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Andy Kroll | How Democrats Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuking the Filibuster
Andy Kroll, Rolling Stone
Kroll writes: "For a variety of reasons, more and more Democrats are reaching the same conclusion Boxer has: that the need to preserve the filibuster as a check on future Republican majorities is outweighed by the danger of leaving it in place and failing to act on urgent crises like climate change, gun violence, and democratic reform."
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Palestinian firefighters search for survivors and bodies under the rubble after intensive bombardment of Gaza City. (photo: Mohammed bed/AFP)
ALSO SEE: CAIR to Boycott White House Eid Celebration
Over Israel Support
Israeli Predawn Bombings Kill Another 42 in Gaza as Rescuers Dig for Survivors
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Rescue workers frantically searched for survivors under the rubble on Sunday as Israel's bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip entered its seventh consecutive day."
At least 33 people died in Gaza after 150 Israeli air strikes hit the besieged enclave in one hour overnight.
escue workers frantically searched for survivors under the rubble on Sunday as Israel’s bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip entered its seventh consecutive day.
An hour-long rain of 150 rockets pounded the territory overnight on Sunday in what a Palestinian security source said was the “most intense” shelling since the second intifada, or uprising, that began in 2000.
Emergency teams worked to pull out bodies from vast piles of smoking rubble and toppled buildings as relatives wailed in horror and grief.
Nearly half of the rockets targeted the Gaza City district of al-Wehda where residential houses, infrastructure and roads were destroyed or partially damaged.
The ministry of health confirmed 33 people were killed overnight – including Dr Ayman Abu al-Ouf, head of internal medicine at Shifa hospital – following Israeli bombardment on their homes. Five children were found alive under the debris.
“We can still hear people shouting from under the rubble,” said Medhat Hamdan, a civil defence worker who came from Khan Younis to Gaza City and worked nonstop for 11 hours to save lives.
“For me, working in this field has numbed me to any fear. I’m no longer shocked by what I see, but one can’t help get emotional when we reach the bodies of children and remove them,” said Hamdan, adding he pulled three dead children from under the rubble.
Translation: Rescue team still searching for missing persons at the scene of the massacre that took place on al-Wehda Street in Gaza City.
“Our entire neighbourhood – from Tel Shubeir to Palmera intersection – was bombed,” said Ramzi Eshkuntana, who was at home when he said 40 successive air raids fell on the area in just a few minutes.
“We ran out of the house and saw the destruction of most the buildings around us, including my brother’s house. His wife and four children were killed as they were sleeping,” said Eshkuntana.
“My brother’s wife was pulled out with her arms around her children,” he added. “These weren’t F-16 missiles; these were bombs from F-35 warplanes.”
‘These are children’
A rescue worker gave his account as he was trying to rescue people from under the debris.
“We heard the screams of a young girl. We also heard the ringing of a mobile phone. We followed the sound and for hours, using a bulldozer and other light devices, we got to the girl, who is alive,” he said.
“The woman, along with her children – two boys and two girls – are dead. Were these children firing rockets? Isn’t it enough they were denied the joy of Eid? These are children! The oldest one was in the fourth grade.”
Mirjam Mueller, head of the ICRC in Gaza said the last few days were marked by a “dramatic” increase in violence.
“Our teams have rarely been able to move. A de-escalation is really needed so that we can assess the humanitarian situation on the ground and deliver much-needed aid,” said Mueller.
“I have been here only a couple of days … and it has been heartbreaking to see how the situation has been unfolding.”
Another resident, Khalil al-Kolak, said both of his family’s buildings were destroyed.
“We woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the bombardment,” he said.
“Only two from our family are alive, ” he continued. “The rest -14 members including women, children and men – are all gone. There are still six under the rubble.”
‘Criminal army’
Raji al-Sourani, head of Palestine centre for human rights, told Al Jazeera that Israel is intentionally targeting civilians.
“What happened here in al-Wehda is clear evidence that Israel is carrying out crimes against humanity and purposely targeting civilians,” he said.
“The most developed and powerful military in the region is attacking residential buildings, banks, journalists and families. It is clear that this criminal army can’t beat the resistance and instead 80 percent of its targets are civilians.”
Al-Sourani said the crimes are being documented and will be presented to international courts.
Israeli Brigadier-General Hidai Zilberman, an army spokesman, told Israel’s army radio on Sunday the military targeted the home of Yehiyeh Sinwar, the most senior Hamas leader inside the territory.
Since violence flared on Monday more than 170 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been killed, including 41 children. More than 1,000 others have been wounded. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces have killed at least 13 Palestinians.
Palestinian armed groups have fired at least 2,300 rockets at Israel, killing 10 people, including two children, and wounding more than 560 Israelis.
‘Striking our children’
The intense bombing on Sunday came hours after Israeli missiles hit the Shati refugee camp killing 10 relatives – two mothers and their four children each. Israel’s army claimed the building was used by senior Hamas officials, which was refuted by residents in the camp.
“They are striking our children, children, without prior warning,” said a devastated Mohammed al-Hadidi who lost most of his family in the strike and whose five-month-old baby was also wounded in the explosion.
On the same day, Israeli forces brought down a high-rise building housing the offices of media organisations, including Al Jazeera’s bureau.
As violence grows, the humanitarian situation steadily worsens with some 17,000 Palestinians fleeing their homes near the Israeli fence east of the Gaza Strip for fear of a ground offensive, the United Nations said.
“They are sheltering in schools, mosques, and other places during a global COVID-19 pandemic with limited access to water, food, hygiene and health services,” UN humanitarian official Lynn Hastings said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “dismayed” by civilian casualties in Gaza and “deeply disturbed” by Israel’s strike on the tower housing news bureaus.
Guterres “reminds all sides that any indiscriminate targeting of civilian and media structures violates international law and must be avoided at all costs”, his spokesman said.
The UN Security Council meets on Sunday to discuss the bloodiest conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since 2014.
Palestinians on Saturday marked the Nakba – the “catastrophe” that saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced during Israel’s creation in 1947-1948.
Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, a day after some of the worst clashes in recent years in the territory left 11 Palestinians dead.
A photo of Mikayla Miller, 16, from a GoFundMe site created by her mother Calvin Strothers to raise money to investigate her death. (image: GoFundMe)
We Should Be Talking About the Death of Mikayla Miller
Jamil Smith, Vox
Smith writes: "A Black LGBTQ high school student was found dead in the woods near Boston last month. Her family has called for an independent autopsy and is fundraising for their search for justice."
t’s been nearly a month since 16-year-old Mikayla Miller was found dead, with a belt around her neck and tied to a tree, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. It remains unclear what happened to the Black teenager, who identified as LGBTQ — both before she died and how she died.
What is apparent is the girl’s family does not want the local authorities to be the ones in charge of finding out. The case, which is only now starting to garner national attention, is becoming another tragic example of law enforcement failing to adequately investigate the death of a Black victim, address immediate concerns raised by grieving loved ones or communicate effectively to those demanding accountability.
Miller’s mother, Calvina Strothers, has remained vocal in her criticism of both Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan and other authorities involved with the investigation. Per the family’s spokesperson, activist Monica Cannon-Grant of Violence in Boston Inc., the family is calling for an independent investigation and autopsy. (The district attorney’s office said earlier in May that the case remains open.)
