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11 August 21
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ight now in northern Minnesota, the Canadian oil-and-gas-transport company Enbridge is building an expansion of a pipeline, Line 3, to carry oil through fragile parts of the state’s watersheds as well as treaty-protected tribal lands. Winona LaDuke, a member of the local Ojibwe tribe and a longtime Native rights activist, has been helping to lead protests and acts of civil disobedience against the controversial $9.3 billion project. “I spend a lot of time,” she says, “fighting stupid ideas that are messing with our land and our people.” So far the efforts of LaDuke, who is 61 and who ran alongside Ralph Nader as the Green Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 1996 and 2000, have been in vain. The Biden administration declined to withdraw federal permits for the project, a stance that Line 3 opponents see as hypocritical given the president’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline as well as his vocal support for climate action. “I have had the highest hopes for the Biden administration,” LaDuke says, “only to have them crushed.” Not long after we spoke, LaDuke was arrested and jailed for violating the conditions of her release on earlier protest-related charges, which required her to avoid Enbridge’s worksites. She has since been released.
How do you understand Biden’s decision to allow the construction of Line 3? He’s hellbent on destroying Ojibwe people with this pipeline. Why do we get the last tar-sands pipeline, Joe? It’s kind of like when John Kerry went and testified to Congress against the Vietnam War and said, Who’s going to tell that soldier that he’s the last one to die for a bad war? Who’s going to tell those Ojibwes that they’re the last ones to be destroyed for a bad tar-sands pipeline? What’s right about this? I organized people to vote for Biden. I drove people to the polls through seas of Trump signs. I drove Indian people to vote who hadn’t voted in 20 years. And what did we get from Joe? A pipeline shoved down our throats.
Are you saying that you think Biden has some specific animosity toward the Ojibwe? No. He doesn’t have animosity, but he’s privileging a Canadian multinational. He knows that this pipeline runs right through our reservations. They know, and have a choice of what they’re going to support. I think it’s a trade-off for him: I canceled Keystone, and so we’ll just let this one go through, because it’s a replacement pipe. It’s not. It’s a new pipe. It’s horrendous. It’s a violation of not only the treaties but also every ounce of common sense. It’s a drought right now. But Enbridge put in an amendment: They get five billion gallons of water out of a region where rivers are 75 percent below normal. What’s with that? There was not a federal environmental impact statement on this pipeline, and the Biden administration just said we don’t need to do one. I mean, why?
Protesters call for the release of Trump's tax returns. (photo: Getty)
The judge approved a subpoena for Trump’s records covering 2017 and 2018, but turned down most of the panel’s request for similar information dating back to 2011.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta approved a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoena for Trump’s records covering 2017 and 2018, but turned down most of the panel’s request for similar information dating back to 2011.
The decision is likely to be appealed by Trump’s lawyers and could also be challenged by the House panel.
While the House panel was deemed entitled to some of the records they sought from the accounting firm Mazars, the ruling could be seen as a setback for lawmakers since Mehta's 53-page ruling delved in detail into their need for the information ruled that the subpoena was not adequately tailored to serve those purposes.
Mehta said the committee's effort to get information on Trump's finances back to 2011 seemed to exceed its legitimate needs and threatened to intrude on presidential powers. The judge specifically discounted the panel's claims that it needed that data to determine whether Trump complied with a financial disclosure statute and whether that law should be changed.
"Due to its broad, invasive nature, the subpoena poses an appreciable risk to the separation of powers," wrote the judge, who was appointed by President Barack Obama. "In the current polarized political climate, it is not difficult to imagine the incentives a Congress would have to threaten or influence a sitting President with a similarly robust subpoena, issued after he leaves office, in order to 'aggrandize itself at the President’s expense....' In the court’s view, this not-insignificant risk to the institution of the presidency outweighs the Committee’s incremental legislative need for the material subpoenaed from Mazars."
Mehta was more receptive to the committee's claims that it needed access to Trump's financial data in order to assess whether he violated the Constitution's emoluments clauses by accepting payments from state or foreign governments and that the panel needed to audit the lease the General Services Administration granted to one of Trump's businesses in 2013 to build and operate the Trump International Hotel at the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
The judge said the dealings related to the hotel were more akin to ordinary business transactions and he was hard pressed to see why Trump's ties to that deal should be off limits to investigation solely because he formerly served as president.
