Ezra LeVant visited Arizona’s U.S.-Mexico border on March 14, witnessing heavy surveillance—drones, blimps, and checkpoints—but no illegal crossings, unlike Texas reports. He contrasts Naco’s economic despair with U.S. incentives like NYC’s $10K welcome package, suggesting migrants prefer capture over desert risks. Meanwhile, Canada’s trucker protest trials, including Tamara Leach’s 49-day detention, expose potential punitive overreach, while the Democracy Fund’s mass legal defense forces charge withdrawals like William LaFramboise’s. The episode questions U.S. sovereignty amid border chaos and urges support for collective resistance against state overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh hi everybody, I'm in Arizona where I had an interview and while I was down here I decided to go to the U.S.-Mexico border to see what I could see.
I'll show you but obviously you have to have the video version of this podcast to see it.
Go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month.
I saw some interesting things.
I'd like to show it to you.
All right.
Without further ado, here's today's podcast.
What am I doing in Arizona?
It's March 14th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Oh, hi.
As you can tell by these prickly bushes behind me, I am not in snowy Canada.
I have zipped down to the state of Arizona just for a day.
In fact, not even a day.
I woke up 21 hours ago in Toronto, got on a plane, made my way to a town called Sierra Vista, Arizona, where I was interviewing Betty Carbert.
She's the mother of Chris Carbert, one of the four accused Coots IV defendants from the blockade that the Truckers had there two years ago.
We'll have a special show about that.
That's not for today.
But since Tucson, Arizona is just, I don't know, 20 miles away from the border between Arizona and Mexico, we decided to use the rest of our day here to go and look around at the border mess that has seen hundreds of thousands.
In fact, I think it's in the millions of illegal migrants just waltz across the border.
You may know that my colleagues Lincoln Jay and Alexa Lavois did some excellent reporting on the subject from Texas earlier this year.
Here, take a look at that.
We met with a retired border patrol agent named Lewis and his nephew, Ethan, who agreed to show us a popular spot for people to enter into Eco Pass, Texas, illegally from Mexico.
This was just miles down the road from Shelby Park.
So at one time, this is, I don't know, well, you guys have researched all this stuff.
We had Title 42.
Yeah.
It was a COVID measure.
Yeah.
So that when people came across, we just kicked it back to Mexico.
So Title 42, when they did away with it, then the hordes of people came across.
Every morning, 700 would walk up this road.
700 aliens, early morning, every morning.
Well, Lincoln and Alexa had a few days on the ground.
They made local contacts and they really spent a lot of time at the border.
And wouldn't you know it, they actually encountered some illegal migrants emerging from the bushes.
And here's a reminder of how that looked.
Lo siento.
Lo siento.
¿Cuál es tu país?
México.
El cuado.
Well, I simply didn't have the time.
I had about four hours of daylight, and I didn't want to go out looking for migrants at night because, of course, the people who smuggle them are sometimes desperate and criminal.
So I had about four hours of daylight.
And what I want to show you today is what I saw during those four hours.
The answer is, I didn't actually see any people sneaking across the border.
I saw a lot of border police.
And I want to tell you one anecdote before I throw to some video clips that I recorded earlier today.
We actually saw dozens of border patrol police vehicles all around wherever we went.
And there was even some sort of migrant check stops on the highway.
We saw one as we were driving down there, but we didn't stop and look at it.
But on our way back to our hotel tonight, we saw one of these migrant police check stops at the side of the highway.
We slowed down the vehicle so we could film this migrant check stop that was closed for the night.
So we were driving on the highway and we slowed down to about, I don't know, 50 kilometers an hour just so we could film this migrant check stop.
And then we sped back up.
Wouldn't you know it, there were still so many border agents all around that when they saw our vehicles slow down to take a look at the border, a migrant check stop, they assumed we were smugglers or something.
And they put on their flashers and they pulled us over and we showed them who we were and they let us go.
It's an enormous border and the difference between America and Mexico couldn't be more stark in terms of economic opportunity and freedom and frankly crime.
Despite the fact that there's an enormous deployment of troops, the migrants are still coming and when they are captured by these border patrol agents, they're not just deported.
Like Justin Trudeau, he lets them stay in the country, Joe Biden.
