20 June 21
#$100DonationsMatter! — Hard Without Them.
Again people are trying to save RSN with ten dollar bills. They need some help from the people who can afford a little more. Trump is gone (kind of) and so are the $100 donations. That’s silly.
The fight continues. The funding must too.
Who can donate a hundred?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
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CA 95611
19 June 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
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Garrison Keillor | I Have Something to Say: Is That a Problem?
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes:
t’s a strange world we live in when a Pekingese wins Top Dog honors at the Westminster Dog Show, a furball beating out a whippet and a sheepdog. I read the story twice and it said nothing about the criteria except “showmanship,” which is pretty far-fetched when referring to a lapdog, a dog designed to be a pillow. A whippet is a racer, a sheepdog herds livestock, and a Pekingese simply grows billows of hair that might be, who knows, made into wigs.
But this is the world we live in. Evidently the dog showed a lot of attitude and this impressed the judges, despite the animal’s lack of useful skills. Huskies pull the sled that brings the vaccine to the Arctic village, St. Bernards carry cannisters of warm liquids to fallen mountain climbers and assist them to safety. German shepherds guard the perimeter of the airbase and rip the throats of enemy spies attempting to steal nuclear secrets. Golden retrievers locate lost children. Border collies can be trained to carry crucial messages through a snowstorm to a distant outpost. Doberman pinschers are useful in a pinsch. A Pekingese is simply a furry stuffed dog who happens to poop.
If attitude is now the all-important quality, then Donald J. Trump will win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He knows more about chemistry than all chemists put together. Ask him, he’ll tell you. About one-fourth of the country imagines he won the 2020 dog show over the Irish wolfhound who is in the White House and doing the work.
“What’s your point?” you say. “Get to the point.” I was just about to when you interrupted me. The point is that the country needs to honor competence over attitude. I say this, having come through a small but interesting medical encounter during which competence — knowing how to analyze the problem, arrive at a reasoned plan to deal with the problem, and how to describe the process to the patient — is front and center. The neurologist comes to my little ER alcove and tells me what the high-tech tests have shown and for fifteen minutes I am the focus of high-grade science and am reassured that life will go on. I admire this more than I care about his hair.
The country is in love with attitude and self-expression. I grew up when children were shushed and our parents were self-effacing, reticent to a fault, and it’s rather sweet to see the self-expression available to people today. Never mind Twitter and Instagram, think about the sheer variety of coffee cups in your cupboard today. Back in my day, we had identical beige cups we got as premiums at the gas station and now we have cups with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sayings by Thoreau, Monet’s water lilies, cartoons, nasty retorts, come-ons. A nice young woman talks to me at a party, wearing a black T-shirt that says, “I look like I’m listening but I’m waiting for someone else” and she is holding a coffee cup that says “Bad girl. Is that a problem?” Her grandmother is a friend of mine and sent her a book I wrote and she is telling me, in a vague way, that she liked it. The T-shirt and the coffee cup are only attitude accent pieces, so she won’t be taken for granted, which is fine by me, but what I really want to know is: what do you do that you care about? Seriously. What is your calling these days?
When I was Bad Girl’s age, I wore a beard, a tweed jacket, jeans, and smoked unfiltered smokes to create an intellectual air about me, but I was a fake. I used CliffsNotes to write a term paper about Moby-Dick, which I’d only read up to page 37, six pages of fake critical intelligence for which I received a B-minus, pure humbug and monkeytalk. My real education was working as a parking lot attendant at 6 a.m. winter mornings on a huge gravel lot on a bluff over the Mississippi, waving cars to park in straight lines, chasing down the freelancers and bullying them back to where they belonged. I believed in creativity but in a parking lot it creates chaos so I embraced authoritarian measures. Enlightening. I was lazy in class but discovered I was a hard worker at heart, menial jobs were up my alley, and that leads to this, writing a short essay about being real. Don’t be a Pekingese. Bring the vaccine. Find lost children.
Images and videos of the riot show individuals associated with a range of extreme and far-right groups and supporters of fringe online conspiracy theories. (photo: Getty Images)
New Videos Underscore the Violence Against Police at the January 6 Capitol Riot
Meg Anderson, NPR
Anderson writes: "The Justice Department has released a trove of videos, including police body-worn camera footage, allegedly showing assaults against police officers defending the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6."
The videos, made available after NPR and other media organizations filed a legal motion for their release, are further evidence of the violent nature of the Capitol riot and are cited as evidence in the assault cases against Thomas Webster and Scott Fairlamb.
Though the storming of the Capitol was widely covered across virtually all news media and live-streamed by many of the people there, several Republican lawmakers have sought to play down the violence that happened in an attack that left five people dead.
