609: It’s Working Out Very Nicely

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

Nairobi, Kenya. Saturday, the day after President Trump signed his executive order temporarily stopping all refugees from entering the United States. This is a transit center for refugees, run by the International Organization for Migration, the IOM, which helps them relocate.

In a tent, about 40 Somalis sit on plastic chairs-- mostly men. They're banned from the United States for two reasons, if you want to get technical about it. Because they're refugees, and because they're from one of the seven countries where we're banning all travelers-- from Somalia.

A middle aged Kenyan, George Okech, stands in front of them with the unenviable job of explaining the news. Many of these men were supposed to fly in the next two or three days.

Ira Glass

Kevin Sieff is the Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post. He was there recording what happened for us.

Ira Glass

This last step, though, is now blocked.

Ira Glass

The camp is the refugee camp seven hours away, where they lived.

Ira Glass

The problem with moving back is, OK, everything. But the practical part of it is daunting. They sold their homes and possessions, gave up their jobs. And they were no longer on the books as camp residents. People running the camp weren't sure what to do with that. George asked the group, what are some of the problems?

Ira Glass

He's saying he's been at the camp for 26 years.

Ira Glass

But, Kevin explained to me, because they didn't have any money, they bought all the clothes on credit with the idea that they were going to earn the money in America and then send it back.

Ira Glass

So George tells the refugees.

Ira Glass

George calls in another guy, a skinny guy in his 20s with a goatee. He used to be a headmaster of a school in the camp. He says that, while he was waiting for his papers to come to the United States, he turned down scholarships in Canada and Germany. The one in Canada included a path to citizenship. And he did that because he wanted to go to America. After the four-month temporary ban, he asks, are we going to be allowed into the United States? George replies.

Ira Glass

Fact is, at the end of 120 day ban on entering the United States, for many, if not most, of these refugees, clearances and their applications will expire. So they're going have to clear those again, which could take years.

Our country does lots of things around the world that have unintended consequences, but this is the intended consequence of the travel ban. These refugees were stopped until the administration could toughen up the vetting process to enter the United States. In the first week of the Trump administration, there was a lot of talk about dealing with illegal immigrants to the US, about building a wall, about how we were going to pay for that.

But immigrants who followed the rules, who filled out the forms, who went through the process-- they were fine. Not this week. With the signing of this executive order, the president made the transition from cracking down on illegal immigrants to cracking down on legal ones. All the people at this camp were legal immigrants. They'd gone through a rigorous vetting process that had taken years, had been approved for resettlement, and now they're barred from the country.

Today on our radio show, we're going to document some of the things that happened when the executive order went into effect, and we're going to talk about the way it was implemented. As I'm guessing you've already heard, customs agents didn't have clear instructions. Government agencies said they weren't properly consulted. There was no advance warning to agencies or to travelers, so people got on planes and then had to be turned back from airports. It was like seeing a major policy change thrown into the world like a fastball with no warning. And it's hard not to feel like, what just happened? Like, what was that all about? We talk about that, too.

About half the country approves of the ban according to a Reuters poll. But if you took a poll at this transit center, I'm pretty confident the numbers would not be that high. Kevin talked to one guy, Ahmed, who's 24. Born in the refugee camp. And until he went to the transit center, he said he'd never been outside the camp.

Ira Glass

It case this isn't clear, these are literal dreams, like while he was asleep. He would be in America, driving a bus, and then Ahmed said he would wake up and, you know, he'd be back at the camp.

So after working their way through the application process-- some of them taking a decade doing it-- Ahmed and the other Somalis find out at the 11th hour, no, they are not going to America. And in fact, they're going to be returning to the refugee camp where they'd given up their jobs and their homes. And in fact, they were now in debt for their new American winter coats and pants.

Ira Glass

Then, six days later, as you've probably heard, a judge in Washington issued a restraining order blocking the Trump administration's travel ban. After that, the State Department issued instructions that all the refugees who were stopped now could come to the United States and they should rebook their flights to arrive here before February 17th. That applies to these Somali refugees, who, by the end of the week, had been sent back to the refugee camp but now will be returned to the transit center to fly to the United States very soon-- unless something changes.

