LULU MILLER: Hey, I'm Lulu Miller.

LATIF NASSER: And I'm Latif Nasser.

LULU: This is Radiolab.

LATIF: And last week ...

[NEWS CLIP: The White House is waiving more than two dozen federal laws ...]

LATIF: ... you might have seen in the news that the Biden administration is going to resume construction of a wall along the southern border.

[NEWS CLIP: This despite promising not to build another foot of the wall if elected.]

LATIF: Also, Democratic mayors have been basically complaining about the waves of migrants ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eric Adams: This issue ...]

LATIF: ... coming to their cities and states.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eric Adams: ... will destroy New York City.]

[NEWS CLIP: Mayor Eric Adams escalating his frustration during a town hall ...]

LATIF: 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, it's—that's kind of more a continuity than a change.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: Anyway, all that news made me think we need to play this.

LULU: 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.

LATIF: Which obviously means that it's three parts. We're gonna play them over three weeks. We're also going to update it to talk to this current moment.

LULU: And then later this fall, after that, we are gonna 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. Some really good stuff coming. But in the meantime ...

LATIF: The first episode in this series is called The Hole in the Fence, and it begins with me telling our original hosts Jad and Robert about a guy named Jason Deleón.

LULU: Oh, and one more thing: this episode does contain graphic descriptions that may not be suitable for our younger or more sensitive listeners.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LATIF: I think the best place to begin, it sounds like, is in 2008.

JASON DELEÓN: Yeah, I think that sounds about right.

LATIF: So this is Jason Deleón.

JASON DELEÓN: I'm an associate professor of anthropology.

LATIF: At the University of Michigan.

JASON DELEÓN: And I direct the Undocumented Migration Project.

LATIF: But back in 2008, Jason had actually just finished grad school.

JASON DELEÓN: And my doctoral dissertation was on ancient stone tools.

JASON DELEÓN: "The lithic industries of San Lorenzo and Tenochtitlan: An Economic and Technological Study."

JASON DELEÓN: About as far removed as you can be from the stuff that I'm doing right now.

JASON DELEÓN: "Using obsidian technological data from 11 domestic and non-domestic contexts."

LATIF: 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 ...

JASON DELEÓN: "This study focuses primarily on percussion flake tools."

LATIF: ... dating back to about 1,000 BC.

JASON DELEÓN: "An industry that has often been ignored in Mesoamerican lithic analyses."

LATIF: And then he would write these papers.

JASON DELEÓN: "I evaluate these models by comparing differences in the frequencies of various tool types."

LATIF: You know, in these journals that just—that really just a handful of people would read. But like many academics—and I can say this because I was an academic ...

JASON DELEÓN: "This study also finds that the introduction and adoption of prismatic blade technology ..."

LATIF: ... he had this moment where he just kind of hit the wall.

JASON DELEÓN: I was like, "Okay, this is enough. I'm not—I'm not doing this."

LATIF: I want nothing to do with this anymore.

ROBERT KRULWICH: [laughs]

JASON DELEÓN: 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 gonna 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."

LATIF: And to make matters worse ...

JASON DELEÓN: I had taken this job at University of Washington.

LATIF: ... he'd just gotten this job where he was supposed to teach the very thing he was now sick of.

JASON DELEÓN: Yeah. Just like—just a full-blown crisis.

LATIF: But then fate stepped in. While Jason was preparing for one of his freshman classes, someone handed him a book.

JASON DELEÓN: By a writer named Luis Alberto Urrea called The Devil's Highway.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "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."]

LATIF: 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. 14 of them died along the way.

JASON DELEÓN: And so I start reading it, and ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Visions of home fluttered through their minds: soft green bushes, waterfalls, children."]

JASON DELEÓN: 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 I couldn't believe that—you know, that this was—this is somebody's world.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "They were drunk from having their brains baked in the pan. They were seeing God and devils."]

JASON DELEÓN: Days and days of walking. Running out of food.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "And they were dizzy from drinking their own urine."]

JASON DELEÓN: You know, dying of thirst.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "The poisons clogging their systems."]

LATIF: And at a certain point, Jason comes across this passage where the author is describing ...

JASON DELEÓN: The things that were in these men's pockets.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Belt buckle with a fighting cock inlay. One wallet in the right front pocket of his jeans."]

JASON DELEÓN: You know, some change, some keys, a silver belt buckle.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Fake silver watch, one comb."]

JASON DELEÓN: You know, these personal effects.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Green handkerchief."]

JASON DELEÓN: And he's trying to reconstruct the story about who these men were that died from—from exposure.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "John Doe number 42. Pure jeans. Colored piece of paper in pocket."]

LATIF: Jason says when he read that book, a lightbulb went on.

JASON DELEÓN: And so I bought a plane ticket, and a month later I was in the Arizona desert.

LATIF: 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.

JASON DELEÓN: And I said, "I want to look at the stuff that migrants are leaving in the desert." He was like, "All right, you want to see this stuff? I'm gonna take you real deep into the desert and see what you—what you're made of." This guy just ran me through the wringer.

