656: Let Me Count the Ways
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. 7 AM Tijuana, Mexico, had a little plaza just outside the border crossing in the United States. About 250 people, lots with backpacks and suitcases, lots with kids, crowd around a woman who holds an oversized notebook in her arms. That would have come to see, the notebook. Anybody else have 532? Anybody who have 533? 534? The notebook is a list of names, each neatly written in ballpoint pound. If she calls you, then you get to enter the official port of entry, it's just over the fence. Each number has 10 names under it. You have to get in the book, if you just walk up to the port of entry and say you want to sign them in the United States, you're running for your life, I tell you to get out. You have to go outside, get a number, wait your turn. A couple of people told us this happened to them. She starts to call out all the names under the number 535. I've edited out the last names here, because so many people weren't nervous about being identified by cartels and gangs when we talked to them. She's standing outside the busiest border crossing in the Western Hemisphere, a complex of buildings so sprawling that I never figured out exactly where they started and ended. It's run by a federal agency with 60,000 employees. This woman is not one of them. She's seeking asylum herself, here with her son. Said her husband was killed by gangs back in El Salvador, then in July they threatened to do her to her 10-year-old son too, if she didn't pay off. So she said she quit her job in a band on her house and came here. That's what we have pulling people from the crowd and lining them up to enter the United States. That's our system for doing it these days. Calm down, calm down, she says. In theory, this job shouldn't fall to a random person who's not even a U.S. citizen. Under U.S. law and international treaties, the woman anybody seeking asylum presents him or herself to a Border Patrol officer, that officer has an obligation to process them, right then. So in theory, all the people standing in this plaza should be able to march up to the huge border station. They've processed immediately, no wait, no notebook with numbers. But under President Trump, the government's saying it doesn't have the capacity to process all the people showing up at our southern border. So people stand outside our border, waiting. Not just here, but at official ports of entry all across the southwest. Over the last six months, customs and border protection officers have been stopping asylum seekers from even walking up to federal facilities at the border. This has been filmed by crews from CBS, NBC, Fox, and many others. They stop people in the middle of bridges that cross from Mexico into the United States at El Paso and Brownsville and turn them away before they can even get to the official ports of entry on the other side to apply for asylum.
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