“Midnight At The Border" | Running on Truth | Episode 2

I feel like the whole country needs to know what's going on here. It's bigger than alarming. This is the worst I've ever seen it. They were told they could get a bite of the American dream here and that dream becomes a nightmare along the journey. I'm down in Yuma and I'm gonna go look at the border. And most of the movement at the border is at this crossing is between 1 and 3 a.m. I came down here because I want to see firsthand what the problem is and get as many ideas as possible about the best way to solve this problem. Hey. Good morning. Pleasure to meet you. Welcome to Yuma. So you and Senator Kelly are the only Democrats that have actually come to the border. And I appreciate you being here. I'm very happy to be here. I'm grateful to you. Thank you. Should we go? Let's go. I have to warn you that I've had some other high profile visits and that day that they came, nobody crossed. Does that mean somebody on this side? Yes. With the Border Patrol is telling them? I don't know if they're with the Border Patrol or where they're with some other agency. Those people who are associated with the cartels? Yes. Yeah, definitely. And they've had more than 300 assassinations across the border, 25 miles from here. Over the last year and a half, because they're fighting for control of the trafficking. Mr. Kennedy, if you want to look ahead, you'll kind of see where the wall begins. This is a new phenomenon for us where we've seen more people coming from Africa than ever before. China, Russia, even the Ukraine. We had a large surge coming from those countries. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. Good morning. How are you? Where did you come from? Peru? How long have you been traveling? Seven days? We left because they threatened my family, my wife and my children, to kill them. They had already killed the pet. How much did it cost you to get here? I sold everything I had in my house. I couldn't keep anything. Everything, everything, everything. You sold everything? Everything, everything, everything. They're looking for asylum. Yeah, they're looking for asylum, yeah. Where are you from? Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan, yes. I'm at the border wall around Yuma, Arizona. It's about two o'clock in the morning. We've watched about 150 people come across. I was expecting that most of the people would be from Central America. This is really extraordinary. Where are you from? Uzbekistan. Okay. Of all of these people, only one of them said that they were here for asylum. The rest of them are here for work, for better lives, doing the things that we all want for ourselves. This is at the regional health center. These are some of the people that we saw come across the border last night, and they're now being processed at the health center. There's a lot of stories that we have heard from the migrants, why they're leaving. What do they say? Political asylum, mostly political asylum. And we want to respond in a humanitarian way. We're working trying to make sure that they're not homeless, and they're not end up in the streets. She is processing these immigrants, making sure that they're healthy enough to travel, and then putting them on buses where they go to every city in our country. The stations are set up to welcome them, providing some food, identify where they're going. We did two weeks to travel from Senegal to Nicaragua. After Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and here. I'm going to New York to join my uncle. My dream is to live the dream American, to live in America, to work and to help my family. We coordinate with the airport in Phoenix, and out they go to the final destination the same day. Yeah, I hope to begin a new life. Yeah, my brother lives here. He's a citizen. Okay, good luck. Goodbye. Most people bring the money or have a sponsor that buys their ticket. What happens if the family doesn't have the money to buy the plane ticket? Well FEMA reimburses us. We can buy the ticket. So you buy the ticket for them? Yes. Colombia. ¿De qué parte? De Bogotá. Yo he estado muchas veces en Colombia, en Bogotá y en todas las partes. ¿Cómo se llama? ¿Cómo? Colombia. Colombia, en su mano. Gracias. El niño también me llamo Joseph. ¿Parece? Joseph. Mucho gusto. Fernando. ¿Y cómo estaba el viaje? Más o menos. Yo soy Jaime Maquera de Perú. Nosotros hemos llegado cuatro personas. ¿Cuatro personas? Yo, mi hija y mi señora. Mi otra hija que tiene 18 años. ¿En qué momento? ¿En qué momento estaba con ella? Mi señora y mi hija están conmigo. Pero mi hija de 18 años, no sé dónde está. ¿Estaba contigo? Pero en el momento en el que nosotros estábamos allá en el fugio, nos han separado y se han librado todos. ¿Cuántos han separado? No tengo mucha comunicación con ellas. ¿Es ella? We see a lot of violence as people are making across the border through Mexico or their countries. Some of them do share their stories. But we see that devastation in the human lives. We are sitting here in Yuma, Arizona, right at the Colorado River at the Morales Dam. Behind us is Algodones, Mexico. And a stone's throw just behind us is the state of California. So that mountain range behind us is California? California, yes, sir. This is the infamous Morales Dam gap. And what you had is under President Trump, you had a big push for infrastructure, the wall system. And when President Biden took office, he signed some executive orders that basically halted all wall construction. And so that left the gap here. And this was a problem for us in Yuma. What no one talked about was the wall system. It was a package deal. Yes, it included steel, but it also included roads, technology, and sensor equipment. And all that was just put on hold. When you have people that can come through here unmitigated because there's a gap in the wall, it causes a problem not only for border security, but also for the community. And that was partisan politics, right? Absolutely. They halted anything that had to do with the Trump wall. It put our agents at risk. It put the migrants at risk. It incentivized the profit making for the smugglers, for the cartels. It's done just the opposite of what they're trying to accomplish from a humanitarian standpoint. When you are giving people an opportunity to come here the wrong way because the policies allow them to do that, that's exploiting people. And that's wrong. What you're seeing behind me here are millions and millions of dollars of materials, including these steel girders, that were purchased by the Trump administration to complete the construction of the wall. When the Biden administration came in, it didn't want to complete the wall. And they left that material to languish and bought new fencing, which you can see over here. This is where Secretary Mayorkas told me he would fill in nine of the 11 