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25 April 21
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The Most Powerful Weapon for Police Reform Is Back
James D. Walsh, New York Magazine
Walsh writes: "On the heels of Derek Chauvin's murder conviction, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department is launching a 'pattern or practice' investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department."
n the heels of Derek Chauvin’s murder conviction, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department is launching a “pattern or practice” investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department. Pattern or practice probes are often a precursor to court enforced reform agreements between the DOJ and local law enforcement agencies, which require them to comply with a list of goals before federal oversight can be lifted. A court-appointed monitor, usually a DOJ attorney in its civil rights division, is responsible for overseeing the goals and evaluating the department’s progress. President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to revive pattern-or-practice investigations – as well as subsequent reform agreements – after the Trump administration suspended the program in 2017.
Congress first gave the Justice Department the power to enter reform agreements in the 1994 crime bill drafted by Biden following civic unrest in Los Angeles two years earlier over the LAPD beating of Rodney King. Many police accountability experts say the reform agreements – both consent decrees and settlement agreements – are the most effective way to achieve long-term police reform.
“If you have a troubled police department, this is how you do it,” said Sam Walker, an expert in police accountability and professor emeritus at University of Nebraska at Omaha. “Consent decrees and settlement agreements really offer systemic reforms for entire police departments. Just photocopy some decrees and change the wording and there you are.”
Under Barack Obama, the DOJ opened 25 pattern or practice investigations, at least 22 of which resulted in court-enforced reform agreements. In those agreements, monitors set reform benchmarks for departments over the unlawful use of force, bias in policing, mental health and crisis intervention, language access for non-English speakers, and more. Sometimes departments take just a few years to achieve compliance, but other departments take much longer: The Oakland Police Department, for example, has been under a consent decree since 2003.
Reform agreements have long-term staying power, according to Walker, and there’s no better example of that than the past four years. “What Jeff Sessions did early in 2017, was to suspend the program. There were no new investigations. No new consent decrees,” he said. “There was a lot of worry that the local U.S. attorneys who participated in this process would undermine existing consent decrees.” But Walker hasn’t seen any evidence that the Trump administration’s halt on new investigations or agreements undermined the agreements that were already in place. He points to Newark, New Jersey where the police department has been under consent decree since 2016. In 2020, no Newark police officer fired his or her weapon, a feat that would have been unthinkable a few short years ago.
“That told me that the U.S. attorney did not back away, that the reforms continued and they worked,” Walker said. “The new policy, the new training, the new supervision – all overseen by the monitor – stayed in place.”
Advocates of reform agreements often point to Connecticut’s East Haven Police Department as an example of their effectiveness. Though pattern or practice investigations look into systemic wrongdoing, they are often triggered by individual incidents. The DOJ started investigating the department in 2009, after officers took decorative license plates from the wall of an Ecuadorian store, claiming it was against the law to have old license plates, and proceeded to arrest a priest who witnessed the incident. A DOJ pattern or practice investigation followed and led to the arrest of four officers for a range of civil rights abuses. All four served time in prison. In 2012, the department entered a consent decree agreement. Over the next five years, the makeup of the department changed radically, as the city pushed hard to recruit Spanish-speaking officers and a new police chief encouraged the reforms laid out by the federal monitor.
“I think people felt uncomfortable going out. They were scared to get harassed,” Paul Matute, the son of the owners of the Ecuadoran store, told the Washington Post in December. “People were afraid to come to the store because they thought they’d get pulled over for being Hispanic. Now people are comfortable. That would never happen again in this town.”
It’s often said that reform agreements, at their core, are an attempt to change the culture of a department, a task some critics on the left say is impossible without radically changing the fundamental nature of policing. Others say that the reforms in cities like Pittsburgh didn’t stick. The East Haven consent decree was one of five Obama-era agreements that expressly targeted discrimination against the Latino community. A similar agreement on Long Island has taken longer to realize. The DOJ opened an investigation into the Suffolk County Police Department in 2009, shortly after a group of white teenagers who called themselves the Caucasian Crew murdered Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant. In December 2013, the SCPD entered a settlement agreement with the DOJ and, one month later, Sgt. Scott Greene, a 25-year veteran of the force, was arrested for, and eventually convicted of, robbing Latino drivers during bogus traffic stops. Since then, progress has been slow. The federal monitor’s last publicly available assessment, completed in October 2018, stated that the department has yet to reach full compliance in bias-free policing and, seven years after the settlement agreement was inked, community leaders say that real progress has been nominal.
