21 September 20
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Noam Chomsky: The World Is at the Most Dangerous Moment in Human History
George Eaton, The New Statesman
Excerpt: "The US professor warns that the climate crisis, the threat of nuclear war and rising authoritarianism mean the risk of human extinction has never been greater."
oam Chomsky has warned that the world is at the most dangerous moment in human history owing to the climate crisis, the threat of nuclear war and rising authoritarianism. In an exclusive interview with the New Statesman, the 91-year-old US linguist and activist said that the current perils exceed those of the 1930s.
“There’s been nothing like it in human history,” Chomsky said. “I’m old enough to remember, very vividly, the threat that Nazism could take over much of Eurasia, that was not an idle concern. US military planners did anticipate that the war would end with a US-dominated region and a German-dominated region... But even that, horrible enough, was not like the end of organised human life on Earth, which is what we’re facing.”
Chomsky was interviewed in advance of the first summit of the Progressive International (18-20 September), a new organisation founded by Bernie Sanders, the former US presidential candidate, and Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, to counter right-wing authoritarianism. In an echo of the movement’s slogan “internationalism or extinction”, Chomsky warned: “We’re at an astonishing confluence of very severe crises. The extent of them was illustrated by the last setting of the famous Doomsday Clock. It’s been set every year since the atom bombing, the minute hand has moved forward and back. But last January, they abandoned minutes and moved to seconds to midnight, which means termination. And that was before the scale of the pandemic.”
This shift, Chomsky said, reflected “the growing threat of nuclear war, which is probably more severe than it was during the Cold War. The growing threat of environmental catastrophe, and the third thing that they’ve been picking up for the last few years is the sharp deterioration of democracy, which sounds at first as if it doesn’t belong but it actually does, because the only hope for dealing with the two existential crises, which do threaten extinction, is to deal with them through a vibrant democracy with engaged, informed citizens who are participating in developing programmes to deal with these crises.”
Chomsky added that “[Donald] Trump has accomplished something quite impressive: he’s succeeded in increasing the threat of each of the three dangers. On nuclear weapons, he’s moved to continue, and essentially bring to an end, the dismantling of the arms control regime, which has offered some protection against terminal disaster. He’s greatly increased the development of new, dangerous, more threatening weapons, which means others do so too, which is increasing the threat to all of us.
“On environmental catastrophe, he’s escalated his effort to maximise the use of fossil fuels and to terminate the regulations that somewhat mitigate the effect of the coming disaster if we proceed on our present course.”
“On the deterioration of democracy, it’s become a joke. The executive branch of [the US] government has been completely purged of any dissident voice. Now it’s left with a group of sycophants.”
Chomsky described Trump as the figurehead of a new “reactionary international” consisting of Brazil, India, the UK, Egypt, Israel and Hungary. “In the western hemisphere the leading candidate is [Jair] Bolsonaro’s Brazil, kind of a small-time clone of President Trump. In the Middle East it will be based on the family dictatorships, the most reactionary states in the world. [Abdel al-]Sisi’s Egypt is the worst dictatorship that Egypt has ever had. Israel has moved so far to the right that you need a telescope to see it, it’s about the only country in the world where young people are even more reactionary than adults.”
He added: “[Narendra] Modi is destroying Indian secular democracy, severely repressing the Muslim population, he’s just vastly extended the terrible Indian occupation of Kashmir. In Europe, the leading candidate is [Viktor] Orbán in Hungary, who is creating a proto-fascist state. There are other figures, like [Matteo] Salvini in Italy, who gets his kicks out of watching refugees drown in the Mediterranean.”
Of the UK, he said: “[Nigel] Farage will come along and be a proper candidate if Boris Johnson doesn’t serve the purpose, which he may.” He added that the UK government’s threat to “violate international law and make a total break with the European Union” would “turn a fading Britain into even more of a vassal of the United States then it’s already become”.
Chomsky described the Progressive International, whose council also includes former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, novelist Arundhati Roy and former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, as “a loose coalition of people committed to a world of justice, peace, democratic participation, of changing social and economic institutions, so that they are not geared for private profit for the few but for the needs and concerns of the general population.”
Having lived through 22 US presidential elections, Chomsky warned that Trump’s threat to refuse to leave office if defeated by Democratic candidate Joe Biden was unprecedented.
“He’s already announced repeatedly that if he doesn’t like the outcome of the election he won’t leave. And this is taken very seriously by two high-level military officers, ex-military leaders, who’ve just sent a letter to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, reviewing for him his constitutional duties if the president refuses to leave office and gathers around him the paramilitary forces that he’s been using to terrorise people in Portland.
