 Welcome to what the app is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, a popular resistance broadcast of hot news out of the region. In partnership with Black Alliance for Peace, Haiti Americas team, Code Pink, Common Frontiers, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, excuse me, Friends of Latin America, Interreligious Task Force on Central America, Massachusetts Peace Action, and Task Force on the Americas, we broadcast Thursdays at 4.30 PM Pacific, 7.30 PM Eastern right here on YouTube Live, including channels for the Convo Couch, Code Pink, and Popular Resistance. Post-broadcast recordings can be found at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Telegram, radindemedia.com, and now under podcasts at popularresistance.org. Today's episode, Asylum for Sale, Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry. Our guest is Adrienne Pine, she is author and medical anthropologist, and for the past 17 years, she has worked in US Federal Asylum Courts as a country conditions expert, excuse me, for Honduran asylum seekers in more than 100 asylum cases. So before I have Adrienne join the conversation, I wanna give all of you a brief background of her book that she was co-editor for, and that will be the foundation for our conversation for this episode. And so also I just wanna share with all of you that Adrienne and I both thought that this particular conversation for this episode was very pertinent given last week's Trace Amigo Summit in Mexico City or what we called in our episode last week the North America Trilateral Summit. So here's a brief description through essays, artworks, photographs, infographics and illustrations, Asylum for Sale, Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry regards the global asylum regime as an industry characterized by profit making activity, including brokers who facilitate border crossings for a fee, contractors and firms that erect walls, fences and watchtowers while lobbying governments for bigger security budgets, corporations running private detention centers and managing deportations, private lawyers charging exorbitant fees, expert witnesses and NGO staff establishing careers while placing asylum seekers into new regimes of monitored vulnerability. Humanity is not for sale and no one is illegal. So let me welcome our guest, Adrienne Pine. She is co-editor of the book, Asylum for Sale and the book was published by PM Press in November 2020. So welcome, Adrienne. Really fun to have you here this evening. I'm so glad we get to work together on this episode. Me too, Teri. Thanks so much for having me. So where's the best place for us to start this conversation? The book is pretty much based on the recurring theme of imperialism and neoliberal capitalism creating migration in addition to other causes as well. It's a structural creation of migration. And as we discussed last week, some of the causes of migration are in fact symptoms of US foreign policy, economic policy and military policy which are all basically one and the same as you can attest to with all your years of work in Honduras. So maybe we should have that discussion, let's have this discussion based on the effects of neoliberal capitalism, specifically that form exported by the United States. Well, and I think that's really a good framing because that's a big part of what we were trying to do with this book was to participate in the reframing of the asylum conversation which has really been dominated by kind of policy language and talk about human rights and these sort of vague universalistic or very specific detail oriented discussions that leave out empire, that leave out the violence of borders, that leave out profit. And there is so much profit in the asylum industry as you know, whether we're talking and you mentioned some of that in the description you just read of the book but you've got very well that wealthy individuals, some politicians, corporate shareholders have a vested interest in policies and practices that increase human suffering among people who have already made the painful decision who have already made the painful decision to leave their countries and communities of origin because it's not safe enough for them to be there. So what we're trying with the book, what we were trying to do is really take the conversation up a notch and talk about these broader issues that activists have long been talking about. So it's but not necessarily with a unified framework. So I think that thinking about asylum as an industry and thinking about all the profits that go into it in relation to US led global imperialism and neoliberal capitalism and even neoliberal fascism when it's backed up by the US military empire which as you know, we've, how many bases are there now around the world? 800 that we know of. 800 that we know of. And many of them in Latin America and of course Latin America as whether you're calling it the backyard or as Biden calls it the front yard of the United States, it's clearly not considered an equal. You talked about that last week in your program, I think really effectively. And what we see is the United States just over and over and over and over again for more than a hundred years, just taking out governments it doesn't like placing dictators that it has trained in the school of the Americas or placing today, you know, doing these legislative coups, but really, you've got local elites who are also very, very much actors in the whole process but without the backing of the United States you wouldn't see the degree of violence in Latin America that and of economic devastation in Latin American countries that is forcing people to leave their communities. It's depriving them of the right to remain in place which we don't talk about a lot, you know? And that's what most people would like to remain in their communities. Most people are not simply economic migrants, they would like to have those economic opportunities at home but they don't have them, right? Well, you know, there was, oh gosh, yeah, I have to, I did read the book and it's very, very good and I would encourage all of you to read and I have copious notes. But at one point, I think perhaps in your, when you were talking specifically about your own