"By freely contracting with GSA for his own private economic gain, and by not divesting upon taking office, President Trump opened himself up to potential scrutiny from the very Committee whose jurisdiction includes the 'management of government operations and activities, including Federal procurement," Mehta wrote. "That he happened to occupy the presidency for some portion of his still-in-effect lease does nothing to change that fact."
The legal fight Mehta ruled on Wednesday has already made one trip to the Supreme Court. Last year, the justices rejected arguments from Trump's lawyers and the Justice Department that the courts cannot rule on subpoena battles between the legislative and executive branches. However, the ruling instructed lower courts to scrutinize Congress' need for the information and whether the subpoena fit those objectives.
The congressional demand has diminished in significance in recent months, due to Trump's loss and a parallel grand jury subpoena obtained by prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's office. The Supreme Court also upheld the enforcement of that subpoena, leading to eight years of tax information being turned over to that office in February. That information fueled an indictment last month, charging the Trump Organization and its longtime Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg with a variety of tax and fraud offenses.
Both have entered not guilty pleas.
While what the House panel would receive under Mehta's decision is just a subset of what the New York prosecutors already have, the committee has one option the prosecutors lack: Lawmakers would face few strictures on making the information public. The records turned over in New York are covered by grand jury secrecy, which limits public disclosure, but Congress isn't bound by those rules.
In a separate case before the court, Judge Trevor McFadden is weighing arguments over whether House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal should have access to six years’ worth of Trump’s returns. Neal says that he needs them so the committee can determine whether the IRS is doing an adequate job auditing presidents, something it has long done as a matter of policy.
Neal is citing an obscure law that allows the heads of Congress’ tax committee to examine anyone’s confidential tax information. Trump’s attorneys argue that Neal needs a legitimate legislative reason to get the returns, that he doesn’t have one and that Democrats simply want to hurt Trump politically.
The case has been moving through the court at a glacial pace, with preliminary legal wrangling now scheduled to drag into November.
Protesters hold an American flag urging Congress to protect voting and pass the For the People Act at the Recess Can Wait protest at the Capitol on 3 August. (photo: Allison Bailey/Shutterstock)
Senate expected to reintroduce Democrats’ marquee election reform bill known as the For the People Act before summer recess
op Democrats in the Senate are poised to make another attempt to push through voting rights legislation before the chamber leaves Washington for a summer recess, in a sign of their determination to counter a wave of Republican-led ballot restrictions across the nation.
The Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is expected to reintroduce Democrats’ marquee election reform bill known as the For the People Act, with additional votes on one measure to end partisan gerrymandering and another measure to tighten campaign spending, sources said.
None of the measures, for which Schumer hopes to schedule votes immediately after the Senate takes up the $3.5tn budget blueprint for infrastructure, is expected to garner any Republican support and will thus likely follow the demise of the For the People Act in June.
The move by Senate Democrats will encourage voting rights activists, who have watched with alarm that the issue appeared to have taken a back seat as protracted negotiations over the $1tn bipartisan infrastructure package consumed the Senate.
Yet in the face of united Republican opposition, the endgame for Democrats – even as they scramble to enact voting rights legislation to roll back a wave of GOP ballot restrictions in time for the 2022 midterm elections – remains unclear.
The only conceivable path for Democrats to ensure passage of the voting rights bills would require reforming the Senate’s filibuster rule, an option not currently available to party leaders after holdouts last week reiterated their opposition.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema on Friday told ABC that she continued to support the 60-vote requirement for the filibuster, days after senator Joe Manchin said anew that he would not acquiesce to carving out a voting rights exemption from the rule.
Democrats face a time crunch as they prepare for the 2022 midterms, when they hope to mitigate Republican gains after House district lines are redrawn on the results of last year’s census.
Democrats are particularly determined to curb partisan redistricting, which could allow Republicans to gain enough seats to reclaim the House majority and thwart their ambitions of enacting Joe Biden’s legislative agenda in the second half of his first term.
And with some Republican-led states racing to redraw lines once the Census Bureau releases detailed population data on 12 August, advocates for stronger federal voting rights laws have warned that Congress needs to act before mid-September in order to affect 2022 balloting.
To that end, a group of Democrats led by Senate rules chair Amy Klobuchar and Senator Jeff Merkley have continued to work on voting rights legislation in an attempt to keep up momentum against GOP ballot restrictions based on Trump’s lies about a stolen election.
