12 December 20
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It's Live on the HomePage Now: Benjamin Wallace-Wells | The Distinct Political Paths of Barack |
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker
Wallace-Wells writes: "Barack Obama is on a book tour, a setting so mundane that it can be a little jarring to encounter him there, amiably pursuing sales."
Aiming for a young audience, the former President appeared this week on the Snapchat show “Good Luck America,” the host of which, Peter Hamby, asked whether the Democratic Party still had a “pro-capitalist” case to offer young voters. “Socialism is cool. Bernie, A.O.C., they’re cool. The Democratic Party isn’t really cool,” Hamby said.
None of this confident allocation of cool surprised Obama, who nodded—and who, incidentally, still looked cool himself, wearing a dark suit and tieless blue-striped shirt, his hair now on the white side of gray. He said he thought that the Democrats should have given Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a much more prominent role at the national convention this past summer. But, if he wanted Ocasio-Cortez to talk more, he didn’t think that the Party should talk more like her. “Socialism is still a loaded term for a lot of folks,” Obama told Hamby. When it came to the call to defund the police, “I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘defund the police,’ but you know you’ve lost a big audience the minute you say it.” Obama added, “The key is deciding do you want to actually get something done? Or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?”
Right now, the most important arguments within the Democratic Party are taking place mostly out of public view, in the maneuverings to place staffers in the Joe Biden Administration—and, in so doing, to shape its ambitions. But, in the month since the election, a parallel argument has taken place in public between the Party’s most progressive elected officials and its moderates, who believe that the progressives’ embrace of activist slogans—particularly the call to defund the police—cost the Democrats seats in 2020 and might eventually cost them their House majority. The progressive faction is poor in numbers but rich in ideas and public profile, and the 2020 election neither strengthened their position within the Party nor wiped them out. The dispute over whether the progressives are too radical in their talk has settled into a stalemate, especially because there is no consensus on what “defund the police” means; Obama’s entry into the debate, characteristically caveated, didn’t break the impasse. But Obama and Ocasio-Cortez are the two politicians who in this century have managed to embody the qualities essential to the Democratic Party: youth and idealism, hope and change, the promise of a future different than the past. In elevating Ocasio-Cortez and gently criticizing her ideas, Obama opened up a different conversation—not just about the left and the center but about how a star politician ought to be, between one generational talent and another.
During the tumultuous past half decade—as conservatives contemplated authoritarianism, as Democrats reconsidered socialism, as liberalism generally faltered—Obama spent much of his time writing a book. Unlike his previous two books, his new memoir, “A Promised Land,” is mostly about the mature Obama (he is inaugurated as President a third of the way in) and about the evolution of the character who appeared on Peter Hamby’s Snapchat show, with his caution and good humor. The book’s first sections are the most interesting in terms of Obama’s account of his own character: a central theme is the tension that the future President felt, when he was around thirty, between “wanting to be in politics and not of it.” On an early date with Michelle, which takes place at an organizing workshop Obama is leading, she tells him that he is talking about a place between “the world as it is and the world as it should be.”
In Obama’s account, he had been snapped out of a self-serious post-undergraduate mode—lost in the abstraction of “the world as it should be”—by his encounters with working-class people on the South Side of Chicago, during his pre-law-school stint as an organizer. “I came to love the men and women I worked with: the single mom living on a ravaged block who somehow got all four children through college; the Irish priest who threw open the church doors every evening so that kids had an option other than gangs; the laid-off steelworker who went back to school to become a social worker,” he writes. “Their stories of hardship and their modest victories confirmed for me again and again the basic decency of people.” Chicago brings him out of his own head: “In other words, I grew up, and I got my sense of humor back.” Reading this passage, I doubted it a bit. Those characters are flat. They read as grist for stump speeches. They are rendered more than they are seen.
The people he does obviously love in this book, whom he takes the time to see in full, are the political professionals who work mostly for him. When he is feeling grouchy on the Presidential campaign trail in 2008, his spirits are restored by his body man, Reggie Love, who says that he’s “having the time of my life.” Obama admires his gruff, heavyset, flannel-clad Iowa field director, Paul Tewes, who has “the heart of the ten year old boy who cared enough, who believed enough, to cry over an election.” A couple of days before Osama bin Laden’s killing, he observes his devoted national-security adviser, Tom Donilon (a man who just returned to BlackRock rather than take a job as Biden’s C.I.A. director). Donilon, Obama writes, had “been trying to exercise more and lay off the caffeine but was apparently losing the battle. I’d come to marvel at Tom’s capacity for hard work, the myriad details he kept track of, the volume of memos and cables and data he had to consume, the number of snafus he fixed and the interagency tussles he resolved, all so that I could have both the information and the mental space I needed in order to my job.” The White House becomes an image of the country he’d like to see. Most people are not out for themselves. Everyone works so hard.
He loves them, and they love him back. When Obama decided to run for President, he had been in Washington for two years, almost exactly as long as Ocasio-Cortez has been there now. Nonetheless, in Obama’s account, he had the tacit support of many of the Party’s elders. He spoke to Harry Reid, who told him a story about a young boxer and said he should go for it: “You get people motivated, especially young people, minorities, even middle-of-the-road people. That’s different.” Obama also paid a visit to Ted Kennedy. (He recalls the avuncular senator rising “gingerly” from his seat.) Kennedy told Obama that he couldn’t endorse him early—“too many friends”—but, recalling his brothers, encouraged the younger senator to run nevertheless: “The power to inspire is rare. Moments like this are rare.” Once in office, whenever Obama feels stuck, he notices the ambition, dedication, and hope in the people around him, and becomes determined again. In Obama’s telling, external pressures—the Republicans, the press—always nudge him toward loneliness. The salve—in many ways, the theme of his story—is comradeship.
