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17 April 22
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) speaks at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson in D.C. on March 23. (photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
The portrayal of the 88-year-old Feinstein in an article this week in the San Francisco Chronicle was devastating, painful and, from my own reporting, accurate. “Colleagues worry Dianne Feinstein is now mentally unfit to serve, citing recent interactions,” the headline read.
“Four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffers … told The Chronicle in recent interviews that her memory is rapidly deteriorating,” reported Tal Kopan and Joe Garofoli. “They said it appears she can no longer fulfill her job duties without her staff doing much of the work required to represent the nearly 40 million people of California.”
In a telephone call with the Chronicle editorial board after the story published, Feinstein proclaimed herself “rather puzzled by all of this.” “I meet regularly with leaders,” Feinstein told the board. “I’m not isolated. I see people. My attendance is good. I put in the hours.”
This is not a new issue. Feinstein’s handling of the 2018 Brett M. Kavanaugh confirmation hearings — in particular, her decision not to alert fellow lawmakers to the allegations by Christine Blasey Ford — prompted a near-insurrection by her Democratic colleagues. Her performance at the 2020 confirmation hearings for Justice Amy Coney Barrett, including her post-hearing hug of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and thanks for “one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in,” was the last straw.
Under pressure from Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer, Feinstein announced she would step down from her position as the committee’s ranking Democrat. According to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, that took “several serious and painful talks,” in part because “Feinstein seemed to forget about the conversations soon after they talked, so Schumer had to confront her again.”
Feinstein is the oldest sitting senator, but she is far from the only official whose mental acuity has been called into question. In their final years in office, Sens. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) and Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) were widely understood to have faded to the point where their senior staffs were essentially functioning in their place. The current Senate is the oldest ever, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), just three months younger than Feinstein, is running for reelection; he would be 95 by the conclusion of his eighth term.
So one question raised by the focus on Feinstein must be whether, as some of her defenders insinuate, there is sexism at work. I think I have pretty good radar for sexism, and I just don’t see it. Times have changed since the deficits of Thurmond and Byrd were ignored; I suspect they now would be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny Feinstein is facing.
Indeed, one theme in the coverage of Feinstein’s decline is how different she is now from the tough-minded Feinstein of days gone by. As the Los Angeles Times’s Mark Z. Barabak wrote in a sympathetic column last month about Feinstein’s performance at the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings, “The widely admired pathbreaker who opened avenues for women in politics and the steely-spined lawmaker who took on the National Rifle Association to pass an assault weapons ban was nowhere to be seen.”
To the extent that there is differential treatment, the explanation might be less gender than ideology. Progressive Democrats long frustrated by Feinstein’s centrism are eager for a more liberal replacement.
The Feinstein story evokes broader issues: the unwillingness of so many who hold power to cede it voluntarily, with their identities and support systems so bound up in their jobs; and the inability of our political system, in the absence of term limits (which I oppose for other reasons), to deal with those unwilling to recognize when it is time to step down. In the private sector, a board of directors would find a way to shunt a senile CEO aside. In public life, the only effective mechanism is the voters themselves.
Which gets to the heart of the puzzle: How are voters supposed to know what’s up when an elected official’s staff works overtime to mask the problem? The instinct to do so is understandable. Loyalty to the principal is one of the highest values in political life, and your role as a staffer is to support the boss, not expose her. But this approach is also deeply self-interested. If aides in normal times are only as powerful as the official they serve, they can become extra powerful when the same official is no longer functioning.
These inherent tensions help explain the high turnover from Feinstein’s office in recent years. Covering up is not public service. At a certain point, it is the antithesis.
A man gestures as a train for internally displaced people prepares to leave the main railway station in Zaporijia, southern Ukraine, on April 17. (photo: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
Here's more context to understand Ukraine and the impact of the invasion:
- Russian forces renewed missile strikes on Kyiv and intensified shelling of Kharkiv, in an apparent strategy to hobble Ukraine's defenses ahead of an expected full-scale assault in the east.
- Pope Francis made an anguished Easter Sunday plea for peace in the war in Ukraine.
- The deputy governor of Kharkiv told NPR he expects the region around Izyum in eastern Ukraine to be the Russians' next primary target and that there will be heavy fighting.
Bonnie Wallace speaks during a county commissioners meeting on in March. (photo: Sergio Flores/WP)
Conservatives are teaming with politicians to remove books and gut library boards
“It came to my attention a few weeks ago that pornographic filth has been discovered at the Llano library,” wrote Bonnie Wallace, a 54-year-old local church volunteer. “I’m not advocating for any book to be censored but to be RELOCATED to the ADULT section. … It is the only way I can think of to prohibit censorship of books I do agree with, mainly the Bible, if more radicals come to town and want to use the fact that we censored these books against us.”
Wallace had attached an Excel spreadsheet of about 60 books she found objectionable, including those about transgender teens, sex education and race, including such notable works as “Between the World and Me,” by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, an exploration of the country’s history written as a letter to his adolescent son. Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches.
“She told me to look at pulling the books off the shelf and possibly putting them behind the counter. I told them that was censorship,” Baker said.
Wallace’s list was the opening salvo in a censorship battle that is unlikely to end well for proponents of free speech in this county of 21,000 nestled in rolling hills of mesquite trees and cactus northwest of Austin.
Leaders have taken works as seemingly innocuous as the popular children’s picture book “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak off the shelves, closed library board meetings to the public and named Wallace the vice chair of a new library board stacked with conservative appointees — some of whom did not even have library cards.
With these actions, Llano joins a growing number of communities across America where conservatives have mounted challenges to books and other content related to race, sex, gender and other subjects they deem inappropriate. A movement that started in schools has rapidly expanded to public libraries, accounting for 37 percent of book challenges last year, according to the American Library Association. Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures.
“The danger is that we start to have information and books that only address one viewpoint that are okayed by just one certain group,” said Mary Woodward, president-elect of the Texas Library Association.
“We lose that diversity of thought and diversity of ideas libraries are known for — and only represent one viewpoint that is the loudest,” said Woodward, noting that there have been an estimated 17 challenges leveled at public libraries in Texas recently and that she expects many more.
