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Ezra Klein | An Unusually Optimistic Conversation With Bernie Sanders
Ezra Klein, The New York Times
Klein writes: "Bernie Sanders didn't win the 2020 election. But he may have won its aftermath."
The Vermont senator discusses the Rescue Act, cancel culture, the filibuster and more.
If you look back at Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders’s careers, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, looks a lot like the proposals Sanders has fought for forever, without much of the compromise or concerns that you used to see from Senator Joe Biden. That’s not to take anything away from Biden. He’s the president. This is his plan. And it is to his credit that he saw what the country needed, what the politics of the moment would support and where his party had moved, and met it with full force.
But Sanders’s two presidential campaigns are part of the reason that the Democratic Party had moved, and the politics of the moment had changed. And so I’ve wondered what Sanders makes of this moment. Is it a triumph? A disappointment? A beginning?
And I’ve wondered about his take on some of the other questions swirling around the Democratic Party: Are liberals alienating people who agree with them on economics by being too censorious on culture? Is there room to work with populist Republicans who might be open to new economic ideas even as they turn against liberal democracy itself?
A memorial for D'Myah Tylise Rankin-Fleming and her father Darrion Rankin-Fleming, who were shot and killed in St. Louis in January. The number of all murders rose 25% across the country in 2020, according to preliminary data. (photo: Bill Greenblatt/Rex/Shutterstock)
US Saw Estimated 4,000 Extra Murders in 2020 Amid Surge in Daily Gun Violence
Lois Beckett and Abené Clayton, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "A surge in daily gun violence contributed to an estimated 4,000 additional murders throughout 2020, in what experts warn will probably be the worst single-year increase in murders on record."
Lull in high-profile mass shootings during pandemic but data shows everyday violence has contributed to a likely record rise
or exactly a year during the pandemic, the United States did not see a single high-profile public mass shooting. But a surge in daily gun violence contributed to an estimated 4,000 additional murders throughout 2020, in what experts warn will probably be the worst single-year increase in murders on record.
There were only two public shootings in 2020 that primarily targeted strangers, were not related to other crimes and killed at least four victims – one standard definition researchers use to classify “mass shootings” – according to two databases that track this kind of gun violence. That’s the lowest annual count of high-profile mass shootings in America in nearly a quarter-century, according to Jillian Peterson, the founder of the Violence Project, which tracks these mass shootings going back to 1966.
At the same time, the number of people murdered in everyday violence last year surged in cities large and small. Early estimates suggest the US may have seen at least 4,000 more murders last year than in 2019, and potentially as many as 5,000 more, according to projections based on FBI data, though complete official statistics will not be available until the fall. The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings in real time using media reports, recorded nearly 4,000 more gun homicides in 2020 compared with 2019, according to founder Mark Bryant.
Many of the homicides are concentrated in communities of color that have historically seen the worst burden of daily gun violence, including in Philadelphia, St Louis, Chicago and Oakland.
“We don’t get the reprieve that other communities get. Black and Latino mothers are still burying their children,” said Pastor Michael McBride, the executive director of Live Free USA, a gun violence prevention non-profit, who has spent nearly a decade struggling to get more national political attention for the toll of daily gun violence.
In response to two high-profile mass shootings in the past week, one targeting shoppers at a grocery store in Colorado and another Asian women at spas in Georgia, Joe Biden called on lawmakers to pass a renewed ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines, and to expand background checks on gun sales, part of a renewed national debate over strengthening gun control laws.
But in Philadelphia, where the number of gun homicides was 40% higher in 2020 than it was in 2019 and with at least 103 people killed so far this year, Pastor Carl Day said an assault-weapon ban would not do much for the communities most burdened by gun violence.
“The point is being missed for the most part. You can take away high-capacity magazines, but a legal clip can kill eight people,” Day, a gun violence prevention organizer in Philadelphia said. “It’s not just about creating tougher gun laws, it’s about where we’re investing our money. You have to enrich and equip communities with what they need.”
