24 December 20
We Seriously Need a Good Day of Fundraising - Can you Help?
All it takes to turn a very bad fundraising day into a reasonable one is a few decent donations. That’s it. This has been a month with very few reasonable fundraising days.
Now we have a problem. Who can reasonably help.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
24 December 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Paul Krugman | The Ghost of Sabotage Future
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes: "The not-a-stimulus deal Congress reached over the weekend - seriously, this is about disaster relief, not boosting the economy - didn't come a moment too soon."
This winter’s economy won’t be as grim as feared, but what about after?
Actually, it came much too late: Crucial aid to many unemployed Americans and businesses expired months ago. But now some of that aid is back, for a while.
True, the aid will be less generous than it was in the spring and summer: $300 a week in enhanced unemployment benefits, rather than $600. But because the workers still out of a job as a result of the pandemic tended to have low earnings even before the coronavirus struck, they will, on average, be receiving something like 85 percent of their pre-Covid-19 income.
By the way, although the one-time $600 checks to a much wider group of Americans are getting much of the media coverage, they account for only a small percentage of the overall expense and are far less crucial than the unemployment benefits to keeping families afloat.
Steny Hoyer. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Republicans Block Last-Minute Bid for $2,000 Stimulus Checks
Sarah Ferris, Marianne Levine and Anita Kumar, POLITICO
Excerpt: "Congressional leaders are clambering to avoid a disastrous government shutdown a day before Christmas after President Donald Trump rejected their $900 billion stimulus deal that would provide relief to millions of Americans."
House Republicans broke with the president over providing $2,000 in stimulus checks to Americans.
And as Trump single-handedly halts hundreds of billions of dollars in coronavirus aid, even some Republicans are urging him to drop the matter.
“The best way out of this is for the president to sign the bill and I still hope that’s what he decides to do,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the No. 4 GOP leader, said on Thursday. But Blunt conceded he had “no idea” what Trump will do.
The scramble on Capitol Hill — which has largely emptied out for the holidays — includes a last-minute bid by House Democrats to roughly triple the size of Americans’ stimulus checks to meet Trump’s demands. House Republicans on Thursday morning blocked the effort, setting up a dramatic showdown in Congress next week that could put the president at odds with members of his own party.
It’s the latest chaotic move in the Trump presidency, which has seen multiple shutdowns and deals scuttled at the last minute. The president’s eleventh-hour demands took lawmakers and senior aides by surprise, particularly since Trump left nearly all of the negotiations to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who made no push for the $2,000 stimulus checks that the president is now seeking.
Both parties are now stranded with a Trump-driven crisis on Christmas Eve — uncertain how to deliver quick relief to millions of Americans suffering in the pandemic-battered economy, let alone keep the government funded.
“Perhaps the only mistake was believing the president and Secretary Mnuchin when we were told that the bill — when it’s passed — would be signed by the president,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters Thursday when asked how they arrived at this point.
Top officials, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mnuchin, are privately discussing contingency plans such as a stopgap spending bill if Trump does formally veto the measure by Monday, when funding is set to lapse. But it’s not clear how long that stopgap measure would last — or whether Trump would sign it, if it makes none of the changes he’s demanded, such as cuts to foreign aid, according to people familiar with the discussions.
“This is Christmas Eve,” Hoyer said. “Surely, the president of the United States, whether he’s in Mar-a-Lago or anywhere else, ought to empathize with the pain and suffering and apprehension and deep angst that the American people are feeling.”
Back at the White House, most aides still don’t seem to know whether the president plans to actually veto the legislation. In recent weeks, the president has been far more focused on a futile effort to overturn the Nov. 3 election than he has on the pandemic and has lashed out at top GOP leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.).
“This is Trump being Trump,” said a former senior administration official who remains close to the White House. “He always keeps you guessing. It’s Trump — who knows what he will do?”
The White House did not respond to repeated questions about the legislation.
