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26 February 21
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Bernie Sanders Slams Parliamentarian Decision on Minimum Wage
Cameron Jenkins, The Hill
Jenkins writes:
en. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) slammed the Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough's Thursday ruling against including a $15 an hour federal minimum wage increase in a coronavirus relief bill, stating that he strongly disagrees with the decision.
In a statement posted to Twitter, the senator said that "because of the archaic and undemocratic rules of the Senate, we are unable to move forward to end starvation wages in this country and raise the income of 32 million struggling Americans."
MacDonough ruled earlier on Thursday that increasing the minimum wage as part of a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill doesn’t comply with budget rules. In order to move forward with the wage increase, House Democrats would have to remove the language from the bill before it is passed Friday or garner support for the bill in the Senate.
Sanders emphasized that the American people, along with President Biden and Vice President Harris, overwhelmingly support the move to increase the minimum wage.
"I'm confident we have a majority in the United States, including the Vice President that would vote to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour as part of Presdient Biden's American Rescue Plan," he wrote.
He also pledged to continue to fight for increased wages.
"In the coming days, I will be working with my colleagues in the Senate to move forward with an amendment to take tax deductions away from large, profitable corporations that don't pay workers at least $15 an hour and to provide small businesses with incentives they need to raise wages," Sanders wrote. "That amendment must be included in this reconciliation bill."
Trump supporters gather outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. (photo: John Monchillo/AP)
GOP Leaders Continue to Fire Up Base With Conspiracies, Lies
Garance Burke, Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman and Larry Fenn, Associated Press
faction of local, county and state Republican officials is pushing lies, misinformation and conspiracy theories that echo those that helped inspire the violent U.S. Capitol siege, online messaging that is spreading quickly through GOP ranks fueled by algorithms that boost extreme content.
The Associated Press reviewed public and private social media accounts of nearly 1,000 federal, state, and local elected and appointed Republican officials nationwide, many of whom have voiced support for the Jan. 6 insurrection or demanded that the 2020 presidential election be overturned, sometimes in deleted posts or now-removed online forums.
“Sham-peachment,” they say, and warn that “corporate America helped rig the election.” They call former president Donald Trump a “savior” who was robbed of a second term — despite no evidence — and President Joe Biden, a “thief.” “Patriots want answers,” they declare.
The bitter, combative rhetoric is helping the officials grow their constituencies on social media and gain outsized influence in their communities, city councils, county boards and state assemblies. And it exposes the GOP’s internal struggle over whether the party can include traditional conservative politicians, conspiracy theorists and militias as it builds its base for 2022.
Earlier this month, the FBI knocked on the door of the Republican Women’s Federation of Michigan vice president Londa Gatt to ask where she was on the day of the Capitol attack.
Gatt, a Bikers for Trump coordinator who roars, leather-vested, alongside political rallies on her Harley-Davidson, had helped organize busloads of Trump supporters to join her in Washington on Jan. 6. She says she climbed the scaffolding outside the Capitol building that day “to take a picture of the whole view.” And she said she gladly told FBI agents that she did nothing wrong, and left the scene right away as things turned violent.
Since then, Gatt has shared hashtags tied to QAnon conspiracy theories online and posted that she has Trump’s personal email. She recently asked her Facebook friends who participated in Capitol intrusions to send messages directly to Trump explaining that he didn’t incite them, but instead they acted of their own volition. “The lawyers need our help,” she posted.
Gatt is among many conservatives organizing on Twitter, Facebook, Parler, Gab and Telegram, and is working on a digital strategy going forward under different monikers.
“We were cheated out of our legit president and we have no voice because our vote didn’t count,” she told The Associated Press. “I’m getting ready to start opening up some new pages, focus on getting out people who voted against Trump and replace those with conservative Republicans.”
Although Democrats have also used incendiary and aggressive language online, AP focused its research on the GOP because court documents show the overwhelming number of people arrested in association with the Capitol insurrection are longtime supporters of Trump, who has a huge Republican fan base even after leaving office.
Working with Deep Discovery, an artificial intelligence company, AP also helped build a classification algorithm that matched officials to accounts on the right-wing aligned Parler, a social media platform that recently returned after being taken offline for several weeks. AP reporters hand-verified each match using an archived Parler dataset. That archive of 183 million posts and 13 million user profiles, provided in advance of publication by New York University researcher Max Aliopoulios, was captured between August 2018 and Jan. 10, 2021, when Parler was taken offline.
AP also surveyed officials’ use of alternate social media sites such as Gab and Telegram, whose active users have soared in recent weeks since Twitter and Facebook barred people from posting extremist content and disinformation.
The AP reached out to GOP officials in many states, and sought comment from those named in this story. Several posted portions of email exchanges with the reporters or discussed the interviews on their social media.
Collectively, state and local Republican officials like Gatt play a major role in shaping the party’s future, in part because they recruit and promote candidates to run for office and help control the party’s messaging.
Even after the bloody insurrection at the Capitol showed the deadly consequences of online ire, many Republicans continue their furious push to delegitimize the new administration. Experts say it’s more dangerous, and influential, when those messages come from elected and appointed GOP officials rather than anonymous gadflies.
“We still have people in this country talking about civil war. I’m talking about high-ranking officials in state governments and elsewhere, talking about civil war, talking about secession, talking about loading up with ammunition,” Brian Michael Jenkins, a terrorism expert and adviser at the RAND Corp. think tank, recently told Congress.
Republican National Committee press secretary Mandi Merritt didn’t answer AP’s specific questions about the online rhetoric but referred to a Jan. 13 statement from Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel: “Violence has no place in our politics. Period.”
Last week, Idaho’s Kootenai County Republican Central Committee Chairman Brent Regan posted on Facebook: “People who DON’T own a gun should register and pay a fee. Per the Idaho Constitution Article 14 Section 1, all able bodied males between the ages of 18 and 45 are part of the militia and should arm themselves ... That is the LAW.”
