Where and why he thinks it's important to start addressing his entire identity and decide that there are undocumented of both that's on next after the news I'm Eileen out in Derry with Kate yes a news headlines the trumpet ministration is drawing up plans to house as many as $20000.00 immigrants on 4 u.s. Military bases in Texas and Arkansas officials have given differing accounts as to whether those beds would be for children or for entire families and a gun memo to members of Congress had the military has been asked to make the facilities available as early as July and through the end of the year the announcement follows a series of contradictory statements and policies from the trumpet administration and reaction to the outrage over the separation of immigrant children and parents a day after President Trump reversed the policy with an executive order he said during a cabinet meeting separations may ultimately be reinstated I cited a very good executive order yesterday but that's only limited. It leads to separation alternately the Justice Department went back to California federal judge Dolly asking her to modify a court order barring the detention of immigrant children for more than 20 days the Justice Department said in its filing that quote relaxing these requirements would permit family units to be kept together in appropriate facilities a senior Trump administration official who would not be identified by name said about $500.00 of the more than $2300.00 children separated from their parents at the border have been reunited Donald Trump tweets this morning that congressional Republicans should stop wasting their time on immigration legislation until after the November elections Trump stance could effectively kill House speaker Paul Ryan's attempt to round up and nuff Republican support to pass the less hard line of 2 Republican bills neither had suppose. From immigrants rights groups or Democrats the tweets come just days after Trump insisted Congress needed to act to resolve the problems at the Us Mexico border but stubborn differences between the most hardline Republicans and others stalled immigration legislation on Capitol Hill a vote on the measure supported by House Speaker Ryan was delayed until at least next week Trump's comments raise the possibility there may be no vote at all the more hardline measure backed by conservative lawmakers failed yesterday 41 Republicans voted against it joining all the Democrats the final tally was 231 no votes 193 supported get Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urged defeat of both Republican bills both of these bills failed to provide a permanent legislative fix for our dreamers selling out the America their American dream to build the president's obscene border wall both are loaded full of every anti immigrant provision imaginable dismantling illegal family immigration. The European Union begins enforcing tariffs on $3400000000.00 in u.s. Products today that's in retaliation to charges the trumpet ministration has imposed on European steel and aluminum the European goods the Europeans targeted typical u.s. Products like Harley Davidsons bourbon peanut butter and orange juice and a way that seems designed to create political pressure on Donald Trump and Republican leaders Harley Davidsons are from Wisconsin the home state of House Speaker Paul Ryan bourbon from Kentucky the state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell orange juice tariffs hit Florida a key state in the midterm elections and the battle for control of the u.s. Senate Cecil Williams the former long time pastor at San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church headlined a rally at city hall to protest actions of the United Methodist Church Bishop who were moved glides associate pastors he says stripping the Church of its pastoral leadership is seen as an attempt to make lied more religiously traditional and conservative and we believe very strongly in being and being loving and being strong and being courageous and being able to stand up and being able to go on being able to make sure that something continues you know that will give meaning to us Glide Foundation president and c.e.o. Karen Hanrahan said the tension between Glyde and Methodist Church of Bishop Minerva Carr Sanyo stems from glides emphasis on serving the poor rather than promoting a religious gospel she would like to bring glide into the fold of a traditional United Methodist Church and congregation. She brings with her a more religiously conservative philosophy that would affect Clyde's values and in a way that would undermine everything that we do Carrie Harpo says Glyde helped him kick his said. Action to drugs 20 years ago you know works with light to help others recover like a b.s. Story it also gave me a song to sing it transformed my life and it has transformed thousands of people's lives mayor elect London Reid brought the weight of her office to the rally we stand proud we stand ready to fight we stand ready to do whatever it takes to make sure that we support glide glide doesn't turn anybody away. And in the city and county of San Francisco we want to turn our backs on why their ship Karsan us office did not respond to can't give face request for comment civil rights advocates are calling for an independent investigation into the east Pittsburgh Pennsylvania police shooting of an unarmed African-American 17 year old Jim Stevens the head of the black political m. Powerman project to the outcome might have been different if and when Rose had been white if the white officer who shot 3 bullets into the arm and one Rose would have done so on who are white 17 year old youth sort of being on the other. Blacks running from the police Stevens added far too many white officers don't look at black children and black men as people look at them as animals he said the officer shot rose just seconds after he fled a traffic stop it's a spare the air day in the San Francisco Bay area today and tomorrow residents are urged to reduce their driving weather forecast for the Bay Area partly cloudy in the morning then sunny and hot with highs in the upper seventy's to lower ninety's around the bay there's a heat advisory for orphans of Napa Sonoma and possibly Contra Costa County where temperatures may top $105.00 degrees in Fresno in the central San Joaquin Valley a heat advisory in effect today and tomorrow highs one 102105 degrees. More news and 94 point one at 730. Good morning you're listening to up front mom or any journalist Lauren Mark met the florist brothers while she was working at Oakland International High School they were teenagers at the time and they'd fled El Salvador on their own as unaccompanied minors their story about escalating violence in El Salvador about families trying to survive in poverty about crossing Central America and the desert on their own prompted Lawrence to write a book her book is called the faraway brothers to young migrants and the Making of an American life so welcome line Thanks so much for having me so this was such a moving and heartbreaking book and I really wanted these boys at some point to find some peace at the end but I think what's really in lining about their situation which is a situation of so many immigrants is are just completely flooded all the time with that with panic and worry with struggles and it seems like a