← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
What Would an Effective, Humane Border Policy Look Like?
00:18:53
Sarah Stillman joins Dorothy Wickenden to talk about how the deterrence policies of Republican and Democratic Presidents have failed, and what the Democratic candidates should be saying about how to deal with asylum seekers.
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A
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This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and guests about Politics. It's Friday, June 28th. Dorothy I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Last week, horrific stories emerged out of a Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, where approximately 350 migrant children were being held in a facility that was made to house 100 adults. Officials reported that in this past year, the number of children held there had sometimes reached around 700. A group of lawyers sent to evaluate the site found that children had been separated from their families for far longer than the 72 hours set as the standard by the Flores settlement, a judge's order in a long running court case, and that they were dirty and hungry, with many covered in lice or suffering from the flu. Public anger was further inflamed by the stark photograph of a migrant father and his toddler daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande while trying to enter the United States yesterday. During the second Democratic debate, Senator Kamala Harris explained what she would do if elected president, starting on her first day in office with those people who were illegally brought to the United States as children.
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C
I will immediately, by executive action, reinstate DACA status and DACA protection to those young people. I will further extend protection for deferral of deportation for their parents and for veterans who we have so many who are undocumented and have served our country and fought for our democracy. I will also immediately put in place a meaningful process for reviewing the cases for asylum. I will release children from cages. I will get rid of the private detention centers, and I will ensure that this microphone that the president of the United States holds in her hand is used in a way that is about reflecting the values of our country.
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B
Sarah Stillman joins me to discuss the recent history of border policies in the United States and why the traditional definition of asylum seeker may no longer apply to or help most migrants. Sarah, welcome back.
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D
Thanks for having me on, Dorothy.
- [03:38]
B
It has been just about a year since Trump issued that executive order to stop child separations. And it seemed at the time that the humanitarian crisis at the southern border could hardly be worse. So how did we get to this point?
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D
Well, here's what we know. What we know is that family separations have continued. We had the executive order from Trump announcing that they would stop. What we've seen is that essentially they're just taking a different shape. So they're a lot less systematic and streamlined than they were under the zero tolerance prosecutions, which essentially just allowed this to happen in a very assembly line fashion. So what I've seen and heard from a lot of families is that now in the context of stripping kids from their parents, it's happening essentially one by one on a case by case basis. So the Department of Health and Human Services released numbers saying around 388 kids have been separated from their parents since the executive order. And that's not even including those who are separated from other loved ones. So I can give you a really quick, easy example. I wrote about the case of a young girl named Helen with a five year old who came in the arms of her grandmother who was her primary caretaker. And they had fled Honduras and were trying to get back to Helen's mom, who was in Texas. And Border Patrol not only separated Helen from her grandmother while the girl was screaming, and this was again after the executive order claimed the family separations had stopped. But I think equally importantly, after they separated from her, they essentially lost her in the system. So even when Helen's own mother came forward trying to get her, Helen's mom wasn't allowed to have her back for quite some time. And we're seeing that with so many of the kids who are currently in the government's custody.
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B
Those lawyers I just mentioned were allowed to visit the facility in Clint, thanks to the Flores settlement. Could you tell us a little bit about how that came about and how it will, one hopes, continue to affect administration policy?
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D
Yeah. The Forest Settlement has been incredibly important in helping us get even a small window into the level of abuses happening that appear to be pretty ubiquitous in Border Patrol custody and also in the custody of orr, the Office of Refugee Settlement, where the kids get transferred. So essentially, it's a settlement that governs the conditions in which kids can be held, says that they should not be allowed to be held in situations that are not safe or sanitary. And we've seen a big debate around what constitutes safe and sanitary. But I think we can all agree that kids being held in squalor in massively overcrowded cells, where they're sleeping on the floor, where they don't have a toothbrush, where they don't have toothpaste or the ability to bathe, I think we can pretty definitively say that's not safe or sanitary. So Flores has allowed us to know about what's going on in Clint and other facilities because of the fact that lawyers and medical professionals are allowed to inspect the facilities and report back. Typically, they wouldn't be talking to the media, but because what they found was so egregious, they decided to speak up.
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B
And what's happening there now? After the news initially broke, hundreds of children were moved to other facilities, and now over 100 have been moved back. Did they solve the issues?
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D
Well, I think we can be pretty confident this will be resolved simply by resolving whatever's going on in Clint. And I'm not confident that even that situation has been ameliorated. I think what we saw is 100 kids were returned to that very troubled facility even after the abuses were exposed. But I think it's really critical to remember that this is not just a matter of Clint. We only knew about Clint, again, because of the Flores individuals who were there interviewing kids. But increasingly, they're going to be going to and seeking access to more facilities. And it won't surprise many of us if more parallel abuses were found. Even just yesterday, I spoke to an attorney, Hope Fry, who had been in another facility where she'd seen a teenage mother who had just given birth to a premature baby, and that baby had been ripped of its blanket, had soiled itself, and was not allowed to change. So it's not terribly Surprising that we've seen the deaths of so many kids in detention, upwards of five, possibly upwards of seven, even though we had not seen a single child death in the prior decade before the Trump administration took office.
