07 February 22
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When looking back at the past, it is tempting to see paths as preordained - narratives we neatly tuck into the contextual confines that make them easier to understand. In contrast, the present is always messy. It will only become clearer once we know how it ends, at which point we will be living in a new era of uncertainty.
We have written a lot at Steady of the crises of our current age. We can never dismiss the many challenges we face or the threats they pose. They are particularly dire. The list of woes bears repeating and remembering - from the climate crisis (felt with an extreme cold front here in Texas), to the ongoing threat to our democratic institutions, to our continued struggle for racial justice, to the threats of war, to the pandemic, and onward.
In the future we may look back and see that one of these forces escalated to a point of even greater dominance, and disaster. But this week, amidst the swirling seas of discontent, I also saw islands of hope emerge. These should remind us that the ultimate course of our current trend lines is not preordained.
One of the few things I have learned with any certainty over the course of a long life is to be wary of certainty. Those who predict with the most confidence what will happen in the future are often the voices that should be treated with the greatest skepticism. These paragons of certainty invariably are the ones who talk the most and consequently do the least to make a difference.
So today, I wanted to highlight three events from the past week that brought a sense of optimism. What they all might add up to remains to be seen.
Democracy
The Republican Party entered the aftermath of the 2020 census salivating at the prospects of expanding on what they were able to achieve back in 2010 - the use of extreme partisan gerrymandering in states they controlled to heavily tilt the balance of power in the House of Representative (and in state houses) in their favor. The result was that even if the Democrats won many more total votes in congressional elections when counted on the national level, the way those votes were pooled into districts meant the Republicans could still win control of the House.
Many election experts predicted that the Republican hopes would be realized again this time around. But that isn’t what happened. Not by a long shot. There seems to be a growing consensus that there might now be no or minimal partisan tilt in the House. In other words, whichever political party wins the most congressional votes will likely win the House in the decade ahead. That’s how it should be.
This doesn’t mean the Democrats will retain control of the House in 2022, or beyond. The historical trends for off-year elections and the headwinds of President Biden’s current low approval ratings suggest the Democrats will likely lose and could lose big. Whether they win or lose, however, should be dictated by what voters think of the job they are doing, not by a gaming of the political system. That both political parties will now have more of a fair shot should be considered a big win for democracy.
How this happened is itself a patchwork of stories, as the rules for how to draw congressional maps still, at this point, reside with the states. What was different from 2010 is that the Democrats went on the offensive. The latest and perhaps most significant victory came in North Carolina on Friday when the Democratic majority on the state's supreme court threw out the map that the (gerrymandered) Republican-controlled state legislature had drawn up. The experts who study these things believe this could lead to a swing of several congressional seats towards the Democrats.
This wasn’t the only victory for the Democrats in the courts. Earlier, the Ohio Supreme Court threw out its state’s maps in a way that will help Democratic representation in the Buckeye State. And federal judges threw out Alabama’s map, ruling it violated fair representation for Black residents. This case is currently pending before the United States Supreme Court, which could reverse course. Or it could rule in a way that further expands non-white representation in Congress.
The Democrats have gotten to parity by also playing the partisan gerrymandering game in states they control, particularly Illinois and New York. In the latter, the map that has emerged is so aggressive that it will likely switch three Republican seats to Democrats. In the New York Times, Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice called it “a master class in how to draw an effective gerrymander.”
Predictably, the trends laid out above have led to hackles from many Republicans. They have argued that there is extreme hypocrisy among Democrats because they promote gerrymandered maps in Blue States while suing to strike down gerrymandered maps in Red or Purple States. These Republican critics would have a strong case, except for one very important point. For years, Democrats in Congress have tried to pass voting rights bills that would outlaw all partisan gerrymandering across the country. And Republicans have voted, in unison, against such measures. So to now complain about partisan gerrymandering is pretty darn rich.
I suspect Democrats would gladly make the maps of New York illegal if it meant the same rules applied to Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin, and the rest of the nation. The bills to do this are still there to be passed by Congress. But after watching Republicans use all the means at their disposal to lock in power, the Democrats seem to have learned to abandon unilateral disarmament.
Maybe the Republicans, weighing their own narrow self-interest, will now change their tune on partisan gerrymandering. We should all hope so. This likely would lead to more contested races, which is what a healthy democracy should encourage. Nevertheless, it is essential that our national legislature more accurately reflects the beliefs of the majority of our nation, whatever that majority may end up being.
January 6
This past week there was also movement on a reckoning over the violent insurrection of January 6. Donald Trump and his enablers are still out there fomenting the Big Lie. But there is a growing sense that the congressional committee investigating those perilous events is making headway. One way of knowing this is the leaks that are coming out that suggest President Trump was much more involved in orchestrating the events that led up to that day than was previously disclosed.
