Ambassador Bridge

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 

Detroit, Michigan, is the home to the Ambassador Bridge, which links Detroit to the Canadian border city of Windsor. The Ambassador is essential. CNN once called it the most economically important one and a half miles of roadway in the Western Hemisphere. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Every day, endless lines of trucks wait for hours on a concrete plaza flanked by rows of traffic cones so they can be processed by a border agent. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s producer Andrew Lapin. 

ANDREW LAPIN: The Ambassador is the linchpin of the North American auto industry. Cars are constantly being driven back and forth to different factories. Last year, more than 2 million trucks drove across the Ambassador. In fact, 30% of all trade between the U.S. and Canada rolls over this break. 

ROMAN MARS: Everybody has to use the bridge because they basically don’t have any other choice. There’s a tunnel nearby that’s too small for most trucks to drive through, and the next closest international bridge is some 65 miles away.

ANDREW LAPIN: To get to the bridge, all those freight trucks first have to drive by a residential neighborhood in Southwest Detroit called Mexicantown. And for many years, they had to drive right through it. Mexicantown is right at the bridge’s entry point, and residents have suffered through loud honking and negative health effects for decades. Here’s how Sam Butler, president of a local neighborhood group, described it to me. 

SAM BUTLER: There is this, like, black soot on, like, windows or on the outside of people’s homes that face the bridge that you can literally take your finger and wipe off a piece of this black soot, living so close to an international crossing that gets 10,000 trucks per day. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Folks in Windsor don’t like the bridge either. It’s not well maintained. Large chunks of concrete have been known to break off and fall on the streets below. 

ROMAN MARS: Basically, everyone in the surrounding area hates this bridge. But they have nobody to complain to. They can’t petition the city or the county or even the U.S. or Canadian governments because none of them own this bridge. 

ANDREW LAPIN: In fact, for the longest time, the Ambassador Bridge was owned by one guy. You had to take it up with him–if you could get a hold of him. 

MANUEL MOROUN: I’m a quiet, private man. But somebody decided to make me something other than being private. I didn’t. 

ANDREW LAPIN: That’s Manuel Moroun. He went by Matty. He owned the Ambassador Bridge from 1979 until 2018, when the ownership transferred to his son, Matthew. The elder Moroun may have been private in the sense that he almost never gave interviews. But for decades, he was–quietly–one of the most important people in Detroit. 

ROMAN MARS: When Matty Moroun died in 2020, he was a billionaire. A good chunk of his empire was funded with bridge tolls and the duty-free gas stations on the bridge. 

ANDREW LAPIN: By this point, you’re probably asking the obvious question: How can one man and his family own an international bridge, a critical piece of infrastructure that so many people have to use? Actually, a lot of critical infrastructure is privately owned. And the story of the Moroun family in Detroit shows how this kind of relationship can go totally wrong. 

ROMAN MARS: The Ambassador Bridge has always been privately owned. And when it was built in the 1920s, that wasn’t so unusual. 

ANDREW LAPIN: At the time, the economy was booming and the country was modernizing. But local governments were often slow to act. So, big infrastructure projects, like bridges, sometimes needed private investors to get off the ground.

ROMAN MARS: In Detroit, the auto industry was taking off. But there was no easy way to get parts across the river from Canada. They needed a bridge. The city and the state weren’t building one, so private investors started raising money and drawing up plans. 

ANDREW LAPIN: I should add, the mayor of Detroit at the time did not like the idea that this bridge would be privately owned. He tried to stop it. But after the city passed a ballot proposal by a huge margin, he had no choice. The stakes were driven into the ground in 1927. At a ceremony to mark the occasion, a 16-year-old girl in high heels bounced across a catwalk over the Detroit River. This girl, Helen Austin, was the daughter of one of the bridge’s original investors. Reports at the time said she was the first person to walk across the river. 

ROMAN MARS: Here’s what one local newspaper wrote that day. 

“Through the clouds of dark brown smoke that rose above the railroad, one could vision a mighty steel structure of greater clearance than the Brooklyn Bridge, spanning the Detroit River and opening a new era in continental transportation.”

