20 October 21
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The health insurance industry is spending big to halt efforts to expand Medicare benefits — and running false ads claiming Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are protecting seniors rather than privatizing Medicare.
Medicare Advantage — the privatized version of the national health insurance program for people over the age of sixty-five and people with disability status — has become a cash cow for private health insurers. As small- and medium-sized employers struggle to keep up with the skyrocketing costs of health care, private insurers are increasingly expanding into the Medicare Advantage market to buffer their profits.
A provision being considered as part of the reconciliation bill would add dental, vision, and hearing benefits to Medicare without including those benefits in the calculation of the rate at which the federal government reimburses Medicare Advantage plans. Doing so could cut the cost of expanding Medicare benefits by 41 percent, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.
The vast majority of Medicare Advantage plans already provide dental, hearing, and vision benefits. But that hasn’t stopped private insurers and their front group, the Better Medicare Alliance (BMA), from demanding more money from Congress and spending $3 million on advertising campaigns since September to try to ensure their reimbursement rates go up if those benefits are also added to traditional Medicare plans.
Some of the BMA ads misleadingly thank conservative Democratic senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, claiming the two main opponents to expanding Medicare have actually “fought for seniors.” The Sinema ad says: “We need her now more than ever, because Washington listens to her.”
Meanwhile, BMA sent a letter last month to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) urging them “to ensure additional benefits are structured in a way that fully reflect the cost of adding dental, vision, and hearing to Medicare in the benchmark calculation.”
Increasing that benchmark calculation would mean private insurers get additional reimbursement for services they already provide — it would amount to a taxpayer-funded windfall for insurance companies that are already raking in money off of Medicare Advantage.
“The insurance companies that participate in Medicare Advantage are making huge, huge profits off of taxpayers in that program, and they absolutely could afford to give up the overpayments that Congress is making to keep the program going at its current level,” said Wendell Potter, a former Cigna executive who became a whistleblower and is now a Medicare for All advocate.
Gaming the Medicare Advantage System
While Medicare has contracted with private insurance companies since the national health insurance program was formed as part of the Social Security Act in 1965, the current iteration of Medicare Advantage has only existed since 2003. Similar in policy design to charter schools, Medicare Advantage offers people the choice of private insurance plans instead of traditional Medicare. Medicare Advantage plans offer baseline benefits, and insurers are paid to provide them by the government.
Utilization of Medicare Advantage has grown steadily since it was launched. According to health policy experts, that’s largely because private insurers invest in marketing tactics to draw people to their plans, highlighting perks like extra benefits that aren’t covered by Medicare and an annual cap on out-of-pocket costs. More than 40 percent of Medicare recipients now receive their coverage through Medicare Advantage.
For insurers, meanwhile, the business is increasingly lucrative.
“One of the reasons why they are so focused on Medicare Advantage is they are finding that the commercial insurance market, private side, is not growing,” said Potter, the former insurance executive. “It hasn’t been growing for years. The unsustainable increase in premiums year after year and their constant shifting of out-of-pocket costs, is making health insurance unaffordable for businesses, so there is no growth there.”
Ahead of the current open enrollment period for Medicare plans, which began on October 15, major insurers including UnitedHealth Group, Humana, and Aetna announced new expansions into the Medicare Advantage space.
Profits come from the generous reimbursement structure for Medicare Advantage. The federal government calculates a “benchmark” rate for benefits, based on what it spends on those services under traditional Medicare coverage.
Private insurers submit estimates as to how much it will cost them to provide the average Medicare Advantage customer with the benefits of traditional Medicare, and the federal government reimburses them at a rate that is slightly higher than that estimate but below the benchmark.
This calculation results in considerable profits. In 2019, when the most recent data is available, private insurers averaged 4.5 percent profit margins on their Medicare Advantage plans. Between 2016 and 2018, Medicare Advantage plans reported nearly double the profit margins per customer compared to individual and employer plans.
The returns are so high in part because Medicare Advantage providers have devised ways to spend less on their customers than traditional Medicare. “They’ve figured out how to game the system in ways that enable them to make outsized profits,” said Potter.
One stratagem is that Medicare Advantage, unlike traditional Medicare, is allowed to require prior authorization for procedures. And high denial rates can deter people from seeking care in the first place, which saves insurers money. The federal Health and Human Services Department has found that “there are persistent problems related to denials of care and payment in Medicare Advantage,” and that in most cases when denials are appealed, insurers overturn their own denials.
