28 August 21
A Blind Eye Ensures Desperation
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27 August 21
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We do have socialism in this country — but it’s not Democrats’ policies. The real socialism is corporate welfare.
Thousands of big American corporations rake in billions each year in government subsidies, bailouts, and tax loopholes – all funded on the taxpayer dime, and all contributing to higher stock prices for the richest 1 percent who own half of the stock market, as well as CEOs and other top executives who are paid largely in shares of stock.
Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Pharma, defense contractors, and big banks are the biggest beneficiaries of corporate welfare.
How? Follow the money. These corporations and their trade groups spend hundreds of millions each year on lobbying and campaign contributions. Their influence-peddling pays off. The return on these political investments is huge. It’s institutionalized bribery.
An even more insidious example is corporations that don’t pay their workers a living wage. As a result, their workers have to rely on programs like Medicaid, public housing, food stamps and other safety nets. Which means you and I and other taxpayers indirectly subsidize these corporations, allowing them to enjoy even higher profits and share prices for their wealthy investors and executives.
Not only does corporate welfare take money away from us as taxpayers. It also harms smaller businesses that have a harder time competing with big businesses that get these subsidies. Everyone loses except those at the top.
It’s more socialism for the rich, harsh capitalism for the rest.
It should be ended.
Civil rights leader Ben Jealous speaks at a voting rights rally outside the White House on Aug. 24 in Washington, D.C. Marches across the country are planned for Saturday. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Texas House Advances Sweeping Voting Restrictions Bill
Thousands of activists are expected to converge Saturday in Washington and other cities across the country on the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington as part of the national fight over access to the ballot box.
"We know that when people engage, we create nonviolent street heat, action occurs," said Martin Luther King III, the eldest son of the Rev. King. He is one of the organizers of the March On for Washington and Voting Rights.
Democrats and voting rights activists want federal legislation to fight back against new rules in Republican-led states that they say are intended to make it harder to vote, particularly for voters of color and young people. But on Capitol Hill, such bills have faced stiff Republican opposition, leaving Democrats so far unable to pass fresh legislation, despite holding control of Washington.
"It also makes it tragic that we're at a place where, as my mom used to say, every generation has to re-earn or earn its freedom. Because theoretically, we should be beyond voting rights," said King. "We should be addressing other issues."
Many Democrats fear that if federal voting bills aren't passed soon, the wave of new Republican laws could make it harder for many Americans to vote in the 2022 midterm elections.
"Old battles have become new again," said Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, the sponsor of the voting rights bill named for the late Georgia congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis.
"No longer are we allowed or told that we have to count how many bubbles there are in order to register to vote or be able to recite the 67 counties in Alabama in order to vote," Sewell added. "But I want you to know that the modern day barriers to voting are no less pernicious than those literacy tests and those poll taxes."
Where voting bills stand in Congress
Underscoring the sense of urgency Democrats feel, House lawmakers returned to Washington this week for a rare August session to vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. It passed on a party-line vote.
The bill would strengthen the Voting Rights Act, which was weakened by a pair of Supreme Court rulings in the last decade. After the House passed the bill named for Lewis, Biden said the legislation would protect a "sacred right."
"The House has acted. The Senate also has to join them to send this important bill to my desk," Biden said. "And the Senate must also move on the [For the] Peoples Act, critical legislation to protect our democracy and the right to vote. We need both of those — those election bills."
Like Biden, supporters of the bills say that both the Lewis bill and the For The People Act are necessary to protect voting rights. The For The People Act would set new national standards making it easier to vote, end partisan gerrymandering and increase transparency in campaign finance.
Democrats don't have enough votes in the evenly divided Senate to overcome opposition from Republicans, who have said these voting bills are overreaching and partisan.
Activists are focused on Senate rules
Republicans can block both bills because of the Senate rule known as the filibuster, which activists and some Democrats want to get rid of. Earlier this week, activists held a demonstration near the White House calling on Biden to more forcefully weigh in on the simmering debate over Senate procedure.
Speakers at the rally spoke in front of bright orange capital letters that spelled out the phrase "Step Up Joe."
Biden needs to "pick a side," said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter.
"At the end of the day, you can't be on the side of more voting rights and on the side of the filibuster. You can't walk that line," Albright told activists.
It is not Biden's decision whether to change the filibuster. Changing the Senate rules would require all 50 Democrats in the chamber to agree. At least two key moderates, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have said they are opposed.
There have been increasing calls from Democrats and activists for Biden to do more, arguing that his influence could change the dynamics.
"The only way to get Manchin and Sinema to stop being a problem is for the president of the United States to put every bit of pressure on them, and to call on them and their colleagues publicly to remove the filibuster as an obstacle," said Ben Jealous, the president of People for the American Way.
What's next?
Senators remain engaged in negotiations on their own versions of voting rights legislation and no text has been released.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has indicated that the Senate will move to the issue when lawmakers return to Washington in September.
One key negotiator, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, expressed optimism this week, saying at a roundtable in Wisconsin that she felt "good about the direction we're headed right now," and that she and fellow Democrats remain in negotiations with Manchin.
