activism, Anarchist, Autonomy, California, Drug War, Environment, Immigration, June 11, Mexico, Political Prisoner, Prisons, repression, Transcribed, United States

Bridging The Rift Through Kumeyaay Territory + 2026 June 11th Call

photo of three children in dresses walking along the Tijuana side of the beach border wall next to graffiti and wheat pasted posters, plus "TFSR 6-7-26 | Bridging The Rift Through Kumeyaay Territory (Tijuana & San Diego)"
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This week, you’ll hear two segments

First up, a long sharing of perspectives from occupied Kumeyaay [Kum-ee-aih] land, the Mexico-US border. Devi Machete from Contra Viento Y Marea in Tijuana in the Mexican state of Baja California about the history and activity of that project and journalist and activist James Stout speaks from San Diego in the US state of California about desert conditions north of the border wall. For this chat, you’ll hear third-hand accounts of border crossings, imprisonment, and deaths in border regions but also about solidarity, organizing, and resistance among those on the move as well as the communities they encounter.

  • Transcript
  • PDF (Unimposed) – pending
  • Zine (Imposed PDF) – pending

After that, at roughly one hour and forty six minutes in, you’ll hear this year’s statement for the June 11th  Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and long term anarchist prisoners which will include perspectives of organizers, updates in folks struggles and conditions of confinement and reflections on solidarity and insurrection. Check the show notes for a few links and the time stamps of where this section begins. [ 1:46:45 ]

Past Interviews

Contra Viento Y Marea Links

Other Links

Announcements

Shine White Hunger Strike Continues

Many of you have been asking for an update, so here’s where things stand.

While at Scotland Correctional Institution, Shine was helping organize political education among prisoners and speaking out about conditions and serious medical concerns inside the facility. As many already know, he had a contraband cell phone. According to Shine, that phone contained recordings and information documenting conditions inside Scotland, including prisoners begging for medical attention. Not long after, Shine and others around him were transferred and separated across different facilities.

In mid-April, Shine was transferred overnight from Scotland to Granville Correctional Institution in what he described as one of the fastest transfers he had seen in 17 years of incarceration. Upon arrival, he was immediately placed on HCON (High Security Maximum Control). Shine maintains the placement was arbitrary, requested a grievance regarding that placement, and to our knowledge has yet to receive a meaningful opportunity to challenge it. He has been on hunger strike ever since.

Over the past few weeks, many of you participated in Calls to Action, making phone calls and sending emails seeking answers about his health, communication, property, grievances, and HCON status. Those efforts led to direct conversations with Assistant Regional Director Timothy Jones, who assured us that concerns were being reviewed and investigated.

Here’s the problem.

We have now confirmed through official records that Shine was already housed at Central Prison on the same date we were being given information that appeared to place him at Granville. We still don’t know whether that means the Regional Office had outdated information, didn’t know where he was, or something else entirely. What we do know is that the answers we were given don’t line up with the timeline we can now verify.

At this point, we have no direct communication with Shine. Updates are coming through fellow comrades who have been able to get word out through prison channels.

What we know right now:

  • Shine remains on HCON.
  • Shine remains on hunger strike.
  • Shine is housed in Central Prison’s medical unit.
  • Communication remains extremely limited.
  • Questions about his mail, property, grievances, and classification remain unanswered.

The transfer changed the address. It did not answer the questions.

This week we are launching another Call to Action. Supporters will once again be contacting Central Prison, the Regional Office, and NC DAC leadership seeking answers and accountability.

If Shine’s status remains unchanged and these concerns continue to be ignored, we are preparing for an in-person demonstration later this week.

If the goal was to make people stop paying attention, it didn’t work.

For updates and ways to get involved, follow the Instagram or other links at https://linktr.ee/shinewhitesupport

You can hear a prior interview we did with Shine White here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2021/01/17/shinewhite-on-turning-razor-wire-plantations-into-schools-of-liberation/

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Featured Track:

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Transcription

TFSR: Welcome back to the show. We’ve had Devi on the show in 2023 to talk about Contra Viento y Marea en El Comedor Comunitario. More recently, we had James on here to speak about his book Against the State. But we’re here this time to chat about mutual aid along the US-Mexico border. Could you please introduce yourselves further for the audience, with any names, pronouns, location, or affiliation that makes sense for this chat?

Devi: I’ll go ahead and start. I’m Devi Machete. I’m a migrant organizer with the mutual aid collective Contra Viento y Marea El Comedor Comunitario. We are located in the so-called Tijuana, along the US-Mexico border on the Mexican side, in the territory of the Kumeyaay. We are a small gathering of volunteers that comes together, primarily Central American migrant youth and other folks that have been deported, refugees that are coming from different places along Latin America, but also intersecting with folks who volunteer, who come down from San Diego and Los Angeles and other cities in California. Together, we provide free meals, free donation distro of everything you can imagine — all the things donated, clothes, shoes, and basic medicines. In addition, we put on a free school in the summer where we have folks volunteer to teach. It’s primarily geared towards people 18 and over, but it’s meant to bring together voices from the community that have expertise and want to share that expertise widely with the community. So we open up our doors to make classrooms out of the community kitchen. In previous iterations of our project, we’ve had a community garden, we’ve had free acupuncture clinics, we’ve had free medical clinics. We host a wide range of services and support for the community here.

James: I’m James, he/him. I live in Kumeyaa homeland as well, the northern side of what’s the US-Mexico border now — San Diego. I’ve lived here since George W. Bush was president, so I’ve seen a few different border regimes, and I participate with various mutual aid groups, but I don’t speak on behalf of any of them right now. I’m just me today. I do water drops when I can. I’ve recently participated in the construction of memorials for people who lost their lives in the borderlands. I have also spent a lot of time on the migrant route to the United States as a journalist. I went into the Darién Gap in 2024, and I’ve stayed in touch with my friends with whom I went through the jungle. I try to share their stories when I can, when I have a platform to do so, and try to help organize wherever I can for migrant aid.

In 2023, under the Biden administration after the end of Title 42 — almost exactly three years ago, it ended in May — I participated in the mutual aid project for migrants who were detained in what was called “outdoor detention,” which was essentially the Biden administration’s policy of leaving people in the desert without food, water, or shelter, which then was provided by mutual aid groups. I did a lot of that back then.

TFSR: Thank you both for being here.

James — a couple of quick follow-ups…with Title 42, was that the COVID regulation slow-down of traffic through the border?

J: Yeah, it’s part of the United States Public Health code. It’s not COVID-specific, it was much older than that. It was designed with tuberculosis in mind. It provided for what they generally called “catch and release,” where, if the United States authorities, chiefly Customs & Border Protection — which is broken down into Office of Field Operations and Border Patrol — encountered somebody who was entering the United States, they could immediately return them to Mexico, as opposed to the processing them and giving them their rights under Title 8, which would be their right to claim asylum and such. That created a disaster. It came in combination with other Trump-era policies, like the MPP, the Migrant Protection Policy. It wasn’t that. It’s an Orwellian name.

But the Biden administration kept Title 42 for much longer than the Trump administration. They defended it in court, and they used it on a lot more people than the Trump administration did, although it’s hard for us to know. The drum I will bang until everyone understands is that the Border Patrol always gives statistics under Title 42 in terms of encounters, and they will heavily imply that each encounter represents a unique individual. We know that’s not true, because we know people would be caught by border patrol, returned to Mexico, attempt to cross again, and be caught by border patrol. I’ve heard of people crossing five or six times. That is why you see these peaks in migrant encounters.

In the Biden era, Biden continued to defend that policy until the end of the COVID federal emergency, — which was in the middle of May 2023 — when, obviously, there was no public health emergency to use this public health law for. So they couldn’t do it anymore. When they couldn’t do it anymore, they moved to this policy of outdoor detention. Sometimes they would detain people between two border walls. In lots of the areas in which both of us live, they would detain people in between those walls, which resulted in the particularly abhorrent practice of us having to try and feed and take care of these people using only things that we could pass through a four-inch gap. It meant we couldn’t give people a plate of food. We had to squeeze everything through this gap in between these two walls. All our interactions with these people were mediated by this monument to brutality.

In other places, there was only one border wall, and it just stopped randomly. So people would cross through gaps between the walls, and then they would be left in the desert until Border Patrol decided to process them. In those situations, my friends and I would do things like build shelters and cook meals. If they needed to, we could contact emergency medical services for them. If people were having a baby or having a heart attack, or any number of things in between those things, we could contact EMS for them, bring them firewood, and spend time and be in community. That was a situation immediately post-Title 42 until Biden passed his asylum ban by executive order.

TFSR: Folks can look it up if they want to, but where exactly is the Darién Gap, and who is passing through it to where?

J: The Darién is between Colombia and Panama. If you look at a map of the Americas, it’s the very skinny bit where Central America meets South America. The best way to explain the Darién is that it’s very remote. There was a road that otherwise would have taken you from the Arctic to Patagonia. But it doesn’t go through the Darién; it stops before you get in, and it resumes about 70 miles later in Colombia. What that means is that it’s very hard for people making the journey to the United States to transit that area.