Who are Ocasio-Cortez’s comrades? If any leading senators are taking her aside to tell her that she represents the future of the Party, no one’s given any public hint of it. Among Democrats, she often seems nearly alone. The Squad, composed of Ocasio-Cortez and Representatives Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, project a sense of solidarity, but there are still just four of them. Trace Ocasio-Cortez’s public statements since her election and she makes her distance from the mainstream Democratic Party plain. When David Remnick asked Ocasio-Cortez, in 2019, whether she had a relationship with Nancy Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez replied, “Not particularly.” When New York magazine’s David Freedlander asked her earlier this year what she made of Joe Biden, Ocasio-Cortez said, “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party.” There is a history of slights and incursions on both sides. In November, 2018, just after Ocasio-Cortez won, she participated in a sit-in of Pelosi’s office by the young climate activists of the Sunrise Movement; a month later, Politico reported that she had recruited a challenger to Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the fifth-ranking Democrat in the House. As for Pelosi, at that time, she made a habit of dismissing the dreams of young progressives, referring to “their public whatever,” “the green dream or whatever they call it.” Last month, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times’ Astead Herndon that, during the first six months of her term, she was unsure whether she would even run for reëlection. “It’s the stress. It’s the violence,” she said. “I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere—they’re probably the same.”
The dispute between the moderates and progressives went on a long hiatus during the Presidential campaign, but the weeks since the election have made clear that it isn’t a matter of the past. On a House Democratic Caucus call in November, Representative Abigail Spanberger, a former C.I.A. case officer who was narrowly reëlected in a suburban Virginia district that voted for Trump in 2016, asked her colleagues to watch reels of attack ads run against moderate Democrats, to see the political consequences of allying with activists. In audio that leaked to the Washington Post, Spanberger said, “The No. 1 concern and thing that people brought to me in my district that I barely re-won was defunding the police. And I’ve heard from colleagues who have said, ‘Oh, it’s the language of the street—we should respect that.’ We’re in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we’re talking about.” Ocasio-Cortez’s response was that the Democrats’ failures were not ideological but tactical; she blamed a lack of digital-ad spending and the Party’s abandonment of door-knocking during the coronavirus pandemic. But the details of the argument appeared less important than how eager both sides seemed to be to engage in it again. A few days later, four progressive groups—New Deal Strategies, the Sunrise Movement, the Justice Democrats, and Data for Progress—produced a memo supporting Ocasio-Cortez’s contentions. These have been Ocasio-Cortez’s comrades: not the Democrats but the activists.
A paradox of Ocasio-Cortez’s position is that her skills are not activist skills but mainstream ones. She delivers highly polished speeches. She finds connections between niche political news and the lives of working people. She can conjure a news cycle out of thin air—and then win it. An early risk in Ocasio-Cortez’s Washington career was that she would be seen strictly as an ingénue, but she turned her committee hearings into platforms to showcase her careful study of policy and incisive questioning. It isn’t news to her allies that her base is not big enough, and in the past two years they have taken steps to build it—to broaden her appeal without moderating her. In July, after Representative Ted Yoho, a Republican of Florida, called her a “fucking bitch” in earshot of reporters, Ocasio-Cortez delivered a remarkable speech expressing frustration on behalf of all women, because “all of us have had to deal with this in some form, some way, some shape, at some point in our lives.” Not long after, Ocasio-Cortez sat for a long cover interview with Vanity Fair, which focussed on her upbringing, her personal life, and the daily indignities that a working person must endure.
The line of scrimmage between progressives and the established Democratic Party has not moved much since Bernie Sanders’s first Presidential campaign, five years ago. For all the talk of generational revolution, the Party is run by more or less exactly the same people. What has changed is that the Democratic establishment has embraced policy changes that it would have shunned a decade ago. Having won the primary as the most moderate figure onstage, Biden adopted a much more progressive agenda in the general election. Biden’s platform proposes raising three trillion dollars in revenue during the next ten years, almost entirely by taxing the wealthy and corporations. He plans to spend two trillion dollars on climate transformation during his first term, forty per cent of it targeted to help disadvantaged communities. Like nearly all Democrats, Biden now supports a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage, a key part of Sanders’s platform in 2016, and like much of the Party he supports a public option for health insurance. There isn’t such an obvious place for Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic effort right now; it is trying to persuade voters that an expansive agenda is actually pragmatic and common sense, while she is trying to emphasize what is revolutionary.
What were Obama’s and Spanberger’s arguments with Ocasio-Cortez about, anyway? Mostly, language. Neither has emphasized policy differences with the progressives; they were talking about talk. In their interview, Obama told Hamby that Ocasio-Cortez and Biden shared a desire for broad action on climate change, and implied that they were divided only by how to talk about it: “If you want to move people, they are moved by stories that connect with their own lives. They’re not moved by ideology.” This tendency to police language is part of what has always grated on the left about Obama. But it is also a sign of a winning hand. The paradox of Ocasio-Cortez’s position right now is that she isn’t isolated politically because she is losing. She is isolated politically because, on more substantive matters than it is in anyone’s interest to admit, she has already won.
Wes Wheeler, president of UPS's global Healthcare and Life Sciences unit, holds an example of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine vial during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., Dec. 10, 2020. (photo: Samuel Corum/NYT/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Rising Death Toll Tempers US Enthusiasm Over Vaccine
Lobbyists Mobilize for Priority Access to Coronavirus Vaccine
Lee Fang, The Intercept
Fang writes: "Journalists, pesticide manufacturers, and factory farms jostle to be counted as 'essential' to receive a vaccine early."
ndustry lobbyists, representing everyone from pesticide manufacturers to factory farms and aquarium and zoo operators, are pushing regulators to allow their workers to jump the line for the coronavirus vaccine.
A coronavirus vaccine, one of which could be cleared for use as early as today, is set to be distributed first to those in health care facilities, essential workers, and individuals most vulnerable to the virus. This has set off an influence blitz as various industry groups petition the government for inclusion on the list of professions most crucial to keeping the country running.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, through a panel known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has established a framework for individuals to receive the first available doses of approved Covid-19 vaccines. The framework is nonbinding but expected to shape state agencies and other institutions that will govern distribution of the vaccines.
The first to receive the vaccine, through a process the ACIP has called Phase 1a, will likely be health care personnel and residents of long-term care facilities, who have been hit especially hard by the virus. The second deployment, Phase 1b, will include essential workers. The following group, Phase 1c, includes adults with high-risk medical conditions and senior citizens over the age of 65.
The category of essential work has been the focus of furious lobbying this year as various businesses and professional groups have pressed to be certified as essential in order to stay open. Each state has its own guidelines for who is considered essential, but the CDC provides broad guidance. Many industry groups have asked the CDC to rely on a memo from the Department of Homeland Security on critical infrastructure workers, a document published in August, to determine whether a worker is deemed essential for vaccination — a list that was itself the focus of intense lobbying.