Jealous and other activists say its key that Biden and Democrats in Washington act with urgency.
"If in September this crisis has [Biden's] full focus, it can be fixed by October, well in time for the 2022 election," said Jealous, who is also a former president of the NAACP. "If the president dallies, if he acts like he's more powerless than he is, then we could see a situation where entire statewide elections are stolen."
Victims of a suicide attack at Kabul's airport arriving at a hospital on Thursday. (photo: Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
e speak with Haroun Rahimi, assistant professor of law at the American University of Afghanistan, about the Islamic State affiliate that claimed responsibility for this week’s devastating suicide bombings at Kabul airport, which killed more than 110 people, including 13 U.S. troops. Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, is a puritanical group that is “critical of all other sects of Islam,” says Rahimi. “Whatever Muslim that thinks differently than them is a major target for them.” He says the group’s name refers to a region of the former Islamic empire and is an attempt to reestablish “some past lost glory” in a bid to attract disaffected Muslim youth.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at the crisis in Afghanistan, a day after at least 95 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops were killed after a pair of suicide bombings in Kabul just outside Hamid Karzai International Airport. The militant group ISIS-K has taken responsibility.
We’re joined in Istanbul, Turkey, by Haroun Rahimi, assistant professor of law at the American University of Afghanistan. He was en route back to Kabul two weeks ago when he heard the news of the Taliban takeover and stayed in Turkey. He tweeted Thursday, “Please don’t ask me for the foreseeable future how I am doing. I am not doing well. No Afghan is.”
Professor Rahimi, welcome back to Democracy Now!
HAROUN RAHIMI: Thank you for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Who are the ISIS-K?
HAROUN RAHIMI: So, there are different ways to answer that question. You can look at their ideological leaning. You can look at their fighters, composition of their fighters. You can look at their objectives. And you would come up with different answers. You can look at their logistical kind of roots and their methods and come up with different answers.
Ideologically, it’s a group that is often called — it’s subscribed to a specific brand of Islamist kind of politics called Salafism. It’s a reactionary, modern phenomenon that seeks to reestablish their reimagined Muslim past. They often are very critical of everyone. They’re puritan. They are critical of all other sects of Islam. Whatever Muslim that thinks differently than them is a major target for them. They target Shias and other Muslims who disagree with them on any matter. And they’ve actually considered them called them the close enemy, compared to distant enemy, which will be the West or the Americans.
In terms of their fighters, they make up — they don’t have a lot of fighters in Afghanistan. It was a branch of the infamous ISIS which emerged in Syria and Iraq. But kind of a regional branch of it emerged in Afghanistan because of some of the connections that existed historically between eastern part of the country and the Arab world, and that — through which the Salafism, that kind of particular understanding of Islam, had spread to the eastern part of the country. Some Arab fighters — some foreign fighters, including Arab fighters, when the ISIS was disseminated in Iraq and Syria, came there, and there were also some local Afghans who joined them, because they felt more ideological alignment with them or they saw it as the opportunity to join a group that was seen by many as resource-rich at the time.
In terms of objectives, they are very anti — as I said, they are very against all other types of Muslims who disagree with them. They have fought with Taliban. They had many fights. They also fight — they target Shias, which are a sect of Muslims in Afghanistan, make up a large minority in the country. They’ve fought the government of Afghanistan, as well. Right now they seem to portray the Taliban as allies of the United States, and they wish to target both, as they did in the last attack, the horrendous attack on Kabul airport.
So, I mean, kind of there are different ways to answer that question, but it’s a complex reality on the ground. How powerful it is, many have concluded that it’s not that powerful anymore, after it was beaten down by the Taliban, the government and international allies, international forces. It still have some followers, sleeper cells in urban areas, because ISIS tends to recruit more kind of educated, middle-class, young members, compared to the rural base of Taliban. So, it has a lot of — it has a number of sleeper cells, for sure, in Kabul, and several of those obviously were responsible for the attack we saw yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: On August 14th, when Taliban swept into the vacuum in Kabul, they executed Abu Omar Khorasani, the imprisoned former head of the Islamic State of South Asia, of ISIS-K. They were freeing people in the prison. They pulled him out. He had been there apparently for years. And they executed him. Also, explain what Khorasan, ISIS-K, for Khorasan — and his name, Khorasani — stands for.
HAROUN RAHIMI: So, Khorasan is kind of a region. You have to realize that the ISIS does not believe in nation-states. So, they believe in a caliphate that has a universal claim. So, all — everywhere in the world falls within the realm or the jurisdiction of the caliphate, but they had regional kind of representation, often with the name of a region as a qualifier. The name Khorasan refers to the eastern part of the Muslim empire, when Islam was an empire, and covers regions like Iran and Afghanistan. And they’re using kind of the older name that referred to that part of the world in relationship with the past Muslim empire.