Former Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech this week where he said something that almost no Republican has felt free to say over the last several years, including, especially, Pence - “President Trump is wrong.” Now Pence was only talking narrowly about whether he, personally, had the right to overturn the election. And he is not exactly a profile in courage on such issues as the Big Lie or all the other outrages we have seen from the previous administration, of which he was an integral part.
Nevertheless, in Trump world this speech counts as a major betrayal and a schism within the party. So where it goes from here bears watching. Will Pence retreat once more in fealty to Trump? Or will he stand firm? I suspect some of what we are seeing is being driven by the fact that Pence knows what will come out from the investigation, and how ugly it could be. Two close Pence aids, including his own former chief of staff, have testified at length in front of the committee in recent days.
Although the drum beats of accountability may be increasing, it is still easy to be cynical. For all that we find out, for all that we already know, Trump and those around him seem to be evading a reckoning once again. We can even point to this week’s outrageous censure by the Republican National Committee of the two Republicans who have joined the Democrats in investigating January 6, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
Another worry many of you have shared is that there doesn’t seem to be much energy, at least publicly, at the Department of Justice in prosecuting the political players responsible for instigating (and possibly actively planning and abetting) the insurrection. But I would suggest that this story still has many chapters. And there are other active investigations into Trump, from New York to Georgia. While I am reluctant to guess at what anyone else might be thinking. I do have a sense, from his words and actions, that Trump is not confident he can escape responsibility this time.
The Economy
And finally, for our third island of hope this week, let’s look at the U.S. economy. According to polling, this has been a weakness for President Biden. And tor the past several days, there had been expectations, including from the White House, that the jobs numbers that were released on Friday would be shockingly bad. Instead they were shockingly good. When a publication like the Financial Times touts the strength of Biden’s approach to the economy, replete with a picture of the president looking fit and active, perhaps a new narrative might be emerging.
We leave you today by acknowledging that this is but one week in time. The positive developments I mention above might very well be swamped by waves of despair. That being said, my hope is to foster, well, a bit of hope. For I fervently believe that we have a real shot here, not only to minimize our decline, or even to just hold on, but to make this world better and more just.
None of these islands of hope just appeared out of nowhere. They are the products of action and determination. And that is in itself also a reason for optimism. The tides of history are controlled, in large part, by us.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a roundtable meeting with federal workers in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, on October 20, 2021. (photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images)
The release of the report from the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment comes months after it was delivered to President Joe Biden in late October, a White House official told CNN, and the President has accepted the recommendations.
"As the President has said, 'unions built the middle class.' They 'lift up workers, both union and non-union.' At its core, it is our administration's belief that unions benefit all of us," the official said in a statement. "The Biden-Harris Administration believes that increasing worker organizing and empowerment is critical to growing the middle class, building an economy that puts workers first, and strengthening our democracy."
The suggestions are meant to "promote worker organizing and collective bargaining for federal employees, and for workers employed by public and private-sector employers," according to the report. "The recommendations include ways to increase private sector workers' access to information about their existing right to join and/or organize a union, and the legally-defined process of how to do so."
Those recommendations include eliminating "barriers to union organizers being able to talk with employees on federal property about the benefits of organizing a union," at agencies including the General Services Administration and the Department of Interior. The report also recommends ensuring "federal contract dollars are not spent on anti-union campaigns," at the Department of Labor, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services, among other issues.
In April 2021, Biden created the task force via executive order and directed the group to make a set of recommendations within 180 days on how existing policies, programs and practices could be used to promote worker organizing and collective bargaining in the federal government and what new policies are needed to achieve its mission. The task force is vice-chaired by Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh and includes more than 20 Cabinet members and heads of other federal agencies.
The report's release comes after Biden signed an executive order Friday while in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, that's aimed at boosting union labor for federal projects paid for by the bipartisan infrastructure law that passed last year.
Ivanka Trump. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
Trump again told Pence that he had a duty to reject Electoral College votes that would formalize Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, something the vice president had no authority to do in his ceremonial role in Congress that day.
“You don’t have the courage to make a hard decision,” Trump told Pence, according to congressional testimony. Even after Trump called him a “wimp,” Pence rebuffed the demand, issuing a lengthy statement afterward laying out his conclusion that he had no power to influence the outcome.
When the call ended, Ivanka Trump turned to retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg and said, “Mike Pence is a good man.”
“Yes, he is,” Kellogg replied.
Now the House committee investigating the riot wants to know what else Ivanka Trump heard and saw that day as they try to stitch together the narrative of the riots and the former president’s role in instigating them. There was a frantic effort by many of Trump’s top supporters to persuade him to intervene, and some directly sought to use his daughter as their conduit.