The reason people end up going through the gap as opposed to, say, flying to Mexico or any of the countries in Central America is that visas are imposed on much of the world by those countries. Brazil has not imposed visas, generally, on countries that don’t impose visas on Brazilians, and many states which are resource-poor don’t bother imposing visas on Brazil. They have no reason to. This includes most of Africa, and Haiti is another example. Haitian people went to Brazil also to help with the infrastructure construction for the Olympic Games that they had there, and then found themselves struggling for employment afterward. Many of those people then begin their journey north, and the hardest and most dangerous point — well, Mexico is also very hard and very dangerous for people, but in a different type of risk — one of the most dangerous points of that journey is going through the jungle. It’s a jungle. There are no roads to get there. To give an example: I flew, and then I drove as far as we could on a paved road, then we hitched a ride in a Jeep on a dirt road, and then I paid a guy to ride in his dugout canoe for a day, and then we walked through the jungle. It is very difficult to get to. It’s the homeland of the Emberá people, and I stayed with them. They were very hospitable, not only to me, but also to the thousands of other people traveling through their homeland.

Otherwise, the state is more or less absent there. Occasionally, you will see — the Panamanian Border Patrol and the military are the same thing — you’ll see the Panamanian state has some presence there, but for the most part, it has very little presence. As a result, migrants not only have to deal with the dangers of crossing the jungle, crossing deep rivers, often rivers that are deeper than they are tall, and many of them cannot swim, and they’re carrying everything they need to survive. But also the fact that they are subjected to anti-social behavior, even things like sexual assault. Sexual assault absolutely skyrocketed in 2024. For most of my job, I cover conflict. I have been to the Syrian civil war and other conflicts, and nothing I have seen has affected me as much as the things I saw there. Really horrible stuff, really desperate things. A lot of the people crossing have very small children, and — as Devi I’m sure can tell you — the people want a better future for their children, or if they don’t see a future for their children where they are, then they try to come somewhere where they can have a future for their children. People will do incredible things for their children. But nonetheless, it’s a dangerous place and bad things happen to people, including those children. That’s pretty fucked up. That’s why I made a series of podcasts about it that you can listen to if you want to hear more about it.

TFSR: I’ll be sure to link those in the show notes.

Would you both share a bit of the background and the work of the projects that you’re currently involved in? James, you did talk about some of the work that you’ve done in the last year around the double borders, for instance. But if you could both go into a little more detail about the work — whether you want to name any of the projects of if not, no worries — as far as mutual aid within the range of the border. Devi, if you want to start, that’d be great.

D: The project that I’m currently a part of is Contra Viento y Marea en El Comedor Comunitario. We are a collective that was founded by Central American migrant youth who arrived in Tijuana with the November 2018 Migrant Caravan. That’s the only caravan that made it all the way from Central America, leaving from Honduras and Guatemala, the only caravan that made it all the way to the US-Mexico border, out of the many, many, many caravans that have attempted the journey. When this caravan arrived at the US-Mexico border, there was an influx of 5,000-6,000 people who were in need of immediate assistance with all kinds of things, from emergency housing to food to medical care to legal aid. And a lot of folks from different parts of the US-Mexico border region, but also internationally, not just from the US, but other countries, came to Tijuana to support the migrants that had just arrived.

I was fortunate enough to come down with a collective I was with at the time called Hecate Society, Sociedad Hecate. It was a collective of femme, queer, radical land defenders, and we were doing land defense in northern Minnesota. That’s how we came together. We decided we wanted to come down and support the migrants who had just arrived. So we came down from the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St Paul, and drove down and did a couple of stops along the way supporting different projects that were doing mutual aid work in Tucson and other various points.

When we arrived in Tijuana, we began immediately organizing with the different efforts that were migrant-led, autonomously-led by the migrants themselves. We eventually linked up with this warehouse where about 500 migrants were living. They had set up their own kitchen, and they were providing free meals, not only to the folks living in that warehouse, but to those who were living on the streets and in tents as well, and to the greater community of Tijuana. There were local folks who were homeless, and there were folks who were in need in that area outside the Benito Juarez Sports Complex, which is in the northern part of the city, so right adjacent to the US-Mexico border wall. That warehouse had its own autonomous migrant-led team. They had the kitchen, they had a security group that was in charge of deescalating conflicts, walking the perimeter, and making sure people were safe at night. There were folks with families, kids, a lot of youth, and a lot of folks who were previously deported as well. The community was a very diverse, very robust effort to organize autonomously. They also selected a spokesperson and the team to receive donations and distribute them. We were really impressed by all the direct action and mutual aid tactics that were being deployed by this group of migrants in the warehouse. A lot of them hadn’t had previous organizing experience; they weren’t part of any collectives or mutual aid groups back in their home countries. They just knew there was a need, and they came together in a really impressive way.

There was one effort, for example, by the municipal government to evict them by force. It was around Christmas, either right after New Year’s or before New Year’s. They sent about 200 riot police to evict them by force in the middle of the night, I think it was two or three in the morning, and the migrants were able to see that they were coming, and they locked down the warehouse and chained the doors. Everybody inside the warehouse cooperated in the effort to keep themselves safe, took direct action into their own hands, and were successfully able to repel that attack by the municipal police at that moment. And we were really impressed when we saw what was happening. The next morning, we approached those who were in leadership roles and asked how our collective, Hecate Society, could be of more use to them, or how we could support their efforts. They indicated that they would like us to have a presence there more formally, because they felt that if there were Americans around or other folks from countries that were not Mexican, the authorities would be less violent towards them or would react differently because of our presence.

So they invited us to move into the warehouse, and some of us agreed to do that. We were simultaneously organizing the first LGBTQ shelter in Tijuana, specifically for migrants. There were other shelters that served that community, but they weren’t specially set up for them. This caravan that arrived had a contingency of LGBTQ migrants in it, and so when we came down, the goal was for us to initially set up a shelter for them, or help set that up, and then turn it over to the local community or to the migrants themselves to run it as they saw fit.

So we were organizing that shelter. We had already rented a house, and we were working on that effort simultaneously. Then some of us went to live in this warehouse. While we were there, we were able to help organize. We were able to build strong relationships with the folks there. The tactics of repression continued to escalate by the municipal government. The police ramped up the different methods of containing and controlling. For example, the municipal government ordered the trash collectors to stop coming by to pick up trash, and that made the local community furious, because they were saying that the migrants were responsible for inundating the community with trash. That created tensions with the local community there. They removed the port-a-potties that were set up outside the warehouse. So the repression just continued.

Another tactic that the municipal government used was that they would go in and tell the families with children that they were going to be charged with child abuse for having their children inside the warehouse because it was considered inappropriate for children. So with the removal of families with children, they could then escalate their use of violence and not have that caught on camera by the waves of reporters that were covering the migrant caravan living on the streets at that time.

After a long battle between the different authorities and the migrants trying to sustain themselves, fighting to have a dignified roof over their heads, they eventually decided that the repression had become too much and that they were going to relocate to a shelter. There was a shelter that opened its doors to them, but it unfortunately didn’t turn out as wonderful as we had expected. But they did eventually leave on their own terms to go to the shelter, and a lot of the folks that had been responsible for the kitchen team and for the main organizing groups decided they wanted to continue to keep organizing autonomously. With the help of various collectives and organizers, we raised funds to put up a space for them to continue organizing a kitchen. That is what Contra Viento y Marea is and became at that time. We opened up the first space where we were located in the Zona Norte, a few blocks from where that other warehouse was, and from there on, we continued organizing together until this day.

TFSR: That’s great. Thank you. James, did you want to?

J: Yeah, I remember that time really well. Actually, it’s funny, obviously a really difficult time, but a special time too, in a sense. For context, the local and national government was trying to move people to an abandoned nightclub that was south of there. They were moving away from where they wanted to be. If people are not familiar with the rhetoric around that caravan, this was during the midterms of the first Trump administration, and it became a political football for people who had never met anyone in that caravan and didn’t really care about them. Also, I should point out that anti-migrant and anti-semitic rhetoric about that caravan can be directly linked to the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, specifically reference to HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society folks who are present in a different way than the way that we are present, maybe, but are still present to help migrants. I saw HIAS in the first UN camp outside the Darién Gap, for example.

The stuff that we partake in on this side of the border keeps changing because of the landscape. The things that we do are many and varied. At times when traffic was higher, people tended to take very remote routes to cross the border. During the Biden administration, what that meant was that people were often coming through a remote and mountainous wilderness area that’s actually not that far from San Diego, but it’s still very rugged. I’m good at walking up and down mountains, I do it a lot, and I could walk all day long there and only go five miles. It’s just extremely rugged, extremely thick terrain. People would cross there and then walk and then attempt to surrender themselves to Border Patrol in order to begin their asylum process, as it’s their legal right to do.

So we would participate at that time in things like making sure that there was water for people who were walking, making sure that there were thermal blankets for people experiencing hypothermia. I’ve participated in water drops in several areas along the border, and we still do that. Try to help people safely complete their journey. We have also participated in the construction of memorials with my friends. Because that’s the final kind thing we could do for someone when the world has been unkind to them. And specifically, this country has created a — the language that the state uses is — a “deterrent.” Did they feel that killing people in the borderlands would deter other people from attempting to cross? Historically, we have seen that that’s not the case.