Obviously, it has symbolic significance. Again, as I said, they are reimagining the Muslim past in modern times as a way to mobilize often disenfranchised and alienated Muslim youth who are angry for different reasons, for the — kind of with the claims and hopes of reestablishing some past lost glory, which is obviously a reconstructed and reimagined past. That’s why the terminology and kind of the names often have those kind of symbolic past kind of pedigree.
AMY GOODMAN: With President Biden vowing revenge for the suicide attacks, do you see the U.S. and Taliban working together — ISIS-K is also the enemy of Taliban, as we know — to target them?
HAROUN RAHIMI: Absolutely. I mean, supposedly, they have already. The United States military said they had been exchanging information, sanitized information, meaning informations that were often — sometimes may not be full information. But some information was passed on to the Taliban to help them prevent such attacks. And the U.S. military claims that some attacks were prevented through those information sharing.
And there is a — moving forward, Taliban are the de facto government on the ground. And counterterrorism is going to be the main issue remaining, from the U.S. perspective, and the only partner they have on the ground, really, given that they have withdrawn — they are going to be withdrawing all troops, would be the Taliban. And it seems like the U.S. is counting on Taliban’s self-interest, to use Biden’s words, to kind of see them as a possible partner — an odd partner, but still a partner — in the counterterrorism attack, at least especially with regard to ISIS-K, because you have to realize there are other terrorist groups active in the region or who have better relationship with the Taliban and there is no enmity between them. For example, al-Qaeda still has strong ties with the Taliban. There’s alignments there. There are many groups that Pakistan, for example, considers a terrorist group. There are many groups that Central Asian countries consider terrorist groups. There are groups that China considers terrorist groups that are active in the region and have good relationship with the Taliban. So, Taliban would not be seen as a strong, robust kind of partner in counterterrorism, in general, but it, with regard to ISIS-K, seems like there have been some cooperation. And moving forward, they will be seen — Taliban will be seen as a partner that can be relied upon in Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN: Also, very quickly, the Taliban have not announced their government in Afghanistan. Are they having trouble pulling together this coalition of theirs?
HAROUN RAHIMI: I mean, the Taliban are very good at not having public dissent. So, if there are disagreements inside the movement, they tend to remain inside the movement.
There could be other reasons why they haven’t announced their government. One is that there are still U.S. troops present on Afghan soil. So, the symbolism of announcing a government while the airport is under control of the United States would not be something that they think they wish for. So, if the U.S. troops leaves by the August 31st and they still have a problem announcing government — for example, September 1st, 2nd, 3rd — then I think it would be cause for more serious internal kind of fractions.
Right now I’m sure there are internal kind of fractions. It is not a monolith, and there are different groups. For example, Haqqani network and the Sadr Taliban from Kandahar and Helmand have been in tensions with each other. Kabul is dominated by the Haqqani network, which is kind of a subgroup within the Taliban that controls Kabul at the moment.
So, there are disagreements, but they’ve been good at resolving them and keeping cohesion. And the fact that they haven’t announced a government yet, I don’t think is a strong evidence of severe internal divide, just because of the fact that the U.S. is still in Afghanistan, and Taliban would not have announced a government with the U.S. — with the Kabul airport being under control of Taliban. It would just not happen.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Haroun, are you planning at any point soon to go back to Afghanistan? I know the president of American University of Afghanistan, your university, Ian Bickford, apparently has fled the country, according to The Wall Street Journal and others. Will you be coming back?
HAROUN RAHIMI: Absolutely, I mean, obviously, just for to continue my mission of educating Afghan youth, and also just to go back home. That is where my home is. That’s where everyone I love is. I don’t have a large family outside Afghanistan in any meaningful way. All my family is inside Afghanistan. As long as it’s safe and I can be reasonably assured that I will not be harmed and targeted personally, I would definitely go back.
AMY GOODMAN: Haroun Rahimi, I want to thank you so much for being with us, assistant professor of law at American University in Afghanistan. He was en route to Kabul when he heard the news of the Taliban takeover and at this point has stayed in Istanbul, Turkey.
ATLAS software mines various federal databases for derogatory information. It runs autonomously on Amazon servers and can be used to justify revocation of citizenship. (photo: iStock)
oftware used by the Department of Homeland Security to scan the records of millions of immigrants can automatically flag naturalized Americans to potentially have their citizenship revoked based on secret criteria, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept.
The software, known as ATLAS, takes information from immigrants’ case files and runs it through various federal databases. ATLAS looks for indicators that someone is dangerous or dishonest and is ostensibly designed to detect fraud among people who come into contact with the U.S. immigration system. But advocates for immigrants believe that the real purpose of the computer program is to create a pretext to strip people of citizenship. Whatever the motivation, ATLAS’s intended outcome is ultimately deportation, judging from the documents, which originate within DHS and were obtained by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Muslim Advocates through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.
ATLAS helps DHS investigate immigrants’ personal relationships and backgrounds, examining biometric information like fingerprints and, in certain circumstances, considering an immigrant’s race, ethnicity, and national origin. It draws information from a variety of unknown sources, plus two that have been criticized as being poorly managed: the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, also known as the terrorist watchlist, and the National Crime Information Center. Powered by servers at tech giant Amazon, the system in 2019 alone conducted 16.5 million screenings and flagged more than 120,000 cases of potential fraud or threats to national security and public safety.