ANDREW LAPIN: But the celebrations were short-lived. The Ambassador struggled after the Great Depression and, for years, had financial problems. The owners managed to keep it open by making the bridge into a publicly traded company with shares available on the stock market. For a time, this approach helped keep the bridge solvent, but ultimately the decision to sell shares opened the door to a takeover by one man–a man nobody in Detroit had ever really heard of. 

JOHN GALLAGHER: His basic biography ought to be that of rags-to-riches American hero. And instead he’s probably the most disliked businessman in Detroit, by far, in a couple of generations. 

ANDREW LAPIN: That’s John Gallagher. He’s a retired Detroit Free Press journalist and one of the only people to have ever interviewed Moroun, who really was a self-made success. Moroun started working in his dad’s garage after college and tenaciously grew that into a local trucking empire. 

JOHN GALLAGHER: Matty told me during one of the few times when he was talking to reporters that, as a teenager, he had pumped gas for Jimmy Hoffa and, you know, came from sort of rags-to-riches–built this enormous fortune, mainly through his trucking company. 

ROMAN MARS: Matty Moroun outbid some fierce competition, including from Warren Buffett, to get total ownership of the bridge. Matty Moroun actually had a long history with the Ambassador before he purchased it. His family had been pushed out of their home by the original construction project. But 50 years later, the bridge was all his–basically a license to print money. 

STEVE TOBOCMAN: You have a family-controlled, private company of scale, right? You know, you do the math, but they must have been turning millions and millions of dollars of unbelievable profit from this asset. 

ANDREW LAPIN: This is Steve Tobocman, a former Democratic Michigan State Representative from Southwest Detroit. He says after Matty Moroun bought the bridge in 1979, he became a notorious figure in the community. 

Describing every shenanigan Matty Moroun got up to in Detroit would take hours. I’m not going to do that. But baseline–according to Tobocman–Moroun didn’t do very much to address the long-standing complaints about noise and dirt in the neighborhoods near the bridge. In fact, there wasn’t much community outreach at all. 

STEVE TOBOCMAN: There was no presence for this company in the community other than the commerce they were doing. So, there weren’t large investments. It wasn’t like there was a Matty Moroun Community Center or Rec Center or Reading Room at the high school or anything like that. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Detroit’s wealthiest businessmen have tended to give a lot to local charities, especially when the city started losing people in the mid-20th century. But Matty Moroun wasn’t a big public philanthropist. 

ROMAN MARS: He was more focused on expanding the bridge empire. In the 1980s, Moroun bought up a bunch of land near the bridge. Then he presented a plan to expand the Ambassador’s entryway, the opening plaza. This expansion was so the bridge could accommodate more traffic and bring in more tolls. 

ANDREW LAPIN: To accomplish this, Moroun needed to buy up the land near the bridge’s opening. But there was one problem. That land was already occupied by a vibrant residential neighborhood. 

KATHY WENDLER: I mean, the bridge company wasn’t thinking about what they were wiping out. They had tunnel vision. “Bridge vision,” I guess, is what it should be called. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Kathy Wendler is a Detroit native. She worked for the Southwest Detroit Business Association for decades, first joining in 1981, two years after the Morouns took over the bridge. Her job was community development. She soon realized that meant she would have to oppose the Morouns. 

KATHY WENDLER: It was located in a community. It was located in a place. And that place was at least as important as that bridge. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Important and, to its residents, pretty special. Southwest Detroit was not some big industrial depot–far from it. This is a closely-knit neighborhood. A lot of the Motor City is really spread out. Wide boulevards meant for a lot of cars. But Southwest–it’s dense. And it’s accessible. 

KATHY WENDLER: It was walkable. You didn’t have to have a car. You could get groceries. You could go to the doctor. You could get dry cleaning done. It was vibrant. 

ANDREW LAPIN: For the folks living here, the neighborhood felt special. And the Morouns and their ambitious plans quickly became everyone’s business. Here’s Sam Butler again, the head of a local neighborhood group. 

SAM BUTLER: I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that a lot of neighbors feel like the bridge company has historically been an existential threat to the neighborhood. 