Trump, meanwhile, spent Thursday at his South Florida Mar-a-Lago resort, keeping Americans in a state of uncertainty for a second day in a row. Just after 10 a.m., Trump hit the golf course. He is expected to stay in Florida until the new year.
A Republican close to the White House said the president is unlikely to actually veto the bill, noting that he didn’t use the word “veto” as he has in the past. And it wouldn't be the first time Trump has threatened to veto legislation before signing it: In 2018, Trump approved a $1.3 trillion spending bill, despite saying he was “unhappy” with it.
“He’s turning a fairly decent four years with a decent record into an utter disaster,” said a former staffer. “Most selfish thing I’ve ever seen.”
But Democrats fear that Trump will formally reject the measure, forcing them to move quickly on a short-term funding measure that can carry Congress into the early days of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Earlier this week, Trump said the $600 direct checks should be increased to $2,000 and described the package’s spending levels as “wasteful,” despite having previously approved and requested them.
Democrats — who have supported bigger checks — were quick to force congressional Republicans to block Trump’s request.
House Democrats went to the floor on Thursday with a proposal to increase the size of direct payments to $2,000, instead of the $600 that’s in the bill. But Republicans rejected the move, and instead offered their own proposal to shrink foreign aid in the broader spending bill. Democrats rejected it.
“Today, on Christmas Eve morning, House Republicans cruelly deprived the American people of the $2,000 that the President agreed to support,” Pelosi said in a statement. “If the President is serious about the $2,000 direct payments, he must call on House Republicans to end their obstruction.”
The House plans to return Monday, where lawmakers will take a full vote on whether to substitute the $2,000 checks in the bill, as Trump has demanded. Democrats could also take up a stopgap spending bill Monday.
But even if the $2,000 check measure clears the House, it’s unlikely the Senate would take it up. Blunt predicted Thursday that the proposal wouldn’t even clear the 60 votes needed to pass the chamber.
Speaking after the Democrats’ failed efforts on the floor, an emotional Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), railed against the president for blocking more relief, arguing that Trump "doesn’t give a damn about people."
"He sowed more fear. He threw kerosene on a fire," Dingell said.
A Walmart store entrance in Pittsburgh. (photo: Gene J Puskar/AP
Walmart Sued by US Over Alleged Role in Fueling America's Opioid Crisis
Victoria Bekiempis, Guardian UK
Bekiempis writes: "The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Walmart on Tuesday, alleging that the retail giant filled 'thousands of invalid prescriptions' for powerful painkillers, helping fuel America's opioid crisis."
Retailer accused of filling ‘thousands of invalid prescriptions’ and pressuring pharmacists to act irresponsibly
Walmart runs more than 5,000 pharmacies across the country. Until 2018, the chain was a wholesale distributor of controlled substances for its own pharmacies, giving it extensive reach into many communities.
The civil complaint points to the role Walmart’s pharmacies may have played in the crisis by filling opioid prescriptions and by unlawfully distributing controlled substances to the pharmacies during the height of the opioid crisis.
“As a nationwide dispenser and distributor of opioids, and given the sheer number of pharmacies it operates, Walmart was uniquely well positioned to prevent the illegal diversion of opioids,” the 160-page civil suit, filed in Delaware federal court, said.
“Yet, for years, as the prescription drug abuse epidemic ravaged the country, Walmart abdicated those responsibilities,” the suit added.
In response, Walmart said the suit was “riddled with factual inaccuracies”.
The DoJ document said the company “knowingly violated well established rules requiring it to scrutinize controlled-substance prescriptions to ensure that they were valid – that is, issued by prescribers in a legitimate manner for legitimate purposes, not for purposes of abuse or other diversion,” the suit continued. While Walmart was legally required to check potential red flags, it “made little effort to ensure that it complied with them”.
Instead, Walmart made it hard for pharmacists to abide by these regulations. Managers pressured pharmacists to fill high volumes of prescriptions as quickly as possible “while at the same time denying them the authority to categorically refuse to fill prescriptions issued by prescribers the pharmacists knew were continually issuing invalid prescriptions”, the complaint charged.
