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ustice Department officials announced a federal lawsuit Friday against Georgia over new statewide voting restrictions that federal authorities allege purposefully discriminate against Black Americans, the first major action by the Biden administration to confront efforts from Republican-led jurisdictions to limit election turnout.
The legal challenge takes aim at Georgia’s Election Integrity Act, which was passed in March by the Republican-led state legislature and signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp (R). The law imposes new limits on the use of absentee ballots, makes it a crime for outside groups to provide food and water to voters waiting at polling stations, and hands greater control over election administration to the state legislature.
The action came as GOP-led state governments across the country have been seeking to impose broad new voting restrictions in the wake of President Biden’s victory over Donald Trump last November. Trump has spent months waging a baseless effort to discredit the result, making false and unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud.
In Georgia, Black voters helped drive record turnout for the presidential election and handed the state to Biden, who became the first Democratic nominee to win the state in 28 years.
“Georgia experienced record voter turnout and participation rates in the 2020 election cycle. … This is cause for celebration,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the lawsuit. Instead, he said, the Georgia legislature passed a bill whose provisions “make it harder for people to vote. The [federal] complaint alleges that the state enacted those restrictions to deny or abridge the right to vote on the basis of race or color.”
Kemp responded Friday on Twitter, asserting the federal lawsuit stems from “lies and misinformation” spread by Biden’s administration and other Democrats. “Now,” the governor charged, “they are weaponizing the U.S. Department of Justice to carry out their far-left agenda that undermines election integrity and empowers federal government overreach in our democracy.”
Garland said he also directed the Justice Department to establish a task force to bolster efforts to protect election workers from abuse and threats, citing recent news accounts that such intimidation tactics have been on the rise. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco issued a memo to the department’s staff detailing the new measures.
Garland and Monaco were joined at the announcement by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The show of solidarity aimed to demonstrate the department’s commitment to enforcing federal voting rights protections amid demands from civil rights groups and Democrats that the Biden administration do more even as a voting rights bill has stalled on Capitol Hill amid Republican opposition.
In detailing the federal filing, Clarke said Georgia lawmakers rushed to pass the new restrictions outside of traditional legislative process, bypassing the standard public debate and deliberation periods of other state laws. The result, Clarke said, was a bill that sought to significantly curb the use of absentee ballots, which Black voters have used at higher rates than Whites in Georgia.
The law prohibits election officials from distributing unsolicited absentee ballots and shortens the period during which voters can request them. The new restrictions also limit the use of absentee ballot drop boxes.
Black voters, Clarke said, are more likely than Whites to face long lines when forced to vote at polling stations, and confusing information more often results in Black voters going to the wrong polling site, meaning their ballots are more likely to be invalidated.
“The Justice Department will not stand idly by in the face of unlawful attempts to restrict access to the ballot,” Clarke said. “Today’s filing demonstrates our commitment to this cause.”
Liberal groups and some Democratic lawmakers have expressed frustration over what they see as Garland’s slow and insufficient efforts to overturn some of the Trump administration’s policies and practices at the Justice Department. But officials said the Georgia lawsuit represents a deliberate but forceful effort by Garland and his team to stand up for voting rights of minorities. Gupta, Clark and Pam Karlan, the principal deputy assistant attorney general, helped develop the lawsuit over the past few months, and officials indicated that more such actions could come against other GOP-led jurisdictions.
“We are looking at laws that were passed before and those that were recently passed,” Garland said. “We will make the same judgments we made with respect to this one. We have a process for evaluating” each of the cases.
George Floyd Square during a Juneteenth celebration in Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 19. (photo: Chrisian Monterossa/Bloomberg)
Prosecutors had asked that Chauvin receive 30 years in prison. His lawyer sought probation.
He was granted credit for time served.
Prosecutors had asked that Chauvin receive 30 years in prison. His lawyer sought probation.
Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill said the sentence was not based on public opinion, "emotion or sympathy." He said he was not trying "send any messages."
