Mailbucket #3: Immigration from the Inside

Also: Report from Cuba!

You know the deal: Y’all send good (and in this case fact-rich!) emails that are too long to read on Members Only episodes, so I periodically cull/clip/clean, and put them here, with some brief responses in italics. By this process we all become smarter & more entertained. Without further ado….

From: Unnamed border officer

Subject: In response to Matt’s liberal border policies

Date: March 3, 2024

Greetings Gents, 

Never Fly Coach member and longtime listener here. I just listened to peasant Episode #444 and was enticed by the friendly disagreement between Matt and M.M. on U.S. illegal migration numbers to possibly help shed some light. 

From December of 2019 through November of 2020 I was an active-duty Army officer assigned, alongside the rest of my brigade combat team, to augment CBP forces alongside the Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona border. Attached to us were an additional 400 National Guardsmen from various states. 

As active duty forces we were held under Title 10 authority, meaning we could not personally detain migrants or suspected migrants. However, what we did was man two-person observation posts roughly each 1-2 miles across the entire southern border. My battalion was directly responsible for the area spanning from Laredo to Del Rio, Texas. Including Eagle Pass. 

Our job was to alleviate the [Observation Post] duty from the Border Patrol so they could more freely respond to sightings and interdict migrants crossing illegally. We were also there four months before, and then the rest of our time during, Title 42 —essentially making us and the BP yell to migrants to turn around and go back to Mexico. 

CBP had three criteria we classified migrants into:

1) Turnbacks

2) Interdictions

3) Gotaways

During the 11 months we were there, we directly led to the interdiction of 34,500ish migrants. These included both ones that attempted to evade the BP and those that walked up to us and surrendered. After Title 42, we started tracking turnbacks, which were an estimated 75k, specifically in the corridor between Del Rio and Eagle Pass alone. 

Gotaways were harder to count. We evaluated gotaways as people we saw through either binoculars or FLIR cameras who were not successfully interdicted by the CBP.

Our estimation was roughly 110k or so, due to either migrant waves, which occupied CBP resources; weather, or the somewhat undulating terrain of parts of the border. 

This was before the repeal of Title 42. While this is chiefly anecdotal, and hard to either prove or disprove, the notion that the number of migrants that are interdicted are equal to the number that get away is laughable. 

I ask that you not say my name if you choose to read this on the pod as several other people I used to work with are listeners. 

Much love to y’all and what y’all do,

(More emails from border-enforcement listeners, please!)

***

From: Vincent

Subject: Immigration!

Date: March 3, 2024

Evening degenerates,

Love the podcast, in particular the recent extended conversation about the operation of immigration law and immigration enforcement. I wish to offer my humble experience as a practicing immigration lawyer to answer some of your questions about asylum, border enforcement, and the immigration backlog. 

For example, Moynihan is absolutely correct that the backlog is years, and that's for every type of relief before every agency. The average wait for a final hearing in immigration court is around three years. In the D.C. area where I practice, the average is lower, because we have over 100 immigration judges between Baltimore, Hyattsville, Annandale, Sterling, Falls Church, and Richmond. Places like Miami, in contrast, which has nearly 10 percent of pending cases, has about 30 immigration judges. Cases are being scheduled for hearings in 2027 and 2028. 

When I started practicing seven years ago, the backlog was around 900,000. The backlog today is close to 3 million. So, an average of three years for the final hearing, but then you can appeal. That's an average of *four* years. My oldest *step-pending* appeal for a client was filed December 2019. These numbers are only going up.

Border enforcement is this weird thing where everyone is talking past each other. The law is actually pretty clear. Applicants for admission are to be detained until their applications are considered. It makes sense to me (as it does to most people) that people caught at the border should not just automatically be let in just because they claim asylum; they should be made to present their case before being allowed in. Of course, enforcement costs money. The United States does not have even close to enough detention space or ICE officers to detain even a small percent of the people showing up.

I don't pretend to have the answers, but there are some suggestions that I think are fundamentally unserious. The United States cannot just catch everyone, round up all the illegals and put them on a plane without first suspending due process and going full police state. I am not willing to give up my rights for that. 

Anyways, I don't know how to end emails, so yeah.

(Stuck the landing!)

***

From: Lesleynka

Subject: Immigration #s

Date: March 7, 2024

Hello fellas & whatever Kmele happens to be in his modern-day View Master right now. 