Leila Green Little, a parent and board member of the Llano County Library System Foundation, said her anti-censorship group obtained dozens of emails from country officials that reveal the outsize influence a small but vocal group of conservative Christian and tea party activists wielded over the county commissioners to reshape the library system to their own ideals.
In one of the emails, which were obtained through a public records request and shared with The Washington Post, Cunningham seemed to question whether public libraries were even necessary.
“The board also needs to recognize that the county is not mandated by law to provide a public library,” Cunningham wrote to Wallace in January.
He declined to comment for this story but said in a statement that the county was aware of citizen concerns and “is committed to providing excellent public library services to our patrons consistent with community expectations and standards, as well as operating within compliance of Texas and Federal statutes.”
Dissent over removing books
Cunningham, a two-term judge who was once part of the security detail for then-Gov. George W. Bush, acted quickly on the complaints. He strode into the main library a few weeks later and took two books off the shelves — Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” — because some parents had objected to the main character in the story, a little boy, appearing nude — and “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health,” a sex education book for parents and children ages 10 and up, that includes color illustrations of the human body and sex acts.
He also ordered librarians to pause buying new material and to pull “any books with photos of naked or sexual conduct regardless if they are animated or actual photos,” emails reviewed by The Washington Post showed.
Texas school districts were already ablaze with book challenges in October, when state Rep. Matt Krause (R), chair of the General Investigating Committee, asked school districts for information on his own list of 850 books, most of them gender- and race-themed, that “might make children feel discomfort, guilt or anguish.” Gov. Greg Abbott (R) jumped into the fray, calling for an investigation of “pornography” in school libraries. One school district removed more than 100 books, although most were reviewed and returned.
EveryLibrary, a national political action committee for libraries that tracks such challenges, said it has seen “dozens of new attacks” on libraries, their governing bodies and policies since the first of the year — in Texas as well as ongoing cases in Montana and Louisiana. In some cases, the challengers are being assisted by growing national networks such as the parental rights group Moms for Liberty or spurred on by conservative public policy organizations like Heritage Action for America, the ALA has said.
At the county’s main library in Llano, director Amber Milum said in an interview that she had already taken it upon herself to put some books away in a file cabinet in her office as early as August, including two popular read-aloud picture books aimed at amusing kids: “I Need a New Butt!” and “Freddie the Farting Snowman.”
The moves circumvented the library’s established practices on objectionable content — including a challenge form to be reviewed by librarians. Isolating or removing books because of subjective or personal opinions — finding the content offensive or distasteful, for example — could open up a library to a First Amendment challenge, experts said.
“We didn’t fill out a form, everyone just came in and talked to me personally,” Milum said. “I took notes on everything that everybody was saying, and that’s how it happened.”
Meanwhile, Baker, head librarian at the library branch in the unincorporated community of Kingsland, about 23 miles from Llano, continued to push back. An Army veteran whose grandfather fought in World War II and who has a son in Afghanistan, said she is a firm believer in the Bill of Rights.
“I don’t think we should give in. If we give them even an inch, they will think they can do whatever they want,” she wrote in an email to Milum.
Then in December, the commissioners voted to suspend the county’s e-book system, OverDrive, because, they said, it lacked sufficient parental controls, which also cut off access to the elderly, people with disabilities or those otherwise unable to visit a physical library. Officials say they plan on replacing the system. They also shuttered the libraries for three days just before Christmas to review and reorganize the teen and children’s collections.
“God has been so good to us … please continue to pray for the librarians and that their eyes would be open to the truth,” Rochelle Wells, a new member of the library board, wrote in an email. “They are closing the library for 3 days which are to be entirely devoted to removing books that contain pornographic content.”
Green Little said little is known about what administrators did during the time the libraries were closed. The book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” a work about systemic racism by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson, has mysteriously vanished, and the fate of several other works remains unknown, she said.
“When I heard books were being taken out of the library, that was a big-time problem for me,” she said. “For others it was the fact that the county was not operating transparently. A small group of private citizens had an inordinate amount of control over county workings.”
Green Little, a mother of two who lives with her family on an 1800s-era cattle ranch outside of town, said it was not easy to take a stand in conservative Llano County, where nearly 80 percent of the majority-White population voted for President Donald Trump in 2020. A Confederate flag still flies at the Civil War memorial.
Some friends stopped returning her calls. Social invitations dried up. Green Little recently threw a Beatrix Potter-themed fundraiser at a park to raise money for the library foundation — complete with a petting zoo with baby lambs. For counterprogramming, Wallace, the wife of the town’s hospital board president, hosted an “adults only” showing of a video of pedophile chasers. It was held at a hall next door to the park at the same time as the garden party. Wallace declined to comment.
A new library board
In January, commissioners voted to dissolve the existing library board — whose members came from Friends of the Library groups and the Women’s Culture Club — and created a reconstituted board of mostly political appointees, including many of the citizens who had complained about books. A retired physician, Richard Day, a Democrat, was denied a seat despite having a master’s degree in library science and experience managing the rare books collection at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, he said.
Cunningham said in a statement that the restructuring of the library board was in keeping with Texas law and past practices to allow for “citizen participation from different perspectives.” The all-female board is overwhelmingly White and Republican, records show.
And the new board was ready to start focusing on its top priorities, including adding content of “academia, educational value and character building” and consulting with a local Christian school about their needs, Wells wrote in one email. Wells, a member of the local tea party who home-schools her six children, did not return calls for comment.
But she had one more complaint: “There were 3 or 4 patrons present taking notes,” at the group’s meeting, she wrote to one of the commissioners. “That surprised a few of us. Would you be able to persuade Judge Cunningham to keep the meetings closed?”
Last month the board voted to close meetings to the public, which could violate the Texas open meeting laws, experts have said. Panel members often stop to pray over questions brought up in meetings, and until the Lord answers, they can’t resolve them, according to county officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions.
The county has argued that although the board will now approve all book purchases going forward, it is operating in an “advisory capacity” only, which means it is not subject to open meeting laws. But if the commissioners simply rubber-stamp the recommendations, they could be, legal experts say.
John Chrastka, executive director of EveryLibrary, said library boards are designed to be independent to protect records, serve the entire community and protect patrons’ First Amendment rights.
