25 December 20
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Michigan's Forgotten Christmas Eve Massacre
Loren Balhorn, Jacobin
Balhorn writes: "On Christmas Eve in 1913, a pitched battle between organized labor and the mining barons of northern Michigan climaxed in the gruesome deaths of over 70 union supporters and their children."
The 1913 Massacre struck a debilitating blow to the region’s labor movement and changed the Upper Peninsula forever. But it’s been largely forgotten in popular consciousness.
ichigan’s Upper Peninsula and the Finnish immigrants whose descendants still make up the plurality of its inhabitants aren’t the first things that come to mind when thinking about American labor history – or anything else, for that matter.
The “UP” occupies a marginal position in the national imagination. Sandwiched between three different Great Lakes, it covers one-third of the state’s landmass but boasts only 3 percent of its population. Its largest city, Marquette, has just twenty thousand residents. Cartographers sometimes mistakenly depict the peninsula as part of Wisconsin — or leave it off the map entirely.
One of the rustier segments of the Rust Belt, the Upper Peninsula has struggled to provide its residents with decent jobs ever since mining and manufacturing dwindled after World War II. Its main industries are now tourism and lumber, and the lure of more opportunities “downstate” prompts many young people to leave the region. Mirroring most of rural America, the UP also tends to be solidly Republican — fourteen of its fifteen counties went for Trump in 2016 and 2020.
It wasn’t always this way. A hundred years ago, the UP was home to a vibrant left rooted in the immigrant communities that made up the bulk of its working class. Particularly around the mines of Lake Superior’s Keweenaw Peninsula known as Copper Country, organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party of America published newspapers, ran cooperative stores and meeting halls, and fought tirelessly against the powerful interests who did their utmost to maintain control over the mines and the people working in them.
Long forgotten beyond narrow circles of labor historians, the decline of socialism in the Upper Peninsula was inextricably tied to one harrowing episode later immortalized in Woody Guthrie’s ballad, “1913 Massacre“: the so-called “Italian Hall disaster” of 1913, when a Christmas Eve celebration held for striking workers and their families in Calumet, Michigan ended in a deadly stampede.
Historians Gary Kaunonen and Aaron Goings once described the event as a “macabre exclamation point on an especially violent time in American labor history” — one that deserves to be remembered for both the brutality bosses displayed in breaking the labor movement, and the bravery of the working men and women who fought until the end.
The Company Towns of Copper Country
The flowering of a mass socialist movement in this isolated part of the country is inseparable from the region’s mining industry, which took root soon after the largest pure copper deposits in the world were discovered on the Keweenaw in 1841. Reports of the metal literally lying on the ground sparked a mining rush, and by the late 1840s Michigan was the country’s biggest producer of copper — in high demand as electricity swept into American businesses and households.
There was a lot of money to be made for the capitalists who bought land in the UP, but only if they could get the metal out of the ground. This was easier said than done, for the Copper Country had neither a settled population nor any infrastructure to speak of. It was not yet accessible by train, and winters, which could last up to six months, brought frigid temperatures and severe snowstorms that left residents trapped for days.
To bridge the gap, big mining conglomerates like the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company dispatched recruiters to hire European immigrants who were unfamiliar with the harsh conditions in the UP and willing to work for less than their native-born counterparts. The first wave consisted of skilled miners from the Cornish diaspora, who left England as the local mining industry declined and jobs grew scarce. They were followed by Germans, Italians, Finns, and “Austrians” — Croatians and Slovenians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The UP’s population more than doubled every decade from 1850 to 1900, as this multiethnic working class turned the Copper Country’s scattered, ramshackle settlements into a well-connected network of small cities stretching sixty miles from Copper Harbor in the north to South Range and Chassell in the south.
Believing that married men made for more reliable workers, the mining companies built single-family houses, hospitals, libraries, theaters, schools, and all kinds of company-owned stores to attract families to the area. Communities like Hancock, Ahmeek, and Calumet were classic company towns, owned and operated by the capitalists that built them. Local government, press, and police were also in the pocket of the mining companies.
Management depicted this as a mutually beneficial arrangement, but for workers it meant that most of their wages went back to the company in the form of rent and groceries. Company towns also gave capital a decisive advantage in the class struggle, as workers who made trouble could be evicted from their homes and placed on industry blacklists.
Ethnic Solidarity and Industrial Unionism
Mining has always been a tough job, and the Copper Country was no exception. Workers went underground for eleven or twelve hours for little more than two dollars per day, while mine operators like Calumet and Hecla’s James MacNaughton pulled down an annual salary of a hundred twenty thousand dollars (the equivalent of over three million dollars today). Cave-ins were rare, as the mineshafts were dug into solid rock, but getting crushed by a thousand-pound boulder was a fairly common occurrence, as was being electrocuted or mangled by tramway wagons.
In 1911, sixty miners died on the job — more than one per week.
Sanitary conditions were medieval. Lighting and ventilation was poor to nonexistent, and only the cleanest mines provided workers with a bucket to defecate in. Once, when a federal inspector inquired about the sanitary conditions in the Copper Range Company mines, a company official responded, “There are no sanitary regulations beyond requiring levels to be cleaned up from time to time.”
