[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: All right.

LATIF NASSER: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. That work?

JAD: Two, one, Jad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab.

ROBERT: And now we're gonna do part two of our border pa-trilogy.

LATIF: Uh, okay.

JAD: With reporter Latif Nasser. In our last podcast, we had part one of the series, which we called "Hole in the Fence."

LATIF: But let's—I'm excited to tell you now the rest of the story, I feel like I've been holding out on you.

ROBERT: All right, okay.

JAD: And now, "Part 2: Hold the Line."

LATIF: So let's do first the—the previously on, I think. So the previously on is that we had—so it was December 1, 1992. You have these Mexican-American high school kids from this poor neighborhood, this high school, Bowie High School in El Paso right on the border. They sue the Border Patrol who is—they say is harassing them, who's hassling them because of really the color of their skin. And they win! They win this amazing improbable victory to get the Border Patrol to stop. So that's where we are now.

ROBERT: Right.

LATIF: And things are about to take some unexpected turns.

TIMOTHY DUNN: Okay, we're looking at the early 1990s. The lawsuit was filed in 1992.

LATIF: And right after that lawsuit, according to Tim Dunn, the sociologist who actually turned us on to this whole Bowie story, right after the Bowie victory, the Border Patrol chief in El Paso, Dale Musegades ...

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

TIMOTHY DUNN: Kind of old-school throwback.

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

LATIF: He's out.

TIMOTHY DUNN: Musegades is replaced, and they bring in a new chief.

SILVESTRE REYES: Yes, my name is Silvestre Reyes, and ...

TIMOTHY DUNN: Silvestre Reyes.

SILVESTRE REYES: I've been a veteran of the US border patrol for 26 and a half years.

TIMOTHY DUNN: And he has a very different style.

LATIF: Great spot here, yeah.

SILVESTRE REYES: Yeah, this is one of my wife and I's favorite place. Where do you want me to sit?

LATIF: Here. So you could ...

LATIF: I met Silvestre Reyes in this Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of El Paso. He's a big guy, broad shoulders, kinda looks like a—like a retired football player but who's now a grandpa.

WAITRESS: How are you? Merry Christmas.

SILVESTRE REYES: Merry Christmas. [laughs]

WAITRESS: My hands are a little ...

SILVESTRE REYES: I'll have some coffee with cream.

WAITRESS: Perfect!

SILVESTRE REYES: If you don't mind.

LATIF: Very kind face—for a guy who revolutionized how we deal with the border.

LATIF: You—and you grew up here.

SILVESTRE REYES: I did. We're sitting here about a mile from where I was born.

LATIF: Yeah.

SILVESTRE REYES: Our farm was northwest of here. We—we grew cotton.

LATIF: Okay.

SILVESTRE REYES: Alfalfa.

LATIF: Uh-huh.

LATIF: Some watermelon, some onions ...

SILVESTRE REYES: I'm the oldest of 10.

LATIF: Uh-huh.

SILVESTRE REYES: Six brothers and four sisters.

LATIF: Yeah.

LATIF: He says that his brothers and sisters, they'd all work on the farm along with a bunch of undocumented workers who came in from Juárez.

SILVESTRE REYES: Back then we had party-line phones, so somebody would say, "Hey the border patrol's coming today," but they didn't know what time or where. So whenever that happened, I was tasked to sit in a two-and-a-half ton truck.

LATIF: And he would watch the road.

SILVESTRE REYES: And I would blow the horn ...

[horn honks]

SILVESTRE REYES: ... at the first sign of what we would refer to as "La migra."

LATIF: So to alert the workers.

SILVESTRE REYES: Yeah.

LATIF: He actually calls it the greatest irony of his life, because fast forward to college ...

SILVESTRE REYES: I got drafted into the army.

LATIF: ... he gets drafted to go to Vietnam.

SILVESTRE REYES: I spent 13 months in Vietnam. I was a helicopter crew chief. When I came back from Vietnam, I was scheduled to go back, but what happened in 1968 was my dad—my second brother was on his way to Vietnam, and so my dad was on his way to the airport, and he had an automobile accident and got killed.

LATIF: Oh no!

SILVESTRE REYES: So I was the oldest in the family, so they let me out to take care of the family.

LATIF: And so Reyes needed a job.

SILVESTRE REYES: Being a veteran, any federal exam they opened up for you.

LATIF: So he starts taking these federal job exams.

SILVESTRE REYES: The post office ...

LATIF: Bureau of Prisons ...

SILVESTRE REYES: ... Customs, Border Patrol. I mean, just any test that I could, because I had to make a living.

LATIF: And the very first place to call him back?

SILVESTRE REYES: Border Patrol.

ROBERT: No! [laughs]

LATIF: Yeah!

TIMOTHY DUNN: That was what was available.

LATIF: Again, Tim Dunn.

TIMOTHY DUNN: Yeah, so he becomes a kind of pioneer in the Border Patrol as one of the early Hispanic agents when there were very few.

SILVESTRE REYES: The job was tough because they didn't welcome you with open arms, because your name is Reyes and not Smith or Jones. But I kind of enjoyed the challenge.

LATIF: He said he was dead set.

SILVESTRE REYES: I'll do everything twice as good in half the time.

LATIF: And eventually he moves from being an agent into management.

TIMOTHY DUNN: And he works his way up through management.

SILVESTRE REYES: I was a first-line supervisor.

LATIF: Through the ranks.

SILVESTRE REYES: Second-line supervisor. Taught at the academy.

LATIF: And he eventually becomes ...

TIMOTHY DUNN: The first Hispanic sector chief.

LATIF: Which means he's in charge of a huge swath of the border in Texas.

SILVESTRE REYES: Yeah.