A committee aide said they are hopeful that she will soon commit to a time to meet.
Throughout her time in the White House, Ivanka Trump was known as a rare voice who could get through to her father and talk him out of bad decisions, though her success was mixed. The former first daughter has kept an extraordinary low profile since her father left office and has distanced herself from him and politics since moving to Florida.
But her proximity to him on Jan. 6 could provide the committee with direct access to what Trump was doing during those crucial three hours when his supporters violently stormed Capitol.
“Ivanka Trump has details about what occurred in the lead-up to and on Jan. 6 and about the former president’s state of mind as events unfolded,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla, a member of the panel, told The Associated Press.
It is highly unusual for congressional investigators to target a family member of a president, but as a senior adviser to her father, she also had a perch close to power.
Kellogg disclosed the exchange with the committee, but so far Ivanka Trump, who famously guards her image and public profile, has not talked to the panel.
The answers could have significant repercussions not only for Donald Trump, who is eyeing a political comeback in 2024, but for those in the Republican Party who have downplayed his role in the insurrection.
A spokeswoman for Ivanka Trump did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But in a statement issued in late January, a representative for her noted that Ivanka Trump did not speak at the rally near the White House where the then-president urged his supporters to “fight like hell” as Congress convened to certify the 2020 election results, and said she still believed that “any security breach or disrespect to our law enforcement is unacceptable.”
Members of the committee hope to get beyond such vague assertions.
Hours after Trump’s call to Pence, Ivanka Trump joined brother Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani and Kimberly Guilfoyle under a large tent at the rally to listen to Trump’s speech.
She reportedly told aides she “decided to attend only because she had hoped to calm the president and help keep the event on an even keel.”
After Trump’s speech, as rioters began to smash through Capitol police barriers and break windows, the former president tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution ...”
That tweet, according to court testimony, only added to the anger fueling the mob.
Back in the White House, as staffers watched in shock at what was unfolding down Pennsylvania Avenue on television screens positioned throughout the West Wing, Trump’s attention was so rapt that he hit rewind and watched certain moments again, according to Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary.
“Look at all of the people fighting for me,” Trump said, according to Grisham, who also served as chief of staff to first lady Melania Trump. At one point, the president was confused why staffers weren’t as excited as he was watching the unrest unfold.
Kellogg testified that staff wanted the president to take immediate action to address the violence consuming the Capitol, but Trump refused.
“Is someone getting to potus? He has to tell protestors to dissipate. Someone is going to get killed,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House communications official, texted Ben Williamson, an aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“I’ve been trying for the last 30 minutes. Literally stormed in outer oval to get him to put out the first one. It’s completely insane,” Williamson wrote back.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., then called Ivanka Trump, pleading that the president “ask people to leave.”
“We’re working on it,” she replied.
At that point, staffers acknowledged that despite efforts by Meadows, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Kellogg, the only person who could get through to him would be his daughter.
Ivanka Trump, according to testimony, went on to make at least two “tenacious” attempts to reason with her father as staffers were bombarded with messages from Trump allies begging him to quell the violence.
“Can he make a statement. I saw the tweet. Ask people to leave the (Capitol),” Fox News host Sean Hannity texted Meadows.
But inside the West Wing, Kellogg strongly recommended that they not ask the president to appear in the press room, where a group of reporters would be waiting for him.
“Apparently, certain White House staff believed that a live unscripted press appearance by the President in the midst of the Capitol Hill violence could have made the situation worse,” lawmakers wrote in their letter to Ivanka Trump.
The president ultimately agreed to a video statement. Multiple takes were filmed but not used. In each one of the initial takes, according to the committee, he failed to ask rioters to leave.
The final video was released on Twitter at 4:17 p.m. — nearly two hours after Trump’s initial tweet criticizing Pence.
“This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said in the video. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you; you’re very special.”
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the vice chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, has said it’s hard to “imagine a more significant and more serious dereliction of duty” than Trump’s failure to quell the riots.
Trump’s last words that day came at 6:01 p.m. when he tweeted that the 2020 election was “unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly and unfairly treated for so long.”
He ended with, “Go home with love and in peace. Remember this day forever.”
The committee has been aggressively interviewing witnesses — nearly 500 so far — and has subpoenaed Meadows and Trump’s personal lawyer. They are asking Ivanka Trump to cooperate voluntarily.
Tents lined up on San Pedro on skid row, in downtown Los Angeles. (photo: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)
Untreated disease, violence, exposure, overdoses and car strikes are all added hazards of living on the streets
An examination of 20 US urban areas found the number of deaths among people living without housing shot up by 77% in the five years ending in 2020.
The rise from 2016 through 2020 was driven by many factors, including ever-rising numbers of people living on the street and the growing dangers they face, such as violence, untreated disease and increasingly deadly illicit drug supplies.