Organizers are calling on the Biden administration to make a historic $5bn investment in inner-city gun violence reduction, focused on Black and brown communities. The money would be disbursed over eight years and go toward existing groups that work in the most hard-hit communities, helping to ensure that mentorship and intervention initiatives can start restart in-person programs that were disrupted during the pandemic.
“Our lawmakers need to be educated about the actual realities of gun violence,” said Fatimah Loren, executive director of the New-Jersey based Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, one of the activists pushing for the $5bn investment in local strategies.
America’s national mourning over shootings needs to become “more inclusive”, she said, “so the survivors who didn’t make national headlines feel seen”.
The number of all murders rose 25% across the country in 2020, with double-digit increases in small, medium and large cities, according to preliminary data from a large subset of law enforcement agencies that the FBI released last week.
A 25% increase in murders nationwide for 2020 would mean an estimated 4,100 additional murders last year, compared with 2019, according to Jeff Asher, a New Orleans-based crime data analyst. At least three-quarters of those murders, and perhaps more, are likely to be gun murders, based on trends from previous years, Asher said.
That would be the highest single-year increase, both in the murder rate and in the total number of additional murders, going back to 1960, the earliest year national crime data is available, Asher said.
The FBI’s preliminary 2020 data does not yet include some of the cities that saw the worst increases in murder last year, including Chicago, New Orleans and New York, Asher said, which might mean that total murders could rise more than 25%.
“If there’s a 30% increase, which I think is very plausible, that would be 5,000 additional people murdered,” he said.
“The thing that stands out about last year’s change in murders is that it was everywhere. Chicago and New York and the traditional places get the headlines, but Omaha, Nebraska; Lubbock, Texas; Shreveport, Louisiana: all of these towns saw huge increases in murder.”
Even with a 30% increase in a single year, he said, the country’s murder rate would still remain lower than it had been in the early 1990s.
The full reasons for last year’s sharp increase in community gun violence are still far from clear. Gun violence interrupters and clinicians point to the loss of vital in-person interactions between prevention workers and those most at risk of being on either side of a gun. Lawmakers and activists have also pointed to the rising levels of unemployment and financial and personal instability related to the pandemic, as well as the surge in gun sales, with Americans buying an estimated 17m guns through September 2020.
A spike in gun purchases during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic was associated with a nearly 8% increase in shooting injuries in the US between March and May, according to an estimate from researchers at the University of California, Davis.
Asher, the crime analyst, said he was skeptical of claims that there was any simple causal connection between the protests over police violence that started after George Floyd’s killing in late May and the spike in murders in the early summer, noting that there was “no relationship between the places that had the most protests, or the places that had the most violent protests, and changes in violence. It was literally everywhere.”
Mark Bryant, the Gun Violence Archive founder, said analysts tracking daily media reports of gun violence saw a large number of drive-by shootings contributing to the rising toll, as well as domestic violence killings and “club shootings” at pop-up parties held despite public health restrictions.
Though there was a year-long lull in high-profile mass shootings, incidents where multiple people are killed or injured have long been occurrences in neighborhoods. Still, these everyday mass shootings are rarely covered in national news.
“The rare mass shooting gets covered nationally because it’s ‘news’ and so people in turn believe that they take up more of a burden than they really do,” said Dr Jessica Beard, a trauma surgeon and researcher with Temple University in Philadelphia. “But you can’t design solutions based on the most rare form of the disease.”
However, highly publicized gun attacks, in which a perpetrator opens fire on strangers in a public place “really disappeared” in recent months as the pandemic led to widespread stay-at-home orders and hundreds of thousands of Americans died from Covid-19, Peterson, of the violence project, said.
Between 16 March last year, when a 31-year-old man shot four people to death at a convenience store in Missouri, and 16 March this year, when a 21-year-old man opened fire at three spas around Atlanta, Georgia, there was not a single recorded mass shooting in the databases of the Violence Project or Mother Jones magazine, which both track a similar subset of mass shootings that leave four or more people dead.
