near proceeds from each sale will benefit the tbia mission including expand literacy among young texans in toward the end of this session we open the floor to questions with the microphones. when that happens, confine yourself to one question and keep it concise. so let me note by, let me start by noting that glenn has some serious texas bona eggs. he was drafted by the san antonio spurs in what was that, 1979, 1979, 1979, spurs fans, spurs fans fans. that was after a stellar career as point guard for harvard. i think you still hold records at harvard a few of them, yeah. yeah. and by the way, he was much taller back then. before before spending decades in washington where they just of ground him down a little bit year by year. glenn my decade of covering the

federal government in washington, i always felt that the inspectors general were the most powerful officials that most americans had heard of. so i'm really pleased you've you've done this terrific book to pull back the curtain on what igs do, and especially at this moment when several major federal department look like they're likely to be led by folks who, to put it kindly, could some oversight. so let's start by defining an inspector general is and does you know, i remember when i when i first heard the term, i thought about the old soviet union where you would have you know, you had the dude who was running the tractor factory. and then right next to him, the party would put a commissar to, you know, to look over his shoulder. so is that what an ig does? no, no, not really. dan and i'll answer that question, but first, let me thank you for moderating thank texas book festival for having me. i do have to address the issue about the basketball, because when people see me, they don't believe i was drafted. the san antonio spurs, when i

was the acting inspector general, the department of defense, i met a lot of admirals, generals, and that's the first thing they asked me. is it true you were really drafted by the san antonio spurs? you're too short. they would say. and i would say, yes, it is. i was drafted in 1979. the san antonio spurs in the 10th round. they only have two rounds now, but back then they had ten rounds. i said i'm five foot, nine inches tall. before i started this as the inspector general, i was six foot nine inches tall, so no inspector general is not a commissar, just counts beans. it is a very important position that detects, deters, waste, fraud and, abuse and promotes the economy and effectiveness of every federal agency. there's an inspector general and each federal there are independent. they report problems both to agency head and to congress. they're supposed to be nonpartisan, and they have access to all information in the agency and can audit, evaluate and investigate anything in that agency.

they are important to our country because they promote accountable government. they return significant amounts of money to the federal treasury. they promote efficiency and effectiveness in government and also let our citizens know what's happening in their government, because i think that is incredibly important. so i have called them some of the most important public servants. you've never heard of. i hope this book exposes more people to their critically important role in the past and also in the future. so how and when we're inspectors general created, i understand a famous texas scoundrel, billy sol estes, a role in this a little bit known. have you heard of billy sol? yeah, yeah that's right. well, there have been a military inspector general for a long time. in fact, the military inspector general instrumental to the birth of our country. there was an inspector general named baron von steuben who was brought to the continental army at valley forge and was to inspect, drill and train the troops and was shocked at the abysmal conditions of the troops.

and after his work, the troops left valley forge a much effective fighting force, and he was called instrumental to the birth of the country. there were inspectors general in the military for many years and but there was not one in the civilian ranks. in 1962, the agriculture department was was fraudulently ripped off by a texan, billy sol estes, who defrauded many department of agriculture programs. and the secretary of agriculture decided to administratively create an inspector to detect fraud in the program. but that was only administrative. it wasn't the law. and as one commentator stated, what the secretary giveth, the secretary can take it away and the next secretary of agriculture abolished the office. then came watergate and there was a series of posts watergate, good government reforms ranging civil service reform to financial disclosure reform, to foreign intelligence surveillance act reform. and they also the inspector general act of 1978, which

created inspector general in 12 different cabinet agencies. it was opposed by the administration, though the carter administration said, we don't need an inspector general. could be on constitution or it would second guess government programs. but ultimately he signed the bill and the inspectors general were created in 12 agencies, and then they have expanded to every federal agency in government and. as a matter of fact, president carter, on the 40th anniversary of the inspector general act, said to a group of inspectors general who were there to celebrate the act, it was the biggest mistake he ever made to oppose the passage of the inspector general act because it has been a valuable tool to the country, valuable to good government, and returned significant amounts of money to the federal. so it has shown its value over time, over the years. so let's bring it right up to the present. how do you think someone like gates, who is president elect trump's to be attorney general,

is going to respond to having an inspector general exercise? his oversight over the justice department? well, i can't predict what matt gates would do were he to be confirmed as the attorney general. but i do that most government officials do not like oversight. most don't like oversight. most organizations don't like oversight, but they all need it. and the strongest leaders in government and some of them that i've worked with recognize the value inspector general and value of oversight, because it should be a nonpartisan issue. fraud and abuse is not a partizan issue. no one's in favor of that. and so the i've worked when i the inspector general, the department of justice, i with five attorneys general and when i was the acting inspector general, the department of defense, i worked with four secretaries of defense, even they didn't know what an inspector general did and sometimes were quizzical about

it. and i would brief them about the role of the inspector general and the importance of it. and the strongest leaders would say we need that. in fact, secretary mattis, when he was secretary of defense, would tell me as the inspector general. i you to bring problems to my attention because that's the only way we can fix them. and so that's what you would want a leader. it's not always the case, but the inspector general needs to that regardless of who the head of the agency is and to detect and deter waste, fraud and report that to both congress and to the executive branch. so in the event that president trump wanted to rid his administration inspector general oversight, would he need to change the law or could just fire all the inspectors general? well, the law would still exist critically. theoretically, the president has the ability to remove general. it would be different than the norm. normally, inspectors general survive the change of administrations because they are

nonpartisan. and that's why i was the inspector general of the department of justice under president clinton, under president bush, under president obama. and same. and when other presidential appointees, an inspector general is appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate, when they left the inspector general remains same in the and the department of defense. but the president can remove inspector general under a recent amendment to the act. he's supposed to give articulable, articulable and case specific reasons why. but that's just a process issue so he can do it it would be unfortunate in my view because igs are nonpartisan but he has the ability to do that now. he fired you right when you were acting inspector general at the pentagon and this was at a time when you were very highly regarded publicly by the defense secretary. did he ever tell you why? no, i never, i never learned the reason why i was the acting inspector general. the department of defense for four and a half years. and then the pandemic hit.

we all we all remember that we were the congress and the executive branch appropriated trillions of dollars in covid relief funds. but they also created what was called a pandemic response accountability committee to oversee the use of those funds to make sure that there was reduced fraud abuse in the funds as part of the pandemic response accountability. one ig, one inspector general had to be selected as the of the committee. i drew the short straw. i was selected by my fellow igs as the chair of that committee with being the acting ig for this department offense. and within a week president would said we don't need that oversight removed. me i was not the only ig removed at the time. there were others but he had the ability to do that was just different than the the prior with regard to charges. early in the book, glenn, you talk about your first real brush with corruption, and this was when you were a college basketball player. tell us that that's it all

revolves around basketball. again, what might be the reason why i wanted to devote a career to fight corruption and waste, fraud and abuse. so as dan said, i was the co-captain of the harvard basketball team in 1978. that's the same year that the ig act was passed. i had my first brush with corruption in 1978, and it happened on the parquet floor of boston garden. i was i had applied to be a rhodes scholar and i was and there interview was in baltimore the only problem was it was the exact same day of our biggest game of the season against, boston college in the boston garden. so i had a dilemma. what was i going to do. i wanted to compete for the rhodes scholarship and i also wanted to play in the game in harvard, alumnus said. he had a solution. he sent a private down to pick me up at the baltimore after the interview was over for the rhodes scholarship. but before the selections were

made, i was flown up to boston, changed into my uniform on the plane rushed to the boston garden, made it just in time for the game just before tip off boston was favored by 12 points. a very strong team but we had a very close game that that night and i played the best game i ever played in my college career. i had 19 points for tennessee stats and eight steals and. that's a lot of steals. we went and forth and at the last minute, boston college won by three points. then i remembered, oh my gosh, the rhodes scholarship. i have to call back and find out what happened. so in my uniform, i went to a payphone on the concourse of the boston garden and called back the rose committee and said, could you please tell me the results of the interview. and they said, congratulations, mr. fine, your rhodes scholar wow. what a day. i had the best game of my college career. well, thank you. thank best game in my college

career. and i won a rhodes scholarship, but there was only one problem. the game was fixed east mafia mobsters had bribed the boston college players to do what's called shaving points to win the game. but by less the point spread so that the mobsters bet on the opposing team. in this case, harvard, and win a lot of money. the harvard game was the first game that they bribed the boston college players and about a year later, after the game, sports illustrated broke the story that one of the mobsters confessed. and it was in sports. and a friend of mine sent me the article showing that the harvard game was the first game that they bribed and on top he wrote hey glenn, i guess you played your best game when the other team was in the tank. and by the way, these were not just any old who seen the movie goodfellas. pretty much everybody. they were the two main characters in goodfellas who did

the bribing. henry hill, played by ray liotta and jimmy burke, played by robert de niro. they were the ones who bribed. and if you look at the movie, there's a scene in the bar, by the way, which they have a basketball game in the background, and they said, oh, is that one of the games up in boston? we were shaving points and one of the other mobster says, don't worry, it's a lock. so when later when i was nominated to be the inspector, the department of justice, a senator, supported my nomination, made a speech, said maybe the reason glenn fine wanted to devote a career to fighting was because he participated in infamous corrupt basketball game. i don't know if that's true or not. it might have an influence on my career choice. glenn, tell about a couple of the investigators that you led starting with the justice department. right. so in the justice department, we had jurisdiction, the ig, over the entire justice department, which includes a lot of different agencies. the fbi the dea, the bureau of prisons, the bureau of alcohol, tobacco and firearms, u.s.

attorney's. we did a whole series of very consequential investigations. i was the ig from 2000 to 2011, both before after the 911 attacks, which was a tumultuous time to be there in the department of justice. so we did reviews of, for example, what intelligence for information the fbi, the department justice missed that might have been able to detect the 911 attacks before they occurred, treatment of detainees after the attacks, both in the united states and elsewhere politicized hirings and firings in the justice, corruption, the federal bureau of prisons and then one case which i'll explain a little bit about is the case of robert hanssen, the most damaging spy in fbi history. how many of you have heard of robert hanssen? yeah, most of you. so he was an fbi counterintelligence agent who spied for the soviets and the russians for more than two decades and gave away some of our most important military secrets, nuclear secrets, military capabilities, technology capabilities, as well

as the identity of assets, who spying for us on behalf the united states. who were some of whom were some of whom were executed. and when he was caught, they asked the fbi, how was he able to evade detection for two decades right under your nose. and the fbi said, well, he a master spy. he was clever, he was crafty. he used his tradecraft to evade detection. i was the department justice. i was asked to investigate that. why was he able to evade detection by the united states senate, asked us to do that. and the attorney general asked us to do that. and what we learned was that nothing could have been further from the truth than the fbi's explanation. he was not a master spy. he was he was took sorts of risks. he raised lots of red that you arouse suspicion. but the fbi ignored those risks, ignored those red flags and a very weak internal security that relied on trust. they trusted their agents were not spy. and that's a bad internal security strategy.

hanson did things like hacked into the computer system and went to reclassified information. and when he was caught said, well, i was just doing that to show how weak the the system was. he put money that he had received from the russians and lots of money in a bank account block from the fbi. he used the fbi phones to contact the soviets and. the russians, but the fbi ignored that. he instead of dealing with that, they thought he was a headache and they sent off to the state department where he was able to spy continually without any supervision. we looked at it and found that fbi's internal security program was incredibly weak, didn't have a polygraph, didn't require financial disclosure, didn't even do the background investigations that they were required to do. we only had one perfunctory investigation in 20 years, so we made recommendations to improve that program. and the fbi accepted some of them, but resisted others eventually, congress had a hearing i testified and pressured the to improve its internal security program.

so that's the value of an inspector general, in my view. that's a prime example. it it's hard for an agency itself to admit embarrassing failures. it's easier and it's more important for an independent inspector general to come in and find out what actually happened. and recommendations for improvement. now, to be clear the ig can't force the agency to do anything other than to respond the recommendations. you know, ig is not part of management, but we can change a spotlight on the situation. we can make and we can prod pressure for the agency, improve their practices. and that's a prime of it. and almost all the ig reports are made public, right? glenn by law well, we try and make them public. there are some there's classified information can't be made public or privacy protected. but we felt an obligation to as much public as possible. and a lot of times the agency this case, the fbi, wanted to classify everything and we would push back. why is this why would this harm the national if it was let out?

