War At Home, War Abroad

Our first Episode of It's Kairos Time! Season 2 "War At Home, War Abroad" highlights the impact of the war economy on U.S. communities, particularly immigrants and the homeless. Gabriela Viera from Detention Watch Network and Eric Tars from the National Homelessness Law Center explain how militarized spending has led to increased immigration detention and surveillance, causing harm and terror in border regions. Eric links the rise of homelessness to Reagan-era policies and the shift towards military spending. Both emphasize the need for a shift from a war economy to one rooted in care and dignity, advocating for policies that address housing, healthcare, and economic security.

Additional Resources: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/the-moral-failure-of-the-grants-pass-decision/ 

Transcript

Unknown: 0:08

Music, welcome, welcome to Kairos time. It's Kairos time. Welcome everybody to it's Kairos time. Kairos time. Kairos time. You music. Hello and welcome back to its Kairos time. This season's theme stop the war on the poor is dedicated to lifting up the calls for demilitarization and the call for a permanent ceasefire. Now, this special season of its Kairos time convenes leaders from movements for racial, economic climate, gender justice and more, who are calling for an end to the war and the war economy. With this latest season, we aims to remind listeners and ourselves that we are not alone, and that in these times, silence is betrayal, as the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr reminds us in his final book, a final problem that mankind must solve in order to survive in the world house that we have inherited is finding an alternative to war and human destruction, when scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. And now we talked about this theme already in this season, but we are swimming in a culture that glorifies war and violence, and our elected officials enact policies that militarize the world and criminalize our local communities here in the US and this culture, these policies and the effects of this war economy can be felt every day in this country, especially by immigrants, the homeless and the 140 million poor and low wealth people in this country today. We're joined by two experts, Gabriela Vieira and Eric tarz to make this point even clearer. So let's just jump straight into it. I want to start with a question for both of you. Any of you can get at it. First, we're talking about the war economy, and our war economy not only proliferates war and devastation around the world, but has an impact here at home. How has militarism spending been used on our communities here? How has this changed over the past 20 years? If they all want to just vote, you know, there are an endless amount of ways that war militarization impact immigrant and border communities here in the US that I'll definitely share some examples of. But I want to first just name explicitly the underlying framework for that, which is, you know, the approach that this country has taken on migration policy as a quote, unquote, national security issue that requires a law enforcement response rather than one of human needs that has social and civil solutions. You know, we know that the majority of folks who migrate to the US, whether we're talking about people who have been living in the States, documented or not, for years, or folks who are newly arriving, are coming here in search of safety and stability, but decades of racialized fear mongering by elected officials to villainize immigrants has been used to really justify both expansive policies that criminalize the act of migrating itself, as well as the development of massive enforcement infrastructure to be able to aggressively carry out those policies, and particularly in the last 20 years, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which houses immigration enforcement agencies, ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP Customs and Border Protection, these operations to target, to incarcerate and to deport immigrants have really exploded over time, and you know, just for those who are unfamiliar with what these agencies do, ice operates throughout the whole interior of the country. They carry out broad surveillance raids, like many have probably seen in workplaces, for example, and other kinds of enforcement actions to target people for arrest simply for being undocumented and often illegally, using tactics like racial and religious and class profiling or coercion in the process, and then the folks they arrest are funneled in to ISIS detention system, which is the largest immigration detention system in the world, and riddled with abuse, from made from fatal medical neglect to sexual and physical abuse by guards to lacking even just basic necessities like sufficient or nutritious food. And meanwhile, CBP at our. Borders operates a huge agent force, tons of invasive surveillance and military technologies like tanks and drones and destructive physical barriers all up to 100 miles into the country from our borders. And so, in addition to creating a deadly environment for people who are trying to migrate by land, the agencies militarized over policing has inflicted really deep terror on the millions of people who live in our border regions, who call those regions home, especially for black, indigenous and people of color. And so you know, funding for these agencies and therefore their operations and their infrastructure has grown exponentially over the last 20 years, since the agencies were created in 2003 post 911 and their collective budgets have more than doubled in those 20 years between 2003 and 2023 last year, when you adjust for inflation, and If you're making those calculations, and that times they've in that time, they've collectively received nearly half a trillion dollars. And so the result is, you know exactly what you were saying Tony, which is, you know, communities of color everywhere in the US are being subject to the violence of immigration and other law enforcement in their communities, especially since ice and CBP also often