The last time the US saw only two of these kinds of high-profile mass shootings in a single year was in 1996, Peterson said.
Research has shown that mass shootings “tend to cluster”, with one 2015 study showing a heightened risk of further public shootings for 13 days after a highly publicized attack, Peterson said.
“We had hoped we had broken the trend and they were going to fade away, because we had lost the social contagion aspect,” Peterson said. “They were out of the news and off our radar.”
Amazon faces a historic union vote in Alabama. Amazon. (image: Elif Ozturk/Anadolu Agency/Dustin Chambers/ReutersSamantha Lee/Insider)
Charles Bethea | On the Overnight Shift With the Amazon Union Organizers
Charles Bethea, The New Yorker
Bethea writes: "At around 4 A.M., two veteran union reps whipped votes outside the Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama, and swapped stories of past organizing efforts at Piggly Wigglys and a condom factory in Eufaula."
t three-twenty-seven on a recent morning in Bessemer, Alabama, Randy Hadley, a sixty-five-year-old man, was dancing at a traffic light. He wore a fedora and had a trimmed white goatee, and he waved a sign as he shimmied: “Without Change, Nothing Changes.” Beside him, a burly younger man named Curtis Gray held up a different sign: “Don’t Back Down.” Gray watched Hadley, who, in turn, watched workers file out of the nine-hundred-thousand-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center up the hill, near where ancient Native American mounds once stood.
“I don’t know what kind of dance that is,” Gray said, pulling his hood up against the cold. He and Hadley, members of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, have been passing out pamphlets and holding up their signs in this spot almost every day since October, in an attempt to unionize a group of Amazon workers in America for the first time. Voting on whether to form a union has already begun. Gray’s earliest successful campaign was at the Pilgrim’s Pride poultry plant, in Russellville, Alabama, a decade ago. Hadley’s been at it longer. He has honed the art of talking through boredom and bad weather.
“You could drive from here to Ohio, he’d talk the whole way,” Gray said.
“Coldest I’ve ever been on a line was in Minnesota,” Hadley said. “Windchill thirty-five below zero. To strike a Hormel factory in fucking February!” He tossed off some of his greatest hits: “I’ve organized a peanut-butter plant in Albany. A dog-food plant in Virginia. Poultry plants in Mississippi. All kinds of nursing homes. Piggly Wigglys.” He added, “I tried to organize a condom plant down in, uh . . . ”
“Eufaula,” Gray said.
“Down in Eufaula, yeah,” Hadley went on.
“That’s the one that Steve Harvey ended up buying,” Gray added.
Around four-fifteen, traffic picked up. Some workers waved as they drove away. Others honked. A few offered a thumbs-up. The majority sped into the dark without a sideward glance.
“She’s gotta drive all the way back to Walker County,” Gray said, reading the license plate of a beat-up Honda. “That’s a long ways.”
“Bless her heart,” Hadley said. He went on, “We’re here this early just in case she rolls her window down and we can lean over there and have a conversation for two minutes.” He added, “Some days you’ll catch fifteen. Some days you’ll catch fifty. It’s just like going fishing.”
Eventually, Hadley was in need of a rest room. “Jeff Bezos just built a house with twenty-five bathrooms,” he said when he returned from the woods.
“They ain’t got twenty-five in there,” Gray said, motioning to the warehouse.
A man drove by and honked affirmatively. “Our president was down here the other day,” Hadley said, “and he goes, ‘Everybody is so friendly. How do you know if they don’t like you?’ I said, ‘Trust me—you’ll get that finger in just a second.’ ”
Traffic picked up again around five. Employees lit their post-work cigarettes and raced away, music cranked. A woman asked Hadley for help adjusting her rearview mirror. A man got out of his car to swear at a driver who’d cut him off. Someone asked Gray when the votes would begin to be tallied. (The end of March.) The sky turned from black to purple to pink and blue. Hadley shared some TikTok videos he’d made with his wife, including one in which the two are dressed as dinosaurs. Gray chuckled at stories he’d heard before and would no doubt hear again.
