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Speaker 1

00:00

♪♪ Moving on. Our main story tonight concerns immigration. It's absolutely central to the American story, as it's sometimes clumsily expressed in cartoons like this. ♪

Speaker 2

00:14

They'd heard about a country

Speaker 1

00:15

♪ ♪

Speaker 2

00:18

Where life might let them win

Speaker 1

00:19

♪

Speaker 2

00:19

They paid the fare to America ♪ And there they melted in ♪ Lovely Lady Liberty

Speaker 1

00:28

♪

Speaker 2

00:28

With her book of recipes ♪ And the finest 1 she's got ♪ ♪ It's the Great American Melting Pot Great American Melting Pot

Speaker 1

00:42

♪ Okay, deeply weird metaphor aside there, I will say this. If you're cooking a bunch of humans in a melting pot, don't include the English. Believe me, we'll ruin the dish.

Speaker 1

00:53

We're bland, and yet also totally overpowering to the palate. We're basically the cilantro of the human race. Now, we have talked about immigration repeatedly on this show, but tonight, we're gonna focus on just 1 narrow area of it, asylum. It's the legal process by which people who are fleeing persecution and make it to the U.S.

Speaker 1

01:10

Can apply to stay here. And asylum seekers are a group that, in theory, everyone should be able to support. They are the literal huddled masses yearning to breathe free, who the Statue of Liberty has for centuries fricasseed. But Trump is famously not a fan.

Speaker 1

01:24

He went on about asylum at length in Thursday's debate, and he loves to riff about it whenever he gets in front of a crowd.

Speaker 3

01:31

The asylum program is a scam. Some of the roughest people you've ever seen. People that look like they should be fighting for the UFC.

Speaker 3

01:45

They read a little page given by lawyers. I am very fearful for my life. -...(AUDIENCE LAUGHING AND CLAPPING IN BACKGROUND I am very worried... That I will be accosted.

Speaker 3

01:59

If I am sent back home. Oh, give him asylum! He's afraid! He's afraid!

Speaker 3

02:05

We don't love the fact that he's got tattoos on his face.

Speaker 1

02:09

Okay, so there is a lot to unpack there, starting with the fact that Trump seems to think that people with facial tattoos are just inherently scary, something definitively disproven by the existence of Post Malone. He looks like a builder bear who spent too much time at the tattoo station. Also, as you probably guessed, the asylum process isn't a simple recitation of magic words by which all manner of fraudulent claims are let through, nor is it responsible for, as Trump's official White House website calls it, the biggest loophole to gain entry into our great country.

Speaker 1

02:40

That is simply not true. Historically, the biggest loophole has been to be the parents of someone that Donald Trump wishes would fuck him. And for the record, asylum seekers are not all tattooed UFC fighters. They're also people like Bertha, who fled Honduras after MS-13 gang members tried to force her 12-year-old granddaughter into marriage.

Speaker 1

03:01

Bertha refused, they threatened to set her on fire, so she and her granddaughter fled to the U.S. They were separated, Berta was detained, and I'll let her lawyer pick up the story from there.

Speaker 4

03:11

Berta, my client, she's a 63-year-old grandmother who legally entered the United States. She's fleeing for her life, but she did it the correct way. Why?

Speaker 4

03:19

Because she went to the port of entry and basically turned herself in. It's not like she was hiding, she was trying to be smuggled in the trunk of a car. She did it the right way.

Speaker 5

03:30

I've been here for 17 months. I've been here for a long time. I don't know why Immigration doesn't want me out.

Speaker 5

03:41

I don't owe anything. Just because I came to ask for protection from this country.

Speaker 1

03:47

That is ridiculous. If you asked the cops for help and they responded by throwing you into detention, you'd be absolutely furious. You'd probably also be black, but let's try and take this 1 systemic social crisis at a time.