experience regarding Honduras, there was a statement about national sovereignty and the right, which involves people being, you know, the right to stay in place, the right to stay where you're born and raised and where you have your work and your roots and your extended life. And how that with these various labor laws, these various, well, and they are a result of these pre-trade agreements that people can't migrate or when they do migrate, it is forced out of violence, et cetera, and that those trade agreements and I'm probably not explaining this as clearly as I should to all of you, that those trade agreements are basically violate sovereignty on all levels. Well, I think one of the things that you might be referring to is an article that I published in popular resistance a couple months ago. It was actually an open letter to the US ambassador to Honduras, Laura Dogu, in reference to some, a number of comments that she had made that really attacked sovereign national Honduran decisions taken by the Libre administration, the government that represents the party under Shio Maracastro represents the party that grew out of the resistance to the 2009 US supported coup in that country. And so you've got the US ambassador really openly and aggressively attacking sovereign policy decisions, domestic decisions that the government, the Honduran government is trying to take to precisely to assert its sovereignty and to remove the yoke of US imperial neoliberal control. And so some of the, so the ambassador is saying things like, well, if Honduras is going to assert that people should have labor rights, then that's bad for business, right? That's bad for investment. And it's such a violent and outrageous kind of assertion for her to make, especially at a very particular time when she made the statement, I think it was in mid-October, the workers, the construction workers at the US embassy, the US is building, the State Department is building a massive new embassy complex as has been its policy for many years now. It's been rebuilding embassy complexes around the world since the bombings in North Africa. And the workers that have been building that embassy complex had gone on strike because they had been horrifically mistreated. Their labor rights had been abused, the under the Honduran labor code. And then the company, the State Department Contract or BL Harbor, which is a multi-billion dollar Alabama-based company that primarily makes its profits from building these massive fortresses around the world for the United States began arbitrarily firing hundreds of construction workers because they merely stood up and requested that this company respect Honduran law, which as it is, it's not even good law, right? I mean, it's law that has been weakened dramatically as a result of the 2009 coup, which I've elsewhere referred to as a neoliberal fascist coup because really the policy imperative of the coup was really to completely neoliberalize the country to privatize everything, to open the entire country up for extractive capitalism, for exploitation, for land takeovers, for direct colonization in the form of the Celes or as they're called model cities. And one of the things that happened as part of the post-cuneo liberalization of Honduras with tremendous United States support was a revision of the labor code that dramatically, drastically weakened labor protections. And so the embassy wasn't even respecting that dramatically drastically, excuse me, dramatically weakened labor code. And so what you have here is the ambassador criticizing the government for wanting to put back in place some labor protections, for wanting to ensure that dramatic exploitation isn't taking place when her own employees are being arbitrarily fired and forced to travel to the United States because they're starving, right? I mean, so you had dozens of former embassy workers at the time that she was saying this who had been forced to leave their communities and make the incredibly dangerous journey because they and their families were starving as a result of U.S. labor violence, of direct state department labor violence, not even U.S. business interest contractors. And so, I mean, I think that it's just, you couldn't get a more direct example of how the U.S. is causing migration and then it's using this twisted discourse about, well, more jobs will stop migration in order to implement jobs that are abysmally, you know... Slave labor. Slave labor, exactly. Colonial labor. And that's precisely what causes migration. And this is, you know, it's the Kamala Harris plan to, you know, the root causes strategy that we've heard a lot about, which is supposedly attacking the root causes of migration. This is, you know, this is what Joe Biden gave to Vice President Harris as like her first big project. And she went straight to Guatemala on her first international trip. And as you'll recall, all what she said when she was asked what the message is for people who are considering migrating to the United States was two words, don't come. Yeah, do not come. We actually did an episode on that on her visit. I will share that link with the audience as well as both of Adrienne's articles that she has referenced and the link to the book as well, Asylum for Sale. I'll put all of that in the program notes for all of you. But, you know, this is, it's heinous and it's fascinating all at the same time because there's so many layers to this that we as US citizens don't see and or clearly understand. And a lot of what Kamala Harris is promoting was actually set in place by the president when he was Vice President. Exactly. And that is something that took place after the 2014 so-called unaccompanied minor crisis when there were reports of an increase of children and teenagers who were coming to the border without their parents without, or without guardians. And they were coming to meet, you know, most of them had plans to reunite with family members when they crossed the borders. Most of them, you know, no parent sends their child away to travel through an incredibly dangerous journey if that journey is not actually safer than what they're facing at home. No parent would do that. And the thing is the discourse we heard at the time was that it's