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Charles Pierce | Justice Sotomayor Impaled Justice Kavanaugh on His Own Previous Rulings
Charles Pierce. Esquire
Pierce writes: "From out of the recently Trumpified Supreme Court came yet another decision that murdered precedent. Delivering the death blow was Justice Brett Kavanaugh."
In the process, she revealed him as the heartless gombeen he is.
rom out of the recently Trumpified Supreme Court came yet another decision that murdered precedent. Delivering the death blow was Justice Brett Kavanaugh. This was a major flex for the carceral state and a major hit to criminal justice reform. It not only closed off future improvements in that regard, but also undercut what few accomplishments already exist.
The case was Jones v. Mississippi. Over the years, the courts began to look askance at the idea of handing juveniles sentences of life without parole, essentially warehousing individuals for decades in the horrors of the American penal system for crimes they committed as minors. Twice since 2012, the Supreme Court has decided that such sentences were in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. With a single decision, Kavanaugh, good Jesuit-educated lad that he is, and six of his colleagues decided that, instead, such sentences were both just and commonplace. It is yet another example of the current majority’s enthusiasm for gutting precedent while pretending that it’s not, and it is a monstrous legal offense against humanity.
By those two precedents, judges had to conduct separate proceedings before sentencing juveniles to life without parole and to provide a public explanation for those decisions. The 6-3 decision on Thursday for which Kavanaugh wrote the lead opinion effectively wipes out those two requirements which, in tandem, had reduced radically the number of juvenile convicts doing life without parole. And, in keeping with how that new conservative majority on the Court operates, Kavanaugh argues that he is keeping faith with those decisions he is obviously eviscerating. In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas at least acknowledged that the Court was overturning precedents set in cases he considered wrongly decided.
Anyway, here, from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate, are the facts of the case in question.
Jones was “the victim of violence and neglect that he was too young to escape.” His biological father was an alcoholic who physically abused his mother, who had severe mental health problems. His stepfather abused him, too, using “belts, switches, and a paddle.” He openly expressed his hatred for Jones. When Jones moved to Mississippi to live with his grandparents, he abruptly lost access to medication he took for mental health issues, including hallucinations and self-harm. Jones’ grandfather beat him, as well. One day in 2004, when Jones’ grandfather tried to hit him, Jones stabbed him repeatedly, killing him. He had turned 15 just 23 days earlier. Jones tried to save his grandfather with CPR but failed. After making minimal efforts to conceal the crime, he confessed to the police.
The judge in the lower court simply ignored the requirements of the two ruling precedents, and that’s how Brett Jones’s life ended up in the oh-so-very-Catholic hands of Brett Kavanaugh, who at one point explains that Jones might not serve the rest of his life in the country’s worst state penal system. Some vague day in the dim future, Kavanaugh suggests, the state of Mississippi might take pity on him and let him go. (Since the Court’s previous decisions required states to re-sentence inmates who’d been sentenced to life without parole, Mississippi re-imposed the sentence in more than 25 percent of its cases, trailing only Louisiana in that regard.) Jesus, what a supercilious twerp.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor proved she can see a church by daylight. Edging right up to the limits of intramural politesse, Sotomayor called Kavanaugh out for the heartless, soulless gombeen this decision has revealed him to be.
The Court simply rewrites Miller and Montgomery to say what the Court now wishes they had said, and then denies that it has done any such thing. The Court knows what it is doing. It admits as much.
At which point, Sotomayor impales Kavanaugh on his own previous decisions.
How low this Court’s respect for stare decisis has sunk. Not long ago, that doctrine was recognized as a pillar of the “ ‘rule of law,’ ” critical to “keep the scale of justice even and steady, and not liable to waver with every new judge’s opinion.” Ramos, 590 U. S., at ___–___ (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) … Given these weighty interests, the Court “usually re- quire[d] that a party ask for overruling, or at least obtain[ed] briefing on the overruling question,” and then “carefully evaluate[d] the traditional stare decisis factors.” Barr v. American Assn. of Political Consultants, Inc.… Now, it seems, the Court is willing to overrule precedent without even acknowledging it is doing so, much less providing any special justification. It is hard to see how that approach is “founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.” Ramos, 590 U. S., at ___ (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.)
Note to self: do not get Justice Sotomayor angry with you. Never do that.
And the final joke of it all is that Mississippi, in its limitless capacity for judicial savagery, had already invented a workaround: simply sentence juvenile offenders to 100 years—and they don’t even have to have killed anyone, either. Here’s to the state of Mississippi, goddamn.