LATIF: So then comes 1993, you are a sector chief and you're assigned back here.

SILVESTRE REYES: Right. I was moved here in late June, and in early July, I decided to assess the situation.

LATIF: And the situation in El Paso did not look good.

SILVESTRE REYES: No. The sector was a mess.

LATIF: So one of the first things Reyes discovers is that ...

[NEWS CLIP: The border between the US and Mexico ...]

LATIF: ... El Paso is in a state of ...

[NEWS CLIP: Pure chaos.]

LATIF: ... chaos.

SILVESTRE REYES: We were averaging about 10,000 illegal entries a day.

LATIF: A day?

SILVESTRE REYES: A day.

[NEWS CLIP: Unprecedented numbers.]

TIMOTHY DUNN: And Border Patrol didn't have enough people to get them all.

SILVESTRE REYES: So people were telling me that agents are pretty much ...

[NEWS CLIP: Regularly stopping El Pasoans.]

SILVESTRE REYES: ... running ramshackle through the city.

TIMOTHY DUNN: Driving around the neighborhoods and questioning everybody, stopping people.

[NEWS CLIP: Asking for their immigration status.]

LATIF: And they're doing this despite the fact that they just got sued by these high school kids for doing essentially the same thing.

TIMOTHY DUNN: And this lawsuit is still hanging over the patrol.

LATIF: How big a deal was that?

SILVESTRE REYES: It was a huge deal. It was making a chaotic situation worse.

[applause]

LATIF: And Reyes says on top of all of this ...

SILVESTRE REYES: There was a movement when I got here ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, speaker: We need to bridge the border.]

LATIF: ... to push the border patrol out.

SILVESTRE REYES: ... that the border patrol should be moved 25 miles out of the city.

LATIF: To kind of create a borderless zone around the city to unite El Paso and Juárez.

TIMOTHY DUNN: It was kind of in the spirit of NAFTA opening up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: NAFTA is good for us because it will cut the tariffs on trade between the United States and Mexico.]

LATIF: The North American Free Trade Agreement.

TIMOTHY DUNN: NAFTA's gonna open the border for the flows of goods and capital, but not people. And they're saying, "Well, how about right here a little bit for people, too?"

SILVESTRE REYES: So they felt that the Border Patrol is an invading army. They're the problem instead of the solution.

LATIF: Yeah, so what he finds is that they're really unpopular, and that's just half the reason they're unpopular. There's a whole bunch of other people that hate them for a whole different reason.

ROBERT: Really?

LATIF: Yeah! He—when he got there, he went on this listening/walking tour of the neighborhoods along the border.

SILVESTRE REYES: There's—there's whole neighborhoods there.

LATIF: Like Chihuahuita and El Segundo Barrio.

SILVESTRE REYES: I walked those neighborhoods and I talked to them. And they thought the Border Patrol was a disaster.

LATIF: But instead of saying that the Border Patrol was overreaching, that they were doing too much ...

SILVESTRE REYES: They felt that the Border Patrol had failed them.

LATIF: ... they were upset that Border Patrol was not doing enough.

SILVESTRE REYES: Had let them down. And the people that lived on those neighborhoods, they felt like they were under siege.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: We have been burglarized three times by illegal immigrants. Our little girl is scared!]

LATIF: People complained about burglaries, about loitering.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: People selling their fruits, and knocking on doors, asking for money.]

TIMOTHY DUNN: They didn't like to have to deal with vendors all the time, or people begging. And they didn't like having stuff stolen off their backyard.

SILVESTRE REYES: A garden hose, a lawn chair ...

TIMOTHY DUNN: Stuff stolen off their clothesline.

SILVESTRE REYES: ... gone overnight.

LATIF: And so what these people living right on the border wanted was more Border Patrol to stop what they perceived to be, you know, migrant petty crime.

JAD: Huh, so he's really getting it from both sides here.

LATIF: Yeah. It's like the whole city's coming at him.

SILVESTRE REYES: We were with one foot on a banana peel of getting driven out of town.

LATIF: Yeah.

SILVESTRE REYES: And so I had to change that. And I didn't have a lot of time to do that.

ROBERT: Okay. So what does he do?

LATIF: Well he had an idea, a pretty radical idea.

SILVESTRE REYES: I knew there would be political pressure, there would be public outcry.

LATIF: And so he takes this idea around to a bunch of high-level people.

SILVESTRE REYES: The mayor of Juárez, the mayor of El Paso.

LATIF: People at the Mexican Consul in El Paso.

SILVESTRE REYES: Our consul in Juárez.

LATIF: The sheriff in El Paso.

SILVESTRE REYES: Chief of police of Juárez and El Paso.

LATIF: And he's going to each one of them and basically saying "Look ..."

SILVESTRE REYES: Look, if we're able to correct this thing ...

LATIF: "... if I can quell the chaos ..."

SILVESTRE REYES: ... would they support the Border Patrol? And they said yes.

LATIF: Okay, so here's what I find so fascinating: it's September of '93, and while Reyes is hatching his plan, at the same time at the El Paso Civic Center, on this one particular weekend, the United El Paso people are having this big convention talking about how we can try and create this borderless community.

TIMOTHY DUNN: All sorts of local officials and civic leaders there hammering out their proposals and everything, and presenting it to the audience. And that same weekend ...

LATIF: Silvestre Reyes rolls out his plan.

TIMOTHY DUNN: He wanted this to be a surprise.

SILVESTRE REYES: So we launched the operation at midnight.

LATIF: So it's September 18, 1993.

SILVESTRE REYES: Saturday night.

LATIF: Reyes gathers all of his Border Patrol agents, 400 Border Patrol agents, from all over his sector.

