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Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill appears to be just as bloodthirsty as Vladimir Putin himself.
“If we see [Ukraine] as a threat, we have the right to use force to ensure the threat is eradicated,” Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill recently preached to his church’s 90 million faithful followers. “We have entered into a conflict which has not only physical but also metaphysical significance. We are talking about human salvation, something much more important than politics.”
The wartime coalition between Putin and his patriarch is called symphonia, an ironclad alliance between church and state that assures reciprocal reverence, with neither institution presuming to dominate the other. Theologians have spent centuries bickering over the fine points, which have now impaled 44 million Ukrainians as the victims of a bloodthirsty land-grab that Putin and the Patriarch have packaged as a holy campaign to cleanse souls.
“A new world order is born before our very eyes,” is how Putin described the relationship in a statement published at the start of the war, later warning those who disagreed with him “inflict maximum damage on people.” He said: “The Russian people will be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths.”
To be sure, the only lingering question is how far into repression and hideous cruelty can Putin and his patriarch descend before the means no longer justify the ends.
Byzantine and Orthodox church historian Henry Hopwood-Philipps reckons NATO and all those who stand against Putin’s klepto-theocratic regime are in for a long wait. “The information war, the military war against Putin looks to be effective,” Hopwood-Philipps says. “But for all the West’s digital gunpowder, we’re up against nearly 700 years of a deeply entrenched otherworldly belief system.”
As the patriarch sees it, Ukrainians are sinners. “Many people out of weakness, stupidity, ignorance and most often a willingness to justify sin condemned by the Bible is a test of our ability to profess faith in our Savior,” Kirill has told his flock.
In Western capitals, Hopwood-Philipps says, Kirill’s muscular significance has been either disregarded or lost in translation. “Putin would execute any Russian churchman who disagrees with Kirill,” he says. “Putin and Kirill are attached at the hip, and they’ve shaped religion to offer the Russian people spiritual nourishment instead of physical sustenance.”
Putin’s scheme to resurrect symphonia and leverage it to gain influence beyond Russia’s borders reached its crescendo at a ceremony in Moscow in 2007, when Putin hosted the signing of the Act of Canonical Communion with the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Kirill was appointed Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’ in 2009, heading a a global congregation of more than 140 million.
Since then, about 100 of the 340 clergymen who administer the Church Abroad community have swapped cassocks to join Orthodox churches not affiliated with Putin, according to Dr. Stratos Safioleas, spokesman for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of New York. A further 145 U.S. Church Abroad parishes have so far followed suit.
A Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam has also left the parish over threats it’s received for condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “It is no longer possible for [us] to function within the Moscow Patriarchate and provide a spiritually safe environment for our faithful,” the parish council of St. Nicholas of Myra said in a statement.
As for the rebel priests left behind in Russia, history could offer a lesson on what to expect next from the Kremlin.
According to the diary of Johann Korb, the Austrian secretary of the Legation to the Court of Peter the Great, the Ukraine-born Exarch Stefan Yavorsky begged the tsar to stop torturing those who disagreed with him. “What business is it of yours to come here,” the Romanov tsar shouted. “It is a duty that I owe God, to save my people from harm and to prosecute with public vengeance crimes that lead to the common ruin.”
So what would it take to defenestrate Putin and the patriarch from further wrecking Russia and annihilating Ukraine?
“We need Frodo,” sighs Sergey Buntman, the program director for the now-muzzled Echo Moscow Radio, eyeing to the Hobbit who toppled Mordor in The Lord of the Rings as the only liberator with the mystical wallop to save both countries.
And Buntman was not being flippant.
The remains of a Russian military vehicles destroyed by the Ukrainian army on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine. (photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Ukrainian commanders say fuel, food and ammunition in short supply after breakdown in Russian supply chains
The claims of major shortages were described as “plausible” by western officials although they said they were unable to corroborate the analysis.
The report from the Ukrainian armed forces general command was said to be consistent with evidence that the Russian advance had stalled, and that they had reverted to using “indiscriminate and attritional” artillery attacks on civilians.
“We do think that the Russian forces have used a lot of material including particular categories of weapons and we have seen isolated reports of particular units that have lacked supplies of one sort or another,” the official said.
“It is consistent with an advance which has ground to a halt. Failures in the logistic chain has been one of the reasons they have not been as effective as they hoped.”
