Border Trilogy Part 1: Hole in the Fence

Hey.

To play this, yeah. And as someone who was not here when this piece was made, who had nothing to do with making it. I am allowed to say I truly think it is one of the best things we've ever made. It's called the Border trilogy, which obviously means that it's three.

Parts we're going to play them over three weeks, we're also going to update it to talk to.

This current moment and then later this fall, after that, we are going to hit you with a bunch of brand new episodes. We've got one about a secret inside the human body, one about a secret inside the sky, one where Latif talks to a guy whose biology completely rearranges his world. So really good stuff coming, but in the meantime, the first.

Episode in this series is called The Hole in the Fence, and it begins with me telling our original host, Chad and Robert, about a guy named Jason Deleon. Oh, and one more.

Thing This episode does contain graphic descriptions that may not be suitable for our younger or more sensitive listeners.

Yeah, wait, you're listening all right. OK, all right, you're listening to Radiolab from WNYC.

I think that sounds about right.

So this is Jason Deleon.

I'm an associate professor of anthropology.

At the University of Michigan.

And I direct the Undocumented Migration project.

But back in 2008, Jason had actually just finished grad school.

And my doctoral dissertation was on Ancient Stone Tools The Lithic Industries of San Lorenzo and Ochtitlan, an economic and technological study. About as far removed as you can be from the stuff that I'm doing right now. Using obsidian technological data from 11 domestic and non-domestic contexts.

Just to explain, Jason was on his way to being an archaeologist, so he would go out into the field. Do these digs in different parts of Mexico and find these little fragments of old stone tools.

This study focuses primarily on percussion flake tools.

Dating back to about 1000 B.c.

An industry that has often been ignored in mesoamerican lithic analyses.

And then he would write these papers.

I evaluate these models by comparing differences in the frequencies of various tool types.

You know, in these journals, that just had really just a handful of people would read.

The study also finds that the introduction and adoption of prismatic blade technology.

He had this moment where he just kind of hit the wall.

Like, OK, this is enough, I'm not, I'm not doing this.

I want nothing to do with this anymore.

You know, when I finished my dissertation, I had really become kind of disillusioned with the work that I was doing. And I had no idea what I was going to do. I remember telling my wife at one point, I feel really bad. I feel like I've wasted the last 10 years of my life doing archaeology. And, to make matters worse, I'd taken his job at University of Washington.

He'd just gotten his job where he was supposed to teach, the very thing he was now sick of.

Yeah, it was just like just an exit, just a full blown crisis.

But then fate stepped in While Jason was preparing for one of his freshman classes, someone handed him a book.

By a writer named Luis Alberto, Urrea called The Devil's Highway.

Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn't know their own names.

It just shocked me. I mean, I knew a lot about the border, at least I thought I did. I'd grown up, you know, in South Texas, my parents were immigrants, but just I couldn't believe that.

They were drunk from having their brains baked in the pan, they were seeing God and devils.

Days and days of walking, running out of food.

And they were dizzy from drinking their own urine.

You know, dying of thirst.

The poisons clogging their systems. And at a certain point, Jason comes across this passage, where the author is describing the things that were in these men's pockets. A belt buckle with a fighting cock inlaid, one wallet in the right front pocket of his jeans.

Some change, some keys, a silver belt buckle.

Fake Silver Watch One Comb.

You know these personal effects?

Green handkerchief.

And he's trying to reconstruct the story about who these men were that died from from exposure.

John Doe number 42.

So I bought a plane ticket. A month later, I was in the Arizona desert.

Jason gets out to Tucson, Arizona, and he manages to convince someone from a local NGO to basically, like, show him around and be his guide.

And I said, I want to look at the stuff that migrants are leaving in the desert.

That part of the sonoran desert, it's, it's hilly, covered in sagebrush cacti, everywhere, red sand. And Jason says. At a certain point, a few hours into the hike, they walked up this incline and got to this ridge where they could kind of look out over this huge expanse.

Just imagine like a ravine or a wash.

And Jason says he suddenly noticed that the desert ground below them.