think the public has a right to know if there's not sensitive information. and so we were able to do that sometimes. we would say to the fbi, why are you classifying this information and the fbi say it would harm national security, then we would look on the fbi's website and be the exact same information, the website. and we pointed out and they'd say, okay, never mind. so as an ig, you have an obligation to push to not just accept on face value what they say, to ensure that what can be made public should be made public. now, let's talk about a case. when you were acting inspector at the pentagon, the fort leonard case, fat leonard case. yeah, fat case is the worst corruption scandal in navy history is a person colloquially name is fat leonard. he ran a ship servicing business in the pacific where he service navy ships and port. you provide them water, sewage treatment so tugboats, food, etc. and he would bribe and corrupt navy officers with

little things first with tickets to, shows, with dinners, with gifts of various sorts, and then bigger things. and then cash and then prostitutes. and when he had them on the hook, he would then demand things in return. so he would demand that they would bring their ships into his port, demand that they would give him information about competitors, contract sometime, and then he would demand that they overlook his exorbitant charges for services that either never provided or couldn't possibly provide. he would blackmail them. we would small things he would do it step by step. he was little bit like an intelligence agent. he knew what your weakness was and he would groom the navy and then he had you on the hook and then he would get things in return. and eventually scores of navy officers purchased it in the scheme, at least 30 people were criminally convicted when he was eventually caught in our we have a criminal defense investigative service who participated the investigation lured him to the united states, arrested him and he cooperated and told about his scheme and eventually people

were convicted and more navy officers were administratively sanctioned and lost their career. it affected hundreds of navy officers. it affected the entire fleet in, the pacific. and it was a tremendous in the navy, the tainted at the the reputation of the navy and their ability to perform its mission effectively for a significant period of time. but that's what the value of an inspector general is, because we uncovered it and we didn't sweep anything the rug. yeah. now you write that the inspector general, if he's doing his job right, is regarded as something of skunk at the picnic. i it was at the pentagon where people would see you and say oh here comes the dentist well yeah, well yeah exactly it the, the ig, i knew i was not the most person in the department of justice cafeteria or the pentagon food court. there was an attorney general who was a big supporter of igs and he told, his staff. you need to cooperate with ig because the ig makes our agency

better. he said getting an audit or an from an ig is like to the dentist. it's painful when you're in the dentist chair but you come out healthier. and i appreciated that tone. the tone at the top was filtered down. i didn't appreciate when i would walk the halls of the justice department. they say, oh here comes the dentist. here come here comes the dentist. but but you are you know you're you're viewed you're not the most popular. you're either too hard or soft. you're either are engaging in a witch hunt or a whitewash. you're either a junkyard dog or a lap dog. sometimes all of the above in the same investigation by different sides. so i'll tell it like a humorous story, but it has a point to it. when i first became the inspector general of department of justice, i was asked to, go up to capitol hill and brief a senator. one of our reports which we had issued, and i would that once the report was over, i brought with me, my deputy, a great guy named paul martin. he's been with me for he was with for a long time. he's now an inspector general

himself at the u.s. agency for international development. i brief the senator about the report after the briefing, senator said to me, okay, good report, he said, but now i want to tell what i think about inspectors general. and he pointed his finger at me and he said, you have to be independent you're going to do things i don't like you do things that congress doesn't like. you can do things the attorney general like, no one's going to like you if you think that don't think that no one's going to like you. you understand? no one will like you. you got that? no, he kept saying that and pointing his finger at me. and then finally my deputy, paul, i think had heard enough because he interjected. don't worry about that. senator. even i don't like him. which cracked the senator up. very humorous. we laughed and it was funny in retrospect. but there's a point that story you're not going to be liked you're not going to be popular. that's not your job your job is to be tough. but to help improve the operations of the agency and hopefully make it better.

and that's what we tried to do, even if we weren't the most popular around. yeah, so who watches the watchdogs in, this case? i mean, how do inspectors general police. who is your boss? yeah, so those are two questions, but that's really those are good questions. who watches the watchdogs. so everyone needs oversight. so our guys get a lot of scrutiny. congress scrutinizes ig's work constantly call up there, testify the press, scrutinize there's a government accountability office nonprofits but also there's a group of igs an umbrella group of i guys called the council of inspectors general on integrity and efficiency. and they have an integrity which investigates allegations against the ig's themselves. so if you have an allegation against one ig, a different ig will investigate it. but in my view that's not sufficient. we shouldn't have volunteer igs investigating each other. we should have a professional staff of the integrity committee to consistently, professionally and, quickly investigate allegations against ig because as i said, everyone needs

including ig's. there's an expression, by the way, in the ig community, if you've seen one ig, you've seen one ig. so everyone needs oversight and we need to ensure that the integrity committee has a budget, has a staff to investigate serious allegations against. ig's and then the next question, who's your well you do report both the attorney general or to the head of the agency in my case, the attorney general, the secretary defense and to congress to keep them both fully and currently informed. but you're supposed to act independently and not supposed to be directed by them. what to do you decide what to do? ultimately? i think ig's work for the american people, that they may work for the american people to let know how their government is operating and to ensure or try to ensure that their taxpayer dollars are spent more effectively and efficiently. and i'll tell one more story, and that is when i explain that to the attorney general. when i when an attorney general would come office, they often didn't know what an ig was explained to them. we're independent. we decide to audit what to evaluate, what to investigate independently.

and one of them, after i explain to him, he said, wait a minute, wait a minute, glenn, he said, are you telling me that i can order everyone around here and what to do and what to audit what to evaluate, what to investigate. but i can't tell you to do. and he and said, yes, that's what the inspector general act requires. and he stared at me intently. and then he said, okay. he said, if that's what the law is, we follow the. and i was very fortunate. i was very fortunate that the people i worked for, while they didn't always love what we did, they respected our work and appreciated the value that it could bring. now, toward the end of the book, glenn, you suggest a number reforms for the inspector general system. and one of the ones that caught my i was creating inspector general for the federal judiciary and the supreme court. and so. of course, my first question is, if that inspector general do you get to go and inspect all those

fancy resorts where wealthy people take supreme court justices? and i don't i don't know about that what i do know is what i said before that most organizations resist oversight. they all need it, including federal judiciary, the federal judiciary, a huge operation. people don't realize that it has 30,000 employees. it has an billion dollar budget, has more than 2000 judges and people are human. there will be mistakes made. there will be some ethical allegations that need to be addressed. i think unaddressed allegations reduce trust in supreme court. it also violates a principle that no person should be the judge of or her own case. i don't want an inspector general to interfere. the institutional and the decision making independence of the judiciary. but it an operation that is subject to waste, fraud and, abuse. it runs it systems, it runs, of course security runs physical security. it could use an inspector general to the same way other organizations can as well.

so i recommend that there be one it could happen ways. i'm not sure it'll happen either way in the near future, but i think it's important just to keep it on the horizon which is congress can legislate it, although some people say that would violate the separation of powers if congress did that and who would determine whether its constitution or not the court itself. so it's a little bit of a catch 22. so in my view would be better for the court itself to an internal inspector general, an internal investigator to help improve its operations. am i holding my breath for it to happen? no, but i think it is. it could be a valuable and useful thing both to restore trust in the court and the judiciary also improve its operations. we're going to go to questions from the audience in just a minute. but before we do that, i have one more question, which is i want to go back to the spurs thing. spurs, so you get drafted. why you try out? well, i really was foot nine inches tall and my chances of making it for the san antonio

were pretty slim and none. and i realize that career as a lawyer was a much better bet. and you can't, by the way, you can't defer rhodes scholarships. i was going to go to a rhodes scholarship. so that i think, was the better choice, although sometimes sometime in retrospect, i wish i had just gone to try out camp. so i have played with george gervin, the the all time leading scorer. think he's the all time leading scorer of this spurs. and a friend of mine actually was speculating why. do you think the spurs drafted you? glenn i said, i don't know. and then he said, oh, i think i know. and i said, why is that? said, well, they already have george gervin, his nickname is the ice man. they drafted you so. they could also have the ice cube. and there's a friend of mine telling me that. but no, i don't regret not trying out. i, i, i'm happy about the career that i had. yeah, well, let's some questions. yes, ma'am. go back to the fat leonard. yes, it was such a long running fraud. what aberration or loser and

brought it to your attention. so there were some whistleblowers who were involved and in eventually people brought complaints. the u.s. attorney in san diego was involved and brought our office in the defense criminal investigative service and part of the reason he was able to evade detection long was that he bribed a naval criminal investigative investigator who would feed him information and feed him information about, the investigations. and we also helped the investigations. so the fraud went on for a long time for over a decade until we brought some significant evidence and ratcheted up the investigation. so that's the sometimes value of whistleblowers and also the value of outside investigators to eventually bring the case to fruition. so what's the best estimate, glenn, of the cost of that fraud to the united states tax? well, i think he he they estimated that he cost at least

$30 million. but i think that's a very conservative low estimate, much than that. yeah. yes, i given the outcome of the recent election and that we we now have a precedent who is seething with a desire vengeance and who plans to arm his attorney general to be his personal attack dog. and given that the supreme court seems to have given the president a. power to act with with impunity. and given that congress seems to have turned red, etc., etc., what is your feeling of the state of checks and balances and the existing of the government and? do you feel confident in future of democracy? so i think i think we're in for a challenging times, particularly for the guardrails of our government and ig is one

of the guardrails, but it depends on taking seriously what they do. in the past, congress has taken seriously what igs have done. i don't think the igs are a panacea and i think that we need to shore up our our guardrails and the courts will be one of them. the free press will be of them, igs will be one of them whistleblowers will be another. but think we're in for a significantly challenging times. and i hope that whoever is ig and there may be new igs that they step up to the challenge and it will be a challenge for igs because they could lose their job. i lost my job, but i think it's very important to as one of the secretaries of defense said, you can't want the job too much. you have to do you can. and even if it means risk of losing job. so i think that's important as well. the thanks so much for being here. i was wondering about the concept of ig and if it to the

local level. it's been, you know, widely documented now with the loss of watchdog journalism. you know, people are moving that space with non nonprofit projects and other. but are there any cities that have a similar like ig program that you can point to as like a model that might be good for austin where we're seeing corruption fraud, waste and abuse explode and nobody knows about it. yes there are igs on the state and local levels. matter of fact about two days ago i spoke to a conference of it's called the association of inspectors general and there are igs on those levels. there are ges in other cities, for example baltimore has one. atlanta, one san francisco just voted, one in in a ballot initiative there, some on the county level. new york state them do not as extensive as federal igs. they don't always have the same statutory basis and resources but i think they can be and they

are an important model. i think an ig could be useful at any level. and so i think that we ought to encourage states, localities to prefer to adopt that kind of a function. yes, ma'am ma'am. hi. hello. thank for being here. i was wondering what your thoughts are with the, um, with trump coming in and it's, i guess the department of efficiency that he's going to create under trump and how that are under the doj's. yeah. yeah. what your thoughts on that. yeah. so i think that waste, fraud and abuse is not a partizan issue and. no, no one's in favor of that. i think we've had those kind of efforts in the past. there was the grace there was reinventing government was the simpson-bowles. i. part of the issue is the will to address these things. and part of the issue is whether congress is willing to adopt measures. so for example, i know that there is waste in the department

of defense, but sometimes it's hard to enact measures, address it, whether they're bases are unnecessary or weapons systems that are not needed. sometimes they have other interests that are promoting them. i do think that they ought to work to use some of the work of inspectors general and also the government accountability office that has already done work about waste, fraud and abuse. so i think that's important. and the question is how to do that? how to detect, deter and minimize waste and abuse without undermining the core functions government. and i think that will be the challenge. hi, i just read the book challenger about challenger explosion and really history of the space program since the apollo. and i see that nasa has an inspector general. so i'd like to know a little bit about that. but also, what's the line between, you know, investigating waste fraud and abuse and cutting corners that, you know, financially end up endangering

people? very good questions. yes. nasa does have an ig in fact, the story i told about paul martin, he was the nasa ig before he came became the usaid. so, yes, he's been involved with the program in pointing out problems with the program. and cutting corners can be waste and abuse because particularly if you cut corners it's going to result in could result in catalysts traffic consequences. so i think that they are related and that's what ig does talks about what not only where they're efficiencies but where there is abuses that could create problems in the future. don't want just ig's to after the fact back and say, oh, this is what happened and you shouldn't done it this way. i mean that's one function but also to in advance talk about what internal controls were what are problems that could be averted. how to avoid these kinds of situations so that we don't have those significant cases. and you're absolutely right in nasa it can be catastrophic.

