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Scorched States and the Fight for Workers’ Rights: Unpacking Heat Exposure and Immigration Narratives

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In the first half of the show, cohost Eleanor Goldfield speaks with lawyer and worker health and safety advocate for Public Citizen’s Congress watch division, Juley Fulcher about her recent report, Scorched States, an expose of the inadequate or wholly lacking protections for workers facing extreme heat in the age of climate chaos. Juley describes the legislative morass standing in the way of workers rights, and how states like Florida and Texas have actually made it illegal to protect workers. Next up, cohosts Mickey Huff and Eleanor Goldfield highlight the importance of critical media literacy vis a vis how media and our government talk about immigration. Beware the dog whistle from both parties and establishment press, and consider the realities of those caught in the snares of our militarized southern border.

Video of the Interview with Juley Fulcher

Video of the Interview with Eleanor Goldfield and Mickey Huff

Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Juley Fulcher

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Eleanor Goldfield: Thanks everyone for joining us at the Project Censored Radio Show. We’re very glad to welcome to the show Juley Fulcher, who’s a worker health, and safety advocate for Public Citizens Congress Watch Division.

She’s a lawyer and a psychologist who has worked for 20 years as a policy expert in Washington, D.C., the belly of the beast. Juley, thanks so much for joining us.

Juley Fulcher: Happy to be here.

Eleanor Goldfield: So I wanted to give folks some context of this report, and you can find the report up at citizen.org. It’s a very powerful report called Scorched States, and I just want to share some findings from that that was released in May of this year.

It’s basically a report card on state laws protecting workers from heat. So, as, as pointed out in this report, globally, nearly half a million people die each year because of extreme heat. In 2023, the Northern Hemisphere experienced its hottest summer in 2,000 years. As many as 2,000 workers die, and 170,000 workers are injured from laboring in extreme heat every year in the United States.

Worker heat stress tragedies disproportionately strike workers who are poor, black, and brown, like any other stressors in our white supremacist capitalist system.

So, with that framework, Juley, I want to first highlight something that you show in the report, that only five states out of the 50, have some workplace heat stress rules in place.

That’s California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Minnesota. And listeners who know geography might notice that three of those states are in the northernmost part of the country, and totally absent are southern states.

So, Juley, could you talk about, in some more broad strokes, could you talk a little bit about what kind of heat legislation these five states have, and if you feel that it is enough to deal with this climate chaos that we’re experiencing right now?

Juley Fulcher: Well, the protections that workers have in those five states vary quite a bit.

We do have rules in Oregon and California that are particularly strong. They cover both indoor and outdoor workers and, actually California has just recently begun to cover indoor workers. They’ve covered outdoor workers since 2005, but both Oregon and California have very strong rules that are clear about what it is that employers need to do, specifically making sure that workers are hydrated and have adequate time for cool down breaks, that new workers are acclimatized during their first week so that it’s not overwehlming, that all workers and managers get trained on the dangers of heat stress and how to recognize heat illness when it starts to occur, how to respond effectively.

And so those states have served as a great model for something that should be done, at least in terms of the structure of the rule itself.

Washington state also has a good rule in general, although it only covers outdoor workers. Minnesota, unfortunately, is a very brief rule and it only covers indoor workers. Colorado is a rule that only covers agriculture workers, but it does have some good items in it that are protective of workers.

Eleanor Goldfield: And I’m curious, I mean, this might be more of a psychological question, but it seems to me that it would just be easier to offer up a kind of sweeping legislation that says, okay, workers, whether they’re indoor, outdoor, whatever the case may be, you are protected, here are the protections, whether they be water breaks or ensuring that you have access to cool spaces, rather than nitpicking, like, oh, 85 degrees and you’re outside and there’s shade, it’s like, why is there so much distinction and little nitpicking red tape here?

Juley Fulcher: Well, some of it has to do with the obvious kind of push and pull that happens when they’re developing a rule from stakeholders on both sides, those advocates working on behalf of workers and the workers themselves, and then some of the industry groups that struggle to try to minimize any regulation of workplaces.

And so that’s where some of it comes from, but a lot of it is there because specificity is necessary in order to get employers to do what needs to be done. This is a complex issue and it’s something that we can’t expect every individual employer, especially small businesses to become experts on and figure out all of those things. And that’s why it’s very helpful to have things like trigger temperatures where it says, you know when it’s above this temperature you do this and if it reaches this temperature you do that.

So, some of it is actually very helpful to the employers, meaning it’s also very helpful to the workers because it gets implemented correctly.

Eleanor Goldfield: And one of the things that you mentioned there in the report is this acclimatization, the importance of making sure that people can get used to a situation.

And I thought about that because I myself am very sensitive to heat. I was not made for the age of climate change. And in the past I have worked in audio tech. And there have been some moments, particularly when it’s outside where other people seem to be doing fine, but I am just about, I can feel that I’m very unsteady on my feet.

How does that play into that kind of legislation? The kind of personal experiences that somebody might have if they’re more sensitive to the heat, or perhaps there’s a disability that makes them more likely to suffer from heat exhaustion. Where does, where would that fit in?

Juley Fulcher: Well, obviously, that’s something very difficult to account for. We’re all individuals. We all have different sort of physical capabilities when it comes to heat, different sensitivities. And it’s not something that an employer can adequately address. We can’t sort of figure out where every individual person’s needs are and make sure that they each have the different kinds of things they might need to be protected.

