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Lawfare Archive: Stephanie Leutert on Violence in Mexico and Central America
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Host/Announcer
Foreign.
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Marissa Wong
I'm Marissa Wong, intern at Lawfair with an episode from the Lawfare archive from March 1, 2026. In the past year and a half, the Mexican government has launched its most aggressive offensive against domestic drug cartels and organized crime groups in more than a decade. As part of this campaign, on February 23rd, Mexican security forces killed Mexico's most wanted crime boss, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, or El Mencho, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. In response to El Mencho's killing, the cartel launched a campaign of violence, including the burning of cars, buses and businesses. At least 74 people were killed as a result of the operation and and the subsequent cartel violence, according to Mexican authorities. For today's archive, I chose an episode from October 8, 2016, in which Stephanie Leutert joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the state of violence in Mexico and Central America, how cartels and organized crime groups have contributed to this crisis, how it affects US national security, and more.
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Benjamin Wittes
Steph Loiter, thank you very much for joining us.
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Stephanie Leutert
Thank you, Ben.
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Benjamin Wittes
So let's start with the Mexico Security Initiative, which readers of Lawfare will have seen associated with your column. But what is it and what are you doing with it? What's your role in it?
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Mexico Security Initiative Representative
So the Mexico Security Initiative is a new program out of the Strauss center at UT Austin. And it was created to fill the void that we were seeing in terms of policy, relevant research for Mexico, for the Mexican government, and also for the US Government related to the security challenges. And it has a few components. So the main one is a year long class at the LBJ School here at ut. And we also have a speaker series where we're bringing in practitioners and scholars who are working on these issues and a spring conference that we're in the process of planning in Mexico City. And of course, the column beyond the border with Lawfare.
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Host/Announcer
So when you describe a void in
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Benjamin Wittes
scholarship, you know, I think most Lawfare readers are aware that there's a lot of violence in particularly northern Mexico, though it has certainly spread beyond the north. But how would you describe the void of scholarship with respect to that constellation of violence and security threats relative to, say, other ones? Like, what's the void that you guys are trying to fill?
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Mexico Security Initiative Representative
Yeah, so first I'll tell you why I think the void exists. And then the void that we're trying to fill. There certainly is a void in the kind of US national security establishment when it comes to hard security questions in Mexico, really, in Latin America generally. But we're focusing on Mexico and it's not really clear why, given that this is our neighbor, it's a country we share a 2,000 mile border with, it's our second largest export market. So we really should be concerned about stability. So kind of why this isn't headlining a lot of our national security conversations, or at least making it onto the top 10 priorities is certainly a question. And I think there's a few reasons for it. I think, first of all, we rely a lot on these kind of stale paradigms of what this violence actually is or where it comes from. And we've all seen narcos, or a lot of us have seen narcos. And so we're thinking of these kind of Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar groups that are out there in Mexico moving drugs, kind of El Chapo is reinforcing the stereotype of the big kingpin in charge of a big organization. But a lot of times that's no longer the reality. So that's number one. Number two, we're less interested in violent groups when they're not kind of espousing some extremist ideology, when they're not trying to take down the United States or they don't have extreme political objectives. These are fundamentally profit motivated organizations. And so they don't seem to capture our imagination in the Same way as other groups that are ideologically oriented.
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Benjamin Wittes
Let's talk about the nature and scope of the violence both in Mexico and in Central America more generally, you know, which is pretty extreme relative to a lot of conflicts that the national security community spends a lot of time on. So what's the scope of this thing? How bad is it? And, you know, how does it stack up against, you know, say, Islamist terrorism in Europe and the Middle East?