The combination of geographic isolation and company intimidation may have placed organized labor at a disadvantage in the Copper Country, but class struggle was never far from northern Michigan’s mining ranges. One of the first labor disturbances occurred in 1872, reportedly instigated by organizers from the International Workingmen’s Association. A major strike broke out on the Marquette Iron Range east of Copper Country in the summer of 1895, shutting down production for over two months.
Mine owners eventually granted shorter working days and higher pay to end the strike, but refused to recognize the union — a sticking point that would spark conflict after conflict in the years to come.
Without a union pension to fall back on, most Copper County workers resorted to mutual aid societies based on shared language and ethnicity. These organizations organized financial support for unemployed workers and widows, and offered cash-strapped families a place to socialize and enjoy what little free time they had with dances, lectures, and other events. Set adrift in a new country with no welfare state and a weak labor movement, for many immigrants these associations were the only thing they could count on in the harsh reality of American working-class life.
German and Swedish immigrants had established the first such societies in the early 1860s. Immigrants from Southern Europe followed suit several decades later, founding organizations like the Società Italiana di Mutua Beneficenza, which rented space in its headquarters, Calumet’s Italian Hall, to the local chapter of the South Slav Socialist Federation and its weekly paper, Hrvatski Radnik. Particularly noteworthy was the Työmies Publishing Company in Hancock, ten miles south of Calumet, which published the Finnish-language daily Työmies alongside the English-language Wage Slave.
Finns migrated to the UP in droves beginning in the 1880s and constituted its largest immigrant group by the early 1900s. According to historians, no immigrant group in early twentieth-century America counted as many socialists among its ranks as the Finns, who were derided by the UP’s right-wing newspapers as “Red Finns” and “jack pine savages.” Their cooperative stores and meeting halls, such as Kansankoti Hall in Hancock, where the Työmies Publishing Company had its headquarters, served as organizing hubs for workers of all ethnicities.
While new immigrants performed the bulk of the labor in the mines, skilled positions and management roles were allocated almost exclusively to men of German and Cornish ancestry. Management used this hierarchy to its advantage, pitting second- and third-generation immigrants against their newly arrived counterparts and blaming labor unrest on impressionable “foreigners” duped by nefarious union organizers.
Copper Country socialists sought to overcome these divisions by organizing in a number of languages and bringing workers together at union events despite linguistic and cultural differences. A meeting of the Calumet Miners’ Union in June 1913, for example, was attended by over two thousand workers and included speeches in “English, Italian, Finnish, Croatian and Hungarian.”
When the Western Federation of Miners began moving into the Upper Peninsula in 1908, its group of crack organizers included a number of Finns like John Välimäki and Helmer Mikko, but also incorporated people like Teofilo Petriella, who edited an Italian-language socialist newspaper in Calumet called La Sentinella, or Anna Clemenc, president of the Slovene National Benefit Society and known among local union supporters as “America’s Joan of Arc.”
Talking Union
Founded in 1893, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) had cut its teeth on a series of hard-fought battles for union recognition in the mining ranges of Colorado, Montana, and Utah. These fights were part of a broader intensification of class struggle across the United States, which no doubt also influenced workers in the Copper Country, where the Finnish Socialist Federation and other left-wing organizations were significant players in working-class life. Though the mines were still union-free, workers in other Copper Country industries were increasingly launching organizing drives — and winning.
Buoyed by its success in the West and confident that the miners of Copper Country would be drawn to the prospect of a unified, coordinated strike, WFM organizers began preparing the ground in 1912. They identified four key grievances: low wages, unsafe working conditions, the introduction of a new one-man drill that risked miners’ lives and eliminated jobs, and — most importantly — the employers’ refusal to recognize the union.
Labor parades and rallies took place throughout the spring of 1913. Työmies reported on a rally of three thousand “wage slaves” from the Calumet and Hecla mines on June 10. Only two days prior, thousands of workers had marched through downtown in a mass rally organized by the Calumet Miners’ Union.
Charles Lawton, general manager of the nearby Quincy Mine, wrote on June 18 that “Many of our best men have joined the Western Federation, and at times are brought into joining with and listening to the socialists.” Two weeks later, things had grown critical: “I am again very much concerned over the present labor situation.… The temper of the Finnish employees today is unprecedented in all of my experience, and is almost unbearable.” His colleague MacNaughton is alleged to have sworn that “grass will grow in the streets before C&H recognizes the union.”
Later that month the WFM submitted its final ultimatum: recognize the union and open negotiations over its demands, or face an indefinite labor stoppage. Lawton allegedly returned his letter unopened, and on July 23 the Western Federation of Miners called for a strike across Copper Country. Government reports from the time describe hundreds of strikers, armed with sticks, stones, and metal bars threatening workers who tried to enter the mines. By the end of the month Työmies reported that 18,460 miners were on strike — more than twice the number of union members in the area.
The initial weeks of the strike were by most accounts an uplifting affair for the miners of Copper Country. Workers marched through town on a near-daily basis to drum up support and boost morale. Local chapters of the Socialist Party held picnics and rallies to raise money for the strike fund, while solidarity messages and donations poured in from unions across the country.
Leading lights of the American labor movement visited to express their support. Mother Jones, the “miner’s angel,” spoke at a mass rally in Calumet in early August and beseeched strikers to “be men, my sons, then you will make the mine bosses humble.” WFM president Charles Moyer also came to the Copper Country, as did famed labor activist Ella Reeve Bloor, whose account of the massacre on Christmas Eve would later inspire Woody Guthrie’s ballad.
