S1E99 - No More Deaths on The "Disappeared" Report & Border Militarization Pt. II

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Inmn is joined again by Sophie and Parker from No More Deaths for part two of their talk about the militarization of the US-Mexico border, search and rescue, 911 discrimination, and medical collaboration with Border Patrol.

Guest Info

The Disappeared report can be found at www.thedisappearedreport.org. No More Deaths can be found at nomoredeaths.org, on Instagram @nomoredeaths_nomasmuertes, or on Twitter @nomoredeaths.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: No More Deaths on the “Disappeared” Report & Border Militarization Pt. II

**Inmn ** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host Inmn and today we have part two of an interview with two folks from the abuse doc working group in No More Deaths or No Más Muertes. And we're just going to pick up right in the middle of where we left off and talk a lot about search and rescue and the newest report from No More Deaths, "Separate & Deadly," which is mostly about 911 dispatch discrimination and medical discrimination and collaboration with Border Patrol. If you haven't listened to part one, probably not entirely necessary but it lays a lot of important groundwork and context for what we're going to be talking about today. So go back and give part one a listen. But before we get to that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here is a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. [Singing the words like a melody]

**Inmn ** 02:14 Yeah, so it's kind of wild to me that like, you know, Border Patrol, has these like non-responses? And it's like, it seems like those nonresponses are on purpose, but they have every piece of technology at their disposal and like every system and like...they just have everything. And yet they purposefully don't help find people.

**Sophie ** 02:50 Yeah, that was something we really chronicled in part three looking at their budget and just the way in which Border Patrol is absolutely a militarized enforcement agency first and foremost and 99% of their budget and personnel are dedicated to an enforcement mission, you know, that they're kind of the search and rescue...border patrol search and rescue--so-called--wing of Border Patrol is miniscule compared in terms of staffing, and funding and so on and it's really, you know, there to propagandize and, you know, they do take part in some of this, of course, but really looking at the way in which they are geared towards enforcement first and foremost. And we have, you know, cases of agents being asked to search for someone in south Texas and a higher up saying, "I'm not going to pull agents off of the checkpoint to go search for a person in distress," you know, so seeing those priorities play out in real time on a given case. So yeah, they have all this, you know, powerful equipment and resources, but those are really dedicated to carrying out their enforcement mission, which then compromises you know, their status as a first responder.

**Inmn ** 04:18 Yeah. And it's like they have that like--god, what is it called--the BORSTAR helicopter that they pull out for photo shoots or something?

**Parker ** 04:27 Yeah, there's a lot of emphasis on, you know, their high-tech capabilities of rescue. And one thing that I can't remember if Sophie mentioned is what we found in the report, you know, when we were looking at these diminished responses and how brief some of their efforts are, is they essentially won't do a search. You know, really in any case, they'll do rescues that are pinpointed where they have exact coordinates. But a lot of the time, what their response will look like is going to the coordinates and if the person isn't right there they call off the search. So what we think of is like a search where like you have a whole, you know, maybe team of people combing an area, you're doing some investigation from like the information that you do have to try and, you know, guess where someone might be, and putting in like resources to look for someone where you don't have their exact location but you have some information to go on. We're not seeing those types of responses at all. So yeah, then what you see instead is these PR events where they're like, "Look, we could rescue someone off the side of a cliff," you know, but that's not translating to actual meaningful responses for the, you know, the situations that they're actually being confronted with. And we definitely have a lot of cases of, you know, Border Patrol saying, you know, "Our helicopters busy right now." So helicopters are used for enforcement. You know, in the "Chase & Scatter" report, we really looked at that, at Border Patrol flying helicopters very low over people who are migrating to scatter them, intimidate them, kick up a lot of dust. It's very intimidating and frightening for people to have a helicopter fly really low over them. And then we're seeing these situations where they won't respond. They won't pull their helicopter from an enforcement mission to go search for somebody who's lost.

**Sophie ** 06:02 And then this like, really perverse scenario in which someone who's been chased and become lost because of the helicopter scattering them then is supposed to look to the same helicopter that put them in harm's way to come and rescue them. I mean, it's incredible, the notion that Border Patrol could function to respond to the search and rescue crisis in the borderlands.

**Inmn ** 06:26 Yeah, and it's like, to put it in weird contrast, we did an episode on search and rescue specifically in a National Park, you know, from this person who does like search and rescue there. And they're like--maybe I'm remembering this wrong and someone's gonna be upset about that--but they're like, "Yeah, we get a call. And then like, within an hour, we're out and looking for people and like, usually find them very quickly." You know? And it's like this.... It's this other national agency with so fewer resources at their disposal. And they're like.... Yeah, it's like search and rescue isn't easy, but they're like, yeah, we find people pretty quickly because we're professionals.

**Sophie ** 07:25 Right. We did some interviews with Pima County Search and Rescue, which we'll talk about more, but talking with them, you know, they go out to deploy for hikers loss in the Catalinas, you know, citizens or tourists. And when they were asked, you know, what is your success rate? They're like, "Oh, you mean in like finding someone before they've died? Like, preventing loss of life?" And we're like, "No, in finding them at all." You know? And it was a confusing question, right?