From 65-year-old Randy Ferris, killed when a car veered into a California sidewalk encampment, Justine Belovoskey, 60, who died alone in a tent during a Texas cold snap, and Anthony Denico Williams, stabbed to death at age 20 in Washington DC, to scores of young people succumbing to overdoses on the streets, their stories reflect the harrowing tragedy of an epidemic of homelessness.
“People who die while experiencing homelessness are some of the most neglected in society,” said Matt Fowle, University of Washington researcher and co-creator of the organization Homeless Deaths Count. “These are folks who most need our help and are least likely to receive it.”
Coronavirus was just one more hazard people struggling on the streets and in shelters faced in the last two years.
While the federal government makes no effort to count deaths nationally of people deemed homeless, the Guardian worked with Fowle to collect local data from large urban areas, where consistent year-to-year counts were available. The stark results stretch from Los Angeles and Seattle to New York, Philadelphia and Miami, via the heartland.
The Guardian’s analysis counted 18,000 people who died homeless over five years in encampments, on sidewalks or in shelters, including 5,000 deaths in 2020 alone. In most cases, the deaths were tracked by county coroners and medical examiners, but in a few locations only local non-profits kept track.
Experts at the non-profit National Health Care for the Homeless Council say that, in many places, the people who perish without housing are never counted. They estimate the total number of deaths is actually between 17,000 and 40,000 every year.
“Every person and every life matters,’’ said the council’s Katherine Cavanaugh. “That’s part of why we are encouraging people to just track these deaths. We want to make sure that we can use that information to improve situations for people in the future and not have these deaths be happening in vain.”
In all but two of the 20 cities or counties examined by the Guardian, numbers rose significantly over five years. For instance, the homeless death toll in Los Angeles almost doubled to more than 1,600 in 2020 from 871 in 2016, while New York’s total more than doubled to 685 from 290.
In places that listed causes of death, the most prevalent have plagued homeless populations for years: drug overdoses, violence, traffic deaths and premature lethality of treatable conditions like heart disease. Only New York and Los Angeles noted a large number of deaths caused by Covid-19.
The overall jump in deaths may reflect both increases in the sheer number of unhoused people but also, disproportionately, the growing dangers they face.
The annual count of the nation’s homeless population was postponed in 2021 due to the pandemic, but counts for previous years showed a disheartening trend: after declining for years, the homeless population increased steadily between 2016 and 2020.
And more people who find themselves without a home are living outside, in unsheltered conditions, a factor that was exacerbated by shelter closures in the pandemic. They also suffer the toll of increasingly deadly synthetic street drugs, including fentanyl.
Many may have faced the kind of societal headwinds encountered by 26-year-old Christopher Madson-Yamasaki of Oregon, a bright, aspiring renewable energy technician with a mischievous grin, who had struggled with schizoaffective disorder since his teenage years, his family said.
He had become addicted to methamphetamines, after falling off his medication routine and self-medicating. He and his mother repeatedly sought to get him treatment around Portland. But in the end, there were no doors open for him.
He was found in a tent on 27 February 2020, dead of a meth overdose and with all his valuables stolen from him, days after being kicked out of a shelter for smoking on a balcony, according to his mother, Hope Yamasaki.
Yamasaki told the Guardian how Christopher fell through the cracks.
She described how he had repeatedly been turned away from drug treatment centers, because they couldn’t handle those with mental illness, and from mental health programs, because they couldn’t take those with addiction problems. When he turned 26, Madson-Yamasaki no longer qualified for youth programs that had previously provided housing.
“And he didn’t make it to 27,” said his mother. “This is so hard to talk about, but it’s so important. So many members of our community are dehumanized for mental health and addiction issues. They matter.”
Officials of Multnomah county, which provides health services for Madson-Yamasaki’s region, held a press conference featuring his story to highlight the need for more specialized treatment, which they hope to provide with recently approved new funding.
“We know that there is a lot more to be done,” said the Multnomah county chair, Deborah Kafoury.
People without a home face three times the risk of death of the general population, according to a local analysis of 2017 to 2019 deaths by Los Angeles county health department’s center for health impact evaluation. It found homeless people in LA were 35 times more likely to die of drug or alcohol overdose, 16 times more likely to die of traffic-related injuries, such as being hit by a car, and 14 times more likely to be the victim of homicide.
In 2020, drug overdose deaths were the top cause of death among homeless people in every urban area that reported causes.
“It’s deadlier to have a substance use disorder now,” said Liz Hersh, director of Philadelphia’s office of homeless services, who said fentanyl, which is as much as 100 times as potent as heroin, is a huge driver of increased overdose deaths.
Methamphetamine was also a factor in many deaths.