Elected officials have taken up the call. US Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who represents the nearby Seventh District, echoed their demand in a statement to Vox: “With far too many unanswered questions about how Miller died, we must have a full, transparent, and independent investigation into her death,” Pressley’s statement reads. “The investigation will help ensure accountability and closure for Mikayla’s family and allow her loved ones and community to begin to heal.”
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a statement that “Mikayla Miller’s death was a tragedy. She and all of our LGBTQ youth and youth of color deserve to be safe. We owe her family peace in knowing that everything possible was done to find answers, including a thorough and transparent investigation into the circumstances of her death.”
A rally and vigil this month in Hopkinton helped shine a harsher light on the authorities’ investigation to this point. Miller’s mother and local activists repeated complaints about both the investigation and the alleged mishandling of events surrounding it.
“I don’t want to be a vigilante in this; I don’t want to have to spend all day on the phone getting and passing along evidence in order for justice to be served,” Strothers told the attendees. “What I want is for the criminal justice system to work.”
It was a familiar scene: a grieving family mourning the death of a Black child, leveling complaints about the law enforcement apparatus tasked to investigate. If the authorities aren’t yet suspicious about what happened to Miller, the events surrounding her death provide reasons to remain suspicious of the authorities themselves.
What we know — and don’t — about Mikayla Miller’s death
The problems spotlighted by Miller’s family start with something that happened while she was still alive.
The night before the teenager was found dead, she was reportedly the victim of a physical assault. On the evening of April 17, Strothers called the Hopkinton police and said her daughter had been “jumped,” pushed, and punched in the face by at least two people, Ryan, the Middlesex County district attorney, told the press last week.
According to Ryan, at least two people, a boy and a girl, were involved; Miller had a bloody lip, consistent with her allegation.
Monica Cannon-Grant, speaking on behalf of the Miller family, said at least five teenagers aside from Miller were present — including one girl with whom the 16-year-old had recently ended a relationship. In a May 4 press conference and in a subsequent statement, Ryan appeared to signal the teenagers were not a focus of the investigation into Miller’s death, citing cellphone GPS data, video surveillance, and witness accounts.
The morning after the assault, April 18, a Hopkinton police detective was called to the Berry Acres Conservation Area. According to an affidavit reviewed by Boston’s NBC affiliate, WBTS, he found Miller’s body hanging from a tree branch, suspended by a black leather belt around her neck; the affidavit said he saw no wounds or bleeding on her body, the scene “appeared to be undisturbed,” and he saw no dirt or debris on her clothing or shoes to suggest a struggle. Her phone and personal belongings were either on her person or near her body. The leaves on the ground “appeared to be matted and heavily traveled,” although he noted Miller was found on “a heavily traveled town path.”
Cannon-Grant said a Massachusetts State Police sergeant initially told Miller’s mother that her daughter had ended her own life. The family also has repeatedly claimed that an officer advised Strothers not to go to the press because doing so would reveal her daughter’s sexual orientation. (The state police directed Vox’s request for comment to the Middlesex County district attorney’s office, which has not yet responded.)
Miller’s family argues the investigation hasn’t been thorough or transparent
The assault is where the Miller family’s complaints about the investigation’s transparency begin. Violence in Boston Inc. released a statement on May 2 attributed to Strothers and alleging that the Hopkinton police logged neither the reported attack on Miller nor the discovery of her body.
“It’s highly unusual if there’s no notation on it. It’s downright suspicious,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, a Yale professor who previously founded the Center for Policing Equity. “It is incredibly distressing to imagine that our lives, and therefore our deaths, don’t rate to record — even when it’s clear indications that there is a homicide [or a suicide].”
A publicly available log generated and tweeted by the Hopkinton Police Department displays no information about either the assault or Miller’s death. One of the first incidents on the morning of April 18 is not a jogger finding a deceased teenager but two officers helping change a tire. (The department has not yet returned a call from Vox requesting clarification and confirmation.)
When first asked during her May 4 presser about the claims that police told Strothers that her daughter committed suicide and why her office said the death wasn’t considered suspicious, Ryan said, “Very often, as everyone knows, things may appear to be one thing, and then we learn more information. I think that is why initially, we always indicate this is at this time. Clearly, often things come to light as we proceed further in this case.”
Strothers has also openly questioned some of the early conclusions and decisions Ryan has made in the case, aside from the initial determination that the death was “not suspicious.” Miller had her mobile phone and belongings still on or near her person when she was found, per the district attorney; however, Strothers contends that her daughter’s phone didn’t have tracking data activated and that she confirmed this with Apple, Ryan indicated in her press conference last week that “the phone traveled a distance of 1,316 steps” between 9 and 10 pm on the night of April 17, “approximately the distance between Mikayla’s home and the place where her body would subsequently be located.”
Investigators also weren’t able to obtain video evidence from Miller’s residential building — neither the assault she suffered nor, potentially, her departure to take the steps Ryan referenced. The video system at the building was rebooted on the morning of April 19, the day after the jogger reportedly discovered Miller’s body, erasing any footage from the prior 17 days. It is as yet unclear why investigators didn’t obtain the footage before the system’s reboot.
Talk is a start, but this is about action
Any death, particularly of someone so young, matters. However, given the documented difference in the manner press and public officials alike treat the disappearances and killings of Black women and girls as opposed to their white counterparts, those investigating a case need to be more cognizant of what their actions communicate.
It has been about a year since a global civil rights uprising began. While predominantly white governmental and law enforcement institutions may claim to value Black lives, the proof is in the results. As evidenced by the family's reactions and that of other Black constituents to their actions thus far, Ryan and all those currently investigating Mikayla Miller’s death are not grasping that such care is best demonstrated through results. Words alone won’t cut it.
During her May 4 press conference, Ryan spoke in gushing terms about Miller, describing her as “a beautiful child,” as well as “a cherished daughter, a gifted student, a talented athlete, and a loyal friend.” She talked about getting to the answers concerning her death “with due speed” and pledged to be forthcoming with details about the investigation, which she emphasized was ongoing.
All of that sounds good, but how does the discovery of that beautiful child, dead with a belt around her neck, not appear suspicious to the district attorney investigating the incident? Why did that assessment not change after the police affidavit describing the scene surfaced? And why weren’t either the assault or the discovery of Miller’s body logged? It is more than a clerical misstep.
“When you’ve got a body like that, that’s a crime scene,” Goff said. “If you’re treating a crime scene of a Black child that way, that’s a level of casualness that nobody in ... a community who’s Black is going to feel okay with."
Mo Brooks. (image: The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Molly Jong-Fast | MAGA Moron Mo Brooks Proves Alabama Isn't Sending Its Best
Molly Jong-Fast, The Daily Beast
Jong-Fast writes: "Despite steep competition, the state of Alabama has given America some of its stupidest and nastiest Republican politicians."
The House stooge running for the Senate, now with Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement, isn’t dog-whistling so much as plain old whistling.
espite steep competition, the state of Alabama has given America some of its stupidest and nastiest Republican politicians.
There’s Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the hideous yet hapless Trumpist who mentored hatemonger Stephen Miller. Roy Banned-From-Some-Malls Moore. Coach-turned-Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who gave an interview where he said so many stupid things (misidentifying the three branches of government, saying the U.S. fought in WWII to “free Europe of Socialism”) that it crashed the website of the Alabama Daily News.
