01 May 21
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Paul Krugman | Good Luck to Republicans if Biden's Family Plan Becomes Law
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes:
onservatives beware: If the main elements in Joe Biden’s American Family Plan become law, they’ll be very hard to repeal. Why? Because they’ll deliver huge, indeed transformational benefits to millions.
I mean, just imagine trying to take away affordable child care, universal pre-K and paid leave for new parents once they’ve become part of the fabric of our society. You’d face a backlash far worse than the one that followed Republican attempts to eliminate protection for coverage of pre-existing health conditions in 2017. And that backlash quickly gave Democrats control of the House and set the stage for their current control of the Senate and White House as well.
So what’s the Republican counterargument? Well, much of the party appears uninterested in debating policy, preferring to lash out at imaginary plans to ban red meat or give immigrants Kamala Harris’s children’s book.
Vietnam War protesters outside the U.S. Capitol in 1971. (photo: Wally McNamee/Corbis/Getty Images)
May Day 1971 Was a Day Against War
Steve Early, Jacobin
Early writes: "Fifty years ago today, on May Day 1971, thousands of antiwar protesters descended on Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam War."
Fifty years ago today, on May Day 1971, thousands of antiwar protesters descended on Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam War. The ensuing three days of disruptive actions directly confronted the Nixon administration — and resulted in the largest civil disobedience–related detentions in US history.
ifty years ago this month, I watched 1,200 of my fellow antiwar demonstrators get carted off to jail for simply sitting on the back steps of the Capitol and listening to speeches from two House members.
That bust was the last gasp of three days of mass protest activity in Washington, DC, against the Vietnam War. Kicking off on May 1, the May Day actions resulted in the largest number of civil disobedience–related detentions in US history—12,000 in all, including a record-breaking single-day total of 7,000 on May 3, 1971.
Organizers of the May 1971 antiwar actions had publicly announced their intention to shut down the nation’s capital by blocking its streets, bridges, and buildings. But that plan was thwarted by nearly twenty thousand local, state, and federal police officers, National Guard members, US Marines, paratroopers from the army’s 82nd Airborne Division, and the 6th Armored Cavalry Regiment from Fort Meade in Maryland.
The crackdown had lasting effects. As L. A. Kauffman argues in her 2017 book, Direct Action, Mayday “influenced grassroots activism for decades to come, laying the groundwork for a new kind of radicalism: decentralized, ideologically diverse, and propelled by direct action.” Lawrence Roberts, who became an award-winning journalist after being detained himself, notes another impact. The Nixon administration’s response, he writes in Mayday 1971, led to “consequential changes to American law and politics, including the rules governing protests in the nation’s capital, which remain in force today.”
A Grand Finale
Mayday was the grand finale of antiwar actions that included the bombing of a Capitol building restroom by the Weather Underground, an occupation of the National Mall by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and a mass rally organized by the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) that drew five hundred thousand people.
This last event was similar to the huge peace demonstrations held in Washington, DC, on weekends during the spring of 1970 and the fall of 1969. Each involved bussing in large crowds of people, doing a little marching around, listening to speeches and music, and then getting back on the busses to go home. For some in the antiwar movement, this familiar routine — what one critic called “dull ceremonies of dissent” — began to feel futile and too easily ignored by the Nixon administration.
The late Rennie Davis, the mastermind and maestro of May Day, had a different idea. Tens of thousands of activists would come to Washington ready to camp out and disrupt business as usual — on a weekday, when thousands of federal workers were trying to get to their jobs.
As viewers of Aaron Sorkin’s flawed film about the Chicago Seven will know, Davis was no stranger to confrontational protest. A leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Oberlin College, he helped organize antiwar demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. He was arrested and put on trial as a defendant in the most famous political trial of the era, resulting in a 1970 conviction for incitement to riot (it was later overturned on appeal).
Davis was still facing a five-year jail term for his Chicago Seven role when he hit the road to convince campus activists that if “the government won’t stop the war, the people will stop the government.” As one old SDS comrade told the New York Times when Davis died in February at age eighty, Rennie’s style of organizing involved a lot of “smoke and mirrors.” He believed in “political salesmanship, creating a kind of myth that wasn’t quite a lie but created an image of possibility, even if it wasn’t yet true.”
The game plan that Davis developed wasn’t an easy sell among traditional practitioners of civil disobedience or NPAC. Pacifist foes of the Vietnam war tended to play by strict nonviolent protest rules: if you broke the law by blocking a federal building or burning draft board records, you didn’t try to evade arrest afterwards. You sat (or laid down) and waited to be handcuffed and hauled away.
NPAC leaders, following the Socialist Workers Party line, didn’t favor getting busted at all. They believed that the broadest possible antiwar movement could only be built through continued reliance on massive protests that remained peaceful and legal. “When people state they are purposely and illegally attempting to disrupt the government . . . they isolate themselves from the masses of American people,” argued the Militant, a Socialist Workers Party publication.
Affinity Groups
Ignoring such counsel, Davis and fellow members of the May Day Collective envisioned widespread, mobile civil disobedience. Protesters would come to Washington as part of small homegrown “affinity groups” ready to disrupt and run, not damaging property or harming people but definitely trying to paralyze commuter traffic entering the District of Columbia on Monday, May 3, 1971.
The staging area for this affront to public order was originally going to be Rock Creek Park in northwest DC. But after negotiations with city officials, our official camping site became West Potomac Park, near the Lincoln Memorial. On May Day itself, Saturday, May 1, fifty thousand people gathered there to hear a rock concert and last-minute pep talks. (Among the bands playing that night were the Beach Boys, who insisted on being the opening act so, as cofounder Mike Love explained, they could leave “before any riots broke out.”) Before we emerged groggy from our tents the next morning, several thousand DC police officers had surrounded the encampment and ordered us to disperse.
To avoid any premature confrontation, almost the entire crowd packed up and left — seeking shelter in college dormitories, church basements, private homes, or apartments throughout the city. By Monday, May 3, our numbers were greatly reduced, though by most estimates still more than twenty-five thousand strong.
That morning, few demonstrators had found their way to the locations they’d been assigned in the “tactical manual” developed for the protest. But it didn’t matter: President Richard Nixon had stubbornly refused to give all federal employees the day off. As protesters roamed downtown DC, dodging huge tear-gas barrages, they created small barricades, left disabled cars in roadways, or temporarily blocked intersections with mobile sit-ins.
As Roberts observes,
The tactical advantage underpinning Mayday was now apparent, the asymmetrical warfare of a guerilla force against a standing army. It was nearly impossible to defend against small decentralized bands who could shift on a dime, tie up police or troops at one spot, and then get to another place before the authorities could adjust.
One adjustment the authorities did make created a legal nightmare for themselves. DC police chief Jerry Wilson suspended the use of field-arrest forms and accompanying Polaroid picture-taking that linked particular officers to individual arrestees. On May 3, nearly seven thousand people were detained — but with almost no information about who they were, what they had done, or who had arrested them.
The city also quickly ran out of places to hold everyone. During my own forty-eight hours of detention, I never saw the inside of a jail cell. Along with fellow detainees from Vermont, I was first transported, via patrol wagon, to the exercise yard of the DC city jail. Then several thousand of us were ferried to the old DC Coliseum, an indoor sports arena, where members of the National Guard, bored but friendly, kept watch.
Conditions were not great, but a lot better than what the protesters who were penned up overnight in an outdoor practice field next to RFK Stadium experienced. There, sympathetic black residents showed up with much-needed donations of food, water, and blankets, which they passed over the chain-link fence to detainees who were almost entirely white. One organizer of that relief caravan, civil rights activist Mary Treadwell, informed the press that she was there because anything that “can upset the oppressive machinery of government will help black people.”
Jamming the Jails
Even critics of our attempted disruption — and there were many in politics and the press — soon expressed concern about the circumstances of our confinement and the militarization of the city. The authorities’ use of mass preventive detention — which led to some non-protesters (including reporters) being swept off the street as well — paralyzed the local jail and court system.
Creating that kind of crisis was very much in the tradition of free speech fights waged by the Industrial Workers of the World a half century earlier and the civil rights protests that had filled southern jails the previous decade. In both situations, orchestrated mass arrests were deployed as a pressure tactic against local authorities that were disregarding civil liberties and civil rights.
As word spread that our legal defense team was trying to persuade a federal judge to order an unconditional release, many detainees in the Coliseum spurned tempting offers to be finger-printed and released on $10 bond. In the meantime, five thousand fellow protestors, who had eluded the first day’s roundup, descended on the Justice Department and Capitol on May 4 and 5, respectively. They sat down and got arrested in more traditional fashion. Among those hauled away was John Froines, one of two Chicago Seven defendants acquitted in that case, but now, along with Davis and Abbie Hoffman, indicted for conspiracy again, this time as a planner of May Day.
In Mayday 1971, Roberts provides a detailed account of the subsequent litigation, which dragged on for sixteen years. Only a handful of people were ever convicted of anything. The charges against everyone else were dropped, including the federal indictments of Davis, Froines, and Hoffman for conspiracy.
“Over the years,” Roberts writes, “thanks to class action cases filed by the ACLU, as well as individual lawsuits, judges and juries awarded millions of dollars to thousands of detainees, for violations of their right to free speech, assembly, and due process. . . . Congress acknowledged, in a backhand way, that the fault lay as much with the federal government as the police; it appropriated more than $3 million for the city to help defray the costs of settlements and damages.” In one jury trial, the plaintiffs initially won $12 million in damages, an amount later reduced on appeal.