At one point, a car with three passengers drove by, smoke pouring from the windows. “Let’s go!” one yelled to Hadley and Gray.
“You smell a lot of weed,” Hadley said, as they skidded off.
“He ain’t lying,” Gray said.
A few hundred yards down the road, at another entrance, Jose Aguilar and Mona Darby stood in matching cold-weather jumpsuits, holding union signs. They’d shown up at four. There was less traffic at their post. Darby was listening to Steve Harvey on her phone. Aguilar was watching TikToks.
A woman drove by with her thumb down. They’d seen her before. She belonged to a small group of aggressively anti-union workers.
“Her and the white guy in a silver truck,” Darby said. “He’s crazy.”
Aguilar agreed. “The other day, he stopped and said, ‘You know what, you waste your time. You need to go home.’ I said, ‘You waste your time. You need to go home and get some rest.’ ”
He told a story about two workers who’d opposed the unionizing of a poultry plant. “Since Day One, they said, ‘No union, no union.’ Well, we win the election. And they’re the first people to join the union. I said, ‘O.K., welcome to the family.’ ”
Seven o’clock arrived. The sun felt good. It was time to go to Cracker Barrel. Hadley made a final pronouncement. “When we win,” he said, “I’m gonna buy that building over there, across the street, and make it our union hall. That’ll be Chapter 2.”
Border detention center. (photo: Henry Cuellar/BuzzFeed)
ALSO SEE: Photos of Migrant Detention Highlight Biden's Border Secrecy
Photos Reveal the Crowded Conditions Unaccompanied Immigrant Kids Are Held in at the Border
Adolfo Flores and Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed
Excerpt: "The photos taken by Rep. Henry Cuellar offer a rare glimpse of conditions inside CBP facilities for unaccompanied immigrant children."
hotos from inside a US Customs and Border Protection tent facility in Donna, Texas, reveal the crowded conditions unaccompanied immigrant minors are being held in at a time when the Biden administration is struggling to find bed space for the rising number of children crossing the border.
The photos, taken by Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, offer a rare glimpse of conditions inside such Border Patrol facilities, which are currently housing just under 4,900 unaccompanied immigrant children. Axios first reported on the images taken by Cuellar.
The issues with overcrowding stem from the rising number of unaccompanied children arriving at the border and CBP’s inability to transfer them to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which doesn’t have enough bed space. HHS has been housing thousands of children in its system of shelter or emergency influx facilities.
There were just under 4,900 unaccompanied immigrant children in border custody late this weekend, as the population in HHS custody continued to grow to more than 11,000, according to government data reviewed by BuzzFeed News. The number of transfers from border custody to HHS custody had increased, with nearly 600 going over to HHS care in one day, according to the data. The Biden administration has tried to relieve the crowding in border custody in part by increasing the transfers to HHS custody.
Many of the children in CBP custody have been there past the 72 hours the government is allowed to legally hold them in border facilities.
DHS has not given the media or attorneys, who are able to visit these facilities as part of a court settlement, the ability to tour these facilities.
Lawyers who interviewed some of the children at the Donna tent facility told BuzzFeed News that some minors were held for as many as eight days in crowded areas without showers or the ability to call their families.
All of the children interviewed by attorneys had been in the custody of the border enforcement agency for at least five days, over the three-day limit they’re allowed to be in CBP custody under law.
CBP did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
"I have said repeatedly from the very outset that a Border Patrol station is no place for a child and that is why we are working around the clock to move those children out of the Border Patrol facilities, into the care and custody of the Department of Health and Human Services that shelters them," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN on Sunday.
In 2019, visits to Border Patrol facilities revealed children were being held in dirty, overcrowded, and unsanitary conditions. Attorneys who visited a Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, described children caring for infants and toddlers, a lack of access to soap and toothbrushes, and inadequate food, water, and sanitation.
