18 September 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The new four-part PBS documentary Muhammad Ali, codirected by Ken Burns, examines the life of the legendary boxer and antiwar radical. Burns talks to Jacobin about how a kid from Kentucky named Cassius Clay became “the spirit of the 20th century.”
As a boxer’s biopic, Muhammad Ali includes exciting, copious coverage of the legendary bouts, from the 1960 Olympics in Rome, to the early Sonny Liston matches, to the “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire against George Foreman, to the “Thrilla in Manila” with “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier, and beyond. Burns and his codirectors do not shrink from the fact that pugilism is an extremely violent sport, and some, especially children, may find the visceral fighting hard to watch.
However, cocreated by the team that made PBS’s 2012 The Central Park Five and 2016’s Jackie Robinson (for which Sarah Burns and McMahon shared an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming), the artistically rendered Muhammad Ali is far more than merely an entertaining sports documentary.
Much to their credit, the filmmakers focus on Ali’s heroic political stances as an antiwar champion who courageously risked everything to stand up for his beliefs — refusing induction into the US military long before the tide of public opinion had turned against the Vietnam War.
Ali rather astoundingly publicly proclaimed: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”
His brazen heroism led to the champ’s most daunting fight — not in the ring but in the courts, induction centers, college campuses, and rallies across America, as he was stripped of his World Boxing Association title and faced hard time behind bars and hefty fines.
Burns spoke with me via phone from his house in New Hampshire on Ali’s extraordinary and courageous life — and what it meant to be a champion, in every sense of the word, both inside and outside the ring.
ER: How did living in the segregated South affect young Cassius Clay?
KB: It affected him totally. He was born in the early 1940s in Jim Crow–segregated Louisville, Kentucky. He had to watch through a chain-link fence while white kids played in an amusement park he couldn’t enter. His father was a painter of some skill, but he couldn’t get a job, so he had to work as a sign painter, and he had a volcanic anger about it. Imagine what it was like in the 1950s, as a young boy the same age, more or less, as Emmett Till, to see the tortured, mutilated, and murdered body in an open casket because his mother wanted the world to see what had been done to her little boy.
Ali seemed to have been born with the sense that he had a purpose in life. He was ebullient; he was funny; he took risks. He was just in love with life. And everyone had the sense that he was going somewhere. He was voluble. When he found boxing as a calling, he took to it like a duck to water.
Louisville was essential, and not only to the usual things that segregation does in a negative sense. Ali grew up — unlike many of the opponents he’d later face, like Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, or Larry Holmes — in a relatively comfortable neighborhood on Louisville’s West End, on Grand Avenue, which was home to many middle-class black people. That ultimately gave him a kind of confidence, a protective layer, and made him fluid in all worlds.
In fact, when he came home from the 1960 Olympics in Rome with gold medals, the city fathers — of course, all of them white — in Louisville formed a syndicate to protect him. He had this unbelievable contract that no one in boxing had ever had — all of his expenses were paid, he was paid a salary, and he got a huge portion of the gate. It’s an amazing, complicated story. Louisville adds and subtracts in an interesting way.
ER: Ali and others frequently referred to him as being “pretty.” It’s curious that a term generally used regarding women was applied to such a masculine icon of that era. What’s the origin of that?
KB: One of his great inspirations was watching the pro-wrestler villain Gorgeous George, who preened and wore makeup and wavy hair. Ali had always been brave enough in school to carry a purse, but he actually said, “Look at me, I’m pretty, I’m pretty as a girl.” He was thinking about the fact that he was a fine specimen. He was blowing apart our gender expectations and crossing lots of lines, and that made some people uncomfortable and made other people crack into a big smile.
ER: Why, when, and how did Ali get involved with the Nation of Islam?
KB: He had heard a record — I’m not sure exactly when — called “The White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell,” and it was read by a Minister X, who turned out to be Louis Farrakhan. He played it over and over again.
He was training in Miami, and he heard Abdul Rahman — “Captain Sam” was his street name, a former hustler — hawking Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam newspaper. Rahman said, “Why are we called ‘Negroes’? Who gave us the name?” So Ali, still then known as Cassius Clay, started secretly attending an Islamic storefront and felt the first spiritual awakening in his life — something he hadn’t felt in the Christian church of his parents’ upbringing. It grew, and it became an issue leading up to the Sonny Liston fight in 1964 — so much so that his dear friend and mentor Malcolm X was sort of banished from Miami as a distraction until the eve of the fight.
ER: One thing that your documentary puts into context better than anything else I’ve seen so far — including One Night in Miami — is the complex relationship between Ali and Malcolm X.
KB: It’s a hugely complex one. At the beginning, it was just pure love. They identified with each other; Malcolm X saw in Cassius Clay his explosive personality and wit and potentiality. Clay saw the future.
Malcolm X was moving away from the corruptions and violence of the Nation of Islam and gaining fame on his own. He wished to be political; the Nation of Islam wished to be apolitical. They were pretty agnostic, if not openly hostile, toward athletics. So they kept their attention toward Ali underground.
