Loading summary
Transcript81 lines
- [00:00]
Andrea Pitzer
There's so much happening in the moment, it's always tempting to address the newest crisis.
- [00:04]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
I want to start with this NPR reporting that the Justice Department withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor.
- [00:14]
Andrea Pitzer
But it's also often a good idea to pause.
- [00:16]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
We're joined now by Julie K. Brown, investigative reporter for the Miami Herald, whose reporting helped expose much of the Epstein
- [00:22]
Andrea Pitzer
network to consider the deeper implications or contexts of a given event. We know that members of the Trump administration, for example, has never met with these victims and have been characterizing this as a hoax. I think people that actually look at these files know that this is not a hoax, that this is a crime that actually happened. We have to do things differently and not let this happen again. So today I want to look at the situation with Urban Strategies, a contractor run detention facility in San Benito, Texas. Reports from earlier this month suggest that all unaccompanied pregnant minors in the U.S. immigration detention system are being sent to San Benito. This is despite the fact that medical staff at the Office of Refugee Resettlement have flagged the shelter, which is a for profit entity, as insufficient for the needs of pregnant children. Meanwhile, Texas state abortion law is draconian. ProPublica found that since the 2022 ban, more women in Texas are nearly bleeding to death during miscarriage. It seems likely that this is the very reason for sending pregnant detainees there. With us now, former Texas state senator and senior advisor to Planned Parenthood, Texas votes Wendy Davis. So they can't get an abortion. And I think what a lot of people don't understand is that this law impacts everyone, not just people who are choosing to terminate pregnancies, but people who very much want their pregnancies and who find themselves in these situations where they are literally facing the possibility of death because they cannot get the care that they need. So for this episode, I want to look at parts of that and consider the San Benito detention facility. In light of some global detention history elsewhere as well, the current moment in Texas carries echoes of Argentina's years under dictatorship.
- [02:16]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
A dirty war, that's what the Argentines called it. But when it was going on in the middle 70s, no one knew the extent of it.
- [02:22]
Andrea Pitzer
After a trio of generals seized power in 1976, anti communist death squads began murdering civilians, leaving their corpses and ditches in and around Buenos Aires, the capital.
- [02:33]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Men, women and children who were labeled left wing terrorists were kidnapped off the streets by the military regime, tortured and killed.
- [02:42]
Andrea Pitzer
The detention system that rose under that dictatorship in Argentina reflected neighboring Chile's recent move from large, traditional camp style detention to smaller and less visible sites.
- [02:55]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
James Nielsen is editor of the English language daily the Buenos Aires Herald, one of the few publications that was to speak out early on against the military regime.
- [03:03]
Andrea Pitzer
Like Chile, Argentina was sensitive to the global optics of their crimes.
- [03:07]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
On March 24, 1976, when the military came marching in, the tanks rolled along the streets amongst the majority of the inhabitants of the country, not just the middle class, but many working class, there was a sense of relief. At long last we're going to have a strong hand that these terrorists are going to be dealt with and our problems are going to be over.
- [03:25]
Andrea Pitzer
The US Embassy had formally rebuked Argentina's human rights abuses soon after the junta took power.
- [03:31]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
And of course, it didn't work that way. Every general or admiral or brigadier had his province and they milked it and they stole and they did what they wanted and they killed whomever they wished and they were accountable to no one.
- [03:43]
Andrea Pitzer
They worked with complete impunity, issuing a formal denunciation. We're joined by John Dengis, author of the Condor How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents. But in a private meeting, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger discreetly told the generals to ignore the public statements that had been made.
- [04:02]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
If you look at the meetings, the transcripts of the meetings between Henry Kissinger and these leaders both in Argentina and in Chile where we have the records, what do they say in private? You know, we understand that you have to assert your authority.
- [04:19]
Andrea Pitzer
Argentine officials had come to the meeting with him believing that they would face threats. But instead they got encouragement.
- [04:28]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Try your best to release some prisoners because I'm under a lot of pressure in Congress because the Democrats are trying to make me, you know, defend human rights.
