The story we're going to tell you, it's about what happened when we set out to find the men on the roof. And it starts not at the beginning,

but here at the end, at the Talladega Federal Correctional Institution. They were just detained there waiting for either deportation or trials or anything like that. Most of them were awaiting deportation. That's Cynthia Corzo. In 1991, she was a young reporter for Miami's Spanish-language daily newspaper, El Nuevo Herald. I would get phone calls from prisoners on a regular basis. And one in particular in Talladega, his name is Jorge Luis Marquez Medina. He was one that used to call regularly, and he would always call me directly.

And one day, phone rings, collect call from Jorge Marquez, and, you know, casual conversation. Hey, how are you? I said, oh, how are things, this and that. And all of a sudden he says, oh, we're rioting and we took prisoners. We've got hostages. I was like, what do you mean we have prisoners? He said, yeah, yeah, we're all up in arms. He said it in Spanish. What was it? Estamos amotinados. And what does that translate to exactly? Basically, we've started a riot. On the morning of August 21, 1991, a handful of the men detained at Talladega were in a secure recreation yard. They overpowered a guard, took his keys, and began releasing other detainees in the unit. By the time Jorge Marquez Medina called Cynthia, all 119 detainees had been released from their cells.

After like an initial shock, I just started asking him additional questions and hung up with him, told my editors. And they got me and a photographer on a flight out to Talladega to cover the situation. It's hard for me to put myself in their shoes, but I wonder if you got a sense of what they hope to get out of all this. I don't know that they really thought that through. You know, he just said it was our only option. We had to do something and this was the only thing we could think of. One, two, three. One, two, three. I got a message into the public opinion of the United States.

Some of them have made the statement very clearly that they are willing to die rather than be returned to Cuba. This man just read our names, all of our names, and then he said, there's a boat waiting for you. Get everybody. I think we should go back and remember what happened in 1980. In effect, these people were dumped on the United States. We'll continue to provide an open heart and open arms to refugees seeking freedom.

This isn't right. What our government is doing in our name is not right. They're not being held because they're charged with a crime. These people are being indefinitely detained. You can't just keep these people in jail until they die. In many cases, we never heard back from them. It was like if the earth had swallowed them. From NPR, this is White Lies.

I'm Chip Brantley. And I'm Andrew Beck Grace. This message comes from NPR sponsor, the NPR Wine Club, a place to explore the exciting world of wine, including wines inspired by popular NPR shows, like Weekend Edition Cabernet. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, all purchases help support NPR programming and fund quality reporting developed to connect people to their communities and the world they

live in. More at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. The men on the roof were in Talladega because their names were on a list, a secret list, a list made in secret, kept in secret. The list has never been released, so all that's known about it for sure is that it was announced on December 14, 1984, and that it contains the names of 2,746 Cubans who came to the U.S. in 1980, but who the U.S. government deemed ineligible for legal admission to the country. There was a list of specific individuals, and as these individuals became deportable, they were moved to Talladega. Had the whole list been deported, there wouldn't have been

any more reason for my job. In August of 1991, Jerry Walsh was a deportation officer for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the INS. He worked inside Talladega in the prison's Alpha Unit. For those on the list who were about to be deported back to Cuba, the Alpha Unit was the last stop. The Immigration Service is strange because you deal with people as commodities. If I arrested a guy for drugs, you take the drugs, you send the guy to jail, and you're done. You know, you arrest an alien, you might take whatever he's got illegal on him, but then you have this person you have to deal with. And it's a lot harder to take care of people than it is five pounds of dope.

Well, what led up to it was that some of the Cubans found out there was going to be a big plane load of them going back to Cuba the next day. That's Linda Calhoun. In 1991, she was working as a deportation docket clerk for the INS at the federal prison in Talladega. Linda is originally from Brooklyn. Maybe you can tell by her accent. And she and her family had only lived in the South for a couple of years. It was like a different world. The little one, I think when we got there, must have been like four or five years old. And she picked up this Alabama slang that it was like a knife, a sharp knife going in my ears and twisting them.