Ultimately, humans at DHS are involved in determining how to handle immigrants flagged by ATLAS. But the software threatens to amplify the harm caused by bureaucratic mistakes within the immigration system, mistakes that already drive many denaturalization and deportation cases. “ATLAS should be considered as suspect until it is shown not to generate unfair, arbitrary, and discriminatory results,” said Laura Bingham, a lawyer with the Open Society Justice Initiative. “From what we are able to scrutinize in terms of the end results — like the disparate impact of denaturalization based on national origin — there is ample reason to consider ATLAS a threat to naturalized citizens.”
Some critics believe it’s no accident that ATLAS could go after individual immigrants for flimsy reasons. “The whole point of ATLAS is to screen and investigate so that the government can deny applications or refer for criminal or civil or immigration enforcement,” said Muslim Advocates’ Deborah Choi. “The purpose of the secret rules and predictive analytics and algorithms are to find things to investigate.”
The Department of Homeland Security refuses to disclose to the public how exactly ATLAS works or what rules it uses to determine when an immigrant should be flagged to potentially have their citizenship revoked. This secrecy makes it nearly impossible to tell whether ATLAS is targeting immigrants baselessly or not. The Open Society Justice Initiative this week filed a new FOIA request with DHS and its United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, division seeking details on how the algorithm functions.
The revelations about ATLAS come as policymakers await a review of denaturalization policies that the Biden administration began in February to “ensure that these authorities are not used excessively or inappropriately,” as the White House put it at the time. President Joe Biden came to office promising a more “humane” approach to immigration than former President Donald Trump, who stripped dozens of naturalized Americans of their citizenship. A deadline related to the review came and went in May. Months later, the administration has yet to publish the review or speak publicly about the matter.
ATLAS originates within USCIS, a DHS division with responsibility for granting citizenship and other immigration benefits. USCIS has called the software its “primary background screening system,” but ATLAS appears to be a feature of a larger computer program that helps manage case information on every person in the immigration system: USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Data System, or FDNS-DS. A 2020 DHS assessment of ATLAS’s privacy implications, one of the few public sources of information about ATLAS, shows that when an individual’s information is run through the software — a virtual certainty for any immigrant — ATLAS autonomously scours the databases, including some that contain classified materials.
ATLAS appears to scrutinize not just individual immigrants but also their wider social networks. A 2016 privacy assessment of FDNS-DS said that ATLAS “visually displays linkages or relationships among individuals to assist in identifying non-obvious relationships… with a potential nexus to criminal or terrorist activities.”
Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the large online retailer, was hosting the ATLAS system as of 2020. That arrangement is one of many instances in which Amazon has sold its services to a controversial Homeland Security initiative targeting immigrants. Amazon has faced protests both from the general public and its own employees demanding that the company cease any further anti-immigrant work; the company did not return a request for comment.
USCIS spokesperson Matthew Bourke declined to answer any questions about ATLAS.
Tracking Millions of Immigrants With Potentially Catastrophic Consequences
It’s unknown how many individuals have been denaturalized via ATLAS. But a 2019 USCIS press release gave some sense of the program’s scale, noting that the program that year processed more than 16 million “screenings” and generated 124,000 “automated potential fraud, public safety and national security detections requiring further analysis and manual review by USCIS officers.”
Immigrants come into contact with ATLAS, according to the 2020 privacy assessment, when one “presents him or herself” to the USCIS for some reason, of which there are many; when “new derogatory information is associated with the individual in one or more U.S. Government systems”; or, according to the 2016 privacy document, whenever “FDNS performs an administrative investigation.” This apparently can happen even after an immigration-related decision has been made: Among the FOIA documents shared with The Intercept is a USCIS memo noting that ATLAS is used to detect “fraud patterns in immigration benefit filings … either pre- or post-adjudication,” suggesting that an immigrant could be subjected to algorithmic scrutiny indefinitely after their filing is approved.
Once the system is triggered, ATLAS eventually decides whether to flag the immigrant in question, but it’s unclear exactly how it arrives at that decision. How ATLAS reasons — that is, its decision-making “algorithm” — is secret. And although DHS documents list a handful of data types ATLAS can potentially search, they do not indicate what sorts of personal information ATLAS will churn through to reach its decision.
The 2020 privacy document states vaguely that “ATLAS contains a rules engine that applies pattern-based algorithms to look for indicators of fraud, public safety, and national security concerns,” a process described as “predictive.” It gives little information about these rules but does state that it is permissible to use ATLAS to target immigrants by race and ethnicity in “exceptional instances,” a term left glaringly undefined. The document claims that USCIS protects immigrants from discrimination by “limiting the consideration of an individual’s simple connection to a particular country, by birth or citizenship, as a screening criterion, unless such consideration is based on an assessment of intelligence and risk and in which alternatives do not meet security needs.” Caveats aside, the point is clear: ATLAS could be used to target certain ethnic groups or nationalities in “exceptional circumstances” or should DHS deem it a “security need.” Appealing to murky notions of “national security” and “fraud” is a long-standing tactic of the post-9/11 homeland security apparatus, and one that has historically permitted the state to justify efforts to harass or target marginalized communities in the U.S. under the auspices of public safety.
