Hey, I'm Lou Miller. And I'm Luthafnasser. This is RadioLab. And last week...
White House is waving more than two dozen federal laws. You might have seen in the news that the Biden administration is going to resume construction of a wall along the southern border. This despite promising not to build another foot of the wall if elected. Also, Democratic mayors have been complaining about the waves of migrants coming to their cities and states.
We'll destroy New York City. Mayor Eric Adams escalating his frustration during a town hall. Which all kind of feels upside down. And that reminded me of a series of stories we did a few years ago that helped me to realize just how complicated the debate around the border is and how that sort of feeling of upside downness, that's kind of more a continuity than a change.
Anyway, all of that news just made me think we need to play this. Yeah, and as someone who was not here when this piece was made, who had nothing to do with making it, I am allowed to say. I truly think it is one of the best things we've ever made. It's called the Border Trilogy.
Which obviously means that it's three parts. We're going to play them over three weeks. We're also going to update it to talk to this current moment. And then later this fall, after that, we are going to hit you with a bunch of brand new episodes.
We've got one about a secret inside the human body, one about a secret inside the sky, one where a lot of talks to a guy whose biology completely rearranges his world. So really good stuff coming. But in the meantime, the first episode in this series is called the hole in the fence. And it begins with me telling our original host, Jen Robert, about a guy named Jason Dleyone.
Oh, and one more thing. This episode does contain graphic descriptions that may not be suitable for our younger or more sensitive listeners. You're listening to RadioLab from WNYC. Thank you.
Rewind. I think the best place to begin, it sounds like, is in 2008. I think that sounds about right. So this is Jason Dleyone.
I'm an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. I direct the undocumented migration project. But back in 2008, Jason had actually just finished grad school. And my doctoral dissertation was on ancient stone tools.
The lithic industries of San Lorenzo and much teetilon, an economic and technological study, about as far removed as you can be from the stuff that I'm doing right now. Using him studying technological data from 11 domestic and non-domestic contexts. Just to explain, Jason was on his way to being an archaeologist. So he would go out into the field, do these digs, into parts of Mexico, and find these little fragments of old stone tools.
This study focuses primarily on percussion flake tools. Dating back to about 1,000 BC. An industry that has often been ignored in Mesoamerican lithic analyses. And then he would write these papers.
I evaluate these models by comparing differences in the frequencies of various tool types. You know, he's a journal that just said really just a handful of people would read. But like many academics, and I can say this because I was an academic. This study also finds that the introduction and adoption of prismatic late technology.
He had this moment where he just kind of hit the wall. It's like, OK, this is enough. I'm not doing this. I want nothing to do with this.
You know, when I finished my dissertation, I had really become disillusioned with the work that I was doing. And I had no idea what I was going to do. I remember telling my wife at one point, I felt really bad. I feel like I've wasted the last 10 years of my life doing archaeology.
And to make matters worse, I'd taken this job at University of Washington. He'd just gotten his job where he was supposed to teach the very thing he was now sick of. Yeah, just like just a full blown crisis. But then fate stepped in.
Well, Jason was preparing for one of his freshman classes. Someone handed him a book by a writer named Luis Alberto Raya called the Devil's Highway. Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass. So sunstruck, they didn't know their own names.
Couldn't remember where they'd come from. Had forgotten how long they'd been lost. One of them wandered back up a peak. One of them was barefoot.
They were burned nearly black. Their lips huge and cracking. So the Devil's Highway is actually, well, it's a true story. It's the story of 26 men who came to the US hiking their way through the Arizona desert.
Fourteen of them died along the way. And so I start reading it. Visions of home flooded through their minds. Soft green bushes, waterfalls.
It just shocked me. I knew a lot about the border, at least I thought I did. I grew up in South Texas. My parents were immigrants.
But I couldn't believe that this was somebody's world. They were drunk from having their brains baked in the pan. They were seeing god and devils. Days and days of walking, running out of food.
They were dizzy from drinking their own urine. You know, dying of thirst. The poisons clogging their systems. At a certain point, Jason comes across this passage where the author is describing...
The things that were in these men's pockets. They're both built buckle with a fighting cock in late. One wallet in the right front pocket of his jeanos. Some change, some keys, a silver belt buckle.
Fake silver watch. One comb. You know, these personal effects. Green handkerchief.