ROMAN MARS: Throughout the ’80s, Matty Moroun bought up a lot of property to expand his bridge empire. His representatives went door to door in the Mexicantown neighborhood, purchasing one house after another and putting pressure on the residents who stayed. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Anthony Benavides is a Southwest Detroit community activist. He says the Morouns used a tactic called “blockbusting” to buy up local real estate. Basically, they would buy up houses and depopulate the street so that eventually everyone would leave. 

ANTHONY BENAVIDES: He was strategically buying houses throughout the block and just letting them sit there. They were vacant, so of course you had drugs, you had prostitutes, you had wild dogs…

ANDREW LAPIN: Anthony loves his community. He’s worked for years at a public park in the area, in full view of the bridge. And he saw the systematic destruction of his neighborhood up close. 

ANTHONY BENAVIDES: The people next door to that house–they sat there looking at a vacant house for years until they were begging Matty Moroun to buy their house. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Sometimes the sales agents gave no indication they were there on behalf of the Morouns. They’d represent companies with names like Mexicantown Real Estate Company. 

ROMAN MARS: Some unsuspecting homeowners were desperate to get out of the area that was being hollowed out and collapsing from blight. They were happy to sell. Only later did they learn the truth about who bought their property. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Moroun wanted to buy up the land near the bridge so he could one day expand its entry plaza and collect more tolls. But he bought lots of other property too–enough to become a true baron of Detroit real estate. One website that tracks landlords in the city estimates the Morouns have owned as many as 978 properties in Detroit alone.

ROMAN MARS: And the Windsor Star estimates that, at one point, Moroun owned another 139 properties in Windsor at the bridge’s entry point on the Canadian side. 

ANDREW LAPIN: A lot of the property the Morouns were buying wasn’t anywhere near the bridge. And once they owned them, the Morouns weren’t that interested in doing anything with them. In fact, the Morouns accumulated so many blight tickets over the years that they struck more than one deal with the city to pay them off in negotiated lump sums. This kind of thing–buying property and just letting it go to seed–it was happening a lot in Detroit around this time. The city was declining rapidly in the ’80s, and land was selling for cheap. That meant land speculators could sweep in, take advantage of an economic downturn, and hoard real estate, just in case Detroit ever made a comeback, without having to worry about keeping it up. Who was gonna foreclose on you? The city? They were broke!

STEVE TOBOCMAN: If you can buy that property for $500, $1,000, $3,000… I guess you’re investing that on a speculation that hopefully one day–someday–somebody comes and wants to buy that property and they’re willing to pay you multiples of that few thousand dollar purchase price and the properties become valuable. And the worst case scenario is you lose the property to tax foreclosure. But that is a 30-year gamble, and then you’re only out your original cost. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Matty Moroun’s buying spree got so big that he eventually landed on a major piece of Detroit history. In 1992, Moroun purchased Michigan Central, a massive former train station in the Southwest neighborhood of Corktown. The station was a relic of an earlier era in Detroit, when people still commuted by train. And its giant, tiled ceilings also welcomed newly arriving migrants and Black Americans coming up during the Great Migration. The building was known as Detroit’s Ellis Island. 

ROMAN MARS: Michigan Central had seen better days, even when Matty Moroun bought it. But he did nothing with it, besides building a fence around the property and putting in some windows after the old ones had been busted by looters. 

ANDREW LAPIN: A majestic transportation hub rotting away in plain sight… To a lot of people, it felt like a metaphor for what had become of Detroit. Carl Craig, a Detroit techno pioneer, cited the building as a weird kind of inspiration for himself and other musicians as they developed this revolutionary, new, post-industrial sound in the Motor City. 

CARL CRAIG: This is a typical example of Detroit. Just beautiful structure– It was booming when I was a kid. And now, 20 years later, it’s just totally [BLEEP] up. 

ROMAN MARS: By the 1990s, Michigan Central was a magnet for graffiti and scavengers. It embodied the dreaded Detroit stereotype of “ruin porn.” 

[DETROPIA OPERA SINGING]

ANDREW LAPIN: Urban explorers went spelunking inside to gawk at the ravages of the Rust Belt, like in this clip from the 2012 documentary, Detropia, in which an opera tenor wanders through Michigan Central. The walls are crumbling and filled with graffiti. 