But I submit to you that the stupidest, nastiest Alabama Republican of them all may be Rep. Mo Brooks. Yes, Mo (short for Morris and, unlike the leader of the real Stooges, this congressman and follower spells it without an “e”) says things like “racism is over” and “criticism of Jeff Sessions is part of a war on whites.” But then a lot of GOP House members say stupid, racist, appalling things.
What takes Mo from common stooge to MAGA Moron No. 1 is that he’s running for outgoing Sen. Richard Shelby’s seat in 2022. And Mo already started holding fundraisers at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, which, for those playing along at home, is not in Alabama.
Trump, who endorsed Roy Moore’s 2017 Senate run (to fill the seat Sessions gave up to become the reality host president’s attorney general and personal whipping boy) after all those women came out and said Justice Ten Commandments tried to have sex with them when they were 14 or 15 and he was in his thirties, has already declared that “Mo Brooks has my Complete and Total Endorsement for the U.S. Senate representing the Great State of Alabama. He will never let you down!”
A couple weeks later, he told Fox that “It looks like he’s got clear sailing, since Mo “just went up 41 points.” I don’t know what points those were supposed to be, since there was no poll showing any such thing. Trump, who usually saves his lies for himself, loves this stooge enough to lie on his behalf. But why?
It’s not just because Mo is willing to have campaign events that the former president can profit off. No, despite his limited intelligence Mo has finally distinguished himself from the herd. More than any other member of Congress, more even than Louie Gohmert, Mo Brooks has been the strongest, most unapologetic advocate of Trump’s ongoing attempted insurrection.
On Jan. 6, Mo stood on the Mall wearing a yellow slicker and a camouflage hat that read, “Fire Pelosi,” and said: “Today is the day that American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” Soon after, that very same crowd broke into the Capitol and trashed the place while chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”
According to The Intercept, “During his remarks, (Mo) asked the crowd to consider the American ancestors who sacrificed their blood and “sometimes their lives” to create the “greatest nation in world history.”
“So I have a question for you,” he continued. “Are you willing to do the same?”
That’s not a dog whistle so much as a plain old whistle.
And that’s not even the whole story on Mo’s involvement with the Capitol riots. Fraudster Ali Alexander claimed in a now-deleted Periscope video that three of the shittiest Republican stooges in Congress—Brooks, Andy Biggs and Congressman Paul “The Dentist” Gosar helped him plan the “Stop the Steal” event. In a sane world, this might hurt Mo’s Senate prospects, but in Trump’s Republican party, active efforts to undermine democracy are a big plus.
Mo, who voted just after the insurrection against certifying Biden’s presidential win and in defense of Trump’s Yuge Lie, did put out a statement declaring that “I ALWAYS condemn lawlessness and violence of any kind and in the strongest terms. As a strong supporter of the Rule of Law, and as a former target of Socialist Democrat gunfire myself, I don’t care what political views motivate the violence.” OK.
Later, he put out a bizarre and long-winded statement whining that the insurrectionists he’d rallied had “destroyed two months of debate and work” trying to dismantle democracy and contest the results of the contest Trump clearly lost, and declaring that he’d “never apologize” for the speech he gave just before they rioted:
“As one of America’s most effective conservative leaders, I defend my honor and reputation against scurrilous, George Orwellian, 1984, Socialist Democrats Politics of Personal Destruction.” Mo’s reputation is gold with Donald Trump, which tells you everything you need to know about this Southern gentleman’s honor.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) is suing Mo (and others) for their involvement with the violent insurrection. Swalwell’s lawyer, Philip Andonian, told Punchbowl he’s having a very tough time pinning down the congressman. "We have been attempting to serve our complaint on Mo Brooks for more than a month," Andonian said. "I talked to staffers in his D.C. office who promised a response from someone, which never came. I sent the complaint and a waiver of service form in a detailed email to his chief of staff and counsel, which to date remains unanswered." Mo has so much respect for the rule of law that he’s currently dodging a subpoena.
I called Swalwell, who told me that “Mo Brooks got exactly the result he wanted on Jan. 6 when he encouraged an angry mob to ‘start taking down names and kicking ass.’ The mob stopped the joint session, terrorized Congress, and injured hundreds of police officers. But we don’t rule by mob, we rule by law. And Mo can run from the law, but its just reach will catch up with him.”
Or, as the former Alabama congressman, Dr. Parker Griffith, put it: "I've been in that Capitol. It is sacred ground for Americans, and to see that disrespect, to see things being stolen, windows being broken, somebody hanging from the balcony, those aren't Americans."
But, sadly, Mo Brooks is exactly where Republicans in America are.
Venezuelan asylum seeker Jhinezka de Arias holds her son Cristhofer at the bus station in Brownsville, Texas, on Feb. 25. (photo: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune/ProPublica)
Border Policy Is Getting More and More Convoluted. That's Creating False Hope for Migrants.
Lomi Kriel, ProPublica
Excerpt: "The Biden administration and the Mexican government have made the situation at the border so confusing that even seasoned experts can't always determine who is allowed in and who isn't. That may be contributing to the high number of border crossings."
o matter how hard he tried, Jonatan Garcia said, he couldn’t find steady work in Guatemala. He dabbled in construction, and on some days picked beans, after losing his sales job at a TV station a few weeks after the pandemic shuttered businesses and further stifled employment in his country.
Desperation quickly mounted for Garcia. He struggled to make enough money to provide food for his wife and two small children, and they faced eviction from the three-room house they rented in the mostly indigenous and impoverished rural state of Baja Verapaz.
Then, Garcia said, smugglers falsely told him that President Joe Biden had signaled during a television appearance that migrants would be allowed to enter the United States. The new administration has been trying to combat such misinformation as it seeks to rein in the influx of migrants at the southern border of the U.S.
Garcia borrowed nearly $7,000 from a friend and, aided by a smuggler, traveled to Texas with his 6-year-old son. He left behind his wife and baby while he searched for stable employment.
Garcia and his son were among a record-setting number of migrants who were detained while attempting to enter the country at the U.S.-Mexico border in March and April under confounding policies that have turned the immigration process into a game of roulette. While not rising as rapidly as they had in the months immediately previous, border detentions reached a 21-year high after increasing again in April, according to federal statistics released this week.
Because of a lack of uniform policies and uneven enforcement of some laws in the U.S. and Mexico, migrants can be granted or denied entrance into the country based on a variety of factors, including where they cross and the age of their children. Smugglers have exploited the confusion to manipulate vulnerable migrants into making the journey north, adding to the sustained influx at the border, experts said.
Migrants were taken into custody by U.S. Customs and Border Protection a total of 178,622 times in April. The data includes migrants who have previously crossed. Nearly 67,000 individuals, mostly those crossing with their families and unaccompanied children, were allowed to stay in the U.S. while they seek protection from deportation. The remainder, largely single adults, were summarily turned away under a health order instituted by former President Donald Trump and continued under Biden that denies entrance to the country during the coronavirus pandemic.
In his first presidential address to Congress last month, Biden said the U.S. must contend with the root causes of migration that force people to flee their countries, including persistent violence, poor economic conditions aggravated by the pandemic and two hurricanes that pummeled Central America last year.
But the deteriorating circumstances in that region, combined with disparate U.S. immigration policies, have created a chaotic situation at the border that is worsened by the perception of mixed messaging from the Biden administration, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
“Messages matter, perceptions matter, but the sudden spike on the ground is because people hear others are getting in,” Selee said. He added, “Many people wait until they see there is some proof that you can actually cross the border, even if it is tentative.”