LATIF: 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.

JASON DELEÓN: Just imagine like a ravine or a wash.

LATIF: And Jason says he suddenly noticed that the desert ground below them was just covered in stuff.

JASON DELEÓN: Over a thousand backpacks and water bottles. I mean just ...

LATIF: What? That much?

JASON DELEÓN: 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, past 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 stuff everywhere: Gatorade bottles, bibles, 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." You know, you see things like a diaper bag or a baby bottle and you wonder, "My God, you know, who—who just came through this and what's—what's happened to them?"

LATIF: So for the next several years, Jason just keeps going back to this stretch of the Sonoran Desert.

JASON DELEÓN: Ripped clothes. Fragments of clothes in bushes.

LATIF: Gathering whatever he could find.

JASON DELEÓN: Dirty socks.

LATIF: And, you know, like an archaeologist, he would collect this stuff.

JASON DELEÓN: Bandages.

LATIF: Itemize it. Categorize it.

JASON DELEÓN: Cocktail dresses. High heel shoes.

LATIF: Try and figure out who it came from, why it was there.

JASON DELEÓN: Baby bottles. Hair curlers. Toys. Wrappers.

LATIF: He did this year ...

JASON DELEÓN: Sneakers. Photographs.

LATIF: ... after year.

JASON DELEÓN: Socks.

LATIF: Picking up this ...

JASON DELEÓN: Shoes. Dresses.

LATIF: ... picking up that.

JASON DELEÓN: Backpacks. Bibles. Bottles.

LATIF: And then one day ...

JASON DELEÓN: A human arm ...

LATIF: ... he finds an arm.

JASON DELEÓN: ... wedged between some rocks.

LATIF: Like, an entire arm up to the shoulder.

JASON DELEÓN: Just sort of sticking—sticking out between two rocks. I mean, there was no flesh other than the—the things that were holding the joint together.

LATIF: Oh, wow!

JASON DELEÓN: Yeah.

LATIF: Jason and his guide, the folks he was there with, they began to search the surrounding areas for other parts of the body.

JASON DELEÓN: 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 gonna be if you can get—if you can get the pieces of the skull.

LATIF: 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."

JASON DELEÓN: And so we were out there basically digging around for—for other parts of this person. We come across a human tooth.

LATIF: Some little tiny bits of rib bones.

JASON DELEÓN: But we never find the skull. And I realize that nobody's ever gonna identify this person. There's just not enough left of them. And this is not—not likely to be a case that will be solved.

LATIF: Now Jason says he knew of course that people were dying in the desert, but to see this ...

JASON DELEÓN: The fragments of a person.

LATIF: Who'd basically been erased.

JASON DELEÓN: You know, it's very—I mean, it's kind of just—it sort of just kills you.

LATIF: Eventually he began to have these nightmares ...

JASON DELEÓN: Snakes coming out of the eyes.

LATIF: ... about the missing skull.

JASON DELEÓN: Birds swooping down and pecking out the eyes. Coyotes playing soccer with this person's skull.

LATIF: And for weeks, he couldn't shake this simple question ...

JASON DELEÓN: You know, what did this to this person?

LATIF: And how many other bodies like this might be out here?

JASON DELEÓN: How did it get to be like this?

LATIF: And those questions would end up sending Jason down a sort of rabbit hole ...

JASON DELEÓN: Digging in the library to ...

LATIF: ... of forensics papers ...

JASON DELEÓN: Decomposing flesh.

LATIF: ... missing persons reports ...

JASON DELEÓN: Hikers who had gone missing.

LATIF: ... historical trends ...

JASON DELEÓN: Sociology papers. Demography papers.

LATIF: ... government documents ...

JASON DELEÓN: Illustrations and the figures in them that are buried in these appendices.

LATIF: 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 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: The immigration issue poses real problems and challenges.]

LATIF: ... that we're constantly fighting about ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: We will build a great wall along the southern border.]

LATIF: ... but still never quite seeing.

JAD ABUMRAD: This is part one of a three-part series on our southern border.

ROBERT: We'll be doing it today, and then next week, and the week after.

JAD: Part one: A Hole in the Fence.

LATIF: All right, so I thought I'd start us off with Jason's question.

JASON DELEÓN: How did it get to be like this?

LATIF: 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—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 ...

JASON DELEÓN: The numbers.

LATIF: ... the yearly numbers of migrant deaths in the desert.

JASON DELEÓN: And I mean, it is shocking.

LATIF: 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 ...

JASON DELEÓN: Overnight ...

LATIF: ... in the late '90s ...

JASON DELEÓN: You go from five to 10 bodies to—to hundreds. I mean, it used to be that if you wanted to cross the US-Mexico border you'd go down to San Die—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 half of you would get by, would make it into the US, and the other half would get caught, sent back and people would do it again the next day. That was the system for a long time, I mean ...

LATIF: So what changed?

JASON DELEÓN: 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 US-Mexico border.

