Days and she deleted she drank some of the water. There are ranches throughout and they have water that are contaminated with bacteria cows can handle and human beings cannot and she became very ill and got to the point she couldnt walk another step. He has a whole group of people with him and they need to catch their ride so he abandoned their 14yearold girl in the desert dragging away the 10yearold brother who begged to stay with her but they took her away and she was left behind. Nobody knew she was missing until the little brother set off the alarm. Three weeks later her body was found by a volunteer. Shes trying to be united with her parents in the United States and thats what im writing about now. In your book acrosstheboard are from the 2001 only 12 of them survived what drew you to this particular story . Ive been writing about the border in different ways for a long time and little brown actually contacted me and asked if i would be interested in doing the buck and i thought no way. Its too much. I have some Border Patrol panels but i thought im not going to deal with the Border Patrol, they scare me and all those things. My editor said well you trust anyone else to do the story, you should tell if. So i started investigating and looking into that in august in the same year with very similar stories. They came and they were promised a job in florida picking oranges and they were recruited. One of the planes was to create the church and force dutch roach and kim there were big smuggling organizations and people dont just automatically i say on the road that we were born in mexico dont have undocumented immigration gland but kicks off until it is ready to go. People bring us or show us the way and they were lied to and were brought and sent into the desert with an experienced guy that almost died in the process is very similar, this experience of meeting this alien terrain youre not ready to deal with and youre not having the proper supplies. A couple of the guys had bottles of pepsi. They didnt know they were going to be and you are dealing with a sort of different case with the writer of the guantanamo diary but it is something similar by the people being held in u. S. Custody. How did he end up in guantanamo . He is a man from eight country in africa and in 2001 a couple months after 9 11, the local authorities at the request came to his house and asked him to come to the Police Station and he drove in his own car and then disappeared. He was taken to jordan where he spent eight months and was then taken to the dog run air force base in afghanistan and then in august of 2002, he was brought to guantanamo and hes been there ever since. He is one of the kindest and funniest people ive ever met. In march of 2014 to go back to meet his family and one of his friends told me a story that captures this spirit talking about when they were Children Together they used to play soccer with the neighborhood children and they would sometimes get competitive and tripped each other and in the effort to make the gold you remember in particular games he was getting competitive and and attract another child fell down and other children would keep going as part of the game he stopped and was apologizing profusely and refused until he made sure that the child was okay. And in the ten years ive known him that is exactly this. He has shown to me such kindness and although he is imprisoned in the circumstances they are horrible. Whats happening with my family and their families okay, just this incredible generosity and spirit. Hes unbelievably funny. One of the stories that we tell, the council asked him early on to tell about all the times hed been interrogated in the military and the circumstances of that. He wrote thats ridiculous, thats like asking Charlie Sheen to describe all of the women that he is dated. [laughter] said hes been in guantanamo since 2002. We filed a petition seeking his release. We had a hearing in front of an impartial judge and the District Of Columbia during which he testified for two days and was subject to crossexamination by the lawyers and at the end of that in 2010 James Robinson ordered that the detention was unlawful and he should be released. He is still there because the Obama Administration appealed the decision and the court found that the law changed slightly in the sense that the judge issued his decision and so it sent the case back for reconsideration and its been standing there ever since. You really unloaded on the policies of new mexico and the United States and that was more than a decade ago. I bet you see these policies are even worse today than they were then. Huge wall. I can tell you that. I dont know. In the book i call it politics of stupidity which came from on the ground folks. There is never the dearth of opportunity to look at those seasons and paranoia and inhumanity in this situation. Every year ive consciously tried to back off a little bit because i was feeling like i had become a border boy. Even when i dont want it they keep pulling me back. One story that i was proud to get in on the for example, theres a reporter i will give her a shout out, a wonderful reporter in the san diego area going on to become nationally renowned but they call them green card soldiers. So, got the opportunity to introduce her to an editor, yes of playboy, mixed feelings about the outcome of the chance to take the story globally. Then we went and did a story about these departed soldiers that came to the United States and were promised by recruiters the opportunity to get their citizenship once they served. And they went to the war for us and then guess what, he parted. Theres a group in tijuana, you can look it up on facebook and talk to them if you want. But they fought for us and were betrayed and thrown out of the country. Or are thousands of them not just mexican guys, they are in europe and so forth. And every day they dress in their full dress uniforms and stand at the border watching americans go home. They hold up flags and people