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After Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, America turned its industrial prowess to building tanks, bombers and destroyers. Now, we must respond with renewables
One of the worst parts of facing today’s reality is our impotence in its face. Yes, America is imposing sanctions, and yes, that may eventually hamper Putin. But the Russian leader made his move knowing we could not actually fight him in Ukraine – and indeed knowing that his hinted willingness to use nuclear weapons will make it hard to fight him anywhere, though one supposes we will have no choice if he attacks a Nato member.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to dramatically reduce Putin’s power. One way, in particular: to get off oil and gas.
This is not a “war for oil and gas” in the sense that too many of America’s Middle East misadventures might plausibly be described. But it is a war underwritten by oil and gas, a war whose most crucial weapon may be oil and gas, a war we can’t fully engage because we remain dependent on oil and gas. If you want to stand with the brave people of Ukraine, you need to find a way to stand against oil and gas.
Russia has a pathetic economy – you can verify that for yourself by looking around your house and seeing how many of the things you use were made within its borders. Today, 60% of its exports are oil and gas; they supply the money that powers the country’s military machine.
And, alongside that military machine, control of oil and gas supplies is Russia’s main weapon. They have, time and again, threatened to turn off the flow of hydrocarbons to western Europe. When the Germans finally this week stopped the planned Nordstream 2 pipeline, Putin’s predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev , said, “Welcome to the new world where Europeans will soon have to pay 2,000 euros ($2,270) per thousand cubic meters!” His not very subtle notion: if the price of keeping houses warm doubles, Europe will have no choice but to fold.
Finally, even the Biden administration – which has been playing its hand wisely in the lead up to the invasion – is constrained by oil and gas. As we impose sanctions, everyone’s looking for an out: the Italians want to exempt high-end luxury goods and the Belgians diamonds, but the US has made it clear that it doesn’t want to seriously interrupt the flow of Russian oil for fear of driving up gas prices and thus weakening American resolve.
As one “senior state department official” told the Wall Street Journal this week, “doing anything that affects … or halts energy transactions would have a great impact on the United States, American citizens and our allies. So our intention here is to impose the hardest sanctions we can while trying to safeguard the American public and the rest of the world from those measures,” the official said. It’s obviously not an idle fear: as of this morning Tucker Carlson was attacking Russia hawk Lindsey Graham for supporting a conflict that will bring “higher gas prices” while he has a “generous Congressional pension”. If you’re an apologist for fascism, high gas prices are your first go-to move.
So now is the moment to remind ourselves that, in the last decade, scientists and engineers have dropped the cost of solar and windpower by an order of magnitude, to the point where it is some of the cheapest power on Earth. The best reason to deploy it immediately is to ward off the existential crisis that is climate change, and the second best is to stop the killing of nine million people annually who die from breathing in the particulates that fossil fuel combustion produces. But the third best reason – and perhaps the most plausible for rousing our leaders to action – is that it dramatically reduces the power of autocrats, dictators, and thugs.
Imagine a Europe that ran on solar and wind power: whose cars ran on locally provided electricity, and whose homes were heated by electric air-source heat pumps. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia, and it would be far less scared of Putin’s Russia – it could impose every kind of sanction, and keep them in place until the country buckled. Imagine an America where the cost of gas was not a political tripwire, because if people had to have a pickup to make them feel sufficiently manly, that pickup would run on electricity that came from the sun and wind. It would take an evil-er genius than Vladimir Putin to figure out how to embargo the sun.
These are not novel technologies – they exist, are growing, and could be scaled up quickly. In the years after Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, America turned its industrial prowess to building tanks, bombers, and destroyers. In 1941, in Ypsilanti, the world’s largest industrial plant went up in six month’s time, and soon it was churning out a B-24 bomber every hour. A bomber is a complicated machine with more than a million parts; a wind turbine is, by contrast, relatively simple. In Michigan alone (“the arsenal of democracy”), a radiator company retooled to make 20m steel helmets and a rubber factory retooled to produce the liners for those helmets; the company that made the fabric for Ford’s seat cushions stopped doing that and started pushing out parachutes. Do we think that it’s beyond us to quickly produce the solar panels and the batteries required to end our dependence on fossil fuel?
It’s not easy – among other things, Russia has a good deal of some of the minerals that help in renewable energy production. (Nickel, for example.) But, here again, the example of the second world war is helpful – with the Axis in control of commodities like rubber, we quickly figured out how to mass produce substitutes.
It’s true that we could produce carbon free energy with nuclear power too, as long as we were willing to pay the heavy premium that technology requires – and right now Germany is probably regretting its decision to hastily shut down its reactors in the wake of the Fukushima accident. But if you think about the scenario now unfolding across Europe, you’re reminded of another of the advantages of renewable power, which is that it’s widely distributed. There are far fewer central nodes to attack with cruise missiles and artillery shells – targeting reactors is pretty easy, but driving your tank across Europe from one solar panel to the next so you can get out to smash it with a hammer is comical.
At the moment, big oil is using the fighting in Ukraine as an excuse to try to expand its footprint – reliable industry ally Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, went on Fox this week to argue that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline had empowered the Russian leader, for instance, and the American Petroleum Institute today called for more oil and gas development. But this is absurd – we may need, for the remaining weeks of this winter, to insure gas supplies for Europe, but by next winter we need to remove that lever. That means an all-out effort to decarbonize that continent, and then our own. It’s not impossible.
We have to do it anyway, if we’re to have any hope of slowing the climate change. And we can do it fast if we want: huge offshore windfarms in Europe have been built inside of 18 months without any wartime pressure.
