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Sanders Plans Aggressive Counter-Trump Measures
Sydney Ember, The New York Times
Ember writes: "Senator Bernie Sanders is planning to mount an aggressive campaign to counter potential attempts by President Trump to delegitimize the results of the November election, warning that Democrats and Republicans alike must do 'everything that we can to prevent that from happening.'"
Warning that this election is an “extremely dangerous moment” for the country, he said in an interview that he would aggressively push to try to stop President Trump from delegitimizing the vote.
In a phone interview on Monday evening, Mr. Sanders said he would spend the next six weeks urging the country to prepare for a “nightmare scenario” in which Mr. Trump declares himself the winner of the election and refuses to step down even if he loses.
As part of his effort, he is set to deliver a speech in Washington on Thursday — his first in-person appearance related to the election since before he dropped out of the presidential race — to outline in stark terms the danger that he says Mr. Trump poses to the nation’s democracy.
The U.S. hit a tragic milestone Tuesday, recording more than 200,000 coronavirus deaths. Here, Chris Duncan, whose mother, Constance, 75, died from COVID-19 on her birthday, visits a COVID Memorial Project installation of 20,000 American flags on the National Mall. The flags are on the grounds of the Washington Monument, facing the White House. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Over 200,000 Americans Are Now Confirmed Dead From Covid-19
Bill Chappell, NPR
Chappell writes: "The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 surpassed 200,000 on Tuesday - reaching what was once the upper limit of some estimates for the pandemic's impact on Americans. Some experts now warn that the toll could nearly double again by the end of 2020."
READ MORE
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) at the Senate on March 17. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
Mitch McConnell Has the Votes to Move Forward With a Supreme Court Nominee
Li Zhou, Vox
Zhou writes: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell officially has the votes to move ahead with President Donald Trump's replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Supreme Court seat, now that Sen. Mitt Romney has announced he won't be blocking the nominee's consideration."
READ MORE
Utah National Guard soldiers line the street as demonstrators gather to protest the death of George Floyd, Wednesday, June 3, 2020, near the White House. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
Andrea Mazzarino | War Zone America: Perspectives on a Riven Nation from a Worried Military Spouse
Andrea Mazzarino, TomDispatch
Mazzarino writes: "When it rains, pieces of glass, pottery, and metal rise through the mud in the hills surrounding my Maryland home. The other day, I walked outside barefoot to fetch one of my kid's shoes and a pottery shard stabbed me in the heel. Nursing a minor infection, I wondered how long that fragment dated back."
Here’s your “Who said that?” quiz of the day:
1. He called on the president, should he lose to Joe Biden, to declare martial law by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, arrest Bill and Hillary Clinton (of course), Mark Zuckerberg, and other prominent figures and simply take control of the country.
2. Of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old Trump fan who shot three people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two of them, she said, “I want him as my president,” while he insisted that the teenager had merely sought to “maintain order when no one else would.”
3. And this official claimed that “when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin... The drills that you've seen are nothing. If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it's going to be hard to get."
And here are the answers for you: (1) Roger Stone, the former Trump associate and dirty trickster who was sentenced to 40 months in prison for lying to Congress and then had that sentence commuted by the president; (2) right-wing political commentator Ann Coulter and Fox News host Tucker Carlson; (3) Michael Caputo, the top communications official at the Department of Health and Human Services, a major Trump supporter, and the man who, as the New York Times put it, “accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of harboring a ‘resistance unit’ determined to undermine President Trump, even if that opposition bolsters the Covid-19 death toll.”
Talk about an increasingly sectarian and riven America -- and that’s just to start down an endless list in the Trump era as we all-too-ominously approach election 2020. No wonder TomDispatch regular, co-founder of Brown University’s the Costs of War Project, and military spouse Andrea Mazzarino is worried. I am, too. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
War Zone America?
Perspectives on a Riven Nation from a Worried Military Spouse
hen it rains, pieces of glass, pottery, and metal rise through the mud in the hills surrounding my Maryland home. The other day, I walked outside barefoot to fetch one of my kid’s shoes and a pottery shard stabbed me in the heel. Nursing a minor infection, I wondered how long that fragment dated back.