It looks like something out of a zombie movie. And this is what I think is so sad about the whole situation. The original owners of the bridge were trying to help grow Detroit’s economy during its boom years. Decades later, the new owners were coming out on the other end and helping to accelerate the city’s disastrous fall. 

ROMAN MARS: While many of their properties fell into disrepair, the Morouns still made huge profits because their main business, the Ambassador Bridge, became even more indispensable after the passage of NAFTA in 1992. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Remember NAFTA? You know, the agreement designed to eliminate tariffs between the United States and Canada. Anyhow, NAFTA led to a big increase in commerce between the two countries and made the bridge essential. Forbes magazine once estimated the bridge makes $60 million in revenue every year. 

ROMAN MARS: After the passage of NAFTA, Matty Moroun became notably more ambitious in his dealings with Detroit. He made a pretty brazen move to expand his business by starting construction on a second bridge, right beside the first one. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Traffic had increased so much on the Ambassador, there was clearly demand for another bridge. The Morouns knew that. They also knew that, if they didn’t act on that demand, the second bridge would be built by someone else–someone who would threaten their monopoly. 

ROMAN MARS: Matty Moroun didn’t have permission from the city of Detroit or the city of Windsor or from anybody to start building a new bridge. In fact, Matty Moroun was supposed to be doing something completely different–something positive for the community. In 2004, Moroun signed a $258 million deal with the city for an initiative called The Gateway Project. 

THE GATEWAY PROJECT ANNOUNCEMENT: The Michigan Department of Transportation, residents, stakeholders, and community leaders are teaming up to improve the international gateway into Michigan, the region, and Detroit… 

ROMAN MARS: For the Gateway Project, the government would build more roads to ease traffic. And in exchange, Moroun promised to build entryways to connect the bridge to the highway system so that trucks would no longer have to drive through the Mexicantown neighborhood. It seemed like a great deal for everybody. But instead of holding up his end of the bargain, Matty Moroun’s company started construction on a second bridge in 2007. They didn’t get very far. In the end, they only built two ramps that didn’t connect to anything. 

ANTHONY BENAVIDES: We call it the “Dukes of Hazzard Bridge” right now. So, you know, it’s never been built. It’s just, like, a ramp going up. 

ANDREW LAPIN: For years, Matty Moroun promised to take action and connect up with the highway, but he never did. All he did was build that bridge to nowhere, claiming it was part of the Gateway deal. The city appeared helpless. They waited five years for Moroun to hold up his part of a bargain. Members of the community fought back against this kind of behavior with dramatic public protests. Anthony Benavides remembers one of them. 

ANTHONY BENAVIDES: There’s people that laid on the road so his trucks couldn’t go through–literally laid on the road. That’s how involved they were. They literally put their bodies in front of trucks. 

ROMAN MARS: More than 100 people formed a human chain to block access to the bridge. Some elected officials joined them. So did the Occupy movement. 

OCCUPY PROTESTERS: We are the 99%! We are the 99%!! We are… 

ANDREW LAPIN: And the protests spread out. The Metro Times–the alt weekly–published a cartoon depicting Moroun as Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. Protesters carried a giant puppet of Matty Moroun and paraded him in front of Michigan Central, where they chastised him for owning so many blighted properties. 

CONCERNED CITIZEN: I’m here because we are sick and tired of Matty Moroun and his broken, torn down– His houses that’s dilapidated–renting them to people… This is crazy with all the money that he has. He’s a billionaire. He’s a CEO. And he’s the only one getting rich… 

ROMAN MARS: Despite these protests and pushback from politicians like Steve Tobocman and Rashida Tlaib, the Morouns still largely got their way–partly because many Morouns spent heavily on lobbying in Michigan. For years, when the state would raise the prospect of dealing with the bridge’s problems, those efforts would die quickly. They are also known to be very litigious. To avoid drawn-out legal battles, local governments usually decided the best way forward was to cut deals with the family on all bridge matters. But with so much pushback against the Morouns, a showdown became inevitable. 

ANDREW LAPIN: In January 2012, Moroun and his longtime right-hand man, Dan Stamper, were hauled before a county judge. Fed up with their foot dragging on The Gateway Project, the judge ordered both of them to spend one night in jail. Moroun was 84 years old. One of the richest and most powerful men in the city was thrown in county lockup. John Gallagher remembers this well. 