And he's trying to reconstruct the story about who these men were that died from exposure. John Doe No. 42, fewer jeans. Colored piece of paper and pocket.
Jason says when you read that book, a light bulb went on. As I bought a plane ticket, a month later I was in the Arizona desert. Jason gets out to Tucson, Arizona. And he manages to convince someone from a local NGO to basically like show him around and be his guide.
When I said, I want to look at the stuff that migrants are leaving in the desert. I was like, all right, you want to see this stuff? I'm going to take you real deep into the desert and see what you're made of. This guy just ran me through the ringer.
That part of the Sonoran Desert, it's hilly, covered in sagebrush, cacti everywhere, red sand. And Jason says at a certain point, a few hours into the hike, they walked up this incline and got to this ridge where they could kind of look out over this huge expanse. Just imagine like a ravine or a wash. And Jason says he suddenly noticed that the desert ground below them was just covered in stuff.
Over a thousand backpacks and water bottles. I mean, just that much. Well, what ends up happening is stuff gets left behind for a couple of different reasons. If you're in routes, you might throw something down because you get so tired and your bag gets so heavy.
And those things are kind of sprinkled across these migrant trails. But once you get to the end, past the checkpoint, you're smug, which is okay, we're safe now. We've got to a new road where we can get picked up. Someone else will show up in the truck.
And then they will say, all right, the 30 of you, get into this van, leave everything behind, change your clothes so it doesn't look like you've just walked for two weeks through this desert. And so when groups are moving really big, you would see things the size of like football fields of just stuff everywhere. Gatorade bottles, vitals, photographs, toys, the kind of random things that you might throw in your bag and say, I'm leaving my home forever and these are the things I want to take with me. I'm like a diaper bag or a baby bottle and you wonder, my God, who just came through this and what's happened to them?
So for the next several years, Jason just keeps going back to this stretch of this northern desert. Ripped clothes, fragments of clothes and bushes. Gathering whatever he could find. Dirty socks.
And like an archaeologist, he would collect this stuff. Bandages, itemites and categorizes. Cocktail dresses, high heel shoes. Trying to figure out who it came from, why it was there.
Baby bottles, hair curlers, hoist, wrappers. He did this year. Sneakers, photographs. After year.
Socks. Pick up this. Shoes, dresses. Pick up that.
Human arm. He finds an arm. Way between some rocks. Like an entire arm up to the shoulder.
Just sort of sticking out between two rocks. I mean, there was no flesh other than the things that were holding the joint together. Oh, wow. Yeah.
Jason and his guy, the folks who was there, they began to search the surrounding areas for other parts of the body. I mean, really the goal was to try to find the skull because in terms of, you know, identification, I mean, your best luck is going to be if you can get the pieces of the skull. Because if you can find pieces of the skull, maybe you can ID the body and if you can ID the body, maybe you can tell the family, here's what happened to your loved one. So we were out there basically digging around for other parts of this person.
We come across a human tooth. Some little tiny bits of rib bones. But we never find the skull. And I realized that nobody's ever going to identify this person.
There's just not enough left of them and this is not likely to be a case that will be solved. Now Jason says he knew, of course, that people were dying in the desert. But to see this. The fragments of a person.
It would basically be erased. You know, it's very, I mean, it's kind of, it just sort of just kills you. Eventually, he began to have these nightmares. Snakes coming out of the eyes.
About the missing skull. Birds swooping down and pecking out the eyes. I know he's playing soccer with this person's skull. And for weeks, he couldn't shake the simple question.
You know what? What did this to this person? And how many other bodies like this might be out here? How did it get to be like this?
And those questions sending Jason down a sort of rabbit hole. Speaking of a library to forensics papers. The composing flesh. Missing persons reports.
Microsuical on missing. Historical trends. Sociology papers. Demography papers.
Government documents. Illustrations and the figures and the buried in these appendices. And over the next several years, Jason would end up putting together this truly startling portrait of lost stories, hidden statistics, little known policy decisions along our southern border that completely upended how I think about this issue. The immigration issue poses real problems and challenges.
That we're constantly fighting about. We will build a great wall along the southern border. But still never quite. Sing it.
This is part one of a three part series on our southern border. We'll be doing it today, I'm in it next week and the week after. Part one. A hole in the fence.