That posting followed Regan’s online messaging in early December, when he boosted a Parler post on his feed: “SIDNEY POWELL’S “KRAKEN” IS DOD CYBER WARFARE PROGRAM! WE ARE AT WAR! – THE MARSHALL REPORT.” Powell, a lawyer who held rallies in support of Trump, referred to her legal strategy as “the kraken,” powerful enough to destroy Biden’s presidency. However, the Supreme Court on Monday rejected a handful of cases related to the 2020 election filed by Trump and his allies in five states.
Another recent Regan Facebook post: “The thing I object most about democrats is that they incite my base instincts to retaliate in kind.”
When AP asked about his posts, Regan said: “My message on social media, print media, and in person is consistent: ‘Pray for serenity. Be the eye of the storm. Stay calm. Think clearly. Don’t panic. Stay peaceful while demanding integrity and honesty.’”
On Jan. 5, Idaho RNC delegate Doyle Beck, who sits with Regan on the board of a libertarian policy group called the Idaho Freedom Foundation, arrived in Washington where he posted a photo of himself on Facebook with Donald Trump Jr., commenting “TRUMP 2020, Stop the Steal.”
Beck told AP he went to a meeting at Trump International Hotel that night with Trump Jr., Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Trump adviser Peter Navarro and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, and attended the Trump rally the next day but stayed far from the Capitol building.
AP confirmed that Trump Jr. and Tuberville attended the gathering. Navarro denied attending, and Giuliani said he couldn’t remember and would need to check his diary.
On Feb. 2, Beck reposted on Facebook a statement reading: “Why Would You Have To Impeach A President That Lost? Unless Of Course He Didn’t. Then You’d Have To Silence Him. Oh, Wait….”
More than a month after the insurrection, Beck told AP he believes the election was stolen, and that he might switch to Parler because he thinks his posts are being censored on Facebook.
“Parler is honest,” he said. “They don’t try to do this fact check bullcrap.”
Some Republican officials are posting theories related to QAnon, which the FBI has called a domestic terrorism threat. And the Department of Homeland Security has warned of the potential for lingering violence from extremists enraged by Biden’s election and emboldened by the Capitol attack. But even as Twitter, Facebook and others are rapidly removing, freezing and suspending accounts, the clamor continues.
Two days after he joined the Capitol attack, Sacramento, California, Republican Assembly President Jorge Riley, posted on Facebook: “I won’t say I stood by. Come take my life. I’m right here.” Then he posted his home address, according to court documents, followed by “You all will die.”
Riley was subsequently forced to resign and arrested for his involvement in the insurrection. Riley and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
Experts warn that if left unchecked, this type of rhetoric could again incite violence.
“What I care about is the potential loss of life, and preventing what appears to be a pretty massive extremist movement that is growing right now,” said Elizabeth Neumann, who was an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Trump. “The only way to stop this, aside from law enforcement, is to get the GOP to acknowledge how they have contributed to its growth and get them to speak out about it. Things cannot continue this way.”
Many GOP officials told AP that Democrats and the media are ignoring, demeaning or even mocking millions of Americans’ legitimate concerns about the election outcome, rather than seriously engaging with them. And they pointed to angry posts from Democrats they said had led to dangerous and costly consequences.
Some of the GOP officials AP surveyed have tempered their online speech in the past month since social media platforms began banning accounts more aggressively and the FBI ramped up investigations tied to Jan. 6.
Still, a rift is opening in some local Republican circles as those who embrace disinformation about election fraud clash with those who recognize Biden’s win.
Following Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment trial, Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican, called the claims that the former president won the election “wild myths” and said the insurrection was “a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole” online, laying the blame at Trump’s feet.
Couy Griffin, a commissioner in Otero County, New Mexico, founded the group Cowboys for Trump, and shows up at rallies on horseback, waving a large American flag. Griffin entered the Capitol grounds Jan. 6, then kept posting on Parler about his support for continuing the fight for Trump. When he got back to New Mexico, he told his fellow county commissioners that he planned to bring his “.357 Henry big boy rifle” and ”.357 single action revolver” to the inauguration Jan. 20, according to court documents.
Griffin was arrested near a security checkpoint in Washington before the inauguration and is charged with entering a Secret Service-restricted area without permission. The Republican Party of New Mexico has distanced itself from Griffin, and a recall effort is underway. Griffin told AP he didn’t bring guns to DC but he will protect himself.
“I’m not going to be threatened and harassed and bullied,” Griffin told AP in an interview. “There’s many of us who will continue to take a stand for our freedom and continue to raise our voices and demand that our voices be heard.”
Others have faced political consequences.
Hours before Parler was taken offline on Jan. 10, Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase posted an image she said was from Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop. “Make no mistake,” posted Chase. “The 2020 Presidential Election was stolen by the Democratic Party with the help of our enemies. She’s the traitor and leader of the insurrection and coup against the USA.”
Chase, who is seeking this year’s GOP nomination for Virginia governor and was at the Jan. 6 rally but said she did not go to the Capitol building, has been censured by the Virginia Senate for an alleged “pattern of unacceptable conduct” and is suing.
In a phone call, Chase initially said the post calling Pelosi a traitor didn’t sound familiar and could have been the work of an imposter. But after the AP emailed her a link of an archived webpage, Chase confirmed it was indeed her post, and said she “stands by it.”
“It’s my free speech right. I can say all day long that the election was stolen, that’s my right to believe that,” Chase said. “And for the press, or for other people to try and cancel the free speech of others who have that opinion is un-American.”
About two-thirds of Republicans say — contrary to all evidence — that Biden was not legitimately elected president, according to a recent poll by AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Free speech advocates say the legal definition of inciting violence is extremely narrow, and over-policing online posts, including those spreading misinformation, could undermine democracy.
“We need to be very careful about not painting with an overly broad brush what incitement to violence is, because it’s going to have serious consequences if we allow that exception to get wider,” said Nora Pelizzari, spokeswoman for the National Coalition Against Censorship. “We can’t allow anger at people in power to become punishable.”