“The military has a duty in that case, the 82nd Airborne Division, to remove him by force. There’s a transition integrity project, high-level people from the Republicans and the Democrats; they’ve been running war games asking what would happen if Trump refuses to leave office – every one of them leads to civil war, every scenario that they can think of except a Trump victory leads to civil war. This is not a joke – nothing like this has happened in the history of parliamentary democracy.
“It was bad enough when your guy, Boris Johnson, prorogued parliament, which led to a furore. The Supreme Court intervened but it was too late. The [US] Supreme Court isn’t going to intervene here, not after the right-wing appointments that Trump has managed, so we’re at a moment that has never happened.”
Chomsky urged US leftists to vote for Biden in this November’s presidential election and to press him to pursue a progressive agenda.
“What the left should do is what it always should do: it should recognise that real politics is constant activism, in one form or another. Every couple of years something comes along called an election, you should take off a few minutes to decide if it’s worth voting against somebody, rarely for somebody. In the course of, say, Corbyn in England, I would have voted for him but most of the time the question is ‘who do you vote against?’
“This time the answer to that question is just overwhelmingly obvious: the Trump Republicans are just so utterly outrageous, way off the spectrum, that there’s simply no question about voting against them. So you take off a few minutes, go to the voting booth, push a lever, vote against Trump, which in a two-party system means you have to push the vote for the other candidate. But then the next thing you do is to challenge them, keep the pressure on to move them towards progressive programmes.”
Asked whether he still identified as an anarchist, Chomsky replied: “We have to ask what we mean by ‘anarchist’. In my view everybody, if they stop to think about it, is an anarchist, except the people who are pathological. The core principle of anarchism, from its origins, has been that authority and domination and hegemony have a burden of proof to bear, they have to prove that they’re legitimate. Sometimes they are, sometimes you can give an argument. If you can’t, they should be dismantled.
“How should they be dismantled? Well, you have to work on that, you can’t do it by snapping your fingers. Organisations are developing elements of the future society within the present one. But I think that ideal is virtually universal within our moral system, except for really pathological elements.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (photo: Michael Dwyer/AP)
Dana Milbank | They Couldn't Even Wait Until Ruth Bader Ginsburg Was in Her Grave
Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Milbank writes: "We can't even pause for a day to reflect on a life well-lived, to mourn the loss of a righteous voice."
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Cassie Hensley is one of two social workers employed by the police department in Alexandria, Kentucky. While they work for the police, they are not cops: they do not carry any weapon, do not have arresting powers and ride in a civilian car. (photo: Josh Wood)
The US Police Department That Decided to Hire Social Workers
Josh Wood, Guardian UK
Wood writes: "As social justice protests continue across America, there has been a push for a reckoning on the role of police in society as well as calls to defund or reimagine policing."
he Alexandria police chief, Mike Ward, was “sick and tired” of sending his officers to respond to 911 calls that they lacked the skills and time to handle. In this small Kentucky town of 10,000 people 15 miles south of Cincinnati, Ohio, two-thirds of the calls police responded to were not criminal – instead, they were mental health crises and arguments resulting from long-brewing interpersonal conflicts.
Police would show up, but they could rarely offer long-lasting solutions. Often, it was inevitable that they would be called back to the same address for the same problem again and again.
“We’ve been tasked – sometimes unjustifiably – with solving the problems of our community,” said Ward, who retired last year. “Just call the police, they’ll take care of it. And we can’t do that. It’s unrealistic.”
In 2016 he decided to try a new approach: he talked the city into hiring a social worker for the police department. “To an officer, they all thought I was batshit crazy,” he said of the police.
The current police chief, Lucas Cooper, said he was “the most vocal opponent” of the plan at the time, thinking that the department should be using its budget to hire more officers for a force he viewed as stretched thin. But now four years later, Cooper sees the program as indispensable: it frees officers from repeat calls for non-criminal issues and gets residents the help they needed, but couldn’t get.
As social justice protests continue across America, there has been a push for a reckoning on the role of police in society as well as calls to defund or reimagine policing. Among those calls have been suggestions that police – who invariably show up in most parts of the country if you dial 911 for a mental health or substance abuse emergency – should not be the primary responders to non-violent, non-criminal emergency calls and that cities should devote greater resources to social services.
While police remain the first responders for those kinds of calls in Alexandria, they are not in some cities in America.
