There is a crisis at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Global forces of climate change, development and war conspire in a deadly feedback loop of human suffering. At the heart of this crisis is the most sprawling system of detention and surveillance the world has ever seen, relying on unjust criminalization for the benefit of a few sources of power. What does it all mean, how did we get here, and what can we do about it?
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[00:00] PART I: The Border Crisis
[3:02:50] PART II: How We Got Here
[6:49:57] PART III: What Can We Do?
(This transcript is machine generated, incomplete, and bad. We'll fix it soon!)
[00:02:35] It's early morning and already scorching hot as our truck crosses into Bureau of land management land. This is the Sonoran desert. For David and I, the beauty of the vast open desert is stunning. A forest of Saguaro cactus, the largest in the world, stretches out as far as the eye can see. David stopped several times to capture the soundscape as we learned to do from Bernie Krauss and episode 44 do not disturb.
[00:03:24] We hear the sound of wind breathing life and vibrance into dry shrubs. The homes of chirping insects. We hear crow's caw, songbirds tweet all around us as this stillness of the vast desert teeming with life hidden from the oppressive sun. It's truly a magical experience for us, but not everyone calls it beautiful for the thousands of people trekking North to escape poverty, violence, genocide, and climate induced environmental disasters.
[00:04:00] This region represents desperate struggle and far too often death.
[00:04:08] Yeah.
[00:04:21] I unlatched and swing open a large metal gate, which David and Doug proceed through.
[00:04:38] Doug is driving a large pickup truck with a converted bed holding a massive 300 gallon water tank, a generator too, blue, 55 gallon drum barrels, and several long metal poles.
[00:04:52] We'd go there in, um, February because, uh, if you've had a good winter rain, it's covered in flowers.
[00:05:01] Doug is a driver for humane borders, a nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona that manages water stations throughout the desert on the U S Mexico border.
[00:05:11] Which is cool in the desert, you know, find a place covered in flowers, looks different going this way.
[00:05:19] Their mission is to save desperate people from a horrible death by dehydration and exposure and T create a just and humane environment in the borderlands. Today, we will visit three water stations in both saguaro national park and the Ironwood forest national monument humane borders. Is one of the three main organizations patrolling the borderlands with the goal of assisting migrants in need.
[00:05:46] Besides them, there are the Tucson Samaritans and No Mas Muertes or No More Deaths and the water stations, the humane borders establish are either approved by city and County permits where they are placed with permission on private land.
[00:06:03] The city of Tucson owned land out here as a way of protecting it from being used for other purposes to protect the water rights. Um, and they have been really supportive. Because you know, they can point to their maps and say, wherever we have tanks, we don't have dead bodies. You know, we don't have a history of dead bodies.
[00:06:26] So you know, if anybody complains, they go, well, you can complain. But we find it's effective in our, you know, on our lands to have watersheds.
[00:06:38] We were surprised to learn that even ranchers who support the border wall and anti-immigration policies support humane borders mission and will allow water stations to be installed on their land. And part of the reason, as #####Doug Ruopp explains it, is that harsh U S policies at the U S Mexico border have diverted migrants away from official checkpoints and forced them into treacherous and dangerous routes in the sprawling 120,000 square miles Sonoran desert.
[00:07:09] And because of the brutal environment, which can reach 120 degrees with little to no naturally occurring water or food. The watering tanks ranchers used for their livestock become a common target for desperate people trekking North from Mexico. In addition, between 1990 or when border security in the United States became increasingly militarized.
[00:07:32] 2012 an estimated 5,000 people died in the Sonoran desert. Regardless of a person's political ideas on immigration, no one wants to discover dead bodies on their land, and so many ranchers will consider allowing humanitarian water stations on their private property if it prevents unnecessary deaths and lowers the number of migrants targeting their own water system.
[00:07:59] Yeah. It's a, it's, it's complicated. Like I said, some people feel like you're telling migrants, come on up. We've got water for you. Which is just crazy cause there's, there isn't water everywhere. It's a huge, huge area. But we do what we can do. That's the bottom line.
[00:08:21] The Tucson Samaritans mission is to save lives in the Southern Arizona desert, and they are faith and who are responding directly practically and passionately to the crisis at the U S Mexico border, like humane borders. The Samaritans only access land that is legally open to them, but they provide more direct service to migrants rolling by vehicles and often with nurses, doctors, and other experts to provide care when needed.