AP found plenty of anger. Parler posts containing the word “revolution” increased five times faster than the overall rate of message traffic after the election, the analysis found. Also, about 84% of posts referring to the hashtag “#1776″ occurred on or after Election Day, according to AP’s analysis. Post-election references to “treason” and the QAnon slogan “trust the plan” both increased by about 10 times the overall rate, the data showed.
Republican Ryan Kelley, a planning commissioner in Allendale Township, Michigan, recently announced he’s running for governor and started organizing for his campaign on Telegram, saying “the funny biz in the 2020 election that the left brushed under the rug.. Patriots want answers,” and pledging to watch a conspiracy theory video pushing Trump’s claims of election fraud.
Kelley had made headlines last spring after he organized a protest in Michigan’s Capitol, inviting heavily armed militiamen who crowded into the Lansing statehouse. Over the summer, he posted an article about the Michigan Liberty Militia on Parler saying, “Love seeing our Militia highlighted and shown as the good guys they are. #militia” Two members of that group later were charged in an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. On Jan. 6, Kelley went to the U.S. Capitol but says he was only outside.
Kelley told AP that militia members are “law abiding, lawful citizens that love this country, and maybe you get a couple of them that are bad apples. Question for you is, are bad apples pretty much in everything that we have as far as groups?”
As for his social media use in general he said, “Somebody might look at my posts and think oppositely, think, ‘Oh wow, I’m offended by that,’ or, ‘Oh, man, I feel intimidated by that.’ I might look at somebody else’s posts that take oppositely of me and think similar things,” he said. “The question is, No. 1, is any of them unlawful?”
He said he’s simply looking to open conversations with his posts.
New Hampshire state Republican Rep. Terry Roy also continues to push the theory that Biden is not the legitimate winner of November’s election.
“THIS guy won 80 million votes? Not in this universe,” he posted on the social media platform Gab earlier this month. “I’m busy trying to keep New Hampshire free during the day and preparing for Red Dawn by night.” In the 1984 movie “Red Dawn,” American teenagers fought Russian invaders.
Roy joined Gab last month, uploading an introductory post showing himself shooting a high-powered bolt-action rifle and displaying a symbol and slogan, “Molon Labe,” favored by gun-rights advocates and some members of the militia group the Oath Keepers. Molon Labe translates to “come and take them.”
He said the symbol is meaningful for Second Amendment supporters, and that extremist groups can’t “hijack” it. He said he referenced “Red Dawn” in part because the film’s premise is that citizens can face a foreign invasion, which echoes his beliefs that Americans should embrace gun rights.
After speaking with AP, Roy asked his Gab followers, “Do ANY of you take anything I have ever said to be a call to initiate violence against the Government or anyone else?” Most who responded said no, though several took the opportunity to share their own views involving right-wing conspiracy theories.
Roy said he’s now more introspective about what he says online.
“I think it does give me a little pause to just make sure and double-check that hyperbole doesn’t run over into encouragement of something that would be illegal,” he said. “I always want to make sure that while trying to fire up my base, I don’t unnecessarily fire up the crazies.”
In Arizona and Illinois, prominent Republicans who refused to support Trump’s bid to overturn the election have been rebuked in recent weeks by the state GOP and a central committee, respectively. Last month, the Texas GOP’s Twitter account urged people to follow the party on “free speech” social media app Gab using the slogan “We are The Storm,” despite its association with the Qanon conspiracy theory.
After the November election, Manhattan, New York, Republican Party chair Andrea Catsimatidis asked on Parler: “Is Joe Biden planning a coup by trying to create his own parallel government?” Earlier this month, she retweeted: “Corporate America helped rig the election.”
Reached by phone, Catsimatidis said she believes it is the duty of political officials to share their opinions and reach as many people as possible.
“Political leaders have influence, and the fact that I have developed a social media following is exactly what you should be doing as a political leader,” she said. “And I want to make sure that I can get information out.”
Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent, is now a critical voice against the agency and an advocate for migrant rights. (photo: Nancee E. Lewis/San Diego Union-Tribune)
The San Diego Union-Tribune: She Used to Be an Agent. Now She Is One of Border Patrol's Loudest Critics.
Kristina Davis, The San Diego Union-Tribune
Davis writes: "Jenn Budd uses her experience to advocate for migrant rights and call for accountability on border."
he migrant girl was around 6 years old, dehydrated, fluish and despondent. Her head looked too big for her body — a sign of malnutrition — and she had lice in her hair.
The girl had spent two weeks outdoors held at the sunbaked Border Patrol detention center in El Paso with her asylum-seeking family before being brought to a migrant shelter in San Diego. That’s where Jenn Budd found her in the summer of 2018, and she needed serious medical intervention.
It was Budd’s first time as a volunteer at the shelter. Still, another volunteer commented, “You’re probably used to seeing this.”
As a former Border Patrol agent, Budd had witnessed first-hand the cruelties of both the border and the agency. She says she was also a victim of them, raped in the academy, harassed on the job, and in fear for her safety when she quit after six years in 2001.
Even then, she was astonished by the girl’s condition — and that it occurred under the Border Patrol’s watch.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Budd responded before rushing the girl to the hospital in the back of her car.
There would be more trips to local hospitals over the next several months, as Budd slowly shed everything she’d been taught as an agent and embraced a new role as an immigrant activist.
Since then, Budd, 49, has become one of Border Patrol’s sharpest public critics, using her personal experience and insider expertise to call out an agency plagued by allegations of misogyny, xenophobia, corruption and human rights abuses.
Her acerbic commentary has generated a Twitter following of more than 27,000, and she is frequently quoted in national media as an expert on Border Patrol’s culture problem — a problem that persisted long before it was reinvigorated under the Trump administration.
The Border Patrol disputes her characterizations of unaddressed corruption and abuse.
“As public servants, the Border Patrol holds itself to the highest ethical standards,” a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, the umbrella agency over Border Patrol, said in a statement. “Allegations of abuse and corruption are taken very seriously as the slightest hint erodes public confidence and subverts the Border Patrol’s ability to effectively accomplish its mission.”