Yeah, we saw in the Biden administration record numbers of deaths. So we were there in any capacity that we could be to prevent that and to take care of people. As I said earlier, right during outdoor detention, that was a particularly intense time for us, because we had as many as a thousand people a day entering. This was a time people will remember, maybe if your politics were different or your news sources were different then, you would have seen Fox News or the New York Times posted up at a gap in the border wall, taking pictures of people. I really don’t like that type of journalism. People can listen to my podcast for an hour of me winching about this. Woody Guthrie wrote a song in 1948 about 28 migrants who died in a plane crash, who were being deported. They were going from Central California to El Centro, from where they would be returned to Mexico. The reporting in the New York Times noted the names of the pilot and the air crew and the two deportation officers, but none of the migrants. They were just numbers, and they didn’t get a story. We are here in 2026, and a friend of mine, whom I met in the Darién Gap, fell off the border wall in January of 2025, and she broke her leg. Somebody filmed her lying there with her leg broken and her little daughter crying. The New York Times published this video, and at no point in that video did they ask her name, did they ask why she’d cross the whole world to come here, did they ask what happened to her, did they ask what happened to her daughter, or ask all the things that they went through. As if none of that shit matters. It’s just another number, another story, another paycheck for someone.

So, another thing that I try to do — it is my job, my full-time gig, but also, I see it as very much part of the struggle for dignity — is give migrants a story, give them a name, explain to people why people do this, why people choose to risk their lives to come to this country, even when it seems so unwelcoming to them, so unkind. I hope that, in doing that, people can see themselves a little bit, because there really is not much difference. I came to this country when I was 21, I didn’t have to go through all that because of the country I came from, and the place I was born, and the class to which I belong, and the language I speak, and all of these things. But I hope that people, when they hear from migrants, can see themselves, and that will encourage them to be in solidarity with migrants. Because it’s really easy to “other” people, and God knows journalists make a lot more money than I do doing that, but I think it’s really important not to do that. And so what I try to do with my work is to encourage people to be in solidarity with migrants, to understand their struggles and their journeys and their reasons for making them, and to have a name and a face. Actually, not so much a face. I’m not really doing visual journalism because a lot of people come to America to get away from things, and those things can follow them. I think a lot of journalists are not considerate of that. This may also happen because a lot of journalists haven’t bothered to learn any languages other than English, and so they don’t know when people are asking not to photograph them. But if people are trying to get away from some form of repression, it doesn’t help to have their photograph on location blasted onto a news website.

Mostly, I talk to migrants, and in doing that, I try to help people understand migrants and migration a little bit more. As Devi said, one of the things that has really inspired me to participate more and do more is the kindness that migrants show to each other and the mutual aid that they construct among themselves. It solidifies my belief that everyone’s an anarchist until the world makes them something else. People will build these beautiful things. They’re not doing it because a dead Russian guy with a beard wrote it in a book. They’re doing it because that’s the way we take care of each other, and because it is natural to want to take care of each other. It demeans my humanity to see another human’s humanity devalued, and so we should both wish to maintain each other’s dignity, to maintain our own dignity.

I try a lot to reflect that in my own organizing, as someone who came to the US myself. I see myself as a participant in that. And it’s no more special when I carry water into the jungle than the Venezuelan guys who carry little children with whom they couldn’t even share a language. Little Nepalese children through the jungle in Darién Gap, or the Venezuelan guys who rescued my friend Primrose, his daughter, Kimberly, from a river when she fell in because she couldn’t swim, and they couldn’t swim either, but they decided to risk their lives to help a stranger. I try to participate in that same process, and I don’t think what I do is more special in lots of ways. It’s a lot less special than what those people do.

TFSR: Cool. Thank you very much, both of you, for sharing that. Devi, did you have any follow-up?

D: I did. Actually, I was thinking about what James was discussing, being careful about photographing migrants’ faces. That’s a whole thing for us, because we rely on taking photographs of the work we do in order to send it to our donors. For example, send them pictures of, like, “Hey, you submitted these donations. Here they are being given out.” For transparency and accountability. But here in Mexico, it is very dangerous to put people’s faces on social media without their consent. Especially vulnerable populations have a lot of care around that issue, because there’s a different culture of precarity in Mexico and in other places in Latin America, where there’s, for example, gang violence and organized crime. Folks in places where there are these non-state actors that are extremely well-organized and violent, they will take photos of subjects that they are planning to kidnap for extortion. So if you’re walking around in the community and someone takes a photo of you, it can cause a lot of distress, because if it’s not clear what the purpose of that photo is, it can mean you’re about to get kidnapped tomorrow. There is a lot of sensitivity around taking photos of folks.

But having said that, we used to post a lot more photos of the meal program, and we used to notify people, “Hey, we’re taking photos. Some of these will go online; if you don’t want your face shown, then turn around. Or you can move to this area for just a couple of minutes, and then you can come back in line for the meals.” But it requires a lot of sensitivity. And of late, on our social media pages, we haven’t been posting as many photos of people’s faces. During COVID, people wore masks, so we posted people’s faces with masks on. But there’s a lot of sensitivity around people being photographed, because folks are fleeing death threats from, for example, being charged what is called “rent.” In Tijuana, this happens as well. This is not just a feature of Honduras or another country in Latin America, but the organized crime charges local businesses for “protection.” So they have to pay them a fee that they decide. If you don’t pay the fee, they will come burn your business. They will kidnap your family. So every month, or every certain period, they come and collect. And they always send the same person to collect the “rent.”

This is a problem that has been escalating in Tijuana, where friends with an LGBTQ organizer, who is a trans matriarch, and she wants to open a shelter or a space a community center to welcome trans youth and other vulnerable trans family and community members, but she’s afraid that she’ll have to pay rent if she’s located further outside of the downtown area of Tijuana. So this is a real issue that people are holding back from constructing community spaces because they’re afraid of the way that organized crime will come and charge them just for existing, for no other reason. And if you refuse to pay, it becomes this whole death threat that you have to live with. Folks fleeing that violence from other parts of Mexico, where the war on drugs is much more brutal in a lot of ways.

Tijuana has its own dynamic. I’m not going to say it’s not brutal here, but there are different complexities in each state, where there are different trade routes, where drugs and migrants are smuggled, and the border region has always been very complicated, because we have an intersection of all the various criminal activities that are carried out. There’s the sex trade, there’s human smuggling, there’s the drug trade, there’s arms being trafficked from the US into Mexico, including military-grade weapons that have been going to the cartels. There was a scandal called “Fast and Furious” that Fox News was hampering about, but it’s actually something that the US supposedly added these trackers to weapons that they gave to the cartels, and then it turned out that they didn’t have the trackers. They basically armed the cartels.

So this is continuing to happen illicitly and explicitly, with the consent of both administrations. But there are other kinds of crime that happen here at the border. There’s organ trafficking. You name it, we have it. But the way that these things break down is unique in Tijuana and is stopping people from living ordinary lives. We have a lot of the intersection of US politics that are anti-migrant, layered on top of the brutality of organized crime, layered on top of the brutality of the Mexican government, which is also carrying out anti-migrant policies to this day. Even with the Sheinbaum administration, we have seen that she’s continued to carry out the policies of AMLO, of the former president, who hand-picked her to be her successor, and then she won the election overwhelmingly. We see a continued repression of migrants on all fronts.

In this context, it’s very difficult for folks to have, for example, just a photo taken when they’re receiving a meal at a free food program. And for us as organizers, it puts a target on our backs as well, because if it’s perceived that we have a lot of donations, that we have a lot of support, that could make us a target for extortion and kidnapping. So we’re really careful about our security, about also showing our faces or our names. I provide a lot of the representation for El Comedor, for our project, Contra Viento y Marea, because a lot of the migrants refuse to have their names identified in public. They refuse to have their photo or their image associated with the project just because of the situation where they’re fleeing gang violence, or if they refuse to join a gang, they can be targeted for assassination. A lot of the migrant youth from Central America who formed our project were fleeing from that situation. So they don’t want to represent our project. It’s become me who has the privilege of having US citizenship as well as having family in Mexico to represent the project, but I wish I didn’t have that role. It’s a migrant-led project. I wish they could be the face of it. But it’s really challenging at this moment, and hopefully one day the situation will change so that it can’t be that way.

TFSR: Yeah, thank you. That’s really important to point out, and because you had mentioned the continuity or changes between administrations, I wonder if you all can talk a little bit about what shifts you’ve seen between Biden’s administration and the second Trump administration on the US side of the border, with the various jurisdictions operating there, or some more insights into how things have changed or stayed the same from AMLO to Sheinbaum on the Mexican side of the border?

J: I can take a swing at the Trump stuff. A lot of people are absolutely appalled right now at the way migrants are being treated in the US, and they should be. But they should also have been appalled in 2023 when people were out there in the desert with nothing. And they should have been appalled in 1994 at Operation Gatekeeper and everything that came after that. They should have been appalled in 2020 when they dynamited Kumeyaay ancestors to build the border wall. So it can seem like there has been this dramatic change in the last two years. And there has been a serious change, but it has not been as dramatic as it might seem if you get all your news from NBC.

In terms of what it’s for us…the Trump administration will tell you there are no people crossing. That’s not true. There are still people crossing. We know this because, occasionally, people will be apprehended crossing, but also people will pass away crossing. Again, I covered in my podcast series a lady called Graciela who died. We could hear ice cream trucks in Tijuana, from where she died. We could see into people’s yards, like 150 yards from the wall, maybe. In the midst of the most surveilled place, — aside from Palestine, perhaps — on the planet, with literally millions of dollars of surveillance infrastructure within half a mile. So people still do cross, and people still do die, and so we still do have to do what we can to keep those people safe.