yeah. it seemed like in the book that there was a culture for a long time. you know, secrecy and silence and not saying things and not not the whistle. yeah. and multiple times, you know, commissions would come back, say this is the culture we need to reform it. and then it just took a really long time to do so. exactly right. and but that's why i have be tenacious about you can't just write one report and expect that's going to be the end. you have to keep coming back to it again and again and ensure that the recommended actions are being adopted and also to encourage whistleblowers. now to encourage people to bring problems forward and and that they won't be retaliated against. it's hard to do, but you need encourage that because often they know where problems are and that's why you can fix them if they're willing to come forward and and say what's going wrong? thank you. last night you were talking about two great examples of people encouraging whistleblowers. bob and jim mattis. yeah, bob, jim mattis as secretary of defense, wood, as i said, would say, look, i want

people to come forward. i want to know about problems. i want to encourage people, bring promise to my attention because, otherwise we can't fix them. so he didn't think that they were, you know, naysayers or people who were outside the program. he thought they were important to the program. and then robert gates, another secretary of defense, i didn't work with him, but i read his book on leadership. and he's a beloved figure in the pentagon would say that he would encourage people to keep him out of trouble, to tell him where he was going wrong, to bring problems to his attention and would salute them. he would celebrate them publicly publicly in front of other people and said this person helped us avoid a problem as to castigating them or marginalizing them. and that's the only way you can have a you know, in an ethical and, effective and efficient culture. if you encourage that kind of truth telling as opposed to denigrating it. yes, ma'am. yes. i want to thank you for your honesty and comments are specifically related to the city of austin. i testified repeatedly about fraud being, a misrepresentation of the facts and our city

council has transportation land use, housing to try to get 50% of $5 billion for the light rail system, which does not all of the city i'm trying to figure out and maybe you can help us here which inspector general do we go to? there's housing, you know, there's hud money and there's also u.s. of transportation. so a toss up as to know who would actually take a look at these issues here. yeah, i'm not completely familiar with the issues, but i would go to both of them. i would go to transportation they they are there are hotlines. first of all, there where whistleblowers can bring forward their allegations, both anonymously or publicly or not. not anonymously. hud as well. we had the department of defense in the department, just as hotline complaint center, which would take in 14,000 complaints a year on each of them. but we had a big staff to separate the wheat, the chaff, and also to find out if there's something in those things, you have to take them seriously.

and i encourage people to bring them forward and hopefully the the agencies themselves take that seriously. now, sometimes when they look into it, they find that maybe it's not substantiated or maybe that there's an explanation for it, but sometimes it's not. it's not true. and that whistleblowers bring forward very important complaints that sometimes result in significant, significant effects and significant improvements. and so you would find those hotlines on like dot website. yes, yes when everyone has all those things in urban housing and urban development. inspector general's office, just go to the website. there'll be a hotline button probably on the right. same with the department of transportation. each one of them has them and that you file a complaint there? i would i would suggest. and lastly, can you just give us a tip? it better to be succinct or is it better to be extensive when we put forward those complaints? probably in between. i mean, i think it's important to give the information in a way

for them to follow up in the sink, but also give them information that they can to follow up on the complaints as well them some evidence or some. yeah. good afternoon i'm i'm retired from the air. i served for 23 years while i was in the air force where we budgeted i, i retired a basic training instructor for the air force. however, prior to that i was working in the services field for air force and. so what we were told is when you're budgeting and this sounds terrible, you don't want to lose money right? so, i mean, and i apologize if this has already been asked, answered, i've just arrived recently. but i do see it often in my commander. i was a reservist as basic training instructor, but i was

actively did so i was showing all the basic training stuff. lackland and they had a large i don't know there were probably 2000 quarterback packs that were there and she said, well, what are we doing these why aren't we issuing these to the instructors? that's like above my pay grade, ma'am. she works for aig and so i'm pretty sure mentioned something. i don't know if she mentioned it at the aig level. yeah, but i mean, so you're with units that are afraid of losing when they're sick for things that they may need. i mean, you're right. anticipating equipment that's going to break down. you're anticipating what's to be most effective. so just i'm just curious your thoughts. right. so that is an issue i think people don't want to lose their money and they spend it on things that they might not need decide to use it or lose it, use

it or lose it, particularly particularly at the end of the year. that's just often a waste of money. and in in terms of bring it somebody's attention, if you're not if it's not effective, just disappear. there are ways to bring to somebody else's attention. that's part the whistleblower hotline and also if the ig in the air force is not following up, there's the ig, the department of defense. so i think there are ways to go forward. and that's part of the reason want to write the book to expose more people to it and there's a place to go to raise your complaint. so thank you very much. ten years ago. okay. all right. we have time for one more question. yes, sir. just anything that you might know. the osprey, the aircraft osprey. the osprey osprey. the aircraft. the osprey. is there anything you know about that? yeah, i mean, i know a little bit about it, but not enough to make an informed judgment of it. and so that is an issue. so the question is about the aircraft, the osprey is that's the one that's supposed to take up vertically and then fly. yeah, well, it's it's like many other department procurement.

it's probably late and way over budget and. it takes a long time. and the procurement system of the department defense is very rigid and often needs reform. so don't know exactly what's going on with the osprey, but i wouldn't be surprised if that was an issue. yeah, and it's always built in someone's congressional, right. i mean, in the ports or built in multiple ones. so it becomes a political often things are a political issue if it's not an efficiency issue. yeah. yeah. well, glen, thank you so much for your insights. and thanks to all of you for coming today. thank you. thanks for having me. glen, going to hustle over to the signing tent, so if you all would like to get your copy signed, mine is please go over.

book tv's live coverage of the texas book festival in austin continues after this break. right. like, is this sick? is he crazy? is he rational? is he dying? he's not dying. my friend bill burns, i think, said it best. the problem with putin's health is that he's too healthy. i've seen him. i've been up close with him.

he looks great. the times, the times was in his presence, which were up to before that right the start of the of the war after the war started. and by the way, it's a crime to call it, a war in russia. it's a special military operation that could get you a term in a labor camp to step away. so when you go to write that line, don't call a war. see the value of this interview. all right so he look great, i mean, for a russian of his age, he look looks looked fantastic the stress of the war think took a bit of a toll on him in 2022. and for example, the prigozhin mutiny occurred occurred in june of 2023, and he gave out an early morning address to the russian people. he looked pretty and stressed,

but i compare him, i describe in the book in the chapter that you referred to andrew, which is called a title, the chapter the checklist and just effects. this. this nonchalance about about him that nothing bothers him it's it's he's in charge he's famous for showing up late and keeping the pope an american presidents and other world leaders waiting. he's got this attitude about him that and it's it's carefully cultivated that he is every russian knows he's a he walks with a these get sort of an odd way he walks his right he swings his left hand when he and i write about this in the book, but he swung his left hand when he walks but his right hand doesn't move as much and any and

he would loves this that people think that is his kgb training so that he always keeps his head this he had close to the weapon he would have on his hip when he was a kgb officer. the people i know who know they said that complete baloney. but he loves that people think that way. and talk that way about him. so he's he's a gangster now. that's good folklore. and he he grew up a poor kid in and he's a tough kid right after the war, too. well, his father was was seriously injured during. the war during the siege of leningrad older brother died of diphtheria during the war. he had a tough upbringing and he's a tough guy and that's what he grew up to be. and he is a and that's sort of he's he wears very expensive

tailored suits and effects a more cultivated. but deep down he's still a tough guy from from leningrad and all his friends these really close to such and patricia off what do they have in common from leningrad join the kgb in the 1970s those are his friends now you've talked about how putin looks at ukraine and the united states, but it has a very long border with china, other global power. you know what's relationship between those two countries and are they united foes against the united states? or are there sharp differences in national interest that provide opportunities for the united states as occurred during the cold war to the extent that the issue involves the united states, they are aligned, both putin and ji individuals and, the prc, and in the russian

federation is is by his own description, trying to reorient russia to look more and east, which is not what most russians want. there aren't many russians i met, in fact, none i ever heard say. the only way i've worked my life and saved all my money is i want to buy a townhouse. beijing there are a lot of russians i know who own property in london, in west palm beach, in beverly hills, on park, not so many are moving to shanghai and guangzhou. they're moving to dubai. their to the gulf and putin is trying to shift the gaze of the russian economy south in and east. but the natural the natural gaze for russians was established by peter the when he established st

petersburg looking to europe and that is still the case for for you european russian european russians. james allen did you confess yes i confess to the detectives, but my mom had already contacted some lawyers and they. did you say anything? i have lot of it. and so it, it took a whole new you know, it off from there and um, but once i started months into a year sitting in the county jail. the truth had to come out. you know, i'm not to sit here and even though we went to trial and the attorney went to trial trying to seek not first degree but second degree murder. so we were trying to get get away from the death penalty, get

away from the first degree. so it's a journey. but i tell you, it's been a journey that i can honestly say i believed in something and it worked. i believe god. and he showed me that it works because it shows we're sitting here today. i took mr. sebastian's nights. do i deserve second chance? did i deserve redemption? do i deserve grace? only what i in told me? yes. you know, i can believe in this town. know i did years in prison. i can believe in this town for 30 years. and if i tell that tell rise light, face. and if it does, it, i believe they knew for 30 years and so i believe even on death row, that

one day i would be free and i would be able to tell my my story. you're 16 years old, 17 years old at trial. you know, by this time i'm 18. that's right. yeah. i get the jury comes back guilty or guilty. what do you remember about that? guilty. it took them, i think maybe 4 hours, not even yeah. to come back with guilty and what circus you know, soon as the judge i mean as soon as the foreman said guilty. the courtroom erupted you know my mom i've never a well like that. i mean that's a sound. yeah that's the shook his head but you know i was a young man sitting giving the. you are guilty yeah guilt guilty of first degree murder and then turn around in the same jury give the death sentence.

so you deserve death. you don't come in someone's home with a weapon at night in their sleep. and it, it makes so much sense today. i'm 64 now, and it just it's just, it just makes so much sense to me now. today that after 30 years of being confined, living in some of a therapeutic community, some parts, it was a jungle, you know, but i dressed severe and i made it through and. there's some reason there's a purpose for my story to be out here. and there was there's other guys that are out here walking the street, and i saw death row time with they are free now, but they don't want this. you'll never get them in front of a camera talking about on their days. they were on death row. the crime they want to be left alone. they just want to enjoy their

second chance at grace and freedom and say, hey, you know, i did it but i'm sorry. i don't want to be seen. no, that's not mr. allen. that's not what god has planned for me. i feel i'm going to be a story to talk about many years, many decades. where were you incarcerated? what was that like for, 30 years? well, sir, i've i've every facility in the state of nevada, i've been to every prison in the state in nevada, it means facility starting at the old state prison in coralville city, where i was housed for the first six years. i the four years on death row and i did two years in there, general population. and i was just telling some people on the sideline said it was such an honor to be able to

go back inside and stand in the cell that i was in when i was waiting execution. yeah. why did you do that? i wanted, you know, i wanted they're going to condemn the prison. the prison's already condemned and going to use it for a tourist. some of tourist attraction. so i go before they do that, can i just go back on death row? can i. can i stand in the chamber? can i go to the cell? can i stand in the cell that i was as a teenager? you know, and they allowed me to do that. and we took pictures and, you know, and now it's going to be part of the problem, my documentary. but because no man wants to go, i think in the first probably it went back and done it. it was eerie. i mean, the the goofball and the feeling just knowing that i was maybe days away, that chamber right there, you know.

what makes my life valuable when the public has and the same the same public, the same community, same society that spoke turned around and spoke again. and so they let him go. yeah. james allen jr how did happen? first of all, you were incarcerated on death row for several but then incarcerated in general population as. you say yes for up to 30 years. yes. how how it that you're sitting here with us at the las vegas convention center caesars. well, and what a beautiful place caesar's for. you know thought i would never see places like this again, but it's through. and mercy and belief, you know, i have nothing but the highest respect for the nevada system

doing. my era during my tenure of being incarcerated. we had some directors and governors who care. you know, surely they could have given up and say, hey, there were way to keep you got it right. he's guilty. got the right guy. go away to keep. but it was something about that administration those governors, they were ex educators, the kids, the exes may rest in peace. governor kenny gwynn gave me an opportunity. yo, i'm going to give you a chance. i see something you. i'm not a law enforcement. you know i'm not a judge. i wasn't a day i was an i'm a businessman and see something in you. i see a well-groomed young man sitting in front of me today. and i'm going to grant you this commutation. i'll you to see the parole

board, but it's up to them. that's out. and now more live coverage. the texas pop festival in austin austin. i want you. hey, everyone. welcome thank you for coming. happy to be here. talking to sarah smarsh. an hour's driver. and these books, superb books,

are for sale correct to. be signed by all of you and there's good reason to buy them and read them if you haven't already. they've been up for a little bit of time. we're just talking about that you want to get them now before they they're out in paperback. i'm john mcmurtry. i'm the nonfiction editor newish at kirkus reviews. and i'm delighted to. speak with both of you and when i read these, i was instantly taken back to a book i think is foundational for a lot of people. i read it in school. i'll think about it often as i'm walking down the street, say. downtown area where there are skyscraper working by studs terkel. and i hope still being assigned and read and one detail in particular stuck with me you know things like happen with

books. i think a steelworker named mike who talks about how should be a beam on it skyscraper buried inside with the names of, the workers, electricians, steelworkers, everyone who put this thing there. and i like this nice tribute. and i think, sarah, you've got three basic words here that speak to i think the work that both of have done for the unseen that's your dedication and really the heart of both of these shining a light on workers like these workers. i was just mentioning who don't get enough attention and in your case alice with this book life and death of the american worker a lot of the workers are immigrants right. and this the meatpacking industry and so i want you if you be so kind, talk a little bit about how you began book.