collaborate with local and state police, and that means, you know, immigrants are being torn out of their communities, away from their loved ones, to be jailed and possibly deported. And you know, this doesn't even begin to address, we'll get into the ways that immigration enforcement uses literal military resources, because, for some reason, spending on DHS isn't formally considered defense spending, but obviously we see how it's part and parcel of our military complex, complex, especially in the last few years, where there's like consistently active military troops, quote, aiding CBP at our southern border and military resources that substantially contributed to the ongoing building of the border wall, or even, you know, back during the summer of 2020 when ice and CBP both deployed agents to support other federal law enforcement in suppressing protests for black lives in major cities across the country. So, yeah, basically it's all the same. All these entities are working hand in hand to wreak the devastation that you have all talked about on this series around the world, while also terrorizing and suppressing our own people here at home, not just pushing the same philosophy that you know war and punishment are the only solutions, but literally sharing the astronomical resources they each have to do it. Yeah, I just want to pitch that question back to you, Eric, just to remind like, we're talking about the war economy. How is militarism spending like, especially in the context of homelessness and criminalization of the homeless, like, how is that landscape shifted over the past 20 years? To understand how it's gone for the past 20 years, you need to look even 20 years before that, like this whole more economy really started under Ronald Reagan in 1980 can look even before that as well. Most people don't remember this, but like our country did not always have mass homelessness on the scale that we have it today, back during a previous war, during World War Two, President Roosevelt, at the time, understood that there was a link between economic security and domestic security and national security, and he looked across the Atlantic at what caused World War Two? And he said, you know, necessitous, men are not free. Men. Hunger is a breeding ground for tyranny. He understood that when people don't have their basic needs met, for housing, for food, that they are afraid, and when people are afraid they make poor decisions. They're willing to follow anybody who will say that I can solve your problems and oh, by the way, it's that person's over. There's fault that you're in this state. And so the New Deal programs that he introduced weren't just social programs, weren't just economic programs to recover from the Great Depression, they were explicitly linked into this concept that if we don't have this ground floor of economic security for people, that we will actually lose our democracy itself. And so this idea that we had adopted a second bill of rights, including the right to a decent home to adequate food and nutrition, to decent work and decent wage. That whole platform wasn't just about economic security, but it was really about trying to preserve democracy. And then you fast forward that so from, I guess, the 1940s up through the 1970s we did have a commitment. A social commitment to one another that we weren't going to let our fellow Americans become homeless on the scale that we had seen during the Great Depression. But that was all broken in 1980 with the Ronald Reagan coming into office, escalating spending on the military and slashing funding to economic social programs, including the HUD budget for affordable housing, which was cut by more than half. And then that has never been made up for the past 40 years. And so really, in the 1980s is when you see the emergence of modern homelessness, and it's only gotten worse. Since then, we've been losing affordable housing every year for the past 40 years, and now we are really at this crisis point where, you know, more than half of Americans are paying more than they can afford for housing, putting every one of them just one missed paycheck, one broken down car, one medical emergency away from getting out on the streets. And unfortunately, we have this approach that says just as our national security is somehow only able to be, you know, upheld through military and use of force kinds of approaches, rather than looking at a broader what would make the whole globe more secure, what would ensure economic security so that people aren't, you know, compelled to try to migrate to the US. But the same thing within our community, where we have this view of public safety as only meaning law enforcement, rather than meaning actual safety and security for everybody in the community, which would include the safety of a roof over their heads and enough food to eat and adequate access to medical care. That's not going to put them into debt. So really, yeah, the whole militarism and law enforcement approaches go hand in hand to move us away from those policies that are actually going to ensure real security for everybody to just a limited view of security for the privileged few, at the expense of keeping others out, in addition to the policies and the dollars and cents that you both have outlined. I think there's something really powerful about the words that we use to talk about these conversations. And we think of conceptions of security, safety and defense, like, what do our lawmakers mean behind that? Where does that money go to that actually goes to violence. What does it actually mean to have safe and secure communities? And look forward to asking a little bit more about that later on. But Gabriel, I want to come back to you because you were making some really good connections between the war economy and immigration policy. But yeah, just ask a more formal question around that, like when we when we say the war economy, we mean, you know explicitly, there are violent institutions in place, and there are profits being made off of that violence. Can you explain how immigration detention in the US contributes to the war economy, and