“When boards become politicized, there are problems because they either favor one group over another or start to spend taxpayer money in less-than-transparent ways,” Chrastka said. “If a board is motivated by political ideology or a religious agenda, it stops being a public institution because it does not serve the whole public.”
Fired
Baker, who had been head librarian at the Kingsland branch for a year, continued to wage her own resistance. Inspired by a recent book-burning in Tennessee, she created a display in the library with banned titles like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and changed the letters on the variable message board out to front to say “We put the ‘lit’ in literature.” Milum told her to take down the display, then began ignoring her emails, she said.
On March 9, when Milum and the director of human resources appeared at the door of her library, Baker was ready. She knew she had caused waves. With a quaking voice, a visibly nervous Milum read Baker’s alleged offenses: “insubordination,” “creating a disturbance” and “allowing personal opinions to interfere with job duties and procedures.”
Baker was being fired.
After Milum finished reading her termination notice, Baker handed over her timecard and began packing up her belongings — books, supplies for the art class she taught and a small plaque that said, “Your beliefs don’t make you a good person, your behavior does.” A co-worker burst into tears. Baker said goodbye and walked out into the warm spring day, leaving the place that had been a refuge since she left a troubled marriage in Colorado and moved back home to Texas in 2016.
She was sad, but has no regrets about defying the board’s orders, she said.
“You’re taking away people’s freedom to read books and that’s not right,” Baker said. “Your intellectual freedom, your mind, is one of the only things you ever truly own. You can’t go against that.”
‘Things I feared already came true’
One recent spring day, an overflow crowd packed the Llano County commissioners meeting as the panel debated the new library advisory board’s bylaws.
Many who spoke praised the commissioners for their recent work “saving the children of Llano County” from “pornography” and “pedophiles,” often breaking into enthusiastic applause and shouts of “Amen!” Tension erupted when latecomers stuck in the hallway attempted to speak. “I’d like to speak in the name of Jesus!” one man yelled.
When Cunningham spoke, he evoked past trials that the county had weathered — a historic flood, a historic freeze, a historic pandemic — and he sounded tired.
“This has gone way too big and way too heated,” he said. “Both sides need to take a breath. We’re going to get to a solution together.”
Throughout the debate, the commissioners deferred to Wallace, who showed up with an giant binder full of papers, including what appeared to be a color copy of an illustration from one of the offending books. Ultimately, each side scored a small victory — the head librarian would now be a member of the board, as the anti-censorship camp wanted, but the meetings would still be closed to the public.
Baker and Green Little were in the audience, but neither wanted to speak. Baker said she is exploring her legal options with an attorney. Cunningham declined to comment on personnel matters or potential litigation.
Green Little’s group is also consulting attorneys from the ACLU and elsewhere to see if there is any “legal accountability” for the commissioners’ actions.
She said they will keep fighting, but “the things I feared already came true. I expect more of the same — more censorship, more opacity, a library for all curated by the few.”
Elizabeth Elias and Jose Espinoza, seen at home with their children in California's Central Valley. (photo: Melina Mara/WP/Getty Images)
Bennet is talking about the single best policy of the Biden era, a policy he helped design: The expanded child tax credit. It gave parents $3,000 for every child age 6 to 17 and $3,600 for every child under age 6. There were no strings attached. It was just money. It could be used for child care, for food, for clothes, for anything. It treated parents, even poor parents, as the experts on their family’s finances, a quietly radical idea in American social policy. It was a huge experiment, it was studied exhaustively, and we can now say this definitively: It worked.
A study out of Columbia found it cut child poverty by more than 25 percent, pulling 3.4 million children above the poverty line, despite the raging Covid pandemic. Data from the census shows that the number of parents who said that their children didn’t have enough to eat fell by more than three million. Conservatives warned that the benefit would discourage work among parents, but the economists watched, and there’s no evidence it did. Poor people, just like rich people, want to live on more than $3,000 per child per year.
'Free Melissa Lucio' buttons are stacked on a table during a media event in Harlingen, Texas, on Feb. 16, 2022. (photo: Denise Cathey/The Brownsville Herald/AP)
Trial jurors, forensic experts, and Texas lawmakers push for Lucio’s life to be spared ahead of her April 27 execution.
“Melissa Lucio is set to be executed on April 27,” a reporter said in a news segment from the previous week. “People that support her, though, say she was wrongly convicted and that her daughter’s death was an accident — and that that so-called confession was coerced.” The report cut to a clip of state lawmakers calling for clemency, led by a representative from North Texas. “As a conservative Republican who has long been a supporter of the death penalty in the most heinous cases,” he said, “I have never seen — have never seen — a more troubling case than the case of Melissa Lucio.”
“Wow,” Galvan said softly. For a moment it looked like he might cry. Galvan was one of the jurors who convicted Lucio in 2008 for killing her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah Alvarez. The little girl’s lifeless body had arrived at the hospital in Harlingen, Texas, covered in bruises; at trial, medical witnesses described it as the worst case of child abuse they had ever seen. Despite his horror, Galvan had been reluctant to impose a death sentence on Lucio. For a time, he was the lone holdout, but he’d ultimately voted for death. Now he feared that he’d made a grave mistake. “If I would have had the knowledge that I have now, Melissa would be free,” he said.
It was a Tuesday in late March, and Galvan had been discussing the case for almost two hours. His uneaten lunch sat on the coffee table in his apartment in Brownsville, Texas. A large U.S flag hung above a large air rifle; on the opposite wall was a painting he’d gotten at Goodwill of an Indigenous woman next to a basket of jalapeño peppers. Galvan once worked as an art teacher in public schools. But at the time of Lucio’s trial, he’d been unemployed. “I told whoever was selecting the jury … ‘Look sir, I can’t be here, I have to be out there looking for a job. I’m responsible for my kids,’” he recalled. “And he said, ‘This is a job!’”
If Galvan had not been so stressed about finding work, perhaps he would have held out longer against the death penalty. But he felt pressured by his fellow jurors, who were also anxious to go home. One of them pointed to the Gospel of Matthew, which suggested that people who hurt small children should be thrown into the sea with a millstone around their necks. For Galvan, a devout Christian, the Bible passage was enough to persuade him.