JOHN GALLAGHER: It was astonishing that a guy of his stature–I mean a billionaire businessman–would be thrown in jail for resisting, you know, a court order. 

ANDREW LAPIN: The stay in the pen wasn’t too bad for Matty Moroun. He got approval to have the Detroit Athletic Club–a swanky, members-only venue in the city–send over a catered dinner that night. When he got out, he had a big smile on his face. 

REPORTER: Mr. Moroun, how are you? 

MANUEL MOROUN: Fine. 

REPORTER: How do you feel to be out? 

MANUEL MOROUN: I love our country. Best country in the world… 

ANDREW LAPIN: For a long time, it seemed like the Morouns’ bridge monopoly would never end. Ultimately, the only group of people with the clout and the ability to stand up to the Morouns was the Great White North.

ROMAN MARS: Yes, Canada came to the rescue to bail out America. And when Canada came swinging, the final battle over the future of the Ambassador began. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Canada’s top ministers actually agreed with the Morouns about something: There should be a second bridge connecting Detroit to Windsor. They just didn’t want Matty to own it. 

ROMAN MARS: Beginning in 2004, the Canadian government made a series of proposals to build a second bridge. Their bridge would link up directly with the freeway, making the trip easier for truckers and the quality of life better for the neighborhoods in Detroit. It would introduce competition, and it would bring back pedestrian walkways. The Ambassador had closed theirs years ago. 

ANDREW LAPIN: A Canadian diplomat named Roy Norton was the public face of the effort. He made it clear–breaking up the Morouns’ bridge monopoly would be no easy task. 

ROY NORTON: I confess to having had periodic visions of a Moroun-owned 18-wheeler bearing down on me and forcing me off the road as I crisscrossed the state of Michigan. The bottom line–in Michigan–the Morouns win. At least, historically, that’s been the case… 

ANDREW LAPIN: Norton called the Morouns “liars” and “scoundrels.” He chastised the lawmakers who took their campaign money and suggested the whole family should be investigated for violating antitrust laws. 

ROMAN MARS: This tough talk paid off. In 2012, an agreement was reached. A second bridge would be built and controlled entirely by the Canadian government. It would be named the Gordie Howe Bridge in honor of the Canadian hockey star who played most of his career with the Detroit Red Wings–a symbol of bi-national unity. 

ANDREW LAPIN: And here’s the sweetener. Canada would pay the entire cost of the new bridge. American taxpayers would pay nothing. This didn’t sit well with the Morouns. Another bridge would mean they’d have to adopt competitive pricing and make costly improvements just to stay afloat. So, they pulled out all the stops to try and prevent the Gordie Howe from being built. Matty Moroun’s son, Matthew, made his case to the media. 

MATTHEW MOROUN: We’ve got a Michigan business that’s been here for 83 years and contributed economically to the city and the state… 

ROMAN MARS: The Morouns fought back with some pretty aggressive tactics. In 2011, when the Gordie Howe was still in the planning stage, a bunch of yellow eviction notices went up in a neighborhood close to the proposed bridge site. A lot of people–understandably–freaked out. 

ANDREW LAPIN: The notices were fake–a scare tactic meant to drum up opposition to the Gordie Howe Bridge. A conservative lobbying group, Americans for Prosperity, took credit for the fake eviction notices. 

ROMAN MARS: Then there was the ballot box. Matty Moroun spent more than $30 million to get an amendment passed by Michigan voters called Proposal 6. Proposals 6 would make all future bridge projects subject to a referendum by both state and local voters. The whole thing was designed to make approval for projects like the Gordie Howe Bridge much more difficult. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Groups supported by Matty Moroun ran ads implying that voters somehow would have to pay for the Gordie Howe Bridge and that Proposal 6 would stop that from happening. 

