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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Deportation in America
00:55:16
A tougher stance on immigration is the signature position of the Trump Administration, and the President’s first year in office has been marked by sharply increased arrests of unauthorized immigrants. In this hour we explore immigration and deportation from the perspective of a Wisconsin dairy farm, a conservative Washington think tank, and the mother of a deportee, as well as a sanctuary church where a woman is hiding in plain sight from immigration enforcement.
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- [00:07]
A
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. From pretty much day one of Donald Trump's presidency, the battle over immigration and deportation has been at the top of the agenda. From the so called Muslim ban to the negotiations over DACA and the fate of the Dreamers. We're going to be spending the entire hour looking hard and deep at these issues and we're going to start here on a street in Manhattan where staff writer Jonathan Blitzer is on his way into a church.
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B
I'm standing outside the Holy Rude Episcopal Church in Washington Heights. It's a giant neo Gothic stone structure just across the way from the George Washington Bridge. Standing out here because there are a few places where immigration authorities aren't allowed to go. One of those places, churches, churches, schools, hospitals. According to regulations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE agents can't go into these spaces in pursuit of undocumented immigrants. I'm standing here precisely because there's a woman inside who sought sanctuary. She's a 33 year old Guatemalan mother of three named Amanda Morales Guerra. She came here in August precisely because she worried that she'd be detained and and deported by ICE if she stayed in her hometown in Long island where she lived with her family. She's here now thanks to the generosity of members of this church who have joined a new movement called the New Sanctuary Movement. We're gonna go inside. It's pretty quiet here. There's one person praying in these old wooden pews. The floor creaks underfoot. There's the sound, the hissing sound of old radiators plugging away in the nooks and crannies of this building. Beautiful, cozy, but definitely old and somewhat rickety feeling space. The particularly dramatic fact of her case is that when she went into sanctuary, she made a public display of it. She thought it was important for members of her community to understand the situation that she was in. It also became a way for her to get support from community members who ended up turning out and have been helping her ever since. But the result is that it's not a mystery where she is. And so she really does run a risk, if she were to leave, of being of being apprehended. Hi, how do you do? Juan Carlos. Oh, Juan Carlos. John. Good to meet you, John. That's Juan Carlos Ruiz, a Mexican priest based in New York City. He's the founder of the New Sanctuary Movement. The church is kind of a funny mix of energy levels. In the back part of the church, there's this sort of labyrinth of Small rooms, a kitchen, a little area where kids are drawing a lot of howling, happy voices, a lot of bustle. So we're in the bedroom. There are two white bunk beds stacked. And I'm here with Amanda, and she's introduced me to her daughter, who's in bed reading. I like it. And we've got kind of big, tall bookshelves with the church's books on them. And then we've got stuffed animals in the beds and backpacks full of clothes. And this is where Amanda and her and her kids sleep every night. It's tight quarters for four people, but homie, Amanda is in the US without legal papers. But her three kids, who are 3 years old, 8 years old, and 10 years old, are American citizens. They kind of pop out and make their little forays out into Washington Heights. But for the most part, it's this family alone in kind of this one island, which is the only place where their mother is currently safe, comes across this piece of paper that her younger sister gives her. And this piece of paper basically is a press account indicating that Amanda, their mother, faces this deportation order. And so when she finds out that this is what's happening, she says.
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Mom.
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Mom, why are you on this piece of paper? They're going to deport you. They're going to deport you. Her mother says, yeah, well, why did you think I was here? This is why we're here. There is this deportation order. They want to send me to Guatemala. Tell me about what's your daily routine like here? What time do you wake up? How do you start your day? How do you spend your days enclosed here in this space for all these hours? She gets up early every morning, you know, around 6:40, she says. And she's kind of up and out by a little after seven. And she has to get up because she's got to get her daughters ready for school. So she's got to get them. She's got to get them ready. She's got to brush their hair. She's got to make them breakfast. She then turns to David, who's generally still sleeping, and says, mom, mom, come back to be. Want to sleep a little bit more. So she'll sleep a little bit more, but then she'll get up a short while later. And she has a pretty active life inside the church. She takes English classes. She gets yoga classes. Another woman comes to the church to do a knitting class with her. The buzz and all this sort of clucking and all these attentive energies of other people make her really Feel like she's a part of something. The night we were there, a group from another Manhattan congregation, the Church of the Good shepherd, came to visit Amanda and to sing for her. What's been the hardest thing about staying here in this. In this church for three months, More than three months? She says the hardest part about being here was the day that my kids first went to school and I couldn't take them. She could only lead them as far as the door and all sorts of other things, like taking my girls to go to the doctor. It feels incredibly painful to be stuck inside here. Gives you too much stress. Do you think he understands the fact of your situation, how difficult it is? The situation is definitely affecting him, Amanda says, because, you know, he used to be comfortable being with other people. Now less so. He only wants to be with his mother. If I go to the bathroom and he doesn't see me, he says, mommy, Mommy, where are you? And he looks and he starts to cry. And I have to say to him, I'm here, I'm here. It's okay. But he immediately thinks that she's gone. Are you ever afraid that ICE agents might come inside or are waiting outside? Are you afraid, or do you feel fully safe in here? So she says, I'm not scared inside here. Because this is a sanctuary church. The immigration agents can't enter. They might walk around outside nearby. But are they coming in? I don't think so. If I go outside to the street, that's different. Yes, I'd be scared of that. Do you ever want to step outside? I feel stuck in here. I feel nauseous, like I can't breathe. I want to get outside. I want to almost have wings and fly away or just walk away outside, to breathe the air outside, to get out of here, to breathe the air.