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Mexico Security Initiative Representative
So to preface kind of this whole conversation before we get to how bad is it? And it is pretty bad, I think it's worth taking a step back and reminding everyone that as we talk about these really bad security challenges, Mexico is also the world's 15th largest economy and attracts almost $30 billion a year in foreign investment and is a world class producer of engineers and scholars and companies, et cetera, et cetera. Now with that said, because often these conversations quickly go into is Mexico a failed state? Which it's not. But with that said along the margins, are, you know, in these remote areas or in states that are far away from Mexico City, you have an enormous security crisis. The data is hard to, hard to come by, but it seems that since 2005, there are at least 150,000 Mexicans who have been murdered.
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Benjamin Wittes
And that's an astonishing number. So, like, that's according to whom and what?
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Mexico Security Initiative Representative
So this is according to the Mexican kind of government's own data. And this includes all murders. So you have to take that with a grain of salt of how many of those are cartel murders versus how many of them are kind of your regular, I guess, run of the mill murders, if we can say that. But on top of that, it's also worth mentioning there are at least another 25 to 30,000 disappeared Mexicans that we know about. So this is a total of 180,000 Mexicans since 2005 who are either have been murdered or who are disappeared. And there are likely many more whose families has never reported them as missing because there are often mass graves that they find in Veracruz or in Morelos or in Michoacan or in Guerrero holding 40 bodies. And then those get counted into that year's homicide data. So this is a really, you know, perhaps 180,000, perhaps even higher, closer to 200,000 Mexicans being murdered over the past, you know, 10, 11 years.
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Benjamin Wittes
And what's the baseline against which to measure that? I mean, what it do we have a sense of? I assume that's a sharp escalation over previous years. But what would the normal 10 year period of body count look like, certainly not that high.
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Mexico Security Initiative Representative
And it's hard to now know what a normal year would look like. There were much lower rates in the years from, say, 2000 to 2005. And then when Calderon came in, President Calderon, and he declared a very aggressive strategy against the cartels, and you saw these numbers of homicides that were increasing very quickly. Now in 2012, when the current president came in, he came in on a platform that he was going to reduce the number of homicides, the number of murders happening in Mexico. And you did see in 2012, 2013, 2014, these decreasing numbers slowly, and they kind of flattened out. And we thought that that was perhaps, you know, they weren't as low as before, but we thought that was perhaps a new norm. Now, since January of this year, we have 14,000 Mexicans who have been killed. So that's an increase in the violence. That's 18% more than last year, and that's 24% more than 2014. So we're on the upswing again. So it's hard to know if this. This level of, say around 2,000 Mexicans being killed a month or a little less than that is the new norm, or if it'll ever go back to being closer to perhaps 1,000 for a country of 113 million people, 1,000 Mexicans being murdered a month, maybe that, but that would be roughly half of the rate we're seeing right now. So it's really hard to tell.
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Benjamin Wittes
And what about in the other countries that you look at? I mean, I think some of them have rates of homicide that's even higher than Mexico.
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Mexico Security Initiative Representative
It is. So I'll give you a few numbers to help put it into perspective. These are, you know, for Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, these countries are much smaller. Guatemala is a country of 15 million. Honduras is a country of 8 million. El Salvador, 6 million. But when you look at it, per rates of 100,000 people and how many are murdered per 100,000 in the United States, it's five. In Mexico, it's 13. In Guatemala, it's 30. In Honduras, it's 57. In El Salvador, it's 103. Talking about the most dangerous countries in the region and in the world. That's. You're looking at Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador always making it into the top five.
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Benjamin Wittes
So these are, you know, just astonishing levels of violence. And as you said at the beginning, they kind of escapes the notice of the national security community. I mean, people are generically aware that there's cartel violence and, you know, Periodically, large numbers of people fleeing it end up as migrants. And we, you know, talk about, you know, whether we should build a wall or what we should do about the migrant crisis. But the sense of this as a sort of major set of conflicts that are right on our border doesn't really enter into the US national security conversation in any sustained or serious way. You've given some reasons for that. I'm interested in the case for the idea that we should think of this, A, in national security terms and B, as sort of like a major conflict that, you know, is worth more attention than we give it, given the proximity to us. I mean, are we understudying this? Underthinking it, underreporting it?