The optimism these men and women must have felt was captured in a song, “The Federation Call,” penned for the occasion by a local worker named John Sullivan and published in the pro-union newspaper, Miners Bulletin:
The Copper Country union men are out upon a strike,
Resisting corporation rule which robs us of our rights.
The victory is all but won in this noble fight
For recognition of the union.
Hurrah, hurrah for the Copper Country strike
Hurrah, hurrah our cause is just and right.
Freedom from oppression is our motto in this fight
For recognition of the union.
The Massacre
Contrary to the miners’ hopes, victory was far from “won” in the summer of 1913. The companies adopted a two-fold strategy of intimidating the strikers with violence and waiting for the harsh Keweenaw winter to break their will. Within weeks, mine owners convinced the state government to send in the National Guard.
Though ostensibly there to keep the peace, these “Michigan Cossacks,” as the Finnish press described them, broke up strike meetings and harassed picketers. When that was not enough, the bosses recruited “gun hounds” from union-busting firms like the Berghoff and Waddell detective agency to spy on workers and, as the strike dragged on, raid union offices and attack or even kill strikers.
Yet if capital had the army and hired guns from Chicago and New York, labor had an equally powerful weapon in community solidarity. Anna Clemenc founded a Calumet chapter of the WFM Women’s Auxiliary in September 1913, marching at the head of parades and organizing groups of women to harass scabs as they entered the mines. Clemenc herself was arrested three times over the course of the strike, along with dozens of other women in the so-called “Broom Brigade” who regularly attacked strikebreakers and police with brooms and other household items.
Nevertheless, as winter approached, strike funds began to dwindle and enthusiasm among the strikers was flagging. The WFM responded by setting up a series of “Union Stores” selling basic staples on a coupon system, and began organizing dances and other indoor entertainment. Fronts were hardening on both sides: the union refused to back down, and the mine owners grew increasingly aggressive in their tactics, arming local merchants’ union opponents into a “Citizen’s Alliance” whose anti-labor rallies and publications struck increasingly violent tones.
It was in this atmosphere that the Women’s Auxiliary decided to organize a Christmas party on December 24, 1913 for striking families and their children. Presents had been donated by organizations around the country and were to be distributed at a celebration in the Italian Hall, the center of the socialist movement in Calumet and long a target of the Citizens’ Alliance’s ire.
After five grueling months on strike, the party was a brief but welcome respite from a labor struggle that many still thought they could win. Instead, it would mark the beginning of their long defeat.
The party was quite the affair, with contemporary reports suggesting over five hundred residents in attendance. Anna Clemenc was one of the main organizers and told stories to the children on the main stage. Some parents dropped their kids off and went for a drink in the bar on the ground floor, while others joined the Christmas festivities.
What happened next will never be fully known, but according to the majority of eyewitnesses, a man wearing a Citizens’ Alliance button walked into the party in the early evening and shouted “Fire!” several times before slipping away. In the minutes that followed, hundreds of guests lunged for the narrow stairwell leading to the exit. According to some accounts, unidentified men laid objects on the stairs to obstruct the way. Others claimed that police and Citizens’ Alliance members stood outside the building and held the front doors shut.
Bodies began piling up on the stairwell as panicked partygoers tripped over each other, fell down, and added to the writhing, suffocating mass. After the dust settled and rescuers removed the bodies one by one, between seventy-two and seventy-five had died, including fifty-nine children. There was no fire.
The Aftermath
Though modern-day accounts of the massacre often characterize it as a “disaster” or “tragedy,” for the Left in Copper Country it was clearly an orchestrated assault designed to break the strike. This view is backed up by the sequence of events that followed.
WFM president Moyer sought to assert leadership in the situation, blaming the Citizens’ Alliance for the massacre and doing his best to rally the workers around the union. Almost as if part of a plan, while Moyer was negotiating with mining company lawyers two days later, an angry mob stormed into the room, shot and beat him to within an inch of his life, and “deported” him out of the Copper Country by throwing him onto a train headed for Chicago.
Työmies broke the story of what transpired in the Italian Hall with the headline “83 MURDERED!” on December 26. The Miners Bulletin and other pro-union publications echoed that sentiment over the coming days, publishing account after account that men from the Citizens’ Alliance, assisted by local police, had both caused the panic and prevented bystanders from intervening.
After printing sworn testimonies that named the specific individuals involved, the editor and several staff of Työmies were thrown in jail on charges of sedition on December 27. Rather than investigate the detective agencies and strikebreakers who were almost certainly behind the disaster, the authorities appeared keen to exploit the commotion to mop up the troublesome union whom they blamed for all of the trouble in town.
The official investigation into the disaster was a lackluster affair. Local prosecutors ignored the many eyewitness accounts that implicated the company and instead suggested that the disaster had been caused by the children themselves.
Though no one could deny that someone had shouted “Fire!”, it was speculated that it had been committed by a local drunk in the bar downstairs, rather than by a Citizens’ Alliance member. A federal investigation in early 1914 recorded a number of testimonies from union sympathizers, and the search for the man who shouted “Fire!” went on for months, but no arrests were ever made.
The End of an Era
The funeral procession held for the victims on December 28 was by all accounts a moving affair. Though the WFM-produced film of the day has unfortunately been lost to history, we know from surviving reports that 5,000 people marched and upwards of 20,000 attended, including hundreds of miners from across the UP.