Malcolm and Ali had a great, great friendship. Then, when Malcolm X was expelled for saying something about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — that it was a case of “chickens coming home to roost” — he was suspended, and quite humbled by that. He tried to get back into the good graces. But it was really Elijah Muhammad and his lieutenants being jealous of Malcolm X’s growing fame and ability to spark a crowd. By then, he had also gone on to Mecca in Saudi Arabia and realized that there was something incredibly corrupt and constricting about this version of Islam — if, in fact, the Nation is Islam — and Malcolm then embraced a kind of ecumenical, much more wide view of it.
Meanwhile, Elijah Muhammad, fearful that he might lose his star — nobody thought he’d beat Liston, but Clay did — ordered him not to see Malcolm X and then gave him a name: Muhammad Ali. Shortly after, Malcolm X was assassinated. It was one of the flaws Ali felt he had to atone for late in his life. He said, “Malcolm was right about so many things.”
I think it’s also fair to understand that this twenty-two-year-old kid was terrified that the same thing might happen to him if he got on the wrong side of Elijah Muhammad.
ER: I never heard that said before.
KB: I mean, Malcolm X was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam. We don’t say this in the film, but lately, in the past few months since the film has been done, I’ve been thinking, how do you explain it? It’s not just “I’m going with the more powerful person.”
The Fruit of Islam, the Nation of Islam’s enforcers, had to be scaring the bejesus out of everybody, including — after the assassination of Malcolm X — a very young and impressionable Cassius Clay, with his new name, Muhammad Ali.
ER: Ali constantly asserts, “I’m free to be what I want.” Yet, as he himself openly stated, he showed deference to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. The man who openly practiced civil disobedience was extremely obedient to Elijah Muhammad. Ali’s parents and first wife complained that Elijah and the Black Muslims exerted too much influence over him.
KB: The first part of this is a little bit of a specious question, because freedom doesn’t mean you’re free of anything. The outlaw lives under more laws than the person who obeys the law. Those of us who believe in the United States and consider ourselves free serve the USA. So the idea that you could declare yourself free but also ally yourself with a controlling sect is one thing. He was an impressionable young man.
His parents were Christian, and they felt like they were losing touch with him. There was probably no small amount of worry about money and where it was going. And that was a good worry, because the Nation of Islam was siphoning it off in the form of Ali’s manager, Herbert Muhammad, son of Elijah Muhammad. There were lots of different complex dynamics that were very fluid and constantly changing, so at no one point is it clear whether the tail was wagging the dog or the other way around.
ER: During his battle against the draft, Ali spoke publicly at antiwar and Black Panther rallies and college campuses. Tell us about Ali and the anti–Vietnam War movement.
KB: There was a nice correspondence. Most of those people [at the rallies] had not really paid attention ever to who the heavyweight champion was. While many were not sympathetic to the proselytizing about Black Muslims, they shared Ali’s belief in what was wrong with the Vietnam War, and there was amazing synergy. You began to see Muhammad Ali becoming the hero of young white kids, in addition to being a hero of young black kids.
Walter Mosley is in our film, realizing how dangerous the ideas are. When a friend asked him about going to Vietnam, Mosley said: “Why would I go across there?” He thought it was entirely his own idea. But of course, he realized that Muhammad Ali was in his head.
ER: Ali was born and raised in Kentucky. Did he ever attend any of the civil rights marches or protests?
KB: No. In the beginning, he was quite sensitive about not offending his white backers, and yet he did meet — and it’s some of the greatest footage we have in the film — Dr Martin Luther King Jr in town to support striking workers in 1967. That was when Ali made the comment about how, when black people get together, you’re always worried — it’s like Kennedy and [Nikita] Khrushchev. And King cracked up.
I’ve seen King crack up in one other bit of footage, when Dick Gregory was telling a joke. But he cracked up at this young kid who was opposing the war, and they both agreed, in this joint news conference, that they had different beliefs, that their religions were in opposition to the war, and that he supported Muhammad Ali 100 percent. It’s a pretty spectacular piece of footage.
Ali put his arm around King, and King looked suddenly like his personal space was invaded. So, in the space of sixty seconds, Muhammad Ali had cracked up the greatest civil rights leader in US history and then made him feel monstrously uncomfortable — which, to me, is part of Ali’s genius.
ER: Norman Mailer said Ali was “the very spirit of the twentieth century.” What did he mean?
KB: It comes in at the very end of our introduction, the last phrase of spoken narration in our film. We believe there’s a sense of Ali being an American in the same way that Louis Armstrong was an American, or Abraham Lincoln was an American — kind of a sui generis figure — and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any other American who was the very spirit of the twentieth century.
Supporters of defendants being prosecuted in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol pray during a rally in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 18, 2021. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: Justice for J6 Rally Gets Started With a
Sparse Crowd and Tight Security
The state of the party was put into focus this week with the sudden retirement announcement of Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio), a onetime rising GOP star who became one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump after the riot, which earned him a Trump-backed primary challenger. He cited a “chaotic political environment” and “the toxic dynamics inside our own party” for his decision.
Meanwhile, Trump this week expressed sympathy for his supporters who participated in the attack and are now being prosecuted by federal authorities ahead of a Saturday rally at the Capitol that is expected to attract a small cohort of far-right protesters, claiming that the arrestees are being held as “political prisoners.”
“Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election,” Trump said in a statement Thursday, adding that the prosecutions have “proven conclusively that we are a two-tiered system of justice.”
