Happy Friday. Hope everyone had a good — and dry — Independence Day. This week I was on the U.S.-Mexico border, getting as close as I could to America’s concentration camps.
I was following a congressional delegation led by Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas. It featured most prominently Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman Democrat from New York who has done as much as anyone in the country to bring attention back to this issue.
After the tour, I sat down for a one-on-one interview with Ocasio-Cortez — much of which I published as a transcript in Mother Jones.
I had other thoughts and reporting to share as well. I’ve done that here in the first-ever Long Version podcast edition, which you can listen to using the player above. It includes exclusive audio from that interview and the scene along the border.
Please enjoy and share.
And, if you haven’t yet, sign up for The Long Version! You’ll get the backstory others missed, the details they didn’t bother to look for, and analysis you won’t get anywhere else:
Transcript (automatically generated, may contain errors)
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Hi, this is Jonathan Katz and you're listening to a special audio edition--in fact, the first ever audio edition--of The Long Version. That's my new newsletter. I'm just back from El Paso and the US-Mexico border where I was following around a congressional delegation that was visiting Donald Trump's concentration camps. And I thought that this would be a good medium to share some of my thoughts. Some of the things that I saw when I was down there.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I want to start off, first of all by thanking everybody who's already subscribing to The Long Version. Hello. If you have not yet I invite you to check it out. You can find it by Googling my name and the long version. Or you can go directly to katz.substack.com to sign up. That's K A T Z dot SUBSTACK dot com. And you can read some back issues there and see if you like it and sign up to get it in your inbox every week.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
So on Saturday, I was on my way back from Puerto Rico and I got where I was working on a different story and I got a phone call that a congressional delegation was about to head down to El Paso to visit some of the concentration camps. And this delegation was going to include Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Congresswoman Ocasio Cortez is of course a freshman, 29 years old representing the Bronx and Queens, who in her, it's almost been exactly a year since she won an upset victory in the democratic primary against a long time, but little known nationally Democrat. And in the time since she's been in office, she has established herself as a significant voice and she used that voice a couple of weeks ago to make a very powerful statement.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
She said that the migrant detention centers as some people call them that were set up all along the Southern border -- but of course there are others throughout the country -- are concentration camps. Now this was a call that resonated particularly with me. Those of you who have been reading this newsletter for a little while it has been going on know that I wrote a piece in late May called "Concentrate on the Camps" where I made that same argument. I made that into a op-ed that ran in the Los Angeles Times. And sometime later the representative responded to that call and made that statement and I think we were thinking about the same thing, which was that calling them by their name using a powerful term that would resonate with people, would call attention to a crisis that to a large extent had been forgotten.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
There had been a brief flurry of attention during the so-called zero tolerance or family separation in 2018, but ever since that had been quote unquote resolved essentially by president Trump deciding to throw whole families into his camps together. It hadn't been talked about a whole lot and I thought that was wrong. I think that this is one of the signature policies of an administration that has shown clear, authoritarian and white nationalist tendencies. And I think that the Congresswoman saw the same. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to see things through the eyes of an emerging and very important public figure and get some access that I might not be able to get myself as, as a journalist.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Now. I was not allowed inside any of the camps or any of the places that we visited. No reporters were--only the members of Congress were--but by virtue of the fact that I was sort of following them around with a small pack of, of other reporters and of course some staff, I think I was able to get more of a look than I normally would be able to. I mean, even just being able to stand up against one of these fences and look through and you know, record little videos and, and a little bit of audio, some of which I'll play for you on my phone. That's something that I probably wouldn't have been able to do if I had just gone on my own. And of course I was able to talk to the members when they came out. Especially Congresswoman Ocasio Cortez who sat down with me for an interview. And I'll be playing a couple snips of that later.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But let me just give you a brief overview of some of the places that we saw and I'll, I'll set the scene a little bit. For those of you who've never been there before. El Paso is a really fascinating town. It's very far from other cities. I was told that if you drive east it's hours before he gets in the next major city, which is probably San Antonio. And it is really a binational city. Really it's, it's still in a lot of ways El Paso del Norte, which is what the area was originally known as. Half of it is El Paso, Texas, and the other half is Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. And you really feel that in a lot of ways. I mean the, the people, you know, families have relatives on both sides of the border.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
People are crossing back and forth every day. And by virtue of that fact, it's a very interesting place to have these camps which are primarily being used to hold people from Latin America. Now, not so much Mexico because immigration from Mexico is way down and has been way down from, from the much higher numbers that we saw, you know 10, 15 years ago. A lot of the people who are moving through right now are coming from farther South and central America from what's known as the, the Northern triangle. That's Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and a couple of other places. You also have significant populations of other people in computing interests, including interestingly enough, Cubans who are flying from Cuba often to Ecuador or to Nicaragua or countries that have good relations with Cuba and making a long and very dangerous Trek North to try to get through the border.