09 March 22
Disaster Fundraising: Is That All That Works?
It’s nearly impossible at this point to run a normal fundraiser. Unless things get seriously dire we get no support. That is one bad formula.
Again a “reasonable” stream of donations fixes all of this.
At this stage the March fundraising drive is — far — behind where it should be.
In earnest.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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08 March 22
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The Justice Department cannot be so afraid of losing a case—or of political blowback—it fails to do its duty.
Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said any criminal referral from the House “would probably have as much political taint on it as you can get.”
“To me it’s clearly politically driven,” he said. Braun said Democrats are scrambling to change up the political narrative in response to Biden’s moribund job approval ratings and predicted launching a federal prosecution of Trump would be viewed along partisan lines. “At least half the country would say it’s all politically motivated,” he said. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said “the Department of Justice has a high bar” to clear before launching an investigation of Trump and raised concerns over the partisan fighting that surrounded the formation of the Jan. 6 committee.
I love it when they get all butched up and start throwing out threats and admonitions, especially when it’s in defense of a vulgar talking yam that most of them would like to see blasted off to Neptune at the earliest opportunity. And nobody is a better show at this than Senator Lindsey Graham and his many dancing personalities.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a close Trump ally and senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Hill Thursday any recommendation to prosecute from the House select committee would lack credibility. “I don’t see anything coming out of this committee not tainted by politics,” he said.
The senator is not merely “tainted” by politics at this point. He’s positively whitewashed in politics. But more important, the piece is a classic Republican attempt to get Democrats to start crawfishing like the Union staff officers did when U.S. Grant first came east to take charge. The officers wouldn’t shut up about the genius of Robert E. Lee. Grant shut them up:
Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.
It is past time for the Democratic members of Congress to stop worrying about what the Republicans are going to do. It is past time for the Department of Justice to stop worrying about the possibility they might lose a case, and about the political fallout whether they win or lose. There is a criminal case sitting right there on the ground in front of them. The filing from the committee lays it out fairly convincingly.
Albert Alschuler, a professor emeritus of law and criminology at the University of Chicago Law School, said the Department of Justice would appear to have a strong case against Trump based on the public evidence of his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. “It looks like a quite strong case for criminal prosecution, particularly conspiracy to defraud the United States and maybe obstruction of official proceedings charge,” he said.
“I see a lot of comment and some people seem to be saying, ‘Well, it’s so hard because they have to prove that the defendant really was lying by projecting all these false claims, you have to prove that he actually did not believe them himself.’…But it seems to me the evidence is pretty strong,” he added. “Juries infer intent from the circumstances all the time, and they infer a criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt.”
No excuses are adequate anymore. There is no risk that isn’t worth taking. If the institutions of democracy mean anything anymore, they have to be strong enough to keep the former president* as far away from political power as he is kept from teenage beauty queens. This isn’t calculation anymore. It is duty, plain and simple. And if it means political war, let it come.
President Biden sits in the Oval Office of the White House, March 4, 2022, in Washington. (photo: AP)
President Biden on Tuesday acknowledged the pain higher costs were inflicting on Americans, but he said the U.S. and its allies had to economically isolate Russia
The move represents one of America’s most far-reaching actions to penalize Moscow since the beginning of its invasion into Ukraine. It would carry enormous geopolitical consequences, as the price of oil has already skyrocketed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, creating huge new costs for businesses and consumers.
“Americans have rallied to support the Ukrainian people and have made it clear we will not be part of subsidizing Putin’s war,” Biden said Tuesday, explaining why he was banning the imports.
Europe, which is far more dependent on Russian energy than the United States, announced Tuesday a plan to cut gas imports from Russia by two-thirds this year. If successful, this move would sharply reduce but does not completely sever energy ties to Moscow.
Collectively, the measures from both the U.S. and Europe will deprive Russian President Vladimir Putin of one of his government’s chief sources of revenue — but also risk a shock to the global economic system that could severely damage numerous domestic economies. Russian oil accounts for about a quarter of the European Union’s oil imports, but just 3 percent of the United States’ imports.
Still, it comes as energy prices are surging. The U.S. government and its allies have faced a difficult trade-off in trying to find ways to completely isolate Russia while minimizing the economic spillover. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said last week that the consequences of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine could ultimately amount to a “game changer.”
In recent days, Biden and other world leaders appear to have acknowledged that the economic fallout is a necessary consequence for trying to punish Russia.
“This is a step that we’re taking to inflict further pain on Putin, but there will be costs as well here in the United States,” Biden said. “I said I would level with the American people from the beginning, and when I first spoke to this, I said defending freedom is going to cost us as well in the United States.”
He warned energy companies against “price gouging” and told them not to “exploit this situation or American consumers.”
Framing the rising gas prices as “Putin’s price hike,” Biden vowed to use his authority to minimize the impact on Americans and assailed companies that are trying to exploit consumers with price gouging.
The ban, which the White House first resisted, has gained momentum as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has made personal appeals to policymakers in the U.S. and around the globe. The United States has already deployed a number of economic measures to hurt Russia, including imposing sanctions on its central bank and oligarchs close to Putin. The administration up to now had sought to protect global energy markets from the impact of banning Russian oil and gas, while keeping a wary eye on soaring gas prices in the United States. The national average gas price on Tuesday was $4.17 per gallon, according to AAA, up from $3.62 a month ago and $2.77 a year ago.
But the ongoing atrocities committed by Russia in Ukraine, as well as bipartisan pressure from Congress, quickly changed the administration’s calculus.
