Original subtitles

Previously on America Divided. What makes Pinellas so particularly

The lowest achievement elementary school. Pinellas has five.

There's no school you can just go to that's not a D or an F school.

We're talking about schools that are now F and failing schools that were A

schools. The vote was that we would go back to neighborhood schools.

And now you called it neighborhood schools. Segregated schools.

It's segregated schools.

Part of the deal was we're going to segregate the schools.

but we're going to add resources to supplement that.

We can't get the state audit?

I don't have that information right now.

Did you contact us to... Is there a reason for the hostility?

What's the problem with that?

139, can you put me on a thing?

I just moved to Dayton about eight months ago, so I don't really know too

people. Let's go.

No.

Come on.

Do you use here? I used to a long time ago, but I'm quitting. That's why I

here.

How long was he here before he passed out?

Not even like three to five minutes. It's that.

You know he was dead, right? And they just brought him back.

Hey, Willie.

Yeah. Right here's the spoon.

He's got the spoon in there.

This is not good. You know what can happen right now, right?

I didn't know. I didn't see anything.

You trying to get off heroin, right? Yeah, that's why I moved here.

If you need some help, I mean, we can get you in the right direction, okay?

Yes, sir. All right.

For a lot of my adult life, I've been an addict.

Alcohol was my drug of choice.

Six years ago, I finally got sober.

However, addiction hasn't released its grip on those dearest to me.

Back home, a cousin's drug addiction has dragged our family into the painful

cycle of abuse, treatment, and relapse.

We are not alone.

Nearly every day, I see our family's pain reflected in stories and headlines.

How's he doing?

And I have to ask, where did this epidemic come from?

How has it consumed so many lives?

And what does the future hold for addicts like my cousin?

I'm Dr. Mike Vickers. I'm a veterinarian in South Texas.

And I'm also chairman of the Texas Border Volunteers.

We have these volunteers that are patriots, and we go out on all these

and watch these trails and report that criminal activity to the Border Patrol.

We've been encountering people that are desperate, that are lost, that are sick.

We've found several dead people in here.

One of these we found over there.

Had actually a broken leg. Somebody either beat her up, sexually assaulted

broke her leg and left her there. It probably took her four or five days or a

week to die.

We have to classify them all together. They're coming here illegally and we

to draw the line.

How we doing?

Thank you.

I'm here to stay.

I'm not going anywhere.

I'm going to fight, do everything I can to try to help law enforcement in our

country shut this border down.

There's so much fear and loathing when it comes to undocumented immigrants.

And this campaign season, people from all sides are fired up about the issue.

Of course, there are some bad actors among the indocumentados,

just as there are among every group.

But how can we lump them all together?

The issue of immigration is personal for me.

I'm the child of parents who immigrated from Honduras.

And I'm interested to know more about the 11 million undocumented people in

country.

Who are they?

Why have they come?

And what is life like for them once they arrive?

It's a system that effectively sweeps millions of poor people into second

status. Did we invest in those communities?

No. Instead, we declared war.

What we have today is a wealth gap that is huge.

The working class have been hammered.

These are human beings. These are people.

What can we do to get that point across?

The constant telling us that we're not doing enough is causing us to explode.

It is not, sir, a matter of opinion anymore.

It is clearly exposed.

What do we do? They can only win by

dividing America.

We know that the way things are working aren't working at all. That's right.

If you just keep pushing, if you just keep trying, if you refuse to let

the nightmares have the last say, eventually the dawn will break, the sun

come out, and you will be in a brand new day.

If there's no struggle, There can be no progress.

I came to Pinellas County because of a disturbing trend in the schools here.

But while canvassing the community, civil rights attorney Amir Whitaker has

across something else that he thinks might be connected to the academic

in South St. Pete.

A couple weeks ago, Through our outreach at Canvas, we located two students who

were arrested for having a lunchroom fight for disorderly conduct.

And they went to county jail.

Did they stay in that jail overnight?

Oh, yeah. And not only that, but we found out they're using pepper spray on

kids, mace on the kids.

Oh. Yeah.

They mace the kids at school? Multiple children is part of this. So we

everything in their FOB.

maced in the school and marked with criminal charges that will follow them

the rest of their lives.

