12 February 22
Yes We “Deserve” a Little Bit of Support
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Founder, Reader Supported News
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11 February 22
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I am contracted to the woman I love but the vow to love and honor (at the altar, I whispered the word “obey” to myself) left out a great deal, such as “take careful aim at the middle of the toilet bowl” and “when asked what you’d like for dinner, the correct answer is ‘a green salad with oil and vinegar, please.’” Over the 26 years of marriage, other addenda have attached to the contract, including “do not give me articles of clothing as gifts because I will only have to donate them to the Salvation Army.”
I remembered the 14th when I walked into the drugstore to pick up a Baby Ruth candy bar, which is a vitamin supplement for a man on a green leafy diet, and I saw the aisle stocked with garish scarlet heart-shaped trash, gifts so ugly they’d be grounds for divorce. Who buys this dreck? Men who just realized on their way home that it is the 14th and there is no time to shop around.
It’s easy for the Day to slip up on a person, since there’s no St. Valentine’s Day service at church, but it’s an important day especially for us Northerners of Anglo/German/Scandinavian persuasion who were brought up to be cautious with declarations of affection, who are not huggers, who save “I love you” for birthdays and anniversaries and don’t say it in front of the children. This day is meant for us. We ignore it at our peril.
Flowers are a better idea than chocolate but the best idea is a poem. For example:
You and I, my dear love,
Are a pair I am gladly part of,
Like carrots and peas,
Or salami and cheese
And when push comes to shove,
We fit like a hand in a glove,
Snug as the hug
Of two bugs in a rug,
Or birds in a nest up above.
A double limerick. A sonnet would be better, but you don’t want to write a third-rate sonnet especially if your true love is someone who actually reads poetry. You could, of course, simply write, with a good fountain pen, Shakespeare’s “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” or if you’ve never been in disgrace, Liz Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” or Robert Dylan’s “I’ll be your baby tonight” but only if your penmanship is good. A love poem that looks like it was written by a child or a physician is not a good idea.
Valentine’s Day was traumatic for me as a child because I was shy, not a popular kid, and I had a home haircut that was not nicely tapered in back but was cut in a series of terraces, and I desperately wanted to be liked and when I looked at my valentines from classmates, I could see that they were the inexpensive kind that came six to a page and were torn out along a dotted line, and the edges had little bumps. Mine were bumpy valentines, not particularly meaningful.
If you’re reading this Monday morning and you have no valentine and she’s still in the shower, write my double limerick on a card and sign it and give it to her. Don’t say I wrote it; claim it as your own. She doesn’t want a valentine from me, she wants one from you. And put your arms around her and tell her she’s your best friend and she makes your life wonderful. It’s an important moment for old lovers, this meaningful embrace. The woman knows all the worst things about you, every single one except your undercover work for Rafael Trujillo, she knows your messiness, your ineptitude, your extensive ignorance, but she stands by you. God bless her. He’s already blessed you. Without our wives, we’d be living in a boxcar, sniffing glue, and would’ve missed the Winter Olympics, and been mesmerized by hoot owls calling, “HOOOO!” Who? Her, of course. Who else?
Jim Lamon, a GOP candidate challenging Mark Kelly for senator of Arizona. (photo: Gage Skidmore)
Jim Lamon’s ad depicts ‘shootout’ with Democrats including Mark Kelly, senator whose wife Gabby Giffords was shot in deadly attack
Jim Lamon, an energy executive, shared the ad on Twitter, saying it would be aired at this year’s Super Bowl.
Lamon would face Kelly in a general election in the autumn should he secure the Republican nomination.
Kelly is the husband of the former Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who was shot in the head in 2011 while greeting constituents outside of a local grocery store.
In Lamon’s ad, styled as a western, figures identified as the “DC gang” enter a town wearing cowboy boots and carrying firearms, their faces half-covered by bandannas. Onlookers are upset by their presence, with one declaring: “We’re tired of being pushed around!”