As the ban gained momentum in Washington, senior White House officials have over the last few days explored a range of measures to fill the gap left by a potential prohibition on Russian energy from the United States and other countries. These measures have included the massive scaling up of production of “heat pumps” for Europe, an additional release of U.S. oil reserves, and a gas tax holiday to protect American consumers, according to people familiar with the matter.
The White House is also considering a renewed push for its clean energy agenda, people familiar with the matter said, as part of an attempt to reduce America’s dependence on authoritarian petrostates.
Energy experts say many of these efforts could take months, if not years to materialize, and the short-term domestic consequences of the Russia oil ban could be severe. With oil prices already rising, the Dow Jones industrial average closed down around 800 points on Monday, a drop of about 2.4 percent. Commuters could see gas prices north of $5 per gallon if Europe joined the U.S. government in banning Russian energy exports, according to the preliminary estimates of Bob McNally, consultant and president of Rapidan Energy Group, an energy market research firm, and a former official in the George W. Bush administration.
Higher gas prices impact many sectors of the economy. Airlines raise their prices, passing along the higher costs to consumers. Drivers often change their behavior, cutting back on travel. And prices on products that are delivered by trucks also can increase, creating a new wave of inflationary pressures. Currently, Russia produces about 11 percent of the world’s oil, or roughly 10.5 million barrels a day.
If the U.S. and Europe banned the imports of Russian energy, “There will be a global recession,” McNally said. “It’s pretty much lights out for the global economy if we ban Russian oil exports … The only thing would be demand destruction, which would be bone-crushing price increases. I don’t see any way out.”
European officials on Tuesday announced they were planning to cut back on their imports of Russian gas but they stopped short of a complete ban.
After resisting for weeks, the Biden administration shifted in recent days toward preparations for the ban as the international outcry built over Russia’s brutal push into Ukraine. America’s ban is effective immediately. No new contracts will be allowed and existing contracts will have 45 days to end, a senior Biden administration official told reporters on a call.
The news that the White House was moving as soon as Tuesday to enact the Russia oil ban was first reported by Bloomberg.
“History is going to remember much better what we did or did not do to stand up for freedom than it is going to remember the inflation rate, or the price of gasoline, in the spring and summer of 2022,” said Larry Summers, a former Democratic treasury secretary who remains in close contact with senior White House officials.
As they moved closer to announcing the ban, senior Biden administration officials spent the last several days exploring drastic measures to protect the global economy from the potential fallout of even higher oil prices.
White House aides, for instance, have studied plans to dramatically scale up U.S. production of energy-efficient heat pumps that they hoped could be used in Europe if European leaders decided to cut its imports of Russian oil, said three people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Biden officials have weighed whether these heat pumps could be produced through the Defense Production Act, an emergency national defense law, or through procurement programs at the Department of Defense, the people said. Some advocates close to the effort have compared the idea to the “Lend-Lease Act” program through which the U.S. sent critical supplies to the Allied nations that had been invaded by Germany in World War II.
Biden aides have also explored yet another release of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — which would represent the third recent move to tap the nation’s oil reserves, although such a measure would likely be months away — and revived discussions about a gas tax holiday to help alleviate Americans’ price pressures at the pump, two other people with knowledge of the deliberations said.
After a ruling last month in which a judge barred the government from considering the cost of climate damage in its decisions, the Interior Department decided to indefinitely pause new lease sales and permit approvals.
Rising oil prices, and industry complaints, have put new pressure on the administration to reconsider that choice. White House press secretary Jen Psaki that took aim at the industry’s argument that the administration is throttling oil and gas production, noting Monday that the industry has 9,000 approved permits to drill on public lands that it has yet to use.
“So I would suggest you ask the oil companies why they’re not using those if there’s a desire to drill more,” she said, adding, “The U.S. produced more oil this past year than in President Trump’s first year … Next year, according to the Department of Energy, we will produce more oil … than ever before.”
Additionally, Biden has personally expressed support for recasting the administration’s clean energy proposals as part of an attempt to move America away from its dependence on authoritarian petrostates, according to two people aware of the president’s thinking on the matter.
“That’ll mean tyrants like Putin won’t be able to use fossil fuels as weapons against other nations, and it will make America the world leader in manufacturing and exporting clean energy technologies of the future to countries all around the world,” Biden said Tuesday as he made a renewed push for investments in renewable energy. “This is the goal we should be racing toward.”
John F. Kerry, the former secretary of state who is now Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate, has advocated internally for the administration to aggressively embrace the argument that its clean energy agenda represents a policy response to the Ukraine crisis. He has worked with other top officials behind-the-scenes in coordinating the effort for Europe to cut off Russian energy, an invaluable source of financial support for Putin.
“From my conversations across the administration, there is a determination that remains just as strong as ever to meet the moment on climate — to really double down on clean renewable energy,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters.
Biden administration officials have simultaneously launched an effort to explore what the administration can do to get other authoritarian countries to ramp up their production of oil — including by relaxing sanctions on Venezuela — to buffer the global economy from the blow.
Biden’s move to shut down Russian oil imports came after a week of mounting pressure from Capitol Hill, where calls for a ban were embraced by leaders of both parties, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
The House was preparing to pass a bill banning Russian oil imports as soon as Tuesday, and even after the White House’s action, other measures aimed at Russia and Belarus could follow. The top Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate committees overseeing foreign trade issued a joint statement Monday announcing an agreement on legislation that would strip Russia and Belarus of their current trade preferences and order U.S. diplomats to seek Russia’s expulsion from the World Trade Organization.