i think you wanted to you were thinking it might be an article. you're from arkansas. you live there now. and arkansas, as you might know, is the capital of the meatpacking industry to this day. tyson foods. um, so you know this place well and in both cases you're not flying in and reporting these stories and then leaving which is really the beauty of them. um so can you walk us through a little bit. alice, how you decided to write about people know who, um it grew up with and their hands on the covers here on, the cover. they're there because i think you can tell with lot of people who are injured from these jobs right? i am from the ozark mountains of arkansas which for those of you all that know, tyson foods is also an arkansas ozarks and

never wanted to stay in arkansas or write about arkansas, that was not a plan that i had. i really, uh, in love with learning languages and i became fluent in spanish and i moved to mexico city and, lived there for many years, and i actually applied the funding. this, it was just going to be one article about meatpacking. i had been thinking about it for a long time because my mom, who still lives in the ozarks in a very small town volunteers with refugees, myanmar, the korean and you might ask what the korean doing in rural arkansas. they're working. they're working at tyson and just thought it was a really, you know, what must it be like to be to be dropped into rural arkansas from myanmar and no, does anybody korean in small

town, arkansas? no. you know there's so many challenges aside from, the work, the meatpacking work. so that was my initial interest. but i freelance and i just no one was interested in that topic until the pandemic. and i got funding to write one article and and so i was working actually with times because the funding was required me to work with a local paper and it was a really terrible experi ence because arkansas was really run top to bottom by tyson. you know, if want to just fill absolutely bad read about something, try writing about tyson, arkansas. and so that first article i really almost didn't finish. i think that editors didn't want me to finish it. they kept saying, you're not a writer this is a terrible mess. and it was just a strange

experience for me because i was thinking i'm pretty established, don't think i'm a terrible mess. so why are they doing this? and and so i'm really glad that i fought my way through that article. and i got funding to write another article and. and this was around the time that workers were starting to die of covid and and publishing anything about tyson was an absolute nightmare. nobody wants to be sued by tyson. i wondered about that you know many big papers did want to work with me so the fact that this is a book is just never saw never thought it was going to happened and i'm to be here today. no one has sued. exactly. they're too busy. perhaps with other litigious matters. but there's it doesn't but there's a lot in this book, and

i can't imagine how difficult it must have been write in certain ways because it's an investor work. and you're also talking to people. it's a very humane work you're you're interviewing people, you know, them and your spanish helps you in that way because so many of the people here in these jobs were spanish. they're from el salvador, elsewhere in mexico, and it's your story, right? as you're going through experiencing covid and what it's like to make it as a writer to to get by financially. so to to work all that in there. like, i don't how much was cut out and how many iterations as there were and i can only imagine that, you know, how many years if you can or perhaps you don't to revisit that too much of the sausage making. but you know, i spent four years interviewing, i basically followed a group of meatpacking workers most of whom are spanish

speaking, both documented and undocumented workers of the meatpacking industry is largely made up of undocumented workers. so i'm sure many people or at least i am imagining what's going to happen with this new administration. and if we're talking about prices and things that people buy and who's going to do that work. so, yeah, it was years and one thing i appreciate about being here with sarah is that i've read her for a long time and, see her as someone who writes even in a very rooted and i really wanted to do for arkansas, which is often kind of, you know, not a state that people interested in, which is strange to me because arkansas has tyson wal mart, which are two global superpower that are on the move and, no one is writing about them in my opinion. and you also you remind us, too,

that in terms of the clout that the clintons, hillary bill, they had a close relationship tyson foods and you could speak to that, of course, better than i could. it's not just republicans, democrats you know, i mean meatpacking is the lobbying is bipartisan. and that's really the point of my book, you know. clinton but josh, obama. trump trump's in my book and know it speaks to the problem that we're facing of the unlimited power of lobbies in our government. and that's gotten us to this point. we are today. but yeah, the clintons had a very close relationship with with members of the tyson, you know, private riding around in the bentley, don tyson. and i thought it was really interesting to revisit that history with clinton and that close relationship in terms of,

you know, what happened when he became president. and the flipside is that tyson, over the years has benefited from lack of regulations and then and then there's osha, which can do so much. you get very granular about how is it less than 1% of the places that they can actually. so but beyond the numbers, i think what the book allows you to do is find someone like a plus, you know, one character and to follow his story until it in a way that an article might not be able to. can you tell us a little bit about him and his story. yeah plus you know from el salvador has had worked and lived and lived arkansas worked at tyson for over two decades. he and his wife both worked at tyson, started out at tyson, which a lot of families, you know, three generations work at tyson graham, know the parents, the children and the so the

challenges in reporting this were immense because no one wants no one wants to speak out about tyson people told. me, they were, you know, that they're supervisor told them that they would be sent to jail if they spoke to a journalist. and so a lot of the people i was interviewing, like placido and his wife, angelina, are illiterate. never had, never been to school, not even kindergarten, which i think we forget that that is thinking of rural america, thinking of who's doing a lot of our food system work. it's just a whole different i mean, i wasn't texting people my reporting was in person. i was driving around state. this is not a story that would have been reported on the phone or, you know, zoom or anything like it was a lot of me sitting on people's front steps just waiting, petting cats. i mean, because there was there's like there's no schedule. if you made it to, that doesn't mean you're meeting it to them.

there's all kinds of things that can happen and then people haven't paid their phone bill or people are depressed. one worker hid from me and then she admitted, like i hid fur from you because i was depressed and. i didn't want to see you then. but then i hour later. so i think we forget, you know, the story that i tell angelina and placido. he is working at tyson. and the problem tyson and the meatpacking companies in general during covid was that they didn't want to lower production and they didn't really want workers to quarantine. so workers said, you know, when they tested positive for covid, they were asked to continue d that's why meatpacking companies, the greatest site of infection aside from prisons in the united states and and so places became infected and, died of covid. but ten of his family members became infected. his wife was hospitalized, was hospitalized. he was in the hospital for months then. so kind of following that out and receiving, you know,

$600,000 worth of medical bills from the hospital visit and how were how are these workers facing this essentially? and so it's sort of that story. and then the story of the wife of placido justice and trying to figure out how to organize around a lawsuit against tyson. there's been, of course, a lot of hostility toward immigrants recent and more recently. and yet as we've said, a lot of the work that gets done in these places is done by from other countries, and that works well. the companies, because they can treat people subhuman, fashion, the working conditions are awful. and the pay is as well. and if you miss a day, that sort of thing, you it's almost something from victorian or dickensian times, rather further

back. so when you hear politicians talking about let's send away immigrants, i, i have to think is not really something that people believe in because they know full well that places like tyson need those workers. yeah, our our entire food is upheld by immigrant labor. a lot of it is undocumented and think i wanted in my book recognize that to see the beauty of it the strength of it. it's such difficult work. i can't imagine you know even if i went to work for tyson for six months, that's not equivalent to i just saw one of the workers in my book weekend and he said, i the best years of my life to that company. and and i think, you know, we're in a political moment where we're refusing to see who is doing not labor and the difficulty of it and i really

would like to honor that work. that. another community i hadn't known about is marshallese community. i had no sense all that people from the marshall islands, a fair number of them more so in arkansas than any other state, i think and this came about as a result of, dozens of explosions, nuclear explosions, tests, postwar. and so the deal was you can come live in america and go back and forth between. the marshall islands in the states, the mainland. but you can't benefit from health care, saying, hmm, yeah, arkansas is the home to the largest marshallese community outside of the marshall islands. and they work at tice. they work in meatpacking, and they also percentage wise were the community that most that

died in the largest numbers from in arkansas, partially because they you know that coming from the marshall islands, many of them have health issues related to the history of a the islands and then they don't have full citizenship here and all the benefits that that entails and i did i interviewed a few marshallese community members because i don't speak marshallese it was a it was a challenge. and high covid to do anything. i just realized i needed the language skills. same with the korean. imagine covid times trying to find a korean translator who wants to drive around arkansas with me just was not going to happen. so beyond lawsuits, some of which are links, one of which major one successful, what can we do? what can average citizens do to help change state of affairs? i mean, i know diet is one

thing. certainly depending on where you live. yeah, i mean, i, i tend not to focus diet i did stop eating meat because i couldn't write this book while i was doing. i think that's kind of an easy if you're you know i think there's many i mean, the one that i focus on in my book is really looking at worker movements. and i think that's really important. workers speaking for themselves. it's that's very difficult because of our gag laws. they're afraid a lot of legal issues. but in there's an organization called sur ramos in florida. there's an organized nation called the coalition of immokalee workers. they're doing incredible work. and can volunteer. you can donatend. i really believe in the importance of workers being able to speak for themselves is not currently the conditions that are, you know, open to them in the u.s. i thank you, sir. we haven't forgotten about you

and i'm that's left also if you have questions say in 1510 15 minutes i'm sure you do all of you. so sarah, sarah's book is a as i think i've said, collection essays, you know. sarah well. from her memoir acclaimed rightfully so, heartland so here, as with alice, looking back at your time in kansas, where you used live and both of you, that's very cool that you live. i can't say the same for me. so most americans, a lot of americans. get uprooted. so there's a lot in here. it's personal, political. um, but i think one thing that really resonated with me is just how much i think i the essay you write about. there's a lot of misunderstanding and.

a lot of it is willful on the part of what we call, the media and how people are treated derision and broad brushes and. maybe you could speak to that. how it relates to the election. but i think one piece in here, an early one, is a 2014. your piece on teeth. if you could talk a little bit about that. i mean, i think you even had a hard time selling that. this is a similar experience for you as a rock star, but this i'm as to how you had the brilliant idea of focusing on dental insurance a way as an insight into something larger. yeah thanks and i, i was thinking when alice whose work admired for a long time by the way, was reflecting on the difficulty to get this story through at certain junctures and i've experienced that myself in in the case of the essay that you referenced poor teeth which did come out a decade.

well ten years isn't all that long. it's it was a different era some ways, wasn't it, including to some extent, although the seeds of our current era had already been planted, of course, but but but i had already been a journalist for over a decade at that point i started as a reporter and and that was the one of the first couple or handful of times i folded a layer of personal testimony or into the journalistic research and reportage and and then that quote unquote went went as as we say, a couple couple million people read it and and then it wasn't as hard necessarily to get my an editor to pick up something i'd written. but but i had to to such extent with that essay that apparently resonated with so many people about teeth, dental, access to

dental care, a signifier of class, perhaps the most under-discussed aspect of our intersectional american identities. i had such a hard row of getting that published in this country where one of our foundational myths, of course, is we're a meritocracy. that finally it got picked up by outlet that's based in london london. and so, so that's what it took. and and that didn't mean that then. it was a easy path for continuing to talk about class here within the you know very fine american free press. but but nonetheless, it's a it's a free press that is full of blind spots there racial sometimes there gender there definitely class in my experience the reason that i started this sort of line of media critique that you referenced that appears in some of the essays of the book is is

because, of course, my my chosen industry as a journalist, i've found that more than not in any given space, any given newsroom and became more true the more prestigious the outlet i would be the only person in the room or in the conversation who a background with direct experience of poverty in my case specifically world poverty. but poor teeth that first kind of hit were i mean. i still hear from people. i mean that that year i stopped like keeping track of them. but at one point i was literally like saving all of the feedback. but i mean thousands, thousands and thousands and thousands of messages. i from people all over this country and all over the world to some extent. but americans who this was just after the aca had gotten through and due to political compromise required for that legislation to be passed dentistry or dental care, dental health was stripped away from the legislation as though your teeth are not of

your body or your overall health. so there were a couple of things that led to, i think i was a very long answer. and you asked, how did i come that topic? well, i was watching some morning news show and at the time the kind of like pop culture moment in television was orange is the new black bet. some of you remember that show and. there was a character in that show called pennsyltucky, and she was kind of i don't know, roughly villainous in show. she was a like an outrageous character and had really, you know, the actress is wearing prosthetic teeth to make her teeth look, you know, really bad by social measures and and ends up being a storyline and part of the show while i'm watching this interview and this this tv host says you might know taryn manning, the actress from her work in orange is the new black. but don't let those prosthetic she wears in the show fool.

you. she's a really brilliant woman who's like and coming from, you know, the working poor of this country, many of whom are funny, brilliant in, spite of their inability to access dentistry or a certain brand of clothing or sorts of physical markers that we use to signal which class we belong to, that really stuck in my career. and then around that same time my dad, who's been a construction worker his whole and has not been able to access dentistry, had a bad tooth, as we say in my family and. it it went on treated for so long that turned into sepsis and permanently his heart almost killed him. so this is like you know we're talking you know, if you want to dice things up by who who this and that and who's been working, who's asking for a handout that in my line, i don't agree with.