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Mexico Security Initiative Representative
Absolutely. And I think the problem is because it's so close to the United States, I think that's actually one of the reasons why we have a hard time focusing and understanding these issues. Why? Because so much of this touches our most sensitive policy nerves in terms of domestic policy. We see migrants arriving at our southern border, and we think illegal immigration. We don't think anywhere near the same terms as Syrians, you know, fleeing violence and, you know, fleeing violence and arriving in Europe. They're refugees. And when you have Central Americans fleeing and arriving at the southern border, they're undocumented illegal immigrants and they need to get out, or it's also touching border security, kind of a big hot button national security issue. So these are often our most challenging, our most sensitive domestic issues. And because Central Americans and Mexicans and the issues in these countries are so deeply intertwined with our own kind of sensibilities, I guess it's hard for us to often separate it out. It's not as easy as looking into a faraway country and, you know, making these judgments when your own opinions and perspectives are so wrapped up in it.
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Benjamin Wittes
In one of your pieces, you sort of broke down the list of the list of actors, like who's. Who's producing these body counts. And your basic argument is it's a lot of different actors. It's not, you know, it's not like sort of ISIS void, you know,
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Host/Announcer
you
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Benjamin Wittes
know, the Syrian government or. But there's, you know, these are. These are many different levels of actors involved in this, and it's fundamentally different in character from, you know, what we think of as, you know, the sort of narco violence from the late 80s and early 90s. So break this down for us. Who is killing people in Mexico and Central America and what are the different groups that are responsible for the violence?
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Stephanie Leutert
So I Think I ended that piece by saying everyone is killing everyone. So I'll start with that premise. In Mexico, you have a lot of different organized criminal groups. You have the big kind of traditional cartels. You have the Sinaloa cartel, that was the one that El Chapo is the head of. And they tend to be overall, or they used to be kind of less violence for violence sake, although that certainly has changed. And then you have other groups that are kind of upstarts, like the cartel Jalisco kind of new generation, and they're expanding really rapidly across Mexico.
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Benjamin Wittes
So what makes, like, are they different in character, or are they just, you know, Kali to Sinaloa's Medellin cartel? I mean, are these basically the same sort of entities, or is there something different about the younger generation of cartels?
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Stephanie Leutert
When kind of 2005 or when you had the Zetas really coming up, they changed the entire structure in that they really embraced the use of violence and they glorified it, and they took videos and they put it online. And this was a game changer in the sense of other cartels began doing the same types of activities.
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Host/Announcer
So.
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Stephanie Leutert
So you do have this kind of divide of people looking at the old cartels of the Sinaloa, which were not as violent, or they were, but there was more. It was less of violent for violence sake. And the new generation of the Zetas, of the cartel Jalisco, new generation, who are really hyper violent, and they're not really trying in a lot of ways to make any inroads with the communities where they're operating. They're more extorting or kind of taking part in other very damaging activities. I wrote in another piece about how the cartel Jalisco new generation, it's expanding very quickly. And this is kind of a case of the Zetas were playing this role only a few years ago. But as these, you know, one criminal group expands very quickly, it of course, encroaches on the territory of other groups, causing a lot of violence kind of along those fault lines as these groups fight over territory, over very lucrative trafficking territory or ports or highways. And so you see that, and then you see the Mexican policy and the U.S. policy of kind of going after the top leaders of these different groups. And as you kind of slice off a few of the heads, you often get, if it's not in a very hierarchical organization with a long kind of chain of command that has already been outlined, you get a lot of infighting and these ruptures within groups and creating this splintering of groups. Really creates a lot of uncertainty, a lot of bloodshed between former colleagues, and everyone's kind of trying to maneuver to get their own piece of the territory. So you have all this going on at the cartel level. And of course, all these groups are fighting also with the police and with the military to continue to be able to engage in these activities. Now that's just kind of on the macro level of the largest groups within a lot of these communities, there's also smaller kind of street gangs or smaller level crime.
