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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Hey, I'm Lulu Miller. And I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. And last week... The White House is waiving more than two dozen federal...
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 basically complaining about the...
the waves of migrants this issue coming to their cities and states will destroy new york city mayor eric adams escalating his frustration during a town which all kind of feels a little 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. Yeah.
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 Latif 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, Jad and Robert, about a guy named Jason DeLeon. Oh, and one more thing. This episode does contain graphic descriptions that may not be suitable for our younger or more sensitive listeners. Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. Okay.
You're listening to Radiolab from WNYC. Rewind.
I think the best place to begin, it sounds like, is in 2008. I think that sounds about right. So this is Jason DeLeon. I'm an associate professor of anthropology. At the University of Michigan. And 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 Uchtitlan.
An economic and technological study. About as far removed as you can be from...
the stuff that I'm doing right now. Using obsidian 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 in different parts of Mexico, and find these little fragments of old stone tools. This study focuses primarily on percussion flake tools. Dating back to about 1000 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, in these journals that 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 blade technology. He had this moment where he just kind of hit the wall. Like, okay, this is enough. I'm not doing this.
I want nothing to do with this anymore. You know, when I finished my dissertation, I had really become kind of 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 feel really bad. I feel like I've wasted the last 10 years of my life doing archaeology. And to make matters worse... I had taken this job at the University of Washington. He'd just gotten this 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.
While Jason was preparing for one of his freshman classes, someone handed him a book. By a writer named Luis Alberto Urrea 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 U.S. hiking their way through the Arizona desert. Fourteen of them died along the way. And so I start reading it, and... Visions of home flooded through their minds. Soft green bushes, waterfalls, children. It just shocked me. I mean, I knew a lot about the border, at least I thought I did. I'd grown up, you know, in South Texas. My parents were immigrants. But just, like, couldn't believe that...
That, you know, that this was, this is 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. And they were dizzy from drinking their own urine. You know, dying of thirst. The poisons clogging their systems. And at a certain point, Jason comes across this passage where the author is describing... The things that were in these men's pockets.
Belt buckle with a fighting cock inlaid. One wallet in the right front pocket of his jeans. 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 number 42. Fewer jeans. Colored piece of paper in pocket. Jason says when he read that book, a light bulb went on. So 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. And 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 crumbling.
covered in stuff. Over a thousand backpacks and water bottles. What? That much? Well, what ends up happening is stuff gets left behind for a couple of different reasons. If you're en route, you might throw something down because you get so tired and your bag just gets so heavy. And those things are kind of sprinkled across these migrant trails. But once you get to the end,
Pass the checkpoint. Your smuggler says, okay, we're safe now. We've got to a new road where we can get picked up. Someone else will show up in a 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 were moving really big, you would see things the size of, like, football fields of just blackness.
So...
For the next several years, Jason just keeps going back to this stretch of the Sonoran Desert. Ripped clothes, fragments of clothes in bushes. Gathering whatever he could find. Dirty socks. And, you know, like an archaeologist, he would collect this stuff. Bandages. Itemize it. Categorize it. Cocktail dresses. High heel shoes. Try and figure out who it came from. Why it was there. Baby bottles. Hair curlers. Toys. Wrappers. He did this year. Sneakers. Photographs. After a year. Socks. Picking up
Shoes, dresses, backpacks, Bibles, bottles. And then one day... A human arm. He finds an arm. Wedged between some rocks. Like an entire arm up to the shoulder. Just sort of sticking up 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 guide, the folks he was there with, 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. And 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... Had basically been erased. You know, it's very... I mean, it's kind of, it just, it 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. Coyotes playing soccer with this person's skull. And for weeks, he couldn't shake the simple question. You know, 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...
would end up sending Jason down a sort of rabbit hole... Digging in the library to... ...of forensics papers... Decomposing flesh. ...missing persons reports... Hikers who had gone missing. ...historical trends... Sociology papers, demography papers... Government documents... ...illustrations and the figures that are 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 seeing. ♪
This is part one of a three-part series on our southern border. We'll be doing it today, next week, and the week after. Part one, a hole in the fence.