[00:08:51] Finally, No Mas Muertes, like the Samaritans, desert aid workers like those from no more deaths go to extreme lengths to end death and suffering in the Mexico U S borderlands, often making lengthy trips by foot and to the most treacherous part of the desert to find people in need, but their work also puts them in direct conflict with the federal government.
[00:09:16] No No Mas Muertes goes wherever there are migrants in need and their water stations are often single gallon jugs and water bottles that can be left in the most treacherous paths in the desert. And this does not mean that what they do is illegal because it is never illegal to provide water, food, and medical assistance to another human being in distress.
[00:09:36] Providing care to victims of humanitarian crises is something nonprofits and NGO is like the international red cross do all around the world in times of crisis. And what is going on at the Southern border of the United States is unquestionably a humanitarian crisis. But for agencies like the U S border patrol who consider parts of the desert as their exclusive territory.
[00:10:01] Desert aid workers are perceived as conspirators, carrying out illegal activity on land. They should have no right to access. For example, Scott Warren, a volunteer with No Mas Muertes is a geographer in his late thirties who has drawn national attention for the past two years as the federal government and us border patrol attempted to prosecute him.
[00:10:25] He faced up to 20 years in prison for the water, food, and shelter he gave to central American migrants. When they showed up at the door of an aid house he was volunteering at after they had just crossed one of the most dangerous stretches of desert. Warren provided care to the men in need, but told them he could not help them escape the law.
[00:10:46] Nevertheless, when border patrol agents came, Warren was arrested and charged with three felonies, including conspiracy and harboring. Two years later in November, 2019 Warren was found not guilty by a jury of his peers.
[00:11:03] Yeah. He can bring this and bring this. You've been taking notes, right, David? Good. Thank you.
[00:11:27] David, Doug and I arrive at our second water station, the Tim Holt station, and immediately get out to observe the area among the desert brush. Is it humane borders? 55 gallon barrel laying on its side on top of a small wooden stand. Drawing attention to the area and right next to the barrel is a 30 foot metal pole supporting a custom designed blue flag featuring a water spigot.
[00:11:55] Once again, I'm pretty sure everything's gonna be okay. Because when the flag is up, easily means things are okay.
[00:12:08] Even some energetic volunteers here collecting rocks to keep the flag up, the winds can really pick up. That's a curve. Bill Thrasher, this mountain, my favorite desert birds.
[00:12:21] It is standard protocol at humane borders to check the water quality of every station they visit and to do so, Doug burst uses a key to unlock a metal clamp. The secures the barrels prevents malicious tampering. A necessary deterrent as humane borders has had to respond to groups in the past who have spoiled water or poured it out as a way to voice their anti-immigrant sentiments.
[00:12:50] Once the cap is open, we visually inspect the water for algae growth. This water looks fine to the naked eye, but to get a closer look, we pour some of it into a cup. And then Doug inserts a TDS meter or total dissolved solids meter to check where the concentration of salt metals and minerals that may have accumulated in the water since it was last build.
[00:13:12] That would be cool if we had one of these for taking the temperature. Okay. Is that one 11 that's four 11 so that's getting towards toward the bad water. Well, yeah.
[00:13:27] This water fails the test. So we pour the barrel out and fill it back up
[00:13:32] Put it in better water.
[00:13:33] water, pulling water with the generator from the 300 gallon tank on the back of the truck.
[00:13:39] David, it's your job to remind me to close the valve here. Remember when everybody was stealing copper and brass from everything. Yeah. People were stealing me. They wanted to speak it. It was because back then we had solid brass. Really nice because go
[00:14:00] did they know they could have just walked
[00:14:02] Yeah, that's right.
[00:14:06] Have got their own. All right. Hold it. Actually spray the. Plants first.
[00:14:34] There you go. And that's like 60 gallons of water and we have way more water than we need.
[00:14:46] As Doug explained, it's important to make ourselves visible at each water station so that anyone in need. Who may be watching from a distance will feel comfortable approaching us. The desert is a massive and unforgiving place, and Doug has been approached by those two desperate to continue their journey.
[00:15:05] And today there is a disproportionate number of women and children attempting the journey.
[00:15:11] and then I usually, while this is going on, I usually walk around a little, see if there's any sign of activity since we didn't see any water. You said down there.