“This is based on your abuse of a position of trust and authority and also the particular cruelty shown to George Floyd,” Cahill told Chauvin.
The judge said he also wanted to "acknowledge the deep and tremendous pain that all the families are feeling, especially the Floyd family."
Hours before the hearing began, Cahill denied a request from Chauvin’s attorney for a new trial. Cahill also denied a request to hold a hearing on juror misconduct.
Chauvin was convicted in April of second- and third-degree murder, as well as second-degree manslaughter.
He spoke briefly before the sentence was announced.
"At this time due to some additional legal matters at hand I'm not able to give a full, formal statement," Chauvin said. "I do want to give my condolences to the Floyd family. There's going to be some other information in the future that would be of interest and I hope things will give you some, some peace of mind."
The sentencing hearing began with statements from four of Floyd's family members.
Floyd's daughter Gianna, his brothers Terrence Floyd and Philonise Floyd and his nephew Brandon Williams all spoke during the hearing.
Gianna, who appeared by video, said she asks about her father "all the time" and misses that he is not around to help her brush her teeth at night.
"I want to play with him, have fun, go on a plane ride," the 7-year-old said.
Philonise Floyd said that he has begged every day for justice to be served.
"George's life mattered," he said. "I am asking that you please find it suitable to give Officer Chauvin the maximum sentence possible. My family and I have been given a life sentence."
Chauvin’s mother, Carolyn Pawlenty, also spoke during the hearing. Pawlenty called Chauvin “a good man.”
“Derek is a quiet, thoughtful, honorable and selfless man,” she said. Pawlenty said her son’s identity has “been reduced to that of a racist.”
"Even though I have not spoken publicly, I have always supported him 100 percent and always will," Pawlenty said.
Under Minnesota statutes, Chauvin could be sentenced only on the most serious charge: unintentional second-degree murder, which has a maximum sentence of 40 years.
Cahill could have sentenced Chauvin to as little as 10 years and eight months or as much as 15 years in prison and remained within sentencing guidelines. The presumptive sentence for a person like Chauvin, who had no criminal history, is 12½ years for second-degree murder.
Last month, Cahill ruled that prosecutors had proven there were aggravating factors in Floyd's death, paving the way for a longer sentence.
Floyd, a Black man, was handcuffed, in a prone position on the street May 25, 2020, as Chauvin, who is white, knelt on his neck for 9½ minutes while Floyd said he couldn't breathe and went limp. Floyd's gruesome death — captured in a harrowing bystander video that was posted to Facebook and widely viewed — ignited a reckoning on racial disparities in America and fueled calls for police reform.
In arguing for a 30-year sentence, prosecutors said there were five aggravating factors in Floyd's death. In his ruling last month, Cahill wrote that the prosecution had proven four of those factors: Chauvin abused his position of trust and authority; treated Floyd with particular cruelty; and that he committed his crime in the presence of children "who witnessed the last moments" of Floyd's life; and with the active participation of at least three other people. (Cahill said prosecutors did not prove that Floyd was particularly vulnerable.)
"It was particularly cruel to kill George Floyd slowly by preventing his ability to breathe when Mr. Floyd had already made it clear he was having trouble breathing," Cahill wrote.
Floyd "was begging for his life and obviously terrified by the knowledge that he was likely to die" but Chauvin "remained indifferent" to his pleas, Cahill also wrote.
Chauvin's conviction was a rare occurrence: It is unusual for police officers to be prosecuted for killing someone on the job. Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, has found through his research that Chauvin is one of only 11 nonfederal law enforcement officers — such as police officers, deputy sheriffs and state troopers — who have been convicted of murder for on-duty killings since 2005.
Chauvin and the three other former police officers involved in Floyd's arrest — J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao — were fired the day after Floyd's death. They are also awaiting trial in federal court on charges of violating Floyd's civil rights. No trial date has been set.