At the same time, taxpayers spend more per person for Medicare Advantage plans than they do on traditional Medicare plans. A recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that in 2019, the federal government spent $321 more per Medicare Advantage enrollee than traditional Medicare enrollee.
Another method insurers utilize is a shady practice known as “upcoding,” in which they manipulate the government’s system for coding diagnoses in order to get larger reimbursements from the government. The Department of Justice has brought lawsuits against multiple insurers in recent months for upcoding.
In some cases, insurers simply illegally underspend on their customers, for which they face few consequences. Last month, UnitedHealthcare was penalized by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for having spent too small a percentage of premiums on providing benefits for three years in a row. In response, the company has been banned from enrolling new subscribers in certain plans in a handful of states, which represent a small fraction of the insurers’ overall enrollment.
Hundreds of Billions in Savings
Adding dental, hearing, and vision benefits to traditional Medicare through the reconciliation bill could make Medicare Advantage plans less attractive to consumers, cutting into private insurers’ profits. Such an expansion of the national insurance program would likely cost the federal government more than $350 billion over the next ten years.
However, a proposal to include those benefits in Medicare without increasing the rate at which the government reimburses Medicare Advantage plans could cut that cost by 41 percent, according to a recent analysis by Matthew Fiedler, an economist at the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy and former chief economist on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. With corporate Democrats demanding a smaller reconciliation bill, such a drastic cost savings should, in theory, be a very attractive move.
“Most of the federal savings from excluding the cost from the benchmark would be coming out of reduced plan profits,” Fiedler told the Daily Poster.
More than 98 percent of Medicare Advantage plans already offer dental, vision, and hearing benefits. While some of those plans could be required to improve their dental, vision, and hearing benefits to meet the new proposed standards for traditional Medicare, and a few would be required to expand their coverage to include those benefits, the plans can afford to do so without the government increasing the benchmark, Fiedler explained.
If the new benefits were included in a new Medicare Advantage benchmark calculation, it would contribute to already high profits for private insurers — with very little of that funding going to people on the plans. Past research has found that when Medicare Advantage increases its reimbursement rate, only one in every eight dollars of reimbursements is passed along to customers in the form of savings or better coverage. A larger share is passed to insurers in the form of profits.
On the other hand, said Fiedler, expanding Medicare benefits without changing the benchmark calculation would only lead to modestly lower profits for insurance companies.
Misleading Ads and Mounting Industry Opposition
In August, Politico reported that an insurance industry source said proposals to add benefits to Medicare had insurers “freaking out,” because they “worry that seniors will drop their private plans en masse and migrate to traditional Medicare once the new benefits are in place.” Politico added that their source “said the industry is mindful of the optics of publicly opposing coverage of eyeglasses, dental care and hearing aids, and is largely lobbying behind the scenes.”
To do so, the insurance industry has turned to the BMA, a dark money group representing insurers and business groups. Health insurance giant Humana and CVS Health, which owns Aetna, each donated $2 million to the organization last year, according to company disclosures.
The BMA has spent nearly $3 million on TV and radio ads since the beginning of September, according to data from AdImpact.
Those ads included paid spots on cable news in Arizona this month that featured the faces of elderly people who, according to a voiceover, are among the more than 625,000 people in the state who “have come to rely on something vital: Medicare Advantage.”
The raspy masculine voice warns, “Now there’s talk in Washington of cutting Medicare Advantage and raising our premiums.” But, the voiceover says, “Senator Kyrsten Sinema has fought for seniors and Medicare Advantage.” The advertisement ends with an image of the senator’s face alongside the phone number for her office, encouraging viewers to thank Sinema “for fighting for us.”
Since September, BMA has spent $516,000 on ads in Arizona and $266,000 in West Virginia, as well as nearly $550,000 in the Washington, DC area. They have also targeted conservative Democrats in the House, including Representatives Stephanie Murphy (FL), Jared Golden (ME), Kurt Schrader (OR), and Cindy Axne (IA).
In reality, there is no proposal in Congress to “cut Medicare Advantage” or raise premiums, and moreover, no evidence that Sinema or Manchin have “fought for seniors.”
Instead, the BMA is running ads thanking Manchin and Sinema because they have become the most prominent obstacles to passing Democrats’ social safety net legislation — and because they do not support the party’s plan to expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing benefits.
