15 March 22
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14 March 22
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The first state constitutional protection of reproductive rights hints at the contradictions and fears of a divided movement.
Meanwhile, 15 states are doing what they can to rescue the legal right to abortion. Twelve are crafting legislation, like New York’s Reproductive Health Act, that reaffirms in statute the court’s ruling in Roe. Three, and the District of Columbia, are moving beyond Roe: codifying a right to abortion throughout pregnancy without state interference. And one state, Vermont, is doing a little of both: proposing a state constitutional amendment that enshrines individual reproductive liberty as a basic right — and then hedging, suggesting that it may not be that basic after all.
These varying approaches show that the reproductive justice movement is divided not just about how to shelter legal abortion in its last redoubts now, but also how to win it back for all and for good. Before Roe, the question was: Reform abortion laws or repeal them altogether? Today that translates to: Hang onto a tattered Roe or scrap it and start anew? Vermont’s hybrid — or self-contradictory — strategy may hint of both a realization and a fear. Roe is probably a dead letter. But it is still a letter, something to hold onto. The movement’s confidence may be as tattered as the right it’s trying to defend.
What is wrong with Roe? A lot. First, it’s based on the right of privacy established in Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 ruling affirming a married couple’s freedom to use birth control. Many critics (including me) have argued that privacy — a young, relatively untested “penumbral” right not named in the Constitution but implied by other amendments — is a fragile support for the weighty human right of reproductive autonomy. Why not, say, the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on involuntary servitude, the use of one’s body against one’s will?
The second weakness is the framework the court set up in Roe, which shifts the balance of the state’s interest from the pregnant person’s rights as independent actor (and the fetus as part of the pregnant person) in early gestation to the fetus’s potential life as it matures toward viability: the point at which a baby can survive outside the womb, now about 24 weeks. A decade after Roe, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor alerted her colleagues that science was pushing viability earlier and earlier in gestation, progressively shaving weeks off the mother’s liberty; Roe, she said, was “on a collision course with itself.” And indeed, hardly an instant later, abortion opponents started revving the engines to accelerate that collision, promoting the myths — and passing laws based on them — that a fetus can feel pain during abortion or survive on its own at the first indication of a “fetal heartbeat” less than six weeks after conception. During oral arguments in Dobbs, Chief Justice John Roberts showed eagerness to eliminate the viability standard altogether, in effect cutting the brake line that keeps Roe from crashing.
The third flaw in the past 40-some years of legally defending Roe is the test O’Connor proposed as more enduring than viability: that the law impose no “undue burden” on the ability to get or provide an abortion. Undue burden is even feebler than privacy. At this point, there may be no burden SCOTUS’s conservatives consider undue: not driving thousands of miles, not having an ultrasound probe shoved up your vagina for no reason, not paying hundreds of dollars out of pocket. Apparently, no emotional burden is undue either. During the Dobbs colloquy, Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett brought up “safe haven laws,” which allow people to leave an unwanted newborn at a hospital or fire station anonymously and without criminal liability. Wouldn’t these provisions “take care of [the] problem” of forced parenthood, Barrett mused. Julie Rikelman, attorney for the abortion provider, responded that the issue at hand was forced pregnancy, which “imposes unique physical demands and risk on women and in fact has impact” on their families and livelihoods. Court etiquette inhibited Rikelman from voicing what was likely on her mind: “And which of your seven children would you put in a basket and float down the Nile, Your Honor?”
Vermont’s Reproductive Liberty Amendment aims to overcome these weaknesses. Introduced in 2019, the amendment easily passed the state Legislature, the mandated second time, this session. If the electorate votes yes on Proposition 5 on the November ballot, it will become part of the Vermont Constitution the next day. This is what it says:
That an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.
At its most basic, the amendment makes permanent “conditions on the ground,” Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, a co-sponsor and active champion of the bill, told me. This is a good thing, because at present Vermont’s policies are exemplary. The state requires no parental involvement in a minor’s decision to end a pregnancy, for instance, and compels Medicaid and private insurance to cover abortion and birth control. Healthy majorities support reproductive justice. The amendment passed the House by a vote of 107 to 41. Seven in 10 Vermont adults favor the right to abortion in most cases.
In this sense, the amendment might be more symbolic than practical. Still, as the first in the nation, the text serves as a signpost for other states. The problem: It’s hard to know which direction the signpost is pointing.
The first part, up to and including “shall not be denied or infringed,” is radical. It asserts that the roughly half of humans who bear uteruses are free to do with their bodies as they wish, period. The second half telegraphs second thoughts. The phrase “unless justified by a compelling state interest” hints that there might be legitimate and compelling justification to violate the fundamental right the state just finished declaring.
What compelling interest might Vermont have to violate the human right to bodily autonomy? This is not a theoretical question. All sorts of arbitrary and burdensome restrictions on abortion claim a compelling state interest. “Whereas the State of Florida has a compelling interest from the outset of a woman’s pregnancy in protecting the health of the woman and the life of the unborn child,” and “the pregnant woman has a compelling interest in knowing the likelihood of her unborn child surviving to full-term birth based upon the presence of cardiac activity,” reads Florida’s Heartbeat Act, language that is nearly identical to other fetal heartbeat laws, including Texas’s, which effectively ban abortion at six weeks. In defending its 15-week ban, Mississippi had the chutzpah — and the wit — to use Roe and other pro-choice precedents against themselves. “The Supreme Court has long recognized … an ‘important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life,’” it argued, quoting Roe. It went on to cite the state’s “interest in protecting the life of the unborn” as well as its “legitimate interests from the outset of pregnancy in protecting the health of women,” both from Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe in 1992.
The Vermont amendment’s sponsors do not agree that its second clause kneecaps the first. The terms “compelling state interest” and “least restrictive means,” they note, echo the language of “strict scrutiny,” the highest level of judicial review. To be upheld as constitutional under this standard, a law must further a “compelling governmental interest” that cannot be achieved in any other way — and that way must be narrowly defined. One of the few triggers for strict scrutiny is the challenge that the legislation abridges a fundamental right.
