"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 50

In this episode: Where Did the Migrant Crisis Come From?

April 15, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 50

Episode 50: Where Did the Migrant Crisis Come From?

American voters say immigration is the number one issue on their minds in this crucial presidential election year. How did we get here? In part one of this series we look at Venezuela, a country that has seen a massive exodus of its population over the past decade, many of whom end up in cities and states across the U.S.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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ARCHIVAL Andre Vasquez: The Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights will now come to order. Today, we have one item on the agenda, which is a subject matter hearing… [FADES TO PLAY UNDER NARRATION]

Andre Vasquez is a member of the Chicago City Council. He’s one of 50 people who holds this role.

ARCHIVAL Andre Vasquez: …and oversight of contracted agencies. We’ll begin with a roll call to establish quorum… [FADES TO PLAY UNDER NARRATION]

Aside from the regular day-to-day business of making sure the garbage gets picked up and the potholes are fixed, Vasquez also chairs the city council's Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

ARCHIVAL Andre Vasquez:… At this time, we will begin the public comment period.

The committee, Vasquez told me, is there to hold the mayor's office accountable for how the city manages the “migrant crisis.” As you've likely heard by now, since the middle of 2022, Chicago, along with other Democratic-leaning cities like Denver and New York, has seen the arrival of tens of thousands of asylum seekers, many from Venezuela, with more coming every week, bussed in and flown in, primarily by Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas.

ARCHIVAL Andre Vasquez: The period is limited to 30 minutes out of respect for everyone's time. Each speaker is limited to three minutes.

The committee meetings are open to the public — a public with a list of questions and concerns about the migrants flocking to Chicago.

ARCHIVAL Andre Vasquez: Our first speaker will be Carlos. Tienes tres minutos, solo para decirle.

ARCHIVAL Meeting Attendee 1: Hola, saludos.

Some speakers are new arrivals:

ARCHIVAL Meeting Attendee 1: Chicago es una ciudad pues que nos ha ayudado mucho…

Others are there to show support for the migrants:

ARCHIVAL Meeting Attendee 1: This is the time for Chicago to shine and lead by example. We're all humans. We all deserve an opportunity.

But there are also a lot of people who sound frustrated. Frustrated about how all these migrants came to Chicago in the first place. Frustrated about all the resources being spent on these newcomers and not on their own communities.

ARCHIVAL Meeting Attendee 3: Standing on the plight of Black people, using our laws, using our issues to get ahead. Where are you all at when it's time for protecting our neighborhoods?

Vasquez keeps calm in these meetings, hearing everyone out.

ARCHIVAL Andre Vasquez: Okay. Thank, thank you for that. Um, just wanted to add, uh, to kind of your point about…

Which can be tough when he’s being called out by name.

ARCHIVAL Meeting Attendee 3: So, Vasquez, I'm gonna need you to get your people.

Andre Vasquez: If you have to pick somebody to chair a committee like that, picking someone who used to be a battle rapper is not the worst decision because you have a thicker skin than most.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF A BEAT, A CROWD, AND VASQUEZ RAPPING]

That's right, before becoming a member of Chicago’s City Council, Vasquez spent many years rapping under the name Prime, battling other rappers in what he estimates were a thousand duels, where his rivals picked at every chink in his armor.

Andre Vasquez: My experience battle rapping has prepared me for people yelling and screaming at me and insulting me in a way that doesn't rattle me in a way that I think it might any other person.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF A BEAT, A CROWD, AND VASQUEZ RAPPING]

Andre Vasquez: It’s the ability to improvise and kind of like find a way to turn a phrase over and find ways to turn the energy around.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF A BEAT, A CROWD, AND VASQUEZ RAPPING]

As the chair of the immigration committee, that ability — to keep calm in the face of anger and reproach — is good to have right now.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Because even though Chicago is 1,000 miles from the southern border, it’s turning into a new battleground of the migrant crisis. It’s a turn of events no one saw coming: after all, Chicago became a “sanctuary city” more than three decades ago, meaning local officials won’t ask about a person’s immigration status or turn that information over to federal agents.

But that welcome is wearing off because of the way these new migrants have arrived. Buses pull up dropping off groups of migrants that number in the dozens — even in the hundreds — having been sent there courtesy of the state of Texas. And city officials in Chicago have received little previous notice of these drop-offs. And that’s caused a lot of chaos as the city has scrambled and often struggled to respond.

