Hi, everyone. My talk is going to be on breaking PRNG, pseudo-random generator. There have been many talks in the past on PRNG, a good one on Black Hat in 2013 and 2013 about various types of PRNG. In general, it's really low talk with a lot of content. I'm going to try to focus on one algorithm, so bear with me, it's going to be a mathematics a bit, but really easy stuff, multiplication, addition, so you should follow. It's going to be very visual, no absolute code, so it should be really visual. There's one recent talk I should mention that specifically addressed Merchant Twister that was done at B-Site Las Vegas, which is also a good talk because it focused only on one algorithm. Instead of seeing so many algorithms in one talk and not understanding fully one algorithm, it's good to have a really specific subject, and my target will be LCG, so linear congruential generator. So the way I divide my talk, there's going to be a first part, which is going to be a vulnerability that I found in a Java framework specifically in Struts and Spring. LCG are in many languages, so it's a categories of a generator I'm going to present, so it's also going to apply on another language, and after at the end I'm going to present tooling, so what can you do in your pentest that you do, but the first part will be more theoretical, but also how the exploitation works, because since you need to understand really how it works to exploit it if you have the source code, or if you're trying to guess how the stem works, it's really important to have a good understanding of how it works. You can not just blindly use tools. So, yeah. So first, there are many types of pseudo-random generators. So pseudo-random generators are generators that are not targeting security, but they are in a language to generate value, because we always need random value if it's a game that you need to generate anything that is not linear. But the most common implementation we see is linear congruential generator. So the language, if they use LCG, it's going to be the same algorithm, but they use different constants. So it's a smaller variation, but the mechanism I'm going to present, if you see an LCG in another language, it's going to be the same thing, just different constants, same operation. Arribaise, it's a different category that we see across a different language. Mercent Twister is used. So in PHP, when you see anti-rand, that's Mercent Twister, but that's not the focus of this talk. And there are many algorithms that are specific to language, for example, V8, as its own specific algorithm. Same thing for Pearl. So there are still many algorithms, but LCG and Mercent Twister are the most common one. So this is the focus of my presentation. So you're probably not going to be able to read the snippet of code, but I hope so. So just a small puzzler to maybe have an interest for what's going to follow in the presentation. We have a snippet of code that is taken from Spring, which is actually still in the code. So they need to generate ID for various types of things. So it's going to be unique identifier for messaging, for ID in database, but it's basically a good representation of an ID. So in two lines, what it does is first generating with secure random value, then it's using this value as a seed for the random, to a random instance, and then it's obtaining value from it. So the important step to identify, so maybe I give you 10 seconds to think about it. So the first part is generating value from secure random, then passing it to random instance, and then obtaining the next value. So the thing to see and a potential weakness, it's potentially the developer saw the implementation of random and saw, okay, the default seed is just the timestamp, current millisecond. So we're going to try to have something secure. So we're going to generate a random seed to be sure that nobody can predict our value. But the thing is that the seed is secure, but the random instance is going to be used, the state is going to be predictable. And this is what my talk would focus. So if we can receive some value, we're going to be able to predict all the previous one and all the following one, okay? So just to highlight that first it was secure random that was used, but in the end the values are generated from a random instance. So in other language, the different part time is we have random API and secure random, and just in another language in C sharp, you're going to see system random, and there's in the cryptography namespace random number generators. So in our language, you're always going to have the basic random one that is the quickest to use, and then there's a cryptographically secure API. So what's really the difference between those two types of API? So LCG versus secure random, what goal is it trying to achieve? So first, the goal is not security. The idea is to have equal distribution. So if you're generating random value for a game or to just generate data, you don't want to have the same value repeat. So you generate two, three, and then all of a sudden it's just the same value. So it breaks the purpose of having a random value. So it should be equalized, equal distribution among a large set of values. So that's the objective. But so far, nothing about I cannot predict the next value or the previous one. And also performance. So if you're doing a game and you're generating values or you need anything that doesn't require security, you don't want to spend too much CPU effort on generating those values because it's going to slow down your application if you have no security requirements. On the other end, cryptographically secure random have different objectives. So first, the equal distribution is also going to be a characteristic because if the first few bits are always, have more probability to be such a value than others, then it's not cryptographically secure. But the most important criteria is it needs to be unpredictable. So if you have one value, you shouldn't be able to predict the next one. So that's what those API has as a contract. So we know the API says it's secure and the other one has comment in the documentation shouldn't be used as a secure, but if you see those API being used, so is it explorable in practice? And the answer is most of the time it's going to be explorable. So the next step, now that we know that the SCG are not secure, I'm going to describe how an SCG work and we're going to see where it can be attacked. So the SCG algorithm will be the same if it's an SCG in whatever language. The constant, if I mention some, it will be associated to the Java implementation. But it's going to be the same algorithm across different language. So you're going to see each box being as a state of the value. So as the added box is created, it's just an evolution of the value. So everything starts with a seed. So the seed could be a timestamp or a random value or a static value. But we need a starting point. So that's the state of the SCG at the time zero. So the first step we do in an SCG, it's a multiplication with a constant. So the language will choose a generally big value. Then there's an add-in with a generally small value. And then the 48-bit are going to be kept. It's the most, the less significant one that are going to be kept. But sometimes it's truncation due to overflow. But in this case, in Java, it's really the only kept 48-bit. Then we have our second state. So that's a seed. But that's not the value that we first generated. So the first integer we're going to take from the seed, only the 42-bit, but the most significant one that were kept from the previous state. So then we have one value generated. And this is the same state we're going to go through for each value we want to generate. So basically, we have generate value one and then value two. It's going to be the same operation one after the other. So, okay. So we have the same step, but with a value. So we have an initial seed of 1337, so we multiply it with the big multiplier. We have another value. We add it BL, which is just B, actually. And then we do a XOR with those FFF. So actually at the bottom is the current value. So we multiply the value with this constant. Then we add the value B, which is L just for long. It's an artifact. And then we XOR it with FFF to just keep the bits we want, the less significant one. Then this is going to be RSC that is going to be used for the next value. And then the last operation is the less significant bit that are truncated. Then this is going to be the NIN value that is generated by the pseudo-random generator. So we can see that through those steps, we don't have the complete information. It's not reversible just by mathematical operation because we have lost the least significant bit. And then we also truncation at the last step before obtaining the seed. And the multiplication generally overflow the value. But an attacker will have at least one of these values. So that's one of the attack scenarios we're looking for. So if we have the first value, and for example, as a scenario you can keep in mind if a website has a reset link for password that they are sending to the email, they're going to need to generate a value. So at some point for your user, you're clicking the button for your email, I want to reset my password so they send you a link to your email and it's going to be the first value for example. But the thing is that if you trigger the same operation for another account that you're targeting, you shouldn't be able to predict this value because this way you'll be able to reset its password and then you're going to win. So what we're targeting with those operations, there's actually one step. Okay, so the objective is to go from one value to the other. The thing is that there's only one step and this part that we need to, we're missing some information. And it's the part where the least significant bit were targeted. Other than that if we start from the, if we have the C number two, we can just go through all the operation and then we have the next value. So first thing we see is there's not that much information that we're missing. So if we have a value, the only part we're missing to generate the next value, it's a 16 bit. So the only thing we need in those cases is to brute force the 16 bit and then for each try do the same loop and then if we obtain actually for an attacker to do this attack, the easiest way is to have two value. So if the attacker can generate, for example, a reset password for two times, he'll be able to take the value, the two value, the sequential value and then just do the operation and then once the try he makes result with the same value, then he can guess it's potentially the good seed that he has found. So then with the seed, he can generate all the subsequent values. So once we have found it, then we can just obtain all the next value. So one thing we need to consider is that most LCG will generate ints. But the thing is that the implementation of the software will represent those ints in different forms. So sometime the int will be, the API will call with next long instead of just obtaining the int. So most of the time, the API will just concentrate two values. So a quick question, if I need two ints to find the seed, if I get how many long value do I need to be able to find the seed? Anybody? Guillem-Ross pointing one value, that's exact, because if we have just one long value or actually eight bytes will be also equivalent, we have two subsequent value. So we'll be able to do the bridge and