The WaPo Defenestration and ICE Flight Brutality (Half the Answer #68, with Gillian Brockell)

Trent and Caitlin check in with journalist Gillian Brockell after the release of her article on 'ICE Air.' They discuss the recent mass layoffs at the Washington Post, the abhorrent treatment of deportees, the justifications used to mistreat humans, and the importance of empathy and being a human.

Half the Answer can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Resources:

Gillian Brockell Website

Gillian Brockell on Bluesky

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are among the 156 billionaires on the Forbes 400 who have given less than 1% of their wealth to charity

Journalist withheld information about Emmett Till’s murder, documents show

'Washington Post' CEO departs after going AWOL during massive job cuts

The 51st

Court hearings Tuesday, Wednesday in lawsuit alleging ICE agents racially profiled U.S. citizens

Ginsburg on Firing Line

News, Discourse, and Ideology

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

Wild Faith

The Lovejoy Trap: Fascism Masquerading As Care

ICE Deportation Flights Are Getting Longer and Crueler

Transcript: Trump ICE Threats Take Darker Turn as MAGA Calls for Blood

The Ba Lô Project

Transcript

**Caitlin M. Green [00:00:30]**
Well, happy days are here again. The viruses are back. I caught them again. It's going great. This is Half the Answer, where understanding the question is half the answer. I'm your husky-voiced friend, Caitlin Green, and with me is my co-host, Trent Nelson. How are you, Trent?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:35]**
You're right, you're not a husky-voice ghost this time.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:58]**
Caitlin. Caitlin, we love you. We are sorry that the germs are coming for you, like Antifa is coming for Border Patrol. Or ICE, or...

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:13]**
I should have thought of this before I became a parent. This is what I signed up for. I guess I thought it was bad becoming a teacher, because I was sick a lot the first year as a teacher. This is so much more. I cannot believe the onslaught.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:20]**
Yeah, absolutely.

**Gillian Brockell [00:01:26]**
Yeah, when I was a flight attendant, I was constantly sick because you're just on a tube with germs. And then when I went back to school, I didn't get sick for a year and a half, and it was like a miracle.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:28]**
Right. Well, you don't live with the students.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:36]**
Oh, I'm sure you...

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:47]**
Because you were like ironclad.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:46]**
It was brilliant. Well, Caitlin, we are having a wonderful time here, despite the horrors that lurk outside of each of our doors every single day. And we just talk to the best folks, and sometimes they come back sooner rather than later. And this time, we have a wonderful friend of the program making her second appearance. It's Gillian Brockell. You know her less well than we do. Sorry, she's not on your podcast, is she? She is a former Washington Post journalist, but now you can find her out in the wild, covering stories without any censure, any strangeness, any billionaire. Yeah, there you go. It's brilliant and fun.

And today, well, we're talking about that very same publication, the Washington Post, a formerly venerable publication, and we'll talk about what happened. But we also have to catch up a little bit later in the program on the wonderful work that Gillian published in Mother Jones on the heels of our last discussion. We'll catch up on ICE Air flights as well. First of all, Gillian, how are you? We missed you. And second of all, how did you react when more of your great colleagues, some of your peers, were released from the Washington Post as the Washington Post apparently seeks to disintegrate before our very eyes?

**Gillian Brockell [00:02:20]**
We'll do our best to change that.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:02:18]**
That's right, we're besties now.

**Gillian Brockell [00:02:38]**
Any faux objectivity, no Boris...

**Caitlin M. Green [00:02:40]**
Oh, my God.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:03:00]**
You all.

**Gillian Brockell [00:03:19]**
Ain't that the truth. Thank you for having me back. I'm doing well. I'm doing a lot better than a lot of my former colleagues are. I mean, I just feel awful, because I know so many of these really good human beings who are doing really good journalism despite everything that their billionaire owner has put them through the last few years. And this is a terrible time for journalism, and it's worse now. It was already hard to find a full-time job in journalism, and now you have some of the best journalists in the country that are going to all be applying for the same few jobs. I just feel awful for everybody.

I also wonder if there can be some sort of opportunity here with all of these terrific people who have already worked together for many years. There's a lot of potential for worker-owned collectives, for different frameworks for journalism. And a lot of the people who were let go were really active in the union and in the Post Guild. So maybe something can come from it.

Right now, I think it's just a lot of grief, just a lot of grieving. People who were there for decades who thought that they would retire from there, as I once thought. I kind of want to welcome some of them into the fold, but I also don't have anything. I do have good things to say, though. I feel a lot better not working at the Post anymore. I don't know how to make money feeling better, but maybe there's more to life than money. At the same time, bills have to get paid.

So yeah, I feel bad for my friends, and I feel outraged, obviously, at what is clearly a premeditated murder of a storied institution. And I feel that a lot of people watching from the outside have an inaccurate view of what happened, and I'm happy to get into that straight away, if you want.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:05:41]**
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that we also do wish those journalists and reporters and folks at every desk absolutely the best, and we're very sorry about what happened. Free idea, throwing it out there on the back of Gillian: the Post-Post, right now, right? The Post-Post. Yeah, let's just get the band back together, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:06:13]**
Yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:06:40]**
I mean, why not?

**Gillian Brockell [00:06:57]**
Yeah, that's literally what I've been calling it in my head. Post-Post.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:07:08]**
Yeah, it's fun.

**Gillian Brockell [00:07:13]**
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that, I think it was Status News that reported it, Oliver Darcy, that a group of wealthy Washingtonians tried to buy the Post from Bezos a couple weeks ago, which is the second attempt that I know of to purchase it off of him. And never heard a single word back. So I just feel like, okay, well, look, the Washington Post brand is dog shit now anyway, so just take all that investor money that you were going to use to buy the company, stand up your own company, and hire all these people who were just laid off. I would rather see worker-owned collectives than a bunch of rich people getting into journalism again, because they haven't done a great job with it. But if that's the avenue to my friends being reemployed, fine.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:07:36]**
Yeah. Yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:07:59]**
Right, if that's what it takes.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:08:12]**
Right. And to that point, Gillian, I mean, we did cut you off. Can you explain, from your perspective, what maybe the outside is getting wrong, and what the reality actually might be?

**Gillian Brockell [00:08:29]**
I feel like I've seen two sort of inaccurate views. One being that this is what Bezos always planned, to destroy the Post. And another one sort of positioning the beginning of the end, or the downturn, to when Bezos spiked the endorsement editorial right before the 2024 election. My view is different.

