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Chapter 1: What is the significance of Ezra Hullett's death in the Dominican Republic?
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All right, listen up. The Jonas Brothers here. Our podcast is called Hey Jonas. Since everyone has a podcast, we wanted to as well.
And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend Niall Horan is joining the show.
How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with Slow Hands.
Slow Hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, our taste so good can't be about food.
You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done.
You too, Joe.
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Chapter 2: How has U.S. immigration policy influenced the Dominican Republic?
Not only were they essential to deporting Haitians during Trujillo's reign, but they also forced the Haitian population into the sugar-producing regions of the country. And because he couldn't deploy overt state violence there in the same way that he did along the border, they came up with a new plan.
Any Haitian immigrant detained in the area would just be brought back to whatever sugar plantation would pay their immigration taxes, essentially creating these zones, which still very much exist to this day, of Haitians living in and around these sugar plantations that they also work at.
I should say that this wasn't a codified policy, but that it coexisted with other tactics throughout the years. Yeah. The Trujillo government also instituted a policy that made all Haitians who owned land or businesses to not be able to work outside of the sugar-producing regions, according to a journal article titled A Veil of Legality by Amelia Hinson.
I visited some of these sugar plantations in 2023, and many of the Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent who live there are descendants of the ones Trujillo pushed into the region. While anti-Haitianism already existed before Trujillo He cemented it into the political structures of the Dominican Republic to the point that it still continues incredibly strong into the modern day.
About 51% of Dominicans believe that immigration harms the country per a 2024 poll by the polling firm Latino Barometro. Many Haitians come to the Dominican Republic seeking a better life for themselves and their families, much like immigrants in the U.S. And similarly to the U.S., getting a visa or becoming a citizen for them is extremely difficult.
This isn't to say that there aren't a lot of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic, and I should also say that they are by far the largest immigrant group in the country, which makes sense because they're next-door neighbors. The construction and the sugar cutting industry are completely dependent on cheap Haitian labor.
The sugar cutting industry is heavily reliant on this labor, a lot of which is done by undocumented immigrants. Many people over the years have called it a quote unquote modern form of slavery. I've been to these camps and what they endure for extremely little pay is horrific. I went there at the tail end of 2023.
And while there are some places set up by the companies that own those sugar producing regions, they're called batallas inside of the sugar cane mazes. Some of the batallas have houses made out of cement with electricity, and some are completely degraded, made from wood that's rotting, and they have no access to running water or electricity. There have been, over the years...
attempts by both human rights groups and the companies that own those regions. It wasn't benevolently, is my opinion on it, but more because of the pressure that they've received over the years to move these people into somewhat better conditions. And thankfully, for some of them, they have. For others, they have not.
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Chapter 3: What historical context shapes the Dominican-Haiti border today?
Right? Yeah. So yeah, this market in the Habong is where a lot of people on the Haiti side of the border are able to buy and sell a lot of stuff they wouldn't otherwise have access to. Sure. So the bridge that runs over the Massacre River that connects the Habong to Ounamint is within feet of the national market. And like I mentioned, all encircled by suspense guards.
Any Haitian who would try to pass that fence without going past the official checkpoint would likely be detained and deported immediately. if they're caught by the border guards. And as we know, even if a border presents itself as extremely rigid, a lot of it is for show, at least in my experience with the DR Haiti border, right? A lot of it is theater, security theater. Yeah. Yeah.
So when I was there, I spent the better part of my time there just watching DGM trucks bring dozens of people to the border, then watched as CIS front guards herded them out of the Dominican Republic. Jesus. Yeah, it was incredibly inhumane and heartbreaking.
I remember taking this picture of a little girl with a suitcase who was justāand this wasn't a person being deported by the trucks, but this was a Haitian person who was leavingā Of a little girl just waiting for her dad with a suitcase. Jesus. That image really sticks in my mind.
Yeah.
Yeah. So the thing about the border, as I mentioned earlier, even if it seems to be incredibly hard, it's still porous in several places. 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.
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Chapter 4: How do current immigration enforcement practices reflect historical legacies?
So it's more comparable to settler societies like the US, Canada, and Australia. Such demographics necessarily led to a difference in how indigenous peoples were managed between projects. Liberia's system depended upon indigenous labor, while Israel's project has generally prioritized securing land while minimizing dependence on Palestinian labor.
In many periods of Zionist history, Palestinian labor was actively displaced in favor of exclusively Jewish labor. But again, settler colonialism operates according to a logic of elimination. That might often be expulsion and extermination, but it can also mean assimilation, confinement, and whatever else.
Again, the settlers want the land, the native becomes an obstacle, and different settler societies develop different methods for dealing with that obstacle. The US had its ethnic cleansings, removals, reservation system, and boarding schools. Australia had frontier wars, stolen generations, and land dispossessions. Canada had assimilation policies like reservation schools.
South Africa, under white rule, couldn't expel the black majority, so they maintained apartheid, controlled reservations, and extracted labor. But again, what matters for defining settler colonialism is that indigenous sovereignty is displaced and settler control over the land is secured. Of course, indigenous people in all cases do not take this abuse lying down.