Anyways, without further ado, let me show you some clips that we assembled from my day today.
I don't think it was as successful as Lincoln and Alexis' trip to Texas because they were there for many days and there was an enormous migration pouring over the border.
We actually couldn't get close to the border.
All the roads were closed.
You could not get right up to that border fence.
But I think it was sort of an interesting journey anyways.
And I'd like to show it to you because we did spend the rest of our day on it.
For better for worse.
Here's how my day went You can see I am NOT in Canada anymore I'm in Naco, Mexico.
Through that fence, 20 feet is Naco, Arizona.
And you can see the border fence stretching for miles, actually all the way to the horizon.
Down here, the fence has been painted in a beautiful, you know, attempt to make it a less ugly barrier than it really is, rusted steel.
But down there, it's near the children's park.
It was an interesting crossing from the American side to the Mexican side.
They didn't ask for any ID.
They didn't ask for any passports.
They literally didn't say anything to us.
They said a few things in Spanish that I didn't understand.
They did look in the car to see if we were smuggling contraband from America into Mexico, and they let us go.
And immediately you can see the obvious, you can hear a drone, whether it's a police drone or a military drone or a drone of coyotes who are planning to smuggle people across the border because the county on that side of the fence is where an enormous number of migrants cross over.
And in fact, all the way down from Sierra Vista to the border, we saw police vehicles, border patrol vehicles.
I'm told that there's often a blimp in the air.
So we are in a place where an enormous number of people are smuggled into the U.S. side.
Slightly alert because although it is bright out and we are, you know, a few hundred yards from a large police presence, I also know that there's a lot of lawlessness there.
Not only do the smugglers bring people over, but they bring, of course, drugs over.
Well, it's five minutes later and we're now on the US side of this border wall.
You can see the US customs and immigration headquarters, sort of in that adobe style.
This is this.
This town on the Arizona side.
The American side of the border has the exact same name NACO, and it's a little bit run down.
It's an unincorporated village, but it's markedly different in every way from the Mexican side.
Enormous security here.
I mentioned before we had a drone overhead and we asked the the border guard what he thought it was.
He thought it probably was American border patrol.
You know, there's all sorts of censors when you come across, all sorts of inspections, investigations.
You have all this, but in a way it's just for show, because when people and I shouldn't just say Mexicans, because I don't even know if Mexicans would be a majority of them anymore anyone from South and Central America, but really everyone from around the world knows if you can make your way to Mexico, you can just march right in and you want to be caught because you're not going to be kicked out.
You'll be well in New York City.
You'll be given a lovely place to live.
You'll be put up in a hotel.
Now the mayor there wants to give every migrant ten thousand dollars.
By the way, in a lot of the countries where people come from, ten thousand dollars US is five years income.
So it's an enormous magnet bringing hundreds of thousands, millions of people.
And of course, these border states have sort of had it, especially Texas, which is shipping a lot of these migrants to these Democrat sanctuary cities New York Chicago, places like that.
That virtue signaled about how open borders were a good thing when it was only these border towns that paid the price, but now they're squawking because their own local poor and homeless people are being pushed aside by the world's illegal immigrants.
So here you can see the border wall going off to the horizon.
There it does look impressive, although I know a little bit about walls if you don't have people patrolling them.
It is true, you can have a 20-foot wall, someone get over it with a 21 foot ladder.
You can have a 30 foot wall you get.
You can always get over a fence.
The fence is to delay and to detect.
You need a fence system, you need patrols, and there are some patrols, but I say again, the craziest thing and we saw police cars and we saw all sorts of infrastructure, but none of it is actually to keep the migrants out.
It's to catch them and then release them, which is the strangest thing I've ever heard.
What an extraordinary view behind me.
This is Arizona.
You can see the border barrier or the border wall between the United States and Mexico.
It stretches a great distance down that way.
We were at the town of Naco, Mexico, and there was a small NACO in Arizona.
I didn't tell you that when we were on the NACO, the Mexico side, we were driving around, we were filming a little bit in front of the wall.
People were stopping to look at us because there's not a lot of tourists from the United States in NACO.
There's not a lot to do or see there.