I think that, I'm not going to say he was a good owner. He was an owner who stayed out of the way for many years, and that changed, and we don't know why it changed. I have some theories, but it changed around, or became apparent to us that it had changed, in 2023, well before the endorsement. And I do think that spiking the endorsement was sort of crossing a Rubicon from which the Post could not return. But I don't think that was the beginning of it.

My experience of working at the Post: I was there from 2013 until 2023. I took the first buyout. I was there when Bezos bought it. The Post had regular employee town halls. My first town hall as a brand-new video editor hire, because I was part of one of the first pivots to video originally, before I became a staff writer, was the announcement that Bezos was buying the Post. And people were surprised and scared. But Don Graham, the former owner who the staff who'd been there a long time had total faith in and real love for, he said, "I'm only interested in selling the Post to people who will respect it and understand it and be good stewards. And I have total faith that Bezos is that guy."

And for a while that seemed to be true. He stayed out of the way. As far as I am aware, and I'm pretty sure I have an accurate view, he never interfered in any reporting. He told us that he did expect the paper to be profitable, that it wasn't charity, and at the same time, he would give us a lot of runway. And runway was huge investment. We hired hundreds of people, we got a brand-new newsroom. We reopened foreign bureaus that had been closed. We opened new bureaus in San Francisco and the Midwest. We just had that runway.

At the same time, when he would say things like "this isn't charity," I think a lot of us, particularly those of us who were active in the union, were kind of like, "Well, why not, though? You're a billionaire. If you understand the importance of journalism's role in democracy and freedom, why do we have to be profitable? What is it to you? What difference does it make anyway?" But we were profitable for many years. So it was like, okay, we don't really need to worry about that.

Every once in a while he would come by to cut a ribbon. He cut a ribbon for a new staircase once, and it was like, okay, cool, thank you sir for the money, please go now. And once or twice I heard from senior managers, like, "Someone in Seattle really liked that story that you wrote." And I would just be like, "Why are you telling me? I don't care what he thinks."

He remained as unkind and cutthroat of an owner when it came to union negotiations as you've heard of happening at his other businesses, and that really soured me on him, even though that was largely private and hidden from view. But it was also just like, fine, if this is what we have to do to have jobs and a functioning newspaper, then fine.

And then in 2023, we were having a lot of issues with our publisher at the time, Fred Ryan Jr., and Bezos came and actually listened to people. And then Fred Ryan was given sort of a golden parachute where he was going to go be the president of a civility institute that Bezos was starting. Okay, great, bye.

And we got this new interim publisher and CEO, Patty Stonesifer, who's a close friend of Bezos. She came in, her first meeting with us was terrific. She was apologetic for what we'd been through with Fred Ryan. It felt like she listened to us. And she was basically like, "I gotta go look at the books for a bit, and I'll come back with a plan." And we sort of heard rumblings that we're not going to be profitable this year, for the first time in years. And I wasn't too concerned about that. Bezos has always taken a long view to his businesses. Amazon wasn't profitable for nine years. So I didn't think it was that big of a deal.

And then Patty Stonesifer came back a few months later and said, "We're seventy million in the hole. It's so much worse than we thought, and we have to do these buyouts." And at the town hall, at the meetings where the newsroom was saying, "Well, why? Why is there suddenly this huge deficit? Why are we seventy-seven million in the hole?" She was like, "Well, a lot of journalism outlets are experiencing fewer subscribers because of news fatigue, and now that Biden is in office, people finally stopped paying attention to the news, and then they cancel their Post subscription." And someone asked, "So does that account for the entire seventy million?" And she said no. And if you actually do the math, it's only a small part of it.

People kept asking, "Okay, so what is it then?" And she would just say, "I don't want to dwell on the past. Let's focus on the future." To a room full of investigative journalists. A room full of people who have dedicated their lives to figuring out why stuff is happening, right? And my beat at the time was history. "Oh, not focus on the past. That's what you're going with."

**Caitlin M. Green [00:16:38]**
Yeah, "don't dwell on the past."

**Gillian Brockell [00:16:40]**
Come on.

**Gillian Brockell [00:16:43]**
That's rude. Anyway, so there was this announcement that we have to do these pretty extreme buyouts. And it was all done in a pretty, I think, insulting way, where only some people were offered the buyout. So it was kind of like, "We don't value your beat, and if you don't take this buyout, there might just be a layoff" type of thing.

And the buyout was pretty generous. I think a lot of people have this impression that that generosity came from Bezos. And I just want to, this is a little in the weeds, but I hope people care. That buyout money wasn't Bezos's money. Before he bought the Post, the pension fund for Washington Post employees was overfunded by more than a billion dollars because of good investments. When he purchased the Post, he froze the pension fund so new employees did not have access to it, but it's still there for the people who will be retiring. He can't touch that money. The purchase of the Post doesn't give him that fund. He can't do anything with it except layoffs, buyouts, pensions. So the buyout money actually came from our pension fund. It wasn't from his money.

Anyway, I actually wasn't even offered the buyout. But because of where I was in my life, really losing faith in the concept of objective journalism, I don't know if I ever even believed in it, really, but it became increasingly difficult for me, just as a human being, to not be like, "This is my beat, so I actually do know a lot about it, and this is bullshit. Can I just write 'this is bullshit'?" And it just became painful. And so I wanted to write a book. I was like, I'll take this pile of money, I'll go write a book, and then maybe I'll be right back. And so I asked them to give me the buyout, and they kindly complied.

And then after I left, I just started hearing things from other people who took the buyout, like, "It's so bad in the newsroom right now." After I left, I still freelanced for them some, so I wasn't really fully saying what I thought in public, because I still wanted that avenue to be open to me.

And then about the same time, just before Bezos spiked the editorial, I wrote a piece about Emmett Till and some new reporting on the way that his story was covered, and how corruptly it was covered by a specific journalist at the time who essentially had a movie deal with the murderers and kept that secret. It was a really good story. I'm not going to go into all of that, but basically, when I was editing it with the editor, who was a long-time Post employee, she was having a lot of difficulty, having to go back and do more re-edits because of vague criticisms of it from on high that she couldn't really explain or understand, and I didn't really understand. It was extremely frustrating. After that story published, ultimately I'm happy with what published, but there was a fight.

So after that, I was like, okay, I'm not writing for the Post anymore. And that was about the same time that Bezos spiked the editorial. And as everyone knows, that really was the biggest blow. That's when people started canceling their subscriptions in droves. And I think rightly so. If you can't trust a news organization to not have some billionaire meddling in the coverage, even if it's the opinion coverage, why subscribe?