It's terrible to say, but I hated for Vicki to talk. But despite the kids' accents, the family liked it in Alabama. They lived on a big property with a bunch of animals. Her husband worked at the nearby army base. My first cousin at that time was an MP at Fort McClellan. He came home one night and in the driveway there was this little puppy that just fit in the palm of his hand. Well, my husband loved animals and he put it in a box and that little puppy just cried all night and we tried to feed it with a little doll bottle. I didn't get that much sleep that night. Maybe I should have stayed home that day, but that day was when they took us hostage.

Well, I remember that I wasn't supposed to be working there that day. I had swapped out with a friend of mine because I had relatives in North Carolina who invited my family to come hang out on the beach. So the day before, I was in the beach in North Carolina, and that morning I came on duty, and there you go. Mary Hogan was a corrections officer at Talladega, working for the Bureau of Prisons. The morning of Wednesday, August 21st, started out like any other day in Alpha Unit. After breakfast, the detainees were allowed time in a secure recreation yard just outside the unit. So they were in a cell and they had to extend their hands out so that they could be handcuffed while they were still in the cell. Once they were handcuffed, we popped open the cell door and one officer would escort the inmate by holding the handcuffs,

and another officer would be supervising it, and we escorted them out. The yard was divided into five chain-link cages, each 20 by 30 feet, with a chain-link fence on all sides, even a chain-link ceiling. And each pen could hold a few detainees. One guard would patrol the rec yard, lighting detainees' cigarettes or bringing them water from a cooler. There was a little enclosed yard area for recreation for the detainees, and we were sending people out to recreation. I was talking to a guy in a bottom cell through the door to a cell,

and I heard a commotion behind me. Over the years we've been working on this story, we've heard different versions about what happened next. The team from the Bureau of Prisons, who would later produce the after-action report on the incident, was unclear how it all started. They would say simply that they were, quote, unable to determine the exact manner in which this occurred. From our reporting, we know that it started with three detainees in one of the recreation cages. One story involves a disguise,

another features a piece of stolen jewelry, and yet another an igloo cooler and a distracted guard. But the most plausible version seems to be that the detainees threw a handball under the bottom of the fence, and when the guard went to retrieve the ball, he was close enough for one detainee to grab his arm and pull him hard against the fence. Another detainee whipped out a screw they'd taken from a crate of instant mashed potatoes and held it against the guard's neck. The third detainee grabbed the guard's keys, and in a matter of minutes, they were trying to get back into the unit. I'm sitting in my office doing paperwork. I think the Cubans were supposed to fly out the next day, and I heard a commotion. One of the BOP yells out, Cubans took over the rec yard.

What the hell's going on? I says, what do we do? I looked out my office door and a BOP guard was leaning on the entry door looking around for help, you know. I went out to help him hold the door. They finally pushed in through the door and retreated to my office. I think I had already called it in. You know, 10-1 I think is a general code for bad things happening, but I think I specifically said, they're taking the place. I started to turn to run, and the guy stopped and came walking towards me.

And he said, don't do it. So I gave up. That's what our training was. I said, okay, I'm not running. Gave him my radio. I was with the language specialist, and we heard all the yelling and the running around and everything. So, you know, my legs were like this, moving so fast. I tried to hold on to them, but my hands were going like that, so he says, just take it easy, don't worry. So then the door flung open, and it was the Cubans. They opened the door, don't hurt Miss Linda.

So they told him, no, we won't hurt her. I mean, it surprised me how fast they move and how they were organized. Do you ever watch any of the Chuck Norris movies? Delta Force. I mean it's quick, quick, one, two, three. I mean you know that every one of my office and the other side were open, and we were vastly outnumbered. They came into the office, okay, and they started going for telephones. It's at this point, just minutes after they've taken over Alpha Unit, that Jorge Marquez Medina called the reporter at El Nuevo Herald, Cynthia Corzo.