but even if that's even if your line my dad and again, i personally don't think this makes anybody more deserving but i'm just for the record, he has been working 60 hours a week for decades and like a half a century, he's pushing 70. still can't retire. and and in this rich -- country he can't get a rotten tooth pulled out of his head and it almost kills him so that that dissonance between our of ourselves and the wealth that we contain and hold as a nation and the way we treat our people and specifically the people at the lowest rung of the ladder. it -- me off. and so i got to write in about it. and you write a lot about your father. there's a lot of touching stuff in here. i think anyone here will, it'll

have personal meaning. i was thinking about my who died decades ago and he was from rural and no one went to the dentist and. saw how your father built things. and my father did the same. and it's it did not get passed on me. i don't have a gene, i suppose, but i have a couple of kids and i it's not there and i wanted to be there so with you too. that's really sweet. how he's imparted a lot. i think in that sense as well, as politically your parents and your grandmother think too. and that had me thinking, what about people who don't have those people in their lives? i think mr. cheatham was a teacher. you had so i think i think some little over here. i think sometimes it comes to having that one teacher, right? because were lucky in that sense of having people who you know they're progressive. but either way, they made you

think could have been conservative, but ask questions, right? kept you engaged. but what about those who, you know, young people who don't that in their lives with them? yeah, for sure. so we were below the poverty line, as we say and even though i never would have thought of myself as poor because we generally had enough to eat and i had clothes on my body and we are roof wasn't leaking nonetheless we certainly were struggling to get by, profoundly struggling. i qualified for a pell grant and all that. that said, there were there were aspects of abundance. my upbringing that i don't offer in order to, you know, sugar coat sentimentalize anything about what it means to be poor if your basic needs are a source of stress and unease and day to day uncertainty that is just

objectively an awful way. live. it takes a toll on your body and mind. that said, i extremely fortunate that though my family were very people and the public schools i went through were extremely along the way. there were there were decent who modeled for me. let's say, among the women in my family when they called themselves feminists were the capital f for anything like that. but boy, were they in the way that they lived and the strength they and the way they survive, no matter. what man was coming or going and or or my father who had a, you know, a real decency about him, know, drank a little too much, gambled a little too much. but and there there was abuse wasn't a collect by the way. but i think what you're getting at is if the more vulnerable the child and whether that's in

racial or, socioeconomic or gender identifying. so on terms, the more that child's outcomes will you be be deeply impacted by just the who who they who they happened to encounter. is there one person that loves them? my grandmother me in when i was 11 years old because my my household was such a mess and so so that was huge. and mr. my fourth grade teacher, he like, took me aside and said, i want to send the story you wrote this children's. is that cool with you? and you know, nobody from my family of whatever even like, conceived of such a thing. and he did that for me because he saw is a kid who's mommy in the pta. this is a kid whose parents aren't coming to this in that classroom, whatever school events, because they're working jobs and they're addicted to something. and there's a hot mess. they're decent. but this kid needs an extra hand. and i saw my name, that magazine

that accepted the story that the very well may be why i ended up becoming writer. so so let it be a lesson to all of us that as we discuss these issues in very abstract as concepts and as systemic and structural issues and we should. but our day to day lives on the ground. the people that we touch and interact with, be they immigrants who deserve respect and kindness. they a child who maybe is kind like dirty and their hair scraggly and they're wearing clothes you find distasteful and boy could we use some more just love and grace in this country, and especially to the least, these. sure. okay. and you do write that you don't have to have a college degree to know the difference between love and hate, good and bad, you know, since i there was a i came

across something that a french economist. piketty and he was musing. how everyone in congress more less i think has a college degree and yet 38% i think is the figure of americans don't. and so it's good to strive for an education. yet there's a disconnect there, a lack of understanding. i think what he's getting at so for politicians to understand citizens a little more so politics, we could talk a little bit about you talk about how sorry you had to do this here. a lot of states went red in this past election and talk, though, as lawrence wright, texan talks about texas, how by rights it should be a democratic state. there's a lot of gerrymandering and in kansas so you speak of

how there's a misunderstanding of what people really like. but having said that, with the election, we just i'm sure your concern that there's going to be yet more of that outsiders, people who are looking on the heartland. is that something you've given much thought to? i have and i think we should take that red and blue map and just set it on fire ohio and and to never to be resurrect because it's so toxic to our understanding of ourselves a place and as a people if you have a winner all politics and an elected moral college and you're always trotting out this map every four years, every two years, and it's deep. our psyches now it's been around over a couple of decades and the is that if you make it gradients of purple rather than just that

red and blue yeah you'll see you'll see distinctions some of them will be regional and if you get granular at the county level, some of them will be rural and so on, but things get a lot more complicated in any so-called red state. generally speaking, 40% of people vote for the losing candidate and it's like two out of five people. ain't nothing. and so, so so there's an erasure going on that is it's just it's just inaccurate to homogenize an entire place let alone region, let alone state. and so really resist those sort of like binary frameworks in terms now of like what what what we're to measure, you know. yes. it's very is very important for us to discuss rightward swing among certain groups be they related to regions or especially certain class marker and so on.

but but but what i is that there is actually because of gerrymandering and because of dark money and because of barriers to voting and a whole host of things we don't talk about enough even those numbered what those numbers tell you that's who got to vote. that's a snapshot of just the electorate and in even that handling in an overly simplistic manner. and so you know i just find that the are so much more complicated on the ground when you get down and start talking to people, often more hopeful to mind than than if you're just referring that red and blue map. well, soon, dear questions. i'm sure you have them. there's a microphone in the middle there. you can run on up. it would be that high, wouldn't it? it's low for me. first, ladies. thank you. well done. i mean, kudos, that whole thing about that.

and so i'm just curious about the tyson, what you were saying about tyson. so i, i don't know much about that that side of the. but don't they have to have accountability for the number of employees they have and do they include them in like workers comp insurance things of nature. so the family is is reciprocated when. they pass away. i'm just i, i it just baffles my mind that someone dies in they worked for you and they get nothing. well, it's not that they get and i think the way you know, tyson is the second largest meat packing company in the world. they have an incredible number of third party systems and that's how they they distance themselves from child labor because as a third party hire, they distance from a lot of worker issues with these.

they have a third party. they have a third party medical provider on site. and i write about that in my book and its workers, essentially a way to keep injuries down as long as a nurse says, i think, go back to work. it's not a record of all injury. and so you go if you drive past a tyson plant it'll say outside like no recordable injuries for 300 days or whatever it is. and so workers many whom have very have experienced very injuries from chemical accident have, you know, lost the function of entire for a number a period of years maybe are told you're fine. and then in order to go outside of system, they have to pay for it themselves. so that's a barrier itself to accessing their the truth about their medical condition. and in the case of my book, a lot of people found out years later, oh, you know, i only have one functioning lung. and then a lot of people who

were in chemical accidents died in covid. so me it was it it told a story of, you know, of the way that that workers were treated by a company that is making money hand over fist and right now just had an incredible fourth quarter or so. you know it's not an issue of we can't afford it it's an issue of, you know, this is where we're choosing to save money. well, i like that you touched on a little bit of what's going on with our new administrator because i'm adopted from the philippines. my dad's colombian passed away. my mom's white, and we are united nations. and that's what this nation is about just saying unless native thank you. hi. so i actually have a question that both of you might be able to answer. how do you speak to the idea that really before world war two, there was a big movement

for workers rights, for unionization and then now just seems like with world war two and after we've moved away from let's give it to the workers and they're willing to fight for them. they're willing to cops, you know, unionize all this very difficult. and now we have this kind of propaganda order that people buy into which i don't believe in unions. the company is my friend. you know, these people are not me. i want to work 60 hours for the company with no overtime. that's like a favor or a friend can you i'll speak to that how you saw that in your both your. so this is i was just talking to an interview about recently actually where so like one piece of the puzzle is the so-called right to work laws in states across this country, including home state of kansas. and those by my reader are basically just union busting in terms of cramp in the style of a

worker's to organize any or a union's ability to collect and so on. but something i think about a lot as a as a writer is how our policies are a reflection of our culture. often not not always. it depends, you know, some then sometimes you get a government that isn't represented and now it's just a reflection of rich, powerful people's culture. but but then and then the policies and what they allow or don't allow sort of is that can might become a self-fulfilling prophecy within the culture. so so what i mean by that is i grew up i was a kid in the eighties and i had well, i grew up in a farming community, were wheat farmers the a good portion of my family worked in airplane factories in wichita. that's historically been a major seat of the of that industry. and they want anything to do with unions. and it was because something in

the culture and i wouldn't happen to with you it involved propaganda just kind of poison the water around. now there are valid critiques unions, and that in itself has been a structure and it has been an empire fic tool, often rife with white supremacy and patriarchy. but or corruption. but and it remains perhaps the most powerful tool that workers have. and we're happily to my mind right now, labor is kind of having a in reversing that culture think. but really they're for that those last few decades of the 20th century there were the these new right to work laws that were hampering their ability to organize and a successful messaging campaign that that that that had that that stripped a worker of true understanding of their own agency by way of organize housing. so i think things are kind of coming and that propagates idea and messaging apparently

proceeded in my mind, you know adult consciousness because i remember as kid hearing my my family who very well could have benefited from it kind of talking down on unions. interestingly enough. arkansas was the first state to pass right to work. in 1944. and going back and looking at why arkansas that legislation. i found the discussion was really about legislators not wanting and whites to be in the same union. and so i thought that was fast an eating history in terms of the roots of what is still in place today in arkansas, in many other states. and in terms of thinking of tyson has at any given, there's workers who might speak 20 to 50 languages. i mean, even in arkansas got marshallese, we've got korean, we've got vietnamese workers, workers from thailand. and so there's a whole element to organizing that is really

about language, which is someone who works in as a translator. i really love that. wanted to focus that on my book in terms of thinking about organizing in the challenges of organizing. and so that's really i focused on this worker sort of worker led movements where. people are coming together and they're teaching each other about their basic rights because i said if i'm if, if i'm working with people who are illiterate who have not been to school so many are really you know, they're easily intimidated by the the the structure of. tyson by people telling them you're going go to jail. if you talk to a journalist and things like that or even, you know, the legal structures that tyson uses, especially with ndas i wish someone could look into for me, but so i think we are in a labor movement and. i'm hoping there will be more focus on on things like right to work and unions and figure out new structures for organize and worker led movements.

thank. this question is sparked. sarah, your point about you been doing this work. you've been talking about working class americans for longer than so many others. i'm just really curious how your responded to or reacted. j.d. vance's book hillbilly elegy when it came out and, the core premise, you know. so learn put it this way and. i was stunned and it was sort of part of my own kind of i already already a pretty keenly honed class consciousness if you will, by the time that book came out in 16 and there weren't any surprises in book to me as far as it sort of integrating personal narrative into what was essentially a conservative polemic but what really not my

socks off was how a whole bunch national urban, coastal, largely liberal media outlets embraced and celebrate and platformed the book and its author and from my vantage what was going on there as someone who thinks a lot about classism and class of course intersects with race, gender and every other identity. you have but we've all we've all we're all living a classic. sometimes it's hard to pin down. it can be static. it's maybe contain multiple class narratives, but roughly speaking, if you're poor, you were probably born. and if you're rich, you were probably born rich. and then there's folks somewhere, the middle, generally speaking somebody that's working in midtown manhattan, you know, probably went to an elite university, they are of a let's say, an upper middle class experience. and what found as someone who

really thinks and observes around classism and what that means and what's going on, j.d. wagged his finger at the place he's from and said these shameful outcomes relate to rot in the culture and a failure of character by the members of that culture and supposedly good liberals ate it up. they also deep down think that is a fair structure in which you get what you deserve and your hard work correlates to your outcomes and. so for me, that moment of embrace in a in a bipartisan among a specific class because of folks i know who are like from hollers in appalachia, they weren't into it. they weren't into that book. and so so i think the the

response to it revealed maybe more about our country and its class structure than the contents of the book itself. i went to college, which is appalachia. it's one of the few schools in the u.s. that's a work school. if you get in, you pay tuition and you work for the school. and when i was there, who was teaching there bell hooks? bell hooks wrote a book called appalachian and the first thing i thought when i saw j.d. vance's book was how lazy is he? but we need be i mean, read appalachian elegy and and so i just think i think of bell hooks. i think of people who are so rooted in appalachia who are really invested in a tradition

of, you. when i went to bury a half of graduating class, was a first generation graduate, which i think you're also and and, you know, none of that. you know, none of that makes an appearance in his book in any in any meaningful way. it was just sad to see that that that got picked up and held in a way that was supposed to represent a place that really clearly spent almost no time there. and so i would just say, you know, read bell hooks. that's a happy note. a happy note to end on. thank you alice and sarah. thank you.