A Pentagon official added there were continuing morale issues among Russian troops, with food and fuel shortages, as well as frostbite due to a lack of adequate clothing.
“They’re struggling on many fronts,” the US official said.
The Ukrainian military said that a major problem for the Russian advance was a failure to lay down a fuel pipe to the front, although the claim could not be independently verified.
On Monday, Komsomolskaya Pravda, the pro-Kremlin tabloid, reported that according to Russian defence ministry numbers, 9,861 Russian soldiers had been killed in Ukraine and 16,153 were injured. The death toll was swiftly removed from the newspaper’s website.
Western officials said they believed the numbers cited by the newspaper are a “reasonable estimate”. The official said: “It is a level of casualties that has not been experienced [by Russia] really since the second world war. It is still continuing … it is a conflict on a different scale.”
While Vladimir Putin’s forces have struggled around Kyiv, a senior US official said the fighting had been taken to the streets in Mariupol, where many civilians remain trapped among rotting corpses and flattened buildings.
Two “super powerful bombs” hit the city on Tuesday even as rescue efforts were ongoing, local authorities said. The port city is said to be under naval shelling from ships in the Sea of Azov.
Russians are said to want to be able to declare Mariupol as a first strategic victory. The city is seen as key to securing a Russian corridor between the separatist Donbas region and illegally annexed Crimea.
It is also home to the largest trading port in the Azov Sea from which Ukraine exports grain, iron and steel, and heavy machinery. The US military said, however, that it has not seen any signs that chemical weapons were being prepared for imminent use.
Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna was released from Russian captivity on March 21. (photo: Hromadske/Twitter)
"Nikita has given us a chilling testimony that confirms the intensity of the war crimes perpetrated by the Russian army against journalists," the secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, Christophe Deloire, said in a statement. "Passing his testimony on to the ICC [International Criminal Court] prosecutor is the least we can do for this courageous young fixer."
In early March, Nikita told RSF he was on assignment with his team when he learned the road into his family's village was clear. He decided to try to evacuate them, so after he was done with work, he borrowed his team's car, which was clearly marked "Press," and began the drive.
On his way into his hometown, however, he was ambushed. Multiple rounds were fired at his car. He crashed into a tree and, shouting that he was a civilian, pulled himself from the wrecked vehicle. Nikita told RSF that he was surrounded by soldiers, who searched and beat him. He thought the Russian forces believed he was really a Ukrainian soldier, acting as a scout.
According to his account, which CBS News cannot independently verify, the soldiers brought Nikita to a nearby building and searched his phone, where they found information related to his work as a journalist including map routes and texts about bullet proof vests. That made them more suspicious. They beat him with rifle butts, breaking his teeth, and mock executed him in a ditch by a dead dog, firing a shot that grazed his head, he told the non-profit group.
The soldiers then brought Nikita to a camp, tied him to a tree, took off his shoes, and beat him repeatedly. He said he lost consciousness multiple times before being moved to another location and interrogated, with one soldier giving him electric shocks. He said there were other civilian prisoners around him, who were also tortured.
The Russian forces put him and the other prisoners into a basement full of water and left them for two days. They were then moved to another house, where they were joined by an imprisoned former civil servant.
Nikita was interrogated again, this time by people he believed to be Russian intelligence or security officers because of their clean clothes and polished boots. Then, Nikita and the other prisoners were told they would be released.
The following day they were driven an hour away to a forest and dropped off. Nikita, fearing he would be executed, ran away, but no shots were fired at him. When he reached a road, he encountered more Russian soldiers, but managed to escape in a car with other civilians.
"If you don't take him, we'll shoot him on the spot," the soldiers reportedly told the civilians in the vehicle.
A number of journalists have been injured, taken captive, or killed while working in Ukraine.
This month, award winning American documentary filmmaker Brent Renaud was killed, and his colleague, photojournalist Juan Arrendondo was injured. Two Fox News journalists, long-time cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and local producer Oleksandra "Sasha" Kuvshynova, were killed, and Fox correspondent Benjamin Hall was seriously injured.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian outlet Hromadske said one of its journalists, Victoria Roshchyna, was freed after being taken captive on Friday by Russian forces.
Another Ukrainian outlet, The Kyiv Independent, said photojournalist Maks Levin was also missing.
