(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "The Journal," I'm Steve Kendall.

We've seen pictures, we've seen video, we've heard stories about the situation at our southern border.

Well, now we're gonna get a firsthand account.

We're joined by Jan McLaughlin and Jeff Schooley, who are here to talk to us about their recent trip down to the U.S.-Mexican border.

And Jan and Jeff, thank you so much for being here.

Jeff, talk about the beginning of this, why you were down there, the story behind why you went down there, and then we can talk about what's happened while you were down there, what you saw and what you heard.

- Sure, and thanks for having us.

Logistically, I was down there because I've got a very close friend, Jake Glossinger, who's also a Presbyterian pastor, and he told me that he and members of his church were headed to the border, because they had discovered an opportunity through this organization, Practice Mercy Foundation.

It's a faith-based organization that organizes border trips as well as support for refugees on both sides of the border.

Well, that sounded amazing, and so I asked if I could smuggle my way into his luggage, and he agreed to that, and my church was thrilled to send me down to the border, especially if I brought two members of the congregation with me, which I did, Jan and our friend, Olio, who's a PhD student at Bowling Green State University.

Well, that's the logistics.

The bigger reason why, though, is I don't, I will hazard an analogy to say that the border, the southern border might be the greatest moral challenge facing this country and facing the church at this moment.

I don't wanna, like I said, hazard an analogy, but it feels like Montgomery in the 1950s, where a great civil rights issue was taking place, and so personally, that was sort of the motivation to get down there.

Also, all we're getting are the politicized narratives, which never really square with reality.

I wanted to go down and do my best to see what reality was, and I was thrilled to be able to bring a journalist along as well.

- Because as you said, what we see, what we hear is the sum total of what our understanding of it is, and sometimes that may be accurate, sometimes it may be filtered in some way, or we only see a little piece of it, and there's a broader, as you said, a much broader context here.

So, Jan, talk about, when he approached you with this idea, what was your first reaction?

As a journalist, of course, you wanna be on a story, there's no doubt about that.

- Right, well, my first reaction was, who am I to tell this story?

I mean, journalists from national, international media have been telling this story.

What can I get that they haven't got?

But I decided, and plus, you know, I'm used to covering Bowling Green and Wood County, but I decided to step outside my comfort zone, and the story just told itself.

Seeing the people and the conditions, and just, no, I immediately knew that this was something that wasn't being presented in a real way to most of the public in the United States.

- Yeah, well, because it becomes like a numbers game, not a faces game, I guess, and that's, and as we know, if you can put a face to an issue, that makes it much more impactful.

So, when you got down there, and either one of you can jump in here, was there anything, when you first got there, you went, oh, didn't expect this, or this is exactly what I thought it would be, or, I mean, what were some of the things that surprised you when you first got there, and obviously, as you're there longer, I'm sure you saw more and more things you were probably taken aback by, or, gee, didn't know this was going on like this.

- Yeah, oh gosh, that's a good question.

So, we made three separate border crossings at three, like, sister cities, and of course, what I've discovered along the Rio Grande, and I think across all of the U.S.-Mexico border, is cities have grown up side by side.

- Sure.

- Often in very healthy and mutually supportive ways, so we did three major crossings.

The first one was Progreso, Texas, Nuevo Progreso, and Mexico, and one of the things that surprised us, I think, the most, was that you would expect would-be refugees to be from, what, Central American countries, maybe from Mexico, maybe, possibly, probably from South America.

The vast majority of the refugees, those asylum-seekers at Nuevo Progreso, were from the "Stan" countries, your Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, et cetera, former Soviet bloc.

And we were just told by our guides there that, yeah, through whatever sort of weird social filtering, folks find folks who are like them, they hear word, maybe they're down in Matamoros, but they hear that there are other, you know, folks who speak language or share culture, they'll make the trip up, and that's a couple-hour trip, to a different port of entry, and so there's a sort of filtering and sifting out that takes place that way.

So that was a major surprise, and also as a reminder that immigration is a global issue right now.

I mean, America should not lose our minds that this is only happening to us.