Some Democrats involved in the effort were optimistic that they could introduce this week a For the People Act version 2.0 that incorporated elements from a three-page, scaled-down version of the bill proposed by Manchin two months ago, the sources said.
But the legislation was not complete as of Tuesday, and Democrats crafting the voting rights legislation now expect Schumer to try to again advance the For the People Act after the Senate completes a set of marathon rapid fire votes on the $3.5tn budget blueprint.
The group, which also includes senators Alex Padilla, Tim Kaine, Angus King and Raphael Warnock, anticipate Schumer will then schedule votes on two measures from Manchin’s proposal: one that aims to counter partisan gerrymandering, and another to combat so-called dark money in politics.
The stakes are significant both for Warnock, who is on the ballot next year, as well as for the Democratic caucus more widely, since the loss of his seat in the battleground state of Georgia could shunt the party back into the minority in the 50-50 Senate.
And Warnock faces an uphill struggle in seeking re-election as he prepares to run in a state where Republicans have moved decisively to limit mail-in-ballots, curb early voting and shift electoral power towards the Republican-led state house.
After Republicans blocked the For the People Act, the most far-reaching election reform legislation to come before Congress in a generation, the Senate majority leader vowed to redouble his efforts.
“In the fight for voting rights, this vote was the starting gun, not the finish line,” Schumer said. “We will not let it go. We will not let it die. This voter suppression cannot stand.”
But some Democrats have signalled skepticism about forcing an almost certainly futile votes measure now, in a rushed move they say could erode potential Republican support should they try to enact bipartisan voting rights bills in the future.
Before the vote on the For the People Act in June, Democrats reached out across the aisle to encourage centrists such as Lisa Murkowski to back the legislation. In a sign of the pessimism about the success of the forthcoming votes, there has been no such effort this time, the sources said.
Members of the Proud Boys. (photo: Nathan Howard/Getty)
or more than six months after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the city of Portland, Oregon, enjoyed a summer largely free of far-right rallies. That changed this weekend when a coterie of fringe figures descended on the city, where they were filmed throwing punches at bystanders, clashing with the left, and in one case pointing a rifle at a journalist.
Among the group was one person charged with allegedly breaking into the Capitol (currently out of jail awaiting trial), as well as people wearing Proud Boys uniforms. The right-wing group’s return to the streets, after a brief lull in post-Jan. 6 scuffles, is a warning for the rest of the country, local activists say.
A famously left-leaning city, Portland has long been in the crosshairs of far-right groups, many of them based outside the city or across state lines.
“Portland itself is seen as this soft target, I think, by the far right, because there’s good activism going on here and a police force that doesn’t give two shits about policing the far right,” Juan Chavez, project director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center’s Civil Rights Project, told The Daily Beast.
At the heart of the weekend’s mayhem was a religious event by an anti-LGBT pastor, the Portland Mercury reported. The event attracted a “security” force of far-right figures, who engaged in an escalating series of fights throughout the weekend. On Saturday, for instance, a group on the right filmed itself shouting homophobic and misogynistic slurs at a man standing alone. The group, which included at least one man wearing Proud Boys colors, knocked the man’s coffee and phone to the ground before hitting him in the head and throwing him down, with one man appearing to hold a wooden bat in the man’s face.
Elsewhere at the event, acting as “security” for the religious gathering, was Jeff Grace, a Washington man currently facing charges for breaking into the U.S. Capitol. Grace has admitted to entering the Capitol (“yes, it was illegal,” he told KGW News, though he denied wrongdoing) and admitted in a Facebook video to attending the weekend event in Portland.
“People say you can’t fight antifa. You can’t fight the evil with these,” Grace said in the Facebook video, holding up his fists. “Guess what? You can. As long as He’s the lead [he pointed toward the sky], you can use this [holding up fists].”
A now-viral picture by photojournalist Nathan Howard shows Grace leaving Portland on Saturday in the back of a pickup truck with seven other men, who are holding bats, a shield, and what appears to be mace. Grace appears to be holding a baton. He did not return a request for comment.
On Tuesday, prosecutors in Grace's Capitol riot case entered a new filing that seeks to bar Grace from owning weapons or destructive devices ahead of his trial. “This modification is necessary in light of Grace’s escalating behavior and his willingness to bring his firearm and other weapons to engage in pre-planned conflicts,” the filing reads.