Lamon enters, along with Mark Lamb, a real-life local sheriff, and Brandon Judd, the current president of the National Border Patrol Council. Lamon addresses the three actors playing Biden, Kelly and Pelosi, saying: “The good people of Arizona have had enough of you.”
“It’s time for a showdown,” Lamon adds.
When the Democrats draw their firearms, Lamon fires his own gun, shooting the weapons out of their hands as the rest of the town cheers. The three Democrats run away.
Criticism towards the ad has been swift, with many people pointing out other recent instances of violent imagery used by members of the Republican party. Last November, Paul Gosar, Republican representative for Arizona, was officially censured by the House after sharing an animated video depicting him killing the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking Biden.
Shannon Watts, founder of the group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, called Lamon’s ad “disgusting”.
A spokesperson for the Lamon campaign refused to respond to the Washington Post about criticism of the ad, but said it “shows the DC gang drawing on Lamon and he merely shoots the weapons out of their hands”.
“Unlike Kelly, Jim Lamon will shoot straight with Arizonans and take the fight to Biden – and he damn sure won’t let the left bully him into backing down,” the spokesperson said.
This image from surveillance video shows Minneapolis police officers Thomas Lane, left, and J. Alexander Kueng escorting George Floyd to a police vehicle outside Cup Foods in Minneapolis, May 25, 2020. (photo: AP)
The new count is up from 1,021 shootings the previous year and 999 in 2019. The total comes amid a nationwide spike in violent crime — although nowhere near historic highs — and as people increasingly are venturing into public spaces now that coronavirus vaccines are widely available.
Despite setting a record, experts said the 2021 total was within expected bounds. Police have fatally shot roughly 1,000 people in each of the past seven years, ranging from 958 in 2016 to last year’s high. Mathematicians say this stability may be explained by Poisson’s random variable, a principle of probability theory that holds that the number of independent, uncommon events in a large population will remain fairly stagnant absent major societal changes.
That the number of fatal police shootings last year is within 60 of the average suggests officers’ behavior has not shifted significantly since The Post began collecting data, said Andrew Wheeler, a private-sector criminologist and data scientist.
“I think the data is pretty consistent that there’ve been no major changes in policing, at least in terms of these officer-involved shooting deaths,” he said.
Advocacy for policing overhauls has intensified since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. More than 400 bills were introduced in state legislatures last year to address officers’ use of force. Police departments increasingly partnered with mental health experts to respond to people in crisis. Cities established civilian review boards for use-of-force incidents.
None of it decreased the number of people shot and killed by officers last year. The total has increased slightly most years since 2015 — a pattern that Wheeler said may or may not signal that fatal shootings truly are trending higher.
Franklin Zimring, a law professor and criminologist at the University of California at Berkeley, said he agreed that the rise in fatal shootings from 2020 to 2021 was relatively insignificant. He noted that the percentage change from one year to the next — 3 percent — was small.
While last year’s policing overhauls did not decrease fatal shootings, Zimring said the stagnancy was unsurprising. A policy enacted now, he said, may take years to make a statistically significant difference.
“The good news is, things aren’t getting an awful lot worse,” Zimring said of the 2021 total. “And the very bad news is that they’re not getting better, either.”'
The demographics of the people fatally shot have remained largely constant since The Post started tracking after a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., killed Michael Brown in 2014, gathering information from news coverage, social media posts and police records. Although the FBI launched its own data collection program to track police use of force in 2019, a lack of participation by departments has put that program’s existence at risk.
Last year, all but 15 percent of people shot and killed by officers were armed, according to The Post’s data. Ninety-four percent were men. Roughly 14 percent had known mental health struggles, down from about one-fifth in the two previous years and about one-fourth in 2016 and 2015.
Sixteen percent of people fatally shot last year were killed after police responded to a domestic-disturbance call. Eleven percent were fatally shot after someone called 911. (Data on racial demographics was too incomplete to provide meaningful analysis. Such data can require additional months of research to finalize.)