Even though Walmart’s compliance arm had amassed extensive information showing that people were repeatedly trying to get invalid narcotic prescriptions filled, the unit kept that data from pharmacists, authorities also said.
Walmart filled prescriptions from prescribers who its own pharmacists had “repeatedly reported were acting as egregious ‘pill mills’ – even when Walmart was alerted that other pharmacies were not filling prescriptions for those prescribers. In fact, some of those pill-mill prescribers specifically told their patients to fill their prescriptions at Walmart.”
So intense were the pressures on pharmacists that managers told them to “[h]ustle to the customer, hustle from station to station” because completing prescriptions “is a battle of seconds”, federal authorities alleged.
As early as 2013, Walmart adopted a plan that used the number of prescriptions processed by an employee’s store as a factor in determining if the pharmacy staffer “was entitled to monetary incentive awards”.
The DoJ contends that Walmart has committed “hundreds of thousands of violations” of the Controlled Substances Act. If Walmart is found liable for violating this act, each unlawfully filled prescription could result in a $67,627 penalty. Each suspicious order that was not reported to authorities could result in a penalty of up to $15,691. Civil penalties could reach “billions”, the DoJ said.
More than 232,000 people died in the US from opioid-involved overdoses between 1999 and 2018, according to the DoJ.
In a statement, Walmart said that the DoJ’s investigation was “tainted by historical ethics violations, and this lawsuit invents a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors, and is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context”.
“Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) approved to prescribe opioids is a transparent attempt to shift blame from DEA’s well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place,” the company said.
Walmart recently sued the DoJ and DEA, alleging that authorities wrongly ascribed blame to the company. The retailer’s suit wants a federal judge to determine that the government does not have grounds to pursue civil damages, according to the Associated Press.
A hooded man holds a laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. (photo: Kacper Pempel/Reuters)
Experts Who Wrestled With SolarWinds Hackers Say Cleanup Could Take Months - or Longer
Raphael Satter, Reuters
Satter writes: "Cybersecurity expert Steven Adair and his team were in the final stages of purging the hackers from a think tank's network earlier this year when a suspicious pattern in the log data caught their eye."
The spies had not only managed to break back in – a common enough occurrence in the world of cyber incident response – but they had sailed straight through to the client’s email system, waltzing past the recently refreshed password protections like they didn’t exist.
“Wow,” Adair recalled thinking in a recent interview. “These guys are smarter than the average bear.”
It was only last week that Adair’s company - the Reston, Virginia-based Volexity - realized that the bears it had been wrestling with were the same set of advanced hackers who compromised Texas-based software company SolarWinds.
Using a subverted version of the company’s software as a makeshift skeleton key, the hackers crept into a swathe of U.S. government networks, including the Departments of Treasury, Homeland Security, Commerce, Energy, State and other agencies besides.
When news of the hack broke, Adair immediately thought back to the think tank, where his team had traced one of the break-in efforts to a SolarWinds server but never found the evidence they needed to nail the precise entry point or alert the company. Digital indicators published by cybersecurity company FireEye on Dec. 13 confirmed that the think tank and SolarWinds had been hit by the same actor.
Senior U.S. officials and lawmakers have alleged that Russia is to blame for the hacking spree, a charge the Kremlin denies.
Adair – who spent about five years helping defend NASA from hacking threats before eventually founding Volexity – said he had mixed feelings about the episode. On the one hand, he was pleased that his team’s assumption about a SolarWinds connection was right. On the other, they had been at the outer edge of a much bigger story.
A big chunk of the U.S. cybersecurity industry is now in the same place Volexity was earlier this year, trying to discover where the hackers have been and eliminate the various secret access points the hackers likely planted on their victims’ networks. Adair’s colleague Sean Koessel said the company was fielding about 10 calls a day from companies worried that they might have been targeted or concerned that the spies were in their networks.
