Hey, it's Aaron. This week on the pod, the whole crew continues looking at arrests of migrants by federal agents. We talk about the responsibilities of news organizations like range during national political crises and chew over a little win for accountability reporting. This is Free Range, a co production of KYRS and Range Media. I'm your host, Luke Baumgarten and I'm joined today, Erin Sellers, our city hall reporter has the day off, or they may try to jump in here at the last second. They are getting their body inked, if I'm not saying we support that, but they are putting a tattoo on their body, currently. I don't know, we support tattoos. I mean, I, I'm not saying one way or the other, because I'm, this is a non partisan tattoo podcast radio show. We thought we actually tacked an essay that I wrote onto the end of last week's episode when we published it as a podcast. Hey, it's Aaron jumping back in here. If you want to listen to the essay Luke is referencing, it's at the top of last week's show. But if you already heard it, you know what we're about to discuss. we're going to be talking about that essay as a team. You know, what everybody thinks about it. Then we're going to talk about a conversation Hedge just had today, Aaron Hedge, with the wife of a Ghanaian migrant who was arrested at home after church somewhere between the valley and Spokane last week. Deportation proceedings are underway for him. We're going to speak with his wife. Or speak to Hedge about the conversation he had with his wife. Her, yeah, earlier today. Wow. Pronounce stuff for me today. Sorry, guys, County Commissioner. Lastly, County Commissioner Al French in response to reporting. We did range did has promised to divest his family stock in manufacturers of forever chemicals. Talk about that in greater detail. But as anybody who reads range knows. There are lots of Forever Chemicals poisoning the water in the West Plains, and Commissioner Al French has been a long time board member of the airport, the International Airport, where one of the sources of those Forever Chemical toxins we noticed during the election that he had a bunch of chemical company stock for chemicals, or companies specifically that manufacture Forever Chemicals, so Hedge did a great job running that story down and got got French to promise to share off his stock to sell off that stock. So I guess we start though with this essay, which I don't really want to be the first person to say something about because I wrote it. So who wants to start? This is dead air, this is great guys. Okay. Val, you start. Yeah, so I'll start because I was going through my email. I'm very bad at keeping up with our email. If anybody who has ever emailed us will probably know. But I was going through a lot of the responses from our readers and listeners who heard, or who read the, the and it was just really heartwarming, you know, that we got a lot of positive feedback. A lot of people saying, thank you for saying this other journalists being really thankful that you know, we're able to and willing to stand on the side of immigrants and people who don't have power. So That was pretty nice. I just wanted to share that with the world, I guess. What about you, Edge? When we first started, like, cause we had, you know, we had a team conversation about this essay over Slack. Luke could stay up all night, just like Stressing out about, you know, the state of the world out there, you know, like, the communities that we care about at range are really, really frightened about, like, you know, just the direction of the United States under a new, a new Trump administration that is kind of, you know, outsourcing all the functions of government, government to billionaires who aren't elected. And I think, I think in times like these, like, news organizations need to be doing some soul searching about how they are going to respond to it, because the traditional methods of, you know, objectivity and or traditional notions of objectivity, I guess, just like do not rise to this occasion. And I think the idea that we need to be louder. I think that Range should be a publication that is and lots of publications should be doing this but Range should be one of those publications. You know, challenging the notion that that, like, traditional news just isn't Like, you read, you read stories in the New York Times that characterize Trump's recent announcement that the United States is going to take over Gaza and not, not, not pointing out that that amounts to ethnic cleansing, an invasion, yeah. One thing I want to hop in real quick, because you said something, Hedge that like sparked a thought and it got me thinking, you said you know, newsrooms need to do soul searching right now, and it kind of makes me think about the first Trump presidency back in 2016, I was still in college and I remember, you know, our local paper was going, or was interviewing student editors at college papers, and I was one of them, and they were asking if we were worried about our First Amendment rights and you know, being censored by the president because I think at the time, at the time, he was definitely going after journalists in general, but then I think this reporter was looking for like a local college angle. And at the time, I didn't really feel Is threatened. I mean, also, I was a student reporter. And now, and I think about how newsrooms responded to the first Trump presidency. There was a lot of people realizing, oh, gosh, look