primarily Honduran kids who were coming across the border, kids and teenagers. And of course, the reason that Hondurans are coming is because they're living at the time in this fascist dictatorship that was a direct result of the U.S. supported coup in 2009. And it was just an incredibly dangerous situation for many people. And so many parents made that really painful determination that I as a parent can't even imagine of sending their children, you know, maybe with relatives, maybe with other teenagers but sending them to the border to reunite with other family members who are in the United States and in search of safety, in search of asylum, the international right. But the Obama administration and Biden in particular who was assigned to the same role that Harris now has as vice president, the same role of tackling the migration crisis, use this as an opportunity not to honestly tackle the root causes which would have forced them to look in the mirror but rather to further their discourse about security and employment, right? That there's the reason to the claim that people are leaving their countries because of insecurity and because there's a lack of jobs. But then you really have to get into the nitty gritty of like, how do we define insecurity? Do we define it as like not sufficient police on the streets, not sufficiently militarized police? Or do we have to find it as a lack of healthcare, a lack of education, a lack of, you know, of sovereigns? A dynamic opportunity. A whole of democracy. And obviously the definition that the United States has chosen is the former, not the latter. And so the solution that Biden created through what was called the Biden plan at the time was merely to invest, you know, hundreds of millions more dollars into the militarization of the Northern Triangle of Central America and to open the door for major business investments, US business investments that created these slave-like jobs, if anything at all, and really didn't trickle down in any way that was beneficial to Honduran, Salvador and Silicon Islands. And so this is, as you say, Biden's plan to sort of tackle the root causes only exacerbated them. And it is being exactly mimicked by Kamala Harris with her root causes plan. And so what we're seeing is policies that are just adding insult to injury. They're using this human crisis that people are experiencing of being taken away from their security, from their safety of being forced to flee to the country that is responsible for them to be being forced to flee. They're taking that as an excuse to clamp down to worsen things, to increase the levels of neoliberal imperialism using violence as a mechanism to enforce it. It really, I mean, it really is a battle of paradigms, right? It's like, do you believe in economic development at all costs and for the US, it's privatization. That's the model. The neoliberal model is complete privatization and Chile and Honduras have been the two principal petri dishes, at least in the hemisphere of the Americas. And then you have those of us and a great many other people and nations who look at, well, yes, there needs to be economic activity, but how do you define that? And does it take care of human, the citizens first and then profits or at least in tandem with one another, not profits above people? At least profits equal to people and in many societies, it's the people ahead of profits. And so one of, in your book, Asylum for Sale, one of the people or one of the cases that you share, one of the stories that you share with the readers is that of Jose Lopez, and that is not his real name, but he was, is well-educated, English speaking, had his own business in Honduras, his own small business, is a gay man, was harassed on many levels, post-coup, and sought asylum in the United States. And let's talk about his series of events that he lived through because I found it really, really helpful for me to really see what an individual goes up against. And I just wanna read to the audience a brief before we start talking about Jose's situation. Read a brief, some brief words from him in the book and after he had gotten to the States, and then we'll talk about what happened to him. So he says in the book, as the US government funds military interventions in Honduras, my people continue to be extorted and harassed by their own government and forced to flee their homes. The same violence that forces people in one country to seek asylum enables another country to fill its detention cells and fill prison contractor's pockets. It's a vicious cycle with profit at every stage from detention and deportation to relying on immigrants to accept poorly paid jobs, which goes back to the whole, working for slave labor and all of that. So let's talk about Jose Lopez, because I think he's such a pertinent example that you chose for your book and it really illustrates so well for people. Yeah, the two sort of examples that, I mean, Jose is a dear friend and I worked with him on that chapter. I translated it from Spanish as well. And I think in my chapter, I use another case study, both him and a case of another like relatively privileged person with an LGBT claim. And in part, I think it's useful to look at privileged people seeking asylum, relatively privileged people that seeking asylum, not the wealthiest because they have easy access to just by citizenship wherever they want, to show that the system is just so structurally violent against almost everyone, right? These are both people who had very strong claims and they were both detained for months in these violent and tremendously profitable private detention centers, where they were subject to humiliation, to illness, to this sort of dehumanization. And it was only, it was very difficult for them even speaking English. So speaking about- Educated English, he was a very, well both of the people What was the pseudonym I gave him again? It was Jose. Jose Lopez. I apologize, I was going to the pseudonym. Jose Lopez. So with Jose, you know, he was somebody, he did his own case, Jose, he put it all together. I mean, he's just, he's very well-educated. He had worked on a number of USAID contracts around the world as an agronomist, he's an expert, he's a very smart, multi-lingual guy