Among the highest-profile of the killings after a 911 call was that of Ma’Khia Bryant, a teenager in Ohio’s foster system. After two people called police to ask for help, body-camera footage shows, a Columbus police officer arrived and saw Bryant swing at another person’s head with what appeared to be a knife. The officer yelled, “Get down!” several times and then fired four shots at Bryant.
The publicly released video prompted local and national outcry, driving hundreds into the streets to protest another deadly interaction between law enforcement and a Black American.
About 20 percent of last year’s fatal police shootings were captured on body cameras — the highest portion since The Post began tracking. In 2015, the first year data was collected, body-camera video existed for roughly 8 percent of shootings.
The increase, however, does not seem to have affected the number of fatal encounters. That lack of change may be because officers get used to wearing the cameras and do not act differently because of them, said Nusret Sahin, a criminal justice professor at Stockton University with an expertise in body cameras.
Body-camera video of a fatal shooting also may not be widely viewed. Some states and police departments make the footage public, while others do not, Sahin said. He said it is also unclear how many police supervisors watch the videos and impart discipline for policy violations.
“If you know that this will just be inside your service and will not be released unless there’s a high-profile incident or a use-of-force complaint, you wouldn’t change your behavior,” Sahin said.
Last year also stands out because one of those shot and killed by police was a young child — 8-year-old Fanta Bility. Bility was shot by Sharon Hill, Pa., police officers who fired at a car outside a high school football game in August. The officers mistakenly thought someone in the vehicle was firing at them, a grand jury said. Four people were hit by the gunfire, and Bility died of her injuries.
The three officers involved were criminally charged with manslaughter and reckless endangerment in January. They were later fired from the police force. The shooting marked the third time in the last seven years that police fatally shot a child under age 10. The other children, both 6, were killed in 2015 and 2017.
Of the 1,055 people fatally shot last year, about 1 percent were juveniles — consistent with other years that The Post has tracked.
The killing of Adam Toledo, 13, roiled Chicago last spring after a city police officer chased Toledo through an alley on March 29 and ordered him to stop and show his hands. Video appears to show Toledo stopping at the opening in a fence, turning and raising his hands as an officer shoots once and strikes him in the chest.
Toledo appears to have been holding something in his hand when he stopped running. Police have said it was a gun that they later recovered. An attorney for Toledo’s family said he had dropped the gun and put up his hands before the officer fired.
The relative stability of the annual number of fatal shootings does not mean the total is unchangeable. Wheeler said societal interventions, such as new policies around use of force, could shift the total from its expected range.
“The data’s consistent with that [range] now,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do stuff to reduce those incidents over time.”
Workers assemble Model S Sedans at the Tesla Fremont factory in 2012. (photo: Patrick Tehan/Getty)
The automaker denies the allegations
The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) filed the lawsuit late on Wednesday, after the automaker published a blogpost pre-empting and denying the charges.
DFEH director Kevin Kish said in a statement: “After receiving hundreds of complaints from workers, DFEH found evidence that Tesla’s Fremont factory is a racially segregated workplace where Black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay, and promotion creating a hostile work environment.”
Warning: racist language and slurs as reported from DFEH’s case follow.
The DFEH’s case against Telsa describes a wide range of discriminatory behavior and harassment at the company’s Fremont factory. Defendants in the case say they heard workers, managers, and supervisors frequently using racial slurs including the n-word, “monkey toes,” and “hood rat.” Areas in the factory where many Black and African American employees were located were referred to as the “porch monkey station,” and defendants say managers and supervisors were either “active participants and/or witnesses to these racist comments.” Racist graffiti was also left in break rooms, restrooms, and work stations including phrases such as “all monkeys work outside,” “fuck [n-words]” and “hang [n-words]” next to a drawing of a noose. Defendants says this graffiti was “left up for months.”
Work, reward, and punishment was also meted out along discriminatory racial lines, say defendants in the case. They report that Black employees were given the most physically demanding jobs in the factory, and told they were “better suited” to such work. Black workers say they were more frequently penalized for minor workplace infractions than non-Black colleagues, and that they were more often denied promotions. As a result, they were underrepresented in Tesla’s management. A 2020 diversity report from Tesla said Black workers made up 10 percent of its workforce and 4 percent of its leadership.
