It Could Happen Here Weekly 204  ## Metadata - Author: [[It Could Happen Here]] - Full Title: It Could Happen Here Weekly 204 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/eeca2f33-84bc-4cbd-bb8d-cd0633108136 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Why Indigenous Peoples Day Matters** - Indigenous Peoples Day replaces Columbus Day to honor those actually here first and acknowledge atrocities committed by Columbus. - Dahlia Killsback frames this as correcting celebration of a historical figure who enabled genocide and slavery. Transcript: Mia Wong How are you doing? Dahlia Killsback I'm doing well. Thank you for inviting me here today. Of course. Mia Wong Garrison is also here. Garrison, hello. Hello. Garrison Davis I'm currently also doing writing about Indigenous stuff, but within the context of Canada, which people will probably hear later this week. So, yeah. Mia Wong I guess first thing I wanted to talk about is a little bit is about what Indigenous Peoples Day is and why it is that and not the other thing. Dahlia Killsback Yeah. So Indigenous Peoples Day, as many people know, is replacing, I'm going to say it, Christopher Columbus Day. That is still like a federal holiday, but multiple cities and states have opted to use Indigenous Peoples Day instead. And the reasoning for that is acknowledging the atrocities that were committed by Christopher Columbus, who, first of all, did not discover America, but continued to not only use Slavery, but commit different forms of genocide, rape, etc., all of these terrible atrocities. And so rather than celebrating um somebody like that um indigenous people's day um ([Time 0:03:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/382bd6a5-7d68-4afe-99d5-9105be21bda4)) - **Doctrine Of Discovery Shapes Policy** - Federal Indian policy stems from a colonial legal framework like the doctrine of discovery that denied Indigenous governance. - Dahlia links Columbus-era doctrines directly to U.S. settler-colonial law and land theft. Transcript: Dahlia Killsback So how do we connect Christopher Columbus to where we are currently? And this is the history of federal Indian policy and Western legal discourse and how European powers throughout history have defined what it means to be an Indian person in relationship To Indigenous peoples' rights to their own land and to self-governance. So when we're looking at the different periods of federal Indian policy, prior to there being the United States government, we have the colonial period, which is 1492 to 1776. This is how federal Indian policy legal scholars divide that. And it's really important to kind of give the difference between what is a colonial state versus a settler colonial state when you're talking about not just the United States government, But also the Canadian government and different governments globally. But I want to talk just a little bit about what I mean by the difference between a colonial government and a settler colonial government because they're tied together. So by a settler colonial government, I mean, what I mean is that it is defined by the de-territorialization of indigenous populations. And so rather than in a colonial government, as you had with Christopher Columbus and the Spanish and with the English, et cetera, is rather than a state and sovereignty being conceived As all these resources are going back to the metropole, all these resources are going back to England or to Spain, et cetera. And colonial occupation is conceptualized within this way in settler colonial governments. The colonists come to these lands and stay, and what they define as sovereignty is within this land that they define now as their own. And in order for that process to happen, there needs to be different forms of genocide of the indigenous populations. And so that's what we saw with Christopher Columbus and throughout history was just the depletion of a lot of our indigenous populace. ([Time 0:07:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/73d8c782-8b17-4b02-800d-b47fb881279b)) - **Marshall Trilogy's Enduring Impact** - The Marshall Trilogy legally defined tribes as "domestic dependent nations," placing them under federal oversight. - Those rulings used racist reasoning and the doctrine of discovery to justify paternalism over tribes. Transcript: Dahlia Killsback So this is the removal period and what a lot of people may have heard of. So it's from 1835 to 1861. And what we have is the extinguishment of Indian title to eastern lands and the removal of Indian tribes westward. So one of the most notable acts is the Removal Act, which was authorized by President Andrew Jackson, which moved Indians from the east to the west of the Mississippi River into what Was called Indian Territory. And what brought about this federal act was a series of three foundational statutes within federal Indian policy dictated by Chief Justice John Marshall. So first we have Johnson v. McIntosh, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, and Worchester v. Georgia. And