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Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman warns the Republican Party is laying the groundwork to steal the 2022 midterms and future elections through a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression and election subversion, that together pose a mortal threat to voting rights in the United States. Republicans, many of whom are election deniers, are campaigning for positions that hold immense oversight over the election process. “What’s really new here are these efforts to take over how votes are counted,” says Berman. “That is the ultimate voter suppression method, because if you’re not able to rig the election on the front end, you can throw out votes on that back end.”
Biden heads to Capitol Hill two days after he gave a major speech on voting rights in Atlanta, Georgia. On Wednesday, Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted Biden’s remarks.
MINORITY LEADER MITCH McCONNELL: Twelve months ago, this president said disagreement must not lead to disunion. Ah, but yesterday he invoked the bloody disunion of the Civil War — the Civil War — to demonize Americans who disagree with him. He compared — listen to this — a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors. How profoundly, profoundly unpresidential.
AMY GOODMAN: Democrats are increasingly concerned that Republicans will be able to successfully steal future elections, both on the national and state level, if major voting rights legislation is not immediately passed. During his speech in Atlanta, President Biden made reference to efforts by Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn the 2020 election.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We’re here today to stand against the forces in America that value power over principle, forces that attempted a coup — a coup against the legally expressed will of the American people — by sowing doubt, inventing charges of fraud and seeking to steal the 2020 election from the people.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Ari Berman, a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering voting rights. He’s the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. His new piece, out just today, “The Coming Coup: How Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork to Steal Future Elections.”
Ari, I want to start off by talking about what this maneuver is — very complex, I’m sure very hard for people to understand — how the Democrats try to plan to get these bills on the floor and voted on in the Senate.
ARI BERMAN: Good morning, Amy.
Well, the plan is that the House is taking a bill, and they are putting the two voting rights bills — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — in what’s essentially a shell bill. They are going to pass that today and send it to the Senate. And that will allow the Senate to immediately debate the bill without needing 60 votes to get it to the floor. They will still need 60 votes to pass the bill if they don’t reform the filibuster, but this will allow at least the Senate to immediately begin debating the bill, probably Friday or Saturday, and then set up a vote on these bills, and also potentially changing the Senate rules, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
AMY GOODMAN: Which, of course, is Monday. I mean, this is really unusual. It’s a bill completely unrelated, something to do with NASA, that the House will pass. Then they will remove the text of that and put the two bills into it, and it’s called a message, that will be sent to the Senate, as they do this. So, then, what has to happen next? And why are Manchin and Sinema key at the point in the Senate?
ARI BERMAN: Yeah, and it’s important to remember, Amy, these bills have already passed the House. So it’s not like the House hasn’t taken up the Freedom to Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act already. They just have to do this message bill to get it to the Senate to essentially avoid 60 votes on debate. That’s the only way that Schumer will be able to then have a debate on the bills themselves and on the rules changes.
Manchin and Sinema are key because there’s essentially 48 votes for changing the Senate rules to pass voting rights legislation, but they’re two votes short, and the two votes that are short are Manchin and Sinema. And Democrats have been working feverishly, both publicly and behind the scenes, to get Manchin and Sinema to support the rules changes, but they’re not there yet. It’s important to remember, this voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, this is Joe Manchin’s bill. This is not like Build Back Better, where he doesn’t support the bill. He supports these bills. The question is: Is he willing to change the rules to pass them? And as of now, the answer is no.
AMY GOODMAN: During his speech on Tuesday in Atlanta, President Biden made reference to Strom Thurmond, the longtime segregationist senator who served in the Senate for nearly half a century.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: In 2006, the Voting Rights Act passed 390 to 33 in the House of Representatives and 98 to 0 in the Senate, with votes from 16 current sitting Republicans in this United States Senate. Sixteen of them voted to extend it. The last year I was chairman, as some of my friends sitting down here will tell you, Strom Thurmond voted to extend the Voting Rights Act. Strom Thurmond. … Think about that. The man who led the longest — one of the longest filibusters in history in the United States Senate in 1957 against the Voting [sic] Rights Act, the man who led and sided with the old Southern bulls in the United States Senate to perpetuate segregation in this nation — even Strom Thurmond came to support voting rights. But Republicans today can’t and won’t. Not a single Republican has displayed the courage to stand up to a defeated president to protect America’s right to vote. Not one. Not one.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Ari Berman, it looks like President Biden was trying to cut through all the bureaucracy, as they talk about filibusters and everything else, and just say, “Which side are you on?” Right? Strom Thurmond or John Lewis? Are you on the side of Jefferson Davis or Abraham Lincoln?
ARI BERMAN: Exactly, Amy. He was trying to frame the fight for voting rights in moral terms, much like Lyndon Johnson did when he introduced the Voting Rights Act in 1965, saying, “This is a defining moment in American history, and you have to pick a side.” You can’t just praise Martin Luther King on Martin Luther King Day; you have to live the values that Martin Luther King fought for — namely, the values of the right to vote, which Martin Luther King called “civil right number one.”
And I thought it was really interesting what the president said about Republicans previously supporting voting rights, because the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized four times, and every reauthorization was signed by a Republican president and supported by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress. Now, that didn’t mean every Republicans like the Voting Rights Act. Lots of GOP presidents, like Nixon and Reagan, didn’t want to sign a reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. But there was such a strong bipartisan consensus for these bills that Republicans had no choice but to support them. And that’s really evaporated. And obviously, so much of the attention has been on the Democrats and been on Manchin and Sinema to use their power to pass these bills, but Republicans have sort of gotten a free pass in terms of people really saying, “How come you reauthorized the Voting Rights Act overwhelmingly in 2006 — 390 to 33 in the House, 98 to 0 in the Senate — Mitch McConnell led the effort to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act — and just two decades later, you are completely opposing a bill that you basically supported not too long ago?”