Operating for more than three decades, the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets program in Eugene, Oregon, dispatches a medic and a crisis worker instead of a police officer to non-violent calls involving mental illness, homelessness and addiction. In Dallas, three-person teams made up of a paramedic, a social worker from a local hospital and a police officer are dispatched to mental health calls in the south central part of the city. A number of other cities across the US are either putting together or considering similar programs.
I’ve been told by individuals that they’re very glad I didn’t show up in a police cruiser at their home and that they’re more likely to talk to me
Cassie Hensley
Police encounters with mentally ill people can have deadly consequences: according to the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, people suffering from untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed in interactions with law enforcement. Earlier this month in Utah, a 13-year-old boy with autism was shot several times by police after his mother dialed 911 to request help as her son was experiencing a mental breakdown.
In Alexandria two social workers are now on the police department’s payroll. But while working for the police, they are not cops: they do not have arresting powers and they do not carry weapons. They ride in a Ford Focus instead of a police cruiser. They wear polo shirts, not police uniforms, and carry a radio with a panic button in case they find themselves in danger.
“We’re like a non-threatening type of follow-up,” said Cassie Hensley, one of the department’s social workers. “I’ve been told by individuals that they’re very glad I didn’t show up in a police cruiser at their home and that they’re more likely to talk to me.”
The social workers in Alexandria are not first responders. Instead, they follow up with people who have had interactions with police or they respond to a call after police officers have made sure the scene is safe for them to enter.
They work with a wide range of people, from persons suffering from mental illness and substance abuse to the homeless and indigent. They also act as advocates for survivors of domestic violence and other crimes.
Police departments employing social workers are rare: in recent months, interest has spurged in Alexandria’s program – so much so that the department drew up an 11-page document explaining their use of police social workers to send to other departments that send inquiries.
Cooper, the Alexandria police chief, says the use of social workers helps reduce repeat emergency calls while also getting residents the help that police officers don’t have the skills, resources or time to provide.
He gave the example of a Vietnam war veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and would call 911 in the early hours of the morning after waking from nightmares.
“He just didn’t have anybody else – so all he knew to do was call 911 and he knew police would come and he would talk to them,” said Cooper.
Over the course of a year, the man called 911 about 60 times. When cops would show up and speak with him, he would calm down, but sometimes it could take hours, diverting away police resources at a time of day when few officers were on duty.
“We knew we weren’t solving the problem, we were just putting a Band-Aid on it every time he called,” said Cooper.
When the department hired on its first social worker in 2016, she was able to work with the man and connect him with medical treatment with Veterans Affairs. His calls to 911 stopped.
“These people end up calling the cops because they don’t know who else to call,” said Tara McLendon, an associate professor at Northern Kentucky University’s School of Social Work who helped the Alexandria police department devise its police social worker program. “And then mental illness symptoms fester and you end up in really horrible situations that I’m thinking we can prevent.”
After social workers connect with persons in the community who need their help, they ask that they call them directly instead of 911 for anything that is not an actual emergency.
These people end up calling the cops because they don’t know who else to call
Tara McLendon
Adding social workers is cheaper than adding on new officers: while a new officer would cost the department around $100,000 up front, adding a new social worker – who does not need to be equipped with a weapon or kitted-out cruiser – costs about half of that, according to Ward.
On Tuesday, Kentucky’s largest city, Louisville, said its police force would establish a social worker program. The move is part of a slew of promised police reforms in the city following the March police killing of Breonna Taylor, a Black 26-year-old ER tech whose name has been a rallying cry at racial justice protests in Kentucky and around the US.
“We often ask our police officers to not only keep the peace, but to deal with challenges that society has failed to address, from mental health to homelessness to substance abuse and everything in-between,” said Louisville’s mayor, Greg Fischer. “That’s not fair to our officers. It’s not the right way to address these challenges.
Neither Cooper nor Ward believe social workers can replace cops.
“Social workers do not supplant police officers – they augment,” said Ward. “So you’ve got to have a number of police officers necessary to cover calls of service in your community first and foremost.”
Jerry Ratcliffe, a former British police officer who is a criminal justice professor at Philadelphia’s Temple University, warned that replacing police with social workers is not as easy as some might hope.
“The sense that social workers are an order of magnitude better than police at dealing with some of these issues – I’m not certain there is strong evidence yet to support that, but I’m open to its possibility,” he said.
Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the author of The End of Policing, said police work and social work should be separated and that police officers should simply not be the first responders on many types of emergency calls.
“The police see the world through a lens where every encounter is potentially deadly,” he said.