LATIF: We ended up calling up the author he mentioned, Timothy Dunn, and then getting so interested in a story that Dunn laid out for us that we're gonna leave Jason behind for a while and we're gonna go on a little trip.

TRACIE HUNTE: Yes.

JAD: That by the way is co-reporter Tracie Hunte.

TRACIE: Yes.

ROBERT: All right. Well, so where are we gonna go?

TRACIE: We're gonna go to El Paso. El Paso, Texas.

LATIF: Yeah, so Tracie and I went to El Paso awhile back.

TRACIE: Latif, do you ever think how your life would've been totally different if you were just born somewhere else? Of course you've thought that.

LATIF: If I was born somewhere else? Yeah, of course. I mean, I think about that, I feel like ...

LATIF: [laughs] I guess I got distracted at that point? We didn't finish the conversation, but anyway ...

LATIF: Two flags flying: the American flag and the Texan flag.

LATIF: We went down to El Paso to visit a high school.

TRACIE: Called Bowie High School.

LATIF: Home of the Bowie Bears.

TEACHER: Guys, the bell rang. Well, you guys are listening much to me.

TRACIE: You know, in many respects it's just, you know, your typical American high school.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Good morning, Bears! Yeah, baby, Taco Tuesdays!

TRACIE: You've got your Taco Tuesdays. It's ninth through twelfth grade. About 1,200 students.

TEACHER: All right guys, so please take out your notes, okay?

LATIF: 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 ...

ANNOUNCER: It's The Pride of the South Side!

LATIF: They've got a marching band: The Pride of the South Side. It's yeah, your typical Texas high school.

TRACIE: Yeah, but there is something a little different about it, and that is that almost all the students here ...

TEACHER: Jennifer is here, Eduardo is here. Jose?

TRACIE: ... are Mexican American.

TEACHER: Josella, Oscar?

TRACIE: And, you know, we actually talked to one former teacher ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: This is Juan Sybert-Coronado. I was a teacher at Bowie High School in the 1980s and 1990s.

TRACIE: And what did you teach?

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: I taught history.

TRACIE: And he said that in all his years teaching at Bowie ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: I taught there for 21 years and never had a single Anglo student.

LATIF: Really?

ROBERT: Really?

TRACIE: Yes.

LATIF: Never taught a single white student. But the reason we went to Bowie High School is because something happened there in the early '90's, something that, it sort of in a kind of roundabout and totally unforeseeable way, completely changed the way we think about the US-Mexico border. So where—where we're gonna start the story is actually in one of Juan Sybert-Coronado's classes.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: The class was immediately after lunch, and ...

LATIF: And on this particular day, they were gonna have a debate in class, and one of the debaters, one of the kids who was gonna be part of the debate, was late.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Yes.

LATIF: His name was Albert.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Albert often came late to class. And so we'd been waiting and waiting and waiting for him.

LATIF: 10 minutes went by. 15, 20.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: And eventually he showed up being dragged in by this campus security guy.

LATIF: The school security guard.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: 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.

LATIF: [laughs]

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: And—and so I kind of lay into Albert for being late again, and for, you know, not holding up his responsibilities to his class.

TRACIE: 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."

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Yeah.

TRACIE: And he—Albert tries to give them his school ID, but they wouldn't take it. And they actually told him ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: 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.

LATIF: And Juan's just standing there like ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Mm-hmm.

LATIF: Uh-huh. Border Patrol? Really?

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: You know, I was haranguing the kid, obviously. And ...

LATIF: But then three or four other students in class ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Just kind of stepped in and said, "No, what Albert's telling you is true."

LATIF: Not only is Albert telling the truth, but in the last couple of weeks ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Border Patrol had been on the handball courts and on the playing fields repeatedly ...

LATIF: Stopping students, harassing students.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: And I was, quite frankly, shocked.

LATIF: 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.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: I was having a hard time processing this.

LATIF: 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?"

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: And I got literally hundreds of stories.

NIDIA RODRIGUEZ: I was walking home from school and, you know, I had my backpack on.

TRACIE: This is Nidia Rodriguez, who was a freshman at the time.

NIDIA RODRIGUEZ: And all of a sudden I saw this truck, a Border Patrol truck, and it was speeding my way.

TRACIE: A couple of agents got out of the truck and started questioning her.

NIDIA RODRIGUEZ: Where am I from or where am I going?

ERNESTO MUÑOZ: Basically we were all rounded up.

TRACIE: Ernesto Muñoz remembers walking to school with a bunch of kids.

ERNESTO MUÑOZ: We were searched, our backpacks.

TRACIE: And again, you know, a couple of agents got out, started asking him questions.

ERNESTO MUÑOZ: You know, where we were born, our date of birth, what classes we were taking.

MARCELA DE LEON: So we stop, they get out of the truck.

TRACIE: Marcela De Leon, who was walking with a friend near school.

MARCELA DE LEON: And they go, "What do you have in the bag?" And I go, "Books." You know, what else would I have in my bag? So they were like, "Well, let us see."