For a lunchroom fight.

You had a pickup record?

Okay. Now, I worked as a public high school teacher in Philadelphia.

I know how hard it can be to run a classroom full of teenagers.

But I cannot understand a school treating what sounds like an ordinary

disciplinary issue as a serious crime.

I'm hoping to find some answers in the arrest records.

But the school board failed to include them among the hundreds of pages of

they handed over to Amir.

As Amir and I begin to look deeper, it seems like this case might be part of a

pattern.

But what does it have to do with the failure of the schools to educate their

black students?

Amir and I set up a meeting at a local church with students and parents.

to talk about school discipline in Pinellas County.

You know, we're here to examine what's happening in Pinellas County, right?

So we want to hear from you all directly and use the platform to hear your

voices, your stories, what it's really like being a parent for kids, you know,

sending them off to school every day.

I'm from Broward County. I moved here in July.

And Tyler has been suspended here four times.

And school started in August. It is now only, what, April? And then when he's in

school, he spent most of his time in internal suspension.

I don't know how many days he's actually been in the classroom.

And the things that they're sending him out of school for are things like just

being disruptive, talking, making jokes, and just being extremely playful.

Sounds normal. Right, the normal stuff.

Not okay.

Yeah, it's not okay. So I basically got kicked out.

Tyler isn't alone.

Beginning in elementary school, where we hear stories of suspensions and

expulsions for apparently minor offenses.

And continuing through high school, where handcuffs, pepper spray, and

seem to be routine.

Black children are being taken out of the classroom.

And they're ending up in the criminal justice system.

I would have never came here if I would have known it was like this.

In communities across the American heartland, prescription pills and heroin

destroying lives.

These are places middle -class America has long thought of as havens safe from

the reach of drugs.

But now this is no longer true.

White America is dying.

Our nation's leaders, long indifferent to the price paid by communities of

during the decades of the drug war, are slowly waking to this crisis.

But as I delve deeper into the reporting, I can see that in some

terrible price has already been paid.

With perhaps more overdose deaths than anywhere else in America, few

have suffered like Dayton, Ohio.

Dayton is my destination.

My ex -wife was an addict.

My stepson died from a heroin overdose.

My nephew died six months ago from a heroin overdose.

My son died 75 days ago from a heroin overdose.

He died the day after Christmas,

alone in his house.

There's not a day in my life in the past 30 years that addiction hasn't taken

its toll on me in one form or another.

Thank you.

There's so much I don't understand about this crisis, but the struggle of

families I know too well.

In Dayton, Families of Addicts has become a place where those caring for

come to care for one another.

Herself a former addict, Lori Arion founded the group with the aim of ending

shame and hopelessness felt by so many.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done, and it is.

Going to take more than us just talking about it. We need to figure out what to

do as a community.

We have people that are seeking recovery.

We have people that are in recovery and families.

And we all come together to help each other.

My cousin, none of us knew anything.

We didn't know the beginnings of, we didn't know the first step.

You become really knowledgeable.

Yeah. You know? Yeah, yeah. And so we all become knowledgeable together.

But at the end of the day, the addict needs to want to get better.

Does anybody have any kind of progress that they would like a milestone for

today?

My name is Kevin. I'm an addict. Okay,

so I got 105 days clean today.

Through this whole thing, it's been really rough. I put my family through a

and I just wanted to tell my sisters that I love you.

It's clear that Dayton's families are paying a terrible price in the epidemic,

but Lori tells me that Dayton as a whole is in crisis.

The epidemic's death toll in 2016 is headed towards record levels.

Gun violence in Dayton is reaching the kind of levels seen to the north in

Chicago.

I've only been here a day, and I can already feel the city's suffering.

Lori tells me that I can't understand this crisis without visiting the place

where so many of Dayton's addicts eventually find themselves.

The Montgomery County Jail.

I'm on a mission to find out about the lives of undocumented immigrants.

And I've come to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas because I've heard that more

migrants come through here than anywhere else.

They're often fleeing violence in their home country and travel hundreds or even

thousands of miles before they get to the Rio Grande River, the last barrier

the United States.

Many are caught by the Border Patrol and thrown into immigration detention.

Private prisons run for profit, like this one in Carnes, Texas.