Vitale warned that many – such as undocumented persons, people on probation and those who simply do not trust the criminal justice system and law enforcement – likely probably not be comfortable working with a social worker who is employed by a police force.
“Rather than trying to turn police departments into hubs for social work, we should just have more social workers doing social work,” he said.
A U.S. Postal Service truck delivers mail in Charles Town, W.V. (photo: Jared Soares/Redux
Postal Workers Are Catching COVID by the Thousands. It's One More Threat to Voting by Mail.
Maryam Jameel and Ryan McCarthy, ProPublica
Excerpt: "More than 50,000 workers have taken time off for virus-related reasons, slowing mail delivery. The Postal Service doesn't test employees or check their temperatures, and its contact tracing is erratic."
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George Peter Alexander Healy, 'The Peacemakers', 1868. (image: Jacobin)
How Abraham Lincoln Fought the Supreme Court
Matt Karp, Jacobin
Excerpt: "It is not enough to question the decisions, the justices, or even the structure of the current court - we need to challenge, as Abraham Lincoln did, the foundation of its power to determine the law."
he death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, just six weeks before a presidential election, is a scenario out of nightmares. But in many ways, it only dramatizes a fundamental problem that has faced the country for years: the likelihood that the Supreme Court, dominated by extremely conservative justices for decades to come, will act as the far right’s major bulwark against democratic reform.
Faced with this prospect — and stung by the ruthlessness with which leading Republicans have pursued it — many liberals have come to support major judicial reforms, most of them modeled on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to expand the court in the 1930s. Yet in some ways, the emphasis on FDR’s “court-packing” idea obscures a historical moment when progressives mounted an even more radical challenge to judicial supremacy: the antislavery struggle of the Civil War era.
In 1857 a Southern-majority Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Scott had no legal right to bring suit in federal court — that, in Chief Justice Roger Taney’s famous words, colonial and US history showed that black Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Equally inflammatory was the court’s ruling that Congress had no constitutional right to ban slave property in the federal territories. This decision outlawed the national platform of the antislavery Republican Party, which was premised on blocking slavery’s expansion to the West.
Slaveholders and their allies — including Democratic President James Buchanan and the overwhelmingly Democratic US Senate — embraced the decision as a final settlement of the slavery question. Taney had proclaimed Dred Scott “the law of the land,” and the ruling party in government agreed with him.
Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, meanwhile, condemned the decision as the “judicial incarnation of wolfishness.” Yet they knew the problem of proslavery jurisprudence could not be solved by antislavery jurisprudence alone. “We can appeal from this hell-black judgment of the Supreme Court,” said Douglass, “to the court of common sense and common humanity.” The remedy for Dred Scott did not reside in a lawyer’s plea or a judge’s opinion, but in mass political struggle.
For the Republican Party, that struggle meant declaring political war on the idea of an all-powerful judiciary. After 1857 Republicans responded to Dred Scott, as the historian David Potter wrote, not with “an attack on the decision,” but “an attack on the court.”
“The Supreme Court of the United States,” announced the New-York Tribune, the largest Republican newspaper in the country, has “polluted its garments in the filth of pro-slavery politics. From this day forth it must stand . . . as a self-disgraced tribunal. And from this day forth it will be one of the great and leading aims of the people of the Free States to obliterate this shameful record and undo what has been done.”
But what could Republicans actually do? By 1858 the court contained five proslavery Southerners, three of their Northern Democratic “dough-faced” allies, and only one (moderately) antislavery justice, John McLean of Ohio. Some suggested immediate reforms, including the appointment of up to five new justices. “This Court is the citadel of Slavery,” reported one Cincinnati newspaper, “and Republicans intend to storm it.”
Probably the most popular idea — maybe even more radical, in its way, than court packing — was a plan to “reorganize” the entire federal judiciary on the basis of the circuit court population.
In 1858 William Seward introduced a bill of this kind, which would have created an instant and enduring free-state majority on the Supreme Court.
“The supreme court,” said Seward, “attempts to command the people of the United States to accept the principles that one man can own other men . . . The people of the United States never can, and they never will, accept principles so unconstitutional and so abhorrent . . . Let the court recede. Whether it recede or not, we shall reorganize the court, and thus reform its political sentiments and practices, and bring them into harmony with the constitution and with the laws of nature.”
Seward’s plan went nowhere in the Democratic Senate, but kept the national focus on the court as a bulwark of slavery. Ultimately, the most important Republican response was not any of the various technical reform proposals, but a concentrated political attack on the court’s authority as an elevated and impartial arbiter of the law.