In addition to concerns about COVID safety, workers at Amazon have expressed frustration about impossibly high productivity expectations and are therefore starting to unionize. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Amazon Workers Don't Need Apologies From Jeff Bezos. They Need to Organize.
Alex N. Press, Jacobin
Press writes: "In his final letter to shareholders before stepping down as Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos promised to do better by workers. Some in the media were impressed, but it's a standard public relations move right out of the anti-union playbook."
oes your Chair take comfort in the outcome of the recent union vote in Bessemer? No, he doesn’t,” wrote Jeff Bezos in his final letter to shareholders before stepping down as Amazon CEO.
For Bezos, the union drive in the company’s Bessemer warehouse is a sign that “we need to do a better job for our employees.” He pledges to make the company “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work” (Bezos has always called Amazon Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, with the modifier “Earth” included because of Bezos’s extraterrestrial colonization plans, though the effect is to make the billionaire sound like an alien.)
It’s an unusual admission of the need to Do Better by a CEO who isn’t prone to conceding any ground when it comes to criticism of the company’s working conditions. Some have pointed out the letter’s dystopian discussion of reducing employee injuries by regulating workers’ muscles, and RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum responded to the letter by saying that “workers need a union — not just another Amazon public relations effort in damage control.” But others are impressed with Bezos for his lip service to working conditions. CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin called it “far and away, the best shareholder letter I’ve ever read,” adding that, “There are some real and profound lessons in there.” Tech journalist Casey Newton said Bezos’s words sound like that of “a man who has at long last gotten the message.” Hook, line and sinker.
In the wake of Amazon winning the union election in Bessemer, I reread Confessions of a Union Buster, a book by Martin Jay Levitt, a pioneer of sorts in the $1-billion-a-year union-busting industry. The book came out in 1993 — copies sell for hundreds of dollars online, if any left-wing book publishers are reading this and want to reissue it — and details union-busters’ bag of tricks. These practices include turning lower-level managers from sympathizing with workers’ plight to waging war on them and stalling the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process; and then, should the union somehow win the NLRB vote, stalling at the bargaining table until union supporters either leave the company or lose hope (the result of this latter tactic is that only around half of unions reach a first contract).
Another tactic Levitt swears by is that of the well-timed conciliatory letter from the top boss. In his book, we see Levitt restrain even the most dictatorial, monstrous CEOs, alternately pleading with and threatening them on the matter of a humanizing letter. Usually, this letter comes late in the unionization process. As Levitt tells resistant CEOs, the workers need to believe the company can change. They need to hear from the boss himself that he recognizes the company hasn’t always treated its employees as well as it could have before they’ll grant it the chance to change. Fail to do this, warns Levitt, and the workers might well believe that they can only force the company to change by acting collectively, i.e., unionizing.
In case after case in Levitt’s book, we see this letter prove crucial, clinching the company’s success in defeating the union. But none of the bosses change after they win the vote, adds Levitt. In no time, they go back to arbitrary firings and abuse.
There is more criticism than ever of Amazon’s working conditions, where the rates of serious injury are nearly twice the industry average, where workers pee in bottles and defecate in delivery vans, where even the white-collar workers at company headquarters lodge bathroom-related complaints with state agencies. There are now over a million people employed by the tech behemoth and countless more who are in the workforce but denied employee status. They are getting organized, and, to the top brass’s horror, a lot of people are listening to their criticisms of the company.
Amazon kept union-busters on the payroll throughout the Bessemer union drive. One management-side attorney told the Huffington Post that the company may have spent eight figures on union-busting. Bezos’s letter is in keeping with that; it might as well have been written by Levitt. Please, one more chance. We can change. We will stop breaking the law. We will stop blaming workers for their own deaths. Please. Whatever you do, do not organize. We’ll take care of it. Look over here, not over there. No one should fall for it.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation was investigating the fatal shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. by a sheriff's deputy in Elizabeth City, N.C., on Wednesday. (photo: Stephen M. Katz/The Virginian-Pilot)
NC Sheriff Not Releasing Body-Cam Video in Fatal Shooting of Black Man
Morgan Winsor, ABC News
Winsor writes: "A sheriff's deputy shot and killed a Black man while executing a search warrant in North Carolina on Wednesday, authorities said."
"It's been a tragic day," the sheriff told reporters.
sheriff's deputy shot and killed a Black man while executing a search warrant in North Carolina on Wednesday, authorities said.
The shooting occurred at approximately 8:30 a.m. ET as deputies from the Pasquotank County Sheriff's Office attempted to serve the man -- identified as Andrew Brown Jr. -- a search warrant at his home in Elizabeth City, about 170 miles northeast of Raleigh. Brown was fatally wounded during the encounter, according to Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten.
