31 January 21
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With urgency and respect.
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31 January 21
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Ginni Thomas, Wife of Clarence, Cheered On the Rally That Turned Into the Capitol Riot
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
Stern writes: "Thomas, a conservative lobbyist and zealous supporter of Donald Trump, has fervently defended the president over the last four years."
“GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”
This article was originally published on January 8, 2021. AW/RSN 
n Wednesday morning, Ginni Thomas—wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—endorsed the rally in Washington demanding that Congress overturn the election. She then sent her “LOVE” to the demonstrators, who violently overtook the Capitol several hours later. Two days later, Thomas amended her post with the addendum: “[Note: written before violence in US Capitol].” By that point, five people involved in the insurrection, including a Capitol Police officer, had died.
On the morning of Jan. 6, Ginni Thomas—wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—endorsed the protest demanding that Congress overturn the election, then sent her “LOVE” to the demonstrators, who violently overtook the Capitol several hours later. She has not posted since. pic.twitter.com/378CHMkFN5
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) January 8, 2021
Thomas, a conservative lobbyist and zealous supporter of Donald Trump, has fervently defended the president over the last four years. On her Facebook page, she frequently promotes baseless conspiracy theories about a “coup” against Trump led by Jewish philanthropist George Soros, a frequent target of anti-Semitic hate. Thomas draws many of these theories from fringe corners of the internet, including an anti-vax Facebook group that claimed Bill Gates would use the COVID vaccine to kill people. In recent months, she also amplified unsubstantiated corruption claims against Joe Biden while insisting, falsely, that the Obama administration illegally spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign, then tried to rig the election against him.
In turn, Trump has rewarded Thomas with an extraordinary amount of access to the Oval Office. Her advocacy group Groundswell got an audience with the president in early 2019. According to the New York Times, the meeting was arranged after Clarence and Ginni Thomas had dinner with the Trumps. (Clarence Thomas and Trump appear to be quite friendly: The justice took his clerks to meet with the president in the Oval Office at least once; Ginni attended as well.) At the White House, Groundswell’s members lobbied Trump against transgender service in the military, which he already prohibited in 2017. The ban took effect in 2019, around the time of Groundswell’s meeting, after the Supreme Court lifted lower court orders blocking it by a 5–4 vote. (Clarence Thomas did not recuse himself from the case; he has never recused from any case because of his wife’s lobbying activities.) The New York Times also reported that Ginni Thomas compiled lists of federal employees whom she deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. She sent her lists to Trump, urging him to fire the disloyal employees, though he seems to have largely ignored her. He has, however, stacked his administration with former Thomas clerks.
Throughout the 2020 campaign, Thomas remained active on Facebook, condemning Black Lives Matter, opposing COVID-19 shutdowns, and touting the “Walk Away” movement, which purports to spotlight Democrats who became Republicans under Trump. (At least two individuals featured in the “Walk Away” series, both Black, were actually models from royalty-free stock photos.) She also campaigned for Trump in person—and, according to the Intercept, spearheaded a dark-money operation to support the president. Cleta Mitchell, the Republican lawyer who participated in Trump’s shakedown of the Georgia secretary of state, led the project.
After Nov. 3, Thomas grew uncharacteristically quiet on Facebook; she did not share popular conspiracy theories about election fraud, perhaps because election challenges would inevitably come before her husband. She provided her clearest statement yet on Jan. 6, when she enthusiastically endorsed the D.C. rally designed to make Congress overturn the election result and give Trump a second term. There is no evidence that Thomas personally attended the rally, and her posts indicate that she watched the events on TV from another location.
Ginni Thomas’ activism on matters that come before her husband raises thorny ethical issues. Federal law requires justices to recuse themselves from any proceeding in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” It also compels justices to recuse if their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome” of the case. In the coming months and years, Democrats will likely pressure Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from high-profile cases or to resign altogether. If Thomas steps down under Biden, progressives can restore a 5–4 divide on the Supreme Court, giving Chief Justice John Roberts control once again. Given Thomas’ staunch refusal to recuse thus far, though, there is little chance that he will take any steps to remediate his conflicts of interest, let alone retire during the presidency of a man he openly despises.
In all likelihood, Ginni Thomas will face no consequences for cheerleading a rally that sought to overturn an election, then laid siege to the Capitol in a failed insurrection. Her husband will ignore the controversy and continue to rule on cases that involve his wife’s lobbying efforts. We may never know how much influence a conspiracy theorist has on the highest court’s most conservative justice.
Donovan Crowl and other members of the Oath Keepers at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)
'Be Ready to Fight': FBI Probe of US Capitol Riot Finds Evidence Detailing Coordination of an Assault
Devlin Barrett, Spencer S. Hsu and Aaron C. Davis, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "When die-hard supporters of President Donald Trump showed up at rally point 'Cowboy' in Louisville on the morning of Jan. 5, they found the shopping mall's parking lot was closed to cars, so they assembled their 50 or so vehicles outside a nearby Kohl's department store."
Hundreds of miles away in Columbia, S.C., at a mall designated rally point “Rebel,” other Trump supporters gathered to form another caravan to Washington. A similar meetup — dubbed “Minuteman” — was planned for Springfield, Mass.