The pushback hasn’t just come during contentious city council meetings or from just one community. In lots of different neighborhoods, there have been protests about where the shelters to house all these migrants should go.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: South Shore neighbors filing a lawsuit trying to block the city of Chicago from moving migrants into the old South Shore High School…

ARCHIVAL Protestor 1: This mayor is acting like a dictator. He needs to go.

ARCHIVAL Interviewee 1: They have to take care of their own constituents, their own people, before they take care of anybody from the outside.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: People here say a lack of resources and lack of safety are their main issues with the plan.

ARCHIVAL Interviewee 2: When you think about all the things that we allow to slide, this is another thing that you know, we just can't allow this to happen.

These heated debates playing out in Chicago are happening across America — not just in border states — and that’s transforming immigration into the defining issue of the 2024 presidential election. Most voters say immigration is more important to them than anything else, from inflation to crime. And the numbers are staggering: in just one month, December of 2023, U.S. border officials dealt with nearly a quarter of a million attempts by people to cross the southern border, a new record. So, no doubt this is a problem. But when you listen to pundits and politicians talk about this problem, it only seems to get more confusing…

ARCHIVAL Pundit 1: Republicans, they want chaos on the southern border. They want fentanyl flooding…

ARCHIVAL Josh Hawley: Joe Biden, he wants this border open because this is his agenda to totally crash our immigration system.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: The crime is going to be tremendous, the terrorism…

ARCHIVAL Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: There is no economic calculation, there is no logical calculation…

…until all you end up with are more questions than answers.

[THEME MUSIC PICKS UP]

This is a complicated issue. So we’re going to take two episodes to explore it. And rather than trying to explain the crisis from absolutely every angle, we’re going to zoom in on two places that reveal problems playing out on a larger scale. First, Venezuela, a country that has seen a massive outpouring of its population over the past decade, and since 2021, hundreds of thousands of those migrants have shown up at the U.S. border. In fact, by the end of 2023, Venezuelans were one of the leading nationalities trying to illegally enter the U.S. from Mexico. So, what’s driving them here? And what can Venezuela’s decline into abject poverty and violent authoritarianism help us understand about the future of migration to the U.S.?

Then, in part two, we’ll head to Chicago, a sanctuary city that’s being strained as it’s asked to shelter and feed tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants, so we can find out what the real, local effects of this surge are — not just what the politicians with their megaphones SAY they are.

And how has busing these recent migrants to cities in the Midwest and Northeast from the border states shifted the political discussion around immigrants in this crucial election year?

I'm Peter Bergen. Welcome to In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

If you want to solve a problem — any problem — it’s important first to understand what’s causing it. And when it comes to understanding the surge of migrants showing up at the southern border of the United States, there’s probably no better case study than Venezuela.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: In September, for the first time ever, more Venezuelans came across the border than Mexicans. 54,830….

Migration from Venezuela to the U.S. has skyrocketed in the past three years, as people flee a country with a poverty rate over 80 percent. But poverty alone doesn’t explain this mass-exodus. Venezuela is a failed state: human rights abuses, extraordinary levels of violence, and nationwide blackouts can make life unbearable. Some migrants are fleeing the violence, others poverty, but it’s often all of the above.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

So how did Venezuela, with the largest oil reserves in the world, surpassing even Saudi Arabia, get to this point? Well, in that story, one figure matters more than any other: a young, charismatic soldier named Hugo Chavez, who became president in 1999…

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF ELECTION CELEBRATIONS PLAY UNDER NARRATION]

…taking his message of revolution to a working class that was tired of the two corrupt parties that together had ruled the country for decades.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner: He came to power with a discourse that was very appealing to many who felt excluded from the political system for a very long time.

[MUSIC FADES]

This is Tamara Taraciuk Broner. She's a program director at the Inter-American Dialogue, a U.S.-based think tank. Broner says that Chavez came to power with promises to fight poverty, and the country’s tremendous oil wealth allowed him to make good on this pledge.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner: It was at a time when Venezuela was benefiting from high oil prices and a lot of oil production. And it was with this enormous amount of funds that he was able to fund a lot of his social programs that benefited many, many Venezuelans.

Chavez was wildly popular and he kept on winning elections.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: Chavez appeared at the presidential palace. The Venezuelan people have spoken, he said, and the people's voice is the voice of God. [CHEERING]

ARCHIVAL Hugo Chavez: ¡Viva Venezuela! [CROWD CHEERS: “¡Viva!”]