Instead, what we create in these rules is something that would cover the average person, and make sure that they are protected from the heat. But something like acclimatization does recognize that there is some degree of tolerance that can be developed in order to get you into a condition for working in the heat.

That’s why we say for the first week or so, you should have increasing amounts of time working in the heat in order to get to a point where you’re working full day. That’s so critically important because we found that 70 percent of the people who die of heat stress in the workplace die during the first week of work.

Juley Fulcher: And another very key aspect to that is it’s not just about building up tolerance, it’s about building up recognition of what your body can and can’t do under those circumstances, recognizing the symptoms of onset of heat illness, so that you’re able to slow down, drink water, do what you need to do in order to try to keep that under control and to identify it for someone else to help if you’re in a situation that requires medical assistance.

So all of those things are important. And I should note, when I say building up a tolerance. No one is ever going to be able to build up enough tolerance to work in 90 or 100 degree heat all day long without any kind of breaks or water or anything like that. The body just isn’t capable of that. But we can get ourselves in a little bit better position than we were if we were used to sitting at a desk job in the air conditioning.

Eleanor Goldfield: Right. And, I think in a perfect world, there would be employers who recognize the different needs of their employees and the like, but that’s a different conversation for a different day. I also wanna talk about some history here, because you also outline in the report

already 50 years ago, there was a call by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to OSHA to adopt an occupational heat standard, and there still isn’t one. And it’s not like OSHA hasn’t adopted other standards in the past 50 years, though as I’ve mentioned, I’d argue that we’re still a long ways away from having generally just workplaces, but, so Juley, what gives here, why is the heat standard such an impossible get for OSHA?

Juley Fulcher: Well, you know, it has to do with a couple of different things. OSHA is only able to do its job if it’s given the kind of resources and support needed to do its job from Congress. Congress passed the law that created OSHA and identified what their responsibilities were. They also need to make sure that OSHA has the kind of funding it needs for adequate personnel to do what Congress has asked it to do. And right now, they are extremely under resourced. They have been from the beginning. And that means we have very little ability to actually get out and do a lot of investigation or enforcement of rules that are created.

It also means that we have less staff that are able to devote time to developing new standards. And then that’s complicated by the fact that legislative language has been created at various points across time that requires OSHA to jump through more and more hoops in order to get a rule created.

And it’s resulted in taking an average of seven to eight years for OSHA to create a rule from start to finish. And it’s also been the case that OSHA has had limited ability to work on more than one rule at a time. So if you look at the rules that OSHA has created in the 50 years since it itself was created, it’s actually a relatively small number of rules for that time period, and a lot of things that haven’t been effectively addressed.

And all of this is a big reason for it. It’s just not something that OSHA can easily and quickly accomplish. And the changing winds in the White House change priorities within each administration, which also are going to interfere with the ability to go through a seven to eight year process.

So yes, 50 years before, ultimately we saw a heat standard be prioritized by the Biden administration so that it could be one of the ones that actually gets worked on, and they’ve been jumping through those hoops to get through the process they need to get through to finish up. They have reached a point where they have now created a proposed rule, that rule will go for hearings and public comment before they’re able to create a final rule which at this point won’t be issued until at least 2026.

So it’s a long process. It’s a long time coming. There’s no way it ever should have taken this long. And yeah, here we are and we just need to all work as fast as we can to get some protection for workers nationwide.

Eleanor Goldfield: And how do you feel about this rule that’s working its way through hoops at the moment?

How do you feel about it as it’s written right now?

Juley Fulcher: The proposal that they’ve written is a strong one. It addresses all the areas of recommendation that come from science, and worker health experts and from the recommendations that have come from the CDC themselves.

So it is something that the advocacy world, the worker rights and protection world are very satisfied with. And, you know, are there things that we would like to see as well? Yes. But in general, this is a very good proposal, a very good standard that advocates would be happy if it were implemented tomorrow.

Eleanor Goldfield: Wouldn’t it be nice, especially considering it’s 100 degrees right now in Baltimore, and I can only imagine what it is in the rest of the country, particularly south of where I am. And I want to talk a little bit about the attacks on heat legislation, i.e. ensuring there’s no protection for workers.

And two of the hottest, if not the hottest states in the country, if you look at Public Citizen, and you have also released a very helpful map, where it’s mapping heat alerts. Texas is predominantly dark red, meaning that there were more than 60 heat alerts in most of those counties in a five month period last year.

So Texas and Florida have passed legislation that prohibits protection of workers. Could you talk a little bit more about this specifically?

Juley Fulcher: Sure. The first to get passed was the Texas bill, which is referred to as the Texas Death Star bill. It is broader than just preventing protections for workers against heat.

It actually prevents local governments from creating any kind of, um, Regulations for employers across sort of a broad range of categories, so not just labor related. It prohibits the local areas from creating these kinds of protections, although it does within the legislation specifically point out that employers can’t be required to give workers breaks. It’s an extremely frustrating piece of legislation, not just for those who work on protecting workers from heat stress, but for many others that are working on protection.

Texas is a very big state. They have 220 counties. It is an area where different kinds of needs exist in different parts of the states. And local governments are elected for a reason. They’re there because they want to protect the needs of their local area. So prohibiting them from stepping in and trying to provide the kinds of protections that the workers in their local jurisdiction need is really, you know, both ridiculous and completely against any principles of making sure that those workers get what they need.

And the idea that was presented from Texas as to why they were doing this was that they wanted to make sure that there was consistency across the state so that, for instance, if you have a chain business where you source in multiple counties that they would all be dealing with the same kinds of rules, same standards that they have to meet.

