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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Trump Administration’s Self-Sabotaging Approach to Border Politics
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The Trump Administration’s Self-Sabotaging Approach to Border Politics
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:17]
B
Critical Scene A weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, April 4th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Five months after a caravan with thousands of migrants traveled from Central America to Mexico hoping to seek asylum in the United States, President Trump announced last week that he's ending all financial support to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. His decision reportedly surprised officials at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, where it's generally agreed that such aid is the best way to forestall migration. President Trump also threatened to close all ports of entry between the United States and Mexico, proclaiming that security is more important to me than trade.
- [02:03]
C
We stopped payment to Honduras, to Guatemala and to El Salvador. We were paying them tremendous amounts of money and we're not paying them anymore because they haven't done a thing for us. They set up these caravans. In many cases they put their worst people in the caravan. They're not going to put their best in. They get rid of their problems and they march up here and they're coming into their country. We're not letting them in our country.
- [02:31]
B
Jonathan Blitzer joins me to discuss the Trump administration's self sabotaging approach to border politics and how climate change is giving officials even more to worry about. John, welcome back.
- [02:44]
D
Thanks, Dorothy.
- [02:45]
B
This is not the first time Trump has threatened to close the U. S. Mexico border and I'm sure it won't be the last. Despite warningsconsistent warnings from other Republicans that this is not a good idea for the US Economy, many of them have said it would have disastrous consequences and he's now seems to be backing off that a little bit and now tweeting about closing large sections of the border. Why though is he on this again?
- [03:11]
D
Well, I think the President loves to engage in this sort of saber rattling. I think politically it kind of buoys his spirits for one thing. But specifically there is has been an indication that the number of people showing up at the southern border is on the rise quite significantly on the rise. So the numbers, for example, of people who were apprehended at the southern border in February was 76,000, which again, as opposed to there are two ways basically of looking at these numbers. You can look at the number of people who are apprehended at the border on a monthly basis and then you can pan out and look at the number of people apprehended at the border on a yearly basis. If you look at the overall number apprehended at the border on a yearly basis, and you kind of put this in a broad context about what those numbers looked like 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, what you see is that more people are being apprehended at the border, more people are migrating to the US From Central America. But compared, for example, to Overall numbers from 20 years ago, we're still almost at half the levels that we saw.
- [04:11]
B
That's interesting. And he insists on characterizing this as a security issue.
- [04:16]
D
That's right. I mean, the security issue stuff is absolute nonsense. But there is a legitimate crisis at the border. It's a crisis related to asylum seekers and specifically to families who are trying to come to the US and more and more, what we're seeing over the last 10 years and now in especially pronounced ways, is that families from these three countries in the northern triangle of Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and especially Honduras and Guatemala are showing up in numbers that are so large at the southern border that it is actually overwhelming in US Authorities ability to process all of them, to handle all of them. There are specific protocols dictating how the US Government should Handle families, children, for example, how long they can remain in detention, how asylum requests should be processed. And when the numbers are this high, as they have been and they have reached, the numbers of asylum seekers are reaching historic levels. We're at numbers we haven't seen in 10, 12 years.
- [05:14]
B
So none of this bodes well for the administration's zero tolerance policy, which you and I discussed the last time you were on last summer. And this is a true humanitarian crisis. So maybe you could update us a little bit on what's happened since then and how the administration's policy is actually exacerbating that problem.
- [05:33]
D
Absolutely. And it's an interesting benchmark, the zero tolerance stuff, over and above this, the scandal of family separation. Because it does seem, if you look at the numbers, that the number of families who have been apprehended at the border has seemed to rise pretty steadily ever since the president had to beat a retreat on the family separation policy. So basically, what the administration has done is after the family separation stuff blew up in their faces, they tried a whole host of other things to try to discourage people from coming to the US to seek asylum, both by US Law and by international protocol. You cannot deny someone the opportunity to present their claims if their lives are in danger. And that's effectively what the asylum ban did. And that was immediately in response to the big caravan from the fall. It was kind of this rash, reactionary move from the administration.
- [06:22]
B
And are most of these migrants, have they. Most of these migrants have been claiming fears for their life and political persecution?
- [06:29]
D
Yeah. It's a complicated question, actually, about, given the strictures of American asylum law, how viable some families claims are to political asylum. In the US There are a whole range of things that drive people north in places like El Salvador and Honduras. The gang threat in those countries is real and extremely pernicious, and people are fleeing for their lives. In Guatemala, there's extreme poverty that's driving people, technically, by the very strict dictates of U.S. asylum law, someone seeking refuge in the U.S. because of extreme poverty, hunger, all of these obviously urgent and desperate things technically don't rise to the definition of political asylum, which is what our system uses as the sort of benchmark for allowing people in. So it's a truly complicated and intractable situation.