"It's been a tragic day," Wooten said at a brief press conference Wednesday.
The sheriff told reporters he wasn't sure of Brown's age, but court records show he was 42.
The unnamed deputy who fired the fatal shot has been placed on administrative leave pending a review by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, according to Wooten, who vowed to be "transparent and take the proper actions based on the findings."
"I have put together a team of local law enforcement to come to Pasquotank County to ensure the safety and protection of the citizens in our community," the sheriff said.
The deputy was wearing an active body camera, but Wooten said the footage can only be released at the order of a judge. The bureau of investigation does have the body camera footage for its investigation.
"We are currently working that right now as hard as we can," he told reporters. "We will be transparent with this situation, absolutely."
The sheriff said in a Thursday press conference that Brown was already a convicted felon and his deputies were serving a warrant for felony drug charges.
"If evidence shows that any of my deputies violated the law, or policies, they will be held accountable because that's what the citizens expect me to do and it's the right thing to do," Wooten said Thursday.
Masha Rogers, the special agent in charge of the northeastern district of North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, said investigators will conduct a thorough probe before turning their findings over to Andrew Womble, the district attorney for the state's first prosecutorial district.
"He will make a determination about any criminal charges," Rogers told reporters.
Womble said his office will be looking for "accurate answers and not fast answers."
"This will not be a rush to judgement," Womble told reporters. "We're going to wait for that investigation as we're duty bound to do."
Further details about the shooting were not immediately available, and Wooten did not go into detail Thursday, saying they didn't have all of the facts.
Brown's death is the latest in a slew of officer-involved shootings of Black men, women and children in recent years that have sparked protests nationwide and even overseas.
Dozens of people, some holding signs that read "Black Lives Matter" and "Stop Killing Unarmed Black Men," gathered on Wednesday at the scene of the shooting in Elizabeth City and outside City Hall where the City Council held an emergency meeting. The crowds grew as the sun set, with hundreds of people blocking traffic on a main thoroughfare of Elizabeth City and another group congregating outside Pasquotank County Sheriff's Office.
Brown's aunt, Martha McCullen, who said she raised him after his parents died, told The Associated Press that her nephew "was a good person," "a good father" and "was about to get his kids back."
"The police didn’t have to shoot my baby," McCullen told AP. "Now his kids won’t never see him again."
Activists with Our Revolution hold signs for a $15 minimum wage outside the Capitol complex in Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, 2021. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
New Hampshire's Democratic Senators Are Quietly Resisting a Minimum Wage Hike
Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Grim writes: "Maggie Hassan's campaign recently cashed a check from the lobbyist leading opposition to the minimum wage. His spouse raises money for her."
Maggie Hassan’s campaign recently cashed a check from the lobbyist leading opposition to the minimum wage. His spouse raises money for her.
week and a half after the Senate rejected an effort by Vermont independent Bernie Sanders to attach a minimum wage increase to a coronavirus relief package, his neighboring Democratic senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, gathered with constituents for a teleconference.
The New Hampshire senators were joined on the March 15 call by Tom Boucher, CEO of Great NH Restaurants, Inc., and a former board member of the National Restaurant Association, known in Washington as “the other NRA.” Boucher laid out for the senators just how perilous the past pandemic year had been for the restaurant industry and profusely thanked them for their help in thwarting the minimum wage increase, telling them they had prevented countless restaurants from closing down.
Democratic state Rep. Maria Perez said that, during the call, she was stunned by how similar Boucher’s rhetoric sounded to that of the senators and that she had heard the same arguments coming from their staff when she had lobbied them to support a wage increase. “The language that I heard from the senators is the same language I heard from the Restaurant Association,” Perez said.
Boucher told The Intercept that servers for his restaurants are so opposed to the minimum wage hike they have organized a petitions and website, WeLikeOurTips.com, which includes a testimonial from Sean Kennedy, the NRA’s top lobbyist, arguing that servers will be worse off under the new law.
Central to the National Restaurant Association’s argument, as parroted by Shaheen and Hassan, is that workers themselves, particularly ones who rely on tips, are strenuously opposed to increasing the minimum wage, worried it will mean fewer shifts or put businesses at risk of closure. In their view, this opposition applies especially to the tipped minimum wage, which allows businesses to pay a lower wage to workers who get a significant portion of their pay through tips. (The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13 per hour.)