PROPOSAL 6 ADS: Here’s why Michigan voters are voting yes on Proposal 6… / There’s no such thing as a free bridge… / There’s no such thing as a free bridge. Someone pays… / I don’t care who owns the bridge! All I care about is paying for a new one without even being asked… / “Yes” means we have the power. “No” means we give it away to the politicians…

ANDREW LAPIN: They called their campaign The People Should Decide. Ultimately, the bridge amendment failed, with 60% of voters rejecting it. Still, the Moroun family wouldn’t go down without a fight. The Morouns took the new bridge authority to court, filing lawsuit after lawsuit to delay its construction and appealing all the way to the state Supreme Court. Eventually, they ran out of legal avenues. But they were able to drag things out for six years. 

ROMAN MARS: In 2018, during President Trump’s first term in office, the Canadian Bridge was due to finally begin construction. So, Matty Moroun tried a Hail Mary to save his family’s monopoly. 

MOROUN AD: Dear Mr. President, there are two grand new bridges being proposed in Detroit between America and Canada. One is American made–American-owned. It uses American made steel–five thousand American workers. The other would be Canadian made–Canadian-owned–Canadian workers. Who knows who would make the steel? 

ANDREW LAPIN: This ad ran on Fox News in the hopes that Trump would see it and intervene. Given that the President was known to watch Fox News constantly, it wasn’t a bad plan. 

ROMAN MARS: In this ad, the Morouns tried to paint their idea for a bridge project as a patriotic alternative. 

MOROUN AD: Choose American. Thank you, sir. Signed, America.

ANDREW LAPIN: Despite all this–let’s just call it “lobbying”–Trump never intervened. And the Gordie Howe Bridge finally broke ground that June. 

ROMAN MARS: This fall, the Gordie Howe Bridge is set to open. It’s a brand new symbol of Canadian-American friendship, at a moment when relations between the two countries and their leaders are at their lowest point since the War of 1812, when British troops burned down the White House. 

ANDREW LAPIN: As another Canadian once said, isn’t it ironic? 

ROMAN MARS: Since the loss of the bridge monopoly, the Morouns have taken a step back. The same month the Gordie Howe Bridge began construction in 2018, the family sold Michigan Central to the Ford Motor Company for $90 million. 

ANDREW LAPIN: In 2020, Matty Moroun died at the age of 93 from heart failure. He had already transferred control of the family’s enterprises, including the bridge, to his son, Matthew. Since then, the Morouns have continued their blockbusting in new areas of the city, connected to other business ventures. But the tone and the family’s tactics have softened. They’ve held public events. They reached a community agreement with Southwest Detroit that clearly defines where they can build and where they can’t. And earlier this summer, they tore down the Bridge to Nowhere. 

And Michigan Central? Hoo boy. Ford Motor Company spent nearly a billion dollars renovating it and turned it into a tech hub and tourist destination with a luxury hotel on the way. They turned the whole project into a major community effort. And they even welcomed the station’s looters to return the historic stuff they stole–no questions asked. And many did. When the building reopened last year, it included a public exhibit of all that repatriated loot. A reopening concert brought out Detroit’s finest musicians, like Eminem, Diana Ross, and Jack White. 

[JACK WHITE SINGING HOTEL YORBA]

ANDREW LAPIN: Between the new bridge and Michigan Central reopening, there are a lot of reasons for Detroiters to celebrate the city right now. In 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. But from this embarrassing failure, things started looking up. New people and businesses have moved in and developers reshaped the city at lightning speed. The new bridge has been part of that excitement. Here’s John Gallagher. 

JOHN GALLAGHER: There was a generational change where some younger people came in–some people who didn’t have the same negative image of the city that maybe their parents had had or something–and the city just began to turn around. And by 2015, 2020, it was pretty apparent that a lot of great stuff was happening. 

ANDREW LAPIN: It’s hard not to see the shift in attitudes around Detroit. When I interviewed Kathy Wendler at a Michigan Welcome Center, she excitedly pointed through the window to the sidewalk outside–not to the Ambassador Bridge, but to something else. 

KATHY WENDLER: I don’t know if they just caught that couple with the two kids walking by. But at one point, this neighborhood would have never been a place where a family moved in. 

ANDREW LAPIN: For Kathy Wendler, this was a sign of what she’s been fighting for over the past few decades: the revitalization of the Motor City. 

