Eyder Peralta
speaker
76 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 10 Jan
Eyder Peralta’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah. But, you know, I think another thing about these migrants, right, is they've been told that throughout. A lot of these migrants, they've been at this for years. You know, a lot of these Venezuelan migrants, you know, they first started in Colombia and then, you know, they crossed the jungle in Panama and then, you know, they went up to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, right?
And so we were catching these migrants at the tail end of a journey. I think that's a lot of why they're saying, we don't care what the American president says, we've been going through hell. And whatever he says is nothing compared to what we've already been through.
You know, this story was born out of a conversation I had with my wife. You know, we live in Mexico City, and Mexico City is a stop along the way for migrants. So you see a lot of migrant families. And my wife had a question, right? She was saying, I don't know that I have the capacity emotionally to put my family through a trip like this.
And what she was saying is, is I have a hard time understanding migrants who do. I was like, you know, that's probably a question that many of our listeners have. I had met this Mexican photographer, Pedro Anza. I had met him in Haiti. when we were doing some coverage in Haiti. And he rides this train a lot. He's working on a long-term project on this train.
And he had told me, you know, you should ride the train. It gives you a very different understanding of the migrant experience.
I did. I have to say, I didn't realize how hard this was. You know, I was coming off of an assignment in Lebanon. I was there as Israel started bombing. It was missiles and you could feel the force of them, right? So, like, I was like, well, you know, what's getting on a train, right? It's all relative.
But I was wrong.
Scott, like we spent a 12-hour part of that train ride was at night. And it was in the high 30s. And that train is moving at 50 miles an hour. So like just the wind, right?
And there are these people who help the migrants. And this lady, she saw me and the photographer I was with. And she said, you guys are crazy. You don't know what you're getting into. And she gave us this very thin blanket. And I was like, I'm not going to take this. Give it to one of the migrants, right? I'm just here. As a reporter, I'm not doing this. And she's like, you're going to want this.
And so, like, I took it sort of with a little shame. And in the middle of the night, I was just holding on to that blanket.
It was difficult and you're just, you know, there's so many people on that train that you can't, you can't really move, but there's also like not really body warmth that you're getting like from other people. Nobody's talking. It's so loud. The wind, right? You're just, like, you look up and all you see is, like, there was, like, a full moon, right?
And, like, you really can't see anything on either side.
The sun. Literally all I could think about is, what am I doing? Like, why did we do this? And when is that sun going to come up?
I think my editor always tells me, like, Ader, you know, the chaos will be there tomorrow, right? Whatever chaos that is, right? Haiti will be there tomorrow. She's like, let's take a breath. Because my instinct, right, as a journalist is... is let's go. I grew up in Miami and the first house we stayed at, it was like a corner house and like a big intersection. Right.
And so there was always car crashes and like no one could keep me from going to see the car crash. Right. It was like the thing I did, um, So I always wanna run toward things, but there's always a conversation between me and my editors about risk versus benefit. It's interesting because on this train, I had a different opinion than my photographer friend.
We had gotten on a couple of trains and they were moving in the wrong direction, everybody got off, and I was not comfortable on top of that train. You know, you're two stories up. I'm afraid of, like, Ferris wheels. So, like, I don't like heights.
The slow height of it, no. And then, like, sometimes, you know, you have to walk on top of those things and you have to jump from cart to cart. And that...
That made me really uncomfortable. I rarely am physically scared, right? Yeah. I was physically scared. And I sat down at some point with Pedro Anza, the photographer who was with me on this trip. And I said, I'm not doing this. And I'm like, we won't even use it for the story, I said. Because actually, in the end, we used about one paragraph of that awful 12 hours overnight of freezing cold.
And so in my mind, I was making that calculation, right? And he stopped me and he said, you will never understand what they go through unless you get on the train with them.
You know, just as President Trump took office, I was in Ciudad Juarez at the border. And I actually met some of the same migrants that had been on the train with me. The same people. The same people. And they were waiting in line because they had gotten... a CPP-1 appointment, which is this app that the Biden administration used to have. And that's kind of like, that is the glimmer of hope.
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