gaps. So 18 months later, we see maybe 50 feet completed. Now, the difference between this product and the other product, this has a 10 foot foundation going into the ground, so it's almost impossible to go under. The other new fencing being installed, the foundations are on the top of the ground. So you don't necessarily have that secondary protection under the ground. Where we've seen them start to use horizontal drilling machines to burrow under and use the bank teller type of tubes to send fentanyl and other drugs across the border. We have had up to 2,000 people a day coming across in this area. Where that car is right there, there's actually a bridge that's been built out of 2x12s that crosses the Colorado River. And most of the people are dropped off right over there off of that freeway. They walk across in those large groups that we saw yesterday morning. A lot of the smugglers have directed them towards this area specifically. Now, if these cameras had been activated, they would have been able to observe this. But these cameras right behind us are not active. This is also an area which is infamous that they referred to as the rape tree. We would see Plan B, which is the day after the morning after pill, found all throughout the ground where the cartel, after taking advantage and raping women and young children, as young as 12, it's been reported to us, they would force them to take the Plan B and then send them along their way. These kids are being exploited all along this track. There's nothing humane about any of this. We work with child abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, elder abuse, and human sex trafficking. Our unaccompanied minors here at the border are incredibly high, far higher than they should be. Imagine being a little kid and being stuck in the desert with no control over who does what to you, and there's nobody around. The youngest one in my recollection was a 10-year-old little boy. It's important to us to finally get people to understand that the dangers that await people as they make this journey, you don't know who you're going to come in contact with. They don't know who they're turning maybe their child over to. So we have four forensic interview rooms. These two that you're going to see here are child forensic interview rooms. I want you to walk in and see if you can find the camera and the microphone in here. I think that's the microphone. It's pretty well disguised. The whole point of that is that the child feels safe. The mics in these rooms are so sensitive that when a child lowers their head because they're feeling shame or they're upset or scared, even if they whisper, those mics are designed to pick up that very muted, quiet voice. In this room, obviously, we designed it to be as comfortable as we can possibly make it because the reality is no child should ever have to come to this exam room for an exam. We were averaging from 5 to 15 deaths on the range. Per year. Last year was our highest year ever, where we then were at 50 deaths on the range. So this is the place where Marine pilots come to train and to practice in simulated war games. Yes, sir. This installation would be referred to as the top gun for the Marine Corps. How far is this base from the border right now? Our training ranges are right next to the border. And why would an immigrant come through the range when they can just walk around the wall in Yuma and register? So the cartels were using some aliens, purposely making them cross the border into the desert area and saying, walk north, and not letting them know that they were going to cross some very harsh environments, using them as pawns. Drones would just kind of sweep the whole area. There's a big group of migrants coming through one area, and they were using the group that was moving in as a diversion for them, the smugglers, the guys doing the dirty work. So they can push through 300 people. They know the U.S. Border Patrol is going to surge to take care of the people. And then an hour later, they could be coming through with a large drug load, knowing that somewhere else on the line. Correct, yeah. And they do the same thing with terrorists, and they do the same thing with gang members that they want into the country. They'll do those diversionary tactics to keep our Border Patrol occupied. So you have individuals dressed in camouflage, wearing these booties, so they can actually traverse the desert to try to hide their shoe impressions so that they're not able to be tracked by Border Patrol. We don't know where they're going. And we don't know what kind of criminal that we're dealing with, because they do not want to be caught. So they will go through the desert. Here, it's going to be two to three days walking through the desert from the border of Mexico through all the remote desert to get to any kind of civilization. You got to be pretty dedicated, especially with the heat coming on. And unfortunately, not all make it. And why do you think this happened? At the end of the day, this is a business for people on the other side of the border. Billions and billions of dollars every month are earned from transporting people and, in conjunction, jugs across into the United States. And that kind of activity doesn't go away easily. So if you were president of the United States, could you stop this immigration crisis? Absolutely. And how would you do it? If I was president for the day, I would finish the wall where it makes sense. I don't need 2,000 miles of wall from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas. Mother Nature has done really good in areas of West Texas where you don't need a wall. We need technology to help the agents respond. I have talked about tall fences and wide gates. Tall fences, in my opinion, is a metaphor for keeping this border secure. And the wide gates is continuing this nation of immigrants, as well as a legal pathway for those that seek to enter the United States. That, to me, is very important. This has been an extraordinary trip for me because, on the one hand, last night, I witnessed this dystopian nightmare of this uncontrolled flow of desperate humanity crossing the border and converging here because of misbegotten policies by high leadership of the United States. And landing in this community that has the other side of America, the best that we can represent to ourselves, to the rest of the globe. But after visiting the border, I've come to understand that the open border policy is just a way of funding a multi-billion dollar drug and human trafficking operation for the Mexican drug cartels. When I'm president, I will secure the border, which will end the cartels' drug and trafficking economy. And I will build wide doors for those who wish to enter legally, so that the United States can continue to be a beacon to the world where diversity and culture make us great.