In his Facebook video, Grace (like other attendees) blamed the day’s violence on the left. Reporter Sergio Olmos filmed the two sides in a brief Saturday dispute, during which a person on the left fired pepper spray and at least one person on the right fired a paintball gun, all while a police car sat nearby, sounding its siren but otherwise appearing inactive. (Two of the far-right crowd aimed firearms at the left, although it was unclear whether both were paintball guns.)
Other onlookers or journalists also found themselves facing fists or firearms. Michelle Galaria, who moved to Portland late last year, told The Daily Beast that she rode her bike to the religious event on the waterfront on Sunday, “to see what’s what” after hearing about clashes the previous day. There, she encountered a group of heavily armed guards, whom she questioned. Although the conversation was initially friendly, the group later became more hostile, ordering her away, she said. Galaria said she asked what authority the men had to issue orders in a public park.
“I said, ‘What, are you going to hit us with that?’” Galaria recalled to The Daily Beast. She said she tapped the baton one of the men was holding. She said he shoved her backwards with the baton. Galaria said she understood his reaction, although it worried her from an unauthorized security guard. But it wasn’t the end of the encounter. “The bigger guy lunges and pushes me in the chest with his baton. As he does that, another guy steps in, grabs my bike and throws it to the ground.”
She said she is currently discussing the incident with police. So far, the Portland Police Bureau has not announced any arrests related to the weekend’s fracas.
Galaria emphasized that she was not a member of any of the weekend’s feuding factions. “That was their response to me, by myself, an almost-50-year-old female on a bicycle, they’re lined up with 10 to 15 men, armed—that was their response,” she said. “That’s what really concerned me.”
Later that night, at least one journalist wound up in the far-right’s crosshairs when a man aimed a rifle at him while the journalist took pictures. Police later determined the weapon to be an airsoft gun, although it did not appear to have an orange tip indicating it to be less-than-lethal.
Elsewhere on Portland’s streets that night, Proud Boy-affiliated brawler Tusitala “Tiny” Toese was filmed participating in clashes with the left. Although Toese lives in Washington state, he has a history of venturing to Portland for fights. In January 2020, he pleaded guilty to punching a Portland man two years prior. He violated his probation in that case by traveling interstate to Portland for a pro-Trump rally last June, and was released from jail early in December. (Toese could not be reached for comment.)
The return of well-known Proud Boy brawlers—as well as a Jan. 6 defendant—to Portland’s streets bodes trouble, says Zakir Khan, a local civil rights activist.
“I think in the wake of January 6th [far-right rallies] had died off,” in the city, Khan told The Daily Beast. “I think the events on Saturday and the minor skirmishes that happened brought out a larger presence on Sunday. The minor skirmishes of Saturday showed yet again, that Portland Police were not going to respond to these types of incidences. And they were largely nowhere to be seen as these things were happening. I mean, this is happening in broad daylight, in the middle of the day in downtown Portland.”
Portland’s rallies are not isolated incidents. Instead, the past clashes have acted as blueprints for future far-right violence, attracting fringe figures who travel across the country for the prospect to mingle with fellow travelers and fight with the left.
Chavez, the Oregon Justice Resource Center project director, recalled past rallies that have featured prominently in Proud Boy propaganda. During one, in 2019, the group was able to march across a Portland bridge that had been closed by police.
“There’s this picture that’s like a Renaissance painting of several figures who were later at the Capitol and who are now either in jail or being prosecuted,” Chavez said. The lack of consequences in Portland emboldened the group, he said. “Of course they thought they can just march into the Capitol and do what they did. They learned it here.”
Khan described local far-right rallies as precursors to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
“Local police around the country failed the Capitol Police,” he said. “I think Capitol Police that day had no idea what was effectively coming because of poor communications between agencies, and agencies just not viewing these groups as a major threat.”
Grace, the Jan. 6 defendant who attended the weekend’s rally also compared the two.
“These colors do not run,” he said in his Facebook video. “That’s the same thing I did in the Capitol. I did nothing wrong. I proudly, peacefully protested. What everyone knows is a lie and you know what? It’s been proven and proven again, so you know what? I told ya I’m not gonna cower, I’m not gonna quit, I’m not gonna bow down. Nope. So I’ll be back”
A box with vials of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine is seen during a vaccination campaign in Amsterdam in April. (photo: Peter Dejong/AP)
or months, a refrigerator at a government facility in the Dutch university town of Leiden has housed 90 or so small white boxes that contain thousands of dollars worth of AstraZeneca vaccine doses. But most of them are emblazoned with six small numbers that will soon render them worthless: 08.2021.