And it didn't bother me that people were stopping and staring as we did a little bit of journalism.
But one SUV without a license plate seemed to be following us, and I didn't mind much.
And as we were driving this way, it followed this way, and we went that way and it went that way.
And I was focused on driving, but our videographer, Lincoln, and he saw this other car, and it was someone in an unmarked vehicle, no license plate with a walkie-talkie.
Why he's following us 150%.
He's on a walkie-talkie.
We didn't know who it was.
Who knows?
It could have been just some local person.
Could have been a cop, or it could have been someone with the cartel.
We didn't want to take our chances, even though we were a few hundred yards away from police.
We thought, let's get back to the American side, which is where we are.
What's funny is there's all these signs when you head into Mexico, weapons not allowed, guns not allowed.
Sure, they're not allowed.
I'm sure they're not, actually, but there's an enormous smuggling operation of armed gangs, and they deal in, they traffic in two main resources.
One is people, and the other is fentanyl, drugs made in China, undermining the United States.
This is an absolutely gorgeous area.
We drove on this windy road up here.
I think this is called the Montezuma Canyon Road.
There's a great amount of history here.
This is the Coronado National Memorial.
And I'm not fluent enough with my Spanish-American history to know who Coronado was, although I am fascinated by it.
It's enormous here.
It's a very large territory, and it's fairly sparsely populated on the American side.
As we drove from Sierra Vista down to Naco and then from Naco to here, we probably saw, I'm going to say, at least 20 border patrol vehicles along the road, and as well, sort of depots or base camps where you might see 10 parked and five parked.
There's towers, which I assume are some sort of observational tower.
There are all sorts of warning signs about migrants in the border.
In fact, in this beautiful park here at the picnic areas, there's warnings to be careful about migrants.
They have a lot of people dedicated to watching the border and finding migrants.
But when they find them, they release them.
And I think the migrants want to be found, to be rescued.
It's almost twilight.
It's almost dusk here.
The sun is setting, and it's getting a little bit chilly.
During the day, it's very hot.
At night, it's cool.
It's a very difficult journey.
I mean, this is, you can see it's a desert.
This is an arid place.
It's not fun, I imagine, to be an illegal migrant crossing over, just making sure you have enough water alone.
You want to be caught.
You want to be caught and brought to a place where you can get medical attention, where you can get food and water, and where you can perhaps get a bus ticket or a plane ticket to New York City.
Who wouldn't want, I mean, you saw what it looked like in NACO, and I'm not disparaging the place, but the average national income in NACO is a fraction of what it is in America.
It didn't feel safe there.
Charges Laid00:16:58
Maybe we just were a little bit on pins and needles because we were unused to it.
But who wouldn't want to go from Naco, Mexico, into Naco, Arizona, be caught, and you're not going to be sent out.
In fact, if you play your cards right, you could wind up in New York City with a $10,000 gift welcome basket from the mayor there.
We haven't seen any migrants, but we've seen a great many signs telling us to be alert to migrants.
Anyway, I'll sign off from the top of the mountain here, and we'll slowly make our way back down.
You know, we didn't have that moment that Lincoln and Alexa had a few months ago where, boom, jumping out of a bush was a group of migrants.
It just didn't happen in the hours we had in town.
But it's an enormous factor.
I really have never seen this many police deployed in an area.
It felt like a military operation, which I guess it sort of is.
I think it's a critical issue for the United States because if you don't have a border, are you really even a country?
Well, as you know, there is an enormous trial on the way in Ottawa.
Tamara Leach, the spiritual leader of the Ottawa Trucker Convoy, enters her second year in prosecution.
She was jailed for 49 days before being released.
And the trial is a bizarre, excruciating exercise.
It's so clear to me that the process is to punishment.
I think the Crown realizes they don't really have a case against her.
They'll just use the trial itself as a kind of punishment.
As you know, as well, there are trials underway in Lethbridge, Alberta, trials for the so-called Cootes III and the Coots IV, who are down to two, actually.
Coots, of course, being the name of the town, the little village, actually, at the border between Alberta and Sweetgrass, Montana, where there was another blockade.
Those are serious trials, and they continue in the weeks ahead.
But there was a third location where the truckers had a sensational blockade that made international news.