I won't go into too much detail, but what these essentially did and legally defined tribes as being domestic dependent nations. And so it clarified more that, again, tribal nations are underneath the federal government's overview, not the states. So yeah, it placed tribes above state jurisdiction. And what this was trying to do was solve some issues that tribes such as the Cherokee Nation had with different states when it came to land and jurisdiction over said land. But that is kind of the basis of a lot of federal Indian policy and still remains true today. Notable in each one of these statutes, I believe particularly in Worcester v. ([Time 0:17:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3a4bd358-ee18-4edc-aec8-4ebc1376c5ba)) - **Allotment Mechanized Land Theft** - The Dawes allotment split communal lands into individual parcels and labeled surplus as "excess" for settlers. - This policy dispossessed tribes of roughly nine million acres through forced economic assimilation. Transcript: Dahlia Killsback Yes, allotment period and forced assimilation. So this is like 1871 to 1934. And so this is the end of the treaty making process. So the whole idea of trying to force tribes onto reservations and sign these treaties were to, again take land and make sure that the united states has more land and all the land etc that They could possibly have um so at this end of treaty making um and federal allotment of indian lands also happened in the Dawes Act. And so what this was, was an attempt to further shrink the reservation lands that tribes were already guaranteed within treaties. Um, so during this period, I think somewhere like 9 million acres were, um, taken from tribal reservations during the allotment process. So the, what the allotment process did was it counted each and every individual Indian, um, that was eligible. I think there were adults, um, yeah, adults that were eligible. And each one of them were given a certain parcel of land, a certain number of acreage. And once all of this land was calculated, what you had was an excess of land, quote unquote, excess of land that the tribes obviously didn't need because they had still too many people. ([Time 0:29:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3f0a66a5-e662-4afb-996f-37dbc4b20bf2)) - **What "Land Back" Really Means** - "Land Back" is a broad, evolving demand ranging from recognition of treaty rights to returning land and rethinking property norms. - Dahlia emphasizes it can mean restitution, reparations, or reframing land beyond Euro-American property concepts. Transcript: Dahlia Killsback I think I could talk more about what I mean by it personally and what I've understood it to mean to other people. Because I think land back itself, it means like a lot of different things. And I don't think that there has been a concrete kind of idea of what it means. But I think a lot of the movement, I want to like contextualize it within a lot of the sort of activism that we've seen in the recent years. So for instance, NODAFL, the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, and kind of, I think that's one of the more recent events that have really illustrated on a wide scale, like globally, about Indigenous movements um sovereign movements and especially when it comes to environmental justice but what you saw there was encroachment on tribal treaty land within um when it Had to do with the dakota access pipeline um so although it didn't cross some of the current reservation borders, it was in treaty land, you know, that kind of thing. Garrison Davis Same thing with stop line three, how it encroached on like the hunting land and the farmland that was not technically in the like residential, like not in like the reservation area where People live, but it's in the surrounding area that is for hunting that is specified in the treaty. So people are trying to use these loopholes to get the pipelines through. Dahlia Killsback Right, right. And so I think what you see is a lot of solidarity across tribes because this is not new. This has never been new. And a lot of tribes can relate to that. And what you've seen and what I hope that I've highlighted throughout this kind of very brief overview of federal policy is the different ways that indigenous rights to land and sovereignty Has been attacked in different forms by settler and colonial governments. And I think that the day and age that we live in now has allowed for sort of more widespread solidarity, especially over social media. It as what people mean when they're saying it is recognition of our tribal sovereignty, of our right to this land that has not been respected. And then I also think that it means, well, if these treaties aren't being respected, then how is this treaty still valid, right? How come we aren't getting our land back because you're not upholding your end of the deal? Well, some people also might mean and recognize that this whole United States government is a settler state, right? Based on the doctrine of discovery, which