His advice to everyone else hunting for the hackers: “Don’t leave any stone unturned.”
Koessel said the effort to uproot the hackers from the think tank - which he declined to identify - stretched from late 2019 to mid-2020 and occasioned two renewed break-ins. Performing the same task across the U.S. government is likely to be many times more difficult.
“I could easily see it taking half a year or more to figure out - if not into the years for some of these organizations,” Koessel said.
Pano Yannakogeorgos, a New York University associate professor who served as the founding dean of the Air Force Cyber College, also predicted an extended timeline and said some networks would have to be ripped out and replaced wholesale.
In any case, he predicted a big price tag as caffeinated experts were brought in to pore over digital logs for traces of compromise.
“There’s a lot of time, treasury, talent and Mountain Dew that’s involved,” he said.
Hillsong Church at Baulkham Hills in Sydney, 2004. (photo: Getty Images)
Hillsong Church Faces New Allegations of Abusive Behavior
Dan Adler, Vanity Fair
Adler writes: "Leadership for the megachurch Hillsong was responsible for the 'abuse of volunteers and real, amazing people,' according to a new New York Post report."
Carl Lentz’s firing from the megachurch has set off a flood of comments from previous members about their experiences.
eadership for the megachurch Hillsong was responsible for the “abuse of volunteers and real, amazing people,” according to a new New York Post report. Nicole Herman told the tabloid that in her experience founding Hillsong L.A. in 2013, she was beneath the senior pastors but “did everything.”
The claim follows a number of reports about the church that have emerged since its famous pastor Carl Lentz was fired over his well-publicized cheating scandal, including Page Six’s report on Thursday that volunteers sent a letter to church leaders in 2018 claiming that there were “verified, widely circulated stories of inappropriate sexual behavior amongst staff/interns.” (Hillsong confirmed in a statement to Vanity Fair on Friday that it “received a letter with serious allegations regarding specific members of the Hillsong NYC volunteer and staff teams.”)
According to the Post, Herman put out a call on Instagram on Saturday to hear from “a million other amazing people who left this cult,” telling the outlet that her inbox has since been flooded. Yolandi Bosch told the tabloid that she attended Hillsong College in Australia after a representative for the school convinced her to give up a career in film and move there from South Africa—and asked her to sign a non-disclosure agreement saying that she wouldn’t speak about her experiences at the college without approval.
Bosch didn’t sign the NDA. She told the Post that the church required a pastor’s permission to date and that her behavior was monitored by fellow students at the request of school administration. “It felt like a reality show—it’s really a cult,” Bosch said.
After Bosch started going to another church on Sundays, she said she was removed from Hillsong’s choir and put into a school program called “Refresh” where she was tasked with 20 consecutive hours of unpaid manual labor. She says she was also threatened with losing her visa. Before a church conference, a Hillsong doctor that Bosch was told to see when she fell ill allegedly said she was fine, while a practice separate from the church said she had kidney stones. Bosch said she was threatened with failing if she didn’t work the conference and passed out during her shift. The church reportedly told her to withdraw from school or be expelled, and Bosch withdrew.
In a statement to Vanity Fair, Hillsong said that “like all students and volunteers on the Refresh team,” Bosch “would have helped maintain the building during special events and conferences. Our guidelines would have prohibited any student or volunteer from performing a single task for 20 consecutive hours as part of this program.” It defended its Refresh program by saying “these practicums give students exposure to the wide range of activities involved in contemporary church life.”
“They convinced me to drop everything I was interested in becoming,” Bosch told the Post. She and hundreds of former students, employees, and volunteers are reportedly looking for representation to lodge a complaint with the Parliament of Australia about what they claim is “industrial slave labor.”