Alright, so I started off with Jason's question. How did it get to be like this? How did it get to be that so many people cross into America through the desert? Like that's the classic image you have.
It's someone walking through the desert. Why, out of all the places along the border that you could cross, why is it that so many people are crossing in the hottest and most unforgiving place imaginable? And one of the things that Jason ended up telling us about that we found most striking was simply the numbers. The yearly numbers of migrant deaths in the desert.
And I mean, there's a shocking. If you look at the data, there's a very stark moment when things shift. It turns out that if you're looking at the number of people dying in this northern desert, the numbers are a bit tough to pin down. But in the early 90s, it's single digits.
Five bodies one, you're six bodies another, you're seven bodies another. And then all of a sudden, in the late 90s, you go from five to ten bodies to hundreds. I mean, it used to be that if you wanted to cross the U.S. Mexico border, you'd go down to San East to Tijuana at dusk, a place called the soccer field.
You would hop the fence with about a hundred other people and you would just bum rush the border patrol. And Paffy you would get by, would make it into the U.S. And the other people would have to get caught sent back and people would do it again the next day. That was a system for a long time.
So what changed? Well, in the mid 90s, there was a lot of pushback against the visibility of fence hopping. And it all kind of starts with this little-known story. There's a great book by this guy Timothy Dunn called Blocking in the Border.
And it's about these Latino high school students in Texas right on the U.S. Mexico border. We ended up calling the author he mentioned, Timothy Dunn. And then getting so interested in the story that Dunn laid out for us that we're going to leave Jason behind for a while.
And we're going to go on a little trip. Yes. That by the way is co-reporter Tracy Hunt? Yes.
All right. Well, so where are we going to go? El Paso, El Paso, Texas. So, yeah, so Tracy and I went to El Paso a while back.
How does everything happen? You've been told to be different if there was born somewhere else? Of course you thought that. If I was born somewhere else?
Yeah, of course. I mean, I think about that. I feel like I guess I got distracted at that point. We didn't finish the conversation.
Two flags flying, the American flag and the Texan flag. We went to El Paso to visit a high school. Called Bowie High School. Home of the Bowie Bears.
Hi, is it Ben Ryan? Who was our first fellow? You guys have anything much to meet? You know, in many respects it's just, you know, your typical American high school.
Good. You got your taco Tuesdays. It's 9th through 12th grade. About 1200 students.
All right, guys. Please take a good note. I think it's Texas, you know. Football is a big game.
And on their campus they have a huge football stadium with those big Friday night lights. They've got a marching band. They'll pride us outside. It's, yeah, your typical Texas high school.
Yeah, but there is something a little different about it and that is that almost all the students here. The university here, Lando is here, Jose. Our Mexican-American. Just solo.
Oscar. And, you know, we actually talked to one former teacher. This is one cyber-coronado. I was a teacher at Bowie High School in the 1980s and 1990s.
When did he teach? I taught history. And he said that in all his years teaching at Bowie. Taught there for 21 years and never had a single-language student.
Really? Yeah. Never taught a single white student. But the reason we went to Bowie High School is because something happened there in the early 90s.
Something that it sort of, you know, kind of roundabout and totally unforeseeable way completely changed the way we think about the U.S. Mexico border. So we're going to start the story is actually one of one cyber-coronado's classes. The class was immediately after lunch.
And on this particular day, they were going to have a debate in class. And one of the debaters, one of the kids who was going to be part of the debate was late. Yes. His name was Albert.
Albert often came late to class. And so we'd been waiting and waiting and waiting for him. Ten minutes went by. Fifteen.
Twenty. And eventually he showed up being dragged in by this cap security guy. This school security guard. And I thought the security guard brought him in because he was, you know, out doing some miscreant stuff like smoking pot again.
And so I kind of lay into Albert for being late again and for, you know, not holding up his responsibilities with class. But Albert's like, no, no, no, no, no. Albert says that he had been at a handball court playing with his friends. And then when it was time to go from the court back to class, these two Border Patrol agents just came out of nowhere in their green uniforms, demanding to see his papers.
Like, who are you? Where are you from? Let me see your ID. Yeah.
And he, Albert, tries to give them his school ID, but they wouldn't take it. And they actually told him that he needed a federal ID of some sort for them to believe at all that he was the United States citizen or belong on the campus. And one's just standing there like, uh-huh. Border Patrol, really?