“What was identified in the DOJ’s settlement agreement are things that we’re still pushing for them to improve today,” said Irma Solis, the Suffolk County director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “They may have some improved policies in place, but they haven’t made much progress, in my opinion, in making sure that those policies are well known by those who are expected to follow them.”
Earlier this month, a federal court cleared the way for a class-action lawsuit to proceed against the SCPD. Filed on behalf of 21 unnamed Latino plaintiffs in 2015, the suit accuses the department of subjecting “Latinos to an ongoing policy, pattern, and practice of discriminatory policing.” Judge Lois Bloom’s recommendation for class certification gives credence to that claim. “The SCPD has failed to collect reliable data and has failed to assess its data to prevent biased policing,” she wrote in her decision. Last year, the plaintiffs submitted an expert analysis by Michael Smith, an expert in racial profiling and police policy at the University of Texas San Antonio, which said that as recently as 2020, the SCPD was not collecting data “that is necessary for an appropriate racial or ethnic disparity analysis of these traffic stop outcomes.”
With nearly 2,500 officers, the SCPD is one of the largest local law enforcement agencies in the country, which might partly explain why it has taken so long to comply fully with the settlement agreement. (For comparison, East Haven’s force numbers just over 60 officers.) But police reformers in Suffolk are up against a department with a long history of corruption and a powerful police union — Donald Trump felt comfortable enough in Suffolk County to encourage cops in a speech he made at a police academy graduation address to rough up suspects. (The SCPD almost immediately distanced itself from the his remarks.)
“There’s this pervasive history of racially biased policing by Suffolk County, which [SCPD] has refused to acknowledge or only begrudgingly,” said José Pérez, an attorney for LatinoJustice, which filed the class-action suit. “Suffolk County routinely failed to collect the appropriate data and failed to analyze the data. Had the department undertaken these steps, as the settlement agreement required them to do, they might have been covered.”
Cleta Mitchcell testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington on 6 February 2014. (photo: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/AP)
Republican Lawyer Is Key Player in Voter Suppression Drive Across US
Peter Stone, Guardian UK
Stone writes: "It was an abrupt end to two decades as a partner at legal giant Foley & Lardner for the influential and conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell."
Cleta Mitchell has emerged in a series of roles that many see as a Republican push on limiting voting rights
t was an abrupt end to two decades as a partner at legal giant Foley & Lardner for the influential and conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell.
Days after Mitchell participated in Donald Trump’s controversial 2 January phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state where the then president pressured him to “find” him more votes to reverse Joe Biden’s win, Mitchell resigned her post in the midst of an internal firm review and mounting criticism.
But Mitchell, a combative and top lawyer in the right’s drive to promote unproven charges of sizable voting fraud in 2020 and tighten future voting laws, was not idle for long. She has now emerged in a series of roles that have put her at the heart of what many see as a ferocious Republican push on limiting voting rights that now reaches across America.
Last month, Mitchell was tapped by the libertarian FreedomWorks to spearhead a $10m drive in seven key states including Georgia, Arizona and Michigan to change voting laws to curb potential but unproven election fraud, which many Democrats and legal experts view as aimed at limiting minority votes.
According to a FreedomWorks spokesman, another key part of Mitchell’s mission leading its “National Election Protection Initiative”, is to rally opposition to a House-passed bill that in part would expand voting rights nationally which its sponsors see as necessary to counter the conservative assaults on voting rights in many states.
Georgia last month enacted a law that makes voting tougher with new curbs on absentee ballots and on voters in heavily Democratic urban and suburban areas, sparking lawsuits from civil rights and liberal groups, plus a sharp attack from Biden.
FreedomWorks’ president, Adam Brandon, has hailed Mitchell as “an outspoken advocate and voice of reason for improved election laws, especially during the chaotic 2020 election cycle”, and dubbed her “our guide”, chairing its election initiative, which will also include training and deploying activists in the states to monitor election procedures.
