captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for saturday, march 9ve: nelopments in a class action lawsuit to reunite families separated at the border.lawsuit to reunite following the money behind illegal crosand migrant smuggling on both sides of the border. and digging into the oceans past to work towards a future of healthier ses . next on pbwshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend ilemade possy: bernard and irene schwartz. sue and edgar wachenheim iii. seton melvin. the cheryl and philip milstein family. dr. p. roy vagelos and diana t. vagelos. the j.p.b. foundndion. rosa. walter. barbara hope zuckerberg. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products.

that's why we're your rerement company. additional support has been prided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. from the tisch wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thank you for joining us. a class action lawsuit challenging the trump administration's zero tolerance policy just got bigge it was the policy which separated more than 2,700 migrant children from their families at the u.s.-mexico border last spring. the federal judge overseeing the case said the government must add what may be thousands more children and families to the case. in a ruling late yesterday, judge dana sabted a ly-released report from the office of the inspector

ral at health and human services. it found federal agencies began separating families as early as july 201 ten months before the zero tolerance policy was publicly annou18ed in may of sabraw said he would hear arguments later this month on whether the government will need to track dn these additional families, but said that while it "may be burdensome, it clearly can be done." the full ruling is on our website and we'll ve more on the money being made on migrant smuggling at the border coming up after our news summary. supporters of venezuela's opposition leader, juan guaido, clashed with police in caracas today. a line o of demonstrators from marching towards the national palace. protesters again demanded food and basic services and blamed the government for one of the worst national blackouts after a major hydropower plant failed on thursday. this morning, many areas across the country were still without electricity. meanwhile, the governing socialist party held a competing rally protesting what president nicolas maduro calls

"imperialist aggression" by the united states. u.s. backed forces in syria paused military operations to continue the evacuation of civilians from the isl eic state's lalave in syria. thousands of people, many of whom are family members of isis mis, have been leaving the city of baghouz for weeks. the syrian democratic forces plan to stage a final assault on remaining isis fighters once vilians have left. more than 62,000 people have left the isis enclave and are now in a refugee camp. an attack on an ebola treatment center in the democratic republic of the congo left one police officer dead and several health workers injured. armed assailants stormed the clinic in the town of bumbo in the heart of congo's deadly outbreak zone. the same treatment center was attacked last month, forcing t aid group doctors without borders to suspend its operations in the area. as of march 5, the world health zation reported 897 ebola cases and 563 deaths in the current ebola outbreak in congo.

>> sreenivasan: while the court case on family separation continues at the u.s.-mexico border, the flow of migrants seeking asylum, many arrivin with their children, continues to grow. how those families get to the border and manage to cross is a money-making enterprise for smugglers and for mexico's powerful cartels. a recent investigation from "the texas tribune" and "time" documented the intrirete infrastruchat's part of this border hustle. >> la technica is one of the big off points for migrants who are passing through guatemala, mostly from honduras, enoute to mexico. you're not going to be able to find it on many maps. it doesn't even show up. this is a one industry town. evyone here is involved. everyone here seems to be making some money feeding them, whether it's driving the boats, whether it's

driving the taxis, providing the hotels. it's an industry, it's s town that hung up around transit migration from honduras. they get on these small boats, these small wooden boats, and there they cross over and get into taxis that are waiting to them on the other side. and then they'll head north. the next big stop on the migrant route is villahermosa. this is where the coyotes start to make bang for their buck because they can smuggle people in ulk. right now, we are arriving to villahermosa, which is one of the biggest hubs for migrant smuggling via tractor trailers in mexico. the migrants are... are going to be boarding now into tractor trailers and moving north through mexico on federal highways just like this one. >> sreenivasan: jay root, investigative reporter for the "texas tribune," joins me now from austin, texas, for more on his reporting. now, you worked on this since june. what you just described or what we just saw is a small clip of a... a 20-minute, 25-minute film. there's an established infrastructure here.