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Host/Announcer
So what is.
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Benjamin Wittes
I want to stop you there because I've sort of wondered this in some of your pieces. What is the difference between an international gang, like the types that you've described, and a cartel?
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Stephanie Leutert
Often the line is very murky. A lot of times you see these small criminal groups that are operating in a city and you'll have a group like the Zetas come in and they'll basically say, you're either working for us or you are, you're all dead. The plato or, you know, plomo kind of thing. So you end up having these small groups of kind of your local criminals, and they're backed by these, you know, big international cartels or organized criminal groups. And to be a big transnational organization that's moving drugs or other kind of illicit goods or moving people, you have to have a very large international network of contacts to be able to have suppliers in Colombia, for example, to have groups working on your behalf in Guatemala to move this all and then in the US to distribute. And a lot of these local gangs don't have that, but they might have the backing or, you know, kind of they're a part of franchise per se, of these larger groups. So it can be difficult to know, you know, who's actually a Zeta, who's actually has the contacts that go all the way up to the top. And who are these smaller groups that may have their name, but are really operating under their own commands, just with the kind of implicit backing and name of the larger group?
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Host/Announcer
you
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Benjamin Wittes
and when you describe these gangs, some of them you describe as very
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Host/Announcer
local,
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Benjamin Wittes
you know, controlling a few blocks of territory in a. In a given city. And some of them you describe as fascinatingly having their origins in US cities and sort of exported back to El Salvador and elsewhere. So walk us through how these gangs, in contrast to the cartels, are actually a US urban phenomenon.
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Stephanie Leutert
Absolutely. It is an interesting story of how a lot of times Central American El Salvadoran migrants, they fled the civil wars in their countries. Back in the 80s or early 90s, you had a lot of these El Salvadoran migrants living often as poor undocumented migrants in the US and they were vulnerable to gang recruitment or to gang violence, living in many of the same neighborhoods where there were kind of long established LA gangs, that being the city where a lot of El Salvadorans were living and which had a large gang presence at this time. So you saw these groups kind of forming their own mini gangs to protect themselves or to kind of fit in. And over time, a lot of these gang members changing policies, getting tough on gangs. They actually ended up going to jail and learning kind of from all of the most established gangs of that time, specifically the Mexican Mafia. These gangs, particularly the Mares Alva Chucha, the MS.13 gang, were then, as immigration policies changed and kind of got very tough on non citizens who had committed violent crimes, that kind of policy push took a lot of these people out of the jails. A lot of these El Salvadoran migrants who had now not only formed their own gangs, but had become even more violent or more established through these ties with larger gangs. It exported them all back to El Salvador. This happened around the same time that El Salvador was coming out of its civil war. It was a fertile place for these gang members who were violent, who had weapons. There was not a strong state presence. There were a lot of very traumatized individuals who had just experienced the civil war and had histories with violence. And it was the perfect ground for a lot of these gang members to really set up their operations, which have been stuck steadily growing ever since. And now you have, you know, you have small local. I mean, the gangs are transnational at this point, and they are really controlling a lot of neighborhoods. But how does it break down? It's also, it's called cliques, which is kind of groups of these gang members. And they might control a city or a town, a small town, but they're all being controlled at the top by the top gang members. So it's a more diffuse network, but they're operating and they all have their kind of local identities and local members. But they're operating under this large kind of transnational criminal umbrella.
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Benjamin Wittes
Okay, so you've got the traditional cartels, you've got the new generation ultra violent cartel types. You've got highly local street gangs reflecting franchises from other organizations. And you have the originally US based, particularly in El Salvador, street gangs that have been exported or deported back to El Salvador.
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Host/Announcer
What else?
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Benjamin Wittes
What are the other major sources of killing?