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go broader, with your piece that was just released as we went to air, “The Coming Coup: How Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork to Steal Future Elections.” You go beyond the issue of actually casting the ballot and how difficult that is — and you can lay that out — around the country, as well, increasingly, 19 states passing, what, more than 30 laws to restrict voting, but then the issue, for example, of gerrymandering and others.
ARI BERMAN: That’s right. I think the big trend over the last year has been the Republican Party’s single-minded focus on instituting an insurrection through other means. They failed to overturn the 2020 election, so they’re doing everything they can to rig and steal future elections through a toxic combination of voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering and election subversion. And they’re really trying to take over every aspect of the voting process. They’ve passed 34 new laws in 19 states making it harder to vote, so they’re making it harder to cast a ballot. They’ve passed all of these extreme gerrymandered maps in places like Texas and Georgia, which entrench the power of anti-democratic politicians. And then they’ve added all of these new election subversion laws that give “Stop the Steal” Republicans unprecedented power in states like Georgia over how elections are run and how votes are counted. And so they’re really trying to take over every aspect of the election process to essentially try to succeed in 2022 and 2024 where they failed in 2020.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Lucy McBath, how you open your piece, a congressmember who we had on for years beforehand, after her son was murdered by a white man.
ARI BERMAN: I think this is really telling. Lucy McBath is a Black member of Congress from Georgia. She ran for the House in Georgia after her son, Jordan Davis, was murdered by a white man. Her victory in 2018 really opened the doors for the victories of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff two years later. And what Republicans did is they gerrymandered her out of her congressional district. She represents a metro Atlanta area that has become a lot more diverse, a lot more Democratic. And they drew this district to go all the way up to the Appalachian Mountains, and basically took out the most diverse and Democratic parts of her district and added in the most white and conservative parts of the state.
And so, what happened in Georgia is that all of the demographic change was from communities of color, who increasingly lean Democratic. But the maps themselves reduced representation for communities of color, reduced representation for Democrats and targeted Black members of Congress like Lucy McBath. And that is a form of election rigging, because if you can choose who your electorate is, then the elections themselves become essentially meaningless. So, gerrymandering is one of the many tactics Republicans are using to consolidate power going into the midterm elections.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the victory against gerrymandering in Ohio that just happened.
ARI BERMAN: Well, this was really significant because Ohio Republicans drew these flagrantly undemocratic maps where there was a bipartisan constitutional amendment passed by the voters in 2018 to rein in partisan gerrymandering, and then Republicans essentially hijacked this redistricting commission to draw these extreme gerrymandered maps that go exactly against what the voters wanted. And the Ohio Supreme Court struck it down, with one of the Republican judges siding with the Democrats and basically saying that the Legislature not just needs to redraw these maps, but that in the future voters might want to consider taking away the power of politicians to be able to draw their districts in the first place.
So, this was a significant victory, but it’s going to be very hard to uphold these maps in most states. Ohio has a moderate state Supreme Court. North Carolina has a moderate state Supreme Court. But in Texas, in Georgia, in Florida, in other key states, the state supreme courts have moved far to the right. And the federal courts, because of the Supreme Court, have said, “We can’t even review partisan gerrymandering.” So it’s going to be very difficult to fight gerrymandering through the courts writ large.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about something that didn’t get a heck of a lot of attention, the Cyber Ninjas, the company that led that partisan review of the 2020 ballots in Arizona, closing down following a scathing report by election officials and the threat of $50,000 fines a day, the report rebutting almost every claim this company made?
ARI BERMAN: Well, yeah, the entire audit in Arizona was a complete —
AMY GOODMAN: It cost millions.
ARI BERMAN: It cost millions of dollars in taxpayer money. At the end of the day, they reaffirmed Joe Biden’s victory, so they weren’t actually able to find any of the evidence of fraud. But I think they accomplished their job, in the sense that after this review Republicans were even more skeptical of the validity of the 2020 election, compared to less skeptical. So, just by airing all these conspiracy theories, they made the Republican Party more conspiratorial. And these same kind of, quote-unquote, “audits” are happening in other states, like in Wisconsin, where a very radically conservative state Supreme Court justice is threatening to jail election officials, threatening to subpoena the mayors of the largest cities, threatening to disband the state’s election commission.
So, it’s very scary, what’s happening here. And I think what’s really new here is all of the efforts to subvert fair elections. We’ve seen voter suppression before. We’ve seen gerrymandering before. It’s gotten worse, but we’ve seen it before. What’s really new here are these efforts to take over how votes are counted. And that is the ultimate voter suppression method, because if you’re not able to rig the election on the front end, you can throw out votes on the back end. And that is a very, very scary prospect for democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: For example, like in Arizona, Republicans stripped the Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs of the power to defend state election laws, and transferred that authority to the Republican attorney general — but only through the 2022 election, just in case the partisan composition of the offices change. I mean, it is truly astounding. If you could comment on that and another key point of your piece, being that Trump and his allies are aggressively recruiting “Stop the Steal”-inspired candidates to take over other key election positions, like secretary of state, and also fiercely intimidating, going after election workers all over the country?
ARI BERMAN: That’s absolutely right, Amy. What we’ve seen is that both Democrats and Republicans who defended the integrity of the 2020 election have been purged from their positions, whether it’s taking away the power of the Arizona secretary of state to defend election lawsuits or removing the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, who stood up to Donald Trump, removing him as chair and voting member of the State Election Board. And The Washington Post had recent article finding that 163 Republicans who have amplified the big lie are running for statewide positions with authority over elections, so positions like gubernatorial races, attorney general races, secretary of state races. And the Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me this is akin to giving a robber a key to the bank. You are having people who say falsely the election was stolen running to oversee how elections are run.