All of a sudden he says, oh, we're rioting and we took prisoners. We've got hostages. After Corzo hung up with Marquez Medina, her first call was to her photographer, C.M. Guerrero. The only thing I knew about Talladega was that there was a big giant racetrack there, you know, the Talladega Speedway. By the time Corzo and Guerrero arrived at the prison, all 119 Cuban detainees and Alpha Unit had been released from their cells, and they were holding 10 hostages, seven guards from the Bureau of Prisons, and three INS employees. Media outlets from across the country were descending on Talladega,

as was law enforcement from across the region. I never felt so much pressure on a photo assignment ever. It was like one big giant SWAT unit was there surrounding this cell compound. A lot of FBI, you can cut through the knife. The tension was so, I don't know what it was. It was how quiet everybody was. Cuban inmates took over part of a federal prison in Talladega, Alabama today. At least 10 people are believed to be held hostage, including guards and immigration and naturalization officials. And what does your training tell you to do at this point once you've been locked in this room? Well, generally speaking, I mean, you're still working, you know, you're still on duty, but you're not in charge anymore. So your job then is to, you know, keep yourself safe, keep everybody else safe. At what point did you get a sense of how the Cubans were going to treat you all?

No. We had no idea. I mean, the first part of any kind of disturbance like that is usually incredibly violent. This was not, thank God, but it could have been at any second. I mean, so you had that kind of in the back of your head that bad things could happen any second, and then they didn't. Prison riots are usually unwieldy, unpredictable, and often very, very violent. The New Mexico state prison riot of 1980, one of the most notorious in U.S. history, began when a group of inmates overpowered four guards. The guards were beaten, stripped, bound, and blindfolded. The inmates then went searching for other guards, dragging one of them, naked and

blindfolded, down a flight of concrete stairs by a belt wrapped around his neck. The riot ended with 33 deaths and over 200 injuries, in what researchers would later call an orgy of violence. The Talladega takeover began with violence too. A guard was hit over the head with a mop handle right at the beginning. But the detainees released him for medical treatment within hours. And according to the after action report, he was only, quote, slightly injured. So as the first day of the takeover came to a close, the detainees moved the 10 hostages into a hearing room. And they brought each one a thin mattress.

Then they made their way to the property room and found their street clothes. So they took off their prison uniform and they put on their regular clothes. You know, clothes from that period of time, back from the 1980s or whenever. Things from that period of time, and they were happy to have them. You know, they felt more comfortable and at ease. Linda Calhoun had worked at Talladega for several years, and she'd gotten to know many of the detainees. She shared with them art supplies when she could, and they would give her homemade Mother's Day cards and Valentines. They called her Miss Linda.

The ones that spoke English, they used to talk to me. They used to draw pictures for me, you know. They were respectful. They took care of to me. They used to draw pictures for me. They were respectful. They took care of us when we were there. They could have just said, okay, you're going to go to the restroom, go, and then somebody could have come into the restroom with us. But they always stood guard. When we went up to the shower room, they stood guard there with their handmade weapons that they made. They didn't let anybody come by there, and they didn't peek or nothing. So, you know, it was like they took care of us like they would, let's say, it's going to sound dumb, like their sisters or their mothers.

Okay? But do you remember much about Jorge? Marquez? I know he told the other Cubans not to mess with me and not to hurt me. Once I had sort of a little pimple and it started bleeding right away. And he wanted to know who hit me. Who did that to you? Nobody did it to me.

I just had a little pimple and it started bleeding. Oh, okay. So he was ready to go and, you know, talk to me. I just had a little pimple and it started bleeding. Oh, okay. So he was ready to go and, you know, talk to somebody. He sort of maybe was sort of, I don't know if I should say this or not, sort of my guardian angel watching over me, you know? See, I see a hostage negotiator as a fisherman. And a good fisherman just doesn't take a hook and a worm. You've got a tackle box and you've got multiple lures in there to use in different situations. Clint Van Zandt was a hostage negotiator from the FBI.

He had arrived at the prison soon after the takeover. Van Zandt sent a message to the Cubans. To try and end the uprising, he wanted to understand their demands. In response, Jorge Marcos Medina demanded to speak to a member of the press, and he chose Cynthia Corzo of El Nuevo Herald. We were just all milling about, and Marquez would still call me. They were trying to get their story told, and they said they wanted to speak to the media,

and if they would speak to the media, they wanted to speak to me. The detainees needed to take a hostage with them to talk to the FBI, so they picked Linda Calhoun. So I went in and they told me right away, don't worry, we're not going to hurt you. I said, OK. They put handcuffs on me, but the handcuffs were so loose. I took off the handcuffs, I says, here. And they looked at me and I says, you see that big fence?

