Dexter Filkins Reports on the Border Crisis
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The latest round of military aid for Ukraine and for Israel has been held up in Congress, not because of spending concerns, but because of border security.

Republicans rejected a spending package earlier this month demanding stricter immigration measures. House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly told his colleagues that changes to immigration policy would be their hill to die on. We have to affect real policy change at the border, and that is a necessary condition to anything we do going forward. Democrats accused the Republicans of holding military aid hostage. Pramila Jaipal, the leader of the progressive caucus...

says the sweeping changes that Republicans want would only destroy the country's asylum system. I think we need to put our foot down and say, no, vote on the aid package without those border policy changes and recognize that some of the things that the Biden administration have been doing have really been working.

The border is surely going to be at the center of the presidential race in 2024. The wall, of course, has always been an obsession for Donald Trump, but the issue has reached beyond partisan politics throughout the year. Congressional Democrats and some big city Democratic mayors are pleading for more federal support.

The city of San Diego, for example, is squeezing dry what's left of their pandemic aid in an attempt to support asylum seekers. That's money that's likely to run out entirely by the end of this month.

New York City's Mayor Eric Adams says he's spent nearly $1.5 billion this year to address the migrant crisis, and that in turn has set off a more general budget crisis in New York. Libraries are closing their doors earlier, and there are deep concerns about numerous other city services. Staff writer Dexter Filkins spent time at the southern border this year to talk with local officials and with migrants about their reality. We spoke back in June.

Dexter, for a long time, you've mainly been a foreign correspondent for us and for the New York Times earlier. You've written about conflict in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, all over the world. And now you've spent months reporting on the border, the border between the United States and Mexico. What were you witnessing and had you ever experienced anything similar before? Well, I think...

I think there's no way I could have imagined what I saw or what I encountered. I mean, I think you need to, it's difficult to appreciate the scale and the magnitude of what's happening there unless you see it

Well, tell us about your experience. Where did you fly to? What were your impressions? What did you see? Well, I went to a bunch of different places all up and down the border. So I was in, I think I started in El Paso. I made a bunch of trips to a little town called Del Rio. I went to another place called Eagle Pass. So I was kind of like working my way up and down depending on, you know, just depending on sort of what was happening and who told me what. And then I went out, and this is in the piece, but I

I went out with, up in a helicopter with the state troopers in Texas. What are the numbers? They're astounding. And I think about 4 million people, as best as I could count, have come into the country since then. And that's, you know, it's a lot of people. It's bigger than a lot of states.

And that's 4 million people who are going to stay in the United States? No, I mean, probably about a million and a half of those people are what the Border Patrol calls gotaways, which is they're basically counted, but they're not apprehended. You know, either by they've seen them on cameras or sensors or whatever. Two and a half million, and this is a lot of the piece, is an attempt to explain the other two and a half million, which is...

I will be persecuted by my home country if you send me back. What's really striking, overwhelming, is just the numbers of people who are coming. And where are those people coming from? Not just Mexico. They're not just Mexicans. Oh, my gosh. They're coming from everywhere. Everywhere in the world. Tajikistan, Burkina Faso, China. Again, the numbers are amazing, but also just the diversity of people who are coming across. You have to try to visualize it.

There's border walls, there's fences, there's all kinds of things. But in the places where there's a border wall, they can't build a border wall in the middle of the river. So if you can get across the river and you can get your foot on American soil, that's all you need to do. Why did the numbers change so radically in 2021? That's a really good question. One of the questions I tried to answer, I think,

I think the short answer is Trump's rhetoric, President Trump, deterred a lot of people. I mean, he basically said, I don't want you people. You're from these terrible countries. Stay out. And he was, you know, very, very, you know, brutal in his language about it. And at the same time, there was the pandemic. And so you can look at the numbers. They sort of drop when the pandemic begins, right?