The still-growing list of allegations about Hillsong has been met with scorn by Brian Houston, the church’s founder and senior pastor. In the aftermath of a Business Insider investigation that quoted a number of former church members who accused Hillsong of discrimination and exploitation, Houston wrote in a tweet that has since been deleted, “Just because the media say it, doesn’t make it true. Just because people chatter, doesn’t make it right. Judge by your own experiences, not the grandstand noise.”
But the extent of the accusations has been enough to force the church into defending its role in less recent controversies. Houston’s father Frank, who died in 2004, led the Assemblies of God in New Zealand in the ’60s and ’70s. He was later accused of sexually abusing up to nine young boys, and a royal commission in Australia found in 2015 that the church's executive board, which Brian Houston led at the time, didn’t alert the authorities when it learned of the allegations.
In an email obtained by V.F., the board of Hillsong Church Australia wrote to church members on Monday that “these articles are primarily gossip and we ignore them in the knowledge that we know the truth,” before broaching the subject of Houston’s knowledge of his father’s abuse.
“From the moment Pastor Brian discovered this shocking news, around 20 years ago,” the letter said, “he has always been very open and clear about the circumstances around this, and our church has stood with him and his family. We want to ensure you are clear about the details.”
Smoke rises above the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi, Sunday, May 20, 2012, during a disturbance at the prison. A guard at the southwest Mississippi prison died Sunday and several other employees were injured during what the facility's private operator is calling 'an inmate disturbance' that continued into the evening. (photo: The Natchez Democrat/Lauren Wood/AP)
Cameroonian Immigrants in Adams County Prison Say They Were Tortured by ICE Agents
Brittany Brown, Mississippi Today
Brown writes: "Cameroonian asylum seeker was sitting in a cell in the Adams County Correctional Center one Sunday afternoon in late September 2020 when he was approached by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent."
Editor’s note: The Cameroonian immigrants quoted in this story are not named by Mississippi Today because they fear for their safety and retaliation from immigration officials. We carefully verified the identities of three men currently in ICE custody and agreed to identify them using their initials — the same way they are identified in federal documents. A fourth man quoted in this story is out on bond and is not named because he fears deportation and retaliation from immigration officials.
The agent asked the man to sign a document.
“I didn’t even know what was on the paper,” the man, identified in legal documents as C.A., told Mississippi Today in a telephone interview.
The ICE agent told C.A. that it was a deportation document.
“(The ICE agent) said he’s doing his job, and he is supposed to make sure I sign because my plane has been scheduled,” C.A. said. “I told him, with all due respect, ‘I have attorneys working my case. I can’t go ahead signing any paper without the counsel of my attorney.’”
When C.A. refused to sign the document, violence ensued, he said.
Later that night, C.A., who has been in ICE detention in Natchez since March 2020, said he was handcuffed, isolated and beaten by ICE agents and detention center officials.
“They were on my fingers, struggling to open my fingers because they were forcing my fingerprints. So I was crying and begging that I want to talk to my attorney first,” C.A. said. “Before I knew it, my fingers were broken in one of my hands.”
C.A.’s experience is one of eight Cameroonian immigrants’ experiences cited in a federal complaint filed this fall by several civil rights groups. The complaint alleges ICE officers and others at the Adams County Correctional Facility used torture against “Cameroonian individuals in their custody in attempts to coerce them to sign immigration documents through pressure, threats and — in several cases — excessive use of force,” the complaint said.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom for Immigrants, the Natchez Network and other immigrant rights organizations submitted the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties complaint on Oct. 7 to ICE, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the DHS Office of Inspector General.
The Adams County Correctional Center, a private detention center run by Nashville-based CoreCivic, partners with ICE to detain immigrants. With a capacity of about 2,300, nearly 800 immigrants are currently detained in the medium-security facility.
Each of the eight immigrants, including C.A., said they experienced different forms of excessive force by ICE agents and CoreCivic officers, the complaint said. When the detained Cameroonian immigrants refused to sign travel documents without first speaking to their attorneys out of fear of deportation, the retaliation began, the complaint said.