SILVESTRE REYES: And I briefed every single shift of agents myself. And I told them what was at stake. I told them that if this thing didn't work, they were gonna run us out of town.

DAVID HAM: My initial reaction was wow, this is gonna be interesting.

LATIF: Retired Border Patrol agent David Ham was there with his anti-drug smuggling unit, and he says after the briefing ...

DAVID HAM: We drove up the border highway on the Mexican side, and we got to downtown Juárez and the levy area about sunrise.

LATIF: And so he and his agents are waiting right at the Rio Grande.

DAVID HAM: The sun came up.

LATIF: And he said there, at the border, he just saw ...

DAVID HAM: Wall-to-wall border patrolling.

TIMOTHY DUNN: A wall of agents along the river, a hundred yards apart. Each one in their trucks, light green trucks.

LATIF: There were helicopters ...

TIMOTHY DUNN: Buzzing ...

LATIF: Low along the river. There were floodlights everywhere so the agents could be out there.

TIMOTHY DUNN: Round the clock.

SILVESTRE REYES: 24 hours a day.

LATIF: Basically what Reyes had done is he had created a human wall on the border at the river that stretched for, like, 20 miles.

JAD: Whoa!

SILVESTRE REYES: And I had told my guys, we're in this for the long haul.

LATIF: What Reyes was doing—this was his plan—was to essentially change our strategy on the border, how we police the border.

SILVESTRE REYES: From a strategy of apprehension ...

LATIF: Of letting migrants come in, and running around chasing them, sending them back.

SILVESTRE REYES: ... to one of deterrence.

LATIF: And he called it ...

SILVESTRE REYES: Operation Blockade.

LATIF: Operation Blockade. Day one ...

SILVESTRE REYES: On Sunday morning like they always did ...

LATIF: ... hundreds of Mexican migrants ...

[NEWS CLIP: Vendors, construction workers, housekeepers.]

LATIF: ... came down to the Rio Grande River, waiting to cross into El Paso for work. But now they were confronted with ...

[NEWS CLIP: The Berlin Wall on the border.]

SILVESTRE REYES: Border Patrol agents ...

[NEWS CLIP: Lining the entire river bank ...]

SILVESTRE REYES: ... on the line, where they would have to wait them out.

[NEWS CLIP: Waiting to see when the Border Patrol agents will pack up and leave.]

LATIF: By the time night falls, the migrants, they just turn and go home and figure, "Okay, I guess we'll just come back in the morning."

SILVESTRE REYES: They came back Monday and we were still there.

LATIF: And that's when this starts to get chaotic.

[people yelling]

LATIF: Day two ...

[NEWS CLIP: News 7's Amy Jacobson is standing by live under the Paso del Norte Bridge where the incident occurred.]

LATIF: ... hundreds of Mexicans took to the main bridge that connects El Paso and Juárez.

[NEWS CLIP: An estimated 800 Mexican protesters closed the Paso del Norte Bridge and confronted Border Patrol.]

SILVESTRE REYES: They burnt tires, they blockaded traffic.

[NEWS CLIP: Began throwing rocks and bottles at agents.]

LATIF: There were skirmishes. One agent was struck in the face with a rock.

[NEWS CLIP: Blood and bandages still litter the area.]

SILVESTRE REYES: Now by that time, there was screaming going on.

[NEWS CLIP: This is racist. It's fomenting racism.]

LATIF: There are all these headlines in the newspapers ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: There are better ways to do this.]

LATIF: ... basically saying this new strategy, this is wrong.

[NEWS CLIP: Operation Blockade is nothing more than an attempt to divide the community.]

LATIF: Reyes says the mayor of El Paso, who he briefed about the operation, is denying ever knowing about it.

SILVESTRE REYES: So I called him and I said, "Mayor." He says, "Chief, I just didn't know what to do."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bishop Pefia: How many children are going hungry because their parents cannot come to El Paso to work?]

LATIF: The local bishop came out and criticized Reyes.

SILVESTRE REYES: He said it was inhumane to do what I was doing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bishop Pefia: How many will suffer cold this winter if the blockade continues?]

LATIF: And this is only day two of the blockade. By day three ...

[NEWS CLIP: A throng of around 200 occupy the Pasa del Norte ...]

LATIF: ... things continue to get worse. Day four, more protests. Day five, six, seven ...

SILVESTRE REYES: At the end of the week, people were starting to get really desperate. But a remarkable thing happened that I didn't plan for.

[NEWS CLIP: The banners on private property are out to show support for Operation Blockade.]

SILVESTRE REYES: The support for the border patrol just—pfft!—skyrocketed.

[NEWS CLIP: These—they're out there support enforcing the laws.]

SILVESTRE REYES: People that lived on those neighborhoods that felt like they were under siege and the Border Patrol had failed them, they came out with these huge banners of "We support our Border Patrol."

LATIF: They tied ribbons on their cars.

SILVESTRE REYES: They came out with donuts and coffee.

LATIF: For the Border Patrol agents who were on the line. It was like all of a sudden there was this sort of flip.

TIMOTHY DUNN: People locally loved it across racial and ethnic lines.

[NEWS CLIP: [speaking Spanish] We've seen crime go down a lot here in El Paso.]

LATIF: Because over time, what happened during this blockade was two things. One ...

[NEWS CLIP: "We've seen it reduce crime" is one of the most popular reasons these El Pasoans are in favor of Operation Blockade.]

LATIF: ... crime goes down. Now it's hard to tell whether this is actually because of the blockade, but there's a reduction in petty crime, something like 15 percent.

[NEWS CLIP: For the local residents, that's the bottom line.]

LATIF: And a second thing—and this is way more surprising—was that for Mexican Americans, who'd been harassed by the Border Patrol presence in their neighborhoods, they start to notice that ...