where we're at now. This is where fake news and misinformation gets us. It gets people voting for somebody like this. We really need to. Tamp down on misinformation and, and fact check and just give people the right information and then they'll make the right choices, hopefully, and thinking. And then, as a result of the first presidency, there was something in the journalism industry called the Trump bump, where, you know, a lot more people were subscribing to their local news outlets, they were subscribing to national news outlets and there was a lot more foundation money and philanthropic money going to journalism. And that was like a boon, that was like a, a boom moment in the journalism industry, and now, I think we're, we're not gonna see that, and, and the consensus that I get from You know, Blue Sky and you know, journalism Social media. Yeah, and, and like newsletters that I follow and stuff is that we're not going to get that this time. It's not that we're alone, because we have each other and we have our community. But I, I don't think that the national news and, and the wider journalism industry is going to see that renewed trust in them anymore. And that's really scary as a local paper. And I think that when you say, like, we need to do some soul searching. I think that some of that soul searching is really examining, like, is this quote unquote objective form of journalism the way that we're ever going to regain trust. Yeah, and I mean, we've answered that question for ourselves, obviously. I think, the thing that I didn't put in the essay, because it wasn't quite as poetic as what I did write about objectivity versus fairness, and I believe this emphatically, and I will go to my grave, I will take my philosophy degree with me. When you think about what objectivity means, just the idea that you have to give both sides, or the idea that there are only two sides is often erroneous, so even the way This dominant medium mode gets framed is kind of erroneous and overly simplifies basically any, any story you would need to, like, any story with any level of context has more than two sides. And like, and honestly to, like, some of the few stories that only really do have two sides are like stories about sports games, right? Where it's like, the Warriors versus the Sonics or whatever. It's like, those are two clear sides. And then it's also. I think it's no, it's no big secret or surprise that We also think about politics in this team sports modality where it's always Democrats versus Republicans Which is why I wanted to put that line in the piece about This is not to me anyways about Democrats or Republicans It doesn't have to be about party at all. Like I've been talking to plenty of conservative folks plenty of people who have Probably voted for a majority of Republicans in their life who are also appalled by this and so it's a moment to me for moral clarity Ruling out over some random principle that doesn't meet the moment, but at the same time, I think, objectivity, so even assuming that there are only two sides, right? One of those sides is going to have more power, and the other side is going to have less power. So, the idea that journalism must be objective, must give equal time to both sides, in every single instance, will entrench and reinforce power. Because power, if power gets equal time with those who don't have power, power is always going to win. Power has, you know, when we talk about, just as one example, you know, when there's an officer involved shooting in Spokane, And you want to try to talk to the family where the, of the shooting victim, you want to talk to the cops. The family is going through the worst time, the worst day of their life, probably, because they've lost a loved one. They probably aren't media trained. They certainly aren't media professionals in almost all cases. They're just normal people who may or may not even know the rules around, like, whether, like, would talking to a journalist harm whatever case they might have, you know, later on. Meanwhile, the, the police have, like, a team of trained communicators to get their story out. An established playbook. Yeah, and an established playbook. And so, when we say the idea of objectivity, my, that, that's, that is my little philosophical argument for why journalistic objectivity, by its very nature, entrenches power in all cases. And so, no matter what else, It can be true. That means you need to treat people fairly still. We're still giving PIOs the time they need, but we're also taking the extra time. And that's, at least for me, and I know this is how you guys do your reporting, it doesn't mean not giving short shrift to the cop's narrative, or to the mayor's narrative, or to the power's narrative, but it's taking extra time to understand the, the situation that normal people find themselves in. And speaking of that Aaron Sellers just joined us and snuck on in here. Hi, I just got finished getting a tattoo from my ex girlfriend. Oh, we know, we know. And they do too, they didn't know the ex girlfriend part, but they knew you were desecrating your body. And so And now you're here. Sellers on the note of like giving extra time You know, for people who aren't media, media trained this is something that you do really well when you're talking to vulnerable people or people who are just Traditionally more disempowered, and could you share a little bit about, like, your process of working with sources to make