how does the war economy inform and shape some of the immigration policy debates and decisions that are being made? Yeah, so I already talked a little bit about the violence of immigration detention. You know, there's decades of documentation detailing the systemic nature of this abuse. At least 237 people have died in ICE custody since 2003 and a new study of death that occurred in recent years done by ACLU Physicians for Human Rights and American oversight, suggests that 90% of those deaths were preventable, mostly attributable to the conditions and woefully inadequate medical care provided in detention. And so you know that obviously is exemplary of the kind of violence that we're talking about that you know, our government is engaging in and operating. But I also want to back up just to clearly say also that immigration detention is wholly unnecessary, and we see the act of detaining people in the first place as violence as well, and so people, you know, people can and should be able to navigate their immigration proceedings while free in community with their own networks of support. But unfortunately, like you said, there is profit to be made from caging people. The federal government actually engages in a really complex contracting scheme to run the immigration detention system. Ice actually only fully owns a handful of what we've previously known to be about 200 facilities in the detention system. It's hard for us to know exactly how many. There are since I said something really transparent about that, surprisingly, but for the rest, the agency contracts out everything from management to services while baking in perverse financial incentives. You know, in some cases, they contract with local governments and promise them huge sums of money for detaining immigrants in local jails and prisons, and a lot of cases, they contract with private prison corporations to use their to use and operate their facilities. And sometimes what happens even is that a contracted municipality will then subcontract to a private prison company for operation of their facility, which makes the you know, already practically non existent, accountability even muddier, and obviously perpetuates this cycle of corruption. And despite the Biden administration's move to eliminate federal private prisons in the criminal punishment context, he blatantly had collected to include immigration detention. And latest estimates actually show that over 90% of people in immigration detention right now are in privately operated facilities. And so you know, these contracts can include per diem rates, the more people detained at a facility, the more money the contractor makes. You know, they include guaranteed minimum sometimes that effectively function as local quotas. Just you know, basically at every turn, there are clear incentives to detain more people while reducing costs, a combination that has obviously resulted in a system that views immigrants as sources of income, rather than as human beings, and has really paved the way for other abuses, including, you know, things like exploitative work programs, where the private prison contractor pays people in detention, people who they are detaining, $1 a day to perform non security labor at the facility, like cleaning or cooking. And you know, this goes for ice too. The agency is pretty infamous for overspending their congressionally approved budget on detention. They often cry poverty and beg for increases in funding every single year, which they mostly receive. We are currently operating under the highest detention budget in the agency's history, and trying to fight back more anticipated increase for increases for next year. And we see like they're absolutely putting it to use to keep expanding, to keep lining the pockets of these companies. You know, in New Jersey right now, folks are facing the threat of a new private detention facility despite having successfully passed a state law banning immigration detention in the state in 2021 private prison corporations recently have basically tried to undermine that when brought legal challenges to The state, and meanwhile, ice is trying to pursue a new contract, and that's where, you know, the GEO group comes in. It's one of the two big, you know, private prison giants in the immigration detention space. They filed a complaint to get judicial relief from the bill. They were granted that relief because they believe that they have a strong chance of securing this new 100 million dollar contract for a 15 year facility. And I think to me, I'm like, This is what I feel like the war economy means, right? Despite overwhelming community opposition that one democratically approved legislation, the government, the courts, the powers that be, are prioritizing the profits of private prison corporations and doing it at the expense of the lives and freedoms of vulnerable populations. And so it's just, it's unbelievable, because there's still so much to say about this. Like, you know, of course, we all know that these companies are contributing to elected officials and their electoral campaigns to, you know, further entrench the government's commitment to incarcerating people. And, you know, I, I kept this specific to detention. But there's a whole other world of immigration enforcement and border enforcement, especially, that's contracting surveillance companies and weapons manufacturers and you know, not to mention something that you know, Eric was touching on, some of the primary reasons that people migrate in the first place are due to forced displacement as a result of our military ventures around the world and Climate crises that our military is heavily contributing to, it's just, it's so, it's just all so all encompassing. And I don't say it to overwhelm us or, like, hopefully not, you know, demotivating people in any way, but I just think it's important for us to recognize the ways that this framework underlies and links. All of these harmful institutions, so that we know why it's actually necessary, like, really, really necessary to be allies and real allies, and why saying things like, you know, we're not free to