31 December 21
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President Joe Biden. (photo: Getty)
From protecting the vote to raising the minimum wage to action on global warming, in the past year, the Democrats did none of it.
If politics worked the way we learn about it in school, Biden and his party would have seized this fleeting opportunity to pass his popular agenda and cement and expand their power.
Instead, after a strong start with the American Rescue Plan, passed in March, the Democrats have puttered forward, slowly losing momentum and now appearing at a standstill. Here are all the things they could have done this year, in theory, but did not.
Come Up With a Plan, Any Plan
It’s true that Democrats hold the Senate with the slimmest margin possible, needing the votes of all 50 Democratic senators — including semi-quasi-Democrats like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin — to pass anything.
But normal people will rightfully never accept this as an excuse — if they’re even aware of it, which many likely are not. Since Biden’s inauguration, his approval rating has fallen from 57 percent to 43 percent. Even among Democrats, it’s gone down from 98 percent to 78 percent.
Democratic voters might have maintained enthusiasm if the party’s leaders had explained that they actually had a plan — one to use all the power they now have to improve people’s lives and to get more power to do more in the future. Instead, their only plan appears to be to come up with as many excuses as possible for their sluggish drift to nowhere.
This dynamic is the same as when Barack Obama took office in 2009. He had the greatest grassroots army ever assembled in U.S. political history, one extremely eager to keep fighting. Instead, Obama essentially told them to go home, stay out of his hair, and let him handle things from there. The Democratic Party then spent the next eight years quietly collapsing into dust across America.
Biden did not have the same energy behind him as a person. But there was certainly lots of energy to be mobilized to keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House, via bold action that Americans would feel in their everyday lives. The Democrats have not done this.
One potential explanation for this is what can be called “The Iron Law of Institutions” — i.e., that people within institutions like the Democratic Party are primarily interested in maintaining power inside the institution, rather than the institution’s overall success. Any steps to expand the party’s power would require bringing in new constituencies, which would in turn lead to some current constituencies losing their status.
This phenomenon could be seen clearly in the 1972 election. George McGovern won the Democratic nomination by taking advantage of new rules which had made the process much more small-d democratic; he sought out donors and voters from the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the youth movement, and more. The old guard of the Democratic Party did not like this at all. During the period between the convention and the election, they were given to saying that McGovern was “gonna lose because we’re gonna make sure he’s gonna lose.” After McGovern did lose badly, his campaign gave their list of 600,000 volunteers and small donors to the Democratic National Committee, then run by the Robert Strauss, a right-wing powerbroker from Texas. The DNC promptly threw the list away.
Whatever the reason for Democratic stasis, it’s perplexing: Even if they don’t care about making things better for Americans, you might think they’d be interested in self-preservation. Biden, for instance, will probably be impeached if Republicans take back the House in the 2022 midterm elections. But this has not produced enough motivation for the Democrats to seriously try to make any of the following things happen.
Use the Full Power of the Presidency
Presidents have enormous unilateral power, if they choose to use it. Biden doesn’t need Congress to cancel student debt (as a candidate he called for forgiveness of “a minimum of $10,000/person”); make marijuana effectively legal (Biden’s lack of action has frustrated even some Republicans); or force drug companies to lower prices (as issue Democrats have purportedly supported for 30 years). Biden has done none of these things, although he has utilized executive orders in some areas.
Protect the Vote
There is no future for Democrats, or democracy, if the GOP succeeds in its ever-more strenuous efforts to undermine the meaningfulness of the ballot. There are three main things Democrats must do to prevent this, but haven’t.
First, they have to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. In 2013, the Supreme Court killed the most significant part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which requires that jurisdictions that have engaged in discrimination get permission from the federal government before changing their voting laws. The JLVRAA would restore preclearance.
Second, they have to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which has eight cosponsors in the Senate, including Manchin. The bill incorporates many provisions of the now-dead For the People Act, and would prevent partisan gerrymandering, purges of voter rolls, restrictions on ballot access, and more.
Third, they must reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, a badly written law that Trump’s allies planned to use to keep him in office despite his loss of the election.
Kill the Filibuster
The Senate was designed by James Madison to, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The filibuster was invented by accident in 1806 and has generally been used to protect the opulent and thwart the will of the majority even more adamantly than Madison envisioned.
The Democrats could eliminate or restrict the filibuster today if they wanted to. So far they haven’t wanted to.
Get People $2,000 Checks
Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff both won in the January 5 Georgia Senate runoff election by promising voters that if they won, eligible Americans would receive $2,000 in additional support during the pandemic. Biden promised it too, saying, “Their election will put an end to the block in Washington — that $2,000 stimulus check — that money would go out the door immediately.” Then both Warnock and Ossoff did win. Then it turned out $2,000 didn’t mean $2,000, but rather $1,400, because Democrats were now counting $600 from a bill already passed in December 2020 under Trump. A Democratic politician even edited a Warnock ad to convert the $2,000 into $1,400. Psych!