sure you're telling their stories right, and also, like, not betraying their trust? Yeah, I know, I think in one way I Deeply, I'm sad that I didn't go to J school journalism school. I'm really glad you didn't. But I think, yeah, having not done that, there's some habits that didn't get ingrained in me. And so the first time that I was writing about sex workers, I remember thinking like, oh, these, these women have already had their narratives taken away from them and, like, used to fit one political point or another in a lot of ways. They're told that they're disempowered, that they are being trafficked. Like, there are all of these things that are just put on them. And I was working on a story about labor rights. And I was interviewing these women and thinking the whole time, like, Oh, I'm so nervous. I don't want to do the same thing to them that other people have. Like, I don't want to take their stories and Tokenize, objectify, yeah. Use their voices to fit whatever narrative I have in my head. I don't want them to feel like their stories are out of their own hands. Yeah. And so I did something that was maybe a little bit non traditional, but that I've kind of kept as a habit in my reporting since, where when I am talking to sources that might be about things that might be considered really vulnerable or intimate, or people who might find themselves frequently having their stories taken out of their own hands, once we do our interview I take it, I write what I'm gonna write with it, and then before I turn my draft into an editor, when it might start getting finalized, I will call back my sources that I've interviewed, and read them their quotes back, and give them the details that I'm including, and kind of give them a last opportunity, A, to tell me if I got anything wrong, like is there anything that's inaccurate, and B, to Make sure that they feel in control of their own stories. Which is not to say that like, I'm gonna write anything that's untrue or let them change my story to something that's not true. But if there's a detail that is too vulnerable or that they said and then once I put it in print, they're like, yeah. I don't want them to be surprised by that. I don't want them to, to kind of feel like, Oh, well, I said this to a journalist, and now they're going to take it and do what they want with it, and spin it how they want, and I don't get a say in that. So, I mean, I, it's nice to get some positive feedback on that from you, Val, as somebody who did go to J school, because it always makes me feel a little bit nervous, like I might be doing something wrong, but. It also doesn't happen a lot in, like, local. because, you know, there's so much smaller, but that's, it's pretty standard practice in, in bigger publications, national magazines and stuff like that. So it's not something Like regular practice for like a fact checker to call a source and read back, you know, check quotes and facts and things like that. But I've never been in that environment, but I'm pretty sure like giving the opportunity to change it or anything like that is not the norm. But it's something that I've heard Aaron do in the newsroom, just sitting next to them. And something that, Has only ever strengthened their reporting and their ability to connect with sources and tell their stories In a way that empowers them and that's the whole point. Yeah, and I don't want to think about it from like a self interested framework but there have been times where I've gotten a call from somebody that's like I got your number from so and so. They said that you handled their story with a lot of grace and care, and that they felt taken care of and not surprised by the process in a way that maybe they hadn't with other news outlets. I'm specifically thinking of my, like, queer in Idaho story. I got calls from people I hadn't reached out to who were like, hey, so and so told me I could trust you. I have something you might want to hear. And that was It's great for my reporting to maybe get to talk to people that don't normally talk to the press because they feel scared by or shut out of that process or worried that they're going to be portrayed in a way that they were maybe not prepared for as just like a normal citizen, not a person in power who doesn't, like, I'm not going to call a city council member and be like, Hey, so you said this in the meeting, do you still stand by that? Can I publish that? Yeah. But, for like talking to sex workers or queer people or people of color who might, you know, find their words twisted by other publications or in other circumstances. Justice involved folks, unhoused folks, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's really good. I think the and I think Hedge does a similar thing. His, the vulnerable folks he's talking to are often like Christian nationalists and stuff and then and other folks, but I, as the I guess the publisher is my title we're going with these days and I don't even get to do a lot of reporting, but I've had folks from the community reach out and maybe not necessarily name sellers by name, or Val by name, or Hedge by name, but say like, hey, we trust you with this story. People have told me you guys are the people that we should trust with our stories. And it means a lot, and I think that's also for the work we're trying to do, like the only way we're going to get it done is by Cause we, we are trying to do something that's like one level. of complexity below, like, standard