Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Immigration (But Were Afraid To Ask)

Current Affairs

Comedy, Government, News, Culture, Politics

4.4 • 645 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2019

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This would usually be a Patreon-only episode, but given how vital this topic is, we've decided to unlock it. Current Affairs contributing editor Eli Massey interviews senior editor Brianna Rennix, an immigration lawyer working with asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border. Brianna does updates on immigration law at the Current Affairs website: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/09/this-week-in-terrible-immigration-news-4 Here's a flowchart we created to give a little insight into asylum law back in 2017 (may be slightly outdated, but helpful for getting a picture of what asylum seekers are up against!) This episode was edited by Dan Thorn of Pink Noise Studios in Somerville, MA.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, current affairs listeners. Contributing editor Eli Massey here for a special episode on
0:04.7	everything you always wanted to know about immigration, but we're afraid to ask. And I am joined by my
0:10.5	colleague, senior editor Brianna Renix, who works full time as an immigration attorney at a detention
0:15.9	center near the southern border. Welcome, Brianna. Hi, everybody. Let's start right there. Describe your work
0:22.5	and what the day in, day out experience is like and what exactly you do. Okay, so big caveat at the
0:30.6	beginning, which is that like everything at my job is changing right now, because as you may
0:34.7	have seen in the news, everything about immigration law is changing right now. But just to give you a general outline. So I work at an immigration detention
0:43.4	center that's about an hour north of the southern border in Texas. And it's what's called a
0:50.0	family residential center, which means it's a detention center that's specifically allocated to
0:55.9	detain mothers who cross the border with children under the age of 18. So there are lots of different
1:01.1	kinds of detention centers. For example, if you're a single adult, you're going to get thrown
1:04.2	into a detention center that's pretty much indistinguishable from a jail. I usually describe the
1:08.4	family residential centers as being more like internment camps. There's sort of these like trailer park complexes that are enclosed by a jail. I usually describe the family residential centers as being more like internment camps.
1:11.1	There's sort of these like trailer park complexes that are enclosed by a fence. And so not all family
1:17.0	units, but many family units pass through this particular detention center. It's the largest
1:22.2	family detention center in the country. And it's sort of the only one that's operational on any
1:27.2	large scale. The population of
1:29.1	people that are ending up here are people who have come to the southern border. They've been put in a
1:34.3	process that's called expedited removal, which is where Border Patrol basically just says,
1:39.9	like, you have no right to be here and we're going to deport you immediately without you going in front of a judge.
1:46.3	This is a process that was set up through a bill in 1996 to allow the government to very rapidly deport people without any kind of due process.
1:56.4	Basically, there is one way to kind of potentially exit this expedited deportation process, and that is to say
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