As Roberts notes, key players in the suppression of May Day ended up spending more time in jail, for more serious offenses, than anybody who blocked traffic to end the war in Vietnam. That’s because thirteen months later, Nixon administration operatives were caught burglarizing and bugging the Democratic National Committee. The resulting Watergate scandal ended with Nixon facing impeachment and ultimately resigning in 1974. Among his various coconspirators were architects of the May Day crackdown like White House counsel John Dean, Nixon chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, top domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman, attorney general John Mitchell, assistant attorney general Richard Kleindienst, and White House staffer Egil Krogh, who was a key source for Roberts’s book.
A future Supreme Court chief justice, William Rehnquist provided a Justice Department memo assuring Nixon that he had “inherent constitutional authority to use federal troops to ensure that Mayday demonstrations do not prevent federal employees from . . . carrying out their assigned government functions.”
During last year’s Black Lives Matter protests around the country, this Nixon-era roundup was replicated on a much broader scale. An estimated fifteen to twenty-six million participated in local marches and demonstrations, and a larger number than during Mayday 1971 were likely arrested nationwide. And in another echo of 1971, the vast majority of cases against those detained have been dismissed — either because protesters were clearly exercising their First Amendment rights or to avoid further jamming a US court system already suffering from pandemic-created backlogs.
As the New York Times has noted, with considerable understatement, most charges have also been dropped because, now as in the past, police officers use “mass arrests as a technique to help clear the streets, not to confront illegal behavior.”
Merrick Garland. (photo: Demetrius Freeman/Getty Images)
Merrick Garland Rapidly Erasing Trump Effect at Justice Department
Zachary Basu, Axios
Basu writes: "Attorney General Merrick Garland is quickly negating the Trump administration's law enforcement legacy, dismaying conservatives with a burst of aggressive reversals and new policies."
Why it matters: As a former prosecutor and respected federal judge, Garland's devotion to the rule of law has always been core to his identity. That reputation has taken on new importance in his first 50 days on the job, after four years of allegations that Trump's DOJ was improperly politicized.
- Attorney General Bill Barr played a central role in the Trump administration's most high-profile controversies, from undermining the Russia investigation to intervening in the cases of indicted Trump associates to ordering the forcible clearing of protesters in Lafayette Square Park.
- DOJ's broad authority also overlaps with many of the issues at the top of President Biden's agenda, including restoring faith in government, promoting racial justice and police reform, and curbing gun violence.
Driving the news: Liberal fears that the soft-spoken Garland might resist prosecuting Trump and his allies for the sake of unity were partially eased on Wednesday, when news broke that federal agents had raided the Manhattan home of Rudy Giuliani.
- The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which Giuliani once led, is known to be highly independent.
- But under Attorney General Bill Barr, the department repeatedly blocked SDNY prosecutors from executing a search warrant for Giuliani's electronic records in the final months of 2020, according to the New York Times.
The Justice Department also announced on Wednesday that three Georgia men were charged with federal hate crimes in the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, whose death was a rallying cry during last year's racial-justice protests.
- In Michigan, a superseding indictment was filed against five men accused of plotting last year to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, with prosecutors referring to the alleged crimes as "domestic terrorism" for the first time.
- That shift comes amid new developments in the investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which has been described as the most complex probe in DOJ history. Garland, who played a leading role in the prosecution of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, has vowed to make prosecuting the Capitol rioters his "first priority."
Other major steps taken in Garland's first 50 days include:
- "Pattern or practice" investigations into the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments, following the deaths last year of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
- A 30-day "expedited review" into how DOJ can better prosecute and track hate crimes amid a surge in violence against Asian Americans.
- The revocation of a Trump-era policy that restricted federal funding for "sanctuary cities."
- Responsibility for five of the six executive actions on gun control ordered by Biden.
What to watch: Garland's commitment to depoliticizing DOJ will undergo a key test when a charging decision is made in the case of Hunter Biden, whose finances are under investigation.
- Special counsel John Durham is also expected to submit a report concerning alleged abuses by Obama-era intelligence officials during the Russia investigation.
'He was a young man carrying profound trauma, core elements of which the U.S. government had a direct hand in creating.' (image: Ryan Garcia/The Intercept)
Marked Man: An ICE Informant, MS-13, and the Long Campaign to Deport Walter Cruz-Zavala
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "Every morning, Walter Cruz-Zavala wakes up with the prospect of his own violent death hanging over his head."
very morning, Walter Cruz-Zavala wakes up with the prospect of his own violent death hanging over his head. The Department of Homeland Security says that the 31-year-old is not a prisoner, nor is he being punished; he is experiencing an administrative process that could end at any moment if he would simply accept his deportation to El Salvador, where immigration judges have twice ruled that he would likely be tortured. It’s up to him to decide: Keep up the fight or let go and suffer the consequences.
The danger is without question. Inked into Cruz-Zavala’s chest are two large letters: “M” and “S.” The man who convinced him to get and subsequently gave him the tattoo when he was a teenager, in 2008, was the top informant in what was then the largest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation against MS-13 ever. Later, after collecting years of payments for his role in leading the San Francisco clique that Cruz-Zavala had joined, the informant admitted that he had committed and ordered a series of grisly murders before going to work for the U.S. government.
Cruz-Zavala, who had just turned 18, was among dozens of young men swept up in the high-profile conspiracy case that followed. He spent nearly three years in solitary confinement before his charges were dropped. He emerged from jail at 21 years old. Though he had left MS-13 behind, he had also spent his first years of adulthood locked in a room alone. It had been seven years since he first came to the United States as a 14-year-old boy, traveling alone, hoping to reunite with his father and escape years of abuse and violence. Though the government poured money into the case that led to his confinement, it offered nothing to address its fallout. Cruz-Zavala soon spiraled. He drank hard, collected DUIs, and one night accidentally shot himself in the leg while heavily intoxicated. By the summer of 2017, he was once again in ICE custody.
After entering ICE’s Mesa Verde processing center in Bakersfield, California, more than three years ago, Cruz-Zavala won his immigration case twice. His probation officer endorsed his release plan, citing his admission into an intensive inpatient rehabilitation facility. And yet, Cruz-Zavala remains locked up, fighting against the current dragging him toward deportation.
“I think I’d probably get killed,” Cruz-Zavala told me the first time we spoke. “I think about it every day.” What eats at Cruz-Zavala is the fact that the tattoo, given to him by a man working for the government now trying to deport him, is a driving force in the danger he faces. And it’s not as though removing the markings would fix things. “If I get in contact for any reason, like I see one of these guys that know me from the past, and I don’t have these tattoos anymore, they’re going to be trying to kill me for that,” he said. “It’s very complicated.”
“It’s like, if I have them, it compromises my life. If I don’t have them, it compromises my life too,” he added. “I don’t know what to do.”
Cruz-Zavala entered his fourth year in ICE custody in what was supposed to be a moment of change. President Joe Biden vowed to break with his predecessor upon entering office, bringing humanity to the nation’s broken immigration system. For Cruz-Zavala, and others like him, the struggle has only deepened.
While the Biden administration has dialed back the blanket targeting of undocumented immigrants that defined the Trump years, it has also reasserted focus on immigrants with gang affiliations — the kind of enforcement that Democrats and Republicans alike have supported for decades. On paper, Cruz-Zavala’s case would read to many as a concrete example of the kind of individual ICE and the Biden administration should seek to deport: five DUIs, a firearms conviction, a gang linkage, and a giant MS-13 tattoo. What those datapoints fail to capture, argues Raha Jorjani, Cruz-Zavala’s attorney, is everything else.
“When you get into people’s stories and their nuances, the picture changes and the story changes,” Jorjani told me. “When you boil things down to these short, concise, categorical categories, you lose all of the humanity. You lose what matters.”
In conversations over multiple months from his detention center confines, Cruz-Zavala recounted the story of his journey from a small town in El Salvador to indefinite detention in a for-profit U.S. immigration jail in southern California. It was a personal story, one of pain and transformation. As Cruz-Zavala would describe it, it was a story of growing up.
Spanning four presidential administrations, Cruz-Zavala’s interactions with the homeland security apparatus reveal the historical ties between counterinsurgency campaigns in Central America, California gang policing, and the explosion in immigrant detention in the United States over the past two and a half decades. His ordeal illustrates how when it comes to immigration, brushes with the criminal justice system — whether or not they result in a conviction — are used to keep people locked up, producing a grinding experience that aids ICE’s deportation efforts. Homeland security lawyers rely on specific language to justify these conditions, arguing that immigrants are not “incarcerated,” they are “detained,” in what should be termed “detention centers,” not “prisons,” for matters that are “civil” not “criminal.”
“There’s no real difference,” Cruz-Zavala said. “The name changes, but the prison doesn’t change. The reality is the same. You don’t have freedom.”
Walter Cruz-Zavala was in born in El Salvador in 1990, two years before the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords, which marked the official end of the nation’s catastrophic civil war. More than 71,000 Salvadoran civilians were killed as the conflict raged throughout the previous decade — nearly 2 percent of the country’s total population. A quarter of the population fled the country. The government and right-wing death squads were responsible for the vast majority of the killings. The military enjoyed indispensable support from the Reagan administration, which took the position that counterinsurgency campaigns in Central America were necessary to “roll back” Soviet influence in the region and safeguard U.S. national security.
The adults in Cruz-Zavala’s life rarely spoke of the war. When they did, they described horrible things. It seemed as though they were still traumatized, he thought. Cruz-Zavala believes, though he is not sure, that his dad’s first journey to the U.S. had something to do with the conflict. There was also the issue of money, and the family’s lack of it. Like many other Salvadorans, Cruz-Zavala’s father traveled to the U.S. to work and send cash back home. All told, Cruz-Zavala said, his dad was present for no more than three years of his childhood.