A neighbor of mine found what he said looked like a cartridge case from an old percussion-cap rifle in his pumpkin patch. He told us that the battle of Monocacy had been fought on these grounds in July 1864, with 1,300 Union and 900 Confederate troops killed or wounded here. The stuff that surfaces in my fields when it storms may or may not be battle artifacts, but it does remind me that the past lingers and that modern America was formed in a civil war.
Increasingly, I can’t help thinking about possible new civil wars in this country and the violence we could inflict on each another. Recently, a family member reposted a YouTube video on her Facebook page that supposedly showed an Antifa activist accidentally setting himself on fire (with the 1980s hit “Footloose” playing mockingly in the background). “I’m just going to leave this here,” read her caption. Shortly thereafter she claimed that the “YouTube speech police” had taken it down.
I thought of saying something to her about how, in countries where I’ve worked, ones without a democracy, people celebrate the misery of their opponents. Was that really, I wanted to ask, the kind of country she’d like our children to see us creating? But I decided not to, rather than further divide our family, which has grown ever more apart since Donald Trump took office. In addition, I knew that confronting her would do neither of us any good. Inspired by a president who offers a sterling example of how never to self-police what you do, she would simply have dismissed my comments as the frivolous words of the “politically correct.”
War and Peace
These days, when I watch the news and see clashes among the police, Black Lives Matter protesters, far-right “militias,” and Antifa supporters, I’m often reminded that just because no one’s declared a civil war begun, doesn’t mean we aren’t staring at the makings of an armed conflict.
Our military service members and their families have toiled for endless years now in Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other countries across the Greater Middle East and Africa under the mantle of establishing democracy and conducting a “war on terror.” They’ve done so to the tune of more than 7,000 of their own lives, a million of their own injuries and illnesses, hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in those distant lands, and significantly more than $6 trillion in funding provided by the American taxpayer. Not surprisingly under such circumstances, they now live in a country that’s under-resourced and fractured in ways that are just beginning to resemble, in a modest fashion at least, the very war zones in which they’ve been fighting.
This is both a personal and professional matter to me. As the spouse of a Navy officer who served three tours of duty on nuclear and ballistic missile submarines and one on an aircraft carrier, and the mother of two young children, I bear witness in small but significant ways to the physical, emotional, and financial toll that endless war has had on those who fight. I’m thinking of those long separations from my husband, his (and my) unlimited hours of work, the chronic health issues that go remarkably unaddressed in the Navy, the hazing by war-traumatized commanders, one near-fatal boat crash, the rising frequency of violence and suicides among military families, a recent lack of regard for obvious safety precautions during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the service’s under-resourced healthcare and childcare systems -- and that’s just to begin a far longer list.
As a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project and a therapist who has worked with active-duty troops, veterans, and most recently children and adults who have arrived here as refugees and asylum seekers from the very lands in which the U.S. still fights, I continue to bear witness in my own way to the human costs of war, American-style. As I look up into the forest of oaks and elms in the hills around my home where, once upon a time, Americans undoubtedly sought shelter from bullets fired by their countrymen, it seems ever less far-fetched to me that my family could be asked to take part in an armed conflict on American soil.
Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night with a line from former President Barack Obama’s recent Democratic National Convention speech still in my head: “Do not let them take your democracy.” In my lifetime, I’d never heard a former president refer to a government that’s still supposed to be of, by, and for the people as “them” -- especially a president as prone to understatement as he is. As a military spouse, I wonder where my family will fall in that ever-deepening chasm between “us” and “them.”
Homefront, Warfront
Obviously, intimidation and even armed attacks are already realities in American cities. Take, for example, the president’s decision to send federal troops using tear gas to clear away peaceful protesters near the White House so he could pursue a botched photo op. And that only happened after he had declared “war” on a virus whose effects are made worse by the inhalation of that very gas. He and Attorney General William Barr have similarly turned a blind eye to physical violence against, and the intimidation of, protesters by far-right groups whose racism, anti-Semitism, and support for this country’s slave history is obvious. Our commander-in-chief, while threatening but, so far at least, shying away from starting new foreign wars (thank goodness), has used military helicopters to intimidate protesters and allowed Department of Homeland Security agents to kidnap demonstrators from the streets of an American city.