Famously, both Seward and Abraham Lincoln accused the court of advancing a proslavery conspiracy: Chief Justice Taney had plotted with President Buchanan to craft a piece of legal “machinery” that would make slavery lawful everywhere. Republicans also denounced “superstitious worship” of the Supreme Court, mocking the “fulsome flattery” of life-tenured judges who, by virtue of their high position, somehow transcended mortal politics. In fact, they were just political appointees like any other.
The Tribune even published a general roast of the court, noting Taney’s “sinister expression,” and describing the dough-faced Justice Robert Grier as “a blonde of a rotund figure” whose “soft and rosy nature . . . succumbs under touch and returns into shape on its removal.” A judicial decision on slavery from the “fanatical” Justice John Campbell of Alabama, meanwhile, was “of no more value than the cawing of a raven. He is a middle-aged, middle-sized man, bald, and possessed of middling talents.”
Above all, the Republican assault struck at the fundamental power of the judiciary. The Supreme Court, they argued, had the authority to decide particular cases, but not to settle larger political disputes over the meaning of the Constitution.
Today, we call this power “judicial review,” but as scholars like Keith Whittington have argued, it really amounts to something much more like to “judicial supremacy,” and its roots are not legal or constitutional but themselves political. After Dred Scott, Republicans mounted a direct challenge to this power — perhaps the most aggressive popular attack on judicial supremacy in US history. “A Court makes a decision,” argued one New York legislator, “but does not make the law.”
Nor was this argument confined to the most self-consciously radical Republicans. Maine senator Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s future vice president, offered a blanket rejection of the court’s authority to “decide a political question for us . . . We make the laws, they interpret them; but it is not for them to tell us . . . what is a political constitutional right of this body . . . Of all the despotisms on earth, a judicial despotism is the worst. It is a life estate.”
In 1858, Lincoln’s famous debates with Stephen Douglas turned on the Republican attack on judicial supremacy. Douglas, like other Democratic conservatives, accused Lincoln’s party of seeking “to destroy public confidence in the highest judicial tribunal on earth . . . From that decision there is no appeal this side of Heaven. Yet, Mr. Lincoln says he is going to reverse that decision. By what tribunal will he reverse it? Will he appeal to a mob? . . . Will he stir up strife and rebellion in the land, and overthrow the court by violence?”
Yet Lincoln persisted in rejecting judicial supremacy — and also the basic idea underlying it, that law somehow exists before or beyond politics, and thus it was illegitimate to resist the proslavery court through popular antislavery mobilization. “We do not propose to be bound by [Dred Scott] as a political rule,” he said. “We propose resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject.”
Across the late 1850s, Lincoln argued that “the American people,” not the Supreme Court, were the true arbiters of the Constitution, and that the only way to defeat the proslavery judiciary was through mass political struggle. And after Lincoln and Hamlin were elected in 1860, the new president’s inaugural address articulated this view in perhaps the strongest language he ever used:
[I]f the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made . . . the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.
Once in power, Lincoln and congressional Republicans “reorganized” the federal judiciary and “packed” the court, adding an additional justice in 1863. More fundamentally, though, they simply ignored the proslavery precedents established in the 1850s. In June 1862, for instance, Congress passed and Lincoln signed a bill banning slavery from the federal territories — a direct violation of the majority ruling in Dred Scott. The court meekly acquiesced, recognizing that its political power was long since broken.
As the legal historian Charles Warren later lamented, Republicans’ popular assault on the court crippled the institution for more than a decade: “During neither the Civil War nor the period of Reconstruction,” Warren wrote, “did the Supreme Court play anything like its due role of supervision, with the result that during one period the military powers of the President underwent undue expansion, and during the other the legislative powers of Congress. The Court itself was conscious of its weakness. . . . The loss of confidence in the Court was due not merely to the Court’s decision but to the false and malignant criticisms and portrayals of the Court which were spread widely through the North by influential newspapers . . . .”
Warren’s point, in other words, is that the greatest democratic expansion in US political history — the era of emancipation and Reconstruction — demanded a direct political attack on the power of the Supreme Court. Nor is it a coincidence that the court, as it began to recover its strength in the 1870s, led the reactionary attack on this democratic project.
Drawing direct lessons from the past is a fool’s errand, but this history should remind us that judicial power — however grandly it may be imagined by friends and foes alike — is critically dependent on political currents.
