it s a major project by volunteers, parishioners, and decendents of those buried there. reporter: behind the sacred heart chapel in bowie, maryland, a long forgotten cemetery. the jesuits founded a church here and a plantation that kept people enslaved, including kevin porter s ancestors. this is where they lived. this is where they came to commune after laboring all day. reporter: as the catholic church acknowledges, this horror of its past, its archdiocese in washington recently brought in an anthropologist to map and document grave sites. as volunteers, including church members and some seventh and eighth generation decendents swept and raked away centuries of debris, they saw graves, stones, grave markers and indications of burials.
is it possible dozens of people were buried here? it s likely hundreds of peoples were buried here. reporter: they marked suspected sites with flags. with this clearing process complete, the church will spend months now grappling with how to properly mark and preserve what s really a tragic piece of the church s history. the church says the committee of decendents, experts and leaders will eventually determine how to mark and honor the cemetery. it s part of history, and it has been talked about but needs to be talked about more. reporter: other organizations and governments are seeking to do the same. one of them, the state of maryland has considered legislation ordering a formal review of burial places to determine where money is needed to find and preserve burial grounds of the enslaved african american experience. kevin porter hopes to see a memorial one day. it s important that we uncover them and honor them. this site is important to our family, it s important to americ
2.1. this year, 230,000. they heard the message. come and we will let you in. that s the biden administration s message. they brought this crisis on. the poor people being brought in, it s extraordinary they re reacting this way. martha: and sleeping in the streets. yes, everybody is decendents of immigrants. this is not a compassionate process that we re carrying out as a nation right now, which is very clear. so juan and karl, thanks very much. i want to get to bill melugin who is watching all of this from the closest perch possible. he joins us now from eagle pass, texas. hi, bill. good afternoon. we re just getting new numbers from the city of el paso that might raise some eyebrows. according to the city, the federal government in the last two weeks alone has released 18,000 migrants in the city of el paso. why are they doing that?
protests have brought. that s the latest round of coming to terms. it s so many different institutions and jurisdictions trying to figure it out. you have places it s contained like georgetown university where they had in the 19th century, sold off 272 enslaved people to pay off debts and said the decendents of those people can go tuition free and put money into a fund for them as well. that s contained. and then you have the broader questions like what they re grappling with in rhode island and california. it raises interesting and important questions. whether it s the lower end of placing a marker, renaming a street, taking down an offensive monument or the higher end of calculating financial reparations. it s a long overdue conversation. the conversation is more around there are still people saying it shouldn t happen. but this is a conversation about how you do it because it s actually happening. the question, respond to that
is higher at $97 trillion. that said, documentation of ancestry can be incredibly difficult to find. so it is a problem if reparations are limited to decendents of the slaved. some argue that limiting reparations ignores the weight discrimination has had on black wealth in the aftermath. according to the brookings intuit the wealth of a white house household is seven to eight times more than the average black household at about $24,000. in 2019, the home ownership rate for white americans was about 73%, compared to 42% for black americans. and that is before even discussing whether reparations are more effective as direct payments or investments available to black communities. it s not as simple as giving a check.