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B
Predictably, it was a really testy week on Capitol Hill as this story continued to unfold. And there were two competing plans in the House and Senate to allocate billions of dollars in emergency humanitarian a. Yesterday, Pelosi announced that the House had reluctantly agreed to pass the Senate bill. Could you just tell us very quickly what was at issue here?
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D
Right. So in the House version of the bill, they really wanted to ensure that there were stipulations on how the billions of dollars that were going to be sent as alleged humanitarian aid were actually used. So, for instance, they'd wanted to build into the bill some more training for Border Patrol around how to properly treat children, and then some actual insurances that their medical care would be taken care of, their food would be supplied. And instead, what we was the bill coming out of the Senate that did not include any of those stipulations, but instead passed a $4.6 billion humanitarian aid package that didn't really specify how we were going to ensure that the migrant kids themselves were actually protected. So you had Nancy Pelosi declaring that she was definitely going to be the lioness protecting these kids. And then we saw that fall apart as Schumer and a number of other Democrats joined the Republicans and said, we're going to go ahead with this bill nonetheless, even though it doesn't have the things that many in the Democratic and certainly on the progressive side were fighting for, which also included a bit of taking away some of the money from ice.
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B
So, of course, Trump and Pence are blaming the Democrats for the crisis. Still, there is some truth in the bluster. So in 2014, the Obama administration was attacked for holding children and parents separately in cages. And then, too, we saw viral photos showing them sleeping under those aluminum foil blankets. And there were also the mass deportations notor which took place under Obama.
- [09:34]
D
Absolutely. So, on the one hand, it's completely false, the narrative that Trump has built that essentially family separations really began under Obama. We saw that on rare occasions for specialized reasons. But obviously, Trump is the person who began the systemic separation through the zero tolerance prosecution. But it's also very true that for quite some time, Border Patrol has taken on, as an active policy, the mistreatment of individuals. I would argue in certainly in what are known as the Border Patrol holding facilities that are called, which is a Spanish word for ice boxes or freezers because they are so frigid. And I'll never forget I interviewed some kids back in 2014 and 15 who were Guatemalan boys who had come unaccompanied trying to rejoin their parents in New Jersey. They had gotten kidnapped by rogue opportunists and then transferred into Border Patrol custody after they were rescued. And they actually told me it was it felt better in the hands of our kidnappers than it felt when we were in the cold cells by Border Patrol being fed frozen sandwiches. We were much more terrified when we were in the hands of the government. I think that says a lot. That was in the Obama era.
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B
So under Democratic presidents and Republican presidents, it seems that traditionally they've been following this idea of prevention through deterrence. Is there a substantive difference here about what we're seeing?
- [10:55]
D
No doubt we've heard from many people, including the folks who enforce the Forest settlement, the attorneys that we were just talking about, who go INS the facilities, who clearly articulated that what they have seen is more egregious than they have ever seen before, people who've been monitoring these facilities for many years. But I think it's also important to recognize how contiguous this is with the longstanding American policy of trying to make things incredibly, incredibly difficult for asylum seekers and the criminalization of those asylum seekers through detaining them. And you mentioned, for instance, prevention through deterrence. So I think it's important to remember that that grew out of the 1990s, and that was really in the Clinton era when we made a big policy shift at Border Patrol to essentially try to stop people from coming by pushing them into more and more lethal areas where they were going to cross the border. So instead of crossing at urban entry points, they were being pushed into this very rugged desert terrain in the hopes that, as you made it more lethal for them to cross, fewer people would cross. But I think the big difference now is that many of these people are coming fleeing for their lives. So it's not going to be enough to simply make conditions tough, because conditions back home are egregious enough that they risk their lives in the first place to come here.
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B
And the Trump administration purposely blurs the distinction between migrants and criminals. To him, they're all criminals.
- [12:16]
D
Absolutely. I mean, I think that's been a big part of the rhetoric that's allowed so much of this to transpire, is the active criminalization of people who've come here expressing their legal right to seek asylum. So, you know, you mentioned the father and daughter who were found dead while trying to cross the Rio Grande this week. And what has been reported is that that family had actually tried to come from El Salvador and they were not able to present at a legal port of entry because the entry was closed. And so instead, they decided to take a really dangerous journey across the river and died in doing so. And that's not an uncommon story at all. It's just that this time we saw the picture already.
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B
This is a huge issue in the coming presidential race. And I wonder what you think about the way the Democrat, the many Democratic presidential candidates are staking out, by and large, very progressive positions on undocumented immigrants. So they mostly support a path to citizenship and higher quotas, and they've hammered Trump on his plan for the wall. Do you think that these policies, given how unbelievably politicized this has become, that these policies could be a liability for the Democratic nominee?