Jennifer Vines, health officer of Multnomah county, said people living outside sometimes report taking the stimulant at night because they fear violence.
“We often hear anecdotally that people will start using meth as a way of staying alert to protect themselves and their belongings,” she said. “And then, the flip side of that is it can also lead to psychosis and erratic and violent behavior.”
Hersh of Philadelphia, where homeless deaths doubled over five years, also noted rising trends in overdoses and violence since coronavirus arrived, even though its homeless population decreased.
“We’re seeing some of the frustration and rage that the pandemic has engendered,” she said. “People are despairing.”
In Las Vegas on 13 July 2020, Brent Michael Lloyd, 48 and unhoused, was shot in the head while he slept outside, in what police described as a “thrill killing”.
Anthony Denico Williams, 20, lost his mother to cancer at age 16 and ended up regularly sleeping under the neoclassical arches of Washington DC’s Union station railway hub.
He dreamed of opening a home for youth in need. Asked what he would do with three wishes, he said he’d want “a house over my head, to be able to give back to others and to have a nice job, that’s it”.
Instead Williams was knifed to death 26 January 2020, in an altercation over a drug sale.
A friend, social worker Grace McKinnon, told a local TV station that his death seemed senseless.
“So young, he still had his life ahead of him. And for it to end like this, I don’t know if there’s meaning in that.”
Homeless people are at greater risk of being hit by cars, according to numerous officials, particularly where large numbers are living under bridges or beside freeway off-ramps.
Randy Ferris, a Vietnam war veteran, was one of three men killed on 15 March 2021 when a driver veered into an encampment under a San Diego bridge.
Amber Joseph, who recently got housing, spoke at a memorial about how Ferris had helped her navigate living on the streets.
“He was like a big brother to me. He kept a close eye on me,” the Times of San Diego reported her saying.
Deaths from exposure make up a relatively small fraction of reported deaths, according to several homelessness experts, perhaps because the coldest cities have programs to get people indoors in winter.
But Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Sacramento regional coalition to end homelessness, said his normally temperate area of northern California, where 70% of the homeless population live outside, has seen more people dying of hypothermia in unusual weather events.
“I think it’s just so many more people outside exposed to the elements,” he said. “And the elements are somewhat more unpredictable than they might have been in the past. Sadly, really terrible storms and fires are the new normal.”
The climate crisis is driving more extreme weather events across the US.
During the exceptional cold snap that gripped Texas last winter, leaving millions without power, Justine Belovoskey, 60, perished of hypothermia in her tent in a state-sanctioned homeless encampment on 15 February. She didn’t make it to a warming center with a diesel generator, according to the Texas Observer.
In Denver, Colorado, the cold certainly killed people living outside, but disease and injury caused more deaths, while drug overdoses far exceeded other causes, Axios reported, citing local reports.
Beyond the direct medical causes, factors such as widespread lack of affordable housing drive increases in homelessness and, ultimately, deaths, experts say.
Those jurisdictions that reported the genders of those who died typically found that about three-quarters were men. Racial trends were hard to establish, based on the few reports that included racial breakdowns.
Sacramento, California, for example, reported that 41% of those dying while homeless were people of color.
The average age of death for people without housing is low. Again in Sacramento county, for instance, it was 51 for men and 49 for women.
“Basically, on average, homelessness takes off 25% of a person’s life,” said Erlenbusch.
Preventable and treatable diseases, including heart disease and diabetes, are among the biggest causes of premature homeless deaths.
“People should be dying of these illnesses when they are 80, not when they’re 48,” said Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of its center for vulnerable populations.
It may be some time before the true effects of Covid-19 on this population are known. The biggest surge in coronavirus deaths nationally didn’t come until January 2021, which isn’t yet included in most jurisdictions’ homelessness data.
New York City, which recently disclosed deaths among people experiencing homelessness for the fiscal year ending July 2020, found that there were 121 deaths from Covid-19, mostly among those living in city-funded shelters. That made Covid the second highest cause of the 613 recorded homeless deaths that year.
Los Angeles’s unhoused have suffered several hundred Covid deaths, Will Nicholas, director of LA county’s center for health impact evaluation, said preliminary figures suggested.
And the pandemic probably worsened overdose deaths across the board.
“It’s a sad situation,” Nicholas said.
Experts agreed that the best prescription is to house people.
“You cannot have a healthy society with this many people living on the economic and social margins,” said UCSF’s Kushel. “Homelessness is lethal. We’re not going to be able to solve this without solving homelessness.”
For UW researcher Fowle, who is working on a doctoral thesis about the crisis of US homeless deaths, it comes down to whether our society can muster the empathy to act.
“It’s a tragedy that people are dying without housing,” he said. “We know the solutions. Housing saves lives and, for these people, is often a form of healthcare.”