Was just covered in stuff, over a thousand backpacks and water bottles, I mean, just that much. Well, what ends up happening is stuff gets left behind for a couple of different reasons. If you're in route, you might throw something down because you get so tired and your bag just gets so heavy. And those things are kind of sprinkled across these migrant trails. But once you get to the end, past the checkpoint, your smuggler says, OK, we're safe.

So for the next several years, Jason just keeps going back to this stretch of the sonoran desert. Ripped clothes, fragments of clothes in bushes, gathering whatever he could find, dirty socks, and, you know, like an archaeologist, he would collect this stuff. Bandages, itemize it, categorize it. Cocktail dresses, high heel shoes. Try and figure out who it came from, why it was there.

Baby bottles, hair curlers, toys, wrappers. he did this year, sneakers, photograph after year, socks picking up this shoes, dresses, picking up that backpacks, bibles, bottles.

And then one day.

Human arm.

He finds an arm wedged between some rocks, like an entire arm up to the shoulder, just sort of sticking, sticking out between two rocks.

I mean, there was no flesh other than the the things that were holding the joint together.

Oh wow, yeah. Jason and his guide, the folks he was there with. They began to search the surrounding areas for other parts of the body.

I mean, really the goal is to try to find the skull, because in terms of, you know, identification, I mean, your best luck is going to be if you can get, if you can get the pieces of the skull.

Because if you can find pieces of the skull, maybe you can, I.

And so we were out there basically digging around for for other parts of this person.

We come across a human tooth, some little tiny bits of rib bones, but we never find the skull.

And I realized that nobody's ever going to identify this person. There's just not enough left of them. And this is not not likely to be a case that will be solved.

Now, Jason says he knew, of course, that people were dying in the desert, but to see this, the fragments of a person had basically been erased.

You know, it's very.

And for weeks, he couldn't shake the simple question You know what, what did this to this person? And how many other bodies like this might be out here? How did it get to be like this?

We'll be doing it today and then next week and the week after part one. A hole in the fence.

All right, so I thought I'd start us off with Jason's question, How did it get to be like this? How did it get to be? That? So many people cross into America through the desert? Like that's the classic image you have, is someone walking through the desert. Why, out of all the places along the border that you could cross, why is it that so many people are are crossing in the hottest and most unforgiving place imaginable? And one of the things that Jason ended up telling us about that, we found most striking, was simply the numbers, the yearly numbers of migrant deaths in the desert. And I mean, it is shocking if you look at the data, there's a very stark moment when things shift.

I mean, it used to be that if you wanted to cross the U.

I mean, so what changed?

Well, in the mid 90s, there was a lot of pushback against the visibility of fence hopping and it. It all kind of starts with this little known story. There's a great book by by this guy Timothy Dunn, called Blockading the Border, and it's about these Latino high school students in Texas, right on the U.S..-Mexico border.

We ended up calling the author, he mentioned, Timothy Dunn, and then getting so interested in a story that Dunn laid out for us. That we're going to leave Jason behind for a while and we're going to go on a little trip.

Yes.

That, by the way, is co-reporter Tracy Hunt.

Yes.

All right.

We're going to go to El Paso.

So, yeah, so Tracy and I went to El Paso a while back.

Did you ever think how your life would have been totally different if you were born somewhere else? Of course, you thought that.

If I was born somewhere else, yeah, of course. I mean, I think about that. I feel like, I guess I got distracted at that point. We didn't finish the conversation.

You know, in many respects, it's just, you know, your typical American high school.

Because it's Texas, you know, football is a big deal.

Yeah, but there is something a little different about it, and that is that. Almost all the students here, Jennifer is here, Eduardo is here, Jose are Mexican-American, Gisela, Oscar. And, you know, we actually talked to one former teacher.

This is Juan Sibert Coronado. I was a teacher at Bowie High School in the 1980s and 1990s.

And what did you teach?

I taught history.

And he said that in all his years teaching at Bowie.

Taught there for 21 years and never had a single Anglo student, really.