Then again, I think something that will seem shocking to people is that in America, the border comes to you. You don’t have to go to the border. Border Patrol operates within a “reasonable distance” of the border. The legal statute doesn’t define what a reasonable distance is. People seem to be confused about this, but Border Patrol interprets it to generally be 100 miles. That includes all of the coastline of the United States, and it also includes all of the coastline of the Great Lakes, which are international waterways, as they see it, and therefore a “border nexus.” So we have seen a lot more internal migration law enforcement, and obviously, this has taken the form of these ICE raids, which are often also CBP raids.

So for people organizing on this side of the border, a lot of focus has been on things like Know Your Rights trainings. I was in the Twin Cities in January, and we saw it there. The whole community is coming together to protect community members who are under threat. That is, these things are not brand new, but the scale is larger than it was. So that kind of organizing has come to play a bigger role in organizing in the US.

And then the fact that this increased state violence has made people’s lives harder to live. A lot of the people who came through the border in 2023 and applied for asylum have found themselves in extreme financial precarity, and in Southern California, that often manifests as them being unhoused. That is for the same reasons that many of us can barely afford or can’t afford a place to live, because they become vehicles of wealth creation for rich people. People listening to us are probably well aware of this. But the idea that you can have a “tough on crime,” or “clamp down on homelessness,” and still be pro-migrant, is bullshit, because we see these people getting cited for living on the streets, and that results in them then getting in trouble, which can result in them being deported.

So some of the struggle now is just very basic, taking care of people so that they can survive. Making sure that someone’s kid has diapers, making sure that everyone has something to eat, making sure that somebody living on the street or living in a car, the roof doesn’t leak, the car starts, so that they can move. All of these things are vital to people’s safety, and so a lot of organizing now has been about how we can take care of people who are already here, but who are in danger, because of the very difficult circumstances under which they’re forced to live.

That’s always been there, but it’s different. It’s even different from the first Trump administration, and certainly, during the Biden era, I was out in Jacumba, where a number of these open-air detention sites were placed an hour east of San Diego. If people have driven from San Diego to El Centro, it’s right before the big drop-off near a place called Valley of the Moon. Those outdoor detention sites are not there anymore. But for months after the last person left a detention site, my friends and I went out there to clean up trash, because every humanitarian disaster becomes an ecological disaster. We love the desert. We spend a lot of time in it, and so we want the desert to be clean, and so we went to pick up water bottles. Also, it meant participating in the really heartbreaking process of finding people’s personal effects, that they weren’t allowed to or weren’t able to take them with them any further. Like finding little children’s toys and little school bags and little books. Also tearing down the shelters that we built with our hands so people wouldn’t be freezing cold at night. That was and continues to be part of our work too. We still pick up trash in the desert, because these things aren’t distinct issues.

D: Thanks for that question. I think it sheds a lot of light on the way in which politics intersects with people’s lives on the ground, so that we can see how international and national policy filters down to the local level and communities, and we can see it in this question. Let’s start with the Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration, the previous president of Mexico, AMLO, for short, and Claudia Sheinbaum, who just won the election about a year ago. She’s the first woman president of Mexico. I think with AMLO, we had a president who was very popular. He created a new party called the Morena Party, which was previously nonexistent. He had been very pro-migrant in his rhetoric on the campaign trail prior to his winning. This was 2018. And some of the stances he had been in favor of were, for example, eliminating the Mexican Federal Police, which was a really popular idea, because people were really upset about the enormous amount of corruption inside the federal police force. When AMLO came into power, he did eliminate the Mexican Federal Police, but he created the National Guard, and the National Guard has been used to go after migrants, to be a new border patrol type of force. And he used it like a personal army and went after migrants.

Allegedly, it was going to be used to fight organized crime. But what we see with the revelations of the investigative journalist Anabel Hernández is that the AMLO campaign received contributions in the tune of millions of dollars from both the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, the CJNG. We see that both of these cartels that had the most influence, the one that had the most influence during AMLO’s time was the Sinaloa Cartel. They had the protection of some of the federal authorities. The corruption stemmed all the way to the top, and that was nothing new. This has been the case with all the previous presidents. Even with this new party, with this new president who came into office with a lot of popular support, the policies that he championed on the campaign trail did not apply when he was in power.

He had a lot of things that were reforms that didn’t really trickle down into serving the communities in the way that he had promised. For example, he had humanitarian visas issued. I’m not sure if those visas were already in existence in previous administrations, or if this was a creation of AMLO, but the humanitarian visas were only a temporary measure that allowed people to traverse the country from the South to the north in order to seek asylum in the US. That’s basically what the humanitarian visas were for. But they did not provide a pathway for migrants who were seeking regularization in Mexico. If they were going to try to seek residency, the humanitarian visa didn’t allow them to use the time that they were on that visa to then apply towards their residency claim. Or if you got the humanitarian visa, then you weren’t allowed to then seek refugee status in Mexico under the COMAR, which is the administration institution that processes refugee claims. There were various disadvantages that people felt they were coerced into taking this visa, and later on, were deeply impacted in their ability to get any legalization in Mexico.

Likewise, AMLO had a lot of pressure from the Biden administration, and I think it was the Trump administration, actually, when he came in. There was a lot of pressure that the Trump administration put on AMLO in order to coerce them to do various things that were anti-migrant, to, for example, extend the border wall, not just being the physical entity that stands at the US-Mexico border, but to create Mexico as a wall, to keep migrants from being able to reach the northern end of the country. There were a lot of policies in which, for example, the use of the National Guard to create checkpoints at all the major transit points in the country, allowing migrants to have to go through more rural, more dangerous areas, to be able to travel north. So there were a lot of policies that AMLO championed in rhetoric only, and then we saw that it was absolutely a disaster for folks who had to live under those policies.

When Sheinbaum came, AMLO had been a huge champion for Sheinbaum. In fact, he said, this is the person I want to carry on my legacy and my policies. Sheinbaum won the election overwhelmingly with popular support, in part because the other candidate in the race was so weak, was just so incompetent, was just so overly disastrous, that there was either the dumpster fire of the other candidate or Sheinbaum. So folks obviously felt like there wasn’t much choice. Then it’s been revealed by the investigative reporter that I mentioned earlier, Anabel Hernández, in her podcast, Narcosistema, that Sheinbaum also received millions of dollars of campaign contributions from both the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación. In these ways, the state protects organized crime from certain cartels and picks winners in the wars against each other that cartels have.

We saw with the recent murder of a leader of one of the cartels, his alias is El Mencho, who was assassinated by the state. After that happened, there was an upsurge of violence, a wave of violence that kicked off across the country. There were so-called narcobloqueos, where cars, convenience stores, and other assets were set on fire as organized crime protesting that the Sheinbaum administration had done that. Even though Sheinbaum had received contributions from the cartel that he represented, they felt it was a betrayal. So they took out that anger, that fury, on the public.

Of course, there was pressure by the US government to capture or arrest this person, because they wanted El Mencho extradited to the US, because they wanted to know what ties he had to the political class of Mexico. They wanted information about whether or not the Sheinbaum administration had been compromised by the cartels, and how far up the corruption goes. It’s very evident that it goes all the way to the top. And all of the different police agencies that are in the state, all the different militarized forces that Mexico has, there is clearly infiltration. The way that we can explain what is happening in terms of the political class is that it has been bought, it has been co-opted by the immense amount of money that is flooding into the coffers of organized crime.

We see that the policies that they represent are that the Sheinbaum administration and subsequent administrations pretend they’re fighting organized crime publicly. They put on this front of being really stringent and their policies against corruption and whatnot, and also of being in favor of the abolition of drugs and all of this. But behind closed doors, we see that they’re getting a lot of funds from the same entities that they’re supposed to be fighting publicly. This is not an accident. This is by design. What has been pointed out by other journalists in the past is that a lot of the contributions that have been coming for the setup of organized crime, like the first cartels, were, in fact, receiving donations or support from the CIA and from other US intelligence agencies. And so the creation of organized crime in Mexico is a creation of US policy in order to destabilize democratically-elected governments in Latin America.

This is something that we’ve seen time and time again, policies of regime change, where the US overthrew democratically elected leaders, installing military dictatorships, like in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, — for example, Operation Condor in the 1960s — using US intelligence agencies to come and infiltrate. This was under the pretext of fighting communism, but it still carries on today. Different names, different operations, but the result is the same: to destabilize different countries in Latin America and to institute regime change, putting in place people who are dictators in reality. They claim to have popular support, of course, and the right wing is funded a lot of the time by US intelligence agencies, for example.

This is stuff that is not history that happened long ago. It continues to happen to this day, and we continue to see the US pressure Mexico to fight the cartels, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the US is providing them weapons, is providing them cover, and is providing them funds in an attempt to have access to the natural resources in these countries. Mexico and Chile have lithium, and we have petroleum in Mexico. That’s a new feature as well that we’ve seen, which is that organized crime controls the illicit petroleum routes and sales and is making money from that as well, not just from the human smuggling and from the sale of drugs, but they’ve gotten into the illicit petroleum market. In Mexico, it’s called huachicol. And we also know that the armed forces in Mexico also traffic petroleum illicitly.