We should be in agony today – people are dying because they want to live in a democracy, want to determine their own affairs. But that agony should, and can, produce real change. (And not just in Europe. Imagine not having to worry about what the king of Saudia Arabia thought, or the Koch brothers – access to fossil fuel riches so often produces retrograde thuggery.) Caring about the people of Ukraine means caring about an end to oil and gas.
Ukrainian citizens traveling by train arrive in Przemysl, Poland, on February 25. (photo: Beata Zawrzel/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The time for the US and its European allies to act is now.
Just hours after Russia’s assault began on Thursday morning, there were massive traffic jams, sold-out train tickets, and long lines at ATMs in Kyiv as people tried to flee with little clue as to how long they might be gone or if they’ll ever return.
“There is a significant movement of the population, but it is also hard to say whether people are moving permanently or for the short-term,” said Irina Saghoyan, the eastern Europe director for Save the Children, which has been on the ground in Ukraine since 2014.
For now, central Europe is welcoming Ukrainians with open arms. Receiving countries include Poland, which is planning to accommodate up to 1 million Ukrainians, as well as Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Moldova, where 4,000 Ukrainians arrived on Thursday. But those countries aren’t currently equipped to handle the volume of refugees that are likely to arrive on their borders in the coming weeks, and European and US leadership need to scramble to help build up that capacity.
The primary receiving countries in central Europe simply don’t have the capacity to meet those needs on a large scale and on a prolonged basis. Poland, for example, only accepted about 5,200 refugees in the first nine months of 2021. A million is a big step up.
“The amount of resources being dedicated to this may not be sufficient to the full scope and scale of the crisis,” said Daniel Balson, the advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia for Amnesty International.
Ukrainians’ needs go beyond temporary provisions of food, clothing, and shelter that can sustain them through the cold weather. They are facing the prospect of long-term displacement, and that means they need formal pathways to legal status, access to resettlement services, permanent housing, education, and healthcare. They also need vaccination for Covid-19, which has ravaged Ukraine in recent months; only about 36 percent of Ukrainians are vaccinated.
European Union states will likely bear the brunt of any potential influx of Ukrainian refugees. That will require a lot of money and infrastructure that aid organizations can’t provide in full.
But there’s a role for the US, too. It can provide even more financial support and humanitarian aid than it already has. And while it has been helping to ensure that Ukrainians have a place to go, it also can help coordinate resettlement so no one country has to bear the entire burden, while also making it easier for Ukrainians to come to the US.
The time to act is now. The number of Ukrainians in need of humanitarian aid could balloon quickly, particularly given Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear in previous conflicts that he has no qualms about targeting civilians, like when he ordered airstrikes on Syrian civilian infrastructure in 2019. Indeed, he has already started bombing Ukrainian hospitals in violation of international humanitarian law.
Europe is welcoming refugees, unlike in past crises
Europe is facing down what could be its biggest refugee crisis since 2015, when more than a million migrants and refugees arrived on the continent. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Thursday that the EU has been preparing to “welcome and host” potential Ukrainian refugees for weeks in coordination with front-line member states.
Von der Leyen said European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations, the EU’s humanitarian arm, is ready to provide for the basic and immediate needs of internally displaced Ukrainians. And the EU will increase its financial assistance for refugees beyond the $1.2 billion in aid that is already available, though has yet to commit to an exact amount.
So far, Ukraine’s western neighbors have pledged to take in refugees fleeing Russia’s attack. On Thursday, Ukrainians began showing up on their borders by the thousands and there appear to be many more on the way given the crowded roadways.
Poland, the largest country on Ukraine’s western flank, is expected to be the primary destination for refugees. There are currently eight reception points along every border crossing where they can get food, medical assistance, and information. And there’s transport available to move them from those sites to other regions of the country if need be.
“We have a calling to ensure our national security, but also ensure the best conditions for Ukrainian citizens who will be seeking shelter in Poland from war,” the Polish deputy minister of internal affairs and administration Błażej Poboży told the media outlet Radio ZET in Polish on Thursday.
But even countries that don’t directly border Ukraine have offered up support: Czech Republic, for instance, has offered to deploy its police force to Slovakia’s eastern border to help manage the influx of refugees.
This kind of mobilization across Europe to come to Ukrainians’ aid stands in contrast to past responses to migrant crises. Just months ago, Poland decided to utilize troops and construct a $400 million wall to repel predominantly Muslim asylum seekers at its border with Belarus. Over the past few years, Hungary has passed laws criminalizing support for asylum seekers and limiting the right to asylum and has allowed police to automatically expel any unauthorized migrants. And in 2015, the influx of Syrians fueled the rise of populist, anti-immigration, eurosceptic, and far-right parties across Europe.
Why is this time any different? EU countries might be more open to absorbing Ukrainians fleeing the wrath of their adversary. But there might also be more willingness to accept Ukrainians because they are white, European, and majority Christian, revealing the “troubling rise of nationalist movements rooted in fear of the other,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
There’s still a lot European countries need to work out, including finding more permanent accommodations for Ukrainians. That will involve developing a regional resettlement scheme and ensuring that the kind of overcrowding that occurred in Greece and Italy in 2015 doesn’t happen again. Ukrainians can stay in the EU without a visa for up to 90 days, but it’s an open question what kind of legal status they might get thereafter. That will need to be cleared up as well.
The US can support the humanitarian response in Europe
Geography dictates that central Europe will likely be the epicenter of the Ukrainian refugee crisis. But the US still has a role to play.
“The responsibility to support refugees and asylum seekers in Europe cannot fall squarely or exclusively on Europeans,” Balson said. “The US constantly talks about the need to show solidarity in various spheres; there’s a need for solidarity in support for asylum seekers.”