Really, yeah, never taught a single white student. But the reason we went to Bowie High School is because something happened there in the early 90s. Something that it sort of, you know, in a kind of roundabout and totally unforeseeable way, completely changed the way we think about the U.S..-Mexico border.

The class was immediately after lunch.

And on this particular day, they were going to have a debate in class, and one of the debaters, one of the kids who was going to be part of the debate, was late. Yes, his name is Albert.

Albert often came late to class and so we'd been waiting and waiting and waiting for him.

Ten minutes went by 15 20.

And eventually, he showed up being dragged in by this campus security guy.

The school Security Guard.

And I thought, you know, the security guard brought him in because he was, you know, out doing some miscreant stuff like smoking pot again. And and so I kind of lay into Albert for being late again and for, you know, not holding up his responsibilities to his class.

But Albert's like, No, no, no, no, no, no. Albert says that he had been at the handball court, playing with his friends and then when it was time to go from the court back to class. These two border patrol agents just came out of nowhere in their green uniforms, demanding to see his papers, like, Who are you? where are you from?

That he needed a federal I.

And one's just standing there, like, Uh-huh, Border Patrol, really.

You know, I was haranguing the kid, obviously. But then three or four other students in class just kind of stepped in and said, No, what Albert's telling you is true.

Not only is Albert telling the truth. But in the last couple of weeks, Border Patrol had been on the handball courts and on the playing fields, repeatedly stopping students, harassing students.

And I was, quite frankly, shocked.

Juan says Of course, he knew that the Border Patrol was around because of where the school is situated, which we'll talk about in a second. But he just never understood how present they were in his students lives.

I was having a hard time processing this.

So over the next few weeks, Juan started asking around different students, being like, Hey, have you had anything happen with Border Patrol at school?

And I got literally hundreds of stories.

I was walking home from school and, you know, I had my backpack on.

This is Nydia Rodriguez, who was a freshman at the time.

And all of a sudden I saw this truck, a Border patrol truck, and it was speeding my way.

A couple of agents got out of the truck and started questioning her.

Where am I from, or where am I going?

Basically, we were all rounded up.

Ernesto Munoz remembers walking to school with a bunch of kids.

We were searched in our backpacks.

And again, you know, a couple of agents got out, started asking him questions.

Where we were born, our date of birth, what classes we were taking. We stop and they get out of the truck.

Marcela de Leon, who was walking with a friend near school.

And they go, What do you have in the bag? and I go, books.

You know, what else would I have in my bag? They're like, Well, let us see.

I was walking, they yelled at me, Hey, get over here.

Ricardo Villalma.

They sped up to me and they stopped in front of me and asked me, You know what's what's in the bag? It was like books. One of them ripped the bag out from my hands as I was trying to pull it away from him. The other one grabbed me and pushed me up against the truck, forcibly took the bag away, rifled through it, pushed me off of the or. They pulled me away from the truck, threw my bag at me and told me to get out of here.

As these stories came out, it became clear that even the staff had had its run ins with the Border Patrol. We talked to the assistant football coach, Ben Murillo, he told us there was this moment he was driving with two of his football players. They got pulled over by the border patrol and one of them actually pointed a gun at his head. Never had a gun pulled on me.

And I identified myself.

My name is Coach Ben Murillo, coach at Bowie High School. I have two of my football players. I would really appreciate if you'd holster your gun and the guy barked at me. I appreciate if you shut your mouth and get out of the car.

Why was the Border patrol on the grounds of the school? did they have some? was there some reason to be there?

Well, that's, I mean, that's a really good question, and I will answer it after the break. Oh.

This is Radiolab.

And today, we are bringing you the first of three stories that we will air.

Over the next few weeks on border crossings at the U.

When we last were with you, just before the break, we were talking to a bunch of former high school students that attended Bowie High School. And really, these are students who who know they're on the Mexican border because they have been interrogated by police. Some of the teachers were harassed.

Stopping them to Border Patrol, stop them to search their bags, demand papers. Even in one incident pulling a gun on the football coach. And I think to understand what was going on at Bowie High School.