James Haslam, executive director of Rights & Democracy, a local progressive organization which operates in both New Hampshire and Vermont, said that Hassan’s and Shaheen’s staff have told him repeatedly that they have gotten a high volume of letters from service industry workers opposed to raising the tipped wage. Haslam said the senators appear not to understand, or willfully misunderstand, that employees in the service industry are under intense pressure to repeat the talking points of their bosses. There are essentially no unions for service staff, and restaurant bosses have an extraordinary ability to make or break a server, both through the power of scheduling — Saturday night and Tuesday afternoon are likely to bring much different paydays — and the power to assign servers to particular sections, some of which are far more lucrative than others.
“In an industry that’s nonunion, there’s almost every incentive to do what your employer says,” Haslam said. “Every single advancement of workers’ rights, going all the way back to slavery, has always been opposed in these terms: that it’s going to be worse for workers.”
But the recent elevation of the minimum wage into a major national issue is altering that dynamic. Haslam said that in a meeting last week, Shaheen’s staff conceded that they were also hearing from a high number of service industry workers who disagreed with their bosses and supported raising the tipped minimum wage.
Boucher said he highly doubted that claim, noting that if restaurants lose wage-credit for tips, and are required to pay $15 an hour on top of the tips servers get, nearly all restaurants will abandon tipping, and servers averaging some $30 an hour will see their wages cut in half. “I’ve had conversations with both senators and I have not heard that,” he said of the claim that workers support the proposal.
Managers have long been known to exploit their power to prey on staff, and they can easily deploy it toward political ends. If sending a letter to Congress opposing a minimum wage increase might lead to a better schedule and section — and if refusing might bring the opposite result — the decision isn’t a hard one for a server on an individual basis. After all, a smart server would likely presume the letter would be discounted anyway by a senator who should know better than to trust the validity of a public comment made under such conditions. That server may be presuming more savvy on the part of their representatives than exists in reality.
Servers who currently earn well above $15 an hour, of course, have no interest in seeing their wages pushed down to that level. Boucher said that none of his managers have pressured workers to take a position, and that once they learned that tips were at risk, they organized the “We Like Our Tips” petition on their own.
The minimum wage in New Hampshire sits at $7.25 an hour. In 2019 and again in 2020, the state’s legislature tried to raise it, to $10 an hour the next year and $12 an hour in three years. Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed the bill each time, arguing to his libertarian-leaning base that “artificial increases in the minimum wage hurt the lower-wage workers an increase is aimed at helping, because businesses may be forced to reduce hours or eliminate jobs entirely.”
Business owners looking for a champion who will fight against minimum wage increases could do little better than Sununu. He’s assured of significant support from the restaurant owners who make up the National Restaurant Association, as well as other companies that have waged war on the wage hike. But workers looking for a similar champion on their side have no obvious option.
Hassan is up for reelection in 2022, and national Republicans hope she’ll face Sununu, who is riding a wave of popularity in response to his handling of the pandemic. He was reelected as governor in 2020 with 65 percent of the vote.
People familiar with New Hampshire’s insular politics say that Sununu, the brother of former Sen. John Sununu, has long made clear that he has zero interest in going to Washington. But the governor is under intense pressure to help Republicans take back the Senate, and a recent poll found him with a 51 percent approval rating among Democrats in the state. The same survey had him edging out Hassan in a head-to-head match. Democrats control the Senate by just one seat, and both Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., and Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., face reelection next year.
Since the Civil War, New Hampshire’s Senate seats have, with a few exceptions, been in the hands of Republicans. The pattern broke in 2008 when Shaheen ousted then-Sen. John Sununu, scion of a local political dynasty, and fully busted in 2016, when Hassan, the state’s outgoing governor, won her narrow election against Kelly Ayotte. Ayotte, who lost her reelection bid to Hassan by just over 1,000 votes, has not ruled out a rematch.
In the Democrats’ barely controlled Senate, Sanders’s amendment to the coronavirus relief package garnered 42 votes: 8 short of the number needed for a majority. Some of those votes — such as the two Delaware senators — would have been easily gettable by President Joe Biden if he’d tried. Others, such as Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have long been known to be skeptical of raising the wage. The two holdouts from New Hampshire were the hardest to explain.
Sinema, Manchin, and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, are currently pushing a slimmed down proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $11 an hour. Both Sinema and Manchin spoke at the National Restaurant Association’s annual conference this week, and both share a fundraiser, Ashley Flanagan Kennedy, who is married to Sean Kennedy, the top lobbyist for the National Restaurant Association.
Sean Kennedy was a longtime aide to Rep. Dick Gephardt before becoming a telecom lobbyist. He swung back through the revolving door to work for then-Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., an early supporter of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and then served Obama as special assistant to the president for legislative affairs. His charge now is to help the restaurant association block a minimum wage increase.