For Dennis Mook-Kanamori, a doctor at Leiden University Medical Center who until recently was administering vaccines there, the upcoming expiration of thousands of doses is tragic. What really incenses him, however, is that the Dutch government is set to let the doses expire rather than send them abroad.
“It’s an elitist, decadent attitude,” Mook-Kanamori said.
The situation is mirrored in countless freezers, refrigerators and backrooms around the world, as millions of coronavirus vaccine doses, developed at record-breaking speeds, march quietly toward expiration before they can be used. And as demand slows in wealthy nations like the Netherlands, more dust is gathering — and more doses are expiring.
Last month, Mook-Kanamori and his colleagues threw away 600 doses. By the end of August, the number is set climb by another 8,000. Unless something changes, by October, all 10,000 or so doses in the refrigerators in Leiden will have been thrown out. Doctors estimate there may be 200,000 AstraZeneca doses in the Netherlands facing a similar fate.
Much of the world has yet to see enough doses to vaccinate even the most vulnerable. Across Africa, as of late last month, only 2.2 percent of people had received at least one dose, while the Netherlands had vaccinated well over half of its population. The Dutch government, which owns the doses, has said that for legal and logistical reasons they cannot be exported, despite criticism from Dutch doctors.
While vaccination programs always have some waste, even standard levels mean mind-boggling numbers of unused doses at the scale of global coronavirus vaccination. But just how many doses have already expired, or are about to, is unclear.
“There is no one who tracks expired doses systematically,” said Prashant Yadav, an expert on health-care supply chains at the Center for Global Development, a think tank. Instead, information has trickled out in news reports and little-publicized official statements.
In Israel, 80,000 expiring Pfizer-BioNTech doses were set to be tossed at the end of July; 73,000 doses from various manufacturers have been disposed of in Poland; and 160,000 Sputnik V doses nearing expiration were returned from Slovakia to Russia, their final status unknown. In the United States, North Carolina alone is estimated to have 800,000 doses soon to expire.
According to data compiled by the World Health Organization, approximately 469,868 doses from various manufacturers had expired in Africa as of Aug. 9. “Most of the vaccines arriving have a very short expiration date,” said Richard Mihigo, coordinator of immunization and vaccine development for the WHO’s Africa arm.
The lack of global data masks the price tag. In the United States alone, estimates of total expired or close-to-expired doses run in the millions. With some vaccines costing as much as $20 a shot, the cost could run into many tens of millions of dollars, if not more.
The toll for human health may be even graver. “The doses we have aren’t enough,” said Lawrence Gostin, global health law professor at Georgetown University. “They’re expiring, they’re spoiling with electrical shortages, they’re not being delivered to the population. It’s a whole catastrophe.”
Why do vaccines expire?
Vaccines often degrade at a higher rate than many other drugs that can be stockpiled, such as Tamiflu, which can be stored for years, according to Jesse Goodman, a professor at the Georgetown School of Medicine and former chief scientist of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
As doses age, they “might not engender the same immune response,” Goodman said, turning a strong, potentially lifesaving inoculation into a weakened dud. And mRNA vaccines, such as those developed by Pfizer and Moderna, are particularly fragile.
Expiration dates are set by the manufacturer and approved by local regulatory authorities. Many coronavirus vaccines were given initial emergency use authorization when only six months of data was available, resulting in cautiously short expiration dates.
In a statement to The Washington Post, the WHO said that unlike opened-vial wastage, where multi-dose vaccine vials were opened but could not be used before expiration, unopened vial wastage, such as expiry, was “avoidable.” In general, the global health body said, it is recommended to keep all vaccine wastage to below 1 percent.
That may be no easy task. Data compiled by the global vaccine alliance Gavi on non-coronavirus vaccines shows wastage can often hit 10 percent, and sometimes far higher.
Use it or lose it?
Marco Blanker, a doctor in the Dutch town of Zwolle, said he had to throw away 58 doses in one day in the spring due to no-shows amid negative publicity about the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“It was devastating for the team,” he said. “We did all our best in the previous weeks to not have any spillage — we didn’t lose a drop.”
Blanker posted a photograph of the discarded doses on Twitter, sparking a public debate in the Netherlands. Soon other Dutch doctors teamed up to create an app to help redistribute the doses.