Earlier this year, dozens of industry associations lobbied the Department of Homeland Security to be on the critical infrastructure list, including gun manufacturers, coal mines, stock exchanges, and the Fragrance Creators Association, the trade group for the makers of perfumes, colognes, and scented candles. The DHS memo, notably, includes the production of “fragrances” as essential work.
The Department of Homeland Security claimed the categories were determined to be “so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.”
The vaccine’s rollout has only intensified the campaign to shape the list of what type of workers are counted as critical to the economy. Now truck drivers, bus drivers, Uber drivers, the restaurant industry, grocery stores, school nurses, and other associations have similarly petitioned the CDC, arguing that their members should count as essential workers. Earlier this week, MarketWatch reported that the American Bankers Association asked that bank tellers, given their close contact with the public, should be given priority for receiving the vaccine.
The Association of Zoos and Aquariums, in a letter sent to the CDC last week, voiced “strong support for inclusion of animal care workers in your phase 1(b) priority recommendation for essential workers.” Dan Ashe, the president of the group, noted that the Georgia Aquarium alone cares for 100,000 animals.
The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a lobby group for pharmaceutical firms such as Mallinckrodt and Bayer, argued in its petition to the CDC that drug manufacturers and lab researchers “cannot work from home” and should be included as essential workers. Pharmaceutical workers, BIO noted, are crucial for innovation “within the human health, food and agriculture, and industrial and environmental sectors.” Though many BIO member corporations include vaccine and immunotherapy developers, the group represents firms that sell opioid painkillers and other medical treatments unrelated to the present crisis.
CropLife America, which lobbies for pesticide manufacturers, wrote to the CDC to urge regulators to consider those who “who develop and package the seed, chemicals and fertilizers that farmers need for their crop” should be counted as workers critical for the nation’s food supply.
Journalists have also lobbied for prioritization. The National Press Photographers Association asked that journalists who have direct contact with the public be expressly included as essential workers. “While others have the option to walk away from large crowds, or to avoid members of the public that don’t follow CDC health guidelines, visual journalist [sic] repeatedly put their own safety at risk to document what is occurring and inform their communities, large and small,” the NPPA argued in its letter.
Other industries that have faced criticism for failing to protect the health and well-being of its workers are now petitioning the CDC for priority for the vaccine. Tyson Foods and Smithfield, two of the largest slaughterhouse companies in the country, are facing numerous lawsuits over allegations that the companies failed to provide protective equipment, coerced sick workers to come into work, and ignored early warning signs that the disease was rapidly spreading within its plants.
The North American Meat Institute, a lobby group for Tyson and Smithfield, ghostwrote the executive order signed by President Donald Trump that compelled slaughterhouse employees to continue working through the first weeks of the pandemic, overriding health and safety concerns.
Now, in a letter last week to the CDC, the same group is petitioning regulators to prioritize “meat and poultry workers.” The NAMI letter casts vaccine priority not only as crucial for maintaining the nation’s food supply but as an altruistic endeavor, vital for mitigating “health inequalities given much of the workforce is comprised of minorities, immigrants, or those with lower socioeconomic status.”
Recent financial disclosures show another potential motive. Tyson Foods has increased revenues by 5.3 percent in the last quarter, in a year that the company has pushed exports of meat products, particularly to markets in China. During the company’s earnings report last month, an analyst from JPMorgan Chase raised the issue that the main risk to future profits would be “labor shortages in the next couple of months, not just because of actual illness, but also because of workers maybe afraid of getting a little sick.”
Migrant children at the border. (photo: Loren Elliott/Reuters)
Trump Issues Sweeping New Curbs on Asylum Eligibility
Rebecca Rainey, POLITICO
Rainey writes: "The Trump administration is moving to broadly raise the standards for individuals to receive asylum status in the U.S., a step that critics are calling the biggest crackdown of this presidency on those seeking a haven in this country."
Individuals who claim that they will face persecution based on gender or gang violence, among other grounds, would also generally not qualify for asylum under the new rules.
A new, 419-page rule by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice would create additional bars to asylum eligibility and limit the circumstances in which individuals can qualify for protection, changes that the administration says "are likely to result in fewer asylum grants annually."
"This is the most sweeping attack on asylum that we have seen under the Trump administration," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group. "Under this rule, asylum would be taken out of reach for a large percentage of people who in the past would have been able to qualify."
Immigration judges would be able to more easily claim that applications are "frivolous" under the new rules, a determination that bars individuals from any form of immigration relief, as well as deny asylum requests without a hearing if they believe they lack certain evidence.
Currently, individuals who claim they have a "credible fear of persecution or torture" if they return to their home country are eligible for asylum status. Asylum grants individuals deportation protections and work authorization. After one year, asylees are eligible to apply for permanent lawful status.
But the Trump administration's new rules would raise the standard for "persecution" that an asylum-seeker must prove they will suffer if returned to their home country to "a severe level of harm."
The administration rule clarifies that "persecution" does not include: "every instance of harm" caused by criminal or military unrest in a country; any treatment that the U.S. considers "unfair, offensive, unjust, or even unlawful or unconstitutional;" harassment; or "threats with no actions taken to carry out the threats."
Individuals who claim that they will face persecution based on gender or gang violence, among other grounds, would also generally not qualify for asylum under the new rules.
The regulatory changes outline several factors that immigration officials must consider in the asylum process that would disqualify individuals from protection. These include whether migrants crossed into the U.S. illegally, used fraudulent documents, failed to pay their taxes, or passed through other countries without seeking protective status there first.
The administration has argued that many people claim that they fear persecution in their home country when turned away at the border, so they can enter the U.S. even if ultimately they won’t be granted asylum.
The changes "will enable the Departments to more effectively separate baseless claims from meritorious ones" and "better ensure groundless claims do not delay or divert resources from deserving claims," DHS said.
What's next: The rule will take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register on Friday.
NYPD officers arrest a protestor during a 'Black Lives Matter' demonstration on May 28, in New York City. (photo: Johannes Eisele/Getty)
What It Looks Like When the New York City Police Commissioner Has "Unchecked Power" Over Officer Discipline
Mollie Simon, Lena V. Groeger, Eric Umansky and Adriana Gallardo, ProPublica
Excerpt: "New York City's Civilian Complaint Review Board is an independent agency charged with investigating complaints of abuse by police officers."