The idea of an International Women's Day was inspired by America's National Women's Day, February 28, 1909, declared by the Socialist Party of America. (photo: unknown)
Capitalists keep trying to co-opt International Women’s Day, a century-old product of the working-class revolutionary movement. But the day belongs to the socialist antiwar tradition.
After several years of militant labor protest and demands for suffrage — as well as “housewives’ uprisings” against high prices — by women in Russia, the United States, Austria, Germany, and France, German socialist feminist Clara Zetkin, in 1910, proposed International Working Women’s Day to honor — and build — women’s struggles for workplace justice and political equality. For several years afterward, the day was marked by labor protests, which in New York City were greatly intensified by the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, a fire in a Manhattan garment factory that killed 146 workers, mostly women and girls. In Russia, these protests were also fueled by demands to end the tsarist regime. Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kollontai later reflected that IWD served as “an excellent method of agitation among the less political of our proletarian sisters” because the framing was so inviting (“This is our day,” she imagines working women saying to themselves as they hurried to the rallies and meetings).
She also noted that IWD strengthened international solidarity. This aspect of IWD became particularly salient when, in 1914, as ruling classes around the world began mobilizing for World War I, Zetkin, along with revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, used International Working Women’s Day as a focal point for antiwar protest.
After many socialist parties disintegrated due to divisions about the war, in March 1915, socialist feminists from Russia, Poland, Switzerland, Britian, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and France gathered for a conference in Berne, Switizerland; out of that meeting came a manifesto addressing “women of the working people.” While earlier drafts of the manifesto addressed the split over the war in the socialist movement, the final draft, authored mostly by Clara Zetkin, instead emphasized the antiwar message against war profiteering (she even gives a shoutout to the Lockheed Martins and Northrop Grummans of her time) and capitalism. She argued that socialism was the only path to peace: “Who benefits from the war? Only a small minority in every nation. . . . Workers have nothing to gain from this war and stand to lose everything that is near and dear to them. . . . Proclaim in your millions what your sons cannot yet affirm. . . . Down with the war! Forward with Socialism!”
Socialist feminists continued to organize antiwar protests on International Women’s Day throughout World War I. Most significantly, on March 8, 1917, women filled the streets of Petrograd, then the capital of Russia, demanding “bread and peace.” They protested the deaths of over two million Russian soldiers in the war and the food shortages devastating the population. The protesters also demanded the removal of the tsar. Workers walked off their jobs to join in. Kollontai, writing a few years later, described it this way: “At this decisive time the protests of the working women posed such a threat that even the Tsarist security forces did not dare take the usual measures against the rebels but looked on in confusion at the stormy seas of the people’s anger.” These protests are now viewed as the beginning of the Russian Revolution, and shortly afterward the tsarist government disbanded. “On this day,” Kollontai wrote, “the Russian women raised the torch of proletarian revolution and set the world on fire.”
Since then, socialist feminists have continued to keep IWD alive as part of an antiwar, anti-capitalist tradition. In 1937, Spanish women protested Francisco Franco’s fascist war forces on IWD, and similarly, Italian women used the day for demonstrations against Benito Mussolini’s insistence on sending their sons to die for his fascist cause in 1943. Because of Cold War anti-communism, International Women’s Day receded in the United States during the middle of the twentieth century. But in 1970, all over the world, including in the United States, socialist and leftist women organized protests against the Vietnam War on IWD.
In 2003, tens of thousands took to European streets — in Stuttgart, Cork, Pisa, and many other cities — on IWD to protest the beginning of the Iraq War. In the United States, Medea Benjamin and others launched Code Pink, a women-led leftist antiwar group that is still going strong (remarkable given the lack of US antiwar and anti-imperialist voices in recent decades). Code Pink organized a four-month-long vigil against the war beginning in November 2002, culminating on IWD 2003 with some ten thousand people protesting at the White House. This year, Code Pink and others held worldwide protests on March 6, a little ahead of IWD, to protest Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and demand an end to the war in Ukraine and no NATO expansion.
Perhaps fittingly given the early history of International Women’s Day, Russians are once again protesting a tyrannical warmongering regime with no regard for working people. The Guardian reports protests in 53 Russian cities, with more than 4,300 people arrested.
Protests alone probably won’t stop war in Ukraine. But International Women’s Day presents an annual opportunity to honor the socialist antiwar tradition, and invites us to find new ways of bringing it back. What Kollontai wrote in 1920 is still true over a hundred years later: “This day has remained the working woman’s day of militancy.” It belongs to us, not to Lockheed Martin.
Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
ALSO SEE: White Nationalists Are Tearing Each Other Apart Over Ukraine
Enrique Tarrio was not physically in Washington on 6 January but is charged with directing, mobilising and leading crowd
In a statement on Tuesday, the US Department of Justice said: “Tarrio, 38, of Miami, Florida, was arrested in Miami and is to make his initial appearance today in the southern district of Florida.”
Tarrio faces counts of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and obstruction of an official proceeding, and two counts each of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers and destruction of government property.
Four other individuals have been charged: Ethan Nordean, 31, of Auburn, Washington; Joseph Biggs, 38, of Ormond Beach, Florida; Zachary Rehl, 36, of Philadelphia; Charles Donohoe, 34, of Kernersville, North Carolina; and Dominic Pezzola, 44, of Rochester, New York.
“They earlier pleaded not guilty to charges,” the DoJ said, referring to an indictment in December.