- [04:38]
Andrea Pitzer
If there are things that need to
- [04:40]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
be done, do the best you can,
- [04:42]
Andrea Pitzer
Kissinger told the foreign Minister. You should do them quickly.
- [04:46]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
But I understand what you're doing.
- [04:48]
Andrea Pitzer
We want you to succeed.
- [04:49]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Unmarked green Ford Falcons like these cruising the streets of Argentina cities inside plainclothesmen with lists of suspects to be picked up and carried off to brutal interrogation.
- [05:00]
Andrea Pitzer
The disappeared who were kidnapped from their homes or off the streets were spirited clandestinely to One of the 600 detention centers operated in the country. One of the outcomes of trying not to lose American support was that detention stayed fairly atomized. La Perla, a military installation outside Cordoba, was among the most notorious. Some 2,000 detainees were sent there in all, with only 137 survivors. Since its inauguration in 1928, the grounds of the Navy Mechanics school were a place associated with training and social advancement. Another site of shame and infamy was the esma, the Escuela Superior de Mecanica de la Armada. After the coup of March 24, 1976, a section of its facilities began to be used as a detention and torture center. Some 5,000 detainees were taken to ESMA during those years of dictatorship. This was a place of timeless torture, a place of timeless denigration, of the most extreme humiliation. Many of them were tortured in the basement as music was played there to cover up their screens. The detainees were admitted in broad daylight through the entrance on Libertador Avenue, one of the busiest streets in Buenos Aires. Others were kept in the top level of the building and forced to work to create propaganda for the regime. I believe that the ESMA's display of being in a visible location, with cars entering through the main entrance, going along Libertador Avenue all the way to the building in the back, making it impossible to miss, was part of that policy of spreading terror, of showing a little, but not everything. They paralyzed you. I mean, they paralyzed society. There were weekly death flights in which detainees were told they would be vaccinated for a trip to a detention center in the southern regions of the country. But what they were actually given was a sedative. Once the planes were above open ocean, the military personnel would throw them from the plane.
- [06:47]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
The methodology was simple. Capture them, kidnap them, torture them, kill them, make their bodies disappear.
- [06:56]
Andrea Pitzer
One part of the Escuela Mecanica was different, however.
- [06:59]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
The prisoners cells were located on the floor above the bedrooms of their torturers.
- [07:03]
Andrea Pitzer
On my Visit there in 2016, I went up to the third floor to find a small, nondescript room. It was a birthing room where pregnant detainees had been brought to deliver their babies. Afterward, their children were taken from them.
- [07:18]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
They told the mother that they were going to give it to direct relatives. They asked for the address, the whole story. But we knew that the babies were not coming.
- [07:26]
Andrea Pitzer
In many cases, vanishing forever from their families. Every year, Argentina holds a day of remembrance for the estimated 30,000 people who were murdered or disappeared by the military junta that ran the country from 1976 to 1983. As many as 500 babies were stolen this way, given to the families and allies of the junta to raise as their own. But the grandmothers of those babies who were not in detention organized and spoke out.
- [07:57]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Only now, under the democratic regime of Argentina's new civilian president, Raoul Alfonsine, is the world beginning to learn the full story. But long before the new Regime came to power. Some of the mothers of the disappeared were trying to get that story out
- [08:10]
Andrea Pitzer
to the world at tremendous risk. They demonstrated on the Plaza de Mayo in front of the Presidential palace every week, year after year, demanding answers.
- [08:19]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
There are no speeches, no chanting. They carry nothing but the pictures of their missing children. THE DISAPPEARED
- [08:28]
Andrea Pitzer
after dictatorship fell, DNA tests began to help reunite families. Carolina Villala represents a victims rights group Argentina e Conocida como Faro Mundial. Argentina is known as a global beacon in matters of memory, truth and justice. With more than 1200 people convicted of crimes against humanity. But it was a grim process with legal consequences. And many of the children had no idea they had been raised by anyone other than their birth parents. Leonardo Fasati was them. In some cases, their false parents were violently abusive.
- [09:08]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
I was born in this clandestine detention center on March 12, 1977, where my mother and father were disappeared. There were many years where I had doubts about my identity.