municipal journalism, right? Like, we're trying to get to the grassroots as much as we can, get to impacted people as much as we can, and try to not use, like, power as a conduit to find those people, right? So, not just not going to the mayor to find a sympathetic person who might be unhoused for their policy position, but also not going to a re even, you know, Compassionate Addiction Treatment or some other organization. Like, not using We're trying to get our own network of reporting because you know, even small nonprofit like organizations have power of a sort over the people they, they serve and we want to do everything we can to get down to that level of the absolute grassroots, the absolute most impacted. And, and I got to say, I'm, it seemed like a bigger hill than I knew how to climb when we were kind of kicking this around as a theory. And now, I honestly don't know how we would do it any other way. It's been so successful in that way. And it's given us this team of four more, more stories than we know what to do with. Yeah. It does make me feel bad sometimes when we get a story pitch from somebody that we've connected with in that way. And I just don't have the time to take it. It's like, you know, we've built that trust with somebody. They know that they can tell us their story and that we'll treat it as important. And then not being able to Do it, because I have like four different things I'm working on is always a hard feeling. If I could have like ten more reporters, I think we could fix that. Minimum. Val and I were talking about this right before the show, and you know, she forwarded me a bunch of emails from people who have stories to tell, like people who've been hurt by systems, like people who don't have access to power, and we have to respond to them and say, We, we, we think your story is important, we will report on it if we have the capacity to, and we don't, we often don't know whether we will or not, and when. Yeah, because it could be that, you know, you're reporting on something big that gets held up in some way, like somebody doesn't call you back, or you can't find a way to confirm X, Y, Z piece of information, and all of a sudden you have like, Free space in your week to report a story, but we never know when that's going to happen. Journalism is a fluid act. Extremely fluid. Fluid, yeah, fluids. Fluid act. Yeah, that's, there are probably some less generous ways to put it that are equally accurate. And honestly, we're, we're explicitly prohibited from Advertising ourselves, but I think what Val was saying about where there's not going to be a Trump, a national Trump bump the way there was last time and that that lasted actually the majority of the funding that got kept range going in the early years was the Trump bump becoming a COVID bump, right? When a lot of There was a lot of talk about trusted communities and how to get information about the vaccine and the disease out to people. That led to a second sort of surge of national funding and, and other sort of ways of getting money to journalists. We were the beneficiaries of that. I think though, like, and this goes for any independent media you support in the world Because there's not going to be a big institutional push, that thing in the essay about, like, locking arms and taking blows for other people and stepping up on the trust that they'll take blows for you to the extent that you believe in an independent media, that should be part of your thinking as well. Supporting, in whatever way you can, the independent media you trust at whatever level, national or local or hyper local, you trust them at. That's the only way that media is still going to be around for you. Probably even in the middle of this thing, let alone the end of this thing. So that's the last thing I'll say. I do have another, maybe less philosophical essay percolating about, It's how it's going to take this community to save this community and but I'll save that until I actually write it. It's like half formed in my brain and I'm waiting for my next night of insomnia to finish writing it, I think. Insomnia slash inspiration. Insomnia slash inspiration. Yeah. No, I, no, I'm going to try to do it this week. So next topic though, and We've got about 25 minutes left in the program. We've been talking a lot about how we're running down stories of federal immigration officials either harassing or interrogating or, You know, deporting folks, and we've written one of those stories at this point, we're reporting others, or if we, we've written more than one, but we're, we're tracking like a dozen. And in a lot of cases people, for very understandable reasons, not only do they not want to go on the record anonymously or under a pseudonym, they're just like, I don't even want to, I feel like I'm such a target, I don't want to even Poke the bear at all. Yeah, even like psychically put it out in the world or something. And so, but we have had an opportunity to connect with one new the wife of a man originally from Ghana who was arrested and is in the process of deportation. He was taken at, from his home right after church, I think, what, last Sunday or two Sundays ago, Hedge? It was the last Sunday, so I think it was January 26th, I think was the date, I'm not sure if that's the correct date. Yeah. It was the final Sunday in January. The final Sunday in January, yeah. So about a week and a half ago. But the, from what you told me, Hedge, the wife said they were