Unfortunately, we know that first of all, that the needs are different in different counties. But also we know that Texas has never taken any steps as a state to put in protections for workers against heat stress. So, you know, it’s difficult to argue that they’re just trying to make sure there’s consistency if they’re also not taking steps to do anything that needs to be done at the state level.

The second state to jump in and do this was Florida. And what they did was monstrous. It was even more, very specific attack on protecting workers from heat stress. Miami Dade County, which is in the southern tip of Florida and is the hottest area of Florida, the area of Florida that received the most heat alerts last year and every year, was working on a standard to protect workers from heat and they were a few weeks away from passing that through their oversight board, and getting it implemented. That’s when the state legislature stepped in to create a bill that would very specifically prohibit local jurisdictions from requiring employers to do anything to protect workers from heat.

Florida went so far as to specifically lay out all of the items that were listed in the protections from the Miami Dade proposed rule. These are the same protections that are very broadly recommended by what we know of science and policy.

It’s been said that specifically you can’t require employers to have water for the workers or to provide them with any kind of breaks in a shaded or cool space. It prevents employers from putting in acclimatization procedures. It prevents any requirement that employers have education or training for their workers or their managers. It even prevents putting up any kind of signs or passing out any kind of written material to workers on the issue. and, most frustratingly, most offensively, it prohibits any requirement for employers to have first aid on hand or emergency response procedures in place for what they will do when there is a heat stress emergency.

So it’s, almost impossible for the Florida legislature to credibly claim that this was all about just getting consistency among the jurisdictions in terms of the way that employers must treat their workers. This very specifically targeted heat stress, It very specifically targeted a proposed standard that was about to be implemented in Miami Dade.

And the bill went so far as to prohibit the state legislature in Florida from creating a heat standard to protect the workers statewide for the next two years.

Eleanor Goldfield: That is so arbitrary and so cruel. I’m also curious, because it seems like there are, even with what OSHA has in place, which isn’t a lot, it seems like there would be things that clash with this kind of legislation, like the idea of not having first aid available.

Thankfully I’ve never had to work in Florida, but in other states that I’ve worked in, you have to have first aid available. So I’m curious if there are existing protections that clash with that kind of legislation or existing protections that could allow states or even workers to bring this and say that, hey, existing OSHA protections say that you have to include this in how you care for your workers.

Is there anything like that?

Juley Fulcher: Well, there are parts of the federal standards that exist through OSHA that can be applicable. As you said, employers are required to have certain kinds of first aid available. Those requirements were created through other standards that focused on things like construction injuries or something of the like.

And those kinds of first aid kits and response systems are specific to those kinds of injuries, and illnesses that we might expect from something like, you know, chemical use or something like that. They do not necessarily have the kinds of things that would be necessary to deal with someone who’s experiencing heat exhaustion or heat stroke.

There’s nothing that’s required to be in those kits to address that. And similarly when it comes to emergency response, we obviously want to call an ambulance when medical attention is needed, and in most cases it involves things like, don’t move the injured worker while you wait for the ambulance, and minimal things that you should be doing to keep that worker from becoming further injured, and of course to do things to stop bleeding if that’s the case, but they don’t have specific procedures about heat, which are critically important.

When your body starts to overheat and your cooling systems, your natural cooling systems start to break down and are unable to keep up, you can move from heat exhaustion to heat stroke in 15 minutes or less.

So there is no time to just sit and wait until the emergency responders arrive. There has to be emergency help on site. I’m not talking about complex things. These are things that everybody can learn about, you know, dragging someone into the shade or in inside to an air conditioned space, using ice packs to try to cool them down, especially under the armpits and in the groin area. And, making sure that you’re using a cool cloth on their forehead and around their neck, not forcing them to drink a lot of water, because that can create its own problems.

So those kinds of things are not built into the procedures that are already required with respect to first aid through OSHA.

There’s one other, one other thing that is important to know as well. And that is that OSHA does not have requirements for breaks during work, which is absolutely mind boggling when you think about it, because regardless of experiencing heat stress, workers need breaks in order to be able to work, physically recover from whatever it is they’re experiencing, including just the physicality of their work, and the mental pressures and focus that are required for their work. And being able to have those breaks enables them to catch up and be productive again. The fact that OSHA hasn’t gotten around to even requiring breaks is kind of insane.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, it’s very insane. Although I guess it’s not that surprising considering the labor history of this country and how hard it’s tried to specifically target those speaking up for workers, it really shouldn’t, like the saying goes, if you know the history, then the present isn’t that shocking.

And I’m curious, with regards to people that are fighting on this issue, Public Citizen also has something called the Heat Stress Network, which is a campaign with over 120 organizations that have joined in support for worker heat protections. Juley, could you talk a little bit more about this campaign and specifically what kind of demands and goals y’all have?

Juley Fulcher: Well, the organizations that are involved actually have a variety of kinds of issues they focus on, many of them not related to heat stress, but we all have in common that desire and need to address heat stress and workers. The organizations within the network come from workers rights and unions, and also come from the climate world, and come from health world, you know, scientific experts in worker health and safety, and even some others who are faith based and you know, just lots and lots of organizations who all recognize this problem, and all want to see it get effectively addressed.

And we know that when it comes to working on anything in Washington, the broader range of people you have who are fighting for something, the more likely it is that that is to occur. And that’s the purpose of bringing these folks together. And our goal has been to try to get protections in place and enforceable at OSHA.