[00:15:42] I just can't get over. How beautiful. Yeah. Not everybody calls it beautiful, but I think it is. Can we call it the beautiful curl that's beautiful and cruel at the same time? Here's the dude I was telling you about.
Okay. We're back in the studio at this moment, our time in the field at this point, because this stuff is, and a little bit of a process in getting produced and out. There has been a couple months ago, we've had time to sit back and reflect and try and figure out how our experiences on the border relate to the people that we're talking about and relate to this larger history.
[00:16:08] Of the United States of Mexico, of other countries, of labor, of people moving around. It's a large spanning story, and that's what you're about to find over the course of this extremely long episode. we want to talk a little bit about some of the voices you're going to hear throughout this. We've conducted many interviews.
[00:16:26] We've conducted an enormous amount of research, all of which you can find on our website, ashes, ashes.org. Or the mini sites specifically for this series called boarders dot ashes, ashes dot orgy. Check that out for, uh, episode specific information, but we want to sort of lay out what you can expect over the next few hours as we get into this topic and try and tackle it as thoroughly as we can with our unlimited resources and time.
[00:16:53] Yeah, David , and before we introduced the voices, you'll hear, let's just talk about the overall outline of the show, if you will. And when we were originally coming up with the concept of this, we found it. Ourselves drawn to three broad questions. One being, you know, what is the state of migration and the us Mexico border and the policies around that.
[00:17:14] Like where are we right now? And then another question being, how did we get here? How did we get to a state where these, uh, cruel policies and, you know, the violence that we hear about and just so many of the stories that we're hearing that are just causing us to stress. How did we get to that point? And then of course the question we always ask is.
[00:17:36] What do we do about this? And so we decided to arrange the show in these three parts. Part one where are we now? And we're going to explore the history of border patrol, the changing landscape of migration policy. emergence of what many call concentration camps within our own country. We'll talk about the process an immigrant takes to become a refugee in America.
[00:17:59] We'll talk about the state, our communities, R, N when they have to come head to head with the policies that ice, the department of Homeland security and in collaboration with the police are carrying out on the streets of of our neighborhoods. And we'll talk about a couple of other issues.
[00:18:17] And part two is asking that question of, well, how did we get here? We're exploring the Hills. From the very beginnings of borders and border patrol up until modern day, looking at the violence and economic problems that pause the situation we see in not just the United States, but in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, all over this area, and really exploring how we evolved and navigated these complex routes of history to bring us to what many in the media are calling this migrant crisis.
[00:18:47] So this is our big question of not only understanding the history, but also the mechanisms that pushed that history along. It answers that question of why is this happening? It's a complicated question with a complicated answer. We tried to be as thorough and as deep in this as we could.
[00:19:04] And an important piece of that. That second part of, of why we're here is the idea that may be this border crisis or my migrant crisis, whatever the media wants to call it, actually might be benefiting those in power and how it might do that. What are the com, who are the companies? What are the, who are the, what are the political interests that actually gain from chaos and human misery?
[00:19:29] And this of course, brings us finally to that third section, which asked that question. We try to ask in every single episode, what can we do? And so we're looking not only at what can do as listeners of this show as . Citizens of these countries or maybe other places around the world, but also looking at specifically what certain people are already doing, and you're going to hear from a lot of these people who are actively working on this problem.
[00:19:54] Throughout this episode. We have a wide variety of interviews with legal experts, with activists, with people who are actively working in this area, and they share a huge amount of knowledge with us. In addition to all the research Daniel and I have performed.
[00:20:10] So you're going to hear primarily from five people, and I feel like we should just go ahead and say that in this seven hour episode or whatever it is, a lot of the opinions we express are not necessarily those represented by, or, uh. Held by the people that we have interviewed or the organizations that they represent.
[00:20:31] Thank you Daniel Forkner Esquire.
[00:20:34] We have Azadeh N. Shahshahani, director of project, South legal and advocacy department and project South is an organization committed to social justice work in the U S South. Originally founded in 1986 as the Institute to eliminate poverty and genocide. And the legal and advocacy department specifically focuses on immigrants rights.
[00:20:57] Uh, the protection of Muslim communities that are facing state repression and the support of social justice movements in the global South. Uh, their attorneys and legal expertise is an asset to grassroots organizations throughout the movement. The AZA de herself has previously served as president of the national lawyer's Guild and as director of the national security, an immigrants rights project for the American civil liberties union of Georgia among many Vinnie other things.