While the board can recommend penalties and, in some cases, can present evidence directly to a New York Police Department hearing officer, the police commissioner has the final say. By law, the commissioner has the power to downgrade or even dismiss discipline, even in the most serious cases handled by the CCRB.
Those decisions have long been shielded from scrutiny by state law.
Through records made public this summer, ProPublica has pieced together details of dozens of cases in which the police commissioner stepped in after the CCRB concluded that officers had wrongly punched, kicked, choked, pepper-sprayed, tasered, searched or otherwise abused civilians. See the CCRB’s summaries of over 80 of these cases, or keep scrolling for a more detailed look at some of the more notable ones.
Between 2014 and 2018, the CCRB substantiated allegations in about 2,400 cases out of the approximately 8,000 it was able to fully investigate, meaning the board concluded that misconduct occurred.
In about 600 of those cases, the CCRB took the most serious level of disciplinary action available: recommending "charges.” After recommending charges, if a plea cannot be negotiated, the CCRB usually prosecutes its case in front of an NYPD lawyer who serves as a hearing officer (and is often called a department “judge”).
But in at least 260 of those 600 most serious cases, the police commissioner disagreed with the CCRB on the final discipline. This included downgrading or dismissing penalties, overturning plea agreements by officers and overruling NYPD judges who review cases. Let’s take a look at some of these cases.
In June 2014, narcotics Detective Thomas Ramirez and his partner stopped a car in Queens for a traffic infraction. Ramirez slammed the driver against the hood of the police car. When the driver’s 18-year-old sister touched the officer on the shoulder and asked why he was hurting her brother, Ramirez punched her twice in the face, according to the CCRB. Ramirez’s attorney said the sister jumped on the detective’s back; she disputed this. After she fell to the ground, Ramirez pepper-sprayed her. She was found guilty of obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest and ordered to do community service.
Then-Commissioner James O’Neill took control of the case before trial and imposed no discipline on Ramirez. He said allowing the CCRB to prosecute the case would be “detrimental” to the disciplinary process — a vague rationale that the NYPD often cites. Ramirez’s attorney called it a “perfect case” for the commissioner to assert his authority because the detective had already been cleared by the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau.
Between 2014 and 2018, nearly 40 of the most serious cases handled by the CCRB ended up like the Ramirez case: The commissioner imposed no discipline at all.
In August 2015, Sgt. Mark Sinatra stopped a couple leaving a methadone clinic in Queens. Sinatra forced them out of their car, pushed the man, damaged the car’s interior and didn’t provide his current badge number, according to the CCRB. Six months later, Sinatra chased down a man who he believed was smoking marijuana and punched him in the face. The cases were prosecuted together and Sinatra pleaded guilty to using unnecessary force and abusing his authority. He agreed to give up 18 vacation days.
Commissioner O’Neill rejected the plea deal and reduced the discipline to 10 lost vacation days, noting that Sinatra was a “highly-rated officer.” Sinatra had eight previous CCRB complaints against him, one of which had been substantiated. Neither Sinatra nor his union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, responded to requests for comment on the case.
Between 2014 and 2018, just over 60 of the most serious cases brought by the CCRB ended up like the Sinatra case: Even after the officer pleaded guilty and agreed to specific discipline, the commissioner imposed something different, almost always lowering the punishment.
In October 2016, NYPD Officer Jose Moreno pulled his gun on an 11-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl who were playing basketball in a Harlem park, according to the CCRB. Moreno was responding to a 911 call about a gun and had been given a description of two Black men in hoodies.
O’Neill dismissed the CCRB’s charges and imposed “formalized training.” NYPD officials said that Moreno’s pointing the gun did not constitute physical force. The CCRB registered its frustration with the final outcome, saying the incident should have merited “the strictest form of punishment.” Neither Moreno nor his union, the Police Benevolent Association, responded to requests for comment on the case.
Between 2014 and 2018, the remaining 160 cases ended up like Moreno’s: The commissioner departed from the CCRB and imposed his own discipline — often training or a reprimand.
Like most police departments across the country, the NYPD historically has handled officer discipline internally. But since the city established the CCRB nearly 70 years ago, police reform advocates have worked to expand external oversight. In 1993, under Mayor David Dinkins, the CCRB was made independent of the Police Department and given subpoena powers. In 2012, the CCRB secured what seemed like another victory: the ability to prosecute the most serious cases in front of the NYPD’s hearing officers. Before that change, the agency sent such cases to NYPD prosecutors, who would present the evidence to an NYPD hearing officer.
The 2012 agreement between the CCRB and NYPD allows CCRB lawyers to argue for penalties in cases where the civilian board determines misconduct has occurred and “charges” are warranted. The agreement did not — and could not — change a key step though, codified in state law and the city’s charter: The police commissioner maintains final say over discipline.
On the surface, the NYPD process for cases that go to a disciplinary trial mirrors the criminal justice system. There is the hearing officer, who functions as a judge; a court reporter; and prosecutors, including some who have worked in district attorneys’ offices. Hearings are conducted in a tribunal at NYPD headquarters with a witness stand and other trappings of a courtroom. But after the NYPD judge issues a decision or an officer agrees to a plea, the case lands on the commissioner’s desk. The commissioner meets with an internal discipline committee and reviews the officer’s performance and any past discipline and examines how similar misconduct cases have been handled.
When the commissioner decides to disregard the recommendations of the CCRB or the department's own trial judges, no substantive explanation is required to the public or even to the complainant.
After ProPublica asked about the CCRB’s disciplinary recommendations, the NYPD put out a news release saying the current commissioner, Dermot Shea, has “meted out tough discipline when needed yet delivered tempered justice as the facts warrant.” The department's “longstanding, paramilitary style justice system” affords “wide latitude for rapid accountability and for real time operational maneuverability in times of public need,” the release said.
But the current system of discipline hasn’t deterred some officers from racking up multiple substantiated complaints.
In August 2015, Sgt. John Mejia and two narcotics detectives stopped a man in Harlem who they believed had drugs, although they later told the CCRB his only suspicious activity was walking to and from a phone booth, according to the board’s summary of the case. The man said he unintentionally spit on the officers while speaking to them. Mejia handcuffed him so tightly it fractured his wrist.
Mejia agreed to give up 20 vacation days in a plea deal. O’Neill reduced the plea to 10 days, saying the original discipline was excessive.