If the “unless” clause is compromise language intended to win more votes, neither Balint nor the chief sponsor, Vermont Senate Health and Welfare Committee Chair Ginny Lyons, admitted as much. Both insist that Clause No. 2 only strengthens the fundamental right to reproductive liberty. “Remember that the Roe v. Wade decision was based on something called privacy that doesn’t exist in the Constitution,” Lyons told me. “What we’ve learned from that is to place reproductive autonomy in the broader context of the state constitution.”
Article 1 of the Vermont Constitution proclaims: “All persons are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights.” Interestingly, also on Vermont’s ballot this November is Proposition 2, asking voters to ratify another amendment — no easy task in this state. Prop 2 repeals Article 1’s second half, which abolished servitude or slavery, “unless bound by the person’s own consent” or in payment of a debt. In its place would be the simple sentence “Slavery and indentured servitude in any form are prohibited.”
Appending an asterisk to a human right is asking for trouble. Does the Eighth Amendment prohibit cruel and unusual punishment “unless justified by a compelling state interest”? Does the 19th proclaim, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex — unless justified by a compelling state interest”? The one U.S. constitutional amendment with an exception written into it is the 13th, banning slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime.” As Michelle Alexander and other scholars argue, this loophole, inserted to gain ratification from Western states ambivalent about slavery, allowed the reincarnation of slavery in striped prison garb during Jim Crow and led to the mass incarceration of the descendants of enslaved people. What if Vermont’s “unless” clause, intended to preempt violation, actually invited it?
At a meeting in the late 1960s, Cindy Cisler, a Redstockings co-founder and leading feminist organizer for repeal — not reform — of abortion laws, held up a blank piece of paper. “This,” she declared, “should be the abortion law.”
Now that there’s little left to lose, we might as well start over with what we really want. Replace the consumerist concept of reproductive choice with the principle of reproductive justice: not just the right to terminate a pregnancy but also to carry one healthily to term and raise the child in a safe and sustainable environment; not just the right to contraception but also the right to refuse it and to be free from forced sterilization or other eugenic coercions. Build this expansive definition of reproductive justice into the right to bodily autonomy. Elevate bodily autonomy in the U.S. to its global status, as an inalienable human right.
Then we should demand what we need from the government when it comes to abortion law. That is, nothing.
Brent Renaud attends the 74th Annual Peabody Awards at Cipriani Wall Street on May 31, 2015, in New York. Renaud, an American journalist, was killed in a suburb of Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sunday, March 13, 2022, while gathering material for a report about refugees. Ukrainian authorities said he died when Russian forces shelled the vehicle he was traveling in. (photo: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
In a tweet, Kyiv region police identified the dead man as Renaud, who was 50. Police posted a photo of his body and his American passport as evidence, as well as a photo of an outdated New York Times press badge with Renaud's name.
Andriy Nebitov, the head of the Kyiv region police, said in a Facebook post that Russian forces shot Renaud, adding that "the occupants cynically kill even journalists of international media, who've been trying to tell the truth about atrocities of Russian military in Ukraine."
"Of course, journalism carries risks, but the US citizen Brent Renaud paid with his life for an attempt to shed light on how underhand, cruel, and merciless the aggressor is," Nebitov added.
CNN has not independently verified the account given by police.
Renaud is the first foreign journalist known to be killed in the war in Ukraine. A Ukrainian camera operator, Yevhenii Sakun, was reportedly killed when Kyiv's TV tower was shelled earlier this month.
Press freedom groups denounced Sunday's violence as a violation of international law.
"Russian forces in Ukraine must stop all violence against journalists and other civilians at once, and whoever killed Renaud should be held to account," the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement.
Time magazine told CNN that Renaud, an acclaimed filmmaker, was in Ukraine in recent weeks to work on "a Time Studios project focused on the global refugee crisis."
"Our hearts are with all of Brent's loved ones," the publication said. "It is essential that journalists are able to safely cover this ongoing invasion and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine."
Arredondo, a Colombian-American photographer, appeared in a social media video from Okhmatdyt hospital in Kyiv and recounted the shooting. He said he and Renaud were driving through a checkpoint in Irpin on the way to film refugees leaving the city when Russian forces opened fire.
Arredondo said there were "two of us," and Renaud was "shot and left behind," adding that Renaud was shot in the neck. "We got split and I got pulled into the (stretcher)." Asked how he got to the hospital, he replied, "an ambulance, I don't know."
Arredondo, a filmmaker and visual journalist who is also an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School, posted photos from Zhytomyr, Ukraine, on Saturday, noting in an Instagram post that he is "#onassignment."
The Dean of Columbia Journalism School, Steve Coll, told CNN: "We don't have any independent information about his injuries at this time but are working now to learn more and to see if we can help."
Arredondo is a prominent photographer, with work featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, ESPN, Vanity Fair and other media outlets, according to his personal website bio.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, said in a statement on Telegram that Renaud "paid with his life for attempting to expose the insidiousness, cruelty and ruthlessness of the aggressor."
Irpin, in northern Ukraine just outside Kyiv, has been the site of substantial Russian shelling in recent days and has seen extensive destruction, according to the Kyiv regional government on Friday.
Tributes to Renaud
Renaud was a Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker, producer and journalist who lived and worked in New York and Little Rock, Arkansas, according to his biography on the Renaud Brothers website.
With his brother Craig, Renaud spent years "telling humanistic verite stories from the World's hot spots," including projects in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Egypt and Libya, according to his website bio.
Ann Marie Lipinski, the director of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, said the foundation was "heartsick" over the death of the journalist, who was a 2019 Harvard Nieman Fellow.
"Our Nieman Fellow Brent Renaud was gifted and kind, and his work was infused with humanity. He was killed today outside Kiev, and the world and journalism are lesser for it. We are heartsick," she said in a tweet.