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D
Fuera comisijos.
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I hope I can leave and be outside with my kids, that my kids can study here and that I can be free. That's the only thing I ask of God.
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A
That's Jonathan Blitzer with Amanda Morales Guerra. She's been living with her children at the Holyrood Episcopal Church in Manhattan for six months. Immigration arrests were up 40% last year. Just in the last couple of weeks, DACA and the status of the dreamers became a bargaining chip in Trump's quest for a border wall. 200,000 refugees from catastrophic earthquakes in El Salvador were ordered home, and the president complained about immigrants from developing countries that he referred to crudely, even by his standards, as shitholes. Donald Trump intends to keep his campaign promise to be far tougher on immigration than any of his predecessors. Jonathan Blitzer joins me now, along with Sarah Stillman. They're both staff writers at the New Yorker. Jonathan and Sarah, both of you have reported extensively on immigrant communities. So, Sarah, how does the reality of this first year compare to their expectations?
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Well, you know, in some ways it's.
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More dramatic than we could have expected, and in some ways it is significantly less dramatic. Insofar as Trump has actually not had an increase in deportations. We saw actually more under Obama than we've seen thus far under Trump. But what we have seen is a massive rise in the number of people arrested by ice. So I think what we're going to see coming down the pipeline is a dramatic increase in deportations, but we're finding it takes some time to work its way through the courts. So we've seen a tremendous backlog in the courts. Jonathan, I don't know if you have more analysis on that, but I mean.
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B
The backlog is a huge issue. I mean, there are over 600,000 cases that have been stalled in immigration courts. There has not been the political will to hire more immigration judges to deal with this court backlog.
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F
What's the typical experience of someone who's been arrested by ICE and put into the current system? What happens to them? What is the current system?
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E
So they'll go often into detention and sometimes they'll sit there for a very long time, more than a year perhaps. And what that means is that you have a lot of immigrants who for the most part don't really have access.
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To a lawyer and they end up defending themselves oftentimes.
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E
I mean, you've actually seen immigration judges in the federal system say that a three year old has to represent themselves in court by themselves. So a lot of the unaccompanied minors who've come through previously came through on what's known as the rocket docket. So they were sped through the system and they had no lawyers and most of the time they were deported.
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F
Jonathan, it's your sense that the Trump administration is approaching the issue of immigration methodically, or are they kind of winging it as they go along?
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B
I think in some ways winging it, which is the administration's way, is actually quite effective in the immigration context. And so for the Trump administration, which is obviously dead set on arresting more people and on deporting more people, it's actually been quite easy for them to remove some of the protections that the Obama administration put in place toward the end of its second term. So at a certain point, the Obama administration recognized that deportations are up on our watch, and we have to find some ways to mitigate the number of.
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F
Deportations and what were the protections.
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B
So they created a series of enforcement guidelines essentially for how ICE should go about its job. So rather than going after anyone who was in the country illegally, the idea was that ICE would go after people with criminal records, people who constituted a so called public safety threat. One of the first things the Trump administration did on taking office was gut all of those enforcement priorities, which makes it kind of open season on the undocumented community.
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F
The other day, the acting head of ice, Tom Homan, said he wants to charge politicians in sanctuary cities with crimes. Is that Trumpy and bluster or what's going on here?