strange place to start this interview but why did you want to convey that aspect of their lives because I was the thing that came across most strongly Yeah well it's interesting you know I chose to write about the Flores twins which is that's a pseudonym it's what I call them in the book to protect their ears. Hannity I just write about them for several reasons I mean one I thought it was really important that they were twins and they were actually 2 of them to kind of show and talk about and reflect on how people who experience the same things right there is identical as possible but there are 2 of them and they actually have really different reactions to the same events or to really similar events and I thought that was really important to convey that no 2 people were will experience the same events internally in the same way but at the same time their story was not the most harrowing story that I had come across and in fact look far from it while horrible things happened to them and they had a lot of struggles they actually in many ways were better off than many of the other students that I've had working at Oakland International High School where work on the one hand I wanted to be able to show just how complex and hard it was for them to on a basic level to be surviving right to be able to pay for their rent to be able to eat food to be able to kind of move through the impacts of trauma that they've experienced but I also hope that the book did some work conveying that they were also trying and fighting for normalcy in a way right like they wanted to feel at home and at peace and so in addition to all of their struggles they were also having these sort of daily life and heart breaks that are just part of the human experience of being alive and being an adolescent and what is the function of distilling these grand narratives about immigration and you know which are so popular right now because of tribes and looking at them through to people yeah through the human lens Well I think it's a lot easier I mean part of the work of the trumpet ministration has been dehumanizing immigrants and he's literally becoming animals are rapists right at stripping the human from the individual and that's easier to do when we talk about people on mass and when we strip individuality away and so in a way a book like. This or any story that's focusing on like the kind of textures of just someone being alive at a particular time in a particular set of circumstances that is a project of trying to understand a human being deeply beneath the headlines because these young men were experiencing themselves as part of a geo political movement of people right they were experiencing themselves as like a new immigration trend they were experiencing themselves as themselves 2 young men caught up in really difficult circumstances one of them I should say has kind of a price put on his head and also a door and then the other one because he looks exactly like him he has to flee they weren't fleeing saying oh here we are one of the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors who come in the past couple of years they were hitting the road to save our lives and so yeah it's very much a project of trying to understand to the extent possible what is that experience like and I don't want to give too much away in this interview but I want everybody to read the book and it was beautifully written thank you so much but I do want to talk about the floors brother and some of their situation what happened to them Yeah so how did you meet them or nest still and out which I know are not their real names right there pseudonyms Yeah so I sort of have a split life I've a dual life I work as a journalist in a writer and I also work at a school for immigrant youths in Oakland called Oakland International High School and I had actually been reporting on unaccompanied minors for several years I did a story for a magazine called the Q r I was in southern Texas writing about the system of apprehending and detaining and litigating and essentially trying to send back unaccompanied minors and this was before the massive 2014 news story and uptick although the numbers of unaccompanied minors had been rising steadily since 2011 most of us didn't really take no until 2014 so I'd written Yeah and really quick can you just say for the audience what is an unaccompanied minor I think you know an unaccompanied minor is somebody who has crossed into the United States without papers and not in the custody of their parents so. They're under 18 so they're under 18 exactly they're minors have crossed the border generally the southern border without papers or parents and have been apprehended so I've been writing about this for a while I had a story and b. Q r And then another story in Vice magazine and right when that Vice magazine article was going to press a friend of mine in coworker at Oakland International High School he's a math teacher and my job there is coordinating like socio motional services for young people he came into my office and said you know a bunch of my advisor have courts coming up they all have immigration court we really have to do something about all these kids with court dates they're really freaking out and they really need support and then he sort of said so anyway just passing that along you kind of turned around and went to go teach math and I was sort of dumbfounded because we as a school hadn't realized that so many of the students who had been enrolling for the past several years were unaccompanied minors and were in these very high stakes legal situations I should note that unaccompanied minors or anyone in the immigration court system no one is provided an attorney you have a right to have an attorney but you were not provided one unlike in the criminal system so that was in the spring of 2014 and we had in about January February we had 40 unaccompanied minors out of $400.00 students in one school and one school 10 percent by the end of the school year it was 60 by the beginning of the next school year it was 90 and we now have about 120 unaccompanied minors so those are all young people who arrived here without papers or parents and who are in very high stakes legal situations where in many cases the government is fighting to deport them back to places where they have left because they feel in most cases like they are in serious danger so that became a lot of my work at the school it is also through that same school that I met role and they're not so the same same guy my same friend David brought them in and said these 2 young men missed their court date they really need some help let's go back and talk about what happened in all Salvador What was their situ. And there yeah so they were born kind of right after in the wake of the Civil War and all Salvador and they were born in this moment of optimism in El Salvador the Civil War had come to an end their family had survived and made it out Ok to a lot of other people and especially a lot of poor people living kind of in subsistence farming situations like their family was the civil war of course was partially funded and backed by the United States government because it was at the time very concerning to our government that there was sort of a guerrilla movement and a leftist movement that smelled a lot like communism that was really happening really close to the