Likewise, the Trump-allied Conservative Partnership Institute last month recruited Mitchell as a “senior fellow” with a similar mission. Mitchell told the AP she is working to “coordinate” conservative views on voting to bolster opposition to the House passed voting rights legislation that is pending in the Senate.
Mitchell’s FreedomWorks and CPI projects come even as a Georgia DA in Fulton county is looking into whether Trump and others broke laws in pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to find enough votes to block Biden’s win. On that call, Mitchell claimed she had evidence of voting fraud, but officials with Raffensperger’s office disagreed and faulted her data.
Some voting rights lawyers say Mitchell could face scrutiny over her role in the call.
Gerry Hebert, who spent over two decades as a senior attorney at the Justice Department’s voting rights section, said in an interview Trump’s actions and words constituted “election interference [and] violated both state law and federal law, and he should be held accountable”.
Mitchell “reportedly interjected multiple times during the call in which she tried to support Trump’s allegations of fraud”, he said. “Her role in that call may well be part of the investigation” by the Georgia DA. Hebert added the state bar to which Mitchell belongs “has a responsibility to determine if she committed any violation of the legal ethics rules in that state.
Reached by phone, Mitchell declined to comment on her work for the two conservative outfits, or the Georgia inquiry into Trump’s call and whether she might face scrutiny.
Historically, the 70-year-old Mitchell has done legal work for many key players on the right including the National Rifle Association where she previously was on the board. A former Democrat and member of the Oklahoma legislature, Mitchell in the 1990s switched parties and moved to DC, where she has given legal counsel to many GOP candidates, campaign committees and non-profits.
Mitchell’s new roles with FreedomWorks and CPI underscore the right’s goal of swaying future election results with more voting curbs. The conservative blitz to tighten voting laws in which Heritage Action for America is a key player too, is being fueled by tens of millions of dollars, coupled with allegations that Trump as well as Mitchell and conservative allies have spread about unproven widespread voter fraud in the last elections.
In post-election radio interviews, Mitchell has escalated her rhetoric charging that Raffensperger is a “pathological liar” and attacking some GOP leaders in Georgia as “morally bankrupt”, according to the watchdog group Documented.
In another radio segment, Mitchell said that last September she told Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, there was a “massive effort to steal the election”.
More recently, Mitchell told the AP that she and Trump have been in contact “fairly frequently”, but declined to provide details.
Meanwhile, other right leaning groups with which Mitchell has had good ties are engaged in campaigns that seem to overlap those of FreedomWorks and CPI to limit voting rights.
For example, Mitchell told the AP: “I’ve been working with state legislatures for several years to get them to pay attention to what I call the political process.”
To be sure, Mitchell prior to the election served as outside counsel and helped coordinate a major voting law initiative for the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), an influential group of conservative state legislators which promotes model bills for states. Alec has reportedly been increasingly active this year in pushing its ideas for changing voting laws.
Known as well connected in conservative big money circles, Mitchell also serves on the board of the deep pocketed Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation, a top donor to many rightwing groups including Alec to which it gave $750,000 dollars in 2020, records show.
Further, Mitchell has attended meetings of the famously secretive Council for National Policy, an influential rightwing group that boasts top donors, evangelical leaders and prominent conservatives like FreedomWorks’ Brandon.
At a CNP national meeting in mid November one panel featured Mitchell, Christian Adams the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), and other lawyers discussing “Election results and legal battles: What now?”
Mitchell, who also chairs Pilf, which received $300,000 in 2020 from the Bradley foundation, has indicated it could get active in the legal battles over the new Georgia law.
To be sure, some conservatives voice doubts about Mitchell’s legal acumen. An ex senior NRA official who knows Mitchell quipped her views are on the “fringe of the fringe”.
And one prominent GOP voting rights lawyer said Mitchell “tells clients what they want to hear regardless of law or reality”. The lawyer predicted Mitchell “will get scrutiny, but probably won’t be charged” in the Georgia DA’s inquiry.
Voting in Ohio. (photo: David Goldman/AP)
Democrats Move to Expand Voting Rights for Felons
Jordan Williams, The Hill
Williams writes: "Democratic states are moving to expand the voting rights of felons as the GOP seeks to tighten voting rules following a spate of losses in the 2020 election."
New York, Washington and Virginia have all recently taken legislative or executive action ensuring previously incarcerated men and women will have easier access to the ballot box.