Cahill delayed the trial of Kueng, Lane and Thao, who are charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter and whose trial was originally scheduled to begin in August, to March 2022, saying last month that he wanted to put some distance between their trial and Chauvin's trial. Cahill also said he wanted them to be tried on the federal charges first.
Members of a militia stand near a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend. (photo: Getty)
“We are seeing a dramatic increase in menacing and violent threats, ranging from the highest administrators to volunteer poll workers.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday that the department will be launching a joint task force with staff from the DOJ’s Criminal, National Security, and Civil Rights division as well as the FBI to crack down on the spike.
“We are seeing a dramatic increase in menacing and violent threats, ranging from the highest administrators to volunteer poll workers. To address this effort to undermine our electoral process, today the Deputy Attorney General will issue a directive to all federal prosecutors and the FBI which will highlight the prevalence of these threats and instruct them to prioritize investigating these threats,” Garland said. “We will promptly prosecute any violations of federal law.”
There’s been an outbreak of threats against election workers as conspiracy theories promulgated by former President Donald Trump have taken root deep in the GOP. As Trump pushed the lie that the election was stolen from him and attacked election officials in both parties with false claims that they either actively helped rig the election against him or charges that they’re blocking investigations, death threats against those officials spiked.
That’s led to threats against both Democrats and Republicans, from prominent elected officials down to low-level poll workers and volunteers.
One of the many targets has been Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom Trump has singled out as an enemy.
Trump’s attacks have led to anonymous text message threats to Raffensperger’s wife, including “You and your family will be killed very slowly” and “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”
But it’s not just high-profile officials. A recent survey by the Brennan Center for Justice found that one in three election officials didn’t feel safe in their jobs, and one in five listed death threats as a job-related concern.
It’s unclear exactly how widespread these threats are—and the DOJ said that one of their top priorities is centralizing information about these threats to a full sense of the scope of the problem.
“We have to identify these threats, prioritize their investigation and prioritize those prosecutions, and hold these individuals accountable,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, who created the task force.
Licensed practical nurse Yokasta Castro, of Warwick, R.I. (photo: Steven Senne/AP)
If you’re pushing anti-vax bullshit, you’re getting people killed
his week CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said adult deaths from Covid-19 are “at this point entirely preventable” due to the effectiveness of vaccines. And a new analysis from the AP confirms what Walensky said.
According to the analysis of government data from May, released on Thursday, out of the 18,000 Covid-19 deaths during the month, approximately 150 were fully vaccinated people. That comes out to 0.8 percent, or an average of five deaths per day out of more than 200 average daily deaths. At the height of the pandemic in January of this year, average daily deaths were above 3,400 per day. Additionally, fully vaccinated people accounted for fewer than 1,200 of more than 853,000 hospitalized with the virus (0.1 percent).
According to CDC data, around 63 percent of eligible Americans have gotten at least one dose of a vaccine. But completing both rounds of two-dose vaccines like Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna is crucial to have the best protection against Covid-19, especially with the new variants that are spreading.
A study by the CDC of adults above the age of 65 — the population most at risk — found that seniors who received partial vaccination were 64 percent less likely to be hospitalized, but fully vaccinated seniors were 94 percent less likely to be admitted to a hospital for Covid-19. Another study, published this month in Nature, found that the two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were 88 percent effective in preventing illness caused by the Delta variant that originated in India, but one dose was only 33 percent effective. The new Novavax vaccine is even better, according to trial data, with 90.4 percent efficacy even against variants.
“The second shot is critical,” Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told NBC News. “We know from the phase one studies that the second shot induces a level of virus-specific neutralizing antibodies that’s about tenfold greater than that after the first dose.”
This data and the emerging variants should be enough evidence to convince anyone to get a vaccine. But thanks to people pushing anti-vax narratives, including Republicans like Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, more than a quarter of Americans say they will not get vaccinated, according to a CNN poll conducted in April.