Raise the Minimum Wage to $15 an Hour
“There should be a national minimum wage of $15 an hour,” Biden said in his first address to Congress in April. Then the Senate parliamentarian declared that raising the minimum wage could not pass via budget reconciliation and hence would need to overcome a filibuster. The Democrats could have ignored the parliamentarian or — as both Democrats and Republicans have done to previous parliamentarians — dismissed her. Instead they’ve just given up, leaving the minimum wage at $7.25 — about the same level in real terms as during the 1950s. (In fairness, Biden has issued an executive order increasing the minimum wage to $15 for federal contractors.)
Climate Action
The world desperately needs the U.S. to take action to decarbonize the American economy. Various measures to make this happen were in various versions of the Build Back Better bills. But with the BBB agenda on life support, it’s anyone’s guess whether there will be significant climate accomplishments during the Biden administration.
Protect the Right to Abortion
Even if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, Congress possesses the power to prevent states from making it illegal. Of course, Texas has demonstrated how far the GOP will go to restrict abortion access even without a Roe decision. But Congress can also stop such state-level efforts. The House has passed such a bill, but it has no chance in the Senate.
Pass the PRO Act
Organized labor has always been the backbone of successful progressive politics, in the U.S. and around the world, and any progressive party would prioritize rejuvenating the labor movement. The decline of the U.S. middle class can be measured in the decline in unions: Almost 30 percent of the workforce was unionized in the 1950s. It’s now barely 10 percent overall, and only 6 percent in the private sector. The Protect the Right to Organize Act would have made organizing unions much easier. (Some of the PRO Act was incorporated into a version of the Build Back Better bill, but again, it’s now unclear whether any BBB law will pass.)
Make the Child Tax Credit Expansion Permanent
The increase of the Child Tax Credit in the American Rescue Plan is estimated to have reduced child poverty in the U.S. by 40 percent. It is a moral and policy slam dunk and should be a political slam dunk — actual, material support for family values, rather than cynical rhetoric. But the expansion will expire on January 1, 2022.
Get Free Masks and Home Covid-19 Tests to Everyone
It shouldn’t be beyond the capacity of the U.S. government to simply mail lots of high-quality masks and home Covid tests to everyone in the country, but apparently it is.
Expand the Supreme Court
There are six justices on the Supreme Court appointed by GOP presidents. Yet only one of them, Clarence Thomas, was appointed by a Republican president who was first elected with a plurality of votes. (John Roberts and Samuel Alito were appointed by George W. Bush in his second term.)
The current court’s makeup guarantees that any new Democratic initiatives will face a real prospect of being declared unconstitutional. This is so blatantly anti-democratic that it will inevitably lead to some kind of political explosion. The only way to defuse this would be to add members to the court appointed by Biden, plus some common-sense reforms that would lower the stakes of future appointments. Biden created a commission to study what to do about the court, the classic move when you plan to do nothing.
Make Stephen Breyer Retire
At the very least, Democrats could have exerted pressure in every way possible to encourage Stephen Breyer to retire, so Biden could replace him with a younger justice. Breyer, now 83, has seen Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s example right in front of him: She was diagnosed with two forms of cancer yet refused to step down during the Obama presidency, finally dying while Trump was president. Yet this seems to have made no impression on either Breyer or Democratic elites, who surely could influence him if they wanted to.
Make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico States
The disenfranchisement of Washington, D.C. residents is an incredible, ongoing scandal — yet it endures because ending it would lessen GOP power, and Democrats don’t press the issue. With a population larger than that of Wyoming and Vermont, D.C. has no representation in the Senate, and one representative in the House, who can sometimes vote as long as it doesn’t matter. D.C. residents clearly want statehood and should get it.
Meanwhile, more people live in Puerto Rico than 20 states. The most recent referendum on statehood there found a small majority does want to become a member of the union.
Change U.S. Foreign Policy
Biden has pumped the brakes on the U.S. use of drones, and he managed to withdraw from Afghanistan, something three previous presidents couldn’t bring themselves to do. But beyond that, his foreign policy trundles onward down predictable paths. He’s spoken nice words about ending the Saudi war on Yemen, with little follow-up in reality. Remarkably, he did not move immediately to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Obama — and with the election of a new Iranian president in June, the window for that may have closed. His policy toward China bears a lot of similarities to that of Trump’s.
Save Untold Millions of Afghan From Starvation
Thanks to a drought, plus U.S. sanctions and a halt to much international aid after the Taliban takeover, tens of millions of Afghans face potentially life-threatening hunger this winter. Aid organizations say a million Afghan children could die. It’s within the power of the Biden administration to greatly ameliorate this situation, but so far it’s largely paid lip service to any humanitarian concerns. Members of the Senate appear to share a bipartisan indifference to this looming catastrophe.
That brings us to 2022, which begins tomorrow. It is, of course, theoretically possible that the Democrats will take significant action on some of these issues in the coming year. But with rare exceptions, that’s not how U.S. politics work. The biggest things happen in a president’s first year in office, or they don’t happen at all.