A post on the Renaud Brothers Facebook page, dated March 8, urged readers to follow their coverage of the war Ukraine.
Christof Putzel, a friend and colleague of Renaud, told CNN his death was a "devastating" loss.
"I woke up this morning to the news that Brent, long-time best friend, incredible colleague, the best war journalist I think ever existed, finding out about his passing," Putzel said on CNN's "Reliable Sources."
"Brent had this ability to go anywhere, get any story, listen and communicate what was happening to people that others wouldn't otherwise see it. And it is a devastating loss to journalism today," he added.
Putzel said Renaud was working on a documentary about refugees around the world when the crisis in Ukraine began. He said that "Brent was on the plane the next day" and covered the plight of refugees from Kyiv into Poland.
Several years ago, the pair won a duPont award for a story they worked on about guns being smuggled into Mexico from the United States.
"What I said when we accepted our award was, the only thing bigger than Brent's balls are his heart. And I stand by that. That's what kind of journalist he was," said Putzel.
Renaud had a unique ability to make people trust him as he told their stories in places like Iraq and other war zones, he added.
"You could sit down and spend a week watching all of Brent's stories over the years back-to-back and just be flabbergasted," Putzel said. "The career that he had, his ability to reach people, his ability to capture the humanity behind people's suffering is something I have never seen before, and I was just honored to work with him as long as I did."
Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik/Kremlin/AP)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Russia is widening its attack on Ukraine as the war enters its 16th day. Earlier today, Russian air strikes hit the city of Dnipro in central-eastern Ukraine, killing at least one person. The air strikes reportedly hit a kindergarten, an apartment building and a shoe factory. Long-range Russian missiles also hit airfields in two western cities, in Lutsk and Ivano-Frankivsk. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials are accusing Russia of shelling a physics institute in the eastern city of Kharkiv that houses an experimental nuclear reactor. Satellite images show the Russian convoy outside Kyiv has now dispersed in a sign that Russia may soon move on the capital city. This all comes as the United Nations says more than two and a half million Ukrainians have fled the country.
We begin today’s show with a Ukrainian environmental lawyer and climate activist who recently fled Ivano-Frankivsk, one of the western cities that was just bombed today. Svitlana Romanko is the founder of the Stand With Ukraine campaign, calling on governments to ban trade and investment in Russian oil and gas. This week she co-authored an article for the Los Angeles Times with Bill McKibben headlined The Ukraine war is a decision point—banks should stop funding the fossil fuel industry forever.
Svitlana Romanko, welcome to Democracy Now! Before we talk about this very important piece in your climate work, can you take us on the journey that you have taken? Describe what has happened. We did not know when we were first talking to you that your city would be bombed. Talk about what happened. This is in the west of Ukraine that hasn’t been hit yet. And then where you are now or at least the overall region.
SVITLANA ROMANKO: Thank you so much for having me and for inviting me and giving a voice and space for Ukrainian activists to share the happenings and share the latest war developments and the huge impact, catastrophic impact that it is making for all of our lives continually and regularly and severely, I would say. That is not true that we only have had explosions today in Ivano-Frankivsk where I am regularly based and where I do have plan to come back in a few days and continue my fight for justice and for peace for my country, my beloved country. I actually woke up with my family to explosions on February 24th, the first day of war. Before that, we got a lot of warnings from different intelligence services all over the world that “Heads up, Putin is going to attack, just get prepared, and just stay strong and hold on.”
I can say as a human, as a lawyer as well because lawyers are normally more prepared to take over some difficulties and challenges because that is normally what their work is, just to solve some problems in legislation and so on. But we all have been unprepared to wake up to explosions. We all have been highly unprepared to see our people dying, to lose our relatives, to lose a lot of children dying under the bombarded maternity hospitals. This is inhumane, this is insane and this is atrocities that must stop. Even now when I’m am speaking to you now, representing Ukrainian climate community, and we are many, we are trying to act. I will tell you a bit more later of how we are organizing and what we are doing and what is our piece with Bill McKibben about, and why we target those institutions and how this could help Ukraine, bombarded Ukraine, just bleeding Ukraine, which is suffering every day. Today it is the 16th day of war already and that has been a very long 16 days for all the world that expressed immense solidarity, which we are deeply grateful for. It has been very long days for us, for all Ukrainians.
Today, as you said, there were new explosions in new cities that just began explosions in Ivano-Frankivsk after 16 days. Fortunately, no victims, no people died in Ivano-Frankivsk but at least one person as you said died in our other city, Dnipro, and Lutsk. The tactic of Putin’s war machine is to keep civilians in fear, to destroy their infrastructure and buildings, to enable the terror, panic, and to enable Ukrainian government to accept what Ukrainian government will never accept, the conditions, which Putin request us, just to hold with. I would also admit that there are still almost 400,000 people that are staying in Mariupol, where there is a huge humanitarian catastrophe. They are starving. They don’t have water. The green corridors don’t work for them because Russian troops opened fire and killed many civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: We still don’t know how many people have died there, but we have seen the images of the mass graves where scores have been buried because there is no time to bury them individually. Hearing in Mariupol about the lack of water, the lack of food, the freezing temperatures and yet there is no electricity. Even cell service is cut off.
Svitlana, I wanted to read from the piece that you wrote with Bill McKibben. I think clearly, overall, it very much ties into what we are seeing today. You say, “Above all, it is obvious that the world’s banks have amorally worked to build Russia’s oil and gas industry, the industry that funds the Russian army, and the industry that Vladimir Putin has used as a cudgel for decades to keep Europe cowering, and that is why we cheered so loudly Tuesday when President Biden, as part of his ban on Russian oil, told American banks to make no new investments in Putin’s oil. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted, it strikes at the heart of Putin’s war machine.” Can you talk about this, how your professional life, your activist life, as a Ukrainian environmental lawyer, comes together now with what you have identified as the reasons for this war and what can be used to stop funding the Russian military and the Russian regime?