News of charges against Tarrio followed charges of seditious conspiracy against 11 members of another far-right group, the Oath Keepers militia, which were announced in January.
Tarrio and the Proud Boys rose to prominence in support of Donald Trump and through violent confrontations with leftwing protesters.
On 6 January 2021, Trump supporters gathered in Washington DC to protest against Trump’s election defeat by Joe Biden. Trump told them to “fight like hell” in service of his lie about electoral fraud. The Capitol was attacked. Seven people died around the riot and more than 100 police officers were hurt.
More than 770 people have been charged. The first jury trial arising from the attack, involving a Texas man who was a member of the Three Percenters rightwing group, reached jury deliberations on Tuesday.
Tarrio was not in Washington on 6 January 2021, having been arrested for vandalising a Black church and for carrying two high-capacity rifle magazines.
But the DoJ said: “From in or around December 2020, Tarrio and his co-defendants, all of whom were leaders or members of the Ministry of Self Defense [a Proud Boys group] conspired to corruptly obstruct, influence, and impede an official proceeding, the certification of the electoral college vote.
“On 6 January, the defendants directed, mobilised, and led members of the crowd on to the Capitol grounds and into the Capitol, leading to dismantling of metal barricades, destruction of property, and assaults on law enforcement.
“Although Tarrio is not accused of physically taking part in the breach of the Capitol, the indictment alleges that he led the advance planning and remained in contact with other members of the Proud Boys during their breach of the Capitol.
“The indictment alleges that Tarrio nonetheless continued to direct and encourage the Proud Boys prior to and during the events of 6 January 2021, and that he claimed credit for what had happened on social media and in an encrypted chat room during and after the attack.”
In August last year, Tarrio was sentenced to five months in prison. He has also been revealed to have previously been an FBI informant.
Tarrio has denied organising violence on 6 January. The Times said a lawyer for Tarrio declined comment, as he was waiting to see the indictment.
Asylum seekers embrace next to the U.S. border wall, while waiting to be processed by U.S. officials, last month in Yuma, Arizona. (photo: Getty)
Participants in the privately run Isap program, billed as an alternative to detention, describe painful ankle monitors and contradictory rules
On the other end of the line was an employee from BI Inc, the private contractor tracking Macarena’s whereabouts on behalf of US immigration authorities. The employee had received an alert that the ankle monitor Macarena was wearing had been tampered with, Macarena recalled them saying. They asked if she was trying to take it off.
Macarena was scared and confused. She was trying to make it out of the house with her children, she told the employee, explaining that the tight jeans must have moved the bulky device.
She’d have to come to the local BI office to prove it, the employee responded.
It was the spring of 2021 and Macarena, whose name has been changed to avoid compromising her immigration case, was two months into the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (Isap).
The US government program was launched in 2004 as a “humane” alternative to detention for immigrants waiting for their cases to be heard in court, a surveillance system that was supposed to keep track of people in the program while helping them access social services.
Selected by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, immigrants in the program are electronically surveilled through an ankle monitor, voice recognition or the company’s proprietary tracking app until their court date, and meet regularly with a case manager. Holding an exclusive, $2.2bn five-year contract to run Isap for Ice is BI, a company that got its start in monitoring cattle and is owned by one of the country’s largest private prison corporations, the Geo Group.
While Isap has allowed some immigrants to go home rather than remain in immigration jail, the program is hampered by fundamental flaws, according to Isap participants, their lawyers and sponsors, as well as 10 BI employees.
They say BI’s technology is substandard, with ankle monitors causing bruising, overheating and at times sending out electroshocks and BI’s proprietary app frequently malfunctioning. Isap’s structure is as flawed as the tools it relies on, they argue, with arbitrary requirements and opaque decision-making processes inhibiting the ultimate goal of the program: transitioning out of it.
BI referred the Guardian to Ice for all questions concerning its work on Isap.
Nicole Peckumn, assistant director of Ice’s office of public affairs, said on Monday that programs like Isap “are an effective method of tracking non-citizens released from DHS custody who are awaiting their immigration proceedings”.
The agency said Isap was effective at increasing court appearance rates among immigrants facing removal proceedings. BI had received an exceptional rating for its management of Isap at the time of its last contractor assessment, at the end of January, the agency added. Ice also said there was no proof the ankle monitor caused any physical harm.
The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
‘My skin turned red and started bleeding’
Macarena followed her mother to the US from her native Honduras nearly 17 years ago, when she was just 16. She settled in Virginia, got married and had two kids. In 2020, police were called to her home during a family conflict. Revealed to be undocumented, she was arrested and sent to an immigration detention center, leaving behind her husband, eight-month-old son and seven-year-old daughter.
“Before I was sent to detention, I was paying taxes, we were working. I didn’t want to lose my daughter, my husband, my baby boy ... I lived in this country for almost 18 years,” she said.
Four months after her arrest, Macarena was presented with a choice: remain detained until her court date or leave but wear an ankle monitor for a month. Desperate to reunite with her family, she chose the latter.
Soon one month turned into 10, with the impact of the monitor extending far beyond what she had imagined. The belt on the bulky black monitor sat tightly above her ankle and it was heavy, she said, making it difficult to walk. Sometimes the device would overheat, burning the skin underneath.
“I put a big Band-Aid or a sock between the belt and my skin because it was so hot,” she recalled. “My skin turned red and started bleeding because it was tight and hot at the same time.”
Ice said BI had conducted extensive testing of its products and had not reported any instances or evidence that the ankle monitors produced enough heat or power to overheat or shock someone. Ice did not respond to questions about whether the agency had independently verified the results of these tests.