To answer the question of why did the numbers skyrocket, which they did, Joe Biden in his campaign for president, and I think he and the party, the Democratic Party,

rejected basically the whole Trump vision of the border and of immigration. And so Biden literally said on many occasions, if you're feeling persecuted, if you are persecuted, come. Come and make your case. In fact, he did that in one of the presidential debates that also happened to be co-hosted by Univision, the big network. And so his critics would say he invited people in, and that's pretty strong language, but it's

It's not inaccurate. I would, in fact, make sure that there is, we immediately surge to the border. All those people are seeking asylum. They deserve to be heard. That's who we are. We're a nation that says if you want to flee and you're fleeing oppression, you should come. I would change the order that the president just changed. Look, the problem here is that

The American immigration system is antiquated. It's too small. It's completely broken. It's too old. And Congress, you know, in its mutual animosity has been unable and unwilling to fix it. And so we're kind of stuck with this system that doesn't work, that was designed for something, you know, a reality that hasn't existed for decades.

At the same time, you have these extraordinary numbers of people who are coming in part because of the terrible political and economic conditions in Latin America and in Central America and other parts of the world. So, for instance, Venezuela, which has produced the political turmoil and the economic collapse there has produced 7 million refugees. Actually, you've met a lot of migrants in your reporting. Any of their stories particularly strike you as either...

particularly moving or emblematic of what's happening now? I met a woman named Julie. She's Colombian. She's gay, was being routinely beaten by her family. She couldn't live in her country anymore, as she said. I couldn't get a job because I was being discriminated against. My

My partner, we were disgraced. We had to go. We decided to make the journey. And this is every single person that crosses the border has a story like this. It's the journey. And so she makes this, she and her partner and her young child make this epic journey. And they start by...

They pretend that they're tourists. They go to Cancun, Mexico. Then they make this long, long bus journey to the border, to the American border. They're robbed the whole way up. They basically run out of money. They're begging, borrowing, doing everything they can. They finally piece together the money. This takes weeks and weeks and weeks. They find a smuggler. They give the smuggler essentially all the money that they have.

And they get across the border. And she's in New York now, one of, you know, 70,000 or so immigrants who've come. But it's kind of, it's, you know, it's crushing because you realize the world's full of people like Julie. Because the world is full of violence and instability and climate change and all the factors that lead to this. Yeah, yeah.

Every time there's a political campaign, if the candidate himself is not a Trumpist and is particularly cruel about the issue of immigration, you will hear the phrase, sensible immigration reform. Everybody's for sensible immigration reform, and there have been attempts in our recent history to have so-called sensible immigration reform. What was it, and why did it fail? So the last time the Congress came pretty close to reforming the system was 2013, and

During Obama. Yes. Complete overall, the system was passed in the Senate in 2013. And basically, the kind of outlines of any compromise are pretty – they're sensible, but they're also like pretty predictable. The Republicans want greater border security and the Democrats typically want sort of more legal immigration. And that's basically what was in that bill. And what happened really was they sent it over to the House –

This was as the Tea Party was kind of gaining momentum and they couldn't get the votes. And it hasn't ever come back. Trump comes along two years later, 2015, and launches his campaign. And that has changed everything. People, criminal aliens.

We will begin moving them out day one as soon as I take office. And more than a couple of people explained this to me, political people who said, you know, what the Republicans wanted was, you know, they want to kind of they want they don't want chaos at the border. They want, you know, and this includes voters that they don't want chaos at the border.

And they want kind of legal, orderly processes for immigration. And if you can do that, people will support it. But do they only want immigration from Norway? Well, but that's what's changed is that is no longer true.

Trump essentially came along and changed the vision of the Republican Party. When the Democratic senators would go into the room in 2013 and say, like, here's our proposal and here's yours and, like, let's hammer something out, they weren't that far apart. Now they're far apart. I mean, now they're just, I mean, as one Democratic senator puts me, there's no appetite for it anymore in the Republican Party.

I'm talking with staff writer Dexter Filkins, and we'll continue in a moment.