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E
Oh, I think they're dead serious. And I think we've seen state legislation also pushing to that effect. So in Texas, we've seen SB4, which is a piece of legislation that's currently held up in litigation, but that would actually allow for the prosecution of sheriffs who refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration's request for keeping immigrants in ICE holds. So detainers in their jails. And this has pretty serious consequences. So this week in the magazine, I write about a case that took place in Texas directly after Trump announced that they were going to crack down on sanctuary cities, where ICE started showing up in the courthouse in Travis county where they had just declared themselves a sanctuary city, and they rounded up a guy who was there on two minor offenses, and he was apprehended by ICE for a prior immigration offense and was deported and then was killed.
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F
How much was that an outlier story? Or in fact, how many people who are living in the United States who fear deportation are really facing violence if sent back to Honduras or Salvador or Mexico?
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E
Oh, I think many of us fail to realize how profoundly violent it has become in the countries known as the Northern Triangle. So Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. And I think you're seeing a lot of people who are being rounded up for minor traffic violations or minor misdemeanors, low level drug offenses, who may now face very real life or death consequences.
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F
And in your view, what do we owe those people?
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At the very least, I think we owe them a shot before an immigration judge. So it used to be in US Policy that most people got a chance to make their case before a judge. And we saw a dramatic change that actually occurred under Bill Clinton, where legislation was passed that allowed for something called expedited removal. So people who had just arrived at the border could be deported almost instantaneously. And a lot of people lost their chance to have their cases heard.
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F
Tara, I want to get to the psychology of the political situation here where it comes to immigration. Clearly, part of the support for President Trump as a candidate was anxiety about immigration and immigrants. And when we look at the numbers, the numbers of people deported during the Obama administration, the fact that in fact immigration numbers and certainly illegal immigration numbers have gone way down, why so much anxiety and why did it help Trump so much? What's he playing on?
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E
Yeah, I find it interesting that we often forget how small Trump's highly anti immigration base really is. When you look at the data on daca, for instance, there's overwhelming support for daca, not just with Democrats, but also Republicans. So well over 2/3 of Americans support it. Even some 60% of Republicans think DACA recipients should actually have a pathway to citizenship. So going even beyond where we are now. And nonetheless, I think Trump has very, very successfully mobilized the rhetoric of fe. And of course, we're all familiar now with the notion of bad hombres and how much he has hammered home this idea that immigrant criminality, immigrants in crime, go hand in hand. And so I think, does he have.
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F
Any numbers to support it?
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E
In fact, the numbers show quite the opposite, that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit crimes at lower rates than people who are native born US Citizens, and also show that immigrants are actually disproportionately victims of crime, often because they feel that they can't come forward to law enforcement to report crime out of fear.
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F
Jonathan Blitzer, you, because we're trying to cover immigration so comprehensively, you had a piece in the New Yorker in which you describe the situation in Long island and the gang called Ms. 13. And the President of the United States has a keen focus on it. What's going on there and what's the story you tell there?
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B
Sure, it's a gang rooted in El Salvador that actually got its start on the streets of Los angeles in the 1980s. And over time, after mass deportation of these gang members, the gang kind of took root throughout Central America. All of the countries that Sarah's discussed, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala. And so what's happened in places like Long island, where there's a huge Central American population and a very big Salvadoran population, is that these gangs have been active actually since the late 90s and the crime kind of spikes. And at the current moment, the crime seems to have gone up. This of course, against a backdrop of reductions in crime across Long Island. But the perception has very much been because of how grisly some of these murders have been on Long island, that. That the streets are being overrun by these gangsters. These are American streets. These are suburban towns. And so Trump has talked a lot about the need to ramp up enforcement to crack down on these gangs on Long Island. And one of the kind of adverse and perverse consequences of that rhetoric is that it's empowered ICE and local law enforcement to go after people who, for the most part, tend to be the victims of this gang crime rather than the perpetrators of it.
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A
Why would they go after the victims.
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F
And not the perpetrators?
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B
I think there's such an attitude of kind of fear and confusion and a lack of understanding of what's actually happening, that there's essentially widespread racial profiling going on.
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F
But what you're describing is like the behavior of a bad cop in any sense. Is ice, in other words, are there violations that ICE is committing that are at a much higher rate than ordinary police?
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B
Two things in response to that. Yes, ICE is definitely notorious for being much less scrupulous even than ordinary police. Why? I think, for the most part, there isn't the same vetting of who the officers are, and they also don't generally interact with the criminal justice system. So this is one of the reasons why ICE is so pernicious on Long island in dealing with the gang problem. The local police is trying to root out gang members. The local police faces basically a public safety threat. They have to then prove eventually in a court of law that the people they're arresting have some gang tie and have been involved in crimes. ICE doesn't have to prove any of that. All ICE has to do is round up people who are here illegally.