The entire event was funded by the union, and the Citizens’ Alliance and other anti-labor organizations were explicitly barred from contributing. This somber event, sparked by a devastating tragedy, was likely also the largest gathering of organized labor in the Copper Country’s history.
The Copper County Strike limped on for several more months, but momentum was now on the employers’ side. Clemenc fell ill in January, and when she recovered she went on a national speaking tour with Ella Bloor, robbing the strike of two of its most talented agitators. Moyer had been threatened with death should he ever return to the Keweenaw, and also stayed away.
By January eight thousand men had already gone back to work, and as winter faded into spring it was clear that the strikers could not hold out much longer. The mining companies made overtures to the workers who were still hanging on, offering an eight-hour day and improved wages on the condition that they give up their WFM cards. Finally, on April 14, an overwhelming majority voted to return to work, thereby ending the strike without winning recognition for their union.
The trauma of Christmas Eve combined with such a bitter defeat was too much for many. No statistics on the ensuing exodus have survived, but hundreds of families left the area after 1914, seeking better wages and a less hostile climate in the manufacturing centers of the Midwest. The Työmies Publishing Company relocated to Superior, Wisconsin, and went on to become the Finnish section of the Communist Party USA. Anna Clemenc moved to Chicago, where she lived a quiet life away from labor organizing.
Back in the Copper Country, groups like the Citizens’ Alliance and the newly founded Anti-Socialist League consolidated their hold over local politics, while the events of that Christmas Eve were suppressed in public memory for decades.
The Italian Hall was torn down in 1984 — ostensibly because renovating it would have been too expensive, but some allege it was also a political move, an attempt to extinguish the memory of that particularly brutal episode in the town’s history.
Today, all that remains is the building’s doorway arch and a plaque donated by the AFL-CIO bearing the Mother Jones quote, “Mourn the dead, fight for the living.”
ADDED:
Health care workers taking care of a COVID patient. (photo: Christopher Lee/NYT/Redux)
ALSO SEE: The US Has Vaccinated Just 1 Million People Out
of a Goal of 20 Million for December
Report: Nearly 3,000 US Health Workers Died of COVID-19
Christina Jewett and Robert Lewis and Melissa Bailey, Kaiser Health News
Excerpt: "More than 2,900 U.S. health care workers have died in the COVID-19 pandemic since March, a far higher number than that reported by the government, according to a new analysis by KHN and The Guardian."
Fatalities from the coronavirus have skewed young, with the majority of victims under age 60 in the cases for which there is age data. People of color have been disproportionately affected, accounting for about 65% of deaths in cases in which there is race and ethnicity data. After conducting interviews with relatives and friends of around 300 victims, KHN and The Guardian learned that one-third of the fatalities involved concerns over inadequate personal protective equipment.
Many of the deaths — about 680 — occurred in New York and New Jersey, which were hit hard early in the pandemic. Significant numbers also died in Southern and Western states in the ensuing months.
The findings are part of “Lost on the Frontline,” a nine-month data and investigative project by KHN and The Guardian to track every health care worker who dies of COVID-19.
One of those lost, Vincent DeJesus, 39, told his brother Neil that he’d be in deep trouble if he spent much time with a COVID-positive patient while wearing the surgical mask provided to him by the Las Vegas hospital where he worked. DeJesus died on Aug. 15.
Another fatality was Sue Williams-Ward, a 68-year-old home health aide who earned $13 an hour in Indianapolis, and bathed, dressed and fed clients without wearing any PPE, her husband said. She was intubated for six weeks before she died May 2.
“Lost on the Frontline” is prompting new government action to explore the root cause of health care worker deaths and take steps to track them better. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services recently asked the National Academy of Sciences for a “rapid expert consultation” on why so many health care workers are dying in the U.S., citing the count of fallen workers by The Guardian and KHN.
“The question is, where are they becoming infected?” asked Michael Osterholm, a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory team and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “That is clearly a critical issue we need to answer and we don’t have that.”
The Dec. 10 report by the national academies suggests a new federal tracking system and specially trained contact tracers who would take PPE policies and availability into consideration.
Doing so would add critical knowledge that could inform generations to come and give meaning to the lives lost.
“Those [health care workers] are people who walked into places of work every day because they cared about patients, putting food on the table for families, and every single one of those lives matter,” said Sue Anne Bell, a University of Michigan assistant professor of nursing and co-author of the national academies report.
The recommendations come at a fraught moment for health care workers, as some are getting the COVID-19 vaccine while others are fighting for their lives amid the highest levels of infection the nation has seen.
The toll continues to mount. In Indianapolis, for example, 41-year-old nurse practitioner Kindra Irons died Dec. 1. She saw seven or eight home health patients per week while wearing full PPE, including an N95 mask and a face shield, according to her husband, Marcus Irons.
The virus destroyed her lungs so badly that six weeks on the most aggressive life support equipment, ECMO, couldn’t save her, he said.
Marcus Irons said he is now struggling financially to support their two youngest children, ages 12 and 15. “Nobody should have to go through what we’re going through,” he said.
In Massachusetts, 43-year-old Mike “Flynnie” Flynn oversaw transportation and laundry services at North Shore Medical Center, a hospital in Salem, Massachusetts. He and his wife were also raising young children, ages 8, 10 and 11.