- It's going on in countries all over the world, people moving all that, which has been that way forever.

We just now are, we see more of it because of the ability to deliver imagery, yeah.

- In that city, I was struck by, people were living, the asylum seekers were living on the bridge, on the sidewalk, on the bridge, on a portion of the sidewalk, because they had to leave-- - Space for people to use.

- Right, right.

So, I mean, you just have to imagine the accommodations were nothing.

- [Jeff] Yeah, it was a tent city like you might find in many major cities or Los Angeles, especially, but it was all in one straight line on half of a wide sidewalk.

- Yeah, and I know that I mentioned numbers, but what are we talking?

How many people are we in that situation roughly?

Hundreds, thousands?

- No.

- Okay, dozens?

- There were larger, there used to be larger camps down there.

- Yeah, okay, all right.

- And then the Mexican government at the request of the U.S. government got rid of those, and in some cases, just bulldozed them, made sure the people were given warning to get out, their things were still there, and they just bulldozed the camps because they didn't look good for either side.

- And this is a good point to note that there's nearly 2,000 miles of U.S.-Mexico border spread over four states and 44 U.S. counties, but there are only roughly 20 mid-20s official ports of entry.

And this is part of our immigration policy as a country.

This is an intentional design.

- [Steve] Yeah, to focus, yeah.

- So we are creating 20 or so bottlenecks all along that border, and so what you would expect to happen happens.

- [Steve] Everybody shows up at those 20 points.

- And to be clear, when we say everybody's showing up to these official ports of entry, these are the law-abiding refugee seekers.

They're the ones doing the process the way we've determined the process should be done, and I'm sure we'll get into more of what that process is, but yeah, so you get these different sort of bottlenecks, and then it does create crises on the Mexican side.

- [Steve] Because it backs up over there, yeah.

- Exactly.

- Well, we come back, yeah, we can talk about that, and also, too, those ports of entries are used every day by people crossing back and forth both into Mexico and into the U.S. - Sure, very daily.

- Ourselves included.

- Doing daily business.

I mean, yeah, that's part of life down there, too, so yeah, we can talk about that.

Back in just a moment, we're talking about the southern border with Jan McLaughlin and Jeff Schooley here on "The Journal."

Thanks for staying with us on "The Journal."

Our guests are Jan McLaughlin from the BG Independent News, and the Reverend Dr. Jeff Schooley from the First Presbyterian Church here in Bowling Green.

When we left that last segment, we were talking about the points of entry, and I know that early in the segment, Jan, you talked about there are various populations and camps all along these 20 points of entry, so talk a little about that and the way people basically migrate to those locations and what that's like.

- Okay, our second crossing was in Metamoros, and we found a camp there where people from Venezuela had gathered.

They hadn't traveled together, but by word of mouth, they found out where people from their home country are, and the last one was in Reynosa.

We found a camp of people from Honduras, and these people had made a community amongst themselves in conditions that none of us can even imagine living in.

They live under tarps.

They're very resourceful.

In one camp, they made an oven from mud and made food to feed everyone.

They're at risk of any bad weather that comes through the cleanliness.

I was impressed, whether it's from buckets of water or what they shower and they wash their clothes.

In each camp, there were long clotheslines full of clothes drying.

They're trying to make the most of it, but they've traveled, sometimes for months, on foot, to get to these places, the ports of entry, and find out that they need to stay in these camps for months, several months at the least, and under horrible conditions, and across, in many places across the river, the Rio Grande, there's razor wire, and these people are there to cross legally.

- Sure, yeah, there are asylum seekers there.

They're refugees, they're not just people trying to sneak across the border.

That's not the right term, but yeah.

- Yes, yes.

- [Steve] Yeah, they're not trying to, yeah.

- Out of desperation, some people had obviously tried to cross there, and the wire is just full of clothing from people, which to me was a very sobering look at things.

- I really wanna highlight what Jan said about making community.

I mean, we have folks who, though they may be from the same country, weren't necessarily best friends.

These are strangers who are finding one another.