were really shocked i think to hear the story. I know people here are probably involved in a lot of border issues but you will know as soon as you are exposed to that world you have an ironic i. They see the irony that they are not allowed to come home until they die and then their bodies can be brought home and buried with full honors. Some of this does not make sense. So, they are lobbying to try to get permission to come home. Some of them fell in ways that we maintain our kind of classic problems returning veterans have and they should have been sent for counseling. They are lobbying very hard to come home. Amazing story. Your most recent book listed how they ended up in the legal system and again you put a face on how the system choose people up. I wonder if you can talk about the experiences of a young woman that ends up being caught in a prostitution ring and then the imprisoned. Shes a good case, she was brought to the United States as a 15yearold by her aunt had custody of her. Of course she never went to high school, she went to work for us. She worked in fast food joints and for a cleaning company and she told me she had advanced in a cleaning company and had become a manager and was proud of her skills have always, always worked. She had three kids, the second and third child ended up becoming an abuser. One night he practically killed her and she fled the house with the children, applied for another cleaning job and when she got there it turned out to be an oldfashioned brothel operated out of a motel and she fell into the clutches and realized what it was and they threatened to kill her and the kids and send pictures sent pictures of the kids on her cell phone to let her know they knew about the kids so she was forced into this prostitution ring and eventually it got busted and she was charged with a crime of prostitution so she did serve a couple months in jail in phoenix, but of course as any of the immigrants find, they do their time for crime and detention. The legal authorities handed her over and she was brought in. When i met her she was than 32yearsold and had been separated for two years. Keep in mind these children are american citizens and you have to think from the point of du of human rights. The only reason i know about your lawn to end her story has a happy ending is that the university of Arizona Law School they found out about her and they fought and fought and they tried to get her out on compassionate release. They thought her every single step of the way and this was a woman that had committed the crime, she was a damaged women and they wouldnt let her out of detention even as she awaited the deportation hearings even though she was the mother of small children in the and primary caregiver and even though the youngest children were with the abusive father while she was in the Detention Center so she lost every case all the way up to the highest levels and then she started looking at the case began as a good lawyer will do from another angle. She said this woman is trafficked on the ground of her having been an abused woman because the loyal to the turpitude ruled that out. If you are the victim of a crime. The court found she was ineligible because she was a person of bad moral character. So she fought another angle and this is interesting because you have a c. E. Under homeland homeland security, and youve got the Justice Department this time she went through the Justice Department and eventually succeeded in proving that you longer was a victim of sexual trafficking and end titled to the trafficking visa. So her happy ending is she got out, shes back with her kids, her life is going great but in terms of legal stuff, undocumented immigrants are not entitled to attorneys as they fight their immigration cases. She was end titled for the crime of prostitution but not for the immigration. She just had a good fortune to come to the attention of this pro bono attorney. There are many other immigrants i would dare to say that majority of them but never have the benefit of legal help and a social worker told me i said isnt it great she got out she said yes its great but i have another woman with the exact same story and shes getting deported. And you didnt visit them where the folks are detained. Can you talk about that and its like to go to the presence . Stomach some of you may know that its in between arizona and phoenix hidden away in the countryside by the the sign. They brought a huge chunk of land and its full of criminal prisons. Its this gigantic piece of land its only one of the many enterprises. They run many regular prison systems for the state of arizona and for the state of hawaii for some reason that i was interested in the Detention Center is the thirdlargest in the United States they are making money from the United States government to house these immigrants into the more money they spent on the immigrants to lower their profits are. People are treated badly, the guards are paid not very well, they are fairly brutal to the people. They actually use solitary confinement for a disciplinary measure. And these are people but again, anybody that is in the Detention Center is not fair on a kernel charge. They are there any status violation on immigration which isnt considered a crime and that is why they are not entitled to a lawyer but they are treated exactly like terminal prisoners and one of the bad things about the private Prison Corporations is Corporation Says that they are very harsh with the families. They have very few family visiting hours and when people do visit, the guards treat them horrible. I could see how nasty they were to the kids that were there to visit their detained parents. So its a huge thing. We have 250 Detention Centers and a good half of them are run by private corporations who are making very good Money Holding these detained immigrants. Talk a little bit about some of the experiences that he writes about in his book. He started writing after he first met with lawyers from his legal team and