find the seed without doing many requests and it will work. So that's one way. Also another potential implementation, sometime next int will be called and from this int, it will be a convert to an alphabet. So we're losing more bits and more analysis and more brute force. So I don't know if I have that much of time. Perfect. So with the screen being a bit small, instead of opening my console, it's really just two common. You're going to see it's going to be quite easy. So I'm going to present it just on the slide, but it's how to use a prankster that supports many LCG. It also supports other implementation but the prankster is currently the most versatile tool to support many implementation and I'm going to show you what things you need to consider in order to use it on a potential next pentas. So the scenario, we have a recovered password functionality. So we have reset our own password. So we have received various things. So for those who cannot read the API, it's ACME slash recover. And then we have a parameter token. So we have three values that we know. And then we have generate one for another user, but we don't have on our end this value. So our objective is to predict what's going to be the next value. So the first step to do with prankster is just to accumulate those values and these will be our input values. So just create an input that text and then it's going to be the content that's going to include just the token we have. So the next step, we're going to do the recover version with prankster. So it's the R parameter. Then the algorithm. So the algorithm, you're going to find it, it's going to be guessing most of the case. So unless you have access to the source code and you know exactly what the implementation, you're going to need to guess, okay, I see it's probably JavaScript V8 because I see this framework. It's expressed, for example. If it's a Tomcat server, so potentially it's going to be a PRNG in Java. So you're going to need to do a good guess. And if you have no idea about the technology, it's going to be pretty hard because there are many implementation and there are also other parameters to do a bit of guessing. But the first part that you need to identify is what's the algorithm. So in this case, it's PRNG Java for the GVM. And the second parameter is the alphabet. So for each next M that is called, we guess that if it's a weak implementation with a weak PRNG, it's going to be converted to a character. So this is the part where you're going to need to do a bit of guessing. So it's not going to include alphanumerical with an uppercase, lowercase, all that time. So a good way to maybe identify this alphabet, it's having more samples. So if you have just two samples, you could do a lot of guessing. But if you have many, you can have a more precise guess on what was the alphabet being used. So the command is really easy. So once you have all those parameters, the last thing you need to do is put in input all your generated value. And PRNG server will recover the seed. So this seed is going to be the state of your PRNG prior the value that you have put as input. So if I go back, the seed being printed out 113, this is the seed prior generating the GKC, the first value. So the next step, we want to generate the next value. So we have the state of the PRNG. So it's really just a smaller step that is required. So we have a more parameter. So again, we have, since we have a potential seed, the same algorithm, the same alphabet that we have used. And then we specify the seed and the length. So how many character do we need to generate? So in this case, we have found a seed. It's potential that, in some case, there's many potential seeds. So you're going to need to retire a few. And then the length. So in this case, we have four values. So what would be the fourth one? And now we have what was the token that was generated from the user we're targeting. And PRNG server, that's one tool that will cover most LCG. There is on twister, if you're looking to attack Merson twister. But this one has many algorithm support. And depending on the implementation, it's possible that you need to modify the tool to make it work to what you're targeting. And that's it. That's the end of my short


Hey everybody, welcome back to my Drupal orthodoxy. My name is David and this is the Deck Review. Hey, today we're going to look at the second Hive Deck, Hive 2 from Brandon Hong and Kingswild Project. This is the second in the Hive series, signed and illustrated by Brandon Hong and released by Jackson Robinson and the Kingswild Project. It was funded on a crowd funding site, but through Kingswild funded. So it was actually private, through Kingswild only. It wasn't on Kickstarter or something else like that. These cards were printed from the expert playing card company and they were printed in two editions. There was this, this green standard edition and then there was a limited edition of 750. Tech Case is foil embossed, silver foil and done in this green color wrapped throughout. It also has a little bit of embossing there as well. It says the Hive across the front. The Tech Case front has a lot of these interlocking circles. This side says Kingswild Artist Series and so does this side. The bottom has some ad copy about Kingswild Project and the top says the Hive. You have these little rose circled symbols all throughout as well. And then the back design of the Tech Case is the back design of the cards. There's no tuck seal, which I like. And then here you've got a little beehive right here. Okay. And it's all done in silver foil. And then the inside tuck is lined with the little roses as well. And that's really cool.  So that is pretty much it for the Tech Case. Let's take a look at these cards. Here's a closer look at the back design. You can see those rose icons in the corners as well as the interlocking circles there in the center. The Hive 2, it's a really great deck. It holds true not only to the series, but also gives the brand a new look. I think that's cool. You know, Hive 1, if you remember I did a review for that a while back. It had a great kind of craft paper look that didn't have any graphic lines anywhere. But the Hive 2 is kind of the opposite. It has a solid base of beautiful and varied line work with solid blocks of color. With this deck, you're going to get two jokers. You're going to get a single joker. He's holding a flower. It's kind of like looking down as he's walking. And then the second joker, he's pulling bees out of a magic hat. Your Ace of Spades is a beehive in the center of a giant spade pip. And at the bottom it says Kings Wild Project. Your Pips and Indicee cards are all completely original. You can see that the placement of the Pips is original. The Pips themselves are original. You've got a unique font up there in the corner as well. And so it kind of really ties the whole theme of the deck together, giving it a very original, very creative look. Brendan's Quartz are also unique for this deck as well. Each one of them has his unique, very cartoon style look. And I think it really ties the deck together. Well, that is it for this deck review. As always, recommend that you like this video just so other people can find it faster. We also recommend that you subscribe to this channel just to stay up to date on the latest in cards and card magic. Now, if you want to follow me on social media, you can. I'm at facebook.com slash magic orthodoxy, twitter.com slash magic orthodoxy and instagram.com slash magic underscore orthodoxy. Thanks, bye.


Righty, so we're back, we just released a video and we have stumbled upon some more information. Allegedly, thank you, Jeffree Star, for teaching me that word and how to use it to prevent yourself from any legal troubles. So allegedly, Cedar Point is going to have a ton of minor announcements for the 2020 season celebrating its 150th anniversary. Super exciting. So on December 11th, as you already know, they'll be making an announcement 150 days before their opening operational day. And that announcement is going to entail a lot of things. So allegedly, it sounds like Cedar Point will be announcing a few rides. If we're correct, it could be plural rides. Couple new restaurants, upgrades to Top Thrill Dragster, their carousel, potentially allegedly, the campsite in the back of the park is going to expand even more to where that old hotel was. I forget what the hotel was called. Again, correct me down below, as always, blah, blah, blah, I'm a GP channel. We just somehow always come across information, whatever it is, what it is. But yeah, let's just start with Top Thrill. So allegedly, Top Thrill Dragster, I'm gonna overuse the word allegedly a lot. So again, as you know, amusement and status videos, blah, blah, blah, rumors and speculation, allegedly, Top Thrill Dragster is going to get an upgrade to its engine motor room. And it'll be getting a new engine and motor for the ride. So maybe it'll be more operational in 2020. That's super exciting. Now let's go back to the front of the park. So on December 11th, allegedly, Cedar Point will be making an announcement. It sounds like maybe the maintenance team will be making the announcement decked out in some swag. And allegedly, some of the announcements will entail an upgrade to the carousel. So the organ should or potentially could be working for the 2020 season with a new LED lighting package. There's gonna be a new Salt Laffy Taffy, whatever you guys call it. I have no idea what it is, Salt Taffy, Salt Water Taffy building up near the front gate. And allegedly, you're gonna get a new Mexican restaurant located at, I believe, one of the burrito shops up near the Kitty Kingdom area. And allegedly, there's a campsite going back here with that old hotel right on the beach, potentially a campsite. And they've already started fencing off the lake or pond where the paddle wheel boats are gonna be going for the 2020 season. And the 2020 rides, no one really knows where they're going. If there is gonna be rides coming allegedly to the 2020 season, they would probably be in the Wicked Twister area of the park in the midway, cause there's a little room there, but who knows, they could end up anywhere.  Again, that we don't know. We don't know what's coming in 2020 rides-wise, but if we were to predict there's probably still some more to come in terms of rides through Cedar Point in 2020. And yeah, who knows? It's definitely getting really interesting. Everything said in this video is mere speculation, rumors, blah, blah, blah, everything's legit. And hopefully you enjoyed this quick video on what to expect on the December 11th announcement for Cedar Point. And hopefully we end up being right about a lot of these announcements. Again, you have the saltwater taffy, the Mexican restaurant, upgrades to top fill dragster, the carousel up front with the LED package and the organ working and some rides, plural. If we're correct, hopefully, and the campsite upgrades and then obviously the peninsula and parking upgrades, blah, blah, blah, all that. Hopefully ends up being what comes forward for the 2020 season. And yeah, Winterfest is probably down the roads too. Probably 2021 if we had to take a guess, but yeah. Anyways, again, hopefully you enjoyed this video. Had to make a quick update to update the small additions for the 2020 season on the December 11th announcement as our prediction. Don't forget to hit the like button, subscribe, if you haven't, and share this video for others to enjoy. Have a good one, guys. Bye.