Some of Budd’s critics dismiss her as a disgruntled former agent living in the past. But her commitment to activism, vulnerability and candid acknowledgement of her own complicity in a broken immigration system have set her apart.
After four years of former President Donald Trump unshackling the Border Patrol, her outspokenness is likely to resonate with a new administration that is under pressure to rein in the agency and root out any indications of a toxic culture.
“The story of Jenn Budd is the story of redemption,” said Hiram Soto, who took Budd under his wing as the then-communications director at Alliance San Diego, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrant rights.
“It’s really the story of the United States in the moment we are going through now,” he said, “recognizing the cruelty and racism and violence that Border Patrol has inflicted on so many people, and how you can come to turn the page on that and actually find other ways to manage immigration and treat people.”
Escape to the unknown
The border was never something Budd thought about growing up White in Alabama.
But by the time she’d graduated from Auburn University with a pre-law degree, the thought of going to law school was unbearable. It would mean racking up more debt, and the lawyers she knew didn’t make much money. She’d also have to stick close to home, within the grasp of her abusive, alcoholic mother.
The Border Patrol — what little she knew of it — offered an escape.
“They told me people were bringing drugs across the border, that it was about protecting America,” she recalled. “The idea of riding ATVs and horses — I pictured in my mind kind of like a cowboy thing.”
Budd signed her employment papers two days before her 24th birthday and headed to the academy in Georgia for four months.
She was already expecting a hyper-masculine environment. She says what she found was worse: a program hostile to women recruits.
Male classmates were told by instructors to view their female counterparts as not up to the job physically or mentally, Budd said. They were told that the few women who managed to graduate did so by exchanging sexual favors — or by accusing instructors or fellow trainees of rape, she said.
Budd’s narrative would be no exception.
Budd had tried to come out as gay when she was 19, but her mother told her it would embarrass the family. She continued to hide that part of herself in the academy.
One night, a classmate insisted on walking Budd home to her townhouse. There, he raped her and punched her in the face as she tried to fight back, she said.
Budd was scared to report the attack, but she told her instructors about it a few days later when she was forced to spar in training with the classmate who’d assaulted her. They told her to file a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission if she had a problem, she said.
She had heard what happened to women who had filed similar complaints — they were failed out of the academy, she said. Budd did not file the complaint.
Weeks later she failed her physical training run by one second, she said. The rules allowed for one more try. “I made sure I smoked the hell out of it,” she said of her second attempt.
She said she later learned from her Spanish instructor that the academy leadership had ordered him to fail her; he’d refused.
She was one of two women to graduate in her class.
It will be different in the field, she told herself.
On the line
Operation Gatekeeper was in full swing by the end of 1995, when Budd arrived as a rookie agent at the Campo station.
Launched a year earlier, the strategy poured resources and manpower into the San Diego Sector, the nation’s hotspot for illegal border crossings at the time.
The initial focus was on controlling the urban San Diego-Tijuana corridor, which in turn drove many migrants east, into the mountains of Campo.
“Working any shift in Campo was constant hiking, running, tracking all night,” she said.
Budd — at one point the only woman working patrol at the station — carried the extra pressure of proving herself to her male colleagues as she learned how to apprehend migrants and seize drug loads making their way through one of the state’s most rugged border corridors. She faced harassment instead, she said.
She’d find used condoms in her mail drawer, panties hanging from video cameras in the processing area, and even a live rattlesnake placed in the cab of her patrol truck, she said.
But mostly, she was ignored.
“I just wouldn’t get any backup,” she said.
She filed an EEOC complaint against two fellow agents, alleging they had spread rumors that she was sexually involved with a male supervisor. Others corroborated the claim, and the investigation concluded that it appeared one of the agents may have engaged in an effort to damage Budd’s professional reputation. But the actions weren’t found to be discriminatory, according to the records.
Other women have complained about sexual harassment in the agency, including a trainee in the academy class after Budd’s who said she was pushed down on a bed and groped by a male classmate. The alleged attacker, who denied the incident, said the woman brought the complaint because she was having problems with physical training, while an instructor blamed the complaint on the woman’s “immaturity” in relating to men in her class, according to EEOC records.
The EEOC complaint was ultimately sustained on appeal, with the agency found liable for harassment.
Another woman reported being raped by an instructor and male peers at a graduation party, according to a report by Newsweek.
When asked about Budd’s assertions of widespread of abuse and corruption, a CBP spokesperson described a multilayered approach to rooting out such issues.
The agency said all reports of misconduct are coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and referred to the appropriate office for investigation or action, while the Office of Professional Integrity works “to identify and counter threats to CBP’s culture of integrity and security.” All agents are also required to take annual integrity training, the spokesperson said.
The Border Patrol has struggled to recruit and keep female agents. When Budd joined in 1995, women made up about 5 percent of the force. The ratio has been stuck there ever since.
James Wong, a retired deputy assistant commissioner for CBP’s Office of Internal Affairs, said the Border Patrol’s culture problem was evident when he was overseeing investigations and vetting new applicants. The agency was plagued by cronyism, which often didn’t bode well for women deemed outsiders, he said.
“It is a male-dominated organization. They call themselves the Mean Green Machine,” Wong, who spent part of his career in San Diego and retired in 2001, said from his home in Louisiana.
“They didn’t welcome new ideas,” he added. “You were either a reflection of the group of people who hired you, or you didn’t get hired, or you didn’t get promoted.”
A renewed effort to recruit more women has continued with “The Fearless Five” campaign, developed with the Border Patrol’s Taskforce for Women “to honor the purpose, pride, and passion that women in our ranks have for the difficult mission we execute every day,” the CBP spokesperson said.
A video launching the campaign compares the 5 percent of women in the agency to diamonds created under intense heat and pressure.
Faltering mission
Looking back, Budd says the walls that she had developed to cope with an abusive childhood were helping her survive on the job.