Speaker 1

04:00

And Berta's story isn't even a one-off. The Trump administration's attack on asylum has been focused, dedicated, and deeply resourceful. And I know that those aren't adjectives you're used to associating with this administration, but in this 1 area, they've been truly disciplined about being truly evil. So tonight, let's talk about our asylum system, how it's supposed to work, and just a few of the key ways that this administration has undermined it.

Speaker 1

04:25

Let's start with how it's supposed to work at our border. Ideally, an asylum seeker presents themselves to ask for protection, and an officer performs a credible fear screening. If there is a chance that they might face danger if they're sent back home, they're allowed to remain in the U.S. Pending a date in immigration court.

Speaker 1

04:42

Which makes sense. When a person says their life is at stake, you want to err on the side of believing them while you weigh the facts of their case. If someone says, I'm drowning, your first move should be to help them out of the pool, not leave them in there while you convene a hearing to determine whether or not they're a fish who's lying. Now, you should know, even before Trump, the odds of being granted asylum were not great, with immigration advocates saying less than half of all claims are granted.

Speaker 1

05:08

Now, that is partly because, as we've discussed before, many migrants don't have a lawyer to help them navigate a very complicated process, and it's partly because the bar to qualify for asylum is high. You have to be able to prove that you're being persecuted on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political opinion. And there's always going to be room for interpretation there. What qualifies as membership in a social group or a political opinion?

Speaker 1

05:34

For instance, someone being persecuted for criticizing a drug cartel might well argue that their criticism is political if they live in a narco state. But the Trump administration has told immigration judges to apply the criteria very narrowly, as this attorney explains to a room full of asylum seekers.

Speaker 6

05:52

El asilo no es un proceso de protección para todo mundo. So, casos en donde huyen de su país porque son los carteles o las pandillas que los están extorsionando, van a ser casi imposibles de ganar.

Speaker 7

06:08

Uh-huh. Yo tengo problemas en mi país. No por el santo, como están

Speaker 2

06:11

en el país, sino... Because it's the

Speaker 4

06:12

cartels or gangs that are extorting them. They're going to be almost

Speaker 2

06:12

impossible to win. I have problems in my country. I can't

Speaker 7

06:12

go to the San Antonio, or wherever I want in my country.

Speaker 6

06:13

This is very common. My family members were killed for not paying. That's not protection, that's crime.

Speaker 7

06:19

I understand, but to prove that someone is dead, can you prove that someone has a history problem?

Speaker 6

06:25

Even if they were dead, it's not for the right reason, it's not protection.

Speaker 1

06:31

Wow. I don't know what's more jarring there, that man's pitch black joke about getting murdered, or the lawyer taking it at complete face value. That's very funny. But seriously, if you could die holding documentation that you were murdered for your religion, that would actually be a big help.

Speaker 1

06:46

So the asylum process has never been easy, but this administration has made it absolute hell. Their policy of family separation caused widespread outrage, but they have done so much more than that. And it's worth slowing down right now to look at 3 tactics that they've used in particular. Migrant protection protocols, safe third country agreements, and Title 42.

Speaker 1

07:08

And I know that none of those have the harrowing ring of family separation, but each represents another cruel, calculated decision that has largely flown under the radar. And let's start with the Migrant Protection Protocols, or as they're more commonly known, the Remain in Mexico program. Very basically, this policy forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their cases to fully play out in U.S. Immigration courts rather than admit them to safety first.

Speaker 1

07:34

We've already done this to over 67,000 people, many of whom wound up in makeshift camps that have emerged at the border. And since we also started limiting the number of people even allowed to ask for asylum at the border each day. In some places, the migrants themselves have had to work out a system for whose turn it was next.

Speaker 8

07:53

The list is a strange thing. Volunteers who are migrants themselves keep it in a notepad in the Mexican border city of Tijuana. It determines the order in which the thousands of asylum seekers here will be seen by U.S.

Speaker 8

08:05

Officials. No 1 knows exactly who started it or when, but it's evolved into a system to try and keep order as the U.S. Has slowed up the processing of asylum claims.