In some ways, the Left today shares the position of antislavery forces in the 1850s. It confronts a rich, well-organized sect, whose commitment to property far exceeds its belief in democracy, and which has made the Supreme Court a citadel of reaction, under the banner of what Jedediah Purdy has called the “Bosses’ Constitution.”
Yet in a deeper sense the Right’s resort to judicial supremacy is not a sign of strength, but an admission of weakness: a beleaguered regime calls upon the authority of the court only to achieve what it cannot accomplish through electoral politics. The Bosses’ Constitution has no more chance of winning majority support today than the slaveholders’ agenda of the 1850s. It is, almost surely, the least popular wing of a larger conservative politics that has come to depend on minority rule.
To make this undemocratic project vulnerable, it must be made visible. It is not enough to question the decisions, the justices, or even the structure of the current court — we need to challenge, as Lincoln did, the foundation of its power to determine the law.
Pro-democracy protesters in Thailand. (photo: Reuters)
Thai Protesters Challenge Monarchy as Huge Protests Escalate
Patpicha Tanakasempipat and Matthew Tostevin, Reuters
Excerpt: "Openly challenging the monarchy of Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn, thousands of protesters marched in Bangkok on Sunday to present demands that include a call for reforms to curb his powers."
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Water protectors walk a path carved out by the Dakota Access Pipeline on Standing Rock Sioux sacred ancestral grounds. (photo: Rob Wilson)
CBP Drones Conducted Flyovers Near Homes of Indigenous Pipeline Activists, Flight Records Show
Yessenia Funes and Dhruv Mehrotra, Earther
Excerpt: "No one knows for sure what CBP is up to in these parts, and the agency offers very little information to the public."
om Goldtooth awoke on Feb. 21 expecting a pretty regular day ahead. And by all accounts, his day was normal. He was on the road by 11 a.m. to catch a flight. But unbeknownst to him, around the same time as he left, U.S. Customs and Border Protection was watching his home in Beltrami County, Minnesota, from 20,000 feet in the air. A CBP Reaper drone operated silently for more than an hour, making five-mile-wide circles around the home of Goldtooth, who is the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network.When asked about this activity, CBP said in an email that “it does not patrol pipeline routes.” On the date a drone was above Goldtooth’s home, the agency claims it was either conducting a missing person search or conducting “border security,” which CBP defined as “a flight that has a direct nexus to the border,” whatever that means. The town Goldtooth lives in is roughly 90 miles from the border.
“That’s where my house is,” 66-year-old Goldtooth said, noting that few other people live in the remote area.
But our analysis of drone flights in Minnesota this year, sourced from Tampa-based flight tracking company RadarBox, suggests that CBP is surveilling multiple Indigenous advocates in the region who have fought against pipelines, including the proposed expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3.
No one knows for sure what CBP is up to in these parts, and the agency offers very little information to the public. While the U.S. government’s violent suppression of protesters in places like Portland, Oregon, and surveilance of individuals’ social media feeds have drawn the most scrutiny, these drones are yet another powerful tool the government can use to chill free speech. Experts still don’t fully know what technology these drones are outfitted with, which means we can’t know for sure what data they’re gathering beyond video.
“IEN works under the assumption that we’re being watched either by government or industry or both,” Goldtooth said. “In principle, this isn’t surprising. However, it’s disturbing that they are using these multimillion-dollar military drones to circle my home. I’m a peaceful person. I follow our spiritual ways, and there’s no reason for [CBP] to be looking in my windows.”
In doing so, it could also be infringing on the sovereign rights of Indigenous tribal nations and their members. Previous presidents have infringed on civil liberties and promoted oil and gas development, but President Donald Trump has put those gears into overdrive. In recent years, states have also passed more draconian anti-protest laws designed to protect fossil fuel interests. The potential aerial surveillance could signal even further escalation at a time when the fossil fuel industry is struggling in the face of calls for climate action and the pandemic-induced drop in demand.
Over the summer, controversial projects such as the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines have suffered major defeats in court. Enbridge’s Line 3—which would run from Canada’s oil sands to a terminal in Wisconsin—is likely one of the next high-profile targets. The project involves abandoning old pipe and leaving it in the ground while installing an entirely new, larger pipeline that can carry more oil as part of a so-called replacement. The construction is complete in Canada and Wisconsin, but developer Enbridge still needs 27 permits and approvals, mostly from tribes and state agencies in Minnesota, where opposition is heavy. Goldtooth and other Native and non-Native groups have been fighting Enbridge tar sands pipeline developments since 2007 with sister organizations like Honor the Earth taking lead on Line 3. Entire tribal nations, including the Red Lake Band of Chippewa in northern Minnesota, have voted to not renew easements for the project and even to have the pipes removed.