If ATLAS produces a negative review, the next steps can lead to denaturalization, and a 2019 flowchart included in the FOIA documents provided to The Intercept illustrates how: When ATLAS finds something derogatory according to its secret list of rules, the software sends out a “System Generated Notification,” which is then “triaged” and forwarded directly to FDNS-DS if potentially “actionable.” From there, FDNS determines whether the notification constitutes a “possible criminal denaturalization referral,” and, if so, will “refer to ICE for criminal denaturalization action.” All told, going from an ATLAS notification to criminal denaturalization proceedings takes only four steps on the flowchart.
A USCIS spreadsheet summarizing the System Generated Notifications created in 2020, also obtained via FOIA litigation, cites 12 different categories of ATLAS alert. Though the meaning of these codes is unclear, the spreadsheet references notifications relating to “DACA,” presumably the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy that protects some undocumented immigrants from deportation; “DOD,” possibly referring to the Department of Defense; and two different “NS,” or national security, categories whose full names were redacted. Most of the notifications created in 2020 were in the “multiple identities” category, which refers to immigrants deliberately using false aliases.
Legal scholars and technologists have widely criticized attempts to use software to predict national security threats, arguing that terrorism is so statistically rare as to be impossible to foresee by drawing “patterns” from a person’s biography. “Because the rules or factors underlying ATLAS’s screening functionality are unknown, there is no way to assess whether ATLAS is disproportionately flagging certain communities,” Choi of Muslim Advocates told The Intercept. “In fact, the Privacy Impact Assessment for ATLAS states that under certain circumstances, an individual’s country of birth or citizenship could be a screening criterion. As was the case in Operation Janus” — a DHS program that involved a review of past naturalization cases of people from “special interest countries” — “any rule based on country of origin is likely to target individuals from Muslim-majority countries.”
The 2020 privacy document does little to dispel worries that ATLAS is making potentially life-ruining decisions on the basis of bad data. The document states that ATLAS’s output is subject to manual review by the agents who use it; it also notes that the accuracy of ATLAS’s input is taken as a given: “USCIS presumes the information submitted is accurate. … ATLAS relies on the accuracy of the information as it is collected from the immigration requestor and from the other government source systems. As such, the accuracy of the information in ATLAS is equivalent to the accuracy of the source information at the point in time when it is collected by ATLAS.” The document further notes that “ATLAS does not employ any mechanisms that allow individuals to amend erroneous information” and suggests that individuals directly contact the offices maintaining the various databases ATLAS uses if they wish to correct an error. The notion that someone struggling to navigate the U.S. immigration system would have the wherewithal to personally negotiate a correction of the FBI Terrorist Screening Database, or have an opportunity to learn of such an error to begin with, is questionable.
An Opportunity To Stop the Denaturalization Wave
The U.S. government’s use of denaturalization has varied widely over the last century. In the early to mid-1900s, the federal government pursued denaturalization for political, racist, and sexist reasons, even going after U.S.-born citizens. That changed after a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision vastly narrowed the potential uses of denaturalization. For nearly five decades afterward, the government brought denaturalization cases only sparingly, usually against accused war criminals and Nazis — up until the Trump presidency.
In September 2017, the Department of Justice announced its intent to denaturalize three men it accused of lying about their immigration histories on their applications for citizenship. It was a loud proclamation of a new front in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants that would lead to nearly double the number of denaturalization cases filed during two years as compared to the number of cases filed from 2004 to 2016, according to a New York Times Magazine investigation.
The infrastructure that helped the Trump Justice Department identify its first targets for denaturalization was years in the making. Under Operation Janus — an initiative that began at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency and continued under former President Barack Obama — the Department of Homeland Security began to digitize fingerprint data for about 315,000 people whose information was missing from a central database, ultimately identifying 1,029 people who had been naturalized after receiving final orders of deportation under another identity. According to a 2016 report from the DHS Office of Inspector General, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had begun the process of investigating some of those cases to decide whether the individuals should be denaturalized.
“But the Obama administration proceeded with caution, instructing officials only to denaturalize those who appeared to pose a danger to the United States,” writes law professor Amanda Frost in her recent book, “You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.” “After the Trump administration took over, however, the program grew exponentially.”
In early 2018, the Justice Department wrote in a press release that USCIS “has stated its intention to refer approximately an additional 1,600 for prosecution,” and later that year, USCIS announced the creation of a new office focused on denaturalization. (Asked about the status of that office, Bourke, the USCIS spokesperson, said that once the administration’s review of denaturalization policies is complete, “USCIS staffing will be adjusted accordingly to meet the needs of the agency.”) Ahead of the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years, the Department of Homeland Security asked for $207.6 million to fund, among other things, investigations into hundreds of additional leads under Operation Janus, as well as a review of another 700,000 immigrant files under Operation Second Look, a related program. In early 2020, the Justice Department created a new office to investigate “terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders, and other fraudsters who illegally obtained naturalization” for denaturalization.
