What's up everyone? This is Lorenzo the Unicorn Riot.
If you don't know, we've been along the United States-Mexico border
for over two weeks collecting stories of the ongoing border crisis.
If you look over there, you can see the border wall.
It's that little rust-colored curve on the hill.
That's Mexico.
I came down to basically learn more about the ongoing border crisis
from people who have been on the ground
sort of doing humanitarian aid work
from what I've learned the last couple weeks
and what it's like to live along a really highly militarized border.
This is the border wall.
Right on the other side is Mexico.
There's like towers around it.
There's a border patrol watching us on the hill up there
and who are watching this wall to make sure nobody's trying to get across.
So there is like a 24-hour security on this.
But also it's, you know, it's a deterrent
and they're monitoring the border 24 hours a day.
Here we are.
From what we've been learning, this border wall exists
not to stop human migration,
but to force the people who are trying to come across
into the remote desert.
We are in Arizona right now at this small camp
called No More Deaths.
You can see Nomas Muertos is a humanitarian aid organization
that's been working along the United States-Mexico border
for over a decade.
They provide just water drops
and sort of really simple humanitarian aid
to migrants who may have gotten lost
or injured in the wilderness in the desert area here.
We're going to meet some volunteers
and just learn a little bit more about what's been going on.
Welcome to the No More Deaths camp.
So we have a flag up the flagpole
to try to indicate to people
who may be lost in the area
that what we have here is water.
We have sleeping quarters.
So there's places in here
for people to sleep.
Here we have the ropa tent,
which is for clothing.
But we have jackets.
We have shoes. We have pants.
We have clothing for women.
People can come in and take whatever they need.
Here we have the kitchen.
So this is where we prepare meals
and fight a constant battle against the raccoons
who come in every night and try to eat all our food.
This is where we clean up wash dishes.
So we've got solar panels here.
We're solar powered in camp.
Here we have the clinic dome,
which is where people stay
when they need a little bit more medical assessment
than other folks who can come on inside.
And here we have a member of our med team
who works with us as a doctor.
I'm just going through a lot of the supplies
that they have here at No More Depths.
They rely on the kindness of a lot of people
to donate supplies.
And some of the supplies are incredibly helpful,
but many of them go out of date very quickly.
So we're always trying to make sure
that we're doing the very best for these people.
Of course, as you can imagine,
a lot of trauma, especially a lot of trauma to feet.
A lot of people have been walking for months
by the time they get here.
They're often walking in shoes that don't fit.
Their feet have been wet.
They're heavily blistered.
Often they're very infected.
And they're practically crawling into camp
and they know that they still have a long way to go.
So what I'm doing now is just sorting through bandages
and hoping we will continue to get more supplies.
People here at camp are incredibly skilled
at evaluating people,
giving them a helping hand,
being able to be the arms that embrace someone
who has nobody else,
and they don't know if they're going to survive another moment.
Some of the young men are definitely less than 18
and they're very scared, but they're very courageous.
As far as women,
I think that the ones that I personally have experienced with
have been very traumatized.
They have faced violence.
They have faced sexual violence.
But they're coming to this country for their children.
They're hoping to reunite with their families here
or to be able to come here to bring their children across.
And the sad thing is that once they've made it this far,
they realize that they will probably never see their children again.
When Border Patrol has surrounded the camp,
there were people you could hear screaming who were being arrested.
So I have been here when that has happened.
We're out here in these trucks.
Almost every single day of the year,
driving pretty rough terrain.
Take the cab.
We have our well system over here,
which was a big improvement.
You know, water is life.
It is a slogan that has been used for Standing Rock,
most recently,
and it's something that is very important.
And it's something that is, you know, definitely
something we think on and ruminate on a lot here.
So just putting water out on the trails,
getting water to people who didn't have water,
it's like this incredibly simple action.
And we try to get it to the places where they're going to find it.
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No more desks, leaves, food and water,
blankets, on trails.
So we just leave those in strategic places.
Basically, we're doing what we can to provide
very basic humanitarian aid.
The border wall is built, is fortified in places
where it's very, very easy to cross,
and then in places where the landscape is so treacherous
that people are going to have a hard time surviving through it.
It's like a broken barbed wire fence.
So it's this strategic funneling of people
into the most dangerous parts of the desert.
Using those tactics is a way for the U.S. government
to essentially keep people crossing from living long enough
to make it to a community in the United States.