is based on denying tribes and American Indians of their rights to this land. So some people might take it to this whole other context of, yeah, well, maybe this is all of our land, et cetera, et cetera. But in practice, what does this look like? And I think in practice, a lot of people are seeing it with reparations or people buying land back tribes and giving it back to tribes. And we have seen some of that or also just people interrupting the narrative in their own mind of their Euro-American identity. ([Time 0:41:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6d3420cf-8b4a-4134-8eb9-b0aa59d979ba)) - **Start Local: Support Tribal Sovereignty** - Learn which tribes are on the land where you live and the local issues they face before acting. - Contact state legislators and support nonprofits that protect tribal sovereignty and treaty rights. Transcript: Dahlia Killsback For sure. So in terms of resources and reading, I have read Lorenzo Veracchini's book on settler colonialism. That's really helpful when you're trying to understand that framework in terms of getting to know kind of more of the basics of like current issues impacting tribes. The National Congress of American Indians does a lot of work on the federal level. If you want to talk more about kind of current lived experiences of American Indians, there's Illuminatives and getting more involved in those as well. I think that they have some tips, but I would recommend everyone getting more familiar with the land that they are on currently, the tribes within their state, and what they can do not Just on the local level, but on the state level to support tribal sovereignty. Because a lot of issues, for instance, I worked on the state policy level in Washington and in Montana, and both of those have a significant amount of tribes. But you have a lot of legislation that's trying to that infringes on tribal treaty rights. And the thing is, as ugly as it may be to say, but sometimes voices of non-Indigenous peoples are listened to more within those contexts. So you need to get more involved on those levels. What sort of nonprofit organizations work with your tribes and what sort of issues are impacting tribes. And again, these are all going to probably be surrounding tribal sovereignty. So maybe it's, um, fishing access, hunting rights, et cetera. Um, I think that's a really good way to make some more palette, um, tangible change to feel like you're doing something to support tribal sovereignty while you're also educating yourself And making sure that their voices are at the forefront. ([Time 0:48:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/78aef192-d2ad-40cd-83fe-486765fb8e54)) - **Title 42's Sudden Repurposing** - Reporter recounts Title 42's sudden use in March 2020 to expel asylum seekers under a public-health law. - The CDC scientists reportedly opposed the invocation as lacking public health rationale. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) You probably don't remember the passage of Title 42, let alone that of Title 42, Chapter 6A, Subchapter 2, Part G, Section 264. But it's a part of US federal law that gives the government the authority to take emergency action to keep communicable diseases out of the country. The portion which allows a sweeping disregard for asylum law, passed in 1944, reads in one giant run-on by the President, shall have the power to prohibit in whole or in part the introduction Speaker 6 Of persons and property from such countries or places as he shall designate an order to avert such danger, and for such period of time as he may deem necessary for such purpose. Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) Before President Donald Trump's administration used it on March 20, 2020, it had been used only in 1929 to keep ships from China and the Philippines from entering US ports during a meningitis Outbreak. But in March of 2020, when you probably weren't paying much attention because the world was falling apart, or when I'd just returned from a work trip to Rwanda, where I was a month before Any precaution that was appeared in the USA, screened for a novel coronavirus, and the Trump administration cited this public health law in instructions to the Department of Homeland Security on restrictions for migrants entering the United States. That very same day, Centre for Disease Control Director Robert R. Redfield relied on this regulation to issue an order suspending the introduction into the United States of certain individuals who had been in quote-unquote coronavirus-impacted Areas and quote, who would be introduced into a congregate setting at the port of entry or a border station. Includes individuals coming from Canada or Mexico who would normally be detained by CBP after arriving at the border, people including asylum seekers and accompanied children, And people attempting to enter the United States between ports of entry. Citing the new CDC order, that same day, the Border Patrol began expelling individuals who arrive at the US-Mexico border