The GOP spent much of the past year chipping away at the authority of state election officials. (photo: Brianna Soukup/Getty)
One message threatened, “You can’t run for governor when you’re already dead. We are going to hang you for treason, you fucking bitch.”
With Trump and his supporters continuing to lie about the 2020 presidential election and criticize election officials who refused to go along with attempts to overthrow the results, it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that, according to a report published by Reuters on Thursday, these local officials have been subject to a steady stream of abuse and threats since the 2020 presidential election.
The report contains more than 850 threatening and hostile messages spanning 30 jurisdictions in 16 states. Law professors and attorneys say that about 110 of them appear to warrant federal prosecution.
In one such message, a caller said, “We’re coming after you and every motherfucker that stole this election with our Second Amendment. Subpoenas be damned… You will be served lead.”
Another caller threatened: “You can’t run for governor when you’re already dead. We are going to hang you for treason, you fucking bitch. You’re going down.”
In addition to election officials, members of Congress have also been caught up in the “Trump hate tunnel,” as Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) put it. Even Republicans have received death threats for supporting bipartisan infrastructure legislation.
Unlike the GOP-led “audits” of 2020 election results in battleground states like Arizona, which were obviously farcical to begin with and went nowhere, the party’s focus on elections boards and other often-overlooked roles in the electoral process could actually be consequential. And the volume of and vitriol contained in voicemails to elections officials seems to reflect how important its efforts are to the Trump base’s goal of getting him back in office.
In the meantime, Ted Cruz and others will likely continue to spread lies about voting, and then try to justify what his party is doing by claiming that many Americans simply have doubts about the election process, knowing full well that who is responsible for sowing those doubts in the first place.
Valentina Orellana-Peralta's death was one of five killings by Los Angeles police in a nine-day period this month. (photo: Ringo HW Chiu/AP)
Valentina Orellana-Peralta’s killing was part of a sharp increase in lethal force during a year of police scandals
Yet her death was just one of five killings by LAPD in a nine-day period this month, marking a brutal end to a year that has seen repeated scandals inside one of America’s largest police departments.
This year, the LAPD killed more than double the number of civilians than in 2020. And while it’s unclear what’s driving the increase, activists argue that LAPD officers have been emboldened to use lethal force in careless and unwarranted ways after seeing their colleagues face little, if any, repercussions.
“The tactic is shooting first and asking questions later,” said Jose Barrera, California director for the League of United Latin American Citizens.
During the past week and a half, LAPD shot six people, including Orellana-Peralta. Five of the people shot by LAPD around the Christmas holiday have died, and none were armed with guns, according to official accounts.
The killings added to an already grim year for the LAPD’s use of lethal force. In 2021, LAPD has shot 38 people, killing 18 of them, according to the LA Times. In 2020, the department shot 27 people, killing seven of them. Those figures were similar to 2019, when LAPD shot 26 people, killing twelve.
“There’s just a reckless disregard for human life,” said Christian Contreras, a local civil rights attorney representing the family of one of the civilians killed by the department this month. “We’re dealing with a huge surge in police shootings and killings of Black and brown people. It’s out of control.”
A deadly Christmas week
The shootings, and particularly the death of the teenage bystander, have brought national attention on the department, which has faced continued accusations of unjustified killings, racial profiling and civil rights violations.
In most instances, police have released few details about the people they killed and why police resorted to deadly force. But even with the limited information available, critics say the circumstances do not indicate deadly force was merited.
On 18 December, LAPD officers fatally shot two people in separate incidents – both involving men allegedly holding knives. In the first incident, LAPD said officers in the Newton division in South Central were responding to a call for a “domestic violence suspect” at an apartment complex, described as a “man in his 30s”. A spokesperson said that officers upon arrival found Rosendo Olivio Jr, 34, who “fit that description”. Police alleged Olivio was holding a “folding knife” and butane lighter and yelling profanities and threats, and that an officer shot him dead when he “ignored commands”.
But Contreras, an attorney representing Olivio’s family, said it was unclear if Olivio was the suspect related to the original call, and that his family has questioned whether he was involved. Holding a pocket knife was not justification for killing him, Contreras added.
Olivio’s shocked family struggled to process the news and the LAPD statements presenting their loved one as a violent criminal, the attorney said. Olivio was a father of four, who lived in a neighborhood where police have been embroiled in repeated scandals over the killing of civilians. (Officers in the LAPD’s Newton division have for years used the nickname, “Shootin’ Newton”.) And although the LA police commission ruled that police officers violated policy in two other recent LAPD killings in south LA, the officers have not faced charges.
“Police investigate themselves … and justify the conduct of their colleagues,” said Contreras. “The system is designed to cover up misconduct.”
In the second 18 December killing, LAPD also alleged that a man with a knife ignored commands, but the department’s statement made no mention of whether he had threatened anyone.