You know, I was hurrying the kid, obviously. But then three or four other students in class just kind of stepped in and said, no, what Albert's telling you is true. Not only is Albert telling the truth, but in the last couple of weeks, Border Patrol had been on the handball courts and on the playing fields repeatedly stopping students harassing students. And I was quite frankly shocked.
One says, of course, he knew that the Border Patrol was around because of where the school is situated, which we'll talk about in a second, but he just never understood how present they were in his students lives. I was having a hard time processing this. So, over the next few weeks, one started asking around, different students being like, hey, have you had anything happen with Border Patrol at school? And I got literally hundreds of stories.
I was walking home from school and, you know, I had my backpack on. This is Nydia Rodriguez, who was a freshman at the time. And all of a sudden, I saw this truck, the Border Patrol truck, and it was speeding my way. A couple of agents got out of the truck and started questioning her.
Where my from or where my going? Basically, we were all rounded up. Ernesto Menos remembers walking into school with a bunch of kids. We were searched, our backpack.
And again, you know, a couple of agents got out, started asking him questions. Where we were born, our date of birth, the classes we were taking. We stop. They get out of the truck.
Marcella Gileon, who was walking with a friend near school. And they go, what do you have in the bag? And I go books? You know, what else would I have in my bag?
They're like, well, let us see. I was walking the yelled at me. Hey, get over here. We caught a Vyama.
They sped up to me and they stopped in front of me and asked me, you know, what's in the bag? It was like, what? One of them ripped the bag out from my hands. As I was trying to pull it away from them, the other one grabbed me and pushed me up against the truck.
And then forcibly took the bag away, rifled through it, pushed me out for the, or they pulled me away from the truck, threw my bag at me and told me to get out of here. As these stories came out, it became clear that even the staff had had its run in this with the Border Patrol. We talked to the assistant football coach, Ben Marillo. He told us there was this moment he was driving with two of his football players.
They got pulled over by the Border Patrol and one of them actually pointed a gun at his head. Never had a gun pulled on me. So I thought, okay, my life is over. And I identified myself.
My name is Coach Ben Marillo. Coach Bui High School. I have two of my football players. I would really appreciate if you'd hold your gun.
And the guy barked at me. I appreciate if you shut your mouth and get out of the car. Eventually the agent did hold through the gun. Ben did get out of the car.
Everything was fine. What was that like? How was that? It was one of the scariest things in my life.
Wow. Why was the Border Patrol on the grounds of the school? Did they have some, was there some reason to be there? Well, that's a really good question and I will answer it after the break.
Oh. Alright, three, two, one. I'm Chad. I'm Robert.
I'm Robert. I'm Tracy. This is Radio 11. And today we are bringing you the first of three stories that we will air over the next on border crossings at the US and Mexico border.
When we last were with you just before the break, we were talking to a bunch of former high school students that attended Bowie High School. And really these are students who know they're on the Mexican border because they have been interrogated by police. Some of the teachers were harassed. Stopping them to Border Patrol, stop them to search their bags, demand papers, even in one incident pulling a gun on the football coach.
And I think to understand what was going on at Bowie High School, you have to understand something else. Imagine a Velcasso. You have to understand a poth. There's a spirit.
A flavor. So come on, Megal. Sit for yourself. From 30,000 feet above the desert floor, I see it.
There be loads. Right on the border of Texas, Mexico and New Mexico. It's right there. It's also the biggest city.
The West Texas city of El Paso. That shares a border with Mexico too. And the other thing to know about it is that it's like it kind of has a mirror city on the other side of the border, which is Juarez. See you, that Juarez.
The largest city on the US, Mexico border. So the two cities are separated by this little sliver of the Rio Grande, but they were essentially the same city up until 1848 when the US invaded Mexico and annexed to half the country. And even now, according to Juan. This mythical division between these two cities, it just doesn't exist for most of us.
I mean, I go to the dentist over there. I buy cigarettes over there. Okay, I smoke this. Okay.
Almost everybody else. Passo knows people who live and see a lot of waters. People who see a lot of people who have family members who live in El Paso. And this is literally one community.
But the thing is, when everything was going down at Bowie in the early 90s, it was a community in crisis. So come on, Megal. When I see the ocean, the peso crisis has spilled across the Rio Grande. In the 80s, the Mexican peso crashed.