SVITLANA ROMANKO: Thank you so much for that. I will talk through and explain a few initiatives that we have been taking over the days as a lawyer, as an activist involved in a lot of global organizations and communities to help us with. The first one is the complaint that I’ve been a part of organizing. It’s called End Global Fossil Fuel Addiction That Feeds Putin’s War Machine. It was in this campaign we demand to European nation-states, the U.S., Canada, China, India, Japan, South Korea and all other importers of Russian oil and gas to stop fund Putin’s war machine. We again call on political deputies to stop the war and actually to divest all funds that have been invested and kept into Russian companies, Russian assets. We also mention that Putin has deliberately weaponized fossil gas to increase his existing energy dominance over the European Union. What we see, I can tell a bit later about another action within the European Union, after amazing leadership of President Biden that you’ve mentioned and how that continues over Europe and through Europe and European leaders. Putin still threatens European nations that would come to Ukraine’s aid and this needs to be stopped.
So we called upon all governments of the countries I have mentioned, outside Europe and inside the European Union, to reject, ban, embargo any import of fossil fuels from Russia and rapidly phase out fossil fuels. Even of course realizing, because I am a researcher, I can understand climate change and easily navigate main provisions and main state of renewable energy development. So yes, it not seems to be easy but that’s quite possible and it’s a decisive point as we pointed out with Bill McKibben in our L.A. piece. That has to be done, to provide affordable access to distributed renewable energy, community-owned energy for everyone. We should start now.
This war is such an immense tipping point and the chance we might not have had in the future, exactly as is with climate crisis. Therefore, we also demanded to stop all trade and end all investment in Gazprom, Erthneft [sp], Transneft, Surgutneftegas, Lukoil, Russian a Russian coal and other Russian companies and freeze the assets of such companies outside Russia as well as freezing other Russian fossil fuel assets. Western companies as Exxon Mobil, as others, have to stop fossil fuel production in Russia. So far we collected 660 organization signatures into that from over 60 countries. Yesterday we have delivered with a campaign group of us, we delivered the letters to all European leaders in the European Union and urged them to follow the example of President Biden and to put embargo on Russian oil and gas and end any investments in fossil fuels for their companies and banks.
Also I would also like to mention a next very important Putin 100 campaign which has been launched in solidarity with Ukraine as well by over 75 organizations which we are writing to global banks, insurers, and S [sp[ managers that are most active in the Russian fossil fuel Sector. These include J.P. Morgan Chase, Crédit Agricole, Citibank, Vanguard, CHAPS, Lloyd’s of London, and Munich Re. Groups are asking them to commit to not provide new financing investment, insurance coverage and other financial services to companies which make up the core of Russian coal, oil and gas industry and divesting from existing assets. There is a start of campaign, you all can join. You can join our call to action which is Stand With Ukraine and you can also join campaign Putin’s 100, which has been launched within the U.S. and many global organizations in solidarity with Ukraine to stop this banking.
AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to say as you talk about stopping reliance on fossil fuel, the other part of this, the solution that you have stressed is renewables. Earlier this week, President Biden banned oil and gas imports from Russia and called for a transition to green energy. This is what he said.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: This crisis is a stark reminder, to protect our economy over the long term, we need to become energy independent. I’ve had numerous conversations over the last three months with our European friends of how they have to wean themselves off of Russian oil. It’s just not tenable. It should motivate us to accelerate a transition on clean energy. This is a perspective [inaudible] that our European allies share, and the future where together we can achieve greater independence.
AMY GOODMAN: Svitlana Romanko, you write in the L.A. Times, “With an influx of funding, we could for instance produce air source heat pumps by the millions, ship them to Europe so by next winter, they could be installed heating homes and putting a noticeable dent in Putin’s oil and gas leverage.” These renewable solutions that you stress?
SVITLANA ROMANKO: These are renewable energy solutions beyond any doubt. Adding to that, I would like to say that the key and root prerequisite for those solutions to be put in place, to be implemented the soonest and not allow the peace-washing of fossil fuel companies actually to justify their increased exploration of fossil fuels, this should also be transformed into renewable energy transition as a society. As an activist, we should not allow fossil fuel companies right now to increase their exploration. These renewable energy solutions that you have mentioned are very true, they are affordable and everyone basically can be a part of a network of implementing those solutions. That is why we call them distributed, community-owned, community-led solutions. But the root prerequisite, I would like to mention that we need to triple our investment in clean energy which means we need to find the cost from somewhere. And there is enough—
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to break soon. We are going to be going to Mykolaiv, and you know that that city is under siege. But I wanted to finally ask you about, one, I was surprised when you said you plan to go right back to your city that was just bombed today, that you plan to go back soon. Are you afraid about speaking out? You are a Ukrainian climate lawyer, can clearly be identified. What are the risks?
SVITLANA ROMANKO: I have seen some signs of risk, that is why I am just trying to mitigate them, but I am personally not afraid. I am not afraid. I am only—of course I should consider some risks for family and so on, but I personally am not afraid, and I am ready to—and I just really plan to, after some security measurers, to go back to my country and to help. Because this is the country of my parents, and where they are. This is the country where I was born. And I am a patriotic person, and I should go back and keep helping. Because everyone in our country is a volunteer right now and together we can overcome the biggest evil which Putin represents with his war machine. We can stop this, I truly believe, and I have no fear.
AMY GOODMAN: Svitlana Romanko, I want to thank you so much for being with us. We are going to check back with you in the coming days. Ukrainian climate activist, longtime environmental lawyer who lives in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk. She founded the Stand With Ukraine campaign, calling on governments to ban trade and investment in Russian oil and gas. We’ll link to the piece you wrote with Bill McKibben The Ukraine war is a decision point—banks should stop funding the fossil fuel industry forever. Coming up, we go to the besieged southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv and then we will be speaking with Andrew Bacevich. Stay with us.