Tesla has previously been sued for racial harassment and discrimination at its Fremont factory. In October last year, a judge awarded a Black former employee $137 million in damages after he reported a hostile work environment where he heard “daily racist epithets” including the n-word and was told to “go back to Africa” by colleagues.
In a blogpost preempting this new lawsuit from DFEH, Tesla said it “strongly opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment and has a dedicated Employee Relations team that responds to and investigates all complaints.”
The company also raised its status as “the last remaining automobile manufacturer in California” in the post, and said past DFEH investigations had found no evidence of misconduct at the plant. “Yet, at a time when manufacturing jobs are leaving California, the DFEH has decided to sue Tesla instead of constructively working with us,” said the company. “This is both unfair and counterproductive, especially because the allegations focus on events from years ago.”
Activists and residents from Brownsville, Brooklyn, disrupted National Grid's construction site, successfully shutting it down for the day. (photo: Erik McGregor/Getty)
Residents have been protesting National Grid’s pipeline, which bypasses wealthier, whiter Brooklyn areas, since 2020
It wasn’t until years later, in 2020, that he learned that the overturned streets were making way for a fracked gas pipeline. “It just felt like a big slap in the face – to have [a pipeline] in my backyard that I didn’t know about,” he said.
Rogers and other residents have spent the last two years protesting National Grid’s 7-mile pipeline, which zigzags through predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods, bypassing whiter, wealthier parts of Brooklyn. Formally known as the Metropolitan Reliability Project, the pipeline is often referred to as the north Brooklyn pipeline. They have blocked the pipeline’s construction at demonstrations and some have stopped paying part of their utility bills, in an effort to divert funding from the project.
Last summer, they went a step further filing a complaint against the utility and state that argues the pipeline has resulted in racial discrimination, violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (Title VI prohibits federally-funded entities from discriminating on the basis of race, gender, and other protected identities).
Historically, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been slow to act on these types of complaints, rarely finding evidence of discrimination. But under the Biden administration, the agency has committed to change this. How the EPA responds to this challenge – in which Black, Indigenous, and brown-led community groups say a fracked gas pipeline represents a violation of their civil rights – will be a test of the agency’s ability to execute on that promise.
Not long after the complaint was filed, two federal investigations were launched into New York state agencies. The lawyers behind the complaint hope that it will result in a full environmental review of the pipeline and connected facility for storing and refining the methane gas, which awaits an air permit. Ultimately, they hope that the gas in the pipeline – which began operating in 2020 – is permanently shut off.
“It would be a real mistake if the state doesn’t listen to the communities that it is designed to protect – that already have a history of dealing with environmental harm and pollution,” says Britney Wilson, a co-counsel to the complaint and an associate law professor and director of the Civil Rights and Disability Justice Clinic at New York Law School.
The pipeline cuts through the designated environmental justice areas of Brownsville, Ocean-Hill, Bushwick and East Williamsburg, neighborhoods long overburdened with toxic hazards from a history of racist policies. Large swaths of these neighborhoods were historically redlined, ineligible for federally backed loans. All neighborhoods have some of the highest rates of adult and child asthma in New York City, a legacy of its history of polluting industries and lack of public benefits. The pipeline has a terminal in Greenpoint, where one the largest oil spills in the country is still being remediated.
“National Grid treated Brownsville like a backyard, but there’s a whole community back here,” said Rogers. “Folks have been supporting each other. Folks have been making it happen.”
Responding to a request for comment, a National Grid spokesperson maintains that the utility company complied with all laws.
The EPA was established just over 50 years ago. In that time, the agency has only made one final finding of discrimination.
In 2017, the agency reached the conclusion that the permitting process for a power plant in Flint, Michigan, was effectively discriminating against African American residents. But it took the EPA more than 20 years to reach that point; the complaint against the Genesee Power Station was first submitted in 1992.
