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22 February 22
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In December, families across the country stopped receiving up to $300 monthly child tax credit checks per kid — money that had been a "godsend" for some parents receiving them. The IRS said that over 36 million families received about $16 billion in the last batch of payments on December 15.
Sanders cited a new analysis from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia, which found that 3.7 million kids slid back into poverty with the credit's expiration. Child poverty rose to 17% in January compared to 12% in December, a 41% increase that brought it in line with late 2020 levels. The researchers found that Latino and Black children saw the largest rises in poverty.
"How did this happen? 50 Republicans and 1 corporate Democrat allowed the $300 a month Child Tax Credit to expire. That is morally obscene," Sanders wrote. Sanders' office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why the credit ended.
Despite calls to keep the checks going, Democrats were unable to win over a holdout in their own ranks: Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. A one-year extension was included in the now-stalled Build Back Better plan, which the conservative Democrat declared dead earlier this year.
Manchin has said he wants only working parents to receive the tax credit, making the poorest parents ineligible. He's been skeptical of sending direct payments without conditions and privately raised concerns about parents spending the cash aid on drugs.
His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Stormy Johnson, a single mother from Manchin's home state of West Virginia, previously told Insider's Erin Snodgrass that she was "heartbroken" over losing the payments.
"Without these payments, I won't eat so my kids can," she said.
Sanders isn't the only progressive to take aim at fellow Democrats over the credit's expiration. On Thursday night, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York assailed Manchin without naming him.
"One US Senator 'heard stories' about people allegedly using the Child Tax Credit 'for drugs' without any evidence or data to back it up," she wrote on Twitter. "He then used that as justification to nuke the entire national program, causing millions of kids to fall into poverty in weeks. Horrifying."
A group of migrant families from Nicaragua and Honduras crossed through a gap in the border wall east of Sasabe, Arizona, looking to surrender to the U.S. Border Patrol and start the asylum process. (photo: Salwan Georges/WP)
The clock ran out before they built it, leaving behind a mutilated landscape and a boneyard of steel fence panels stacked by the hundreds.
At more than $41 million per mile, Guadalupe Canyon was the most expensive segment of a $15 billion megaproject that ranked among the costliest in U.S. history. Today the abandoned border wall site is a liability for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, with loose rocks and boulders sliding down the mountainsides.
Sage Goodwin, whose family’s nearby ranch house rattled daily through nine months of blasting in 2020, wants the government to repair the damage to their land. He filed suit against the Trump administration and is now waiting for CBP to indicate how far it’s willing to go to put the mountain back together and prevent a flood that could wash out the road to his home.
“We want to be reasonable and realistic,” Goodwin said. “We want to roll back the destruction and help CBP come up with a model that balances ecological values, ranching values and border security.”
In the year since President Biden halted border wall construction, his administration has been developing plans to put its own stamp on Trump’s pet project. Biden has waved off calls from activists to tear the structure down and recycle the steel. The president promised while he campaigned that there would “not be another foot,” but his government has been adding new barriers as it shores up 13 miles of flood levees along the Rio Grande and fixes other segments left in a precarious state by the contractors rushing to build right up to Biden’s inauguration.
In recent weeks, CBP officials have been soliciting input from ranchers, environmental advocates, landowners and others as the Biden administration prepares to spend hundreds of millions for border wall remediation. The money, which will include unused construction funds, will go to clean up worksites, stabilize areas facing erosion and remedy some of the worst environmental damage, while also allowing CBP to close gaps in the wall. The precise details — where and how much money — remain undefined.
CBP officials say the efforts will be initially focused on southern Arizona’s Tucson sector, including remote and ecologically fragile areas where the most destructive blasting occurred, such as Guadalupe Canyon, as well as the dry creek beds and channels that surge during summer “monsoon” thunderstorms. Segments of the wall were damaged in flooding last year, and erosion along the base of the structure has left its foundation exposed at multiple locations across southern Arizona.
Republicans have been clamoring for Biden to close gaps in the wall that have become busy crossing points for migrants and smugglers. In some locations those spaces are a few feet across, but they’re far wider in others, and it’s unclear what the Biden administration will consider closing a gap vs. building new barriers.
Paul Enriquez, the deputy director of the CBP infrastructure division responsible for the border wall, said the Biden administration’s remediation effort will prioritize “safety, erosion and flood control,” to ensure roads and hillsides don’t wash out and the barrier itself “does not fail and cause some sort of life safety issue for the public, local residents or agents who patrol in that area.”
At abandoned construction sites and staging areas used to store materials and heavy equipment, CBP is preparing to clean up and replant vegetation, but officials say locations where blasting occurred can’t be easily put back together.
“We’ll be working with federal land managers to identify an appropriate restoration method,” Enriquez said in an interview. “And, in some instances where we had temporary roads installed, we’ll be remediating those areas, as well.”
Looming over Biden’s repair plan is the possibility Trump could run for office again, whipping up crowds with chants of “Finish the Wall!” and promises to bring back the bulldozers. Trump built 450 miles of new barriers during his term but had plans for at least 250 more.
Trump was unable to build in many of the areas identified by CBP as a top priority, especially along the Rio Grande in Texas. Nearly all of the land there is in private hands, and, despite placing his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of the effort to seize those properties using eminent domain, Trump built relatively little in South Texas.
His administration went for the lowest-hanging fruit, building along public land in New Mexico and Arizona — including national forests and wildlife preserves — that was already under federal control. Some of those remote locations had few crossings to begin with.