And so, this is both a legal mechanism, in that they’re changing the laws in many states to make it easier to subvert elections, but it’s also a political dynamic, in that people who are election deniers are running to take over election operations in all of these key states. And when they get this power, who knows what they will do with it? Because I believe if you are willing to overturn the 2020 election for Trump, you are very likely going to be willing to overturn the 2022 and 2024 election for Republican candidates if it doesn’t go in your favor.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Ari, if the bills are passed, the voting legislation in the Senate, could the U.S. Supreme Court overrule them? I mean, this is the Roberts court, and John Roberts has been opposed to voting rights legislation throughout his career.
ARI BERMAN: Absolutely, it’s possible the Supreme Court could strike down these laws. But I think it’s important to remember that Congress has authority, under both the 15th Amendment and also under the core guarantees of the Constitution, to write the rules of federal elections. So Congress has the power to pass these bills. Could the Supreme Court strike them down? Absolutely. The Supreme Court can clearly do whatever it wants at this point. It’s gone so far.
But I have to say it’s very ironic that Mitch McConnell wants there to be 60 votes to protect voting rights in the U.S. Senate, but he was able to put three justices on the Supreme Court for Donald Trump to take away voting rights with just 51 votes. So there’s a fundamental asymmetry here that Republicans have been able to take away voting rights at both the state level and the federal level with 51 votes, but they want Democrats to have 60 votes to be able to protect voting rights in the U.S. Senate. And that’s the fundamental asymmetry that has to change here.
A poll worker sorts vote-by-mail ballots. (photo: Getty Images)
Texas Republicans last year enacted new identification requirements for voting by mail as part of sweeping legislation that further restricted the state’s voting process and narrowed local control of elections.
Election officials in some of the state’s largest counties are rejecting an alarming number of mail-in applications because they don’t meet the state’s new identification requirements. Some applications are being rejected because of a mismatch between the new identification requirements and the data the state has on file to verify voters.
Under Texas’ new voting law, absentee voters must include their driver’s license number or state ID number or, if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social Security number on their applications. If they don’t have those IDs, voters can indicate they have not been issued that identification. Counties must match those numbers against the information in an individual’s voter file to approve them for a mail-in ballot.
In Harris County, 208 applications — roughly 16% of the 1,276 applications received so far — have been rejected based on the new rules. That includes 137 applications on which voters had not filled out the new ID requirements and 71 applications that included an ID number that wasn’t in the voter’s record.
In Travis County, officials said they’ve rejected about half of the roughly 700 applications they’ve received so far, with the “vast majority” of rejections based on the new voting law.
In Bexar County, officials have rejected 200 applications on which the ID section was not filled out. Another 125 were rejected because the voter had provided their driver’s license number on the application, but that number was not in their voter record.
“It’s disturbing that our senior citizens who have relished and embraced voting by mail are now having to jump through some hoops, and it’s upsetting when we have to send a rejection letter [when] we can see they’ve voted with us by mail for years,” said Jacque Callanen, the Bexar County election administrator.
Texas has strict rules outlining who can receive a paper ballot that can be filled out at home and returned in the mail or dropped off in person on Election Day. Only voters who are 65 or older automatically qualify. Otherwise, voters must qualify under a limited set of reasons for needing a mail-in ballot. Those include being absent from the county during the election period or a disability or illness that would keep them from voting in person without needing help or that makes a trip to the polls risky to their health.
Throughout last year’s protracted debate over the new voting law, state lawmakers were warned about potential issues that could arise from the new ID matching requirements, in part because the state does not have both a driver’s license and Social Security number for all of the roughly 17 million Texans on the voter rolls. Voters are not required to provide both numbers when they register to vote.
Last summer, the Texas secretary of state’s office indicated that 2,045,419 registered voters lacked one of the two numbers in their voter file despite the office’s efforts to backfill that information in the state’s voter rolls. Another 266,661 voters didn’t have either number on file.
Those numbers have since dropped. As of Dec. 20, 702,257 voters had only one number on file, while 106,911 didn’t have either, according to updated figures provided by the Texas secretary of state’s office.
Meanwhile, 493,823 registered voters didn’t have a driver’s license on file, which is the first number voters are asked to provide on both applications to register to vote and applications to vote by mail.
The new law is also tripping up voters who may be unaware of the new ID requirements. Callanen said she had to reject 30 voters who submitted an outdated application form that didn’t include the new ID field. Election officials in Williamson County, which has processed a total of 305 applications to vote by mail, said the same issue plagued a chunk of the applications that they rejected.
The sources of the outdated applications are unclear. While the Legislature banned county election officials from proactively sending out applications to vote by mail, even to voters who automatically qualify, voters can still receive unsolicited applications from campaigns and political parties.
Republican state lawmakers wrote the new ID requirements into sweeping legislation, known as Senate Bill 1, that further restricted the state’s voting process and narrowed local control of elections. Joining a broader legislative push to ratchet up voting rules across the country, Texas Republicans billed the proposals contained in SB 1 as an effort to safeguard elections from fraud, despite no evidence that it occurs on a widespread scale.
Warning it would raise new barriers to voting, SB 1 was denounced by advocates for voters with disabilities, voter advocacy groups and civil rights organizations with histories of fighting laws that could harm voters of color. It also prompted Democrats to flee the state last summer to delay consideration of the legislation, leaving the Texas House without enough members to conduct business for weeks. The wide-ranging law also faces several federal lawsuits.
Voters whose applications are rejected because of the ID requirements are supposed to have an opportunity to fix the issue. Building on Democratic proposals, the new voting law also created a new correction process for mail-in voting, including errors on applications. That process begins when county officials provide voters with a notice that their application was rejected and information on how to correct the defect, including through a new online ballot tracker.
A spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office said it would be providing “specific guidance to the counties in the near future to address any outstanding questions about this process.”
But the window for corrections is narrowing. County officials can receive applications to vote by mail until Feb. 18, but it takes time to process applications and prepare materials to inform voters of a rejection.
In Bexar County, Callanen is budgeting to hire two temporary workers just to handle processing rejections when the “deluge” of applications hits closer to the deadline.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Getty Images)
Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sometimes like to make a show of their reasonableness, did join the liberals in a separate case heard the same day, upholding the administration’s vaccine mandate for health-care workers.
Technically, the cases turned on the question of whether a particular branch of the federal government had authority to impose these requirements in a pandemic that has, as the dissenters in the broader workplace case plainly point out, “killed almost 1 million Americans and hospitalized almost 4 million.” The health-care-worker case was easier to make in the eyes of Roberts and Kavanaugh: Medicaid and Medicare funding gives the government the power to set conditions, and their patients are uniquely vulnerable.
In the case regulating all workplaces over 100 employees, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, has the ability to issue an emergency standard when employees are “exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or from new hazards,” which sounds a lot like COVID-19. All of the conservative justices insist that what OSHA imposed in response is a “vaccine mandate,” even though there are plenty of ways to get out of it: testing negative weekly; working from home, alone, or outdoors; even claiming religious or medical exemptions. They say the rule is unprecedented, “a significant encroachment into the lives — and health — of a vast number of employees.” Then again, so is the pandemic.
They point out you can also get COVID-19 somewhere else, although with a few exceptions, like school for students, they are places where people have a choice to go. As the dissenters note, at work, “individuals have little control, and therefore little capacity to mitigate risk.” But the conservative majority shows more concern for the supposed “billions of dollars in unrecoverable compliance costs” and “hundreds of thousands of employees” who they say will quit — a number that has shrunk wherever mandates are already in place and reality has interfered — than for the workers inhaling the aerosols of untested, unvaccinated colleagues in close quarters. Or, for that matter, the systems that are buckling under providing their care.
The dissents in each case tell a story of a Court urgently struggling not just with the question of federal power in a pandemic, but with the authority of the Court itself and who, exactly, has become “untethered” in the exercise of power.
“And then, there is this Court. Its Members are elected by, and accountable to, no one,” write Justices Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer in their joint dissent to the OSHA case. (I’m not the only one who thinks it sounds a lot like the now-oft-exasperated Kagan wrote it.) They add, “When we are wise, we know enough to defer on matters like this one. When we are wise, we know not to displace the judgments of experts, acting within the sphere Congress marked out and under Presidential control, to deal with emergency conditions. Today, we are not wise.”
Meanwhile, in Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent on the health-care case, joined by Justices Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Samuel Alito, it is the government that has vastly overreached. To require two or three quick shots to reduce one’s chance of infection and infectiousness, of disease and death, is actually to “compel millions of healthcare workers to undergo an unwanted medical procedure,” and “to force healthcare workers, by coercing their employers, to undergo a medical procedure they do not want and cannot undo.”
For those of us bracing ourselves for the Court’s all-but-certain rollback of abortion rights — the outright denial of a much-wanted medical procedure in favor of an infinitely more coercive, invasive, and life-changing alternative, forcing someone to stay pregnant and give birth — this was sick irony. As law professor Liz Sepper pointed out, Barrett explicitly made the analogy during the court’s recent abortion arguments, casually referring to forced pregnancy as “an infringement on bodily autonomy, you know, which we have in other contexts, like vaccines.” We haven’t yet been treated to Barrett’s rationale for why the state’s encroachment on pregnant people is the acceptable tradeoff for life, whereas vaccines are the overreach.
The pandemic, we are told, will not last forever. But as today’s opinions make clear, the reordering of authorities and priorities, the brazenness of what the Court has done and seems ready to soon do, will long remain.
Former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke is set to be released a little more than 39 months after being sent to prison for the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald. (photo: Antonio Perez/AP)
The Chicago Sun Times reports that Van Dyke's release is set for Feb. 3,
Van Dyke was sentenced in 2018 after being found guilty of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery in the October 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
Van Dyke was eligible to take time off his prison term with credit for good behavior because he was convicted of second-degree murder, the Sun Times reported.
McDonald's shooting was captured on video, which was released about a year after the killing.
The dashcam video showed McDonald walking away from Van Dyke just before the officer, who is white, shot 16 times at McDonald.
The shooting and the eventual release of the video led to protests in the streets of Chicago and a reckoning for the city's police department. The Justice Department issued a report in 2017 that called for a comprehensive reform of a department it accused of excessive force and civil rights violations.
Immigrants in an ICE detention center. (photo: Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty Images)
On Thursday, 1,766 immigrants were being monitored or isolated at ICE detention facilities due to confirmed coronavirus infections, a more than sixfold jump from January 3, when there were 285 active cases, government statistics show.
The number of detainees with active COVID-19 cases represents 8% of the 22,000 immigrants ICE is currently holding in its network of 200 detention centers, county jails and for-profit prisons.
Since the outset of the pandemic, more than 32,000 immigrants have tested positive for the coronavirus while in ICE custody, according to agency data. ICE has so far reported 11 coronavirus-related deaths of detainees.
The recent surge in COVID cases at ICE detention sites comes amid the rapid nationwide spread of the Omicron variant, which has been found to be more transmissible than other strains of the virus.
A senior ICE official who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity defended the agency's pandemic response, saying it expected an increase in infections due to the Omicron variant. The official noted that ICE requires immigrants to undergo testing and a 14-day quarantine upon entering a detention facility.