the book talks about the moment from when hes picked up two when he gets to guantanamo and the most perfect treatment that he received so from 200322004, he was beaten and threatened with a threatened to bring his mother to guantanamo as the only female detainee if he didnt cooperate and they talked about what that meant and of course you can imagine what that meant. He was deprived of all sensory said he couldnt see light. He was forced to drink water so that he couldnt sleep. He was deprived of food. Its a horrible story. His treatment there is just her were horrific. They talk about that abuse and the abuse and it was horrific. The abuse stopped but the suffering has not. He continues to be detained, thousands of miles from his family. In u. S. Prisons the conditions are horrible. I dont know how it is an immigration detention but when youre convicted of a crime and incarcerated you can have contact with your family and call them on the phone when you are worried about them are lonely that he cant do that. He is hes limited to phone calls that are set up on a schedule that is approved by the government and so one of the tragedies is that he is very close to his mother which is why the u. S. Military used threats against him to try to get him to cooperate and while he was incarcerated his mother passed away. He had a phone call arranged and they were afraid to time because hes so isolated so they told him she was sick but that was it and he figured something was wrong so he sent a request to talk to his lawyers to try to figure it out and it took two weeks for the phone call to happen and ultimately we got it and i have to tell him over the phone that hed lost the most important person to him so we are grateful hes no longer he is no longer being tortured but certainly he is still suffering and suffering should and. In your book across the wider you looked at the deplorable conditions of people in the 80s and 90s if i recall. I wonder if you can talk about what it is then and have the return to see what its like . One of the interesting things is that it was a slightly porous dam where the tide would catch and swirl and some of the tide of the bodies would settle in to try and try to make do and one of the places a lot of the immigrants immigrant provision would settle was the tijuana garbage dump and it was probably coming you dont know this but its on the hill and theres another smaller hill rising out out of it and if you climb up that hill, you have the most beautiful panoramic view in san diego into the garbage pickers sit there and watch san diego into the light did you think if i could take every american there and say you want to understand undocumented immigration come here is someone trying to find a rubber dog took to feed the children looking at disneyland 24 hours a day across the fence. Its hard to say no, stay there. It is a life of deprivation and horror, hunger. On christmas eve, 14 babies died of exposure. Using thats not possible. San diego. They are on a hill and its cold and rainy and windy and they are in bad health and they died redirect in plastic trying to stay alive. The conditions today are peculiar and we of course have had the ear option of marco warfare which changed the ground game pretty radically for a while though realizing that it got more american visitors in disney world every year sort of self policed for a while and backed off on the violence and a lot of those garbage dump people have realized their version of the American Dream and the parents picked garbage and put their kids in school and gave everything they had quite literally to put those kids in school and they learned to read and got an education and now they are not seeking garbage caregiving jobs in tijuana which is fascinating and in spite of all the kind of propaganda you hear about the simplest tidal wave of invasion, the tide is going backwards. Harpers magazine reported this month 140,000 undocumented people down this year, people going back so people are staying and changing and i kind of interesting side for me little bit more positive in some ways come at the tijuana garbage dump, a guy opened up a taco stand because theres 300 families living permanently. She changes it into an internet cafe. [laughter] so the garbage dump has an internet cafe and the kids that learned to read of course have learned computing. And so these kids were going to the talk of stand calling up youtube and seeing all their favorite bands, and in other words, information, art, culture, that cant be stopped by barbed wire. We are in a world now where the least of those are connected to the most of us and that is something transformative and interesting. Do we have a twitter feed for the tijuana garbage dump . People are now getting cheap phones cheaper phones and they do in fact do facebook. I have garbage dump people that follow me on the face. [laughter] they ask me for money. [laughter] you told me before that you were drawn to the stories because they remind you of the stories you wrote about your own family experiences as they wish the immigrants in the turn of the last centurys talk a little bit about that. St. Patricks day is coming up here on thursday can and what come and what is interesting is st. Patricks day as an example of how the United States as a whole we celebrate our immigrant ancestors, Everybody Loves the irish now, they are great. It wasnt so great back in the 1850s when a million desperately poor refugees from the irish famine which is more appropriately called the great hunger because england was shipping food out of ireland the whole time that the famine was going on. They flooded the shores of the United States, 1 Million People. It puts you in mind of kind of what is happening and everybody says who are these people . They are catholics. Thats going to threaten. So they were considered extremely alienated the majority of them actually spoke irish because they were that were just like what we see today, so many Indigenous People coming up from Central Amer