Advocates have argued that most people who are affected by felony disenfranchisement come from communities of color.
“The history of this is very much connected to Jim Crow and racism. And sadly, our nation has deep and long history about choosing who gets to vote as a mechanism to keep some people down,” said New York Assembly Member Daniel O’Donnell (D), who sponsored legislation that the legislature passed expanding voting rights to previously incarcerated felons.
"And you look at the population within our prison system. You can see why that would be,” he said.
The Democrat-led efforts come amid a growing battle over voting rights, with Republican-controlled state houses across the U.S. moving forward with their own legislation critics argue is intended to restrict voter access.
As of March 24, 361 bills had been introduced in 47 states aimed at tightening voting rules in some way, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
But granting voting rights to felons once they have completed their sentences appears to have bipartisan support.
A poll from the Pew Research Center released Wednesday found that 70 percent of Americans favor allowing people convicted of a felony to vote after serving their sentences, including 84 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Republicans.
Neil Volz, deputy director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRCC), said the conversation shouldn’t be purely about politics.
“This is more important than red or blue. This is about humanity. This is about how we see our democracies, and whether we believe that every voice matters,” Volz said.
No state permanently bans previously incarcerated felons from voting, but the debate centers around how long a felon should wait until they are released from prison before being able to do so.
O’Donnell’s legislation in New York and legislation passed in Washington state both granted felons the right to vote immediately upon release from prison, even if they are on parole or probation.
Washington State Rep. Tara Simmons (D), who sponsored the legislation, says her own experience being previously incarcerated drove her to push for it.
“I know the feeling of being stigmatized against or being excluded from different parts of our society,” Simmons said. “It’s a personal priority for me to continue to break through that stigma, and to continue to fight for racial equity knowing, you know how these policies disproportionately impact people of color.”
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) also recently signed an executive action that restored voting rights to nearly 70,000 felons in the state who have completed their prison terms.
“Probationary periods can last for years,” Northam said last month while announcing the new policy. “But that’s also time in which a person is living in the community, rebuilding their lives. They should be able to exercise those civil rights, even if they are still under supervision.”
The debate over felony disenfranchisement previously drew attention in Florida, after voters passed Amendment Four in 2018. The referendum allowed felons to vote after they have completed all the terms of their sentence, including parole or probation.
The state house later passed legislation in 2019 requiring previously incarcerated felons to pay off any outstanding fines, fees and costs connected to their convictions before being able to vote again.
A federal appeals court later ruled that the bill didn’t equate to a poll tax, defeating the voting rights advocates that argued otherwise.
The opposition against expanding voting rights to felons mainly lies in perceptions of those people.
O’Donnell said that most of the opposition facing his bill was rooted in objection to the people being placed on parole.
“[The] criticism laws. Sometimes the parole board releases people who I don't think should be released,” he said. "When you look at the totality of an individual's life, and the totality of what they're like in prison. Those are much better indicators, than one night in 1978.”
Simmons said it was sad to hear some of her colleagues who hadn’t had her experiences criticize her bill.
“It's sad to me that my colleagues are so removed, and that they've not ever had my lived experiences, or even, you know, become educated on them to where they would continue this really punitive approach when, you know, voting is like something that there's no public safety risk,” Simmons said.
While legislation is a good place to start, advocates say that legislative action has to be met with grassroots efforts in order to help formerly incarcerated felons be able to vote again.
“When you take the right to vote away from somebody, it takes work to actually bring that back into democracy,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “And it takes that work for everybody, not just people who are, you know, formerly incarcerated or have been disenfranchised, but especially for those folks.”
Isaiah Brown. (photo: NBC News)
Black Man Shot 10 Times by White Deputy Was Holding a Phone: 911 Call
Blake Montgomery, The Daily Beast
Montgomery writes: "Before a white Virginia sheriff's deputy shot a Black man 10 times late Wednesday night, he told the man to drop his gun. Body-camera footage and the recording of the man's initial call to 911, however, show he was never holding one. He had his phone in his hand, and he had told authorities so."
Isaiah Brown had told a 911 dispatcher that he did not have a weapon. Seconds later, he was shot by a deputy who had given him a lift home earlier that night.
efore a white Virginia sheriff’s deputy shot a Black man 10 times late Wednesday night, he told the man to drop his gun. Body-camera footage and the recording of the man’s initial call to 911, however, show he was never holding one. He had his phone in his hand, and he had told authorities so.