She said she tried to ignore other corruption she saw — agents with ties to drug traffickers, superiors convincing agents’ girlfriends and wives not to report domestic violence incidents. She focused on her own apprehensions and seizures. But that became unfulfilling, as she slowly began to see cracks in the border security narrative that had been drilled into her.
One night, she tracked a large group of migrants north of Tecate, across state Route 94 and up a rocky slope that descended into a treacherous crevasse.
“If you go down there you’re going to die,” she shouted. “Let me give you a ride back to Mexico. You can try again tomorrow.”
They finally acquiesced.
She settled in with the group to wait for backup. She lit a cigarette while many of the migrants ate quietly.
Budd asked why they were crossing. “Have you ever been to Mexico?” a man responded in English. “Don’t you think you need to know something about the people you’re arresting?”
Budd was defensive: “You committed a crime,” she said.
“We committed the crime of crossing an arbitrary line to find work,” he said.
The migrant, who told her he had a law degree from Mexico, kept pushing.
“He asked me if we hunt down Canadians. It made me start to think about what I did for a living,” Budd remembered.
“I had to admit to him it was racist; we didn’t treat White people like this.”
Before the man was taken away, he put a hand on Budd’s uniformed shoulder and challenged her: “You know better than this. Think about what you’re doing,” he said.
“OK, OK,” she shrugged, “Get back in the van.”
But Budd was rattled.
“I never forgot about that guy.”
By the late ‘90s, Operation Gatekeeper was pushing migrants farther east into even harsher environments. She saw the effects firsthand during a temporary detail in Indio. People died of heatstroke and dehydration in the desert, or lost limbs while hitching rides on trains.
“It was miserable out there, so much death,” Budd said. “We spent our off-duty nights getting drunk constantly, not realizing it was being caused by the trauma.”
Her misgivings were getting stronger. She had joined the Border Patrol to catch smugglers, seize drugs and help people. Instead, she was spending most of her time apprehending migrant farm workers.
“We’re just the labor police,” she concluded at one point. “What’s the worst thing undocumented people are doing? Bending over 12 hours a day picking strawberries to get paid almost nothing? That’s just not what I got a degree in.”
Budd, who eventually advanced to a senior agent position, was finding it harder to stay in in the field.
She transferred to the intelligence unit. “I’m thinking the higher up I get, then I can do good, go after the drug dealers and smugglers. It turned out to be just as corrupt.”
Blowing the whistle
Budd had heard rumors that a high-ranking agent was aiding in the smuggling of drugs. Her own growing suspicions — bolstered by intelligence from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — led her to quietly launch her own investigation, she said.
Her boss did not act on her findings, she said.
She was told she had misunderstood some things and was offered a management position at sector headquarters that would keep her safe. She declined.
When she got home that evening, she was notified that she’d have to pull a patrol shift in Campo that night, sitting in a truck outfitted with a high-powered scope camera pointed toward the border fence.
About 3 a.m., she was startled by the explosive sound of automatic gunfire ricocheting off the rocks next to her. The flashes were coming from Mexico.
She sped away in reverse, calling on the radio for backup. Nobody responded.
She soon saw headlights coming toward her. It was the same official she’d been investigating.
“He says, ‘I heard that you were calling for help. You’re getting shot at and nobody is responding to you. I thought I’d come out and see if you are OK,’” she recalled.
After a moment of silence, he added: “Have you learned your lesson?”
Budd didn’t answer and drove off. She went to the station, threw her keys on the supervisor’s desk and announced her plans to quit.
She went home and got her girlfriend, now her wife, out of bed. “I don’t even believe in what we do anymore,” she told her. “I’m going to die out there and nobody’s going to care.”
Rebuilding
Budd tried to shed the last six years of law enforcement by reinventing herself as a custom woodworker, building furniture at her girlfriend’s woodworking shop. But she was unraveling inside.
“I felt like everything I’d worked so hard for was just thrown away,” she said.
In 2015, she attempted suicide in the woodworking shop. She was saved when her wife found her, but her hands were permanently damaged in the attempt. She is on disability, the chronic pain, lack of mobility and numbness preventing her from using her hands to drive, type or do much else for prolonged stretches.
To heal the rest of her, the walls she’d built would have to come down.
At the same time, presidential candidate Trump was talking about building walls.
His outsized focus on the securing the southwest border understandably buoyed morale among Border Patrol ranks. A Trump administration would significantly raise their influence, and in some ways embolden a troubled culture.
Budd, deep into therapy and blogging about her own experiences as an agent, was watching closely.
It was easy for her to condemn the anti-immigration policies she was seeing unfold — the detention of asylum-seekers in overflowing Border Patrol facilities, the separation of families, the “Remain in Mexico” program. It was more challenging to admit her own role in the same system.
Her transition into the world of advocacy was not immediate. She first had to listen to experiences of the same migrants she would have apprehended. And she had to earn the trust of immigrant rights activists in San Diego, many of them Latinos who’d dedicated their lives to the cause and had their own traumatic pasts with Border Patrol.
“She was scared other people would judge her,” said Soto, who met Budd through his work at Alliance San Diego.
Soto knew one of the most powerful things Budd had to offer was her personal story. He got her writing seriously.
Budd’s “Open letter from an ex-Border Patrol agent,” posted by the Southern Border Communities Coalition, spoke directly to the current ranks. She eviscerated Operation Gatekeeper on the 25th anniversary. When investigative news outlet ProPublica broke news of the “I’m 10-15" private Facebook group to which thousands of current and former Border Patrol members belonged, she wrote that she wasn’t in the least bit surprised at its crude, misogynist posts.
Several former and current agents have reached out to her in solidarity, most of them privately, she said. Others have pushed back.
“She’s an idiot and probably didn’t do much work in the field,” Art Del Cueto, a Border Patrol union official, said in 2019 on “The Green Line,” a podcast produced by the union. He went on to list a number of female agents he admired, adding: “I don’t want female Border Patrol agents to be judged on what this moron has said.”
Andrea Guerrero, Alliance San Diego’s executive director, describes Budd as “a very extraordinary, unique person.”