You may recall that the city of Windsor across the bridge from the American city of Detroit was blocked as well.
And this got great attention in Toronto because that bridge is an important international hub for the auto industry.
Well, many charges were laid over that.
And I'm delighted to report to you news from our cousins at the Democracy Fund.
Let me read to you from a press release.
The Crown Attorney has withdrawn all criminal charges against William La Framboise, the alleged leader of the Windsor protests that blocked the Ambassador Bridge in February of 2022.
The Democracy Fund litigation director Alan Honor stood beside his client, La Framboise, as the charges were withdrawn before Justice Campbell this past Wednesday.
And here's my favorite part.
While the Crown Attorney stated that there were tribal issues, he also explained to the court that it was not in the public interest to prosecute La Framboise, given the evidentiary challenges of the Crown's case and other serious matters that were vying for trial time in a backlogged court system.
In other words, there was no point in trying the case.
There was really no public interest.
And there was, you know, that little thing called evidence.
Well, what a delight to have the acquittal of Mr. La Framboise.
And I understand that the Democracy Fund, in fact, represented a third of all the people in that blockade.
Joining us now in person is Alan Honor, the acting, sorry, the litigation director, pardon me, of Democrats Finellow.
Great to see you.
Thanks very much for having me on, Ezra.
Well, I think it's pitiful that they went all the way to the end before saying, just kidding, we don't have enough evidence to try you.
They didn't have any less evidence today than they had two years ago or two months ago.
They just, I think, were in a staring contest with you and Mr. LaFramboise, trying to get you guys to buckle.
Well, you know, Ezra, it's not uncommon for criminal charges to resolve right before the trial or close to the trial.
This particular trial was set for five days, and it was going to be heard at the end of April.
You know, PDF came on just about two, three weeks ago.
And within about a week of our getting on to represent Mr. LaFranbois, the charges were withdrawn.
know that so for the first two years he actually didn't have did he have another word No, he didn't have counsel.
He was self-represented, but he was sort of a unique person.
He wasn't like the other protesters.
All of the other protesters that we represented, they were all arrested on the streets at the scene of the protest.
But LaFranbois was different.
He was arrested about six months later.
And he was arrested because I suppose it's the police, maybe it was the Attorney General, decided that they needed a leader.
They needed somebody who could probably be a bit of a scapegoat for the blockades that happened in Windsor.
And like I say, it's not that uncommon for charges to resolve prior to trial.
So that's when everybody's focused on them.
But in this case, Mr. LaFranbois lost his opportunity to defend himself in trial.
And a withdrawal is a favorable conviction, but it doesn't have that same satisfaction of going before a court and being acquitted.
So they waited half a year to charge him.
That's weird in itself.
He was self-represented, which is always risky.
Then Democracy Vund comes in and the Crown says, oh, yikes, maybe this isn't going to go how we thought it was.
But it's sort of funny that the Crown Prosecutor is saying, well, it's not in the public interest.
You know, there's all this backlog.
He knew that all along.
There's been a backlog since the pandemic.
Courts aren't just jammed because of all these foolish pandemic lockdown tickets.
They're jammed because the courts basically went on a one-year holiday.
That is not new news.
We knew that in 2021, 2022, 2023.
And it's only been used as the excuse now.
I think that the presence of Democracy Von lawyers was probably the thing that tipped the balance.
They thought this is not going to be a takewalk.
Well, you know, as all lawyers would like to think that, you know, when I got on the file, the charges were withdrawn.
And it's a chronological fact.
You know, maybe there's some truth to that.
But I think, you know, I don't think the facts were there to convict LaFranbois.
The facts weren't there to convict a lot of these people who were arrested in connection to these protests.
Now, one of the interesting things that happened when I was in court with Mr. LaFranbois is that the Crown Attorney came in with a prepared statement.
It was about two pages long.
And I knew he was going to come in with a statement because he had to say something to the judge.
He had to explain to the judge why he was withdrawing these charges quite close to the trial date.
Judges don't always like that because we have this back court system.
And if you, you know, if you resolve something too close to trial, the judge will ask, well, why didn't you do it sooner?
I did somebody else.