we'll have more live coverage of the 2024 texas book festival after a short break. this is f the green beret mindset. we'll get back to it. i got on a little bit of a you know, a little bit of a frustrated soliloquy. there you. know i asked again, we specialize unconventional warfare, unconventional thinking. i once asked the senior official at the air force who was coming to the committee for stealth bombers, said, look, i absolutely support pre-positioning more in guam or other locations back to the indo-pacific. i said, but what it inside beiji

thinking what inside their decision more a few more stealth bombers or another hong kong or even the potential of a weaker uprising or you know and started kind of going down that list because the thing whether it's dietl was in iran or in beijing the thing they fear the most of their own people and if we have them looking internally or even considering it, i'm not for, you know, everybody watching for regime change or anything along, those lines. but when you have people like mussa amini, the the girl who was murdered by ayat always baku police for not wearing a hijab, a head covering and it sparked a national uprising. these people are begging for even type of rhetorical support. the united states, much less like encrypted apps, starlink or other things. iran has, a lot less energy to

muck around abroad. they're looking internally at their own folks. and we from a moral should be supporting these people. we did it in the cold war those dissidents whether it's a solidarity or inside the soviet union, were household names that we absolutely supported and why we taking that more unconventional approach now. i also tell a story about an afghan elder that i have been working with the better part of a year. like my teeth were brown drinking so much tea with this man and he kept going on and on. he commanded a pretty large i was trying to win over to our side about his secret weapons. oh commander, mike, my secret weapons. this is how we're going to defeat the extremists. this is how we're going to win this war. this is the long term approach. and eventually i kind of had to call him to the carpet because i didn't know if he had stinger missiles or. what? and he said he says, okay, okay,

commander mike, i'll bring out my secret weapons. and he sends somebody to the back and. i hear a bunch of rustling. i know what he's going to bring up. you know what walked out? his two daughters and, one of the most conservative taliban run parts of afghanistan. i never seen a woman outside of a burka completely uncovered in their late teens early twenties. he was smuggling them over back and forth to india to, get educated as doctors and lawyers and, you know, he said, i'll take a battalion of them. this was completely illiterate, by the way. i mean, was a he was a warlord boss, he said, but this is how you undermine al qaida and isis and town. and then when women like them are running this country, when they're marching in in islamabad and in tehran on and in kabul, that's how you know when the extremists are. and it just it's that war of ideas right that.

i thought was so powerful. but you know, that our default in washington to throw more money, more tanks, planes, ships at it or divisions at problem and that's the kind of thinking i, i try to get to and hard truths they can lead like a green beret to think about these problems differently. and so thinking about these problems, i mean, obviously the election and you're on the short list of names for for secretary of defense, if if what i am for. well, yeah, everyone i'm talking to. and so at least, i mean, you just, you know, you're you've close to the former president. you spoke at the rnc. you know, obviously in the book you mentioned that that you have multiple meetings with them. and, you know, you shared your advice with them and you took some of your advice and listened to you. so under a trump, if you're in the administration, not, what would you say? what would be the some of the major shifts that you do you don't go all the way around the world, but would be some of the big things that you would suggest push for that could get at some of this move public

diplomacy or as you said, like starlink's in iran things like that. what could be should the united states do in the near term? well, number one, i'll just tell you, in the engagement with him, you know, there's narrative out there that you know he's he's stubborn and and always knows kind of that the right answer way or the highway it's all of my experiences would have been complete constantly asking questions constantly seeking input. what do you think about this? what do you think about that? the frustration you talk to some in his administration, they think he's made up his mind and then he talks to somebody else again and and and and changes it. so he really does kind of espouse one of the attributes i talk about that bottoms up and constantly seeking input and ideas and and and but then you know in terms of what difference i think you'll see accountability which we've seen far too little, particularly with such debacles. the afghanistan withdrawal, not a single fired not even like

laterally transferred. in fact some are being promoted that were charge and i tell the story you know his are so right and then he leaves it dotted for the details and his instinct hey we can't be number one on earth if we're number two in space. and once was really briefed on what the chinese and russians are doing up there to militarize space and to be able to take out our entire economy, which is dependent on much less the military's ability operate around the world. gps, global communications and what have you, he said, well, we need our own to defend it. the space force, everybody made fun. everybody it you remember the netflix series adam corral and and what have you? well, look, there were people that were resistant even as own air force secretary. she was fired. a lot of people said that was really mean. but you know what the generals got on board real fast.

they got the message and think now, even just a few years and we see that actually that was very prescient how well they're with the private sector and commercial space and how critical that new force is, because that absolutely is the future and we can't continue to dominate or be a leader economically or militarily. we don't if we don't, our space assets. so that's the kind of you know, i think approach oftentimes that is is that is needed you know, on the 80th 80th anniversary of d-day and i hate to call it an anniversary, but we did a bit this evening on this and just sheer magnitude of of what on that day is it's it's like one of the most humbling things and as we were writing this segment, everybody was was very emotional about it. and the the thing to think that more died on a single day in normandy than died in the entire

war of 20 years. and when you sit back and you think about that you have 430,000 americans died in world war two, 54 total 54 million total people died. that day that's 3% at the time of the world's population gone in a world war and you can't say it enough, you can't look back and can't teach history. enough about that. but i'm fortunately, it's being stripped out of our culture today and anything is not popular. anything that's not politically correct. anything that doesn't fit a progressive narrative is being pushed further and further and further out of our curriculum. that's why i wrote this book. it's not it's not a hard read in. the sense that it's short stories about pivotal people. some you've heard of, some you haven't heard of, and it doesn't allow people to whitewash history, you know, and everybody's heard the story of some of the key founding fathers, george washington, ben

franklin, places like that. they they did did fantastic things. people behind them also did amazing things to influence people, to make them become the they are today. i have a high school wrestling coach who i dedicated the book to. his name's brad wallace and i lived my entire life by one phrase. he told me he was, you, my coach from junior as a sophomore year to senior year. and he said, half --, anything, whole --, everything. i said, that's a pretty good thing. so i live my entire by that phrase. and probably about two years ago when i started writing this, i told him, i said, hey, brad, you know, like that phrase really struck me, what the hell are you talking about? and he had no idea, he told me that phrase. so i was like, okay, from the heart, i guess. no, but but those the people, there's always someone behind somebody influences them and they don't always get the credit. and in this book, i talk a little bit about some of the people behind, the big people who made all waves that that changed this nation. also, the fun stories that you're going to hear about, like ben franklin. you know, i named my son after

him. yeah. because ben was a g. he was not here at all during the revolutionary war. he was over fornicating with booze and hookers who, quite frankly, him and hunter biden might've got along just fine but he was over france. but he was also getting us all the to win the war. we never we never would have won the revolutionary war without ben franklin. and, you know, people for the hundred dollar bill on electricity and who stands out in a lightning storm, a key. but whatever george. a ulysses. yes. who was obviously during the civil war. i mean, he was the only president to ever get arrested twice on horseback drinking as president. so. him and trump would get along great these days days. but these people really made a mark on on society and we have we have a culture now that is trying to strip everything about history of our thing out of our,

i guess, the repertoire of our kids up. and, you know, i have three kids. i don't want them to up in a world that forgets some of the greatest moments. but i also don't want them to forget the worst, because the worst moments in life are the that shape us the best as a wrestler in high school and college, i always tell people that the most i learned was from the matches i lost. and if we erase those those stories, we're doomed to repeat. you know, every country through the history or every i should say, every country, every everything through the history of the world has always had some sort of downfall, you know, is america next? i sure hope not. can we fix it. well, if we learn from history, we will. but every single society, when they've gotten weaker and weaker and weaker, they've become this problem. there's saying that actually we had a general on this evening who, took the words right out of my mouth and he said, you know, hard times, great, hard men, hard men create good times, good

times, great soft men, soft, great hard times. and the only way we can stop that cycle is is teaching the history, teaching what made this great. the honestly, the greatest country in the world and gave us the resolve to to do all the things that we get to do here. i mean, we have such privileges and such here that most people will never know. you know, 50% of the country doesn't or 50% of the world doesn't have clean drinking water. and we decide which starbucks we want to go to every day. and it's an anomaly in piece we enjoy is not the norm is the norm. peace is something that is generated through being now. more live coverage of the texas food festival than austin. is.

better now. good. hello. good afternoon. thank you for joining us this and thank you for coming to that 29th annual texas book. a true professor. right at the end of the day. thank you so much for again for joining us today. and i hope this is a rich discussion and we're going to have a moment for you to ask questions afterwards. so feel free to start lining up at the. about 15 minutes around 445. but before start, a couple of other housekeeping items here, please silence your cell phones. tell your significant other that if they're not here, you can not

talk for 10 minutes, 45 minutes. the other is that, you know, books are for sale at the books, people nyro's. and this is important, right? because you go there, you can support our authors, you can support the texas book festival, you can support book people, which is largest independent bookstore in the state. so you'll be doing three things that are good karma points. just go and other important thing is that and david are going be signing their copies of their books at the book, people signing tent. so please go afterwards and take photos with them. we had loves photos with people so, series of. today i'm joined by, as i mentioned david oh yeah i know he is another for our professor and the editor portraits of resilience. here's the book in equality and hope in latin america. and then i'm also joined by jonathan blitzer, a journalist

who is the author of everyone who is gone is here the united states central america and the making of a crisis. and i said martinez beltran, i'm a national correspondent, npr. i cover immigration. so, again, thank you for joining us today. we are going to talk about the election. so don't worry, there is going to be a point to point out. but i want to start with you, jonathan, because, you know, i mean, the title of your book says is right. it's like the united states central and the making of our crisis. in your book you give multiple examples of how the u.s. has played a key role, displacing people from their countries. can you share maybe, you know, a moment or an example that you think it's simple and emblematic of how the u.s. has contributed to to this immigration crisis, not only at the because immigration is more on the border, but but as a whole in this country. sure. sure. so one of the ideas of the book is to try to capture power in a

kind of visceral, immediate in the stories of actual real lives of people who have experienced this how the u.s. has kind of feedback loops that play out over years and decades. and multiple decades, that kind of to erupt into the public consciousness at a given moment in time. so, for instance, you know, to answer your question, most, you know, in the and summer 2014, i'm sure all remember there was a humanitarian at the southern border in which tens thousands of unaccompanied children and families from central america were arriving seeking asylum, which was a kind of major shift in what the u.s. government faced at the southern border prior to moment. the sort of typical profile of someone who'd show up at the southern border was that of a single adult, most likely from mexico crossing for work and u.s. enforcement policy and kind of all the thinking in washington had basically been

built around the idea that that was the persistent profile of the kind of person show up at the southern border. and then in 2014, you have this very significant shift which posed all kinds of problems in every imaginable way. but most administratively, you know, how does the handle the fact that there are tens, thousands of people who have a legal right to seek and yet government isn't prepared to really, with any aspect of that process. and so there's a way in which that moment in 2014 catches the the obama administration by surprise, certainly catches the public by surprise. and yet if you kind of drill down into the history of it and this is the idea of the book, the kind of of okay well what's driving this many people to leave their homes at this moment time you start to peel away layer after layer of history in which the u.s. plays a central role that explains things precisely the kinds of that have driven people to these these depths of desperation.

and so to my mind, the first kind of layer of it through the 1980s was u.s. involvement all across the world, but especially in central america, as a result of the cold war, the u.s. was quite with the idea of limiting the spread communism or the spread of leftism in the region. and that led the u.s. to support, that is to say, arm advise, provide diplomatic protection for murderous, repressive in places like el salvador and guatemala that forced hundreds of thousands of to flee. fast forward mean this is like an extremely history, but fast forward to the 1990s. you have emergence in places like inner city, los angeles of street gangs that were basically the earliest incarnations of the street gangs that we all of as ms13, which people tuning in late to the story would think that's a salvadoran street gang because that's the way in which it's discussed publicly and

politically. but in fact those gangs started the streets of los angeles in the late eighties and early 1980s, and they spread and metastasized through the region as a result of u.s. mass deportation policies, the 1990s. and so you start to look at these late these effects layer upon layer of u.s. foreign policy and u.s. domestic policy. and it to the kinds of circumstances that drive people to flee. so you had, you know, the people who are arriving at the southern border in 2014 are not fleeing regimes like the ones in 1980s, but are fleeing the gangs that have taken the place of those regimes. and the u.s. has been deeply involved in both iterations of those kinds of crises. so that's that's sort of how i've been thinking about it. and the u.s. has been deeply involved. but also has not been acknowledged many times that their involvement here and i'm because it seems the biden administration has originally done this, but other republicans and democratic administrations have done it, too, is striking

deals with central american governments in a way, they're moving the border south. so they are trying to stop people in panama before they cross it out in gap, they're talking about or trying to make a deal with mexico before people come north are like path. mexico city. but but those deals have backfired on and i think at times and i think this is maybe of what's contributing also to people coming here. it's like those deals don't work all time. i mean, you in some ways the history is illuminating. also infuriating because you, see, the depths of hypocrisy driving a lot of this policy. i mean, all through the 1980s, the kinds of foreign commitments that the u.s. to neglect human rights to the degree that it had had everything to do with the u.s. trying to limit the spread leftism in the region. you know now you get to the moment kind of in the you know, the early to mid 2000s to the certainly to the present moment and to your question of sort of deal struck between the u.s. and governments in the region to

limit the spread of migration you now have replacing the kind of cold war orthodoxy of the eighties. you have a different sort of orthodoxy guiding u.s. policy in the region and that is limiting the spread of people. and so all of the sorts of allowances you saw that the u.s. made for abuses and corruption and the like in, the region in the eighties, you now see in a different form because all of these governments in the as long as they play ball with the united states in terms of limiting immigration, the region or participating in regimes, you know, regional enforcement and so on, or accepting deportation flights, we can go through all the particulars of it. the u.s. is willing to strike with these people. and so it's it's know, i think it's fair to say i think it's sort of uncontroversial to say that that the lessons are not learned in any meaningful well, anything to, you know, reporting in the mexican side, as you have, we talk to people, particularly migrants, who often talk about how the abuses received from their systems, the

government systems in mexico tend to be more cruel than in other of the world, sometimes even their own home countries. and part of it is like this effort that mexico, other latin american countries are making to try to acquiesce to to this with the u.s. i'm curious. right. because it's no secret elect trump has promised amnesty protections and in book you talk about the impact of mass deportation, of mass, or when people are sent back and there's no preparation from that, from home countries. can you can you talk a little bit about el salvador in particular and? what did how did that look like when when people from inside already boarded, hundreds of thousands were deported i mean, there are so many ways in which it plays. i mean, the u.s. doesn't think about how its immigration policy actually creates new categories of immigrants, the world.