As Cruz-Zavala got older, his father’s efforts to make a living in the U.S. drew the attention of local gang members. “They thought my family had money,” he said. Robberies, beatings, and harassment became a fact of life, but that wasn’t the only struggle he faced. Beginning around the time he was 6, Cruz-Zavala was sexually abused by an adult male neighbor. The abuse continued for nearly three years. The man swore him to secrecy. Cruz-Zavala would carry the secret for more than two decades.
Between the childhood trauma and the violence he experienced as a preteen, Cruz-Zavala made up his mind to journey to the United States to find his father. By 2004, he had scrounged enough cash to make his way more than 2,300 miles north. The young Salvadoran didn’t know what to expect as he set off for California. “When you’re in another country, people say a lot of beautiful things about the United States,” he said. “You think the United States is like paradise.”
Border Patrol agents took Cruz-Zavala into custody in Texas. He spent two weeks in a cell while government officials tracked down his father, who was then living in San Francisco’s Mission District, and arranged for his release.
Cruz-Zavala felt overwhelmed in the massive American city. It seemed that everyone was in a hurry. It was hard to keep up. His father was renting a room in a two-bedroom apartment shared by eight people. He, his dad, and a cousin shared a tiny space with two beds. Cruz-Zavala would sometimes sleep on the ground. “My dad was like a stranger,” he said. It had been years since the pair had spent any time together. His dad worked a graveyard shift. When weekends came around, he was too exhausted to do much of anything. Any hopes of reconnecting, let alone addressing what had happened in their years apart, crumbled away. “It was really difficult for me,” Cruz-Zavala said. “I didn’t know the place. I didn’t know the people.” He felt trapped.
Slowly, Cruz-Zavala discovered that he had stepped into a community with deep and often painful links to the turmoil of his home country. In Los Angeles, young members of the Salvadoran diaspora formed cliques to defend themselves against established gangs. Among them was a group of pot-smoking metal fans who called themselves Mara Salvatrucha — what would later become more widely known as MS-13. As the gang evolved through the 1980s and early 1990s so, too, did U.S. law enforcement’s approach to gang policing. The war on drugs was in full swing in California. With the passage of the 1988 Street Terrorism and Enforcement Act, gang policing became a domestic counterinsurgency campaign of its own. Other measures soon followed, including databases that featured hundreds of thousands of individuals who were deemed amenable to “gang enhancement” charges, as well as gang injunctions, which aimed to criminalize the gathering of groups of two or more people in certain neighborhoods.
The drug war and the gang policing that followed it, including raids and sweeps that led to the arrest of roughly 50,000 people between 1988 and 1990, helped to turn California into the incarceration capital of the most carceral nation in human history. Groups like MS-13 grew inside the state’s bloated penal system. Cycles of incarceration produced a more organized gang, with leaders on the inside issuing orders to those on the outside. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed legislation that, in addition to laying the foundation for today’s industrial-scale immigration detention and deportation apparatus, bolstered the pipeline from U.S. prisons back to El Salvador. Supported by then-Sen. Joe Biden, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act widened the pool of people eligible for deportation and “extended the War on Crime to the immigration system.” The U.S. began deporting Salvadorans with criminal convictions by the thousands. The Salvadoran state, still reeling from the war, was in no position to handle to the influx.
Journalist Roberto Lovato grew up in the Mission District. He and his teenage friends formed a gang that ran the streets Cruz-Zavala would later call home. In his recent book, “Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas,” Lovato details how U.S. officials who advised on Central American counterinsurgency operations in the 1980s became California police advisers in the early 1990s, shaping the “war on gangs” and its expression in Salvadoran communities. “My experience in El Salvador and in the United States, in the case of the Salvadorans, showed me clearly that we have been a thoroughly policed and militarized community for decades,” Lovato told me. “It’s a circuit of counterinsurgency that is at work when you’re looking at the police, the prosecutor, and judges going after immigrant gangs.”
Historically, Latino gangs in California have broadly divided into two factions: norteños, largely made up of U.S. citizens and individuals with longstanding ties to the U.S., often of Mexican descent, and sureños, more commonly made up of immigrants from southern California and south of the border, including Central America. Cruz-Zavala knew nothing of these divisions when he first got to California. As a freshman at a San Francisco high school dedicated to refugee and immigrant youth, his troubles only deepened. Unable to hide his Salvadoran dialect or speak English, he soon found himself on the receiving end of norteño harassment and beatdowns. “They thought I was from MS-13 or whatever, but I wasn’t nothing back then — I was a regular kid,” he said. The violence was jarring, prompting flashbacks to El Salvador. “I couldn’t believe the same thing was happening to me again here,” he said. “All that I did to leave my country to come and stay here with my dad, and then the same thing was happening to me again.”
Through an after-school program, Cruz-Zavala met other young people like himself: Central American kids from El Salvador and Honduras, adjusting to hostile new surroundings. They introduced him to a wider network. He made friends and found community. “I felt like I belonged to somewhere,” he said. Back at home, Cruz-Zavala and his father were clashing regularly and with growing intensity. “It was horrible,” he said. “Even to this day, now, I think we’ve barely started healing from those first mistakes that I did in the past.” Cruz-Zavala began drinking, getting high with his new friends, and getting into trouble at school. “The next thing you know, my life changed dramatically,” he said. “It got to the point that I didn’t even know what to do.”
Shortly before his 17th birthday, Cruz-Zavala was jumped into the MS-13 clique that ran the Mission District, known as 20th Street. “When I met these people, I didn’t even know that MS-13 was in San Francisco,” he said. What he did know, or at least thought, was that if he hung around with this new crew, he wouldn’t get his ass kicked anymore. “I kinda got tired of being the victim,” he said. “I got jumped in a gang so I can defend myself.”
The cycle is not uncommon, said Frankie Guzman, a lawyer and director of the Youth Justice Initiative at the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland. Guzman grew up in a sureño-dominated community outside of Los Angeles in the 1990s as the state’s hyperaggressive gang policing was reaching new heights. He cycled in and out juvenile and adult detention facilities before making his way to law school. Guzman now works with young people with backgrounds similar to his own. In 2017, he interviewed Cruz-Zavala and submitted a legal assessment of his background in his immigration case.
Obviously, not all immigrant kids join gangs, Guzman told me, “but many do, and those that do have a lot of the experiences that Walter experienced.” Low self-esteem, adverse childhood experiences, and immaturity are all common characteristics for gang-involved youth. Hostile immigration experiences can intensify feelings of displacement and powerlessness. “This condition of powerlessness will drive them to do things that make that not so,” Guzman said. Beyond physical protection, a gang can offer an alienated young person access to seemingly unobtainable resources and experiences: clothes, cash, and opportunities for socializing and romantic relationships. “These are not frivolous factors to a teenager,” Guzman said. “What society doesn’t give them, the gang does, and we blame them for that when that, to me, is a natural human response to a very common human condition.”
“These are not sophisticated criminals,” he said. “These are immature young people who do the very thing that will cause them more harm believing that it will protect them.”
Four years after he arrived in the U.S., that reality would come crashing down on Cruz-Zavala in ways he never could have imagined.
Asmall army amassed at an airfield on the edge of the San Francisco Bay in the predawn darkness of October 23, 2008. There were at least 300 local, state, and federal law enforcement officials on hand. ICE SWAT teams had flown in from across the country for the operation.
The sun was just beginning its rise when the raiders moved out — 16 teams riding in armored vehicles, 20 men each, hitting targets as choppers circled above. They pounded on doors and pulled men from their homes, checking them for tattoos.
In San Francisco, Joseph P. Russoniello, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, briefed the press on a 52-count indictment that charged 29 individuals, most of them members of the Mission District’s 20th Street clique, in a massive conspiracy that involved multiple murders and attempted murders, drug dealing, organized car theft, and witness tampering. Russoniello vowed to seek the “maximum possible penalties” in the crackdown, which for most of the defendants meant life in prison.
Flanked by San Francisco’s chief of police and the city’s district attorney, future Vice President Kamala Harris, Russoniello described the case as an effort to rescue vulnerable young people from the pull of MS-13, providing them with “alternatives to the often short-term gratification” of gang membership. The crackdown was “but one more steady step in the process of taking back our communities and giving young people the chance to make meaningful good long-life choices.”
The youngest defendant in the case was already in government custody when the raids kicked off. Cruz-Zavala had been arrested that summer on joyriding charges. Weeks before the arrest, the teenager made a decision that would alter the course of his life forever, visiting an apartment where a 20th Street leader known as “Bad Boy” was staying.
Bad Boy was older than most of the members, in his late 20s or 30s, Cruz-Zavala estimated. “We’d always look up to him,” he said. “He used to be giving us advice, ideas of what we’re supposed to be doing, and he was always pushing the issue for us to do a lot of things.” Among the things Bad Boy pushed for were tattoos. “You’ve been around in the game for too long,” he would tell the younger guys — it was time to show some commitment. “He was good,” Cruz-Zavala said. “He would play with your mind. He was a really smart guy and, you know, I was like 17 years old, 18 years old.” Using a homemade tattoo gun, Bad Boy etched MS-13’s initials into Cruz-Zavala’s chest. The tattoos would serve as an ID, Bad Boy told the young men, a lifelong testament to their affiliation.
“He gave a lot of minors tattoos at that time,” Cruz-Zavala said. “It wasn’t only me.”