I dramatically devalued peso. It's called in havoc. The prices and wages. And so people in Juarez started flocking to El Paso because, well, that's where the jobs were, like jobs and construction or childcare gardening.
So you had tons of people get in these permits to come and tell El Paso legally, but then you had all these other people workers who can't get permits required by US law. Couldn't get permits, but they still need it to work. Simply respond to the laws of supply and demand. And so they started coming to making illegal dentures across the border to the United States and unprecedented numbers.
I mean, it was as high as like 10,000 people a day. A day. Coming back and forth illegally, basically for their commute to work. It was chaos.
It was a mess here. We spoke to this phone, a virtual agent, a guy named David Hamm. He told us that when he was on that job, before dawn, you could go down to certain parts of the Rio Grande. You'd have 100, 200 people lined up.
Waiting on the river's edge. Sun come up and here they come. It's morning that America and the rush hour has begun. The rush across the Rio Grande into El Paso.
And there are videos where you can see this. You see people waiting into the shallow parts of the river to cross over to El Paso. If they don't want to get wet, they can pay a young entrepreneur a small fee and raft across. And so for people like David, these were virtual agents.
Okay, here comes the 500. It becomes this cat and mouse game where... Probably the way we had always done business. When you come in, you chase them, catch them and send them back.
Day and night and night. It was never ending job. And it was something you can catch the same guy as two or three times or a shift sometimes. So it was chaos.
Obviously, we're not accomplishing 100% of our mission. And this is actually kind of hilarious. So like around this time in 1992, there was a television interview and Dale Musigades, he's the sector chief of the Border Patrol in El Paso. He's wearing his green hat with his green uniform with the gold shield on his chest.
If we were not here and did not keep a lid on his situation. And in the shots behind him. There would be just an absolute free info from other countries. You can see people climbing up the banks of the Rio Grande and just walking into El Paso.
That's like having white earth standing in front of three bank robbers robbing the bank. Yeah, exactly. And like so, okay, how many entries? All right, so it was reported at a time that for every one migrant, the Border Patrol caught, there were at least three to five who snuck in and didn't get caught.
And the Border Patrol said that this was because they just didn't have the resources. They didn't have the money or the agents to apprehend all these people that are coming in. Which finally brings us back to Booyi High School. Okay, all right.
Okay, yeah, let's try it. Because there's two important things about Booyi. Okay, I'm counting my steps actually here. Okay, from the sidewalk.
One, Booyi is right, right. Or five, six, right on the board. 49. But basically it's 50.
That was 50 steps. 50 steps from the Booyi campus into Mexico. Yeah. And two, the former assistant football coach and teacher Ben Maria, he showed me.
What is that? This fence. Part of the old fence. Oh, that's part of the old fence, you think?
So in the 70s put up a bunch of fencing on the border to curb illegal immigration. So it's like a, it's not much taller than us. But it was pretty flimsy. They called it to tortilla curtain and right at this spot across from Booyi High School.
There was a hole in the fence. Yeah. And David Hamm, former Border Patrol agent told us that what that meant was that you had migrant, you had a lot of migrants who would be coming through that hole in the fence. Through Booyi High School.
And he claimed that it wasn't just people looking for work. It was also people bringing in drugs. The way I know that because our anti-smugming unit would watch them come through. And so Border Patrol agents had taken to just sort of hanging out around the school on the school's property, on the football field, across the street from the school.
Like just they were just there all the time. There were even rumors that Border Patrol agents would go undercover as students and that they would, you know, wanted the halls, that they would go into the locker rooms. I'd noticed the, the, the Suburbans parked on the Booyi campus. Yeah.
Again, former Booyi teacher, one cyber coronata. But the whole reason, you know, that I thought they were there was the chain link is cut and they need to stop people from entering into a high school. Instead of realizing that what they're doing is they're using a high school as a hunting round. And so, and so to one, when he started hearing about all these stories of these 14, 15, 16 year old kids getting stopped and shaken down, it wasn't about Border Patrol trying to stop migrants from coming in or trying to stop drugs from coming across a border.
It was the Border Patrol simply stopping people because they were brown. And that really, this radio angered me. But for most of these kids, it was nothing like out of the ordinary. You know, kids like Ernesto Munoz, Ricardo Villama.