Well, good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us here today for those of you who are here in the room and for those who are joining us via live stream. Thank you to our partners and our hosts here today, the Gerald R. Ford School for Public Policy and the International Policy Center. And we also want to give a special thanks to C-SPAN for the interest they've taken in this conversation today and for joining us here to capture the discussion. I'm Lynette Clemetson. I'm Director of Wallace House, which is home to the Knight Wallace Fellowships for Journalists and the Livingston Awards. And it's the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists that brings us here today. The Livingston Awards is a prestigious prize often referred to as the Pulitzers for the Young that awards excellence in journalism by journalists under the age of 35. So Brooke Jarvis, our special guest today visiting, won the Livingston Award for National Reporting in 2017 for her story, Unclaimed. And it is that story that brings us to our talk today with the title, Beyond the Wall, The Human Toll of Border Crossings. Unclaimed tells the story of an anonymous, undocumented man left in a vegetative state after a tragic truck accident during a border crossing. Unknown and unclaimed, he languished in a hospital bed for now nearly two decades. The man came to be called 66 Garage because there was no information on him. No one knew his name. Perhaps that name was a reference to the truck route on which the accident occurred, but no one ever knew for sure. During a time when immigration stories are in the news every day, sometimes on a repeating loop throughout the day, so much so that we can become desensitized to them, the stories are often tied to politicized policy debates and political factions. And it's easy to just stop listening. Brooke Jarvis' Unclaimed captures an achingly human story that explored the hopes, the dreams, the tragedies, and the disappointments not just of the unknown man at the center of the narrative, but of the hundreds of families who thought that his story might contain a missing, longed-for piece of their own family story. I'll read just one paragraph from the story before we turn it over to our panel. And yet, as his story, or really the news of the lack of a story, spread, people began to contact the hospital to ask detailed questions about his moles or his scars. Their own family histories also included a journey across the border interrupted by a mystery. Each had a son or a brother or a husband or a cousin or a friend who'd headed northward and then disappeared, leaving no answers about what might have happened to him, whether he was dead or incarcerated or suffering somewhere, whether he'd abandoned them. In the anguish of their uncertainty, they looked to the man in the bed and saw hope. They peered into his empty past and saw the possibility of themselves. Acknowledging these human stories is what brings us here today. We at Wallace House believe that excellent journalism presents an opportunity for communities. It prompts us not just to think and absorb stories in solitude, but also to talk, to explore, to debate, and to try to understand the issues and the stories together. And so we've brought Brooke Jarvis here to join us on campus today for a conversation with two esteemed scholars with deep experience and interest in the issues that her work explores. We're pleased to have joining us today, Jason de Leon, associate professor of anthropology here at the university and director of the Undocumented Migration Project. His research on Latin American migration explores among other topics, violence, death, and mourning. He's the author of the book The Land of Open Graves, Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. And he was awarded a 2017 MacArthur Genius Grant for his work that the MacArthur Foundation cited for, quote, challenging audiences to confront the complexity of international migration and American policy choices. And to moderate the discussion today, we're pleased to have Ann Lynn, associate professor of public policy here at the Ford School, where she teaches courses on public policy and implementation, qualitative research methods, and a range of topics tied to immigration. So I'm going to turn things over to Ann to guide our conversation today. But before we do, I want to remind you that it's our policy at Wallace House always to invite our audience to participate in our conversation. You'll notice that we've given question cards when you came in. If you don't have a card, as the conversation's going on, raise your hand, someone will pass you a card. And if you have a question, please jot it down. We'll have people in the aisles. Our Night Wallace fellows are here, and they'll be collecting those question cards and making sure they get down to the front for when we open it up for question and answer. For those of us who don't want to write a question down, but would rather join the conversation on Twitter, either from the room or from the live stream, you can submit your questions to Twitter using the hashtag Wallace House. I'll come back up at the end. We'll also have a brief reception after our conversation for you to meet our panelists and hopefully talk to one another. And so I welcome you to stay. And with that, I will leave it in the able hands of Ann Lynn. Thank you so much. So, Brooke, we're really honoring your story today. And I'm wondering if we can just, if you can just tell us a little bit about it. It starts with a man in a bed and nobody knows who he is. Tell us about how he got there and what then happened. Sure. So as Lynette began, for a long time, the story of how he got into the bed was, you know, was all that was known about him. His story was like this long. He was in an accident near the border, the other people in the car were migrants. And so it was assumed that he also was, but no one was very sure. It's common for people to be advised not to carry their identification with them because, for a variety of reasons, but smugglers often encourage that. Is the microphone working right? It just changed. Okay. So there were very few clues about his past. He had in his pocket a calling card that had been purchased in Mexico and some dollars and pesos, and that was it. And so he became this mystery, even the mystery of his name, but no one that I talked to was able to clarify how such a strange name came about. And the nurses who treated him would make up names for him because they needed something to call him. But I mean, his story was so short. It was just like a shadow of the story. But what was so interesting and what drew me to write about him was how that lack of a story affected other people as Lynette began to read. There are tens of thousands of people who have someone that they love that they don't know what happened to them. They set out to cross the border and then something happened, and it could be a wide variety of things, but it means a lot of people left wondering. One of the people that I spoke to when I was researching this story who works with a lot of families like these trying to make the connections between, you know, mysterious remains and mysterious unfinished stories. She said that the families she worked with, they turned to psychics, they believed in dreams. Many of them were convinced that their person was the one case where someone had amnesia, you know, which is an unlikely thing, but people were really eager for something to believe. And the way she put it was that it's a kind of torture that she wouldn't wish on anyone, a very special kind of torture of not knowing. So the point of the story was to learn more about all of these families and what their experience was like. When I first started working on it, I thought a lot about this novel that I love, which is called The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Has anybody read that? And at the heart of the novel is a deaf mute man and these other characters who live in the same town whose lives all rotate around him. They all feel like he's the one person they can talk to and the one person they can trust and who really understands them and they see themselves reflected back by this man who when you read his perspective, he thinks they're all kind of nuts. And I kept thinking of garage 66, the man in the bed as kind of a similar person in these person's lives. Like he reflected back all of their fears and their hopes and that was something I wanted to explore. One of the people that you write a lot about is Liliana and she's from Mexico originally, but she currently lives in Houston and she has a legal visa to be in the United States. She's missing her brother, right? How does she come to know about the man in the bed and what does she do to find her brother and then how does she come to know about the man in the bed? By the time that I met Liliana, the last she had heard from her brother was 1999, I believe, so it had been like 16 years. And when he first went missing, her family looked for him. They went to the last place where they heard from him. He'd made a phone call and the call had cut out. His calling card ran out of juice. And then they never heard from him again and some time passed and then they went to the last place that they knew where he was and they looked in the hotel and then they looked in other hotels and then they looked in hospitals and then they looked in morgues and detention centers and the people in the county, they showed them pictures of people who had died in the desert. Is this him? Is this him? And every time it wasn't him, but it was a common enough story that there were these other people that were offered to them for identification. And then they didn't know what to do and how she heard of this man who was in San Diego by that time that's where the hospital was. There are large online networks for people in their family situation that have sprung up very grass roots. People just believe like in the age of the internet if you put a photo out and it gets wide enough circulation maybe the right person will see it and maybe somebody will get an answer to their question. And so there are, you know, more than a dozen from what I found possibly more of Facebook groups with followers ranging from, you know, 10,000 to 200,000 people. And it's this whole world of people sharing stories and sharing pictures either of someone they've lost or of someone who has been found although usually not the way that you would want to eventually find your family member. I mean people will share sometimes very disturbing photos of bodies found in the desert or, you know, like a backpack and just these little clues for people to follow up on. And Liliana came across one of those, one of her cousins saw it and forwarded it to her because they thought that the man looked like her brother. Jason, you've done a lot of thinking and writing about and working with the clues that migrants leave behind in the desert. And I'm wondering if you can say a little bit about your own work and talk a little bit about groups like the one that Liliana used to try to find her brother. Yeah, I mean, first I want to say the story is amazing. And so if you haven't read it, I would highly recommend that you read it. I think they're going to give out copies of it later. And I think for me, one of the amazing things about the story it's not a story about immigration. And I don't necessarily think that we need more stories about immigration at this point. We're flooded with them. We need people to see statistics and the word migrant associated with people, with faces, with stories, with names, with real trauma that people are living with on a daily basis. And the work that I've been doing since about 2008 has been trying to piece together what actually happens along the border, what border crossings look like from an archaeological perspective, from an ethnographic perspective, a forensic perspective. So trying to piece together these stories that are fragmentary, oftentimes difficult to document because they happen in the middle of nowhere. And so I've spent a lot of time picking up the things that migrants leave behind in the desert, like these backpacks. I've spent a lot of time with migrants in shelters after they've been deported or as they're getting ready to attempt a desert crossing. And then we spent a lot of time focusing on the forensic aspect.  