They share a country of origin in many instances, our culture and others, but these are strangers, and they are really living in community together.

I mean, and you see just like normal, very normal human things.

Like one of my favorites was watching all the little kids play together, and you'd get like a group of two or three moms kind of watching the whole brood, and then while other parents get a little rest from their kids, and I'm like, boy, that's playing out at every playground in Bowling Green right now.

- [Steve] Exactly, that's just, yeah, that's what we see every day here.

- Exactly, and I really wanna emphasize that because if these refugees, and I hope they will, as refugees, people who don't have another place to go back to because of violence or persecution, these refugees find their ways to our communities.

These are top-notch community makers.

These are the neighbors you wanna have.

They're already demonstrating an ability to work well with strangers, to share, to collaborate.

These are powerful things.

I mean, I dare say some of us sitting at home right now might even think to ourselves, and I know which neighbor I want to move out of my, right, you know?

- Yeah, and these are under incredibly, horror as you describe, incredibly challenging conditions, and yet they're still able to develop that sense of community.

- And this is a journey of last resort for these people.

They go through, I mean, they leave because of horrible crime and no jobs, and we met individuals, neither of us can speak Spanish, but there were people with us who could, and we met people who really touched us with their stories.

Melvin from Honduras used to work at an American Fruit of the Loom office.

- [Steve] Okay, yeah, gotcha.

- And jobs were cut, he lost his.

He has a wife and four children at home, which he carries the photo of them with him, and you could tell he was heartbroken to be away from his family, but he had no idea what else he could do to survive, to get his family someplace safe.

- To move forward in some way that would, yeah, that would get them out of that situation if he could.

Yeah, when you look at that, and obviously you're talking about these different groups, and I think you made a good point, Jeff, these people aren't all from the same town.

They're from, it'd be like us saying, well, somebody from Massachusetts shows up, and California, they're both from the United States, but two dramatically different locations and sort of thing, so it's amazing, though, that they can then develop that community when they probably lived hundreds of miles, if not thousands of miles away from each other, and yet still they share enough to do that.

With regard to, you mentioned, I think, Jan, the fact that the Mexican government, at the behest of the U.S. government, has done certain things to mitigate the look of all of this.

Was there like a high military presence or police presence on both sides of the border?

Because, obviously, these are the legal points of entry.

These are people who are applying.

They're not simply trying to, as you described, jump through the razor wire, good luck with that, and wade through the Rio Grande.

But there was obviously a high military or government presence there, obviously.

- Well, yeah, I mean, obviously, crossing the border, it's worth noting that a lot of the border is secured by the Customs and Border Patrol, which is a branch of our security.

And it falls under the Department of Homeland Security.

So this is not the State Department.

This is not development or diplomacy.

This is military and security.

- Yeah, this is law enforcement.

- Exactly.

And so I think maybe the most, probably the best example we had of that was in Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas.

We could see the Rio Grande.

We could see the American side from the camp we were at.

And all of a sudden, the Hondurans who were in that camp began to sort of just gently move us away because they had seen a known cartel member walking near the camp.

And by the way, I wanna go back to neighborliness.

I'm a pastor.

Being a good neighbor is a big deal.

So I come from the tradition of Fred Rogers.

- [Steve] Okay, okay.

- And so these immigrants, or would-be asylum seekers in America, put themselves, their bodies, they closed the gate to the camp.

They put their bodies between us, the gringos, and the cartel.

- And the real deal, yeah.

- Meanwhile, on the other side, we spotted a Customs and Border Patrol agent in the full ghillie suit, you know?

And he had been tracking that cartel member.

And so, is this like a daily occurrence?

No, I didn't get the sense it was daily, but this is sort of the specter under which these refugees live.

And again, remember, all they're doing at this moment is waiting to get an appointment through the CBP1 app, the Customs, Border, and Patrol 1 app.

That is your legal point of entry.

- Yeah, you start at the process, yeah.

- So they're trying to live quiet lives.

They hope their number gets pulled sooner rather than later.

And both the cartel and American military presence is kind of the cloud under which they're doing this.