United States so we were finding horrific military government there to perpetrate serious crimes against humanity on particularly poor villages like the ones where the Flores family lives so the twins were born in this moment of optimism and the peace accords has been signed you know and it was this like moment of rebuilding in El Salvador and then they grew up kind of in tandem with the rise of the gangs so a lot of us now I must 13 has become almost like a household name at this point which was not true when I 1st started this book and frankly wasn't even true last year when I finally finished the book Trump has made much of a mess 13 and the threat that it poses which is overblown but I'm a 13 was born in the United States during and right after the Civil War and I'll Salvador it was started among people who had fled El Salvador during the war and ended up in low income pretty dangerous neighborhoods in the United States and out of sort of a self protection mechanism to start a mess 13 largely in l.a. And then it was deported these young people were deported back to us out there as not for the gangs really took root in a post-war context there are power vacuums and there are limited economic opportunities so that's where I messed. 13 really took hold so they're twins in this book one of the twins ends up getting on the wrong side of the wrong guy in town and he's sort of a big man a rich man in town in this very poor small village and this guy really gets very angry for reasons that I won't go into but gets really angry at Ernesto who's the oldest twin and so there's a price that on his head and he has to flee and then they realized pretty quickly that the other twin because he looks just like his older brother older brother by 12 minutes that he too has to flee the country so there's a lot going on here yes and let's step back and talk about the Civil War because the war ended in 1902 in the early ninety's. And your book is a historical analysis of why the gangs became so prevalent. Basically in the aftermath of the Civil War These gangs came to power and it's not just Mr team but this is a lot of them and you quote a journalist who said. That El Salvador I think you said it had been brought to its knees by an army of fleet fleas or flies there was such a powerful cool. The Touch me a little bit more about this. What are the gangs doing in El Salvador Why did they become so powerful and yet so powerful it's a great question so it's interesting because I think we have this image of gangs or gang life that invokes images of sort of high roller and like rap videos kind of glamorous but dark life of crime and that is so not the case for most games and certainly not for m.s. 13 an excellent online magazine in El Salvador called us federal collaborated with The New York Times on that story that you just quoted that said all Salvador has been brought to its knees by an army of flies and that reporting really did an excellent job of delving into the daily life of most gang members and showing that as much as gangs have a stranglehold over many not all but many communities and many aspects of like life in the economy and also of it or most gang members are barely scraping by they arrested one of the higher ups in one of the gangs and El Salvador and he had something like $5000.00 in this big account and a lot of these people are really young incredibly young and that's the interesting thing is that the gangs in El Salvador exist because of lack of other opportunities and that is true of gangs in the United States right and that has always been true about gangs in the United States wrote a piece a few months ago for lack of on line that that was just talking about the fact that new Irish immigrants joined and form gangs Italian immigrants joined in for things like they were Jewish gangs young men coming to this country who are sort of excluded and pushed to the margins of society often find belonging and purpose and economy in the shadows and that's true in El Salvador that's true in this country and so the gangs are really made up largely of young people and people are recruited or forced into the gangs either by pure force like I will rape your sister if you don't join the gang or I will kill you or I will kill your father. Or I will make you kill your father or by force of circumstances you don't have a family you're an orphan or you're abused at home or there's not enough food for you to eat at home so if you join this gang you're not going to be getting rich but you'll have a cell phone and you'll have clothes and you'll have enough food to eat in a place to sleep it's really a day to day survival and I also wonder how much the sort of generational violence that happened because of the Civil War how much that plays into the ability of other power structures coming in I mean because. A country can't just recover from something like that it was a long civil war it was in crude oil the brutal and we're still uncovering mass graves exactly exactly I'm so glad you brought that up because it's so true right trauma because trauma and trauma we know travels through generations actually right like on a genetics level even and so the trauma of the war are very much still present and I'm also glad you brought up the graves There's a scene in the book that takes place at a more and they were still uncovering this was 2 or 3 years ago when I was there reporting this particular piece of the book and laid out on these table there's the more recent bodies that are found go to the to one more guy office but if they find bodies that essentially don't have any tissue they have to try to identify the bodies and make sense of what happened to the bodies through friends like Anthropologie and so I went into that room and there were bodies laying out on the table that had just been uncovered from a mass grave that is thought to be the work of the gangs people who got on the wrong side of the gangs were thrown into a pit behind us the sounds of it are slim but they were also still exuding the mass graves the massacre of almost all day which is one of the most famous and brutal but there were many like it massacres that the government perpetrated during the Civil War and it was so horrifying compelling to see the bodies Exuma from this grave from this horrific event in the eighty's right next to a body that was recently examined like last week or a couple months ago or something from from the current war it was like this perfect symbolism of the horrors of the past kind of being. Deeply connected to the horrors of the present. And on spending a lot of time on what's going on on the also video but I think it's important to understand why these 2 brothers left absolutely and you know it's entire small neighborhoods not just big cities but these small yaml areas where the brothers are from 2 that are being ripped apart by this violence and at some point you mentioned that people don't go out anymore in this village even during the day Wyatt on the streets because people are so scared. Yeah I mean you know I want to be careful to be sure to say that there's like a there's a range of violence and certain communities are much more deeply impacted than others and it's interesting as an outsider I go there and it doesn't look dangerous to me you know what I mean because I don't know the signs and of what to look for and I