Many of the 5,500 US troops deployed to Poland have already been helping set up processing centers. But some migration experts in Poland have raised concerns that Poland has nowhere near the capacity to absorb 1 million refugees as it has promised. As of earlier this month, there were only 2,000 spots for refugees across all the centers operated by the government’s Office of Foreigners. The Polish border guard had room for only 800 people (its facilities can hold a total of 2,300), though authorities said they would be able to make additional spots available. It will need to do so, and quickly, and is likely to rely on international funds and personnel to make those expansions happen.
A State Department spokesperson told Vox on Wednesday that the US has been coordinating with the government of Ukraine, European allies, international organizations, and NGOs on contingency planning and preparedness efforts. It was engaging diplomatically to ensure neighboring countries keep their borders open to those seeking international protection. And it was “actively planning to augment ongoing US humanitarian support in Ukraine” in response to Russian aggression, they said. It’s not yet clear, however, what form that support will take.
The UN Refugee Agency, which has a longtime presence in Ukraine, has been asking the international community for $190 million in humanitarian assistance, a request that hadn’t yet been answered as of Wednesday. That would help fund the agency’s 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan for Ukraine and meet the needs of an estimated 1.8 million people, nearly half of which are children or elderly, said Shabia Mantoo, a spokesperson for the agency.
Congress could also work to pass an emergency supplemental bill that would provide further resources for US embassies in affected countries. That would increase the effectiveness of relocation pipelines and provide further support to Ukrainians and other impacted individuals in the region, O’Mara Vignarajah said.
And though the US government has said that Putin has closed the door to diplomacy, Saghoyan said there is an urgent need to negotiate for a humanitarian corridor that would allow people who want to leave the country to do so safely and for humanitarian groups to continue to operate in Ukraine without fear of reprisal or harm after military activity subsides. On Thursday, safety concerns forced Save the Children to close its offices in Ukraine, which according to Saghoyan have served more than 350,000 children since 2014, though it is still partnering with civil society groups on the ground to assist displaced people.
How the US could welcome Ukrainians
There are policies that the US can pursue stateside that would help some Ukrainians resettle in the US.
Biden could immediately and unilaterally increase the number of spots allocated to Europeans under the US refugee admissions program. That number is capped at 10,000 for the current fiscal year, and as of January 31, 335 of those slots had already been filled, mostly by Ukrainians. But it can take months or even years to come to the US as a refugee, which might be too long for Ukrainians in crisis. And the capacity of the US refugee program abroad continues to be limited due to pandemic-era shutdowns and Trump administration cutbacks.
“The Biden administration should aggressively focus on rebuilding the processing efficiency and capacity of the refugee program abroad, which has continued to lag throughout its first year in office,” O’Mara Vignarajah said.
Biden could also provide temporary protected status to Ukrainians who have already arrived in the US, which would temporarily shield them from deportation and allow them to work legally. That kind of status is typically offered to citizens of countries suffering from armed conflicts like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. According to the Migration Policy Institute, there are an estimated 30,000 Ukrainians already living in the US who do not have American citizenship or other kinds of permanent status.
Biden can also allow Ukrainians to come to the US on humanitarian parole, which allows people facing urgent humanitarian need to enter and stay in the US without a visa. The benefit of parole is that it can be approved within a matter of days or hours, as opposed to the many months or years it typically takes to process a visa. It’s the same mechanism that allowed tens of thousands of Afghans to come to the US following the American withdrawal last year.
But given that the airports in Ukraine are now closed or destroyed by Russia and Biden has said that his administration will not carry out an evacuation, it’s not clear if any significant number of Ukrainians would be able to reach the US even if any of those immigration pathways were available. That makes the US’s imperative to support the humanitarian response in receiving nations in Europe even stronger.
Juan Salazar, 77, a resident of the Haley Sofge Tower apartments in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, explained how his political party affiliation was changed from Democrat to Republican without his permission. (photo: Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald)
“I’ve been a Democrat since the day I became a citizen,” Estevez said as she rifled through old mail from the elections department, each letter carefully labeled by year and stowed in a plastic tub. She pulled out card after card showing the same thing — Democrat — until she found the most recent letter, and there it was: “Republican Party of Florida.”
“They changed me!” she cried. “Who would do this?”
Records kept by the Miami-Dade elections department provided an answer: canvassers from the Republican Party of Florida. They submitted the form that changed Estevez from Democrat to Republican on Dec. 22, 2021. Later, Republican canvassers submitted a second form, again marking her down as a Republican, records show.
Estevez doesn’t even remember speaking with any of them.
In all, 22 voters at Vernon Ashley Plaza, the public housing complex in Hialeah where Estevez lives, told reporters their party affiliation had also been changed without their knowledge or consent last year. All of them became Republicans. All of the paperwork was submitted by Republican Party canvassers, records show.
The pattern was repeated in low-income housing complexes throughout Hialeah and Little Havana, a Herald investigation found. A team of reporters visited eight locations where voter registration data showed unusually high numbers of voters switching from one party to another last year. The reporters knocked on every door where someone’s party affiliation had changed.
Four out of every five voters who spoke to the Herald — 141 in total — said that their party affiliation had been changed without their knowledge. In all but six cases, records show they were registered as Republicans by canvassers from the Republican Party of Florida. (Four of the others had recently moved and their registrations were sent through the DMV. And the remaining two were registered as Republicans, but by Democratic Party canvassers, records show.)
Herald reporters visited the elections department and reviewed each voter’s registration history to determine when the party affiliation changes were made and which third-party voter registration organization was responsible.