The barrier’s performance so far is mixed. It has funneled illegal entries and smuggling activity toward gaps and crossing points that remain open. But determined smugglers scale it with cheap makeshift ladders or saw through it with common demolition tools available at any hardware store. In Texas, the wall doesn’t stop migrants from crossing the Rio Grande because the structure can’t be built on the river, the natural border with Mexico.
Immigration arrests by CBP along the Mexico border are higher than ever. Republican support for the project appears to have further intensified during Biden’s presidency, and lawmakers have been pounding him for halting the project.
Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), the highest-ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said the Biden administration’s border wall remediation plan and its approach to border security, generally, are “insufficient.”
“Frontline homeland security personnel, especially the Border Patrol, are stretched far too thin and lack the resources needed to address the overwhelming and historic flow of migrants crossing the southwest border,” Katko said in a statement. “Every dollar appropriated by Congress for border barrier funding should be used for that very purpose.”
Trump obtained roughly $15 billion for the wall project, two-thirds of which came from diverted military and counternarcotics funding. The Biden administration said it will return $2.2 billion in unused funds to the Pentagon.
The Department of Homeland Security said about half of the $5 billion the Trump administration obtained for the wall through Congress and nonmilitary sources was awarded to contractors, and the department is still calculating how much of the money can be recovered. New contracts for Biden’s remediation projects will be awarded in April, DHS said, with a second round of awards planned for late summer.
Biden has called the wall “a waste of money” and “not a serious policy solution,” but Enriquez, of CBP, says it remains a valuable asset.
“The barrier provides impedance and denial, and it’s one of the tools that our Border Patrol agents use in their mission to secure the border,” Enriquez said. “The administration has indicated that that’s not their policy at this time, and we respect that. And so what other methods can we use to help secure those areas?”
CBP said it continues to move forward on an environmental assessment and public comment solicitation for 86 additional miles of barriers in the Rio Grande Valley approved under Trump. But agency officials say they do not have the Biden administration’s approval to proceed with construction.
Guadalupe Canyon
Guadalupe Canyon runs through the heart of the rugged Peloncillo range, a crucial wildlife corridor that is one of the few unobstructed bridges between the Rocky Mountains and Mexico’s northern Sierra Madre. The canyon’s large sycamore and cottonwood trees create a shaded oasis during the hot summer months.
Goodwin’s family and neighboring ranchers have worked for decades to protect hundreds of thousands of acres in these remote areas of southern Arizona and New Mexico using “conservation ranching” methods that closely manage livestock grazing and restore native habitat. Those efforts received wide acclaim after 1996 when a wild jaguar that roamed across the border from Mexico was the first to be photographed on U.S. soil in a generation.
Several other jaguars have been documented in southern Arizona since then, but many of their pathways are now potentially blocked by the border wall.
Goodwin said he and other like-minded landowners are eager to go back to an earlier era of cooperation with the government.
“We want to be a part of CBP achieving its overall goals in a way that benefits the values important to us and meets their objectives,” he said. “We have confidence there is a way to do that and not jeopardize what we’ve been working on for three generations now.”
Goodwin said he recognizes the need for barriers in populated areas but that improved surveillance technology can provide solutions in areas that should remain open to wildlife.
“The mountains are a natural deterrent,” he said. “The grade of the international border is so steep the contractors couldn’t get their equipment up there.”
Closing gaps
In the scramble to build as quickly as possible before Biden took office, construction crews in several areas of southern Arizona skipped over locations that required additional engineering or custom wall panels. That included stream channels that need flood gates and areas at border markers that are supposed to afford CBP agents access to the south side of the barrier in case of an emergency. In other locations, crews working from opposite directions needed irregular-sized segments to fill a gap, and the panels didn’t arrive in time.
One span of the barrier east of Sasabe, Ariz., has two dozen gaps in the wall and other segments with misshapen, temporary panels welded to the structure like patches.
Myles Traphagen, a conservation biologist who has mapped and documented the impact of border wall construction using motion-activated wildlife cameras, wants the Biden administration to leave the gaps open to provide a minimal degree of safe passage for large animals.
When a Mexican gray wolf with a radio collar headed south last fall, it hit the barrier and walked parallel to it for miles before eventually turning back. The young male wolf, nicknamed Mr. Goodbar, later suffered a gunshot wound that resulted in a leg amputation.
CBP says its remediation will add more wildlife openings in the barrier, but Traphagen says they’re too small for species like wolves, jaguar, bighorn sheep, ocelot or Sonoran pronghorn to cross. “Nothing larger than a rabbit is going to use them,” he said. “It’s only a veneer of environmental compliance.”
“The majority of the remediation work they’re planning is occurring to support existing border wall infrastructure, not for ecological restoration,” Traphagen said.
On one recent afternoon along the wall east of Sasabe, a group of families with small children crossed through a gap in the wall and began trekking along the border road, looking to turn themselves in to U.S. agents and start the asylum process. Most of the families were from Nicaragua, part of a historic surge of migration from the country following president Daniel Ortega’s reelection to a fourth term last year, in elections the Biden administration denounced as fraudulent.
“We can’t live in our country anymore,” said one mother who was traveling with two young daughters. She said she was trying to get to Arkansas.
A woman calling herself Butterfly drove up to the group in a battered Honda Accord and started handing out teddy bears. She had called the Border Patrol to come pick up the families, she said. Butterfly, from Spokane, Wash., said she was with a group called Veterans on Patrol but is not a veteran herself.