The Biden administration has ramped up Spanish-language media campaigns in Central America that urge migrants to stay in their home countries as it seeks to repair what officials have called a fractured U.S. asylum system.
But such public messages are muddled by Biden reversing some of Trump’s immigration policies while maintaining others, according to experts who said that at times they too struggle to make sense of who gets into the country and who doesn’t. Below is a breakdown of how some of those policies and decisions have played out for Garcia and hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving at the border.
Some Families With Children Under 7 Are Allowed to Enter
On the day that Garcia waded through the Rio Grande at the southernmost tip of the U.S.-Mexico border, the vast majority of the 200 families in his group were immediately sent back.
But Garcia and his son were allowed to stay.
“I guess we were lucky,” said Garcia, who now lives near his mother-in-law in New Jersey while he awaits a July court date to plead his asylum case.
During the journey, Garcia said, he learned that many families were turned away, while those with children his son’s age and younger were allowed to enter the U.S. to await court hearings.
Under the Trump administration, the U.S. began sending migrants seeking asylum to Mexico until their cases could be heard. The process requires cooperation from the Mexican government, which has been overwhelmed by the number of migrants in its border cities.
Officials in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, where Garcia crossed, have increasingly denied U.S. attempts to return families with young children to the state. They cite a lack of capacity in shelters, according to the Biden administration. Such rejections appear to be the result of a new Mexican law, implemented in January, that prevents the detention of migrant children and mandates that they instead be housed by the country’s family welfare agency.
“With the Rio Grande Valley, there are some families who cannot be expelled in that particular area of the southwest border by reason of capacity constraints in Mexico,” U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters last week.
As Tamaulipas rebuffs U.S. efforts to return certain families with young children, other Mexican states continue to accept them. It is unclear why the Mexican law appears to be enforced mostly in Tamaulipas, five experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
In some cases, the U.S. government has bused or flown migrant families entering through Tamaulipas to different areas along the border, including El Paso and San Diego, and then sent them to Mexican states adjacent to those locations. Mayorkas said last week that the administration was taking a “close look” at whether to continue expelling families not accepted by Tamaulipas. On Thursday, the government told CBS News that it would no longer fly families elsewhere, but would still bus them to other areas for expulsion.
One potential explanation for the uneven implementation of the law is that the Tamaulipas welfare agency is underfunded, and more migrant families cross there than in other border states, said Ariel Ruiz Soto, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
“The bottom line is that this is all relatively murky,” Ruiz Soto said. “It is a mixed result of shelter capacity and increasing discretion by Mexican authorities, not only one or the other.”
He added that welfare agencies in Tamaulipas “are simply not equipped” to handle the current migrant family flow. That sentiment was reinforced by Jean Gough, regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the United Nations’ refugee agency for children.
Gough said in an April statement that most of the shelters she visited across Mexico were overcrowded and could not accommodate the surging number of families and children arriving at the border. Children represent more than 30% of migrants in Mexican shelters. Half of them traveled without their parents, one of the highest percentages of unaccompanied minors ever recorded in Mexico, Gough said.
The agency estimates about 150,000 children and families affected by violence and poverty in their places of origin will require humanitarian assistance in Mexico during the next two years.
The Mexican government did not respond to specific questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
Biden Is Accepting 25,000 Migrants With Pending Cases
One of Trump’s signature border initiatives was the Migrant Protection Protocols, which forced people seeking asylum to wait in Mexico until their cases could be heard by U.S. immigration judges.
The policy, also known as “Remain in Mexico,” was a departure from the traditional asylum process, which generally allowed those requesting protection to stay in the U.S. until their claims were adjudicated.
Between 2019 and January of this year, the Trump administration ordered more than 71,000 migrants to stay in Mexican border cities pending their court hearings. A majority of the migrants were later denied protection from deportation.
In February, Biden issued an executive order that suspended the policy and began the process of allowing into the U.S. about 25,000 migrants whose cases had not yet been decided. More than 10,200 have since entered the country, according to the U.N., which is processing asylum seekers in six Mexican border cities.
Biden’s decision paused a case before the U.S. Supreme Court and several other lawsuits challenging the policy, drawing early praise from advocates who are seeking resolution outside of the courts.
In April, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt sued the administration to reinstate the policy.
The Republican officials argued in court filings that MPP was an effective tool for turning back migrants at the southern border. Halting the policy, they said, imposed “severe and ongoing burdens” on the two states, including forcing them to provide health care and education for migrants. A Department of Justice spokesperson declined to comment on the case.
Unaccompanied Migrant Children Are No Longer Expelled
In one of his most consequential immigration actions as president, Biden stopped a Trump practice of expelling children who had crossed the border alone.
Unaccompanied minors generally have broad protections under long-established U.S. law because they have widely been viewed by both Republicans and Democrats as more vulnerable.
But in a stark reversal of such policies, the Trump administration in March 2020 instituted the pandemic health order known as Title 42. The order used an obscure provision of the federal public health and welfare code to justify making more than 733,830 expulsions of adults and children at the border without asylum screenings.
Among those sent back last year were a 17-year-old girl who had been raped and her baby. The teenager asked U.S. agents for asylum, saying her abuser had threatened to make her “disappear” in Guatemala. Federal agents expelled the girl and her infant, forcing a scramble by international refugee organizations to relocate them to a third country because of concerns for their safety.
A federal district judge in Washington ruled in November that the government could not expel unaccompanied minors, after advocacy organizations sued. The decision was reversed by a federal appeals court in January, but Biden said his administration would not continue the practice.
“The idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, if an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let them starve to death and stay on the other side — no previous administration did that either, except Trump,” Biden said at his first presidential press conference in March. “I’m not going to do it.”
The number of unaccompanied children crossing the southern border of the U.S., which had been slowly rising since April 2020, skyrocketed after Biden’s announcement.
About 18,900 children entered alone in March, surpassing the previous monthly record of nearly 11,500 detained at the southern U.S. border in May 2019. In April, the number of unaccompanied minors declined by 9% to just under 17,200.
A growing number of children are being sent alone across the U.S. border by desperate parents who made the decision to separate from their kids after being forced to wait in Mexico under Trump and Biden policies, immigration lawyers and advocates said.
Paxton, the Texas attorney general, cited the high number of unaccompanied minors in his fourth lawsuit challenging the Biden administration’s border policies. DOJ officials declined to comment on the lawsuit, which aims to force Biden to resume the practice of expelling unaccompanied migrant children.
Most Single Adults Are Turned Away Under the Pandemic Health Order
Despite halting the expulsion of children under Trump’s health order, Biden has maintained the policy for most single adults and some families, effectively shutting them out of the asylum process.
Previously, migrants who asked for protection had a chance to make their claims to U.S. authorities. If they passed an initial screening, they would argue their cases before immigration judges in formal proceedings that could take months and would often lead to deportation. Those who returned to the U.S. after being removed could face prison for reentering illegally.
Under the health order, Border Patrol agents expel migrants in proceedings that take an average of 90 minutes and include no asylum screenings, court hearings or criminal prosecutions.
In April, federal officers returned nearly 110,000 migrants under the health order, 3% more than in March. Most were single adults, and nearly a third had been previously expelled, CBP officials said.
In danger in Mexico and facing no criminal consequences for making multiple crossing attempts, many migrants have repeatedly tried to enter since the health order went into effect. Since Biden took office, advocacy groups, including Human Rights First, tracked almost 500 attacks by criminal groups, Mexicans, and other migrants against people who had been expelled from the U.S..