That same day, FBI personnel in Norfolk were increasingly alarmed by the online conversations they were seeing, including warlike talk around the convoys headed to the nation’s capital. One map posted online described the rally points, declaring them a “MAGA Cavalry To Connect Patriot Caravans to StopTheSteal in D.C.” Another map showed the U.S. Congress, indicating tunnels connecting different parts of the complex. The map was headlined, “CREATE PERIMETER,” according to the FBI report, which was reviewed by The Washington Post.
“Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in,” read one posting, according to the report.
FBI agents around the country are working to unravel the various motives, relationships, goals and actions of the hundreds of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Some inside the bureau have described the Capitol riot investigation as their biggest case since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and a top priority of the agents’ work is to determine the extent to which that violence and chaos was preplanned and coordinated.
Investigators caution there is an important legal distinction between gathering like-minded people for a political rally — which is protected by the First Amendment — and organizing an armed assault on the seat of American government. The task now is to distinguish which people belong in each category, and who played key roles in committing or coordinating the violence.
Video and court filings, for instance, describe how several groups of men that include alleged members of the Proud Boys appear to engage in concerted action, converging on the West Front of the Capitol just before 1 p.m., near the Peace Monument at First Street NW and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Different factions of the crowd appear to coalesce, move forward and chant under the direction of different leaders before charging at startled police staffing a pedestrian gate, all in the matter of a few minutes.
An indictment Friday night charged a member of the Proud Boys, Dominic Pezzola, 43, of Rochester, N.Y., with conspiracy, saying his actions showed “planning, determination, and coordination.” Another alleged member of the Proud Boys, William Pepe, 31, of Beacon, N.Y., also was charged with conspiracy.
Minutes before the crowd surge, at 12:45 p.m., police received the first report of a pipe bomb behind the Republican National Committee headquarters at the opposite, southeast side of the U.S. Capitol campus. The device and another discovered shortly afterward at Democratic National Committee headquarters included end caps, wiring, timers and explosive powder, investigators have said.
Some law enforcement officials have suggested the pipe bombs may have been a deliberate distraction meant to siphon law enforcement away from the Capitol building at the crucial moment.
'Ready for war'
The FBI is also trying to determine how many people went to Washington seeking to engage in violence, even if they weren’t part of any formal organization. Some of those in the Louisville caravan said they were animated by the belief that the election was stolen, according to interviews they gave to the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Much of the discussion of potential violence occurred at TheDonald.win, where Trump’s supporters talked about the upcoming rally, sometimes in graphic terms, according to people familiar with the FBI investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open matter.
After the riot, a statement posted on the website said moderators “had been struggling for some time to address a flood of racist and violent content that appeared to be coming primarily from a small group of extremists who were often brigading from other sites,” leading to inquiries from the FBI.
One of the comments cited in the FBI memo declared Trump supporters should go to Washington and get “violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die.”
Some had been preparing for conflict for weeks.
Prosecutors say Jessica Marie Watkins — an Ohio bartender who had formed her own small, self-styled militia group and had joined Oath Keepers, according to prosecutors — began recruiting and organizing in early November for an “operation.”
Days after the election, Watkins allegedly sent text messages to a number of individuals who had expressed interest in joining her group, which called itself the Ohio State Regular Militia.
“I need you fighting fit by innaugeration,” she told one recruit, according to court papers.
The same day, she also asked a recruit to download Zello, an app that allows a cellphone to operate like a push-to-talk walkie-talkie, saying her group uses it “for operations.”
In conversations later that month, Watkins allegedly spoke in apocalyptic terms about the prospect of Joe Biden’s being sworn in as president on Jan. 20.
“If he is, our way of life as we know it is over. Our Republic would be over. Then it is our duty as Americans to fight, kill and die for our rights. . . . If Biden get the steal, none of us have a chance in my mind. We already have our neck in the noose. They just haven’t kicked the chair yet.”
In December, prosecutors say, Donovan Ray Crowl, a 50-year-old friend of Watkins’s, attended a training camp in North Carolina, while another friend, Thomas E. Caldwell, a 66-year-old Navy veteran from Berryville, Va., booked a room at an Arlington hotel, where Watkins also had a reservation for the days surrounding the Jan. 6 pro-Trump rally.
Prosecutors say Caldwell had written earlier to Watkins that “I believe we will have to get violent to stop this, especially the antifa maggots who are sure to come out en masse even if we get the Prez for 4 more years.”
In the week leading up to the rally and riot, Watkins and Caldwell were in regular contact as they talked about various groups of people meeting up on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, according to an indictment filed this past week against them.
At different points, according to court filings and people familiar with the investigation, Watkins and Caldwell indicated a degree of impatience with Stewart Rhodes, the national leader of Oath Keepers, for not providing more direction.
Watkins messaged Caldwell that if Rhodes “isn’t making plans, I’ll take charge myself, and get the ball rolling,” according to the indictment. Caldwell replied that he was speaking to another person who expected a bus with 40 people to come from North Carolina. Caldwell allegedly told her that person, identified only as “Paul” in other court papers, “is committed to being the quick reaction force [and] bringing the tools if something goes to hell. That way the boys don’t have to try to schlep weps on the bus” — an apparent reference to weapons.
Caldwell added in a subsequent message that he didn’t know whether Rhodes “has even gotten out his call to arms but it’s a little friggin late. This is one we are doing on our own. We will link up with the north carolina crew,” according to court papers and the people familiar with the investigation.
On New Year’s Eve, according to the indictment, Watkins “responded with interest to an invitation to a ‘leadership only’ conference call” for what was described as a “DC op.”