On a call with reporters last week, senior Biden administration officials said the HHS was racing to open up shelter space, but noted it would take months and was not a solution for the current situation.
Instead, the agency has turned to emergency intake sites, like a convention center in Dallas and another facility in Pecos, Texas, to try to move children out of CBP custody faster.
In February, more than 9,400 unaccompanied immigrant children were encountered by US border authorities.
The Trump administration started the practice of expelling unaccompanied immigrant minors encountered at the border by US border authorities, citing a public health code called Title 42. The administration was blocked by a federal judge from continuing the practice in November. An appeals court lifted the judge’s order in late January, but by then a new administration had taken office and the Biden White House decided not to continue the practice of expelling unaccompanied immigrant children.
However, the Biden administration has continued to expel some immigrant families and adults whom border officers encountered at the border, citing the same health code as the Trump White House.
Before the judge forced the Trump administration to allow unaccompanied children to seek asylum in the US, the government was quickly sending these children back to dangerous Mexican border cities or flying them back to conditions they fled.
Deb Haaland, center, with Kamala Harris, right, during Haaland's swearing-in for interior secretary in Washington DC on 18 March. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
'She's Representing All of Us': The Story Behind Deb Haaland's Swearing-In Dress
Hallie Golden, Guardian UK
Golden writes: "The skirt, a traditional Native garment, outshone everything in the Eisenhower building - and there is a story of empowerment and survival behind it."
t was a dress that triggered a flood of headlines. Standing in front of Vice-President Kamala Harris with her right hand raised, Deb Haaland was sworn in last week as the secretary of the interior dressed in a long rainbow ribbon skirt adorned with a corn stalk, butterflies and stars.
The skirt, a traditional Native garment with a variety of meanings often rooted in honoring the community’s heritage and symbolizing empowerment, outshone everything around her in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building during her swearing-in as the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in US history.
But there is also a story behind the dress: one of empowerment and survival of a community and also its designer. The garment was made as a “celebration-style skirt” in recognition of Haaland’s nomination, explained its creator, Agnes Woodward, who is Plains Cree from Kawacatoose First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada.
The 38-year-old devoted weeks to creating the distinct piece of clothing from her home in North Dakota. While the rainbow colors are meant to represent all people and the pair of dark blue butterflies serve to offer an uplifting message, the cornstalk is a symbol of Haaland’s enrolled membership of the Pueblo of Laguna, a tribe in New Mexico, explained Woodward.
The shimmering four-pointed stars, however, were Woodward’s own distinct addition. She said she likes to feature them in all of her ribbon skirts as a homage to both the stories she grew up with about stars being relatives looking down on them and to signify the connection Native people feel “to everything around us; that everything has a purpose; that everything that was created by creator has a purpose”.
Woodward, who also works as an advocate for victims of violence for the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, started making ribbon skirts around 2010, when she was attending Native ceremonies with her husband, and she and her daughters, now ages 13 and nine, needed to wear them.
But she learned quickly that the act of creating such an important symbol of matriarchal empowerment that tells stories of survival, resilience and sacredness, also helped with her own healing and to restore her pride as a Native woman.
“So many women would inbox me and say, ‘This is my life story, can you put that on a skirt?’ or ‘This is my given Native name, can you put that on a skirt?’ Or ‘I’m a survivor of all this stuff and I need to heal, I’ve never owned a ribbon skirt,’” she told the Guardian. “And so, as I’ve had those conversations, it’s given me so much empowerment for myself, but also for all the women that I’ve connected with.”
Woodward explained that her father survived residential school and her mother the “60s scoop” – which involved thousands of Indigenous children being removed from their families in Canada and placed into foster care – and the year she was born her aunt was murdered. And then as a child growing up in Saskatchewan, Canada, she also experienced a wide array of racism, including being called a “dirty Indian”.