who found himself in a situation where he was going to get killed if he stayed in Honduras, if he stayed in Tegucigalpa, if he remained in taking care of his business. He went to the United States, he flew in, he had a tourist visa, I believe. And he tried to get information, but was unable to, you know, to get help from any of the NGOs that said they gave asylum information and that, you know, and he wasn't able to get help from lawyers. And so he filed his application per se and then he decided that he was going to, he had left all of his business affairs just a mess and he hadn't vacated his apartment and he hadn't, you know, clean things up with his parents and, you know, he wanted to turn his properties over to them and things like that. And so he decided to fly back just for a few days to remain in hiding and just to try to get everything in order and then fly back to the United States so he could continue with his claim. And of course, he didn't realize, he didn't know that you're not allowed to do that. And because the United States says, well, if you did that, then you're not afraid of being in your country. But he really did have people who had, you know, somebody who had attacked him on multiple occasions who had issued death threats who had made very clear that he was gonna kill him if he found him again. And so he was taking a great personal risk to go back but he certainly was not safe to go back and not be in hiding and to stay and hunder us. And so he made this mistake, was immediately detained, spent months in this prison, which was, you know, at the time in Atlanta, which is one of the worst courts in the country. And I think that's another thing that's really important for people to know is that asylum is, it's so arbitrary that asylum lawyers all know this but other people don't really have a sense of how arbitrary it is. There are, you know, there are some judges that will reject 99.9% of their cases. And others that will only reject like 20% of the cases because they're more humane because they, you know, recognize that a greater number of people are in danger. And it's really regional as well. So the Atlanta court asylum seekers know this is one of the worst courts in the country. You don't want to end up in Atlanta asking for asylum. So he ended up not only in Atlanta but in this atrocious and dangerous detention facility where he was also getting, you know, he getting threatened by people. He was feeling unsafe and he ended up after going through a whole court process in which the judge himself said that it was the best pro se case he had ever seen. But then the judge said he was gonna take like 30 days to make his decision after he presented his case and he didn't feel safe to stay another 30 days. And so he took voluntary deportation, right? You know, like this was under the, I think during the Trump administration, I can't remember when, you know, they were talking about and of course voluntary deportation is still a thing. And there's nothing voluntary about it. People are being forced to, you know, make the choice to leave because otherwise they're faced with this police terror or with detention in these terribly inhumane conditions. And it's just, and again, the detention, these detention corporations, whether we're talking about GEO or one of the others, they're billion dollar companies. They're making so much money from filling up these detention centers. I think it was in Jose Lopez's chapter. He said it was $78 a night. The detention center got for him occupying a bed and then also that court decisions are often made based on how many beds in the local detention center are filled or are empty. So if the detention center is filled, there's a chance the judge is gonna be more lenient. Yeah. I mean, that's just like, and if there's empty beds, it infers, the judge is gonna be more strict. If there's empty beds versus a detention center that has no beds available. I mean, it's just... That does happen. It's not across the board, but it does happen. And then now, I mean, and the sources for profit are, they go so far beyond detention. You know, you've got the ankle monitoring companies. Now you've got the CBP-1 app that you had mentioned previously, the app that is being forced on new asylum applicants that uses facial recognition technology that can track them, that could put them in, that who knows what kind of data it's gathering on people who are merely trying to exercise their international right to seek asylum at the Mexico border or in various sites within Mexico are now being required to download this app so that they can seek a Title 42 exemption, which means that they would be exempt from this policy that was put in place by Stephen Miller as part of a white supremacist agenda, a completely xenophobic policy that is supposedly justified through public health that's saying, whoa, we've got COVID, we can't let people from this and this and that country come in. And actually, you know, numerous public health experts, doctors and scientists have said that this has nothing to do with public health at all. It's absurd. Everybody else has to go across the border now without getting tested. You know, I mean, the virus, the virus since its inception has been worse in the United States than in just about any other country in the world, we're exporting the virus. And in the beginning of the pandemic, one of the major exporters of the virus was the private deportation flights that we call ICER that were sending people from these detention centers to various countries, to Ecuador, to Honduras. And that's where you see the inception of coronavirus spreading around the world. So the asylum industry is harming us all in all sorts of ways. When you mentioned the private detention flight, so there again, private airlines are profiting off of the whole cycle of migration, deportation. I mean, there's again- There's so much money in it. And there's so much exploitation of the people, everybody makes money. I make money as an expert, as a country conditions expert. I don't make a lot of money, but you know, like there's so much money that is required for any individual. And I wanna make clear that when I am, if I am representing an individual who's paying for