04 April 21
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Myanmar's Military Is Killing People for Telling Stories Like This One
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Defiance for Myanmar Protesters
Alex Morris, Rolling Stone
Morris writes: "On the morning of February 1st, the people of Myanmar awoke to the news that life as they knew it had come to an end."
In Myanmar, the military has seized power and violently suppressed pro-democracy protests. But here, a dissident tells his story
n the morning of February 1st, the people of Myanmar awoke to the news that life as they knew it had come to an end. The internet was cut, phone lines were down, and a military-run TV channel announced a one-year state of emergency in which the country would be run by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing. Before that broadcast, the military had rounded up leaders of the country’s civilian party, the National League for Democracy, in early morning raids, detaining them along with activists, public intellectuals, and other politicians. In last November’s election, the NLD had obtained 396 seats in parliament, while the military had secured only 33. The new parliamentary session was supposed to begin later that day.
For the past decade, before the February 1st coup, Myanmar (a former British colony also known as Burma) had been held up as something akin to a triumph of democracy. But the reality was always more complicated: The military had ceded some control to democratically elected officials, but it retained much of the power for itself. Even as the country touted its “free” elections in 2010 and 2015 — and as its citizens began to enjoy freedoms they’d never known in their lifetimes — a quarter of the seats in parliament were reserved for officers of the Tatmadaw, as the military is known. One of the country’s two vice presidents was appointed by the military, a number of its ministries were reserved for military officials, and the Tatmadaw held control or ownership of over 100 companies and two of Myanmar’s largest banks, accounting for a massive share of the country’s economy. Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the NLD and winner of a 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent resistance to military rule, maintained only frosty relations with Min Aung Hlaing; yet when the military’s attack of the Rohingya ethnic group forced 750,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh, she did not condemn the ethnic cleansing. In fact, she defended the Tatmadaw’s actions at the Hague, sacrificing her reputation in the international community in deference to a military that could seize back power at any time.
Last month it did. Since then, a population that had grown accustomed to some democratic norms has faced the horror of isolation (limited internet has been restored, but Facebook, Twitter, and other sites have been blocked) and persecution. What began with a crackdown on peaceful protests has led to a campaign of terror in which the military has begun to systemically massacre its own people, including children as young as five. “We are being brutalized,” says Darko C., an indie-rock musician whose work bringing out the vote in the past election has now forced him into hiding in Myanmar. When Darko (not his real name, but the one under which he performs) reached out to Rolling Stone, he was desperate for the world to know what was really happening in his country. “I want people to be aware of this, because I believe in people. I don’t believe in institutions or organizations, but I have hope in people to intervene in this madness.”
Thus far, news out of the country has been extremely limited, and there are no trustworthy government sources. In the fog of disinformation, it is difficult to verify any accounts. And yet, a growing body of evidence has led U.N. officials to claim that the military’s actions against civilians “likely meet the threshold for crimes against humanity.” Here, edited for length and clarity, is what Darko had to share about a nation in crisis, and a people under attack.
When did you first find out that something was wrong?
On February 1st. The coup happened around, I think, 3 a.m. in Naypyidaw. But when I woke up that morning, I didn’t check any social media or news. I [did] my morning meditation session, and then my wife came back from a bazaar. She went for shopping, and then she told me that our phone connections were cut, internet’s cut, and there was coup in Naypyidaw, which is the new capital of Myanmar. Yangon used to be the capital, and it is still the capital in people’s heart. Naypyidaw is a new city, and it is structured to make a coup very easy — now every official [is] in that area. So they were preparing to do something like this.
When you heard that, were you completely shocked? Was it completely out of the blue?
Yeah, completely out of the blue. But it was weird. I was not shocked at all — maybe it was unbelievable, you know? Like, there were some rumors about a possible coup, but we did not take it seriously because it doesn’t make any sense right now. You know, it would be extremely stupid to go backward like that. Nobody believes in that shit. Even though there was a coup, on that day I thought it would be just to threaten the government to take [the military] seriously, to talk or to have a dialogue with them, to have a negotiation to share the power. That’s what I thought. But, yeah, it turned out to be real. It was real.
Those first few days, when a lot of people were still hearing the rumor about how staying inside for 72 hours would help, what was it like out on the streets? What does it feel like and what are you thinking on day two, three, four, five?
It was like a dead city. During the first week, it was very much like Covid lockdown. Everything stopped because no one feels safe going out — or maybe they were too sad. Everyone was very cautious, very quiet, really sad. There was almost no one in the streets.
That was for the first week. And then on the second week, everybody was going out. From the eighth day, there were massive rallies, getting bigger and bigger. We brought some snare drums, and some floor toms, and some speakers too, to spice up the rallies and protests a little bit. These small groups of like five or 10 people became thousands.
So basically people are just seeing other people starting to protest and joining in?
Yeah, there was no single leader [of] these protests. So it is good and bad. The good thing is it fucked up the military’s [ability] to search and destroy the leaders — because there are no leaders. So it made them confused. Normally there would be a few leaders, so that, you know, they can search them and take them and everyone will become quiet. But this time, everyone was super furious with their coup, and everyone was pushing back. This is not about a political dispute or whatever; it is actually about our futures [having] been robbed. Everyone knows that. We only had 10 years of a little bit of an infant democracy, and a little bit of freedom and a little bit of freedom of expression. Now it is grabbed. There’s actually only a little chance of winning, but nobody wants to give up, because we can’t live another 50 years of dictatorship. We saw what happened then. We know what’s going to happen to us. So this is now going to become a civil war.
When did the military start cracking down on these protests?
A 19-year-old girl called Myat Thet Thet Khaing was shot dead in the head by a police officer. That’s how it started. Now it’s 183 people shot dead [RS note: The most recent estimate is more than 500, including a number of children]. I don’t remember on which day they started showing up, blocking the streets, blocking the road, trying to scare the students. Now we are being butchered. For example, some NLD party members were just taken at night, and their bodies were sent to their families the next day. There was no explanation. There was no law, actually. Nobody was going to trial, prison, or nothing. They didn’t even provide the cause of death. There were so many bruises on the bodies and the face. One guy, there was no teeth in his body, and there was no organ in his body. What did they do to him in just one night? They took him at night, and just called the family to get his body. So I don’t know. They are trying to scare the people.
Also, they arrest the students, the protesters, and then when they grab them, to some people, they point a gun to their head and shoot in the street. What kind of terrorists would do such things in public? And these kids are only like 19 or 17 years old. I mean, they’re harmless. They’re kids.
How have protesters adapted to the crackdown?
Right now, the protests became more like defense. We all are building barricades and bunkers, blocking the military trucks from coming into our own streets. If they come, people start throwing Molotov cocktails and everything that we have, but of course, we know we can’t win with these little weapons, this resistance. We know we can’t fight them back with Molotov cocktails and bricks and stones. But people are doing the best we can just because we don’t want to bow down to this military. We don’t want to give up just because of the guns and because they can kill us easily. Everybody is ready to fight back, and now everybody is preparing for getting a gun, too. But this is not Texas — I’ve been to Texas, by the way. I’ve been to South by Southwest.
What is day-to-day life like for people in Myanmar right now? Is normal life just destroyed?
Normal life is gone now. There is no normal life anymore. I mean, everything is closed. Everything has stopped. All the food coming from outside of the city stopped. There’s no transportation, no buses. People are staying inside. We heard the internet will be cut off soon, and also electricity might be cut off too. All the banks are closed, we can’t even withdraw our own money. We are eating what we have, and people are helping each other. The good thing is people are helping each other. The next thing is a starvation. I think the starvation will come.
So the situation is really deteriorating?
Right now, every day is escalating. Every night there were more arrests, more arrests, more arrests. Every day is getting worse and worse. The violence and the horror is more and more. Nobody is safe. Anything can happen. Now they are stopping and searching cars. They will search your purse. If they see money inside, they would take it. They’re not even acting like security forces, they are acting like bandits. They are bandits, actually. They are terrorist bandits.