And unfortunately, like what Brooke writes about, this is not an uncommon thing. Thousands of people, more people have died crossing the border since 2000 than 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina combined. Those are recovered bodies. I have argued in a lot of different places that we drastically undercount the number of fatalities that happen on a yearly basis. And so not only do people die out there and we don't hear about them, we don't see about them, that trauma continues to carry on to now. And so these families of the missing who are looking for loved ones, it is a really horrific thing to talk to family members about missing a loved one. And some of the work that we've done is focused around the story of a 15-year-old kid named Jose Takudi who had left Ecuador in 2013, tried to reunite with his parents in New York and he went missing in the desert, has not been heard from since. And his family, they'll tell you these stories about, he comes to them in dreams. The mysterious phone call in the middle of the night, maybe he's got amnesia, maybe he's been kidnapped. And these families live with this trauma forever. Clinical psychologist Pauline Boss wrote about this, written in many different places, one of them is in the context of 9-11 with the bodies that weren't recovered there and people who are living with what we refer to as ambiguous loss. So this loss, it can never be resolved because you'll never have confirmation that someone is alive or dead. And for a lot of these families, the difficulty, they have to go to Facebook to start to coordinate, to look for people because there's minimal support for this kind of stuff. The federal government could care less about these bodies. There are some nonprofits around who are struggling to raise money and awareness about this stuff. But, you know, there's not a lot of infrastructure for these things. So if your relative goes missing in the desert, who do you call? You call the Mexican consulate. Do you call someone in Tucson? You know, people just don't know. You call Tucson. They may send you to, you know, 12 different places. Information gets passed around kind of willy-nilly. And there are just only a handful of organizations that are really working to collate all of this data. But, I mean, at the moment, there are something like 800 or 900 unidentified bodies recovered in Southern Arizona alone. And we know that many more of those bodies are out in the Arizona desert decomposing or have completely disappeared now. And there's nobody working, at least at the federal level, to help alleviate what I would consider to be, you know, this horrific humanitarian catastrophe that the U.S. has been, has had its hand in for a long time. Brooke, maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you got to know about this story. How did you begin to write about it and the kind of work you did to research and write about it? I, let's see. I think I was first considering, so there was a story that made some national headlines a few years ago. Migration routes shifted and happened to pass through this county in Texas that was not directly a border county. And there was a border patrol checkpoint that people had to go around to not get caught. And in doing so, they, many of them died of exposure and ranchers would find them. Some of them would, you know, leave out water and supplies and, but still many people were dying. And the county with no medical examiner didn't know what to do and ended up burying a lot of the bodies in a mass grave, which made a lot of headlines. And I was considering writing about that. I thought about, there's an anthropologist who has an ongoing project to try to identify those people. They exhumed them and are following what clues they can to find out what their stories are. But it didn't, it didn't feel like the right way in. For a number of reasons. One that was that it was early. They had only at that point identified one person. And it felt, as I think you were saying, many times stories about immigration can feel like abstractions. And we hear a lot of numbers and statistics. And I wanted to be able to find some people's stories and that wasn't yet available.  And yeah, it just, but that's what made me aware of the scale of this problem. I talked to that anthropologist who you probably know, Kate Bradley. And she put it in the same terms like this is a Katrina and a 9-11 that is going unaddressed. How can that be? So I had it, you know, as something I wanted to write about, but I hadn't found out how. And then I was reading somewhat randomly because I also have written about physician assisted suicide and sort of rate to die movements, death, death and dying issues. And I was reading a story about the number of people who are kept alive at government expense in California. And there was a mention of this man who was 66 garage and it mentioned that families had come forward hoping he was their missing person. And when I'd been thinking about these, you know, massive numbers of missing people, I hadn't been thinking about their families. That was a whole part of the story that hadn't even occurred to me. And when I read just that mention, it, you know, it just caught me of, like it's not hard to imagine that emotional experience of having to live in doubt and fear because you don't know what happened to someone you loved. So then I, you know, I wanted to find some of those families to talk to you, which was difficult because there's a lot of privacy considerations, especially when it comes to things that are healthcare involved. But eventually I found, I found some. Yeah. One of the really heartbreaking parts of your story is at the end where you talk about a woman, Paula, who sort of adopted this man and visited him and spoke to him and then helped to publicize him. And then at the end, when he's identified, she's no longer able to speak to him anymore. Yeah. Yeah, that really breaks her heart and it is a heartbreaking part of the story. The timing just happened to work that way. Like if I had started reporting this, I didn't know he was going to be identified. You know, for 16 years, he had not been identified. He'd continued to be a mystery and that did allow, you know, people who were involved in his life to tell me things that if I had started reporting after he was identified, would have been considered private or at least at the discretion of the family. And then surprise, which is a great outcome for that family, which is one of the rare, you know, so many people I talked to, they continued looking for years and decades. And in this case, he had a living sister who after many years of not hearing from him had given him up for lost and was surprised to find that he was alive. Yeah. President Trump last night talked about open borders and how he felt that, you know, prior to his administration, the borders between, America had this open border policy that allowed in all of these drugs and all of this crime. Jason, I'm wondering if you can say something about whether, what the border looks like and how it is not open. You know, the open border question is just one that's not based on any kind of truth or facts. And if you think about who the people that are pushing for like the wall, right, the wall is going to solve this whole thing. It's not people high ups at DHS. It's not agents that are on the ground. You know, they people recognize that the border is a very complex place and it's not. And we don't have an open border. We don't have what's being said politically and publicly is not a reflection of what's happening on the ground. And so this whole notion of like an open border, you know, numbers have been down. Obama deported more people than George W. Bush. I mean, these things are much, are much more complicated than the way they're being portrayed now. And the policies that we have that are in place that the way that our security kind of works now, they started into the Clinton administration. And so, yeah, this idea that we're being overrun by MS-13 and drugs and terrorists, these are falsehoods. I mean, these are not true. And what we've done over the years is we've conflated the war on terrorism with southern border security, which is a very savvy sleight of hand. And it's a way to generate lots of fear. It's a way to generate lots of spending for things like a wall that we know will not work and will destroy the environment. But we'll put money in certain people's pockets. But we throw these things out there and unfortunately, they pick up steam, you know, and, but from my experience and from the many hours of conversations I've had with Asians on the ground, I mean, these things that we're being told publicly are not true. Yeah. One of the things that I think people often don't realize is how much border enforcement contributes to the, not only of course the difficulty of getting across the border, but also to the existence of a large undocumented population in the US because once people come across, they don't want to risk going home. They can't, because they fear they fear they can't cross again. And crossing is not, you know, as easy as walking across a dotted line. It really, as a lot of your work talks about can be a weeks long, months long process. And I'm wondering if you can just say a little bit about that. It's not, you know, this idea that the wall's going to stop this whole thing. I love the quote that I like I used from Janet and Paula Tana where she says, show me a 50-foot wall. I'll show you a dude on the other side who's renting a 51-foot ladder. I mean, that's, that's where people are constantly responding to changes in enforcement, but not necessarily in ways that are super obvious. And so, putting up a wall is an architectural impossibility that will cost us billions of dollars and will be totally ineffective. What we have done, starting with Obama, I mean, the way that immigration has changed in the last probably three or four years. In 2014, we were all very afraid of the poor brown children from Central America who were flooding our detention centers and people got really concerned about this humanitarian crisis that they recognized for about a New York minute and then it went away. And Obama comes out and says, well, we've really toughened up border enforcement, put more boots on the ground kind of thing. We didn't change anything at the border. What we've done is we've outsourced immigration enforcement to Mexico. So, we have encouraged Mexico, we put political pressure on them to stop Central Americans in country. And so, they deport equal numbers of Central Americans that we do as part of this plan that was initially called plan from Teresur. They don't have a name for it anymore and they deny that it exists. But we train agents in Mexico and in Honduras to catch people leaving the country. That's where a lot of this border enforcement is happening. The stuff that happens at the US-Mexico border, much of that is a smoke screen. One of the things I think is often missed in this discussion is that it's not very easy to come to the US legally. People often talk about waiting in line and how it's important for people to do the right thing and wait in line. But the fact is that American immigration policy is really about who you know because it is centered around sponsorship.  