Galvan thought about the case only occasionally in the years following Lucio’s trial. He never seriously considered that she would be put to death until he saw a news story in the Brownsville Herald in early March, which said she had been given an execution date. The next day, a lawyer and two law students showed up at his apartment. They asked him questions about what he remembered and shared information he’d been unaware of at trial. In a subsequent declaration, Galvan admitted that no evidence stood out to him that proved Lucio had murdered her daughter. “The fact that you can’t pinpoint what actually caused Mariah’s death means that she shouldn’t be executed,” he said.
In fact, there were a lot of things that bothered him about the case in hindsight. Lucio’s defense attorney went to work for the district attorney’s office shortly after the trial. The DA himself later went to federal prison on corruption charges. Then there was Lucio’s supposed confession on the night her daughter died. Jurors were shown footage of the more than five-hour interrogation. To Galvan, Lucio seemed less like a woman admitting to murder than a mother blaming herself for her daughter’s death. He remembered a Texas Ranger pushing Lucio to hit a doll like she had beaten Mariah — then demanding that she show him how she’d also bitten her daughter. At trial, “they showed us something that looked like a bite mark, but we couldn’t tell,” Galvan said. “I think she was just giving into the interrogation.”
“I used to live in the poorer sections of Brownsville,” Galvan said. There were a lot of struggling families living in rundown apartments like Lucio’s. She tried to tell authorities that Mariah had fallen down some stairs, but no one believed her. In retrospect, the account rang true. “It could have been any of us,” Galvan said. Now, as he searched for the latest videos about the case, Galvan’s voice was heavy with remorse. “We were overtaken by the tragedy that happened,” he said. “We probably wanted to blame someone. But we went the wrong way.”
Failure at Every Turn
Galvan is one of four jurors who now say they wished they’d been given more information before voting to sentence Lucio to death in 2008. A fifth, who served as an alternate, said that she believed Lucio should get a new trial “with the benefit of an actual defense.” Their affidavits are among hundreds of pages of exhibits included in a request for clemency that Lucio’s attorneys filed on March 22 with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Lucio’s clemency petition makes a convincing case that her life should be spared, arguing that faulty forensics could see her sent to the execution chamber for a crime that never happened. A host of experts have raised serious questions about the evidence used to convict her, including an interrogation built on coercion and a superficial medical inquiry that amplified a spurious and prejudicial claim that Lucio had bitten her daughter.
Lucio “ended up on death row through a horrific combination of investigative missteps and a prosecution unhinged from the truth,” the petition reads.
But realistically, clemency in Texas is a long shot. The board is made up of individuals appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, and they generally do the governor’s bidding. Since Abbott assumed office in 2015, the board has recommended clemency in just two capital cases. Abbott accepted the board’s recommendation in one of those cases — an intervention that came less than an hour before the scheduled execution. Under Texas law, Abbott’s power is limited to granting a one-time, 30-day stay of execution. Any additional relief requires a recommendation from the board.
With the likelihood of clemency so grim, the push to save Lucio has been increasingly driven by an unlikely source: the Texas House of Representatives. An unprecedented bipartisan group of representatives — more than half the members of the Texas House — wrote a letter imploring the board and Abbott to stop Lucio’s execution. Their efforts have been led by Republican Rep. Jeff Leach and Democratic Rep. Joe Moody, who also co-chair the chamber’s Criminal Justice Reform Caucus.
The facts surrounding Mariah’s death are “still in grave dispute,” Leach said at a press conference shortly after Lucio’s clemency packet was filed. “The system literally failed Lucio at every single turn. And I am going to do everything that I possibly can in the coming days, in every way possible, legal, constitutional — and maybe in some ways we haven’t thought of yet — to delay and to prevent Ms. Lucio’s execution.”
Leach and Moody also traveled with several of their colleagues to the prison where female death row prisoners are held for a meeting with Lucio that included a prayer session in one of the prison’s stark white rooms. Two weeks later, they convened a meeting of the House’s interim Criminal Justice Reform Committee to question Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz, who had requested Lucio’s execution date. The whole situation was clearly troubling to Leach.
“To say I’m wrestling with the very existence of the death penalty in Texas would be a dramatic understatement,” he said.
A Rush to Judgment
At the heart of Lucio’s case is the question of whether her daughter’s death resulted from repeated physical abuse, as the state contends, or a tragic accident. Lucio has maintained since the beginning that Mariah fell down a hazardous staircase in the days preceding her death, and experts who have since reviewed the case at the behest of Lucio’s lawyers say the toddler’s injuries were consistent with such a fall.
But no one ever investigated the possibility that Mariah’s untimely death was the result of an accident. Instead, from the beginning, the authorities seized upon child abuse as the only explanation. According to the clemency petition, the cops and the doctors who testified against Lucio based their determinations on faulty assumptions and flawed science.
No one seemed more certain of Lucio’s guilt than the cops who arrived at the ER and took her to the station for questioning. As The Intercept previously reported, Lucio’s interrogators — an assembly line of cops that included Texas Ranger Victor Escalon — deployed a mix of guilt-presumptive and coercive techniques known to produce false confessions, particularly from vulnerable individuals like Lucio, whose life had been defined by abuse and trauma. The cops repeatedly showed Lucio graphic photos of her dead daughter and then fed her suggestions about what might have caused the injuries, suggestions that Lucio then parroted back to them.
Just after 3 a.m., as the marathon interrogation was coming to a close, Escalon pulled his chair close to Lucio, who looked dazed and weary, and showed her a series of photos of Mariah’s bruised body. He asked her to demonstrate on a plastic baby doll how she’d inflicted the various injuries. “Don’t hold back,” Escalon told her. “Do it and get it over with.” He said they would start with the “bite mark.” There were two on Mariah’s back, he said. “Just re-enact how you did it.”
“Do I have to?” Lucio asked. Yes, he replied. Lucio held the doll upright with its back to her face and told Escalon that she just put her mouth there and bit her. Escalon asked why she did it; Lucio said she didn’t know.