The Center for Public Integrity found that the EPA rejected or dismissed over 90% of the civil rights abuse allegations, from 1996 to 2013, while only 5% of complaints were resolved with voluntary or informal agreements. To date, the agency has not once restricted federal funding for a civil rights violation.
But under the Biden administration, there have been signs that the EPA wants to put environmental justice at the forefront of its policies.
In October, the agency released a strategic plan draft that aims to revamp its civil rights enforcement program. The plan states the EPA will “vigorously enforce” federal civil rights law to “address the legacy of pollution in overburdened communities that results from discriminatory actions, whether direct or indirect, intentional, or unintentional”. This reflects a sharp departure from both the Obama and Trump administration’s strategic plans, which didn’t mention civil rights – let alone make it a central objective.
“This could possibly be a turning point with how the EPA approaches environmental racism,” said Anjana Malhotra, a senior attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice and a co-counsel to the complaint. “It’s a landmark acknowledgement of how [the EPA] hasn’t addressed environmental injustice.”
After community groups filed their complaint against the north Brooklyn pipeline, the EPA launched an investigation into New York’s department of environmental conservation, while the department of transportation began investigating New York’s public service commission. Those investigations are currently paused while the federal agencies meet with the state to seek an informal resolution.
In a recent development, Malhotra and Wilson were invited to meet with federal agencies in January. There, the co-counsels presented a letter reiterating why it is “unequivocally clear” the environmental conservation department violated the law and to push for greater inclusion of their clients in the informal resolution. Typically, the process doesn’t include the complainants, but the EPA and transportation department are developing a new model to better include the impacted communities, according to Malhotra and Wilson.
It’s an important development, given that Brooklyn residents claim they never had the opportunity to consent to the pipeline – a frequent complaint shared by environmental justice communities.
“[National Grid] never reached out to me, never reached out to my fellow neighbors, none of us,” said Rogers, a member of Brownsville Green Justice, one of the groups behind the complaint.
If no agreement can be reached, the investigations will resume – with a timeline of 180 days in total to potentially arrive at preliminary findings of discrimination.
A DPS spokesperson claims the agency’s decision to approve the pipeline was based on “a robust factual record”, while a environmental conservation department spokesperson similarly claims that the agency “subjects every application to rigorous review of all applicable federal and state standards”.
With regard to the EPA’s record on environmental justice, there are some promising changes. Marianne Engelman-Lado, a lawyer who has previously described the agency as “spectacularly unsuccessful at ensuring that recipients of EPA funding comply with the non-discrimination provisions of Title VI”, was appointed to the agency last year.
The EPA has also issued two letters with preliminary findings of civil rights violations in 2021, for separate complaints in California and Missouri. And in September, the agency responded to an audit from the office of inspector general with measures and deadlines for improving civil rights oversight – from more guidance for permitting decisions to initiating investigations even before a complaint is lodged.
These moves could mean good news for organizers like the ones challenging the north Brooklyn pipeline.
“Our neighborhoods in Brooklyn have always been dumping zones,” said Pati Rodriguez, a community organizer with Mi Casa Resiste, a Bushwick-based group resisting gentrification and displacement, and one of the complainants. “[But] these are our neighborhoods that we’ve stewarded.”
Two young girls watch a World Cup soccer match on a television from their holding area where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held. (photo: AP)
A historical and contemporary look at migrant incarceration and the detainees pushing for change inside and beyond the system.
Wooten also disclosed that immigrant women held at the facility underwent surgical procedures without having consented to or having been informed of them. Several detainees reported that they had their uteruses removed in this way.
These shocking revelations form part of investigative journalist Seth Freed Wessler’s gripping documentary, The Facility. The film starkly reveals the inhumanity and oppression at the center of the immigrant detention system. Two other recent works also investigate this topic, including historian Jessica Ordaz’s book, The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity; and “Cruel By Design: Voices Against Immigration Detention,” a new report just released by the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). Together, the three works demonstrate the ability of the detained to subvert mechanisms of control, to chip away at the walls and fences that surround them, while highlighting the need for abolitionist thinking and action.