Detainees walk with their hands clasped behind their backs along a line painted on a walkway inside the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, La., on Sept. 26, 2019. Detainees are required to walk from site to site with their hands clasped behind their backs. (photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center about deportations without required interviews or hearings.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) said in a complaint filed last month against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's New Orleans field office that, in some cases, asylum-seekers never had a credible fear interview to explain why they fled and why they fear returning.
Some deportations are happening before asylum-seekers can get a hearing before a judge, or while a review of their case or their appeal is pending, according to SPLC attorneys.
The center filed the complaint on Jan. 18 with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
According to federal law, a person who expresses fear of return to their country cannot be deported until they have had an interview with an asylum officer. The law also bars asylum-seekers from being removed while an appeal is pending or while a case is before the Board of Immigration Appeals.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Mich Gonzalez, an SPLC attorney who said three of his clients were illegally deported.
Gonzalez and other attorneys say they have seen sporadic cases over the years where an asylum-seeker was mistakenly deported and often returned when DHS realized they had made a mistake.
“But seeing this many cases in a six-month span is unprecedented,” Gonzalez said. “And in these recent cases, DHS and ICE are aware and everyone is washing their hands.”
One of his clients was deported to Nicaragua on Dec. 23, the day before Christmas Eve. The client said he spent two months requesting a credible fear interview. He said he fled Nicaragua after being beaten multiple times by members of the National Police.
“The National Police shot me with a rubber bullet and beat me. And here, the United States turned its back to me,” he said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo Investiga before his deportation.
An ICE spokesperson said Gonzalez's client “was afforded all due process that he was entitled to under U.S. law.”
ICE insisted in an emailed statement that it conducts a thorough review of cases before removing anyone from the U.S to "ensure due process has been afforded and that they are not eligible for any additional form of relief at the time of removal.”
Immigration attorneys insist this is not the case.
Gonzalez said another client was deported to Haiti days before Christmas, even though emails shown to NBC News indicate that ICE had been informed of a request for reconsideration.
After arriving in Haiti, according to photos and text messages sent to Gonzalez by his client, he was “brutally beaten” by supporters of two political parties because of his family’s political activism, and narrowly avoided being set on fire.
Gonzalez said his client is still actively fleeing persecution.
According to Gonzalez, ICE has not responded to multiple requests that his client be returned from Haiti.
Homero López, executive director of Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy in New Orleans, said his office has received about 20 to 30 calls from asylum-seekers saying they have been notified they will be deported but haven’t received a credible fear interview. By the time attorneys try to meet with them, they’re already gone.
“There’s definitely some shift that has happened at the asylum office,” said López, who noticed the trend during the past three to four months.
Attorneys and advocates have long criticized conditions at detention centers of the New Orleans field office since the Trump administration. There have been complaints of “horrendous conditions” in the facilities, excessively low rates of parole, and asylum-seekers being offered parol under unusually high bonds.
Jeremy Jong, a staff attorney with the nonprofit Al Otro Lado, said he has a client who was deported to Guatemala despite an active “stay of removal.” He said that for several months ICE assured him it would bring her back. “They haven’t made any moves in that direction at all — she’s still out there languishing, and I can’t get any of the ICE people who are responsible to answer me," he said.
Jong believes part of the problem is that even though administrations have changed, the staff that runs the day-to-day operations at the detention centers remain the same.
“I am not in touch with the thousands of people the ICE office detains," Gonzalez said. "I don’t know how deep the scope of this problem runs. The human cost is terrifying."
People wait outside of a food distribution in Havana, Cuba on December 21, 2021. (photo: Natalia Favre/Reuters)
Sixty years of US embargo on Cuba have not starved the island into ‘democratisation’, the way Washington hoped.
Indeed, as Cuba now marks six decades of existence under United States embargo, basic commodities are hard to come by – and that is just one aspect of the ongoing US policy of making life hell for Cubans. While the right-wing Cuban exile crowd and allied zealots like the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady prefer to insist that there is “no blockade”, reality indicates very much otherwise.
Sixty years ago, on February 7, 1962, an “Embargo on All Trade with Cuba” entered into effect under the supervision of then-President John F Kennedy, who had taken care beforehand to procure for himself no fewer than 1,200 Cuban cigars. It continues to be the most exhaustive embargo ever imposed on any country by the US, and at the time included a ban on all sales of medicine and food.
This was two years after Kennedy’s predecessor Dwight Eisenhower had made a nifty suggestion during a White House conference. According to the writeup of the January 1960 conference that appears on the State Department website, “the President said that… we could quarantine Cuba. If they (the Cuban people) are hungry, they will throw Castro out”.
Who ever said US statesmen were not charming?