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F
Jonathan, in addition to the argument that immigrants are making life unsafe and raising the crime rates, which both of you say is untrue statistically, it's also that they're taking our jobs. And we hear this in all parts of the country. We hear it in political debate all the time. Is it true?
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B
It's not true. In fact, it's emphatically the opposite. That they, immigrants, undocumented immigrants, increasingly do the work that Americans wouldn't want to do, such as construction, home care, service industries. I mean, the list goes on and on. The economic research on this is extensive. That the vibrancy, the economic vibrancy that immigrants bring to the community speaks for itself. The problem is, of course, it's very, very easy as a matter of political rhetoric to suggest otherwise and to cherry pick statistics to mislead it's interesting.
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E
We got a sneak preview of this back in Alabama and Arizona a while back, prior to Trump when they did pass some pretty draconian anti immigrant policies that led to fruit rotting on the vine in Alabama because there were literally just not the workers there to do the labor. And you really just led to severe economic problems.
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B
Every stakeholder in all of these issues, whether you're talking about the business community, the educational sector, law enforcement, all of them beg the administration not to pursue these policies. But I think the administration sees that it has a captive audience.
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F
I think a lot of conservatives would say, okay, Sarah Steelman and Jonathan Blitzer, that's nice that you're liberals on immigration. What's your solution? Because unless you're saying, unless you're saying a country like the United States or Germany or whatever should just let everybody in, what's your solution? And what is the more liberal solution to a comprehensive understanding and policy for.
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Immigration, there's always going to be quandaries about who you let in and who you don't. I think we have very clear international and domestic law on protecting people who are asylum seekers and refugees. And I think that's something that Trump has turned around that has been so fundamental to how we define ourselves as Americans. So I think that's a very good starting point, is protecting people who have come here fleeing gang violence and fearing for their lives.
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B
Yeah, I mean. Two thoughts on that. I mean, to begin with, in 2013, there was bipartisan support for comprehensive immigration reform. And the only thing that scuttled it, it wasn't in the Senate. There were Republican votes in the Senate at the time. What scuttled it were extremists in the House. And so it's always been this is an issue that has always been dominated by a small minority that can mobilize fear to prevent people from backing these kinds of thoroughgoing solutions. And so one of the things that the administration and anti immigrant conservatives play on is the idea of letting people in. But in fact, when you think about what comprehensive immigration reform would do, it would deal with a population that's already here. So you have roughly 12 million people here who are undocumented. This doesn't refer to allowing more people in. This refers to actually normalizing or in some way stabilizing their status. There is a political will to solve this problem. But it is so much easier to speak as a kind of demagogue on this issue. And politicians tend to fall into line.
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Jonathan Blitzer and his colleague Sarah Stillman, they're both staff writers at the New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and we're talking today about the battles over immigration and its consequences. In a moment, we'll get the view from Washington. I'll talk with a policy analyst who.
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Has helped to shape the Trump administration's approach. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
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Stick around.
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A
You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're talking today about immigration, illegal immigration in particular, and what to do about the roughly 12 million unauthorized people who are in the country right now. Donald Trump is president now in large part because of his claims, mostly unsupported, that immigrants were causing crime, stealing jobs and draining the national coffers, and that heuniquely he was going to put a stop to it all. Now, I'll be transparent here that we invited a number of key players in the administration to speak, including senior policy advisor Stephen Miller, Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE and many others. And these officials all declined to be interviewed. But I did get a chance to speak to one very influential researcher who's helping to shape the administration's policies. Jessica Vaughn is director of Policy Studies at the center for Immigration Studies. It's a think tank based in Washington that's been making the case for lowering immigration in this country for decades. Long before it was a Republican talking point. And because of its affiliations with certain other anti immigrant groups, the center for Immigration Studies has been seen by some as extreme, even reactionary. But these are very influential voices in politics right now, especially in the administration.
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F
Now, President Obama was deporting people like crazy, something that not all his supporters wanted to rush to the microphones to say, but it's true. Was he deporting not enough for your tastes?
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G
Well, the only point in the Obama administration in which there were high rates of deportation was in the early years. But that really dropped off substantially at the end of the Obama administration to really 10 year lows. Many, many people were being released even though they were probably amenable to deportation. So that has started to tick back the other way. Now, under the Trump administration, there was an increase of about 25% in interior deportations under Trump. But in general, and the enforcement has been much tougher under the Trump administration than it was under the Obama administration. And you have to remember that the Obama administration was able to achieve what they tried to claim was record deportations, mainly by counting different types of cases than were ever counted before. Jake did it more.