RICARDO VIELMA: I was walking and they yelled at me, "Hey, get over here!"

TRACIE: Ricardo Vielma.

RICARDO VIELMA: They sped up to me, and they stopped in front of me, asked me, you know, what's—what's in the bag? I 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.

LATIF: 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.

BEN MURILLO: 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 it if you'd holster your gun." And the guy barked at me "I'd appreciate it if you'd shut your mouth and get out of the car!"

LATIF: Eventually the agent did holster the gun. Ben did get out of the car, everything was fine.

LATIF: What was that like, having that right in your face?

BEN MURILLO: It was one of the scariest things in my life.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: Why was the Border Patrol on the grounds of the school? Did they have some—was there reason to be there?

LATIF: Well, that's—I mean, that's a really good question, and I will answer it after the break.

ROBERT: Aww!

JAD: All right. Three, two, one. I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

LATIF: I'm Latif.

TRACIE: I'm Tracie.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today we are bringing you the first of three stories ...

JAD: That we will air over the next few weeks on border crossings at the US-Mexico border.

ROBERT: 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.

JAD: And stopping them to—Border Patrol stopped them to search their bags, demand papers, even in one incident pulling a gun on the football coach.

LATIF: And I think to understand what was going on at Bowie High School you have to understand something else.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: The legend of El Paso.]

LATIF: You have to understand El Paso.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: There is a spirit, a flavor. So come on, amigo, see it for yourself. [singing] From 30,000 feet above the desert floor I see it there below.]

LATIF: It's right on the border of Texas, Mexico and New Mexico. It's right there.

TRACIE: It's right there. It's also the biggest city ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: [singing] The West Texas city of El Paso.]

TRACIE: ... that shares a border with Mexico, too.

LATIF: 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 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Juárez]

LATIF: Juárez.

TRACIE: Ciudad Juárez.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The largest city on the US-Mexico border.]

LATIF: 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 half the country. And even now, according to Juan ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: 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 Juárez, people in Ciudad Juárez know people who have family members who live in El Paso. I mean, this is literally one community.

LATIF: But the thing is, when everything was going down at Bowie in the early '90s, it was a community in crisis.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: So come on amigo, and see for yourself.]

[NEWS CLIP: Tonight, the peso crisis has spilled across the Rio Grande.]

LATIF: In the '80s, the Mexican peso crashed.

[NEWS CLIP: A dramatically devalued peso is causing havoc with prices and wages.]

LATIF: And so people in Juárez started flocking to El Paso because well, that's where the jobs were. Like jobs in construction.

MAN: Or childcare, gardening.

TRACIE: So you had tons of people getting these permits to come into El Paso legally, but then you had all these other people ...

[NEWS CLIP: Workers who can't get permits required by US law ...]

TRACIE: ... who couldn't get permits, but they still needed to work.

[NEWS CLIP: ... simply respond to the laws of supply and demand.]

TRACIE: And so they started coming, too.

[NEWS CLIP: Making illegal dashes across the border to the United States at unprecedented numbers.]

LATIF: I mean, it was as high as, like, 10,000 people a day.

ROBERT: A day?

LATIF: Coming back and forth illegally basically for their commute to work.

DAVID HAM: It was chaos. It was a mess here.

LATIF: We spoke to this former Border Patrol agent, a guy named David Ham.

DAVID HAM: Anti-smuggling special agent.

LATIF: He told us that when he was on that job, before dawn, you could go down to certain parts of the Rio Grande ...

DAVID HAM: And you'd have 100-200 people lined up.

LATIF: Waiting on the river's edge.

DAVID HAM: Sun come up and here they'd come.

[NEWS CLIP: It's morning in America, and the rush hour has begun—the rush to cross the Rio Grande into El Paso.]

LATIF: 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.

[NEWS CLIP: If they don't want to get wet, they can pay a young entrepreneur a small fee and raft across.]

LATIF: And so for people like David, these border patrol agents ...

[NEWS CLIP: Okay, here comes about a hundred.]

LATIF: ... it becomes this cat and mouse game where ...

DAVID HAM: Probably the way we had always done business. They come in, you chase them, catch them and send them back.

LATIF: Day and night and day and night it was ...

[NEWS CLIP: A never-ending job.]

DAVID HAM: And there was something—you know, you catch the same guys two or three times a shift sometimes. [laughs] So it was—it was chaos.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: Obviously we're not accomplishing 100 percent of our mission.]

TRACIE: And this is actually kind of hilarious. So, like, around this time in 1992, there was this television interview, and Dale Musegades—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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: If we were not here and did not keep a lid on this situation ...]

TRACIE: And in the shot behind him ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: ... there would be just an absolute free inflow from other countries.]

TRACIE: ... you can see people climbing up the banks of the Rio Grande and just walking into El Paso, like ...

ROBERT: [laughs] That's like having Wyatt Earp standing in front of three bank robbers robbing a bank.

TRACIE: Yeah, exactly. And, like—so okay, how many entries—all right, so it was reported at the 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.