- [07:14]
B
You know, it also seems politically that this is not working well for the Trump administration. So last fall, as I recall, heading into the midterm elections, we started first hearing about the migrant caravans, and clearly they were fanning the flames of fears. And then, of course, the Republicans did not do well in the midterm elections. So maybe just remind us what happened to those caravans.
- [07:35]
D
Yeah, that's a really startling point, because the caravans have not stopped coming to the U.S. i mean, what was so significant about the caravans from the fall, aside from the fact that the Trump administration saw political advantage to playing up the dangers associated with migrants coming to the border, was that it marked a kind of new ascendant strategy of asylum seekers and migrants in the region. Traveling through Mexico is extremely dangerous. It's extremely hard to navigate the web of threats to people's lives, making this trip from organized crime, from corrupt law enforcement, all of those things. And so, increasingly, what you're seeing and what you've begun to see since that massive caravan in the fall is that more and more families, children, groups of people who are migrating north are gonna do it in these groups because it affords them more protection. So those caravans, caravans in much smaller numbers and with a lot less visibility, continue. But for the most part, what happened to the particularly notorious caravan from the fall is that a lot of people have gotten stuck in cities in northern Mexico because the Trump administration has been doing something else at the border, something that's gotten a little bit less attention, but actually very concretely affects the lives of people trying to enter the US and that is what's called metering. So, basically, when people try to enter the U.S. there are two ways to seek asylum.
- [08:51]
C
One.
- [08:51]
D
One is you cross the border and you hope that you'll actually get apprehended. Many of these families describe to me wanting to get apprehended so they can make their claims to asylum and begin that process. The other way is to go through a port of entry. And what you do is you go up to the border, you explain that you've got this claim, and your claim should be heard. You should be given a preliminary screening, and then, depending on how that screening goes, allowed in and given a future court date to argue your full case. What the Trump administration has increasingly done is it's limited the number of people it's allowing to go through ports of entry. The metering has given rise to a much more sweeping plan called Remain in Mexico, which is, by Trump administration standards, a more systemic attempt to block the ports of entry. So what the Trump administration has begun to do this year, and this is actually a very, very significant policy that can affect tens of thousands of people if it stays in effect, is to basically say, anyone seeking asylum in the US we'll give you a chance to plead your case, but the American immigration courts are badly backlogged. It might take three years before your claim is fully heard. In the meantime, you have to wait in Mexico and we'll let you know when we're ready for you. That has all kinds of legal and constitutional interventions.
- [10:10]
B
What's Mexico's response to this?
- [10:12]
D
Well, interestingly, you'd think that the Mexican government would never want that to happen. I mean, that just means basically having tens of thousands of Central American migrants on their hands in northern Mexican cities. Strangely, the Mexican government did not really resist the Trump administration's imposition of the Remain in Mexico plan. There's all kinds of speculation about why that was. Some people say it's because the new administration in Mexico is still trying to juggle a more ambitious domestic agenda and they don't want to anger the Trump administration. One of the more persuasive takes I've come across is the claim that people in the Mexican government, for example, think that this remain in Mexico policy is going to be struck down in US Federal courts. And so, you know, why bother expending political capital countering Trump on such a big policy when, you know, in a month's time, the ACLU's lawsuit against remain in Mexico will lead to an injunction. At this point, the latest numbers I've seen suggest that about 370 asylum seekers have actually gone through this new protocol in which they've made their claims and then they've been transported back to Mexico and, and are forced to wait.
- [11:22]
E
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlamagne Tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [11:52]
B
So let's talk about foreign aid. Why has allocating aid figured so prominently in border policy until now?
- [11:59]
D
There was a big moment in 2014 when seemingly out of the blue, tens of thousands of unaccompanied child migrants showed up at the US Southern border seeking asylum. Authorities at the border were absolutely overwhelmed. It's extremely complicated to handle so many children. And so the Obama administration began to think of more far reaching and ambitious ways of tamping down migration from the region. And one of the conclusions they reached, which follows from years of policy expertise and kind of consensus among policy wonks is if you want to limit migration, you can't just deal with the problem at the border. You have to address root causes. And so in 2015, the Obama administration created what was called the alliance for Prosperity, and they pledged to invest about $750 million in anti poverty programs, anti violence programs, programs designed to limit political corruption in the three countries that were responsible for the greatest number of migrants showing up at the border. Those policies have had mixed success. Really. The biggest problem of that particular pledge is that it wasn't enough money. But there are other questions about, you know, more efficient ways of allocating that money, things that can help improve the situation in these three countries in the Northern Triangle of Central America. The. The Trump administration has gotten extremely impatient with that. The president obviously has threatened to, has now set in motion the elimination of that aid. By every measure, that's going to make the situation at the US Border much, much worse.
- [13:35]
B
So you recently spent two weeks in Guatemala reporting for a piece that just went up yesterday on new yorker.com why did you focus on Guatemala?