[MUSIC BREAK]
AMY GOODMAN: “Concerto for 2 Keyboards in C Minor,” featuring Alexander Malofeev. Despite voicing opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the young Russian pianist was struck from the schedule of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra this week. In a Facebook post, Malofeev wrote “The most important thing now is to stop the blood. All I know is that the spread of hatred will not help in any way but only cause more suffering.”
Tiesha Harris stands with her 1-year-old son, Knowledge, outside her grandmother's home. (photo: Adam Reynolds/TNR)
In Indianapolis, like many American cities, the long shadow of segregation continues to punish Black neighborhoods—to the disproportionate benefit of white landlords.
She’d been living in her 2007 Chevy Trailblazer since she contracted Covid-19, fell behind on her rent, and was evicted from an apartment in September. Her four children, ages one to 13 years old, were split around Indianapolis, with three away and living in various homes, and her youngest by her side. Since their eviction, Harris had packed most of her family’s belongings into a storage unit. The rest resided in plastic bins stacked carefully in the back of her trunk.
When we spoke via a Zoom app on her phone, her face hardened into a shield of stoicism. The one moment she nearly cried—when she pointed to the winter coats she had bought at Burlington for her children—was short-lived. Then, suddenly, the soft vulnerability in her dark brown eyes disappeared, and her voice became fiercely steady. “I need to keep it together for my children,” she said.
For months, the plunging temperatures of Midwest nights had perpetually jerked her awake. Unable to bend her schedule to accommodate anything other than her $14-an-hour job as a front-desk clerk at a pawnshop and her visits to her children, she had been unable to drive to a pantry or shelter for food during the few hours they were open.
As pandemic-era protections lapsed in August 2021, a new wave of evictions spread across the country. And Harris falls into the group that has been disproportionately affected: She’s Black.
Black renters are nearly twice as likely to be evicted as their white counterparts nationwide, said Peter Hepburn, an assistant professor at Rutgers University and a research fellow at Princeton’s Eviction Lab. This uneven impact was a reality before the pandemic, and it’s persisted since Covid entered our lives.
Nationwide, the number of people forced out of their homes began gaining momentum in August, when the Supreme Court ruled that President Joe Biden’s extension of the federal eviction moratorium was outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s powers. Across the six states and 31 cities tracked by the Eviction Lab, there was a 20 percent jump in eviction filings in the three months after the court’s decision, as compared to the final three months that it was in place.
Among the large cities for which the Eviction Lab has data, Indianapolis had the fourteenth-highest eviction rate prior to the pandemic, making it “normal” in terms of U.S. evictions. In Marion County, 64 percent of the Black population rent their homes, according to the 2019 U.S. census. Comparatively, 37 percent of the white population are renters. Nationwide in 2021, 74 percent of white families owned homes, compared with 43 percent of Black families.
Indiana is already well on its way back toward the pre-pandemic reality where one in 12 renter households faced eviction proceedings in a regular year. “Renters who are harmed are disproportionately people of color,” said Fran Quigley, a clinical professor and director of the Health and Human Rights Clinic at the Indiana University McKinney School of Law. He has noticed that “landlords who benefit from those laws are corporations and individuals who are disproportionately white.”
During its heyday early in the twentieth century, Indiana Avenue was considered the epicenter of Black culture in Indianapolis. Legendary jazz greats, the likes of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, made regular appearances. At the same time, the Avenue was a regional center of Black entrepreneurship, including Madam C.J. Walker’s theater and hair care manufacturing company, Black newspapers, Black churches, and a host of other successful Black-owned businesses.
The historical nature of eviction in Indiana—or anywhere else in this country—looks the way it does in the modern era thanks to the Great Black Migration, according to Darryl Heller, director of the Civil Rights Heritage Center, established by Indiana University South Bend. Between 1916 and 1970, more than six million African Americans from the rural South relocated to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West. But in their flight from oppressive segregation laws in the South, they often ended up in the worst jobs cities had to offer—and in unhealthy, substandard housing.
Overcrowding created a housing shortage, Indiana University began expanding its campus to acres claimed uninhabitable, and the city’s chief of police publicly stated in 1939 that he intended to enforce segregation along the Avenue, where, in its prime, whites were drawn. Eventually, the common 1950s method for the extinction of Black neighborhood wealth arrived: Interstates were built, wiping out entire blocks of neighborhoods, and Indiana Avenue ceased to exist as it had been known.
Today, many Indiana residents call the east side of Indianapolis—a predominantly Black part of town—“the desert” or “the gate.” On the east side, there are no grocery stores, said Dee Ross, founder of the Ross Foundation, an organization that oversees the Indianapolis Tenants Rights Union, which fights against housing injustices throughout the city. The area is bereft of banks or transportation to get to the west side of town, where most of the well-paying jobs are. This makes being evicted from a home there even more challenging. If your car breaks down and you don’t have family to help you, you end up trapped on the east side. That’s why it’s called “the gate”—because it’s like an entrance that, for those without resources, remains locked.
Katina Roqueta, a 40-year-old customer service representative, did not have the key to unlock it. Her last of several evictions was in April 2021, she said. Soon after she moved into that apartment, she began having problems with the sewage. The toilet flooded. Around Christmas, feces started seeping into her bathtub. And she stopped paying her $926-a-month rent. Though she is making a bit over $17 an hour, she said, she hasn’t been able to pay for a decent apartment because her wages are still being garnished from a previous eviction in 2006.
When I spoke with her last fall, she was living in a home on the east side that belongs to a woman she met at church. (She’s since moved in with her new husband in Anderson, outside Indianapolis.) Roqueta is still trying to figure out what happened and why she received no notice about the garnishments, which resurfaced nearly 15 years after the eviction, she said. She did not have a lawyer.
Shaquanda McKenzie, 37, was served an eviction notice on September 22. A health care coordinator for a small company that provides in-home services, the Black single mother of three teenagers earns $16 an hour—while simultaneously studying part-time at Marion County’s Ivy Tech Community College to become a nurse.