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, criticized Biden’s continued use of the directive, calling it harsher than MPP. The latter, he said, was “at least a fig leaf of due process,” whereas the health order “provides nothing but a one-way ticket back to Mexico.”
Under the current policy, few exceptions exist. But starting this month, the U.S. is allowing more migrants to enter the country for humanitarian reasons, in a process that includes coordination with advocacy groups. The White House and the Department of Homeland Security declined to say how many migrants have been allowed in under that status by the Biden administration.
In May, Eledin Garcia, a 26-year-old from Honduras, was permitted into the U.S. from Mexico after previously being turned away under the pandemic health order. With the help of an attorney, Garcia successfully persuaded the government that he should be granted a humanitarian exception because he is gay and other migrants with the same sexual preference have been assaulted in Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Texas in the Rio Grande Valley.
“It is impossible to explain how overjoyed I am,” Garcia said shortly before boarding a flight to Florida, where he has relatives.
Thousands Are Still Waiting to Enter, Hoping for Asylum
Thousands of migrants whose asylum claims were denied under the Trump administration have been waiting in Mexico and other countries for an opportunity to try again under Biden.
In typical asylum proceedings, migrants with rejected cases would be deported to their home countries. They would then face a higher legal standard if they sought protection a second time.
But attorneys and migrants said the Biden administration should recognize that many asylum cases were dismissed through an MPP process that was plagued with problems, including hearings in tent courts where migrants often lacked attorneys and proper translation.
Most migrants with denied MPP cases did not appear in court for their final hearings, according to federal statistics. Ariana Sawyer, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, said some were kidnapped, while authorities bused hundreds more to cities in the interior of Mexico, making it harder for them to attend proceedings in the U.S. More than 1,500 migrants waiting in Mexico under MPP were killed or assaulted, according to Human Rights First and other advocates.
The majority of migrants in the MPP program lacked legal representation. Only about 8% had attorneys, according to federal data analyzed by Syracuse University.
Biden has not said whether migrants with denied asylum cases will get another shot. But, in March, his administration allowed some migrants whose MPP cases had been dismissed into the U.S. after it shuttered a tent camp in Matamoros, Mexico, that had become notorious for poor conditions. DHS officials said admissions from that camp were based on “urgent humanitarian concerns” and that they also sought to keep families together.
Marbin Arnuby is one of thousands of migrants denied asylum under MPP who are waiting for additional opportunities to make their cases under Biden.
Arnuby, who asked that his middle name be used instead of his last name out of fear of retribution, said he fled Honduras after gang members, furious that he refused to sell drugs, killed his brother in June 2019. Arnuby carries a picture of his brother’s tombstone and his death certificate, which lists strangulation as the cause.
The 32-year-old attempted to cross the border in October 2019 but was returned to Mexico. At a hearing in 2020, a U.S. immigration judge denied his asylum claim.
Arnuby, who did not have a lawyer and does not speak English, said the judge told him he had not provided enough proof that he faced danger in Honduras. He tried to appeal the ruling, but said he missed the deadline because immigration courts were closed on account of the pandemic and access to ports of entry was restricted.
After losing his immigration case, Arnuby could not renew his work authorization in Mexico. He remained in Matamoros until March, renting a room after leaving the tent camp where he’d lived for seven months.
Arnuby said he fled the settlement last year after he was assaulted, a move that inadvertently made him miss a chance to enter the U.S. when Biden dismantled the camp in March.
That month, Arnuby sought a COVID-19 test at a Mexican government facility. There he was detained and deported to Honduras, where, he said, he is now in hiding because he fears gang members.
Arnuby plans to return to the U.S. border to try again.
“I have no hope here,” he said.
Other migrants under different circumstances are also still waiting.
Beginning in 2018, the Trump administration sharply limited the number of migrants who could seek asylum at U.S. ports of entry, a manner of requesting protection that is codified within U.S. and international law.
Under a practice known as metering, U.S. officials began allowing only a handful of migrants a day to ask for asylum. To keep their place in line, migrants created informal waiting lists, which were run by asylum seekers, shelters and Mexican authorities. The migrants could have crossed illegally and asked for asylum once detained by Border Patrol agents, as hundreds of thousands have done. But some migrants prefer to request protection at ports of entry, in part because it is safer. While it is lawful to ask for asylum anywhere along the border, criminal organizations often charge migrants to cross illegally at points other than designated ports of entry.
Ports of entry have been closed to asylum seekers during the pandemic, so more than 16,000 migrants remain on those waiting lists, said Savitri Arvey, a researcher on migration at the University of Texas at Austin. Some migrants, including a large number of Haitian and African asylum seekers, according to advocates, have been waiting as long as two years to ask for asylum at U.S. ports of entry.
“There is growing anguish,” Arvey said. “The messaging is just really unclear, and there is a lot of confusion on the path forward for people who have been waiting for so long.”
A Need to Fix Legal Pathways and Overburdened Courts
Biden has proposed immigration bills that would provide a pathway to citizenship for about 11 million immigrants already in the U.S., fund border security technology and expand legal immigration.
All require approval from Congress. Republican senators have threatened to filibuster the legislation, saying the administration must first contend with the latest influx at the border.
But experts said the country’s challenges at the southern border are driven by the inability of Congress to significantly reform the immigration system over the past three decades. Selee, from the Migration Policy Institute, said that U.S. officials should have learned by now that enforcement only works if there is a way to channel at least some people onto legal pathways.
“If you create a line that you can actually get into, over time it changes people’s options,” Selee said. “The sense for many people in Central America is that when there’s an opening, you grab it.”
Biden announced earlier this month that he would raise the cap for admitting refugees to 62,500 but said the number would not be reached this fiscal year. Only about 5,000 slots would be available to people from Central and South America, who are driving the largest number of detentions at the border. Refugees differ from asylum seekers in that only a limited number can receive that status. They are also screened outside the U.S. through the U.N., while asylum seekers request protection at the border.
Experts said few avenues exist for Central Americans seeking protections that include asylum. They pointed to a lack of predictability about when and how migrants qualify for protection and the need for additional pathways for temporary work. Expanding provisional employment programs for people from the region would reduce the strain of asylum seekers at the border, said Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
In the absence of significant reforms, experts said, an overburdened immigration court system has become the arbiter for many trying to come to the U.S. Overseen by the DOJ, the court system has a record backlog of more than 1.3 million cases. On average, a case can take more than two years to decide.
The Trump administration added more than 330 immigration judges. Biden has asked Congress to fund 100 additional judges to bring the total to 634, said Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former DHS official who is managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, said the Biden administration should order asylum officers to directly decide the protection claims of migrants at the border, rather than having them wait years for their cases to be determined in court.
“Immigration courts should be the last resort, not the first resort, when it comes to adjudicating asylum,” Cardinal Brown said. “This avenue has become the only avenue for people to try and has completely overwhelmed the systems put in place to deal with a much smaller number of people, which is why we need to rethink all of that.”
Many service stations in Washington, D.C., were still without fuel on Saturday after a cyberattack crippled the biggest fuel pipeline in the country. (photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
Ransomware Is a National Security Threat and a Big Business - and It's Wreaking Havoc
Ellen Nakashima and Rachel Lerman, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The hacker ring's ransom note appeared on the company's computer screens this past Monday. 'Your computers and servers are encrypted, backups are deleted,' it said. 'We use strong encryption algorithms, so you cannot decrypt your data.'"