BI employees repeatedly accused Macarena of trying to tamper with the monitor, she said, including the time she had been struggling to put on her jeans. Once she was accused of disconnecting the ankle monitor when she was lying on her couch, sick. “I’m here on my sofa with fever and coughing. I think I have Covid,” she remembered telling the employee. “How am I gonna remove this?”
Over time, Macarena said, she grew increasingly distraught. She tried to get a job cleaning houses or babysitting, but she said people didn’t trust her in their home when they saw her ankle monitor. She saw mothers pull their kids away from her in the park. She’d notice people pointing and staring at the device while she was out with her children, and she worried her daughter would hear people call her a criminal.
The burden of ‘over-policing’
Isap participants around the country told similar stories to their lawyers and their sponsors, people who sign affidavits of support to help with the immigration process.
Rosalia and Sarah, whose names were also changed to avoid compromising their cases, were detained when they sought asylum in the US in 2018, fleeing anti-trans persecution in Honduras and El Salvador. They were enrolled in Isap after being detained and were fitted with ankle monitors. With that came other requirements: a BI worker would visit them every Friday – though they never were told what time – and their movements were restricted to the state their sponsor lived in. Once a week, they visited the BI office about 1.5 hours away.
Rosalia and Sarah’s sponsor, whose name is being withheld to avoid jeopardizing the women’s cases, described their experience in the program as dehumanizing and traumatizing. Once, Rosalia’s monitor had gotten so hot she had to wrap it with a towel to keep it from burning her leg, the sponsor said. Another time, Sarah had missed a home visit because she had gone to the store before a BI worker was scheduled to arrive. He had arrived 30 minutes early and Sarah had been accused of working illegally, the sponsor said. Rosalia’s case manager was cruel and always treated her with suspicion, the sponsor alleged.
“They were really trying to catch them breaking the law,” the sponsor said. Nearly all asylum seekers show up for their court dates, they added, citing a study from the non-profit Vera Institute of Justice. “They really want to go through the legal process. So all of this over-policing and inviting the carceral system into people’s homes is not necessary.”
Ice said not all people in Isap shared the same circumstances as the people evaluated in the Vera Institute study and that electronic monitoring technology contributed to the program’s success.
Ice said BI workers were trained to be objective and not to assume that a person in the program is trying to abscond, work illegally or intentionally violate their supervision regimen.
Several former employees the Guardian spoke to said this had not been their experience and that while they had been taught that not everyone in the program had a criminal background, their training had included how to defend themselves against potential attacks.
Immigrants speaking to a group of non-profits including Casa de Paz and the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition in Boulder, where BI is headquartered, said they too felt their case workers appeared intent on proving they were trying to abscond.
“My Isap officer treats me like I am a criminal,” one immigrant told the non-profits, according to their report. “He yells at me. I feel constantly afraid that I may be doing something wrong.”
Another missed a home visit and was told they’d be arrested if they didn’t travel an hour and a half to the BI office to check in in person. “I had to pay someone $200 to take me,” they told the non-profits. “I have no income. I am an asylum seeker and I do not have work authorization yet.”
Frequently, the immigrants reported, it was issues with BI’s own technology that made it impossible to meet requirements.
Instead of wearing an ankle monitor, some in Isap are required to upload a location-tagged selfie to BI’s proprietary app, SmartLink, once a week. The company matches that image against the picture the person took when they were first enrolled. But Google Play and App Store reviews of the app listed a wide variety of issues, including people missing their check-ins because their pictures wouldn’t go through, the facial recognition technology had failed to recognize them, or the notifications hadn’t worked. “Couldn’t send a picture …” one review read. “Got a call and got told to delete and reinstall, I deleted the app and now I can’t install it back. They blamed us for not sending pictures. Ridiculous!”
Alyssa Kane, the managing attorney at Aldea People’s Justice Center, an immigrant rights organization in Pennsylvania, said one woman represented by her organization couldn’t get SmartLink to work on her Cricket Wireless phone. When the woman had called BI to explain, employees had accused her of trying to abscond, Kane said. The woman had legal status and had been in the country for at least 15 years before she was sentenced to probation for pleading guilty to receipt of stolen goods, Kane added. But her technical difficulties were so bad that she was listed as not enrolled in the program and was given fugitive status.
“All of this is for a 55-year-old woman who technically still has legal, permanent residency and an application pending with the immigration court and has been in and out of the hospital on multiple occasions for serious health issues,” Kane said.
Making matters worse are the program’s contradictory requirements and its opaque decision-making processes, immigrants and advocates say. Requirements to transition from an ankle monitor to app check-ins, for example, vary office-to-office, but could include participants paying for a work permit if they’re eligible and living in one place for at least 90 days. But participants report that ankle monitors – which are clearly visible and often loudly announce “batería baja” when they run out of battery – make it hard to hold a job and that few employers offer flexibility to go home for case manager check-ins. With no income, securing a place to live for 90 days or hiring an attorney is difficult. Participants have also reported needing to show BI a passport to make the transition, even though Ice had confiscated the document when they were detained.
It was unclear to participants and advocates how major decisions, such as immigrants’ transition from one level of surveillance to another, were made. Immigrants typically wear an ankle monitor for a minimum of six months, when some are expected to receive work authorization. But many end up wearing it for an average of one to three years. BI case workers can recommend participants’ “de-escalation”, but it’s up to Ice to approve the request. Two former BI case managers said Ice had only approved about about 20% of those they recommended for de-escalation and had offered few explanations for its decisions.