but, you know, the specific example that you're referring to has to to do with the spread of of of gangs, central america, which began really in the 1990s, i have to say that the political moment now feels a lot. i mean, i wasn't terribly of this in the mid-nineties as it was happening, but in the course of my research, the moment now feels very similar to the kind of general spirit in washington in the mid nineties when some of the harshest immigration laws went into effect, you know, laws that that really kind of capitalized on this broad public willingness lend a zeal for fighting crime with a hostility to which, you know, needless to say, is obviously a dynamic that we're seeing. and one of the things that was most striking about that was, you know, with people who had been involved gangs in the u.s. and who had kind of been radicalized as gang members in the u.s. so people who came here, you know, from like el

salvador who lived in, you know, south central los angeles in the who were brutalized by, the kind of like, you know, gang hierarchies on the streets of los angeles begin form groups of their own in self-defense, get thrown in prison where. there's even more racial segregation and identities formed around gangs on race and identity. those guys get hardened and get deported back to the region. and, you know, all through the 1990s, it's actually kind of incredible to go through the historical record on this. you had salvadoran presidents begging the clinton administration to please inform them of the actual of the people who were being deported. there was a kind of complete absence of accountability. the u.s. side, i mean, here, the u.s. was actually participating actively in response, doing the salvadoran police force, for instance, which is to say the u.s. government was perfect, willing to micro-manage aspects of salvadoran security in the

nineties and early 2000s. but on the matter of the lives of deportees they just sent whoever they whenever they could to a place like el salvador without informing the government this is a government that had just basically been kind of cobbled together after more than a of civil war the economy was cratered weapons were freely it was very easy for criminal elements in that kind of landscape to kind of overtake state authority and the played right into it and deportation. one of the ways in which that happened and now we see people from inside of the northern triangle countries, but even in other parts of latin america, to talk how they're fleeing gang violence. exactly. from those countries. exactly. exactly. that's that's and that's the circuit. that's the circularity. it and i also think, you know, this is what just to be clear, is one sliver of the kind equation with deportations. i mean, obviously have and this is what actually me the most, you know, the sorts of people

who are vulnerable to deportation now are people who, of course, have no criminal background at all. and, you know, who are nevertheless vulnerable immigration enforcement, because the immigration system has been dysfunctional, hasn't been modified in any substantial way since 1990. and so are people who have deep ties to the community who have deep, you know, family commitments, work commitments, who are now very vulnerable. you know what that means to them, to the lives around, to all of the concentric circles of of lives and interests around some of these vulnerable. and then, of course, to the country at large for a key segment of the population to suddenly be uprooted or at least for the threat of there being uprooted, be as present as it now is, is a terrifying prospect. i mean, i want to to you because i'm to listen to him. yeah. yeah. he needs to drink some water. so that's where we're going to

wait 2 minutes and then we go back to our airplane to here. but but i want to turn to you because, you know, we've been talking quite a bit about people who leave, people who leave their country, but your book talks a lot about people who stay. correct. and i want to i want to if you can tell me a little bit about about that. like, what does that mean when when you when focus on much? i mean, there's stories, people who have left, but the majority of the people stayed in this in this region, in latin america. well, first, i say that different from jonathan's. it's it's our book. it's not i was the editor. some of the authors are here. it's not my baby. it's not my baby. it's everybody's. yeah. so it's an edited volume and but yes, the book is about the 90, 92% of latin americans who never leave the region. i mean we sometimes think that you know, latin americans are when they a problem for us for the us they exist but 92% 90% of

people never leave the continent. and they and the book is about their lives and how managed to resist and to live their lives in a continent that is both very unequal, very violent, because i think it's here's the sociologist in me think it's 88% of the people of the world live latin america. a third of the murders occur there. so it's a very region, the most unequal region. and however, it's a very contentious region is you don't a week goes by in latin america without some sort of protest of sorts. and so they don't they don't stand by and they, you know, we'll see what happens. so that's it's a book about, you know, individual, you know, histories of a human rights activist, security entrepreneur. but it's just so service worker, someone who migrates, who

managed persist against all these, you know, things go on in their lives. i think one of the things for me when when i read book and i mention this to you was that i find, you know, it was pretty, pretty beautiful to see that that the authors were dictating the stories of these folks. they were the ones telling these stories and and all them had this thing where it seemed like everybody was fighting somewhere. actually on the street, giving police hard time or, you know, like shaking that tree. but others were like fighting in their own corners, like the farmers, the local farmers who were like fighting in their own commune. so it seems like i mean, for me, this is a statement which i'm going to ask people to not do when they ask questions. part of part of what i what i about is that something that drives me crazy is when we talk about latin america, clearly there are these issues of inequality, of violence but oftentimes we talk about latin america like it's weak, like it's it's yeah, mostly like,

like it's it's weak. it's less than is subpar, but a lot of social movements that have transformed the world and transformed the region. certainly we're in latin america. i grew up a in many, many years ago and until quite recently, i've abortion was illegal in. argentina, as a result of the feminist movement and very hard long fought struggle. now it is legal. i shouldn't say this because it's it's it will get me in trouble here in texas. but that is one one sort of case of belligerent and contentious and people don't don't you know they fight for the rights. you know, there's a long history sort of dictatorship rape and repression and still keep keep at it. the task for the authors not only to register that story, but, you know, to i think i mentioned is to know these

people well and to write well. so every single author been between six months and a year and a half hanging shadowing these and, trying to understand the complexity of their lives and where do they get the energy to persist. right. because it's not easy, as you say. it's not easy to keep keep going when things seems to be, you know, so and there is a lesson for all of us in times when we some of us, not everybody, feels down and hopeless that you know these people. so the way that they sounded with populist and romantic, that's how they felt doing it. i think i think it's incredibly well said. well, i think you said you told them to know how a lot of them read, the whole lot of them. i think that was the direct quote. know them well, write them well. okay. i, i want to go back to this idea of like, you know, saying what, does that tell us about like the region as a whole that the psyche of the when so many

have decided to stay and so have decided to keep fighting from from their corners. i think we it's a difficult question because most people are not thinking all the time. we think because we are here and we face a border crisis, people are thinking shoelace day or should i go? nobody thinking like that. people are leaving their lives and and it managed to hold their lives without of migration. i mean, migration is driven by a series of processes and there's no wonder why some people end up where they end up. but but i don't think that's question that most people would have and it would be very amusing to be the professor now, be very ethnocentric of to think like, why are there not leaving because their lives this is their right and they to do it collectively which is again a lesson for us all these stories of you know this to the couple

of persons who are trying to do agro they starting an agricultural in the middle of the jungle after the peace accords in colombia. they were threatened by the paramilitaries, the guerrillas and they still copied trying to do it without. the use of agrochemicals i read the chapter is like there is hope. there is hope for me, not just them. they are they are acting their hope. yeah, that. yeah. and there's also i mean, there's something different. we were talking about the chapter of maita, which is it's based in brazil. the author is here, the author is here. thank you. can you ask her hand? thank you. thank you thank you for writing that. but that chapter of my i think was a powerful we talk all this over the phone if you want to know more have to buy the book but of it was this part of like mito had not lost her child but she was joining forces with mothers who had lost child and there was like this collective fight, this collective pushback.

i think i'm going to pass it to him now. but, you know, mito story and if you read the stories, it's beautiful written. you know, she actually is telling us the best version of ourselves is, the one that are the ones that attach to larger communities. and she she show us that. and we know that, you know, if you about the civil rights movement, you know that. but you know she's an example. you know you're better when you're with others even if you lost a child. but you know, you join others in the struggle. so, yeah, but i want to go back to or i guess talk a little bit more about like the present moment and when we're leaving and the expectation of a second japanese situation. when we talk about immigration. something that i find fascinating. right? as someone who's covered like particularly the biden administration on immigration, is that a lot of the policies that biden has been pushing, particularly at the southern border mirror or are identical

to those that trump's trump pushed at the border, particularly the asylum ban that's currently place democrats seem to have shifted to the right on immigration. but also when you read when you read history and you read your book, you realize that, you know, clinton had policies were very restrictive on others, too. but one thing that i cannot stop thinking is that obama and trump have so much in common, which is tom homan. and for those who don't know who the nominees, he has been named border star for president trump, that one in charge of overseeing trump's deportation policy is another immigration related policies and i mean, i think this is something that we're going to hear over, over and over. tom homan was also a contributor to project 2025, and he's a lot about deportations. he's talked a lot about family separation. so can you tell us a little bit

for those here who are preparing, you know, to these for this job administration? that's something that they're going to hear often. it is sadly going to be a name that everyone here is often you know, tom homan was a career officer at ice at immigration customs enforcement, and, you know, one of the interesting things that happened during the first trump administration was he was brought back i mean, he was actually at his retirement in january of 2017 when he got a call from john kelly. i mean, he was at his retirement party from ice was done. he had served his time was about to go into a private, you know, get a lucrative in the private sector and had to excuse himself to take a phone call from the then, you know, soon to be dhs secretary john kelly who went on to, of course, beat chief of staff asking him to stay on and be the acting head of ice and he agreed he saw it kind as the realization of his kind of

ambition and dream. he was kind of a company man through and through as. far as i was concerned, i think revealingly was not ever confirmed to that role he was acting from beginning to end during the trump administration and didn't survive the entire of the administration. eventually he eventually he stepped down. one of the most interesting things, talking to obama era officials about homan during the first trump administration was their surprise at how a aggressive he sounded because was always seen as, you know, a tough minded enforcement guy, but was also seen as someone who was kind of conscientious enough about the kind of inner workings federal agencies to kind of play ball with both sides of the aisle. so when there was a democrat in office, he kind of had to accommodate himself to what that policy world was. and so actually, for someone like and maybe this is a little bit in the weeds but for someone like obama's second dhs

secretary jay johnson homan was a pretty indispensable ally and johnson relied on him to kind of the troops. he was someone who had the kind of trust of the rank and file and was seen as basically being unhappy with the direction in which the obama administration was taking enforcement. but nevertheless reasonable enough to have conversations. and so when you first started hearing him at the at the sort of dawn of the trump era, sounding as as he did, i mean, you may remember said maybe most famously, i believe this was on cnn, although he also gave similar comments in front of congress that, you know, if you're undocumented, you should be looking over your shoulder. that was the kind of signal quote of his. and what was significant about that in policy terms was mirrored a major shift that we were seeing from the obama era to the trump era. this is the first trump era, which was for immigration customs enforcement, one of the sort of innovations sort of say in the later obama years was to

create enforcement priorities for how targeted which people to go after. when you have 11 plus million undocumented people in the country, you go after anyone, everyone who's violated immigration laws, or you can say, okay, we're going to target specific people. people have committed. we're going to and in effect, what prioritization meant was it meant the federal government was trying to spare large portions of the undocumented community. so one of the first things that the trump administration did was it threw out these priorities, said, nope, you know, all the gloves are off. we can go after anyone. we want. and symbolic language is very important to the ice rank and file i actually think practically speaking, it was counterproductive to them because if you're not prioritizing anyone, you're not really systematically going after anyone. but that was that was holman's kind of rebranding, so to say, during the first trump

administration and trump him because he was you know, he was he was he the part i mean, i know it's a cliche now to of trump picks for various jobs that they're kind of picked out of central but he he looks he looks the part. trump praised him once looking nasty, which he meant as a compliment. and so it kind of only a matter of time before someone like homan kind of got brought back into the mix what's interesting, to my mind now is he's described as the borders are you know, if we had to distill of the kind of senselessness of our moment into any phrase, borders are pretty well summarizes where we are, which that, you know, as you said yourself, you one of the most fascinating developments from the first trump term to now is that there is actually bipartisan agreement. now that asylum is not of value worth preserving, which is a scary and fact of our world. now but the first trump administration was really

waylaid in its enforcement ambitions by fact that the border was, you know, out of control that there were a lot of people arriving seeking protection and the trump administration had to interrupt its for interior enforcement and inside the united states to redirect its resources and time and attention the border. and so some of the ugliest, most things you remember from the first trump term were all more or less centered around the of asylum seekers, people who had recently arrived, who were seeking entry and protection. now you have in some form or another, the democrats doing a lot of that work for the republicans already granted the philosophy behind. biden's moves i do think is different, but for all intents and purposes that know to people seeking asylum who show up at the southern border, the door is not open in the way that it once was and the administration has effectively closed it was a democratic administration.