Flanagan Kennedy, a West Virginia native, is a partner at the fundraising firm Fulkerson Kennedy & Company, which, according to FEC records, works nearly exclusively for Senate Democrats and has pulled in millions in fundraising consulting fees since 2017.
The firm has done recent fundraising work for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in charge of reelecting Senate Democrats, as well as its affiliated super PAC, Senate Majority PAC. (Consulting for both the DSCC and the Senate Majority PAC requires strict legal guardrails, as the two are not allowed to coordinate.)
Fulkerson Kennedy & Company has also recently fundraised, records show, for Manchin, Sinema, and Hassan, as well as Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, who is chair of the DSCC.
The firm also does fundraising for Granite Values PAC, which is Hassan’s leadership group; a PAC affiliated with Manchin called Country Roads; and one tied to Sinema called the Getting Stuff Done PAC.
On March 31, Sean Kennedy contributed $2,000 to Hassan’s reelection campaign. On December 20, he gave the maximum allowable amount, $2,800, to Sinema.
At the National Restaurant Association’s conference this week, Kennedy heaped praise on Sinema and Manchin. “You and your staff have been absolutely amazing in working with small businesses, including the National Restaurant Association, in finding a commonsense path, so we can wrap up that aspect by just saying thank you,” he said.
The fight to raise the minimum wage nationally to $15 is moving in parallel, and at times in tandem, with the related push to phase out the sub-minimum wage. While the tipped minimum is the most well-known sub-minimum wage, current labor law also allows companies to pay some workers with disabilities less than the full minimum wage. Defenders of the policy say that it encourages companies to hire disabled workers who would otherwise be unable to compete against able-bodied ones, giving them an independent source of income and a way to participate more fully in society. Opponents cite the law’s patent exploitative potential.
When it comes to the question of raising the tipped wage, service industry workers are not monolithic in opinion. Like in all industries, particularly nonunionized ones, some workers do far better under the status quo than others. Servers who pocket hundreds of dollars in a four-to-six-hour shift would see no increase in their paycheck if the underlying wage were increased. Under current law, restaurants are supposed to make up the difference between the sub-minimum wage and the standard minimum if tips don’t cover it. For many servers, that isn’t necessary — but when it is, the law is rarely enforced.
Managers also use the sub-minimum wage law to squeeze nonservice work out of their wait staff, scheduling workers to arrive several hours before a restaurant opens, for instance, to perform so-called side work. Labor laws allow bosses to require some basic preparatory work, but managers routinely stretch its definition far beyond that, putting servers to work doing custodial or other tasks that ought to be paid at a full minimum wage. Because a server can make well above the minimum wage when business is bumping, managers get away with making them work additional hours essentially for free to reduce their average hourly pay.
The effort to phase out the tipped wage has received far less national attention than the fight for $15, and given the skepticism of holdouts like Shaheen and Hassan, it’s not hard to see service staff getting stiffed in a final compromise — if one is ever reached.
Nicole Poole Franklin could face up to life in prison for the federal hate crime charges. (photo: KRCG)
Iowa Woman Who Hit 2 Children With Car Pleads Guilty to Hate Crime Charges
Tara C. Mahadevan, Yahoo! News
Mahadevan writes:
n Iowa woman who injured two children with her car has pleaded guilty to hate crime charges.
The Hill reports that 43-year-old Nicole Poole Franklin told police she purposely drove her vehicle into the children because of their race. She was charged with two counts of violating the U.S. Hate Crime Act for trying to kill the children due to their skin color and could be hit with a maximum sentence of life in prison. Prosecutors have suggested that Franklin should be handed a 27-year sentence in prison.
The two separate incidents happened on Dec. 9, 2019, when Franklin first struck a 12-year-old Black boy, driving onto a curb, running him over, and injuring his leg. She reportedly said she thought he was Middle Eastern and a terrorist, with a witness telling police that when operating the car, Franklin “gunned its engine” before driving into the child.
An hour later, she hit a 14-year-old girl with her vehicle, reportedly telling police she thought the girl looked “Mexican.” Police say she also “made a series of derogatory statements about Latinos.” The girl spent two days in the hospital.
Another hour-and-a-half later, Franklin went into a corner store and spewed racial slurs at an employee and customer, and threw store items at the employee. Poole says she suffers from schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder, and reportedly told authorities she was high on meth during the hit-and-runs.