That was just day to day life. Talk it even to some of the community members. Tony Santos. The Tommy.
The way about it. Growing up in this poor neighborhood right next to the border. That's where we are life here in South Paso. It wasn't like a concern that comes out.
You go to the park and shoot some basketball. You tell your schoolmates, you know, you just would have in after school. It was like, you know, how you got stopped? Because you got hurt out of probably because of how you dressed or whatever.
So the students were more likely to laugh about it than be angry. But in his US history class that year, one started teaching his kids about civil rights. Actually getting them to debate the different ways of thinking about civil rights. Talking about stuff like the activities which have taken place in Birmingham over the last few days.
A letter from Birmingham Jail. On to my mind. Mark the non-violent movement coming of age. And this liberty or then.
Malcolm X's ballot for the bullet. This freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody. And so these students are learning about farm worker strikes in California 1960s. We learn about sister Chavez.
And the workers know they are in a lot of votes. We learn about Dolores Huerta, various lobbyists behind the hearing. And it was like, okay, I'm bringing the book and I look outside the window and there they are. Border Patrol agents and ask you these on the parking lot, stopping students.
I think that's when we were like, wait, just kind of like. It felt not okay. I mean, I didn't fully know exactly the letter of the law. That's Nydia Rodriguez again.
But I knew that's what they were doing was wrong. And eventually some of these students started to get together. That's what I talked about. Like, do you think this is right?
What do you think this is about? telling each other you know that this is wrong. We've talked about how we wanted things to be different. Let's see what we can do about it.
Because this has to stop. Alright, alright, that's what's up. Coming up, want and his students fight back. We'll continue in just a moment.
Let's do some more warm ups. Let's do. Robert. Robert.
What the F.T. Hello. Ricardo. And Tony.
Okay. Alright, so some of these kids at Bowie High School, they actually belong to this group. Meccha. M And for one of these meetings, Juan brought in one of his friends, a woman named Susan Kern.
She worked for the Border Rights Coalition. And so she comes in and the students start telling her, you know, what's been going on. And they ask her, do we have any rights here? She tells them, absolutely you do.
Because according to the US Constitution, the Border Patrol or really any officer of the law, they cannot stop you without reasonable cause. They have to have seen you cross the border or when you saw them, you started acting fidgety or you ran away or something. They can't just arbitrarily stop you. Question you.
Just because of the color of your skin. That's not enough to stop you. Because if that's the only reason they have to stop you, then they're violating your fourth amendment right. The right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Exactly. They just said, you know what, you're getting, your rights are getting stomped all over. Let's see what we can do about this because it means to stop. After Susan explained that the rights were being violated, the conversation turned to, what are we going to do about it?
We have a lot of students who are suggesting things that were probably, you know, slightly inappropriate. Like how about we just curse them out? Which I thought, well, maybe that's not a bad approach. But apparently.
According to Juan's friend Susan. Off was not the right response. That can maybe get you in trouble. Can be considered assault.
And other students said, well, what if we just run away from them? No. Another kid was like, what if we fight back? Oh, God.
Definitely don't do that. But finally, one of the students. Who's been watching law and order. Debbie Mason, you're under arrest and attempted murder of your mother.
No, this is stupid. Who's knew all about things. You have the right to remain silent. The right to remain silent.
Carol Lattunner, you have the right to remain silent. He was like, that's a thing. Is your fifth amendment constitutional right? Is that something that you typically hear?
I have ever been instructed by my counsel not to testify based on my fifth amendment constitutional rights. When rich white dudes get in trouble. On the advice of counsel, I invoke my fifth amendment privilege and respectfully decline to answer your question. But this one boo-ee-machist student was like, why don't we do that?
And that's exactly what our students started doing. After that, when Border Patrol agents would stop students and say, hey, give me your papers, some of these students would say, no. I want to use my fifth amendment right. I want to take the fifth amendment.
Right. Do we remain silent? Simple as that. I have the right not to incriminate me.
I do not want to answer your questions. Sorry, Pat. I have a fifth amendment right. Do we remain silent?
I don't want you to go through any of my stuff. Right. Do we remain silent? You're not going through my backpack.
I want to use my fifth amendment right. And the message started spreading around, right? We remain silent. We remain silent.