And I've just sort of watched my friends for a year and a half now on the news side really continue to produce excellent journalism, and also, I think, not fully understanding how too late it was, how past the Rubicon things were, that the quality of their journalism, I just don't think, was going to be able to recover from those blows.

Then you have Bezos saying that the opinion section is now going to focus on "personal liberties and free markets." And you have Will Lewis just being an absolute idiot. His idea to save the Post was to pivot to video with this third newsroom, which, buddy, we'd been pivoting to video for fourteen years at that point. It just didn't make any sense.

And then there's this sort of parade of own goals. What I think that people are missing is that something changed in 2023 and we don't know what it was, because they wouldn't allow an investigation, right? The weird thing is, by the time Patty Stonesifer came in, everyone in upper management had left and been replaced, or had an interim person, the CFO, the CTO, CEO, publisher, etcetera, except for the CFO. He was still there and didn't say a single word in the meeting about why we're seventy-seven million in the hole. Didn't say a word. And he retired last year. Mission accomplished. Storied company tanked.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:23:19]**
Yeah, because that would be harping on the past. So don't do that. That would be wrong.

**Gillian Brockell [00:24:09]**
So, yeah, I think that, again, I don't know what caused the downturn. I think that Arc had something to do with it. Arc was this project that Bezos really liked, where it was a custom CMS built for the Washington Post, which is great, because our old CMS was a nightmare. But the idea was, "We're going to be able to sell this CMS to other journalism outfits," and they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into that, and it was a total failure. There just aren't that many journalism outlets even out there anymore to sell this to. And I think maybe that hurt his ego. And we were also pretty deadlocked in some intense union negotiations at that point. I don't know what else was going on, but Trump wasn't president at that point.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:24:38]**
As they often are.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:23:55]**
Which feels like his purview. Seems like you might want to field this one.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:25:22]**
Now, my question, Gillian: he wasn't president at that point, but as your story sort of alludes to, this process happened after we got out of the first Trump administration. So you look at what Biden was doing. Is it possible, I mean, of course, this is just trying to imagine getting into somebody else's mind, but is it possible that many billionaires throughout the Biden term actually appraised that their fortunes, as per their own self-interest, might be better served under Trump than Biden?

**Gillian Brockell [00:26:05]**
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that, this is conjecture, this is speculation, I think that had to have played a huge role in the decision to spike the Harris endorsement editorial. Harris was the only candidate that was proposing to tax billionaires more. And I'm not going to say that she was some sort of progressive Bernie Sanders working-class hero or whatever. But she was proposing a tax on billionaires.

The thing that we have seen with Bezos over and over is that he doesn't like groups of people getting together to make him do something. He wants to do something from the goodness of his heart. There was this thing in Seattle years ago where there was going to be a tax on billionaires that was going to help the homeless, right? And he sank a lot of money into ads against it, campaigning against it, and then when it was barely defeated, donated a huge amount of money to organizations to help unhoused people. And it's like, "Oh, look, he's so nice." He just didn't want to be made to do it. Well, if he had been made to do it, the amount he would have been taxed was orders of magnitude larger than what he donated, right?

And this happened with our last union negotiation, if memory serves, years before, where one of the big sticking points was a better parental leave policy. And we finally had to give up on it in order to extract better 401(k) matching, which was also pathetic. And then after we finally were sort of made to sign this contract that we were pretty disappointed with, then he gave us twenty weeks of parental leave, just out of the goodness of his heart, right? He just didn't want to be made to do it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:30]**
Yeah, of course.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:28:35]**
Yeah, and this is all so Gilded Age, right? "Don't tax me. I will create a park for you." Right? "I don't need to be told what to do by these plebs. Let me figure it out, and it'll work out better for us all, because isn't big government so bad?"

**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:45]**
Yeah, let me set up a foundation.

**Gillian Brockell [00:28:48]**
Like, I...

**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:58]**
Yeah, meanwhile, when they are left to do their own charity, they do so astonishingly little of it that it makes you want to cry, because nobody's making them. That's how it works.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:29:14]**
Yeah, I actually stumbled upon an infographic earlier today...

**Caitlin M. Green [00:29:19]**
Thank you. I was looking for that. I'm failing. Okay, well, I have the Business Insider article from 2021 that's like, "Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are among the 156 billionaires on the Forbes 400 who have given less than one percent of their wealth to charity."

**Gillian Brockell [00:29:42]**
And I don't know about you guys, but I give more than one percent of my income to charity, and I'm just some person who hasn't had a full-time job for two years.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:29:56]**
No, I'm just doing a monthly PayPal to Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and then a homeless shelter near me, and that's all I got.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:30:04]**
If you are a regular person and walk outside and see a homeless individual and give them a twenty spot, you are giving more money out of what you own. You've beaten almost all of these people, other than Warren Buffett. I mean literally, the numbers, other than Warren Buffett, are sub five percent for everybody. Only Warren Buffett. Literally, most of them are sub one percent. You got to know how to read hundredths to get to something. And that's not good. But of course, philanthropy offers the added benefit of me being able to brag about it, right? Philanthropy is something I get to show off. Taxes are an obligation.

**Gillian Brockell [00:30:29]**
Yeah, and most of them are sub one percent.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:30:49]**
Right? You get to wear a fancy dress, right?

**Gillian Brockell [00:30:54]**
And there's a gala. You get to go to a gala and be told how kind you are, instead of having to write a check to your accountant to actually help people.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:31:06]**
You heard it here first, folks. IRS, I'm talking to you. You want people to want to pay taxes? Make a gala, right?

**Gillian Brockell [00:31:11]**
Have a gala. This is a great idea, Trent.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:31:13]**
Have a taxpayer gala. Oh my gosh, I'd be in. Thanks for reminding me, I needed to add diapers to my grocery cart because the church needs them. I forgot, and now I have unforgotten. So that's very helpful.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:31:27]**
Yeah. Well, we appreciate that so much. So the Washington Post. It is a damn shame, because for those of us who enjoy history, enjoy the rich tradition of the American circumstance, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, numerous other stories. I mean Snowden, the Access Hollywood tape, right? This is not a hole-in-the-wall publication that has been subverted. This is a big-time deal.

And you had mentioned earlier, and I know we have to move on to ICE Air, but just a final thing for me: it is crucial that everybody gets together, that everybody does a Post-Post, that everybody does something. Because right now, what we're witnessing, and I believe in one of our first discussions, Gillian, we talked about this, right? We're watching the forest burn. And the forest is burning, but that does mean that smaller brush will be able to develop, will be able to grow, will be able to take its place. And that's kind of what we're all doing right now.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:32:20]**
Yeah, and I think the worker-owned thing is really crucial, because it will help be a little bit more immune, a little more robust to the kind of interference that clearly has been happening.