Reporters Without Borders has filed two separate complaints with the International Criminal Court pertaining to the war in Ukraine, one alleging deliberate attacks on journalists by Russian forces, and another over Russian attacks targeting TV infrastructure in Ukraine.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on February 18. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
A look at the Supreme Court nominee’s record defending indigent clients.
“I have questions about your views on the rights of detainees, and that in turn causes some concern about how you will handle terrorism cases that may come before you if you are confirmed,” Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) said at a hearing in 2012, when Jackson, now President Joe Biden’s nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, was confirmed as a federal district court judge.
“Have you ever represented a terrorist at Guantánamo Bay?” asked Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) during her confirmation hearing for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals last year. Would Jackson’s work “result in more violent criminals — including gun criminals — being put back on the streets?” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) asked in a written follow-up questionnaire.
As Supreme Court confirmation hearings begin Monday, Jackson’s background could come under attack again. But that very work is one reason putting Jackson on the bench would be historic.
During Jackson’s time as a federal public defender, a job she held from 2005 to 2007, she represented some of the country’s most vulnerable people, which has given her a perspective that would be unique on the current Supreme Court. And because people of color are disproportionately arrested, prosecuted, and locked up, her work is also inextricably tied up with the fight for racial justice.
The pipeline from being a corporate attorney or prosecutor to judge is robust. By contrast, the public-defender-to-judge pipeline barely exists.
The Center for American Progress reported in 2020 that only about 1 percent of all federal appellate judges spent the majority of their careers as public defenders or legal aid attorneys. And only about 8 percent of all federal judges are former public defenders, experience that researchers say can make a difference in sentencing. A recent study, examining millions of sentences handed down by district court judges, found that former public defenders were somewhat less likely to sentence someone to incarceration. (Jackson has not spent most of her career as a public defender, but she continued to advocate for criminal defendants as a private corporate attorney and at the federal Sentencing Commission, which reduced sentences in guidelines for drug offenses during her tenure as vice chair.)
Jackson defended Khi Ali Gul, a man whom the US government considered an “enemy combatant,” wading into a new area of the law when she advocated for his right to challenge his imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. She filed briefs and assisted in cases on behalf of an indigent parent in a child custody proceeding and a pregnant juvenile who was a victim of human trafficking.
“100% percent of my time was devoted to the disadvantaged,” Jackson wrote of her time as a public defender.
Jackson would be the first public defender on the Court in a generation
If confirmed, Jackson would be the first justice in more than 30 years with significant experience representing criminal defendants. The last was Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice, who left the court in 1991 after serving for 24 years.
The parallel to Marshall is noteworthy, said April Frazier Camara, the president and CEO of the National Legal Aid … Defender Association and a co-founder of the Black Public Defender Association. The work Marshall did before he joined the court had a lasting influence on his perspective and decisions.
Before he joined the Court, Marshall “represented indigent people who were oftentimes accused of capital offenses in the South — some very socially unpopular clients like Black men who had death penalty cases after being accused of raping white women,” she said, noting that the charges were often inflated or unsupported.
In 1941, Marshall defended young illiterate Black sharecropper W.D. Lyons, who was falsely accused of three counts of murder. Police beat him and coerced his confession.
Though Marshall lost the case, it galvanized him to take on the most obscure cases in an effort to extend equal protection of the law to all people regardless of their race. And even after arguing Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 before the Supreme Court, in which he invalidated segregation in public schools under the 14th Amendment — one of the Court’s landmark decisions — Marshall was met with resistance at his 1967 confirmation hearing from Southern senators who questioned his record.
North Carolina Sen. Sam Ervin, for example, expressed concern that “the easiest way to destroy the Constitution” was to have it “manned by judges who will not exercise judicial self-restraint.”
Nevertheless, Marshall was confirmed; by the time he retired, he had become known as “the Great Dissenter” on a court that had grown increasingly conservative.
Marshall worked as a public defender well before Gideon v. Wainwright established in 1963 that guarantee of counsel for criminal defendants is a fundamental right.
“Back then, the structured public defender system that we have now wasn’t in place,” Camara said. “He was really filling a gap.”
By the time Jackson became a public defender, the system had more of a structure — a job in the federal defender’s office was competitive — but a stigma in representing criminal defendants remained. Still, the value of seeing the justice system from the perspective of defendants has not diminished. “For Judge Jackson to walk in those shoes and actually serve a person that’s accused of an offense, there’s an intimate understanding of how important it is that our legal system, specifically judges, ensure that every person’s rights are fully recognized,” Camara said.