But despite the GOP rhetoric, the charges against defendants like Webster and Fairlamb are not an anomaly. Rather, they are part of a larger pattern of violence wrought that day, particularly against the largely outnumbered police officers who were there. Of the more than 500 people now charged in relation to the storming of the Capitol, at least 96 of them, or nearly 1 in 5, are accused of committing acts of violence, according to a database created and maintained by NPR of all the people charged in the riot.
According to court documents, Webster is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and retired New York City Police Department officer. He is facing seven charges for his alleged involvement in the Capitol riot and has pleaded not guilty on all counts. He is among at least 71 other rioters, or around 14% of all those charged, who appear to have military or law enforcement backgrounds, according to NPR's database.
In a 56 second video cited in Webster's case, prosecutors say Webster can be seen in a red, white and black jacket approaching a metal barricade. The officer's body-worn camera footage, which is also described in court documents, shows Webster allegedly bursting through the crowd, carrying a large flagpole with a U.S. Marine Corps flag attached to it. In the video, prosecutors say he can be heard yelling: "You f****** piece of s***. You f****** Commie motherf****** ... Come on, take your s*** off. Take your s*** off."
Later, Webster can allegedly be seen shoving the metal gate into the officer and lunging toward him, striking at him with the flagpole several times. Prosecutors say he then broke through the barricade, and charged the officer with clenched fists, knocking him to the ground. In an interview with the FBI detailed in court documents, the officer who was assaulted said that he was choked by his own chin strap and was unable to breathe during the time he was on the ground.
In the case against Fairlamb, the Justice Department released four videos, outlined in court documents. According to local news reports, Fairlamb is the owner of the Fairlamb Fit fitness gym in Pompton Lakes, N.J. In May 2020, Fairlamb said his business was struggling to survive during the pandemic and announced plans to reopen his gym despite New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy's stay-at-home order. "He has overstepped his boundaries and it's time for these gyms... that are essential to open up," Fairlamb told CBS New York of the governor's action. NPR was not able to confirm whether Fairlamb's business is still in operation. Fairlamb is facing 12 charges related to the insurrection. In April, a judge ruled that Fairlamb should remain detained until his trial.
In one short video, Fairlamb allegedly appears underneath some scaffolding, where — in selfie mode — he shrieks into the camera and then yells "We ain't f***ing leaving either. We ain't f***ing leaving." In another short selfie video posted on Facebook, Fairlamb can allegedly be seen walking toward the Capitol building carrying a baton and saying "What [do] patriots do? We f***in' disarm 'em and then we storm the f***in' Capitol."
In two other videos, one taken from the point of view of the crowd and another from police body-worn camera footage, Fairlamb can allegedly be seen wearing a brown camouflage jacket and approaching a line of officers from Washington, D.C.,'s Metropolitan Police Department. In the video, the man identified by prosecutors as Fairlamb walks alongside the officers and aggressively gets close to their faces, asking them if they're American. Fairlamb goes off-camera for a moment and when he reappears, another officer is walking past him. Fairlamb allegedly says "don't touch me," shoves the officer away, and then punches the officer in his face shield.
Attorneys for both Fairlamb and Webster could not be reached.
Ms. Opal Lee has been celebrating and advocating for Juneteenth since she was a child. 'We were doing Juneteenth celebrations like they were like Christmas.' (photo: Don's Photography)
The Grandmother of Juneteenth on What the Holiday Means to Her
N. Jamiyla Chisholm, Colorlines
Chisholm writes: "At age 94, Ms. Opal Lee, who is lovingly called the 'Grandmother of Juneteenth,' has no time to slow down her Juneteenth activism. The native Texan, who was born in 1926, has been celebrating the holiday for decades, and pushing Congress and the White House to make it a national holiday, which President Joe Biden signed into law on July 17."
Activist, Ms. Opal Lee, talks to Colorlines about the significance of Juneteenth and why its history should never be forgotten.
t age 94, Ms. Opal Lee, who is lovingly called the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” has no time to slow down her Juneteenth activism. The native Texan, who was born in 1926, has been celebrating the holiday for decades, and pushing Congress and the White House to make it a national holiday, which President Joe Biden signed into law on July 17. Born in Marshall and raised in Fort Worth, Lee grew up commemorating June 19, 1865 every year — a day that many call “Emancipation Day,” as it marked the official end of slavery for African Americans in Texas — with community parties. Even though Texas made Juneteenth a statewide holiday in 1980, Lee and many others would like the entire nation to honor the day that celebrates the end of slavery.
In 2016, at age 90, Lee launched a walking campaign, from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness. “It’s not a Black thing. It’s not a white thing,” Lee told Blavity, in 2019. “It’s just the right thing.” Fast forward to the 2020s, and the former teacher wants everyone in the country to understand the nasty ripple effects that slavery has on everyone and to honor Juneteenth with the fanfare and recognition she believes it deserves.