That is not just say I need workers of this particular type, but I need this person here now and I'm willing to make that application. And so if you go back to the issue of waiting in line for a lot of people as it turns out, there is no line for them to wait in. There is never a line that they can join that will get them to the United States. And so people develop all of these other ways of getting to the United States. One of the things you were talking about earlier is MS-13 and how it's become powerful in part because it smuggles people over the border. And I wonder if you could say something about that, Jason. I didn't watch the State of the Union last night. I was joking though that I just got my update from the onion about how that went. But this trope of the MS-13 that's going to destroy America, we made MS-13 in America. It's a homegrown problem. We've then outsourced it. We've sent people back to Central America with skills to become more organized around criminal activities. But MS-13 is the new kind of boogeyman. It's the very scary thing that we can throw out there and now we need to put this wall up. But keep in mind that MS-13 as a transnational gang starts in California, starts in LA. We start deporting people who were fleeing Central America because of U.S. intervention policies that were making those countries unlivable. So they come to the U.S., they get marginalized in the U.S., start these gangs, then we send them back to Central America, get more organized there, make life even more miserable for everybody else in Central America. So it's just kind of back and forth. But MS-13 is an American problem that we have had a hand in creating.  But increasingly, I work with a lot of guys from MS-13 who love Donald Trump. They think Donald Trump is amazing because every time he says, I'm going to build this big wall, they say to me, the smugglers, I work with them say, well, that's just more money that I can make. I know this wall isn't going to do anything, but my people, I smuggle, they don't know that. They think that this wall is going to require more things from me. So now I can jack up my prices. MS-13 now largely controls the movement of Central Americans across Mexico. So they control the train tracks and the routes, cartels control particular geographic areas. But you can't cross Mexico now without paying MS-13 to smuggle you across. And those guys are making lots of money now. Things are slow after the election because people were afraid to come. It's picking back up again.  But MS-13 now, I mean, they look at every time Trump says something about them, for them it's like, yeah, that's just more money in our back pocket. And so I have interesting conversations with those folks about the perceptions of what these things that are being said in the US, those impacts they're having on people in Central America and in Mexico. I want to remind everybody that we are looking forward to your questions later on. And so please write your questions on your question cards. If you need a card, just raise your hand a little bit and somebody will come by to give you a card. And remember, too, that you can also tweet your questions with Addis with the hashtag Wallace House. Brooke, I wanted to ask you about a story that you've been working on more recently. And this is about the citizen children of parents who now fear deportation. And as Jason was saying earlier, first in the great ramp up, ramping up of deportation policies under President Obama and then with President Bush's, excuse me, President Trump's change and directive to ISIS, excuse me, change and directive to ICE, to Immigration Customs Enforcement, that encourages ICE to pick up any undocumented immigrant, even if they do not have a criminal background or criminal record. The fear of deportation for families has really gone up tremendously. And I'm wondering if you can tell us about what some of those families are doing to deal with it. Sure. Well, as you mentioned earlier, you clarifying the adult children are able to sponsor their parents for citizenship. Children, children are not. So if you are the American-born child of someone who is at risk of deportation, you really don't have a right to have that person in your life in America. It's a very interesting situation where, so the best interests of the child is the legal standard that is used in international law. It's enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which we did not ratify but we did sign. The only country not to ratify. And it's also used like if there's a custody decision, you know, that this is the main criteria that judges are considering. But there's not a mechanism for looking at that when it comes to immigration law and when it comes to deportation of parents. So there are, you know, lots of people who are deported leaving behind American children which opens a question of, you know, what's best for these children, whose lives are bound up in the future of our country, even if they do leave. The choice is generally, you know, you can leave with your parent to go to a country that you don't know. Maybe you don't speak the language. Maybe you don't even, you know, it's, people are planning better for this now but for a while, kids were showing up in Mexico and they didn't have any kind of paperwork there. So like, how were they going to get enrolled in schools? And we hear a lot about, oh, immigrants overrunning American schools but Mexican schools are really having a hard time right now because they're overrun with American kids who don't speak Spanish. And so families are very afraid from what I have seen in my reporting. Many of them are planning for the eventuality of, you know, like what happens if you have a small child and one day your parent doesn't come home from work or doesn't pick them up at school because they've been detained and there are nonprofits that work with families to make, you know, a whole plan for this. Like, who are they going to call? Who has the bank account information? Who has the documents? The story that I recently worked on was specifically about a woman in Miami who, so it's something that many people do, is sign a power of attorney letter to allow someone to, you know, step in in a legal sense and either take care of their children or at least see them through this transition. Like, they're a person who can sign the school paperwork or sign the doctor paperwork. You know, it's all of this little stuff that you wouldn't necessarily imagine to be a problem. And there's a woman in Miami where parents have signed that paperwork for more than a thousand children for her. And it's gone, you know, it's gone up a lot since the election. She's reported that she sees people being much, much more afraid. And the effect that that has, you know, on the whole family, there's a psychologist named Luis Cias who refers to these children as invisible citizens whose rights are not being remembered or respected is the way that he looks at it and having, you know, interviewed and analyzed many of them. He found clinical levels of separation anxiety and low self-esteem and so many of these kids that, you know, they live in fear that they're going to be the one to mess up. Like, they have their parents fate in their hands and what if they do something wrong and it's their fault, their family falls apart. So it's a really terrifying prospect for kids.  This was one dream that a girl reported that just stuck with me and all of her friends had on black sweatshirts but she had a pink hoodie and she couldn't hide or dreams about having to sacrifice themselves for their parents. It's just, you know, I met children who have either had parents deported or are afraid of having parents deported and the effect is pretty heartbreaking. How do you get people to trust you in situations like that? As you say, these families are, you know, terrified that something they say, something they do will bring them to the attention of ice and then lead to a deportation. So in circumstances like these, why do people trust you to trust you and not to speak to you? It's a good question. You know, I definitely, I'm very cautious about things like that. I, you know, I think that my first responsibility is to readers, but it would be different if I were writing about public figures, right? But these are ordinary people who would not be in the spotlight if I didn't put them there and that creates a responsibility to not mess up their lives. So, I mean, it helps to be introduced by someone that they already know and trust. You know, it's not like you're going to just knock on doors in an immigrant neighborhood and be like, hey, who wants to talk about your legal status?  And then, you know, when the circumstances require it to anonymize their details. Jason, you work with a lot of people too who you wouldn't think have much reason or to trust you, whether these are young men who are coming across the border, whether they're families, you know, and for that matter, you've done a lot of work with border patrol agents and who probably don't see professor from the University of Michigan as somebody who's going to be very sympathetic to my beliefs. So how do you create trust? How do you get sources? Well, it's funny Brooke mentions that I'm not going to knock on their doors. I was actually worked on a project once where it was a sociology survey that I was a part of where we knocked on doors in this immigrant neighborhood asking people about immigration status. And of course, it totally fell flat. It was the worst research design that I ever, it was a very good learning moment for me as a graduate student to be like, yeah, this is not really working. But for me, like, you know, the anthropologist, it's, I think, it's a couple of things. It's one, we're super annoying because we don't go away. So like the communities that I work with and the people I work with, you know, I have the luxury of spending years with them working on one thing. And so, you know, it takes a long time to develop that trust. And over with that length of time, there's this kind of dual commitment. Right? I'm committed to them and they become committed to me. So part of that is just when you tell someone, okay, I'm interested in your story.  And you say, I'm going to come back the next week and then I'll be back next year. And then eventually they realize that you're not going to go away until you, until they help you figure some things out. So the part of that is, you know, is a methodological thing. But I think another part of it too is, is, you know, do people want to talk to you? Do you, do you give off this vibe of, I'm interested in these issues and I'm here to, to do the best job I can and also to be fair to the people that are trusting me.  