I said, do you think I can climb that big fence? I says, there's no way. So we all laughed about it. So they let me go out there and we talked to the FBI. Talladega was surrounded by hills. So I am up this hill. It's at a good vantage point. The El Nuevo Herald photographer, C.M. Guerrero,

got the call from reporter Cynthia Corzo that they were going in to talk to the detainees. I just gather my gear and I sprint down, going downhill. It seemed like a mile. And of course, everybody's looking at me saying, where's Guerrero going? Uh-oh, Guerrero's onto something. What's happening with Guerrero? Why is he running so fast?

And then all of a sudden, next thing I know, we're in the compound. And that's where everything was so high tension, man. We were right, like 10 feet in front of them, sitting down, talking to them. And I'm shooting away. It was like anything could happen. And we'd be in the middle of it. I kind of just remember a million things going on at once. Like there were things happening in every direction.

And you kind of didn't know where to look. Okay, you know, let me start taking notes, but where do I look first? As CM Guerrero shot photos and Cynthia Corzo took notes and spoke to the detainees, the negotiator from the FBI, Clint Van Zandt, grew increasingly concerned that the detainees didn't want to negotiate an end to the standoff. They wanted media attention instead. The lead hostage taker was demanding that the CNN come with a live camera. And, well, I mean, that wasn't going to happen.

And he was yelling louder and louder. And I told the female reporter and this camera person, I said, turn around and walk away. And at that juncture, the guy says, look, I want to show you the hostage. And I remember telling the FBI, no, they're going to show us the hostage. We can't stop this now. They're going to bring a hostage to the door. I said, both of you with me, turn around, walk away and walk back to the command post. As negotiators, you're at the tip of the spear. You're out there as far as you can be, and if things go right, that's good.

And if you're wrong, people die. It's tail dig Alabama. It's day six. And we're here hoping that this siege will end shortly. Six days after the takeover started, an INS staffer showed up with a VHS camera to document the crisis for the agency's internal use. There are wide, shaky shots of the outside of the prison with a line of TV news trucks with satellites on top. A helicopter passes overhead. Law enforcement officers in riot gear lounge underneath an oak tree. And then the camera moves to a room adjacent to Alpha Unit. And, shooting through a window, captures the unit's roof.

Holy shit. We're going to have to take this. How the heck did they get that? The Cubans have gained access to the roof of Alpha Unit. And soon, dozens of the detainees are there. Some of them begin to unfurl a banner. Now you can read this one, huh? Can you read this one from here?

I can't make it out of the camera. Can someone read it for me? No, I read it in the lawyer's office. Can you see this new one, Arnie? You might be able to read this. Pressure what? Is justice freedom or death? They unfurl another banner. It says simply, pray for us.

As the takeover enters the second week, the feds are running out of patience and the Cubans are increasingly desperate. Their primary demand that the deportation flights stop is falling on deaf ears, and their only bargaining chip is the continued safety of the hostages. Our job was to try and make these guys like us enough

to where they didn't want to kill us. One of the guys came in with a pillowcase and said, need an identification card from everybody. So we all threw our licenses into the pillowcase. And he said, okay, we're going to pick a name out for the first guy we're going to kill. I mean, we were all bright people, and I think we all knew that it was very, very, very possible and kind of likely that we might not make it out in one piece. You know, I wasn't buying the whole put your thing in a pillowcase bit.

I thought that was more just showmanship, but it didn't matter because if they were going to do it, they were going to do it. So I didn't know if we were going to be rescued or not. And I wrote my kids a little note each telling them that I love them no matter what and you know to pray for us and not to be angry with anybody that things happen and that I love them and to take care of each other and their dad and their grandma and grandpa. The detainees agreed to have the hostages examined by medical staff in exchange for more food rationsees agreed to have the hostages examined by medical staff in exchange for more food rations. During this exchange, the hostages were able to communicate

their fears that things might soon turn violent. And that was all the FBI needed to finally move in. It was my habit to sleep with my feet in front of the door. So if anybody decided to come in, they'd have to wake me up. And I heard a flunk. And I stood up and went to the door. Of course, I thought it was a flash bomb. What had happened on the door furthest from us, the charge that was placed on the door slipped off the door. When the assault went down on Talladega, the hostage rescue team put an explosive charge on one of the doors to get in. And initially the charge didn't work. And another negotiator standing next to me said, oh my God, everybody's going to die.