and so now for a combination of reasons only partly to this form of harshness, but primarily related to the fact that the mexican government has really ramped up enforcement. the numbers of people showing the southern border are way down, which is going to allow, like tom homan in his role as, borders are to focus on the interior of the country. and i actually think that a lot of the lessons learned from the first trump term are now going to be to bear on the second one. and that's what makes me most concerned. and so the things that interrupt did the trump administration's interior enforcement plans, the first go around was first, the border being kind of unmanaged well, now that's been tamped down. and the second thing was resistance. blue cities and states, so-called sanctuary jurisdictions where law enforcement wouldn't cooperate with immigration authorities. now you have at every level of the federal government an incoming trump administration, a real kind of unity of in going after those jurisdictions and

partly as a result of or largely as a result of the work of the texas governor greg abbott, in bussing to blue cities and states. i think the political culture in those places is that so much tended toward resistance. the first trump term is now lot murkier and less certain. we want hear your questions so you can start lining up. you have questions. we want to hear them. the question or like my my ask is that you the question and try not to provide a statement because we don't have a lot of time and we want to make sure we go through all the questions before people standing up. i mean, i do think that that that you mentioned about about governor abbott here in texas. i mean, i think that that is significant is something we we have to talk about, you know, is the fact that he's been super effective at making the issue of immigration a national issue. i mean, like it has been a national issue. but but governor abbott was super effective at doing that and something we were talking

before it was this idea that abbott started busing migrants to blue cities and this was this has been something that immigrant rights groups have always wanted. they wanted states help transport migrants to cities that they wanted to go. i would started doing that not to help the immigrant rights groups would most want more than anything to to annoy the cities. and then we ended up having, like jared polis in colorado, a democrat, bussing migrants to other governors like katy hobbs in arizona, doing the same thing, bussing people the other part. so it became this like perfect storm. and one one thing that i'm you know, i think about often is the fact that president biden ran on this campaign of immigration. he was like the main right, like the trump administration separated families by end, talked about reunifying them, and the administration was not going to take that position. and here we are three years later, the ministration seems very it seems to be taking this these approaches, not separating families, but certainly not allowing families coming to their country claim asylum.

again. do you have a question. we're going to watch you as you walk down this aisle. that sounds good. yeah. hi. your name? my name's michelle wilson. hi michelle. i'm a public health nurse from denver, colorado. i hear, and i'm for you. but me how to tell my people we died. i mean, i work with. i'm a public health person who works. people who are unhoused. all my unhoused that got hotel sometimes for different reasons. they were all then out on the street because we had thousands of venezuelans who now are also out on our streets and you saw what colorado did during the how do i get back? i'm it's i don't know how to i mean, i don't mean just me, but

how do we get them back? they're. exactly what you said. they're people are angry people are not in and it wasn't people it wasn't the people it wasn't someone you think would be doing that. does that make any sense? how do we get them back? when you say get him back, who are you? i mean, how do we get the people to come to turn into i'm going to meet, you know, i mean, people who are like me who think that immigrants deserve a chance and should safe and should have food. but when you know the 5000 venezuelan aliens got to denver and nobody knew they were coming. right. we almost did destabilize public health infrastructure. i mean, i think this is a good i don't think we can. so i'm yeah, that's my question. yeah. and i think you guys could help me because. we're turning purple, really moving into red.

thank you. thank you. i mean, that's a really good question. i think, you know, i'm in a position to to answer. right. like how do we get how do we get people back to to understanding the situation? but i do think this this question, michel, it's like a lot of what we've been talking about, which is this clash in realizing, i think there was a poll, gallup poll, that showed that 30% of a vice harris's supporters support mass deportations. and in the past, that number would have been as high. keith i'm a little bit about that. that clash or we're seeing cities now grappling this question. yeah it's a it's a great question. and it doesn't an easy answer. and actually i would love to talk to you after about denver, by the way, because that's on my too. but, you know, i spoke at the start of the year to the mayor of denver who, you know, as you know and as others made it may also know, you know, his initial campaign about dealing with homelessness. and so it was a real political nightmare for him. and he strikes me actually as someone quite smart and kind of quite progressive minded, who nevertheless is in this bind, i

actually think i mean, this is a backwards looking to your question, but, you know, i the biden administration was terrified of being seen as acting so primitively as help move people off the border to cities and states where were more resources and this is the kind of flip side of the abbott coin and this is one of the great ironies of writing and reporting on immigration matters is like there's sort of a finite number of policy available and each thing almost has a dual aspect. there's almost a kind, pragmatic, progressive version of a thing and a kind of, you know, darker, more sinister iteration of of a policy. so abbott represents the kind of more sinister, ah, we're going to just send people off the border not coordinate with local and authorities ahead of time and and create as much chaos as possible. and as the mayor of denver said, one of the reasons why we bore the brunt of this was, we were the cheapest bus ticket from el paso. so a pure at the same time, if

you were to talk to, you know, progressive minded immigrants rights advocates who study the border, you'd say you'd a different version of bussing. you basically hear a world in which a democratic administration would coordinate with democratic cities and states across the country to gauge what resources were possible to, try to coordinate things on the front end. and i know for a fact that there was planning at certain levels of dhs to consider that kind of eventuality. but at every turn. the decision was made in the white house. nope. politically too toxic. and so i think the very sad consequence of all of that is think people who live in places now where there are real resource strains are left wondering, well who's thinking about us? and there's there's no easy way around it. i do think some of that was preventable in as i think some of it was preventable. i imagine maybe too naively. but i imagine that there are there are policy solution to

help relieve that. but now we're entering an era where. we're going to see kind of the ugliest response. next question, please. what's your name. hi, i'm mayor of dallas a member of austin dsa and asked me 1624 i questions kind of twofold. one, you mentioned the darian gap, which the podcast did could happen here, did a really good series on about a week or two ago. and i hoping you could speak to what motivates people take such a treacherous and uncertain journey towards an uncertain and like border crossing and like how have they come to that decision and then second and kind of tied in because of the way the panamanian government has conspiring with the u.s. and the rise of surveillance technology that being used on the u.s. border and in places like palestine. what kind of international and public private collusion. you've seen in your research that contributes that rise in surveillance technology.

that's used against immigrants, but then progressively more all of us. thank you you. i know i mean, i think that with what's pushing people, right. i mean there's many factors i think about venezuelans that i interviewed quite a bit and. i mean, the venezuelans been in this crisis for over a decade now and that one of the things that i mean, i believe it's like don't want to say the number and i know, but it's like almost a quarter of the venezuelan population has left in the last decade or so. and it's because in response to this crisis. and with their election that just over the summer, the expectation is that more will leave. and so there's no other i mean, the u.s. doesn't have a relationship with venezuela. so the idea of obviously is very complicated. the idea of getting our perspective. venezuela at least, is more complicated, too, so that the gap is the only out if i mean, they could go to chile or, they could go to other countries, but usually it's that end well. and javier earlier said something that i think is really

important, which is, you know, from our perspective, we of ask this question like it's sort of on the table for everyone from the start is like, do you stay or do you go? and that's not anyone lives his or her life. but by the same token, you when someone is willing to risk a journey as dangerous as the through the darian gap, it does to the level of desperation and. i think one of the things, one of the things that drives me, i don't want this to turn into a therapy for journalists covering this issue, but one of the things that drives me craziest just about the sort of general tenor of coverage this stuff is it's like the this sort of conversation starts only at the u.s. southern border when in fact, you know, the world is a complex place like in the middle of a period of global displacement, certainly the western hemisphere, the likes of which we haven't seen in more than 50 years. and like there are limits to what any government do in the face of that of desperation and upheaval. and so, you know, there are even think about just all of the layers of it. you have people who have been you know, millions of people have been fleeing venezuela

since 2014. a lot of those people have settled at different points in other countries, which they've essentially been uprooted twice. so like when you hear about people arriving at the southern border, you know, you may remember in texas, in del in september of 2021, you know, the 12th thousand haitians who showed under the del rio bridge, you those were people who actually, for the previous had largely been in places like, chile. they hadn't been in haiti. and one of the reasons they had fled haiti in some cases as early 2010 as a result of the earthquake settled, other countries found jobs and tried to make ends meet. there and then were uprooted again, a result of the fallout related the covid pandemic. and so, you know, you're just dealing with so much complex kind of world historical forces at play. and, you know, it sounds it sounds sort of pat to say, but we have to we can't just bracket that off. that is that is the whole story, the story that we're tuning into

is like the last chapter of the i don't if, you know, we have a few left so i just want to dropping the last part of the because it's a smart and a good question i don't know the answer. we have a couple of minutes left so this going to be the last question. i apologize. name a quick question and then quick answer. my name is gary. i think you've all been very illuminating, but i wonder if you could clarify something that i think i heard you said say, mr. blitzer when when you were discussing asylum. question suggesting, as i heard it, that policies of these two administrations had become very similar, that essentially asylum is, if not shut down as a basis for coming here, that for practical purposes, taken off the table. i thought there's still a distinction that is made between the basis for asserting asylum having to do with oppressive

political conditions in the home country as opposed to seeking asylum for, a better job reasons, poverty and so forth. is that distinction not still relevant to, the debate that we're having? yeah, it's a it's a good question. i'm glad you asked for clarification on this. i mean, the kind of throughline in all of it is the asylum system no longer works the way it was intended to and that because the wider immigration system hasn't been updated in any meaningful sense in decades. and so the asylum system basically been forced to perform a task wasn't meant to perform, which was it's become essentially the only opportunity for people to enter the country lawfully. and as a result, the system has overburdened, it's gotten overloaded. the backlogs extremely long. and so if you were to, you know, if you were to assert persecution and pass your initial credible fear, hearing your interview and then get scheduled to appear before a judge may be several years before you appear before a judge i mean, the system has just gotten totally overgrown in that sense. and that is the predictable

consequence of a lack of resources being directed, the system, a lack of kind of political will to defend it so that recognition that the system has gotten overburdened is now a acknowledgment the biden administration's theory of the case. i mean, this is a distinction i do think matters. i think the first trump administration saw the existence of asylum as a loophole and didn't believe that there was any legal validity to the notion of asylum, which was, you know, a breach of the law of a sense of ethics, all the rest. the biden approach has been essentially okay, we're inheriting a system that is basically not only not working on a good day, but is effectively been sabotaged by the first trump administration. and our theory the case this is the biden administration speaking. our theory of the case is we are going to try to direct people to ports of entry. i meaning, you know, in the past if you wanted to seek asylum, it didn't matter where you sought asylum, whether in a port of entry or in between ports of entry, as long as you can make a

claim that you were being persecuted based on your identity in the language of the statute is specific that regard you should have an opportunity. make your case. what the biden administration has increasingly tried to do in light of the fact that the system has gotten overburdened is. it's trying to make it harder for people to cross and seek asylum in between ports of entry and it's trying to direct people to ports of entry where there is a kind of more manageable way of at least getting people into the country. and what they've done in the name of discouraging people from crossing in between ports of entry is to basically raise the threshold to levels that are almost impossible to meet. that said, avenues do exist for people if. they were to show up at ports of entry. similarly the biden administration is also another kind of branch of its theory of the case is if congress isn't acting, what tools do we have our disposal? and the president? i think, made use of an authority known as parole to basically control the number of people who could enter the country through this program of parole, be given temporary work

authorization. and in theory, those people, once entered the country through parole, if they had an claim asylum claim, could present it. but there's been very little done, actually increase the resources of the asylum system. so all of those backlogs all of those delays, all of that dysfunction, they will continue to exist. so you're right to flag it. it's a much more complicated picture. but some of the tools you're seeing from the biden administration in between the ports of entry are tools that you saw the first trump administration try to use to discourage writ large and thank you. thank you. and the humanitarian parole was also suspended. now, even though it seemed to be very effective for people from, certain countries. thank you so much, jonathan harley, for the discussion thank you for our question and thanks for joining us today. we'll have more live coverage, the texas book festival tomorrow starting at 12:15 p.m. eastern. and if you missed any of today's coverage,