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Stephanie Leutert
You have the police and the military themselves. These are bodies that are, you know, in Mexico and in Central America that are, you know, authorized to fight against all these groups, but then are accused of committing their own as one report put at crimes against humanity. And each kind of force is a little different. I'd say Mexico's police and military are pretty professionalized, but they still are blamed for pretty egregious violations of human rights, of killing, you know, 22 or up to 40 cartel members, many of whom apparently tried to surrender, that was a recent case. Or in El Salvador, where you kind of repeatedly hear cases of the kind of shoot before asking questions where over a hundred gang members have been killed, not arrested, killed by police in the last few years. So this, sorry, the last year. So this type of constant confrontation between these criminal groups and the police and the military, even perhaps much of it justified, is also another source for a lot of human rights violations or for a lot of the violence in general. And it also creates kind of deep divides between these communities and the state, which makes reporting crime more difficult, which makes stopping these groups at all more difficult. So it's kind of a vicious circle that continues.
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Benjamin Wittes
So I want to return to the question of how bad it is. So you hear, you hear different things about these different countries and sometimes different things about the same country. I mean, you often hear people say Mexico's turning into a failed state or you know, particularly about Honduras, you know that, you know, these, some of the Central American countries are really approaching governance failure. On the other hand, I've heard lots of people say Mexico is a quite effective state in most ways. It's an effective state with a violence problem. And so I'm interested in your sense of how we should assess these states relative to other states in the world that have large numbers of murders or killings or non state actor violence.
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Stephanie Leutert
It's a hard question to answer because in a lot of ways it's all of the above. Mexico is a world class economy. It has a amazing aerospace sector, world class aerospace sector. It has an unbelievable automotive industry, it has all of these incredible world class industries. If you go to Mexico city and you walk around, it's cosmopolitan.
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Marissa Wong
It.
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Stephanie Leutert
It's an amazing place. It feels safe. There's boutiques, there's cafes, there's people walking their dogs. But if you went up to Tamaulipas or if you went to a small town in Veracruz or in Michoacan, these kind of more remote states, you would probably get a lot of opposite answers, that these areas have been overlooked by the government, that there isn't much employment, that there's been brutal, kind of grotesque killings on a regular basis. So you have a Mexico kind of a state structure that's incredibly sturdy and these pockets where you have unbelievable violence going on.
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Benjamin Wittes
And what about the Central American states? I mean, should we think about, you know, Honduras and El Salvador, as, you know, states that are, you know, on the verge of failure or threatened with sort of basic governance failure, or do they have more staying power and resilience than that?
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Stephanie Leutert
I don't think that these are states that are going to be failing anytime soon, but I would say, I think the. I mean, they're much smaller in size. And so if you have a few towns in Mexico or a handful or quite a few towns in Mexico that are extremely violent or where it's extremely unsafe, you also have large swaths of the country that are fine. When you have that same thing in a country like El Salvador, which is very small, that really is the entire country, I think it's. I think I'm safe in saying that the situation in Honduras and El Salvador on a kind of larger scale is much worse. You really do have kind of an emptying out of the region. You have thousands, tens of thousands of Central Americans who are fleeing of El Salvadorans is a country of 6 million, and you have tens of thousands of people who are fleeing every month or more, because that's only the people who are making it to the United States. They're fleeing a lot of different things. They're fleeing the gangs. Incredible kind of gang violence, extortion. Someone shows up and slips a note under your front door, says to pay this person at this time. And if you don't, they're going to kill you. And, you know, that's what happened to your neighbor down the street. And so you're terrified, so you pay, and then you can't make that last payment, and you're worried they're actually going to kill you, so you flee. Or they were harassing your daughter, so you have this as well. But I'll also say I spent time working with a lot of these Central Americans who have made it to the United States. And there are other epidemics going on as well that are often tied to the gangs, but of domestic violence. And it's kind of this breakdown of the social fabric that's occurring right now through El Salvador and Honduras and parts of Guatemala that I think is going to become. It is a dire challenge already, and it's going to continue to become an even worse one.