On 23 December, LAPD killed two people inside a Burlington Coat Factory store in North Hollywood: a 24-year-old man who had a bike lock and had assaulted several customers, and Orellana-Peralta, the 14-year-old who was in a dressing room.
Video of the shooting showed an officer immediately firing at the man from a distance, without appearing to issue any commands. One of the officer’s bullets hit the girl, who was shopping for Christmas dresses.
Civil rights advocates questioned why an officer with an assault rifle appeared to fire at 24-year-old Daniel Elena Lopez, who did not have a gun, without attempting to deescalate and without assessing whether bystanders could be endangered.
Valentina’s mother, Soledad Peralta, said the shot knocked them both to the ground and that police ignored her cries for help. Once LAPD located them in the dressing room, officers removed her from her daughter, and “just left her laying there alone”, she said. LAPD declined to comment on her claims.
Then on Christmas Eve, LAPD shot a man who was allegedly shooting a gun in the air; he survived, but was in critical condition. And on 26 December, an officer fatally shot a man who was at a gas station and allegedly had a knife.
LAPD did not respond to the Guardian’s inquiries about the rise in killings.
‘LAPD creates the danger’
Advocates argued that the surge in killings was part of a pattern of misconduct this year that required systemic change.
Other controversies involving the LAPD in 2021 included: officers detonating seized fireworks in south LA, destroying part of a neighborhood and 22 residential properties; officers allegedly purchasing stolen guns; officers accused of falsely labeling civilians as gang members; officers not wearing masks in violation of Covid policies, but facing no discipline; the department promoting inaccurate data about its traffic stops; and revelations about the agency’s use of surveillance technology, prompting a rebuke from Facebook.
Officials have touted a range of LAPD reforms during the pandemic, including initiatives sending mental health professionals to respond to certain calls, expanded deescalation training and community programs meant to build relationships and restore trust.
But the steady stream of scandals, activists said, illustrated how the department fails to prioritize public safety and how reforms have not prevented harmful practices.
“LAPD is the one that creates the danger,” said Albert Corado, whose sister Mely was killed by LAPD in 2018 in a shooting with similarities to the Burlington case. She was working as a manager at a Trader Joe’s store when an officer fired at a suspect and killed her in the process.
The death of his sister could have been a turning point for LAPD, he said. But instead, the cycle of killings and unanswered calls for justice has continued, even after the reckoning prompted by George Floyd’s death.
“We’ve been at this moment many times in LA and across the country. Every few months, we say we’re so sorry for this person, and LAPD needs to be reigned in, and it doesn’t happen,” said Corado. “After Mely’s death, they didn’t change a damn thing. All these people are dead, and we’ve yet to do anything really substantial in a way that is going to be meaningful for victims.”
Corado is running for city council and advocates for the defunding of LAPD and the abolishing of police. Supporters of defunding argue that the best way to reduce police violence is to cut LAPD’s budget, limit their interactions with the community, and reinvest the funds in services. He said he was tired of conservatives who defend police at all costs, as well as Democrats who continue to increase law enforcement budgets while pushing modest reforms that have failed to stop the killings.
LAPD and its supporters have recently been pushing for more resources, citing concerns about rising crime, including high-profile robbery cases and retail thefts. The data, however, paints a more complicated picture; homicides have increased, reflecting national trends during the pandemic, but property crime is generally down.
Latora Green, an advocate who attended the press conference of Orellana-Peralta’s parents on Tuesday, said she hoped more people would come together to push for defunding: “It’s the whole system that needs to be dismantled.” No amount of accountability can bring back the 14-year-old victim, she added: “What really is justice when you lose someone?”
Corado also came to the news conference to offer support to the grieving parents. He said he wanted them to know they were not alone – that there was a network of families across LA who have suffered similar tragedies.
Rep. Cori Bush. (photo: Getty)
The total amount of student loan debt in the U.S. stands at $1.75 trillion.
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is sounding the alarm over potentially losing voters and subsequent races if the campaign promise of canceling student loan debt goes unfulfilled by the Biden-Harris administration.
Before the pause was extended, several prominent Democrats voiced their concerns about payments starting again and how it could cost them the midterms.
Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., tweeted, that "forcing millions to start paying student loans again" will cost Democrats the midterms.
The total amount of student loan debt in the U.S. currently stands at $1.75 trillion.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said it would be "delusional" to believe that Democrats can get reelected without taking action on student debt.
It is actually delusional to believe Dems can get re-elected without acting on filibuster or student debt, Biden breaking his BBB promise, letting CTC lapse, 0 path to citizenship, etc
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 17, 2021
Esp when they run from convos abt race+culture (which is what 1/6 was abt)
We need to act now
Natalia Abrams, president of the Student Debt Crisis Center, a nonprofit focused on ending the student debt crisis, told ABC News that "Democrats and lawmakers need to be careful because this is something the public has said they want."