On Friday, Trump hailed Gonzalez’s retirement, saying “Good riddance to Anthony” and “1 down, 9 to go!” His primary opponent, former Trump aide Max Miller, thanked the former president for his continued support.
Trump’s willingness to not only sweep the Jan. 6 riot under the rug, but to embrace its perpetrators as political martyrs, has been met with silence by GOP congressional leaders, despite their stated desire to move on from the past and focus the party on opposing President Biden’s governing agenda.
House Republican leaders have yet to fully denounce the “Justice for J6” rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, even as pro-Trump members in the conference, like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), previously argued in defense of insurrectionists outside of the Justice Department this summer. With Trump warning his supporters not to attend, calling it a “setup” meant to embarrass him in a recent interview, even sympathetic right-wing lawmakers have kept their distance from the event.
But none of the top six Republican congressional leaders offered a fresh rebuke of Trump after he issued his Thursday statement of solidarity with the rioters. A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) referred a reporter back to his earlier denunciations of the violence, while aides to the other leaders declined to comment or did not respond.
The refusal to engage directly with Trump has led some of his Republican critics to warn that party leaders are adopting the same nonconfrontational posture that allowed his rise to the presidency — and later enabled his promotion of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen and the subsequent violence at the Capitol.
“That’s not leadership, it’s simply trying to hang onto what you got,” said Mark Sanford, the former GOP congressman and governor from South Carolina who lost his House seat in a 2018 primary after crossing Trump. “I get it that that’s the operating paradigm for most people in politics. But that’s also what makes Gonzalez a hero.”
The silence among GOP leaders when it comes to condemning attacks by Trump supporters that are aimed at fellow Republicans and their families has made it difficult for some to find their footing in an unrecognizable party.
Gonzalez made his decision not to seek reelection exclusively with his wife, a Republican aide familiar with his thinking but who was not authorized to speak publicly told The Washington Post. He did not consult House Republican leadership or close friends such as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) during the process, instead publicly announcing his decision late Thursday evening.
House Republicans leadership did not release a statement in support of Gonzalez following his decision, another indicator of just how much sway Trump holds on the party and its elections.
But the aide contends that Gonzalez still maintains a good relationship with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other members of leadership, all of whom actively considered him a rising star in the party when he beat a fervent Trump supporter in 2018. McCarthy recently announced Gonzalez would serve on his advisory team on Cuba.
Though Gonzalez no longer faces the pressure of reelection, he is unlikely to suddenly become as prominent as Reps. Cheney and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), fellow impeachers who have vocally opposed Trump and his hold on the Republican Party. The Republican aide said the congressman will continue to focus on issues of importance to him and his constituents but not shy from commenting when appropriate.
Meanwhile, Trump’s endorsements this cycle have elevated not only loyalists but key promoters of his false claims about rampant fraud in the 2020 president election. Trump on Thursday endorsed lawyer Matthew DePerno for Michigan attorney general, who filed a lawsuit calling for a statewide audit after Trump’s loss there based on alleged election fraud in one rural country. A tabulation error by an election worker was quickly identified as the reason for an election-night inconsistency, and a judge dropped the lawsuit in May.
Another Trump endorsee, Joe Kent, said on Twitter this week that he planned to speak at Saturday’s rally, calling those being prosecuted “political prisoners” who are being denied their constitutional rights “due to their political affiliation & a narrative based on lies.” Kent is running against Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), another one of the 10 Republican impeachers.
Trump’s endorsements have forced fellow Republicans into the position of deciding whether to support their colleagues get behind Trump’s pick. Many have tried a third option — the squishy middle. Wyoming Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia M. Lummis, for instance, have declined to say whether they would support Cheney’s reelection bid while saying they are also not endorsing her challenger.
McCarthy has assisted some of the pro-impeachment Republicans financially, including Gonzalez — contributing $10,000 in March to the Ohioan from his leadership PAC. Another GOP PAC with ties to McCarthy, Take Back the House 2022, has donated $100,000 each to Herrera Beutler, John Katko (N.Y.), Fred Upton (Mich.), David G. Valadao (Calif.) and Peter Meijer (Mich.), all of whom also voted to impeach Trump. But he has had frosty relations with others, including Cheney and Kinzinger, who joined an investigative committee focused on Jan. 6 created by Democrats over McCarthy’s objections.
The risks for the GOP of having another election cycle focused on Trump were on full display this week in California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom easily repelled a Republican-led recall campaign by tying his most prominent GOP opponent, conservative talk show host Larry Elder, to Trump’s policy and personality.
That result has buoyed Democrats as Biden’s approval ratings have sagged in recent weeks, giving the party hope that they will be able to cast the 2022 midterms as a choice between Biden and Trump rather than a referendum on the incumbent.
Chris Taylor, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said “there’s no wonder why” Gonzalez chose to retire, citing some Republicans’ embrace of anti-vaccine and anti-mask rhetoric as well as Trump’s false election claims. “Fed up with crazytown, we bet voters will reject the GOP’s dangerous agenda too,” he said.
Meanwhile, Gonzalez’s decision to leave the House rather than face a hard-fought battle against Miller demonstrates how Trump continues to purge GOP lawmakers whose moderation and independence were once crucial to allowing the party to compete in key suburban districts that have steadily drifted toward Democrats.