[NEWS CLIP: You just don't see the agents anymore.]

LATIF: ... the agents were gone.

TIMOTHY DUNN: Right. Right, it completely cleared them out.

LATIF: Because now they were all down on the border. So there's this—you know, this tidal wave of support. Like, virtually everybody locally in El Paso, both sides, are really happy with what he's doing. He seemed to solve the problem in one fell swoop.

LATIF: What was the reaction at Bowie High School?

SILVESTRE REYES: The principal called me.

LATIF: Yeah.

SILVESTRE REYES: Paul Strelzin was his name. He's passed away now. He called me and he said, "Chief, I hope you—I hope you've thought this out because you have given us our campus back."

LATIF: But right in the midst of all of this, Silvestre Reyes gets a phone call. A phone call from Washington, DC.

SILVESTRE REYES: Saying, "You gotta stop this."

JAD: We'll tell you all about that phone call and what falls out of that call after the break.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Adam McBride from Laporte, Colorado. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: This next part of the episode contains some moments that are very graphic, that depict death in a pretty brutal way. If you're squeamish or you're listening with kids, maybe turn—maybe think about skipping this part.

JAD: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab. This is part two of our border pa-trilogy from reporter Latif Nasser. When we left the story, Silvestre Reyes had put into place Operation Blockade.

ROBERT: Which was then renamed Operation Hold the Line.

JAD: And everyone in El Paso seemed happy.

ROBERT: Very happy.

LATIF: Yeah. But people in Washington, DC, were not, because the Clinton Administration, they're about to have this vote on NAFTA. They're talking about free trade, and then this guy, this little guy in El Paso, he's created a blockade.

TIMOTHY DUNN: And it's looking like it's gonna be a little closer than they thought, and the last thing the Clinton administration needs is any controversy over this.

LATIF: And so right in the middle of Operation Blockade, Reyes gets a phone call from his boss's boss's boss.

SILVESTRE REYES: Have you ever met Janet Reno?

LATIF: No!

LATIF: Janet Reno who's the Attorney General.

TIMOTHY DUNN: The Attorney General.

SILVESTRE REYES: She's a big lady. Very imposing. I like her. I mean, even back then when she was hammering away at me I liked her. And she wanted to talk to me. And she started using talking points of why it was the wrong thing.

LATIF: Yeah.

SILVESTRE REYES: Political consequences, international ramifications, blah blah blah.

LATIF: Yeah!

LATIF: He has this sense, "Okay, I'm—I'm about to be fired." [laughs]

SILVESTRE REYES: Oh yeah.

LATIF: But he says to her ...

SILVESTRE REYES: I said, "Madam Attorney General, with all due respect, do me one favor." I said, "Come and visit El Paso. Just come and visit El Paso."

LATIF: Yeah.

SILVESTRE REYES: I said, "Because you are making these statements, with all due respect, without knowing the difference that it's made in El Paso." I said, "Please come to El Paso." She—silence, and I said, "Oh, crap." But she says, "I will be there Tuesday."

LATIF: So Janet Reno flies to El Paso. Reyes sets up a bunch of meetings for her.

SILVESTRE REYES: And I told her. I said, "Look, I'm not gonna be there because I want you to hear it unfiltered and without me being there."

LATIF: Yep.

LATIF: As he tells it, Janet Reno sat down for all these meetings with all these local business people, and she was so blown away by what she heard, how happy everyone was with the situation, that she put aside the fact that Mexico was pissed, put aside NAFTA ...

SILVESTRE REYES: And she came back and she—she shook my hand. Very impressive.

LATIF: Hmm.

SILVESTRE REYES: "What you've done here is amazing. What people are telling me is incredible." I mean, she went on and on. She says, "I'm going back and I'm gonna tell the President that he needs to hear you talk about this operation."

LATIF: Wow!

SILVESTRE REYES: I said, "The President of the United States?"

LATIF: [laughs]

SILVESTRE REYES: "Yes."

JAD: Wait, she just changed her entire view after—after one visit?

LATIF: That's what he says. And apparently, she was barely there for a day.

JAD: What?

LATIF: I wish we could get Janet Reno's take on this, but unfortunately she died in 2016. But her change of heart actually makes a certain kind of sense.

DORIS MEISNER: I mean, there was a real—a very important political element to all of this.

LATIF: That's Doris Meisner. She was at the time the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service—basically Janet Reno's number two when it came to the border. And she says that at that moment that Janet Reno was in Texas touring El Paso, the Clinton Administration had a big problem on its hands because about a thousand miles west ...

DORIS MEISNER: Californians are up in arms about the illegal immigration that is coming into California.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dianne Feinstein: Where 40 percent of the babies born on Medicaid in California today are born of illegal immigrants.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Of course we're gonna enforce the borders. I agree.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We are gonna take back California.]

LATIF: You had this wave ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Do you like Americans?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yeah!]

LATIF: ... of anti-immigrant sentiment and initiatives like Proposition 187.

[NEWS CLIP: Proposition 187 attempts to solve the state's illegal immigration problem by denying services to illegal immigrants.]

LATIF: Super hardline measure ...

[NEWS CLIP: The measure passed by 59 percent of the state's voters.]

LATIF: Passed by a wide margin. And the Clinton Administration was definitely paying attention.

DORIS MEISNER: Because California is California.

[NEWS CLIP: The largest electoral college prize in November's presidential election.]

LATIF: And keep in mind, California had been a red state from 1968 all the way to 1992. Clinton was the guy who broke the cycle, and if he was gonna get reelected ...

DORIS MEISNER: California had to continue to vote for the Clinton Administration.