Mothers and children can be held here for weeks and months before being

released, with orders to appear before a judge and bracelets on their ankles.

Some end up in border towns, like McAllen, Texas, and sanctuaries.

like the Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

Sister Norma Pimentel runs the sanctuary

and introduces me to a family from Honduras, one of the most dangerous

for women.

Y un riesgo para todos y para mis hijos.

Porque si vengo huyendo de mi país, en verdad, me encontré con algo más peor en

México. Caemos en manos de cárteles.

Nos secuestraron y nos tuvieron en una casa.

Secuestrado por dos semanas, por ahí.

Mi familia tuvo que pagar casi 15 mil dólares por ahí. Y ahí seguimos el

Nosotros. ¿Y dónde está tu esposo?

Sister Norma tells me nearly all the families have been through a journey

by kidnapping, extortion, and getting separated from each other, which makes

wonder...

Sí,

el muchacho era el que cuidaba ahí como el jefe.

My husband came and fought with them.

So he told us, 24 hours so you can leave, or we'll kill you.

So we left everything abandoned and came.

Like that.

In my country, I don't want to go back.

If they knew how hard it is.

It's horrible.

The girl.

Seeing this family is like looking in a distorting mirror.

This could be me if my parents had never left Honduras.

Honduras, Guatemala, Salvador, they now have some of the highest murder rates in

the world.

And nobody is prosecuted for it.

I've come to talk to attorney Jennifer Harbury because she has seen the roots

violence in Central America.

Harbury has always been a lion for human rights.

She spent the 80s and 90s witnessing the dirty war in Guatemala.

a war that killed more than 200 ,000 people. Questions are surfacing about U

support for the Guatemalan military.

Now in Texas, she's representing people like that family I met at Sacred Heart,

desperate people facing deportation.

She sees a connection between her past and present because, she says, the dirty

wars in Central America never really ended.

We're sending people back to highly dangerous situations in Honduras,

and Guatemala.

These people are in danger of being killed, tortured, or dragged into de

slavery by the narcotráfico drug lords in those countries. Yet when they get

here, we choose to pretend that none of those dangers really exist and to throw

them back.

So what about people who say, well, that's not our problem?

Why don't the governments in those countries deal with it?

The United States actually played a key role in backing and arming and funding

military death squads, even though we knew that they were carrying out those

systemic human rights abuses.

That kind of collaboration is allowing these people to continue the incredible

kinds of torture, rape, femicide, brutalization that they did all through

dirty wars. These are human beings coming across, and they are refugees

terrible danger.

When I was a kid, schools rarely employed police officers.

But today, the internet is full of graphic videos of police beating

64 % of U .S. high schools now have uniformed police working as school

officers or SROs.

But in schools where at least half of the population is non -white or high

poverty, the numbers are much higher.

The Pinellas County School Board runs its own police force, headed by Chief

Stelgis.

After trying to arrange an interview for months, I finally get him on the phone

after hours.

Hey, Chief Stelgis.

Good evening. This is Jesse Williams calling.

I was really hoping that we could find a time to talk.

Stelgis won't go on record, but he agrees to set up a meeting for me with a

school resource officer who works in Campbell Park, one of the five failing

elementary schools.

The thing about it is, as a school resource officer, you have to have a

desire to work with youth.

So on your belt today, you have a gun, you have, what, some kind of mace, same

things you would have on the street. Yes.

We have the same equipment that a regular officer has that's on the

I don't use the taser or the spray, not on an elementary kid.

How do you determine what warrants handcuffs and arrests?

We're not going to be called unless it's a criminal violation.

If you hear, okay, Johnny was doing this and that, and then you get into it and

say, well, that's not a criminal violation, then...

You might say, hey, Johnny, you need to just calm down, need to do what you got

to do and move forward.

Nine times out of ten, it's not a criminal violation.

It's very seldom, very seldom you see a child in elementary school getting a

criminal charge.

Mike Hawkins is one of only two black officers on Chief Stelgis' force, and

hard to see how the discipline policies that he describes could result in

hundreds of arrests a year.

I don't want to take up too much more of your time. I just want to ask you just

kind of about these numbers because these are just school arrest numbers.

going to show you. These are just Southern Poverty Law Center numbers.