As a supposed fiscal hawk, Manchin might be expected to welcome the cost savings that would come with expanding Medicare benefits without changing the reimbursement rate going to private insurers — but instead, he appears to be parroting the talking points of his corporate allies, who don’t want the benefits expanded at all, much less without scoring a better reimbursement rate.
Manchin has said he thinks Democrats need to shore up Medicare’s finances before expanding the program, and he also wants any new benefits to be means tested and only help poorer Americans — an idea that would undermine Medicare’s draw as a universal program.
Sinema, meanwhile, refuses to say anything about Democrats’ plans publicly, but Axios recently reported that she is “less interested in offering new dental and vision benefits in Medicare.”
Sinema does appear interested in protecting the Medicare Advantage payouts to private insurers, however. On October 15, she sent a letter, cosigned by Manchin, to CMS “to express our support for the Medicare Advantage (MA) program.” The letter continued, “To ensure this continuum of care, we stand ready to protect MA from payments cuts, which could lead to higher costs and premiums, reduce vital benefits, and undermine advances made to improve health outcomes and health equity for MA enrollees.”
The BMA subsequently issued a press release thanking the signatories for their “unwavering leadership.”
In addition to the BMA advertisements, the health insurance lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the right-wing think tank American Action Forum, and UnitedHealth Group’s employee lobbying arm have been mobilizing to ensure that taxpayer dollars continue to prop up the Medicare Advantage program.
AHIP commissioned a study that showed that adding dental, vision, and hearing to Medicare without including them in the benchmark calculation would leave Medicare Advantage with fewer rebate dollars to be spent on supplemental benefits.
The American Action Forum — a think tank affiliated with the American Action Network, a dark money group that bankrolls House Republicans — has opposed adding new benefits to Medicare on the grounds that Medicare Advantage already provides those benefits.
“If Democrats are really looking for pain-free ways to cut back on their $3.5 trillion spending spree, scrapping the dental, vision, and hearing additions to Medicare would be a good place to start, because the benefits are already available through Medicare Advantage. Perhaps advocates for enhanced Medicare coverage should instead focus on bolstering MA, which already provides a range of tailored benefits to the Medicare population,” wrote the organization’s health policy analyst in a blog post earlier this month.
At the same time, UnitedHealth Group has pushed its employees to call Congress and ask them “not to cut Medicare Advantage” through its internal political engagement platform, called United For Action.
“While action is entirely voluntary, consider lending your voice to protect seniors in Medicare Advantage,” noted a September 16 email sent to employees by management of the company, which was found to have been spending too little on seniors’ care for years.
“Policymakers are currently debating and considering proposals that may impact the Medicare Program and other health policies,” the email said. “To protect Americans enrolled in Medicare Advantage, ask Congress to ensure any reforms to Medicare maintain stability for the 27 million seniors currently served by Medicare Advantage.”
On an earnings call last week, the company announced that it had surpassed $4 billion in profits last quarter, $1 billion more than the same quarter last year. UnitedHealth Group’s chief financial officer John Rex pointed to Medicare Advantage as a source of ongoing growth, and said the company plans to bring on nine hundred thousand more customers through Medicare Advantage this upcoming year.
A protest against racism and President Trump in Washington, DC, resulted in police officers using tear gas, pepper spray pellets, and concussion grenades against demonstrators on May 31, 2020. (photo: Michael S. Williamson/Getty)
A new opinion suggests that “qualified immunity” could become something much closer to absolute immunity from lawsuits.
Though the Court’s decision in Rivas-Villegas v. Cortesluna is fairly straightforward — the justices held that Officer Daniel Rivas-Villegas “did not violate clearly established law” when he briefly used his knee to hold down a suspect who was armed with a knife and who had allegedly threatened his girlfriend and her two children with a chainsaw — it contains two sentences that should alarm police reformers. Both sentences suggest that there is support at least among some of the justices to significantly expand police officers’ immunity from federal civil rights lawsuits.
Government officials accused of violating federal law are entitled to “qualified immunity,” meaning that they cannot be sued unless their conduct violates “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”
In Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), the Court laid out several reasons this doctrine exists. Qualified immunity protects public employees from the “expenses of litigation.” It ensures that the stress of litigation does not divert “official energy from pressing public issues,” or deter “able citizens from acceptance of public office.” At least according to Harlow, qualified immunity also reduces “the danger that fear of being sued will ‘dampen the ardor of all but the most resolute, or the most irresponsible [public officials], in the unflinching discharge of their duties.’”