From 30,000 feet above the desert floor, I see it.

There below, right on the border of Texas, Mexico and New Mexico, it's right there, it's right there.

It's also the biggest city, the West Texas city of El Paso, that shares a border with Mexico, too.

And the other thing to know about it is that it's like it kind of has a mirror city on the other side of the border, which is Juarez, Juarez.

Ciudad Juarez, the largest city on the U.

So the two cities are separated by this little sliver of the Rio Grande, but they were essentially the same city up until 1848, when the U.

This mythical division between these two cities, it's, just doesn't exist for most of us. I mean, I go to the dentist over there, I buy cigarettes over there. OK, I smoke, yes.

But the thing is, when everything was going down at Bowie in the early 90s, it was a community in crisis. So come on, make on the night. The peso crisis has spilled across the Rio Grande.

So you had tons of people getting these permits to come into El Paso legally, but then you had all these other people.

Workers who can't get permits required by U.

Law couldn't get permits, but they still needed to work.

Simply respond to the laws of supply and demand. And so they started coming to making illegal dashes across the border to the United States, at unprecedented numbers. I mean, it was as high as, like, 10,000 people a day coming back and forth illegally, basically for their commute to work. It was chaos.

And this is actually kind of hilarious. So like around this time in 1992, there was this television interview and Dale Moosigate. He's the sector chief of the Border Patrol in El Paso. He's wearing his green hat, with his green uniform, with the gold shield on his chest.

If we were not here and did not keep a lid on this situation.

And in the shots behind him, there would be just an absolute.

Free inflow from other countries.

You can see people climbing up the banks of the Rio Grande and just walking into El Paso.

That's like having Wyatt Earp standing in front of three bank robbers robbing a bank.

Yeah, exactly, and like, So OK, how many entries? All right? So? It was reported at the time that for every one migrant the Border Patrol caught, there were at least three to five who snuck in and didn't get caught.

Which finally brings us back.

And he claimed that it wasn't just people looking for work, it was also people bringing in drugs.

The way I know that because I work our anti-smuggling unit, we watch them come through.

And so Border Patrol agents had taken to. Just sort of hanging out around the school, on the school's property, on the football field, across the street from the school. Like, just, Yeah, they were just there all the time.

There were even rumors that Border Patrol agents would go undercover as students and that they would, you know, wander the halls, that they would go into the locker rooms.

I've noticed the the suburbans parked on the Bowie campus.

Again, former Bowie teacher One Cybert Coronado.

But the whole reason, you know, that I thought they were there was. The chain link is cut. And they need to stop people from entering into a high school instead of realizing that what they're doing is they're using the high school as a hunting ground.

And so to Juan, when he started hearing about all these stories, of these 14, 15, 16 year old kids getting stopped and shaken down. It wasn't about Border Patrol trying to stop migrants from coming in or trying to stop drugs from coming across the border.

It was the Border Patrol simply stopping people because they were brown, and that really.

But for most of these kids, it was nothing out of the ordinary.

You know, kids like Ernesto Munoz, Ricardo Villalma.

That was just day to day life.

Talking even to some of the community members, Tony Santos told me the way about it.

Growing up in this poor neighborhood, right next to the border.

That's a way of life here in South El Paso.

It wasn't like a concern like, Oh, no, you got stopped.

You go to the park and shoot some some basketball, you tell your your schoolmates, you know, guess what happened after school?

It was like, You know, ha ha, you got stopped.

You know, it's probably because of your haircut, or probably because of.

How you're dressed or whatever.

So the students were more likely to laugh about it than be angry. But in his U..S. history class that year, Juan started teaching his kids about civil rights, actually getting them to debate the different ways of thinking about civil rights.

Talking about stuff like the activities which have taken place.

In Birmingham over the last few days.

A letter from the Birmingham Jail to my mind.

Marked the nonviolent movement coming of age, and it's liberty or death.

Malcolm X's ballot for the bullet. It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody.

And so these students are learning about.

That's Nydia Rodriguez again.