Former GOP Rep. Ryan Costello (Pa.), a moderate who retired in 2018 after his district was redrawn and is now considering a Senate run, said “I understand exactly why” Gonzalez chose to retire.
“Having said that, I think it is a loss for the party, and I think there are a lot of people in the country that, had they gotten to know Anthony better over time, would realize that’s exactly the kind of person you want in public office,” he said. “He was pragmatic. He had an independent streak. … It’s a loss for our representative democracy.”
Instead it has fallen to a familiar and dwindling cast of anti-Trump Republicans to warn about the perils to American democracy.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) delivered such a warning Thursday during an event at Brigham Young University, declaring that “our resolve to follow the Constitution’s path, avoiding the perils of authoritarianism on one hand and pure democracy on the other, that’s wavering.”
“No more stunning evidence of that was the attempt to prevent the lawful and constitutional transfer of power on Jan. 6,” he said. “It followed from the president of the United States claiming that the election had been stolen from him.”
Meanwhile, the tension and violence inflamed — and rarely denounced — by Trump has become a growing point of concern for Republicans not aligned with the former president. In an interview with the New York Times, Gonzalez made clear that he would not have felt fulfilled in the job had he won reelection because the party has learned to take its cues only from Trump.
“It’s incredibly dangerous stuff that we’re playing with right now, and it hurts the party, it hurts the conservative movement, hurts our country,” Sanford said. “It needs to be stamped out and people need to speak up. And that’s why you’ve got to give credit to someone like Gonzalez, who did speak up.”
A woman uses her phone. (photo: Getty Images)
Geofence location and keyword warrants are new law enforcement tools that have privacy experts concerned
In January 2020, an alarming email from Google landed in McCoy’s inbox. Police were requesting his user data, the company told him, and McCoy had seven days to go to court and block its release.
McCoy later found out the request was part of an investigation into the burglary of a nearby home the year before. The evidence that cast him as a suspect was his location during his bike ride – information the police obtained from Google through what is called a geofence warrant. For simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, McCoy was being investigated and, as a result, his Google data was at risk of being handed over to the police.
Geofence location warrants and reverse search warrants such as the ones McCoy dealt with are increasingly becoming the tool of choice for law enforcement. Google revealed for the first time in August that it received 11,554 geofence location warrants from law enforcement agencies in 2020, up from 8,396 in 2019 and 982 in 2018.
It’s a concerning trend, argue experts and advocates. They worry the increase signals the start of a new era, one in which law enforcement agencies find ever more creative ways to obtain user information from data-rich tech companies. And they fear agencies and jurisdictions will use this relatively unchecked mechanism in the context of new and controversial laws such as the criminalization of nearly all abortions in Texas.
“As long as the data exists, all it takes is a creative law enforcement officer to say, ‘Hey, we can get a warrant or we can send a subpoena for this particular subset of the data that’s already being harvested’,” said Caleb Kenyon, the defense attorney who represented McCoy, to the Guardian. “They’re coming up with everything they can to do their job. That’s all it takes for the next type of [reverse] search warrant to come about.”
Dragnet search warrant
Lawyers such as Kenyon and privacy experts argue geofence and other broad warrants such as those that ask companies to sift through keywords people searched for are akin to a general warrant, made illegal by the fourth amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Unlike other kinds of search warrants, which are targeted and seek information about people who law enforcement has probable cause to believe has committed a specific crime, these warrants don’t have a particular person in mind.
In other words, with reverse search warrants law enforcement is still looking for their suspect and they’re asking tech companies to give them a list of people to investigate. For geofence warrants, anyone in a certain place at a certain time becomes a suspect and is subject to further investigation which could mean giving police even more of their user data. For keyword search warrants, another relatively new mechanism to obtain user information that has emerged, anyone who searched for a certain phrase or address becomes a suspect.
The latter is potentially more far-reaching than geofence warrants, Kenyon argues, because keyword search warrants are not necessarily geographically or tangibly tied to a specific crime and could make suspects out of people around the world who happened to search for specific terms. “It’s what I would frame more of as a true digital warrant, without any ties or connections or tethers to the physical world,” he said.
Privacy groups argue that tech companies bear responsibility in law enforcement’s growing access to these types of data by developing new features that index user information in a way that makes it more searchable.
One such feature is Apple’s proposed child sexual abuse material detection (CSAM) function, which would analyze images to detect child sexual abuse images.
“From our position, creating more vulnerabilities on our devices that can be abused whether by authoritarian governments or by law enforcement or hackers doesn’t make anyone safer,” said Caitlin Seeley George, the director of campaigns and operations at Fight for the Future, which organized a protest outside Apple stores in 11 cities to pressure the company into abandoning its plans for the feature. “It absolutely fits into the dragnet search and surveillance function of law enforcement because it makes images searchable.
“For communities being disproportionately targeted by law enforcement surveillance based on the color of their skin, their religion, their home country – this is adding more fodder,” she said.
Information vulnerability
The normalization of these mechanisms is particularly worrying as controversial laws such as the Texas abortion ban are being passed, privacy advocate Albert Fox Cahn, the founder of the Surveillance technology oversight project, said. While Texas’s law doesn’t allow public officials to sue abortion providers or those who help, it doesn’t prohibit them from aiding private citizens who do sue, he pointed out.