[00:21:27] Be believe that a fundamental change needs to occur happens. So when it comes to. Uh, immigration, immigrant stress. For example. You know, the believe that ice needs to be abolished, that detention centers need be shut down as a whole. Um, you know, we don't want to make prettier gels. We want them to be shut down.
[00:21:49] Following . Hey, we have Paedia Mixon, CEO of new American pathways since its formation in 2014 now, new American pathways is a refugee resettlement nonprofit that serves over 5,000 refugees per year, and the nonprofit offers services at every single step of the way from picking refugees up at the airport to securing housing and education jobs, and ultimately guiding them towards citizenship and the successful lives that we hope they'll find one day here in the United States.
[00:22:19] Right now we are seeing the worst refugee crisis in history. There are more refugees now than there were during and after world war II in the world, and. The United States has historically had the largest refugee resettlement program. Although right now we do not. We have lowered the numbers dramatically at the same time that the need for finding a safe place for refugees has grown.
[00:22:45] Erin Argueta.
[00:22:46] Actually, David's more like Erin Argueta
[00:22:50] Is it direct service attorney with the Southern poverty law center? The SPLC, as many of you are familiar with, is an organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry and is seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society. They use litigation, education and advocacy to fight for justice.
[00:23:08] The SPLC was famously formed in 1971 and Montgomery, Alabama, and has since been an important organization in civil rights, in other civil justice movements. And Erin's role as direct service attorney is specifically nestled in one of the SPL CS programs called the Southern immigrant freedom initiative, also known as CFE. This provides free legal representation to immigrants or detained in the deep South.
[00:23:32] It's wrong. I don't think that we should be making money off humans being detained. Um, and I think it creates. Terrible incentives that for everyone, for the private company, and then you learn the locale where the detention centers are located. They get a contract, so they get a certain amount of money per bed per night.
[00:23:56] And so, yeah, it's, it creates an incentive to. Build these, have these facilities, keep them filled, and people aren't making money off of that instead of looking at ways, because like I said, these people shouldn't be detained. They could be released, they could have their case, they could ask for asylum without being detained.
[00:24:15] But there is this reverse incentive because it's a huge money making operation to retain people.
[00:24:21] We will hear from a meal car Valencia, who was the executive director of Al Refugio in Georgia. Amilcar has been involved in the immigrant rights movement ever since he moved to Georgia from El Salvador and as director of El Refugio, he helped found the organizations hospitality house and helps those in detention through the organization's mission to recognize the humanity of people who are detained.
[00:24:48] They lead face to face visitations too. Stewart detention facility in Georgia. They provide housing and warm meals to the families and those visiting their loved ones who are in detention and they offer friendship and support to asylum seekers in their families.
[00:25:05] I believe that when everyone is welcome, we all be free. So if you believe that immigrants should be loved and welcomed, turn to them and let them know you can do that every day. We do support immigrants in our community, and when Joe called me to their fin and protect their rights, so if I comes through there to them. You will protect them inside to hide more than everyone else.
[00:25:44] And finally, we will continue to hear from Doug, who we heard earlier in the intro, guiding us in the Sonoran desert. Um, Doug is a longtime volunteer with humane borders. He's a teacher and he was an amazing guide to us during our visit to the Sonoran desert in Tucson, Arizona.
[00:26:04] I just can't get over how beautiful it is out here.
[00:26:06] Yeah. Not everybody calls it beautiful though.
[00:26:10] Well, yeah, I guess that's
[00:26:11] I think it is. Can we call it the beautiful curl? Kind of that's beautiful and cruel at the same time. Here's the dude I was telling you about.
[00:26:22] And also before we start, we'd like to take a moment to recognize the incredible book. No wall. They can build a guide to borders and migration across North America. This is a fabulous, fantastic resource written by anonymous desert aid activists published by crime. Think a collective book publishing group.
[00:26:43] It's a, it's an incredible resource. I cannot recommend it enough. It really helped us to round out all of our research and to get a lot more information from people who are actively working directly on the ground. So with all that, Daniel, let's dig in and sort of lay out what this crisis as the media likes to call it is.