Consequently, Lee has become a cause célèbre and her efforts have undoubtedly raised awareness. Last year, The New York Times profiled her efforts. The same day the story was published, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) introduced H.R.7232, Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, with overwhelming Democratic support. Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) revisited the case this past February, where it passed through the Senate. Also in February, Lee was awarded Visit Fort Worth’s 2021 Hospitality Award for her activism (watch the video below). In addition to Lee’s signature Juneteenth 2.5-mile walk, she will also join musicians Pharrell Williams and H.E.R. at Variety’s Changemakers Summit, on June 17-18.
As someone who has witnessed many changes around Juneteenth over the decades — from Texas being the lone state that acknowledged it to a proposed Juneteenth bill now reaching the House and President Joe Biden’s desk- Lee’s advocacy represents a historical piece of the Black community’s struggle in the U.S., which is to never forget history. Lee is a living history; a national educator. Lee spoke to Colorlines about what Juneteenth means to her and why she’s fighting to make it as significant as July 4.
Ms. Opal Lee as told to Colorlines:
I tell people, we didn’t know what a white person looked like, except for the man who would come in his car to sell you linen, clothing, dishes and all that kind of stuff. There was a store at the end of our street called Miranto’s Grocery Store. And Mr. Miranto and his family didn’t look white to me so I didn’t think they were. All the people I knew in Marshall were Black. Then we moved to Fort Worth and things changed.
I learned about Juneteenth in Marshall. We were doing Juneteenth celebrations like they were like Christmas. We’d go to the fairgrounds and there would be parades, music and food and games. It was an all-day affair on the 19th day of June. I don’t remember being told why we were celebrating, but it was a glorious day.
I learned about the significance of Juneteenth when we moved to Fort Worth and I had a mentor named Lenora Rolla. Together, with others, we started the Tarrant County Black Historical & Genealogical Society. There was a group who put on the Juneteenth activities, and their idea was to make money and share it with the nonprofits. But they found it was so costly to put on the festivals that they chose not to do it anymore and the Historical Society started doing Juneteenth festivals. One of those times, we had some 30,000 people together across a three-day period, 10,000 people a day, at Sycamore Park.
It was through the Historical Society that I learned about the significance of Juneteenth. I learned that it was two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation that the enslaved in Texas found out they were free. Now, they knew it because they had what was called “watch night” services on New Year’s Eve. They had watched and waited for freedom. And when it came, a general, Gordon Granger, with maybe 7,000 Colored troops, made his way to Galveston and began to tell the troops to tell people that the enslaved were free. Gordon Granger nailed that General Order Number 3 to the door of what’s now Reedy Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Galveston. When those people came in from their labor and somebody read that to them, they started celebrating and we’ve been celebrating ever since.
Once I learned the history of Juneteenth, I was hooked. I wanted to share it with everybody. I joined a group called the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. The Rev. Ronald Myers, who is a minister, medical doctor, and a jazz musician, is responsible for celebrations being in more than 47 of the 48 states that celebrate now. Since Texas made Juneteenth a statewide holiday in 1980, we are letting people know that we are addressing disparities. Homelessness is one of them. We work on joblessness and jobs; that two different groups could be doing the same job and get different pay. The health disparities. I can go to the hospital and get what I need but you can’t. And climate change, climate change, climate change. The scientists have told us that we need to do better than what we’re doing and I embrace this. In fact, I believe if we don’t do something about climate change, we’re all going to Hell in a hand basket.
There are also the educational components. We have something called “I’m Following You,” where we show people how to buy a home, how to straighten up their credit. We get the children of all nationalities together and they practice music for a week. Then they do a concert of the different songs they’ve learned from the different ethnic groups. The children were also given 12 freedoms gained. When the enslaved were freed, they gained the opportunity to learn to read and write. They were free to name themselves. They were free to not let their children be taken from them. They were free to buy property. Twelve freedoms they gained and 12 is what was given to the 800 children who then created drawings about these freedoms.
We also don’t want people to think it’s a Black thing, or a Texas thing because it’s not. None of us are free until we’re all free. And we aren’t free yet.
They’re just too many disparities. Last September, we took 1.5 million signatures to Congress and we proposed taking another million signatories to them this Juneteenth. Each one of us could be a part by going to Opalswalk2dc.com and giving us the signatures that we need. Congress are the busiest cats on the Hot Tin Roof cover and we don’t need them to put Juneteenth to the back burner. If we have to do Juneteenth every day of the cotton picking year, we have got to get this bill passed. And we almost had something going with Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who called for a vote in the Senate [last year]. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) proposed discarding Columbus Day and having Juneteenth instead and it didn’t pass, when he could have gone along with Cornyn, making it unanimous in the Senate, he dissented instead. Well, I was at the press conference in the spring, and Cornyn authored another bill to have Juneteenth made into a national holiday, as did Sheila Jackson Lee, which are the two bills we’re pushing. Everyone needs to let their Congress people know that they, too, want Juneteenth to be a national holiday and that it’s not just one little old lady in tennis shoes running around talking about Juneteenth.