Some Republicans, however, are urging people to get a vaccine. As he announced seven new deaths in West Virginia due to Covid-19 this week, Republican Governor Jim Justice told the state’s residents that if you aren’t getting vaccinated, “All you’re doing is entering the death drawing.”
“If I knew for certain that there was going to be eight or nine people [dead from Covid-19] by next Tuesday and I could be one of them if I don’t take the vaccine, what in the world do you think I would do?” Justice said. “I mean I would run over on top of somebody because I don’t want to take the chance when the wheel spins that it could come up Jim Justice. I don’t want to take that chance.”
Billionaires Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. (photo: AP)
Fifteen years of tax information on thousands of plutocrats is one of the biggest stories of the decade. And yet … crickets
merican billionaires don’t pay taxes, and American politicians are all but ready to send Seal Team Six to assassinate the nameless bureaucrat who let ProPublica in on this fact. Welcome to our political hellscape.
This month, ProPublica revealed that American billionaires essentially do not pay taxes, and within hours the White House had awkwardly promised no fewer than four federal investigations into the identity of the individual who had alerted the news organization to this fact.
By Thursday, a North Carolina congressman was demanding the FBI director explain why he hadn’t made any arrests or at the very least, “executed any search warrants or raided any offices” in the international manhunt for the leaker.
By the weekend, demands for justice on behalf of America’s parasite oligarchs had unified the Republican party like nothing since perhaps the phrase “public option” was a thing you heard on cable television. Politicians from Susan Collins to the author of the infamous North Carolina “bathroom bill” both grilled law enforcement officials testifying in their committees about the website’s “illegal” violations of mega-billionaire privacy.
Fox News screamed about Twitter’s double standard in enabling sharing of the ProPublica revelations despite blocking an earlier New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. At least 19 senators signed angry letters demanding the investigations they had been repeatedly assured were well under way. (Senator Mike Crapo alone released three separate statements to this effect.) The ranking member of the powerful ways and means committee told the Hill on Friday that the revelations had dealt Democratic proposals to add an additional $8bn to the annual IRS budget – which was meant to help with tax law enforcement and compliance – “close to a death blow”.
Meanwhile, the Democrats hardly had a better response. The billionaire tax avoidance story warranted nary a mention on the Twitter feeds of the four founders of “the Squad” aside from a retweet from AOC. And so the only elected officials who seem to have read the story ProPublica president Richard Tofel had framed as “the most important story we have ever published” were the ones who calling for the feds to ransack the ProPublica offices.
But the worst part of the whole saga was the realization that ProPublica’s bombshell revelations would probably have more attention during the presidency of Donald Trump. ProPublica carefully chose the six billionaires whose tax returns it chose to single out for specific scrutiny, and several of them – Jeff Bezos, George Soros and Mike Bloomberg – are so loathed by conservatives it would have been impossible for a Trump-era Republican party to respect their constitutional right to dodge taxes. The scarce press coverage of the fact that billionaires have not only paid virtually no taxes, but that they have also added to their net worths in recent years, makes the four-year media obsession with former president Donald Trump’s tax returns feel like a partisan crusade that was never about a genuine commitment to ending billionaire tax avoidance, but just scoring points against Trump alone.
So, while we were homeschooling our kids and waiting on hold with the unemployment department, Democrats of every declension barely say a word about the fact billionaires added $1.2tn to their fortunes over the past year alone. And it’s not that there’s nothing to say about the matter. ProPublica has the goods to actually put tax avoidance on the map, and if Democrats were committed to ending the class warfare that the rich wage against the poor every day, they would take these goods and run.
After all, Jeff Bezos got a $4,000 middle-class tax credit the year his net worth hit $18bn. There’s something so marvelous and transcending of petty tribal affiliations about this fact, like a perfectly executed 60-yard touchdown pass in the final 18 seconds of a five-point game. Unearth a diamond like that, and your side deserves to win. Now imagine if the Democrats would just catch the damn thing!