“You could use a pretext to get a reverse search warrant targeting an abortion provider’s location, using literally any other law on the books, and then provide that information to activists,” Cahn said.
And it’s getting easier. A company called Hawk Analytics offers services that purport to put together Google geofence warrants in “just a few clicks”. In one webinar hosted exclusively for law enforcement, the company said it would walk attendees through “everything Google” including “what’s available, how to get it, and what to do with it, with an emphasis on the Google geofence reverse location returns”.
Without specifying how many, a Google spokesperson, Genevieve Park, said the company has challenged many overly broad government requests.
“We use a rigorous process designed to honor our legal obligations while narrowing the scope of data disclosed,” Park said in a statement.
It’s not just major tech players like Google and Facebook that are targets, however. Personal information in the hands of smaller companies that may not have the resources or wherewithal to withstand sweeping warrants is just as vulnerable, Cahn said. “You could subpoena period tracker apps to provide any users who apparently became pregnant during a given time period, for example,” he said.
“This information is flowing to so many different companies and vendors, even if you get one company trying to protect your location data you have so many more points of vulnerability in the commercial market than a decade ago,” Cahn said. “All it takes is one company to give up that information without a fight or more often than not sell it.”
While there is legislation in the works that would impose safeguards on other means of getting hold of vast swaths of sensitive location data, such as cell site simulators and the outright sale of that information, there isn’t currently a publicly known congressional effort to do the same for geofence warrants, according to Jake Laperruque, a senior policy counsel at the project on government oversight. In the meantime, the onus is on state and local jurisdictions not to issue overbroad warrants and on tech companies to fight off those warrants, Laperruque and Cahn argue.
For tech companies that count advertising among their revenue streams – or as a major source of revenue, as is the case for Google, there’s no real technical solution to curbing government requests for their data. “It would be technically impossible to have this data available to advertisers in a way that police couldn’t buy it, subpoena it or take it with a warrant,” Cahn said.
That’s why Apple’s now-postponed plan to launch a feature that scans for CSAM caused such a furor. When the FBI in 2019 asked Apple to unlock the phone of the suspect in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, Apple resisted the request arguing the company couldn’t comply without building a backdoor, which it refused to do. Once Apple begins scanning and indexing the photos of anyone who uses its devices or services, however, there’s little stopping law enforcement from issuing warrants or subpoenas for those images in investigations unrelated to CSAM.
“We can’t ignore that these technologies are sold within legal regimes where if you create a tool to address one set of crimes you can’t the refuse when governments are forcing you to use them to identify other sorts of crimes like political dissent and religious expression,” Cahn said.
For McCoy, while he was one of several known individuals swept up in a broad, dragnet-style warrant, he’s among the fortunate few. The police withdrew the subpoena after Kenyon filed a motion to quash. That Google notified McCoy about the request at all is a relative anomaly. Subpoenas and warrants issued to tech companies often contain a non-disclosure clause. Still, as is typical of these notices, McCoy had just days to hire a lawyer who knew what a geofence warrant was and how to handle it – which Kenyon said is still hard to find in many places. For many without resources, that’s a near impossible ask.
“Every single time one of these warrants is signed, it erodes a little bit of the bedrock of the protections we have under the law,” Kenyon said.
Haitian migrants set up make-shift camp along the Rio Grande after crossing into the United States from Mexico, Friday, Sept. 17, 2021, in Del Rio, Texas. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
Details are yet to be finalized but will likely involve five to eight flights a day, according to the official with direct knowledge of the plans who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. San Antonio, the nearest major city, may be among the departure cities.
Another administration official speaking on condition of anonymity expected two flights a day at most and said all migrants would be tested for COVID-19.
U.S. authorities closed traffic to vehicles and pedestrians in both directions at the only border crossing in Del Rio, Texas, after chaos unfolded Friday and presented the administration with a new and immediate challenge as it tries to manage large numbers of asylum-seekers who have been reaching U.S. soil.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it was closing the border crossing with Ciudad Acuna, Mexico, “to respond to urgent safety and security needs.” Travelers were being directed to Eagle Pass, Texas, 57 miles (91 kilometers) away.
Haitians crossed the Rio Grande freely and in a steady stream, going back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico through knee-deep water, with some parents carrying small children on their shoulders. Unable to buy supplies in the U.S., they returned briefly to Mexico for food and cardboard to settle, temporarily at least, under or near the bridge in Del Rio, a city of 35,000 that has been severely strained by migrant flows in recent months.
Migrants pitched tents and built makeshift shelters from giant reeds known as carrizo cane. Many bathed and washed clothing in the river.
The vast majority of the migrants at the bridge on Friday were Haitian, said Val Verde County Judge Lewis Owens, who is the county’s top elected official and whose jurisdiction includes Del Rio. Some families have been under the bridge for as long as six days.
Trash piles were 10 feet (3.1 meters) wide, and at least two women have given birth, including one who tested positive for COVID-19 after being taken to a hospital, Owens said.
Val Verde County Sheriff Frank Joe Martinez estimated the crowd at 13,700 and said more Haitians were traveling through Mexico by bus.
The flight plan, while potentially massive in scale, hinges on how Haitians respond. They may face a choice: stay put at the risk of being sent back to their impoverished homeland -- wracked by poverty, political instability and a recent earthquake — or return to Mexico. Unaccompanied children are exempt from fast-track expulsions.