Demand in the Netherlands eventually dried up. The country is now 55 percent fully vaccinated and AstraZeneca is only recommended for certain age groups. So Blanker and other doctors such as Mook-Kanamori began looking for other nations that might accept the doses.
Namibia, a West African nation struggling for doses, looked like a good destination. There was even a Dutch doctor who said he was willing to fly them there himself, Mook-Kanamori said. But the Dutch government has stuck to the same position: The doses must be disposed of after they expire.
The Dutch Ministry of Health did not respond to a request for comment. The Netherlands has pledged to donate other vaccine doses, including 75,000 AstraZeneca doses to Namibia.
‘We just didn’t have enough time’
Even when doses do go to those in need, expiration dates can pose problems. Across Africa, most countries have tailored their rollouts around a three-to-four-month delivery window, Mihigo said. But shipping delays have forced some to contend with shorter periods.
Liberia had 15 days to distribute tens of thousands of AstraZeneca shots from the African Union. About 27,000 expired. “We just didn’t have enough time,” said the country’s health minister, Wilhemina Jallah.
Benin discarded 51,000 doses in July after struggling for three months to deliver them, said Landry Kaucley, the country’s director of vaccine logistics. Fears of the shots lingered after European nations paused rollouts to investigate blood clot risks.
Other countries have gone a step further. In Malawi, the government burned almost 20,000 expired AstraZeneca doses in May, in what local officials said was a move to show the public that they would not receive expired doses. Some health authorities, such as the Palestinian Authority, have refused to accept doses they said were too close to expiration.
Expiration dates can change. The FDA last month extended the expiry for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the United States to six months from 4½ months. A representative of the Russian Direct Investment Fund said that they expected the expiration of Sputnik V to be increased from six months to one year. Such moves can help claw back doses.
Some experts hope to see Covax, the U.N.-backed vaccine-sharing mechanism, or bilateral deals help move vaccine doses to where they need to be before they expire. But finding a way to share doses is not really the problem, according to doctors like Mook-Kanamori.
“I can get 8,000 shots into an arm in Namibia next week, if there’s a will,” he explained. “The problem is that there is no will.”
Members of the State Police participate in a security operation on one of the roads that lead to the international bridge with the United States, in Nuevo Laredo, June 17, 2005. (photo: Alfredo Estrella/Getty)
ess than eight months after his officers allegedly committed a brazen massacre just miles from the Texas border, the commander of an embattled Mexican police special operations unit received awards from the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for his team’s extensive and continuing collaboration with U.S. law enforcement agencies.
Last week, Félix Arturo RodrÃguez RodrÃguez, the commander of an elite U.S.-trained state police unit, made an appearance at the American consulate in Matamoros, a border city in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, home to some of the worst drug war violence of the past decade. Photos posted by the state government showed RodrÃguez — who the DEA’s own Phoenix office had previously advised was wanted by Interpol — receiving a pair of plaques from the DEA and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, wing for his “exceptional,” “outstanding,” and “continuous contributions” to joint U.S.-Mexico law enforcement efforts.
Twelve of RodrÃguez’s officers are currently in Mexican government custody, accused of massacring 19 migrants and incinerating their remains in late January. RodrÃguez and his officers have been linked to a string of kidnappings and extrajudicial killings going back years. The unit is considered the personal enforcement arm of the governor of Tamaulipas, Francisco GarcÃa Cabeza de Vaca, a prominent ally of some U.S. border hawks and currently under investigation by federal authorities in Mexico City for money laundering and organized crime. RodrÃguez has not been charged in connection with the January massacre. In a statement, the DEA told The Intercept it had confirmed that the commander “currently has no outstanding warrants, domestically or internationally.”
“Grupo de Operaciones Especiales (GOPES) Commander Arturo RodrÃguez RodrÃguez was recognized for the support that he and his unit have provided to several bilateral investigations and fugitive apprehensions,” the drug agency said. “Specifically, Commander Rodriguez’s group was critical in locating U.S. fugitive Eduardo Zamora, who was wanted in Texas for killing two women and injuring an off-duty U.S. Marshal in Harlingen, Texas.” Zamora was killed by the GOPES, the special operations group, on July 4, in what Mexican authorities described as a shootout, though there has been sparse additional reporting on the case.
The State Department declined to comment on its role in last week’s award ceremony, deferring to the DEA. ICE did not provide a comment despite multiple requests. The Intercept contacted the state prosecutor’s office in Tamaulipas, which is handling the case stemming from the January massacre, for more information but did not receive a response by publication.