Why public defenders matter, including on the Supreme Court
When Jackson responded to Sasse’s questions last year, she likened her intent as a public defender to that of the framers of the Constitution: “In order to guarantee liberty and justice for all, the government has to provide due process to the individuals it accuses of criminal behavior, including the rights to ... competent legal counsel.”
Public defenders, who are appointed by the courts to represent people who cannot afford a lawyer, uphold one of the most basic rights afforded by the Constitution: that people put on trial for a crime will have the assistance of counsel to defend themselves. They do not have the power to choose the indigent criminal defendants whom they represent, and they must take any and every case given to them.
“One of the unique things about the public defender role is it’s really one of the only jobs that’s guaranteed by the Constitution,” said Vida Johnson, a professor of law at Georgetown University and former public defender at the federal public defender’s office. “The Sixth Amendment provides that people who can’t afford a lawyer will be given one. Public defenders play this enormously important role in the legal system, and without it, the system couldn’t function.”
Jackson worked for DC’s Office of the Federal Public Defender from 2005 to 2007, when she left for the corporate law firm Morrison … Foerster.
A.J. Kramer, the current federal public defender and the federal public defender who assigned Jackson’s cases, said she had no choice in who she represented. But when Jackson applied for the role, she specifically requested to work on appeals — seeking relief for people who had already been convicted in federal court.
“I think she believed it was her strength, where she could best use her writing abilities and her ability to analyze,” Kramer said. Like any other public defender, her responsibility was to look at the record of the case and decide what issues needed to be raised before a higher court. She ultimately argued before the appeals courts about 10 times.
“Being a public defender and working from within the system gives someone a full grasp of how the criminal justice system works because you get to see the people involved on both sides, from the prosecutor’s perspective and the client’s,” Kramer said. “You really get to see that clients are human beings.”
Former defense attorneys have direct experience with the perspectives of people arrested and incarcerated, a population with a disproportionate number of people of color. Public defenders also represent the majority of people who come before the court in criminal cases.
“In addition to having this perspective about what it means to be a person accused of a crime, what it means to be a poor person accused, and what it means to be a poor person of color accused of a crime, Jackson also brings the perspective of what prosecutors do and the role that prosecutors play in our criminal legal system,” Johnson said.
This is key since federal prosecutors are known for using harsh tactics in federal court and have lobbied Congress to get high statutory maximum sentences and mandatory minimums for a number of crimes to have leverage over criminal defendants, Johnson said, adding, “Judge Jackson will really have this very interesting perspective that no other justice would have.”
Plus, there’s the added layer of Jackson’s gender and racial identity in the context of her public defender experience.
“As a Black public defender, this work is professional, but it is also personal. It’s hard for you to find a Black public defender or maybe even a Black attorney who does not have a loved one who is directly impacted specifically by the criminal legal system,” Camara said.
While Jackson served as a federal public defender, her uncle, Thomas Brown Jr., was serving a life sentence in Florida for a nonviolent drug offense, which President Barack Obama later commuted. Two of her other uncles served in law enforcement — one worked as a sex crimes detective in Miami-Dade County and the other became chief of the Miami Police Department. Her brother served as a police officer in Baltimore, including time in an undercover drug sting unit; he also joined the National Guard and led two battalions during tours of duty in Iraq and the Sinai Peninsula.
“We uniquely understand what it means to work within those systems every day with a law degree,” Camara said. “But then we return home to communities where we see the very real experience of what mass incarceration means for our communities. Public defenders, Black public defenders, Black woman public defenders, are uniquely qualified to be fair and just.”
Jackson’s public defender caseload
Legal experts who spoke to Vox argue that there’s no real reason to inspect the cases that Jackson worked on as a public defender; after all, like other public defenders, she was assigned her cases and did not choose her clients.
“The views that were expressed were the views of my clients. I represented them in that capacity and the briefs did not necessarily represent my personal views,” Jackson said in a 2012 confirmation hearing.
But even if she did not choose her own cases, how she argued them can shed light on her thinking, including how she used her power as a public defender to call out procedural errors on the part of prosecutors and judges.