“She’s done really hard work to recognize her role in a troubled past that she was also a victim of, and I wish there were more agents like her who had courage to come forward, had courage to question what they’re asked to do, and had the conviction to do something about it,” Guerrero said.
At times, Budd would find herself slipping into the same thought patterns or hard exterior of an agent. Once, when she volunteered at the migrant shelter in San Diego, she had to be reminded to smile at the group of migrants standing in front of her.
She was still holding onto a part of her past.
One day, she dug out her leather Border Patrol jacket, her commemorative badge and cowboy hat, and turned them over to Soto.
“I don’t need to hang onto this anymore,” she told him.
A worker at a Walmart in Gladstone, Missouri. (photo: Wikimedia)
Corporations Are Making Billions in Profits - Yet American Workers Have No Paid Sick Leave
Julia Rock, Jacobin
Rock writes:
The United States is the only industrialized country in the world not to federally mandate paid sick leave. Walmart, McDonald’s, and other giant corporations are trying to keep it that way.
ast March, as part of Congress’s first COVID relief bill, the federal government enacted a blanket paid sick leave benefit to ensure that people infected with COVID-19 could stay home without fear of losing their wages.
The benefit had gaping holes, including a provision that exempted companies with more than 500 employees from the policy, leaving millions of workers without protections. Then, in December, Congress declined to extend what was left of the COVID-related paid sick leave program.
Now, as a congressional hearing today scrutinizes corporations’ treatment of low-wage workers, the battle over paid leave is being rekindled: Shareholders at a variety of major US corporations are pushing for resolutions asking management to, as one of the proposals put it, “analyze and report on the feasibility of including paid sick leave (PSL) as a standard employee benefit not limited to COVID-19.”
The initiatives are designed to make permanent the leave policies that some of the companies agreed to temporarily extend to workers during the pandemic. However, the companies facing the resolutions are fighting the shareholder pressure every step of the way, asking federal regulators to help block them.
Big Companies Ask the SEC to Intervene
The paid sick leave resolutions, coordinated by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a shareholder advocacy organization, have been filed at CVS, Dollar General, Kohl’s, Kroger, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Yum! Brands (which owns KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut). The efforts are part of an attempt to force companies that have made a point of calling their employees “essential” to put their money where their mouth is.
“These companies have been saying day after day that their employees matter, that their employees are essential,” said Nadira Narine, senior program director of strategic initiatives at the ICCR. “The best way to show that they mean that is to extend a paid leave benefit.”
In response to the proposals, every single company except Dollar General asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to agree that they do not need to put the resolutions to shareholders for a vote this spring. In four of the cases, the SEC has sided with the company, while two decisions are still outstanding.
The United States, meanwhile, is the only industrialized country in the world not to mandate paid sick leave on a permanent basis.
If shareholder resolutions end up being put up for a vote, major institutional shareholders such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and large pension funds will have the opportunity to use their huge holdings to support or oppose the measures.
Company executives often try to block the votes from ever happening, for fear that those influential institutions could themselves face public pressure to support the measures and help change corporate behavior.
Elevating Paid Sick Leave to Social Policy
As grassroots momentum for paid sick leave has grown across the country, corporate interests — and their cronies in the GOP — have worked hard to stem the tide. Thanks to Republican-controlled state legislatures, twenty-three states have passed laws preempting local efforts to require companies to provide paid sick leave benefits to their employees.
Now, to keep their shareholders from voting on the matter, the six companies targeted by the ICCR effort argued in their SEC no-action requests that the resolutions amounted to investors “micromanaging” the company by intervening in its “ordinary business operations.” SEC precedent, according to commission rule 14a-8, requires that shareholder resolutions must rise to the level of a “social policy issue” for investors to have a say in the policy.
But investors taking part in the endeavor say paid sick leave is a social policy issue, a fact that has been made even clearer by the pandemic.
“Paid sick leave, especially at companies with heavily customer-facing workforces, should qualify as a significant policy issue now and even after the current pandemic has passed, given the huge increase in public attention to the issue and policy initiatives, many of which are not limited to the COVID-19 context,” Narine said. “Saying that this is not a significant policy issue, in a pandemic world, that raises a red flag.”
The SEC has, for about two decades, taken the stance that issues pertaining to worker benefits don’t amount to social policy issues, according to Jonas Kron, the chief advocacy officer at Trillium Asset Management, which filed the paid sick leave resolution with CVS.
“There are areas that have been typically no-go areas under rule 14a-8,” he said. “Worker benefits is one of them, worker pay is another . . . We knew that going into this filing, but we really thought that, given the amount of attention getting paid to the well-being of essential workers, that this would be one of those occasions where the SEC would take a different approach.”
CVS cited the SEC’s previous decisions to strike out shareholder proposals pertaining to employee benefits in its no-action request, as did the other companies.
However, investors working on the paid sick leave campaign believe that worker benefits have gained renewed attention over the past year.
That has been especially true for a company like Kroger, one of the nation’s largest grocery store chains, whose employees are interfacing directly with customers and are especially vulnerable to COVID. Last month, Kroger shut down two stores in Seattle after the local city council passed a resolution mandating hazard pay for grocery workers.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, Kroger as much as admitted that their paid sick leave policies were not sufficient to keep people safe, at home, and ready to come back to work in a way that was going to help them continue as a business and supply America with food,” said Pat Tomaino, the director of socially responsible investing at Zevin Asset Management, who filed the resolution at Kroger. Many Kroger employees did not have access to any paid sick leave before the pandemic, when the company provided it on a temporary basis.
Taking Corporations to Task
Although the SEC appears to be maintaining its stance against investors who demand more from companies when it comes to employee benefits, the companies are facing scrutiny elsewhere and could face renewed pressure to change their ways thanks to the new chairman of the Senate budget committee, Bernie Sanders.
Sanders, in fact, will begin a series of hearings today to call on corporate executives to answer for how they treat their employees. The first hearing is titled, “Should taxpayers subsidize poverty wages at large profitable corporations?” Executives from Walmart and McDonald’s have been called to testify, but it is not clear yet whether they will appear.