And I didn't really need to hear that at that point because I had invested every ounce of emotions I had. And then they blew the door off and went in. I said, all right, we need to put those mattresses in this hole here. So we started shoving mattresses in about that time the other door went off. And you could hear chunks of concrete ricocheting off the walls that blew the light fixtures out of the ceiling. It was early, early in the morning because I remember I didn't have shoes on. But it felt like the ceiling sort of jumped up and came down because the fluorescent light just missed my head. It was all dark. So you couldn't see where you were walking.

I didn't have shoes on. I know I stepped on some big pieces of rocks because I got heel spurs due to that. So we all got up and we were barricading the doors. And, you know, all they need is a few seconds. These guys are amazing. And all they needed was that little bit of time. I think it was about a minute and a half before they made contact with us. And then I think it

was at three minutes, I was walking through the door. I think I was the first one out. The hostage standoff at the Talladega prison in Alabama ended just before dawn today. They had pulled us out. We were all in a group outside the unit. And I asked the rest of the group, is it okay if I have a cigarette now? Because they had to vote on whether I could have a cigarette because I was that annoying. And they said, yes, I could. And I lit it up. And I think I took about two drags. And a very nice man from the FBI tapped me on the shoulder and asked me very politely to put that out

because I was standing in the middle of their field armory. And I can remember very clearly the first breath of fresh air I got. It must have been 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning, you know, beautiful Alabama morning. You breathe in that fresh air, and it was just the greatest air I'd ever tasted in my life. The VHS tape filmed by the INS picks back up after the breach of the wall. It's dark before dawn. Generators run in the background.

There are shots of INS staffers, and then the camera pans across the lawn of the prison. Rows and rows of the Cuban men are lying face down on the ground, their hands zip-tied behind their backs, their feet shackled. Standing over them are SWAT team members and FBI agents in full riot gear, holding batons. One of the men on the ground is heard screaming. Where's the FBI? Where's the FBI? Where's the FBI? Then there's a shot a little later.

The sun has come up. The men are being walked one by one across the yard to be strip-searched. There seem to be more SWAT and FBI members than detainees at this point. The camera pans across the yard where the men were shackled, and now it's strewn with clothing and shoes, the relics of the personal effects and street clothes they had rescued from the prison's property room during the takeover. Looks like a blue light special.

Kmart, doesn't it? A lectern is pulled in front of cameras with the prison in the background. And the acting attorney general, William Barr, yes, that Bill Barr, steps out to address the crowd. I extend to you my heartfelt appreciation for your bravery, professionalism, dedication. Thanks. The next day, the deportations resume. Jorge Marquez Medina and the other leaders of the uprising

are on the first flights out. The final shots from the tape are INS staff milling about in the front of the prison posing for photographs. It has this weird end-of-summer camp vibe to it. Hey Steve, why don't you come in the picture? All right, hold on. I'll tell you, this is a great operation with great people. Good job, guys.

Yeah, thank you very much. We're all done. August 30th, 1991. Don't repeat. Finding those photos of the men on the roof is what started all of this. But it wasn't long before we came to understand just how vast and complex this story was. These men had all come to this country in 1980 as part of the Mariel boatlift when, in a matter of months, 125,000 Cuban refugees had come to South Florida on overcrowded shrimp boats and rusty freighters and virtually anything that would float.