ROBERT: Hmm.

TRACIE: 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.

LATIF: Which finally brings us back to Bowie High School.

LATIF: Okay, all right. Okay, yeah let's try it.

LATIF: Because there's two important things about Bowie.

LATIF: Okay, I'm counting my steps, actually. Here, okay from the sidewalk. One ...

LATIF: One, Bowie is right, right ...

LATIF: ... three, four, five, six ...

LATIF: ... right on the border.

LATIF: 48, 49. So basically it's 50. That was 50 steps.

TRACIE: Fifty steps.

LATIF: Fifty steps from the Bowie campus into Mexico.

LATIF: Yeah.

LATIF: And two, the former assistant football coach and teacher, Ben Murillo, he showed me ...

LATIF: What's—what is that?

LATIF: ... this fence.

BEN MURILLO: That's part of the old fence.

LATIF: Oh, that's part of the old fence, you think?

LATIF: El Paso in the '70s put up a bunch of fencing on the border to curb illegal immigration.

LATIF: So it's like a—it's not much taller than us.

LATIF: But it was—it was pretty flimsy. They called it a "tortilla curtain." And right at this spot, across from Bowie High School, there was a hole in the fence.

DAVID HAM: Yeah.

LATIF: And David Ham, the 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 ...

DAVID HAM: Through Bowie High School.

TRACIE: And he claimed that it wasn't just people looking for work, it was also people bringing in drugs.

DAVID HAM: And the way I know that because I worked at our anti-smuggling unit. We'd watch them come through.

TRACIE: 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 ...

LATIF: Yeah

TRACIE: ... they were just there all the time.

LATIF: 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.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: I'd notice the—the Suburbans parked on the Bowie campus.

LATIF: Yeah.

LATIF: Again, former Bowie teacher Juan Sybert-Coronado.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: But the whole reason, you know, that I thought they were there was the chain link was cut and they need to stop people from entering into a high school.

LATIF: Right.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Instead of realizing that what they're doing is they're using the high school as a hunting ground.

LATIF: 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 ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: The Border Patrol simply stopping people because they were brown. And that really, uh—this is radio? Angered me. [laughs]

LATIF: You can say whatever you want.

TRACIE: But for most of these kids ...

ERNESTO MUÑOZ: It was nothing, like, out of the ordinary.

TRACIE: ... you know, kids like Ernesto Muñoz, Ricardo Vielma ...

RICARDO VIELMA: That was just day-to-day life.

TONY SANTOS: Talking to even some of the community members ...

TRACIE: ... Tony Santos ...

TONY SANTOS: They told me, "Ah, don't worry about it."

TRACIE: Growing up in this poor neighborhood right next to the border ...

TONY SANTOS: It was just a way of life here in south El Paso.

ERNESTO MUÑOZ: It wasn't like a concern like, "Oh, no! You got stopped?"

RICARDO VIELMA: You go to the park and shoot some basketball. You'd tell your—your schoolmates, you know, guess what happened after school?

ERNESTO MUÑOZ: It was like, you know, "Ha ha, you got stopped! It was probably 'cause of your haircut or probably 'cause of how you're dressed or whatever."

LATIF: So the students were more likely to laugh about it than be angry, but in his US 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.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Talking about stuff like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Martin Luther King: The activities which have taken place in Birmingham over the last few days ...]

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: ... Letter From the Birmingham Jail.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Martin Luther King: ... to my mind mark the nonviolent movement coming of age.]

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: And ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Malcolm X: It's liberty or death.]

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: ... Malcolm X's Ballot or the Bullet.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Malcolm X: It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody.]

LATIF: And so these students are learning about farmworker strikes in California in the 1960s.

TONY SANTOS: We learned about Cesar Chavez.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dolores Huerta: And the workers know that they are no longer alone.]

TONY SANTOS: We learned about Dolores Huerta, Reies López Tijerina. And it was like okay, I'm reading the book and then I look outside the window and there they are.

LATIF: Border Patrol agents in SUVs on the parking lot stopping students.

ERNESTO MUÑOZ: I think that's when, you know, we were like, wait.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Just kinda like ...

LATIF: It felt not okay.

NIDIA RODRIGUEZ: I mean I didn't fully know exactly the letter of the law ...

TRACIE: That's Nidia Rodriguez again.

NIDIA RODRIGUEZ: ... but I knew that what they were doing was wrong.

ERNESTO MUÑOZ: And ...

TRACIE: And eventually, some of these students started to get together

ERNESTO MUÑOZ: Met and talked.

RICARDO VIELMA: Like, do you think this is right? What do you think this is about?

NIDIA RODRIGUEZ: Telling each other, you know, that this is wrong.

ERNESTO MUÑOZ: We talked about how we wanted things to be different.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Let's see what we can do about it, because this has to stop.

TEACHER: All right! All right, that's what's up!

JAD: Coming up, Juan and his students fight back.

ROBERT: We'll continue in just a moment.

