David Remnick: The latest round of military aid for Ukraine and for Israel has been held up in Congress, not because of spending concerns, but because of border security. Republicans rejected a spending package earlier this month demanding stricter immigration measures. House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly told his colleagues that changes to immigration policy would be their hill to die on.

Mike Johnson: We have to effect real policy change at the border, and that is a necessary condition to anything we do going forward.

David Remnick: Democrats accused the Republicans of holding military aid hostage. Pramila Jayapal, the leader of the Progressive Caucus, says the sweeping changes that Republicans want would only destroy the country's asylum system.

Pramila Jayapal: I think we need to put our foot down and say, no, vote on the aid package without those border policy changes, and recognize that some of the things that the Biden administration have been doing have really been working.

David Remnick: The border is surely going to be at the center of the presidential race in 2024. The wall, of course, has always been an obsession for Donald Trump, but the issue has reached beyond partisan politics throughout the year. Congressional Democrats and some big city Democratic mayors are pleading for more federal support.

The City of San Diego, for example, is squeezing dry what's left of their pandemic aid in an attempt to support asylum seekers. That's money that's likely to run out entirely by the end of this month. New York City's Mayor Eric Adams says he's spent nearly $1.5 billion this year to address the migrant crisis, and that in turn has set off a more general budget crisis in New York. Libraries are closing their doors earlier, and there are deep concerns about numerous other city services.

Staff writer Dexter Filkins spent time at the southern border this year to talk with local officials and with migrants about their reality. We spoke back in June. Dexter, for a long time, you've mainly been a foreign correspondent for us and for The New York Times earlier. You've written about conflict in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, all over the world.

Now, you've spent months reporting on the border, the border between the United States and Mexico. What were you witnessing, and had you ever experienced anything similar before?

Dexter Filkins: I think there's no way I could have imagined what I saw or what I encountered. It's difficult to appreciate the scale and the magnitude of what's happening there unless you see it.

David Remnick: Tell us about your experience. Where did you fly to? What were your impressions? What did you see?

Dexter Filkins: I went to a bunch of different places, all up and down the border. I think I started in El Paso. I made a bunch of trips to a little town called Del Rio. I went to another place called Eagle Pass. I was working my way up and down just depending on what was happening and who told me what. Then I went out and this is in the piece, but I went out up in a helicopter with the state troopers in Texas.

David Remnick: What are the numbers?

Dexter Filkins: They're astounding. I think about 4 million people, as best as I could count, have come into the country since then. It's a lot of people. It's bigger than a lot of states.

David Remnick: That's 4 million people who are going to stay in the United States?

Dexter Filkins: No. Probably about a million and a half of those people are what the Border Patrol calls Gotaways, which they're basically counted, but they're not apprehended either by they've seen them on cameras or sensors or whatever. Two and a half million and this is a lot of the piece, is an attempt to explain the other two and a half million, which is, I will be persecuted by my home country if you send me back. What's really striking, overwhelming is just the numbers of people who are coming.

David Remnick: Where are those people coming from? Not just Mexico. They're not just Mexicans.

Dexter Filkins: Oh, my gosh, they're coming from everywhere. Everywhere in the world, Tajikistan, Burkina Faso, China. Again, the numbers are amazing, but also just the diversity of people who are coming across. You have to try to visualize it. There's border walls, there's fences, there's all kinds of things, but in the places where there's a border wall, they can't build a border wall in the middle of the river. If you can get across the river and you can get your foot on American soil, that's all you need to do.

David Remnick: Why did the numbers change so radically in 2021?

Dexter Filkins: That's a really good question, one of the questions I tried to answer. I think the short answer is Trump's rhetoric, President Trump, deterred a lot of people. He basically said, "I don't want you people. You're from these terrible countries. Stay out." He was very, very brutal in his language about it. At the same time, there was the pandemic. You can look at the numbers, they drop when the pandemic begins.