A few months after that, in April 1960, Eisenhower’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lestor Mallory produced a memorandum on the subject of what was to be done about Fidel Castro now that the glory days of brutal US-backed dictatorship in Cuba had come to an end. Significantly, the very first “salient consideration” listed in the memo is that “the majority of Cubans support Castro”. So much for Washington’s favourite old “democracy” argument for regime change.
On account of this problematic majority and other salient considerations, Mallory advised that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba”. He continued in nefariously longwinded diplomatic jargon:
“If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
After all, there is nothing quite like adroit and inconspicuous starvation.
Fast forward to 2022, and the sanctions regime against Cuba is going strong, making it the longest-running embargo in US history – and one that has cost Cuba an estimated $130bn, according to the United Nations. The punitive details have fluctuated over the years, but the US has remained committed to strangling the Cuban example: the notion that there could be a functioning nation that places things like collective wellbeing and free health care and education above soul-sucking consumerism and savage military campaigns.
Penultimate US President Donald Trump imposed 243 new sanctions on the diminutive island, while also lifting a ban on US citizens suing international companies and individuals for utilising former US-owned properties in Cuba that were nationalised by the Cuban government after the 1959 revolution. Imperial grudges die hard.
Current US President Joe Biden – who was supposed to be, you know, nicer than Trump – imposed even more sanctions, ramping up the de facto US war on Cuba, and, in June 2021, the UN General Assembly voted for the 29th consecutive year in favour of a resolution calling for the end of the US economic blockade. As is par for the course on such matters, it was 184 nations against the US and Israel – another country where they like to believe that blockaded and besieged people are to blame for their own plight.
In his official explanation to the General Assembly in defence of the US vote, Political Coordinator for the US Mission to the UN Rodney Hunter described sanctions as “one set of tools in our broader effort toward Cuba to advance democracy [and] promote respect for human rights”, encouraging the Assembly “to support the Cuban people in their quest to determine their own future”. Obviously, preventing people from acquiring needed foods, medicines, and other basic goods is not the first thing that comes to mind when someone says “respect for human rights”. Nevertheless, the only democratic “future” for Cuba is, as ever, the one the US has determined the Cuban people should want.
A far sounder analysis of the Cuba situation appeared just after the UN vote, in the form of an article in The Nation by American actor and activist Danny Glover, who blamed the US embargo for Cuba’s shortage of millions of syringes in the middle of a pandemic: “No company wants to be bogged down navigating the complicated banking and licensing demands the US government places on transactions with Cuba”.
To be sure, the US has placed so many onerous restrictions on Cuba – and made doing business with Cuba such a colossal headache, with potentially gargantuan legal and financial repercussions – that it all seems anything but “adroit and inconspicuous”.
Here in Havana, staple food items and other essential products are conspicuously absent. Milk is an absolute luxury, and coffee is scarce. (I myself would have been equipped with the latter commodity, had the fine folks at the Mexican airline Viva Aerobus not made me leave it on the floor of the Mexico City airport as punishment for violating the weight allowance.)
None of this is to imply, of course, that the Cuban government is flawless – but current flaws must necessarily be analysed within a context of economic asphyxiation by the global superpower. As many an observer has reasoned in response to the argument that the Cuban state uses the embargo as a scapegoat for all its malevolent mismanagement: Why not just end it, then, and deprive the state of its excuses?
As luck would have it, my first interlocutor in Havana was a 50-year-old man who was in the process of repatriating himself to Cuba from Miami, where he had lived for the past five years working as a mechanic and truck driver. “My whole body hurts when I am in the US,” he told me in animated Cuban Spanish, “and I only begin to relax when I am on a plane out of there”.
He had concluded in his old age, he said with a wink, that he needed very few things to be happy. Life in the US was not one of them, because what he had experienced in the US was not life but rather capitalism – an “American dream” in which he never even had time to go fishing because he was always working. Yes, Cuba was crazy, but it was a craziness he understood and loved – and plus he was tired of listening to Cuban exiles in Miami endlessly plot their right-wing revolution.
Now, as the 60-year-old US embargo forces Cubans to live with less and less while imperial immunity from human decency and compassion proceeds apace, it is worth hanging on, perhaps, to Che Guevara’s words: “The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love”.
Phoebe Suina of the Pueblo de Cochiti Nation stands on the shore of Cochiti Lake, which feeds into the Middle Rio Grande Valley. (photo: Kalen Goodluck/High Country News)
Phoebe Suina on the Rio Grande River, Pueblo inclusion and the need for holistic solutions to our man-made disaster.