But ProPublica seems to have deliberately underthrown. After breathlessly informing readers they possessed a “trove” of 15 years’ worth of tax returns on literally “thousands” of the world’s richest people, the story’s three authors proceeded to weave a few juicy and non-contextualized facts into a narrative that felt like a protracted sidebar to the “real” story. We learned that the 25 richest billionaires in America added $401bn to their net worths between 2014 and 2018 and paid about 3% of that amount in taxes, but we didn’t learn much about any specific billionaire’s tax avoidance strategies outside a brief discussion of the borrowing habits of random 1980s corporate raider Carl Icahn, of which Icahn is clearly proud enough not to bother suing. (“I enjoy winning,” he told the website.)
Fifteen years of tax return information on thousands of American plutocrats is, to be sure, one of the biggest stories of the decade. It’s just not clear ProPublica has that much appetite for sticking with the story.
Bloomberg has already threatened to “use all legal means” to determine who leaked the tax returns and “ensure that they are held responsible”. No doubt Charles Koch and Dan Gilbert are already sharpening their knives. In a podcast interview last week, ProPublica’s series editor, Steve Engelberg, expressed profound discomfort about actually using the information provided by the anonymous tipster, explaining that editors had agreed to only publish information they determined to be “absolutely necessary for the public to appreciate what is, let’s face it, an arcane topic”.
There had been early thoughts of publishing basic tax return data on the top 25 richest billionaires in the country, he added, but they decided against it on grounds that some of the names on the list “are quite well known and some are much less well known”, and he preferred “using household names” who are “in the fabric of our daily lives” and not, I suppose, their lower-key heiresses and widows.
This was, I believe, a moral and strategic mistake that will be difficult to undo. Every billionaire is an inherently public figure, whose fortunes are inextricable from the fabric of our daily lives; the Forbes 400 could serve as an invaluable guide for unsentimentally demystifying our social dysfunctions, were billionaires not plenty rich enough to hire all the lobbyists and publicists who ensure nothing of that nature ever gets written about their clients.
Once, the malefactors of great wealth burnished their public images by investing in journalism outlets; now, plutocrats seems just as happy to siphon their ad revenue, flip their office buildings or even sue them into oblivion. Surely the editorial board of ProPublica, one of the last two or three American news organizations with the resources to handle this story, understands the stakes. One can only hope they stick to their guns – and that someone with a modicum of political power starts paying attention.
Juana Flores hugs grandson Jarrett, 13, June 4 on returning to her home in Goleta, California, from Mexico two years after being compelled to leave the United States. (photo: Jane Hahn/Washington Post)
The 58-year-old citizen of Mexico has 10 children and 18 grandchildren in the United States, including a son serving overseas in the U.S. Air Force.
“What if they turn me away?” she said in Spanish to her daughter, Cristina, 35, who hugged her tightly as they dodged traffic and street vendors on the way to the border crossing.
Flores’s arrival at the U.S.-Mexico border this month was a rare reversal of the deportation of a military family member that veterans advocates hope will expand in coming months. On the campaign trail, President Biden had blasted his predecessor for deporting veterans, calling it an “outrage” and promising to create a process in his first 100 days for them to return to the United States. He has since expanded that review to include their family members.
The Department of Homeland Security “recognizes the profound sacrifice that our military families make on behalf of our nation, ”spokeswoman Marsha Espinosa said in a statement.
“The Department is committed to bringing back military family members who were unjustly deported,” she said. “Additional steps will be taken to make sure that military families’ path to naturalization is easy.”
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s staff has been meeting with advocates, deported veterans and members of Congress in recent weeks to gather information about cases, and in May, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a memo saying that service members and their immediate relatives generally should not be deported.
But officials have not said how many cases are under review or how many veterans and their relatives have been returned to the United States. Espinosa said this month that DHS is still “developing a rigorous, systematic approach to reviewing these cases.”
Veterans advocates said they have heard of few deported military family members or veterans returning to the United States.