Juneteenth is a bridge that should be celebrated from the 19th to the Fourth of July. And we weren’t free on the Fourth of July. So if you’re going to celebrate freedom, let it be celebrated for everybody. Then, let’s address the things that need to be addressed, together.
Activists rallying to defend DACA in Washington, D.C. (photo: Andrew Stefan/RSN)
Internal Documents: ICE Discussed Punishing Immigrant Advocates for Peaceful Protests
Jose Olivares and John Washington, The Intercept
Excerpt: "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement monitored immigrant advocacy organizations engaged in First Amendment-protected activity around a highly contentious immigration detention center in Georgia, according to documents obtained by the advocacy groups and shared with The Intercept."
Internal documents show how ICE surveilled immigrant advocates’ protest activities — and floated retaliating against them for it.
.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement monitored immigrant advocacy organizations engaged in First Amendment-protected activity around a highly contentious immigration detention center in Georgia, according to documents obtained by the advocacy groups and shared with The Intercept. The public records show that ICE kept track of the groups’ nonviolent protests and social media posts, at one point suggesting that the agency might retaliate by barring visitations by one organization.
Internal ICE records and emails, as well as a deposition by an ICE officer in a court case, show the agency referring to an advocacy group as a “known adversary” and closely surveilling the immigration and civil rights activists’ activities, both online and in person.
“ICE’s pattern of surveilling and targeting immigrant rights organizers demonstrates how afraid the agency is of being held accountable for its actions,” Alina Das, a law professor at New York University and co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, who has closely studied ICE surveillance and retaliation against activists, told The Intercept. “Government agencies should be protecting these voices, not silencing them.”
The groups that were surveilled by ICE include Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, El Refugio, and others, as well as individual activists. The immigrant advocates have all worked to bring national and international attention to alleged abuse at ICE’s Stewart Detention Center and the Irwin County Detention Center, both in Georgia. Stewart is one of the largest ICE facilities in the nation, and it is also the facility that has seen the most deaths of detained migrants over the past five years.
The emails show that in one instance, ICE considered retaliating against the advocacy group El Refugio, an immigrant rights organization and ministry that focuses on visiting and supporting people detained in Stewart. ICE was monitoring a vigil planned for one of the men at Stewart who had died in custody. When informed that the main organizer of the vigil was not El Refugio, an ICE official wrote, “If it was El Refugio I was going to have to put some effort into getting them out of their visitation program.”
“We are concerned to know that ICE is surveilling community members, activists, and organizations like ours because we are concerned about the well-being of people in their custody,” El Refugio Executive Director Amilcar Valencia said. “As an organization that walks alongside those affected by immigration detention, we are obligated to report issues of poor treatment, medical neglect, and other abuses suffered at Stewart Detention Center.”
In a statement, an ICE spokesperson did not respond to questions about the discussion of retaliation. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fully respects the rights of all people to voice their opinion without interference,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Like all other law enforcement agencies, ICE follows planned protests to ensure the safety and security of its infrastructure, personnel, officers and all those involved.”
While ICE has a history of monitoring and intimidating its critics — a practice that falls within a long pattern of the U.S. government surveilling activist groups — the agency’s surveillance of the groups first took place in Georgia following the 2017 death by suicide of Jean Jimenez-Joseph in Stewart. Advocates alleged that CoreCivic, the private prison company that runs Stewart, and ICE didn’t properly monitor or care for Jimenez-Joseph, noting that he was placed in solitary confinement for 18 days prior to his death, despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a history of mental illness, and a recent suicide attempt. (An internal ICE review obtained by CBS News confirmed that staff engaged in improper mental health care and failure to conduct routine health and safety checks in the days leading up to his death.)
Project South, a human rights group that has been at the forefront of investigating and exposing allegations of medical abuse in immigrant detention centers over the past year, shared the documents exclusively with The Intercept. The documents revealing the surveillance practices came from a larger trove of records accessed by Jimenez-Joseph’s family through the Freedom of Information Act as they prepared a wrongful death lawsuit against ICE. (In the statement, an ICE spokesperson told The Intercept, “ICE continues to place a greater focus on suicide prevention, working to improve its suicide risk assessment tools and providing more robust suicide prevention training for detention center staff.”)