But qualified immunity is not supposed to be absolute immunity. Again, officers can still be sued for violating clearly established law.
Under existing precedents, an officer may still be sued if their actions clearly violate a legal rule laid out in a Supreme Court decision that has not been overruled. An officer also is not entitled to qualified immunity if their actions clearly violate a legal rule laid out by the federal appeals court (also known as a “circuit” court) that oversees the jurisdiction where the officer is sued.
A passage in the Court’s new decision in Rivas-Villegas, however, floats a radical idea: that officers may be entitled to qualified immunity even if they violate clearly established circuit court precedents. The opinion was unsigned, which is a common practice when the justices dispose of a case in a brief decision without hearing argument on the case, so we don’t know who wrote the opinion or who inserted the two significant sentences into it.
Twice, the Rivas-Villegas opinion uses nearly identical language — “even assuming that Circuit precedent can clearly establish law” and “even assuming that controlling Circuit precedent clearly establishes law” — that implies it is uncertain whether a circuit court decision is sufficient to overcome qualified immunity. These lines open the door to a new regime, where victims of police violence can no longer rely on appellate court decisions to breach an officer’s partial immunity to suit.
At least as recently as Lane v. Franks (2014), a unanimous Supreme Court indicated that circuit court precedent can overcome qualified immunity. Six of the justices who joined Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s unanimous decision in Lane — Sotomayor, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, and Elena Kagan — are still on the Court today.
If the justices do reject the position they took in Lane, that would be a major shift in the law that would significantly expand police officers’ immunity from litigation. That’s because the 13 federal circuit courts collectively handle over 50,000 cases a year, while the Supreme Court normally only decides about 60 to 80 precedent-setting cases in the same period.
If civil rights plaintiffs can no longer rely on circuit court precedent to show that a particular legal rule is “clearly established,” they will lose an enormous body of law that currently can be used to breach qualified immunity.
How disregarding circuit courts will make it harder to hold police accountable
Plaintiffs seeking to hold officers accountable for their illegal conduct already face enormous obstacles. As the Supreme Court held in Mullenix v. Luna (2015), such plaintiffs cannot overcome qualified immunity unless their legal rights are clearly established, and “a clearly established right is one that is ‘sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right.’”
Currently, these plaintiffs can rely on multiple legal authorities, including circuit court precedents, to show that a particular right is “clearly established.” Take away their ability to rely on circuit court decisions and these plaintiffs will lose nearly all of the case law that they can currently point to in order to breach qualified immunity.
The circuit courts, moreover, do not simply hear vastly more cases than the Supreme Court — they also tend to hear a greater diversity of cases. A party that loses in a federal trial court has a right to appeal that decision to federal circuit courts, which are not allowed to turn away cases that they deem to be too easy or too uninteresting.
The Supreme Court, by contrast, has discretion to decide nearly all of the cases that it hears — and it uses this discretion fairly mercilessly. In a typical term, the Court receives between 7,000 and 8,000 petitions asking it to hear a case, but typically grants fewer than 80 of these petitions. One of the most common reasons the Court agrees to hear a case is if the case presents a sufficiently difficult legal question that two circuit courts disagree about the correct answer.
The Supreme Court, in other words, typically hears the hardest cases, while circuit courts hear thousands of much easier cases.
But that means that, if an officer commits a legal violation so obvious that any reasonable judge will agree that the officer violated the constitution or a federal statute, that officer’s case will most likely never be heard by the Supreme Court. Thus, if the Supreme Court were to hold that circuit precedents cannot be used to breach qualified immunity, officers who engage in obviously unconstitutional actions may never be held accountable because there will never be a Supreme Court decision clearly establishing that their actions are illegal.
In addition, many of the Supreme Court’s precedents governing the use of force by police are extraordinarily vague. As the Court acknowledges in Rivas-Villegas, the justices’ seminal excessive force decisions in Tennessee v. Garner (1985) and Graham v. Connor (1989) announce legal standards that “are cast ‘at a high level of generality.’”
Graham, for example, held that the question of when police conduct crosses the line into excessive force “is not capable of precise definition or mechanical application,” and that it involves factors such as “the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”
In the 32 years since Graham was decided, federal circuit courts have placed a fair amount of meat on these bare bones. These lower court decisions make up the bulk of the law answering questions like how severe a crime needs to be to justify the use of additional force, or what is a sufficient threat to officer safety to justify such force.