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F
Rather than go right down the rabbit hole of statistics, let me start with an essential question of values. I think you and I would both agree that the United States is in large measure a nation of immigrants and immigration, and yet we're having this colossal battle that's been going on and on. Begin by telling me what you think your values are, where immigration is concerned in this country and what your greatest concerns are as a result.
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G
Well, I think that we can agree that Americans cherish our tradition of immigration. And there is a growing consensus that it is time to reform our immigration system to moderate the levels of legal immigration and better control illegal immigration so that it is no longer causing exorbitant fiscal costs, it's no longer distorting the labor markets, and it is no longer causing public safety problems or national security problems. This. So those are the things that I value in immigration policy, and I think many Americans do as well.
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F
There's a lot of studies that show if we deny access to certain jobs from a lot of immigrants, undocumented immigrants, that job doesn't get done. Whether it's home care or a lot of agricultural jobs, there are many jobs that Americans will not do. And it's being these functions are being filled by immigrants. Is that false?
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G
It is false. There's no such thing as a job an American won't do. And this is borne out again by the Census Bureau. We've actually looked at occupational data that's collected by the Census, and we could only find four occupational categories where the number of Americans doing a job was less than the number of immigrants doing a job. I think that when we allow excessive illegal immigration and when our legal immigration numbers are rising higher than our economy's ability to create jobs, then what happens is that employers are able to choose illegal immigrants in some cases, or newly arrived legal immigrants because they can get away with offering them inferior pay rates and inferior working conditions. And they don't have to be competitive for workers, and that's not a good situation for any workers.
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F
So you would object when you hear when the President of the United States, in his former life as a businessman, hired scores of undocumented workers illegally.
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G
I'm not familiar with those allegations, so I don't know if it's true.
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F
They're not allegations. He readily cops to it.
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G
Well, I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with that, so I can't really comment on that. I haven't seen that. But that, I think is the key to deterring illegal immigration.
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F
The former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, has just said that admitting refugees, in fact strengthens our national security. Do you disagree with the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
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G
I think that's kind of a hard case to make, actually, that resettling refugees here necessarily increases our national security. I do think we should be resettling some refugees for whom there's no prospect of repatriation or going back home when conditions change. But actually, what we found by studying the cost of refugee resettlement programs is that they do help people, but they help relatively small numbers of people compared to the number that we could help if we took that same money and used it to support international efforts in their regions and in creating safe havens to protect people. From what I understand by talking to researchers and policy analysts and government officials who've traveled to the camps that are housing Syrian refugees, that the best possible thing that the United States could do to help those Syrians would be to help build schools in the refugee camps.
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F
Where most of the keep them in refugee camps in, say, Turkey, Jordan, and the rest.
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G
Well, you didn't let me finish all the things that we could do with the dollars that we were formally spending on resettlement. But think about it this you have a house overlooking a public park, and there are people who are homeless living in that park, and you decide that you want to provide them with a meal, which do you think would be better? To invite two of them in for a fancy dinner of filet mignon or to spend that same money and get pizza for all the people who are living in the park without something to eat that night? Personally, I would rather help more people rather than, you know, offer just a few people filet mignon. Resettlement. Yeah, exactly.
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A
Well, we hear over and over stories about increased vigilance and sometimes overaggressiveness in enforcement. Recently in Texas, Border Patrol agents detailed a girl who had cerebral palsy. In Washington state, Motel 6 allegedly passed on guest names to ICE. This week, we learned that 200,000 Salvadorans had fled earthquakes and they're going to be deported. People are seeking sanctuary in churches. At what point, Jessica, is there enough enforcement?
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G
Well, first of all, I wouldn't agree with your characterization of any of those four incidents and events. But in what sense? We are certainly not even close to the point at which there is overzealous enforcement of our immigration laws. ICE has, in recent years been deporting fewer than 200,000 people, and only about 65,000 to 80,000 of them were caught in the interior of the country. In the meantime, there's a population of about 12 million people living in the country illegally. So enforcement efforts are really a drop in the bucket to the size of the illegal population.
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A
So do you want to get that 12 million? 12 million down to zero?
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G
I don't think that's realistic, frankly. There's always going to be some illegal immigration as long as we have something slightly more strict than open borders. But I think what we need to reach is a point at which that there is less of an incentive to try to come to this country illegally so that. That people will not make the choice to try to come here illegally.