The attack that crippled Colonial Pipeline is just the tip of the iceberg
he hacker ring’s ransom note appeared on the company’s computer screens this past Monday. “Your computers and servers are encrypted, backups are deleted,” it said. “We use strong encryption algorithms, so you cannot decrypt your data.”
But, the extortionists said, “you can restore everything by purchasing a special program from us — universal decryptor.” This program, the message said, “will restore all your network.”
The price: $1.2 million.
They also had stolen 1 terabyte — the equivalent of 6.5 million document pages — of the company’s sensitive data. If the firm did not pay to decrypt it, the data would be “automatically published” online, the hackers said, according to the note, which was shared with The Washington Post by the firm that helped the victim deal with the attack.
On Wednesday, the company paid $850,000, according to Austin Berglas, the former head of the cyber branch in the FBI’s New York field office who is now global head of professional services for the cyber security firm BlueVoyant.
“In this case,” he said, “they had no option.” If they didn’t pay, he said, “they would go out of business.”
The firm’s dilemma is faced by thousands of companies, schools, governments, and other entities around the world every year. Most incidents go unreported. Anecdotally, according to companies that help victims hit by ransomware attacks, more than half pay some form of ransom — estimated last year to average about $312,000, according to Palo Alto Networks, another cybersecurity company that deals regularly with ransomware attacks. Some experts suspect that amount is low.
The attack that led Colonial Pipeline to shut down its 5,500-mile pipeline, causing fuel shortages throughout the southeastern United States, underscored that the ballooning ransomware wave isn’t just about money. Targeting the private businesses that run much of the economy also threatens national security.
President Biden on Thursday announced that the U.S. government had “strong reason to believe” the criminals behind the attack lived in Russia, though he said he did not believe the Russian government had directed the assault. Nonetheless, he warned Moscow about the need to “take decisive action” against them. The Justice Department, he said, would step up prosecutions of ransomware hackers and the government will “pursue a measure to disrupt their ability to operate.”
Shortly after Biden’s comments, DarkSide, the hacker ring behind the Colonial strike, told its criminal partners that it had lost control of its computer servers and was shutting down. Some experts and U.S. officials warned this could be an “exit scam,” to pretend they were leaving the business only to reappear at a later date under a different name. In any case, it is unlikely to end the risk from ransomware attacks.
One thing is certain. DarkSide had a profitable quarter. The ring that collected $14 million in ransoms for all of 2020 and raked in $46 million in just the first three months of this year, according to an analysis by Chainalysis.
Colonial told U.S. officials it was not planning to pay ransom, according to three people familiar with the matter, but one person later said the company changed course. The Washington Post previously reported that the company had no plan to pay a ransom. Industry analysts, based on circumstantial evidence in an online ledger that tracks cryptocurrency payments, say they believe Colonial made a $5 million payment. Colonial has declined to say. Both the FBI and Mandiant, the cybersecurity company assisting Colonial, also declined to comment.
Ransomware has been around for the last decade, but it really exploded in the last several years, with the rise of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin that are difficult to trace and can be transferred electronically without the assistance of banks or other institutions that are regulated by governments.
Two devastating state-sponsored cyberattacks in 2017, WannaCry, which infected thousands of computers running Microsoft Windows, and NotPetya, which struck computers primarily in Ukraine, showed how worms and destructive malware can cripple major companies, experts said. The pandemic only accentuated the trend as criminals targeted online systems that people relied on to continue to conduct business.
Nearly 2,400 health care facilities, schools and governments in the United States were hit by ransomware last year, according to the Ransomware Task Force, a group of more than 60 experts from industry, government and academia that delivered an 81-page report to the Biden administration last month on how to combat the ransomware scourge. Chainalysis, a firm that tracks cryptocurrency payments, conservatively estimated that victims paid $400 million in ransom during 2020, more than four times the estimate for 2019.
The explosion of attacks also reflected a change in the way hackers handled the business of ransomware. DarkSide was just one of many groups that operated as a sort of service provider for other hackers, or “affiliates,” who used its malware to extort targets in exchange for a cut of the profits. In recent years, these groups have expanded their repertoire beyond just encrypting data. Now they threaten to release the data — a tactic known as “double extortion.” And some have moved to “triple extortion,” threatening to launch so-called denial-of-service attacks on victims that don’t pay, deluging their servers with traffic until they crash, some experts said.
“Ransomware has evolved from an economic nuisance to a national security threat, and to a public health and safety threat,” said Michael Daniel, president and CEO of Cyber Threat Alliance, an information-sharing nonprofit.
“If you roll the clock back to 2013, ransomware affected primarily individual computers, and ransoms were a hundred bucks. Now ransomware affects whole companies, school systems, local governments,” said Daniel, who was the White House cyber coordinator in the Obama administration. “The average ransom is several hundred thousand, and with high-profile companies, into the millions of dollars.”
The dilemma for affected companies and organizations can be acute. Last fall, ransomware launched by Russian criminals hit U.S. hospitals, forcing some to disrupt patient care and cancel noncritical surgeries, and raising the concern that a prolonged disruption could result in deaths. Also last year, hackers struck a South Carolina cloud software provider, Blackbaud, stealing the data of thousands of users across the United States and Canada. Though Blackbaud paid the ransom, data breach laws required the firm to notify its clients, which included schools and hospitals, in dozens of states. The company was hit with almost two-dozen class-action lawsuits.
On Thursday, a criminal group known as Babuk, which is thought to operate out of Russia, posted online a trove of documents hacked from the Washington D.C. police department, including raw intelligence on threats following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The data dump apparently came after negotiations with District officials over a fee to prevent the release broke down, according to posts by Babuk.
With such high stakes, it is no surprise that victims feel they have no option but to negotiate with their attackers. The vast majority of victims do not have cyber insurance and try to handle the situation on their own, experts said.
A mini-industry also has arisen in companies that help victims of ransomware attacks. Firms such as Coveware, Kivu and Arete, specialize in negotiating with ransomware criminals. Often these specialists are called in by the insurer, said Michael Phillips, chief claims officer of the insurer Resilience, who noted that policies that cover ransomware became commonly available only about five or six years ago.
Most insurers require that the bargaining with ransomware extortionists be conducted by experienced negotiators, said Phillips, who co-chaired the Ransomware Task Force. They have strategies for bringing ransom prices down. They know how to obtain proof, for instance, of stolen files and of a functioning decryption key, which might involve a limited exchange of encrypted files, he said.
“As perverse as it is, the ransomware market is based on trust,” he said. “That is a routine part of ransomware negotiations.”
The negotiations typically happen through email or an encrypted chat room on the “dark web,” a portion of the Internet where sites are not accessible through search engines and typically require the use of an anonymizing browser, like Tor. The chat rooms often include the group’s logo or the hacker’s avatar, Phillips said.
In the case of the firm that paid the ransom last week, BlueVoyant negotiated a lower amount, Berglas said. “You obviously don’t want to piss them off and have them say, ‘we’re raising it another million dollars,’” he said. “But you want to try to get them to lower the price as much as possible.”
Some companies choose to do the bargaining on their own. “The craziest thing we saw was a company where the CEO started having communications with the ransomware actor, got frustrated and threatened the actor, who promptly disappeared and refused to negotiate any more,” Berglas recalled. “And the organization wound up having to pay the initial ask without any negotiation.”