waiting, the immigration officials were waiting there at their home when they got back from church on Sunday morning? So, they left church, which, they, they go to a Christian church, an evangelical church in, in Spokane Valley, and they live kind of on the border of Spokane and Spokane Valley. And it's a largely migrant church, they, they went home separately, so he, he went home ahead of her, and she had the children. They have two kids. One's an eight month old baby, and the other's a three year old. He went home ahead of them, and she was gonna stop at the grocery store to get some food, and she called him to to see what he wanted. And he didn't answer, which was unusual for him, according to his wife. And, So she gets home and no one's there. His, his clothes, his church clothes, which he normally like changes out of right away, were not anywhere in the home. And his cell phone and his wallet were on the table. And so she was like, she found it strange. She thought maybe he went for a walk. But that was unusual for him. And so she was a little unsettled by what was going on. The previous week, just to set the table, he had been applying for his green card for a long time, and the Thursday before so three days before, he was, his application for the green card was denied. And so He, she gets a call from a number that she doesn't know, and she normally screens her calls so she didn't answer it, and he left her a message saying, I think I'm being deported ICE was at home when I, when I got here, and they're taking me to the ICE facility in Tacoma and so she, like, immediately tried to call him back, it took him, it took her a while to get in touch with him he's, he's still there now, nobody really knows what's gonna happen to him. They have a lawyer who's trying to find information about the case, but they don't really The lawyer is ICE is just basically, pun intended, icing everybody out. Like, they don't, They're not giving anybody information about his case or what they're gonna do. She was able to attend a hearing about his case in Tacoma. I think a couple of days ago, but there's really no clarity, like they have, it's all up in the air. She, he was, he had been taking care of the children and she was going to school. She dropped out of college because, in the last week, because she needs to be at home with her small children. So it's completely upended their life. She's been in the country, she has her citizenship, she came, she came in under, she said seven or eight years ago under a program that was established by the Obama administration. She's Congolese and she spent, she, her, her family fled in Congo when she was seven years old and she spent the next 15 years in a camp in Uganda, but she was able to come into the United States through this program. He came as a student about 15 years ago. He's Ghanaian and he he he he he I'm not, I'm not sure the exact like, narrative of his status, but I assume he came in under a student visa and maybe that, that lapsed and he tried to apply for a green card, but, you know, they've been working at this for years. He's, he's been here for 15 years. And the reason why they knew where to find him was because he was trying to follow the process and fill out his paperwork. He was following the rules. Follow the rules. Exactly. I've seen lots of stories just on TikTok and things like that of people saying like, I have been trying to get my papers. I've been trying for years and it's just been in hold. It's been just like not happening. And. I'm following the steps, but they're, the process isn't working and now they're either at risk for being deported or are getting deported and it's so frustrating. I have a kind of a random question that is it's going to seem super small, but do you know if one, if the, the husband or the wife was like serving at their church and that's why they drive separately? No, I don't, I don't know the reason that they came back separately. It sounded when I, when I spoke with her, and I didn't ask that question it sounded like this was kind of not something that they normally did. And so I, I don't, I don't know about that. Just like, I was asking because like that, you know, might illustrate how connected they are in this community, you know, they're serving at their church, things like that. She did, she did say that She's very connected to her church. She's always, she's always been a Christian. The family, the entire family has always been Christian and they, I know a lot of people who are in a similar situation who attend that church and they, like a lot of, a lot of the congregation has stopped attending the church because they're afraid of what's going to happen when they leave their home. I mean, I think, I mean, that is one of the criteria when, when a normal administration is Judging things like asylum claims or, or not, probably more green card. It's like, how connected are you to the community you're in? You know, how long have you been here? That's why the conversation we had with Sam Smith is kind of ringing through my head. I kind of want to re listen to it so I can kind of commit all the bullet points to memory. Because it was just fascinating how he was talking about, like, if you have an, a state ID, that should be what you give to the authorities. If, but it's, Don't give them your, you know, your non Ameri U. S. passport. Take the, take the citation for not driving without an I. D. Yeah, or, and, but then if you do, if