The leaderless resistance concept
Such exchanges are critical early clues in the planning and coordination that went on before, during and after the riot. Videos from the Capitol show Oath Keepers such as Watkins dressed in military-type gear, moving in coordination with Crowl through the crowds around the building.
Watkins used the walkie-talkie app to tell others she was part of a group of about 30 to 40 people who are “sticking together and sticking to the plan,” according to court documents.
Caldwell, for his part, posted images to Facebook, writing: “Us storming the castle. Please share. Sharon is right with me. I am such an instigator!” Sharon Caldwell, his wife, has not been charged with any crime; Caldwell, Crowl and Watkins are accused of conspiring to obstruct Congress and other violations.
Thomas Caldwell’s lawyer has said his client expects to see the charges dropped or to be acquitted at trial. Caldwell, the lawyer said, is not a member of Oath Keepers.
Watkins has previously denied committing any crimes. “I didn’t commit a crime. I didn’t destroy anything. I didn’t wreck anything,” Watkins told the Ohio Capital Journal, adding that the riot was a peaceful protest that turned violent.
Crowl’s lawyer has described his client as a law-abiding citizen who helped protect people during the riot.
In a phone interview this month, Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, told The Post that he gave no direction or signals to members of his group to storm the Capitol, and that he considers the entry by rioters a mistake that played into the hands of critics.
Rhodes said the only “mission” the Oath Keepers had organized to undertake in D.C. on Jan. 6 was dignitary protection for far-right personalities who had traveled to the city to participate in “Stop the Steal” events.
At the time of the riot, Rhodes said, he had just escorted one of the VIPs to a nearby hotel. Rhodes said one of his deputies “called and said, ‘People are storming the Capitol.’ I walked back over and found” fellow Oath Keepers, Rhodes said, but did not enter the building.
Rhodes disavowed any meaningful connection to Caldwell or Crowl. Rhodes said Watkins had played an important part in the group’s mobilization in opposition to demonstrations around police abuse in Louisville last year.
Former domestic terrorism investigators say the alleged discussion by Watkins and Caldwell about the group’s leader points to a longtime pattern among such extremists.
“Historically, within the right-wing extremist movements, leadership has produced rhetoric to spin up their members, increase radicalization and recruitment, and then stand back and let small cells or individual lone offenders follow through on that rhetoric with violent action,” said Thomas O’Connor, a former FBI agent who spent decades investigating domestic terrorists. “Domestic terrorism actually developed the leaderless resistance concept, taking the potential blame away from the leadership and putting it down into small groups or individuals, and I think that is what you’re starting to see here.”
Current law enforcement officials said they have not reached any conclusions about the interactions between leaders of extremist groups and their members or followers.
Investigators are examining who may have joined Caldwell and Watkins’s group, and whether any of those individuals, “known and unknown,” had links or communications with others at the Capitol that day or elsewhere.
Colin Clarke, a domestic terrorism expert at the Soufan Group, said the Jan. 6 attack represents a “proof of concept” for dangerous extremists.
“They talk about things like this in a lot of their propaganda, and the fact that the Capitol Police allowed this to happen, you can call it a security breach, or intelligence failure, but these people do not look at this as a failure, they look at it as an overwhelming success, and one that will inspire others for years.”
Butch Bowers is well known in the insular world of South Carolina politics, where he represented two former governors, Mark Sanford and Nikki Haley. (photo: Mary Ann Chastain/AP)
Trump's Entire Impeachment Team of 5 Quits
Gloria Borger, Kaitlan Collins, Jeff Zeleny and Ashley Semler, CNN
Excerpt: "Former President Donald Trump's five impeachment defense attorneys have left a little more than a week before his trial is set to begin, according to people familiar with the case, amid a disagreement over his legal strategy."
It was a dramatic development in the second impeachment trial for Trump, who has struggled to find lawyers willing to take his case. And now, with legal briefs due next week and a trial set to begin only days later, Trump is clinging to his election fraud charade and suddenly finds himself without legal representation.
Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier, who were expected to be two of the lead attorneys, are no longer on the team. A source familiar with the changes said it was a mutual decision for both to leave the legal team. As the lead attorney, Bowers assembled the team.
Josh Howard, a North Carolina attorney who was recently added to the team, has also left, according to another source familiar with the changes. Johnny Gasser and Greg Harris, from South Carolina, are no longer involved with the case, either.
No other attorneys have announced they are working on Trump's impeachment defense.
A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he's left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard.
The attorneys had not yet been paid any advance fees and a letter of intent was never signed.
CNN has reached out to the attorneys for comment.
"The Democrats' efforts to impeach a president who has already left office is totally unconstitutional and so bad for our country. In fact, 45 Senators have already voted that it is unconstitutional. We have done much work, but have not made a final decision on our legal team, which will be made shortly," former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller told CNN.
Bowers, a respected lawyer from Columbia, South Carolina, once worked in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.
Barbier, a South Carolina litigator, worked closely on several high-profile cases and was a former federal prosecutor for 15 years in the state before opening up her own boutique criminal defense firm.
Gasser and Harris are both former federal prosecutors. Gasser served as the interim US attorney for South Carolina earlier in his career. Both have worked closely with Barbier on the defense side.
Howard worked as an associate independent counsel on the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations during the Clinton presidency and spent a decade in the Justice Department where he worked on the confirmations of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. Howard once served as the chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, leaving the post at the beginning of 2016.