Ahmed told Kevin that, just a few days before the executive order was signed, in the cultural orientation class to prepare them for what it's going to be like to live in America, the instructors described the country this way.

Ira Glass

Kevin asked him, how do you make sense of this executive order which does, in fact, single out people from just a few countries, including his. Ahmed said he didn't know how to make sense of it. He's just a student, he said. He's not a politician.

Ira Glass

Act One, Basket of Deportables.

So the same day as those Somalis were getting that news, here in the United States at airports around the country, there were protesters, hundreds of volunteer lawyers. A lot of that was on TV. Maybe you saw it. One of our producers, Zoe Chace, was at JFK Airport, terminal 4 on Saturday as customs agents stalled out, waiting for instructions from above. Around the country, there was confusion over who to let in and who to keep out. It seemed like they were erring on the side just holding everybody till they heard from Washington.

Zoe hung out with the lawyers for a while, like Becca Heller from the International Refugee Assistance Project. Her team had been at the airport since the night before, trying to get information from Customs and Border Protection, CBP.

Ira Glass

All day the lawyers couldn't see their clients. Zoe and the other reporters couldn't see them or talk to them. They were hidden away somewhere back in the airport. And there's all this mystery about what was happening with these people who had arrived from the seven banned countries.

In the days that followed, over the course of this week, Zoe tried to answer that question about what was going on back there.

Zoe Chace

While Becca and I and the masses of other reporters and lawyers were stuck in the arrivals terminal outside the Dunkin' Donuts, here's what her client Haider was doing right at this moment. He was sitting quietly among dozens of people with no phone in a little room just a few minutes walk from where we were. He'd started off in another terminal, trying for hours to ask the customs officer, what's going on?

Zoe Chace

I reached Haider by phone a few days after the JFK episode. We spoke through an interpreter. He says when he got off the plane, he never even made it to customs. There were lots of people waiting around, which confused him. And a woman led him into a little room.

Zoe Chace

Haider had been trying for three years to come to America. He fled Iraq a year and a half ago, found his way to Sweden. His wife had worked for an American contractor in Baghdad and their lives were threatened because of it. She and their son have been in Houston for those three years, trying to get him a visa. He got that visa to come to the United States on January 27, 2017. That was executive order day. His flight left Stockholm at 12:00 PM New York time on Friday. While he was in the air, the order went into effect. Haider didn't know that. He didn't know the order existed, that things have changed. His mind was racing.

Zoe Chace

He couldn't call his wife, Dunya, who was waiting in Houston, but she had a good idea why he might be late. She had Fox News on Friday afternoon.

Zoe Chace

Back at the airport, Haider was stood up against a wall and searched. They put him in handcuffs. They took him to a car.

Zoe Chace

In the car was an Iranian and another Iraqi also in handcuffs. They drove to terminal 4, the terminal where the lawyers and I were. He got taken into another room. CBP took the handcuffs off and told them why they were there.

Zoe Chace

Julie, the lawyer in JFK, keeps getting calls from Dunya's sister over the next few hours. She keeps her earbuds permanently in her ears and periodically shouts things out, like I am at the airport ready to assist.

Zoe Chace

The customs official comes out at one point into the crowd of lawyers. She says, come on back, but only two congressmen, Nadler of the 10th District of New York and Velazquez of the 7th, are allowed to follow her.

Zoe Chace

Haider told me he stayed in that room at the terminal for another 10 hours. At some point, they brought him chicken and biscuits. One by one, he watched people leave. Haider was not interrogated, like was reported at other airports with other people who were held up. His wife waited, cried, texted the lawyers.

We asked the White House to help us understand what was happening. We got no response. But I read The Washington Post. Here's what the administration told reporters on a conference call. The news media needs to calm down their, quote, "false, misleading, inaccurate, hyperventilating coverage" of the, quote, "fractional, marginal, minuscule percentage of international travelers who have simply been," as the reporter puts it, "set aside for further questioning for a couple hours on their way into the greatest country in the world." And OK, sure, a couple hours. Even 10 hours. Even 24 hours is not a big deal if you know what happens at the end-- that you get to come take refuge in America like you were promised. It is a big deal if you spend 10 hours worrying you're going to be flown off to a place where you're going to be killed, and your wife spends those hours thinking she'll never see you again.