We really don't need to answer these people's questions. Do we remain silent? Yeah. That was perfect.
Yeah. That was amazing. That was amazing. I'm kind of imagining myself being you and giving advice to these students.
And on the one hand, obviously, this is their legal right not to provide this information. On the other hand, I can imagine that I've heard that there are these Border Patrol abuses. There are times when this doesn't go well. And I'm telling these students to go out and basically, you know, stonewall these agents and they could put them in harm's way.
And it did frequently. Students were harassed for this. Students were the most notorious case is the case of David Drentdedia. And the way I started was on June the 3rd.
So this is David Drentdedia from a documentary that was made in the 90s about Bowie High School. Yeah. So David Drentdedia, he was a senior at Bowie, a legally blind student who was coming home from graduation practice. And this one day he and his friend are just walking down the street and a Border Patrol truck rolls up.
And the ass is for citizen, I respond, you know, you'll do a citizen. My friend did the same thing. And the ass is again what is your citizen? You'll do a citizen.
The ass is again, and I said you'll do a citizen. And I looked up at him and said, you know what, it's gone. I kept up walking. And the Border Patrol agent on the go passives, right, said it would be a stop.
It would be a stop. It would be a stop. It would be a stop to go back to what the Border Patrol would be available. So the Border Patrol agent gets out of the truck, comes up to David.
And he threatened to break his arm if he tried to walk away. He thought his hands had my arm left out. He jerked it back. He jerked it.
I turned and faced him. And I looked at him and said, I'm exercising the right arm inside. And he got me snat me and gets tense. And he put his neck on the back of my neck.
And he kicked my legs. Slapped him in his face, apparently. And, you know, David wasn't physically injured after that. He was freaked out.
But the reason that Juan called this particular incident notorious is because immediately after, the local news in El Paso picked it up and started doing a lot more reporting on Border Patrol, on Bowie. And so did... El Paso, Texas. Good morning.
Good morning, freaking America. You know what I mean? That's pretty huge. The daily invasion has strained the relationship between the Border Patrol and some people at Bowie High School.
You know, and we're talking to us. We all have rights and that our rights daily on a day-to-day course are being violated. Why are you right? Because we're Hispanic, because of color of our skin, because we live right on the border and because, well, we live in a really poor neighborhood and that's the only reason.
And as this news started to grow, the Border Patrol sector chief Dale Musigades decided he was going to come to Bowie to talk to the students. Is that something you remember him showing up to... Oh yeah, the Musigades. I was kind of doing damage control at that point.
When Agent Dale Musigades met with about 40 students to discuss the alleged harassment, he kept us out. We tried to contact Dale Musigades multiple times for this story, but he did not reply to our voicemail or emails. But... They patched him, I think, Wednesday morning.
We were able to get footage of that meeting Musigades kept Good Morning America out of him, because one of the students taped this and then we managed to get our hands on it. So it's like 30-40 kids from Meche in this classroom, and Dale Musigades... He was sitting in front of us wearing a suit and tie, trying to put things in perspective. He started telling the students, like, look, the holes in the fence.
I can't hold those holes. We keep patching them up, they keep getting cut open. I was telling them to come back and I said, I would try. It's a commitment I can't.
I don't think there's any way in the world to keep those holes. And he told the students, they busted some people who had brought drugs through booty. I now have no case to do the investigation. So Musigades is like, we're essentially trying to stop the flow of drugs here.
Why are you guys complaining so much? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
One student stands up and says A, you're harassing us, and that's why we're upset. And B, your strategy for capturing border crossers seems to be to have heard them all into the school where they're penned in. I'm sorry. You're turning my car to a place where they can get out of the circle and then get your car to my car to my car.
Those people will not stop. They will not obey the law. So you have to. Somehow or another African.
I don't know. I don't know a better way to do it. I don't know. I have to take a back on the right.
It's a little hard to hear, but he said not at the sacrifice of our rights. Okay. What do you mean by the right? They're all right.
They're all right. They're all right. They do not have rights to come into United States illegal. What did it feel like to be sitting in that meeting?
It felt bizarre. I mean, somebody is denying what everybody sees with their own eyes. Yeah. There was no face value to what he said.