But I knew that what they were doing was wrong.

And eventually, some of these students started to get together.

Met and talked.

Like, Do you think this is right? what do you think this is about?

Telling each other, You know that this is wrong.

We talked about how we wanted things to be different.

Let's see what we can do about it because this has to stop.

All right, all right, that's what's up.

We were the first ones to get a collegiate group.

And they asked Juan if he could, you know, supervise.

We would meet about once a week, and our meetings tended to be 30, 40, 50 kids packed into a classroom.

And for one of these meetings, Juan brought in one of his friends, a woman named Susan Kern. She worked for the Border Rights Coalition. And so she comes in and these students start telling her, You know what's been going on? And they ask her, Do we have any rights here? She tells them, Absolutely, you do. Because, according to the U.S.

They cannot stop you without reasonable cause.

They had to have seen you cross the border, or when you saw them, you started acting fidgety, or you ran away or something.

They can't just arbitrarily stop you.

Question you?

Just because of the color of your skin.

That's not enough to stop you.

Because if that's the only reason they have to stop you, then they're violating your Fourth Amendment, right?

The right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Exactly.

They just said, you know what you're getting, your rights are getting stomped all over. Let's see what we can do about this because it needs to stop.

After Susan explained that the rights were being violated, the conversation turned to What are we going to do about it?

We had a lot of students who were suggesting things that were probably, you know, slightly inappropriate.

Like, how about we just curse them out?

Which I thought, Well, maybe that's not a bad approach, but apparently.

According to Juan's friend Susan.

Off was not the right response.

That can maybe get you in trouble.

Can be considered assault and so.

Another student said Well, what if we just run away from them?

Uh, no.

Another kid was like, What if we fight back?

Oh God, definitely don't do that.

But.

One of the students.

Who's been watching law and order? Debbie Mason, you're under arrest for the attempted murder of your mother. No, this is a mistake who knew all about saying?

You have the right to remain silent.

The right to remain silent.

Carolyn Tyler, you have the right to remain silent. He was like, That's a thing.

It's your Fifth Amendment constitutional right, and it's something that you typically hear.

I have, however, been instructed by my counsel not to testify based on my Fifth Amendment Constitutional rights.

When rich, white dudes get in trouble.

On the advice of counsel, I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege and respectfully decline to answer your question. But this one booey Mecha student was like, Why don't we do that?

And that's exactly what our students started doing.

After that, when Border Patrol agents would stop students and say, Hey, give me your papers, some of these students would say no.

I want to use my Fifth Amendment rights, I want to take the Fifth Amendment.

Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

Simple as that, I have the right not to incriminate myself.

To remain silent, I do not want to answer your questions.

Sorry, I had a burp, Okay, ready. I have a Fifth Amendment right to to remain silent.

Remain silent, I don't want you to go through any of my stuff.

Right to remain silent.

You're not going through my backpack, I'm not talking to you.

I want to use my fifth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, right?

And their message started spreading around right to remain silent.

Remain silent, silent, silent.

Silent.

That we really don't need to answer these people's questions.

To remain silent.

Yeah.

Perfect.

You nailed it, Woo.

Nice to meet you all, bye bye.

Well, I'm kind of trying to imagine myself being you and giving advice to these students. And on the one hand, obviously this is their legal right not to provide this information. On the other hand, I can imagine that, you know, I've heard that there are these Border Patrol abuses, there are, you know, these. There are times when this doesn't go well and I'm telling these students to go out. And basically, you know, Stonewall, these agents, and it could put them in harm's way.

And it did frequently.

So this is David Renteria from a documentary that was made in the 90s about Bowie High School.

Yeah, so David Renteria, he was a senior at Bowie.

My friend did the same thing and they asked us again, What if it's a citizen? They asked us again, and I said, You're a citizen. And I looked at my friend and said, You know what, it's gone.

He kept on walking.

And the Border Patrol agent on the passenger side said. If we didn't stop, they were going to beat us up real bad, to the point that we weren't going to be able to move.