With data extortion becoming more prevalent, some criminal groups are setting up “call centers” and dialing up CEOs to urge them to pay up or see their data — or their clients’ data — spilled online, said John Bennett, a managing director in the cyber risk practice of Kroll, a risk management firm. “They’re getting the company’s client list, going to the client and saying, ‘I now have your data. You might want to call XYZ company and tell them to pay up,’ ” said Bennett, who led the FBI’s San Francisco and Los Angeles field offices and retired from the bureau in November.
Some companies are able to avoid paying, but that generally involves advance preparation. Grant Schneider, senior director for cybersecurity services at Venable, a law firm, recalled one client in the Mid-Atlantic that was able to avoid paying a ransom demand of $250,000 because the company had stored backups of its data in the cloud. “The calculus on whether or not to pay was more one of, ‘How long is it going to take us to get back up and operational?’ ” he said. “Thinking they would be able to get back up sooner rather than later, they chose not to pay.”
They never shut down and were back to normal operations within two weeks, he said.
But most firms aren’t in that position. The task force report said that companies hit by a ransomware attack took on average 287 days to fully recover.
The surge in ransomware has rocked the insurance industry. Carriers are finding increasingly that premiums don’t cover the cost of ransomware attacks, said Joshua Motta, CEO and co-founder of Coalition, a cyber insurance firm. “Everyone was making money and doing well in the cyber insurance market until ransomware became the dominant criminal business model,” he said.
Premium costs have risen by up to 50 percent since the beginning of the year, said Adam Lantrip, leader of the cyber practice at insurance broker CAC Specialty, and ransomware claims just keep pouring in. The trend is so vexing that France’s largest general insurer, AXA France, announced this month that it will no longer cover ransomware payments for customers within the country, though a French resident could purchase a global policy that would cover such payments.
The U.S. government has long held the position that victims should not pay ransoms so as not to encourage and finance criminals. The FBI routinely advises against paying ransoms, a position political leaders also have endorsed. “We don’t want people to think there’s money in it to threaten the security of a critical infrastructure in our country,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters at her weekly news conference on Thursday.
But, officials note, the decision is ultimately the victim’s to make. “Are you going to tell a hospital you can’t pay, and patients die?” Kroll’s Bennett said.
Complicating the decision to pay are federal laws that bar transactions with people or groups that have been sanctioned by the Treasury Department. In guidance issued in October, the department warned that victims making ransom payments to a sanctioned person or group could be fined. “Ransomware payments made to sanctioned persons … could be used to fund activities adverse to the national security and foreign policy objectives of the United States,” the guidance said.
Currently, only a handful of ransomware groups are on the sanctions list, and experts say Treasury has not been known to impose a penalty on anyone for paying a sanctioned entity. Figuring out if a hacker who’s extorted you is related to a group that’s been sanctioned is not easy, experts said. Hackers use pseudonyms, proxy Internet addresses and generally live in the shadows. Affiliates of operations like DarkSide may have links to a sanctioned group. That puts companies in a difficult spot.
“Ransomware attackers are by definition liars, thieves, extortionists and members of a global criminal enterprise, and they take extreme technological measures to conceal any trace of their identity and location,” said John Reed Stark, a cybersecurity consultant and a former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission Office of Internet Enforcement. “Determining the bona fides of a ransomware attacker is like trying to confirm the height and weight of a poltergeist. Yet that is exactly what the government expects the company to do.”
The guidance also leaves unclear whether ransom negotiators or insurance companies that make payments might also be held liable. Berglas said last year a client wanted to pay a ransom to unlock its data, but the attacker, the Russia-based Evil Corp, was on the sanctions list, so BlueVoyant refused. The client went to another firm, which paid it, he said.
Treasury’s guidance indicates that reporting an attack to law enforcement will be considered a “significant mitigating factor” in determining whether to fine someone for violating the rule.
The international nature of ransomware crime is also an impediment to bringing it under control. The Justice Department and FBI are working with allies and partners overseas to investigate criminal rings, disrupt their operations and online infrastructure, and prosecute hackers, officials said. In January, the department joined Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain in dismantling the botnet known as Emotet, which had infected hundreds of thousands of computers in the United States and caused millions of dollars in damage worldwide. The botnet, an army of hijacked computers, could also be used to spread ransomware.
But many of the actors are in countries outside the reach of U.S. and allied authorities. DarkSide, for example, is believed to be based in Russia and many of its communications are in Russian.
“They’ve become the 21st century equivalent of countries that sheltered pirates,” said Daniel, the Obama White House cyber coordinator. “We have to impose diplomatic and economic consequences so they don’t see it as in their interest to harbor those criminals.”
Companies and organizations need to be encouraged to strengthen their defenses, experts say. Many are failing to deploy even basic best practices, such as requiring multifactor authentication for employees logging onto systems, patching vulnerabilities promptly, segmenting networks, keeping backups off line and testing them periodically to ensure they work.
One way companies and law enforcement can team up to thwart extortionists is by quickly identifying midpoint servers used by the hackers to “stage” or store data after it’s siphoned from a company but before it’s sent to the hackers’ server. That happened in the case of Colonial Pipeline, when a cloud provider in New York shut down a server containing data stolen from the firm. The provider had been notified by Mandiant, the company helping Colonial investigate the attack. The move prevented the hackers from collecting the data, which could have been used as part of the extortion effort.
Regulating cryptocurrency is another step experts recommend, especially by enforcing requirements that exchange houses that facilitate cryptocurrency transactions abide by anti-money laundering laws. Even if an exchange is overseas, if it has “substantive” business with a U.S. person, Treasury can regulate it, experts say.
“These operators are required to know their customers, and if Treasury enforced the law, it would arm the Justice Department with the tools they need to identify and prosecute these criminals,” said Phillips.
“A ransomware attacker is not going to use PayPal,” said Allan Liska, senior intelligence analyst at the cyber firm Recorded Future, and a task force member.
The task force also urged Congress to mandate that ransomware victims report attacks to the federal government and, if a payment is made, reveal all of the financial details, including the address of the electronic wallet to which a payment was made. “The ransomware data gap is real and it is an extraordinary obstacle to national and international disruption of these cyber criminals,” Phillips said.
Berglas said it’s unlikely that the problem can be solved by simply hoping businesses won’t make payments. BlueVoyant’s client, he noted, was down all week, its corporate networks frozen by ransomware. By the weekend, with the payment made, the firm was gradually restoring services.
“In the grand scheme of things,” said Berglas, “being down for a few days is better than shutting your doors and going out of business.’’
People swim at the west side of Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge where hundreds of oil deposit substance from an oil spill washed up on the beach in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, Saturday, March 20, 2021. (photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
A Leaking Oil Refinery on St. Croix Gives Biden His First Environmental Justice Test
Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute
Loki writes: "A controversial oil refinery on St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, is in the government's crosshairs after a third incident in just three months has sickened people."
controversial oil refinery on St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, is in the government's crosshairs after a third incident in just three months has sickened people. On May 5, after gaseous fumes were released from one of the oil refining units of Limetree Bay Refining, residents of the unincorporated Caribbean territory reported a range of symptoms, including burning eyes, nausea and headaches, with at least three people seeking medical attention at the local hospital. At its peak in 1974, the facility, which opened in 1966, was the largest refinery in the Americas, producing some 650,000 barrels of crude oil a day. It restarted operations in February after being shuttered for the past decade.
