Dexter Filkins on the Front Lines of the Immigration Crisis

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Now, in the United States, the Supreme Court has revived a key Biden immigration policy, handing the president a major victory. The ruling allows the administration to prioritize which undocumented immigrants to deport. Journalists, Dexter Filkins, has much more about America’s perennial immigration crisis in his recent article, “Biden’s Dilemma at the Border.” And he’s joining Walter Isaacson to discuss what he’s witnessing.

(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)

WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And, Dexter Filkins, welcome to the show.

DEXTER FILKINS, THE NEW YORKER STAFF WRITER: Thank you. Thank you.

ISAACSON: You’ve covered Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan. And now, for “The New Yorker,” you’ve written this very detailed, very nuanced piece about the southern border of the United States with Mexico. What drew you there?

FILKINS: Well, I was just — I was struck by the chaos, really, and also, the level of disagreements in the country about what was actually happening. So, you know, if you read “The New York Times” in the morning, that gives you one picture and then — but then, if you go to Tucker Carlson, you know, formally of Fox, he was on every night with a completely different picture. And I was sort of struck by that. And I thought — so, I went into that story with a pretty simple question, which was just, how many people are getting in and how many people are getting sent back out?

ISAACSON: But you also came up with an answer that it has truly transformed towns and places along this 2,000-mile border, it was very rich and detail in that. Were you surprised? Because I’m down here in Louisiana, we kind of know, because most people in this country, were you surprised that they don’t know how transforming this is?

FILKINS: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it’s begun to touch the cities in the northeast. But, gosh, if you live in Texas, down on the border, it is transformative. I mean, that’s the word. And so, you have towns like Del Rio where literally tens of thousands of people have moved through there in the past two years. Like I think in Del Rio, it’s a city of about 40,000 people, they have about 80,000 people who have gone through their towns. So, if you could just imagine your own neighborhoods, legions of people coming through on — and they don’t stay, typically, they — you know, they move on out, but it’s just this kind of this constant stream of people.

ISAACSON: Speaking of Del Rio, you talk to the man, now the former mayor there, and it was just a very surprising conversation. He gets phone calls. Tell us about — you know, give us a narrative, because your piece is very much a narrative piece.

FILKINS: Well — so, the mayor — the former mayor of Del Rio is a guy named Bruno Lozano. He’s a Democrat. He’s gay. He’s a flight attendant for Delta actually. It’s — I mean, being the mayor there is supposed to be a part-time job. And he said, this is just a couple years ago, 2021, he got a phone call from the border patrol, and they said, hello, we think in the next — you know, by Friday, in the next four or five days, you’re going to have about 10,000 people moving into your city. And, you know, he said, I just fell out of my chair. He said, hold on a minute, 10,000 people? And it turned out it was 16,000 people moved into Del Rio in the course of about a week. And so, they try to — the border patrol, which only had four or five agents there, and that — you know, you’d got to try to picture that. These people are just moving across the border. There was some rumor — and that’s how these things happen, there was a rumor that went around that you’re going to be let in. And so, people just came. 16,000 people, most of them from Haiti, who had been living in South America for a number of years, but they camped under a bridge.

And so, suddenly, overnight, there’s a city of 16,000 people under a bridge. They were babies being born. They had to find ways to feed them. And so, the mayor just basically had a breakdown. You know, he said, what am I to do as the mayor? This city is — my city is now ungovernable.

ISAACSON: I was in El Paso and Brownsville in the past month or so, and it was somewhat stunning to just see the border people. And then, you got to feel that the politics, as you just said, is changing. It was almost like the air is changing in a political sense. What did you see about the changing politics?

FILKINS: Well, I — the — I spent a couple of days with one of the congressmen from the area, named Tony Gonzales. He’s actually a moderate Republican. And the district, which is he’s got a couple of hundred miles on the border. So, he deals with this problem all the time. It’s very real for him. But he’s actually a moderate Republican, and he does not support the more draconian measures that the Republican Party supports. But he is — in very much in the same way, he feels like, I — when I went around to him, for instance, we sat down with a couple of ranchers and, you know, there’s just big, sprawling ranches in South Texas and in West Texas. Thousands of acres. Migrants are moving through there. They’re cutting the fences, their livestock are getting freed, they’re trampling all over the place. They find backpacks, you know, with fentanyl in them. These people are angry at him. And they said, you know, what are you going to do? You know, what — we need results. And, you know, what can you say as a congressman, except, you know, we’re working on. But he could barely say that. You know, and he’s a Republican. And the — you know, the administration is Democratic. So, he can — you know, he can barely get in the front door. So, it’s basically paralyzed the local politicians there.