Only 16 voters told the Herald they intended to change their voter registration last year. All of them switched to Republican. Eleven others were unclear in their responses.
Like Estevez, many voters who spoke to the Herald didn’t realize a change had been made to their party affiliation until they were visited by reporters. They tended to be elderly — the average age was 76. Often, they were first-generation immigrants from Cuba, Colombia, the Dominican Republic or other parts of Latin America.
Many described being misled by canvassers who said they needed a new voter ID card, to update their addresses or to verify their signatures. Then the canvassers would offer to help with the paperwork. (Getting a new voter card or updating addresses is necessary only if a voter has recently moved, and can be done online, through the DMV while updating an identification card.)
Some didn’t remember having conversations about their registrations at all, although records show their forms were submitted by Republican Party canvassers. Canvassers often visited the same voter more than once, submitting multiple registration forms all indicating affiliation with the Republican Party of Florida.
Under Florida State Statute 104.011, willfully submitting false voter registration information is a third-degree felony in the state of Florida, punishable by up to five years in prison and fines of up to $5,000.
Some voters interviewed by the Herald have also given statements to investigators from the State Attorney’s Office in Miami as part of an ongoing criminal probe into voter registration fraud.
In email responses to the Herald’s findings, Helen Aguirre Ferré, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida, said that the party “follows all applicable laws relating to voter registration” and that it is the party’s protocol to “review every concern with our [voter registration] vendors promptly.”
She added: “Let’s be honest, it is suspect that these reports surfaced immediately after Florida Republicans overtook Democrats in voter registration in record numbers.”
She declined to speak with reporters.
Ferré is correct that Republicans recently surpassed Democrats in statewide party members. As of Jan. 31, there were almost 67,500 more registered Republicans than Democrats.
John McKager “Mac” Stipanovich, a former Florida Republican strategist and chief of staff to Republican Gov. Bob Martinez who has since left the party, said the Herald’s investigation, which builds on reporting by WPLG Local 10 News, suggests there could’ve been an organized effort to reinforce the idea that South Florida’s Hispanic voters were fleeing the Democratic Party.
“It strikes me as part of the messaging and the gloating by Florida Republicans about their registration gains,” Stipanovich said. “It’s part of this effort to build this sense of momentum and inevitability about the Republican Party’s strength with Hispanic voters in Florida. ... This enables them to say: ‘Look what’s happening in Florida, in Miami-Dade. Hispanic voters are abandoning the Democratic Party. Join the parade.’ ”
In Little Havana, Maria Sanchez, 73, said she suffered after she found out her registration had been changed without her knowledge. She wasn’t particularly upset because of the party changing, Sanchez said, but rather by the humiliation of being tricked.
“I’ve felt terrible because I’m seeing the way they’re abusing elderly people. Because I still have some clarity, but you have some elderly people here who are 90 and 92 years old and they deceive them,” Sanchez said.
A resident at the Haley Sofge Towers, one of the low-income housing buildings in Miami where some of the first claims of voter registration fraud emerged, Sanchez realized what happened only after receiving a call from the elections department.
“I feel mocked, humiliated … I truly do,” she said.
Like Sanchez, many voters who spoke to the Herald were upset by what they saw as trickery and attacks on the democratic process. (“There is some little game there,” one man said.) Some fretted about how they would correct their registration. (“I need help. I can’t see well,” said a woman while squinting at the elections department website on her phone.) A few were most concerned about getting caught up in political problems. (“I’m very worried,” one woman said over and over. “I have bad knees and I just can’t handle this on top of everything else.”)
Others were indifferent. (“Regardless, I’m an independent and I’m going to vote for whoever I want,” one woman said.) And a handful were happy with the changes. (“I’ve always been a Republican,” one man said, although his voter registration showed otherwise and he confirmed he had not agreed to update his party registration in the previous calendar year.)
Most of the voters whose party was changed without their consent were previously registered Democrats, although a sizable minority had not had any prior party affiliation, voter records show.
Canvassing operations often target densely populated residences. On any given year, records show small numbers of voters at these locations change their affiliation. But 2021 was different.
Herald reporters interviewed voters at Hialeah Residence, Robert King High Towers (both), El Sol Condominium, Vernon Ashley Plaza, Haley Sofge Towers, Brisas Del Rio and Courtly Manor Mobile Home Park, where about one in five voters’ party affiliations changed in 2021, a rate that had previously been unheard of, voter records show. At Brisas Del Rio, records showed party affiliation changes for half of the voters living there last year.
In the past, voters in those buildings who changed their affiliation switched between NPA (“no party affiliation”) and either of the two major political parties at nearly equal rates. Changes to Republican never accounted for more than about half of the total.
But in 2021, 94% of voters in those buildings whose party affiliation changed became Republicans, most from being registered Democrats.
Although the GOP has always had a strong base of support among conservative Cuban Americans in those buildings, data show the 2021 registration drive resulted in registered Republicans becoming the majority of voters in all but one of the locations visited by the Herald.
A review of statewide voter records did not reveal similar trends outside of South Florida.
Sen. Joe Gruters, a Sarasota Republican and the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, said he was not aware of the Herald’s findings, which had been presented to the party, but said the party will “do whatever we can to comply with the law and do what’s right.”
“Whatever ends up happening, we will deal with it internally in terms of, if there’s a bad apple somewhere, we’ll replace them immediately,” Gruters said.
District 37
Most of the voters interviewed by the Herald were in Senate District 37, a Miami district, where Republican Sen. Ileana Garcia won in 2020 by just 32 votes. Out of 104 voters whose party changed in that district, 84 told the Herald the change had been made without their permission.