this takes a tremendous amount of planning and money.wh are the economics of this? how did human trafficking become so profitable? >> well, one of the things thaat happened is he enforcement ramped up quite a lot. you kw, 20-- 15 to 20 years ago, it wasn't that hard to cross, a it wasn't that pensive. one of the coyotes that i talked to in this-- for this film-- a guy named ramon in reynosa tamaulipas, which is very dangerous city-- told me that about 15 years ago, he could pay 50 bucks to across the river. now, the cartel, the gulf cartel that controls that secon of the u.s./mexico border charges anywhere between $1,000 to $1,500. and it can go a lot higher than that, too. i mean, that, you know, it's the kidnapping capital. reynosa is the kidnapping capitaof mexico. and when these migrants come through there and they go into e safe houses, they're--

they're pretty much held against their will in the sense that, you know, they have to pay. and if they don't pay, they're g to stay there until they do pay. >> sreenivasan: so, is this more profitable than smuggling drugs? >> smuggling drugs is still a profitable industry, but one of ithe things that's happen that pot has been legalized in a lot of u.s. states, and pot prices have sunk tremey. and the gulf cartel moved a lot of ps and still does move a fair amount of pot, but they can't make near as much money on that. the other thing is when you get to the u.s. side of the equation, and you have people that are trying to evade law enforcement-- not asylumke ss turning themselves in-- but then they also have the added cost of but en they also have that added cost of getting acss the border, past the border patrol, past the checkpoints north of

there. they have to pay a lot of ney. and i talked to a guy named emilio trejo who was convicted of human smuggling, and he had been bn jail. he hn in prison for cocaine trafficking for about al dozen years. and he said that when he got out of prison, the world had changed. and i said, you know, "whatbo you're talking?" and he said, "the money's in the people now." he said that the going price is $2,000 a head. he got busted with 25 people in his 18-wheeler. so, do the math, you know. that's $50,000 to go to drive from mcallen, texas, to houston, a seven- eightour drive. that's a lot of money. you do that ten times, that's lf a million dollars. north of there. >> sreenivasan: you follow a family through this process, from when they started from honduras all the way through, and what happened to them and on ey are really cogs in a, you say different kind of money machine. >> correct.

one of the things that was really the sort of "ah-ha" moment for me and... and theor ideahis film began when i interviewed carlos in livingston, texas, north of houston. he was talking about how much he had to pay for phone rights to call his family, to try to call his sisterfowho was in caia. and i was like, you know, i started looking into that. i was like, "wow!" i mean, who knew landlines could beo profitable, right? i mean, the... the private prison industry is one place where landlines can be extremely profitable. it's a sort of what they described as kind of a company town atmosphere where, you know, in a lot of cases, they're working for either a dollar a day or sometimes for nothing. and if they don't do it, they can beunished for it. >> sreenivasan: one of the things i also was wondering was, is it cheaper for someboe to cross ther with a child in tow? >> yes, yes. >> sreenivasan: this is the case tt the administration has been making for, in some part, justifying the zero tolerance-- to create a disincentive, to say, "u know what? there are people using as ways to get in and through

the asylum system instead of having to go through the border, hide and trucks go further inland." that's why people go in caravans, strength in numbusrs, begoing through mexico without a smuggler is a really sod way to get physically harmed aken down for every penny you have. the top level is about 10-- it can go up to 10, 12-- i even talked to a guy who paid $16,000. but the bargain-basement deal that they tell people to be most e people get off anndthey go, "go border patrol agent." and that is the experience of a lot of asylum seekers. >> sreenivasan: this hasn't slowed the flow of migrants. mean, even after last summer, where it was so much in the public eye, you're still seeing vol thiewms are higher than what we've seen over years past, ride rite? >> >> right. well, with family units, family. units is off the charts. i mean, in some cases,

literally. and one of the things that appears to be going on is that, you know, people... they're told now's the time to get out, you know, before the law changes. i think you do see some awareness on the ground of that, particularly among the coyes. and they... and they used that for marketing. i mean, these are business heople tre, you know. one ofost fascinating things that i found out was shis... this phenomenon-- and we this in the documentary-- of where the smuggler actually takes a video of the family crossing t river and then sends it back... back to the family and says, "hey, you know, there there. they got across. we did our job." and that's good for business. >> sreenivasan: jay roex from the "t tribune." you can see the reporting under the headline "border hustle." thanks so much for joining us. >> thank you. >> sreenivasan: there's a time machine of sorts at california's monterey bay aquarium. scientists and researcrs use technology and historical data