All right. So I thought I'd start us 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 is 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, it is 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 the Sonoran Desert, the numbers are a bit tough to pin down. But in the early 90s, it's single digits, five bodies one year, six bodies another year, seven bodies another. And then all of a sudden— Overnight. In the late 90s— You go from five to ten bodies to—
To hundreds. I mean, it used to be that if you wanted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, you'd go down to Tijuana at dusk, a place called the soccer field. You would hop the fence with about 100 other people and you would just bum rush the border patrol and half of you would get by, would make it into the U.S. and the other half would 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 –
blockading 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 getting so interested in a 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? We're going to go to El Paso, El Paso, Texas. El Paso.
Yeah, so Tracy and I went to El Paso a while back. Did you ever think how your life would have been totally different if you were just 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, but anyway. Two flags flying, the American flag and the Texan flag. We went down to El Paso to visit a high school.
called Bowie High School. Home of the Bowie Bears. You know, in many respects, it's just, you know, your typical American high school. You've got your Taco Tuesdays. It's 9th through 12th grade. About...
1,200 students. Because it's Texas, you know, football is a big deal. And on their campus, they have this huge football stadium with those big, you know, Friday night lights. They've got a marching band.
The pride of the South Side. It's, uh, 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... Jennifer is here, Eduardo is here, Jose... Are Mexican-American. Gisela...
And, you know, we actually talked to one former teacher. This is Juan Seibert Coronado. I was a teacher at Bowie High School in the 1980s and 1990s. And what did you 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 Anglo student. Really? Really. Yes. 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 in a kind of roundabout and totally unforeseeable way completely changed the way we think about the U.S.-Mexico border.
So where we're going to start the story is actually in one of Juan Seibert 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.
And eventually he showed up being dragged in by this campus security guy.
The school security guard. And I thought, you know, 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 to his class. But Albert's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Albert says that he had been at the 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 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 a United States citizen or belonged on the campus.
And Juan's just standing there like, uh-huh, Border Patrol, really? You know, I was haranguing 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.
Juan 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, Juan 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 love it.
This is Nydia Rodriguez, who was a freshman at the time. A couple of agents got out of the truck and started questioning her. Basically, we were all rounded up.
Ernesto Munoz remembers walking to school with a bunch of kids. We were searched in our backpacks. And again, you know, a couple of agents got out, started asking him questions. Where we were born, our date of birth, what classes we were taking. We stop and they get out of the truck. Marcela De Leon, 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. They yelled at me, hey, get over here. Ricardo Villalba. 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 books. One of them ripped the bag out from my hands as I was trying to pull it away from him. The other one grabbed me and pushed me up against the truck, forcibly took the bag away, rifled through it.
pushed me off of 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-ins with the Border Patrol. We talked to the assistant football coach, Ben Murillo. 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 Murillo, coach at Bowie High School. I have two of my football players. I would really appreciate if you'd holster 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 holster the gun. Ben did get out of the car. Everything was fine. What was that like, having that right in your... 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, I mean, that's a really good question, and I will answer it after the break.
All right, three, two, one. I'm Jad. I'm Robert. I'm Lata. I'm Tracy. This is Radiolab. And today we are bringing you the first of three stories that we will air over the next few weeks on border crossings at the U.S.-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...
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 stopped 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. The legend of El Paso. You have to understand El Paso. There's a spirit, a flavor.
So come on, Amigo. See it for yourself. From 30,000 feet above the desert floor, I see it there below. It's right on the border of Texas, Mexico, and New Mexico. It's right there. 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.
Juarez. Ciudad Juarez. The largest city on the U.S.-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 U.S. invaded Mexico and annexed 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, yes. Okay, okay. Almost everybody in El Paso knows people who live in Ciudad Juarez. People in Ciudad Juarez know people who have family members who live in El Paso. I mean, 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, make on. Tonight, see it for yourself. The peso crisis has spilled across the Rio Grande.
In the 80s, the Mexican peso crashed. A dramatically devalued peso is causing havoc in prices and wages. And so people in Juarez started flocking to El Paso because, well, that's where the jobs were. Like jobs in construction. Or child care, gardening. So you had tons of people getting these permits to come into El Paso legally. But then you had all these other people. Workers who can't get permits required by U.S. law. Who couldn't get permits.
but they still needed to work. Simply respond to the laws of supply and demand. And so they started coming too. Making illegal dashes across the border to the United States at 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.
We spoke to this former Border Patrol 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... Waiting on the river's edge.