So there is just a ton of different intersecting issues here. But I think the point that I want to get across is that no matter what administration is in power, the policies of repression against migrants, the policies of war, of militarization of civil society, all have continued pace. And we see increased poverty in a lot of ways, even though the Sheinbaum administration has passed certain reforms using the guise of el bienestar, the public good. For example, there’s a bank that ALMO started, Banco del Bienestar, which folks can use instead of using the private banks. But these measures haven’t resulted in changes that we can say affect every person in society who needs support. We see that migrants, for example, have been turned into scapegoats for a lot of the problems of poverty and economic desperation that have been happening as a result of, for example, the free trade agreements that Mexico has been a signatory to, and other reasons.

We see that the exploitation of Mexico’s resources continues unabated, even though there’s a new administration. In terms of the way migrants live on the ground, I’ve mentioned some of the ways in which migrants live in precarity, from having no status. If you’re unable to get residency, or if you’re unable to get some document so that you can have a legal status, life is very dangerous, very precarious.

For example, you need to get a work permit to be able to work in the country. That work permit costs money. So how can people pay for a work permit if they have just arrived, traveling sometimes 3,000 miles from Central America, Haiti, or other countries? How are they expected to get funds to pay for a work permit if they just arrived in the country and are trying to get a job to be able to pay for the work permit in the first place? There are policies like that that are just catch-22s. People will do heinous things when they’re in desperation. That’s not to cast judgment morally on them. It’s more about saying that people in desperate situations will do desperate things. But I think that’s the point of creating poverty. That’s why poverty exists. It’s to create crime. It’s for people who have very few resources to turn on each other instead of turning to support each other.

That’s some of the dynamics that play out in the real world and where we live, and the situations where we see things that are affecting the migrant community, because there’s just immense, grotesque poverty in Tijuana, and it’s really difficult to wrap our heads around it when we cross over to San Diego and we see just the difference. It’s The Tale of Two Cities — it is the best of times in San Diego, and it’s the worst of times at the border and in Tijuana. A lot of the desperation that people have is coming from a place of trying to survive. We shouldn’t criminalize survival. We should make it easy for folks to get the resources they need, instead of denying them access to housing, shelter, free food, and health care. There are hospitals here in Tijuana that don’t care for migrants if they cannot pay. We’ve seen there was a recent migrant, I think, from Colombia, a woman who died because they refused to treat her at the hospital because she couldn’t pay.

Those kinds of abuses are also coming from the top. I want to emphasize that a lot of the vulnerability that people are facing is coming from policies that are carried out by the Mexican government, overlaid with the US government being here at the border, and that’s what’s really driving a lot of the different ways in which people sink into economic desperation and to fall prey to organized crime and other situations of harrowing terror that happen here at the border.

TFSR: Thank you. There was a lot in there.

James, do you have an immediate response to any of that you’d like to share?

J: I’ll talk about the National Guard for 10 seconds, because I think that is important. When people were coming through those gaps in the border wall, chiefly, this was because — my perception, at least — in 2020, towards the end of Trump 1.0 they were attempting to build as much wall as they could, in part to say they had built a certain amount of wall, and in part to build it, because that was the thing that they believed was good. So what they would do would be build a wall in 30-foot sections up to mountainous areas, and then they would get to a particularly rugged piece of terrain and stop and be like, “I’m sure the migrants wouldn’t go around this.” And, of course, the migrants just went around it. You had people flowing through literally gaps that were often 10 feet between the wall and a very rugged, steep mountainside.

The Mexican National Guard set up camps at those gaps under Biden. That is when people stopped coming in large numbers through those gaps, because there were literal technicals — like pickup trucks with machine guns in the back — parked in the gap to stop them from doing it. We saw this in several locations where people were doing that in Southern California.

D: And you’re referring to the national guard on the US side, or the Mexican?

J: The Mexican side. That’s a good clarification, because there was also the National Guard deployed to the border on the American side. They’re different. They’re not the same thing. But, yeah, that’s a good clarification.

TFSR: But they’re the national police force that was created in recent administrations in Mexico.

J: Yeah, as opposed to the US being part-time soldiers. The American National Guard has also been deployed to the border, albeit they were not there to, in theory, interdict migrants or to detain them. Because they’re not law enforcement.

I just wanted to point out that, as Devi said, cooperation, the border, and then that movement of the border south, to the southern Mexican border. Many people whom I met in the Darién Gap have been — they call it “deported,” but in technical terms, maybe it isn’t. They have been caught moving north in Mexico and moved back south into Tapachula, somewhere in southern Mexico. Generally Tapachula is where they tend to end up. And this happens countless times, where they’ve made progress north and then been moved back south. Maybe they’ve ridden the train and then been sent back to southern Mexico. So this externalization of the US borders.

I should also add that when I was in Panama, in Lajas Blancas, the first real state presence outside of Darién Gap, people will walk for several days and then arrive in Emberá village, and then the Emberá will transport them in piraguas, little dug out canoes, to this UN camp at Lajas Blancas. And that’s where they encountered a state. Often, they register their entry into Panama at that point, although sometimes they can also do that in Lajas Blancas. When I reached there, I was spending time with people. I saw people being deported by the Panamanian government from Panama straight back to Colombia, in most cases. That deportation was funded by US taxpayer dollars under Biden. And the Panamanian line is that those people had pending cases or warrants in Colombia. None of the people whom I spoke to —because we stayed in touch now they are back Colombia — none of them have been charged with anything. None of them was detained on arrival. They were flown back and then let go, just back to their lives. They’ve spent all the money they saved in their whole life, and they got booted right back to where they started. But none of them were charged. I’m not big on understanding legal prosecution systems in Colombia, but it strikes me that if they have a case pending, and they are delivered into the hands of the state, the state would then detain them or charge them. And none of the people I have spoken to have been detained or charged.

This border externalization goes a very long way, and the United States has done that for a very long time. It has funded, as Devi said, anti-democratic outcomes across the Americas. I’d like to say, you can listen to Washington Bullets by the Clash, and then you can find people in the song. Joe Strummer mentions all these countries where the United States has funded coups or overthrows of democratically-elected governments. And we can see the consequences of that on any given day in Tijuana. We can find people from each of those places where people have been denied the ability to make their own homeland better, and so they’ve tried to come to the place where they think they can have a better life. Then, of course, the United States kicks them out of the United States as well.

I want to highlight how long the United States has been externalizing its border. Great book called Empire of Borders, if you’d like to read more about that. Maybe I’ll also pick up a point from that text: all of the border security infrastructure, or much of it, much of the surveillance that impacts all of our border communities north and south of the border has been tested on Palestinian people for a very long time. Arguably, the border between Israel and Palestine is the most militarized in the world, but much of the technology comes from companies like Elbit Systems, based in Israel. Because companies there can very quickly prototype, develop, and test their products because of the militarization of that border and the amount of surveillance that happens there, and then they can sell them to the US as proven and tested. And that testing has happened for a very long time on the Palestinian people. And many of those same systems that surveil Palestinian people are also surveilling us in the borderlands.

TFSR: I think I’ve mentioned this in a past conversation, another good book that covers some of that testing on Palestinians is the Palestine Laboratory by Loewenstein, which talks about the international levels of different nation-states and fascist movements and prison regimes that have participated in developing, purchasing, and deploying that technology. Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about Border and Rule by Harsha Walia recently, which covers a lot of similar things as what y’all have been talking about in this conversation.

Just to think really briefly, in relation to the Sheinbaum administration and the Narcos and the US, last week, an interesting thing happened, where a couple of, CIA agents, along with some state officials, I think from Chihuahua, were killed after being involved in, supposedly, an action against some Narcos in the northern parts of Mexico. I wonder if anyone could speak about that, and if, without too much speculation, what they know about what’s going on with that?

D: I was actually going to mention this, and then I digressed into talking about other things. To round out the point about US intelligence agencies being involved in Mexico and participating in the drug war themselves. It’s still a developing situation. I encourage people to look into this for more information. But there were two CIA agents killed recently in Chihuahua, which is the state where Ciudad Juárez is, on the border of El Paso and Texas. The state of Chihuahua borders New Mexico and Texas. I’m not really sure about what their involvement was there, but just to say that they were carrying out some policy for the US government, and they were killed by organized crime. The governor of Chihuahua has been receiving a lot of backlash. A lot of folks in the country are calling her a traitor for allowing the CIA to get involved in her state. She’s with the PAN party, not with Morena which is the dominant party now in the country, but the PAN is a conservative party in the country. There’s been a lot of speculation about what they were involved in. It’s not clear, from what I understand at the moment, what exactly they were doing. But it just goes to show that this isn’t archaic history where the CIA has come and been involved in the drug war itself, and it seems their role is basically to administer which cartels are representing them on the ground, or which ones they are working with in collaboration.

The CIA has been known to participate in drug trafficking and do all kinds of other heinous things in Latin America. And there were, for example, with the Iran-Contra scandal, the use of arming the Contras using drug money that was coming from the illicit sale of cocaine was then used to fund right-wing military groups in Latin America. Of course, there was this element of Iran in the equation, of the CIA wanting to use funds to destabilize Iran. It’s a complicated history. I want to stick more to the topic of the border. There’s a long history of the CIA getting involved in the drug trade in Mexico, not to prohibit it, not to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, but in fact, to administer which routes are safe, which cartels get support and which ones don’t, and to use the state apparatus in Mexico to go after the cartels that are not aligned with US interests.