When Georgia Detention Watch and other groups organized the vigil to honor Jimenez-Joseph, ICE monitored the vigil closely, exchanging multiple emails and counting attendees as they RSVP’d online. The documents indicate that ICE monitored the real-time presence of advocates at the vigils, resorting to militant language in their descriptions of them. ICE officials referred to Georgia Detention Watch as “a known adversary” and ordered the preparation of a “SIR,” or Significant Incident Report, for a candlelight vigil involving 19 people.
An ICE spokesperson, in an internal email the day after Jimenez-Joseph’s death, claimed that activist groups were trying to “exploit” Jimenez-Joseph’s death “by making a lot of false claims.” It is unclear what claims the spokesperson was referring to.
Andrew Free, the attorney representing the Jimenez-Joseph family, contrasted the efforts toward surveillance with a litany of what he considered failures by ICE leading up to and after the death.
“ICE didn’t bother to conduct the forensic autopsy their standards required, correct the false record of Jean’s criminal history, or reveal to Congress and the American people that he held valid DACA status up until the moment he died. But they found time to digitally surveil his memorial in Kansas City and a protest in Nashville against the CEO of a private prison company,” Free told The Intercept. “Even in death, ICE officials found ways to wantonly torment Jean and his community. We hope the evidence Jean’s family has gathered will end this toxic agency’s stranglehold on the truth.”
During proceedings for Jimenez-Joseph’s wrongful death lawsuit, Free asked Stewart Detention Center’s ICE Officer in Charge John Bretz about the agency’s surveillance practices.
“Once we get a — once we hear, or get a report that there is going to be a demonstration, past practice was that we had to do a Significant Incident Report,” Bretz said in the deposition. “But that’s no longer the case, we discontinued that several years ago. That’s no longer a requirement.”
Besides ICE closely monitoring, accusing, and vilifying the human rights organizations, the documents reveal the close coordination between ICE and CoreCivic, the for-profit corporation running the detention center.
Members of El Refugio had asked to visit Jimenez-Joseph shortly before his death but were denied.
Records show that in addressing why Jimenez-Joseph was denied a visit shortly before his death, an ICE spokesperson wrote, “I’ll simply explain denying the visit was a CoreCivic decision… My sole intent here is to protect ERO” — ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations — “and I’ll be as sensitive as possible to not criticize CoreCivic in doing so.”
In another email, ICE’s then-Assistant Field Office Director Sean Ervin implies that he and CoreCivic are “on the same page” and that “we are trying to allow CoreCivic the opportunity to explain why they refused visitation to Jimenez.” When ICE realized that CoreCivic wouldn’t be making a public statement, Ervin proposed ICE spokespeople simply tell reporters, “ICE cannot comment on operational decisions made by Core Civic employees and defers questions to CoreCivic for response.”
“Our organization provides social visits at SDC” — Stewart Detention Center — “as a way of accompanying people who are detained,” Valencia, of El Refugio, told The Intercept. “This role does not prevent us from speaking up when we are made aware of neglect and abuse.”
As other vigils for Jimenez-Joseph were planned, according to a deposition from the wrongful death suit, Bretz, the ICE official, wrote in an email that ICE continued to monitor groups by doing “a little research on facebook,” noting the number of participants who were signing up to attend. Another email noted that the importance of the vigil, for which 19 people were planning to attend, was “high” — the same vigil for which the assistant field office director ordered someone from ICE to prepare the Significant Incident Report.
Earlier this year, ICE settled with the Jimenez-Joseph family, paying the family $925,000.
“Our family struggles everyday to cope with the fact that the only way ICE could resolve Jean’s death is with a settlement. We want change beyond that,” said Jean Jimenez-Joseph’s family in a statement addressed to ICE. “Jean is gone because of ICE. Gone because of carelessness. Gone because when he cried out for help you threw him into isolation. Gone because Stewart Detention Center was not staffed correctly. You are all complicit and to blame for Jean’s death. “
The monitoring of immigrant advocates, and interventions by ICE officials, continued into spring of last year.
On March 26, 2020, the advocacy groups Project South, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Mijente, Georgia Detention Watch, and Siembra NC organized a virtual press conference to bring attention to hunger strikes taking place at Stewart due to the lack of Covid-19 safety protocols.
When Project South’s Legal and Advocacy Director Azadeh Shahshahani tweeted about the hunger strike, ICE spokesperson Lindsay Williams sent an email to Shahshahani claiming that there were no hunger strikes happening and demanding that she “edit/delete your posts.” (Twitter does not give users the option to edit posts.) Williams chastised Shahshahani: “Persons who spread misinformation are engaged in irresponsible behavior by needlessly spreading fear, and they do a disservice to the communities they claim to represent.”