In C.A.’s case, after his struggle with the ICE agent, he said he was taken to the medical unit after the incident, and three days later, he was put in isolation for two weeks.
When asked for comment by Mississippi Today, ICE did not offer any specifics about the allegations in the complaint.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not comment on specific matters presented to the Office of the Inspector General, which provides independent oversight and accountability within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” Sarah Loicano, an ICE public affairs officer, told Mississippi Today in an email.
The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General did not confirm or deny an ongoing investigation into the Adams County Correctional Center or the New Orleans ICE Field Office as a matter of policy, Tanya Aldridge, a spokesperson, told Mississippi Today in an email.
CoreCivic, which owns and operates the detention center in Natchez and another facility in Tutwiler, denied the allegations outlined in the complaint.
“The allegations contained in SPLC’s October 7 letter are completely false,” Ryan Gustin, CoreCivic manager of public affairs, told Mississippi Today in an email. “CoreCivic does not enforce immigration laws or policies or have any say whatsoever in an individual’s deportation or release. Those decisions are solely made by our government partners.”
Cameroon, a country in central Africa, is embroiled in violence due to the nation’s language divide. Cameroonians have been in conflict, known as the Anglophone Crisis or the Cameroonian Civil War, since late 2016 along the lines of language between the French-speaking majority and the English-speaking minority.
More than 3,000 people have died and more than half a million people have been forced to flee their homes during the violent conflict, which intensified greatly in late 2019.
C.A., an English-speaker, said he fled Cameroon and came to the United States to save his life.
“When I got into this country, I knew I could be protected because I know, from what I’ve learned, that this country is one of the best countries in the world,” C.A. said. “Humanity is highly progressive in this country. So I was shocked at not receiving it. They just sent me to the jail and begin torture by ICE. They’re making me seem much more like I am a criminal.”
Another Cameroonian asylum seeker, previously detained at the Adams County Correctional Facility and currently out on bond, told Mississippi Today he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border into Arizona after a yearlong journey.
His journey to Natchez spanned several months and thousands of miles. He left Cameroon on foot and traveled to Nigeria, where he got on a plane and flew to Ecuador. With the help of locals, he traveled by foot from Ecuador through Colombia and into Panama, where he said he was held in a detention center for one month.
Once he was released in Panama, he continued his travels north by catching a bus through Costa Rica and traveled by foot through Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. He crossed the border into Mexico, where he said he was detained for about four months and released after the intervention of a nonprofit lawyer.
He then traveled through Mexico for the next several weeks. He said when he originally tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, it was closed due to COVID-19 restrictions, so he waited in Reynosa, Mexico, a city just across the border from McAllen, Texas, spending time washing cars on the side of the road for money as a means of survival.
“Some people passed by and kind of like hurt us, the migrants,” he said. “Life was really kind of like extremely difficult for me.”
He said he was soon forced to leave Reynosa and traveled to Mexicali, Mexico, a border city between California and Mexico. He said he paid a Mexican citizen, who showed him where to cross the border into Arizona. He arrived in the United States this summer, he said.
When he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, he said he turned himself in to border patrol agents and was quarantined for one week in La Palma Correctional Center just south of Phoenix, Ariz. He was soon transported to the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, and after about five months in ICE custody, he was released on bond from the ICE detention facility this fall.
“I fled Cameroon because of a genocide that is going on,” the man told Mississippi Today. “I fled Cameroon because of my political opinion, so I had to flee to come to the United States to seek protection.”
He told Mississippi Today that although he never experienced any violence or harm from ICE agents in the Adams County Correctional Center, he had heard about the other Cameroonian immigrants who were allegedly tortured.
“When they told me that their hands were hurt and tied to put signatures or to do fingerprints, I learned that most of them were put in chains and they were held with force to enter signatures on these documents,” the man said. “Being in detention behind four walls and behind barriers, it really wasn’t easy.”
E.O., another man listed in the federal complaint, has been in the U.S. since November 2019 and has been in Adams County Correctional Center since January 2020. He also talked in grim terms about his future if he were to be deported.