**Gillian Brockell [00:33:05]**
And there are people who live in your communities. It's not somebody that lives behind a gate in Georgetown.

I mean, the one thing I will say related to this is that there's a news outlet, I don't know if it's worker-owned or worker-governed, but it's called The 51st, like the fifty-first state. And it's hyper-local DC news coverage. And Martin Austermuhle, who used to be with WAMU here, he's one of the reporters that works there. And anyone who lives in DC, like, Austermuhle is at every council meeting, he knows the ins and outs of the budget better than a lot of the people on the council do. So everybody subscribe to them. And maybe they'll get so big that they can hire some people from the Post. I don't know. But let's all, genuinely, start thinking more intentionally about where our money is going and making sure that we're supporting different structures of journalism too, and not just good journalism itself.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:34:33]**
The local stuff is so good. Just looking at what's been happening in Minneapolis and the way that the local news organizations have been ready to hit the ground running in terms of reporting on that, and they're the ones who are still there now that the surge has ended, supposedly. We know that when they end an official mission in a city, they still leave behind a lot of agents to continue to cause problems in that city. And so it's good that we have this ecosystem of local journalists that are there to cover that and help us see what's still happening once the people who are following ICE around have gone.

**Gillian Brockell [00:35:23]**
Absolutely. Yeah, when during the Chicago surge, I became aware of, I can't remember their real names, but it's a duo of journalists with Unraveled Press, and I think it's just the two of them. They were doing absolutely incredible coverage of the surge in Chicago, just way better than national news or even the bigger local news outlets. And I just got so much out of their coverage. And they actually went up to Minneapolis too to cover some of that, because now, Chicago is their purview, but they're experts on these ICE surges, and they can see this stuff happening and they're better sourced. So, yeah, that's one of the news outlets that I'm watching closely with ICE and that I am really grateful for.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:36:34]**
And again, we here at Half the Answer, we've noticed these types of things as well, right? When we bring on Amanda Moore, we get coverage that is more detailed and more organic than what they report in the newspapers. And it's the same thing when you talk to any of, I mean, we're fortunate to have good guests, have good emailing, but it is a blessing to have these people who can give actual thoughts.

So often I feel, there was a great Firing Line, I don't say that often, there was a great Firing Line once upon a time with Allen Ginsberg, right? And he talks to Buckley regarding the different ways that we speak and how the news speaks to us in a way that is inorganic relative to how we speak to one another. And it breathes. It becomes, right, "I'm a person," right? And this sort of loses us in translation. And I think that what the regrowth is going to be, in an ideal world, is going to be the authentication of this medium, of this profession, again.

**Gillian Brockell [00:37:15]**
Yeah, you don't become, the "I" is deleted and becomes the organization, right? "Told the Washington Post." Well, he told me. But yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:38:13]**
You can see it. Indie journalists are more likely to refer to themselves as just themselves and to talk about how it felt to hear this from this person, or what it took to get this information. Who they said it to? It was me. They told me, right? Which is so nice, I think.

And yeah, I just wanted to note that there's a really robust subsection of discourse studies and linguistics that's all about the discourse of news. And it is always so fascinating. I had to get into that when I was talking about news-like organizations that try to mimic "news-ese," that try to sound like they're the news when they're not, like Campus Reform and those kind of propaganda outlets. Because they would reach out for comment, and they would promise updates, and there was never an update, not even a single one ever, right? And they would structure their website to look like it was a real news website when it's not. So there's a lot of research into what syntactically, what lexically, and also visually, what a news style looks like. And the indies are, I think, deviating a little bit in a way that is more a move towards authenticity.

**Gillian Brockell [00:39:31]**
It's so interesting because, well, it's interesting for two reasons. One, I think saying "told me," not pretending that I'm not just a person doing this, maintaining that I am a person, I am just a human, is actually a proxy for the reader. What would it be like if this person, we were talking about Melissa Tran last time, what would it be like if I was having a conversation with this woman who has lived in Maryland for thirty years, if she got deported to Vietnam, which she hasn't been to since she was a kid? And "they told me," like, it's a proxy for the reader, and you're able to connect with that.

It's also because when I was in grad school in 2010, that was the leading edge of "building your personal brand." "You have to have a personal brand as a journalist," blah, blah, blah, and at the same time being told you have to be objective. It was like, how am I going to have a personal brand if I can't say what I think? Is a personal brand just having, like, I wear the same color? And I think about the way that we all were tweeting as baby journalists, where we were just basically rewriting AP leads to stories and calling them Twitter posts. This is how we wrote regularly, because we were also afraid to express an opinion.

Whereas I think a lot of the people who came into journalism through the sort of op-ed blogosphere have such a leg up because they've always been, quote-unquote, "voicey." And being voicey was the thing I used to get in trouble for at the Post. And then for a period I had an editor who was able to say, "This is a Gillian special, get as voicey as you want." And then it would be like, "Okay, we're gonna dial this one back," or, "We're just gonna write this one as news." And that worked until it didn't.

But junior journalists are discouraged from thinking, right? Because if you think about something thoroughly and think about all of its complexities, think about it as a human, that's bad, because you can't be voicey.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:42:23]**
Everything has to be dogmatic. Everything has to be formulaic. What I always tell young writers or young people is, read all the stuff that they put out and then go read the piece by Hunter S. Thompson in Rolling Stone, right? And it opens up with him describing the filthy, muddy-ass track and how trashed all the wealthy people are, right? And that was a revolution at that time, because you were getting these puff pieces about the horse racing, and it's all very superficial, and it's all very impersonal, right?

And he painted a picture that you could close your eyes and you could actually see it for once. You could see what it was, you could smell it, you could feel it. You could feel what it actually was like. It wasn't all these rich people with the fancy hats, better than us. It's everybody's drunk as shit, and they're gambling lots of money, and they're losing lots of money, and they're vulgar, and the track is filthy, and the horses are being tortured to run fast. And it just actually gives you what you came for, instead of this...

**Gillian Brockell [00:43:00]**
Yeah, you could smell it.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:43:48]**
Yes, and that's part of our job, right? You're not...

**Caitlin M. Green [00:43:40]**
Oh, yeah. Like, what it would be like to have your body physically there. You're telling me it's not this, right? And not be trashed? You're telling me it's not just that scene from, he probably was, all right, yes, Hunter S. Thompson. Yeah, he was for sure trashed. The scene from My Fair Lady, where they're all standing with their little items in their hands and they're all singing in unison about how exciting it is. That's not what happens at the horse races. I don't understand. My only point of reference, so that's all I have. That's not...