It's morning in America and the rush hour has begun. The rushed across the Rio Grande into El Paso. And there are videos where you can see this. You see people wading 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 Border Patrol agents... Okay, here comes about 100. It becomes this cat and mouse game where... Probably the way we had always done business. They come in, you chase them.
Catch them and send them back. Day and night and day and night. It was... A never-ending job. And it was something, you know, you'd catch the same guys two or three times a shift sometimes. So it was chaos.
And this is actually kind of hilarious. So like around this time in 1992, there was this television interview and Dale Musigates, 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. And in the shot behind him.
There would be just an absolute free inflow 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 Wyatt Earp standing in front of three bank robbers robbing a bank. Yeah, exactly. And like, so, okay, how many entries? All right. So it was reported that
Which finally brings us back. We're back in the house of the big.
to Bowie High School. Okay, all right. Okay, yeah, let's try it. Because there's two important things about Bowie. Okay, I'm counting my steps, actually. Here, okay, from the sidewalk. One. One, two. Bowie is right, right. Four, five, six. Right on the board. Eight.
49, but basically it's 50. That was 50 steps. - 50 steps. - 50 steps from the Bowie campus into Mexico. - Yeah. - And two, the former assistant football coach and teacher, Ben Murillo, he showed me. - What is that?
This fence. It's part of the old fence. Oh, that's part of the old fence, you think? El Paso 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 the Tortilla Curtain. And right at this spot, across from Bowie High School, there was a hole in the fence.
And David Hamm, a former Border Patrol agent, told us that what that meant was that you had migrants. You had a lot of migrants who would be coming through that hole in the fence. 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 I work our anti-smuggling 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, wander the halls, that they would go into the locker rooms. I'd noticed the Suburbans parked on the Bowie campus.
Again, former Bowie teacher, one Seibert Coronado. But the whole reason 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 the high school as a hunting ground.
And so to Juan, 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 the border. It was the Border Patrol simply stopping people because they were brown. And that really, this is radio, angered me. But for most of these kids, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Yeah.
You know, kids like Ernesto Munoz, Ricardo Villalma. That was just day-to-day life. Talking even to some of the committee members. Tony Santos. They told me, ah, don't worry about it. Growing up in this poor neighborhood right next to the border. That's just a way of life here in South El Paso. It wasn't like a concern, like, oh no, you got stopped. You go to the park and shoot some basketball. You tell your schoolmates, you know, guess what happened after school. It was like...
You know, haha, you got stopped. That's probably because of your haircut or probably because of how you're dressed or whatever. So the students were more likely to laugh about it than be angry. But in his U.S. history class that year, Juan 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 the Birmingham jail. And... Malcolm X's ballot for the bullet. And so these students are learning about...
farm worker strikes in California in the 1960s. We learn about Cesar Chavez. And the workers know that they are no longer alone. We learn about Dolores Huerta, Reyes Lopez Tijerina. And it was like, okay, I'm reading the book and then I look outside the window and there they are. Border patrol agents in SUVs 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 what they were doing was wrong. And eventually some of these students started to get together. Met and talked. Like, do you think this is right? What do you think this is about? Telling each other, you know, that this is wrong. We talked about how we wanted things to be different.
Let's see what we can do about it because this has to stop. All right. All right. That's what's up. Coming up, Juan and his students fight back. We'll continue in just a moment. Let's do some more warmups.
♪ ♪
Chad. Robert. Luthif. Tracy. And... Hello? Ricardo. And Tony. Okay. All right, so some of these kids at Bowie High School, they actually belong to this group. Mecha. Mecha. Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan. Which is a Chicano civil rights group. It has been around for a while, I guess, since the 1960s. It was a college group, but these kids at Bowie actually petitioned them to have a chapter at the high school. And... And Mecha said, sure. ♪
We were the first ones to get a collegiate group. And they asked Juan if he could, you know, supervise. We would meet about once a week. And our meetings tended to be 30, 40, 50 kids packed into a classroom. 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 these 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 U.S. 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
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 needs to stop.
After Susan explained that the rights were being violated, the conversation turned to, what are we going to do about it? We had a lot of students who were 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...
That can maybe get you in trouble. Another student said, well, what if we just run away from them? Another kid was like, what if we fight back? Definitely don't do that. But...