“I’m trying to stay positive because I don’t want to go back to my country,” E.O. said. “I don’t want to die.”
On Sept. 27 and Sept. 28, ICE agents handcuffed the men and took them to a dorm in the Adams County Correction Center known as “Zulu,” according to the federal complaint. This dorm “is known amongst the men as a place where those who are punished are taken,” the complaint said, and ICE agents and CoreCivic officers “took turns beating up the men and forcing them to sign travel documents.”
One of the detained Cameroonian immigrants, identified in the complaint as D.F, said when an ICE agent approached him on Sept. 27 asking him to sign a deportation document, he refused, reportedly saying, “I am afraid to go back to my country.”
“He promised he would torture me,” D.F. said in the complaint.
When an ICE agent returned to D.F. the next day, he still refused to sign the documents out of fear of deportation, the complaint said.
“He pressed my neck into the floor. I said, ‘Please, I can’t breathe,’” D.F. said in the complaint. “They continued to torture me in Zulu. They put me on my knees where they were torturing me and they said they were going to kill me… While in Zulu, they did get my fingerprint on my deportation document and took my picture.”
D.F. and four of the eight men in the complaint have since been deported, according to the SPLC. Three of the men in the complaint — C.A., E.O., and B.J. — remain in ICE custody at the Adams County Correctional Center.
There have also been reports of violence against detainees at other facilities within the New Orleans ICE Field Office, which oversees facilities and operations in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.
On Aug. 10, 2020, detained Cameroonian immigrants at the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Louisiana “staged a hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention, racist treatment from prison staff, and inhumane conditions amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to an SPLC press release. “In response, prison officials used unnecessary lethal force to place them in choke holds, pointed a gun at them and told the men they were going to be placed in solitary confinement.”
SPLC and other immigrant rights organizations submitted another Civil Rights and Civil Liberties complaint on Nov. 5, 2020 — a month after the complaint about Adams County Correctional Center was submitted — about the alleged use of force by ICE agents against detained Cameroonian immigrants in the Jackson Parish Correctional Facility in Louisiana.
“The New Orleans Field Office, which is responsible for Adams (County Correctional Center), is well aware of these allegations of torture and use of force in signing of deportation documents, and they have been for quite some time,” said Sofia Casini, director of visitation advocacy strategies at Freedom for Immigrants organization.
Casini, who was one of the main authors of the federal complaints, said ICE also has a pattern of deporting witnesses in investigations.
“What’s really important here is ICE’s pattern and practice of disappearing key witnesses to investigations,” Casini said. “There were eight people on that complaint (against the Adams County Correctional Center). The other five are key witnesses to corroborate the stories of these three men, and they themselves suffered this same violence and intimidation. Why were they deported? You know, ICE is disappearing key witnesses.”
B.J., one of the immigrants included in the complaint against the Adams County Correctional Center, told Mississippi Today that once he fled Cameroon, he never thought he would experience detention and torture in the United States.
“It was like hell to me,” B.J. said. “I don’t know why they’re doing that to us.”
A bald eagle perched in a Sitka spruce in Tongass National Forest. (photo: All Canada Photos/Alamy)
Alaskan Tribes, Activists and Businesses Sue to Save America's Biggest National Forest
Nina Lakhani, Guardian UK
Lakhani writes: "A coalition of Alaskan native tribes, conservation groups and small businesses have filed a lawsuit in an effort to save America's largest national forest by overturning one of the Trump administration's most contentious environmental rollbacks."
Tongass national forest, which plays a key role in fighting climate crisis, poised for logging after US ruling
Protection for the Tongass national forest in Alaska, one of the world’s last intact temperate rainforests, which plays a crucial role in fighting climate change, has been gutted by a recent US government decision to overturn a two-decade ban on logging and road building.
The widely condemned rollback jeopardizes the ancestral homelands of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian people, and threatens the culture and food security of many indigenous communities who rely on the Tongass for hunting and gathering.