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Benjamin Wittes
So you have, as have others, but you've really insisted that the violence in these countries is what's driving this massive migration, including of kids to the United States. Now, this. This migration was big news a few years ago, and it's largely out of the news now. To what extent has it continued and to what extent. And people just don't care anymore, and to what extent has. Has it really been curtailed?
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Stephanie Leutert
It's still continuing. I think one of the reasons why it's out of the news is because we've just gotten better at absorbing these numbers of people. Just last month, just families. There were about 9,000 families who showed up at the border from Central America. But we now have a much better system for processing them. And we have family detention centers that are already established. So it's not as much of a breaking news story.
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Benjamin Wittes
And when you say absorbing and processing, so what is happening to, you know, of the X number of tens of thousands of people? I mean, how many people have come over this whole wave and what's tended to happen to them?
- [36:50]
Stephanie Leutert
I'm not sure of the exact number of people who have come, but you're looking at, you know, upwards of. I think it's, you know, over 100,000 people easily who have, you know, cross the border when they. So there's different pathways of what happens to you, you know, when you make it here. And I also want to go back that not all of these people are fleeing violence. There are some who are coming for economic opportunity, and there are some who are coming to reunite with family members who are living here. But I do think that, and statistics back it up, that or survey statistics, that a large majority are fleeing violence of some form. Now, when they come to the United States, there's three pathways. There's unaccompanied children, which is the one that made the most news. And those numbers have actually stayed stable. Around 5,000 unaccompanied children have been arriving over the past about two years from central America every month. And then you also have the families that come, and then you also have just adults. And each of those three categories is pretty Processed a little differently with the children going into a kind of more the Department of Health and Human Services. And they're processed on a very kind of different timeline. There are families which many of them go to family detention center and they have an entire process of how to leave those centers. And then there's the adults, which are again, on a entirely different pathway. And they're the least likely to have the chance to, to stay in the United States.
- [38:22]
Benjamin Wittes
So in your perception, in the aggregate, are most people getting sent back or are we absorbing, I don't want to, you know, make Donald Trump reach for the smelling salts, but, you know, are we absorbing a large number of people or is this largely a processing in terms of, you know, an orderly system for sending people back?
- [38:43]
Stephanie Leutert
We it is an orderly system for sending people back. And that was really the initial intent of the Obama administration's response. Our first response to the Central American migrants was how can we process them quickly to send them back quickly so that more realize they cannot stay. Now, each of those three groups that I mentioned, unaccompanied children, family detention, just plain adults, each of them, I'd say it's probably a little different statistics. If you're an unaccompanied child, your chances of staying in the United States are much higher than if you are a 20 year old male from Elsa. Just based on asylum law protections that we offer to children here in the United States. And similarly for parents with children, it is easier to stay. Although with that said, these types of asylum cases are often quite difficult to win because gangs usually aren't the, you know, asylum law wasn't written for individuals fleeing gangs. So it's often difficult to prove that type of persecution back in their home country.
- [39:45]
Benjamin Wittes
You mean because the gangs aren't fundamentally political in the country?
- [39:48]
Marissa Wong
Exactly.
- [39:49]
Stephanie Leutert
And because these countries are taking efforts in a lot of places to try to stop the gangs. So there isn't. They're not fleeing the state per se. It's, you know, to kind of go back. Though you do have a lot of people who are entering the country right now on asylum proceedings, and those are long and often they're shelved over kind of administrative reasons after, especially for children after they've reached a certain length of time. But it also depends where in the country these individuals are applying for asylum. There are places, there are different districts that are much that have judges that are more lenient to these cases and others that are not. So it really depends geographically, you know, where they're actually filing the cases.
- [40:28]
Host/Announcer
So when you look at this.