“The Court is grappling with doing novel criminal justice issues all the time, whether that is Fourth Amendment cases or taking up issues related to constitutional policing,” said Daniel Goldberg, the legal director of Alliance for Justice, a progressive advocacy organization. “Jackson has seen these issues from a broad perspective — as a litigator, as a policy maker and as a judge. The Court currently lacks this multi-faceted perspective.”
One case that has attracted much attention is that of Khi Ali Gul, the Guantánamo Bay detainee. Jackson made her way to the public defender’s office after the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush in 2004 that detainees on the base in Cuba could challenge their detainment in federal court.
“Our office had a number of these cases. It was a brand new area of law so nobody really knew what the law was. We didn’t yet know what claims or issues we could raise,” Kramer said.
But as cases arose, the office needed someone to help with this legal work. “It was complex and very novel. It required somebody who had a brilliant legal mind. It was assigned to Ketanji,” Kramer said. “She did not ask for it.”
Gul was seeking habeas corpus review of his classification as an “enemy combatant” and his detention in Guantánamo Bay. In a brief filed in 2005, Jackson argued that Gul lacked the ability to “vindicate his rights under domestic and international law” since he was being held at Guantánamo without being charged with an offense, appearing before a military or civil tribune, or being given access to counsel.
The United States was holding Gul “virtually incommunicado,” Jackson wrote, not informing him of his rights under the Constitution, the standards of the US military, the Geneva Convention, and other international law. She argued his rights to “freedom from torture” and from “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” had been violated and that he was suffering from severe physical and psychological abuse as a result of being locked in his cell for 23 hours a day.
The case was later consolidated with other detainee cases; Gul was sent back to Afghanistan in 2015, following a 2009 executive order from President Obama that initiated a review of cases like Gul’s. In an effort to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, Gul’s transfer was unanimously approved by the many departments commissioned to review the case.
Jackson considered the case career-defining. Although she wasn’t able to see Gul’s case through while she was a public defender, she continued to advocate on behalf of Guantánamo detainees, co-writing Supreme Court amicus briefs for two cases (Boumediene v. Bush and Al-Odah v. United States) while at Morrison … Foerster. She also co-wrote a brief on behalf of the libertarian Cato Institute and other groups in 2009, arguing that the US did not have the authority to detain lawful residents as enemy combatants.
“I believe that I was assigned to work on these amicus briefs because of the knowledge of the military tribunal processes that I had accumulated from my prior work as an assistant federal public defender,” Jackson wrote.
When asked whether she was concerned that her work for Gul would return him to “his terrorist activities,” Jackson explained that her brother was deployed in Iraq when she represented Gul, giving her a deeper understanding of the US’s detention of people in Guantánamo.
“In the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks in September of 2001, I was also among the many lawyers who were keenly aware of the threat that the 9-11 attacks had posed to foundational constitutional principles, in addition to the clear danger to the people of the United States,” she wrote. But she maintained that as an attorney, her duty was to “represent her clients zealously.”
The case showed how Jackson handled a new and quickly evolving area of law. In other moments during her time as a public defender, she worked on behalf of criminal defendants seeking to appeal their convictions.
In 2007, Jackson convinced a three-judge panel to vacate the conviction of her client Andrew J. Littlejohn III. Littlejohn had been convicted of unlawfully possessing a gun as a felon after police found a gun hidden in his home.
Jackson, upon appealing the case, argued that the jury selection process had been flawed — the trial judge asked potential jurors questions in a manner that allowed them to avoid answering whether they had relatives who were police officers, a detail that, if true, could make them biased against the defendant. The judges unanimously ruled that the trial violated Littlejohn’s Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.
In 2006, Jackson secured a plea deal for a man accused of threatening to blow up the federal courthouse in DC. Jackson argued that since he did not act on the threat, most of the charges against him should be dropped. Prosecutors agreed, and a sentencing judge determined that the time he served in pretrial detention was sufficient and ensured the man moved to Florida — away from the people he threatened — and seek out counseling, according to the Washington Post. Jackson got the government to back down in favor of an order that took the defendant’s state of mind into account.
In 2005, Jackson’s advocacy overturned the conviction of former lawyer Navron Ponds, who had been convicted of five felony counts of tax evasion (he owed over $117,000 after failing to file federal personal income taxes for several years) in connection to accepting a Mercedes-Benz that the mother of a drug dealer gifted him as a retainer. Ponds was sentenced to 20 months in prison.