The Spotsylvania County sheriff’s deputy had dropped Isaiah Brown, 32, home earlier on Wednesday night after Brown’s car had broken down miles away.
But, moments later, Brown dialed 911 over a dispute with his brother that was apparently preventing him from getting back to his car. He described a heated argument in which he had asked his brother for a gun, but he notified the dispatcher that he did not have a weapon. His brother had refused his request.
Brown said, “I’m about to kill my brother.”
The dispatcher replied, “Don’t kill your brother.”
“Alright,” said Brown.
“Why would you say something like that?” asked the dispatcher.
“Somebody needs to come here real quick,” said Brown.
The same deputy who had dropped him home arrived back at the scene and found Brown standing on the road outside the home.
The recording of Brown’s 911 call captured the confrontation, indicating that Brown was walking down the road, on a house phone, at the time. “You need to hold your hands up,” the dispatcher tell him as a siren can be heard in the background.
The deputy is then captured in the 911 call and in body-cam footage shouting at Brown, “Show me your hands. Show me your hands, now. Show me your hands. Drop the gun. He’s got a gun to his head. Drop the gun now. Stop walking towards me. Stop walking towards me. Stop. Stop.” The deputy then shot Brown and continued yelling at him to put his hands up and “drop the gun.”
The Spotsylvania sheriff’s office and Virginia State Police confirmed Brown was unarmed.
The officer, whose name has not been released, has been put on administrative leave, the Spotsylvania sheriff said. The Virginia State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation is reviewing the shooting.
Brown is now in intensive care being treated for 10 bullet wounds.
His family’s attorney said in a statement, “It is evident that the tragic shooting of Isaiah Brown was completely avoidable. Isaiah clearly told dispatch that he did not have a weapon more than 90 seconds before the deputy arrived. He told dispatch that he was walking away from the house and away from anyone else and was on the roadway by himself. Isaiah was on the phone with 911 at the time of the shooting and the officer mistook a cordless house phone for a gun.”
Brown’s brother, Tazmon, told NBC Washington that he thought Brown called the cops because he wanted a ride back to his car so it wouldn’t be towed.
“The officer just started shooting at him for no reason. I didn’t hear a warning shot. All I heard was ‘Hands up!’ one time. And all he had was his phone, so I know he put his hands up,” Tazmon said.
Protesters gathered Friday at the Spotsylvania sheriff’s office, shouting “No justice, no peace!” NBC reported.
The shooting and demonstrations come on the heels of a tense week in American policing. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder Wednesday for the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, in May 2020. Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. The same day as the verdict, a Columbus police officer shot and killed Black 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant while she lunged at a woman with a knife.
In the 24 hours after the Chauvin verdict, six people were killed by the police.
Rancher Whit Jones figures he's spent more than $30,000 since January fixing fences and gates, like this one, that human smugglers busted through in order to 'bailout.' (photo: John Burnett/NPR)
Human Smugglers Bypass Border Patrol, Bedeviling Sheriffs and Ranchers in South Texas
John Burnett, NPR
Burnett writes: "Undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America trekking on foot and packed into vehicles are heading north through South Texas in ever greater numbers. Some are dying along the way in the harsh, arid terrain."
hen immigration policy changes in Washington, D.C., it's felt immediately on the Jones Ranch, located an hour's drive north of the Rio Grande in South Texas.
Whit Jones III — in a mud-spattered hat and spurs — drives his pickup along a rural highway, pointing out all the repairs where smuggling vehicles plowed through his fences.
"A lot of times they come and hit these gates," he says, motioning to a mangled metal gate. "You can see it's been knocked down a bunch."
In its 130 years of existence, the Jones Ranch has weathered hurricanes and droughts, fever ticks and screwworms, and lots of migrant traffic. But he says he's never seen so much human smuggling in the region. Jones estimates they've spent more than $30,000 just since January fixing dozens of breaks in their fences.
Undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America trekking on foot and packed into vehicles are heading north through South Texas in ever greater numbers. Some are dying along the way in the harsh, arid terrain.