- [09:21]
Andrea Pitzer
This was true in the case of Guillermo Perez Reis, a child whose mother was one of the disappeared. When he learned of his actual history as an adult. Her tiny frame and seeming frailty belied the determined spirit of Dr. Rosa Tarlovsky de Rosenblitt. She spent half her life fighting tirelessly for the tens of thousands of Argentinas disappeared. He eventually brought charges against the man he grew up with as his father. For the murder of his biological parents. Among them was her daughter, Patricia Rosenblitt. She was pregnant at the time she was abducted by the junta in 1978, was convicted. She gave birth in a clandestine detention center. She was then murdered. And like hundreds of others born in the same circumstances, her baby was handed over to a military family. Some 130 children have been reunited with their parents. But some do not want to testify in court against the people who raised them. Particularly against those they believed were their mothers. The boy named Guillermo was raised in an abusive home, never suspecting his true origins. Thanks to Rosa Roizenblitz activism, the grandpa, mother and grandson were reunited when he was 21. But her mission did not end there. The fathers could hardly claim ignorance as part of the junta. But their wives often claimed not to know there was anything irregular in the adoptions. All I want is justice, truth and remembrance. That's what is important. The rest is what it is. I don't hate them. I am not looking for revenge, no vengeance. The whole monstrous system remains an open wound on society. There today there are concerns that the
- [11:05]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
government of Argentine President Javier Malay is reversing long standing policy to continue the search for the tens of thousands of citizens who are abducted, never to be seen again.
- [11:23]
Andrea Pitzer
Now we see the US Government, which is enthralled to anti abortion activists.
- [11:27]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Carissa Haugeberg is a historian and author
- [11:31]
Andrea Pitzer
of Women Against Abortion, sending children to give birth in a state that will disregard the additional medical risks that pregnancy inflicts at that age. Among the big changes in anti abortion activism it occurred in the in the 1980s as evangelical Christians flooded into the movement, espousing much more conservative ideas about proper gender roles but also the role of government in ordinary people's lives. And the government is sending them to a facility that has already been determined to be incapable of managing those elevated risks. According to a 2024 report from the World Health Organization, adolescent mothers that's mothers who are aged between 10 and 19 years face higher risks of eclampsia, peripheral endometritis and systemic infections than women who are aged 20 to 24 years. And babies of adolescent mothers face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm birth and severe neonatal conditions. In the past, the government would house pregnant unaccompanied minors in Office of Refugee Resettlement Shelters or foster homes in communities with medical services experienced in handling high risk pregnancies. Jill Filipovich, a well known blogger and women's rights activity advocate, dozens of such settings do exist. The facility where these girls are being held is hours away from the kind of large hospitals that can handle complex obstetric emergencies. This is very much a deadly disaster just waiting to happen. But the current administration is punishing both the pregnant children and the children they will be forced to carry to term, inflicting short and long term physical trauma. This policy was written down in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2020. The California newsroom and the Texas newsroom co produced an excellent feature this month on what is happening to those girls in Texas. About half of these pregnant kids are rape victims. The youngest is just 13. Jonathan White, who has since left government but previously ran Orr's Unaccompanied Children program during the first Trump administration, he told reporters, this is 100% and exclusively about abortion. White explained that the administration had tried to restrict abortion access for unaccompanied minors in 2017 but had failed. Now, he says, they casually roll out what they brutally fought to accomplish last time and didn't. Pregnancy is one of the leading killers of adolescent girls worldwide. With Roe v. Wade overturned now, the stage was set for this kind of legal shell game with pregnant children. So this is what the pro life movement is doing with its newfound power. The administration is also working to undermine Biden era rules protecting the reproductive rights of pregnant minors in detention. Again, this is a moral imperative to them. It is their goal to have an abortion free nation. But I would also caution it is their goal to have an abortion free world. And as recently as 2024, Orr barred the very shelter at San Benito from receiving pregnant girls for a time due to mismanagement of medical appointments and care plans. If we look at international policy in the George W. Bush administration, there was an effort to stamp out comprehensive sex education and funding for abortion and international aid. Reports this month suggest that there haven't yet been any major medical emergencies. And attorneys representing the children who are mothers say that postpartum several girls have remained detained at the facility with their infants. An OR staffer anonymously told reporters, I feel like we're just waiting for something terrible to happen. Mistreatment is endemic in the US Immigration detention system.