If civil rights plaintiffs cannot rely on circuit court decisions to answer such questions, countless lawsuits that would otherwise prevail are doomed.
Why a few words in a longer decision should ring alarm bells
In many cases, when the Supreme Court uses the kind of coy language it used in Rivas-Villegas, implying that the correct answer to a legal question is unsettled when it is actually well-established, that is because one or more justices want to unsettle the law.
Such language is a not-too-subtle signal to lawyers that they should start bringing cases making a particular legal argument — in this case, the argument that circuit court precedents cannot be used to breach qualified immunity.
Just in case there is any doubt: Current law indicates that circuit court decisions may be used to breach qualified immunity.
For several years in the 2000s, beginning with the Court’s decision in Saucier v. Katz (2001), the justices required circuit courts to follow a two-step process in cases involving qualified immunity. First, the court was required to determine whether the officer actually violated the law. Then, if the officer’s actions violated the law, the circuit court would determine whether it was “clearly established” that the law was violated.
This procedure, Saucier explained, “permits courts in appropriate cases to elaborate the constitutional right with greater degrees of specificity” — that is, it allowed circuit courts to expand the universe of legal questions with “clearly established” answers, and thus reduce the universe of cases where officers could claim qualified immunity.
Though the Court abandoned this two-step framework in Pearson v. Callahan (2009), which permitted lower courts to consider whether a right is clearly established without determining if that right had actually been violated in a particular case, Pearson largely rooted its holding in concerns about judicial efficiency. Saucier’s two-step process, Pearson explained, “sometimes results in a substantial expenditure of scarce judicial resources on difficult questions that have no effect on the outcome of the case.”
The Court’s 2012 decision in Reichle v. Howards (2012) does include a line suggesting that under certain circumstances, a circuit court decision may not be enough to breach qualified immunity — but the Court clarified two years later, in Lane, that circuit courts may create “clearly established” law. Lane includes an extensive discussion of whether a particular interpretation of the First Amendment was “clearly established” in the 11th Circuit — a discussion that makes no sense unless circuit court decisions are sufficient to overcome such immunity.
So the language in Rivas-Villegas suggesting that circuit court precedents cannot be used to overcome qualified immunity is quite odd. It conflicts with a fairly recent, unanimous Supreme Court decision. And it would leave many victims of excessive police force without recourse.
The odd language in Rivas-Villegas is also a bit surprising because, not that long ago, civil rights lawyers had good reason to hope that the Court might back away from an expansive qualified immunity doctrine. In a 2017 opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas — arguably the Court’s most conservative member — wrote that his Court should “reconsider our qualified immunity jurisprudence.” He followed up that statement with a 2020 opinion arguing that there “likely is no basis for the objective inquiry into clearly established law that our modern cases prescribe.”
Now, however, the Supreme Court is floating a change in course — one that would expand qualified immunity considerably.
Nikolas Cruz plead guilty to killing 17 people at a South Florida high school in 2018. (photo: Getty)
Appearing in Broward County court in a face mask and dark-colored shirt, Cruz listened as Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer guided him through the charges and potential punishment for the massacre that killed 14 students and three faculty members.
“These are capital felonies, and they’re punishable one of two ways, either life in prison or the death penalty,” Scherer said. “Do you understand that you are facing a minimum, best case scenario of life in prison?”
“Yes ma’am,” Cruz responded.
Before accepting the plea, Scherer emphasized that Cruz’s decision would be irreversible, even if he ended up on death row. “You will not be able to change your mind,” she told him.
The judge then read the 34 charges and asked how he wished to plead. “Guilty,” Cruz said after each.
The plea by Cruz, 23, came more than 3½ years after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. His change of plea from not guilty was an abrupt reversal in the case. His attorneys had long acknowledged Cruz’s guilt but said he would formally plead guilty only if prosecutors agreed to let him be sentenced to life in prison. Prosecutors had refused, calling this the type of case that demanded the death penalty.
Cruz spoke in the courtroom Wednesday morning, making his first public remarks about the massacre since he was arrested. “I am very sorry for what I did,” he said during a brief, rambling statement. “I have to live with it every day. … It brings me nightmares, and I can’t live with myself.” Cruz also said he wanted the victims and their relatives to decide his sentence.