David Thompson, a certified forensic interviewer whose report is included in the clemency package, concluded that the outcome of the interrogation was wholly unreliable. Thompson is president of Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, a law enforcement training organization that advocates for evidence-based interview approaches. “Lucio’s admissions occurred after multiple examples of fact-feeding, revealing of evidence, and modifications of her story,” he wrote. “This created a contaminated confession.”
This guilt-presumptive approach spilled over into the medical investigation. Emergency room doctor Alfredo Vargas testified that Mariah’s injuries, including abrasions on her back that he labeled “bite marks,” showed that she had been horribly abused. Dr. Norma Jean Farley, the forensic pathologist who autopsied Mariah, also concluded that the child had been beaten to death. Trial records indicate that before Farley even cut into the body, she’d already made up her mind. “I mean, it would have been evident to a first-year nursing student,” she testified. The bite mark was “obvious,” Farley told the jury, because it was a “big bite!” She said it looked as though the person who bit Mariah had dragged their teeth across her back, creating a painful wound.
“There appears to be a bite with raking, where it just pulls the flesh off the back?” prosecutor Alfredo Padilla asked.
“Yes,” Farley replied.
To Dr. Adam Freeman, a forensic dentist, this testimony was nonsense. “It is so inflammatory to walk into a courtroom and say, ‘This is a big bite mark. It was made by an adult; the skin was raked and peeled back,’” Freeman said
The most basic problem with Farley’s assertion is that bite-mark evidence is neither valid nor reliable. To date, it has been implicated in at least 35 wrongful convictions and criminal indictments. Yet, for years, practitioners have claimed the ability not only to detect which injuries left on skin were made by teeth, but also the ability to match a given injury to the dentition of a particular person. In 2016, the Texas Forensic Science Commission recommended a moratorium on its use as evidence in criminal prosecutions.
But even if it were a valid practice, Freeman argues, Farley was not qualified to opine one way or another. She hadn’t been trained in the discipline and no forensic dentist ever provided a report or took the stand to back up Farley’s bald assertion. As such, her testimony that the mark on Mariah’s back was the result of an adult bite served no other purpose than to prejudice the jury. “If I were in a courtroom,” Freeman said, “and saw pictures of a dead baby and then heard that description, and I think you’d probably, too, you’d say, ‘Let’s hang the bastard,’ right?”
Dr. Thomas Young, a veteran forensic pathologist in Kansas City, Missouri, who first reviewed the case as part of Lucio’s state post-conviction appeal, opined in 2010 that the abrasion Farley, Vargas, and the cops decided was a bite mark was consistent with a scrape incurred from a fall down a flight of stairs.
Young concluded that Mariah had died from a blunt head injury, consistent with a fall, with “delayed effects”: brain swelling with repercussions that developed over several days, including a blood-clotting disorder that can cause extensive internal and external bruising.
Several doctors who reviewed the case and provided declarations for the clemency package agreed, including renowned pediatric forensic pathologist Dr. Janice Ophoven. Ophoven said that there was forensic evidence that Mariah was suffering from that coagulation disorder — known as disseminated intravascular coagulation, or DIC — which can result from trauma. Falls, she noted, “remain the No. 1 cause for traumatic brain injury in children of Mariah’s age,” and Mariah had a history of falls, including one at day care in 2006 after which she’d lost consciousness.
The medical evidence was “consistent with a cause of death related to a fall down the stairs two days before Mariah’s collapse,” Ophoven concluded. “There are several potential causes and contributions to Mariah’s injuries and death that have nothing to do with intentional force.”
The failure to consider Mariah’s history of falls or her family’s account of the days preceding her death is problematic, because child abuse is a diagnosis of exclusion. “Medical guidance, including from the American Academy of Pediatrics, is clear that before determining whether injuries were caused by child abuse, physicians must rule out coagulopathies, such as DIC,” Dr. Michael Laposata, chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, wrote in a declaration.
“Dr. Farley’s inverted approach critically left key evidence uncollected and obscured the true story of Mariah’s death,” the clemency petition reads.
There is another key piece of evidence the doctors reviewing the case noted: In the hospital, well after Mariah had been found unresponsive and then declared dead, her body temperature was recorded at over 100 degrees, meaning that before death she’d been battling an infection. How that factored into Mariah’s demise went unexplored. Such an elevated temperature would be consistent in a child who has DIC. But it would be “highly unusual” in a child who died as a result of abuse, Dr. Harry Davis wrote in his declaration.
Davis’s declaration contains another troubling revelation: Although Vargas testified at Lucio’s trial that he was the emergency room doctor on duty the night Mariah died and had declared her death, Davis said that he was the attending physician — and thus the primary doctor responsible for directing her care. He recalled Mariah being brought into the hospital unresponsive; his efforts to revive her failed. He was the one — not Vargas, he said — who pronounced Mariah dead. Davis said that Vargas, who worked in a different division in the ER where less acute patients were treated, came to assist him later, after he’d already begun treating Mariah.
While Vargas, who died in 2015, readily endorsed the state’s child abuse narrative, Davis would not have been so quick to do so, he said. In large part that came down to Mariah’s elevated temperature. “I know State investigators prosecuted Mariah Alvarez’s death as abuse. I have had considerable doubt about this conclusion,” he wrote. “The presence of active infection at the time of … death suggests alternative medical explanations for the bruising and internal bleeding that should have been explored.”
Although Mariah’s medical records would have included Davis’s name and notations about her fever, he was never contacted by police, prosecutors, or the defense. Roughly eight months after Mariah’s death, Davis moved out of Texas. “I was never asked to testify,” he wrote. “In fact, I was not even aware there was a trial. I would have testified to what I’ve said here.”
Running Out of Time
The office of District Attorney Luis Saenz is on the fourth floor of the Cameron County court complex in Brownsville’s historic district. In late March, the reception area was decorated for Easter, with a large artificial tree and plush garden gnomes in bunny ears. The DA’s mission statement appeared in large block letters on the wall: “To protect the public by providing a safe community while safeguarding the rights of victims and above all to see that justice is done.”
After being elected in 2012 to replace disgraced District Attorney Armando Villalobos, Saenz launched a special unit to combat domestic violence, complete with a dedicated vehicle that sat in the courthouse parking lot. Dramatic window decals showed women’s faces partially covered with scrawled messages like “HELP” and “I thought he loved me.”