ATLAS is a direct descendent of these efforts to simultaneously digitize huge swaths of paper fingerprint records and sift through them en masse in order to find damning inconsistencies. One of the FOIA-produced documents shared with The Intercept, the USCIS memo on that office’s fingerprint digitization strategy, notes that ATLAS “will help to ensure USCIS is aware of cases with multiple identity fraud patterns so that officers can address this potentially derogatory information prior to final adjudication of immigration benefits.”
Several of the documents obtained under FOIA suggest that deportation is the end goal of these recent efforts: A heavily redacted, undated USCIS presentation lists “Removal Proceedings (if Amenable)” as the final step in a denaturalization case, while a flow chart on the “Historical Fingerprint Enrollment Denaturalization Workflow” shows the second-to-last step as “Immigration Removal Proceedings Occur,” followed by a decision by an immigration judge. A 2018 USCIS memo states that a key consideration in settlement agreements is to determine if deportation “is a priority or if denaturalization is sufficient,” noting that deportation “would generally be within the enforcement priorities, where the subject is denaturalized with an admission or finding of fraud.” A 2009 ICE memo notes that in cases in which the Justice Department declines to criminally prosecute someone suspected of “identity and benefit fraud,” that person “must, if legally possible, be administratively arrested and placed in removal proceedings. Several of the subjects have been granted citizenship through naturalization. These cases should be given priority.” Additionally, a USCIS spreadsheet listing settlement proposals for 10 denaturalization cases in 2018 and 2019 (all of which were rejected) shows that all of the offers included some sort of protection from deportation — either explicitly or through an agreement to maintain permanent resident status.
Denaturalization experts say that putting an immigrant’s paper trail through the algorithmic wringer can lead to automated punitive measures based not on that immigrant’s past conduct but the government’s own incompetence. Experts have long pointed out that using matches against shoddily maintained fingerprints, many collected on notecards decades ago, as evidence of deliberate “fraud” or malfeasance is likely to ensnare and punish innocent people.
According to Choi, in some cases “denaturalization is sought on the basis of the mistakes of others, such as bad attorneys and translators, or even the government’s failures in record-keeping or the failures of the immigration system.” Bureaucratic blundering can easily be construed as a sign of fraud on an immigrant’s part, especially if decades have passed since filling out the paperwork in question. If ATLAS finds that your name doesn’t match a name associated with your historical fingerprint record, you could be fast-tracked for denaturalization without ever realizing that there was an inconsistency in your paperwork, potentially through no fault of your own. “Many denaturalization cases are based on the government’s allegations of fraud, but the government has never substantiated its sweeping justification of fraud prevention to warrant the irreparable harm to American families and society that is caused by denaturalization,” Choi added.
The Justice Department’s denaturalization prosecutions appeared to slow in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic caused massive delays throughout the judicial system, according to a document obtained by the Open Society Justice Initiative. Another USCIS document obtained by the group, however, shows that there were thousands of cases in the pipeline: As of April 2020, the agency had produced 2,628 “affidavits of good cause,” which are a procedural requirement for initiating civil denaturalization cases, and had assigned 1,265 cases to the USCIS Office of Chief Counsel. Of those, 745 cases were pending with the OCC and 502 had been referred to the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. Asked about the current number of cases it is currently investigating or has referred to the Justice Department for prosecution, USCIS referred questions to the Justice Department. Justice Department spokesperson Danielle Blevins declined to comment on the department’s denaturalization caseload.
Under Biden’s February executive order, the departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security were due to submit a report to the president in early May. The State Department confirmed to The Intercept that it had completed its portion of the review and directed questions about if and when the report would be made public to the White House. Bourke of USCIS told The Intercept that the agency is working with DHS and the Justice Department on the review and that it would “potentially make adjustments following that assessment.” The White House did not respond to questions about the report.
Advocates, meanwhile, have been pushing the administration to dismantle the denaturalization-focused infrastructure built by Trump and to restore the previous status quo of very limited pursuits of denaturalization. In May, Muslim Advocates was the lead signatory among 48 advocacy groups that detailed these demands in a letter to USCIS. The groups recommend that the agency halt its use of ATLAS until completing a “disparate impact review” and publicly release information on the rules ATLAS uses to flag people, demographic information about the people flagged by the system, and the number of screenings and flags, as well as their outcomes.
Sameera Hafiz, policy director at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, who has been involved in advocacy efforts related to denaturalization for several years, said she wants to see the administration do even more. “Our expectation is that the Biden administration will establish a clear process to immediately restore citizenship to all the individuals stripped of their citizenship during the Trump years and commit to dropping the pending denaturalization cases initiated by Trump,” she said. “Unfortunately, Biden’s immigration enforcement tactics continue to instill fear in our communities — this is one important step the administration must take to begin addressing the harms of the Trump years.”