To be sure, the Antifa activist featured in that video my relative posted (if it even was real) could have been part of the same problem, as were those who looted storefronts, vehicles, and public property to make a point (or not) during the protests of these last months. And yet what choices did many of them have? Isn’t our major problem that those with power in a country growing more economically unequal by the month increasingly see themselves not as of the people but only as threatened by the people -- by, that is, us?
More to the point, as Professor Robin Kelley wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times, what kind of society values property over Black lives?
Even journalism, once considered a hallmark of our democracy, has become the target of endless presidential insults and intimidation, including memes like the one in which the president is shown punching an opponent with CNN emblazoned on his head. What’s more, some of the Republican Party’s most vocal leaders all but directly condone racism. Typical of this Trumpian moment, for example, that rising star in the Republican Party Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has called slavery a “necessary evil.” In June, he even urged that the Army’s 101st Airborne Division be sent into the streets to deal with Black Lives Matter protesters.
Under these circumstances, violence may be the only thing that actually captures the attention of parts of a nation seemingly indifferent to the dehumanization and disenfranchisement of large swathes of this country’s people.
Like Iraq and Afghanistan, which have borne witness to increasing sectarianism and violence, the United States seems to be devolving into its own kind of sectarian conflict. After all, the police, now regularly armed by the Pentagon with weaponry and other equipment sometimes taken from this country’s distant war zones, increasingly wage a kind of proto-counterinsurgency warfare on our streets.
At the heart of today’s crisis lies a grim but simple fact: in this century, America’s power brokers decided to invest staggering sums of taxpayer dollars, manpower, and time in distant and disastrous “forever wars.” As Catherine Lutz and Neta Crawford, co-directors of the Costs of War Project, wrote in a recent op-ed, had some of the money this country spent on its post-9/11 wars been invested in healthcare, we would have had the tools to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic so much more effectively. The same might be said of our crumbling infrastructure and cash-starved public schools.
Speaking of public education, as economist Heidi Garrett-Peltier has pointed out, $1 million in federal spending creates nearly twice the number of jobs in public education as it does when “invested” in the Pentagon. If money had been diverted elsewhere from the military-industrial complex, perhaps we would have been able to return to school reasonably safely with enough teachers, staff, and protective equipment to ensure small-group instruction, sanitation, and social distancing. Our inability to deal with the pandemic effectively has, in turn, fed into our children losing the chance for in-person education -- for, that is, reasonably safe interaction with peers and teachers from all walks of life.
Recently, after my kindergartener overheard a conversation about the police killing of Breonna Taylor in her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, he asked me whether “they” might be coming to kill us in our home, too. I assured him that they weren’t, but I did mention our (white) privilege in relation to some of his black friends in the preschool that he loved and can’t attend in person this fall.
I then tried to explain how, in this country, the right to life is not evenly shared. He responded simply enough, “Yes, but I don’t see them anymore.” And I couldn’t help but think that precisely this kind of social distancing, where you don’t get to interact with people whose lives and perspectives are different from yours, could be one grim sectarian legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic in a country that looks like it might be starting to come apart at the seams. In these months, the Black Lives Matter activists so often filling our television screens and streets with their righteous rage are among the few who remind my children to care about racial inequality.
In the Footsteps of 9/11?
How did this country reach a point where a significant portion of us -- our president’s most vocal supporters -- are comfortable debasing the humanity of Blacks and liberals or progressives of every sort? Think of it as the road from 9/11, from that moment when, in response to a set of terror attacks by 19 mostly Saudi hijackers, the Bush administration launched what it quickly termed “the Global War on Terror,” invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq, and then... well, you know the rest of the forever-war nightmare that’s never ended. In the process, they turned the Pentagon (and the war industries that go with it) into a sinkhole for our tax dollars and our dreams of the future.