Jackson argued in an appeal that prosecutors violated Ponds’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when they required that he turn over certain personal records. “Because the government has failed to show with reasonable particularity that it knew of the existence and location of most of the subpoenaed documents, we hold that Ponds’ act of production was sufficiently testimonial to implicate his right against self-incrimination,” the panel of judges wrote. They sent the case back to the lower district court, where Ponds was sentenced to probation.
The Supreme Court’s work on criminal cases often doesn’t get the same attention as its highest-profile decisions, and typically the bulk of its workload is civil actions. But the Court encounters cases involving criminal law frequently: in 2020, according to Harvard Law Review, the Court considered two state criminal cases; six appeals on federal incarceration; and seven federal criminal cases. Their decisions can be life or death, if dealing with an inmate facing execution; they can affect how criminal cases are handled across the country.
But for the past three decades, no one on the Court has had public defender experience representing the people who are most affected by its decisions in criminal cases like this. Public defenders — and those who believe that it is past time to bring greater diversity to the Supreme Court — see Jackson’s potential appointment as an opportunity for America to bolster its ideals.
“We claim that the goals of the criminal legal system are fairness and justice,” Camara said. “Public defenders stand up every day to make sure that those principles are actually realized by people who are oftentimes disproportionately facing targeted racism and other inequities.”
When Jackson’s record has come under scrutiny in the past, she has never expressed regret. Instead, she spoke about the valuable perspective she gained from the work. When questioned last year by senators about why she decided to spend her time defending criminals, she wrote: “I lacked a practical understanding of the actual workings of the federal criminal justice system, and I decided that serving ‘in the trenches,’ so to speak, would be helpful.”
Ultimately, she said, it was about giving clients a fair chance under the law. In her questionnaire, she wrote that she saw her work as promoting “core constitutional values.”
“The government cannot deprive people who are subject to its authority of their liberty without meeting its burden of proving its criminal charges,” she wrote, continuing: “Every person who is accused of criminal conduct by the government, regardless of wealth and despite the nature of the accusations, is entitled to the assistance of counsel.”
ICE. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
After Congress demanded changes, ICE officials will now have to get approval from senior leaders before issuing an administrative subpoena to members of the media.
The development of a new policy comes more than a year after ICE issued an administrative subpoena during the Trump administration demanding BuzzFeed News identify its sources — an extraordinary attempt by the government to interfere with a news outlet acting under the protections of the First Amendment.
At the time, the move was met with criticism from media rights organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and even former ICE leaders, who called it a blatant overreach. The agency later backed down after BuzzFeed News published a story detailing the demand.
The new policy, which follows a congressional directive included as part of the most recent government funding bill, would make it so ICE personnel must elevate decisions about whether to issue administrative subpoenas to members of the news media to the “the most appropriate senior ICE official, such as the ICE Director.” The agency must also make sure that its employees know of this new policy through training. ICE officials will also have to provide congressional staffers with a copy of the policy and the associated training details within 90 days.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is committed to protecting the civil rights of all individuals including press freedoms,” ICE spokesperson Tamara Spicer said in a statement. “Based off language in the FY2022 appropriation bill, ICE is taking immediate steps to begin drafting a policy regarding the issuance of administrative subpoenas to members of the news media. The policy will elevate those decisions to the most appropriate senior agency official for review and approval and will ensure that appropriate training is provided to personnel.”
Jay Tilton, a spokesperson for the Senate Appropriations Committee, told BuzzFeed News late last year that congressional officials learned about the lack of a policy after meeting with the agency.
“Through press reporting, the committee became aware that an ICE employee allegedly used ICE’s subpoena authority on a member of the press. After further inquiries, the committee learned that contrary to the DOJ, ICE had no policy in place guiding its employees on how to properly engage the press in these matters,” he said. “Given the fundamental First Amendment issues involved, the committee thought it prudent to direct ICE to develop such a policy using the long-standing DOJ policy as a guidepost.”
The administrative subpoena to BuzzFeed News was issued by an agent with the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility, and concerned emails sent to ICE attorneys on a fast-track deportation program and plans to fine certain undocumented immigrants. It demanded that BuzzFeed News “provide all documentation including, but not limited to: (1) date of receipt, (2) method of receipt, (3) source of document, and (4) contact information for the source of the document.”