One instance when she was about eight years old and had to escape a domestic violence situation with her mother in the middle of the night is especially haunting. She said she remembers both of them being barefoot, dressed only in nightgowns, and running down a dark alley to get to a gas station to call for help. But instead of being greeted by concern, she remembers the clerk looking at them in disgust, before begrudgingly calling the police for them.
“I can’t explain how as a little kid you know that they’re looking at you in disgust because you’re Native, not for any other reason other than because you’re Native and this person doesn’t like Natives,” she said.
Woodward said the shame she felt about being Native meant her parents had to force her to wear ribbon skirts as a child. So, when she became an adult and made the active decision to start not only wearing the skirts again, but actually sewing them, she said it helped her heal and reclaim who she is as an Indigenous woman.
Once she started posting images of her creations on Snapchat, community members began reaching out to her requesting custom orders, and things just grew from there. Today, she has made hundreds of skirts, including ones helping to bring attention to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit (MMIWG2) movement, and sells them through her organization, ReeCreeations.
Two of her MMIWG2 skirts had already made it on to the floor of the US Congress as part of discussions surrounding Savanna’s Act, a bill dedicated to Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a Native American woman who was killed in 2017 in North Dakota. So, when she was connected with Haaland and sent her a draft of her design, it seemed only natural that her skirt would be just right for this occasion.
Woodward said Haaland wearing the skirt designed by someone from all the way up north in Saskatchewan while being sworn in, makes it clear to her that “she’s still representing all of us as a people."
Cerro was a leader of the Indigenous Lenca people and coordinated the movement United Communities. (photo: El Heraldo)
Indigenous Environmental Activist Shot Dead in Honduras
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Indigenous environmental activist Carlos Cerro was shot dead in San Antonio, Honduras, local media outlets reported on Tuesday."
According to the advocacy group Global Witness, Honduras is among the deadliest countries for environmentalists.
Cerro was a leader of the Indigenous Lenca people and coordinated the movement United Communities, which brings together residents from the surroundings of Ulua de Chinda and San Antonio Cortes rivers as they fight against the El Tornillito hydroelectric project in the area.
According to the Santabarbarense environmental movement coordinator, Betty Vasquez, Cerro's children witnessed their parents' death.
"We condemn the murder of one defender and one more colleague. That is not fair. It is not possible that you are criminalized, persecuted, and then have your life taken away for defending a territory. We give this crime the assessment that it is a political murder," Vasquez said.
According to the advocacy group, Global Witness Honduras is among the deadliest countries in the world for environmentalists. During 2020 alone, at least 18 activists were killed.
Water protectors rally against the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in Park Rapids, Minn., on March 15, 2021. (photo: Courtesy of Honor The Earth)
Minnesota Police Ready for Pipeline Resistance as Enbridge Seeks to Drill Under Rivers
Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Brown writes: "Law enforcement agencies are preparing for protests against planned drilling under the Mississippi River, internal documents reveal."
s you drive toward the Mississippi River’s headwaters from the east, the lakes that open up on either side of the highway are still white-blue with ice. The Mississippi River, however, is flowing. The open water — a trickle compared to the expanse it will become farther south — is a hopeful sign of the end of another long Minnesota winter, but it also has opponents of pipeline construction in the area on edge.
Enbridge, the Canadian energy-transport firm, is planning to route its Line 3 pipeline under the Mississippi, near where it crosses Highway 40. In winter, a pollution-control rule bars drilling under the frozen waters. As the ice melts away, so do the restrictions. Those organizing against the project worry that Enbridge could begin tunneling under the Mississippi and other local rivers any day — and the pipeline-resistance movement is getting ready for it.
“They got a lot of money, they got a lot of equipment, but we got a lot of people,” said Anishinaabe water protector Winona LaDuke at an event last week with actor and activist Jane Fonda, which took place in front of the flowing Crow Wing River, not far from where Enbridge seeks to drill under its shores. “Spring is coming. Let’s be outdoorsy.”