In Episode #444, Matt suggested that he thinks there may be equal numbers of deportations or send-backs happening as entries at the border. I assumed he was way off, so I looked into it & figured I'd share so we can all be a bit more knowledgeable. 

Here's what I can find for 2023: 

According to Border Patrol & Customs, in FY 2023 nationwide encounters were 3,201,144, with 2,475,669 being at the southern border.  

"U.S. immigration officials along the southern border are on track to process more than 300,000 migrants in December, an all-time monthly high…." 

"Through coordination, planning, and execution that includes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, since May 2023 and through November 30, DHS removed or returned over 400,000 individuals...." — If we do the math using these numbers, it looks like approximately 686,000 would be removed in a year. 

ICE says it deported 142,580 people in FY 2023. 

I can't seem to find the total number of returned or removed for FY 2023, so I just included some statistics I found for other months.  

In summary: 

Encountered: 3,201,144

Returned: 686,000 approximately 

The numbers above don't even take into account those not encountered upon arrival, so upon further inspection it looks like Matt was incredibly wrong on this one. 

Yours truly, 

Lesleynka

(Love-love-love the three emails above, particularly the views from different vantage points inside the belly of the beast. This is how knowledge is disseminated!)

***

From: Kevin

Subject: (Interested in Cuba)

Date: March 6, 2024

So FYI, I'm actually still fully interested in giving the report about Cuba. [We had had an email back-and-forth with Kevin about this.] Incredibly interesting place….

Here are a few thoughts about my visit.

1. For Moynihan: The first thing I learned when landing on the island was that miniskirts are allowed as part of official uniforms. So how bad can communism really be? Pretty bad, but you know, I can see how one would be convinced.

2. On a vaguely more serious note, it's an interesting thing to really see the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Don't get me wrong, Cuba is very definitely both of those things, but the idea of enforcing the state versus the idea that just absolutely everything has to be for the party and the state are just kind of very different concepts. 

3. As far as racial essentialism goes, if you want to see a bunch of black people that absolutely despise anything leftist ... go to Cuba.

4. You talked about how you have to have a fucking sweet-ass house and lots of money for a 5 to get with a smoking hot girl. Let me tell you the solution for all the average-looking dudes who aspire to be shift manager at the Burger King ... go to Cuba. Apparently my pudgy white ass was continually coming up in conversations around town with my stepdaughter continually reminding them I was there with her mom.

And as a nice little propaganda preview. The sign for the town where the in-laws live that's right on the fence of the U.S. naval base (close enough that I used a U.S. cell network for an idea). The translation is "The first anti-imperialist trench."

(Will confess to not fully understanding #2, but can testify that #4 is both true and extremely uncomfortable to view up close, as I wrote about back in 1998. The inequality between rich/free-country schlubs and poor/authoritarian-country hotties leads to, shall we say, much international exchange. Decades before I, too, became a middle-aged paunch-haver, there were few sights on God’s green earth that filled me with more contempt than Paul Giamatti lookalikes on horndog vacations confusing their unearned privilege with actual game…. Anyway, everyone should go to Cuba, and send us their reports!)  

***

From: “Another Satisfied Paying Customer”

Subject: Thanks for Putting Me to Sleep

Date: March 3, 2024

I recently had open-heart surgery. Complete recovery from this procedure takes 12 weeks, during which time there are many constraints on what you can and can't do. One of my biggest struggles is that I wasn't permitted to sleep on my side like normal. Instead, I was required to sleep on my back, at an incline, for the first month. That turned out to be a monumental challenge—it seemed impossible to find a position where I was comfortable enough to sleep. During my first two weeks post-op I got only snatches of sleep here and there ... a cruel complication to an already miserable experience.

Since I'd be awake at all hours, uncomfortable, worn-out and bleary, I'd often put on a podcast to keep me company in the wee small lonely hours of the night. Naturally this included plenty of nutritious Fifth Column, both new episodes and re-runs. And it was the darndest thing—a couple times I noticed myself waking up with the podcast still going. Which meant I had gone to sleep! Even if it was only for 45 minutes at a stretch, that was a big improvement over not sleeping at all.

It seems there's something special about the way the three of you blather on about Putin and Claudine Gay that I find relaxing. It distracts one part of my brain, letting the rest of my consciousness slip out the back door and shut things down. I started deliberately putting your podcast on in the hopes that it would lead to sleep. Sometimes it worked!