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D
Yeah, I think it's tough. I mean, I thought Kamal was quite smart last night to frame these things as a public safety issue insofar as if communities are made to feel so incredibly terrified, undocumented communities specifically, then they're not going to be able to come forward to law enforcement when they witness a crime or experience a crime. And the rhetoric that we see coming from the writing, coming from Trump, actively trying to convince us that all migrants and all asylum seekers are criminal and is actually not only making us less safe as a country, but also fundamentally eroding our values. So I think the Democrats, when they stay in the terrain that many, many Americans agree upon, such as ripping children from their parents, but that's not acceptable to us, that feels like pretty safe terrain at this point. But when it comes to those who are pushing more interesting proposals, like, for instance, the idea of decriminalizing border crossings, I think it'll be fascinating to see how that reads. Katie.
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I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director.
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I'm Michael Colori, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
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And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired.
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And our show, Uncanny Valley, is all.
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About the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
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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.
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D
Right.
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So whether we're talking about privacy, AI.
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Social media, or a major tech figure.
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We will always explain the Silicon Valley.
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Forces behind these stories and how they affect you.
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Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice, so you don't miss an episode.
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B
So you have been reporting for quite a while on what happens to migrants whose asylum claims have been rejected and are deported and essentially to their deaths. And I'd like you to talk just a little bit more about the consequences of this and whether that too shouldn't be made part of this debate.
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D
Absolutely. So for the last two years, plus, I've been working with the team at Columbia University to document what happens to people who came here seeking some kind of legal refuge and who get sent back instead. And documenting specifically the cases of people who get killed or who face other kinds of irreparable harm, including sexual assault, including kidnapping. We've documented at this point upwards of 100 stories. One of them comes to mind because I got a text message this morning from a kid whose mother passed away, was actually murdered after she had tried to have legal refuge here. And she was pulled over for a minor traffic violation when she was on her way home to her three kids. And she had been living most of her life undocumented in the US So she wasn't an active asylum seeker, but she had been seeking relief from a husband who was very violent. And when they decided to send her back across the bridge that very same night into Mexico, her last words to Border patrol were, when I'm found dead by my violent husband who's been threatening to kill me, my blood will be on your hands. And that's exactly what happened to her. And we're seeing that happen to many other families, most of whose names we never learn.
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B
So who does count as an asylum seeker right now?
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D
So, you know, the way we came up with the international norms around who we protect through refugee and asylum law really emerged out of the post World War II context. It was really an act of atonement for the sins of that moment when so many people had come fleeing Nazi Germany and specifically Jews who arrived in a boat where we actively told them, I'm sorry, we cannot give you safe harbor, and they were sent back and they were killed in the Holocaust. And out of that whole political moment emerged the set of norms that really fit that moment and that feel less well suited for this moment, because those were norms around protecting people for political persecution, persecution on the basis of religion, and a number of other parameters that now feel a little bit ill suited for a moment when we have so many people fleeing serious gang violence in Central America who don't necessarily constitute refugees in certain legal definitions, but who certainly are fleeing for their lives.
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B
I'VE spoken with John Blitzer on this program about climate change affecting who's coming, which formerly that too was an issue in 10, 15 years ago that didn't enter into the picture.
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D
Absolutely. And I think that's only of course going to get worse. And climate refugees are not protected under the conventional ways we've defined a valid asylum seeker. But of course, Jonathan Blitzer told a really important story about many of the people who are fleeing Guatemala and we would call them economic migrants. In reality, many of them cannot survive.
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B
50 years ago this summer, we sent men to the moon. And so you would think that it would be possible to address this issue pragmatically and humanely. If you were to give advice to whoever the Democratic nominee eventually is, what would be your sort of top two ways of going after this?
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D
Wow. Luckily I'm not running for office anytime soon. This is why I like being a journalist. We get to thoroughly document the breadth of the problem, which at this point, I think what we know is that there's so much urgent abuse that is happening that the rudimentary stuff would actually be pretty easy to take on first. So we know that, for instance, it's not just kids being detained in horrible conditions, but it's also a large number of adults who are also facing egregious situations in detention. And part of that is again because people are being criminalized when they come here trying to express the right to asylum. So I think I would start with that. I would start with the fact that we have companies who are making a lot of money off of these federal contracts for immigration detention when taxpayers don't need to be paying for these folks to be detained. We've seen it documented that if people have good legal representation that they actually do appear in court after they have been released. And so I would argue that we should start there with getting people out of the private detention industry. We take the profit making companies out of this. And then I would say, you know, we have clear documentary evidence that families do appear in court. 98% of them appear in court if they have legal representation. And so I think it needs to end that. We have kids as young as three or four years old who are expected to show up in immigration court to represent themselves by themselves. We've actually had judges argue that it's perfectly reasonable for a three year old to represent themselves in immigration court. We saw Pence argue on TV that most of these people don't show up in court. And we have clear evidence to the contrary. When people are given the proper resources to do so.
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B
Great answer, Sarah. Thank you so much.
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D
A starting point, maybe. Thank you, Dorothy.
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B
Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the director of the Global Migration Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. 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 new yorker.com feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program was produced by Jill Duboff with assistance from Kylie Warner. I'm Dorothy Wickenden. Next week we are off for the Fourth of July. We'll be back on July 11th.
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E
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global Editorial Director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that that eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week we're going to offer offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcast casts.
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From. PRX.