But that steady life began unraveling last year when, after her boyfriend got into a car accident and was subsequently fired from his job at a Goodwill, he could no longer contribute toward the rent in the four-bedroom house where McKenzie had been living for two years.
At the same time, her home became uninhabitable. In July, she noticed that a wall was warping in the kitchen and there was mold growing in the cabinets. Not long after, the hosing between the washing machine and the kitchen sink stopped working, and every time she washed clothes, the kitchen sink flooded. For a while, she tried cleaning her clothes in a trash can lined with a garbage bag, and washed dishes in the bathroom tub. Then she used some of her rent money to go to the laundromat and to buy paper plates and plastic utensils. But these extra costs, along with the time and money she allocated to fixing the issues, added up, and she fell behind on rent. After she received the eviction notice, she emailed the management company to clarify whether she could simply pay the back rent and stay—or if she owed late fees. “Unfortunately,” she got in reply, “we are no longer accepting payments from you directly because of the eviction filing.”
Before her court hearing on October 21, McKenzie admitted, she was having a difficult time getting through her everyday life, let alone trying to plan next steps.
Meanwhile, her sister, who had been evicted two months earlier, was living in a hotel with her husband and daughter. Their mother, who lives in a one-bedroom house, had offered to help with money, but then changed her mind because of her own financial troubles. In November, McKenzie managed to find another home around the corner, but her old management company is suing her for maintenance issues and withholding her security deposit, forcing her to go back to court.
“I’m supposed to be the glue that holds everyone and everything together,” McKenzie said. “But all I can think is: Oh, my God, I’m going to get evicted.”
The impact of eviction can be devastating and long-lasting. An eviction on an individual’s record makes it harder for them to find safe and affordable housing in the future, forcing them to pay more for housing than they can afford and, often, to rent from an undesirable landlord.
It creates a dangerous feedback loop that, in turn, increases people’s risk for another eviction. “We are seeing so many of our clients spending 60 to 70 percent of their income on housing,” said Dee Ross.
This fall, the National Housing Law Project surveyed 119 legal aid and civil rights attorneys in 41 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico about tenant welfare after the federal eviction moratorium ended in August. Forty percent of respondents reported an increase in landlords lying in court to evict tenants. To evade local tenant protections, landlords would, among other tactics, change lease terms without notifying tenants, deny receipt of funding to keep cases moving through court, or withhold maintenance to render units uninhabitable.
“It’s this power thing with landlords,” said Eric Dunn, director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project. “They’re proving that ‘I can do whatever I want with my property. Tenants shouldn’t have any rights.’”
Indiana and many other states have what legal experts call weak tenant protection laws. Entrenching the imbalance of lack of protection is the fact that, on average across the country, 90 percent of landlords have lawyers, while 90 percent of tenants don’t, according to research from 2010.
This power imbalance is why eviction is a prime indicator of systematic and institutional racism, said Elora Lee Raymond, assistant professor at the School of City and Regional Planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “People want to blame eviction on poverty, but I don’t want to blame poverty, because poverty is a direct result of the legacy of racism in this country,” Raymond said.
“Could there be more tenant protection laws?” Wayne Township small claims court Judge Gerald Coleman asked rhetorically when I spoke with him in December. “Certainly. [But] the only issue for the court at the time of the hearing is whether you paid your rent.”
No judge takes pleasure in evicting a tenant, he said. But a judge doesn’t have much discretion for leniency. In Indianapolis, four out of nine small claims judges handling evictions are African Americans—“me being one of them,” Coleman said. “It’s pretty clear who could do something about this problem,” he said. “The courts don’t make the laws.”
In Indiana, both the state House and Senate have Republican supermajorities. In February, the Senate voted to override Indianapolis city legislation that would have required landlords to give tenants notice of their rights and responsibilities, connected tenants to legal assistance, and restricted landlords from retaliation against tenants for exercising their rights.
In late January, I checked back in with Tiesha Harris to see how she’d been since we’d last spoken. She’d still been living in her SUV until earlier that month, but had been forced out when it stopped running. She’d briefly stayed with friends of friends, and then with the man she thought was her significant other. But he had beaten her up two days before we spoke—pulled out her hair and bruised her face.
I asked her why she didn’t stay at the homeless shelter. She said she felt people were rude, dismissed her, and made her follow rules that were unfair. For example, she couldn’t bring in outside food after a certain hour. She broke that rule by bringing in a bottle of milk for her son and got yelled at. Harris explained through her tears that less than 48 hours had passed since she had been beaten up, and there was nowhere she felt wanted, let alone safe. Throughout it all, she has managed to keep her job at the pawnshop. “That’s the only thing I have managed to keep hold of,” she said.
The GoFundMe account that she had started before Christmas has accrued an underwhelming $40. Any discretionary income she’s cobbled together she’s spent on Lyft trips to get to work, totaling $165 by late January. “I just want my voice to be heard,” she told me, “before anything really horrible happens to me.”
Data. (photo: Guardian/Getty Images/Alamy)
Guardian review of company’s policies raises privacy concerns amid fears records could be shared or monetized
In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), US lawmakers on 23 February raised fresh concerns about the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, and the data collection practices of BI Inc, the private company running the effort for US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (Ice).
Lawmakers say the privacy policy of SmartLink, the app that BI requires immigrants to use, is overly broad and leaves unclear what data the company collects and what it does with that information.
A review of BI’s publicly available policies, demonstrations of its products as well as interviews with former employees and immigrants in the program reveal that Ice and BI have issued conflicting information about how often it tracks the location of the people it surveils, that BI’s app collects a broad swath of information on its users, and that BI encourages its law enforcement and government clients to share crime data with each other.
Without sweeping federal laws regulating consumer data, there are few mechanisms to compel BI to share much beyond the basics and even fewer to limit its ability to collect, store and share personal data as it wishes.