Yeah, because they've got this judge now, a week of his life is freed up, and he's not going to take a vacation.
But how can he fill that with real work?
We'll work on short notice.
So it's a discombobulation to him.
It's a discombobulation to the entire legal system.
That's right.
And as you say, there's a backlog in the court system.
That existed before COVID, but COVID made it so much worse, right?
And so the Crown Attorney comes in and he makes these comments, which I think are very fair.
He admits that the evidence isn't as strong against Mr. LaFranbois as the Crown would like it to be.
So, there are real triable issues here.
He also mentions the backlog in the court.
And one of the things that's happening in the Ontario Court of Justice right now is that the courts are stacking trials because it means that if you go to court for your trial date, there are going to be other people who are scheduled to have their trials in that same courtroom on that same date.
And they're doing this to make sure they're trying to oversell double by five seats.
So, what happens if you show up, your lawyers show up, and they say, Sorry, we're out of time.
Well, that can happen, right?
So, you might, it's not, and it's not just a question of being double-booked, it can be triple-booked, quadruple-booked.
And the more serious cases are going to be tried before the less serious cases, right?
Because we have this backlog and there's some pushback about cases, serious cases, sexual assault cases being stayed because the Crown can't get to them in time.
You know, this is something I've said a lot.
We admire the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, have done a lot of great fighting during the lockdowns.
The CCF, the Canadian Constitutional Foundation, has taken a small number of cases, and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been sleeping.
But the Democracy Fund has a different approach: 3,000 clients, really no discrimination, just anyone, any race, any religion, every background, almost any fact pattern, 3,000, not 300, not 30 strategic cases.
And why?
Because to jam the system, to make this exact, to make the judges and the prosecutors actually think: is it worth a thousand man hours to go after these hundred clients, a hundred suspects who didn't wear their masks?
Is that more important than the bank robber or the rapist?
And it's precisely because 3,000 people stood up and said, I'm going to fight, that so many of them were saved.
I think Mr. La Framboise was saved not just by himself, but by the fact that so many others stood up and fought.
If only a handful of people would have fought, they would have been steamrolled.
Jam the system, I say.
Well, you know, if in any area of law, if it's civil law, if it's criminal law, if the other side, whether it be another lawyer or the crown attorney, knows you're going to take something to trial, if you have a reputation for doing that, then they'll take you far more seriously.
And the Democracy Fund runs trials all the time.
We do run trials all the time.
I remember I flew out to the island of Ganges.
That's in British Columbia.
Where's that?
That sounds like it's in India.
Look, Ezra, you have to take a plane to Vancouver.
You have to take a ferry to Victoria.
Then you have to take another ferry to this island called Ganges, drive up to a very small courthouse, smaller than this room.
Are you sure this wasn't a trick or a practical joke?
We fought that trial.
We brought a charter application that resulted in a 40-page decision.
We were partially successful, partially not.
There were more rounds of submissions, more rounds of submissions.
This was a $600 ticket.
We're still fighting it.
They know that we're going to fight.
You know what?
And that's the thing because I think of the ArriveCan app.
Over $5,000 in fines plus GST or whatever it was.
It was almost $6,000 a pop.
And you'd have a family of three, four, five landing at the airport.
They'd all get the fine.
So that could be a $30,000 hit.
Thing is, most people just ignored it, bad idea, or paid it, worse idea.
But hundreds chose to fight it.
And there is no way that the court.
And I think in the Toronto Commission Airport, they all went to the little court in Mississauga.
They were dumped with all these because it happens to be where the airport is.
Do you think any judge there said, yeah, I'd like to spend the next two years of my life talking about ArriveCan app?
Or do you think the prosecutor said, yeah, I went to law school so I can day after day prosecute people because they didn't want to fill out a glitchy app on their phone.
I think the very fact that people stood up is what saved their freedom.
Well, you know, you're probably right, and that goes back to what you were saying earlier about clogging the court system.
Now, I'm not saying that we were trying to do that, but if you fight every single ticket, the courts just manage that, right?
And when you get that reputation, those charges are going away, as most of them did.
You know, I think there's a lesson there.
It reminds me of that old movie, I'm Spartacus.
No, I'm Spartacus.
No, I'm Spartacus.