“We give little gifts to the kids. We want to make sure there’s no trafficking going on,” she said, driving off.
In another area nearby where the wall abruptly ends, U.S. border agents with all-terrain vehicles, dogs and a helicopter chased a separate group that was trying to slip away into the craggy Baboquivari Mountains. After the agents left, another group of men in camouflaged clothing approached from the Mexico side, heading for another gap in the wall. They appeared to be part of a smuggling operation.
“What are you doing here?” they yelled, shouting obscenities after seeing a photographer and reporter. Traphagen, who wore a pistol on his hip which he said he began carrying after harassment from contractors’ security teams, suggested a quick departure.
Border security concerns “are real,” he said. “Human and drug smuggling are real. There is a degree of border security that is needed. The idea of having open borders is not a reality.”
Traphagen said he supports more technology along the border as well as use of smaller “vehicle barriers,” long employed by CBP to stop smugglers from driving through, which don’t block wildlife.
At some locations near gaps and open gates in the wall where he has left motion-activated cameras, Traphagen has captured images of pumas, javelina, deer and other species crossing back and forth into Mexico, but during months and months of footage, he said, not a single person appeared.
“If we can accomplish border security with a smaller footprint and more compassion toward the land and its people, I think we could start constructively trying to solve this problem,” he said.
Protesters at a rally in support of Trayvon Martin. (photo: David Manning/Reuters)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
In Minneapolis Friday, a judge sentenced former police officer Kim Potter to two years in prison for the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright during a minor traffic stop last April. Potter was convicted of manslaughter in December. Judge Regina Chu said Potter made a “tragic mistake” when she shot Wright, a 20-year-old Black man. Potter claimed she meant to deploy her Taser. Video shows Potter shouting several times she was going to tase Wright, but her service gun, a Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol, was in her hand. She fired one shot into Wright’s chest. On Friday, Judge Regina Chu broke down and cried as she talked about Kim Potter.
JUDGE REGINA CHU: Kimberly Potter was trying to do the right thing. Of all the jobs in public service, police officers have the most difficult one. They must make snap decisions under tense, evolving and ever-changing circumstances. They risk their lives every single day in public service. Officer Potter made a mistake that ended tragically. She never intended to hurt anyone. Her conduct cries out for a sentence significantly below the guidelines.
AMY GOODMAN: Kim Potter was ordered to serve to 16 months in prison, then eight months in supervised release, for killing Daunte Wright. Some had expected her to receive a seven-year sentence. Minnesota state law permits a maximum sentence of 15 years. Daunte’s mother Katie Wright responded Friday after the sentencing.
KATIE WRIGHT: Today the justice system murdered him all over again. To sit there and watch, pouring my heart out in my victim impact statement, that took so long to write, and I reread it over and over again, to not get a response out of the judge at all, but then when it came down convicting — or, to sentencing Kim Potter, she broke out in tears. So, once again, we are standing here to say that we’re very disappointed in the outcome. Yes, we got a conviction, and we thank everybody for that. But again, this isn’t OK. This is the problem with our justice system today: White woman tears trumps — trumps — justice. And I thought my white woman tears would be good enough, because they’re true and genuine. But when they’re coerced, coached and taught by the defense attorney, I guess we didn’t have a win in this at all.
AMY GOODMAN: At a White House press briefing Friday, Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Potter’s sentence and expressed support for Daunte Wright’s family.
PRESS SECRETARY JEN PSAKI: Well, what I can say is that Daunte Wright should be here with his family and loved ones, and his death was the tragic result of a law enforcement officer’s error. We know we have a long way to go when it comes to criminal justice and racial equity in this country.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by civil rights attorney Ben Crump. He represents the family of Daunte Wright, along with the families of Ahmaud Arbery and Z’Kye Husain and Malcolm X — all cases we’re going to discuss today. But let’s start with Kim Potter.
You’re right there, Ben, standing next to Katie Wright as she responds to the verdict. Can you talk about what happened? And start off with the traffic stop itself, with the air freshener on his mirror.
BENJAMIN CRUMP: [inaudible] the example of what we believe excessive force by police officers when they interact with Black people in America. I have long said that police officers, when it comes to Black people, they always do the most. And you see that, time and time again, seems like they show such professionalism and so much consideration, so much restraint, when they interact with white citizens, but when it’s Black citizens, whether it is Amir Locke and Breonna Taylor, where they execute these dangerous no-knock warrants in the wee hours of the night and early morning, or when it’s George Floyd, who has an alleged $20 bill that’s counterfeit, and they could just give him a notice to appear, it seems to be always “Let’s do the most,” and certainly with Daunte Wright, what a lot of people have argued as a pretextual stop about an air freshener. And there are — they try to say it was his tag was expired, during a global pandemic, where there was a memo sent out saying to all the police officers in the state of Minnesota, “There are going to be many people with expired tags because everything is shut down, so we are advising not to pull people over for expired tags.” But yet they pulled Daunte Wright over for a minor traffic stop, and it ended up in this death sentence.
And, you know, we’ve often heard where they say, “We meant to pull our Taser and pulled our gun,” when it comes to Black people and Brown people, whether Oscar Grant and others; however, you don’t hear them making this mistake when it’s white citizens. It’s just citizens of color they seem to make these errors, Amy. And she didn’t even have to pull the Taser. It’s a minor traffic stop. You have the tag number. Was it really that important to pull the Taser or use any excessive force over something you had already been given notice that the state DMV said, “We don’t want you criminalizing them because we were shut down.” And so, that’s the history of it.