ISAACSON: But you got Congressman Gonzalez, moderate Republican, you say. It used to be, back in 2010, 2012, even leading to the 2013 bill that passed the Senate and failed the House, that there was hope of bipartisanship. Can Gonzalez find any bipartisan things that he can do or would he just be shunned by the Republican Party if he tried?

FILKINS: And I think that’s the tragedy here, is that you can sort of imagine a compromise, it’s not that difficult. Basically, the Republicans want better border security, you know, they want more walls, more border guards. And the Democratic Party wants kind of more legal pathways for people to come, kind of make it an orderly process. Some of the most interesting conversations I had were with people who said that what happened was — I mean, first the — that bill in 2013 that came very close to passing, it passed the Senate, died in the House, basically killed by the tea party, but the Republican Party was changing, essentially. And then, when Trump came in, instead of kind of, you know, how do we find the right language for this bill, it became something entirely different, which was, we can’t let any immigrants in. This isn’t just a problem, these are bad people. And it completely changed the complexion.

ISAACSON: Was that because of Trump’s rhetoric, which was really inflammatory, racist in a way, about Mexican Americans and rapists?

FILKINS: Yes. And I — you know, I had an interesting conversation. She’s actually not quoted in the piece but a very interesting woman, Linda Chavez, who worked for Reagan administration. And she told me that she often goes around the country and gives a speech in which she says, we need immigrants for the economy. She says, forget about the humanitarian argument, this is about self-intertest, we need them. And she says, I give that speech everywhere. And, you know, people, to the Chambers of Commerce, all over the country, people are applauding at the end of it. 2015, when Trump became a candidate, the reception that she got to that same speech just changed remarkably. You know, she said, I practically had to run out of the room in some of these places. Peoples views of immigrants, particularly among Republicans, began to change very drastically. And I — so, I think that’s contributed too.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s talk about Biden for a second. You called — your piece is titled “Biden’s Dilemma at the Border.” Why is that a dilemma? What is the dilemma?

FILKINS: I think there’s a dilemma for him in the party. And I think — I tried to describe this in the piece. During the campaign, Biden gave a number of speeches in which he said, what President Trump is doing on the border is inhumane. You know, he’s enacted these draconian programs and he’s giving America a bad around the world. And we’re going to take those programs, we’re going to tear them down. And they did. They went into office and they took down all of President Trump’s programs. Remain in Mexico, the transit ban, these things that were set up to try to control the enormous flow of people, the daily flow that’s coming in. And what’s happened, and I think that Biden was led to that point by the left-wing of his party, I need to say.

ISAACSON: And you say that he invited a lot of those progressives on immigration to be his policy team initially, right?

FILKINS: Yes.

ISAACSON: Have there been some change?

FILKINS: Yes. That’s what’s so interesting to track over the past couple years. So, basically, what happens is Biden comes in, you know, basically with the left-wing of his party, they take down all of Trump’s programs, and what happens? We get this incredible surge of people, so that over the past two years, depending on how you count, it’s a little difficult, about 4 million people have come across the border and into the United States. I mean, you know, that’s bigger than a lot of states. And this is not sustainable. It’s not sustainable economically, politically, anything. It’s too much. You know, there’s 70,000 migrants in New York City living in hotels. It’s costed a billion dollars already. And I think Biden came to that realization.

And so, what’s happened is that you’re watching, over just the last six months, the policies change. And what’s really remarkable to me — and I say this without irony, what’s happening, basically, is that the Biden administration is erecting policies which will look remarkably like President Trump’s. And so, they’re kind of —

ISAACSON: Really? What do you mean by that? I mean, is he going to build a wall?

FILKINS: Well, not — he hasn’t gone there yet. Although, you know, that’s the irony here is that there’s is so much wall on the border built by President Obama, built by President Bush. You know, and then, again, sort of Trump comes in and everything becomes like very, very polarized. But —

ISAACSON: You know, that’s interesting on the polarization around the wall too, because when I read your piece, one little thing that struck me is that there’s a lot of wall, and it actually work. It stops the people there, and yet, it seems so difficult for many Americans. Give me your take there.

FILKINS: It’s really true. The wall — there’s so much wall. And in fact, I went to a press conference of Congressman Gonzalez’s and he was talking about — we were right on the Rio Grande. And as I was leaving the press conference, I watched like six people come over the wall. They climbed right over it. I mean, it — you know, it was difficult to climb over the wall, but it slows them down, it kind of challenge them. It works. I think it — you know, there’s a lot of that border, hundreds of miles, they’re in the middle of nowhere and it — you know, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to put a wall there. But what’s remarkable is, again, like Obama built a lot of wall. George W. Bush built a lot of wall. There was a kind of consensus about it. You know, there was this kind of growing consensus that we can’t control the border anymore. And then, you know, we have the politics of today where all of that’s blown up, and there’s no consensus on any of it.