Pinellas is third in the state in disproportionately arresting black

Three times as many students are arrested for disorderly conduct in

than in Miami.

Miami is three times the amount of students.

That's pretty alarming. Is that fair to say? Does that sound to you like it's

working or like it's not working?

That's alarming, listening to the numbers.

Yeah. It's not fair to hold me with a lot of that data.

Well, nobody's holding Officer Hawkins for all that data.

We try to talk to SROs, and they only gave us Officer Hawkins, which I find

curious to begin with. The question should have been to a supervisor who

more about the staff, is it fair to get to me?

Supervisors seem to want us to talk to you instead.

I can't answer why.

But each agency has their own supervisor to watch and see what these officers

are doing. And if they're not doing it, That's between them and their agency.

I know what I'm doing. Do you think you're representative of the SRO

in this area?

I feel I'm a representative of myself.

As a part of this neighborhood we're in right here. I grew up in here. I went to

Merrill's Elementary.

I'm from this neighborhood.

I'm going to continue to be in this neighborhood, and I'm going to do all I

But I'm not going to be a token.

I'm not here speaking as a token.

What would that mean?

That means that I was picked because of the color of my skin to speak to y 'all.

At the Montgomery County Jail in downtown Dayton, I meet Sheriff Phil

As the Montgomery County Sheriff, Plummer is responsible for the 25 ,000

who stream through the jail each year.

Plummer tells me that most of the addicts here have seen the inside of his

many times and that they're mostly picked up for theft and prostitution,

committed to support their addictions.

So what percentage of the people that are in here right now have a heroin

problem and that's why they're in there? I'd say 50%. 50 %? Yeah, our female

population is climbing every day.

Plummer tells me that the jail has become the default detox center for

Inmates get no special medical care. They face the pain of withdrawal on

own.

I asked Plumber to introduce me to some of his female inmates.

I want to hear from them how their addictions began.

Maybe in their stories I'll find some of the answers I'm looking for.

Ladies, how's everything going?

Considering. Considering?

Pretty good. As we talk, it becomes clear that for many of these women, a

one helped set them on the path to addiction.

How did your mom get into it?

Mm -hmm.

I don't have my GED. I didn't graduate from high school.

I've lost everything and everybody that I loved. I don't have anything.

I was introduced by my boyfriend.

It started out recreational. Before I knew it, I was a full -blown addict.

My husband had lifelong health issues, and then he couldn't get his

so he went and got heroin.

I'm probably on the verge of losing two of my children.

And I'm in here and can't do a damn thing about it.

I have four kids.

I haven't seen them in six months.

And their dad finally brought them to see me last week here.

And my 10 -year -old daughter looked at me and said, I thought you were dead in

a ditch.

My youngest children just don't understand.

For them, everything is just scary.

So that's rough.

And that's something that not only I have to deal with, but they have to live

with.

I've done that to them.

When I ask Plummer about the connection between pills and heroin mentioned by

some of the women, he arranges for me to talk to another prisoner, Jason Lyle.

So I want heroin right now. Where do I go out there?

Go out here, take a left, and go up the street to the first gas station and

stand there.

And you'll probably get something within five minutes.

How did you wind up doing heroin?

I was 16.

Had an accident, broke my leg.

Started getting prescribed.

Um, painkillers pretty heavily.

And at that moment when you were, when they gave it to you, you really felt

this is something, this is going to be a problem.

Yeah. You didn't call them up and say, I'm not in any pain anymore. I probably

don't need any more.

No, he just kept giving them. I kept taking them. Once he took me off of

began to, um, buy them from the street.

Then I got introduced to someone who had.

stronger pain medicine, which was Oxycontin.

So I started doing those, and the guy that I was getting them from, he died,

there was no more of those around, and that's where heroin came into the

picture.

That's when it kind of blew out of control.

I mean, it starts with the doctor, and then, you know, it ultimately ends

with you trying to fix your addiction that you've...

Let yourself get, pretty much, you know.

After my visit to the jail, the source of this epidemic is becoming clear.

I see that addiction for the women prisoners and Jason Lyle had a common

beginning.

Even if migrants make it into Texas, their ordeal is far from over.