In a statement Friday, ICE said the coronavirus positivity rate in some of its detention facilities "is lower — in some spots significantly lower — than the local community because of the stringent testing and quarantine protocols in place."
But the sharp increase in infections has renewed concerns about ICE's detainee vaccination campaign, a significant vaccine refusal rate, frequent facility-to-facility transfers and the agency's decision to keep thousands of immigrants with underlying medical conditions in detention.
According to unpublished ICE data obtained by CBS News, 48,246 detainees have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. As of January 5, 671 immigrants in ICE custody had received a booster shot, which the agency said it began to offer in late November.
"Booster dose distribution is low because the average length of stay for individuals in ICE custody is about a month — well below the eligibility requirement," the agency said. "For instance, if an individual receives their primary vaccination while in ICE custody, most individuals are no longer in ICE custody when they become eligible to receive a booster 2-6 months later."
While the number of ICE detainees who have received a vaccine has more than doubled since August 2021, the agency did not say how many immigrants currently in custody are vaccinated.
The 48,246 individuals who have received a coronavirus vaccine in detention also represent only one-third of 141,000 immigrants who have entered ICE custody after July 2021, when the agency received its first federal allocation of vaccines for detainees, according to an analysis of government data.
Prior to July 2021, ICE relied on state and local vaccine allocations to vaccinate a limited number of immigrants in its custody, a strategy that was strongly criticized by advocates and public health experts.
According to unpublished ICE records, 37.6% of immigrants who have been offered the vaccine by the agency have declined it.
Citing accounts from detainees, public health experts and lawyers said distrust of the government, misinformation, lack of educational materials and broader societal vaccine hesitancy could be reasons that lead immigrants to rebuff vaccination while in U.S. custody.
"Making vaccines available to detainees is essential but it must be coupled with effective education and counseling to overcome skepticism and confusion regarding COVID and vaccinations," Scott Allen, a doctor who specializes in the medical treatment of migrants in U.S. custody, told CBS News.
Allen, who also advises the Department of Homeland Security on detention conditions, added: "As for anyone else, a decision to accept or decline a vaccination involves informed consent, so health education and individual counseling has to be part of the strategy to increase vaccination uptake among detainees."
The senior ICE official said the agency has translated vaccination consent forms into Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese and Punjabi.
"U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) remains committed to applying CDC guidance and providing vaccine education that ensures those in our care and custody can make an informed choice during this global pandemic," the agency said in a statement.
Lawyers across the country have also been urging ICE to release immigrants with medical conditions. Several attorneys reported that clients with conditions ranging from inflammatory bowel syndrome and diabetes to post-traumatic stress disorder have been denied release because of criminal histories.
According to government records provided to lawyers in a federal court case, there were 5,200 immigrants in ICE detention as of late December whose health issues or age placed them at higher risk of getting severely ill or dying if they contracted the coronavirus.
"The number of people who are medically vulnerable in ICE custody is shocking," Eunice Cho, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who focuses on detention issues, told CBS News. "The Biden administration needs to take a very quick and hard look at who they are detaining and be very aggressive about making sure they are releasing people to the safety of their homes."
The senior ICE official noted the agency has released thousands of at-risk detainees because of its own pandemic-era policies and federal court orders. ICE also considers whether detained immigrants could pose a threat to "public safety" if released, the official added.
As of Thursday, the official said, there were no coronavirus-related hospitalizations of immigrants detained at the 21 detention facilities directly serviced by ICE Health Service Corps, the agency's medical arm. The official did not provide hospitalization data for the scores of other detention facilities used by ICE.
Unlike the federal or state prison systems, ICE detention is, legally, a civil procedure designed to ensure the government has custody over noncitizens it seeks to deport because of immigration violations.
Individuals in ICE detention include migrants who recently crossed the southern border, asylum-seekers, permanent residents convicted of crimes that render them deportable and other noncitizens, including unauthorized immigrants arrested because of criminal records.
Roughly 76% of the 22,000 immigrants currently detained by ICE do not have criminal records and many of them were transferred from U.S. border custody, government figures show. The remaining 24% have criminal convictions or pending charges.
Departing from broader Trump-era deportation priorities, the Biden administration has sought to narrow the scope of ICE arrests, instructing agents to focus on detaining border-crossers, noncitizens convicted of serious crimes and immigrants deemed to threaten national security.
Detention conditions and medical services at ICE facilities have been heavily criticized during and before the pandemic, including by government watchdogs. A September 2021 report by the DHS Inspector General found that inspected ICE detention facilities did not follow all coronavirus mitigation protocols.
Unlike ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has not been systematically providing coronavirus testing or vaccination to migrants in its custody during the pandemic, arguing that its detention facilities are designed for short-term custody.
CBP has instead relied on non-profit groups to test migrants it releases. It was not until last month that the agency started offering vaccines to a limited number of migrants enrolled in the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a Trump-era policy that requires them to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings
"COVID-19 vaccination for migrants in CBP custody is only being provided to MPP enrollees and is administered by Department of Health and Human Services contract staff," the agency said in a statement.
Citing the "unprecedented" spread of the Omicron variant, Allen, the public health expert, urged the government to take several steps to protect migrants in its custody.
"The government absolutely has a responsibility to protect individuals it detains, as well as staff and surrounding communities, from a serious threat such as COVID by using all reasonable tools including education, population reduction, testing, masks, and vaccinations including boosters," he said.
Achi Mayan survivors of Guatemala's civil war gather on the steps of the Supreme Court. (photo: Jeff Abbott/Al Jazeera)
Forty years after the heinous state-sponsored crimes were committed, Maya Achi women get their day in court.