LATIF: So one of the things that might have changed Janet Reno's mind—or more importantly her boss, Bill Clinton's mind—was that they saw in El Paso a potential solution to the California problem. If they could make illegal immigration way less visible as Reyes had done in El Paso, maybe they could hold the state.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Janet Reno: I am pleased to be here today with the INS Commissioner Doris Meisner.]

LATIF: February 7, 1995.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Janet Reno: And a special hero of mine, Chief Silvestre Reyes of the El Paso Border Patrol. We have just come from a meeting with President Clinton, at which time he signed a presidential memorandum directing our agencies to move forward with new initiatives to gain control of our border and better enforce our immigration laws.]

LATIF: This was the first national border patrol strategy.

DORIS MEISNER: That's right. I spent a great deal of time on it. Things had not been done that way before, and it was a—it was a fundamental change in strategy.

LATIF: According to Doris Meisner—and she really was the architect of this strategy—the idea was to take what Reyes was doing ...

DORIS MEISNER: Which was very clarifying ...

LATIF: ... and scale it up.

DORIS MEISNER: There were basically four major crossing corridors along the Southwest border.

LATIF: In each of those four spots, they were gonna amass border patrol agents on the border—not behind the border, not in the city where they piss off the locals, but directly on the border.

DORIS MEISNER: Concentrate resources.

LATIF: Starting, of course, in California.

DORIS MEISNER: Our strategy was to start in San Diego, because that was the highest crossing corridor. Maybe 45 to 50 percent of the crossings across the entire Southwest border were happening in the San Diego sector. We start in San Diego with Operation Gatekeeper.

LATIF: That's what that one was called.

DORIS MEISNER: We then moved to, I believe, Arizona. And I'm just trying to think of what we named that operation.

LATIF: Safeguard. Was that it?

DORIS MEISNER: Oh, Safeguard, that was—right, exactly. And then the fourth was South Texas.

JASON DE LEÓN: All of a sudden now, in 1994, the Border Patrol publishes this, what's called the Strategic Plan, also known as Prevention Through Deterrence.

LATIF: This is Jason De León again, the anthropologist who started us off on this whole series.

JASON DE LEÓN: They write in this policy document, "We know the border cuts across a whole bunch of very difficult environments. If we disrupt traditional crossing places—urban ports of entry—and we push people towards these extreme environments, they will have to cross rushing rivers, mountainous terrain, places that—where you can freeze to death, where you can die of dehydration. But the extreme environment will slow people's movement, will make them easier to catch, and will also perhaps stop them from coming."

LATIF: In other words, after Reyes, it became our national strategy to push people away from urban areas and use, say, the desert as a kind of natural deterrent.

DORIS MEISNER: The thinking was that that would be a natural geographic, you know, ally that would take care of the rest. Now one of the things of course that we learned is that that didn't hold.

LATIF: Because in the '90s, the Mexican economy was struggling so people still needed jobs. And then on the American side, farms and businesses were still happy to hire them, so people still crossed, except now, they weren't crossing through the cities, they were crossing through the desert where no one was watching.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck, they didn't know their own names."]

LATIF: Just like in Urrea's book, The Devil's Highway.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Couldn't remember where they'd come from, had forgotten how long they'd been lost."]

LATIF: And so that's why in the late '90s, you see the number of people dying in the Sonoran Desert overnight start to skyrocket.

JASON DE LEÓN: You go from five to ten bodies to—to hundreds.

LATIF: By 2002 or so, the numbers in Arizona are up around 150 deaths per year. A couple years after that it goes over 200. Those are the official Border Patrol numbers that they report based on the number of bodies found. But after Jason had that experience, finding an arm in the desert and not being able to locate the rest of the body, he started to wonder whether those numbers were accurate or not. How many more people might be dying out there who are never found, never counted?

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah.

LATIF: Which, for Jason at least, became a scientific question.

JASON DE LEÓN: About what happens to bodies in the desert.

LATIF: How fast do they decompose?

JASON DE LEÓN: And what ends up happening is I just kind of hit the library, scoured the literature. You know, there's body farms where we do this in Tennessee, Texas.

LATIF: Jason found this one paper that suggested that when bodies are decomposing in the desert, the heat and the dryness can drastically slow that process down.

JASON DE LEÓN: This idea that the desert's gonna conserve a body, is gonna mummify and then people will be out there forever.

LATIF: According to that paper it could take up to six months for a body to decompose to the point where you'd be able to see the bones.

JAD: Wow.

LATIF: But the remains in that study were collected in a bunch of different areas under different conditions—sometimes even indoors.

JASON DE LEÓN: No one had done a kind of in situ in the desert. We had literally no—no scientific data on that at all. And so I started getting really interested in is there a way to—to do some science around this?

LATIF: He eventually roped in an assistant named Kate Hall.

KATE HALL: Kate Hall, and I'm a physical anthropologist.

JAD: What's a physical anthropologist?

KATE HALL: A physical anthropologist is someone who studies—they study human bones, and they try and infer what someone's life and death was like from skeletal remains. And Jason pretty much came up to me and told me that he'd been thinking about getting some pigs.

JAD: Pigs?

LATIF: Pigs.

JASON DE LEÓN: Pigs have long been the common proxy for human bodies, you know, for crime scene stuff. Like, they—they shoot them, they bury them, and they—you know, and they use them for these different sort of decomposition experiments.

LATIF: So Jason and Kate and the research team head down to Arizona.

JASON DE LEÓN: University of Arizona has a meat laboratory that deals with live animals. So we called up Jerome the pig euthanizer, and he came out.

LATIF: In this big truck.

JASON DE LEÓN: He comes out with these animals.

KATE HALL: Two pigs.