Most want to go north, to big cities like Houston, where work and family may

waiting.

But far from the border, as many as 100 miles inside the United States, there

are U .S. Border Patrol checkpoints that stop the migrants in their tracks.

Is this the border?

Is this the border with Mexico?

The Immigration Naturalization Act.

But non -citizens need to avoid the checkpoint and the certainty of

So they go around it, trying to cross the unforgiving terrain on foot.

This is the guy who has to deal with all those migrants trying to get around the

checkpoint.

So when you're driving out here, are you constantly looking for people?

You're looking for any element that doesn't appear to be the norm.

Okay.

You see this right here?

Yeah. Those were done so they can cross over.

And they can get real bad in a hurry.

This is what they got to put up with, just walking it.

And then you got the terrain. It's thick.

It makes it harsh.

And especially if you don't have enough water, a lot of supplies that you need

to keep yourself going.

Because he's law enforcement, Chief Martinez is duty -bound to apprehend the

migrants.

But I sense that he's torn about that, since he has a lot of sympathy for them

too. How hot does it get?

In the summer months, we run about 105.

So it varies as to what can happen to them while they're walking.

And the thing is, though, once they get sick, they don't know where they're at.

And they just, it doesn't take us long to find a body here.

And for every one body we found, we're probably missing five.

By Chief Martinez's calculations, thousands of bodies are still out in the

brush. since about 400 have been found just in the past five years.

That's in Brooks County, inside the United States, not on the border.

And Chief Martinez says that with all those deaths, he and his staff have the

gruesome task of making a record of every court.

So these are pictures from the last year?

Yes. From 2015.

It says here that this is a body you found out there.

He was found along the fence line.

And will they try to identify who these people were, or is that impossible?

We've been able to identify some of them, in fact.

Are they all men?

No. They're men, they're women, they're young adults, they're youth.

probably as young as 10 at times.

They'll do whatever they can just to go make ends meet.

He died in the ambulance.

Honestly, when I set out to explore the topic of immigration, I didn't bargain

for this.

I didn't expect to encounter this many people dying inside our own country.

This is a death that you don't want.

You know you're dying.

Who's going to hear you?

Out in the middle of nowhere, animals around you waiting for you to expire so

they can go tear you up.

Just, it's senseless.

Every year, hundreds of kids are arrested in

Pinellas County schools.

Children as young as six years old are handcuffed, interrogated by armed

officers without their parents present, loaded into the back of a police cruiser

while the whole school watches, and then taken here, to Pinellas County Jail.

Here, chances are, their case will be taken up by a team of 20 public

led by Bob Dillinger.

I guess we should start with maybe just the broad question, you know, is the

criminal justice system here in Pinellas failing these kids?

Well, when I started out, I was in juvenile.

OK. And it was very frustrating to say this child needs help.

If he doesn't get help, he's going to be in serious trouble down the road. And

then I went up the ladder and became a felony lawyer. And lo and behold.

I've got this kid who's looking at life in prison that I kept saying he needs

help, and he never got it. The system didn't provide it, and now he's doing

in prison when we could have avoided it. When kids come to you, by the time they

get to you, and they've waived their Miranda rights with their children, how

does that work?

We keep fighting that. We keep losing it on the appellate level.

We think the parents should be there before their child makes a decision that

could impact that child for a long time.

they should be able to talk to their parents.

Yeah, we don't allow minors to make a lot of decisions, but we allow them to

waive rights that they can't possibly comprehend.

They can't sign a contract, they couldn't buy a car, but they can waive a

and talk about a crime that could put them in prison for the rest of their

Yeah. I found it pretty alarming that, by and large, white students are not

being arrested at the rates that their black counterparts are for a range of

other charges for disorderly conduct, for example.

Yeah, there's a racial disparity.

You know, we have an overpopulation of minorities in both systems, the juvenile

and the adult systems.

We had a child arrested who was six years old for disorderly conduct.

And they put both hands into one handcuff and brought him out to the

center. You don't handcuff a six -year -old. Right, right. And you think about

school, you think that's a track towards employment, right? That's kind of the

selling point. Our schools were the track to prison.

We're ruining these kids' lives.