They'd wormed their way through the perplexity of the immigration system until the U.S. government decided it wanted to return some of them to Cuba. But it wasn't that simple. This was a Cold War. And so there were back-channel communiques over years about the creation of a list, a secret list. And while this list was being negotiated, thousands of Morial Cubans languished in federal prisons without due process, without any constitutional rights. And in 1991, when these men seized the prison and took to the roof, again, they were not being held as prisoners, but as immigration detainees. And some of them had been indefinitely detained for more than a decade. But it wasn't just what had happened to them. As our angle of view widened, as we went through reams and reams of their legal filings, picking apart the memos of various presidential administrations, reporting from Havana to Vancouver, we came across all kinds

of stories about what sort of people they were. In one version, they were dangerous criminals, the worst of the worst. In another, they were refugees seeking freedom. One person would tell us injustice after injustice had befallen them, while someone else would say they got exactly what was coming to them. But there was one thing that pretty much everyone agreed on. Those men on the roof of the prison in Talladega, Alabama in 1991, they were gone, forgotten. They'd been deported or they'd disappeared. You couldn't trace them. Early on, someone told us it was as if the earth had swallowed them. So we knew it would be difficult to find the men on the roof.

But what we could not have known when all this started was that in trying to track down what happened to them, we'd actually wind up finding a bigger story. A story about us, about our own country, about our ideals and our history and our laws. Sunday, October 3rd, Leonard and I had late breakfast, then got ready to go to the National City Christian Church. This is from Lady Bird Johnson's audio diary. It's 1965, and on this Sunday, she was traveling with President Johnson

and some friends from Texas to a ceremony in New York City....going up for one of the most dramatic hours of this year's congressional session, the signing of the immigration bill. It took place where else but in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. And if anybody hollers it's corny, we'll make the most of it. On the heels of two of the most consequential pieces of legislation in the 20th century, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, President Johnson was poised to sign the most sweeping and significant immigration overhaul in the nation's history. Simply put, the bill would redefine who could become an American.

And in the decades that would follow, an unprecedented migration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America would radically reshape the demographics of this country. Nearly 200 years after our founding, exactly 100 years after a civil war nearly tore us apart, this bill liberated our immigration policy from an explicitly racist quota system. It has been un-American in the highest sense because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country. Today, with my signature,

this system is abolished. We can now believe that it will never again shatter the gate to the American nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege. And his eyes turned from Lyndon's face to the flag, to the great statue itself. I was caught up in the magnificent drama of the moment. It was good history and good theater. Good history and good theater. I have to confess, we're a little obsessed with this idea. Because when you look back at the past, it's this constant battle between what really happened and how we think about what happened.

The story we tell about what happened. The history on the one hand and the theater on the other. It's very theatrical to say that we're a nation of immigrants. That what is written on the base of the Statue of Liberty, right where President Johnson is standing, is true. That we're here to welcome the refuse from your shore, your tired and huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But the history, it can get in the way of that theater. The first immigration law passed in the United States was the Naturalization Act of 1790. It established that the path to citizenship was reserved for free white persons of good character. And this policy of excluding non-whites would be upheld again and again.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced indigenous people from their land and denied them citizenship. The Dred Scott Decision of 1857 held that people of African descent, even those freed from slavery, could not become U.S. citizens. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned migration from China and refused citizenship to Chinese people already here. And finally, the Immigration Act of 1924 virtually eliminated immigration from non-white countries. The net result of all this wasn't subtle. It was simple. To enshrine whiteness as the national identity. But then things began to change. You can draw a line from the end of World War II to the Civil Rights era, a line when forces in the country are pushing it to live up to the radical proposition of this country's founding documents,

that here is a place where the inalienable rights of all people will be protected before the law. It's a time when some are trying to tell a more inclusive story about the country, about who deserves to be an American. It's by no means a perfect time. There's reactionary violence to nearly every attempt to change the story. But the theater and the history at this moment, they align. And that's how we get to President Johnson standing at the Statue of Liberty, celebrating the most expansive immigration act in the nation's history. Those are, that's the pocketbook that I had that when I went to work that day,

you know, when the Cubans, sit down, sit down. When the Cubans took over the unit. But here's the thing about theater and history. They seldom converge the way they did back then. Usually they're in tension with each other because stories are vulnerable things. And try as we might to tell a new story about who we are, it's hard to outrun your history. Wait. Yes. Can I go check the pizza? Sure, sure.