The Tamaulipas Ministry of Public Security, in a statement last week, said the DEA and ICE awards reflected the “outstanding service that GOPES has performed in the fight against crime and the cooperation that exists between the HSI, the DEA and the Government of Tamaulipas.” The statement noted that since 2018, Tamaulipas state police have collaborated with seven U.S. federal agencies in a campaign that has produced more than 300 arrests as well as the seizure of more than 1,000 firearms and millions of dollars in cash and property.
Michael Lettieri, a senior human rights fellow with the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego, described the fact that a pair of local DEA and HSI offices would see fit to honor a Mexican official whose unit is currently the subject of high-profile mass murder investigation as “bonkers.”
“It just tells me that management of this stuff is totally incoherent and discombobulated,” Lettieri told Intercept. “There is no really meaningful U.S. strategy, and certainly not a strategy that has done anything to critically examine the way the ‘war’ is being fought.”
In the past decade and a half, the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars training, equipping, and advising Mexican security forces at all levels and participating in countless investigations, raids, and surveillance operations in the name of combating drugs and organized crime. The result: more than 300,000 dead, more than 90,000 disappeared, and an unending stream of guns flowing south and drugs flowing north.
RodrÃguez’s 150-member GOPES became operational last year. The SWAT-style, rapid-reaction force is hardly unique. In Mexico, agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development provide professionalization and human rights training for Mexican security forces, Lettieri said, and in his experience, they are genuinely “risk averse” when it comes to the reputational damage that can come from association with problematic units. At the same time, he said, “when for sort of internal political reasons, Mexican politicians go this route of militarized enforcement, the U.S. doesn’t object.” The specialized units that result often become the muscle of criminal power brokers — some in government, some not. Collaborations between such units and U.S. law enforcement agencies, in training and operations, is ubiquitous across the border.
In the GOPES case, the unit is a rebranded iteration of the Centro de Análisis, Información y Estudios de Tamaulipas, or CAIET, a similarly oriented team that RodrÃguez also led.
In 2019, the DEA’s Phoenix field office circulated a bulletin alerting personnel that the commander was wanted by Interpol and that CAIET was essentially a kidnapping ring with badges. Under Cabeza de Vaca, RodrÃguez’s teams used official vehicles to “carry out ‘operations’ where they detain people, who in most cases are missing and even handed over to organized crime groups,” the DEA bulletin read. Describing one such operation earlier that month, the DEA reported: “They kidnapped 7 people and according to their relatives, demanded the payment of a ransom, which, although it was paid, did not release the victims, whose whereabouts are unknown.”
RodrÃguez did not appear in a search of Interpol’s publicly accessible “red notice” database this week. Noting that “many Red Notices are not made public,” the international policing agency told The Intercept that it does not “comment on specific cases or individuals except in special circumstances and with the approval of the member country concerned.”
The same month that the DEA issued its bulletin, law enforcement officials in Starr County, in South Texas, invited RodrÃguez and his officers to participate in joint-training exercises. As InSight Crime, a news outlet specializing in crime and security issues in Latin America, noted in a thorough profile of the GOPES, the government of Tamaulipas produced a video celebrating the “unprecedented” event. Nine months later, in September 2019, RodrÃguez’s officers were accused of kidnapping eight people from their homes, dressing them up as cartel gunmen, and then executing them.
Though human rights advocates found evidence that 40 members of the specialized unit were involved in the murders, only two were charged.
Rather than being disbanded, CAIET was renamed last August. According to ground-level accounts in Tamaulipas, the unit continued to rampage through communities in northern Mexico like a paramilitary gang. In early January, more than two dozen families from the community of Ciudad Mier fled to Mexico City after the GOPES descended on their town. They described violent raids, kidnappings, and shakedowns at the hands of a seemingly untouchable U.S.-backed police unit.
As the Associated Press later noted, “A federal legislator even filed a non-binding resolution in Mexico’s Congress in early January to protest beatings and robberies by the unit.” Nine days later, the charred husks of a pair of pickup trucks were found 14 miles south of the Rio Grande near the community of Camargo. The crime scene bore signs of evidence tampering: The vehicles the migrants rode in were riddled with more than 100 bullet holes, yet no shell casings were found.