Yet Saenz has thus far been unmoved by those who explain how Lucio’s own history as a survivor of sexual abuse and domestic violence impacted her case. The clemency packet included a letter signed by dozens of Texas organizations and advocates combating domestic violence, who echoed what many experts have said about Lucio’s interrogation: “Contrary to what we know are the best practices for engaging with trauma survivors, the police who interrogated her employed coercive techniques designed to intimidate her and extract a confession.”
Elsewhere in the parking lot was a pair of lawn signs that had been placed by Death Penalty Action. One read “WATCH THE FILM” in English and Spanish, a rallying cry referencing the documentary “The State v. Melissa.” For weeks, activists and family members had stood vigil outside the courthouse, pausing only after Lucio’s eldest son, John, successfully approached Saenz during his lunch hour. “I don’t want anybody to feel I’m out here trying to cause problems,” John politely told the DA, “but I know for a simple fact that my mother is an innocent woman.”
John urged Saenz to consider the materials in the clemency packet — particularly the statements from the jurors who said they had not been given all the facts at trial. Approached by The Intercept, Saenz refused to say whether he’d read the jurors’ declarations yet. “I’m not giving any interviews about the Melissa Lucio case,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of other work in addition to that.”
In late March, John and his wife, Michelle, pulled up at a cemetery just north of Harlingen. Mariah was buried in a small plot toward the back, where the land gave way to a tangle of mesquite and wildflowers. The grave was unmarked aside from an angel statuette left by a family friend years back; John was in the process of getting a headstone. One Easter they laid down a miniature fence and some colorful eggs. “It was very, very beautiful,” John said.
In his signature black “Free Melissa Lucio” T-shirt, John spoke quickly, almost frantically, about the campaign to save his mother’s life. Although he’d never planned to stand idly by as the state tried to kill his mother, he had no idea what to do after she got her execution date. “I was lost, I was confused,” he said. “What do I do next?” He was grateful to the activists who had attracted public support for Lucio on a level he’d never imagined. One lawmaker had even urged him not to make funeral plans.
Still, the high-profile organizing has taken a toll on the family. With Lucio’s story more prominent than ever, old traumas resurfaced, aggravating wounds that had never healed. The anguish and upheaval from Lucio’s death sentence was embedded in a letter from her children and declarations included in the clemency petition, which described her as a loving mother whose execution would devastate her family. “By killing her you will be killing me too,” her daughter Melissa wrote.
Over the phone, Johnny Galvan, the former juror, expressed dismay that Saenz had brushed off questions about Lucio’s case. Maybe he would call himself. “If he’s the only person that can do something from Brownsville, I should be in touch with him,” he said. “And I’m not just anybody. I’m one of the jurors.”
Galvan never reached the DA. But two weeks later, on April 12, he stood before members of the Criminal Justice Reform Committee at the Texas State Capitol in Austin. Galvan has poor eyesight, so his daughter Carmen read a statement to the lawmakers on her father’s behalf, which urged the governor to intervene. “The idea that my decision to take another person’s life was not based on complete and accurate information and a fair trial is horrifying. … If I could take back my vote I would,” she read. “I will be haunted by Ms. Lucio’s execution if it goes forward.”
Afterward, Saenz himself joined the meeting remotely. It was the first time he had publicly addressed Lucio’s case. For those who hoped Saenz might stop the execution, his exchange with the lawmakers was disappointing, even surreal. The DA seemed indifferent to the new issues raised in the case — and unaware of the basic facts, including when, exactly, Lucio was scheduled to die. He denied that he could simply withdraw Lucio’s death warrant, even though her execution date had been set at his request. Instead, he pointed to the courts, where there are several issues still pending. If the courts didn’t act before the execution, Saenz said he would step in — before immediately contradicting himself, saying he had no legal reason to intervene.
“My hope is that the right thing is done — by somebody,” Leach, the committee co-chair, said. But he told Saenz what the DA already knew: “You have the power right now, singlehandedly, tonight, to withdraw this request.” After all, there was no harm in delaying Lucio’s execution — certainly not compared to the harm of executing a potentially innocent woman.
Leach acknowledged John Lucio and his family, who were seated in the audience. “They are your constituents. And they are begging you to just press the pause button,” he said. “Has a single member of the victim’s family requested you or urged you to set this date for execution?” Saenz had no answer to that question.
Yalitza, Felicia and Santos Rosario. (photo: NY Mag)
Like most unusual specialties, his has a backstory. When Elberg was in his early 20s, his younger sister introduced him to someone she described as her boyfriend. The man, Elberg says, turned out to be a cult leader, a description he does not use lightly. Elberg’s sister spent the next 40 years under his control until she died in 2009.
“There are people out there who meeting them is like winning the negative lottery,” Elberg said. “My sister’s experience made me realize that it could happen to anyone.”
When asked why he felt compelled to make the trek to watch Ray’s victims recount the harrowing details of their own experience with control, coercion, and abuse, Elberg said Ray was a maximalist case study that fascinated him. Then he paused.
“I’ve spent too much of my life thinking about what I did or didn’t do, the signs I didn’t pick up on when my sister was trying to leave,” he said. “When I thought about Claudia Drury’s parents, Santos Rosario’s parents, and the things they did or didn’t do, I thought to myself, Every family has a story. It’s a mistake to ever make this about the family and not give the devil his due. And Larry Ray is the devil.”
Ray’s trial ended last week with the jury speedily declaring him guilty on 15 charges including sex trafficking, extortion, and forced labor. Much of the trial was made up of witness testimony about coercion, intimidation, violence, and control. Ray was the subject of a New York story in 2019 that sparked an FBI investigation; he will be sentenced in September and faces life in prison.
While reporting on Ray, we have tried to keep some version of Elberg’s “negative lottery” metaphor in mind. What are the odds that a Sarah Lawrence College student’s dad could move into a dorm and proceed to manipulate a group of students into years of servitude and misery? Yet understanding how improbable that scenario is hasn’t helped us answer the question everyone asks: How the hell did it happen?