we're all free is not just a line, but like, a tangible truth. And I like, wanna I know? Like, Eric just went into a bunch of pieces of like, the history, you know, behind, behind the like, broad expansion of homelessness. It aligns so well with the history behind the expansion of immigration detention, which obviously aligns with the history of broader incarceration. It just, it makes so much sense, and I think again, that that's, that's really the reason that we need to be here having these conversations and and have faith that, you know, if we're pulling at one I saw this someone, I want to give credit. It was somewhere online, and the internet, I saw someone saying, you know, have faith that if you're pulling at one little piece thread on this cloth that you're helping unravel. The whole thing, it's hard to say, like the most important thing, one of the most important things that you said is that it doesn't have to be this way. This funding could go towards actual care. Like it doesn't have to go to Lion the profiteers of you know, these detention centers, like it could actually go to care and to families, if we build the political will to do that. Thank you for tuning in to it's Kairos time stop the war on the poor. We're going to take a brief break from our conversation to hear about an upcoming policy summit on october 17. The Cairo center is bringing together experts on the economy, militarism, the rise of authoritarianism, and project 2025 alongside religious leaders and organizers to offer a concrete analysis of our current context and how our movements and organizations are responding. Join us as we discuss the challenges and opportunities of this kairos moment and how we can build on lessons from the pandemic era to build up powerful movements for the long haul. Visit us@www.cairocenter.org Welcome back to it's Cairo's time stop the war on the poor. And Eric, I want to, I want to bring you in now because, you know, there's a recent Supreme Court decision, the Grants Pass, decision that a lot of folks are talking about right now that will escalate the criminalization of unhoused people in the country. Can you, first of all, break it down a little bit for us, like a little bit of context to understand this decision, but also a little bit going a little bit deeper here? Clearly, this decision impacts on house people, first and worst, but it's also an expression of militarized society, this direction, this pull to the right that is slowly happening in this country from a human rights standpoint, why is this a major concern for us? For those that are against militarized communities? Why is this a concern for us? Yeah, yeah. It all clearly builds on what Gabriela was talking about. But to start off with the the Grants Pass case, for those who aren't familiar, is Johnson versus Grants Pass a case out of Grants Pass Oregon, which is a small town in kind of South Central Oregon, right over the California border, that, like many communities across the country, has seen a massive population growth. They've almost doubled in size over the past 20 years, but their supply of affordable housing has not kept pace deliberately. So you know, this is a consequence of active decisions by local officials to not create affordable housing in their community, to not fund and and to prohibit homeless shelters from existing in the community, even as their homelessness problem grew, and because of the the rise in in rates that people you know all across this country are familiar with, that rent, the rent is too damn high. So as a consequence of this, a woman named Gloria Johnson and many others in Grants Pass became homeless. There's no shelter where they can go overnight. But instead of responding to that and saying, oh my gosh, our neighbors are becoming homeless, what can we do to help them get back inside the community, instead said we're going to pass some ordinances that are going to make it illegal to do so much as wrap a blanket around yourself. They made it illegal to camp, but camping includes like just any use of any form of bedding, and it only applies to people experiencing homelessness. It says only if you're using that blanket or form of bedding to create a temporary habitation. So if you're housed, you can go out to the park, spread a blanket, stargaze, do whatever. But because you have a permanent house to go to, you're not creating a temporary habitation. It's only if you actually need to do that to survive that it's a crime. Nine, and so they passed these laws. They heavily enforced them. And Gloria Johnson and John Logan, Deborah Blake and some other folks in Grants Pass said, we're not going to take this. Our organization, the National homelessness Law Center, had just brought a case called Martin versus Boise that it established this principle in the ninth circuit that said that it's cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to arrest or ticket or find people for simply surviving in public spaces when there is no legal, safe alternative place where they can actually be. And they said, well, there's no shelter here, so obviously that applies to us. They brought a case. They got an injunction. The courts agreed with them, and they said, you know, you can't enforce these laws against people because there's, there's literally nowhere else where people can go. That case was then appealed up to the ninth circuit. The Ninth Circuit said, We just said this in Martin versus Boise, we meant it, you know, you can't have this. And so they upheld the decision, the injunction against the city, enforcing the law. But there are really big actors, as Gabriela was was alluding to powerful interests that want this prohibition gone, and so together, with the help of a big law firm based out of Los Angeles, they appealed up to the Supreme Courts. The Supreme Court took the case just a few months ago, decided against us, overturning the the lower court case and saying that actually it is fine for communities, even if there's literally nowhere else where people can go, they are free to continue to enforce these anti camping ordinances against people, which, if that's not