their own case, I never charged them. But I do make money when I'm representing people who have a government right to representation. So the government is paying for them. Or if I'm doing pro bono with a big law firm, then the law firm will pay me. But all this to say that people who don't have access to lawyers that are paid for by the government or paid for pro bono, people who don't have access to experts who will donate their time or who are paid for through other reasons, like they don't have access to asylum. It is not a right. It's very much a privilege. And it is such an incredibly profitable industry. And all it is doing is reinforcing the dramatic inequities of capitalism and in particular of US led neoliberal imperialism, which has forced these people to leave their countries in the first place. Well, I mean, to me it seems really clear with the app that the US now has migrants download. First of all, you need a smartphone. Then you need Wi-Fi cellular data, paid account to download the app. And then it's only for migrants arriving via air. So you have to be able to afford an airline ticket. So it's very class based. It's very, I would say it's very racist and very class based. And it's really clear who the United States is saying you can come and you can't come. Well, then that's very much true for the parole program. I mean, what we're seeing with Biden's recent immigration changes is him just completely mimicking the Trump policies. He's preventing people who have gone through a third country on their way to the US border from seeking asylum by claiming that they should have sought asylum in that third country, whether it's Mexico or Panama or Guatemala. For many people, this is absurd. Those countries are not safe for them either. And also, people should have a right to go to the country they choose. And especially, I mean, I think when we're thinking about the fact that the United States is the responsible party for most of the people who leave Latin America, we have an obligation. With a parole program, people need to have a contact in the United States who will sponsor them. They need to have a sponsor with a lot of money so that they can ensure the guarantee that they will pay for them, that they won't be breaking any labor laws or anything like that. Again, like you say, it's only for the rich. And so what you have are, and right now the app is only available in English and Spanish. It's not even available in English. So it's really clear it's directed at Latin American security. Like how much more, it's not even available. You've got like Russians, Ukrainians, like it's not available in any other language but English and Spanish, it's capturing biometric data. I mean, this is tremendously profitable for all of the sort of privatized military corporations that we're seeing that are making so much more money. I mean, Biden's wall is by far more dangerous and profitable than Trump's wall. Biden's wall is an electronic surveillance wall. And complimented by Trump's wall, like Biden hasn't torn down Trump's walls to the contrary, that the physical wall continues to grow, but Biden is amplifying it with all of these very scary and again, very profitable technologies that are doing who knows what with people's safety and security, with their data. I mean, it's very much a sort of terrifying sci-fi futuristic movie world that is happening right now through asylum. Well, you know, with this app, this is really clear to me, at least it seems, there's certain people that are gonna have access to all of that. As we said before, the cell phone, the smartphone, the data, you know, the data connection and the flight in and the people who could never afford any of that. So those are the people who are gonna take extreme risk to migrate and or stay. And I would argue that the intention is for those people to stay and that they become, as we said earlier, they become almost forced labor. I mean, slave labor, working hard. That's very much the intention. That's very much the intention. I mean, and Kamala Harris, again, made that clear. Do not come what she wants, what the Biden administration wants and what all of the corporations that are propping up the Biden administration want is to have this incredibly exploitable basically have paid labor force at their disposal in Central America and throughout the hemisphere. And so, you know, it's a very tricky, well, it's not tricky at all. I mean, it's very clear analytically to see what's going on but they're lying. You know, there's all this discourse about root causes, about jobs and none of it is honest. There's, you know, I've been here in Mexico, in and out of Mexico now for a while. And one of the things that, you know, we see here is migrants from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. And more recently, there's been caravans of Venezuelans, up the Caribbean coast of Mexico to the Mexico-Texas and California border. And then thing, and a lot of those people, particularly Haitians, sit at that border for years waiting to entry. And then one thing that was evident after February 24, 2022, Ukrainians fleeing Eastern Europe coming here to Mexico, going to the Mexico-U.S. border and having easy access as assailees. I mean, they were just granted, you know, political asylum or, you know, war-conditioned asylum just overnight. Yeah, no, there's two- And I would say it became very clear, and not just here in Mexico, but I'm sure you would agree with this for anybody who has spent any time south of the U.S. border. But I think the idea was very, very clear that asylum was being given to white Christian Europeans because war conditions have been suffered by people throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. And those people do not qualify for asylum. There's two things going on there. On the one hand, you know, it's very much what you're talking about. It's the dramatic racism and the xenophobia where you see Haitians being whipped. And I mean, the imagery with that is just unspeakable. And then on the other hand, white people just sort of sliding in, no problem. But then of course, the other thing is that throughout the United States history with asylum, it's always been political. It's always easier for