I think that what [the junta] are doing [is] pushing all the people to be extremely angry and furious to kill them back. That’s what they want. I think they are asking for it. So then maybe they can shoot more and [say] they are doing the right thing to control the situation, or something like that. That’s what I feel. Everybody is thinking about defense and fighting back, actually. Almost everybody is preparing for war.
And you personally know people who’ve been detained by the military?
One of my friends, who is a singer of a reggae band called One Love, he was taken on the first of February. His name is Saw Poe Kwar, and he was known as kind of NLD lobby because he promoted National League for Democracy and their leaders. Nobody knows where he is right now.
When you heard that he was taken, were you afraid that they might come for you?
Yes, of course. I don’t want to lie about it. Saw Phoe Kwar was in one of the bands in this program called Rock Your Vote, like urging young people to vote. My band, Side Effect, was in it too. There was a talk show plus live performances in a studio, and a projection of a music video urging young people to vote. So we did something that [the junta] didn’t like. It actually really worked, and it went viral among young people. And maybe that’s why now a lot of young people are super pissed when their votes are ignored or robbed.
You feel that having done that program together, you would be someone who would be a—
Target. Yes, of course a target. I’m sure I’m on their list somewhere. And not only because of that. I mean, I’m friends with activists, strong activists. So I started calling them, and I was advised to go somewhere. My friends’ houses were searched by the police and security forces when they were not there. That’s when I realized, OK, maybe I should be somewhere else. I don’t want to be taken too easily.
When did you start going into hiding?
I think it was in the second week, when I started going out for the protests. I mean, everyone was doing it, and I know they can’t take everyone, but if they want someone, they can use it as a kind of reason. And of course, you know, I could be on the list. If I stay in my house, they know exactly where I’m registered, and they can come at night. They can just knock your door. So now I’m somewhere else. They have no idea.
What do you remember from 10 years ago? What was life like under military rule?
That’s true trauma. First of all, you would be intimidated every time you see a man in uniform. And you had no rights at all. You needed to be related to a military family, or know someone related to their family, or nobody can protect you. And there are some laws, but law and order — they define whatever they want and they could do whatever they want to do. They can knock on your door in the middle of the night, and they can take you just to, you know, ask a few questions, and you will never show up again. And no one knows what happened to you — that kind of thing. We knew it could happen every night. And that’s how we lived.
The education system was also totally fucked up. They did it really on purpose, they destroyed the Burmese education system completely, because they can control stupid people easier than smart people. Also, businesses, I mean, you can’t even imagine how they control the businesses. You can’t make any businesses normally because everything is in their hands and they do whatever they want.
In your profession as a musician, how did the military rule affect your work specifically?
We could not sing a song that criticized them even indirectly. There was severe censorship, a censor board, where my songs were censored — just for writing about sex! Sex was not discussable in public. One of my friends got banned for six months after they were not happy with the songs that they already approved. Can you imagine? Crazy.
So every song you wrote had to be approved by the censorship board?
Yes, but there are a few ways to get around it. They censor our song, and what I did is I changed some lyrics that they didn’t like — that they underlined with a red pen — and I rerecorded it and sent it to them, and they said, “OK, approved.” But then when I released it, I released the original version.
And they just never followed up?
Never found out. Of course, they would not listen to my music because they are lazy people. And I knew they actually didn’t even care about it; they were just showing off their power or control.
You lived through something like the current coup before, in 1988, when the military violently repressed a pro-democracy movement to preserve its power. What similarities and differences do you see from then?
In 1988, I was seven. Exactly my son’s age, right now. So that’s why on the first week, I was extremely sad whenever I looked at my son, you know? Because I knew how I had to struggle, how I had to work so much harder than the people or the artists from the other side of the world, just because I was born in Myanmar, just because I was born in this fucking shithole here. And I thought my son would not have to go [through] the same process, because things looked better. I was so hopeful. And now when I look at my son, oh, my God, he has to do it all over again.
How much of what’s going on does your son know about? And what does he say about it?
Oh, he knows pretty much of everything. I explained it to him. I even explain to him a little bit of what happened back in the days and that this is history repeating itself, and stuff like that. He’s not very shocked. But one of the safe houses where [we were] staying, we had a lot of gunshots and these sound grenades. And my son got used to it. I mean, he was not even afraid. Every morning the police would show up and started shooting — pow-pow-pow-pow-pow-pow-pow —a lot of shots, and he would keep playing his Minecraft. It became normal. [Voice breaks] That sucks.
You mentioned that some students are hopeful that if the violence escalates, perhaps the international community will step in to help. Do you think that’s a possibility?
They believe in that, because they are young and they believe [in] this globalization. And this is why they are risking their life: “You know, if there are more deaths, the world would probably save us.” And it’s an illusion, Alex. The world will be watching us. And we should be thankful if they are watching us. But we will not be saved by the world. It’s a bitter truth. And it’s really hard for me to convince the young people that they should let go of hope of being saved by the international community. They really believe in it. And I don’t believe in it. We will not be saved by the U.N., for sure. The U.N. will probably release 1,000 more statements, and maybe they will release stronger statements, but … I don’t know.
Where do you think this all is headed?
I don’t think this will be compromised or negotiated. Nobody wants to negotiate with [the military junta]. Everybody wants them out. Also, for them, they cannot go back, too. They committed crimes. They will do whatever it takes. If there’s civil war, I think they would bomb us all. They will use air strikes for sure, on their own civilians. The Myanmar military is preparing for war. I’m not sure if they are expecting U.S. troops or the U.N. troops, as we hope. I’m not sure. But the military is stationing forces in the hospitals, in schools. If the international airstrikes come, they will not bomb the hospitals and the schools, right? See how cruel these motherfuckers are? They took the hospitals and they kicked out the patients.
And this is during a global pandemic, of course. We haven’t even talked about that.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, forget about the pandemic. Nobody is scared of Covid anymore, right now. Nobody is even thinking about it. Now, our true enemy is worse than Covid-19, for sure.
Do you know what’s going on with Aung San Suu Kyi? How do you feel about her and what do you think will happen to her?
I have no idea where she is and what is happening to her. I’m not an Aung San Suu worshiper, you know? I respect her for her commitment and for her sacrifice for the country. She’s a very smart and wise lady, of course. But there are some things that I disagree with. For example, her silence about the Rohingya genocide. I totally understand that she had to be silent, just look away, so that she could continue her work, because there was always a threat of coup, always a threat. But I think the coup is also her fault, too. She knew it was coming. I wonder why she did not send specific letters to international communities stating, “If this happens, please do this and this and this and this.” You feel me? She was so confident and stubborn, you know, showing the middle finger to Ming Aung Hliang, the coup leader. He was not happy. This motherfucker was not happy about this. Now we are suffering from that too, where she could have done something about it. She could have done something about it.
Now she’s stuck too. She’s a great leader but, I mean, I don’t think it’s going to work again. I really hope, during this crazy time, new leaders will emerge. The silver lining of this terrible thing is that the 2008 constitution is gone. We will need a new constitution for sure. It’s 54 million peoples’ life and future.
How are people processing what’s happening?
It’s complicated. There’s mood swings, a lot of mood swings. Sometimes you can relate to somebody’s story and then you’ll be crying, sobbing, weeping. I’m not kidding, you really feel like your own son has died or something. Sometimes when you see the soldiers beating these kids, beating the hell out of little kids, you get fucking angry. But when you think about … I mean, right now, we don’t think about the future. There is no future right now. I can’t even guess what’s going to happen next week. So there’s no future at all. I believed I could die every day.
When was the last time you cried about what is happening?
Oh, it was the day before yesterday. That’s when I saw — oh, my God, I can’t even picture that. Oh, my God — when I saw a young person’s brains out. Fuck, it made me cry. I don’t know. That image stuck in my fucking mind. Fuck. Fuck.
Alex, to be honest, I thought this kind of brutality and these kind of heartless or ruthless killings could only happen in the past, because human beings were stupid back then. I thought, “Now we are more civilized. And now, because of new information flow and globalization and all this, this kind of thing could never happen again. And if this kind of horrible thing [did] happen and [was on] Twitter and everything, the whole world will know it. And the whole world will stop it from happening.” [Voice breaks] But this is an illusion, right? No one can stop it. It is happening. We are being butchered. And if this injustice can happen somewhere in this world, the reality is it can happen everywhere. Democracy, peace, security — they are fragile.