But you know, so it's, you know, and people are not always open to this in the beginning and so it takes, you know, with the agents I've worked with, let's take it some, some time to develop trust and we disagree about certain things but they recognize at the end of the day that if I'm going to write about them, I want to write about them as this kind of complete person that I've come to know. Maybe we disagree about certain things. Same thing with smugglers. I work with people who do a lot of horrible stuff and, but I want to understand how does someone come to that position, right? And what is life like for them as a, as a person? So, and I think so, you have these, these sort of this, this thing that you just bring and people pick up on that and they go, okay, you seem like an okay person and I don't, maybe I don't quite know what you're doing but I, but I can trust you to do a job that I think will reflect the relationship that we're having. And so, I mean, it's kind of one of these things I mean, but people will have a pretty good detector for, you know, if you're, if you're not being kind of forthcoming about stuff, I think that's my sense. Brooke, I'm wondering if you can say something about the kind of journalism that you try to do. So, you write for magazines, but my sense is that you, you, you write for different magazines, right, and you freelance, you place, you pitch stories to a lot of different places. What do you look for in a good story? That's a really hard question. I mean, the best answer is a story. It needs to be, you know, the kind of story that would stick with you and that you would tell your friends in a bar.  And when it comes to something like this, like, about like immigration, you know, I don't, I don't have any kind of policy agenda or thoughts. I want to tell the stories of the people involved so that we understand them better so that they're not abstractions. And when you can do that, in particular, in a way that cuts through what people expect and what they think they already know, that's the most effective. I think like the, you know, the largest barrier to all of us to learning something is feeling like you already, you already know the answer, even if we don't or something's familiar. And I, that can be frustrating when you're selling stories to editors because like, they always think that they've heard that story before. And you have to find a new way in. But yeah, I'm, I've never been very good about talking about what I do. But the goal, the goal is to tell good stories about, I mean, I'm always drawn to topics that are messy and mushy and morally unclear. And I want to know people's motivations and what they were thinking and why they did what they did and, you know, anything that's going to make me see the world that I thought I knew in a different way and show me that maybe I didn't know it, maybe, maybe I didn't know as much as I thought and I think that's a valuable experience for us all to have all the time. Jason, I have a somewhat related question for you, but it's a little different. You work with people as you say over years and years and years you have tons of material. How do you select from that material?  You know, I think about the work that I do as kind of telecompelling story with the data that I have, can I use theory to help you understand the data in an interesting and kind of different way, but at the end of the day, it's, you know, I would consider myself to be, you know, I'm an anthropologist in the field, but I don't think I'm necessarily an anthropologist or a social scientist when I start to put stuff towards the paper. I think now I'm much more interested in being a writer. I'm much more interested in being a, I don't know, like a fake journalist or being some, being some other, some other thing that values words and that values the storytelling and is thinking about the reader.   That's totally fine. That's not a bad thing. That means that you're putting interesting things on paper and people want to follow along and with the social science stuff. I mean, it's really, it's you have all of this information and you have to figure out then what to include and what to leave out in terms of, you know, what can the reader handle? What is the overarching kind of story and how do you do that in a kind of concise way? And so I've had to over the years figure out what to, you know, to be more honest about the editing process and to think about if I lose you with the narrative, it doesn't matter how much data I put in there, right? It's indecipherable. And so for me, I've had to not be wedded to certain data sets or wedded to certain things that I've written if it's going to be distracting. But it's hard. I mean, you're always editing something, whether it's a journal article or a public piece or a book and I just now want to think about the editing process. I just have a lot to work with, but I'm thinking about it much more in a sort of journalistic or kind of novelistic way. I think it's probably time to invite everyone else into the conversation. And so I see people collecting cards. I know the cards are coming down here and then some of the Wallace House fellows will be asking the questions. So this is a question from our audience. Would a physical wall that truly ran the length of the border prevent deaths? No. It's not the wall. Wall is not, I mean, because the wall won't stop movement. We have walls. We've got giant walls in Nogales, San Diego. They redirect people towards the desert because you have to walk five, six days to get across. That's our border enforcement right now is about the natural environment whether it's walking through Brooks County or through the southern desert of Arizona. That is the wall. That is the physical barrier to movement. The actual wall that we put up, you know, it's not going to stop the flow of people because they can go underneath it. They can jump over it. They can go around it via water. And at the end of the day, you know, it doesn't get at the core reasons for why people are coming, why they're leaving or what's pulling them here. And so this wall, I mean, if we wanted to stop immigrants from coming here, migrants from coming, we would just police the workforce in a real way. We don't do that. That will crash our economy. That will make a lot of people who make money off of undocumented people upset. We don't do that. That would be much cheaper than building this wall. And it would actually, it would slow. When our, in 2008 when Obama came out and said that border enforcement that they had put on the, down on the border had slowed things down, that they were being really tough on immigration. That's not what slowed immigration down 2008. It was our economy being in the toilet. That's what slowed things down. And that's how it's always been. Our economy and the push and pull factors whether it's the fact that we employ people in the US who are undocumented because we like cheap labor or there are things happening around the globe that are forcing them to leave whether that's global climate change, political instability in places like Central America, the drug war in Mexico. The US has a big hand in a lot of those things. And so this wall thing, I mean, it's just, I keep thinking that we're going to stop having this conversation because I don't know how many times people can say that this wall is not, we're not talking about a physical wall. We're talking about these other anxieties. And but this is, it's the perfect smoke screen to get us not thinking about these other issues. I would add, so that question is not my area of expertise if I have an area of expertise. But something that brings to mind is that Spain has two outposts in Morocco that are considered Spanish territory and those are the only land border between Africa and the European Union and they're very, very small borders to protect. It's basically, you know, two cities with elaborate series of fences around them, heavily guarded and not only do people get over those walls, they also are injured and killed in the process frequently, like nearly on a weekly basis. So that is like a microcosm of what we're trying to accomplish and has not been successful. Yeah. The only thing I would add is that as Jason was talking about earlier, when you make a place, when you make it difficult to get into the US, then you create a market for people who tell you that they can help you conquer those difficulties. And so there are undocumented immigrants from Asia who come in through smuggling, right? They're smuggled in. If we make it hard for people to cross, but there's still an economic incentive for them to be in the United States, there's still family reasons for them to come to the US and there's no legal way to do it, then what we will see is people paying smugglers and being in debt to those smugglers for years and years in order to get across, get through the get through the the checkpoints that are between them and the life in the US. I was at one quick into that too. The federal government thought in the early 90s that if they started to use the desert as its natural barrier, they said, well, people will die because it'll be too hard to get across.  But the thinking was if enough people die, they'll stop coming. And you can look this up on the internet. I mean, this is like GOV as long as I think the DHS websites are still currently online. So you can see these policy documents where people say, yeah, people are going to die in the desert, but then that'll stop them. Once some people learn that it's really dangerous and you can die doing it, they will stop coming. If hundreds of deaths a year, don't stop you from coming. I don't know what this wall is going to do. I mean, so the most extreme thing that we can do is kill people at the border which we have been doing and that still is not stopping people from coming. I just wanted to say before the next question that the question cards are being collected and collated and read by the amazing Wallace House Fellows. And I hope that you will introduce yourself before you ask the next question and that others will too as well. Thank you. I'm Robert Yoon from Washington DC. I'm one of the Night Wallace Fellows. This question is also from the audience. Does country of origin affect specific routes taken through Mexico or do they take the same route and then a related question of those crossing the U.S. border, do you know the breakdown between those from Mexico and Central America? Roots are segregated by country of origin. So if you look at like who shows up in Tijuana. You have like Haitians showing up in Tijuana. You've got people from African countries who are coming up to that route. These are the sort of unexpected foreign nationals in Mexico. Hondurans who I largely work with sort of come through two routes.  