Tomorrow is World Refugee Day,
and my guest tonight is the director and cofounder
of the International Refugee Assistance Project,
a group that has helped more than 200,000 refugees
and displaced persons find legal pathways to safety.
Please welcome Becca Heller.
-♪ ♪ -(cheering and applause)
Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's an honor to have you on the show,
especially considering what your organization has done.
Many people first saw your face and the organization
when Trump's travel ban went into effect.
We heard about all these lawyers who were rushing to the airport
to try and help people, to give them legal assistance.
You were leading that effort.
Why was that so important for you to do?
I think we realized
about halfway through the first week of the presidency
that the executive order could come down any day.
It actually leaked Monday,
um, officially, the third day of the presidency,
but he had spent the first weekend golfing,
so, really, the first day that-that business was done.
Um, and someone sent us a photo
of a desktop computer in the White House
with the text of the travel ban on it.
-Wow. -And, um... So we were calling on our cl...
all our clients and we were saying, "Get on a plane.
"The doors to America are closing.
-We don't know when." -Right.
Um, and realized that it wasn't just gonna affect our clients
but that, at any given time,
when the executive order became law,
there were gonna be thousands of people in the sky
who, when they took off, had legal permission
to enter the U.S. and then would land,
essentially, as undocumented immigrants.
-Right. -And nobody knew what was gonna happen to them.
And, um, lawyers,
being the really self-important people that we are,
I think we were like, "Well, obviously, the solution to that
"is to get thousands of lawyers to show up at the airports
and see if there's something we can do about it."
Yeah, it was the one time people were cheering for lawyers.
I've never seen that before.
It was a really beautiful initiative.
It-it really was.
What do you feel you wish people knew about refugees?
Like, what is the biggest, you know, misinformation
that people have succumbed to?
I think that there's two dominant narratives of refugees
that are both wildly inaccurate.
I think one is that refugees are victims
who are desperately in need of our help,
and I think the other is that refugees are terrorists
-who are trying to kill all of us. -Right.
And I wish that what people knew about refugees
is that they are some of the most tenacious survivors
-that I have ever met. -Right.
It is just 100% a privilege to work with them.
And I think if-if we're a country
that wants entrepreneurs and patriots,
there's nothing more entrepreneurial
than escaping from Islamic State-occupied Mosul,
getting across the border,
going through this crazy refugee resettlement process,
which takes years,
getting your whole family to America
and starting your whole life over.
Like, the type of tenacity and grit and creativity
that that takes is something that I wish that I had.
And-and the other thing is that a lot
of the most patriotic people that I know are refugees.
-Right. -In the lawsuits that we worked on
following the Muslim ban, we would talk to our clients
who were involved in the lawsuits.
And-and, you know, the whole lawsuit is saying,
"Oh, I'm-I'm really hurt
because I'm being discriminated against,"
so you would think that it would make you really angry.
But when we talked to a lot of our clients,
they were like, "No, this makes me love America even more.
"I-I lived under Bashar al-Assad for three decades,
"and now I live in a country
where you can sue the president."
(laughter)
-Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a... -(cheering and applause)
that's a different way to see it.
That's a really different way to see it.
When you look at the situation
that is now being created at the border--
this is the current issue
where kids are being separated from their parents.
You know, you hear these anecdotes
of parents being tricked or maybe not being informed
about what's gonna happen to their kids.
Is there legal recourse
that may come back to bite the United States?
Yeah. I mean, one way or the other,
this policy is going to fold, right?
Either the ACLU is gonna win the litigation
or the GOP is gonna grow a backbone
or the, you know, great movement
of people who came to the airports
that's now going to the border will make it known
-that America won't stand for this. -Right.
But I think at the end of the day,
when this policy is over, the Trump administration
is probably literally going to have to pay for it.
Because, in my opinion,
every single one of these parents and kids
has a pretty good damages lawsuit
to bring against the Trump administration
-for false imprisonment, -Right.
intentional infliction of emotional "dispress."
Sorry. Let me try that again.
For false imprisonment,
intentional infliction of emotional "dispre..."
-Oh, my God. -"Distress"?
Yeah. Thank you. I'm not gonna try again.
It'll make it too hard for the editors.
Oh, that's hilarious. Try it one more time.
-You should say it one more time. -All right.
I think every single one of them will have a damages claim
for false imprisonment, kidnapping,
-intentional infliction of emotional distress... -Right.
(cheering and applause)
Lots of fans of damages. That's a... a...
Damages are important.
It's how you make people pay for doing (bleep) up shit.
(applause and cheering)
I can safely say
I've never heard it put that way ever before.
Um, when we hear these stories of people being given scripts...
You know, they say like, "Oh, these are not asylum seekers.
"They've got scripts.
The kids are reading scripts at the border,"
what are people talking about?
And what do... what do we need to understand
about what people need to say
to actually become an asylum seeker legally in the U.S.?
I mean, I think the first thing to understand is
that that's complete bullshit.
Um, I think that, you know, the myth of the script
is that refugees are coming, or asylum seekers are coming,
and they're making up some story
to try to fit the legal definition of an asylum seeker.
-Right. -And, uh, you know, number one: the i...
Asylum law and refugee law is so complicated.
I've been doing it for ten years,
and I mostly still don't get it.
So the idea that an eight-year-old
-who's not a native English speaker... -Right.
...and maybe comes from a country with a lit...
like, a really low literacy rate
has memorized some sort of script
that highlights all of the key portions
of asylum law in their testimony...
-Right, right, right. -...and then performs it adequately
-while they're being detained... -Right.
...and separated from their parents is, um,
you know, Machiavellian. Um...
Right. If anything, those are the people
you should welcome into the country.
-You should be like, "Wow." -Yeah.
-"This is amazing." -No, that is... that is...
"You learned... Yeah, you learned international law
"and asylum. Yeah, you should come in.
We need you. That's what we need."
-Yeah, I mean, my organization will hire them. -Right.
Um...
(applause)
It really... it really is one of those situations.
For those... for those who argue
that the United States cannot handle any more people,
the United States has taken in too many people,
uh, how-how do you respond to that?
How does your organization respond
to that type of criticism?
Well, I think there's a number of ways to respond.
One, I think, goes back several hundred years and says,
"If you think that your destiny is manifest
"such that you should control a 3,000-mile swath of territory,
"perhaps you have an obligation to take in a lot of people
"to that space, especially in light of all the people
that you killed taking over that space."
Wow.
(applause and cheering)
Wow.
But then, more immediately, I... You know, I think it...
Usually that comes down to some kind of argument
about jobs or the economy,
and there's been a huge number of studies showing
that refugees and immigrants are hugely beneficial
to the economy.
I-I have a personal favorite study,
um, 'cause I'm super nerdy, um, which is
that in the second version of the Muslim ban,
the Trump administration actually ordered itself
to do a study on the net cost of refugees
-to the American people. -Right.
And the study done by the Trump administration found
that over the past ten years,
refugees have netted $63 billion to the U.S. economy.
-To the U.S. economy? -To the U.S. economy.
(applause and cheering)
Well, that's how you got to talk to Trump.
Well, they... they then suppressed the study,
and it was leaked to the New York Times
-two months later. -WOMAN: Wow.
-And there we are back again at the border. -Yes.
Well, I never thought I'd say this, but thank God for lawyers.
-(laughs) -Thank you very much for being on the show.
-Thank you. -To learn more about the work
of the International Refugee Assistance Project, go to:
Becker Heller, everybody.