I have data showing that Pinellas County schools have one of the highest arrest

rates for black students in the state.

I've spoken with the students who told me about their encounters with law

enforcement. But after months of trying, I still haven't been able to get a hold

of the school's arrest records.

The school board told me to talk to the sheriff, but he won't speak with me.

Then, I finally get a call from a contact at his office.

It's worse than I even imagined.

Disorderly conduct for knocking over a trash can.

Criminal mischief for writing on a bathroom wall.

A felony battery for bumping into an administrator's shoulder.

Dozens of children who'd been pepper sprayed.

A few of the kids are white, but most are black and are identified by the

of their skin.

Seriously. Light, medium, or dark.

I need to talk to someone.

Chief's Delegate still refuses to meet with me, but I managed to track down the

most powerful law enforcement official in the county.

No one is charged with a crime here without the approval of State's Attorney

Bernie McCabe's office.

Mr. McCabe, sir. How are you?

Jesse Williams.

Do you think that, in general, the criminal justice system in Pinellas is

failing the kids?

Well, you'd have to ask the police, I guess.

You don't have access to the arrest records?

I don't pay attention to... I don't look at the arrest records of those cases

like my juvenile division does.

I have 165 lawyers.

Sure. But your offices have a policy as to how to charge juveniles, right?

We're investigating cases every day, looking at what's appropriate to divert,

what's not appropriate to divert, and making decisions.

So there's diversion, but there's also what charges you want to...

How do you want to consider it? And they come into your office. It's a

disrupting school function. Should we charge them with the felony of

school function or the misdemeanor of disorderly conduct?

Or do you have to charge them?

No, we don't have to charge them. But if there's a case there, would it be

responsible to just ignore it?

Would it be responsible to charge every single kid that comes to your office?

Don't charge every single kid. Well, we have stacks and stacks of arrest records

for children that are getting arrested for things that happen in school that I

remember as being school scuffles or mischief at school, right? And you would

well. Back when I was in school, I had corporal punishment.

I got paddled. Sure, but you didn't get a charge that follows you until you were

35 years old.

No. Okay, so if you're obviously aware of the alarming amount of arrests for

kids in the school system, in this particular area, in this particular

that something in the water? What do we attribute that to? I mean, you're saying

that you guys are working so hard to divert. Well, I think there's a cultural

aspect to it that I don't understand.

What's that? There's a cultural aspect to the data around arrests?

No, what's going on in the schools.

That I don't understand.

Whose culture is that?

Societal culture.

Culture in Pinellas County. I don't know. The culture of the people getting

arrested. There's a cultural factor that I don't understand.

And to that point, we're trying to understand the culture of the prophet,

I'm not a social worker. I'm a prosecutor.

Thank you. Thank you for your time.

What future is school preparing for these kids, really?

Odds are it's not teaching them how to read at grade level.

Okay, let's go.

It's not putting them on a path to college or a real job.

It might not even graduate them with a high school diploma.

But it sure can send them to jail for a food fight.

In Pinellas County, Florida, failing schools and high arrest rates.

Go hand in hand.

I asked Sheriff Plummer for an expert on addiction, and he tells me to talk to

Keith Bukasinovich, the director of a new treatment center currently under

construction in one of Dayton's hardest -hit neighborhoods.

So explain that chain of events of how that works, from being prescribed a

medication to ending up, you know, on heroin.

Well, what typically happens is somebody gets prescribed drugs for an injury,

surgery. The problem is that as you take opioids for any amount of time, you

start to build up a tolerance.

See, one Percodan got it for you today.

Maybe a week from now it's two.

When that becomes insufficient, they start injecting the prescribed drug.

When even that becomes insufficient, because prescription drugs cost way more

the street than heroin,

they transition at some point to heroin. So heroin was introduced indirectly

from one's use of pain medication.

Because of the fact that most people have a very trusting relationship with

their family doctors, if the doctor prescribed it, it must be okay.

Where this whole trust -based relationship fell off of the rails was

companies were telling doctors, oh, this is safe, go ahead, you can prescribe

it. No, it's not addictive.

And Doc said, okay.

And it was like open season because suddenly we started giving out pain

And to this day, the United States still consumes 90 % of the hydrocodone

produced in the whole world. We're doing something wrong here.