The 2020 District 37 race was at the center of a wide-ranging “ghost candidate” scheme in which a sham candidate who had the same last name as the Democratic incumbent was recruited, apparently with the intention of confusing voters to sway the outcome in favor of the Republican. So far the case has led to two indictments and revealed widespread “dark money” connections to power players around the state.
Garcia has denied any involvement in the plan. The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office has said there is no evidence to show that Garcia knew of the plan or had any involvement.
Regarding the volume of party switching in her district, Garcia said in a text message to the Herald that, although neither she nor her campaign have been part of any voter registration efforts, she believed in engaging voters in her district regardless of their party.
“My work as a senator in District 37 reflects that party affiliation has no bearing when it comes to fighting for the needs of the district,” Garcia said.
Juan-Carlos Planas, an election attorney and former GOP state representative who is now a Democrat, said the Herald’s data suggested a coordinated effort by the Republican Party to switch voters in those areas.
“The fact that they would turn to our most elderly citizens is despicable,” Planas said. “These folks are in public housing. They are the downtrodden.”
Planas said changing voters’ parties without their consent could violate another statute that prohibits interfering with “the free exercise of the elector’s right to vote at any election.”
That’s because voters who unknowingly became Republicans would not be able to vote in Florida’s Democratic primaries, which are open only to party members. Breaking that law is a third-degree felony.
“You could call this elder abuse,” Planas said.
Deceived
The first time two canvassers knocked on the door of Ana Luisa Rubio, a 71-year-old resident of the Robert King High Tower in Little Havana who has proudly not affiliated herself with any political party, she turned them away, questioning why they’d want her to fill out a new registration form in the first place.
But about two weeks later, the canvassers came back. Around November of last year, a man carrying a clipboard with a stack of empty forms knocked on Rubio’s door. He gave her the same speech she’d heard the first time, that they would send her an updated voter ID card if she filled out a new registration form — the same offer she now knows many of her neighbors received.
Except this time around, the canvassers caught her in a moment when her guard was down: It was late in the day and she was exhausted from moving to a new apartment, packing and unpacking boxes by herself. The man at the door, she says, was being pressured by a fellow canvasser to wrap up the conversation.
“So I just asked him, ‘OK, what is it that you want? ... Where do I sign?’ ” Rubio said, recalling that the canvasser filled out the rest of the form for her.
By December, she had gotten a new voter ID card in the mail, identifying her as a Republican.
“I will never forgive myself for being so trusting in that moment, something I am not,” she said.
At the time, Rubio didn’t know who those people were at her door. She noticed a badge but didn’t ask who they were working for.
But a different voter whose affiliation was changed unknowingly after being visited by canvassers, 54-year-old Noel Almora of Hialeah Gardens, did take notice. He said a man and a woman came to his house to fill out forms for him and his wife. Suspicious of the canvassers, Almora took a picture of the man’s badge.
The badge identified him as Marlon David Rubio, and showed he was canvassing for the Republican Party of Florida. Rubio did not respond to Herald reporters who knocked on his door last weekend.
Rubio later sent the Herald a statement saying he was working for a Florida-based canvassing firm called Victory Labs. In the statement, he told the Herald he always shows voters his badge and also wears a cap that identifies the campaign he’s working for.
“I haven’t changed any political affiliation without the consent of a voter. Voters review the form before signing and they provide their license or Social Security number to verify their identity,” he said. “I’ve always conducted my work with honesty and integrity and I’ve never had any issues in my work. I am a firm believer in conducting safe and free elections to uphold democracy and I would never do something to compromise that process.”
Victory Labs confirmed that Rubio was working for the firm and that it had been contracted to do canvassing for the Republican Party of Florida through an Arizona-based company called September Group LLC. (Shown the badge photo, Ana Luisa Rubio said she is not acquainted with Marlon David Rubio.)
“Victory Labs works in accordance with all applicable laws,” Hillary Koellner, an executive at both Victory Labs and September Group, wrote in an email. “We are at a loss as to why some are claiming they didn’t fill out and sign the registration forms.”
Koellner said canvassers simply asked people if they were registered or wanted to update their registration, then helped them fill out forms and asked them to sign at the bottom. She said Victory Labs paid canvassers on an hourly basis with no bonus for registrations.
“For this specific campaign, canvassers used a ‘cold pitch’ strategy, meaning that they had no information concerning the person who answered the door. They didn’t have a list of people to target, they picked areas that seemed like high-density housing and areas they would find the most doors to knock on in close proximity. Elderly Hispanics weren’t targeted,” she wrote.
“Canvassers clearly identified themselves with the Republican Party of Florida by wearing a hat with party initials, a badge that has their picture and name as it appears on their state ID as well as the logo of the party.”
Koellner said that September Group terminated its contract with Victory Labs this past week.
“Victory Labs is no longer conducting any voter registration efforts in Miami-Dade,” she said.
State campaign finance records do not show any sign of the Florida GOP engaging the September Group in the most recent election cycle.
In 2018, the Republican Party of Florida paid the September Group more than $1 million, largely for canvassing, records show.
Herald reporters attempted to contact the second canvasser, who was first identified by WPLG Local 10 News as Maria Barek. A man answered the door of her listed home address through a Ring doorbell device and asked reporters to leave. Victory Labs confirmed Barek was also working for the firm.
Mike Hogan, Duval County’s Supervisor of Elections, said third-party canvassing groups must act carefully.
Hogan said last June his office discovered canvassers turning in registration forms with signatures that looked the same and were made by the same pen. The case led to two arrests, Hogan said, and investigators learned that canvassers were being paid bonuses for everyone they managed to process.