And she was convicted by a jury of her peers. It was a majority-white jury. And the crime that she was convicted of was not one of intent; it was one of recklessness. So, it was so deflating to hear the judge say, “Well, because she didn’t mean it, we’re going to do a downward departure. We’re going to give her all the consideration in the world,” because in that same courtroom a few years earlier, a Black police officer was convicted for killing a white woman —
AMY GOODMAN: Mohamed Noor.
BENJAMIN CRUMP: — and — Mohamed Noor. And he had a manslaughter — a second-degree manslaughter conviction. Kim Potter had a first-degree manslaughter conviction. Mohamed Noor, this Black man, said all the same things, that —
AMY GOODMAN: Somali American.
BENJAMIN CRUMP: Yeah, all the same things. Society perceived him as a Black man. And he said all the same things. When he shot the white woman, he was worried about his fellow officer’s safety. He felt remorse. He did not mean it. But yet he got no consideration. In fact, the judge sentenced him to the top of the guidelines, did an upward departure. And then, when you look at this white woman killing this young Black man and saying it was about officer safety and she’s sorry, well, she got all the consideration in the world. She will spend less time in prison than many Black people will spend in prison for selling marijuana, even though marijuana is legal in many states. And that is what has made so many people outraged, because it just seems to underscore the two justice systems in America — one for white America and another for Black America.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of which, I want to go to Georgia. Closing arguments are starting today in the federal hate crimes trial of the three white men convicted at the state level for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Defense lawyers rested their case Friday after calling just one witness. Last Thursday, jurors were shown graphic images of Arbery’s autopsy. One juror asked the judge if there was money for counseling available after hearing the racist language used by the killers and after viewing the images of the damage to Arbery’s body caused by two close-range blasts from Travis McMichael’s 12-gauge shotgun. This comes after Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael — former cop — and William “Roddie” Bryan were convicted by a Georgia court in November of felony murder and other charges for chasing down and killing Arbery. He was killed two years ago this Wednesday, February 23rd, 2020. Georgia has passed a resolution that the day will now be known as the Ahmaud Arbery Day throughout Georgia.
Ben Crump, can you talk about this case? I mean, the number of times that you saw in these texts of the — of, for example, the man with the gun, Travis McMichael, using the N-word, that’s when the juror first started saying, “We need therapy in dealing with this.” Talk about what has to be proved here. It’s not just the murder; it’s the animus, motivated by racial animus.
BENJAMIN CRUMP: Yes, and that’s why these federal hate crimes are so rare to have people held accountable, because you have to be able to prove that the crime, the murder, the act, was motivated by race. And oftentimes you don’t have text messages like the ones we see recovered from Travis and Gregory McMichael, where they seem to have a predisposition when they interact with people based on race. They talk about the protesters should all be killed, and they use the N-word in a line with that. One woman testified that Travis McMichael referred to her as an N-word lover because she was dating an African American man. You see them over and over again talk about they need to get rid of Black people, that they are the problem, you know, with their job or whatever — all kind of horrific comments. And so I believe this should be enough to have the jury convict them of a historic hate crime conviction, which I believe will be the first ever in the state of Georgia.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, I want to go to this other case of police brutality that you are now involved in, this horrific video emerging of two police officers breaking up a fight between a Black and a white person in a mall. The Black teen, the older white teen is — the Black teen is pushed down, handcuffed, knee in his back. The white teen is put on the couch to sit there free. You see the older teen shoving Z’Kye. They come to blows. Fourteen seconds into the fight, a pair of white police officers arrive and pull the boys apart. One offficer wrestles Z’Kye to the floor as he puts his knee in his back. The other officer pushes the white teen on the couch and motions him to sit still and then presses her knee into Z’Kye’s shoulder, as well. Z’Kye is handcuffed. The older white teen looks on, is not arrested. The video ends with a bystander’s comments.
BYSTANDER: Yo, it’s because he’s Black. [bleep] Racially motivated!
AMY GOODMAN: Z’Kye’s mother, Eboné, told CNN racism clearly played a role in the officers’ disparate treatment of the two boys.
Bq. EBONÉ HUSAIN: I hate to say this, but if it wasn’t for race, then what is it? What made them tackle my son, not the other kid? What made them be so aggressive with my son, not the other kid? Why is the other kid sitting down, looking at my son be humiliated and put into cuffs? It just doesn’t make sense. And it makes me angry.
AMY GOODMAN: Saturday, outside Bridgewater police headquarters in New Jersey, people chanted, “We are Z’Kye.” Your final comments on this, before we go to Malcolm X?
BENJAMIN CRUMP: Yes, Amy. Again, you see where police in America, like the criminal justice system, presumes Black people to be guilty until proven innocent and presumes white people to be innocent until proven guilty. And in this situation, the back story is Z’Kye was trying to stand up against a bully to help protect his friend. But yet, when the police came, the first thing they saw was: “Young Black man, guilty. Let’s take him down, put a knee in his back, and let’s handcuff him,” while the white kid is allowed to sit there free and observe the Black kid being humiliated.
And the reason we have to have accountability on this matter is, if we don’t, they end up being the next Trayvon Martin, the next Ahmaud Arbery. And that’s why when people say, “Well, he wasn’t killed. He wasn’t hurt. What’s that — why are you all making such a big deal out of this?” it’s because when they wrongfully accuse our children and our people, you end up with Black men staying in prison for decades, wrongfully convicted, because somebody made a presumption.