TEACHER: Let's do some more warm-ups. Let's do [singing]

JAD: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

LATIF: Latif.

TRACIE: Tracie.

LATIF: And ...

RICARDO VIELMA: Hello?

LATIF: ... Ricardo.

TONY SANTOS: Umm ...

LATIF: And Tony.

JAD: Okay.

LATIF: All right, so some of these kids at Bowie High School, they actually belonged to this group ...

RICARDO VIELMA: MEChA.

LATIF: ... MEChA.

RICARDO VIELMA: Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán.

LATIF: Which is a Chicano civil rights group.

TONY SANTOS: That has been around for awhile, I guess since the 1960s.

TRACIE: It was a college group that these kids at Bowie actually petitioned them to have a chapter at the high school.

RICARDO VIELMA: And um ...

TRACIE: And MEChA said sure!

RICARDO VIELMA: We were the first ones to get a collegiate group.

LATIF: And they asked Juan if he could, you know, supervise.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: We would meet about once a week, and our meetings tended to be 30, 40, 50 kids packed into a classroom.

TRACIE: 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 US Constitution, the Border Patrol, or really any officer of the law ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: They cannot stop you without reasonable cause.

TRACIE: They had to have seen you cross the border, or when you saw them you started acting fidgety, or you ran away or something.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: They can't just arbitrarily stop you.

TRACIE: Question you.

RICARDO VIELMA: Just because the color of your skin.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: That's not enough to stop you.

LATIF: Because if that's the only reason they have to stop you, then they're violating your Fourth Amendment right.

TRACIE: The right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Exactly.

RICARDO VIELMA: They just said, "You know what? your getting—your rights are getting stomped all over, let's see what we can do about this because it needs to stop."

LATIF: After Susan explained that their rights were being violated, the conversation turned to what are we gonna about it?

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: We had a lot of students who were suggesting things that were probably, you know, slightly inappropriate.

LATIF: Like how about we just curse 'em out?

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Which I thought well, maybe that's not a bad approach. But apparently ...

TRACIE: According to Juan's lawyer friend Susan ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: [bleep][00:33:41.05] off was not the right response.

LATIF: [laughs] That can maybe get you in trouble?

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Can be considered assault, and so ...

TRACIE: Another student said well what if we just run away from them?

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Uh, no.

LATIF: Another kid was like, what if we fight back?

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Oh God!

TRACIE: Oh, definitely don't do that.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Mm-mm.

LATIF: But finally, one of the students ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Who'd been watching Law & Order ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Law & Order: Debbie Mason, you're under arrest for the attempted murder of your mother.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Law & Order: No, this is a mistake.]

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Who knew all about saying ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Law & Order: You have the right to remain silent.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Law & Order: No!]

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: ... the right to remain silent.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Law & Order: Caroline Tyler, you have the right to remain silent.]

LATIF: He was like, that's a thing.

TRACIE: It's your Fifth Amendment constitutional right, and it's something you typically hear ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I have, however, been instructed by my counsel not to testify based on my Fifth Amendment constitutional rights.]

TRACIE: ... when rich, white dudes get in trouble.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: On the advice of counsel, I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege and respectfully decline to answer your question.]

LATIF: But this one Bowie MEChA student was like, "Why don't we do that?"

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: And that's exactly what our students started doing.

TRACIE: After that, when Border Patrol agents would stop students and say "Hey, give me your papers," some of these students would say no.

STUDENT: I want to use my Fifth Amendment right.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: I want to take the Fifth Amendment.

STUDENT: ... Amendment right to remain silent.

RICARDO VIELMA: Simple as that. I have the right not to incriminate myself.

STUDENT: To remain silent.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: I do not want to answer your questions.

RICARDO VIELMA: Sorry, had to burp. Okay, ready?

STUDENT: Mm-hmm.

STUDENT: I have a Fifth Amendment right ...

STUDENTS: To ...

STUDENT: ... to remain silent.

STUDENTS: ... remain silent.

RICARDO VIELMA: I don't want you to go through any of my stuff.

STUDENT: Right to remain silent.

TRACIE: You're not going through my backpack, I'm not talking to you.

STUDENT: I want to use my Fifth Amendment ...

STUDENT: Fifth Amendment right ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: And the message started spreading around ...

STUDENT: Right to remain silent.

STUDENT: Remain silent.

STUDENT: Silent.

STUDENT: Silent.

STUDENT: Silent.

STUDENT: Silent.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: ... that we really don't need to answer these people's questions.

STUDENT: To remain silent?

TRACIE: Yeah, perfect. You nailed it!

STUDENTS: [cheers]

TRACIE: Nice to meet y'all, have a good day.

STUDENTS: Bye, miss!

LATIF: 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, 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 it could put them in harm's way at some point.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: And it did frequently. Students were harassed for this. Students were—the most notorious case is the case of David Renteria.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Renteria: And the way it all started was on June the 3rd ...]

LATIF: So this is David Renteria from a documentary that was made in the '90s about Bowie High School.