It's designed to kill people.
People will not have enough water,
get really dehydrated, drink out of this green water,
and then of course get really, really sick,
vomit and suffer a lot.
Higher levels of dehydration,
super dangerous to drink,
but people get really desperate and do.
There is not a direct road route,
obviously, it's all foot trails,
and winds around a lot,
so this area is extremely, extremely remote.
This is a pretty typical water drop.
So we just got here, we just got to this water drop,
and you'll see we leave water over here under this little tree.
There are people coming from effective communities
who are volunteers who understand this work very intimately,
and then also some of our volunteers are people
who've never done Desert Aid before,
and don't have a very specific connection,
and I think this is a way to just kind of personalize it
in a really, really, really quick way.
There's another drop over here that I kind of wanted to check out.
Alright, so this drop has been CTFO'd,
or cleared the fuck out.
I'm very dedicated to it,
and it's also very, very overwhelming
thinking about how many people are being attacked
by law enforcement, border patrol, militia.
No more desk volunteers specifically have found seven,
there remains of seven different individuals
who lost their lives in the desert in the last month.
We're at a water drop, you can tell that it's been vandalized,
it's been destroyed.
The cans have been slashed with a knife,
and these have been slashed and stomped.
We have a lot of footage of border patrol agents,
and unsympathetic locals destroying water drops.
Often it's border patrol.
There have been remains found near slash water drops.
We see this all the time.
So shitty, I fucking hate them, I fucking hate them.
I expect that they'll come back to the same spot,
I expect that they will slash this spot,
and because of that I put another water drop close to this,
it's near to this, but it's not here,
and so that's in the hopes that they'll come here,
if they're gonna come destroy the water,
they'll come here, they'll destroy this water,
and they won't find the other spot
that I've strategically put behind a bush.
As you can see, the terrain is really treacherous,
I'm sure you can imagine trying to hike through this at night,
carrying whatever you can carry,
trying to keep up with the group would be very, very difficult.
People often cross on the darkest nights.
As you can imagine, it makes it very, very difficult for safe passage.
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What you're seeing right now is what it would be like
if you were a migrant coming through the desert in the middle of the night.
Now we're getting around to the infrared,
so you can see a little bit better.
I still can't see that well.
No idea if there's cactus in front of me,
I have no idea if there's rocks in front of me,
it just looks like there's some bushes I'm moving towards.
What you're seeing on the camera, I can't see at all.
Like if you can switch it off infrared really quick,
you're gonna see how dark it is, it's just black.
So that's what it really looks like.
And we've seen this in the daytime, it was cactus everywhere,
sharp rocks everywhere.
Some of these migrants too are moving through this terrain
and then being surprised by Border Patrol
and then they're just running through this.
They're just running through what?
Just blackness.
And so it's super dangerous, it's already really cold.
You know, it's truly horrifying to think about.
And this is what they go through.
All right.
So
Just for being an immigrant, you're criminalized and you're sent to your streamline through
a federal program, meaning you're incarcerated en masse, you show up in shackles in front
of a judge, and within 30 minutes, 70 people are sentenced to a minimum of 30 days in a
private jail.
You go to a private jail, make them money, and then they deport you.
Every person is going to make a buck for another corporation that has a bed for them, children,
women.
In their contracts with their government, they say we have to have a minimum of so many
beds filled at all times in order for the contract to be fulfilled.
We don't have due process anymore, and this is something that liberals keep telling us,
right?
They said, calm down.
We have lawyers.
In order for them to deport millions of people, they're going to have to go through the court
system.
What we've seen is that they don't care about the court system, they're severing that completely
so that we have no protection under any court system.
They're making money off of the criminalizing of poor people, criminalizing undocumented
immigrants.
It's the criminalization of marginalized people.
Politicians, private interests, collaborating to oppress human beings, to oppress our culture,
to oppress our people, make profit out of them, and then massively deport them.
Before we go any further, I want to recognize the ICE and Border Patrol officers in this
room today, and to honor their service, and not just because they unanimously endorsed
me for president.
This is what we've always known is happening, that our government is bought and paid for
by the 1%.
What's different now is that they're just shameless about it.
We are removing gang members, drug dealers, and criminals that threaten our communities
and prey on our very innocent citizens.