In April 2017, just over a year after the commissioner downgraded Mejia’s discipline, the CCRB again found Mejia abused his authority, this time for refusing to get medical attention for a 43-year-old man. For this, he received what is known as “command discipline,” which means a supervisor decides the penalty, ranging from “instructions” on proper procedures to a loss of 10 vacation days. Neither Mejia nor his union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, responded to requests for comment on the incidents.
The Commissioner's Unilateral Control Over Cases
In 2018, O’Neill appointed an outside panel to review the NYPD’s disciplinary system following a series of stories in the Daily News. The panel’s report criticized the sparse explanations provided by the commissioner when changing discipline and described the commissioner’s decisions as an “unchecked power.”
“The Commissioner’s unilateral ability, without explanation, to overturn a trial judge’s detailed findings can create the perception that the fact-intensive, adversarial trial process is a mere formalism devoid of real consequence,” the panel wrote.
The NYPD said it has “substantially implemented” recommendations made by the panel, including adding more detail to decision memos written when the commissioner disagrees with the CCRB on discipline. While the CCRB’s chair, Fred Davie, told ProPublica the memos have improved, they “don’t yet meet the standard” set by the panel.
In 2018, the CCRB analyzed its own role in this process and found its recommendations were inconsistent, with what it called “varied disciplinary recommendations for similar allegations."
But even after the CCRB created a written framework for assessing cases, the CCRB’s process can lead to “inconsistency,” said NYPD Assistant Chief Matthew Pontillo, who oversees disciplinary procedures. Rotating three-person panels of the civilian board vote on whether cases merit charges.
Davie, who took over as CCRB chair in 2018, said there is “always room for improvement” in the CCRB’s process but is satisfied with the changes the board has made. He remains concerned though about the persistent disagreements with the commissioner on final discipline for the most serious cases.
“For the department to flip verdicts and undo pleas goes to the heart of undermining the public’s confidence in the process,” Davie said in an interview this week. “Thoughtful consideration is given to penalties that are recommended at the end of the disciplinary process, and we believe that the department should honor that, should give deference to that.”
Davie said he has had “intentional, directed and focused” conversations with the NYPD about CCRB recommendations in disciplinary cases. He said the NYPD could improve public confidence immediately by honoring those recommendations.
“All of these things they could change today if they wanted to,” Davie said.
According to CCRB data, from 2013 to the present, the commissioner has outright reversed the guilty finding of an NYPD judge in 13 cases the agency prosecuted — including three under Shea, who succeeded O’Neill in December 2019.
In addition to those three cases — which all stemmed from one incident — Shea has reduced five pleas and taken seven cases back from the CCRB.
While the NYPD and CCRB agree on when to hand out discipline in the vast majority of lower-level misconduct cases, when the CCRB tries to push for more severe consequences for serious incidents, the agency’s recommendations are less likely to be followed.
In one 2016 case, the CCRB recommended termination for an officer. Instead, he lost 10 vacation days. Similarly, two cases from 2014 and 2015 where CCRB called for a termination ended with five and four days of lost vacation time respectively.
State Sen. Zellnor Myrie, who has proposed legislation to remove some Police Department control over discipline, said he doesn’t expect the CCRB and NYPD to agree all the time since they play different roles. But Myrie said he finds it alarming how often the two “not only arrive at a different conclusion” but that the NYPD decides “a lesser consequence is necessary.”
Myrie, whose district covers part of Brooklyn, said this “erodes trust in the process” for civilians. Right now, the only check on the police commissioner’s power over discipline is the mayor.
Fight Over Former Law Still Impeding Transparency
While the NYPD declined to comment on specific incidents, a spokesperson said cases often have “important circumstantial distinctions.” But that circumstantial information is not available for the public to assess.
Under New York State’s 50-a statute, the particulars of what commissioners decided, most notably the officer’s name and disciplinary history, were secret. The law was repealed this summer, but the city’s police unions are fighting in court to prevent further release of records.
This opacity can be frustrating not only for victims but for some officers, said Rae Koshetz, who was the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for trials from 1988 to 2002.
Now a lawyer in private practice, Koshetz has represented officers in NYPD trials and said the lack of transparency undermines officers’ due process rights. If officers don’t know how the department has decided similar cases, they can’t tell if they are being treated fairly. “Sunlight is the best treatment for all of this,” Koshetz said.
In a handful of cases where the commissioner has disagreed with his trial judges, the final outcome has been an increased penalty: In eight cases between 2014 and 2018, the commissioner imposed final discipline higher than what his trial judge recommended. More frequently though, the consequences are lowered.
The NYPD says that, pending the outcome of the 50-a litigation, it intends to make public disciplinary data of active-duty officers, including trial outcomes and commissioner decisions.
ProPublica has worked to piece that information together independently.
Some Officers Have a History of Complaints
Pontillo said that having a substantiated civilian complaint, regardless of final discipline, is “very impactful” for officers. But it doesn’t always mean they avoid similar behavior. By matching officer names to specific cases, we found at least 19 officers who had new, substantiated civilian complaints against them even after being charged by the CCRB.
At least 20 officers whose recommended discipline was downgraded by the commissioner have been the subject of 10 or more complaints throughout their time with the NYPD.
Even when the commissioner imposes more substantive penalties, like lost vacation days, civilian complainants can be left feeling frustrated with the process.
On Aug. 15, 2014, Jarreth Joseph was sleeping in his Brooklyn apartment when Lt. Mauvin J. Bute and two other officers yelled "Police" and pushed open the door. Bute searched Joseph’s home and then pressured him to sign papers authorizing the search after the fact. When Joseph refused, the officers arrested him. Criminal charges against Joseph, then 31, were dismissed. The CCRB did not describe the officers’ reasoning for searching the home.
Bute pleaded guilty and agreed to forfeit eight vacation days for the misconduct, but the commissioner, citing “the interest of justice,” reduced the penalty to five days of lost vacation. Richard J. Washington, who represented Joseph in a civil suit over the incident, called the reduction in discipline “shameful.”
“These issues will never be remedied if we continue to allow the police to police themselves,” said Washington. Without the ability to enact discipline, he said, “the CCRB does not have the authority to bring justice to those who have been aggrieved by the police.”