People who ask that question come at it from one of two angles. They either want to know exactly what it was about Ray’s personality, his charm and cunning nature, that roped his victims in, or they want our take on the foundational failures (parental, legal, or institutional) that allowed Ray to prey on his victims. Why was he so strong, in essence, or in what way were the victims weak?
The first question is less of a mystery. Ray was a large and captivating character. He swept in and offered unfettered attention, encouragement, and concrete advice when other adults (parents, professors, actual therapists) might offer abstract guidance. All of it was packaged with the trappings of a “cool” dad, someone who ordered extravagant takeout dinners, provided a crash pad in Manhattan, and “talked at an impossible clip about topics ranging from tomato sauce to the military,” as Daniel Barban Levin, one of Ray’s victims, wrote in his memoir, Slonim Woods 9. Not all of Ray’s daughter’s roommates bought into his shtick, but those who did quickly found themselves stuck.
The other, more vexing question speaks to the guardrails in Ray’s victims’ lives. Their families tried, in different ways, to pry their children from Ray’s grip. They often found that, as if wading into quicksand, their efforts made things worse. Ray convinced his adherents that he had something close to mind-reading abilities then used that belief to implant notions in them of childhood abuse, which were often coupled with accusations that their parents were part of a shadowy conspiracy. Any effort parents made to extract their kids was proof of both parental overreach and Ray’s fantastic conspiracy. Isabella Pollok, whom the government has charged as Ray’s co-conspirator, accused her family of failing to protect her from a sexual predator and cut off contact. Drury also cut ties with her parents, testifying in housing court that her mother had been in cahoots with Ray’s enemy, Bernie Kerik. The Rosario siblings began telling people their parents were drug dealers.
“I can’t reach you. What changed? I don’t understand,” wrote Levin’s father in an email to him during his senior year of college. “This only seems to happen when you are at Larry’s, but I can’t figure it out. Are you in a trance? Drugs?”
The Rosario parents, who had three children fall under Ray’s spell, told us they went to the NYPD three times to report Ray but were told there was nothing the police could do because their children were adults.
“Institutions, including the NYPD, need to be aware that abusers are manipulative and clever,” said Chitra Raghavan, an expert in coercive control and victim psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “People take you seriously when you tell them a story that resonates with them, and often when parents or students tell the story, they’re halting — they don’t have the language to explain how afraid they are or how intense the abuse is.”
Of course, why should parents, victims, or family members have the language to describe such an astronomically unlikely dynamic? Often, by the time they realize what’s happening, it’s already too late.
The Larry Ray story is often referred to as the Sarah Lawrence cult story, and yet we never hear from that institution.
After we published our story in 2019, Sarah Lawrence’s president, Cristle Collins Judd, wrote in a statement that the school “found no evidence to support the claim that this parent lived on the campus during the 2010–11 academic year.”
When Ray was indicted nine months later, Judd released another statement. “The question, How could the College not know this?, has been asked by many, including myself,” she wrote. “What we do know is that no reports about this parent’s presence on campus during that semester, formal or informal, were lodged by students sharing that small living space, by their student neighbors, or by anyone else.”
The idea that a man like Ray could live on a college campus for months without triggering some schoolwide alarm seems preposterous until one considers the social environment of liberal-arts campus life, the housing setup, and the atmosphere within this particular dorm.
The dorm in question, Slonim Woods 9, is a freestanding house without a live-in resident adviser. Although overnight guests at Sarah Lawrence were required to sign in with the campus front desk, there was no mechanism to keep track of who was actually coming and going. Ray would only have needed someone to unlock the front door for him. All eight residents knew each other, and Ray’s daughter, Talia, had told many of them over the previous year about her heroic father. It just didn’t seem all that weird to some of Talia’s roommates that Ray needed somewhere to crash after getting out of prison. And as Levin told us, the dorm’s residents were “talking about getting a big bag of sand and dumping it out on the kitchen floor to make a tiny beach — it’s not like we were trying to have a normal household.”
While there may not have been reports filed about Ray during the window of time Judd referenced, evidence introduced at trial shows that some faculty members were made aware of Ray while his victims were enrolled at the school.
Drury testified that not long after meeting her roommate’s father, she told a professor, Nancy Baker, that she felt uncomfortable with Ray sleeping in Pollok’s room. In 2011, Drury sent an email to Allen Green, then Sarah Lawrence’s dean of student life, along with several other teachers, administrators, and students, in which she seemed to recant that statement. Titled “The Truth,” the email outlined a bizarre tale: Drury claimed she had expressed “fears and concerns about Larry Ray being a bad, dangerous, manipulative, and sexually deviant man” to teachers and administrators only because Ray’s ex-wife had ordered her to do so. Drury later testified that she had written the letter with direct input from Ray.
Drury praised Ray further in a 2012 email to Green, in which she asked to be reinstated after taking time off because of a hospitalization for mental-health issues. “Sarah Lawrence is the place this journey began for me, when I met Larry for the first time two years ago,” she wrote. “His friendship changed my life.” She went on to describe how Ray inserted himself into her psychiatric care, meeting with her doctors and talking to her parents on her behalf in order “to break them out of their denial.” She was readmitted to Sarah Lawrence.
In several 2011 emails we’ve seen, Pollok describes to Baker and another professor, Kim Ferguson, how important her relationship with Ray was. Green was cc’d on one of the emails.
“I have only a very vague memory of this,” Baker wrote in a 2018 email in response to an inquiry that outlined Ray’s dealings with her former students. “I knew something not good was happening either to one of my students or to a roommate, but I had no idea it was this bad or that the father in question had been in prison on a felony charge.” Baker did not respond to a recent request for comment. Ferguson declined to comment when reached in 2019. Michael Davis, another professor cc’d on Drury’s 2011 email, also declined to comment.
Green, who retired in 2019, has never responded to a request for comment.
Aside from Judd’s statements, the school has said little about the case. The Sarah Lawrence Emanon, the campus newspaper, has not published an article about Ray or the trial.
Just because the school has been mum about Ray doesn’t mean the community isn’t interested. A rotating crew of current Sarah Lawrence students watched nearly every minute of Ray’s trial from the gallery over the past month. The students were about the age of Ray’s victims when he met them.