LATIF: 150 pounds each.

KATE HALL: Alive.

LATIF: Jerome shoots the pigs in the head right in front of them, and then Kate and Jason ...

KATE HALL: We got shoes and socks ...

LATIF: ... dressed their pigs ...

JASON DE LEÓN: ... bra, panties ...

KATE HALL: ... jeans, t-shirts ...

LATIF: ... in clothes that migrants would wear, because they wanted to recreate the conditions exactly. And then they took these dressed dead pigs out into the desert.

KATE HALL: Arivaca, Arizona. It's like another planet. It's like nowhere else I have ever been on Earth. It's hot, and saying it's hot doesn't really do it justice.

LATIF: It was like 110-115 degrees Fahrenheit.

JAD: Whoa!

KATE HALL: So ...

LATIF: Jason and the research team get together.

KATE HALL: In this big field. And we had one—one pig under a tree in light shade. We were trying to replicate, like, if someone was tired and needed to take a rest somewhere.

LATIF: And for the second pig Jason had heard ...

KATE HALL: From anecdotes from migrants ...

JASON DE LEÓN: Stories about people dying in their groups, and they would say, "Well, we didn't want to leave this person behind but we had to because they were dead."

LATIF: So they would cover their body with rocks ...

JASON DE LEÓN: In hopes of protecting them from animals.

LATIF: So they placed these two pigs, one in the shade, one under rocks in the sun, and they set up a series of motion-sensing cameras all around the perimeter of the area to watch both pigs. These are the kinds of cameras that turn on if something moves.

KATE HALL: Right. We set up the cameras under a very, very, hot sun.

LATIF: And then they waited. And remember, based on what Jason had read, the prevailing idea was that bodies in the desert don't decompose until, you know, six months in ...

KATE HALL: To around nine months in.

LATIF: And that would make the likelihood that they'd be found higher, which might suggest that the official numbers are accurate. Regardless, the assumption was that these bodies would be laying around for a while.

KATE HALL: But ...

LATIF: Pretty quick, something moves and triggers the camera. So this is footage of the pig that was in the shade.

KATE HALL: And on the cameras you see ...

LATIF: This pig, just under a tree lying on its side. It's wearing his little white shoes, it has jeans on.

KATE HALL: It's bloated, but it's intact. And then ...

LATIF: Later that night, camera comes on again. It's night vision. You can see the pig again. And then you see this vulture a few feet away from the pig ...

KATE HALL: Kind of looking at it. Kind of checking it out.

LATIF: ... just standing there.

KATE HALL: And then after a couple of hours ...

LATIF: Camera comes back on, and now there are eight vultures on top of this pig.

KATE HALL: Pecking and ...

LATIF: Tearing. A few hours later ...

KATE HALL: They—they go in. They make a hole in the back of the neck, kind of like—kind of right behind the ear. And they're trying to get at the brain. And then they pull off the shirt. They eventually rip the jeans off.

LATIF: By noon of the fifth day there are hoards of vultures.

KATE HALL: You see them attack the abdomen, rip open the stomach and then you see intestines being pulled out. And then you have two vultures come in front of the camera, and they're playing tug of war with these intestines. And they start to take apart the limbs. They'll actually, like, carry them away. They will carry limbs as, like, convenient packages of meat that they can eat later.

LATIF: On day seven ...

KATE HALL: They dragged what was left of the body about 20 meters up a hill, and within nine days, they had picked it—picked it clean. Everything's been pulled apart and just scattered all over the place.

LATIF: After nine days, there's hardly anything left.

JAD: Nine days?

LATIF: Yeah.

ROBERT: So they thought it might take nine months, and now it's down to nine days?

LATIF: Mm-hmm. And that was the pig in the shade. The pig in the little rock hut? That pig went way faster.

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah. That was within 24 hours vultures had started feeding, and just got in underneath the rocks and ripped it up. Because we had really forgotten that—that rocks conduct heat. So it literally cooks the body and speeds up this process.

KATE HALL: It completely defied expectations. This wasn't what we were expecting at all.

LATIF: And were vultures the only scavengers that you were noticing?

KATE HALL: Not the only scavengers. So we saw some ravens.

JASON DE LEÓN: Domestic dogs.

LATIF: [gasps]

JASON DE LEÓN: Even—so this town of Arivaca where we work in, a lot of people die nearby, and they have these, you know, kind of ranch dogs that are pretty wide ranging. And people have—I'd heard stories of people saying, "You know, my dog came home with a—with a piece of human bone."

JAD: Oh, wow!

JASON DE LEÓN: But these animals were—you know, were on our property eating these pigs.

JAD: I'm just now thinking of it from the point of the dog owner and, like, this dog comes in, gets on the couch and, like, licks your face.

JASON DE LEÓN: Oh, yeah.

JAD: That's the same tongue that might have been gnawing on a human arm.

JASON DE LEÓN: Exactly.

LATIF: And after the vultures and crows and dogs had had their way with these pigs, Jason and Kate told us that the desert started working in smaller, almost invisible ways.

KATE HALL: I had never seen this before. Like, we're used to flies and some beetles, but ...

JASON DE LEÓN: We have footage of ants ...

KATE HALL: Ants!

JASON DE LEÓN: ... consuming parts of long bones.

KATE HALL: They're chipping off pieces of bone and carrying them off to this ant hole a meter away.

JASON DE LEÓN: That was really shocking, and it kind of hinted at the fact that you leave someone out there for—for long enough, and they'll—and they will completely disappear.

KATE HALL: This is an environment in which people can become really easily just erased.

JAD: Well there's something about when you were describing the first moment when the vultures really sort of tear into the body, I found myself kind of recoiling, trying to protect my abdomen.