About 500 Haitians were ordered off buses by Mexican immigration authorities in the state of Tamaulipas, about 120 miles (200 kilometers) south of the Texas border, the state government said in a news release Friday. They continued toward the border on foot.
Haitians have been migrating to the U.S. in large numbers from South America for several years, many of them having left the Caribbean nation after a devastating earthquake in 2010. After jobs dried up from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, many made the dangerous trek by foot, bus and car to the U.S. border, including through the infamous Darien Gap, a Panamanian jungle.
It is unclear how such a large number amassed so quickly, though many Haitians have been assembling in camps on the Mexican side of the border, including in Tijuana, across from San Diego, to wait while deciding whether to attempt to enter the United States.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. “We will address it accordingly,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on MSNBC.
An administration official, who was not authorized to address the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the action is not targeting Haitians specifically and does not reflect a policy shift, just a continuation of normal practices.
The Federal Aviation Administration, acting on a Border Patrol request, restricted drone flights around the bridge until Sept. 30, generally barring operations at or below 1,000 feet (305 meters) unless for security or law enforcement purposes.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican and frequent critic of President Joe Biden, said federal officials told him migrants under the bridge would be moved by the Defense Department to Arizona, California and elsewhere on the Texas border.
Some Haitians at the camp have lived in Mexican cities on the U.S. border for some time, moving often between them, while others arrived recently after being stuck near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, said Nicole Phillips, the legal director for advocacy group Haitian Bridge Alliance. A sense of desperation spread after the Biden administration ended its practice of admitting asylum-seeking migrants daily who were deemed especially vulnerable.
“People are panicking on how they seek refuge,” Phillips said.
Edgar RodrÃguez, lawyer for the Casa del Migrante migrant shelter in Piedras Negras, north of Del Rio, noticed an increase of Haitians in the area two or three weeks ago and believes that misinformation may have played a part. Migrants often make decisions on false rumors that policies are about to change and that enforcement policies vary by city.
U.S. authorities are being severely tested after Biden quickly dismantled Trump administration policies that Biden considered cruel or inhumane, most notably one requiring asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while waiting for U.S. immigration court hearings. Such migrants have been exposed to extreme violence in Mexico and faced extraordinary difficulty in finding attorneys.
The U.S Supreme Court last month let stand a judge’s order to reinstate the policy, though Mexico must agree to its terms. The Justice Department said in a court filing this week that discussions with the Mexican government were ongoing.
A pandemic-related order to immediately expel migrants without giving them the opportunity to seek asylum that was introduced in March 2020 remains in effect, but unaccompanied children and many families have been exempt. During his first month in office, Biden chose to exempt children traveling alone on humanitarian grounds.
The U.S. government has been unable to expel many Central American families because Mexican authorities have largely refused to accept them in the state of Tamaulipas, which is across from Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings. On Friday, the administration said it would appeal a judge’s ruling a day earlier that blocked it from applying Title 42, as the pandemic-related authority is known, to any families.
Mexico has agreed to take expelled families only from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, creating an opening for Haitians and other nationalities because the U.S. lacks the resources to detain and quickly expel them on flights to their homelands.
In August, U.S. authorities stopped migrants nearly 209,000 times at the border, which was close to a 20-year high even though many of the stops involved repeat crossers because there are no legal consequences for being expelled under Title 42 authority.
People crossing in families were stopped 86,487 times in August, but fewer than one out of every five of those encounters resulted in expulsion under Title 42. The rest were processed under immigration laws, which typically means they were released with a court date or a notice to report to immigration authorities.
U.S. authorities stopped Haitians 7,580 times in August, a figure that has increased every month since August 2020, when they stopped only 55. There have also been major increases of Ecuadorians, Venezuelans and other nationalities outside the traditional sending countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
People inspect the damage at the Ahmadi family's house in Kabul. (photo: Bernat Armangue/AP)
Grieving relatives of Afghan civilian victims demand accountability, as well as financial compensation for their losses and relocation.
Emal Ahmadi, whose three-year-old daughter Malika was killed on August 29, when the US hellfire missile struck his elder brother’s car, told The Associated Press news agency on Saturday that the family demands Washington investigate who fired the drone and punish the military personnel responsible for the strike in Kabul.
“That is not enough for us to say sorry,” said Ahmadi. “The US should find the person who did this.”
Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javaid, who visited the site of the attack, said memorabilia of the children, including their toys, could be seen scattered.
“Family members told us that they are looking for compensation from the US. They want justice for their family members and if possible those who have remained in this compound want to leave Afghanistan,” he said.
“Here in this compound, there is death, misery and memories of those who passed, and people who try to rebuild their lives in the mayhem of what is Afghanistan and what happened to their families.”
A day after the attack, family members told Al Jazeera that the 10 people killed ranged in age from two to 40 years old.
“They were innocent, helpless children,” Aimal Ahmadi, whose nieces and nephews were killed in the attack, told Al Jazeera at the time.
News organisations reported after the attack that the driver of the targeted vehicle, Zemerai Ahmadi, was a longtime employee at a US humanitarian organisation and cited an absence of evidence to support the Pentagon’s assertion that the vehicle contained explosives.