**Gillian Brockell [00:43:50]**
And to not be a part of it, to be watching it, to not be a member of that elite with their hats. Yeah. I mean, he was probably trashed as an arrest, let's be real, but he could still write.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:44:22]**
From what Hunter said, that's not what happens, my folks. My folks have been to a couple, and I believe they have validated that piece in the past to me. So, Gillian, we could literally have you for many hours. We, in fact, we've done it before.

But we've got to move on from WaPo to another tragedy, this one even worse in so many ways, because people are not only losing their jobs, they're losing their ability to live in our country, to be our neighbors, to be our fellows, to be our comrades. And as we spoke, losing their freedom is worse than losing your job. I have lost my job. I have lost freedom to some degree. One is worse than the other.

ICE Air. What we talked about last time. Dreadful. As you noted in the very beginning of that discussion, it's not just people getting sent out to Uganda. It's not just people getting sent out to Cameroon. It's people being shifted from Missouri to New Orleans, from Louisiana to California, from California to here, etcetera. Now, before we, when we were having our discussion, your wonderful Mother Jones piece had not come out yet, and yet that is untrue. Now it is out. We have all read it and enjoyed it. It is worth reading for all of our viewers and listeners. Please get on that, arm yourself with knowledge. Well, Gillian, can you break down what you wrote, and can you give us some updates as per what's been going on in that whole little opaque world since last we got together?

**Gillian Brockell [00:46:11]**
Yeah, so that story was, I tried to be as human as possible, and I was able to talk to some of the people who were recently deported on these flights. But it's essentially a business story. It's about an airline called Omni Air International, and they do all of the large-jet deportations and removals to Africa and Asia. No other airline, as far as we can tell, is willing to do this. They've done it for a long time. It used to be part of a conglomerate that was a publicly traded company. And last April, April 2025, they were sold to a private equity firm.

I was able to go into the flight data, and I cataloged all of their ICE flights for 2024 and 2025, and I was able to see that since their sale to this private equity firm, Stonepeak, their ICE flights have quadrupled. And there's a great organization called Human Rights First, they put out a monthly ICE flight monitor report of all ICE flights. What they found is that, year over year, ICE deportation and removal flights went up about forty-one percent, but Omni's quadrupled.

So I really just went into what these flights are like, how much money Stonepeak is making. Interestingly enough, Stonepeak is founded and run by an immigrant, a guy named Michael Durell, who is from Australia, came here in his early twenties to bring this concept of infrastructure investment, which we can get into if you want, but it's boring, to bring that to the US. And he bought ATSG, which is Omni's parent company, for 3.1 billion in cash. And they all really minimize Omni's existence and their work. There are a couple cargo airlines in this conglomerate, and they fly most of Amazon Prime's aircraft, and that's what they really like to highlight: "We're a leading cargo jet, and we also have this little airline called Omni that does mostly military charters and other federal agencies."

The big thing that I really want people to understand from this story, we can get into the cruelty of the flights in a second, but the big thing I want people to understand is that I was able to get a list of Stonepeak's investors from PitchBook, and more than half of them are public employee retirement funds, public state treasury funds, union funds, retirement funds. And these companies, I'm certain that these funds do not know the kinds of things that Omni does. A lot of these funds have ESG policies, right, which is environment, social, and governance, basically saying we are not going to be invested in companies that are doing things that are cruel to the earth or cruel to humanity, right? I mean, a lot of it is lip service.

The thing that I really wanted to make people aware of is that their retirement funds might be invested in this airline right now that is torturing their neighbors.

One of the things I showed with the flight data in the story is that not only is Omni doing more flights, the flights are getting longer. And the reason that matters so much is because, as we talked about last time, all adults and some children on ICE flights are shackled at the wrists and ankles, attached to a chain around their waists. And I spoke to a forensic pathologist who talked about the risks to a human being who is subjected to this kind of restriction for this long. They're also strongly discouraged from getting up, and some of them just straight up aren't allowed to get up and use the restroom.

If you think about, if you've flown to Africa or Asia, it takes a long time, even if you're going a relatively direct route, but you're also getting to stand up and walk around, maybe you have a transfer, right? These people are not allowed to do that. There are more stops because they're doing four, five, six, seven deportation stops per trip, and these people have to sit there the whole time. They don't get to get up and stretch. You can't even stretch your arms above your head because they're shackled.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:51:51]**
They're stuck. Yeah. So you had your opening anecdote with Melissa Tran, right, who was being taken from detention in Louisiana to Vietnam. So she was on a bus for ten hours, and then they put her on this flight, and they shackled her. And then when they asked her where she was from, she said Vietnam, and they were like, "Oh boy, you have a long way to go, because we're going to be dropping everybody off before you." So she has to do a bunch of takeoffs and landings until it's finally her, which means it's going to be days.

**Gillian Brockell [00:52:20]**
Yeah, she was the last stop. He is the last stop with these trips now.

**Gillian Brockell [00:52:33]**
Right, right. I mean, she was asking the ICE guard how long is it going to take. And he said, when she said she was from Vietnam, he's like, "Sorry, you're the last stop, and we're not going to be there till Thursday," and it was Monday night.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:52:51]**
This is why it is so important. And this is the same discussion we could have as it concerns people that get incarcerated, that get locked up in jails, that get locked up in prisons. There is a need for the public to think that these people deserve pain and suffering, because if they don't deserve that, then we might have to pay attention to what the hell's going on. And if we paid attention to what the hell's going on, we would see that this type of trauma, this type of barbarity, is not only reserved for those brilliant and beautiful souls that are being deported for some type of legal status dispute. We do this to people who get locked up for stealing candy, right? That get locked up for things that we do all agree are bad, and yet it does not justify, as we spoke about last time, right, the barbarity that we do.

**Gillian Brockell [00:53:54]**
Yeah. I mean, what I'm finding out, the more I get into this reporting, the more I'm sort of seeing it as an extension of just the criminalization of Black and brown bodies since, I mean, we can say the nineties, just because of the crime bill. But for forever.

On the one hand, I want to reach for metaphors that people understand and say, yeah, on the way to the concentration camps during the Holocaust, they were on these horrible trains, put in these cattle cars, and sometimes people died on the cattle cars. And I think that's a good metaphor for what ICE Air is like. I also want to say that we don't have to go overseas. This is a legacy. There's an easier metaphor to slavery, to self-emancipated people escaping to the north, being caught and being put in coffles with the exact same types of handcuffs and shackles that people are being put in now, right? And being sent back to God knows what that they, like any human, were trying to escape, like any human would want, right? Everybody just wants stability for themselves and their loved ones, right?