Do you think you might be able to get out of Myanmar? If you could, would you want to?
I do. If I can, yes, because I don’t feel safe. I’m not a pacifist, but I don’t believe in war. I believe in guitars and microphones and, you know, stuff like that. These are my weapons. If I could get out of the country tomorrow, I would.
Asylum-seeking mothers from Guatemala carry their children after they crossed the Rio Grande river into the United States from Mexico on a raft in Penitas, Texas. (photo: Adrees Latif/Reuters)
Biden's Treatment of Asylum-Seekers Looks a Lot Like Trump's
Tina Vasquez, In These Times and Prism
Vasquez writes: "So far, the events that unfolded are disturbing but standard practice. In Phoenix, local police and federal immigration authorities have long cooperated. But what happened next was part of something new."
Migrants are being whisked away in the night, without a hearing, on “public health” grounds.
man calls the Phoenix Police Department on January 29 — his uncle has been kidnapped. Smugglers are holding his uncle at a drop house. They had helped his uncle, a newly arrived undocumented immigrant, cross the border. Now, they want more money.
After the police arrive, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement show up. They apprehend the uncle and dozens of migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, including three children.
So far, the events that unfolded are disturbing but standard practice. In Phoenix, local police and federal immigration authorities have long cooperated.
But what happened next was part of something new.
To find out where these migrants were taken, grassroots migrant justice organization Puente Human Rights Movement tapped its network of activists and legal advocates. Some were detained at the Florence Correctional Center in Florence, Ariz. Others, at the Eloy Detention Center in Eloy Ariz. According to advocates (who spoke with one migrant’s family members), the migrants were never asked if they were asylum seekers, and they were never asked to participate in a criminal investigation into human trafficking, which could have earned them temporary immigration visas.
Instead, advocates say, the migrants were held and expelled under an obscure provision in U.S. Code Title 42, the part of the law that covers public health and welfare. President Donald Trump weaponized Title 42 during the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to expel border-crossers more quickly and with less fuss, a practice that continues under President Joe Biden.
Title 42 Explained
The Trump administration invoked Title 42 early in the Covid-19 pandemic, under the pretense of protecting public health, to authorize Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to expel migrants without documentation near the border or at ports of entry. Migrants subjected to Title 42 are whisked away, leaving almost no trace in the U.S. immigration system.
That mechanism — expulsion — is different from deportation.
In deportation, migrants are first admitted into the United States. They receive an Alien Registration Number, or A‑Number. And, unless they qualify for “expedited removal,” they get to appear before a judge. Even in expedited removal cases, asylum seekers who pass a “credible fear interview” get a hearing. No matter how broken and punitive the process is, there is, at least, a process. Expulsion results in the same ejection of migrants from the United States, but without any of this process.
Title 42 has sealed the border in a way that anti-immigrant zealot Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide and the policy’s biggest proponent, could have only dreamt of.
At the start of the pandemic, Title 42’s forerunner, the 2019 Remain in Mexico policy, had already pushed approximately 60,000 asylum seekers to Mexico — people who previously would have been allowed to wait in the United States for their cases to be adjudicated. At the urging of Miller, the Trump administration effectively closed the border using Title 42. Remain in Mexico hearings were indefinitely postponed and newly arrived migrants — including asylum seekers — were expelled.
Of course, for the anti-immigrant Trump administration, public health concerns were a mere fig leaf. According to the Associated Press, experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention balked at the Title 42 order, saying there was no evidence it would slow the virus. Public health experts stated that there was no scientific justification for the policy. Masks, social distancing and screening measures at the border could make migration safe.
Crucially, experts noted, the government would also need to stop holding newly arrived migrants in group detention centers and instead allow them to shelter with their families or community contacts in the United States. These alternatives to detention programs have existed for years, enabling asylum seekers to reside in the United States as their cases are adjudicated.
Beginning in February, the Biden administration began its slow reversal of Remain in Mexico (frustrating those who wanted it immediately rescinded) by processing a couple dozen asylum seekers a day in some ports of entry, including San Diego and El Paso.
Title 42 expulsions continue on a daily basis.
On February 10, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had a message for migrants seeking life-saving asylum: “Now is not the time to come.” Psaki cited Biden’s limited time in office as the reason “a humane, comprehensive process for processing individuals” at the border does not yet exist. In the meantime, Psaki said, a “vast majority of people will be turned away.”
Trump’s Kids
Outrage over the Trump administration’s Title 42 expulsions exploded in summer 2020 after federal immigration authorities secretly contracted with a private security firm to detain children and families at hotels. Unaccompanied children were of particular concern.
Otherwise known in the immigration system as “unaccompanied alien child[ren],” these minors migrate alone to the United States without authorization. In theory, minors have significantly more protections than adults, because of laws such as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and the Flores settlement agreement (which outlines basic standards of care for immigrant children in federal custody). Before being sent back across the border, Mexican and Canadian children must be screened to determine if they are trafficking victims, eligible for asylum, or can’t make decisions for themselves. Unaccompanied children from other countries are transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, where they are detained in shelters or placed with a sponsor (typically a family member) until a judge hears their case.
This process for unaccompanied children impeded the Trump administration’s ability to deport newly arrived children as easily as it wanted. So, instead, under Title 42, children as young as one year old were put into black sites under the supervision of unlicensed transportation workers employed by a private company, contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) spoke with some of these children. According to TCRP senior attorney Karla Marisol Vargas, the organization learned that there were children held in hotel rooms, watched over by guards, for days. Phone calls were generally forbidden. This meant children could be driven to the airport for expulsion flights in the middle of the night, with many of their families not even knowing they had been in federal custody.
Beyond violating asylum laws, the Trump administration’s use of Title 42 also created a shadow system that made tracking these migrants impossible.
There was no record of these children in the regular immigration system, no A‑Number, no information about where they were detained. It was as if they didn’t exist, according to Vargas, who has advocated for children subject to Title 42. Attorneys eventually learned these children instead received Title 42 identification numbers, which were entered into a shadow tracking system.
An ongoing class action lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children prompted a judge in November 2020 to block the federal government’s ability to continue using Title 42 to detain children in black sites. Another court reversed the ban on January 29, but there have been no reports to date of children being held in hotels under the Biden administration.
The use of Title 42 to expel adults who cross the border without documentation, however, continues.
Biden’s Migrants
Presently, under Title 42, adult migrants found at the border without documentation (who are not “amenable to immediate expulsion to Mexico or Canada,” per a CBP memo) are detained, then expelled to their home country. Border Patrol’s “portable command stations” process migrants in the field, allowing “expeditious” expulsion — meaning they are transferred to ICE custody, where, in the name of public health, they are detained in crowded facilities where Covid-19 is known to spread. ICE then expels these immigrants (and the virus, if they have contracted it) all over the world.
In total, between March 2020 and January 2021, Title 42 was used more than 450,000 times at the U.S.-Mexico border. Many of these people would otherwise have undergone the asylum process.
In the first 11 days of February, the Biden administration commissioned planes to fly about 900 Haitians seeking asylum back to Port-au-Prince under Title 42, according to an analysis by Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
On February 23, more than 60 members of Congress signed a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas calling for an end to Title 42 expulsions, focusing specifically on expulsions to Haiti.
“Many migrants are at high risk of exposure to Covid-19 while being detained in the United States pending their expulsion or deportation to less-resourced countries with severely strained health systems,” the letter says. “Haiti, for example, has only 124 [intensive care] beds and the capacity to ventilate 62 patients for a country of 11 million. The island nation also is mired in severe economic, security, and constitutional crises, yet has received more than 900 migrants since February 1. This includes a recent February 8 flight in which 72 people were deported to Port-au-Prince, including a two-month-old baby and 21 other children.” (Although the letter used the term “deported,” this was actually an expulsion.)