They're shameless, it's in your face, and they're just taking that power, pushing this
white supremacy, and getting a lot of support from a lot of Americans with those fear tactics.
The day is over when they can stay in our country and wreak havoc.
We are going to get them out, and we're going to get them out fast.
Trump's famous, one of his, the first thing he mentioned when he started running for president,
immigrants are drug trafficking, they're rapists, they're murderers.
They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists.
This is legal language that the government's using.
I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American
victims.
The office is called Voice, Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement.
This is an office that is literally just there to tell us why immigrants are bad for American
society.
We are now disposable as immigrants.
What this office is actually going to do is yet to be seen.
Nobody's talking about it, nobody's marching about it, but soon we're going to have literally
a list, any crime, any offense will be there, your name posted, for anything wrong that
you've done.
This is why you're detrimental to their society, and also an office where anybody can report
you.
This country is changing, it's getting browner and it's getting blacker, so there are politicians
in charge that are afraid of that.
For that reason, we will soon begin the construction of a great, great wall along our southern border.
There is no fear now to be as openly bigoted and racist and sexist and misogynist as you
can be.
You're afraid to go to the grocery store because you might get deported, also because you might
get attacked by some white supremacists.
I see them, I'm attacked by them on a daily basis.
Just last week, two Indian residents were gunned down.
One of them unfortunately passed away because some white supremacists with a gun decided
to shoot them and tell them, you know, go back to your country or get out of America.
There was a bomb threat to our Jewish community center, and my friend and her three children
are on lockdown, so this is something that we're seeing, it's happening as we speak.
I was putting gas in my car the other day, a group of guys just came and it wasn't to
me, it was another Mexican family parked and they said, you know, just racial slurs at
them, just yelling at them, for literally no reason.
It's just ridiculous.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a guy driving up and down the street, a group of guys driving
up and down the street with a confederate flag waving around their car, just terrorizing
them, just, you know, yelling at people.
This doesn't have to be this way, right?
This shouldn't have to be this way, we don't, we could be better, we could do better.
In a few moments, the president will sign the North American Free Trade Agreement.
That will tear down trade barriers between our three nations.
That completely devastated Mexico's agricultural economy.
It's basic economic incentive that people cross the border, and that's directly tied
to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
So the majority, you had a huge pest of migration up north, because what they were looking for,
they were looking for jobs.
We can go back to the 80s, during the Reagan administration, when they started funding
and financing paramilitary murderous organizations, and that was all being financed with drugs.
We have an obligation to be of help where we can to freedom fighters and lovers of freedom
and democracy from Afghanistan to Nicaragua.
Aren't you advocating the overthrow of the president's government?
Not the president's government would turn around and say, all right, if they'd say,
uncle, uh...
The CIA is closely tied to the Colombian drug trade, to the Mexican drug trade.
We know through the 80s, right, who dumped crack cocaine into the streets in black neighborhoods,
into the poorest neighborhoods in this country.
It was the United States government.
The agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time.
Not only are the drugs coming here, but all the guns, for example.
All the guns, you know, the biggest manufacturer of guns is the United States.
And all our guns, a lot of that funnels down to Mexico to fuel the cartel wars.
Casi el 90% de las armas y pertrechos militares decomisados a las organizaciones criminales
en México tienen registro en armerías de Estados Unidos.
We were mandated, let these guns go, the Bush administration was the one that started wide
receiver.
The Obama administration is where fast and furious began.
And what's really happening is just corporate greed.
These people are running our government again, both Democrats and both Republicans.
So it is that business relationship that maintains those dictatorships, that maintains
those corrupt politicians.
So it's about imperialism, it's about neoliberalism at this point, and it's about capitalism.
And those are the driving forces of mass immigration.
We're seeing that in Europe now, with the devastation of Syria, of Libya, of Yemen.
If you stop destabilizing countries, which is what they've done, Iraq, Iran, I mean,
we cannot forget modern history.
People stop getting, you know, millions of refugees.
Yep.
With some of the new executive orders, what we do here, which is, you know, direct and
indirect aid, is being largely criminalized.
It's really shady the language that they're using, so like, you know, aiding doesn't have
to be putting someone in your car and driving them aiding could be giving them water.
This is an intersectional issue of climate change, capitalism, globalism, and it's forcing
people north.
If you watch these people, it's like, oh gee, that's so sad, we're getting bad ones out.