The city settled Joseph’s lawsuit for $15,000 plus an additional $3,000 paid directly by Bute, with neither the city nor Bute admitting fault. A year after entering Joseph’s home, the CCRB found that Bute had made an abusive stop of a 37-year-old Black man.
Cities Try Out Alternatives to Absolute Power
Some other big cities impose a check on disciplinary decisions involving police. In Chicago, if the police superintendent proposes lighter discipline than the civilian oversight board, a member of the board gets the final say on whose recommendation to accept. In cases of suspension or termination, though, officers in Chicago can sometimes appeal the outcome through arbitration — a process that has been blamed for keeping problematic officers on the job.
In Seattle, the chief of police is required to send a letter to the mayor and City Council if departing from a disciplinary recommendation made by the city’s Office of Police Accountability. The explanations, which do not name officers, are posted online.
New York City is moving toward changes. Over the summer, the City Council passed a law — originally introduced in 2018 — requiring the NYPD to outline presumptive penalties for certain types of misconduct as well as factors that could justify lesser or greater discipline. The NYPD accepted public comment on its draft of this planned “matrix,” which it intends to publish in January. Myrie, the state senator, hopes the new guidelines provide clarity on the disciplinary process, but he is waiting to see whether it changes the process significantly given that the commissioner maintains final discretion.
Mina Malik, the CCRB’s executive director from 2015 to 2016, said the diverging decisions between the CCRB and the NYPD’s commissioner can diminish the value of having an independent agency investigating misconduct.
“It sends a message to the public that police accountability isn't being taken seriously, police misconduct isn't being taken seriously, and it can also send a message to the masses in law enforcement that ‘We can do whatever we want to do, and we won’t be held accountable,’” Malik said.
Help Us Hold the NYPD Accountable
Tell us about your experience with the NYPD. Have you ever filed a complaint? Was the officer involved in your complaint disciplined? Have you ever been harassed and wanted to file a complaint but didn’t? Are you a police officer who’s tried to call out misconduct? We want to hear from you.
About the Data
New York City’s CCRB publishes quarterly reports covering the outcomes of disciplinary cases it has prosecuted — or intended to prosecute. Since 2014, the agency has published 13 such reports, describing 84 of the approximately 600 cases in which it has recommended charges.
Those descriptions do not include officers’ names. Over the summer, New York repealed the law, known as 50-a, which shielded officers’ identities. After the repeal, some records of civilian complaints against NYPD officers were briefly made public, but police unions are fighting the release of such information and a federal court has banned the further release of information until the case is resolved. During the brief period when records were made available, ProPublica was able to get the names associated with the quarterly reports. You can now view the summaries of over 80 of these cases, and the officers involved in them, through ProPublica’s NYPD Files database.
To gather additional information on officers’ histories of misconduct and the locations of incidents, ProPublica cross-checked each case through our NYPD Files database as well as the New York Civil Liberties Union’s complaint database, both of which were created when CCRB disciplinary complaints were briefly available. For every officer involved in these incidents, we tracked whether they had any prior complaints that were fully investigated and substantiated or any such complaints after the prosecuted case described by the CCRB. We also researched each incident to find any associated civil lawsuits and news reports, and we examined how long it took to close each case.
In order to contextualize the cases covered in the CCRB’s quarterly reports, we requested data from the agency on case outcomes for all complaints it has prosecuted, including those not yet covered in the reports. ProPublica also utilized data from the CCRB’s 2018 annual report, which covers the frequency of disagreements between commissioner decisions and the CCRB on discipline since 2014. To better understand the trial process, we reviewed copies of NYPD judges’ decisions and a set of memos showing the deliberations over a sample case before the commissioner made his decision.
In this photo provided by Last Prisoner Project, Richard DeLisi walks out of prison, Dec. 8, 2020. (photo: AP)
America's Longest-Serving Marijuana Prisoner Freed After 31 Years
CBS News
Excerpt: "While serving a 90-year prison sentence for selling marijuana, Richard DeLisi's wife died, as did his 23-year-old son and both his parents. His adult daughter was in a horrific car accident and suffered a paralyzing stroke as a result. He never met two granddaughters - a lifetime of missed memories."
Yet, 71-year-old DeLisi walked out of a Florida prison Tuesday morning grateful and unresentful as he hugged his tearful family. After serving 31 years, he said he's just eager to restore the lost time. DeLisi was believed to be the longest-serving nonviolent cannabis prisoner, according to the The Last Prisoner Project which championed his release.
DeLisi also finally met his 11-year-old and 1-year-old granddaughters for the first time this week.
"I'm a blessed human being, a survivor," DeLisi said in a phone interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday while he was in the parking lot of his favorite hamburger joint as he watched his granddaughters laugh and bounce a ball.
DeLisi was sentenced to 90 years for marijuana trafficking in 1989 at the age of 40 even though the typical sentence was only 12 to 17 years. He believes he was targeted with the lengthy sentence because the judge mistakenly thought he was part of organized crime because he was an Italian from New York. DeLisi said he had opportunities, but never had any desire for that life.
He prefers not to dwell on lost memories and time he'll never get back. He's not angry, and instead takes every opportunity to express gratitude and hope.
"Prison changed me. I never really knew who God was and now I know and it changed the way I talk to people and treat people," said DeLisi, who became a mentor to younger inmates. "For me, being there so long, I was able to take gang members from gangs to gentleman."
When the then-40-year-old hipster with the thick Italian accent first entered prison, he was illiterate, but taught himself how to read and write.
Now, he wants "to make the best of every bit of my time" fighting for the release of other inmates through his organization FreeDeLisi.com.
"The system needs to change and I'm going to try my best to be an activist," he said.
Chiara Juster, a former Florida prosecutor who handled the case pro bono for the The Last Prisoner Project, criticized DeLisi's lengthy sentence as "a sick indictment of our nation."
The family has spent over $250,000 on attorneys' fees and over $80,000 on long-distance international collect calls over the past few decades, but it's not money they want back.
Rick DeLisi was only 11 years old when he sat in the courtroom and said goodbye to his father. Now, he's a successful business owner with a wife and three children living in Amsterdam. He can't wait to bring his father overseas and to their vacation home in Hawaii.
Those are the memories his father yearned to create while he was locked up.
"Taking a swim, lay in the sun, oh so many things, eat at Jack's Hamburgers," the father said.
Every moment, even the little ones, are milestones.