- [15:30]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Patrick Terpsa joins me now for more on this. This is something that you have been following closely. It's part of a series ICE Inc. What have you learned?
- [15:37]
Andrea Pitzer
Pregnant adults in immigration detention face their own kinds of abuse.
- [15:42]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Dilly is this family detention center where we know hundreds of immigrant children are held and we really were curious to hear all of the 911 calls that made from this center.
- [15:52]
Andrea Pitzer
There have been extensive reports of pregnant adult women being shackled in pregnancy and forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded quarters.
- [16:00]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
We were surprised to see how many involve babies, children and pregnant women.
- [16:06]
Andrea Pitzer
Pregnant women experiencing bleeding have been refused medical care.
- [16:10]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Patrick, we heard some emergency calls involving pregnant women. Is there any idea how many pregnant women are actually in Dilly? Yeah, we heard from Congressman Joaquin Castro on a Friday.
- [16:20]
Andrea Pitzer
The anti abortion movement in the country is politically vicious and bent on controlling both women and children.
- [16:26]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
He actually did a visit to Dilly and said that he believes that people are actually hiding some of the pregnant women from him so that he can't talk to them. It's a claim we ran by DHS and they didn't immediately respond to that.
- [16:39]
Andrea Pitzer
This underlying theme is mirrored in family separations, a way to punish migrants with deliberate and sometimes permanent harm for crossing the border, whether it is to seek a better life or to seek asylum.
- [16:51]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Our 911 calls that we received showed that at least two of them were in regards to pregnant women, including one Andrew that had had a seizure.
- [16:59]
Andrea Pitzer
It's no surprise that a government elected in part through its embrace of these pro life arguments and laws delivers direct harm to Both women and children in many different settings.
- [17:12]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
There is a real tension in a lot of places between law enforcement, first responders, ems, and the people that are actually running these facilities that we've seen time and again. But when we played those 911 calls, we were surprised to hear people from Los Angeles, Utah, calling to say they had questions about some of the kids inside the Dilley Detention center in Texas.
- [17:33]
Andrea Pitzer
According to a December 2024 report from a collaboration between Human Rights Watch, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Lowenstein International Human rights clinic at Yale, 1,360 children had not yet been reunited with their parents six years after the US government forcibly separated them at the border to deter migrants during the first Trump administration. Liam and his bunny ears have captured the country's attention, but he is just one of many young children being targeted by this administration, supposedly in pursuit of the, quote, worst of the worst. More recently, the Minneapolis Star Tribune has been reporting on minors being picked up alone in their neighborhoods and cities and towns across the US and treated as unaccompanied minors. Jacob Soboroff has new and exclusive reporting on a two year old toddler and her dad who were taken by federal agents from Minneapolis last month. That is as if they had crossed the border alone and had no family in the country.
- [18:34]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
They kept telling me to roll down the window or open the door. I just hugged my baby. Then one agent, I think he was Mexican, told me to call my wife so she could take the baby. So you thought it was a. A trap? Yes.
- [18:49]
Andrea Pitzer
These children are sometimes hidden by being assigned new alien identification numbers, making them untraceable in the system, especially after they are sent to ORR shelters rather than ICE facilities.
- [19:00]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Elvis and Chloe were going to buy some fruit at the market. He says he was. He says he was racially profiled. They followed him into that alley and they smashed the window, took little Chloe and him out of the car.
- [19:11]
Andrea Pitzer
To harm immigrants in the U.S. they're trying to rupture family connections as completely as they're able to get away with.
- [19:18]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
When they broke the window, she started crying. And when the glass shattered, my baby's little hand was right there. She had red marks and some blood.
- [19:25]
Andrea Pitzer
With all the warehouses they're trying to acquire, the expeditionary military style camps they're trying to set up, the potential for harm expands dramatically. Based on the arrest quotas they have established as their goals, they appear to be hoping to more than double the number of deportations in 2026 compared to when the ones that they carried out in 2025.