[00:27:01] And, uh, this is sort of laying the groundwork as we explore all these concepts in more depth, but really to define what it is we're talking about directly. There's a lot of numbers here, but as we get going, we'll get more and more into the systemic component and less of these quantitative measurements.
[00:27:17] But, but it is important to have an idea of exactly what we're dealing with.
[00:27:20] Yeah. I mean, right now around the world, the UN shows that the number of migrants are outpacing the growth of population around the world. . Is the number of migrants increase. We have, uh, in parallel the rise of authoritarianism, um, not just in the U S but around the world. And that means that the way we treat these migrants becomes increasingly cruel in 2016 U S immigration and customs enforcement or ice detained.
[00:27:49] Some 352,000 people in that year. Uh, the daily average, uh, was between 30 1030 4,000, but then in October, 2016, the daily average reached a new record high of about 41,000 people in any given day. And today, ice detains an average of over 50,000 people each day and around 450,000 people in a given year.
[00:28:16] And Daniel, just as those numbers increased over the . Since then it's exploded even more. 2019 has climbed to a six year high for migraines, crossing the border, seeking asylum, and according to journalists, Anna Maria Berry, jester. Yeah. Unlike previous ways of integration, these are not single men from Mexico looking to blend in and find work.
[00:28:38] Most are families fleeing gang violence, political instability, or dire poverty.
[00:28:43] And we'll go in more depth later on in the show about why that is. But because we as a country in our policies are so committed to detaining, it seems like as many people as possible. It's expensive for the U S tax payer. In 2016 the cost for immigration detention was six point $1 billion.
[00:29:03] And speaking of high cost projects or seeing the construction of the border wall here in the United States with some money given from Congress, more pulled from Pentagon budgets, and that itself is increasing to six plus billion dollars and probably going to increase even more as the wall continues to be built out and we find it's more and more expensive than expected.
[00:29:22] This is a huge amount of money that could go to helping people. That is instead being. Spent on keeping people out, but the walls being built here in the United States are no different than anywhere else in the world. We are building more walls now as a collective human race than ever before in human history.
[00:29:38] that's something we really want to, to keep in mind is that while this episode does focus on the American Southern border. These types of stories are playing out all around the world right now as these numbers of refugees increase, whether it's from economic crises, whether it's from war or whether it's from climate change, which influences those as well as causing its own problems.
[00:29:59] These problems will only get worse, and we need to keep that in mind as we go forward and explore the causes of why and exactly how this issue is manifesting itself right now.
[00:30:09] And as this migrant crisis progresses, the collective political approach to incarceration and while building is disastrous for human rights and contributing to the dangerous conditions that migrants have to continually fight against just to survive. For example, the Pima County office of the medical examiner in Arizona has tallied some 2,816 deaths in the Sonoran desert between 2020 17 and this is a figure that gets quoted often.
[00:30:44] It's in many articles that, you know, 3000 people have died in the desert. But the fact is, it's unquestionably lower than the actual number of deaths that no one will ever truly uncover. I mean in the first place. This figure is just, it's just the number of remains that the Pima County medical examiner's office has physically examined.
[00:31:03] It doesn't speak to the mass graves or remains that are never found, and Pima County is just one County. The true number of deaths just on our us Mexico border is a figure that, you know, probably only a higher power will ever know.
[00:31:20] Suffice to say, there is a crisis at the border. There is an immigration crisis, but it's not what we're told by the media. The crisis is not that America's being invaded or flooded by immigrants bringing crime and disease. The crisis is that America has built the most sprawling system of detention and surveillance the world has ever seen, which for now relies on the unjust criminalization of people by ethnicity and skin color.
[00:31:47] And the crisis is not merely that this system exists, but that it benefits those in power. People profit billions from a top, their private prison corporations or their drug trafficking organizations or their surveillance and technology companies designing drones, camera towers, analytics software. This system benefits politicians who mobilized racism and fear to justify inhumane policies of segregation.
[00:32:11] Family separation and foreign policies of genocide and war, which all of course feeds back into those profits of those industries, which we have railed on on this show over and over and over again.
[00:32:25] Yeah. It's really a sprawling system that he really doesn't get the attention it deserves. I mean, w we always hear about like individual stories of migration at the border or, or we hear of large numbers that. Used as like scare taxes, right? Oh my gosh. Like so many people coming across our border, but we never hear about the infrastructure that is created to funnel these people directly through our borders.