From the very beginning of Liberian settlement, indigenous peoples resisted. The Kru, Grebo, Vai, and numerous other ethnic groups fought against territorial expansion, taxation, forced labor, and attempts by the Liberian states to extend its authority into the interior. And despite generations of American-Liberian dominance, indigenous resistance never entirely disappeared.
Eventually, the political order that had governed Liberia for over a century began to crack. Economic crisis, corruption, and growing resentment towards settler domination culminated in a military coup in 1980, led by Samuel Doe, overthrowing the government of President William Tolbert and ending more than a century of uninterrupted Amerigo-Liberian political dominance.
Now, that coup clearly did not create a free or egalitarian society. Liberia would soon face dictatorship, civil war, and immense suffering. But it did mark the collapse of the old settler elite's monopoly on state power, and efforts at recovery in the country are ongoing. Palestinian resistance, on the other hand, faced a very different trajectory.
From the beginning of Zionist settlement, Palestinians resisted displacement and land loss through protests, strikes, political organizing, and armed revolt. The Great Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 saw Palestinians launch a massive strike and uprising against both British colonial rule and Zionist settlement.
Decades later came the First and Second Intifadas, mass movements that combined protest, civil disobedience, community organizing, and armed resistance. Palestinians have built a number of institutions alongside international solidarity movements in an effort to sustain their efforts under occupation, siege, exile, and apartheid.
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Chapter 5: What misconceptions about anarchists does the indictment highlight?
But the fewer people who have that misunderstanding, the harder it becomes to make that argument. Yeah.
I think the point in this indictment that perfectly illustrates the fundamental misapprehension that the government has about what an anarchist is and what we're up to is the phrase, the aggressive use of shields.
Yeah, that was what I was going to clip out as well.
Because as you say, we're not food and bombs.
Chapter 6: How do anarchists support each other in their communities?
Yeah.
Right. It's food, not bombs. We're feeding each other. We're protecting kindergartens where, you know, we're providing security for meetings. We're mostly, frankly, feeding each other.
Yeah. Yeah.
Not always very well, right?
Yeah, a little overemphasis on badly cooked eggplant.
Too many human beings, possibly. But, you know, but we're doing our best out here. And maybe I actually think that the idea that anarchists are people who engage in the aggressive use of shields is actually, in some respects, really precise.
Yeah. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the anti-data center movement?
Yeah. If these people all walk, it would be a great album title for someone. There has been a lot of reaction to several federal cases in the last 12 months, right? Maybe 16, 18, God knows how long we've been into this. But this is not that. This is not Prairieland. As we spoke about before, more than half the 18 USC cases in Minnesota have already been dropped.
Can you maybe help situate this in a place that helps people who are struggling with a sky is falling feeling right now? Well, I think one really nice thing is the arraignments are, I believe, still ongoing as we are speaking of the people who were raided and arrested this morning.
And last I heard, all five whose cases had been called were ordered released with conditions of not talking to each other, with one exception for people who are roommates, but...
Chapter 8: How does the podcast address the recent police violence in Minnesota?
That's interesting and probably a whole other conversation. But that's a big deal that people were facing conspiracy charges, which are very serious federal charges, and were released today at their arraignments. I think it shows it's an indication of where the courts are at. And also just these cases are taking place in these cities where the whole world watched them.
the federal government do absolute terror and people do beautiful human loving each other in all the ways that they could to try and keep people alive while federal agents killed people. So it's just the context that it is in. It's super different than rural Texas, you know, and Even the facts that we are dealing with in this are just less hard.
You know, there's not allegations that someone shot a cop, which is a harder narrative to overcome in the court of public opinion. And the allegations generally also seem even less serious than the recent indictment that came out in Michigan for the Palestine protesters. So I just think that's an interesting grounding thing.
And on the other hand, we did recently see that with the Spokane three people convicted of conspiracy, which was that's the second one after Prairieland. So while a lot of these cases around the country have been dropped, not all of them have. But it's hard to imagine this being super successful given where it's taking place.
And I think that when we look at Minneapolis and we're like, okay, Minneapolis was theāor the Twin Cities. I'm sorry, St. Paul. I'm so sorry. I keep accidentally doing that. St. Paul, you're also wonderful. And people have done so much work, and they have been this, like, guiding light forā a huge chunk of people living in the United States of America in this past year, right?
Like looking how people have come together to defend their neighbors and themselves. And like, I think that it's important that we say that unity has to continue. And so it's like, the reason that I am optimistic is because of the actions that I saw in Minneapolis. Sorry, I didn't go to St. Paul, but you know, the actions I saw in Minnesota, But that has to continue during court support.
So it's not like just a, oh, we've got this, right? But instead, by continuing to say we are looking, this does matter to us, this matters to everybody, I'm hoping that that kind of continues to influence things. And I think we saw that today, the arraignments, the courtroom was packed. It was overflowing. So people were outside chanting. And that's when tear gas was deployed.
And there was unprecedented. I mean, it just was unprecedented here at the federal courthouse to see that kind of force used. But there's tons of people outside. You know, this happened this morning and the community is not having it. So. Yeah. Even though they're car-kicking anarchists. Cars are living in fear.
We need to remember, too, that no action is over until the last person accused is home and free.
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