One of the students who's been watching Law and Order Debbie Mason, you're under arrest for the attempted murder of your mother. No, this is a mistake. Who knew all about saying You have the right to remain silent. The right to remain silent? Carolyn Tyler, you have the right to remain silent. He was like, that's a thing.
It's your Fifth Amendment constitutional right. And it's something that you typically hear. I have, however, 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 Bowie Mecha 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. Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. Simple as that. I have the right not to incriminate myself. To remain silent. I do not want to answer your questions. Sorry, I had a burn. Okay, ready? I have a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. Remain silent.
I don't want you to go through any of my stuff. Right to remain silent. You're not going through my backpack. I'm not talking to you. I want to use my Fifth Amendment. Fifth Amendment right. And the message started spreading around. Right to remain silent. Remain silent. Silent. Silent. Silent. That we really don't need to answer these people's questions. To remain silent. Yeah. Perfect. You nailed it. Nice to meet you all. Bye, ladies.
Well, I'm kind of trying to imagine 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, you know, I've heard that there are these Border Patrol abuses. There are, you know, these...
There are times when this doesn't go well, and I'm telling these students to go out and basically stonewall these agents, and it 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 Renteria. So this is David Renteria from a documentary that was made in the 90s about Bowie High School.
Yeah, so David Renteria, 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. They stopped and they asked us for a citizenship and I responded, you know, you're a citizen. My friend did the same thing and they asked us again, what if you're a citizen? She said, you're a citizen. They asked us again and I said, you're a citizen. And I looked at my friend and said, you know what, let's go. Kept on walking.
So this Border Patrol agent gets out of the truck, comes up to David, and started threatening to break his arm if he tried to walk away. I turned and faced him. And I looked at him and said, I'm exercising the right to remain silent.
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... Welcome to El Paso, Texas. Good morning, America.
national news. Good morning freaking America, you know what I mean? That's pretty huge. The daily invasion has strained the relationship between the border patrols and some people at Bowie High School. And we're talking to us. We all have rights and that our rights daily on a day-to-day course are being violated.
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, Mr. Musigates. That guy was kind of doing damage control at that point. When Agent Dale Musigates met with about 40 students to discuss the alleged harassment, he kept us out. We tried to contact Dale Musigates multiple times for this story, but he did not reply to our voicemails or emails. But...
We were able to get footage of that meeting Moosegades kept Good Morning America out of. 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 Mecha in this classroom and Dale Moosegades. He was sitting in front of us wearing a suit and tie, trying to put things into perspective. He started telling the students, like, look, the hole's in the fence. I can't hold those holes.
We keep patching them up. They keep getting cut open. It's a commitment, and I said it, 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 closed. And he told the students they'd busted some people who had brought drugs through Bowie. I now have another case that's under investigation. So Musagades is like, we're essentially trying to stop the flow of drugs here. Why are you guys complaining so much? Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, my God.
But eventually, these students started speaking up. Are you going to ask a question? Give him your name. Sign up order.
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 herd them all into the school where they're penned in. Oh.
It's a little hard to hear, but he said, not at the sacrifice of our rights. They do not have rights to come into the United States illegally.
What did it feel like to be sitting in that meeting? I mean, it felt bizarre. I mean, that, you know, somebody is denying what everybody sees with their own eyes. Yeah, there was no face value to what he said, you know, because at that point we were cynical about the whole situation. And, you know, 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 Murillo, the assistant football coach who had a gun pointed in his 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. He said, we're getting ready to sue the Border Patrol. Will you be our local counsel? And I said, not only yes, but hell yes. Yeah.
El Paso civil rights lawyer Albert Armendariz Jr. Were you optimistic? I mean, it's never an easy job. Suing the government is not easy. When you live on the border and work in Según de Barrio, you are never optimistic that a governmental system is going to work for you. So, October 23, 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 in full uniform sitting there. On the other half, you had these buoy students. Dressed in their finest. Sunday dresses, slacks, shirts. Those kids were little troopers. They all got up on the stand, told their stories. And then eventually, Border Patrol sector chief Dale Musigate testifies. 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 Musa Ghaidz got up there and his basic argument was that if you look at the U.S. 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,
quote, search for aliens in any railway car, aircraft, conveyance, 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 onto 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-examined Chief Musigates. And so what Musigates 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.