“President Biden made all these promises,” said Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer and retired Army officer who testified about the issue before a Senate subcommittee on Wednesday. “I’ve hardly seen anybody brought back.”
Nobody knows how many veterans and military family members have been deported from the United States. The practice has occurred for decades, including when Biden was vice president. Veterans advocates estimate that hundreds of veterans have been deported over the years and perhaps thousands of their relatives.
ICE is supposed to screen service members for eligibility for U.S. citizenship or other immigration benefits before deporting them, but the Government Accountability Office found in 2019 that the agency did not track how many veterans it had removed from the country, often after they were arrested for crimes.
Hector Barajas-Varela, an Army veteran who was deported after a weapons offense but has since been pardoned and become a U.S. citizen, said many veterans fall into trouble because of post-traumatic stress linked to their service.
He said that he was encouraged by Biden’s plans but that it is urgent to return deported veterans, who are far from their families and medical and social services in the United States.
“It’s been over 100 days. I haven’t seen any of the deported veterans go back through anything Biden has done,” said Barajas-Varela, who runs the Deported Veterans Support House, nicknamed the “Bunker,” in Tijuana, and connects deported veterans with legal aid and other resources. “They all want to go back.”
The ‘Good Land’
Juana and Andres Flores married young in Aguascalientes, a state in central Mexico, and their family grew quickly. The couple had worked in the fields as children, too poor to finish grammar school. They wanted a better life for their own children.
Andres’s solution was to migrate to Southern California to join a friend working construction jobs, and his wife and children soon followed.
They settled in a modest house in Goleta, a city of 30,000 nicknamed the “Good Land” for its fertile fields and lemon groves. If neighboring Santa Barbara attracted celebrities and investment bankers, Goleta drew the workers, people who cleaned houses, patched roofs and built koi ponds in the yards of the wealthy.
The Flores family vaulted into the middle class, in a loud, loving and sometimes chaotic home filled with the sounds of music, boisterous children and the aroma of tasty mole sauce simmering in giant pots on Juana Flores’s stove.
All 10 children graduated from high school. Four work in hospitals, including two studying to become registered nurses. Cristina is a special-education teacher. Caesar, who played football at Dos Pueblos High, joined the Air Force in 2016.
Juana is the “glue,” her family often says. She cared for grandchildren so her sons and daughters could work and study. She coached her daughters through childbirth, her children through breakups, and helmed dozens of birthday celebrations, somehow remembering each child’s favorite flavor of cake. She went to Mass at St. Raphael Catholic Church. In her spare time, she cleaned houses.
She used to rise before dawn with Caesar, her youngest, to make him protein shakes for football practice.
“She’s everything,” Caesar Flores, 24, a staff sergeant, said in an interview from Turkey, where he works 24-hour shifts on an ambulance service providing care to injured airmen. “She sets the foundation for our family.”
Andres Flores became a U.S. citizen during the Obama administration — he obtained his papers through work — and tried to sponsor his wife for legal residency. The authorities, however, said Juana Flores was ineligible because she had left the United States in the 1990s to visit her sick mother. Under federal law, she had to wait outside the country for 10 years to apply.
Officials referred Juana Flores to deportation proceedings, and days before Caesar Flores’s July 2018 wedding, immigration officials said she had to go.
After tearful pleading, they allowed her to stay for the ceremony. But by April 2019, she was gone.
Andres drove her 30 hours to their old house in Aguascalientes. Her sisters and brothers were thrilled to see her after decades apart. But they had their own families, and her husband had to return to Goleta to work.
For the first time in her life, she was alone.
Before Andres Flores left, he planted apple, peach and lemon trees for her to tend. He gave her chickens to raise. And he bought her a small flock of sheep, so she would get out of bed twice a day to feed them.
“Like therapy,” he said.
Her children in the United States called daily. But Flores missed the births of three grandchildren. She missed graduations. She missed Mother’s Day.