TRACIE: Yeah, so David Renteria, he was a senior at Bowie.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: A legally blind student who was coming home from graduation practice.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Renteria: ... and uh ...]

TRACIE: And this one day, he and his friend are just walking down the street, and a Border Patrol truck rolls up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Renteria: They stopped and they asked us for citizenship. And I respond, you know, US citizen. My friend did the same thing. And then they asked us again, what is your citizenship? US citizen. They asked us again and I said US citizen. And I looked at my friend and I said, "You know what? Let's go." Kept on walking. And the Border Patrol agent on the passenger side said if we didn't stop, they were gonna beat us up real bad, to the point where we weren't gonna be able to move.]

TRACIE: So this Border Patrol agent gets out of the truck, comes up to David ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: And started threatening to break his arm if he tried to walk away.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Renteria: I felt his hand on my arm, left elbow. He jerked it back. When he jerked it, I turned and faced him, and I looked and said to him. "I'm exercising the right to remain silent." And he got me and he slammed me against the fence, and he put his left forearm on the back of my neck and he kicked my legs.]

TRACIE: Slapped him in his face apparently. And, you know, David wasn't physically injured after that, he was freaked out.

LATIF: 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 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Good Morning America: Welcome to El Paso, Texas. Good Morning America!]

LATIF: ... national news.

RICARDO VIELMA: Good Morning freakin' America, you know what I mean? That's—that's pretty huge.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Good Morning America: The daily invasion has strained the relationship between the Border Patrol and some people at Bowie High School.]

RICARDO VIELMA: You know, and they're talking to us.

[NEWS CLIP: We all have rights, and that our rights daily, on a day-to-day course are being violated.]

[NEWS CLIP: Why are they harassing you?]

[NEWS CLIP: Because we're Hispanic, because the 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.]

LATIF: And as this news started to grow, the Border Patrol Sector Chief, Dale Musegades, decided he was gonna come to Bowie to talk to the students.

LATIF: Is that something you remember? Him showing up to ...?

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: [laughs] Oh yeah, Mr. Musegades. That guy was kinda doing damage control at that point.

[NEWS CLIP: When agent Dale Musegades met with about 40 students to discuss the alleged harassment, he kept us out.]

LATIF: We tried to contact Dale Musegades multiple times for this story, but he did not reply to our voicemails or emails. But ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: This past Wednesday morning ...]

LATIF: ... we were able to get footage of that meeting Musegades kept Good Morning America out of.

ROBERT: Hmm.

LATIF: Because one of the students taped this, and then we managed to get our hands on it.

ROBERT: Huh.

LATIF: So it's like 30, 40 kids from MEChA in this classroom, and Dale Musegades ...

RICARDO VIELMA: He was sitting in front of us, wearing a suit and tie, trying to put things into perspective.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: Uh ...]

LATIF: He started telling the students like, "Look, the holes in the fence?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: I can't hold those holes.]

LATIF: "We keep patching them up, they keep getting cut open."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: And something—it's a commitment, and I said I would try. It's a commitment I can't—I don't think there's anyway in the world to keep those holes closed.]

LATIF: And he told the students, they—they'd busted some people who had brought drugs through Bowie.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: I now have another case that's under investigation.]

LATIF: So Musegades is like, we're essentially trying to stop the flow of drugs here. Why are you guys complaining so much?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, STUDENTS: Oh, come on!]

TRACIE: But eventually ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: Let's get some of these students, C'mon, you had your hand raised over here. Go ahead.]

TRACIE: ... these students started speaking up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, STUDENT: Are you gonna ask a question?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, STUDENT: I've been living here right on the border ...]

LATIF: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, STUDENT: You're treating human beings like cattle. What you're doing is you run them into a place where they can't get out and then you circle them in? You're treating them like cattle, not human beings.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: Those people will not stop or will not obey the law. So you have to somehow or another apprehend them. I don't—you know, I don't know a better way to do it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, STUDENT: But not at the sacrifice of our rights.]

LATIF: It's a little hard to hear, but he said "Not at the sacrifice of our rights."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: What do you mean the sacrifice of their rights? They're illegally in this country.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, STUDENT: Our rights.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, STUDENT: But they're human beings! They have rights.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dale Musegades: They do not have rights to come into the United States illegally.]

LATIF: What did it feel like to be sitting in that meeting? I mean ...

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Well, it felt bizarre. I mean, that, you know, somebody is denying what everybody sees with their own eyes.

RICARDO VIELMA: Yeah, there was no face value to what he said, you know, because at that point we were cynic—cynical about the whole situation and, you know, you can't undo the stuff that was already done.

LATIF: 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.

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: The phone rings one day ...

LATIF: And eventually they call up this guy.

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: They 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! [laughs]

LATIF: El Paso civil rights lawyer, Albert Armendariz, Jr.

LATIF: Were you optimistic?

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: I mean, it's never an easy job. Suing the government is not easy.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: When you live on the border and work in Segundo Barrio, you are never optimistic that a governmental system is going to work for you.

LATIF: 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 Bowie students.