ARCHIVAL Hugo Chavez: ¡Viva Zamora! [CROWD CHEERS: “¡Viva!”]

But his populist charm came with a hunger to consolidate his power. And he quickly moved to weaken the country's institutions so he could rule with impunity.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner: He was able to politically take over the Supreme Court in 2004. He got a huge majority in congress, and that allowed him to govern with basically no limits and no checks to what he was doing once in office.

Chavez died of cancer in 2013 after 14 years in power and his handpicked successor, a former bus driver named Nicolas Maduro, managed to scrape out a win, and has held onto power thanks to changes Chavez engineered to the constitution and the judiciary.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner: And it is precisely this concentration of power that has allowed the current government of Venezuela to commit all sorts of abuses without any checks on its power.

That’s included plenty of state violence against protestors who contested Maduro’s regime. Security forces rounded up young people, arrested them, beat them, even tortured and killed them. College students like Gabriel, whose name we’re changing to protect his identity, took to the streets.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Gabriel: Tear gas bombs raining, and suddenly you couldn't breathe. You start to cry and then you get blind. In the back of that tear gas cloud it was a soldier that has orders to capture you and then torture you.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner: They were not rogue agents that just committed excesses. There were systematic abuses committed by security forces — electric shocks, brutal beatings.

Gabriel: The military, the soldiers, kill kids around me. We only have a wooden shield, and rocks, and bottles, and they have rifles, guns, tanks, tear gas. We are like kids that dress up like soldiers, but we weren't soldiers.

[MUSIC SHIFTS, PACE PICKS UP]

Meanwhile, the price of Venezuelan oil collapsed. The welfare programs Chavez had founded ran out of money, and it was hard to find basic goods.

ARCHIVAL Interviewee: [SPEAKING SPANISH DUBBED OVER IN ENGLISH] Our daily routine is not to go to the gym or the cinema, but to go from one supermarket or shop to another. I go to one, and they've got nothing. I go to another, and they've got sugar. But there's no cooking oil, no butter, no cereal or flour.

And then there was runaway inflation.

ARCHIVAL Venezuelan Inflation AJ: Inflation in Venezuela is the highest in the world, and one of the issues that fuelled the recent anti government protests.

And violent crime exploded.

Gabriel: You don't know if you're going to be robbed in the street by a thief or if you're going to be the victim of some corrupt police officer.

[MUSIC FADES]

Upper-class Venezuelans began to leave shortly after Maduro was elected. People like Gabriel’s friends and family, who could secure visas, bought plane tickets. They started new lives in places like Spain and the United Kingdom.

Gabriel: You asked me why I’m still here and I really don’t know.In every birthday, I made a list of friends to invite and celebrate my birthday. And every year, that list is shorter because every year a different friend migrates.

In the past few years, even the country’s working-class — people who had once benefited from the safety net of Chavez’s social programs, found they could no longer get so much as basic medicine or even afford to buy food.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner: They couldn't survive in Venezuela with their salaries and they couldn't get enough money to feed their kids.

Starting in 2021 a tidal wave of Venezuelan migration to the U.S. was prompted by a combination of things: COVID travel restrictions were being lifted, smugglers were opening up new routes. Meanwhile, online chatter suggested that the Biden administration might be more lenient for migrants than the Trump team. That all came after a pandemic year that had devastated economies in Latin America.

Gabriel: People don't migrate just because we live in a violent country, you know? People migrate because we live in a violent country, but we also live in a country that is in economic crisis, in humanitarian crisis, and in a country where human rights are not respected.

As of 2024, one in four Venezuelans are living outside of their country. People like a migrant I’ll call Julio, who didn’t want us to use his real name. He left Venezuela more than four years ago. Julio learned to speak English from his dad.

Julio: My first contact was with English and not with Spanish.

His father’s family was originally from Trinidad. They passed the English language down between the generations. And he also speaks a little bit of Italian.

Julio: Solo tanto po. Lei parla italiano?

Alexandra Salomon: Parlo italiano, si.

Julio: Wow, bell-, bravo bravissimo. [SALOMON LAUGHS]

Julio once had a middle-class life, working for the social security agency in Venezuela.

Julio: I had a very good job. I used to earn seven times the minimum wage in Venezuela but when everything started to, you know, going crazy, this salary wasn't enough. There was a point that we, we were eating only once a day to save food for the children. So the situation was, was getting worse and worse every day.

Julio thought about leaving Venezuela for a long time.