And I don't want to get too, you can delete this if you want, if it's too much history. But the handcuffs that they use, the shackles that they use on ICE flights, it's a company called Hiatt Thompson. I shouldn't say handcuffs, because it's a full shackle. The shackles that they use are this company called Hiatt Thompson, and Thomas Hiatt, I believe, invented these shackles in 1780 for the transportation of enslaved people. So it's the same shackles.

And Melissa Tran's flight was horrible and torture, and also sort of the best-case scenario for these types of flights, because she had nice guards, or a nice guard. They're generally thirty guards and a couple federal agents. The guards are mostly from GEO Group, from the private prison company. She had this nice guard, and every time they landed, so Baltimore, Romania, India, and Nepal, they were allowed to stand up for one minute, one row at a time, each time they made those stops. So they stretched a little bit. She was shackled for forty-two hours total, I believe.

And she said that she didn't sleep the entire trip, because every time she closed her eyes, she just started thinking about her kids. She has four children, ages seven through twenty, that need their mom. And she would just think about them and start sobbing.

Update on her: she's staying with distant relatives now in South Vietnam. She's doing better than when I first talked to her, which was pretty soon after she arrived. But she's like, "I'm okay. Some days are better than others." She just misses her kids, like I can only imagine. Anyone who's been a parent knows how much it hurts, physically hurts, to want to be able to embrace your child and not be able to. And she can't do that now. She came here as a refugee because her family was being persecuted by the government, and she's afraid that that can start again at any time.

Yeah, I see you tearing up, Caitlin, and I gotta tell you, if you listen to the tapes of our interviews, I'm crying along with her the whole time, because it's awful. And at the same time, I want people to understand how awful it is. What she did, being arrested for theft when she was nineteen, does not warrant taking someone away from their kids.

**Gillian Brockell [00:59:13]**
When I started reporting this story, I've got this spreadsheet of all of the ICE flights and how long they lasted. The longest one I was aware of was fifty hours, which, when I shared that with people who have been covering this for a long time, they were shocked and disgusted. Immigration attorneys weren't aware that they were getting that long.

And what I found out, actually, was that there have been several that were longer than that, and I just wasn't reading the flight data correctly. I talked to a man named Vinnie Duong. He is in Laos now. He's from there originally. He came here, I think when he was six, as a refugee with his family. He told me that he actually didn't know that he wasn't a citizen, because when he graduated from high school, his guidance counselor gave him a voter registration card and a draft card.

He had done a stint in prison in the early aughts, and nothing happened after that. And then he did another stint in prison in the 2018 to 2023 range, I believe. And when he was about to get out, the prison guards were like, "By the way, there's an ICE detainer on you." He was originally supposed to be one of the people on that flight to Libya. He was on the plane to Libya before the court stopped it.

Something that we talked about the first time is that for many years, Laos and Vietnam would not issue a travel document for someone if they came before the mid-nineties. So for many years, those people couldn't be deported, even if they had a final removal order. And so that was the situation that both Vinnie and Melissa were in. Suddenly, it's changed. Suddenly, these two countries are issuing travel documents for everyone. I think the assumption is that is related to the tariffs.

So he was given a travel document eventually and deported in October, I thought on a flight, the actual deportation flight was forty-seven hours. I knew that some people were shackled hours before they got on the plane, but I thought the travel time is a useful proxy for about how long they've been shackled.

Well, when I talked to him, he said, "Actually, I was shackled for twenty-eight hours longer than that, because we were loaded up on the plane and it flew to Baltimore, and we sat at the Baltimore airport on this plane for six hours, and then it flew back to the detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, and they just put us in a holding room next to the airport overnight, and I slept on the floor, and they never unshackled us." So it was forty-seven hours plus the twenty-eight hours.

And he said there were dozens of elderly people, mostly from India, on this flight, and that after sleeping on the floor shackled, most of them were too weak to even get back on the plane for this forty-seven-hour trip. They had to be wheeled up and then carried up.

He sort of described, it was almost the opposite of Melissa's experience, where she was just with her kids the whole time in her mind. He went into this sort of survival state where nothing else in the universe existed except getting through the next minute and then the next minute and then the next minute, because of the pain of being shackled that long. He said people, grown men, were crying out from the pain. And if anyone stood up to stretch, the guards would say, "Sit the fuck down." There wasn't this, "We're gonna let you stretch for one minute" kind of thing.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:03:51]**
It's totally incredible that you could be a person watching somebody hurting that much and not feel for them, because you are a guard and it is your job to actually make it worse, if you can.

**Gillian Brockell [01:04:00]**
Yeah. I mean, one of the things I've been wondering about this entire time is, because I was a flight attendant, what are the flight attendants doing? I had hoped to talk to some flight attendants for this story. Was unsuccessful. Well, since the story published, and I'll be publishing this in my newsletter soon, three of them have contacted me.

What they said was they're there to arm and disarm the doors, and then they are escorted by two agents up to the first-class section of the plane, and they stay up there for the rest of the flight. They don't talk to the migrants, they don't serve them meals. They're not doing anything; that's all done by the guards.

And they said that the guards and the federal agents, every flight attendant I talked to emphasized this, they are telling us that these are all rapists and murderers and that we shouldn't feel bad for them. I mean, that line that we hear from Trisha McLaughlin all the time. That's the company line across the board. "These are all rapists and murderers," right? And there are children on board. So I'm pretty sure, even if the dad that they're with is a rapist and murderer, the kids aren't.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:05:14]**
Yeah, right, and no, no, and even if they were...

**Caitlin M. Green [01:05:15]**
Yeah, right, and no, they're not.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:05:30]**
So often, you brought up runaway slaves, right? Illegal. Illegal slave, right? Illegal, in the same way that we use language like that to talk about immigration.

**Gillian Brockell [01:05:48]**
Yeah. All the people that are like, "I just want them to come the legal way." I'm just like, would you say that to Harriet Tubman?

**Trent R. Nelson [01:05:55]**
"I just want her to be emancipated the legal way."

But what we end up seeing historically in these circumstances, whether it's from runaway slaves, whether it's from the northerners going on their little mini Grand Tour that they used to do, Seward and his wife were famous for it. They went down during their honeymoon, and they traveled to the South, and that was one of the things that made them strong abolitionists thereafter. It really validated these thoughts that, "Hey, these people are telling you that these Black people are treated better than in the North." And, "I just saw it, and now I want to go fight everybody," right?