Meanwhile, frustrated Border Patrol agents say they're so busy processing asylum seekers that they can't apprehend others who cross illegally.
And human smugglers, known as coyotes, have been bedeviling ranchers and local authorities. Jones says when the sheriff is in hot pursuit of a vehicle believed to be involved in human trafficking, the smugglers "just run through the fence."
Cowboys notice change after new immigration policies
"They drive as far as they can on the property and tearing down fences as they drive. The car stops and everybody bails out of the car. So that's why they call it a bailout," Jones says.
Cowboys on the Jones Ranch noticed a change as soon as the Biden administration came in and loosened immigration policies.
Unaccompanied minors and families traveling with children — who were expelled under former President Donald Trump — started crossing the border in increasing numbers to surrender to the Border Patrol.
But these asylum seekers are usually processed and released legally into the country to await their court dates. The migrants who are vexing ranchers are generally adult men looking for work or reunifying with families in the US who are being told by coyotes that now's the time to dash north while agents are busy with the kids and families.
"In some areas, up to 40 to 50% of Border Patrol resources have been pulled off the line to provide humanitarian assistance ... leaving large areas of the border unmonitored and unsecured," says Mark Morgan, who was the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump.
Morgan, now a visiting fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, says that CBP estimates there are 1,000 "gotaways" a day — people who successfully sneak across the border. A current senior CBP official confirms that unofficial estimate.
Asked to comment on the "gotaways" and troubles caused by the jump in human smuggling, a CBP spokesman said only that 300 agents have been detailed to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas from other parts of the country to help out with the current surge of immigrant traffic.
Morgan said the same cycle happened in 2019 — agents became preoccupied with asylum seekers and there was a surge in "gotaways" — but that now, it's worse.
Other ranchers across the rugged Texas borderlands have noticed, too.
"Increase in smugglers headed north"
John Saunders, whose family owns ranches north of Laredo, says unauthorized immigrants aren't being apprehended at the Rio Grande as much because Border Patrol agents have told him they aren't able to conduct their normal patrols. Instead, the coyotes are transporting the immigrants into the interior of the country, where local authorities are getting involved.
"You're activating more of the state troopers, the sheriffs and the local police," because of the increase in smugglers headed north, Saunders says. "When they get chased, they turn off the highway at full speed, break the fence and go until they can't go anymore. It ends up costing us a bunch of money."
Human smuggling also has other, more serious consequences than broken fences, says Whit Jones, who's parked under the welcoming shade of a mesquite tree. Jones says he's angry that migrants who just want to work are dying.
"The fences and all that, that's a problem for sure," he says. "But the bodies we're finding out here, that's what needs to be discussed. And that should be focused on more."
Nearby, an old Aermotor windmill clatters as it pumps water into a concrete cattle tank. The water source can save migrants trekking across this parched country — if they're lucky enough to find it.
In neighboring Brooks County, migrants trek through the unfamiliar ranchland to circumvent a Border Patrol checkpoint on Highway 281. Often, they don't carry enough water and may be out of shape, and they can perish from dehydration.
Just since January, authorities in Brooks County have recovered 22 human remains that are presumed to be migrants dropped off by coyotes, compared to 34 migrants found dead in all of 2020.
"And I'm talking about bodies that died in the bush. We picked up, I think, three bodies in the last five days or so," says Brooks County Sheriff Benny Martinez. "And we still got the hottest months comin' up. This is April. We got June, July, August."
Martinez, whose county has a deadly reputation as a corridor for migrants headed to Houston, says what has changed this year is the recklessness of the smugglers.
In one brazen incident, a speeding truck full of migrants careened 15 miles straight across the backcountry, busting through barbed wire fences and spooking cattle the whole way. The maneuver was so crazy that even his deputies wouldn't pursue, and the vehicle got away.
"One of the differences is that they're more aggressive in terms of how they're coming through and knocking fences down and just being careless, because they have people in the vehicle and they don't care," Martinez says. "They're just driving through and they're driving hard."
It's gotten so bad that earlier this month in the town of Cotulla, located on Interstate 35 north of Laredo, school officials warned parents to be watchful of their children playing outside and walking home from school because the sheriff's department was conducting 8 to 10 high-speed car chases a day, often ending in bailouts.