Ana Maria Moreno Portillo from Guatemala embraces her daughter after they were deported from the U.S., at the Kiki Romero Sports Complex in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, on April 5, 2021. The sports complex was adapted as a shelter because of the growing number of migrants being deported daily. (photo: Christian Chavez/AP)
New Report Documents Nearly 500 Cases of Violence Against Asylum-Seekers Expelled by Biden
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "Pressure is mounting on the Biden administration to end its use of a Trump-era law that stifles asylum access at the southern border, as new evidence points to human rights abuses and violence against individuals and families seeking refuge across the U.S.-Mexico divide."
Human rights organizations and border researchers are calling on the White House to end its use of a sweeping Trump-era law.
A joint human rights report published Tuesday, based on more than 110 in-person interviews and an electronic survey of more than 1,200 asylum-seekers in the Mexican state of Baja California, documented at least 492 cases of attacks or kidnappings targeting asylum-seekers expelled under a disputed public health law, known as Title 42, since President Joe Biden’s January inauguration.
The victims of violence represented 17 nationalities, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Africa and the Middle East, and described cases of assault, kidnapping, and rape in northern Mexico border towns in recent months. Black asylum-seekers, in particular, stood out as targets, with more than 60 percent of Haitian asylum-seekers in Baja reporting that they were the victims of crimes. Out of a sample of more than 150 asylum-seekers interviewed between March and April, the researchers found that none were given an opportunity to apply for asylum before being summarily expelled from the U.S.
“Despite his frequent pledges to reverse President Trump’s cruelty at the border, President Biden is continuing a policy that is wreaking havoc: it endangers children, drives family separations, and illegally returns asylum seekers to danger,” said advocates with Human Rights First, Al Otro Lado, and Haitian Bridge Alliance. While acknowledging that the administration inherited an asylum system that was decimated by Donald Trump, the report argued that those challenges do not excuse the deplorable and deteriorating conditions asylum-seekers continue to face: “Sacrificing adherence to U.S. refugee law and adopting a Trump-administration policy that treats human lives as dispensable are not the answer.”
Pressed by Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller over the objections of public health professionals, Title 42 — an obscure Centers for Disease Control and Prevention law from the 1940s — went into effect last spring with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. According to the administrations of both Trump and Biden, the law allows Border Patrol agents to swiftly expel individuals and families encountered on U.S. soil without a hearing, regardless of whether they are attempting to exercise their right to seek asylum, while also broadly barring asylum access for most people at ports of entry.
Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, has carried out more than 630,000 expulsions in the past year. As The Intercept detailed in an investigation published last weekend, Border Patrol agents have used Title 42 as a basis to drop asylum-seekers in Mexican border towns in the middle of the night — a practice that’s been largely prohibited for years under agreements between the U.S. and Mexico. The agents have also relied on Title 42 to expel individuals and families through remote ports that were previously not used for removals, into communities dominated by organized crime and without transportation services. The law is under challenge in the courts, with critics arguing that what’s been presented as a public health measure is in fact being used as a means to deny people their rights under domestic and international law. Hundreds of thousands of travelers continue to pass through the nation’s ports every day; it’s asylum-seekers — and virtually asylum-seekers alone — who are rebuffed at those locations.
“In Tijuana, under Title 42, our staff and our volunteers have increasingly received reports from asylum-seekers whose family members or themselves have been kidnapped by organized crime and held for ransom,” Nicole Ramos, director of Al Otro Lado’s Border Rights Project, told reporters in a press call Tuesday. “Our staff receives videos of asylum-seekers with guns pointed at their head, children held over the mouths of barking dogs, all being threatened that if their families do not pay the $5,000, the $10,000, they will be killed and the parts of their bodies scattered, never to be recuperated or identified.”
Ramos added that while the U.S. reportedly stopped the practice of expelling unaccompanied children in November — after the Trump administration carried out at least 13,000 such expulsions — that halt has not applied to unaccompanied Mexican children. “They’re still turning back the Mexican minors in much the same way that we’ve seen previously,” she said. Nicole Phillips, legal director at Haitian Bridge Alliance, said on the call: “It feels like Stephen Miller is still here.” In addition to expulsions into Mexico, Title 42 has been used to send 27 flights to Haiti since February, the report noted, unloading more than 1,400 adults, children and asylum-seekers into violently unstable conditions in which Department of Homeland Security officials have privately acknowledged they “may face harm.”
“This particularly cruel right now because of the state Haiti is in,” Phillips said. “There’s a political instability like Haiti has not seen since the 1980s under the Duvalier regime.”