American soldiers in Afghanistan, 2006. (photo: John Moore/Getty)
ow that the long and monstrous war in Afghanistan is finally coming to an end, supporters of the occupation have a problem. Do they claim that if the United States had only stayed in the country for a little while longer, the Taliban could have been decisively defeated, and the troops could have left without the US-installed regime immediately crumbling? Or do they admit that the anti-war movement was right all along, and a “forever war” is exactly what the hawks wanted?
A long series of pundits have settled on the same response to this dilemma: keeping some American troops in Afghanistan long-term would be fine and nothing like a “forever war,” since the United States has permanent military bases all over the world.
Here’s Eli Lake — a columnist for Bloomberg and a “National Security Journalism Fellow” at the Clements Center:
GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini hit a similar note. Bret Stephens said pretty much the same thing in the New York Times, focusing on America’s seventy-one-year presence in Korea. Andrew McCarthy worked a version of the same sneer into the National Review, joking that if we were to keep troops in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, we might as well rebrand World War II as “World Forever War II,” since the United States still has bases in Germany and Japan.
None of these pundits seems to feel any need to explicitly spell out the argument they’re gesturing at with these sneers: that America’s supposedly peaceful long-term military presence in these other countries discredits what the antiwar left says about “forever wars” in the Middle East.
As far as I can tell, their implied line of reasoning goes something like this:
- The antiwar left claims that indefinitely extending the presence of American troops in Afghanistan would amount to waging a “forever war” in Afghanistan, but this can only be true if maintaining long-term American military presence in any country counts as waging a “forever war” in that country.
- America has maintained long-term bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and other countries without waging a “forever war” in those countries.
- We can conclude from number two that maintaining long-term American military presence in any country would not count as waging a “forever war” in that country, and thus is no big deal.
- We can conclude from one and three that the antiwar left is wrong to say that indefinitely extending the presence of American troops in Afghanistan would amount to waging a “forever war” in Afghanistan — and we should keep some troops in Afghanistan.
Number two is true enough if war means an ongoing “hot war” like the one that’s ending in Afghanistan. US troops aren’t in Germany to help Angela Merkel stave off insurgents already in control of large parts of Bavaria and Saxony. No one is getting into any firefights in Okinawa. Korea comes the closest, but even there, none of the occasional flareups of violence between North and South Korea have involved American soldiers shooting or being shot by anyone in decades. Like Germany and Japan, Korea is a stable society where the government enjoys as much internal legitimacy as the American government does within the borders of the United States.
But these disanalogies between the role American troops were playing in Afghanistan and the role they play in countries like Germany also show that number one is absurd. American soldiers might be able to walk around Berlin or Seoul without anyone shooting at them, but that doesn’t mean that if the war had dragged on for another year or another decade, the same kind of tranquility would have reigned in Kabul.
That said, they aren’t entirely wrong to suggest that there’s an analogy between the issue of whether the United States should be waging a “forever war” in Afghanistan and the issue of whether there should be “forever bases” scattered around the world.
For one thing, maintaining this kind of globe-spanning imperial military presence across over seven hundred bases worldwide is incredibly expensive. A report earlier this year found that the United States had spent $34 billion on its bases in two of these countries (Japan and South Korea) between 2016 and 2019. That money can and should be redirected to domestic social programs.
For another, even where local power structures approve of the bases and want them to stay, local populations often have good reasons for bitterly resenting American presence. Crimes committed by Americans stationed in Okinawa, for example, have sparked massive street protests against US presence there in the relatively recent past.
Finally, the bases in these countries aren’t just a potent symbol of America’s military might or an implicit threat to rival powers. They play a practical role in facilitating imperial wars.
Germany was diplomatically opposed to the invasion of Iraq, but when it started, planes regularly departed from US bases there, loaded with troops and weapons, and came back with wounded soldiers treated at base hospitals. Making it logistically easier for the US forces to quickly intervene all around the world in turn makes disastrous future interventions more likely.
The globe-spanning network of American military bases can’t be separated from America’s role as the world’s dominant imperial hegemon. That’s exactly why they need to go.
Pro-Palestinian activists gather near the White House to protest the visit by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, August 26. (photo: Ali Harb/Al Jazeera)
A meeting between Naftali Bennett and Joe Biden was moved to Friday amid turmoil in Afghanistan.
Waving Palestinian flags and chanting against the occupation, the demonstrators on Thursday called on President Joe Biden to uphold his campaign promise to advance human rights globally.
Biden was set to meet Bennett at 11:30 (15:30 GMT) but the bilateral talks were moved to Friday as the White House turned its attention to the situation in Kabul where two explosions killed and wounded people outside the airport.
“The US is sending this message of moral authority, moral responsibility, but then they don’t do anything when the Israelis commit violence against Palestinians,” Yousef Abdelfattah, a 24-year-old protester, told Al Jazeera.
The activists invoked Israeli efforts to forcibly displace Palestinian families from their homes in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah and the blockade on Gaza, where Israeli forces have wounded dozens of protesters this week.