It is possible that through these hearings or other efforts, Sanders could spotlight the need for companies to continue paid sick leave policies long after the immediate danger of COVID-19 has subsided.
In the meantime, the idea of the United States joining the rest of the industrialized world by requiring such worker protections remains a distant dream. The new COVID relief bill put forward by House Democrats, for example, does not require companies to provide paid sick leave. Instead, Democrats will try to persuade companies to offer paid sick leave with tax credits.
Absent any federal policy, investors want employers to act. “These companies should not be waiting for a pandemic to hit to tell employees they can take time off when they are sick,” said Narine, the ICCR program director.
U.S. military personnel. (photo: Adobe Images)
Pentagon Report Warns of Threat From White Supremacists Inside the Military
Dan De Luce, NBC News
A small number of extremists within the ranks carry the potential to carry out “high-impact” actions, the report says.
Defense Department report highlights disturbing examples of white supremacy inside the military, calling for changes in how the department screens recruits for possible ties to domestic extremism.
The report, which the Trump administration drafted last year before the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, was sent to Congress in October, but it has not been made public until now.
It describes one case in which a Florida National Guards member, who was part of a neo-Nazi group, was chatting in an online forum with a fellow white supremacist, bragging that he makes no secret of his racist ideology among his colleagues.
"Are you worried at all about being found by your mates or someone, now being in the U.S. military?" he was asked.
The guard membersman replied: "I was 100% open about everything with the friends I made at training. They know about it all. They love me too cause I'm a funny guy."
The exchange appeared in an extremist "Iron March" online forum in 2016, part of a database that the news site Ars Technica published in 2019. A screenshot from the chat appears in the Pentagon's report to Congress, which examines efforts to prevent white supremacists from joining the military.
The report, which was first obtained by Roll Call, does not estimate the number of white supremacists in the military, although it says the number is low in a force of more than 2 million active-duty members and reservists.
But it warns that even a small number of extremists poses a threat to national security and to the cohesion of the armed forces, citing murders, foiled terrorist plots and other incidents linked to white supremacists in the ranks over the past decade.
"Despite a low number of cases in absolute terms, individuals with extremist affiliations and military experience are a concern to U.S. national security because of their proven ability to execute high-impact events," the report said.
Domestic extremist groups view the membership of active-duty U.S. forces as "highly prized," because service members can bring "legitimacy" to their cause and help them attract more recruits, according to the report.
"Access to service members with combat training and technical weapons expertise can also increase both the probability of success and the potency of planned violent attacks," it said.
After the deadly siege of the Capitol last month by a pro-Trump mob, the new defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, ordered a militarywide stand-down to allow commanders to hold discussions with members about the threat posed by extremism. A number of current and former service members face federal charges in connection with the storming of the Capitol.
Lawmakers ordered the Defense Department to prepare the report after they raised questions last year about how it screens recruits and about recent cases of service members linked to white supremacist causes.
The report recounts how some service members were discharged after they were found to be active supporters of the neo-Nazi group known as the Atomwaffen Division and the white nationalist American Identity Group.
Others were disciplined but not kicked out of the force, it said.
A Marine involved in the deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was discharged for his ties to the Atomwaffen Division in 2018. Another member trying to recruit members for the organization enlisted in the Navy, the report said.
As of 2017, a member of the American Identity Movement was enlisted with the Alabama National Guard and worked as a civilian security guard for a leading far-right figure, Richard Spencer, according to the report.
In another chat on the Iron March forum, a user who calls himself an infantryman described how fellow white nationalists find one another through fascist symbols, the report says.
"A good way people in the military find other rightists is to simply wear a shirt with some obscure fascist logo," the person wrote, according to the report. "I met my good buddy at a brigade luncheon when he noticed the Totenkopf on my shirt."
Tattoos and security clearances
The report recommended that the Pentagon work more closely with the FBI, including the bureau's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit and its National Gang Intelligence Center, to help spot possible white supremacists applying to join the military. Those offices could help the Defense Department identify tattoos or other telltale symbols during the recruitment process, it said.
The report said that security clearance checks should include questions worded in a clearer way to spot white supremacist links and that federal agencies need to agree on a consistent definition of what constitutes domestic extremism.
The authors also recommended more training of military recruiters and others involved in overseeing who joins the force, including using the FBI's counterterrorism expertise.
The Defense Department, however, sounded a note of caution about screening potential recruits' social media posts. The department is exploring the use of social media information in background checks, but "more review and analysis are required before we will be able to determine how and if we can integrate this information into the background check process," it said.
There is a risk of relying too heavily on reviews of social media data, it said. "Databases alone cannot provide a full, whole-person determination of applicants," the report said.
The report examined recruitment only and did not look at how to handle extremism among current service members.
"Given its narrow focus, it does make several suggestions that I think are good or viable," said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow who studies extremism for the Anti-Defamation League.
He said white supremacy and anti-government extremism have periodically surged in American society and in the military dating to the 1980s. But, he said, the Pentagon has never enacted the kind of sweeping reforms necessary to tackle the problem.
Two U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors fly over Syria, February 2, 2018. (photo: Staff Sgt. Colton Elliott/DoD)
Biden Administration Conducts Strike on Iranian-Linked Fighters in Syria
Missy Ryan, Anne Gearan and Alex Horton, The Washington Post
he Biden administration conducted an airstrike in Syria on Thursday that officials believe killed a number of alleged Iranian-linked fighters, signaling its intent to use targeted military action to push back against violence tied to Tehran.
The attack on a border-crossing station in eastern Syria, the first lethal operation ordered by the Biden administration against Iran’s network of armed proxies, was “authorized in response to recent attacks against American and coalition personnel in Iraq, and to ongoing threats,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
The facilities were used by Iranian-linked Iraqi militias, including Kataib Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, he said.
The operation follows a deadly attack on a location housing U.S. personnel in Iraq that American officials have attributed to Iranian-linked groups. Earlier this month, rocket fire in northern Iraq killed a contractor working with the U.S. military and injured a U.S. service member.