We’ve used multiple tactics to try to do that, including obviously petitioning OSHA directly to create a rule. We’ve also worked on trying to get legislation passed in Congress, and continue to work on that, because as I said, we’re still a couple of years away from seeing a final rule come out from OSHA.

Whereas Congress could direct OSHA to issue an interim heat standard tomorrow, an immediately enforceable standard that could be protecting the workers right now in this 100 degree heat. And so this legislation we’re working on in Congress would do that, would direct OSHA to create this interim heat standard that would be in place tomorrow until a final standard is issued, whether that’s two years from now or 20 years away from now, there would be something protective in place.

And we have 110 co sponsors of the legislation in the House. We have 20 co sponsors in the Senate. We continue to work on that and will continue to work on that even as OSHA is working on trying to finalize their rule.

So that’s the kind of advocacy that we as a broad network are able to provide. Also as a broad network, we’re able to bring in information and expertise on a lot of different ways that this impacts workers. We have all sorts of worker groups and unions that focus on specific kinds of employment, construction, farm workers, restaurant workers, bricklayers, you know, you name it, they’re there and are helping us understand the individual issues in their types of work, and, you know, also giving us a basis for making sure that whatever is in the standard does apply across the board in a way that’s going to equally protect all of those types of workers.

Eleanor Goldfield: And this kind of interim OSHA protection, that would override what Florida and Texas have done, correct?

Juley Fulcher: Yes, it will. Anytime OSHA puts a standard in place, it becomes the workplace standard for all private employers throughout the country. An individual state can create a rule that is stronger than the standard put out by the federal OSHA, but they cannot put out anything that is weaker.

So that means that any attempts to block those kinds of protections will immediately evaporate because they will be required to follow the federal OSHA standard in Texas and in Florida. And it also means that even a few of these state rules that already exist will have to be strengthened to meet the heat federal heat standard or exceeded, if that’s what they choose to do.

Eleanor Goldfield: And I’m just curious. I mean, it’s hard to think right now of a time when it will be cold and snowy and icy, but I’m thinking in particular of states that reach, you know, minus 40 and things in the winter. Is there a push to have this expanded to kind of like an overall climate protection so that workers who then have to work outside, I don’t know, like railroad workers or things like that, when it’s minus 40, would also have protections under something like this?

Juley Fulcher: It is important to protect workers in those circumstances. And it is a sort of policy issue on the back burner, if you will. There are not as many injuries and deaths due to cold as there are due to hot, but still it is a critical mass of individuals that should not be experiencing those kinds of problems at work.

There are protections that can be put in place, but the protections differ quite a bit from the kinds of things you need to do to protect workers from heat. Our body systems that cool us are different from the ones that warm us up. And so, you know, everything that we’re doing when we’re talking about cooling workers effectively is about how we work with the existing cooling systems to augment what they’re doing in our body, and enable them to be able to control the heat that’s there.

We need to be able to do that the same way when we talk about augmenting the systems in our body that keep us warm in cold conditions. And so that’s something that requires a different knowledge base that is driving it, and is able to create policies that are more specific to that particular danger in workplaces. And hopefully it won’t be long off before that begins as well.

I will say, though, that with the increased global annual warming that we’ve seen in the last couple of years, well, actually that we’ve seen a pattern of for the past 40 years, but has become particularly intense in recent years, there’s been less focus on addressing the cold.

Not only are we experiencing ridiculous heat in the summertime, we’re not getting the same kind of cold temperatures in general or as often in the wintertime. And so there’s just been less of a perceived need for that kind of standard in light of the sort of desperate need for the heat standard that we’re facing.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. Great point. And I, it makes me feel like there should just be a climate change worker bill that like deals with floods and droughts and fires and like all of the things that we’re facing as workers and as humans beings because the climate is in such chaos right now.

Juley Fulcher: It is a complicated thing and there are going to be a lot of effects.

from different kinds of climate change disasters and just general changing in temperatures that are going to affect things like, you know, vector borne illnesses, and different kinds of products that will need to be used in order to keep plants alive that also have toxic effects on humans.

Things like that, we’re going to have to sort of catch up and deal with each one as the issues arise. I will note that because of the fire season that we have in, you know, most of the the western half of the United States, smoke inhalation has become a big problem.

And a couple of these states that have addressed heat stress have companion standards that address the issue of smoke, so that they’re dealing with how those things combine, not just how we address them separately, because we have a lot of workers in those areas, outdoor workers who are out trying to do their work in the heat wearing, you know, bandanas and barely able to see 10 feet away because of the smoke in the air. So hopefully there will be more and more states that address that although hopefully there’ll be less states that where that will be a need. It doesn’t seem to be the direction we’re going in in terms of climate change though.

Eleanor Goldfield: No, indeed, it does not. It’s quite a dystopian, to be honest. But we battle on and I’m very grateful that you are battling on on this issue, Juley. Where’s the best place for folks to stay up to date on this issue?

Juley Fulcher: Go to citizen.org and put in the search bar, heat stress networky you can click on that web page that I try to keep as up to date as I possibly can. It has all sorts of information. It has access to all of the reports that I’ve written on the issue that have focused on different aspects of the problem, it also has reports from other allied organizations who are part of this heat stress network, where they have come at it from another perspective: Union of Concerned Scientists addressing it from the climate change aspect. We have a report from Restaurant Opportunity Centers that addresses specifically what restaurant workers are up against and workers who are working back in the kitchen making your food.