Both Rosalia and Sarah were given ankle monitors, but only one had it removed after receiving a work permit. The other had to keep wearing it for several more weeks. They weren’t given any reason for the discrepancy.
Former BI employees said it was these inconsistencies that drove people away before their court dates. “Some people never saw a light at the end of the tunnel and that’s why they abscond,” said Olivia Scott, a former BI case manager in Indiana. “There was no set protocol. So if you had a GPS unit on for three years, you’ve done everything, you have your work permit. What else is it that you need to do to get this unit off?”
Ice confirmed these decisions were made on a case-by-case basis and took into account criteria including immigration status, criminal history, compliance history, community or family ties, caregiver or provider concerns, and other humanitarian or medical conditions.
Having a lawyer appeared to help expedite the process to remove the device, some former employees and activists said.
However, Ice prohibits attorneys from attending meetings between their clients and BI case managers, according to the 2020 Isap contract. Kane and Karen Hoffman, an attorney, said that made it difficult to ensure their clients had all the information they needed. Several of Hoffman’s clients had been given wrong court dates, while one had erroneously been told they faced a final order of deportation, she said.
Surveillance fears
At least 182,607 people were enrolled in Isap as of January, according to Ice data, making it the largest supervision program of any US law enforcement agency. More than 60,000 people have entered the program in the last year, according to Ice. The Biden administration is expanding the program to include new levels of supervision, such as strict curfews.
After wearing an ankle monitor for 10 months, Macarena had the device removed in the winter. Instead of being tracked through the monitor, she’s now sent a text once a week, after which she has to upload a location-tagged selfie to the SmartLink app. If something happens to her phone, she has to show up to the office to explain.
Macarena’s ecstatic about the change. But experts worry about the long-term privacy ramifications of her surveillance regime.
Macarena said she was told by BI employees the app is “always running” and that she always has to have the GPS on or else she could be put back on the ankle monitor. There’s little transparency into what information BI is collecting through SmartLink and even fewer regulations limiting what data it can collect. Ice said the app only tracked locations during check-ins but did not respond to questions about why Macarena and others in the program were told it was always tracking them.
Privacy experts and immigration advocates worry the company could share or sell the information, and that the data could be used against immigrants in other law enforcement contexts even once they gain legal status.
“The way the immigration system operates is to make us believe that we have no other recourse,” said Maru Mora Villalpando, an organizer with the immigrant rights group Latino Advocacy. “When people are out of detention, they think they’re on the other side of it, but whatever company has a contract with Ice, we have to be afraid of.”
Macarena is too relieved to have the monitor off to be worried.
“I’m going to do whatever they’re asking me to do to not be in trouble and keep close to my family,” Macarena said.
Dozens of educators on strike picket outside Justice Page Middle School in Minneapolis on Tuesday, March 8, 2022. (photo: Alex Kormann/AP)
Union leaders said they could not get district officials to compromise on wages, especially a “living wage” for education support professionals, as well as caps on class sizes and more mental health services for students.
“We are on strike for safe and stable schools, we’re on strike for systemic change, we’re on strike for our students, the future of our city and the future of Minneapolis public schools,” Greta Callahan, president of the teachers’ chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, said outside a south Minneapolis middle school where more than 100 union members and supporters picketed in freezing weather.
The heads of the two major national teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — joined the Minneapolis union leaders.
The national teachers union leaders say teachers and support staff across the country are experiencing the same sorts of overload and burnout challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, no other large districts were on the verge of a strike. Minneapolis school officials say they’re already facing budget shortfalls due to enrollment losses stemming from the pandemic and can’t spend money they don’t have.
The school district called the news disappointing but pledged to keep negotiating. Callahan said the union was also willing to resume bargaining, but no talks were scheduled.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said class sizes are “way too high” in Minneapolis, with “way too few” guidance counselors and nurses, and that wages for education support professionals are too low to support families.
“How do you attract Black and brown teachers if you don’t pay a living wage?” Weingarten said.
Classes continued without interuptoin at the neighboring St. Paul Public Schools district, with about 34,000 students, after teachers and administrators announced a tentative agreement late Monday night to avert a strike.
Union officials in both cities said the issues were largely the same. The St. Paul teachers union said their tentative agreement — subject to approval by members — includes maintaining caps on class sizes, increased mental health supports and pay increases.
“This agreement could have been reached much earlier. It shouldn’t have taken a strike vote, but we got there,” local union President Leah VanDassor said.
St. Paul Superintendent Joe Gothard said the agreement was fair while working within the district’s budget limitations.
State mediators facilitated the negotiations between administrators and union leaders in both districts.
The Minneapolis district advised parents to arrange their own child care. They said the district could offer emergency child supervision for preschool through fifth graders only “on an extremely limited basis” starting Wednesday. Bagged breakfasts and lunches can be picked up at schools starting Wednesday. The city’s park system extended the hours at its recreation centers to give students places to go and stay busy.
Erin Zielinski’s daughter, Sybil, is a first grader at Armatage Community School in southwest Minneapolis. She and her husband support the teachers, though she said she worries whether the union’s requests are sustainable.
Zielinski said her family is fortunate. She and her husband can count on support from their parents during a strike, and she still has some flexibility to work remotely.
“You kind of become immune to it, between distance learning, and home school, it’s now a way of life, unfortunately,” she said. “My husband and I will piece it together.”