don't know what it what it was like before right so I see a quiet street and that doesn't necessarily seem ominous to me it just seems like a quiet street but people who live there will tell me oh no it actually has to be packed you know we could go out at night I know we can or we don't it's impacted different communities differently but it's impacted a wide range of communities and El Salvador and I should also say I'm really glad that you're wanting to focus on what's happening in El Salvador because I think too often we tend to talk about or think about immigration as something that happens at our border or after our border right when someone crosses that red line and in fact the choice to immigrate or the circumstances that push someone to immigrate happened long before and sometimes even in the case of the forest wins like we're talking about with or decades and decades before these kids are even born that Erling the groundwork to kind of push them out of their homes right and then there's this question that almost feel silly ring up in this interview but it you know I think about what is the responsibility of the United States having cause that civil war to the people that are now fleeing exactly the gang violence and all saboteurs I direct result of the United States foreign policy during the eighty's and immigration policy during the eighty's. Ninety's and right now we're having very horrifying foreign policy all over the world and extremely problematic immigration policy the fact is we can to poor people all day and night but that's not changing the realities on the ground and all Salvadoran people are still coming no matter what kind of horrific to turn to policies we try to put in place like you know horrifying detention and mass detention and separating kids from their families or building walls and pushing people into more harsh territories of the desert people are coming anyway no deterrent strategy that we have used has stopped people from coming and so they'll continue to if the conditions on the ground don't change and for the florist wins what would have been their life if they had stayed in El Salvador would they have survived it's so hard to know but at the time they had very very good reason to believe that at least one of them as though would be murdered and if not him his brother so at the time they very much felt like we have to go or we will be killed if they had stayed might it have blown over potentially if they had stayed might they have been able to work it out sure if they had stayed maybe was it possible it was a rumor that was sort of overblown Possibly but if you or I had really good reason to believe that our lives were at stake we wouldn't stick around to figure it out and you mention that the homicide rate there now rivals the homicide rate during the Civil War Yeah that was especially true in 2015 it's gone down slightly in the past couple of years but it's still of among one of the most dangerous countries in the world. So they made this decision to leave and I want to talk about this a little bit in your book you quote the secretary of Homeland Security who wrote a letter for me yes yes. The revolving door of the creates the exact argument and he wrote a letter to Central America as part of the good that the or stay home campaign. And he said you know basically don't send your children here and so the direct quote was in the hands of smugglers many children are traumatized and psychologically abused by the journey or worse beaten starved sexually assaulted or sold into the sex trade and that's actually all true that's completely true so why did the parents of these twins decide to send them north and not to judge them but just understand that the types of decisions that people are having to me and the dimension the very complex dimensions of all of the risks right that sort of like it's one of those decisions that so many families are forced to make that has no good answers right because they know that this is all true Exactly and that was what was so interesting to me talking to families and kids even about after the campaigns I was supporting in El Salvador in 2015 and I talk to people about the case at the campaigns and everyone said to me yeah we knew all of that stuff like none of that was news to us we all knew the horse and the risks of migrating and of sending your kids but if you know that they're going to die in El Salvador and they and there's a chance that they won't if you send them north you send them north and it's sort of a horrifying calculation that families are making but they're making it in the best interest of their children. Talk you know what the journey north is like I think at some point in your book you talk about young girls taking birth control before they leave knowing that they're going to be raped yet there's an assumption that there's at least a very good chance that they will be raped and so young women either take the pill or often get the shot so that they won't get pregnant the journey is and is often and can be extremely dangerous it is thought to be in generally is less dangerous if you hire a coyote or a human smuggler to take you because then you're not you know I mean thousands and thousands of young people and adults make this journey by themselves and sort of travel on their own writing trains riding buses you're having to figure out the route yourself that way and that's a much more dangerous but even in the hands of coyote's very intense things can happen to them they can be robbed or beaten they can witness horrific things they're put in safe houses well whole number of things can happen to them royal actually saw some pretty horrifying things happen to his coyote exactly who has a horrifying encounter on the side of the road that he's still there are memories that he's still sort of grappling with that are very much inside him and then later on the border of Mexico in the United States a horrific thing happened to a fellow traveller a migrant people get lost in the desert people are abused people are extorted I mean migrants are big business and that's true everywhere from massive corporations like Geo corps that run our immigration the Cillit is through government contracts all the way down to just migrant profiteers who stay on the side of the road and old up migrants to get the cash that's in their pockets even some of the cartels have turned to migrant kidnapping and extortion as a business tactic as certain drug flows have changed so a lot of people are profiting off of migrants You were just listening to larn Markham talking about her new book called The Faraway brothers and. To hear much more from Learn about the twins and how they adjust to life here in the u.s. And about the struggles all unaccompanied minors face and we're also going to talk to one preamp though about his experience being queer and undocumented on our immigration special for today so stay tuned we'll be right back after the news I'm Eileen out in Derry with Kate gets a news headlines President Donald Trump doubles down on his demonization of undocumented immigrants this morning saying quote We cannot allow our country to be overrun by illegal immigrants as the Democrats tell their phony stories of sadness and grief hoping it will help them in the elections also tweets that congressional Republicans should stop wasting their