without giving them the opportunity to seek asylum. Reports indicate the CDC scientists expressed opposition to the invocation of Title 42, arguing that there was really no public health rationale to support it. Ever since then, public health experts outside the CDC have continued to agree, arguing that while international borders largely remain open to other travellers, there is no need To turn away refugees and expel them to their home countries or send them to Mexico. Despite this, DHS has been applying Title 42 to migrants for three years since then. And people have been turned away without getting a chance to plead their case for asylum 3 million times. Now Trump is no longer president, but Title 42 has persisted. ([Time 0:57:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7f8e51cc-f56f-4213-9511-3c5e8757aac6)) - **Policy That Increased Border Deaths** - Title 42 pushed migrants into more dangerous crossings, contributing to a sharp rise in border deaths during its enforcement. - Deaths rose from 247 in 2020 to 857 in 2022 as people avoided official ports of entry. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) Instead of crossing and trying to turn themselves in for asylum or approaching a port of entry, people began crossing in more remote places, places without border walls or barriers, And with less frequent border patrols. In 2020, the Border Patrol found 247 dead bodies along the border. This is unlikely to represent the full human toll of border enforcement. Many deaths in the desert go unreported and undiscovered. But it gives some kind of point of comparison for the 2021 number after a year of Title 42. 546 people died that year. In 2022, third year of Title 42, 857 people died. None of those people were guilty of any crime other than wanting a better life. But under Title 42, they lost their lives because the US didn't give them a safe way to exercise their human right to claim asylum. ([Time 1:05:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4e93a26f-92c9-4725-9d2c-4d08b3e94c8f)) - **Tech Tools Reproduce Inequity** - CBP One app and other tech fixes favored those with better phones and connectivity, skewing access to asylum appointments. - The system functioned like Ticketmaster, allocating scarce appointments to relatively affluent migrants. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) Even as the legal battle went back and forth, another major bottleneck emerged in a migration system in the form of never-ending clusterfuck that is the CBP1 app. Again, I'll let Gustavo explain his reporting here. Speaker 8 It actually kind of started with the Ukrainians. That was kind of how they started using it for the asylum context. But CBP-1 is essentially a phone app for asylum. And on paper, it kind of makes sense, right? Instead of like, you know, Joe Biden and the Dems are really terrified of the optics of a lot of people at the border. And a lot of their policy is revolved around stopping that, right? They don't want masses of people at the border. The CBP1 app aims to address that by telling migrants, hey, instead of coming all the way to Mexico and showing up at the border, just download this app and schedule an appointment to Come here and we'll vet you to see if you're eligible for asylum or not. Another example of a policy in Washington, D.C. That has no reality in what's going on in the border, because migrants live in shelters with really bad Wi-Fi access, and they have crappy phones. So what I found in the reporting is that CBP-1 rewards people with the best phones, not necessarily people who are most vulnerable. And the story I came out with last week was about how data from the Mexican government shows that at least in Tijuana, about 44% of every migrant who has gotten a CBP-1 application enter The country is a Russian national. And Russian nationals make up at most 10% of the overall migrant population in Tijuana. So you have this situation where a relatively affluent 10% of the population is getting almost half of these humanitarian protection appointments that are designed for the world's Most vulnerable people. And that's what CBP1 does. They call it the ticketmaster of asylum, and that's not a compliment. That is, like, ticketmaster fucking sucks. Nobody likes it. ([Time 1:17:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/13873f2a-f4dd-4fb1-acec-8e1dbbc2c57a)) - **People Held Between Two Walls** - At San Ysidro Border, migrants were held between double walls with no shelter, volunteers passing food through tiny gaps. - Volunteers improvised charging, solar power, and pizza as Border Patrol provided minimal care. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) Assistance and planning didn't exactly meet the task at hand. Albeit, the specific call-out of El Paso does suggest that they saw their task as not looking bad in the right-wing media. Here's some audio recorded after a couple of hours walking around talking to people at San Ysidro, where Customs and Border Protection had detained around 500 people in between the Two 30-foot fences that make up the border between San Ysidro and Tijuana. I'm just, for people familiar with San Diego, like in the Tijuana River Valley Park by International Hill, where Border Patrol are holding people in between the two border fences. For those who thought we didn't have a border wall or weren't having a border wall, we have at least two, sometimes three. But right here we have two. People are being put in between these fences by border patrol. So I just spoke to some young Colombian women who had crossed about 50 miles east of here and then been relocated here. And they're in between these border walls. They don't have running water. What food and water they have appears to be being supplied by volunteers on the northern side. They've just been given space blankets, but a lot of people are literally sleeping under bin bags right now, blankets. It's pretty brief. There's one port-to sort of thing that we can see, about 500 people. So it kind of gives you an idea of the conditions. Obviously, those don't live up to the detention conditions that Border Patrol are supposed to hold people under. But here we are, I guess. Border Patrol have just said that they're calling an ambulance. There have been a number of medical emergencies. There nearly always are in these situations because you're holding people, you know, old people, young people, sick people, and they're in the sun all day, they're in the cold all night. If it rains, they get wet. If it's hot, they get hot. If it's cold, they get cold. Their little children were just asking me for a blanket a minute ago, which is always a pretty bleak thing. If you've not been here, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that we have a double layer of walls separating us from our neighbours in Tijuana. Both sections are now of the Trump era design. But we're standing in a place where not so very long ago Nancy Reagan stood and said she hoped that there wouldn't be a fence here for very long. Now there are two towering walls, and there are little children stuck sleeping in the dust between them. All the aid to these people had to go through the wall too, that meant no hot meals because the gaps are smaller than a plate. Someone tried to bring tents, but they wouldn't fit. Everything from food to clothes to medical supplies had to go through the gaps in the wall. ([Time 1:35:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ceb6984d-7e24-4efc-9d9f-a22aa30961fd)) - **Small Town Stepped Up Overnight** - In Hukumba, a tiny town's hotel and residents organized overnight mutual aid feeding and sheltering over a thousand migrants. - Locals turned their hotel and petrol station into distribution hubs, supplying water, blankets, and meals. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) On Thursday night, the 11th of May, locals in Hukumba became aware that CBP were holding people on a dirt road in the open desert just a few miles east of town, and a few hundred feet from The wall. The people held they didn't have access to toilets, running water or shelter. With every hour that went past, the number of people grew. The biggest camp soon held over a thousand people, desperately trying to scratch out a little shade in the desert. Other smaller camps popped up. One was apparently in someone's yard and the people of this tiny desert town set about helping as best they could. Soon, they were joined by volunteers from all over the county. Katie was one of those volunteers. She doesn't live in Okumba, but her friends do and her family sometimes spends time there. Once she heard about what was happening, she knew she had to help. I let her describe her feelings after she saw the post online and then drove out to Akumba to see what she could do to help. Speaker 4 At first I was just super touched by the activation and the caring and And my son was asleep, comfortable in his car seat, you know, in our Mercedes van. And my husband is still trying to get citizenship after being here since he was two years old. So, and we're married and he pays taxes. When I saw our friends activating, I just told him, tomorrow is Mother's Day, and I need to come back here, and it's not safe for you here. So when I first arrived, I thought it was kind of odd that everything was organized around a random road that has a gate. And there were only five border patrol at the time. And about... That was a larger camp, so I want to say at least 800 people, maybe 1,000. I didn't see them all because many of them received their donations and the assistance and went back to their shelters. Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) A few days after the migrants arrived, I camped out in Hukumba. I was cold in my sleeping bag at night and dizzy in the sun in the day. It's not a place where you'd want to be stuck outside for long, but it's a place where 1,500 or so people were held for days, little more than the shelters they built out of creosote and Mesquite to protect their families from the elements. They slept on the dirt or in cardboard boxes left over from the food volunteers fed them, and under whatever folks in tiny desert town could find to give them. By the time I arrived, the migrants were gone and volunteers were cleaning up. The landscape was dotted with impressively constructed brush shelters. Volunteers from Hukumba set up tables to distribute food, blankets, water and clothing. ([Time 2:01:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1f801bd4-a47a-411e-a12f-527b786bd40f)) - **What To Donate For Immediate Impact** - If you want to help at the border, donate travel-size hygiene, phone chargers, and standardized small kits. - Coordinate with local mutual aid groups to avoid chaos and match real-time needs. Transcript: Speaker 3 I met up with him and he had just received election donations through mutual aid networks. So we know even more of the travel size. I got some tooth hygiene kits and deodorant and a bunch of trends and papers, because the kids that are between the walls don't really have much to do, unfortunately. So those went really fast. And so we got a whole bunch of bags of all those kinds of supplies, and then we drove down to the border from there. Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) By the time they arrived, various organizations had organized areas along the wall for different kinds of aid to be passed through. Everything from clothes, to food, to medical supplies and toilet paper was piled up, given out. Speaker 3 People would show up with donations and organize the toilet paper food everything like that and people just come up to the wall and if their family needed something they would just kind Of point to it and ask us if we were able to you know if there was a common language there um so yeah we just kind of you know gave things as people needed them um i know that i um helped give out Some of the trends and pads of paper and those were a those were a big hit um tons of uh kids all kids paper running over from the whole, all the parts of the camp when they heard that there Were toys being given out. So that was, it was heartbreaking, but it was also, you know, it made me smile too. Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) Seeing them smile made it made me smile. Because of the need to use CBP-1, and of course the need to stay in touch with families back home, there was a constant and overwhelming demand for phone charging. News reporters took phones back to charge in their cars. Some people bought charge bricks and power strips, and mutual aid groups wrote names on the back of the phones using painter's tape and sharpies so they wouldn't get separated from Their owners. By the second day, it was a better system, but on the first day it was chaos. Arlette Keber, who spent a whole day charging phones, described the system that volunteers came up with to mitigate that chaos a little bit. Speaker 3 And obviously they couldn't charge their phones if they're just in this kind of desert gap between these walls that doesn't have any kind of amenities or anything. So we had a system where they would pass a phone through and we would put a piece of tape on it with their name and give them a piece of tape with their name, the same name, and then they would Give us,, they came back a couple hours later and give us the tape back and we'd match the names and get them in the phone. And that was, it worked well enough. I mean, it was still an extraordinarily chaotic process. I mean, we had, we always had at least a hundred phones on our side of the wallet at any given time. And some people had, you know, some people had chargers, some people didn't, some people had Android or Samsung or iPhones, and some people had wallet adapters, and some people didn't Have the wallet AC adapters. So we kind of had to, every phone that came through was we had to find a way to get it, you know, daisy chained into the set of generators that we had which was to have a power strip to move the Right cables and and do we have space on those cables um and and i think it was it was a bit of a puzzle the whole time uh the only part of it that really overwhelmed me was we did um overload Uh someone brought a bunch of um uh usbc power strips um and blew out one of them. ([Time 2:50:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/58cec39d-fcad-46bb-800a-25a2ad242c6a)) - **The Border's Reach Is Nationwide** - The border enforcement zone extends far inland and suspends some Fourth Amendment protections up to 100 miles from the border. - Two-thirds of the U.S. population live inside a constitution-free border enforcement area. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) But the US border is much bigger than the land boundary between the USA and Mexico to the south and Canada to the north. If you're listening to this in the United States, the chances are that you live in the border enforcement zone. This swath of territory outside the constitution has been established since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 established that a reasonable distance of the border would Extend 100 air miles around the outline of the country. Two-thirds of the US's population live within this zone. Washington DC, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans and Boston are all within it and that means that CBP agents can search vehicles and vessels to look for property that's in the country Without the right documents. They can board public transportation or set up interior checkpoints and stop, interrogate and search citizens and non-citizens without the need for a warrant. Within 25 miles of the border, they can enter your property provided it's not a domicile. The Fourth Amendment, part of a foundational bill of rights the US likes to tout as what makes it different from the rest of the world, doesn't apply when you're near the border. An all-encompassing history of the border and its enforcement is beyond the scope of this podcast. Even a history of the southwest border could take up a whole bookshelf. But we will try and skim the high points here. Let's start with the Gadsden Purchase, when a party of military surveyors first bumped into T'Honautam elders as they attempted to throw a line dividing T'Honautam people from T'Honautum People. The southern border is no more obvious today than it was then, and of course to the autumn it was and remains an aberration that divides them from much of their ancestral and current homelands. It has, over the years, seen violent enforcement on members of the nation, and a growing encroachment of the border patrol into today's T'Honautum reservation, which is the second Largest in the USA, but only represents a fraction of the tribe's historical homeland. ([Time 3:20:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6dbe0d04-cd04-4a8a-9ad2-688072c4290f)) - **Gatekeeper Pushed Migrants Into Danger** - Operation Gatekeeper (1994) militarized the San Diego border and deliberately pushed crossings into deadlier terrain. - Policy showed deterrence by danger was an intentional strategy that increased migrant deaths. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) Attorney General Janet Reno announced the start of Operation Gatekeeper. The first phase of the operation focused on the first five miles of the western border, including the place where I recorded all those interviews you heard earlier this week. According to a piece written a quarter of a century later in the LA Times, the strategy was to deter migrants from illegally crossing in the first place, and, for those who remained undeterred, To encourage them to cross in more isolated wilderness areas to the east, where they could be more easily captured. There were already fences in 1994, first a chain link fence, and then one made of helicopter landing mats left over from Vietnam that had horizontal struts that closely resembled and Were used as a ladder. Anti-migrant rhetoric was already there too. California Governor Pete Wilson became an outspoken advocate for Prop 187, a ballot measure that cut off state services like healthcare and education to undocumented people. Here's a clip of Wilson's re-election ad. Speaker 12 They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won't stop Governor Pete Wilson Here's Wilson. Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) Under the operation, a much higher number of agents were deployed to the border. Apprehensions increased, and with them so did funding for border enforcement. It was around this time that the narrative around the border began to change. It was also around this time, a few months earlier in fact, that the US, Mexico and Canada entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it easier than ever for capital To move across the border and take advantage of lower wages in Mexico. To learn a little bit more about Operation Gatekeeper, I spoke to one of the agents who was tasked with executing it. Speaker 11 My name is Jen Budd, and I'm a former senior patrol agent with the United States Border Patrol. I was a senior intelligence agent as well at San Diego sector ([Time 3:27:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/01b85d6d-07cd-46d4-94cd-79f40aea720c)) - **Walls Imposed On Indigenous Lands** - Border wall construction repeatedly desecrated Indigenous sacred sites using emergency waivers and the Roosevelt Reservation. - Tribes like the Tohono O'odham face militarization of ancestral lands and violent enforcement. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) The Israeli company Elbit Systems has built fixed surveillance towers, which they pioneered in the West Bank on tribal land, with the permission of tribal council. Meanwhile, other members of the nation strongly oppose the militarization of their homeland, in the name of security of whatever homeland the Department of Homeland Security is Securing. I'll quote here from Todd Miller, whose excellent work on the border is required reading for anyone interested in the subject. Amy Juan and Nellie Jo David, members of Tohono-Ottem Hemajicum Rights Network, TOHRN, joined a delegation to the West Bank in October 2017, convened by the Palestinian organization To stop the war. It was a relief, Hwan says, to talk with people who understand our fears, who are dealing with militarization and technology. In 2017, Tohono-Ottem Vice Chairman Verlaine Jose said that a wall would be built, quote, over my dead body, and the tribe released a video saying there is no autumn word for wall. The 62 miles of the border on their reservation would remain without one, they said. By 2020, the Trump administration had fought through a wall on much of the border using what is known as the Roosevelt Reservation. This is a 60-foot wide strip of land that the federal government owns along the border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Although much of the autumn nation remains wall-free, and some has what's called a vehicle barrier or a Normandy barrier, approximately one-third of the Roosevelt Reservation is On tribal land. ([Time 3:32:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/738aecc1-82bc-41df-a989-cafdc3a04848)) - **Self-Investigation Shields Abuses** - Border Patrol's internal "critical incident" teams often control investigations into agent violence, shaping narratives and shielding agents. - Jen Budd and reporting suggest these teams remove witnesses and craft official accounts favoring agents. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) This giant cover-up. Here's John Carlos Frey, a journalist who covered CIT cover-ups, talking to Democracy Now! About how these teams work. Speaker 6 Within the actual agency of the U.S. Border Patrol, there is an investigative body called SIT, the critical incident team. They are tasked with investigating incidents that involve Border Patrol, and it can be anything from a car accident to, in this case, an individual who's killed at the hands of the U.S. Border Patrol. In this particular case of Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas, Border Patrol agents deleted video. They collected evidence at the scene. They were present in the hospital when Anastasio was being treated. They were present at the autopsy. They fudged reports. They deleted reports. They coached their own agents on what kind of testimony they were to give. They were present at every one of the depositions. They made sure that they were the victims in this case. And when I say that, what I mean is that border patrol agents, sit team agents, make sure that border patrol agents are looked at as the victims in any sort of an incident, meaning that They are allowed then to use lethal force. ([Time 3:35:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d8a0887a-eb7d-473f-b353-7b08a4dc5461)) - **Border Enforcement Became Big Security** - Post-9/11 migration policy moved Border Patrol into DHS and transformed it into a heavily funded security agency. - Agent numbers rose from ~4,000 in 1995 to ~20,000 by 2020, expanding surveillance and militarization. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) In the wake of 9-11, and quite tellingly, the Border Patrol moved from oversight by the Department of Justice to the new Department of Homeland Security. This move from justice to security has been echoed in its recruiting, which once drew heavily on those with humanitarian aid experience, and now tries to appeal to veterans of the two Decades of war that have accompanied the growth of DHS since 2001. When the DHS was first established, the name struck many as problematic. In the 2002 article in the New York Times, Elizabeth Becker wrote that the name had worrying similarities to the way the Nazis talked about their fatherland, and it didn't really fit With the way Americans spoke. Nobody in 2001 was talking about the homeland. But two decades and billions of dollars later, it's hard to find much in the way of criticism of the agency in DC, despite the fact that the 2022 budgets of CBP and ICE were $16 and $8 billion Respectively, and that every year since 2001, DHS has obtained more guns, more drones, and more surveillance technology that is inevitably used to spy on citizens as well as non-citizens. In 1995, there were about 4,000 CBP agents. By 2020, there were 20,000, with 17,000 stationed on the southern border. ([Time 3:47:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e2548d5e-af83-4e65-9f25-99e952045024)) - **Where To Give Right Now** - Donate to vetted organizations the reporter lists: Asian Solidarity Collective, Al Otro Lado, AFSC, Border Kindness, and others. - Support legal aid and mutual aid groups working directly with migrants at the border. Transcript: Narrator / Reporter (Title 42 series) They are the Asian Solidarity Collective, Al Otro Lado, the American Friends Service Committee, Border Kindness, Borderlands Relief Collective, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, The Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, and Prevencasa. ([Time 4:07:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1e539f2a-41f4-4c49-a3f1-ec911642a236))