Julio: But the fact that made me took the decision for real — I mean, this is it. I'm done, I'm going to leave my country — is when my wife’s oldest daughter got killed because of a shooting between the forces of law, the government forces of law and a gang band.

Julio says one of his family members saw the shooting, between the police and the gang.

Julio: After that we were threatened. So we decided to move from Venezuela to Colombia.

Like Julio, many of the Venezuelan migrants who are now at the U.S. border first tried living in neighboring Colombia or other Latin American countries like Ecuador and Peru. But those fresh starts got derailed when those countries fell into their own economic depressions that began during the COVID-19 pandemic, and jobs became scarce, even for locals. Julio and his family spent four years in Colombia, but he says they were still being threatened by Venezuelan police.

Julio: So, we decide to put the more distance we can between these people and my family.

In July of 2023, they joined tens of thousands of other Venezuelans, making the treacherous journey from Colombia north.

Julio: Do you know the jungle, the name of the jungle is Darién, between Columbia and Panama. We crossed walking, on foot. My whole family, my two kids, my, my, my step sons, my step grandchildren, okay. A baby of, of, of three months.

[EERIE MUSIC PICKS UP]

Cecilia Muñoz: It's hard to overstate how dangerous a trip it is. In that, literally, it's like walking through a dangerous jungle. So like, you start there.

Cecilia Muñoz is one of the United State’s leading experts on immigration she’s also on the board at New America, where I work. And as she says, crossing the Darien Gap is a huge risk.

[SOUND EFFECTS OF JUNGLE AMBIENCE, RAIN, A RIVER]

This massive, roadless jungle connects Panama and Colombia. Here, migrants wade through rivers, walk for days through downpours, sleep on the jungle floor. Many end up penniless if they survive the journey at all.

Cecilia Muñoz: I mean, imagine being desperate enough that that is the better option for you and your children than to stay where you are. It is a ferociously dangerous thing people are doing. And they're doing it on the small hope that there will be something for them here.

Until recently, the Darien Gap was considered too treacherous to cross. Back in 2011, the Panamanian government registered fewer than 300 people who had made the trip. Many Venezuelans used to fly into Mexico, skipping the Darien Gap altogether. But when Mexico changed its visa requirements in 2022, a move intended to stem this flow of migrants, Venezuelans began coming this way instead. Last year half a million people, most of them Venezuelan, made the trip through the Darien Gap.Julio says to get his kids through the journey he made it out to be like it was an adventure:

Julio: You know mountains, the river, sleeping in tents! So they weren’t scared.

But for him, trekking through this dangerous jungle was frightening.

Julio: I was afraid to, to die. Because I have 46 years, I am still young, but I am not a kid. You got me? So I said well if I, if I die here, how they gonna make it after? So I have to do this, I have to do it. I, I can’t, I can’t quit. I can’t, I have to keep going. I have to move forward, for them.

He made it: across the Darien Gap, then through Central America and Mexico. And here is where the story gets bumped up to the front pages of American newspapers. Like tens of thousands of other Venezuelan migrants, Julio and his family are applying for asylum — a legal designation that would allow them to stay in the U.S. and eventually apply to be citizens.

Julio: So, I am in the middle of a process requesting for, for asylum.

But Julio says that many of his official documents were lost when he and his family were trying to cross a river in the Darien Gap. You’ll notice I’m using that phrase a lot — “Julio says” — because when it comes to these stories of migrants far from home, it’s often difficult to verify the details. And that’s often a problem for these migrants, because, in order to get asylum, they need to prove that their stories are true.

[MUSIC FADES]

Peter Bergen: Can I ask you a sort of basic question? So when somebody claims asylum, what are the legitimate bases for asylum, as opposed to you know, what would get you sent back if your claim was found to be unfounded?

Cecilia Muñoz: You need a well-founded fear of persecution. So the classic model for people who are, like, old enough to remember the Soviet Union was somebody who was defecting, um, who could find their way to the United States and said my life would be in danger back in my home country.

Fewer than half of the applicants for asylum in the U.S. receive it. It’s a system that was created after World War II when around 400,000 displaced people were resettled in the U.S. Many of them were Holocaust survivors.

ARCHIVAL 1940s Newsreel: Arriving in the USA is the first batch of displaced persons admitted under the annual quota fixed by President Truman. Friends and relatives are at the quayside to greet the survivors of the Hitler terror.