"If you can afford to pause student loan payments over and over again, you can afford to cancel it," NAACP President Derrick Johnson tweeted after President Joe Biden announced his administration would extend the federal pause on student loan repayment for the third time in December.
Vice President Kamala Harris responded to Ocasio-Cortez's comment in a recent interview with CBS News, saying that Secretary of Education Cardona is looking into what the Biden administration can do to alleviate the pressure that borrowers are enduring from student loan debt. However, Harris also acknowledged the impact student debt is having on individuals across the country.
"Graduates and former students across our country are literally making decisions about whether they can have a family, whether they can buy a home," she said.
Harris was then asked if the Biden administration needs to deliver on its promise of forgiving student loan debt before the 2022 midterms in which Harris agreed.
"Well, I think that we have to continue to do what we're doing and figure out how we can creatively relieve the pressure that students are feeling because of their student loan debt. Yes."
During the 2020 election, Biden promised to forgive a minimum of $10,000 of federal student loans per borrower.
Additionally, we should forgive a minimum of $10,000/person of federal student loans, as proposed by Senator Warren and colleagues. Young people and other student debt holders bore the brunt of the last crisis. It shouldn't happen again.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 22, 2020
There are two major issues standing in the way of Democrats tackling student debt. First, there's no agreement within the Democratic Party on who has the power to cancel student debt.
Several Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have pushed the Biden administration to use executive authority to cancel federal student loans. Still, the Biden administration has pushed back, saying they do not know if Biden has the authority to do so.
When asked about Biden's campaign promise to cancel $10,000 of federal student loan debt in mid-December, Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that if Congress sent Biden a bill to cancel student debt, he would be "happy to sign it."
Back in July, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a press conference that President Biden does not have the legal authority to use executive action to cancel federal student loan debt.
"People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness; he does not," said Pelosi. "He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power, that has to be an act of Congress."
Another issue that stands in the way of Democrats making any headway on student debt is that there seems to be no consensus on how much to cancel.
Several Democrats, including Schumer and Rep. Ayanna Pressley D-Mass., have urged canceling $50,000 of federal student loan debt, which Biden said he would "not make happen" when asked about it during a CNN town hall in February.
In that same town hall, Biden reiterated his support for canceling $10,000 dollars in student loan debt.
Democrats have about five months before the pause on federal student loans repayment expiries.
"I think one of the best things that Democrats can do to secure midterms would be to cancel student debt," Abrams told ABC News. "At the very least keep loans on pause."
Huda Al-Sarari in 2021. (photo: Adil Salim Obaid Al Bahrani)
Huda Al-Sarari was forced into exile after her work documenting human rights abuses by U.S.-backed Emirati forces garnered global attention.
As a civil conflict in Yemen turned to a proxy war between regional powers, women would call Al-Sarari in the middle of the night to tell her that their homes had just been raided and their husbands, brothers, and sons taken away by force. Others would reach out to her after having spent days searching for their loved ones at prisons and police stations, and pleading with officials who told them they had no involvement in the men’s detention or knowledge of their whereabouts.
“These families were saying, ‘Help us, our sons were kidnapped,’” Al-Sarari told The Intercept in an interview. “I couldn’t hear about these violations and crimes and do nothing.”
The disappearances started shortly after Saudi Arabia launched an aerial and ground intervention in Yemen that was backed by the United States and involved other regional powers, like the United Arab Emirates. During the campaign, the UAE, a key ally in the U.S.-led war on Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, took control of vast swaths of Yemen’s south. As the number of the forcibly disappeared in and near the city of Aden grew in the hundreds, reports began to circulate that the men had been detained, beaten, and often tortured by informal Yemeni security forces trained and armed by the UAE.
Al-Sarari, along with a group of other attorneys and activists, began quietly investigating the reports. Their meticulous documentation effort culminated in a database that at one point included the names of more than 10,000 men and boys, most of whom were detained outside the domain of the state’s judicial system. It helped expose a network of secret prisons run by the UAE with the knowledge and at times direct involvement of U.S. forces.
The work of Al-Sarari and her colleagues was central to groundbreaking reports published by the Associated Press and Human Rights Watch in 2017. The revelations about the coalition’s abuses in southern Yemen renewed scrutiny of foreign powers’ involvement in the country’s civil conflict, as well as of the human rights abuses that continue to be carried out by U.S. allies in the name of counterterrorism. The documentation efforts contributed to the release of more than 260 detainees in the months following the reports’ publication, and could provide essential evidence as a growing number of international actors call for accountability for the widespread violations committed by all parties to Yemen’s conflict. More than 1,000 people remain detained to this day, Al-Sarari said, and more than 40 are unaccounted for, their fate and whereabouts unknown.
The UAE government did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department referred questions to the Defense Department, which did not respond to a request for comment.
The identities of many of the people who documented the abuses are not publicly known, due to their fear of retaliation in Yemen. But Al-Sarari appeared in media interviews and was publicly recognized for her involvement. That recognition put a target on her back. She faced a relentless defamation campaign, as well as threats and intimidation attempts, and was implored by her family to stop speaking out. “They blamed me, saying, ‘If you’re not afraid for yourself, fear for your children, fear for your reputation,’” she said.