The tattoo was still fresh when Cruz-Zavala was arrested in June 2008. Because he had recently turned 18, he was charged as an adult for joyriding, and because he had the initials of the Western hemisphere’s most notorious street gang inked into his pecs, he was also hit with a gang enhancement charge born out of the Street Terrorism and Enforcement Act. The first charge was dropped; Cruz-Zavala pleaded guilty to the second. He was shuttled into ICE custody, where the feds picked him up when the October raids happened. From there he was moved to a small, underground cell in the county jail. There he would remain, alone, for 23 and a half hours day, every day, for nearly three years.
Outside the jailhouse walls, the story of ICE’s Operation Devil Horns was major news. “It was our first big RICO case in our district,” Randy Sue Pollock, the court-appointed attorney who was assigned Cruz-Zavala’s case, told me. To this day, she said, precedents set in U.S. v Cerna, the official title of the case, are routinely cited in gang cases in the Northern District of California.
Through a translator, Pollock did her best to explain to Cruz-Zavala what was happening. It wasn’t easy. “He was just a young kid,” she said. Pollock’s client hardly came up in the government’s indictment. The most serious individual allegation against him was that he brandished a knife while members of his clique collected money from a drug dealer. Still, because it was a conspiracy case, the consequences he faced were devastatingly serious. Cruz-Zavala struggled to take it all in.
“I was young back then, 18 years old, barely, so when they took me to the court and they read my charges and everything, I’m like, these people’s crazy,” he said. “They can’t do that. Why they gonna give me life?”
Weeks turned to months. At night, Cruz-Zavala would stay up for hours reading. He would wake up the next morning, work out, and then begin drawing. “Before, I didn’t even know how to draw,” he said. Soon, he was pouring hours into images he created for himself and others at the jail. Art became a way to steady himself, but even the best of coping mechanisms have their limits. “I would get tired of doing the same thing every day. I would get tired of reading. I would get tired of working out. I would get tired of drawing,” Cruz-Zavala said. “Spending 23 hours and a half in a cell, every day, for more than two years — it’s not an easy thing to do.”
It was around the two-year mark when Cruz-Zavala’s thinking shifted. “These people, they’re really try to give me life in prison,” he thought. “This is actually happening.” He fixated on the things he missed out on growing up, because of where he came from and because of the decisions he made. “Eventually you start thinking, you know what, I’m gonna be here for a minute. This is my reality right now. This is my life. This little cell right here, this is what I am,” Cruz-Zavala said. “I started thinking for the first time in my life about life.”
As the years went by and the trial approached, new details came to light in the San Francisco conspiracy case. It was clear that ICE’s case leaned heavily on a confidential informant and before long, the informant’s name was known: Roberto Acosta, aka “Bad Boy.”
According to court filings, Acosta was 14 years old when he joined an MS-13 clique in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula. In the late 1990s, the U.S. began deporting large numbers of the gang’s rivals to the city. War ensued. Acosta rose through the ranks but was eventually slated for execution following an internal financial dispute. At one point, he reportedly refused an order to murder his pregnant wife and saw his teenage brother and sister killed in front of him. He took off for the U.S., arriving in San Francisco in late 2004, where he was picked up on a jaywalking charge. By mid-2005, he was working as an ICE informant, with his wife, child, and mother relocated to the United States courtesy of the U.S. government.
As the Operation Devil Horns trial approached, attorneys for the defendants filed a series of failed motions accusing ICE of entrapment. Identified in court records as “CI 1211,” Acosta was said to have “transformed the gang from a disorganized group [of] ‘paisas’” — normal people — into “a violent organization with stricter rules, a well-defined chain-of-command, and greater emphasis on violence.” In addition to pushing for more “shootings, robberies [and] attacks,” the informant allegedly focused his attention on the recruitment of new members and cementing their allegiance by personally giving them tattoos.
A cover story in SF Weekly detailed the impact of Acosta’s arrival on the Mission District’s 20th Street clique, reporting that he “tattooed more than a dozen members with MS-13 symbols” and quoting members who said that he threatened to kill them or their family members if they refused to join the gang. A Wall Street Journal examination of the relationship between ICE and its Operation Devil Horns informants said the agency’s conduct pointed to “bigger questions about how well government officials are controlling criminal cooperators.”
The most dramatic turn in the Acosta saga came on the eve of the trial, when the government charged its source with the federal crime of lying to law enforcement. Acosta’s handler revealed that his informant had failed to disclose the fact that he had committed or ordered eight murders in Central America before going to work for ICE. Acosta had copped to “a few murders” in 2008, but the statements he made in 2011 were more specific and numerous and meant that he had previously lied to ICE by saying he had disclosed all of his past criminal activity.
Though ICE’s star witness would not take the stand, the government nonetheless relied on the evidence he gathered as the foundation of its case. For Cruz-Zavala, the fact that Bad Boy was an informant with a trail of alleged killings to his name was difficult to comprehend. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I used to look up to him.” The trial was a grueling, five-month ordeal. “Walter celebrated his 21st birthday in trial, next to me,” Pollock said. In the end, Cruz-Zavala was the only defendant acquitted. Pollock remembers how swiftly he was ushered out the courtroom. Only later did she learn that he had been transferred back to ICE custody, where he would now be facing deportation.
For the veteran criminal defense attorney, visiting the immigration court where Cruz-Zavala’s case was being heard was disorienting. Life-altering decisions were being made, not just in Cruz-Zavala’s case but in all of the cases coming before the judge. Where were the court-appointed attorneys? In immigration court, she learned, there are none. The government was pointing to the alleged crimes for which Cruz-Zavala had just been acquitted as grounds for his detention and deportation. “Even though he’d walked out not guilty, they kept throwing up the whole case at him,” Pollock said. It was in that moment that Pollock did something she never does: She posted bail for a client, spending $10,000 of her own money. “I had to help him,” she said. “I couldn’t see him in ICE custody.”
Cruz-Zavala had much to be grateful for. Not long after his release, his mother and sister moved to the U.S. — Cruz-Zavala is the only member of his immediate family living in the U.S. who lacks legal immigration status. “I feel like that was maybe one of the happiest days of my life,” he said. “To spend one Christmas with them and a new year with them, it was one of the best experiences of my life.”
At the same time, nearly three years of isolation left their mark. Grocery stores were an issue in the early days. After years alone, the sheer number of other human beings in one place was overwhelming. “Everything was like a new experience to him,” Pollock said. “I provided help to him, but he was still on his own and that’s a lot for young kid who had been in custody for so long.”
While he was locked up, Cruz-Zavala requested and received permission to leave MS-13, and he hasn’t looked back since. Still, the experience colored his ability to reintegrate into society. Relationships built through his clique were the only relationships he had. “I got attached to some of them,” Cruz-Zavala said. “I considered some of them my friends.” The people who had taken him in were receiving life sentences. Survivor’s guilt seeped in. Cruz-Zavala felt alone even when he was with other people. He would drink and get high by himself, fixating on the years he couldn’t get back.
Before too long, Cruz-Zavala had collected five DUIs. In those days, he said, he lacked the education and language to recognize and articulate what he was feeling. “That’s the thing that I always have to explain to people,” he said. “Back then, when I was doing the things that I was doing, I didn’t really know that I actually got a problem.”
In January 2014, northern California’s Alameda County made history, becoming the first county in the state to devote a portion of its public defender’s office to immigration defense. At the head of the legal effort was Raha Jorjani, a former law professor and expert on the intersection of criminal justice and immigration enforcement. It was through that program that Jorjani first met Walter Cruz-Zavala.
The facts of Cruz-Zavala’s immigration case had changed considerably since his 2004 arrival. The DUIs clearly worked against him, as did the gang enhancement charge he pleaded guilty to in 2008. The Operation Devil Horns prosecution was a different matter. Cruz-Zavala’s name was linked to a high-profile case involving MS-13 members cooperating with law enforcement. Though he left the gang, he still bore its initials on his chest. Those facts alone would be enough to invite violence if he was deported back to El Salvador, by the gang itself or by the country’s notorious security forces. By law, the U.S. is prohibited from deporting people to countries where an immigration judge has determined that they are more likely than not to be tortured.
“All of these things make him more likely to be tortured in El Salvador,” Jorjani told me. From late 2016 into 2017, as she prepared his asylum case, Jorjani began digging deeper into Cruz-Zavala’s experience of solitary confinement. She was struck by his openness. “He doesn’t hide things,” she said. Their conversations were often painful. Jorjani believes that the process unsettled old demons. One night in the summer of 2017, after weeks of reliving some of his darkest days, Cruz-Zavala got exceptionally drunk, got into a shouting fight with neighbors, and then later accidentally shot himself in the knee. The police showed up and he was taken to the county jail. He was later convicted of felony possession of an unregistered firearm. Cruz-Zavala posted bail, not knowing that the sheriff’s department collaborated with ICE, and was immediately handed off to the immigration enforcement agency. He was later transferred to the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility in Bakersfield, a drab complex penned in with razor-wire and managed by the GEO Group, a major for-profit prison corporation.
With Cruz-Zavala in custody, the stakes and urgency of his immigration case increased exponentially. “That’s when the case really was live,” Jorjani said. Detention, by its nature, is advantageous to ICE prosecutors, with individuals held in exhaustingly difficult conditions with diminished access to legal and emotional resources.