In no small part, we’ve reached this point of unease, sectarianism, and strife due to our reverence for the military as the way to solve what are actually problems of staggering and growing global and American inequality, economic and otherwise. My spouse and I stay up late talking about the upcoming elections. Even if (and that’s a big “if”) the November 3rd vote turns out to be free and fair -- hard to imagine with a pandemic that has further disenfranchised communities of color and given Trump’s shenanigans encouraging double-voting, bad-mouthing mail-in ballots, and seeking to obscure or rewrite national intelligence information about Russian election interference -- who wouldn’t worry about November 4th? Or 5th, or 10th, or whenever all those mail-in votes are finally counted? What uproar will this president stoke among his supporters, including a heavily armed and rogue Department of Homeland Security, if he seems to be losing?
And what about inauguration day? Trump has already threatened not to accept results that don’t please him. My husband feels sure that, if necessary, our military will escort him from the Oval Office and provide a hypothetical President Biden with the nuclear football. This I question, thanks to such acts as Trump’s recent appointment of retired Brigadier General Anthony Tata, a staunch supporter of his, known for his extreme Islamophobia and racist remarks, to the Department of Defense’s number-two policy post over the bipartisan objections of Congress.
That we even have to imagine a military solution to the usual peaceful transition of power is both absurd and 2020’s version of reality. That’s why what its enemies call “political correctness” -- respect for standards of decorum, kindness, and the peaceful mechanisms of democracy -- is vital. If you don’t like what the other side’s nominees say or do, then vote them down at the ballot box. Organize other voters. Write letters and attend town hall meetings. Support evidence-based journalism. But don’t debase the mechanisms that have, for centuries, allowed us to better our union.
War is an indescribable nightmare. I’ve gotten the barest taste of its horror from my work at the Costs of War Project; from photos of bloodied, pain-ravaged children in our war zones; from testimonies I’ve heard from refugees and survivors grieving over the killing, maiming, or rape of loved ones; and from the stories of veterans haunted by having to shoot other people, even armed children, in cold blood.
We can’t let such violence consume us. I don’t want to be left wondering whether someday my family and others like us could find ourselves hiding in the woods to escape a government that might ask us to do the unthinkable and kill or torture fellow Americans. Military families -- most so much more than mine -- have already suffered for far too long without watching our own country become a new war zone.
Andrea Mazzarino, a TomDispatch regular, co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kao Saelee expected to be released from prison last month after 22 years, but was instead placed in Ice custody. (photo: Kao Saelee/Guardian UK)
He Fought Wildfires While Imprisoned. California Reported Him to Ice for Deportation
Sam Levin, Guardian UK
Levin writes: "After 22 years in prison, Kao Saelee had modest plans for his first days of freedom: swim in a lake and barbecue with his family."
Kao Saelee told the Guardian his sister was waiting outside the prison to pick him up on his release date, but guards transferred him to US immigration
But when his release date came on 6 August and his sister was waiting on the other side of the barbed-wire fence to take him home, California prison guards did not let them reunite. Instead, officers handed the 41-year-old over to a private security contractor who shackled his hands, waist and legs, put him in a van and drove off.
For the first time in his life, Saelee was placed into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody and flown 2,000 miles to an Ice jail in Louisiana. He is now facing deportation to Laos, a country his family fled as refugees when he was two years old.
“I paid my debt to society, and I think I should have a chance to be with my family,” Saelee told the Guardian in a recent call from the Pine Prairie Ice jail. “What is the point of sending somebody back to a country where they don’t have no family? I would be frightened out of my mind.”
In addition to serving his sentence for a robbery case from his adolescence, Saelee also served the state of California while imprisoned: in 2018 and 2019, he worked as an incarcerated firefighter, battling the kinds of blazes that are currently devastating huge swaths of the western US.
Despite this record of service, the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR) opted last month to partner with Ice and ensure federal agents could take custody, leaving him indefinitely incarcerated.
His transfer from state prison to immigration jail was in line with a controversial practice that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has defended. This year, the state has sent hundreds of people to Ice at the end of their prison sentences. Even though the law doesn’t require the transfers, and Newsom positions himself as a leader in the resistance to Donald Trump’s xenophobia, the Democratic governor continues to funnel immigrants into the president’s deportation machine.