The parents of several of the victims attended the hearing via Zoom, and other relatives were in the courtroom. Some shook their heads as Cruz spoke. Lori Alhadeff, whose 14-year-old daughter, Alyssa, was killed in the attack, appeared in a video feed sitting beneath a banner reading, “make our schools safe” and “#LiveForAlyssa.”
Ahead of the hearing, Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed by Cruz, said he planned to spend the day working on a fundraiser in her name. “Today, the murderer will plead guilty. The news will be about that, we will focus on Jaime’s life,” he tweeted Wednesday.
Other parents said Cruz’s plea of guilty offered a small measure of relief.
“We’re all okay with the idea that this will definitely move forward something that has been very slow,” Manuel Oliver, the father of 17-year-old victim Joaquin Oliver, told WSVN 7News before Cruz appeared in court.
“Joaquin is not here, but we are still here,” Manuel said. “So we’ve got to do things for Joaquin, with Joaquin, along with Joaquin. We can save tons of kids.”
A day earlier, on Tuesday, the families of those whom Cruz killed and dozens whom he injured or traumatized reached a $25 million settlement with the school district, according to a lawyer representing some of the families.
Attorney David Brill said the largest chunk of the settlement with Broward County Public Schools would be split among the families of the 14 students and three faculty members killed. The agreement settles 52 of the 53 negligence lawsuits filed against the school district over the shooting. The settlement includes 16 of the 17 people injured in the attack and 19 suffering from PTSD or other conditions years later.
The shooting on Feb. 14, 2018, devastated the community, horrified the country and spurred a nationwide, student-led push for greater gun-control legislation. It also led to other fallout for pivotal figures in the case, including then-Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, who was forced out of office, and Scot Peterson, at the time a sheriff’s deputy and school resource officer who did not confront the attacker and was later charged with neglect.
A state commission investigating the shooting found numerous lapses on the part of the Parkland, Fla., high school as well as responding law enforcement officers, and local and federal authorities have been criticized as failing to act on numerous red flags related to Cruz, including explicit warnings that he could carry out a gun attack at a school.
Cruz, then 19, was arrested after the shooting and indicted on 17 counts of murder in the first degree and 17 counts of attempted murder. With his guilt effectively unchallenged, the main question surrounding the pending trial was whether jurors would think he should be sentenced to death.
Cruz’s plea now means the trial will more quickly reach the penalty phase. For Cruz to be sentenced to death, the jurors must be unanimous in their vote for death.
Despite the defense’s previous contention that he would plead guilty only in exchange for a life sentence, prosecutors said last week that they had not reached any deal in the case and that the matter still would proceed to the penalty phase.
Before the shooting, Cruz had repeatedly drawn the attention of local, state and federal officials. But the numerous calls to authorities, warnings about him as a potential school shooter and recognition that he planned to buy a gun did not prevent the attack, during which terrified children hid under desks and were gunned down inside classrooms.
Cruz last week also changed his plea in a separate case. He was charged about nine months after the school shooting with assaulting a law enforcement officer working as a guard in his jail. Jury selection had begun earlier this month, but on Friday, Cruz reversed course and pleaded guilty on all counts in that case. Cruz and his defense attorney said he was competent when entering the plea.
After the massacre, Marjory Stoneman Douglas students organized the March for Our Lives demonstration in Washington, which drew hundreds of thousands of people from around the country demanding action against gun violence. The rally in March 2018 gave rise to a student-led gun-violence-prevention group of the same name with hundreds of chapters around the country.
Border Patrol apprehend immigrants on near the Southern Border. (photo: John Moore/Getty)
An intelligence cell run by DHS will expand biometric data collection from migrants and monitor social media disinformation that may spur mass migrant movements.
The new cell, to be operational by the end of the month, would supply the agency with “indications and warnings” of possible migrant surges by collecting intelligence from DHS personnel in Central and South America, seek to establish aerial surveillance of trucks and migrant camps massing on borders and increase communication with the U.S. intelligence community and law enforcement agencies in other countries, according to the planning document.
With that information in hand, the officials said, DHS could then allocate resources to areas of the border where surges are expected and counter messages spread by cartels and those on social media who falsely claim that the U.S. will allow all migrants arriving now to stay.
Another senior DHS official, explaining that the U.S. strategy is to counter false messages before migrants embark on dangerous journeys, said, “Once they’re in Mexico, it’s too late.”