6:30 PM, 22 hours later, Haider walks out into the arrivals area with everybody waiting. According to his lawyer Julie, five minutes after being told no, no, no, he cannot leave, apparently CBP suddenly changed its mind. They got a phone call and then they said, he can go. His lawyers think it's because they filed a habeas corpus suit, but really we don't know. We might never know. He came out with no documentation of what happened, which is extremely unusual.

And so Haider is here in America with Dunya. The customs officials were nice about it when they let him go.

Zoe Chace

It's reported later that there was basically no prep on the government's part for how to deal with this. Apparently, this executive order was signed after very little consultation with Homeland Security or the State Department or the Department of Justice-- the guys in charge of this sort of thing.

As this week went on, the more that came out, the more confused it sounded. Like the green card holders. At first, it seemed like the green card holders were banned. Homeland Security, late Friday night, said, no, not green card holders. Then the White House overruled Homeland Security, like, green card holders, still out, basically. On Sunday, the White House said, OK, fine, Homeland Security, let's just do some extra screening of the green card holders. On Tuesday, the new Secretary of Homeland Security said the rollout went smoothly. On Thursday, the White House said, never mind. No additional screening for green card holders. Also this week, Congress requested an internal investigation into the Department of Homeland Security, into the way this policy got rolled out.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace. Haider's case, by the way-- a few hours after Haider's release was the case that led a New York judge to issue the first order halting deportations under the president's ban. Others obviously followed in the days after.

[MUSIC - NARCY, "HEY!"]

Ira Glass

Act Two, Heavy Vetting.

So the whole premise of the executive order is that we're going to stop all refugees and we're going to stop travelers from seven countries for a few months because we need to overhaul the way that we screen people before they come into the United States. Well, I talked to somebody who does that screening. He's on the staff of the United States Citizen and Immigration Services, USCIS. He's an interviewer. Flies to Africa and to the Mideast. He's interviewed Africans from all seven countries that we have temporarily banned. Sits with people for hours, drilling them on the details of their stories, looking for inconsistencies and lies. He asked that we not use his name or put his voice here on the radio, so I'm going to call him Bob. We have an actor, Scott Shepherd, saying what he said here on the air.

Bob said that when he and his colleagues heard about the executive order, the reaction was mostly shock and sadness. A few dozen of them went out for drinks together, and some people cried then.

Ira Glass

Bob and I talked for a while about the vetting procedures that are in place now. And they are considerable. People are fingerprinted. We take biometric data. In many countries, there are iris scans. Security checks are run by the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Counterterrorism Center, and sometimes others. They look at criminal databases and terrorism watch lists. They check family members' affiliations. They'll call contacts on people's smartphones. They have document verification labs. They compare the biometric information. And of course, they check people's social media accounts.

The interviews Bob does are face to face. They take hours. A lawyer that I talked to who advocates for refugees seeking asylum, Laura Finkbeiner from the International Refugee Assistance Project, emphasized how these interviews are customized for each person.

Ira Glass

I asked Bob about this.

Ira Glass

And all this brings us to something that is not just Bob's opinion. Many people believe that the current vetting system is effective. They'll tell you our current system's working. And as for the rare cases where somebody gets through, they'll say no system's perfect. No system can be perfect. We need studying learned from those cases.

One of the people who said the system is effective to me most fiercely this week was Kirk Johnson. He's been on our program before. He worked for USAID in Iraq. And then when he came back to this country, he started the List Project to help interpreters and other Iraqis and Afghans who worked with the US overseas, whose lives were threatened because of it, move to this country. In that job, he's become very familiar with how hard it can be to get somebody into the US, even if they risk their lives helping American troops. He said it's tough.

Ira Glass

We reached out to the person that Kirk talked to at the Population, Refugees, and Migration bureau to confirm this. He hung up on us.

Of course, not everybody agrees with Kirk Johnson. We reached out to two experts who have questions about how well our current system works and we asked them what's missing. How can we vet better? Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which generally argues for less immigration, said we could ask more questions during the vetting process to figure out the ideology of applicants. Ask if they agree with American values. But that was the only specific thing that he could point to.