“Whether you’re a candidate or a person who’s working with amendments ... if you’re going to pay a circulator, you want those documents that come to us that are going to be accurate and truthful,” Hogan said.
The fight over voter fraud
Gov. Ron DeSantis has spoken frequently about voter fraud and the need for increased election security, and has pushed a proposal to create a new law enforcement body that would be dedicated to investigating allegations of fraud. Democrats say he and other Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have exaggerated or fabricated allegations of illegal voting to justify tightening rules at the state level in an attempt to discourage turnout, particularly among Black people and other minorities.
David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from the Tampa-area who later left the GOP, said this scandal should prompt DeSantis to take action.
“For a governor who believes election integrity is a major problem, there is no greater opportunity to prove that than to come down on the Republicans in South Florida who appear to have done this,” Jolly said. “If Ron DeSantis is serious about voter fraud in the state of Florida, he’d be the leading voice on this.”
DeSantis’ office declined to comment on the Herald’s findings, instead referring reporters to a Feb. 4 tweet from Secretary of State Laurel Lee, which said such allegations demonstrate the need for a police agency to enforce election integrity, as advocated by DeSantis.
Jolly said the scandal deserved the full attention of criminal investigators — and potentially a class-action civil lawsuit from voters against the Florida GOP.
“What occurred, based on your findings, is one of the two major parties in Florida switched voter registrations to benefit itself in an election, regardless of how far up in the party hierarchy that knowledge went,” he said. “That is graft. That is fraud.”
Liliana Martinez, who has worked for years for political campaigns to court elderly Hispanic citizens at senior centers throughout Miami Beach, said she was outraged about the switching.
“Never in my life have I seen this,” Martinez said. “It’s like brainwashing a person who makes their own independent decisions.”
But Martínez said she knows the truth will eventually get out.
“Todo se sabe,” she said, “People talk. Seniors are respectable people and they will not stay silent.”
A rally for transgender rights in Texas. (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
Legislative sessions in the state, which can last up to 140 days every two years, can be exhausting, she told NPR.
"It's emotionally traumatizing," Briggle said. "I've been seeing a therapist for years so I don't cry in front of my kids over things that they shouldn't have to worry about."
Anti-trans rhetoric in Texas has grown louder in the past few weeks. Attorney General Ken Paxton — who broke bread with Briggle's family years back — issued an opinion that likened gender-affirming surgery — a procedure that gives transgender people a body that aligns with their gender identity — to child abuse.
Days later, Gov. Greg Abbott doubled down with a letter calling on professionals, including teachers and doctors, to report parents who give their children gender-affirming care. The letter added that there would be similar reporting requirements for the general public, and consequences for those who don't report.
The letter and the opinion don't hold legal ground, ACLU says
But Adri Pérez, a policy and advocacy strategist at the ACLU of Texas, emphasized that neither the letter nor the opinion are legally binding. No one has a legal duty to report someone receiving gender-affirming care, they added.
"They have no legal effect, and they cannot curtail anyone's constitutional rights," Pérez told NPR. "The attorney general and the governor can share their opinions, but it is just their partisan opinion that have been created to target transgender kids and their families."
But the message is clear, said Emmett Schelling, the executive director of the Transgender Education Network of Texas.
"The state leadership has said, 'We would rather see dead children ... instead of happy, loved, supported, thriving trans kids that are alive and well,' " Schelling told NPR.
Texas, among other states, has seen lawmakers propose dozens of anti-LGBTQ bills. More than 40 proposed bills in Texas targeted trans and nonbinary youth in 2021.
As states pushed to criminalize gender-affirming care, the American Medical Association sent a letter to governors in April urging them to oppose state laws that would ban gender transition-related care. The American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement Thursday expressing its ongoing support for gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
The bills take a toll on the mental health of trans kids
In October, the Texas legislature passed a bill barring transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams and transgender boys from playing on boys sports team. The law went into effect in January, making Texas the 10th state to enact similar legislation.
And as conversations mounted, the Trevor Project — an organization dedicated to suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth — received more than 10,800 total crisis calls, texts and chats from LGBTQ youth in Texas looking for support between Jan. 1 and Aug. 30, 2021. More than a third of those crisis contacts came from transgender or nonbinary youth.
For Pérez, gender-affirming care was life saving. Gender dysphoria, the distress someone might experience if their gender doesn't match their sex, can lead to helplessness. And helplessness leads to depression and suicidal thoughts, they said.
"It is a helpless and hopeless feeling that you may not be able to access the care that you need to live as you truly are," Pérez said.
Between 2020 and 2021, the Trevor Project saw a 150% increase in crisis contacts from LGBTQ youth in Texas seeking support. While the volume of contacts can't be attributed to one factor, an analysis found that transgender and nonbinary youth "are feeling stressed, using self-harm, and considering suicide due to anti-LGBTQ laws being debated in their state," the organization said.
Amber Briggle noted that 2020 marked the onset of the pandemic in the U.S — it shut down schools, eliminated birthday parties and limited visits to grandparents, among other things.
"And yet these anti transgender bills the Texas legislature was so hell-bent on passing was more detrimental to these kids' health than a global pandemic," she said.
Staying put and pushing for the Equality Act
As Abbott's latest letter comes comes on top of anti-trans legislation, some Texas families with trans kids are looking to leave the state. But not everyone has the means to move, and relocating wouldn't make the attacks stop, she said. And staying in the state — and showing that trans-inclusive families exist — is how she fights back.
Now Briggle's eyes are on the federal Equality Act, which would expand Civil Rights Act protections to cover discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity. It's a way for allies in blue states to help red states, she said. She urges transgender allies across the country to call their senators to get it passed.