people who are in countries that the United States is not friends with that have historically had much easier access to asylum in the United States because that bolsters the U.S.'s claim that those countries are living under dictatorships. So for a long time, the United States was granting, Venice was allowing Venezuelans in more easily than the Central Americans. And it has consistently granted their asylum requests at much higher rates than people who are actually fleeing dictatorships like Hondurans under Juan Orlando Hernandez that were fleeing tremendous violence, militaristic violence and danger. And that's precisely because it fits into the U.S. narrative. It defends the imperialist project. And with the Ukraine, you have the exact same thing. I mean, you have people legitimately fleeing a terrible violent situation. But if you take an analysis that that violent situation is really the result of a proxy war between NATO and Russia, then it doesn't paint them in as, well, I mean, it doesn't paint them in the same light for the purposes of the USPR like promoting NATO, promoting this war against Russia, as if you say that these people are victims of this terrible like, you know, Putin-Nazi project and have nothing to do with the United States, right? You know, obviously NATO is a project that the United States has control over. And, you know, along with some of the more right-wing European countries, and it's this long-term militaristic imperialist project, but allowing in all of the Ukrainian refugees and highlighting their truly tragic stories in a decontextualized way allows the United States to paint a picture that justifies it's sending billions of dollars, billions of our U.S. taxpayer dollars that we should be spending on creating more humane conditions for ourselves and ourselves, including all of the people who come to our borders and who reside within our borders and who want to reside within our borders instead of murdering people abroad and carrying out this proxy war with Russia. So I think like part of asylum policy is always rooted in racism and the structural racial capitalism that is foundational to this country. But then another part of it really is always in sync with U.S. aggression, U.S. imperialism, U.S. foreign policy, and it's used as a tool to justify U.S. aggression against countries that are trying to assert their own sovereignty. Well, it's like when the Cuban one-foot, dry-foot policy was in place. Exactly, exactly. You get this preferential treatment for people, which applied to no other country except Cuba. And good for Cubans who want to come here, that's fine, but everybody else should have that same right. Yeah. It should be across the board. There are, I tend, sometimes I talk to people who are traveling or who will join the work that you and I do and my work isn't even close to the significant of yours, but like when we organize delegations or go on social justice trips to witness or do human rights observation in countries and for people who it's their first time or who have never gone and done that work and are considering doing it. One of the things I ask people to think about is why are migrants from Venezuela considered political refugees? And at the time of the coup governments post-2009 through 2021 elections in Honduras. So the Venezuelans fleeing Venezuela are considered political refugees and the Hondurans in that timeframe were illegal migrants. Or economic migrants, exactly. I mean, in exactly this, that's how- You can see whose government is supported and whose isn't. Yeah. And asylum really becomes a tool of foreign policy. I mean, it's one that's enacted by individual judges, but judges that have been appointed with these policies in mind in large part. I mean, especially when you have these Trump appointed immigration judges, but also a lot of the democratically appointed immigration judges, they're only a little bit better. And they just like so many citizens in the United States who just absorb mainstream media and don't have access to critical viewpoints, to thinking critically about imperialism and what the United States is doing abroad, they take these assumptions, what they hear on the news, if you hear anything on the news about Venezuela, it's about it being a dictatorship, it's about it being like a socialist- So they get political asylum. Right. They're labeled refugees versus migrants. And there's no actual interrogation of looking at it objectively. And by objectively, I mean, look at it statistically. Look at, you can see that if you look at the statistics of people migrating from Venezuela prior to the implementation of sanctions, Venezuela was a migrant receiving country more than it was- Specifically Colombia. Exactly. And it's only with the implementation of US sanctions that were meant to starve and kill Venezuelans and to destroy the government, but it's a collective punishment measure that made life very difficult for a lot of Venezuelans. It's only done that you see them leaving. And so then the United States, of course, it was all planned beforehand. They knew that this was the impact it was going to have and they knew they were gonna be able to say, see socialism when it had nothing to do with that. Versus the 100% privatized economy in Honduras that was put on steroids by the US sponsored coup. Those people, it's illegal for them to migrate. Yeah, it's really, I mean, I really think when people can understand that, that the different labels given for different purposes, when you can understand that, you really see what US foreign economic and military policy is. It's very clear who gets labeled what and why. Yeah, unfortunately. And I wanna emphasize that everybody who's migrating without a lot of money, regardless of whether they're escaping US-led sanctions in Venezuela or US-led coups in Honduras, they're all suffering. Nobody is having a good experience. It's not like anybody deserves that regardless. But, and often they don't have a clear sort of structural analytical sociological analysis of why they're leaving. They just know things got really bad. That hasn't been the case. One exception to that that's been, I think really interesting and that you've probably seen has been with the caravans