time on immigration legislation until after the November elections Trump stance could effectively kill House speaker Paul Ryan's attempt to round up enough Republican support to pass the less hard line of 2 Republican bills neither had support from immigrants rights groups or Democrats 41 Republicans joined with Democrats yesterday to defeat the more hard line of the measures. The u.s. Supreme Court has ruled that police generally need search warrants to collect information on where suspects use their cell phones the 5 to 4 decision was the 1st case about tracking cell phone location data that the Supreme Court has ruled on the case centered on a 2011 robbery in Detroit police gathered months of phone location data from Timothy Carpenter's phone provider they pulled together nearly 13000 different locations from Carpenter over 127 days without a warrant 3 black journeyman working for San Francisco based Clark construction filed a racial discrimination complaint against the company saying it failed to provide a harassment free workplace the complaint filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says that 3 crane operators were subjected to racial slurs using the n word written on signs in the restrooms and worse civil rights attorney John Burris is representing them to carriage act black character actor that we're. Going to use and each one of those there's going to you know you can you Crick and. There was a note that would take care you sooner or later worst of that effect one had a knife drawn on him demands complying often to the superintendent and nothing happened even when the nooses were found initially nothing happened and so finally the man couldn't take it anymore they called the police and all it will do with them we're going to week one of them was fired within another month another was by Clarke construction said in a statement it does not tolerate harassment or discriminatory behavior and has worked with police on the complaints and the end to provide cultural sensitivity training weather forecast for the San Francisco Bay Area sunny and hot highs in the upper seventy's to low. Or ninety's around the bay a heat advisory for portions of Napa Sonoma and possibly Contra Costa County as in Fresno in the central San Joaquin Valley a heat advisory in effect today and tomorrow with highs 102105 degrees I'm Eileen elephant Barrymore news a 94 point one at 8 o'clock and it is 733 you're listening to front any and we're going to get back to our interview with Laura Markham talking about her book The Faraway brothers and I thought the part was really interesting on top of being really horrifying was that Rose coyote had something pretty horrible happened to her body and then she kind of just brushed it off and visit me moved on moved on and made me realize that this has happened to her a lot and I was really scary to think about Absolutely and the payoff is that she has this beautiful house in Mexico City but at what price exactly and it's interesting because you know I didn't get to interview her because I kind of put the twins at risk and also they didn't know how to find her I mean we sort of tried but from their perspective she brushed it off and kept moving Who knows what that did to her meant to her so I want to jump ahead yeah and there's a lot about their journey that you can read in the book but I want to talk about what happens up north for the boys this journey was psychologically very impactful . What were those impacts on the boys and under this sort of intense distress how did the boys begin to deal or act out. Yeah a lot of people read this book and say I was so frustrated with them I just wanted to shake them you know and they make a bunch of bad decisions and they do so do a lot of teenagers so do a lot of teenagers young men I mean and I feel like they're just making stupid teenaged exactly but under a lot of duress and a really high stakes situation so I think about my brother and how he was at their age and he was you know make it all sorts of mistakes all the time he had the safety net of he was born in this country and so he had citizenship and he came from a middle class family and my dad was a lawyer and could support him if he ever got on the wrong side of the law which he sometimes did and the twins didn't have any of that sort of back up they were pretty much alone so they were dealing with the fact that they were separated from their family they were dealing with the fact that they were living in an urban context 1st in San Jose and then in Oakland after coming from a really were all background they were dealing with the fact that they while they had gone to school their whole lives they had had a really limited education because their school was so under-resourced all of the things that they knew how to do really well like they were really great farmers they were really great with their younger siblings they were like part of this important family unit they came from a very religious and devout family none of that stuff mattered or counted they felt like when they got here and all the things they needed to know how to do speak English you know make money figure out how to take an urban all of that stuff like do paperwork find a lawyer go to court all of that stuff was really foreign to them and just that alone without all of the deeply traumatic stuff that happened to them was incredibly challenging they were also integrating and dealing with these horrible memories it's pretty common I see this a lot with the young people I work with at the school where I work our students come from over 35 countries and many of them from you know active war zones or refugee settlements or some form of political or religious persecution. Once young people or any of us really get out of the heightened context of trauma and of the traumatic events and the more we feel safe and the more we're in a context of safety the more the trauma actually like bubbles up and it starts to manifest right so for these young men that looked like they were self medicating they were drinking from time to time or they were smoking pot they were prioritizing their social life over their schoolwork because they wanted to be in situations that made them feel good or better or distracted from all the things that rose going on and they were also waking up in the most of the night screaming from Nightmare exactly they were having horrible ghosts of the things that happened to them. It just makes me think about you know I have to go to therapy. And it's you know barely working so. I wonder about all these young people who come here and were very quickly like you have to succeed in school you have to go to court you have to do all these things are high stakes very high stakes but almost no psychological support exactly I also have that exact same concern and question and part of my role at the school actually is to mobilize as many resources or partnerships as possible to bring as many you know mental health resources into the school I mean there's look there's a lot of important work that can be done without professionals in the sense of like making sure school feel safe and warm and welcoming and that there are opportunities for students to express themselves in their opportunities for like distressing like playing soccer doing there are lots of different ways that we can be infusing positive