KATE HALL: I still have that reaction. There's something just so overwhelmingly human about this. You can't not take this personally.

JAD: Well, can we talk about the—the numbers for a second?

JASON DE LEÓN: Okay.

JAD: Because if bodies are decomposing and disappearing this fast, those Border Patrol numbers start to look suspiciously low. Do you have any sense, based on the speed of the decomposition, how many people we might be missing?

JASON DE LEÓN: Well, you know, it just—it just depends, I mean, on when people die, at what time of year. I mean, if you look—I guess a better way to do it is if you compare the number of missing persons reports with the numbers of recovered bodies, there's a discrepancy of thousands.

JAD: These are missing persons reports from ...

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah. These are people, like, leaving from Latin America and missing persons reports are either filed in the US by families already here, or from these sending countries. But thousands of missing persons reports more than—than actual recovered bodies.

LATIF: Thousands a year?

JASON DE LEÓN: Thousands of people go missing a year during this process. Starting ...

LATIF: Obviously, missing persons reports don't equate to deaths in the desert, but pretty much everyone I talked to—including some retired Border Patrol agents—agree that the official number is an undercount. Now when it comes to the actual number of deaths, nobody knows for sure. Depending on who you ask, the real number could be anywhere from twice to 10 times the official count. And if you think about the fact that that has been happening for 20 years, then what that high school history teacher Juan Sybert-Coronado told us at the end of our last episode doesn't sound so crazy.

JUAN SYBERT-CORONADO: Because of us, fences were built. Because the fences were built, maybe 10,000 people have died in the desert.

LATIF: Again, there's no way to verify that number, or any number, but the potential scale of it kind of forces you to ask who is responsible? Some of these people I've talked to said that the Mexican government needs to do more to stop people going into these areas. Others blame the smugglers who bring people over. Some people have said that the migrants themselves, it's their responsibility. They knew they were making this decision to come, if they die, it's on them. But the other obvious question is what about us?

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah.

LATIF: And what's clear, you know, according to Jason, is that US policymakers weren't exactly clueless about this.

JASON DE LEÓN: There were points where people were saying things like, "If we do this, if we funnel them towards the Sonora Desert of Arizona, if we funnel them towards the sort of backwoods of Texas, people are gonna get hurt, people are gonna die. But if enough people die, perhaps that will be the deterrent then that they will stop coming." And there are charts and ...

JAD: Wait. Wait, wait, is that—is that written down? That if ...

JASON DE LEÓN: Oh my God, yeah.

JAD: That death equals deterrence?

JASON DE LEÓN: There's a chart that I cite in the book—and this was one of the moments where I was—when I was doing the kind of archival research that just—just shocked me—where there was a point where someone had written this policy document, and then in one of the follow-up reports by the Government Accountability Office, some number cruncher or some policy maker, is sitting at a computer in DC, making an Excel chart where they're putting out different metrics to measure the effectiveness of this policy. And one of the metrics is an increase in migrant death. So there was a recognition that if death goes up, it means that this policy is working.

LATIF: I ended up finding the document Jason was referring to. It's a report from the Government Accountability Office from 1997. And it also mentions that in other areas, deaths might also go down. But I wanted to talk to Doris Meisner about it. She's, remember, the former INS Commissioner that helped take Silvestre Reyes' Hold-the-Line strategy national. And I actually read part of the report to her.

DORIS MEISNER: Yes.

LATIF: And there was this kind of one appendix in it. So it's called Appendix V, and it's "Indicators for Measuring the Effectiveness of the Strategy to Deter Illegal Entry Along the Southwest Borders." And one of the indicators was "Death—deaths of aliens attempting entry." And basically what it says is that—I'm sort of quoting it—that, "If the Attorney General's strategy is successful, deaths may increase as enforcement in urban areas forces aliens to attempt mountain or desert crossings." In effect, saying that if this strategy—if deaths increase in these treacherous areas, that's a sign that the strategy is working.

DORIS MEISNER: I do—I think I recall reading that because it's so—you know, it makes you gasp when you have to really think about what the—all the implications of all these things are. I mean, you know, this is one of the paradoxes of how is it that you go about doing work like this? It's absolutely clear for so many reasons that there needs to be border security. But I think it is fair to say that the idea that we had at the time, and the thinking that we put into place at the time, was too simple. What was much more difficult to take into account has been the tenacity of people coming to the United States, wanting to come to the United States, and the lengths to which people will go in order to do that.

JAD: Well, but there's another way to read this. I mean, the—the Appendix V, the sort of the thing that as you in your words you said, you know, could make you gasp, what that sort of says—I mean, one way to read that is that we took a problem that was very visible and we pushed it to places where we can't see it anymore. And we did that with full knowledge that—that people dying means we're doing the right thing. To me, Appendix V begs the question: I mean, what responsibility do we have for this? It doesn't quite feel like this is something that we can just shrug and say we didn't know this was gonna happen. It feels like we knew damn well this was gonna happen.

DORIS MEISNER: You know, when you ask the question what is our responsibility—and when you say "our," I think—and I take that to mean what is our responsibility as a nation—the answer at the time and the answer still is that the enforcement will do everything that it can to prevent people from crossing in dangerous areas, but that cannot include no longer doing enforcement across the border.

LATIF: Now Doris says that, you know, once they started to realize these numbers had spiked and that people were going through these areas, they started doing a lot of public awareness campaigns ...

DORIS MEISNER: ... and information campaigns.

LATIF: ... warning people about the dangers of the desert.

DORIS MEISNER: Efforts devoted to safety on the Mexican side.

LATIF: And they created a whole new search and rescue unit.