In 1951, the UN created its definition of a “refugee” — a person who can’t return to their country “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” The U.S. eventually enshrined this definition into its laws during the Cold War, and it’s what guides judges as they determine whether a migrant like Julio will qualify for asylum or not. Simply fleeing a screwed-up country that’s mired in extreme poverty isn’t enough to get asylum.

Cecilia Muñoz: Our asylum law was really built on a kind of Cold War model. Through court cases and changes in asylum standards over the years, the aperture has broadened. And the things people are fleeing go now beyond communist regimes, which is in some ways what our asylum system was kind of intended for. And are being tested around things like a gang and drug violence, domestic violence.

Peter Bergen: So in countries like El Salvador, where there's a lot of gang violence and you have a well-founded fear that your family could be subject to it…

Cecilia Muñoz: So ultimately that gets adjudicated. And, you can't say definitively whether such a case would, would make it through, but some do.

Peter Bergen: One thing that's always striking to me is, I think the number is, there are only 650 asylum judges or, I mean it's a tiny number. We're a country of 350 million odd people.

Cecilia Muñoz: We have such a backlogged asylum system that people wait five to ten years to have their hearing. And honestly, the smuggling networks operating in places like Venezuela know this. What they market to people is, give us the money, we'll take you across. And if you just get in, look for the Border Patrol and tell them you want asylum. ‘Cause then you've got years before anything happens. And that's true.

What Muñoz just said gets at one of the most confusing aspects of this issue: how people are coming in, and whether that makes them “legal” or “illegal” immigrants. It’s an idea that comes up everywhere from presidential campaign speeches….

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We sent home nearly 1 million illegals during my first term, and we will far surpass that number because we have no choice…

To city council meetings in Chicago…

ARCHIVAL Meeting Attendee: I cannot call them migrants ‘cause see, migrants are people who come through the borders legally. The right way.

“Illegals” is a term that Andre Vasquez, the Chicago city councilmember, hears often.

Andre Vasquez: It brings a level of sorrow to hear folks say like, well, who are these people?

And he takes issue with the label “illegal.”

Andre Vasquez: Calling them illegals or illegal aliens. Seeking asylum is a legal process. Folks are here legally. That is absolutely the truth.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Vasquez is right: asylum is a legal process. Some of the people claiming asylum are making an appointment for an interview with U.S. border officials while they’re still in Mexico, where they may wait weeks or months. When the day of their appointment arrives, they come to a U.S. port of entry and are interviewed to see if they have a “credible fear” of persecution in their country of origin.

But not everyone who claims asylum is coming that way. Some people enter into the U.S. illegally, but are still able to enter into the legal asylum process once they’re on U.S. soil. So they may have come here illegally, but they remain here legally.

But Muñoz says it isn’t the right to claim asylum that’s causing this crisis at the border, it’s the fact that the number of people applying for asylum has risen astronomically while the process to consider those requests has remained more or less the same.

Cecilia Muñoz: The asylum system is badly, badly overloaded. The entire system of laws in the United States focused on our border, including our asylum laws, including really the whole policy regime, including also our physical infrastructure, like the buildings that we have at, you know, in border facilities, the personnel and all of their training. All of that was designed for the border we had 30, 40 years ago, where our biggest challenge was individuals coming from Mexico seeking to evade our authorities and work. Our whole infrastructure, legal, physical, personnel, is built for that. And that is not the border that we have now.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

We began this journey in Venezuela because tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants are coming to the U.S. border every month. So how can the U.S. government try to stem the flow of migrants at the source so they don’t go on this dangerous journey at all? One American strategy over the past five years has been to try to weaken and ultimately change the political leadership of Venezuela by sapping Maduro’s government of oil revenues.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: A significant escalation: the Trump administration imposing a total economic embargo against the government of Venezuela, intensifying the campaign to remove Nicolas Maduro from office.

These sanctions have succeeded in weakening the Maduro government, but they haven’t been enough to topple it. The Biden administration has also tried to use oil sanctions on Venezuela as leverage to compel Maduro’s government to allow for fair elections.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner: The U.S. has been a key actor in the ongoing political negotiations between the Venezuelan opposition and the Venezuelan government because they actually have something to offer, which is lifting these sanctions that are making the Maduro government have less money and less legitimacy in the international markets.