The accused—all former members of the Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC), paramilitaries created by the Guatemalan army—likely did not imagine that the women survivors would successfully recuse that judge. Nor could they have known that another former PAC member, the brother of one of the six, would soon be deported to Guatemala from the United States to face his own criminal proceedings. After a series of hearings in 2021, a new judge, Miguel Ángel Gálvez, ruled that there was sufficient evidence to send that man and three of those freed in 2019 to trial. He later added a fifth man who had previously been a fugitive.
The incredible tenacity of the Maya Achi women survivors, who began seeking justice more than a decade ago, and the steadfast support of their legal representatives—Indigenous women lawyers Gloria Reyes, Lucía Xiloj, and Haydeé Valey—made it possible for their case to be heard in court today. The presiding judge is Yassmín Barrios, known internationally for her fierce independence and her role in previous high-profile cases, including the 2013 genocide trial against former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt and the 2016 Sepur Zarco trial, the first to address wartime sexual violence committed by the Guatemalan army.
Now, the Maya Achi sexual violence case is a striking reminder that while the old guard military and their oligarchic allies might be trying to block the sun with one finger—to use a well-known Latin American saying—the light still finds a way to shine through.
A Long Search for Justice
The Rabinal Legal Clinic (ABJP) began to collect testimonies from surviving victims of army massacres in the village of Chichupac and surrounding communities in the early 2000s. Given the difficulties of pursing prosecutions in Guatemala, in 2007 ABJP lawyers filed a complaint on behalf of the victims before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
“Clear patterns began to emerge,” recalls lawyer Haydeé Valey, who has been accompanying women survivors since 2011. “The women were detained during market days, when they went to sell their surplus crops and livestock. The PACs accused them of being guerrillas. They were then detained and taken to the Rabinal military detachment, where they were interrogated about weapons, about their husbands, about guerrilla activity, and then they were gang raped.”
They would rape women and girls, with no regard for their age.Sometimes women were raped in their homes amid military operations carried out by soldiers and the PACs. “They would go to the women’s homes and ask for their husbands,” says Valey. “They would rape women and girls, with no regard for their age.” The military also pursued and attempted to capture the surviving victims who fled to the mountains. “Several women were captured, raped, and then taken to the military detachment,” she says, where they were raped again and again.
The ABJP lawyers uncovered another disturbing pattern. Many families who had taken refuge in the mountains, where they endured harsh living conditions and ongoing repression, decided to avail themselves of the 1982 amnesty for “political and common crimes” decreed by military dictator Ríos Montt. However, once in government custody in the military detachment, the women were separated from their families and sexually assaulted.
As in the Sepur Zarco case, the Maya Achi women were also subjected to a system of forced labor. According to Valey, “after the massacres, when the infamous model villages were set up, the women were forced to prepare food for the PACs and the soldiers.” The Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) documented that domestic slavery was part of the counterinsurgency strategy applied by the army in conjunction with the PAC.
Along with collecting testimonies, the ABJP also provided psychosocial support for the survivors and their families, with the aim of empowering the women. Eventually, the women survivors brought a complaint to the public prosecutor's office in Rabinal. But they met resistance.
“The assistant prosecutors who received the first complaints questioned the credibility of the survivors, asking why they only dared to talk about what had happened after so much time had elapsed,” Lucía Xiloj, a Mayan K'iche' lawyer and representative of the Maya Achi women survivors, tells us. “They even told them that these cases should not be investigated.” Xiloj and her colleagues requested that the case be transferred to the Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office, which is headquartered in Guatemala City.
Difficulties Advancing the Case
In 2016, the plaintiffs successfully petitioned the pretrial judge to hear the women’s testimonies and admit them into evidence. This was traumatizing for the survivors, Xiloj notes, because not all judges are trained to work with victims of these crimes. “The judges would leave the women locked in a room for two or three hours before taking their statements. They felt anxious about being in the capital city, far from their communities,” Xiloj explains. “The judges also didn't display much patience with them when they were giving their statements.”
But the 36 Mayan Achi women’s efforts were not in vain. In April and May 2018, seven men were captured and charged for mass sexual violence: Damian Cuxum Alvarado, Bernardo Ruiz Aquino, Benvenuto Ruiz Aquino, Pedro Sánchez Cortez, Simeón Enríquez Gómez, Felix Tum Ramírez, and Juan Cecilio Guzmán Torres. Guzmán Torres died in custody in August 2018; three men wanted in the case remained at large.
After the arrests, the women complainants began to receive threats from relatives of the ex-paramilitaries. “The sons of the men who were arrested told me that they were going to grab me when I was walking and that they would put me in a sack and get rid of me,” said Paulina López, who, according to the public prosecutor’s accusation was raped at the age of 12 by the brothers Bernardo and Benvenuto Ruiz Aquino.
López is one of the petitioners who brought the Chichupac case to the IACHR and, eventually, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In a 2016 judgment, the Court found the state of Guatemala responsible for at least 183 cases of forced disappearance and at least 361 cases of forced displacement as a result of military operations carried out in conjunction with the PAC. The Court ordered Guatemala to investigate, prosecute, and punish those responsible, and to guarantee the physical integrity of the complainants, to whom it granted precautionary measures.
Challenging Judicial Corruption
The case was first assigned to pretrial judge Claudette Domínguez, who presides over High Risk Court A. Human rights groups have criticized Judge Domínguez for several rulings that they claim evidence her ties to and sympathy for the military, including her 2016 decision to exclude more than 80 percent of the victims in the mass forced disappearance case known as CREOMPAZ, which has remained in legal limbo ever since.
A little over a year after the initial arrests in the Achi women’s case, Domínguez ruled on June 21, 2019 that there was insufficient evidence for a trial. She ordered the definitive dismissal of charges for three defendants and the provisional dismissal of charges for three others. Within days, all six were released. Her decision did not take into account the testimonies of the women survivors, who fully identified the accused.