Red Flags
The use of Title 42 in Arizona is unprecedented.
Phoenix is a major metropolitan area that is a 150-mile drive from the nearest U.S. border, far from where enforcement of Title 42 would be expected, given that the policy is directed at people in the act of crossing over. But in September 2020 and January 2021, under Title 42 — in different operations and during different presidential administrations — advocates report at least 125 newly arrived migrants were apprehended and processed.
The morning of Sept. 16, 2020, Sandra Solis, director of organizing and movement building for Puente, received a text message from a colleague about a multi-agency raid unfolding in Phoenix. Solis is accustomed to providing support when immigrant communities are targeted, but when she arrived at a home on residential 27th Avenue, something seemed off.
According to Solis, the chaotic scene included about 30 officials with the Department of Homeland Security (including CBP), the Phoenix Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Undercover officers mixed with armed officers in paramilitary gear as unmarked SUVs and trucks — and a tank — stood in front of the house. Migrants apprehended in the raid were herded into vans parked in an alley.
Solis says she became suspicious because CBP and DEA officials were on the scene — two agencies that almost never participate in Phoenix-area immigration raids. Later that day, in nearby Chandler, a similar raid was staged. Grassroots organizers and legal advocates were able to determine the migrants apprehended were expelled from the United States within hours.
No records of these migrants exist by A‑Number in the U.S. immigration system, Solis says. They were disappeared.
The speed of the expulsions meant Puente was unable to establish contact with the migrants. Advocates never learned if they were trafficked or asylum seekers.
“The city of Phoenix has its own protocol for when people are victims of trafficking [and] essentially this was trafficking,” Solis says. “All of these people should have been provided U‑Visas [for victims of crime]. Instead, they were [expelled] without due process.
“I think that’s one of the biggest, most important things to note: They’re utilizing Title 42 to deny people who are victims of trafficking.”
Local news outlets reported on the raids and cited narcotics search warrants, potential criminal activity and the apprehension of several dozen people “suspected of entering the country illegally,” but only one referenced Title 42.
The use of Title 42 was confirmed, however, by Javier Gurrola, CBP executive officer of law enforcement operations, in an email to Losmin Jiménez, who worked in partnership with Puente as a former senior attorney at the Advancement Project, a racial justice nonprofit in Washington, D.C. First, he confirmed Border Patrol participated in a “multi-agency operation” Sept. 16, 2020, in two Phoenix-area locations, and took custody of 65 people, including unaccompanied minors, suspected of being undocumented.
Then, the email reads: “The majority of these detainees have been processed as per [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines (T42) to prevent the introduction of Covid-19 into the United States.”
Solis says the multi-agency September raids remind her of how Arizona has piloted a partnership between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities before, with a 2010 law known as SB 1070 that attracted attention and outrage nationwide for explicitly allowing racial profiling. The law, at the time, was the strictest anti-immigrant measure in the United States. Portions of the law were struck down by the Supreme Court, but the “papers please” provision that critics say allows racial profiling was not— meaning that police officers in Arizona are still required to make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of anyone lawfully stopped if the officer has “reasonable suspicion” they are undocumented.
Copycat bills were introduced in other states, although most failed to make it into law.
SB 1070 solidified a police-ICE partnership in Arizona, creating what advocates call a poli-migra state, a slang term used in some Spanish-speaking immigrant communities to refer to the coordination of local police with federal immigration authorities.
Expelling Victims
Even before Arizona’s SB 1070 law, the state had a history of piloting deeply harmful immigration policies and practices. For example, in 2006, Arizona became one of the first places to implement Operation Streamline, under the radar. This joint Homeland Security and Justice Department initiative created “zero-tolerance immigration enforcement zones” in which authorities could criminally prosecute migrants for “illegal entry” — where, previously, Mexican migrants would be returned to Mexico and non-Mexican migrants would have to appear before an immigration judge.
In effect, Operation Streamline pioneered the “crimmigration” system the U.S. now has, in which undocumented migrants are prosecuted through the criminal justice system, rather than processed through the civil immigration system.
Advocates with Puente fear it’s only a matter of time before immigration authorities use Title 42 to expel migrants in cities beyond Phoenix — if it’s not happening already.
After the September 2020 raids, Jiménez thought the use of Title 42 so far from the border could have been a “one-off thing.” Then, it happened again.
On January 29, someone called Puente’s crisis line to report a number of unmarked vehicles in front of a house on 14th Avenue. There are few media reports about the January 29 raid, but a statement to Prism and In These Times from Mercedes Fortune, Phoenix Police Department public information sergeant, confirms police responded to a caller reporting “a person who was being held against their will.”
Officers found more than 50 people inside the residence and “determined the persons were involved in human smuggling,” according to the February 19 statement. “The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement were advised and they have taken over the investigation.”
In instances of suspected human trafficking, the Phoenix Police Department is supposed to perform its own investigation. According to the department’s Operations Order 4.48, the “papers, please” provision of SB 1070 does not apply if it may hinder an investigation by undermining cooperation. The order notes, in particular, the need for “significant cooperation of those involved” in human trafficking cases.
Instead, in the January 29 raid, the Phoenix Police Department appears to have simply handed the case to ICE. The police department did not respond to a query about whether it was conducting its own investigation. ICE, in an emailed statement to Prism and In These Times, says it took 60 people to the ICE office for processing. From there, according to advocates, the migrants wound up at the Florence and Eloy Detention Centers. (The Eloy Detention Center, in June and July of 2020, had one of the largest coronavirus outbreaks of any immigration detention facility in the country, and both centers had confirmed cases as of January.)
Solis and her colleagues at Puente maintain ICE processed the migrants under Title 42, based on information from someone who was picked up in the raid and held at Eloy. (The names of undocumented migrants and their family members have been withheld for their protection.) Puente says it confirmed with a legal-aid attorney that the person was detained at Eloy and that they do not appear to have an A‑Number. Since this person’s release, members of Puente say another aid group has confirmed similar Title 42 findings.
A great deal of murkiness still surrounds the use of Title 42, including whether ICE even has authority to use it. The Trump administration’s original memo outlining the use of Title 42 was directed at CBP and “specifically the United States Border Patrol,” separate from ICE. In the first Arizona raid in September 2020, CBP was at the scene; at the January raid, advocates saw only ICE and the Phoenix Police Department.
When asked directly whether ICE has authorization to process newly arrived undocumented migrants under Title 42 without coordination from CBP, ICE spokesperson Alexx Pons would only say Title 42 is within the purview of CBP and “expulsions under Title 42 are not based on immigration status and are tracked separately from immigration enforcement actions.”
ICE referred further questions to CBP. CBP did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
A Rogue System
The raids that unfolded around Phoenix are perhaps the first (documented) cases of Title 42 used to expel migrants far from the borders.
It is relevant to note that, while many associate CBP directly with the U.S. border, its reach is actually much larger. It has authority within 100 air miles of any land border or coastline, a territory that encompasses Phoenix, New York and many other major cities. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population resides within CBP’s jurisdiction — in other words, the territory where Title 42 grants CBP license to quickly expel newly arrived migrants under the guise of public health.
That the Biden administration has so far chosen to continue Title 42 expulsions may surprise some, but not Solis. The community organizer anticipated Biden taking an “Obama-style” approach, a nod to the raids and mass deportations that occurred during President Barack Obama’s years, when Biden was vice president.
“The people affected the most are those whose lives are affected by the immigration system, and this administration’s not really doing anything super proactive,” Solis says. “Title 42 is serving its purpose. It’s doing what [Homeland Security] intended it to do, which is create a rogue system.
“Regardless of the presidency, when it comes to immigration, there’s always a rogue system.”
A Dominion voting machine in Georgia. Last month Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the bogus claims. (photo: John Bazemore/AP)
Dominion: Will One Canadian Company Bring Down Trump's Empire of Disinformation?
David Smith, Guardian UK
Smith writes: "When Donald Trump and his allies pushed the 'big lie' of voter fraud and a stolen election, it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity."
Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against several Trump allies for pushing election ‘radioactive falsehoods’ – could it triumph?
hen Donald Trump and his allies pushed the “big lie” of voter fraud and a stolen election, it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity.
Politicians and activists’ pleas fell on deaf ears. TV networks and newspapers fact-checked in vain. Social media giants proved impotent.
But now a little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for billions of dollars.
“Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.”
The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion Voting Systems, an election machine company named after Canada’s Dominion Elections Act of 1920. Its main offices are in Toronto and Denver and it describes itself as the leading supplier of US election technology. It says it serves more than 40% of American voters, with customers in 28 states.
But the 2020 election put a target on its back. As the White House slipped away and Trump desperately pushed groundless claims of voter fraud, his lawyers and cheerleaders falsely alleged Dominion had rigged the polls in favour of Joe Biden.
Among the more baroque conspiracy theories was that Dominion changed votes through algorithms in its voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chávez.
It was laughable but also potentially devastating to Dominion’s reputation and ruinous to its business. It also fed a cocktail of conspiracy theories that fuelled Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, as Congress moved to certify the election results. Five people died, including an officer of the Capitol police.
The company is fighting back. It filed $1.3bn defamation lawsuits against Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, for pushing the allegations without evidence.
Separately, Dominion’s security director, Eric Coomer, launched a suit against the Trump campaign, Giuliani, Powell and some conservative media figures and outlets, saying he had been forced into hiding by death threats.
Then came the big one. Last month Dominion filed a $1.6bn defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, accusing it of trying to boost ratings by amplifying the bogus claims.
“The truth matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”
The suit argues that Fox hosts and guests “took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire” by broadcasting wild assertions that Dominion systems changed votes and ignoring repeated efforts by the company to set the record straight.
“Radioactive falsehoods” spread by Fox News will cost Dominion $600m over the next eight years, according to the lawsuit, and have resulted in Dominion employees being harassed and the company losing major contracts in Georgia and Louisiana.
Fox fiercely disputes the charge. It said in a statement: “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”
Other conservative outlets have also raised objections. Chris Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax, said: “We think all of these suits are an infringement on press freedom as it relates to media organisations. There were the years of Russian collusion investigations when all of the major cable networks reported unsubstantiated claims. I think Fox was reporting the news and certainly Newsmax was.”
But some observers believe Dominion has a strong case. Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said: “Dominion has an outstanding prospect in its litigation against Fox for the simple reason that Fox knowingly broadcast over and over again the most outrageous and clear lies.
“Certainly there are protections under the first amendment and otherwise but this is so far outside the bounds, such a clear case, that I think Fox is looking at a very serious legal exposure here and that’s the way it should be.
“You should not have a major television outlet that is able day after day to provide a megaphone for outrageous falsehoods having to do with the election, one that helped trigger a violent insurrection on 6 January. They should not be able to feed a steady stream of those pernicious lies into the body politic without any legal consequences.”
‘A real battleground’
Eisen, a former White House “ethics czar”, suggests that the Dominion case could provide at least one model for dealing with the war on truth.
“The United States and the world need to deal with disinformation,” he said.
“There can be no doubt that every method is going to be required but certainly libel law provides one very important vehicle for establishing consequences and while there’s no such thing as a guarantee when you go to court, this is an exceptionally high risk for Fox with a large price tag attached as well.”
There are signs that the legal actions, and their grave financial implications, have got reckless individuals and outlets on the run.
Powell asked a judge to throw out the lawsuit against her, arguing that her assertions were protected by the right to free speech. But she also offered the unusual defence that she had been exaggerating to make a point and that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process”.
Two days after voting machine maker Smartmatic filed a $2.7bn defamation suit that alleged TV host Lou Dobbs falsely accused it of election rigging, Fox Business abruptly canceled Lou Dobbs Tonight, its most viewed show. It has also filed a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic suit.
Meanwhile pro-Trump outlets have begun using prepared disclaimers or prerecorded programmes to counter election conspiracy theories spouted by guests. When Lindell launched into an attack on Dominion on Newsmax in February, co-anchor Bob Sellers tried to cut him off and then walked off set.
RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, told the Washington Post: “We are seeing the way that libel has become a real battleground in the fight against disinformation.
“The threat of massive damages for spreading probably false conspiracy theories on matters of public concern could turn out to be the one tool that is successful in disincentivising that behaviour, where so many other tools seem to have failed.”
The defamation suits will provide another test of the judiciary as a pillar of American democracy. The courts’ independence proved robust regarding dozens of lawsuits by Trump and his allies seeking to overturn the election outcome.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “It is such an under-appreciated illumination of the multiple avenues for pursuing politics. Sometimes we get understandably absorbed by what Congress can do, which is obviously significant at times, but mostly fairly kind of deadlocked.
“But we’re going to see the legal system prosecuting the 6 January perpetrators, prosecuting Donald Trump and prosecuting these libel charges by Dominion over the monstrous lies that were told after the election.
“Thank goodness for the courts because the elected branches have really botched it.”
Former Marine Corps Sgt. Mark S. Villamac Ho deployed to Iraq in 2003 as an aircraft rescue firefighter. He and the Marines he served with were exposed to cancer-linked firefighting foam in Al Numaniyah, Iraq (above.) (photo: Mark S. Villamac Ho/McClatchy)
VA Expected Iraq, Afghanistan Wars Would Lead to Toxic Exposures, Agency Reveals
Tara Copp, McClatchy D.C.
Copp writes: "Soon after the 9/11 attacks, disease researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs began internal discussions on how to prepare for the war-related illnesses they knew would follow, agency officials told McClatchy."
“There were lots of conversations about ‘we don’t know what to expect, but we expect there to be consequences’” for the service members who would deploy overseas in response to the 2001 attacks, Victoria Davey, an epidemiologist and associate chief research officer at the VA, told McClatchy in an exclusive interview.
“We expected there to be hazardous exposures,” she said.
The VA was trying to be proactive, after a general feeling among the researchers that it had not been ready to address toxic-exposure illnesses that troops developed after previous conflicts, Davey said.
“I think our major, major impulse was — not another Vietnam,” Davey said. “To not follow these people and to look forward and to expect consequences of service in the deployed environment.”
So the VA started tracking service members as military operations began in Afghanistan and eventually Iraq following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“We have had eyes on these populations, we have been collecting data since the conflicts began,” said Davey, who has been with the VA since before 9/11.
“I think the first features that we saw coming back were what was called the ‘Iraqi lung,’ the respiratory problems,” Davey said. “It’s complicated because it’s a sandstorm environment and in addition there’s just a lot of smoke, dust, solvent exposure in the military occupation of many kinds, and then we had these chemical, biological weapons worries going on.”
The revelation that the VA was concerned that some veterans would return home with illnesses, and that it has been collecting data on those service members since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began, deeply angered veterans who have spent years trying to convince the agency their illnesses were linked to their service overseas.
Many of them have spent the last two decades being told by the VA that there was no known connection yet between their overseas deployments and their ailments, which has resulted in their claims for medical care or compensation being denied.
“This is an insult to know that the VA started planning for toxic exposure shortly after the planes hit the Twin Towers,” said retired Army Capt. Le Roy Torres, a reservist who deployed to Balad, Iraq, from 2007 to 2008 and now relies on supplemental oxygen to breathe. He had daily exposure to the military’s football field-sized open air trash burning pit at the base.
“It’s been over a decade for those deployed to Iraq, and the only conversations I have witnessed [with the VA] are regarding how we do not have enough science,” Torres said.
Both Davey and chief VA research officer Rachel Ramoni said the agency’s focus now is two-pronged: to identify what made the veterans ill and to improve their health situation now.
“Whether or not you know the reason for the symptoms doesn’t mean we can’t treat them,” Davey said.
As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, there’s been a growing momentum on Capitol Hill to provide remedy for veterans who became ill after serving overseas.
Some breathed air contaminated with ash and metal particulates from hundreds of burn pits across Afghanistan and Iraq, where the military incinerated human feces, ammunition, plastics and other toxins in massive fire trenches.
