Today, Explained - Nowhere to go

Episode Date: May 2, 2018

Forty-nine Central Americans seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border were granted entry today. They're part of a caravan of around 200 migrants who arrived Sunday and camped in the rain, after traveling 2,000 miles and fleeing gang violence and other dangers in their home countries. Vox’s Dara Lind explains the long road facing asylum seekers, who still might not be able to stay. ************************************** Cambridge Analytica announced it was shutting down today. We explained how that company acquired data from millions of Facebook profiles with the hope of manipulating voting behavior in our March 21 episode: https://art19.com/shows/today-explained/episodes/a0f6735f-2df0-4277-b65e-ff3710dc1d08 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everyone. You might have noticed our show is totally free. It's paid for through ads. And the people who sell the ads for our show find it easier to do their jobs if they know a little bit about you. Not like in a creepy way, just stuff like if you drive a car or a truck or how often you listen or whether you have pets. It's pretty benign. It's all anonymous. And it's a quick way to help the show. So if you have a moment, go to podsurvey.com slash explained

and throw down a couple of quick clicks. To sweeten the deal, once you get done, you can enter to win a $100 Amazon gift card. Again, it's podsurvey.com slash explained. Thanks. Hello, this is Mike. Hey, this is Mike from Myersville, Maryland. That's right. Yeah, Myersville. I hear you listen to every episode of Today Explained, Mike. I listen to every second of every episode closely. I really appreciate that. Mike, I also hear you might have

mattress problems. I actually do have mattress problems. Serious mattress problems. I haven't had a good night's sleep in like 10 years. Oh my God. Well, I want to hear all about it. Every year, tens of thousands of people come to the United States seeking asylum. They either show up at the border or they're already in the country and they say something like, look, it's too dangerous for me to go back to my home.

There's a gang war. I could die. I need to stay here. And in theory, the United States can't say no. Back in the 1970s, you could be granted asylum in a day, but today it can take months, even years. And that's bad news for a caravan of people seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border right now. The caravan of Central American migrants traveling for more than a month is at the U.S.-Mexico border trying to cross. U.S. officials are trying to keep the group of nearly 200 people out. They want asylum. Many fear they'll be forced to return to the violence and persecution they fled.

People try to get asylum at our borders every day, but it's not every day an immigrant rights group gets hundreds of asylum seekers together to take a trip through Mexico to the United States border. And that's why this caravan is getting a ton of attention, all the way up to the president. His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, says it's a deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system. Daryl Lind has been covering the caravan for Vox. It's primarily women and families.

Most of them are from Honduras and El Salvador. Also some from Guatemala, which means that they represent the three countries that have made up this migrant and asylum seeker flow over the last several years. Once a caravan like this gets past the southern Mexican border with Guatemala, what's the journey through Mexico like? The caravan, one of the advantages that they had as, you know, an organization that was something that was more organized and out in the open, they could just walk for days at a time. You know, they could take buses. It succeeded in its goal of providing a relatively safe experience of a journey through Mexico, but it shouldn't be mistaken for the typical journey that somebody would take if they were in that situation and needed to get to the U.S. They'd be much more isolated and much more

vulnerable. Why does this particular caravan have such a high profile? Yeah, it's undeniably true that this year it has become not just a Mexican story, not just a Central American story, but a story in the U.S. as well. There are probably a few reasons for this. One is that it's bigger than any caravan, or at least at its peak when it entered Mexico, it was estimated 1,200 to 1,500 people, which is just a massive amount, you know, filling town squares to sleep, that kind of thing. Another reason is that at least one English language reporter, turned it into a story of, you know, a group that was deliberately setting out for the U.S. to, you know, challenge U.S. laws, to invade, that was deliberately trying to subvert the Trump administration. You've seen these photos.

Well, the current situation at our southern border is completely out of hand. When you arrive in a country to contribute to it and to assimilate into its culture, you don't wave the flag of a foreign nation. That's what you do in triumph when you invade a country. Around the same time, President Trump himself decided that this was a huge problem and started tweeting about it. He tweeted this week that the migrant caravan

that is openly defying our border shows how weak and ineffective U.S. immigration laws are. President Trump started threatening to cut foreign aid to Central American countries from which asylum seekers were coming. Wow. Alternately said that the U.S. needed harsh laws like Mexico's. I said, look, your laws are very powerful. Your laws are very strong. And attacked Mexico for not doing more to stop the caravan as it was coming through and ultimately sent the National Guard to the border. The immigration apparatus at the border has been kicked into a higher gear

to deal with this caravan, even though on the numbers of it, it's not posing a massive, massive threat to border enforcement. It's only Tuesday and this tent city has turned into an organized community. There are separated rooms by the tents that you see behind me. There is a kitchen area in front of me. There is even a place for kids to play or a place to hold a meeting if they need to. Now, the ultimate goal is to get into the United States, but clearly these people are in it for the long haul. So what's the status of these members of this caravan

that just arrived at the border on Sunday? They tried to get to the United States. What happened? They tried to come through the U.S. at a port of entry, which means they tried at like a road checkpoint rather than just kind of sneaking through into the U.S. It's totally legal to present yourself at a port of entry and say, I do not have papers. I am seeking asylum in the United States. Customs and Border Protection officers told them on Sunday, we don't have the resources to start processing you guys right now.