"It's imperative that people stand up and fight against this," Briggle said. "My kid matters, too."
Ravi Ragbir, center, leaves his ICE check-in accompanied by Jumaane Williams, left, and Rev. Kaji Douša, right, in New York City on January 23, 2020. (photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Ravi Ragbir said he was targeted for deportation because of protected speech criticizing ICE and the immigration enforcement regime.
The settlement ends a long-running court battle over whether the government is allowed to target people for deportation based on their political speech, and whether courts have the power to protect the First Amendment rights of undocumented immigrants.
Ragbir was the executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City in 2018, leading an organization that helped undocumented New Yorkers fight deportation and rallied public opinion against ICE and harsh immigration policies. Ragbir himself lived under the cloud of a deportation order.
“What we did is a victory on many levels, because immigrants were being told we didn’t have any rights, especially First Amendment rights,” Ragbir said. “We were able to take this up and prove this strategy to people who are now using the First Amendment as a way to challenge what is happening to them and the retaliation that they have experienced.”
Asked whether ICE believes it did anything wrong in Ragbir’s case, and whether the agency has instituted any policy concerning the targeting of people for deportation based on their constitutionally protected speech, an ICE spokesperson declined to comment. The Department of Justice, which represented ICE in the case, did not respond to a request for comment.
Ragbir legally immigrated from Trinidad as a young man but subsequently served a prison sentence for a wire fraud conviction related to a mortgage fraud investigation, a criminal record that can lead to removal from the U.S. In the decade after his release, Ragbir became one of the most visible advocates for undocumented immigrants in New York City, even as he lived under an order of removal and continued to make required periodic check-ins with the local ICE field office.
A policy put in place during the Obama administration had prioritized the deportation of undocumented people deemed to pose a danger to the public, but President Donald Trump lifted the restriction. Soon, there were indications that ICE was using the expanded mandate to target its most vocal critics. In January of 2018, Jean Montrevil, another leader of the New Sanctuary Coalition, was picked up outside his home in Queens, New York, and hustled out of the country before his lawyer could even challenge his detention.
The same day Montrevil was picked up, Ragbir’s supporters and others began to notice that the New Sanctuary offices, located in Greenwich Village’s Judson Memorial Church, appeared to be under surveillance. ICE officials initially denied surveilling Ragbir and New Sanctuary Coalition but ultimately conceded that it had.
When Ragbir attended a scheduled check-in at the ICE headquarters on January 11, 2018, he was detained. Ragbir’s supporters attempted to block the ambulance carrying him, leading to a melee up and down Broadway: Federal and New York police tried to clear the road by force, choking clergy members and arresting 18 people. The New York police escorted ICE officers carrying Ragbir to the city line, and he was quickly put on a plane to a detention center in Florida.
Before ICE could get him out of the country, Ragbir sued, alongside the New Sanctuary Coalition and other immigrant rights groups. The lawsuit alleged that Ragbir’s attempted deportation was part of a broad pattern of ICE targeting people based on First Amendment-protected political speech.
Justice Department lawyers countered that an immigration law from the 1990s designed to speed and streamline deportations precludes courts from protecting the speech of people subject to deportation. In April 2019, a panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed.
“The government’s retaliation was egregious,” the court found. Though the 1996 immigration statute limits the court’s ability to intervene, “Ragbir’s claim involves outrageous conduct,” according the ruling, and “to allow this retaliatory conduct to proceed would broadly chill protected speech, among not only activists subject to final orders of deportation but also those citizens and other residents who would fear retaliation against others.”
Ragbir and immigrant rights activists celebrated the ruling as a resounding win, but the Justice Department appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which vacated the ruling and sent Ragbir’s case back down to district court. In June 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate case that people who wish to challenge ICE’s decision to deport them in fact have very little recourse to the courts. That case was different in some respects from Ragbir’s — it did not concern ICE using its discretion to target people for their protected speech — but it emphasized how hostile sitting justices are to the idea of exposing deportation decisions to judicial scrutiny.
In this uncertain legal climate, Ragbir decided to settle his suit. Under the terms of the deal, ICE and the U.S. government don’t admit they did anything wrong, but they do grant Ragbir a three-year reprieve from deportation proceedings. While Ragbir and his lawyers concede that it is frustrating not to see their claims vindicated in court, they say the settlement still feels like a victory.
A vigil for peace in Bogota, Colombia. (photo: Reuters)
He was killed at the Turbo, a municipality that has the highest concentration of drug-related problems as its territory is home to several drug trafficking corridors bound for Central America.
The OIA demanded justice, investigations and convictions. For its part, the Major Government Council expressed its solidarity with his family and friends.
Currently, the communities of Apartado, Carepa, Chigorodo and Turbo are at high risk of violence. Due to this situation, the Ombudsman's Office issued an early warning for these municipalities.
The Institute for Development and Peace Studies (INDEPAZ) stated that the Turbo municipality has the highest concentration of drug-related problems as its territory is home to several drug trafficking corridors bound for Central America.
Yet another horrific attack on peace in Colombia.
— Justice for Colombia (@JFColombia) February 25, 2022
Yesterday former FARC combatant Jorge Santofimio was killed in Putumayo, 3 days after murder of Fabián Rodríguez.
Jorge led environmental projects for those in the peace process. 310 former combatants now killed since late 2016. https://t.co/oRhE6w4jk7 pic.twitter.com/tDag5ThUuR
Antoquia authorities disclosed that armed groups such as the Colombian Gaitanistas Self-Defenses (AGC) regularly operate in their territory. The OIA demanded that these illegal groups respect the lives of Indigenous men and women.