A Limetree spokesperson said that there was a release of "light hydrocarbon odors" resulting from the maintenance on one of the refinery's cokers, high heat level processing units that upgrade heavy, low-value crude oil into lighter, high-value petroleum products. The noxious odor stretched for miles around the refinery, remaining in the air for days and prompting the closure of two primary schools, a technical educational center and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), which local officials said was shuttered because its employees "are affected by the strong, unpleasant gas like odor, in the atmosphere."
Limetree and the U.S. government conducted their own air quality testing, with different results. The National Guard found elevated levels of sulfur dioxide, while the company said it detected "zero concentrations" of the chemical just hours later. "We will continue to monitor the situation, but there is the potential for additional odors while maintenance continues," said Limetree, which is backed by private equity firms EIG and Arclight Capital, the latter of which has ties to former President Donald Trump. "We apologize for any impact this may have caused the community."
The May 5 incident follows two similar incidents in April at the refinery that the Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources (DPNR) concluded were caused by the emission of excess sulfur dioxide from the burning of hydrogen sulfide, one of the impurities in petroleum coke, a coal-like substance that accounts for nearly a fifth of the nation's finished petroleum product exports, mainly going to China and other Asian nations, where it is used to power manufacturing industries like steel and aluminum. Days after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the company that it was violating the Clean Air Act after the April incidents, Limetree agreed to resume sulfur dioxide monitoring, while contesting the violation. "If EPA makes a determination that the facility's operations present an imminent risk to people's health, consistent with its legal authorities, it will take appropriate action to safeguard public safety," the agency said in a statement. The Biden EPA withdrew a key federal pollution permit for Limetree on March 25, but stopped short of shutting down the facility altogether.
Care2 has launched a public petition—already signed by more than 98,000 people—urging President Biden to shut down the Limetree Bay Refining facility. The petition also notes the risk that the refinery poses to the island's biodiverse wildlife, saying that "turtles, sharks, whales, and coral reefs… [are] threatened by the Limetree Bay Refining plant—both by what it's done in the past, and by what it's spewing right now." The group also frames the human rights and environmental justice aspect of the ongoing public health situation on the island in historical terms: "On top of the obvious problem that no person should be poisoned with oil, St. Croix is an island with a highly disenfranchised population. The vast majority of residents are Black, the [descendants] of enslaved Africans brought to work on sugar and cotton plantations. For generations, the U.S. government has cared little about the well-being of people there." (One recent example happened in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which landed on the island in September of 2017. Even two months after the storms hit, many residents of St. Croix who were evacuated to Georgia were unable to return home, and felt abandoned by the government. "I feel like we are the forgotten people and no one has ever inquired how do we feel," said one of the St. Croix evacuees at the time.)
After the May 5 incident, Limetree said, "Our preliminary investigations have revealed that units are operating normally." Perhaps it is normal for such facilities to emit toxic fumes. But what's not normal is the fact that such fumes should present a constant threat to people and the environment, and that, according to the environmental group Earthjustice, about 90 million Americans live within 30 miles of at least one refinery. Adding insult to injury is the fact that Black people are 75 more likely to live near toxic, air-polluting industrial facilities, according to Fumes Across the Fence-Line, a report produced by the NAACP and the Clean Air Task Force, an air pollution reduction advocacy group. That report also found that more than 1 million African Americans face a disproportionate cancer risk "above EPA's level of concern" due to the fact that they live in areas that expose them to toxic chemicals emanating from natural gas facilities.
You don't need to live next door to a refinery to feel its impact on your health; in fact, you can be several miles away. A study conducted last year by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) found an increased risk of multiple cancer types associated with living within 30 miles of an oil refinery. "Based on U.S. Census Bureau data, there are more than 6.3 million people over 20 years old who reside within a [30-mile] radius of 28 active refineries in Texas," said the study's lead author, Dr. Stephen B. Williams, chief of urology and a tenured professor of urology and radiology at UTMB. "Our team accounted for patient factors (age, sex, race, smoking, household income and education) and other environmental factors, such as oil well density and air pollution and looked at new cancer diagnoses based on cancers with the highest incidence in the U.S. and/or previously suspected to be at increased risk according to oil refinery proximity."
In granting Limetree's permit in 2018—a move that E&E News reported was made to "cash in on an international low-sulfur fuel standard that takes effect in January [2020]"—Trump's EPA said that the refinery's emissions simply be kept under "plantwide applicability limit." But then in a September 2019 report on Limetree—which has been at the center of several pollution debacles and Clean Air Act violations for decades—the agency said that "[t]he combination of a predominantly low income and minority population in [south-central] St. Croix with the environmental and other burdens experienced by the residents is indicative of a vulnerable community," and added the new requirement of installing five neighborhood air quality monitors. "[G]iven several assumptions and approximations... and the potential impacts on an already overburdened low income and minority population, the ambient monitors are necessary to assure continued operational compliance with the public health standards once the facility begins to operate," the agency stated. Limetree has appealed this ruling with the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board, arguing that "the EPA requirements are linked to environmental justice concerns that are unrelated to operating within the pollution limits of the permit."
"It is unclear when the EPA's appeals board will rule on the permit dispute. The Biden-run EPA could withdraw the permit, and it is also reviewing whether the refinery is a new source of pollution that requires stricter air pollution controls," reports Reuters, adding that the White House declined to comment.
President Biden has made environmental justice a central part of his policy, including the overhaul of the EPA External Civil Rights Compliance Office, which is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex or disability. "For too long, the EPA External Civil Rights Compliance Office has ignored its requirements under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act," states Biden's environmental justice plan. "That will end in the Biden Administration. Biden will overhaul that office and ensure that it brings justice to frontline communities that experience the worst impacts of climate change and fenceline communities that are located adjacent to pollution sources."
Now it is time for Biden to make good on his campaign promise. John Walke, senior attorney and director of clean air programs with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Reuters in March that the situation in St. Croix "offers the first opportunity for the Biden-Harris administration to stand up for an environmental justice community, and take a strong public health and climate… stance concerning fossil fuels."
Earth | Food | Life contributor Sharon Lavigne has previously written about a similar issue in another region before. Lavigne is the founder and president of RISE St. James, a grassroots faith-based organization dedicated to opposing the siting of new petrochemical facilities in a heavily industrialized area along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as "Cancer Alley." Writing in Truthout in October 2020 about St. James Parish, Louisiana, the predominantly Black and low-income community where she lives, Lavigne pointed out that "Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden mentioned St. James Parish in his clean energy plan speech because we're notorious for having the country's highest concentration of chemical plants and refineries, [one of] the highest cancer rates, the worst particulate pollution and one of the highest mortality rates per capita from COVID-19 in the nation," She added, "For those of us living here, it's not just Cancer Alley; it's death row."
The stated mission of the EPA is "to protect human health and the environment." When so many Americans face a disproportionate cancer risk simply by living near toxic industrial sites such as oil and gas refineries, the EPA is derelict in its duty. The Limetree Bay Refining facility has presented President Biden with an early test of his commitment to environmental justice. Considering the facility's terrible legacy of ecological and civil rights violations, three new public health incidents in just the past two months, and the disproportionate and ongoing health risks faced by the community's predominantly Black and low-income population, it is finally time for the federal government to revoke Limetree's license to operate on St. Croix. This is a perfect chance for President Biden to show the country and the world just how serious he is about environmental justice.
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