And one last thing I will say, it all ties together when you think about the sentencing of Kim Potter. The judge said at the end, “Just put yourself in Kim Potter’s shoes,” a convicted killer. This is what the judge asked the citizens of society to do. I have never heard a judge say, when a Black person had been a convicted killer, “Put yourself in their shoes.” That’s the kind of consideration that police and the criminal justice system and American society give to white people when they have committed a crime versus when you have Black people completely innocent. We still don’t get the consideration. Think of Z’Kye. Think of Trayvon. Think of Ahmaud Arbery. And the list goes on and on.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is the 10th anniversary, next weekend, of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Ben Crump, of course, deeply involved with that case, as well. Ben, we’d like you to stay with us. We’ll be back in 30 seconds to talk about this 57th anniversary of the Malcolm X assassination and the call by his family for a new federal probe.
Election workers validate ballots at the Gwinnete County Elections Office on Friday, Nov. 6, 2020, in Lawrenceville, GA. (photo: Kent Nishimura/LA Times/Getty Images)
Election workers are under new threats. Protecting them might be the one national voting reform Congress enacts.
This rural slice of northwest Ohio—population 38,000—went for Donald Trump by more than 30 percentage points. The county has long favored Republicans, and it hasn’t been competitive in a very long time.
But for the people who run elections in Defiance County, the job has never been harder. “In the last three years, this job has basically tripled,” said Tonya Wichman, the county elections director.
It’s not just the endless stream of calls and letters. It’s what they entail for election workers these days: near-constant harassment and denigration from people who, largely spurred on by Trump’s election fraud conspiracies, have developed a toxic distrust of the election system and those who run it.
“It’s a disheartening thing… to have people tell you how bad you do your job when you’re going above and beyond what they expect from you,” Wichman says. “They’re listening to people speak about our jobs without asking us about our jobs.”
In response, the Defiance County elections office has upgraded every aspect of its security, and there is an additional physical barrier between staff and those who walk in. They instruct poll workers what to do if they see a suspicious car at a voting location, which Wichman says has not been necessary before.
Wichman stresses that election workers love what they do and are committed to protecting the integrity of the system—no matter what. But for some in the field, the work has simply become too overwhelming.
A longtime election official at the county recently resigned, citing the unmanageable workload, Wichman said. Some poll workers have decided not to volunteer anymore because they do not feel safe.
More than a year after the 2020 election concluded—and months away from the pivotal 2022 midterms—election officials around the country have strikingly similar stories. Whether it’s in jurisdictions where Trump sought to sow conspiracies, like Milwaukee and Atlanta, or sleepy counties like Defiance, there’s an unprecedented, nationwide wave of rage directed at election workers, from secretaries of state to volunteer poll workers.
Sometimes that rage takes the form of harassing phone rants directed at election officials, or filing reams of purposely burdensome records requests. Other times, it has taken the form of menacing personal messages scrawled near an election official’s home, or death threats that prompt law enforcement investigation.
Not every election office has been touched by this phenomenon, but it’s widespread enough to seriously alarm officials and election experts nationwide.
David Becker, a leading election lawyer, recently co-founded the Election Official Legal Defense Network, a group that seeks to provide legal resources to election workers facing various threats. He has spoken with dozens of them nationwide and told The Daily Beast that they “feel like no one has their back right now.”
“If we lose these election officials, and we’re losing more than ever before, our democracy is at risk,” Becker said.
The alarm has reached the halls of Congress. After Senate Democrats failed to advance a voting rights and election reform package in January, a bipartisan group of senators began to discuss a narrower bill to shore up the country’s election systems. That could include ways of supporting election workers in crisis.
One possibility being considered is to make criminal penalties stiffer for people who threaten or harass election workers. Several states, including Washington state and Vermont, have passed laws in recent months doing just that.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), one of the senators studying expanded support for election workers, said in a statement to The Daily Beast that she is “encouraged by the progress we are making in our discussions and the ongoing, good-faith efforts from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to address this shared concern.”
“We agree on the urgent need to protect election workers and that our federal laws must be strengthened and clarified to that end,” Shaheen continued.
The challenge for senators, however, is doing something that can make a difference for election workers and can also get the 60 votes needed to become law. Some senators are skeptical of new legal protections for election workers, and want a compromise package to narrowly focus on amending the centuries-old Electoral Count Act, which Trump and his supporters tried to exploit on Jan. 6.
Election workers around the country, and their advocates, are watching Congress closely. Many believe that what lawmakers do—or don’t do—could have a real impact on a crisis that threatens to erode the foundations of election systems nationwide.
With unprecedented numbers of election workers quitting their jobs in jurisdictions around the country, officials warn that a lack of support from Washington could only accelerate the drain of passion and expertise.
In interviews, a half-dozen election workers from different parts of the country emphasized their commitment to the work. But they also said they would not only welcome any help from Congress—on a basic level, they are simply relieved that the nation’s federal lawmakers are taking their problems seriously.
Zachary Manifold took over as the elections director of Gwinnett County, Georgia, six months ago. The recent turnover has been so stark in greater Atlanta that Manifold guessed he is now one of the most senior election officials in the 11-county metro area.
“It’s been hard to recruit people to come into the industry,” Manifold said. “So, anything that gives out confidence that people should get involved in elections, any step in that direction is a good step.”
“It’s sad we even need to contemplate the need for protection of election workers,” said Wesley Wilcox, elected as a Republican to serve as the chief elections official in Marion County, Florida.