- [19:47]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
They still are trying to reach numbers that are unreachable, that require violations of the Constitution, that require them to sweep street by street, community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood.
- [20:01]
Andrea Pitzer
There will be significant obstacles to actually doing that.
- [20:04]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
As the Trump administration's detention efforts expand free our children, so too does the resistance to them. In a statement, the Chairman of the U.S. conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration said, these plans are deeply troubling, adding, the thought of holding thousands of families in massive warehouses should challenge the conscience of every American.
- [20:23]
Andrea Pitzer
But in the meantime, Jordan Foster, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at Yale University, in the horrific detention situations that will be created, imagine how many parents will lose their children, how many sexual assaults will occur in camps and other facilities.
- [20:38]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
There's decades of research to show that when children are exposed to this type of violence, to family separation, it can lead to disruptions in connections between different parts of the brain, such as the amygdala, a part of the brain that's very important for fear processing, and the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain that's very important for regulation. When there are disruptions between these regions that can have cascading effects on children's development of emotion regulation skills, emotion processing,
- [21:03]
Andrea Pitzer
how many children will become parents brought into circumstances where the system is designed to unleash additional harm? While US Immigration detention camps do not carry out death flight executions as took place in ARGENTINA More than 40 years ago, the U.S. system, much faster and more impersonal, is nonetheless designed to inflict serious harm that will lead to trauma and the permanent rupture of families.
- [21:35]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Just the most savage, inhumane conditions in some of these facilities. And of course you have dhs, who has lied to Americans time and time and time again. They've lied over and over and over again.
- [21:49]
Andrea Pitzer
The consequences of how we allow our government to treat those it detains, particularly in these current operations, which are public spectacle and private terror, can last for generations.
- [22:00]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
They're not detention centers. These are internment camps. Except I really would like a historian to come on and compare Japanese internment camps of the 1940s. Did the condition in these internment camps, because I think this may be even more extreme.
- [22:18]
Andrea Pitzer
Last week, A group of 10 Democratic US senators sent a letter demanding answers from the administration on its treatment of children in immigrant detention. The government has been trying to terminate the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, which sets minimum standards for the humane treatment of children in custody. Senators are accusing agencies of being intent on detaining and removing children from the country without regard for constitutional or statutory
- [22:47]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
protections all this to say, this is what mass deportation looks like. Chloe, Elvis, Liam, his parents, what we've been seeing play out in Minneapolis and across the country as well.
- [22:58]
Andrea Pitzer
What can you do? The Department of Homeland Security will reportedly not move forward with plans to construct a massive ICE detention center in Merrimack, New Hampshire, after protests and public debate erupted over the proposed facility. You can demand your senators join these calls for accountability.
- [23:17]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Could the United States have done anything about this?
- [23:22]
Andrea Pitzer
In fact, all your legal representatives. You can ask them to address the treatment of pregnant minors overall, as well as children in general, and the funneling of pregnant minors to a substandard facility in South Texas.
- [23:35]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
The United States did something.
- [23:36]
Andrea Pitzer
You personally can also reach out to help the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, which is an American Bar association effort that is representing some of the detainees who are currently at San Benito, Texas.
- [23:51]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
Jimmy Carter's human rights policy must have saved thousands of lives here. It drove the generals here mad. It drove them up the wall.
- [24:02]
Andrea Pitzer
They need donations as well as help from attorneys and volunteers alike to complete asylum applications, translate documents, organize files, and represent clients in hearings, among other tasks.
- [24:16]
Co-host or Guest Interviewer
They hated the United States, but they realized that they had to desist from killing all the people they'd like because of US Reaction.
- [24:24]
Andrea Pitzer
But you can also work close to home by reaching out to immigrant supporting organizations in your community to work with your city to make it harder for ICE to kidnap or detain people where you live, to make sure your neighbors have legal representation, and to push back on overreach from the current administration wherever you find it, so that we can end this nightmare. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next comes what? Please share this with one person who's looking for ways to survive this mess. To support this podcast, please become a paid subscriber@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving NextComes what a five star review where you get your podcasts.