Shahshahani did not delete the posts, and Project South pushed back against ICE’s request. She noted that Project South goes through a corroboration process to verify its information from multiple sources and that there was indeed a hunger strike taking place at Stewart.
Shahshahani told The Intercept that the incident was an example of “ICE not only monitoring your speech, but telling you what to do.” She added, “It’s very much in line with what you’ll find in totalitarian regimes.”
Twice in two weeks during April 2020, correctional staff at Stewart pepper-sprayed immigrants who were demanding improved conditions and protections from Covid-19. Advocates and family members of people detained have continued to speak out about alleged abuse at the facility.
Shahshahani told The Intercept, “The response of ICE is to dismiss abuses, not to do anything to address abuses.”
ICE monitoring of and use of scare tactics and retaliation against advocates is not new. As previously reported by The Intercept, New York University Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic documented more than 1,000 incidents of alleged retaliation against immigrant rights groups, individual activists, and journalists. Most of the incidents occurred from 2016 to 2020, but some go back as far as 2012, while others have been documented in recent months.
Rachel Maremont, an NYU law student and member of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, told The Intercept, “ICE is going after movement-based groups, knowing that these are the people who have the most contact with the folks in detention who are the most marginalized and vulnerable.”
Chiraayu Gosrani, also an NYU Law student who helped document the incidents of retaliation, noted a pattern in ICE’s monitoring of and actions against advocates. “ICE surveillance leads to more egregious forms of retaliation,” Gosrani said. He pointed to the arrest and attempted deportation of Ravi Ragbir, one of the leaders of the New Sanctuary Coalition, and the targeting of Maru Mora Villapondo, of La Resistencia in Washington state. Both high-profile activists were surveilled and eventually targeted by ICE. Gosrani asked, “What business does ICE have in monitoring people investigating human rights abuses?”
From the Obama administration through the Trump administration, and continuing today, the NYU Law group has witnessed ICE seeking to silence dissent within detention centers and deporting government informants, witnesses of mass shootings, and witnesses of medical abuse.
“Instead of addressing the grave issues advocates are raising,” Shahshahani and Priyanka Bhatt, both attorneys from Project South, said in a statement to The Intercept, “ICE is using intimidation in an attempt to silence us.”
Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
Georgia's Secretary of State Says More Than 100,000 Names Will Be Removed From State's Voter Record
Sarah al-Arshani, Business Insider
Al-Arshani writes: "Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced that more than 100,000 names will be removed from the state's voter registration records."
This mass removal, or voter "purge," mainly targeted those who filled out a change of address form (about 67,000) or had election mail returned (about 34,000), the AP reported. Voters can also be purged if they are declared "inactive" meaning they have not participated in an election in a certain number of years.
The purge accounts for 1.3% of the state's 7.8 million registered voters, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported. Eligible voters who are removed can re-register to vote.
"Making sure Georgia's voter rolls are up to date is key to ensuring the integrity of our elections," Raffensperger said in a statement. "That is why I fought and beat Stacey Abrams in court in 2019 to remove nearly 300,000 obsolete voter files before the November election, and will do so again this year. Bottom line, there is no legitimate reason to keep ineligible voters on the rolls."
Abrams was the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidate who lost to Kemp. After that election, Abrams founded Fair Fight Action, a voting rights organization.
The purge comes after Gov. Brian Kemp signed a controversial omnibus voting bill in March that made sweeping changes to the state's voting rules. The bill was criticized by several civil rights groups and led to several federal lawsuits.
The state has also been a battleground over the results of the 2020 election. President Joe Biden won the state of Georgia, and two Democratic senators were also elected in a run-off election in January. The state voted for former President Donald Trump in 2016. Trump and his team had made repeated efforts to try to dispute the state's election results, and Raffensperger was censured by his own party for stating Biden won the state.
Raffensperger said this is the first "major cleaning of the voter rolls" since 2019, and he's "made it a priority to continue with the list maintenance process" since the 2020 presidential election. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the previous purge of 300,000 voters was not a complete victory. While a federal judge at the time agreed to have those who had been inactive for over eight years removed from the voter records, Raffensperger had to reinstate 22,000 voters who had voted a little while before the cutoff date.
"The last time Secretary Raffensperger conducted a massive voter purge, he was forced to admit 22,000 errors - 22,000 Georgia voters who would have been kicked off the rolls were it not for Fair Fight Action's diligence. We'll be reviewing the list thoroughly and reaching out to impacted voters," said Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action.
Syrian Kurds demonstrate on June 10 in the northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli against the Turkish offensive in northern Iraq. (photo: Delil Souleiman/Getty Images)
Turkey Is Waging a Brutal Campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan
Elif Sarican, Jacobin
Sarican writes: "In its latest assault against the Kurds, Erdogan's Turkey is targeting civilians and refugees along the Iraq border - a brutal campaign to stamp out democracy and self-determination in Kurdistan."
n April 24, 2021, the anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian genocide, the Turkish state launched a military attack in Iraqi territory against Kurdish forces.