What 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 Fourth Amendment right. You have to have a legitimate reason to stop somebody. So what did the court—what ultimately happened? Okay, before this court—so findings of facts and conclusions of law, Bunton, senior district judge—
Before this court, its plaintiffs motion for temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction memorandum of law in support pursuant to rules. I don't know. Does that sound like anything to you? Yeah. He's saying, here's what we got in front of me here. All right. Okay. Read the next paragraph. Jurisdiction and venue. Okay. That means keep reading the next paragraph. Findings of fact. The litigation. The name. Individual plaintiffs. Go to the very, very bottom. Last paragraph. Okay.
Is it I hereby order? The court hereby enjoins the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the INS, which at the time was above the Border Patrol. Uh-huh.
Okay, that's a fancy way of saying stop judging people by their looks. Sign the judge. Yes. So they won. They won. They won.
It was just absolute elation. There was a big celebratory school assembly. For the whole school. Tony Santos was there. But we were, yeah, yeah. We were all happy. There were all these parties. People gave us plaques. I think I may even have some on the wall out there.
It was pretty awesome. Again, former student Ricardo Villalma. It was crazy, to say the least. The final ruling holds that the Border Patrol did violate constitutional rights. You just don't see the agents on our campus anymore. That's the assistant football coach Ben Murillo, who ended up being the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. They're treating us like people, not like second-class citizens.
not like we have to be submissive simply because they're federal agents. We couldn't believe that we took on the federal government and won. 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 they 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. Like, no, we kind of want to bask in this.
So we walked from the federal courthouse downtown to Bowie High School. And, you know, when we were getting there, we were all just kind of tearing up. We were proud. We were just happy and surprised all at once. It was just, we were beside ourselves. And, you know, we had camera crews and news crews waiting for us as we were walking up because I guess they got wind that we were just walking back to school.
But in the wake of this victory, in the months following, there would be a chain of events that would really drastically change the U.S.-Mexico border forever and take us to really to where we are now. Because you wrote in that essay sort of just sort of you don't see the connection, you don't think there's a connection, but the fact that the connection is being made still sort of weighs on you? Of course it weighs on us, okay? Because, I mean...
Because of us, fences were built. Because the fences were built, maybe 10,000 people have died in the desert. But they didn't know what cactus among the many before them might hold some hope. Men tore their faces open, chewing saguaros and prickly pears, leaving gutted plants that looked like animals had torn them apart with their claws. The green here was gray.
He said,
This episode was reported by Latif Nasser and Tracy Hunt and produced by Matt Kilty with Bethel Habte, Tracy Hunt and Latif Nasser. Special thanks to Timothy Dunn for writing the book that really guided our story of Bowie High School and to Chris Swan and Kevin Lavelle with KVIA for the archival footage they gave us and to Gustavo Ravellas at the El Paso Independent School District.
to Principal Francisco Ordaz, Sam Attell, Grace Hernandez, and the rest of the staff at Bowie High School, to Maggie Southern Gladstone from Hachette for allowing us to use excerpts from The Devil's Highway, to Eric Robledo and Michael Wells at the Parsons School of Design at the New School, and to Susan Kern and Debbie Nathan. Okay, so that was the first of our Border Trilogy series. You'll hear the rest of the series in the next two episodes later.
Updated over the next two weeks. And before we go for today, we wanted to acknowledge that Tracy Hunt, who you heard co-reporting that story, was one of many people affected by layoffs at WNYC last week. We're going to miss her so much. She was not just an incredible reporter and riveting interviewer. She was like a kind of
I don't know, moral compass of this place. And Tracy was not the only person from the Radiolab family that was let go. We also want to shout some love at Julia Longoria, who was at Radiolab for a while, made the episode Americanish, but then also hosted the new incarnation of More Perfect.
as well as Amy Pearl, the alpha gal herself. If you remember that episode about her tick bite giving her a meat allergy. She was also laid off after, you know, decades at the station. And finally, we wanted to say goodbye to Anna Raskwet-Paz.
our digital media producer. If you receive our newsletter, you will have read many of her beautiful essays. We are going to miss all of you and we envy whoever gets to work with you next. Thanks for all the beautiful stuff you made. Next week is episode two of The Border Trilogy. It's called Hold the Line. Catch you then.
Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, Keddie Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanasambadam.
Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khary, Alyssa Jong Perry, Sarah Sombach, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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