But I just wanted to get to something that I was reading not too long ago. I was reading a biography of Army General George Henry Thomas from the Civil War, and he was everywhere, and he was actually the best. And he was from Virginia, and he was actually the best of the Civil War Union Army leaders. He never lost a battle. And there's a lot of conjecture as to why he's not more famous. One of it being that he died shortly after the Civil War, and he wasn't a puff-piece writer like McClellan or Grant.

But there's a part in his life that always sticks with me, and you probably know it, Gillian. He lived and was a small child during Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, literally in that area where they were revolting. And his father had passed away already, and he and his family had to leave their house to go flee into the woods, right?

And this is, as Gillian knows, a great turning point in his life, because while the rest, much of the rest of his area, and the South, and even the North, right, are tricked into being like, "Well, this is why we got to treat them so badly," right? He was one of those people who looked at this and was like, "These people will do anything to get free. That must mean that we're treating them so badly that they would do anything to get free. Wouldn't we do anything to get free?" Right?

And that is part of the side effect that the fascists don't want, right? That's a part of the side effect of doing this barbarism. They want only for us to absorb that these are bad people, they're rapists, they're murderers, we shouldn't care about them, right? But there's always some person who has a normal human response to human suffering.

**Gillian Brockell [01:08:45]**
Right? Who has a normal human response to human suffering? Yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:08:48]**
Yeah, and this is something, it's hard to come to terms with, but we absolutely have to, which is that we have been tricked for a long time into thinking that there's a kind of person that it is okay to corral and to keep locked up and to hurt and to torture. We still have things like solitary confinement. We still shackle people. We, in this country, the United States of America, do still continue to act as though it is okay to treat certain people this way.

And we're seeing it in the ICE flights. We're seeing it in the way that we're treating immigrants in detention. We're seeing it in these warehouses of people that are in unsanitary conditions, who are unsafe, who are getting sick, who are not being fed food, or not being fed clean food. And it is the kind of way of thinking that is poisonous to our brains, to think that it's okay for certain people to be treated this way. Calling them murderers and rapists, it doesn't make it more okay, even if they did commit crimes like that. It still doesn't make it okay. There isn't a kind of person that it is okay to treat this way.

**Gillian Brockell [01:10:07]**
God, there's just so much I could say to that. Yeah. I mean, I love the story of George Thomas. The sort of leading takeaway from Nat Turner's rebellion was that white southern slaveholders buckled down and were even crueler. But some people that we just don't hear about went, "Wow, this is really messed up. Maybe we should stop doing this." And he was afraid for his life. He could have been killed by Nat Turner, and still saw him as a human.

One thing that I think all the time, especially with my basically fallow book project, is just that we, as a country, ended slavery. We did not end our addiction to having an underclass. And in order to have an underclass, you have to remove from children what I think of as an inherent understanding of the sovereignty and the sacredness of the body.

There are studies that they do with babies, and if you show them a video of someone getting slapped across the face, they'll grab their cheek, right? Because they feel it. They're experiencing empathy, right? And the sort of process of othering that has been with our country since jump has been, "Well, there are certain people who you don't have to hold your cheek for," right? And you can go to stereotypes that scientists put forward about Black people not experiencing pain like we do, right, which is still a factor with medical care today, particularly with pregnant women.

But the thing that I just come back to over and over and over again is, we have to have a universal blanket acknowledgment and respect for the sovereignty and the sacredness of the human body. And if you are in a body, we should not treat you in certain ways. Period. It really can be that simple. And that would require an entire reorganization of our society. But it really can be, the principle can be simple.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:13:17]**
I mean, the conservatives were complaining back in the nineties that Hillary Clinton wanted to empower all the children to be able to sue their parents, right? They are afraid of children not being serfs. They are terrified of that. I mean, I talk about the tyranny of the parent fairly regularly.

**Gillian Brockell [01:13:43]**
Yeah, and I mean, Talia Lavin's book was really big for me in understanding that. I didn't understand the connection between ownership of children and child abuse and Christian right nationalism, and how that becomes a global political issue once you're an adult. That was really big for me.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:14:06]**
And not to toot my own horn, but it is a part of my article about trans rights and the denial of trans rights. It's about coercive control of children's bodies. It is not about protecting the children.

**Gillian Brockell [01:14:21]**
Right, right, or serving them. We are caregivers. We are not owners.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:14:29]**
Right, right. Well, but there is this idea that we own them, right, when in reality, it's sort of as I like to describe it, it's like you're getting to know someone, and you're getting to know somebody that is related to you and is a part of you, right? But you're still getting to know them. And that doesn't mean putting all of your stuff in, right?

We have to think of it in terms of how we get to know people, right? When we get to know one another, it's sort of like going to a supper at somebody's house. You bring something, and they bring something, and then they try a little bit of your thing, and you try a little bit of their thing, right? And all of a sudden, you like the sport that they really enjoy, right? And they're reading the book that you mentioned you really liked, right?

And that sort of give and take is, in my view, how both parties, the child and the parent, can always find happiness, right? Because the parent wants the child to see the beauty of some of the things that they find lovely, right, that they find interesting. But after a while, the child wants that too. The child wants to be like, "Hey, listen to this new song I found," right? "Listen to this book that I read. Talk to me about this thing." We crave that sort of back and forth. And when it only comes from "I am here and you are here," we're always going to feel gypped to some degree. We're always going to feel shortchanged, because, well, I matter too, damn it. What I feel and what I like is just as important as what you like.

**Gillian Brockell [01:16:22]**
There's just such a misunderstanding of the role of, like, "I'm gonna teach them the rules of life, and my job is to get them to fit in to whatever." And you just miss out on so much. We're getting so far from the Omni story, but whatever.

You just miss out on so much when you can't let yourself be delighted by what your kids are into that has nothing to do with you. Obviously, a lot of the time kids are just like you, right? But there are things where you can just go, "Wow, where'd that come from? This is interesting," instead of being like, "No, I'm putting you into soccer practice, and I don't care if you don't like it."

And I mean, just this morning, I was driving my kid to school, and he was kicking his feet back and forth. He has new shoes that make a sound. And he was just listening to the sound. And I was like, "Touchy, stop it." And then he goes, "Why?" And I was like, "Yeah, good point. Go ahead, go ahead and kick, kid. Listen to the sound. It's fun." And it's like, why can't I just let him explore the world?