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You said the system is broken and that it's an incredible mess and chaotic. Describe for us what that looks like. Well, I mean, for starters, I mean, there's not enough Border Patrol agents on the border. There aren't enough immigration judges to hear cases. The whole system is overwhelmed. It's a series of gigantic bottlenecks. And so if you come into this country, get your foot on American soil, ask for asylum—

you're not going to get a hearing on that case, on your case, for on average four or five years. And then if you lose... So where are you living? How are you living your life in those four or five years? Well, that's what's... It's just you can see by looking at the way the system works, it's just a series of like ad hoc decisions and...

and workarounds. And so, as more than a couple people put it to me, once a person gets in the country, they're in for a good decade because they can appeal their case and it'll sort of go on forever. So, nothing really works the way it was supposed to work. Nothing. Among the many people you talked to for this story, there's the former Democratic mayor of Del Rio, Texas, Bruno Lozano. Tell me about him and

And the phone call that he received while he was mayor from the Border Patrol chief, what happened there? Well, Del Rio is like a little town or kind of a small city. It's like 35,000 people. Mayor Lozano said to me, he was the mayor in 2021, and he said, I got a phone call one day from the Border Patrol. And they said, we're expecting 10,000 migrants to cross the river at Del Rio by the end of the week.

And, you know, he just said, what are you talking about? And this is a Democratic mayor. This is not an anti-immigration mayor. And he just flipped out. He said, you got to be kidding me. 10,000 people? It turned out to be 16,000 people. And at one point he said there were 1,000 people crossing the river every hour.

And they all were sort of brought to, they were brought to a, under a bridge. But it was basically a city sprung up kind of overnight among this, you know, pretty small city. And so Mayor Lozano just, it basically broke him, I think. He, the city was completely overwhelmed. He couldn't deal with it. He died.

Again, he's a Democrat. Very angry at the Biden administration. Feels like he was let down. But more important, he literally said to me, I can't govern the city. I can't do it because it's not in my control anymore what happens here. So he basically gave up. He didn't run for another term. What has the Biden administration proposed in specific terms, in policy terms?

They've, I mean, within, I think in the first week upon taking office, President Biden put forward a comprehensive proposal to reform the immigration system. I think not terribly unlike the 2013 proposal. Dead in the water. It didn't go anywhere. So he's trying. But absent that, absent that, it's an impossible situation. For instance, a federal judge ruled that

about a decade ago, that the immigrant children crossing the border cannot be detained for more than 20 days. So they have to be released into the country. And so, now that sounds like a very humane decision. But the result of that has been, since then, an enormous surge of

migrant children coming across the border. Some of them unaccompanied, their parents bring them to the border, they send them across. Because typically, you know, a child comes with his or her parents, they can't be detained either. So that's kind of what you're dealing with, which is like, you want to do this, but you can't do that. Like Obama, President Obama, who was very tough on illegal immigration, he tried to detain children and families and was basically blocked from doing it. It kind of fell apart.

So all the presidents, Trump, Obama, Biden, they all have faced the same problem, which is they can't get Congress to act. So they can only act on their own. Through executive order. Yeah. And there's just a very limited number of things they can do. Dexter, you wrote that under Biden, remarkably fewer immigrants have been placed in deportation proceedings. So how does that jive with the other numbers you've been discussing?

When President Biden came into office, there was a kind of overriding sense of we have to reverse everything that Donald Trump did. And they did. And the result of that was a deluge. And that's what we've been seeing basically over the last six months, which is Biden has been reversing course and becoming much tougher on immigration. In fact, he's imposing sanctions.

programs and proposals that look remarkably like some of the ones that Donald Trump was doing. For example? Well, for example, there's a rule called the transit ban, which basically means if you show up at the border and you ask for asylum, you have to prove that you've been rejected for asylum by another country that you pass through on the way here. That would disqualify a lot of migrants. When Trump did that,

You know, people went insane. And another example is Remain in Mexico. Remain in Mexico was a Trump program, which was you want to apply for asylum? You can, but you're just going to get an appointment and you can sit down in Mexico until we call you, tell you to come. Now, Dexter, in your piece, you outline the Biden administration's current parole policies. So a migrant is given a document ordering him to go to ICE on a specified day in the city of his destination.