In addition to asking DHS to reconsider its exclusive contract with BI altogether, lawmakers are demanding more transparency around BI’s data policies, expressing concern that this information could be used against immigrants.
“We already know that data collected from ankle shackles has been used to conduct enforcement and deportation operations,” the lawmakers wrote.
“This technology has the capability of surveilling not only the subject but also bystanders – including US citizens and individuals with legal status – raising further civil rights concerns and creating a potential for unwarranted surveillance,” the letter reads.
BI referred all questions for this story to Ice. Ice’s acting press secretary, Paige Hughes, said these programs were “are an effective method of tracking noncitizens released from DHS custody who are awaiting their immigration proceedings”.
“As part of the process, DHS officials collect biometric and biographical information – fingerprints, photos, phone numbers, and an address in the United States – and run a background check to identify criminals or those who pose a public safety risk,” Hughes said in a statement. “Those who do not report are subject to arrest and potential removal.”
Ankle monitors and facial recognition
The intensive supervision appearance program (Isap) allows people who have applied for asylum or have been detained by Ice to go home while they await a hearing in court, if they comply with an Ice-prescribed surveillance regime. Among the requirements Ice can impose are ankle monitors, voice message check-ins and facial recognition check-ins through BI’s proprietary smartphone app, SmartLink.
Ice told the Congressional Research Service in 2018 that while it continuously monitored the location of people wearing an ankle monitor, it did not “actively monitor” the location of people being surveilled through the app and only gathered GPS points during those people’s weekly check-ins.
But there are indications BI may be tracking SmartLink users more frequently. SmartLink’s single disclaimer in the App Store warns: “Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.”
Immigrants in the program told the Guardian they had been instructed by BI employees to always keep their phones on so the company could track them. José, an immigrant in the program whose name the Guardian is withholding to protect his immigration case, said he had been told by BI employees to have his phone with him at all times so BI could locate him. Macarena, another Isap participant whose name the Guardian is withholding to avoid jeopardizing her proceedings, was told the app was always running and she always had to have her location services on. Several immigrants told the Guardian they had been told they could not let their phone batteries die. “It’s exactly like my [ankle monitor], but now it’s in my phone,” Macarena said about the instructions she received.
Ice said it does not track location outside of regular check-ins but did not respond to questions about why participants were told location services always needed to be on.
In addition, it appears SmartLink collects far more information than location data. Guardian interviews and a review of documentation suggest SmartLink collects:
- Images uploaded for weekly check-ins
- The locations (latitude and longitude) where each of those images were taken
- Records and copies of correspondence in SmartLink’s messaging feature, including email addresses and phone numbers
- Any information entered in the app, including personal identifying information
- Usage details, including when a user accesses or uses the app, and any communication data
- Mobile device information including internet connection details, IP addresses, telephone numbers and mobile network information
BI’s policies do not make clear how long it stores that information or who has access to it. But former BI case managers said they were able to access the images and location data that immigrants had uploaded to the app for their weekly check-ins in previous months.
That information may be added to the permanent case file the US government keeps on all immigrants, according to Julia Mao, deputy director of the immigration rights organization Just Futures Law. She worries this information could be shared with other agencies or used against the immigrants in the future.
Where does the data go?
In addition to concerns about what data BI collects, lawmakers and advocates worry about whom BI and Ice may be sharing that data with, and whom they could share such information with in the future.
That data could be used in other law enforcement contexts or sold to the highest bidder, said Mao. “We are concerned that some of this data could be shared and monetized.”
BI’s privacy policy states it may share personal information, without restriction, with its subsidiaries, in response to legal requests, and with “third parties as required in connection with your community supervision”.
BI has also encouraged information-sharing between different law enforcement agencies, according to company messaging and former employees. BI clients, which include Ice and local law enforcement agencies that run probation and parole programs, use a BI app called Total Access to access case files. But in addition to managing information, the app allows BI clients to share the locations of people they are monitoring and view the information other law enforcement agencies have shared.
“The information is yours, the data is yours; it is kept confidential. You’ll simply see a dot on the map,” a demo for Total Access says.
If an officer is looking to see whether a person their agency is monitoring was at a crime scene, for instance, they may see dots showing there were people monitored by other neighboring or federal agencies in the area as well. They can then call the appropriate agency to let them know, the demo says.
“When you see this, you’ll be able to literally share crime data from agency to agency,” it continues.
Advocates worry that such sharing practices could lead to information collected during Isap being used against immigrants in the future, even if they gain legal status, said Mao.
“There’s a lot of harassment that happens, especially for Muslims, frankly, regardless of immigration status,” she said. “Folks are and should be fairly concerned about how Ice is going to store or pull this data in the future.”
Lawyers and activists also worry about the potential for BI to sell that data as demand for biometric information grows.
“I both don’t trust Ice with that information and I don’t trust the private company with it, particularly when so many companies have contracts with data brokers to buy and sell information,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, a field director at the Latinx rights organization Mijente.
An estimated 180,000 immigrants are enrolled in Isap today, according to Ice, and at least 95,000 of them are using the SmartLink app. The Biden administration is looking to expand Isap in coming years. The number of people enrolled in the program is growing, and the administration has tasked BI to pilot a new, stricter surveillance mechanism that would require people to stay home 12 hours a day, according to Reuters.
China. (photo: Stringer)
Cities including Shanghai and Shenzhen locked down again, but a leading Chinese virologist questions whether China can be kept COVID-free.
Facing the worst national outbreak since the first wave of the pandemic, authorities have introduced lockdown restrictions in cities across the country, with production lines falling idle in the tech hub of Shenzhen and offices shuttered in the financial capital Shanghai.
Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has stuck to a strict zero-COVID policy since the virus emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, locking down entire cities whenever cases emerge and using mass testing and strict quarantining to bring local outbreaks under control.
But Chinese virologists say the arrival of the Omicron variant and its new “stealth” subvariant—both of which appear to evade China’s Sinovac vaccine—could leave that policy in tatters.