If doctors were prescribing something that they didn't fully understand, it

the question, what do the pharmaceutical companies know?

My research points me to a courthouse in Scioto County.

two hours south of Dayton.

Prosecutor Joe Hale was the first to bring a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma,

maker of OxyContin, the prescription opiate which has created more addicts

claimed more lives than any other.

At what point did you start to get involved to try to do something about

this? I first got involved as a result of the daughter of a client of mine

overdosing on OxyContin.

Two years later, I filed the first lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, first

in the country.

Well, of course, they filed an answer denying negligence, denying liability.

All of a sudden, the U .S. Attorney's Office announces that three of the

Pharma executives pled guilty to misdemeanor charges, what were referred

misbranding narcotics, not disclosing the addiction potential.

Purdue Pharma was... fined $635 million, something like that.

Everybody from the U .S. attorney involved, all these federal government

agencies, gave these great speeches. The end of the OxyContin epidemic.

Baloney. It grew after that.

They made up enough money in the next four or five years to make that $600

million look like a drop in the bucket.

What do you feel like the consequences should have been?

People should have gone to jail.

Even a fool could figure out if you put 40 milligrams or 80 milligrams of pure

oxycodone into a pill, the drug abusing population will eventually figure out

you can shoot it up.

So Purdue Pharma committed a gross act of negligence.

As it started to seem like there was a problem, did they have any reaction?

there warnings sent to doctors? Did doctors start to go, okay, this is an

No, in fact, I believe that Purdue Pharma actively tried to suppress that

information. What do you think Purdue Pharma's motivations were and are

for making this drug, ultimately?

The first year that Purdue Pharma began marketing OxyContin,

I believe that their gross sales in OxyContin was $43 million.

By 2010, they would surpass $3 billion.

Do you feel like Purdue is in some way not just responsible for the OxyContin

epidemic, but responsible ultimately for the heroin epidemic that's going on?

Absolutely. There's no doubt in my mind, and the evidence is there.

So what is the solution?

I don't know if there is one.

Purdue has generated sales of more than $35 billion since it released its

supposedly addiction -proof painkiller.

All the while, year after year, the deaths keep mounting.

Migrants with no papers who are trapped in the Rio Grande Valley have a few

stark options.

Leave the country.

risk death by trying to go around the Border Patrol, or stay put.

Today, I'm meeting someone who's chosen to stay.

But from what I hear, this choice may end up being just as deadly.

Jackie what was that like when you found out from your mom? I was in shock

When she told me that, I thought, what was I going to do if the next thing I

found out my mom wasn't going to be by my side?

And I was scared.

to do activities, bingos, raffles, everything to raise money.

And you didn't come back to clean houses?

No, I couldn't come back to work.

The doctor was taking care of me with the county insurance.

But on December 26, he wasn't going to work here at the cancer center.

Wow.

Because she's undocumented, Alondra isn't eligible for Medicaid, even though

she's poor and very ill.

Pues es que tengo muchas ganas de vivir, que pasen los años, de volver a

trabajar y verlos crecer.

Ella me dice que quiere ser abogada y le digo que quiero ver mi abogada en la

familia. Y sí, o sea, ver sus hijos, verlos casarse todos, todo

eso me inspira a que yo quiero vivir, quiero seguir adelante, no quiero quedar

en esto.

The state's attorney told me that the culture in Pinellas County is what gets

students arrested in the first place.

And he doesn't seem interested in the toll that arrests overcharging, and jail

time are taking on students.

The school board is still in denial about its failing segregated schools.

But it feels like things are finally changing here.

In the last few weeks alone, the school board has announced a slate of reforms.

A federal civil rights investigation has been launched into whether the school

district systematically discriminates against black children.

And the Tampa Bay Times has won a Pulitzer Prize for their groundbreaking

which first revealed the crisis within Pinellas County schools.

Community pressure, which had been building slowly for years, is starting

break through.

I'm going to a massive rally organized by local churches here called Faith and

Action for Strength Together.

Fast.

Lisa and Tyler are here as well, along with 3 ,000 of their classmates and

fellow parents.

For the first time ever, the entire school board has agreed to meet with

3000 members and listen to their demands.