Some deployed to toxic bases such as Karshi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan, known as “K2.” A McClatchy investigation on K2 first exposed that “black goo” emerged from soil that was contaminated with radiation, chemical weapons and jet fuel.
“I’m hoping this will be the year of toxic exposure, at least the remedies to it, because I think we’ve reached a sort of critical mass of understanding and perhaps political support, a feeling that we have a moral imperative as well as a political reckoning here” to care for those veterans, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told McClatchy in an interview.
It has become a generational issue, with some of the ill veterans fighting for change witnessing their younger family members serving in the military and facing the same toxins.
Retired Army Staff Sgt. Mark Jackson was 26 when he first deployed to K2 in 2003. He spent later deployments in Iraq and at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. He’s a cancer survivor who has recently undergone a series of tests to determine if cancer or something else is causing a severe degradation of his bone density.
“I remember the first time I ran around it and it was around dusk. And I remember people had told me how big the burn pit was, but I didn’t really prepare myself,” Jackson said of the Bagram burn pit. “It just looked like rivers of fire. Just this molten mass and of course this oily smoke rising up out of it.”
Jackson now has a son-in-law who is in the military and who recently returned from a deployment to Bagram.
“My son-in-law described it the same way. He described the ash that falls like snow but sticks to your skin, and the smell that you first taste, then feel in your lungs. And he’s 24,” Jackson said.
“I hope by the time he retires in 20 years that we’re not still talking about this, although I do hope that I am around to talk about something,” Jackson said.
Blumenthal and several other lawmakers have introduced legislation this year to improve care for ill veterans who served at toxic bases overseas. A rally on Capitol Hill is planned for April 13 with comedian Jon Stewart, who previously championed providing health care for firefighters and first responders exposed to toxins at the site of the collapsed World Trade Center. He is now pressuring Congress and the VA to make it easier for post-9/11 veterans to receive health care benefits for illnesses related to toxic exposure.
For some, it’s too late.
“I just lost my son, and I don’t want any more sons to be taken away,” Ludy Gilkison, mother of Marine Corps Sgt. Mark S. Villamac Ho, said through tears over the phone.
Ho had served as a firefighter in Iraq, where he was exposed to cancer-linked PFAS chemical compounds in the military’s firefighting foam and to burn pits.
Ho’s battle with multiple myeloma after he was diagnosed at age 38 was featured in McClatchy’s 2019 series “Stricken,” which reported skyrocketing rates of cancer treatments at VA hospitals.
“I got cancer because of my service in the military,” Ho told McClatchy in 2019. “There could be hundreds, thousands of veterans behind me getting cancer.”
Late last year, doctors found more tumors in Ho’s lungs and spine, Gilkison said. He had completed another round of radiation therapy when he contracted COVID-19. He was hospitalized and died Dec. 27 at age 41.
“If not for his cancer Mark could have really fought the COVID because Mark was so strong,” his mother said.
Ho had frequently helped other veterans navigate VA health care. He also advocated for the government to recognize how many of them were sick from toxic exposure.
He told Gilkison before he died that she had to keep being his voice, she said.
“I know he’s not going to be at peace until this thing is fixed,” she said.
Police. (photo: Bennian/Shutterstock)
Family Files Lawsuit After Black Teen Is Brutally Beaten by California Police Officers After Alleged Car Chase
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes: "It appears that a lot of police officers think that being led in a car chase justifies them beating the shit out of Black people once they've caught up with them."
t appears that a lot of police officers think that being led in a car chase justifies them beating the shit out of Black people once they’ve caught up with them. From Antonio Harris to Ronald Greene to Javier Ambler, their cases remind us that there are very few things that are as dangerous to Black people as a cop’s ego—and they wonder why some of us run.
The family of a Black teenager who became another victim of police violence after a traffic stop last year in Stockton, California, filed a federal lawsuit against the city and four officers involved in the altercation in which police officers said the teen led them on a high-speed chase, but the teen said he didn’t even realize the cops were trying to pull him over.
NBC News reports that on Dec. 30, 2020, Devin Carter “was left with bruises on both eyes as well as scratches on his face and back” after he was arrested following the stop.
John Burris, the attorney representing Devin and his family, released photos of the teen’s injuries as well as police body camera video of the incident that resulted in two officers, Michael Stiles and Omar Villapudua, being fired.
From NBC:
The footage shows an officer yelling at Carter to “take his f——— seat belt off.”
“OK, OK, OK. I’m down,” Carter responds as he’s pulled from his car and forced to the ground. “I’m not resisting,” the 17-year-old repeatedly says.
In the video, Carter can be heard screaming in pain and repeatedly saying “ow” as officers place him in handcuffs.
The lawsuit, which was filed Friday, says that Carter was driving to his father’s house when officers began following him in an attempt to pull him over for speeding. The teen was initially unaware that police were behind him, the suit states.
The lawsuit accuses officers of using a “pursuit intervention technique” to get Carter to stop, which caused another vehicle to swerve. The car was hit by a police vehicle, according to the suit, which states that Carter was unaware of the accident.
The teen eventually stopped and waited in his car with his hands “visibly raised above the steering wheel,” the lawsuit says. He was then pulled from the car and slammed to the ground, according to the lawsuit.
“Devin Carter immediately curled up in a fetal position as multiple officers gathered around him and viciously beat him with their closed fist and feet,” it says. “Devin Carter was kneed in his face by an officer and was struck in the face a number of times. Additionally, Devin Carter was kicked and kneed in his side and back.”
Of course, the police had a different version of the story claiming that they went after Devin because he was driving “erratically and speeding in excess of 100 mph,” and accusing him of turning off his headlights and leading police on a roughly three-minute chase that ended when he lost control of his car and crashed. Devin was booked into a juvenile detention facility and charged with evading and resisting arrest.
Notice that neither version of the story even comes close to justifying cops brutally beating a teenager or anyone else.
According to NBC, Stockton Police Chief Eric Jones said in a statement Tuesday that four officers used force during the arrest—leaving one to wonder why only two were fired—and that several officers have been “disciplined” behind the incident.
“Our department has policies that state we should make attempts to avoid striking an arrestee around the head and neck area when possible,” Jones said. “Given this set of circumstances, I cannot and will not condone any excessive force. Additionally, any use of profanity is considered unwarranted and not professional.”
Burris said in a press release that “Devin was afraid that the officers were going to beat him to death.”
And they wonder why Black people run.
Pope Francis. (photo: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images)
Pope, in Easter Message, Slams Weapons Spending in Time of Pandemic
Philip Pullella, Reuters
Pullella writes: "Pope Francis urged countries in his Easter message on Sunday to quicken distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, particularly to the world's poor, and called armed conflict and military spending during a pandemic 'scandalous'."
oronavirus has meant this has been the second year in a row that Easter papal services have been attended by small gatherings at a secondary altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, instead of by crowds in the church or in the square outside.
After saying Mass, Francis read his “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world) message, in which he traditionally reviews world problems and appeals for peace.
“The pandemic is still spreading, while the social and economic crisis remains severe, especially for the poor. Nonetheless – and this is scandalous – armed conflicts have not ended and military arsenals are being strengthened,” he said.
Francis, who would normally have given the address to up to 100,000 people in St. Peter’s Square, spoke to fewer than 200 in the church while the message was broadcast to tens of millions around the world.
The square was empty except for a few police officers enforcing a strict three-day national lockdown.
The pope asked God to comfort the sick, those who have lost a loved one, and the unemployed, urging authorities to give families in greatest need a “decent sustenance”.
He praised medical workers, sympathised with young people unable to attend school, and said everyone was called to combat the pandemic.
“I urge the entire international community, in a spirit of global responsibility, to commit to overcoming delays in the distribution of vaccines and to facilitate their distribution, especially in the poorest countries,” he said.
Francis, who has often called for disarmament and a total ban on the possession of nuclear weapons, said: “There are still too many wars and too much violence in the world! May the Lord, who is our peace, help us to overcome the mindset of war.”