Is this policy for all migrants or only the ones who seek asylum? What's been the reaction to these parole policies? That's basically what you get if you're seeking asylum. So, you know, you get to the border and you get on American soil. You say, I want asylum. I want to apply for asylum. I'm going to be persecuted if I go back. They hand you a piece of paper. And, you know, the Border Patrol guy says, where are you going? He says, well, I got a cousin in Chicago. So he goes to Chicago.

And there's a piece of paper and it says, please report to, you know, with your name and address and an ID, et cetera, et cetera. Please report to the Department of Homeland Security, the ICE office in Chicago. And then down at the bottom, and I saw a bunch of these, it'll say...

you will likely to wait, you know, the average wait time for your hearing is, you know, 1,752 days or whatever. So in other words, like check in with the ICE office when you come in and then expect to get a phone call from us in like three or four years. Dexter, not so long ago, you wrote a terrific profile of Florida governor and presidential candidate, Governor DeSantis.

It's been reported that migrants are leaving Florida because of DeSantis' anti-immigration law in Florida, which is called SB 1718. Did we see anything nationally like that during the crackdown of the Trump era? We didn't. That was part of the law that I think you're referring to is essentially a worker. The employer has to verify the citizenship of the worker.

What we found in the past in the last really big overhaul of the immigration system, which was 1986, that became unworkable very, very quickly. And for a whole bunch of reasons. But it's like, what are we going to, you know, we're going to have national ID cards? You know, how are we going to do this? And it becomes very, very intrusive and very difficult. And it didn't work that well the first time. You know, maybe it'd be different the second time. But I think as to Florida...

Boy, he's skating on, I mean, that's pretty, I don't know if it's thin ice, but, you know, when you look, when you take a community like Miami, which is completely dominated by, I mean, Miami's a Latin city. It's a Latin American city. And it's filled with refugees and the children of refugees. And so he's going to have to find a way to explain that to them. Dexter, Republicans often accuse Democrats of,

maybe just Democrats on the left, but Democrats usually in general, of being for, quote unquote, open borders. What does that mean? And is, in fact, anyone in the Democratic Party or in Congress for open borders? Look, that's a super catchy phrase. Everybody knows what it means. The border's not open. I mean, Biden, over the past couple of years, has deported, or he's, sorry, turned around more than 2 million people at the border.

It's incredibly vigorous enforcement. It's just that the problem is enormous and a lot of people have come in. When Republicans or anyone else says the border's open, you know, that's meant to, it's a very emotional term. It's meant to evoke images of, you know, giant hordes of people flooding, you know, the country and flooding American cities. But it's not, the border's not open in any sense.

As we've said, you grew up in Florida where immigration is extremely vivid. You live in New York City. How did your experience at the southern border change your perspective on the extent of the immigration problem? And what should be done about it? I didn't realize how, you know, you can look at the numbers all you want. I just didn't realize when you see the numbers of people coming, you realize like there's what on earth can we do as a country to

and maintain our humanity. And that's a real tough one. I don't know the answer to that. To try to build a workable immigration system will cost... We'll have to do it at some point. It will cost billions and billions of dollars. And we could build a wall across the entire southern border, but I'm not even sure that's going to work. But it's, I think what's... And that would be inhumane. Yeah, and that's the most disturbing thing, which is...

You look out in the world and you see what's happening and you see the misery and you see the desperation of the people who are, you see it in their eyes, who are coming to the border. And it's not, how do you answer the question, what can we do? What can we do as the United States of America, which has always prided itself on being a nation of immigrants, but also like the haven of last resort for people all around the world. What do we do? Dexter Filkins, thank you so much. Thanks, David.

Staff writer Dexter Filkins. His reporting from the southern border and on the political impasse in Washington appeared in The New Yorker this summer. I'm David Remnick, and I join everybody at The New Yorker Radio Hour in wishing you a great holiday and a happy new year. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kal Aliyah, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Decken. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.