The decision to exempt the Tongass from the Roadless Rule, which protects millions of acres of pristine forest nationwide, came after Trump personally intervened following a private meeting with the Alaska governor, Mike Dunleavy, aboard Air Force One.
The subsequent consultation process by the Forest Service was also mired in allegations of funding violations and bias towards the logging industry and the state of Alaska, which has long pushed for the Roadless Rule to be revoked.
Now Earthjustice and co-counsel Natural Resources Defense Council are suing the US Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service on behalf of small businesses in south-east Alaska, more than a dozen conservation organizations and five tribes: the Organized Village of Kake; Organized Village of Saxman; Hoonah Indian Association; Klawock Cooperative Association; and Ketchikan Indian Community.
“The Trump’s administration’s ignored input from tribes and the impact on tribes who rely on the Tongass for hunting, gathering and fishing. It ignored the impact on fishermen, the tourist industry, and the impact on the climate for the whole world,” said Kate Glover, a lawyer with legal nonprofit EarthJustice. “Essentially the decision did not make sense, it was arbitrary.”
The Tongass is considered the “crown jewel” of national forests, sequestering huge amounts of carbon dioxide to keep the global-heating greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.
Stretching 16m acres over 500 miles, the Tongass is unique for its size and biodiversity, with thousands of islands, waterways, glacial fjords and green valleys flanked by rugged mountains and sprawling forests of old-growth cedar, spruce and hemlock trees. It is home to myriad species including wild Pacific salmon, brown bears, wolves, Sitka black-tailed deer and bald eagles.
“The need for this litigation is a mark of shame upon the federal government for violating the trust and responsibilities it has to the Indigenous peoples of the Tongass,” said Robert Starbard, tribal administrator of the Hoonah Indian Association. “It is equally a stain upon the State of Alaska which colluded with the Trump administration to circumvent scientific analysis to achieve a desired political outcome.”
The Tongass had been safeguarded since 2001, when the Roadless Rule was adopted during the Clinton administration after an extensive public consultation, in which 96% of the 1 million participants nationwide supported protection for unspoiled forests.
Since then tourism has soared to more than a million visitors annually, and the forest supports some of the last productive wild salmon runs in the world, as well as a billion-dollar commercial fishing industry.
“South-east Alaska’s future depends on safeguarding the natural capital that sustains our economy and cultural identity,” said Linda Behnken, commercial fisherman and executive director of Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.
The timber industry currently contributes less than 1% to the south-east Alaska economy, compared with 25% by the fishing and tourism industries combined.
Exemption from the Roadless Rule leaves more than 9m acres of forest vulnerable to a new wave of clear-cutting and roadbuilding, and threatens a key buffer against climate change. A 2019 study found that the Tongass absorbs more carbon than any other national forest, on a level comparable to the Amazon.
The Trump administration claims this will benefit the timber industry without hurting tourism and fishing. Yet its own analysis showed that the change would not create significant logging jobs or income, fueling fears that the real reason behind the controversial decision has not been divulged.
“This is not about timber sales; everyone knows that the logging industry is waning and dying. This is about mining,” said Kashudoha Wanda Loescher Culp, 72, a Tlingit activist and Tongass coordinator for the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network.
“The 2001 Roadless Rule was a victory by the people but by not codifying the protection into law, forests like the Tongass were left deliberately vulnerable and that’s what we’ve seen industry take advantage of through Trump,” added Culp. “This an attack on our peoples and the climate.”
It could take up to a year for the federal court in Juneau to rule on the litigation, leaving the Tongass vulnerable to speculators unless the incoming Joe Biden administration intervenes to reinstate protection.
“If the judge doesn’t overturn the government decision, our way of life will be destroyed,” Joel Jackson, 64, president of the Organized Village of Kake, told the Guardian. “The Tongass has been our home for over 10,000 years, we need to protect what we have left.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.