Tim Kane, who heads up immigration studies at the Hoover Institution-- not the former vice presidential candidate-- had no specific things he thought that we should add to the vetting process. He thinks it's thorough. Instead, he questioned whether we can effectively screen people at all from places like Syria and Somalia.

Ira Glass

Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies went a little further on the same point.

Ira Glass

Bob, the interviewer that I talked to at USCIS, says that that's a naive picture of our security databases and the role they play in screening and the kind of information in them. And he said, in fact, Syrians, though they come from a failed state, are among the best-documented refugees. They almost always have documentation with them, he said. Like these things called family books, which are government-issued documentation of entire families.

None of the people we talked to this week could tell us exactly what was meant by the phrase extreme vetting. National security experts say that it's not a term that's been used in their world. Both Kane at the Hoover Institution and Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies said the phrase extreme vetting seems like something that Donald Trump just made up. It's a marketing term, Kane said. And the moment Donald Trump invented it seems to have been last summer, right after the attack in Nice, France. This is then-candidate Donald Trump on Fox News about four hours after the attack. Greta Van Susteren asked him what he'd be doing in this moment if he were president.

Ira Glass

Again, this is Bob, who works interviewing refugee applicants. He says he, and he thinks most of his coworkers, are open to anything that could make the vetting process better. What he has a problem with is stopping the flow of refugees for four months while the administration figures it out.

Ira Glass

Coming up, we take apart one key sentence in the executive order and we ask, is this really true? That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, It's Working Out Very Nicely. We got that title from something the president said about the rollout of his executive order, the temporary ban on travel and resettlement.

Ira Glass

A senior administration official told reporters on Sunday, quote, "it really is a massive success story in terms of implementation on every single level." White House aide Stephen Miller said later in the week, quote, "it is hard to envision a smoother rollout."

Ira Glass

So in the first half of our radio program today, we documented what happened during some of that smooth rollout. In this half, we're going to be talking more about what we should make of its substance. And that brings us to Act Three. Act Three, Statement of Purpose.

So the very first section of President Trump's executive order is called Purpose. It's the premise on which the order is based. It's the why of the whole thing. The Purpose section starts by saying, quote, "the visa issuance process plays a crucial role in detecting individuals with terrorist ties and stopping them from entering the United States." OK. No debate there. That is true.

It's the next sentence that caught the eye of one of our producers, Nancy Updike. That sentence reads, quote, "perhaps in no instance was that more apparent than the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when State Department policy prevented consular officers from properly scrutinizing the visa applications of several of the 19 foreign nationals who went on to murder nearly 3,000 Americans." That sounds all right-- just like a quick summary of 9/11. But Nancy had a couple questions. Here she is.

Nancy Updike

The whole reason there was a commission after 9/11 that put out a 585-page report about 9/11 was to be precise and thorough about what on Earth went wrong. And if we're going to base a sea change in United States immigration policy on a one-line summary of 9/11, I want to look at whether we're getting it right.

I called the senior counsel for the 9/11 Commission report, Susan Ginsburg. She wasn't just a staff member for the commission. She was team leader of the group that was focused on the visa process and border controls and how the terrorists were permitted into the country, because there's no disputing that the 9/11 hijackers came into the United States with approved visas.

Susan and her group, in fact, wrote a whole separate 241-page report just about immigration, border control, and terrorist travel. She also worked, before 9/11, for the law enforcement division of the Treasury Department, which at the time controlled customs, ATF, and the Secret Service. She also worked on counterterrorism initiatives with Richard Clarke, who led counterterrorism efforts under Presidents Bush and Clinton. Susan Ginsburg is not a softy. She asked me not to record her, but she said I could quote her if I cleared the quotes with her first. Here's what she said.

I asked her if, in her view, it's true, as it says in the executive order that, quote, "State Department policy prevented consular officers from properly scrutinizing the visas," end quote. Susan said, there is truth in that, but it's not the whole truth. She said it's, quote, "distorted and arbitrary to focus solely on the visa process if you want to understand how the 9/11 hijackers were able to get into America," end quote. Why? Because, she said, the problem was so much bigger than that.