you are in the process, and this is what's so kind of I think brutal for people who are trying to go through the legal path, which is what mm-hmm For generations and generations of people, president, after president on a bipartisan basis from, you know, George W. Bush to to Obama, to Reagan. Like, come in the right way. Mm-hmm You know, Kamala at the border during the Biden administration, so we've. That's one of the ways that this administration is really, it's preying on the people who have, in the past, it's the lowest hanging fruit, the people who followed the, the bipartisan advice of generations of federal officials. Just do it come the right way. The people that are doing that are now the ones being targeted. It's so frustrating for me to see, like, these dual online narratives of, like, Oh, Trump is only arresting criminals. Like, he's only deporting criminals. If you're not a criminal, you have nothing to worry about. And it's like, there's A, yeah, demonstrably false. B, there's like quotas for agents to meet and the easiest people to find are the people who have been keeping up to date on their paperwork. I saw a news story from, I want to say it was Michigan or Wisconsin, about a conservative business owner who, like, a majority of his employees were undocumented. And he wasn't worried about it because he was like, they're law abiding people. You know, they are not gonna get deported and he showed up to work one day and half of his workforce was being taken away by ICE and he was like this impacts me really negatively like my business and I just think people don't understand or refuse to to bear witness and empathize with what's happening until it negatively impacts them and it's so Frustrating and sad and heartbreaking to watch this happen in real time. Yeah. And to be like frantically trying to fact check our way out of, like, the rampant misinformation online, and we're always like four steps behind just trying to catch up. The other thing that I was thinking about as you were talking, Hedge, is just like how resilient these communities of people are and these people within those communities are, and it, it reminded me of the other anecdote that, Sam Smith said that he has a client who's been, like, on him to, to go through the, the legalization process, the naturalization process, which he was in the middle of as fast as possible in a way that Sam was like, dude, I'm going as fast as I can. This is all we can do right now. And then the moment this stuff started happening a few weeks ago, Sam said he was ready to follow up and start moving on. And the guy was like, no, let's just slow roll this for a while. Like. Clearly now the, you know, at least some percentage of people who are in these communities going to church every Sunday who are, you know, trying, doing everything they can to get their American citizenship as quickly as they can are now disappearing from the communities that they enrich so much and then like slowing down on these ostensibly legal processes because it's very clear that the game has changed and we're living under a new set of rules. It really, talking about resiliency, it really, The thing that, one of the things that really sticks in my head from my conversation with this man's wife is She has tremendous guilt. Over not having answered the phone when he called because she was screening her calls Even though that's just something she's always done and now she sits next to her phone She's been sitting next to her phone for a week and a half It's all she's been doing. I could hear I could hear the the baby like Just making noise in the background, very cute little, little sounds. And she was just, and the three year old is constantly asking where, Like, if Dad's coming home, and she has no idea, and she doesn't know how to answer that question and she said to me, she said, I'll just read a quote, she said, He left a voice message, I think I'm going to be deported, Ice came and picked me up, call me back on this number. At that point, when I listened to the voice message, And now I'm still living the trauma of missing his call. I keep holding onto the phone. I feel like he's going to call again. I'm going to miss his call. I have to have the pho, I have to leave the phone with me the whole time just to know that I, that I won't do that again. I feel like I let him down. She was, she grew up without without a father. And now. She's worried that her children are gonna grow up without a father. She doesn't know There was a part of her that, like, a small part of her that, like, just hopes that they'll deport him quickly so that she knows where he is and when, like, has some clarity about the situation. Yeah. She doesn't know what she's gonna do if that happens, but I do think it's eroding people's Mental health and, and the, the resiliency is, is, is tough right now. Yeah. In some ways, I mean, this is not anything, it's, it's the best, or the only acceptable of terrible choices in some cases, but it, The whole thing about a quick deportation would probably be preferable to, because if she's a citizen, the kids were born here, they're obviously citizens, like we, I'm on the board of Feast World Kitchen, and we have lots and lots of the chef family members who, We'll work at feast as a way of getting money to then go back and visit their relatives in either their home country or the refugee camp they might be living in, the people that aren't, that haven't made it to another