The women survivors and their lawyers filed a recusal motion against Domínguez. They argued that the judge had failed to fully consider all the evidence and had demonstrated a discriminatory attitude toward the Indigenous complainants when she asked them if the Attorney General’s Office was paying them to testify. The High Risk Appellate Court found Judge Domínguez had acted with discrimination and bias and removed her from the case.
The case was transferred to High Risk Court B, led by Miguel Ángel Gálvez. This made a huge difference. “Judge Dominguez used to address us and the victims in a very rude manner,” says lawyer Lucía Xiloj. “On the other hand, Judge Gálvez is very cordial with all the parties to the proceedings.” She notes that unlike Domínguez, who rarely if ever referred to international standards, Gálvez regularly cites and applies international standards, including international humanitarian and human rights law, the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court, and jurisprudence of other international tribunals such as those of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, especially regarding the evaluation of the testimonies of victims of sexual violence. This is crucial, says Xiloj; sexual violence crimes are known as “crimes of solitude,” since there are rarely other witnesses to corroborate the victims' testimonies.
After a series of hearings in 2021, Judge Gálvez determined that three of the men who were freed in 2019, Damian Cuxum Alvarado, Bernardo Ruiz Aquino, and Benvenuto Ruiz Aquino, alongside Francisco Cuxum Alvarado, who was deported from the United States, and Gabriel Cuxum Alvarado, who was captured in May 2021 after being a fugitive since 2018, should face trial for their alleged role in sexual violence against 36 Maya Achi women. That trial is now underway in High Risk Court A, over which Judge Yassmín Barrios presiding.
A Ground-breaking Opportunity for Gender Justice
The trial began on January 5, 2022, after a brief hiccup during the first scheduled hearing on January 4, when the lawyer for three of the defendants was a no-show. Judge Barrios, who has ample experience with defense efforts to delay and obstruct human rights trials like this one, ordered the lawyer, Julio César Colindres Monterroso, to appear the next day.
Colindres appeared in court the following day. He claimed that his absence was due to health concerns and requested a one-week delay in the proceedings. Judge Barrios rejected the request, saying that she would not abide any efforts to derail these proceedings. The trial began.
Government prosecutor Paula Herrarte presented the accusation against the five defendants, each of whom declared their innocence. In subsequent hearings over the next few days, expert witnesses discussed the context in which the women survivors were systematically sexually assaulted and the lasting impacts on them, their families, and their community; the nature of racial bias and discrimination against the Indigenous population in Guatemala and how state violence was racially motivated; and the nature and purpose of the PAC and their relationship with the Guatemalan army.
During the second week of the trial, the court is expected to hear the testimonies of the Maya Achi women survivors. Meanwhile, Xiloj, Reyes, and Valey have petitioned the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court to nullify the ruling dismissing the charges against the other three ex-PAC members who walked free in 2019, Pedro Sánchez Cortez, Simeon Enríquez Gomez, and Felix Tum Ramírez.
In the meantime, the Maya Achi women survivors will face at least some of their perpetrators in a court of law and seek justice for the grave harm done to them. It’s a reckoning that has been 40 years coming.
African elephants can transport seeds up to 40 miles away. Here, a bull is feeding from a sausage tree in Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe. (photo: Getty Images)
Many plants need to migrate to survive climate change, but they’re losing their animal rides.
It may not be a luxurious form of travel — via digestive tract, that is — but for roughly half of all plants, animals are a way to branch out over great distances. They can ride in the stomach of a tusked mammal, the pincers of an insect, or on the fur of your dog. Some seeds even hitch rides with multiple animals before arriving at their final destination.
Movement is essential to survival, especially in a changing climate. As plants are scorched by heatwaves and battered by extreme rainfall, their best shot at avoiding extinction can be to spread to new areas where the climate still fits their needs. Research suggests that some plant populations may need to travel kilometers a year to remain in the same conditions in which they evolved — a phenomenon known as “climate tracking.”
But this strategy has a major drawback: It rides on wildlife, and wildlife is disappearing around the world. That means many plants are losing their mode of transportation, according to a new study published in the journal Science, leaving them stranded in areas that are becoming less hospitable to their kind and at a greater risk of dying out.
The ongoing decline of wildlife could also trigger a frightening feedback loop: If some tree and plant species wither because they can no longer hitch a ride on wildlife, that could worsen climate change, which makes it harder for both plants and animals to survive.
When plants and animals die off, it’s not just extinction that should concern us, but the erosion of relationships that evolved over millions of years, scientists told Vox. These ancient bonds between species form the very basis of a healthy ecosystem.
We’re emptying the environment of wildlife
Forests are a lot quieter today than they were centuries ago. There are fewer birds singing for mates, fewer monkeys howling in fig trees, and fewer frogs looking for insects to snag. Over the last 50 years, populations of mammal, bird, amphibian, reptile, and fish species have declined by around 68 percent on average, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Humans have helped erase more than half of all medium-sized and large mammals in Central and South America.
Each animal we lose sends ripples through its ecosystem in unpredictable and profound ways. Plants and animals have finely tuned evolved relationships with their fellow creatures, whether in the form of fruit-loving elephants or birds and bees that pass pollen between flowers.
This new research, built on thousands of studies of birds and mammals as well as advanced computer modeling, helps sketch out the impact of those losses. The authors, led by the ecologist Evan Fricke at Rice University, discovered that birds and mammals have suffered so greatly in recent centuries that many plants are utterly unable to spread their seeds like they used to. This problem is worst outside the tropics, the scientists found.