The missile struck as the car was pulling into the family’s driveway and the children ran to greet Zemerai.
On Friday, US Marine General Frank McKenzie, head of US Central Command, called the attack a “tragic mistake”, and after weeks of denials, said that innocent civilians were indeed killed in the attack and not a fighter associated with the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), as originally claimed by the US military.
“At the time of the strike, I was confident that the strike had averted an imminent threat to our forces at the airport. It was a mistake, and I offer my sincere apology,” McKenzie said, adding the US was considering making reparation payments to the family of the victims.
McKenzie said the decision to strike the white Toyota Corolla sedan, after having tracked it for about eight hours, was made in an “earnest belief” – based on a standard of “reasonable certainty” – that it posed an imminent threat to US forces at the Kabul airport. The car was believed to have been carrying explosives in its boot, he said.
But Ahmadi wondered how his family’s home could have been mistaken for an ISKP hideout.
“The US can see from everywhere,” he said of US drone capabilities. “They can see that there were innocent children near the car and in the car. Whoever did this should be punished.”
“It isn’t right,” he added.
Even as evidence mounted to the contrary, Pentagon officials asserted that the attack had been conducted correctly, to protect the US troops remaining at Kabul’s airport ahead of the final pullout the following day, on August 30.
‘Horrible mistake’
The drone attack followed a devastating suicide bombing by ISKP – a rival of the Taliban – that killed 169 Afghans and 13 US military personnel at one of the gates to the Kabul airport. For days, desperate Afghans had swarmed the checkpoints outside the airport, trying to leave the country amid the chaotic US and NATO troops’ pullout, fearing for their future under the Taliban.
McKenzie’s admission is a significant departure from the Department of Defense’s previous statements about the drone attack. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the attack as “righteous” several days after it was conducted.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin released a statement on Friday also calling the attack a “horrible mistake”.
Members of Congress also called for a thorough investigation into the matter, including Betty McCollum, chair of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said on Friday he will investigate “the accuracy and completeness of public statements” that the Pentagon made defending the attack.
Justice and punishment
Emal Ahmadi insisted an official apology will not bring back members of his family, and said he was frustrated that it took weeks of pleading with Washington to at least make a call to the family.
Looking exhausted, sitting in front of the charred ruins of Zemerai’s car, Ahmadi said he wanted more than an apology from the US – he wanted justice, including an investigation into who carried out the strike “and I want him punished by the USA”.
Zemerai was the family’s breadwinner and had looked after his three brothers, including Emal, and their children.
International aid groups and the United Nations have warned of a looming humanitarian crisis that could drive most Afghans below the poverty level.
“Now I am then one who is responsible for all my family and I am jobless,” said Emal.
Women protest outside a courtroom in San Salvador, demanding the government free women prisoners who are serving 30-year prison sentences for having an abortion. (photo: Salvador Melendez/AP)
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said on Friday a series of constitutional reforms the government will send soon to Congress will not contain decriminalization of abortion, legalization of same-sex marriage or steps to permit euthanasia.
"I have decided, to dispel ANY DOUBT, NOT TO PROPOSE ANY KIND OF REFORM TO ANY ITEMS RELATED TO the RIGHT TO LIFE (from the moment of conception), to marriage (keeping only the original design, A MAN AND A WOMAN) or to euthanasia," Bukele wrote on his Facebook account, capitalizing certain parts.
The El Salvador president announced he plans to study the proposals, drawn up at Bukele's request by Ulloa with a team of lawyers in 2020 to overhaul human rights legislation, as well as the political and economic system, and the government's judicial structure.
El Salvador is known for having some of the strictest anti-abortion laws throughout the Americas.
Critics swiftly pounced on the president's announcement regarding same-sex marriage and abortion.
Highlighting the 40-year-old president's words, the executive director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, Jose Miguel Vivanco, said, for example, on Twitter: "Just in case any dupe still thought Bukele was a modern leader..."
Bukele made no mention of his plan to extend the presidential term from five to six years, nor of other contentious measures. He also failed to say when they would be sent to Congress, which his party and its allies control.
Many cities are navigating declining water infrastructure. (photo: John Walker/The Fresno Bee)
Hundreds of thousands of lead service lines in Wisconsin are a threat to public health, and communities of color are particularly vulnerable.
Wisconsin tested roughly a quarter of its children under age six for lead poisoning in 2018; 6.6 percent had blood lead levels of at least five micrograms per deciliter (mcg/ dL), over double the national average of 2.6 percent.
The problem is worse among Black children, like McElroy’s son. A 2016 report from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services found that, though Black children made up only 21 percent of children tested for lead poisoning, they accounted for half of all lead poisoning cases. In total, 13.2 percent of Black children tested had elevated lead levels, four times the rate of children with lead poisoning in Flint, Mich., that year.
When her son was born in 2006, McElroy took him to an appointment with the national low-income public health program Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Nurses revealed that her son’s lead level was 5 mcg/ dL, which was half the official “level of concern,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They gave her a pamphlet, but did not tell her to get a water filter or test her paint. As an 18-year-old, first-time mother, McElroy thought she and her son were safe.
It wasn’t until 2012 that the CDC updated its stance on lead. It now says 5 mcg/ dL is poisonous and that no amount is “safe.” Early lead poisoning can damage the brain and delay development, causing issues in learning, behavior, hearing and speech, among others.
