That Time Valient Thorr Almost Accidentally Smuggled a Group of Illegal Immigrants Across a Border
Did anyone see that shitty movie We’re the Millers that came out last year? I recently caught it on HBO in a moment of severe boredom. It’s not worth watching by any stretch of the imagination… but I mention it because there’s this scene where the protagonists are crossing over into the United States via Mexico, and they get pulled over by border patrol; it turns out they have a group of Mexicans hiding underneath their RV, trying to illegally sneak in the U.S. And you see it in the movie and you’re all, “That is SO dumb. How would anyone EVER be unaware that a single person, let alone a whole GROUP of people, were stowing away on or inside of your vehicle?”
And this happened to Valient Thorr during their current European tour, and suddenly the scene from We’re the Millers seems a lot more plausible: MetalSucks’ own “Grim Kim” Kelly, writing for Indyweek, reports that the band were recently stopped at a French border crossing at Calais, where officials found not one, not two, but SEVEN men hiding out in the band’s equipment trailer.
Although drummer Lucian Thorr tells Kim that the band had “heard a clink kind of sound and felt the bus sort of shake” in the middle of the night, a quick peek outside provided no cause for concern. It wasn’t until the border crossing that officials found the “young, teenage-to early 20s” refugees “sitting on top of our gear, hiding in there, sweating their asses off!”
Elaborates Vocalist Valient Himself:
“I was already in the customs area with the other dudes,” he says. “Lucian comes in and I start telling him about an issue with our visas and he’s all, ‘No, no, there’s some illegal dudes in our van!’ His eyeballs were huge. My first question was, ‘Is my guitar there? Did they steal anything?’ I went outside and saw them all coming out, and it was this group of really tall dudes that looked like a basketball team piling out of the trailer like a clown car.”
“The trailer’s about 8 feet long and 5 feet high, and packed with gear, full stacks, drums, everything, and they’re just crammed into the top,” Valient continues. “It was so humid in there that there was water condensed on the ceiling. The customs agent told us that the guys were so dehydrated they were about to die. It would’ve been three-and-a-half hours before we got to land and another two-and-a-half hours [after that], so they probably would’ve busted out at some point.”
It’s not entirely uncommon, though it is a sad tale.
“It’s a pretty heavy situation,” Valient says. “The cops said that it happens all the time. There’s a big refugee population, and when they get caught, they usually get sent back to where they came from, which I’ve been told is usually Italy or Greece. They get put in these refugee camps, and regardless of how we like to think about the governments of the world, there are still these fascist dudes out there who run these internment camps, and some of these refugees either get back out and try again or end up on the streets. We decided that since they didn’t steal any of our stuff or knock us over the head while we were pissing at night, they were just trying to get over to the UK, because maybe they saw a better way of life over here. It’s hard for to get over here, much less if you just stow away in the back of someone’s trailer.”
So that’s pretty depressing. These guys don’t get the “better way of life” they were so desperately seeking, and I have to apologize to the makers of We’re the Millers. It’s lose-lose all around.
[via Metal Insider]