Coyotes are "a danger to innocent bystanders"
In Zapata County, which shares 63 miles of border with Mexico, Sheriff Raymundo Del Bosque also sees the dangers in this spike in coyote activity. He says they used to have about one highway chase or bailout a week.
"Now it's once a day," he says. "It's a danger to innocent bystanders on our highways because these coyotes don't have regard for anybody."
Del Bosque recently signed a letter to the White House along with 274 other sheriffs from 39 states who are concerned about the border crisis.
"I just felt that President Biden needs to know that we're here on the border fighting for our country and to protect our citizens and not to forget about us," he says.
The increase in migrants tromping through brush country also alarms Eddie Canales, director of the South Texas Human Rights Center. His organization, based in the Brooks County seat of Falfurrias, maintains a database to identify dead migrants, and sets out drinking water in flagged barrels beside the highway.
Canales and rancher Whit Jones would agree there has to be a better immigration policy than one that enriches smuggling cartels and imperils migrants.
"Think about it: If you regularize people, let 'em come through, give 'em safe passage," Canales says. "I mean, everybody's an essential worker anyway, and people are going to work! The policy needs to get away from enforcement and deal with the reality of migration."
The U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire included this photo of dead Armenians on a road in his 1918 book recounting the horrors he witnessed. (photo: Brigham Young University)
The Armenian "Genocide": This Is What Happened in 1915
Gillian Brockell, The Washington Post
Brockell writes: "The word genocide was coined in 1944 by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his Jewish family in the Holocaust."
he word genocide was coined in 1944 by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his Jewish family in the Holocaust.
But it wasn’t the Nazis who first got him thinking about how to stop the intentional destruction of national, ethnic or religious groups. Decades earlier, when he was in college, he heard about the assassination of Talaat Pasha, one of the main organizers of the deportation and mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, by an Armenian man who had survived it. The subsequent trial of the assassin opened his eyes to the suffering of the Armenian people.
“At that moment,” Lemkin wrote later in his autobiography, “my worries about the murder of the innocent became more meaningful to me. I didn’t know all the answers, but I felt that a law against this type of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world.”
The Ottoman Empire killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians during World War I. On Saturday, President Biden called it “genocide,” making him the first president to do so since Ronald Reagan. It’s a move that could further strain relations with U.S. ally Turkey.
The Ottoman Empire comprised many different ethnic and religious groups but was largely controlled by Muslims. In 1908, a group called the Young Turks seized control, first of a society called the Committee of Union and Progress, and then of the government. The CUP promised modernization, prosperity and secular, constitutional reforms.
At first, it seemed as though this vision included ethnic Armenians, most of whom were poor peasants on the eastern side of Anatolia (what is now Turkey). But over the next few years, the CUP grew increasingly focused on Turkish nationalism; by 1913, it was a full-on dictatorship.
When World War I broke out, Armenians found themselves physically on both sides of the battlefront between the Ottomans and the Russians. The Ottoman government drafted Armenian men to fight, but when the military suffered heavy losses, it blamed them on Armenians, accusing them of collaborating with the enemy. The Armenian soldiers were disarmed and murdered by Ottoman troops.
On April 24, 1915, the government arrested about 250 Armenian leaders and intellectuals. This is seen by many as the beginning of the massacre, and April 24 now marks Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.
In the following months, most of those Armenian leaders were killed. The military forced Armenian villagers from their homes and on long, cruel marches to concentrations camps in what is now northern Syria and Iraq. Many of them died along the way; others died in the camps of starvation and thirst. Meanwhile, irregular forces and locals rounded up Armenians in their villages and slaughtered them. Historians estimate that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians died.
The few survivors were often forced to convert to Islam, and Armenian orphans were adopted by Muslim families. The empty homes and businesses were also given to Muslims, some of whom had recently been forced out of the Balkans.
At this point in the war, the United States was still neutral. Henry Morgenthau Sr. was the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and witnessed many of the atrocities. In a July 16, 1915, cable, he told the State Department: “It appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress.”
He pleaded with Ottoman officials to stop it, and with President Woodrow Wilson to intervene. (He didn’t.) Eventually, Morgenthau fundraised for Armenian refugees and published a book recounting the horrors he had witnessed.