Can you stop? Because I don't want you to eat toxic waste. This interview with Linda Calhoun was the first one we did for this story back in 2015. We'd found the photos of the men on the roof just a couple of months before a long-shot presidential candidate, a reality television star, announced his run by saying that immigrants were criminals, that our country had become a dumping ground for the rest of the world's problems, that the American dream was dead, and that the solution was to build a giant wall. The story he told wasn't subtle, it was simple. And if this seemed out of place and improbable at first, like theater from a

different era, by the time we sat with Linda Calhoun in her living room, this theater was resonating in a new way. And that vulnerable national story was fraying because of it. Look, put it this way. After we got released and the day that they, you know, got the Cubans and they stripped them and they put them on the floor and they kept them there for a couple hours, I cried. I cried because some of them didn't deserve that. I mean, I've got to say that's a remarkable attitude, I think, for somebody who's just been out of that situation. They didn't do that to us.

Even though we were a hostage and they threatened us and everything, they still treated us with dignity and respect. You know? So don't you think they deserve the same thing? What did those men deserve? This question from Linda Calhoun all those years ago, the very beginning of our reporting, it stuck with us. Because really, it stuck with us. Because really, it's a question about what this country is and what this country is not.

A question about our values, about justice and fairness, about how we decide who has the right to have rights. This season on White Lies. They had received shortwave transmissions from their Cuban relatives that Fidel was letting grandma essentially come. My mom, of course, had no choice because she already knew that if she cried, I would stay in Cuba. There is a continuing concern that Fidel

Castro is emptying his jails and forcing boat captains to take undesirables to the United States. They get out of their boats and they walk through the water and they're yours. What do you do with them? You don't know who you're bringing or what their intentions are. There's a racial element to this suspicion and stereotype. Absolutely, without question. I mean, Miami was sort of like Baghdad, you know, it was a very unpleasant place. They were sent here with a label and you know what we did? We accepted the label. We have effectively lost control of our borders.

We are talking about the most dangerous group of inmates confined in American prisons anywhere. And staff came along and proceeded to beat the living daylights out of them. No jury, no attorney, and no due process. Just locked up and the keys literally thrown away. I mean, look at the whole place. I mean, look at the components of it, right? We're in a graveyard. All these men died here.

This is not the place you want to die. Please don't send this letter to the mailbox of forgetfulness. I hope one day to go back to the United States. I left my daughter when she was four years old. I didn't see my daughter anymore. of forgetfulness. Thank you. If you want to hear our next episode now, before everyone else, sign up for Embedded Plus at plus.npr.org slash embedded. Or find the Embedded channel on Apple. It's a great way to support our work, and you'll get to listen to the entire season sponsor-free. That's plus.npr.org slash embedded. White Lies is reported, written, and produced by us and Connortown O'Neill. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer.

Annie Yetze is our associate producer. Robert Little edits the show with help from Bruce Oster, Keith Woods, Christopher Turpin, and Kamala Kelker. Our incredible score is composed and performed by Jeff T. Byrne. Emily Vogel is Senior Visual Editor. Barbara Van Workum is our Fact Checker. We had production help from Pablo Arguelles. Audio engineers include Robert Rodriguez and Andy Huther.

A huge thanks to Radiohead for the use of their song, The National Anthem, courtesy of XL Recordings and Warner Choppel Music. Archival tape in this episode comes from C-SPAN, CBS, NBC, the PBS NewsHour Collection and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, the LBJ Presidential Library, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Historical Library, and the Hoover Institution Archives. Special thanks to Elizabeth Whitmire and the Alabama Media Group, longtime Birmingham News photographer Joe Songer, who took those photos of the men on the roof, Jose Iglesias and the Miami Herald, Zach Wilski, senior historian at the USCIS History Office and Library, Wisconsin Public Radio,

Brittany Young and Pat Duggins at Alabama Public Radio, and Meredith McDonough in the Alabama Department of Archives and History. We are grateful for the work of Micah Ratner and NPR's legal team, and Tony Cavan, NPR's Standards and Practices Editor. Our project manager is Margaret Price. Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of NPR's Enterprise Storytelling Unit. And Anya Grunman is NPR's senior vice president for programming and audience development. It's all love. This message comes from Grammarly. Back-and-forth communication at work is costly.

That's why over 70,000 teams and 30 million people use Grammarly's AI to make their points clear the first time. Better writing, better results. Learn more at grammarly.com slash enterprise.