For years, 43-year-old Rick dreamed of cooking his father breakfast like he did Wednesday morning with heaping platters of eggs, bacon, sausage and biscuits. He burst into tears just watching his dad eat a bagel and drink a bottle of water that didn't come from the prison commissary.
But it's bittersweet thinking about the lost time, the waste.
For what, his son asks?
"It's just kind of like torment on your soul for 31 years," he said. "I was kind of robbed of my whole life so I just appreciate that I can witness it, but on the other hand I feel like isn't somebody responsible? Is there somebody that can answer to this?"
Rick DeLisi said his family fell apart after his father's sentence. His mother never recovered. His brother overdosed and died, his sister was in a terrible car accident. Rick fled at the country at 17 to get away from the pain.
"I can't believe they did this to my father. I can't believe they did this to my family," the grieving son said, describing the reunion like opening up an old, painful wound.
His voice cracks and his eyes well up with tears as he talks about how grateful he is to finally see his dad.
"There's a feeling of who's responsible for this debt in my mind, and justice," said Rick DeLisi. "I don't mean debt with money. I mean something more valuable. Time. Something you can never get back."
Demonstrators celebrate with green headscarves outside the congress building in Buenos Aires on Friday. (photo: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images)
Argentina's Lower House Approves Landmark Abortion Bill
Uki Goñi and Tom Phillips, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Argentina is poised to become the first major Latin American country to decriminalize abortion after legislation was given the green light by lower house."
Argentina will become only fourth Latin American country where abortion is legal
The bill, which was submitted last month by the leftwing president, Alberto Fernández, was approved on Friday morning by a margin of 131 to 117 votes after a 20-hour debate. It will be voted on by the senate at the end of this month.
The televised announcement of the “resulta afirmativo” sparked carnival-like scenes of joy outside Argentina’s national congress, where thousands of activists had been anxiously following the marathon session on big screens. One local news website, Infobae, called it “a tsunami of joy”. Abortion is currently a crime in Pope Francis’s homeland in virtually all circumstances.
“I feel really, really excited and happy,” said Mariela Belski, Amnesty International’s executive in Argentina, who was among those who had spent the night camped outside congress in Buenos Aires waiting for the news. “It was an amazing night.
“When the bill was passed, everyone was shouting, celebrating, crying,” added Belski, who said the legislation would help to save the lives of impoverished women who undergo illegal and often dangerous procedures in underground clinics or at home.
“This is a victory for the women’s movement that’s been campaigning for this for many, many years,” said the journalist and campaigner Ingrid Beck, emphasising the importance of the consensus-building effort by pro-choice campaigners and the current Fernández government. “The fact that this bill is sponsored by the government makes all the difference.”
Many of those celebrating wore green masks, the colour that has come to symbolise the pro-choice campaign and women’s rights in general in Argentina.
At the other end of the square, in front of congress, anti-abortion campaigners, who wore light blue, voiced disappointment. “We’re hopeful the senators won’t approve the bill,” one woman was quoted as saying by Infobae. “It’s not a rabbit that a woman carries in her womb, it’s a human being.”
Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, Argentina’s minister for women, gender and diversity, commemorated the result on Twitter using the widely shared hashtag #QueSeaLey (Let it be Law). “Today we have written a new chapter in our history,” she wrote.
There was also celebration in other parts of Latin America, a predominantly Roman Catholic region where women’s rights activists hope that the move could help to accelerate similar legislative changes.
Latin America has some of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws, with only three countries – Cuba, Uruguay and Guyana – permitting elective abortions and several, including El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, outlawing them altogether. Millions of illegal and often unsafe procedures are conducted in Latin America each year.
“This is a really important decision, not just for Argentina but for the whole of Latin America,” said Debora Diniz, a prominent reproductive rights activist from Brazil, where terminations are outlawed for all but a few circumstances involving rape or risk to the mother’s life. Even then, it is sometimes far from easy. In August, religious extremists persecuted a 10-year-old Brazilian girl who was trying to undergo a legal abortion after being raped, allegedly by her uncle.
Diniz said the size and regional influence of Argentina, which has a population of 45 million, meant that the “utterly innovative” decision would have a “contagion” effect. “I haven’t the slightest doubt [other countries could follow Argentina’s lead],” Diniz said.
Argentina’s feminist movement has spent decades pushing for change, with an attempt to decriminalise abortion failing to clear the senate in 2018. But the pro-choice “green wave” received a boost in October 2019 when Fernández was elected and pledged to place LGBTQ and women’s rights at the heart of his administration.
Belski said Fernández’s support would be critical in getting the bill, which decriminalises abortions up to 14 weeks, past the senate.
A similar bill, which the then president Mauricio Macri said he personally opposed, cleared the lower house but was rejected by the senate in August 2018 amid intense pressure from the Catholic church.
“This project is absolutely different because this project was produced by the president – he sent it to congress … because he knew he was going to win,” Belski said.
“This is a Peronist and we know Peronists never put forward a project they know will be defeated,” she added, pointing to the fact that Argentina’s vice-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was the senate president.
A source at the Casa Rosada presidential palace told the Guardian that the senate would probably vote on the bill in the final days of December.
Heavy equipment is clearing a path for the border wall next to Coronado National Forest in Southern Arizona. Mexico is on the left. (photo: John Kurc/NPR)
Contractors Dynamite Mountains, Bulldoze Desert in Race to Build Trump's Border Wall
John Burnett, NPR
Burnett writes: "In the Coronado National Memorial - where conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado entered what is now Arizona - contractors are pulverizing the wilderness in a rush to put up as many miles of border wall as possible before the Trump administration vacates Washington."
They're dynamiting mountainsides and bulldozing pristine desert for a barrier the incoming Biden administration is expected to cancel.
"Wow! This is almost like busy work they're doing," exclaims biologist Myles Traphagen as he drives his truck up to the construction staging area and beholds the destruction for the first time. He specializes on the Arizona borderlands for the Wildlands Network.
"They're cutting roads into a place where no vehicle could go, not a four-wheeler," he says. "But now they're cutting into the mountain to create access to build a wall."
This is one of 29 construction projects being performed by 13 different contractors from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas. In Arizona, contractors have added shifts — they're working all night long under light towers to meet Trump's goal of 450 miles of new barriers before his term is over.