Four years later, Al-Sarari’s work continues to have a profound impact on her life. Al-Sarari fled Yemen in 2019 months after her teenage son was killed, in what she believes to be retaliation for her work. She is now hiding in a country she asked The Intercept not to name. From there, she continues to field calls from people back home, mostly mothers, and to investigate reports of abuses.
Even from exile, she prefers to talk about ongoing human rights violations in Yemen rather than about how much exposing them has cost her.
“I will continue my work; I never regretted what I did despite the loss I incurred,” she said. “Not being able to live in Yemen and stay with my family because of my work — it’s my responsibility as a lawyer, as a human rights defender, and as a human being. You have to advocate for these victims because they have no one else to turn to.”
Prisons of No Return
The Saudi-led campaign in Yemen came in response to an insurgency by the Houthis, a Shia rebel movement that in 2014 took over the capital, Sanaa, and forced Saudi-backed President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi to flee the country. That political crisis had followed an earlier one, in 2011, when a popular uprising forced Yemen’s longtime, authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to hand over power to Hadi, his deputy.
Since ousting the president, the Houthis have controlled most of the country’s north, but in 2015 they briefly took over parts of the south, including the port city of Aden, where Al-Sarari was based. They were pushed back with U.S. support by the Saudi-led coalition, who believe the Houthis to be backed by Iran, a key Saudi rival.
Following the campaign, UAE forces established a presence in the south, where they undertook what was ostensibly a counterterror campaign that swept up countless people with no proven connection to terrorist groups. Senior U.S. officials have praised the ways in which the UAE and Saudi Arabia have led counterterrorism operations in the region, with a former deputy CIA director, Michael Morell, hailing the UAE’s role in southern Yemen as a “textbook solution of dealing with terrorist groups” and calling for the intervention to serve as a “model for other countries in the region.” U.S. military officials have taken to refer to the UAE as “Little Sparta.”
With Aden designated as an interim capital for Yemen’s ousted government, the UAE set out to establish a vast security apparatus that existed in parallel to the official one. Rather than rebuilding Yemeni institutions, they trained and armed a system of Yemeni special forces subordinated officially to the exiled president, but in reality to a UAE-led chain of command. The forces, which included the “Security Belts” in Aden and the “Hadrami Elite Forces” in Hadramawt, were soon accused of widespread abuse. UAE forces withdrew from Yemen in 2020 but continued to exert significant influence in the south.
“The UAE formed these militias outside the framework of the state, separately from the law enforcement apparatus at a time when the judicial system was disrupted,” Al-Sarari said. “The police departments were ineffective, and therefore the Security Belts that the UAE set up are the ones that took over security work inside the governorate of Aden. And they are the ones that later carried out the incursions, arrests, and raids.”
As it became known that she was investigating the disappearances, Al-Sarari received 10 to 20 complaints a day about raids and kidnappings. At first, she would turn to the official police and court systems but quickly concluded “there were forces other than the official security forces that were carrying out these arrests,” she said.
So she and her colleagues began to write down the testimonies of the families of the disappeared, gathering details such as the weapons the security forces carried and the words written on their uniforms. The raids, they learned, were systematic and were happening well beyond Aden, in a series of districts where the Houthi insurgency had been pushed back. The reports became so numerous they soon grew into a sprawling spreadsheet.
“There was no official party to report to, so the families resorted to us,” said Al-Sarari, who noted that it was usually the mothers of the disappeared who came to know of her, by word of mouth or through the advocacy of the Abductees’ Mothers Association, a women-led civil society group.
The disappeared men, including several who had resisted both the Houthis’ offensive in the south and the coalition’s intervention, were summarily accused of connections to various terrorist groups, including Yemeni branches of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and imprisoned for months in more than a dozen informal detention centers.
Al-Sarari was able to identify the location of several of the sites and interview men who had been held and abused there. Once, she spoke with a man who had been released after being detained along with his brother. At his home, he asked his mother and sister to leave the room before telling Al-Sarari that security forces had held his brother’s head underwater and that he was sure his brother had not survived.
Human rights advocates have long called for an independent process to document widespread and systematic abuses and war crimes committed by all parties to the conflict in Yemen. This month, more than 75 civil society groups called on the U.N. General Assembly to establish a new international accountability mechanism for Yemen, after a group of experts tasked by the U.N. with documenting human rights abuses in the country saw its mandate end amid political pressure from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Critics of the Saudi-led coalition have also called for an investigation by the International Criminal Court.
“At some point there’s going to have to be recognition of what has happened in Yemen on all sides, and any sort of accountability mechanism in a post-conflict Yemen has got to include the counterterrorism abuses that were committed,” said Jennifer Gibson, a lawyer who leads the extrajudicial executions project at the U.K.-based group Reprieve, which has worked to amplify Al-Sarari’s advocacy efforts outside Yemen, including by nominating her to two prestigious human rights awards. “That’s why Huda’s investigations are so important, because of what she was able to document in real time and the evidence she was able to gather. That evidence doesn’t go away.”