Flynn, who shone at father-daughter dances, fell ill in late November and died Dec. 8. He had a heart attack at home on the couch, according to his father, Paul Flynn. A hospital spokesperson said he had full access to PPE and free testing on-site.
Since the first months of the pandemic, more than 70 reporters at The Guardian and KHN have scrutinized numerous governmental and public data sources, interviewed the bereaved and spoken with health care experts to build a count.
The total number includes fatalities identified by labor unions, obituaries and news outlets and in online postings by the bereaved, as well as by relatives of the deceased. The previous total announced by The Guardian and KHN was approximately 1,450 health care worker deaths. The new number reflects the inclusion of data reported by nursing homes and health facilities to the federal and state governments. These deaths include the facility names but not worker names. Reporters cross-checked each record to ensure fatalities did not appear in the database twice.
The tally has been widely cited by other media as well as by members of Congress.
Rep. Norma Torres (D-Calif.) referenced the data citing the need for a pending bill that would provide compensation to the families of health care workers who died or sustained long-term disabilities from COVID-19.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) mentioned the tally in a Senate Finance Committee hearing about the medical supply chain. “The fact is,” he said, “the shortages of PPE have put our doctors and nurses and caregivers in grave danger.”
Oneita and Clive Thompson celebrate their freedom after ICE dropped its removal order. (photo: CNN)
A Couple Hid in Two Philadelphia Churches for 843 Days to Avoid Deportation. Now They Are Free
Ganesh Setty, CNN
Excerpt: "For 843 days, Oneita and Clive Thompson took sanctuary in two Philadelphia churches to escape Immigration and Customs Enforcement."
Daily life was constrained within the humble walls of the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, and later the Tabernacle United Church downtown.
They ate, bathed, and slept cloistered inside the churches, bereft of the ability to walk beyond the grounds for fear of deportation.
"At first I would not even go on the porch, I was so fearful," Oneita, 48, told CNN.
Though there is no explicit law preventing ICE from going into "sensitive locations" like churches to deport undocumented individuals, the agency says it generally avoids such enforcement actions.
After the family's repeated attempts to block the deportation order, the federal government dropped the order in mid-December.
On Monday, the Thompsons finally walked free.
"It's still sinking in, it was liberating. I don't know how to explain it," Oneita said, likening the experience to a caged bird finally freed.
"You just want to spread your wings and fly away."
The family had been enjoying a 'quiet life'
Oneita and Clive, 61, had fled from Jamaica's gang violence in 2004 with their children, after Oneita said her brother was killed and Clive was threatened. Though denied asylum, they were allowed to stay in the U.S., received work authorization, and had periodic check-ins with ICE.
They settled down and enjoyed a "quiet life" raising their seven children in Cedarville, a small town in New Jersey's Cumberland County, Oneita said. For roughly 14 years Oneita worked as a certified nursing assistant and Clive worked with heavy machinery at the Cumberland Dairy processing facility.
That was until August 2018, when ICE under the Trump Administration told the Thompsons they would not extend their stay for removal and were to report to them within days to be removed from the country.
The family turned to the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, which found them shelter and assisted in legal proceedings.
"It was a nightmare. From one day living the American dream...within four days all of that was just taken away," Oneita said.
She, Clive, and their two teenagers, Christine, 18, and Timothy, 14, who are both American citizens, moved in to the Methodist church, and later on, in September, to the Tabernacle United Church. While the teenagers were free to come and go, one step outside of the church grounds for Oneita and Clive could have meant a one-way ticket back to Jamaica.
"The reality of physical sanctuary is that it is incredibly hard...It becomes house arrest, you're almost trapped," Peter Pedemonti, co-director of National Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, told CNN.
Being holed up may have been even worse than house arrest, Oneita added, noting how they could not even view the outside world beyond the churches' stained glass windows.
Letters pour in on their behalf
During those 843 days ICE had repeatedly denied the couple's requests to stay ICE's order for removal as they applied for permanent residency, she said. Their daughter Angel went on to gain citizenship and got her I-130 form approved, the federal form that's the first step in having alien relatives establish permanent residency in the United States.
"We have no criminal record, we work and pay our taxes, we volunteer, I spent my whole almost 14 years taking care of the elderly in this country," Oneita said.
Come Thanksgiving time, the Thompsons filed a motion to reopen their asylum case with the Department of Justice's Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). After the Thompsons' two affidavits, previous letters from Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, and Rep. Dwight Evans (D-Pennsylvania), and approximately 200 letters from church and community members, ICE decided to join the Thompsons' motion to reopen their asylum case.
"Upon the BIA's issuance of a decision, the Thompsons were no longer subject to a final order of removal, thereby removing any imminent concerns of possible removal," an ICE official told CNN, adding that the agency carries out removal decisions made in federal immigration courts, which are administered by the DOJ's Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).
Though safe from deportation, the Thompsons have still yet to gain permanent residency.
But for now, the they are just relieved the ordeal is over.
"We danced," she said. "We just danced for freedom."
Victoria Guillemard, of Murdock, at an October meeting of the Murdock City Council questioned the Asatru Folk Assembly's representative, Allen Turnage, about the violence that has been perpetuated by members of the Asatru Folk Assembly, which has been accused of being a white supremacist organization. (photo: Mark Wasson/West Central Tribune)
'Racism Is Not Welcome Here': Minnesota Residents Speak Out Against Whites-Only Church Permitted by City Council
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes: "Earlier this month, The Root reported that in Murdock, Minn.-a small city of around 280 residents-white nationalist group Asatru Folk Assembly was granted permission via city council vote to turn an abandoned Lutheran church into a whites-only church for worshipers to ... oh, I don't know ... be white and racist together in the name of whatever Klan-ish deity they pray to."