The subpoena stated that BuzzFeed News should produce the records to an ICE agent in Virginia by Dec. 22. “Failure to comply with this summons will render you liable to proceedings in a U.S. District Court to enforce compliance with this summons as well as other sanctions,” the subpoena sent to BuzzFeed News stated. “You are requested not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time. Any such disclosure will impede this investigation and thereby interfere with the enforcement of federal law.”
Rohingya refugees walk through a shallow canal after crossing the Naf River as they flee violence in Myanmar to reach Bangladesh in Palongkhali near Ukhia on Oct. 16, 2017. (photo: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images)
For me and many other Rohingya, this is an epochal moment. For too long, we have felt abandoned by the world. For years, we pleaded for help — but our calls went unanswered. The violence and suffering we endured were compounded by the realization that so much of the world preferred to look away. This collective memory has further traumatized us. How could no one care when they burned down our homes and slaughtered our people? How could the international community close its eyes when hundreds of thousands of us were forced to flee our country?
Blinken’s announcement has important legal implications. That the world’s leading power has finally acknowledged our experience gives us hope that our oppressors will one day be held accountable for the crimes they have perpetrated against us. But it is also important to understand the moral and emotional impact of the U.S. government’s move. For many of us, it feels as though the pain and trauma of a generation are now being recognized in their entirety.
Those of us who experienced the 2017 campaign of terror that drove nearly 1 million of our people — two-thirds of the total Rohingya population — out of Myanmar and into exile never had any doubt that we were victims of genocide. Detailed accounts from Rohingya victims, as well as reports from the United Nations’ Independent International Fact-Finding Mission and many human rights organizations, have confirmed this. And yet our collective trauma has been ignored, denied and minimized.
For decades, we have suffered at the hands of the Myanmar military, which has stripped us of our citizenship, denied us our basic rights to give birth or marry, and deprived us of access to education, health and livelihood. Myanmar troops have tortured, raped and killed our people.
Today, more than 800,000 Rohingya struggle to survive life-threatening conditions in squalid refugee camps in Bangladesh. Across Southeast Asia, more and more of these refugees risk their lives in the search for a semblance of humanity, only to confront hate speech and discrimination. They are sometimes arrested for “illegal entry” and threatened with deportation back to Myanmar — where the remnants of our people live under siege by the perpetrators of the genocide.
Since the February 2021 military coup, the roughly 600,000 Rohingya who remain in Myanmar have faced an increasing risk of being subjected to further atrocities. The Myanmar junta, responsible for widespread killings, arrests and other acts of brutality, is now poised to launch a final assault on those who remain. As reported by survivors in Rohingya communities inside the country, the Myanmar military has issued more apartheid-like policies, including official orders prohibiting Rohingya from leaving their townships and imprisoning those who violate this arbitrary rule. Earlier this month, my organization, the Women’s Peace Network, found that the junta has arrested more than 856 Rohingya — of which more than 60 percent are women and children — for allegedly violating such policies.
Although it is past time for our genocide to be recognized for what it is, I am thankful for this week’s action by the United States. My seven-year imprisonment as a political prisoner, as well as my near-decade of activism since then, have instilled in me the importance of hope in helping to brave periods of darkness. I believe in this hope that brings us together today. All human beings deserve to live in dignity regardless of our race, religion, color or creed.
The genocide determination is a key step in bringing justice to Rohingya victims and survivors. I hope the U.S. government will follow its words with actions. The United States should lend its support for legal efforts around the world to establish justice and accountability for our people, including persuading the U.N. Security Council to refer the case of Myanmar to the International Criminal Court. Washington should also act to impose a global arms embargo on the military junta in Myanmar and issue economic sanctions and financial penalties against the generals and their businesses.
I am hopeful that the U.S. government’s actions will spur a global response to crimes against the Rohingya. I trust that other governments will follow America’s lead by officially acknowledging the atrocities still being committed against the Rohingya as genocide and taking comprehensive steps to hold the Myanmar military accountable. Myanmar’s National Unity Government, which has brought together a wide range of national figures in opposition to the junta, should publicly recognize the crimes committed as genocide, hold all actors involved accountable, and restore equal rights to the Rohingya.
This week’s genocide determination is an important step on the path toward justice for the Rohingya people. My hope is that it is the first of many meaningful actions to come.