mental health strategies into our schools but the fact is with a lot of the complex trauma that people are coming with professionals are really what's needed and there's a lack of that there's a lack of funding for that but frankly there's also a lack of bilingual bicultural mental health resources just in this country well and I think about these but there's a lot and then all the other students that are coming like you said from active wars already refugee camps. And we're expecting these kids to learn English to succeed in school to learn math and meanwhile when they go home at night they're waking up in the more than a screaming because they saw someone killed in front of them or because of they left their home and they saw this horrible stuff happen the journey has left them scarred there's nowhere for them to put that Yeah exactly I think that was what became really obvious about these brothers was that they couldn't even really talk to each other about it yeah it was very much this and especially because a lot of their trauma was wrapped up in guilt it was my fault that happened I had done this thing this other thing wouldn't have happened or not so very much feels like if I hadn't gotten into this problem with my uncle my younger twin wouldn't have had to take the journey and then be in the situation we found ourselves and so there's a lot of guilt and shame wrapped up in just like these horrible memories as well and I think one of the things that really. Burdens of boys is that. Yes I'm so glad you brought up the debt so it is safer although not safe but it is often safer. To pay someone a coyote to help one of these young people make the journey from El Salvador Guatemala or Honduras which is where the vast majority of these unaccompanied minors are coming from to move from that country up through Mexico and into the United States that is an incredibly expensive journey so it's anywhere between $6.00 to $10000.00 a head so these young men each took out $7000.00 so it was 14000 dollars like a minute that they left off Salvador that was and compounding a very predatory interest rates the total shadow industry this this lending industry is just rich people in town make people sign paperwork and say Ok it's going to be x. Y. Z. Percentage and it's going to compound forever so at a certain point in the course of the book it's over $20000.00 even though they've been paying it off steadily it is beyond their control over what is their family's average income is probably a guess but isn't anywhere close to that it is nowhere close to that there are mostly subsistence farmers and they make some money by selling excess tomatoes or onions when they have them so they make a couple $1000.00 you know there's been a drought and there's been a drought and that was that's an interesting thing that I found in this book and that I like a topic for a whole other book probably that someone needs to read and that some people have written which is that no matter what story I write about migration whether it's and also I would or Kenya or Burma every. Every story that I write about make ration has some at some level of it so climate change complicating factor just to bring some more doom and gloom into the conversation but it does you know it is often a complicating or compounding factor to situations on the ground actual resource scarcity of food and water and land which is what climate change is doing in a lot of places does not help. Matters when it comes to gang violence or war or you know political unrest when we actually did interview about that topic yes it's about the projections for the coming decades and climate change and how many millions will be feeling and so the u.s. Is has this plan on how to protect the border it's called storming the wall is the more I've heard of this yeah I certainly want you to listen yes go back and find that it's really fascinating and very disturbing conversation and. They also end up having to get a lawyer yes they hear us which also costs a lot of money so what happens to people who don't have a lawyer and try to go to immigration court so unaccompanied minors are at least 5 times more likely to win their immigration case if they have a lawyer so that is to say like many things in the world and in the United States if you have money you are more likely right to have the outcome that you want which is essentially like saying you're buying your immigration status so if you don't have a lawyer it is possible but exceedingly difficult and complicated and unlikely that you will be able to win any kind of ability to stay here because even highly trained expert lawyers these are complicated cases and kind of complicated legal precedents that you're having to draw upon in order to say prepare an asylum case or fight for a special immigrant juvenile status so they end up with even more debt and I think this is interesting because their family back home sees pictures of them on Facebook as you mention with nice shoes they have a cellphone which is such a luxury and yet so smart phone or a smart phone but what they don't see is how expensive living here is actually when they ended up in one of the most expensive cities in the United States actually And so there is this also this tension between their family back home thinking that they've just forgotten about the debt and aren't being responsible and the kids here who are overwhelms with that responsibility and can't ever seem to make a dent in it exactly I think from their perspective it's like oh. Are working so hard I really want to cool pair of shoes because even though I have to pay my lawyers fees and my family needs money back home my shoes are all busted and I want cool shoes because I'm also a teenager and I'm also deeply steeped in American capitalism. It's like a complicated set of calculations and this is part of the problem of struggling with very adolescent life and these very adult preoccupations in this adult life of well I'm responsible for my family someone wants to kill me I have incredible debt I have a high stakes legal situation coming up I need to find a lawyer so they're dealing with a lot at the same time and so they kind of go back and forth between being like responsible adults and then being sort of like more age appropriate to where they are and they are working a lot they work a lot so they go to school every day most days they try to go to school every day in the book and then after work pretty much every day they go and work at a restaurant until 101112 at night they're often up until midnight or 1 in the morning and even with that income they were unable to pay off the debt yeah they were able to pay off the debt at the rate in which the debt was climbing and when I talk about this in the book but I asked the dad I said what is because they would have to go kind of hangdog every month to the lender and say you know we have this much we don't have that much and I asked the dad I said how much is the interest and he's an incredibly smart incredibly capable man but he's not trained in math interest rates and you know like he went to get a 2nd grade education and the lender is very much I think taking advantage of that and so the dad said to me the interest is 5 percent now it's 50 percent now maybe it's 15 percent like he didn't know the number of the interest because it almost didn't matter