Muhamed, an asylum-seeker from East Africa who arrived in Tijuana with his family one month before Title 42 began and was just granted entry into the U.S. this month, described what it is like to be a Black asylum-seeker in a foreign city where violent and extortionist targeting of migrants is entrenched. “Apart from the racism of the society, the police extortion was also a very huge challenge to us,” he said, adding that he was extorted by police on three separate occasions. Earlier this year, Muhamed began volunteering at a camp for asylum-seekers hoping for an opportunity to make their case in the U.S. “These people are not criminals,” he said. “They are migrants. They are human beings who are sleeping on the streets under the sun and rain, just to fulfill their dream of seeking asylum in the United States of America.”
The implementation of Title 42 is creating a new vocabulary of immigration enforcement. Alexandra Miller, managing attorney of the Border Action Team at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, told reporters of the emergence of what advocates are calling “delayed Title 42”: cases where Title 42 is used to expel individuals in ICE detention in the interior of the U.S., not at the border. “Over the past five months, on any given day, there’s been around 100 individuals in ICE custody, who will not have access to due process, who will have limited access to counsel, and who will ultimately be removed to their country of origin, despite asserting fear claims,” Miller said. Marisa Limón Garza, deputy director of the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Texas, described the challenge of responding to “lateral flights”: operations in which individuals and families are flown to El Paso and booted across the bridge into Ciudad Juárez, a city that has earned an infamous reputation for violence and targeting of migrants.
Limón said that while advocates in the region have contended with Title 42 for more than a year, conditions have worsened in the past two months, with nearly 5,000 men, women, and children flown to the border cities and expelled. Typically, flights arrive carrying 135 passengers, she explained, U.S. officials choose 35 individuals to stay, and the rest are sent to Juárez. Embedded in the process is what advocates are calling “the borderlands betrayal,” wherein families are told they are being flown to another U.S. city, only to be expelled into Mexico.
“We have hundreds of empty beds right now ready to welcome people. We know that our partners in South Texas also have beds ready to receive people,”Limón said. “And yet the United States government continues to apply the use of Title 42 incorrectly, inappropriately at all of our collective expense.” Limón added that she and her colleagues have called on the administration to end its use of Title 42 and that the response they continually receive is to wait. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the benefit of waiting,” she said. “Every day is another 100 people. Every day is another family. Every day is another person that is attempting to cross between ports of entry because we have cut off asylum at our southern border.”
The human rights report comes just one day after a binational coalition of 92 Mexican and U.S academics who study the border issued a series of recommendations to the governments of their respective countries in order to “avoid a humanitarian crisis.” At the top of the researchers’ list was the phaseout of Title 42 and the beginning of processing for families seeking asylum. The signatories, which included many of the region’s top experts, noted a pattern that’s emerged in recent weeks of families choosing to separate themselves upon learning that the U.S. is still accepting unaccompanied children. Allowing families to seek asylum together “will decrease the need for facilities dedicated to unaccompanied minors, as families are able to travel to their final destinations upon release and require less immediate support” following their initial interview in the asylum process, they argued.
The border and immigration scholars advocated for expanded use of so-called filter locations, such as hotels, as a measure to prevent the spread of Covid-19. “The creation of ‘filters’ and the ‘filter hotel’ have proven to be efficient venues for the control of the pandemic prior to transferring migrants to other spaces such as shelters where they receive support,” they noted. “However, it is important to increase capacity, both in terms of the number of spaces and in the application of PCR tests,” they wrote, referring to testing for Covid-19. The researchers added that filter locations could be used to administer one-shot vaccines and said that “more dignified holding conditions should be built for unaccompanied children, adolescents, and families on the US side while they are processed and transferred to their final destination.”
Responsible and coronavirus-conscious admission of asylum-seekers is not without precedent, the experts said, pointing to the recent admission of individuals who were enrolled in the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program as an “orderly, efficient and safe” model of success. The Trump-era program forced more than 71,000 asylum-seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico, triggering an explosion in violence and human rights abuses against those populations. Biden ended the notorious program on his first day in office, and his administration has moved forward with the phased entry of individuals formerly enrolled in the system.
One thing the governments of the U.S. and Mexico should stop doing, the border and immigration researchers argued, is relying on Mexican security forces, with their long and well-established record of human rights abuses and corruption, to interdict asylum-seekers making their way north. Just two days after Biden’s inauguration, a U.S.-trained Mexican special operations team massacred 19 migrants in northern Mexico; last month, a Mexican soldier shot and killed an unarmed Guatemalan migrant in southern Mexico. Less than two weeks later, the Biden administration announced that it had secured agreements with the governments of Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala to deploy thousands of troops to their respective borders.