the definition of cruel and unusual, I don't know what is, but they, you know, based on their interpretation of the Constitution as it was framed by our white land owning males that it was designed to protect in the first place. You know, that's who they're choosing to protect here, 200 years later. And so it's and, yeah, it's a very dangerous precedent in particular, we know what the likely consequences of this will be, because during the prior Trump administration, after having seen that he could lock up kids in cages on the border through his detention policies, was looking who's the next most vulnerable group who I can see if I can lock up into cages, and found, you know, who are the citizens who are most vulnerable? It's people experiencing homelessness. And so he had started to go down the road of trying to create these mass camps, concentration camps, for for Americans experiencing homelessness. The Martin versus Boise decision in the Ninth Circuit actually stopped him when the Supreme Court decided not to overturn that decision, Trump has already said, as part of his platform for his next administration, he wants to revisit those policies create relocation camps where people experiencing homelessness will be taken under threat of arrest, pushed out of the city centers into, you know, camps far on the outskirts of society. And this is, you know, that's his plan. And the Supreme Court having this decision in Grants Pass has now paved the road for that if he wants to do it, and even if he doesn't. This is already happening at the state level. There's a organization called the Cicero institute that is created template legislation that would criminalize homelessness across entire states, and has is taking away funding from proven housing solutions and putting it into these encampments. And we know in some places where they've already passed this legislation, the kinds of organizations bidding on those camps are ones like the Gotham's group, which is, you know, one of the groups that has also set up these facilities for detention, immigration detention. So it's, you know, it is. It's the same people profiting, whether they're locking up kids in cages on the border or American citizens who just can't afford their rent. This is, this is the future that we're building for ourselves through the choices that our elected officials are making or avoiding making, but it's, you know, that's, that's what we're allowing to happen. I want to end with one last bigger picture question here so and. We've already touched on militarism spending, both of you the dollars and cents of things, but it really is hard to fathom how large this militarism spending in this country has grown year to year. And bipartisan agreement on that spending nearly $9 billion and growing. But how is this culture of violence impacted families abilities to live and thrive. We've touched on that already a lot. But what would it take to shift our war economy into an economy rooted in care and dignity and in human rights? What would that look like, materially, and how does joining mass movement help us get to that reality? Yeah, I can start with my my response to this very small question by actually throwing it back a little to our hosts, who you know, Kairos has done really incredible research and calculations with the poor people's campaign about how this approach to spending, in addition to actively harming, particularly black, brown people, also, you know, generally, prevents all of us from being able to live full, healthy, stable lives. According to calculations, I know these are a few years old. I think back from 2019 cutting even a fraction of our militarized spending in just one year could fund health care for all and could eradicate homelessness. And, you know, I'll throw in some specific statistics, like specific to immigration enforcement, courtesy of the national priorities project we work with closely on a lot of these kinds of calculations as well. You know, we spent over$26 billion on ice and CBP last fiscal year, and that same amount of money could have funded low income healthcare programs for over 9 million children or provided two years of public housing for 1.3 million people. And I don't know if there's a better way to demonstrate how an economy that thrives off war, off policing and incarceration, is not an economy where people thrive. And now what we do to flip the switch being the the imposing question, and honestly, I think, you know, more important than ever, as we're seeing, particularly post pandemic or mid pandemic, you know, people struggling to make ends meet more and more. And instead of making these adjustments to support people like Eric was saying, the government is continuing to actively choose its course with to stay its course with militarized spending, which is, as we've discussed, exacerbating the harms that people are already facing, and then turning around and trying to scapegoat people like migrants or people experiencing homelessness. And I mean, I've raised that I live in New York City. I take it as the perfect example, particularly over the last year or two. You know, elected officials are approving higher budgets for the NYPD and then saying that they have to close libraries because too many people are seeking asylum here, but also fear mongering about crime and blaming them for that too, and also the unhoused population. And, you know, actually, this is why we need the more cops and like it just, you know, I think there's a lot of work to do to unravel these twisted narratives and redirect people's frustrations. And I think a big part of that is actually just listening to what people's needs really are and making genuine efforts to address them. You know, I the climate justice movement developed a framework for what they call a just transition that really has resonated across issues. I think a lot of movements are trying to understand and apply this in their own context. And, you know, in our context, we're thinking about how we can be empowering communities to take proactive steps to envision and achieve a future that doesn't rely on a carceral based economy