While he was in ICE detention, Cruz-Zavala shared with Jorjani the secret he had carried his entire life: the abuse he suffered as a boy. Jorjani made it her mission to show the court that Cruz-Zavala was more than a list of offenses on a sheet of paper; he was a young man carrying profound trauma, core elements of which the U.S. government had a direct hand in creating. She collected expert witnesses who assessed Cruz-Zavala’s life story from all angles and included their testimony in a 350-page evidence packet.
Guzman, the expert on gang-involved youth, said he was “moved” by the conversation he had with Cruz-Zavala through the plexiglass of the ICE detention center. “He was able to very well articulate a lot of the trauma that he had experienced as a kid,” and he was able to do so without having had any therapy, Guzman said. “He was just a genuine guy who had suffered a lot, understood the impact that his upbringing had on his thinking, his behavior, his decisions, namely to join a gang once he got to California, and how solitary confinement and all of that trauma cumulatively impacted his thinking.”
Dr. Terry Kupers, a California psychiatrist and expert on the impacts of prolonged isolation, also interviewed Cruz-Zavala. According to Kupers’ testimony, the recommended practice for rehabilitating individuals who have spent extended periods in isolation is to first move them back into the general population so they can slowly reacclimate to being around people, then release them from custody, all while continually monitoring their mental well-being. Cruz-Zavala had received none of those things. The form of solitary confinement he experienced was “extremely harsh,” Kupers said, and he already had “quite a remarkable amount of trauma for one individual” when it began. Cruz-Zavala was “at very low risk of violence and crime in the community,” the psychiatrist testified. He advised alcohol treatment and psychotherapy to address past trauma.
Against the odds, Cruz-Zavala’s petition prevailed in May 2018, with immigration Judge Alison E. Daw granting him relief under the Convention Against Torture, which protects individuals from deportation on the grounds that their removal would more than likely result in torture. For Cruz-Zavala, it was a major win. Then came the appeal. ICE prosecutors have the power to file an unlimited number of appeals. They are not afraid to use it.
Cruz-Zavala’s case was turned over to the Board of Immigration Appeals, or BIA, for review. There it would sit for the next two years. After 11 months in detention, Cruz-Zavala sought a bond hearing, asking that the burden fall to the government to prove that he was a flight or public safety risk. Among the letters of support and dozens of documents he submitted was a plan to participate in an alcohol rehabilitation program.
In May 2019, Daw denied the requests, taking the position that Cruz-Zavala failed to prove that he was not a threat. She retired shortly thereafter. The following month, after 13 months of silence, the BIA finally weighed in, finding that Daw had failed to indicate which of the two forms of protection under the Convention Against Torture she intended to grant to Cruz-Zavala. The board did not challenge the findings or evidence in the case. It was effectively a clerical error. The BIA sent the case back to Daw’s replacement, Judge Patrick S. O’Brien. Appointed by former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2017, O’Brien, a former assistant chief counsel in ICE’s Office of Chief Counsel, was among a wave of new immigration attorneys brought on by the Trump administration. According to a Reuters analysis, former President Donald Trump “filled two-thirds of the immigration courts’ 520 lifetime positions” with judges who “disproportionately ordered deportation.”
O’Brien, too, found that Cruz-Zavala was deserving of protection from removal on the basis of likely torture. Again, ICE appealed. Cruz-Zavala spent another year locked up.
Unlike the separation between courts and prosecutors in the criminal justice system, ICE prosecutors, immigration judges, and the BIA all fall under the same branch of government, the executive. “Our immigration prosecutors and our immigration judges effectively have the same boss,” Jorjani said. In late March 2020, Cruz-Zavala stepped out of that circular network for the first time, filing a habeas petition before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In addition to his risk of exposure to Covid-19, he argued that his incarceration was illegal because his bond hearing had been unconstitutional. The court agreed, sending the case back to O’Brien with orders to conduct a “constitutionally compliant” hearing. According to court filings, an ICE prosecutor made a brief statement in the hearing that followed. Pointing to Cruz-Zavala’s criminal record, the government lawyer said he was a “danger to the community,” had been so “for many years,” and should not receive bond under any circumstances. The judge asked no questions of Cruz-Zavala or Jorjani regarding the prosecutor’s allegations. The government did not put on a witness. Cruz-Zavala’s bond was again denied.
It was around this time, Jorjani says, that the case took a turn for the surreal. In July, the BIA responded to the latest DHS appeal, ordering O’Brien to redo the case from top to bottom. The board cited no errors in fact to support the do-over, nor did it challenge the conclusion of two immigration judges that Cruz-Zavala would likely be tortured if he were deported. To Jorjani, the BIA’s message to the court was clear: Come to the conclusion that Walter Cruz-Zavala is not deserving of protection from deportation.
Evidently the message was received. On August 24, 2020, O’Brien issued a new decision: Cruz-Zavala was not in fact likely to be tortured if he was deported. O’Brien arrived at this conclusion by reviewing the same body of evidence that he and Daw had looked at before. O’Brien leaned heavily on a report in Cruz-Zavala’s packet published by researchers at Florida International University titled, “The New Face of Street Gangs: The Gang Phenomenon in El Salvador.” The study was prepared for the State Department. O’Brien highlighted its objectivity and detail, claiming that it showed that in El Salvador “very few gang members are attacked or injured by police, let alone tortured.”
According to the FIU experts who wrote it, the judge fundamentally misread the report. “Based on the presented evidence and our knowledge of current country conditions, it can be argued with certainty that Mr. Cruz-Zavala is more likely than not to be tortured in El Salvador,” the authors said in a sworn statement the following month. Salvadoran security forces “maintain a large database of individuals with a history of gang affiliation” that is “generally used to detain active and former gang members while committing human rights violations.” As a recent deportee with a known gang history, Cruz-Zavala was “likely to be immediately detained by the police and sent to prison,” the experts said. There was “an extremely high probability (more than 51%)” that he would be “killed as soon as he arrives to El Salvador either by security forces or gangs.”
The do-over order was unlike anything Jorjani had seen in more than 15 years of practicing immigration law. It was “egregious,” she said, and called the legitimacy of the entire system into question. “You can present a case with your hands tied behind your back — which is what presenting a case while you’re detained is like — and win,” she said, “and that doesn’t count for anything because they can order you to do it over again.”
Last summer, Walter Cruz-Zavala fell ill. He tossed and turned at night, unable to sleep. He asked to go to medical. On August 10, he tested positive for Covid-19. Within weeks, nearly everyone in his unit had the disease. The infection was not unforeseen. Cruz-Zavala and others in his unit, like ICE detainees around the country, had staged hunger strikes to protest the risks that ICE’s operations were creating.
“People started getting scared,” he said. “They kept taking people out, bringing new people into the facility, and eventually people got sick.”
Though Cruz-Zavala recovered, Covid-19 cases continue to crop up at Mesa Verde and in ICE detention centers nationwide — according to the agency’s data, more than 12,00 people in ICE custody have tested positive for Covid-19 since the pandemic began. Nine have died and nearly 1,000 others are currently being held in isolation or are under close observation.
It was against this backdrop that Jorjani again asked the immigration court to order Cruz-Zavala’s release in September. He had been accepted into a full-time, in-patient, residential alcohol treatment program in Oakland and his probation officer, whose office was located just blocks from the facility, offered to double her supervision efforts. “In my letter dated April 23, 2020, I stated Probation would be conducting bi-weekly check ins with Mr. Cruz,” she wrote. “However, upon learning that the Immigration Court continues to be concerned with releasing Mr. Cruz to the community, I am committed to providing weekly check ins for as long as needed to further support consistent monitoring and supervision of Mr. Cruz.”
None of it was enough. Because O’Brien had vacated the protection against deportation, Cruz-Zavala was back at ground zero. It would take years to rebuild what he had lost. “[Cruz-Zavala] has the power to end his detention immediately,” ICE argued in September. “[He] could accept the August 24, 2020 decision as a final decision and be released from custody and removed from the United States.”
“It is his choice to remain detained,” a government lawyer said. “He should not blame anyone else for that choice or his past choices that led to his detention.”
In October, Jorjani filed a sweeping, 63-page writ of habeas corpus calling on the federal district court in northern California to assume jurisdiction over Cruz-Zavala’s case and order his immediate release. His ordeal had never been ruled on by an independent and neutral court. Jorjani hoped and expected that the district court would act swiftly and order his release, allowing him to pursue his immigration case as a free man. She also thought, at least at first, that a change in the White House might work in his favor.
On January 20, Biden’s first day in office, DHS announced a review of the rules that guide who the government prioritizes for immigration detention and deportation. Under Trump, that population included virtually every undocumented person in the U.S. Under Biden, the department’s acting secretary acknowledged that “DHS cannot respond to all immigration violations or remove all persons unlawfully in the United States.” Enforcement resources would be directed into three areas: national security, border security, and public safety.
Cruz-Zavala did not meet the initial criteria. Jorjani saw a glimmer of hope. Then, in February, DHS released a revised public safety criteria memo. It included a new provision singling out individuals who had been “convicted of an offense for which an element was active participation in a criminal street gang” — Cruz-Zavala’s 12-year-old gang enhancement conviction, handed down following his U.S. government-funded indoctrination into MS-13, fit the bill. In a briefing to reporters, senior DHS officials described the decision to add the gang provision as a part of the fiber of DHS. “It’s always been part of our approach to public safety,” one of the officials said.
It can be difficult to explain to those who have not experienced it, Jorjani argued, but in the United States there exists a parallel carceral system in which indefinite detention is wielded as a legal weapon, access to an attorney is not guaranteed, and the prosecutors and the judges are on the same team. Within that system, the government routinely holds people against their will on the basis of actions that already resulted in a sentence served or charges that were dropped. “There’s supposed to be something called double jeopardy in this country,” Jorjani noted. “We don’t punish you twice for the same crime.” Not only is that the effective result in cases like Cruz-Zavala’s, she argued, but the experience of indefinite detention itself is also often weaponized to achieve the government’s ends.
