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Biden’s Disastrous Deportation of Haitians

Amy Wilentz on the situation at the border, plus Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce on Occupy Wall Street 10 years after.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

September 23, 2021

A Haitian migrant crosses the Rio Grande to the encampment on the Del Rio, Tex., side of the border from Ciudad Acuna, Coahuila state, Mexico, on September 21, 2021. (Paul Ratje / AFP via Getty Images)

Joe Biden is deporting 15,000 Haitian refugees who crossed the border at Del Rio, Tex., to a country ravaged by assassination, earthquake, poverty, and gang violence—it’s a disastrous move. Amy Wilentz comments; she’s been reporting on Haiti and Haitians for more than two decades.

Also: Ten years ago this week, a small group of young radicals declared “We are the 99 percent” and set up camp in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s financial district. Instead of a few people protesting for a few days, the movement exploded; hundreds of thousands of people joined Occupy camps in more than 600 US towns and cities. CUNY professors Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce comment—they’ve written for The Nation’s special issue on the 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.

This episode of Start Making Sense was developed as part of a collective of podcasts brought together to explore the legacy of Occupy, in light of the 10th anniversary. Through this project you can also hear analysis on the impact of Occupy from Belabored, The Dig, Upstream, and more. The producing partners for this project are the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s New York office and The New School’s Milano program. We encourage you to learn more and listen to some of the other episodes by visiting RosaLux.NYC/Occupy.

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Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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