that gets rid of these institutions and moves towards regenerative economic strength that's based in the well being of our communities. And we're already seeing some really incredible work happen, especially at the local level. You know, example, I can, I want to shout out our partners in California, especially the budget to save lives coalition, who put in a lot of work to successfully pass a bill that incentivizes local governments to divest from carceral facilities by providing funds for sustainable sustainable workforce development in locally relevant industries. After hearing, you know, very real concerns that jails and detention centers are unfortunately, primary sources of jobs for people in surrounding communities, and trying to figure out a response for that, they passed six. Successfully the heal act. And it's been really inspiring to see, you know, the work that went into that, but also, you know, the work that has to continue, to ensure that it has the impact that we want it to have. But I think that's what it takes. You know, it's just a huge part of is the work of hearing people out and understanding what their needs are, not just prescribing broad solutions from national experts like us, but you know that, like I said, that work of understanding needs is so important to bringing people along and fostering a sense of ownership that could shift things in a real way, from local budgets and state budgets like we're talking about here, as examples that are already happening to hopefully influencing the beast of federal spending. And you know, just as again, as I got into a bit before, working together across movements is going to be crucial to making real changes, because overhauling an economy is no small task. And, you know, every inch of the issues that we all work on will be impacted and will matter to our end vision. And that's not, you know, any sorry, it's, it's not a specific tactic or strategy, but I, I think it's work that needs to be done and principles that we should really be thinking about as we're trying to, you know, carve a path forward for ourselves on this. Agree with all of that. You know, one of the things that we did deliberately during the Johnson versus Grants Pass case is understanding that we were not hopeful of winning the case, we knew that we needed to use the moment of kind of focused national attention on this issue of criminalization of homelessness, to build up those cross movement connections to help other organizations see the intersection of their issues with criminalization of homelessness, which disparately impacts black and brown communities, disabled communities, LGBTQ plus communities, so that coming out of this win or lose, if we had won the case, the most we would have won is a right not to be punished for sleeping in a public space when there's A lack of affordable housing or even shelter, but it doesn't actually get anybody into affordable housing or shelter. And so we knew, in order to get those things that we actually need affirmatively, we were going to need a much bigger group of folks pushing for it, and especially if we lost, which we did, you know, now we need this big group of people pushing, you know, we're 10 steps back. We need them pushing that to either help pass new protections at the local or state level or at the federal level. And but really, what's going to solve this is, you know, when people are in housing, then there's no need to pass anti camping laws, because nobody's camping in public spaces. Nobody wants to be camping in public spaces in the first place. And so when you ensure that broader vision of what public security public safety is, when you make sure that people's basic needs are met, you know, the need for this police state just withers away naturally. It's, you know, people look at this abolition movement as saying, like, you know, how are we going to survive if we don't have the police to provide security, but the police don't provide security in the first place. They only come in when, after the fact, when laws are broken. They're not really preventing harm and crime in our communities. It's only when we have this affirmative vision of what like makes everybody safe and secure, that that we'll be able to really enjoy that and it benefits everyone, and that need for this externally imposed security state just naturally fades away. That's what you know, abolition really looks like in practice. And so, yeah, I think the most important piece is to continue to emphasize those intersections, that your struggle is my struggle, that we are all stronger together, that these all these harms when they come to our communities are experienced by everybody, and they are experienced by some communities, more than others, by black and brown, LGBTQ plus disabled, other marginalized communities, and we've seen The active work that others are trying to do to wedge us apart. To, you know, with immigration crisis that we have seen people, you know, being bused up to New York, and then the New York shelter system refusing access to migrants who need access to shelter. They're human beings. Things in your city who need a place to live, to survive, to not be on the streets. You know, folks were trying to pit these migrants with needs against native New Yorkers with needs. But like, it's all everybody who needs a place to live should have a place to live. Like, that's, that's the bottom line. And we're, only going to win this as a movement if we, you know, actively resist those efforts to divide us and really work together across movements. Because, yeah, it's all it's all one, which brings us all the way back to where we started. So you both have spoken to this, but it's going to take, and we say this at the Cairo center as well, but it's going to take a movement of movements connecting these struggles, and it's going to take the leadership of those most impact at the forefront of these movements to get us where we need to go. Gabriella, Eric, thank you both so much. Again. I said all right, but we needed the two of you in conversation for This episode. That was just perfect. Thank you. Seriously. You