“There is no safe lead level,” says McElroy, who is now an organizer with the Coalition on Lead Emergency. “My son is living proof that, at even 5 mcg/ dL, [lead] can have life-altering effects.”
The 2016 Wisconsin Department of Health Services report says kids from low-income families are most at risk “because they have limited options for selecting housing.”
In Milwaukee, more than 40 percent of water service lines are made of lead and more than 50 percent of households rent, which means they rely on their landlords to replace the pipes. Brenda Coley, co-executive director of the nonprofit Milwaukee Water Commons, says this is an environmental justice issue.
“Most of [Milwaukee’s] 70,000 lead laterals are in old housing stock, which are left in vulnerable communities — that would be people of color,” Coley says.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) says the state has at least 325,000 remaining lead service lines. By some estimates, this is more than any other state per capita. And the problem isn’t only in Milwaukee. “Dozens of other communities have tens of thousands of lead service lines that pose a public health risk,” says Scott Laeser, Water Program Director at environmental advocacy group Clean Wisconsin. “This is a statewide problem.”
Many rural Wisconsinites who rely on one of the state’s 800,000 private wells assume their water is clean, but lead contamination, Laeser warns, is something that every resident “should be doing their due diligence” to prevent. Laeser should know. He and his wife own a 19th-century farmhouse outside Argyle, a southwestern Wisconsin town with a population of roughly 900. When they decided to have children, they got their well tested and had to replace a small lead pipe. The cost was $1,200.
For most homeowners, the cost would be $3,000 – $5,000. Wisconsin does have several programs to help and is only the third state to let utility companies use ratepayer funds to assist homeowners in removing private-side lead pipes. In total, the DNR estimates it has distributed $38 million to cities assisting about 10,000 homeowners since 2017.
"I had no idea where we were gonna get that money."
One such homeowner was Hannah Doudna, a resident of Stoughton, a city of 13,000 just south of Madison. In July 2020, while working on an adjacent street, contractors discovered a lead pipe on Doudna’s property.
When Doudna called Jill Weiss, utility director for the city of Stoughton, Weiss told her that because the pipe was on private property, Doudna was responsible for replacing it — at a cost of $27,000. That was an unimaginable sum to Doudna, a lab technician, and her boyfriend, a student who worked part time at Kwik Trip and Pick ‘n Save.
After repeated calling, Weiss eventually told her the city had learned about a DNR grant that might pay to replace Doudna’s pipes, as well as those of approximately 650 other Stoughton homeowners.
For the next nine months, Doudna anxiously waited to learn if Stoughton’s grant application had been approved. “It was a scary situation,” Doudna says. “If we would have had to pay for that $27,000, I had no idea where we were gonna get that money.” Eventually, the DNR funding did come through, and Doudna’s pipes were replaced in July 2021.
Other success stories include Madison, which was one of the first cities in the country to proactively replace all of its lead pipes, and Green Bay, which completed its five-year, $6 million replacement project last year.
Despite some regional successes, however, statewide progress has been slow. In Milwaukee, for example, fewer than 1,000 lead service lines are replaced annually. At that rate, removal will take 70 years and several generations of vulnerable children.
Activists point to a myriad of reasons for Milwaukee’s sluggish pace. One is frequent turnover in the scandal-plagued city health department. Another is a lack of political will.
“The narrative that has come out of the city of Milwaukee has been that the amount of lead poisoning that happens from lead in water is minuscule,” says Robert Penner, a member of Get the Lead Out Coalition of Milwaukee. “It’s a mechanism they’re using to try to not have to pay out for a very quick lead lateral replacement.”
In an email to In These Times, Emily Tau, marketing and communications officer at the Milwaukee Health Department, says that while “all sources of lead poisoning need to [be] removed from the city,” lead paint is the department’s “priority.” Tau cites two 2019 reports stating that most childhood lead exposure in Wisconsin results from lead-based paint and its dust.
Penner, however, says geographic information system mapping from his organization suggests otherwise: that most of Milwaukee’s lead poisoning cases result from a combination of contaminated water and paint.
Either way, Milwaukee’s most formidable roadblock is the $800 million it would cost to replace its lead pipes. In 2021, the city budget allocated just $5.5 million to private-side LSL replacement.
“What the city needs to do is it needs to accept help where it can from the state government and from the federal government,” Penner says.
The American Jobs Plan initially allocated $45 billion to replace lead pipes nationwide but was reduced to $15 billion — which experts say is too little. Attempts to increase state aid have also failed; in 2019 and 2021, Wisconsin’s Republican-majority legislature rejected plans for $40 million in additional funding. Even if money weren’t an issue, Steve Elmore of the Wisconsin DNR says that replacing the pipes would be at least a decade-long project in Milwaukee alone, because of the lack of workers.
Meanwhile, heading to his first high school football practice, McElroy’s son had another anxiety attack. In the parking lot, he said to his mother, “I don’t think I’m brave enough to go through this for another four years.”
“He’s exhausted,” McElroy says. “He has to push himself 10 times harder than the average student.” Just keeping him in school is her top priority, she adds, pointing to studies that correlate lead exposure with juvenile delinquency. “The worst thing for a parent is something happening to your children,” she says. “And I’m still living that fear.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