To understand what we still have to lose, the authors also considered what would happen if all birds and mammals that are currently classified as endangered or vulnerable were to disappear. They found that losing these rare animals would hit plants in regions like Southeast Asia and Madagascar especially hard, where endangered wildlife carries much of the burden of distributing seeds over long distances.
Plants and animals need to move to survive on a warming planet
Plants and animals are undertaking epic journeys as the planet warms. Atlantic cod and a species of butterfly in Europe, for example, have each migrated more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) in just 10 years or less, National Geographic’s Craig Welch reports. Meanwhile, large numbers of Atlantic mackerel have moved all the way from waters near the UK and Scandinavia to Iceland, spurring geopolitical tensions related to fishing rights. In the US and elsewhere, ticks and other pests are marching into new territory, too.
Plants are likewise finding new places to put down roots. In the last half-century, the line where trees stop growing has moved roughly 150 meters (492 feet) higher in the Altai Mountains of Central and East Asia, where the temperature has increased by as much as 1.7 degrees Celsius. By the end of the century many species of sugar maples, which produce maple syrup, could move north by as much as 200 kilometers, according to the US Forest Service. Not all plants and animals are moving toward the cooler temperatures of the poles; some are chasing rainfall or competing with other species, which is why some mountain plants are actually moving downhill.
Many ecologists believe these climate-driven migrations are a sign of resilience, and that’s what makes this study especially bad news. It will only get harder for plants to survive in a changing climate as more animals disappear. Indeed, the researchers estimate that today 60 percent fewer seeds are capable of spreading far enough to follow the changing climate on average across the globe, compared to a world in which birds and mammals hadn’t been wiped out by humans.
That’s a staggering figure, said Rodolfo Dirzo, a Stanford University ecologist who was not affiliated with the study, and it only accounts for the wildlife we’ve already harmed. If the birds and mammals currently threatened with extinction disappear too, the amount of seeds capable of shifting with the climate would drop by an additional 15 percent, on average, according to the paper.
So far, the breakdown of these fundamental ecological relationships has hit eastern North America and Europe especially hard, the authors write, “as a result of past losses of large mammals that provided long-distance dispersal.” A type of elk, for example, once roamed the eastern US, spreading seeds in its dung and on its fur, and elephant-like mammoths once lived in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. And it doesn’t help that migratory birds in Europe carry the seeds of many plants south, where it’s warmer, not to cooler climates where they might find relief.
What happens when plants get stranded
Plants store carbon dioxide that might otherwise warm the planet. But when they can’t tolerate a particular climate, they die and that can trigger a dangerous cycle, said William Ripple, an ecology professor at Oregon State University.
“It’s a feedback loop,” said Ripple, who was not affiliated with the study. When natural ecosystems break down, he said, “we lose carbon sequestration, and that results in more climate change.” That, in turn, can cause still more plants to perish, especially those that have no way to migrate. Previous research has also shown that poaching tends to limit the growth of big trees that store a lot of carbon, because hunters tend to target larger animals that are capable of spreading large seeds.
“We’re only beginning to really quantitatively wrestle with that vicious cycle,” Fricke said.
Which brings us back to the idea of resilience. Forests without animals have a harder time recovering from disturbances like the death of a large tree, Fricke said. In Guam, for example, an island where nearly all native birds have been lost to snakes introduced in the mid-20th century, the physical gaps created by fallen trees aren’t filling in as they should be, he said.
“Usually that’s a hotbed of regeneration that kicks off the self-sustaining process of a forest being a forest,” Fricke said. “What we’re seeing is that those canopy gaps have fewer species of trees growing up in them. They don’t close as quickly.”
“A huge potential for restoration”
While many native animals are in dire straits, other species that humans have introduced to a given area — creatures that are often labeled invasive, such as European starlings in the US — are thriving. So could they take on the role of native animals and help plants migrate?
Yes and no, said Yasmine Antonini, a biologist at the Federal University of Ouro Preto, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. It’s true that new arrivals can help plants disperse their seeds, but not as effectively as native plants, and often with costs to the environment along the way, said Antonini, who was not involved in the research.
In Hawaii, for example, most native forest plants depend on birds to spread their seeds, yet two-thirds of the archipelago’s avian species have gone extinct. Now, introduced birds are the primary dispersers of many native plants there, Sam Case, a doctoral student at the University of Wyoming, writes. The problem is that their beaks didn’t evolve to peck at native plants. Their mouths are too small to transport many of the seeds, and these birds are also dispersing seeds of plants that aren’t native to the islands.
“We should certainly not discount the benefits of nonnative species in the ecosystem where they exist,” Fricke said. “They often aren’t exclusively negative, and sometimes their benefits can outweigh the costs.” But it’s typically a better idea to restore the native species that evolved with the plants, he said.
That’s one area where this study can chart a path for the future. It shows the value of returning wildlife to the landscape — by creating well-connected networks of protected areas, for example. “There’s huge potential for restoration,” Fricke said. While he worries about plants that can no longer move like they used to, “we could go a long way toward reversing that by restoring the seed dispersers we still have.”
Helping even one creature can go a long way, and there are some pretty wonderful examples of this. In the Brazilian savanna, known as the Cerrado, maned wolves — funky creatures that look kind of like foxes on stilts — nosh on fruits called wolf apples that look like green tomatoes and make up as much as half of the wolves’ diet. In exchange for the snack, maned wolves deposit seed-rich poop throughout the savanna, to the delight of nearby dung beetles. The beetles then roll perfectly round balls of feces and will often bury them underground, effectively planting wolf apple seeds in little fertilized packets.
Nature has cultivated all kinds of these remarkable connections between species. If you harm some, that harms others in ripple effects we can’t always predict. But when even one thrives and multiplies, the benefits can reverberate between many plants and animals, up and down the tree of life.
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