You're trying to get to Houston, Texas or New Orleans. White Mestizo Hondurans tend to come through other sorts of routes. They're trying to get maybe to New York City. But you will see these routes in Mexico, like people will differentially come. So there are segregated routes that happen there. At the border, the breakdown right now, it's 98% or some. So people from Mexico or Central America and then they tend to split pretty evenly these days between Mexico and Central American countries. But you have people come from all those places who are coming now through Mexico from much farther away that you would be unexpected, like China, for example. Can one of you address? This is also from our in-house audience. Can one of you talk about the sanctuary movement? Our church is the only places that can provide sanctuary. What does that mean? Do you know about the church in Detroit that's supposedly a test case for this movement? Well, I'll just start that by saying that there is actually no legal prohibition against ICE or anyone else, any other law enforcement officer going into a house of worship or, like I said, anywhere else. So the sanctuary movement is built on a particular belief and the belief is that if law enforcement agents have to force their way into a church to pick up a particular family that that will create a public relations storm for them that that agency cannot tolerate. That's all it is. There's nothing else that keeps law enforcement from going in to a church synagogue, mosque, any other house of worship. Having said that, so I think there are two issues to go on here. The sanctuary movement I think is a really important way for congregations, for Americans to think about whether they approve of the policies of a government which is in their name saying we cannot survive as a country if these people who did not come through legal immigration means stay here. It's a way for Americans to look at themselves and see what they're willing to accept. And in that sense, I think it's been tremendously useful in teaching people about the issues of immigration in general and documented migration in particular. It's been a great way of teaching people about the millions of people in the United States that are protected against deportation. Their deportation has been deferred, but they have no legal status and no way of getting legal status, which means at any time that protection from deportation can be lifted. And that's the situation of people who are under temporary protected status or TPS. That is the situation of people who have received DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, as well as people who are undocumented and do not have any program or court decree protecting them. So I think it's important. I think it's great that people are concerned and care about it, but as an actual policy to prevent deportation, it's not very helpful. This question is also from our in-house audience. Migration across the border, like many other issues, has aspects of intersectionality in identities of race and gender. Could you speak to how issues at the border are also feminist issues, particularly in these times of the Me Too movement? I mean, I don't have... I guess I have kind of a wide definition of what a feminist issue is. And, you know, these are people's families and lives. You know, one of the trends is that a majority of people who are deported from the U.S. interior are men. And so that leaves a lot of families with, you know, just a mother. And that's, you know, a major impact on a lot of people's families. Yeah, I would also... I think that's really important. I think the image of the undocumented migrant is usually, you know, a young man who's, you know, coming to the U.S.   Families come over in steps where one person comes first and then they're able to send money back to bring other people over or families come together. And I think one of the... Another way of thinking about what goes on at the border as a feminist issue is... It's two things I would say. First, whether formally through smuggling or informally, one of the fears that women face, that men face less is the fear of sexual violence. And that is certainly a feature of the... It is often a feature of the experience, particularly when women are trusting smugglers to get them across the border. And then the other thing that I would say that, you know, I think is also important is we... The U.S. created a set of legal protections of a... a ways to get legal status for women who were battered or abused and where one of the elements of that abuse is that the husband controlled the immigration visa. That is the women. He was a citizen. He's a citizen. And if they divorce, she will no longer have the ability to stay in the U.S. Or he is the principal applicant for a visa. And if again, if he divorces her, if he disowns her, she will not have the ability to apply for that visa on her own. And so a visa was created for women in this situation. These are women that are already in the U.S. And the extent to which those visas are actually granted, the kinds of proof people need in order to get those visas is a really... It's sort of an invisible part of the immigration system because it's very discretionary. It really depends on decisions that USCIS makes. Citizenship and Immigration Services make when they look at an application. And I would just say in general, I mean, you're absolutely right. Our idea of the migrant is young Mexican and male. And that is definitely not the case. And all of these, you know, the things that make us individuals, you know, our identity, our gender, our sexuality, all of these things complicate people's migration experiences in all kinds of ways that I think we just still aren't paying enough attention to. And the ways in which families have been fragmented by transnational migration impact family structure, puts certain pressures on different members of the household that oftentimes fall along gender lines. And I think that that's, you know, we are saying there's so many things happening right now, especially in Mexico in relationship to like women fleeing like Honduras with kids. They're fleeing violence from, you know, I'll give you an example of this. I work with a smuggler who, a female smuggler who left Honduras with her kids. Her boyfriend had been killed. So there was no paperwork of him really other than this obituary. She couldn't leave the country because it's illegal to leave Honduras as a single parent with your kids without all kinds of paperwork. And so she had to sneak out of her own country to get into Mexico, which then there's a whole new set of complicated issues being a migrant now turned smuggler who's working to feed your kids through human smuggling, you know, dealing with corrupt law enforcement who differentially exploit men and women who are migrating. So it's not just at the border. It's throughout the entire kind of route but gender and issues of like sexuality come up constantly. And I think that we're just only now scratching the surface in terms of understanding those dynamics. This question is for you, Jason. What are some of the artifacts and stories you found in the desert and are they on display anywhere? So for those of you don't know for about 10 last almost 10 years, I've been trying to use archaeology as one method to understand this process. And so migrants leave a lot of stuff in the desert that we have gone and collected and treated like an archaeological assemblage. And we've got about 7,000 objects here at University of Michigan. The Smithsonian has about 120 objects now. I think we have four pieces that are currently on display in an exhibition called Many Voices of One Nation. It took a lot of fighting to get to get those artifacts to be in the same conversation with things from Ellis Island. And so we hope that those things can be used to show these kind of historical connections to get people to be thinking about what was like to be an immigrant in the early 20th century. How were you treated at Ellis Island? You know, shockingly, not well. But it took a long time for us to realize that that was an important archaeological assemblage. But now with the materials that we've collected, I worry about the stuff because there's always this focus on the, the archaeology is really interesting. But for me, the archaeology is just a way to think about the people who left them behind. And so they sort of, they both speak to the human experience. And they're also a historical record of this thing that happened in the middle of nowhere where there weren't a lot of people sort of around to see this stuff. But, you know, there's lots of interesting objects that we have found. And I could go, I could talk at Nozom about, you know, food and ripped up shoes and bloody shirts and baby bottles and that sort of stuff. But those things for me are just one other way to get you to think about what it is to be a migrant. And so, you know, it's like I'm not trying to, I'm not using archaeology to tell an archaeological story. I'm not even using archaeology, I think, to tell an immigration story. I think archaeology is being used to tell a story about humanity and about the American experience and about these global kind of connections. But I hesitate to tell you, like, I found this baby bottle and it was this important thing. I mean, there's, I'd rather talk about Maricela Zaguipuia, who was a woman whose body we found in 2012. And the struggles that her family went to find her and the difficulties that were involved in identifying her body and then the trauma of repatriating this poorly, this badly decomposing body that had been sitting in cold storage for six weeks unembalmed and people opening the casket because they wanted to see the family member. Those are the stories that I'm more interested in because I think that they're more uncomfortable and they speak to this brutal reality that has a name and a face to it as opposed to the artifacts themselves, I think sometimes we can get lost in romanticizing them and losing sight of the actual people who left the stuff behind. This relates to your answer. What would a trauma-informed policy need to look like in order to support immigrants in the United States? Not a policy person. You know, in the... So the U.S. has a refugee policy now that after the U.S. passed the Refugee Act in 1980 that recognized our country's obligations to refugees created a program that would screen refugees abroad but would commit us to take refugees from all around the world. And I think this is an improvement in our refugee policy which prior to this was very haphazard. It was very dependent upon political support for a particular group and it did not create any sort of long-standing infrastructure that would allow refugees from different places to be treated equally. But having said that, one thing that I think was really important about our previous refugee policy was that because it was so haphazard and dependent on political support for people of a particular national origin it also kept us very much in touch with the U.S. Waged a war in Vietnam. We have an obligation to those people whose lives were destroyed by that. The Hmong, this hill-dwelling people who don't speak any English fought fiercely on our side during the wars in Indochina. We should protect them. We have an obligation to protect them. We have the same policy towards Cuba and Cuban refugees was very similar. We felt that this was a country, an outpost of communism in North America. And we wanted to make sure that we stood for people who could escape from Cuba, who could escape from communism. Soviet refugees, I could go on about this. We currently don't have a policy like that, a policy that recognizes our historical obligations, our economic ties. And because of, and so there's no give in our policies for people from countries where we are a large part of the reason they're migrating. And so one thing I would say about trauma-induced, a policy that recognizes trauma and migration would also be a policy