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F
I guess my question is, how much is enough? We've increased funding 14 times since the year 2000, and there are 500% more Border Patrol agents since then. It's almost $4 billion. How much is enough?
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G
That's why I think the biggest bang for the buck in terms of immigration enforcement would be enforcement in the interior of the country, particularly directed at employers who are knowingly and deliberately hiring illegal workers. But. And we spend almost nothing on that now.
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F
Jessica Vaughn, thank you very much.
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G
You're welcome, David.
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A
Jessica Vaughn is the Director of Policy Studies at the center for Immigration studies in Washington, D.C. the question and the rhetoric about the economic impact of immigrants is ongoing. One thing, maybe the only thing that's not in dispute is that without immigrant labor, documented or otherwise, the price of food would rise dramatically. Just take one example. A report by the dairy industry says that the price of milk would double without immigrant labor. In Wisconsin, where the license plates say America's Dairyland, it's estimated that 80% of the workers on dairy farms are Latino immigrants. To see how that plays out, we sent the Radio Hour's Sara Nixon to a farm in western Wisconsin not far from the Mississippi River.
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So tell me what you do here.
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Oh, well, when? In the morning. I have to start get the mixer with four, five cans of feed. Haylage, corn, silage corn.
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H
And you said these are the heifers?
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I
Yeah, this is the heifers we have.
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H
I met Jimmy. At least that's the name he goes by at the big commercial dairy farm where he works. At this time of year, the fields are caked in snow and ice. It's cold and windy. But at least half the farm's 1,000 cows are making milk year round, no matter what the weather is.
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I
Maybe 4 or 500. Depends.
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H
500 cows milk twice a day. That's a lot of work. There are 10 people from Mexico who work here, including Jimmy.
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I
I think long time ago it was a school.
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H
Like a lot of migrant workers, most of them live on the Farm too. It means less chance of running into immigration agents. Some of the workers here do have visas, but they still don't want trouble with ice. When Jimmy started here about three years ago, he worked down in the milking pit where the cows udders are easy to reach.
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I
This is a parlor, milking parlor.
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H
Now Jimmy falls, he feeds the cows and calves and he's learned to weld too, so he can help out with the machinery.
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It's kind of fun.
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H
He grew up in Veracruz, Mexico. His father cut sugar cane and he says didn't make a lot of money. Jimmy was 18 the first time he came here to look for work.
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I
So I'm being here Till I think 99, 98. I have my life in America. First time cut trees, next pick tomatoes, pick squash. It's hard job.
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Since then he's worked on a golf course and a tobacco plant. He's picked blueberries, peach.
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Peaches.
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Peaches.
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H
Did you pay much attention to the election last year?
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I
Yeah, I was like crazy. And some guys, they don't like us. They talk about a lot for Latinos. They get out of here or whatever. They guys, they think they're gonna have more opportunity or they gonna have more jobs, but I don't think they gonna.
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J
Watch your heads. It's really short doorway.
- [38:21]
H
After I talked to Jimmy, I drove to a different dairy owned by Scott Marika. It's in south central Wisconsin. A family farm, smaller than the one Jimmy works on. Marika has 215 cows and two year round Latino employees. And these guys have been with you how long?
- [38:37]
J
Oh, Cabino started in 2012, the first calving season he worked here. We had a heifer calf unexpectedly early. So it was heifer calved in like 3 or 4ft of snow in a corner that you couldn't get to with a tractor, with a four wheeler dirt bike, nothing you could, you mean. Only way to get there was on two feet post holing and he went down there, he pulled the calf up, you know, 85 pound calf, put it on his shoulders and walked about a half a mile back to the dairy. You know, with this calf on his shoulders, he got to where, you know, where we kind of bring the cows into the feedlot and he just fell on his knees and dropped the calf. And that was the first calf of the season and we named it Gabina. So. But yeah, so you have dedicated people who care about cows, who care about their well being.
- [39:23]
H
You know, we often hear in this debate that immigrants take lower wage jobs, which is true in this case, but Marika says it's more than just finding somebody who will work for the wage he can offer these guys like agriculture. In his experience, people born in the States don't want these kind of farm jobs.
- [39:41]
J
You know, it's so uncommon to see people milking cows on dairy farms that are native born people, local people, like driving tractors. They don't like milking cows so much maybe, but they like to, you know, drive trucks and tractors sometimes, which is good for them. If you have a farm and you milk more than what your family can manage and do yourself, most likely you have Hispanic employees. And it's one of those things, it's like, well, nobody wants to talk about it because you know what, most of them vote for Trump and they screw themselves because they vote for somebody who's gonna get rid of probably one of the most, the most immediate part of quality of life for them, they're gonna get rid of. So, like immigrants fill jobs on dairy farms that allow other people in the dairy industry, whether it's, you know, milk truck drivers or service people or technicians or tractor dealerships, whatever it is, when those jobs that run the dairy farm from the ground up aren't met, then everything else above us fails.