Speaker 1

08:16

Look, there are plenty of things you'd expect to be handwritten in a college rules notebook. Math homework? Sure.

Speaker 1

08:22

A list of the cutest boys in homeroom? Natch. Just an absolute shitload of cool s's. You know it.

Speaker 1

08:27

What you wouldn't expect, though, would be the names of thousands of families for whom this scrap of notebook paper is their only lifeline to safety, because how the fuck have we let that be the best system available to them? And conditions on the border can be dire. In February, more than 2,500 migrants were living in a camp in Matamoros, where there was only 1 toilet for every 60 people, and safe drinking water was scarce. And even people who don't wind up in those camps can be in real jeopardy, because migrants in general are targets for cartels, who regularly kidnap and try to extract ransom money from those that they suspect of having family in the U.S.

Speaker 1

09:04

This is done so often, there is a whole system in place for it, as this cartel member explains. They end up where they end up. He's talking about murder victims with the same casualness most people Reserve for lost socks. And as of May, there were over a thousand publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and other violent assaults against asylum seekers and migrants forced by the U.S.

Speaker 1

09:57

Completely unnecessarily to wait in Mexico. In fact, kidnappings are such a fact of life, cartels will give some kidnapped migrants a code word upon release. So if they're kidnapped again, the key word would indicate they'd already paid the ransom. And it's pretty bleak when drug cartels have a more efficient system for keeping track of asylum seekers than the U.S.

Speaker 1

10:18

Government. And yet, despite the wreckage this administration has caused, it has trumpeted its Remain in Mexico program as a great success. In fact, Chad Wolf, acting secretary of Homeland Security and undisputed chaddiest wolf, has touted it using a pretty weird metric.

Speaker 9

10:34

What we're seeing is about half of these individuals that are put in the program never show up for their court hearings. So, individuals that are put in this program that know they do not have a, again, a meritorious claim, simply choose to walk away.

Speaker 1

10:48

Okay, real quick, get fucked, Chad, you human razor burn. Because remember, these hearings are migrants only shot at getting to safety. It's everything they've been waiting for.

Speaker 1

10:57

And if they miss their hearing, they lose their case. So a person not showing up in court after you forced them to wait in a dangerous area without adequate shelter or support isn't proof they were trying to cheat the system, it's proof your system is not fucking working. And for the record, the government can make these hearings pretty missable. Some migrants have received notices to appear in court that bear no date or time, or scheduled hearings for when the courts aren't open, including 1 that was scheduled at 1 a.m.

Speaker 1

11:25

And it can be hard to know about any changes to dates of hearings given that some border patrol agents filling out forms for migrants have written in Facebook as a street address. All in all, the government system is about as effective as painting, Meet Us at the Place on a raccoon, and then just throwing it over the wall into Mexico. Good luck getting the instructions, and if you do, good luck figuring out how to follow them." So this program all but shut off the pathway for many asylum seekers to enter the country, but that seemingly wasn't enough, because the administration then came up with safe third country agreements. Basically, the U.S.

Speaker 1

12:01

Managed to force Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to sign up to this. And it meant that we could bar migrants from seeking asylum here, and send them to apply for it in those countries instead. Which is completely absurd, since for many migrants, those are the exact countries they're seeking asylum from. Oh, you're fleeing Honduras?

Speaker 1

12:21

Why not try El Salvador? It's right next door so you can stay in touch with your family, friends, and the people who want to murder you. And if that wasn't bad enough, None of these 3 countries have robust asylum systems, as the president of El Salvador himself admits.

Speaker 10

12:36

A member of the president's inner circle said that asylum seekers could end up staying in El Salvador, that that could happen. Is El Salvador prepared for that?

Speaker 11

12:47

Well, not right now. We don't have asylum capacities. But we can build them.

Speaker 10

12:53

But you don't have it now.

Speaker 11

12:54

We don't have it now.

Speaker 10

12:55

And he said I can throw up a tent.

Speaker 11

12:56

A tent? That's not a... That's not asylum capacity.