So this Border Patrol agent gets out of the truck, comes up to David.

And started threatening to break his arm if he tried to walk away.

Felt his hand on my left elbow, he jerked it back, he jerked it. I turned and faced him.

Slapped him in his face, apparently, and you know, David wasn't physically injured. After that, he was freaked out.

But the reason that Juan called this particular incident notorious is because.

Good morning freaking America, you know what I mean? That's pretty huge.

The daily invasion has strained the relationship between the border patrol and some people at Bowie High School.

And we're talking to us.

We all have rights and that our rights daily, on a day-to-day course, are being violated. Why are they harassing you? Because we're Hispanic because of the color of our skin.

Oh yeah, Mr. Musagades, that guy was kind of doing damage control at that point.

When agent Dale Musagades met with about 40 students to discuss the alleged harassment, he kept us out. We tried to contact Dale Musagades multiple times for this story, but he did not reply to our voicemails or emails. But....

It was a patched up Wednesday morning.

We were able to get footage of that meeting. Musagades kept Good Morning America out of because one of the students taped this and then we managed to get our hands on it. So it's like 30 40 kids from Mecha in this classroom and Dale Musagades....

He was sitting in front of us, wearing a suit and tie, trying to put things into perspective.

He started telling the students, like, Look, the hole's in the fence, I can't hold those holes. We keep patching them up, they keep getting cut open. And I said I would try. It's a commitment, I can't....

I don't think there's any way in the world.

To keep those holes closed.

And he told the students they'd busted some people who had brought drugs through Buoy.

But eventually.

One student stands up and says, a, you're harassing us and that's why we're upset. And b. Your strategy for capturing border crossers seems to be to herd them all into the school where they're penned in.

So you have to.

It's somehow or another, apprehended. I don't know a better way to do it.

They have rights.

They do not have rights to come into the United States illegally.

What did it feel like to be sitting in that meeting, I mean,...?

It felt bizarre. I mean, that, you know, somebody is denying what everybody sees with their own eyes, yeah.

There was no face value to what he said, you know, because at that point we were cynical about the whole situation. You know, you can't undo the stuff that was already done.

So the meeting goes poorly. And a bunch of the students and some of the staff, including Ben Murillo, the assistant football coach, who had a gun pointed in his face. They all together decide that they want to sue the border Patrol.

Will you be our local counsel?

And I said, not only yes, but hell, yes. El Paso Civil rights lawyer Albert Armendariz Jr. Were you optimistic?

I mean, it's never an easy job.

Suing the government is not easy. When you live on the border and work in Segundo Barrio, you are never optimistic that a governmental system is going to work for you.

So.

October 23rd, 1992 The trial between Bowie High School and the Border Patrol begins, and apparently the courtroom was pretty much divided in half. On one half, you had the Border Patrol, like a ton of agents in full uniform, sitting there, on the other half, you had these Bowie students.

Dressed in their finest.

Sunday dresses, slacks, shirts.

Those kids were little troopers, they all got up on the stand, told their stories.

And then eventually, Border Patrol Sector chief Dale Moosigate testifies.

Yeah.

Do you remember what the defense's argument was? Well, they had lots of arguments. Now, we can't verify the specifics of what happened in the courtroom because a lot of the court documents have been destroyed. But Moosigate got up there and his basic argument was that. If you look at the U..S. Code of Federal Regulations, Section 1357 Powers of Immigration Officers and employees. Number one. Officers have the power to interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien as to his right to be or to remain in the United States.

I cross-examined Chief Moosigate and so.

What Moosigate was arguing is that, like, if they have all this power and if they can go on, you know. Private property right up on the border, and you got this high school on the border, then there's no question that they can be on school property and do their jobs. That's how they read that.

What they couldn't understand is.

They were doing it in a way that violated the Constitution.

And that is against the supreme law of the land.

This was Albert's argument that no matter what powers you have, you can't violate somebody's Fourth Amendment rights. You have to have a legitimate reason to stop somebody. So what did the court? What ultimately happened?

Okay, before this court.