Hurricane Ida. (photo: Warren Faidley/Getty Images)
The agency will dole out $60 million from the infrastructure bill to four states hit by Hurricane Ida.
“In recent years, so many communities around our nation have been damaged by storms and floods,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at a press conference in Sunset, Louisiana, on Monday, where she announced the new funding. “Our administration is committed to helping all communities to prepare for, to respond to, and to recover from extreme weather.”
The $60 million fund, called the Swift Current initiative, will be administered through FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance Program and is part of $3.5 billion allocated for flood mitigation assistance grants by the bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden last fall. It’s the first FEMA project to get funded by the bill.
The president had originally hoped Congress would be approving another, bigger bill with a lot more money in it for emissions reduction and climate adaptation efforts. But the Build Back Better Act and its $555 billion in climate spending are currently stalled in the Senate. So the Biden administration is using the few tools available to deliver on its promise to advance environmental justice and climate action at the federal level.
FEMA’s new tranche of money for flood-prone homes is evidence of that. Individuals in the four states chosen by FEMA who own homes and properties that are insured by the National Flood Insurance Program and were substantially damaged by Hurricane Ida or have repeatedly flooded will be eligible for the money. FEMA will prioritize homes that are worth less than $750,000 so that the funding can be stretched between many properties. The grant funding, which will be distributed by local governments, can go toward one of five flood mitigation categories, including elevating buildings off the ground, retrofitting them, and making them more resilient to water.
The funding can also go toward a sixth category: “property acquisition and structure demolition/relocation.” In non-agency speak, that means the federal government will either pay homeowners for their land and tear down the house built on it or pay to have the house moved. As storms become more intense and seas rise, parts of the coastline in the U.S. will become so inundated by water that living there will become impossible. That means people will have to move, or retreat, from these areas.
The Swift Current initiative is both an acknowledgment that retreat is a reality for some people and evidence that the federal government isn’t ready to incentivize or mandate retreat from flood-prone areas. It’s up to towns to decide what kind of projects they want to submit for grant money, so there’s no saying how many individual homes will end up receiving buyouts thanks to this program. “A lot will depend on which communities come in for funding,” Anna Weber, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist. “If it’s a town where the local government is really interested in buyouts and a lot of residents think it’s the right choice, then you could see that happen.”
Swift Current will be administered in a way that complements the Biden administration’s effort to direct 40 percent of the benefits of its climate and environment programs toward disadvantaged neighborhoods, FEMA told CNN, by shouldering 90 percent of the cost share of rebuilding “substantially damaged” homes in “socially vulnerable” communities. A substantially damaged home is one where the cost of restoring the structure to its pre-disaster condition would equal or exceed 50 percent of the market value of the house. The agency typically takes on 75 percent of the cost of substantially damaged homes, but the remaining 25 percent can still be prohibitively expensive for many homeowners. For properties that have flooded more than twice, FEMA said it will cover between 90 and 100 percent of the cost of rebuilding, depending on the severity of the flooding.
“The Swift Current initiative represents FEMA’s commitment to quickly and equitably getting hazard mitigation funding to the communities who need it the most,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said in a statement.
While it’s a good start, the $60 million isn’t enough funding to match the scale of the flooding crisis in the U.S. Extreme flooding fueled by climate change already costs the U.S. roughly $32 billion a year. A recent study showed that, by 2050, that financial burden could rise 26 percent to $41 billion a year, and a majority of that risk will fall on predominantly Black communities. “Sixty million dollars is nowhere near enough to make a dent even in addressing the most flood-prone properties in the nation,” Weber said. “But in the bigger picture, this is a situation where FEMA is trying out something new, so it makes sense that they’re only looking at a limited pool of funding.” Depending on how Swift Current goes, FEMA says it could make similar funding available to more states. And the agency provides more money for flood mitigation in states via other streams of funding every year.
However, in some places, no amount of federal funding will be able to stave off flooding brought on by rising sea-levels. Eventually, people in those areas will have to leave their homes. That’s a problem that FEMA can’t tackle alone. Managed retreat, the coordinated movement of people, assets, and infrastructure from coastlines further inland, will require stronger leadership and a holistic, all-of-government approach, Weber said. “Managed retreat isn’t the jurisdiction of any single federal agency or person,” she added. “I think that we’re going to need a lot more coordination and collaboration if we’re going to have something that actually addresses communities’ needs.”
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