The collection and dissemination of intelligence about migration movements used to fall to DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, two current and two former DHS officials said, but the office stopped regularly creating reports about migrant movements during the Trump administration.
The two former officials, who worked in the Trump administration, said that the office was largely weakened during the previous administration but that Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did much of their own intelligence-gathering.
But the two current officials said the Biden administration has had to rebuild the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis so that all parts of DHS get the same reliable information about groups that might be coming to the U.S. border in real time.
“The Trump administration’s almost singular focus on building a border wall as the solution to stopping illegal migration and illegal drugs from coming into the country actually resulted in the opposite. It allowed key intelligence and operational capabilities to atrophy,” one of the officials, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, said on the condition of anonymity.
Senior leaders at CBP, ICE, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis and the Coast Guard met Wednesday to solidify the plans, the officials said.
In the short term, each agency would supply personnel to the cell, operating out of Washington, to gather information about waves of migrants who might soon be making their way to the U.S., the officials said. Part of their mission will be to build and monitor algorithms that can monitor social media chatter about migration movements. Often, immigrants communicate by Facebook and WhatsApp to organize.
More than 20,000 migrants from Haiti are gathered in northern Colombia and Panama, for example, and may soon decide to try to immigrate to the U.S.
In the long term, according to other documents obtained by NBC News, DHS would collect more biometric data about migrants as they cross borders on the way to the U.S. so more is known about who might soon be approaching the U.S. border, the documents say.
The Office of Intelligence and Analysis would also work with countries like Colombia, Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico to enter into agreements that would allow for more intelligence, surveillance and recognizance, according to the copy of the plans, significantly increasing the amount of both human and signals intelligence DHS gathers in the region.
The goal is to “institutionalize” the intelligence-gathering systems so future administrations cannot dismantle them, the officials said.
A DHS spokesperson confirmed the plans to NBC News. “DHS recently developed a new analytic effort that combines law enforcement and intelligence resources to improve our ability to operationally prepare for large numbers of migrants that may arrive along the southwest border. This critical initiative — which is led by the Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the United States Coast Guard — will strengthen existing efforts such as Operational Sentinel that counter transnational criminal organizations, including those that smuggle illicit narcotics and migrants across the border.”
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who has sued the Biden administration over its policies that keep asylum-seekers from entering the country, said increasing surveillance of immigrants is a step in the wrong direction.
“Rather than creating a surveillance system to deter migrants seeking protection, the administration ought to focus on complying with its legal and moral obligation to provide desperate asylum-seekers with a hearing,” Gelernt said.
Iowa Democratic Party chair Ross Wilburn. (photo: Kelsey Kremer/AP)
“The voicemails include very explicit language. Every other word was the N-word,” said Iowa Democratic Party chair Ross Wilburn.
Wilburn, the first Black Democratic Party chairman in the state, wrote an op-ed in the Des Moines Register that blasted Republicans for their fealty to Trump ahead of Trump’s visit to Iowa on Oct. 9. After its publication, he says he received two threatening phone calls and an email that used racist language and made specific threats.
“The voicemails include very explicit language. Every other word was the ‘n-word,’” he told the Des Moines Register.
“What stood out this time was the language that was used — specifically, the very direct statement about lynching,” Wilburn said. “And I get angry about that — that people feel that they can come in and make you feel less than human, subhuman, with that type of reference to lynching. There's the history behind that and trying to intimidate Blacks, intimidate African Americans.”
Wilburn reported the calls to the police, who told the Des Moines Register that they’re investigating the threats.
The alleged threats against Wilburn are the latest in a long string of politically motivated violent threats from the right in recent years, stirred up by Trump’s bellicose lies that the election was stolen from him in 2020.
Local, nonpartisan election workers faced a spate of death threats in the immediate aftermath of the election, as Trump lied that the election had been rigged against him. Those threats have continued in recent months. And threats of violence against members of Congress have only increased in the wake of the pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
U.S. Capitol Police recorded more than 4,100 threats against members of Congress in just the first three months of 2021. That’s more than four times the total number of threats received in all of 2016. If that pace keeps up, it’ll double the number of threats they recorded in 2020. Many members of Congress have responded by hiring private security, a step that was almost unheard-of in the past.