During the Covid crisis, it’s a policy that can be deadly.
A Mien refugee in California: ‘I had no one’
Saelee was born in Laos in 1979, the oldest of four. His parents were farmers and his family is of Mien descent, an ethnic minority that sided with the US during the Vietnam war and faced subsequent persecution. After fleeing to a refugee camp in Thailand, his family ended up in California in 1987.
“His story is similar to that of a lot of south-east Asian refugee youth who got resettled in neighborhoods in California that had really high rates of violence, poverty and incarceration,” said Anoop Prasad, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus (ALC), who is representing Saelee.
His family moved around the Central Valley and northern California, struggling to make ends meet. Saelee was often responsible for taking care of his younger siblings and was a “big brother” to nine younger cousins. At school, Saelee said he struggled to fit in with his white classmates and was frequently bullied.
“Life was hard. For a long time, I didn’t have nobody to talk to, to rely on,” Saelee said, recalling that he started using drugs at age 10 “to medicate my mind and get away from all the craziness of life”.
Saelee’s father kicked him out when he turned 18. Struggling with drug addiction and homelessness, he participated in an armed robbery and was arrested in 1998.
“I didn’t know nothing about the law,” he said, recalling his confusion at court hearings and difficulties with public defenders. Eventually he signed a plea deal for second-degree robbery, firearm assault and attempted second-degree murder, agreeing to a 25-year sentence. “I just wanted to get it over with, so I took whatever they gave to me.”
One of the hardest parts of prison for Saelee was how it derailed his family and prevented him from looking out for his sisters, he said: “When I was gone, it hurt a lot of people.” Over the years, his family would visit him once every few months, but when he was moved to a southern California prison, they couldn’t travel to see him.
As he neared the end of his sentence, Saelee was thrilled to get a firefighting opportunity, which he qualified for because of good behavior.
California has for decades deployed thousands of incarcerated people to respond to wildfires, paying $2 to $5 a day for the grueling work, whether clearing brush or saving lives and property.
Saelee was grateful for the pay. Instead of eight-cents an hour in other prison jobs, he made $1 an hour when working on fires. The food was also better. But mostly, he appreciated how rewarding the job was: “It’s hard work, but for me it was worth it to see the look on people’s faces when they know they got people out there trying to help them save their land and their homes.”
He has memories of being consumed in such heavy smoke that he couldn’t see five feet in front of him, and in one close call amid falling embers, a fire burning a hole in a crew member’s helmet, he said.
The environment and long hours also took a toll on him. Before his fire camp placement, Saelee said he had found a support system of people who had helped him stay focused on rehabilitation programs, self-help classes and church. But when he lost those relationships on the wildfire frontlines, he said he ended up relapsing on his drug addiction and was removed from the camp due to a substance rule violation (a common infraction in CDCR).
Still, as he has watched occasional news programs from this year’s devastating fires, he said he longed to be back out and that he hopes he can someday work as a professional firefighter.
How California separates families: ‘I’ve never been this far from home’
There has been increasing civil rights scrutiny of the inmate fire camp program, which some have compared to slave labor. Participants are also largely denied firefighting jobs when they are released, because of their criminal records.
This month, however, California lawmakers passed legislation for the first time that could allow some former fire camp workers to apply for their records to be expunged upon release, which could then allow them to pursue a firefighting career.
It’s a small step meant to acknowledge the impact and sacrifice of these crews by providing a possible path for them to put their training to work after prison – and this time, get paid for it.
The new law does not, however, stop California from sending incarcerated firefighters to Ice – and does not protect them from deportation.
In his inaugural speech in January 2019, Gavin Newsom said he would stand up to Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, fight family separation and ensure California remains a “sanctuary for all”. But despite the state’s high-profile “sanctuary” law, intended to limit local law enforcement collaboration with Ice, CDCR has a close working relationship with federal immigration authorities.