Advocates are worried the old pipeline could contaminate the soil and water as it ages, and their worries are based on more than just fear. The project’s environmental impact statement from the Minnesota Department of Commerce says as much, noting that “some potentially significant effects are associated with abandoning the existing Line 3,” including “soil and water contamination.” Activists also want to see an end to new fossil fuel infrastructure. The land can’t handle an oil spill, and the climate can’t take any more carbon emissions.
These water protectors should be able to voice their concerns freely without fear of retaliation from a private company or, worse, the government. More importantly, tribal nations should be able to assert their sovereign right to reject infrastructure they don’t want running through their lands. You would think tribal sovereignty would protect them from federal interference, but that’s just not the case. The federal government doesn’t treat tribal nations like independent entities, and CBP is no exception.
“The Border Patrol has been behaving badly since its creation in 1924,” Deborah Kang, an associate history professor at the University of Texas, Dallas, said.
CBP’s first agents in the 1920s were often white supremacists coming from other agencies with a history of brutality. More recently, agency employees have faced corruption accusations. The drone program is only the latest instance of the bad behavior Kang mentioned. CBP launched its first drone test flight over the southern border in 2004. By 2005, the first Predator drone was soaring above the U.S.-Mexico border. Not even a year later, that same drone crashed—a sign of the technical and safety issues the program was suffering.
Since then, the drone program has faced internal and external scrutiny. The Department of Homeland Security has flagged that the program costs more than it’s worth, and the hundreds of millions of dollars the program requires a year become especially questionable to taxpayers when looking at privacy concerns. While the program launched under the banner of immigration enforcement, it’s evolved to do a lot more in recent years. That’s become especially clear in light of the Black Lives Matter movement that’s exploded since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The agency flew one of its drones over the citywide protests back in May and has since deployed officers to Portland, Oregon, in response to protests there.
“I have several concerns, and my foremost concern is the lack of information,” Kang said. “We actually know very little about these drone flights. We often don’t know who ordered the drone to surveil for non-immigration-related situations. We don’t know what kind of technology gets loaded onto each drone flight. We don’t know what kinds of data exactly those drones are picking up. We aren’t certain about where that data goes.”
The agency’s purview includes the U.S.-Canadian border, which the new Line 3 pipeline would cross. Nearly two out of every three people in America live within the 100-mile zone the CBP largely operates in, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. And if CBP partners with another law enforcement department, it’s no longer subject to even this 100-mile radius.
“It is often misunderstood that our operations are limited to a certain distance from the border,” CBP said in an email. “AMO operates aircraft and vessels under 6 USC § 211(f)(3)(C), which authorizes the agency to conduct aviation and maritime operations in support of federal, state, local, tribal, and international law enforcement agencies without any geographic limitation for such operations.”
While it remains unclear what exactly the drone was doing above Goldtooth’s home in February, that flight is not the only evidence we found that CBP is monitoring activity at the pipeline. On May 19 and 20, a drone registered as CBP104 flew from Grand Forks, Minnesota, to patrol a specific area over the pipeline that activists we spoke to claimed houses Enbridge’s construction equipment. The drone took the same flight path on both days.
“That area is the easement for Line 3. That’s the route they want to use,” Dallas Goldtooth, Tom’s son and an anti-pipeline organizer with IEN, said. “The easement is the swath of land they have the right to build within. It’s at the very least 100 yards across that they can do construction in that space.”
Construction hasn’t yet begun here, according to Dallas, but pre-construction activity has. Enbridge has begun to move in pipes and other equipment in preparation for construction.
Earlier in the year, a drone registered as CBP216 flew directly to a private residence that activists say is owned by an advocacy organization involved in the pipeline’s opposition. The drone lingered briefly above the home before turning around and flying back to Grand Forks Air Force base, cutting through tribal lands at the Red Lake Reservation. In total, Earther observed five flights that occurred between February and June 2020 wherein a CBP drone appeared to surveil an area with an obvious connection to the pipeline or to anti-pipeline activity.
Joe Plumer, legal counsel with Red Lake Nation, said the nation has no agreement with CBP to allow this drone activity over sovereign tribal lands. He is personally concerned whether this signals a growing criminalization of Indigenous activists. Plumer said a resolution “to condemn this action might be necessary,” as is a meeting with CBP and other state agencies.