Elberg and those students are just a few examples of the larger group of people invested in Ray’s case. Over the years, we’ve heard from other victims of Ray’s and of other abusers. Shortly after Ray’s guilty verdict, we received a text from the mother of a former student at a prestigious college who fell under the sway of a classmate’s parent under eerily similar circumstances. She hasn’t seen her child in years, and Ray’s guilty verdict offered her a sliver of hope.
“One of the reasons these things go on the way they go on is because in order to stop them, you have to be all in. You can’t stop them by nicking them in the arm. You need to devote your life to taking them down,” said Elberg.
It’s easy to see how the burden of ending coercive-control relationships falls on the victims themselves. The abusers are simply too adept at exploiting institutional blind spots and toeing the law’s fuzzy boundaries, careful not to raise the hackles of law enforcement. In Ray’s case, it wasn’t until the victims began telling their stories — to the press, to law enforcement, and to the jury — that they brought their abuser to justice.
Few stories could be harder to tell than Drury’s. During her two and a half days of testimony, spread out across 12 days because of delays caused by Ray’s two apparent medical emergencies, Drury brought the full measure of Ray’s horrific abuse into focus. According to Drury’s attorney, Brooke Cucinella, Drury insisted she stay until she told her whole story — the details of her own abuse and what she witnessed Ray do to others.
“Claudia is among the smartest women I have met — she is still healing, but her strength is inspiring, and she will heal from this. I cannot wait to see what choices she makes for herself going forward. I feel lucky to know her,” Cucinella said.
Soon after the verdict, Cucinella and Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon called Drury to tell her Ray had been convicted on all 15 counts. Sassoon surprised Drury by having the Rosario siblings — Santos, Yalitza, and Felicia, who were all in the courtroom to hear the verdict — on speakerphone. Drury had not spoken to any of the Rosarios in years, since even before her 2019 escape from Ray.
“Hearing their voices, their relief, that they were together and happy — that was more meaningful to me than Larry finally being held accountable to what he did to each of us,” Drury said through Cucinella.
In the days following the verdict, Drury still struggled to find some inner peace. But according to Cucinella, she also recognized the role she played in holding Ray accountable and felt a sense of relief that her story had resonated with the jury. She had helped them understand that Ray was culpable for everything she and her friends had been through.
Drury has begun to think about her future, about life beyond Ray and the unwanted media attention that recounted the sordid details of her abuse. For the first time since she was in college, Drury is free to think about what she wants out of life. She’s considering a career in law or academia while rebuilding her relationships with friends and loved ones. Whatever her future holds, Drury is certain about one thing: It won’t be defined by Larry Ray.
A Cargill inland grain terminal in Canada. The Cargill food company, which has its HQ in Minnesota, employs more than 155,000 staff in 70 countries. (photo: Terrance Klassen/Alamy)
Fortunes of siblings James Cargill, Austen Cargill and Marianne Liebmann up a fifth this year
Siblings James Cargill, Austen Cargill and Marianne Liebmann – all great-grandchildren of William Wallace Cargill, who founded the Cargill company in 1865 – this week joined the Bloomberg Billionaires list of the richest 500 people alive. Each of them has an estimated $5.4bn (£4.1bn) fortune – up a fifth so far this year.
They join Cargill’s other great-grandchildren Pauline Keinath and Gwendolyn Sontheim Meyer on the richest 500 list. They each have fortunes of about $8.06bn.
Their fortunes track those of the giant Cargill food company, which employs more than 155,000 staff in 70 countries, and is expected to report record profits this year, outstripping 2021’s record-breaking $5bn profit.
The United Nations this month warned that global food prices had soared to a record high because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization said its food price index rose by 12.6% in March compared with February, “making a giant leap to a new highest level since its inception in 1990”.
The UN said the war in Ukraine “spread shocks through markets for staple grains and vegetable oils”. The price of cereals, vegetable oils and meat have all reached all-times highs, the agency said.
The war has disrupted Black Sea exports of crucial commodities from a region that had been producing more than a quarter of the world’s wheat exports.
The invasion has helped push cereal prices up 17% over the past month, with the closure of ports throttling wheat and maize exports from Ukraine. Russian exports have also been slowed by financial and shipping problems.
World wheat prices soared by 19.7% during March, while maize prices posted a 19.1% month-on-month increase, hitting a record high along with those of barley and sorghum.
Food prices were already rising before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February, and Cargill’s chief executive, David MacLennan, had said he expected them to remain high throughout 2022.
Cargill, which has its headquarters in Minnesota, reported a 63% increase in profits last year to almost $4.93bn – the biggest in its 157-year history. Revenues rose by 17% to $134bn.
Andrew Speke of the High Pay Centre thinktank, which campaigns for a fairer society, said the soaring wealth of the Cargill family was “a depressing indictment of our current economic model – one which has enabled a tiny minority to grow ever richer despite the longest freeze of living standards in the modern era and a cost of living crisis which is threatening to impoverish millions”.
He added: “Now more than ever, it is essential that governments take serious action to redistribute wealth from the super-rich to those on low and middle incomes.”
Three more Cargill family members – Alexandra Daitch, Sarah MacMillan and Lucy Stitzer – are also billionaires. The extended family controls about 87% of the company and is ranked as the 11th richest family in the world, with a collective fortune of about $50bn.
Eric Muňoz, Oxfam America’s senior policy adviser for agriculture, said: “Right now, we’re seeing food prices skyrocket, which is taking a devastating toll on the most vulnerable communities. Exorbitant food prices, alongside the Covid-19 pandemic are pushing families in countries like Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and South Sudan to the breaking point – meanwhile, the richest have seen their profits soar. We must see urgent action to save lives now and to address the inequality, broken food system and other root causes that are driving this crisis.”
Gemma McGough, a British entrepreneur and a founding member of Patriotic Millionaires UK, a group campaigning for the introduction of a wealth tax on the world’s richest people to help close the inequality gap, said the Cargill family’s soaring wealth was yet another example of “the grotesque failure of our global economy”.
She said: “We are in a state of multiple crises, and governments cannot continue to stand by while hunger and food poverty increases and the wealth of a select few soars. It is essential that we rebalance our economies, taxing the wealth of people like me, and invest in systems that can support the millions of families currently unable to feed their children.”
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