TFSR: I feel like, also in this first year of the Trump administration, too, there’s been at least a few instances where the administration has talked about Northern Command talking about deploying military to the border and beyond the border with Mexico. There were a couple of shutdowns of airports in southern Texas that have been related to the deployment of drones or concerns about drones crossing the border in relation to cartels. Not that it’s just this administration, but the Trump administration seems to be very much playing with the idea that they’ve already talked about, of escalating this into a more active war zone in that region alongside of the immense destabilization that it has for various communities on either side of the border, the Indigenous communities that straddle both sides of the border, the animals and plants that live in the area. It’s all rather frightening. And this plan of building a ton of ICE prisons along the border to create this nightmare in the region. I don’t really have a question associated with that, but if anyone wants to riff off of that, you’re more than welcome to. Otherwise, I can move on to a related topic.

J: I can riff off there, destruction of cultural resources, because it’s obviously a topic that doesn’t get covered enough. I’m a person who appreciates wildlife. I spend a lot of time looking at animals. I love animals. I do find it sometimes upsetting that there are outlets that have written many, many, many more words about the impact on bighorn sheep than they have on human beings. Maybe we could see a little solidarity with people as well as sheep. You don’t even have to stop being nice to the sheep. You could do both. You’re allowed to do that.

But the destruction of these incredibly fragile and beautiful ecosystems. I spent a lot of time deep in the desert, places where it can be dangerous for people. I wouldn’t suggest just meandering in there if you haven’t done much of that travel. Obviously, the reasons that we go there are, in part, because it is dangerous to go there. That means that it’s dangerous to people traveling through there, too. But I love that ecosystem. I am a desert person, despite having been born on a rainy island. There are things there. There are pieces of art that long, long predate the arrival of the United States in this area that are in danger of being destroyed by the creation of a barrier in a place that has not been the United States for very long. It became the United States in the middle of the 19th century, and it has been Kumeyaay land for far, far longer than that. It remains the Kumeyaay homeland today. A lot of the time, I saw a mule deer running along the wall, just running back and forth along the wall in the way that you see animals at the zoo doing, when they have zoochosis, which messes with their mental well-being, being locked up. Because she and her mother and her great, great, great, great grandmother had all gone that way to get water or to have their young, their foals, or to get food or to spend time away from the heat in the mountains at that time of year, whatever it was. And now this wall is here, and she can’t.

And I’ve seen so many other animals trapped by the wall. We were very lucky to live in a place that has wild big cats. But they didn’t respect the border, nor should they have to. But this wall will impinge on their habitat. We have seen rushed wall construction, often leading to the construction of a wall without flood gates. In these desert ecosystems, it’s not that it doesn’t rain; it rains rarely, but often we see flash floods when it does rain. And those flash floods will then carry debris, which normally can pass along these river beds, which have been there for hundreds and thousands of years, unless you put a border wall along there. And then the debris will jam up in the border wall, and then the water will push against the debris, and that will either undermine the border wall, or it will cause the water to go in a different direction, and that causes erosion and moves the water away from things that desperately need water. Even if tomorrow, the United States said, “Anybody can enter who wishes to, they just present at San Ysidro, and they can come on in, and that’s fine, and we’ll work it out later,” this border wall would have done incredible damage.

In 2020, I was with Kumeyaay folks who were in a ceremony in memory of their ancestors whose remains were being destroyed by dynamiting for the creation of the border wall. I don’t know the word, it’s beyond disrespectful to dynamite ancestral remains in that way. But we are probably going to see more of that. The Department of Homeland Security under Noem, who’s no longer secretary, waived almost every legal protection, including NAGPRA, the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, which means that they can bulldoze and dynamite ancestral remains, people’s ancestors. I think it is the better way of referring to that, rather than as cremation, soil, or what have you, is that it’s someone’s grandmother or great-grandmother who’s there, or grandfather, or non-binary grandparent. All these things. They even waved the Bald Eagle Protection Act, the special American bird. All of these fragile ecosystems will be damaged irreparably. Our neighbors to the east, in O’odham territory and what are called the Sky Islands, have jaguars that now get stuck. There are countless game cam videos of these jaguars getting stuck and not being able to cross. A really special creature that many of us would feel so fortunate to get to spend time with. It’s now stopped from living the way that it’s lived since long before people from Europe came to the Americas. All of that is a tragedy, too.

TFSR: I wonder if either of you has recent experiences of being able to speak to — in the context of this increased danger of crossing opportunities for folks that are trying to not only get to the possibility of a less dangerous life, but get away from a more dangerous life, and with this ramp-up of the border regime, ICE detention camps that the Trump government has been building up — I wonder if you’ve had a chance to speak with anyone who’s gone through brutalization, capture, and detention recently, and if you could share any impressions that you’ve gotten from them with the audience. What organizing efforts that are happening that you want to uplift, if any, besides the ones that you’ve already mentioned?

D: There are several new migrant detention centers that are being built in the state of Louisiana. I’ve heard that the reason they pick the state of Louisiana to build them is that the criminal justice system there is very anti-migrant. And a lot of the migrants that have to go through hearings in courts based in Louisiana, 99% will get denied asylum. So that is why that is the state that is being picked to create a lot more immigrant detention centers.

I have a friend who was with us when we arrived with the caravan in 2018 in Tijuana. He’s one of my really good friends, a queer man, and he was an incredible youth organizer in Honduras, organizing youth against the Juan Orlando Hernandez regime there, the US-supported President of Honduras a couple of years back, who, incidentally, was charged with drug trafficking and money laundering in US courts and was convicted and recently had his conviction lifted by the Trump administration. So the claim that the Trump administration is fighting organized crime is bogus when you look at the case of Juan Orlando Hernandez from Honduras, the former president.

So my friend was organizing youth out on the streets, received a head injury shortly after that, and felt his life was threatened in Honduras. He came with the migrant caravan, arrived in Tijuana in 2018, and was organizing with us and with other groups as a socialist. He was really involved in providing donations to a lot of the shelters and supporting us with the community kitchen and in other ways. Eventually, he applied for US asylum, was able to cross, and was put into a detention center in Texas, and then, he was flown to Louisiana and was held there. He described some of the policies under which he had to live. He mentioned that LGBTQ folks in detention are put into cells with people who are homophobic on purpose in order for them to be brutalized or to live in very dangerous ways, to have to deal with that on a regular basis as a punishment. When he was released, he described to me some of the other ways in which being detained as a queer man is very, very difficult. He described how a lot of the migrants there believe that the reason the conditions in detention centers are so harsh is that it’s the equivalent of being incarcerated for a serious crime, such as murder or something, when their only crime has been to seek asylum in the US, and that’s not a crime. That’s an international right. The treatment they receive is as if they had been convicted of some serious crimes.

In detention, for example, they’re denied every possible right. They’re moved around without their lawyers knowing where they are. Sometimes folks are disappeared into the system, and it’s very hard for their families to have contact with them, to visit them. A lot of folks have family members back in their home country who cannot travel to the US to support them in any way. They don’t have access to funds for commissary, for things like buying additional food when the food there is really terrible and culturally inappropriate, and maybe they have some dietary needs that are not respected. If they have diabetes or if they have some underlying medical condition, receiving care for those things is nearly impossible, if at all. They get access to medical care that’s adequate, but the dietary restrictions that are needed are not respected. Folks describe the situation inside as being so deplorable. My friend said that they want you to commit suicide or they want you to leave. They want you to seek your own deportation, so they make the conditions as harsh as possible. People will say, “You know what, I give up. Let me go back to my home country.”

But in reality, a lot of folks cannot go back to their home country. Deportations are, in fact, a death sentence for a lot of people fleeing their home countries. We’ve seen some some volunteers that were here with us in Tijuana, who crossed over into the US and lived in the US for a few months, got deported when the Trump administration ramped up the deportations and ended up back in their home country, let’s say, Venezuela or Honduras, Guatemala, and we’ve seen volunteers that were with us killed upon arriving back into their home country. So a lot of the folks that are in detention, a lot of migrants that are in detention centers, some of them for-profit, don’t have the ability to say, “Yeah, deport me back,” because it’s just not feasible under their circumstances.

So the conditions there are very brutal. There’s very little access to any dignity. My friend said that he was detained there for about six months in Louisiana. He was very, very fortunate to be part of the 1% of cases in Louisiana that actually received asylum. That was due to the pressure of his sponsor family that supported him throughout the entire process. It was through the work of an LGBTQ organization that sets up sponsors for folks who don’t have family in the US or who need resources and access. And a lot of the asylum claims are actually approved if you have a family member or something, a support system in the US to champion you through the system, or if you have legal aid or access to lawyers. So through his sponsor family, he was able to have support from lawyers who helped them through all the paperwork and all of the legalese. A lot of the forms are in English and are not accessible in Spanish. Speaking only Spanish, or an Indigenous language, it’s very hard for people to navigate that on their own, including some children who are put through the legal system of asylum without being able to see a lawyer or have a lawyer present during their immigration court hearings or their refugee asylum case hearings. 99% of those are denied asylum.

My friend, upon being released, said that it was very difficult to adjust back into civilian life, but he was very thankful for all the support he was able to receive. Now he has his permanent residency, luckily, and he’s working towards getting his citizenship. He works in a hospital in California, as a member of a cleanup crew, and he’s doing really well. But the experience of being detained, I think, really marked him for the rest of his life. I think it really traumatized him to the point where he needed to seek therapy afterward, because it was just so, so brutal to see the health of lot of folks who don’t have access to support dwindle, and watch them slip into all kinds of very precarious situations, mentally and physically. And then only to see them deported. A lot of folks that you meet there are deported back. And just the incredible amount of suffering that happens in these detention centers. They’re effectively prisons. I think we should call them prisons.