‘INSTRUMENTS OF DEATH’
Noting that it was International Awareness Day against anti-personnel landmines, he called such weapons “insidious and horrible devices ... how much better our world would be without these instruments of death!”
In mentioning conflict areas, he singled out for praise “the young people of Myanmar committed to supporting democracy and making their voices heard peacefully”. More than 550 protesters have been killed since a Feb. 1 military coup in Myanmar, which the pope visited in 2017.
Francis called for peace in several conflict areas in Africa, including the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia and the Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique. He said the crisis in Yemen has been “met with a deafening and scandalous silence”.
He appealed to Israelis and Palestinians to “rediscover the power of dialogue” to reach a two-state solution where both can live side by side in peace and prosperity.
Francis said he realised many Christians were still persecuted and called for all restrictions on freedom of worship and religion worldwide to be lifted.
Mike McKenzie, a member of the Secwepemc Nation, leads a protest outside the British Columbia Legislative Assembly, where Indigenous youths ceremonially occupied the front steps of the building. The protest was also held in solidarity with Wet'suwet'en people fighting the Coastal GasLink pipeline. (photo: Mike Graeme/The Tyee)
Fighting Pipelines to the Last Mile
Braela Kwan, Grist and InvestigateWest
Kwan writes: "McKenzie and other Indigenous opponents of the Trans Mountain pipeline comprise the vanguard of a network of eco-activists, local governments, economists, and lawyers fighting new pipeline infrastructure under construction in British Columbia."
In British Columbia, Native communities, activists, and local government are split over new pipelines and their environmental risks.
ike McKenzie felt that he had to leave his home. He says he was no longer welcome in Skeetchestn, a community in central British Columbia west of Kamloops that’s one of 17 reserves in the Secwepemc Nation. Three years later, he’s still not home.
His uprooting was by choice, but not by preference. McKenzie said he felt compelled to leave because of tensions around his outspoken opposition to the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, which is building a second pipeline to pump heavy oil from Alberta’s tar sands to a tanker terminal near Vancouver.
Opposition comes with conflict since the project has also amassed considerable support within the Secwepemc Nation. Some elected chiefs representing Secwepemc reserves say its environmental risks are manageable, and four signed long-term agreements for shared benefits between their communities and the pipeline. Meanwhile, some of the more traditional leaders within First Nations are opposed.
“I’m not living in my nation right now. And I can’t live in my nation right now,” said McKenzie. He stays away, he says, because he feels unsafe there — that he is targeted and harassed by local police.
McKenzie and other Indigenous opponents of the Trans Mountain pipeline comprise the vanguard of a network of eco-activists, local governments, economists, and lawyers fighting new pipeline infrastructure under construction in British Columbia. Opponents decry how two new pipelines — the Trans Mountain expansion and a natural gas pipeline farther north, Coastal GasLink — will lock in decades of dangerous greenhouse gas emissions and, they say, compromise Indigenous land rights.
They are blockading roads and construction sites and even banks financing Trans Mountain. Some involved in the civil disobedience reject the label “protesters.” They call themselves “land defenders.” And 95 percent of British Columbia’s lands are unceded by First Nations, meaning they never signed away rights to the land and thus retain some title under Canadian law.
With both pipelines already under construction, they are fighting seemingly long odds. But pipeline activists have beaten tough odds before. While federal courts and the government pipeline regulator have defeated numerous challenges put forward by the activists, they recognize that a pipeline has zero value until its last mile is connected. “In order to be 1 percent useful, it needs to be 100 percent complete,” said lawyer Eugene Kung of West Coast Environmental Law.
If the anti-pipeline network is to succeed, Indigenous leadership will be pivotal. For them, this fight is deeply spiritual.
McKenzie’s spiritual connection to the land where he grew up harvesting fish and berries drove him to host rallies and candlelit vigils in Kamloops to oppose Trans Mountain. McKenzie’s elders taught him the Secwepemc law, X7ensqt, which translates to “the land (and sky) will turn on you” if you disrespect the land.
McKenzie’s breaking point came when his dad, a Skeetchestn councilor, came under pressure to sign agreements supporting Trans Mountain, which he declined. The pressure was more intense because his son, living right there in his house, was a leading face of pipeline opposition.
McKenzie left home to relieve the pressure on his parents. Although he can’t return home, he says he must keep fighting.
As McKenzie put it: “We have to protect the land and the water no matter what. Our survival depends on it.”
Trudeau takes over
The ongoing battle against the Trans Mountain expansion and Coastal GasLink is part of a broader protest movement that blocked nearly every proposal to ramp up exports of coal, oil, and natural gas from the West Coast for a decade.
Now British Columbia’s twin pipeline projects appear poised to punch two big holes in what activists called their Thin Green Line against fossil fuel exports from North America’s western coast.
Coastal GasLink is designed to feed natural gas from the province’s northeastern gas-fracking fields to an export terminal under construction near Kitimat, British Columbia, about 110 kilometers southeast of Prince Rupert. Coastal GasLink ignited a national uprising last year, when people across Canada orchestrated blockades and demonstrations to support hereditary chiefs from the Wet’suwet’en Nation who oppose the project — tensions that remain unresolved.
The fate of B.C.’s fossil fuel megaprojects — along with comparable developments worldwide — will help determine whether greenhouse gases can be slashed to contain the threat of catastrophic climate change. Climate scientists and, increasingly, even traditionally conservative energy planners such as the Paris-based International Energy Agency, say building new fossil fuel infrastructure undermines climate action.
British Columbia’s pipelines broke through with forceful government backing. Full-throated provincial endorsement launched Coastal GasLink, owned by Calgary-based TC Energy, in 2018. The same year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s C$4.5 billion acquisition of Trans Mountain secured its expansion project just after the Indigenous activists and their allies, against seemingly impossible odds, hounded the pipeline’s original developer, Texas-based Kinder Morgan, into essentially abandoning the project.
“This is a pipeline in the national interest and it will get built,” said Trudeau. The federal takeover changed the playbook for pipeline resistance.
“Our strategy was … making the projects such a headache [that] the companies were willing to abandon them. We got to that point with Trans Mountain. But we didn’t prepare for a world in which the federal government bought the pipeline and assumed all the risk around it,” said Sven Biggs of Stand.earth, an activist group operating from offices in Vancouver, San Francisco, and Bellingham, Washington.
The significance of Trudeau’s move is hard to overstate. Trans Mountain’s expansion will triple its capacity to 800,000 from 300,000 barrels a day. The new line terminates at a shipping terminal in Burnaby, east of Vancouver, where the oil can be shipped for refining in Asia and where spur lines and barges link the pipeline to Washington state’s refineries.
Mark Jaccard, a sustainable energy professor at Simon Fraser University, calculated that producing tar sands oil known as bitumen and pumping it to Burnaby would release the equivalent of 7.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year in Alberta and British Columbia — as much as 2.2 million cars — while refining, distributing and burning the bitumen would release 71 million more metric tons overseas.
Farther north, the 670-kilometer-long Coastal GasLink pipeline is designed to initially carry 2.1 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day to Kitimat. There, the fracked gas is to be liquefied for export, emitting 4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. The capacity of the pipeline and export facility could be expanded in future phases.
Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink began building in 2019 and intend to begin pumping by the end of 2022 and in 2023, respectively. Each is roughly one-quarter built, but work has slowed recently amid environmental violations and safety incidents, including some connected to the coronavirus pandemic.
Anti-pipeline activists say the arrival of COVID-19 has cut both ways for their cause. On the one hand, it’s distracted people and made organizing harder.
On the other hand, in December the provincial health authority ordered British Columbia’s pipeline projects to scale down the number of workers on site to reduce COVID-19 transmission. Safety regulators also ordered a two-month project-wide pause at Trans Mountain after a second serious worksite accident in recent months.
In January, the province ordered an audit of Coastal GasLink’s erosion-control measures after officials discovered compliance violations and risks to watersheds along the pipeline route.
As of early last month, 76 kilometers of the Trans Mountain route — 8 percent of the total — remained to be finalized. A First Nation situated approximately 100 kilometers southwest of Kamloops is holding hearings on the risks Trans Mountain poses to its drinking water aquifer. The Coldwater band, a reserve in Nlaka’pamux Nation territory, is pushing Canada Energy Regulator to reject the proposed route.