- Yeah, because it's a delicate balance down there.

And obviously, as you said, you've got people watching cartel members, which right away raises a lot of issues for people.

Did you experience anything or see anything where there was, because obviously, here we're talking people trying to cross illegally.

And Jan, you mentioned you could tell, obviously, people had tried to cross the Rio Grande, get into the U.S., not through the official port of entry.

Any instances where you saw either the Border Patrol or the Mexican authorities stop people, capture people, detain people?

No?

Okay.

- No, and a lot of that is because we were intentionally putting ourselves at official ports of entry.

It is a big border.

- Sure, and there's lots of open range.

- Exactly.

We know that folks cross illegally.

I suspect the vast majority who cross illegally do so either out of ignorance, they don't understand the official ports of entry, because this is a new development in American policy, or they do it out of desperation, that they have served six months in a refugee camp, and now they're just ready to hazard a chance.

- Yeah, it's like, get out of a prisoner of war camp, I gotta try it, yeah.

When we come back, there's obviously a lot more to talk about, and we'll cover some of the other pieces of this as well.

Back in just a moment with Jan McLaughlin and Jeff Schooley, we're talking about the U.S.-Mexican border and the situation down there.

Back in just a moment here on "The Journal."

You're with us here on "The Journal."

Our guests are Jan McLaughlin and Dr. Jeff Schooley, Reverend First Presbyterian Church, recently back from the southern border.

Jan, we've talked about a lot of stuff, and obviously there's a lot to talk about.

We could do more than 26 minutes and 46 seconds, which is the length of the show.

Was there something after you were down there, for the time you were down there, that you looked back and said, well, this is what I've come away with from this whole experience, what it was, that sort of thing, and what you feel about it now that maybe you didn't feel before you went down there?

- I think the most striking thing to me was that what we hear primarily from our politicians is that these people crossing are murderers, rapists, and drug dealers.

And that's not what we saw.

I mean, these people are good people trying to help their families, trying to join their families that are already here.

And we have made it almost impossible for many of them to reach that goal.

They have great hopes in our country that we almost felt guilty about.

Our country is letting them down.

We've made it almost, we've made it so difficult for them to get here.

And studies, countless studies, have shown that immigrants tend to keep their noses clean.

They aren't, major crimes are not committed by them nearly as often as U.S. citizens because they're so worried about being taken back.

- Yeah, getting caught in the net of whatever and being labeled something that they're not.

And obviously, and you mentioned the process, and it almost seems like, again, that we've made it difficult for people who we would like to have in the country get in, and yet other people, in some cases, who are bad actors, are able to circumvent the system by other processes.

So, Jeff, talk a little bit about the process, how, because I think a lot of people have any, it's like, you walk up to the board or you put your credit card in and we let you in and you get it, and on the other side, we hand you an ID and now you're, you can do whatever, yeah, you now can access everything that the U.S. offers people.

And that's, it's nothing like that at all.

- No, no.

And just one more time, we are talking about asylum seekers or would-be refugees.

We're not talking about worker visas, we're not talking about student visas.

So, the process is to get within proximity of the U.S.-Mexico border from whatever country you're coming from, download the CBP One app, which, by the way, already presumes a certain amount of technological resources.

- [Steve] Which most of these people probably don't have.

- Surprisingly, they do, but we're also still talking about how do you keep your phone charged, et cetera.

There are logistical challenges here.

You upload all your information and then you wait for your date.

And the average wait is somewhere between two and a half to eight months.

And the app does intentionally factor country of origin in.

So, if you were a Ukrainian at the southern border, you'd get an appointment tomorrow, but God forbid you're a Haitian.

So, there's some built-in prejudice there, but that's a long part of America's immigration policy.

You finally get your date.

It typically comes three weeks out.

So, you'll know, you still have three more weeks of waiting.

You then go through a Mexican side screening and they will then physically walk you to the center point of the international line, hand you into Customs and Border Patrol, and you will complete your screening process.

Customs and Border Patrol does not determine whether or not you are a refugee.

We have immigration courts and asylum hearings for that.