Vice President Joe Biden. (photo: Keiko/Hiromi)
Biden, Democrats Hit Gas on Push for $15 Minimum Wage
Kevin Freking, Associated Press
Freking writes: "The Democratic push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour has emerged as an early flashpoint in the fight for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, testing President Joe Biden's ability to bridge Washington's partisan divides as he pursues his first major legislative victory."
Biden called for a $15 hourly minimum wage during his campaign and has followed through by hitching it to a measure that, among other things, calls for $1,400 stimulus checks and $130 billion to help schools reopen. Biden argues that anyone who holds a full-time job shouldn’t live in poverty, echoing progressives in the Democratic Party who are fully on board with the effort.
“With the economic divide, I mean, I want to see a $15 minimum wage. It should actually be $20,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.
Some Republicans support exploring an increase but are uneasy with $15 an hour. They warn that such an increase could lead to job losses in an economy that has nearly 10 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic began. Moderates such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rep. Tom Reed of New York are urging Biden to split off the minimum wage hike from COVID-19 talks and deal with it separately.
“The more you throw into this bucket of COVID relief that’s not really related to the crisis, the more you risk the credibility with the American people that you’re really sincere about the crisis,” Reed said. Including the wage increase, Murkowski said, “complicates politically an initiative that we should all be working together to address.”
The resistance from moderates has left Democrats with a stark choice: Wait and build bipartisan support for an increase or move ahead with little to no GOP backing, potentially as part of a package that can pass the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote. Democratic leaders appear to be moving toward the latter option, with no guarantee of success. Even if raising the wage can get past procedural challenges, passage will require the support from every Democrat in the 50-50 Senate, which could be a tall order.
Leading the charge is Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who unveiled $15 wage legislation this week with the backing of 37 Senate Democrats. His bill would gradually raise the wage to $15 over a period of five years. The federal minimum is $7.25 and has not been raised since 2009.
Sanders, the incoming chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said it was fine with him if Republicans were not prepared to “come on board.” He said the government needed to pump money into the economy to make sure “people are not working on starvation wages.”
Democrats are moving toward using a tool that allows certain budget-related items to bypass the Senate filibuster — a hurdle requiring 60 votes — and pass with a simple majority. Sanders is confident that a minimum wage increase fits within the allowed criteria for what is referred to in Washington lingo as budget reconciliation, though the Senate parliamentarian has final say on what qualifies.
“As you will recall, my Republican colleagues used reconciliation to give almost $2 trillion in tax breaks to the rich and large corporations in the midst of massive income inequality. They used reconciliation to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act and throw 32 million people off the health care they had. They used reconciliation to allow for drilling in the Arctic wilderness,” Sanders said. “You know what? I think we can use reconciliation to protect the needs of working families.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the Senate as early as next week will begin taking the first steps toward getting the COVID-19 relief bill passed through the budget reconciliation process. The goal would be passage by March.
The latest sign that a $15 minimum wage is popular with voters came in November, when more than 60% of voters in conservative-leaning Florida approved an amendment to the state’s Constitution that will raise the minimum wage there from $8.56 an hour to $15 an hour by 2026.
The House passed legislation to gradually increase the minimum wage in the last Congress, but it went nowhere in the GOP-controlled Senate. Opponents argue that a large increase in the minimum wage would lead many employers to cut the number of workers they have on their payrolls.
A 2019 study from the Congressional Budget Office projected that an increase to $15 an hour would boost the wages of 17 million Americans. An additional 10 million workers making more than $15 an hour would see a boost as well. However, about 1.3 million workers would lose their jobs.
“There’s no question that raising the minimum wage, especially to $15, will put some small businesses out of business and will cost a lot of low-wage workers their jobs,” said Neil Bradley, the chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Bradley said there should be a separate debate on the minimum wage, and while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes $15 an hour, “we’re open to a reasonable increase in the minimum wage and that ought to be a topic of discussion. But, you know, including that in the COVID package just imperils the whole thing.”
Mary Kay Henry, international president of the Service Employees International Union, said that increasing the minimum wage would benefit many of the people who have been working on the front lines of the pandemic. That’s why she supports including it in the COVID-19 relief package.
“They’ve been called essential, but they all believe they’ve been treated as expendable or sacrificial because they don’t earn enough to be able to put food on the table and keep themselves and their families safe and healthy,” Henry said.
Henry says nursing home workers, janitors, security guards and home health workers are among the union’s 2 million members.
“The real way to appreciate this work is to raise the minimum wage to $15,” she said.
Most states also have minimum wage laws. Employees generally are entitled to the higher of the two minimum wages. Currently, 29 states and Washington, D.C., have minimum wages above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
Protesters assemble at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017. (photo: Craig Ruttle/AP)
Reflections on the Muslim Ban on the Four-Year Anniversary
Reed Dunlea, Rolling Stone
Dunlea writes: "Four years ago today, the xenophobic promises of Donald Trump's presidential campaign became a reality."
Nisrin Elamin was on a flight back to the U.S. from Sudan when Trump enacted the Muslim ban. She was detained and released, but it forever changed her perception of America’s immigration system
The Muslim ban, signed a week into his presidency, declared that non-American citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen could not enter the United States for the next 90 days; that the Syrian refugee program would be suspended indefinitely; and programs for all other refugees would be suspended temporarily.