Well now, members of the community and others are speaking out against the church for people who dry clean reusable nooses, and they’re making it clear that racism is not welcome in their town.
According to NBC News, people who don’t wish to live near a church for people who would call the police on Black Jesus for turning water into wine without a permit, collected 50,000 signatures on an online petition to stop the group and their church from calling Murdock home.
From NBC:
“I think they thought they could fly under the radar in a small town like this, but we’d like to keep the pressure on them,” said Peter Kennedy, a longtime Murdock resident. “Racism is not welcome here.”
Many locals said they support the growing population of Latinos, who have moved to the area in the past decade because of job opportunities, over the church.
“Just because the council gave them a conditional permit does not mean that the town and people in the area surrounding will not be vigilant in watching and protecting our area,” Jean Lesteberg, who lives in the neighboring town of De Graff, wrote on the city’s Facebook page.
Of course, not all residents oppose the discriminatory church. Twenty-six-year Murdock resident Jesse James—whose real name is Jesse James even though he probably hasn’t even run his own gang of outlaws or robbed a single stagecoach—cited religious freedom in his opinion that the church should be allowed to stand.
“I find it hypocritical, for lack of a better term, of my community to show much hate towards something they don’t understand. I for one don’t see a problem with it,” James wrote on Facebook, NBC reports. “I do not wish to follow in this pagan religion, however, I feel it’s important to recognize and support each other’s beliefs.” (Either he thinks “pagan” is pagan for “no niggras allowed” or he’s missing the point of why people oppose this church.)
As we previously reported, Asatru Folk Assembly has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. According to NBC, the SPLC said the group masks its “bigotry in baseless claims of bloodlines grounding the superiority of one’s white identity.”
The group denied that characterization while describing itself in a way that fits the characterization damn near perfectly. More from NBC:
“We’re not. It’s just simply not true,” said Allen Turnage, a folk assembly board member. “Just because we respect our own culture, that doesn’t mean we are denigrating someone else’s.”
The group, based in Brownsville, California, says teachings and membership are for those of strictly European bloodlines.
“We do not need salvation. All we need is freedom to face our destiny with courage and honor,” the group wrote on its website about their beliefs. “We honor the Gods under the names given to them by our Germanic/Norse ancestors.”
Their forefathers, according to the website, were “Angels and Saxons, Lombards and Heruli, Goths and Vikings, and, as sons and daughters of these people, they are united by ties of blood and culture undimmed by centuries.”
“We respect the ways our ancestors viewed the world and approached the universe a thousand years ago,” Turnage said.
In other words: They only allow the purist of lily-white caucasian bloodlines in their church for people who think some guy named Jim Crow is just another innocent victim of cancel culture.
Murdock Mayor Craig Kavanagh also cited religious freedom as the reason the city council had no choice but to approve the church.
“We were highly advised by our attorney to pass this permit for legal reasons to protect the First Amendment rights,” he said. “We knew that if this was going to be denied, we were going to have a legal battle on our hands that could be pretty expensive.”
“The biggest thing people don’t understand is because we’ve approved this permit, all of a sudden everyone feels this town is racist, and that isn’t the case,” Kavanagh continued. “Just because we voted yes doesn’t mean we’re racist.”
I mean, I guess.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud (L) meets US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, US on 14 March 2017 (photo: AP)
Trump Administration Pushes Forward on $500 Million Weapons Deal With Saudi Arabia
Missy Ryan and Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The Trump administration has formally notified Congress that it intends to sell nearly $500 million in precision bombs to Saudi Arabia, a transaction that is likely to fuel criticism from lawmakers who object to arming the Persian Gulf nation over its record of human rights abuses and stifling dissent and role in the war in Yemen."
An individual familiar with the sale, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment to the news media, said the deal includes 7,500 “Paveway IV” precision-guided bombs, worth $478 million, which under the terms of the agreement would be produced in the kingdom.
The proposed transaction, which has been in the works since early last year, also includes an internal security communications systems worth $97 million. Bloomberg first reported that the State Department sent the notification on Tuesday.
William Hartung, director of the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy, said the sale should not go ahead.
“Saudi access to tens of thousands of precision-guided munitions thus far has not diminished the civilian toll in Yemen, so Pentagon claims that more accurate bombs will reduce civilian casualties don’t hold up to scrutiny,” he said in a statement.
In August, the State Department said its inspector general found that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did not break the law when he used an unusual emergency declaration in 2019 to bypass bipartisan congressional opposition to a larger arms sale to Saudi Arabia.
The gulf monarchy, with which the Trump administration has forged close ties, has been the subject of bipartisan criticism over its war in neighboring Yemen, where Saudi jets, using U.S. precision munitions, have repeatedly bombed civilian targets as the kingdom has sought to weaken Iranian-linked rebels there.
Scrutiny of the longtime U.S. ally intensified after Saudi agents carried out a brutal 2018 operation against Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist who was killed and dismembered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. U.S. intelligence officials concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing.
Under arms sale rules, lawmakers have 30 days from the day of notification, or until Jan. 21, to pass a resolution of disapproval.