Minneapolis has about 3,265 teachers, while St. Paul has roughly 3,250 educators. The average annual salary for St. Paul teachers is more than $85,000, while it’s more than $71,000 in Minneapolis.
The districts also employ hundreds of lower-paid support staffers who have been a major focus of the talks. The Minneapolis union is seeking a starting salary of $35,000 for education support professionals, up from the current $24,000, with union officials saying it’s essential to hire and retain people of color.
Polar bear scientist Dr. Thea Bechsoft. (photo: Polar Bear International)
To do its part to break this bias, EcoWatch is profiling four female scientists involved with the Polar Bear Research Council (PBRC). This body, which was founded by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) in 2018 with support from Polar Bears International (PBI), just released its 2022 research Masterplan last month to help understand and protect these fearsome but vulnerable Arctic predators. There are only around 26,000 polar bears left in their native habitat, which is rapidly transforming because of the climate crisis. The four scientists responding to this urgent moment represent a variety of life experiences and research approaches. They are both mothers and not, field workers and zoo based. But their stories offer an important example to the scientists of the future.
As one of the scientists, PBI’s Dr. Thea Bechshoft, put it: “However you feel like you’re not being represented by the stereotypical white male researcher, I just want you to know that there is room for you, and we need you.”
So meet these four incredible researchers who prove every day that a woman’s place is in the field, or the lab.
Dr. Terri Roth, Ph.D., is a PBRC co-chair as well as the Vice President of Conservation and Science at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and director of the zoo’s Lindner Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW). Her current primary research focus is on rhinos, but CREW as a whole is working on polar bears as one of its four primary research projects.
Specifically, Roth’s team is trying to find a way to diagnose pregnancy in female bears. This would be game-changing for several reasons. For one thing, polar bears are not breeding well in zoos. For another, female polar bears only go into torpor for the winter if they are having cubs. Zookeepers can better care for female bears if they know whether they should be secured in a small den or left free to wander in a larger space. Finally, polar bears in the wild are now also struggling to breed because of the climate crisis, but their reproduction is much harder to study. A simple diagnostic test would make field observations much easier. In general, Roth explained that studying zoo bears can help understand wild populations.
“By studying zoo polar bears, we can get a lot of information that is not attainable when studying wild bears because we can see the same bears every day all year, we know when they are breeding, we can collect biological material for analysis on a regular basis, and we know when they give birth or don’t, and when cubs live and die,” she said.
Roth didn’t originally specialize in polar bears. She focused on goats and sheep for her master’s, horses for her Ph.D., cats for her postdoctoral research, and, finally, rhinos. However, all of her work focused on reproduction, and this expertise allowed her to step in when she noticed that two female bears at the Cincinnati Zoo were suffering from dermatitis. She suspected a hormone imbalance, and prescribed a treatment that reduced hormone fluctuation. This appeared to do the trick, though she couldn’t know for sure why. However, her theory was supported when CREW began working with other zoos to study dermatitis in bears. They would ask the zoos about their bears’ skin and coat quality, and also about how well they were breeding and whether or not male bears had any preferences when choosing females.
“Initially, we were amused when we received comments about the male bear’s preference for the female with the prettier coat, but then we realized why the two were connected,” Roth said. “The female preferred by the male was breeding and undergoing different hormonal changes than the female that was not breeding. This connection supported our theory that the dermatitis might be hormone related.”
Roth said she personally has not experienced many barriers as a female scientist. The only exception is when she conducts fieldwork with Sumatran rhinos in Indonesia, where she has noticed that people tend to listen more to men who know less. However, Roth can’t say for sure if her advice is heeded less because she is a woman, or because she is a Western foreigner.
Back in the U.S., Roth does note that CREW is a unique work environment: of a permanent staff of 12 to 15, only one of them is a man! Most of the job applications they receive are also from women. Roth said the field of veterinary medicine is heavily female, and this is becoming true of wildlife science as well.
“I think a lot of women are drawn to animals and also have a nurturing side,” she said. “You combine those characteristics with the brilliant mind of a smart woman and you have the perfect wildlife scientist – someone who uses her brain to help the animals she loves survive and thrive. It is a powerful combination!”
Dr. Megan A. Owen, Ph.D., is also a PBRC co-chair as well as the Vice President of Conservation Science at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. As vice president, she does more overseeing of other people’s research than direct fieldwork nowadays, but she is currently involved with two polar bear research projects.
The first is trying to find out whether the climate crisis is really shortening the amount of time that mothers and new cubs spend in their dens. If this is true, “the implications are pretty profound,” Owen said. That’s because polar bear cubs are born altricial, the scientific term for helpless and in need of motherly love.
“The safety and security of the den ensures that a polar bear cub that’s born at about a pound, and blind, and hairless, will have the time to develop physically and behaviorally to such an extent that they can successfully follow their mom out onto the sea ice,” Owen explained. “So if the dening period is disrupted or shortened, it reduces that development time that a polar bear cub might have.”
The other project involves finding ways to improve interactions between humans and polar bears. The main goal here is to try and improve methods for detecting bears as soon as possible when they approach human communities.
Owen has been conducting Arctic fieldwork since 1994, when she first spent a season in Churchill, Canada, “the polar bear capital of North America.” At the time, her scientific focus was nesting birds, but the white bears still captured her imagination. Owen said much of her early work was done on foot.
“When you would encounter a polar bear in that kind of situation, you realize very quickly your vulnerability in the face of such a majestic, powerful, extraordinary species,” she said.