Confrontation here, there, everywhere
Confrontation continues. On the coast and in interior British Columbia, people are regularly arrested for obstructing Trans Mountain work sites.
Frequent activity occurs in Burnaby, British Columbia, the terminus of Trans Mountain in the traditional territory of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation. Coast Salish community members occupy a watch house in Burnaby, where they keep vigil and host ceremonies to oppose the project. About 5 kilometers south of the watch house, activists inhabit a treehouse camp from which they work to delay Trans Mountain’s plan to clear roughly 1,300 trees adjacent to the salmon-bearing Brunette River.
Further resistance occurs along the pipeline route, such as in Secwepemc territory, where a group is fighting Trans Mountain from a camp of tiny homes near the Blue River community, 175 kilometers northeast of Kamloops.
Southwest of that camp, Romilly Cavanaugh was arrested in October with others after chaining herself to a worksite gate to delay construction. An environmental engineer who briefly worked for Trans Mountain in the 1990s, Cavanaugh said she got involved on the front lines because she had no other choice. “There is no way to take a dirty industry like that and make it clean,” she said.
Cavanaugh cites the carbon emissions the pipelines will spur and limited advancements in technology for cleaning up oil spills. Trans Mountain will increase tanker traffic by at least sevenfold in the Salish Sea waters shared by the U.S. and Canada.
Data from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation and Transport Canada lends credence to Cavanaugh’s concern. According to both the Canadian agency and the global tanker spill advisory organization, no more than 15 percent of oil is recovered in a typical spill. And spill recovery may be even lower for spills of the diluted bitumen carried by Trans Mountain, which is the heaviest form of crude. It tends to sink to the bottom.
“From my perspective, civil disobedience is the only option we have left,” said Cavanaugh.
Other activists continue hammering the financial front, with a little help from Trudeau. The prime minister unveiled a revamped climate plan in December, but heightened climate action by his government may not ease the pressure on British Columbia’s pipeline projects. In fact, in the hands of expert activism, it may do the opposite.
More than 100 Canadian economists and policy experts signed a letter to Trudeau questioning the viability of the Trans Mountain expansion in September 2020. The letter noted weakened oil demand amid the pandemic and doubts from oil giants such as Shell and BP about whether demand would “fully recover” after COVID-19. It also cited the International Energy Agency’s conclusion that oil demand must decline by nearly a third over the next two decades to limit global warming.
Meanwhile, federal agencies and auditors have sharpened the experts’ attack on Trans Mountain’s viability. Just before Trudeau’s climate policy announcement, Canada Energy Regulator, the agency that oversees the Trans Mountain expansion, reported that tougher policies might cut oil use and thus eliminate the need for additional pipelines.
The parliamentary budget officer echoed that finding a few weeks after Trudeau’s announcement, writing that the federal government could lose money on Trans Mountain under strengthened climate policy.
Adding uncertainty to the financial stability of the project, at least three of the pipeline’s 11 big insurers recently walked away from Trans Mountain, under pressure from environmental campaigners.
‘We will always be here’
In October, two days after Cavanaugh’s arrest, Miranda Dick laid down a blanket outside a Trans Mountain gate near Mission Flats, B.C., a community adjacent to the Thompson River, which Trans Mountain has drilled beneath repeatedly to install pipe. On the blanket, Dick’s sister cut her hair off. Moments later, she was arrested with others for breaching an injunction prohibiting unauthorized access to Trans Mountain work sites.
The 489-kilometre-long Thompson River is one of roughly 250 salmon-supporting streams and rivers in the Fraser River watershed transected by Trans Mountain. It hosts one of the largest Sockeye salmon runs in the world. The resulting threat to salmon populations is the project’s single greatest risk, says Dick, the daughter of hereditary Chief Sawses, who was also arrested two days prior.
“I want to protect clean water for the salmon and our livelihoods, not to mention the other links in the chain. The bears, the eagles, everything that lives off of salmon,” said Dick.
Dick says her hair collected knowledge in the two and a half years she grew it out — knowledge she let go of that day. She said the ceremony symbolizes the grief and loss Trans Mountain brings her.
Secwepemc people have opposed Trans Mountain since 2013, asserting Secwepemc law on historically occupied lands that were never ceded to Canadian governments. They follow hereditary leadership, traditional governance systems that vary between nations. Title and authority passes down generationally through families but is also “granted on merit” after “many years of training in culture and tradition,” according to reporting this week by The Tyee. Hereditary leaders retain the authority to oversee their nations’ ancestral territories.
But some elected chiefs and band councils have chosen their own path on pipeline projects for their reserves — colonial land set-asides and Indigenous governments created, funded, and overseen by the federal government under Canada’s Indian Act. As of February 2020, 58 First Nations had signed “mutual benefit” agreements with Trans Mountain.
The Whispering Pines Clinton Indian Band is one of four Secwepemc reserves with a signed agreement. Its elected chief, Mike LeBourdais, represents one of at least three First Nations groups seeking to purchase the project. His community will receive a share of operating revenue from the project, which he said would support education efforts, elders’ retirement programs, and environmental oversight of the pipeline.
In an interview with InvestigateWest, LeBourdais said he signed the benefit agreement because he wants to have agency in the project. He said his lawyers assured him the project would be approved regardless of the circumstances.
“This is what I’m fighting for — to be in the conversation. In the economy of British Columbia and Canada,” he said.
Such divisions place the projects on unsteady ground, as the unresolved conflicts over the Coastal GasLink pipeline show. Central to the conflict is the RCMP’s arrests of Wet’suwet’en land defenders in their territory, which galvanized a solidarity movement of blockades and rallies across the country.
The tension began to rise sharply in 2019, a year before the Canada-wide protests. On Jan. 8, 2019, RCMP officers breached a camp in Wet’suwet’en territory established in 2018 to oppose Coastal GasLink. The RCMP came armed with a court injunction and made 14 arrests.
Sleydo’ Molly Wickham, a member of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, was among those arrested that day. She recalls being “surprised and horrified” by the intensity of conflict.
Wickham’s clan, the Gidimt’en, is one of five clans within Wet’suwet’en Nation. Hereditary chiefs representing all five clans are united in their opposition to Coastal GasLink. Since 2006, they have opposed all pipeline proposals in their territory, noting efforts to protect water, wildlife, and their livelihoods.
And it is the centuries-old hereditary system that holds territorial power, as recognized even by Canadian law under a 1997 Supreme Court landmark decision stating that hereditary governance represents “all of the Wet’suwet’en people.”
Yet, Coastal GasLink signed mutual benefit agreements with five out of the six chiefs elected by the federally created Wet’suwet’en bands.
Thus, the tensions were already high by February 2020 when the RCMP arrested around two dozen people in Wet’suwet’en territory to enforce a new project injunction. The conflict ignited national backlash. Mass demonstrations in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en blocked highways, ports, rail lines, and other infrastructure from coast to coast, for as long as five weeks. Rallies disrupted traffic, universities, and legislatures.
The conflict abated in March when the Canadian and B.C. governments opened negotiations with the Wet’suwet’en over their land claims. But conflict could erupt again without warning.
The persistent threat of an uprising has even some ardent pipeline supporters seeing the opposition holding the upper hand. One Alberta columnist wrote last month that only Indigenous ownership can secure Trans Mountain’s success, calling on Alberta’s premier to “convince the Trudeau Liberals to quickly strike a deal on Trans Mountain” with First Nations groups.
Wickham says it’s “inevitable” conflict will flare up on Wet’suwet’en territory again since her community has not agreed to stand down. B.C. Premier John Horgan has presented the liquified natural gas sector as an economic growth engine, and currently, four more proposed gas pipeline projects are pending.
Two of those projects would cross Wet’suwet’en territory. The Wet’suwet’en hereditary leaders, noted Wickham, oppose both.
“Wet’suwet’en will never ever go away. We will always be here,” said Wickham.
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