WEBVTT
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[light music]
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It's long been written into U.S. law
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that if you come here fleeing,
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and really do believe you will face particular forms
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of persecution, then you deserve protection here.
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That has been just so fundamental,
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to the essence of this country.
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They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime,
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they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.
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Almost the moment Trump got into office
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he begun issuing executive orders
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that changed the idea of who is deportable.
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[somber music]
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Let's just talk about who Laura was
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and what had happened to her.
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So Laura was a 22 year-old mother of three boys
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in South Texas and she'd been living undocumented
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in the U.S. for a long time.
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One night, she got off work and was driving home
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with her colleagues pretty late,
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and they got pulled over by a local border cop,
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he said, are you documented or undocumented?
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She acknowledged that she was not here legally,
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he called Border Patrol.
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This is a woman who had been routinely abused
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by her romantic partner, to the point that
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she sought a protective order against him,
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she received that order, and he was deported.
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He had joined a drug cartel right back across the border
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in the same area where she was from, and she knew,
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because he'd been threatening her with death,
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that she faced a very, very serious risk
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of harm if she was sent back.
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And she told this, right away, to the policeman,
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she said again and again,
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I fear I will be killed if you send me back.
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When I am killed next week, my blood will be on your hands.
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You're sending me back to the slaughterhouse.
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And they presented some forms to her
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at the Border Patrol station,
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it's called a voluntary removal form,
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and she was told that she had to sign.
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So, at sunrise, she was crossing the bridge
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directly into Reynosa, Mexico,
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which is known to be a Zetas cartel stronghold.
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It's there that a few days later, he indeed strangles
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and sets her body on fire, and kills her.
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[somber music]
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So one of the things that was interesting
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about this reporting process is that it actually began,
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far before Trump was even elected.
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I set out with a team of students
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in a graduate school class I teach at Columbia,
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we picked four or five local legal aid providers
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that help immigrants, and we asked them,
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have you heard of anyone who was deported to their death
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or deported to other kinds of harm?
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We basically set out to assemble a database of harm.
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Really documenting all the different ways
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that people can get harmed after they're deported.
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And then we set off to find these people.
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And mostly these are women and men coming from
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Central America's Northern Triangle,
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so the countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
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So many of the families I've spoken to who came here
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actually came here fleeing violence.
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They don't come here just because they wanna take our jobs,
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or make a lot of money.
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They many, many, many, many times come here
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because they really do fear for their lives.
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If you don't join this gang, we're going to kill you,
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or we are going to kill your mother,
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or we are going to kill your entire family.
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Oftentimes, the people I interviewed
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came explicitly telling the U.S. Government
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they wanted protection, not trying to sneak in,
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in fact reporting directly to Border Patrol,
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and then they were never given that chance,
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despite the fact that the law requires it.
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Maria, Laura's mom, has taken on a lot
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in the aftermath of her daughter's death.
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Including, really being the primary caretaker for the kids.
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I do remember that one of the things she said to me was,
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I wanna show you this little miracle,
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this thing that I find very surprising,
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and she walked off into her bedroom,,
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and she went and grabbed a box, and she brought back
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in her hands a bunch of Laura's clothes.
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And she handed it over to me, and gave this pile
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of Laura's waitressing clothes, and I remember like,
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she said, the crazy thing about this is
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that Laura's still there, and the clothes smell fresh.
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So, the big takeaway for me, under Trump, has been,
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if you're going to massively expand the numbers of people
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who are deportable, and you are not going to afford them
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the conventional due process that we have
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written into the law, and that we have agreed to
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in the International Law as well,
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there are going to be real consequences.
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The consequences have been death,
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or the consequences have been sexual assault,
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or kidnapping, or all these kinds of things
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that we want to look away from.
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How we think about ourselves as a country
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is that we have always been a nation of refuge.
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And that is changing, and that is evolving,
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as we send back more and more people who
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have fled legitimate forms of violence,
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and who may have very, very good
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legal claims to seek protection here.
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[somber music]