- [40:34]
H
Thank you.
- [40:35]
J
Thank you.
- [40:50]
A
Scott Marica, a farmer in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, with Sarah Nick of the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's more to come. Stick around. I'm David Remnick. Now, next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll talk with Sir David Allen Attenborough, the reigning master of nature. Films like the Blue Planet and the extraordinary series Planet Earth. No matter how much you think you might know about the world we live in, Attenborough will show you 10,000 things you had no idea about. He's an absolutely thrilling person to talk to. And that's next time. This hour, we've been talking about the immigration debate over daca, over sanctuary cities, and over deportation itself. Who should we be deporting and how? One thing that's not always noted here is that the causes of immigration are changing. An increasing number of people are coming here not just for a job or a better life, they're fleeing for their lives. In Central America, instability and powerful gangs have created absolutely appalling levels of crime and murder. Immigrants from Honduras, from Guatemala and El Salvador, all come here seeking asylum, saying that if they're sent back to their countries, they're likely to be killed. The New Yorker Sarah Stillman has been leading a project with other journalists tracking the fates of deportees back in their home countries. We just Published a long article in the New Yorker by Sarah, and it makes a very sobering read. And in that piece, she tells of the fate of a young man named Nelson Avila Lopez.
- [42:42]
C
Should I just leave it on the table?
- [42:45]
H
So.
- [42:46]
E
So first of all, we've already started.
- [42:48]
C
A recording, so we want to make sure that she's comfortable with that.
- [42:56]
D
I recently found myself in Pasadena, California, in a tiny law office on the top floor of a little building right above a bridal shop. And I was there to talk to a woman named Ana Lopez.
- [43:15]
C
Do you need me to translate?
- [43:16]
D
As she is speaking, and she works as a housekeeper, and she came into the room clutching her gold purse, looking quite nervous. And she was there to tell me about her son Nelson, who she last saw when he was 20 years old.
- [43:34]
C
He had happiness in him. He would say things that would make people laugh. Used to be the short period of time that I was with him, he was like that.
- [43:46]
D
Did she remember a time that he made her laugh or smile or something? He did that was founder on. You see.
- [43:54]
C
He was a joker. So he gave me a very small cake with a teeny, tiny candle. Same equal that I.
- [44:10]
D
So Anna and her son had spent the majority of their lives apart. She left him to go to the US to make money cleaning houses when he was just about 4 years old. And Nelson lived actually with his aunt back in Honduras. This is common for families in Honduras. But for Anna, there was an added complication of leaving her kid back home, which is that there was this tremendous rise of extreme gang violence. So starting as early as age 9, Nelson starts getting recruited by the gangs in his neighborhood. And for a young person there, it's nearly inescapable. Essentially, it really is life or death. You're faced with this choice, you know, convert to join the gangs and join us in persecuting other people, or you will be persecuted and potentially lose your life. And then for Nelson, there proved to be this added layer of complexity because as he got older, he started to discover that he was gay, which exposed him to an even further level of potential violence from the gangs.
- [45:05]
C
And did he share what that was like for him? He had more of a communication with my sister, and he didn't want to go into too much detail with me because he said that he didn't want to make me sad. Pero yo si savilla que fria. But I did know that he suffered. How could you tell? Como saville porro que cumbo mi habla val. The way that he used to speak to me. He would Speak to me very sadly when he was a little boy.
- [45:47]
D
So as the gang pressure ratcheted up, Nelson reached the point where he just.
- [45:51]
E
He knew he had to get out of there.
- [45:54]
D
The gangs were threatening his life, and they were making it really clear that they were going to try to pin their crimes on him. So he decided he's going to make this journey as a kid by himself, as a gay kid, on this, one of the most dangerous journeys in the world. So he makes the journey and he crosses over, and he actually does end up reuniting with his mom in California.
- [46:21]
C
When we went to go pick him up, he said, I want to be with you here.
- [46:26]
D
Do you remember what you were feeling when you saw him at the airport when he first came?
- [46:34]
C
Excitement. And him the same. I know.