Among the wreckage were the incinerated corpses of 19 people. Most of the victims were young men and women from rural Guatemala, though 49-year-old Edgar López was also among the dead. López spent nearly half of his adult life working in the U.S. He was arrested in 2019 while clocking out after a graveyard shift at chicken plant in Mississippi. Swept up in one of the largest ICE workplace raids of all time, López was killed trying to get back home to his three children and four grandchildren.
In the wake of the massacre and the arrest of 12 officers, the State Department confirmed that three members of the GOPES “received basic skills and/or first line supervisor training” through its Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs in 2016 and 2017, before being assigned to the elite team.
Last week, on the same day that RodrÃguez appeared at the consulate in Matamoros to receive his awards, Vice News reported that one of those U.S.-trained members was a regional police commander who “took weekslong classes on human rights and police ethics in 2016 and 2017” and “allegedly went door-to-door trying to flush out survivors” following the attack on the migrants.
The Camargo massacre came just four days after Joe Biden was sworn in as president. In the months since then, the administration’s relationship to the U.S.-Mexico border has been principally defined by immigration. The president’s message has been clear: Don’t come.
But migration is only one part of the human rights situation on the U.S.-Mexico border, and what the Biden White House can or will do about the interconnected conditions that led to the tragedy in Camargo, if anything, is less certain.
In the years before Biden took office, the administrations of President Donald Trump and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador collaborated extensively on migration, with López Obrador making Mexican security forces available for crackdowns on migrants traveling north and the two countries sharing intelligence on journalists, advocates, and immigration attorneys with a proximity to asylum-seekers.
The two countries’ shared relationship to the drug war was more complicated. In 2018, López Obrador declared an end to the militarized campaign that his predecessor, Felipe Calderón, began more than a decade earlier. Trump, meanwhile, floated the prospect of designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations. Though that idea quietly died, likely because labeling cartels as terrorist groups could open up new avenues of relief for asylum-seekers, Trump’s Justice Department did execute two high-profile arrests of former ranking Mexican security officials: Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico’s public security minister under Calderón, and former Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda.
While Garcia Luna remains in U.S. custody awaiting trial in New York, Cienfuegos was released and returned to Mexico just six days before Trump’s term ended. The López Obrador administration accused the DEA of fabricating evidence against the former general — whose tenure was marked by numerous scandals and military-linked massacres — and proceeded to publish hundreds of pages from the U.S. government’s investigation online in response to his arrest.
By March, law enforcement officials on both sides of the border were describing cooperation between the two countries as “paralyzed.” Last month, López Obrador’s top foreign official said the Mexican government has lost interest in the multibillion dollar U.S. security package known as the Merida Initiative, which has formed the backbone of U.S. drug war support to Mexico over the past decade. “The Merida Initiative is dead,” Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard told the Washington Post. Last week, the Mexican government filed a historic lawsuit targeting the American companies that have flooded Mexico with guns.
“It’s a tense moment for the relationship, it really is,” Lettieri said. At the same time, he added, “that it is a tense moment doesn’t necessarily change anything.” In Mexico, units like the GOPES have a way of persisting regardless of U.S. aid or who’s in power on the ground. “When Cabeza de Vaca goes, it’s probably going to be old wine, new bottle,” Lettieri said. “Same officers, new name, similar operating tactics.” Real change, he argued, would require meaningfully new approaches on both the structural and hyperlocal level.
“Right now, I don’t know what we care about — Is it drugs? Is it violence? Because we haven’t done a very good job stopping either,” Lettieri said. The lack of clarity, purpose, or direction is at the heart of the awards RodrÃguez received last week, he argued. “I totally believe that a local DEA office would have given an abusive commander an award,” he said. “Because the whole thing is incoherent.”
Environmental activists halted construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Virginia, Aug. 9, 2021. (photo: Appalachians Against Pipelines)
nvironmental activists temporarily shut down construction of the already over-budget and behind schedule Mountain Valley Pipeline in southwestern Virginia on Monday.
Organizers with the group Appalachians Against Pipelines said 10 people locked themselves to construction equipment to protect native species threatened by the controversial pipeline that would carry fracked gas — primarily methane — more than 300 miles from West Virginia to southern Virginia.
"Right now we're looking at a future with extreme water shortages, accelerating difficulty in growing food, mass human displacement due to natural disasters and manmade disasters caused by pipelines like these," said Mandy, one of the protesters. The temporary construction comes as activists across the state are ramping up pressure to block the pipeline.
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