I don’t think migrants and refugees should be treated as hardened criminals simply for wanting to flee conditions that the US, through its foreign policy, has impacted their home countries in ways that are unlivable now, and punishing them for nothing but wanting to have a dignified life is not what democratic societies do. The intersection of the criminal justice system and immigration policy has been to treat all migrants like criminals, all refugees like criminals. They’re effectively treated like that; they have to wear, for example, the ankle bracelet monitors. The encroachment of the surveillance state into immigration policy has been unabated through the Biden administration, the Trump administration, and so forth. There are a lot of ways in which, even when they’re released, they still have to check in with their ICE officer or their case officer. I’m not exactly sure for how long, but if they have to continuously, every month, go into review, and if they have any misdemeanors that could result in their deportation and the annulment of their asylum claim or their status at any point. They live walking a fine line, even after being released.

But a lot of the people who are there are really wonderful people, and to see them treated as criminals is just not acceptable. We should welcome migrants. We should treat them with dignity. We should offer them free health care, free food, and free shelter. A lot of the migrants that are coming, a lot of the refugees that are coming are coming because of US foreign policy. We have to keep in mind that our government created this refugee crisis all across Latin America and, in fact, the world, through the wars that we engage in, through all the coups that the US has been involved in. The way forward now is to treat people with dignity and respect and give them the resources they need to thrive. Because, in fact, migrants provide an economic boon to the country in which they’re located. They’re coming to work. They’re coming to support with their tax dollars, they’re coming to provide community relief and support for the ways in which they organize and move. So we should treat them as human beings, at least.

J: I’ve talked to a lot of people who have been detained in the last couple of years. Partly because it’s my job, I made a podcast about my friend Primrose and her daughter Kimberly, who were detained in Los Angeles. They actually attended their check-in with their ICE officer, like Devi mentioned, and then they were detained on their way out. They went back to get a document that they hadn’t been given, and when they went back to get it, they were detained. You can hear, in very great detail, about that. I’m not trying to plug my podcast here. It doesn’t help me financially if you listen. We only have so much time. I would like her to be able to tell her own story, which she does there, and I think it’s better that you hear it from her than from me.

But she went through a very difficult time, very difficult struggles. She was in Dilley. Dilley is a detention center for families in Texas. It’s been in the news more recently because of the horrific conditions there, because migrants there took action and protested against the horrific conditions in which they were detained. It won’t surprise people to hear that she had a very difficult time. As she did throughout her whole journey, they are incredible people, and they both keep each other very strong. Even when Primrose was struggling, her daughter Kimberly said, “If you want to go home, go home, but I’m staying here,” which I think was very brave of her. She was eventually released under the Flores Settlement.

Flores Settlement is a court case that dictates the conditions and duration for which minors can be detained. She was detained for longer than she should have been under the Flores Settlement. But she was eventually released because of Flores, and while that is good, it doesn’t take away from the fact that you took a person who has been through horrific things and traumatized them again. When I visited them where they were living, it was very difficult for them, even to just be out and about, to go out and get dinner, to go out shopping, just because they were afraid. I think a lot of migrants are afraid, even the people who have been released. Because under Flores, and in certain other cases too, there’s no prohibition on re-detention. Flores governs how long you can detain someone for, but not how many times you can detain them.

So they’ve now moved somewhere else, and they’re doing so well. Kimberly’s in school, and they’re living with a friend of mine. And it makes me so happy that one of my friends, one of the hundreds of people I met in the jungle, has a good story. That they came to America, and so far, they’re doing well. But as Devi said, the reason they are doing well is that someone has stepped up and been like, “I will personally take responsibility for this person, and I will keep them safe.” And that’s pretty cool. I know of other people who have just been detained and released and are just scared. They don’t have a sponsor or a way to keep them safe. Or, in some cases, a work permit so they can’t work. How are they expected to fund a lawyer? And it’s a case for many, many migrants.

Everyone I spoke to had a miserable time in detention. I just met for tea with some people who had been previously detained last week. One of the things one of them said to me was, “I don’t understand why these guys have to treat people this way. We get that they have a job and they have a role, but there’s no need to be unkind and unnecessarily cruel about it.” But yet, even when they have a chance to show humanity, some of them choose not to, and that’s pretty difficult.

I’ve covered extensively court cases about the conditions in which people are kept, the lack of food, the food that is provided to the very poor, and the lack of medical attention. It’s nearly always cold in these detention centers. They call it, the English word would be the “ice box.” That’s been the case under the Biden administration. It remains the case now.

Most of these detention centers, if not all of them, are operated by private prison corporations, and when Biden did his private prison thing at the start of his administration, that did not include migrants. While he made a big song and dance about not sending US citizens to private prisons, because they were considered to be inhumane, obviously, those conditions, according to the Biden administration, are not too inhumane to send migrants into. So migrants continued to be sent into those conditions, and they continue to be sent into these private prisons. Many of which operate over capacity, with not enough space, and as I said before, without sufficient medical attention.

Another thing people have shared with me is that, in every single room all the time, there are self-deportation forms that they can sign. The idea is to have people give up on this thing that they’ve risked their lives to do. It’s extremely difficult for people who, as Devi said, don’t have English or Spanish. People who speak Indigenous languages have a very, very, very low rate of receiving asylum, even though that does not reflect the rate at which they are persecuted by the states and by non-state actors in the places they come from. And that can even be true with migrants who speak French, Arabic, any language other than English or Spanish. I’m fortunate to speak a few languages. It dramatically impacts the access to resources migrants have. Even in a place where everyone is struggling, it’s even harder for them. I know my friend Primrose was in a room with a number of Spanish-speaking women. She does speak Spanish. Her daughter, Kimberly, had actually learned some Spanish on the way between Brazil and Mexico, just through traveling. They had a little bit of communication, but still, it’s very isolating for these people.

What Devi and I both said is that it’s terrible in these places. It’s inhumane, it’s a disgusting reflection on us as American citizens. My taxes are paying for people who did nothing but come here and say, “Hey, I need help. I’m not safe. Can you look after me?” This is how we treat them. It’s disgusting. It’s not like, “Oh, we should behave.” But I’ve spoken to probably dozens of people who have been detained. No one thought it was in any way humane, dignified, or appropriate.

TFSR: Thank you both for the experience that you’ve shared with the audience. I wonder just in closing up, since we’ve been chatting for a while, if you could speak a little bit about if you have a media project that you’re doing where you talk about these sorts of issues, if you want to give some further clarification about where people could find that, or if you’re working for a project that is directly engaging with mutual aid that you do want to talk about by name and if it has funding needs while it’s making a transition? This is a good opportunity to mention those. I don’t know if Devi would be up for starting, maybe, on that note.

D: Thanks for that question. I really appreciate it. Our project relies 100% on small donations and some small grants from the community. We’re entirely funded by grassroots efforts. We do collaborate with other mutual aid groups to fundraise together, and we do have some support from various organizations that are aligned with us in our values. One of those is Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. It is an organization that has been really supportive of us in the last four years, with which we’ve been collaborating. But there have been a lot of other organizations as well that we’ve partnered with across time to put on everything that we do for free. Because the communities we serve are so deeply impoverished that they cannot sustain the survival programs that we have. With the help of small contributions from people across California and other states like Texas and New York, we’re able to gather together the resources we need to operate on a grassroots level. So we do this with a lot of heart and a lot of passion for making the world a better place. Where we have the most impact is in our lives and our communities, where we’re situated, and so that’s where we take action. Folks can support us through our Venmo, which is @TJrefugee-support, or through Zelle, with phone number 832-216-5722. We also use Cash App, which is $comedorTJ, that’s one word together. We also have a GoFundMe page that I can link to, and we have social media pages.

We have been doing a lot more work for street animals as well, because we see the need in our community and wherever it arises, we try to do our best to address it. We’re not just focused on food justice or supporting migrants, refugees, and deportees. We’ll do everything we can for everyone when we have the volunteers who want to do that project. At certain times, we’ve had free acupuncture clinics. As I mentioned earlier, we were collaborating with Acupuncturists Without Borders. We’ve collaborated with different organizations in the past, too. They changed their name recently, but they were known as Refugee Health Alliance. We were collaborating to put on free medical clinics at our space on Saturdays for about a year. Then the pandemic hit, and they opened up their own clinic, and we were serving meals outside of their space. We collaborate across vast networks of mutual aid groups that are local, that are also across the border, and then with groups as far south as Mexico City and beyond in the US and in other places in the US.

We do our best to rally international support, as well as local support, and open those lines of communication. So if folks are interested in collaborating in whatever ways are mutual and beneficial and bring together whatever resources you have at hand, that’s what we use, our bread and butter. The way that mutual aid for us translates into the work we do on the ground is that folks contact us and say, “Oh, I have access to, for example, Dr. Bronner’s soaps and hand sanitizers.” We’ll say, “Sure, send them over to San Diego, and we will have volunteers drive them down to us.” So we collect donations in Los Angeles and San Diego. Other folks will say, for example, “Oh, I have access to this organization that we’re currently partnered with through a volunteer of ours, which is Inland Empire Harm Reduction Coalition.” They give out free Narcan in the Inland Empire, which is east of Los Angeles, and a volunteer of ours picks up boxes of Narcan, which is the nasal spray used to reverse opioid overdoses. We have them brought down to us as well, and we currently give those out. So that’s another way in which we work together across international borders to bring resources into our community.