to understand how the ocean is changing. the ocean memory lab is less than two years old, and it's already delivering a wealth of data. newsho weekend's ivette feliciano reported this story in august. this segment is part of our ongoing series, "peril & promise: tcl challenge of ate change." >> reporter: at northern california's monterey bay aquarium, scientists are conducting an experiment in time travel. >> we put it in one of those little vials and send it off. >> reporter: they're part of ean memorywn as the la >> so we can sort of go back in time from zero to the very end here. >> reporter: its mission: to paint a pictureaof what the looked like 200 years ago. >> imagine opening up a book at the last chapter and trying to understand what the story's about. we're kind of doing that right now with the ocean. >> reporter: science director kyle van houtan heads the project. >> we've studied the land. we live on land. and we've studied the land for centuries. we know quite a bimiabout the dy of how things work in forests and deserts and

grasslands. we know a bit less about the ocean. >> reporter: studies on the ocean's environmental health iely go back a few decades, so ists often can't say what marine life was like before pollutants, including plastics and chemicals, were introduced to the water. >> we really want to generate an informed baseline for what a healthy ocean is. to do that, we need more data than we have. and to-- we have to get creative. >> reporter: to that end, the year-old ocean memory lab draws on specimens collected by naturalists and explorers over the last two centuries. usinmodern techniques, lab scientists can analyze those specimens and compare them with samples collected today. >> the seabirds and the turtles and the whales, all these things that we study, they're essentially drones taking inrmation about their ecosystem experience out in the ocean and recording it in their feathers, their bones, in their blubber, various parts of

their body, and storing that away. so by using this approach and using the animals as drones to measure the environment, we can actually go back in museum archives and records and repositories and go back much further than if we started measuring today. >> reporter: seabirds-- gulls, cormorants, and albatross-- provide the ocean memory lab with a particularly valuable data set. >> s nesting on land, of course, but flying thousands of kilometers dit into the ocean, sometimes sp more than 95% of their life on the wing, in flight. and these animals search huge areas of the ocean for fish and squids, and then will come back to their colonies to breed. >> reporter: to get data on the ocean from sea birds, scientists cut small fragments from their feathers and then grind them into a fine powder. they then send the samples to a lab for protein analysis. >> they're recording all sorts of information about their food in their feathers.

and so we recently did an analysis looking at 130 years of inabird feathers and recre their diets from those feathers, from the ratio of amino acids and proteins in those feathers. >> reporter: with this technique, the ocean memory lab has been able to map out the ges in diet for several seabird species over time. ye what we learned was that, over the past 13s, these birds have gradually been ndifting their place in the food web,hey've been eating more squid and less fish, about twice as much squid than they were eating in the late 1800s. from our analysis, that's due to climate change and due to the fisheries activity, that humans have been taking a lot of fish out of the ocean. >> reporter: but it's not just animal life that proclues to the ocean's history. tgae samples have been collected hopkins marine station, right next door to the aquarium, for 125 years. >> this from 1916. it's amazing that they've been preserved. but what we hope to do is to recreate what the ocean was like nst here, down the coast, 1916 through the experience of that specimen.

>> reporter: scientists can analyze the specimen and extract information on the state of the ocean from the time it was preserved. >> so, we can get the temperature of the ocean, we can get pollutants in the ocean, we can get the nutrient levels. what we hope to do is to kind of at some of these things today, but then, pricessly, go back in time to these specimens. >> reporter: other specins can provide the lab with centuries' worth of data. this is the ear bone of a bowhead whale, which can live to be over 200 years old. the bone can provide information about the ocean throughout the animal's lifetime. >> yeah, so this animal could have been several hundred years td, and this sample is fr early 1950s. this animal could have been swimming around in the ocean

before the declaration of independence was written. so, that's quite amazing. and all of the information here, it's not just a snapshot of the recent life of that animal, it's the entire lif it's kind of like a black box for an airplane, you know, it records all of the data that happened in that whale's lifetime. ou reporter: van houtan says that furtherin understanding of the ocean's history isn't just important for posterity. s 's also vital to understanding how chan the ocean's thkeup affect people now. >> the ocean ibeating heart of the climate system. and we need to understand that, and we need toxplain that and to educate the world about that. we want them to understand the portance of the ocean, n just for fish and things that swim in the ocean, but the import them. the ocean for