[00:32:49] We never hear about the infrastructure that was planned by border patrol itself to direct the flow of migrants into certain places in the deserts specifically, so that they would die and suffer. We don't hear about. The companies that are overseas profiting hundreds of millions of dollars off of military tools and technologies that as American taxpayers are purchasing so that they can surveil us and all these people and improve their systems so that they can, uh, generate even more profits.
[00:33:24] I mean, it's, there's so many pieces to this that we have to explore and at the heart of this crisis is. A system of control and domination that encompasses our us foreign policy. It encompasses gangs and extra governmental groups, uh, along the journey North for migrants from central America to the United States.
[00:33:43] It encompasses us domestic policy. Um, for example, the collaboration between local law enforcement and immigrations and customs enforcement. Something we'll, we'll talk about and most importantly. The, the enforcement and control apparatuses of this U S immigration policy, specifically ICPP border patrol, and the department of Homeland security is really complicit in so much of the cruelty that's being carried out.
[00:34:12] you know, we'll talk about concentration camps. We'll talk about many things. The associate press, just recently. In January, 2020 toward a whole bunch of, uh, detention facilities in the United States and found them to be incomplete, disarray and chaos. And we have collectively empowered some really troubling groups within our government.
[00:34:33] And I just want to highlight one story, David, if that's all right. It's a little bit off topic, but I just want to give a, you know, a little bit of the sense of the madness that we're dealing with here. Um, and I say it's a little off topic because you know, the focus of this show is going to be the U S Mexico border.
[00:34:50] And this doesn't really relate to that, but it deals with the same enforcement arms of the U S government, specifically ice. So between January and November of 2019. A U S immigration and customs enforcement arrested and deported some 250 students of a university in Detroit, Michigan. Now this is called the university of farming 10 it was formed in 2015 it recently closed down, but.
[00:35:17] Most of the students were from India. They were pursuing graduate degrees in technology and computer science, that type of thing. And they were arrested when it was determined that their student visas were not valid and that they were here illegally, and some of them were actually given lengthy jail sentences.
[00:35:36] Now what happens? You might ask David, right? Um, okay. We have a bunch of students coming over from India. They're going to this university, but they have, you know, invalid student visas must be a giant scam, right?
[00:35:48] Sounds that way.
[00:35:49] Well as it turns out, it was a giant skiff because the university of Farmington was completely fake.
[00:35:55] It was created by the U S department of Homeland security. They even went so far as to get a real accreditation agency. To list the university as legitimate. And you could even find on the department of Homeland security's website, this university was listed as a legitimate institution of higher learning.
[00:36:15] Um, undercover agents were hired to act as university officials. Which they then proceeded to entice students from India, providing them with real and legitimate student visas that permitted them to legally enter the United States. And then after this fake university actually run by Paul mend security, collected millions of dollars in tuition fees from the students.
[00:36:39] The government suddenly declare the university was a fake. All those student visas were invalid. And then they arrested, you know, 250 people over the year. And eight of those students have been charged with conspiracy for visa fraud and sentence too, up to 30 months in jail for some of them.
[00:36:57] This is such a Kafka moment, and I think really drives home, uh, just how absurd this system has gotten to be with. There are people out there who are sitting in jail or who are banned from ever reentering the United States because I applied to a legal and fully accredited school, given a actual valid, the ISA, but because they were unknowingly part of a pointless sting operation designed to generate, I guess, millions of dollars off books for her that these organizations, uh, they're just screwed for no reason.
[00:37:34] No reason at all, except they were easy marks when somebody has the backing of the government to do this stuff. That's insane. Absolutely insane. But we see these types of stories happening over and over and over, all across the border where things just don't make any sense. If you look at the world with any sort of compassion or logic, but if you look through these, these lenses that we're talking about of power and profit, then suddenly all these dots start connecting.
[00:37:57] Yeah. And you know, clearly these students lost out on a lot of money and time, but I would say that relative to a lot of the. Stories that, that we've seen in terms of people coming up through the U S Mexico border and then being stuck in concentration camps for years. I would say their experience is relatively mild, given some of the alternatives, but obviously to get to this point, the policies around immigration and border patrol specifically, these things have undergone massive changes, right?
[00:38:29] So maybe we should start the show, David, with a little bit of history on the good old border patrol.