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And those people are being held in these places and they are places that are meant not to be seen. I think that's one of the major things that really stuck out to me from what I saw there. There, there are places that are meant to blend in with their surroundings and be ignored. So the first one that we went to was called Casa Franklin and it's a building, nondescript office building, kind of a sandy beige color brick, no signs on the outside except for some very small ones that basically tell you the troublemakers are going to be prosecuted. But you could walk right by it, which is what I did. I, it was actually very close to the hotel that, that I was staying in, which was also where some of the members were staying. And I use my Google maps to head over there and I, I walked right past it because I just didn't see that it was there.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But if you look really closely, if you stop on the street and notice you can see that there's something strange going on. All of the blinds are really tightly drawn. No daylight is getting in or out. And of course, that means that you can't see anybody who's inside. And the people who are inside are children. Several dozen children. Again I think the majority of them from central America who have been put in there and a lot of them have actually been taken away from their families. Not parents because of the result of, of, of the outrage over the family separation policy back in 2018. But if they travel across the border with an uncle, an aunt, a grandparent, a cousin, even if they have parents who are already in the United States is my understanding. They're taken away from them and some are being put into, into this particular place. And the delegation got there. And they visited there first and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez actually came out and told us in Spanish a little of what she had seen inside
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Aquí por un tour algunos días, pero hay tambien niños aqui que esta, you know, llegando a, como, algunos meses aqui en estas facilidades. Y tambien yo tengo preocupaciones por los niños que solo pueden hablar quiché, o mam, o otros dialectos -- idiomas,idiomas indigenas
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And what she's saying there is that, first of all, some of the kids who were supposed to be kept there for only a matter of days had been kept there for months on my heard from one member as many as eight months. And also that she's concerned because some of those kids not only don't speak English but don't speak Spanish, they speak indigenous languages such as Mam, Ki'che, and so they're having trouble communicating with anybody from the outside. I also was told by another member of Congress who went in that one of her concerns was that there's a telephone that the children can use to call in and make a report of abuse if there are any abuses going on. But then that phone is being put in a very public area. So like you would have to be making these declarations basically in front of all of the other inmates, the other child, inmates who are being held in this place.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Not to mention the guards. So that, that would suggest that if there's malfeasance going on, we may not know very much about what's going on inside. The next place we went was a border patrol station one El Paso. And if you've been following any of the coverage of this trip, including what I wrote in mother Jones this is where a lot of the news that you've been seeing came out of. I'll give you a little bit of background about what was happening right at the moment that we went in that morning. ProPublica had published a story about a Facebook group of border control agents who were posting racist and sexist and just awful, awful memes and jokes. Both about the migrants and sort of retaliation against the members of Congress who were about to come inspect them. Particularly AOC.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And this story had come out, you know, just then, and when the members went inside they were already, you know, kind of nervous about what they were going to encounter. Because this Facebook group, I mean, let's, let's be clear here. It contained about 9,500 members. That's almost half of the entire border patrol. I think that's, that's like the, almost the majority of the people who actually worked for this entire agency. And I mean, one of these, one of these photo illustrations that somebody had made showed Representative Ocasio-Cortez literally being raped by Donald Trump. And that's the level of, of what we're talking about here. And so the, the members were understandably concerned. There are also some sort of weird ground rules that were being laid out that the members couldn't take phones inside. They couldn't record what was going on.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And I just, I, I really want to underline this, like over and over and over again. Remember, press isn't allowed inside. You know, anybody who's basically below the level of a member of Congress isn't allowed inside. And even the members of Congress, I mean, these are elected officials. Some of your elected officials are being told that they can't record, they can't take any video. They can't take any audio of, of what they're seeing. Border patrol does not want you to know what is happening inside of these places. The Trump administration does not want you to know what is happening inside these places. They want to be able to get away with whatever they want to do. They want to have no oversight whatsoever. And this was understandably concerning. It was understandably concerning to a group of law makers one of whom in particular had been targeted by, by some, some pretty violent and, and sinister stuff online. But, you know, they were willing to go with this because these were the ground rules. I mean, it's, they didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. So during the visit well I'll, I'll let, I'll let you hear from Representative Ocasio-Cortez herself. This is from the one on one interview that she and I did just after.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
I'm listening to CBP kind of give this tour. And then I see, and I think someone else has seen it first. It was either like Madeline Dean or Rashida to leave or somebody saw the screen with the surveillance that had like all of the video feeds of all of the cells. And so I started walking up to the screen with the surveil--with all of the surveillance feeds and I started, since they made us check our phones at the door. I did have like some paper and some pen and I started jotting things down. I was writing down everything that I had seen around me and so I was counting, I kind of have my pen up and I was counting like all of the little, in one of the, one of the feeds of the cell, there was one cell that just had very large amount of people, like large -- there were so many people crowded in the cell that people could not sleep in there.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
So there were some people like sitting, some people crouched and I went in and I started counting all of the people that were in the cell and then I looked down and I kid you not, there was literally a CBP officer with their phone and they started trying to do this to take a selfie of themselves with me in the background.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Right?! It wasn't even in the distance. She was like two feet in front of me and there was this glass perimeter in front of them and she was literally like, and that's when all hell broke loose.