KATHY WENDLER: I mean, it’s tremendous, especially for the people who held out and said, “We raised our kids here. We sent them to school here.” Properties that are still here are getting invested in. New construction’s going on. There is hope. There’s always hope. If you can live long enough, there’s always hope. 

ANDREW LAPIN: For decades, the Morouns have been seen as civic villains by lots of people in Detroit. Maybe things would have turned out differently if another family had owned the bridge. But Kathy Wendler says it doesn’t matter. To her, there’s a much simpler lesson here. 

KATHY WENDLER: International border crossing shouldn’t be privately owned. 

ROMAN MARS: The Ambassador Bridge has been in the news recently for some pretty upsetting reasons. More with Andrew Lapin after this… 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So, I’m here with producer Andrew Lapin. Hey, Andrew. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Hey, Roman.

ROMAN MARS: So, you live in Michigan. And how often do you actually use the Ambassador Bridge? 

ANDREW LAPIN: All right, well, I’m not a long haul trucker, so I’m not using it all the time. But whenever I go into Canada–yeah–I do pay my fair share of coin to Moroun Enterprises. A few weeks ago, the family and I took a trip to Toronto. We drove over the bridge, we paid our toll, and then we sat through the customary eight to ten traffic lights that separate the bridge from the Trans-Canadian Highway on the Windsor side, so we got the full trucker experience. 

ROMAN MARS: And so how excited are you for the new Gordie Howe Bridge to open? 

ANDREW LAPIN: I think this is really cool. Everybody here is talking about it. I should add that, like, Gordie Howe was also the originator of the phrase, “Elbows up,” which has become this Canadian anti-Trump rallying cry, which I just think is kind of funny in the current moment. We did recently hear that, even though it was slated to open up this fall, it might actually get delayed until next year. That’s looking like more and more of a distinct possibility. And that’s because the Canadian government, which is paying for all the construction, has not yet fully built out the entry ramps. So, even though the bridge itself is, they say, 98% complete–something like that. Some of the surrounding infrastructure isn’t quite there yet. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, there really is nothing easy about the infrastructure bridging these two countries at this point, is there? 

ANDREW LAPIN: No, I guess that’s why they only do it once every hundred years. 

ROMAN MARS: So, one of the reasons we wanted to do this story about the Ambassador Bridge is that it’s been in the news recently. So, could you fill us in on some of the recent developments? 

ANDREW LAPIN: Yeah, for sure. It’s been in the news for a pretty dark reason. So, the Ambassador is obviously an international crossing. And there’s been a lot of focus in this new Trump administration on the border and on various international crossings–mostly on the southern border–but also here in the north. We just had Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, in town recently doing an event called Secure Our Northern Border, where she claimed that gang members from South and Central America might be plotting to cross the Ambassador. And I don’t really know how likely that is. But concurrent with that, we have seen increased detainments of migrants at the bridge, mostly by Customs and Border Patrol, but also increasingly by ICE. 

ROMAN MARS: So, there has been more activity at the Canadian border. I mean, we mostly hear about news on the Southern border, but the Canadian border is also showing a lot of activity. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Yeah, and at the Ambassador, there’s, like, this unusual twist to it that is so strange, which is that this bridge–it’s not particularly well marked. Like, only in the last several years has it actually connected directly with the highway. And the signs that tell you you’re going onto the bridge come at you really fast, and it’s sort of notorious because it says, “Bridge to Canada, no reentry to the U.S.” And so, if you take that, you are stuck. You kind of have to go over the bridge. There was a Detroit Free Press investigation recently that found–oh–actually there is a way that is completely unmarked where, if you make this turn, you don’t have to go on the bridge and pay the toll. But most people just don’t know about it. So, they’re pushed into the bridge, into this toll lane. They’re forced into Canada. They have to turn back around, which means they have to get processed by border security. And we’ve just seen a lot of migrants get nabbed this way since the start of the year. A lot of people make this term by accident. But just in the first part of this year, from January to March, the statistic came out that more than 210 people were detained at this bridge crossing and more than 90% of them had crossed under the bridge by accident. 