Enbridge’s Line 3 project began construction four months ago. It was designed to replace a decaying pipeline of the same name; however, a large portion of its 338-mile Minnesota section, which makes up most of the U.S. route, plows through new land and waters. The project would double Line 3’s capacity for carrying tar sands oil, one of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuels in the world, at a moment when a rapid shift away from fossil fuels has become critical to address the climate crisis.
The delicate waterway ecosystems through which the pipeline passes have become the central organizing point of the anti-pipeline, or water protector, movement. Hundreds of rivers, streams, and wetlands face the specter of a tar sands leak after the replacement Line 3 begins operating. And the particularly intensive form of drilling required to tunnel the pipeline under rivers holds its own set of risks during construction.
Those same waters are central to the Anishinaabe people’s identity, and Anishinaabe women have led opposition to the Line 3 project. Over the past year, women and nonbinary people have organized small camps near planned construction sites. In recent weeks, they’ve led a steady schedule of gatherings and ceremonies at the edges of rivers, with some organizing more obstructive protests, known as direct actions, aimed at slowing pipeline construction. With spring on the horizon, pipeline opponents are poised to take even more obstinate stands to block construction at the river crossings.
Law enforcement agencies, with Enbridge’s support, are also preparing for the time when the rivers open up. Documents obtained by The Intercept confirm that local sheriff’s offices have for months been practicing for direct actions focused on the Mississippi River.
“Operation River Crossing”
This past September, members of the Northern Lights Task Force, a coalition of state and local law enforcement and public safety agencies set up to respond to pipeline resistance, gathered for the 12-hour training at Camp Ripley, a Minnesota National Guard training center on the Mississippi River south of the pipeline route. The exercise was titled “Operation River Crossing.”
In a manual for exercise participants, obtained by The Intercept through a public information request, officials from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and the Minnesota State Patrol provide hints about what they fear will happen — and how they intend to respond.
Operation River Crossing was designed for law enforcement trainees from along the pipeline route to practice their response to a “civil unrest situation with threats to public safety including criminal damage to property, obstruction of transportation, assaults, threats to bystanders, and rioting.” Officers would confront a range of people posing as pipeline opponents. Some would be quietly holding signs. “Others are blocking the roadway and access to the work area and refusing orders to disperse. A small group of protesters has started threatening pipeline workers and law enforcement officers and lobbing balloons filled with urine and deer repellent.”
In the fictionalized scenario, law enforcement officers have access to various headquarters for cross-county coordination. “Two Regional Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs) have already been established: Northwest EOC near Crookston and Northeast EOC near Duluth,” the planning document says. A hypothetical state-level operation center had also been “partially activated” at Camp Ripley.
The manual also explains that fictive officers have been monitoring social media and using it to determine their strategies. “Public safety officials became aware of a spike in social media messaging activity regarding planned protests” at a second Mississippi crossing site in Aitkin County, downstream from the headwaters. “Multiple groups indicate they will travel to the counties along the route to protest the project,” the scenario says. “One of these groups is associated with past criminal activities during protests.”
In response to all these hypothetical details, the police would practice coordinated crowd-control tactics and methods of cutting away materials used to attach pipeline opponents to infrastructure. They would simulate the use of chemical munitions, while observers watched the training on bleachers.
Six months later, law enforcement agencies have put some of the planned exercises into real-world action. As the scenario foreshadowed, a Northeast Emergency Operations Center was activated November 30, shortly after the pipeline’s approval, according to Northern Lights Task Force meeting notes obtained by The Intercept. Multiple county sheriff’s offices now have their own extrication or cutting teams trained and ready to use equipment for cutting water protectors away from infrastructure. Some of that equipment has been paid for by Enbridge itself.
An escrow account set up by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and funded by Enbridge, primarily to cover the costs of policing pipeline resistance, has distributed more than $500,000 to law enforcement agencies as of March 15. The account is not meant to be used for equipment, though, unless it’s personal protective equipment. The state-appointed account manager has rejected law enforcement requests for reimbursement of cutting tools. But there are ways around that. In Hubbard County, for example, Enbridge donated cutting tools separately from the escrow account.