Yeah, yeah, he's saying, Here's what we got in front of me here. Oh right, okay, read the next paragraph.

Jurisdiction and venue.

Okay, that means.

Findings of fact, the litigation, the named individual plaintiffs are united.

Go to the very, very bottom last paragraph.

The court hereby enjoins the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the INS, which at the time was above the Border Patrol. From stopping and questioning an individual as to his or her right to be or remain in the United States, unless the agent has reasonable suspicion based on specific, articulable facts involving more than the mere appearance of the individual being of Hispanic descent.

Okay, that's a fancy way of saying, stop judging people by their looks, signed the judge, Yes.

So they won, they won.

It was just absolute elation.

There was a big celebratory school assembly, Tony Santos was there.

We were all happy.

There were all these parties.

People gave us plaques.

I think I may even have some on the wall out there.

It was pretty awesome.

Again, former student Ricardo Villalma.

It was crazy to see all these.

The final ruling holds that the border Patrol did violate constitutional rights.

You just don't see the agents on our campus anymore.

That's the assistant football coach, Ben Murillo, who ended up being the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. They're treating us like people, not like second-class citizens.

Not like we have to be submissive.

Simply because they're federal agents.

We couldn't believe that we took on the federal government and won. That was one of the first times that I was really proud of what our government stands for.

And Ricardo said, coming out of federal court that day, it was like him and seven other students. And they came out and there was a bunch of other students and faculty from the school there.

Everybody was like, Cool, let's go back to school, hop in the car. We're like, No, we kind of want to bask in this. So we walked from the school building, the federal courthouse, downtown, to Bowie High School. And, you know, when we were getting there, we were all just kind of tearing up. We were proud.

But in the wake of this victory, in the months following, there would be a chain of events that would really drastically change the U.

When you because you just you wrote in that essay, sort of just sort of. You don't see the connection, you don't think there's a connection, but the fact that the connection is being made still sort of weighs on you.

Of course, it weighs on us. Okay, because, I mean, because of us. Fences were built, because the fences were built. Maybe 10,000 people have died in the desert.

But they didn't know what cactus, among the many before them, might hold some hope. Men tore their faces open, chewing saguaros and prickly pears, leaving gutted plants that looked like animals had torn them apart with their claws. The green here was gray.

This episode was reported by Latif Nasser and Tracy Hunt and produced by Matt Kilty with Bethel Habte, Tracy Hunt and Latif Nasser. Special thanks to Timothy Dunn for writing the book that really guided our story of Bowie High School. And to Chris Swan and Kevin Lovell with KVia for the archival footage they gave us. And to Gustavo Rivelas at the El Paso Independent School District, to Principal Francisco Ordaz, Sam Attell, Grace Hernandez and the rest of the staff at Bowie High School. To Maggie Southern Gladstone from Hachette for allowing us to use excerpts from The Devil's Highway. To Eric Robledo and Michael Wells at the Parsons School of Design at the new school, and to Susan Kern and Debbie Nathan.

Okay, so that was the first of our Border trilogy series. You'll hear the rest of the series, the next two episodes, updated over the next two weeks.

And before we go for today, we wanted to acknowledge that. Tracy Hunt, who you heard co-reporting that story, was one of many people affected by layoffs at WNYC last week. We're gonna miss her so much. She was not just an incredible reporter and riveting interviewer. She was like a kind of, I don't know, moral compass of this place.

And Tracy was not the only person from the Radiolab family that was let go. We also wanna shout some love at Julia Longoria, who was at Radiolab for a while. Made the episode Americanish, but then also hosted the new incarnation of More Perfect, as well as Amy Pearl, the Alpha gal herself, if you remember that episode about her tick bite giving her a meat allergy, she was also laid off after, you know, decades at the station. And finally, we wanted to say goodbye to Anna Rasquette-Paz, our digital media producer.

We are going to miss all of you and we envy whoever gets to work with you next. Thanks for all the beautiful stuff you made.

Next week is episode two of the Border trilogy. It's called Hold the Line.

Catch you then.

Hi.