Inside the Detention Centers
Wessler’s documentary, the production of which began in early 2020, premiered this past December. The short film provides an often-painful look at life inside two facilities, Irwin and, to a lesser extent, Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia.
The movie features two detainees, one of whom is Andrea Manrique. At 34 years of age when the filming begins, Manrique is an asylum-seeker from Colombia. “A living hell” is how she describes her life in Irwin.
The Facility follows Manrique over several months as she meets with her immigration lawyer (by videolink) and is constantly frustrated by the lack of progress on her case.
“It’s like a prison sentence,” she says about her detention while wiping away tears at one such meeting. “Except I don’t know when I’m leaving. At least prisoners know when they’ll be leaving.”
Nilson Barahona, originally from Honduras, is the other detainee featured. Barahona has been living in the United States since 1999, and he is married to a U.S. citizen with whom he has a child.
Barahona calls his son as often as possible, but he fears that the separation is fraying their ties. He recounts how during a recent call his son said, “’Daddy, can we speak in English please?’” Barahona goes on to tearfully explain, “Speaking Spanish was our thing. It was a bond that we have. I just feel like I’m losing that bond.”
This film is composed largely of recordings of pay-per-minute video calls. These, as well as the words and images that the viewer hears and sees on a television screen mounted on a wall in the Irwin cellblock—and the very filming of the documentary itself—give the 26-minute documentary somewhat of a surreal feel. They also show how the detention center is far from isolated from the world outside. It is through a Spanish-language television news report, for example, that Irwin detainees learn about the first positive Covid case in the facility. These technologies of connection, along with the creativity of detainees, reveal the permeability of walls, literal and figurative, within and around the facility.
An Expanding System
Such linkages are not limited to life at Irwin, as demonstrated by Jessica Ordaz’s illuminating book. In The Shadow of El Centro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Ordaz tells the story of the El Centro Immigration Detention Center over its 69-years of existence. In so doing, she insists that, although immigration detention is not officially framed as punishment—detainees, because they are held under civil law, are not classified as criminals and thus not subject to criminal penalties—it functions in a punitive fashion. While the very incarceration of migrants is an example of such, violence of various sorts permeates the detention system. And it always has, asserts Ordaz.
When it opened in 1945, El Centro Detention Camp (located in the small city of El Centro in southern California’s Imperial Valley) held only 100 men and was intended as temporary. When the much bigger El Centro Immigration Detention Center closed on September 30, 2014, it had 588 detainees and 428 employees.
The El Centro facility’s size at the time of its closure is indicative of how the immigration detention system has grown over several decades, especially over the last 25 years. This growth, assert the authors of “Cruel by Design” is the product of “a punitive, racist, and xenophobic political climate combined with massive government funding.” Today, the United States has the world’s largest immigration detention system, which holds up to fifty thousand people a day. On average, in 2020, the daily number of detainees was 33,724; in 1994, the figure was 6,785.
Increased Federal Funding and Facilities
The IDP-CCR report situates the detention system within a broader system of migration control, while showing how immigration laws are designed to make it as easy as possible to detain and deport people. Through interviews with former detainees, including Barahona, and court documents from people fighting for release, it also highlights how the detention system thrives by employing tactics intended to break people’s spirits and to undermine their ability to fight deportation.
In addition to the human costs of the system, the monetary ones are high, according to the report. In fiscal year 2020 alone, the United States spent more than $3 billion on immigrant detention. The much larger budget for immigration and border policing as a whole totaled $23.2 billion in 2019. This amount exceeds the military budgets of Canada, Israel, Spain, and Turkey. And there’s no sign of change on the horizon: the Biden administration’s 2021 budget request calls for $2.8 billion for immigrant detention. This is more than three times the amount the Department of Homeland Security (of which ICE is part) spent on detention in 2005.