“There is a strong correlation between violence against migrants in the form of kidnapping, extortion and even massacres with increased immigration enforcement in Mexico,” the researchers said. “Mass detention will drive people to hide in dangerous and risky conditions, which will cause greater humanitarian costs.”
'Oil and gas extracted from public lands and waters account for about a quarter of annual U.S. production.' (photo: AP)
Achieving Net-Zero Climate Targets Will Depend on Public Lands
Kaya Axelsson, Kate Cullen and Stephen Lezak, The Revelator
Excerpt: "Since the start of the Biden administration, federal climate policy seems to be waking up from a four-year slumber. But things are not as they were in 2017. The planet is hotter, 57 million acres of American forests have burned, and the global carbon budget is tighter than ever."
To slow climate change, we’ll need to not just cut emissions, but sequester them. And for that we’ll need to protect healthy ecosystems, experts say.
ince the start of the Biden administration, federal climate policy seems to be waking up from a four-year slumber. But things are not as they were in 2017. The planet is hotter, 57 million acres of American forests have burned, and the global carbon budget is tighter than ever.
But there’s good news. Even while the Trump administration sought to dismantle national climate policies, a growing number of local, state and private-sector actors found ways to lead at home.
Our latest research, conducted at the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, shows how these “subnational” actors have kicked off a new era of climate action. As a result, the majority of Americans now live in jurisdictions committed to reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century or earlier.
But the push to net zero can only go so far without coordination from D.C.
In their current form, subnational targets have wide discrepancies in how states choose to pursue and measure their pathways to net zero. For instance, if Oregon buys electricity from a coal-fired power plant in Idaho, should Oregon count those emissions as its own? Should Idaho? What if the coal came from Wyoming? A lack of consistency could lead to double counting — or worse, not counting at all.
These targets are also unable to address a substantial gap in the fabric of subnational climate action: Emissions that come from the one quarter of U.S. land that is owned and managed by the federal government.
A stunning 23% of the nation’s greenhouse gases can be traced directly to public lands. Much of these emissions come from the extraction of fossil fuels under leases issued by the Bureau of Land Management. States have limited control over what takes place on federal property, even when that land is within their borders. The BLM and U.S. Forest Service set the terms for oil and gas leasing, mining permits and logging.
More recent attempts to regulate emissions from federal government leasing and permitting programs were stymied by climate obstruction by the federal government. The American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act would have required federal lands to reach net zero by 2040, but it never received a hearing in the Republican-controlled Congress in 2019. As a result, states — especially those in the West with large swathes of public land — remain limited in their ability to meet their own decarbonization targets.
But public lands offer an opportunity as well as a challenge. American public lands already sequester roughly 250 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. The restoration of forests and other native ecosystems plays the leading role in taking up this carbon, while protecting biodiversity and ecological resilience.
Today these carbon sinks give the United States the equivalent of a 4% rebate on the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions. That might sound small, but it’s greater than the annual emissions from every commercial flight in the country.
Looking forward into the decisive decade, as emissions begin to decline, the amount of carbon sequestered by public lands will be determined by our actions as stewards of these landscapes. Ultimately, reaching net zero means ensuring that for every ton of CO2 emitted in a given year, another ton is put back into the earth. A large portion of those negative emissions has the potential to come from America’s public lands, but forests will not regrow in the course of a single night or even one election cycle.
Recognizing this opportunity will be important to communicating that public land is valuable for more than just extraction and logging. The more we can protect public lands to ensure they’re carbon sinks rather than sources, the easier it will be to reach net zero by 2050.
The Biden-Harris administration took a key step in this direction in January when it issued a temporary moratorium on new fossil fuel leases on public lands. But the administration has yet to issue guidance on whether this moratorium will continue or how it plans to deal with existing leases.
Even more recently, Congress began debating the CLEAN Future Act, which would commit the United States to net-zero emissions by 2050, in addition to setting a 50% emissions reduction by 2030. But the act doesn’t provide an explicit mandate to the Interior Department to align the actions of the BLM with the needs of a net-zero future. Unlike the American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solutions Act, the CLEAN Future Act doesn’t require federal and state actors to come together and plan to reduce emissions and sequester carbon on public lands.
With this omission Congress risks making the common mistake of overlooking the federal government’s direct role in facilitating nearly a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Aligning ambition with action will require a new era of federal leadership. And if Congress is too gridlocked to act on climate, there’s every hope that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland will be one of the nation’s most influential climate champions in the years to come.
Creating a net-zero strategy for the United States’ public lands would be an excellent place to start.
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