You're going to have to wait here. They haven't said explicitly, we think you're not real asylum seekers. That's certainly the implication of the message that's been sent. So there have been concerns about whether they're really going to give the full due process to this group. But even assuming that they do, it's not that unreasonable to expect them to be extremely slow in processing people at this bottleneck in San Ysidro. So what are the numbers down to now? You said there was like a there were over a thousand people in this caravan now? Numbers have varied a little bit but it seems that there's a core of 200 to 300 people who are still there. Where did everyone else in the caravan go?

After the Trump administration's reaction to it at the beginning of April, the Mexican government stepped in and dissipated, was the word they used. They dissipated the caravan. What that looked like in practice is that they went through pretty much everybody who was there at the time and tried to see if they were eligible for asylum in Mexico, if they wanted to make an asylum claim there, or deported them back to Central American countries. Some of the people who were part of the caravan decided that they wanted to continue moving forward even though they'd been intercepted.

How does Mexico feel about them? Is Mexico willing to just let them stay? The Mexican government has generally taken a really harsh line towards Central Americans. It's detained a lot of people who are seeking asylum. It's mistreated a bunch of people who they apprehend. This caravan has flipped the script a little bit, not because of the caravan itself, but because of the Trump administration's reaction to it. They're blaming the Mexican government for not stopping this group of people and talking about the wall again, talking about

how they might pull out of NAFTA negotiations because they're so mad about this caravan, has taken even politicians in Mexico who are usually more favorable to the U.S. and made them kind of put their foot down. One of the chambers of the Mexican legislature actually passed a resolution saying that they were going to stop cooperating with the United States on migration security stuff because they felt so insulted and mistreated by Trump. The Senate of the Republic demands respect for the people of Mexico from President Trump and condemns the unfounded and offensive descriptions of Mexico and Mexicans. Okay, so as of today, I think 74 people have made it into the United States for processing. What does that even mean? All that means is that, you know, a Customs and Border Protection agent came out and said,

you're allowed to enter the building and present yourself for asylum, and we'll kind of start to process you. How did they, like, choose the first people to let in? How did they pick out of this group? The caravan organizers had pre-selected this group of 50 people with particularly compelling cases that they wanted to be the first ones to go. But in terms of who of that 50 is getting selected right now, the U.S. government doesn't have information on anybody. They're just saying who's the next person in line and taking them.

Getting into the United States legally keeps getting harder, and it's getting harder to stay here once you're in legally, too. That's after the break. This is Today Explained. I've been having trouble getting a consistent night's sleep all the way through. I keep waking up, tossing and turning, rearranging my pillows, shifting my blankets, moving my body weight around. Maybe it is the method. Yeah, I mean, are there specific problems with the mattress? Over the years, it sinks in places. First of all, my mattress is too high.

It's like five, four to five inches too high. I have to kind of, you know, lean up and push myself up onto the bed to get in there. I just want a mattress that's the perfect height so I can just flop right down and fall into a blissful night's rest. I do not have that at the moment, and I wish that I did. Mike, I think we're going to find you some bliss at mattressfirm.com slash podcast and 10% more bliss when you use the code podcast10 to get 10% off your new mattress. Bring me the bliss, Sean. Bring me the bliss. Daryl, why are all these people in the caravan trying to come here to begin with?

When we talk about Central American countries or Central American migrants, we're really talking about three countries in particular, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Those three countries make up what's called the Northern Triangle. Those are all countries where the rule of law is a little bit less than stable, where corruption is a major problem, where organized crime is a major problem. And they're at the mercy of gangs or criminal organizations, and the government either is incapable of protecting them or has deigned not to protect them because there's corruption or because they're simply afraid to stand up.

Yeah. In a country with the world's highest murder rate, Luisa only feels safe inside San Pedro Sula's main church. Ever since her husband was killed eight months ago, drug gangs are after her children. They want to recruit the six-year-old and have him train his baby brother. A lot of people who are coming up out of these Northern Triangle countries have stories of, you know, I had to leave when I did because I was worried for my life or I was worried for my child's life. And does the United States have like a long history of letting them in?