“But it is good news that some of the things my colleagues have experienced across the country have gotten to the federal level,” Wilcox said. “To me, it’s at least, we’re having a conversation that we need to do something.”
There are no simple answers to what that solution should be. Virtually all policymakers and experts recognize that the roots of this crisis are complicated, interconnected, and difficult to resolve through legislating. And as long as Trump continues to make the Big Lie an article of faith in the GOP that is constantly parroted in right-wing media, it may be impossible to fully resolve.
But election officials and experts agreed that Congress could start to attack the problem in two ways: criminal penalties, and ensuring those on the front lines have the resources they need.
Washington state’s new law, for instance, would make harassment of an election worker a class C felony—on par with assaulting a police officer—that can carry as many as five years in prison.
Establishing a similar statute on the federal level could provide a strong deterrent to those who might threaten or harass them, said Becker.
“Anyone who would seek to commit what I think of as an act of domestic terrorism, intended to inflict fear on civil servants doing their civic duty, those people should be held criminally liable and should have to pay a price for that behavior,” Becker said.
Those who experienced first-hand the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election recall how little accountability there was for those who harassed or threatened election workers.
Clare Allenson, of the League of Conservation Voters chapter in Michigan, was an official observer of the absentee ballot counting process in Detroit in the days after the presidential election. She witnessed how Republican challengers, who traveled to the overwhelmingly Democratic city to try and throw out absentee ballots, acted with near-impunity in intimidating election workers.
Allenson recalled that, inside the tallying center, those GOP challengers chanted “stop the count!” and encircled the poll workers trying to do their jobs. Police threw out people who banged on the windows and refused to wear face masks, but that was the extent of the consequences for the disrupters.
The least that federal policymakers can do going forward, Allenson said, is to ensure election workers are treated like “essential infrastructure.”
“The biggest thing is accountability,” Allenson continued. “If you make a threat, it needs to get pursued, and there should be consequences for people who are making threats to those who are administering our elections, whether it’s full-time as a clerk or one day as a poll worker.”
Some experts are skeptical that toughening criminal penalties will do much, however, and point to the number of highly publicized cases of election worker threats—which already likely met thresholds for criminal behavior—that did not result in prosecution.
Some lawmakers in both parties share that skepticism. Although he admitted it would be “popular” to pass tougher criminal penalties, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), the top Republican on the Senate committee that oversees elections, said “most of these things are already against the law.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a former Attorney General of Connecticut, said “criminal punishment is often a real deterrent, but prevention often depends on scrutiny and real time oversight at the polls.”
To that end, a more straightforward way that Congress could help election workers is the easiest one: appropriating some cash.
Election administration has been perennially underfunded, from the state to city levels. Heading into the 2022 elections, many jurisdictions are facing grave budget shortfalls amid rising costs and other challenges, The Washington Post reported,
Increased federal funding to elections agencies could give them tools not only to protect themselves from danger, but replenish depleted workforces and fund outreach to communities, said Christopher Piper, the Virginia state director of elections.
“Threats are one thing,” Piper told The Daily Beast. “There’s a lot of things that are making the job much more difficult.”
Recently, Piper said that Virginia used federal grant money to establish a program to help protect election workers’ information online and digitally. Virginia continued funding it, but other jurisdictions often are not so lucky, particularly smaller city and county election administrators.
“If the state doesn’t step in, or the federal government, to sustain it,” these programs “go away just as quickly,” Piper said.
A larger problem than the effectiveness of specific solutions: it’s far from guaranteed that the Senate does anything soon—or at all. After talks moved quickly on bipartisan election reform in early February, the pace has slowed down as senators grapple with the details and face skepticism from their colleagues.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), a leader of the group, said last week that senators were “making progress, but it is evident that the complexity is such that it's going to take a while.”
Election officials, like Wichman, in Defiance County, urged Congress to seek the perspectives of the people who are weathering these conditions out of their passion for the work.
“It’s great that they’re talking about it,” Wichman said. “But they need to talk to the people in our offices—talk to the election officials.”
An eviction. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
But then the 43-year-old hairdresser got a letter last month from her landlord saying the company was canceling her lease in March —- seven months early — without any explanation.
“I’m really pissed about it. I thought I would be comfortable again back in my home,” said King, whose work dried up during the pandemic and who now worries about finding another apartment she can afford. “Here I am back up against the wall with no where to stay. I don’t know what I am going to do.”
Although the $46.5 billion Emergency Rental Assistance Program has paid out tens of billions of dollars to help avert an eviction crisis, some tenants, like King, who received help are finding themselves threatened with eviction again — sometimes days after getting federal help. Many are finding it nearly impossible to find another affordable place to live.
“It is a Band-Aid. It was never envisioned as anything more than a Band-Aid,” Erin Willoughby, director of the Clayton Housing Legal Resource Center Atlanta, said of the program.
“It’s not solving the underlying problem, which is a lack of affordable housing. People are on the hook for rents they cannot afford to pay,” she said. “Simply finding something cheaper is not an option because there is not anything cheaper. People have to be housed somewhere.”
The National Housing Law Project, in a survey last fall of nearly 120 legal aid attorneys and civil rights advocates, found that 86% of respondents reported cases in which landlords either refused to take assistance or accepted the money and still moved to evict tenants. The survey also found a significant increase in cases of landlords lying in court to evict tenants and illegally locking them out.
“A number of issues could be described as issues related to landlord fraud ... and a set of problems I would describe as loopholes within the ... program that made it less effective to accomplish the goal,” said Natalie N. Maxwell, a senior attorney with the group.