They also called on international organizations working in Colombia to provide special accompaniment for the Indigenous communities of Antioquia.
According to INDEPAZ, 1,313 Indigenous leaders have been killed since the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement. So far this year, 32 social leaders have been assassinated.
A formation of armored vehicles manned by U.S. Army and Marine Corps personnel stand ready to lead a convoy through the parade grounds established for the 50/20 celebration in Kuwait, February 21, 2011. (photo: Third Army/U.S. Army Central PAO/Flickr)
The Pentagon claims it’s serious about reducing American military emissions, which eclipse those of some developed nations. But the US military has helped perpetuate the climate crisis and continues to obscure its contribution to climate change.
Now, we’re told, the Pentagon is serious about reducing its own substantial carbon footprint — which, the Post explains, makes up 56 percent of the federal government’s emissions and 52 percent of its electricity use. How serious? Their “ambitious goals” include:
Carbon-free electricity for installations by 2030. Net zero emissions from Army installations by 2045. An increasingly electrified vehicle fleet, including developing electric tactical vehicles — the ones that actually drive out into combat — by 2050. Microgrid installations on all Army posts by 2035, paving the way for increased renewable energy. Thinking more about climate issues when making decisions about how the Army manages its vast land holdings.
Left out of the Post article and US Army press release is a key bit of context: the global scale of the US Army’s current carbon footprint. According to political scientist Neta Crawford, codirector of Brown University’s Costs of War project, the Department of Defense is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and its single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases. The Pentagon produces more emissions than entire developed countries such as Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal. For the last forty years, its entire military strategy was premised on protecting access to Persian Gulf oil — as in so many other cases, helping to create the enemy it now fights.
There’s another bit of context absent from the Post story. It is well known that parties to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol bent over backward to accommodate US preferences. The key questions were: Would the United States commit to binding emissions targets? And would “key developing countries” such as India, China, and Mexico make their own pledges? In a 95-0 vote just months before countries met in Kyoto to sign the agreements, the US Senate (in the form of the bipartisan Byrd-Hagel resolution) provided an answer: the United States would agree to binding limits only if China and India also made pledges, and it wouldn’t sign any agreement that might harm the US economy.
Though President Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto agreements, he called them a “work in progress,” and said that he would not submit them to the US Senate without the “meaningful participation of key developing countries in efforts to address climate change.” In 2001, the incoming George W. Bush administration readily adopted this reasoning to justify continued US inaction on reducing emissions. Bush declared:
[The Kyoto Protocol] exempts 80 percent of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the US economy. The Senate’s vote, 95-0, shows that there is a clear consensus that the Kyoto Protocol is an unfair and ineffective means of addressing global climate change concerns.
What Bush (and the Post story) neglected to mention is how US negotiators ensured their country’s own major exemptions to reporting and meeting internationally agreed-upon emissions targets — in short, the reason why this climate action plan is indeed the army’s “first.”
Understandably, the Kyoto Protocol exempted counting humanitarian operations and other United Nations–sponsored interventions against any country’s emissions targets. More controversially, the United States obtained language exempting “multilateral operations, such as self defense, peacekeeping, and humanitarian relief,” giving a wide scope for future action. But most controversial was the United States’ pursuit of a waiver for all military use of “bunker fuels,” the reserves that keep American Humvees rolling, aircraft carriers sailing, and sorties flying wherever and for however long they please.
Clinton’s under secretary of state Stuart Eizenstat even bragged to Congress in February 1998: “We took special pains, working with the Defense Department and with our uniformed military, both before and in Kyoto, to fully protect the unique position of the United States as the world’s only super power with global military responsibilities.”
According to newly declassified documents from the Clinton Presidential Library, the Pentagon wanted to go much further, demanding “blanket exemptions” for all bunker fuels (including international passenger flights) and domestic training exercises. Even the State Department thought that was a bridge too far.
To advance its preferences, the Department of Defense emphasized its new use of energy-saving technologies to the press while ringing alarm bells about defensive readiness on Capitol Hill. The strategy worked. Clinton, in typical fashion, tried to out-conversative the conservatives in Congress, and in May 1998, Eizenstat promised that no military operations or training would be subject to Kyoto requirements.
Shortly after, Congress passed a new National Defense Authorization Act including all the “blanket exemptions” requested by the Department of Defense. Clinton described himself, and the Pentagon, as satisfied with the Kyoto text, but Congress was not, and Clinton neglected to try to convince them.
The 2015 Paris Agreement, Kyoto’s successor, finally included all countries, but at the cost of common or binding standards. Under Paris, countries define their own climate targets, and the decision to count military emissions (or not) is up to each government.
If the Pentagon is actually serious, its first challenge will be transparency about the full scale of military emissions. As Crawford explains, she arrived at her emissions numbers by triangulating multiple sources of government data: “The Pentagon does not release petroleum fuel consumption data and most US government accounting of US greenhouse gas emissions omit figures on how much the military and military industry contributes to US emissions.” Exemptions from counting bunker fuels and multilateral wars (i.e., Afghanistan and Iraq) meant that it never bothered to keep track of those emissions, much less curb them.
The arc of this story is a bracingly direct manifestation of how US empire defined down global climate responsibilities at a pivotal moment. Washington’s insistence on sharing burdens but not power or money in the fight against climate change signaled that the United States was not serious about reducing its own emissions, delaying action on mitigation in rich and poor countries alike and setting the stage for today’s conflict over adaptation funding. But it is also a reminder that nothing is foreordained and much is still contingent, particularly in the realm of climate change, where so many of the rules are still being — or yet to be — written.
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