>> sreenivasan: the great lakes, and the channeth that connect , make up one of the largest fresh water systems on earth. the lakes are an iispensable source of drinking water for more than 48 million people in the u.s. and canada. but a nine-month investigation by american public media, great lakes today, and npr found that in six large cities on the shorelines of the great lakes, residents are facing a growing water crisis. maria ines zamudio, an investigative reporter with wbez in chicago joined sc recently to s the findings. r> we found that the cost of water in the geat lakes region has increased dramatically. in somcacities, like co, the cost has tripled. and in other cities, like detroit and cleveland, the cost has ubled. and so, what we wanted to find out is how the acces w toer is compared to other areas. so we compared it to phoenix, arizona, which is a city that gets most of its water from the colorado river, about 200 milesy

and we found that the cost of water in phoenix is actually a lot-- a lot less than the cities acrosshe great lakes region. >> sreenivasan: so you've got itcity that's in the desert and getting its water from 200 miles away, and that's still cheaper than a cityhat's on the great lakes adjacent to one of the largest resources of fresh water at america has. so give me an idea. like, for a family of four, what kind of money are we talking about? >> so we calculated the average usst for a family of four, assuming they e about 50 gallons of water per person, per day. sand so one of the citithat had the largest increase was chicago. so the cost went from $178 in 2007 to about $576 in 2018. and so, what we know is that the mayor increased the rates in 2011 to cover infrastructure cost. but then, in 2017, he actually added a water and sewer tax to

replenish t micipal pensions. so we know that some of that money is going tor cover ot expenses. >> sreenivasan: okay, you utow, it's fine if you can afford it,hat happens to people who are going to pay for that water in poor areas >> so at was one of the other arereally startling realities of our investigats that we talyzed shutoff notices, in each one of six cities that we investigated, and we found that tti shutoff s were disproportionately concentrated in mostlyoor, black, and latino neighborhoods. in chicagofor example, you have to pay an additional $40 to get your water reconnected. you have to get on a payment plan if you can't afford to pate entire balance. and on top of that, you pay interest on the amount owed. so we-- during the course of the reporting, we found that a lot of poor families get trapped in

this cycle of trying to keep the water on and having to pay additial fees. found that the city of chicago charged about $7 million in finesnd fees. and so, those fines and fees were also concentrated in poor-- mostly poor neighborhoods in chicago. >> sreen this is an aging infrastructure of how our water actually gets delivered to our tap, right. i mean, these are signif costs that every city is going r have to bear. ht. so i think getting at the reason why we've experienced such increase in the cost of water was one of the more difficult parts of this reporting. we know that the cities that we look at have experienced r amatic population loss. ample, detroit has a water infrastructure for a city that nas for about a millio population, but now about half

of that live there. and so, the folks who are now livingn detroit are having to subsidize this very large infrastructure. and the other part oit is that the federal support for water pipes, reconstruction, and all of that stuff, has decreased dramatically. so what a lot of cities have been dryng isg to add these hikes so that they can keep up with, u know, fixing the pipes and keepg up with the infrastructure. >> sreenivasan: all right chicago wbez reporter maria ines zamudio. thank you for joining us. >> thank you for having me. s enivasan: finally tonight, it's that time again for most of us to spring ahead for daylight saving time.

hoset your clocks ahead on at 2:00 a.m., unless you're in hawaii, most of arizona, american samoa, the northern mariana islandri guam, puerto , or the u.s. virgin islands, where clocks stay on standard time year round. that's all for this edition of pbs newshour weekend. i'm hari sreenivasan. thanks for watching. have a good night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: rnard and irene schwartz sue and edgar wachenheim iii. seton melvin. the cheryl and philip milstein elamily. dr. p. roy v and diana t. vagelos. the j.p.b. foundation. rosalind p. walter barbara hope zuckerberg. corporate funding is provided by mutual ofmerica-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. additional supportovas been ed by: and by the corporation for public rcontributions to your pbs

station from viewers like you. thank you. be more. pbs.

- [narrator] explore new worlds and new ideas through programs ke this. made available for everyone, through contributions to your pbs station, from viewers like you. thank you. deepak chopra: what is the purpose for which we are here? why do we want to know ourselves? or: dr. deepak chopra world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and author of over 80 books, created the seven cc world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine spiritual laws of s to help everyone overcome barriers to reaching their peak potential. of success, that can change how we experience the world and allow us with very little effort to fulfill our goals