country. And that's just sort of a fact of life for a lot of folks and they plan their entire year around it, going back for a month, you know, saving up all their money to go back to be with their loved ones for a month before returning to America. So in some ways. And this is, I think, the brutal tragedy of our immigration system, probably always, but especially right now. It's like, assuming he's still in Tacoma, he's a five hour drive away, but it would actually be easier for them to be a family if he were a continent away. It would be more expensive, it would take an entire day to probably travel there, but that's the reality we're living through right now, and it's It's one of the saddest things I can contemplate, I think. Can you come back to the U. S. after you've been deported, or is it like, there's like a time frame? I think in normal circumstances, and who knows, you know, once there's a new administration in, if all of the decisions that were made by this one, because it's, It's pretty clear that, like, deporting somebody who's in the middle of a green card process and is known to authorities. Who is married to a citizen. Who is married to a citizen is not standard operating procedure for even our traditionally pretty broken immigration system. So, I don't know if I can answer that. I don't know if anybody can answer that question because it depends on I mean, and also the Trump administration is getting a lot of heat for this, whether they care or whether it matters remains to be seen. They just sent the first flight of migrants to Guantanamo Bay. So we'll see if they're going to actually make good on their promise to put 30, 000 people in a prison that's only ever held 700. So yeah, I think, I don't think we can answer any of these questions yet. But it would be incumbent on assuming if, you know, a Democrat were to take power in the next thing, that would also require the Democrats actually living their, the values they say they have and actually doing things to undo things and not merely like the Biden administration did, basically just keeping the, the, the default border policy that Trump had in place in his first go around. So, you know, This is not to, again, I really, when I, when I think about this stuff, I am really not trying to demonize one party over the other because this is a cycle that's been playing out for my entire life and at some point there needs to be a break in that cycle where we let some humanity back into our politics. I don't know, I don't know who's gonna do it first, but it's not looking good for either at the moment. I had a conversation with a high school history teacher, a social studies teacher, who pointed out, like, we need to be clear about this, like, the Obama administration deported millions of people. Yeah, and he was called the Deporter in Chief. Yeah, this, this, this teacher was like, the first Trump presidency. This teacher said, you know, with all the chaos and all the new policies and all the, you know, all the complicated, the more complicated landscape that now exists, and the fact that Trump is so loud about all of this, he said he, he, bet a friend money that Trump would not be able to deport as many people as Obama did. Yeah, and I think that's why this, if there's any silver lining to this, that's not That's well known by, like, a lot of the community leaders in, like, especially Latine community leaders that I know. Like, this is, this is a topic of conversation frequently. That it's not, like, one good side of our political class against the bad side of our political class. If there is a silver lining to take away from this, it's like we really I wouldn't have thought we could look away from child separation on the border in the last administration, but hopefully at some point the, something's gonna be a straw that breaks the back of this idea that we aren't a, a nation that has always been built on first enslaved and then eventually extremely cheap labor that we largely now get from immigrant, you know, migrants. And That if we're ever gonna do anything about it, we need to really reckon with that. I have been wrestling with this over the last few weeks. I understand the need to highlight, like, the Keep Washington Working Act and the, like, need to lean on that as protections for undocumented people living in Washington. It is also so heartbreaking to see people act like The only value that undocumented people have is in labor that is far too cheap and the fact that they can be exploited because of their status. If your economy is reliant on exploiting people because they do not have the power of citizenship, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your economy. And I just hope that as folks, you know, rightfully request that their City and state employees follow state law and do not collaborate with Border Patrol. They also reckon with the fact that we have a state that relies on Labor, that it comes inherently from exploitation. Yeah, just take a second to contemplate that even, I think, in, in this fight, Washington would be one of the, sort of, the, the states on the side of right or justice. Still, the only way we got that bill passed is by basically wrapping it in a, in a, this will help our economy stay afloat better. And that, that really means something. Well, we were wondering if we're going to need a fourth segment. To get through. We now have five minutes to get to our third segment. So our answer is we always, we