“The government’s tactic cannot be: wear someone down by torturing them in detention so that they give up a case that is hard for the government to otherwise win,” Jorjani said. And yet, she argued, that was precisely what was happening in Cruz-Zavala’s case. “The Department of Homeland Security understands that power and abuses it,” she said. “And nowhere is that truer than Walter’s case, where he has a meritorious claim. It’s so meritorious that he’s won it twice.”When we first began our interviews in February, Cruz-Zavala and Jorjani both believed that U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh’s decision would arrive any day, though there were troubling signs along the way. Five months after Jorjani filed Cruz-Zavala’s claim of ongoing unconstitutional detention, Koh announced that she would not hear oral arguments in his case. Not once in the nearly four years that he has been in ICE custody has Cruz-Zavala been able to speak to any of the judges making decisions about his freedom. They have never been in the same room. They have never looked him in the eye. For Jorjani, making sure that Cruz-Zavala was seen and heard as a full human being with a complex story was the whole point. Koh’s decision was a clear setback. Still, she believed that no independent judge considering the facts of Cruz-Zavala’s continued detention — his years in custody, the BIA’s glacial response to his appeals, the expert testimony regarding his trauma, his commitment to recovery, his acceptance into rehab, his probation officer’s vow to double his supervision — could come to the conclusion that he needed to remain locked up.
Late on the night of March 29, nearly six months after Cruz-Zavala filed his habeas petition, Koh returned her decision. She denied Cruz-Zavala’s core due process claims but agreed that his immigration judge had applied the wrong legal standard in denying him bond. Rather than ordering a new hearing, however, Koh instead ordered an immigration judge to reconsider the decision while applying the appropriate standard. It was effectively a denial in full, Jorjani said, because Koh’s ruling relied on the same judge — O’Brien — to revisit a question he had clearly already settled in his own mind. Jorjani called the order “shocking.”
Cruz-Zavala was shattered. He and Jorjani had poured all of their hope into the habeas effort. He was looking at the unfathomable reality of multiple years of continued ICE detention, versus deportation to a country where systematic torture and killing of people like him is entrenched, but where he would also have a slim chance at a free life. “At this point, Walter’s case represents a total justice failure,” Jorjani said. “It’s hard, I think, as a lawyer, to see these decisions and maintain a belief that Walter’s life matters to the court.”
There were levels to Jorjani’s despair. “The hardest part about all this is that Walter repeatedly sacrificed his own well-being by placing his faith in our justice system, a faith that an injustice shown would become an injustice remedied, but that’s not at all what happened,” she said. There was a personal component as well. Jorjani had spent countless hours listening Cruz-Zavala recount the most painful moments of his life. She had given interviews and participated in advocacy campaigns. She had done everything she could to show the court the person who she had come to know because, as she put it, “the system tries to keep out the humanity of people.” In the end, she had to get on the phone and explain to Cruz-Zavala that the one thing she had told him to hold on for had failed.
“It’s been one of the most intense and amazing experiences in my career to get to know Walter and to have the privilege and the honor of fighting alongside him,” she said. “I can’t even begin to summarize what he’s taught me about humility and grace and resilience and endurance and courage and patience.”
“I’m really grateful,” Jorjani said. “I’m really, really grateful to him for that.”
For the people who stood by him, Cruz-Zavala, too, felt a gratitude that he could scarcely articulate. “I don’t think that there’s any words that I could say to express what I feel about the people who’ve been helping me out all of these times — it’s just been amazing,” he said. He singled out Jorjani in particular. “I never tell her this,” he said, “but sometimes I feel like she believes in me more than I believe in myself.”
Throughout our conversations over the past few months, Cruz-Zavala was open and honest about his life, even the hard parts. That remained true the last time we spoke, though the exhaustion and pain in his voice was evident. “This has been torture for me, mental torture for me, and I don’t want to keep suffering,” he said. “I don’t want to keep going through this type of pain. I just want to live.” Searching for the right words, he said, “I don’t know if you know about feelings where you feel so angry about something, so frustrated, that you even want to cry because there’s nothing you can do about it and you feel you like you’ve tried everything, done everything, and nothing works, and everything is a no.” Those were the feelings he was wrestling with now. “It gets to the point where it breaks my heart,” he said, “breaks my spirit.” I asked what he would say to the judges who he was never able to speak to, if given the chance. “I think I would say to the judge that honestly, I really believe, I truly believe, that I deserve another chance to stay in this country,” he said. “I feel like I have so much to still give.”
Life, Cruz-Zavala said, is based off experience. Some people can recognize when others make mistakes and have the foresight not to go down those roads themselves. “There’s people like that,” he acknowledged. “But in general, it’s life, you know? Life is living, making mistakes, learning, and becoming a better person,” he said. “Life is not a book that you read about it and you’re gonna learn about it. You actually gotta live life to learn.”
In late April, Cruz-Zavala’s family requested permission to visit with him while he worked through one of the most difficult and consequential decisions of his life. ICE denied the request, citing its Covid-19 safety protocols.
The dog, similar to the Boston Dynamics dog pictured above, sparked an immediate backlash, with critics noting police dogs have been traditionally used to suppress and intimidate communities of color. (photo: Reuters)
New York Mayor Calls Off 'Creepy, Alienating' Police Robo-Dog
Emma Bowman, NPR
Bowman writes: "After a public outcry, a robotic dog once hailed by the New York Police Department a high-tech crime-fighting sidekick is getting sent back to its owner."
The police canceled a $94,000 contract with the robot's maker Boston Dynamics following a backlash tied to calls to cut the police budget and concerns of police militarization and abuses of force.
The department introduced the public to the "Digidog" in December after acquiring the device in a test program.
"This dog is going to save lives, protect people, and protect officers and that's our goal," NYPD Technical Assistance Response Unit Inspector Frank Digiacomo said in an interview with the local ABC station.
The purpose of the Boston Dynamics "Spot" robot, an agile 70-pound hound able to climb stairs and survey hazardous areas, was to help officers better identify dangers at crime scenes and keep officers safe.
Mayor Bill de Blasio is "glad the Digidog was put down," a spokesperson told ABC7. "It's creepy, alienating, and sends the wrong message to New Yorkers."
Critics have likened the machines to the robotic dogs featured in the TV series Black Mirror. In fact, the dystopian show's creators drew inspiration from Boston Robotics videos in depicting a nightmarish military state for the 2017 episode "Metalhead."
In February, a viral video of the futuristic dog — seen patrolling a Bronx neighborhood after officers responded to a hostage situation — sparked controversy. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who then called it a "robotic surveillance ground drone," praised activists in her district who pushed back on the tech to demand that police funds should instead go toward investments like school counseling.
"When was the last time you saw next-generation, world class technology for education, healthcare, housing, etc consistently prioritized for underserved communities like this?" she tweeted.
John Miller, NYPD's deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, defended the department's use of the robot in an interview with The New York Times this week. The Digidog keeps officers out of harm's way, he said, and it's cheaper and more advanced than the robots the force has used in the past.
Miller said that the department had previously sought to test the device until its contract was up this August. But plans changed, he said, after the robotic dog became a "target" in arguments over race and surveillance.
The Times reported that the lease was cut short last week: "In response to a subpoena from City Councilman Ben Kallos and Council Speaker Corey Johnson requesting records related to the device, police officials said that a contract worth roughly $94,000 to lease the robotic dog from its maker, Boston Dynamics, had been terminated on April 22."
As Wired reported last month, Kallos has proposed a bill to ban the NYPD from using "weaponized" robots. That legislation would not prevent the deployment of devices like the Boston Dynamics Spot, which the company said buyers must agree to not use as a weapon.
Law enforcement has used armed robots before, prompting concerns of potential misuses. In 2016, Dallas police officers used a "bomb robot" to remotely detonate an explosive in order to kill a sniper who killed five officers.
Although New York City has put its Digidog to rest, police departments in Massachusetts and Hawaii are also testing the device.
Two Uyghur women enter a highly surveilled bazaar in Hotan, in China's northwest Xinjiang region. (photo: Greg Baker/Getty Images)
Demanding an End to Uyghur Oppression
Sean R. Roberts and Matthew Byrd, Jacobin
Excerpt: "We can oppose the saber-rattling and militarism of the US's China hawks without downplaying the oppression of the Uyghur people."
he Uyghurs — a predominantly Muslim people who inhabit China’s northwestern Xinjiang province and consider the region their homeland — have long had a tumultuous relationship with the various iterations of the Chinese state that have governed them since the mid-eighteenth century.
In 2017, that relationship entered a new and more terrifying phase as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — eyeing the region’s economic potential and drawing on Islamophobic, “War on Terror” rhetoric — began to construct a series of mass internment camps that, according to a 2018 study, are believed to hold over a million people in arbitrary detention.
The CCP has built a repressive apparatus that includes a panopticon of digital surveillance, family separation, forced birth control, and the physical destruction of Uyghur communities. As scholar David Brophy wrote in Jacobin in 2018, “More than at any point since its incorporation into the People’s Republic of China, Xinjiang today resembles occupied territory, and the party’s policies reveal an all-encompassing view of the Uyghurs as an internal enemy.”