You can't take them all.
And I remember the opposite happening in the case of restaurants.
You had in Toronto, you had Adam Skelly's barbecue, Adamson's barbecue.
Just one guy, really, who stood up without Papers Pizza.
You had like one restaurant per city, and so the entire police force could be taught.
They had 100 police raid Adam Skelly's barbecue place.
They had riot horses there.
That's what happens when one restaurant.
If there had been 10 restaurants, it would have been a challenge for the Toronto police.
This is a city of there's probably 3,000 restaurants in Toronto.
I'm just guessing.
Maybe 5,000 restaurants in the greater Toronto area.
If 100 of them said, we're not closing, there would not have been enough police resources to go after them.
And because only a handful of martyrs stood up, they were crushed.
And I think that where the restaurants failed, these individual people succeeded.
Yeah, no, you're right.
I mean, some of the restaurants were fine to some extent, right?
They fought back without papers, pizza.
Whistle stop in Alberta.
Exactly.
But that was an extremely costly trial.
Ezra, I've looked at the legal bills.
That was a very costly trial.
But again, it's part of you need to spend money to fight back sometimes.
But, you know, it's really interesting.
You mentioned Adamson Barbecue.
Look at that response.
Like, I mean, it's just, it's disproportionate, the amount of police you get.
And that's what it was like.
It was theater.
That was not policing.
That was theater.
I think you're right.
It was shocking awesome.
Well, so I understand that's the last of the pending cases from the Windsor Bridge.
Is that right?
Well, it's the last of the cases that TDF is representing.
I mean, I'm talking about protesters who have trials.
We have one under appeal.
You know, the majority of our clients had their charges withdrawn.
We do have one conviction, but we're fighting that in the appellate courts.
But you know what?
One thing that really interested me, when I was last in Windsor with Mr. Laframbois, and the Crown was giving his speech to the judge and to the courtroom, and he said, well, you know, we've had 44 trials or 44 matters, 44 people who were arrested in Windsor, and here's how they resolved.
And, you know, the thrust of his speech was to say, well, look, we've achieved a general objective of deterrence.
But what he didn't say is he didn't say that a lot of these people who were arrested in Windsor were arrested on the sidewalk or were arrested on private property.
Those people had their charges withdrawn.
And, you know, maybe they were expected to quietly go away.
But that's not happening because I know that at least five of those people have launched civil lawsuits.
Those lawsuits have been served on the opposing police forces.
And four of those people who have launched lawsuits against the Windsor Police and other police forces are actually former TDF clients.
Well, I'm glad you hear it.
And I think putting the police on the back foot is an important thing to do.
I think the police very obviously engaged in politics.
They were used, like I said, for theater in the case of Adamson's barbecue.
I think that So much of the COVID enforcement was terrifying to terrify people, to make things so scary to normal Canadians that normal Canadians would voluntarily not fly, not leave their house, not go to restaurants.
Like the absurdity of the airport quarantine hotels, I think on purpose they were made awful.
So just the word of mouth, people would say, oh, I don't want to go through that.
So I think the police should answer for their brazen partisanship.
I'll never look at police the same way again.
I mean, I was starting to have my doubts about them because of their politicization before 2020.
But from 2020 onwards, I realized that too many police were happy to be instruments of politicians as opposed to law enforcement officers.
Well, listen, congratulations, congratulations to William LaFramboise.
It sounds like he pronounces it a little bit differently than I'm doing here.
Folks, you can help the Democracy Fund at theDemocracyfund.ca, where the battle continues.
I mentioned three important battles: the Coots 2, the Coots 3, the Coots 4, Tamara Leach.
Pavlovsky's Appeal Heard00:00:50
And actually, Arthur Pavlovsky is having his appeal heard later this year in Alberta.
All those cases funded by the Democracy Fund.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Well, that's our show for today.
You know, we didn't have that moment that Lincoln and Alexa had a few months ago where, boom, jumping out of a bush was a group of migrants.
It just didn't happen in the hours we had in town.
But it's an enormous factor.
I really have never seen this many police deployed in an area.
It felt like a military operation, which I guess it sort of is.
I think it's a critical issue for the United States because if you don't have a border, are you really even a country?