- [46:45]
D
So this was in 2011, and Nelson and his family were really hopeful that things would work out for them, that he would put in an asylum application and get to stay there with his family. So he started doing the things that a young kid would do. He went to school, he got a landscaping job to try to help support his mother, who had supported him for so long. But it turns out a lot of asylum seekers and other undocumented immigrants are pretty ripe targets for scammers. And it looks like essentially an attorney they hired gave them really bad legal advice. Nelson was never informed about his court date, and he thus didn't show up. And that placed him on the conveyor belt for deportation. So, you know, more than a year later, it's early in the morning, and suddenly there's a knock on the family's door.
- [47:34]
C
And where were you? And this was happening. We were in bed because they got there in the morning and they didn't respect me. My older daughter was there, and they wanted to take her, too. She asked them why they were doing that. She speaks English. They told her to put down her cell phone, and she said, why? And la oficial. The officer threw her phone in her face. And what was going through your mind as all of this was happening? I was in shock. I didn't know what to do. They took him without shoes or a shirt. He was just wearing his shorts.
- [48:41]
D
Ana was really desperate to make sure her son was not deported. So she hires another lawyer, a really competent guy, and he gets a judge to block the deportation and to give Nelson another chance to apply for asylum. So he's actuallynelson is still sitting at the detention center, and Anna thinks, you know, everything is going to be okay, because now they've actually got a chance to build up the asylum case. And the judge has said very explicitly, nelson cannot be deported. But then, you know, for some reason, Nelson was sitting in a cell one day and they come to place him in shackles and load him off towards the plane and they deport him back to Honduras. It's not clear why immigration authorities defied a judicial order in Nelson's case, but it is pretty clear that he should not have been deported. And it appears it may have been just sloppy paperwork or some lack of oversight in a system that's moving really, really quickly with these cases. But either way, he was suddenly in a plane heading back to a country where he feared for. So when he arrived in Honduras, he was instantly detained by Honduran authorities because they considered him to be gang affiliated, even though he had fled gang violence in the first place. So this is actually pretty common. The Honduran government is able to instantly incarcerate people, even based on tattoos alone and the suspicion of gang affiliation. And so he was sent to this very notorious Honduran prison and he was held there without any charges. And at that point, his mom writes a letter to the US government and she says very explicitly, I fear for his life. He's going to die if he stays there. You need to get him back.
- [50:30]
C
He was very afraid. He couldn't trust anybody. He not left. I would send him money so that nothing would happen to him.
- [50:41]
D
She was really hoping that she could get him back to the US as had been promised to her by the people who had made the mistake of deporting him. And in that time period, while she's waiting, a few months go by and one day she's working at her housekeeping job and she gets a call from her sister saying there's been a terrible fire at the prison and don't worry yet, because we don't know what's happened to Nelson immediately. Anna flies down there, waits in Honduras with hundreds of other families because it turns out that more than 350 people had died in this gang controlled prison after an intentional fire. And she waits and she waits and eventually she gets the DNA testing back that Nelson had been found clinging on to another inmate and had perished in the fire.
- [51:43]
C
That's so difficult, very sad. I'm never gonna forget it.
- [52:05]
D
So Nelson had come here at 17, seeking to be safe, and instead what he got was being very speedily deported to his death. And in many ways, his case exemplifies the real stakes of these speedy deportations, because, you know, it was essentially by accident by some kind of clerical error. But that's exactly the kind of incident that we're likely to see more of as we speed up the pipeline for deportations. And that leaves a huge cloud of uncertainty around Anna and her other children.
- [52:35]
E
Going forward under Trump.
- [52:39]
C
My daughter is very affected because of what happened right now that this man won. She keeps asking me what is going to happen with me. Don't worry, nothing's gonna happen.
- [53:17]
A
Anna Lopez talking with the New Yorker. Sarah Stillman. Sarah's article when Deportation is a Death Sentence was just published and you can find it@newyorker.com the debate over immigration is as old as our country and it will probably never end. We should be able to acknowledge that reasonable people can disagree. Liberals on this issue can be guilty sometimes of ignoring the costs, and hardliners can be guilty of exaggerating them. But I would ask you, whatever your views are, how will our choices, how will our moral conduct look in 30 years or 50 or 100? We've made mistakes in our history, some of them tragic. Think of the Chinese Exclusion act or of turning away boatloads of Jewish refugees during World War II. When they write the history of the 21st century, what will they say about our priorities and our values? That's the standard we should be setting ourselves here. I'm David Remnick and I want to thank you for joining me today on the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I hope you'll join us again next week.
- [54:40]
H
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced with special help from Annie Hilton, Terrence Bernardo, Andy Lancet, Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.