“Steps should be taken to ensure that surveillance of the Red Lake Nation and its citizens is not conducted without the knowledge of the Red Lake tribal government,” Plumer said.
Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and White Earth Nation did not return Earther’s requests for comment.
CBP has a history of using drones to surveil protesters, and the drones over Tom’s home are reminiscent of what happened in 2016 at Standing Rock. There, Indigenous leaders and allies came together to try to stop the Dakota Access pipeline from cutting through lands that are sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The federal and local governments responded with an overtly militarized response, including the use of rubber bullets and tear gas. An investigation from the Intercept also uncovered that CBP provided a video feed to the county and state law enforcement through the agency’s drone program.
Many pipeline opponents across the country—and those now protesting in Minnesota—spent time at Standing Rock in 2016. Tara Houska, a tribal attorney and founder of Giniw Collective, which is resisting Line 3, spent six months at Standing Rock to stand in solidarity with fellow Indigenous people there. Now, she’s on the frontlines to stop Line 3, where she’s working to protect her homelands as a member of the Couchiching First Nation in Ontario, Canada. Her people consider the wild rice they tend in the region sacred. Line 3 threatens their sacred grains, should it spill or leak. That’s, in part, why Houska started the Giniw Collective, a resistance camp, in the first place. The goal isn’t just to stop the pipeline, but also to teach and learn from one another about food sovereignty and sustainable food practices.
“It’s a place meant to be a safe and welcoming space for anyone who wishes to learn more about engaging in the Line 3 resistance, specifically in land defense and cultural revitalization,” Houska said.
Line 3 hasn’t received as much international attention as Standing Rock did, yet local law enforcement has appeared to track opposition to the project. According to Houska, she’s suspected organizers have been dealing with some form of surveillance since 2018, when they first began their efforts to stop the project. She has spotted drones flying over their resistance camp in Minnesota, where anywhere from 10 to 90 activists may be gathering at a time. She remembers one instance in particular last summer where law enforcement officers pulled over a camp member and pulled out a list the officers claimed included the names of Line 3 protesters.
“[The camp member was] pretty shocked by that, the fact that they had a list of names and were specifically targeting and pulling us over because of that,” Houska said.
It’s unclear whether CBP was behind the drones Houska has seen, but the CPB flights Earther has tracked may be on behalf of a local law enforcement agency that requested the help, according to Victor Manjarrez, associate director of the Center for Law and Human Behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso and a retired chief with CBP. Earther reached out to seven local sheriff’s departments, including Hubbard and Beltrami Counties, which have been actively preparing for Standing Rock-level protests. None claims to know anything about the drones.
The Intercept documented local law enforcement and emergency managers’ efforts to prepare for Line 3 opposition through presentations and meetings in 2017 and 2018. Law enforcement has denied requesting drone surveillance, leaving us with the question of who made the call for CBP to take these flights: the federal government or local agencies? What is clear is that this activity seems to target activists specifically.
Beyond the privacy and ethical concerns around the surveillance, many legal advocates, including with the ACLU, worry that CBP may be infringing on the rights of the sovereign tribal nations whose lands it’s crossing over. After all, there’s so little we know about these devices and what technologies they’re capable of. As for how legal it is, Manjarrez said CBP is free to do as it pleases. As someone who used to work in the agency, he believes it’s within CBP’s legal rights to do this. He said CBP has the legal authority to fly these drones anywhere on the continental U.S., per U.S. Code Title 6 and annual appropriations language. When asked whether national security is more important than human right to privacy, Manjarrez paused.
“That is the fine line that you try to do. It’s a struggle. It really is,” he said.
He added that it’s possible to see both sides of the issue, given that privacy and national security are both urgent issues. Regardless of this debate, however, CBP is able to keep the details of its flights and activities secret simply by invoking national security concerns.
Efforts to defend land and water from devastating infrastructure projects come with a cost. In northern Minnesota, it appears to be targeted surveillance. Across the U.S., it’s increasingly becoming arrests and prison sentences. Elsewhere, it’s death: 2019 marked a record number of environmentalists killed around the globe.
This is the risk advocates are willing to take in an effort to stop these companies from furthering the mass extinction unfolding in the face of the climate crisis. It is, essentially, a fight for life. The question now is which side the government will be on.
“It might be unsettling to know that private security is working with state and federal authorities to attempt to suppress the rights of citizens,” Houska said. “However, the cause that we are advocating for is far greater than any personal risk. We’re talking about the rights of future generations to live and the continuation of human life and of many other lives on this planet. We’re talking about having an inhabitable environment.”
