Claire's Brother
speaker
2,353 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 20 Jun
Claire's Brother’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
When I was in the Batellas, in the sugar-producing regions, which are the little towns that they have, or little settlements that they have inside of the sugarcane maze,
I spoke to someone who had been detained outside of the sugarcane areas without their work permit and then deported.
His family had to pay a buskong, essentially what the U.S.
would call a coyote, to bring them back across the border.
However, this forced him into what's essentially debt bondage to a buskong because the worker couldn't really pay because of the sugar plantations pay a pittance.
So they were essentially in a recursive cycle of
Some part of my money has to go to the buskong and then whatever's left has to go to paying for my family and my needs.
And it was never enough, sadly.
Yeah.
So one of the news videos that I watched as part of research for this was at PBS, like a seven minute clip where they talked to a Haitian man as they were being deported along the border.
And when they went to talk to the guy's family the next day, the guy who had been deported was there because he crossed the border through the river overnight.
And you can hear the astonishment in the narrator's voice, even though that script reading was probably weeks later.
And it's just an example of how these borders are more porous than the state wants them to be and wants them to appear to be.
So I wanted to start finishing off by mentioning that the Dominican government is now actively collaborating with the Trump administration's deportation campaign by agreeing to accept third country deportees from the U.S.
under the initiative.
This agreement, as I hope I've shown throughout the course of this episode, is another action in a long line of collaboration between the DR and the U.S.
when it comes to immigration enforcement.
Noticeably, the agreement leaves out Haitian nationals, and the U.S.
is supposed to provide funding to ensure that these deportees have a quote-unquote adequate conditions for the global detention project, which really remains to be seen if that's the case.
But if the conditions in the current immigration detention centers are anything to go by, I'm really not holding out hope that they're adequate conditions.
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