Meanwhile, tensions have been steadily escalating between Washington and Beijing, with US hawks increasingly — and cynically — using the anti-Uyghur repression as just another means to saber-rattle. It is vitally important for the US left to understand the scale of the catastrophe being visited upon the Uyghurs — and doing what we can to stop it — while also refusing to play handmaiden to an ultra-hawkish turn in US foreign policy toward China.
Sean R. Roberts — a cultural anthropologist who has studied the Uyghur region for over three decades — has written a new book on the crisis, The War on the Uyghurs, which places its origins both in the Chinese state’s colonial relationship with the Uyghur people and the global War on Terror launched by the United States in 2001. Roberts talked to Jacobin contributor Matthew Byrd about those origins, why he considers the situation similar to the United States’ destruction of its indigenous populations, and what means might be used to end the crisis. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
What’s Happening In Xianjing
MB: What is the current situation for Uyghurs living in China?
SRR: What has been happening generally since 2017 appears to be continuing apace. By 2017 the repression targeting Uyghurs had been getting worse since 2009. But most of the state securitization of the region and racial profiling of Uyghurs had been focused in Uyghur-majority and rural regions, especially in the south of Uyghur territory.
Then in late 2016 and early 2017 we saw a sudden escalation of repression that targeted not only Uyghurs but also other indigenous peoples in the region, including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and others. This included the fortification of an already draconian system of electronic surveillance with ubiquitous police stations and checkpoints throughout urban spaces in the region. It also involved a campaign targeting Uyghur secular intellectuals, cultural figures, religious figures, and party officials, resulting mostly in the arrest of these people on the charges of “separatism,” “extremism,” and “terrorism.” This was followed by the disappearance of many less prominent civilians into extralegal internment camps which were framed as “reeducation” or “deradicalization” centers.
Internment was determined by a combination of evaluating one’s loyalty to the state — using a database that compiled surveillance on individuals, behaviors, connections, communications, and association with religious activities — as well as with quotas that came down from central authorities to local party organs. These two aspects have created an environment of fear.
The state is seeking to alter the Uyghur people by breaking their solidarity and severing their attachment with the territory of their homeland. This is being done by forced assimilation measures, forced language change, and the breaking up of social networks. At the same time, the state is transforming the terrain by demolishing or decommissioning mosques and religious pilgrimage sites, removing the Uyghur language from public spaces, and leveling entire Uyghur communities.
A critical part of this process involves thinning out the Uyghur population in the region to ensure they cannot voice concerns about this transformation. This is partly being accomplished by limiting births and promoting mixed-ethnic marriages. But perhaps a more prominent driver of these demographic changes has to do with the state’s large coerced labor program, sending Uyghurs to residential factories both inside and outside the region.
Some of those sent to factories are those who have been released from reeducation and mass internment camps. Others are merely rural Uyghur residents that the state wishes to move out of their villages to make way for development. While parents are placed in mass internment, prison, or residential labor programs, their children are being sent to residential boarding schools to be socialized in Chinese culture and language.
MB: In The War on the Uyghurs, you characterize this as the culmination of a settler-colonial project whose origins go back to the initial conquest of the Uyghur homeland by the Qing Dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century. Can you sketch out that history?
SRR: China initially conquered the Uyghur homeland in the mid-eighteenth century and ruled it as a dependency for a century, before being pushed out by local revolts in the 1860s.
You only see the type of colonialism usually associated with European states in the late nineteenth century. The Qing Dynasty conquered the region again in the 1880s and began a “civilizing mission” which included Han settlement. By most accounts it was a failure and the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, followed by a fragile Republican government that inherited the Qing Territory. Throughout this period, the region was loosely controlled by Han governors who had tenuous relationships with the central authorities and ran it as their own little feudal empire.
After the Chinese Revolution in 1949, it was unclear what was going to happen to the region. It could have ended up like the Mongolian People’s Republic, an independent Soviet satellite state. But eventually it was folded into the People’s Republic of China [PRC].
Since 1949 there has always been a drive by the PRC to integrate this region, but there hasn’t always been the capacity to do so. Initially, it tried the Soviet model of coopting local elites and governing through them. That ended in failure by the late 1950s, and then you had a series of chaotic mass social campaigns under Mao that didn’t allow the state to focus on this region in particular.
It was only in the early 1980s that the state really started thinking, “How do we incorporate this region into China?” and, “How do we define our nation? Is it a multicultural nation? A nation-state?”
There were a lot of very progressive ideas in the Chinese Communist Party generally and a lot of this affected the Uyghur region positively, including discussions about whether the region should have more substantive autonomy, more of a role for local peoples in governing and so on. But that began to end with the Tiananmen Square Massacre and, in particular, the fall of the Soviet Union.
From that time onward, the CCP began to look at what happened to the Soviet Union and determine how to prevent that from happening to China. They wrongly identified “ethnic self-determination” as one of the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union and started targeting any signs of a desire for self-determination — which throughout the 1990s, they referred to as “separatism.”
So the settler colonial process only really begins in the ’90s, which makes it much less drawn out than it seems if you’re first talking about this region becoming a part of modern China in the mid-eighteenth century.
MB: Media outlets have often labelled the forced labor camps as “the largest internment of an ethnic group since the Second World War.” The historical parallel you draw in the book, however, is not with the Holocaust but with the destruction of indigenous communities in the United States, Canada, and Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
SRR: The comparison that is most relevant to what is happening in China is the US expansion to the West, and probably Canada as well. It begins with the desire to expand American economic growth, and to do that in the nineteenth century meant the United States had to control more land, develop it, and settle it. In that process, indigenous peoples were viewed as at best superfluous and at worst an obstacle that had to be removed.
Starting in the 1820s you had the policy of Indian removal, which became increasingly draconian throughout the rest of the nineteenth century — to the point where you saw the United States trying to break the solidarity of Native American nations, employing all kinds of forced assimilation measures, and eventually quarantining them onto reservations.
When I was writing my book and looking at what was happening to the Uyghurs, I saw so many parallels, even in tactics. The attempt to break solidarity and identity seemed to be central to what the Chinese government was doing. There was also embedded in a lot of these policies a desire to remove people from their homeland and thin out their demographic footprint.
The residential boarding schools and the residential labor programs are very similar to policies imposed on Native Americans in nineteenth-century America. There’s a famous quote from the director of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
MB: And now it’s, “Kill the Uyghur, save the human.”
SRR: Exactly, and while we don’t see the rapid, wholesale killing of people like we did in the Holocaust, what we do see is an attempt to separate families, separate communities, forcibly assimilate people to the dominant culture, remove them from their land, sever their connection to that land, break their social capital and solidarity, and destroy their culture.
This is essentially a technique of pacifying a people, ensuring that they cannot pose any threat or resistance to whatever the state wants to do with their homeland. I use the term cultural genocide because of its associations with the removal of indigenous peoples. And I think that what we see right now in the Uyghur region is a lot like the process of cultural genocide elsewhere in the world from a century ago, but benefitting from high-tech forms of repression that are available now in the twenty-first century.
The Uyghurs and the US “War on Terror”
MB: A major theme in The War on the Uyghurs is the role that the US War on Terror played in creating the international environment where repression of the Uyghurs could rapidly escalate. How did this war launched in 2001 lead to Uyghurs being thrown in forced labor camps in 2017?
SRR: After the fall of the Soviet Union, a lot of liberal thinkers had very optimistic ideas of a future where the principles of human rights and democracy would be maintained by American leadership. The global War on Terror destroyed that illusion, as we saw the United States perpetrate mass human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary internment, mass involuntary surveillance — a lot of the things now happening in the Uyghur region.
Simultaneously, the War on Terror made the term a means of dehumanization, because if someone was labeled a “terrorist,” it suggested they were less than human, not worthy of any human rights. This opened a door where states could justify human rights abuses by saying such abuses were merely “combatting terrorism.”
It has also gradually fostered a generalized Islamophobia, where people are able to associate that same dehumanization of “terrorist” with any Muslim. We’ve seen this happen with the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia, and the Uyghurs in China. It’s a very dangerous source of dehumanization which has replicated the nineteenth-century idea of “savages” about subjects of colonialism. It says, “these people are less than human and the only way to bring them into civilization is to transform them into humans,” which is also assumed to be something you can’t completely do.
With the Chinese government, there was a quick pivot right after 9/11 to redefine what it had been calling “separatism” in the 1990s into “terrorism,” and to try to link Uyghurs with groups such as al-Qaeda. The United States was complicit in this, in 2002 recognizing a small group of Uyghurs in Afghanistan as a terrorist group and endorsing its addition to the UN’s consolidated list of terrorist organizations. This did a lot of damage to Uyghurs, as it justified a higher level of persecution inside China that was immune from international criticism.
MB: There were even Uyghurs held in Guantanamo Bay, correct?
SRR: Yes. The United States was using bounty hunters in Afghanistan and Pakistan to round up alleged or suspected terrorists. There were a group of Uyghurs who — due to a variety of different circumstances — ended up in Afghanistan. They weren’t going there to join “global jihad.” They were finding different ways to get out of China and go somewhere that the Chinese government wouldn’t be able to catch them. A lot of them intended to get to Turkey, which was known as a kind of safe haven for Uyghurs. When the US bombing began, a lot of these people fled across the mountains into Pakistan, and a large group of them were sold to the US military by bounty hunters.
The US military brought them to Guantanamo Bay and imprisoned them for years, with the last Uyghur detainee being released in 2013. They were repeatedly questioned, and the US even allowed Chinese interrogators to come and interview them as part of an agreement on joint counterterrorism operations.
I actually talked to one young Uyghur man who was repatriated to Albania after being released. He was eighteen when he was brought to Guantanamo. He was trying to get to the United States to study and went to Pakistan to get a US visa, and a friend of his convinced him to go see Afghanistan.