For over a month, aerial bombardment has been carried out against civilian targets. Border villages have been targeted, alongside the Maxmur refugee camp, which is home to thousands of Kurdish refugees who fled the Turkish state’s village destruction campaign in North Kurdistan during the 1990s.
Since the early 2000s, the more than 10,000 people of Maxmur have been democratically self-organizing. Their assemblies were one of the first to practice democratic confederalism — known internationally from Rojava (an autonomous region in northeast Syria) — which is a system based on the principles of direct democracy, ecology, and women’s liberation.
Every woman in the camp is part of the autonomously organized women’s assembly and actively participates in the transformation of a society displaced by war and destruction. The Turkish state labels this terrorism, and governments such as the United States and the United Kingdom follow suit.
The Turkish military is simultaneously engaging in systematic ecological destruction, bombing and cutting down forests in South Kurdistan, attacking water infrastructure in Rojava, and blocking the water flow down the Euphrates and Tigris rivers into Northern Syria. Millions of people have been left without a reliable water source as a result.
This attack is a continuation of the Turkish state’s policy of illegal invasion, occupation, and expansion into Kurdistan. In fact, it’s only the latest of many attacks that in recent years have killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands.
We witnessed the Turkish state’s war crimes and human rights abuses in the city of Afrîn in 2018, and in Serê Kaniyê in 2019. These same methods are being employed in South Kurdistan at this very moment.
The Turkish state’s tactics are well known by now: torture, chemical weapons, bombing of hospitals and water infrastructure, and using rape as a weapon of war. These are actions widely reported in the invasions of both Afrîn and Serê Kaniyê. Since being occupied, Afrîn has one of the highest rates of kidnap, rape, and torture of women in the region.
The Turkish state plans to build military bases in Zap, Metina, and Avasin in Iraqi Kurdish-majority areas. In 2019, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared before the United Nations General Assembly that Turkey intends to militarily enforce a border zone on its southern edge, replacing the existing majority-Kurdish population with Syrian refugees — essentially carrying out ethnic cleansing against Kurds in the region.
It is clear from both the statements and actions of the Turkish government that the aim of this military campaign is to bring back the borders set out in the National Pact at the end of the Ottoman Empire, under which areas of Iraq and Syria would be annexed.
Erdoğan proclaims that the borders allocated to Turkey after World War I — which left millions of Kurds stateless — were a serious compromise for Turkey, and one that must be resolved. It’s hard to know whether this is comic or tragic.
Developments in recent days show that Turkey is trying to stoke an intra-Kurdish war by escalating tensions between the Kurdish freedom movement and the KDP, the ruling Kurdish party of the Kurdistan Regional Government of northern Iraq. Only last week, the KDP prevented a peace delegation from Europe from entering Iraq, deporting them back to Europe. Meanwhile, police in Germany prevented another delegation of seventeen politicians and activists from traveling altogether.
These delegations were intending to observe the situation and report directly from the ground. Along with recent military clashes between the Kurdish freedom movement and the KRG Peshmerga, these are extremely worrying developments.
The Turkish state will continue its violence and ethnic cleansing in all regions of Kurdistan unless there is an appropriate, serious response from the international community. The aim of the Turkish state is to wipe out Kurdish culture, kill Kurdish people, and crush any attempts by Kurds to establish true self-determination.
It is not just Kurds who are the target, but the very attempt to build a peaceful and democratic society in the region, in collaboration across ethnic and religious communities such as Yazidis, Arabs, Syriacs, Assyrians, and Turkmen. Just as these attempts have been under attack in Syria for years, so too are they now being targeted in Iraq.
What the Turkish state considers a great, existential threat is the realization of the political ideas of Abdullah Öcalan, a man who remains imprisoned on Imrali island, held in isolation by the Turkish state for over two decades. Denying a chance for peace and democracy in the Middle East is the Turkish state’s greatest political ambition.
All who believe in a just world must condemn this invasion, and take a stand for freedom and justice. The freedom of Abdullah Öcalan is paramount to a peaceful solution in Kurdistan and the wider region.
A jaguar. (photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance)
Let's Rebuild the US Jaguar Population - Yes, Jaguars
Eric W. Sanderson, Scientific American
Sanderson writes: "On a chilly January morning in 1964, Russell Culbreath, a U.S. government hunter, trapped a jaguar on the broken hills above the Black River, on the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona."