Congressional aides said it was doubtful a vote on congressional disapproval would take place between now and when a new Congress takes over Jan. 3 because it wouldn’t be veto proof. At the same time, President Trump could issue an emergency declaration, as he did last year, overriding any congressional objection, at any point.
A representative for President-elect Joe Biden declined to comment on the sale. Earlier this year, Biden said he would reassess the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia over its record on human rights and, especially, the death of Khashoggi, promising to ensure that the United States would “not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”
More recently, Biden tapped retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, who has served as a member of Raytheon’s board, as his nominee to be defense secretary.
Addressing the new Raytheon transaction, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said Biden “should immediately reverse course if this deal does go through.”
A Democratic congressional aide said the Trump administration was “trying to ram through even more arms sales to human rights abusers in its last month in office over clear congressional objections.”
A spokesman for Raytheon did not immediately provide a comment.
In addition to the Saudi sale, the Trump administration sent additional arms sale notifications to Congress this week, including small arms and small arms components for Canada, Philippines and Mexico.
Officials are expected to send notifications for aircraft missiles and other items for Egypt.
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, pictured in 2002. (photo: Zia Mazhar/AP)
Pakistan Court Orders Release of Man Charged Over Daniel Pearl Murder
Jason Burke, Guardian UK
Burke writes: "A court in Pakistan has ordered that a British-born Islamist militant charged with the 2002 kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl should be freed, his defence lawyer has said."
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a suspect in US journalist’s 2002 killing, had conviction overturned this year
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was sentenced to death in 2002 for masterminding Pearl’s murder but the conviction was overturned this year. He has been in jail ever since awaiting the outcome of a series of appeals and legal arguments.
Sheikh’s role in the murder of Pearl has long been disputed. The 47-year-old is known to have been involved in the kidnapping of the journalist, who was investigating al-Qaida in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi when he disappeared in January 2002, but is thought not to have taken part in his killing.
In April the high court of Sindh province found that the murder charge had not been proven, but upheld a seven-year jail sentence for kidnapping. Three other people sentenced to life in prison for their role in the plot were acquitted. The decision stunned the US government, Pearl’s family and journalism advocacy groups.
Sheikh’s conviction was showcased by Pakistan as proof of its commitment to the US-led war against terrorism, launched after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 that killed 3,000 people in New York and Washington.
Pearl’s murder, which was filmed and the video posted online, may instead have been carried out by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the key organiser of the 9/11 attacks, who is being held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
In 2007, US officials said Mohammed, who was systematically tortured after his arrest in Pakistan in 2003, had confessed to personally killing Pearl during a military hearing at Guantánamo Bay.
The Sindh high court’s release order overturns a decision by Pakistan’s top court that Sheikh should remain in custody while Pearl’s family appeal against the acquittal.
Sheikh’s lawyer, Mehmood Sheikh, called for his client to be released immediately.
Faisal Siddiqi, the Pearl family lawyer, said Sheikh would be freed until the appeal was completed but would be returned to prison if the family was successful in overturning the acquittal.
There are separate appeals against the acquittal by the government and Pearl’s family, a process that under Pakistani law could take years. The government has opposed Sheikh’s release, saying it would endanger the public. The supreme court will resume its hearing on 5 January.
Sheikh grew up in east London and was educated at a private school where he gained a reputation for being unruly. The son of a prosperous Pakistan-born businessman, he briefly studied at the London School of Economics before dropping out to join an organisation coordinating relief efforts for Muslims during the Bosnian war.
Radicalised by his experience in the Balkans, Sheikh travelled to Pakistan where he joined an extremist group. After several months training in camps in Afghanistan, Sheikh was sent to India to kidnap tourists to secure the release of a senior militant imprisoned there.
Captured in a police raid, he was imprisoned in India but was released when extremists hijacked an Indian Airlines plane in 1999, and he travelled back to Pakistan.
Sheikh set a trap for Pearl in the first days of January 2002, though his exact motives are unclear. He eventually gave himself up to civilian authorities after Pearl’s death.
According to an authoritative investigation and a 100-page report researched over several years by staff and students at Georgetown University, Pakistani authorities knowingly used perjured testimony to pin the act of murder on Sheikh and his three co-conspirators to achieve a rapid conviction.
“While the four were involved in the kidnapping plan and certainly were culpable, they were not present when Pearl was murdered. Others who were present and actually assisted in the brutal beheading were not charged,” the report concluded.
The kidnapping and eventual execution of Pearl involved three sets of militants, the investigators found: one, led by Sheikh, to abduct the journalist; a second, which kept him prisoner in a home on the outskirts of Karachi; and a third, comprising senior figures in al-Qaida, which killed him.
The decision to murder Pearl was taken by Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian militant who was very influential within al-Qaida but virtually unknown to others at the time. Adel is now regarded as one of its most effective operators and is considered a potential successor to Ayman al-Zawahiri as leader of the organisation.
The Georgetown investigation revealed that US investigators had found that the pattern of the veins in the hand seen beheading Pearl in the video of his murder closely resembled those seen in images of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s hands. The investigators concluded that the al-Qaida extremist had killed the journalist.
The report also found that most of those involved in the crime had escaped justice. Several were killed in clashes with Pakistani security agencies, and one was shot dead by four unidentified men on motorbikes in 2009. Several of the guards who kept Pearl imprisoned, including one who held him down during his execution, have never been fully investigated by Pakistani authorities.