According to the Washington Office on Latin America, U.S. sanctions may have inadvertently spurred more migration because they’ve intensified the humanitarian crisis that’s driving millions to leave Venezuela. They’ve also made it hard for the international community to do business in Venezuela. That includes charities that have struggled to get food and medicine to people in need. And the U.S. sanctions have also provided the Maduro government with a pretty convenient scapegoat.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner: What you give the Maduro government is an excuse to blame someone else for the problems for which they only are responsible for.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Even though this crisis is bad for Venezuelans, it’s actually benefiting Maduro’s government in a bunch of ways. First, migrants who leave send money back to their families, and that’s created the illusion of normalcy in certain pockets of the country, where people have enough cash to afford the ever-rising cost of living. Second, migration means that many of the people who oppose Maduro have simply left the country. And finally, all those hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants showing up at the U.S. border? They’re a valuable bargaining chip for Maduro’s government as it tries to get the U.S. to lift its sanctions.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

For a U.S. audience, this crisis may seem new, it may seem sudden. But for Venezuelans, it’s the culmination of many factors over decades and across an entire region. Of smugglers promoting a new route through the dangerous Darien Gap. Of the COVID pandemic wreaking havoc on a continent. Of the daily chaos of living in a failed state, where there are gas shortages despite having the world’s biggest oil reserves.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner: Venezuela has been in crisis for a long time. It's not always made headlines. When it's a protracted, constant crisis, it's not as interesting and people just are not concerned about it or don't learn about it as much.

With limited ability to affect the outward flow of migrants from Venezuela, there are of course calls to stop these migrants from coming into the U.S., and from entering an asylum process that often allows them to stay for years while their cases are considered.

The Trump administration imposed two policies that made the asylum-seeking process much more difficult. One policy, commonly known as “Remain in Mexico,” required some asylum seekers to stay on the Mexican side of the border while their claims were considered by U.S. courts. But some groups, like unaccompanied kids, were exempt from this, and it only applied to around 70,000 people over two and a half years.

Trump also applied a health code during the COVID pandemic called Title 42, which Biden also continued until May of 2023, to keep most migrants from being able to claim asylum in the U.S. when they crossed the border illegally. That measure resulted in 2.8 million migrant expulsions from the U.S., although some individuals were expelled multiple times. And it’s hard to know how exactly this affected net migration to the U.S., because there’s also evidence that getting expelled didn’t necessarily deter people from trying to get back in. In fact, according to data collected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, it may have actually incentivized migrants to evade authorities altogether.

Cecilia Muñoz: If we learned anything in the Trump years, it should be that there's not a lot that we can do in terms of policy in the United States that deters people from coming. The Trump administration, they did every harsh thing they could think of and the problem did not abate. And so what we should learn from that as a policy matter is that we can't tough our way out of this problem.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

After Julio and his family crossed the southern border, they spent several nights in a tent, before border officials took them to a Super Lodge Motel in El Paso, Texas. Now they were free to go anywhere in the U.S. as their asylum case wound its way through the legal process. Julio first considered heading to New York City.

Julio: But I met a guy who lived here for more than 10 years and he told me, you know what? New York City is not a good place to raise a family.

Then he thought about Washington D.C., but was told that it’s too expensive.

Julio: And my third option was Chicago. So here I am.

Coming up next week: what happens after Julio and his family land in Chicago…

Alexandra Salomon: Do you have a winter coat?

Julio: No, we don't have, I don't have winter coat. It is my understanding that this is just the beginning. That it, it is gonna get worse. Is that right?

… as city officials scramble to deal with all the newcomers…

Andre Vasquez: We started seeing people sleeping at the police stations. Babies — diapers on and no shirt — walking barefoot on a police station floor at the same time somebody's being brought in for questioning. Just horribly soul-breaking things you would not have imagined you'd see in the third-largest city in the country.

… and who’s really to blame for the policies that led to this crisis?

Cecilia Muñoz: If we had a rational Congress and a real policy debate, we could figure this out.

And what will happen next as Chicago’s debate over the fate of migrants reaches a fever pitch?

ARCHIVAL Chicago Alderwoman: I saw nothing in the presentation about how much money we’re spending. That slide, I guess, got lost. Y'all wasting our time. I got stuff in my community I need to do.

That’s next week on In the Room.

###

If you’d like to learn some more about some of the issues discussed in this episode, we recommend Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer, and we also recommend Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration by Julie Hirschfield Davis and Michael D. Shear.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.

This episode was produced by Laura Tillman and Alexandra Salomon, with help from Luke Cregan.

The episode was sound designed by Steven Jackson.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Erik German, Holly DeMuth, Nathan Ray, Sandy Melara, and JP Swenson.

Our theme music is by Joel Picard.