The Republic of Turkey rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, led by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who had been part of the Young Turks takeover and a revered general. Ataturk brought the long-promised secular reforms and modernization, though, by that time, the country he united was missing millions of its ethnic Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks.
Nations often resist exploring the darkest corners of their past. Many Americans, for example, are angered by the characterization of the nation’s founders as enslavers of Africans and killers of Indigenous people. Former president Donald Trump even tried to introduce a new history curriculum to paper over some of the uglier chapters of our history.
But in Turkey, that avoidance is enshrined into law; publicly denigrating “Turkishness” is punishable by six months to two years in prison.
Some of Turkey’s most well-known authors and journalists have been prosecuted under this law just for acknowledging the mass killings of Armenians in 1915. Turkish officials have acknowledged that atrocities took place, but they regard it more as a civil war than a coordinated campaign to destroy the Armenian people.
So was it a genocide? The majority of historians say yes.
As did the man who created the very word “genocide.”
A research team has found a way to make biodegradable plastics actually disappear, unlike ones that only claim to break down. (photo: Agricultural Research Service/Wikimedia Commons)
Scientists Develop Truly Biodegradable Plastics
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "A research team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC), Berkeley has found a way to make biodegradable plastics actually disappear."
research team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC), Berkeley has found a way to make biodegradable plastics actually disappear.
While biodegradable plastics have been touted as a solution to plastic pollution, in practice they don't work as advertised.
"Biodegradability does not equal compostability," Ting Xu, study coauthor and UC Berkeley polymer scientist, told Science News.
But by studying nature, Xu and her team have developed a process that actually breaks down biodegradable plastics with just heat and water in a period of weeks. The results, published in Nature on Wednesday, could be game-changing for the plastic pollution problem.
"We want this to be in every grocery store," Xu told Science News.
What's the Problem?
Humans have tossed 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic since the 1950s and only recycled 600 million metric tons, leaving 4.9 billion metric tons sitting in landfills or otherwise polluting the environment, BBC Future reported. Plastic waste is a problem because it does not disintegrate, but only breaks apart into tinier pieces known as microplastics, which have infiltrated almost every part of the planet — and our bodies.
Biodegradable plastics were supposed to solve this problem, but face three main limitations, according to Berkeley News and Berkeley Lab.
- They get missorted and contaminate recyclable plastics.
- They end up in landfills, where the conditions are not suitable for plastic breakdown, so they last as long as forever plastics.
- When they are composted, they don't entirely degrade and still leave microplastics in the soil.
Xu told Science News that she had found supposedly biodegradable plastics in compost.
"It's worse than if you don't degrade them in the first place," Xu said.
The Solution
To create plastics that do disappear, Xu and her team studied nature.
"In the wild, enzymes are what nature uses to break things down — and even when we die, enzymes cause our bodies to decompose naturally," Xu told Berkeley Lab. "So for this study, we asked ourselves, 'How can enzymes biodegrade plastic so it's part of nature?"
The researchers focused on a polyester called polylactic acid, or PLA, which is used for most compostable plastics. Berkeley News explains how the process works:
The new process involves embedding polyester-eating enzymes in the plastic as it's made. These enzymes are protected by a simple polymer wrapping that prevents the enzyme from untangling and becoming useless. When exposed to heat and water, the enzyme shrugs off its polymer shroud and starts chomping the plastic polymer into its building blocks — in the case of PLA, reducing it to lactic acid, which can feed the soil microbes in compost. The polymer wrapping also degrades.
The researchers found that as much as 98 percent of their modified plastics converted into small molecules, leaving no microplastics behind. At room temperature, the plastics degraded by 80 percent after about a week. In the high heat of industrial composting conditions, plastics degraded even faster. They also disappeared after a few days in warm tap water.
What's Next?
Aaron Hall, another study coauthor and a former UC Berkeley doctoral student, has founded a company to commercially develop these plastics.
Xu also thinks the process could apply to different types of polyester plastic and various recycling problems, such as developing compostable glue for electronics.
"It is good for millennials to think about this and start a conversation that will change the way we interface with Earth," Xu told Berkeley News. "Look at all the wasted stuff we throw away: clothing, shoes, electronics like cellphones and computers. We are taking things from the earth at a faster rate than we can return them. Don't go back to Earth to mine for these materials, but mine whatever you have, and then convert it to something else."
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