To answer the question of why did the numbers skyrocket, which they did, Joe Biden in his campaign for president, and I think he and the Democratic Party rejected basically the whole Trump vision of the border and of immigration. Biden literally said on many occasions, if you're feeling persecuted, if you are persecuted, come, come and make your case. In fact, he did that in one of the presidential debates that also happened to be co-hosted by Univision, the big network. His critics would say he invited people in and that's pretty strong language, but it's not inaccurate.

Joe Biden: I would in fact, make sure that we immediately surge the border. All those people who are seeking asylum, they deserve to be heard. That's who we are. We're a nation that says, if you want to flee and you're fleeing oppression, you should come. I would change the order that the president just changed saying--

Dexter Filkins: Look, the problem here is that the American immigration system is antiquated, it's too small, it's completely broken. It's too old, and Congress in its mutual animosity, has been unable and unwilling to fix it. We're stuck with this system that doesn't work, that was designed for something, a reality that hasn't existed for decades.

At the same time, you have these extraordinary numbers of people who are coming in part because of the terrible political and economic conditions in Latin America and in Central America, and other parts of the world. For instance, Venezuela, which has produced the political turmoil and the economic collapse there has produced 7 million refugees.

David Remnick: Actually, you've met a lot of migrants in your reporting. Does any of their stories particularly strike you as either particularly moving or emblematic of what's happening now?

Dexter Filkins: I met a woman named Julie. She's Colombian. She's gay, was being routinely beaten by her family. She couldn't live in her country anymore. She said, "I couldn't get a job because I was being discriminated against. My partner, we were disgraced. We had to go. We decided to make the journey." This is every single person that crosses the border has a story like this. It's the journey.

She and her partner and her young child make this epic journey. They start by, they pretend that they're tourists. They go to Cancun, Mexico then they make this long, long bus journey to the American border. They're robbed the whole way up. They basically run out of money. They're begging, borrowing, doing everything they can. They finally piece together the money. This takes weeks and weeks and weeks. They find a smuggler. They give the smuggler essentially all the money that they have and they get across the border.

She's in New York now, 1 of 70,000 or so immigrants who've come. It's crushing because you realize the world's full of people like Julie and what--

David Remnick: Because the world is full of violence and instability and climate change, and all the factors that lead to this.

Dexter Filkins: Yes.

David Remnick: Every time there's a political campaign, if the candidate himself is not a Trumpist and is particularly cruel about the issue of immigration, you will hear the phrase, sensible immigration reform. Everybody's for sensible immigration reform and there have been attempts in our recent history to have so-called sensible immigration reform. What was it and why did it fail?

Dexter Filkins: The last time the Congress came pretty close to reforming the system was 2013.

David Remnick: During Obama?

Dexter Filkins: Yes, complete overhaul of the system was passed in the Senate in 2013. Basically the outlines of any compromise they're sensible, but they're also pretty predictable. The Republicans want greater border security and the Democrats typically want more legal immigration. That's basically what was in that bill.

What happened really was they sent it over to the House, this was as the Tea Party was gaining momentum, and they couldn't get the votes. It hasn't ever come back. Trump comes along two years later in 2015 and launches his campaign, and that has changed everything.

Donald Trump: --millions of people, criminal, aliens. We will begin moving them out, day one, as soon as I take office, day one.

Dexter Filkins: More than a couple of people explain this to me, political people, who said what the Republicans wanted was, they don't want chaos at the border, and this includes voters. They don't want chaos at the border, and they want legal, orderly processes for immigration. If you can do that, people will support it.

David Remnick: Do they only want immigration from Norway?

Dexter Filkins: That's what's changed is that is no longer true. Trump essentially came along and changed the vision of the Republican Party. When the Democratic senators would go into the room in 2013, and say, "Here's our proposal, and here's yours, and let's hammer something out." They weren't that far apart. Now, they're far apart. Now they're just, as one Democratic senator puts me, there's no appetite for it anymore in the Republican Party.