it was just such a big number but that also meant that they were just going every month to the lender and were just sort of trusting whatever number was written down on the ledger her kind of blindly trusting that So even if they sent in $500.00 they needed at a certain point they needed to be sending home like 11 or $1200.00 a month to actually dig into the principal otherwise they were just paying off infinitely compounding interest. So the last question is you know you wrote this book for a purpose and I haven't really asked you that. But what are you hoping that people take away from the story what is it that she wants to learn Yeah I think for that question I approached this book very earnestly It was a very earnest project where it's trying to understand why are all of these young people coming and why are there so many of them and why are they coming now I'm fascinated by migration I think it's a very important indicator of inequality and it's an indicator of geo political goals things that we should be paying attention to right like anytime one group of people starts migrating who hasn't migrated before or from a place that there where there hasn't been a source of migration before we need to start paying attention and so when like tens of thousands of young people are start moving from El Salvador Guatemala and Honduras and numbers higher than historic proportions that is something we should be paying attention to and so I really kind of wanted to understand textural lived experience level and so my hope is that this book can make sense of some of the headlines but also make human sense of headlines which are much more often about numbers and about sort of buzzwords and about policy but policy is ultimately enacted by people and affects people and so the hope with this book that's a very like human story about young people who are caught up in the mess that has been made of history the challenges that that history has inflicted upon their home countries and that are caught up also in this battle in which for using migrants and immigrants all over the world as weapons for policy and for personal and political gain Well thank you so much for joining us Lauren thank you it's been so lovely to be here I really appreciate inviting me you were just listening to Laura Markham talking about her book called The Faraway brothers and we want to air their interview because of what's been happening at our borders separating children from their families and I thought Lauren Markham's book deal. Wonderful job of talking about the entire being of an immigrant what their life was like before immigration during and after and so on that note this week in his pride and San Francisco when thinking about what part of queerness we want to talk about on today's show because of pride we couldn't really get off this topic of immigration or this idea that immigrants and refugees are also queer or trans So again this idea of representing each other as complete and complex human beings So joining us in the studio is one works in communications for California immigrant youth justice Alliance a welcome one and so when I send out a general call on why I'm asking if anybody wants to talk about immigration and career identity and you responded pretty quickly why did you want to join us today I often don't give myself the time to think and converse about the intersections of queerness and being an undocumented immigrant as well as everything unfolds I even joke around it with other queer immigrants about like Ok Tonight we're not going to be immigrants we're not going to worry about the fascist government that's coming after as we're just going to be clear we're going to go dancing we're going to celebrate ourselves but realistically speaking even if I try to divide them I'm being both at the same time and these 2 spaces so you can go to pride this weekend no I'm not actually they try to avoid it but why do you try to avoid it it's interesting that queer or bt has found a way to be proud of themselves throw a flag and create this sense of like home or national. And so that's what it represents to me To me it's like you have straight people have the 4th of July and white queers have pride pride pushes so hard to remain a political I remember last year there were so many protests that specifically black organizers were playing together to try and get the police out of pride and they were met with great repression not from the police but from from the organizers of different pride events we forget who whenever queers fought for liberation and they were fighting just against society they were quite literally fighting against police like the literal police. Was beating queer folks at bars arresting them in much like and their spaces and then brutalizing them on the streets and I don't know if that we have like historical amnesia or like what happened that all of a sudden we no longer want to have an honest conversation about really what are the cops doing our pride when the 1st prides were riots when you know our fights against homophobia manifested themselves against fights with actual police officers and if we're not willing to challenge that then we've only just assimilated into heteronormativity and whiteness as opposed to being the liberators of queerness globally yet you also mention that you separate out the Craig and me from the immigrant identity why do you think you do that whenever I say turn on the immigrant It's like turning off possibly being hunted down by and you know locked up indefinitely he or. You know being separated from my family or being deported to a country that I no longer would feel safe and so I went out and that's it that's what sort of what I mean by that but realistically speaking again we're not really dividing them we're carrying it like I'm carrying both being a migrant and being queer in both of these spaces and it's more so so that I can when I go out I can turn off this sort of constant attempt to find that belonging to fight again and. You know why nationalism to fight against deportation and the current administration. And I guess it is like oh I'm like fooling myself because really you know cement as you mentioned there's the undocumented immigrants who are clear when detained phase another layer of oppression once in detention another layer layer of neglect and isolation and one's the taint specifically the trans folks who are detained right and for some reason I just so see. Ated queerness as I came to flourish in the Bay Area as belonging as fluid as open and in fun. Do you feel like there is space in organizing to accommodate all those identities or do you feel like you have to pick some other organizing tactics are based on clear tactics like coming out of the shadows right that if we no longer hide this identity from our peers then it will open them up to being to humanize in ourselves and then being more open to allowing us to have dignity and respect in this country and so you know that stems from coming out of the closet right which had similar tactics of if we come out our peers our friends or coworkers will be more opened to giving us the rights and dignity that we deserve and so. You find similarity in all over organizing spaces you can find queer folks I just think that now we're more open about the queerness within organizing I think before it was just kind of we