There are a lot of different ways people can plug in. Folks, for example, have children’s clothes that their kids are no longer using. We can be in contact about delivering that to one of our volunteers in one of the cities where we collect donations, and then have folks drive it down to us. We distribute them. We do our best to photograph the donations that you sent in particular and send you some photographs of them. We do ask folks to be mindful about posting people’s faces on their social media pages, and just to be cautious about that. If we haven’t been able to seek permission to post online, we ask that they share that with their networks, but not post it online. So we try to be mindful and respectful of people’s identities. The way in which the current surveillance state is encroaching into surveilling, detaining, and deporting migrants, now using AI and all the technology that’s becoming available of late. So we ask people to be mindful of security culture.

What else? We have launched a new YouTube and a TikTok recently to share the work we do for animals, which is really wonderful. We feed a couple of dogs and cats in our neighborhood, and we provide them with whatever basic medications we can get them. One of our street dog friends yesterday broke his leg, so we’re trying to come up with donations to take them to the vet. So that’s what I’m working on this afternoon, in addition to crossing the border after this podcast, to go up and down to do work.

We try to be responsive to crises that are happening in our community. That’s another way in which mutual aid for us is about responding to people’s needs. We don’t just focus on handing out food, which is really essential, or handing out donations and clothes and things that are survival needs. But folks ask us, for example, “Where can I go to find a dentist? I need help accessing a dentist.” And so we’ll look in our networks to see if there is a low-cost dentist or anyone that’s offering free dental care, and we put people in touch that way. We do a lot of referrals to other organizations and other collectives that do complementary or adjacent work to what we do. People ask us, “Can I use a CBP One app to apply for asylum?” or “Where can I go get support with childcare in this community?” or “I need to register my kids in school. We just arrived.” We’re seeing an influx of migrants coming from Haiti right now in Tijuana. We have a lot more African diaspora, refugees, and migrants who are currently arriving in Tijuana. There’s a lot of need for support in that community as well. People will ask us, for example, how to register my kids in school. Do they have to have status? And so a lot of the work we do as well is just looking up information for people and reaching out to our network of supporters and friends. I might contact James and be like, “Hey, do you know how to do this thing?” or, “How do I find this support for this person?”

So a lot of the work we do as well is that kind of resource and referral. So if you have resources or referrals, or if you know people who have information on any number of these issues that arise, for example, student visas. “Oh, I know that UCSD can support international students.” We work with students at UCSD as well. Engineers Without Borders put in a water filter for us at our faucet so that we can use that water to provide aguas frescas for the community. Any resource that you can think of is welcome, really. We value all skill sets. We believe that everybody has something to offer, and we also want to provide that resource back. For example, today, you’re offering us a donation of toothbrushes or toothpaste, but tomorrow, you need help finding this resource. You know this family that’s looking for a shelter, and if you contact me or contact our collective, I can also help you in that way. It’s about creating community. It’s about standing up for each other’s human rights and also for our dignity. It’s about creating a world in which we value and respect and love each other. Treat each other like we are cosmic consciousness, experiencing life in an immortal body, but we are essentially star children. We are all part of a unified collective consciousness, and the more we take care of each other, the better off all of us will be.

We have a world of love to build, a world of dignity, a world where we can all thrive together, and it starts with us in our families and our communities, because that’s where we can take action. We welcome anyone who wants to stand in solidarity with us, who wants to come down and support as well, to reach out, and the invitation always stands. We are always here for everyone who needs it, and we will also reach out occasionally to ask for support. It’s a two-way street, and we think that this is the way forward. This is a way in which we can create healthy, dynamic communities that stand up against fascism, and we are going to be the front line of caring for each other, no matter what happens with this economy.

Our communities, robust communities, can stand up for each other, and we can make a difference in each other’s lives. We have to believe in that. We have to see that we can build a world of abundance and hope from the ashes of this fascist empire.

J: That was really lovely. Thank you. I’ll name some orgs I think are awesome. Al Otro Lado does a lot of good work. The Borderlands Relief Collective does a lot of good work. Detention Resistance does a lot of good work, taking care of people who have been detained and have gotten out. Those are all places where, if you have some spare money, you can send it, and it will be used in the best way possible. Also, if you live in the United States, there are migrants in your community, and they’re probably afraid right now. It costs you nothing to show up for them. And if you don’t think there are migrants in your community, there are. Either people are afraid to talk about that right now, or they’re afraid to come out right now, or your social circles may be different, but there are so many ways you can show up for people. If somebody’s afraid, if you have children, and your children go to a school, then maybe there are other children whose parents are really worried about picking them up, because that puts them in the same place at the same time every day. Immigration arrests have absolutely happened outside schools. If you are a person who goes to the grocery store, then there are probably people in your community who are worried about going to the grocery store. The stuff that you’re doing anyway, you can do that in solidarity with people and really make a meaningful difference to their lives. So I would really encourage you to do that.

It takes all of us sharing the best parts of ourselves to get through this. Maybe you are someone who does graphic design, and you could design fundraising materials or something we’ve done before, which is just explaining to people. There are parts of the mutual aid struggle or the mutual aid work that we do, which require us to communicate like, “Oh, in this box that we’ve left in the desert, there is medical equipment. Please, take what you need and leave it.” Stuff like that. We try our best with all the languages. But there are languages we don’t speak. Maybe that’s a skill you have.

Maybe you’re someone who can come down like the Refugee Health Alliance people did, and help out with medical care. We had a lot of wonderful people come and help with medical care during the time of outdoor detention. Maybe you’re really good at cooking a massive pot of beans, and you want to come down and do that; that’s great. We’ve cooked a lot of beans over the last few years. Maybe you have a hookup on water with funky bottles that they can’t sell, but it’s perfectly fine to drink, and we can leave them in the desert and save people’s lives.

There are groups like Sidewalk School who provide really, really, really important services to children on both sides of the border, I believe. You can also come down and help, and we’ve had really wonderful people come down and help. And I’ve made some really good friends with people who have come down and helped and done a water drop, or participated in a search, or done whatever, especially if those people have special skills and outdoors that we don’t have. But I also think that you can do a lot without having to come here. It’s not like we’re the only place with a mutual aid need right now.

There are so many overlaps. Don’t think that your homeless community and your migrant community are distinct communities. They’re not. If you live in a major city in the US, there are people living outside, and you should help them, and you can do that in most cases so easily. So we should be in solidarity with folks who need our help, and in doing so, we’re in solidarity with migrants, but we’re also building the world that we want to live in, as the world that we are living in falls apart. And in doing that, we make everyone safer by creating a world where no one falls through the gaps. So I would encourage you to do that wherever you are.

D: I also wanted to give a shout-out to another group that we collaborate with that is really amazing — Casa Carmelita, based in El Paso, Texas. They’re a mutual aid group, but they also have nonprofit status. They have a house. They provide donations to Ciudad Juárez, but they also have a base of operations in El Paso, where they do a lot of work around the issues of migration, intersection with the criminalization of low-income communities, in conjunction with free food programs and other mutual aid work.

There are a lot of really wonderful mutual aid collectives that are also based in San Diego. City Heights Defense Committee, they’re really wonderful. We have volunteers who do work for us, who do work for them, just fabulous organizing that they do. There’s also another group that’s just starting in San Diego, Mutual Aid for Moms. There’s another one that’s going to start that is formed by 20 women who, I think, are also moms, and they’re just starting to provide deliveries of free food. They’re looking for volunteers and getting started. But I think they are also doing really wonderful work in the San Diego side.

In terms of Tijuana, there are a lot of really wonderful groups, too, that we collaborate with. I mentioned some of them: Casa Manos Benditas is a nonprofit that works with senior citizens who are homeless. So the state picks up homeless senior citizens and brings them to them, and they house them and feed them. We collaborate with them, exchanging free food. We give them sacks of beans and rice, and they bring us a couple of fresh produce items. We collaborate on that basis as well, exchanging goods. There’s a lot of work going on.

And I also wanted to take a second to really offer a message of solidarity and hope and praise for those that are doing so much wonderful work already, and are really plugged into different mutual aid projects, or are doing work and volunteer roles, alongside from keeping their roof over their head, working maybe one or two jobs, and then having their families and their kids and still finding the time to do mutual aid work. Y’all are incredible. We see you, we hear you, we love you. We’re in solidarity forever with you. And if there’s anything we can do to lighten your load, please reach out.

TFSR: Awesome. We’ll have a big, big list of groups, and if you all think of any after the conversation, please send them my way, and I’ll be sure to put links to the projects in the show notes.

Thank you, Devi and James, so much for having this conversation and for sharing all this experience and the real wealth of knowledge. Glad to bring this to the audience.

D: Thanks so much.

J: Thank you for having us.

D: If we were to have a follow-up conversation, I would want to spend more time talking about examples of migrant resistance in the face of all of these overwhelming challenges. Because I think there is a lot there that I should have brought up, or could have brought up, and I think time flies when you’re having a really good conversation. That could be something for another day, where we talk about the intersection of technology being used to repress, and how that technology can also be used to liberate, and the resistance that migrants are mounting in the face of overwhelming odds, how we make community, and how that community becomes a lifeline in the face of repression.

TFSR: Yeah, absolutely.