Trump's wall forcing unplanned experiment on deserts
"There's no doubt they're accelerating the rate of construction," says ecologist Ron Pulliam, who has been monitoring the wall's progress on the Arizona border. "They're trying to do as much as they can in the next 50 days. And Trump wants to fulfill his promise that he's securing the border."
Landowners and conservationists are irate. Gary Nabhan, a longtime author and ethnobotanist in the region, says Trump's wall is forcing an unplanned experiment on the deserts of Southern Arizona.
"The wall is going through such sensitive areas and going up so fast that no one knows what effect it's going to have on wildlife," he says. "I mean, we have no idea what 24/7 lighting will have on the bats that pollinate at night."
The reason the 30-foot wall with its high-intensity security lights and wide patrol road is sparking such outrage is because of the region's rich biodiversity and stunning natural beauty. Critics consider this a desecration of some of the last wild places along the U.S.-Mexico divide.
Dramatic landscape alteration documented
The Department of Homeland Security has waived dozens of federal environmental protections — such as the Arizona Wilderness Act and the Endangered Species Act — in order to erect the wall in these sensitive landscapes, and to avoid lawsuits.
In New Mexico, Arizona and California, the government is erecting the wall on a 60-foot strip of federal land that parallels the international border called the Roosevelt Reservation.
Wall construction proceeds much more slowly in Texas where most of the border acreage is in private hands and must be acquired through the power of eminent domain. But with a change of presidents only six weeks away, U.S. attorneys have sped up their condemnation of property along the international river in Texas to build the wall.
The dramatic extent of landscape alteration in the remote Arizona borderlands is being documented through drone footage shot by John Kurc. He's a wedding and rock 'n' roll photographer from Charleston, S.C., who fell in love with the Sonoran desert. Gray hair tumbles out of a sombrero, as he sets his little aircraft on the ground.
A critical wildlife corridor
"So what I'll do is I'll fly fairly close to the top of that ridge to try to determine where they're going to dynamite," he says, directing his drone toward the defaced slopes in the Coronado.
Nature lovers come here for the oak-dotted canyons, rugged peaks, extravagant vistas and grasslands so verdant that the nearby San Rafael Valley was used as a setting for the 1955 musical Oklahoma!
Moreover, the area is a critical wildlife corridor. Two endangered cats — the ocelot and the jaguar — crisscross the international boundary looking for water and prey.
"There's only a 4-inch gap between the bollards in the wall," says Traphagen, who joined Kurc for the drone excursion, "so it excludes anything larger than a ground squirrel."
The drone descends out of the brilliant blue sky like a giant insect, with the first images of the Border Patrol's new roads up the west side of the mountain. Kurc says when he visited this place three months ago, it was unscarred.
"And now what I'm seeing is a thousand times worse," he says. "Now I'm documenting destruction versus complete wilderness areas."
Contractors continue their work even though President-elect Joe Biden has said there won't be another foot of wall constructed in his administration. Biden's transition team did not answer an email asking when and where the new president may stop wall construction.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the massive $15 billion project, says it will not speculate on actions the incoming administration "may or may not take."
"Unless a Suspension of Work order is issued, USACE expects contractors to continue work as obligated under their contracts," the agency said in statement.
'Border wall has made our city safer'
U.S. Customs and Border Protection maintains that the barrier is necessary to gain operational control of the Southwest border. The agency says the mountainous zones — as beautiful as they may be — are used by drug and human smugglers, and the agency's mission is to stop that illegal traffic.
Much of the current wall is replacing dozens of miles of so-called Normandy barriers that stop vehicles driving over from Mexico, but not people on foot.
"I know there's wildlife and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, as callous and as horrible as this sounds, I think the lives of people is a lot more important than anything else," says Art Del Cueto, with the National Border Patrol Council, the agents' union. He is not a spokesman for CBP.
"I think it's important to have wildlife out there. But I don't think enough research has been done to actually say, 'Hey, if you build out here, all the jaguars in the world are gonna die.' I think it's more of a cop-out for some people, and they use that as their little ace up their sleeve so they can prevent border security."
Del Cueto's hometown is Douglas, Ariz., which sits across from Agua Prieta, Mexico. "When I was growing up in Douglas," he says, "you were having groups of 50 and 60 illegal aliens running through the alleys."
Today, Douglas is sealed off from Mexico by a tall wall built under President George W. Bush and completed by Trump.
"What we used to see in this city was illegals running up and down our alleys, through our streets, chases by the Border Patrol. (It was) unsafe for our local citizens," says Douglas Mayor Donald Huish. "The border wall has made our city safer. It's pushed that type of activity outside our city limits."
Huish was unaware that wall teams have been dynamiting near Guadalupe Canyon — another beloved, biodiverse natural area located east of Douglas, where he goes deer hunting. When shown an iPhone photo of the new switchback roads zigzagging up Guadalupe Peak, he reacts with shock: "Oh no! It's hard to believe that that was the solution. That's not good."
"The wall is a good solution for around the city limits," he continues, "but once it gets outside of town into the wilderness area, that's where the surveillance technology should have taken over. But nobody asked my opinion."
Opponents say the wall will worsen flooding
Like Huish, many landowners are upset by plans for the massive steel-and-concrete barrier in the malpais, or badlands, near the Arizona-New Mexico border. Owners of the Diamond A Ranch sued the government last week in federal court.
"In many portions of the proposed border wall, grades before construction began were so steep that the land was accessible only by foot and mule," reads the complaint.
Blasting crews have used explosives — they call it pioneering — to level the cliff sides for access roads. "Clouds of demolition dust, shrapnel, and car-sized boulders have come tumbling down the Roosevelt Reservation onto ranch property," says the complaint, which calls for an immediate halt to construction.
Opponents also say the wall will worsen flooding. The structure crosses numerous dry creeks and riverbeds. During the rainy season, they turn into torrents that carry tons of debris that could clog the steel-bollard barrier and cause floodwaters to back up.
So far, the Trump administration has won nearly every court challenge to the border wall. And CBP assures that it will dispatch crews to unlock gates in the wall to let the floodwaters pass.
But that has not mollified neighbors. Valer Clark is president of Cuenca Los Ojos, a land conservation group that has spent decades restoring ranchland and wetlands in Mexico on property next to Trump's wall.
"It's horrific," she says. "I mean, it's 40 years of work that I'm seeing dry up, and for what? As an American, I feel ashamed."
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