were there and we had similar tactics and we sort of introduced them into the space and now we're very much like No we're like give his ability to queer folks have queer folks at the table provide the different insights that being queer might have given us right. I do think it's really interesting for me like queerness and also being a migrant I think and having to hide dual identities growing up allowed me to see the world from the inside out I don't belong to that world so I need to sort of build a little protective shelter and then watch that world and know how to navigate it and that happened as a queer person navigating a federal world versus had a world and it happened as an undocumented immigrant navigating a word or a world of citizenship and nationalism and so within that I was able to sort of as achieving as a child be very conscious of my mannerisms be very conscious of how the world perceives me and so then now as you grow older you start using that a strategy in organizing and her bringing it into. Every day life like how how can I take a step back into into myself. And view the world and everything that's happening and then find ways to push the boundaries to normalize. Migration that's something that's just natural to human beings like it's the part of like the natural order if you suck the resources out of the rest of the world the world is going to travel to the place where all the resources are at the you know outside of that like the world especially the United States is focusing in ensuring that the resources that it sucked up from the world remain exclusively accessible to says hetero white folks and and those who unfortunately for them they had to give rights to right and so for migrants it becomes easy to dehumanize and say those don't belong and you know that propaganda has been ongoing for a while it begins with the war on drugs and criminalizing you know the the countries that these migrants would eventually come from and then it starts with them crossing into the border goes on with them crossing into the border and then dehumanizing them there and now that they're here and that's the problem in camps Let's continue to exploit them in the fields because we can't feed the country without explicate of later labor let's continue to exploit them in our cities because San Francisco doesn't eat without undocumented cuts and so you know all of this propaganda not only allows them to be humanized and lock us up but allows a sort of like exploitative class that they can easily get rid of if the population is getting too brown for them and I was a question I was going to ask you is you know there's so many queer people in organizing spaces not inquire spaces just an every single movement and you know I wonder if being clear that experience makes you a better organizer or draws you to movements in a different way yeah I honestly think are more inclined to defy the state because of that perspective we were able to grab right as I mean it's very unfortunate that we're forced to hide ourselves for so long. It gives us a different perspective into the world that as it unfolds around us and so you know yeah most of my career. Organizing friends or movement friends are very like far left and are not willing to compromise for reform or policy that might give some some breads of crumbs but then it'll end up you know stripping the larger majority of our community of rights and I think you saw that with Dr Wright with the 1st action where it was like bread crumbs and a lot of like the more dominant narrative undocumented folks are like yes this is all we want and then you have a queer for folks who are like no this is criminalizing the rest of the millions of undocumented people in this country and we should not out to happen it's like anarchism in a sense or a like I think queerness is anarchy to both of these systems that keep telling us that this is how we should be and we just constantly defying it and I think it provides a very lengthy angry leftist organizer movement person and it's interesting because it's a lot of crypt people in movement spaces but I don't necessarily see queer organizing again. Organizations being very diverse or that's even the right word I don't think but they're still predominantly white still focused on marriage equality still ya know and yeah that's exactly what what that's like and I think a lot of us queer folks of color queer folks with differing varying identities like we're like we're not even going to bother with that we're going to focus on all these other identities that are so facing systemic racism that are facing structural oppression because you know marriage isn't going to solve our liberation like even if I think a lot of like white l.g.b. T.v. Queer or queer or exotic are specifically focused on being accepted into the normative because at the end of the day they're still white they don't have to face structural oppression in the ways that we do still these white Oregon fight for us to have every single right straight person in this country happens and then we're still off color we're still undocumented we're still facing. All these other problems and so I personally rather put my energy on this other like structural problem then fight for a voice or a space within a white movement fighting for hetero acceptance and that's not what I want I don't want what straight people have why didn't the such a fear of this organizing because we're not I think black like Smetters not fighting for white acceptance where folks were the non white for a while and now they're like fine bt or even just the right if you're white now welcome and now it's like Ok fine like we're good now and realistically speaking there's the rest of us who are like no we're not fine we're still fighting for liberation not acceptance and I think that message just doesn't sit well with them because they're still white and they just want to be accepted into the white world not be free. As we can be if we all collectively use our efforts and our queer creativity to create a world that's better than the one that the system man created So what does it look like to get all or creative queers in one room and imagine something else and as in a queer world without borders without nations without flags this absolute liberation well imagine it and then let's work towards it. You were just listening to one p. At the from the California immigrant youth justice alliance and that does it for today show a front as we did mornings the 7 am we post information about topics and our guests on line and keep if a dot org We can also dig through archives to subscribe to the show as a podcast and connect to social media if you like to give us feedback on something you've heard or suggest something for us to cover send an e-mail out front to keep the affair dot org Stay tuned. You're listening to k.p. a Fake if you have be in Berkeley K.F.C.'s $88.00 or Fresno. Ok 2 for 8 be our 97.5 in Santa Cruz and to keep their feet dot org. Rising up is next to. The. Front Gate b.f.d. Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles This is rising up with. Host So non-equal Hucker where online and rising up what's on Ali dot com Donald Trump has signed an executive order ending his own practice of separating undocumented children from their parents only to cement the indefinite detention of whole families.