An Enormous Cost
As she built up a database of extrajudicial detentions between 2015 and 2016, Al-Sarari was getting frustrated that documenting the abuses was not doing much to stop them. So when a journalist with the Associated Press and representatives of various international human rights groups began reaching out, she shared her research with them and coordinated visits with the families of the detained to help expose their plight to the world.
The existence of the prisons was eventually documented in 2017, in separate investigations by the Associated Press and Human Rights Watch which relied extensively on the work of Al-Sarari and other local activists. They were later confirmed by U.N. investigators — the Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen, or GEE — in 2018.
The reports included the testimonies of former detainees who denounced systematic violence and torture at the hands of UAE-backed Yemeni special forces. Witnesses described being beaten, sexually assaulted, held in crowded shipping containers, and blindfolded for months on end. They said they were caned with wires and given electric shocks. The secret detention sites were located at airports, military bases, private homes, and a nightclub, with some detainees reporting that interrogations also took place onboard ships. The torture included a technique called the “grill,” during which a person would be tied to a spit and spun in a circle of fire, the AP reported. A man who was detained in one of the centers described it as a “no return prison,” according to the HRW report. Another, who visited a child detained in a crowded cell at one of the sites, said that the boy “looked insane.”
Once they became public, the reports were picked up widely. Al-Sarari, who was quoted in one of the AP articles, became the reluctant face of the story. After she gave an interview to Al Jazeera, supporters of the Saudi-led coalition started a ferocious harassment and defamation campaign against her. On social media, she was called a spy, a terrorist sympathizer, a mercenary, and a “whore.” The online abuse sometimes escalated into threats sent to her anonymously. Once, someone broke into her home and stole her phone. Someone smashed her car’s windows.
“My goal was to keep working, but I was terrified,” Al-Sarari said.
Some of her relatives were firmly opposed to her work and accused her of putting her four children at risk. They couldn’t understand why, in a collapsed state where none of the official institutions were functioning, she insisted on carrying out her dangerous work. “They’d say, ‘Do your normal job, but do not do the monitoring, do not speak out,” she recalled. “‘There is no judiciary, there is no prosecution; no organization is working except for you.’”
But that’s exactly why Al-Sarari felt an obligation to keep documenting the abuses. She kept a low profile for a while but eventually resumed her visits to the homes of the disappeared, pretending to go out with friends and hiding under a burqa to protect her identity.
“Anybody who was speaking out on this stuff faced significant risks,” said Kristine Beckerle, a former Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch, who said the organization’s 2017 report relied extensively on the work of Al-Sarari and several other people.
“She has truly paid a cost for the work that she’s done,” Beckerle added. “And that’s pretty devastating, because you wish that Yemen was a place where people like Huda and others were rewarded and applauded, rather than threatened or had their lives upended.”
In March 2019, while Al-Sarari was on television discussing a spree of protests against Yemeni special security forces, her 18-year-old son Mohsen was shot while at one of the protests. He was immediately paralyzed and remained in intensive care for a month, before dying of his injuries. Al-Sarari asked local authorities to investigate her son’s killing, but they did not, she said. So she began to investigate herself, and learned from a witness that he had not been struck randomly, as she initially believed, but that he had been shot intentionally, from the front and at a short distance by the brother of a senior member of Aden’s UAE-backed Security Belt. The Intercept could not independently verify her account.
After her son’s killing, Al-Sarari ignored friends’ advice that she flee and instead remained in Yemen, where she continued her work documenting the abuses of the same forces that had been responsible for his death. She left several months later, as the smear campaign against her intensified following international recognition of her work.
The tipping point, she said, came when an anonymous comment online threatened her surviving son. “They should get rid of another one of your kids so that you leave,” it read.
Outsourcing Torture
While she doesn’t regret her sacrifice, Al-Sarari says she is deeply disappointed her work didn’t yield stronger action from the international community — and the United States in particular — in response to UAE abuses in southern Yemen. “The U.S. should hold the UAE accountable,” she said.
“They did not take any action that does justice to the victims, especially considering there were American elements along with the Emiratis inside the coalition camp,” she added, referring to U.S. officials. “They did not put any pressure on the coalition to stop committing such crimes.”
In early 2015, when the Houthi insurgents moved south, the U.S. evacuated troops it had deployed to Yemen as part of its long-running fight against Al Qaida. But after the Houthis were pushed back by coalition forces backed by U.S. intelligence and aerial support, the U.S. redeployed a small number of Special Operations troops to aide in UAE-run counterterrorism efforts. In southern Yemen, the U.S. worked with the Emiratis to train and arm Yemeni special forces, to which it has provided tactical and technical support.