What the CCR-IDP report characterizes as “a sprawling network of facilities” is a hodgepodge of institutions. The ICE detention system includes “facilities that have contracts with private prison companies, county and city jails, and state prisons.” In the case of Irwin County Detention Center and Stewart Detention Center, they are both privately owned, for-profit facilities, the former owned and operated by Lasalle Corrections, the latter by CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America).
A Legacy of Mistreatment
While private facilities may seem especially prone to abuse—not least because they have a financial incentive to deny resources to detainees—maltreatment seems to have long been the rule across facilities. In the 1940s, for example, forced labor was common at El Centro.
“From the start,” Ordaz reveals, “Mexican migrants were used in constructing and maintaining the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp.” At the same time, immigration authorities would farm out labor to private interests in exchanges for services. Ordaz gives the example of one contractor who “provided the Border Patrol with carpenters, bricklayers, and plasterers in exchange for the labor of unauthorized Mexican men who could dig ditches for the sewer and water lines and clean up his yard.”
In the 1970s, a Mexican journalist went undercover as a prisoner at El Centro. He reported insufficient food rations, a facility so crowded that some detainees were compelled to sleep on the floor, and a lack of medical care. Ordaz quotes U.S. Representative Edward Roybal, a Democrat representing Los Angeles, characterizing immigration centers in general “as fit only to house dog food.”
On May 27, 1985, 15 detainees, representing a diverse set of countries of birth, launched a hunger strike to protest the conditions that reigned within the facility. The action would grow to include a few hundred detainees. That detainees successfully worked across differences of nationality reflects the “shared experience of rightlessness within the carceral system that fostered solidarity among the detained men.” The consciousness and organizing skills needed to carry out the protest manifests a “transnational migrant politics,” suggests Ordaz. It is one that “emerged from struggles that surpassed the detention center’s fences and took place beyond the nation’s borders.”
Such resistance is hardly unique to detainees in El Centro. On April 12, 2020, five women detainees at Irwin, Andrea Manrique among them, also protested. One of their boyfriends on the outside recorded the women as they spoke about the dangerous conditions in the facility and their fear that they would contract Covid-19. Spanish-language television soon broadcast the video, which was also distributed by social media and posted on Youtube.
In the video, the women express their fear of reprisals for publicly speaking out. And their fears were well-founded. According to the IDP-CCR report, reprisals— including physical abuse, transfers to other facilities, solitary confinement, and deportation—for protesting unjust conditions in U.S. detention facilities are common. As Manrique reported to Wessler while showing him bruises she incurred on her arm, she and the other women were violently dragged into punishment cells, where they were held for at least two weeks.
Around the same time of the video, men in the facility protested as well, demanding the release of vulnerable detainees and increased protections from the coronavirus. A number of them went on strike by refusing to work in the kitchen, laundry room, or the commissary. And five detainees, including Nilson Barahona, went on a hunger strike. Soon thereafter, ICE transferred Barahona to Stewart Detention Center.
Reflecting the arbitrary nature of detention, ICE released both Manrique and Barahona—without warning or explanation—on November 20, 2020, allowing them to rejoin their families. Both of the former detainees, the documentary shows, are now active in supporting those still locked behind the walls of the detention system.
A Violent Core
Ultimately, The Facility, Ordaz’s book and the IDP-CCR report all suggest that the business of immigrant detention has little if anything to do with protection against threats.
What explains the detention system for Jessica Ordaz is that it is a key component of “the continuity of anti migrant violence,” with violence “at the core of its essence.”As a result, she believes that the system is beyond reform and thus invites the reader“to imagine and work toward a world without cages.”
Similarly, for the authors of the IDP-CCR report, the “cruelty and harshness” of the detention system are a symptom of a larger disease, one at the heart of the border and immigration policing apparatus. It’s about “denying liberty, discouraging people from fighting to stay, deterring people from migrating and returning.” As such, “ending the immigration detention, deportation and border policing regimes is the only way forward.”
As Andrea Manrique and Nilson Barahona—and countless others—demonstrate, the authors write, “people currently in detention, and those who have survived it, are already leading the way.”