never have a hard time finding things to talk about, but Lastly, another Hedgebanger. We're usually getting two seller pieces. This is a rare double hedge week and I'm loving it. It's because all of mine are waiting for edits. Ooh, that's only one. Two. One of them's not your fault. Okay. I would say you were looking directly at me. The audience can't see the daggers that I was being, the ocular daggers I was being stabbed with a second ago. But we noticed in, during the last election, and we weren't able to run the story down in time, but we noticed in the PDC filings that, Commissioner French, who has a central role to play in the, or has played a central role in the ongoing Forever Chemical PFOS contamination of the West Plains. Not directly with the contamination, but the decision to not tell the public about it for years after the fact. We noticed in his PDC filings in the last couple of years, he's, has. stocks in the sorts of chemical companies that manufacture PFAS. And we just wanted to ask him about that. And so we did that. We partnered with this really cool national startup investigation room called Sunlight Research Research Center. We're one of their sort of beta test newsrooms. We're super. Lucky to work with that team, a bunch of really, really smart people. And they worked with Hedge on running down this story, so. And we got our first quote from Al French ever. Not to spoil it, but he actually talked to us for the first time about this story, so. I think it's to pat us, pat everybody except me on the back here although I was the only one who did notice the PDC records, and I actually just looked into it. Yeah, you found, you found the story, yeah. So maybe we'll, feel free, one of you, to pat me on the back for once for God's sake, but So yeah, talk to us about it, Hedge, like, how'd that go? Oh, there we go, I actually got a physical pat on the back here a second ago. Oh, that was sweet. Yeah, so yeah, Hedge, talk to me about that, and, and just running down, this is, this is nerdy data stuff that we usually don't talk about. Yeah, well we wanted to make sure, I mean, and the the disclosures that you found were pretty clear, like, there were, there were three companies that Commissioner French had listed in his campaign filings as having stock in. Keymores Company, DuPont, and Corteva. Keymores and Corteva are both Or have at one time been subsidiaries of DuPont. But they all have had a hand in, in this massive, in manufacturing Products that contain forever chemicals, including the firefighting foam at the airport that was, like, the kind of firefighting foam that was used at the airport that contaminated the aquifers out there. But also, like, non stick pans have similar chemicals. Like, very chemically similar chemicals. Yeah, yeah, these chemicals are everywhere. They're in, like, the laminate on your On your, on your, you know, kitchen counters, they're in your steering wheel, they're in the food wrapping that you get in fast food, they're everywhere, and every person has a little bit of these chemicals in their body, but it's a lot more concentrated in this, in this firefighting foam, and much more dangerous levels than, than most products. But you know, the, the airport had discovered in 2017 that it had contaminated the aquifer, which was connected to a whole bunch of private drinking wells, and also Airway Heights Drinking water supply. And they didn't tell anybody about it. They didn't let For years. For, for many years until they were basically forced to by a private citizen who requested those well tests. And so they were forced to, to disclose this. Commissioner French was on the airport board and so, and he's been accused of, like, participating in what a lot of these residents view as a cover up of that contamination, but yeah, he responded to us saying that he was going to divest, and he was He said these, these stocks had belonged to his mother and they're in a probate process right now and once they're released to him, he's going to sell them off for, in favor of other kinds of stock. Yeah, according to him, they were technically his mother's stock and when she passed away, this is part of the process of her estate, that he will eventually get them. He said, I do not have the ability to sell the stocks until they are fully transferred to me. When that happens, I have every intention to sell the stocks that you refer to as well as others in her estate. Estate and reinvest them into other companies. So that's it for us today. That's a bit of good muck, Rick, in journalism, getting at least somebody on the record promising to do something if not actually doing something. And what we're doing right now, guys, is we're celebrating the wins when they come through because there's a lot of, there's a lot of bad, there's not a lot of winning going on, especially for journalists right now, I don't think. But that feels like a win to me and, mm-hmm I don't know, I'd kind of like to end today on a high note, a little bit. Alrighty. That's it for us. Aaron, you just sat down. Do you want to play us out, or should I play us out? I don't have the script in front of me. Do you have questions about local government? Wondering who to complain to about an issue in your neighborhood? Wondering which agency governs certain things? Wondering why something is happening, or how much it costs? Email us at freerange at kyrs. org with your questions, and we'll try and answer them next week. Bye! Bye!