For a school board that I'm more used to seeing perched behind their high

podium, denouncing their critics,

This is a stunning power reversal.

Will you replace all other school suspension with a supervised program

trained staff?

Yes. Yes.

Yes. That's a yes.

Will you support a policy change to stop arresting children for disorderly

conduct in school? I will ask our school campus chief of police to eliminate

arrests for nonviolent disorderly conduct.

I'm sorry, at this time I guess I'm going to have to say no.

No. Why are you saying that? It's really a matter of terminology.

It is my opinion that when you use the terminology... Excuse me.

We are talking about nonviolent offenses.

So will you support a policy change to stop arresting students?

If you're going to put it like that, yes.

That's a yes.

Just weeks after the FAST protest, the Pinellas School Board announced another

slate of reforms.

And they replaced every one of the principals from the five failing

Are these victories?

Maybe.

But an entire decade of damage has already been done here.

And it really shouldn't take years of struggle to finally get a school board

just to listen.

Or to finally get a nation.

to make good on its promise of equal access to a quality education for all of

its children.

When I hear stories like Alondra Garcia's, I

get sad.

And then I get angry.

Do the undocumented have any human rights?

If so, who's fighting for them?

You've got to get out there with a picket sign and get some action going.

And when you put all of those things together, then nonviolence works.

America's most famous farmworker leader, Peter Chavez, founded La Unión del

Pueblo Entero, or LUPE, an activist group dedicated to the idea that low

immigrants should band together to help themselves.

In spring 2016, their cause was DAPA, a federal program to allow undocumented

parents to stay in the U .S.

The Supreme Court was about to rule.

If we get a decision from the Supreme Court that is not beneficial to our

community, we're not going to stop.

And in June, the ruling meant the parents could be deported.

For Tanya Chavez, it was a blow and a reason to keep fighting.

Chavez works for Lupe and is a community leader.

She has two master's degrees in business administration and communications.

But despite her credentials, she's also trapped in the valley, for she too is

undocumented.

I actually didn't really know that there was an actual wall.

All the way, the whole border.

The whole border? The whole border, from Bronzeville all the way to California.

Oh, to California?

I mean, it cuts through different parts, but yeah, it goes all the way.

Where were you born and raised, and where do you come from?

I was born and raised in Veracruz, Mexico.

And then my parents decided to send me and my brother over to the United States

to a better place for our education.

But when we came in to the United States, we asked for a student visa, and

student visa was denied.

Why? Because my parents didn't have enough money in the bank. And so for you

be able to acquire a student visa, you need to have thousands of dollars in the

bank.

So instead of student visas, Tanya says the kids came on tourist visas.

But while she was in college in Texas, Tanya wasn't aware of the difference.

All along, I thought I was documented.

When did you fully understand what it meant to be undocumented?

I found myself caged in the valley. I couldn't go beyond the checkpoint, and I

couldn't go back to Mexico.

So people say that if you legalize immigrants who came to this country

illegally, then you are rewarding.

illegal behavior.

What is your response to that?

I think it's about rewarding individuals.

I think it's about allowing them to contribute to the society that they have

made their home.

It's about allowing them to pay taxes back. It's allowing them to contribute

this economy.

Some people claim the border is wide open, but as I've just become aware,

there's already a wall along much of it.

I've also learned that the federal government spends more to secure the

than on any other element of law enforcement.

Border patrol is coming.

Today, we see the border patrol everywhere.

Oh, no.

Were they trying to cross?

Yes.

This is when I realized how privileged I am.

My heart's beating so hard.

I think for me, every time I read an article or watch a news report or meet a

dreamer or see a farm worker.

You know, I see myself. I see my family. And I just think it only would take

a small amount of imagination for any of us to put ourselves

in these people's shoes and try and understand that they're people and

that they're humans just like us and that it could very well be us and that

won the lottery.

By being born in this country.

On the next America Divided. And how do you see this issue of anchor babies?

Anyone who's born in the United States is a citizen. They can go right there.

Give me an idea of the scale of this problem.

Suicide and drug overdoses are going up in tandem.

We have a government operating in bold.

Contrast and opposition to the fundamental values of North Carolina.

How do these people get in power? Money and politics.