They urged Biden to end the “blank cheque” policy to Israel.
Laura Albast, an activist with the Palestinian Youth Movement, one of the groups that organised the protest, said Biden has failed to deliver on his promise of conducting a human rights-centred foreign policy.
“But we’re here to stay, and he will listen to us whether he likes it or not,” she said.
Bennett told the New York Times earlier this week that his government will not proceed with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to annex large parts of the West Bank.
“This government will neither annex nor form a Palestinian state, everyone gets that,” he said, citing the delicate balance in his coalition cabinet that spans across the ideological spectrum in Israeli politics.
Albast, however, said de-facto annexation is continuing, even if it is not formally announced, noting Israeli policies against Palestinians in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1980.
“The families in Sheikh Jarrah are still under threat of losing their homes, and houses in Silwan have already been demolished, including small businesses of Palestinians,” she told Al Jazeera.
The Biden administration regularly calls for “equal measures” of freedom for Israelis and Palestinians, but it has categorically rejected suggestions of restricting or conditioning the annual $3.8bn in military aid to Israel.
The president and his top aides have also avoided publicly criticising the Israeli government.
Before a meeting with Bennett on Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the American-Israeli partnership is “unshakable”.
The State Department later released a statement saying Blinken reiterated Washington’s commitment to Israel’s security.
“The Secretary also emphasized that Israelis and Palestinians alike deserve equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and dignity, which is important in its own right and as a means to advance prospects for a two-state solution,” the statement said.
A senior administration official told reporters earlier this week that Biden will promote the two-state solution in his talks with Bennett.
“We’ve had very constructive discussions with this new government on the set of issues regarding Israel-Palestinian peace,” the official said.
“President Biden believes a negotiated two-state solution is ultimately the only way to ensure Israel’s future [as a] democratic and Jewish state.”
At the protest on Thursday, Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an advocacy group, said by hosting Bennett and refusing to condemn Israeli policies, Biden is letting down the voters seeking justice, who elected him.
“I remind President Joe Biden today that he’s breaking his promise that he will honour and promote and defend human rights … Justice for people here is no different than justice for people in Palestine,” Awad said.
A firefighter tries to extinguish the flames at a burning house as the South Fire burns in Lytle Creek, San Bernardino County, north of Rialto, California, Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2021. (photo: AP)
Thousands of firefighters working to bar blaze from reaching Tahoe Basin, a home to thousands and tourist destination
he Caldor fire continued its march through dense forest in the Sierra Nevada toward Lake Tahoe on Friday, as winds and temperatures are expected to pick up and humidity is set to drop.
Thousands of firefighters are working to bar the fire from reaching the Tahoe Basin, a home to thousands and destination for millions of tourists who visit the alpine lake on the California-Nevada border.
If the fire continues its path, fire crews plan to make a stand at Echo Summit, a mountain pass where US Route 50 begins its descent toward Lake Tahoe.
“Everything’s holding real good along Highway 50,” said the Cal Fire operations section chief Cody Bogan. “The fire has been backing down real slowly ... we’ve just been allowing it to do it on its own speed. It’s working in our favor.”
Johnny White and Lauren McCauley left their home near Echo Summit on Thursday after seeing flames on the webcam at their local ski resort.
Even as ash rained down under a cloud of heavy smoke, the couple wasn’t panicked because they had an early warning to leave, and wanted to avoid last-minute pandemonium.
“You don’t want everyone in the basin panicking and scrambling to try and leave at the same time,” McCauley said.
The Caldor fire is one of nearly 90 large blazes in the US. There were more than a dozen big fires in California alone, including one that destroyed 18 homes in southern California.
A new fire broke out Thursday in the Sierra foothills, forcing evacuations near the historic Gold Rush town of Sonora, just dozens of miles from Yosemite national park.
Fires in California have destroyed about 2,000 structures and forced thousands to evacuate while also blanketing large swaths of the west in unhealthy smoke.
Climate change has made the west warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, according to scientists.
The Caldor fire has been the nation’s top firefighting priority because of its proximity to Lake Tahoe, where its tourist economy should be in full swing this time of year.
“This is the week before Labor Day weekend, a busy weekend, normally,” said Joe Irvin, South Lake Tahoe city manager, . “That is not going to be the case this year.”
On Thursday, visitors were still crowding the highway that loops the giant lake and riding bikes and walking the beaches, but many are wearing masks. The lake, known for its water clarity and the granite peaks that surround it, has been shrouded in dense smoke that has reached hazardous levels.
The Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority has recommended tourists postpone their travel.
The Caldor fire has burned over 139,000 acres, or 218 sq miles (565 sq km), and was only 12% contained on Thursday.
Retired fire district captain Joe McAvoy, who lost his own home in the fire, said wildfires larger than 100,000 acres were once-in-a-lifetime events in his career. Not any more.
“Now it seems like they’re all 100,000 acres,“ McAvoy said. It’s way more extreme … Now [fires] are 100,000 acres and it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, big deal.’ You know, it’s every fire.”
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