Speaker 11

12:59

No.

Speaker 1

13:00

No. No, it really isn't. Throwing up a tent doesn't inherently give you asylum capacity. There are only 2 things throwing up a tent can give you.

Speaker 1

13:08

Shelter from the elements and the arena for a shame-based baking crucible whose only prize is the narrow avoidance of public failure. And quick side note here. Why the fuck did the new season of The Great British Bake Off make the first Showstopper Challenge celebrity cake busts? Because it gave us squashed Freddie Mercury, something the baker insisted was Lupita Nyong'o, and, I admit, a photo-perfect David Bowie.

Speaker 1

13:30

That baker deserves a Paul Hollywood handshake. The rest of you need to think about what you've done. And forcing migrants to sit in refugee camps or sending them to countries with non-functioning asylum systems is comfortably bad enough before you get to what happened earlier this year, when the administration invoked Title 42 of the U.S. Code.

Speaker 1

13:49

And that isn't even an immigration law. It's a provision that gives the government broad power to act during a public health crisis. And the Trump administration is currently claiming that because of the pandemic, it gives them the authority to shut down the border to virtually all migrants. And not just that, they're also claiming that it allows them to take asylum seekers who've already made it into the U.S.

Speaker 1

14:10

And expel them with no due process whatsoever. It is a transparent attempt to exploit this pandemic to do whatever they want with migrants. Although, Mark Morgan, Trump's head of Customs and Border Protection, has repeatedly insisted that nothing could be further from the truth.

Speaker 12

14:26

Title 42 has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. I'm gonna say that again, I've said it before, I'm gonna continue to say it. Title 42 has nothing to do with immigration enforcement and everything to do with public health.

Speaker 1

14:42

Yeah, Mark, we're aware that you keep saying that this has nothing to do with immigration, but the thing is, a Trump official saying his actions have nothing to do with immigration is about as believable as Cookie Monster saying his actions have nothing to do with cookies. Because of course they do. They're the thing that you are so obsessed with, it literally makes you a monster.

Speaker 1

15:00

And it's a little hard to take this administration citing their deep concern about the coronavirus even before you learn that the CDC was apparently forced to issue the Title 42 order, despite their own scientists saying that there was no evidence it would slow the coronavirus. So this clearly has nothing to do with public health at all. And if you need any more proof, Stephen Miller, Trump's top immigration advisor and world's tallest minion, has apparently been trying to invoke Title 42 for immigration purposes long before COVID. He reportedly pushed to invoke it twice last year.

Speaker 1

15:34

Once when an outbreak of mumps spread through immigration detention facilities, and again when border patrol stations were hit with the flu. In fact, using emergency public health powers to curb immigration was apparently on a wish list that Miller crafted within the first 6 months of the administration. And incidentally, the rest of that wish list was just what looks like a hand-drawn picture of a ripped Stephen Miller, and maybe an all-white reboot of Hidden Figures, question mark, circled 3 times. And you can kind of see why this appeals so much to Miller, because invoking Title 42 has basically created a shadow deportation system that moves quickly and is accountable to no 1.

Speaker 1

16:12

And they have used this a lot. Since March, there have been nearly 200,000 expulsions in which asylum seekers were sent back without so much as a court hearing. And the government has gone out of its way to avoid scrutiny here. For example, unaccompanied minors are usually kept in shelters where immigration attorneys can find them and try and help them.

Speaker 1

16:32

But by citing public health concerns, the government has instead been quietly keeping kids in hotels supervised by private contractors. And the rare glimpses that we've gotten of this have been absolutely chilling. Just watch as a civil rights attorney tries to help the kids but gets stopped.

Speaker 4

16:47

Can we see your badges, sir? I'm here. I can't be here.

Speaker 2

16:51

Can I

Speaker 4

16:51

ask who you are? Can I ask who you are, sir?