Most Americans are probably surprised that we still share a country with these magnificent big cats. But they need help to survive
n a chilly January morning in 1964, Russell Culbreath, a U.S. government hunter, trapped a jaguar on the broken hills above the Black River, on the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona. In pictures that appeared in local papers shortly thereafter, Culbreath was shown cradling the head of the sagging corpse. After a few days on display at Fort Apache, the cat was skinned, its skull and remains sent back to a museum in Washington, D.C. As far as we know, this was the last jaguar to inhabit the mountains north of Tucson.
Nearly six decades later, there is an opportunity to bring America’s great cat back to the United States for good.
When they think of jaguars at all, many Americans probably think first of football players in Florida or luxury cars from England, but the jaguar Culbreath slew was a gorgeously patterned, heavily-muscled feline, cousin to the lion, leopard and tiger. While many of its American cousins live in the Amazonian rainforest, this jaguar and his kin had inhabited the dry cedar breaks and rugged pine-oak woodlands of the American Southwest for centuries.
Proof of jaguars in North America is ample. In the 19th century, Texas Rangers shot one north of San Antonio. Sam Houston proudly wore a vest made out of jaguar skin. Harder-to-believe but nonetheless intriguing observations come from California, Colorado, Oklahoma and Louisiana—and even Virginia and North Carolina.
The historical evidence for jaguars is strongest in Arizona and New Mexico, especially in the ancestral homelands of the Apache, Yavapai, Tohono O’odham, Pueblos, Hopi, Navajo and Zuni peoples. As the Arizona Territory was settled, Americans hunted jaguars in the mountains north of Tucson to the Grand Canyon, east of the Rio Grande River in New Mexico, and in the “sky island” ranges south to the international border. Ranchers shot and poisoned jaguars, along with Mexican wolves and other predators, to protect livestock that the arid terrain didn’t kill first.
When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) first listed jaguars on the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1972, they were protected only in Central and South America. Court cases and scientific papers encouraged a more expansive view.
Policy about jaguars swayed back and forth between dismissive and supportive, depending on who was in charge in Washington. But the arguments were mostly theoretical: jaguars, always elusive and magnificently camouflaged, were practically nonexistent north of the human line that demarcated the U.S. and Mexico.
That changed in 1996, when a rancher hunting for mountain lions found himself face-to-face with a jaguar in Arizona’s Peloncillo Mountains. Warner Glenn’s photographs of an unmistakable jaguar in unmistakably arid terrain intensified interest in the species. They were the first photographs of a live jaguar ever taken in the U.S. He later wrote movingly of the “eyes of fire” of that utterly self-possessed cat.
Over the last two decades, motion-sensitive camera traps have photographed other jaguars in the mountains south of Interstate 10, including pictures taken as recent as March of this year. For some, such as the USFWS, I-10 has been taken as the natural northern boundary of jaguars in the Americas, despite the historical records to the contrary and even though the road wasn’t built until 1956.
The detection of jaguars in the United States excited the public and generated a flurry of scientific activity. Over the last 25 years, researchers created nine models to predict the species’ potential distribution in Arizona and New Mexico, using a variety of different inputs, techniques and starting presumptions. My colleagues and I contributed three additional models, including extending the service’s own habitat model north of I-10, to show that jaguars potentially could find enough prey, water, cover and freedom in the central mountain ranges of these two states, between Flagstaff, Ariz., and Silver City, N.M.
This block of suitable habitat is vast, over 20 million acres, an area the size of the entire state of South Carolina. The U.S. Forest Service manages most of this land (68 percent) for the public good, including the health, diversity and productivity of its ecosystems, with several declared wilderness areas. Native American tribes, which have sovereign rights to manage wildlife on their lands, care for another 13 percent.
Before our work, the best available science was that the U.S. could only harbor six jaguars south of I-10. After our work, the new estimate is 90–150 jaguars, a potentially self-sustaining population.
But the jaguar needs our help. Habitat destruction, transportation infrastructure, natural constrictions in the landscape and the border’s walls and barriers mean that natural reestablishment of female jaguars from source populations in Mexico 300 miles north to central Arizona and New Mexico is unlikely. A more active approach is needed. Jaguars have been successfully reintroduced to lost range in Brazil and Argentina, and the same could happen here.
Russell Culbreath did a terrible thing, but he was not a villain. It is said that late in life he regretted killing that male on the breaks. Rather, the death of this jaguar is a symbol of the injustices that Americans have meted out to wildlife for over 400 years.
We have forgotten how to live in a respectful and reciprocal relationship with our wild relations. Our forefathers destroyed habitat and took the lives of millions of creatures with hardly a second thought, impoverishing our native fauna, undermining fragile ecosystems and diminishing us all in the process.
But we can make amends. Many Americans in the 21st century want to make amends. Nature is ready, as always, to help and to heal. Let us begin with justice for the jaguar, America’s great cat.
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