At this point I'm through the worst of it. I've found a position that works for me sleeping on my back, and I'm caught up on my sleep. I no longer really need TFC as a sleep aid and have returned to my normal recreational listening. But I thought it would do your heart some good to know that, among your many talents, you provide a valuable drug-free therapeutic sleep aid.

p.s. tell Matt I'll see him at Reason Weekend!

(This is hilarious, and I’m glad to hear you’re already recovering well enough to travel! Speaking of which, we should have some kind of renegade Fifth Column meetup at RW….)

***

From: Brian

Subject: An encounter with right-wing radio royalty, thoughts on talking to (possibly) crazy people and kind of getting on well with them

Date: Feb. 13, 2024

I work at a very old and expensive men’s clothing store in an Ivy League college town that will remain nameless.

We were visited the other day by someone who strikingly resembled [_____ ____]. 

While helping him with high-end Oxford shoes made in Massachusetts, I spent a good 20 minutes silently trying to figure out if this man was [_____ ____] or just a very close doppelgänger both in voice and appearance.

While he was trying on Scottish chunky cardigans, I finally asked the man if he was in media, and he sheepishly replied that he was. 

“Are you [_____ ____]?” I then asked him bluntly.

“Yes.”

I offered my hand and introduced myself, and he gave it a firm and warm squeeze.

He told me that he was in town because his father was on his deathbed. It was more than a little arresting to hear the grief and sorrow evident in his voice when he told me this, that famous talk radio voice that has caused so much ire in so many people for years. 

There was something incongruous, though in a pleasant way, about witnessing a deeply humane and vulnerable side to this giant of the conservative pundit class.

I rang him up at the register, and all told he spent over $1,400, a pretty big deal in our pricey but small and scantly trafficked shop.

I’ve dealt with many astoundingly wealthy people at my job, and many of them are demanding, childish blowhards, who labor in thought over which house they want their luxury goods sent to after they’ve bought them from me, all too often pushing for some sort of preposterous discount. (“Deep pockets and short arms,” a friend of mine’s father always said).

Many are Ivy leaguers, and a person must bear the mark of one of those institutions to qualify for minimal human decency. Consequently, as a state-school chimpanzee myself, I notice they tend to expect those assisting them in a retail store to be excessively servile. 

I have to say that [_____ ____] was unusually friendly and kind to me, and not at all in a slick media way, but as a human being. Above all, he was considerate, not at all vain or self-important, and treated me as an equal. 

I don’t agree with his views (with the usual provisions for broken clocks, etc.), but I honestly found him to be a genuine, sweet guy.

I know Moynihan spent time with [____] for a V*ce story some years ago, and I wonder if he walked away with the same impression. In the time I interacted with him, I honestly can’t say that I think [_____ ____] is your typical pundit dickbag. He may be wrong about a lot of things, and prone to tilting at windmills, but I don’t think he’s a bad guy at all. 

Not just Moynihan, but have any of you fellas been shocked by someone you thought of as a windbag, turning out to be a decent, even likable person? 

I know this is somewhat of a recurring theme on your program, but not being in media at all, this was a genuine, pleasant surprise to me. 

Though, like Moynihan, my Achilles heel is that I tend to like almost anyone provided I spend enough time with them one on one.

— Brian, longtime listener, first time write-in-er

(I was the one who edited out the name, because there were too many intimate, privately offered details! I don’t want this place to become Gawker Stalker, and I don’t want to imagine a world where some unassuming famous person like Kmele would have his five-digit Apple purchases relayed to the rest of the world. But also, I wanted to publish this email, because it’s a nice story that reminds us that human beings can be and often are nice people. And also that: Many of our listeners, including Matt R. this past week, have lost a parent, and we should remember our common humanity in those and other moments.

To address the question, I don’t know if anybody I met personally ever turned around my opinion that they were a “windbag,” per se, but I will happily report that the following bright lights greatly outshined my initial expectations: Hunter S. Thompson, MTV’s Kennedy, Tucker Carlson, Christopher Hitchens, George Will, Dave Barry, Jerry Brown, Adam Michnik, Gary Johnson, Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, Patti Smith, Milan Hlavsa, Al Sharpton, Ann Coulter, Lisa Marie Presley, G. Gordon Liddy, Dan “Tom Tomorrow” Perkins, David Brooks, Cornel West, John Bolton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Richard Riordan, for starters. The usual rule still applies—avoid hanging around famous people, and don’t meet your heroes unless you are prepared to be disappointed. Everybody above was shockingly nice to me, and/or just very decent and interesting. And, OK, Coulter’s hilarious.)

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