that had more given it and more recognition of particular circumstances where the U.S., I think, has an obligation to the places in the world that have depended upon us. And I mean, thinking about trauma policies, I mean, we recognize that our federal immigration policies literally kill people, hundreds of them a year. We know that that's not my liberal bias, that's not making this up. We do this, we knowingly do this. And it's recognized by policymakers that they've made the policy that's happened. But I think like in Brooke's story, if we're going to kill people and acknowledge that we're killing people, maybe the least we could do is to spend some time and energy to send those bodies back, to repatriate these bodies so that people aren't sitting in some hospice care center for 15 years because nobody knows who they are, because there's no energy invested in in identifying these people. There's no money for the DNA samples. There's no money to... We kill them at the border and then we let them continue to create these different forms of violence that are long-lasting. And I think that, for me, a form of more sensitive policy would be at least to minimally invest in the DNA samples in the repatriation of bodies and helping these non-profits like the Colibri Center for Human Rights in Tucson, helping those folks to do work that needs to be done. I think that that's the minimal amount of work that we could do that would just at least... There's the murder that happens and then we should... We cannot let this thing continue because I think that as a story sort of shows and as many people are experiencing it, this trauma just continues forever. And for me, that's one of the cruelest parts of this whole thing that's going on right now. And that is something that the Mexican government addresses at a governmental level like their people and consulates whose job it is to try to solve some of these mysteries, but they don't solve a lot of cases. One person told me that they have a backlog of 30,000 cases and they solve about 80 a year. But it is something that they have a DNA lab on retainer. It's part of what they consider their governmental duty to their citizens. One of the things that was amazing to me, Brooke, in the end of your story, you talk about how the man's fingerprints were finally identified and they in fact had existed in an American database all along. Yes. Yeah. Spoiler. Yeah, I mean it was... It had just never been thoroughly checked out. And finally somebody... It came to the attention of somebody who was well connected politically and he brought it to the attention of I guess the head of DHS. I'd have to check that. Who was like, make this a priority to the San Diego guys. Get on this. And they just went to the hospital and they ran the prints in one database and there was no hit. But then they ran them in an older database and there was his name after all that time. A related question for you, Brooke. Did you develop your own relationship with 66 Garage? How did you... How did you do the story without getting emotionally involved or is that impossible? You know, anytime you're interviewing somebody in there it's amazing what people will tell to a relative stranger. I mean people have these intense stories to tell and they are very eager to talk about them and they will tell you stuff that is just really haunting and emotionally vulnerable.  And I don't think that that is a compromise of journalistic integrity to be able to empathize with the people that you're talking to.  I did not meet him. It wasn't possible given the privacy laws. So I met, you know, met and talked to a number of people who did meet him but I never met him in person. This also relates to that. In an era of alternative facts is there a role for journalism and academia in fighting for humane immigration policies? Yeah. And, you know, as a journalist like people have different ways that they draw the line of what is journalism and what is advocacy. And, you know, I don't advocate for specific policies or politicians or, but there are certain things that I just don't see as a bias. You know, I will gladly claim the bias that I think a livable planet is a handy thing to have, you know? Like, I don't think that should be considered like a bias that disqualifies me from reporting on environmental issues, you know? Like, there are different ways that we can protect it. There's all kinds of gray area and difficult questions, but I am a person and I'm not gonna, you know, like I don't need to be the devil's advocate. That's like, well, what if we just cut down all of the rainforests? And I think that this is, you know, when it comes to immigration, like, I am very happy to claim the bias that I think that the people involved are real people whose humanity should be respected and understood. And if I can write stories that like help keep that in mind when it comes to writing policies that affect these people, you know, I think that that's what I can do. I think kind of after the election last year, there was a moment, at least in the discipline of anthropology, where people started looking around and going, well, what is it that I do, right? How do I contribute to this, to dialogue about these different things? And I have a lot of very brilliant colleagues who write about super important topics, ones that are of global interest, but who I think for a long time either haven't thought about kind of the public outreach component or we make, we're in these systems where I won't get tenure if I'm a public intellectual, right? I have to go through, I've jumped through a lot of hoops and then I can become that thing after I pass muster in other places. But, you know, I have to write the journal article on the pie profile journal that six people are gonna read, right? That's what gets me tenure and then you're able to do this kind of other stuff. I think what has happened recently is I'm seeing a lot of my colleagues look at people who before they would say, well, I'm a, they do public anthropology. So they do anthropology that's sort of digestible, readable, understandable to the layman. And previously people would say, well, you know, that's what so-and-so does, public anthropology or public anthropology just means that you're not very theoretical and it's kind of pop, it's kind of pop science sort of thing. And I think that we've gotten to a point now where we have to take stock and go, okay, well, what is it that I do? And why can I in good conscience sort of just keep doing what I'm doing and not think about the dumpster fire of the world that's happening right now, right? How am I gonna contribute to that conversation? And I think that there has been a shift that I've seen at least in my colleagues where they're now seeing public scholarship as not this distinction from what they do. But it's a real commitment to the world and to sharing information about the work that we do in an accessible way. And so I think that now more than ever do we need social scientists to be working to be understandable, to be readable and to be louder in terms of contributing to this counter to the alternative facts. We have time for one last question. How does the current anti-immigrant wave compare to other historical periods and is there any discernible connection with the economy and unemployment rates over time? There's so weak, as you say, we currently have an anti-immigrant wave. Native sentiment in the United States is not a known, right? And it existed in the early 1800s and was directed against Catholics and it existed in the late 1800s, mid 1800s and was directed against Chinese. And it exists in the late 1800s and was directed against Southern Europeans. So, nativism is a part of our, is a constitutive part of our country. I think it's also an important part of our story, right? Because whenever you confront nativism, I think the right response is not to say, gosh, these people are racist. I don't want to talk to them. The right response is to say, you care very much about what this country is, what this country stands for. And I do too, right? And can we have a conversation about what your values and my values are understanding that we are both part of a country that we want to protect and that we respect. To bring this conversation back a bit to the alternative facts, in many ways the facts about immigration are actually not particularly complicated. What's complicated about immigration is that we have a bunch of different values which often run against each other. And so we have to have that conversation about the values. And if we don't have that conversation about the values and we just yell at each other, then we end up with policy that doesn't serve our country well and policy that doesn't serve people who want to come to our country very well. So I think it's important to understand first and to come to the other part of your question that nativism is not really related to economic conditions or to wars around the world. It can exist in good times and it can exist in bad times. One of the things that indicate it's a good time is that many immigrants are coming in because there are many jobs and then people react to the new population of immigrants. So it's not really a discussion about Americans who are suffering and isn't it time to love them more than it is to love people from another country. It's really about what we think this country stands for and how we think it's going to grow and flourish. That was a perfect place to end. Thank you for that question to round things up and Anne for pulling it all together. So in such a beautiful way. Thank you to Brooke Jarvis for writing a story that prompted this conversation into Jason de Leon and Anne Lynn for their work and the depth of knowledge and research that they bring to the topic. And personally, I loved this cross-disciplinary conversation. And seeing the connections between journalism and scholarly work and the questions that you all brought for us to hopefully continue to discuss out at the reception. Jason mentioned at the beginning that you should read Brooke's story and we would like you to. We have some copies, not enough for everyone in the room but we do have some copies. We print these booklets every year for the Livingston Awards and the winners this year all happen to be print winners and their stories are here for you to read Brooke's story is included. And so we hope that those of you who can have an interest in reading it will be able to do so. You can also find the story on our website if you go to Wallace House and look under the Livingston Awards tab winners and you'll find the link to the story there and you can simply Google unclaimed Brooke Jarvis and you will find the story that way. So anyone who really wants to read it can find it. We invite you to join us for other events. We have some coming up very soon. These cards are available and just the right size for you to put on your refrigerator. Even a very small refrigerator. Here on February 15th we are having an event at Rackham Auditorium for those of you who are public radio listeners the show 1A that airs here every day on Michigan radio is coming for a live show called Speak Freely Debating the First Amendment in a Changing America. The show will have guests from the university community. That is our next event and you can find the other events here. We hope to see you again. Thank you so much for coming and Lynn Brooke Jarvis, Jason De Leon. Thank you so much.