National Apartment Association President and CEO Bob Pinnegar said the survey was not based on facts, adding that its members are doing everything they can to keep tenants in their homes, including lobbying to get rental assistance out faster.
“Skewed surveys aren’t reflective of the entire situation. By and large the rental housing industry has gone to great lengths to support residents, including when it comes to rental assistance and adherence to laws and regulations,” Pinnegar said in a statement.
Legal aid attorneys interviewed across the country confirmed they are seeing a steady increase in cases where tenants were approved for rental help and still faced eviction.
These include the mother of a newborn and two other children in Florida who received rental assistance but was ordered evicted after the landlord refused to take the money. Another Florida landlord lied in court that she hadn’t received the money in a bid to push through an eviction.
There have also been cases in Georgia and Texas where landlords who received assistance moved to end leases early, increased rents to unaffordable levels or found other reasons than nonpayment to evict someone, lawyers said.
“As it is right now, it doesn’t seem to be working as intended,” said Tori Tavormina, an eviction prevention specialist with Texas Housers. “It feels much more like it’s a program that is alleviating the pressure of the eviction crisis but not solving the underlying problems.”
District Court Judge Shera Grant, who handles housing cases in Birmingham, Alabama, said she and her fellow judges have seen an uptick in cases of landlords getting assistance and returning to court a few weeks later after a tenant has fallen behind on rent to seek an eviction. So far they have prevented them — though she expects a spike in these kinds of cases going forward.
“It’s incumbent on the judges to make sure we are paying close attention to our eviction cases and making sure that the landlord is not having their cake and eating it too,” she said. “By the same token, we are not forcing landlords to take the money. There are some unfortunate circumstances where the tenant has to be evicted.”
In the case of King, she believes her landlord was retaliating for earlier complaints about mold and water leaks in her three-bedroom house. The company King was dealing with, NDI Maxim, which manages property for owners, said it “was not at liberty to share details of tenants’ status nor their payment records.”
Other cases are complicated by the length of the pandemic and conflicting accounts of landlord and tenant. And they often leave both parties feeling shortchanged.
Despite his landlord getting more than $20,000 in rental assistance, Prince Beatty is facing imminent eviction from his three-bedroom house in East Point, Georgia.
After the money was approved, Beatty signed an agreement in court late last year to pay several thousand dollars more that he owed as a condition to remain housed. He went back to the county for additional assistance to cover the balance but says he was denied. Unable to find warehouse work during the pandemic, the 47-year-old Navy veteran still can’t pay rent and is now $12,000 behind, in part due to his rent increasing from $1,250-a-month to $2,000.
Beatty, who was told he would be evicted this month, said he wakes most mornings in a panic, wondering if this will be the day when marshals “come and disrespect my stuff and throw it in the street.”
His landlord, Monique Jones, said she tried to work with Beatty. But she said he violated the lease by subletting rooms to several other people and that the amount of rental assistance has not covered losses from months of unpaid rent that started before the pandemic.
“It was helpful but it did not address the underlying issue which is his nonpayment of rent,” she said of the rental assistance. “That still remains and that is rightfully why I am proceeding. If I have a tenant who will pay rent and abides by the lease, I would not attempt to evict.”
Limits with rental assistance often come down to some states and localities failing to follow Treasury Department guidance calling for policies requiring landlords delay evictions after getting money. Although the program prevents landlords from evicting during the period covered by rental assistance, the Treasury Department can only encourage states to adopt policies that ban evictions up to three months afterward.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition found only 29 states and localities in 2021 had adopted policies that prohibit landlords who participate in the rental assistance program from evicting tenants for a period ranging from 30 days to 12 months. Six states — Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, North Carolina and West Virginia — passed regulations while several cities or counties in Texas and Maryland did.
Gene Sperling, who is charged with overseeing implementation of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package, said there was no data to suggest landlords evicting tenants after getting assistance is a “pervasive issue” but that it was “completely unacceptable.”
While it’s “not against the letter of the act, it’s against the spirit of it,” he said.
The Coalition also said the program’s issues illustrate a larger problem.
“We are in the middle of a severe affordable housing crisis with gaping holes in our social safety net,” CEO Diane Yentel said. “We have a systemic power imbalance that favors landlords at the expense of low-income tenants. Emergency rental assistance and eviction moratoriums were a temporary patch to those holes.”
Russian soldiers. (photo: Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)
Ukraine-Russia crisis news from February 21: Russian president says troops to ‘maintain peace’ in Donetsk and Luhansk, areas he earlier recognised as independent.
In two official decrees, Putin on Monday instructed the country’s defence ministry to assume “the function of maintaining peace” in the eastern regions.
The West has repeatedly warned Russia not to recognise the separatist regions in Donetsk and Luhansk – a move that effectively buries a fragile peace process in the region.
Putin’s announcement paved the way for Russia to openly send troops and weapons to the long-running conflict pitting Ukrainian forces against Moscow-backed rebels.
Millions of bison, also referred to as the buffalo although they are different animals, once roamed the U.S. (photo: CampPhoto/Getty Images)
The Rosebud Sioux nation in South Dakota aims to build the largest Indigenous owned herd to help food security and restore the land
“I really hope we’re not on the brink of some disease outbreak,” said Doyle, who manages the Wolakota Buffalo Range here in a remote corner of south-western South Dakota in one of the country’s poorest counties. The living bison sidle away as Doyle inspects the carcass, which is little more than skin and bones after coyotes have scavenged it.