coming from Honduras. Because those caravans, especially when Juan Orlando was still in power, they were so politicized and they were so clear that what they were doing was fleeing a US supported dictatorship and they were doing it collectively. And it was actually a source of real collective empowerment in one of the most terrifying and traumatic experiences that people could normally have. But I think the asylum process for most people is sort of isolating and deep politicizing and very traumatic. And very expensive. Tremendously expensive. People are getting kidnapped. They're getting extorted. They're getting killed. They're getting raped as they try to make their way through Mexico and the other intervening countries. So let's talk in our last few minutes, let's talk a little bit about Mexico because you were here not too long ago and I, and I have to say this comes up on occasion. It's a similar theme in several episodes that so many of us throughout the Americas are really looking at the current Mexican government and supporting it for its vision of the Americas, specifically Latin America and the Caribbean, but attempts to bring in US and Canada. And it is, you know, it's a really terrific vision that Amlo has in my opinion that he has for the Americas. And I've said this to the audience before, there's a fantastic speech he gave July 24 of 2021 on the 238th anniversary of Simone Boulevard's birth that is worth listening to. It really out, really gives, he outlines his vision. And then certainly in reconvening the Salak in September of 2021 after a four-year pause and having the majority, I think 32 of the 33 members with 35 countries, US and Canada is not part of Salak and what the region as a whole has come to envision for itself. And then we have this trilateral summit last week that basically solved nothing about migration and we continue to see almost a full cooperation with the Mexican government and the US government regarding border policy. And it's a tough pill to swallow because there's so many, you know, this vision for the Americas is so exciting and so positive in this multilateral embrace of countries throughout the hemisphere, but we still have this really difficult, militarized, horrible situation at the US-Mexico border. Well, not just at the border, but throughout Mexico because, I mean, what we need to understand is that borders now extend, this is something Todd Miller writes about, so- He's been a guest, by the way. I would imagine that borders really extend now everywhere because border agencies extend everywhere. They're able to police in so many different spaces and the US border patrol is collaborating with Guatemala and Mexican police and you've got all of this. And for people who are traversing Mexico, they're subject to these checkpoints very frequently. You can't travel throughout Mexico by land or by air without having to go through migration checkpoints, you know, at every turn. You can remain within a city, but if you're traveling anywhere, they're everywhere. And in particular on the routes that migrants take, so they'll come into Tapa Chula, they'll go through Oaxaca and there's just the checkpoints everywhere. And so it really seems to me like Amlo has sort of like, that's what he sacrificed in order to do his other anti-imperialist projects. He's sacrificed all the people in mobility from other countries who are going through Mexico. He said, okay, we'll do whatever the United States wants, we'll crack down on them more, but you know what cracking down means? In no way means that fewer people are gonna go through Mexico. All it means is that migration agents and coyotes and all of the people who are profiting off of these people now get to make more money because they're worth it. And so I was in Mexico, as you mentioned, late last October because a dear friend and his family from Honduras were traveling through and were very afraid for their safety. And so I decided to go to Mexico City and meet them and see if there was anything I could do to ensure that they got safely and legally to the border to exercise their legal right to seek asylum. And what I saw there, and you know, through their eyes as I accompanied them to, you know, get help from different amazing NGOs that were there, Chirla, Imoomi, Alotrolado, Jewish Family Services of San Diego where these were the organizations that helped us and they were doing incredible work. But compared to the amount of migrants that are in Mexico, it's just a drop in the bucket. And I was so lucky to be able to have contact with those. But in any case, what I wanna say is that this family that was fleeing was fleeing drug trafficking and police violence in Honduras. And a very scary story that I won't get into. They, you know, they made it, they were traveling through from Chiapas to Oaxaca. They got stopped by a police officer who abducted their, then 10 month old baby girl and said that they weren't gonna return her unless they gave them $600 right there. So of course they managed to come up with a $600. They got it wired to them, they got their baby back. They, you know, made it to a town in Oaxaca where quote unquote humanitarian visas were being issued. But the Mexican government had just changed the policy where there had been 30-day visas that allowed you to transit through the country. They had made them only seven-day visas and put the stamp on them saying that you could only travel within Oaxaca, which is completely absurd. Visas are for countries, not for regions within countries. But what that stamp did was it enabled every single checkpoint operator to extort more money out of the migrants that were going through. And so again, what this is, is this violent asylum industry that, and I saw it in person when I went through the checkpoint with them in the T-1A Airpoint, the agents were incredibly aggressive and tried to detain the family that I was accompanying. I got in a huge fight with them. They were threatening, they were terrifying. And I mean, it was a really terrible experience. We managed to get out because I have the privilege and legal backing that I am so grateful to have had. But most migrants don't have that kind of white international accompanying and privilege and