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: Dressed in their finest.

TRACIE: Sunday dresses, slacks, shirts.

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: Those kids were little troopers. They all got up on the stand, told their stories.

TRACIE: And then eventually, Border Patrol sector chief, Dale Musegades testifies.

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: Yeah.

LATIF: Do you remember what the defense's argument was?

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: Well, they had lots of arguments.

LATIF: Now we can't verify the specifics of what happened in the courtroom because a lot of the court documents have been destroyed, but Musegades 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."

JAD: What's a—what's a reasonable distance?

LATIF: This is what's nuts is I don't know exactly what went into the determination of what that is, but the distance is a hundred miles.

JAD: Really?

LATIF: Yeah, in that hundred 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, 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. There's—it's like this little zone.

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: That's designed to prevent Border Patrol officers from being charged with trespass when patrolling the border. I cross-examined Chief Musegades, and so ...

LATIF: What Musegades 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.

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: 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.

LATIF: 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.

ROBERT: So what did the court—what ultimately happened?

TRACIE: Okay, before this court—so it says, "Findings of facts and conclusions of law; Bunton, Senior District Judge. Before this court is plaintiff's motion for temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction memorandum of law and support, pursuant to rule." I don't know, does that sound like anything to you? [laughs]

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah. He's saying, "Here's what we got in front of me here."

TRACIE: All right. Okay.

ROBERT: So read the next paragraph, down one.

TRACIE: "Jurisdiction and venue?"

ROBERT: Okay that means—read the next one.

TRACIE: "Findings of fact. The litigation, the name—individual plaintiffs ...

ROBERT: Go to the very, very bottom, last paragraph.

TRACIE: [laughs]

ROBERT: Is it "I hereby order?"

TRACIE: "The court hereby enjoins the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the INS ..." which is above—at the time was above the Border Patrol.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

TRACIE: "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 descent."

ROBERT: Okay that's a fancy way of saying "Stop judging people by their looks, signed The Judge."

TRACIE: Yes!

LATIF: Correct.

ROBERT: So they won.

LATIF: They won!

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: It was just absolute elation.

TRACIE: There was a big celebratory school assembly.

TONY SANTOS: For the whole school.

TRACIE: Oh, wow!

TRACIE: Tony Santos was there.

TONY SANTOS: We were, "Yay!" All happy.

TRACIE: There were all these parties.

ALBERT ARMENDARIZ JR.: People gave us plaques. I think I may even have some on the wall out there.

RICARDO VIELMA: [laughs] It was pretty awesome.

TRACIE: Again, former student Ricardo Vielma.

RICARDO VIELMA: It was crazy, to say the least.

[NEWS CLIP: The final ruling holds that the Border Patrol did violate constitutional rights.]

BEN MURILLO: You just don't see the agents on our campus anymore.

LATIF: That's the assistant football coach, Ben Murillo, who ended up being the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit.

BEN MURILLO: They're treating us like people, not like second-class citizens, not like we have to be submissive simply because they're federal agents.

RICARDO VIELMA: You know, we couldn't believe that we took on the federal government and won. That was one of the first times I was really proud of what our government, you know, stands for.

LATIF: 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.

RICARDO VIELMA: Everybody was like, "Cool, let's go back to school, hop in the car." And I'm like, "No, we kinda 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.

LATIF: But in the wake of this victory, in the months following, there would be a chain of events that would really drastically change the US-Mexico border forever, and take us to really to where we are now.

TRACIE: When you—because you wrote in that essay sort of just that you don't see a connection, you don't think there's a connection, but the fact that the connection is being made still sort of weighs on you?

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: 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 had died in the desert.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "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. They walked west, though they didn't know it. They had no concept anymore of destination. They were in a vast trickery of sand. One of them said …]

LULU: This episode was reported by Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte, and produced by Matt Kielty with Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte 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 Reveles at the El Paso Independent School District. To Principal Francisco Ordaz, Sam Atell, Grace Hernandez and the rest of the staff at Bowie High School. To Maggie Southard Gladstone from Hachette for allowing us to use excerpts from The Devil's Highway. To Eric Robledo and Michael Wells of the Parsons School of Design at the New School. And to Susan Kern and to Debbie Nathan.

LATIF: Okay, so that was the first of our Border Trilogy series. You'll hear the rest of the series, the next two episodes updated over the next two weeks.

LULU: And before we go for today we wanted to acknowledge that Tracie Hunte, who you heard co-reporting that story was one of many people affected by layoffs at WNYC last week. We're gonna 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.

LATIF: And Tracie was not the only person from the Radiolab family that was let go. We also want to shout out some love at Julia Longoria, who was at Radiolab for awhile, 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 Rascouët-Paz, our digital media producer. If you receive our newsletter you will have read many of her beautiful essays.

LULU: 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.

LATIF: Next week is episode two of the Border Trilogy. It's called "Hold the Line."

LULU: Catch you then.

[LISTENER: Radiolab 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, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz , Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Alyssa Jeong Perry, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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