DORIS MEISNER: So there were all kinds of efforts to address it, but I will be absolutely frank with you, the idea of abandoning any kind of strengthened border enforcement because of that consequence was not a serious—not a point of serious discussion.

LATIF: And the policy never really changed in any substantive way. There was a—there was a later report that came out from the Government Accountability Office in 2006 that basically said, "Look, you've done all these safety measures, but the deaths in the desert are still going up."

LATIF: Doris Meisner was no longer head of the INS at that point, but after reaching out to a whole bunch of people who wrote that report and the people who received it and hearing nothing back frankly, I finally got in touch with the Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under President Bush at the time, Ralph Basham—now retired—and he told me he remembered reading that report. He said that he thought about those deaths all the time, every day, but in the end he said it was just politically infeasible to back off the enforcement at the major crossing points, or to get enough Border Patrol to really control dangerous areas like the desert.

LATIF: And in the end, the US government didn't make any substantive changes in response to the rise in deaths. And I guess you could read that as a lack of political will or indifference, but Jason actually argues that we were giving a sort of tacit blessing to this system that was killing all these people because it kept this problem just swept under the rug.

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah.

JAD: Are you saying that the US government, or whatever portion of it is responsible for this policy, is knowingly killing people?

JASON DE LEÓN: I would say it's knowingly putting people in harm's way, and they know that there is a high likelihood that a certain percentage of people are gonna die and have been dying.

LATIF: So it's like—so it's like they're having nature do their dirty work, that's kind of what you feel like?

JASON DE LEÓN: Absolutely. I mean, I would say 100 percent that nature is an agent of the Border Patrol. It's this kind of unsung hero of the Border Patrol. They're not on the payroll but they do all this work. The environment beats up on migrants, and then those who don't make it, it just—it cleans up the mess as well. And nobody has to be accountable for this because it just disappears.

JAD: We asked Customs and Border Protection, which oversees Border Patrol, to comment whether they had tried to change their strategy to avoid migrant deaths. And they declined to answer.

LATIF: I wonder—I wonder if you feel somehow ambivalent about it. Like, obviously there are tradeoffs for everything, every plan has unintended consequences, but this—now this has happened, and these deaths are also happening. I wonder how you feel about it, if you feel somehow ambivalent about it.

DORIS MEISNER: I feel deeply ambivalent about it. I feel deeply sorry about it. I am very conflicted about it. I also know that migration is by its very nature an incredibly dangerous enterprise, you know, when it's illegal immigration. People coming up, you know, well before they ever get to the US border. People coming up through Mexico, through very dangerous areas where they are robbed and kidnapped and extorted. I mean, there are awful, terrible things that go on in this quest for a better life.

DORIS MEISNER: What I wish is that we would be able as a country to put immigration policies into effect that actually allow for people to come here legally, whom our economy is asking for in terms of the jobs that exist in the country. This system that we've been involved with for now decades of allowing illegal immigration to occur in sizable numbers, having work for people in this country, is indefensible. And the enforcement agencies are caught in between that. They're required to create border security, and yet there are these terrible costs. Those terrible costs would not be there if we as a country and as a political system would come to grips with the issue that is right in front of our eyes, and that we simply won't come together politically to answer.

DORIS MEISNER: We are a nation of immigrants. We are a country that believes in the rule of law. We can't—it is indefensible in light of that history and those values to have allowed this kind of an illegal immigration picture to go on in the way that it has for all these many years.

JAD: Wouldn't a wall—I mean, this is gonna sound—I mean, this is an intentionally naive question, but if what you're saying is that—that we need to save lives, whether—however you feel about the issue of immigration, isn't a wall more humane, given what you've just told us?

JASON DE LEÓN: Well, the wall's not gonna do anything. I mean, we know that—you know, I spend a lot of time now, most of my time is now spent with smugglers, who love the idea of a wall, because they're like, "Man, I can charge twice as much for this, for my services, even though it's really not gonna be that much harder." I mean, because people dig underneath it, they crawl over it, they fly over it, they take a boat around it. I mean, the wall itself is never gonna—is never gonna be a deterrent.

LATIF: And on top of that, I actually—I didn't even know this when we talked to Jason, but if you listen to the things that President Trump has said about the wall since coming into office ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: That doesn't mean 2,000 miles of wall because you just don't need that because of nature, because of mountains and rivers and lots of other things.]

LATIF: ... it would end up just being a sort of even stronger version of this policy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: There are large areas where you don't need a wall because you have a mountain and you have a river, you have a violent river, and you don't need it.]

LATIF: An even stronger funnel into these very places that are killing people and erasing any evidence of their deaths.

ROBERT: This episode of our border trilogy was reported by Latif Nasser with Tracie Hunte.

JAD: And it was produced by Matt Kielty with Bethel Habte and Latif Nasser. The third installment of our trilogy, where things get a lot more personal, is coming up in our next podcast, so stay tuned for that.

ROBERT: Big thanks to Jason De León whose book is called The Land of Open Graves.

JAD: And to Timothy Dunn, who's written a lot about this, including the book Blockading the Border and Human Rights. Special thanks to Oscar Cervantes, Jose Romero, Erica King, Joe Reyes and the rest of the agents that we met from US Border Patrol in El Paso.

ROBERT: And to David Ham and Liz and the rest of the staff at the Border Patrol History Museum.

JAD: And to Veronica Reyes Cintron.

ROBERT: And to former El Paso mayor, Larry Francis.

JAD: Retired Border Patrol sector chief, Ron Sanders.

ROBERT: And Robin Reineke at Colibri Center for Human Rights.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Rebecca Jordan calling from Dacula, Georgia. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar-Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Maggie Bartolomeo, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Amanda Aronczyk, Shima Oliaee and Jake Arlo. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.]

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