Ice issues “detainers” for people in state custody eligible for deportation, which could include undocumented residents, as well as longtime Californians and refugees with green cards who could be deported due to their criminal record. CDCR complies with Ice requests, meaning the state proactively informs the agency about the release dates for prisoners with detainers – and facilitates the transfers.
While the state has no legal obligation to respond to Ice’s requests, Newsom has said this is standard protocol. When asked about the criticisms of this practice, he recently responded that “it’s been done historically” and was “appropriate”.
State data from January through May of this year suggests that CDCR released more than 500 people to Ice custody, according to the Asian Law Caucus. And the state has not backed away from this practice in the wake of mass Covid outbreaks within CDCR, which have claimed 60 lives so far.
Newsom’s policy risks shipping Covid from state prisons to Ice jails, and in some cases, to other nations, advocates said. Ice has been a key domestic and global spreader of the virus, regularly deporting sick detainees.
When the governor ordered the expedited release of thousands of prisoners due to Covid, at least 78 people were sent from prisons to Ice. In the first three months of the crisis in northern California, state prisons and jails were the number one source of new Ice detentions (94 people, representing 59% of immigration arrests in the region), according to a study by advocacy group Centro Legal de la Raza.
Some prisoners aren’t aware that they are facing transfers until they happen.
Prison staff woke Saelee up at around 4am on his scheduled release date, telling him to get ready. But when a first group of prisoners was sent home, he stayed behind. He eventually reached his sister by phone, and she told him she was outside the prison, but that authorities had informed her “another organization” would be picking him up, he recalled.
In a holding room, he changed out of his prison uniform and was handed to a private security officer with a contractor called G4S, who shackled him. He was then transported to Ice’s Fresno office, where he was kept in a concrete holding cell with no bed for a night. He thought the stay might be temporary, but then two Ice officers escorted him on to a flight to Dallas, Texas – and then a second plane to Pine Prairie.
“When they said Louisiana, that was kind of scary to me,” he said. “I had never been this far from home.”
The governor’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment. An Ice spokesman said the agency lodged a detainer for Saelee earlier this year and that the prison “honored” the request with the transfer. Saelee will remain in custody “pending removal proceedings” before an immigration judge, the spokesman said.
A prison spokesperson said Saelee was “released from CDCR custody … after serving his full sentence”, but declined to comment on his transfer to Ice. Prisons notify other law enforcement agencies whenever a prisoner with a detainer is being released, CDCR said.
‘My family already paid for my mistakes’
Saelee’s deportation case is in limbo. Laos does not recognize citizenship of Mien refugees, which means it’s unlikely Ice could deport him there. For now, Saelee remains jailed in a detention center that has had more than 60 Covid cases, waiting for a hearing. One of his cellmates is another transfer from a different California prison, which was also recently battling a Covid outbreak.
Saelee now communicates with his sister in 10-minute phone calls when he gets access to phone time and is not on lockdown. The worst part of his Ice detention, he said, was knowing the stress it placed on his family: “It’s like my family is doing this time with me. They didn’t do anything wrong. They already paid for my mistakes.”
In addition to swimming and grilling, Saelee said he was most looking forward to seeing his relatives in person. He hasn’t seen some of his cousins in decades and has watched them grow up through photos he received in the mail every few years.
Saelee said he couldn’t imagine returning to a country where he has no memories: “It would be like the first time I’m walking into the prison system – scared and just lost,” he said. “If I do get deported, it’s like getting sentenced again, for life.”
National police agents repress a protester in Bogota, Colombia, Sept. 21, 2020. (photo: Twitter)
Colombia: Strike Over Police Abuses Ends in Brutal Repression
teleSUR
Excerpt: "At least 11 people Monday were injured and 13 others were detained after Colombia's security forces repressed the national strike that took place against police brutality."
The Police's Mobile Anti-Riot Squad injured several young people after throwing a stun bomb.
The protests concentrated in Bogota, where the National Police's Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD) injured several young people after throwing a stun bomb.
Videos posted on social networks showed how the agents also used tear gas to dissipate the peaceful demonstrations.