Her chance to study polar bears officially came when she arrived at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance as part of its giant panda research group. She realized that giant pandas and polar bears had a lot in common as ecosystem specialists responding to rapid, human-driven change and she decided to pursue that comparison.
“The polar bear is a fascinating species to study,” Owen said. “They are the sentinel species of the Arctic sea ice environment and their habitat is being impacted at such a rapid rate.”
Owen said that being a woman had definitely affected her career. Her early fieldwork especially was very male dominated.
“The fieldwork was very intense and demanding and physical and arduous, and so certainly attitudes about women in the field in those kinds of settings when I started my career were very much that you had to prove yourself in a way that wasn’t similar to my male colleagues,” she recalled.
However, she noted that things were improving and that there are now many well-respected female polar bear scientists. She also said that she felt her gender had influenced the opportunities she had been offered, and that, because of this, her career has taken longer to develop than some of her male counterparts. However, she reflected that this had its silver lining.
“The evolution of the way I think about what I do has been a constant, ongoing learning experience,” she said. “No laurel resting. And I think that that is very much a positive in my career.”
Dr. Thea Bechshoft, Ph.D. is PBRC’s “Field Techniques Advisor and a PBI staff scientist. She is currently working on a project to determine if polar bears can recognize kin, and, if so, how long they remember their family members. This is important for understanding bears’ behavior in the wild as well as their genetics.
“It also is a very small piece of the puzzle as to whether, when we see orphan cubs… we can actually help keep them wild and how we would go about doing that,” Bechshoft explained.
There have been documented cases of polar bears adopting orphan cubs, but none of these have been facilitated by humans. But if polar bears don’t recognize their own cubs, for example, it would theoretically be simple for scientists to introduce an abandoned baby to a new mother and her other children.
Bechshoft took a winding path to polar bear research. She was studying biology in Denmark and casting about for an idea for her master’s thesis when a professor pointed her in the direction of the University Centre in Svalbard, Norway in the high Arctic. The professor had suggested she take a short course there, but she ended up staying for around two years. It was here that she saw polar bears in the wild for the first time. When she finally decided it was time to choose a master’s thesis, a friend pointed her in the direction of a professor in Oslo with a collection of 700 polar bear skulls they wanted someone to look at.
“Obviously I had become completely enamored with this amazing creature that I had now met in the wild, the polar bear, and also with the Arctic, and with the cold, and so how could I not want to do that?” she said.
The master’s led to a Ph.D. working with polar bears in East Greenland followed by post-doctoral research with polar bears in Canada.
“The more you learn the more you want to learn, about most things but definitely also about polar bears,” she said.
Bechshoft said that she didn’t think personally that being a woman had influenced her career trajectory.
“However,” she added, “it’s really hard to tell because I don’t know the opportunities that I’ve missed or not been given, and I don’t know the opportunities that others would have had or not had if they were someone else.”
She did acknowledge that her decision not to have children has made it easier for her to move around freely as a field scientist.
Overall Bechshoft, who began her career in 2004, said that most of the research teams she worked with were still “hugely male dominated.” Before coming to PBI, she had never worked with a group with so many women. While things are improving, there is still a ways to go before the research community represents the true diversity of human experience. But she thinks that working towards that goal can only help science.
“The more diversity we have, the more ways we have of looking at the different problems… we have that are facing polar bears and everyone else with climate warming, and the more ways we have of coming up with solutions,” she said.
Dr. Karyn Rhode, Ph.D. is a Research Wildlife Biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center. She is also a highly-recommended active PBRC member, involved with three current PBRC-endorsed research studies. Currently, she is working on three main projects. The first is looking at how changes in diets in the two Alaska polar bear populations are impacting their bodies, reproduction and survival.
The second involves trying to estimate how much time polar bears will spend on land in the future. Typically, only some Alaska bears come onto the land during the summer, but this number is increasing as sea ice melts. Researchers want to know when half of the bears might emerge onto the land and when they might begin to spend as many as three months there.
“There’s industry there, there’s native communities, there’s recreation, so polar bears are going to interact with people more in those settings,” Rhode said.
Relatedly, Rhode also wants to understand how coming onto the shore will impact the bears’ health, reproduction and survival.
Rhode’s decision to pursue polar bear research was a matter of timing. She graduated with a Ph.D. focused on grizzly bears in 2005, right around when a petition had been submitted to the U.S. government to list polar bears as an endangered species.
“There was just a lot more attention on sea-ice loss and global warming, and so, as I looked for a job, I had a colleague that said ‘there’s going to be a lot of information needed about polar bears,’” Rhode recalled.
She took her friend’s advice, and ended up landing a job studying polar bears with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Rhode thought that being a woman had impacted her career, though it’s hard to generalize from personal experience. For her, perhaps the biggest challenge has been her decision to have a family. While she said her agency had been extremely supportive, achieving a work-life balance is still a challenge.
“You don’t have the time that a colleague that doesn’t have children has to put into their work, so you have to be really careful about what you commit to and how you use the time that you have available because you’re balancing that with another huge responsibility,” she said.
However, being a mother also gave her a better understanding of the animals she works with. For example, she has conducted studies with animals to assess their behavior while carrying out different activities like eating and walking. During these observations, she noticed that mothers with young were always the most vigilant or alert.
“After I had kids I thought, ‘Oh, well of course.’” she said. “I was a lot more vigilant when I was running around chasing a toddler in a parking lot.”
This is just one example of how female researchers can bring important insights to the field.
“Your personal experiences do affect your perspective and it’s good to have women out there studying these animals as well for that reason,” she said.
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