“President Biden will act to protect American and coalition personnel,” Kirby said in a statement. “We have acted in a deliberate manner that aims to de-escalate the overall situation in both eastern Syria and Iraq.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Thursday that he was confident the building targeted in Syria was used by the militia responsible for recent attacks.
“It was my recommendation. We’ve said a number of times, we will respond on our timeline. And, once again [we] wanted to be sure of the connectivity and that we had the right targets,” he said, according to Military Times.
The White House did not issue a statement or otherwise acknowledge the strike.
A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide additional details, said the single strike targeted a cluster of buildings along Syria’s eastern border and was believed to have killed up to a handful of people.
Syrian state media confirmed the strike, and said it took place at a time the army was targeting the Islamic State in the area. It quoted a member of Russia’s Federation Council who condemned the attack and called it “unlawful,” adding that any similar escalations in the area could lead to “a massive conflict.” There was no mention of the Iranian positions hit.
The aide of a senior commander in Kataib Hezbollah told The Washington Post one of its soldiers was killed in the attack. “It’s strange the United States bombed Kataib Hezbollah over an attack that was condemned by Kataib Hezbollah themselves,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The attack comes as President Biden attempts to open a diplomatic door to Iran. Biden has agreed to European-led talks with Iran about the future of the 2015 international nuclear deal that President Donald Trump renounced.
Iran has appeared to rebuff Biden’s initial efforts to resume diplomacy, and for now the United States remains outside the agreement.
The airstrike appears to be part of a U.S. message to Iran that it cannot improve its leverage in talks by attacking U.S. interests.
But Biden’s decision to use force may also set back his plan to shift the focus of U.S. national security away from the Middle East in a long-planned pivot to Asia.
“The strike, the way I see it, was meant to set the tone with Tehran and dent its inflated confidence ahead of negotiations,” said Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official who is currently a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute. “You don’t want to enter into potential talks with Iran on any issue with a bruise to your face from the Irbil attacks.”
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who has called for retaliatory strikes on Iranian-backed militias, welcomed the attack.
“Responses like this are a necessary deterrent and remind Iran, its proxies, and our adversaries around the world that attacks on U.S. interests will not be tolerated,” he said in a statement.
Other Republicans, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), described the strike as “targeted, proportional and necessary.”
SITE Intelligence Group reported that a pro-Shiite militant news outlet minimized the effect of the strike, alleging it struck an empty building and killed one person.
The operation follows intense U.S.-Iranian hostilities during the Trump administration, which identified weakening Iran’s leadership as a top foreign policy priority.
In January 2020, the military launched a strike killing a senior Iranian military figure, Qasem Soleimani, in Baghdad. In response, Iran launched a major missile attack on a base housing U.S. troops in Iraq.
Some experts said the airstrike on Thursday signals a strategic middle ground that avoids further diplomatic strains with the Iraqi government, which assists the United States in the fight against the Islamic State and could view a strike in Iraq as a violation of its sovereignty.
Mick Mulroy, who served as a top Pentagon official for the Middle East during the Trump administration and is now an analyst with ABC News, said the strike was probably “calculated and scaled to avoid an escalation and send a message that Iran’s use of militias as proxies will not allow them to avoid responsibility.”
On Tuesday, Biden discussed the recent attacks with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi and agreed that those responsible “must be held fully to account,” the White House said in a statement.
As the Pentagon seeks to shift its focus, officials are conducting a review of the U.S. posture in Iraq, where a force of about 2,500 remains to support counterinsurgent operations, and in Syria, where U.S. troops number fewer than 1,000.
Millions of monarch butterflies arrive each year in Mexico after traveling, in some cases, thousands of miles from the United States and Canada. (photo: Pedro Pardo/Getty)
Climate Change, Deforestation Threaten Monarch Butterfly Migration
Jaclyn Diaz, NPR
Diaz writes: "The population of monarch butterflies that migrated to Mexico to ride out the cold winter months in the north fell 26% from a year earlier, according to a new report from the Mexican government and the Word Wildlife Fund."
2020 was a bad year for butterflies, too.
The population of monarch butterflies that migrated to Mexico to ride out the cold winter months in the north fell 26% from a year earlier, according to a new report from the Mexican government and the Word Wildlife Fund.
Mexico's Commission for Natural Protected Areas said the butterflies' population occupied only 2.10 hectares in 2020, compared to 2.8 hectares a year earlier. And the monarch Biosphere Reserve in Michoacán, Mexico lost trees at a higher rate than it did in 2019.
A combination of logging, falling trees, and drought in the areas where the butterflies roost, as well as a reduction of milkweed in their breeding places, pose threats to the monarch's migration. But the damage wrought by climate change is the biggest factor.
During the spring and summer of 2020, wild weather in the southern United States killed milkweed blossoms--which female monarch butterflies lay their eggs upon. In turn, the development of butterfly eggs and larvae was also impacted, the report said.
Despite the report's findings, the butterfly isn't in danger of extinction, said Jorge Rickards, director general of WWF-Mexico.
However, the monarch's migratory process is at risk, he said, and the governments, the scientific community, and civil society of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada must work together to ensure the survival of the butterfly going forward.
Rickards said, "Monarch butterflies show us how individual work, in this case, migration, can become an exceptional collaborative exercise, when all these migrants gather in the forests to hibernate together and buffer the climate."
The number of the black and orange butterflies wintering in Mexico has been decreasing for several years, according to research by the World Wildlife Fund. The organization previously said in 2013 the number of butterflies wintering there was at its lowest in the prior 20 years up until that point.
Colder, wetter winters can be lethal for monarchs while hotter, drier summers alter their habitats in the north.
The monarch is the only butterfly known to make a two-way migration like birds do, according to U.S. Forest Service. Monarchs can't survive the cold winters of northern climates, unlike other butterflies.
Monarchs can travel between 50-100 miles a day. It can take the insects up to two months to complete their journey to their winter sojourn.
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