Under Western water law’s “first in time, first in right” doctrine, sovereign tribal and pueblo nations are entitled to the most senior rights on the region’s waterways. Yet the U.S. water regime has long locked tribal nations out of the federal, state and local water-planning and decision-making process. Over the past century and a half, federal, state and local agencies have dominated planning on New Mexico’s largest river, the Rio Grande, fracturing it with man-made reservoirs and diverting it to irrigate farms and lawns and golf courses. They have over-allocated it to such an extent that they now must import water from neighboring basins just to keep the river flowing.
“It’s a system that we developed where we didn’t account for the needs of our Native American people who have lived here since time immemorial,” said Grace Haggerty, endangered species program supervisor for the Interstate Stream Commission, speaking in a July 2021 New Mexico Water Data video.
It can take years, sometimes decades, for tribal nations to navigate the legal maze of negotiating their rights within the massive tangle of other users staking claims. While the northern pueblos have secured water rights through three settlement agreements, most others have not. A majority of tribes, including the six Middle Rio Grande pueblos, have unresolved water claims that are moving at a glacial speed through New Mexico courts. There are a dozen active water rights adjudications, involving 18 tribal and pueblo nations, with the oldest one filed in 1966.
The state has acknowledged how inconvenient the water settlement negotiations are and has sought ways to speed up the process in recent years, but the system remains imbalanced. State water managers, meanwhile, quickly carve up water among municipalities, industry and private users instead of treating tribal and pueblo nations as partners.
High Country News sat down with Phoebe Suina, a hydrologist from the Pueblos of San Felipe and Cochiti, to talk about water and Indigenous knowledge. Suina talked about having meaningful engagement with tribal leaders in water planning and starting her own consulting company after a catastrophic wildfire.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Can you tell me a bit about your company, High Water Mark, and how you work with pueblo communities?
In 2013, my colleague Ryan Weiss and I started a small company called High Water Mark. Around that time, we were working for another, larger environmental consulting firm trying to help tribal communities, in particular the Pueblo of Cochiti after the Las Conchas wildfire. Cochiti Pueblo and the village were severely compromised by flooding in 2011 and 2012 and needed flood mitigation infrastructure in the main Jemez watershed.
After you have a wildfire in a mountainous area, if you get a moderate or severe burn in a watershed, it’s a catastrophic condition and impact to a watershed. The land will not absorb water like it normally could during a normal rain. It becomes hydrophobic, meaning the sand gets so hot during a wildfire — actually becoming similar to glass — (that) raindrops will hit and just immediately run off and can bring everything along, like an avalanche.
I was faced with a decision to leave Cochiti Pueblo to spearhead the company’s federal contract, and I didn’t see myself doing that. However, I realized that I had a certain experience and, some will call it, expertise as a hydrologist and navigating federal funding, navigating compliance, and navigating the real threat that post-wildfire flooding had on the community. So, in a matter of days, we jumped ship and started High Water Mark.
What do you think water- management agencies miss when they don’t include tribal nations when stewarding our watersheds?
I really feel like Indigenous peoples still have that knowledge, that lived experience of being connected to natural resources, like water, that maybe modernization has separated from being an everyday connection. As an example, how many people out of the billions on this earth can say that they’ve drank right from the earth, not from a faucet, not the water bottle? The largest portion are probably Indigenous peoples.
The current system is based on assumptions from back in the early-1900s with their interstate stream compacts and the other water agreements that didn’t have the breadth of understanding or the expertise or the knowledge or wisdom of Indigenous peoples at the table to help the decision-makers create a framework. So if it was deficient in that, how can it be a sustainable system, a sustainable framework, a sustainable way to go forward?
In this state of New Mexico, we have a term called “prior and paramount water rights.” Those that have prior and paramount water rights were not at the table in the early 1900s, when agreements were signed and were decided.
There’s an essence of being — having that direct connection to natural resources, but also how that connection is inherent culturally. To not take it for granted. And so when the tribal leaders and the state engineers and non-tribal governments come together, we tend to create that separation during these water discussions. We say, “OK, here’s a piece of paper and this identifies how many water rights our pueblo people have, as mothers, as daughters, sisters and all those that have gone before us.” I worry that we are veering dangerously from that perspective and are taking water for granted.
This reminds me of something Grace Haggerty of the Interstate Stream Commission said in a video explaining New Mexico’s 50-year plan. Speaking as someone who is in such a high position, she said that the system that operates the Rio Grande River — that it’s a system the U.S. developed that didn’t account for the needs of Native American people who have lived here since time immemorial. And I’m wondering what you make of that?
I appreciate her acknowledging that. People have reached out to me and asked about engaging tribes in these water conversations, and I encourage that. And I wholeheartedly hope that that continues. But let’s now follow up with action. How do we actually put those words into action? And how do we wholeheartedly incorporate the Indigenous wisdom and expertise in plans and laws and policies in how we track water, how we manage water, how we steward water? That will tell me if these are just words, or if there is real sentiment and understanding behind those words.
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