The escrow account manager also rejected requests that had framed chemical munitions as “personal protective equipment.” Whether or not they’ve been reimbursed, law enforcement agencies have new stock available. No use of chemical munitions has been reported so far. Instead, water protectors say that they have seen increased traffic stops, aerial surveillance, and police officers following pipeline opponents in cars.
In an interview with The Intercept, Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida denied there has been an escalation of law enforcement’s response to water protectors in his jurisdiction. He spoke as he monitored his county’s extrication team, which was attempting to remove seven people that had attached themselves to an Enbridge Line 3 pipeline pump station. He said his county is not deploying aerial surveillance, that any traffic stops were a response to traffic laws being broken, and that he is committed to protecting the safety and first amendment rights of water protectors, as well as the property rights of the pipeline company.
“When there is illegal activity around — it doesn’t matter what movement you’re involved in — we focus energy on it. That’s our job,” said Guida. A spokesperson for the Northern Lights Task Force did not answer a list of questions sent by The Intercept. Guida, who previously served in a leadership position for the task force, confirmed that his county participated in the Operation River Crossing training.
Nonetheless, tension between law enforcement agencies and water protectors is simmering, and the planned river crossings threaten to serve as a tipping point toward more aggressive policing.
Any Day Now
Enbridge has suggested that no river crossing is imminent. Last week, the company announced that Line 3 is now half complete and that the project will go on a “planned” two-month hiatus. Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner confirmed to The Intercept that river drilling will occur in the summer. Many opponents are hopeful that it will be enough time for President Joe Biden to intervene and stop the project, the way he stopped the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. There are also ongoing legal cases to stop Line 3, including from the White Earth and Red Lake tribal governments, whose treaty land the pipeline passes through.
Project opponents, though, remain on edge, wary of the possibility that any day they could receive word that drilling at one of 21 river and waterway crossings has begun. Darin Broton, communications director for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, told The Intercept that no rules prevent Enbridge from installing their pipeline under rivers where the ice has melted: “They are able to drill under those waters. The only condition was prior approval when waters were frozen.”
In November, the pipeline company commenced construction so swiftly that it caught local sheriff’s departments off guard, according to notes obtained by The Intercept from another Northern Lights Task Force meeting. “Enbridge has advised they intend to begin construction as soon as November 27 (much earlier than anticipated and without a 45 day notice as expected),” the document says. “We are approximately three to four weeks from all initiatives being fully operational but we are prepared to make it work in the interim.”
Much of the remaining drilling work involves a process called horizontal directional drilling, in which pipeline is threaded through a tunnel bored below the riverbed. The slurry of water and clay used as a drill lubricant can leak into waterways, clouding aquatic habitats or drinking water.
People’s greatest fears, however, center around what could happen once the workers leave the construction site: a spill. The largest inland oil spill in U.S. history happened in 1991 in nearby Grand Rapids, Minnesota; 1.7 million gallons of crude oil spilled from Line 3, the same pipeline that Enbridge is now replacing. In 2010, a Michigan community suffered a huge spill from another Enbridge pipeline.
Last Tuesday, as Clearwater County Sheriff Darin Halverson looked on, Anishinaabe women from nearby communities led a group in a ceremony, and men sang and drummed. As three giant puppets — a wolf, a bear, and a woman in a jingle dress — moved toward a wide bare gap in the trees — the pipeline easement — a figure in the dark truck parked in the easement driveway filmed the group with a phone.
Sarah LittleRedFeather, who is Anishinaabe and whose family is from White Earth, said she was undaunted by the resources being poured into law enforcement efforts against pipeline opponents: “It’s not going to stop us.”
“If they bring that drill pad to that river, I’m there. If that means I’m standing in the water, I’m there,” said LittleRedFeather, who works with the nonprofit Honor the Earth. “That’s what I’m waiting for. We’re praying that it won’t get to that point.”
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