Throughline Presents: White Lies

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2023

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It all started with a photograph. A photograph from 1991 of a prison takeover in rural Alabama. A photograph of a group of men on the roof of that prison holding a bedsheet scrawled with a message: "Pray for us." In the first episode of the new season of White Lies, hosts Chip Brantley and Andrew Beck Grace go searching for answers to the questions raised by this photograph. Who were these men? What on earth had made them want to take over that prison? And what became of them after? As they search, they uncover a sprawling story: a mass exodus across the sea, a secret list, and the betrayal at the heart of this country's ideals. This week, we're bringing you an episode of White Lies, a series by NPR's documentary podcast Embedded, which unearths the stories behind the headlines.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Rund.
0:01.6	And Romteen.
0:02.8	More than 2.5 million undocumented migrants
0:05.7	cross the US Southern border in 2022.
0:08.9	Hundreds of thousands more people than the previous year.
0:12.5	US Customs and Border Protection
0:14.4	says the increase has been largely driven
0:16.5	by migration from Venezuela,
0:18.4	Nicaragua, and Cuba.
0:20.6	There's a certain irony here,
0:22.7	because the current state of the US immigration system,
0:25.1	the detentions, the deportations,
0:27.6	the question of who has rights and who doesn't,
0:30.0	can actually be traced back, at least in part,
0:32.6	to a mass migration from Cuba more than 40 years ago.
0:37.4	In 1980, the migrants came by boat
0:40.0	on what became known as the Marial Boat Lift.
0:43.5	Then Cuban President Fidel Castro
0:45.9	opened a port for any Cubans who wanted to leave the country,
0:49.2	and more than 100,000 people did.
0:51.8	The story of what happened to some of those migrants
0:54.4	once they arrived in the US, helps explain a lot about
	...

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