For those in the Americas or Europe, the case numbers reported from China still seem pretty small: Authorities confirmed 1,337 new locally transmitted cases in mainland China on Monday. By contrast, the U.K. is currently seeing more than 200,000 cases a day, according to the main COVID tracker.
But the example of Hong Kong, the former British colony that is officially semi-autonomous, is worrying. Omicron appears to be running virtually unchecked through the population of the island territory, which has registered an average of 40,000 cases a day over the past week despite widespread vaccination.
Worst-hit on the mainland is the northeastern province of Jilin, bordering North Korea, where many residents are restricted to their homes except for grocery shopping trips every other day. Jilin has recorded more than 4,000 cases in the past fortnight.
But multiple smaller outbreaks have also been recorded. Shenzhen, a city of 17.5 million people bordering Hong Kong, registered 66 new cases on Saturday, prompting authorities to suspend public transport, close factories—among them the huge Foxconn plant that produces the Apple iPhone. Residents have been told to stay home for the next week except when they are called for three rounds of compulsory testing.
A prominent infectious-disease expert from Shanghai, Zhang Wenhong, said in an article for the Chinese business outlet Caixin that the outbreak was being driven by the Omicron BA.2 “stealth” subvariant, the most infectious lineage yet of the SARS-Cov-2 virus.
Zhang, whose plain-spoken appeals for people to put up with lockdown restrictions at the beginning of the pandemic made him a prominent figure, said that the case numbers suggested the beginning of an “exponential rise”—but China had no option but to try to contain the virus.
“If our country opens up quickly now, it will cause a large number of infections in people in a short period of time,” Zhang wrote, according to a translation carried by the Associated Press. “No matter how low the death rate is, it will still cause a run on medical resources and a short-term shock to social life, causing irreparable harm to families and society.”
Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturing partner, said it would use its “diversified production sites in China” to minimize the impact of the Shenzhen lockdown.
But from a wider economic viewpoint, the lockdowns—both in Shenzhen and the industrial hub of Dongguan—could hardly have come at a worse time. Panic selling saw Chinese tech stocks listed on the Hong Kong fall 11 percent on Monday—their worst single-day fall since the 2008 crash—because of wider fears that China could be dragged into the conflict in Ukraine, or that Chinese companies doing business in Russia might face Western sanctions.
If China sticks with its zero-COVID policy, despite the spread of Omicron, one option is to insist that manufacturers introduce “closed management” systems, where workers live and work in a COVID-free “bubble.” The Chinese used such a system to protect last month’s Winter Olympics in Beijing, where staff and volunteers wore hazmat suits to marshal and test visiting athletes and even robots to feed them. Making that work in a megacity like Shenzhen or Shanghai would be harder.
Hawaii. (photo: Yenwen/iStock/Getty Images)
Out of over a dozen climate change cases filed nationwide, Honolulu’s lawsuit is leading the pack, attorneys say.
Hawaii Circuit Court Judge Jeffrey Crabtree ruled in favor of the city amid an attempt by Chevron, Sunoco, ExxonMobil, and other defendants to dismiss the lawsuit. The move is a key step in allowing the case to proceed to trial.
“This is an unprecedented case for any court, let alone a state court trial judge,” Crabtree wrote in his ruling.
The Honolulu Board of Water Supply filed the state court case in 2020 with the help of Sher Edling, a national firm that is pursuing similar cases across the country.
The plaintiffs argue that the fossil fuel industry engaged in a decades-long campaign of deception to discredit climate science and sow doubt in the mind of the public that fossil fuel production was harming the planet. And now, the lawsuit complaint says, the public is paying the price.
Because of climate change, Oahu will experience rising sea levels, flooding, erosion, beach loss, and extreme weather, as well as decreasing fish populations, the death of coral reefs, habitat losses, and other dire impacts, the lawsuit states.
The plaintiffs are using state tort law against the oil companies, arguing that the defendants had a duty to disclose information they knew and that they breached that duty.
The fossil fuel companies countered that the plaintiffs were trying to regulate global fossil fuel emissions and that the case is a federal legal matter, but Crabtree rejected that argument, among others.
“As this court understands it, Plaintiffs do not ask for damages for all effects of climate change; rather, they seek damages primarily for the effects of climate change allegedly caused by Defendants’ breach of long-recognized duties,” Crabtree wrote.
This debate about state and federal jurisdiction is playing out in similar climate change cases across the country, but Crabtree is the first judge in the nation to have issued a ruling rejecting the fossil fuel companies’ argument, said Denise Antolini, a local attorney who specializes in environmental law.
“He based his ruling on very traditional tort law theory and practice, and so as he says, while the claims may be unusual and unprecedented, the law they’re based on is not,” said Antolini, who has submitted legal filings in support of the city and county’s case.
In a statement, Honolulu’s chief climate change officer Matthew Gonser said he appreciated Crabtree’s ruling.
“The Court recognized that Honolulu’s case is grounded in well-established state law tort claims such as failures to disclose and deceptive promotions, and that it is important for cities such as Honolulu to be able to seek redress for their injuries,” said Gonser, who heads Honolulu’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency.
“On behalf of Honolulu’s taxpayers, we look forward to the opportunity to present our evidence at trial. We are confident in the strength of our case.”
The oil companies are represented by some of Honolulu’s most prominent attorneys, including Paul Alston for Exxon Mobil, Joachim Paul Cox for Shell Oil, and former attorney general Margery Bronster for BHP GROUP.
Those lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
The County of Maui filed its own climate change case with Sher Edling, which has been consolidated with Honolulu’s case.
While the counties’ case proceeds in state court, they are simultaneously fighting the oil companies in federal court as well.
U.S. District Court Judge Watson remanded the matter from federal court to state court last year, but the oil companies are appealing that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. While the parties await a ruling on that appeal, Watson ruled that the state cases can proceed.
If the 9th Circuit determines it should be a federal case, the state rulings would be moot and the process would have to start over from the beginning at the federal level, Antolini said.
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