Before 9/11, the entire government from the president on down did not see the country's borders or its visa system as the front line of counterterrorism as we do now. The problem wasn't so much a matter of this or that policy. It was a whole mindset, a pre-9/11 mindset that was operating at all levels of government. Before 9/11, our consular offices in other countries weren't funded or staffed to do serious scrutiny of visa applicants.

Applicants were supposed to be interviewed face to face, but a lot of times they just weren't because the word from above was that interviews were too time consuming. They slowed everything down. That might be an example of one of the State Department policies the Trump administration had in mind when it wrote in the executive order that State Department policy prevented us from properly scrutinizing visas.

There was a terrorist watch list before 9/11 called TIPOFF, and consular officials would check names against it. But the list was frighteningly incomplete. The FBI and CIA weren't even sharing a lot of information with each other before 9/11, let alone making it available to junior foreign service officers working for the State Department overseas.

Customs and border agents also lacked funding and support to do real screening. Susan said, quote, "counterterrorism at the time was viewed as the purview of specialists. There was no government-wide strategic focus on counterterrorism," end quote.

What that meant in practice with visa applications before 9/11 was that we were on the lookout for people who seemed like they might want to use a student or visitor visa to come to the US and then just stay in the country even after the visa expired because they wanted to live here. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian. Saudis at the time weren't scrutinized as potential security threats. They were seen as tourists who would most likely spend a lot of money and then go home.

To state the obvious, before 9/11 happened, we as a nation couldn't imagine 9/11. Now, 15 years later, we think about it all the time. We've spent billions of dollars to study and fix what went wrong. As Susan says, quote, "any policy or practice that was in place at the time 9/11 happened has long been superseded. Long been superseded," end quote. In other words, we wrote a whole book about this in order to change it, and the government did make enormous changes.

I'm not saying, and Susan is definitely not saying, that now we're invulnerable. Quite the opposite. The United States is vulnerable in ways that have evolved radically since 9/11 and are continuing to evolve. But that evolution is not reflected in the executive order. The order says, correctly, that, quote, "while the visa issuance process was reviewed and amended after the September 11 attacks to better detect would-be terrorists from receiving visas, these measures did not stop attacks by foreign nationals who were admitted to the United States," end quote. That is absolutely true. But it's also true that, in the last several years, the majority of terrorist attacks in the US-- not all, but the majority-- have been committed by US citizens, not green card holders, not visa holders, not refugees. Citizens.

I talked to a former CIA case officer who said what worries him about the executive order is that it's letting the exceptions set the rule. He said ISIS propaganda doesn't need a visa. It doesn't need a plane. It's here. And to crack down right now on refugees and other visa holders, people who've been through our screening process-- to make that the focus, as if not much has really changed with our visa process since 9/11, doesn't address the biggest part of the problem right now. Which of course, doesn't mean that someone can never again get in from the outside and do terrible damage. That is always, always a risk. Susan said the government is constantly modifying security procedures as new tactics and new weaknesses emerge, and it cannot ever let up doing that.

One last thing to note about 9/11. The authors of the 9/11 report, after documenting every failure that led to 2,996 deaths, every mistake, every naive notion, after immersing themselves in this tragedy, they wrote not just that it's vital to secure the country's borders and to check and triple check everyone who wants to come here. They also wrote this. Quote, "our borders and immigration system, including law enforcement, ought to send the message of welcome, tolerance, and justice to members of immigrant communities in the United States and in the countries of origin," end quote.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike is one of the producers of our show.

This idea, by the way, that security experts told Nancy that trying to stop terrorists at our borders might not be the best way to stop future acts of terror, that is also the very first point made by foreign service officers and diplomats in that dissent memo you may have heard about. The State Department has a process for its experts to call attention to policy mistakes they think the United States is making. This one was signed by about 1,000 State Department officials, apparently the most anybody can remember of signing one of these things.

This is from their memo. They said one problem with the travel ban is that it, quote, "will not achieve its stated aim to protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals admitted to the United States. Despite the executive order's focus on them, a vanishingly small number of terror attacks on US soil have been committed by foreign nationals who recently entered the United States on an immigrant or non-immigrant visa. Rather, the overwhelming majority of attacks have been committed by native-born or naturalized US citizens-- individuals who have been living in the United States for decades, if not since birth.