Others have served short prison sentences for other crimes but have never been charged for their roles in Pearl’s murder.
Authorities in Pakistan were embarrassed both by Sheikh’s involvement with a series of Pakistan-based extremist groups prior to the kidnapping of Pearl, and the extensive role of such organisations in the detention and murder of the journalist. Many Islamist extremist factions in Pakistan have received extensive support from the country’s security services over decades.
Members of the Cowboy-Indian Alliance, a group of ranchers, farmers and Indigenous leaders, protests against the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington on 22 April 2014. (photo: Gary Cameron/Reuters)
Faith Spotted Eagle and Kendall Mackey | Biden Must Be Our 'Climate President'. He Can Start by Ending Pipeline Projects
Faith Spotted Eagle and Kendall Mackey, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "As we prepare to turn the page on 2020, and inaugurate Joe Biden as president on 20 January 2021, the incoming administration has a climate mandate to listen to people across America - and keep fossil fuels in the ground. This means stopping the Keystone XL, Dakota Access and Line 3 pipelines on day one."
There is no way to mine fossil fuels without driving the planet past 1.5C of warming and putting Indigenous communities at risk
While Trump props up failing fossil fuel companies, including through government handouts from Covid-19 stimulus packages to the tune of $15bn, Biden has already committed to transitioning the United States off oil, holding polluters accountable, honoring treaty rights and stopping the Keystone XL pipeline.
In August, Joe Biden laid out his $2tn climate plan, which has the support of Indigenous peoples and their allies, Black communities and environmental voters. Biden’s climate plan is the most ambitious plan of a major party presidential nominee ever. To be the most ambitious climate president ever, Biden must implement a climate test on all federal permitting and projects, to ensure any project not aligned with tackling the climate crisis and keeping warming under 1.5 degrees does not move forward. A meaningful climate test must keep fossil fuels in the ground.
Just last week, Biden announced the New Mexico congresswoman Deb Haaland as his nominee for US secretary of the interior. Haaland is a member of the Pueblo Laguna tribe; if confirmed she will be the first Native person to serve in the role. We hope her leadership will help protect our public lands and Indigenous sovereignty as we phase out fossil fuels.
As we write, communities across Minnesota are rising up to protect land, water and treaty rights as Line 3 pipeline construction begins and lawsuits are filed in opposition. Meanwhile, communities in South Dakota are mobilizing to pressure Biden to rescind the permit for Keystone XL and end the project once and for all.
If built, Line 3 would release as much greenhouse gas pollution as 50 new coal-fired power plants, violate Ojibwe treaty rights, and put Minnesota’s water, ecosystems and communities in harm’s way. Keystone XL would have a similarly devastating impact on water, land, people and the Oceti Sakowin tribes’ treaty and inherent rights.
Both pipeline projects have blatantly refused meaningful consultation with the tribes impacted. This is glaringly disrespectful to grassroots dedication in territories that have stood up to this invasion for years, as well as a denial of the irreversible impact these pipelines will have on cultural and spiritual sites.
Projects like Line 3 and Keystone XL are also directly linked to violence against and trafficking of Native women and girls, due to the installation of temporary housing for mostly male pipeline workers, known as “man camps”. These man camps are also a hotbed for Covid-19, drawing thousands of out-of-state workers. South Dakota is at a crisis point with Covid-19 cases, yet the threat of Keystone XL construction looms.
There is increasing anticipation of violence from militarized police partnered with Enbridge, the Canadian pipeline company backing Line 3, triggering memories of violence against water protectors and allies in the fight to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).
In the shadow of centuries of genocide and erasure of Indigenous peoples, Barack Obama halted DAPL and rejected Keystone XL. Now, Biden has a chance to build upon this legacy and stop Line 3, Keystone XL and DAPL.
Stopping these pipelines is completely within Joe Biden’s purview and responsibility. Through executive action, Biden can order an immediate pause on oil pipeline construction, and a moratorium on any new projects or expansions, as he reviews Trump-era approvals for conflict or undue influence from the fossil fuel industry. Biden must also reverse over 100 environmental and climate protection rollbacks brought on by the Trump administration.
But to be a true climate president, Biden must go further. Just as pipelines will inevitably spill, any new or existing fossil fuel project would inevitably fail a climate test. There is no safe or clean way to extract, transport, or refine coal, oil or gas without poisoning our communities and driving us past 1.5C of warming. In addition, the construction, transport and burning of fossil fuels have grave impacts on public health and safety, including premature death, lung cancer and increased rates of Covid-19.
From the Keystone XL Promise to Protect to the Line 3 Pledge of Resistance, tens of thousands of people are prepared to wield our sacred and patriotic duty to stop these toxic and unnecessary fossil fuel projects. In addition, thousands of people have already sent petitions to Joe Biden urging him to halt these projects.
It’s time to make polluters pay for the damages done to our communities’ health, land and wellbeing. This starts with stopping fossil fuel projects and returning land to Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, we must dismantle existing projects and fund a just and equitable transition to a regenerative 100% renewable economy.
The stakes are higher than ever – economically, socially and politically. Biden must show guts in holding coal, oil and gas executives accountable for knowingly bringing climate disasters, pollution, sickness and death to our doorsteps.
It’s our time to leap toward a renewable energy revolution that centers Indigenous sovereignty, community health, and a safe, livable future for all.
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