“When it first happened, I couldn’t believe it,” Cristina Flores said. “How could you deport an older lady who’s not a threat to anybody and hasn’t done anything? I was in shock. And mad. And just in disbelief that things like that could happen to people.”
Once word got out that ICE had ordered Flores to leave, the people of Goleta were furious.
The Goleta City Council passed a resolution supporting her.
“We were mad. Our mayor was mad. Our then-mayor pro-tem was mad. Our council members. Everyone was just like, ‘Really?’ ” Goleta City Council member James Kyriaco said in an interview. “It felt like an assault on our community.”
Her advocates even wrote to President Donald Trump, but nothing changed.
Soon it became clear that Caesar Flores, who was halfway around the world, would be key to bringing Juana Flores back.
In an interview, he said he had felt a “higher calling” to join the military. The sacrifice has meant missing the first year of his daughter’s life because he is stationed in Turkey while his wife remains in California. And he has worried about his mother in Mexico. From his post overseas, he wrote a letter last year urging officials to let her return to the United States.
“I have never felt so hopeless in my life,” he wrote.
U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.), a Marine veteran, filed a bill inspired by Flores that would let military parents apply for legal residency, though it has received little support so far.
“He’s willing to give his life for our country,” he said of Caesar Flores. “And yet consideration wasn’t given to his mom?”
On May 28, ICE granted her “humanitarian parole,” which allows her to enter the United States but not to stay permanently. She had to report to the agency within 72 hours of arriving and submit to the agency’s “monitoring and tracking.”
The permission is good for one year, and she will have to apply to renew it.
Homecoming
Flores arrived in Tijuana on June 4, as her husband, Cristina and lawyer scrambled to escort her to the U.S.-Mexico border down a carnivallike street packed with vendors hawking soaps, crispy churros, and Baby Yoda figurines.
Cristina, who had not seen her mother since last summer, climbed into her mother’s lap in the back seat as her father drove them to the border checkpoint.
“Did you miss your bed? Your sheets? Your babies? Your crying babies?” Cristina whispered in English and Spanish.
“Yes,” Juana laughed, stroking her back but looking exhausted. She had not slept the night before.
After Flores was fingerprinted and photographed, Customs and Border Protection quickly admitted her into the United States.
She began to cry.
“I feel bad. There are a lot of people who are waiting,” she said. “It’s so sad for the others. It’s been a long time.”
And it had saddened her to abruptly leave her siblings in Mexico; they have no idea when she might return.
Cristina drove the five hours home, never protesting when her mother admonished her to slow down. At home, Juana Flores gasped that her adult children — many of whom live in the family home — had painted her kitchen cabinets too light and the bathroom walls too dark. They had rearranged the living-room furniture, and the vases were dusty.
“I don’t like it,” she murmured. “They work so much. They don’t have time to clean.”
A parade of children and grandchildren soon burst through the front door. Bouquets of flowers piled high on the coffee table.
Her grandchildren Zoe and Leon, both under 2 years old, stared at her with enormous eyes. They did not know “grandma,” as they call her in English.
She hugged them all, clucking that some seemed thinner, some fatter. She took a long look at one son, who had been hospitalized while she was away.
“Are you okay?” she asked him, searching his face, and he nodded.
On Sunday, her supporters gathered in Oak Park in Santa Barbara to celebrate her return.
Carbajal showed up, along with members of the Goleta City Council, the school board, relatives and family friends.
Caesar Flores appeared via videoconference from Turkey.
Andres Flores, 61, serenaded his wife of 42 years to a mariachi band playing “Volver,” which means “to return.”
“If it happens again, if their hearts are not moved to fix my wife’s situation, then I would decide to return with her,” he said. “But I don’t think it will happen.”
'The United States of America conducts cyberattacks to threaten the country, to enable drug trafficking and drug trade.' (photo: Bloomberg)
"The United States of America conducts cyberattacks to threaten the country, to enable drug trafficking and drug trade." Venezuelan deputy defense minister Adm. Alexander Velasquez Bastidas said at the Moscow Conference on International Security.
he U.S. has been targeting Venezuela's power grid to intimidate the nation and enable drug trafficking, according to a statement by the Venezuelan deputy defense minister Adm. Alexander Velasquez Bastidas on Wednesday.
