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Radio Atlantic

The Trauma at the Border

Radio Atlantic

The Atlantic

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr ordered immigration judges to stop releasing asylum seekers on bail. The move signals an even fiercer immigration policy that could include the return of family separations. A few weeks ago, the president threatened to close the southern border. Days later, he fired his Homeland Security chief, who reportedly lost out to hardliners in the White House. Isaac Dovere interviews Taylor Levy, the Legal Coordinator at Annunciation House, a Catholic charity based in El Paso that provides shelter to immigrants on both sides of the southern border. El Paso has emerged as a hot spot for migration recently. It’s drawn national attention for the number of people crossing there and for the conditions in which those people have been held. Levy shares the harrowing stories of migrants she works with every day. What are these families escaping when they seek asylum in the U.S.? Why are they being held outside under bridges? And does the Trump administration’s new “Remain in Mexico” policy endanger them? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

You! Hi Radio Atlantic listeners, this is Isaac Dauver, staff writer here at the Atlantic. It's been a big week in politics. If you haven't read

0:24.7

the mother report itself yet, you should. But with everyone on the internet and on cable news

0:30.3

giving you more than enough to digest about it and the fallout from that

0:33.5

report. We thought we'd focus on something that has been going on long

0:36.9

before this week and we'll be going on long after. The situation at the border.

0:41.6

For the people who've been living their lives in pens and detest the situation at the border.

0:42.7

For the people who have been living their lives in pens and detention centers, those lives

0:46.6

go on.

0:48.2

And while you probably saw Attorney General William Barr's press conference on Thursday morning

0:51.7

pre-spinning the release of the report,

0:54.1

what you may not have seen is the news from him on Tuesday when he ordered immigration judges

0:59.1

to stop releasing asylum seekers on bail.

1:02.2

That won't impact families or unaccompanied children, but it signals

1:05.7

an even fiercer immigration policy that could include the return of family separations.

1:12.0

Trump has been making a trip to the border every few weeks and he tweets about it basically

1:15.2

non-stop when he's not complaining about Mueller.

1:18.0

He's threatened to close the southern border and backed off of that.

1:21.6

He fired Kirsten-Nilsen Nelson his Homeland Security Secretary because she wouldn't go along with hardliners on family separation.

1:28.0

And meanwhile, people who disagree with him explode with protests and recriminations, but there are thousands of people who wake up with

1:35.0

this every day and go to sleep with it every night.

1:39.1

We wanted to bring some of those stories to you, the stories that can get lost in the political

1:42.3

news cycle, so our guest today is

...

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