- [40:31]
Benjamin Wittes
I mean, this is a really complex tapestry of policy pro problems and second order effects. And when you look at it, do you say there's an obvious set of policy interventions that a reasonable U.S. government would make that we are not making, or do you look at this and say this is kind of an inevitable consequence of a dramatic standard of living difference across one border and then another dramatic standard of living difference across that country's southern border. You're going to get net, you're going to get some violence, you're going to get net migration, both as people sort of, you know, produce drugs to sell across those respective borders and as people flee. How much of this is sort of inevitable and how much of this is bad policy in the country's incorporation question, including ours?
- [41:30]
Stephanie Leutert
These are the exact questions that the Mexico Security Initiative is trying to take on here at ut. And it's complicated. A lot of it is what looks like good policy then creates very bad consequences.
- [41:43]
Benjamin Wittes
So what's an example of that?
- [41:45]
Stephanie Leutert
You know, I think that the, you know, going back to the one that we talked about quickly of deporting criminals in jails, that might have seemed like a very good policy from the US Perspective of lowering violence rates in major cities and that created an enormous, enormously bad situation in El Salvador that is leading to the security crisis you have today. Or perhaps good policy that still creates bad consequences is going after the heads of gangs, I'm sorry, of gangs and of cartels. Because every time you take off a stable head like El Chapo, you often create splintering or vulnerabilities that other organized criminal groups try to exploit. So that might be a good policy. It's probably a good thing to try to get these leaders, but it also creates perhaps more violence.
- [42:34]
Benjamin Wittes
When you look at the general landscape, is there one aspect of US Policy that you say, okay, reasonable minds can disagree about X, Y and Z, but this is insane.
- [42:47]
Stephanie Leutert
The first thing that comes to mind is something I know, Ben, we've talked about something that I hope to be writing about soon, which is the conditions in short term detention centers once migrants cross into the United States. And this is, you know, this is a, not a small problem, but it isn't a, you know, as big of a problem of how do you take on, you know, criminal organizations in El Salvador. But it seems like such an easy fix that it's to me, it's the low hanging fruit of how do you kind of just one policy that would improve a lot of people's lives. And so that is that when migrants are apprehended along the border as they're trying to cross, they're put into these short term processing centers, which they call la sieleras, which means the ice box or ice boxes. And temperatures in these places are. They report them to be quite low, and they report not having adequate food or medical care. Now, the reason for this, I believe, is not that the border patrol are being incredibly malicious by any means, it's that these were meant to be short term processing centers of a few hours. And so the resources that they have to offer to these migrants are made for that timeline or that time frame. But often these migrants, because there's so many, and they're now staying in these processing centers which, imagine it's kind of like a concrete cell, they're staying there for about 72 hours, which is for small children. For older migrants, that is a long time to be sleeping on a concrete floor or only eating kind of bread or ham, which is what they report to eat. So to me, this is, this is just where a situation evolved and the infrastructure remained the same. So I imagine there could be very small changes in terms of providing just three meals a day of good food, or making sure that all migrants have a small mattress, not a real mattress, but kind of a fold out mattress to sleep on or blankets, and making sure the temperatures are adequate for small children. And that would make a huge difference in the quality of life. Because when you talk to migrants here, they'll tell you the horrors of their home country. They'll tell you the horrors of the journey, and then they also tell you the horrors of those first few days. And a lot of these people go on to win asylum cases. And it just seems like there isn't really a reason why we couldn't just ensure those conditions kind of meet industry standards for individuals who, many of whom will go on to become legal U.S. residents.
- [45:21]
Benjamin Wittes
Steph Loiter, thank you very much for joining us.
- [45:24]
Stephanie Leutert
Thank you, Ben. The Lawfare podcast is produced in cooperation
- [45:30]
Mexico Security Initiative Representative
with the Brookings Institution. Our music is performed by Sophia Yan,
- [45:35]
Stephanie Leutert
who's a big fan of Narcos. And as always, please spread the word and promote the Lawfare podcast via your
- [45:41]
Mexico Security Initiative Representative
social networks on Twitter, Facebook and email.
- [45:51]
Host/Announcer
Sabla Italiano.
- [46:17]
Mexico Security Initiative Representative
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