And so lots of information up there and resources and hopefully you find what you need or within those items that are up there. You’ll see an awful lot of them have extensive footnoting and are a great assistance as well in trying to locate information if you don’t see it within any of the reports or blogs that are currently there.

Eleanor Goldfield: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Juley. I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with us and contextualizing this and giving us this very important information. I appreciate it.

Juley Fulcher: I appreciate the willingness of you to cover this, and to help us get the word out, not only in order to make sure that workers get protected, but it also helps to educate the public of just how dangerous heat is, and their own personal need to learn about it and learn about how to avoid getting a heat illness, or a heat injury, and how to see the problems when others are experiencing them and get them help very quickly.

So it’s an area that we all need education to deal with all aspects of what’s happening in our lives this summer.

Eleanor Goldfield: Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.

Thanks again, Juley. Appreciate it.

Juley Fulcher: Happy to be here.

Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Mickey Huff and Eleanor Goldfield

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Mickey Huff: Welcome back to the Project Censored Show on Pacific Radio, I’m Mickey Huff with Eleanor Goldfield. In this segment, Eleanor and I are going to talk a little bit more about current events and applying the critical media literacy lens to them.

Eleanor, it’s always a pleasure to catch up with you and talk about things going on in our crazy world. Of course the assassination attempt against Donald Trump happened not long ago in Butler, Pennsylvania in the Rust Belt, not far from where I grew up, so I imagine we might have a little chat about some of the media coverage around that.

It’s also the RNC convention here. We’re talking on July 18th. The program, of course, airs the following weeks. But no shortage of things to talk about. However you particularly wanted to talk about this story that came from the conservative, we’ll say, to be generous, Washington Examiner. There was a recent piece called Media Ripped for Falsely Claiming Biden Deported More Than Trump.

This is a story that came out about a week ago now. This is a former U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement chief condemned a wire service report this week that claimed that Joe Biden recently deported more illegal immigrants than Donald Trump.

And, of course, immigration is a big issue in the campaign, particularly among the G.O.P. There’s a lot of dog whistle politics that go on with any of these talks about immigration. What we’re seeing at the convention is a lot of talk about unity and so forth, while we simultaneously see people holding placards and signs that of course are nothing close to what unity looks like.

And a lot of them are very hostile and negative towards immigrants, and particularly certain kinds of immigrants. But Eleanor Goldfield, please tell us about this issue in this piece, because I know you’ve been thinking a lot about it.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, thanks, Mickey. And just to your point, certain kinds of immigrants.

I mean, I’m the child of immigrants, right, and my mom didn’t move here till 1980 something. But of course, she’s blonde. She’s white and blonde. So it’s not “that kind” of immigrant. Right. And so what I want to cover here is actually a Reuters report that the Washington Examiner then decided to put in its crosshairs that is titled, Biden is now deporting more people than Trump. And it uses quotes from both Biden and Trump. Trump, the usual anti immigrant drivel. But then Biden also, a quote from him is, “today I’m announcing actions to bar migrants who cross our southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum.”

And this is something that Natasha Leonard over at The Intercept covered early in June, I believe, about the Democrats legacy of this, of policing the southern border, which actually started with Clinton after he pushed through NAFTA, he made sure it was the first time that the U.S. Mexico border was actually militarized.

So the Democrats have a rich history of this kind of anti Southern immigration legislation. And so it’s not really cause for surprise. It’s obviously cause for concern, but just to set the context there with that understanding.

What happens in this Washington Examiner article is something that is prime fodder for Project Censored and the work that we do, because there’s this person who’s a former ICE chief of staff, John Feere, and yes, his last name is Feere. He says that there’s an, and he now works, the revolving door has pushed him to a think tank called the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes, quote unquote, illegal immigration. And he says that you have to look at the difference between a removal conducted by ICE, And a return conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, CBP.

So he’s making a distinction between people getting, like, their doors knocked on by ice and being removed as in they were already here, and then a return which he says is different because they haven’t been processed through the American immigration system. Now, there is, of course, an administrative distinction here, but that administrative distinction is the US’s alone.

It is not a distinction that is realized in the lived experiences of people who end up in cages, who end up deported, who end up dead in the deserts between Mexico and the United States. So this is one of those examples of, I don’t know if Project Censored has a word for it, but a way of trying to create distinction where there isn’t one, a way of trying to fool the reader or the viewer into thinking, Oh, well, this policy is actually nicer because it’s a return.

You know, return sounds nice, you’re returning somewhere, even though these people aren’t from Mexico most of the time. So it’s a way to try and bend reality to suit their own means in this way to try and make it look like Biden is not actually doing enough at the border, and he’s letting too many people in, so Trump’s the better one because he’s actually deported more people.

So it’s also a race to the bottom, like who can be the worst human being, and who can deport more people, and put more people in cages, rip families apart, etc, etc, Mickey.

Mickey Huff: Or which president can bury more children under rubble with U.S. made bombs? I mean, again, it is a race to the bottom and the rhetoric that, you know, that’s coming out of, say, right now, of course, the convention is going on, the show is pre recorded. Again, I repeat that because when people listen to this next week, sometimes people will shake their fist at the broadcast acting as if we’re missing something that’s happening next week. Rest assured something strange will happen next week when this show airs, and we’ll talk about that later.

But, you know, how many people read fact checking and of course there’s issues with fact checking not all fact checking is equal, but it is good at least to have some sort of record or a tally of how many statements are being made at such convention which is prime time aired, right? Getting, you know, some considerable viewership and so on, particularly after what happened this last weekend in Butler, Pennsylvania with the Trump campaign.