In the last couple of decades in particular, both Honduras and El Salvador have been the beneficiaries of something called temporary protected status. TPS. TPS, which the U.S. gives to people who are in the U.S. whose home countries have just suffered a natural disaster or a humanitarian disaster. Yeah. TPS allows people who either don't have any kind of legal status in the U.S. or who are on temporary visas that are going to expire to stay in the U.S. and work in the U.S. rather than having to go back to examine whether TPS is still necessary and extend it. What ended up happening is, you know, rebuilding takes a long time, especially in countries where there are already underlying governance issues and security issues. After a few times of extending that 18 months, you start dealing with a group of people who have been now living in the U.S. for years, who have put down roots here. My name is Patricia Merlos. I am 25 years old. I am currently under TPS. You'd be

surprised at the amount of people that are actually under this permit. And it's people like you and me who, you know, sit next to you at work every day and, you know, have families just like you, have dreams just like you. President after president has kind of just re-upped these TPS designations because they don't want to be the person to pull the plug out. The Trump administration feels no such compunctions. They announced at the beginning of January that they were going to give 18 more months for Salvadorans in the U.S. with TPS, and then they were going to end that. Friday is the deadline for when the Trump administration has to make that decision about Honduras. Everything that the Trump administration has said and done indicates that they're going to try to end TPS for Hondurans one way or another. But it is certainly worth noting that at the same time as these people are coming up from El Salvador and Honduras with these very recent claims of humanitarian violations,

that the Trump administration is doing its best to send people who have lived in the U.S. for years back to there. And what does the Trump administration say about TPS? Why does the administration want to get rid of it? You know, the line from John Kelly when he was secretary of Homeland Security is by definition, TPS is temporary. It's not meant to be forever. That kind of implicitly has the meaning of, well, even if your country isn't safe right now, by the technical definition of if we gave you status to recover from this disaster, is that disaster over? They can answer yes with a relatively clear conscience. Like in Honduras, in 1998, there was a big hurricane that led the Clinton administration to say, we're not going to send you back to this.

In 1999, they gave temporary protected status to Honduras. So logically, by 2017, you are going to have recovered from the hurricane as much as you can. That doesn't mean your country is safe. How many people have TPS in America right now? Do we know? We don't have great data on this because the government isn't terrific at keeping it. But we know that several hundred thousand people in the U.S. have TPS of one form or another. And frankly, most of them stand to lose it over the next couple of years. Between November of 2018 and September of 2019, 334,300 people who currently have TPS will lose it. That's a few thousand Sudanese, Nicaraguans and Nepalese, 59,000 Haitians, about 260,000 Salvadorans. At some point during there,

we could also have 86,000 Hondurans losing their status. That's the decision that Trump administration needs to make theoretically by this Friday. If that happens, we'll be talking about over 400,000 people who currently have legal status and the ability to work in the U.S. no longer having it by the end of 2019. So what happens to the Central Americans, like the ones in this caravan, if the Trump administration doesn't allow them in? Can they stay in Mexico? Do people look at that and go like, well, they made it to Mexico. So what the U.S. is trying to encourage them to do now is to apply for asylum in Mexico while

they're waiting, which is not something that people, the people who have spent three weeks coming through Mexico to claim asylum in the U.S. are particularly keen on doing. You know, if they cross into U.S. soil and start the asylum process and are not ultimately granted asylum if they are being detained for months on end and decide it's not worth it. If they've been separated from their children and are willing to plead guilty to illegal entry and not push an asylum case so that they can be reunited with their children, they're not going to get sent back to Mexico. They're going to be sent back to the countries that they came from. So I would say it's high risk, high reward for the asylum seekers themselves. They certainly didn't feel safe in their home countries. That's why they left. But the thing that I always try to remember covering this is that the people on the ground often have better information about

what the risks and rewards are than those of us who were looking at it from outside. So I always try to think of it as, you know, they have weighed as best they can the risks and the rewards, and they've decided that the reward of potentially staying in the U.S. is better and more likely than their odds of surviving or flourishing, you know, where they were. And it's not like they've been duped into something. The Trump administration really likes to say that immigrants are being told lies by smugglers, that they're, you know, the pawns of open borders activists. That's not true.

They're making the decision that because U.S. and international law make it possible for somebody to come in and claim asylum, that that's what they're going to try to do. What the Trump administration is really trying to do is give them no reason to be able to stay. And that's where you start running into, you know, how do you try to prevent people from making a journey that might be dangerous and from coming into the U.S. when you might not want them to without actually violating the bedrock principle of the U.S. cannot turn away people who are fleeing imminent peril. Daryl Lynn writes about immigration at Vox. One thing before we go, according to the Wall Street Journal,

Cambridge Analytica is completely shutting down. We explained exactly how that company used people's Facebook data to manipulate them on our March 21st show. You can find a link to it in today's description. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. You know what my thing about mattresses, though, is a lot of them look good. You know, they all look good, especially a new mattress. It looks like every single mattress is great. But when you lay down in it, you realize that it's not as comfortable as it looks.

And actually, that reminds me of the thing that happened a while back. My friend, he's got a dog, a Rottweiler named Debo. And Debo would chew on his dog biscuits, and he would make those dog biscuits look scrumptious. Just made them look so delicious. And so I had to reach down and take a biscuit and try it myself. No, you didn't. You know what? I did. And that biscuit was horrendous. It was awful. Oh, no.

You know, I don't want to make the biscuit mistake with these mattresses. You know what I mean? I want a mattress that looks good and feels like it looks. That's very understandable and great news for you. I think Mattress Firm has like a 120-night sleep trial where you can exchange it if you're not that happy. Thank you so much, Sean. It's great to hear from you. Keep up the good work.