The reports Al-Sarari helped bring to light, in fact, also implicated the United States, with former detainees and Yemeni officials saying that they had seen Americans around the detention sites or been questioned by them.
The 2017 AP investigation cited unnamed U.S. officials saying that Americans did participate in the interrogation of detainees at the sites, and that they provided questions for other forces and received transcripts of the interrogations. The officials said that they had been aware of allegations of abuse but that they believed none had taken place when U.S. forces were present. “We would not turn a blind eye, because we are obligated to report any violations of human rights,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Defense said at the time.
Men who were released from the prisons reported that detainees would be split between those accused of links to terrorist groups and critics of the coalition and other political activists, said Baraa Shiban, Yemen project coordinator at Reprieve, who works closely with Al-Sarari and personally interviewed some of the former detainees.
“When some of the detained started to get out, they started to say, ‘Actually we were interrogated by American interrogators,’” Shiban told The Intercept. “We were told by a number of prisoners that when they took them in, they would split them and say, ‘These are people of interest to the American interrogators, and these are people of interest to the UAE.’”
The revelations prompted questions about the U.S.’s direct or indirect role in extrajudicial detentions and torture. Beckerle, the Yemen researcher, said that while reports by Western groups brought belated international attention to forcible disappearances and the UAE-run secret prisons, “It wasn’t a secret in southern Yemen that these awful abuses were happening.”
U.S. officials’ position — that they were not aware of the abuses until high-profile reports were published — is “nonsense,” she added. “If they had looked, they would have found it, but they didn’t want to find it.”
A former senior Defense Department official told The Intercept that following public allegations of torture, U.S. officials pushed for representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross to be allowed to visit the facilities, and met with them to coordinate such a visit. The former official, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said that the department advised its members against visiting prisons abroad to avoid being held “responsible to do something about conditions.” He added that the ICRC had greater ability to report on prison conditions and “more credibility” with critics.
But the former official also said that he does not believe the UAE were responsible for torture at the sites, adding that torture is “not only immoral it is ineffective.”
“We had a near-constant engagement with the Emirates on the efforts in Yemen,” said the official. “If we were to be aware of human rights abuses, of which torture would be included of course, we would have stopped any support.”
The ICRC made its first visit to “conflict-related” detainees in Aden in 2018. Imene Trabelsi, a spokesperson for the group, wrote in an email to The Intercept that “all details and any concerns or observations we might have are shared as part of a strictly confidential and bilateral dialogue with the authorities in charge.”
The spokesperson added that the ICRC has visited approximately 40 detention sites throughout Yemen, reaching approximately 20,000 mostly civilian detainees. “The ICRC’s access to conflict-related detainees remains limited and continues to be the object of ongoing negotiations with all parties to the conflict,” Trabelsi wrote.
The UAE-run sites in Yemen were reminiscent of the CIA “black sites” where U.S. forces tortured scores of terrorism suspects in the aftermath of 9/11, critics said. While U.S. abuses were amply documented, no U.S. officials or forces have been held accountable for them — a failure that human rights advocates warn has only enabled other countries to pursue similar tactics in the name of counterterrorism.
If anything has changed since the early days of the U.S. torture program, said Reprieve’s Gibson, it is that the U.S. has distanced itself from abuses committed by other forces it closely cooperates with, building “a layer of plausible deniability into the system.”
“U.S. torture was thought to be historical, and what Huda’s work is showing us is that all the U.S. has done from the first half of the war on terror to the second half is to realize, ‘Hey, actually, it’s much better to outsource the torture, outsource it to our partners, and then we don’t have any accountability, our fingers are not on it,’” Gibson added. “When you don’t grapple with your own accountability for your own actions, and you don’t hold your government to account for the torture it has committed, it’s just going to keep doing that in one way or another. The impunity just breeds more impunity.”
In this Nov. 11, 2016, file photo, more than 500 clergy from across the country gather for a "Clergy for Standing Rock" march on N.D. Highway 1806 near Cannon Ball, N. D. A federal judge on Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2021, has sided with local law enforcement in a case brought by Dakota Access Pipeline demonstrators alleging excessive use of force by police at a protest site in North Dakota in 2016. (photo: Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune/AP)
The Bismarck Tribune reported that temperatures dropped below freezing the night of Nov. 20 as police and protesters faced off on a highway just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Officers sprayed protesters with water during the incident.
Attorneys for the protesters who brought the suit say police fired rubber bullets and exploding munitions “indiscriminately into the crowd” and also used tear gas. Some of the demonstrators were injured that night.
Lawyers for law enforcement, including Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, say officers were outnumbered and were concerned for their lives and safety. They sought to have the protesters’ legal claims dismissed.
U.S. District Judge Daniel Traynor issued the order granting their request on Wednesday.
Morton County Assistant State’s Attorney Gabrielle Goter said in a statement that she was pleased with the ruling.
An attorney for the plaintiffs did not immediately comment on the case. The lead plaintiff is Vanessa Dundon, a member of the Navajo Nation whose eye was injured the night of the incident.
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