- [13:44]
D
One of the big things in the last two, three years is that a significant number of Central American migrants showing up at the US Border are coming from Guatemala. El Salvador has gone down a bit in terms of migration, in part as a result of US Aid. And Honduras and Guatemala have kind of continued to really send more and more people to the U.S. it's really staggering, the numbers. 300 people a day leave Guatemala for the U.S. 200 of them get arrested by either Mexican or American immigration agents and deported. But this is just a daily flow. And so my thought was, okay, how can we begin to anatomize what things look like on the ground in Guatemala so that we can begin to understand better what it is we're seeing when these people reach the US and you.
- [14:27]
B
Discovered, I mean, this came as a big surprise to me, that climate change is driving a lot of this.
- [14:33]
D
Well, that was a big question. It was. Obviously, climate change has to impact these populations in some ways. And so what I started to do was I started to move around among different subsistence farmers and their communities and. And just start to ask people, what's the dynamic been over the last few years? What sorts of things have you observed with your own crops? And the overwhelming response, I mean, to a person in different communities all over the western highlands, at different altitudes, in different areas, was that the weather has been changing so radically that the crops that many of these families depend on entirely are no longer, allowing them to live in these places. And so they're left with really no choice but to leave.
- [15:16]
B
And you mentioned, you know, going from village to vil, noticing that the young men have basically vanished.
- [15:22]
D
It's a really startling thing to see. Typically, what's happened is that young men are the ones who leave for the US and if they're married, their wives and children stay in Guatemala. And then eventually, if these husbands are successful in reaching the U.S. the families then survive off of the remittances sent home. But increasingly, too, and this is an important cultural thing, and it's difficult to tease out because there's a psychology to it as well. If you're a young Guatemalan, there's really not much for you to expect or to do if you stay home. And so there is also a kind of cultural shift that is the result of years of entrenched poverty and political corruption and mismanagement. There was one young man I met. He was in his mid-20s, and he was actually in the process of going around to try to raise money so that he could pay a smuggler to take him to the US And I asked him how his family responded when he told them that he was finally making the decision to leave. And I betrayed a bias of my own. I said to him, your father must have been upset. He must not have been happy. And this young man said to me, are you serious? My father's been telling me I should leave since I was six or seven years old. He was annoyed that I even finished high school. I really think that shows the extent of people's desperation. I don't think this young man particularly wanted to leave, but there was just nothing for him to say.
- [16:42]
B
So it sounds like he was trying to get through illegally. How many of them try to go through the asylum process? And can you plead climate change when you're trying to get out of the country?
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D
Well, this is the problem, is that, you know, typically when I do reporting on this and when colleagues of mine do reporting on asylum seekers from Central America, we often write about the very real problem of people fleeing gangs, people fleeing violence, things that obviously constitute some form of persecution. Now, the Trump administration would sadly quibble with that and say that that doesn't even amount to legitimate asylum claim. But. But there are these other combinations of factors that drive people. And climate change is a factor that we're gonna see, obviously, more and more in increasingly pronounced ways, but it's a factor that exacerbates extreme poverty. And so there isn't an easy way at least in the limited terms of U.S. asylum law, there isn't an easy way to classify someone who's displaced by that particular phenomenon.
- [17:40]
B
So I wanted to ask you about what these foreign aid programs look like that will now be eviscerated.
- [17:48]
D
There was one town that I spent a lot of time in. The town was called Parajileon. Tiny, tiny community, about 300 people in the western highlands. And they were engaging in a really novel experiment that was funded by, in part by US aid money, tiny sums of money. Here we're talking about, in this community, something like $190,000 over the course of three years, which is just a drop in the bucket. And the idea was to teach this community how to begin to diversify its crops so they could better accommodate changes in climate. This community saw great success. And actually, anecdotally, in my interviews with people in the community, fewer and fewer people were leaving for the US As a result.
- [18:28]
B
So, final question. What will happen when this aid, this aid will be cut off relatively soon? Are there private groups that will pick up the slack?
- [18:37]
D
I think it's going to be pretty dire what happens, and it's impossible to predict exactly how dire. I mean, I think one thing that's certain is you're gonna see more people leaving. So it's hard for me to know. A lot of these organizations, both local groups, national groups, international groups, rely on funding streams from usaid, from the State Department. Without those funding streams, it's not clear to me how they'll continue to do the deep work they need to do.
- [19:01]
B
Thanks so much, John.
- [19:03]
D
Thanks, Jonathan.
- [19:07]
B
Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at the New Yorker. This has been the political scene. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. And find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program is produced by Alex barron for new yorker.com with assistance from Kylie Warner. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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F
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial Director.
- [19:53]
D
I'm Michael Colori, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
- [19:57]
B
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [20:06]
F
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech, right?
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D
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F
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- [20:37]
D
From prx.