Presently, there's a two to two and a half year wait.

- To get before the courts.

- To get before the courts.

- To be adjudicated or processed and that for the, yeah.

- So, you've waited six months.

You're gonna have another two to two and a half years wait before you can really be heard, but you are released into America.

And most folks have family and like close family, aunts, uncles, parents, children, not like third cousins twice removed, that they wanna get to all throughout the United States, plenty of charities, especially Catholic charities are on the border to help with that.

And then you just wait for your date.

You're not allowed to get a work permit though, until six months in, which means that you're gonna probably feel like a real slug and a bum sitting on your sister or brother's couch for six months.

- Because you're not allowed to do anything legally, technically to hold a job in the sense that we normally would assume as citizens, legally you can't do that.

- Yeah, so it's a very challenging process.

And we're also still putting more guns at the borders than administrators, because of what we're really doing is processing.

I mean, I've been making the joke as a pastor, we need a small army of church secretaries along the border because they get things done.

- Everything, you get done.

- Exactly.

So yeah, so there are real policy decisions that we're making as Americans that are directly impacting these refugees lives.

- And since you mentioned that, and we've got a few minutes yet, but what we hear is, well, let's send the National Guard to the border.

Not that they're not good administrators in a lot of ways, but this isn't what they're going down there for really.

They're down there to provide more presence to basically deter people from thinking about coming across versus with the process.

And of course we've heard the stories too, that if we did staff down there correctly with a lot more people who could do process like this, it would alleviate a lot of the things you're describing or at least start to alleviate them.

- It's become such a political issue that that effort was tried, but blocked.

- [Steve] That's right.

- We're forgetting that these are human beings.

- [Steve] Sure.

- They're not a threat.

I mean, of course.

- I guess, you know, part of this too, we know that with every group, I mean, walk around any town, any village, any rural area, not everybody's a upstanding, perfect human being.

We know that.

But we focus on if they're out of 20 people that go through this process, if one of them makes a mistake and maybe a bad mistake, that then is reflected on all, well, see, there we go.

The other 19 must be just as bad.

And we know that's not the case, but for some reason we buy that into that.

- And the other 19 are actually working on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on a cold March night, filling potholes for our cars.

- A job that other people wouldn't do anyway.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah, we've got just a couple of minutes.

Is there anything that you want people to take away from this or understand or that we haven't talked about that we could touch base with?

- Yeah, I found a lot of resistance from folks, where I have found resistance from folks around security measures.

And I wanna be clear, I don't wanna speak for Jen, I don't think either of us are anti-security.

Sure, we're just pro-humanity here.

And so you often hear like, "well, they bring drugs in".

The reality is drugs enter through large cargo shipment containers through official ports of entry every single day.

40 pounds of fentanyl that somebody's carrying on their back is not the reality.

- [Steve] Is not the real crux of our problem.

- No.

- Yeah, it's sort of like it gets lost in the rounding the numbers up.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot, but the reality is 40 pounds versus 400 tons coming in somewhere.

- Exactly.

And it is worth noting just this year, Mexico became America's largest trading partner, displacing China.

I think that's great.

Again, countries right next to each other, we should be good neighbors.

But if we really wanna cut down, say, illegal fentanyl coming across the border, that's gonna be hidden up in truck wells and truck beds, et cetera.

We don't need to harass refugees from Honduras.

- Yeah, people aren't carrying it in their pockets.

At least, yeah.

And even if they are, that amount is gonna be so, not that any of it's good, but the reality is that's not where we're gonna solve that problem either.

- Correct.

- Yeah, good.

Well, I appreciate you both being here and it's great information.

It's information that we don't get at the level that you guys have been able to describe it and experience and then kind of inform the rest of us because watching it on TV, hearing people talk about it on the radio, reading it, looking at whatever social media, that doesn't give you the real understanding the way you guys have of what it looks like down there with regard to the refugees and the asylum seekers down there.

So we appreciate that very much.

Thank you again for being here.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for having us.

- You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at eight o'clock on WBGU-PBS.

We will see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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