Speaker 13

16:55

Desperately trying to communicate to children, the Associated Press says they're being held by ICE on the fourth floor of the Hampton Inn & Suites Hotel in McAllen, Texas.

Speaker 6

17:04

If you're detained, give me your name!

Speaker 4

17:06

Get out if you're smart. Get out. Who are you?

Speaker 4

17:09

Who are you? Don't worry about who you are.

Speaker 2

17:10

Are you police?

Speaker 4

17:11

Don't worry about who we are. You need to get out. Get out.

Speaker 4

17:15

Get out! Get out now!

Speaker 1

17:17

What the fuck is happening there? Although I will say, I'm actually curious if after that interaction, those men felt they'd successfully hidden the government's child prison. Whew!

Speaker 1

17:26

That was a close 1. I got a bit worried when he asked, who are you? But then Randy said, Don't worry who we are. Nice save there, Randy.

Speaker 1

17:32

That's the last time anyone asks us questions about this mysteriously off-limits hotel floor packed with terrified children. Now, incidentally, our lawyers are insisting that I have to clarify that that Hampton Inn said they had made those bookings without knowing what they'd be used for and have canceled their business. Because the entity you're definitely angriest at right now is the Hampton fucking Inn. And when you put all of this together, this administration has effectively taken an asylum system that was already imperfect and shattered it.

Speaker 1

18:01

And the thing is, they're now trying to make this damage permanent because along with extending Title 42 indefinitely, they've drafted new regulations that would, among other things, make it easier for immigration judges to reject asylum requests out of hand, make it more difficult, if not impossible, to win a case involving gender-based violence or gang threats, and make it so migrants are required to submit complete asylum applications, which have to be in English and with all supporting evidence within just 15 days of their first court hearing, and that is regardless of whether or not they have a lawyer. The Trump administration's attack on this system has just been relentless. And there are lives at stake here. Remember Berta, who came here to protect her 12-year-old granddaughter?

Speaker 1

18:41

Just watch her lawyer update her on the outcome of her case.

Speaker 5

19:00

I don't want to be killed. I don't want to. Yes.

Speaker 4

19:05

Are you afraid?

Speaker 5

19:06

Yes. I'm afraid.

Speaker 1

19:10

Yeah. The government, acting on our behalf, deported Berta back to Honduras, where you should know she once again fled and is currently living in limbo in Mexico. And the tragic thing is, in some ways, she's actually luckier than many asylum seekers like her. She at least had a lawyer, and her case was heard.

Speaker 1

19:28

But for so many, especially now, there is just no telling if or when they'll even get that far. And if you are wondering, well, what can we do about this? There is actually 1 thing that you can do. You can vote for Joe Biden.

Speaker 1

19:40

And I know that sounds simplistic, especially considering that our immigration policy has been pretty shitty under Democratic administrations too, like the 1 Joe Biden was in for 8 years. And I am not saying that he is the perfect candidate. Far from it. I personally find his opposition to Medicare for All utterly ridiculous, especially in the middle of a pandemic.

Speaker 1

20:00

Also, I think aviator glasses should only be worn by hot pilots, cute babies, and cute baby pilots. But the fact is, a lot of our immigration policy is set solely by the executive branch. And you should know, Biden has explicitly promised to end the Remain in Mexico policy and restore asylum eligibility for domestic violent survivors and the victims of gang persecution. And those could be life-saving changes.

Speaker 1

20:27

1 immigration attorney that we spoke with has said, I spend hours every day telling asylum seekers stuck in Mexico we won't know until November 3rd. They cry, they pray, they ask about the latest polls, I show my countdown timer, they show me their scars. And obviously, Biden will have to do a lot more, and we will have to hold him to the promises he's made. But we can't begin to fix the damage done by this administration until we replace the administration itself.

Speaker 1

20:54

If we even want a shot at change, it is on us to vote and then advocate like lives depend on it. Because the fact is, we badly need an asylum system that works. And that is ideally 1 based on compassion, due process, and of course, ultimately, cannibalism by a giant green statue. You