Arbitrary arrests were made during the demonstrations, which were called in rejection of the systematic massacres and murders of young people, social leaders, and former combatants.
Thousands of people also took to the streets to repudiate President Ivan Duque's neoliberal policies and demand social protection, security, work, health, and education.
The national strike called by labor organizations and student associations spread to Cucuta, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Pereira, Medellín, Cali, and other cities.
For the last 15 days, the country has faced a wave of protests that were unleashed after the young Javier Ordoñez's murder in the hands of two police agents. On Monday, the officers were sent to prison for the crimes of torture and murder.
Migrant and seasonal day laborers gather outside a Chase parking lot to wait for buses that will take them to work on agricultural fields several miles away. (photo: Christine Romo/NB
From the Fields to the Classroom: Inside the Lives of US Agriculture's Youngest Workers
Didi Martinez, Gabe Gutierrez, Christine Romo and Nicole Suarez, NBC News
Excerpt: "It's nearly 4 a.m. in this border town, where a group of day laborers wait under the fluorescent lights of a Chase bank parking lot to board several white school buses."
The Aguilar sisters work in the fields 40 hours a week. They’re also high school students, doing homework when they can. Many nights they go without sleep.
Leslie Aguilar, 15, looks on as her sister, Jimena, 17, boards one of the buses heading to a farm several miles away. This is the first time the sisters are not traveling together and Leslie is concerned.
“I don't know where she is going,” she says. “I don't know who the people are, where they're taking her and all that.”
“I don't like to go like this because we usually go together.”
The Aguilar sisters have been in the parking lot since 10 the night before, going from bus to bus looking for field work, a task that proves challenging this September morning.
Arizona is in between crop seasons, creating a scramble among day laborers for fieldwork. Grown men and experienced workers were picked first that day.
“They know that we come day to day to come look for a job,” she says. “And they don't accept us. They wish they can, but they can't because they have rules they have to follow. Because some they just need boys.”
For the past year, the Aguilar sisters have worked in fields harvesting produce — eight hours a day, five days a week. They are just two of the estimated 400,000 to 500,000 child laborers who harvest the nation’s produce, according to the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs (AFOP). Current regulations under the U.S. Department of Labor allow for children, some younger than 12, to work in agriculture. Many of them are on their own in the U.S. — available statistics suggest that most don’t live with their parents.
The result, experts say, has been a generation of children whose lives revolve around the fields — and who struggle to get an education. The Aguilar sisters work 40 hours a week, but they’re also high school students, squeezing their homework into late-night study sessions and grabbing naps when they can. On many nights they go without sleep at all.
Migrant and seasonal child laborers run the risk of being overlooked by the education system, several educators told NBC News. However, there are also people at the state and federal level working to counter this cycle.
The U.S. Department of Education Office of Migrant Education has several programs aimed at helping migratory child workers and children of migrant workers attend and finish grade school, high school and college. The Migrant Education Program (MEP) provides education assistance for migrant children ages 3 through 21, and the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) provides financial assistance for undergraduates. They were founded to help child laborers like the Aguilars overcome any barriers standing in the way of their education.
“Imagine moving from one state to another not knowing a soul, not knowing where to go to find resources for your child,” said Laura Alvarez, director of MEP for the state of Arizona. “That's where we come in. It's an unsettling thought to think what would happen if our program was not in place.”
In Arizona, where agriculture is a $23 billion industry, an estimated 10,000 students are eligible for the Migrant Education Program, according to DOE data. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Alvarez’s team of educators would travel the fields to interview agricultural workers and identify children who could benefit from the resources provided by the program, even providing hearing aids and glasses when needed — any “tools to help them be successful in school,” said Alvarez.
Another challenge brought on by COVID-19 has been ensuring that migrant children have access to computers and Wi-Fi during a time when some Arizona schools have decided to start off the school year online.
“It is definitely a concern that for migratory children and our students in those communities, that access to internet is a challenge,” said Kathy Hoffman, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction. “Sometimes it's not so much an issue of access to the laptop, but then when the laptop is brought into the home, then there's likely no internet connection. So you can't use it as much for that learning experience.”