Pointer Institute, PolitiFact, not the worst of the fact checking groups. They’ve actually done a pretty decent job of breaking down and bringing this up because they specifically recently looked at immigration and they looked at the Arizona Senate candidate, Carrie Lake, their claims talking about how the U.S. representative from Arizona, Ruben Gallego voted to let millions of people pour into the country and illegally cast ballots. These are false statements, right? These are things that are not happening. Steve Scalise in Louisiana said on the border Biden and Harris opened it up to the entire world and prisons were being emptied.

Mickey Huff: The idea that the border is open is just categorically false. I understand that it’s useful rhetorically and politically to use that kind of language. But as you know, Eleanor, the borders are pretty heavily policed. In fact, we know that the borders, as you were mentioning earlier about which kinds of immigrants, some borders seem to be far more policed and walled than others.

And that’s by design, right? But again, I think back to the media literacy angle, and I’d like to have you talk a little bit about this with some of this kind of coverage, people that are tuning into this kind of convention, you know, depending upon if they watch team blue or team red media sources.

They don’t really know if Nikki Haley’s claims about Kamala Harris are true, Haley acted as if it was entirely Kamala Harris’s job to quote, fix the border. But let’s go back to the frame. It assumes the border is broken. It assumes that that’s what the vice president is supposed to do. And by the way, I’m in California. I remember what Kamala Harris did here for immigrants and communities of color and people, and you’d think the GOP would actually be cheerleading some of the things that Harris did in California.

So, again, the frame of this, it’s based on a series of assumptions. You mentioned this earlier, there’s gross distortion of language and hyperbole to make things appear to be worse than they are.

I’m not saying there aren’t issues around border and people coming in and so on, but what I am saying is that there is a concerted effort to create straw person kind of fallacies blowing up situation so that they’re easily able to be kind of torn apart in terms of criticism against Democrats who will get into later.

But Eleanor Goldfield, maybe you can say a little bit more just about media and media coverage around this issue of immigration. And of course, the fact that in general, the establishment press seems to let political figures get away with saying nearly anything. Right?

And it’s not such that the lying is happening, the degree to which that people are supposed to believe them all paraphrasing Hannah Arendt. It’s that when so many falsehoods are coming out, people just kind of lose the notion of what’s true in the first place. They almost stop looking for it. Can you comment on some of that?

Because there’s a lot of that going on out of the convention. I’m sure later we’ll see similar things happening in a different way from another convention in Chicago. Let’s see what happens, but Eleanor, what are some of your remarks on these things?

Eleanor Goldfield: I mean, absolutely, Mickey, and I want to just also mention to listeners that we previously had on the show, John Washington, the author of the book, The Case for Open Borders, who writes a really compelling book about borders and their malleability, their movability, and indeed their militarization.

And that, in fact, today we have the most militarized border that we’ve ever had. And it still doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in the sense that people still find a way across because humans move. That is the only thing that has been true of us throughout history when all other things have changed, right?

Humans will always find a way to move, particularly when the U.S. is responsible via the Monroe Doctrine and other kinds of policies like that for destroying people’s home countries.

Mickey Huff: Okay, so this is where I wanted to go. You already came in with it as I was saying, why is it that so many people are coming here?

History has clearly shown many of the places that the United States colonizes in whatever way, neoliberal way, economically, physically bombs, destroys, etc. You know, when we saw in the 60s and 70s massive waves of people coming from Southeast Asia, what was happening there? What was happening in Southeast Asia at the time?

Oh yeah, the Vietnam War that leveled Vietnam, killed 3 million people, went into Laos, Cambodia, the surrounding region. We could go on and on. The Middle East, we’ve been bombing the hell out of the Middle East for 30 plus years.

Eleanor Goldfield: And why is it that Europe is now freaking out and moving towards the right in so many ways because of immigration from the Arab world?

Well, thanks, U. S. Empire.

Mickey Huff: And NATO, and the idea that there was just these big left gains in Europe. Again, let’s remember this center left is a neoliberal, more of a neoliberal kind of a coalition going on there. So a lot of hay being made about this left insurgency in Europe doesn’t stack up to all the details if you’re paying attention, but nevertheless, back to that issue of immigration, creating immigrants, right?

There’s a push and a pull. Okay. Cool. There’s no contextual discussion of, in the media, why there are people at the border, where they’re coming from, and what’s causing people to need to move out of their own homelands. So maybe, talk more about some of that, Eleanor.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, and it’s incredible. I mean, and I mentioned NAFTA earlier.

That caused a huge wave. The North American Free Trade Agreement is what that stands for. And this was, this has been a horrific trade agreement that crippled the ability, particularly of small, like campesinos, small scale Mexican farmers to be able to make a living. And so where are they going to go?

And so, and of course, Clinton knew this, which is why Clinton, under Clinton, was the first time that the border between Mexico and the U. S. started to be militarized. Because, again, these people aren’t dumb. They know what they’re doing. They know that they’re going to be ripping families apart. They know that people are going to die at the border.

It’s not about safety, because as James Baldwin famously said, If I’m starving, that’s your problem. And so you don’t make safety by oppressing other people. And that’s very evident by what we see around the world, at all kinds of borders and checkpoints, whether that be in Israel or in the United States.

And I think with regards to the Washington Examiner article in this lens of critical media literacy. I think it’s also important to note that I think a lot of times when somebody sees a critique, particularly of corporate media, they immediately think, oh, well, if it’s a critique of it, then this critique must be true.