Panic immediately erupted at airports around America. Lawyers, elected officials, and protesters flocked to JFK, LAX, San Francisco International Airport. Nervous chants of “No hate, no fear, Muslims are welcome here” echoed outside of arrivals terminals. The ban was the first sign that people’s worst fears about the administration were coming true. Other policies like family separation at the Mexico border and a near-end to the refugee program were still to come.
The hastily drafted and legally dubious order had been signed while planes were in the air. When those planes landed, the White House policy needed to be implemented, although details on how it was to be enforced were not clear yet to officials on the ground.
Nisrin Elamin was on one of those flights. A Ph.D student at Stanford University, she had been in her home country of Sudan, researching foreign land grabs (and local resistance to them). At the time, she held a green card in the United States. While abroad, Elamin had started to hear rumors of the Muslim ban. “My partner was here in the U.S.,” she says. “I was just worried that I would be separated from him, and decided to get on the next plane to try to beat the ban, essentially.”
What followed for Elamin has forever changed her ideas about America, she says, cementing for her that the entire immigration system needed to be abolished and started anew. But her work during college at Stanford and Harvard on international solidarity movements, and after college teaching in prison, meant that the experience wasn’t fully a surprise. “When the Muslim ban hit and I was detained, I came with the knowledge that this wasn’t an exception necessarily, that this was part of a larger legacy and history of a racist criminal and immigration system coming together.”
For Elamin, who has since received her American citizenship, the conflicting realities of her status and her position in American society have proved to be personally difficult for her to navigate, but “I’m not impacted in the same way that a lot of other people have been,” she says. “I speak in part because I have the privilege to do so, and because I don’t put my life or my immediate family’s life at risk by doing so.”
Last week, after four years, the Muslim ban came to an end. It had gone through multiple expansions and reductions through Trump executive orders and survived a myriad of court cases, with a version ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court. It at times also included full or partial bans on travel from Venezuela, North Korea, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania, and was also referred to as the African ban. But one contested election and a stroke of a pen later, the ban was rescinded by an executive order from President Joe Biden on his first day in office.
This is just one story of what happened on January 27th, 2017. Upwards of 41,000 people were denied visas as a result of the Muslim ban. Who knows how many never got that far, or never even tried. Who knows how many mothers, fathers, partners, siblings, and friends were left waiting.
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
My name is the Nisrin Elamin. I am 43 years old. I had to think about that for a minute [laughs]. I currently teach at a liberal arts college in Philadelphia [Bryn Mawr] in international studies, and I’m originally from Sudan. I came to the U.S. when I was 15 on my own. I came from Germany, looking really, ironically, for a place where I could be more myself as a black person. I had read Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X and had this idea that the U.S. would allow me to embrace and feel comfortable in my blackness in a way that Germany post- the Berlin Wall falling did not. Because there was a lot of xenophobia at the time, especially toward people who looked like me.
Fifteen sounds like a really young age to move to a different continent without your family. How did you come to that decision?
I think it’s a fairly common story, perhaps. I was on scholarship at a boarding school in Germany and we had an exchange student from a boarding school in the U.S. And I was having a pretty hard time in Germany. There’s a lot of racism, not only from my peers, but also from my teachers. I remember very vividly in biology class, you know that Darwin chart, the sort of evolution chart, it starts with an ape? Well, in German books, it ends with some very German-looking person. And at some point, one of my peers said that the ape looks like Nisrin. And the teacher laughed instead of calling them out.
There were many other instances like that, but it was one of those moments where I had a kind of “aha” moment. And that’s when I kind of started imagining being somewhere where people actually spoke back to that kind of racism. And that’s what ultimately got me dreaming about going to America. I met this exchange student who happened to be a person of color, and I asked her, “Well, what’s the racism like in the U.S.?” And she was like, “Well, it’s very different from in Germany, you know, it’s like more systemic, structural. But there are places where you can be yourself and there are other people who look like you.” And that’s what I was missing, as I was in a situation where I was one of maybe two or three black students. I applied to the same boarding school several times, got rejected because I was, like, forging my parent’s signature, writing my own financial aid forms and things like that, because I just didn’t want to tell [my parents]. And then ultimately, I got in and they gave me a scholarship.
You were in Sudan when the Muslim ban started. What happened?
When the Muslim ban hit, I was about 10 months into my research. And mind you, when I went to do the research, I had to go through an extensive process through something called an OFAC licensing process, which is the Office of Foreign Assets Control. If a country is on the state sponsors of terror list and you receive funding through a U.S. agency — I received a grant from the National Science Foundation — you had to go through this whole bureaucratic process of getting approved for your research. And that took a year. So I was already behind my peers by a year. And when the Muslim Ban hit I was basically in the middle of my research. [My partner is] West African, and at the time had a tenuous immigration status. I remember I was scrambling to get a ticket and that was difficult, especially because my grant only allowed me to take certain airlines. So I finally got a ticket that brought me to Bahrain. And then from Bahrain, I went to London and in London, I missed my connecting flight. In part because there was this person in front of me who wouldn’t let me get to the front of the plane. I was wearing the hijab and he was just an angry person. And I was trying to explain to him that I really need to catch this other plane. And he was like, “Yeah, we’re all trying to catch planes.” And I was like, “I understand, but I really need to catch this plane.” And he was like, “Yeah, you’re just going to have to wait.”
So are you assuming that you’re going to be good when you get to the United States? Or do you not really know what’s going on?