**Caitlin M. Green [01:17:45]**
Yeah, right. I really love Janet Lansbury, the child parenting advice lady. She has a podcast called Unruffled, and one of the main takeaways, in terms of dealing with conflict with your kid, or dealing with some feelings that might be inconvenient for you in the moment, is just say the feelings back at them. Like, "Oh, you're really angry right now. You wanted this to happen and it's not happening, and that made you angry." Or, "You're really sad that your toy broke," or whatever it is. And that alone will help you reframe into, "We're gonna move through the feeling and we're gonna get our thing done that we still need to get done," without just being like, "Stop it. That's enough. Enough of that feeling." Because that is only going to throw up more roadblocks, and it's going to be, long-term, really hard.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:18:07]**
I hope, I hope.

**Gillian Brockell [01:18:30]**
Well, non-punitive parenting takes longer. It takes a lot more effort, right? If you want your kid to stop hitting other kids or whatever, you can put them in timeouts. You can punish them. Sure, maybe that'll be effective, maybe it won't. Or you can talk to them about, "Well, do you like it when someone hits you? Okay, well, he doesn't like it when you hit him, because he also has feelings." And it takes time to teach kids to be ethical rather than get them to conform.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:19:10]**
But then they'll have an easier time navigating things later, because they'll have these skills. So it is worth doing. And anyway, it gets back to the fact that treating other people like they're people is a top-level human skill that we all need to have.

**Gillian Brockell [01:19:25]**
And I think it's something that is inherent in children that we remove from them. And we'd be better off as a society if we didn't do this.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:19:29]**
Yeah, well, I mean, I really loved your story with the sound of the shoes, because so often we are going about our lives, we are driving, we're listening to the radio, we've got a million things on our mind, right? And this annoying-ass sound is driving me bonkers, right? But that's only because we're deluged with annoying-ass sounds all the time that we ignore.

But for the child, almost every single thing is, to some degree, a new thing. It's a new feeling, it's a new sensation, it's a new experience, it's a new sound. It's a new feeling from the sound. It's a new stimulation, right?

And when we, I mean, this is what happens when you yell at children often, right? You yell at them because they're annoying or because they did something that you find unpleasant, right? And for you, it was just like telling off a child like you've done a number of times in your life before, right? But then in twenty years, when you're paying for the therapy bill, it turns out that that was a real formative moment in that child's life, getting yelled at for something that you don't even remember. They bring it up to you, and you're like, "I don't remember that. That was a moment in time while I was going to work," right? But for them, it was an important moment in time. And because we become jaded to the stimulations of the world, we lose sight of this. And this is damaging for children, because you don't mean necessarily to hurt them or to ingrain something in them that won't be good. But if they catch it at that moment, then you've got to dig yourself out of a new hole.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:21:22]**
I will say, the unfortunate byproduct of my kids being unused to the sound of me yelling is that if there's a body emergency and I need to stop them from walking somewhere, it always freaks them out, because I had to yell to be like, "Stop! Body emergency!" And then they're like, "Mom, you yelled." Like, yeah. Yeah, I know. I know, sorry. It's only for emergencies.

**Gillian Brockell [01:21:43]**
That is so surprising. Yeah. I mean, yeah, no, I totally agree. The... we didn't really finish with Vinnie. I would love to say a little bit more about that.

So Vinnie, it's interesting. He, in a lot of ways, his flight was worse than Melissa's, but he's doing better now. He told me that when he arrived, basically, there have been so many returnees to Laos recently that they've converted this old refugee camp into a place to take all these people. And they're not detained. They can come and go as they please, but they immediately have a place to live and are fed, and there are policemen there who are helping them, helping them find family members and get a phone and a bank account and these sorts of things.

And he said that the day that he arrived, one of these policemen said, "We welcome you home, and we love you." And I don't think he was expecting that. And I was heartened to hear that he's doing better. It hasn't been that way with everyone, and a lot of people that we've talked about are facing really imminent danger. But I was happy to hear that he's doing better.

Another thing is that one of the immigration attorneys that I talked to a lot, he has helped to start a mutual aid group called the Ba Lo Project, B-A-L-O Project. And that is to just help returnees to Vietnam, because there are so many of them, in a way that is easier. They have a checklist now of where to go to get everything that you need, how to get a SIM card, how to do it. But they're also providing funding to help people get on their feet. And they also, and I think this is really important, part of their mission is to help, they say, siblings, to help their siblings know that they're not forgotten, that these people have been returned to Vietnam, a place many of them may not even remember, but they're not forgotten by their homes here in the United States.

So go support the Ba Lo Project.

I should also say, because this is how journalism works now, I have a newsletter. It's Gillian Brockell, gillianbrockel.ghost.io. It's a Ghost newsletter. You can get it for free. If you can get it for money, that would be better, just because I know everybody's really strapped for cash right now. So am I. But I am actually afraid that I'm not going to be able to continue doing this ICE reporting. Full-time freelancing is a nightmare, and it does not pay the bills. So I'm going to try the newsletter stream of income and see if that works. So gillianbrockel.ghost.io, and all my stuff is on Bluesky. I'm regularly posting ICE flights that are in progress. Just yesterday, Omni did a removal flight to Africa that stopped in Cameroon, which is probably a third-country removal, Ghana, which may have been a third-country removal, Chad, and Nigeria. And I was posting about that as it was happening, and hopefully we'll know more about the people on board soon.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:26:15]**
Yeah. Well, all of these things are susceptible to resistance by people who work there, people who live there, people who have a stake in it. So, these private equity firms, if your union is invested in it, that's an angle that you could hit them at.

**Gillian Brockell [01:26:51]**
And I have a list of those at my newsletter. So if your retirement fund, yeah, especially if you're a public employee of a state, you should go check my newsletter and see if your retirement fund is on the list. I know that the University of California employees are starting a movement to divest. I've heard some rumblings about New York State employees. I know some people have sent emails to Illinois state funds. I haven't heard anything for Maryland, where I live, but Maryland public employees, you are invested with Stonepeak. So hopefully there will be a lot more of that soon.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:26:51]**
Yeah. So, well, Gillian, absolutely brilliant. Thank you.

**Gillian Brockell [01:27:51]**
Thank you. I appreciate it.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:27:54]**
We appreciate you very much. To all of our listeners and our viewers, don't become jaded by all of the things that are going on. Continue to care, continue to love, continue to put in effort. And when things are tough, just remember the story of George Thomas, because even when you yourself feel like you're in a bad situation, it's never enough to stop us from remembering the human side of circumstances.

And certainly this was an emotionally charged episode, but we like that, because life has meaning and purpose, and if we're not crying, are we really even living? Caitlin, understanding a question is half of an answer. And well, you know that. This has been Half the Answer with your hosts, Trent R. Nelson and Caitlin M. Green, with Gillian Brockell. And until we do this thing all over again, take care.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:28:48]**
We love you. Bye.