"The United States of America conducts cyberattacks to threaten the country, to enable drug trafficking and drug trade. You know that the electric power system of the country is vulnerable to such attacks," Bastidas said at the Moscow Conference on International Security.
Two massive blackouts hit Venezuela in March 2019. Incidents caused both cases at the country's largest hydroelectric power plant, which were blamed on cyberattacks and "mechanical impact."
Venezuela's minister for communication and information reported that the suspects had been identified. They are residents in the U.S., Spain, and Colombia, and requests have been submitted to Interpol for their arrest.
In January 2019, an artificial political crisis was initiated in Venezuela when Juan Guaido, former head of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, arbitrarily proclaimed himself interim president to oust democratically re-elected President Nicolas Maduro from power.
Taking advantage of the artificial crisis, the United States and most Western countries followed up with a coercive international campaign against Maduro. They endorsed Guaido while imposing crippling sanctions on Venezuela. The sanctions specifically targeted the country's oil and financial industries. As a result, a total of $5.5 billion of Venezuelan assets have been frozen in international banks.
Russia, China, Turkey, and several other Latin American nations have been supporting Maduro.
A mysterious ailment is killing off hundreds of birds across the U.S. (photo: NBC News)
The strange disease was first widely observed in Washington, DC, Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia in late May, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Since then, it has also spread to Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, the Evansville Courier & Press reported.
"This is truly scary," Jim Monsma, who runs the Washington, D.C.-based rescue organization City Wildlife, told DCist. "We don't see the light at the end of the tunnel, as it were, yet. And it's just every day more and more birds."
Monsma said his organization had dealt with 174 dead or ill birds as of June 15. The birds brought to City Wildlife suffer from seizures, loss of balance, swelling, crusty eyes and blindness. These same symptoms are being observed in wildlife departments across the U.S. South and Midwest.
"They'll just sit still, often kind of shaking," Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources avian biologist Kate Slankard told NBC News. "It's pretty safe to say that hundreds of birds in the state have had this problem."
The most often-afflicted species are blue jays, common grackles and European starlings. However, the ailment has also been observed in American robins and Northern cardinals, among others, Indiana Department of Natural Resources ornithologist Allisyn-Marie Gillet told the Evansville Courier & Press.
No one yet knows what is causing the outbreak. Samples gathered in Indiana tested negative for both bird flu and West Nile virus. One possibility is that the disease is linked to the emergence of Brood X cicadas, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center ornithologist Brian Evans told DCist.
The disease has been observed in the same states as the cicadas, and emerged at around the same time. If this is the case, it could be that the birds are being harmed by an insecticide or a pesticide present in the cicadas, or by a fungus that is attacking the insects. For Evans, this would actually be a close-to-best-case scenario.
"A population can take a once-every-17-year hit without any major long-term impact to the population," Evans explained. "But if this is something else in the environment — which is just as likely — then there's real concern about the long-term health of bird populations."
Just in case the disease is contagious, residents in the affected states are being asked to stop feeding birds and clean feeders and baths with a 10 percent bleach solution, USGS advised.
"Bird feeders and bird baths are a major source of disease transmission, in part because birds aren't really great at social distancing around these resources," Evans told DCist. "It's sort of like us with the pandemic — we need to be able to ensure social distancing among the bird community."
The strange illness comes at a vulnerable time for birds in the U.S., The Guardian pointed out. North American bird populations have declined by 29 percent since 1970, and the climate crisis threatens two-thirds of North American bird species with extinction. In the fall of 2020, hundreds of thousands of migrating birds died in New Mexico when they fell out of the sky. The die-off was eventually attributed to starvation and bad weather, according to The Guardian.
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