I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m assuming I’m still OK, because the executive order was announced while I was in the air. There were rumors of it. I will say between 9/11 and 2017, this time, I basically had been stopped almost every time I entered into the United States and taken to this room for questioning. Under Bush, under Obama. And so to me, that room that I was taken into ultimately was not unfamiliar. But I had never been taken to that room as a green card holder. I remember the first time I traveled with my green card, I walked in and the officer says to me, “Welcome home.” And I had to do a double take because nobody had ever said that to me before. It’s usually like, “I’m sorry, ma’am, you have to be taken to this extra area.” I was used to it, but it always produces anxiety for me. It always means that I have to make special arrangements because my luggage could otherwise be taken or somebody might be waiting there for me for hours. But for the most part, it was a bureaucratic procedure. And so coming in this time, I had traveled a little bit beforehand with the green card and was just not expecting that I would once again find myself in that room. Nor was I expecting that this time I could be deported. Because you shouldn’t as a permanent resident. I have a right to enter the country just as much as anybody else with a passport, like there’s no difference when it comes to permanent residency. The only difference is that we can’t vote.
What happened when you landed?
I get to JFK and I go to the machine where you can put your green card in. And usually this piece of paper comes out with your picture. It comes out with an X. OK, that happens to me all the time. So I go to the officer. I had all my paperwork. And then he goes to his supervisor. He sees the passport and he says, “Isn’t this one of the countries?” And he’s like, “yes.” And he’s like, “what should I do?” And I hear his supervisor tell him, “Just treat her like you would any green card holder.” But as he’s walking back, his supervisor calls him back and says, “Wait a minute.” And he says something to him that I don’t hear. And as he then comes back for the second time, he says to me, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we have to take you to an extra holding area for further questioning.”
And so at this point, I’m still OK because I’m kind of used to this. And then I get taken in for the first round of questioning, and they explained to me that this executive order had been issued and that people from countries like Sudan were needing to be vetted before entering the country. They asked me to tell them what I’ve been doing in the U.S. And I was like, “OK, I’ve been here for like 25 years. This is going to take a minute.” He was asking me specifically about all the educational institutions that I’ve visited and I’ve been a part of. And he asked me how many languages I spoke. And at some point he tries to get at some of my political views, but they were sort of interwoven, those questions. So he’d go from asking me about boarding school to then asking me about what my viewpoints are on radical Islamic groups. It was sort of obvious what he was trying to get at, like it wasn’t done in the most subtle way. “Did I have any association with people who’ve held radical views in Sudan?” He asked me to list all the people that I had interviewed during my research, which is like 10 months of dissertation research, that’s a lot of people. And then he asked me who my dissertation supervisors were. He asked me about some of the people that I had worked with in different organizations, because he had some of that information on the computer. And then he also at some point asked me about the Trump administration, what I thought of it. And then they asked me about my social media handles and they asked me to basically open Facebook for them. And I had just written some type of post about the Muslim ban, just as I was coming in, about how ridiculous this was. So I was a little nervous about that.
Then at some point they were like, “All right, we really need to call it a night.” It’s like midnight. So they were like, “we’re going to transfer you to a 24 hour holding area”. And I asked them if I could make a phone call. They said “No.” Could I call a lawyer? “No.” They said, “This is a kind of special jurisdictional area. You’re not in the United States yet. You’re in a border zone where we as immigration officers are both lawyer and judge. So your rights are basically suspended in this space, and in order for you to be transferred to this other area, you have to be searched.”
So they took me into this holding room with two women officers. And I had been searched before. But this was a special kind of search. So they put my hands up against the wall. They basically touched me, like searched me, in my groin area and my chest area several times. And I started crying because it felt really uncomfortable. And then they handcuffed me and I asked them what they were going to do, were they going to deport me? And they said they don’t know that. That I just needed to sit tight. And so when I came out of the holding area, I was crying in handcuffs. Then we got transferred to another holding area in a kind of armored vehicle. They had guns on them. We were surrounded, I would say, by about eight to 10 officers in this van. The handcuffs by now were off. There was an Iraqi detainee there. He was a translator for the U.S. military in Iraq who had just gotten asylum and was coming to be reunited with his family. And his family, I believe, were already in. But he had been held. And ironically, he was someone who had risked his life for the U.S. government and was now under detention. And then they separated us. They told us we couldn’t speak to each other. And there was an Iraqi man and an Iranian man who were led in in handcuffs as well.
When we first came into the holding area, they treated us fairly well. But over the course of the night, I felt like we were becoming increasingly criminalized and treated more and more with no dignity. Like, “Shut up, sit down…” We sat there for, I don’t know, God knows how many hours. And then we were being called to the front. “Sudanese green card holder.” So I got called up and he asked me a couple of questions and I had to sit down again. And then again, “Sudanese green card holder.” And then this officer told me that they had done an extensive background check on me. They had not found anything derogatory, that’s the term he used, against me in the system and that I was free to go.
Did you see protesters when you were released?
I got out to an empty airport because I was one of the first people to be detained. My partner was there and a friend. It was like four in the morning. She had followed what was going on and she came with some food, she made some Sri Lankan curry and brought it. I was met by those two people, which was a wonderful way to exit. When I was in the car going back home, I immediately got on the phone with people that I’d been in touch with before, who were trying to figure out what was going on on the inside so they could help other people who were coming in and being detained. I hadn’t slept in like 48 hours. I maybe took a one hour nap, got back up and continued doing phone calls with lawyers, but then also doing a little bit of media work. And I remember when I saw footage of people at JFK, basically 24 hours later. People started coming to the airports. San Francisco, New York City. I saw this footage on the news of a family coming out and they were being reunited with somebody, and there were so many people at the airport. And I just remember thinking it was just a powerful moment, because I couldn’t imagine being a five-year-old. There were five-year-old children who were also handcuffed and detained. And I can’t imagine that experience. And then coming out and people with balloons and welcoming them and basically humanizing the experience for them. I felt like that was an important moment after you get dehumanized like that, to have people kind of do the opposite. Like, stand there and say, “The officers who did this and the administration that told them to do this, told them that this is their job, don’t speak for us.”