Because it all of a sudden points out to them that, oh, well, here’s what they said that’s wrong. And here’s why, here’s the real answer. They don’t then say, well, what’s the critique of the critique, right? It feels like the person who knows enough to know that that’s wrong must also just have the answer, that single, perfect, you know, mathematical response that makes them right.

So I think that’s the other thing that critical media literacy does is opens things up to nuance so that I can say that this guy who’s the former head of ICE, he obviously knows more about the admin of ICE than I do, and, you know, God bless him for that. But the lived experiences and the reality of people who are being caged, who are being thrown back, whatever you want to call that, deported, removed, returned, however that lingo is used, the lived experiences are still there.

And so it’s still true that people are being forcibly removed from the United States from entering and seeking asylum in the United States under Biden. That is the bottom line here. And so I think that that is also something that this kind of watchdog journalism, that independent journalism needs to do, is expose to viewers how this is sneaky, how this is insidious.

And interestingly enough, which it’s the same man Feere from, the former ICE official said that media that reports anything to the contrary, basically of what he’s saying, that the Biden administration isn’t doing enough at the border “further undermines the credibility of journalism.

If journalism’s wanted to help protect the American people against dangerous federal policies and politicians, they would be exposing the fallout of the Biden administration’s agenda and pressing Biden’s political appointees to defend their records .” So he’s basically saying, if you want to be considered a journalist to me, you are going to protect my agenda.

But of course, Mickey, we know that real journalists don’t protect any politician’s agenda. That’s not our job. Our job is to dig for the truth and hold politicians of all stripes accountable for the kind of policies that they’re pushing.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, absolutely. Watchdog journalism is a mainstay of just muckraking reporting.

I mean, that’s what’s at the root of it is to hold people in power accountable to the public by informing the public of what’s actually going on. As George Sheldon said in the mid 20th century, the job of journalism isn’t to be objective and do both sides. And it’s to tell the public what’s actually going on, to tell people how are the powerful fleecing the public. You know, you go back a hundred years ago and Lincoln Steffens in the shame of the city series went to many major towns and cities in the united states and looked at the what he called an unholy alliance between political figures and prominent business people.

I mean 100 years later, dark money is basically the whole name of the game. Peter thiel behind jd vance I mean, this is basically the the hard right, more libertarian, very anti immigrant, very right wing and reactionary. That’s the money that’s behind Trump. Elon Musk, $45 million a month, pledged, right? You know, the tech bro money is pouring in to the RNC coffers. And again, one of the things that attracts those people is the bravado.

It’s the idiocy, which you’ve already pointed out factually, and let the facts speak for themselves, the Biden administration hasn’t been friendly at the border.

They’re not friendly around immigration policies. You know, they have a very neoliberal approach. And again, I, as an historian, I have to say, pointing out Bill Clinton and pointing out how this stuff really started to shift into a more neoliberal world in the 1990s was in the Rust Belt, right, where this J.D. Vance person writes the Hillbilly Elegy, I mean, talk about a con man grifter, you know, throwing his own folks under the bus. But let’s save that for another time. People might want to read that, but this idea, you know, that they just concoct this up that all these people are coming for their jobs and so on.

I mean, it’s just sheer rubbish. And Clinton was able to sell it, and I watched him do it because I grew up in the Rust Belt. I saw them come in and campaign around all of this stuff. I saw them say how no jobs would be lost, and what did they do? They brought in private prisons for people from the mills to go work.

So they filled those up with non violent drug offenders, right? I mean, again, all of this bait and switch, all of this shell game stuff came then, and then after people in the Midwest saw, the billionaire Ross Perot from Texas called it, it’ll be a giant sucking sound of jobs leaving the country, while the billionaires are often right about some things, and that’s usually about the bottom line, money, you know, these kind of things, he was right.

It was a boon to some corporations, but terrible for workers. Terrible for workers. And that resentment, right, that comes out of the collapse of the Rust and the creation of the Rust Belt in the 1970s and the 1980s, was ripe to have people desperate for Clinton in the 1990s, where he was selling them this bill of goods, it just paved the way for Bush’s, quote, compassionate conservatism.

It just kind of continued the policy. But by the way, even Bush’s immigration policy, you’d have to wonder what the current GOP would have to say about that, right? Because Bush openly said, well, we actually need immigrant labor to do cheap things, right? Bush actually said that stuff out loud, George W. Bush. But things have shifted so far to the right in the last 30 years that we’re really left with the Biden administration and the Democrats pretending that they have some humanitarian immigration policy, which it really is not.

And then, of course, the GOP, which, you know, you go take a look at Project 2025. They want to incarcerate 100,000 immigrants, like, right away. They want to begin deportations, incarcerations. Again, you know, I think people need to really pay closer attention in the kind of spectacle that we’re seeing at the convention in Milwaukee right now. The Republicans, yeah, it’s thin on facts and high on rhetoric and high on sort of the red meat to the lions thing about trying to build the base and pump people up, which I think is frankly very, very dangerous.

And the media should be doing a better job of dissecting those messages, historically contextualizing them as you were just doing. But again, that’s what the critical media literacy lens does. It doesn’t pick a side or a party. It looks at the issues, looks at the facts, looks at the history, and tries to help the public understand what’s actually happening.