ROMAN MARS: 90%! Oh my god. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Yeah, this is a number that comes from the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and the offices of Rashida Tlaib, who’s a Detroit congresswoman, who made this congressional visit in April to this detention site right next to the bridge that’s run by CBP. So, I spoke recently with someone at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, their legal group that helps immigrants in the state. So, they worked with the ACLU to get these numbers, which they say come directly from CBP, including that stat about more than 90% crossing it by accident. We don’t really know how many people have been detained in this manner since March. So, since then, I’ve been told that CBP has kind of stopped holding migrants in these windowless detention facilities. But that’s only because they’ve farmed out the responsibility of holding the migrants to ICE, which is using this privatized facility at the other end of the state. 

ROMAN MARS: So, have any news stories leaked out about who is getting detained and what the tragedy of their detainment is all about? 

ANDREW LAPIN: Yeah, there were some pretty horrifying stories here. Just to give you a sense of just how incidental all this tends to happen, there was this one mother with her family. And they were just trying to get to Costco, but they had accidentally mapped out directions to the Costco in Windsor, which took them across the bridge, which resulted in the CBP throwing them in a detention facility for several days. And then there was this other very well-publicized story from The New York Times. This Venezuelan man named Ricardo Prada Vásquez, who had been working in Detroit as a delivery driver. And so in January, actually, like, a few days before Trump’s swearing in, Vásquez made a wrong turn onto the Ambassador Bridge and was added to a deportation list. And then, you know, months later, his family had not heard from him. And he essentially seems to have vanished from the government’s records of migrants that they had deported. So, there was this period of time where he seems to have been functionally disappeared by the U.S. Government. People just didn’t know where he was. Since then, there have been reports that indicate that he was sent to CECOT, which is this notorious prison in El Salvador where Trump is sending a lot of these migrants. So, he was not sent back to his country of origin, which was Venezuela. And the Department of Homeland Security has claimed that he was affiliated with gangs and that they had reason to deport him. But again, all this happened because he drove onto the Ambassador by accident. 

ROMAN MARS: Right. I mean, it’s not the bridge’s fault that the government has taken these horrific actions against the people who crossed the border by accident. But the way I see the world is that bad design contributes to horrible decisions and everything gets more complicated. And it adds to the bridge’s complicated legacy. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Yeah, totally. I mean, this to me feels like one more kind of unfortunate chapter in the history of this giant piece of infrastructure that has been managed in these very specific ways over the years and how it’s sort of formed this chokehold on the livelihoods of everybody who lives around it and relies on it because this bridge just has been the only game in town. Like, it took so much work just to get these highways to link up with the bridge. And then it took so much work recently to improve the signage–that there’s a big Canadian flag on it for people who may not read English or may not be able to decipher the sign quickly enough. But all of this stuff just adds to this stew of reasons why it’s probably not in the best interest of the public to rely so much on the owners of this one bridge. You may have heard about this other incident–these protests in 2022–where these Canadian truckers literally blocked the bridge for several days because they were protesting COVID vaccine mandates. Nobody could get through. This was, like, a six-day protest. And over those six days, $300 million was lost because the auto industry and all these other businesses that relied on the bridge just had literally no way to get their product across the bridge. So, it helps explain why Canada was so desperate to get another bridge in place here and why so many people are fed up with the fact that this one bridge has been the only economic throughline between these two extremely valuable nations. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, it’s really sobering stuff. And it’s such a fascinating story. I’m so happy that you reported it for us. I just enjoyed the process of watching the story develop so much. So, thank you for reporting it. I appreciate it. 

ANDREW LAPIN: Thank you so much. It’s been a real treat to dive into this. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Andrew Lapin. Andrew made a podcast called Radioactive about Detroit’s inflammatory radio priest, Father Charles Coughlan. And you can check it out at andrewlapin.org. 

Editing this week by Chris Berube. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real.

Special thanks this week to Thomas Klug, Ray Lozarno, Glenn Lapin, Anna Megdell. And the archival staffs at the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library, and the Bentley Library at the University of Michigan for help with research. Recording help this week by Peg Watson at Michigan Public Radio and Eric Wojahn at Solid Sound.

Our Executive Producer is Kathy Tu. Our Senior Editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. 

The rest of the team includes Jayson DeLeon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars.

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. 

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.

You can find us on Bluesky, as well as our Discord server. You can find all of our past episodes at 99pi.org.