There’s been a lot of language from the Biden camp around this issue about still needing America safe, that they will pursue any threat. What do you think about that sort of framing, about an inherent suspicion from these countries or of a Muslim background?
There was a lot of talk after the ban was issued that the countries that were on it were the wrong countries. We shouldn’t be talking about how to expand this list, right? We need to be talking about the premise of this entire thing. For me, it reminded me of the Third Reich. Honestly, this is how these things start. You know, you start to exclude people. You ban them based on their national origin or religion. Where does that lead us? Where could that lead us? And we have examples in history of where that could lead us. And so that should have been a warning. So we should not be talking about how do we expand the structure of this thing to exclude even more people, you know?
The various iterations of it that came after, especially the latest iterations, have been really about banning people from African countries. If there’s anything that I want people to know, it’s that I don’t want people to think of the Muslim ban as an exception. I want them to think of it as symptomatic of an immigration system that from its inception has been racist and xenophobic. So if we look at 1790, the first Naturalization Act gave citizenship to only white people. And then a century later, you have the Chinese Exclusion Act. And ever since you’ve had various iterations of immigration policy that have targeted or excluded people of color and people based on their religion or national origin.
When I think of the legacy of this in modern history, I think of 1996 and the immigration laws that came out under Clinton that criminalized undocumented people. And then leading to the present where the Muslim ban was issued a day after another executive order that essentially poured more money into militarizing our southern border and into expanding ICE and hiring more immigration enforcement officers, again with the intent of criminalizing people that look like me.
The unfortunate thing about my story becoming highlighted was that it sort of eclipsed the stories of the hundreds and thousands of people who never made it to an airport, who never got to be on that plane or who got to an airport, say, in Turkey or Jordan, trying to come to the United States after having waited for an entire 24 months for a visa, to be reunited with their families, or possibly having spent their entire life savings trying to get to the United States, being admitted, say, under the diversity lottery and then being told, “I’m sorry, you can’t board the plane.” So now they’re stuck somewhere waiting for a new administration to come back to them to say, “I’m sorry. Here’s another chance for you.”
So for me, rescinding the ban is only the first step. There’s a lot of work to be done to undo the harm and the trauma that this ban created for so many people, who were denied medical care, who had to postpone weddings, who maybe haven’t seen their child in four years because of this ban. Or have been separated from their partner. I mean, there’s a million scenarios that have been sort of caused by this, that have caused pain and trauma and hurt, as with other immigration policies that the Trump administration passed.
What sort of hopes do you have for a Biden presidency when it comes to immigration?
I want to dream big a little bit and say that I think we have an opportunity to make a clean break and to reimagine our entire immigration system, of which the ban is a very small part. I’ve done a lot of work around prisons, and generally have felt that it’s a very dehumanizing system. But it wasn’t actually until my detention that I felt like we really needed to abolish the system. The procedure that I went through, the sort of invasive search and the handcuffing, when I asked them if it was necessary, they said that this was standard procedure. So it made me think there are hundreds, if not thousands of people who get admitted every day to the United States who are searched and handcuffed in that way, simply for entering this country. And that sends the wrong message. It tells the visitor that you’re not welcome, and their first experience in the United States becomes a dehumanizing one.
And I think what we need to do is create a system where that cannot happen. Why is it that, for example, goods are able to cross borders very easily, but people aren’t? Why is it that NAFTA removed all these trade barriers but the border became more secure and fortified to people moving across the border? And we could, of course, explain this in terms of the logic of capitalism. I think we have to then imagine an immigration system that is not based on profit, that is based on both valuing and respecting people’s humanity and dignity. Ultimately what I want is to live somewhere where I can be with the people that I love the most. And I think most people in the world want that, including Biden, including Donald Trump. I think that needs to be extended to everybody. And so if you can create an immigration system that allows for that, that’s what I want.
Sunday Song: Ten Years After | I'd Love to Change the World
Ten Years After, YouTube
Excerpt: "I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do. So I'll leave it up to you.
Ten Years After in 1970, Top, Leo Lyons, left, Chick Churchill, right, Ric Lee, front, Alvin Lee. (photo: Billboard Magazine)
Everywhere is freaks and hairies
Dykes and fairies, tell me, where is sanity?
Tax the rich, feed the poor
'Til there are no rich no more
I'd love to change the world
But I don't know what to do
So I'll leave it up to you
Population keeps on breeding
Nation bleeding, still more feeding, economy
Life is funny, skies are sunny
Bees make honey, who needs money? No, not poor me
I'd love to change the world
But I don't know what to do
So I'll leave it up to you
Oh, yeah
World pollution, there's no solution
Institution, electrocution
Just black and white, rich or poor
Them and us, stop the war
I'd love to change the world
But I don't know what to do
So I'll leave it up to you
Joe Biden speaks about the climate crisis in the State Dining Room of the White House on Wednesday. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Dizzying Pace of Biden's Climate Action Sounds Death Knell for Era of Denialism
Oliver Milman, Guardian UK
Milman writes: "For a landmark moment in the global effort to stave off catastrophic climate change, Joe Biden's 'climate day'at the White House was rather low-key."