“If you don’t catch them immediately after they’ve died, it’s pretty hard to say what happened,” he said.
So far, at least, the Wolakota herd has avoided outbreaks as it pursues its aim of becoming the largest Indigenous American-owned bison herd. In the two years since the Rosebud Sioux tribe started collecting the animals on the 28,000-acre range in the South Dakota hills, the herd has swelled to 750 bison. The tribe plans to reach its goal of 1,200 within the year.
“I thought we had an aggressive timeline on it, but the thing’s gotten a lot of support,” said Clay Colombe, CEO of the Rosebud tribe’s economic development agency. “It’s been a snowball in a good way.”
With their eyes on solving food shortages and financial shortfalls, restoring ecosystems and bringing back an important cultural component, dozens of indigenous tribes have been growing bison herds. Tribes manage at least 55 herds across 19 states, said Troy Heinert, executive director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council.
The pandemic, which has hit tribes particularly hard, added to the urgency of bison restoration, said Heinert, who is also the minority leader in the South Dakota state senate. The first animal harvested by Wolakota helped feed homeless residents of the Rosebud Sioux reservation.
“It did highlight the fact that many of our areas on tribal lands do have some kind of food insecurity,” he said. “When trucks stopped coming in, it was rural and reservation communities that got hit hardest. Our people don’t have the ability to travel long distances to find new food sources.”
Although the words are used interchangeably, bison and buffalo are different animals. Bison – named the US’s national mammal in 2016 – are found in North America and Europe, while buffalo are native to Asia and Africa.
“I used to be a stickler for calling them bison, but I’ve heard them called buffalo a lot around here,” said Doyle, who is also a wildlife biologist. “I feel like it rolls off the tongue more easily, and it’s just fun to say.”
Millions of bison once roamed the US, but they were hunted nearly to extinction in the 19th century, partly to suppress Indigenous Americans as they were forced on to reservations. In many areas, bison were replaced by cattle, which overgrazed the western US and killed off native vegetation.
Indigenous American leaders are hoping Congress will help tribes bring back the bison. The Indian Buffalo Management Act, modeled after a bill that provided federal help to fishing tribes, was passed by the House in December and is awaiting Senate approval.
“For Indian tribes, the restoration of buffalo to tribal lands signifies much more than simply conservation of the national mammal,” said Ervin Carlson, president of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, at a House hearing last year. “Tribes enter buffalo restoration efforts to counteract the near extinction of buffalo that was analogous to the tragic history of American Indians in this country.”
Not all the tribes that would benefit from the federal funds are in places where buffalo previously roamed. The Alutiiq tribe on Alaska’s Kodiak Island has been raising bison since 2017 to combat food insecurity. The tribe has nearly 90 animals – including three bulls from Yellowstone national park that were sent part of the way via a specially outfitted FedEx plane – and expects to reach at least 150 this year, said herd manager Melissa Berns.
“People are excited to be able to harvest right in our own back yard,” she said. “It’s clean meat and we know exactly where it came from.”
While food security is most often cited as the reason for the recent interest in bison, tribes also hope that returning bison to the land will restore ecological balance. At Wolakota, for instance, bison have been eating the yucca plants that became plentiful after native grasses disappeared, tearing them up by the roots and allowing grasses to return. The grass regeneration increases carbon capture.
The bison also is tightly connected to the culture of Great Plains tribes such as the Sioux. The animals provided food, tools and shelter for indigenous people, and some tribes consider them to be family.
“It’s a powerful feeling bringing our relatives home,” said TJ Heinert, Troy’s 27-year-old son who lives on the Wolakota range with his family and helps manage it. On a recent winter morning he was dressed in camouflage as he prepared to hunt coyotes as part of a tribal benefit for his mother, who is recovering from cancer surgery.
“If our buffalo nation is healthy, we’re healthy,” he said.
It takes a lot of work to keep that buffalo nation healthy. Doyle and TJ spend hours each day crawling over dirt roads that test the suspension on their trucks.
“It’s bumpy out here,” Doyle said as he navigated his truck through rolling hills dotted with running coyotes. “It will really rattle your kidneys if you spend a full day bumping around.”
Much of the past two years has included replacing 40 miles of fences to keep neighboring cattle ranchers happy. Another 40 miles will be replaced or added this year. In the winter, employees must constantly chop up frozen watering holes with axes to keep the animals hydrated. About once a year the bison need to be vaccinated against an array of diseases and the females checked for pregnancy.
As with grass-fed cattle, the bison are herded from one pasture to another to prevent overgrazing. On a recent day, nearly all the animals were confined to a 2,000-acre pasture, except for a few “ornery” bulls that Doyle said had been reluctant to move with the rest of the herd and were left behind.
“We’re trying to strike a balance of letting the buffalo express their natural behaviors, making sure they have plenty of room to roam,” Doyle said as he drove toward a group of about two dozen bison, “and being able to manage where they’re grazing so we can make sure we’re still improving the range health and habitat quality for other wildlife.”
With millions of dollars donated to the project in the past two years, the Wolakota herd has grown quickly. That growth has been aided by donated animals from at least nine sources, most of them federal wildlife refuges and national parks. Doyle expected to bring in 60 additional bison from Montana in the coming days.
“I think the rapid growth of this project is a sign of how much support there is for projects like this,” said Dennis Jorgensen, who coordinates the World Wildlife Federation’s bison initiative and has helped Wolakota get off the ground. “I really think there’s an energy among the American people to return bison to the native people."
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