Eleanor.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely, Mickey. And to your point about the ramping up, I mean, Project 2025 is really just the yes anding. I mean, I feel like it’s a very terrible improv class that we’re living through in the U.S. right now. It’s just a continuous yes anding, okay? Yes, more money to the military. Yes, more money for militarizing the border. Yes, more money for ecocide. And so it’s just like this continuous yes anding regardless of which side of the aisle you’re looking at it from. And so I think that’s the other important thing to note here. And lest we forget that, you know, Obama was nicknamed the deporter in chief.

I mean, there’s a reason for that, right? And these Biden policies, in early June, when the Biden administration pointed out that, they announced that they were going to basically disallow asylum seekers at the border. Biden tweeted something, or his lackeys tweeted something to the effect of, Well, there’s one thing I won’t do, and that’s split up families.

Well, here’s the thing, Joe. Again, the lived experience, you can say that. But you know, or his people know, that that actually is what’s going to happen because, for instance, what happens at the border is that asylum seekers can’t go in, but unaccompanied children can still get in. Now, this is where it gets really sick because, of course, what does unaccompanied mean?

It means that you just shove your child towards the border and say, I need you to make it because I might not. Is that not splitting up families? As a parent, I cannot imagine saying goodbye to my child at the border and having that be considered a more compassionate policy than what was under Trump or what would be under Trump.

I mean, it’s absolute drivel. And that’s the other important thing is that the Republicans are a lot better at saying things just like flat out, like, hey, we’re going to do this and it’s inhumane and we’re down with it. The Democrats say things like, we’re not going to split up families, but they’re well aware of what their policies do.

They’re well aware of how these actually affect people on the ground at the border. And so it’s really important not just to have that critical media lens when looking at how journalists portray things, or how the stenographers to the State Department portray things, but just looking at how the politicians themselves talk about these things and say, Okay, well, you say you’re not going to do that, but let’s see what your policy actually does.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, we will certainly see. We’re not prognosticators. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Things are looking more and more 1968 by the day.

But time will tell. Anything else you want to add here in this segment, Eleanor? It’s always good to talk about some of the latest things and apply a critical media lens to things that are happening and also not just to critique the establishment press and so on, but to highlight independent reporting and the muckraking type journalism that the independent press is known for and to remind the public why we really need it.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely, Mickey. And I’d say that, you know, ProjectCensored.org has great resources, whether that be alternative news sites, or how to continuously critique the media that you take in. And again, that isn’t just the media that is journalists, that is the media that is really anything that you see, read, or listen to. I would recommend that folks also check out, and I had a person who works on this, Dr. Austin Kocher on the show recently, he has a transactional records access clearing house, which is basically, through FOIA requests and a lot of other things, it is a one stop shop for immigration data, which they don’t want you to have. That’s why it’s behind a FOIA request. Lots of them, in fact. It’s at trac.syr.edu. It’s a project out of Syracuse University that basically gets all this information from the government, which should be public information and easy to access. And shows you the reality of the situation statistically, and then also shares information on the ground.

So I’d recommend that people check out that. That is a great place to look for this. And then, again, you know, the goal of Project Censored is to expand your media diet, not constrict it. So I’m not gonna tell you only get your immigration information from this one place. If you want to read The Washington Examiner, that’s fine. Yeah, we all need a laugh. But I think it’s important to make sure that we read a lot of different places and, again, recognize who they’re talking to. They just spoke to one ICE, former ICE official who now works for an anti immigration think tank. They spoke to that one person for this article.

So it’s like, Okay, but what about, anybody over, no? Okay. So, again, really checking out who they’re talking to and the angles and the biases that those outlets have as a whole is super important.

Mickey Huff: Absolutely. The frames that they use, the language they employ, the terms they avoid. Many things go into crafting, let’s just call it what it often is, propaganda.

And a lot of effort goes into making the propaganda appear to be journalistic. Right? But of course, you know, many of them made a team red, team blue corporate networks, cable networks. They’ve kind of even just done away with the pretense that they’re actually committing acts of journalism, many of the times, and they’re just sort of either platforming nonsense and he said, she said, or they’re just going for 1 particular bias.

It’s a classic thing too with a lot of these think tanks and these fancy sounding places with banal patriotic names and so on, right? Right? Like the Heritage Foundation, right? Project 2025, the Atlantic Council, they’re counseling around the Atlantic, but it’s never really explained who funds them, what they are, what their ideological proclivities are, what their agendas are.

Historically, one of my favorites was the Heartland Institute, right, which was actually started by the fossil fuel industry, is a propaganda arm to pay quote unquote scientists 10 grand per article to try to debunk or cast doubt on global warming issues. And of course, that’s another right wing coup is they got us away from saying global warming and into climate change, right? The banal climate change, right? And it’s not a climate change. It’s a crisis, right? So, again, we have to be very mindful. This is what critical media literacy education does. It helps us decode propaganda.

It helps us understand biases and you’re right. We need to diversify our sources of information. We need to read things like the Washington examiner, even for the reasons you put forward. We need to read everything. Things across the spectrum. So again, we’ve got a lot of independent sources and things listed at projectcensored.org for free. And of course, we’re always open and welcome to hear from you, all our listeners and viewers, the things that you think, things that you’re checking out.

So, Eleanor, I think we’re probably about out of time in this segment. As always, it is a delight to sit down and speak with you about these things, and I’m sure we’ll do it again next month.

I am Mickey Huff, and you are

Eleanor Goldfield: Eleanor Goldfield. Thanks so much, y’all, for tuning in to the Project Censored radio show. We will talk to you next time.