Analysis: The new president has framed the challenge of global heating as an opportunity for US jobs, saying: ‘We have to be bold’
The US president bumped elbows with his newly appointed climate tsar, John Kerry, who he called his “best buddy”, then gave a short speech before perfunctorily signing a small stack of executive orders, donning his mask and striding out without taking any questions.
The vision laid out in the actions signed by Biden on Wednesday, however, was transformative. A pathway for oil and gas drilling to be banned from public lands. A third of America’s land and ocean protected. The government ditching the combustion engine from its entire vehicle fleet, offering up a future where battery-powered trucks deliver America’s mail and electric tanks are operated by the US military.
Biden may eschew the politically contentious framing of the Green New Deal but there was even an echo of the original New Deal with his plan for a civilian climate corps to restore public lands and waterways. “The whole approach is classic Biden; working-class values, putting people to work,” said Tim Profeta, an environmental policy expert at Duke University.
The dizzying list of actions demonstrated the breadth and depth of the climate crisis. Biden’s administration will spur new climate-friendly policies for farmers while also devoting resources to the urban communities, typically low-income people of color, disproportionally blighted by pollution from nearby highways and power plants. In all, 21 federal agencies will be part of a new, overarching climate body. “This isn’t time for small measures,” Biden said. “We need to be bold.”
The first 10 days of Biden’s presidency have represented a startling handbrake turn from Donald Trump’s term, where climate science was routinely disparaged or sidelined and policies to cut planet-heating emissions were jettisoned. A complete rewiring of the economy is now needed to avert what the president calls an “existential threat” to civilization. US emissions dropped by about 10% last year but only because of pandemic shutdowns, and similar cuts will be required each year. “We can’t wait any longer – we see it with our own eyes, we feel it in our bones,” Biden implored.
“It truly is a new day for climate action,” said Carol Browner, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton. “President Joe Biden is taking unprecedented actions and sending an unmistakable message to the world that the United States is back and serious about tackling the climate crisis.”
Biden is yanking every possible governmental lever, it seems, to lower emissions but is also cognizant of attacks from Republicans, and unease among some unions, that ditching projects such as the Keystone XL oil pipeline will kill jobs. Battle lines have already formed – Republicans are trying to prevent any halt to drilling, with Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, vowing to “protect the oil and gas industry from any type of hostile attack launched from Washington DC”.
The counter to this backlash will be framed around jobs. Those who know Biden say the president views the climate crisis as a destabilizing threat to American might and national security but also an opportunity to create employment in a Covid-ravaged economy. “When I think of climate change I think of jobs,” has become a Biden slogan.
The president argues a $2tn clean energy plan will bring millions of new jobs by refashioning the power grid to run on carbon-free sources such as solar and wind within 15 years, building a new generation of energy-efficient homes and electric cars and mopping up pollution from oil and gas wells. “People have been in pain long enough,” said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s new domestic climate adviser, in reference to the pandemic. “We are not going to ask for sacrifice. If we fail to win the heart of middle America, we will lose.”
But emissions won’t get to zero via presidential action alone and Democrats’ hopes of sweeping climate legislation appear remote in a finely balanced Senate where climate denialism is still rife, as demonstrated on Tuesday by the Republican senator Rand Paul promoting a baseless theory that global heating is caused by the Earth’s tilt rather than human activity. Joe Manchin, a key Democratic vote who represents the coal heartland of West Virginia, once shot a climate bill with a rifle in a TV campaign advertisement.
“Congress seems to be the last bastion of climate denialism left in America,” said Todd Stern, the lead US negotiator of the Paris climate agreement.
There will probably be bipartisan agreement in certain areas, such as tax breaks for wind and solar and upgrades to ageing infrastructure that is being increasingly battered by floods, storms and wildfires. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, is confident some climate spending can sneak into overall budget bills. Biden could do more unilaterally if he declared a state of emergency over climate, Schumer has suggested. “Trump used this emergency for a stupid wall, which wasn’t an emergency. But if there ever was an emergency, climate is one,” the New York senator said last week.
While obstacles remain in Congress, the overall landscape has shifted since Biden’s time as vice-president. Solar and wind have plummeted in cost, countries are charging ahead, however imperfectly, on cutting emissions, and even supposed climate villains are changing their tune – in just the past week BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment fund manager, threatened to sell shares in the worst corporate polluters, the US Chamber of Commerce said it would support a price on carbon, and General Motors announced it will make only zero-emissions cars from 2035 onwards.
The Trump years may well have been the death rattle of influential denialism. The American public’s concern over the climate crisis is at record levels, with even a majority of Republican voters supporting government intervention in the wake of a year of unprecedented wildfires and hurricanes that cost hundreds of lives and tens of billions of dollars. The question is now whether the US is able to change quickly enough to avert further disaster, rather than if it will change at all.
“We are already spending the money, folks,” Kerry, the former secretary of state who is now Biden’s climate envoy, said of the recent climate-fueled disasters. “It’s cheaper to deal with the crisis of climate than to ignore it. This is life or death, a challenge to the fibre of our society. The stakes on climate change couldn’t be any higher than they are now. Failure is literally not an option.”
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