He showed up in the country on September 12, 2001 with no idea what had happened the day before. He ended up at a Uyghur encampment which he didn’t see as a terrorist training center or related to any kind of organization but was probably in some ways connected to Häsän Mäkhsum, a Uyghur who I talk about in the book as having this idea of creating an insurgency to liberate the Uyghur homeland from China and also ended up in Afghanistan.
It’s Kafkaesque to read the interviews the US military did with Uyghur detainees, because many reported never having even heard of Osama Bin Laden or al-Qaeda before.
MB: As you mentioned, the War on Terror kicked off a global wave of Islamophobia that has touched France, Denmark, Israel, India, Sri Lanka, and beyond. When did this wave arrive in China?
SRR: It didn’t arrive immediately after 9/11. For most Chinese citizens, they didn’t really know what to associate this new idea of “terrorism” with. You probably had people who, over time, watching the news about the War on Terror, were thinking, “Oh, maybe Muslims are a real threat.” But from 2002 to 2008, there were no reports of violence in the Uyghur region of China, which belied the question of whether there really was this “existential terrorist threat” that the Chinese government faced.
Uyghurs used to be exoticized as people who liked to sing and dance, and were maybe dangerous in the sense of criminality, similar to racist stereotypes of African Americans in the United States. For example, in 1990s Beijing, Uyghur enclaves were popularly seen as places where you could get illegal narcotics. But that really changed in 2008 during the Beijing Olympics. A group of small, under-resourced Uyghurs in Pakistan — who posed no threat to China — began making videos threatening the games. This was the first time you had the idea of Uyghurs as an “existential threat” enter the imagination of regular Chinese citizens.
The Uyghurs shifted from this group that was seen as inferior, semi-criminal, and exotic to an existential threat. That ramped up the next summer in 2009, because you had riots in Ürümqi, the capital city of the Uyghur region, which involved both Uyghur-on-Han violence and Han-on-Uyghur violence. This erupted out of a peaceful demonstration by Uyghur youth — protesting the murder of two Uyghurs working in a toy factory in Shaoguan by their Han coworkers — that was violently put by down law enforcement.
This ethnic violence had nothing to do with terrorism or Islamic extremism, but it was the most violent event involving Uyghurs in China up to that point and led to significant demonization of Uyghurs. In the mind of many Han that I’ve spoken to, that event more than anything else defines their idea of Uyghur terrorism, even though it was essentially a civil disturbance that was an outcome of massive state-led development in the region and the pressures that created more than anything else.
MB: It’s not a central thread in the book, but you do mention that the CCP’s economic aspirations for Xinjiang province are a significant driver of the escalating repression. What are those aspirations, and why do they not include the Uyghurs?
SRR: In the 1990s, as the Chinese government started to focus on exporting consumer products abroad, the state began to understand that the Uyghur homeland was a significant region to develop because it had all of these overland routes to different markets. If you look at it on a map, most of its borders are outward facing, with routes going throughout the former Soviet Central Asian Republics on to Europe, going down to South Asia in Afghanistan, India, and through Pakistan down to the Persian Gulf. In some ways, the Belt and Road Initiative, at least the “Road” part of it, came out of this realization that the Chinese state was making about the importance of this region. It became an integral part of the strategy under Xi Jinping for promoting Chinese economic expansion globally.
At the same time, you had some of the same dynamics that you had in the United States in the nineteenth century. It’s ridiculous to call China anything but a capitalist country. And there’s been a realization that the development of the Uyghur homeland as an industrial base is something that will create economic growth. Some of these coerced residential labor programs seem to also be about making the Uyghur region a significant production hub. We’ve seen the proliferation of factories in the region — particularly in the apparel industry, as this region is the source of most of China’s cotton.
It again can be compared to the Native American example where, on the one hand, the indigenous population doesn’t necessarily want the area they see as their homeland developed by what they perceive as outsiders. And secondly there’s this dehumanization that has taken place, where Uyghurs are seen as inferior and incapable of participating in this new kind of development. Over the last several years, Uyghur intellectuals have been put in “reeducation centers” to be trained to work in apparel factories. So, they become a part of the economic machine, but at the very lowest rung.
What Can Be Done?
MB: The US government has started to employ more rhetorical opposition to China’s anti-Uyghur policies. However, the United States’ own history of cultural genocide means any US effort to lead a coalition of nations — many of whom have direct experience with the brutal consequences of US empire — would lack any moral credibility. How should ordinary people outside of China — particularly on the Left — address this situation?
SRR: I’m really hoping for more global grassroots advocacy on the issue, particularly focused around consumer advocacy.
MB: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar led several members of Congress in drafting letters to the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, Gap, and other companies demanding they stop using forced Uyghur labor in their supply chains.
SRR: Right, in this day in age, that kind of advocacy can be powerful.
As my colleague Darren Byler pointed out to me, when engaging on this issue, critics on the Left also have to understand that Uyghurs have a very small diaspora population and are less concerned with articulating a leftist critique of what is happening to them than with stopping it.
With that said, there are some left-leaning groups now emerging that have the type of strategy I mentioned. Groups like the Uyghur Solidarity Campaign, a leftist group in the UK. It is not necessarily an ethnic Uyghur group, but they have supporters from the Uyghur community and have done some campaigning targeting corporations that are complicit in the abuses against Uyghurs. There’s also the End Uyghur Forced Labor Coalition in the United States.
Thwaites glacier acts as a buttress for 10 percent of the ice that covers Antarctica. (photo: The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration)
Antarctic 'Doomsday Glacier' May Be Melting Faster Than Was Thought
Matthew Taylor, Guardian UK
Taylor writes: "An Antarctic glacier larger than the UK is at risk of breaking up after scientists discovered more warm water flowing underneath it than previously thought."
Study finds more relatively warm water is reaching Thwaites glacier than was previously understood
n Antarctic glacier larger than the UK is at risk of breaking up after scientists discovered more warm water flowing underneath it than previously thought.
The fate of Thwaites – nicknamed the doomsday glacier – and the massive west Antarctic ice sheet it supports are the biggest unknown factors in future global sea level rise.
Over the past few years, teams of scientists have been crisscrossing the remote and inaccessible region on Antarctica’s western edge to try to understand how fast the ice is melting and what the consequences for the rest of the world might be.
“What happens in west Antarctica is of great societal importance,” said Dr Robert Larter, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey and principal investigator with the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, the most ambitious research project ever carried out in Antarctica. “This is the biggest uncertainty in future sea level rise.”
The ITGC’s $50m research drive has sent teams of scientists to the region to use the latest scientific tools to better understand the speed of the melting and the stability of the glacier.
This month one of the ITCG’s teams, which had managed to get an uncrewed submarine under the front of Thwaites for the first time, published a study showing more relatively warm water was reaching the glacier than previously thought, triggering concerns of faster melting.
Anna Wahlin, a professor of oceanography at the University of Gothenburg who led the study, said the findings suggested that the fate of the glacier and the west Antarctic ice sheet would be sealed in the next two to five years. “The coming years will be crucial … they will determine what happens to this glacier,” she said.
Wahlin said the front of the Thwaites glacier was resting on a number of “pinning points” under the sea. But as relatively warm water from the deep ocean increased the melting, she said, these would be lost, breaking up the ice and allowing warm water further under the ice. This would speed up the flow of the glacier into the sea.
“It could be that once that happens everything falls apart and this is just the beginning of some quite dramatic change … but if it doesn’t happen now I think we can be more confident that it is not going to happen as the worst-case scenarios,” Wahlin said.
The worst-case scenarios for Thwaites are grim. It is the widest glacier on the planet, more than 1km deep and holds enough ice to raise the sea level by 65cm.
Ice loss has accelerated in the last 30 years and it now contributes about 4% of all global sea level rise. Experts say this could increase dramatically if the ice at the front of Thwaites breaks up, with knock-on effects for other glaciers in the area.
To heighten scientists’ concerns, west Antarctica has been one of the fastest-warming place on Earth in the past 30 years, and since 2000 it has lost more than 1tn tons of ice.
Last year, a team of British scientists discovered cavities half the size of the Grand Canyon under Thwaites that, like decay in a tooth, allow warm ocean water to erode the glacier, internally accelerating melting. And because a lot of the ground on which the glacier sits is below sea level, it is thought to be particularly vulnerable to melting as warmer water encroaches further under the ice inland.
Larter said: “The bed gets deeper upstream and there is a glaciological theory that says this is potentially a very unstable situation … it is a very scary scenario when you first hear it, but there are various negative feedback scenarios that might counter it.”
He said if the glacier’s “pinning points” were lost in the next few years it would start to flow faster “and put more ice into the sea”. But he said the question no one could currently answer was exactly how much extra ice will go into the sea if the glacier begins to break up.
“That is a tricky question,” said Larter. “I think I would have to say come back in a couple of years.”
He added: “Nobody knows how it is going to respond to persistent warming – we don’t know because in human history we have never seen it happen. We are trying in every way we can to get a handle on what is going to happen.”
Ella Gilbert, a research scientist at the University of Reading, said what was happening in the polar regions demanded an urgent response from the international community.
“The polar regions are the canary in the coalmine – they are the symbol of climate change,” said Gilbert, who was a joint author of a recent study warning of the catastrophic impact of global heating on Antarctic ice.
“We really do need to minimise our emissions because if we lose the polar regions, not only are we going to amplify climate change … it will contribute to sea level rise which affects everyone around the globe.”
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