David Remnick: You said the system is broken, and that it's an incredible mess and chaotic. Describe for us what that looks like.

Dexter Filkins: Well, for starters, there's not enough border patrol agents on the border, there aren't enough immigration judges to hear cases. The whole system is overwhelmed. It's a series of gigantic bottlenecks. If you come into this country, get your foot on American soil, ask for asylum, you're not going to get a hearing on your case, for on average four or five years.

David Remnick: Where are you living? How are you living your life in those four or five years?

Dexter Filkins: You can see by looking at the way the system works, it's just a series of ad hoc decisions and workarounds. As more than a couple of people put it to me, once a person gets in the country, they're in for a good decade because they can appeal their case, and it'll go on forever. Nothing really works the way it was supposed to work. Nothing.

David Remnick: Among the many people you talked to for this story is the former Democratic mayor of Del Rio, Texas, Bruno Lozano. Tell me about him and the phone call that he received while he was mayor from the border patrol chief. What happened there?

Dexter Filkins: Well, Del Rio is like a little town or a small city. It's like 35,000 people. Mayor Lozano said to me, he was the mayor in 2021. He said, "I got a phone call one day from the Border Patrol, and they said, 'We're expecting 10,000 migrants to cross the river at Del Rio by the end of the week.'" He just said, "What are you talking about?"

This is a Democratic mayor, this is not an anti-immigration mayor. He just flipped out. He said, "You got to be kidding me. 10,000 people?" It turned out to be 16,000 people. At one point he said, "There were a thousand people crossing the river every hour." They were brought under a bridge, but it was basically a city sprung up overnight among this pretty small city.

Mayor Lozano, it basically broke him I think. The city was completely overwhelmed. He couldn't deal with it. Again, he's a Democrat. Very angry at the Biden administration, feels like he was let down, but more importantly, he literally said to me, "I can't govern the city. I can't do it because it's not in my control anymore what happens here." He basically gave up, he didn't run for another term.

David Remnick: What has the Biden administration proposed in specific terms, in policy terms?

Dexter Filkins: I think in the first week upon taking office, President Biden put forward a comprehensive proposal to reform the immigration system. I think not terribly unlike the 2013 proposal. Dead in the water; it didn't go anywhere. He's trying. Absent that, it's an impossible situation. For instance, a federal judge ruled about a decade ago that immigrant children crossing the border cannot be detained for more than 20 days, so they have to be released into the country.

Now, that sounds like a very humane decision, but the result of that has been since then, an enormous surge of migrant children coming across the border, some of them on a company, their parents bringing them to the border, they send them across. Because typically a child comes with his or her parents, they can't be detained either.

That's what you're dealing with, which is, you want to do this but you can't do that. President Obama, who was very tough on illegal immigration, he tried to detain children and families and was basically blocked from doing it. It fell apart. All the presidents Trump, Obama, Biden, they all have faced the same problem, which is they can't get Congress to act. They can only act on their own.

David Remnick: Through executive order.

Dexter Filkins: Yes. There's just a very limited number of things they can do.

David Remnick: Dexter, you wrote that under Biden, remarkably, fewer immigrants have been placed in deportation proceedings. How does that jive with the other numbers you've been discussing?

Dexter Filkins: When President Biden came into office, there was a overriding sense of, we have to reverse everything that Donald Trump did, and they did. The result of that was a deluge. That's what we've been seeing basically over the last six months, which is Biden has been reversing course and becoming much tougher on immigration. In fact, he's imposing programs and proposals that look remarkably like some of the ones that Donald Trump was doing.

David Remnick: For example.

Dexter Filkins: Well, for example, there's a rule called the transit ban, which basically means, if you show up at the border, and you ask for asylum, you have to prove that you've been rejected for asylum by another country that you pass through on the way here. That would disqualify a lot of migrants. When Trump did that, people went insane.