ISAACSON: You quote a border agent saying what I think a lot of Americans have all political stripes, Democrats and Republicans, feel, which is that the border is wide open. Now, you talk about 4 million people coming in, but that also seems wrong. Is it wide open?

FILKINS: It’s not wide open. That’s not — it’s not the way to put it. A lot of people are coming in. But what — it’s almost — it really is a kind of perfect — it’s a perfectly unsolvable problem. I mean, Congress could solve this. But as it is, it’s a kind of very jerry-rigged system that doesn’t work. But basically, of the 4 million people that I’d tried to count, who have come in in the past two years, about 2.5 million of them, most of them, have come in and basically, the way the wall is written, and has been written for decades, you can get your foot on American soil and you can ask for asylum. So, it’s not legal to cross the border, but if you’re in America and you say, I will be persecuted if I go back to Venezuela, I will be persecuted if you send me back to Tajikistan, people from Tajikistan have crossed the border. It is the legal obligation of the United States to not to send those people back. That’s the biggest loophole that exists in American immigration law.

ISAACSON: Wait, wait, wait. You’re calling it a loophole, but we’re talking about asylum.

FILKINS: Yes, I know. Yes.

ISAACSON: And asylum is something, especially after World War II, we said, OK, this defines us as America. We give asylum to the oppressed. How did that become what you just called a loophole?

FILKINS: And that’s the tragedy here, because I just called it a loophole. And in fact, it is the — we are haven of last resort for people around the globe. And, you know, that’s — we’re all proud of that. I mean, that’s a great American thing. We as Americans should be proud of that. But it’s become essentially — it’s basically out of control, I think is the — I think both sides would agree because the system is —

ISAACSON: Well, give me an example of it being out of control. There are a couple in your piece, even — there’s one person, let me say, who, because of sexual orientation, has trouble getting a job and problems with the family. And so, once asylum in the U.S. I could feel both sides of that one. Explain how we think that through.

FILKINS: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I — so, you come across the border, you get a very brief interview, just like a minute and a half, to establish, does this person have a credible fear of persecution if he or she returns home? And if you make it over that bar, that’s pretty low bar, you’re in. You are in America for at least four or five years, and possibly a decade. You can string your case out. That’s a decade to work, you can send money home, you know, with luck you’ll get in. And so, that is the problem, is that I think there’s a growing sense that the asylum system, as well-intentioned does it is, as noble a system as it is, is being gained. It leads to —

ISAACSON: So, how do you fix it?

FILKINS: Well, I think the way to fix it is to like hire a lot more immigration judges, and put them down on the border. So that now, when you come in, you have to wait four or five years to get your case figured out. And so, the whole thing kind of falls apart. You know, where are you? Like, this person, we let across the border, is he in Denver, as he and Detroit, is he in New York? Like nobody knows. And so, what you need to do is like – – and everybody — anyone would tell you this, have a bunch of judges on the border who can go through these cases, if not immediately, then very quickly, basically, and determine who is telling the truth and who is not. And that would be very expensive, that’s the problem. It comes back to Congress.

ISAACSON: You say in your piece, much of the migration of the United States in recent years has been driven by profound developments in Central and South America where economic turmoil, drug related murders, natural disasters have brought many states to the brink of collapse. To what extent is it out of the Biden administration’s control? And what could be done about that?

FILKINS: Well, that’s like — it’s a super good question. It’s — and this is what you see when you go to the border. There are so many people coming every day. Thousands of people every day. They are so desperate. I mean, they’re genuinely desperate. They are fleeing countries, whether it’s Venezuela, whether it’s Cuba, whether it’s Haiti, whether it’s Nicaragua, they’re in a state of collapse. There are no jobs, they’re not safe, they can’t send their children to school. They’re all looking for better lives, you know. So, and really, the way to look at it is sort of, yes, they’re seeking asylum, but what they really — what most of them really are better lives. But the problem is that the conditions are generating this, they’re generating the migration. And so, what do you do? How do you fix Venezuela? It’s been in a state of collapse for years. It’s already produced 7 million refugees, they’re all over South America. Nicaragua, the same. Haiti, the same. Cuba, the same. What can we do? And so, the Biden administration is trying. I mean, they’re trying to sort of set up, you know, they’re trying to generate business investment and they’re trying to fix the economies and the political systems of South and Central America. But, I mean, that’s not a short-term thing. I mean, that’s not a quick fix. Like that’s going to take years. I mean, you know, we’ve tried that in other parts of the world and like it’s hard, you know. And — but that’s the thing, which is that they’re coming every day and they’re fleeing those collapsing states.

ISAACSON: Dexter Filkins, thank you so much for joining us.

FILKINS: Thank you. Thank you so much.

(END VIDEO TAPE)