At places like PPEP TEC High Schools, a series of charter schools focused on catering to vulnerable populations like homeless and migrant children, computers and personal hotspots have been distributed to households in need of connectivity. In rare circumstances, PPEP TEC has also allowed for students like the Aguilar sisters to study around a busy growing season, sending them paper packets of homework in lieu of daily instruction.
The girls say juggling work and school can be hard, but that they continue to put a priority on their education so that they can become “a big person in life.” For Jimena that means becoming a surgeon and for Leslie, a pediatrician. Both are U.S. citizens, born in the U.S.
The sisters’ current schedule only requires them to attend school on Fridays, but even then, free time is almost nonexistent.
When work is stable, the girls wait in parking lots at 4:30 a.m. to travel to worksites an hour and a half away. The girls pick weeds from melon patches for eight hours and then reboard the buses. They nap or do homework on the ride home. At 4 p.m, finally home from work, they climb into their beds and try to get some sleep.
But by 10 p.m. they’re up again, this time to finish their assigned homework. They study through the night until 3 a.m., when it’s time to head back to the parking lot once again.
“It’s kind of hard, but at the same time, it's good, because that way we're in school,” Jimena Aguilar said. “And then we're in work, and we don't miss a day at work.”
As the eldest of five children, Jimena has more responsibility than most, serving as her siblings’ caretaker. The sisters also financially support their parents who they say were deported to Mexico almost two years ago and recently, lost their jobs due to COVID.
Jimena and Leslie each earn $500 a week. They live with family friends, pay rent, food and utilities every month for themselves and their younger siblings, and then send money to Mexico. They admit this level of responsibility may be forcing them to grow up too fast.
“‘You guys, every time, always have to think about first what's in the house, then worry about what you need,’” Jimena recalls her parents telling them.
The Aguilar sisters’ experiences resemble those of many other young adults who work in American fields and help support parents and other family members south of the border.
Leaning up against a white truck, Erick Delamantes, now a student at Arizona Western College, looks out across a field much like the ones where he used to toil as a high school student. He recalls the long days, which were especially long when he was trying to spend time with his family and keep his job. His family was still in Mexico, but work and school were in Arizona.
"I was alone over here in the U.S.,” he said. “And so I used to wake up at 2 a.m. and [get in line for two hours] just to enter the U.S. to work over here [during] the weekends. And it was very, very cold because like, you work over here during winter break or winter season.”
But with the help of CAMP, Erick no longer works in the fields and is contemplating a career in education.
His classmate Luis Vargas, another CAMP recipient, also started working the fields as a child and continues to work in agriculture to make sure his parents are taken care of.
“It's a lot of responsibility because they can't come inside the United States,” he said. “They have a Mexican salary and I have to work here to earn some money and give them to sustain my other brothers and the house, basically.”
Data on the number of youth farm workers living without their parents is scarce, says Kendra Moesle of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and Children in the Fields Campaign. However, data from the DOL’s National Agricultural Workers Survey has found that from 2004-2009 just 10 percent of the youth farm workers interviewed lived with their parents.
AFOP’s estimates on the number of children working in agriculture does not include children whose parents own the farm, a situation that Moesle says differs from today’s young migrant and seasonal workers.
“There are very few of the farm workers that you might picture from the Dust Bowl era of the poor white families,” said Moesle, who grew up on a family farm. “There's some African American, some Caribbean, but they almost all have some kind of foreign tie. If they're not born abroad then their parents were, is almost always the pattern.”
While having parents across the border can serve as an incentive to work hard in school and in the fields, the Aguilar sisters say being apart from their parents also takes an emotional toll.
“I miss that we're always together, and we always wake up in the morning together, and we always receive a hug,” said Jimena Aguilar.
But there is some relief from this feeling on Sundays when the girls cross the border to San Luis Rio Colorado in Sonora, Mexico to see their mom and dad. Yuma County, where the girls live, is located within 25 miles of two border crossings making the trip to Mexico easier.
The day NBC News met up with the sisters, Jimena and Leslie made their way across the border carrying only the essentials...water, wallet and of course, their homework.
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