Given the near absence of terror attacks committed in recent years by Syrian, Iraqi, Irani, Libyan, Somali, Sudanese, and Yemeni citizens who were in the US after entering on a visa, this ban will have little practical effect in improving public safety."

[MUSIC, THE SUNTONES, "GIVE ME YOUR TIRED YOUR POOR"]

Ira Glass

Act Four, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sharia?

So one thing about this executive order is that it doesn't just target people who are members of terrorist groups. It targets anybody sympathetic to their ideas. It says, quote, "the United States cannot and should not admit those who do not support the Constitution or those who would place violent ideologies over American law," which presumably is supposed to address Muslims who want to impose Sharia law. The executive order specifically mentions people who believe in honor killings, who believe in other forms of violence against women, and who believe in the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own.

But the order does not say the word Muslim, and that's an important point. The administration spokespeople said a number of times this week that this executive order is not a Muslim ban. Here's White House press secretary Sean Spicer, for instance.

Ira Glass

This is the explanation over and over, in various ways and various spokespeople. This is about safety, this executive order. Sean Spicer did a pretty good job summarizing the point at a different press briefing this week.

Ira Glass

When I tried to make sense of this radical change in our immigration and anti-terrorism policy over the last weekend, I came across this article on a website that's devoted to national security law, called Lawfare, by the site's editor-in-chief, Benjamin Wittes, who I learned is usually pretty hawkish on national security issues. And he noted a bunch of things that bothered him about the executive order. He said that the drafting-- like the actual language, the writing of it-- was inept and made it prone to legal challenges. He called that, quote, "a birthday gift to the ACLU or anybody who wanted to challenge it."

But the most interesting thing he said-- he let out this argument where he said that if the real purpose of this order is to stop terrorists, like it claims, it's not going to achieve its goals. He says he didn't believe it was the executive order's real goal. He said if stopping terrorists was its goal, then the order is, quote, "wildly overinclusive and wildly underinclusive at the same time." On the underinclusive side, Wittes notes that the executive order doesn't stop people from lots of countries that might be just as likely as these seven countries to have terrorists. And on the overinclusive side, he says the order bans all kinds of people that it shouldn't, people we have no reason to suspect of being connected to terrorism. I had him read.

Ira Glass

Because of that, he writes, "I don't believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose of this executive order. In the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don't marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process." He's referring here, I guess, to the fact that the Department of Defense, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies were not consulted in the normal ways before this thing was released.

He writes, "you don't target the wrong people in nutty ways when you're rationally pursuing real security objectives. When do you do these things?" he writes. "You do these things when you're elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. This will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do." He writes that he doesn't make this charge lightly. He's never said anything like this about any other post-9/11 measures. But that, "whatever the White House is saying this is going to do," he writes, "this will not help with terrorism, but it will keep out Muslims." and he's concluded that's its purpose.

Ira Glass

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare.

Ira Glass

Act Five, It's Not Easy Being Green.

You might remember Abdi Nor from a show that we did a couple of years ago. He was a Somali refugee. He'd been living in Kenya, like the guys you heard at the beginning of our program today. Only Abdi got lucky. There's a thing the US has done for years, the Diversity Visa Lottery. It makes 50,000 permanent resident visas available each year around the world. And it's a real lottery. And he won and came to the United States. He's living in Portland, Maine. Reporter Leo Hornak reached out to Abdi this week to see, in light of the executive order, what Abdi is thinking.

Ira Glass

Abdi Nor. He's writing a book about his life as a refugee. Leo Hornak is a BBC reporter for PRI's The World.

[MUSIC - BRETT HARRIS, "UP IN THE AIR"]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Zoe Chace and myself. Our production staff, Susan Burton, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Neil Drumming, Karen Duffin, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, David Kestenbaum, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, and Diane Wu. Research help today from Christopher Swetala, Michelle Harris, and Ben Phelan. Music help today from Damien Graef.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, somebody stole his kayak for the weekend and then brought it back, and Torey thinks it was a Somali pirates. But he doesn't know how to catch them.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.