You know, because it happened we were sick about the whole situation and you can't undo the stuff that was already done. So the meeting goes poorly and a bunch of the students and some of the staff, including Ben Mario, the assistant football coach who had a gunpoint in this face, they all together decide that they want to sue the Border Patrol. The phone rings one day. And eventually they call up this guy.
We're getting ready to sue the Border Patrol. Will you be our local counsel? And I said, not only yes, but hell yes. I'll pass a civil rights lawyer.
Albert Armandar is Jr. Were you optimistic? I mean, it's never an easy job. So the government is not easy.
When you live on the border and work in Sagoon the body out, you are never optimistic that a governmental system is going to work for you. So, October 23rd, 1992, the trial between Bowie High School and the Border Patrol begins. And apparently the courtroom was pretty much divided in half. On one half you had the Border Patrol, like a ton of agents and full uniforms sitting there.
On the other half you had these Bowie students. Dressed in their finest. Cindy Dresses, slacks, shirts. Those kids were little troopers.
They all got up in the stand and told their stories. And then eventually Border Patrol Secretary Chief Dale Musigate specifies. Yeah. Do you remember what the defense's argument was?
Well, they had lots of arguments. Now, we can't verify the specifics of what happened in the courtroom because a lot of the court documents have been destroyed. But Musigate's got up there and his basic argument was that if you look at the US Code of Federal Regulations Section 1357, Powers of Immigration Officers and Employees, number one, officers have the power to interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien as to his right to be or to remain in the United States. And they can do that without a warrant.
And then, skipping down a bit from that, they can do that quote within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States. What's a reasonable distance? Well, this is what's nuts is I don't know exactly what went into the determination of what that is, but the distance is 100 miles. Really?
Yeah, in that 100 mile zone Border Patrol has the power to interrogate, has the power to arrest without warrant. And they can also, and I'm quoting here, quote, search for aliens in any railway car, aircraft, and the trains or vehicle within that distance. And then, on top of that, within a narrower distance of 25 miles from the border, they can go right on to private property whenever they want. It's like this little zone.
That's designed to prevent Border Patrol officers from being charged with trespass when patrolling the border. I cross-examine, Chief Musigate's. And so... What Musigate's was arguing is that, like, if they have all this power and if they can go on, you know, private property right up on the border, and you got this high school on the border, then there's no question that they can be on school property and do their jobs.
That's how they read that. But they couldn't understand is they were doing it in a way that violated the Constitution, and that is against the Supreme Law of the Land. This was Albert's argument that no matter what powers you have, you can't violate somebody's force on the right. You have to have a legitimate reason to stop somebody.
So what did the court, what ultimately happened? Okay, before this court, finding, also, it's a findings of facts and conclusions of law, Bunton, Commissing, or District Judge, before this court, it's plaintiff's motion for temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction of memorandum of law and support. First thing we'll see, does that sound like anything to you? Yeah, he's saying, here's what we got in front of me here.
We need the next paragraph, don't we? Jurisdiction and venue. Okay, that means, we need the next. The findings of fact, the litigation, the name, individual plaintiffs are going to be...
Oh, very, very bottom, that's part of it. Is it here by order? The court here by enjoins the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the INS, which is above the time, it's above the border patrol, from stopping and questioning an individual as to his or her right to be or remain in the United States, unless the agent has reasonable suspicion based on specific, articulable facts, involving more than the mere appearance of the individual being of Hispanic dissent. Okay, that's a fancy way of saying stop judging people by their looks.
Signed the judge. Yes. So they won. They won.
It was just absolutely delicious. There was a big celebratory school assembly. A whole school? Tony Santos was there.
We were in? Yeah. There were all these parties. They gave us clacks, I think I may even have some on the wall out there.
It was pretty awesome. Again, former student Ricardo Villama. It was crazy to see the least. The final ruling holds that the court of patrol did violate constitutional rights.
You just don't see the agents on our campus anymore. That's the assistant football coach Ben Marillo, who ended up being a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. After treatment like people, not like second class citizens, not like we have to be submissive since we're federal agents. We couldn't believe that we took on the federal government at one.
That was one of the first times that I was really proud of what our government stands for. And Ricardo said, coming out of federal court that day, it was like him and seven other students, and it came out, and there was a bunch of other students and faculty from the school there. Everybody was like, cool, let's go back to school, hop in the car. We kind of want to bask in this.