And racially and religiously motivated right-wing violence has risen sharply in the Trump era as well, from the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” riot in 2017 to the murder of seven people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 to the massacre of 21 Latinos at an El Paso Walmart in 2019. ABC News found 54 separate cases where Trump was specifically invoked in cases of violence and assaults in mid-2020.
Angry political attacks have become increasingly commonplace, and politicians of all stripes face them. But Wilburn, who’s also a state representative, said these attacks went far beyond the normal angry messages he gets, and that he felt it necessary to report these specific messages because of the “intensity” of the language used.
“I'm concerned about this type of escalation of comments, including violent references, that are happening, even down to some of the school board meetings and elections that are coming up,” Wilburn told the Des Moines Register.
And he blamed Trump.
”I don’t think there's any question that he was a catalyst during his administration and since then, for how hateful rhetoric can translate into serious threats against people of color,” Wilburn said.
Aftermath of a Saudi bombing in Yemen. (photo: Getty)
London-based Guernica 37 legal team argues key figures in Saudi Arabia, UAE were complicit in crimes against humanity.
The London-based Guernica 37 legal team submitted their dossier to the capital’s Metropolitan Police Service and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) on Wednesday.
Toby Cadman, the barrister leading the complaint, said 22 high-ranking Saudi and Emirati political and military officials are alleged to have been involved in crimes against humanity.
The dossier calls for the individuals to be immediately arrested should they enter the UK, a close political ally of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.
The lawyers have not released the list of names.
“We are talking about the most heinous crimes and we don’t believe there is any immunity from them,” Cadman told UK newspaper The Guardian.
Universal jurisdiction
Guernica 37 is focusing on three events including a 2018 air attack on a school bus in northern Yemen, which killed at least 26 children, and a 2016 aerial bombing of a funeral in the capital, Sanaa, that killed140 people.
The other concerns the alleged torture and murder of civilians in Aden, a strategically important port city in southern Yemen, by Colombian mercenaries under the command of a US private military company contracted to the UAE.
As evidence, the group cited accounts from survivors of the three incidents and their relatives. Their file also features testimony from the families of those killed in the events.
Cadman said the team was relying on universal jurisdiction under UK law to bring forward their case. The principle ensures that individuals who are guilty of certain offences, including war crimes and torture, can be prosecuted in UK courts regardless of where their crimes took place.
“Under UK law there is no requirement for the crimes to be committed on UK territory or there to be UK victims or UK defendants,” he said.
‘Relentless suffering and pain’
Yemen has been convulsed by war since 2014, when the Iran-aligned Houthi rebel group seized large swaths of the country, including Sanaa, forcing the internationally recognised government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to flee.
Fighting escalated in March 2015, when a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and featuring the UAE intervened in an attempt to restore Hadi’s administration.
In the years since, the conflict has largely ground into deadlock. The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people and spawned what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Both sides have been accused of committing war crimes.
Global rights campaigners praised Guernica 37’s move to hold the warring parties accountable for the alleged offences.
“Yemen’s battered population has been subjected to more than seven years of relentless suffering and pain,” Oliver Feeley-Sprague, Amnesty UK’s arms programme director, told UK newspaper The i.
“Anything which gets us a step closer to holding those responsible for war crimes in Yemen to account is to be strongly welcomed.”
Rescue crews assist residents in Port Arthur, Texas on Sept. 1 2017 after Hurricane Harvey left a trail of devastation. Climate change worsens extreme weather events. (photo: Emily Kask/Getty)
A review of scientific literature, published in Environmental Research Letters, found just 28 papers linked to climate skepticism in its trawl of more than 88,000.
The findings support the IPCC's declaration in August that the science of human influence on the heating atmosphere is "unequivocal," and refute the concerted disinformation campaign by fossil fuel interests seeking to sow doubt and uncertainty about their products' causation of the crisis — the impacts of which are visible around the world.
A UN report released Tuesday warned all of Africa's glaciers could vanish in the next two decades. Africa is responsible for just 4% of greenhouse gas pollution, but the continent and its people are exceptionally vulnerable to the ravages of the climate crisis. Climate change accelerates glacier melt, intensifies droughts, and worsens extreme precipitation events like those that cause flash flooding.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday: the governor of California expanded a drought emergency to cover the entire state; Indian officials said flooding caused by torrential rain has killed at least 22 people in Uttarakhand state; and a separate UN report said climate change exacerbated the worst flooding to hit South Sudan in almost 60 years.
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