somebody with knowledge about asylum accompanying them. And so this is what Amno has created. He's created or enabled the creation by submitting to Biden's every wish of what is in effect a state of terror for people who are trying to escape that. Yeah. And just trying to assert their right to their international right to asylum. It's a conundrum, because I would argue a lot of the policy, the migration immigration policy in Mexico, particularly the cooperation with the United States is a project in part that Amno has inherited from prior administrations to be fair to him. And you can't just undo that overnight or necessarily in one six-year term. And I would say, there's things that new governments throughout the Americas are gonna have the same issue in decoupling policy from the United States. If you have constitutionally have one six-year term or one four-year term as Petro in Columbia, that's not a very long time to decouple yourself from decades-long relationships. It is. And at the same time, you've got all of these people who are for the moment stateless, they have no, they're not constituents, they don't fit within this fiction that we have of democratic participation. And there is so many of them are dying, so many of them are suffering. And so, I mean, Amno does have excuses that he can refer to, but I think it's a humanitarian imperative that he do better and that the movements demand that and support him in doing it. And support him, yeah, that support's gotta come, that has to be there to make it happen. I mean, for it to push from below up and then to deliver from the top down. You mentioned stateless, a lot of people are stateless right now. Do you think that that's the overarching neoliberal plan? Statelessness? I mean, that's a whole nother conversation, but you said that, that could like, I mean, the goals, right? It's in the formal legal sense, which is another thing. There are a lot of people who are like formally legally stateless, who they have nowhere to be deported to, right? They don't, you know, and many of them are suffering violence in the United States or suffering detention because the U.S. doesn't wanna let them in, but doesn't have any word to deport them to, that's one issue. I guess I was referring, I meant it in more of a, sort of, they don't have a state to go back to. They have a state that they pertain to legally as we are all in this world that is made up currently of nation states, but that doesn't mean that they actually have a home. And when they're in transit, they have less protection than anyone else could possibly have because they are not protected by their home state. They're not protected by, I mean, depending on their home state. There are some countries that, through their embassies and through various programs in other countries that do try to offer services, whether people want them or not is another question, but Mexico is not doing anything to recognize the humanity of these people who are, some of them are living in Mexico, some of them are not in transit, some of them are working. I mean, there are so many migrants who are just living in Mexico right now who are not necessarily actively trying to get into the United States. They also are being disenfranchised, dehumanized, not recognized in the way that citizens are. And this restrictive citizen nation state model is harmful to us all in that way because it's really continuing to implement the inequalities that capitalism creates. It's... Yeah, only people of a certain economic class can cross borders and the rest of us cannot. Or access any of the rights that citizens get when they're within borders. Yeah, exactly. So, wow, Adrienne, what a fantastic conversation and a fantastic book. And let me just remind the audience. The book is Asylum for Sale, Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry. And it is at PM Fresh. And you can order it online or for the hard copy, paperback or you can even buy an e-book, which I did. And it's a really, really informative and eye-opening read. And I'm so thankful that we have you call you a friend and because it's just such a, you know, your work is just so important and so honorable what you're doing. So to know you and befriend a friend if you was really, it's a big deal. So what should we... Just again for the audience, I will include the links to the book and to Adrienne's two articles that she mentioned in our conversation, Open Letter to US Ambassador, Stop the Assault on Honduras as Human Rights and Social Struggle in Neal Liberal Central America. That's fantastic. Paper two, I'll include links to both of those. And also, yes, we did, Todd Miller has a chapter in your book. We did have an episode with him in his book, Climate Change Displacement and the Border Industrial Complex. And for easy reference, I'll include the link to that episode as well as some good background to today's conversation. So Adrienne, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Adrienne. I really appreciate it. Is there anything we should share with the audience before we leave? Well, I guess you can share my Twitter handle, it's just that, Adrienne Pine. I have Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, Twitter only, or all three? I guess Twitter and yeah, mostly Twitter because now is this gonna go live? Okay, okay, great. Yeah, because Instagram I never post. I just lurk there. Okay, great. So thank you everyone for joining us. I just remind you, you've been watching what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean. It's where a popular resistance broadcast of hot news out of the region. Again, in partnership with Black Alliance for Peace, Haiti, America's team, Code Pink, Common Frontiers, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Friends of Latin America, Interreligious Task Force on Central America, Massachusetts Peace Action and Task Force on the Americas. We broadcast on Thursdays on YouTube live at the ConvoCouch, Popular Resistance and Code Pink and post broadcast episodes can be found at Spotify, Apple Podcast, Telegram, radindemedia.com and popularresistance.org under podcasts. So thank you again, Adrienne. And to all of you tuning in, be sure to catch us next week. So thanks a lot, everyone.