A koala joey named Humphrey is comforted by his mother, Willow, at Taronga Zoo in Sydney in March 2021. Australia's government has declared koalas endangered in New South Wales, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory. (photo: Lisa Maree/Getty)
Environment Minister Sussan Ley announced on Friday that she is increasing protection for koalas in New South Wales, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory by changing their status from vulnerable to endangered. The government is also providing millions of dollars in conservation funding and seeking states' approval for a national recovery plan, she said.
"Together we can ensure a healthy future for the koala and this decision, along with the total [$53 million U.S.] we have committed to koalas since 2019, will play a key role in that process," she said.
The move comes a decade after koala populations in those three regions were first classified as vulnerable, meaning they faced a high risk of extinction in the wild in the medium term. Their endangered status connotes a much more imminent risk.
Without urgent government intervention, New South Wales' koalas would become extinct by 2050, a parliamentary inquiry released in June 2020 found.
The Koala population has seen a dramatic decline
Koala numbers have dropped dramatically in recent years, due to climate-driven weather events and rampant land-clearing for agricultural and urban development. Koala populations in Queensland and New South Wales, for example, were recently found to have decreased by 50% or more in the last two decades.
The deadly bush fires in 2019 and 2020 — which scorched millions of acres over several months — further exacerbated the decline. Some 60,000 koalas were "killed, injured or affected in some way" by the fires, according to a report commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund Australia.
"The bushfires were the final straw," Josey Sharrad, a campaign manager with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said in a statement issued Friday. "This must be a wake-up call to Australia and the government to move much faster to protect critical habitat from development and land-clearing and seriously address the impacts of climate change."
The country lost 30% of its total koala population between 2018 and 2021, according to a report from the Australian Koala Foundation. That loss was particularly stark in New South Wales, which saw a 41% decline.
While the bush fires contributed to the population drop, AKF Chair Deborah Tabart said last year that they were far from the only driver.
"We have witnessed a drastic decrease in inland populations because of drought, heat waves, and lack of water for Koalas to drink," she said. "I have seen some landscapes that look like the moon — with dead and dying trees everywhere."
Land clearing has been a major factor
Land clearing has ramped up in recent decades, with the World Wildlife Fund Australia noting that it has increased 13-fold in New South Wales since the government weakened native vegetation laws in 2016.
Conservation and animal welfare groups have long urged Australia's government to take more action to protect the species.
In April 2020, WWF-Australia, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Humane Society International jointly called on the federal government to reclassify koalas as endangered, saying the move would mobilize funds, spur public support and increase protection for the forests and woodlands that koalas call home.
The Australian government has allocated some funding for koala protection efforts in recent years.
It committed $13 million in 2019 for habitat protection and restoration, health research and medical support and the federal koala monitoring program. And last month, the government announced it would direct another nearly $36 million toward recovery and conservation initiatives over the next four years.
Conservation groups welcome the reclassification but say more action is needed
The three groups welcomed Ley's announcement on Friday but stressed that the status change alone is not enough to save the koalas.
They called on the government to take a stronger stand against deforestation and refocus its efforts on forest protection and restoration, saying its words would be empty without action.
Tabart, with the AKF, called the reclassification "nothing but a token gesture," saying it was "too little, too late" and calling for meaningful legislative change. The organization has long advocated for a Koala Protection Act, which would focus on protecting koala trees from developers.
"A status change is just a word," the AKF tweeted. "It does nothing legally to stop land clearing, which is the key reason for Koalas becoming homeless and then getting sick with disease."
The foundation also criticized the government for choosing not to list koalas as endangered in Victoria and South Australia, saying the decision shows "how out of touch our political leaders are with the current state of the koala."
Sharrad, with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, praised the decision but also described it as a "double-edged sword."
"We should never have allowed things to get to the point where we are at risk of losing a national icon," she said. "If we can't protect an iconic species endemic to Australia, what chance do lesser known but no less important species have?"
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