Another example is Remain in Mexico. Remain in Mexico was a Trump program, which was, you want to apply for asylum, you can, but you're just going to get an appointment, and you can sit down in Mexico until we call you and tell you to come.

David Remnick: Dexter, in your piece you outline the Biden administration's current parole policies. A migrant is given a document ordering him to go to ICE on a specified day in the city of his destination. Is this policy for all migrants, or only the ones who seek asylum? What's been the reaction to these parole policies?

Dexter Filkins: That's basically what you get if you're seeking asylum. You get to the border, and you get on American soil, you say, "I want asylum. I want to apply for asylum. I'm going to be persecuted if I go back." They hand you a piece of paper, and the border patrol guy says, "Where are you going?" He says, "Well, I got a cousin in Chicago." He goes to Chicago. There's a piece of paper and it says, "Please report with your name and address and an ID, et cetera, et cetera, please report to the Department of Homeland Security, the ICE office in Chicago."

Then down at the bottom and I saw a bunch of these it'll say, "The average wait time for your hearing is 1752 days", or whatever. In other words, like check in with the ICE office when you come in and then expect to get a phone call from us in like three or four years.

David Remnick: Dexter, not so long ago, you wrote a terrific profile of Florida governor and presidential candidate, Governor DeSantis. It's been reported that migrants are leaving Florida because of DeSantis's anti-immigration law in Florida, which is called SB 1718, SB 1718. Did we see anything nationally like that during the crackdown of the Trump era?

Dexter Filkins: We didn't. The law that I think you're referring to is essentially the employer has to verify the citizenship of the-- What we found in the past, in the last really big overhaul of the immigration system which was 1986, that became unworkable very, very quickly, for a whole bunch of reasons. It's like are we going to have national ID cards? How are we going to do this? It becomes very intrusive and very difficult. It didn't work that well the first time, maybe it'd be different the second time.

I think as to Florida, boy, he's skating on-- that's pretty, I don't know if it's thin ice, but when you take a community like Miami, which is completely dominated by-- Miami is a Latin city. It's a Latin American city, and it's filled with refugees and the children of refugees. He's going to have to find a way to explain that to them.

David Remnick: Dexter, Republicans often accuse Democrats, maybe just Democrats on the left, but Democrats usually in general, of being for "open borders". What does that mean, and is in fact, anyone in the Democratic Party or in Congress for open borders?

Dexter Filkins: Look, that's a super catchy phrase. Everybody knows what it means. The border's not open. Biden over the past couple of years has deported, or he's turned around more than 2 million people at the border. It's incredibly vigorous enforcement, it's just that the problem is enormous, and a lot of people have come in. When Republicans or anyone else says the border's open, it's a very emotional term. It's meant to evoke images of giant hordes of people flooding the country and flooding American cities, but it's not. The border's not open in any sense.

David Remnick: As you said, you grew up in Florida where immigration is extremely vivid, you live in New York City. How did your experience at the southern border change your perspective on the extent of the immigration problem, and what should be done about it?

Dexter Filkins: You can look at the numbers all you want, I just didn't realize. When you see the numbers of people coming, you realize, what on earth can we do as a country and maintain our humanity? That's a real tough one. I don't know the answer to that. To try to build a workable immigration system, we'll have to do it at some point, it will cost billions and billions of dollars. We could build a wall across the entire southern border, but I'm not even sure that's going to work.

David Remnick: That would be inhumane.

Dexter Filkins: Yes, and that's the most disturbing thing which is you look out in the world and you see what's happening, and you see the misery, and you see the desperation of the people who are-- you see it in their eyes who are coming to the border. How do you answer the question, what can we do? What can we do as the United States of America, which has always prided itself on being a nation of immigrant but also the haven of last resort for people all around the world? What do we do?

[music]

David Remnick: Dexter Filkins, thank you so much.

Dexter Filkins: Thanks, David.

David Remnick: Staff writer Dexter Filkins. He's reporting from the southern border and on the political impasse in Washington, appeared in The New Yorker this summer.

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